Free Republic

How ironic that the 1984 iconic advertisement that Apple used to introduce the Macintosh computer "played on imagery from George Orwell's 1984 novella [sic] presenting Apple as rebels fighting a technocratic elite. The spot certainly was a lot gloomier than the company’s previous commercials, that used Apple celebrity spokesman Dick Cavett." In truth, "there was nothing cuddly about the new Macintosh ad, which was firmly rooted in the burgeoning dystopian cyberpunk aesthetic." Ostensibly the advertisement's intention was "to remove people’s fears of technology [.]" In fact, Apple claimed that they "wanted to democratize technology, telling people that the power was...

Facial recognition systems threaten our privacy. They can track where you go and add that information to the massive amount of information already saved about each of us. Big Brother is watching you and enabled by AI. And when it makes a mistake reading your face, you could end up with criminal charges far worse than when the toll tag system misreads your license plate. Here are several methods for fooling and interfering with facial recognition systems.

With the current coronavirus crisis creating a boom for video meetings, competition for secure platforms has become fierce. The recent controversies surrounding early frontrunner Zoom allowed Google to pounce at the opportunity, making rival Google Meet free to the general public. Google has begun positioning itself as the pro-privacy option because of supposed protections it has in place, even as many in the public remain skeptical. No protections in the world, however, will change that Google is a corporation whose whole business model revolves around tracking, mining, and selling personal user data, along with the history of privacy violations that...

Instead of being a vital technology empowering average people to learn and act for themselves, the internet now mostly succeeds in making users feel small, paranoid, and helpless. Some people might take issue with Facebook’s decision to remove posts attempting to organize protests against shelter-in-place orders, Twitter’s stance against presumed misinformation, and major news outlets acting as mouthpieces for the Chinese government. But by now, most people hardly blink at these heavy-handed moves to control public speech. They are told that dissent is either misinformation or hate speech, and, in the midst of a pandemic, such freedoms are positively dangerous.This...

Including the line ‘China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong’ discredits any piece of writing that discusses civil liberties and the rule of law. My former law professor Jack Goldsmith, now at Harvard Law School, and Andrew Keane Woods of the University of Arizona Law School, have a remarkable article in The Atlantic that defends technology companies’ surveillance and speech controls regarding coronavirus information. “Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet,” they write, “and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is...

There is a great debate going on in America about the power of big tech over our lives. One issue is whether they are going too far when they sell personal data collected by the company. Another issue is when they moderate content in a way that is perceived as discriminatory against conservatives. These are important issues and recent events show that these companies’ hands are not clean when it comes to privacy and censorship. Social media companies like Twitter and Facebook fill a networking and communications need felt by Americans, and because of their success, they have been handsomely...

Facebook didn't provide much confidence in its ability to navigate the uncharted waters of a pandemic in the age of Big Tech on Monday. Experiencing a pandemic on the scale of the Wuhan coronavirus in the age of Big Tech is a journey into uncharted territory, making the industryÂ’s often cozy relationship with the political class a recipe for new abuses of personal data and speech policing. Facebook didnÂ’t provide much confidence in its ability to navigate these waters on Monday. At first, the company seemed to be bragging about its work with state governments to remove posts promoting protests...

In the past, when federal contractors complained about the treatment they received from the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, agency officials would dare them to take it to the judge because “he works for us.” But Google took the dare – it took a complaint about harassment by the agency over alleged employee discrimination to an administrative law judge who works for the agency. And the judge agreed Google was right.Google said it turned over 740,000 pages of documents, at a cost of 2,300 man hours and $500,000, to address an inquiry by the Office of Federal Contract Compliance...

If you could transport yourself back to the Middle Ages and tell people that living things too small to see can cause disease, they’d think you were crazy. Seeing is believing and, quite often, not seeing is not believing. Tragically, this phenomenon is also operative with the virus in our political system called Big Tech bias, which is, unseen by most and with no paper trail, killing Republican electoral chances and remaking our nation. What if I told you that Big Tech could have been responsible for President Trump’s impeachment? What about the credible expert who warns that Big Tech...

Conservative leaders spoke at a game-changing panel about how the movement will take on Big Tech censorship.Donald Trump, Jr., House Minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) blasted Bich Tech bias at a Feb 28 CPAC panel “What’s the Right Path Forward on Big Tech?” This panel represented just how rapidly the conservative movement has largely overhauled its approach to the Big Tech issue in recent years. Don Jr. addressed how many in conservative leadership “have not even realized that with our base across the country this is probably a top three issue.”

