Tag: technology

Amazon’s next market

I refuse to use any of these smart, voice-activated devices or to have one in my home. It astonishes me that anyone does:

Amazon wants to put a camera and microphone in your bedroom with the UK launch of its latest Echo home device. The camera on the £119.99 ($129) Echo Spot, which doubles up as a ‘smart alarm’, will probably be facing directly at the user’s bed.  The device, which is already available in the US has such sophisticated microphones it can hear people talking from across the room – even if music is playing.

However, there remain privacy concerns over using such a device in the home. Amazon devices have previously activated when they’re not wanted meaning this small device could turn into a potential spy.

Five years from now, I’m sure we’ll all be shocked when Amazon unveils that it is adding adult channels to all of its streaming services, with a library bigger than all of its rivals combined.

The most hostile work environment on the planet

James Damore’s lawsuit is making it clear to everyone just how toxic the work environment is at Google. It is so extreme that even Rod Dreher has taken notice of the lethal convergence.

7. ‘Discourage them all throughout the industry’
“If we really care about diversity in tech, we don’t just need to chase serial offenders out of Google, we need to discourage them all throughout the industry,” a lengthy internal post on Damore read. “We should be willing to give a wink and a nod to other Silicon Valley employers over terminable offenses, not send the worst parts of tech packing with a smile …”

8. ‘I will hurt you’
Damore’s memo prompted another employee to post this quote: “I’m a queer-ass nonbinary trans person that is fucking sick and tired of being told to open a dialogue with people who want me dead. We are at a point where the dialogue we need to be having with these people is ‘if you keep talking about this shit, i will hurt you.”

9. ‘Relies on crowdsourced harassment’
Google encourages employees to enforce unwritten norms by harassing and ostracizing those who break them, according to the suit, and by allowing employees to create “blocklists” on their communications systems. “[Google] relies on crowdsourced harassment and ‘pecking’ to enforce social norms (including politics) that it feels it cannot write directly into its policies,” the suit states.

11. ‘You’re being blacklisted…at companies outside Google’
Google manager Adam Fletcher wrote in 2015 he would never hire conservatives he deemed hold hostile views. “I will never, ever hire/transfer you onto my team,” he wrote. “Ever. I don’t care if you are perfect fit or technically excellent or whatever. I will actively not work with you, even to the point where your team or product is impacted by this decision. I’ll communicate why to your manager if it comes up. You’re being blacklisted by people at companies outside of Google,” he added. “You might not have been aware of this, but people know, people talk. There are always social consequences.”

It’s really rather remarkable how completely out of control the big technology companies are. And it’s going to be even more remarkable to see how fast they collapse once the artificial circumstances keeping them afloat change. They are like hollow, cancer-ridden giants and I expect that several of them will vanish as soon as the debt-equity bubble pops.

Convergence tends to metastasize after a company hits its peak. We’re seeing this in industry after industry, and particularly in corporations whose executives start to believe their position is unassailable.

Photo-preening is wrong and illegal

You can’t say that I haven’t repeatedly warned you about the negative consequences of photo-preening online at your children’s expense:

An Italian woman has been banned from posting images of her teenage son on social media, and threatened with a 10,000 euro fine if she defies it.

The 16-year-old had made a court complaint about his mother’s social media habits, which included posting pictures of him on Facebook without his consent.

A Rome family court dealing with the mother’s divorce from the teen’s father, ruled in the 16-year-old’s favour. The court ruled that as per Italian copyright law, the subject of the photographs owns the copyright and the mother was therefore in breach.

It’s natural to be proud of your children. But they do not exist to serve your ego, and as a parent, you should be far more concerned about protecting their privacy and their futures than in trying to demonstrate to everyone what a wonderful father or mother you are, or how fabulous your genetic legacy happens to be, or showing the distant relatives they barely know what they look like. That’s what Christmas cards are for.

Posting your children’s pictures online without their consent is obnoxious, self-serving, and potentially dangerous. It is also illegal in an increasing number of jurisdictions. Just don’t do it.

Even being a woman in tech won’t help

An actual female programmer discovers that actually being a woman who genuinely works in tech doesn’t protect you from Tech SJWs once you violate the Narrative:

To be clear, right from the start: I never actually did anything wrong. I didn’t egregiously violate any codes of conduct. (Quite frankly, even if I had, I have no idea how, why, or when it might have happened, since my “accusers” refuse to tell me.) My only “crime” is being an outspoken, albeit moderate, conservative who doesn’t prescribe to the radical feminist narrative of many women in STEM groups. I’ve questioned some of their talking points and, at times, I’ve vehemently disagreed with some of their views, but I nonetheless support their mission of supporting and advocating for women in technology.

