Browsed by
Category: Technology

Studying the hidden effects of artificial light

Studying the hidden effects of artificial light

Rebecca Boyle writes: Light is the basis for all life, but it is more than just a source of energy. It is also a source of information, telling organisms when to sleep, hunt, hide, migrate, metabolize, and reproduce. Since the advent of incandescent light bulbs, humans have been interfering with those messages. And the interference is worsening with the spread of LEDs, which consume less electricity and so are often brighter and stay on longer and later than their predecessors….

Read More Read More

I researched Uighur society in China for 8 years and watched how technology opened new opportunities – then became a trap

I researched Uighur society in China for 8 years and watched how technology opened new opportunities – then became a trap

Uighurs wait in line at a face scan checkpoint in Turpan, Xinjiang in northwest China on April 11, 2018. Darren Byler, CC BY By Darren Byler, University of Washington The Uighurs, a Muslim minority ethnic group of around 12 million in northwest China, are required by the police to carry their smartphones and IDs listing their ethnicity. As they pass through one of the thousands of newly built digital media and face surveillance checkpoints located at jurisdictional boundaries, entrances to…

Read More Read More

Facebook, Google face off against a formidable new foe: State attorneys general

Facebook, Google face off against a formidable new foe: State attorneys general

The Washington Post reports: Historically, the federal government has taken the starring role in competition matters, including investigations into potential monopolies and mergers, and such inquiries involving the tech giants are underway. But the states are potent actors in their own right, with the power to invoke local laws on antitrust and consumer-protection and to tap Washington’s antitrust statutes on behalf of their residents. When state attorneys general have banded together on a broad, bipartisan basis, they’ve managed to muscle…

Read More Read More

The moral rot of the MIT Media Lab

The moral rot of the MIT Media Lab

Justin Peters writes: Founded in 1985, the Media Lab cultivated an image as a haven for misfit geniuses, for academics who, as the Lab’s most recent director put it, “don’t fit in any existing discipline either because they are between—or simply beyond—disciplines.”. These thinkers were the latest inheritors of MIT’s famed “hacker ethic”: iconoclastic engineers who used applied science to try and make the world a better place. Yet the money came from modern-day robber barons, whose main interest in…

Read More Read More

Voice-mimicking AI software reportedly used in a major theft

Voice-mimicking AI software reportedly used in a major theft

The Washington Post reports: Thieves used voice-mimicking software to imitate a company executive’s speech and dupe his subordinate into sending hundreds of thousands of dollars to a secret account, the company’s insurer said, in a remarkable case that some researchers are calling one of the world’s first publicly reported artificial-intelligence heists. The managing director of a British energy company, believing his boss was on the phone, followed orders one Friday afternoon in March to wire more than $240,000 to an…

Read More Read More

A new era of machine-driven warfare: Robots that can kill

A new era of machine-driven warfare: Robots that can kill

Zachary Fryer-Biggs writes: Wallops island—a remote, marshy spit of land along the eastern shore of Virginia, near a famed national refuge for horses—is mostly known as a launch site for government and private rockets. But it also makes for a perfect, quiet spot to test a revolutionary weapons technology. If a fishing vessel had steamed past the area last October, the crew might have glimpsed half a dozen or so 35-foot-long inflatable boats darting through the shallows, and thought little…

Read More Read More

It’s not just fires — the tech industry’s voracious demand for gold is also destroying the Amazon

It’s not just fires — the tech industry’s voracious demand for gold is also destroying the Amazon

BuzzFeed reports: The wildfires ripping through the Amazon have drawn the world’s attention to the destruction of the “lungs of the planet.” Many scientists believe cattle ranchers clearing land caused the flames, spurring groups around the world — including the government of Finland — to call for a boycott of Brazilian beef. But to boycott all of the products damaging the Amazon, you’d have to do much more than give up steak. You’d have to toss out your phone, laptop,…

Read More Read More

How ‘dark patterns’ online manipulate shoppers

How ‘dark patterns’ online manipulate shoppers

Comments 0 Comment

Sidney Fussell reports: Dark patterns are the often unseen web-design choices that trick users into handing over more time, money, or attention than they realize. A team of Princeton researchers is cataloging these deceptive techniques, using data pulled from 11,000 shopping sites, to identify 15 ways sites subtly game our cognition to control us. The research builds on the work of Harry Brignull, a London-based cognitive scientist who coined the term dark pattern in 2010, and the authors Richard Thaler…

