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Category: Technology

Amazon’s antitrust antagonist has a breakthrough idea

Amazon’s antitrust antagonist has a breakthrough idea

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David Streitfeld reports: The dead books are on the top floor of Southern Methodist University’s law library. “Antitrust Dilemma.” “The Antitrust Impulse.” “Antitrust in an Expanding Economy.” Shelf after shelf of volumes ignored for decades. There are a dozen fat tomes with transcripts of the congressional hearings on monopoly power in 1949, when the world was in ruins and the Soviets on the march. Lawmakers believed economic concentration would make America more vulnerable. At the end of the antitrust stacks…

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Microwave weapons are prime suspect in attacks on U.S. embassy staff in Cuba

Microwave weapons are prime suspect in attacks on U.S. embassy staff in Cuba

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The New York Times reports: During the Cold War, Washington feared that Moscow was seeking to turn microwave radiation into covert weapons of mind control. More recently, the American military itself sought to develop microwave arms that could invisibly beam painfully loud booms and even spoken words into people’s heads. The aims were to disable attackers and wage psychological warfare. Now, doctors and scientists say such unconventional weapons may have caused the baffling symptoms and ailments that, starting in late…

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As technology makes billions of people economically irrelevant, their political power is likely to shrink

As technology makes billions of people economically irrelevant, their political power is likely to shrink

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Yuval Noah Harari writes: There is nothing inevitable about democracy. For all the success that democracies have had over the past century or more, they are blips in history. Monarchies, oligarchies, and other forms of authoritarian rule have been far more common modes of human governance. The emergence of liberal democracies is associated with ideals of liberty and equality that may seem self-evident and irreversible. But these ideals are far more fragile than we believe. Their success in the 20th…

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The digital corruption of the human brain

The digital corruption of the human brain

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Maryanne Wolf writes: Look around on your next plane trip. The iPad is the new pacifier for babies and toddlers. Younger school-aged children read stories on smartphones; older boys don’t read at all, but hunch over video games. Parents and other passengers read on Kindles or skim a flotilla of email and news feeds. Unbeknownst to most of us, an invisible, game-changing transformation links everyone in this picture: the neuronal circuit that underlies the brain’s ability to read is subtly,…

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California advances an ambitious climate policy that should be a model for the world

California advances an ambitious climate policy that should be a model for the world

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MIT Technology Review reports: California is accelerating its rollout of clean energy, even as the White House is racing to unravel climate regulations. On Tuesday evening, the California Assembly passed a bill requiring 100 percent of the state’s electricity to come from carbon-free sources by the end of 2045, putting one of the world’s most aggressive clean-energy policies on track for the governor’s desk. Given the size of California’s economy and the bill’s ambitions, it “would be the most important…

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The hidden injuries of the age of exposure

The hidden injuries of the age of exposure

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Rochelle Gurstein writes: What do we lose when we lose our privacy? This question has become increasingly difficult to answer, living as we do in a society that offers boundless opportunities for men and women to expose themselves (in all dimensions of that word) as never before, to commit what are essentially self-invasions of privacy. Although this is a new phenomenon, it has become as ubiquitous as it is quotidian, and for that reason, it is perhaps one of the…

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How Russia, China or America could accidentally start a nuclear war

How Russia, China or America could accidentally start a nuclear war

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BBC News reports: A mysterious Russian satellite displaying “very abnormal behaviour” has raised alarm in the US, according to a State Department official. “We don’t know for certain what it is and there is no way to verify it,” said assistant secretary Yleem Poblete at a conference in Switzerland on 14 August. She voiced fears that it was impossible to say if the object may be a weapon. Russia has dismissed the comments as “unfounded, slanderous accusations based on suspicions”….

