2k16 what's the worst enormous tech company?

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