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Who Did This to a Generation?

It’s not for nothing that social media has been dubbed “the Big Tobacco of the 21st century”. Like Philip Morris and Rothmans in the ’50s and ’60s, companies like Meta have done their internal research and know how harmful their products are. Especially to teens. Yet that’s just

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What Is Wrong With Tesla?

What Is Wrong With Tesla?

Francesco Biondi Associate Professor, Human Systems Labs, University of Windsor Tesla is yet again undergoing scrutiny from federal regulators in the United States. The issue at hand now is whether the automotive company did enough in response to the 2023 recalls by the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration

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Should You Share Family Snaps Online?

Should You Share Family Snaps Online?

An author acquaintance of mine recently put out a call for help: she’d been increasingly subject to decidedly creepy inquiries from ‘fans’. Put broadly, these covered everything from questions about her sex life to requests for photos of her young children. At the time, we thought she might have

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Yes, Your Child Is Being Targeted by Online Predators

Kimberly Ells Kimberly Ells is the author of The Invincible Family. Follow her at Invincible Family Substack. mercatornet.com For many parents, the day they find out their child is being approached, targeted, educated, and manipulated by strangers on his or her digital devices is the day they finally take

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Is CRISPR the Rebirth of Eugenics?

Is CRISPR the Rebirth of Eugenics?

Sayyed Mohamed Muhsin Dr Sayyed Mohamed Muhsin is Assistant Professor at the International Islamic University Malaysia. Alexis Heng Boon Chin Dr Alexis Heng Boon Chin is Associate Professor at Peking University, China. mercatornet.com In recent years, the emergence of CRISPR technology has ignited a fervent debate regarding its potential

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Do We Want a Global Surveillance State?

Jaimie Stevenson Jaimie Stevenson JD (Monash) is a legal consultant for Australian-based SMEs, specialising in technology, data, privacy and IP law. She is passionate about the rule of law, as opposed to arbitrary rules, and minimal government encroachment on the inherent rights of the individual including freedom, autonomy and dignity.

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When Silence Fails
NZ

When Silence Fails

Simon O’Connor Husband, step-father, and longtime student of philosophy and history. Also happen to be a former politician, including chairing New Zealand’s Foreign Affairs, Defense, and Trade Committee. onpointnz.substack.com It is difficult to describe the experience of knowing you have been targeted by hackers from a

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Will New Zealand’s School Phone Ban Work?

Will New Zealand’s School Phone Ban Work?

With the coalition government’s ban of student mobile phones in New Zealand schools coming into effect this week, reaction has ranged from the sceptical (kids will just get sneakier) to the optimistic (most kids seem okay with it).

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Iran’s New War Zone Is the Internet

Iran’s New War Zone Is the Internet

Vasileios Karagiannopoulos Associate Professor in Cybercrime and Cybersecurity and Co-Director of the Centre for Cybercrime and Economic Crime, University of Portsmouth Iain Reid Course Leader, MSc Cybercrime, University of Portsmouth A feature of the simmering tensions between the US, Israel and Iran has been not just the tit-for-tat missile and

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Last Hurrah of the Serial Killers

Last Hurrah of the Serial Killers

They’ve spawned books by the thousands and movie and true-crime documentaries by the hundreds, but is the Golden Age of the Serial Killer coming to an end? Serial murder is nothing new, of course. Records of what are now recognised as serial killings go back as far as Chinese

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Has Plato’s Tomb Been Found?

Has Plato’s Tomb Been Found?

It’s often said that all Western philosophy is ‘a series of footnotes to Plato’. Of course, Plato was the successor to Socrates (and if you pronounced that ‘Soh-krayts’, you’re clearly a person of culture and distinction), and the contemporary of Aristotle, but it’s certainly indisputable that Plato’

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The Foodstuffs Facial Recognition Trial

Mark Rickerby Lecturer, School of Product Design, University of Canterbury The incident of a woman misidentified by facial recognition technology at a Rotorua supermarket should have come as no surprise. When Foodstuffs North Island announced its intention to trial this technology in February, as part of a strategy to combat

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Why AI Chatbots Have a Free Speech Problem

Why AI Chatbots Have a Free Speech Problem

Jordi Calvet-Bademunt Research Fellow and Visiting Scholar of Political Science Jacob Mchangama Research Professor of Political Science Vanderbilt University Google recently made headlines globally because its chatbot Gemini generated images of people of colour instead of white people in historical settings that featured white people. Adobe Firefly’s image creation

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water bubbles in blue water

Israel’s Water Innovation Benefits the World

Paul Driessen Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, environment, climate and human rights issues. cfact.org More than 3,400 years ago, Joshua led the Hebrew people across the Jordan River into

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black Audi R8 parked beside road

Quit Clinging to Your Cars

Duggan Flanakin Duggan Flanakin is a senior policy analyst with the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow. A former senior fellow with the Texas Public Policy Foundation, Mr Flanakin authored definitive works on the creation of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and on environmental education in Texas. A brief history

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When Will We Get It?

Recently something happened in the tech world that should have made world headlines. But it didn’t. On March 29, Microsoft software developer Andres Freund was trying to optimize the performance of his computer when he noticed that one program was using an unexpected amount of processing power. Freund dove

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