Tag: Technology

  • Researchers Claim to Have Detected A Cosmic Gravitational Wave Background

    As widely reported, including in this piece on the Caltech website, “[s]cientists are reporting the first evidence that our Earth and the universe around us are awash in a background of spacetime undulations called gravitational waves.” 

    As the article reminds us, “[g]ravitational waves were first proposed by Albert Einstein in 1916.” The new evidence confirming their existence is a result of “15 years’ worth of observations made by the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav), a National Science Foundation-funded (NSF) Physics Frontier Center of more than 190 scientists from the United States and Canada.” 

    The article gives some background on NANOGrav: 

    “NANOGrav is an international collaboration dedicated to exploring the low-frequency gravitational-wave universe through radio pulsar timing. NANOGrav was founded in October 2007 and has grown to more than 190 members at more than 70 institutions. In 2015, it was designated a National Science Foundation (NSF) Physics Frontiers Center.”

    The methodology of this long-term study has been summarised in lay terms as follows: 

    “NANOGrav used data from radio telescopes—the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, and the Very Large Array in New Mexico—to monitor 68 dead stars, called pulsars, in the sky. The pulsars acted like a network of buoys bobbing on a slow-rolling sea of gravitational waves.” 

    and 

    “When gravitational waves travel across the cosmos, they stretch and squeeze the fabric of spacetime very slightly. This stretching and squeezing can cause the distance between Earth and a given pulsar to minutely change, which results in delays or advances to the timing of the pulsars’ flashes of light. To search for the background hum of gravitational waves, the science team developed software programs to compare the timing of pairs of pulsars in their network. Gravitational waves will shift this timing to different degrees depending on how close the pulsars are on the sky […]” 

    Reportedly, a “series of papers detailing the new NANOGrav results have been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.” 

    Read the full article here.

  • Germany to Purchase Israel-made Air Defence System

    As multiple reports have pointed out, including this one in the European version of Politico, Germany is set to purchase the Israeli Arrow-3 air defence system. 

    The purchase is part of Germany’s efforts “to modernize its military under a €100 billion fund.” The anti-missile system has apparently “been in use in Israel since 2017 as part of its Iron Dome protection network.” 

    The cost of the procurement is not insignificant: 

    “Eventually, Germany’s expenditure on Arrow-3, which is designed to intercept ballistic missiles, is expected to reach €4 billion.”

    This is only one instance of “a splurge in defense spending across Europe following Russia’s war on Ukraine.” 

    Read the full Politico report here.

  • Civil Society Urges EU to Invest in Non-commercial Digital Commons and Infrastructure

    More than forty civil society groups recently released this statement as a response to the European Declaration on Digital Rights and Principles for the Digital Decade, which was signed in December 2022. 

    The signatories of the statement “welcome the attention to sustainability and the need to avoid environmental harm” in the EU declaration and highlight “the growing recognition that there is a need for alternatives to the dominant commercial platforms and the extractive practices that dominate the online environment today.” 

    The central argument of the statement is this:

    “To create more socially-oriented and climate-friendly digital spaces and ensure the sovereignty of communities and our societies as a whole, Europe needs to invest in digital commons and public digital infrastructures.”

    “As a concrete first step” towards that end, the statement proposes that “the EU and its Member States should set up a European Public Digital Infrastructure fund” which “should be tasked with supporting the development and maintenance of digital public infrastructure that delivers public value by providing citizens and institutions with alternatives to commercial digital infrastructures.” 

    Read the full statement here.

  • Scam Involving International Missed Calls on WhatsApp

    As this report in The Indian Express explains, “many WhatsApp users in India have reported receiving a spate of missed calls from international numbers” and “[t]he scam has caught the government’s attention.”

