Andrew Orr

Rich people are banning screens in classrooms, in a surprising turn in the digital divide debate.

It wasn’t long ago that the worry was that rich students would have access to the internet earlier, gaining tech skills and creating a digital divide…But now, as Silicon Valley’s parents increasingly panic over the impact screens have on their children and move toward screen-free lifestyles, worries over a new digital divide are rising. It could happen that the children of poorer and middle-class parents will be raised by screens, while the children of Silicon Valley’s elite will be going back to wooden toys and the luxury of human interaction.

At one point when I was growing up, my dad got rid of the television because us kids were glued to it. I didn’t like it then, but looking back I think it was a good decision. And I’ve already written about how kids are being raised by YouTube.

In a new decision, the Librarian of Congress and U.S. Copyright Office proposed new rules that make it legal to hack DRM to fix your electronic devices.

The move is a landmark win for the “right to repair” movement; essentially, the federal government has ruled that consumers and repair professionals have the right to legally hack the firmware of “lawfully acquired” devices for the “maintenance” and “repair” of that device. Previously, it was legal to hack tractor firmware for the purposes of repair; it is now legal to hack many consumer electronics.

This is a great decision, and although Apple opposes the right to repair, it’s a pro-consumer choice.

When Google’s AlphaGo system beat Chinese players at the game twice, this set off a sort of AI cold war between China and the United States.

On October 18, 2017, China’s president, Xi Jinping, stood in front of 2,300 of his fellow party members, flanked by enormous red drapes and a giant gold hammer and sickle. As Xi laid out his plans for the party’s future over nearly three and a half hours, he named artificial intelligence, big data, and the internet as core technologies that would help transform China into an advanced industrial economy in the coming decades. It was the first time many of these technologies had explicitly come up in a president’s speech at the Communist Party Congress, a once-in-five-years event.

Sean Captain writes about a report that shows how the government is increasingly outsourcing surveillance to Silicon Valley companies.

While Amazon plays the leading role, the report also details the involvement of companies including Peter Thiel’s Palantir, NEC, and Thomson Reuters in storing, transferring, and analyzing data on both undocumented residents and U.S. citizens.

“There is a transfer of discretion and power from the public sector to the private sector in the form of these contracted technological services,” says Shankar Narayan, director of the Technology and Liberty Project at the ACLU in Washington State, which was not involved in the report.

The future sounds more dystopian every day.

U.S. intelligence agencies discovered that Russia and China are spying on conversations President Trump has on his insecure iPhone.

Mr. Trump’s aides have repeatedly warned him that his cellphone calls are not secure, and they have told him that Russian spies are routinely eavesdropping on the calls, as well. But aides say the voluble president, who has been pressured into using his secure White House landline more often these days, has still refused to give up his iPhones. White House officials say they can only hope he refrains from discussing classified information when he is on them.

Inflamed by Russian bots, an issue during the 2016 election was Hillary Clinton’s personal email server, because there was a possibility it could be compromised. Now we find that Trump’s iPhone has confirmed to be compromised.

Google will start showing privacy controls on its search page, instead of forcing users to navigate their My Activity page.

Google calls the new feature Your Data, and has experimented with offering information about data privacy in different formats like video, illustrations, and text. The idea, Miraglia says, is to help as many users as possible understand what data a service collects, why, and what controls are available.

I think it’s a good move by Google, but like Douglas Schmidt said in the article: “It never hurts for people to be reminded that their online activities are being monitored, but I’m not sure it would make anybody feel better about what’s being done with it.”

Researchers have had a fiber optic breakthrough, and it could significantly speed up existing networks and boost efficiency. The secret is twisted light.

Fibre optic cables use pulses of light to transmit information, but currently information can only be stored through the colour of the light, and whether the wave is horizontal or vertical.

By twisting light into a spiral, engineers effectively create a third dimension for light to carry information: the level of orbital angular momentum, or spin. “It’s like DNA, if you look at the double helix spiral,” said Min Gu from RMIT University. “The more you can use angular momentum the more information you can carry.”

I wonder how much current ISPs would throttle this 100X faster internet?

With the famous Bloomberg spy chip article, other news organizations have attempted to copy Bloomberg’s research. But they haven’t gotten the same results.

According to a company source, editorial staff has been “frustrated” that competing news organizations haven’t managed to match the scoop. Sources tell the Erik Wemple Blog that the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and The [Washington] Post have each sunk resources into confirming the story, only to come up empty-handed.

In science, peer review is an important part of scientific research. If other scientists follow the exact methodology you used, and they get the same results, your experiment is valid. But if they don’t get the same results, there is something wrong with your experiment.

Gizmodo has a great list of 8 advanced photo editing techniques for the iPhone.

You might already be familiar with the quick fixes you can apply to your pictures after you’ve snapped them, right on your phone—but if you want to take your mobile photo editing to the next level there are tools and apps that can help here too.

The editing techniques include: Combining photos together (compositing), removing objects from photos, adjusting the depth of field, adjusting white balance, brightening shadows, healing, correcting image distortion, and photo pixelation.

Who will teach ethics to Silicon Valley? Kara Swisher asks this in her column for The New York Times. A title of Chief Ethics Officer should become the norm.

Grappling with what to say and do about the disasters they themselves create is only the beginning. Then there are the broader issues that the denizens of Silicon Valley expect their employers to have a stance on: immigration, income inequality, artificial intelligence, automation, transgender rights, climate change, privacy, data rights and whether tech companies should be helping the government do controversial things. It’s an ethical swamp out there.

I think the answer to this is US. It’s up to American citizens to elect responsible politicians who will “nudge” corporations into having ethical and privacy standards.