MISCELLANEA

19 ‘Nobody should trust Wikipedia’, warns its co-founder; says the site is taken over by Leftists

Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia, has said that nobody should trust the crowd-sourced online encyclopaedia as it is run by Left-leaning volunteers. The site is no longer trustworthy as it does not allow content that does not fit the agenda of Leftists, and therefore people can’t get a complete view on topics.

Sanger, who had co-founded Wikipedia along with Jimmy Wales in 2001, said that the platform has betrayed its original mission by only reflecting the views of the ‘establishment.’ In an interview with Lockdown TV, he said that he agrees with the view that there are teams of Democratic Party-leaning editors who remove content that they don’t like.

In fact, he noted, Wikipedia had lost its neutral nature way back in 2009, before which editors from all ideologies would debate equally before deciding what should be published on the platform. Articles on most recent issues, from Covid to Biden, had become partisan, particularly supporting the Biden administration on such issues and blacking out information that does not show the Democrats in positive light.

The Wikipedia co-founder gave examples of articles on Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden in which important details about them were completely missing. The article on the US President does not mention most of the criticisms against him and it has completely whitewashed the Ukraine scandal. The paragraph on the Ukraine imbroglio ‘reads like a defence counsel’s brief’. The section concerned on the page says ‘no evidence was produced of any wrongdoing by the Bidens’ and that ‘Trump and his allies falsely accused Biden’ of involvement in Ukraine to protect Hunter Biden.

In fact, the Wikipedia page on Hunter Biden is even more shocking as it does not mention anything about the content found on his laptop. The article does say that no evidence of wrongdoing was found ‘after the seizure of a laptop purportedly belonging to Biden’, but does not mention other explosive content found in the laptop which was left by Hunter at a computer repair shop and which he forgot to pick up later.

In October last year, The New York Post had published emails retrieved from the laptop relating to Hunter’s business dealings in Ukraine and the links to his father. Twitter and Facebook, run by the same Left-leaning propagandists, had blocked The News York Post article, preventing people from sharing it. Similarly, Wikipedia is also completely blocking out any information about the contents of the laptop.

Larry Sanger said that Wikipedia’s coverage of Covid-19 is also very biased as it just reproduces the views of the World Economic Council or the World Economic Forum, the World Health Organization, the CDC and various other establishment mouthpieces like Anthony Fauci.

He also gave the example of Wikipedia articles on eastern medicine which are biased as they basically call the ancient medicine systems quackery in dismissive, quite judgmental language.

Showing how biased Wikipedia has become, Larry said that major media houses like Daily Mail and Fox News are blacklisted by it. This means that if something is covered by these published publications but not by the Leftist media houses, then that can’t be published on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia has become just like any other Left-leaning media house. ‘There are a lot of people who would be highly motivated to go in and make the article more politically neutral, but they’re not allowed to.’ Sanger added, ‘If only one version of the facts is allowed, then that gives a huge incentive to wealthy and powerful people to seize control of things like Wikipedia in order to shore up their power. And they do that.’

There are now big companies like Wiki PR that employ people to write on Wikipedia, but such writers and editors don’t reveal that they are associated with such companies. People are spending money to make changes to Wikipedia articles ‘because there’s a very big, nasty, complex game being played behind the scenes to make the article say what somebody wants them to say’.

Larry Sanger had left Wikipedia over differences with co-founder Jimmy Wales over how to run the website and has since become a staunch critic of it for its Left-leaning bias. Earlier, he had said that Wikipedia has become a huge moral hazard, saying that it has turned into a ‘monocultural establishment organ of propaganda’.

(Source: OpIndia – https://www.opindia.com/2021/07/nobody-should-trust-wikipedia-warns-its-co-founder-larry-sanger/-16th July, 2021)

II. Business

20 How can you become a space tourist?

Thrill-seekers might soon be able to get their adrenaline kicks – and envy-inducing Instagram snaps – from the final frontier, as space tourism finally lifts off. All you’ll need is a bit of patience. And a lot of money.

