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Two interesting quotes from Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde concerning file-sharing in an article at TorrentFreak. First, he mentions how file-sharing “paved the way for legal streaming services”:

“File-sharing has definitely helped the rise of services like Spotify and Netflix,” Sunde told M3, noting that this wasn’t what the Pirate Bay team envisioned. Instead, they wanted to move the power back from large companies to individual artists.”

Second, the importance of file-sharing for people around the world:

“I constantly meet people all over the world who tell me how important it has been (and is) for them to have access to materials. People who otherwise could not have the profession they have or who have learned the language and culture,” Sunde said.

An interesting report on the deployments of biometric and behavioural mass surveillance in EU Member States was recently published. The report was commissioned by the commissioned by the Greens/EFA in the European Parliament.

The online report furthermore includes a clever visualization of a network showing connections between MS authorities and public and private partners.

In an opinion piece at The Financial Times, Izabella Kaminska compares the creation of Meta/Facebook’s metaverse to the creation of Las Vegas during The Great Depression of the 1930:

In the long run, if there is any moral to the Las Vegas story it’s that if you want to bootstrap a fantasy realm for the purpose of enriching a small elite at the expense of users, it helps to have a repressed, desperate and captured demographic within your proximity. With the metaverse it’s unlikely to be any different. You’re still going to be the product. You may be more accepting of it, but only because base reality is getting more and more like historic Boulder City by the day.

Two interesting articles from MIT Technology Review:

• This article examines what might happen with the biometric databases that were established in Afghanistan following the Taliban’s takeover of the country.
• Another article discusses “TikTok’s decision to use a woman’s voice without her permission” as very literal example of how women’s voices are written out of the history of computing.

• Hannah Fry write at The New Yorker about how visualizations have data have shaped the way we solve problems.
• An article at Ian Visits on the use of wooden shutters to reflect sunlight as a way to light building.
• Some notes on the history of regular expression in a blog post at Why is this interesting.

An article from Slate.com describes photography technique used by photographer Jay Mark Johnson to “emphasize time over space”:

[H]e uses a slit camera that emphasizes time over space. Whatever remains still is smeared into stripes, while the motion of crashing waves, cars and a Tai Chi master’s hands are registered moment by moment, as they pass his camera by. Like an EKG showing successive heartbeats, the width of an object corresponds not to distance or size, but the rate of movement. Viewing the left side of the picture is not looking leftward in space but backward in time.

In an article at The Atlantic Ian Bogost writes about the differences between the Facebook Papers and older leaked documents:

The Facebook Papers are, in aggregate, a supersensory supply of materials about a social network, produced on its own, internal social network, prima facie assumed to have meaning whose depth exceeds their surface, and mustered as rapidly as possible to generate emotions. They’re a tiny outrage machine, sucking the exhaust from a much bigger one.

Furthermore, he notes that the analysis of these documents reflects the discourses on social media platforms themselves:

This dance between Facebook’s internal debates and journalists’ interpretation of them as withering revelations repeats the ritual that online debate has normalized: Posts beget discourse that begets ever more posts that take the place of action, let alone knowledge. Depth and surface become indistinguishable, always implying that there’s more to the story, only to recede back into the shadows moments later.

Facebook/Meta is shutting down its facial recognition system. They explain their choice in this blog post.

But the many specific instances where facial recognition can be helpful need to be weighed against growing concerns about the use of this technology as a whole. There are many concerns about the place of facial recognition technology in society, and regulators are still in the process of providing a clear set of rules governing its use. Amid this ongoing uncertainty, we believe that limiting the use of facial recognition to a narrow set of use cases is appropriate.

The Markup has investigated the shadowy industry of collecting and selling location data. The article details some worrisome examples of very invasive practices.

Fascinating photography in this series: “China Says Goodbye to Crypto Mining”

Dozens of cryptocurrency mining centers were shuttered last month in Southwest China’s Sichuan province in the wake of a June 18 clean-up notice from local authorities as the country intensified its crackdown on cryptocurrency trading and mining. Sichuan is China’s second-biggest Bitcoin mining province, where most miners take advantage of the mountainous region’s abundant sources of hydropower to run their electricity-hungry computers.