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Category: Technology

$76 billion a day: How Binance became the world’s biggest crypto exchange

$76 billion a day: How Binance became the world’s biggest crypto exchange

The Wall Street Journal reports: The world’s fastest-growing major financial exchange has no head office or formal address, lacks licenses in countries where it operates and has a chief executive who until recently wouldn’t answer questions about his location. Started just four years ago, Binance is the exchange giant that towers over the digital currency world, a crypto equivalent of the London, New York and Hong Kong stock exchanges combined. After a burst of growth, Binance processes more trades for…

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Technology is designed to make its users to believe in human obsolescence

Technology is designed to make its users to believe in human obsolescence

Jaron Lanier writes: [W]hat we need to talk about is the dominant business model. This model spews out horrible incentives to make people meaner and crazier. Incentives run the world more than laws, regulations, critiques or the ideas of researchers. The current incentives are to “engage” people as much as possible, which means triggering the “lizard brain” and fight-or-flight responses. People have always been a little paranoid, xenophobic, racist, neurotically vain, irritable, selfish and afraid. And yet putting people under…

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Why longtermism is the world’s most dangerous secular credo

Why longtermism is the world’s most dangerous secular credo

Phil Torres writes: [O]ver the past two decades, a small group of theorists mostly based in Oxford have been busy working out the details of a new moral worldview called longtermism, which emphasizes how our actions affect the very long-term future of the universe – thousands, millions, billions, and even trillions of years from now. This has roots in the work of Nick Bostrom, who founded the grandiosely named Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) in 2005, and Nick Beckstead, a…

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Can the world’s most polluting heavy industries decarbonize?

Can the world’s most polluting heavy industries decarbonize?

Fred Pearce writes: We know how to decarbonize energy production with renewable fuels and land transportation with electric vehicles. Blueprints for greening shipping and aircraft are being drawn up. But what about the big industrial processes? They look set to become decarbonization holdouts — the last and hardest CO2 emissions that we must eliminate if we are to achieve net-zero emissions by mid-century. In particular, how are we to green the three biggest globally-vital heavy industries: steel, cement, and ammonia,…

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Silicon’s 300% surge throws another price shock at the world

Silicon’s 300% surge throws another price shock at the world

Bloomberg reports: A metal made from the second-most abundant element on Earth has become scarce, threatening everything from car parts to computer chips and throwing up another hurdle for the world economy. The shortage in silicon metal, sparked by a production cut in China, has sent prices up 300% in less than two months. It’s the latest in a litany of disruptions, from snarled supply chains to a power crunch, that are creating a destructive mix for companies and consumers….

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AI is no match for the quirks of human intelligence

AI is no match for the quirks of human intelligence

Herbert Roitblat writes: At least since the 1950s, the idea that it would be possible to soon create a machine that was capable of matching the full scope and level of achievement of human intelligence has been greeted with equal amounts of hype and hysteria. We’ve now succeeded in creating machines that can solve specific fairly narrow problems — “smart” machines that can diagnose disease, drive cars, understand speech, and beat us at chess — but general intelligence remains elusive….

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Microsoft’s million-tonne carbon dioxide removal purchase — lessons for net zero

Microsoft’s million-tonne carbon dioxide removal purchase — lessons for net zero

Lucas Joppa et al write: In January this year, Microsoft made a major announcement: it had paid for the removal of 1.3 million tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Among its purchases were projects to expand forests in Peru, Nicaragua and the United States, as well as initiatives to regenerate soil across US farms. Microsoft will pay the Swiss firm Climeworks to operate a machine in Iceland that pulls CO2 from the air and injects it into the ground,…

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How Miami seduced Silicon Valley

How Miami seduced Silicon Valley

Benjamin Wallace writes: The flood of new Miamians who have arrived, full or part time, during the pandemic includes tech investors (Peter Thiel, David Sacks), cryptocurrency bulls (Anthony Pompliano, Ari Paul), new-media tycoons (Bryan Goldberg, Dave Portnoy), start-up founders (Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, Steven Galanis), and many more who aren’t yet billionaires but think the Magic City will give them their best shot. They’re breaking sales records for dock-accessed mansions by day and packing the new branches of Carbone and Red…

