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Category: Technology

An alternative history of Silicon Valley disruption

An alternative history of Silicon Valley disruption

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Nitasha Tiku writes: A few years after the Great Recession, you couldn’t scroll through Google Reader without seeing the word “disrupt.” TechCrunch named a conference after it, the New York Times named a column after it, investor Marc Andreessen warned that “software disruption” would eat the world; not long after, Peter Thiel, his fellow Facebook board member, called “disrupt” one of his favorite words. (One of the future Trump adviser’s least favorite words? “Politics.”) The term “disruptive innovation” was coined…

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Games are taking over life

Games are taking over life

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Vincent Gabrielle writes: Deep under the Disneyland Resort Hotel in California, far from the throngs of happy tourists, laundry workers clean thousands of sheets, blankets, towels and comforters every day. Workers feed the heavy linens into hot, automated presses to iron out wrinkles, and load dirty laundry into washers and dryers large enough to sit in. It’s loud, difficult work, but bearable. The workers were protected by union contracts that guaranteed a living wage and affordable healthcare, and many had…

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Thanks to genetic genealogy, anonymity will soon become a thing of the past

Thanks to genetic genealogy, anonymity will soon become a thing of the past

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The New York Times reports: The genetic genealogy industry is booming. In recent years, more than 15 million people have offered up their DNA — a cheek swab, some saliva in a test-tube — to services such as 23andMe and Ancestry.com in pursuit of answers about their heritage. In exchange for a genetic fingerprint, individuals may find a birth parent, long-lost cousins, perhaps even a link to Oprah or Alexander the Great. But as these registries of genetic identity grow,…

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How China used a hardware hack to infiltrate Amazon, Apple and dozens of other U.S. companies

How China used a hardware hack to infiltrate Amazon, Apple and dozens of other U.S. companies

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Bloomberg Businessweek reports: In 2015, Amazon.com Inc. began quietly evaluating a startup called Elemental Technologies, a potential acquisition to help with a major expansion of its streaming video service, known today as Amazon Prime Video. Based in Portland, Ore., Elemental made software for compressing massive video files and formatting them for different devices. Its technology had helped stream the Olympic Games online, communicate with the International Space Station, and funnel drone footage to the Central Intelligence Agency. Elemental’s national security…

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Solar energy largely unscathed by Hurricane Florence’s wind and rain

Solar energy largely unscathed by Hurricane Florence’s wind and rain

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Inside Climate News reports: Faced with Hurricane Florence’s powerful winds and record rainfall, North Carolina’s solar farms held up with only minimal damage while other parts of the electricity system failed, an outcome that solar advocates hope will help to steer the broader energy debate. North Carolina has more solar power than any state other than California, much of it built in the two years since Hurricane Matthew hit the region. Before last week, the state hadn’t seen how its…

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Utility companies are at odds with public demand for 100% renewable energy

Utility companies are at odds with public demand for 100% renewable energy

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Vox reports: Renewable energy is hot. It has incredible momentum, not only in terms of deployment and costs but in terms of public opinion and cultural cachet. To put it simply: Everyone loves renewable energy. It’s cleaner, it’s high-tech, it’s new jobs, it’s the future. And so more and more big energy customers are demanding the full meal deal: 100 percent renewable energy. The Sierra Club notes that so far in the US, more than 80 cities, five counties, and…

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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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