All posts tagged: Internet

Lawmakers Want to Cut Low-Income Schoolchildren Off from the Internet

Lawmakers Want to Cut Low-Income Schoolchildren Off from the Internet

Published by José

This week, the Senate voted to shutter a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) program that provides free internet for low-income children, which could risk cutting them off from tools they need to do homework. As Ars Technica reports, the GOP-controlled Senate voted along party lines to repeal the late Biden-era initiative that lends out free Wi-Fi hotspots to schools so that kids who lack internet access at home can get connected. In a statement announcing the repeal vote, senator Ted Cruz called the program “illegal, harmful to children, duplicative of other government programs, and a blatant overreach” that would undermine parents’ ability to monitor their kids’ internet activities. Those on the other side of the aisle, however, see it quite differently. “It would be a disgrace if we deprive those students and their families of this vast resource, of literally life-changing access to a really necessary service that helps them not just now but throughout their futures,” said senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, after voting against the repeal. “We ought to expand Internet access, not constrict it. …

Best Internet Providers in Greensboro, North Carolina

Best Internet Providers in Greensboro, North Carolina

Published by skeptic

What is the best internet provider in Greensboro? If you’re looking for the best internet provider in Greensboro, you’ll need to consider a few factors, including budget, speed and overall availability. Some providers may offer top speeds but aren’t budget-friendly; others may be affordable but not available at your address. CNET’s experts have tested available internet providers to help you find the best option to fit your needs. AT&T Fiber stands out as the best ISP in Greensboro due to its local fiber coverage, fast plans and high customer satisfaction. AT&T Fiber also offers a fast 5,000 megabits per second internet plan in Greensboro and free equipment rental, a perk not available from all internet providers in the area. Fellow fiber internet provider, Lumos Fiber, has the fastest speeds of any major provider in the area, with plans ranging from 500Mbps to 8,000Mbps. If fiber internet is unavailable at your address, Spectrum is your best bet for wired internet with coverage spanning 92% of Greensboro, according to the Federal Communications Commission. As CNET’s top pick …

Best Internet Providers in Alaska

Best Internet Providers in Alaska

Published by skeptic

Alaska has a lot to offer, including rugged natural beauty, national parks, stunning glaciers and fresh seafood. However, the offerings are limited when it comes to internet options available to the state’s 730,000 residents. Whether it’s fiber, fixed wireless, DSL or satellite, you’ll have to make some compromises when picking an internet service provider in Alaska. According to our CNET experts, GCI is the top pick for most in the state — if it’s available in your neighborhood. What is the best internet provider in Alaska? GCI is CNET’s pick for the best internet service provider in Alaska, thanks to top speeds of 2.5 gigabits per second and the widest (and still growing) availability of any wired provider in the state. If you’re hunting for the lowest prices around or the fastest blazing speeds, we’ve also found those top options. One of the cheapest internet plans in Alaska is offered by Alaska Communications featuring up to 2,500Mbps starting at $80 a month. Almost any choice of internet provider in Alaska will come with some compromises, …

AI data scrapers are an existential threat to Wikipedia

AI data scrapers are an existential threat to Wikipedia

Published by skeptic

Wikipedia is under threat from the AI boom Chris Dorney / Alamy Wikipedia is one of the greatest knowledge resources ever assembled, containing crowdsourced contributions from millions of humans worldwide – and it faces a growing threat from artificial intelligence developers. The non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, says since January 2024 it has seen a 50 per cent increase in network traffic requesting image and video downloads from its catalogue. That surge mostly comes from automated data scraper programs, which developers use to collect training data for their AI models.… Source link

‘God-lover’ Kyle’s Instagram memes mix Catholic iconography and internet absurdism

‘God-lover’ Kyle’s Instagram memes mix Catholic iconography and internet absurdism

Published by skeptic

(RNS) — A meme, as Kyle Hide explains it, is like a gene for culture. A concept first coined by biologist Richard Dawkins, it’s a unit of meaning that evolves and spreads through imitation. “ A meme functions similarly to a virus,” said Hide, the 34-year-old administrator of the popular Instagram account I Need God in Every Moment of My Life, a self-described culturally non-practicing Catholic and lifelong internet obsessive. “That’s why we might call something online viral. You could think of memes as anything that culturally transmits itself and replicates through culture.” I Need God in Every Moment of My Life reads like a digital confessional booth filtered through Tumblr-core aesthetics, Catholic iconography and internet absurdism. Posts range from blurry screenshots of tweets about prayer and heartbreak to ironic riffs on spiritual longing.  For Hide, who is known online and on his podcast “I Need God Pod” as “God-lover Kyle,” memes are more than just content striving for virality; they are a form of meaning-making. Posting under the persona allows Hide, who lives in Brooklyn, …

