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You might recall that when political news website Semafor entered the media industry on the back of $25 million in private money, they made all kinds of promises about how they were somehow going to revolutionize U.S. media. In reality most of their promises were relatively inane, and it didn’t take long before the outlet demonstrated it was primarily interested in propping up the status quo....
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is danderbandit with a very straightforward reaction to the fallout from Ring’s Super Bowl commercial:
Fuck Ring
Exactly why I would never own a cloud based camera system.
In second place, it’s MrWilson with a piece-by-piece reply to a comment about DHS demanding social media info from legal immigrants and US citizens:
Immigration law...
Five Years Ago
This week in 2021, Australian news sites were reacting bizarrely to Facebook’s withdrawal from sharing news in the country, just before Facebook caved and decided to restore news links. The whole ordeal was surrounded by silly reactions so we pointed to the best summary of everything, and also looked at how it demonstrated the evil of Zero Rating. We also wrote about how attacks on...
One of the unfortunate knock on effects of being generally insufferable is that many people don’t want to be associated with you in any way. And when you’re both insufferable and happen to be the most divisive American political figure in modern history, all the more so. And that is certainly why, during both of the Donald Trump presidential campaigns, it became common practice for musical...
Full disclosure up front: I sit on the board of Bluesky. That said, I had absolutely no idea this lawsuit existed until recently. Which, honestly, tells you something about how much of a legal non-event it was. But the underlying story here—about the NFL treating social media the way it treats television broadcast rights—is worth digging into, because it reveals something deeply broken about how...
ICE can’t keep up with the baseline set by resident ghoul/White House advisor Stephen Miller. Miller has demanded 3,000 arrests per day, which he presented as the minimum he would be satisfied with.
To reach this goal, tons of talent from other federal law enforcement agencies have been added to the mix. The results have been less than impressive, to be entirely too kind to these kidnappers and...
Earlier this year we noted how the Trump FCC, at the direct request of wireless phone giants, destroyed popular phone unlocking rules making it easier and cheaper to switch wireless carriers. The rules, applied via spectrum acquisition and merger conditions after years of activism, required that Verizon unlock your phone within 60 days after purchase so you could easily switch to competitors....
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Palantir Sues Swiss Magazine For Accurately Reporting That The Swiss Government Didn’t Want Palantir
If you run a company whose entire value proposition is the ability to see patterns, predict outcomes, and connect dots that others miss, you’d think someone in the building might have flagged that suing a small independent magazine over unflattering-but-accurate reporting would only guarantee that millions more people read it.
And yet, here we are.
Palantir Technologies, the infamous surveillance...
Netflix has retreated from its protracted bidding war with Larry Ellison for control of Warner Brothers, giving the Trump ally likely control of Warner, CNN, and HBO. In a statement, Netflix co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters said that Paramount’s latest offer made the acquisition financially irresponsible:
“The transaction we negotiated would have created shareholder value with a clear path...