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Google tracks your movements, like it or not

Google tracks your movements, like it or not

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The Associated Press reports: Google wants to know where you go so badly that it records your movements even when you explicitly tell it not to. An Associated Press investigation found that many Google services on Android devices and iPhones store your location data even if you’ve used a privacy setting that says it will prevent Google from doing so. Computer-science researchers at Princeton confirmed these findings at the AP’s request. For the most part, Google is upfront about asking…

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Carmakers speed toward electric future despite Trump rollback

Carmakers speed toward electric future despite Trump rollback

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Bloomberg reports: The Trump administration wants to try to limit California’s special ability to require increasing purchase of electric vehicles in the state—but major automakers say they have no intention of reversing course on their electric vehicle plans. The Environmental Protection Agency and the Transportation Department are targeting California’s authority under the Clean Air Act to set stricter tailpipe emissions limits and zero emission vehicle requirements than the federal government. The agencies, as part of a larger Aug. 2 proposal…

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The marvel of LED lighting is now a global blight to health

The marvel of LED lighting is now a global blight to health

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By Richard G ‘Bugs’ Stevens, Aeon Light pollution is often characterised as a soft issue in environmentalism. This perception needs to change. Light at night constitutes a massive assault on the ecology of the planet, including us. It also has indirect impacts because, while 20 per cent of electricity is used for lighting worldwide, at least 30 per cent of that light is wasted. Wasted light serves no purpose at all, and excessive lighting is too often used beyond what…

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Inside Google’s shadow workforce

Inside Google’s shadow workforce

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Bloomberg reports: Every day, tens of thousands of people stream into Google offices wearing red name badges. They eat in Google’s cafeterias, ride its commuter shuttles and work alongside its celebrated geeks. But they can’t access all of the company’s celebrated perks. They aren’t entitled to stock and can’t enter certain offices. Many don’t have health insurance. Before each weekly Google all-hands meeting, trays of hors d’oeuvres and, sometimes, kegs of beer are carted into an auditorium and satellite offices…

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Inside China’s dystopian dreams: AI, shame and lots of cameras

Inside China’s dystopian dreams: AI, shame and lots of cameras

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Paul Mozur writes: In the Chinese city of Zhengzhou, a police officer wearing facial recognition glasses spotted a heroin smuggler at a train station. In Qingdao, a city famous for its German colonial heritage, cameras powered by artificial intelligence helped the police snatch two dozen criminal suspects in the midst of a big annual beer festival. In Wuhu, a fugitive murder suspect was identified by a camera as he bought food from a street vendor. With millions of cameras and…

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How Silicon Valley fuels an informal caste system

How Silicon Valley fuels an informal caste system

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Antonio García Martínez writes: California is the future of the United States, goes the oft-cited cliché. What the US is doing now, Europe will be doing in five years, goes another. Given those truthy maxims, let’s examine the socioeconomics of the “City by the Bay” as a harbinger of what’s to come. Data shows that technology and services make up a large fraction of citywide employment. It also shows that unemployment and housing prices follow the tech industry’s boom-and-bust cycle….

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How robots helped Trump win

How robots helped Trump win

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Brian Alexander writes: “We used to laugh at the robots,” Rickey’s buddy said. “When they first came in, they were so slow. We would sorta hurry and outproduce them. But one of the lines was about 18 people, and now they can run it with, like, five.” Rickey and his friend were echoing, almost word for word, two other men with whom I’d shared one-dollar beers in the Agenda Sports Bar, not far from the Toledo Assembly Complex. Both 30-year…

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The dangers of distracted parenting

The dangers of distracted parenting

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Erika Christakis writes: Smartphones have by now been implicated in so many crummy outcomes—car fatalities, sleep disturbances, empathy loss, relationship problems, failure to notice a clown on a unicycle—that it almost seems easier to list the things they don’t mess up than the things they do. Our society may be reaching peak criticism of digital devices. Even so, emerging research suggests that a key problem remains underappreciated. It involves kids’ development, but it’s probably not what you think. More than…

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Google’s artificial intelligence drone project for the Pentagon provoked backlash for the company

Google’s artificial intelligence drone project for the Pentagon provoked backlash for the company

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Gizmodo reports: Google will not seek another contract for its controversial work providing artificial intelligence to the U.S. Department of Defense for analyzing drone footage after its current contract expires. Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene announced the decision at a meeting with employees Friday morning, three sources told Gizmodo. The current contract expires in 2019 and there will not be a follow-up contract, Greene said. The meeting, dubbed Weather Report, is a weekly update on Google Cloud’s business. Google would…

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