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Kenya’s Threat to Ban Facebook Could Backfire | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/story/kenya-facebook-elections-hate-speech-ban

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Que Facebook ait du mal à filtrer les messages de haine produits par des particuliers, on peut le comprendre (même si cela remet en cause ce que l’on peut penser des médias sociaux). Mais que Facebook n’arrive pas à filtrer les publicités incitant à la haine... L’argent n’a pas d’odeur, mais celle de Facebook pue profondément.

In July, Meta touted its efforts to clamp down on hate speech on Facebook ahead of Kenya’s August 9 election. It spoke too soon. The company continued to permit ads encouraging ethnic violence in the country, according to a new report—and now Meta’s platforms face a possible suspension.

In the report, researchers from the activist group Global Witness and the British law firm Foxglove Legal attempted to buy ads that included hate speech and calls for violence, including genocide, in both Swahili and English. Meta’s ad systems eventually approved all of them.

“It is very clear that Facebook is in violation of the laws of our country,” Danvas Makori, the commissioner of Kenya’s National Cohesion and Integration Commission (NCIC), said in a press conference following the publication of the Global Witness report. “They have allowed themselves to be a vector of hate speech and incitement, misinformation, and disinformation.” The NCIC said Meta would have a week to comply with the country’s hate speech regulations, or be suspended. (The NCIC and the Communications Authority did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication).

But shutting down the platform, or even the mere threat of doing so, could have long-term consequences, says Odanga Madung, a Kenyan journalist and Mozilla fellow who has researched disinformation and hate speech on social platforms. “We have been saying for years that if the platforms do not clean up their act, their models of doing business won’t be sustainable,” says Madung. Leaving up hate speech and other content that may violate local laws provides governments an easy justification to ban social platforms altogether. “In authoritarian governments, or governments with authoritarian streaks, they are looking for convenient reasons to get rid of platforms.”

Kenya formed the NCIC in 2008 to ensure peaceful elections, after the results of the country’s 2007 presidential elections led to widespread violence and the displacement of some 600,000 people. Earlier this year, the commission warned that hate speech on social platforms had increased 20 percent in 2022, citing the “misuse of social media platforms to perpetuate ethnic hate speech and incitement to violence.” Experts have warned that this year’s elections are also at risk of becoming violent.

In June, Global Witness and Foxglove found that Meta continued to approve ads in Amharic targeting Ethiopian users that included hate speech and calls for violence. Facebook has been implicated in spreading hate speech and stoking ethnic violence in Ethiopia’s ongoing conflict.

Crider argues that Facebook needs to invest more in its moderation practices and protections for democracy. She worries that even the threat of a ban allows the company to deflect accountability for the problems it has left unaddressed.

“What the researchers did was stress-test Facebook’s systems and proved that what the company was saying was hogwash,” says Madung. The fact that Meta allowed ads on the platform despite a review process “raises questions about their ability to handle other forms of hate speech,” says Madung, including the vast amount of user-generated content that does not require preapproval.

#Facebook #Modération #Publicité

The Infamous 1972 Report That Warned of Civilization’s Collapse | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/story/the-infamous-1972-report-that-warned-of-civilizations-collapse

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THE COMPUTER MODELING made it plain: If people continued to overextract finite resources, pollute on a massive scale, and balloon the human population in an unsustainable way, civilization could collapse within a century. It sounds like that modeling could have been done last week, what with climate change, water shortages, and microplastics corrupting every corner of the Earth. But in fact it dropped in the 1972 book The Limits to Growth, published by the Club of Rome, an international organization of intellectuals founded in 1968. 

The book sold millions of copies and was translated into at least 30 languages, attracting a storm of controversy. It was, after all, very early computer modeling—completed on a punch-card machine at MIT—and a highly simplified simulation of complex global systems. And it was making rather grand and consequential predictions. (As the old quip goes: All models are wrong, but some are useful.) That model spit out scenarios in which humanity either got more sustainable and equitable, and thus flourished, or continued letting capitalists plunder the planet and our civilization to death.

“What came from the simulations is that most of the cases—but not all, and it’s important to say not all—the evolution of a number of variables like population, production, pollution, was showing that around the mid-21st century, we would have a scenario of collapse of human civilization,” says Carlos Alvarez Pereira, vice president of the Club of Rome and co-editor of the new retrospective book Limits and Beyond: 50 Years on From The Limits to Growth, What Did We Learn and What’s Next? “The whole thing was framed into doomsday prophecy. We didn’t succeed in bringing the message that it was not about that. It was really about: We have the capacity to choose. We have, as humanity, the capacity to decide what kind of future we want.”

How Covid Tracking Apps Are Pivoting for Commercial Profit | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/story/covid-19-data-switch/?bxid=61d2146d06833d7e0c58d56a&cndid=67944061&esrc=profile-page&mbid=CRMWIR09

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Spector sees this current version of the Zoe app as a giant citizen science project. Users can sign up to different studies, which involve answering questions through the app. Current studies include investigations into the gut microbiome, early signs of dementia, and the role of immune health in heart disease. Before the pandemic, recruiting hundreds of thousands of people for a study would be nearly impossible, but the Zoe app is now a huge potential resource for new research. “I’d love to see what happens when 100,000 people skip breakfast for two weeks,” says Spector.

People who reported Covid symptoms aren’t automatically included in these new studies. Some 800,000 people have agreed to track their health beyond Covid through the Zoe app, while a smaller proportion of people have signed up to specific trials. But it’s hard to imagine these huge sign-up figures without the app having played such a prominent role during the pandemic.

“These emergency situations become catalysts and create a very unique environment,” says Angeliki Kerasidou, an ethics professor at the University of Oxford. “Something we need to be thinking a bit more carefully about is how we use these situations and what we do with them.”

There’s also a question about the line between providing care and conducting research, Kerasidou says. At the height of the pandemic, the National Health Services of Wales and Scotland directed people to track their symptoms through the Zoe app. Tracking Covid symptoms that way might have seemed like the socially responsible thing to do, but now that the app’s emphasis is on wider health tracking and clinical studies, should people feel the same obligation to take part?

Phil Booth, coordinator at activist group MedConfidential, says it was inevitable that businesses and projects that provided services through the pandemic would try to parlay that prominence into post-pandemic success. “Everyone’s seeing that there is opportunity here,” he says. But government-backed apps can also blur the line between public health and private profit. “The NHS is chronically commercially naive,” he says, pointing to the example of Evergreen Life—an app that lets people in the UK book appointments with doctors and organize prescriptions but also sells private DNA tests. Booth calls for clearer signposting about how people’s data is used in all of these situations and says that the purpose for data collection should be made clear at the very beginning of each project.

