"is an experimental service from Carnegie Mellon University that stores images of old processors, as well as the old operating systems that ran on top of them, along with software packages for those old OSes; this allows users to access old data from obsolete systems inside simulations of the computers that originally ran that data, using the original operating systems and applications."

"In a world of cloud computing, everything we do is governed by tens of thousands of words of legal fine-print (including the fine print that warned Mr da Silva that his movies might stop working if he changed the region associated with his Itunes account) that no one (including Mr da Silva, and you, and me) has ever, ever read (famously so!)."

"But, for a growing number of users - and mental health experts - the very positivity of Instagram is precisely the problem. The site encourages its users to present an upbeat, attractive image that others may find at best misleading and at worse harmful. If Facebook demonstrates that everyone is boring and Twitter proves that everyone is awful, Instagram makes you worry that everyone is perfect - except you."

""Weapons of math destruction" is how the writer Cathy O'Neil describes the nasty and pernicious kinds of algorithms that are not subject to the same challenges that human decision-makers are. Parole algorithms (not Jure's) can bias decisions on the basis of income or (indirectly) ethnicity. Recruitment algorithms can reject candidates on the basis of mistaken identity. In some circumstances, such as policing, they might create feedback loops, sending police into areas with more crime, which causes more crime to be detected."

"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. "

"The judges considered three aspects of digital surveillance: bulk interception of communications, intelligence sharing and obtaining of communications data from communications service providers. By a majority of five to two votes, the Strasbourg judges found that GCHQ's bulk interception regime violated article 8 of the European convention on human rights, which guarantees privacy, because there were said to be insufficient safeguards, and rules governing the selection of "related communications data" were deemed to be inadequate."

"The proponents of the so-called decentralised web - or DWeb - want a new, better web where the entire planet's population can communicate without having to rely on big companies that amass our data for profit and make it easier for governments to conduct surveillance."

"This way of thinking about search results is wrong. Recent studies suggest that search engines, rather than providing a neutral way to find information, may actually play a major role in shaping public opinion on political issues and candidates. Some research has even argued that search results can affect the outcomes of close elections. In a study aptly titled In Google We Trust participants heavily prioritized the first page of search results, and the order of the results on that page, and continued to do so even when researchers reversed the order of the actual results."

"I've got a theory of change I call the "peak indifference" theory. The early stage of a crisis involves trying to convince people that the crisis even exists, because things haven't gotten really terrible yet and it's not obvious that there's anything to really worry about, and the people who profit from the status quo will spend liberally to convince people that there's no reason to worry or change anything (see also: climate change, Facebook, cancer from smoking)."

"Can you guess how long AlphaZero spent learning chess from scratch, preparing for the match against Stockfish 8, and developing its genius instincts? Four hours. For centuries, chess was considered one of the crowning glories of human intelligence. AlphaZero went from utter ignorance to creative mastery in four hours, without the help of any human guide."

"There is little evidence to show algorithms by online firms are based on politics, and many conservatives - including Trump himself - have large a social media following. Analysts say it would be dangerous to try to regulate how search engines work to please a government or political faction."

""In some ways we've lost agency. When programs pass into code and code passes into algorithms and then algorithms start to create new algorithms, it gets farther and farther from human agency. Software is released into a code universe which no one can fully understand.""

"Tufekci describes how insurgent, democratic movements were early arrivals to the internet, and how clumsy authoritarians' attempts to fight them by shutting the net down only energized their movements. But canny authoritarians mastered the platforms, figuring out how to game their automated algorithms to upvote their messages, and how to game their moderation policies to banish their adversaries."

"The future of human flourishing depends upon facial recognition technology being banned before the systems become too entrenched in our lives."

"In the meantime, I actually like how most of these islands represent an attempt by education institutions to embrace the weirdness of the web. The current crop of education startups seem bland and antiseptic in comparison to these virtual worlds. I can't take a Coursera class on a pirate ship, or attend office hours in front of an edX campfire. And honestly, that's probably a good thing. But it makes the web slightly less interesting."

"Big data and artificial intelligence are some of today's most popular buzzwords. Both are promised to help deliver insights that were previously too complex for computer systems to calculate. With examples ranging from personalised recommendation systems to automatic facial analyses, user-generated data is now analysed by algorithms to identify patterns and predict outcomes. And the common view is that these developments will have a positive impact on society."

"The groundbreaking artificial intelligence system, developed by the AI-outfit DeepMind with Moorfields eye hospital NHS foundation trust and University College London, was capable of correctly referring patients with more than 50 different eye diseases for further treatment with 94% accuracy, matching or beating world-leading eye specialists."