Tag: technology

I’d like to believe that New York City is dead forever, but I don’t know if I dare to hope:

BUT NYC ALWAYS COMES BACK

Yes it does. I lived three blocks from Ground Zero on 9/11. Downtown, where I lived, was destroyed, but it came roaring back within two years. Such sadness and hardship and then quickly that area became the most attractive area in New York.

And in 2008/2009, there was much suffering during the Great Recession, again much hardship, but things came roaring back.

But… this time is different. You’re never supposed to say that but this time it’s true. If you believe this time is no different, that NYC is resilient, I hope you’re right.

I don’t benefit from saying any of this. I love NYC. I was born there. I’ve lived there forever. I STILL live there. I love everything about NYC. I want 2019 back.

But this time is different.

One reason: Bandwidth.

In 2008, average bandwidth speeds were 3 megabits per second. That’s not enough for a Zoom meeting with reliable video quality. Now, it’s over 20 megabits per second. That’s more than enough for high-quality video.

There’s a before and after. BEFORE: No remote work. AFTER: Everyone can work remotely.

The difference: bandwidth got faster. And that’s basically it. People have left New York City and have moved completely into virtual worlds. The Time-Life Building doesn’t need to fill up again. Wall Street can now stretch across every street instead of just being one building in Manhattan.

We are officially AB: After Bandwidth. And for the entire history of NYC (the world) until now, we were BB: Before Bandwidth.

Remote learning, remote meetings, remote offices, remote performance, remote everything.

That’s what is different.

Best pandemic ever. It’s killing the centers of moral and physical filth. Look at all the lamentations for Gotham and the Hellmouth! When I go out, I don’t wear a mask out of fear or submission. I wear one out of pure unadulterated glee.

In case you ever wondered why so many tech companies impose individual arbitrations on their users, this class action lawsuit filed against Facebook should suffice to explain their reasoning:

A new class-action lawsuit has accused Facebook of illegally harvesting biometric data on its subsidiary platform Instagram with a photo-tagging tool that allegedly stores facial recognition data. The lawsuit, filed on Monday in state court in Redwood City, California, accuses the company of collecting, storing and profiting from the biometric data of more than 100 million Instagram users, without their knowledge or consent.

Facebook does not impose arbitration, and its lawyers are obviously a little more up on California law than Patreon’s, as they do not impose an illegitimate waiver of class action litigation. So, there shouldn’t be any procedural impediments to this lawsuit, although Facebook’s lawyers will almost certainly invent as many as they need in order to delay discovery. But Facebook has a near-infinite supply of financial and legal resources, so it can afford to lose even a very large class-action lawsuit without its operations being disrupted.

I have no idea if the litigants have a claim or not; I don’t use Facebook or Instagram. But I do note that the company’s objection – “Instagram doesn’t use Face Recognition technology” – does not even contradict the lawsuit’s primary claim that the company was “collecting, storing and profiting from the biometric data of more than 100 million Instagram users, without their knowledge or consent.”

You’ll note that “face recognition technology” is a small subset of “biometric data”. Facebook’s non-denial denial is not unlike a company saying they weren’t collecting, storing, and profiting from your DNA because they don’t use fingerprint technology.

That’s why it is so interesting that Patreon is so Hell-bent on avoiding arbitration of the claims concerning their deceptive practices and violations of California law. They genuinely seem to believe that they’d be better off facing the class action litigation they specifically imposed individual arbitration to avoid. Or, at least, their outside lawyers would be.

President Trump opens a new offensive in the trade war:

President Donald Trump has issued executive orders effectively banning Chinese video sharing app TikTok and messaging service WeChat in a dramatic escalation of tensions with Beijing that sent stocks tumbling worldwide overnight.

Using national emergency powers, Trump on Thursday night signed the orders, which give TikTok parent ByteDance 45 days to sell the app, and bar WeChat from the U.S. after the same time period.