#Covid_trackers #Economie_numérique

How Pixar Uses Hyper-Colors to Hack Your Brain | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/story/how-pixar-uses-hyper-colors-to-hack-your-brain

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Lighting a computer-rendered Pixar movie isn’t like lighting a film with real actors and real sets. The software Pixar uses creates virtual sets and virtual illumination, just 1s and 0s, constrained only by the physics they’re programmed with. Lights, pixels, action. Real-world cameras and lenses have chromatic aberration, sensitivities or insensitivities to specific wavelengths of light, and ultimately limits to the colors they can sense and convey—their gamut. But at Pixar the virtual cameras can see an infinitude of light and color. The only real limit is the screen that will display the final product. And it probably won’t surprise you to hear that the Pixarians are pushing those limits too.

Using color to express emotion is a hallmark of life. (Humans aren’t even the only animals to send signals with a bit of sexy red or dangerous green.) But the mechanical production of color has defined and changed human cultures since before recorded history. The technology for making colored things and the science of how those colors work in the world and in our minds changes and evolves, transforming culture along with it. Right now, that technology is evolving again.

First of all, you have to forget the dorm-room philosophizing about whether you see the same red that I do even though we both call it “red,” man. If we both agree—and let’s agree to agree—that “red” is light with a wavelength of somewhere above 620 nanometers, well, waves of what, exactly? (It’s fluctuations in electrical and magnetic fields, as if that helps.) Or we could agree that “red” light is made of subatomic particles called photons, the irreducible quanta of energy—1.8 electron volts, to be more or less exact.

Go ahead and map those electron volts and nanometers for red, plus the ones for all the other colors you can name, into a straight line, or even wrap them into a circle as the physicist Isaac Newton did. You still won’t be capturing everything that comes together to mean a color. The real map needs more dimensions than that. It needs the amount of color, from pastel to saturated. It needs the amount of light you’re talking about. That’s “luminance,” or sometimes “intensity.” Color that’s made of light is different from color that’s light bouncing off a surface, changed not only by how that light reflects or refracts but also by whether the surface is colored itself, maybe by a pigment. Map all those values together, usually in three dimensions, and try to match the objective numbers to the vagaries of the way human color vision works—we see yellow as brighter than other colors, even if the actual brightness is equal, and that’s just the beginning of the headaches—and you have what’s called a color space.

Control the lighting, control the colors, control the feelings. That’s filmmaking. As of this writing, Pixar’s last 23 movies—going back to 1995’s Toy Story—have made a combined $14 billion globally, and that’s not even adjusting for inflation. Kids like them; adults like them. Even in a locked-down, movie-theater-free world, the latest Pixar movie, Soul, grossed $117 million worldwide.

But I’ll tell you a secret: When it comes to wringing emotion from color, Pixar cheats.

Newton broke whitish sunlight into a rainbow’s worth of colors and chose to draw the borders at seven: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. He called that a spectrum, but of course that categorization leaves out a lot—the “extraspectral” colors like pink or purple or, yes, brown. (Brown is just dark yellow. Shh.)

If you’re reading this on a screen instead of on paper, you’re seeing a concatenation of light generated by red, green, and blue pixels—a whole other set of primaries, not coincidentally at similar wavelengths to those the color receptors in your eyes are tuned to. A little more or a little less of each, and just as with CMYK pigments (and white light or white paper), you can make just about every color that the human eye can discern. Point is, the colors we see aren’t actually mixed from a list of available ones, like buying from a paint store. It’s a continuum of light and reflection, interpolated by the biological sensors of our eyes and the not-totally-understood think-meat just behind them.

The colors a projection system can reproduce are bounded by a triangle-shaped color space—red, green, and blue at the corners, and everything else a mixture of those inside the lines. But that color triangle is invariably smaller than the possible colors of the universe, or even those that the human eye and mind can distinguish. Which leaves a little wiggle room for Pixar. “The specific hues at the red, green, and blue corners of that triangle are not really what you’d experience under, say, ultraviolet illumination,” Glynn says. “We said, ‘Hey, what would happen if we tickled all the portions outside a traditional cinema gamut?’”

This quirk of human color vision has vexed scientists since before anyone knew about the color photoreceptors in the eye. Color-thinkers in the 19th century recognized that the same colors—or rather, objects of the same color—might look different depending on context, on what colors they were adjacent to.

They also recognized the obverse—different spectra can appear the same in different contexts. This was one of the tricks that the color-seeing brain could play. Varying levels of brightness change the colors people see. Look away from a bright light, like a candle, and the afterimage you’ll see is the color of that light’s complement on a color wheel. In all those cases the brain seems to be generating colors that aren’t there.

Now, Glynn says, it might be possible to take control of those illusory effects. Blast the middle-wavelength greenish receptor in the eye with light at its peak sensitivity and “you can actually heighten the sensitivity or perceived sensitivity to other colors in complement to that.”

#Couleur #Pixar #Culture_numérique

Elon Musk Is Right About Twitter | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-right-about-twitter/?bxid=61d2146d06833d7e0c58d56a&cndid=67944061&esrc=profile-page&source=EDT_WI

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If this is really Musk’s plan, it’s terrible news. The First Amendment permits all kinds of horrible speech that most people don’t want to see in their social feeds. Allowing any legal speech would mean opening up Twitter to explicit racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, advocacy of violence, and worse. If this isn’t really his intent, his comments are still terrible news: It means he has spent close to zero time thinking seriously about free speech before attempting to buy Twitter in the name of free speech.

Musk is on firmer ground, however, when he calls Twitter a de facto public square. Not everyone thinks so. On my feed, at least, that claim has drawn a fair bit of mockery. Some people have pointed out that Twitter is a private company, not the government, and so can do what it wants. Others have argued that Twitter can’t be the public square because most of the public doesn’t even use it. Twitter is far smaller than other social platforms. It has only around 200 million daily active users worldwide and around 37 million in the US. Compare that to around 2 billion active users for Facebook and YouTube and more than a billion for TikTok. Nor does Twitter have the kind of quasi-governmental market power of the biggest tech giants. Meta’s current market cap is about $575 billion—a precipitous fall from last year, when it cleared $1 trillion, but still out of reach for even the world’s richest person. TikTok’s parent company has been valued at $250 billion. Next to those numbers, Twitter looks like small potatoes.

