While the datagram has served veIy well in solving themost important goals of the Internet, it has not served sowell when we attempt to addresssome of the goals whichwere further down the priority list. For example, thegoals of resource management and accountability haveproved difficult to achieve in the context of datagrams.As the previous section discussed, most datagrams are apart of some sequence of packets from source todestination, rather than isolated units at the applicationlevel. However, the gateway cannot directly see theexistence of this sequence, because it is forced to dealwith each packet in isolation. Therefore, resourcemanagement decisions or accounting must be done oneach packet separately. Imposing the datagram model onthe intemet layer has deprived that layer of an importantsource of information which it could use in achievingthese goals.

There is a mistaken assumption often associated withdatagrams, which is that the motivation for datagrams isthe support of a higher level service which is essentiallyequivalent to the datagram. In other words, it hassometimes been suggested that the datagram is providedbecause the transport service which the applicationrequires is a datagram service. In fact, this is seldom thecase. While some applications in the Internet, such assimple queries of date servers or name servers, use anaccess method based on an unreliable datagram, mostservices within the Internet would like a moresophisticated transport model than simple datagram.Some services would like the reliability enhanced, somewould like the delay smoothed and buffered, but almostall have some expectation more complex than adatagram. It is important to understand that the role ofthe datagram in this respect is as a building block, and notas a service in itself.

This problem was particularly aggravating because thegoal of the Internet project was to produce specificationdocuments which were to become military standards. Itis a well known problem with government contractingthat one cannot expect a contractor to meet any criteriawhich is not a part of the procurement standard. If theInternet is concerned about performance, therefore, it wasmandatory that performance requirements be put into theprocurement specification. It was trivial to inventspecifications which constrained the performance, forexample to specify that the implementation must becapable of passing 1.000 packets a second. However, thissort of constraint could not be part of the architecture,and it was therefore up to the individual performing theprocurement to recognize that these performanceconstraints must be added to the specification, and tospecify them properly to achieve a realization whichprovides the required types of service

Put another way, the architecture tried very hard not toconstrain the range of service which the Internet could beengineered to provide. This, in turn, means that tounderstand the service which can be offered by aparticular implementation of an Internet, one must looknot to the architecture, but to the actual engineering of thesoftware within the particular hosts and gateways, and tothe particular networks which have been incorporated.

Another possible source of inefficiency is retransmissionof lost packets. Since Internet does not insist that lostpackets be recovered at the network level, it may benecessary to retransmit a lost packet from one end of theInternet to the other. This means that the retransmittedpacket may cross several intervening nets a second time,whereas recovery at the network level would not generatethis repeat traffic. This is an example of the tradeoffresulting from the decision, discussed above, of providingservices from the end-points. The network interface codeis much simpler, but the overall efficiency is potentiallyless. However, if the retransmission rate is low enough(for example, 1%) then the incremental cost is tolerable.As a rough rule of thumb for networks incorporated intothe architecture, a loss of one packet in a hundred is quitereasonable, but a loss of one packet in ten suggests thatreliability enhancements be added to the network if thattype of service is required.

On the other hand, some of the most significant problemswith the Internet today relate to lack of sufficient tools fordistributed management,especially in the area of routing.In the large intemet being currently operated, routingdecisions need to be constrained by policies for resourceusage. Today this can be done only in a very limitedway, which requires manual setting of tables. This iserror-prone and at the same time not sufficientlypowerful. The most important change in the Internetarchitecture over the next few years will probably be thedevelopment of a new generation of tools formanagement of resources in the context of multipleadministrations.

This goal caused TCP and IP, which originally had beena single protocol in the architecture, to be separated intotwo layers. TCP provided one particular type of service,the reliable sequenceddata stream, while IP attempted toprovide a basic building block out of which a variety oftypes of service could be built. This building block wasthe datagram, which had also been adopted to supportsurvivability. Since the reliability associated with thedelivery of a datagram was not guaranteed, but “besteffort,” it was possible to build out of the datagram aservice that was reliable (by acknowledging andretransmitting at a higher level), or a service which tradedreliability for the primitive delay characteristics of theunderlying network substrate. The User DatagramProtocol (UDP)13 was created to provide a application-level interface to the basic datagram service of Internet.

It was very important for the success of the Internetarchitecture that it be able to incorporate and utilize awide variety of network technologies, including militaryand commercial facilities. The Internet architecture hasbeen very successful in meeting this goal: it is operatedover a wide variety of networks, including long haul nets(the ARPANET itself and various X.25 networks), localarea nets (Ethernet, ringnet, etc.), broadcast satellite nets(the DARPA Atlantic Satellite Network’“, I5 operating at64 kilobits per second and the DARPA ExperimentalWideband Satellite Net,16 operating within the UnitedStates at 3 megabits per second), packet radio networks(the DARPA packet radio network, as well as anexperimental British packet radio net and a networkdeveloped by amateur radio operators), a variety of seriallinks, ranging from 1200 bit per second asynchronousconnections to TI links, and a variety of other ad hocfacilities, including intercomputer busses and thetransport service provided by the higher layers of othernetwork suites, such as IBM’s HASP.

Another service which did not fu TCP was real timedelivery of digitized speech, which was needed to supportthe teleconferencing aspect of command and controlapplications. III real time digital speech, the primaryrequirement is not a reliable service, but a service whichminimizes and smooths the delay in the delivery ofpackets.

There are two consequencesto the fate-sharing approachto survivability. First. the intermediate packet switchingnodes, or gateways, must not have any essential stateinformation about on-going connections. Instead, theyare stateless packet switches, a class of network designsometimes called a “datagram” network. Secondly, rathermore trust is placed in the host machine than in anarchitecture where the network ensures the reliabledelivery of data. If the host resident algorithms thatensure the sequencing and acknowledgment of data fail,applications on that machine are prevented fromoperation.

It was an assumption in thisarchitecture that synchronization would never be lostunless there was no physical path over which any sort ofcommunication could be achieved. In other words, at thetop of transport, there is only one failure, and it is totalpartition. The architecture was to mask completely anytransient failure.

For example,since this network was designed to operate in a militarycontext, which implied the possibility of a hostileenvironment, survivability was put as a first goal, andaccountability as a last goal. During wartime. one is lessconcerned with detailed accounting of resources usedthan with mustering whatever resources are available andrapidly deploying them it-i an operational manner. Whilethe architects of the Internet were mindful ofaccountability, the problem received very little attentionduring the early stages of the design. aud is only nowbeing considered. An architecture primarily forcommercial deployment would clearly place these goalsat the opposite end of the list.

From these assumptions comes the fundamental structureof the Internet: a packet switched communicationsfacility in which a number of distinguishable networksam connected together using packet communicationsprocessors called gateways which implement a store aridforward packet forwarding algorithm.

The technique selected for multiplexing was packetswitching. Au alternative such as circuit switching couldhave been considered, but the applications beingsupported, such as remote login, were naturally served bythe packet switching paradigm, and the networks whichwere to be integrated together in this project were packetswitching networks. So packet switching was acceptedas a fundamental component of the Internet architecture.

Further, networks representadministrative boundaries of control, and it was anambition of this project to come to grips with the problemof integrating a number of separately administratedentities into a common utility.

The components of the Internet were networks, whichwere to be interconnected to provide some larger service.The original goal was to connect together the ori BinalARPANET’ with the ARPA packet radio network’. ‘, inorder to give users on the packet radio network accesstothe large service machines on the ARPANET.

The connectionless configuration of IS0protocols has also been colored by the history of theInternet suite, so an understanding ‘of the Internet designphilosophy may be helpful to those working with ISO.

Just for reference I believe that the "more speech" idea originated with Louis Brandeis, who was a brilliant thinker and one of the important liberal Supreme Court justices of the 20th century. The actual quote is:"If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence."[0]Louis Brandeis did believe that context and specifics are important, so I think the technology of the online platform is significant especially with respect to the first part of that quote.[0] https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep...

