Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
When Maria Cantwell first ran for the U.S. Senate, she championed what was then an unconventional political cause: internet privacy. “What you do on your computer should be your business, and no one else’s,” Cantwell, the dot-com millionaire and former U.S. House member, said in a 2000 campaign video that showed her huddled around a…
Last week, the Wall Street Journal published a 10-minute-long interview with OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, with journalist Joanna Stern asking a series of thoughtful yet straightforward questions that Murati failed to satisfactorily answer. When asked about what data was used to train Sora, OpenAI’s app for generating video with AI, Murati claimed it used publicly…
Last November, Michael Morell, a former deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, hinted at a big change in how the agency now operates. “The information that is available commercially would kind of knock your socks off,” Morell said in an appearance on the NatSecTech podcast. “If we collected it using traditional intelligence methods, it…
Americans at the lower end of the economic ladder suffer from an ever-growing privacy divide, impacting more than just their personal dignity and autonomy. In 1969, a woman named Barbara James walked into a neighborhood legal services office in New York City in search of help to fight the city’s home visit policy. Her case…
Content owners are wising up to their work being freely used by Big Tech to build new AI tools. Bots like Common Crawl are scraping and storing billions of pages of content for AI training. With less incentive to share online freely, the web could become a series of paywalled gardens. AI is undermining the…
The Metaverse, the once-buzzy technology that promised to allow users to hang out awkwardly in a disorientating video-game-like world, has died after being abandoned by the business world. It was three years old. The capital-M Metaverse, a descendant of the 1982 movie “Tron” and the 2003 video game “Second Life,” was born in 2021 when…
For a long time we have existed in a weird world where if as a human you want to use a website you agreed to a long terms-of-service either explicitly or implicitly… But if you were a robot accessing a website the rules of the road were pretty basic: 1. There was some usual blanket…
A photographer is refusing a prestigious award after admitting to being a “cheeky monkey” and generating the prize-winning image using artificial intelligence. The German artist Boris Eldagsen revealed on his website that he was not accepting the prize for the creative open category, which he won at the Sony world photography awards. The winning photograph…
Over the course of his life, Alejo Lopez de Armentia has played video games for a variety of reasons. There was the thrill of competition, the desire for companionship, and, at base, the need to pass the time. In his 20s, feeling isolated while working for a solar panel company in Florida, he spent his…
Hack the SEC A good plot for, like, an insider-trading Hollywood thriller would be if the villains hacked into the computers of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC, after all, is maybe the world’s greatest repository of material information about public companies. Companies are constantly filing earnings releases, merger announcements, management changes, proxy…