    This is how the scam works: 

    “The scam typically involves defrauding unsuspecting people on platforms such as WhatsApp, where the victim, who responds to a missed call, is promised money for YouTube video likes or a positive Google review. The scammer makes initial payments to the victim, who is invited to join a group, typically on Telegram app. The victim is encouraged to “invest” small amounts for bigger payouts, but after a considerable sum has been invested, they are blocked from the group.” 

    Further investigation by The Indian Express revealed that “the fraudster who intends to target multiple people doesn’t even need to manually call each of them” as “automatic dialer software” can make multiple calls to an entire database of numbers “in one go.” 

    Reportedly, experts have “pointed to holes in WhatsApp’s security systems” but “[a] detailed questionnaire sent to WhatsApp on whether it was aware that its platform was being used by an ecosystem that created fake accounts to scam people and if it was working to strengthen its firewall remained unanswered till the time of publication of” the report. 

    Read the full report here.

  • Socialist Software Engineers

    This article in The Drift magazine talks about “a non-negligible number of the people who write software for a living” being socialists, though not “as many as the right would have you believe.” 

    Calling it “the engineer’s predicament,” the author talks about such coders developing a desire to “to put their politics into code”: 

    “They want to write software that will facilitate the creation of worker cooperatives, seed the internet with self-governing platforms, and equip movements and municipalities with tools for democratic decision-making and participatory governance.”

    Elaborating on the article’s theme after sharing some facts about the history of “highly skilled workers in capital-intensive industries who had radical politics,” the author concludes: 

    “This is the greatest dilemma faced by socialist software engineers: in working against the grain of their technological heritage, they may also be working to bring about a world in which technology matters less.”

    Read the full article here.

  • Class Action Lawsuit Filed Against Starbucks in New York For Collecting Biometric Data and Sharing It with Amazon

    According to this press release put out by Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P) on May 4, 2023: 

    “Today, a Starbucks customer, the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P), Peter Romer-Friedman Law PLLC, and Pollock Cohen LLP filed a proposed class action lawsuit claiming that Starbucks illegally failed to notify customers that Starbucks’ stores using Amazon’s “Just Walk Out” technology in New York City collect biometric data on customers. The class action also claims that Starbucks illegally shared those customers’ biometric data with Amazon. Two Starbucks stores in Manhattan use the “Just Walk Out” technology to track each customer’s movements and purchases in the store’s lounge and marketplace. They also take palm images of customers who enter those areas of the stores with a palm signature. The case was filed under New York City’s 2021 biometric notice law, which requires businesses to post signs warning customers whenever their biometric information is being collected or shared and prohibits sharing customers’ biometric information for anything of value.”

    In addition to the parties listed above, the class action suit was filed on behalf of “a proposed class of tens of thousands of Starbucks customers.” 

    Starbucks did try to take some steps belatedly, but apparently, they do not cover all legal grounds: 

    “On March 13, 2023, Starbucks allegedly took the additional step of posting signs that state that it only collects biometric data from customers who opt into the optional palm scanner program that Starbucks operates at two of its stores. However, as the lawsuit alleges, Starbucks collects and shares biometric data on all customers who enter the gated area of the store that includes the lounge and marketplace, even those customers who refuse to use the palm scanner, namely information on the shape and size of each customer’s body.” 

    Read the full press release here.

  • Quantum Effects Demonstrated at Macroscopic Scale

    As this report states, physicists have been able to bring “the bizarre behavior of the quantum world to larger scales than ever before.” Various publications are calling it the world’s heaviest or largest Schrödinger’s cat. 

    The experiment can be summarised as: 

    “The trick, performed by vibrating 100 million billion atoms inside a sand-grain-sized sapphire crystal, created the world’s heaviest quantum superposition as the crystal simultaneously oscillated in two different directions.”

    This is important because: 

    “As most quantum effects typically decohere and disappear at macroscopic scales, Schrödinger’s analogy was meant to demonstrate the fundamental differences between our world and the world of the very small. Yet no hard limit exists between the two realms, enabling physicists to begin cajoling complex, near-macroscopic-scale objects into showing freaky quantum behavior.” 

