Curated Commons // Edition 94
Thank you for subscribing and welcome to the 94th edition of Curated Commons. Happy reading, and do pass on the newsletter and share it on your social networks if you find it interesting! It’s free!
Let’s dive right in ($ indicates potential paywall).
Desi tech skills for hire. For illegal hacking.
One very good investigative piece on how for-hire Indian hackers are helping US & European lawyers get an edge in litigation through shady practices. - Read here
Luring jobseekers into espionage, Chinese style
Chinese authorities go to some serious extent to draw out info. - Read here ($)
Moderation is hard, till it is not
Pretty telling that moderation, even it if it is algorithmic, is ultimately the result of a human’s choices. - Read here
Can an AI system be an author?
A scientist asked GPT-3 to write an academic paper about itself and then tried to get the paper published. What happened next….was it raised a lot of questions - Read here
Tollywood takes on Bollywood
The Telugu (my first language!) film industry earned about $212 Mn last year. Hindi language focused Bollywood made $197 Mn. - Read here ($)
#TIL Truman babies
Apparently, these are kids whose families shared their lives on YouTube since birth. They are now coming of age. - Read here
Minority Report was just ahead of time
There’s now a new algorithm that can apparently predict crime a week in advance. With all the associated risks of bad data and bias. - Read here
Friends smell like one another. Says Science
Don’t stink. - Read here ($)
Want a bunk bed up in the air?
Air New Zealand is installing bunk bed-style sleeping pods that you can rent for 4 hours at a time on long-haul flights. - Read here
Pushing back the surveillance state
Organized pushback in France’s second-largest city Marseilles on increase in camera-based surveillance - Read here
3D Printing to fight PPE shortages
Open source design and 3D Printing helped play a part in fighting shortages of PPE in Nigeria. - Read here
One 3D printer operator and one assembler produced on average one face shield in 1 hour 30 minutes, costing 1,200 Naira (£2.38) and one mask in 3 hours 3 minutes costing 2,000 Naira (£3.97). In comparison, at the time of the project, commercially available face shields cost at least 5,000 Naira (£9.92) and reusable masks cost 10,000 Naira (£19.84).
When incumbents ‘get’ tech
Walmart is pushing the envelope when it comes to hybrid cloud/multi-cloud - Read here ($)
More Interesting Reads:
A startup is using drones to replant forests burnt in wildfires - Read here
The iPhone is 15 years old. Good documentary from WSJ - See here
Nearly a quarter of the earth’s seafloor is now mapped - Read here
Telcos/ISPs in the US never fail to amuse - “Couple bought home in Seattle, then learned Comcast Internet would cost $27,000” - Read here
“DeFi’s Existential Problem: It Only Lends Money to Itself” - Read here ($)
Two Pieces on the transformation of Hong Kong. - Economist; FT
Science, FTW! Pfizer, BioNTech are testing a universal vaccine for coronaviruses. - Read here
“What if the internet was run by women?” - Read here
“A Saudi prince, a Taliban financier, international spycraft and pallets of US dollars — it’s a story with everything. Except evidence.” - Read here ($)
Bingeing might not be good for Netflix. Anymore. - Read here
On 50 years of Nike, the swoosh and how the brand is much more beyond sports now - Read here ($)
The cost of regulation
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