Jack Poulson is one of several googlers to quit the company over Project Dragonfly, the company's secret plan to launch a Chinese search tool that will incorporate state surveillance and… Read the rest of the article: Detailed look at Google's secret, censored, spying Chinese search tool
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Cory Doctorow As the tide of public opinion turns against monopolism, Amazon has become the poster child for irredeemable, late-stage capitalism; the company's ham-fisted attempts to burnish its reputation have not stemmed… Read the rest of the article: Leaked video reveals Amazon's union-busting playbook
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Cory Doctorow In All You Need is "Love": Evading Hate Speech Detection, a Finnish-Italian computer science research team describe their research on evading hate-speech detection algorithms; their work will be presented next… Read the rest of the article: Hate-speech detection algorithms are trivial to fool
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Cory Doctorow In 2014, Facebook bought the messaging system Whatsapp for $22B; it was a weird fit, because Whatsapp founders had decried Facebook's surveillance-based business model and targeted advertising, and had promised… Read the rest of the article: Whatsapp founder: I sold out, but I walked away from $850,000,000 when I quit Facebook
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Cory Doctorow For two years, a group of die-hard Star Trek fans labored to create Stage 9, a totally noncommercial virtual replica of the USS Enterprise built with Unreal Engine; they assumed… Read the rest of the article: CBS smashes fans' virtual, noncommercial recreation of the USS Enterprise
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Cory Doctorow Messages leaked to Buzzfeed reveal the bizarre story of the "Tory First Battalion," a secret Twitter group formed to capitalise on the smear that the Labour party was anti-Semitic by… Read the rest of the article: UK Tories created a secret anti-Corbyn Twitter army, which promptly attacked Theresa May
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Cory Doctorow There are lots of calls for the platforms to police the bad speech on their platform — disinformation and fake news; hate speech and harassment, extremist content and so on… Read the rest of the article: Want the platforms to police bad speech and fake news? The copyright wars want a word with you.
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Cory Doctorow "Everything's fine the way it is. Trump…that was us. He's our guy. Tax cuts for the rich? Hell yeah, I'm rich as fuck. Climate change? That's a "you problem"…I'll be… Read the rest of the article: A message to the kids from America's gerontocracy: DON'T VOTE
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Cory Doctorow Jordan Peterson is a Canadian academic whose mysticism-soaked misogyny revolves around the social hierarchy of some lobster species and the literal existence of witches and dragons; somehow, when this rubbish… Read the rest of the article: Jordan Peterson's gamma lobsters find a new low: defending censorship
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Cory Doctorow Science fiction author, librettist, singer and historian Ada Palmer (previously), science and piracy historian Adrian Johns, and I have teamed up to create a seminar series at the University of… Read the rest of the article: Kickstarting a seminar series with Ada Palmer and me about the history of censorship and information control
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Cory Doctorow Surya Raghavendran started fixing phones when Apple tried to charge him $120 to fix the defective screen they'd installed in his phone; instead, he followed online instructional videos and fixed… Read the rest of the article: A 17-year-old is leading Michigan's Right to Repair movement
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Cory Doctorow Firefox Monitor is a new service from Mozilla that draws on data from Have I Been Pwned? (previously) to keep you informed when your data is breached and shows up… Read the rest of the article: Firefox Monitor: get alerts if your data shows up in a breach
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Cory Doctorow Facebook's acquisition spree — including huge-dollar payouts for Instagram and Whatsapp — was supposed to shore up the company's crumbling user base by creating a "family" of semi-independent companies with… Read the rest of the article: Facebook kremlinology: Instagram founders' exodus signals immanent facebookization
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Cory Doctorow With only weeks to go before the most important midterm election in living American memory, the deadline for voter registration is fast approaching in many key states: here's how to… Read the rest of the article: Do or die: register to vote!
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Cory Doctorow Even though the DoJ has expressly prohibited using the No-Fly list to gain leverage over potential informants, the FBI has continued its longstanding practice of blackmailing American citizens by putting… Read the rest of the article: FBI will face lawsuit for putting people on the No-Fly list for refusing to inform on friends
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Cory Doctorow Mexico's governance crisis continues: beyond the clandestine mass graves, the kidnapping of elected officials (and assassination of political candidates) and coordinated attacks on anti-corruption candidates, there's the well-known problem of… Read the rest of the article: Mexican forces seize control of entire Acapulco police department
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Cory Doctorow For weeks, Honeywell Home customers have been complaining about outages with their Honeywell "Total Connect Comfort" apps, which allow them to remote control their smart thermostats; several days ago, customers… Read the rest of the article: Internet of Shit watch: Honeywell server outage means "smart" thermostats are inaccessible
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Cory Doctorow Eccentric spectacle-maker Scott Urban kickstarted his Reflectacles in 2016: ray-ban-style frames inset with highly retroreflective material that is visible from hundreds of meters and strobes under a flash, making for… Read the rest of the article: Spectacle frames that reflect infrared light, blinding CCTV cameras
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Cory Doctorow Big Tech companies — like all the apex predators of all the world's concentrated industries — is swimming in cash; but unlike those other firms, Big Tech is not using… Read the rest of the article: Big Tech is building a $80B capex wall around its empire
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Cory Doctorow A research team from Imperial College London have published promising results of an experiment in which Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes — responsible for the spread of malaria — were genetically modified… Read the rest of the article: A CRISPR-based hack could eradicate malaria-carrying mosquitoes