The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America
The true, behind-the-scenes history of the people who built Silicon Valley and shaped Big Tech in America.
Read More— Broad Topics
Major topic areas.
She risked everything to expose Facebook. Now she’s telling her story.
Sophie Zhang, a former data scientist at Facebook, revealed that it enables global political manipulation and has done little to stop it.
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How Facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation
The company’s AI algorithms gave it an insatiable habit for lies and hate speech. Now the man who built them can’t fix the problem. [Not because he doesn’t want to, but because he is not allowed to as it would get in the way of profits.]
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A powerful new model could make global warming estimates less vague
One of the biggest sources of climate uncertainty is how clouds will behave. Caltech physicist Tapio Schneider is trying to give us some answers.
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How China’s Hacking Entered a Reckless New Phase
China has increasingly relied on contractors for its hacking, which opens the door to all kinds of criminal behavior.
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China’s and Russia’s Spying Sprees Will Take Years to Unpack
The full extent of the SolarWinds hack and Hafnium’s attack on Microsoft Exchange Server may never be known.
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Chinese Hacking Spree Hit an ‘Astronomical’ Number of Victims
A single group appears to have infiltrated tens of thousands of Microsoft Exchange servers in an ongoing onslaught.
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Facebook Catches Iranian Spies Catfishing US Military Targets
The hackers posed as recruiters, journalists, and hospitality workers to lure their victims.
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Microsoft Password Guidance
This paper provides Microsoft’s recommendations for password management based on current research and lessons from our own experience as one of the largest Identity Providers (IdPs) in the world. It covers recommendations for end users and identity administrators.
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Life Without the Tech Giants
Maybe you’re in the camp of people who worry that these companies have too much access to our purchases, our movements, our social networks—and perhaps even our thoughts. Maybe you’re disturbed by the concentration of so much economic power in a handful of companies built on the West Coast’s fault lines. Or maybe you want them to have less insight into your life so they have less sway over our society. But how? How do you reduce their power? Is it even possible?
The common retort to these concerns is that you should “just stop using their services.” So I decided to try.
What happens when you type a URL in the browser and press enter?
Although this seems like a very tedious prolonged process, we know that it takes less than seconds for a web page to render after we hit enter on our keyboard. All of these steps happen within milliseconds before we could even notice.
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I Cut the ‘Big Five’ Tech Giants From My Life. It Was Hell
Over the course of five weeks, I blocked Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple one at a time, to find out how to live in the modern age without each one. To end my experiment, I’m going to see if I can survive blocking all five at once.
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Want to Really Block the Tech Giants? Here’s How
As consumers, we are afforded only a few avenues of acceptable dissent—the most reasonable of which is that, if you don’t like what a company is doing, you can move your money and data elsewhere. But increasingly this option is unavailable to us.
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Hacker Lexicon: What Is the Signal Encryption Protocol?
As the Signal protocol becomes the industry standard, it’s worth understanding what sets it apart from other forms of end-to-end encrypted messaging.
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China’s scary lesson to the world: Censoring the Internet works
“After two decades of Internet development under the Communist Party’s firm leadership, [China’s Internet czar, Lu Wei] said, his country had struck the correct balance between ‘freedom and order’ and between ‘openness and autonomy.’” – BEHIND THE FIREWALL: How China tamed the Internet | This is part 1 of 6 of a series examining the impact of China’s Great Firewall, a mechanism of Internet censorship and surveillance that affects nearly 700 million users.
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Internet activists are finding ways around China’s Great Firewall
“I hope one day I’ll live in a country where I have the freedom to write any code I like without fearing.” – BEHIND THE FIREWALL: How China tamed the Internet | This is part 2 of 6 of a series examining the impact of China’s Great Firewall, a mechanism of Internet censorship and surveillance that affects nearly 700 million users.
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The Internet was supposed to foster democracy. China has different ideas.
“I just want freedom of speech without fear.” – BEHIND THE FIREWALL: How China tamed the Internet | This is part 3 of 6 of a series examining the impact of China’s Great Firewall, a mechanism of Internet censorship and surveillance that affects nearly 700 million users.
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America wants to believe China can’t innovate. Tech tells a different story.
“The truth is that behind the Great Firewall — the system of censorship designed to block content that could challenge the Chinese Communist Party — China’s tech scene is flourishing in a parallel universe.” – BEHIND THE FIREWALL: How China tamed the Internet | This is part 4 of 6 of a series examining the impact of China’s Great Firewall, a mechanism of Internet censorship and surveillance that affects nearly 700 million users.
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China’s plan to organize its society relies on ‘big data’ to rate everyone
“This is what China calls “Internet Plus,” but critics call a 21st-century police state.” – BEHIND THE FIREWALL: How China tamed the Internet | This is part 5 of 6 of a series examining the impact of China’s Great Firewall, a mechanism of Internet censorship and surveillance that affects nearly 700 million users.
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U.S. companies want to play China’s game. They just can’t win it.
“For some highflying U.S. Internet businesses, the China dream is fading; for others, it looks radically different from what they had hoped.” – BEHIND THE FIREWALL: How China tamed the Internet | This is part 6 of 6 of a series examining the impact of China’s Great Firewall, a mechanism of Internet censorship and surveillance that affects nearly 700 million users.
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