eye on tech

TOKYO, July 3 (Reuters) - Japan's government has finally eliminated the use of floppy disks in all its systems, two decades since their heyday, reaching a long-awaited milestone in a campaign to modernise the bureaucracy.

By the middle of last month, the Digital Agency had scrapped all 1,034 regulations governing their use, except for one environmental stricture related to vehicle recycling.

"We have won the war on floppy disks on June 28!" Digital Minister Taro Kono, who has been vocal about wiping out fax machines and other analogue technology in government, told Reuters in a statement on Wednesday.

The Digital Agency was set up during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, when a scramble to roll out nationwide testing and vaccination revealed that the government still relied on paper filing and outdated technology.

A charismatic figure with 2.5 million followers on X, Kono formerly headed the defence and foreign ministries as well as the COVID vaccine deployment, taking up his current role in August 2022 after a failed bid to become prime minister.

Japan's digitisation effort has run into numerous snags, however. A contact-tracing app flopped during the pandemic and adoption of the government's My Number digital identification card has been slower than it hoped, amid repeated data mishaps.

According to its conflict minerals report (CMR) for 2023, Amazon cannot rule out having sourced minerals from nine of ten African countries where human rights-violating militias finance themselves through mining. These countries are the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic, South Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, Zambia and Angola. The other four members of GAMAM, a group synonymous with the moniker Big Tech, also potentially source some of the raw materials processed in contracted smelters from these regions.

Both Apple and Google’s parent company Alphabet reported that smelters integrated into their supply chains potentially processed minerals from six of the ten countries on the African continent mentioned above. Meta lists five of these countries in its report, while Microsoft claims to have reason to believe that minerals from two of the ten countries listed might end up in their products. However, the country list provided by Alphabet was last updated in 2021 and has been absent from their annual CMR since 2022. Additionally, Microsoft doesn't clarify if the countries listed in its report are merely those where smelters are located or if they are the source countries for potential conflict materials.

Contractors working for GAMAM companies are also active in extracting and processing raw materials in countries defined as CAHRAs, short for Conflict-Affected and High-Risk Areas. The extended CAHRA definition, which includes the extraction of minerals as well as other conflict resources, encompasses specific regions in Afghanistan, Mexico, Myanmar, and Yemen, among others.

According to Microsoft’s conflict minerals report, the company relies on "responsible sourcing" rather than restricting or avoiding the usage of the conflict minerals tantalum, tin, tungsten, and gold, known as 3TG, from these regions. Stopping operations in Covered Countries and CAHRAs would allegedly cause significant economic harm to the affected countries.

U.S. importers of raw materials have been required to disclose their sources for potential conflict minerals under the Dodd-Frank Act since 2010. A similar regulation has been in effect in the European Union since January 1, 2021, aimed at curbing the financing of violent militias, particularly in the Democratic Republic of Congo and surrounding countries, where said groups control the mining of tin and coltan. In the 1990s, the term "blood diamonds" gained significant attention in this context, referring to gemstones mined in Sierra Leone and Angola and sold by rebel groups to finance their operations.

... research has now found that the vast majority of data stored in the cloud is “dark data”, meaning it is used once then never visited again. That means that all the memes and jokes and films that we love to share with friends and family – from “All your base are belong to us”, through Ryan Gosling saying “Hey Girl”, to Tim Walz with a piglet – are out there somewhere, sitting in a datacentre, using up energy. By 2030, the National Grid anticipates that datacentres will account for just under 6% of the UK’s total electricity consumption, so tackling junk data is an important part of tackling the climate crisis.

Ian Hodgkinson, a professor of strategy at Loughborough University has been studying the climate impact of dark data and how it can be reduced.

“I really started a couple of years ago, it was about trying to understand the negative environmental impact that digital data might have,” he said. “And at the top of it might be quite an easy question to answer, but it turns out actually, it’s a whole lot more complex. But absolutely, data does have a negative environmental impact.”

He discovered that 68% of data used by companies is never used again, and estimates that personal data tells the same story.

Hodgkinson said: “If we think about individuals and society more broadly, what we found is that many still assume that data is carbon neutral, but every piece of data whether it be an image, whether it be an Instagram post, whatever it is, there’s a carbon footprint attached to it.

“So when we’re storing things in the cloud, we think about the white fluffy cloud, but the reality is, these datacentres are incredibly hot, incredibly noisy, they consume a large amount of energy.”

One funny meme isn’t going to destroy the planet, of course, but the millions stored, unused, in people’s camera rolls does have an impact, he explained: “The one picture isn’t going to make a drastic impact. But of course, if you maybe go into your own phone and you look at all the legacy pictures that you have, cumulatively, that creates quite a big impression in terms of energy consumption.”

Cloud operators and tech companies have a financial incentive to stop people from deleting junk data, as the more data that is stored, the more people pay to use their systems.

In now unsealed court documents reviewed by Forbes, Google was ordered to hand over the names, addresses, telephone numbers, and user activity of Youtube accounts and IP addresses that watched select YouTube videos, part of a larger criminal investigation by federal investigators.

