Recent outages have revealed how vulnerable the internet is, but there seems to be no official plan in the event of a catastrophic failure. Vladimir Lenin is said to have warned that all societies are three square meals from chaos. But in the modern world, it is only a Wi-Fi signal that separates us from anarchy. Every aspect of our lives is reliant on computers and the internet, and when they fail, they do so with disorientating speed. This became abundantly clear during power cuts across Spain and Portugal earlier this year.

Natural and human-made common goods present key challenges due to their susceptibility to degradation, overuse, or congestion. We explore the self-organisation of their usage when individuals have access to several available commons but limited information on them. We propose an extension of the Win-Stay, Lose-Shift (WSLS) strategy for such systems, under which individuals use a resource iteratively until they are unsuccessful and then shift randomly. This simple strategy leads to a distribution of the use of commons with an improvement against random shifting. Selective individuals who retain information on their usage and accordingly adapt their tolerance to failure in each common good improve the average experienced quality for an entire population. Hybrid systems of selective and non-selective individuals can lead to an equilibrium with equalised experienced quality akin to the ideal free distribution. We show that these results can be applied to the server selection problem faced by mobile users accessing Internet services and we perform realistic simulations to test their validity. Furthermore, these findings can be used to understand other real systems such as animal dispersal on grazing and foraging land, and to propose solutions to operators of systems of public transport or other technological commons.

Satellite internet is blasting off right now. Nations and states are inking deals with satellite providers to fill in service gaps for their residents and keep their critical infrastructure connected. Phone makers are building satellite capabilities into their handsets. Airlines are partnering with satellite operators to keep your in-flight Netflix stream stutter-free. And the race to blast the satellites powering these networks into orbit is helping the rocket business thrive.

Elon Musk's SpaceX and its competitors are making reliable, and decently-fast satellite internet services a reality thanks to a growing armada of shimmering satellites orbiting overhead. Through its constellation of over 6,000, 500-pound satellites, SpaceX's Starlink internet service already reportedly provides broadband to around three million global users, some in remote locations underserved by traditional internet providers. But what happens when all those aging satellites no longer serve their purpose? A new report from environmentally-focused advocacy group PIRG warns the current approach to decommissioning old satellites, which usually involves having them burn to a crisp when re-entering the atmosphere, lacks meaningful rules and regulation. That absence of oversight, they say, could lead to an increase in dangerous space junk affecting Earth, especially as competing satellite internet companies rush to build out and launch tens of thousands of new satellites into orbit.

In his polarizing "Techno-Optimist Manifesto" last year, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen listed a number of enemies to technological progress. Among them were "tech ethics" and "trust and safety," a term used for work on online content moderation, which he said had been used to subject humanity to "a mass demoralization campaign" against new technologies such as artificial intelligence. Andreessen's declaration drew both public and quiet criticism from people working in those fields--including at Meta, where Andreessen is a board member. Critics saw his screed as misrepresenting their work to keep internet services safer. On Wednesday, Andreessen offered some clarification: When it comes to his 9-year-old son's online life, he's in favor of guardrails.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken twice declined to criticize Elon Musk after the SpaceX founder said he refused to help the Ukrainian government access his Starlink internet service in order to attack Russia. Blinken was pressed by CNN's Jake Tapper to comment on details in a new book confirmed by Musk, including that he refused the Ukrainian government's requests to activate Starlink, a satellite internet service run by SpaceX, in Crimea so it could launch a submarine drone attack against Russian naval forces. "There was an emergency request from government authorities to activate Starlink all the way to Sevastopol," Musk posted Thursday on X. "The obvious intent being to sink most of the Russian fleet at anchor. If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation." Tapper asked Blinken whether Musk should face repercussions after he "effectively sabotaged a military operation by Ukraine, a U.S. ally, against Russia, an aggressor country that invaded a U.S. ally."

The Italian privacy watchdog mandated a ban on the popular chatbot ChatGPT and launched an investigation on its provider OpenAI for suspected breaches of EU data protection rules. Italy's Garante for the protection of personal data on Friday (31 March) accused the AI system of breaching the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and failing to implement age verification systems. The blocking of the site for Italian users is temporary and will last until the provider OpenAI respects the EU privacy framework when processing the personal data of Italian users. The Italian data protection authority has also initiated an investigation into the American tech company. Launched in November, ChatGPT has been notorious for its unprecedented ability to generate human-like text based on prompts.

Internet-wide scanning is commonly used to understand the topology and security of the Internet. However, IPv4 Internet scans have been limited to scanning only a subset of services -- exhaustively scanning all IPv4 services is too costly and no existing bandwidth-saving frameworks are designed to scan IPv4 addresses across all ports. In this work we introduce GPS, a system that efficiently discovers Internet services across all ports. GPS runs a predictive framework that learns from extremely small sample sizes and is highly parallelizable, allowing it to quickly find patterns between services across all 65K ports and a myriad of features. GPS computes service predictions in 13 minutes (four orders of magnitude faster than prior work) and finds 92.5% of services across all ports with 131x less bandwidth, and 204x more precision, compared to exhaustive scanning. GPS is the first work to show that, given at least two responsive IP addresses on a port to train from, predicting the majority of services across all ports is possible and practical.

ChatGPT, the recently viral and surprisingly articulate chatbot, has dazzled the internet with its ability to dutifully answer all sorts of knotty questions--albeit not always accurately. Some people are now trying to adapt the bot's eloquence to play different roles. They hope to harness the AI like that behind ChatGPT to create programs that can persuade, cajole, and badger with super-human tenacity--in some cases to empower consumers but in others to win sales. Joshua Browder, the CEO of DoNotPay, a company that automates administrative chores including disputing parking fines and requesting compensation from airlines, this week released video of a chatbot negotiating down the price of internet service on a customer's behalf. The negotiator-bot was built on the AI technology that powers ChatGPT. It complains about poor internet service and parries the points made by a Comcast agent in an online chat, successfully negotiating a discount worth $120 annually.

Banks, telephone service companies, Internet service providers, pay TV companies, insurance firms, and alarm monitoring services, often use customer attrition analysis and customer attrition rates as one of their key business metrics (along with cash flow, EBITDA, etc.) because the cost of retaining an existing customer is far less than acquiring a new one (Wikipedia). According to this article, the probability of selling to a new customer is 60-70%, while the probability of selling to a new prospect is 5-20%. So knowing if a customer is at risk of leaving is one of the most important tasks a company has to perform in order to keep growing its business. The data can be found here on kaggle public datasets. We will predict if a customer will churn based on his informations. There are 7043 customers and 20 features.