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Tech NewsIndia Finally Popped the Ban on TikTok and 58 Other Chinese Apps
This is the story of a microvlogging app that nobody had heard of two years ago, and how it lured the world’s teens with karaoke, gobbled up their data, ballooned to monstrous proportions, and, finally, became a geopolitical bargaining chip in an escalating feud between the world’s two most-populous countries. The most recent development: India has … Continued
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Tech NewsNewsReddit Brings the Banhammer Down on r/The_Donald and 2,000 Other Subs
This weekend’s rumors were true: Reddit has swung its mighty banhammer, taking out 2,000 groups, including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse. A few hours later, the Verge reported that Twitch temporarily banned the Donald himself, namely over video of his racist rallies, with few additional details. Many have long wondered when Reddit would finally boot r/The_Donald, which … Continued
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Tech NewsPaying for a Reference Is Just What the Job Hunt Hellscape Needed
If you have shame spiraled after sending a birthday message to a secondary contact on LinkedIn or had a few too many at a professional event, you, too, have probably wondered how much you would be willing to throw down for a networking cheat. Enter the platform Rooftop Slushie, where you can post a bid … Continued
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Tech NewsPoliticsHow Long Will Trump Allow TikTokers to Make a Mockery of Him?
After K-pop stans took credit for the embarrassingly low turnout at Trump’s rally in Tulsa last week, the president waits to see what humiliation will befall the campaign next. The TikTok troops are plotting to claim more territory on donaldjtrump.com: the webstore. On Wednesday, a Twitter user instructed followers to load up their shopping carts … Continued
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Tech NewsTwitterJudge Finds That Twitter Isn’t Legally Liable for Devin Nunes’s Tormentor Cow
Twitter does not have to stop a merry cow from dunking on California Republican Congressperson and Trump bootlicker Devin Nunes, a court has ruled. She will mock him until her last breath. Which will not be today. To greet the arrival of the good news, the cow squirted celebratory milk all over Nunes’s face. In … Continued
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Tech NewsPrivacy and SecurityPolice Wrongly Arrested a Black Man Using Racist Facial Recognition Technology
In a spectacularly rare admission of likely very common fuckery, police copped to using face recognition to make a wrongful arrest, according to the ACLU, confirming a long-suspected but nearly-impossible-to-prove practice. On Wednesday, the civil rights litigation group lodged a complaint against the Detroit Police Department for allegedly arresting Robert Williams in early January and … Continued
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Tech NewsTech PolicyThe Endangered Internet Archive Is Full of Treasures
The Internet Archive set out in the 1990s with an improbable mission to become the “Library of Alexandria Two”; by 2020, they’ve arguably surpassed that goal, plus delivered their collection straight to the masses. It’s the only repository where a NASA recap of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster logically coexists with a 1990 recording of the … Continued
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Tech NewsFear of K-Pop Fans Sends Pro-Trump Convention Registration Offline
After K-pop stans and Tiktokers flooded the online registration for Trump’s campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Students for Trump has quietly removed online sign-ups for its convention today in Phoenix, the Daily Mail first reported. While it’s unconfirmed that the stans were solely responsible for the meager turnout, which has also been attributed to pandemic … Continued
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Tech NewsCultureAn All Too Quiet Place
When I log off work today at six, I’ll shuffle over to my window where I’ll anxiously check the time over and over again. For the next hour, I’ll wait, listening to the quiet music of New York during lockdown: birds chirping, trucks wheezing in the distance, a tinkering wind chime. Finally, at seven, the … Continued
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ScienceHealthBritain Scraps Its Doomed Contact-Tracing App, Turns to Apple and Google for Help
Britain swore an oath of sovereignty against Apple and Google earlier this year, resolving to devise a workable contact-tracing app that didn’t have to cave to Apple and Google’s user privacy demands. After numerous warnings from experts that the app simply wouldn’t work, the rollout has been delayed from May to winter, and now Britain … Continued