The orders also banned any U.S. transactions with WeChat owner Tencent, a major Chinese company that owns significant shares in Tesla, Snap Inc, and Reddit. Tencent shares fell as much as 10 percent in Asian markets overnight, and it was not immediately clear whether the company would be forced to divest its U.S. holdings.

Coming days after the United States ordered China to vacate its consulate in Houston, the move looks set to trigger retaliatory action by Beijing, stoking fears that a ‘Silicon Curtain’ is descending between the two superpowers. It raised the possibility that Beijing could retaliate by banning major U.S. tech companies from China, a major market for some of the top American firms.

‘China could block Apple or Microsoft from China. The information sector growingly looks divided into two camps. We could be seeing just the beginning of an information technology war,’ said Nana Otsuki, chief analyst at Monex Securities.

‘Investors in the West would have to hesitate to invest in China, missing growth opportunities there when there are not many investment opportunities except perhaps except for Nasdaq.’

Although this will tend to help the God-Emperor’s enemies in Silicon Valley fend off what would likely be a successful foray into the US market by Chinese technology companies, it’s the right thing to do in the long term. China has successfully defended and developed its technology sector, now it is time for Americans to free the US technology sector from the grip of the bad and mostly foreign actors who presently control it.

But this isn’t even the big news on the trade war front, as the report released yesterday by the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets appears likely to drive even more significant changes:

In response to President Trump’s June 4 Memorandum on Protecting United States Investors from Significant Risks from Chinese Companies, the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets (PWG) today released a report making five recommendations.  These recommendations are designed to address risks to investors in U.S. financial markets posed by the Chinese government’s failure to allow audit firms that are registered with the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) to comply with U.S. securities laws and investor protection requirements.

“The PWG examined the risks to investors posed by the Chinese government’s failure to allow access.  The PWG unanimously recommends that the Securities and Exchange Commission take steps to enhance the listing standards on U.S. exchanges for access to audit work papers, among other recommendations,” said Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin, Chairman of the PWG.  “The recommendations outlined in the report will increase investor protection and level the playing field for all companies listed on U.S. exchanges.  The United States is the premier jurisdiction in the world for raising capital, and we will not compromise on the core principles that underpin investor confidence in our capital markets.”

The PWG recommends that the SEC take steps to implement the five recommendations outlined in the report.  In particular, to address companies from jurisdictions, such as China, that do not provide the PCAOB with sufficient access to fulfill its statutory mandate (“Non-Cooperating Jurisdictions,” or “NCJs”), the PWG recommends enhanced listing standards on U.S. exchanges.  This would require, as a condition to initial and continued exchange listing, PCAOB access to work papers of the principal audit firm for the audit of the listed company.

Translation: Chinese companies are not providing the US financial authorities the ability to audit their books.  The US government is now making it clear that any companies using auditors who are not subject to PCAOB oversight will not be permitted the ability to list or remain listed on US exchanges. So, this could lead to a mass exodus of US-listed Chinese companies from the US markets.

Being a foreign concern, Tik Tok doesn’t seem to understand that the threat of losing jobs has not historically saved companies in the USA:

TikTok tells Axios it plans to add thousands of jobs in the U.S. over the next few years — ripping a familiar page from the “companies under fire” playbook.

The big picture: Chinese-owned TikTok is working to distance itself from Beijing in the face of a threatened ban from the Trump administration and broader scrutiny out of Washington, where policymakers are looking to blunt China’s influence and economic might.

Driving the news: TikTok plans to add 10,000 jobs in the U.S. in the next three years as user growth explodes, spokesperson Josh Gartner told Axios.

• TikTok’s U.S. job growth has already nearly tripled this year, going from almost 500 employees Jan. 1 to just under 1,400.
• The company plans to hire for jobs in engineering, sales, content moderation and customer service, with a focus on growing workforces in California, New York, Texas, Florida and Tennessee, Gartner said.
• “It’s supporting the tremendous growth in the country and follows our strategy of building out teams where we have users,” Gartner told Axios.

