Some 50 years ago, at the Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) of renowned photocopier company Xerox, a revolutionary approach to local digital networks was born. On 22 May 1973, Bob Metcalf authored a memo that described ‘X-Wire’, a 3Mbps common bus office network system.

There are very few networking technologies from the early 70s that have proven to be so resilient (TCP/IP is the only other major networking technology from that era that I can recall), so it’s worth looking at Ethernet a little closer in order to see why it has enjoyed such an unusual longevity.

Hang on, was that 3Mbps? True, the initial Ethernet specification passed data at a rate of 2.94Mbps, not 10Mbps. That came later, as did the subsequent refinements to the Ethernet technology that allowed data transfer rates of 100Mbps, 1Gbps, and then 100Gbps. Terabit Ethernet (TbE) is on the way, by all accounts.

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À la mi-2016, Aviv Ovadya s'est rendu compte qu'internet avait un très gros problème —tellement gros qu'il a décidé d'abandonner son travail pour pousser un cri d'alarme. Quelques semaines avant les élections américaines de 2016, il a exposé ses inquiétudes à des professionnels du secteur des nouvelles technologies de la région de la Baie de San Francisco et averti de l'imminence d'une crise de la désinformation lors d'une présentation qu'il a intitulée «Infocalypse.»

The power consumption of our high-tech machines and devices is hugely underestimated.

When we talk about energy consumption, all attention goes to the electricity use of a device or a machine while in operation. A 30 watt laptop is considered more energy efficient than a 300 watt refrigerator. This may sound logical, but this kind of comparisons does not make much sense if you don't also consider the energy that was required to manufacture the devices you compare. This is especially true for high-tech products, which are produced by means of extremely material- and energy-intensive manufacturing processes. How much energy do our high-tech gadgets really consume?