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Europe is scrambling to help Ukraine find a viable replacement for Elon Musk’s Starlink and our of Europe’s largest satellite companies are in talks with European leaders about how to shore up internet connectivity in Ukraine: France’s Eutelsat, Luxembourg’s SES, Spain’s Hisdesat, and Viasat, owner of the UK firm Inmarsat.

Ukraine has been heavily reliant on satellite internet service since the start of the war. Not only can internet infrastructure be easily damaged by the fighting, but the Russian military frequently uses “jamming” techniques that block connections. Ukraine’s digital minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, told that about 40,000 Starlink terminals are in use across the country.

The news comes after reports surfaced last month that the US had threatened to cut off access to Starlink if Ukraine failed to agree to a deal giving it access to mineral resources. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk denies it, calling Reuters, which first reported the rumors, "legacy news liars" in a post on X(More details: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1893375607079059629).

Despite the importance of Starlink to Ukraine's infrastructure, Europe could still potentially provide a partial solution if Starlink access were cut off. “A patchwork” of European services owned by European companies could provide backup, such as for critical operations like government infrastructure or healthcare.

However, this approach would have significant limitations. Lluc Palerm Serra, research director at consultancy Analysys Mason, told that none of these possible alternatives “can offer the level of supply that Starlink has.”

At present, Eutelsat is one of the small number of satellite networks that can provide functioning global internet coverage that can compete with Starlink. Its share price has skyrocketed since the high-profile public argument between Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy last week.

Europe is making headway toward creating its own satellite internet infrastructure to reduce its reliance on Starlink, but it may be a long time before these plans come to fruition. The European Union plans to launch IRIS², its low-orbit satellite network, in 2027, but it is not expected to be operational until the early 2030s.

But it's not just European leaders who are concerned about the possibility of Ukraine losing access to vital connectivity. Grassroots efforts have emerged on social networks like Reddit and X in recent weeks, with people encouraging users to boycott Starlink if it cuts off access to the war-torn country.

Yesterday, a group of former Twitter users who are fed up by the platform’s decline under billionaire control, are launching a new campaign to transform social media into a public good, free from profit-driven incentives, venture capital pressure, and politically-motivated censorship.

The project is called “FreeOurFeeds,”(More details: https://freeourfeeds.com) and it has launched with the support of big names including actor Mark Ruffalo, writer Cory Doctorow, businessman Roger McNamee, director Alex Winter, and others.

FreeOurFeeds aims to build a new social media ecosystem on top of the AT Protocol, an open, decentralized framework designed to enable interoperable social media platforms, giving users greater control over their data, algorithms, and online experience (it’s what Bluesky runs on). They want to leverage this tech to create a social media ecosystem focused on individual control, creativity, community well-being, and free expression.

hey basically want to build Bluesky out from one company into a whole ecosystem of different apps and companies by making a non profit foundation that opens up its underlying technology so anybody can build on it.

“This is the moment to reclaim social media,” said Robin Berjon, technologist and project custodian. “As we did with the creation of public roads and shared spaces in our towns, we must invest in digital infrastructure that operates under a social contract — benefiting everyone, not just the few.”

To do this, the group aims to raise $30M over the next three years, starting with $4M to create the foundation and get critical infrastructure up and running. You can donate to their GoFundMe. Their plan includes building independent infrastructure to guarantee that Bluesky users and developers have uninterrupted access to data streams regardless of corporate decisions, and to fund outside developers in order to “create a vibrant ecosystem of social applications built on open protocols, fostering healthier and more equitable online spaces.”

“The last two decades have seen the world sleepwalk into a situation where a handful of companies dictate our entire social media experience. Now, for the first time we have an opportunity to rewrite the rules. Bluesky’s underlying technology, the AT protocol, could offer a new pathway for the social web.” said Sherif Elsayed-Ali, Executive Director of the Future of Technology Institute.

Elsayed-Ali continued: “As it stands, [Bluesky] is still venture-capital backed. This important initiative aims to safeguard Bluesky’s underlying technology and put it on an independent pathway, so that the future of social media can be freed from the whims of any one company or group of billionaires.”

FreeOurFeeds writes: Social media once promised to be a global public square, connecting communities and sparking creativity. Yet, under the control of billionaires and venture capital driven control, it has devolved into a tool for personal gain, corporate agendas, and declining user experience. Project FreeOurFeeds envisions a better future, one where community, capital, and control are reclaimed in the public interest.

“What’s so exciting here is a clear pathway to large-scale social media controlled by its users, not by fickle billionaires or advertisers. It’s a whole new paradigm of how to connect people,” said Eli Pariser, of New_Public, Upworthy, and The Filter Bubble, and a custodian of this project. The group is accepting donations for the project, with governance of the fundraiser overseen by the non profit Development Gateway.

With erosion of trust in institutions at an all-time high, creating a social media ecosystem that centers transparency, accountability, and user empowerment is a noble goal. There’s an undeniable frustration with billionaire control of our digital public spaces. Billionaires’ grip on social media has turned platforms like X and Meta into censorship-happy hellscapes, where marginalized voices are silenced while right wing influencers receive algorithmic amplification. The entire social web has also become burdened with a growing number of ads and features aimed at squeezing every last penny of profit from users.

The internet is at a crossroads, and the centralized corporate control we have seen emerge in recent years is a grave threat to the internet’s original promise as a tool for democratization and free expression. FreeOurFeeds faces a steep uphill battle. Raising $30 million in a landscape where venture capital dominates funding for tech projects is no small feat, and creating a truly decentralized platform that avoids corporate capture and doesn’t cater to political pressure will be a challenge.

The biggest hurdle, however, may be convincing users to transition away from mega-platforms like Meta, X, and others. We have all acclimated to these legacy platforms and they house years (if not decades) of our social connections and memories. I adore Bluesky— please follow me on there!— but the app has still not replicated the full functionality of Twitter for many. Network effects are real, but if FreeOurFeeds is successful I do think it could offer a blueprint for a better, more free and open internet.

Industry forces — led by Apple and Google — are pushing for a sharp acceleration of how often website certificates must be updated, but the stated security reason is raising an awful lot of eyebrows.

Website certificates, also known as SSL/TLS certificates, use public-key cryptography to authenticate websites to web browsers. Issued by trusted certification authorities (CAs) that verify the ownership of web addresses, site certificates were originally valid for eight to ten years. That window dropped to five years in 2012 and has gradually stepped down to 398 days today.

The two leading browser makers, among others, have continued to advocate for a much faster update cadence. In 2023, Google called for site certificates that are valid for no more than 90 days, and in late 2024, Apple submitted a proposal to the Certification Authority Browser Forum (CA/Browser Forum) to have certificates expire in 47 days by March 15, 2028. (Different versions of the proposal have referenced 45 days, so it’s often referred to as the 45-day proposal.)

If the CA/Browser Forum adopts Apple’s proposal, IT departments that currently update their company’s site certificates once a year will have to do so approximately every six weeks, an eightfold increase. Even Google’s more modest 90-day proposal would multiply IT’s workload by four. Here’s what companies need to know to prepare.

The official reason for speeding up the certificate renewal cycle is to make it far harder for cyberthieves to leverage what are known as orphaned domain names to fuel phishing and other cons to steal data and credentials.

Orphaned domain names come about when an enterprise pays to reserve a variety of domain names and then forgets about them. For example, Nabisco might think up a bunch of names for cereals that it might launch next year — or Pfizer might do the same with various possible drug names — and then eight managerial meetings later, all but two of the names are discarded because those products will not be launching. How often does someone bother to relinquish those no-longer-needed domain names?

Even worse, most domain name registrars have no mechanism to surrender an already-paid-for name. The registrar just tells the company, “Make sure it’s not auto-renewed, and then don’t renew it later.”

When bad guys find those abandoned sites, they can grab them and try and use them for illegal purposes. Therefore, the argument goes, the shorter the timeframe when those site certificates are valid, the less of a security threat it poses. That is one of those arguments that seems entirely reasonable on a whiteboard, but it doesn’t reflect reality in the field.

Shortening the timeframe might lessen those attacks, but only if the timeframe is so short it denies the attackers sufficient time to do their evil. And, some security specialists argue, 47 days is still plenty of time. Therefore, those attacks are unlikely to be materially reduced.

“I don’t think it is going to solve the problem that they think is going to be solved — or at least that they have advertised it is going to solve,” said Jon Nelson, the principal advisory director for security and privacy at the Info-Tech Research Group. “Forty-seven days is a world of time for me as a bad guy to do whatever I want to do with that compromised certificate.”

Himanshu Anand, a researcher at security vendor c/side, agreed: “If a bad actor manages to get their hands on a script, they can still very likely find a buyer for it on the dark web over a period of 45 days.”

That is why Anand is advocating for even more frequent updates. “In seven days, the amount of coordination required to transfer and establish a worthy man-in-the-middle attack would make it a lot tighter and tougher for bad actors.”

But Nelson questions whether expired domain stealing is even a material concern for enterprises today.

“Of all of the people I talk with, I don’t think I have talked with a single one that has had an incident dealing with a compromised certificate,” Nelson said. “This isn’t one of the top ten problems that needs to be solved.”

That opinion is shared by Alex Lanstein, the CTO of security vendor StrikeReady. “I don’t want to say that this is a solution in search of a problem, but abusing website certs — this is a rare problem,” Lanstein said. “The number of times when an attacker has stolen a cert and used it to impersonate a stolen domain” is small.

Nevertheless, it seems clear that sharply accelerated certificate expiration dates are coming. And that will place a dramatically larger burden on IT departments and almost certainly force them to adopt automation. Indeed, Nelson argues that it’s mostly an effort for vendors to make money by selling their automation tools.

“It’s a cash grab by those tool makers to force people to buy their technology. [IT departments] can handle their PKI [Public Key Infrastructure] internally, and it’s not an especially heavy lift,” Nelson said.

But it becomes a much bigger burden when it has to be done every few months or weeks. In a nutshell, renewing a certificate manually requires the site owner to acquire the updated certificate data from the certification authority and transmit it to the hosting company, but the exact process varies depending on the CA, the specific level of certificate purchased, the rules of the hosting/cloud environment, the location of the host, and numerous other variables. The number of certificates an enterprise must renew ranges widely depending on the nature of the business and other circumstances.

C/side’s Anand predicted that a 45-day update cycle will prove to be “enough of a pain for IT to move away from legacy — read: manual — methods of handling scripts, which would allow for faster handling in the future.”