And yet Musk is onto something. A platform’s importance to democracy isn’t purely a function of its size or even its popularity. Twitter may not be the biggest social network, but, at least in the US, it’s the most politically significant. (This is probably less true internationally. The US remains Twitter’s biggest market.) Its relatively small user base is composed disproportionately of people who influence politics and culture. It’s where journalists, politicians, academics, and other “elites” spend tons of time. It’s where they get news and workshop their takes. It is, after all, where Musk—the world’s richest person—chooses to express himself. If you want to influence public opinion, you don’t post on Facebook. You tweet.

“Public square” may not be a perfect term for this, as the legal scholar Mary Anne Franks has written. But whatever you call it, it’s hard to deny that Twitter is the place to be if you want to be heard by people with power. This means access to Twitter has become an oddly crucial tool if you want to participate fully in democratic life—by most accounts, the reason the right to free speech is enshrined in the First Amendment.

This is extremely unhealthy. Treating Twitter as a gauge of public opinion leads political figures to take unpopular positions favored by loud online activists, accelerating political polarization. And it warps media organizations’ baseline sense of what people believe and care about. A comment that goes viral on Twitter might have tens of thousands of retweets. That looks like a lot but is actually a tiny, nonrepresentative sample of the population. (Plus, some unknown share of those retweets probably came from bot accounts.) Even if the user base looked more like society overall, Twitter is driven by an engagement-based algorithmic feed that rewards outrage, sensationalism, and virality, all in the service of selling ads—meaning what you see there is not the product of some organic deliberative process. Those same design features hack the brains of media and political elites, as well, too often leading them to behave like assholes in public in pursuit of attention and engagement.

But perhaps the real problem is that Twitter is so influential in the first place. Here, neither Twitter nor Musk is to blame. We journalists are. It’s the media’s fixation with Twitter that drives its political importance, because getting attention on Twitter is a shortcut to getting press attention, which all politicians—and some eccentric billionaires—covet.

How did we get here? Over the past decade, practically everyone in media came to feel that they had to be on Twitter. It seemed essential for promoting stories and reaching audiences. Over the years, this has grown into an unhealthy addiction for some individual journalists (guilty!) and the field at large. Reporters and editors often have a green light to waste time scrolling through social media during work hours, since one never knows when something important will appear in the feed. Whole stories are based on trends observed on Twitter. A viral tweet is used as evidence of popular sentiment. Some under-resourced newsrooms lean on Twitter feeds as a cheaper, faster substitute for deeper reporting. And some of us mistake Twitter engagement for journalistic impact—even though Twitter drives far fewer readers to stories than Facebook or Google search.

The good news is that there are some signs the profession is nearing a moment of clarity. Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle has argued that the way to fix what Twitter has done to public discourse is “for major institutions in the media and think-tank world to tell their employees to get the hell off Twitter.” Recently, New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet issued a memo to staff informing them that they are not required to have a Twitter presence and urging them to spend less time on the platform. That’s an important signal because unilaterally withdrawing from social media is not really an option for journalists lower down the totem pole.

#Twitter #Elon_Musk #Médias #Médias_sociaux #Influence

Elon Musk Reaches Deal to Buy Twitter for $44 Billion | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-buys-twitter-deal/?bxid=61d2146d06833d7e0c58d56a&cndid=67944061&esrc=profile-page&source=EDT_WI

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“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said in a press release announcing the news. Twitter independent board chair Bret Taylor described the deal as “the best path forward” for the company’s shareholders.

Musk’s accompanying letter to the chair of Twitter’s board was strident in its criticism of the platform. “I believe in [Twitter’s] potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy,” he wrote. However, he added, “I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form.”

Instead, he wanted to take the company private, offering $44 billion for it in a “best and final” offer. At the time, analysts were split about the likelihood of Musk’s bid succeeding, and whether it was good value; while it sat in the middle of the usual 30 to 40 percent premium above the trading price, the stock price had reached well above that just last year. Twitter’s board, for its part, said it would evaluate the offer.

“He’s setting a bit of a precedent for activists that will go after a company,” says Timothy Galpin, senior lecturer in strategy and innovation at the Said Business School at the University of Oxford. “It’s been done a bit before by Carl Icahn and a few others, but it’s not as prevalent to go after the whole company.”

On the same day that he lodged his bid to take over the entirety of Twitter and take it private, Musk appeared at a TED talk in Vancouver, where he laid out his vision. “This is not a way to sort of make money,” he claimed. “My strong intuitive sense is that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important.” That gave some within Twitter, and those who held large shares in the platform, pause.

The confirmed funding reportedly caused some of Twitter’s shareholders who were more agnostic about Musk to petition the company to hear him out. Meetings reportedly took place over the weekend, and Twitter’s board met on April 25 to recommend the deal to shareholders. It was a swift and surprising reversal. “On Friday, there was so much skepticism and cynicism, and now it almost looks like a done deal,” says Vasant Dhar, a professor of information systems at NYU Stern. Musk’s quick movements have left other potential bidders stuck playing catchup. But the deal appears to have passed the money test, at least for Twitter’s board of directors, since “ the board’s fiduciary responsibility is to get the most value for shareholders,” says Galpin. “Obviously, there are questions about what he’ll do with the company if he takes control of it. He’s got to do more than just add an edit button. ”

#Twitter #Elon_Musk #Démocratie

How to Spot Content Marketing in Search Results | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-spot-content-marketing-search

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Google results are less useful than ever. It’s my fault.

OK, not entirely. Until recently I was employed, full-time, by a software company where I wrote articles designed to rank highly in Google results, where they’d get millions of clicks.

More and more of your search results are like this. It’s called content marketing, and it’s somewhere between the editorial content you read on sites like this one and straight-up advertising. At its best, content marketing blends a certain amount of useful information with something that serves specific marketing aims. At its worst, content marketing is a way for marketers to get blatant sales pitches to rank highly in search results while also ruining your day.

You probably interact with search-based content marketing all the time, whether you realize it or not. Here’s how to identify it and think critically about it.

Pay Attention to the Website You’re On

This might sound simple, but the easiest way to identify content marketing in search results is to notice what website you’re looking at—or, if you’re on a social network, whose account you’re looking at.

Content marketing, generally, lives on the website of the product that’s being sold. So if you Googled “the best lawn mowers” check to see whether you’re on the website or social media handle of a company that sells lawn mowers, or a lawn care service, or any closely related industry. It’s easy, while searching for a specific piece of information, to skim past the header of whatever website you’re looking at and just scroll to the actual article. You need to be mindful.