The hypothesis is that hate speech is met with other speech in a free marketplace of ideas.That hypothesis only functions if users are trapped in one conversational space. What happens instead is that users choose not to volunteer their time and labor to speak around or over those calling for their non-existence (or for the non-existence of their friends and loved ones) and go elsewhere... Taking their money and attention with them.As those promulgating the hate speech tend to be a much smaller group than those who leave, it is in the selfish interest of most forums to police that kind of signal jamming to maximize their possible user-base. Otherwise, you end up with a forum full mostly of those dabbling in hate speech, which is (a) not particularly advertiser friendly, (b) hostile to further growth, and (c) not something most people who get into this gig find themselves proud of.

The lawsuit, filed on Dec. 1 in federal court

The ability for users to choose if they wish to be collateral damage is what makes Mastodon work. If an instance is de-federated due to extremism, the users can pressure their moderators to act in order to gain re-federation. Otherwise, they must make the decision if to go down with the ship or simply move. This creates a healthy self-regulating ecosystem where once an instance starts to get de-federated, reasonable users will move their accounts, leaving behind unreasonable ones, which further justifies de-federation, and will lead to more and more instances choosing to de-federate the offending one.

Most Mastodon servers run on donations, which creates a very different dynamic. It is very easy for a toxic platform to generate revenue through ad impressions, but most people are not willing to pay hard-earned money to get yelled at by extremists all day. This is why Twitter’s subscription model will never work. With Mastodon, people find a community they enjoy, and thus are happy to donate to maintain. Which add a new dynamic. Since Mastodon is basically a network of communities, it is expected that moderators are responsible for their own community, lowering the burden for everyone. Let’s say you run a Mastodon instance and a user of another instance has become problematic towards your users. You report them to their instance’s moderators, but the moderators decline to act. What can you do? Well a lot, actually.

What I missed about Mastodon was its very different culture. Ad-driven social media platforms are willing to tolerate monumental volumes of abusive users. They’ve discovered the same thing the Mainstream Media did: negative emotions grip people’s attention harder than positive ones. Hate and fear drives engagement, and engagement drives ad impressions. Mastodon is not an ad-driven platform. There is absolutely zero incentives to let awful people run amok in the name of engagement. The goal of Mastodon is to build a friendly collection of communities, not an attention leeching hate mill. As a result, most Mastodon instance operators have come to a consensus that hate speech shouldn’t be allowed. Already, that sets it far apart from twitter, but wait, there’s more. When it comes to other topics, what is and isn’t allowed is on an instance-by-instance basis, so you can choose your own adventure.

As users begin migrating to the noncommercial fediverse, they need to reconsider their expectations for social media — and bring them in line with what we expect from other arenas of social life. We need to learn how to become more like engaged democratic citizens in the life of our networks.

Because Mastodon is designed more for chatter than governance, we use a separate platform, Loomio, for our deliberation and decision-making.

We believe that it is time to embrace the old idea of subsidiarity, which dates back to early Calvinist theology and Catholic social teaching. The European Union’s founding documents use the term, too. It means that in a large and interconnected system, people in a local community should have the power to address their own problems. Some decisions are made at higher levels, but only when necessary. Subsidiarity is about achieving the right balance between local units and the larger systems.

Nevertheless, from the standpoint of learning theory, these and other authors have it backward, because a steep learning curve, i.e., a curve with a large positive slope, is associated with a skill that is acquired easily and rapidly (Hopper et al., 2007).

Nevertheless, even ardent proponents of the view that DID is a naturally occurring condition that stems largely from childhood trauma (e.g., Ross, 1994) acknowledge that “multiple personality disorder” is a misnomer (Lilienfeld and Lynn, 2015), because individuals with DID do not genuinely harbor two or more fully developed personalities

There is no known “optimal” level of neurotransmitters in the brain, so it is unclear what would constitute an “imbalance.” Nor is there evidence for an optimal ratio among different neurotransmitter levels. Moreover, although serotonin reuptake inhibitors, such as fluoxetine (Prozac) and sertraline (Zoloft), appear to alleviate the symptoms of severe depression, there is evidence that at least one serotonin reuptake enhancer, namely tianepine (Stablon), is also efficacious for depression (Akiki, 2014). The fact that two efficacious classes of medications exert opposing effects on serotonin levels raises questions concerning a simplistic chemical imbalance model.

Furthermore, there are ample reasons to doubt whether “brainwashing” permanently alters beliefs (Melton, 1999). For example, during the Korean War, only a small minority of the 3500 American political prisoners subjected to intense indoctrination techniques by Chinese captors generated false confessions. Moreover, an even smaller number (probably under 1%) displayed any signs of adherence to Communist ideologies following their return to the US, and even these were individuals who returned to Communist subcultures

numerous scholars have warned of the jingle and jangle fallacies, the former being the error of referring to different constructs by the same name and the latter the error of referring to the same construct by different names (Kelley, 1927; Block, 1995; Markon, 2009). As an example of the jingle fallacy, many authors use the term “anxiety” to refer interchangeably to trait anxiety and trait fear. Nevertheless, research consistently shows that fear and anxiety are etiologically separable dispositions and that measures of these constructs are only modestly correlated (Sylvers et al., 2011). As an example of the jangle fallacy, dozens of studies in the 1960s focused on the correlates of the ostensibly distinct personality dimension of repression-sensitization (e.g., Byrne, 1964). Nevertheless, research eventually demonstrated that this dimension was essentially identical to trait anxiety (Watson and Clark, 1984). In the field of social psychology, Hagger (2014) similarly referred to the “deja variable” problem, the ahistorical tendency of researchers to concoct new labels for phenomena that have long been described using other terminology (e.g., the use of 15 different terms to describe the false consensus effect; see Miller and Pedersen, 1999).

The Great Depression and its aftermath offered Schmitz and a colleague one such opportunity. Poverty shrinks brains from birth By comparing markers of ageing in around 800 people who were born throughout the 1930s, the team observed that those born in US states hit hardest by the recession — where unemployment and wage reductions were highest — have a pattern of markers that make their cells look older than they should. The impact was diminished in people who were born in states that fared better during the 1930s.The cells could have altered the epigenetic tags during early childhood or later in life. But the results suggest that some sort of biological foundation was laid before birth for children of the Great Depression that affected how they would age, epigenetically, later in life.

A 2020 study by the European Union found that contrails and other non-CO2 aircraft emissions warm the planet twice as much as the carbon dioxide released by airplanes.

Meta collects so much data even the company itself sometimes may be unaware of where it ends up. Earlier this year Vice reported on a leaked Facebook document written by Facebook privacy engineers who said the company did not “have an adequate level of control and explainability over how our systems use data,” making it difficult to promise it wouldn’t use certain data for certain purposes.

Some of the sensitive data collection analyzed by The Markup appears linked to default behaviors of the Meta Pixel, while some appears to arise from customizations made by the tax filing services, someone acting on their behalf, or other software installed on the site. Report Deeply and Fix Things Because it turns out moving fast and breaking things broke some super important things. Give Now For example, Meta Pixel collected health savings account and college expense information from H&R Block’s site because the information appeared in webpage titles and the standard configuration of the Meta Pixel automatically collects the title of a page the user is viewing, along with the web address of the page and other data. It was able to collect income information from Ramsey Solutions because the information appeared in a summary that expanded when clicked. The summary was detected by the pixel as a button, and in its default configuration the pixel collects text from inside a clicked button.  The pixels embedded by TaxSlayer and TaxAct used a feature called “automatic advanced matching.” That feature scans forms looking for fields it thinks contain personally identifiable information like a phone number, first name, last name, or email address, then sends detected information to Meta. On TaxSlayer’s site this feature collected phone numbers and the names of filers and their dependents. On TaxAct it collected the names of dependents.

We’re not mandating content warnings.   I think I’ve kind of had every single opinion that one can have about this. My first response, which I think is most journalists’ first response, was, “Who are these precious snowflakes?” Then a bunch of people said, “No, that’s not how to think about it; it’s really just the subject line of an email,” and if I had the right to send you an email where you had to see the whole thing, that’d be kind of annoying. But then a lot of people in the BIPOC community said, “The way this is being used on Mastodon is often to shield White people from racism and homophobia and other issues.” And so I’m very sympathetic to that as well. I think the solution Eugen came up with is the right solution: It’s a tool, and you can use it if you want to.

