An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Scientists have discovered "unexpected physics" by opening up "slits" in time, a new study reports, achieving a longstanding dream that can help to probe the behavior of light and pioneer advanced optical technologies. The mind-boggling approach is a time-based variation on the famous double-slit experiment, first performed by Thomas Young in 1801, which opened a window into the weird probabilistic world of quantum mechanics by revealing the dual nature of light as both a particle and a wave. The new temporal version of this test offered a glimpse of the mysterious physics that occur at ultrafast timescales, which may inform the development of quantum computing systems, among other next-generation applications.

In the original version of the double-slit experiment, light passes through two slits that are spatially separated on an opaque screen. A detector on the other side of the screen records the pattern of the light waves that emerges from the slits. These experiments show that the light waves change direction and interfere with each other after going through the slits, demonstrating that light behaves as both a wave and particle. This insight is one of the most important milestones in our ongoing journey into the quantum world, and it has since been repeated with other entities, such as electrons, exposing the trippy phenomena that occurs at the small scales of atoms.

Now, scientists led by Romain Tirole, a PhD student studying nanophotonics at Imperial College London, have created a "temporal analogue of Young's slit experiment" by firing a beam of light at a special metamaterial called Indium Tin Oxide, according to a study published on Monday in Nature Physics. Metamaterials are artificial creations endowed with superpowers that are not found in nature. For instance, the Indium Tin Oxide used in the new study can change its properties in mere femtoseconds, a unit equal to a millionth of a billionth of a second. This incredible variability allows light waves to interact with the metamaterial at key moments in ultrafast succession, called "time slits," which produces a time-based diffraction pattern that is analogous to the results returned in the spatial version of the experiment. [...] In other words, the super-speedy changeability of Indium Tin Oxide finally made a time slit experiment possible, after many years of eluding scientists. To bring this vision to reality, Tirole and his colleagues used lasers to switch the reflectance of the material on and off at high speeds.

Capita, the United Kingdom's largest outsourcing company, confirmed Monday that an IT outage which left staff locked out of their accounts on Friday was caused by "a cyber incident." The Record reports: Staff attempting to login were erroneously told their usual passwords were "incorrect" according to reports, fueling speculation that a cyberattack was to blame, although not all of Capita's 61,000 employees were affected. At the time, a Capita spokesperson said the company was investigating "a technical issue."

In an update on Monday about the incident sent to the Regulatory News Service, the company confirmed it "experienced a cyber incident primarily impacting access to internal Microsoft Office 365 applications." The nature of the incident has not been disclosed. While financially motivated ransomware attacks remain a prevalent threat for organizations in Britain, Capita also provides services to the British government that may be of interest to state-sponsored espionage groups.

Capita's numerous contracts include several with the Ministry of Defence. Last year, a consortium it leads took control over engineering and maintenance support of training simulators for the Royal Navy's nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines used as part of the U.K.'s nuclear deterrent. In its statement, Capita said: "Immediate steps were taken to successfully isolate and contain the issue," which was "limited to parts of the Capita network."

For flights, Google already showed you whether the flight price you were looking at was high, low, or typical compared to historical prices. Now it's going a step further by putting a guarantee on those predictions. Android Police reports: Now, whenever Google thinks a flight is priced as low as it's going to go, it will put a "Price Guarantee" badge beside the price indicating it doesn't think that price will drop any further. If you decide to book a flight with a price guarantee through Google and the price does go down, the company will reimburse you for the difference in price via Google Pay similar to the promotion it ran in 2019. The price guarantee was announced in a blog post today alongside new features for researching hotels.

"Now when you search for a hotel on mobile, you'll be able to swipe through full-screen images of the hotel similar to how you might view a story on Instagram," reports Android Police. "From that photo page, you can also quickly tap into reviews to see if a property is as good as it looks and learn more about the area where a potential hotel is located. There's also a link to the hotel's website right on the page when you're ready to book."

Apple will expand ProMotion to the standard iPhone models in two years, according to Ross Young, CEO of Display Supply Chain Consultants. ProMotion was first introduced on the iPhone 13 Pro models in 2021 and remains exclusive to Pro models for now. MacRumors reports: In a tweet today, Young provided a roadmap outlining various display-related technologies coming to future iPhones. Notably, the roadmap indicates that low-power LTPO display technology will be expanded to the standard iPhones in 2025, which Young said will enable ProMotion on these devices, allowing the display to ramp up to a 120Hz refresh rate for smoother scrolling and video content when necessary.