    Of course, this could have far-reaching consequences for quantum technologies like quantum computing. 

    Read the full report here.

  • Spate of Privacy Breaches by Healthcare Businesses

    According to this report, “Telehealth company Cerebral is facing a lawsuit that accuses the company of installing tracking technologies on its website and app that led to the protected health information of more than 3 million patients to be sent to social media companies.” 

    This is happening against the backdrop of “14 other hospitals and health systems around the country” facing lawsuits “alleging use of these tracking technologies on their websites.”

    Read the full report here.

  • Social Media, Disinformation, and the Sudan Conflict

    This newsletter from Coda Story paints a grim picture of how “Big Tech is ‘failing the Sudanese people.’” 

    Reportedly, the conflict in Sudan has led to a situation on social media platforms “that bore many hallmarks of a coordinated disinformation campaign.”

    A Twitter account with a blue checkmark that “looked like the official account of the RSF” falsely announced the death of Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, “the leader of Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces — the paramilitary organization formerly known as the Janjaweed, notorious for carrying out the genocide in Darfur in the early 2000s”: 

    “In the current situation, the disinformation — whether it’s a bogus tweet claiming the general is dead or one claiming that attacks have taken place where they haven’t — could affect how the fighting plays out and how civilians make decisions about where to take shelter or how to traverse dangerous territory.”

    Adding to the chaos of the conflict are factors like internet connections “faltering or collapsing altogether” and social media being “a jumble of real news, hearsay and propaganda.” 

    “With blue ticks available to anyone for a fee, it’s become exponentially harder to know who’s really speaking.” 

    Read the full report in the Coda newsletter here.

  • Buzzfeed News Shutting Down

    As this report summarises: 

    “Last week, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti announced that BuzzFeed News is being shut down, leading to layoffs of about 15% of BuzzFeed staff. The layoffs will affect the company’s business, content, tech and admin teams as well as some staff in international markets. In an email to staff reprinted by CNBC, Peretti said they can no longer fund BuzzFeed News as a standalone operation.”

    Reportedly, the company’s news content will be shifted to Huffpost: 

    “The company’s sole news provider will now be HuffPost. BuzzFeed.com will continue its signature clickbait content, including listicles, quizzes, celebrity gossip and more.”

    Read a comprehensive report on the issue here.

  • Paid Subscriptions Now Necessary for Running Ad Campaigns on Twitter

    Twitter now requires that individuals or organisations intending to run ad campaigns on Twitter be subscribed to either Twitter Blue or the “Verified Organizations” service.

    This report from Tech Crunch quotes a letter from Twitter to a Twitter user:

    “[…] your @account must have a verified checkmark or subscribe to either Twitter Blue or Verified Organizations to continue running ads on Twitter.”

    Read the full Tech Crunch report here.

  • Cryptocurrency in Africa

    This article in Rest of World looks at the decline of crypto in Africa in the aftermath of the FTX collapse. The author quotes reports that talked of the “tens of millions of Africans who bought into the cryptocurrency frenzy over the last few years” and how “[b]lockchain startups and businesses on the continent raised $474 million in 2022, a 429% increase from the previous year.” 

    Now, however, “crypto-related startups across the African continent have been struggling to survive.” 

    Regulatory pushbacks have been seen around the world, including by African governments. But “[s]ome industry stakeholders believe crypto is too important to just be a bubble in Africa, and that the current troubles aren’t unique to this industry. Some industry insiders claim that “several African crypto startups still seem to be doing well, and that stablecoins are a great alternative to Africa’s cross-border remittance restrictions.” 

    Read the full report here.

  • The Potential of CRISPR-edited Fats to Treat Cancer

    Various publications have covered a study where researchers converted white fat into brown fat using CRISPR and used it to surround tumours, starving them of essential nutrients. 