Everyone who goes through the exercise of “what is journalism?” quickly learns there are no obvious, uncontroversial answers. We had a conversation this morning about somebody who has a blog about beer. We said, well, this person does reporting, they actually interview people, they look at statistics, they’re not just sharing their opinion on beer. And it felt like, yeah, that’s journalism. Now, would we make that decision a month from now? I don’t know. I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to get into specifics, but we’ve had some tricky edge cases. Inherently, it’s tricky.

The Twitter blue check, for all the hate I have given Twitter over the years, is a public good. It is good, in my view, that when you read a news article or view a post, you can know with confidence it’s the journalist at that institution. It doesn’t mean they’re 100 percent right or 100 percent ethical, but it does mean that’s a person who is in some way constrained by journalism ethics.

Davidson: I think the interface on Mastodon makes me behave differently. If I have a funny joke or a really powerful statement and I want lots of people to hear it, then Twitter’s way better for that right now. However, if something really provokes a big conversation, it’s actually fairly challenging to keep up with the conversation on Twitter. I find that when something gets hundreds of thousands of replies, it’s functionally impossible to even read all of them, let alone respond to all of them. My Twitter personality, like a lot of people’s, is more shouting. Whereas on Mastodon, it’s actually much harder to go viral. There’s no algorithm promoting tweets. It’s just the people you follow. This is the order in which they come. It’s not really set up for that kind of, “Oh my god, everybody’s talking about this one post.” It is set up to foster conversation. I have something like 150,000 followers on Twitter, and I have something like 2,500 on Mastodon, but I have way more substantive conversations on Mastodon even though it’s a smaller audience. I think there’s both design choices that lead to this and also just the vibe of the place where even pointed disagreements are somehow more thoughtful and more respectful on Mastodon.

I just learned this idea of anchor institution at the Association of Rural and Small Libraries Conference. There are institutions that anchor communities. Right. So that the hospital is one. Lots of people work there. Everyone goes there at some point, has a role to play in the community and the library is similar. You'll often get people who will say that the library's are irrelevant, but that just means that they can afford not to use a public service. And I don't know why they are the people we ask to share their expertise on the use of public services. But most of us use the public library. Our kids get their picture books there. We maybe do passport services. Maybe the library has tech training. One of my first jobs at the public library was teaching senior citizens how to do mouse and keyboarding skills. So where else are you going to learn those things? You learn them at the library.

BROOKE GLADSTONE It's always framed as parents rights, but according to Summer Lopez, who's the chief program officer of free expression at PEN America, most of these book bans are on books that families and children can elect to read. They're not required to read them. They just exist.   EMILY DRABINSKI One of the things I loved about libraries when I first started is that they are non-coercive learning spaces. You don't have to read anything. You can choose from anything on the shelf. And if your kid checks out something you don't want them to read, that's between you and your child and the way that you're parenting. And it just isn't something that the state needs to be involved in.

Well, librarians are professionals. We go through a library master's degree program, and we're trained on the job to make book selections for our communities. We build collections that are responsive to the needs of the people we serve. So right now, I'm talking to you from the Graduate Center in midtown Manhattan. My liaison responsibilities here to the School of Labor and Urban Studies and to our urban education program. I'm not going to choose Gender Queer to purchase for our library, not because I'm a censor, but because that's not a book that we need in our collection right now. But I think you can tell that it's not really about the books if you look to some of the particular cases. So, for example, attacks on the Boundary County Library in Northern Idaho. This was the same set of 300 books that they want banned. The extremist right in that part of the state came after the public library there. That library didn't own any of the books that were on the list.

BROOKE GLADSTONE In the Tennessee State Assembly last April, Representative Jerry Sexton took on this question.   [CLIP]   JERRY SEXTON Let's say you take these books out of the library. What are you going to do with them? You can put them on the street, let them on fire.    JERRY SEXTON I don't have a clue, but I would burn them.

“In a way, Twitter has become a kind of aggregator of information,” says Eliot Higgins, founder of open-source investigators Bellingcat, who helped bring the perpetrators who downed MH17 to justice. “A lot of this stuff you see from Ukraine, the footage comes from Telegram channels that other people are following, but they're sharing it on Twitter.” Twitter has made it easier to categorize and consume content from almost any niche in the world, tapping into a real-time news feed of relevant information from both massive organizations and small, independent voices. Its absence would be keenly felt.

For eight years, the US Library of Congress took it upon itself to maintain a public record of all tweets, but it stopped in 2018, instead selecting only a small number of accounts’ posts to capture.  “It never, ever worked,” says William Kilbride, executive director of the Digital Preservation Coalition. The data the library was expected to store was too vast, the volume coming out of the firehose too great. “Let me put that in context: it’s the Library of Congress. They had some of the best expertise on this topic. If the Library of Congress can’t do it, that tells you something quite important,” he says.

Part of what makes Twitter’s potential collapse uniquely challenging is that the “digital public square” has been built on the servers of a private company, says  O’Connor’s colleague Elise Thomas, senior OSINT analyst with the ISD. It’s a problem we’ll have to deal with many times over the coming decades, she says: “This is perhaps the first really big test of that.”

Judith Cremer, the library director, said the book was added to the library after it made the William Allen White Award 2017-2018 Master List for grades 3-5, and has only been checked out four times.Cremer said parents have the option of filtering which books their children check out, and can speak to staff about limiting their children’s access to certain books. She stressed that she and her staff aren’t trying to fight the council and aren’t interested in divisive matters. She’s been at the library for almost 20 years, and just wants to serve the community.“We just are doing what public libraries do,” Cremer said. “We don’t really judge information, we are a reflection of the world and things that are in the world. We have information that has been published and mediated and checked for facts. So it’s a safe place that people can go to get access to that information. It’s not like we are handing out or advocating it in any way. It’s just there.”

St. Marys resident Hannah Stockman, a stay-at-home mom looking after 13 kids, said the move would be devastating for her and others like her.“At this point, it’s the only space left that we have for the public,” Stockman said. “We don’t have any pool or any other amenities through the community center. So people come here for many, many different reasons.”

Although complicated, Gen Z’s relationship with data privacy should be a consideration for brands when strategizing their data privacy policies and messaging for the future. Expectations around data privacy are shifting from something that sets companies apart in consumers’ minds to something that people expect the same way one might expect a service or product to work as advertised. For Gen Zers, this takes the form of skepticism that companies will keep their data safe, and their reluctance to give companies credit for getting it right means that good data privacy practices will increasingly be more about maintaining trust than building it.

The notable exception: social media companies. Gen Zers are more likely to trust social media companies to handle their data properly than older consumers, including millennials, are.

Furthermore, the youngest generation is more jaded than others on this topic, finding it less surprising if a company stores data in a way that exposes it to a breach or asks for information without explaining what it will be used for.

Gen Z came of age during a major moment in data privacy. The global conversation around the topic shifted following the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018. The incident altered the public’s view of major technology companies from great innovators and drivers of the economy to entities that need more oversight. Massive regulatory efforts like the General Data Protection Regulation in Europe and the California Consumer Privacy Act have since gone into effect, with more on the way, representing a break in consumers’ trust in tech companies to sufficiently safeguard people’s data.

In other words, the community of early users were super serious about consent. They don’t like their utterances circulating in ways they don’t like. You could say, “well, tough; you’re posting stuff in public, right?” But since this is Mastodon, users have powerful tools for responding to actions they don’t like. If the folks on server A don’t like the behavior of people on server B, they can “defederate” from server B; everyone on server B can no longer see what folks on A are doing, and vice versa. (“Defederating” is another deep part of Mastodon’s design that is, ultimately, powerfully antiviral.)