ProMotion would also allow the display to ramp down to a more power-efficient refresh rate. iPhone 13 Pro models can ramp down to 10Hz, while iPhone 14 Pro models can go as low as 1Hz, allowing for an always-on display that can show the Lock Screen's clock, widgets, notifications, and wallpaper even when the device is locked. All in all, the roadmap suggests that the so-called "iPhone 17" and "iPhone 17 Plus" will feature ProMotion, and likely an always-on display too. Young also claimed the "iPhone 17 Pro" will be the first iPhone to feature under-panel Face ID technology.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The federal government is considering a "roadmap" on how to restrict access to online pornography to those who can prove they are 18 or older, but there are warnings that any system could come at the cost of Australians' privacy online. On Friday, the eSafety commissioner provided a long-awaited roadmap to the government for how to verify users' ages online, which was commissioned by the former Morrison government nearly two years ago. The commissioner's office said the roadmap "explores if and how age verification and other measures could be used to prevent and mitigate harm to children from online pornography" but that any action taken will be a decision of government.

There were a variety of options to verify people's ages considered during the consultation for the roadmap, such as the use of third-party companies, individual sites verifying ages using ID documents or credit card checks, and internet service providers or mobile phone operators being used to check users' ages. Digital rights groups have raised concerns about the potential for any verification system to create a honeypot of people's personal information. But the office said any technology-based solution would need to strike the right balance between safety, privacy and security, and must be coupled with education campaigns for children, parents and educators. [...]

It comes as new industry codes aimed at tackling restricted-access content online, developed by groups representing digital platforms, and software, gaming and telecommunications companies were submitted to the eSafety commissioner for approval. The content covered includes child sexual abuse material, terrorism, extreme crime and violence, and drug-related content. The commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, will now decide whether the voluntary codes meet her expectations or whether she needs to enforce mandatory codes. [...] The second phase of the codes will set out how the platforms restrict access to pornography on their sites -- separate from the use of age verification systems.

Researchers from Darktrace have seen a 135% increase in novel social engineering attack emails in the first two months of 2023. IT Pro reports: The cyber security firm said the email attacks targeted thousands of its customers in January and February 2023, an increase which it said matches the adoption rate of ChatGPT. The novel social engineering attacks make use of "sophisticated linguistic techniques," which Darktrace said include increasing text volume, sentence length, and punctuation in emails. Darktrace also found there's been a decrease in the number of malicious emails that are sent with an attachment or link.

The firm said that this behavior could mean that generative AI, including ChatGPT, is being used by malicious actors to construct targeted attacks rapidly. Survey results indicated that 82% of employees are worried about hackers using generative AI to create scam emails which are indistinguishable from genuine communication. It also found that 30% of employees have fallen for a scam email or text in the past. Darktrace asked survey respondents what the top-three characteristics are that suggest an email is a phish and found:

- 68% said it was being invited to click a link or open an attachment
- 61% said it was due to an unknown sender or unexpected content
- Poor use of spelling and grammar was chosen by 61% too

In the last six months, 70% of employees reported an increase in the frequency of scam emails. Additionally, 79% said that their organization's spam filters prevent legitimate emails from entering their inbox. 87% of employees said they were worried about the amount of their personal information online which could be used in phishing or email scams.

Tim Cook's vision for AR and VR hasn't changed. "For almost a decade, Apple's CEO has been banging the drum that AR is more important than VR and that AR is fundamentally about bringing people together," reports The Verge. "And he's still at it." From the report: "If you think about the technology itself with augmented reality, just to take one side of the AR/VR piece, the idea that you could overlay the physical world with things from the digital world could greatly enhance people's communication, people's connection," Cook told GQ's Zach Baron in a long and very interesting profile just published by the magazine. Cook told Baron that he's interested in collaboration; he said something about measuring glass walls; he said his thinking on glasses-as-gadget has changed over the years.

None of this is a product announcement, of course, only the latest in a long string of hints about what Apple sees in this space. Cook's been on this particular line since at least 2016, when he said on Good Morning America that AR "gives the capability for both of us to sit and be very present, talking to each other, but also have other things -- visually -- for both of us to see." [...] At various times over the years, Cook has said AR is a powerful technology for education, that he thinks it'll be as common as "eating three meals a day," and that he thinks AR is as big an idea as the smartphone. But he keeps coming back to the idea that AR should be meant to bring people together in the real world, not keep them apart or transport them to another universe entirely.

