Group items tagged

"But historians of the future may struggle to understand fully how we lived our lives in the early 21st Century. That's because of a potentially history-deleting combination of how we live our lives digitally - and a paucity of official efforts to archive the world's information as it's produced these days. However, an informal group of organisations are pushing back against the forces of digital entropy - many of them operated by volunteers with little institutional support. None is more synonymous with the fight to save the web than the Internet Archive, an American non-profit based in San Francisco, started in 1996 as a passion project by internet pioneer Brewster Kahl. The organisation has embarked what may be the most ambitious digital archiving project of all time, gathering 866 billion web pages, 44 million books, 10.6 million videos of films and television programmes and more. Housed in a handful of data centres scattered across the world, the collections of the Internet Archive and a few similar groups are the only things standing in the way of digital oblivion."

"This is what's about to happen with twitpic, for years the go-to service for posting photos to Twitter, and the people in charge appear to be doing what they can to prevent the Internet Archive preserving the database and to deny users functional archive access to their own uploads. "

"More than 10m tweets sent by state actors attempting to influence US politics have been released to the public, forming one of the largest archives of political misinformation ever collated. The database reveals the astonishing extent of two misinformation campaigns, which spent more than five years sowing discord in the US and had spillover effects in other national campaigns, including Britain's EU referendum."

"While the Trump administration's scrubbing of federal web pages presents a notable example of the severed links issue, it's long been an epidemic. A Pew Research Center study published last year found that roughly 38% of web pages on the internet that existed in 2013 were no longer accessible as of 2023. According to a Harvard Law Review study published in 2014, about half of all links cited in U.S. Supreme Court opinions no longer led to the original source material. Kahle, who early on recognized the ephemeral nature of the web, said the rapid deterioration of the living web is a serious threat to historical preservation. "We're building our culture on shifting sands," he said."

"The change is part of the company's ongoing efforts to improve the Twitter API"

"German Green party MP, Malte Spitz, went a step further and published 6 months of records kept (at the time by law) by his phone company about him. To emphasise how scary it was privacy-wise he published it in the form of a minute by minute interactive map, so anyone could follow his exact location (just like the phone company) as though in real time from the location metadata his phone was giving away all the time. The metadata was combined with his freely available social networking data, allowing anyone to see not just where he was but often what he was doing. Germany no longer requires phone companies to keep this metadata, but other countries have antiterrorist laws that require similar information to be kept for everyone. You can explore Malte's movements at (archived link: www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention) to get an idea of how your life is being tracked by metadata."

"Something that a lot of mourners find disconcerting is when they receive automated prompts from social networking platforms telling them to friend somebody who has died, or connect with their dead spouse. Some platforms such as Twitter [now known as X] and TikTok lack a mechanism to treat a profile as being that of a dead person. Or, as in the case of LinkedIn, a mechanism exists but most people are not aware of it or don't use it. And while most platforms do offer an ability to download your archive, which you can then bequeath, it is far from straightforward. These products emanate from people who haven't had to think too much about the messiness of human existence Platforms can also delete dormant accounts, which can have repercussions. And there are also no guarantees how long any of the platforms we participate in will survive. That death hasn't been baked into tech platforms to begin with is a sign of a particular kind of privilege: these products emanate from people who haven't had to think too much about the messiness of human existence."

"Should Teens Have Access to Disappearing Messages? A recent lawsuit argues that Snapchat causes harm to young people through its basic design."

"The government-run website Parent Info published a guide to decrypting teenage slang for baffled parents amid concerns for children's safety online earlier this week. " This article explains how the "Digital Immigrants" are worried about this generation and technology and how it can effect teen's lives and safety.

"One such camera, the Seek Thermal has just gone on sale in the UK for the first time. WIRED took a look at it at IFA in Berlin." This is a cool new camera for your smartphone which could make your life a lot easier if you have lost a pet and many other uses.

The BBC has defended its plan to supply a million schoolchildren with free micro:bit computers after it was criticised for delaying the launch until at least 2016.

Project Tango is a prototype tablet that British developers made so that people can easily 3D map areas. I could see this as a privacy issue, do you?

A cool bit of tech that should help educated young brits on coding and other things to help them in jobs later in life although this could put the younger people at an advantage due to the inequality between older students and younger ones

The free antivirus software AVG is selling your online information for profit and you have no control over your privacy and security.

Google is never giving up on developing their tech- devices whether its successful or not. Google ought to making a new difference to their old headphones so that they made it suitable for both audio and video consumption.Although they have succeeded in developing such headphones with a cheap price yet they made it only completable with two TV companies