Two headlines caught my eye today, and sadly they are related. Meta (the faceless corp. once known as Facebook) took down a large troll farm on Facebook run by Nicaragua’s government. The tale of the troll farm plays out like I would have expected, from Facebook’s report, “We removed a networkContinue Reading
Recently Facebook announced a name change and a bit of a new vision for the company’s future. That new vision, called the metaverse, is really a vision for the internet, not just Facebook. As a concept of a future iteration of the internet, the metaverse made up of shared virtual realityContinue Reading
Facebook has been a busy little beaver this week. It’s just possible the social network, with 2.89 billion users, generated more headlines this week than Dave Chappelle’s extremely overly discussed three-week-old stand-up special. Here’s a bit of a round-up of some of the reason’s the social network made headlines thisContinue Reading
In February 2020, the world seemed to shut down, and it’s reopened and re shut down several times since. With nearly two years of only intermittent access to the real world, it’s not surprising that everything from escape rooms to medical care moved online. Almost every work-related meeting having moved to the internet isContinue Reading
This week Google went down… Well, YouTube, Gmail, and Google Cloud Platform services when down. The outage lasted only a few hours, and it felt a bit like an old video from The Onion where Google shut Gmail down for two hours to show their immense power. The cause of the outageContinue Reading
Twitter announced it plans to once again start taking applications for verification in 2021. While Twitter never really stopped handing out “blue ticks” the company discontinued the open application process in 2017 after being criticized for verifying Jason Kessler, an organizer of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. The company says they plan toContinue Reading
The end of web publishers being handcuffed to Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is in sight. In May of 2021, Google will roll out an algorithm update using a new set of page experience signals to help determine rankings. these new guidelines will no longer give preferential treatment to sites usingContinue Reading
The Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit providing free public access to digitized materials, including a substantial archive of web pages in the Wayback Machine announced they will start adding a fact check banner to some pages in the archive. Relying on third party checking organizations including FactCheck.org, Check Your Fact, Lead Stories, Politifact, Washington Post Fact-Checker, APContinue Reading
Google has a team of white hat hackers whose job is to uncover security flaws in widely used tech. This team known as Project Zero discovered a flaw in iOS, the team alerted Apple on February 1, 2019 , and Apple released a patch a few days later on FebruaryContinue Reading
In a blog post, YouTube says it has removed over 100,000 videos and more than 17,000 channels from April to June for violating its new hate speech rules. This is five times more than YouTube removed in the previous three months. The company also took down over 500 million commentsContinue Reading