What Does a Guy Have to Do to Acquire a Media Company Around Here?
Tech has been long overdue for a correction, and it certainly hit this week, with a vengeance and on all fronts, and especially in the stock market, where Jeff Bezos lost $13B in just a few hours. He’s still one of the wealthiest people on the planet but, hey, a billion here, a billion there, before you know it, it adds up to real money
Elon Musk had been battling for Twitter for weeks. The board scoffed at his initial offer. Twitter workers freaked out over Elon Musk in internal Slack messages (“Physically cringy watching Elon talk about free speech,” wrote one site reliability engineer, and for fook’s sake, doesn’t the South African-born billionaire realize that he’s in America now!!!). Now that Musk has more or less been handed the keys, the tech press is up in arms, too, that yet another billionaire owns a media company. Or so it was reported by MSN (backed by billionaire Bill Gates), in a Bloomberg opinion piece (owned by billionaire Michael Bloomberg) published in the Washington Post (owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos).
With all of those forces against him, makes you wonder what a guy has to do to acquire a media company in this day and age?
Same Schmidt, Different Day
It’s been a while since we’ve checked in on the tech cabal,. You know that there’s always something to see. And something they’d prefer you’d not see.
One of the latest reports is that Apple and Meta Gave User Data to Hackers Who Used Forged Legal Requests. It seems the two behemoths “provided customer data to hackers who masqueraded as law enforcement officials,” Yahoo!finance reported, including “basic subscriber details, such as a customer’s address, phone number and IP address, in mid-2021 in response to the forged “emergency data requests.””
It seems that rather than hacking Apple and Meta (nee Facebook) directly, given their armies of coders, instead, the hackers breached law enforcement agencies worldwide. For the record, the hackers who sell this information to various and nefarious, only charge $100-$250 for this service. In 2021, Meta received 21,000+ ‘emergency requests’ which do not need to be signed off by a judge, and complied with 77% of them, while Apple received over 1100 and complied with 93% of them.
What Hath Tech Wrought…This Time
The world was up in arms when Russia says it’s blocking Facebook in alarming new censorship push. Meta president of global affairs Nick Clegg then tweeted in response to the move, saying “Soon millions of ordinary Russians will find themselves cut off from reliable information…and silenced from speaking out,” The Verge reported. Yet, how long has the tech cabal been censoring people and posts that are not in lockstep with what they deem appropriate, or do not conform to their agendas?
Meanwhile, we’re witnessing The creeping authoritarianism of facial recognition that’s being adopted more and more. “The same technology that Russia uses to keep its people in line has come to America,” Spectator World reported. Of course, it’s all in the name of lowering crime rates, but note to self, More States Than Ever Passing Laws For No Cash Bail and Pretrial Detention, including New York, where the NYPD provide(d) hard proof that no-bail law is causing a crime spike. Said the New York Post, “Since Jan. 1, 482 suspects busted for serious felonies were released without bail only to commit another 846 new crimes. Over a third were arrested for one of the seven most serious crimes: murder, rape, robbery, felony assault, burglary, grand larceny and grand larceny auto.”
Life, the Metaverse and Everything
The reference is the third book in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, The Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything, FYI.
It’s traditional at this time of the year to either look back at the best/worst ofs from the year before, or to prognosticate about the year ahead.
This point in the trajectory of tech feels different, as we venture across the threshold of Web 3.0. meaning that there have been two prior iterations:
The Platform Formerly Known as Facebook
When recording artist Prince got into a contract dispute with his record label, Warner Brothers, he literally changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol and was thereafter referred to as The Artist Formerly Known As Prince.
Which brings us to The Platform Currently Known As Facebook, which will soon be a name to forget, with a nod to those readers among you for whom that ship sailed long ago, name change or not.
EPIC!!!
The news of the week was that the closely-watched trial between Apple Computer and Epic Games concluded. It was not a win all around, but it did deal “a massive blow to the walled-garden business model of Apple’s App Store.”
According to CNBC, “Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers…issued an injunction that said Apple will no longer be allowed to prohibit developers from providing links or other communications that direct users away from Apple in-app purchasing. Apple typically takes a 15% to 30% cut of gross sales.”
“Apple will now be required to allow developers to direct users to third-party payment processors, meaning developers can now collect revenue directly, and can no longer disallow developers from using account registration data to contact users outside the app,” Gizmodo reported. “…but it’s very far from a complete victory. Gonzalez Rogers ruled against the gaming company on every single other count, finding that while Apple violated California’s Unfair Competition law, the case did not establish Apple to be an illegal monopolist…It’s not clear, as of this moment, how wide the ramifications will be beyond the App Store specifically. Google, which also booted Fortnite from its Play Store in response to Epic’s moves, is facing a similar lawsuit that has yet to be resolved.”
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
We often get reader feedback/notes and have received several lately that brought various points to our attention which we feel are worth sharing.
One such reader is a so-called minority. We’ve met in person. We do not know his vax status, neither do we care, nor is it any of our business. He did note that with all the various programs that people, establishments and companies have put in place on both the private and professional fronts, whenever he is asked to show his proof of vax, qua ‘papers’ (unheard of since the Nazi era), what he feels is something not unfamiliar to him:
Discrimination.
Wee the People
We were half joking last week when we suggested that, in many cases in tech, so-called terms of service be renamed ‘terms of servitude.’ Given the amount of data scraping and surveillance we’ve seen because of the lockdowns (think the enormous spike in Amazon and Walmart online orders, while mom and pops were forced to close). It’ll be interesting to see what fresh hell comes next. The New Normal? Might want to think New Police State.
Or something like that.
The New Apple, to the Core
Apple recently announced that they’re going to scan U.S. iPhones for images of child sexual abuse, “drawing applause from child protection groups but raising concern among some security researchers that the system could be misused, including by governments looking to surveil their citizens,” according to Yahoo News.
Apple is all about protecting children, as we well know. After all, Apple knew a supplier was using child labor but took 3 years to fully cut ties, despite the company’s promises to hold itself to the ‘highest standards,’ report says. “Ten former members of Apple’s supplier responsibility team (said) the company has refused or has been slow to stop doing business with suppliers that repeatedly violate its labor policies when doing so would hurt its profits.”
So, obviously Apple is not driven by protecting children, although claiming so does tend to pull at the heartstrings and move people to quickly surrender yet another aspect of their privacy/allow surveillance. As Matthew Green, a top cryptography researcher at Johns Hopkins University, pointed out in the Yahoo piece, “abuses could include government surveillance of dissidents or protesters…”What happens when the Chinese government says, ‘Here is a list of files that we want you to scan for,’” Green asked. “Does Apple say no? I hope they say no, but their technology won’t say no.”