Millions of people rely on Facebook to get online. The outage left them stranded.

This woman's brain implant zaps her with electricity when it senses she's getting depressed 

The Download Your daily dose of what's up in emerging technology Outage outrage  10.05.21 Good morning! Today: why Facebook's dominant position in much of the developing world made yesterday's outage so devastating. Also: a brain implant reversed years of depression for a woman called Sarah. Get your friends to sign up here to get The Download every day. Millions of people rely on Facebook to get online. The outage left them stranded.   Serious implications: For many internet users in the United States, yesterday’s six-hour outage of Facebook’s apps and sites was a minor annoyance. But for the millions of people around the world who rely on Facebook’s products to access the internet the sudden downtime was far more serious.  What went wrong? The outage was down to changes made to Facebook’s backbone routers, the firm said in a blog post. Those changes meant that traffic was no longer being properly directed by the Domain Name System (DNS), a tool that directs traffic and tracks addresses across the internet.  Reliance: For much of the world, Facebook has become synonymous with the internet. That made the outage the equivalent of nothing less than a big infrastructure collapse. Its status as internet gatekeeper was by design. For years, Facebook has been working to expand internet access in the developing world—thus expanding its own user base, which is now more than 3.5 billion people. That means that even temporary outages have a devastating effect. Read the full story.  —Eileen Guo and Patrick Howell O'Neill This woman’s brain implant zaps her with electricity when it senses she’s getting depressed A remarkable turnaround: Sarah, a 36-year-old woman living in California, had lived with chronic depression for five years. She felt suicidal multiple times an hour and was unable to make decisions about basic questions like what to eat. Nothing she had tried to treat it, including electroconvulsive therapy, had helped. Then, in June 2020, she had an implant inserted into her skull that zaps the parts of her brain that cause her illness. She’s now well on the way to a full recovery. How it happened: The team used electrodes to map Sarah’s brain activity. They found that high levels of activity in a specific part of Sarah’s amygdala predicted the onset of severe depression. They also established that a small burst of electricity to another region of her brain significantly improved these symptoms.  Surgery: Next, they implanted a neurostimulation device and set it up to trigger a tiny pulse of electricity in that area when it detects high levels of activity associated with depression symptoms. Sarah says the improvement in her mental health was as rapid as it was powerful, with her scores on a common depression rating scale plummeting within days. Read the full story. We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction in these weird times. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet 'em at me.)   + This man has essentially been forcibly married to a homicidal crane.    + The weird world of Ghanaian movie posters.   + Squid Game is horrific… yet we can't stop watching it. (WSJ $)   + A bear found a GoPro and switched it on. And if you haven't paid attention to Fat Bear Week yet, it's a good time to start.    + Sometimes branding consistency is good! And sometimes it is… not.   + The best fall meme.     + A dispatch from a bird's paradise. (NYT $) The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Facebook is weaker than you think Remarkably, this was published before the outage started. (NYT $)   + Losing Facebook was bad, but losing WhatsApp was worse. (The Verge)   + About $6 billion was knocked off the theoretical value of Mark Zuckerberg's wealth yesterday due to a drop in Facebook's share price. (Bloomberg $)   + Congress is less clueless about Facebook than it seems. (WP $)   + Facebook filed a motion to dismiss an antitrust lawsuit on the same day, claiming the FTC lacks evidence it's a monopoly. (NYT $)   + It's time to stand up to Facebook. (WP $)  2 Dictatorships did not do better during the pandemic The data suggests that democracies did at least as well if not better. (The Atlantic $)   + Doctors in Alaska are having to decide who lives and who dies. (NYT $)   + The Pfizer jab is 90% effective against hospitalization for at least six months. (The Guardian)  + Covid vaccines cut the risk of transmitting Delta—but not for long. (Nature)  3 Which countries bear most responsibility for climate change? Six of the top 10, including China, Russia and Brazil, have yet to make ambitious new pledges to cut their emissions. (The Guardian)   + Could fossil fuel companies be tried for crimes against humanity? (Gizmodo)  4 Clearview AI's facial recognition technology is getting better at identifying you It's now scraped more than 10 billion images from the open web. (Wired $)   + Its technology is being used by the NYPD, and plenty of other forces across the US. (TR)   + Venice has a new plan to stave off overcrowding: tech-enabled surveillance. (NYT $)  5 How a ship became a ticking time bomb 🚢 The Safer supertanker could explode or sink at any time, threatening not only the ecosystems of the Red Sea but also the lives of millions of people. (New Yorker $)   6 What happened to Siri? It launched a decade ago, yet Apple still doesn't seem to know what it wants it to be. (The Verge)  + Here's what Siri itself had to say about its 10-year-old birthday. (The Next Web)  7 Tech companies want to pay remote workers less. That's a bad idea.  Unless you want to alienate and enrage your workforce in one fell swoop. (Recode)   8 What even is the metaverse, anyway? No one seems to have a definitive answer—but they're all very excited about it. (The Verge)   9 Italy's winemakers are turning to machines to bring in the harvest 🍷 It's a snapshot of the new wave of automation caused by worker shortages. (WSJ $)   + Many jobs are still too difficult to automate though. (FT $)  10 Online ordering is ruining lunch for everyone else It can be demoralizing waiting in line, but especially so when the customers in front of you are invisible. (Slate $) The brain is the most complex bit of technology on the planet.  The latest issue of MIT Technology Review, the Mind issue, is all about our quest to understand what's between our ears, and in doing so, better understand ourselves. Read the whole magazine when you purchase a subscription today. Quote of the day "How much?" —Twitter's cofounder and CEO Jack Dorsey responds to the fact that facebook.com was briefly listed as for sale during yesterday's outage.  Top image credit: JOHN LOK | UCSF Please send fall memes to hi@technologyreview.com. Follow me on Twitter at @charlottejee. Thanks for reading! —Charlotte Was this newsletter forwarded to you, and you'd like to see more? Sign up today Build your strategic defense again cybercriminals Join us virtually | November 16-17, 2021 Register now Want to change how you receive these emails? You can *update your preferences or *unsubscribe from this list.  Subscription Information This message was sent to  Webmaster220 Bible Study Blog *the blog owner has deleted the hyperlink intentionally Follow us: MIT Technology Review One Main Street Cambridge, MA 02142