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Category: Technology

We’re entering an AI price-fixing dystopia

We’re entering an AI price-fixing dystopia

Rogé Karma writes: If you rent your home, there’s a good chance your landlord uses RealPage to set your monthly payment. The company describes itself as merely helping landlords set the most profitable price. But a series of lawsuits says it’s something else: an AI-enabled price-fixing conspiracy. The classic image of price-fixing involves the executives of rival companies gathering behind closed doors and secretly agreeing to charge the same inflated price for whatever they’re selling. This type of collusion is…

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The Google antitrust ruling is huge, but we don’t know what it really means yet

The Google antitrust ruling is huge, but we don’t know what it really means yet

Fortune reports: Yesterday’s Google antitrust ruling was historic. It may be kind of obvious to most people that a company handling 90% or more of search queries in the U.S. is a monopolist, but it’s nonetheless a big deal for a judge to rule as such—and to confirm that Google was therefore breaking antitrust rules when it shored up that outsized position by paying billions to Apple, Samsung and other players to make Google Search the default on their devices….

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The antidemocratic politics of the broligarchs

The antidemocratic politics of the broligarchs

Brooke Harrington writes: Eight years ago, the PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel was an outlier in liberal Silicon Valley for publicly supporting Donald Trump. But now a number of prominent male tech plutocrats who previously opposed the former president have done an about-face: These broligarchs are publicly endorsing and donating to the Republican candidate—and revealing a lot about their own priorities. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who according to his biographer once waited in line for six hours…

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How a Washington tax break for data centers snowballed into one of the state’s biggest corporate giveaways

How a Washington tax break for data centers snowballed into one of the state’s biggest corporate giveaways

By Lulu Ramadan and Sydney Brownstone, The Seattle Times, photography by Karen Ducey, The Seattle Times This story was originally published by ProPublica In 2010, as the country still reeled from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, tech companies, real estate developers and rural lobbyists went to the state Capitol in Olympia, Washington, to press for a tax break for data centers. Turning it down, supporters argued, would mean rejecting high-paying, long-term and environmentally friendly jobs in distressed…

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How decline of Indian vultures led to 500,000 human deaths

How decline of Indian vultures led to 500,000 human deaths

BBC News reports: Once upon a time, the vulture was an abundant and ubiquitous bird in India. The scavenging birds hovered over sprawling landfills, looking for cattle carcasses. Sometimes they would alarm pilots by getting sucked into jet engines during airport take-offs. But more than two decades ago, India’s vultures began dying because of a drug used to treat sick cows. By the mid-1990s, the 50 million-strong vulture population had plummeted to near zero because of diclofenac, a cheap non-steroidal…

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AI models fed AI-generated data quickly spew nonsense

AI models fed AI-generated data quickly spew nonsense

Nature reports: Training artificial intelligence (AI) models on AI-generated text quickly leads to the models churning out nonsense, a study has found. This cannibalistic phenomenon, termed model collapse, could halt the improvement of large language models (LLMs) as they run out of human-derived training data and as increasing amounts of AI-generated text pervade the Internet. “The message is, we have to be very careful about what ends up in our training data,” says co-author Zakhar Shumaylov, an AI researcher at…

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Tech broligarchs are lining up to court Trump. And Vance is one more link in the chain

Tech broligarchs are lining up to court Trump. And Vance is one more link in the chain

Carole Cadwalladr writes: Less than a month after Donald Trump was elected president in November 2016, he invited the cream of Silicon Valley’s tech elite to a meeting at his transition team’s headquarters at Trump Tower. It was an awkward affair. Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, Google’s Larry Page and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos had facial expressions that ranged from a semi-rictus grin to full tech-mogul-in-a-hostage-situation. But then, in a sense they were. There was a new sheriff in town – and none…

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Data centers are draining resources in water-stressed communities

Data centers are draining resources in water-stressed communities

Eric Olson, Anne Grau, and Taylor Tipton write: The rapid growth of the technology industry and the increasing reliance on cloud computing and artificial intelligence have led to a boom in the construction of data centers across the United States. Electric vehicles, wind and solar energy, and the smart grid are particularly reliant on data centers to optimize energy utilization. These facilities house thousands of servers that require constant cooling to prevent overheating and ensure optimal performance. Unfortunately, many data…