By telling the story of how I got mercilessly smeared and ostracized by the leadership and members of two prominent women in tech groups, Women Who Code and Google’s Women Techmakers, my hope is to encourage other people to speak up and to fight back if they’re the victims of bullying. It’s important to recognize that women can, and do, bully each other, and in the tech industry, it is unfortunately a problem that is all too often ignored and even denied, because other factors like racial bias, sexism, and even sexual harassment are typically blamed for an unfavorable attrition rate of women in tech.

The thing is, it’s all nonsense. Very few women actually want to work in tech, and even fewer will want to do so surrounded by foreign H1B Gammas and Omegas imported by the tech giants. But it is a salutary lesson in learning that no one who violates the Narrative is off limits, no matter what victim cards you can play.

If anything, SJWs crack down even harder on women and other victim classes who refuse to accept their victimhood, because no one is more threatening to the SJWs’ right to speak on their behalf.

The sex criminals of Seattle

High-level employees at Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are busted for prostitution- and sex trafficking-related crimes:

Several Seattle employees of both Google and Amazon were busted after using their corporate accounts to send emails to local brothels and pimps looking to purchase services from sex workers trafficked from Asia, according to emails obtained by Newsweek.

“[E]mails obtained by Newsweek reveal another sordid corner of the tech sector’s treatment of women: a horny nest of prostitution “hobbyists” at tech giants Microsoft, Amazon and other firms in Seattle’s high tech alley.”

Many of the emails were swept up in a 2015 sting operation which targeted online chat rooms and message boards in which customers rate sex workers – resulting in the arrest of 18 of these “prostitution hobbyists,” including several high level Amazon and Microsoft directors – two of which are currently scheduled for trial in March.

Seattle brothels had been catering to Microsoft employees through several “backpage.com” ads located nearby the company’s Redmond, WA headquarters, in what is becoming a booming business.

No names were mentioned. What do you want to bet that most of them are reflective of New/Not American heritage?

Of course, you have to wonder what the poor employees of these SJW-converged companies are supposed to do. They certainly don’t dare express any interest in their female colleagues or they’ll be denounced and disemployed.

Auto-deleted or banned?

Regardless of the reason, the Twitter account of Julian Assange has disappeared:

The official Twitter account of controversial Wikileaks founder Julian Assange — @JulianAssange — isn’t showing up.

Instead, anyone trying to reach it gets this message: Sorry that page doesn’t exist.

It wasn’t clear whether the account was suspended or deleted by Twitter or Assange himself — or why or for how long. Twitter wasn’t commenting.

The official Wikileaks Twitter account was still live but wasn’t mentioning the Assange account.

An account purporting to be an alternative Assange account was claiming Twitter had deleted his official one ahead of a blockbuster story he’s preparing to break. There was no confirmation that Assange was authoring that alternative account — and that account has now been suspended by Twitter.

But did it do so of the account owner’s volition or not? That is the question. The one thing that is clear is that Assange’s account wasn’t perma-suspended like mine. But as to whether it was Twitter or Assange who deleted the account, we can’t know until one of them accepts or rejects responsibility. My assumption is that Assange deleted it himself, because Twitter seems to prefer the softer approach of permanent suspensions to outright bans.

Throttling their own tech

Despite being a very early fan – I had both an Apple //e and an original Macintosh as well as a Macintosh SE – I despise what Apple has become. And with good cause; they are an SJW-converged and fundamentally dishonest corporation:

Apple has long inspired an almost religious devotion among customers and tech aficionados — but it just seriously undermined its fans’ faith and loyalty.

The company on Wednesday acknowledged what some people have long suspected: that it has been secretly stifling the performance of older iPhones.

Critics have accused the company in the past, based on anecdotal evidence, of purposely slowing phones to compel users to upgrade to the latest model. While Apple admitted to the practice on Wednesday, it sought to underscore that it had done so for a purely altruistic reason: to prevent older phones from shutting down unexpectedly.

The justification hasn’t mollified Apple’s outraged fans. If anything, the company’s statement has stoked the conspiracy theories, and for good reason.

