Internet Salmagundi

Understanding emerging threats from social media platforms.

How the battle over the right to repair is tipping in favor of consumers.

The young company sent shock waves around the world when it released ChatGPT. But that was just the start. The ultimate goal: Change everything. Yes. Everything.

They met by chance, got hooked on an idea, and wrote the “Transformers” paper—the most consequential tech breakthrough in recent history.

AI is making its way into decision-making in battle. Who’s to blame when something goes wrong?

Tips for aspiring innovators on trying, failing, and the future of AI.

Li’s research could prevent AI models from failing catastrophically when they encounter unfamiliar scenarios.

Heata is now using these busy servers to heat water for homes.

An oral history of WIRED 01.01.

Four Frontline films from Douglas Rushkoff focusing on modern culture, social media, advertising, and marketing.

Traditionally, people have been forced to reduce complex choices to a small handful of options that don’t do justice to their true desires. Artificial intelligence has the potential to remove that limitation. And it has the potential to drastically change how democracy functions.

The internet is forever … or is it? The average webpage is deleted or changed in just 100 days. To preserve all human knowledge — digital and analog — Brewster Kahle created the Internet Archive.

GCHQ unveils new docs on Colossus, a 1943 marvel that let allies “read Hitler’s mind.”

CISA has published the finalized Microsoft 365 Secure Configuration Baselines, designed to bolster the security and resilience of organizations’ Microsoft 365 (M365) cloud services.

Being fully anonymous is next to impossible—but you can significantly limit what the internet knows about you by sticking to a few basic rules.

CISA released this Resource Guide for Cybersecurity Clinics to outline ways CISA can partner with and support cybersecurity clinics and their clients.

Cybersecurity Information Sheets (CSIs) to provide organizations with recommended best practices and/or mitigations to improve the security of their cloud environment(s)

Yet as IoT adoption increases, IoT sensors and devices also are becoming more popular targets for cybercriminals.

Consumer cybersecurity can no longer be ignored.

Going forward cyber-insurance providers will thrive by succeeding in: rewarding security; generating knowledge; and punishing insecurity.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) 2023-2025 Strategic Plan is the agency’s first, comprehensive strategic plan since CISA was established in 2018. This is a major milestone for the agency.

CISA has developed and published a factsheet, Free Tools for Cloud Environments, to help businesses transitioning into a cloud environment identify proper tools and techniques necessary for the protection of critical assets and data security.

Why do nations break into one another’s most important computer networks? There is an obvious answer: to steal valuable information or to attack. But this isn’t the full story.

Imagine a world in which developers and operators of systems exploit attackers as much as attackers exploit defenders. By leveraging system-design knowledge and modern computing to deploy deception environments, software engineering teams can successfully bamboozle attackers for fun and profit while deepening systems resilience.

The Catholic Church is one of the world’s largest landowners. Using public data and GIS, Molly Burhans is trying to make it a better steward.

Ocean creatures soak up huge amounts of humanity’s carbon mess. Should we value them like financial assets?

But what about the overall environmental impacts of this growing infrastructure and the huge number of short-lived devices connected to it, or the indirect impacts on other sectors?

In California’s ‘zombie’ forests, conifers have become mismatched to a warming climate.

We will most likely never do better than a best guess at computing’s carbon footprint, but given uncertainties it would be safer and more responsible to act on the assumption that higher estimates could be closer to the truth—especially since the pace of warming has exceeded our expectations at every point. But in big-picture terms, the difference between 1.8% and 3.9% does not fundamentally change our mission: computing’s emissions must be reduced urgently and drastically. How are we going to achieve this?

The “urban heat island effect” creates extra-hot temperatures that kill. But cities can prescribe powerful treatments, like green spaces and reflective roofs.

Digging deep into a humble lake in Canada, scientists found a spot on Earth like no other — and a record that could redefine our history of the planet

Tropical storms are increasingly likely to batter the US as oceans warm—and will continue to wreak havoc so long as climate change remains unaddressed.

Climate change and human activity are destroying the layers of fungi, lichen, and bacteria that protect deserts from erosion.

Less pavement and more green spaces help absorb water instead of funneling it all away—a win-win for people and urban ecosystems.

Using AI to predict weather has a big advantage: it’s fast. Traditional forecasting models are big, complex computer algorithms based on atmospheric physics and take hours to run. AI models can create forecasts in just seconds.

They could also help to make them more accurate.

The National Weather Service glossary contains information on more than 2000 terms, phrases and abbreviations used by the NWS.

The machine-learning model takes less than a minute to predict future weather worldwide more precisely than other approaches.

During the last week of March and first week of April, Big & Little Cottonwood Canyons saw an epic snow cycle the likes of which have never been seen before. Little Cottonwood Canyon (“LCC”) closed due to avalanche danger on Sunday April 2, 2023. The canyon generally did not open again until Saturday April 8. (There were two brief periods when the canyon was open to the public to downhill travel only, so that people who needed/wanted could leave. Otherwise, the general public was prohibited from going up or down the canyon during the period April 1-8.

The Wasatch Backcountry Skiing Map is a full-color paper map that compliments the website, Android app, and iOS app. The map includes the names of almost 1,000 backcountry locations in the Central Wasatch.

The United States was hit by historically cold and windy Winter weather with a rare mid-latitude mid-continent cyclone, one that would undergo a process of rapid intensification called Bombogenesis, or Bomb Cyclogenesis. The event was termed “Winter Storm Elliott.” This …

Big and Little Cottonwood Canyon roads carve between steep mountains that are prone to avalanches in the winter. In fact, 57% of the 9-mile Little Cottonwood Canyon Road is in an avalanche runout zone. Still, recreationalists, residents, and canyon employees need to transport themselves up and down these canyons regularly and as safely as possible.

“This is a starter kit for good design. It is intended to be enjoyable and informative for everyone: everyday people, technical people, designers, and nondesigners.”

A study conducted in 2021 by Web Accessibility In Mind illustrated that 83% of the Internet’s top one million homepages failed to meet minimum color contrast requirements. That means about 860,000 of the most visited pages on the Internet aren’t designed with people with Color Vision Deficiency in mind.

Yoast’s WordPress theme infographic.

This is an interactive video intro to flexbox and is comprised of 5 sections that walk through various parts of flexbox.

F.B. Purity is a browser extension / add-on that lets you clean up and customise Facebook. It filters out the junk you don’t want to see, leaving behind the stories and page elements you do wish to see. The list of story types that FBP hides is customizable to your taste.

At WPBeginner, our main goal is to provide cutting-edge helpful WordPress tutorials that are easy to understand for small businesses, bloggers, and non-techy WordPress website owners.

The Firefox 70 Accessibility Inspector is an auditing facility to help identify and fix many common mistakes and practices to help improve site accessibility.

The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web and other information on the Internet. It was launched in 2001 by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, California, United States.