Cook also offered what sounds like an explanation for why the headset, which has been heavily rumored over the last couple of years, has taken so long to come out. "I'm not interested in putting together pieces of somebody else's stuff," he told GQ. "Because we want to control the primary technology. Because we know that's how you innovate." Maybe the most revealing thing in the story is the way Cook explains Apple -- or at least explains the way he hopes you'll see Apple. He talks frequently about Apple's environmental commitments, its loud fight against "the data-industrial complex," and the way Apple is trying to help people have better relationships with technology. (Conveniently ignoring that Apple is perhaps more responsible for our phone addictions than any other company, of course.) "Because my philosophy is, if you're looking at the phone more than you're looking in somebody's eyes, you're doing the wrong thing." Apple plans to unveil a mixed-reality headset on June 5th at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC).

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: MicroG is a free-as-in-freedom alternative to proprietary Google services, including the Play Store. Vanced, a popular app that provided an ad-free YouTube experience, relied on microG to operate, something also true for successor ReVanced. In a scheme to damage microG and Vanced-style apps, imposters masquerading as microG have targeted almost two dozen sites with DMCA notices.

On March 30, 2023, someone claiming to be 'MicroG' sent a DMCA complaint to Google. "The following websites use our content, which is a significant loss for our company," it begins, listing the allegedly infringing URLs below. In the majority of cases, the URLs relate to microG's software when utilized in Vanced-related projects, with one notable exception seen at line 8 where the takedown notice targets microG's official website. [...]

At the time of writing, Google has delisted 13% of the URLs in the complaint with 87% currently marked as pending. Other recent complaints, broadly along similar lines (but also completely bogus) were previously rejected in full. Others, including this one sent by 'copyright owner' YouTube Vanced, whoever that is, listed the official YouTube app on Google Play as the original content infringed, before attempting to take down links related to microG and/or Vanced-type software.

Hong Kong's attempt to attract cryptocurrency companies is getting help from an intensifying crackdown by American regulators. From a report: The city was once home to a number of prominent companies, including Crypto.com, BitMEX and now-bankrupt FTX. But increasing competition from Singapore, concerns about China's tough approach to crypto and Hong Kong's prolonged and strict response to Covid-19 meant many companies in the sector left. Hong Kong is now determined to bring some of that action back, in contrast with the U.S. In the past few weeks alone, U.S. regulators have cut off access to crypto products and services, targeted crypto friendly banks, brought civil charges against celebrities said to have touted digital assets and sued exchanges including Binance, the operator of the world's largest crypto exchange. Prosecutors have also accused FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, who was based in Hong Kong at one point, of conspiring to bribe Chinese government officials in their latest indictment.

"The U.S. being more stringent these days than ever on crypto and Hong Kong regulating in a more favorable way...is going to clearly shift the center of gravity of crypto assets trading and investments more towards Hong Kong," said Ambre Soubiran, chief executive of Kaiko, a digital assets data provider based in Paris. "We want to be where our clients are," she said. Hong Kong's Securities and Futures Commission proposed a new licensing framework in February, focusing on investor protection. A senior official said at a briefing that the regulator wanted to prevent a recurrence of the problems that brought down FTX, as well as other fraudulent behavior. More than 20 crypto and blockchain companies from mainland China, Europe, Canada and Singapore have told the government they are planning to establish a presence in Hong Kong, while over 80 firms have expressed interest in doing so, according to official figures.

Google is bringing Android's "Nearby Share" feature to the desktop with a new Windows app. Google says the new program will make sharing between Windows and Android easier, letting you send files over in just a few clicks and taps. From a report: Google's Nearby Share has been built into Android for a few years now and allows you to locally transfer files over Wi-Fi, with the initial device-pairing happening over Bluetooth. Nearby share has been kind of tough to use in real life, since most people share files over the Internet. And for personal use, most people only have one Android device, their phone, so there has been nothing to share files with. A ton of Android users have Windows PCs, though, so for many this will be the first time Nearby Share has an actual use. Using the app is easy. Just download it from the Android website and click a few "next" buttons in the installer. You need a 64-bit Windows PC (not ARM, ironically) with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. From there you can easily share by dragging and dropping on Windows or by using the Android "share" button and hitting "Nearby Share." You have the option of signing in to the Windows app or not. If you don't you'll need to manually approve every transaction on both the phone and PC. If you sign in, you can set up auto-accept from yourself, anyone in your contacts, or the probably not advisable "everyone" option.