Read More Read More

Google’s onetime hired gun could now be its antitrust nightmare

Google’s onetime hired gun could now be its antitrust nightmare

Comments 0 Comment

Politico reports: When Google needed government sign-off on a 2007 acquisition that would tighten its grip on the digital advertising market, the company turned to antitrust attorney and lobbyist Makan Delrahim to help get the job done. Now, as the Justice Department’s top antitrust enforcer, Delrahim could be the one to undo it all. As U.S. competition enforcers cast a more critical eye on the nation’s biggest technology companies, Delrahim would play the leading role in any DOJ lawsuit accusing…

Read More Read More

Amazon asserts its contribution to climate change is a trade secret

Amazon asserts its contribution to climate change is a trade secret

Comments 0 Comment

The Register reports: Amazon has refused to publish data about the energy consumption and carbon emissions of its business in Australia, including vast server farms, claiming its contribution to climate change is a trade secret. The company has asked the Clean Energy Regulator (CER) – the country’s agency tasked with regulating carbon emissions and encouraging clean energy use – to keep its data from publication, arguing that this involves proprietary information on reducing energy use. Amazon’s cloudy offspring AWS landed…

Read More Read More

Attack on democracy: Tech giants use our data not only to predict our behavior but to change it

Attack on democracy: Tech giants use our data not only to predict our behavior but to change it

Comments 0 Comment

Shoshana Zuboff writes: In a BBC interview last week, Facebook’s vice-president, Nick Clegg, surprised viewers by calling for new “rules of the road” on privacy, data collection and other company practices that have attracted heavy criticism during the past year. “It’s not for private companies … to come up with those rules,” he insisted. “It is for democratic politicians in the democratic world to do so.” Facebook’s response would be to adopt a “mature role”, not “shunning” but “advocating” the…

Read More Read More

China forces tourists to install text-stealing malware at its border

China forces tourists to install text-stealing malware at its border

Comments 0 Comment

Motherboard reports: Foreigners crossing certain Chinese borders into the Xinjiang region, where authorities are conducting a massive campaign of surveillance and oppression against the local Muslim population, are being forced to install a piece of malware on their phones that gives all of their text messages as well as other pieces of data to the authorities, a collaboration by Motherboard, Süddeutsche Zeitung, the Guardian, the New York Times, and the German public broadcaster NDR has found. The Android malware, which…

Read More Read More

San Francisco: City of the rich and the destitute

San Francisco: City of the rich and the destitute

Comments 0 Comment

Julia Carrie Wong writes: The tale of how tech destroyed the city that gave us the Summer of Love has been told so many times that in 2014, the San Francisco Chronicle produced a satirical cheat sheet for out-of-town reporters parachuting in for taste of avocado toast and class warfare. (Amid a bumper crop of new elegies to San Francisco in recent months, web publication HmmDaily updated the form with an “AI Algorithm-generated” version.) But what’s striking about the current…

Read More Read More

The looming information apocalypse

The looming information apocalypse

Comments 0 Comment

Charlie Warzel reports: In mid-2016, Aviv Ovadya realized there was something fundamentally wrong with the internet — so wrong that he abandoned his work and sounded an alarm. A few weeks before the 2016 election, he presented his concerns to technologists in San Francisco’s Bay Area and warned of an impending crisis of misinformation in a presentation he titled “Infocalypse.” The web and the information ecosystem that had developed around it was wildly unhealthy, Ovadya argued. The incentives that governed…

Read More Read More

80% of the stock market is now on autopilot

80% of the stock market is now on autopilot

Comments 0 Comment

CNBC reports: It’s no secret that machines are taking up a bigger and bigger share of investing, but the extent of their influence is approaching shocking proportions. It is as high as 80%, according to one major investing firm. Passive investments such as index funds and exchange-traded funds control about 60% of the equity assets, while quantitative funds, those which rely on trend-following models instead of fundamental research from humans, now account for 20% of the market share, according to…

Read More Read More

What happens after Amazon’s domination is complete? Its bookstore offers clues

What happens after Amazon’s domination is complete? Its bookstore offers clues

Comments 0 Comment

The New York Times reports: “The Sanford Guide to Antimicrobial Therapy” is a medical handbook that recommends the right amount of the right drug for treating ailments from bacterial pneumonia to infected wounds. Lives depend on it. It is not the sort of book a doctor should puzzle over, wondering, “Is that a ‘1’ or a ‘7’ in the recommended dosage?” But that is exactly the possibility that has haunted the guide’s publisher, Antimicrobial Therapy, for the past two years…

Read More Read More