MyBroadBand: “Google is planning to “render obsolete” a key tool advertisers use to track people around the web, increasing user privacy but also disrupting the marketers and publishers who rely on the search giant’s ad products. Over the next two years the Alphabet Inc. unit intends to stop supporting third-party cookies in its Chrome browser,… Continue Reading
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Monthly Archives: January 2020
‘OK, Boomer’ makes a Supreme Court appearance in age case
AP: ““OK, Boomer” made its first appearance in the Supreme Court Wednesday, invoked by baby boomer Chief Justice John Roberts 12 days before he turns 65. The meme is a favorite of younger generations and Roberts used it in questions in a case about age discrimination in the workplace. “The hiring person, who’s younger, says,… Continue Reading
Verizon Media launches OneSearch a privacy-focused search engine
VentureBeat: “Verizon Media, the media and digital offshoot of telecommunications giant Verizon, has launched a “privacy-focused” search engine called OneSearch. The launch comes at a time when public trust in big technology companies has hit rock bottom following countless reports of breaches, lapses, and data harvesting escapades. Consequently, “privacy” is pretty much the buzzword of… Continue Reading
Jack Dorsey says we’ll “probably” never get to edit tweet
Input – “Since the dawn of Twitter, users have been begging and pleading for a way to edit Tweets. If you’ve ever used Twitter, odds are you’ve tweeted something so pithy you’d consider it for your tombstone only to notice a few hours — and favorites — later that it’s got a glaring typo in… Continue Reading
More than 600M users installed Android ‘fleeceware’ apps from the Play Store
ZDNet: A new set of 25 Android apps caught illegally charging users at the end of a trial period. “Security researchers from Sophos say they’ve discovered a new set of “fleeceware” apps that appear to have been downloaded and installed by more than 600 million Android users. Our editors hand-picked these products based on our… Continue Reading
Trump impeachment trial: legacy of judicial independence at stake
The Christian Science Monitor – As Roberts enters fray, legacy of judicial independence at stake – Why We Wrote This: “Presiding over an impeachment trial, Chief Justice John Roberts will seek to embody the judicial independence he often promotes. But the remainder of the Supreme Court term may be a tougher test…For an institutionalist like… Continue Reading
The Hidden Dangers of the Great Index Fund Takeover
Bloomberg: The Big Three—BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street—are the most important players in corporate America. Whether they like it or not. “If you hold a stock market index fund, congratulations. The S&P 500’s total return was a thumping 31.5% in 2019, and a fund that passively tracks that benchmark delivered almost all those gains, minus… Continue Reading
The Evil List Which tech companies are really doing the most harm?
Slate – Here are the 30 most dangerous, ranked by the people who know: “…The tech industry doesn’t intoxicate us like it did just a few years ago. Keeping up with its problems—and its fixes, and its fixes that cause new problems—is dizzying. Separating out the meaningful threats from the noise is hard. Is Facebook… Continue Reading
EFF Asks Supreme Court To Reverse Dangerous Rulings About API Copyrightability and Fair Use
EFF: “Washington D.C.—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today asked the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that functional aspects of Oracle’s Java programming language are not copyrightable, and even if they were, employing them to create new computer code falls under fair use protections. The court is reviewing a long-running lawsuit Oracle filed against Google, which… Continue Reading
Why do customers buy seemingly irrelevant products?
Amazon Science – “Product search algorithms, like the ones that help customers place orders through Alexa, aim at returning the products that are most relevant to users’ queries, where relevance is usually interpreted as “anything that satisfies the users’ need”. A common way to estimate customers’ satisfaction is to rely on the judgment of human… Continue Reading
How digital sleuths unravelled the mystery of Iran’s plane crash
Wired – Open-source intelligence proved vital in the investigation into Ukraine Airlines flight PS752. Then Iranian officials had to admit the truth: “..I.t’s not unusual nowadays for OSINT to lead the way in decoding key news events. When Sergei Skripal was poisoned, Bellingcat, an open-source intelligence website, tracked and identified his killers as they traipsed… Continue Reading
Meteorite contains the oldest material on Earth: 7-billion-year-old stardust
The Telegraph (UK) – “The oldest thing ever found on Earth has been discovered by scientists, and it is more than two billion years older than our planet. Tiny specks of stardust, dating back seven billion years, have been uncovered in a meteorite which landed in Victoria, Australia, in 1969. Known as the Murchison Meteorite… Continue Reading
