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 MoreComputing & Technology
Generally covering the broad topics of computing and related technology.
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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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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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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China’s vast Internet prison
In law and in practice, China is creating the world’s largest online thought prison. It turns the idea of the Internet as a force for freedom on its head, and as China goes, so go other tyrants. From Vietnam to Saudi Arabia, from Russia to Turkey, the age of Internet repression has blossomed.
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Passwords Evolved: Authentication Guidance for the Modern Era
Here’s the bigger picture of what all this guidance from governments and tech companies alike is recognising: security is increasingly about a composition of controls which when combined, improve the overall security posture of a service. What you’ll see across this post is a collection of recommendations which all help contribute to a more robust solution by virtue of complementing one another.
Read More The World’s First Computer Password? It Was Useless Too
Who invented the computer password?
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The Secret History of the First Microprocessor, the F-14, and Me
This is the story, then, of how another first microprocessor, a secret one, came to be—and of my own entwinement with it. The device was designed by a team at a company called Garrett AiResearch on a subcontract for Grumman, the aircraft manufacturer. It was larger, it was a combination of six chips, and it performed crucial functions for the F-14 Tomcat fighter jet, which celebrates the 50th anniversary of its first flight this week.
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The US Government Needs to Invest in Digital Design
Our nation’s failure to invest in information technology has severely limited our Covid response. A federal chief experience officer could change that.
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Censorship, Surveillance and Profits: A Hard Bargain for Apple in China
“Censorship, Surveillance and Profits: A Hard Bargain for Apple in China” The New York Times, May 17, 2021 (Updated June 17, 2021) Technology By Jack Nicas, Raymond Zhong and Daisuke Wakabayashi “Apple built the world’s most valuable business on top of …
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