Another big, big difference with Mastodon is that it has no algorithmic ranking of posts by popularity, virality, or content. Twitter’s algorithm creates a rich-get-richer effect: Once a tweet goes slightly viral, the algorithm picks up on that, pushes it more prominently into users’ feeds, and bingo: It’s a rogue wave.On Mastodon, in contrast, posts arrive in reverse chronological order. That’s it. If you’re not looking at your feed when a post slides by? You’ll miss it.

For example, Mastodon has no analogue of Twitter’s “quote-tweet” option. On Mastodon, you can retweet a post (they call it “boosting”). But you can’t append your own comment while boosting. You can’t quote-tweet.Whyever not? Because Mastodon’s original designer (and the community of early users) worried that quote-tweeting on Twitter had too often encouraged a lot of “would you look at this bullshit?” posts. And that early Mastodon community didn’t much like those dynamics.

As Beschizza said …“I wanted something where people could publish their thoughts without any false game of social manipulation, one-upmanship, and favor-trading.”It was, as I called it, “antiviral design”.

By the mid-2010s, Chinese people in big cities had generally switched from using cash to using Alipay and WeChat Pay. By the end of 2021, about 64 percent of Chinese people were using mobile payment systems, according to a report by Daxue Consulting, with Alipay and WeChat Pay handling most payments. For city dwellers, the figure was 80 percent. One reason China’s government is pushing the digital yuan is to try to gain more control of how citizens make payments. For years, big tech companies were able to operate almost like public utilities, creating and effectively regulating large parts of the financial industry.

The central bank is building the infrastructure needed to enable sweeping adoption in years to come, signing up merchants, adapting the banking system, and developing applications such as a way to earmark money for health care or transit, he says. That lays the groundwork for eCNY to be China’s default payment system in 10 to 15 years, and it has been enough to put the project ahead of any other government-backed digital currency.

Unlike a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, the digital yuan is issued directly by China’s central bank and does not depend on a blockchain. The currency has the same value as its analog equivalent, the yuan or RMB, and for consumers the experience of using the digital yuan is not that different from any other mobile payment system or credit card. But on the back end, payments are not routed through a bank and can sometimes move without transaction fees, jumping from one e-wallet to another as easily as cash changes hands.

The hope for government-sanctioned digital currencies is that they will improve efficiency and spur innovation in financial services. But tech and China experts watching the country’s project say that eCNY, also known as the electronic Chinese yuan or digital yuan, also opens up new forms of government surveillance and social control. The head of UK intelligence agency GCHQ, Jeremy Fleming, warned in a speech last month that Beijing could use its digital currency to monitor its citizens and eventually evade international sanctions.

This circular process of issuing new shares to employees and then buying those shares back with company money – MY money as a shareholder – is called ‘sterilization’.

“There is growing evidence that the legislative and executive branch officials are using social media companies to engage in censorship by surrogate,” said Jonathan Turley, a professor of law at George Washington University, who has written about the lawsuit. “It is axiomatic that the government cannot do indirectly what it is prohibited from doing directly. If government officials are directing or facilitating such censorship, it raises serious First Amendment questions.”

Under President Joe Biden, the shifting focus on disinformation has continued. In January 2021, CISA replaced the Countering Foreign Influence Task force with the “Misinformation, Disinformation and Malinformation” team, which was created “to promote more flexibility to focus on general MDM.” By now, the scope of the effort had expanded beyond disinformation produced by foreign governments to include domestic versions. The MDM team, according to one CISA official quoted in the IG report, “counters all types of disinformation, to be responsive to current events.” Jen Easterly, Biden’s appointed director of CISA, swiftly made it clear that she would continue to shift resources in the agency to combat the spread of dangerous forms of information on social media.

The stepped up counter-disinformation effort began in 2018 following high-profile hacking incidents of U.S. firms, when Congress passed and President Donald Trump signed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Act, forming a new wing of DHS devoted to protecting critical national infrastructure. An August 2022 report by the DHS Office of Inspector General sketches the rapidly accelerating move toward policing disinformation. From the outset, CISA boasted of an “evolved mission” to monitor social media discussions while “routing disinformation concerns” to private sector platforms.

DHS’s mission to fight disinformation, stemming from concerns around Russian influence in the 2016 presidential election, began taking shape during the 2020 election and over efforts to shape discussions around vaccine policy during the coronavirus pandemic. Documents collected by The Intercept from a variety of sources, including current officials and publicly available reports, reveal the evolution of more active measures by DHS. According to a draft copy of DHS’s Quadrennial Homeland Security Review, DHS’s capstone report outlining the department’s strategy and priorities in the coming years, the department plans to target “inaccurate information” on a wide range of topics, including “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.”

the container ship was simply becoming so large so unwieldy that much of the infrastructure around them is struggling to cope a lot of the decisions to build Supply chains were really based on

the industry agreed that the standard container sizes would be 20

at the same time the US Army had been experimenting and seeing success with their smaller container Express or context boxes during the Korean war

he understood that rather than adapting the container to suit the industry it was the industry and its entirety that would have to adapt trucks trains and ships ports and dockyards would all have to

he'd over time built a very large trucking company in the United States he became worried in the

it took about 11 and a half days to actually go across the Atlantic and it took about six or four days to actually unload it all in Germany

break both shipping tended to be slow a vessel could spend a week or more at the dock

Mark Levinson who has literally written the book on the shipping container called The Box how the shipping container made the world smaller and the

Mastodon gained 22,139 new accounts this past week and 10,801 in the day after Musk took over, said Mastodon chief executive Eugen Rochko. The site now has more than 380,000 monthly active users, while Twitter has 237.8 million daily active users.

Claudia requested support through the Teleperformance scheme, which had to be approved by a supervisor, but she did not receive any help for two months. When the company’s mental health support staff finally did get in touch, they said they were unable to help her and told her to seek out support through the Colombian healthcare system.

Some social media platforms struggle with even relatively simple tasks, such as detecting copies of terrorist videos that have already been removed. But their task becomes even harder when they are asked to quickly remove content that nobody has ever seen before. “The human brain is the most effective tool to identify toxic material,” said Roi Carthy, the chief marketing officer of L1ght, a content moderation AI company. Humans become especially useful when harmful content is delivered in new formats and contexts that AI may not identify. “There’s nobody that knows how to solve content moderation holistically, period,” Carthy said. “There’s no such thing.”

Advocate Aurora Health says it embedded pixel tracking technologies into its patient portals and some of its scheduling widgets in a bid to "better understand patient needs and preferences."

A Midwestern hospital system is treating its use of Google and Facebook web tracking technologies as a data breach, notifying 3 million individuals that the computing giants may have obtained patient information.

It is the work itself that is copyrighted, not the form.56 While works mustbe in a fixed form to qualify for copyright protection, that protection is for the workitself. Some forms are necessarily part of some types of works (e.g., sculpture), butthis cannot be said of most printed works.57 The form in which a work is fixed isirrelevant, and Congress recognized the importance of media neutrality when itadopted the language in the Copyright Act.58 Digitization changes only the form,and “the ‘transfer of a work between media’ does not ‘alte[r] the character of ’ thatwork for copyright purposes.”

First, digitization and distributionwould not be done for commercial gain and would be handled in a manner com-pletely consistent with a library’s function. Because the library would not beincreasing the number of copies available for use at any given time, the digital copywould not serve as a substitute for an additional subscription or purchase. Shoulddemand be so great that multiple copies were needed simultaneously, TALLOwould need to purchase or license additional copies or individual libraries withinthe consortium would need to make local purchases.

Instead of the current practice of forming regional or bilateral agreementsfor resource sharing, law libraries could form a national consortium through whicha centralized collection would be established. The TALLO consortium would serveas a kind of jointly owned acquisitions department for member libraries. The dis-cussion here is limited to a collection of print and microform acquisitions anddonations

With each purchase decision,libraries risk either losing future access to databases (including retrospective con-tent) and experiencing greater restrictions on use through license terms than are

I believe it is possible to build a digital library thatrespects both of the intended beneficiaries of the Copyright Clause—copyrightowners and society—while testing commonly held assumptions about the limita-tions of copyright law. In balancing these goals, TALLO permits circulation of theexact number of copies purchased, thereby acknowledging the rights inherent incopyright, but it liberates the form of circulation from the print format.

academic law libraries pool resources, through a consortium, to create a centralizedcollection of legal materials, including copyrighted materials, and to digitize thosematerials for easy, cost-effective access by all consortium members. For the sake ofexpediency, this proposal will be referred to here as TALLO (Taking Academic LawLibraries Online) and the proposed consortium as the TALLO consortium.

