Thursday, May 8, 2025

Google Stocks Tumble After Apple Exec Testimony

Google Stocks
Shares in Google parent Alphabet plunged more than eight percent last 7 May after Apple executive Eddy Cue testified in federal court that Google's search traffic on Apple devices declined last month for the first time in over two decades.

Cue, Apple's senior vice president of services, told the Washington antitrust trial that Google was losing ground to AI alternatives like ChatGPT and Perplexity.

His revelation that this decline "has never happened in 22 years" sent shockwaves through Wall Street, wiping more than US$ 170 billion from Google's market capitalization in a single trading session.

The testimony came during a pivotal trial where District Judge Amit Mehta will determine remedies for Google's previously ruled illegal search monopoly.

The case, ongoing since 2020, has exposed Google's practice of paying Apple tens of billions dollars annually to remain the default search engine on Safari browsers and Apple smartphones.

Investors were further unsettled when Cue suggested Apple might soon offer AI alternatives as default search options on its devices, heightening concerns that Google's advertising revenue could face serious threats from AI competitors.

With the three-week trial set to conclude Friday, government attorneys are pushing Judge Mehta to order Google to divest its Chrome browser.

They argue that AI technologies will only strengthen Google's dominance by leveraging its vast data resources across products like Maps, YouTube, and Chrome to stifle competition.

However, Cue's testimony bolstered Google's defense that AI is already disrupting its search dominance, with chatbots now posing legitimate threats to its business model.

When Judge Mehta issues his ruling in August, he could end Google's default search agreements with Apple and others -- a prospect that Cue told the court he was "losing sleep" over, with potential revenue losses impacting Apple's product development and operating system investment.

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Wednesday, May 7, 2025

What Is Surveillance Capitalism And How It Used In Social Media

Surveillance Capitalism
The world of freebies and "claiming what you don't own" in apps and social media have made it nearly indisputable, heralding a previously unimaginable tech panopticon known as "surveillance capitalism."

According to Joe Wilkins of Futurism, surveillance capitalism came about when some crafty software engineers realized that advertisers were willing to pay bigtime for our personal data, which builds up as users surf the web. That data helps advertising corporations "understand their audience" and "deliver highly relevant content," and has expanded into a global data trade as more and more people spend more time online.

The data trade is how social media platforms like Google, YouTube, and TikTok make their bones. In 2022, the data industry raked in just north of US$ 274 billion worth of revenue. By 2030, it's expected to explode to just under US$ 700 trillion.

And as the data trade expands, so too does the tech behind it. What were once chintzy if endearing tabloid-style popups — "Doctors hate him! See how he reversed his age with one weird trick" — have now become hyper-personalized ads crafted and delivered for very specific groups of users, a system called "social media targeting."

Wilkins added that targeted ads on social media are made possible by analyzing four key metrics: one's personal info, like gender and age; interests, like the music they listen to or the comedians to follow; their "off app" behavior, like what websites users browse after watching a YouTube video; and "psychographics," meaning general trends glossed from behavior over time, like social values and lifestyle habits.

The evolution of these metrics is important to understanding the all-consuming nature of surveillance capitalism — even a scathing rant about surveillance capitalism becomes fodder for the machine, as users can clearly see with the ads on this page. When deep-pocketed advertisers are involved, positive and negative traits alike become dollar signs; search terms to be probed, analyzed, and used for profit.

A recent tell-all book by former Facebook insider Sarah Wynn-Williams, titled "Careless People," is blowing the lid on the sheer depravity of the social media giant's targeting machine. Wynn-Williams worked at Facebook — which subsequently changed its name to Meta a few years back — from 2011 to 2017, eventually rising to the role of public policy director.

As early as 2017, Wynn-Williams writes, Facebook was exploring ways to expand its ad targeting abilities to thirteen-to-seventeen-year-olds across Facebook and Instagram — a decidedly vulnerable group, often in the throes of adolescent image and social crises.

Though Facebook's ad algorithms are notoriously opaque, in 2017 The Australian alleged that the company had crafted a pitch deck for advertisers bragging that it could exploit "moments of psychological vulnerability" in its users by targeting terms like "worthless," "insecure," "stressed," "defeated," "anxious," "stupid," "useless," and "like a failure."

The social media company likewise tracked when adolescent girls deleted selfies, "so it can serve a beauty ad to them at that moment," according to Wynn-Williams. Other examples of Facebook's ad lechery are said to include the targeting of young mothers based on their emotional state, as well as emotional indexes mapped to racial groups, like a "Hispanic and African American Feeling Fantastic Over-index."

"To me, this type of surveillance and monetization of young teens’ sense of worthlessness feels like a concrete step toward the dystopian future Facebook’s critics had long warned of," Wynn-Williams reflects.

The author says that when the news first broke back in 2017, the executives behind the advertising drive were nonplussed. The company crafted a cookie-cutter statement: "We take this very seriously and are taking every effort to remedy the situation." A junior researcher was fired, "even though that poor researcher was most likely just doing what her bosses wanted... another nameless young woman who was treated as cannon fodder."

And yet, work on this kind of sleezy ad-targeting continued. Wynn-Williams writes that the deputy chief privacy officer at the time confirmed, "not only does Facebook offer this type of customized behavioral targeting," but that "there's a product team working on a tool that would allow advertisers to do this themselves, without Facebook's help."