Chemicals that were banned after they punched a hole in Earth's ozone layer are still building up at an alarming rate in our atmosphere, according to research published today in the journal Nature Geoscience. The chemicals were once widely used in air conditioning and refrigeration but were supposed to be phased out globally by 2010. From a report: Scientists were surprised to find that concentrations of several types of those chemicals have climbed since then, reaching a record high in 2020. The culprit could be alternative refrigerants that were meant to replace the ozone-depleting substances, the new research suggests. An even bigger problem? Researchers can't find where all the chemicals are leaking from. The ozone layer has managed to make a remarkable recovery over the past few decades. If emissions continue to climb, however, it could counteract some of that progress and exacerbate climate change.

Spring break is here, and summer vacations are just around the bend. But while increasingly stressed-out US workers say having paid time off is critical, many still don't even take all that they're allowed. From a report: Only 48% of US workers say they use all their vacation days, according to a new survey from Pew Research Center. Those who don't take all their time off say it's because they don't need it, or they worry about falling behind at work or feel badly about co-workers carrying their load. A few even think vacation time hurts their chances for promotions or could cost them their job. There is growing anxiety in the labor force with layoffs spreading, hiring slowing and organizations cutting perks and other costs. Last month, the job site Indeed said it was reducing headcount because it's "simply too big for what lies ahead" -- an excuse used by many companies to justify recent cutbacks. It's no wonder that workers are exhausted.

Cruising at a depth of 8,336 meters (over 27,000 feet) just above the seabed, a young snailfish has become the deepest fish ever filmed by scientists during a probe into the abyss of the northern Pacific Ocean. From a report: Scientists from University of Western Australia and Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology released footage of the snailfish on Sunday filmed last September by sea robots in deep trenches off Japan. Along with the filming the deepest snailfish, the scientists physically caught two other specimens at 8,022 meters and set another record for the deepest catch. Previously, the deepest snailfish ever spotted was at 7,703 meters in 2008, while scientists had never been able to collect fish from anywhere below 8,000 meters. "What is significant is that it shows how far a particular type of fish will descend in the ocean," said marine biologist Alan Jamieson, founder of the Minderoo-UWA Deep Sea Research Centre, who led the expedition. Scientists are filming in the trenches off Japan as part of a 10-year study into the deepest fish populations in the world. Snailfish are members of Liparidae family, and while most snailfish live in shallow water, others survive at some of the greatest depths ever recorded, Jamieson said.

Dogecoin (DOGE) rose 12% after the Shiba Inu symbol representing the token replaced the familiar blue bird atop the Twitter homepage. From a report: Elon Musk in the past has suggested the meme coin may offer better payments functionality than bitcoin.

Google's finance chief Ruth Porat recently said in a rare companywide email that the company is making cuts to employee services. From a report: "These are big, multi-year efforts," Porat said in a Friday email titled: "Our company-wide OKR on durable savings." Elements of the email were previously reported by the Wall Street Journal. In separate documents viewed by CNBC, Google said it's cutting back on fitness classes, staplers, tape, and the frequency of laptop replacements for employees. One of the company's important objectives for 2023 is to "deliver durable savings through improved velocity and efficiency." Porat said in the email. "All PAs and Functions are working toward this," she said, referring to product areas.

Australia will announce a ban on TikTok on government phones this week, following other countries in barring the Chinese-owned video app over security concerns, Australian newspapers reported late on Monday. From a report: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese agreed to a government-wide ban on the use of TikTok after the completion of a review by the Home Affairs department, The Australian newspaper reported. Victoria state will also ban the short video app from government phones, The Age newspaper reported, quoting a state government official as saying Victoria would follow the federal government's guidance. The United States, Britain, New Zealand, Canada, Belgium and the European Commission have already banned the app from official devices over security concerns./i

A Canadian astronaut and three NASA veterans, including one of the world's most experienced female spacewalkers, will fly around the moon next year in the first piloted voyage beyond Earth orbit since the Apollo program ended 50 years ago, the space agency announced Monday. From a report: NASA's Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch and Victor Glover will join Canadian rookie Jeremy Hansen aboard an Orion crew capsule for the Artemis program's second fight, the first carrying a crew bound for the moon. The Artemis 2 mission is intended to pave the way toward the first moon landing -- Artemis 3 -- in the 2025-26 timeframe. Wiseman, Koch and Glover are all veterans of long-duration stays aboard the International Space Station while Hansen will be making his first space flight. Navy Capt. Wiseman, 47, a widowed father of two, is a veteran F/A-18F Super Hornet pilot who holds a master's in systems engineering. He launched aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft in 2014 and spent 165 days aboard the space station, then served as chief astronaut after his return to Earth.

