This Week In Mobile
Signal vs WhatsApp: Chat App Encryption
If you spend any amount of time on social media these days (and heaven knows I do), you’ll see people talking about encrypted chat apps. In the days following the Capitol riots, both Twitter and Facebook cracked down hard on violent speech and anything that could be considered a conspiracy theory. The result was a …
CES 2021: Moflin, Masks, and Meeting the Future
Believe it or not, we’re going to talk about something other than politics today. CES was this week! The Consumer Electronics Show is usually a fun, exhausting, 3 days in Las Vegas. This year, obviously, it was a fun, exhausting, 3 days on your couch. And to be honest, we kind of like these virtual …
Why President Biden Wants to Repeal Section 230
It’s worth mentioning that when I first decided to write about 230, there had been no Capitol riot, and things seemed a little bit more normal than they do today (relatively). But for the next few paragraphs, let’s pretend it’s all as it was 48 hours ago, shall we? Last week we all waited on …
The FTC’s Next Strike on Data Privacy
Remember last week when we talked about the new avalanche of lawsuits against Facebook? Well it gets worse for the social media giant (whether or not it’s better for us remains to be seen). Yesterday, the FTC made a move that could signal future regulation of data handling: They demanded all of it. The data, …
(Anti)competitive spirit: Facebook, the FTC, and Antitrust
Modern life is completely dominated by just a few corporations. That’s a discordant thing to realize in a nation that prides itself on an excess of choice. If you search “nightlight” on Amazon, you get 11,000 results. “Coffee mug” gets 100,000. We cannot possibly scroll through 100,000 coffee mugs, and there’s simply no rationale for …
(Anti)competitive spirit: Facebook, the FTC, and Antitrust Read More »
One in a Googol: DeepMind’s Protein Folding AI
A couple weeks ago I talked about all the hard science that’s being done by intrepid gamers and idle PCs. One of the coolest was, and is, Folding@Home, a groundbreaking research project that allows millions of distributed, amateur scientists to gain insight into diseases like Alzheimer’s, cancer, and even COVID-19 by simulating protein patterns to …
Bite of the Apple: App Store Commissions
When Apple and Fornite went to war in the great battle over commission costs, Apple was left with super-expensive egg on its face. It didn’t look good for the richest company in 5 galaxies to tighten the thumbscrews on a brand from whom they’ve made $360 million in app revenue and in-app purchases over the …
Eve Online’s Crowdsourced Covid19 Research
Science is infinite in its capacity. Humans are not. And the volume of data needed to do something like find life in the galaxy, or cure disease, is overwhelming. That’s where we come in. Years ago, when I was a bright-eyed college student, I set up an unused laptop to analyze radio signals in the …
