A mere week of news about antitrust lawsuits shows the extent to which Facebook and Google face legal turmoil. Michael Weiner provides a concise summary of these issues. He covers the historical aspects (Facebook buying Instagram), as well as the most recent (complaints over Oculus self-preferencing). All told, Weiner brings up two FTC and two state AG cases as well as one DOJ case against two surveillance advertising giants.
Face recognition is a major technology that has seen more lawsuits in its early days than any other. Clearview AI CEO Hoan Ton-That is our interview this week. This week, we dive into the face recognition industry’s history of gender and race bias and how Clearview AI is addressing it. Hoan refutes common myths and says that the technology can overcome any efforts to make it dangerous. The debate is clearing away what could have been formidable competition from Amazon, Microsoft and IBM. This interview will challenge you to think about whether face recognition is racist, inaccurate and sexist.
Meanwhile, David Kris notes, rumors of war are rampant on the Russian-Ukrainian border – and in cyberspace. It’s currently a fake cyberwar with web defacing, file wipers, and other dormant activities. However, it can explode anytime and anyone with a keyboard could do serious damage.
The open-source software that allows you to do damage with your keyboard is open source. Nick Weaver, Nick and I look into Log4j as well as other messinesses and assess the White House efforts to prevent future open-source disasters.
This week, David will be in charge of the good news. Russia seems to have taken a number of REvil coconspirators into custody, one of whom the White House considers responsible for the Colonial Pipeline Attack. The fact that Vladimir Putin is showing some interest in cooperation over Ukraine’s issues shows that he would not be surprised to gain leverage from the Biden administration.
Now, the EU has made it clear that it will not be able to access a variety of technology offered by Silicon Valley, which often comes at no cost. Austrian authorities claim that Google Analytics is banned from sending pseudonymized data the U.S., which ironically implies that the European parliament has violated European law. Nick points out that this interpretation could also affect the Like button and Analytics. Google Translate is also affected by transatlantic data flows, and may become inaccessible in Europe. That problem is mine.
While end-to–end secure messaging remains under attack, it appears that this week the FBI is being replaced by European governments. UK’s government plans to launch an advertising campaign against encryption. Germany is furious about Telegram being shut down for its acceptance of hate speech. Nick expresses deep concern at the lack of honesty on both sides during the crypto debate.
Nick mentions that Germans don’t protect privacy as they claim. Nick says the German police used a coronavirus call-tracing app in Germany to locate potential witnesses at an unrelated event to covid-19.
Twitter receives a reward for its woke colonialism, which led to it suspending Nigeria’s president, from the military, for threat of secessionists by war. Buhari declared war on Twitter instead of secessionists and said, effectively, “You cannot suspend me, but I am suspending you.” Twitter has unconditionally surrendered its support to the Nigerian government.
As one of those podcasters left-leaning academics and NGOs hope to ban, I feel kinship with Joe Rogan. My idea is to set up a joint defense fund where Joe and me will each contribute 1% to our podcasting earnings.
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