Pantheon creator on uploading our brains to the internet

Pantheon creator on uploading our brains to the internet

Published by skeptic

Sign up for the Smarter Faster newsletter A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people Notice: JavaScript is required for this content. Be sure to check out “The Gods Will Not Be Chained,” the first in the series of Ken Liu short stories on which Pantheon is based, right here on Big Think. “Criminally underrated.” “One of the best animated series I ever watched.” “Legitimately one of the best sci-fi shows of the past decade.” These are some of the comments you’ll run into when you search reviews for Pantheon, an animated series about a world in which shadowy tech firms have found a way to scan and upload human brains onto the internet, inadvertently creating a new, superpowered, and potentially immortal race of people referred to as “uploaded intelligence.” “One of the best” because Pantheon — in addition to having a well-crafted, suspenseful, and heartfelt narrative about love and loss — thoughtfully engages with both the technical and philosophical questions raised by its cerebral premise: Is a perfect digital copy of …

Times Internet spin-out Abound raises M to let more Indian Americans send money home

Times Internet spin-out Abound raises $14M to let more Indian Americans send money home

Published by skeptic

Abound, a remittance app that was spun off by Times Internet in 2023, has raised $14 million in its first external funding round as it aims to reach more Indian expats in the U.S. Remittance flows to India are rising as the Indian diaspora spreads worldwide. In 2024, the South Asian country recorded $129.1 billion in remittances, accounting for 14.3% share of the global market and topping the charts, according to a World Bank report. Abound aims to tap this growth with its mobile app. “Indians are among the largest immigrant groups in the U.S. The average household income in the U.S. is close to $58,000, and the average Indian household income is about $150,000. That tells you that Indian expats are wealthy, affluent, and yet they’re vastly underserved in terms of products and services that are geared for them,” said Nishkaam Mehta, CEO of Abound, in an interview. Mehta, who worked at Hulu as head of its mobile strategy and growth for more than four years, joined Times Internet in 2019 after meeting its …

Jeffrey Goldberg on the Group Chat That Broke the Internet

Jeffrey Goldberg on the Group Chat That Broke the Internet

Published by José

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts It’s happened to the best of us. We mistakenly send a text about a colleague we are mad at to that very colleague. We accidentally include our mom on the sibling text chain about our mom. Today on Radio Atlantic, a much higher-stakes texting error: The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, received a connection request on Signal from a “Michael Waltz,” which is the name of President Donald Trump’s national security adviser. Two days later, he was added to a group text with top administration officials created for the purpose of coordinating high-level national-security conversations about the Houthis in Yemen. On March 15, Goldberg sat in his car in a grocery-store parking lot waiting to see if the strike would actually happen. The bombs fell. The text thread had to be real. We talk with Goldberg about this absurd chain of events, and with Shane Harris, who covers national security for The Atlantic, about what it means that defense officials were …

Best Internet Providers in Lakeland, Florida

Best Internet Providers in Lakeland, Florida

Published by skeptic

What is the best internet provider in Lakeland? After spending hours testing many popular providers in the Lakeland area, we’ve narrowed down the best broadband options for your home. Spectrum is CNET’s top choice for the best internet service provider in Lakeland for most households. It offers wide coverage, simple service details and reasonable prices — at least for the first year. Spectrum is a great choice for home internet wherever you’re located. So if you’re looking for the best internet provider in Lakeland, Spectrum should be your pick. However, if Spectrum doesn’t service your address, CNET also recommends Rapid Systems and Frontier Fiber for broadband. Select households may also be serviceable for T-Mobile Home Internet, which costs $50 to $70 a month for download speeds up to 415 megabits per second. If you’re hunting for cheap internet or the fastest speeds in Lakeland, we’ve also found those picks to help make your decision easier. Frontier Fiber offers the cheapest plan in the city with its 200Mbps plan for $30. Frontier Fiber also takes the …

Single-Player Politics | Mark O’Connell

Single-Player Politics | Mark O’Connell

Published by skeptic

Since the assassination on December 4 of the UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, by an alleged shooter whose apparent motive was righteous fury at the iniquity and injustice of America’s profit-driven system of health care, one thing we have been hearing again and again is that political violence changes nothing. This idea has been expressed more or less uniformly by countless and diverse figures from the world of politics, business, and the media. Everyone keeps saying it, and everyone agrees: violence is no way to bring about change.  Everyone keeps saying it, you suspect, to ward off the suspicion, even perhaps the certain knowledge, of its being completely untrue. If violence changed nothing, would American taxpayers have spent over $824 billion last year on maintaining the world’s most powerful and deadly military force? If violence changed nothing, would the United States exist in the first place? “Violence,” as the Black Panther leader H. Rap Brown put it, “is as American as cherry pie.” Thomas Jefferson’s more celebrated remark about the tree of liberty having to be …