Monopolizing
our privacy? Not sure I buy (or completely understand) these
arguments.
Ben
Brody reports:
Antitrust authorities probing Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google have struggled with scrutinizing companies whose products are popular and free. Now they may have a solution: Use privacy as a test.
As the U.S. Justice Department, Federal Trade Commission, Congress and the states investigate whether internet companies are flouting antitrust laws, academics and even some regulators are pushing to go beyond the traditional focus on price as a determinant of harm. Enforcers, they say, should also consider privacy lapses as a proxy for anti-competitive behavior.
Read
more on Bloomberg
[From
the article:
Their
legal reasoning goes like this: Monopolists generally stop
innovating, let product quality slip and treat customers poorly,
knowing no competitor has the ability to grab market share. Repeated
privacy lapses can be a sign that a company -- Facebook is often
cited as a prime example -- has let product quality and customer
service slip, knowing its social-media dominance is unassailable.
Because
4% isn’t enough.
UK
Data Protection Watchdog Asks for Seizure Powers
… For
most businesses 4% of annual global turnover is indeed a significant
amount. However in a world of Googles and Facebooks, many have
questioned whether even these larger fines could be absorbed as a
“cost of doing business” with little or no deterrent effect.
Nonetheless with data protection authorities across Europe flexing
their muscles, the increase in potential fines seemed, for now,
sufficient.
But
this week (8 November) the British watchdog, the Information
Commissioner’s Office (ICO) said that it wanted further powers to
seize assets – including data – under the Proceeds of Crime Act
2002 (POCA).
… The
proposed new rules would only apply in the case of criminal offenses,
which are recordable under the current data protection law. But the
only sanction available to the courts is a fine. Similar to the
“cost of doing business” scenario noted above, criminals could
shrug this off as the fine is likely to be much less than the
financial gains made by the offender. “This will inevitably lead
to a greater disparity between the deterrent and punitive effects of
sanctions imposed in relation to civil breaches and criminal
offences,” said the ICO.
Someone
my students should follow.
Stephen
Wolfram on the future of programming and why we live in a
computational universe
… The
British-born computer scientist's life is littered with exceptional
achievements -- completing a PhD in theoretical physics at Caltech at
age 20, winning a MacArthur Genius Grant at 21, and creating the
technical computing platform Mathematica (which is used by millions
of mathematicians, scientists, and engineers worldwide), plus the
Wolfram Language, and the Wolfram|Alpha knowledge engine.
… For
all his other achievements, Wolfram is probably best known for
launching Wolfram|Alpha, the computational knowledge engine that
underpins Apple's
Siri digital
assistant's ability to answer questions from "What's the tallest
building in the US?" to "How many days until Christmas?".
Perspective. Architecture for AI.
8 ways to
prepare your data center for AI’s power draw
For
data centers running typical enterprise applications, the average
power consumption for a rack is around 7 kW. Yet it’s common for
AI applications to use more than 30 kW per rack, according to data
center organization AFCOM.
That’s because AI requires much higher processor utilization, and
the processors – especially GPUs – are power hungry. Nvidia
GPUs, for example, may run several orders of magnitude faster than a
CPU, but they also consume twice as much power per chip.
Complicating the issue is that many data centers are already power
constrained.
Cooling
is also an issue: AI-oriented servers require greater processor
density, which means more chips crammed into the box, and they all
run very hot. Greater density, along with higher utilization,
increases the demand for cooling as compared to a typical back-office
server. Higher cooling requirements in turn raise power demands.
Perspective.
Gartner:
Cloud computing revenues to jump in coming years
Public
cloud-services technology revenues are projected to grow by more than
50 percent worldwide in the next three years, to about $355 billion
in 2022, according to a new report from IT consulting and research
firm Gartner.
Cloud-application
services, also known as software-as-a-service, would remain by far
the largest segment of the cloud-computing market. Its predicted
returns would surge by more than 50 percent in the next three years,
to approximately $151 billion in 2022, reflecting companies’
ability to scale up their use of such subscription-based software.
Cloud-system
infrastructure services, also known as infrastructure-as-a-service,
would see their revenues nearly double, to about $74 billion, by
2022, Gartner projected. The firm attributes the growth to the
demands of modern applications and workloads, which they say require
infrastructure that traditional data centers cannot meet.
Before
the music dies…
Internet
Archive and Boston Public Library to digitize and preserve over
100,000 vinyl LPs
Internet
Archive Blogs –
“Imagine
if your favorite song or nostalgic recording from childhood was lost
forever. This could be the fate of hundreds of thousands of audio
files stored on vinyl, except that the Internet Archive is now
expanding its digitization project to include LPs. Earlier this
year, the Internet Archive began working with the Boston
Public Library (BPL)
to digitize more than 100,000 audio recordings from their sound
collection. The recordings exist in a variety of historical formats,
including wax cylinders, 78 rpms, and LPs. They span musical genres
including classical, pop, rock, and jazz, and contain obscure
recordings like this
album of music for baton twirlers, and
this
record of radio’s all-time greatest bloopers.
Unfortunately, many of these audio files were never translated into
digital formats and are therefore locked in their physical recording.
In order to prevent them from disappearing forever when the vinyl is
broken, warped, or lost, the Internet Archive is digitizing these
at-risk recordings so that they will remain accessible for future
listeners…” [This work is made possible by the Music
Modernization Act ]
[From
the Internet Archive Blog:
Currently,
there are more than 900 LPs from the Boston
Public Library LP collection available
on Archive.org.
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