2k16 what's the worst enormous tech company?

cool thread!

was wondering what people think of this: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-09/amazon-is-building-global-delivery-business-to-take-on-alibaba-ikfhpyes

feel like coming in last 3 years in a row should be enough to drop microsoft from the running

voting facebook yet again

feel like coming in last 3 years in a row should be enough to drop microsoft from the running

yea oracle is worse than microsoft imo

I want to stick w/ consumer facing companies

Strong competition, as always.

it's not necessarily evil or anything but im blown away by the number of places that still use oracle's peoplesoft w/ interfaces that haven't changed in 10 years

Facebook in being most annoying, but Google in having most potential for evil

I still feel like it's Amazon, although Dominique probably OTM about the most evil lurking under the surface of Google.

Uber is the most obviously assholish.

i feel like any company attached to so a project called Global Supply Chain deserves consideration:

A 2013 report to Amazon’s senior management team proposed an aggressive global expansion of the company’s Fulfillment By Amazon service, which provides storage, packing and shipping for independent merchants selling products on the company’s website. The report envisioned a global delivery network that controls the flow of goods from factories in China and India to customer doorsteps in Atlanta, New York and London. The project, called Dragon Boat, is proceeding, according to a person familiar with the initiative, who asked not to be identified because the information isn’t public.

...Amazon’s plan would culminate with the launch of a new venture called “Global Supply Chain by Amazon,” as soon as this year, the documents said. The new business will locate Amazon at the center of a logistics industry that involves not just shippers like FedEx and UPS but also legions of middlemen who handle cargo and paperwork associated with transnational trade. Amazon wants to bypass these brokers, amassing inventory from thousands of merchants around the world and then buying space on trucks, planes and ships at reduced rates. Merchants will be able to book cargo space online or via mobile devices, creating what Amazon described as a “one click-ship for seamless international trade and shipping.”

i kind of feel like it is the users that make facebook so shitty, and they are just giving the people what they want

amazon clearly most evil

as usual for me this is a choice between amazon's terrifyingly well-updated 19c-style vertically-integrated ghoulish capitalist totalitarianism in the service of getting you cheap stuff from anywhere by the end of the week even if you live in almost the exact middle of the pacific ocean, and facebook's idealistic innovation in the service of driving you to suicide

they're all bad, what's the point in ranking them

Welcome to ilxor.com

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

not sure if this is the best thread for it, but this is an interesting conundrum:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/18/technology/apple-timothy-cook-fbi-san-bernardino.html

Apple said on Wednesday that it would oppose and challenge a federal court order to help the F.B.I. unlock an iPhone used by one of the two attackers who killed 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif., in December.

...The F.B.I. said that its experts had been unable to access data on Mr. Farook’s iPhone, and that only Apple could bypass its security features. F.B.I. experts have said they risk losing the data permanently after 10 failed attempts to enter the password because of the phone’s security features.

...Mr. Cook said the order would amount to creating a “back door” to bypass Apple’s strong encryption standards — “something we simply do not have, and something we consider too dangerous to create.”

In 2014, Apple and Google — whose operating systems are used in 96 percent of smartphones worldwide — announced that they had re-engineered their software with “full disk” encryption, and could no longer unlock their own products as a result.

That set up a confrontation with police and prosecutors, who want the companies to build, in essence, a master key that can be used to get around the encryption. The technology companies say that creating such a key would have disastrous consequences for privacy.

@mims
Employers can now get alerts when their female employees stop filling their birth control prescriptions http://www.wsj.com/articles/bosses-harness-big-data-to-predict-which-workers-might-get-sick-1455664940

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CbxZMZlXIAAJaPR.jpg

facebook's plan for the next 10 years

http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/570d2caa52bcd01a008bc210-997-419/screen%20shot%202016-04-12%20at%201.10.45%20pm.png

http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-f8-ten-year-roadmap-2016-4

cant' wait for FB lasers

by what metric are people casting amazon as the worst tech co?

for me it's been facebook for a long time

zuckerberg wants to pull a wechat-style monopoly on the western world/english speaking market

fb/messenger will be the "one app to rule them all"

some dude was operating a drone outside my house last night

should have FP'd him

if you want a picture of the future, imagine amazon.com stopwatching your frantic retrieval of consumer goods from airless warehouses, forever

i'm not putting a vr headset on until i don't have to take it off

It's not just the western world Facebook is after, the whole controversy around Free Basics in India has been interesting. Essentially offering the Internet for free to tens or hundreds of millions of people but acting as a gatekeeper for that free content:

http://www.thenational.ae/business/technology/india-says-no-to-facebook-founder-mark-zuckerbergs-free-basics-initiative

smart move, india

the smile.amazon.com thing seems kind of cool, i don't really know how it works but apparently when i buy stuff they donate to NARAL now

Trending:
"Facebook Trending: Leaked Documents Show Guidelines for Maintenance of Facebook Feature"

Write-in vote for Comcast. Fuck you, Comcast.

