On the other hand, it is clearly the greed of plutocrats, be it in the form of feudal lords, multinationals (#BigOil, #BigTech, ...-》 #Technofeudalism) that has brought human society to the brink of extinction and caused mass-extinction for thousands of species that were intrusted to us, at least if you belong to any religion having originated in the Middle East.
#Apple#VisionPro#AR#VR#BigTech: "The concept of the Vision Pro might have excited some developers in an Apple lab in Cupertino, but most people are never going to use computers in the way those engineers and their managers imagined. Before the 14-day return window closed, there were plenty of reports of people heading back to the Apple store or popping their headsets back in the post to get their money back. They bought into the hype, they tried the new thing, and they ultimately realized it wasn’t worth it. That’s now being reflected in the sales numbers.
Apple initially had a sales target of 3 million Vision Pro units in its first year, but slowly revised that number down to 900,000. When the product was released, estimates pegged initial sales at around 200,000 units, though it’s not clear how many of those were returned. Even people who kept their devices have recently been sharing on social media that they rarely use them anymore. It was no surprise on Tuesday when Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reported Apple had slashed Vision Pro production even before its international launch, expecting to sell as little as 400,000 units this year. Kuo also suggested a cheaper version had been pushed beyond 2025, if the company makes one at all.
For some companies, selling 400,000 units would be a major achievement. But for a company like Apple that sells well over 200 million iPhones every year, along with tens of millions of Macs and iPads, it’s nowhere near the success they need it to be to justify the resources that went into it. And it’s looking ever more likely it will never get there."
The #bigtech companies have masterfully muddled the definitions of advertisement and #tracking, making them indistinguishable for a typical person. I see the #Facebook#privacy tax being compared to the #Youtube Premium all the time, so let me explain the difference and why one of them is unlawful in the eyes of #GDPR.
Nach meiner Ankündigung Ende April habe ich heute meine Accounts bei #WhatsApp und bei #Facebook zur "Löschung" beantragt.
Schön, dass mir #Meta nach gefühlten 4000 Klicks nochmal eine Bedenkzeit von 30 Tagen einberäumt, bis mein Account verschwunden ist. Dass die irgendwas löschen, können sie gerne dem SantaClaus erzählen, wenn sie ihn treffen.
Ein weiterer Schritt weg von #Bigtech - ein weiterer Schritt hin zu mehr Selbstbestimmung.
The successful #Mastodon and #PeerTube instances for #EU institutions run by @EDPS will be shut down on May 18th 😥
It seems that the #EuropeanCommission and #EVP have no interest in promoting independent, #bigtech-free and low-surveillance European platforms and thus a free and democratic discourse…
If you're looking for alternatives to Chrome in terms of which browsers to use on Android, Talk Android has compiled this nifty list of the latest and greatest browsers you can switch to.
✍🏾 The tech writer and journalist, Irene O., talks about how she used our highly customizable Vivaldi browser and its features, like tab stacking, and the built-in Notes and Translator.
📝 It's nice to see writers and journalists alike share their appreciation for Notes, a noteworthy tool built right into the browser. This way, there's no need to switch between apps to jot down quick notes or to add text to an existing note.
📲 It even syncs across devices making it effortless to carry all important notes on your desktop, tablet, and mobile.
Prof. David Erdos has shared his latest (excellent) research “showing i) little UK GDPR enforcement, ii) worrying gap with formal law expectations & iii) limited accountability for this.”
A less polite version would be: the 🇬🇧 government has demonstrated how a law on the books it dislikes (the General Data Protection Regulation) can be undermined by the appointment of supine or actively hostile Information Commissioners. (As prime minister, Margaret Thatcher was against its predecessor Data Protection Directive from the start; not much has changed.)
I hope the European Commission is not going down the same route with the Digital Markets Act’s Art. 7 (on NIICS interoperability), which it was hostile to from start (early 2020) to finish (enforcement). Legislators learned from the GDPR that it is too easy for national regulators to be deliberately undermined by governments looking to attract technology firm investment (see also: Ireland and Luxembourg). The Commission therefore has a central enforcement role. So I’m especially disappointed by the flimsiness of its finally-published decision not to designate iMessage as a DMA gatekeeper NIICS. It hardly justifies the “exceptional” non-designation decision (Art. 3(5)), or “manifestly call[s] into question” the quantitative tests it meets [1]. I wonder if Meta now feels slightly foolish to have obeyed that provision in (somewhat) good faith 🫠
I still remember the jaw-dropping moment the new 🇬🇧 Information Commissioner in 2009 told a law conference (just about his first public appearance) he didn’t think data protection law should apply to the private sector. (He previously ran the advertising “self-regulatory” Advertising Standards Authority.) It’s fortunate indeed for GDPR enforcement it contains rights of private action, so effectively taken up by Max Schrems. Meanwhile, the Commission’s lack of legal action to force some member states to properly implement the legislation, enchantment with mass surveillance/data retention, and some of its adequacy decisions, are much less impressive than the Court of Justice’s judgments on Schrems’ two cases.
