Reluctant regulators Who should police the web?
Politicians should not offload the responsibility onto others?
SHOULD VIDEO websites have to review content before they publish it? Where does the boundary lie between hate speech and incitement to violence? Is pornography created by artificial intelligence an invasion of privacy? These are all hard questions, but behind them lies an even more difficult one: who should provide the answers?
On the internet, such dilemmas are increasingly being resolved by private firms. Social networks are deciding what kinds of misinformation to ban. Web-hosting companies are taking down sites they deem harmful. Now financial firms are more actively restricting what people can buy (see Finance section).
A definition of DDD as a software design discipline
Domain-Driven Design is a software design discipline centred on the principles that:
- Software for a complex domain requires all designers (engineers, testers, analysts, …) to have a deep, shared understanding of the domain, guided by domain experts
- That understanding is rooted in language: the domain language should be formalised into a Ubiquitous Language (shared, agreed upon, unambiguous)
- The understanding is expressed in a model, shared between experts and designers, which express the problem space (as opposed to the solution space)
- The model must not shy away from explicitly expressing the essential complexity of the domain
- A complex domain can not be efficiently expressed as a single universal model and language, and must therefore be separated into Bounded Contexts (ie. an internally consistent language and model) by the system designers
- The model and language should be in sync with our understanding of, and changes in the domain, through continuous refactoring towards deeper insight
As a mnemonic:
The first-ever three years National Digital Payments Strategy (NDPS) of the National Bank of Ethiopia (NBE) hints that it would apply incentives and discouraging instruments like tax incentives and cash handling fees to attain the goal of the NDPS.
The strategy that officially launched on July 15 and will face implementation till 2024 quoted Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s message that there are efforts within and beyond the Ethiopian payment ecosystem that have laid the foundations for digital payments in Ethiopia, “however, challenges still remain and a strategic effort to address these is needed; a NDPS.”
I trust that NDPS will assist Ethiopia in meeting the challenges that currently lie ahead as we transform the payment ecosystem to move toward a cash-lite and more financially inclusive economy,” Abiy said in his message on the new strategy
A new study finds that incumbent parties lose votes after their citizens get online
THE EARLY days of the internet were full of predictions about access to information unleashing a wave of democratisation. More recently, views on the internet’s impact have soured, as states use it to spy on dissidents and influence foreign elections.
Opinions on this topic are abundant, but hard data are scarce. No one knows whether the Arab spring could have occurred without the internet, or whether Russia’s online efforts to boost President Donald Trump’s campaign had any effect. Nonetheless, scholars can sometimes find natural experiments to substitute for such counter-factual scenarios. A recently revised study by the economists Sergei Guriev, Nikita Melnikov and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya, which is now undergoing peer review, uses the growth of mobile broadband to reveal a link between internet access and scepticism of government.
When you need to give someone your location, you usually point them to an address. Here in Addis, you often point them to an intersection instead. But sometimes an address is just difficult to find — or you don’t have one at all.
For those purposes, Google introduced Plus codes five years ago, allowing you to share your location in a short alphanumerical format, whether you simply can’t find an address or are in the middle of nowhere. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem they were actually used all that much, so now Google is making it easier to share the Plus codes than ever.