Automation can either be handled by third parties such as certificate lifecycle management (CLM) vendors, many of which are also CAs and members of the CA/Browser Forum, or it can be created in-house. The third-party approach can be configured numerous ways, but many involve granting that vendor some level of privileged access to enterprise systems — which is something that can be unnerving following the summer 2024 CrowdStrike situation, when a software update by the vendor brought down 8.5 million Windows PCs around the world. Still, that was an extreme example, given that CrowdStrike had access to the most sensitive area of any system: the kernel.

The $12 billion publisher Hearst is likely going to deal with the certificate change by allowing some external automation, but the company will build virtual fences around the automation software to maintain strict control, said Hearst CIO Atti Riazi.

“Larger, more mature organizations have the luxury of resources to place controls around these external entities. And so there can be a more sensible approach to the issue of how much unchecked automation is to exist, along with how much access the third parties are given,” Riazi said. “There will most likely be a proxy model that can be built where a middle ground is accessed from the outside, but the true endpoints are untouched by third parties.”

The certificate problem is not all that different from other technology challenges, she added.

“The issue exemplifies the reality of dealing with risk versus benefit. Organizational maturity, size, and security posture will play great roles in this issue. But the reality of certificates is not going away anytime soon,” Riazi said. “That is similar to saying we should all be at a passwordless stage by this point, but how many entities are truly passwordless yet?

There is a partially misleading term often used when discussing certificate expiration. When a site certificate expires, the public-facing part of the site doesn’t literally crash. To the site owner, it can feel like a crash, but it isn’t.

What happens is that there is an immediate plunge in traffic. Some visitors — depending on the security settings of their employer — may be fully blocked from visiting a site that has an expired certificate. For most visitors, though, their browser will simply flag that the certificate has expired and warn them that it’s dangerous to proceed without actually blocking them.

But Tim Callan, chief compliance officer at CLM vendor Sectigo and vice chair elect of the CA/Browser Forum, argues that site visitors “almost never navigate past the roadblock. It’s very foreboding.”

That said, an expired certificate can sometimes deliver true outages, because the certificate is also powering internal server-to-server interactions.

“The majority of certs are not powering human-facing websites; they are indeed powering those server-to-server interactions,” Callan said. “Most of the time, that is what the outage really is: systems stop.” In the worst scenarios, “server A stops talking to server B and you have a cascading failure.”

Either way, an expired certificate means that most site visitors won’t get to the site, so keeping certificates up to date is crucial. With a faster update cadence on the horizon, the time to make new plans for maintaining certificates is now.

All that said, IT departments may have some breathing room. StrikeReady’s Lanstein thinks the certification changes may not come as quickly or be as extreme as those outlined in Apple’s recent proposal.

“There is zero chance the 45 days will happen” by 2028, he said. “Google has been threatening to do the six-month thing for like five years. They will preannounce that they’re going to do something, and then in 2026, I guarantee that they will delay it. Not indefinitely, though.”

C/side’s Anand also noted that, for many enterprises, the certificate-maintenance process is multiple steps removed.

“Most modern public-facing platforms operate behind proxies such as Cloudflare, Fastly, or Akamai, or use front-end hosting providers like Netlify, Firebase, and Shopify,” Anand said. “Alternatively, many host on cloud platforms like AWS [Amazon Web Services], [Microsoft] Azure, or GCP [Google Cloud Platform], all of which offer automated certificate management. As a result, modern solutions significantly reduce or eliminate the manual effort required by IT teams.”

Russia has reportedly cut some regions of the country off from the rest of the world's internet for a day, effectively siloing them, according to reports from European and Russian news outlets reshared by the US nonprofit Institute for the Study of War (ISW) and Western news outlets.

Russia's communications authority, Roskomnadzor, blocked residents in Dagestan, Chechnya, and Ingushetia, which have majority-Muslim populations, ISW says. The three regions are in southwest Russia near its borders with Georgia and Azerbaijan. People in those areas couldn't access Google, YouTube, Telegram, WhatsApp, or other foreign websites or apps—even if they used VPNs, according to a local Russian news site.

Russian digital rights NGO Roskomsvoboda told that most VPNs didn't work during the shutdown, but some apparently did. It's unclear which ones or how many actually worked, though. Russia has been increasingly blocking VPNs more broadly, and Apple has helped the country's censorship efforts by taking down VPN apps on its Russian App Store. At least 197 VPNs are currently blocked in Russia, according to Russian news agency Interfax.

These latest partial internet blocks are because Russia is testing its own sovereign internet it can fully control. Russia already tested blocking or throttling sites like YouTube this year by slowing down speeds so much that sites are virtually unusable. Russia has reportedly poured $648 million into its national internet and tech that can power restrictions and has been seemingly working on this since at least 2019.

In the future, Russia could also block Amazon Web Services (AWS), HostGator, and other foreign web hosts. The country may also force Russian residents and companies to stop using such services and migrate over to Russian-owned ones so the government can enforce its own rules.

Separately, in September, the Wix and Notion platforms told Russian users to stop using their sites due to US sanctions. And back in 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, Western domain registrar GoDaddy condemned the war as "horrible," stopped supporting Russian domains, ditched Russia's currency, and announced it was donating $500,000 to support Ukraine. All of these blocks and disconnections contribute to the splinternet(An Internet that is increasingly fragmented due to nations filtering content or blocking it entirely for political purposes. Splinternet also occurs when apps use their own standards for accessing data, which differs from the universality of the Web (browsers, websites, HTTP protocol, etc.) we're hurtling toward today.

China is another country known for its internet censorship. Colloquially dubbed the "Great Firewall" in reference to the Great Wall of China, internet access in China has been censored in this way for over a decade, but Chinese internet censorship efforts first began back in 1998 with China's "Golden Shield" project. In recent years, China has censored even single letters as well as keywords it deems unwanted and unacceptable for the internet. Video streaming sites and meeting platforms like Zoom have also been censored, along with a slew of other foreign apps. It's unclear, however, to what extent Russian internet censorship might mirror these policies.

VPNs, which stand for virtual private networks, can allow users to get around certain geographic restrictions by virtually locating the user in another country. But VPNs aren't a one-size-fits-all solution and can be censored. Internet providers are able to tell if a user has a VPN enabled and can block access to sites in some circumstances. In the US, streaming platforms like Netflix and some shopping sites have blocked VPN users globally by determining whether an IP address is tied to a VPN provider or appears to be in a different location from the user's internet provider.

VPN use has historically spiked when internet censorship appears. US Pornhub users in some states have been looking for VPNs to get around state-level blocks, and Hong Kong residents flocked to VPNs when China announced a new security law, to name two examples from the past few years. But Iran, Cuba, Myanmar, Vietnam, and Saudi Arabia are also considered to offer little internet freedom. While VPNs can help some for now, they're not a perfect solution and may not work forever.

Pornhub is now blocked in Alabama amid a battle over the states' age-verification laws. It joins Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Utah, where the adult site is also blocked—unless you try to get around it with a VPN. It's also poised to happen in Florida, where an age-verification law goes into effect on Jan. 1, 2025.

In Alabama, access to Pornhub was blocked ahead of an age-verification law that goes into effect on Oct. 1. Under HB164, adult sites must use "reasonable age verification methods" to confirm that people are over the age of 18 and display warnings about porn being "potentially biologically addictive" and harmful to "human brain development".

In Indiana, SB17 went into effect on June 27, and requires sites that offer adult content to "use a reasonable age verification method to prevent a minor from accessing an adult-oriented website." Detractors argue that it could have a chilling effect on free speech since people may fear having their identities exposed should a site like Pornhub ever be breached. The California-based Free Speech Coalition and a group of adult platforms, including Pornhub parent company Aylo, have sued, arguing that "laws like SB17 have effectively functioned as state censorship."

Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita, however, says "children shouldn't be able to easily access explicit material that can cause them harm. It's commonsense. We need to protect and shield them from the psychological and emotional consequences associated with viewing porn. We look forward to upholding our constitutional duty to defend this law in court."

In Kentucky, House Bill 278 is similar and applies to sites where more than one-third of its content would be considered harmful to minors.

At issue in Texas is HB 1181, which requires adult sites to verify that visitors are of age. It was set to go into effect in September 2023, but Pornhub sued and secured an early victory. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton appealed and got a temporary reprieve in March, allowing the state to enforce HB 1181. Pornhub responded by blocking access to its site in the state a few months ago.

As noted by CBS Austin political reporter Michael Adkison, those who visit Pornhub in Texas are now met with a message that argues the Texas law is "ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous."

"We believe that the only effective solution for protecting minors and adults alike is to verify users' age on their device and to either deny or allow access to age-restricted materials and websites based on that verification," the message adds.

Pornhub further argues that this type of legislation will only drive people to less scrupulous sites, which "put minors and your privacy at risk."

"This is not the end. We are reviewing options and consulting with our legal team," Alex Kekesi, VP of Brand and Community at Aylo, said following the Texas ban. (These bans affect all sites run by Aylo, formerly MindGeek—which includes YouPorn, RedTube, Brazzers, and more.)

This battle kicked off almost a year ago when Pornhub blocked access in Utah over a similar age-verification law. As more states adopted these laws, Pornhub blockades followed. By early 2024, it was also blocked in North Carolina, Montana, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Virginia.

In North Carolina, House Bill 8 is a larger education bill that also covers things like adding a computer science requirement for high school graduation. But it also imposes the age-verification check for adult sites. In signing the bill in late September, Gov. Roy Cooper said those age checks are "important...to help protect children from online pornography."

HB8 requires sites to use "a commercially available database that is regularly used by businesses or governmental entities for the purpose of age and identity verification or...another commercially reasonable method." Sites that fail to comply could face a civil action from the parents of kids who viewed pornography or anyone whose data is unlawfully retained.

n Montana, SB 544 requires sites to verify age by having people provide "a digitized identification card" or access a "commercial age verification system" that checks a government ID or uses some other sort of "commercially reasonable method" to verify someone's age.

In both states, sites are covered by the laws if at least 33.3% of its content is adult in nature.

If you're affected by the ban, use the VPN app of your choice to connect to a server not in a location currently blocked by Pornhub. (Note that while this guidance can be used to get around Pornhub's embargo, it could also be used to avoid the very age-restriction requirements Pornhub is protesting. I can't advise you on the risks of trying to circumvent the law.)

When you switch on a VPN, your web traffic is routed through an encrypted connection to a server operated by the VPN company. That server could be in a different state or a different country from you. Because your web traffic exits that server, it appears as if you are browsing the web from wherever the server is.