So I moved recently. At the old place I had AT&T internet but I heard the new place is a Comcast building. I call them on 6/22 to set up service and opt for the self-install.

Kit shows up with my name completely mis-spelled. Need I mention I was a customer less than 3 years ago, and had been several times over the past decade. Need I mention I spelled my name out letter-by-letter when I set up service, and that they somehow have my correct name for my email account. FFS.

Anyways I spend 2 days (w customer service on the phone) trying to get it to work. At the end of the second day they say "it looks like the problem is w the building. We're going to need to schedule a technician to come out". I say okay, great, we pick out Saturday July 3, and in the meantime I start working from Starbucks.

Saturday comes and I got a bill in the mail, with my name mis-spelled of course, due on July 18th. I am waiting for my technician and nobody shows up. About an hour and a half into the technician's window I call them up to ask what is taking so long, and what do you know, there isn't any appointment at all! So right now I am pissed. I am going from manager to manager asking them to put someone on who can send somebody out. They can't do it. It's a holiday weekend. "Would you liked to schedule an appointment?" Fuck lot of good that did the first time!

Eventually I calm down and schedule an appointment. It is for July 19th. Nearly one month after I signed up for service, a day after my first bill is due, they are going to send someone to TRY and get it working. FFS.

When I mention that I have a bill and am not going to pay for service that I have been denied, they tell me I CAN APPLY FOR CREDIT. FFS.

Luckily I found another company to go with, turns out AT&T could do it after all. They set up an appointment 3 days from when I called. I actually got txts on my phone about the upcoming appointment. It was incredible, the concept of customer service having something to do with common courtesy, with valuing my time and investment in their service. Comcast's customer service was DISMAL.

Comcast has been valiantly rebranding as Xfinity, because the very name Comcast now stirs such deep hatred among tens of millions of people who have dealt with them over the decades that mobs of peasants bearing torches and pitchforks spontaneously gather whenever the name "Comcast" is spoken aloud.

Last year, in a fit of pique while recording a payment check to Comcast in our check register, under the name of the check recipient I wrote the notation "Bloodsuckers!" A week later while I was writing another entry in the register I noticed my wife had added the notation "Too right!"

lol nice

http://m.globallegalpost.com/corporate-counsel/hyperloop-one-faces-colossal-lawsuit-from-co-founder-37202632/

Not the worst tech company but it's interesting and idk where to put this:

It's paywalled but the gist is that one of Germany's big success stories in online travel bookings, Unister, which apparently had revenues in the hundreds of millions of Euro, got into financial trouble and the founder started moving money between subsidiaries to avoid creditors and insolvency proceedings. As a last ditch effort to save the company, he agreed to get a €10m loan from an "Israeli diamond dealer" on the understanding that he'd offer €1.5m to cover fees and insurance. The €1.5m was handed over but the first tranche of the loan, which was paid in a hotel lobby in cash, turned out to be made up almost entirely of counterfeit notes. Having discovered this, he chartered a small plane to fly back from Venice to Germany - which crashed in Slovenia, killing everyone on board.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e47a376e-5f04-11e6-ae3f-77baadeb1c93.html#axzz4HNqGAtB3

Not enormous but there was just a story in the news about Instacart -- it basically decided to start keeping its shoppers' tips as a "service fee" or something, but then there was so much outcry they backed down.

It's so obvious that their business model makes no fucking sense whatsoever -- paying a personal shopper even a minimal wage to pick up and deliver your groceries on demand is always going to be too expensive to be anything but a niche service, and it's never going to scale to the point of something like Uber. There's already this thing called Fresh Direct which is hugely more efficient and sells groceries at competitive prices, only difference being you need to have your shit together enough to order like 1 day in advance. Latest attempt to take more money out of workers' pockets seems like probably evidence of that.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/adobe-voco-photoshop-for-audio-speech-editing/

Adobe has demonstrated tech that lets you edit recorded speech so that you can alter what that person said or create an entirely new sentence from their voice. It seems inevitable that it will eventually be referred to as "photoshop but for audio."

want

adobe is the pits

from the pinboard guy: http://idlewords.com/talks/robot_armies.htm

We're now several generations in to this technology, and soldiers now have smaller, portable UAVs they can throw like a paper airplane. You launch them in the field, and they buzz around and give you a safe way to do reconaissance.

The topic in general is pretty depressing to me (like a lot of news these days I guess) but I really do want to play with one of these. Some of that stuff is really headed to the uncanny valley. The guy just goes on and on tho. Bullet points, dude.

