Technology

Smartphones enable people to access the online world from anywhere at any time. Despite the benefits of this technology, there is growing concern that smartphone use could adversely impact cognitive functioning and mental health. Correlational and anecdotal evidence suggests that these concerns may be well-founded, but causal evidence remains scarce. We conducted a month-long randomized controlled trial to investigate how removing constant access to the internet through smartphones might impact psychological functioning. We used a mobile phone application to block all mobile internet access from participants’ smartphones for 2 weeks and objectively track compliance. This intervention specifically targeted the feature that makes smartphones “smart” (mobile internet) while allowing participants to maintain mobile connection (through texts and calls) and nonmobile access to the internet (e.g. through desktop computers). The intervention improved mental health, subjective well-being, and objectively measured ability to sustain attention; 91% of participants improved on at least one of these outcomes. Mediation analyses suggest that these improvements can be partially explained by the intervention's impact on how people spent their time; when people did not have access to mobile internet, they spent more time socializing in person, exercising, and being in nature. These results provide causal evidence that blocking mobile internet can improve important psychological outcomes, and suggest that maintaining the status quo of constant connection to the internet may be detrimental to time use, cognitive functioning, and well-being.

• X may be launching a new funding round to increase its valuation to $44 billion.
• A recent valuation only put the platform’s value at just under $10 billion.
• Owner Elon Musk may be trying to prove doubters wrong that he overpaid for the site in 2022.

Mirror: https://archive.is/hkGXN

Subtitle: Qualys finds two worrying bugs in OpenSSH

When I checked my personal rigs Debian had already released the patches and my home server had already auto updated itself.

IT'S OFFICIAL, FOLKS! Trump thinks he can just slap tariffs on our friends abroad and watch us 'compete' again? Newsflash: this only hurts the little guy (and the planet). Just got word from Acer CEO that those tariffs have already led to a 10% price hike for laptops in the US. That's right, we're paying more for the very devices that are supposed to help us succeed in an era of 'American greatness'. Meanwhile, Trump is too busy coddling his corporate pals to care about the real American people. Wake up, sheeple! It's time to stop voting for politicians who only look out for their buddies on Wall Street.