Between the lines: TikTok’s ongoing hiring spree also includes the addition of more than 35 lobbyists meant to convince the Trump administration and lawmakers of the company’s independence from China, according to a New York Times report.

There is something very ironic about a Chinese company warning about the potential loss of American jobs, considering how many American jobs have been lost over the last 50 years to free trade dogma.

I don’t know who Tim Pool is, but he is warning his 584k subscribers about the demise of Patreon:

If you still use Patreon you should consider warning your subscribers about potential disruption

Due to the legal defeat they recently faced some lawyers are speculating that Patreon will collapse under the weight of legal costs

You Could LOSE Your entire income stream

I just think it’s funny they still don’t understand how many people want to burn them down to the ground and dance on the glowing cinders.

The way the whole situation has evolved is rather interesting. For generations, companies have understood very clearly that they had to maintain positive relationships with their customers in order to stay in business. Hence the outmoded corporate doctrine that “the customer is always right”.

However, the combination of practical monopolies and the venture-to-IPO model has tended to sever the historical link between the consumer and the corporation, to the point that many technology companies no longer depend upon their consumers for their operating income. To the contrary, they have transformed consumers into users that are nothing more than raw material for their real customers. This is why they simply don’t possess a culture of giving a damn about their users, let alone harboring any regard for a single user they don’t like for one reason or another.

Their problem is their failure to understand that although the technology corporations are not financially dependent upon consumers, they nevertheless possess the same legal responsibilities toward their consumers that they did before, so their survival still relies upon maintaining the good will of the very users they now regard as irrelevant. And, as I noted in Corporate Cancer, because they remain caught between the Scylla of class action litigation – now complete with jury trials – and the Charybdis of mass individual arbitration, there is no way to legally finesse their way out of the situation.

Even worse, every attempt to legally thread the needle by their legal Odysseuses only renders them more vulnerable to being held responsible for the deceptive practices that are necessarily involved, such as Patreon’s false, misleading, and unenforceable “waivers” on class action and trial-by-jury.

The only way out is to accept the fact that their continued survival requires the goodwill of their users, but this necessitates a fundamental change in corporate culture that may not be possible for more than a few converged technology corporations.

We really don’t need to communicate any better with the animals than we do:

A rock star, a vegan financier and a pioneer of the internet are backing a project to find ways for humans to communicate with animals using machine learning and artificial intelligence. The Interspecies I/O forum on Friday announced the Coller Prize for Interspecies Conversation, a $1 million research award, according to a statement. The effort kicks off this weekend with a video conference on subjects running from the language of bonobo apes to the music of elephants.

Can you imagine how incredibly irritating it would be to actually understand what your dog was saying all the time? It would be like taking a long trip in a car with a little kid who keeps asking “are we there yet?” Except your dog would be alternating “I’m hungry, is it time for dinner yet?” with “hey, hey, hey, there’s a BIRD out there!” all day every day.

It didn’t take long for the consequences of Linus’s surrender to the SJWs to take effect:

Subject [PATCH] CodingStyle: Inclusive Terminology
From Dan Williams <>
Date Sat, 04 Jul 2020 13:02:51 -0700
share

Recent events have prompted a Linux position statement on inclusive
terminology. Given that Linux maintains a coding-style and its own
idiomatic set of terminology here is a proposal to answer the call to
replace non-inclusive terminology.

Cc: Jonathan Corbet
Cc: Kees Cook
Signed-off-by: Chris Mason
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman
Signed-off-by: Dan Williams
—
 Documentation/process/coding-style.rst          |   12 ++++
 Documentation/process/inclusive-terminology.rst |   64 +++++++++++++++++++++++
 Documentation/process/index.rst                 |    1
 3 files changed, 77 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 Documentation/process/inclusive-terminology.rst

diff –git a/Documentation/process/coding-style.rst b/Documentation/process/coding-style.rst
index 2657a55c6f12..4b15ab671089 100644
— a/Documentation/process/coding-style.rst
+++ b/Documentation/process/coding-style.rst
@@ -319,6 +319,18 @@ If you are afraid to mix up your local variable names, you have another problem, which is called the function-growth-hormone-imbalance syndrome. See chapter 6 (Functions).

