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"I'm not the only one who has been struggling with Google recently. Many users are saying its principal product, its search engine, isn't working as well as it should. They claim the ingenious vehicle that has enabled us to navigate the internet's infinite scroll of information is beginning to rust and decay. That's not to mention the company's endless court battles with rival companies and world governments, or the rise of ChatGPT, which many tout as a search engine killer; even Bill Gates said last year that once a company perfects the AI assistant or "personal agent", "you will never go to a search site again"."

"The problem with digital technology is that, for engineers, it is both intrinsically fascinating and seductively challenging, which means that they acquire a kind of tunnel vision: they are so focused on finding solutions to the technical problems that they are blinded to the wider context. At the moment, for example, the consensus-establishing processes for verifying blockchain transactions requires intensive computation, with a correspondingly heavy carbon footprint. Reducing that poses intriguing technical challenges, but focusing on them means that the engineering community isn't thinking about the governance issues raised by the technology. There may not be any central authority in a blockchain but, as Vili Lehdonvirta pointed out years ago, there are rules for what constitutes a consensus and, therefore, a question about who exactly sets those rules. The engineers? The owners of the biggest supercomputers on the chain? Goldman Sachs? These are ultimately political questions, not technical ones."

"It's actually a big myth that search engines need to track your personal search history to make money or deliver quality search results. Almost all of the money search engines make (including Google) is based on the keywords you type in, without knowing anything about you, including your search history or the seemingly endless amounts of additional data points they have collected about registered and non-registered users alike. In fact, search advertisers buy search ads by bidding on keywords, not people….This keyword-based advertising is our primary business model. "

" Some search engines, including Bing and DuckDuckGo, give an entire first page of spurious results (see image in upper left). Most of the results are for pages obviously designed to obfuscate, throwing banal dust into the eyes of the search engine and leaving a casual searcher with the incorrect impression that there's nothing to see here. "

"Shodan is a search engine for the Internet of Things, scanning the public Internet for devices communicating on ports and over protocols that are commonly used by IoT devices. By feeding it the right parameters -- Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP, port 554) -- you can find innumerable publicly shared webcams, ranging from CCTVs that oversee marijuana grow-ops and many, many baby-monitors. "

"Jack Poulson was a senior research scientist at Google whose work on machine learning work was used to improve Google's search results; now he's quit the company over its Project Dragonfly, a once-secret plan to launch a censored Chinese search engine; Poulson called the move a "forfeiture of our values." Tech companies find it hard to qualify skilled engineers at any price, and machine learning specialists are especially prize, commanding salaries of $1MM/year or more. "

"These exploits are based on chip engineering flaws, not on software flaws. Apple, Google, Abode, Microsoft, and other software companies didn't write poor software or bad Operating Systems to cause these problems to occur. Rather, the chip manufacturers - Intel, AMD and ARM - designed and then engineered computer chips with flaws built into them. Once discovered, those flaws allow the Meltdown and Spectre exploits to be run. Worse, these chips have been sold with consumer computers, servers and mobile devices since 1995. so the impact is, potentially, both personal and global in scope."

"By reverse engineering ProTrack and iTrack's Android apps, L&M said he realized that all customers are given a default password of 123456 when they sign up. At that point, the hacker said he brute-forced "millions of usernames" via the apps' API. Then, he said he wrote a script to attempt to login using those usernames and the default password. "

"self-awareness: Columbia engineers created a robot that could figure out what it looked like without any external input. In essence, it could imagine itself"

""The code reasonably attempts to address the bargaining power imbalance between digital platforms and Australian news businesses," he said. Google's search engine not as good as its competitors for news, research finds Read more "It also recognises the important role search plays, not only to consumers but to the thousands of Australian small businesses that rely on search and advertising technology to fund and support their organisations." The code, which is currently before the parliament, would facilitate negotiations between media companies and digital platforms - currently just Facebook and Google - for payment for content. If an agreement cannot be reached, then it goes to an arbiter for resolution."

"Engineer who created Facebook 'like' button swears off social media apps"

"Researchers at Columbia University sought to shed light on the problem by tasking 400 AI engineers with creating algorithms that made over 8.2 million predictions about 20,000 people. In a study accepted by the NeurIPS 2020 machine learning conference, the researchers conclude that biased predictions are mostly caused by imbalanced data but that the demographics of engineers also play a role."

"Although you'd never guess it from mainstream media, the most significant antitrust case in more than 20 years is under way in Washington. In it, the US justice department, alongside the attorneys general of eight states, is suing Google for abusively monopolising digital advertising technologies, thereby subverting competition through "serial acquisitions" and anti-competitive auction manipulation. Or, to put it more prosaically, arguing that Google - which has between 90% and 95% of the search market - has maintained its monopoly not by making a better product, but by locking down almost every avenue through which consumers might find a different search engine and making sure they only see Google wherever they look."

""Western partners trusted me to distribute stuff, give them actionable feedback and then adapt the product to Ukrainian conditions," he explains during a trip back to San Francisco to harness help from local software engineers. He still spends part of his time in the fragments of the Donbas region that remain under Ukrainian control, so that he can observe his "customers" - Ukrainian soldiers - in action, in order to develop products they can use. "I like to say this is the world's first open-source war," says Oleg Rogynskyy, 35, another Ukrainian who runs a Silicon Valley start-up. He is also helping the Ukrainian cause and exchanging ideas with other computing engineers on social media sites, message groups such as Signal, and GitHub, the platform where coders exchange ideas."

"Data is sometimes compared to oil, but a better analogy might be coal. Coal was the fuel that powered the steam engine. It propelled the capitalist reorganisation of manufacturing from an artisanal to an industrial basis, from the workshop to the factory, in the 19th century. Data has played a comparable role. It has propelled the capitalist reorganisation of the internet, banishing the remnants of the research network and perfecting the profit engine."

""If these systems aren't used to create propaganda and misinformation yet, I don't know what certain governments are doing with their time," ex-Google engineer Blake Lemoine said. "We're letting the engineering get ahead of the science. We're building a thing that we literally don't understand.""

"Still, I am sceptical about the possibility of cultivating a relationship with an AI. That's until I meet Peter, a 70-year-old engineer based in the US. Over a Zoom call, Peter tells me how, two years ago, he watched a YouTube video about an AI companion platform called Replika. At the time, he was retiring, moving to a more rural location and going through a tricky patch with his wife of 30 years. Feeling disconnected and lonely, the idea of an AI companion felt appealing. He made an account and designed his Replika's avatar - female, brown hair, 38 years old. "She looks just like the regular girl next door," he says. Exchanging messages back and forth with his "Rep" (an abbreviation of Replika), Peter quickly found himself impressed at how he could converse with her in deeper ways than expected. Plus, after the pandemic, the idea of regularly communicating with another entity through a computer screen felt entirely normal. "I have a strong scientific engineering background and career, so on one level I understand AI is code and algorithms, but at an emotional level I found I could relate to my Replika as another human being." Three things initially struck him: "They're always there for you, there's no judgment and there's no drama.""