Internet

Nov. 25 (UPI) — Online retailer Amazon has begun to roll out its Leo Internet service that offers gigabyte speed via its satellite network for businesses and other organizations.

Amazon’s enterprise customers will be the first to use the Amazon Leo Internet service that includes a new “Ultra” antenna, and a wider rollout is planned for 2026, Amazon announced on Tuesday.

Amazon officials said Leo is designed to extend reliable, high-speed Internet to those beyond the reach of existing networks, including millions of businesses, government entities and organizations that are located in areas where Internet service is unreliable.

“Amazon Leo represents a massive opportunity for businesses operating in challenging environments,” said Chris Webber, vice president of consumer and enterprise business for Amazon Leo.

“We’ve designed Amazon Leo to meet the needs of some of the most complex business and government customers out there,” Webber added.

“We’re excited to provide them with the tools they need to transform their operations, no matter where they are in the world.”

The Amazon Leo Internet service uses an innovative network design, satellites and “high-performance phased-array antennas” to support download speeds of up to 1 gigabyte per second and upload speeds of up to 400 megabytes per second.

A new antenna dubbed Leo Ultra enables users to attain such downloading and uploading speeds, which exceed those of the competing Starlink Performance Kit, according to The Verge.

SpaceX officials said a new V3 satellite will support faster uploading and downloading speeds next year.

Amazon also has more than 150 satellites orbiting the Earth to provide digital communications that are undergoing initial network testing that involves a small group of enterprise customers.

Commercial airline JetBlue is among Amazon Leo’s enterprise customers participating in the service’s initial rollout.

“We knew Amazon Leo would share our passion for customer-first innovation,” JetBlue President Marty St. George said.

“Choosing Amazon Leo reflects our commitment to staying ahead of what customers want most when traveling, such as fast, reliable performance and flexibility in our free in-flight Wi-Fi.”

Amazon Leo also enables enterprise customers to connect directly to their cloud-based accounts and establish private network interconnects so that they can connect and communicate with remote locations using their respective data centers and core networks.

Nov. 24 (UPI) — The Chilean city of Valparaíso has the fastest fixed broadband Internet in the world, according to the Speedtest Global Index, which ranks average connection speeds based on user tests.

The port city leads the latest ranking with an average download speed of 398.21 megabits per second, surpassing major cities such as Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, which placed second with 376 Mbps and Lyon, France, which ranked third.

In the United States, Los Angeles is the first city to appear in the ranking, in 11th place, followed by New York in 12th.

Valparaíso ranked ahead of Chile’s capital, Santiago, because it sits in a strategic location for technology companies that use the city as a hub for developing fiber-optic infrastructure for Chile, South America and connections to Oceania.

“Valparaíso is the landing point for submarine cables such as Google’s Curie, América Móvil’s Mistral and SAC, which add capacity and redundancy to the connectivity ecosystem, while Google’s Humboldt transpacific cable with the Chilean government is set to land in Valparaíso in 2027,” Danilo Bórquez, who holds a doctorate in complex systems engineering and is a professor at the Adolfo Ibáñez University’s engineering school, told UPI.

He added that residents of Valparaíso have faster and more stable Wi-Fi.

“With more than 300 Mbps you can have several users online at the same time. Video calls run smoothly and game or photo downloads and backups are much faster. You can also hold classes or use educational platforms without interruptions, with materials downloading in seconds or minutes,” Bórquez said.

At the national level, fiber-optic adoption is high. “In Chile, it accounts for about 70% of fixed connections, which drives the typical speeds measured by Speedtest. There are companies that can migrate or extend fiber to another 4.3 million households in Chile, which increases the base of users with high-speed plans.”

Marco Aravena, director of Modernization and Digital Transformation and a computer engineering professor at the University of Valparaíso, told UPI that service providers come to the city to expand fiber-optic Internet access.

“In Valparaíso you have Las Torpederas beach, where one of the submarine cables that brings fiber-optic connections from other parts of the world comes ashore. We are one of the technology hubs through which internet arrives in Chile. It’s not that users connect directly to that fiber, but they have more direct access to it,” he said.

Experts say these factors make Valparaíso attractive for people who want to work in hybrid or remote roles.

“Valparaíso is becoming a hub that allows people to come live and work here because of its strong connectivity. It also attracts students because there are many universities in the city,” Aravena said.

However, the city has significant investment in technology and networks but little investment in infrastructure or economic development.

According to the latest 2024 Urban Quality of Life Index from the Catholic University, Valparaíso scored medium-high in connectivity and mobility, but low in housing and surroundings and medium-low in health and the environment.

The technologist and professor Mindy Seu was having drinks when her friend casually referred to the phone as a sex toy. Think about it, her friend, Melanie Hoff, explained: We send nudes or watch porn, it’s vibrating and touch-sensitive — it’s practically an appendage.

“What exactly is sex, and what exactly is technology?” Seu wondered. “Neither can be cleanly defined.”

