av Mikael Winterkvist | jan 7, 2020 | Lästips
Tid för att läsa: < 1 minut
A brutal year: how the ’techlash’ caught up with Facebook, Google and Amazon
Privacy scandals and antitrust issues dogged Facebook and Google and Amazon saw a rise in employee organizing
What goes up must come down, and in 2019, gravity reasserted itself for the tech industry.
After years of relatively unchecked growth, the tech industry found itself on the receiving end of increased scrutiny from lawmakers and the public and attacks from its own employees.
“The whole year has been brutal for tech companies,” said Peter Yared, chief executive officer and founder of data compliance firm InCountry. “The techlash we have seen in the rest of the world is just now catching up in the US – it’s been a long time coming.”
From new privacy legislation to internal strife, here are some of the major hurdles the tech industry has faced in the past year.
Källa: A brutal year: how the ’techlash’ caught up with Facebook, Google and Amazon
av Mikael Winterkvist | jan 6, 2020 | Lästips
Tid för att läsa: < 1 minut
Vår nya digitala tillvaro har skapat speciella problem för en mycket speciell verksamhet – spioner.
Vi lämnar alla spår efter oss, även spioner, och alla spår kan följas.
When hackers began slipping into computer systems at the Office of Personnel Management in the spring of 2014, no one inside that federal agency could have predicted the potential scale and magnitude of the damage. Over the next six months, those hackers — later identified as working for the Chinese government — stole data on nearly 22 million former and current American civil servants, including intelligence officials.
The data breach, which included fingerprints, personnel records and security clearance background information, shook the intelligence community to its core. Among the hacked information’s other uses, Beijing had acquired a potential way to identify large numbers of undercover spies working for the U.S. government. The fallout from the hack was intense, with the CIA reportedly pulling its officers out of China. (The director of national intelligence later denied this withdrawal.)
Yahoo.com
av Mikael Winterkvist | dec 28, 2019 | Lästips
Tid för att läsa: < 1 minut
Smartphones Transformed India. Now Indians Are Turning Them Against The Modi Government.
Cheap data and inexpensive smartphones brought millions of people online in India this decade. As the country’s government cracks down, protesters are using the internet to resist.
Last week, after the Indian government turned off access to the internet from mobile devices in state after state as furious protests erupted over an anti-Muslim citizenship law, I sent a WhatsApp message to a colleague in panic.
“Is there any chance in hell that Delhi would lose internet?”
For days, I had watched as authorities plunged districts across the country into digital darkness. On December 10, far-flung districts in the northeastern states of Arunachal Pradesh and Tripura went offline, followed a day later by parts of neighboring Assam. The authorities had shut off internet access to try to stymie protests against a law passed that week by India’s Hindu nationalist government, whoch made getting an Indian citizenship easier for immigrants who practice all major South Asian religions except Islam. People opposing the law say that it destroys India’s secular ethos.
Källa: Smartphones Transformed India. Now Indians Are Turning Them Against The Modi Government.
av Mikael Winterkvist | dec 26, 2019 | Lästips
Tid för att läsa: < 1 minut
Silas Warner skapade Castle Wolfenstein och gav därmed upphov till en helt ny genré av spel – där du spelar i första person. Du ser dina händer och det du har framför dig – First-Person-Shooter, FPS.
Hans namn är trots det inte särskilt välkänt utanför spelvärlden och kanske beroende på att han gick bort 2004 bara 54 år gammal. Det här är historien om en spelutvecklare som skapade en helt ny typ av spel.
The late Silas Warner is barely remembered in gaming, but he did something extraordinary.
UntilUntil recently, Kari Ann Owen ran a therapeutic horse ranch in Montana. Now focused on writing and political activism, she isn’t much interested in video games. But she takes her late husband’s legacy very seriously. “He was a genius,” she says of Silas Warner. “And he’s never received the credit or the rewards he was due.”
Silas Warner’s most notable contribution to gaming was to create Castle Wolfenstein in 1981, whoch was the first game to include digitized speech and an early example both of stealth gaming and of the World War II shooter. Three years later, he released a follow-up, Beyond Castle Wolfenstein.
Källa: The man who made Wolfenstein
av Mikael Winterkvist | dec 24, 2019 | Lästips
Tid för att läsa: < 1 minut
In the not-so-distant past, TV viewers were forced to wait a week for the next installment of their favorite shows, parceled out by networks in half-hour or hour-long increments.
Fast forward to 2019, when media and tech companies are subverting that schedule and the majority of viewers using U.S. TV streaming services watch an average of four hours of content in one sitting, according to Deloitte.
To understand how we got here, look at Netflix (NFLX.O).
At the start of the decade, binge watching involved VHS tapes, DVD box sets or long nights glued to a DVR. TV cable hits included “Homeland” and “The Wire” – hour-long dramas with complicated plot lines that needed to be watched sequentially.
Källa: The Netflix decade: How one company changed the way we watch TV
av Mikael Winterkvist | dec 22, 2019 | Lästips
Tid för att läsa: < 1 minut
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg won’t talk to the Guardian. So we fed everything he says into an algorithm, built a Zuckerbot, and interviewed it.
Mark Zuckerberg is press shy. The 35-year-old billionaire’s innate sense of swagger (“I’m CEO … bitch”) has failed to translate into confident public speaking. But after the Cambridge Analytica scandal precipitated a massive crisis of trust for the company, Zuckerberg was forced to step out of his comfort zone and start answering for himself and his company.
Källa: ’I am going to say quiet words in your face just like I did with Trump’: a conversation with the Zuckerbot
