131–135 of 135 posts
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I think Musk got one of the biggest concessions ever without any precedent, something like 100% ownership where no other car plant ever got that before.
The CCP can seize that at any moment, and I think will in the event of economic war. Certainly if they invade Taiwan and there's a hot response from the US
A whistleblower is not required to determine that Meta, and all adtech companies, have been severely damaging not just to the US, but to all governments and societies where these platforms are used. They don't need to collude with any adversarial government for this to be true. The same tools built to manipulate people into buying things, are used to manipulate them into thinking and acting in ways that could be bene…
On the other hand these tools do allow individuals to connect and share. I see it like politics ( at least the way it's managed in the UK ) - democracy means everyone get's to vote, leaflet door to door, politically organise etc. However there are ( in the non-online space ) strict regulations about money not being able to buy a larger voice - political spending is(was) strictly limited. You can't use broadcast media…
Yes , with the NSA, MI6 and other 3 letter agencies. The best democracy ever.
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In the blogosphere (at least the part I was in) most used to have comments turned on, and at very least pingbacks were definitely common practice . There used to be communities around blogs with similar theme/views and usually blogs had a sidebar with links to other blogs, linking to the newest articles there. People used to write and refer to what others wrote. I assume there must have been also isolated blogs, as t…
So did Usenet, no one cares. They simply require you go to 18 different sites to follow what friends are up to. Tumblr would just be the ad tech company instead, or the blog hosting company, for a while it was MySpace. It's either free and supported by ads, or self hosted or comes with a cost and doesn't gain mass adoption. When did the comments here get to the point they can't think past 1st order magnitude effects…
Blogs require an effort to post sth because you cannot get away with posting a catchy 2-phrases sentence or a photo (you can, but that's not what they are for mainly). In this sense, yes, social media won because of convenience among other things. But the same convenience is what I find as problem with them.
And where are we now? The role of social media as "grandmothers sharing with grandkids" are long gone, in most places at least (cannot speak of the whole world). Very few from my social circles post in social media any mode. Most of the content is direct or indirect advertising (if it's not meta, it is the next door bar or yoga studio broadcasting posts), (semi-)professional content creators/influencers and, lastly, a lot of AI slop. Most people I know use facebook for events and the like, and which is definitely not what facebook optimises for or profits from. Now, most of the sharing-role has fled in closed group chat platforms (whatsapp, viber, messenger and the like).
The only thing that seems to still hold some livelihood is microblogging platforms (xtwitter and clones) which are also what replaced part of the blogosphere. But a rant about these would be too large to fit in a comment here.
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Honestly, it's crazy that any country allows online media to control the national discourse about politics without having any insight into how the algorithms decide what kind of content is shown to whom and how content is moderated or controlled. Then there's bot/propaganda accounts run by who knows who poisoning any political discussion.
And only ten years ago, during the Arab Spring, social networks were praised for their role. Wondering what has changed in the meantime.
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I am really curious to hear what evidence there is of that high-capacity fiberoptic undersea cable connecting LA to Hong-Kong (being worked on by many companies like Google/Meta/etc.) ever having any plans of being used as a “backdoor” for China to intercept all the user data. Either there is some massive grand conspiracy going on between all those different companies (a good number of which have exactly zero product…
> Any record of congress doing that for those reasons I think it was part of Clean Networks Initiative, there's ongoing strategic game to cut PRC out of subsea infra business, just like telcom. IIRC a bunch of sanctions a few years ago killed many cable projects or at least pushed PRC out as partner. Cables landing in PRC didn't. Cables landing in ASEAN but with PRC suppliers/builders ended up switching to other supp…
None of those reasons have anything to do with the congress stepping-in due to the concerns of Meta/Google/etc. conspiring with PRC, to provide them a dedicated backdoor access to american user data.