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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
"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
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
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
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
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
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
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!
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
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
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
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
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
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