An oracle is a conventional program which runs off the blockchain and which periodically publishes information about the world onto the blockchain. The problem is trust. Using an oracle turns your clever blockchain program into a fairly pointless appendage to the much more important (and subjective) conventional program: the one which is interpreting the world and drawing conclusions.

If people have been doing international transfers for a thousand years, why are they still so complicated? The reason is largely KYC/AML, the compliance processes that the world financial system uses to ensure you aren't transferring money to economically sanctioned individuals, criminals, terrorists, etc. Banks won't send money to just anywhere, they first want to check that it's not at risk of going to the baddies. This can take a long time and often requires exchange of lots of complicated documents. Any blockchain-based financial transfer system that grows in popularity will be pressured by governments to implement KYC/AML and will then start to resemble traditional international transfers, except with higher charges and smaller economies of scale. Many Bitcoin brokerages have long since required identity verification for the account owner. Some are starting to require details of who you're sending money to.

The best way to ensure that you’re licensing a solution that will interoperate with other solutions and conform tonecessary standards is to build that understanding into your signed contract.

Include a CC0 or CC-BY statement in the data (including MARC records) you create. Here’s an example from theUniversity of Florida:588 _ _ $a This bibliographic record is available under the Creative Commons CC0 “No Rights Reserved”license. The University of Florida Libraries, as creator of this bibliographic record, has waived all rights to itworldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law.

Libraries should reestablish a professional investment in technology. This requires a shift in mind-set, where the “waitand see” approach of library led projects within the open source arena should be instead fed and funded within thepublic funding model, otherwise we will perpetually delay our own empowerment. As stated earlier in this report,libraries should be asking “why not open source?” as a primary question early in the procurement process. If it’s notfeasible to develop in-house resources, partnering with a vendor who supports open source (so long as that vendorhas a commitment to the long-term success of the overall open source community) may be a good option. Or workwith groups of libraries, consortia, or collaborations between consortia to build investment in skills

This shift in funding may require shifts inlibrary procurement rules (e.g., rethinking RFP requirements to consider open source solutions; exploring models tofund open source development pre-adoption), so in the short term we recommend working within existingorganizations.

We cannot continueoperating with a status quo mentality and expect to achieve a different result. A paradigm shift is needed in howlibraries allocate our increasingly limited funds. Our budgets are currently beholden to maintaining the status quo,usually with vendors whose pricing increases annually. Rather than continuing to fund proprietary development, wepropose reallocating a portion of what we expend with those vendors for deliberate investment in library-created orcommunity-owned solutions.

In addition, open source solutions are “community-owned” or licensed by a community with a direct stake in thatsolution’s remaining open and available to others.

Providers supporting open source systems can be a useful entry point for libraries thatmay not have the resources to do in-house development but still wish to move to an open source solution. It is criticalto ensure that those vendors support the larger open source project community and contribute their work back to theoriginal code base.

These trends are further exacerbated by a dwindling supply of library personnel and the professional expertisenecessary to support library infrastructure in-house. Even the largest and most successful information technologycompanies struggle to hire and keep the technologists and software developers they need; libraries aredisadvantaged in attracting and retaining individuals and software support from this same pool of talent. This perfectstorm has led to a critical lack of capability and capacity and “learned helplessness” in the face of increasinglyprivatized information, the politicization of knowledge, and the commoditization of analytics and other services.

In the United States, funding is woefully inadequate across the library sector. The global Covid-19 pandemic hasexposed everything that was not working well (or at all) but was papered over with good intentions. The blunt traumaof decades of disinvestment in the public sector, particularly in education, has left libraries lacking many of the coreresources necessary to function effectively. While libraries can and should continue to advocate for additional funding,current political climates, an uncertain economy, the declining number of high school graduates across many regions,and the continuing fallout from the pandemic mean that increased funding is unlikely in most cases. Library workersdedicated to the profession of literacy and equal access to information are now called on to defend traditionalprinciples with few resources to ward off assaults.

Underpinning all these strategies is a recognition that libraries – even the largest, best-funded ones – mustcollaborate to accomplish their missions. Conversely, even the smallest, poorly-funded libraries can be valuedcontributors to these efforts. Consortia can play a unique role in this undertaking, working with all their libraries –however big or small, no matter their funding – to identify strategies that work for their libraries and bring themtogether to regain collective agency, power, and control.

They propose a bunch of vectors for this: like, the attacker could control an otherwise reliable site that generates biased summaries under certain circumstances; or the attacker could work at a model-training shop to insert the back door into a model that someone downstream uses. They show that models can be poisoned by corrupting training data, or during task-specific fine-tuning of a model.

There's no market for a machine-learning autopilot, or content moderation algorithm, or loan officer, if all it does is cough up a recommendation for a human to evaluate. Either that system will work so poorly that it gets thrown away, or it works so well that the inattentive human just button-mashes "OK" every time a dialog box appears.

After cornering the market on entertainment, TikTok began offering its model of behavioral tracking and algorithmic suggestion to advertisers, promising them a way to know which ads people find most compelling without having to ask. It was an instant hit: The company’s ad revenue tripled this year, to $12 billion, according to eMarketer estimates, and is expected to eclipse YouTube at nearly $25 billion by 2025. In the United States, the cost to advertisers for TikTok’s premium real estate — the first commercial break a viewer sees in their feed, known as a “TopView” — has jumped to $3 million a day.

TikTokers are increasingly using the app as a visual search tool; 40 percent of Generation Z respondents to a Google survey this year said they had opened TikTok or Instagram, not Google, when searching for nearby lunch spots. (One tweet in June, “I don’t Google anymore I TikTok,” has been ‘liked’ 120,000 times.)And as Americans’ trust in news organizations has fallen, TikTok’s role as a news source has climbed. One in three TikTok viewers in the United States said they regularly use it to learn about current events, Pew Research Center said last month. In the United Kingdom, it’s the fastest-growing news source for adults.

The average number of hours each American user spent every day on TikTok exploded 67 percent between 2018 and 2021, while Facebook and YouTube grew less than 10 percent, investment analysts at Bernstein Research wrote in an August report. TikTok has replaced “the friction of deciding what to watch,” the researchers said, with a “sensory rush of bite-sized videos … delivering endorphin hit after hit.”

TikTok starts studying its users from the moment they first open the app. It shows them a single, full-screen, infinitely looping video, then gauges how they react: a second of viewing or hesitation indicates interest; a swipe suggests a desire for something else. With every data point, TikTok’s algorithm narrows from a shapeless mass of content to a refined, irresistible feed. It is the ultimate video channel, and this is its one program.The “For You” algorithm, as TikTok calls it, gradually builds profiles of users’ tastes not from what they choose but how they behave. While Facebook and other social networks rely on their users to define themselves by typing in their interests or following famous people, TikTok watches and learns, tapping into trends and desires their users might not identify.

Even as the app has transformed into a public square for news and conversation, TikTok’s opaque systems of promotion and suppression fuel worries that China’s aggressive model of internet control could warp what appears there. Many users already are self-censoring, adopting a second language of code words — “unalive,” not dead; “procedure,” not abortion — in hopes of dodging the app’s censors and preserving their chances at online fame.

former TikTok employees and technical experts argue that the company’s fixes do nothing to address its biggest risk: that its top decision-makers work in a country skilled at using the web to spread propaganda, surveil the public, gain influence and squash dissent. That crisis of trust has led to an ongoing debate among U.S. regulators: whether to more closely monitor the app or ban it outright.

No app has grown faster past a billion users, and more than 100 million of them are in the United States, roughly a third of the country. The average American viewer watches TikTok for 80 minutes a day — more than the time spent on Facebook and Instagram, combined.

