Sunday, December 16, 2018

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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