Generally covering the broad topics of computing and related technology.
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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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.
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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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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“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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“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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“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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“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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“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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“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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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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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 Who invented the computer password?
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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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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” 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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Google’s claim to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” has earned it an aura of objectivity. Its dominance in search, and the disappearance of most competitors, make its lists of links appear still more canonical. An experimental new interface for Google Search aims to remove that mantle of neutrality.
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Technology has completely transformed the global food supply system, yet still hasn’t brought an end to hunger. For that to happen, the choices we need to make are political, not technological.
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Dark patterns are user interfaces that benefit an online service by leading users into making decisions they might not otherwise make. Some dark patterns deceive users while others covertly manipulate or coerce them into choices that are not in their best interests.
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Why, Vespignani wondered, were computer networks still susceptible to viruses even though millions of individual users had antivirus software? The answer, he discovered, was that if you didn’t inoculate the nodes, malicious code could still zip around the internet with relative ease.
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