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May 2021- Things of Interest

 


How algorithms took creativity out of social media. It’s time we brought human curation back to the newsfeed

Tech v Journalism. Inside the nasty battle between Silicon Valley and the reporters who write about it

Ads are impersonating government websites in Google results, despite ban

How dating apps have adapted to COVID-19

Bitcoin falls further as China cracks down on crypto-currencies

Kaiwei Tang and the Light Phone!

Apple made more than $100 mn in commissions from 'Fortnite' - executive at trial. Tim Cook grilled over App Store fees as Epic battle reaches climax. Judge quizzes Apple chief over ‘disproportionate’ share of commissions paid by iPhone gamers. How consultants will sway the outcome of the Epic v Apple case. The trial that could break the app store hinges on one important question – market definition – and it gives Apple a huge advantage over Epic Games.

Why are tech companies pretending to be governments?

What a crossword AI reveals about humans' way with words. Dr. Fill is a puzzle-solving automaton and recently won a national tournament

Why Apple and Google’s virus alert apps had limited success. The virus-tracing effort raises questions about the power of Big Tech to set global standards for public health tools

11 facts about Napster

One start-up's quest to take on Chrome and reinvent the web browser. The web browser is a crucial part of modern life, and yet it hasn't really been revised since the '90s. That may be about to change

Orwell’s 1984 could happen in 2024 if lawmakers don’t protect the public against artificial itelliegence, says Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president

Computers will be able to read images from your brain within a decade. The potential applications are both amazing and alarming

Once a buzzword, digital transformation is reshaping markets

New AI Regulations are coming. Is your organisation ready?

Ilovecreatives collection of their favourite websites

Amy Klobuchar on her book, “Antitrust”

Matt Stoller asks where's the change? The Federal Trade Commission let a $39B pharmaceutical merger through without any scrutiny, and the Antitrust Division let Michael Milken roll up the salt market. Speaking of mega-mergers, AT&T admits its Time Warner Merger failed. Time Warner ex-CEO Jeff Bewkes got a $400 million golden parachute. Everything else about the merger was a disaster

A new antitrust lawsuit raises the stakes for federal scrutiny of Amazon

Antitrust establishment confused as big tech foe Lina Khan gets overwhelming support from Congress

The Federal Trade Commission lays groundwork for rulemakings: Are new substantive competition rules coming?

The FTC submitted to Congress its Fiscal Year 2022 budget request, which also includes the Performance Plan for FY 2021 and FY 2022, and Performance Report for FY 2020 [Source]

Why you should care about Discovery and WarnerMedia merging

After Alibaba, Meituan is latest Chinese e-Commerce giant in antitrust crackdown. See also: I'm a delivery worker in China. My job is better than you think. I make good money, and sometimes I ride along Xiamen's seaside road as the sun sets. It's breath-taking.

Here’s how much your stolen personal data is worth on the dark web. Precious little, or a lot - depending on what's at stake

Data isn’t oil, whatever tech commentators tell you: it’s people’s lives

5 big privacy-focused features coming to Android 12. Google's privacy push to match Apple

Everything you need to know about the new American Executive Order on Cybersecurity

Pentagon surveilling Americans without a warrant, Senator reveals. This includes collecting internet browsing, location, and other forms of data

New technology has enabled cybercrime on an industrial scale

India’s internet is gradually heading in the direction of China’s

Big Tech moves to influence State privacy laws, laying the groundwork for a Federal push

Suspected Iranian ransomware gang N3tw0rm starts another cyber-attack wave against Israel

Check Point researchers discovered that sensitive information of more than 100 million Android users was exposed due to cloud services misconfigurations

The human factor — why data is not enough to understand the world. Companies are turning to anthropology to balance the insights of algorithms and AI

Apple is changing how digital ads work. Are advertisers prepared?

Facebook still tracks your iPhone location. This is how to stop it

Browser fingerprinting is a controversial user data tracking technique. Companies like it for security but it can be a data privacy issue for users and compliance concern for organisations. Here’s the Good, Bad & Ugly

Kazuo Ishiguro’s deceptively simple story of AI. Why does “Klara and the Sun” serve up its big questions so explicitly?

