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 …
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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 …
COVID-19 and the Broadband Gap
School is about to start for millions of kids around the country, in the middle of a pandemic (sadly, the pandemic isn’t over just because we’re over it). We can’t quite imagine how this’ll work out, since if we cast our minds way (way) back to childhood, the likelihood of being able to pay attention …
Fortnite, Apple, and the Rumblings of War
It’s possible you don’t play Fortnite. 250 million people do, but we don’t really know you; you may hate prison levels and viral dances. Understandable. But Fortnite is big business for Epic Games, earning them a ridiculous $1.8 billion dollars in 2019. Fortnite is gold not just for Epic, but for any middleman. In just …
Broadband Access in the Age of Covid-19
BiTE is a completely remote, distributed team. That’s not COVID-related; we’ve been that way since the day we hung out our virtual shingle. As the I-guess-we’re-in-the-second-wave-even-though-the-first-never-ended pandemic rages on, and more businesses move to remote work, we’re watching businesses struggle with the shift. And the infrastructure, too. Temporary outages are more and more common (in …
Google opens Chromecast to all developers
Google opens Chromecast to all developers It looks like all the fears of Google initially blocking access to Chromecast were quite unfounded. As it turns out, Google did just what it said: It was tweaking the APIs during Beta but planning to open them up to apps. Now the wait is over. This makes the …
India’s Ban on TikTok and App Store Politics
TikTok, if you’re the average user, is probably nothing but a wonderland of silly videos and exceptional creativity. But it’s also a global platform with 500 million active monthly users that has risen out of nowhere to become an accidental, sociopolitical powerhouse in just three years. And it’s the center of some pretty high-test controversy. …