So, if you're in Utah, you should connect to a VPN server that's not located in Utah, and then navigate to Pornhub as usual. I recommend that you also use incognito mode while streaming pornography to prevent the URLs from showing up in your browser's history and autocomplete options.

Nearly all VPN services will let you specify the country where you want your traffic to appear. Some will let you pick down to the city level. A few let you see a list of the actual servers themselves, and their locations, and make your choice that way.

US-based Pornhub viewers will probably want to use a VPN server that's located in the US. I recommend a VPN that will at least let you choose servers in a specific US state. Do note that latency will increase and browsing speed decrease when using a VPN, and that the impact will be more noticeable the further away the VPN server is from you.

For example, Proton VPN, shows the cities and specific servers available to customers. It also offers an excellent free VPN, but your server choice will be far more limited—there are servers in the US, but you can't specify which to use. Fortunately, the free version has no time or data limit.

Other VPNs that let you select cities include IVPN, Mullvad VPN, NordVPN, Surfshark VPN, and TunnelBear VPN. Note that IVPN and Mullvad VPN use a privacy-protecting account number system that requires very little personal information, and both will accept cash sent to their respective HQs for a nearly anonymous experience.

Вполне возможно, что вы внимательно следите за тем, как одни оппозиционеры радуются задержанию Павла Дурова, а другие, наоборот, говорят про свободу слова и называют собеседников людоедами.

В интернете определяют его конфликты, а говоря совсем грубо — срачи. Тема может быть любой. Спорят про 1990-е, журналистов, зумеров, психические расстройства, сервис в кафе, клининг — в общем, про все. Телевизионные ток-шоу (и политические, и нет) тоже редко обходятся без яростных перепалок. Да и в реальной жизни россияне, украинцы и другие жители бывшего СССР — особенно жители крупных городов — часто спорят в свободное от работы время. Более того, за последние 30 лет количество спорщиков резко выросло.

При этом о самом главном граждане спорят совсем не так часто. Две самые большие социальные группы — те, кто за и против Путина — зачастую отказываются даже разговаривать друг с другом, ссылаясь на взаимную агрессию и неприязнь.

В своей любви к спорам бывшем граждане СССР, конечно, не одиноки. Число конфликтов растет во всем мире — особенно в цифровой его части. Многочисленные исследования показывают, что в интернете в целом растет уровень «агрессивной коммуникации».

Культуролог Генри Дженкинс объяснял это так: в сети у человека с буквально любыми взглядами появляется возможность найти «своих» и ощутить принадлежность к чему-то. При этом алгоритмы площадок поощряют радикализацию общественных дискуссий, очерчивая информационный пузырь человека и окружая того все более яростными борцами за «правду». В итоге неосознанной реакцией становится отвращение к собеседникам с другим мнением.

Социологи довольно давно исследуют это явление и с одной стороны, интернет-дискуссии значительно повысили уровень гражданского активизма. Людям стало проще бороться за свои права, узнавать о несправедливостях и искать поддержки.

Исследователь Антон Йегер даже считает, что мы вступили в новую политическую эпоху. Мол, у множества людей накопились раздражение и недовольство внутренней и международной политикой, но старые институты вроде партий, которые могли бы представлять наши интересы, теряют авторитет. На смену им приходят мимолетные, хаотичные, разрозненные движения, в том числе в онлайне — так называемая гиперполитика.

Впрочем, в советской любви к «срачам» все же есть кое-что особенное. В публичном пространстве партии и политические институты не могут терять доверие: они не имеют его уже очень много лет. Провластные социологи так и вообще все эти годы утверждают, будто люди доверяют исключительно президенту Путину. То есть человеку, который не терпит чужих мнений и не участвует в дебатах даже с собственными «спойлерами» на выборах.

Невозможность повлиять на реальность заставляет россиян уклоняться от реального участия в политике и испытывать недоверие и цинизм по отношению к любым медиа. Однако фрустрация, вызванная разочарованием в мире, никуда не исчезает — и находит выход в бесконечных онлайн-склоках.

Правда, тот же Антон Йегер сравнивал продуктивность «гиперполитики» — что российской, что мировой — с ездой в автомобиле, в котором давно закончился бензин. С каждой секундой водитель жмет на педаль газа все активней, но с места не сдвигается. Классик социологии Юрген Хабермас тоже считает, что в таких условиях невозможно прийти к какому-то демократическому согласию. Правда, специфику автократий с военной цензурой и нефтяной экономикой Хабермас не рассматривал.

Идея о безусловной пользе споров сложилась еще в Древней Греции: Аристотель считал, что благодаря им граждане могут достигать коллективных целей. В общем-то, в Афинах народное собрание (экклесия) выполняло роль высшего государственного органа — и без споров (как продуктивных, так и не очень) там не обходилось.

В XVIII веке греческое наследие породило в западном обществе представление об образцовом споре — логичном, оперирующем фактами и эмоционально сдержанном. Тогда по всей Европе возникали дискуссионные общества, а соперникам нередко запрещали оскорблять друг друга. В Лондоне были десятки подобных клубов: там заранее анонсировалась тема, спикерам давалось время на подготовку аргументов, а в конце дебатов среди зрителей проводили голосование, чтобы выбрать победителя.

Эти клубы вдохновили социолога Юргена Хабермаса на теорию об идеальной публичной сфере — пространстве, где все уважительно обмениваются друг с другом мнениями, спорят и в конце концов находят лучшее решение. Они же вдохновили бельгийского философа Шанталь Муфф на теорию агонистической демократии («состязательной демократии», в противоположность «антагонистической» — «демократии противоборства»), где противник в споре не превращается во врага.

Публичная сфера противопоставляет неконтролируемый «срач» (или, говоря языком риторики, полемику) дискуссии, которая предполагает, что участники должны прийти к общему согласию, найти компромисс. Самый формальный вид спора — дебаты, когда две стороны представляют противоположные точки зрения — сегодня во всем мире видится идеалом демократии.

Пожалуй, серьезнее всего к дебатам относятся в США. Риторику там изучают в школе, там же американцы впервые пробуют себя в «спортивных» спорах. С 1925 года в стране существует единая Национальная ассоциация дебатов, которая проводит соревнования по всем штатам и ежегодно вовлекает более 140 тысяч школьников.

Форматов подобных соревнований множество: парламентские дебаты, оксфордские, дебаты с перекрестным допросом. У всех есть свои особенности и строгие регламенты, но чаще всего конечный смысл один: две команды должны отстаивать противоположные позиции по какому-то важному вопросу. Например, должен ли быть у женщин свободный доступ к абортам? Причем позиция за или против достается каждой команде случайным образом.

По мнению американских властей, такие дебаты развивают у учащихся критическое мышление и командный дух. Некоторые исследования показывают, что у школьников, которые регулярно участвовали в дебатах, более высокий средний балл и уровень гражданской активности. Иными словами, дебаты воспринимаются как важная часть гражданской социализации.

Но в последние годы дебаты как политический спор все чаще критикуют.

Во-первых, участникам нужно выбрать одну точку зрения — условное за или против — и отстоять ее в споре с противником. В таком формате совершенно не обязательно найдется истина, компромисс или хотя бы демократическое решение, учитывающее интересы большинства.

Во-вторых, политики часто предполагают, что государственные дебаты — это высшая и самая репрезентативная форма демократии. Но таким образом целые группы людей могут быть исключены из диалога, если они не имеют своего представителя. Настоящий политический спор не просто транслирует официальные мнения, а помогает расширить горизонт доступных точек зрения, даже если они нам неприятны. Дебаты же этот горизонт часто сужают.

В-третьих, предвыборные дебаты — то есть, по сути, самый главный спор в стране — в США скорее ассоциируются с развлечением, телевизионным шоу. Привлечение внимания к ним не всегда порождает истину или помогает изменить мнение. И это проблема: еще во время американских президентских выборов 2020 года опрос избирателей показал, что дебаты не повлияли значительно на их голос(Как насчёт последних дебатов Байдена с Трампом и как они повлияли на предстоящие выборы президента?).

Впрочем, это не только американская проблема. Исследование 2019 года, проведенное в семи странах и охватившее 56 телевизионных дебатов во время выборов, показало, что дебаты скорее не влияют на голоса избирателей, в том числе не помогают неопределившимся принять решение.

Единственное, на что современные политические дебаты вообще способны, — это смягчить взгляды партийных сторонников в пользу оппонентов, то есть уменьшить общественную поляризацию. Да и то — некоторые социологи фиксируют, что из-за уже существующей поляризации люди перестают воспринимать споры как нечто серьезное или достойное их внимания(Но почему-то все с нетерпением ждут дебатов Харрис с Трампом?)

Желание спокойствия обманчиво. Лучше спорить, чем ждать удобного момента.

Доводы людей, уставших от постоянных «срачей», вполне понятны. Дискуссии (и политические, и бытовые) не приводят ни к каким конкретным результатам и не влекут за собой выработку «нормы» или «консенсуса». Часто они разобщают и без того атомизированное общество.

Как бы сильно мы ни были фрустрированы агрессивными спорами в российском интернете, идеальные политические дебаты из XVIII века — это иллюзия. Впрочем, это знали и раньше. Тот же Аристотель признавал, что большую часть времени публичные споры приводят лишь к нарастанию эмоциональности.

А в России тем более: что «срачи» в твиттере, что попытки устроить публичные дебаты среди оппозиции как будто бы и вовсе не помогают привить «идеалы демократии» населению. И желание прекратить споры хотя бы до тех пор, пока что-нибудь не изменится, вполне понятно.

Но идеальных условий для идеальных споров не будет никогда.

Еще до войны в Украине социологи регулярно сообщали, что Россия — очень деполитизированная страна. Между россиянами мало горизонтальных связей, люди повсеместно считают политику «грязным делом» и предпочитают жить исключительно частной жизнью.

Кажется, что интернет только усугубляет эту атомизацию и общественный раскол. Но парадоксальным образом даже самые странные и якобы бессмысленные публичные споры могут привносить элементы демократии в автократичный мир.

Самый, пожалуй, очевидный аргумент — это так называемое поддержание гражданской привычки. Логика тут такая: если человек не придет на выборы сейчас, то вряд ли он посетит их и в условной «прекрасной России будущего». Более того, этой России может и не случиться, если россияне не начнут практиковать даже ограниченное политическое участие. Важно сохранить способность занимать ту или иную политическую позицию, даже если речь идет о сущих мелочах.

