2k18 what's the worst enormous tech company?

not really the place to post this but my facebook quit lasted a whole three days. too much good stuff (all or mostly from ilxors) with an unspecified amount of me being lonely mixed in. don’t hate the players hate the game or something.

4. https://t.co/QRfgwkNj80 Google creates an advertisement profile based on your information, including your location, gender, age, hobbies, career, interests, relationship status, possible weight (need to lose 10lbs in one day?) and income

— Dylan Curran (@iamdylancurran) March 24, 2018

Stunning that more people don't know this.

I mean Google Takeout will wake most people out of their slumber if they are not lazy.

mh otm Watson & WebMQ are like the whole company now

it’s so fucking weird, we were evaluating products implementing a certain enterprise authorization standard and IBM has one, but they integrated it into an appliance and none of the support pages have been updated for over five years

their “let’s get modern” approach for a long time was to just buy a company making a tool people need now, then never updating that product ever again. they aren’t alone in that approach but they’re one of the worst offenders. also, the appliance crap is exactly what hbo’s Silicon Valley show is parodying and they’re otm

They're basically unprecedented afaict

they're sears-roebuck

hot take, no tech company should be "reminding" me of old posts or photos at any time ever. apple photos ffs just pinged "you have a new memory" with a shitty picture i've skipped over hundreds of times for a reason.

https://mondaynote.com/mark-zuckerberg-thinks-were-idiots-638c64dfab12

mark zuckerberg otm

People think Amazon has the most positive impact on society out of any major tech company
CEO Jeff Bezos’s decisions also have the greatest impact on their daily lives.

lol tesla tho

#branding #marketing

I feel like it’s almost anti-branding at this point that Apple actually does have decent security practices and a lack of interest in ads other than providing an app ads thing that developer companies demand

Facebook confirmed it has a confidential agreement with Aleksandr Kogan, the man at the heart of the Cambridge Analytica scandal

Facebook confirmed that it had a confidential agreement with Kogan, signed when he provided records showing he had deleted the app data.

He sent them this photo so it's cool

https://fthmb.tqn.com/qXdBnZMaMoz3YMtucYIsIINEW84=/768x0/filters:no_upscale():max_bytes(150000):strip_icc()/delete_key_174896383-56a0193d3df78cafdaa01585.jpg

We live in an era where I can’t tell if this story belongs here, in the “quiddities & agonies” rolling how-fucking-useless-is-the-NYT thread, or some old Campbell Brown C/D thread I can’t be bothered to revive, if it exists at all, because there’s so search on Zing and laziness rules all:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/21/technology/facebook-campbell-brown-news.html

But fuck Facebook, fuck “school choice” ghouls, and fuck “profile” stories about fake ass American Mendicants with fake ass shitty overpaid jobs. Fuck all y’all.

Amazon hardly pays tax anywhere, systematically uses 'burn & churn' on its own employees, kills its competitors, has been making losses for decades to get here and now they finally make money, they don't even know what to do with it! Why does this company even exist? 🙄😡 https://t.co/Lmp0J2oVhw

— Stonehead (@stonehead) May 2, 2018

pic.twitter.com/iJ3i9aT3uZ

— Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) May 1, 2018

Facebook closed 583m fake accounts in first three months of 2018

And yet still not as horrible a tech company as Google.

583,000,000? Would this put their claimed user base back under a billion?

one would think, at least for DAU

https://zephoria.com/top-15-valuable-facebook-statistics/

Despite protests from employees, Google is still charging ahead with a Department of Defense collaboration to produce machine-learning software for drones... now a report from Gizmodo says "about a dozen" employees have resigned over the issue. https://t.co/y03rJkrTbJ

— Ars Technica (@arstechnica) May 20, 2018

"Don't be evil."

*attorney whispers in their ear*

"It has come to our attention that being extremely evil will probably be more profitable in the long run. All we do is spy on you and construct killer robots now, hope you enjoyed finding out who the dad on Alf was faster than ever before."

speaking of...

https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-dont-be-evil-from-1826153393

BREAKING: The ACLU has obtained records showing Amazon helping governments deploy a dangerous new facial recognition system that can track people in real time against huge databases. Our investigation: https://t.co/6aJ3Vjm21L

— Matt Cagle (@Matt_Cagle) May 22, 2018

But Amazon may save The Expanse. They can recognize my face while I'm watching it and sell me whatever.

It's Netflix. I think they've had the worst effect on my life for the last year or so. So many shite shows. So much scrolling and time wasted on awful content that should never have been made.

there's a gradual, really sad development going on with amazon and their echo spot devices and advertising

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ln9dGdIxTCE

so it's being sold to old people as an easy way to stay in touch with their family that their young tech-friendly descendants will definitely be into. and maybe there are a few families out there who are like this. but for most families, this hypothetical grandma/children/grandchildren call is going to happen exactly once, tops. the grandchildren will quickly learn to try to get out of it, or commit only to a handful of seconds a quick "hi grandma" and run away, at best. eventually she'll call and they'll stop picking up, but the devices will remain there as a constant reminder to grandma that even when she tries to communicate with her family in a more futuristic way, they are now too far apart to understand one another. amazon is the platform of choice for this newest painful phase of domestic self-realization!

