Internet
In OneZero. More on Medium.
Hours after a baby is born, its internet presence begins — no matter what we try to do to stop it
The day after my wife delivered our first baby, a photographer knocked on the door of our hospital room and offered to take pictures. We were sleep-deprived, dazed from the realization that everything we once considered “normal” had just been smashed with a sledgehammer, and emotionally speaking, we were puddles of liquid. Of course, we let her in.
Later on, when I looked over the terms of service on the photographer’s company-issued iPad, I noticed that one of the default checked boxes authorized it to use the photos in online marketing materials. Without hesitating, I unchecked it and told the…
To mark the web’s 32nd birthday, Sir Tim Berners-Lee calls for internet access for all, a fight against abuse and misinformation, and more
Last year, we marked the web’s birthday just one day after the World Health Organization declared the Covid-19 crisis a pandemic. In the 12 months since, the web — like so many of us — has been tested like never before. Today, as the web turns 32, it has proven to be a lifeline that allows us to adapt and carry on.
Now, as we repair and rebuild, we have an opportunity to reimagine our world and create something better. The web’s power to catalyze change can and must help shape the world we want.
Across the globe, young people…
Some rural residents, religious communities, and people who just like simple phones are still reliant on the vanishing network
Over the years, Mia Lipsit has innovated a number of tech workarounds to avoid buying a smartphone: She’s hacked her Kindle Fire to download Google Play (so she can use the Whole Foods app), listens to podcasts on an old iPod, and stays in touch with friends using a flip phone.
But in October, the fiftysomething New York City resident realized her days of smartphone-free living are coming to an end. That’s when Verizon customer service informed her that, beginning January 1, her simple cellphone would be rendered useless by the sunsetting of 3G.
“It’s the end of an era,”…
2020 was a big year for the internet. As Covid-19 spread worldwide and many countries descended into monthslong lockdowns, much of daily life moved online. Racial justice, mass surveillance, and America’s contentious elections took center stage, too — both online and off. Each year, the Mozilla Foundation takes the internet’s vital signs and publishes a report on its health. This year, it’s not looking good.
If you feel like you were online all the time in 2020, you’re not alone. According to the Foundation, use of the Firefox browser (a proxy for overall internet use) increased almost 15% overnight as…
In another era, Parler would have owned its servers—and remained online
When Amazon Web Services decided to stop hosting the alt-right social network Parler last week following the insurrection at the Capitol, it looked like the site was doomed to go offline.
Migrating an app successfully between cloud providers, and ensuring it works on the other side as expected, is hard enough. But moving the vast amounts of data associated with a social network (likely hundreds of terabytes of information) would be agonizingly slow, taking far longer than the 24-hour warning Amazon gave Parler.
Unfortunately for Parler, virtually every other vendor was ditching them as well. With cloud providers rejecting them…
It’s hard to imagine the internet without Wikipedia. Just like the air we breathe, the definitive digital encyclopedia is the default resource for everything and everyone — from Google’s search bar to undergrad students embarking on research papers. It has more than 6 million entries in English, it is visited hundreds of millions of times per day, and it reflects whatever the world has on its mind: Trending pages this week include Tanya Roberts (R.I.P.), the Netflix drama Bridgerton, and, oh yes, the 25th Amendment to the United States Constitution.
It was also never meant to exist — at least…
As the AIDS epidemic spread, Ben Gardiner took to the nascent internet — and shaped the way we share health information online
Ben Gardiner was a larger-than-life mainstay of San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood in the 1980s. He had wavy white hair, big eyebrows, and a bushy beard that took Santa Claus to task. He rarely left the house without his signature pair of coveralls. His voice boomed; when he entered a room, “he was a presence,” his friend Paul Boneberg told OneZero.
Gardiner joined just about every gay organization in the city, organizing mailing lists, hosting meetings, and leading marches. He seemed to work full-time as an activist, piecing together an income through freelance side projects. …
‘If you’re going to have users generating content, you’re going to have users generating harmful content’
Last week, Evelyn Douek, a Harvard lecturer who studies online speech, spoke to OneZero’s Will Oremus about a rising tide of moderation controversies across platforms as diverse as Peloton, Pornhub, Facebook, and YouTube.
Peloton has hosted QAnon hashtags; Pornhub has a deeply troubling child pornography issue; and there’s not space enough in this post to enumerate the issues with those other two.
“If you’re going to have users generating content, you’re going to have users generating harmful content,” Douek said.
The responses to these problems have become predictable and, in some ways, ineffectual, she said. Oremus paraphrased a four-point theory…
“I’m supposedly faking every single aspect of my identity for some Instagram followers,” one target says.
At the height of summer last year, Sophie received an Instagram DM on her phone from an account she didn’t follow. “I’m going to make you disabled,” it read. With it came a photograph, one of her and her friends crossing the street. The photo suggested to Sophie — a 22-year-old who asked that her real name not be used — that not only did this stranger know where she lived, but they were watching her. The threat, and others like it that she’d been receiving for months, soon made her dread leaving the house. …
Trackers piggybacking on website tools leave some site operators in the dark about who is watching or what marketers do with the data
By Aaron Sankin and Surya Mattu
Kara Zajac said SPART*A, a small nonprofit serving transgender military service members and veterans, helped her begin her transition while in the Navy. To give back, she volunteered to build the group’s website in her spare time after leaving the military — and kept her eye on a key value: privacy.
“I don’t track users,” Zajac said. “Not everyone in the military is wanting to be known for being trans. They might not be out yet. So any time we can protect privacy in that way, we try to do it.”
