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Daily Archives: December 12, 2022

Here’s When You Should Use Tor Instead of a VPN

How-To-Geek: “If you’ve been looking into the different ways to browse anonymously, two terms will come up regularly: VPNs and Tor. However, when you compare these two, you’ll quickly see that they have very different use cases. To figure out when you should use Tor rather than a VPN, let’s first go over how they both work. VPNs are privacy tools that allow you to connect to servers owned and operated by your provider. Doing so encrypts your connection in a so-called VPN tunnel and also lets you assume the location of that server. Spoofing your location in this way gives you greater flexibility when accessing sites all over the web: you can unblock Netflix regions other than your own, circumvent internet censorship imposed by countries like China or Russia, or even just access internet banking while on holiday. It does all this while also securing your connection. Tor is a little different. Instead of being a standalone tool that encrypts your whole connection, it’s a browser that reroutes your traffic. However, it doesn’t do this through VPN servers, but instead through what are called nodes. Nodes can be any internet-connected device—laptops, smartphones, even IoT devices qualify—and are points within the network where traffic is routed through…”

How Will AI Change the World?

Open Culture: A Captivating Animation Explores the Promise & Perils of Artificial Intelligence – “You can hear a considered take on how we might manage that in the animated TED-Ed video above, adapted from an interview with computer scientist Stuart Russell, author of the popular textbook Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach as well as Human… Continue Reading

The New Chatbots Could Change the World. Can You Trust Them?

The New York Times: “Siri, Google Search, online marketing and your child’s homework will never be the same. Then there’s the misinformation problem…OpenAI is among the many companies, academic labs and independent researchers working to build more advanced chatbots. These systems cannot exactly chat like a human, but they often seem to. They can also… Continue Reading

Growing network of conservative groups is fueling a surge in book bans

The New York Times: “Traditionally, debates over what books are appropriate for school libraries have taken place between a concerned parent and a librarian or administrator, and resulted in a single title or a few books being re-evaluated, and either removed or returned to shelves. But recently, the issue has been supercharged by a rapidly… Continue Reading