Want to become a better leader? Question your assumptions, says Adam Grant in his new book, Think Again

Why we remember more by reading – especially print – than from audio or video

75 nonfiction books you should read this summer

And Junk is Mark Bittman’s history of why we eat bad food

ExxonMobil found the real reason for the climate crisis: You! How oil companies used language to make us blame ourselves

How can corporate leaders move from words to action to make a real difference?

Rana Foroohar on five lessons from 25 years of corporate wealth creation. The rewards of a superstar economy must be shared more equally

Value of 10 Chinese tech majors fall over $800bn since February. Government crackdown sends investors fleeing

Inside Jeff Bezos’ obsessions. Amazon has had a boss with big ideas and incredible persistence. That hasn’t always been helpful

Covid economy: What economists got right (and wrong)

Has the financial sector become a drag on the real economy?

Are you ready for the digital euro?

Paul Romer, once tech’s favourite economist, now a thorn in its side. His call for government activism, particularly toward the big tech companies, reflects “a profound change in my thinking”

Why the next stage of capitalism is coming

We can’t be Friends any more. The sitcom sold an empty promise of total connection and freedom

Box Office Blockbusters: The top grossing movies in the last 30 years

A Quiet Place: Part II’: The Sound of Silence (and Sequelitis)

How America became the money laundering capital of the World. The U.S. is the venue of choice for cartels and kleptocrats. Now lawmakers want to use an agency called FinCEN to do something about it

Climate change does not just impact the environment in the natural sense; it also impacts social and historical environments. Material Memory is a podcast that explores this link between climate change and cultural memory (currently on its second season)

Long slide looms for world population, with sweeping ramifications. Fewer babies’ cries. More abandoned homes. Toward the middle of this century, as deaths start to exceed births, changes will come that are hard to fathom

“Vaccine tourism” emerged as a potential fast lane for the wealthy to get inoculated, says the MIT Technology Review. Now, it’s becoming a bit more common—and “[a] small but increasing number of places even see this travel as a way to help restart local economies stalled by the pandemic,” including in the US

Public Trust in Government 1958-2021 remains low.

China announces three-child policy in a major policy shift

How the personal computer broke the human body. Decades before 'Zoom fatigue' broke our spirits, the so-called computer revolution brought with it a world of pain previously unknown to humankind

Seven sustainable, future foods we should be eating

COVID-19 vaccines: there's no such thing as intellectual property

What scientists know about new, fast-spreading coronavirus variants. Key questions remain about how quickly B.1.617 variants can spread, their potential to evade immunity and how they might affect the course of the pandemic

How journalists in Narendra Modi’s home state exposed India’s Covid-19 deception

How the Covid pandemic ends: Scientists look to the past to see the future

Your gym routine is worthless. Our obsession with exercise shows a depressing lack of aspiration

In ‘Involuted’ China, eating disorders are a hidden epidemic. In modern China, the pressure on young women to be perfect has become overwhelming. The result: an alarming rise in cases of anorexia and bulimia.

The Truth about Mental Models. Shane Parrish, Farnam Street’s founder talks about learning loops, how to read, and how to avoid bullshit

How to stop overthinking. Grappling with your thoughts will leave you even more entangled in worry. Use metacognitive strategies to break free

Self-knowledge is a super power – if it’s not an illusion

How to be excellent. Plato and Aristotle can help you resist conventional worldly success, direct your energy and find your own highest calling

How 'optimism bias' shapes our decisions and futures

Why we gloss over great ideas – and invest in bad ones

The check mark: the oldest productivity trick around

The key to finding time for learning

The master list of logical fallacies. Fallacies are fake or deceptive arguments, that is, arguments that seem irrefutable but prove nothing

Average person thinks they can survive for 2 weeks in the wilderness — but most can’t start a fire

You're doing Gmail wrong!