How TikTok ate the internetThe world’s most popular app has pioneered a new age of instant attention. Can we trust it?By Drew HarwellOct. 14

The paper, published Wednesday in Nature Communications, represents the first findings of an ongoing study into long covid — the Long-CISS (Covid in Scotland Study).

THE COURT: No, but they want -- you are using it as apromotional advantage by providing the service to yourcustomers. I think that's -- I think that's really obvious,isn't it?MS. RODMAN: We're using it because our customers areasking for it, and by giving our customers the tools that theyare asking for, we build good --THE COURT: And you make it -- if you make yourcustomers happy, presumably you'll get more customers.MS. RODMAN: Exactly, but that's not --

THE COURT: All right. In fact, what you are doing, Ithink, is you are developing a database of information toprovide to libraries in competition with OCLC.MS. RODMAN: No, Your Honor, absolutely not

And given that we're talking about this interference interms of a contract claim, we have to keep going back to thelanguage of the policy at issue, and that language says -- andI'm going to quote it if the Court will bear with me because Ithink it's important -- that the members have the right -- andit uses the word "right" in the rights section -- members whohave extracted WorldCat data representing, or enriching therecords for, their own holdings from the WorldCat database havethe right to: transfer or make available such data to other

And I'm having trouble with a lack ofspecificity as to which records your subscribers are free toprovide -- because they created them or someone other than OCLCcreated them and -- and how the Court is going to be able todetermine in a -- in a group of data, even with an OCN numberattached to it, whether it is something that the -- yoursubscriber is -- has freedom to release or does not under yoursubscriber agreemen

OCLC has no proprietary interest in this metadata. Ithas no proprietary interest in the OCN number. In fact, OCLChas been very clear over the years that it wants the OCN numberto remain attached to records even when they are in thesubscriber's own catalog and they are not WorldCat records, andit wants that so that it can always go back to that record,that OCN number can pull in any additional information thatwill enhance the WorldCat record, and OCLC has declared thatthe OCN number can be treated as they are in the public domainsince 2013, and at the same time, since 2013, OCLC expresslydisavowed the OCN number being used as an indication that arecord originated with OCLC and was, therefore, subject to itsmember agreement.

the term "enhancement" I think is a bit of a misnomer. Youhave to understand where this data comes from.When OCLC creates a record, it is pulling metadata fromother sources, from public sources, from libraries themselves,from the Library of Congress, from publishers. Almost all ofthe metadata in an OCLC record comes from sources other thanOCLC. OCLC pulls that in, and they add an OCN number, which isjust a sequential number.

Do you assign OCN numbers to all the data that you have,including data created by your subscribers?MS. MARTINEZ: We put an OCN number on any record thatOCLC enhances.So if it comes into their database and they are going toenhance it by -- kind of similarly to what I talked about onTuesday to the Court, you know, if they are going to addheadnotes or footnotes -- I'm sorry -- head notes, you know,pagination, they are going to change the way that the record issearched.

THE COURT: How would you define a catalog?MS. MARTINEZ: So it depends, I think, on thesubscriber, because they can be different, but initiallywhen -- before a customer comes to WorldCat, obviously, theywill have their own records that haven't been touched orenhanced or cared for through the WorldCat process.

Your book is going to meet the fate of most books, and be barely read. Reportedly one-percent of books sell more than 5000 copies.

The structure and economics of publishing make absolutely no sense as a business at any level. We pretend that this isn’t the case, but as the PRH/S&S trial turned to what happens to books that go up for “auction,” it became clear that all the valuations attached to particular books are simply made up. If a publisher decides they want a book, they just keep offering more until they have it. PRH, the company with the biggest war chest, is the winner most often. If it absorbs Simon & Schuster, it will win even more often. The merger itself is a highly rational move to create an entity that is simply larger, capable of making more big bets, reaping the rewards of the good guesses, and being better cushioned for the bad ones.

I’m actually attempting to run this newsletter on a patronage model. All of the content is free and subscriptions are purely voluntary, expressions of support for the work that receive no additional goods in exchange. The Substack algorithm tells me that if I made the content exclusive to subscribers, rather than making it free, I would increase my revenue by somewhere around 50%. At the same time, my readership would be maybe 1/8th its current size. I’ve consciously chosen readership over revenue because, A. the additional money wouldn’t really make a significant difference to my day-to-day existence, and B. knowing that I might have a few thousand people read this (as opposed to a few hundred) helps motivate me to do the work.

While money derived from markets is necessary at some point, the support of the art and artist is not subject to markets, but instead falls under the category of “patronage,” where the artist with the second job is a kind of self-patron.

there is a similar exchange going on when you borrow a book from the library. In fact, libraries are specifically designed to remove the market from the equation entirely, which is why people who use libraries - even though libraries are free - are referred to as “patrons.”

The most prominent public patrons of books in my lifetime are Dolly Parton and Oprah Winfrey. Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library has gifted over 185 million books to children. Oprah’s Book Club not only moved millions of copies, but helped build a reading culture are big, literary books. Oprah’s book club episodes were routinely among her lowest rated, but she didn’t care.

When I began researching the publisher-library e-lending relationship, I expected it to be straightforward. However, as I dug into the data from dozens of sources, I realized the literature on this topic is largely disjointed. I also found myself asking question after question about the supposed facts I was uncovering. I noticed conflicting information, and opinions inserted into publications that should have been reporting the facts. Data was cherrypicked, and articles were not reporting the whole truth.Whether it has been intentional or not, the library community and general media have portrayed the libraries’ side of the story as indisputable fact instead of what it really is—opinion. It became clear as I researched that, historically, libraries seem to have much more of an issue with the Big Five publishers than most of those publishers have with libraries.I have attempted to correct the error in the current literature by objectively analyzing the publisher-library e-lending events, news, policies, and research from the 2010s, in the hope that readers will gain a comprehensive overview of all sides of the story—not just one side—and see the full, complex picture of what e-lending was like during the decade.

They both publicly stated how much they valued libraries, and were merely trying to protect the value of ebooks (not only for themselves, but for their authors) as they became mainstream.

In March 2011, after the Vernor v. Autodesk verdict, HarperCollins made a historic change to their library contracts: rather than sell ebooks to libraries on perpetual terms, they would license their ebooks for a maximum of 26 loans, after which libraries could choose to repurchase a license to that ebook at a discounted price.Footnote 24 This applied only to new ebooks.

The 2010 court case Vernor v. Autodesk disrupted this business model by challenging the “you bought it, you own it” notion that had long been the standard for physical books.Footnote 23 Resulting from this case, ebooks were deemed computer software that only needed to be licensed, rather than physical products owned by the purchaser. This verdict meant publishers did not need to sell ebooks to libraries with the same freedoms and rights as print books.

MacmillanFootnote 21 did not start e-lending until 2013.

This leaves Macmillan as the only publisher placed solely in the resister category, as they were the only publisher in the late 2010s to take an aggressive step away from e-lending.

But over the years, the technology and process have significantly improved, reaffirming the validity that there is not enough friction in the e-lending process.

Ebooks are a software product; they never deteriorate, so libraries theoretically never need to buy a new copy.

And what what I like to do in the show and in the book is have people notice those things so that they are aware of all the design decisions that are made around them to make their life a little bit better because it is really easy to not see these things and really think that you're on your own in the world, but you're not, you know, there's a bunch of people that thought about a problem that you've never even thought about and solved it before. You even had to encounter it. And it makes the world more clearly reflect that we are like interconnected group of people that are trying to create a place where we can all live and thrive. And those breakaway bolts are a great example of this.

sidewalks became, you know, places for us to sit and congregate when they used to just be the domain or you know, even into the roads that used to just be the domain of roads, like no one took away a road from anybody. But, but like all of a sudden you could form a cafe and people accepted that. And the thing that I love about thinking about cities is that when you're in them, there's a habit of thinking these this thing is the way it is, it was this way when I was born into this world and noticed it and it's very hard to change. But they've always been these evolving entities that reflected our values.