Funny how much weirder some of this stuff is than the fictional universe of say Westworld.

"Nothing gives you peace of mind like connecting something inside your body to the outside of your clothing."

gallows lol @ Chad and Brad. Move fast, Chad! Break things, Brad! Ship it ship it ship it now!

http://i.imgur.com/aKPPKki.jpg

Google omits to say that trusting such a machine requires one to trust the experts who constructed it, hold it in their custody, and would be able to alter it without us non-experts understanding what they did or how they did it.

xp only if it looks like that sexy ex machina machine amirite

http://i.imgur.com/gkXp5ST.gif

game changer! innovation! the world is a better place thanks to: http://nyti.ms/2h8fXB5

This seems like a dumb business idea:
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/amazon-takes-on-techs-white-whale-grocery-shopping-2016-12-05

I mean, IDK, the RFID checkout thing is neat, but the lack of human presence could creep people out and it seems like there will be ways of gaming it for shoplifting, just like with self-checkout. Also, just sounds like Amazon going outside its wheelhouse by getting into expensive long-term leases in prime RE shopping centers.

I support this.

For example, I'm guessing you could have a few grocery bags and just have one of them be made of RFID blocking material. Put the most expensive stuff in there, pay for the other stuff. Boom.

I support this

You Jeffs, always sticking together.

Also just feels a little too much like a double-down on a failure, i.e. Amazon Fresh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cA2-iMz479o

i hate the future so much

same

http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/044/247/297.png

An AWS cloud.

I just don't think that replacing what is one of the last refuges for the non-educated worker with automation is going to help our already dire situation wrt wealth inequality and social safety, especially it is a kind of automation we have no need for.

like at this point it's not even disruption or innovation, it's just trying to go back to the early 20th centuries level of disdain for low wages worker.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/23/mark-zuckerberg-hawaii-land-lawsuits-kauai-estate

what a dick!

as neoimperialist symbols go if we can't have "anything built on oahu in the last decade" i much prefer zuck's driveway to the mauna kea summit access road

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/27/technology/google-in-post-obama-era-aggressively-woos-republicans.html

otoh

Patrick O'Neill ‏@HowellONeill 30m30 minutes ago

Google founder Sergey Brin is at the SFO protest against Trump's order.

zuckerberg is really failing hard at the turing test

answer is still facebook

https://medium.com/@jitbit/facebook-is-terrifying-8dc4a016b64b#.kfkgzsjjx

do we need a 2017 thread

only if we can agree to finally poll Oracle

as usual for me this is a choice between amazon's terrifyingly well-updated 19c-style vertically-integrated ghoulish capitalist totalitarianism in the service of getting you cheap stuff from anywhere by the end of the week even if you live in almost the exact middle of the pacific ocean, and facebook's idealistic innovation in the service of driving you to suicide

― denies the existence of dark matter (difficult listening hour), Thursday, February 11, 2016 12:13 PM (eleven months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm tho otherwise, Uber is too doomed to be truly terrifying, the non-doomedness of Amazon and Facebook remain threatening

someone come up with a definitive list

i fuck with oracle so i can't say anything truly bad about them

how much does your contract specify as a messageboard shit-talking fee

i know where you're coming from though iatee

lol silby

Is it time for the 2k17 thread yet?

Oh, Uberpaws: http://www.theverge.com/2017/3/6/14791080/uber-sexism-scandal-strike-waymo-lawsuit-travis-kalanick

