Andrew Orr

For two and a half years China Telecom re-routed a lot of U.S. internet traffic to China. It’s not clear if it was intentional or a mistake.

As the following traceroute from December 3, 2017 shows, traffic originating in Los Angeles first passed through a China Telecom facility in Hangzhou, China, before reaching its final stop in Washington, DC. The problematic route, which is visualized in the graphic above, was the result of China Telecom inserting itself into the inbound path of Verizon Asian Pacific.

Now, it could be a bug in the internet’s Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). Or it could have been malicious (ALLEGEDLY) seeing how Washington D.C.’s traffic was compromised.

David Nield shared some helpful tips on how to limit website access on your Mac or PC. It includes controlling browser cookies and browser privacy settings.

We’ll also explain how to restrict the cookies and other data websites can save locally on your laptop. It’s up to you whether you let sites track your identity across the web to better personalize the ads you see, but you should know the options that are available.

Mining bitcoin is bad for the environment. According to a new paper, mining one dollar’s worth of bitcoin takes twice the energy to mind the same value of copper, gold, or platinum.

One dollar’s worth of bitcoin takes about 17 megajoules of energy to mine, according to researchers from the Oak Ridge Institute in Cincinnati, Ohio, compared with four, five and seven megajoules for copper, gold and platinum.

Mining bitcoin takes a lot of computing power, and those computers likewise need a lot of energy.

According to the Financial Times, which I can’t link here due to its paywall, Apple could be trying to woo radio listeners of color with its iHeartMedia grab.

Even with its mounting debt and impending bankruptcy filing, iHeartMedia has a crushing grip over the radio industry with over 850 stations. Nielsen research found black people spend more time listening to the radio than any other ethnic group averaging more than 13 hours a week, making them a prime target for Apple’s radio expansion dreams.

Personally, I think that’s an odd conclusion to draw from the iHeartMedia rumors, and I don’t think Apple has ever set out to target a specific audience.

Ben Bajarin argues that the Apple Pencil 2 is the iPad Pro’s mouse, especially with the new gesture support.

Apple’s new gestures clearly support this theory. Apple may be easing people into this new functionality but the idea of a multi-touch function on the Apple Pencil seems like a logical path forward. At the moment, you can customize the double tap gestures on Apple Pencil to switch between the two tools you use the most.

I agree with Mr. Bajarin; when you double-tap on the Apple Pencil 2, think of it as a right-click. The iPad Pro doesn’t need a trackpad or mouse, and I personally hope Apple won’t add them. Those are legacy tools.

The social network known as Gab is back online. Its previous host—GoDaddy—withdrew support and hosting because of accusations that Gab was a haven for alt-right users. The Pittsburgh synagogue shooter was a member.

Rob Monster, the founder and CEO of Gab’s new host Epik, wrote a blog post defending his firm’s decision. He acknowledged that Gab had a duty to “monitor and lightly curate, keeping content within the bounds of the law”.

However, he also said he felt that Gab’s founder Andrew Torba was “doing something that looks useful” and described Gab’s removal from the internet as “digital censorship”.

I’ve never used this platform but if it really was mostly comprised of alt-right people, therein lies the problem. It becomes an echo chamber that only serves to reinforce pre-existing opinions and world views. Even if it was a left-leaning platform, the echoing results would likely be similar.

Google has made a particular machine learning technique open-source. It’s called Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), used for natural language processing (NLP).

With this release, anyone in the world can train their own state-of-the-art question answering system (or a variety of other models) in about 30 minutes on a single Cloud TPU, or in a few hours using a single GPU.

For more technical details Google released a white paper called BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding.

Researchers from McMaster University set out to examine smartphone environmental impact. Their study shows that buying a new phone consumes as much energy as using a phone for ten years.

Smartphones are particularly insidious for a few reasons. With a two-year average life cycle, they’re more or less disposable. The problem is that building a new smartphone–and specifically, mining the rare materials inside them–represents 85% to 95% of the device’s total CO2 emissions for two years. That means buying one new phone takes as much energy as recharging and operating a smartphone for an entire decade.

Rene Ritchie’s iPad Pro review is the only one you’ll need. 90% of these reviews are written by jaded tech reporters who can’t get over the “But can it replace a computer?” question, to which most of them shout an indignant “NO!”

I like Rene’s writing because in my opinion he seems to write from the perspective of the average, everyday consumer. Whereas many tech reporters write things from their own point of view, which may not reflect their audience. His iPad Pro review has useful information, and I definitely recommend it.