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David Auerbach's exploration of the phenomenon he has identified as the meganet begins with a simple, startling revelation: There is no hand on the tiller of some of the largest global digital forces that influence our daily lives: from corporate sites such as Facebook, Amazon, Google, YouTube, Instagram, and Reddit to the burgeoning metaverse encompassing cryptocurrencies and online gaming to government systems such as China's Social Credit System and India's Aadhaar. As we increasingly integrate our society, culture and politics within a hyper-networked fabric, Auerbach explains how the interactions of billions of people with unfathomably large online networks have produced a new sort of beast: ever-changing systems that operate beyond the control of the individuals, companies, and governments that created them. Meganets, Auerbach explains, have a life of their own, actively resisting attempts to control them as they accumulate data and produce spontaneous, unexpected social groups and uprisings that could not have even existed twenty years ago. And they constantly modify themselves in response to user behavior, resulting in collectively authored algorithms none of us intend or control. These enormous invisible organisms exerting great force on our lives are the new minds of the world, increasingly commandeering our daily lives and inner realities. Auerbach's analysis of these gargantuan opaque digital forces yield important insights such as: The conventional wisdom that the Googles and Facebook of this world are tightly run algorithmic entities is a myth.

Master key exam objectives and crucial cybersecurity concepts for the CompTIA Security+ SY0-701 exam, along with an online test bank with hundreds of practice questions and flashcards. In the newly revised ninth edition of CompTIA Security+ Study Guide: Exam SY0-701, veteran cybersecurity professionals and educators Mike Chapple and David Seidl deliver easy-to-follow coverage of the security fundamentals tested by the challenging CompTIA SY0-701 exam.

CompTIA Security+ Practice Tests: Exam SY0-701, Third Edition, prepares you for the newly updated CompTIA Security+ exam. You'll focus on challenging areas and get ready to ace the exam and earn your Security+ certification. This essential collection of practice tests contains study questions covering every single objective domain included on the SY0-701. You'll find 1000 practice questions on topics like general security concepts, threats, vulnerabilities, mitigations, security architecture, security operations, and security program oversight. You'll also find: Complimentary access to the Sybex test bank and interactive learning environment Clear and accurate answers, complete with explanations and discussions of exam objectives.

Video games are both physically and cognitively demanding--so what does that mean for those with a disability or mental illness? Though they may seem at odds, Ability Machines illuminates just how vital video games are to understanding our bodies and abilities. In Ability Machines, Sky LaRell Anderson shows us how video games can help us imagine what our abilities mean and how they engage us physically, behaviorally, and cognitively to envision our agency beyond limitations. On the surface, this can mean games provide power fantasies; more profoundly, games can fundamentally reshape cultural and personal understandings of mental health, illness, disability, and accessibility. Video games are indeed ability machines that produce a reimagined state of agency. Featuring a comparative analysis of key video game titles, including Metal Gear Solid V, Wolfenstein II, Celeste, Devil May Cry 5, Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, Hades, Nier: Automata, and more, Ability Machines tackles larger questions of ability and how our bodies relate to interactive media.

With the updated edition of this hands-on guide, you’ll learn how to write effective, modern Python 3 code by leveraging its best ideas. Author Luciano Ramalho guides you through Python’s core language features and libraries and teaches you how to make your code shorter, faster, and more readable. Featuring major updates throughout the book, Fluent Python, second edition, covers: Special methods: The key to the consistent behavior of Python objects Data structures: Sequences, dicts, sets, Unicode, and data classes Functions as objects: First-class functions, related design patterns, and type hints in function declarations Object-oriented idioms: Composition, inheritance, mixins, interfaces, operator overloading, static typing and protocols Control flow: Context managers, generators, coroutines, async/await, and thread/process pools Metaprogramming: Properties, attribute descriptors, class decorators, and new class metaprogramming hooks that are simpler than metaclasses.

Definitive handbook for manipulating, processing, cleaning, and crunching datasets in Python. Updated for Python 3.10 and pandas 1.4, the third edition of this hands-on guide is packed with practical case studies that show you how to solve a broad set of data analysis problems effectively. You'll learn the latest versions of pandas, NumPy, and Jupyter in the process. Written by Wes McKinney, the creator of the Python pandas project, this book is a practical, modern introduction to data science tools in Python.