• January 28th: The company was accused (falsely, it turns out) of breaking a New York City taxi driver strike during the anti-immigration protests at JFK airport.
• January 28th–29th: Uber CEO Travis Kalanick’s decision to participate in an economic advisory committee for President Trump led to a grassroots backlash among customers, spawning the hashtag #DeleteUber.
• January 30th: Lyft, Uber’s main rival, tops Uber in the iOS and Android app stores for the first time ever. The company also announces its plan to expand to 100 new markets in 2017.
• February 2nd: Kalanick ultimately backed out of the Trump committee, and promised $3 million in aid for drivers stuck overseas. But not before at least 200,000 users delete their accounts.
• February 16th: Jeff Jones, president of ride-sharing at Uber, was supposed to take an hour to conduct a public Facebook Q&A to try and address driver complaints. In the face of angry complaints, he cut it off after 12 questions and 30 minutes.
• February 19th: An ex-Uber engineer named Susan Fowler publishes a scathing blog post detailing systemic sexism and harassment at the company’s San Francisco headquarters, as well as a complete failure by the company’s human resources department to address her concerns. Her story goes viral.
• February 20th–21st: Kalanick promises a swift investigation, tapping former Attorney General Eric Holder and Uber board member Arianna Huffington, among others, to lead it. He also holds an “raw, emotional” all-hands meeting, where he apologies for Uber’s toxic culture and cries.
• February 23rd: Two early investors in Uber, Mitch and Freada Kapor, publish an essay expressing their deep “disappointment” in Kalanick’s decision to entrust the investigation to company insiders and supporters.
• February 23rd: Waymo, Google’s driverless car spinoff, files an explosive lawsuit against Uber, alleging that an Uber vice president named Anthony Levandowski stole thousands of documents from Google when working there as an engineer. Uber calls the charge “baseless.”
• February 24th–March 3rd: Several other female Uber employees come forward with their own tales of sexism and harassment, some on the record and some anonymous. Meanwhile, The New York Times publishes an explosive account of Uber’s cultural failings, including anecdotes of male managers groping female employees, drug use, homophobic slurs, and threats of assault with a baseball bat.
• February 25th: A self-driving Uber that was caught on video running a red light in San Francisco last December turned out to be under autonomous control, not manual as Uber claimed when the clip first surfaced. Meanwhile, emails between Uber and the California DMV reveal that the company was warned months in advance that its self-driving testing violated the law.
• February 27th: A top Uber executive was asked to resign by Kalanick after failing to disclose harassment allegations from his tenure at Google.
• February 28th: Bloomberg published a video of Kalanick arguing about prices with an Uber driver. Kalanick appears to blame the driver rather than take responsibility for his company’s fare decreases. After the video goes viral, Kalanick promises to seek leadership help.
• March 3rd: Uber’s global “Greyball” program used to hide from government employees looking to catch Uber cars operating in violation of local regulations is exposed by the Times.
• March 3rd: Uber VP for Product and Growth Ed Baker resigned amid rumors of a sexual relationship with another employee, Recode reported.

The BBC has been investigating secret child porn rings on Facebook for years. And last week a representative from Facebook, Simon Milner, finally agreed to sit down for an interview about moderation tools on the network. There was just one condition: Facebook asked that the BBC reporters send the company images that they’d found on Facebook’s secret groups that the BBC would like to discuss.

The BBC journalists sent Facebook the images they had flagged from private Facebook groups. And not only did Facebook cancel the interview, the company reported the journalists to the police.

I think we need a 2k17 thread

https://arstechnica.com/business/2017/05/facebook-helped-advertisers-target-teens-who-feel-worthless/

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/10/technology/daily-report-too-late-to-run-from-techs-frightful-five.html

My order: Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple

I think I'd put Microsoft at the back end of that list

Oracle always belongs somewhere in there, they just aren't a consumer firm so we don't think about them as much

My stores run on Microsoft-only software so I guess that has to be last. A few years ago that would be aggravating, but I kind of like my Windows 10 desktop.

Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft for me.

Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook, Apple

I realize I depend on google for email, but facebook is pretty much my social life so i couldn't lose that. I'd just have to use messenger for email!

I suppose losing microsoft and alphabet mean I'd have to use iWork or something for documents, which is total bullshit, but I'd survive.

Apple (I don't think I use anything from apple regularly)
Facebook (I only look at facebook about once a week or so, it's main use is for receiving invites from friends to various things)
Amazon (I guess everything I order from amazon I could order from elsewhere, biggest impact for me would be finding an alternative to the kindle)
Alphabet (I use Google search, chrome, gmail and android, I guess I could switch to alternatives for all of these, but it would definitely annoy me)
Microsoft (it's an unhip thing to say, but I am pretty attached to Windows and also Visual Studio is something I do a lot my work on)

Losing Google would be a life-changing disaster, the rest are tied for "I use them but could easily do without"

I could live without any of them. Apple would be the greatest loss for us.

A crippling dependency on Facebook for socializing sounds like it would be a salient feature of my personal Hell.

I get a lot out of it for better and worse.

Facebook has become Fark.com, except with stories submitted by my step-dad and my ex-girlfriends.

Trying to figure out if Amazon were to actually disappear how much money we would end up saving

just relocated home from work and left my iPhone SE plug there. i figured, nbd, i will just use the USB-C plug that powers my MacBook Pro, since this is Apple's brilliant the all-chords-in-one solution. for some fucking reason it is a different fucking chord. to the naked eye it looks exactly the same but it must be fraction of a millimeter too small or something. why the fuck would they do this. what the fuck.

