The Blog Experiment | Technology Nonsense and Internet Tripe

https://video.reclaimthenet.org/platform/restrict-act-32478932523432.mp4 45 days after 9/11, the United States government passed the PATRIOT Act — a chilling law that used the guise of “national security” to greatly expand the federal government’s secret surveillance powers. Almost 23 years later, another far-reaching bill, the “Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology Act,” better known by its acronym, the RESTRICT Act, is using the same national security talking point to justify further federal government encroachment on Americans’ rights. Although the bill doesn’t mention TikTok, its authors, Democratic Senator Mark Warner and Republican Senator John Thune, have framed it as “the best way to counter the TikTok threat.” However, the impact of the bill extends far beyond TikTok and gives the US government sweeping powers to ban a wide range of apps and services. The bill authorizes the Secretary of Commerce to review and prohibit “current, past, or potential future transactions” involving technology products or services with more than one million US-based annual active users that: Are deemed to pose an “undue or unacceptable risk” in various areas (such as national security and election interference) Involve anyone determined to be “owned, directed, or controlled” by a “foreign adversary” (a term that can currently be applied to China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and Venezuela but can be extended to other nations by the Secretary) The Secretary of Commerce can also refer these tech products and services to the President who can take action to “compel divestment of, or otherwise mitigate…The RESTRICT Act will usher in a new era of censorship under the guise of “national security”

(Mark King sent me an interesting message on LinkedIn. So I thought I’d use it to try a new experiment and add a guest post to my not-a-newsletter. Please do give me your feedback, because I am curious as to whether you, the readers, think that an occasional guest post will add to the quality of the debate and discussion that I personally value. And should I post it here or to the new Substack Notes?)In the future, everyone will be famous for 15Mb is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Dave Birch is right to seek a debate, but it’s non-trivial to arrange in the UK, starting with having a permanent civil service unable to question the Minister’s public endorsement of some fashionable misunderstanding. Yet those of us retired or escaped are old and wise and never wrong, but sometimes not quite right.The Lords now have too many single issue fanatics, to the phrase of the late Bernard Levin, and the UN is otherwise entangled, but perhaps the OECD can help us to get real harmony, and not the EU or Chinese version (unison) nor the US sort (antiphon).The position feels much as it did in the ‘90s when trying to pick up the pieces after the Clipper Chip saga: an excellent solution for what it was designed for (US public sector use), and a complete no-no for what it was suggested as a panacea for.Then as now,…Guest Post: Mark King

Luke Thorburn is a doctoral researcher in safe and trusted AI at King’s College London; Jonathan Stray is a Senior Scientist at The Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence (CHAI), Berkeley; and Priyanjana Bengani is a Senior Research Fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. Luke Thorburn While concepts such as filter bubbles, echo chambers, and rabbit holes are part of the popular wisdom about what is wrong with recommender systems and have received significant attention from academics, evidence for their existence is mixed. It seems like almost every research paper uses different definitions, and reaches different conclusions depending on how the concepts are formalized. When people try to make the question more precise, they usually head in different directions, so the results they come up with are no longer comparable. In this post, we recap the history of these concepts, describe the limitations of existing research, and argue that the concepts are ultimately too muddied to serve as useful frameworks for empirical work. Instead, we propose that research should focus on feedback loops between three variables: what is engaged with, what is shown, and what is thought by users. This framework can help us understand the strengths and weaknesses of the wide range of previous work which asks whether recommenders — on social media in particular — are causing political effects such as polarization and radicalization, or mental health effects such as eating disorders or depression. Currently, there are studies which show that bots programmed to watch partisan or unhealthy…From “Filter Bubbles”, “Echo Chambers”, and “Rabbit Holes” to “Feedback Loops”

