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Category: Technology

The nightmare economy created by Silicon Valley’s overlords

The nightmare economy created by Silicon Valley’s overlords

Lia Russell writes: Vanessa Bain was less than a year into her gig as an Instacart shopper when the company announced it would no longer allow tipping on its app. Instacart instead began imposing a 10 percent “service fee” that replaced the previous default tip of 10 percent. The change had no impact on customers, who could be forgiven for assuming that the new fee would still go to the workers who shopped for their groceries and delivered them to…

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Which tech companies are really doing the most harm?

Which tech companies are really doing the most harm?

Jonathan L. Fischer writes: Maybe it was fake news, Russian trolls, and Cambridge Analytica. Or Travis Kalanick’s conniption in an Uber. Or the unmasking of Theranos. Or all those Twitter Nazis, and racist Google results, and conspiracy theories on YouTube. Though activists, academics, reporters, and regulators had sent up warning flares for years, it wasn’t until quite recently that the era of enchantment with Silicon Valley ended. The list of scandals—over user privacy and security, over corporate surveillance and data…

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The secretive company that might end privacy as we know it

The secretive company that might end privacy as we know it

The New York Times reports: Until recently, Hoan Ton-That’s greatest hits included an obscure iPhone game and an app that let people put Donald Trump’s distinctive yellow hair on their own photos. Then Mr. Ton-That — an Australian techie and onetime model — did something momentous: He invented a tool that could end your ability to walk down the street anonymously, and provided it to hundreds of law enforcement agencies, ranging from local cops in Florida to the F.B.I. and…

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With a new weapon in Trump’s hands, the Iran crisis risks going nuclear

With a new weapon in Trump’s hands, the Iran crisis risks going nuclear

William Arkin writes: Ten days before Donald J. Trump was elected president in 2016, the United States nuked Iran. The occasion: a nuclear war exercise held every year in late October. In the war game, after Iran sank an American aircraft carrier and employed chemical weapons against a Marine Corps force, the Middle East commander requested a nuclear strike, and a pair of B-2 stealth bombers, each loaded with a single nuclear bomb, stood by while the president deliberated. “Testing…

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How to survive the internet in 2020

How to survive the internet in 2020

Farhad Manjoo writes: The new year is here, and online, the forecast calls for several seasons of hell. Tech giants and the media have scarcely figured out all that went wrong during the last presidential election — viral misinformation, state-sponsored propaganda, bots aplenty, all of us cleaved into our own tribal reality bubbles — yet here we go again, headlong into another experiment in digitally mediated democracy. I’ll be honest with you: I’m terrified. I spend a lot of my…

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Pentagon warns military members DNA kits pose ‘personal and operational risks’

Pentagon warns military members DNA kits pose ‘personal and operational risks’

Yahoo News reports: The Pentagon is advising members of the military not to use consumer DNA kits, saying the information collected by private companies could pose a security risk, according to a memo co-signed by the Defense Department’s top intelligence official. A growing number of companies like 23andMe and Ancestry sell testing kits that allow buyers to get a DNA profile by sending in a cheek swab or saliva sample. The DNA results provide consumers information on their ancestry, insights…

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How to track President Trump

How to track President Trump

Stuart A. Thompson and Charlie Warzel write: If you own a mobile phone, its every move is logged and tracked by dozens of companies. No one is beyond the reach of this constant digital surveillance. Not even the president of the United States. The Times Privacy Project obtained a dataset with more than 50 billion location pings from the phones of more than 12 million people in this country. It was a random sample from 2016 and 2017, but it…

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A popular chat app is secretly a spy tool

A popular chat app is secretly a spy tool

The New York Times reports: It is billed as an easy and secure way to chat by video or text message with friends and family, even in a country that has restricted popular messaging services like WhatsApp and Skype. But the service, ToTok, is actually a spying tool, according to American officials familiar with a classified intelligence assessment and a New York Times investigation into the app and its developers. It is used by the government of the United Arab…

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Zero-carbon ships on horizon under fuel levy plan