И со спорами та же история: если не научиться спорить сейчас, вряд ли этот навык появится сам собой в момент перемен. Скажем, исследователь Майкл Джексон предполагал, что социальные действия прививаются только «постепенным накоплением опыта». Собственно, примерно этот урок многие извлекли из опыта 90-х годов: общество, более полувека не практиковавшее плюрализм, быстро в нем разочаровалось и вернулось к «единому лидеру».

Но это не единственный довод.

Например, споры возвращают людям чувство контроля над своей жизнью — и остаются одним из немногих доступных нам лекарств от бессилия. Муниципальный депутат Александр Замятин отмечал, что у россиян давно бытует представление, будто политика бывает только «кабинетной» или «митинговой», и эта убежденность лишь усиливает отчужденность большинства людей.

А еще только взаимодействие друг с другом — в том числе и посредством споров — может восстановить у россиян социальные связи и интерес к диалогу. Так произошло, например, во время «болотных» протестов 2010-х. В тот период десятки тысяч людей не просто перестали воспринимать политику как «грязное дело», но стали наслаждаться самим опытом публичной дискуссии, даже если она в итоге ни к чему не привела.

Да и аристотелевская «эмоциональность» споров не обязательно плохое свойство. Политика в принципе невозможна без эмоций, и не стоит недооценивать их, отмечает исследовательница Сара Ахмед. Прямо сейчас постоянный поток агрессии в русскоязычном интернете усугубляет общественную поляризацию, но вместе с тем злость может быть и мощным мотиватором для мобилизации. Например, многих россиян объединяет отвращение к коррупции и богатствам российской элиты.

Наконец, не так бесполезны и споры с теми, кто «не хочет слышать». Как рассуждает социолог Максим Алюков, диалог между оппозиционерами и путинистами, сторонниками войны и ее противниками все же имеет смысл. И дело здесь даже не столько в подборе нужных аргументов или правильных «скриптов».

По мнению Алюкова, часто люди соглашаются с курсом российских властей, потому что просто не хотят чувствовать себя исключенными из общества. Следовательно, в моменте дискуссии могут и не переубедить сторонника войны, но они сделают антивоенную позицию более видимой. Зная о ней и ее доводах, сторонники войны смогут быстрей и проще конформистски к ней присоединиться. Например, когда она приблизится к общественной норме.

Право на споры в интернете иногда можно отстоять. Южная Корея однажды пыталась установить государственный контроль за уровнем агрессии в интернете. Заняться этим власти решили после нескольких случаев суицида на почве кибербуллинга. Предполагалось, что новые меры понизят агрессию и положат конец неконтролируемым «срачам».

В 2007 году в стране приняли закон, согласно которому все сайты с более чем 100 тысячами посещений в сутки должны были запрашивать у пользователей их идентификационные номера (аналог СНИЛС) при регистрации.

Но довольно скоро местные активисты запустили масштабную кампанию против закона. Они настаивали на том, что документ нарушает права пользователей на свободу слова и при этом не уменьшает количество ненависти. К тому же сбор личных данных во имя борьбы со спорами в итоге вылился в масштабный «слив» персональной информации. Так что Конституционный суд встал на сторону активистов и отменил закон.

Tim Berners-Lee’s legacy as the creator of the World Wide Web is firmly cemented in history. But as the Internet strayed away from its early egalitarian roots towards something much more big and corporate, Berners-Lee decided a radical new approach to data ownership was needed, which is why he co-founded a company called Inrupt.

Instead of having your data (i.e. data about you) stored across a vast array of different corporate databases, Berners-Lee theorized, what if each individual could be in charge of his or her own data?

That is the core idea behind https://www.inrupt.com the company that Berners-Lee co-founded in 2017 with tech exec John Bruce. Inrupt is the vehicle through which the duo hope to spread a new Internet protocol, dubbed the Solid protocol, which facilitates distributed data ownership by and for the people.

The idea is radical in its simplicity, but has far-reaching implications, not just for ensuring the privacy of data, but also to improve the general quality of data for building AI.

When Berners-Lee wrote the first proposal for the World Wide Web in 1989, the Internet was a much smaller and altruistic place than it is now. Small groups of people, largely scientists, used the Net to share their work.

As the Web grew more commercialized, the static websites of the Web 1.0 world were no longer sufficient for the challenges at hand, such as the need to maintain state for a shopping cart on an e-commerce site. That kicked off the Web 2.0 era, characterized by more JavaScript and APIs.

As Web companies morphed into giants, they built huge data centers to store vast amounts of user data to work with their application. Berners-Lee’s insight is that it’s terribly inefficient to have multiple, duplicate monoliths of user data that aren’t even that accurate. The Web 3.0 era instead will usher in the age of federated data storage and federated access.

In the Web 3.0 world that Inrupt is trying to build, data about each individual is stored in their very own personal data store, or a pod. These pods can be hosted by a company or even a government on behalf of their citizens, such as the government of Flanders is currently doing for its 6 million citizens.

Instead requiring Web giant to not lose or abuse billions of people’s data, in the Inrupt scheme of things, the individual controls his or her own data via the pod. If an individual wants to do business with a company online, they can grant access to his her pod for a specific period of time, or just for a specific type of data. The company’s application then interacts with that data, in a federated manner, to deliver whatever service
it is.

So instead of chasing 500 versions of you around the Web and trying to say ‘Update my address, update my name, update my whatever,’ they come to you and it’s your data and they can see it one place...

At a technical level, the pods are materialized as RDF stores. Users can store any type of data they want, not just HTML pages. Apps can write to the data store with any kind of data they can imagine. It doesn’t have to be a particular format. Whether it’s your poetry, the number of chairs you have in your home, your bank account info, or your healthcare record, it can all be stored, secured, and accessed via pods and the Solid protocol.

This approach brings obvious benefits to the individual, who is now empowered to manage his or her own data and grant companies’ access to it, if the deal is agreeable to them. It’s also a natural solution for managing consent, which is a necessity in the world of GDPR. Consent can be as granular as the user likes, and they can cancel the consent at any time, much like they can simply turn off a credit card being used to purchase a service.

The interoperability allows you to rotate to another card. Get a new card, get a new number, so you rotate your key and then you’re back to golden. You give consent in a way that makes sense. You’re not giving it away forever, then finding you can no longer get back the consent you gave years later and have no idea where the consents are. They called it the graveyard of past consents.

But this approach also brings benefits to companies, because using the W3C-sanctioned Solid protocol provide a way to decouple data, applications, and identities. Companies also are alleviated of the burden of having to store and maintain private and sensitive data in accordance with GDPR, HIPAA and other rules.

It’s very exciting because queries are meant to be agile, more real-time, as they say,” he says. “I remember this from very big retailers I worked with years ago. You grab all this data, you pull it in, and then there’s all kinds of security requirements to prevent breaches, so you pull things into other databases. Now they’re out of sync, often stale. Seven days old is too old. And it’s impossible to get a fresh enough set of data that’s safe enough. There’s all these things conspiring against you to get a good query versus the pod model, it’s inherently high performance, high scale, and high quality.

Companies may be loathe to give up control of data. After all, to become a “data-driven” company, you sort of have to be in the business of storing, managing, and analyzing data, right? Well, Inrupt is trying to turn that assumption on its head.

New academic research suggests that AI models built and operated in a federated model atop remotely stored data may outperform AI models built with a classic centrally managed datastore.

More details: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.12852.pdf

The latest research out of Oxford in fact shows that it’s higher speed, higher performance when you distribute it. In other words, if you run AI models and federated the data, you get higher performance and higher scale, than if you try to pull everything central and run it.

At first, the centrally managed data set will outperform the federated one. After all, the laws of physics do apply to data, and geographic distance does add latency and complexity. But as updates to the data are required over time, the distributed model will start to outperform the centrally managed one.

At first, you’re going to get very fast results for a very centralized, very large data set. But then when you try to get bigger and bigger and bigger, it falls over. And in fact, it gets inaccurate and that’s where it really gets scary, because once the integrity comes to bear, then how do you clean it up?

And you can’t clean up giant data sets that are really slow. They become top heavy, and everybody looks at them and says, I don’t understand what’s going on inside. I don’t know what’s wrong with them. Whereas if you have highly distributed pod-based localized models and federated models using federated learning, you can clean it up.

So, the idea of a smaller but higher quality data set brings certain advantages.

That big data thing that I worked on in 2012–that ship sailed. We don’t want all the data in the world because it’s a bunch of garbage. We want really good data and we want high performance through efficiency. We won’t have data centers that are the size of Sunnyvale anymore that just burn up all the energy. We want super high-efficiency compute.

The pod approach could also pay dividends in the burgeoning world of generative AI. Currently, people predominantly are using generalized models, such as OpenAI‘s ChatGPT or Amazon’s Alexa, which was recently upgraded with GenAI capabilities. There is a single foundational model that’s been trained on hundreds of millions of past interactions, including the new ones that users are having with it today.

There many privacy and ethics challenges with GenAI. But with the pod model of personalized data and personalized models, users may be more inclined to use the models, Ottenheimer says.

So in a pod, you can tune it, you can train the model to things that are relevant to you, and you can manage the safety of that data, so you get the confidentiality and you get the integrity. Let’s say for example, you want it to unlearn something. Good luck askin] Amazon…It’s like you spilled ink into their water. Good luck getting that back out of their learning system if they don’t plan ahead for that kind of problem.

Deleting the word I just said, so that it doesn’t exist in the system, is impossible unless you start over and they’re not going to start over on a massive scale. But if they design it around the concept of a pod, of course you can start over. Easy. Done.

Sex work is the oldest profession, and that is certainly the case with the internet where online pornography has been equal parts innovation driver and bogeyman. The importance of online erotic content was perhaps never more evident than at the height of the pandemic, when many of us were stuck working and playing from home and staying at least six feet away from, well, everyone. While porn can still be a welcome relief even as the pandemic is waning, consuming it can also put your privacy (or at least your dignity) at risk.

A quick side note: Beyond any personal moral objections to pornography anyone may have, there is also the issue of exploitation. Given how frequently and easily content can be recycled and reposted online, it can be difficult to tell if the people appearing in pornography have consented to have the content released or were fairly compensated. That's not to mention the trafficking in images or videos of child sexual abuse. I don't touch on these issues, but it's important to be aware of them. I encourage everyone to report abuse and exploitation wherever they see it. I don't have the space for it here, but web site Mashable(https://mashable.com) has an excellent deep dive on how to find ethical porn.

