Free Republic

Regulations: When FCC Chairman Ajit Pai announced plans to repeal the Obama administration's heavy-handed "net neutrality" regulations, critics acted as if the world were coming to an end. Actual consumers, however, aren't likely to notice any difference, because the "problem" those rules were supposed to solve has always been wildly exaggerated.

The holiday season will be a busy one for Amazon, and as 2017 draw to a close, it could be said this entire year has been a big one for the e-commerce giant, from its acquisition of Whole Foods to the HQ2 race and its expansion in its hometown, Seattle. But behind the company’s growth and expansion, and future plans, lies an immense, intricate logistics network that enables it to offer incredible delivery times to every corner of the country. The company’s footprint is pretty wild. According to Amazon, the company now operates more than 75 fulfillment centers and 25...

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman (D) is investigating what he calls a massive scheme to corrupt the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) with fake public comments on net neutrality. In an open letter to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai, Schneiderman said the agency hasn't provided him with information "critical" to an investigation his office is conducting. Schneiderman said in a tweet his office has been investigating a "massive scheme" over the last six months to "corrupt the FCC's comment process on net neutrality by impersonating 100,000s of real Americans." In the letter, Schneiderman wrote that the process the FCC...

This week Uber fired its chief security officer and one of his deputies. The reason? They had concealed a massive security breach for more than one year. And that's not all: in order to convince the hackers to delete the information on 57 million people, the security officers paid the hackers $100,000. "At the time of the incident, Uber was negotiating with U.S. regulators investigating separate claims of privacy violations. Uber now says it had a legal obligation to report the hack to regulators and to drivers whose license numbers were taken. Instead, the company paid hackers to delete the...

While many human workers fear that they will ultimately be replaced by artificial intelligence (AI), it's more likely that our current workforce will shift into new types of roles for people, according to a new report from professional services company Cognizant. "In the future, work will change but won't go away," the report stated. "Work will continue to be core to our identities, our nature, our dreams and our realities. But it won't necessarily be the work we know or do now." Work has always changed as technology advances, the report noted, with positions such as switchboard operators, lamplighters, and...

Second Life was supposed to be the future of the internet, but then Facebook came along. Yet many people still spend hours each day inhabiting this virtual realm. Their stories—and the world they’ve built—illuminate the promise and limitations of online life. Gidge Uriza lives in an elegant wooden house with large glass windows overlooking a glittering creek, fringed by weeping willows and meadows twinkling with fireflies. She keeps buying new swimming pools because she keeps falling in love with different ones. The current specimen is a teal lozenge with a waterfall cascading from its archway of stones. Gidge spends her...

ne of the biggest puzzles about our current predicament with fake news and the weaponisation of social media is why the folks who built this technology are so taken aback by what has happened. Exhibit A is the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, whose political education I recently chronicled. But he’s not alone. In fact I’d say he is quite representative of many of the biggest movers and shakers in the tech world. We have a burgeoning genre of “OMG, what have we done?” angst coming from former Facebook and Google employees who have begun to realise that the cool...

LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman is not shy when expressing his opinions of President Trump. The entrepreneur, who now sits on Microsoft's board of directors and is a partner at venture capital firm Greylock, campaigned publicly for Hillary Clinton and in March said that Trump was even worse than he feared. In an interview with CNBC's Julia Boorstin at the Disruptor 50 event in San Francisco on Wednesday night, Hoffman had perhaps his harshest words yet about the president, calling him "worse than useless" and saying that he'd "take someone randomly picked from a phone book" over him as president. He...

In a major shift, Republicans on the Federal Election Commission plan to join Democrats Thursday in calling for new Internet regulations on paid digital political ads. In a statement issued late Wednesday, the three GOP members cited the “thousands of comments” from the public calling for new disclosure rules in light of concerns Russian activists used Internet posts on Facebook to try to influence the 2016 presidential elections. “We hereby move to direct the Office of General Counsel to draft a notice of proposed rulemaking, as soon as is practicable, that proposes revisions to commission rules governing disclaimers on paid...

As part of its plans to deliver luxury fashion, United States retail giant Walmart is to launch a dedicated online Lord & Taylor flagship store next year, offering premium fashion brands to its customers. The initiative announced Monday will start next spring. "Our goal is to create a premium fashion destination on Walmart.com", said the Head of Fashion for Walmart's U.S. E-commerce Division Denise Incandela in a statement to NBC. "We see customers on our site searching for higher-end items, and we are expanding our business online to focus on adding specialized and premium shopping experiences, starting with fashion", Incandela...

