Technology

Ofcom warns traditional public-service TV is endangered Recommendation for prominence on third-party platforms part of six-point action plan Urgent clarity needed from Government on how TV will be distributed to reach audiences in future Broadcasters must work more together, and with global tech firms, to survive

Urgent steps must be taken to ensure that public service media content is easy to find and discover on third-party platforms, under new Ofcom recommendations to secure the system’s survival.

• Trombone
• Treasure Chest
• Distorted Face
• Hairy Creature
• Fight Cloud
• Apple Core
• Orca
• Ballet Dancers
• Landslide

Many people sense that the United States is undergoing an epistemic crisis, a breakdown in the country’s collective capacity to agree on basic facts, distinguish truth from falsehood, and adhere to norms of rational debate.

This crisis encompasses many things: rampant political lies; misinformation; and conspiracy theories; widespread beliefs in demonstrable falsehoods (“misperceptions”); intense polarization in preferred information sources; and collapsing trust in institutions meant to uphold basic standards of truth and evidence (such as science, universities, professional journalism, and public health agencies).

According to survey data, over 60% of Republicans believe Joe Biden’s presidency was illegitimate. 20% of Americans think vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases they prevent, and 36% think the specific risks of COVID-19 vaccines outweigh their benefits. Only 31% of Americans have at least a “fair amount” of confidence in mainstream media, while a record-high 36% have no trust at all.

What is driving these problems? One influential narrative blames social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter (now X), and YouTube. In the most extreme form of this narrative, such platforms are depicted as technological wrecking balls responsible for shattering the norms and institutions that kept citizens tethered to a shared reality, creating an informational Wild West dominated by viral falsehoods, bias-confirming echo chambers, and know-nothing punditry.

The timing is certainly suspicious. Facebook launched in 2004, YouTube in 2005, and Twitter in 2006. As they and other platforms acquired hundreds of millions of users over the next decade, the health of American democracy and its public sphere deteriorated. By 2016, when Donald Trump was first elected president, many experts were writing about a new “post-truth” or “misinformation” age.

Moreover, the fundamental architecture of social media platforms seems hostile to rational discourse. Algorithms that recommend content prioritize engagement over accuracy. This can amplify sensational and polarizing material or bias-confirming content, which can drag users into filter bubbles. Meanwhile, the absence of traditional gatekeepers means that influencers with no expertise or ethical scruples can reach vast audiences.

The dangerous consequences of these problems seem obvious to many casual observers of social media. And some scientific research corroborates this widespread impression. For example, a systematic review of nearly five hundred studies finds suggestive evidence for a link between digital media use and declining political trust, increasing populism, and growing polarization. Evidence also consistently shows an association between social media use and beliefs in conspiracy theories and misinformation.

But there are compelling reasons to be skeptical that social media is a leading cause of America’s epistemic challenges. The “wrecking ball” narrative exaggerates the novelty of these challenges, overstates social media’s responsibility for them, and overlooks deeper political and institutional problems that are reflected on social media, not created by it.

The platforms are not harmless. They may accelerate worrying trends, amplify fringe voices, and facilitate radicalization. However, the current balance of evidence suggests that the most consequential drivers of America’s large-scale epistemic challenges run much deeper than algorithms.

Data, code, and visualizations

This experiment breaks a 5-bit elliptic curve cryptographic key using a Shor-style quantum attack. Executed on IBM's 133-qubit ibm_torino with Qiskit Runtime 2.0, a 15-qubit circuit, comprised of 10 logical qubits and 5 ancilla, interferes over an order-32 elliptic curve subgroup to extract the secret scalar k from the public key relation Q = kP, without ever encoding k directly into the oracle. From 16,384 shots, the quantum interference reveals a diagonal ridge in the 32 x 32 QFT outcome space. The quantum circuit, over 67,000 layers deep, produced valid interference patterns despite extreme circuit depth, and classical post-processing revealed k = 7 in the top 100 invertible (a, b) results. All code, circuits, and raw data are publicly available for replication.

When a midair collision and a series of radar outages captured attention in the United States this year, some air traffic controllers thought it might finally lead to solutions for a nationwide staffing shortage and other longstanding problems at the country's air traffic facilities.

Microsoft Guidance.

Discord Blog.

• Hackernews.

After five years of using Matrix.org/Element as my primary communication platform, and rooting for it, and promoting it, and enduring its many quirks, I’ve decided to move on (or rather back). Despite promising ideals and growing institutional adoption, the network remains slow, unreliable, and confusing for everyday users. Development feels directionless, client and server projects are fragmented, and the user experience still lags far behind my expectations. A recent incident that essentially broke my own community channel on the Matrix.org homeserver was the final straw: I’m heading back to XMPP.

Hackernews.

The publicly accessible bucket contained data from the iOS app FlirtAI - Get Rizz & Dates. It mainly included private chats that users wanted the AI wingman to help them reply to.

• FlirtAI wingman app leaked 160K chat screenshots through unprotected cloud storage.
• Teenagers frequently used the app, making the breach more concerning for minors.
• Some individuals were likely unaware their conversations were screenshot and sent to third parties.

• Hackernews.

Project info:

• GitHub.
• Extension.

Tech giant Meta has apologized and said it has fixed an auto-translation issue that led one of its social media platforms to mistakenly announce the death of Indian politician Siddaramaiah.

After a ProPublica investigation revealed how Microsoft’s “digital escort” tech support service could expose sensitive government data to cyberattacks, the company says China-based engineers will no longer provide assistance on DOD cloud services.

• Lobsters.
• Hackernews.

Hackernews.