Now here's how to enjoy pornography without putting your privacy (or your reputation!) at risk:

1. Go Incognito to Protect Your Privacy While Watching Porn.

One of the easiest ways for your pornographic preferences to become public is the auto-complete self-own. Most browsers and search engines try to be helpful by guessing what you're typing based on what you've done in the past. This can save time, but it can be the source of some embarrassment. If you frequent pornsite.xxx, your browser might "helpfully" fill in that URL when you go to show someone to search for best VPN roundup. This is bad enough if someone is looking over your shoulder, but in these days of working from home and screen sharing in Zoom meetings, you’re likely to multiply your embarrassment by the number of people attending your meeting.

"People who use their devices in public for presentations, demos, school, and work should at least use Incognito mode to make sure porn website addresses don’t get stored," said Bogdan Botezatu, Director of Threat Research and Reporting at Bitdefender. I however, would recommend that any porn partakers use Incognito mode to protect themselves from embarrassment.

While useful, it's worth noting that Incognito mode has limitations. "Your searches, pages you visited, login details, and cookies will not be saved on the device after you close your private windows," explained Daniel Markuson, digital privacy expert at NordVPN.

"However, Incognito mode doesn’t hide traffic from third parties, and it doesn’t secure traffic from hackers or other attacks and vulnerabilities. Your browsing data can still be collected by your ISP, your employer, and any other third party that can track your IP address," said Markuson.

2. Defend Yourself Against Data Theft While Watching Porn.

A more dramatic threat is data theft, which is unfortunately common in all industries. A data breach from an adult website might contain, "private information such as chat conversations, transaction history or even video content preferences," said Botezatu. "This is likely to create a nightmare similar to what happened when Ashley Madison got leaked—people learned about the online whereabouts of spouses, employees, and public persons, causing an unprecedented meltdown." If info from a dating app (albeit one focused on cheating) can cause such a ruckus, imagine how much more sensitive data from porn sites is?

A savvy attacker may not even need to steal your data to profit from it. "Porn watchers might experience some blind blackmailing attempts where they receive messages claiming that hackers have gained access to the computer used for porn-binging and that they also managed to record the victim via the built-in webcam," said Botezatu. "This is a common claim and all similar messages should be immediately deleted."

A variant of this kind of scam is called "sextortion," where the attacker blackmails the victim into providing explicit images of themselves. These can then be used to further pressure the victim. While scammers may be bluffing, it's a good idea to keep your webcam covered when not in use, and to use local antivirus to guard against any snooping software.

In some places, what would be considered legal pornography in the US is outright banned, and accessing it could lead to complications with law enforcement. Even within the US, new age verification laws are making it harder to access pornography. In those situations, a VPN would be a useful tool, but we must stress that we are not advocating breaking any laws and must caution that doing so can have serious consequences.

Mass data collection is big business (in fact, it's pretty much the only big business online, apart from affiliate sales), and incentivizes the collection of enormous amounts of highly detailed personal information. In the US, the list of organizations hungry for your data includes your internet service provider (ISP).

3. Use a VPN to Watch Porn.

The pornography you consume doesn't need to be anyone's business but your own, and in this sense, a VPN is extremely useful. "A VPN reroutes internet traffic through a remote server and hides the IP address, preventing websites from seeing the visitor’s original IP or location," explained Markuson. "A VPN also encrypts traffic exchanged between the internet and your device. This means that nobody, including your ISP, can see what you’re doing online."

A VPN may be more necessary than ever, depending on where you are. Recently passed legislation in Louisiana requires citizens of that state to provide websites with distressingly detailed personal information to access pornographic content. Using a VPN to spoof your location to anywhere else in the US would protect you from having to hand over this information.

A great way to protect your data is to simply never provide it. Privacy services like Abine Blur and others let you create disposable email addresses, phone numbers, and even credit card numbers on the fly. The disposable email addresses are particularly useful since you can generate a new, unique address for each service, making it much harder to tie accounts back to you.

Similarly, disposable credit card numbers are harder to link directly to you and are effectively a one-time-use payment. Additionally, you use Abine's address as the billing address, meaning you'll never have to hand over this sensitive information to a porn site. "They can also facilitate cancellation, which many adult sites make intentionally complicated to retain customers and can be a source of embarrassment for consumers," said Rob Shavell, Co-Founder and CEO of Abine. "Since, really, who wants to explain why you’re disputing a questionable charge from your favorite adult site?"

Websites can track you across the web in a variety of ways, but the method is largely the same: find (or assign) a unique identifier to a visitor, and then wait to see where else that identifier turns up. Tracker blockers break the cycle by preventing ads and sites from IDing you, making it much harder to follow you from site to site. Stand-alone tracker blockers, such as Avast AntiTrack or the EFF's Privacy Badger, are excellent, especially when paired with the privacy tools found in some browsers such as Firefox.

Note that these tools can sometimes break site functionality, particularly custom video players. Privacy Badger, for instance, lets you toggle specific trackers on and off, which can usually fix the issue. Firefox has less flexibility but can likewise be tuned for specific situations.

More than using particular tools, Shavell encourages people to take the time to understand what privacy settings exist in their browsers. "Most have tools to block javascript, pop-ups, and to flush cookies every time you close [your browser]. Basic practices like this go a long way to improving overall browsing safety."

Phishing sites are another avenue of attack. These are malicious websites that prompt you to enter personal information, and then use it for nefarious ends. A common tactic is to disguise a phishing site as a bank login screen, thus tricking victims into parting with their financial login information. A phishing site can also masquerade as a pornographic website, harvesting credit card numbers and personal information for fraud, or contact information for spam. Most web browsers are fairly adept at detecting phishing sites, and antivirus software even more so. If your browser or your security software says that a titillating URL is dangerous, it's best to listen.

4. Why Porn Consumers Need Antivirus.

Even if a pornographic website takes great care to protect its users, it can still become an unwitting vector for attack. "There are some cases where malicious advertisements are bought from small advertising companies and displayed on porn websites," said Botezatu. He explained that this is an issue not just for porn sites, but any place that sells ad space. "Unfortunately, users can’t immediately tell when malicious activity takes place on the respective websites, and this is why a security solution running in the background is highly recommended. "If anything malicious is hosted on the respective page, it will automatically be blocked."

Most people are probably confident in their ability to avoid malicious files and don't see the use of antimalware software. Unfortunately, it's exactly these kinds of people that keep attackers in business. The best security software will identify files and malicious sites before they can cause any damage and can even protect against insidious threats like ransomware.

"When looking for explicit content, users might end up on phishing sites or may click on ads that lead to downloading malware or ransomware," warned Markuson. He advised that users avoid downloading pornographic content, and instead stream it (via a VPN, naturally).

5. Stick to Trusted Porn Names and Sites.

Beyond societal shame, there's a reason why pornographic websites have a spotty reputation. "In the wild-west days of the early internet (late 90s-2000s), there was an explosion of adult sites, many of which were quickly slapped together and were just trying to make a quick buck any way they could," recalled Shavell. "This included implementing outright scams, such as distributing ransomware, viruses, or adware that sent your browser into endless click-generating pop-up cycles."

All the experts we spoke to for this story told some variation of the same tale, concluding that, in general, adult sites are safer now than they used to be. Still, the shady tactics used in the early days of online adult entertainment remain red flags to watch out for. Opening numerous windows or leading you down endless trails of links to access content, for example, is a bad sign.

Many of the experts we spoke with warned against small, "fringe" sites peddling pornographic material. They advised sticking with well-known names in the industry, which are more likely to take care when handling personal information. Things like contact information, a business address, and a privacy policy can be signs that a site is on the up and up.

Shavell also warned against using logins for pornographic sites that might be shared on forums or elsewhere. "These simply tend to be teasers to lure people to the worst sort of scam sites."

Markuson points out that any website could be dangerous, so use the same scrutiny that you would for a pornographic site. "Users should check if the URL of the website begins with HTTPS and has a padlock icon next to it. If it’s just HTTP, the site is not secure."

6. Avoid Risky Behavior.

It's also essential to keep a cool head, even when handling hot content. "Many consumers of pornography exercise poor judgment while browsing because they’re in an excited state. Biology takes over and users overlook risks they’d normally pay attention to," said Shavell. The checkered past of pornographic sites can also set a dangerous expectation that customers should expect some level of shadiness. Shavell recommends being extra cautious and listening to warnings from your computer or browser if it detects something untoward.

Lastly, consider your context. Browsing pornography on a work computer, or while using a work-provided VPN—even if you're quarantined at home—can land you in serious trouble. It's also not a good idea to involve other people in your private fantasies, without their express consent and in an appropriate way. Basically, don't slide into random DMs or be creepy with your colleagues, and be respectful to the sex workers whose content you consume.

The company formerly known as Twitter on Tuesday slowed the speed with which users could access links to the New York Times, Facebook and other news organizations and online competitors, a move that appeared targeted at companies that have drawn the ire of owner Elon Musk.

Users who clicked a link on Musk’s website, now called X, for one of the targeted websites were made to wait about five seconds before seeing the page...

The delayed websites included X’s online rivals Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky and Substack, as well as the Reuters wire service and the Times. All of them have previously been singled out by Musk for ridicule or attack.

On Tuesday afternoon, hours after this story was first published, X began reversing the throttling on some of the sites, dropping the delay times back to zero. It was unknown if all the throttled websites had normal service restored.

The delay affected the t.co domain, a link-shortening service that X uses to process every link posted to the website. Traffic is routed through the domain, allowing X to track — and, in this case, throttle — activity to the target website, potentially taking away traffic and ad revenue from businesses Musk personally dislikes.

The analysis found that links to most other sites were unaffected — including those to The Washington Post, Fox News and social media services such as Mastodon and YouTube — with the shortened links being routed to their final destination in a second or less. A user first flagged the delays early Tuesday on the technology discussion forum Hacker News.

Musk, a self-described “free speech absolutist,” did not respond to requests for comment. X also did not respond.

Online companies pour millions of dollars into ensuring their websites open as quickly as possible, knowing that even tiny delays can lead their traffic to plunge as users grow impatient with the delay and go elsewhere. A Google study of mobile traffic in 2016 found that 53 percent of users abandoned a website if it took longer than three seconds to load. A person familiar with the Times’s operations said the news organization had seen a drop in traffic from X since the delays began.