Amazon Web Services, the leading cloud computing platform, offers customers APIs for on-demand access to computing services. Rich in examples and best practices of how to use AWS, this Manning bestseller is now released in its third, revised, and improved edition. The Wittig brothers give you a comprehensive, practical introduction to deploying and managing applications on the AWS cloud platform. With a sharp focus on the most important AWS tasks and services, they will save you hours of unproductive time. You'll learn hands-on as you complete real-world projects like hosting a WordPress site, setting up a private cloud, and deploying an app on containers.

Across the world, people watch more than a billion hours of video on YouTube every day. Every minute, more than five hundred additional hours of footage are uploaded to the site, a technical feat unmatched in the history of computing. YouTube invented the attention economy we all live in today, forever changing how people are entertained, informed, and paid online. Everyone knows YouTube. And yet virtually no one knows how it works. Like, Comment, Subscribe is the first book to reveal the riveting, behind-the-scenes account of YouTube's technology and business, detailing how it helped Google, its parent company, achieve unimaginable power, a narrative told through the people who run YouTube and the famous stars born on its stage. It's the story of a revolution in media and an industry run amok, how a devotion to a simple idea--let everyone broadcast online and make money doing so--unleashed an outrage and addiction machine that spun out of the company's control and forever changed the world.

Why voice technology is the next big thing in technology, as big as mobile a decade ago and the internet in the late 90s, fundamentally altering the way companies do business. Voice is the next technology - remarkably similar in potential impact to the internet and mobile computing - poised to change the way the world works. Tobias Dengel is in the vanguard of this breakthrough, understanding the deep, wide-ranging implications voice will have for every industry. In The Sound of the Future, he connects the dots about this emerging paradigm to vividly illustrate how business leaders can stay ahead of the game, rather than scrambling to catch up, as voice technology gradually reveals its power, creating a host of new winners and losers.   Using fascinating, colorful stories, Dengel explains how the "voice-first" experience is becoming part of the global technology mainstream, exploring the ways voice will do a better job of serving basic human needs such as safety, speed, accuracy, convenience, and fun, as well as making it possible for hundreds of millions of people around the planet to participate more fully and productively in today's high-tech world by making interactions with technology virtually effortless. A pervasive technology like the internet and mobile, voice, with applications in marketing, sales, service, manufacturing, and logistics, will change the way we work at every level and every function, driving down costs, boosting productivity, and enabling the creation of entirely new business models.

An essential introduction and guide to navigating the next Internet revolution--everything from the metaverse and NFTs to DAOs, decentralized finance, and self-sovereign identity--from the co-author of the international bestseller Blockchain Revolution. The Web, and with it the Internet, are entering a new age. We've moved from the "Read-only Web," which had little functionality for interacting with content, to the "Read-Write Web," which offered seemingly endless collaborative opportunities, from sharing with our favorite people to shopping at our favorite brands. But the profusion of cyberattacks, data hacks, and online profiling have left many of us to view digital life as a Faustian bargain in need of a major rethink. That rethink is Web3, the "Read-Write-Own Web"--a decentralized Internet where individuals own their own identities and can securely trade assets like money, securities, intellectual property, and art peer to peer. Made possible by blockchains, the foundational technology of bitcoin, Web3 promises the biggest shake up of business since the invention of double-entry bookkeeping in the Middle Ages. It is the Internet's new frontier. In Web3, award-winning author and technology investor Alex Tapscott provides a cutting-edge guide to the Internet's next era. Covering everything from the metaverse and non-fungible tokens to DAOs, decentralized finance, and self-sovereign identity, this indispensable, forward-thinking book describes the building blocks and often hidden technologies that will be foundational to our cultural and economic progress.

An engrossing origin story for the personal computer--showing how the Apple II's software helped a machine transcend from hobbyists' plaything to essential home appliance. Skip the iPhone, the iPod, and the Macintosh. If you want to understand how Apple Inc. became an industry behemoth, look no further than the 1977 Apple II. Designed by the brilliant engineer Steve Wozniak and hustled into the marketplace by his Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, the Apple II became one of the most prominent personal computers of this dawning industry. The story of personal computing in the United States is not about the evolution of hackers--it's about the rise of everyday users. Recounting a constellation of software creation stories, Nooney offers a new understanding of how the hobbyists' microcomputers of the 1970s became the personal computer we know today. From iconic software products like VisiCalc and The Print Shop to historic games like Mystery House and Snooper Troops to long-forgotten disk-cracking utilities, The Apple II Age offers an unprecedented look at the people, the industry, and the money that built the microcomputing milieu--and why so much of it converged around the pioneering Apple II.

