If you’ve ever wondered how daily life
would go on without access to email,
social media, GPS, or any internet service
at all, said Pranav Dixit in BuzzFeed
News .com, it’s happening now in
Kashmir. Since Aug. 5, Indian authori-
ties have kept the people of Kashmir in
a nearly total “digital blackout.” They
flipped the switch to “prevent public
opposition from turning into open rebel-
lion” after the Indian government split
the Muslim-majority state of Jammu
and Kashmir into two territories and
curbed its autonomy. “Overnight, mobile phones and land-
lines stopped working, broadband lines were frozen, and text
messaging stopped.” Despite a ruling from India’s Supreme
Court that the blackout was unconstitutional, mobile data
and social media— except for a few “ government- approved
websites”— remain blocked for almost everyone. The digital
dead zone has led to chaos: Doctors and hospitals struggle to
acquire supplies, drug smugglers can’t be tracked, and local
media has ground to a halt; the region’s oldest and largest
newspaper has not updated its website since December.Such crackdowns on access are growing in frequency around the
world, said Feliz Solomon in The Wall Street Journal. Last year,
“parts or all of the internet were shut down at least 213 times in
33 countries, the most ever recorded,” according to the nonprofitAccess Now. In 2016, the United Nations
declared in a nonbinding resolution that
internet access is a human right, but even
private-sector telecom companies, “which
rely on government licenses and agree to
follow a nation’s laws, rarely push back.”
Government officials can pull the plug
“by ordering service providers to block
certain areas from receiving signals,” said
Joe Tidy and Becky Dale in BBC.com.
Another form of blackout is “throttling,”
which “happens when a government
slows down data services” from, say, 4G
to 2G, “making it impossible to share videos or livestream.” The
goal is similar to that of a full shutdown: “Stifle the flow of infor-
mation online—and crack down on any potential dissent offline.”Technology’s promise for democracy is looking more like a curse,
said Andrea Kendall-Taylor in Foreign Affairs. The rise of the
internet and social media fostered great optimism that autocrats
could no longer “maintain the concentration of power their sys-
tems depend on.” But authoritarian regimes are “evolving,” em-
ploying tools such as AI-powered surveillance to curb protest and
marshaling social media to shape public perception. Rapid tech-
nological change in the near future will keep citizens and govern-
ments in a “cat-and-mouse dynamic” to gain the upper hand.
Believers in democracy need “new ideas, new approaches, and
the leadership” to withstand “intensifying digital repression.”Repression: Big Brother’s internet shutdown
Reuters, EPFLSilicon Valley naming and shaming
“A parody Twitter account is getting under
the skin of some Silicon Valley venture capital-
ists,” said Biz Carson in Protocol.com. Since
starting in November, the account, @VCBrags,
has amassed 39,000 followers with a simple
“shtick”: “Retweet boastful posts from VCs,
and top them with three withering hand-clap
emojis.” The account really took off after the
new year, when “VC Twitter went predict-
ably wild doing grand lookbacks about the
decade and their achievements.” The account’s
popularity has spawned a handful of unrelated
“cousins,” such as @CEOBrags, @Founder
Brags, and @VCComplaints. Some venture
capitalists with a sense of humor have even
begun tagging @VCBrags in their own tweets.
Others are less amused. One angry VC who
blocked the account said it is “basically sham-
ing people who were celebrating wins.”No free speech rights on YouTube
A federal appeals court in California rejected
the argument that tech platforms are bound by
the First Amendment, said Jacob Gershman in
The Wall Street Journal. In a blow to conser-
vatives who have claimed that YouTube, Twit-
ter, and Facebook censor conservative content,
the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals backed alimited view of the First Amendment’s speech
protections that “put constraints on govern-
ment, not the private sector,” with rare excep-
tions. “The 9th Circuit was emphatic: This
case was no exception.” The case concerned a
YouTube channel run by Prager University, a
nonprofit “that produces short explainer vid-
eos promoting conservative ideas.” In 2017,
Prager sued Google after YouTube “flagged
dozens of its videos as ‘inappropriate,’” in-
cluding clips with such titles as “Why Isn’t
Communism as Hated as Nazism?” and “Are
1 in 5 Women Raped at College?”High-tech baby monitors see pushback
Pediatricians are pushing back against AI-
powered baby monitors in the nursery, said
Drew Harwell in The Washington Post. Some
parents swear by monitors such as Cubo AI
that use “always-on cameras, microphones,
thermometers, motion sensors, and speakers”
to “gather round-the-clock data on newborns
and send alerts to parents when they detect
crying, vomiting, or signs of distress.” But
experts say the increasingly popular systems
mainly “prey on the fears of young parents”
and there is “little evidence that AI-powered
baby monitors lower the risk of suffocation
or sudden infant death syndrome.”Bytes: What’s new in tech
A new 3D printer can produce a
model in seconds, said Ron Ama deo
in ArsTechnica.com. Exist ing 3D
printers have proven to be great for
prototyping and other pursuits, “but
they sure can take a while”—often
hours or days. That’s because they
work in a “layer-by-layer process”
in which a 3D model is effectively
“sliced into hundreds of 2D hori-
zontal layers and slowly built up,
one layer at a time.” But a new
technique developed by researchers
at École Poly tech nique Fédérale de
Lau sanne in Swit zer land can “build
the entire model at once” through a
technique called rotational printing.
A “photosensitive resin” inside a
sealed rotating container is blasted
by a laser from multiple angles
simultaneously to harden portions
of the resin into the desired shape.Innovation of the week
18 NEWS Technology
Kashmiri journalists protest an internet shutdown.