reader comments 4 with 4 posters participating Share this story For years, the anonymity service Tor has been the best way to stay private online and dodge web censorship. Much to the ire of governments and law enforcement agencies, Tor encrypts your web traffic and sends it through a chain of computers, making it very […]
Monthly Archives: July 2022
The Download: a breakthrough climate bill, and Twitter’s terrible trends
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Bitcoin traders don’t care about a recessionDebate over the definition of a recession, and whether we’re in one, feels like a distraction. (CoinDesk)+ Technically the US may now be in recession, but much of the economy remains strong. (The Guardian)+ Here’s […]
Griffin on Tech: We have a problem with digital trust
Peter Griffin, Editor. 29 July 2022, 12:43 pm If we want to make the most of a society and economy that is increasingly digital, we need to get to grips with how we manage identity in the digital world. But as Department of Internal Affairs identification consultant Joanne Knight said this week, “here in New […]
Comcast stock falls as company fails to add Internet users for first time ever
Enlarge / Comcast CEO Brian Roberts at an event in Beijing on October 17, 2019. reader comments 55 with 47 posters participating Share this story Comcast is the largest Internet provider in the US with over 29.8 million residential broadband customers, but the company’s long streak of adding Internet subscribers each quarter is finally over. […]
Here are the biggest technology wins in the breakthrough climate bill
In announcing the new agreement, Schumer asserted that the legislation “puts the US on a path to roughly 40% emissions reductions by 2030.” And experts agree the bill could be a game changer in cutting the nation’s emissions in the coming years, helping to curtail warming and extreme weather events in the coming decades. What’s in […]
Why Twitter still has those terrible Trends
So what’s important to the world right now? #ClimateScam trended last Friday and drove users to a river of memes about climate change from those who insist it’s a hoax. Earlier this week, “Sodom and Gomorrah” trended in the US, fueled by far-right anti-LGBTQ conspiracy theorists. The term “Satanic Panic” spiked soon after, along with […]
The Download: a big DeepMind breakthrough, and fixing the US grid
The news: DeepMind says its AlphaFold tool has successfully predicted the structure of nearly all proteins known to science. From today, it’s offering its database of over 200 million proteins to anyone for free. It’s a massive boost to the existing database of 1 million proteins it released last year, and includes structures for plants, […]
DeepMind has predicted the structure of almost every protein known to science
However, for many proteins “we’re interested in understanding how their structure is altered by mutations and natural allelic variation, and that won’t be addressed by this database,” said AlQuraishi. “But of course the field is developing fast, and so I expect tools to accurately model protein variants will begin to appear soon,” he added. The […]
Stitching together the grid will save lives as extreme weather worsens
Heavy use of energy-sucking air-conditioners is the biggest problem. But intense heat can also reduce the output of power plants, blow transformers, and force power lines to sag. Severe droughts across large parts of the country have also significantly reduced the availability of hydroelectric power, according to the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC). It’s […]
A ‘tidal wave’ of disruption is on the way – CSIRO
Peter Griffin, Editor. 28 July 2022, 12:31 pm Australia’s national science agency, the CSIRO, has published its once-in-a-decade report on the future and it’s a picture of massive change, with tech playing a central role. In the absence of a similarly comprehensive foresight project from our own government, the CSIRO report is a useful summary […]