On a call for a long-dead startup building its empire on Google+, someone, a person, objected to being paid to appear in a commercial promoting a class they sold because of how it would impact their brand. They were a chef, not a famous one. But in July of 2011, they had quickly amassed a following of about 6,000 in under a month on the hot emerging social network that was Google+, and they believed fame was on the horizon. Google+ launched with hype in 2011. Even a flurry of new players fighting to capture the mindshare of an uncertain Twitter doesn’t match the hype I saw around Google’s new social network. It was a big deal in June, July, and part of August in 2011. The startup I worked with used Google+ to connect experts with people who wanted one-on-one online instruction. Solid as a concept, and outsourcing almost the entirety of product development to the rapidly growing social network arm of a major tech company left startup costs at nearly zero. R.I.P. Google+ June 28, 2011 – [Technically] April 2, 2019 In November of 2011, The BBC ran an article titled ‘Google denies Google+ death reports‘. The BBC joined the chatter after most of the tech press had already called the time of death. A critical mass of normal users abandoned Google+ by September. In January 2012, Google made signing up for a Google+ account mandatory to create a Google account. But just because you make a horse create…Brands As People, People As Brands

Being the default search engine is a big deal for Google. The company spends billions of dollars to be the default search engine on devices like the iPhone. In 2017 Google reportedly paid Samsung $3.5 billion in fees to be the default search engine on Samsung mobile phones. It’s almost to the point of being an anti-trust issue. Anyway that may change soon. In a case of the headline is most of the story, here’s Markets Insider. Alphabet loses $55 billion in market value after Samsung reportedly considers replacing Google with Bing in its phones Alphabet stock slid as much as 4% on Monday, erasing about $55 billion in market value after a report from The New York Times suggested that competition is heating up in the mobile search market.Matthew Fox, April 17, 2023, markets.businessinsider.com The post Samsung May Make Bing Its Default Mobile Search Engine appeared first on Mason Pelt.Samsung May Make Bing Its Default Mobile Search Engine

In an upcoming interview with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, Twitter CEO Elon Musk revealed that government agencies had a high level of access to the Twitter platform and its users. Fox News has revealed that its primetime host, Tucker Carlson, will engage in a comprehensive conversation with tech titan Elon Musk on his popular show. The two-part interview, scheduled for Monday and Tuesday, promises to delve into several critical topics that have recently garnered attention. https://video.reclaimthenet.org/articles/musk-twitter-carlson-int-9032435.mp4 In a pre-release clip of the interview, Elon Musk said, “The degree to which various government agencies effectively had full access to everything that was going on Twitter blew my mind.” When pressed by Carlson about whether the government agencies also had access to direct messages between users, Musk responded, “Yes.” Elon Musk has previously exposed a series of confidential documents, now known as the “Twitter Files,” revealing a close collaboration between Twitter and the US government to censor content on the social media platform. Musk, who acquired a controlling stake in Twitter last year, took to the platform to share the revelations, sparking a global conversation about the extent of censorship and the role of social media in controlling narratives. The Twitter Files consist of a series of internal communications and documents which indicate that the US government has been exerting influence on Twitter to suppress certain information and promote specific narratives. The files unveil a secret partnership between Twitter executives and government officials, involving content manipulation and the suppression of dissenting voices….Elon Musk says government agencies had mind-blowing levels of access to Twitter and user’s DMs

Audio of these conversations is available via your favorite podcast service. This week’s podcast features two episodes looking back on the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which arguably kicked off when the New York Times and the Guardian published articles on March 17, 2018. The Times headline was “How Trump Consultants Exploited the Data of Millions,” while the Guardian went with “Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach.” That number, and the scale of the scandal, would only grow in the weeks and months ahead. It served as a major catalyzing moment for privacy concerns in the social media age. In these two episodes we’ll look back on what has happened since, the extent to which perceptions of what happened have changed or been challenged, and what unresolved questions that emerged from the scandal mean for the future. In the first episode, I speak with David Carroll, a professor of media design in the MFA Design and Technology graduate program at the School of Art, Media and Technology at Parsons School of Design at The New School. I’ve known David for over a decade, including during the period in which he legally challenged Cambridge Analytica in the UK courts to recapture his 2016 voter profile using European data protection law, events that were chronicled in the 2019 Netflix documentary The Great Hack. In the second episode, we hear a panel discussion hosted by the Bipartisan Policy Center that I helped moderate at the end of March….The Cambridge Analytica Scandal, Five Years On

