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📣 My blog posts
Netflix is not a tech company - all the questions that matter are TV questions. The same lens applies to Tesla, or many consumer D2C brands. Link
🗞 News
The head of the US 'FTC' agency says he's willing to break up past tech mergers. Important (theoretically), but also important to distinguish market power issues from platform abuse issues: you *could* argue that changing the ownership of Youtube or Instagram would open up more competition (though I think this is often debatable - the winner-take-all effects apply service by service, not by shareholder), but of course changing who owns Youtube or Instagram would have no effect at all on problems (abuse, radicalisation, etc, etc) on those services themselves. Addressing those needs different approaches - there are no silver bullets here. Link
Apparently the FBI is asking Facebook for things the FTC told it not to do. Real life policy is about trade-offs and has unintended consequences. Link (WSJ $)
A biometric security company used by a lot of UK government agencies left all of the data on an open server, unencrypted and unprotected - including admin passwords, fingerprints and faces. It was even possible to create new identities. This sort of casual sloppiness is endemic to government IT (remember the US OPM breach of security clearance data, which at least involved targeted malware, not just an open server) but at this stage it's shameful. I hope everyone at MI6 has changed their fingerprints. Link
The developer of Kings Cross, a major new development in London, has been deploying cameras with facial recognition, without telling anyone. The UK privacy regulator is investigating. Corporate use of this in 'public' (but privately owned) spaces is an especially tricky issue - retailers doing it is bad enough but can they really claim you consented by walking into a square? Link (FT $)
Verizon sold Tumblr to Automattic, the owner of Wordpress. Price not disclosed but apparently immaterial. Yahoo bought it in 2013 for $1.1bn, Verizon bought Yahoo and AOL as part of a push into 'data', 'content' and 'adtech' (this never made much sense to me), and the new CEO of Verizon has been unwinding all of it. Automattic is probably a good home, and Tumblr still has something over 100m users, but it missed mobile, has been overtaken by Instagram (and Twitter), and at the critical moment it was part of a 'revitalise Yahoo' push that didn't take. Link
Continental AG will shift most of its investment away for the internal combustion engine towards electric. Continental is one of the big 'Tier One' component and subassembly suppliers to the car industry - I tend to think that the move to electric will cause much more pain to car suppliers than car manufacturers. Link
Apple is listing some AR/VR jobs. Glasses in the labs... Link
Snap is making another version of the 'Spectacles' wearable camera. I still think this is interesting. Link
Amazon is now delivering close to 50% of its US shipments itself, according to Rakuten. Link
🔮 Reading
How the police in Hong King are using face recognition. Link
Big story in Wired on the 'culture wars' fights (race, gender, China, working for the US military) inside Google. Bottom line: Google structured the company so that everyone would feel like they were still at university - and then they got student politics. Link
TikTok has hate speech issues in India. Any system that lets ordinary people contribute and grows over a certain size encounters this problem. The problem isn't who builds the product - it's who uses them (i.e. ... us. Maybe this is a cause of displacement) Link
And meanwhile the New Yorker has a piece on moderating Hacker News. Link
Hollywood Reporter rounds up all the questions Hollywood people ask about Netflix. Underlying: Netflix is a TV company, not a tech company, and all the questions are TV questions. Link
The US Navy had serval serious and avoidable collisions recently: it seems a significant cause was confusing touch-screen interfaces on the bridge, so they're reverting to physical controls. Link
Beyond Techno-Orientalism - useful corrective on western coverage of Chinese tech. Link
How Google Maps 'invents' neighbourhoods based on mistakes on old maps. Link
The security researcher who chose 'NULL' as his custom license plate, and got thousands of dollars of traffic tickets. There's such a thing as being too clever. Link
Useful roundup of fashion labels using data and analytics. Link
Access piece on how Deepmind is looking for more real-world problems to solve. Link
😮 Interesting things of the week
The Nigerian teenagers making sci-fi shorts with an old smartphone and a green sheet. Link
Apparently, some people who visit US slave plantations don't want to hear about slavery. Link
The history of the Bloomberg keyboard. Link
'Someone left old TVs outside 50 homes in Virginia while wearing a TV on their head.' Link
Wework, a big new property company, filed for IPO. Link
📊 Statistics
EU statistics on tech adoption in 2019. Link
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