The delays also affected X’s biggest rivals in social media. Links to Facebook, Instagram and the new microblogging service Threads were all throttled; all three are owned by Meta, whose founder and chief Mark Zuckerberg has been locked in an ongoing online feud with Musk over not-yet-existent plans for a mixed-martial-arts fight.

X also throttled traffic to Bluesky, the platform started with help from former Twitter chief Jack Dorsey, who has used it to criticize Musk’s leadership. The same throttling also applied to Substack, the email newsletter platform that runs its own short-text service, Substack Notes.

X also throttled traffic to Bluesky, the platform started with help from former Twitter chief Jack Dorsey, who has used it to criticize Musk’s leadership. The same throttling also applied to Substack, the email newsletter platform that runs its own short-text service, Substack Notes.

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The Pentagon said Thursday, June 1 it has agreed to purchase Starlink satellite internet terminals from Elon Musk’s SpaceX for use in Ukraine as Kyiv continues to defend itself against a full-scale Russian invasion.

The Pentagon declined to offer additional contract details, including the price, scope and timeline of the delivery.

The first Starlink terminals in Ukraine arrived four days after Russian troops poured over the nation’s border in what became the largest air, land and sea assault in Europe since World War II.

Ukraine digital minister Mykhailo Fedorov, who had previously asked Musk for the capability on Twitter, posted that Starlink was “here” in Ukraine — with a photo showing more than two dozen boxes in the back of a truck.

Musk said in October that SpaceX wouldn’t be able to continue funding use of Starlink terminals in the country out of its own coffers “indefinitely,” after a report from CNN said the company had asked the Pentagon to cover the cost.

Western officials have previously hailed Musk’s decision to equip Ukraine with Starlink internet, citing the colossal and indiscriminate Russian shelling on civilian infrastructure that has left large swaths of the country without communications.

Musk reportedly told the Pentagon in October he would no longer finance the Starlink terminals in Ukraine as the country prepared to fight through the harsh winter months. However, the billionaire reversed course and did continue to fund the service.

Starlink is SpaceX’s global network of over 4,000 satellites that provides service to more than 50 countries. The company has grown Starlink to more than 1.5 million customers, and is weekly launching batches of additional satellites to expand the network’s capability. The U.S. has approved a plan to expand to as many as 7,500 satellites in orbit.

SpaceX has steadily expanded Starlink’s product offerings in recent years, selling services to residential, business, RV, maritime and aviation customers.

The most significant network and service outages of 2022 had far-reaching consequences. Flights were grounded, virtual meetings cut off, and communications hindered.

The culprits that took down major infrastructure and services providers were varied, too, according to analysis from ThousandEyes, a Cisco-owned network intelligence company that tracks internet and cloud traffic. Maintenance-related errors were cited more than once: Canadian carrier Rogers Communications experienced a massive nationwide outage that was traced to a maintenance update, and a maintenance script error caused problems for software maker Atlassian.

Here are the top 10 outages of the year, organized chronologically:

1. British Airways lost online systems: Feb. 25

British Airways' online services were inaccessible for hours on Feb. 25, causing hundreds of flight cancellations and interrupting airline operations. Flights couldn’t be booked, and travelers couldn’t check in to flights electronically. The airline was reportedly forced to return to paper-based processes when its online systems became inaccessible, and the impact was felt globally. “Our monitoring showed that the network paths to the airline’s online services (and servers) were reachable, but that the server and site responses were timing out,” ThousandEyes said in its outage analysis, which blamed unresponsive application servers – rather than a network issue – for the outage.

“The nature of the issue, and the airline’s response to it, suggests the root cause is likely to be with a central backend repository that multiple front-facing services rely on. If that is the case, this incident may be a catalyst for British Airways to re-architect or deconstruct their backend to avoid single points of failure and reduce the likelihood of a recurrence. Equally possible, however, is that the chain of events that led to the outage is a rare occurrence and can be mostly controlled in future. Time will tell,” ThousandEyes said.

2. Twitter felled by BGP hijack: March 28

Twitter was unavailable for some users for about 45 minutes on March 28 after JSC RTComm.RU, a Russian Internet and satellite communications provider, improperly announced one of Twitter’s prefixes (104.244.42.0/24) and, as a result, traffic that was destined for Twitter was rerouted for some users and failed. Access to Twitter’s service was restored for impacted users after RTComm’s BGP announcement was withdrawn. ThousandEyes notes that BGP misconfigurations can be used to block traffic in a targeted way – however it’s not always easy to tell when the situation is accidental versus intentional.

“We know that the March 28th Twitter event was caused by RTComm announcing themselves as the origin for Twitter’s prefix, then withdrawing it. While we don’t know what led to the announcement, it’s important to understand that accidental misconfiguration of BGP is not uncommon, and given the ISP’s withdrawal of the route, it’s likely that RTComm did not intend to cause a globally impacting disruption to Twitter’s service. That said, localized manipulation of BGP has been used by ISPs in certain regions to block traffic based on local access policies,” ThousandEyes said...

One way for organizations to deal with route leaks and hijacks is to monitor for rapid detection and safeguard BGP with security mechanisms such as resource public key infrastructure (RPKI), a cryptographic security mechanism for performing route-origin authorization. RPKI is effective against BGP hijackings and leaks, however adoption isn’t widespread. “Though your company might have RPKI implemented to fend off BGP threats, it's possible that your telco won't. Something to consider when selecting ISPs,” ThousandEyes said.

3. Atlassian overstated outage impact: April 5

Atlassian reported problems with several of its biggest development tools, including Jira, Confluence and OpsGenie, on the morning of April 5th. A maintenance script error led to a days-long outage for these services – but it only impacted roughly 400 of Atlassian's customers.

ThousandEyes in its analysis of the outage emphasized the importance of a vendor’s status page when reporting problems: Atlassian’s status page had “a sea of orange and red indicators” suggesting a significant outage, and the company said it would mobilize hundreds of engineers to rectify the incident, but for most customers, there were no problems.

A status page often under-emphasizes the extent of an outage, but it’s also possible for a status page to overstate the impact, ThousandEyes warned: “It’s a really difficult balance to strike: say too little or too late, and customers will be upset at the responsiveness; say too much, be overly transparent, and risk unnecessarily worrying a large number of unaffected customers, as well as stakeholders more broadly.”

4. Rogers outage cut services across Canada: July 8

A botched maintenance update caused a prolonged, nationwide outage on Canadian operator Rogers Communications’ network. The outage affected phone and internet service for about 12 million customers and hampered many critical services across the country, including banking transactions, government services, and emergency response capabilities.

According to ThousandEyes, Rogers withdrew its prefixes due to an internal routing issue, which made the Tier I provider unreachable across the Internet for nearly 24 hours. “The incident appeared to be triggered by the withdrawal of a large number of Rogers’ prefixes, rendering their network unreachable across the global Internet. However, behavior observed in their network around this time suggests that the withdrawal of external BGP routes may have been precipitated by internal routing issues,” ThousandEyes said...

The Rogers outage is an important reminder of the need for redundancy for critical services; have more than one network provider in place or at the ready, have a backup plan for when outages happen, and be sure to have proactive visibility, ThousandEyes suggests. “No provider is immune to outages, no matter how large. So, for crucial services like hospitals and banking, plan for a backup network provider that can alleviate the length and scope of an outage,” ThousandEyes wrote.

5. Power failure downed AWS eastern US zone: July 8

A power failure on July 28 disrupted services within Amazon Web Services (AWS) Availability Zone 1 (AZ1) in the US-East-2 Region. “The outage affected connectivity to and from the region and brought down Amazon’s EC2 instances, which impacted applications such as Webex, Okta, Splunk, BambooHR, and others,” ThousandEyes reported in its outage analysis. Not all users or services were affected equally; Webex components located in Cisco data centers remained operational, for example. AWS reported the power outage lasted only approximately 20 minutes, however some of its customers’ services and applications took up to three hours to recover.

It’s important to design some level of physical redundancy for cloud-delivered applications and services, ThousandEyes wrote: “There’s no soft landing for a data center power outage—when the power stops, reliant systems are hard down. Whether it’s an electric-grid outage or a failure of one of the related systems, such as UPS batteries, it’s times like this where the architected resiliency and redundancy of your digital services is critical.”

6. Google Search, Google Maps knocked out: Aug. 9

A brief outage impacted Google Search and Google Maps, and these widely used Google services were unavailable to users around the world for about an hour. “Attempts to reach these services resulted in error messages from Google’s edge servers, including HTTP 500 and 502 server responses that generally indicate internal server or application issues,” ThousandEyes reported.

The root cause was reportedly a software update gone wrong. Not only were end users unable to access Google Search and Google Maps, but also applications dependent on Google’s software function stopped working during the outage.

The outage is interesting to IT professionals for a couple of reasons, ThousandEyes notes. “First, it highlights the fact that even the most stable of services, such as Google Search, a service for which we rarely experience issues or hear of outages, is still subject to the same forces that can bring down any complex digital system. Secondly, the event revealed how ubiquitous some software systems can be, woven through the many digital services we consume on a daily basis and yet unaware of these software dependencies.”

7. Zoom outage scuttles virtual meetings: Sept. 15

Users were unable to log in or join Zoom meetings for about an hour during a Sept. 15 outage that yielded bad gateway (502) errors for users globally. Users were unable to log in or join meetings, and in some cases, users already in meetings were kicked out of them.

The root cause wasn’t confirmed, “but it appeared to be in Zoom’s backend systems, around their ability to resolve, route, or redistribute traffic,” ThousandEyes said...

8. Zscaler proxies suffered 100% packet loss: Oct. 25

On Oct. 25, traffic destined to a subset of Zscaler proxy endpoints experienced 100% packet loss, impacting customers who use Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA) services on their Zscaler Cloud network 2. The most significant packet loss lasted approximately 30 minutes, although some reachability issues and packet-loss spikes persisted intermittently for some user locations over the next three hours, according to ThousandEyes’ outage analysis.

Zscaler referred to the problem on their status page as a “traffic-forwarding issue.” When the virtual IP of the proxy device became unreachable, it resulted in an inability to forward traffic.

ThousandEyes explained how this scenario could have made critical business tools and SaaS apps unreachable for some customers that use Zscaler’s security services: “This may have affected a variety of applications for enterprise customers using Zscaler’s service, as it’s typical in Secure Service Edge (SSE) implementations to proxy not just web traffic but also other critical business tools and SaaS services such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Microsoft Office 365. The proxy is therefore in the user’s data path and, when the proxy isn’t reachable, the access to these tools is impacted and remediation often requires manual interventions to route affected users to alternate gateways.”

