Category: Technology

  • Sympathy for the Devil

    This New York Times story about the parents of Noah Pozner, who was murdered in the Sandy Hook massacre, is horrific. In the five years since Noah Pozner was killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., death threats and online harassment have forced his parents, Veronique De La Rosa and Leonard Pozner, to…

  • The end is neigh. Get on your bike

    According to former General Motors VP Bob Lutz, as far as personal transport is concerned the car is about to go the way of the horse. A minority of individuals may elect to have personalized modules sitting at home so they can leave their vacation stuff and the kids’ soccer gear in them. They’ll still…

  • I’ll take the quiet life

    I’m doing something I should probably do more often: unfollowing a lot of people on social media. It’s not that they’re bad people. Quite the opposite. It’s that unfortunately good people often share bad things. I block or filter out a lot of people on Twitter and other networks: nazis, bigots, people who point at…

  • Facebook is rotten from the head down

    I’m not the best person to opine on Facebook: during its original meteoric rise I believed its momentum would slow and it would be overtaken by something less obviously dismissive of its users. After all, this was a business built on the belief that its users were “dumb fucks”, as Mark Zuckerberg famously said. So…

  • Social media is different for girls

    I retweeted a post by Common Space editor Angela Haggerty last night. If you’re not familiar with the social network Twitter, retweeting is when you copy somebody’s message so that the people who follow you on Twitter can see it. As part of a thread on Twitter’s toxic abuse problem, Haggerty wrote: Social media abuse is…

  • The best democracy money can buy

    This is superb journalism, very frightening and quite clearly the tip of an iceberg. Observer: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach. The short version: one company surreptitiously and unethically gathered data on 1/3 of US Facebook users and used it to precision-target them with political messages on behalf of the…

  • The camera lies

    If you think we’ve got problems with fake news now, wait until deepfake is mainstream. The Guardian: Show a neural network enough examples of faces from two celebrities and it’ll develop its own mental model of what they look like, capable of generating new faces with specific expressions. Ask it to generate a set of…

  • YouTube and Facebook are fuelling fake news and bigotry

    This is absolutely terrifying: YouTube has a “conspiracy ecosystem”. YouTube viewers who started searching for information on “crisis actors” — people who supposedly play roles as mass shooting survivors to push gun control — could soon find themselves tumbling down a rabbit hole of conspiracies about the the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, the JFK assassination…

  • Detox your digital life without giving up your digital life

    We’re coming out of digital detox season, where newspaper columnists share the incredible insight that you can get a lot of stuff done if you don’t spend all your time dicking about on the internet. But as the developers of the excellent iA Writer app point out, taking a break is good but going offline…

  • “My computer turned into a Nazi.”

    The banality of evil: I married a white supremacist.  As it turned out, becoming a Nazi was not unlike catching a common virus like the flu, and then having it spiral out of control as it hijacked your immune system and ultimately your common sense. As I tried to retrace my ex-husband’s descent into madness, my…