Amazon disappearing would probably be the biggest net positive for me, personally, and for society as a whole. I don't think it would even take that long to retrain people away from same-day delivery of bullshit you don't really need.

i love Amazon for finding/selling books alone. tracking down books without would be a huge pain unless there was an equally huge online retailer for books i am currently unaware of.

lol i was gonna recommend abebooks but i forgot that amazon owns them now (and has for almost a decade?!?)

lol seriously? I just bought a book from them for the first time and has this idea of them as some small bookstore

The bestis obviously ISIS. They're even better at the internet than Google is iirc.

http://a64.tinypic.com/6getmg.jpg

there's so much synergy going on there i just shit my pants

it's like a synergy meganova

Woot!
Deals and
Shenanigans

see I use Amazon for everything but books now; if Amazon went away I would never be able to buy housewares b/c I'd have to leave the house or something

I'd be fine if Google went away

I've never bought anything from amazon other than books and video games - which i now generally get from the library and don't really bother with anymore respectively - and would never think to do so

I thought video games came from the App Store and Steam

Don't buy stuff from Amazon but it's a tremendously useful bibliographic research tool for books published over the last 20+ years

does instagram sell information derived from user photos to advertisers?
it seems like such an obvious evil moneymaker that i assume they must do it, or are planning to soon.

couldn't they just use photo recognition on all your photos to identify the places you tend to go, what kind of clothes your friends wear, where you go on vacation, the kinds of objects that interest you, plus whatever text or location data you voluntarily supply when you post? the introduction of the stories seems tailor-made to provide you with incentives to put together a daily summary of all the cool places you went or saw. if you post a story you'll gradually start sliding over to the right, but you can add another clip onto your story to get bumped back to the top of the queue, and do this 10 times a day if you want. i'm already accustomed to certain people in my feed following this practice. every hour or so their story lengthens and pops up at the top again. these persistent story tellers seem like the ideal instagram users for advertising purposes, and they're dedicated as fuck to the process, to boot!

i guess it's common knowledge

https://digiday.com/media/facebooks-new-image-recognition-technology-data-windfall-advertisers/

all consumer tech companies with the not inconsequential exception of Apple will sell information derived from the stuff you feed them directly to advertisers; this should be unacceptable on so many levels

all these *gestures at poll* consumer tech companies I guess I mean

i bought a new graphics card via amazon on Sunday evening and it arrived the very next morning, even though it was Memorial Day. it was very impressive.

pinboard is the only good tech company

https://blog.pinboard.in/2017/06/pinboard_acquires_delicious

"Science sold it to Delicious Media in 2016, and last month Delicious Media sold it to me.

Do not attempt to compete with Pinboard."

Is this some passive aggressive shit or am I not in on the joke here?

it's a joke

The joke is he doesn't attempt to compete with anybody? Pinboard is basically maciej (and I assume some administrators he hires to keep things up while he travels the globe)

I assume the sale price was a round of beers and a dozen donuts

what is "a bookmarking site" and how is it any better than the built-in bookmarks feature available in every browser since at least Netscape Navigator days

Bookmarks on a bookmarking site aren't stored locally

The joke is that at one point Delicious was many, many times larger and with more exposure/"mind share"/whatever than Pinboard, so maciej probably heard some variation on "Uh, you probably don't want to attempt to compete with Delicious" like a million times. So, like, the irony is, well, you know...

Never thought of nuns as activist investors but I am glad they are sticking it to Alphabet. pic.twitter.com/Px1q8oLdTt

— Evgeny Morozov (@evgenymorozov) June 5, 2017

Google begins beta testing "feudalism" pic.twitter.com/koRSlUHRLU

— WFLS (@leemkuilschu) June 14, 2017

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DCYGmY-XgAAqumF.jpg

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-16/amazon-to-acquire-whole-foods-in-13-7-billion-bet-on-groceries?cmpid=socialflow-twitter-business&utm_content=business&utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social

that settles it

Mark Zuckerberg meeting truckers in Iowa looks like a movie about an alien who slowly learns to feel pic.twitter.com/9if4vUpq4V

— Zach Schonfeld (@zzzzaaaacccchhh) June 24, 2017

he does have a reptilian humanoid shapeshifter quality doesn't he

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/7xpgvx/amazons-is-trying-to-control-the-underlying-infrastructure-of-our-economy

was trying to find the right text/paragraph that summarizes it but every other paragraph was just O_O

maybe this

Last year, Amazon captured nearly $1 of every $2 Americans spent online. As recently as 2015, most people looking to buy something online started at a search engine. Today, a majority go straight to Amazon.

but once they buy whole foods the monopoly will feel real

don't worry, the trump administration is on this

voted amazon in the poll. i'm worried that my friends who work at whole foods will have worse working conditions and compensation as a result of the buyout. i've been boycotting AMZ mostly because of how they treat their fulfillment center employees, and was thinking that the WF acquisition would make the boycott impossible. but maybe i can cut way back on shopping at WF and spend more time at local health food stores.

probably hard to cut out WF altogether as it's the closest supermarket to where i live. anyway i'm not sure but i suspect jeff bezos might be the antichrist and we haven't seen his final form.

