The Blog Experiment | Technology Nonsense and Internet Tripe

Republican politician and commentator Kari Lake has criticized Facebook for censoring her views. She claimed that the Meta-owned platform has been removing her posts. In a tweet, Lake, who has recently been labeled “the most dangerous politician in America” by the mainstream media, wrote: “The Fake News called me ‘the most dangerous politician in America’ & apparently the Big Tech tyrants agree. This Orwellian censorship doesn’t intimidate me one bit. I will never stop speaking the truth to the American people. So take your best shot, Zuckerberg. You don’t scare me.” Kari Lake has previously called for laws in Arizona which would stop social media platforms from censoring speech. Lake made the statement on the Louder With Crowder show last year. “It is absolutely outrageous and it should be criminal to take somebody who’s running for office and take their voice away for political reasons,” Lake said. If you’re tired of censorship, cancel culture, and the erosion of civil liberties subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post “Take your best shot, Zuckerberg.” Kari Lake blasts Facebook censorship appeared first on Reclaim The Net.“Take your best shot, Zuckerberg.” Kari Lake blasts Facebook censorship

Free speech-friendly platform Parler has been shut down by its new owner Starboard Media, pending a reassessment. In a press release announcing the decision, Starboard Media praised Parler’s CEO for leading the company to new markets, including cloud services. The company said that, although it was shutting down Parler, it would continue to serve censored communities. “Parler’s large user base and additional strategic assets represent an enormous opportunity for Starboard to continue to build aggressively in our media and publishing business. The team at Parler has built an exceptional audience and we look forward to integrating that audience across all of our existing platforms,” said Starboard’s CEO Ryan Coyne. The press release stated: “No reasonable person believes that a Twitter clone just for conservatives is a viable business anymore.” It added: “While the Parler app as it is currently constituted will be pulled down from operation to undergo a strategic assessment, we at Starboard see tremendous opportunities across multiple sectors to continue to serve marginalized or even outright censored communities – even extending beyond domestic politics. “Advancements in AI technology, along with the existing code base and other new features, provide an opportunity for Starboard to begin servicing unsupported online communities – building a home for them away from the ad-hoc regulatory hand of platforms that hate them.” The Parler app emerged as an alternative social media platform to Twitter and Facebook, aiming to provide a space for uncensored speech and discourse. Launched in August 2018 by John Matze and…Parler shuts down as its future is reconsidered

Bluesky Social, a decentralized alternative to Twitter, is now available on the App Store as a private beta, with an invite-only access. The Bluesky project was started by former Twitter CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey. It was funded by Twitter until 2021 after Dorsey stepped down as Twitter’s CEO. Three months after resigning, Dorsey announced that Bluesky was “an independent organization,” with the mission of developing and driving “large-scale adoption of technologies for open and decentralized public conversation.” The platform’s interface and functionality resemble Twitter. Users can follow others and be followed, repost content, and even upload images. Also, posts have a maximum of 256 characters. The company claims that the platform is powered by the “AT Protocol,” which it describes as a new federated social network that allows “servers to communicate with each other — like email. Instead of one site running the network, you can have many sites. It means you get a choice of provider, and individuals and businesses can self-host if they want.” The company claims that the protocol allows algorithmic choice, interoperability, and account portability, which allows users to move accounts across different providers without losing data. “The many existing decentralized social networks that currently make up the ecosystem can be categorized into federated and p2p architectures. Our approach will be to combine the best of both worlds by integrating the portability of self-certifying protocols with the user-friendliness of delegated hosting, so users don’t have to run their own infrastructure and developers can build performant…Bluesky announces how moderation will work on the decentralized platform

The College of Policing, a UK taxpayer-funded organization that advises police forces in England and Wales, has been accused of watering down Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s free speech charter. Last month, the Home Office published its first Non-Crime Hate Incidents (NCHIs) code of practice. Braverman had previously expressed concerns that police were “wrongly getting involved in lawful debate in this country.” Between 2014 and 2019, about 120,000 people had NCHIs recorded against them, including minors. These records show up in background checks for certain jobs, like teaching. The College of Policing updated its own NCHIs recording manual, called the “authorized professional practice” (APP), which officers in England and Wales will refer to on a daily basis. The College of Policing’s draft APP has been criticized as “Orwellian” and has a “woke spin,” The Telegraph reported. The College of Policing’s new draft guidance has eight scenarios, which are different from those in the Home Office’s code, and only 12.5% of those scenarios advise officers not to record an NCHI. Seven of eight of the scenarios in the new guidance were in the old guidance, which was found unconstitutional by the Court of Appeal because it had a chilling effect on freedom of speech. Founder of Fair Cop, a group that monitors political correctness by the police, Harry Miller, a former police officer who sued Humberside Police after they recorded an NCIH against him for a “transphobic” tweet, said the college’s new guidance is overly political. “The police will not be schooled…UK College of Policing continues to threaten free speech

Proton Calendar, the encrypted calendar from Proton, now has new features to increase productivity while still maintaining Proton’s commitment to privacy. The main purpose of calendars is planning. However, calendars carry a lot of personal information, including someone’s movements, their interests, and even relationships. As such, ensuring that information remains private is crucial. Still, it is important for calendars to efficiently integrate with the products people use in their day-to-day lives. For these reasons, the new version of Proton Calendar has features that offer users security and privacy while also making it easy to collaborate and share with colleagues and friends. Perhaps the most notable feature is the one allowing importation of invites from any source. Proton Calendar’s new sharing feature allows sharing with friends and family via the web app and app. Business users can share their calendar with colleagues, say for the purpose of finding available meeting slots to avoid overlap of appointments. Users can also open invitations from any app. The new feature allows the calendar to open any .ics files. Therefore, users can import events to the Proton Calendar and view them in one centralized place across all devices. Proton Calendar uses the same end-to-end encryption used in Proton Drive and Proton Mail. All information and data is encrypted on a user’s device before reaching Proton’s servers. Not even Proton can access that data. If you’re tired of censorship, cancel culture, and the erosion of civil liberties subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Proton launches…Proton launches private calendar sharing

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