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machine learning research mirrors the way cryptography research developed around the middle of the 20th century. Much of the cutting edge research was done in secret, and we're only finding out now, 40 or 50 years later, what GCHQ or the NSA was doing back then. I'm hopeful that it won't take quite that long for Amazon or Google to tell us what they're thinking about today

All the components of the system are thought of as agents — effectively "smart" pieces of software

increased adaptability in the face of asynchronously arriving data

So, this moldy jail I was in was this old dot-com McMansion, out in the Permanent Foreclosure Zone in the dead suburbs. That's where they cooped us up. This gated community was built for some vanished rich people. That was their low-intensity prison for us rehab detainees.

This place outside was a Beltway suburb before Washington was abandoned. The big hurricane ran right over it, and crushed it down pretty good, so now it was a big green hippie jungle. Our prison McMansion had termites, roaches, mold and fleas, but once it was a nice house. This rambling wreck of a town was half storm-debris. All the lawns were replaced with wet, weedy, towering patches of bamboo, or marijuana -- or hops, or kenaf, whatever (I never could tell those farm crops apart). The same goes for the "garden roofs," which were dirt piled on top of the dirty houses. There were smelly goats running loose, chickens cackling. Salvaged umbrellas and chairs toppled in the empty streets. No traffic signs, because there were no cars.

The rich elite just blew it totally. They dropped their globalized ball. They panicked. So they're in jail, like I was. Or they're in exile somewhere, or else they jumped out of penthouses screaming when the hyperinflation ate them alive.

What might this tell us about the future?  Let’s consider Ryugu as a datapoint or story for where space exploration might head next.

robots continue to be cheap, far easier to operate, capable of enduring awful stresses, and happy to send gorgeous data back our way

Hayabusa is a Japanese project, not an American one, and national interest counts for a lot.  No humans were involved, so human interest and story are absent.  Perhaps the whole project looks too science-y for a culture that spins into post-truthiness, contains some serious anti-science and anti-technology strands, or just finds science stories too dry.  Or maybe the American media outlets think Americans just aren’t that into space in particular in 2018.

There are ways to defang Chrome, which is much more complicated than just using “Incognito Mode.” But it’s much easier to switch to a browser not owned by an advertising company.

The vast majority of the company’s content is apolitical—and that is certainly the way the company portrays itself.

But here’s the thing: TheSoul Publishing also posts history videos with a strong political tinge. Many of these videos are overtly pro-Russian. One video posted on Feb. 17, 2019, on the channel Smart Banana, which typically posts listicles and history videos, claims that Ukraine is part of Russia

the video gives a heavily sanitized version of Josef Stalin’s time in power and, bizarrely, suggests that Alaska was given to the United States by Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev

“Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital 'pocket litter.'”

To be fair, the US government has given significant contributions to the research and development of free speech and anonymity technologies, such as the Tor Project.[26] Technologies created and fostered by the US government have been invaluable in the fight for freedom all around the globe. After all, it was the US military that created the precursor to the internet, called ARPANET. But without the ability to be accountable for its own crimes, and to protect the rights of those in opposition to its own policies, the US continues its greatest tradition of hypocrisy. The Obama administration lifts up the struggles of those fighting its enemies with one hand, while attacking those who speak up about injustices of US-sponsored regimes with the other. All the while, it is slowly and secretly building up its omni-present police state at home.

A visit to Dictionary.com resulted in 234 trackers being installed on our test computer, and only 11 of those were installed by Dictionary.com.

Every time I have a thought, I take an action online and Google it. So [online tracking] does build up these incredibly rich dossiers. One question is: Is knowing your name the right definition of anonymity? Right now, that is considered anonymous. If they don't know your name, they're not covered by laws that regulate personally identifiable information. And that's what the Federal Trade Commission is considering — that the definition of personal information should be expanded beyond name and Social Security number. Another thing that [online tracking] raises is sensitive information. So if you're looking at gay websites, then you're labeled as gay in some database somewhere and then you're followed around and sold on some exchange as gay, and you just may not want that to happen. So I feel like there are some categories that we as a society may not want collected: our political affiliation, our diseases, our income levels and many other things."

you can go to the websites of all of these tracking companies and ask them not to track you — which is absurd, because you'd have to know who they are. There is a list of all of them on the ad industry's webpage, and you can opt out of all of them at the same time. But one thing to know about tracking is they actually put a tracker on your computer saying don't track me. So you're opting in to being tracked for not being tracked

it’s a little creepy, especially if you don’t know what’s going on

personalized retargeting or remarketing

the palpable feeling that they are being watched as they roam the virtual aisles of online stores

it's the re-packaging and transfer of this data to the U.S. Government -- combined with the ability to link it not only to your online identity (IP address), but also your offline identity (name) -- that has made this industry particularly pernicious.  There are serious obstacles that impede the Government's ability to create these electronic dossiers themselves.  It requires both huge resources and expertise.  Various statutes enacted in the mid-1970s -- such as the Privacy Act of 1974 -- impose transparency requirements and other forms of accountability on programs whereby the Government collects data on citizens.  And the fact that much of the data about you ends up in the hands of private corporations can create further obstacles, because the tools which the Government has to compel private companies to turn over this information is limited (the fact that the FBI is sometimes unable to obtain your "transactional" Internet data without a court order -- i.e., whom you email, who emails you, what Google searches you enter, and what websites you visit --is what has caused the Obama administration to demand that Congress amend the Patriot Act to vest them with the power to obtain all of that with no judicial supervision). But the emergence of a private market that sells this data to the Government (or, in the case of Project Vigilance, is funded in order to hand it over voluntarily) has eliminated those obstacles.

a wide array of government agencies have created countless programs to encourage and formally train various private workers (such as cable installers, utilities workers and others who enter people's homes) to act as government informants and report any "suspicious" activity; see one example here.  Meanwhile, TIA has been replicated, and even surpassed, as a result of private industries' willingness to do the snooping work on American citizens which the Government cannot do.

this arrangement provides the best of all worlds for the Government and the worst for citizens: The use of private-sector data aggregators allows the government to insulate surveillance and information-handling practices from privacy laws or public scrutiny. That is sometimes an important motivation in outsourced surveillance.  Private companies are free not only from complying with the Privacy Act, but from other checks and balances, such as the Freedom of Information Act.  They are also insulated from oversight by Congress and are not subject to civil-service laws designed to ensure that government policymakers are not influenced by partisan politics. . . .

The DJ has now replaced his bed with friends' couches, paper bills with online banking, and a record collection containing nearly 2,000 albums with an external hard drive with DJ software and nearly 13,000 MP3s

Mr Klein says the lifestyle can become loathsome because "you never know where you will sleep". And Mr Yurista says he frequently worries he may lose his new digital life to a hard drive crash or downed server. "You have to really make sure you have back-ups of your digital goods everywhere," he said.

like a house fire that rips through a family's prized possessions, when someone loses their digital goods to a computer crash, they can be devastated. Kelly Chessen, a 36-year-old former suicide hotline counsellor with a soothing voice and reassuring personality, is Drive Savers official "data crisis counsellor". Part-psychiatrist and part-tech enthusiast, Ms Chessen's role is to try to calm people down when they lose their digital possessions to failed drives. Ms Chessen says some people have gone as far as to threaten suicide over their lost digital possessions and data. "It's usually indirect threats like, 'I'm not sure what I'm going to do if I can't get the data back,' but sometimes it will be a direct threat such as, 'I may just have to end it if I can't get to the information',"