Here are a few quick tips for spotting, and potentially avoiding, content marketing:

Notice the name of the website you’re reading. Most of us have a few websites we trust. Try to click those links before clicking anything else. Failing that, notice what website you’re looking at when you click.
Pay attention to the website’s top bar. Blogs and media outlets generally don’t have links to a Pricing or Features page. If you see those things above an article, you’re probably looking at content marketing.
If an article recommends a product, check whether you’re on that product’s website. This sounds obvious, but it isn’t. I can’t tell you how many times I, while working in product marketing, failed to do this—to think I’m reading a neutral review of a product only to realize I’m on their website.
Check out the homepage of the site you’re on. Is this an editorial outlet or blog dedicated to providing information? Or is it a company that’s trying to sell you something? Either way, it’s good to know what you’re looking at. If you can’t tell, do a web search for the name of the website you’re looking at.

Again, this all sounds simple because it is. But on the modern internet, where we all click search results and Twitter links without thinking, it’s surprisingly easy to read a post on a company’s website without realizing that’s what you’re doing.

#Evaluation_information #Publicité #Marketing #Content_marketing

How the Battle Over a Pesticide Led to Scientific Skepticism | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/story/ddt-battle-scientific-skepticism

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In the midst of all of this, a British American Tobacco executive received a copy of a curious letter from two malaria scientists. The letter, which was circulating among delegates to a global convention on chemicals known as POPs (persistent organic pollutants), argued that no global regulation should affect DDT because it was so crucial for stopping the spread of malaria in poor countries. To the BAT executive, the letter seemed germane to one of the company’s new special projects. The company had just joined with Philip Morris and Japan Tobacco International—which together controlled more than 40 percent of the world tobacco market—to launch something called Project Cerberus, named for the three-headed dog that guarded the gates to the underworld in Greek mythology and created to defend the tobacco industry from any global regulation.

On their own, Philip Morris executives were also talking about how to defend against regulation. One outcome was a plan for TASSC to engage in an “aggressive year” of activities to promote “science based on sound principles—not on emotions or beliefs considered by some as ‘politically correct.’” As the DDT letter sparked intense debate at the POPs convention, executives at BAT and Philip Morris saw the chemical’s story as a way to undermine support for regulation more broadly. The DDT story served the industry in two ways: It focused global attention on malaria as a health threat bigger than tobacco use. And it implied an inherent hypocrisy in global health efforts led by Western interests: It threw Western nations’ ability to set global health agendas into question because Western DDT bans had cost so many lives.

Like TASSC’s other “sound science” campaigns of the late nineties and early 2000s, the DDT campaign drew on the expertise and media connections of a cadre of professional science deniers who had been denying and distracting from science unfavorable to industry for years. The tobacco companies funded a neoliberal economist who had previously written dismissively of secondhand smoking’s harms; now, he published a book that detailed how DDT had been wrongly banned. They also funded Bate, whose ESEF had previously denied the harms of secondhand smoke, endocrine-disrupting chemicals, and global warming. Now, Bate authored a document titled “International Public Health Strategy,” which wove its way through tobacco executives’ inboxes as the POPs convention talks brought DDT into the public eye.

Bate’s strategy pulled threads from the scientific debate about DDT and spun them into a tale that warned against Western-led public health. Malaria rates were climbing globally, he wrote, especially in Africa, and decades of epidemiological research on DDT had failed to turn up conclusive evidence of harm to health. Evidence of a connection between DDT and cancer, in particular, was weak at best. It was time, he said, to amplify the idea that environmentalists’ unfounded vilification of DDT had placed millions of young, poor children at risk of deadly infection. DDT wasn’t just another example of “junk science,” according to Bate. A revision of its history would accomplish what few other stories about science, health, and the environment could.

“It’s time to spray DDT,” wrote popular columnist and author Nicholas Kristof. “DDT killed bald eagles because of its persistence in the environment,” wrote editorialist Tina Rosenberg in the New York Times. “Silent Spring is now killing African children because of its persistence in the public mind.” ABC News reporter John Stossel wondered how else environmentalists had misled the country. “If they and others could be so wrong about DDT, why should we trust them now?” he said.

The tobacco companies were pleased. “Bate is a very valuable resource,” said one Philip Morris executive. “Bate returned value for money,” said another.

Bate didn’t act alone. The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a think tank whose scholars had spent the nineties defending tobacco and denying global warming, launched a website, www .RachelWasWrong.org, featuring the school photos of African children who had died of malaria. CEI’s site said its partners included a group called the American Council on Science and Health (long devoted to decrying chemical bans) and an equally anodyne-sounding organization called Africa Fighting Malaria.

The global POPs convention was signed in 2001, with an exception in place for DDT among the persistent chemicals it brought under global regulation. The malaria scientists who had advocated most heartily for the exception moved on. But to free-market defenders like Bate, the exception only amplified the value of DDT’s story. So they continued to spread their DDT narrative far and wide. People who bought the story as they came across it on the fast-growing internet in the early 2000s took it from there. Before long, websites, blogs, and chat rooms were filled with people calling Rachel Carson a “paranoid liar,” “mass murderer,” and worse. Because of the DDT ban her book inspired, she was responsible for more deaths than Adolf Hitler, they said. Dead more than 40 years, she and her argument against DDT became potent symbols for conservatives of the hazards of liberalism.

Importantly, the aim of Big Tobacco and Bates’ campaigns was never to bring DDT back, no matter what those early 2000s op-eds said. They succeeded in their true aim: to undermine regulation by casting doubt on the sanctity of science in policymaking.

#Science #Anti-science #Tabac #Politique_scientifique

Boston Dynamics’ Robot Dog Is Now Armed—in the Name of Art | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/story/boston-dynamics-robot-dog-armed-name-art

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Boston Dynamics has racked up hundreds of millions of YouTube views with viral clips of its futuristic, legged robots dancing together, doing parkour, and working in a warehouse.

A group of meme-spinning pranksters now wants to present a more dystopian view of the company’s robotic tech. They added a paintball gun to Spot, the company’s doglike machine, and plan to let others control it inside a mocked-up art gallery via the internet later this week.

The project, called Spot’s Rampage, is the work of MSCHF (pronounced “mischief,” of course), an internet collective that regularly carries out meme-worthy pranks.