Wynn-Williams says that, as she worked to wrap her head around her company's sordid revenue model and craft effective PR statements, her bosses raged at the idea that there was any problem with targeting vulnerable youth. (Meta took legal action against the book, forcing Wynn-Williams to stop promoting it, but that didn't stop it from becoming a bestseller.)

"This is the business, Sarah. We’re proud of this," one of the top advertising executives told her at the time. "We shout this from the rooftops. This is what puts money in all our pockets. And these statements make it look like it’s something nefarious."

In response to questions about the book, a Meta spokesperson didn't directly Wynn-Williams' claims, but pointed us to a 2017 blog post the company published about The Australian's reporting.

"The premise of the article is misleading," it read. "Facebook does not offer tools to target people based on their emotional state. The analysis done by an Australian researcher was intended to help marketers understand how people express themselves on Facebook. It was never used to target ads and was based on data that was anonymous and aggregated."

The age of surveillance capitalism has brought us many dystopian horrors, which tech researchers and journalists are working tirelessly to uncover. Among them, it seems, is the monetization of despair and insecurity — the skin-crawling epitome of everything that those critics have been saying about surveillance capitalism from the start.

As the philosopher Antonio Gramsci wrote from his prison cell in Fascist Italy: "The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters."

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Tuesday, May 6, 2025

Best Description Of The Game Called Golf

Robin Williams
In honor of Robin Williams' considerable impact on entertainment, his extensive charitable work and his incisive social commentary, below is one of his famous quotes about the game of golf.

Williams, unlike peers Bill Murray and Norm Macdonald (also RIP), wasn't much of golfer himself but he clearly grasped its simple pleasures and unique torments. He also played golf in the movie, "Old Dogs".

Below is a sample of his classic brand of comedy in a nutshell.

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Monday, May 5, 2025

Growing Online Trafficking Of Endangered Species

Online Traffickers
Researchers from the University of Miami has sifted through thousands of online listings and found some of them are enabling the trafficking of endangered species. In their recent study, they identified 546 listings for endangered or trade-restricted animals representing 83 species.

The researchers developed a tool that automatically collects data across 148 English-text online marketplaces to analyze online sales of threatened animal species, according to their writeup published by Phys.org.

The tool was used to search for online sales of 13,267 animal species classified as at risk of global extinction by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and 706 animal species listed in Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. The search was conducted over a period of 15 weeks in 2018.

Their study revealed that the shortfin mako is one of the most targeted threatened species in online wildlife trafficking. The endangered shark species is exploited for its jaws and other body parts, which are sold on hundreds of social media sites and open markets.

The researchers also identified other threatened shark species through their study, including the longfin mako, scalloped hammerhead, sandbar, and pelagic thresher. Sharks represented nine of the 10 most threatened species identified in this study.

According to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), not all wildlife trade is illegal, but it becomes a serious problem when it overexploits species and threatens their survival in the wild. Efforts to crack down on wildlife trafficking have been implemented, but online trafficking is hard to address.

Professor Jennifer Jacquet, one of the authors of the study, explained that online platforms typically aren't held legally responsible for sales since they're considered marketplaces where buyers and sellers can connect for transactions.

Wildlife trafficking poses a threat not only to the endangered species but also to humans. Illegally traded species may become invasive when introduced to unfamiliar environments. Some species may carry zoonotic diseases that could transfer to humans and threaten global health.

Trafficking can also negatively impact biodiversity. According to the WWF, species and organisms in the wild work together to maintain balance in ecosystems, where we get food and clean water.

"Society has underestimated the threat posed by the trade in wildlife," Jacquet warned, per Phys.org.

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Saturday, May 3, 2025

MIT Developed New Method In Fabrication

Fabricating Materials
Several researchers at MIT have developed a new technique for fabricating materials, allowing them to become flexible while also staying strong and somewhat stiff.

According to the MIT News report, the research team achieved this by using a microscopic double-network design that combines microscopic struts and a woven architecture. This combination was first tested on a plexiglass-like polymer, which allowed it to stretch four times its size before breaking. However, the same technique could be applied to other materials, like glass, ceramics, and metals, extending its possibilities to other industries, like semiconductors.

This metamaterial design gets its strength from microscopic struts and trusses, making it rigid but brittle. However, by adding a thread-like structure made of coils that wrap around the linear support structure, the polymer material was able to stretch three times its size before failing, some ten times more than a material just using the basic lattice structure.

"We are opening up this new territory for metamaterials," says MIT Associate Professor Carlos Portela, who is part of the team behind this research. "You could print a double-network metal or ceramic, and you could get a lot of these benefits, in that it would take more energy to break them, and they would be significantly more stretchable."

The secret to its added flexibility comes from the knots and entanglements of the thread structure within the lattice frame. This allows it to absorb more stress, and when a crack appears on a strut, it’s unlikely to propagate through because of how the energy is spread unevenly through the material.

"Think of this woven network as a mess of spaghetti tangled around a lattice. As we break the monolithic lattice network, those broken parts come along for the ride, and now all this spaghetti gets entangled with the lattice pieces," Portela told MIT News. “That promotes more entanglement between woven fibers, which means you have more friction and more energy dissipation.”

Manufacturers can potentially apply this new technique in semiconductors, allowing them to build flexible chips that they can install on garments and other wearable accessories. Furthermore, the research team is exploring the use of two different materials for the structure. One example is to use polymers that react differently to temperature, so that the material becomes softer and more compliant in cold environments, while harder and more rigid in hot temperatures.

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