Now they’re lying about the reason for their despicable behavior. Can you honestly say you are even a little bit surprised?

Spammees double down

Some of you have been complaining that Blogger has tightened its spam filters and you’ve been getting caught up in it. First of all, this is true and it is why we have been seeing less spam and fewer trolls of late. Second, I am completely unsympathetic because this is exactly what I told you would happen if you touched the poop. You were warned, you couldn’t control yourself, you did it, and now you’re suffering the consequences.

Third, if you’re dumb enough to try to defeat the spam filters by – and I cannot believe I actually have to point this out to anyone – reposting exactly the same comment that was previously spammed, all you’re doing is confirming to the spam filters that you are a spammer. You’re actually making the situation worse for yourself, because while the moderators can remove a single spammed comment from the filters, reposted comments get deleted, which strengthens the filters’ confidence that your comments are, indeed, spam that merits removal.

In the event that your comment fails to appear or mysteriously vanishes, the correct thing to do is nothing. Do not alert me or the moderators. Do not attempt to immediately comment again and absolutely do not repost your cut-and-pasted comment. If a single comment from a known commenter is seen in the spam, it will eventually be seen and restored by the moderators and the spam filters will gradually learn over time that your comments are not spam. In the meantime, rest assured that the other readers will do their best to survive despite being temporarily bereft of your valuable insights.

The decline of American innovation

It’s been gradually becoming more and more obvious over the last two decades, but now entrepreneurs are starting to talk openly about the problems that increasingly limit innovation in the USA:

China, we’ve been told for years, never will overtake the United States because command economies can’t innovate, only copy or steal. As a partner in a Hong Kong investment banking boutique, I saw plenty of innovation in companies we took to the stock market, notably by young Chinese scientists trained at America’s best universities. China may be a tortoise in terms of innovation, but the American hare has been asleep. Bound and gagged might be a better description. Here’s the quote of the year, from Sam Altman, the chairman of the start-up incubator Y Combinator, one of Silicon Valley’s most successful innovators:

Earlier this year, I noticed something in China that really surprised me.  I realized I felt more comfortable discussing controversial ideas in Beijing than in San Francisco.  I didn’t feel completely comfortable—this was China, after all—just more comfortable than at home. That showed me just how bad things have become, and how much things have changed since I first got started here in 2005. It seems easier to accidentally speak heresies in San Francisco every year.  Debating a controversial idea, even if you 95{9a996019c711e78922037ddc236e8e30d6b42c40f34cfa785ada7e9abef6c172} agree with the consensus side, seems ill-advised.

Corporate America is wallowing in political correctness, following our elite universities. That is all the more destructive in a winner-take-all world where there is room for just one search engine and Internet ad provider (Google), one social media site (Facebook), one standard business software maker (Microsoft), and so forth. The politically correct corporate culture that destroys the career of a Google engineer who wrote a thoughtful memo on the problems of recruiting female STEM professionals threatens to destroy our capacity to innovate at all.

Western Europe is pretty bad in this regard too, so those countries are unlikely to unseat the US as an innovative engine. But Eastern Europe is a very different matter, as those countries are a) unadulterated by the third world, b) not particularly PC, and c) totally uninterested in diversity. However, unlike China, Christianity is not aggressively growing there.

In any event, all of the factors that made the USA such a center of innovation are now seriously in decline. Which is why it will not be at all surprising if the USA continues to decline in this area, particularly if China gets around to addressing its corruption problem, which is probably the biggest single factor holding it back at this point.

Don’t get me wrong, the USA is still the primary place to be with regards to technological innovation. But it is no longer safe to assume that it will continue to be.

Social media persecution

Having purged the likes of Milo and me, Twitter has now moved onto targeting conservative journalists:

Don’t get noticed in the major mainstream press as a conservative if you want to keep your social media accounts. The first time Rush Limbaugh read one of my articles, my YouTube channel was demonetized. The second time, which was last week, my Twitter account was suspended. On November 26, I published an article called Teachers Attend “LGGBDTTTIQQAAPP” Sensitivity Training (WTF?). The next day Matt Drudge linked it and it went viral. Then Rush Limbaugh read it on the air.

A few hours later, my Twitter account was suspended for responding to someone commenting about the article who accused me of “harming people” by writing it.

I am dubious that much can be done about this for now. But it can’t hurt to show your support for those who are still on Twitter and Facebook and are being targeted.