+For symbol names, avoid introducing new usage of the words ‘slave’ and
+’blacklist’. Recommended replacements for ‘slave’ are: ‘secondary’,
+’subordinate’, ‘replica’, ‘responder’, ‘follower’, ‘proxy’, or
+’performer’.  Recommended replacements for blacklist are: ‘blocklist’ or
+’denylist’.
+
+Exceptions for introducing new usage is to maintain a userspace ABI, or
+when updating code for an existing (as of 2020) hardware or protocol
+specification that mandates those terms. For new specifications consider
+translating specification usage of the terminology to the kernel coding
+standard where possible. See :ref:`process/inclusive-terminology.rst
+` for details.

And let’s not bother with the whole “well, the changes haven’t been fully adopted and enforced YET” defense. We all know how this is going to end.

Not content with eradicating thought crime from the social media platforms, the media is now teaming up with the technology companies to eradicate it from personal accounts in the Cloud:

The Washington Post’s Silicon Valley Correspondent Elizabeth Dwoskin complained that after the coronavirus documentary Plandemic was censored on social media, some YouTube clips were telling users how to access “banned footage” from the documentary via Google Drive. She then notes that after The Washington Post contacted Google, Google Drive took down a file featuring the trailer for the Plandemic documentary.

This is why you need to get off the Cloud, get off the social media platforms, and support the independent alternatives. Even if you are certain that you are not a crimethinker today, you cannot be certain that you will not be deemed a crimethinker tomorrow.

The President threatens to shut down Twitter:

Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices. We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen. We saw what they attempted to do, and failed, in 2016. We can’t let a more sophisticated version of that happen again. Just like we can’t let large scale Mail-In Ballots take root in our Country. It would be a free for all on cheating, forgery and the theft of Ballots. Whoever cheated the most would win. Likewise, Social Media. Clean up your act, NOW!!!!
– Donald J. Trump

The great weakness of the conservative Right is their inability to accept the necessity of action. Every single social media giant merits being shut down for their crimes and their ongoing war against the Constitution.

As I wrote in Corporate Cancer, China is going to dominate the consumer technology high ground – namely, the apps and interfaces, because they a) protect their home markets from competition and b) don’t hate more than 50 percent of their users. The signs of this coming domination are already visible.

YouTube is automatically deleting comments that contain certain Chinese-language phrases related to criticism of the country’s ruling Communist Party (CCP). The company confirmed to The Verge this was happening in error and that it’s working to fix the issue.

“Upon review by our teams, we have confirmed this was an error in our enforcement systems and we are working to fix it as quickly as possible,” said a YouTube spokesperson. The company did not elaborate on how or why this error came to be, but said it was not the result of any change in its moderation policy.

But if the deletions are the result of a simple mistake, then it’s one that’s gone unnoticed for six months. The Verge found evidence that comments were being deleted as early as October 2019, when the issue was raised on YouTube’s official help pages and multiple users confirmed that they had experienced the same problem.

Comments left under videos or in live streams that contain the words “共匪” (“communist bandit”) or “五毛” (“50-cent party”) are automatically deleted in around 15 seconds, though their English language translations and Romanized Pinyin equivalents are not.

The fact that we’re already seeing companies like Apple, Google, and Facebook beginning to kneel before Beijing means that it won’t be long before other converged companies like Paypal and Patreon are completely compliant, assuming, of course, that they even survive the initial shock of competition from the East.

It’s even possible that rogue independent platforms like SG, BitChute, and UATV may have a brighter future than the Silicon Valley giants.