Zero-carbon ships on horizon under fuel levy plan

The Guardian reports: Shipping companies would have to pay a small levy on every tonne of fuel they use under proposals aimed at developing zero-carbon vessels within 10 years, transforming the high-carbon global shipping business. Ships running on hydrogen or ammonia as fuel are thought to be technically possible, but more research and development is needed to bring forward the development of prototypes. The International Chamber of Shipping (ICS), which represents 80% of the global shipping industry, is proposing a…

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The real trouble with Silicon Valley

The real trouble with Silicon Valley

Derek Thompson writes: How should we tell the story of the digital century, now two decades old? We could focus, as journalists tend to do, on the depredations of the connected life. As Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have devoured the online world, they have undermined traditional media, empowered propagandists, and widened America’s political divides. The smartphone, for all its wonder and utility, has also proved to be a narcotizing agent. But what if, instead of focusing on Big Tech’s sins…

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To decode the brain, scientists automate the study of behavior

To decode the brain, scientists automate the study of behavior

Jordana Cepelewicz writes: The quest to understand what’s happening inside the minds and brains of animals has taken neuroscientists down many surprising paths: from peering directly into living brains, to controlling neurons with bursts of light, to building intricate contraptions and virtual reality environments. In 2013, it took the neurobiologist Bob Datta and his colleagues at Harvard Medical School to a Best Buy down the street from their lab. At the electronics store, they found what they needed: an Xbox…

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A quantum computing future is unlikely, due to random hardware errors

A quantum computing future is unlikely, due to random hardware errors

Will quantum computers ever reliably best classical computers? Amin Van/Shutterstock.com By Subhash Kak, Oklahoma State University Artist’s rendition of the Google processor. Forest Stearns, Google AI Quantum Artist in Residence, CC BY-ND Google announced this fall to much fanfare that it had demonstrated “quantum supremacy” – that is, it performed a specific quantum computation far faster than the best classical computers could achieve. IBM promptly critiqued the claim, saying that its own classical supercomputer could perform the computation at nearly…

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Light pollution is key ‘bringer of insect apocalypse’

Light pollution is key ‘bringer of insect apocalypse’

The Guardian reports: Light pollution is a significant but overlooked driver of the rapid decline of insect populations, according to the most comprehensive review of the scientific evidence to date. Artificial light at night can affect every aspect of insects’ lives, the researchers said, from luring moths to their deaths around bulbs, to spotlighting insect prey for rats and toads, to obscuring the mating signals of fireflies. “We strongly believe artificial light at night – in combination with habitat loss,…

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Ruthless quotas at Amazon are maiming employees

Ruthless quotas at Amazon are maiming employees

The Atlantic reports: When Candice Dixon showed up for her first day of work at an Amazon warehouse in Eastvale, California, she stepped into a wonder of automation, efficiency, and speed. Inside the sprawling four-story building in Southern California’s Inland Empire, hundreds of squat orange robots whizzed across the floor, carrying tall yellow racks. As a stower, her job was to stand in a spot on the floor, like hundreds of others in that million-square-foot warehouse, and fill an unending…

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The devastating environmental impact of technological progress

The devastating environmental impact of technological progress

Wired reports: For decades, David Maisel has been photographing places where humans are changing the environment so dramatically that the impact can be seen from the sky. For his latest project, Desolation Desert, the San Francisco-based visual artist spent two weeks in and around South America’s Atacama desert, where humankind’s insatiable demand for copper, lithium and rare-earth metals to fuel the consumer electronics and electric vehicle industries is reshaping the landscape of a fragile ecosystem. The Atacama, in northern Chile,…

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Why Zuckerberg’s embrace of Mayor Pete should worry you

Why Zuckerberg’s embrace of Mayor Pete should worry you

Noam Cohen writes: We recently learned that Elizabeth Warren is the kind of presidential candidate Mark Zuckerberg considers an existential threat to Facebook. She is, after all, determined to break up the sprawling social-networking empire. But what about the others? What sort of presidential candidate does Zuckerberg consider an existential asset to Facebook? We may have an answer: Step right up, Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana. Bloomberg recently reported that Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, privately recommended…

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