OLDaily

Welcome to Online Learning Daily, your best source for news and commentary about learning technology, new media, and related topics.

CAPTCHA successor Privacy Pass has no easy answers for online abuse
Martin Thompson, distI//ed, 2023/12/22

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All web sites that accept input need to protect themselves against bots and spam. That's just a sad reality. A variety of methods are at work behind the scenes, powered by companies like Aksimet, and these work well for low-value targets. Beyond that is the hated captcha system, a "widely loathed and unreliable system... that depends extensively on invasive tracking." A new proposal, Privacy Pass (eg. from Cloudflare, extensions), was published by the IETF. The idea is that a site grants a token to a visitor it deems reliable, and these tokens can be recognized at other sides. Sounds great, but as the authors of this report argue, it's a system ripe for abuse. "Our vision of an open Web means that restrictions on participation cannot be imposed lightly. "

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Tech Trends 2024: AI and electric vehicle deals
Ben Morris, BBC News, 2023/12/22

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Four trends are identified: a slowdown in AI development, a price war for electric vehicles, humanoid robots, and the rise of the weight-loss drugs. I think AI development will be a bit like Moore's law, with more and more power packed into smaller and cheaper units. If a limit to this is reached (and it won't be in 2024) the alternative architectures (analogous to multiple cores or special purpose processors) will keep things moving. Regarding electric vehicles, I think the big issue starting in 2024 will be whether we should be building nuclear plants to address electricity shortages as we cut back on fossil fuels. I think we should. Humanoid robots will be a novelty in 2024 but probably not much more (the future arrives more slowly than you think). Finally, I'm hopeful for the weight-loss drugs.

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Communities and Conversations of the Past
David Truss, Daily-Ink by David Truss, 2023/12/22

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There's a bit of a challenge in this post. "Maybe online communities are a white whale. What is the best we can hope for in terms of online engagement and community for educators?" In this post Dave Truss waxes poetic about the community he found on Twitter. I think it was a bit of a chimera; Twitter was only ever a subset of the larger educational community, and it always felt to me a bit like a high school clique. It was pretty easy to find yourself on the outside or the subject of Twitter disapprobation; I experienced it a few times (but to nowhere near the extent of some others). If Twitter was the best we could hope for, we weren't hoping for much.

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Pluralistic: What kind of bubble is AI?
Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic, 2023/12/22

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"AI is definitely a bubble," writes Cory Doctorow. His evidence? "As I write in the column, if you fly into SFO and rent a car and drive north to San Francisco or south to Silicon Valley, every single billboard is advertising an 'AI' startup..." And "Once the bubble pops (all bubbles pop), AI applications will have to rise or fall on their actual merits, not their promise." So, let's examine this. Let's allow that AI is a bubble (this saves us an exercise in semantics). Is it true that all bubbles pop? Yes, we can name many bubbles that have popped, but let's consider some other technologies that experienced rapid growth, so much so that any 'pop' of the bubble was merely a rounding error. Like, say, the telephone. Cars. Aircraft. Microwave ovens. Computers. I could go on, but you get the idea. We tend to forget the bubbles that didn't pop, because they became fixtures of everyday life. Don't bet on AI - or even the hype about AI - suddently disappearing.

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We publish six to eight or so short posts every weekday linking to the best, most interesting and most important pieces of content in the field. Read more about what we cover. We also list papers and articles by Stephen Downes and his presentations from around the world.

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