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Amazon’s cloud is about to get dirtier

by NestorHPOM Posted on September 17, 2014

SERVER HARM

Amazon’s cloud is about to get dirtier

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17 Sep 2014 3:18 PM

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Amazon’s cloud is about to get dirtier

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In the latest effort to satisfy our desire to save every photo, thought, and fragment of information in cyberspace, Amazon plans to build a fat new server farm that will offer “cloud” storage for such companies as Yelp, Netflix, Pinterest, Dropbox, Spotify, Soundcloud, Tumblr, and Vine, to name more than a few.

According to the Seattle Times, the $1.1 billion server farm will be located in Dublin, Ohio. The city is served by an electric utility that gets two-thirds of its juice from coal-fired power plants, and has a history of lobbying for the coal industry.

As a Greenpeace report from earlier this year shows, not all energy-hogging data centers warm the climate equally, and Amazon’s are among the worst of the worst. Fossil fuel burning provides over half the energy used by Amazon’s colossal digital network — and nuclear power supplies another quarter. Here’s the breakdown:

Greenpeace

By contrast, the Greenpeace report raves that Apple powers the iCloud with 100 percent renewables; Facebook put a data center in Iowa to spark the world’s largest purchase of wind turbines; and Google is signing long-term contracts to buy cleaner power for some of its centers. What’s more, these three web giants teamed up in North Carolina to pressure Duke Energy, the largest U.S. utility and one of the country’s biggest emitters, to offer customers — including their data warehouses — the choice to buy greener electricity.

(Before heaping too much praise on all that progress, recall that these companies and their founders don’t have perfect track records when it comes to caring for the climate.)

To avoid adding to Amazon’s dirty energy use (and supporting its labor-abusing, writer-exploiting, bookstore-bullying, and publisher-extorting ways) we can host our websites and store our digital stuff elsewhere until the company cleans up its act — and maybe even shop in a real store like back in the old days.

Yet given Amazon’s’s dominion over many of the apps and sites we use for fun, entertainment, information, and procrastination, we’d basically have to give up our computers and all other devices to steer clear of its sovereign realm.

If all the less desirable impacts of the internet were as palpable as the gratification we get from instantly streaming the last five Parks and Recreation episodes (made possible by Amazon’s web infrastructure), it would be a lot easier to make an informed decision about how much digital property we really want.

Maybe we need an app that’ll kick a could of smoke out of the back of our laptops every time we order a bag of groceries from Amazon Fresh.

Source:
Investors may balk, but Amazon plans to boost cloud spending

, The Seattle Times.

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Amazon’s cloud is about to get dirtier

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Facebook Cracks Down on Illegal Gun Sales

by NestorHPOM Posted on March 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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Facebook has officially decided that it doesn’t like shady gun deals. On Wednesday, the social-sharing behemoth announced significant policy changes aimed at policing gun trafficking on its platform: The company will delete posts that offer to buy or sell guns without background checks, block users under the age of 18 from viewing gun listings, and require all gun pages and groups to prominently refer to laws governing gun sales. Facebook will also apply controls to its photo-sharing subsidiary Instagram, which has also grown as an outlet for gun trafficking.

The move comes after weeks of pressure spearheaded by Moms Demand Action, the grassroots advocacy group formed after the Sandy Hook massacre that recently merged with Michael Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns. Moms Demand Action says it drew more than 230,000 supporters for a petition urging Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom to deal with the issue. “Our campaign showed how easy it is for minors, felons and other dangerous people to get guns online,” founder Shannon Watts said in a statement. “We are happy that these companies listened to American mothers and we believe these changes are a major step toward making sure people who buy or sell guns on their platforms know the law, and follow it.”

GunSellerz/Facebook

Exactly how Facebook will go about enforcing the new policies is unclear, and it remains to be seen how effectively the company will be able to control such activity on its pages. But at a minimum these changes—which also allow Facebook users to flag suspicious posts—should help diminish the opportunity for kids and felons to acquire firearms.

Yet, would-be criminals may simply flock elsewhere, as there remains at least one major social-sharing site where such deals can easily go down: Reddit. As we were the first to report back in January, Reddit hosts thousands of for-sale listings for military-style assault rifles, semi-automatic handguns, high-capacity magazines, and other weaponry. The site appears to be particularly ripe for dubious gun deals, because most of its users operate anonymously—and because, as a company official confirmed to us, Reddit does not track the gun transactions on its site and has no idea whether they are conducted legally. That didn’t stop the company from granting its users permission to engrave Reddit’s official logo on assault rifles.

Moms Demand Action says that it plans to keep pressuring companies to act in the interest of gun safety, though according to a spokesperson the group has had no conversations with Reddit yet.

via Reddit

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Facebook Cracks Down on Illegal Gun Sales

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Why Some Meteorologists Still Deny Global Warming

by NestorHPOM Posted on December 4, 2013

Mother Jones

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Just before Thanksgiving, many conservatives seized on a new study examining the climate views of members of the American Meteorological Society. It’s no secret that there’s a schism between climate scientists and weather forecasters over climate change, and the study captured this, to skeptics’ delight. The fact that a sizable percentage of AMS members disagree with mainstream climate science represented “the latest in a long line of evidence indicating the often asserted global warming consensus does not exist,” according to Forbes blogger and Heartland Institute fellow James Taylor.

Yet a closer look at the study—conducted by researchers at George Mason University, Yale, and the AMS itself—shows that its main punch line is quite different. The research was chiefly focused on trying to understand why the meteorological community as a whole (the AMS includes climate scientists, academic meteorologists, forecast meteorologists, and general atmospheric scientists, among others) features such disparate views on global warming. And one of its principal findings is that AMS members who publish less peer-reviewed climate research, or less peer-reviewed research in general, are more likely to be climate skeptics.

Far from undermining the scientific consensus on climate change, then, the new study could be said to strengthen it, by defining who’s a relevant expert in the first place. “You listen to the scientists who really know the field in question,” says George Mason’s Neil Stenhouse, a Ph.D. student and the study’s lead author. “And previous studies show that if you ask the scientists who really know climate change, there is high consensus on human causation.”

Similarly, after sorting AMS members by their climate expertise as well as their scientific publishing record, Stenhouse’s study found that this seemed to have a big impact on their views about climate change. “93% of actively publishing climate scientists indicated they are convinced that humans have contributed to global warming,” noted the study’s authors. By contrast, among “nonpublishing” climate scientists, only 65 percent believed that humans have contributed to global warming.

Something similar occurred with a different set of experts within AMS: meteorologists and atmospheric scientists. Those who published a lot on climate change, or a lot on other aspects of meteorological science, generally showed much higher conviction that humans are contributing to global warming (79 percent and 78 percent, respectively) than the “nonpublishing” experts (59 percent).

And there’s more bad news for skeptics who want to cite this AMS survey to bolster their case. You see, the study also showed that conservative political ideology is a big factor behind the denial of climate science by some meteorologists—ideology was a consistently bigger influence on meteorologists’ views, in fact, than their level of scientific expertise. This finding of a major role for ideology, write the researchers, “goes against the idea of scientists’ opinions being entirely based on objective analysis of the evidence.”

The irony, then, is considerable. Even as climate skeptics cite the new AMS survey to claim there’s no scientific consensus on climate change, the survey itself calls into question whether disagreement among meteorologists has much to do with purely scientific considerations in the first place.

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Why Some Meteorologists Still Deny Global Warming

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