Author: The Conversation

It’s been a momentous month for space-faring billionaires. On July 11, British entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson’s Unity “rocket-plane” flew him and five fellow passengers about 85 kilometres above Earth. And this week, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ New Shepard capsule reached an altitude of 106km, carrying Bezos, his brother, and the oldest and youngest people ever to reach such a height. Passengers on both flights experienced several minutes of weightlessness and took in breathtaking views of our beautiful and fragile Earth. Both flights created an avalanche of media coverage and brand recognition for Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Bezos’s Blue Origin. There is renewed anticipation of a…

The world’s most sophisticated commercially available spyware may be being abused, according to an investigation by 17 media organisations in ten countries. Intelligence leaks and forensic phone analysis suggests the surveillance software, called Pegasus, has been used to target and spy on the phones of human rights activists, investigative journalists, politicians, researchers and academics. NSO Group, the Israeli cyber intelligence firm behind Pegasus, insists that it only licenses its spyware to vetted government clients in the name of combating transnational crime and terrorism. It has labelled reports from investigative journalists a “vicious and slanderous campaign” upon which it will no longer comment. Yet the founder and chief executive of NSO Group previously…

Many governments are increasingly approaching artificial intelligence with an almost religious zeal. By 2018 at least 22 countries around the world, and also the EU, had launched grand national strategies for making AI part of their business development, while many more had announced ethical frameworks for how it should be allowed to develop. The EU documents more than 290 AI policy initiatives in individual EU member states between 2016 and 2020. The latest is Ireland, which has just announced its national AI strategy, “AI – Here for Good”. It aims to become “an international leader in using AI to benefit our economy and society, through…

For nearly two years, 68 United Nations member states — along with private enterprises, non-governmental organizations, technical communities and academics — participated in an open-ended working group on developments in information and telecommunications in international security (Cyber OEWG). The working group deliberated on responsible state behaviour in cyberspace. In March 2021, the working group produced a final report. The report comes at a critical time in light of the high-profile cyberattacks on SolarWinds and Microsoft Exchange Server, as well as ransomware attacks on critical civilian infrastructures and essential public services. Multi-stakeholder inclusion The Cyber OEWG was established in 2018. It was tasked to continue cybersecurity negotiations in a…

Billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson and his team successfully flew to the “edge of space” on the Unity 22 mission aboard a Virgin Galactic plane on July 12. The event was hailed as the start of space tourism, narrowly beating the planned launch on 20 July by fellow billionaire business magnate Jeff Bezos and his firm Blue Origin. But does the 85km (53 miles), the altitude of the recent Virgin Galactic flight, actually count as space? And what are these companies likely to achieve going forward? The definition of where space begins is very subjective. The Kármán line is a distance of 100km (62 miles), determined in 1957. This line has been adopted…

The video games “Resident Evil: Biohazard” and “Resident Evil: Village” are the most recent releases in Capcom’s long-running survival-horror series. Both games feature first-person gameplay and centre on the protagonist Ethan Winters, who is almost wholly anonymous: his face is hidden in advertisements and in the game. All we know of Ethan is a back-lit silhouette and set of hands, which is what players project onto as they play. Some players have suggested that their experience of the damage to Ethan’s hands stays with them after playing, motivating commentaries on sites like Gamerant. On other game commentary sites like like Kotaku and IGN, writers have…

The cryptocurrency bitcoin now uses up more electricity a year than the whole of Argentina, according to recent estimates from the University of Cambridge. That’s because the creation of a bitcoin, in a process called mining, is achieved by powerful computers that work night and day to decode and solve complex mathematical problems. The energy these computers consume is unusually high. Police in the UK recently raided what they believed to be an extensive indoor marijuana-growing operation, only to discover that the huge electricity usage that had aroused their suspicions was actually coming from a bitcoin-mining setup. Thousands of similar setups, around 70% of which…

One of the joys of watching the Olympics is seeing the speed, strength and grace of the competitors. It’s amazing how the best athletes in the world make it look easy, but for anyone with personal experience in a particular sport, there’s an appreciation for the hard work, sacrifice and dedication that goes into producing medal-winning performances. Given the high standards of Olympic competition, it’s not surprising that coaches and athletes look for any possible advantage — from dietary regimens to equipment innovations and novel training methods — to maximize the chances of success. One of the more recent tools…

Five years since the Brexit vote and three since the Cambridge Analytica scandal, we’re now familiar with the role that targeted political advertising can play in fomenting polarisation. It was revealed in 2018 that Cambridge Analytica had used data harvested from 87 million Facebook profiles, without users’ consent, to help Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign target key voters with online adverts. In the years since, we’ve learned how these kinds of targeted adverts can create political filter bubbles and echo chambers, suspected of dividing people and increasing the circulation of harmful disinformation. But the vast majority of the ads exchanged online are commercial, not political. Commercial targeted advertising is the primary source…

Over the past few weeks, the Chinese government’s crackdown on big tech companies has intensified. The giants have all felt the brunt of heightened regulatory scrutiny. At the end of last year, Ant Group (which owns the payment platform AliPay) failed to go public on the stock market. Chinese regulators cited a lack of compliance with new fintech regulations, which were abruptly introduced a week after founder Jack Ma publicly criticised the existing regulatory regime. Since then, the calculated reining-in of China’s largest tech firms by the government continues unabated, culminating in several high-profile cases over the past month. Two of China’s largest…