Author: Amalgamated Contemplation

The TikTok War | Stratechery

Source: The TikTok War | Stratechery, by Ben Thompson

  • Humans prefer video to photos to text
  • TikTok makes it easy to create videos, ensuring a massive supply of content (even if most of the supply is low quality)
  • TikTok relies on the algorithm to surface compelling content, and is not constrained by your social network

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The point, though, is not just censorship, but its inverse: propaganda. TikTok’s algorithm, unmoored from the constraints of your social network or professional content creators, is free to promote whatever videos it likes, without anyone knowing the difference. TikTok could promote a particular candidate or a particular issue in a particular geography, without anyone — except perhaps the candidate, now indebted to a Chinese company — knowing. You may be skeptical this might happen, but again, China has already demonstrated a willingness to censor speech on a platform banned in China; how much of a leap is it to think that a Party committed to ideological dominance will forever leave a route directly into the hearts and minds of millions of Americans untouched?

Again, this is where it is worth taking China seriously: the Party has shown through its actions, particularly building and maintaining the Great Firewall at tremendous expense, that it believes in the power of information and ideas. Countless speeches, from Chairman Xi and others, have stated that the Party believes it is in an ideological war with liberalism generally and the U.S. specifically. If we are to give China’s leaders the respect of believing what they say, instead of projecting our own beliefs for no reason other than our own solipsism, how can we take that chance?
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In short, I believe it is time to take China seriously and literally: the Communist Party is not only ideologically opposed to liberalism, it believes that only one of liberalism or Marxism can prevail. To that end it has been taking action for over 20 years to control information within its borders and, over the last several years, to control information outside of its borders. It is time for the U.S. to respond, both on the government level and corporate level, and it should do so in a multi-faceted fashion.

How Big Tech Monopolies Distort Our Public Discourse | Electronic Frontier Foundation: Deeplinks

Source: How Big Tech Monopolies Distort Our Public Discourse | Cory Doctorow’s craphound.com, by Cory Doctorow
RE: How Big Tech Monopolies Distort Our Public Discourse | Electronic Frontier Foundation: Deeplinks, by Cory Doctorow

In a nutshell, my dispute with the “surveillance capitalism” hypothesis is that I think it overstates how effective Big Tech is at changing our minds with advanced machine learning techniques, while underplaying the role that monopoly plays in allowing Big Tech to poison and distort our public discourse.

I think this is a distinction with a difference, because if Big Tech has figured out how to use data to rob us of our free will, anti-monopoly enforcement won’t solve the problem – it’ll just create lots of smaller companies with their own Big Data mind-control rays. But if the problem rests in monopoly itself, then we can solve the problem with anti-monopoly techniques that have been used to counter every other species of robber-baron, from oil to aluminum to groceries to telephones.

Review: 7th Gen Apple iPad

Dear Apple,

I am probably not your typical customer. The previous time I purchased an Apple device, it was a second generation iPod, when those were new. I have not set up a new Apple device since then. I was in need of a self-controlled screen immediately and found that the cheapest option in stock at the local Best Buy was a brand new seventh generation Apple iPad, on sale. This was my experience setting it up:

The user cannot display the wifi password while typing during setup to see why it is incorrect. The time of 8-character passwords is ending and the time of 64-character passphrases has begun; being unable to even have the option to see the password is frustrating.

The popup default/Apple keyboard shows greyed out input options (symbol characters) in grey above the letters, but there is no way to access them without leaving the alphabet board for the numerals and symbols board. Pressing and holding does not grant access to those options (as it does on Android) and instead grants access to alternative European characters. Why even show inaccessible options?

If you try to type quickly instead of one-finger-poking each key slowly, you will find that an “undo” key exists, which wipes all input for the wifi password text field, and it is located directly in place of the right-hand symbol board key. That way if you try to instinctively hit the same spot to switch boards back from symbols to alphabet, you wipe your input. This was not a positive user experience for me.

One of the apps this new device needed was Zoom. Why does the App Store show the developer of Zoom as Meet Happy instead of as Zoom Video Communications?

Not only is it impossible to input a slash ‘/’ (for example, to manually type a URL) without switching away from the alphabet keyboard to the symbols keyboard, but it is also impossible to tap or slide the keyboard input cursor into the middle of text without spaces (for example, to add a space in between two search terms where a space was missed) while in the Safari address bar / search box.

But hey, at least it was the cheapest option. Is that what Steve Jobs wanted?