Daniel Greenberg, a member of MSCHF, claims there’s a serious side to Spot’s Rampage though. “Anytime you see a TikTok or a dance it’s like, ‘Oh God, Spot is so happy,’” Greenberg says. “But if we actually talk candidly about what it’s going to be used for in the real world, you could say it’s police, you could say it’s military.”

Needless to say, Boston Dynamics isn’t very happy. The company tweeted on Friday: “We condemn the portrayal of our technology in any way that promotes violence, harm, or intimidation. Our mission is to create and deliver surprisingly capable robots that inspire, delight and positively impact society.”

#Robot #Guerre #Memes #Art #Installation #Boston_Dynamics

Pourquoi la Silicon Valley est-elle la Silicon Valley ? Des mesures pour améliorer l’investissement plutôt que des allégements fiscaux, et surtout d’énormes dépenses publiques (militaires, mais également des programmes sociaux qui ont été essentiels). ▻https://www.wired.com/story/silicon-valley-business-tech-geography-innovation #siliconvalley

Zerschlagt #Facebook ! "Oder fangen wir im Zuge dessen an darüber n...
▻https://diasp.eu/p/14064626

Zerschlagt #Facebook ! „Oder fangen wir im Zuge dessen an darüber nachzudenken, wie wir gemeinnützige Infrastrukturen schaffen können, die eventuell vom Staat auch mitgetragen werden, aber eben nicht profitorientiert sind?“ (piqd) ▻https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-public-utility-regulation

Retour à la normale ?

And crucially, we haven’t all weathered the same storm. Certain communities have been forced to shoulder the worst effects of the pandemic: people of color and those in poorer areas have suffered the most. And for many, a forced return to normalcy means returning with a disabling, life-shrinking condition: It’s estimated that 1.3 million people in the UK are living with long Covid, a term to describe a case of Covid that stretches on for weeks or months, with symptoms such as brain fog, fatigue, and shortness of breath.

For some, there is no return to normal. For Nick York, the loosening of restrictions for others means tighter restrictions in his own life. York, who is in his late fifties and lives in the Midlands in England, has been living with chronic lymphocytic leukaemia, a cancer of the immune system, for over a decade. His condition means his body doesn’t mount a response to vaccines; it struggles to defend itself against any pathogen. For York and other immunocompromised people, a government’s declaration that society will “live with Covid” means it will be living without them. The dropping of masking requirements means he is largely confined to his home. He can’t go into shops. He can’t travel. He has spent the past two Christmases alone. He struggles to see his own daughter. “It’s essentially removed a swathe of society,” he says of the easing of restrictions.

York describes himself as pretty resilient, but he says he feels forgotten—by his own local community and by the government. “The feeling of isolation, the mental health side of that, it’s hard to manage,” he says.

One of the consequences of the government lifting restrictions is that the onus to take health precautions will fall from the collective to the individual. “As we move to thinking about Covid as an endemic risk instead of a pandemic, it comes along with this shift from a public health approach of ‘What can we all do to help reduce the systemic impact of this event?’ to this being one of all the risks that we’re trying to reduce for ourselves,” says Downs. “And it’s going to take a while for people to reorient and make their own decisions.”

Politicians Say It’s Time to Live With Covid. Are You Ready?
As countries declare endemicity and drop restrictions, how does a battered and bruised society embrace a sudden return to normality?
▻https://www.wired.com/story/living-with-covid-new-normal

Spotify Was Never Going to Drop Joe Rogan | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/story/spotify-joe-rogan-neil-young

https://media.wired.com/photos/61f320c4b92104f9e83d16fd/191:100/w_1280,c_limit/Culture_JoeRogan_Spotify_GettyImages-1233899531.jpg

Of course it did. Young vs. Spotify has been framed as a culture-war victory for Joe Rogan, but it’s not. There was no battle. Yes, plenty of people are angry at Rogan, including the 270 health care professionals whose highly publicized open letter to Spotify about the podcaster’s content inspired Young. But there is no evidence that this rancor has impacted Rogan’s position as Spotify’s golden boy. His podcast remains number one on its charts in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. (Young, in contrast, is the 778th most popular musical artist.) Spotify didn’t give Rogan a reported $100 million in a noble effort to spearhead a public health campaign. It gave him the money to be his freewheeling, contrarian, and almost constantly controversial self. He’s a shock jock.

No disrespect to Neil Young, but he was never going to move the needle here. Ever. Even if he got other artists on board to boycott Spotify, it’s unlikely any coalition would have the desired effect. First of all, there are practical roadblocks, as musicians are rarely the owners of their own music. Young didn’t actually have the ability to remove his albums, and had to get permission from his label to do so; it’s far from a given that the major labels would do the same for their contemporary stars. But say they did—and say the streamer’s current top four artists, Drake, Ed Sheeran, Bad Bunny, and Ariana Grande, joined forces and yanked their music from Spotify—even then, it is unlikely that Spotify would exile Rogan.

Spotify started out with music, but it has thundered into the podcasting space, pouring hundreds upon hundreds of millions into a remarkably efficient effort to unseat Apple and establish itself as the premiere destination for podcasts. It paid $340 million for the podcast network Gimlet Media in 2019 and nearly $200 million for The Ringer (my former employer) in 2020, as part of this blitz. When people listen to music on Spotify, the streamer has to pay a third party (usually the record label). But when people listen to Spotify-owned podcasts, there’s no third party to pay. Spotify can place ads within its own podcasts even for premium users, who do not have ads in between songs. While premium subscriptions are still the company’s primary money-maker, advertisements are catching up, a development credited to the podcast arm. Podcasts are central to Spotify’s growth strategy. Rogan is central to Spotify’s podcasting arm. There would have to be a consumer boycott on an unprecedented scale to make cracking down on Rogan worthwhile from a business perspective. My guess? As long as Rogan stays on the top of Spotify’s charts, he will remain inoculated against repercussions.

#Spotify #Podcast #Neil_Young #Musique #Economie_numérique

Ad Tech Could Be the Next Internet Bubble | WIRED
►https://www.wired.com/story/ad-tech-could-be-the-next-internet-bubble

https://media.wired.com/photos/5f77b566c0f9e168b6c0615d/191:100/w_1280,c_limit/ideas-ad-tech.jpg

We live in an age of manipulation. An extensive network of commercial surveillance tracks our every move and a fair number of our thoughts. That data is fed into sophisticated artificial intelligence and used by advertisers to hit us with just the right sales pitch, at just the right time, to get us to buy a toothbrush or sign up for a meal kit or donate to a campaign. The technique is called behavioral advertising, and it raises the frightening prospect that we’ve been made the subjects of a highly personalized form of mind control.

