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Tag: #Twitter

Jesus Was a Blackbelt: A Lesson in Moving Forward

Jesus Was a Blackbelt: A Lesson in Moving Forward

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Image by Artistraman on Pixabay

Last week, Twitter removed US President Donald Trump from the platform, tweeting that “After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence.” Never mind that Twitter Allows ‘Hang Mike Pence’ To Trend. Violent groups and terrorists have been using the platform for years to coordinate their activities, but we cover technology, not politics, and are more focused on the implications of Twitter’s move – as well as those of tech cabal members Google, who removed Parler from their app store, as did Apple, and Amazon, which eliminated Parler app from its servers.

As actress Emily Ratajkowski warned: If Mark Zuckerberg Can Shut the President Off Facebook, He Can Shut Any of Us Off. History will remind us that no one is truly immune.

There’s no doubt that censorship is alive and well and spreading – unchecked – and it’s not simply to do with politics but also having opinions that are not in lockstep with those of the cabal or the prescribed talking points. Example: Big Tech censors COVID-19 video featuring doctors, YouTube REMOVES viral video of two California doctors questioning stay-at-home orders  and Facebook declares war on anti-vaxxers as it pledges to remove conspiracy theories, never mind that Hundreds (were) Sent to Emergency Room After Getting COVID-19 Vaccines, and “Thousands of people self-reported being unable to work or perform daily activities, or required care from a health care professional, after getting one of the doses from the first tranche,” as the Epoch Times reported. Read More...

Net Non-Neutrality in the Age of Social

Net Non-Neutrality in the Age of Social

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Image by mpmd2009 from Pixabay

Esther Dyson used to hold a high level, invitation-only conference each year in Scottsdale, AZ called PC Forum. The dates were always carved in stone on our calendar. The conference was acquired, but one of the last ones under Dyson’s auspices was at the dawn of the Age of Social, and the theme was Users in Charge. That was over a decade ago, and truth be told, Dyson is and always has been something of an optimist.

This past week, both Twitter and Facebook came under fire for censoring a NY Post article that they (baselessly) claimed was based on ‘hacked material.’

Once again, Senate to Subpoena Twitter CEO Over Blocking of Disputed Biden Articles, the Wall Street Journal (et al) reported. Read More...

Lift-Off! A Milestone Week in Tech

Lift-Off! A Milestone Week in Tech

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First, SpaceX made history with the First-Ever Human Rocket Launch For NASA, as Forbes reported. Saturday’s launch was the first time since 2011 that humans had launched into orbit from U.S. soil. The Dragon shuttle did successfully dock at the International Space Station, and we recall when SpaceX was considered more or less a moonshot.

Tech has come of age, and with age comes responsibility. Read More...

Online Dating and the Missed Opportunity

Online Dating and the Missed Opportunity

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Image by Tumisu from Pixabay

App dating is a crap shoot, to be sure. We have friends who have been using the dating apps for years, to no avail, despite the number of apps available and the number of people using them. As of 2017, Tinder alone had over 100M downloads  and 57 million monthly active users (both free and paid).

So where’s the disconnect, literally?

In our opinion, expectations and preconceptions could be part of it. Too much surface information and not enough commonality might be part of it, too. Our friends who use the apps and potentially initially ‘meet’ someone immediately hit LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram et al to cross reference. Read More...

Don’t Look Now, But Tech Just Became Way More Dangerous (Actually, You Need to Look)

Don’t Look Now, But Tech Just Became Way More Dangerous (Actually, You Need to Look)

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While we’re not big on conspiracy theories – we’re simply too busy to get sidetracked – we do love to follow trajectories to see where things may be going. Or to once again quote Wayne Gretzky, if you want to know where the puck is going, look to where it has been.

The news this week was the banning that has been happening with the social media platforms. War on Free Speech: Facebook Bans People It Considers “Dangerous”, and Twitter is at it, too. While the question seems to be coming up more and more – Is it time to break up Twitter, or regulate it as an edited platform (Big Tech Trying to Have it Both Ways as Platform and Publisher)?, and this would extend to all of the socials – let’s be honest, aren’t they publishers, after all? In fact, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself is calling for regulation, and that should be concerning, especially given his focus, which is in lock step with that of the tech cartel, trust us. As Wired reported, Platforms Want Centralized Censorship. That Should Scare You.