The videos were sent by undercover police to a suspected cryptocurrency launderer under the username "elonmuskwhm." In conversations with the bitcoin trader, investigators sent links to public YouTube tutorials on mapping via drones and augmented reality software, Forbes details. The videos were watched more than 30,000 times, presumably by thousands of users unrelated to the case.

YouTube's parent company Google was ordered by federal investigators to quietly hand over all such viewer data for the period of Jan. 1 to Jan. 8, 2023, but Forbes couldn't confirm if Google had complied.

The mandated data retrieval is worrisome in itself, according to privacy experts. Federal investigators argued the request was legally justified as the data "would be relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation, including by providing identification information about the perpetrators," citing justification used by other police forces around the country. In a case out of New Hampshire, police requested similar data during the investigation of bomb threats that were being streamed live to YouTube — the order specifically requested viewership information at select time stamps during the live streams.

Russia has replaced Wikipedia with a state-sponsored encyclopedia that is a clone of the original Russian Wikipedia but which conveniently has been edited to omit things that could cast the Russian government in poor light. Real Russian Wikipedia editors used to refer to the real Wikipedia as Ruwiki; the new one is called Ruviki, has “ruwiki” in its url, and has copied all Russian-language Wikipedia articles and strictly edited them to comply with Russian laws.

The new articles exclude mentions of “foreign agents,” the Russian government’s designation for any person or entity which expresses opinions about the government and is supported, financially or otherwise, by an outside nation. Prominent “foreign agents” have included a foundation created by Alexei Navalny, a famed Russian opposition leader who died in prison in February, and Memorial, an organization dedicated to preserving the memory of Soviet terror victims, which was liquidated in 2022. The news was first reported by Novaya Gazeta, an independent Russian news outlet that relocated to Latvia after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. It was also picked up by Signpost, a publication that follows Wikimedia goings-on.

Both Ruviki articles about these agents include disclaimers about their status as foreign agents. Navalny’s article states he is a “video blogger” known for “involvement in extremist activity or terrorism.” It is worth mentioning that his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, firmly believes he was killed.

Across the world, mass protests used to offer a degree of safety in numbers. But in the last decade, the spread of facial recognition technology has meant a lone face in a crowd is no longer anonymous — it allows law enforcement to capture people’s identities en masse. Authorities in several countries have generally pitched facial recognition as a tool to capture terrorists or criminals, but the technology has emerged as a critical instrument in a new context: punishing protesters.

This week, we published a new feature by journalist Darren Loucaides on the proliferation of facial recognition as a tool to control and curtail protests. We take a look at three case studies — in Russia, India, and Iran — to show how this technology, combined with the rise of authoritarianism in many countries, is upending civil demonstrations as we know it.

The industry is primarily driven by around 24,000 talent agencies, which help influencers gain followers and income by providing them with training and equipment. These agencies take commissions from the earnings of individual livestreamers, as they sing, dance, sell products, flirt with the audience, or stage life-threatening gimmicks to make a living.

But once they sign contracts with the talent agencies, influencers are forced to make a choice: Livestream for several hours a day, for years, for little money, or pay hefty penalties to break their contract. Ultimately, it is a trap. Rest of World reporter Viola Zhou spoke to livestreamers who said they would owe tens of thousands of dollars if they breached their contract and failed to complete their work.

the platforms these men have shaped and shepherded are tuned to reward outrageous behavior. Having colonized our attention spans through their products, they now seek attention for themselves.

Whatever the precise reason for these developments, the new Silicon Valley machismo is predictably terrible for women. Under the old geek mode of masculinity, women in tech reported an exhausting litany of workplace microaggressions. But this top-down machismo arguably invites aggression of a more macro sort: sexual harassment and abuse, the rollback of DEI programs and inclusive benefits, and — ultimately, inevitably — even fewer women in leadership or technical positions. “It makes [the workplace culture] misogynistic and sexist — in some cases, not everywhere,” Swisher said. But in places where the bros in charge have adopted more masculine posturing or explicitly moved against DEI, she added, “they set it up as if it’s a giant video game in which they’re the main player, and then they populate it with people like them.”

For consumers, meanwhile, the trend yields worse products with fewer safeguards. Even male executives have admitted as much: Evan Williams, a co-founder of Twitter, once said harassment would be less prevalent on the platform if the company hired more women early on. At Reddit, it took Ellen Pao, the site’s first female leader, to finally cleanse the platform of its most toxic communities.

“I do think people who are in touch with the harm caused by the platform not doing anything are going to be more empathetic to the users who experience it,” Pao told Links.

What is really interesting about the pandemic is that I think many or even most people have realized they would like to live a slower, quieter life, and also that that kind of life is basically economically, socially and structurally impossible for the vast majority of Americans

Response: In the latest Vox Conversations episode, @annehelen and @cwarzel talk with @seanilling about why we need to rethink the role of work in our lives.