Here’s a rundown of where things stand.

Two companies are offering short ‘suborbital’ hops of a few minutes: Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, founded by Richard Branson.

Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket takes off vertically and the crew capsule detaches and crosses the Karman line (62 miles, or 100 kilometres, in altitude), before falling back to earth with three parachutes.

Virgin Galactic uses a massive carrier plane which takes off from a horizontal runway then drops a rocket-powered spaceplane. This, in turn, soars to over 50 miles altitude before gliding back.

In both cases, up to six passengers are able to unbuckle from their seats to experience a few minutes of weightlessness and take in the view of earth from space.

Virgin Galactic has said that regular commercial flights will begin from 2022, following two more test flights. Their waiting list is already long, with 600 tickets so far sold.

But the company predicts it will eventually run up to 400 flights per year. Two seats on one of the first flights are up for grabs in a prize draw: registrations are open until 1st September.

As for Blue Origin, no detailed calendar has been announced. ‘We’re planning for two more flights this year, then targeting many more in 2022,’ a spokesperson told AFP.

Another way to get to space is via reality television. Space Hero, an upcoming show, says it plans to send the winner of a competition to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2023.

The first tickets sold by Virgin Galactic went for between $200,000 and $250,000 each, but the company has warned that the cost for future sales will go up.

Blue Origin hasn’t announced prices. The anonymous winner of a public auction for a seat on the first crewed flight paid $28 million, but decided to defer the trip.

It’s not known what amount was bid for the seat secured by Dutch teen Oliver Daemen, who will fly in the auction winner’s place.

The more ‘budget-conscious’ might consider spending $125,000 for a seat on Space Neptune, a capsule that offers 360-degree windows and is lifted to the upper atmosphere by a balloon the size of a football stadium.

Despite the promise of spectacular views, the balloon ascends only 19 miles – far from the boundary of space and weightlessness. The 300 seats for 2024 have all been sold, but reservations are open for 2025.

No – you’re only expected to be in reasonable shape. Virgin Galactic’s training lasts just five days. And Blue Origin promises to teach you everything you need to know ‘the day before you launch,’ and its first crewed flight includes pioneering aviator Wally Funk, who at 82 will become the oldest astronaut.

The company’s requirements include being able to climb seven flights of stairs in under 90 seconds (the height of the launch tower) and being between 5’0” and 110 pounds (152 centimetres and 50 kilogrammes) and 6’4” and 223 pounds (193 cm. and 100 kg.).

Elon Musk’s company is also getting into the space tourism game, but its plans involve journeys that are far longer. The costs are also predicted to be astronomical – tens of millions of dollars.

In September, American billionaire Jared Isaacman has chartered a mission called Inspiration4 to take him and three other passengers into orbit around the earth on a SpaceX Crew Dragon, launched into space by a Falcon 9 rocket.

Then in January, 2022, three businessmen will travel to the ISS with an experienced astronaut. The mission, named Ax-1, is being organised by the company Axiom Space, which has signed up for three other future flights with SpaceX.

Elon Musk’s company is also planning a trip to orbit for four people, organised by intermediary Space Adventures – the same company in charge of the flight of the Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa to the ISS in December, aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket.

Maezawa is also supposed to take a trip around the Moon in 2023, this time aboard a rocket that is still under development by SpaceX, called Starship.

He invited eight members of the public to join him – but applications are now closed.

(Source: International Business Times, 17th July, 2021 – By Lucie Aubourg)

III. Technology

21 How Web3 is overturning the Internet status quo

Today, it’s almost taken for granted that the Internet is controlled by a handful of tech behemoths that seem to amass more and more power every day. It’s easy to forget that when these titans first arrived on the scene, each one of them was considered a disrupter, a revolutionary, an upstart. Now, they are the establishment.

Since its birth in 1983, the Internet has evolved from an obscure and clunky tool used by a select few into a vast network integral to every facet of our lives. This destiny first became apparent during the dot-com boom of the 1990s. And although many naysayers were quick to self-congratulate during the ensuing bust, the downturn proved no more than a healthy pruning that readied the Internet for a new era of growth.

