The early days of COVID brought a new sense of urgency to shopping for certain items. Toilet paper, pasta and bread flew off the shelves as people stocked up on vital supplies. Then came the must-have purchases to help with the tedium of lockdowns, with hot tubs, kitchen gadgets and new pets becoming extremely popular...
Category: Digital trends
Software Development Team Trends for 2022
Software development teams will continue to work remotely in 2022. Remote work is here to stay, and employees won't come back to the office.
Web3 – Current State of Affairs
Web3 is a blockchain-based attempt to technically and socially improve and decentralize the World Wide Web.
Proof of Stake – Will this make Ethereum Eco-Friendly?
NFTs, so called non fungible tokens that can represent digital art, music and videos, saw a huge increase in demand last year, reaching $44 billion. The blockchain network that most NFTs are traded on is Ethereum. The massive media coverage, however, drew attention to another issue: the huge energy wastefulness involved in cryptocurrency mining. This...
Digital Trends in Retail 2022
It's clear that digital transformation in retail has been accelerated by the recent global events and that this trend won't slow down.
The Twitter Surveillance State
When Justine Sacco, who in 2013, before a flight to South Africa, tweeted a joke about getting AIDS on Twitter it blew up, as did her life.
Massive online surveillance by PenLink: Google is ‘best’, Apple ‘phenomenal’
A small Nebraska company called PenLink claims it does very good business with law enforcement agencies in the US and around the world. The company specializes in helping investigators monitor users of messenger services and social networks. Acting as an intermediate instance, they collect the data streams from Facebook, Google & Co. and passes them...
AirTags have serious Privacy Issues
When Apple released AirTags last spring, many marvelled at the effectiveness of the coin-shaped trackers in locating lost items. At the same time, many early reviewers raised concerns because the AirTag's remarkable accuracy makes it a powerful stalking tool. This was proven by several cases of stalking that got a larger media coverage. There is...
TikTok’s secret algorithm is its greatest strength – and could also be its undoing
I have a ten-year-old niece named Divya (not her real name) in rural northern India. Two years ago, I visited and she came running to hug me. I asked what was the best gift I could give her, and all she wanted was for me to follow her on TikTok. Divya posts videos of her...
A little bit of Consciousness
Ilya Sutskever is a senior scientist at OpenAI with a certain knack for PR. With a casual tweet, Sutskever revived a long-closed discussion: The question of whether artificial intelligence can ever possess a consciousness. Sutskever suggested that the large neural networks of today "have a little bit of consciousness". OpenAI, which Sutskever founded with Elon...
