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With more than 9 billion gigabytes of information traveling the internet every day, researchers are constantly looking for new ways to compress data into smaller packages. Cutting-edge techniques focus on lossy approaches, which achieve compression by intentionally “losing” information from a transmission.
Hired as customer service reps, these freelancers were instead tasked with luring in the lonely and lovestruck through a network of dating and hookup sites. The niche dating portals funnel users into the system and usually include lengthy terms and conditions.
Russia’s efforts often draw comparisons with China, where authorities use digital surveillance on a vast scale. Sensitive individuals are routinely tracked, either by cameras or via their cellphones, email and social media accounts to stifle any dissent.
There are no obvious killer generative AI apps yet. And as businesses scramble for ways to use the technology, economists say a rare window has opened for rethinking how to get the most benefits from the new generation of AI.
This Hotel lists hotel, hostel and bed & breakfast recommendations from trusted experts like New York Times, Lonely Planet, Fodor’s, Frommers, CNN and many more.
Brand deals have dried up; sponsored posts have been delayed. The great reckoning is unlikely to topple the influencer industry—by now, it’s already too big—but the business of influence is going to change.
As art institutions continue to raise ticket prices and roll out blockbusters, we may come to see shows that will be curated entirely by optimized algorithms. What happens when a museum becomes curator-less? Will this be the end of art history as we’ve known it, or the dawn of a techno renaissance?
The second half of humanity is joining the internet. People in countries like India will change the internet, and it will change them. You have a whole bunch of languages that don’t enjoy very good support in terms of web browsers or input. And you have a whole bunch of people who can’t actually read or write.
What is happening on the other side of the barrier? There we find people who respond to state controls with creativity and spunk. While some spend their days trawling cat videos, others create oases of subversion within the reality that they’ve been dealt.
Transactions have given rise to a complex data-selling ecosystem. At the heart of it are credit card processing networks, including Visa, American Express, and Mastercard, the latter of which took in $4.1 billion in 2019 for services that include marketing analytics as well as fraud detection.
As the coronavirus continues to kill thousands each day, tech companies are seizing the opportunity to extend their reach and power. Towards a future in which, for the privileged, almost everything is home delivered, either virtually via streaming and cloud technology, or physically via driverless vehicle or drone.
At 22, he saved the internet from what was the worst cyberattack in history: a piece of malware called WannaCry. It was Hutchins who had found and triggered the secret kill switch contained in its code, neutering WannaCry’s global threat immediately. Then he was arrested by the FBI.
Over the past decade, prices for solar panels and wind farms have reached all-time lows. However, the price for lithium-ion batteries, the leading energy storage technology, has remained too high. So researchers are exploring other alternatives, including flow batteries, thermal batteries, and gravity-based systems.
Founded by Palmer Luckey and backed by Peter Thiel, Anduril is rekindling the connection between the American military and Silicon Valley. The company’s surveillance technology consists of large towers, packed with sensors, and small surveillance drones that can be set up to guard the perimeter.
Tommy DeVoss used to break into websites illicitly. But after serving time for his crimes, he now uses his skills to earn an honest living. Through arrangements known as bug bounty programs, companies pay him to find security holes in their systems. He’s now earned more than $1 million in this emerging profession.
If you started a business in an ultra-competitive space in consumer tech, and within three years it was earning more revenue than AMD, Spotify, Twitter, Snap or Shopify, you’d justifiably be pleased with yourself. Apple’s wearables, home and accessories division has done just this.
In 2012, while living in China, longtime e-waste recycler Eric Lundgren manufactured 28,000 PC restore discs to be used in refurbished computers sold in the United States.
This essay is going to scare you. There is a better-than-average chance that, at some point in the last several years, your personal information was stolen. Not something small like a credit card account, but the good stuff, your Social Security number coupled with your birthdate.
Keeping on top of manipulated videos and images is no easy feat. Scientists trace the roots of their proliferation, dig up new techniques to counter digital forgeries and warn of the growing dangers ahead.
China was praised for a law it passed in 2002 — the world’s first integrated law dedicated to combating desert expansion. With this goal in mind, China has carried out several projects that have been successful, including at one desert in northern China.