Automotive software seems a lot more fragile than I’d like to believe. Here’s a couple stories about minor errors causing mayhem. Thanks to a glitch, some Seattle Mazda drivers can’t tune their radios away from KUOW As the radio remained frozen, the rebooting visuals on the screen in the middle of the dashboard were just too distracting when he was driving. Welding ended up covering the spot with cardboard.Erik Lacitis, Updated February 11, 2022, seattletimes.com Tuning to KUOW, caused some Mazda in-vehicle infotainment systems to fail. According to the Seattle Times, the error impacted 2014-2017 Mazdas with HD Radio infotainment systems. The cause of the failure was seemingly broadcasting images without a file extension. That’s not the first infotainment system related error. The Reply All podcast had an episode about how another podcast 99% Invisible broke Mazda. The combination of Bluetooth + car radio + the 99% Invisible podcascaused some Mazda’s radios to freeze, shut down and restart. The podcast is embedded, and can also be found here. The problem (now long fixed) had to do with the name of the podcast. Reply All’s Brilliant Roman Mars Episode Messes With the Podcasting Industry Oftentimes, the internet being what it is, these adventures touch the surface of something much darker, perhaps even dangerous. Not so with the case of Ben’s malfunctioning Mazda, which instead leads Goldman & Co. into a journey of pure whimsy. In their bid to figure out why the car so vehemently rejects 99% Invisible — is it Mars’s voice?…Automotive Software Seems Fragile

As lawmakers across the country try their best to legislate TikTok out of the US, its parent company, China-based ByteDance, has been undeterred and has set its focus on a new app for Gen-Z named Lemon8. The app is surging in the US right now, and as of the time of this writing has over 5 million downloads in the Google Play Store.Lemon8 is not new, but it is for US users. Originally launched in Japan in 2020, Lemon8 is ByteDance’s response to a popular Chinese lifestyle app known as Xiaohongshu (or Little Red Book), which is largely popular with young women. By 2022, Lemon8 amassed over 5 million active monthly users across East Asia and was stealth launched in the US in February of this year as TikTok faced increasing pressure from US legislators over data privacy concerns. As it continues to gain popularity in the States, here’s what you need to know about Tiktok’s sister app. SEE ALSO: As U.S. leaders debate a TikTok ban, lawmakers and creators clash over generational and social differences What is Lemon8?Not to beat a dead horse but every descriptor about Lemon8 calls it “Pinterest meets Instagram.” And it’s true. Combining the best aspects of 2016-era Instagram’s photo sharing with the type of stuff you’d find on Pinterest, Lemon8 is a social media app built for content curation. With an emphasis on photos over videos, Lemon8’s UI is perfect for those who enjoyed the pleasing, curated aesthetics of old Instagram and hated all…What is Lemon8, and is it safe?

Since acquiring Twitter, Elon Musk maintained that one of his major objectives was to eliminate the bots.Last night, Twitter did just that. One problem, though: The bots blocked are the good ones.Numerous public service Twitter accounts have lost their ability to automatically post breaking news and events. Twitter has been removing API access, which allows many of these accounts to post in an authorized way by the platform, as it switches to Musk’s new high-priced paid API system.Many of these affected Twitter accounts have automated updates, but aren’t the type of hands-off bot accounts that some may think of when they hear the term “bot.” For example, numerous National Weather Service accounts that provide consistent updates, both automated and manually posted by humans, shared that they could no longer provide their up-to-the-minute, potentially life-saving updates. Tweet may have been deleted (opens in a new tab) “Twitter is now limiting automated tweets and as a result this account can no longer auto post warnings as we have done so in the past,” tweeted the National Weather Service (NWS) Wilmington, OH account this morning. “We will continue to provide general updates, but always ensure that you have multiple means for receiving weather information & alerts.” Tweet may have been deleted (opens in a new tab) “@Twitter is now limiting automated tweets and as a result, this account can no longer post all #Tsunami Warnings, Advisories, Watches, and Information Statements as they are issued,” tweeted the NWS Tsunami Alerts account. “We will make every…Elon Musk just shut down potentially life-saving public safety Twitter accounts