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Shadowboxing and Geopolitics on the Dark Web

Mohar Chatterjee Politico
The takedown of a Russian darknet marketplace exposed cracks within the cyber-criminal underworld — and the global effort to shut down these digital black markets.

Stop Here. And Look.

Devin Short Lady Science
The labor pattern ECP scientists envisioned treated the new systems as super-charged desk calculators operated by people like Snyder who, they believed, would not create new knowledge. 

Public Attitudes Toward Computer Algorithms

Aaron Smith Pew Research Center
Americans express broad concerns over the fairness and effectiveness of computer programs making important decisions in people’s lives

books

Broad Band

Dylan Schleicher 800-CEO-READ
A "computer" used to be a job description, not just a machine. At the time, most computers were women. Dylan Schleicher reviews a fascinating history of how "computers" helped make the computer networks that are so interwoven into contemporary life.

Silicon Valley Wants Access to Your Brain

Andrea Capocci il Manifesto
Soon, speaking and typing may be old-fashioned forms of communication. The new wave of Silicon Valley products will use your brain as the interface. Will bioethicists be able to control the new technology?

The Computer That Mastered Go

Go is often viewed as a game computers could never play. Now AlphaGo has proven the naysayers wrong, beating a world-class Go player for the first time. 

Brainlike Computers, Learning From Experience

John Markoff New York Times
These computers are not programmed instead, connections between the circuits are “weighted” according to correlations in data that the processor has already “learned.” Those weights are then altered as data flows in to the chip, causing them to change their values. That generates a signal that travels to other components and, in reaction, changes the neural network, programming the next actions much the same way that information alters human thoughts and actions.
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