An Oral History of Wikipedia, the Web’s Encyclopedia
The story of the crowd-sourced encyclopedia.
The Confessions of Marcus Hutchins, the Hacker Who Saved the Internet
The compelling story of a hacker who stopped a massive cyber-attack, only to be arrested.
The System That Actually Worked
The internet has dealt with unprecendented levels of traffic during lockdown, and has largely managed to cope.
The Drone Boat of ‘Shipwreck Alley’
A self-driving boat is helping with the discovery and exploration of shipwrecks.
Clearview AI Says Its Facial Recognition Software Identified A Terrorism Suspect. The Cops Say That’s Not True.
Clearview AI’s offering to police forces of facial recognition using images scraped from social profiles and elsewhere across the web is either a dystopian vision of a surveillance state, or next generation policing tool, depending on your perspective. This story suggests the company’s pitch may be out of sync with the reality.
The Secret History of Facial Recognition
A look at the ingenious, secretive, technical research undertaken in the 1960s on what now seem ludicrously underpowered machines, that formed some of the earliest steps in what would eventually become the field of facial recognition software.
The Decade Tech Lost Its Way
An account of how a positive vision for technology’s impact on society curdled over the course of a decade, narrated by people at the centre of the industry – from the Arab Spring, to the slow-down of Moore’s Law, to the launch of Instagram.
Big Tech’s Big Defector
The story of a Silicon Valley cheerleader, and significant investor, turned vocal critic.
Why I (Still) Love Tech: In Defense of a Difficult Industry
Paul Ford (writer of the fantastic What is Code? story from Journal 3 – bit.ly/bloomberg-code) assesses an industry under increasing public scrutiny.
How Algorithms Know What You’ll Type Next
A dive into the predictive algorithms prevalent in many digital applications.