Controversial Reads 102221


Mark Zuckerberg, unlike Einstein, did not dream up Facebook out of a sense of moral duty, or a zeal for world peace. This summer, the population of Zuckerberg’s supranational regime reached 2.9 billion monthly active users, more humans than live in the world’s two most populous nations—China and India—combined.


The greatest risk of monopolies is that they’ll obstruct the ideas that will make our homes truly smart. Our “Jetsons” future is on the line.


Given these concerns, it seems especially bizarre that Amazon was willing to reference the price of competing smart thermostats sold via its platform during the launch. Its smart thermostat is “less than half the average cost of a smart thermostat sold on Amazon.com,” the company’s senior vice president of devices and services, Dave Limp, said.


Apple’s co-founder changed how we view tech. A decade after his death, we’ve changed how we view the tech industry, too.


The U.S. government is secretly ordering Google to provide data on anyone typing in certain search terms, an accidentally unsealed court document shows. There are fears such “keyword warrants” threaten to implicate innocent Web users in serious crimes and are more common than previously thought.


There are two main types of tech criticism. Despite some superficial similarities, they are polar opposites. Here is how to distinguish them.


Governments and corporations are tracking how we go about our lives with a unique marker that most of us cannot hide or change: our own faces. Across the country, communities are pushing back with laws that restrain this dangerous technology.


Amazon.com Inc has been repeatedly accused of knocking off products it sells on its website and of exploiting its vast trove of internal data to promote its own merchandise at the expense of other sellers. The company has denied the accusations.


The report is supposed to highlight the country’s prowess in artificial intelligence, yet it reveals a lesser-known truth: China’s AI isn’t so much a tool of world domination as a narrowly deployed means of domestic control.


To access data from unsuspecting users, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) could be exploiting a universal authentication process that is thought to be secure, but in reality may not be, cybersecurity experts warned.


Have you ever been in an online discussion where a vocal proponent confidently claimed that his opponent was the victim of the dreaded “Dunning–Kruger” effect?


The controversy revolves mainly around a mechanism known as client-side scanning. Briefly, client-side scanning checks whether the content of a message, in the various formats in which it can be, whether text, images, videos or files, is similar to some “questionable” content before the message is sent to the intended recipient.


Professional networking site LinkedIn announced it will shut down its website in China because China’s hefty compliance requirements have created a “significantly more challenging operating environment.”


“It’s simply not reasonable to expect that Huawei would refuse a direction from the Chinese Communist Party.” — Simeon Gilding, former head of the Australian Signals Directorate’s signals intelligence and offensive cyber missions.