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A massive earthquake struck off the Kamchatka Peninsula of Russias far east on Wednesday morning, July 30, local time. The quake was the sixth-largest ever recorded and sent tsunami waves spreading across the Pacific Ocean. Some of those waves are headed to the United States and have already made landfall in some states, leading to numerous tsunami warnings and advisoriesmany of which are still in effect. Heres what you need to know about the Kamchatka quake and tsunami, and how you can track the latest warnings for where the waves could be headed next. Whats happened? On the morning of July 30 local time (about 11:24 p.m., July 29 UTC), a massive earthquake occurred off the coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russias far east. The quake registered a magnitude of 8.8 on the Richter scale, making it the sixth most powerful earthquake to ever be recorded, according to CNN. The epicenter of the quake was about 74 miles southeast of the region’s largest city, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, and occurred at a depth of about 12.8 miles below the surface. The Kamchatka earthquake is the largest quake recorded since the Thoku earthquake in Japan on March 11, 2011. That earthquake measured 9.1 on the Richter scale and led to a devastating tsunami in Japan, which cost around 20,000 lives and led to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. In the hour after the initial quake, two significant aftershocks measuring magnitudes of 6.3 and 6.9 struck, and since then, multiple aftershocks measuring 5 on the Richter scale have hit as well. The initial quake and these aftershocks have sent tsunami waves spreading across the Pacific Ocean. Where did the Kamchatka tsunami waves head? The tsunami waves that spread as a result of the Kamchatka earthquake headed across the Pacific Ocean and made landfall on Russias far east coast. According to CNN, the waves first hit Russia and Japan. They then traveled across the Pacific to Canada and the United States. In the United States, the waves are known to have made landfall in five states: Alaska California Hawaii Oregon Washington Following the earthquake, as the tsunami waves spread across the Pacific, authorities in these states issued tsunami warnings, and in some locations, urged residents to evacuate to higher ground. In Hawaii, Governor Josh Green told residents to evacuate coastal areas, stating, It will not hit one beach, it will wrap around the islands. In addition to the five U.S. states listed above, as well as Russia, Japan, and Canada, other countries have issued tsunami warnings and alerts, including Chile, China, French Polynesias Marquesas Islands, Indonesia, Mexico, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Peru, the Philippines, Solomon Islands, Taiwan, and Vanuatu. Tsunami Warning map Numerous tsunami warnings and advisories have been issued for cities and states in the U.S. as a result of the Kamchatka quake. Some of these warnings have been downgraded to advisories, while others remain in place. Its also still possible that further warnings or advisories will be issued. A great way to keep track of all these alerts is by checking out the Tsunami Warning map by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Weather Service. The color-coded map displays the latest tsunami warnings and advisories, as well as other alerts. Its mapping technology is powered by the spatial analytics company Esri. Alerts are displayed on the map in one of five colors: Tsunami WarningRed Tsunami AdvisoryOrange Tsunami WatchYellow Tsunami Information StatementGreen Tsunami ThreatPurple (International) Two of the most serious alerts on the map are the red Tsunami Warning and orange Tsunami Advisory alerts. According to the U.S. Tsunami Warning Centers, the red Tsunami Warning is issued when a tsunami with the potential to generate widespread inundation is imminent, expected, or occurring. Warnings alert the public that dangerous coastal flooding accompanied by powerful currents is possible and may continue for several hours after initial arrival. A yellow Tsunami Advisory is issued when a tsunami with the potential to generate strong currents or waves dangerous to those in or very near the water is imminent, expected, or occurring. The threat may continue for several hours after initial arrival, but significant inundation is not expected for areas under an advisory. If youre in a coastal area that may be impacted, its a good idea to keep abreast of tsunami alerts in your area. To find out more about what to do in the event of a tsunami threat, you can check out the U.S. governments Ready website about tsunamis.