Disruption resulting from the proliferation of AI is coming. Artificial intelligence (AI) has impacted many industries around the world--banking and finance, pharmaceuticals, automotive, medical technology, manufacturing, and retail. But it has only just begun its odyssey toward cheaper, better, and faster predictions that drive strategic business decisions. When prediction is taken to the max, industries transform, and with such transformation comes disruption. What is at the root of this? In their bestselling first book, Prediction Machines, eminent economists Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb explained the simple yet game-changing economics of AI. Now, in Power and Prediction, they go deeper, examining the most basic unit of analysis: the decision. The authors explain that the two key decision-making ingredients are prediction and judgment, and we perform both together in our minds, often without realizing it.

A brand-new edition of the popular introductory textbook that explores how computer hardware, software, and networks work. Computers are everywhere. Some are highly visible, in laptops, tablets, cell phones, and smart watches. But most are invisible, like those in appliances, cars, medical equipment, transportation systems, power grids, and weapons. We never see the myriad computers that quietly collect, share, and sometimes leak personal data about us. Topics include how computers are built and how they compute; what programming is; how the Internet and web operate; and how all of these affect security, privacy, property, and other important social, political, and economic issues. Kernighan touches on fundamental ideas from computer science and some of the inherent limitations of computers, and new sections in the book explore Python programming, big data, machine learning, and much more. Includes numerous color illustrations, notes on sources for further exploration, and a glossary explaining technical terms and buzzwords.

"Unsettling, absolutely riveting, and--for better or worse--necessary reading." --Brian Christian, author of Algorithms to Live By and The Alignment Problem. An entertaining account of the philosophy and technology of hacking--and why we all need to understand it. It's a signal paradox of our times that we live in an information society but do not know how it works. And without understanding how our information is stored, used, and protected, we are vulnerable to having it exploited. In Fancy Bear Goes Phishing, Scott J. Shapiro draws on his popular Yale University class about hacking to expose the secrets of the digital age. With lucidity and wit, he establishes that cybercrime has less to do with defective programming than with the faulty wiring of our psyches and society. And because hacking is a human-interest story, he tells the fascinating tales of perpetrators, including Robert Morris Jr., the graduate student who accidentally crashed the internet in the 1980s, and the Bulgarian "Dark Avenger," who invented the first mutating computer-virus engine. We also meet a sixteen-year-old from South Boston who took control of Paris Hilton's cell phone, the Russian intelligence officers who sought to take control of a US election, and others. In telling their stories, Shapiro exposes the hackers' tool kits and gives fresh answers to vital questions: Why is the internet so vulnerable? What can we do in response? Combining the philosophical adventure of Gödel, Escher, Bach with dramatic true-crime narrative, the result is a lively and original account of the future of hacking, espionage, and war, and of how to live in an era of cybercrime. Includes black-and-white images

If you've mastered Python's fundamentals, you're ready to start using it to get real work done. Programming Python will show you how, with in-depth tutorials on the language's primary application domains: system administration, GUIs, and the Web. You'll also explore how Python is used in databases, networking, front-end scripting layers, text processing, and more.

Get a comprehensive, in-depth introduction to the core Python language with this hands-on book. Based on author Mark Lutz's popular training course, this updated fifth edition will help you quickly write efficient, high-quality code with Python. It's an ideal way to begin, whether you're new to programming or a professional developer versed in other languages. Complete with quizzes, exercises, and helpful illustrations, this easy-to-follow, self-paced tutorial gets you started with both Python 2.7 and 3.3-- the latest releases in the 3.X and 2.X lines--plus all other releases in common use today. You'll also learn some advanced language features that recently have become more common in Python code. Explore Python's major built-in object types such as numbers, lists, and dictionaries Create and process objects with Python statements, and learn Python's general syntax model Use functions to avoid code redundancy and package code for reuse Organize statements, functions, and other tools into larger components with modules Dive into classes: Python's object-oriented programming tool for structuring code Write large programs with Python's exception-handling model and development tools Learn advanced Python tools, including decorators, descriptors, metaclasses, and Unicode processing