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Peter Thiel’s ideology dominates Silicon Valley

Peter Thiel’s ideology dominates Silicon Valley

Max Chafkin writes: Other Silicon Valley personas may be better known to the general public, including Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and even a few who don’t regularly launch rockets into space. But [Peter] Thiel is the Valley’s true idol — the single person whom tech’s young aspirants and millennial moguls most seek to flatter and to emulate, the cult leader of the cult of disruption. The blitzscaling strategy he and his employees pioneered at PayPal created the growth playbook for…

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A new company with a wild mission: Bring back the woolly mammoth

A new company with a wild mission: Bring back the woolly mammoth

Carl Zimmer reports: A team of scientists and entrepreneurs announced on Monday that they have started a new company to genetically resurrect the woolly mammoth. The company, named Colossal, aims to place thousands of these magnificent beasts back on the Siberian tundra, thousands of years after they went extinct. “This is a major milestone for us,” said George Church, a biologist at Harvard Medical School, who for eight years has been leading a small team of moonlighting researchers developing the…

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Hundreds of AI tools have been built to catch Covid. None of them helped

Hundreds of AI tools have been built to catch Covid. None of them helped

Will Douglas Heaven writes: When covid-19 struck Europe in March 2020, hospitals were plunged into a health crisis that was still badly understood. “Doctors really didn’t have a clue how to manage these patients,” says Laure Wynants, an epidemiologist at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, who studies predictive tools. But there was data coming out of China, which had a four-month head start in the race to beat the pandemic. If machine-learning algorithms could be trained on that data to…

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‘I will not be silenced’: Women targeted in hack-and-leak attacks speak out about spyware

‘I will not be silenced’: Women targeted in hack-and-leak attacks speak out about spyware

NBC News reports: Ghada Oueiss, a Lebanese broadcast journalist at Al-Jazeera, was eating dinner at home with her husband last June when she received a message from a colleague telling her to check Twitter. Oueiss opened up the account and was horrified: A private photo taken when she was wearing a bikini in a jacuzzi was being circulated by a network of accounts, accompanied by false claims that the photos were taken at her boss’s house. Over the next few…

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The spyware threat to journalists

The spyware threat to journalists

Steve Coll writes: Khadija Ismayilova, an investigative reporter from Azerbaijan, is an icon among the subtribe of journalists who work to expose cross-border financial corruption. She has broken big stories about money laundering and dodgy banking, despite being targeted by President Ilham Aliyev’s authoritarian regime. Operatives planted cameras in her home in Baku and, in 2012, released a video of her having sex with her boyfriend. In 2014, she was arrested on trumped-up charges that included tax evasion; a court…

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Space tourism is a waste

Space tourism is a waste

Gizmodo reports: Bezos’ New Shepard rocket, made by his company Blue Origin, runs on a combination of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. Though neither of those emit carbon when they’re burned, producing liquid hydrogen usually does. Compressing and liquifying the oxygen for the fuel is also an energy-intensive process that, if not done using renewables, results in carbon pollution. Refining and burning these fuels isn’t just the equivalent of a tank of gas for your car. They’re not even necessarily…

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Saudis behind NSO spyware attack on Jamal Khashoggi’s family, leak suggests

Saudis behind NSO spyware attack on Jamal Khashoggi’s family, leak suggests

The Guardian reports: In the wake of the brutal murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the NSO Group emphatically denied that its government clients had used its hacking malware to target the journalist or his family. “I can tell you very clear. We had nothing to do with this horrible murder,” Shalev Hulio, the chief executive of the Israeli surveillance firm, told the US TV news programme 60 Minutes in March 2019. It was six months after Khashoggi, a Washington…

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Huge data leak shatters the lie that the innocent need not fear surveillance

Huge data leak shatters the lie that the innocent need not fear surveillance

Paul Lewis writes: Billions of people are inseparable from their phones. Their devices are within reach – and earshot – for almost every daily experience, from the most mundane to the most intimate. Few pause to think that their phones can be transformed into surveillance devices, with someone thousands of miles away silently extracting their messages, photos and location, activating their microphone to record them in real time. Such are the capabilities of Pegasus, the spyware manufactured by NSO Group,…

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