The Drums of Cyberwar

Georgia was hit with a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack that took down media outlets and military command centers. With the government struggling to communicate with its citizens and the outside world, Russia commandeered the airwaves, broadcasting its own version of events. The hackers themselves were freelancers, recruited from social media sites, which gave Russia plausible deniability, making retaliation that much harder. When Russian troops invaded the country about a month later, the hackers had prepared the battleground. It was the first time cyberwarfare was used to initiate an armed conflict,

Facebook to be fined $5bn for Cambridge Analytica privacy violations

The (US) Federal Trade Commission has reportedly voted to approve fining Facebook roughly $5bn to settle an investigation into the company’s privacy violations

“Don’t Be Evil”

Zuckerberg’s new privacy essay shows why Facebook needs to be broken up

Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t understand what privacy means—he can’t be trusted to define it for the rest of us.

Governments are concerned that cryptocurrencies can undermine anti-money-laundering and sanctions-enforcement regimes

Drug trafficking organizations operating as far apart as Colombia and China, and even blacklisted nations such as North Korea, Venezuela, and Iran, have made headlines for their clandestine crypto maneuvers.

Europe’s Copyright Rules Will Stifle Free Expression

Even if you think the internet’s main function is to serve up entertainment and news, these rules are still a bad idea. But the internet is more than that: it’s our new global nervous system. These rules will affect education, civic and political engagement, family life, employment, and a thousand other fields of human endeavor. To pass them would be an act of gross regulatory malpractice in a parliament charged with the orderly governance of more than 508,000,000 people.

We’re Asleep to Technology’s March & That’s Dangerous

the big tech companies are cornering the market that is humanity.

Google has been working on a top secret project that will aid China’s oppression in Tibet

Named ‘Dragonfly’, the search engine will comply with Beijing’s notoriously repressive censorship regime. It will restrict or completely block searches for “human rights”, “democracy”, “Dalai Lama” and “Tibet”. 

The Autocracy App

What would the world look like if Facebook succeeded in becoming the Operating System of Our Lives? That status has arguably been achieved only by Tencent in China. Tencent runs WeChat, which combines aspects of Facebook, Messenger, Google, Twitter, and Instagram. People use its payment system to make purchases from vending machines, shop online, bank, and schedule appointments. Tencent also connects to the Chinese government’s Social Credit System, which gives users a score, based on data mining and surveillance of their online and offline activity. You gain points for obeying the law and lose them for such behavior as traffic violations or “spreading rumors online.”

The FCC in December handed ISPs sweeping new powers to recast how Americans use the internet

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra said on Sunday the Trump Administration was ignoring “millions of Americans who voiced strong support for net neutrality rules” while California, which is “home to countless start-ups, tech giants and nearly 40 million consumers - will not allow a handful of power brokers to dictate sources for information or the speed at which websites load.”

The decline in Facebook usage is a symbol of a corrupt internet

Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon now have employee camps and internal discontent to worry about. We went from over-sharing to over-consuming to not caring at all. 

Join the protest on copyright action day in your city on August 26

Save your internet today!

Facebook wants to know your bank balance

The tech mogul’s Facebook has been quietly lobbying some of the biggest US banks to sign partnerships that would have the financial institutions share customer data — including account balances and recent purchases.

Social media manipulation rising globally

The manipulation of public opinion over social media platforms has emerged as a critical threat to public life. Around the world, government agencies and political parties are exploiting social media platforms to spread junk news and disinformation, exercise censorship and control, and undermine trust in media, public institutions and science.

The Event

they (Silicon Valley’s elite) were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from a very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape.

Google hit with record $5 billion EU antitrust fine *

EU regulators hit Google with a record 4.34 billion euros ($5 billion) antitrust fine on Wednesday for using its Android mobile operating system to squeeze out rivals.

* and the Facebook, which "apps" are inside the system of the devices (because the labels did allow it) and cannot to be removed? How much they will be fined? (I wrote to the European Commissars Vera Jurová and Cecilia Malmström on that issue)

The New Octopus

Today, as technology creates new forms of power, we must also create new forms of countervailing civic power. We must build a new civic infrastructure that imposes new kinds of checks and balances. But where new firms, however innovative, outstrip our ability to assure their accountability, then we have to ask hard questions about whether we want to pursue such innovation in the first place.

A former Facebook moderator says she had to review 8,000 posts a day

Katz said she was not asked to report the accounts sharing the material — a fact that "disturbed" her. "If the user's account was less than 30 days old we would deactivate the account as a fake account. If the account was older than 30 days we would simply remove the content and leave the account active," she said.

The EU's dodgy Article 13 copyright directive has been rejected

The Copyright Directive, which contained the particularly concerning Article 13, was rejected by 318 votes to 278, with 31 abstentions

EU votes for copyright law that would make internet a 'tool for control'

Earlier this year, a group of 169 European academics specialising in intellectual property urged MEPs to reject the “misguided” plans, which they said would “likely impede the free flow of information that is of vital importance to democracy”. Scores of academics have since added their names to the letter, which also says the proposals would be likely to harm journalists, photographers and many “non-institutional creators and producers of news”, including freelancers. The UN’s special rapporteur on freedom of expression, David Kaye, has also raised concerns about “prepublication censorship”, with automatic filters being unable to detect fair comment, satire, criticism and parody. In a rare feat, the law has united consumer and tech lobbies in opposition

The Washington state law prohibits home and mobile Internet providers from blocking or throttling lawful Internet traffic and from charging online services for prioritization. The rules will be enforced by the state attorney general under Washington's Consumer Protection Act.