A Colorado company is betting it can make the decentralized web more accessible with a no-frills server you can install in your own home. Start9 Labs’ Embassy server, housed in a Raspberry Pi, sets up its own private internet network and comes with its own operating system as well as […]
Benjamin Powers
17 posts
The crackdown on alleged hate speech is intensifying as social media platforms either expand their policies or step up enforcement of their terms of service. Reddit banned over 2,000 subreddits as part of a focus on what it deemed hate speech, including The_Donald as well as the subreddit for the […]
What’s in a name? The power to render someone mute. Last week, Scott Alexander, the author of the influential rationalist blog Slate Star Codex (SSC), abruptly shut down (perhaps temporarily) his blog in advance of a New York Times (NYT) story on him and SSC that would include his real […]
Facebook, Accenture, IoTeX, Nvidia and six other companies are joining the Linux Foundation’s Confidential Computing Consortium (CCC), increasing the size of the privacy-focused group by 60 percent. The addition of members IoTeX, which leverages blockchain to secure the internet of things, and R3, an enterprise blockchain company, nearly doubles the […]
Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, recently re-tweeted a call for fact checking through open source tech rather than new intermediaries, like Twitter. Dorsey’s message came at the end of May, after Twitter factchecked tweets by President Trump about mail in voting, leading to Trump to sign an executive order attacking […]
Alethea AI, a synthetic media company, is piloting “privacy-preserving face skins,” or digital masks that counter facial recognition algorithms and help users preserve privacy on pre-recorded videos. The move comes as companies such as IBM, Microsoft, and Amazon announced they would suspend the sale of their facial recognition technology to […]
Coronavirus is ravaging the globe, canceling presidential primaries in the U.S. and calling into question the wisdom of having lawmakers, many of them elderly, sitting close together as votes are held in Congress. Lawmakers, especially Democrats, have sought to expand mail-in voting, and perhaps give some voters the opportunity to […]
Researchers in Australia have identified a bug that caused that country’s contact tracing app to malfunction, it was announced Monday. Governments around the world have introduced contact tracing apps to track the spread of the coronavirus. But, as in Australia, so far it’s unclear how much of a benefit these […]
When Shoshana Zuboff returns my call 15 minutes late, it’s because her previous call with an organization in Israel dropped halfway through and it took them a while to reconnect. Such is the peril of functioning in quarantine, even as tech companies exert more power than ever. Rather than having […]
For would-be U.S. lawmaker Jonathan Herzog, financial exclusion isn’t just a talking point, it’s lived experience. When launching his congressional run, he said, Herzog went to Bank of America and Citibank and tried to open a campaign checking account, but was denied. Herzog saw it as an example of the […]
At a press conference Sunday Minnesota Department of Public Safety commissioner John Harrington compared the methods police were using to identify protestors to those used to track COVID-19 cases. We’ve “begun analyzing the data of who we have arrested, and begun, actually, doing what you would think as almost pretty similar […]
Cynthia Lummis was the U.S. Representative for Wyoming from 2009 to 2017, and is now running for U.S. Senate. A budget hawk and founding member of the Freedom Caucus, she first bought bitcoin in 2013 after a tip from her son-in-law. She’s been an advocate ever since. A rancher with […]
U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday, seeking to amend Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Section 230 prevents social media companies from civil liability for the content posted on them. The order targets Twitter and Facebook after Twitter fact-checked two of the President’s tweets. The text […]
A member of the ID2020 Alliance, which aims to bring digital identities to billions of people who don’t have them, has resigned over the organization’s direction on digital immunity passes and COVID-19. In her resignation email last Friday, Elizabeth Renieris cited ID2020’s opacity, “techno-solutionism,” and corporate influence along with the […]
Citizen, the mobile application that alerts its more than two million users to crime and disaster around them, has launched a contact tracing functionality, called SafeTrace, in the fight against the coronavirus. Now it’s just a matter of the New York City-based startup finding a customer for the product, which […]
Zoom, the popular-by-necessity video conferencing service, has acquired crypto key directory Keybase in a bid to bring end-to-end encryption to its paying customers. “We are working on a detailed cryptographic design to be published by May 22 for public review,” tweeted, Alex Stamos, a former chief information security officer of […]
Buoyed by scandals including Facebook and Cambridge Analytica and the perennial reports of breaches at companies including Equifax and Marriott, the data privacy industry has expanded significantly over the last few years. The information privacy and security industry was worth an estimated $124 billion in 2019, according to Gartner. The […]