Group items tagged

"Major Wall Street institutions were cracked wide open by a phishing scam from FIN4, a hacker group that, unlike its competition, can write convincingly and employs some basic smarts about why people open attachments."

"The device tracks a single person with an accuracy of plus or minus 10 centimeters - about the size of an adult hand. Apart from the ability to "see" through a wall, its main advantage is that the person being tracked isn't required to wear a transmitter. While other location systems depend on Wi-Fi, this device can track a person's movements within the radius of its radio waves."

"The "mountain" of waste electronic and electrical equipment discarded in 2021 will weigh more than 57 million tonnes, researchers have estimated. That is heavier than the Great Wall of China - the planet's heaviest artificial object."

"To demonstrate how reality may differ for different Facebook users, The Wall Street Journal created two feeds, one "blue" and the other "red." If a source appears in the red feed, a majority of the articles shared from the source were classified as "very conservatively aligned" in a large 2015 Facebook study. For the blue feed, a majority of each source's articles aligned "very liberal." These aren't intended to resemble actual individual news feeds. Instead, they are rare side-by-side looks at real conversations from different perspectives. "

"Dye told the Wall Street Journal that hackers increasingly use novel methods and bugs in the software of computers to perform attacks, resulting in about 55% cyberattacks going unnoticed by commercial antivirus software."

New social network built inside iTunes fails to keep out the spammers, showing a curse of social media - even inside proprietorial walls

"Just a few days after Turkey's scandal-rocked government banned Twitter by tweaking national DNS settings, the state has doubled down by ordering ISPs to block Twitter's IP addresses, in response to the widespread dissemination of alternative DNS servers, especially Google's 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 (these numbers were even graffitied on walls). "

"Robots engender human sympathy. Seen in the wild, they appear to have agency, feelings, and desires. R2D2's spunk, C3PO's intelligence, Wall-E's charm. When delivery bots get stuck on the sidewalk, good Samaritans help them get unstuck. In light of the attack on K5, then, you may be thinking: Poor guy."

"It's been said that software is "eating the world." More and more, critical systems that were once controlled mechanically, or by people, are coming to depend on code. This was perhaps never clearer than in the summer of 2015, when on a single day, United Airlines grounded its fleet because of a problem with its departure-management system; trading was suspended on the New York Stock Exchange after an upgrade; the front page of The Wall Street Journal's website crashed; and Seattle's 911 system went down again, this time because a different router failed. The simultaneous failure of so many software systems smelled at first of a coordinated cyberattack"

"Humming does not sit easily with the way we imagine technology, but it highlights a crucial truth about how humans navigate the world of work, in offices, online or anywhere else: even if we think we are rational, logical creatures, we make decisions in social groups by absorbing a wide range of signals. And perhaps the best way to understand this is to employ an idea popularised by anthropologists working at companies such as Xerox during the late 20th century, and since used by Beunza and others on Wall Street: "Sense-making"."

"It means the specially engineered spinach has embedded within its leaf mesophyll single-walled carbon nanotubes capable of fluorescing with an intensity relative to the level of nitroaromatics taken up by the roots. And then it sends an email."

"Robinhood's free-trading revolution helped pave the way to the recent Reddit mayhem on Wall Street. The rise of Robinhood means that the ability to buy stocks, on a whim, is now at everyone's fingertips. Robinhood has opened investing up to the masses. Rival online brokerages were forced to mimic Robinhood's zero-commission business model, and some joined forces just to survive. "

"What the apps have done, instead of competing to serve customers and restaurants, is use Wall Street money to accumulate market power, raise barriers to entry, and then merge with each other and set up regional monopolies.The people who have invested tens of billions of dollars in the four dominant delivery apps tolerate huge short-term losses purely because they see the likelihood of monopoly power"

"What wasn't publicly known until now is that Facebook actually ran experiments to see how the changes would affect publishers-and when it found that some of them would have a dramatic impact on the reach of right-wing "junk sites," as a former employee with knowledge of the conversations puts it, the engineers were sent back to lessen those impacts. As the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, they came back in January 2018 with a second iteration that dialed up the harm to progressive-leaning news organizations instead."

"We live in a performative age. We're rewarded for revealing our private lives to strangers, for exaggerating our emotions online, for sharing every crisis that happens in our bodies, every thought that passes through our heads. So many of us now depend on the reactions of strangers for our own identity."

""We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls," said a slide from one internal presentation in 2019, seen by the Wall Street Journal. "Thirty-two per cent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse," a subsequent presentation reported in March 2020."

"As adolescents and young adults fled Facebook for platforms like Instagram and Snapchat, Facebook knew its long-term survival depended on winning over that demographic. But the savvy business move had a different, less public price tag. Caught up in recommendations from a powerful algorithm designed to keep them engaged, some teen girls found Instagram worsened their body image, according to a new Wall Street Journal investigation. Users even pinned feelings of increased depression, anxiety, and suicidal thinking on the app."

"A 10-year-old girl asked Alexa for a "challenge to do." The voice assistant replied: "Plug in a phone charger about halfway into a wall outlet, then touch a penny to the exposed prongs.""

"It's sometime in the near future. Your beloved father, who suffered from Alzheimer's for years, has died. Everyone in the family feels physically and emotionally exhausted from his long decline. Your brother raises the idea of remembering Dad at his best through a startup "digital immortality" program called 4evru. He promises to take care of the details and get the data for Dad ready. After the initial suggestion, you forget about it until today, when 4evru emails arrive to say that your father's bot is available for use. After some trepidation, you click the link and create an account. You slide on the somewhat unwieldy VR headset and choose the augmented-reality mode. The familiar walls of your bedroom briefly flicker in front of you."