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E-Commerce
For all of those doomscrolling on TikTok, a new feature is here to bring additional context to videos, regardless of what weird side of TikTok you might find yourself in. Alongside a series of new features related to safety, TikTok announced on Wednesday, July 30, the launch of “footnotes,” the video app’s take on X-style “community notes. Available for users in the U.S., the community-approved notes are set to appear on short videos when members of the community feel like further context is needed. “Footnotes are drawing on reflective knowledge of TikTok’s entire community in the U.S. by allowing people to add relevant information that they know to content that they’re watching on TikTok,” said Erica Ruzic, TikTok’s global head of integrity and authenticity product, at a press event in New York. For instance, an expert or researcher might weigh in on videos related to scientific topics, while other users might provide additional resources and data to videos with misleading claims. Ban deadline loomingagain The announcement comes just 49 days before the September 17 deadline imposed by President Trump’s administration requiring ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese-owned parent company, to sell the popular app to an American buyer. This new date is the administration’s third-extension for the TikTok ban, following a brief shutdown of the app earlier this year. As a privately held company, ByteDance does not share its financials, yet estimates earlier this year hinted that its U.S. operations could be worth as much as $50 billion. Footnotes also follows a series of already active features developed for trust and safety, including labels for AI-generated content, verification checks to confirm a creator’s identity, and banners offering reliable sources for topics vulnerable to misinformation. How do footnotes work? Similarly to X, not everyone is able to contribute community notes, with participation limited to a select group of contributors. “These contributors are going to be able to write and also rate footnotes, starting with short-form content,” said Ruzic. With footnotes’ pilot initially announced in April, 80,000 users signed up to join the contributor community. To qualify, TikTok is requiring contributors to be a user based in the U.S., to have an account that has been active for at least six months, and to not have recent community guideline violations. For accepted contributors, an extra button will be available on screen to add their written community notes or rate the existing notes. Powered by a bridging-based system, contributors can rate notes as “helpful” or “unhelpful,” with the system identifying the areas of consensus to determine what community note to broadcast. “The more footnotes that get written and rated on these different topics, the smarter and more effective our system is going to become,” Ruzic said. “At first, it might take some time for a footnote to become public, as contributors are getting started and they’re really familiarizing themselves with the feature.” While the feature is now available for those who registered for the pilot, all U.S. users can expect to start seeing footnotes at the bottom of videos in the coming weeks. Are footnotes enough? It’s become increasingly more common for social media platforms to rely on users to moderate in-app content. Community notes first launched on then-Twitter in 2021 (the feature was then called Birdwatch) as a crowd-sourcing information tool, but once Elon Musk took over, it quickly became a replacement for in-house content moderators. Earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg of Metawhich owns Facebook and Instagramannounced a similar strategy, relying on community notes and replacing fact checkers. “I think the fact checkers see a lot of potential in these programs. They have a lot of good sides,” said Angie Drobnic Holan, director of the International Fact-Checking Network, during TikTok’s event. “They get the public engaged in thinking about the quality of information that they have access to.” Still, Holan raised three main concerns with these features: There can be low participation due to a lack of interest in the feature; the systems can be swayed by convincing a large group of people to weigh in on a note; and if no consensus is reached, a note never appears. “There’s a lot of opportunities when the note systems are combined with other systems,” she added. “Where we raise a red flag is [where platforms may] turn their entire content moderation effort over to a public notes program.”