Around the same time, in 2023, Seu had just published “Cyberfeminism Index,” a viral Google Sheet-turned-Brat-green-doorstopper from Inventory Press. Critics and digital subcultures embraced the niche volume like a manifesto — and a marker of Seu’s arrival as a public intellectual whose archiving was itself a form of activism. The cool design didn’t hurt. “If you’re a woman who owns a pair of Tabis or Miistas, you are going to have this tome,” joked comedian Brian Park on his culture podcast “Middlebrow.”

Still, the knot between sexuality and technology tugged at her. “Recently, my practice has evolved toward technology-driven performance and publication,” she said. “It’s not exactly traditional performance art, but I believe that spaces like lectures and readings can be made performative.” Though she wasn’t yet finished exploring this theme, she wasn’t sure how to approach it next — until an experiment by Julio Correa, a former Yale graduate student, sparked an idea. Correa had devised an Instagram Stories-based lecture format, and she immediately saw its potential. She reached out to ask if she could “manipulate” his idea into a performance piece, and would he like to collaborate?

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Thus, “A Sexual History of the Internet” was born. The work is two things at once: a participatory lecture-performance conducted through the audience’s phones, and an accompanying, palm-sized, 700-plus-page “script” examining how our devices serve as bodily extensions.

The book isn’t exhaustive but instead a curated miscellany of non-sequiturs and the kind of dinner-party lore Seu delights in. Did you know that the anatomical structure of the clitoris wasn’t fully mapped until a decade after the invention of the World Wide Web? Or that the first JPEG — introduced in 1992 at USC — cribbed a Playboy centerfold nicknamed “Lenna,” which journalist and the author of the 2018 “Brotopia” Emily Chang called “tech’s original sin.”

The metaverse, web3 and AI — none of this is new, Seu said in her loft this past Saturday, hours before her West Coast debut at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. “But understanding the arc is helpful, especially how it’s tied to militaristic origins rooted in power, and how those same people were also confronted with sexuality.”

She’s just returned from a whirlwind tour — Antwerp, New York, Oslo, Madrid — with Tokyo next month. She splits her time between L.A. and Berlin, where her boyfriend lives, but for now, she’s staying put in what she calls her “bachelor pad on the set of a ‘90s erotic thriller,” inherited from a friend, the artist Isabelle Albuquerque.

The floor-to-ceiling windows high in a historic Brutalist artists’ complex overlook MacArthur Park and the downtown skyline. She’s offset the building’s cement with a childhood baby grand piano and her grandmother’s lacquer vanity with pearl inlay. That Seu marries the feminine and the spartan in her space feels intentional — a reflection of the dualities that animate her life and work.

“A Sexual History of the Internet” by Mindy Seu

(Photography by Tim Schutsky | Art direction by Laura Coombs)

Though she moved from New York three years ago, she resists calling herself an Angeleno — partly, she admits, because she never learned to drive despite growing up in Orange County. Her parents ran a flower shop after immigrating from South Korea. The household was conservative, Presbyterian and promoted abstinence. Like with many millennials, her sexual awakening unfolded online.

“I asked Jeeves how to have an orgasm,” she writes. “I sexted with classmates on AOL Instant Messenger. Any curiosities were saved until I could sneak onto my family’s shared ice blue iMac G3 in the living room.”

At 34, the very-online academic holds a master’s from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and has taught at Rutgers and Yale before joining her alma mater, UCLA, as one of the youngest tenured professors (and perhaps the only one who has modeled for JW Anderson and Helmut Lang). Her first three years at UCLA have each had their crises — encampments, fires, ICE raids — yet her Gen Z students give her hope. “They’re so principled and motivated, even if it’s in a nihilistic way,” she said.

Online, fans declare their “brain crushes” on Seu, whose ultra-detailed spreadsheets have become unlikely catnip for TikTok. Vanity Fair dubbed her the rare cybernaut who “lands soft-focus photoshoots in niche lifestyle publications.” Her unusual power is the ability to move through different fields, Trojan-horsing her theories across academia, the art world, the lit scene, tech, fashion, et al. Seu’s notoriety continued to swell after appearing on the popular internet talk show “Subway Takes” with the standout zinger: “Gossip is socially useful, especially to women and the marginalized.”

“Mindy’s really good at bridging different audiences who might not read an academic text about the history of the internet but are interested in Mindy’s practice,” said Correa, Seu’s student-turned-collaborator. When the two workshopped their performance last year on their finsta (a.k.a. fake Instagram), they encountered one major hurdle: censorship. They had to get creative with their algospeak (like changing “sex” to “s*x”) to keep from getting banned.

Mindy Seu in her MacArthur Park loft.

(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)

“A Sexual History of the Internet,” designed by Laura Coombs, carries that collaborative ethos into its financial structure. Seu’s first book went through traditional publishing, where authors often receive about 10% and contributors receive fixed fees. This time, she wanted a citation model that compensated the 46 thinkers who shaped her understanding of the subject.

She approached Yancey Strickler, director of Metalabel, “an indie record label for all forms of culture,” and co-founder of Kickstarter. Seu’s original proposal waived all profits to collaborators. “Everyone got paid but her,” Strickler said. If she wanted the model to be replicated, he told her, it needed a capitalist backbone.