    As this report on the popular science website LiveScience summarises: 

    “Fat sucked out of the body and tweaked with the gene-editing tool CRISPR could be used to treat cancer, a study of mice and transplanted human tissues hints. 

    However, it remains to be seen whether the experimental therapy would be safe and effective in people.” 

    Read the full report here.

  • Data Security Concerns Over the Use of Generative AI Tools

    A study by an Israeli firm Team8 got widely picked up by media outlets because of the concerns it raises about corporate secrets and customer information. 

    As one report says: 

    “The report said that companies using such tools may leave them susceptible to data leaks and laws. The chatbots can be used by hackers to access sensitive information. Team8’s study said that chatbot queries are not being fed into the large language models to train AI since the models in their current form can’t update themselves in real-time. This, however, may not be true for the future versions of such models, it added.”

    Bloomberg News covered the study first and is said to have received it “prior to its release.” As the Bloomberg report says: 

    Major technology companies including Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc. are racing to add generative AI capabilities to improve chatbots and search engines, training their models on data scraped from the Internet to give users a one-stop-shop to their queries. If these tools are fed confidential or private data, it will be very difficult to erase the information, the report said. 

    Read the complete Bloomberg report on the Team8 study here.

  • Generative AI in Finance

    This report in Forbes covers the research paper released earlier by Bloomberg introducing BloombergGPT, which applies ChatGPT-style machine learning techniques to financial datasets, those available in Bloomberg’s own vast repertoire and beyond. 

    Forbes‘s “back-of-napkin cost estimation” speculates that just the cost of Amazon Web Services cloud computing used to generate these models would have been to the tune of “$2.7 million to produce the model alone.” 

    After listing the datasets that were used to train these models, the report goes on to speculate about the uses that BloombergGPT could potentially be put to, like drafting Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings, researching companies, individuals, and their linkages, drafting market reports and summaries, fetching financial statements etc.

    Read the full Forbes report here. Read the Bloomberg announcement of BloombergGPT here.

  • Widespread Vulnerability to Cyberattacks

    This article on Dark Reading about a report published by cybersecurity firm Rezilion states that “[m]ore than 15 million instances of Internet-connected applications, services, and devices are vulnerable to software flaws that the US government has confirmed are being exploited by attackers in the wild.” While “[t]ypically, only a small fraction of vulnerabilities are exploited every year”, Yotam Perkal, director of vulnerability research at Rezilion, is quoted as saying that vulnerabilities “are being exploited, continuously, by sophisticated threat actors as well as advanced persistent threat (APT) groups.” 

    Furthermore, these estimates could be conservative “as the services affected by more than one vulnerability were counted only once” and Perkal reportedly thinks that “it is safe to assume that the actual number of vulnerable instances is much higher.” 

    Read the full article here.

  • San Francisco After the Silicon Valley Bank Collapse

    This piece on Bloomberg takes a look at San Francisco in the wake of the Silicon Valley Bank collapse. While all the usual issues that come up when talking about San Francisco – the city’s fiscal deficit, cost-of-living, tech slump, post-pandemic economic recovery, layoffs, vacant offices, homelessness, drug use, etc. – are touched upon in the article, it doesn’t give a conclusive picture on whether or not there is any cause for optimism in the sombre picture that the quoted figures paint. Even as the mayor of the city is said to have “pointed to cataclysms from the 1906 earthquake to the bursting of the dot-com bubble that brought in a spate of naysayers, only to have the city rebound stronger than ever”, an investor at a venture capital firm is quoted as having said that “the renewed interest in San Francisco is more in spite of the city, not aided by it”. 

    Read the full article here.

  • The CERN of AI Research

    Large-scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network (LAION) has launched this petition to “democratize AI research by establishing an international, publicly funded supercomputing facility equipped with 100,000 state-of-the-art AI accelerators to train open source foundation models.” They are calling such a proposed facility “a CERN for open source large-scale AI research and its safety.” 