Or maybe that fear is precisely backwards. The real trouble with digital advertising, argues former Google employee Tim Hwang—and the more immediate danger to our way of life—is that it doesn’t work.

Hwang’s new book, Subprime Attention Crisis, lays out the case that the new ad business is built on a fiction. Microtargeting is far less accurate, and far less persuasive, than it’s made out to be, he says, and yet it remains the foundation of the modern internet: the source of wealth for some of the world’s biggest, most important companies, and the mechanism by which almost every “free” website or app makes money. If that shaky foundation ever were to crumble, there’s no telling how much of the wider economy would go down with it.

Hwang draws an extended analogy between the pre-2007 housing bubble and today’s market for digital advertising. In the years leading up to the Great Recession, American lenders went wild, issuing mortgages to people who (in retrospect) were unlikely to pay them off. Those loans—the infamous “subprime” mortgages—were then packaged into complex financial instruments that hid the shakiness of the underlying assets. Investment banks and other financial institutions bought into those securities without quite knowing what was in them. When the housing market sagged, it triggered a panic that tanked the global economy.

Just as housing played an outsized role in pre-crash financial markets, so does advertising in the digital economy. Google earns more than 80 percent of its revenue from advertising; Facebook, around 99 percent. Advertising also makes up a fast-growing share of Amazon’s revenue. The global market for digital advertising was $325 billion last year and is projected to grow to $525 billion by 2024. All that wealth is used to fund myriad other ventures—including cutting-edge research into AI and clean energy—that might wither away if the advertising spigot were turned off.

If the financial market of the aughts was dangerously opaque, so, too, is modern internet advertising. In the early days of online ads, a brand would strike a deal with a website owner to host a paid banner. The onscreen space for that image, known as the ad inventory, would be sold by the publisher directly. (The magazine you’re reading right now made the first such transaction, back in 1994.) Today, the process has grown far more complicated, and humans are barely involved. “As they do in modern-day capital markets, machines dominate the modern-day ecosystem of advertising on the web,” Hwang writes. Now, whenever you load a website, scroll on social media, or hit Enter on a Google search, hundreds or thousands of companies compete in a cascade of auctions to show you their ad. The process, known as “programmatic” advertising, occurs in milliseconds, tens of billions of times each day. Only automated software can manage it.

It’s fair to wonder why, if programmatic advertising is such a bum deal, so many brands continue to pour money into it. The reasons are manifold and overlapping. To begin, most of the people responsible for ad spending have no idea where their ads are actually running, let alone how they’re performing, and certainly have not brushed up on the latest research papers. That’s especially true for the small and medium-size businesses that make up the bulk of Google and Facebook advertising customers. I spoke recently with the owner of a successful online audio equipment store who had recently learned, thanks to a chance encounter with an expert, that 90 percent of his programmatic ad budget was being wasted on fraudulent clicks. Most other merchants simply never find out what happens after they send an ad out into the world.

So if Hwang is right that digital advertising is a bubble, then the pop would have to come from advertisers abandoning the platforms en masse, leading to a loss of investor confidence and a panicked stock sell-off. After months of watching Google and Facebook stock prices soar, even amid a pandemic-induced economic downturn and a high-profile Facebook advertiser boycott, it’s hard to imagine such a thing. But then, that’s probably what they said about tulips.

This is not something to be cheered. However much targeted advertising may have skewed the internet—prioritizing attention-grabbiness over quality, as Hwang suggests—that doesn’t mean we ought to let the system collapse on its own. We might hope instead for what Hwang calls a “controlled demolition” of the business model, in which it unravels gradually enough for us to manage the consequences.

It’s a strange thing, the internet economy. The product that generates all the money doesn’t work very well, and when it does work, people tend to hate it. The question is which problem should be solved.

#Tim_Hwang #Publicité #Economie_attention

How Bloghouse’s Sweaty, Neon Reign United the Internet | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/story/how-bloghouse-music-united-the-internet

https://media.wired.com/photos/61e8750b3e654a13e9a16fcd/191:100/w_1280,c_limit/Backchannel-Bloghouse-IMG_3833.jpg

The first thing to know about bloghouse is that, when it all began, nobody called it bloghouse. During its sweaty, neon-slathered 2000s reign you might’ve called it electro, or indie dance, or maybe you didn’t know what the hell to call it. The point is that bloghouse wasn’t a traditional music genre. Was it a fashion trend? The gateway drug to EDM? The mid-aughts equivalent of hair metal? Music was at the core of the thing, but more than being unified by any specific sound, bloghouse was about how you found it: on MP3 blogs, the Hype Machine aggregator, or auto-playing from Myspace pages.

Myspace was many music fans’ introduction to the new landscape of social media. For a half-decade following its founding in 2003, the site was the most-visited social network in the world, and the first popular platform for musicians and wannabe scene celebs to build a following. On Myspace Music, artists could upload tracks, connect with fans, and control their own branding. For free.

On Myspace, musicians could be weirder and more personalized than in an album’s liner notes or on the websites of major labels. Creating a fun profile was a free growth hack, ensuring fans would share an artist’s music to millions of other potential fans. Does It Offend You, Yeah? drummer Rob Bloomfield says of the group, “The stupid name plus the pornographic up-skirt Lolita hentai avatar we used meant that thousands of people put Does It Offend You, Yeah? in their Top 8 friends.” Industry folks quickly came calling, looking to monetize the digital middle finger the band was giving the whole internet.

Myspace knew that its platform was making and breaking careers. The company built out features to keep the momentum up, but it was users who were really pushing things forward. A generation of kids was customizing profile layouts in HTML, adding in a line of code to trigger songs to play automatically. The ability to directly link a song to your personality became a pissing war of coolness, resulting in incalculable free publicity for artists.

This brief moment in music history could never be replicated today. For one thing, the crunchy, MP3-bitrate sound wouldn’t fly now, and after so many years of digital content proliferation neither would writing for free. Even more importantly, maybe, is that the life cycle of a song in the bloghouse generation would not legally be possible. “The entire reason that moment happened and dance music in general got to the level it’s at in the world is because of remix culture and reinterpretation. So much of it was mashups or unofficial remixes outside the bounds of the law,” says Clayton Blaha, a publicist who represented clients including Diplo, Justice, and Fool’s Gold Records.