This next phase of Internet evolution, dubbed Web 2.0 in 2005 by Internet guru Tim O’Reilly, produced the trends that now dominate our lives: mobile-centric e-commerce, social media, user-generated content and video streaming. It also set the stage for the reign of the FAANGs: Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google.

Together, these giants offer us forms of connection, entertainment and instant gratification we could only have imagined a decade ago. But because their business models are based on the large-scale monetisation of data and centralised control of networks, our reliance on these services has also handed them enormous power: over our time, our wallets and our personal information.

That stranglehold may seem unbreakable at this point. But behind the scenes, away from debates about monopolies, privacy and free speech, a new incarnation of the Internet is emerging. Forces are quietly mustering for a new revolution – one whose very structure is designed to prevent such concentrations of profit and control from shaping the future.

The key to this new iteration is decentralisation. Its foundation is blockchain technology.

A quiet revolution

While the concept of blocks of information shackled together in a tamper-resistant way dates back to 1991, it wasn’t until 2009 that Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym for the developer (or developers) of Bitcoin, set up the first blockchain to allow trading in the new currency. Now there are hundreds. On each blockchain, peers can exchange economic value – work, content, assets – without intermediaries.

This opens up the potential for a new kind of Internet – Web 3.0. Since blockchain transactions are anonymous and processed by a distributed network of many computers known as nodes, users no longer need to cede control of their data to a central authority. Meanwhile, the links between blocks produce a record that is resistant to hacking and manipulation.

Protocols powered by the many

There are a multitude of new ideas for how to use the power of decentralisation to offer tools and services that eschew centralised authority and are thus more affordable and accessible. And since protocols built on the distributed Internet are powered by hundreds or even thousands of computers, they are subject to neither single points of failure nor single points of control. This makes them both more stable and more secure.

As part of the Web3 community’s commitment to democratisation, many of these projects are led by Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) – decentralised corporations governed by egalitarian communities rather than boards and executive hierarchies. Built on principles of self-sustaining growth and community governance, they are already having major real-world impacts.

Mirror, a community-run publishing protocol, puts power in writers’ hands. Since it is built on the Ethereum blockchain, the authorship and provenance of each piece of content is indelibly recorded. Writers can also collaborate on projects, turn their work into non-fungible tokens (NFTs) for auction, or even bankroll efforts by issuing their own tokens.

The user-generated music platform Playdj.tv uses decentralised infrastructure to cater to a different kind of creator at rates that enable it to be competitive with YouTube. Its platform enables DJs to set up their own live streams for their sets, which they can use to earn money and interact with fans all over the globe – a boon during the pandemic, when clubs and private party venues were forced to shut their doors.

The team behind Arweave has built a distributed hard drive that offers a permanent repository for all kinds of information and data. Then there’s The Graph, which helps make sense of all this by allowing fast, private and secure queries of its vast store of data about the Web3 universe.

New breeds of distributed financial systems are on the rise as well, including decentralised finance (DeFi) platforms where people can earn rewards by ‘staking’ assets and performing key tasks on a network. The number of decentralised cryptoasset exchanges (DEXs in industry parlance) has ballooned in the past two years, capturing some market share from their centralised counterparts (CEXs) with their promise of greater anonymity, safety and security.

Total trading volume on these platforms surged to a record $172 billion in May, more than twice the $80.2 billion record set just three months before. Protocols such as Uniswap have been at the forefront of this growth.

There are scores and scores more out there or percolating in the imaginations of developers, many of which will become the building blocks for a new Internet and a new economy. Some projects will inevitably fall by the wayside as Web3 grows to maturity, but many will survive and become foundational tools for the industries and customer bases they serve.

The difference this time is that these tools are governed and powered by their own user communities, rather than by the leaders of a small circle of massive corporations.

(Source: Opinion: International Business Times, 7th June, 2021 – By Doug Petkanis)