A composed and contrite Mark Zuckerberg held up under hours of grilling by more than 40 U.S. senators — but his performance did little to mask Facebook’s growing political problems in Washington. Read Here – Politico Also Read: Key Moments From Mark Zuckerberg’s Senate Testimony
In early 2009 the attendees of a conference published a statement of principles in the prestigious journal Science. In light of the role of social scientists in the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica debacle—slurping up data on online behaviour from millions of users, figuring out the personalities and predilections of those users, and nominally using that knowledge to influence elections—that article turns […]
Two years and four months after Facebook found out that Cambridge Analytica might have illicitly pulled user data from its platform, and five days after the latest round of stories about the political consultancy’s electioneering, Mark Zuckerberg finally made a statement about the situation. Read Here – The Atlantic
When Alphabay, the world’s largest dark web bazaar, went offline two weeks ago, it threw the darknet into chaos as its buyers and sellers scrambled to find new venues. What those dark web users didn’t—and couldn’t—know: That chaos was planned. Read Here – Wired
Orwell could not see that with the dawn of the Information Age several decades later, efficiency would become far less economically significant than innovation and adaptiveness. Apple, Microsoft, Google, and myriad other late-twentieth-century companies did not offer faster typewriters. They created entirely new products, such as handheld computers and applications for them. Read Here – […]
Evan Williams is the guy who opened up Pandora’s box. Until he came along, people had few places to go with their overflowing emotions and wild opinions, other than writing a letter to the newspaper or haranguing the neighbours. Mr. Williams — a Twitter founder, a co-creator of Blogger — set everyone free, providing tools […]
Data mining is such a prosaic part of our online lives that it’s hard to sustain consumer interest in it, much less outrage. The modern condition means constantly clicking against our better judgement. We go to bed anxious about the surveillance apparatus lurking just beneath our social media feeds, then wake up to mindlessly scroll, Like, […]
I imagined the web as an open platform that would allow everyone, everywhere to share information, access opportunities and collaborate across geographic and cultural boundaries. In many ways, the web has lived up to this vision, though it has been a recurring battle to keep it open. But over the past 12 months, I’ve become […]
When brilliant Soviet cyberneticist Viktor Glushkov designed a blueprint for a computerised planning system, the Soviet Union looked on track to become web pioneers. In the end, however, there was to be no digital network. Read Here – The Calvert Journal
The web, as it appears at any one moment, is a phantasmagoria. It’s not a place in any reliable sense of the word. It is not a repository. It is not a library. It is a constantly changing patchwork of perpetual nowness. You can’t count on the web, okay? It’s unstable. You have to know this. […]
looking beyond borders 