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Plastics pollution has become a ‘crisis,’ Biden administration acknowledges

Plastics pollution has become a ‘crisis,’ Biden administration acknowledges

Inside Climate News reports: Single-use plastic would be phased out of all U.S. government operations by 2035 under a new federal plastics pollution strategy unveiled Friday by President Joe Biden’s administration, which cited a “crisis” of littered oceans and poisoned air due to plastics. “The Federal government is—for the first time—formally acknowledging the severity of the plastic pollution crisis and the scale of the response that will be required to effectively confront it,” said Brenda Mallory and Ali Zaidi, the…

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How one bad CrowdStrike update crashed the world’s computers

How one bad CrowdStrike update crashed the world’s computers

Wired reports: Only a handful of times in history has a single piece of code managed to instantly wreck computer systems worldwide. The Slammer worm of 2003. Russia’s Ukraine-targeted NotPetya cyberattack. North Korea’s self-spreading ransomware WannaCry. But the ongoing digital catastrophe that rocked the internet and IT infrastructure around the globe over the past 12 hours appears to have been triggered not by malicious code released by hackers, but by the software designed to stop them. Two internet infrastructure disasters collided on Friday to produce…

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Why tech titans are turning toward Trump

Why tech titans are turning toward Trump

Vox reports: Former President Donald Trump used to be persona non grata in Silicon Valley. Nearly all of the dollars spent by Silicon Valley elites in 2016 went to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. In 2020, those elites spent even more to defeat Trump. The few who supported Trump that year — such as venture capitalist Peter Thiel, the co-founder of Paypal and Palantir — did so knowing they were standing on a third rail, and many did not speak openly about it for fear…

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The hidden ties between Google and Amazon’s Project Nimbus and Israel’s military

The hidden ties between Google and Amazon’s Project Nimbus and Israel’s military

Wired reports: On April 16, police entered Google offices in New York and California to detain several employees protesting a $1.2 billion cloud contract with Israel’s government called Project Nimbus. The deal, shared with Amazon, has met pushback from some employees at both companies since 2021, but the protests have grown louder since Israel’s renewed conflict with Hamas after the attacks of October 7, 2023. Current and former Google and Amazon workers protesting Project Nimbus say it makes the companies…

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Elon Musk and tech elite back a pro-Trump super PAC

Elon Musk and tech elite back a pro-Trump super PAC

The Verge reports: Several close friends of Elon Musk, including Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale, venture capitalist Doug Leone, and investor and podcast host David Sacks, have donated lavishly to a super PAC backing former President Donald Trump — and The Wall Street Journal reports that Musk plans on donating as much as $45 million a month to America PAC. In a post on X, Musk replied to the Journal’s article with a meme claiming it was “fake gnus” (fake news),…

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AI supercharges data center energy use – straining the grid and slowing sustainability efforts

AI supercharges data center energy use – straining the grid and slowing sustainability efforts

A data center in Ashburn, Va., the heart of so-called Data Center Alley. AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey By Ayse Coskun, Boston University The artificial intelligence boom has had such a profound effect on big tech companies that their energy consumption, and with it their carbon emissions, have surged. The spectacular success of large language models such as ChatGPT has helped fuel this growth in energy demand. At 2.9 watt-hours per ChatGPT request, AI queries require about 10 times the electricity of…

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The president ordered a board to probe a massive Russian cyberattack. It never did

The president ordered a board to probe a massive Russian cyberattack. It never did

By Craig Silverman This story was originally published by ProPublica. After Russian intelligence launched one of the most devastating cyber espionage attacks in history against U.S. government agencies, the Biden administration set up a new board and tasked it to figure out what happened — and tell the public. State hackers had infiltrated SolarWinds, an American software company that serves the U.S. government and thousands of American companies. The intruders used malicious code and a flaw in a Microsoft product…

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What is machine learning?

What is machine learning?

John Pavlus writes: By now, many people think they know what machine learning is: You “feed” computers a bunch of “training data” so that they “learn” to do things without our having to specify exactly how. But computers aren’t dogs, data isn’t kibble, and that previous sentence has way too many air quotes. What does that stuff really mean? Machine learning is a subfield of artificial intelligence, which explores how to computationally simulate (or surpass) humanlike intelligence. While some AI…

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