    Significantly, the petition has this to say on AI Safety research: 

    “The proposed facility should feature AI Safety research labs with well-defined security levels, akin to those used in biological research labs, where high-risk developments can be conducted by internationally renowned experts in the field, backed by regulations from democratic institutions. The results of such safety research should be transparent and available for the research community and society at large. These AI Safety research labs should be capable of designing timely countermeasures by studying developments that, according to broad scientific consensus, would predictably have a significant negative impact on our societies.”

    LAION’s website describes them as a non-profit “aiming to make large-scale machine learning models, datasets and related code available to the general public.”

    Read the full petition here. Read more about LAION’s work and philosophy on their team blog here.

  • Preventing Harm Caused by Machine-learning

    “As a leading researcher on the ethics of artificial intelligence, Timnit Gebru has long believed that machine-learning algorithms could one day power much of our lives,” writes Emily Bobrow in this profile for the The Wall Street Journal.

    “Because machine-learning systems adopt patterns of language and images scraped from the internet, they are often riddled with the internet’s all-too-human flaws” and Gebru is well-known for her work in trying to change that. As Bobrow points out:

    “For years, Dr. Gebru earned notoriety as an in-house AI skeptic at big tech companies. In 2018, while she was working at Microsoft, she co-authored a study that found that commercial facial-analysis programs were far more accurate in identifying the gender of white men than Black women, which the researchers warned could lead to damaging cases of false identification. Later, while working at Google, called on companies to be more transparent about the errors baked into their AI models.”

    Gebru “hopes for laws that push tech companies to prove their products are safe, just as they do for car manufacturers and drug companies.”

    At Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR), a non-profit she launched in 2021, “Dr. Gebru is working to call attention to some of the hidden costs of AI, from the computational power it requires to the low wages paid to laborers who filter training data.”

    Read the full article here.

  • Claude Shannon and Information Theory

    In this tribute for Quanta Magazine, Stanford professor David Tse highlights the remarkable contributions of Claude Shannon.

    Summing up Shannon’s foundational contribution to information theory, Tse writes: “in a single groundbreaking paper, he laid the foundation for the entire communication infrastructure underlying the modern information age.” Shannon “applied a mathematical discipline called Boolean algebra to the analysis and synthesis of switching circuits.” This was such an important development that it “is now considered to have been the starting point of digital circuit design.”

    All our digital communication technologies can be traced back to Shannon’s work. For instance, consider:

    “Another unexpected conclusion stemming from Shannon’s theory is that whatever the nature of the information — be it a Shakespeare sonnet, a recording of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or a Kurosawa movie — it is always most efficient to encode it into bits before transmitting it. So in a radio system, for example, even though both the initial sound and the electromagnetic signal sent over the air are analog wave forms, Shannon’s theorems imply that it is optimal to first digitize the sound wave into bits, and then map those bits into the electromagnetic wave. This surprising result is a cornerstone of the modern digital information age, where the bit reigns supreme as the universal currency of information.”

    Read the full article here.

  • OpenAI's Plans for AGI

    OpenAI has made unprecedented waves in the field of AI with ChatGPT. As a key player in the field, this mission statement of sorts about their plans regarding AGI, attributed to their CEO Sam Altman, makes for necessary reading for people with an eye on AI, if not for every literate citizen of the world.

    Read about OpenAI’s plans regarding AGI here.

  • The Concentration of Innovation Across US Cities

    Writing for the MIT Sloan School of Management website, Dylan Walsh discusses the findings of various studies on the concentration of innovation across various US cities.

    The issue at hand: 

    “The most technologically productive places in the country also have some of the highest labor and real estate costs. Startups deciding where to locate as well as established companies opening new offices must actively weigh the benefits of productivity in a given location against the costs of doing business there.” 

    Importantly, the findings of such studies “hold particular relevance as the federal government redefines its role as an investor in innovation.” 