Koch, 44, holds a master's in electrical engineering who has experience in Antarctic research. She also launched aboard a Soyuz and spent nearly a full year aboard the lab in 2019-20, venturing outside for six spacewalks, including three all-female excursions. With 42 hours and 15 minutes of EVA time, she ranks third on the list of most experienced female spacewalkers. Glover, 46, is a Navy captain, a father of four and one of only a half dozen African Americans in NASA's astronaut corps. He launched to the station aboard the first operational SpaceX Crew Dragon mission in 2021-22, logging 168 days in orbit. Glover is a veteran test pilot with more than 3,000 hours of flight time and more than 400 carrier landings. Hansen, a 47-year-old colonel in the Canadian armed forces and father of three, is a veteran F-18 fighter pilot. He will be the ninth Canadian to fly in space and the first to venture beyond Earth orbit.

Data storage giant Western Digital has confirmed that hackers exfiltrated data from its systems during a "network security incident" last week. From a report: The California-based company said in a statement on Monday that an unauthorized third party gained access to "a number" of its internal systems on March 26. Western Digital hasn't confirmed the nature of the incident or revealed how it was compromised, but its statement suggests the incident may be linked to ransomware. [...] Western Digital notes that the incident "has caused and may continue to cause disruption" to the company's business operations.

The Tor Project, the organization behind the anonymous network and browser, is helping launch a privacy-focused browser that's made to connect to a VPN instead of a decentralized onion network. From a report: It's called the Mullvad browser, named after the Mullvad VPN company it's partnered with on the project, and it's available for Windows, Mac, or Linux. The Mullvad browser's main goal is to make it harder for advertisers and other companies to track you across the internet. It does this by working to reduce your browser's "fingerprint," a term that describes all the metadata that sites can collect to uniquely identify your device.

Paris voted overwhelmingly Sunday to banish for-hire electric scooters from the streets of the French capital, delivering a blow to operators and a victory for road safety campaigners. From a report: The referendum means the City of Light, once a pioneer in embracing e-scooter services, is set to become the only major European capital to outlaw the widespread devices booked on apps such as Lime. The city's residents were asked to weigh in for or against them in a public consultation organised by mayor Anne Hidalgo, with nearly 90 percent of the votes cast against, official results showed. "We're happy. It's what we've been fighting for over four years," said Arnaud Kielbasa, co-founder of the Apacauvi charity, which represents victims of e-scooter accidents. "All Parisians say they are nervous on the pavements, nervous when they cross the roads. You need to look everywhere," Kielbasa, whose wife and infant daughter were hit by an e-scooter driver, told AFP. "That's why they've voted against them."

The ACM's software engineering magazine Queue delves into the latest draft for "a new major revision of the C language standard, C23... due out this year," noting the highs, lows, and several useful new features. The most important, if not the most exciting, make it easier to write safe, correct, and secure code. For example, the new header standardizes checked integer arithmetic:

int i =...; unsigned long ul =...; signed char sc =...;
bool surprise = ckd_add(&i, ul, sc);

The type-generic macro ckd_add() computes the sum of ul and sc "as if both operands were represented in a signed integer type with infinite range." If the mathematically correct sum fits into a signed int, it is stored in i and the macro returns false, indicating "no surprise"; otherwise, i ends up with the sum wrapped in a well-defined way and the macro returns true. Similar macros handle multiplication and subtraction. The ckd_* macros steer a refreshingly sane path around arithmetic pitfalls including C's "usual arithmetic conversions."

C23 also adds new features to protect secrets from prying eyes and programmers from themselves. The new memset_explicit() function is for erasing sensitive in-memory data; unlike ordinary memset, it is intended to prevent optimizations from eliding the erasure. Good old calloc(size_t n, size_t s) still allocates a zero'd array of n objects of size s, but C23 requires that it return a null pointer if n*s would overflow.