i can usually get everything i need at trader joe's and the korean or japanese market

i'll pick up a couple things at whole foods but i can avoid it, though after surgery i've been going there just about everyday out of convenience. luckily that'll stop come friday

trader joe's will never come to hawaii :(( we do have nice japanese markets though

yeah, you know i probably could live without WF easier than i was thinking

do people not shop at 'regular' supermarkets anymore

In the naaaaame of love (between a man and a woman)
What more in the name of love? (between a married man and a woman)
In the name of love (between a man and a woman)
What more in the name of love? (and only a man and woman)

oops, wrong thread

I've never set foot in a Whole Foods or Trader Joe's. My brother is a manager at the nearest WF though.

fwiw i shop at the good ol regular supermarket two doors down from WF every chance i get, but i'm a sucker for a few things over at whole paycheck. the bulk and meats departments in particular have been draws for me, and my friend gerald is a cheesemonger there so i usually get some expensive but really delicious cheese from him

Karl's interjection has amused and confused me. Always thought it was "Once more in the name of love".

I just grabbed it off of genius because they seemed really smart! I was unwilling to go back to the source material

https://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-diversity-screed-1797564320/amp

TLDR indeed

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/23/silicon-valley-big-data-extraction-amazon-whole-foods-facebook

Thanks for the link, Karl. The info/tech giants are super creepy. I recommend Eric Schmidt's book cowritten with Jared Cohen, "The New Digital Age". Creepiest shit I have ever read.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/30/us/politics/eric-schmidt-google-new-america.html?_r=0

kowtowing to massive corporate donors is basically the point of most think tanks, though

creeeeeepppppppyyyyyy

http://nymag.com/selectall/2017/10/does-even-mark-zuckerberg-know-what-facebook-is.html

Congratulations, nobody understands you or your company anymore. supreme slime mold of the internet.

Decent article. Here's the key bit, I think: “Facebook has the same kind of attentional power, but there is not a sense of responsibility. No constraints. No regulation. No oversight. Nothing. A bunch of algorithms, basically, designed to give people what they want to hear."

And here we are now with an reality TV show president in the most terrifying US political climate I've ever experienced.

*a reality

oh for the halcyon days when the media and govt would work together to sell us bullshit wars

let's run footage of some kid being shot after this promo for Ellen cos media is responsible

and lucky us, now we have new media to sell us on all kinds of other bullshit too, hooray

The delicious irony of Facebook buying a print ad to address their digital malfeasance. https://t.co/fwiUifqv56

— Gary Shteyngart (@Shteyngart) October 4, 2017

https://www.recode.net/2017/10/11/16458490/amazon-google-alphabet-corporate-conference-call

As of today neither of those asshat conglomerates is cracking the top two I don’t think. FB and Twitter can’t go out of business fast enough imo

Almost literally ran into Jeff Bezos the other day as he was walking out of and I was entering my friend's bar, Bevy, here in Honolulu. I was wondering what the black cars outside were for... It was my chance to tell him to treat his warehouse workers better but I was caught off guard and missed it :(

Jeff B has personal protection security. It's paid for by the company so they have to disclose it in the annual report every year.

Heh, I figured the tough looking drivers were also his bodyguards.

http://mashable.com/2017/10/23/facebook-explore-publisher-post-organic-reach-drop/#VEQYakHvYPqS

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/why-its-good-to-have-a-real-audience

The sourcing on this seems somewhat opaque. But Mashable is reporting that Facebook is testing a new system which would remove publishers from your Facebook timeline unless the publishers pay Facebook. This, frankly, doesn’t terribly surprise me. It’s how monopolies operate.

The Mashable article says the test is only underway in Slovakia, Sri Lanka, Serbia, Bolivia, Guatemala, and Cambodia. (Here’s a similar write-up in another industry publication.) Notably, those are countries I suspect would generate considerably less industry attention than if you ran the test in the US or France. As I said, the sourcing on the story seems a little fuzzy. We may find out the details are a bit more complicated. But the broad outline seems clear: Facebook is testing a new regime that will require publications to pay Facebook if they want to show up in users feeds.

but *i* want publications to show up in *my* feed when i put them there

Facebook doesn't give a shit what you want!

crying

News: Facebook 2016 elections team provided advertisers with a blueprint of a divided America, carving up electorate https://t.co/LJFbm7tzii pic.twitter.com/ehMvCAodMC

— Alex Kantrowitz (@Kantrowitz) October 30, 2017

While we're on Facebook...