    The article makes the interesting suggestion that “building lots of mid-sized hubs for innovation would not only be good economics — there are lots of positive effects and social gains that flow from knowledge creation — but also good politics.” 

    Read the full article here.

  • The Obsolescence Problem

    Planned obsolescence had almost started sounding like a conspiracy theory – a catch-all term for the nefarious schemes of the big bad industrialists out there, used by exasperated consumers when a product unexpectedly stopped being of use.

    But it may not all be in our head, as a piece by Izzie Ramirez for Vox suggests. Ramirez writes: “people are conditioned to buy the new thing and to keep replacing it. Companies, in turn, amp up production accordingly. It’s less so that objects are intended to break — functional planned obsolescence, if you will — but rather that consumer mindsets are oriented around finding the better object. But “better” doesn’t always mean long-lasting when companies are incentivized to produce faster and faster and faster.” 

    Further complicating the problem: 

    “Social media helps accelerate the trend cycle even further. Consumers are buying five times more clothing than they did back in the 1980s. In order to produce goods that fast, both the quality of the item and the quality of life for workers have to take a hit. This is happening alongside a decrease of prices for the consumer (not rooted in reality!) to encourage more trend-oriented shopping and haul buying.” 

    While Ramirez brings up a lot of issues related to the problem (such as companies like Apple opposing the right to repair), the her argument seems to be focussed on design thinking in contemporary culture:

    “Design has shifted more toward manufacturability and appearance than functionality, when it should be a balance of all three. Arguably, it’s nearly impossible for corporations to avoid participating in the trend cycle as long as consumers have an appetite for more — whether it’s a predilection for cooler clothing or whatever new incremental yet buzzy technology just came out. At the same time, the blame does not lie on consumers’ shoulders; corporations are responsible for creating and stoking the “new and more is better” culture we have today.”

    Read the full article here. 

  • On Social Media Companies Charging for Basic Services

    Geoffrey A. Fowler writes for The Washington Post: “Social media used to be free. That’s starting to change, in part, because the profits are no longer piling up quite as high in Silicon Valley for companies that built businesses on targeting us with ads. So they’re looking for new sources of growth that are actually worth paying for.”

    Comparing these subscription plans to mobsters asking for protection money, Fowler writes: “Facebook’s current support limitations are costing people time, money and relationships. It’s true that, unlike Twitter, Facebook is not removing any existing security features from everyone else to begin charging for them. But don’t even think about offering premium customer service until you’re able to keep a product or service functional at a basic level for everyone.”

    Meta’s Zuckerberg has responded to such concerns with: “Verifying government IDs and providing direct access to customer support for millions or billions of people costs a significant amount of money. Subscription fees will cover this and will also pace how many people sign up so we’ll be able to ensure quality as we scale,” he wrote.

    But users and commentators are far from convinced by this explanation.

    As Fowler concludes: “These are Zuckerberg’s and Musk’s problems to solve, not ours. Meta’s net income last year was $23 billion, mostly made off our personal data. Protecting us is a cost of doing business.”

    Read the full article here.

  • A Return to Blogging

    Writing for The Verge, Monique Judge makes the following case: “The decline of Twitter with the current erosion of legacy media has left me thinking we need to bring personal blogging back with a vengeance.”

    The biggest reason for this, according to her, “is a simple one: we should all be in control of our own platforms.”

    Perhaps most important of all her arguments is the following: 

    “We are now in an age where people come on the internet to be the worst possible versions of themselves, and it’s an ugly sight to behold. Take the power back by building blogs and putting comment moderation in place (it’s relatively easy on both WordPress and Blogger).

    Trolls only thrive in an environment where they are allowed to run around unchecked, and that is what most of social media is. There are plenty of tools that allow you to keep those people out of your comments while still allowing those who appreciate your words, thoughts, and content to fellowship with each other in a community of your own design.

    It’s what the social web was originally about, and we desperately need to get back to that.”

     Read the full article here.