So, why now?

Forest through the trees time, and Big Tech has gotten the four Ds down to an art, and yes, four – Deny, Deflect, Defend, Delay. Important, considering what else has been going on in tech to which not many people have been paying much attention: the rise of the Fakes, or as we prefer to call them, PHAkEs, which is our acronym for Post Human-Acknowledged Entities. Read More...

Net Neutrality and How the Tech Cabal Just Shot Themselves in the ISP

Net Neutrality and How the Tech Cabal Just Shot Themselves in the ISP

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The Senate Intelligence Committee is meeting this week about foreign influence on tech platforms. In the hot seat: Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.

Google refuses to make an appearance, even though the committee specifically requested Larry Page’s presence. Google no doubt prefers not to come under too much scrutiny. Just last week The Intercept reported that Google Executives Misled (Their Own) Staff on China Censorship. With so many balls in the air/fronts to defend, the cabal (Google, Facebook, Twitter, in this instance) have become such hydras with so many tentacles – and fronts – to defend, that they may well be on the verge of falling on their own swords – and they themselves have provided the arguments and ammunition, should Congress or an oversight committee be forced to step in. Notice: we don’t necessarily suggest regulation. They did that themselves: Last week, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Twitter and others urged a U.S. appeals court to reinstate federal “net neutrality” regulations on internet service providers, to maintain a “free and open internet.” Read More...

No is an Acronym

No is an Acronym

Investors hate to say no. They like to hedge their bets and keep their options open. But they will sometimes give you a hard and fast No. Still, that said, things change, so one never knows if it truly is a hard No.

For example, take Avner Ronan, founder of Boxee, a cross-platform freeware media center with social networking features that eventually spun out the Boxee Box. Et al, but more on that later. When he was going for funding, Ronen decided that Fred Wilson would be the perfect investor for Boxee, so he targeted Fred and did get the meeting, but Wilson said No. Undeterred, Ronen continued to send Wilson monthly update on their pivots and progress. The answer continued to come back as No. This went on for 18 months, until there came that one update that changed everything. Finally, Fred said ‘Yes!’ Read More...

The Wizards of Menlo Park

The Wizards of Menlo Park

Whenever we notice a preponderance of attention being paid to one aspect of tech – lately, how the platforms and devices are rewiring our brains and mental states- we assume that that’s where the chorus wants us. We’re always more interested in what they don’t want us to notice.

Much. Read More...

The End of Net Neutrality, or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Blockchain

The End of Net Neutrality, or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Blockchain

Last week, the FCC reversed the 2015 Net Neutrality Act and contrary to popular misconception, the internet did not disappeared. In fact, there has been a lot of disinformation or phacts as we now like to call them (in print, at least), as they bear little or no resemblance to the real thing, surrounding NN.

As for that so-called last mile, as Wired pointed out in 2014, prior to the first NN vote, in What Everyone Gets Wrong in the Debate Over Net Neutrality, “The net neutrality debate is based on a mental model of the internet that hasn’t been accurate for more than a decade. We tend to think of the internet as a massive public network that everyone connects to in exactly the same way. We envision data traveling from Google and Yahoo and Uber and every other online company into a massive internet backbone, before moving to a vast array of ISPs that then shuttle it into our homes. That could be a neutral network, but it’s not today’s internet… Ten years ago, internet traffic was “broadly distributed across thousands of companies,” said Craig Labovitz (CEO of DeepField Networks, an outfit whose sole mission is to track how companies build internet infrastructure) “..But by 2009, half of all internet traffic originated in less than 150 large content and content-distribution companies, and today, half of the internet’s traffic comes from just 30 outfits, including Google, Facebook, and Netflix… Because these companies are moving so much traffic on their own, they’ve been forced to make special arrangements with the country’s internet service providers that can facilitate the delivery of their sites and applications. Basically, they’re bypassing the internet backbone, plugging straight into the ISPs (and) essentially rewired the internet.” Read More...