[If you thought your relatives' gift of a "smart speaker" was the worst way that a family member could compromise your privacy, think again: home genetic tests can opt your whole bloodline into mass-scale state genetic surveillance, and while there has been some progress into bringing the rule of law into the stuff of life, it's been halting -- and that's bad news, especially as companies that do genetics for spies and cops merge with consumer genomics companies, something that's just happened, as my EFF colleague Jennifer Lynch discusses below, in this crosspost from EFF's Deeplinks blog -Cory]
This week, GEDmatch, a genetic genealogy company that gained notoriety for giving law enforcement access to its customers’ DNA data, quietly informed its users it is now operated by Verogen, Inc., a company expressly formed two years ago to market “next-generation [DNA] sequencing” technology to crime labs. Read the rest
Companies that make successful Mac apps live in constant fear of being sherlocked -- having Apple release a feature-for-feature clone to compete with your product, bundling it in with Macos.
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I sat down for an interview for Reason's short feature, The Decentralized Web Is Coming, which documents the surging Decentralized Web movement, whose goal is to restore the internet's early, decentralized era, before it turned into five giant services filled with screenshots from the other four.
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Back in 2017, a law student named Lena Khan made waves in policy circles with the publication of her massive, brilliant, game-changing 24,000-word article in the Yale Law Journal, Amazon's Antitrust Paradox, which revisited the entirety of post-Ronald-Reagan antitrust orthodoxy to show how it had allowed Amazon to become a brutal, harmful monopoly without any consequences from the regulators charged with ensuring competition in our markets.
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Spotify has asked the EU Commission to intervene in its business relationship with Apple, citing the fact that Apple takes a 30% vig on all customer revenues from people who join the service or buy songs through an Iphone app, while Apple's own competing Itunes store does not have to pay this commission.
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