Africa has been a continent exploited since the European scramble carved it out in lines of a draughtsman’s crude design. Its resources have been pilfered; its peoples enslaved for reasons of trade and profit; its political conditions manipulated to favour predatory companies. A similar pattern is detectable in the digital […]
Tag: Big Tech
Tuvalu, Climate Change And The Metaverse
When lost to climatic disaster and environmental turbulence, where does a whole nation go? History speaks about movements of people, whether induced by human agency or environment, finding sanctuary and refuge on other terrains, or perishing altogether. In the case of the Pacific Island state of Tuvalu, the response is […]
Silicon Valley Fake: Elizabeth Holmes And The Fraudster’s Motivation
It has been one noisy time for the paladins of big tech. Jobs have been shed by the thousands at Meta, Amazon and Twitter; FTX, the second largest cryptocurrency company, has collapsed. Then came the conviction of Elizabeth Holmes, founder of the healthcare company Theranos, for fraud. Pursuing the steps […]
Privacy Woes: Google’s “Location History” Settlement
It all speaks to scale: the attorney generals of 40 states within the US clubbing together to charge Google for misleading users. On this occasion, the conduct focused on making users assume they had turned off the location tracking function on their accounts even as the company continued harvesting data […]
Eric Schmidt: A Conflict Of Interest
Ethics and Eric Schmidt are rare bedfellows. The former Google/Alphabet CEO/Chairman exudes a sense of predatory self-interest, always making the point that what he wants aligns with what is supposedly good for the United States. He has splashed money on numerous projects, including such artificial intelligence outfits as Rebellion Defense, […]
Whistleblowing At Twitter: Mudge Spills The Beans
It must have been music to Elon Musk’s ears. Twitter, a platform he has had a patchy relationship with, has been the recipient of various blows inflicted by Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, the company’s former head of security. This was no mean feat, given the company’s reputation as being essentially indestructible. […]
All Search-Engines Are Effectively Controlled By The U.S. Government
Because it has become widely known that Google search-results exclude any find that proves the falsehood of the U.S. Government’s key allegations regarding international relations (such as the U.S. Government’s allegation that Ukraine’s Government is not controlled by racist fascists or “nazis” as it actually is and has been ever […]
Ukraine And Cyberwarfare
In his recent interview with the Japanese TV channel TBS President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko said that cyberweapons are more dangerous than nuclear weapons. He explained that such weapons are difficult to detect and “we are not ready to be afraid of cybercrime and cyberweapons”. There is logic in his […]
Totalitarian Cyber-Creep: Mark Zuckerberg In The Metaverse
Never leave matters of maturity to the Peter Panners of Silicon Valley. At their most benign, they are easily dismissed as potty and keyboard mad. At their worst, their fantasies assume the noxious, demonic forms that reduce all users of their technology to units of information and flashes of data. […]
Metaverse Or Matrix?
Critics aren’t wrong when comparing the metaverse to the matrix. In fact, it’s arguably worse because those in the matrix weren’t preconditioned to accept their servitude but were simply grown in vats by machines without any choice about whether or not to participate in their alt-reality. What’s happening in real […]
Space Dildoing With William Shatner
Overpaid breakfast hosts on an Australian network sniggered, wondered and pondered. Why is that top throbbed Blue Origin capsule heading to space shaped that way? Is Jeff Bezos’s effort nothing more than a phallic spurt into the heavens? The implications are flowing: Can he hold it? Will he come in […]
COVIDSafe: The Failure Of An App
The returns have not been impressive. For an app essentially anointed as a saviour for tracing purposes in the worst pandemic in a century, COVIDSafe is a lesson in exaggerated prowess and diminished performance. It was billed as necessitous and supremely useful. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison was fashionably vulgar […]
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