Bloghouse’s free-for-all tone shifted when MediaFire, a popular file hosting service, cracked down, ensuring that tracks could be hosted only by a song’s owner. As a result, a lot of niche, remixed tracks from the late 2000s survive only in personal Dropboxes. “At the time, you had to know where to look and what site to follow, and [a song] was usually only available by some weird direct download with a low-bitrate MP3 that would expire quickly,” says Ben Ruttner of the Knocks. If you were a dedicated fan at the right place at the right time, you might download the track and preserve it, transferring the file from hard drive to laptop to USB. Some of those don’t-listen-to-this-on-a-fancy-speaker tracks are still lurking like ghosts in the deep corners of the internet.

Now, no one creating music, music criticism, or new communities online is doing so with a blog, let alone feeling like Does It Offend You, Yeah?’s “rockstar” while doing it. Even if the best, most dedicated bloggers came back to start new micro-sites today, the need and the space for independent blogs to push music forward just isn’t there. In fact, traditional media hardly makes a tangible dent in an artist’s career. “A magazine doesn’t fucking matter at all. You could be in 10 magazines, and no one listens to your music. The curatorial power dynamic is now with the streaming services and the algorithms that populate playlists as well as the users that populate playlists,” Blaha says.

Steve Reidell, one half of the Chicago-based mashup duo the Hood Internet, ominously jokes, “Forget bloghouse. If genre names are based off where music was bubbling, next is ‘playlist house.’”

#Musique #MySpace #Remix #Pop_culture

Meta and Twitter’s NFT Landgrab Could Backfire | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/story/nft-metaverse-facebook-twitter/?bxid=61d2146d06833d7e0c58d56a&cndid=67944061&esrc=profile-page&source=EDT_WI

https://media.wired.com/photos/61eb077be365ac4c3753090b/191:100/w_1280,c_limit/meta-nft.jpg

Whether you view Web3—the decentralized vision of the future of the internet—as a utopian idea or a Ponzi scheme, one thing is for certain: It’s meant to look different from what’s gone before.

This is what makes the latest moves by Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram, and Twitter so strange. On January 20, Twitter rolled out the ability for users of its paid premium service, Twitter Blue, to change their profile picture to a non-fungible token (NFT) they own—a key part of Web3.

On the same day, The Financial Times reported that Meta was working on integrating NFT ownership into their profiles on Facebook and Instagram. The company is also developing a tool to allow users to mint NFTs of their own on Meta platforms, according to reports. It follows public statements in December 2021 from Instagram chief Adam Mosseri that his app was exploring the promise of NFTs.

The co-opting of NFTs by big tech platforms is, in some way, unsurprising. Web3 and NFTs have become hot commodities—the biggest player in the space, NFT marketplace OpenSea, raised $300 million in funding earlier this month, giving it a valuation of $13.3 billion. It makes sense that the biggest names on Web 2.0 would want to capitalize on the trend and stay relevant.

Unfortunately, Meta and Twitter’s plan to sanitize NFTs goes directly against the principle by which they were created. Both companies favor key practices that Web3 supporters want to do away with—centralized control of key digital services by a handful of multibillion-dollar corporations. Both make inordinate amounts of money from the things that Web3’s biggest boosters want to remove.

And for the Silicon Valley titans, the backing of a market full of scammers and fraudsters is an odd move.

“At the moment it’s the wild west—there’s nobody to police this,” says Alan Woodward, professor of cybersecurity at the University of Surrey. “The problem is these social media companies become responsible. They become policemen.” That’s particularly worrisome given the sheer volume of copyright and ownership disputes that have blighted NFT artwork in recent months. “If there’s a dispute over those NFTs, who do those people go to?” asks Woodward. “It’ll be Facebook or Twitter. Why would you want to take that liability?”

Already buffeted by regulators who want to curb their power, Twitter and Meta are among the internet companies caught in the middle of a polarized political debate over whether they are responsible for the propagation of violent and extreme content online, so giving any ammunition to their critics seems foolhardy. And yet they’re about to share the imprimatur of their implicit support to a technology that is famous for a rug pull that stole millions of dollars from victims, racism (lots of racism), and theft, as well as questionable ties to shady Russian crime gangs who are happy to fictionalize their nationality and gender to take money from rubes. Both Twitter and Facebook did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

“Despite the positivity around NFT use cases, there’s a lot of distrust in the community—perhaps due to the anonymity of key artists and influencers, and almost certainly due to the scammers that circle like vultures and frequent rug pulls,” says PJ Cooper, founder of Pandimensional Trading Co., which is launching its own NFT collection later this year. Despite those reservations, Cooper is largely supportive of Twitter’s entry into the NFT space, and says he will display an NFT as his profile picture when functionality rolls out to the UK.

Cooper does, however, have worries about the fact that people can still right-click and save NFT profile pictures and mint their own version of them as NFTs.

A company spokesperson for NFT marketplace OpenSea, Allie Mack, confirmed that NFT profile pictures that appear on Twitter are verified through the company’s site. In fact, Twitter uses API, metadata, and collection information from OpenSea to authenticate an NFT displayed on a user’s profile and turns it into a “soft hexagon” on the site. Around the same time as Twitter launched NFTs, OpenSea crashed. At the time, security researcher Jane Manchun Wong tweeted that OpenSea’s platform had taken out Twitter’s NFT feature. OpenSea says that the outage had “absolutely zero impact on the public Twitter integration” and that the issue flagged by Jane happened in a closed beta. Since the Twitter integration launch, Mack says there has been zero interruption to the Twitter service.

Others are not convinced that relying on a third party site is the right decision. “OpenSea is pretty unreliable,” says Patrick McCorry, senior system engineer at blockchain startup Infura. This may be one thing Big Tech wants to fix before embracing NFTs full bore, he says.

The OpenSea platform itself has not been free of controversy. Artists have pointed out that the site is rife with rip-off NFT versions of their real-life art, or versions of their sculptures and paintings that could easily be purchased by unwitting social media users. The problem got so big that DeviantArt, an art hosting website from which works were repeatedly lifted, developed its own tool to scan the blockchain for works that also appear on its site, and inform the creators. The platform does have procedures for those whose art has been stolen to appeal for work to be taken down, but the problem persists. A recent investigation found profiles selling NFTs of trademarked logos from some of the world’s biggest brands, including Microsoft, Disney, Amazon, and Adidas, without permission.

Theft is a perennial problem for the NFT world, and one that seems unlikely to be easily fixed, but McCorry thinks that’s a non-issue for Meta and Twitter. “What matters really is custody and the ability to sell it on a secondary market,” he says. For now, it is clear that neither company would own or have custody of an NFT. “Custody is a liability for them,” he said.

