Image: Mike Ljung
Journalism is facing unprecedented assaults from attempts at censorship and the proliferation of fake news around the world. To push back against these threats, blockchain and distributed ledger technology (DLT) applications are being developed to help authenticate media content, preserve records and maintain journalism integrity.
From Rappler CEO Maria Ressa’spersecution and conviction in the Philippines for cyber libel, to the arrests of reporters and media tycoons in Hong Kong, to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange potentially being extradited to the U.S. where he could face over 100 years in prison, media watchers say the outlook for press freedom is bleak.
Leonie Bos
An increasingly large proportion of video content online will be synthetic in 2021 â meaning wholly or partially generated by AI. Some of it will be benign, and even hilarious, such as the YouTubers who are using the power of AI to deepfake Nicolas Cage into every Hollywood movie ever made â but there will be plenty that have been created with wholly malicious intent.
Indeed, the first widespread use of synthetic media â non-consensual deepfake pornography, which almost exclusively targets women â has proliferated wildly since it first emerged at the end of 2017. According to Amsterdam-based cybersecurity startup Sensity, which was founded in 2018 to combat deepfakes in the visual media, the number of deepfake pornography videos online is doubling every six months, and by next summer, there will be 180,000 available to view. By 2022, that number will have reached 720,000.
December 15th, 2020
It’d be easy to just say
all of 2020 was terrible and call it a day. But while most of the year was awful for everyone, some things in tech suffered more than others. TikTok, for example, got jerked around by the Trump administration for months, only to be ghosted at the end of the year. Streaming services thrived, sure, but one in particular was both born and killed all within 2020.
If you were hoping to buy yourself some relief from the pervasive dread and banality by getting some next-gen graphics cards or gaming consoles, all you got was more disappointment thanks to poorly prepared retailers. And, as always, there were terrible gadgets filling in as cherries topping the garbage cake that was 2020. Still, we made it. Perhaps instead of admitting we were all losers in 2020, we can feel better about leaving it all behind us by looking back at the worst things tech served up this year.
December 15th, 2020
2020 has felt like an eternity, but the year is finally coming to a close. Despite everything we’ve all been through, though, there were a few bright spots in the world of tech. Console makers blessed us with mouthwatering next-gen hardware, while Apple wowed the industry with the prowess of its own M1 CPU. Google also delivered an excellent phone for just $350, demonstrating an ability to not just read the room, but also to think of a world beyond a well-heeled tech-savvy audience.
There are also companies that flourished during the global lockdown, and though truth continued to be contested throughout the US elections, we thankfully saw social media step up their efforts to combat misinformation. Clearly, staying home gave some of us the freedom to make great products and fight for good.