company:paypal

  • Commons:La voix est libre - Comment participer au projet vocal de Wikipédia - Wikimedia Commons
    https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Voice_intro_project/fr

    La voix est libre est un projet de Wikimedia Commons qui a pour but d’illustrer les biographies des personnalités par des enregistrements de leurs voix.

    #Wikipédia #Enregistrement_vocal

  • Uber Pushed the Limits of the Law. Now Comes the Reckoning - Bloomberg
    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-10-11/uber-pushed-the-limits-of-the-law-now-comes-the-reckoning

    The ride-hailing company faces at least five U.S. probes, two more than previously reported, and the new CEO will need to dig the company out of trouble.

    Illustration: Maria Nguyen
    By Eric Newcomer
    October 11, 2017, 10:11 AM GMT+2

    Shortly after taking over Uber Technologies Inc. in September, Dara Khosrowshahi told employees to brace for a painful six months. U.S. officials are looking into possible bribes, illicit software, questionable pricing schemes and theft of a competitor’s intellectual property. The very attributes that, for years, set the company on a rocket-ship trajectory—a tendency to ignore rules, to compete with a mix of ferocity and paranoia—have unleashed forces that are now dragging Uber back down to earth.

    Uber faces at least five criminal probes from the Justice Department—two more than previously reported. Bloomberg has learned that authorities are asking questions about whether Uber violated price-transparency laws, and officials are separately looking into the company’s role in the alleged theft of schematics and other documents outlining Alphabet Inc.’s autonomous-driving technology. Uber is also defending itself against dozens of civil suits, including one brought by Alphabet that’s scheduled to go to trial in December.

    “There are real political risks for playing the bad guy”
    Some governments, sensing weakness, are moving toward possible bans of the ride-hailing app. London, one of Uber’s most profitable cities, took steps to outlaw the service, citing “a lack of corporate responsibility” and specifically, company software known as Greyball, which is the subject of yet another U.S. probe. (Uber said it didn’t use the program to target officials in London, as it had elsewhere, and will continue to operate there while it appeals a ban.) Brazil is weighing legislation that could make the service illegal—or at least treat it more like a taxi company, which is nearly as offensive in the eyes of Uber.

    Interviews with more than a dozen current and former employees, including several senior executives, describe a widely held view inside the company of the law as something to be tested. Travis Kalanick, the co-founder and former CEO, set up a legal department with that mandate early in his tenure. The approach created a spirit of rule-breaking that has now swamped the company in litigation and federal inquisition, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing sensitive matters.

    Kalanick took pride in his skills as a micromanager. When he was dissatisfied with performance in one of the hundreds of cities where Uber operates, Kalanick would dive in by texting local managers to up their game, set extraordinary growth targets or attack the competition. His interventions sometimes put the company at greater legal risk, a group of major investors claimed when they ousted him as CEO in June. Khosrowshahi has been on an apology tour on behalf of his predecessor since starting. Spokespeople for Kalanick, Uber and the Justice Department declined to comment.

    Kalanick also defined Uber’s culture by hiring deputies who were, in many instances, either willing to push legal boundaries or look the other way. Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan, who previously held the same title at Facebook, runs a unit where Uber devised some of the most controversial weapons in its arsenal. Uber’s own board is now looking at Sullivan’s team, with the help of an outside law firm.

    Salle Yoo, the longtime legal chief who will soon leave the company, encouraged her staff to embrace Kalanick’s unique corporate temperament. “I tell my team, ‘We’re not here to solve legal problems. We’re here to solve business problems. Legal is our tool,’” Yoo said on a podcast early this year. “I am going to be supportive of innovation.”

    From Uber’s inception, the app drew the ire of officials. After a couple years of constant sparring with authorities, Kalanick recognized he needed help and hired Yoo as the first general counsel in 2012. Yoo, an avid tennis player, had spent 13 years at the corporate law firm Davis Wright Tremaine and rose to become partner. One of her first tasks at Uber, according to colleagues, was to help Kalanick answer a crucial question: Should the company ignore taxi regulations?

    Around that time, a pair of upstarts in San Francisco, Lyft Inc. and Sidecar, had begun allowing regular people to make money by driving strangers in their cars, but Uber was still exclusively for professionally licensed drivers, primarily behind the wheel of black cars. Kalanick railed against the model publicly, arguing that these new hometown rivals were breaking the law. But no one was shutting them down. Kalanick, a fiercely competitive entrepreneur, asked Yoo to help draft a legal framework to get on the road.

    By January 2013, Kalanick’s view of the law changed. “Uber will roll out ridesharing on its existing platform in any market where the regulators have tacitly approved doing so,” Kalanick wrote in a since-deleted blog post outlining the company’s position. Uber faced some regulatory blowback but was able to expand rapidly, armed with the CEO’s permission to operate where rules weren’t being actively enforced. Venture capitalists rewarded Uber with a $17 billion valuation in 2014. Meanwhile, other ride-hailing startups at home and around the world were raising hundreds of millions apiece. Kalanick was determined to clobber them.

