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Category: Technology

Inside the UK’s Silicon Valley for nuclear fusion, where unlimited energy is becoming a reality

Inside the UK’s Silicon Valley for nuclear fusion, where unlimited energy is becoming a reality

BBC Science Focus reports: Flick through any collection of popular science magazines from the last 50 years and the chances are that you will encounter a feature about nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion is the process of joining lightweight atoms together to release energy; it is the reason the Sun and the rest of the stars shine, and recreating that process on Earth promises an abundant form of low-carbon energy. As you look through the archival material, keep an eye open…

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Under capitalism, the colonization of space means the destruction of Earth

Under capitalism, the colonization of space means the destruction of Earth

Srećko Horvat writes: In February 2022, the Adam Smith Institute published a report claiming that the Moon should be privatized to help wipe out poverty on Earth. According to the report, the Moon should be divided into parcels of land and assigned to various countries to rent out to businesses, which would boost space tourism, exploration, and discovery. For now, thankfully, there is a treaty that stands in the way of such plans. The Outer Space Treaty was drawn up…

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FBI investigation determined Chinese-made Huawei equipment could disrupt U.S. nuclear arsenal communications

FBI investigation determined Chinese-made Huawei equipment could disrupt U.S. nuclear arsenal communications

CNN reports: On paper, it looked like a fantastic deal. In 2017, the Chinese government was offering to spend $100 million to build an ornate Chinese garden at the National Arboretum in Washington DC. Complete with temples, pavilions and a 70-foot white pagoda, the project thrilled local officials, who hoped it would attract thousands of tourists every year.       But when US counterintelligence officials began digging into the details, they found numerous red flags. The pagoda, they noted, would have been strategically…

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Sustainable cities made from mud

Sustainable cities made from mud

BBC Future Planet reports: In Yemen’s ancient walled city of Sana’a mud skyscrapers soar high into the sky. The towering structures are built entirely out of rammed earth and decorated with striking geometric patterns. The earthen buildings blend into the nearby ochre-coloured mountains. Sana’a’s mud architecture is so unique that the city has been recognised as a Unesco World Heritage site. “As an outstanding example of a homogeneous architectural ensemble reflecting the spatial characteristics of the early years of Islam,…

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Crytopmining capacity in U.S. rivals energy use of Houston, findings show

Crytopmining capacity in U.S. rivals energy use of Houston, findings show

The New York Times reports: Seven of the largest Bitcoin mining companies in the United States are set up to use nearly as much electricity as the homes in Houston, according to data disclosed Friday as part of an investigation by congressional Democrats who say miners should be required to report their energy use. The United States has seen an influx of cryptocurrency miners, who use powerful, energy-intensive computers to create and track the virtual currencies, after China cracked down…

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Uber broke laws, duped police and secretly lobbied governments, leak reveals

Uber broke laws, duped police and secretly lobbied governments, leak reveals

The Guardian reports: A leaked trove of confidential files has revealed the inside story of how the tech giant Uber flouted laws, duped police, exploited violence against drivers and secretly lobbied governments during its aggressive global expansion. The unprecedented leak to the Guardian of more than 124,000 documents – known as the Uber files – lays bare the ethically questionable practices that fuelled the company’s transformation into one of Silicon Valley’s most famous exports. The leak spans a five-year period…

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Google allowed a sanctioned Russian advertising company to harvest user data for months

Google allowed a sanctioned Russian advertising company to harvest user data for months

By Craig Silverman, ProPublica, July 1, 2022 The day after Russia’s February invasion of Ukraine, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner sent a letter to Google warning it to be on alert for “exploitation of your platform by Russia and Russian-linked entities,” and calling on the company to audit its advertising business’s compliance with economic sanctions. But as recently as June 23, Google was sharing potentially sensitive user data with a sanctioned Russian ad tech company owned by Russia’s largest…

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‘An invisible cage’: How China is policing the future

‘An invisible cage’: How China is policing the future

The New York Times reports: The more than 1.4 billion people living in China are constantly watched. They are recorded by police cameras that are everywhere, on street corners and subway ceilings, in hotel lobbies and apartment buildings. Their phones are tracked, their purchases are monitored, and their online chats are censored. Now, even their future is under surveillance. The latest generation of technology digs through the vast amounts of data collected on their daily activities to find patterns and…