Elections in 18 separate nations were influenced by online disinformation campaigns last year, suggests research. Independent watchdog Freedom House looked at how online discourse was influenced by governments, bots and paid opinion formers. In total, 30 governments were actively engaged in using social media to stifle dissent, said the report. Educating users to spot fake news and making tech firms police their networks could combat the manipulation, it said. The different tactics used to influence online speech included: * automated bots that echoed official messages * armies of paid commentators that swamped discussions with pro-government views * false news sites...

The Conservative Voice in the news of the day is fast fading The News of the Day the Mainstream and Social Media are squatting on: Legions of people are being thrown off the Information Highway; the bus is leaving the depot without them. Amid a daily myriad of made-to-order distractions, including the ongoing visceral hatred of the outcome of presidential election 2016; the more than 20-year old sexual harassment claims of loud Entertainment Industry victims; the recent advance of Character Assassination By Allegation, allegations of which are impossible to prove or disprove, Conservatives are steadily losing their voice on the...

Humanity has a massive password problem. We might call it The Password Pandemic. Computers keep getting faster and cheaper, making passwords easier to crack, while human operators do not change their bad password habits. This is a losing proposition, with the advantage clearly toward hackers and cyber criminals. Most users of the Internet now know that they need to use “strong” passwords, and that they should use a different password for each site. With a dozen or several dozen online accounts, this quickly becomes unmanageable. Exasperated, people just use the same (usually weak) password across several accounts. Hackers know this,...

By July 2016, according to the analysis site SimilarWeb, Matt Drudge’s link-aggregation site Drudge Report was the second-most-visited on the Internet in the United States. Over the course of the month — the month of the Republican and Democratic presidential conventions and the month of the leak of emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee — SimilarWeb estimates that Drudge had 1,472,220,000 page views. That’s 1.4 billion, the equivalent of 47 views of the Drudge Report every second of every minute that month. Being the second-most-visited site, incidentally, means that Drudge had more page views than Yahoo, Disney (including ABC...

The deputy social media director for Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign admits she never had "the cool candidate." "We were never the cool candidate," Emmy Bengtson wrote in a Medium post commemorating the one-year anniversary since the election. "It was very, very hard to convince people to 'come out' with their support of Hillary." Bengtson, who started at Clinton's Brooklyn headquarters in May 2015, said instead the team "showed why knowing issues inside and out and never, ever quitting were worthy of the same respect." Nov. 8, 2016, was "the best day and the worst night of my life," Bengtson...

News Nanny: The Race to Censor Internet News If we don’t fight now, conservatives will vanish from the internet. November 10, 2017 Daniel Greenfield Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism. How can you tell that internet censorship is really taking off? Easy. It’s becoming a business model. Steven Brill is raising $6 million to launch News Guard. This new service will rate news sites on their trustworthiness from green to red. Forget politically unbiased algorithms. The ratings will be conducted by "qualified,...

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, met with small business owners who are using the social network to grow their business in Viet Nam and internationally on the sidelines of APEC Summit 2017 in the central city of Da Nang on Thursday. “Small businesses are at the heart of our economies – and create the majority of new jobs all around the world. We recently teamed up with MorningConsult for an Economic Impact Survey to understand how small business owners are growing their companies, hiring more employees, and contributing to their communities,” Sandberg said. “In Asia and the Pacific region,...

BERKELEY — It didn’t take long for fake news about the shooter in Sunday’s church massacre to spread across the internet. Now, a pair of computer-savvy UC Berkeley students are trying to do what lawmakers have been begging Twitter to do for months: call out automated bot accounts that spew false, deliberately divisive political propaganda under the dangerous guise of being real people with legitimate views. On Halloween, while most of their fellow students were donning costumes and preparing for a night of celebration, Ash Bhat and Rohan Phadte officially launched Botcheck.me, a Google Chrome browser extension and website that...

Opera released an overhaul of its browser today, and claims to have grown its market share substantially in the year since it was acquired by a Chinese private equity company a year ago. ... Golden Brick capital completed the acquisition a year ago. Its website explains: "The Group is focused on investments in China, Russia and other countries and regions of 'One belt, One Road' area to maximize return for investors and meanwhile dedicate to the national strategy and economic development."

eCommerce has been shaping much of the world’s economy recently. One of those that are profiting from this is the global luxury industry. Further helping are Chinese travellers. This industry is seen to have a recent growth of six percent, after a rather stagnant 2016. Total market value of the industry is at a cool $304 billion. This is in part due to much activity in the Chinese market. China leads the way for global luxury spenders. Also helping this growth are the global millennialMillennials are also known as Generation Y, Echo Boomers or Millenniums. They encompass the age group...