    One way to get more drivers working for Uber was to have employees “slog.” This was corporate speak for booking a car on a competitor’s app and trying to convince the driver to switch to Uber. It became common practice all over the world, five people familiar with the process said.

    Staff eventually found a more efficient way to undermine its competitors: software. A breakthrough came in 2015 from Uber’s office in Sydney. A program called Surfcam, two people familiar with the project said, scraped data published online by competitors to figure out how many drivers were on their systems in real-time and where they were. The tool was primarily used on Grab, the main competitor in Southeast Asia. Surfcam, which hasn’t been previously reported, was named after the popular webcams in Australia and elsewhere that are pointed at beaches to help surfers monitor swells and identify the best times to ride them.

    Surfcam raised alarms with at least one member of Uber’s legal team, who questioned whether it could be legally operated in Singapore because it may run afoul of Grab’s terms of service or the country’s strict computer-crime laws, a person familiar with the matter said. Its creator, who had been working out of Singapore after leaving Sydney, eventually moved to Uber’s European headquarters in Amsterdam. He’s still employed by the company.

    “This is the first time as a lawyer that I’ve been asked to be innovative.”
    Staff at home base in San Francisco had created a similar piece of software called Hell. It was a tongue-in-cheek reference to the Heaven program, which allows employees to see where Uber drivers are in a city at a given moment. With Hell, Uber scraped Lyft data for a view of where its rival’s drivers were. The legal team decided the law was unclear on such tactics and approved Hell in the U.S., a program first reported by technology website the Information.

    Now as federal authorities investigate the program, they may need to get creative in how to prosecute the company. “You look at what categories of law you can work with,” said Yochai Benkler, co-director of Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. “None of this fits comfortably into any explicit prohibitions.”

    Uber’s lawyers had a hard time keeping track of all the programs in use around the world that, in hindsight, carried significant risks. They signed off on Greyball, a tool that could tag select customers and show them a different version of the app. Workers used Greyball to obscure the actual locations of Uber drivers from customers who might inflict harm on them. They also aimed the software at Lyft employees to thwart any slog attempts.

    The company realized it could apply the same approach with law enforcement to help Uber drivers avoid tickets. Greyball, which was first covered by the New York Times, was deployed widely in and outside the U.S. without much legal oversight. Katherine Tassi, a former attorney at Uber, was listed as Greyball supervisor on an internal document early this year, months after decamping for Snap Inc. in 2016. Greyball is under review by the Justice Department. In another case, Uber settled with the Federal Trade Commission in August over privacy concerns with a tool called God View.

    Uber is the world’s most valuable technology startup, but it hardly fits the conventional definition of a tech company. Thousands of employees are scattered around the world helping tailor Uber’s service for each city. The company tries to apply a Silicon Valley touch to the old-fashioned business of taxis and black cars, while inserting itself firmly into gray areas of the law, said Benkler.

    “There are real political risks for playing the bad guy, and it looks like they overplayed their hand in ways that were stupid or ultimately counterproductive,” he said. “Maybe they’ll bounce back and survive it, but they’ve given competitors an opening.”

    Kalanick indicated from the beginning that what he wanted to achieve with Yoo was legally ambitious. In her first performance review, Kalanick told her that she needed to be more “innovative.” She stewed over the feedback and unloaded on her husband that night over a game of tennis, she recalled in the podcast on Legal Talk Network. “I was fuming. I said to my husband, who is also a lawyer: ‘Look, I have such a myriad of legal issues that have not been dealt with. I have constant regulatory pressures, and I’m trying to grow a team at the rate of growth of this company.’”

    By the end of the match, Yoo said she felt liberated. “This is the first time as a lawyer that I’ve been asked to be innovative. What I’m hearing from this is I actually don’t have to do things like any other legal department. I don’t have to go to best practices. I have to go to what is best for my company, what is best for my legal department. And I should view this as, actually, freedom to do things the way I think things should be done, rather than the way other people do it.”

    Prosecutors may not agree with Yoo’s assumptions about how things should be done. Even when Yoo had differences of opinion with Kalanick, she at times failed to challenge him or his deputies, or to raise objections to the board.

    After a woman in Delhi was raped by an Uber driver, the woman sued the company. Yoo was doing her best to try to manage the fallout by asking law firm Khaitan & Co. to help assess a settlement. Meanwhile, Kalanick stepped in to help craft the company’s response, privately entertaining bizarre conspiracy theories that the incident had been staged by Indian rival Ola, people familiar with the interactions have said. Eric Alexander, an Uber executive in Asia, somehow got a copy of the victim’s medical report in 2015. Kalanick and Yoo were aware but didn’t take action against him, the people said. Yoo didn’t respond to requests for comment.

    The mishandling of the medical document led to a second lawsuit from the woman this year. The Justice Department is now carrying out a criminal bribery probe at Uber, which includes questions about how Alexander obtained the report, two people said. Alexander declined to comment through a spokesman.