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E-Commerce
Cloudflare supports more than 20% of total internet traffic. The company recently made headlines with breakthrough technology that blocks AI companies from scraping online content with impunity. Cofounder and CEO Matthew Prince shares how the new tools are poised to dramatically impact AI firms, publishers, and the future of the internet. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by Robert Safian, former editor-in-chief of Fast Company. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. You released a new tool that’s got a lot of folks buzzing: a blocker for AI crawlersthe bots that scrape content from websites without their consent. You’ve called this new tool the biggest thing you or the company has ever accomplished? Yeah. I feel incredibly fortunate to have built what today is a $60 billion company on the back of the internet. And we became aware about 18 months ago of a new threat to the internet, to content creators, which was being posed by these AI companies. When we realized that there was something we could do about it, we spent about a year talking to everyone in the content creation space, everyone in the AI space. . . . We’re going to change the rules of the road, and say that if you’re not paying for content as an AI company, then you don’t get that content. Today it’s almost 10 times harder to get actual traffic from Google for the same amount of content you created. The minute you show an AI overview, it’s less likely that people click on links. And again, that is better for the Google user, but it is worse for the content creator because it means that you can’t sell a subscription, you can’t sell ads, and you can’t even get the ego boost of knowing that people are reading your stuff. Today, OpenAI is 750 times harder to get traffic from than the Google of old. Anthropic is 30,000 times harder to get traffic from than the Google of old. And so, if content creation is struggling today [when its] 10 times harder, I worry that it won’t survive [if its] 750 times or 30,000 times harder [to read] original content. . . . And if people don’t have the incentive to create content, they’re not going to create content. So there needs to be some business model behind the future of the web, and it’s not going to be around traffic because an AI-driven web doesn’t drive traffic. And the irony is that the AI itself needs the content to be able to make those answers. Now who knows where they’re going to get their answers from. That’s the key: 80% of the major AI companies use Cloudflare in their infrastructure. What they have all said, with a few exceptions, is We agree, content creators need to get paid for content, but it has to be a level playing field. What nobody wants to do is pay for content where all of their competitors get it for free. So, creating that level playing field is incredibly important. Just Anthropic will scrape a site 60,000 times for every one visitor that’s there. Someone has to pay for that traffic. Just from a pure fairness perspective, they should be compensating creators that they’re pulling that content from. We started as a cybersecurity company. We go to war every day with Russian hackers, Iranian hackers, North Korean hackers, Chinese hackers who are trying to get in and thwart our systems. So when we first started talking to publishers about this, it was almost this sort of nihilistic, Oh my gosh, what are we possibly going to do? There’s no way we can stop it. These guys are so smart, they’re a bunch of nerds in Palo Alto. . . . We can’t ever possibly block them. And I remember thinking, We block the North Koreans every day. AI companies are a piece of cake. Before you release the first round of this tool, did you give the AI companies a heads-up? I think there are some bad actors out there, and I think it’ll surprise some people who the bad actors are. We’re monitoring them, and very soon we will publish and we will name and shame who is actually a bad actor in this space. And we will take from what has been basically posting a speed limit sign that says Don’t drive more than 55 miles an hour . . . and we’ll make it into something that is actually much more strict. We’re saying, Listen, we’re taking away your car, you’re not allowed to drive on the road anymore. I understand you’re exploring sort of a pay-per-crawl model with some of the content publishers, which to me sounds a little bit like a toll on the highwaythat you have to pay a toll if you want to come through. If you are generating a huge amount of cost by crawling somebody, but you’re not giving them any benefit, then step one is block them. Then once you’ve created scarcity, then there can be a market, right? There has to be some compensation for taking content, and it’s not going to be traffic anymore, it’s going to be something else. Now the question is, Okay, how do you pay? And I think a lot of times, big AI companies and big publishers are just going to negotiate deals themselves. So if you’re Condé Nast, you go out and do an OpenAI deal, or a Google deal, or something else, and you negotiate it yourself. We don’t have any role in that. I think for the smaller AI companies, or for the long tail of publishers, Cloudflare can hopefully sit in between and help negotiate what is the best deal. And we don’t know exactly what that will look like yet. It could be a micropayment every time a page is accessed. It could be something that’s closer to a Spotify model where there’s a pool of funds and that gets distributed out to all of the different content providers. . . . That will develop, but step one in any market has to be scarcity. If you don’t have scarcity, you don’t have a market. I’m actually optimistic [that] all of us are going to have subscriptions to a certain number of AI agents that are out there. And how AI companies will differentiate themselves is access to unique content that they have and they have alone. So, imagine Taylor Swift is about to release a new album, and she does an interview with some journalists, and they are willing to give that interview to one AI company exclusively for a week. How much is that worth? Probably quite a bit, right? A lot of people are going to sign up. And so, I’m actually optimistic that we might be at the precipice of a golden age of content creation. If we do this right, and we get the incentives right, it might be that instead of us all worshiping the deity that Google taught us to worship, which is traffic, which has always been a really bad proxy for value, if instead we find a way to compensate creators based on when they actually create something which is worthwhile and advances human knowledge, we can actually do some real good in the world, at the same time that wehelp the content creators get paid more.
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E-Commerce
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