Someone recently posted a funny picture on the memes Reddit forum about their struggles with Google’s CAPTCHA test that checks if the user is a bit. There are also some funny comments, check it out here.
In an article by Yuval Noah Harari at the Financial Times, he talks about how Israel has “vaccines for data” deal with the company Pfizer:
Meanwhile, Israel has the seventh highest average confirmed case rate, and to counter the disaster it resorted to a “vaccines for data” deal with the American corporation Pfizer. Pfizer agreed to provide Israel with enough vaccines for the entire population, in exchange for huge amounts of valuable data, raising concerns about privacy and data monopoly, and demonstrating that citizens’ data is now one of the most valuable state assets.
Harry Halpin (a researcher and CEO of privacy startup Nym Technologies) wrote a critical article about the standards used by prominent so-called immunity passports. Besides a technical critique of the standards, he also makes some important remarks about the risks related to the obduracy of the technologies:
Rich Mogull writes at TidBITS (a blog focusing on Apple products and technologies) about Apple’s latest Platform Security user guide. He notes how the emphasis for increasing security is on vertical integration, which he defines as “the combination of hardware, software, and cloud-based services to build a comprehensive ecosystem.” This of course has other effects which he notes:
Amusing conversations on this picture in the subreddit ProgrammerHumor after someone posted a picture of Bart from The Simpsons writing “Excel is not a database” on a chalkboard as punishment.
Ben Thomas on Stratchery.com writes why he considers Tesla a “meme company”:
It turned out, though, that TSLA was itself a meme, one about a car company, but also sustainability, and most of all, about Elon Musk himself. Issuing more stock was not diluting existing shareholders; it was extending the opportunity to propagate the TSLA meme to that many more people, and while Musk’s haters multiplied, so did his fans. The Internet, after all, is about abundance, not scarcity. The end result is that instead of infrastructure leading to a movement, a movement, via the stock market, funded the building out of infrastructure.
Interesting new article from Shoshana Zuboff at The New York Times. She recaps some of her arguments on surveillance capitalism, but also links it with more recent events related to the US elections and the Covid-19 pandemic.