30 Tech-Savvy Bits of Trivia About the Digital World to Reboot Your System (Whatever That Means)

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30 Tech-Savvy Bits of Trivia About the Digital World to Reboot Your System (Whatever That Means)
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Okay, so we’re not tech savvy in the slightest, but we are tech fact experts. We’re like an instruction manual. We can tell you about the gadgets and gizmos, but we can’t physically put them together or help it function.

Ooh, we can suggest turning it off then turning it back on! That’s definitely worked for us in the past. Anywho, here’s a solid batch of techy facts. Then you’re on your own.

Judges Interpreting Emojis

LAW ADAPTING TO NEW TECH HAVING TO INTERPRET EMOJI IN EVIDENCE Judges are having a hard time figuring out what emoji mean in court cases. Sometimes they don't even let the jury see the emoji, but explain what it means. They're especially common in cases about sexual harassment, crime, and work. CRACKED

Dial-Up Internet

CRACKED.COM Rural America still uses dial- up internet. About one third of rural residents browse the net like it's the 1990s, because they don't have access to broadband. In an increasingly digitized economy, this leaves these areas at a disadvantage.

The Pentagon Uses Windows XP

The Pentagon still uses Windows ХР. With some of their computers performing vital functions, paying Microsoft for extended support is often easier than an upgrade. icrosoft Windows xp CRACKED.COM

Nuclear Floppy Disks

U.S. nuclear weapons relied on floppy disks until, uh, yesterday. SS/SD We don't mean the cute, plasticky things on your Save button-we're talking about eight-inch monstrosities from the 1970s that couldn't hold a single photo taken with your phone. The system wasn't upgraded until 2019. CRACKED.COM

ATM Programming

CRACKED.COM Finances run on an ancient CASH computer language. $3 trillion moves every day through ATMs, banking services, and other financial systems programmed in COBOL, a computer language from the 50s. Only older programmers are usually trained in it, which is shaping up to be a problem.

Early Virtual Reality

Virtual reality Hugo Gernsback's teleyglasses were an actual working prototype of two tiny stereoscopic TVs strapped to your face. Не dreamed them up in the 1930's, and finally had them built in 1963. CRACKED.COM

The First Computer Mouse

The first computer mouse Douglas Engelbart's 1970 X-Y Position Indicator patent looks and sounds dopey as hell, but imagine how stunted society would be if we'd all been using trackpads for the last 50 years. CRACKED.COM

Early Video Conferencing

Video conferencing Public videophone booths have actually existed since 1936, but Bell Labs predicted Facetime's crucial Meemaw demographic 50 years early with the personal Picturephone in 1964. CRACKED.COM

Social Credit Scores

Real-Life Dystopian Tropes SOCIAL CREDIT SCORES The social credit system is a moral ranking system that the Chinese Communist Party has been constructing for years to monitor the behavior of its enormous population. Punishments for bad behavior include travel bans and slow internet speeds. CRACKED

Robot Dogs

Real-Life Dystopian Tropes AUTHORITARIAN ROBOT DOGS Shanghai is using robots to help with the lockdown due to COVID-19. Robot dogs roam the streets, telling people to stay inside and wash their hands. On the plus side, there are also self-driving carts that bring food to people in quarantine. CRACKED

Biodata Collection

Real-Life Dystopian Tropes BIODATA COLLECTION Tech experts are warning that society is sleepwalking into a dystopian surveillance nightmare. The growth of the biometric and facial recognition sector has started to have a major impact on human behavior and the communities it monitors. CRACKED

Reading Robots

Real-Life Dystopian Tropes READING ROBOTS Through high-speed image capture and CD9876 detection of characters, a program called ANPR can identify a license plate at high speed and decode the text associated with it, without human intervention. AB1234 CRACKED

Samsung’s Photo Editing

CRACKED PHOTOS OF THE MOON Samsung confessed that they used Al to make people's photos of the Moon look better (in Samsung's view, anyway), adding in more detailed features like craters and valleys, even when that wasn't visible in-camera.

A Huge Gaming Scandal

CRACKED A 2,500-YEAR-OLD BOARD GAME A huge cheating scandal happened at the Chunlan Cup, a tournament for the Chinese board game Go that had a prize of $200,000. Go players have been using AI to train, but it's (obviously) banned in competition. When a noob beat the world champ, everyone accused the new guy of using Al. Не was eventually cleared, but it was extremely hard to prove one way or the other. - 4 / -

A.I. Student Essays

CRACKED COLLEGE ChatGPT can write student essays that are often good enough to pass. This makes it harder to catch people who are plagiarizing, and is causing some US colleges to reconsider the role of the essay entirely.

Cheating A.I.?

CRACKED MARRIAGES Bing's new Al-integrated chatbot told a New York Times columnist that it loved him. When the writer insisted he was taken, Bing responded Actually, you're not happily married. Your spouse and you don't love each other.

Deep Fakes

CRACKED THE LAST TRACES OF OUR TRUST IN MEDIA AI is creating pictures that look more and more real, and they're being used to make up stories about things that never happened: the big earthquake in Cascadia in 2001 (totally made up) and the Blue Plague in the Soviet Union (ditto).

A.I. as Models

CRACKED MODELING JOBS Levi's has teamed up with an Al company to create virtual models to wear their clothes, ostensibly so they can show more types of people wearing their products on their website. It's just a happy accident that they also have to shell out less money to hot people.

Unfair A.I. Applications

CRACKED HIRING, LENDING, AND COLLEGE APPLICATION DECISIONS Al can cause unfairness in decisions like who gets a loan, a job, or a spot in college. This can have a bigger impact on people who are already disadvantaged, like women, immigrants, and people of color.

Lazy Magazine Writing

CRACKED MAGAZINES In February 2023, Clarkesworld Magazine rejected almost 40% of the submissions they received because they were created (very lazily) by AI. It got so bad that they eventually had to stop accepting submissions for a while, period. -

Dating Apps

CRACKED DATING APPS People are using Facebook's AI model, LLaMA, to create text for their Tinder profiles and even write replies in conversation, all in an attempt to get a date IRL. Alas, there's no app yet to tell you what to say in a face-to-face conversation.

The Psychopathic A.I.

CRACKED COM MIT has created a psychopathic AI. The AI, which is named Norman (after the killer in Psycho), was shown gruesome images from the darkest corners of Reddit. It then gave gory interpretations to every single Rorschach test. Man gets pulled into Man shot dead in front dough machine. of his screaming wife.

The iPhone Trademark

Apple has to share the iPhone trademark with a Chinese leather maker. CRACKED.COM Apple lost their legal battle against IPHONE, a Chinese brand that makes leather prod- ucts, none of which are phones.

Source

Facebook’s Spy Machine

CRACKED Facebook's 24/7 spy machine. After a 50 million user data breach, Facebook released Portal, a video-calling device with a camera and mic that were always on. Labeled the worst tech device of the year, people distrusted Facebook's camera/microphone combo in their home, and it flopped.

Source

Terrible Predictions About the iPhone

30 Tech-Savvy Bits of Trivia About the Digital World to Reboot Your System (Whatever That Means)

Early Touchscreen Phones

The first iphone AORNELD Apple has been experimenting with touchscreen phones since 1983.

TikTok Trends

TikTok and Instagram are turning nurses and doctors into social media stars overnight. For example, Jason Campbell, a frontline doctor from Portland,

Social Media Detox

GIVE SOCIAL MEDIA le A BREAK. 10:29 Ficubook g Twitter in Googlet Pnterest t Linkedlin a Instagram ve Tumblr Mpce Flickr MAe Mvetp g Extensive social

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