Late last year, this little snippet passed almost unnoticed in the NZ media: The government is working with an Israeli-born surveillance firm named among a group of “cyber mercenaries” and kicked off Facebook for spying on people. It is keeping most of the operations with Cobwebs Technologies secret, but they
Dominic Lees Associate Professor in Filmmaking University of Reading Film and television actors in the US came out on strike on July 14, causing Hollywood productions to shut down. The action has also had an impact on US films shooting in the UK: director Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice 2 has
James Intriligator Tufts University theconversation.com ChatGPT has exploded in popularity, and people are using it to write articles and essays, generate marketing copy and computer code, or simply as a learning or research tool. However, most people don’t understand how it works or what it can do, so
Bruce Schneier Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy Harvard Kennedy School Nathan Sanders Affiliate, Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society Harvard University If you ask Alexa, Amazon’s voice assistant AI system, whether Amazon is a monopoly, it responds by saying it doesn’t know. It doesn’t take much
This series is designed to help people to understand modern technology, and become more confident in using computing devices. It is not designed to educate experts. The author is involved in tutoring older students at SeniorNet, a New Zealand wide organisation. SeniorNet hopes that students will feel more confident in
A common argument from the anti-free speech left is that “it’s only censorship if the government is doing it!” This, they claim, means that when social media companies censor speech on their platforms, it’s not really censorship. This is wrong, of course, on several points. Firstly, while private
No doubt Spark will be pretty keen to move to Threads, after their debacle on Twitter last week. After all, they won’t have to worry about a public backlash to the misogynist bigotry of their employees in a space where no one will even see it. The great terror
This series is designed to help people to understand modern technology, and become more confident in using computing devices. It is not designed to educate experts. The author is involved in tutoring older students at SeniorNet, a New Zealand wide organisation. SeniorNet hopes that students will feel more confident in
This series is designed to help people to understand modern technology, and become more confident in using computing devices. It is not designed to educate experts. The author is involved in tutoring older students at SeniorNet, a New Zealand wide organisation. SeniorNet hopes that students will feel more confident in
Well, that didn’t take long. It’s been barely a couple of weeks since Mark Zuckerberg’s latest data-mining project, the so-called “Twitter killer” Threads was launched. And already the wheels are falling off. Threads was created by and for the censorious wokesters who simply cannot bear the fact
Bob Jones nopunchespulled.com Former President Barack Obama criticised the 4 days news blitz re the Titanic sub drama compared to the relative silence on the circa 500 mainly Pakistani migrant lives lost in the crowed fishing boat off the Greek coast. The clear innuendo was racism. That was bloody
Sure, the idea of a space elevator just sounds too stupid to be true. But then, people once said the same thing about satellites. When Arthur C Clarke first proposed the idea of communications satellites, newspapers smirked and asked what would hold them up. As it happens, ol’ Arfur was
George Orwell worried that the future would be the government boot stamping on us – forever. Aldous Huxley was more worried that corporate culture would so distract us with luxury that we wouldn’t notice we’d become slaves. Both were right, in very important ways. But, while it’s easy
Brownstone Institute The Brownstone Institute for Social and Economic Research is a nonprofit organization conceived of in May 2021 in support of a society that minimizes the role of violence in public life. brownstone.org Brownstone Institute has recently taken its first step into the world of audiobooks, joining a
Robert Blumen Robert Blumen is a software engineer and podcast host who writes occasionally about political and economic issues brownstone.org Alongside Brownstone author Jennifer Sey, I received honorable mention in Walter Bragman’s breathless Important Context: Leaked Brownstone Institute Emails Reveal Support for Child Labor, Underage Smoking. Bragman has