For those deep in the NFT space, the adoption of official standards by Twitter in particular is welcomed. Plenty of Twitter users have NFT art as their profile picture, but find it difficult to prove ownership, particularly when faced by trolls who like nothing more than to right-click and steal their NFTs to show them the fallibility of their investments. “Right now, anyone can just put up a CryptoPunk picture and pretend to have one,” says McCorry. Twitter’s plans to prove ownership officially are “a nice way to demonstrate digital property rights.”

It’s easy to see why Twitter and Meta want to get involved in the NFT space—Woodward says it’s a land grab that, in the case of Meta, gives it ownership of one of the key technologies that could be involved in constructing its own version of the metaverse. For Twitter, it’s a way to build credibility around a forward-thinking tech community. “But there’s a point when the rubber hits the road, and there could be real commercial disputes about it,” says Woodward.

The legitimacy that Big Tech lends the NFT experiment is a major benefit for boosters of the technology. But it could also be the thing that signals the beginning of the end for it in the long run. “One of the things about NFTs is that you and I can agree to exchange wherever we like,” says Woodward. “But if you get a corporate involved, isn’t it all becoming a bit Big Tech and commercial?”

Behind this decision is an assumption that users on all three social media sites want to be involved in buying, selling, and displaying NFTs. But none have provided evidence to back up this assumption. Once the functions on these sites are rolled out, this will be the first time that the general public will be exposed and encouraged to join a digital token market that, until now, may have been perceived as obscure and niche. Zoomers on Facebook could suddenly join the once-nerdy ranks of OpenSea users and bid real money to buy digitally minted pictures of a monkey, or whatever else takes their fancy. And they may not want to at all.

Woodward cautions overexuberant members of the NFT community from being too jubilant. “I don’t think anyone fully understands what the true potential or implications of NFTs are,” he says. “But I think there’s a bundle of bollocks being talked about it. I’m not sure people have got their thinking all aligned on this yet. I suspect it’s very much a case of the big tech companies wanting to jump on the bandwagon—because it is a fairly fast-moving bandwagon.” What might the big social media giants do when they’re in charge of the bandwagon? Woodward has one theory. “I think it’s just another way of acquiring and keeping users.”

#NFT #Web3 #Meta #Twitter #Profile

Now You Can Rent a Robot Worker—for Less Than Paying a Human | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/story/rent-robot-worker-less-paying-human

Automation is reaching more companies, imperiling some jobs and changing the nature of others.

Covid Will Become Endemic. The World Must Decide What That Means

The task of 2022 will be figuring out how much action we’re willing to take and how much disease and death we’ll tolerate.
▻https://www.wired.com/story/covid-will-become-endemic-the-world-must-decide-what-that-means

This is not the year-end we wanted, but it’s the year-end we’ve got. Inside it, like a gift basket accidentally left under the tree too long, lurks a rancid truth: The vaccines, which looked like the salvation of 2021, worked but weren’t enough to rescue us. If we’re going to save 2022, we’ll also have to embrace masking, testing, and maybe staying home sometimes, what epidemiologists broadly call nonpharmaceutical interventions, or NPIs.

(...)

“The key question—which the world hasn’t had to deal with at this scale in living memory—is how do we move on, rationally and emotionally, from a state of acute [emergency] to a state of transition to endemicity?” says Jeremy Farrar, an infectious disease physician who is director of the global health philanthropy the Wellcome Trust. “That transition period is going to be very bumpy, and will look very, very different around the world.” (...)

To start, let’s be clear about what endemicity is, and isn’t. Endemicity doesn’t mean that there will be no more infections, let alone illnesses and deaths. It also doesn’t mean that future infections will cause milder illness than they do now. Simply put, it indicates that immunity and infections will have reached a steady state. Not enough people will be immune to deny the virus a host. Not enough people will be vulnerable to spark widespread outbreaks.

Colds are endemic—and since some types of colds are caused by other coronaviruses, there’s been speculation this coronavirus might eventually moderate too. (The coronavirus OC43, introduced to humans in the late 1800s, took a century to do that.) But flu is also endemic, and in the years before we all started masking, it killed anywhere from 20,000 to 50,000 Americans each year. Endemicity, in other words, isn’t a promise of safety. Instead, as epidemiologist Ellie Murray has argued, it’s a guarantee of having to be on guard all the time. (...)

*Researchers argue that we are late in explaining to people what endemicity actually represents. “We should have been trying, from a very early stage, to teach people how to do risk calculation and harm reduction,” says Amesh Adalja, a physician and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security. “We still should be trying, because people have gone back to their lives. They have difficulty understanding that no activity is going to have zero Covid risk—even though we’ve got great tools, and more of them coming in the new year, that are going to allow us to make Covid a much more manageable illness.”*

(...)

But endemicity will be a daily grind, whenever we get there: a painstaking repetition of frequent testing, sometimes masking, and never quite being free of the need to think about the virus, like an annoying neighbor whom you wish would move away.

If we resolve to do this better in the next round, we nevertheless are left with how we play out this one. “If we keep going as we are doing, it will be protracted and painful and prolonged,” Farrar says. “We need to commit to making sure everybody in the world has access to their two doses of vaccines by the end of March 2022. A level playing field isn’t just sort of a nice thing to do. It’s the only way to reduce the chance of other new variants coming.”

Are Apple AirTags Being Used to Track People and Steal Cars?

Privacy groups sounded alarms about the coin-sized location-tracking devices when they were introduced. Now people are concerned those fears are being realized.

▻https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/30/technology/apple-airtags-tracking-stalking.html
ping @etraces

#harcelement #géo-localisation #apple #stalkerware

Protecting the Immune-Compromised Keeps Everyone Safe | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/story/protecting-the-immune-compromised-keeps-everyone-safe

https://media.wired.com/photos/610b197e9561b7c69f07856b/191:100/w_1280,c_limit/ImmuneCompromised.jpg

This lack of consideration for immune-compromised people, from public health authorities and the public at large, is dangerous not only for the more than 10 million people with weakened immune systems but also for public health in general. The Alpha variant, as Science reported in December, almost certainly arose from an infection in an immune-compromised person whose prolonged battle against #Covid provided ample opportunity for the virus to evolve . Emerging evidence suggests that other #variants, possibly including Delta, could have evolved similarly, and a recent report from the UK warns of the potential for more variants to develop the same way.

#immuno-deprimés