The BBC News Verify team has published their first article using a new open media provenance technology called C2PA that we've been working on for the past three years.
This shows where media comes from and how it’s been edited - like an audit trail or a history.
In an age of LLMs, is it time to reconsider human-edited web directories?
Back in the early-to-mid '90s, one of the main ways of finding anything on the web was to browse through a web directory.
These directories generally had a list of categories on their front page. News/Sport/Entertainment/Arts/Technology/Fashion/etc.
Each of those categories had subcategories, and sub-subcategories that you clicked through until you got to a list of websites. These lists were maintained by actual humans.
Typically, these directories also had a limited web search that would crawl through the pages of websites listed in the directory.
Lycos, Excite, and of course Yahoo all offered web directories of this sort.
(EDIT: I initially also mentioned AltaVista. It did offer a web directory by the late '90s, but this was something it tacked on much later.)
By the late '90s, the standard narrative goes, the web got too big to index websites manually.
Google promised the world its algorithms would weed out the spam automatically.
And for a time, it worked.
But then SEO and SEM became a multi-billion-dollar industry. The spambots proliferated. Google itself began promoting its own content and advertisers above search results.
And now with LLMs, the industrial-scale spamming of the web is likely to grow exponentially.
My question is, if a lot of the web is turning to crap, do we even want to search the entire web anymore?
Do we really want to search every single website on the web?
Or just those that aren't filled with LLM-generated SEO spam?
Or just those that don't feature 200 tracking scripts, and passive-aggressive privacy warnings, and paywalls, and popovers, and newsletters, and increasingly obnoxious banner ads, and dark patterns to prevent you cancelling your "free trial" subscription?
At some point, does it become more desirable to go back to search engines that only crawl pages on human-curated lists of trustworthy, quality websites?
And is it time to begin considering what a modern version of those early web directories might look like?
The Emergence of Mind: Where Technology Ends and We Begin by Jeffrey Kane demonstrates the profound and fundamental limitations of the technology and its use as a model of human thinking. In response, the book offers an emergent model of the human mind rooted in our experiences as living, sentient, social and conscious beings.
STORY: Security researchers have created one of the first generative AI worms—which can steal data from emails and send spam messages.
“It basically means that now you have the ability to conduct or to perform a new kind of cyberattack that hasn't been seen before,” says Ben Nassi, a Cornell Tech researcher behind the research.
Please welcome Flipboard U.K. to the Fediverse! 🇬🇧 You can follow the main account, @FlipboardUK, to see all the stories the team is flipping, or these Magazines for specific topics that interest you. Everything is curated by human editors and updated multiple times a day.
The hardest part of this semester was trying to urge #students, amid the available #technologies, to really #read. Most friends worldwide are on mobile phones, preferring short posts, and not easily accessing links. I can therefore be thankful for the global readership of my #publications in these #research#repositories:
Japan's ResearchMap (和英), where I have filled in #Japanese as well as English information about publications (6,600+ downloads): https://researchmap.jp/waoe
Once upon a time, #technology either did what you wanted or it was broken. Or maybe if bad, it worked inefficiently or with great effort.
It feels like around 2005 when it began to change. Technology started actively trying to get YOU to do a different action than you wanted. It started selling YOU.
Now, we desperately struggle to evade bots chasing after and blocking us to do their bidding, while we search for a way to trick programs into approximating an action adjacent to what we want.
Today in Labor History February 27, 1812: Poet Lord Byron gave his first address as a member of the House of Lords. In his speech, he spoke out in support of Luddite violence against industrialism in his home county of Nottinghamshire. He spoke specifically against the Frame Breaking Act, which gave the death penalty to anyone guilty of breaking a machine. The state hanged 60-70 Luddites during the time the law was on the books. However, most of the time, the courts used other laws to convict them.
Wise Animals How Technology Has Made Us What We Are by Tom Chatfield
Explores the history of our relationship with technology, and our deep involvement with our creations from the first use of tools and the taming of fire, via the invention of reading and printing, to the development of the computer, the creation of the internet and the emergence of AI.
Here's a podcast on New Books Network where I talk about (surprise surprise) my new book, 'Visions of a Digital Nation', and why Margaret Thatcher's 1984 #privatisation of British Telecom was a pivotal moment for both #neoliberalism and #digitalisation.
Honestly, I had no idea DuckDuckGo had its own web browser lol. This article reminded me to try out DuckDuckGo's search engine again, and compare its search results with those of Google Search. I was actually surprised to find out that DuckDuckGo churned out way better search results. I'm definitely gonna use it instead of Google from now on.
“Is an attack on American soil imminent and will it lead to World War III? Did the judge in the E. Jean Carroll civil defamation trial take a $5 million bribe to convict Trump? According to some TikToks I saw, yes on both counts.” What happens when a writer for Fast Company spent a week getting his news exclusively from the popular app. https://flip.it/aKJZn- #Tech#Technology#SocialMedia#News#TikTok
The capitalist dream of endless “green growth” and a sustainable high-tech civilization will never come to pass. It is, according to the author of the article below, a literal impossibility — because the concept violates the laws of physics!
Hello,
I was originally on ppb1701@noc.social, but started my own instance.
A little about me, I’m a Software Engineer from Tennessee. Been #Coding for over a decade, primarily in the .Net world, but also some Flutter and Ruby. I enjoy #gaming, #SteamDeck, #Disney, #StarWars, and #StarTrek.
'We think we are studying the world - but in reality we are merely making evident the limits of our own thinking, which are embodied in our logbook and measuring instruments. The truth is always stranger, more lively and more expansive than we can compute.' #DeZinVanHetBoek#TheEssenceOfTheBook
Superstars or Black Holes: Are Tech Clusters Causing Stagnation? - American Affairs Journal ( americanaffairsjournal.org )
How Google is killing independent sites like ours ( housefresh.com )