Tony Schwartz. He had this theory that if done well, radio would be more compelling than television because it had more power over the imagination

this story of the Montgomery ward complex, that's that's along the river. And Montgomery Ward is, you know, kind of long gone as a company. But there's this one, the headquarters building was this kind of generic, um, rectangular, modernist building. But they had these four concrete post on the corner and I passed this building all the time. I'd never cared much for it. And then the architecture of the curator on the boat, the docent said that, Well, the reason why that building is the way it is, is that the Montgomery Ward Company sort of prided itself on its egalitarian hierarchy. And they wanted to build their headquarters so that there were no um, VPs fighting over who got the corner office. And so they made a building with no possibility of a corner office at all.

From the smallest details to the large scale infrastructure, every piece of the city was thought about designed and built by someone to make one large living thing we could all inhabit together when it all works well. It enables our society to work well too.

N.T.P. works by telling computers to send tiny, time-stamped messages to time-checking devices superior to them in a hierarchy. The hierarchy’s uppermost layer consists of servers that are closely connected to highly accurate clocks kept in tight synchronization with Coördinated Universal Time. The time then trickles, from strata to strata, to the machines at the bottom of the hierarchy, such as ordinary laptops. The protocol tracks the instants that elapse as a time-checking message is sent, received, returned, and received again by its original sender. All the while, a collection of algorithms—the “popcorn spike suppressor,” the “huff-n’-puff filter”—sifts through the data, singling out falsetickers and truechimers and instructing the clocks on how to adjust their times based on what the time-stamped messages tell them.

He started work at COMSAT, where he had access to funding from the Department of Defense, some of which was earmarked for the ARPANET. “It was a sandbox,” he later told an interviewer. “We just were told, ‘Do good deeds.’ But the good deeds were things like develop electronic mail, and protocols.”

Vital systems—power grids, financial markets, telecommunications networks—rely on it to keep records and sort cause from effect. N.T.P. works in partnership with satellite systems, such as the Global Positioning System (G.P.S.), and other technologies to synchronize time on our many online devices. The time kept by precise and closely aligned atomic clocks, for instance, can be broadcast via G.P.S. to numerous receivers, including those in cell towers; those receivers can be attached to N.T.P. servers that then distribute the time across devices linked together by the Internet, almost all of which run N.T.P. (Atomic clocks can also directly feed the time to N.T.P. servers.) The protocol operates on billions of devices, coördinating the time on every continent. Society has never been more synchronized.

“I always thought that was sort of black magic,” Vint Cerf, a pioneer of Internet infrastructure, told me.

On the part of the searcher one move that a lot of people now use is they will use google with the keywords that they have to search for but tell it to only search Reddit increasingly people are turning to Reddit to search for information but they're using google to do it because read its own search function is supposedly not very good.

Search engines like google so often missed their mark is because unlike say a librarian's approach, which might be more like here are 10 books you could read to try to figure out on your own, Google tries to give you the most popular quote, unquote best search results. In other words, a direct answer, it can sort of understand what's on a web page. Find the information that it thinks you're looking for based on its statistical analysis of all of the billions and billions of searches that it sees all the time and feed you an answer and we now have come to think, oh well that must be the answer then.

It felt like we had finally made it to the very top of human knowledge and it felt like not a constrained experience. It felt like, oh that's done, that's fixed. It works. In fact the google search bar with all of its millions of data points is so good. It changed our expectations of what search is and today that's part of the problem. We were all trained very well to think well now search bars are just like the google search bar everywhere and everywhere. I see a search bar, it's going to be just as good as a google search bar is and then you try that on amazon. For many of us when we type a query into an e commerce website, we expect that the results will be ranked for us by relevance to our search but that is not how it works. So a place that's trying to sell something is trying to sell. Like if it has more of one thing in its warehouses than another, it'll try to push that onto you. If it has something that's on sale, it might show you that first. If it has a product where the people who make it have a pay for play deal with the e commerce site, it'll show you that stuff first. The result is that the thing you search for that you're trying to buy will be buried by results for stuff that the company wants you to buy.

they get billions and billions and billions of searches every day and only about 15% of the searches that they've seen a given day. Our new that they've never seen before. So 85% of the searches that the world does on Google every day are things they've already seen.

The same way that ants tell each other there's food over there, but not over there. If an ant walks over the trail and leaves pheromones on it again and again and again, that trail becomes more important to the colony pretty soon with the help of page rank google became a verb.

Whereas searching by topic like you would in a library is similar to looking through the table of contents of a book. Keyword search is like using the index. It is much more precise and searching by keyword worked well for a time when you type in a word and get only a couple of dozen results.

So in 1945, van ever took to the page and dreamed up an imaginary futuristic solution to the problem of search. A machine called mimics. The mimics would make search easier. It would look like a desk. There'd be a keyboard, viewing screens and storage space for all of human knowledge as long as it was on microfilm and could fit into a dust drawer on the left side there would be all the information in the universe and it would all have links. And then on the right side you would follow those links for the information you wanted. So the search became about connections within the what you were looking for theoretically the user could teach the mimics which words were relevant to each other. So if the word vulture and one document makes me think of death, I could tell the mimics to connect those two words. Then when I search for the word vulture, all the documents featuring death that I previously linked would show up, I could scroll through all the results by turning a crank. In essence, the mimics user could build their own little analog algorithm for search.

Google was essentially a person, a reference librarian. If you wanted to find something on say growing vegetables, you could go to the gardening or farming sections of the library. But in the thousands of books in that huge section you'd quickly get overwhelmed. That's where reference librarians and archivists come in. They take your topic and help you narrow it down even further, applying their own nuanced knowledge and specialized training to help you search better and find exactly what you're looking for. That's how search operated for centuries by topic mediated by human to human interaction and it works pretty well.

She was a librarian. They were really well organized. The books held all the knowledge that Adam's grandmother wanted to access. It was arranged by topic and author, complete with important search tools, notes and tabs stuck into all the various volumes that she could reference when looking to pull up some tidbit of information.

Some children could adapt better without them than others. Throughout his career in education, Pederson has never heard a single parent complain about data protection. But after the Google ban, he did receive complaints—mostly from parents of dyslexic students, who rely on Chromebook tools such as AppWriter.

The Google ban was partly imposed because the data protection regulator discovered Helsingør never carried out a full risk assessment for Google’s school products before using them, as required under Europe’s GDPR privacy law, according to Allan Frank,

Denmark’s data protection regulator found that local schools did not really understand what Google was doing with students’ data and as a result blocked around 8,000 students from using the Chromebooks that had become a central part of their daily education.

That hypothetical "interoperable Facebook" is the subject of a new white paper and narrated slideshow I've just launched with EFF, called "How to Ditch Facebook Without Losing Friends."

Now, digital technology has intrinsically low switching-costs, because the only digital computer we know how to build – a Turing-complete Von Neumann machine – can run every program we know how to write. Someone can always figure out how to plug something new into something old.

Facebook users claim to hate the service, but they keep using it, leading many to describe Facebook as "addictive." But there's a simpler explanation: people keep using Facebook though they hate it because they don't want to lose their connections to the people they love.

They found out that there are truths evident on maps which distances do not full capture which influence customer behavior. One, extremely relevant in Chicagoland and having no rational explanation, is that users prefer not to drive through forest preserves on the way to their bank branch; they’ll go substantially out of their way to avoid mixing greenery with their money.

A curb cut is authority granted to you by the owner of the road (often the state government) to make a physical change to your property and the road to allow customers access. Curb cuts alter the properties of traffic management at a block-by-block engineering level.

The branch network is an extension of advertising, sometimes extremely literally; there are branches which exist for no purpose other than “had a city-approved large billboard adjacent to a thoroughfare with hundreds of thousands of desirable commuters daily.” The bank built the branch and staffed it with about half a dozen professionals as the cost of being able to put their logo on the billboard for half a century.

Bank branches are not destinations. Like Starbucks and cell phone shops, they rely on capturing your day-to-day custom when you’re out and about. In the U.S., that mostly means being maximally accessible by cars. (In Japan, and other places with different transit behavior, bank branches are among the most likely user for large parcels directly adjacent to hub train stations, with smaller light branches and ATM-only locations being deployed close to far-from-station workplaces.)

banks are privately funded public infrastructure.

