Here’s the US Senate Statement of Frances Haugen who used to work for Facebook countering misinformation and espionage [1]. She believes that Facebook is capable of dealing with the online radicalisation and promotion of bad things on it’s platform but is unwilling to do so for financial reasons. We need strong regulation of Facebook and it probably needs to be broken up.
Interesting article from The Atlantic about filtered cigarettes being more unhealthy than unfiltered [2]. Every time I think I know how evil tobacco companies are I get surprised by some new evidence.
Cory Doctorow wrote an insightful article about resistance to “rubber hose cryptanalysis” [3].
Cory Doctorow wrote an insightful and informative article Big Tech Isn’t Stealing News Publishers’ Content, It’s Stealing Their Money [5] which should be read by politicians from all countries that are trying to restrict quoting news on the Internet.
Matthew Garrett wrote an interesting review of the Freedom Phone, seems that it’s not good for privacy and linked to some companies doing weird stuff [7]. Definitely worth reading.
Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting and amusing article about backdoors for machine learning [8]
Petter Reinholdtsen wrote an informative post on how to make a bootable USB stick image from an ISO file [9]. Apparently Lenovo provides ISO images to update laptops that don’t have DVD drives. :(
Barry Gander wrote an interesting article about the fall of Rome and the decline of the US [10]. It’s a great concern that the US might fail in the same way as Rome.
Charles Stross wrote an insightful blog post about Billionaires [13]. They can’t do much for themselves with the extra money beyond about $10m or $100m (EG Steve Jobs was unable to extend his own life much when he had cancer) and their money is trivial when compared to the global economy. They are however effective parasites capable of performing great damage to the country that hosts them.
Cory Doctorow has an interesting article about how John Deere is being evil again [14]. This time with potentially catastrophic results.
- [1] https://tinyurl.com/yeppy78q
- [2] https://tinyurl.com/28yt5wbg
- [3] https://onezero.medium.com/rubber-hoses-fd685385dcd4
- [4] https://tinyurl.com/2ztqaw9a
- [5] https://tinyurl.com/2kv68veo
- [6] https://en.culturess.com/view/?id=santiago-genoves-experiment-cul
- [7] https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/59479.html
- [8] https://tinyurl.com/yy8pyg65
- [9] https://tinyurl.com/2qr9evgb
- [10] https://tinyurl.com/2ngytzuh
- [11] https://tinyurl.com/2qjffrt3
- [12] https://tinyurl.com/2ote6mw7
- [13] https://tinyurl.com/yxe75yel
- [14] https://tinyurl.com/y23lbw2n