Guidelines for touching at work

Lessons on culture and trust from military strategy. John Boyd’s A Discourse on Winning and Losing

A flowchart for founders (or anyone else) trying to pursue an office romance

How to lead in the stakeholder era. Focus on purpose and people. The profits will follow

Best to try to resist old routines when returning to the office

Companies that truly embrace transformation aren’t just agreeing to adopt new technologies. They’re committing to optimising their teams, processes, and practices, too, that can transform the way companies build culture and serve customers.

The interesting story of Def Leppard’s Love Bites and R.E.M.’s Reveal is 20!

25 years ago, Depeche Mode’s Dave Gahan briefly died

One song highlights the many different sounds made by different Bass Guitars

And Nick Kamen, whose only song as far as I can recall was “Each Time You Break My Heart” (co-written with Madonna) died after a long illness

25 edits that define the modern internet video

Why is making friends so hard?

How your name affects your personality

This TV commercial for Cherry Coke is peak 1980s

Unhealthy thinking patterns: Overgeneralisation - taking one experience and assuming it applies to all experiences

Another brain-frying optical illusion: What colour are these spheres?

How thirsty is our food?

Bill, Melinda Gates' split after 27 years of marriage was due to a ‘combo of things’

Bill Gates’ divorce is airing out all his Jeffrey Epstein laundry. Melinda Gates was worried about Bill and Epstein’s relationship as far back as 2013

Bill Gates's carefully curated dad-geek image unravels in two weeks

Humanity does not need Bill Gates. On everything from climate change to global health, the billionaire tycoon is a study in shamelessness

Bruce Friedrich thinks there’s a better way to eat meat

‘Take it easy, nothing matters in the end’: William Shatner at 90, on love, loss, and Leonard Nimoy

Modi is one of the worst pandemic leaders in the world. A group of academics name the other leaders who badly mishandled Covid-19

The already intense rivalry between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos is extending to the moon. The billionaires are waging war over the right to fly NASA astronauts to the lunar surface

A powerful statement from Darnella Frazier, who filmed George Floyd's murder

Facebook Oversight Board co-chair rips Trump and Facebook. What is the Facebook Oversight Board? The panel of about 20 people includes academics and political leaders.

The Trump decision shows Facebook can’t hide behind its fake court. The Oversight Board is supposed to help Mark Zuckerberg avoid making hard decisions. With Trump, it sent the decision right back to him.

EU wants firm pledges from tech giants in fake news fight

Facebook moderator: ‘Every day was a nightmare

Facebook’s users will make the final choice on seeing “Likes” in their feeds.

Attorneys general urge Zuckerberg to abandon preteen Instagram. Attorneys general from 44 United States territories and states urged the Facebook CEO to drop plans to launch a version of Instagram for kids under 13

Instagram, Twitter blame glitches for deleting Palestinian posts

WhatsApp sues Indian government over ‘mass surveillance’ internet laws. Lawsuit says controversial new laws are unconstitutional and violate the right to the preservation of privacy

And Twitter fears for freedom of expression in India

People are ready to log off social media for good. We’re so used to putting our entire lives online, but what if we just…didn’t?

Our digital pasts weren’t supposed to be weaponised like this. A recent firing at The Associated Press is the latest example of the way in which our digital pasts are never far from the present, despite what early internet evangelists thought

Munich hits back over Dubai Oktoberfest plans. The city of Munich has released a terse statement distancing itself from reports about an Oktoberfest event in Dubai. Other businesses expressed bewilderment with the plans

Vancouver has become North America's anti-Asian hate crime capital

Why do people in relationships cheat? A new study breaks down the reasons—they’re complicated

The pandemic has been terrible, but Fareed Zakaria says that it has also ushered in innovations that should leave us optimistic about the future

Everyone thinks Americans are selfish. They’re wrong

The children selling explicit videos on OnlyFans

Defending civic space during and after the pandemic

Americans and ‘Cancel Culture’: Where some see calls for accountability, others see censorship, punishment

What Oxford taught me about posh people. The dreaming spires hide a vicious sense of entitlement

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