For my Computer Security and Software Architecture students.
Autonomous vehicles were supposed to make driving
safer, and they may yet—some of the
more optimistic research indicates self-driving cars could save
tens of thousands of lives a year in the U.S. alone. But so far, a
recklessness has defined the culture of the largest companies
pursuing the technology—Uber, Google, and arguably even Tesla—and
has led directly to unnecessary crashes, injury, even death.
Perspective.
Opinion |
Indians are reshaping the Internet
… This is part of a striking trend: Indians
are an increasing powerful presence online. Even with an Internet
penetration rate of less
than 30 percent, India is the largest market for
WhatsApp
and its parent company, Facebook.
It ranks third by users on Instagram and fourth on Twitter,
according to eMarketer, a research firm. Four of Tinder’s top 10
cities by paying users are
in India. And 1 in 10 Uber rides globally occurs in India, a
proportion that is set to grow.
Tech leaders look at these statistics with cartoon
dollar signs on their eyes. India was the only
country to get its own section in the “recent milestones”
section of Amazon founder and chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos’s
letter to shareholders this year. (Bezos also owns The Post.) And
Sundar Pichai, the Indian-born chief executive of Google, has
mentioned India in six
out of the company’s last seven earnings calls. The investment
bank Morgan Stanley expects smartphone penetration to more than
double between 2017 and 2020.
… But for years, data prices remained high and
growth slow. That changed in September 2016, with the launch
of Jio, a mobile network offering low-cost, high-speed data. Other
networks scrambled to compete, offering ever-greater data allowances
at lower prices. The effect is startling: Mobile Internet
connections grew from 346
million in late 2016 to 491
million this year, according to India’s telecoms regulator. In
the same period, monthly data consumption jumped by a factor of more
than 13, to 3.2 gigabytes per user.
As Indians come online in the hundreds of
millions, the first thing they do is connect with their friends on
WhatsApp and Facebook. They then stream Bollywood movies and
pornography. Lots of pornography. Searches for “Hindi sexy film”
on PornHub grew 27,814 percent in 2018.
This is way out of my comfort zone, but it caught
my eye. Interesting (or strange) my library offers this as an Audio
book or an eBook, but not in print.
The
nation-state of the internet
The internet is a community, but can it be a
nation-state?
… That question led me to Imagined
Communities, a book from 1983 and one of the most lauded (and
debated) social science works ever published. Certainly it is among
the most heavily cited: Google
Scholar pegs it at almost 93,000 citations.
… Anderson’s answer is his title: people
come to form nations when they can imagine their community and the
values and people it holds, and thus can demarcate the borders
(physical and cognitive) of who is a member of that hypothetical club
and who is not.
I wonder if Dilbert teaches...
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