In addition to these new correctness and safety aids, C23 provides many new conveniences: Constants true, false, and nullptr are now language keywords; mercifully, they mean what you expect. The new typeof feature makes it easier to harmonize variable declarations. The preprocessor can now #embed arbitrary binary data in source files. Zero-initializing stack-allocated structures and variable-length arrays is a snap with the new standard "={}" syntax. C23 understands binary literals and permits apostrophe as a digit separator, so you can declare int j = 0b10'01'10, and the printf family supports a new conversion specifier for printing unsigned types as binary ("01010101"). The right solution to the classic job interview problem "Count the 1 bits in a given int" is now stdc_count_ones().

Sadly, good news isn't the only news about C23. The new standard's nonfeatures, misfeatures, and defeatures are sufficiently numerous and severe that programmers should not "upgrade" without carefully weighing risks against benefits...
The article complains that C23 "transforms decades of perfectly legitimate programs into Molotov cocktails," citing the way C23 now declares realloc(ptr,0) to be undefined behavior. ("Compile old code as C23 only for good reason and only after verifying that it doesn't run afoul of any constriction in the new standard.") It also criticizes C23's new unreachable annotation, as well as its lack of improvement on pointers. "Comparing pointers to different objects (different arrays or dynamically allocated blocks of memory) is still undefined behavior, which is a polite way of saying that the standard permits the compiler to run mad and the machine to catch fire at run time."

The article even cites the obligatory XKCD cartoon. "Let's not overthink it; if this code is still in use that far in the future, we'll have bigger problems."

The Evening Standard interviewed Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, in a piece headlined "Will Wikipedia be written by AI?" "The discussion in the Wikipedia community that I've seen so far is...people are cautious in the sense that we're aware that the existing models are not good enough but also intrigued because there seems like there's a lot of possibility here," Wales said. "I think we're still a way away from: 'ChatGPT, please write a Wikipedia entry about the empire state building', but I don't know how far away we are from that, certainly closer than I would have thought two years ago," he said.

Wales says that as much as ChatGPT has gripped the world's imagination over the past few weeks, his own tests of the technology show there are still plenty of flaws. "One of the issues with the existing ChatGPT is what they call in the field 'hallucinating' — I call it lying," he said. "It has a tendency to just make stuff up out of thin air which is just really bad for Wikipedia — that's just not OK. We've got to be really careful about that...."

But while full AI authorship is off the cards in the near-term, there's already plenty of discussion at Wikipedia on what role AI technology could have in improving the encyclopaedia in the months ahead. "I do think there are some interesting opportunities for human assistance where if you had an AI that were trained on the right corpus of things — to say, for example here are two Wikipedia entries, check them and see if there are any statements that contradict each other and identify tensions where one article sems to be saying something slightly different to the other," Wales said. "A human could detect this but you'd have to read both articles side by side and think it through — if you automate feeding it in so you get out hundreds of examples I think our community could find that quite useful."
Wales says another problem is AI technology's failure to spot internal contradictions within its responses. He once called out ChatGPT on this — "And it said, you're right, I apologise for my error."

"What would it look like if we called time on Big Tech's failed experiment?" asks the co-editor of the Oxford-based magazine New Internationalist: A better social media would need to be decentralized... As well as avoiding a single point of failure (or censorship), this would help with other goals: community ownership, and democratic control, would be facilitated by having many smaller, perhaps more local, sites. Existing social media giants must be brought into public (and transnational) ownership — in a way that hands power to citizens, not governments. But they should also be broken up, using existing anti-monopoly rules.

It is hard to know what sort of algorithms would best promote real community until we try... But the algorithms that determine what enters peoples' social feeds must be transparent: open source, open for scrutiny, and for change. We could also adapt from sites like Wikipedia (collectively edited) and Reddit (where posts and comments' visibility is determined by user votes). Moderation policies — what content is and isn't allowed — could be decided collectively, according to groups' needs....

An important step towards a decentralized social network would be interoperability, and data portability. Different sites need to be able to talk to each other (or 'federate'), just as email providers or mobile operators are required to. There's no point being on a site if your friends aren't, but if your server can relay messages to theirs there is less of a barrier. Meanwhile encryption will be vital for privacy.

One particularly intriguing idea is that of artist and software developer Darius Kazemi, who suggests every public library — there are 2.7 million worldwide — could host its own federated social media server. As well as providing local accountability and access, and boosting increasingly defunded neighbourhood assets, these servers would benefit from librarians' expertise in curating information.