Amazon Echo is a horrible grease fire of shitty tech designed by thrown-together d-teams of overworked schmucks who have barely any idea what they’re actually supposed to be doing. Definitely put one in your house and let it listen to everything you say.

If I ever meet a person in my field who starts a sentence with “so my Echo...” I think I’ll just say “Oh, so you keep your compost pile in the dining room?”

“Echo woke up due to a word in background conversation sounding like ‘Alexa’. Then, the subsequent conversation was heard as a ‘send message’ request. At which point, Alexa said out loud ‘To whom?’ At which point, the background conversation was interpreted as a name in the customer’s contact list. Alexa then asked out loud, ‘[contact name], right?’ Alexa then interpreted background conversation as ‘right’.”

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/may/24/amazon-alexa-recorded-conversation

couldn't afford a car so she woke up due to a word in background conversation sounding like 'alexa'

Karl Malone not otm imo re. grandma / grandkid interaction these days. my kids play jackbox over twitch with my mom. People in their 70s can be pretty tech-savvy.

and tbh my kids call grandparents out of their own volition more than weekly, in addition to our weekly calls. My daughter came out to my mother before she did to me!

and this isn’t unusual in my experience but I know ilx is not home for happy families so I’ll stop posting

my coworkers at the end of the aisle got the alexa business starter pack and are wiring up some alerts and notifications from internal application statistics because someone higher up thought it sounded interesting

tbh having a few more flashing lights that are responsive when app infrastucture is crashing isn't a horrible idea

xpost

no, you're totally right, euler. the % of ilx posts that i regret immediately upon posting has slightly dropped over the years, but it's still up there. i was just projecting my weird family bullshit (which isn't even necessarily true in my own family! my niece and nephew love texting with my mom, for example). and even if it were true, it's not like the amazon spot is the first consumer device capable of reminding people of the difficulty they have communicating with their own family. sometimes i just post too much :o

I use all kinds of digital communication things with my parents, who are definitely old enough to be grandparents now

my friends use facetime with their parents so they can video chat with their two year old all the time

my association with these kinds of home listening devices to amazon is apparently already outdated

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/05/report-google-home-overtook-amazon-echo-in-total-shipments-last-quarter/

Amazon echo returned after it announced unprompted in silent middle of the night "here are some Santana songs" & cranked Black Magic Woman.

— Philip Gourevitch (@PGourevitch) May 23, 2017

i do that sometimes

"Amazon echo returned after it announced unprompted in silent middle of the night "here are some Santana songs" & cranked Black Magic Woman."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tfI9tTzlI0

personally i'm down with santana abraxas but if my amazon echo isn't hip enough to know "black magic woman" is a fleetwood mac song it has no place in my home

A Washington-based advocacy group that claims to be a voice for tech startups is actually a sock puppet for Google, according to a new report that itself is funded by a rival. https://t.co/25QAYcFtom by @ddayen

— Jon Schwarz (@schwarz) May 31, 2018

frequent Trump-suer, the Attorney-General of Washington, is suing Google and Facebook on a small scale for destroying Western democracy on a major scale

I feel like we need an opposite thread to this so we can congratulate Microsoft on saving open source

Is that what they’ve done

I can’t tell but what a clusterfuck

Fucking cognitive dissonance playing hell with me right now.

Due to Facebook and Google not complying with WA electoral law on political ad disclosure, the state passed a rule clarifying that this applies to digital ads.

It "takes effect" today (the law has been in effect since 1972). As of today, Google will no longer take ads aimed at influencing ballot measures or elections....... in Washington State only.

yay democracy is saved

that's really weird and depressing

uh

did she get like hacked or whatever like that one twitter lady

if she was hacked, it was by people who've mastered google SEO

https://www.splcenter.org/20170118/google-and-miseducation-dylann-roof

google deemphasized specific sites named in this 2017 article after it made the rounds. but their engine still operates under the same principles.

She said in the NYTimes that she’s reading a David Icke book, it’s not a hack. YouTube and social media claim another Baby Boomer.

Is there a thread on Theranos anywhere? I've been totally oblivious to the story up until now (not seen it/her on TV or anything) but have just finished the Carreyrou book and have loads of questions! I know there's a podcast starting today and a film in the pipeline...

discussed in detail on this thread: Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

although you have to go back a couple years

cheers

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/mar/30/mark-zuckerberg-calls-for-stronger-regulation-of-internet

Fuck this clown. Disavowing all responsibility for the monster he has created whilst practically declaring it an institution worthy of protection.

Qualcomm has been in the running for this prize for many years.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/05/how-qualcomm-shook-down-the-cell-phone-industry-for-almost-20-years/

A couple of crazy bits (and I've experienced these in my job):

Qualcomm's patent licensing fees were calculated based on the value of the entire phone, not just the value of chips that embodied Qualcomm's patented technology.

The other one that was nuts?

patent licensing terms requiring customers to pay a royalty on every phone sold—not just phones that contained Qualcomm's wireless chips.