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.
Elon Musk is now worth $230 billion—as much as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett combined, and he has even surpassed Jeff Bezos. But, hey, a billion here, a billion there, why quibble? What was not mentioned in the CNBC piece is Elon Musk’s secret? Taxpayer money. His two companies that helped him to achieve that status – Tesla and SpaceX – “together have benefited from an estimated $4.9 billion in government support (subsidies),” according to the LA Times.
Considering that it’s lawmakers who decide who gets what, many of them have coincidentally done quite well picking stocks, even though we know that insider trading is illegal – at least for the rest of us. Still, congress is required to disclose their stock transactions. According to NPR, the “STOCK Act is a law that was passed and signed in 2012, (that) requires more disclosures by federal lawmakers when they trade, they purchase, they sell stocks. It also criminalizes trading on inside information.”
As a writer, we love words. New words enter the patois constantly, and always good to keep up, what, eh? Some we appreciate; some leave us utterly gobsmacked. You needed to turn that noun into a verb? Seriously??? Sometimes they make sense. Ofttimes, we roll our eyes at the absurdity. Those are the ones that we know in our heart of hearts will lead us right down the rabbit hole
We thought we’d share a few that have entered the vocabulary, for better or for worse:
Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram, Messenger and Oculus – all Facebook-owned properties – all went offline Monday, and odd that the outage came the day/morning after the “60 Minutes” interview with former Facebook employee turned whistleblower Frances Haugen.
“The documents, first reported in a series of (Wall Street) Journal stories, revealed that the company’s executives understood the negative impacts of Instagram among younger users and that Facebook’s algorithm enabled the spread of misinformation, among other things,” CNBC reported.
In the 60 Minutes interview, Haugen said, among other things, that Facebook is “tearing our societies apart and is causing ethnic violence around the world.”
When the tech industry was first establishing itself, it was something completely new to the planet, like, for example, the Industrial Age before it. Various mantras hit the zeitgeist: fake it til you make it; move fast and break things; fail fast. There are byproducts of these practices: the disregard for ethics, morality and responsibility or as we’ve said many times before, the only way to cover up a crime is to commit an even bigger crime.
The Elizabeth Holmes trial is on and it turns out that the Stanford dropout sidelined the real scientists at Theranos “By leaving them off email threads,” The Verge reported. Then attempted to blame them for Theranos’s failures. “A lot of new emails were introduced, showing Holmes was aware of the company’s problems, and was even actively trying to manage the situation. Several times in those emails, (former Theranos lab director Adam) Rosendorff tried to get Theranos labs to run FDA-approved tests instead of the ones Theranos developed. But maybe even more telling were the emails that Rosendorff was excluded from…“The company was more about PR and fundraising than patient care,” he said.
The subject line references a book by Douglas Adams: the second in his Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy trilogy.
We’ve been out here in the countryside for over a year now, in the woods, not far from a small town. Quality restaurants are few and far between, if not basically non-existent, compared to the NYC restaurants to which we are accustomed.
We were doing errands a few years back and stopped for lunch at a restaurant right next door to one of the shops we’d visited. The décor was very ‘50s, and they did have a salad bar, which we took as a good sign, so we agreed to be seated. There was ‘50s and maybe early ’60s memorabilia everywhere, including in the salad bar, which offered up iceberg lettuce, onions, canned olives and what appeared to be cucumber and tomato slices. The latter two were the appropriate colors and shapes for said vegetables, so we’re assuming that that’s what they were. As for the lunch itself: all the vegetables came out of cans. In the middle of summer, in the midst of farm country, and where farm stands abound. Next, or as Oscar Wilde said, “Once is an experiment; twice is a perversion.” We never returned to that establishment.
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.”
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.
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.
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.”