Techno-politics

On October 1, the Republican-led Federal Communications Commission (FCC) prevailed in the Washington DC circuit court of appeals and crushed the hopes of those arguing to reinstate net neutrality on a federal level. The responses from the FCC commissioners are split along party lines, so I will not bother to relitigate the case here. But Continue Reading →

Online publishers in the EU were all excited about Article 15 of the EU’s copyright directive which allows the press to request money from platforms like Google and Facebook when copyrighted material appears on their respective sites. France transposed the EU’s copyright reforms into a national law that takes effect October 1st. There’s only one Continue Reading →

Google got some good news from the European Union’s top court yesterday, “The Court concludes that, currently, there is no obligation under EU law, for a search engine operator who grants a request for de-referencing made by a data subject, as the case may be, to carry out such a de-referencing on all the versions Continue Reading →

We have entered the age of personalized politics, and it is very important for us to understand what that means. In practice, there are as many candidates in the 2020 presidential race as there are voters with online access in the United States. Every candidate is a customized persona created specifically for us by a complex set of algorithms that very few people fully understand. This means we are all test subjects in an unprecedented sociopolitical experiment that, quite frankly, scares the hell out of me. Continue Reading →

Mr. Zuckerberg went to Washington yesterday for private meetings with the President and several lawmakers. The meetings were private and Mr. Zuckerberg did not answer questions about specifics. However, according to the WSJ, Sen. Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) challenged Facebook’s CEO saying, “Prove that you’re serious… sell WhatsApp, and sell Instagram.” There is only hearsay Continue Reading →

Facebook is getting into the dating game. Deepfakes are getting better and better. Put them both together and they present a potential reality as sinister as it is deceitful. Imagine online dating in a world replete with deepfakes. Continue Reading →

Enterprise-grade AR headset builder, Daqri is getting ready to close its doors. The 10-year-old company has raised mored than $275 million and was concentrating on industrial applications for the nascent technology. “You can always tell who the pioneers are. They’re the ones with the arrows in their backs.” — Anonymous Politically Incorrect Person AR (Augmented Continue Reading →

California legislators approved a landmark bill on Tuesday that requires companies like Uber and Lyft to treat contract workers as employees, a move that could reshape the gig economy and that adds fuel to a yearslong debate over whether the nature of work has become too insecure. You can argue this two ways: 1) workers Continue Reading →

I have been in an abusive relationship with Apple since the mid 80s. They keep torturing me and I keep buying their products. From the Apple II to the present, I have only cheated on them with some PCs in the 90s and some Samsung phones in the smartphone era. They are the company I love to hate, so you can imagine how weird it was for me to be defending Apple on television yesterday. Me? Defending Apple? Continue Reading →

Fifty attorneys general are joining an investigation into Google over possible antitrust violations according to the initiative’s leader, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. I understand both the desire and the need for our government to get a handle on the issues surrounding data privacy, but think about this… let’s say that the outcome is a Continue Reading →