Disillusioned after leaving Pandora, Tim Westergren set out to create a better kind of streaming platform. His new Sessions app helps musicians get paid. Can he save struggling artists while redeeming himself?
While the rest of the world has evolved to a place where we can track anything at all times and order anything from anywhere, government has been hopelessly stranded on an island in 1993.
Dozens of central banks have started looking at whether to issue digital currencies. But only a few have run trials and none has gone as far as China, which appears set to become the first country to put a central-bank digital currency (cbdc) into limited use.
Operation Match was a computer dating service started at Harvard in 1965 by two undergraduates, that paired students together for dates for $3 a pop. Students filled in questionnaires which were processed by an IBM 1401 before receiving the names and telephone numbers of their matches in the post.
Many regular people that choose VPNs do so to prevent their ISPs from spying on their browsing history and selling it to advertisers. What they don’t realize is that they are not enhancing their privacy – they are just delegating the trust to a different company.
Meet the hackers who are working with investigative journalists to expose organized crime and corruption by some of the world’s most sinister governments. Those governments are going to great lengths to shut down investigative reporting through cyber attacks and other intimidation tactics.
Just one per cent of Sweden’s GDP circulates as cash. As debates over the need for cash rage along lines of age, wealth and location, the country is looking to create a digital currency.
Game-making algorithms are almost as old as video games, but their use has typically been limited to generating terrain and other simple digital art. The next frontier is using increasingly sophisticated machine-learning techniques to design entirely new kinds of games that have, to date, evaded the human imagination.
Apple’s 2013 Mac Pro was a classic case of form over function. Pro users were unable to upgrade the “trash can” or customize it to their liking. There were also thermal limitations that Apple didn’t think about with this design. And 6 years after the revolutionary “trash can” design, Apple goes back to the cheese grater design.
Ladar Levison built an encrypted email service called Lavabit that counted a prominent figure among its users: Edward Snowden. When the FBI demanded Levison decrypt Snowden’s communications, he had two options, either hand over the encryption key or destroy his servers. He chose the latter.
Nintendo hasn’t always made video games. It was founded over a century ago and at one point sold ramen noodles and operated a taxi service. Today, Nintendo is part of a crowded video game market, up against companies like Sony, Microsoft, Apple and Google. When Nintendo first got into the home console business in the 80s, it dominated.
Instead of the bits that today’s network uses, which can only express a value of either 0 or 1, the future quantum internet would utilize qubits of quantum information, which can take on an infinite number of values. A quibit is the unit of information for a quantum computer; it’s like a bit in an ordinary computer.
In 2013, Bill Gates admitted ctrl+alt+del was a mistake and blamed IBM. With the del key across the keyboard from the other two, it seemed unlikely that all three would be accidentally pressed at the same time. Here’s the story of how the key combination became famous in the first place.
Despite tech’s reckoning with equality over the past few years, the industry’s storied history of inequality carries on. A small sampling: Only 11% of executive positions in Silicon Valley are held by women, and women make up only 9% of partners at the top 100 venture capital firms.
In the kale-filled facility at vertical farm startup Bowery Farming, it’s a piece of proprietary software that makes most of the critical decisions — like when to harvest and how much to water each plant. But it still takes humans to carry out many tasks around the farm.
Search engines are powerful tools that can be incredibly helpful, but they also require a bit of understanding to find the information you are actually seeking. Small changes in how you search can go a long way toward finding better answers.
Clearview is the most powerful form of facial recognition technology ever created, according to the New York Times. With more than 3 billion photos scraped surreptitiously from social media profiles and websites, its image database is almost seven times the size of the FBI’s.
Created at the end of World War II and introduced in 1956, the Fialka replaced the Albatross, a Soviet cipher machine that was itself more complex than the Enigma. By the 1970s, Fialka encryption machines had been widely adopted by Warsaw Pact and other communist nations, and they remained in use until the early 1990s.
Artificial Intelligence remains a Pandora’s Box of possibilities, with the potential to enhance the safety, efficiency, and sustainability of cities, or destroy the potential for humans to work, interact, and live a private life.