New by me: Facebook misinformation is fast becoming a global humanitarian crisis. https://t.co/VHcRn32EV7

— Kevin Roose (@kevinroose) October 30, 2017

Horrifying. Maybe I change my vote to FB next year

Welcome to app hell. You need an app or a printed QR code to use the bathroom here. pic.twitter.com/hYbHcsOOrN

— One Bright Light (@onebrightlight) November 5, 2017

This is quite something:

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/this-city-hall-brought-to-you-by-amazon/

Chicago has offered to let Amazon pocket $1.32 billion in income taxes paid by its own workers. This is truly perverse. Called a personal income-tax diversion, the workers must still pay the full taxes, but instead of the state getting the money to use for schools, roads or whatever, Amazon would get to keep it all instead.

what the fuck

nationalise the tech giants

I hope we get it!

I can accept that with great wealth comes great fraudulency, but lol! - this is seriously taking the piss!

"Most of the HQ2 bids had more traditional sweeteners. Such as Chula Vista, California, which offered to give Amazon 85 acres of land for free (value: $100 million) and to excuse any property taxes on HQ2 for 30 years ($300 million). New Jersey remains the dollar king of the subsidy sweepstakes, having offered Amazon $7 billion to build in Newark."

New Jersey deserves it

Maybe they can put it next to American Dream

This is quite a useful resource:

https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/prog.php?parent=amazoncom

this is ridiculous. these municipalities should be redirecting their constituent's money toward subsidizing new stadiums for major sports teams instead

Which I thought was Chicago's plan in the first place.

https://i.imgur.com/RldxxB5.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/U05bz8X.jpg

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos-now-worth-100b-thanks-black-friday-n823911

may his wealth trickle down upon us all

https://i.imgur.com/suP1MtC.jpg

And those top 10 dipshits let the Kochs run half the country that most of them live in. Fuck all of them.

The cult of rich people is capitalist Jonestown with hexavalent chromium instead of cyanide in the flavor-ade. Takes longer, turns your own body against you.

At Business Insider's IGNITION conference, Scott Galloway gave a blistering presentation on why "The Big Four" — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google — should be broken up.

http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-apple-facebook-google-should-be-broken-up-scott-galloway-2017-11

I'm not linking to the Poynter.org write-up of the presentation because it's terrible but here's a good pull quote

Galloway, the author of "The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google" derided Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg as making an argument akin to McDonald's claiming it was a "fast food platform." There's no company in world history more a "media company," he contended, than Facebook. It just wants to "operate without accountability."

When the big platform companies declare they have "to do better," Galloway said, that should be translated as, "We know we do wrong but have no intention of doing better."

didnt post them but ive been reading all the bezos/amazon news as of late and its p much tied for the worst w fb

thinking of ways to avoid it but its more unavoidable than fb

Amazon is definitely the worst at this point.

It's still Google and I can't imagine a worse company.

what's the worst thing abt google

The worst? I'll just sum it up in that they are the entry point for most of the Internet and know more about us than any other giant tech company and are scaling in a direction to know even more and become even more powerful. The company that knows the most is the most powerful. And it's not a company obsessed with privacy.

I'm curious about who's gonna win the AI war--my vague recollection of things I've read suggest Amazon has the tech necessary to make big leaps but its Google that has the largest (and so most useful) data sets.

AI is probably better described as machine learning, and Google is way ahead of AMZN.

haha i typed and then removed the phrase "machine learning" on the expectation tombot would arrive to shit upon it from a great height for some reason

I anxiously await him to arrive and shit on both of us, it's always glorious.

alexa cannot even tell me "what a choo choo sounds like"

we've gotcha covered big guy

it's

CHOOO CHOOOOOOO

dirupted machine learning

After I read that Gizmodo article I unplugged my Echo Dot and put it in a drawer

it's still listening tho

its in a drawer in a BAG ok

it can still hear your bag

*hoos receives push notification*

"customers who stuffed their echo dot in this bag also bought:
--128-pack wolf brand chili (no beans)
--good housekeeping (12-month subscription)
--amazon ginsu knife (neck-sized)

"Alexa, what does a hoos bag sound like?"

"shamone"

Genuinely do not know why any of you nutbags voluntarily PAY to have a big tech company spy device in yr homes

http://gsb.haifa.ac.il/~sheizaf/ecommerce/timemagazine/intro.jpg

this was a good read. about things that are awful. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-07/how-rodrigo-duterte-turned-facebook-into-a-weapon-with-a-little-help-from-facebook

reposting from the Weinstein thread, h/t Simon H for catching this: https://gizmodo.com/silicon-valley-s-worst-apologies-of-2017-1821064631

I think the Best Buy one doesn't qualify (they're brick & mortar retail, their corporate hq is in the minneapolis burbs, and they committed a regrettable human error and said so) but there are some really good ones in there. key graf, imo:

As I mentioned earlier, tech companies love to point fingers at machines behaving badly. They spend a lot of time exalting their beloved algorithms as a solution to many of life’s grand problems, but they will not skip a beat before throwing them under the bus for the latest fuck-up. There is a hypocrisy in trying to boost one’s image using the same tools you’re exploiting as a scapegoat.