They landed on Citational Splits, where everyone who was cited joined a 30% profits pool, in perpetuity, across future printings (27 opted in). The remaining 60% goes to Seu and five core collaborators. Strickler likened it to music royalties or company shares: “Your presence increases the project’s value, and some of that value should flow back to you.”

Neither can name a publishing precedent. “It shows a profound, practical morality that underlies her work,” he said.

At MOCA, about 300 Angelenos braved an atmospheric river to sit in the darkened former police car warehouse bathed in red light. No projector, no spotlight. A pair of Tabis winks at her all-black-clad friend; a couple holds hands as Seu moves through the room. (“I intentionally wear very noisy shoes,” she said earlier.)

With the calm cadence of a flight attendant, Sue instructs everyone to put their phones on Do Not Disturb, sound and brightness to max and open Instagram to find @asexualhistoryoftheinternet.

The audience reads in unison when their designated color appears. What follows is a chorus of anecdotes, artworks and historical fragments tracing the pervasive — and sometimes perverted — roots of our everyday technologies. Hearing men and women say “click and clitoris” together is its own spectacle.

“From personal websites to online communities, cryptocurrencies to AI, the internet has been built on the backs of unattributed sex workers,” one slide notes. Sex work has long been an early adopter of emerging technology — from VHS to the internet — and the present is no exception. Two years ago, OnlyFans creators made more money than the total NBA salary combined; today, the company now generates more revenue per employee than Apple or Nvidia.

Seu ends with the widely known dominatrix Mistress Harley’s concept of data domination, a subset of BDSM in which her “subs” (a.k.a. submissives) grant her remote access to their machines. Seu tells the crowd that she has essentially done the same, “viewing the voyeurs” and taking photos of us throughout the performance, which are already posted to Instagram.

We walk out into the dark rain, wondering what exactly we witnessed — and realizing, perhaps, we’ve been witnessing it all along.

‘Soon, you’ll no longer be able to use Facebook’, Meta said in messages it sent to young people ahead of the social media ban.

Meta will prevent Australians younger than 16 from accessing Facebook and Instagram from December 4, as Canberra prepares to enforce a sweeping new social media law that has sparked concerns from young people and advocates.

The US tech giant said it would start removing teenagers and children from its platforms ahead of the new Australian social media ban on users under 16 coming into effect on December 10.

The Australian government is preparing to enforce the law with fines of up to 49.5 million Australian Dollars (US$32 million) for social media companies even as critics say the changes have been rushed through without addressing questions around privacy, and the effects on young people’s mental health and access to information.

“From today, Meta will be notifying Australian users it understands to be aged 13-15 that they will lose access to Instagram, Threads and Facebook,” Meta said in a statement.

“Meta will begin blocking new under-16 accounts and revoking existing access from 4 December, expecting to remove all known under-16s by 10 December.”

There are around 350,000 Instagram users aged between 13-15 in Australia and around 150,000 Facebook accounts, according to government figures.

Meta has started warning impacted users that they will soon be locked out.

“Soon, you’ll no longer be able to use Facebook and your profile won’t be visible to you or others,” reads a message sent to users that Meta believes to be under 16.

“When you turn 16, we’ll let you know that you can start using Facebook again.”

In addition to Facebook and Instagram, the Australian government has said that the ban will be applied to several other social media platforms, including Reddit, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, X and YouTube.

Ban ‘doesn’t add up’

A number of young people and advocates have expressed concerns about the implementation of the new ban, including journalist and founder of youth news service 6 News Australia Leo Puglisi, 18, who told an Australian senate inquiry that young people “deeply care” about the ban and its potential implications.

Puglisi says that many of the people who engage with 6 News are young people who find their content on social media.

“I think young people do have the right to be informed,” he told the inquiry.

“We’re saying that a 15 year old can’t access any news or political information on social media. I just don’t think that that adds up.”

Australian Senator David Shoebridge, has expressed concerns that “an estimated 2.4 million young people will be kicked off social media accounts… just as school holidays start.”

“I’m deeply concerned about the impacts on the ban including on young people’s mental health and privacy,” Shoebridge wrote in a recent post on X.

John Pane, from Electronic Frontiers Australia, also told a senate inquiry that the new legislation creates new risks, while trying to address other issues.

While Pane acknowledged the ban seeks to address young people potentially seeing “unsuitable content” online, he says it also creates a new “far greater, systemic risk” of “potential mass collection of children’s and adults’ identity data.”

This will further increase “the data stores and financial positions of big tech and big data and increasing cyber risk on a very significant scale,” Pane said.

Since most Australians aged under 16 don’t yet have official government ID, social media companies are planning to require some users to verify their age by recording videos of themselves.

Other countries mull similar bans

There is keen interest in whether Australia’s sweeping restrictions can work as regulators around the globe wrestle with the mixed dangers and benefits of social media.

In New Zealand, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon is planning to introduce a similar bill to restrict children’s social media use.

Indonesia has also said it is preparing legislation to protect young people from “physical, mental, or moral perils”.

In Europe, the Dutch government has advised parents to forbid children under 15 from using social media apps like TikTok and Snapchat.