Are Amazon’s ‘Ring’ Cameras Exacerbating Societal Inequality?

In one of America’s top city for property crime, the Atlantic examines the “porch pirate” of San Francisco’s Potrero Hill. It’s an 8,000-word long read about how one of the neighborhood’s troubled long-time residents “entered a vortex of smart cameras, Nextdoor rants, and cellphone surveillance,” in a town where the public hospital she was born in is now named after Mark…

Does California Need A More Decentralized Energy System?

“California’s electricity system is failing,” argues Vox, in an article shared by Slashdot reader nickwinlund77. But they’re proposing a way “to make California’s electricity system cleaner, more reliable, and more resilient.” In a nutshell, it is accelerating the evolution from a centralized, top-down, long-distance, one-way energy system to a more decentralized, bottom-up, local, networked system. In the energy world, this is…

Google’s Sidewalk Labs Leaked Document Reveals Company’s Early Vision For Data Collection, Tax Powers, Criminal Justice

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Globe and Mail: A confidential Sidewalk Labs document from 2016 lays out the founding vision of the Google-affiliated development company, which included having the power to levy its own property taxes, track and predict people’s movements and control some public services. The document, which The Globe and Mail has seen, also describes how…