9. WhatsApp outage halted messaging: Oct. 25

A two-hour outage on Oct. 25 left WhatsApp users unable to send or receive messages on the platform. The Meta-owned freeware is the world's most popular messaging app – 31% of the global population uses WhatsApp, according to 2022 data from digital intelligence platform Similarweb.

The outage was related to backend application service failures rather than a network failure, according to ThousandEyes’ outage analysis. It occurred during peak hours in India, where the app has a user base in the hundreds of millions.

10. AWS eastern US zone hit again: Dec. 5

Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered a second outage at its US-East 2 region in early December. The outage, which according to AWS lasted about 75 minutes, resulted in internet connectivity issues to and from the US-East 2 region.

ThousandEyes observed significant packet loss between two global locations and AWS' US-East-2 Region for more than an hour. The event affected end users connecting to AWS services through ISPs. “The loss was seen only between end users connecting via ISPs, and didn’t appear to impact connectivity between instances within the region, or in between regions,” ThousandEyes said in its outage analysis.

Later in the day AWS posted a blog saying that the issue was resolved. “Connectivity between instances within the region, in between regions, and Direct Connect connectivity were not impacted by this issue. The issue has been resolved and connectivity has been fully restored,” the post said.

Give unto Elon what is Elon’s and give unto us what is ours. Social media may never have been a great idea. It is like the capitalist answer to Maoist self-criticism. You confess all of your vanity in one place and hope that the people who own the site will use it for good.

On the whole, the influence of social media on society, especially on socialization, seems to have been negative, and people have been quiet quitting—or not-so-quiet quitting—Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube for some time. With Musk’s purchase of Twitter and his rapid-fire (and arguably rash) decision-making, many social media enthusiasts have been trickling into not Facebook’s metaverse but something called “the fediverse.”

The fediverse is a network of social media servers that share one another’s content. The most famous example is Mastodon, which is a lot like Twitter. However, instead of one “Twitter” there are many Mastodons (apparently the verdict of extinction was premature). If I set up my account on one server and you set up your account on another server, we can still see and repost each other’s content because the servers are part of a “federation.”

Each Mastodon server has its own policies and administrators. If you do not like them, you can leave one for another without losing followers. Most servers follow the Mastodon Covenant, which requires a basic level of administrative service as well as active moderation against various forms of hate speech. Servers that don’t follow the covenant will not be listed by the core Mastodon site. Also, non-compliant servers will tend to be blocked by other servers, so their content will not be seen by the rest of the fediverse.

Through a set of community-developed open source software and standards, anyone can set up their own alternative to Twitter, Instagram, or YouTube. As long as they agree to the minimum standards in the Mastodon Covenant, they will have access to an instant audience and community of users who are already posting.

Naturally, many of these instances cater to specific languages, geographies, or interests. So if you are, for instance, a self-published author you might join an instance devoted to people such as yourself. Additionally, different instances enforce additional content moderation (at least in theory) and block content from servers that do not. For example, maybe you do not want to be on an instance that hosts pornography.

People have raised a number of issues with Facebook such as the manipulation of users and the ubiquity of annoying ads and fake news. While one person’s content moderation is another’s censorship, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram have seemed to utterly fail at moderating content in a way acceptable to anyone. In many cases they have seemed to encourage misinformation, fake news, and even hate speech in order to drive “engagement.”

I personally quiet quit Facebook after the company, despite numerous reports, refused to take down a user with a fake name who doxxed a friend and was menacing a number of women online. My use of the service, like many others, had already dwindled to a trickle over the years. Instagram, which is also owned by Facebook’s parent company Meta, is known to have similar problems with moderation, manipulation, and loads and loads of spam.

Twitter was purchased by Elon Musk reportedly in order to promote his ideas of free speech. He immediately began reinstating controversial figures known for hate speech and hostility to minority groups. At the same time he silenced other people for making fun of him or publishing the location of his private jet. Musk’s other decisions resulted in farcical results, with spoof accounts of famous brands getting blue check marks of authenticity. You can read more about that in the Economist, New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, Time Magazine, and the website of the Brookings Institute, among others.

YouTube now has the kinds of ads that made you leave broadcast TV. It also algorithmically recommended junk science videos during the height of the Covid pandemic and promoted other misinformation. However, this content is super engaging to the people it doesn’t disgust or repulse.

For all of these services, it seems the user manipulation has produced short-term gains. But who actually “likes” these services anymore? You’re there out of some mysterious obligation. If your experience is like many, you will start using them less and less because they make you feel... bad.

The ultimate question is whether having a digital “public space” in the hands of a single billionaire or any corporation with a profit motive is fundamentally a bad thing. Nearly everything that is done to “monetize” user content and engagement tends to disadvantage the users and their content. This includes what content the algorithms show you in your feed and which ads you are served. It also includes which features get added, like “trends” or “Fleets.”

Mastodon is the fediverse answer to Twitter. It is also the most mature part. There are a few differences, like a 500 character limit, and posts are called toots instead of tweets, but overall it works the same way. News, hashtags, and feeds are more useful and relevant. The feed is just chronological rather than some manipulation of posts and additional stuff you wish Twitter would not show you. There are a few glitches, especially if you use the Android app and the website. For instance, Mastodon did not sync the follower/following count or profile picture between them until I clicked edit. But overall Mastodon is just as easy to use as Twitter.

The fediverse answer to Instagram is Pixelfed. According to one user, “It is so similar to Instagram I forget which one I’m using.” The layout is similar, including the profile screen, hashtags, and alerts. There are differences. “Local” means the Pixelfed server that you are using; it has nothing to do with your actual location. You’ll see images from all over the fediverse and even from Mastodon, but text-only posts are filtered. There is a reshare button, but it does something different than what you might expect.

However, it is clearly the early days in the Pixelfediverse. There is no Android app yet and the iPhone app is in beta and has a number of glitches. Notifications in the app do not work. Messaging is, for all intents and purposes, non-functioning. When you reply to comments, they do not show in the app, but they do show up on the website. The search is glitchy, and search for hashtags is not working at the time of writing. Some other features seem to work one day and not the next. Yet both the website and the app are usable.

Whereas Instagram and Twitter have a border wall between them, you can see posts between Pixelfed and Mastodon. However, there is some weirdness between the two. People on Mastodon instances can see posts from Pixelfed instances. When they “boost” (repost) your picture you’ll get a notification, but if you look at their profile it often says they have no followers and no posts. And, oddly, my Mastodon account hasn’t sync’d the last four days of posts from a Pixelfed user I follow, despite my being able to see the posts on Pixelmo.

The federated version of YouTube is called PeerTube. It works just how you would expect. Publishing videos and joining a server are easy. The playback is quite snappy. PeerTube innovates on the design of most video sharing services in that it uses a peer-to-peer protocol (similar to BitTorrent) to augment video stream downloads. Sadly I can’t just cast videos to my Chromecast like I can on YouTube without sharing my whole screen. However, that is to be expected as Chromecast is proprietary Google technology.

As for content, there is not yet the kind of awful stuff you might find on YouTube. I searched for stuff I actually do not want to see and got perfectly innocent results. However, when I searched for MariaDB content, I only found two-year-old video uploads that covered a five-year-old version of MariaDB Community Server. So PeerTube is probably not where you’re going to watch your “how to” videos for now. It’s a great place to share with your friends, but not yet a go-to site.

Well if you aren’t happy with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, why not head into the loving arms of the Chinese government? According to Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko, “We won’t see a federated TikTok because the core of what made TikTok popular is an advanced video recording and editing app and an advanced content discovery algorithm. It is not enough to create a server that accepts video file uploads and distributes them to followers and call it ‘federated TikTok’.” So there may not be a federated web of sites for learning dance moves anytime soon.

Twitter famously manipulated and hobbled their APIs, disabled third-party apps, and made it painfully clear whose sandbox a developer is playing in. Mastodon’s robust REST APIs are based on ActivityPub, a W3C standard. Aside from supporting third-party apps, Mastodon makes it possible to do more of the search and research on text and trends that we used to do using the Twitter API. For example, you can get the firehose for the whole fediverse—if you dare.

Some of Twitter’s famed ecosystem is migrating over to the fediverse, and the number of third-party apps is growing fast. For example, Tusker promises to customize your timeline and supports both Pixelfed and Mastodon. For some power users, the app Tweetbot “was Twitter,” but after Twitter killed third-party apps the Tweetbot developers launched an app called Ivory for Mastodon (currently an early access preview). If those are not to your liking you can turn to Ice Cubes, Woolly, Mona, or Mammoth.

For now, both Mastodon and Pixelfed feel safer than their non-federated counterparts. According to some user, “It feels more like a community. In the week I’ve been active on Pixelfed, I’ve gotten nice comments on my artwork, and that’s all. I haven’t gotten any of the annoying business messages.”

In the early days of the internet, the web promised to democratize publishing and let everyone participate. However, one of the features of the early web was that it was not particularly easy to use. The bar to entry was somewhat high. On the one hand, that meant that non-technical people were underrepresented. On the other hand, you had to have at least some smarts to publish. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that some of the decline in the quality of content is due to lowering the bar.

For now, the fediverse audience is small and the motivation to create spambots and flood the network with fake news is low. Moreover, if you figured out how to get on Mastodon then probably you’re not the average Facebook user, you are a little less likely to fall for the next Pizzagate, and you make a poor target for fake news.

However, if the fediverse grows, so will the motivation for malfeasance. Mastodon proponents point to the structure of the network and to the fact that bots tend to create engagement to manipulate the feed—something they can’t easily do in the fediverse. Their faith strikes me as unwarranted. Twitter and Facebook decided they needed AI tools to patrol their networks. Assuming the fediverse continues to grow, will AI be needed to filter content and flag bad behavior? Or will the nature of decentralization be enough? Only time will truly tell.

For now, I’m stuck straddling both the corporate-owned and the community-owned networks. I’ll keep posting to both and letting my audience build in the fediverse. Despite the rough edges and glitches, I enjoy reading Mastodon and scanning Pixelfed. The content, though more sparse, is either stuff I’m interested in or at least not manipulative. While I’m posting on both Twitter and Mastodon for now, I’m actually reading my Mastodon feed.

Elon Musk this weekend defended SpaceX's decision to curtail Ukraine’s use of the Starlink satellite internet system to launch drone strikes against Russia, citing the threat of “escalation.”

"Starlink is the communication backbone of Ukraine, especially at the front lines, where almost all other Internet connectivity has been destroyed,” Musk wrote. “But we will not enable escalation of conflict that may lead to WW3.”

