Crowdworking platforms used as a tool of war
File under “grim dystopian 21st century”: Bogdan Kulynych on Twitter: “New (to me) dimension of crowdwork platforms: Russian military [used] Premise microtasking platform to aim and calibrate fire during their invasion of Ukraine. Example tasks are to locate ports, medical facilities, bridges, explosion craters. Paying ¢0.25 to $3.25 a task.” This may explain why Google Maps coverage of the area wound up with many of those features tagged in the past week.
(tags: ethics security google crowdwork crowdsourcing warfare war ukraine grim-meathook-future)
Why you should develop a correction of error (COE) | AWS Cloud Operations & Migrations Blog
AWS are proselytising their post-outage retrospective analysis process, the COE. Generally good stuff but they are clearly _still_ married to jeffb’s local timezone:
When documenting times, be sure to include a time zone, and make sure that you’re using it correctly (e.g., PDT vs. PST). Better yet, either use UTC or omit the middle letter of the time zone (e.g., “PT”).
As Brian Scanlan sez: “A good 1/4 of the neurons in my brain were wired to quickly add and subtract 8 hours from timestamps by the time I left there” Just. Use. UTC.(tags: amazon aws timezones coe process postmortems dates pdt pst utc)
New – Customer Carbon Footprint Tool | AWS News Blog
‘Starting today customers can calculate the environmental impact of their AWS workloads with the new customer carbon footprint tool. This new tool uses easy-to-understand data visualizations to provide customers with their historical carbon emissions, evaluate emission trends as their use of AWS evolves, approximate the estimated carbon emissions they have avoided by using AWS instead of an on-premises data center, and review forecasted emissions based on current use. The forecasted emissions are based on current usage, and show how a customer’s carbon footprint will change as Amazon stays on path to powering its operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025, five years ahead of its original target of 2030, and drives toward net-zero carbon by 2040 as part of The Climate Pledge. The customer carbon footprint tool is visible today through the AWS Billing console and helps to support customers on their sustainability journey. When signed into the AWS Billing console, customers can view their carbon emissions data by geographical location and by AWS services, such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). They can also measure changes in their carbon footprint over time, as they deploy new resources in the cloud. The new tool uses data that meets the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, which is the international standard for greenhouse gas reporting.’ Covers Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions.
(tags: aws carbon emissions climate-change sustainability climate infrastructure ops ec2 s3)