I was reminded last week talking to a BigTech competitor these much smaller firms have to be extremely cautious about upsetting a company they may rely on for key resources, and the Commission has spent most of its time preparing for DMA enforcement talking to those two groups. So perhaps Schrems’ None of Your Business, or something similar, will have to take up the rights of the individuals the legislation is ultimately supposed to help 🤷🏻♂️ Fortunately the DMA also contains rights of private action, as well as the ability of organisations to take representative actions (thanks to campaigning by consumer and digital rights groups in its final stages). As with the Schrems I and II cases, these apparently small issues can ultimately have enormous global impact [2].
[1] Where does the DMA talk about the relative intensity of use of one core platform service versus another? This provides two of three reasons for the decision! Who cares if iMessage for Business is lightly used, given it’s likely iMessage itself is used by many microbusinesses, very few of whom I imagine were part of the “corporate users of iPhone to whom the Commission reached out during the market investigation”? Really, the EC didn’t even bother with a large-scale survey, and/or demand data from Apple?
I also heard from an impeccable source Apple threatened to withdraw iMessage from the EU if it had been DMA-designated. The EC should not be rewarding such blackmail, even if it was highly likely to be a bluff.
[2] For now, we might have to rely on technology and philanthropy to improve messenger interoperability, such as this great project: a cross-platform, memory-safe OpenMLS library to enable interoperable, end-to-end encrypted messaging (E2EE) in multiple clients, combining “Matrix’s decentralized and federated infrastructure with Signal’s low metadata footprint.” 🎯
What’s happening with TikTok in the US is a strong reminder about the vulnerability of centralized platforms to censorship and surveillance. The Open Technology Fund notes Signal “provides a high level of metadata protection, but is centralized and thus easily censored. In addition, Signal cannot efficiently provide E2EE for large-group communications.” I hope Signal will move in this direction over time, as well as towards interoperability with other platforms implementing its own protocol (with metadata guarantees) as well as the IETF’s open Messaging Layer Security standard.
#CommunitySpotlight: Are you concerned about #BigTech, but still cannot fully escape them? Do you use (or just learned about) alternative frontends for popular services?
Check out #LibRedirect on #Codeberg, a browser addon which redirects many proprietary sites to alternative viewers.
I can't accept that this is where we're now, but at least you can learn a lot about opensource, community, bureaucracy, funding, boardroom drama, conflict of interests and bigtech shills just by reading this.
« Quel rôle les grandes firmes technologiques américaines, qui s’exportent massivement dans le monde tout en ayant leurs sièges localisés dans la célèbre #SiliconValley, jouent-elles dans le carnage qui a cours actuellement dans la bande de #Gaza et qui est perpétré par l’armée #israél|ienne ? »
Break 'Em Up: Recovering Our Freedom From Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money by Zephyr Teachout, 2020
"[We need] a grassroots, bottom-up movement that understands the challenge in front of us, and then organizes against monopoly power in communities across this country. This book is a blueprint for that organizing."
―From the foreword by Bernie Sanders.
When Spotify entered the podcast world, audio producer Alex Sujong Laughlin was wary — and with good reason, since back when she was a social media editor working at The Washington Post, she saw the devastating effect some private tech companies have had on media and journalism. She's sad to be proved right. "Spotify — along with many other companies — wants to create a closed ecosystem for the creation, distribution, and consumption of podcasts, bypassing RSS technology altogether because that would allow them to harvest more listener data to leverage with advertisers," she writes in this story for Defector. Luckily, she says it's not too late to take back our feeds. "You don’t have to understand the technology of RSS to choose to listen to your podcasts on an open app. You can just choose to do it." [Story may be paywalled]
I simply cannot understand how someone who claims to be a human being can find it perfectly normal to aggressively demand a multi-billion dollar bonus while at the same time laying off thousands of people. I do not have to be a socialist to find this behaviour disgusting.
— #economy#society#BigTech#SomeBillionaire#SomeCarCompany
"The early results come after the EU's sweeping Digital Markets Act, which aims to remove unfair competition, took effect on March 7, forcing #bigtech companies to offer mobile users the ability to select from a list of available web #browsers from a #choicescreen."