Was it a resentful AI bot that wrote that

This feels true to me as someone who uses the internet every day, but I also know it’s true because when The Verge partnered with Reticle Research to conduct a representative survey of Americans’ attitudes towards tech’s biggest power players, 15.4 percent of Facebook users said they “greatly” or “somewhat” disliked using the product, while 17 percent of Twitter users said the same. That made them the most disliked of the six companies in question, which also included Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. More than 10 percent of respondents described Facebook’s effect on society as “very negative,” and 10.5 percent said the same about Twitter — in both cases a higher number than the other four companies combined.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/28/16795090/internet-community-2017-post-mortem-tumblr-amino-drip-tinyletter

wow Amino looks like an amazing mess that's so great

cash isn’t a problem for Amino, which raised $1.65 million in Series A funding last year.

most people have no idea of the reach of Google or they'd hate it worse than Facebook

google has useful products though (search engine, mail, drive, docs)

wave

orkut

google has one useful product

then bought another useful product

I thought they developed maps, mail, docs, drive themselves?

o i forgot abt maps

thats true, but i feel like apple maps is better imo

the rest i feel are not that great, like gmail steals all yr info and sells it while something like hotmail/microsoft weirdly enough feels safer

Apple maps is not better.

Apple maps is horrible.

gmail, the useless product used by more than 1 billion people

the way google has insinuated itself into so many enterprise situations should be causing people to scream holy hell

i do scream holy hell maura rly i do

google docs is a great free platform imo, use sheets quite a lot too - better than excel by now, imo

I've no idea why hotmail, which is terrible to use, would be "safer" than gmail, tbh unless you only send encrypted mails (or only send emails to people using encrypted email servers) I don't see the difference (apart from gmail basically being faster and better than outlook

drive also my goto, prefer it to dropbox, great syncing and indexing

I would never use any other maps service than google maps

the way google has insinuated itself into so many enterprise situations should be causing people to scream holy hell

otm

but somehow i know that i won't literally scream holy hell until one of these companies (google, amazon, facebook, apple, microsoft) merges with another.

Android also much better than iOS imo, at least I can do anything faster on an Android device and really enjoy that it's customizable

I hate every google product and do my best not to use any of them

so yeah, the hegemony of google is bad, but their products are simply the best atm imo (unlike FB which is horrible, they're leading the market by chance/being there first)

if only Google paid taxes and didn't have their servers in USA where apparently NSA has a claim to look into any data transfer

why is apple maps bad? i kno they got bad press w the australians who almost went off a cliff or whatever but google maps takes me into dangerous ways all the time in the city

apple takes me through major roadways and it feels easier to drive on those streets

wasnt gmail hacked before? i dont remember hotmail ever being hacked

why is apple maps bad, I dunno, cause it's clumsier, slower and just not as powerful as gmaps, kinda like why is Libre Office not as good as Microsoft Office

Here is a great link why Apple Maps is way behind Google Map:

https://www.justinobeirne.com/a-year-of-google-maps-and-apple-maps

all i see there is google overoptimizing probably to gather more data for whatever evil way they want to take over the usa then the world

Google is gathering data at a significantly faster rate than Apple is with regards to Maps. Their machine learning capabilities are significantly above Apple's, which means that Google's is not only gathering more data but able to do more with it.

specifically, more able to sell advertisements against your behavior patterns

are they able to do more w it though? how many people actually use all those little functionalities? its the same w all their failed products

https://www.computerworlduk.com/galleries/it-vendors/google-graveyard-3508070/

machine learning is a fake idea

that google has an absurdly ubiquitous reach or that they have an insatiable thirst for data isn't what's evil about them -- it's their abdication of responsibility of using that power explicitly for the public good. if anything, they should get more data and beef up their ability to analyze such data.

some real fuckin challops itt atm

xp so what's evil about Google is that they are a for-profit corporation and not the state?

they're a de-facto public utility with a duty of care that people looking up cures for tummy aches and global warming don't end up at flat-earth homeopathy sites

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/feb/18/facebook-to-restrict-australian-users-sharing-news-content"> https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/feb/18/facebook-to-restrict-australian-users-sharing-news-content

I think I’ve learned some valuable lessons today about posting on a phone while walking in the city

Does Facebook expect a critical mass of late Xers and Boomers to riot because they can’t see news links on Facebook?

i think they expect news sites will see a drop in traffic

I don’t know if this is just starry-eyed Utopianism but if feels that this move coooould really turn public opinion (here) against the Zuck - which given FBs seeming impregnability thus far is actually an exciting prospect