Conservative Hispanic author Jon Del Arroz had his new crowdfunding campaign listed on Kickstarter ... only to be shadow banned. This follows the Science Fiction Writers of America openly discriminating against conservative authors and the comic book industry being revealed to have a clique of decision makers shutting out conservative creators.

If Hoan Ton-That is feeling the pressure, he isn't showing it. Over the last month, fears about facial recognition technology and police surveillance have intensified, all thanks to Ton-That's startup, Clearview AI. First came a front-page investigation in The New York Times, revealing Clearview has been working with law enforcement agencies to match photos of unknown faces to people's online images. Next, cease-and-desist letters rolled in from tech giants Twitter, Google and Facebook. Lawmakers made inquiries and New Jersey enacted a statewide ban on law enforcement using Clearview while it looks into the software. But during an interview at CNN's...

Note: The FTC will host a conference call for media with FTC Chairman Joe Simons:Date: Feb. 11, 2020Time: 1 p.m. ETCall-in: 877-226-8216, confirmation number 4193234Call-in lines, which are for media only, will open 15 minutes prior to the start of the call.The Federal Trade Commission issued Special Orders to five large technology firms, requiring them to provide information about prior acquisitions not reported to the antitrust agencies under the Hart-Scott-Rodino (HSR) Act. The orders require Alphabet Inc. (including Google), Amazon.com, Inc., Apple Inc., Facebook, Inc., and Microsoft Corp. to provide information and documents on the terms, scope, structure, and purpose of transactions...

Google is paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to The Young Turks, a progressive digital news outlet, to create an online course that helps content creators properly report in their local communities.

For the first time ever, there are FOUR trillion-dollar companies in the US. Their acronym is MAGA... Microsoft Apple Google Amazon I’ll just sit back and enjoy the comments about this.

Intel shares rose after the chipmaker's earnings easily cleared Wall Street expectations and management guided for a much stronger 2020 than analysts anticipated. The stock rose 6.73% to $67.58 a share in postmarket trading Thursday, after having risen 0.94 % in regular trading hours. Earnings per share for the December quarter grew 19% year-over-year to an adjusted $1.52, beating Wall Street estimates of $1.25. --snip-- Management guided for full year 2020 revenue of $73.5 billion, better than analysts estimates of $72.4 billion.

Hospitals across the United States are said to have granted Microsoft, Amazon and IBM access to sensitive identifiable medical records. The tech giants are each working with medical centers in Washington, Massachusetts and Minnesota. Google will now have access to patients' test results, diagnoses and hospitalizations to give them a full digital health history. Neither doctors nor the patients in the 21 states where it will be used had been told about it. About 150 Google employees and 100 Ascension staff collaborated on Project Nightingale, transferring the personal data of more than 50 million Americans to Google.

More left-wing journalists are waking up to the fact that unaccountable Silicon Valley corporations are ranking Americans with a system that bears a growing resemblance to China’s totalitarian “social credit” system — almost a year after Breitbart Tech pointed out the same thing. China’s “social credit” system assigns citizens with a “score” based on good or bad behavior, which is in part determined by one’s compliance with Beijing’s totalitarian communist value system. Those who fall below a certain score are excluded from basic services. There’s no escape, either; to track everyone’s behavior, China subjects its citizens to mass surveillance, powered...

“the group is accomplishing this all behind the scenes — without any prior public scrutiny” Democrats are fond of claiming that they want big money and so-called ‘dark’ money taken out of politics. Yet a Silicon Valley-based group is quietly pumping over a hundred million dollars into efforts to help Democrats in 2020, mostly through voter registration. Funny, it doesn’t sound like anyone on the left is complaining about this. Theodore Schleifer reports at Recode: How Silicon Valley’s secretive donor group plans to beat Trump Mind the Gap, the secretive group quietly reshaping big-money politics in Silicon Valley, is aiming...

Fox News host Tucker Carlson attacked the Heritage Foundation on his program on Friday night, claiming that the organization and other groups "colluded with big tech to shield left-wing monopolies from any oversight." Carlson, who used to work at the conservative think tank, said "Heritage no longer represents the interests of conservatives, at least on the question of tech." According to The Hill, the Fox News host also criticized a policy paper by the organization, which he claimed "defends the special privileges that Congress has given to left-wing Silicon Valley monopolies." Heritage responds The Heritage Foundation wasted no time in...