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Category: Technology

Jarrod Dicker on what the blockchain can do for news

Jarrod Dicker on what the blockchain can do for news

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Mathew Ingram writes: For journalists who are also into new technology, Jarrod Dicker has a pretty compelling CV: He was the head of product management at Huffington Post, director of digital products at Time Inc., helped run operations at online-publishing startup RebelMouse, and ran a digital-research lab at The Washington Post. With a career like that, lots of people in media pay attention when Dicker calls something interesting, and so many heads turned when he said he was leaving the…

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Predictive policing system made by Palantir has been secretly tested in New Orleans

Predictive policing system made by Palantir has been secretly tested in New Orleans

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Ali Winston reports: In May and June 2013, when New Orleans’ murder rate was the sixth-highest in the United States, the Orleans Parish district attorney handed down two landmark racketeering indictments against dozens of men accused of membership in two violent Central City drug trafficking gangs, 3NG and the 110ers. Members of both gangs stood accused of committing 25 murders as well as several attempted killings and armed robberies. Subsequent investigations by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives,…

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China deploys big data analysis to enable ‘predictive policing’

China deploys big data analysis to enable ‘predictive policing’

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Human Rights Watch reports: Chinese authorities are building and deploying a predictive policing program based on big data analysis in Xinjiang, Human Rights Watch said today. The program aggregates data about people – often without their knowledge – and flags those it deems potentially threatening to officials. According to interviewees, some of those targeted are detained and sent to extralegal “political education centers” where they are held indefinitely without charge or trial, and can be subject to abuse. “For the…

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Algorithms of oppression

Algorithms of oppression

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MIT Technology Review reports: The internet might seem like a level playing field, but it isn’t. Safiya Umoja Noble came face to face with that fact one day when she used Google’s search engine to look for subjects her nieces might find interesting. She entered the term “black girls” and came back with pages dominated by pornography. Noble was horrified but not surprised. The UCLA communications professor has been arguing for years that the values of the web reflect its…

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Warren Buffett loves Apple because of consumer addiction to the iPhone

Warren Buffett loves Apple because of consumer addiction to the iPhone

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Quartz reports: Warren Buffett told CNBC that Berkshire Hathaway has purchased more shares of Apple than any other stock over the past year. It reflects the famed investor’s belief in Apple’s value as a consumer brand, not unlike Coca-Cola, Berkshire’s fourth-largest US stock holding. (Apple is now the second largest.) Buffett’s take on Apple is striking because it’s seemingly not rooted directly in a view of Apple’s technology, manufacturing, or design prowess. The Berkshire CEO didn’t mention the iPhone X’s…

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Blockchain could reshape our world — and the far right is one step ahead

Blockchain could reshape our world — and the far right is one step ahead

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Josh Hall writes: Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain reads the title of a 2017 book. From currency speculation through to verifying the provenance of food, blockchain technology is eking out space in a vast range of fields. For most people, blockchain technologies are inseparable from bitcoin, the cryptocurrency that has been particularly visible in the news recently thanks to its hyper-volatility. Crypto-entrepreneurs have made and lost millions, and many people have parlayed their trading into a full-time job. But…

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Why moths learn so much faster than machines

Why moths learn so much faster than machines

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Technology Review reports: One of the curious features of the deep neural networks behind machine learning is that they are surprisingly different from the neural networks in biological systems. While there are similarities, some critical machine-learning mechanisms have no analogue in the natural world, where learning seems to occur in a different way. These differences probably account for why machine-learning systems lag so far behind natural ones in some aspects of performance. Insects, for example, can recognize odors after just…

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Google Chrome now blocks ads in order to promote advertising

Google Chrome now blocks ads in order to promote advertising

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The New York Times reports: Google did not become the creator of the world’s most popular browser and a dominant advertising force by running its business in a manner that did not serve its own interests. With the Chrome update, the company hopes to come out ahead by lessening the temptation of web users to install more comprehensive ad-blocking software. In other words, Google is betting that ridding the web of especially intrusive ads will render it more hospitable to…

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Amazon behaves like a planned economy

Amazon behaves like a planned economy

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Malcolm Harris writes: Although they attempt to grow in a single direction, planned economies always destroy as well as build. In the 1930s, the Soviet Union compelled the collectivization of kulaks, or prosperous peasants. Small farms were incorporated into a larger collective agricultural system. Depending on who you ask, dekulakization was literal genocide, comparable to the Holocaust, and/or it catapulted what had been a continent-sized expanse of peasants into a modern superpower. Amazon’s decimation of small businesses (bookstores in particular)…

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How New Zealand became a new Ararat for Silicon Valley’s misanthropic billionaires

How New Zealand became a new Ararat for Silicon Valley’s misanthropic billionaires

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Mark O’Connell writes: Early last summer, just as my interests in the topics of civilisational collapse and Peter Thiel were beginning to converge into a single obsession, I received out of the blue an email from a New Zealand art critic named Anthony Byrt. If I wanted to understand the extreme ideology that underpinned Thiel’s attraction to New Zealand, he insisted, I needed to understand an obscure libertarian manifesto called The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the…

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Quinn Norton and how anti-fascists are helping bring fascism to America

Quinn Norton and how anti-fascists are helping bring fascism to America

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How fascism is coming to America: It’s happening when people decide the ideal society is one where everyone thinks the same way. And it’s happening when people who know better, kowtow to the dictates of social media instead of doing the right thing. I didn’t know the New York Times hired Quinn Norton until I saw news they’d parted ways. Without question, this is a greater loss to the Times and its readers, than it is to Norton — although…

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Paleolithic parenting and animated GIFs

Paleolithic parenting and animated GIFs

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The creation of the moving image represents a technical advance in the arts comparable with the invention of the steam engine during the industrial revolution. The transition from static to moving imagery was a watershed event in human history, through which people discovered a new way of capturing the visible world — or so it seemed. It turns out, however, that long before the advent of civilization, our Paleolithic forebears figured out that movement seen in living creatures around them…

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With the very best technology, humanity is digging its own grave

With the very best technology, humanity is digging its own grave

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Technology is generally thought of as extending human capabilities by facilitating everyday actions more easily or allowing us to do things that would otherwise be impossible. From this expansive perspective, technological advance has become synonymous with human progress. Conversely, the less technology populations possess, the more they are viewed as developing or even less evolved. What these views mask are the multiplicity of ways in which technology feeds human regression. The regressive mechanism built into technology in most of its…

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