When contracting with vendors that support open source, ensure that they commit to support future development of the underlying system and contribute their developments back to the community.

We recommend a three-pronged approach that combines both local and larger-scale actions.

libraries of all types must be able to select the services, platforms, and technology providers that match organizational values and meet both long and short-term needs. To that end, we argue that libraries must empower themselves by reestablishing agency and reasserting control over the technical infrastructure critical to libraries' success.

The “Library First Principles” identified by BTAA call for libraries to become the “long-term guardian and preservers of research products” and support “egalitarian access to the tools of knowledge creation.” BTAA’s call for the effective in-housing of library systems through collaboratively owned and supported infrastructure is pivotal in building a sustainable future for libraries.

SONIA BEN OUAGRHAM-GORMLEY: Yeah, that's—that's the impression it gives. And my point is that the thought experiment is just a thought experiment. It just shows that it is possible to identify new molecules, but there's a long way between the idea and the production of an actual drug or an actual weapon.

FABIO URBINA: Just did a couple of copy-and-paste changes. Typed a '1' where there was a '0' and a '0' where there was a '1.' SEAN EKINS: It was that simple. It was literally that simple. LATIF: He hit 'Run' on Mega-Syn.

paper

For example, it explains why Web3 – notionally a project to remake the web without Big Tech choke­points – is so closely associated with cryptocurrency. It’s not just the ideological notion that if we paid for things, companies would abandon surveillance and sensationalism (a dubious proposition!); it’s the idea that the internet could be remade as something that can only be used by people who have cryptocur­rency tokens. The internet is not a luxury. It’s a necessity, as the pandemic and the lockdown proved. Without the internet, you are cut off from family life, healthcare, employment, leisure, access to government services, political discourse, civic life, and romance. Those are all things you need, not just things you want. If you need cryptocurrency to access these services on a replacement, transactional internet built on the blockchain, then you will do work and sell goods in exchange for cryptocurrency tokens. They will become the new hut-tax, and the fact that everyone who wants the things the internet provides has to trade work or goods for cryptos will make cryptos very moneylike.

Money, then, is intrinsically linked to liabilities: something is moneylike if you need it to settle some kind of obligation.

thought experiment devised by economist Warren Mosler, one of the foremost proponents of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT, the theory built upon this understanding of money): Sometimes when Mosler is explaining money to an audience, he’ll hold up a handful of his business-cards and ask, “Who will stay after the lecture and help stack the chairs and mop the floor in exchange for one of my cards?” When no hands go up, Mosler adds, “What if I told you that there were gun-toting security guards at the all the exits, and they will only let you leave in exchange for one of my cards?” Every hand shoots up. Mosler has just turned his cards into money, through the creation of a non-discretionary door-tax. Now, Mosler didn’t need to get his business-cards from the audience before he could levy this tax. He is the sole supplier of his cards, and while the audience will treat them as money, Mosler won’t. Mosler doesn’t need business-cards – he needs people to help clean the lecture hall and stack the chairs. At the end of the night, when the security guards turn over all the collected cards to him, he doesn’t need them – he can’t pay for his airfare to the next lecture using his cards, or pay for his hotel room with them. Indeed, given how cheap business cards are to produce, he can just dump all those used cards in a shredder. When people say, “Government budgets aren’t like household budgets,” this is what they mean. Mosler isn’t a currency user in this thought-exper­iment, he’s a currency issuer. Mosler needs your work, not your “money.” He has all the money (Mosler’s business cards). You can’t get money (Mosler’s business cards), except from Mosler. When you pay your door-tax to Mosler’s armed agents, you aren’t giving him your money – you’re giving him his own money back.

Debt describes our best, most evidence-supported historical understand­ing of the origin of money in the needs of the empires of the Axial Age (800 BCE to 600 CE). As imperial armies went a-conquering, they needed some way to provision the soldiers garrisoned in their far-flung territories. The solution was elegant – and terrible. Soldiers were paid in coin, minted and controlled by the state, which punished counterfeiters with the most terrible torments. Conquered farmers were taxed in coin, on penalty of violence and expropriation. Thus: the soldiers had coin and the farmers needed it. This meant that farmers would be willing to trade their produce for coin, which meant that soldiers would be provisioned. Tax-bills were nondiscretionary liabilities: failure to pay your tax would lead to violence and ruin. The value of money, then, came from taxation – from the fact that farmers needed coins. This need rippled out through society: Even if you didn’t farm, you would accept coins in exchange for your own labor and goods, because the farmers would accept coins in exchange for food (which everyone needs), because farmers needed coin to settle their tax-debts. Coins became money because there was a nondiscretionary, terrible obligation that you could only fulfill with coins.

so I save web archive links too as an annotation

If you use h., I’d be interested to hear about it.

thought to be a potential approach to create a better consensus in a world where multiple truths sometimes seem to co-exist. Today, each side argues only their “truth” is true, and the other is a lie, which has made it difficult to find agreement. The bridging algorithm looks for areas where both sides agree. Ideally, platforms would then reward behavior that “bridges divides” rather than reward posts that create further division.

These records were not created for the purpose of corporate gain or fiscal sustainability, though corporations may develop enhanced services that rely on this data.

While libraries pay substantial fees to OCLC and other providers for services including deduplication, discovery, and enhancement, they do not do so with the intent that their records should then be siloed or restricted from re-use. Regardless of who has contributed to descriptive records, individual records are generally not copyrightable, nor is it in the public interest for their use to be restricted.

This research suggests that the greatest challenges faced by library systems maintainers are ageneral ignorance about the nature of this work and an unpredictable swing from invisibility tohypervisibility within the library. When the hypervisibility results from stress-inducing bugs whichare outside their control, this hypervisibility leads to negative affective experiences, apparentlyat a higher-level among women. In some cases, the affective strain results from harshcommunications from stressed coworkers. It can also be caused by the maintainer'sdissatisfaction with their inability to help others and questioning their own competence.

Vendor support, or the lack thereof, was a consistent pain point in the network. Participants feltthey could not rely on the vendor to solve bugs in the ILS in a timely manner. Most expressed alevel of dissatisfaction with the support they received. A particular theme was that of a ticketlanguishing for weeks in the tier-one support queue before escalation to someone who would fixit.

Participants identified a lack of understanding of what it is that they do as a key contributor tothe invisibility of their work. Communicating about technology can be time-consuming work andcut into one's time to accomplish other things. Nor are such communications requested. Thesense that only technology workers can or should be familiar with technology can be damagingat all levels of the library.

Five themes emerged from the coding: unpredictability, invisibility/time, collaboration,communication, and affective impact. Just as few jobs can be broken into truly discrete tasks,none of these themes stands by itself. The fifth theme, affective impact emerged in discussionsof the four other themes.

A legacy ILS is one which is still used by many libraries but is no longer the focus of the vendor's activedevelopment work. In this study, that includes Aleph, Symphony, and Voyager and, with Ex Libris'spurchase of III, may soon include Sierra.

In this article, maintenance is defined to include regular system upgrades, updating systemsettings, addressing bugs and issues, upkeep of integrations with other institutional systems,and minor tasks to improve user experience or support existing functions. The latter type ofwork spans maintenance and innovation,5 but when it consists of bringing existing systems intoalignment with expectations and work already being performed, it aligns closely with other areasof maintenance included here.

Modbus is a different protocol - you'll notice  that it says request, reply, request, reply.   You have to ask for data from the  other end before it will be sent back.   What this means is you can't cut one of those  wires. You've got to have the ability to transmit   data from one end to the other.

it turns out it was using conventional  serial: you've got a receive and a transmit pair.   The thing is with a lot of serial systems  like this, what you can do, is you can  

The thing is that people add these   jump boxes - pivots between different networks -  they want to get data out from the control system   to the business network. They want to be able to  monitor things.

much of hacking  is about understanding systems better than those   who built them and using that knowledge  to do what is supposed to be "impossible"