Days earlier, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell confirmed the company had taken steps to limit the Ukrainian military’s ability to use Starlink to pilot unmanned drones on the frontlines of the war. "It was never intended to be weaponized,” Shotwell said of Starlink’s battlefield uses. “On the other hand, they are trying to fight for their country.”

Still, the decision isn’t sitting well with everyone. On Twitter, former NASA astronaut Scott Kelly called on Musk to lift the restrictions on Ukraine’s use of Starlink. “Please restore the full functionality of your Starlink satellites. Defense from a genocidal invasion is not an offensive capability. It’s survival. Innocent lives will be lost,” Kelly tweeted on last Friday.

Musk responded: “You’re smart enough not to swallow media and other propaganda bs.”

In a separate tweet, Musk added: “SpaceX commercial terminals, like other commercial products, are meant for private use, not military, but we have not exercised our right to turn them off. We’re trying hard to do the right thing, where the ‘right thing’ is an extremely difficult moral question.”

The ethics over weaponizing Starlink occurs when both the US and European allies have spentmillions to bring the satellite internet system to Ukraine. At least one government official in Ukraine has also publicly urged SpaceX to lift the restrictions.

Russia, on the other hand, has made veiled threats to attack Starlink, citing its use in Ukraine. One Russian company even claims to have made technology capable of detecting and hunting down Starlink dishes on the battlefield.

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As many as one in three US households doesn’t have broadband internet access, currently defined as just 25Mbps down and 3Mbps up — which feels like the bare minimum for a remote learning family these days. Even before the pandemic, that statistic might have been shocking; now, it’s the difference between whether millions of schoolchildren can attend classes and do their homework or not(Details: https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/17/21183589/fcc-commissioner-jessica-rosenworcel-homework-gap-editorial-wifi-hotspots-coronavirus).

Nearly 12 million children don’t have a broadband connection at home, the Senate Joint Economic Committee reported in 2017. And the “homework gap” hits harder if you’re poor, of course: only 56 percent of households with incomes under $30,000 had broadband as of last February.

But even if they could afford broadband, there’s no guarantee they’d get it — because the FCC has spent the past decade trying to paint a rosy picture of America’s broadband instead of figuring out where it actually exists.

In 2009, the US spent $350 million on a “National Broadband Map” that turned out to be nothing more than a chance for the wolves to guard the hens: it relied on ISPs like Comcast and AT&T to submit their own data, which the FCC does not audit. According to the FCC’s map, I have 11 different broadband providers at my address! But if you break it down:

* Two of them are “fixed wireless” that cater to businesses, not homes, one of which starts at $99 a month for 3Mbps (not a typo)

* Two of them are slow, data-capped satellite internet

* Four of them are duplicates of the same providers (including three different tiers of AT&T DSL, two of which don't meet the FCC's definition of broadband)

* Two of them don’t offer service at my address at all

That leaves just Comcast — and you with the reason why the United States and its ISP lobbyists get to pretend they’re doing a decent job, even when there’s no meaningful competition. About 88.3 million Americans only have a single choice of broadband provider, according to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, because their other choice is DSL that doesn’t even meet the FCC’s own definition of broadband at 25Mbps down / 3Mbps up. That’s effectively a monopoly, and the report claims 22 million of them are dependent on Comcast alone. And those are *low* estimates, by the way, because they’re based on the same faulty, self-reported data as the FCC’s terrible maps.

When Comcast knows you have no other alternative, it can get away with things you’d never see anywhere else. Exhibit A: the 1.2TB home internet data caps it’s about to erect in a dozen additional states next year(Details: https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/23/21591420/comcast-cap-data-1-2tb-home-users-internet-xfinity#:~:text=Next%2520year%252C%2520Comcast%2520plans%2520to%2Cother%2520parts%2520of%2520the%2520country.&text=Customers%2520will%2520be%2520notified%2520as%2520they%2520approach%2520the%25201.2TB%2520threshold).

Forget for a moment that Comcast itself was caught red-handed explaining that data caps have nothing to do with network congestion. Forget that the CEOs of several smaller ISPs have admitted that internet capacity is anything but scarce. Forget that Comcast disabled its own congestion management system because it found it was unnecessary. Forget even that Comcast is a wildly profitable company whose cable division spends only a tenth of its yearly revenues on keeping that network strong. The proof that data caps are a swindle is something you probably witnessed yourself earlier this year: Comcast, AT&T, and T-Mobile all suspended their data caps when the pandemic hit, and the internet kept on working without a hitch.

But Comcast’s generosity didn’t last for long. Now, with cases and deaths repeatedly hitting record highs in the United States, tens of millions of Americans out of work, and many of them thousands of dollars behind on rent, the ISP is so unconcerned about angry customers that it’s bringing those data caps to even more states. AT&T, to its credit, extended its initial data cap waiver through the end of the year — but that wasn’t enough to pressure Comcast to do the same. Comcast’s waiver expired on July 1st, alongside most other ISPs, and now it’s back to extracting money hand over fist.

Exhibit B: Though the United States once led development of the world’s internet, we now pay more than the rest of the developed world on average. We consistently pay more than Europe regardless of speed, according to a fascinating, approachable study you should read from the New America think tank. In fact, we pay roughly double that of Europe at the 100Mbps and 1,000Mbps tiers, and eight to 17 times more to rent a modem on average than Asia and Europe do, respectively. Only one US city cracked the top ten in affordability but only because it had an ace up its sleeve: a municipal fiber-optic network erected by the city itself, where ISPs provide their services across fiber that the residents themselves own. Those sorts of municipal networks create competition that simply doesn’t exist in many places in the US because it wasn’t designed to exist. In places that do erect municipal networks, New America shows that both speed and affordability far outpace the rest of the US.

That’s why it’s a real shame many states (and telecom lobbyists) have erected roadblocks to keep those municipal networks from spreading. In one particularly egregious example, Comcast sued the city of Chattanooga, Tennessee to try to block its municipal network in 2015, lobbied for a law to prevent its award-winning network from expanding to rural areas, then finally convinced the state to spend $45 million of taxpayer money to subsidize the big ISPs instead.

We need competition. We need accurate maps to clearly see just how little competition there actually is, and we need to change the laws to let citizens fed up with being unserved and underserved build their own networks instead. We need those maps to show how much people actually pay. We need to stop pouring taxpayer money into hugely profitable telecoms that claim they’ll build out internet access, since they’ve found they can often just straight-up lie or wait to be sued instead of fulfilling their obligations. (If you want to be infuriated, follow that last link and keep on clicking through the examples.)

At least in 2020, the US is finally making some progress. This year, Congress finally passed a bill that requires the FCC to actually audit its broadband map data and create a “user-friendly challenge process” so people like me can point out that no, AT&T doesn’t actually offer fiber (or even fast DSL) at my address. Here's hoping it actually works, unlike the millions upon millions of net neutrality comments the FCC simply ignored. Earlier this month, the FCC also already awarded $9.2 billion to 180 different companies to bring broadband to 5.2 million rural Americans over the next ten years — though big companies like Charter, CenturyLink, Frontier, and Windstream still account for at least $2.4 billion of it.

But another way of looking at things is that we’re already too late: the FCC just awarded a decade’s worth of money to bring broadband to only five million additional addresses, without knowing whether it was awarding those contracts to communities that will now see competition — or just erecting more pockets of monopoly on the fringe. What is the rest of America supposed to do, wait another decade?

We need to go much, much further than fixing our maps. If the best we can do during the pandemic is ask ISPs to “pretty please make the internet work better for 60 days,” to borrow a phrase, it’s time for more regulation.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown, perhaps for the first time, how essential the internet is. The internet was already a powerful tool for learning, but now it’s a critical one for kids to attend school. Many millions are jobless but could maybe find a new job that lets them work from home. Many are already working from home because — with no other choice — companies are learning to adapt.

This all means there might finally be enough political will to declare the internet should be delivered to homes like a utility, the way water and electricity are delivered today, the way landline telephones were under the Communications Act of 1934 that originally created the FCC. The last time the law was truly overhauled was 1996 — back when the internet was delivered one digital screech at a time over standard phone lines, after all.

That’s how we’ve always dealt with necessary monopolies, the ones that own the pipes and wires that feed your house. We put them on a tight leash and make them serve everyone, not just the homes they deem most profitable.

Anti-vax proponents have used social media to spread health myths, suggesting vaccines can cause autism or that “natural immunity” is better than inoculation. (Such claims have been debunked repeatedly by doctors.) So in the last year, sites including Facebook and YouTube began working to stymie anti-vax misinformation through both algorithmic and ad-sales strategies.

The anti-vax movement has coincided with an alarming spike in preventable diseases:

* Measles cases reached a more than 25-year high in the U.S. this year.

* Chickenpox has broken out in schools with certain vaccinations exemptions.

* The World Health Organization currently lists "vaccine hesitancy" as one of the top ten threats to global health this year.

Pinterest is hoping a change to its search capabilities will stamp out viral misinformation about routine vaccinations on the platform.

Last Wednesday, the company announced that searches for terms including “vaccine safety” and “measles” will now only yield information from public health institutions like the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and World Health Organization (WHO).

Despite concrete scientific evidence that vaccines prevent disease, a growing “anti-vax” movement claims that vaccines have detrimental effects on children. Pinterest has over 300 million monthly visitors, many of whom could encounter anti-vax pins while searching for parenting advice or Instant Pot chicken & dumplings recipes.

But with Pinterest’s new search experience, certain queries will only show content from Pinterest's network of public health websites—no ads, no related pins, and no comments. “We’re taking this approach because we believe that showing vaccine misinformation alongside resources from public health experts isn’t responsible,” the company said ( More details: https://apnews.com/2fea5241a8594c88bf9a075f63fee845?utm_source=morning_brew).

This isn’t the first time Pinterest has tried to squash anti-vax messaging on the platform:

1) Earlier this year, Pinterest tried blocking all searches for vaccine-related info.

2) Before that, Pinterest’s community guidelines prohibited anti-vaccine advice and other health misinformation—but those guidelines weren’t strictly enforced.

Pinterest’s new policy addresses the so-called “data void” for reliable information about vaccines. And without safeguards, search functions like Pinterest's can queue up misleading content that's optimized to spread rapidly.

Bottom line: One in five adults trust social media sites like Pinterest and Facebook as a news source. Tweaking their search and sharing capabilities could quarantine false information from users moving forward.

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