The invisible downside to our online lives is the data stored at giant energy-guzzling datacentres

It’s been called “the largest coal-powered machine on Earth” – and most of us use it countless times a day.

The internet and its associated digital industry are estimated to produce about the same emissions annually as aviation. But we barely think about pollution while snapping 16 duplicate photos of our pets, which are immediately uploaded to the cloud.

Continue reading...

💾

© Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

💾

© Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

They shrugged off concerns about the company’s fate ahead of closing arguments in the Justice Department’s lawsuit this week.

© Jason Henry for The New York Times

The company also reported that profit more than tripled, to $10.4 billion, topping Wall Street expectations.

© Karsten Moran for The New York Times

The spending that the industry’s giants expect artificial intelligence to require is starting to come into focus — and it is jarringly large.

© Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg

The tech giant’s quarterly results included strong growth in cloud computing, fueled by its services in generative artificial intelligence.

© Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

The dismissals escalated longstanding tensions between company leaders and activist employees opposed to supplying technology to Israel’s government.

© Nathan Frandino/Reuters

Internet traffic dropped by 40 percent or more during the eclipse in states in the path of totality, including Maine, New Hampshire and Ohio, Cloudflare found.

© Madeleine Hordinski for The New York Times

Good essay on software bloat and the insecurities it causes.

The world ships too much code, most of it by third parties, sometimes unintended, most of it uninspected. Because of this, there is a huge attack surface full of mediocre code. Efforts are ongoing to improve the quality of code itself, but many exploits are due to logic fails, and less progress has been made scanning for those. Meanwhile, great strides could be made by paring down just how much code we expose to the world. This will increase time to market for products, but legislation is around the corner that should force vendors to take security more seriously.