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Tech NewsFacebookFacebook Won’t Do Shit About Political Ads, But Here, You Can Ignore Them Now
After weeks of watching hypnotoad Mark Zuckerberg attempting to smush logic to accommodate a threatening conspiracy theorist, meanwhile allegedly firing critics, Facebook has produced an offering that could maybe take some of the heat off without fixing any of the aforementioned problems. In a rare USA Today op-ed yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook will allow … Continued
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Tech NewsA Brief History of Listening In on Police Radios
Last Friday night, thousands defied New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and Governor Andrew Cuomo’s curfew order and marched in the rain, the fifth evening in a week marked by beatings and mass arrests after dark. It was now common for police to leapfrog ahead of the crowd, assemble a chokepoint, and ambush with … Continued
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Tech NewsAppleEuropean Commission Launches Investigation Into the App Store and Apple Pay
The future is streaming and payment plans, and it is also a maelstrom of antitrust disputes. This is to say that the mutiny against Apple is making a little headway: the European Commission has announced two antitrust investigations into the iron rule of the App Store and Apple Pay. The first investigation examines the App … Continued
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Tech NewsPoliticsVoter Registration Groups Targeted Black Lives Matter Protesters’ Location Data
We know that the cops surveil us at protests, which is why you generally should be cautious about posting crowd photos and get a burner. Now, the Wall Street Journal reports, Democratic voter registration groups have jumped on the BLM surveillance bandwagon, collaborating with the tech firms in order to identify protesters’ locations (or, geofence … Continued
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Tech NewsPoliticsTop Tulsa Health Official and Newspaper Beg Trump Not to Hold His Plague Rally
Both the newspaper Tulsa World and a local health official have urged Donald Trump to cancel his cursed Saturday rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which is sure to be a memorable stop in his Superspreading Across America tour. The president has effectively announced, under the Trump 2020 banner, that he’s done with covid-19, and that if … Continued
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Tech NewsZoom Promises to Enforce China’s Censorship Better
Zoom will enforce Chinese Communist Party censorship, the company confirmed in an official release yesterday. Earlier this week, after it was alerted by the Chinese government, the company suspended three accounts for hosting Tiananmen Square memorials, including a U.S.-based pro-democracy group that featured mothers of those killed in the protests. The other two were based … Continued
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Tech NewsFacebook Suspends Anti-Racist Skinheads and Ska Musicians for Reasons Unknown
For years, activists and media have supplied Facebook with a long menu of white supremacist groups to target, and to its credit, it’s finally budging a little (emphasis on little). Last week, Facebook deactivated nearly 200 accounts tied to the white supremacist groups the Proud Boys and the American Guard. Facebook is being proactive, and … Continued
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Tech News#8CantWait Won’t Change the Police, Says Human Rights Watch
As cities are making big pledges for police reform, the viral #8CantWait campaign has become city officials’ go-to atonement manual. When Campaign Zero launched it on June 3rd, they initially made the striking claim that the proposed set of eight policies could reduce police killings by 72 percent, by, among other action items, banning chokeholds, … Continued
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Tech NewsDid Instagram Just Say It’s Rewriting Online Copyright?
In one fell swoop, Facebook may have changed its mind about how the online news media will operate from here on out. Undermining a now age-old assumption, Facebook told Ars Technica on Thursday that embedding from Instagram may not shield news organizations from freely cross-posting on their sites. A spokesperson said: While our terms allow … Continued
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Tech NewsFacebook Let a Politician Advocate Shooting Looters With His ‘Liberty Machine’
Popular Information broke the news Thursday that Facebook had allowed a Republican Congressional candidate to run an ad suggesting that looters should be shot. In the video, former Georgia Congressman Paul Broun, who is currently running to represent Georgia’s 9th Congressional District, fires off his “liberty machine”—an AR15—over the caption “Looting hoards from Atlanta? That’s … Continued
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