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Unions might not be Amazon’s biggest labor threat

Unions might not be Amazon’s biggest labor threat

Recode reports: Amazon is facing a looming crisis: It could run out of people to hire in its US warehouses by 2024, according to leaked Amazon internal research from mid-2021 that Recode reviewed. If that happens, the online retailer’s service quality and growth plans could be at risk, and its e-commerce dominance along with it. Raising wages and increasing warehouse automation are two of the six “levers” Amazon could pull to delay this labor crisis by a few years, but…

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Sweeping legislation aims to ban the sale of location data

Sweeping legislation aims to ban the sale of location data

Motherboard reports: Sen. Elizabeth Warren and a group of other Democratic lawmakers have introduced a bill that would essentially outlaw the sale of location data harvested from smartphones. The bill also presents a range of other powers to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and individual victims to push back against the multibillion-dollar location data industry. The move comes after Motherboard reported multiple instances in which companies were selling location data of people who visited abortion clinics, and sometimes making subsets…

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Could Google’s carbon emissions have effectively doubled overnight?

Could Google’s carbon emissions have effectively doubled overnight?

Bill McKibben writes: The temperature in parts of the Antarctic was seventy degrees Fahrenheit above normal in mid-March. Pakistan and India saw their hottest March and April in more than half a century, and the temperature in areas of the subcontinent is above a hundred and twenty degrees this week. Temperatures in Chicago last week topped those in Death Valley. But, on Tuesday, three nonprofit environmental groups jointly released a report containing a different set of numbers that appear to…

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We need to take back our privacy

We need to take back our privacy

Zeynep Tufekci writes: Over 130 years ago, a young lawyer saw an amazing new gadget and had a revolutionary vision — technology can threaten our privacy. “Recent inventions and business methods call attention to the next step which must be taken for the protection of the person,” wrote the lawyer, Louis Brandeis, warning that laws needed to keep up with technology and new means of surveillance, or Americans would lose their “right to be let alone.” Decades later, the right…

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The more technological power grows, the smaller we become

The more technological power grows, the smaller we become

Audrey Borowski writes: For [the philosopher Günther] Anders, the disasters of the 20th century were simply the logical outcome of a pernicious process that had already been underway for many years, involving the gradual exclusion of mankind from all production processes – and, ultimately, from the world created by those processes. The real catastrophe in this regard, which Anders hoped to make ‘visible for the first time’, lay in the transformation of the human condition, a transformation that had become…

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Google is sharing our data at a staggering scale

Google is sharing our data at a staggering scale

Parmy Olson writes: Along with the Pixel phones, watches and earbuds at Google’s annual showcase of software and devices last week came a pair of nifty-looking translation glasses. Put them on and real-time “subtitles” appear on the lenses as you watch a person speaking in a different language. Very cool. But the glasses aren’t commercially available. It’s also unlikely they will make anywhere near as much money as advertising does for Google’s parent, Alphabet Inc. Of the company’s $68 billion…

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Small drones are giving Ukraine an unprecedented advantage

Small drones are giving Ukraine an unprecedented advantage

Wired reports: In the snowy streets of the north Ukrainian town of Trostyanets, the Russian missile system fires rockets every second. Tanks and military vehicles are parked on either side of the blasting artillery system, positioned among houses and near the town’s railway system. The weapon is not working alone, though. Hovering tens of meters above it and recording the assault is a Ukrainian drone. The drone isn’t a sophisticated military system, but a small, commercial machine that anyone can…

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Ukraine’s digital battle with Russia highlights the advantages of decentralized power

Ukraine’s digital battle with Russia highlights the advantages of decentralized power

Wired reports: When Russian president Vladimir Putin launched his full invasion of Ukraine in February, the world expected Moscow’s cyber and information operations to pummel the country alongside air strikes and shelling. Two months on, however, Kyiv has not only managed to keep the country online amidst a deluge of hacking attempts, but it has brought the fight back to Russia. Even Ukrainian officials are surprised by how ineffective Russia’s digital war has been. “I think that the root cause…

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