    In 2015, Kalanick hired Sullivan, the former chief security officer at Facebook. Sullivan started his career as a federal prosecutor in computer hacking and intellectual property law. He’s been a quiet fixture of Silicon Valley for more than a decade, with stints at PayPal and EBay Inc. before joining Facebook in 2008.

    It appears Sullivan was the keeper of some of Uber’s darkest secrets. He oversees a team formerly known as Competitive Intelligence. COIN, as it was referred to internally, was the caretaker of Hell and other opposition research, a sort of corporate spy agency. A few months after joining Uber, Sullivan shut down Hell, though other data-scraping programs continued. Another Sullivan division was called the Strategic Services Group. The SSG has hired contractors to surveil competitors and conducts extensive vetting on potential hires, two people said.

    Last year, Uber hired private investigators to monitor at least one employee, three people said. They watched China strategy chief Liu Zhen, whose cousin Jean Liu is president of local ride-hailing startup Didi Chuxing, as the companies were negotiating a sale. Liu Zhen couldn’t be reached for comment.

    Sullivan wasn’t just security chief at Uber. Unknown to the outside world, he also took the title of deputy general counsel, four people said. The designation could allow him to assert attorney-client privilege on his communications with colleagues and make his e-mails more difficult for a prosecutor to subpoena.

    Sullivan’s work is largely a mystery to the company’s board. Bloomberg learned the board recently hired a law firm to question security staff and investigate activities under Sullivan’s watch, including COIN. Sullivan declined to comment. COIN now goes by a different but similarly obscure name: Marketplace Analytics.

    As Uber became a global powerhouse, the balance between innovation and compliance took on more importance. An Uber attorney asked Kalanick during a company-wide meeting in late 2015 whether employees always needed to follow local ride-hailing laws, according to three people who attended the meeting. Kalanick repeated an old mantra, saying it depended on whether the law was being enforced.

    A few hours later, Yoo sent Kalanick an email recommending “a stronger, clearer message of compliance,” according to two people who saw the message. The company needed to adhere to the law no matter what, because Uber would need to demonstrate a culture of legal compliance if it ever had to defend itself in a criminal investigation, she argued in the email.

    Kalanick continued to encourage experimentation. In June 2016, Uber changed the way it calculated fares. It told customers it would estimate prices before booking but provided few details.

    Using one tool, called Cascade, the company set fares for drivers using a longstanding formula of mileage, time and demand. Another tool called Firehouse let Uber charge passengers a fixed, upfront rate, relying partly on computer-generated assumptions of what people traveling on a particular route would be willing to pay.

    Drivers began to notice a discrepancy, and Uber was slow to fully explain what was going on. In the background, employees were using Firehouse to run large-scale experiments offering discounts to some passengers but not to others.

    “Lawyers don’t realize that once they let the client cross that line, they are prisoners of each other from that point on”
    While Uber’s lawyers eventually looked at the pricing software, many of the early experiments were run without direct supervision. As with Greyball and other programs, attorneys failed to ensure Firehouse was used within the parameters approved in legal review. Some cities require commercial fares to be calculated based on time and distance, and federal law prohibits price discrimination. Uber was sued in New York over pricing inconsistencies in May, and the case is seeking class-action status. The Justice Department has also opened a criminal probe into questions about pricing, two people familiar with the inquiry said.

    As the summer of 2016 dragged on, Yoo became more critical of Kalanick, said three former employees. Kalanick wanted to purchase a startup called Otto to accelerate the company’s ambitions in self-driving cars. In the process, Otto co-founder Anthony Levandowski told the company he had files from his former employer, Alphabet, the people said. Yoo expressed reservations about the deal, although accounts vary on whether those were conveyed to Kalanick. He wanted to move forward anyway. Yoo and her team then determined that Uber should hire cyber-forensics firm Stroz Friedberg in an attempt to wall off any potentially misbegotten information.

    Alphabet’s Waymo sued Uber this February, claiming it benefited from stolen trade secrets. Uber’s board wasn’t aware of the Stroz report’s findings or that Levandowski allegedly had Alphabet files before the acquisition, according to testimony from Bill Gurley, a venture capitalist and former board member, as part of the Waymo litigation. The judge in that case referred the matter to U.S. Attorneys. The Justice Department is now looking into Uber’s role as part of a criminal probe, two people said.

    As scandal swirled, Kalanick started preaching the virtues of following the law. Uber distributed a video to employees on March 31 in which Kalanick discussed the importance of compliance. A few weeks later, Kalanick spoke about the same topic at an all-hands meeting.

    Despite their quarrels and mounting legal pressure, Kalanick told employees in May that he was promoting Yoo to chief legal officer. Kalanick’s true intention was to sideline her from daily decisions overseen by a general counsel, two employees who worked closely with them said. Kalanick wrote in a staff email that he planned to bring in Yoo’s replacement to “lead day to day direction and operation of the legal and regulatory teams.” This would leave Yoo to focus on equal-pay, workforce-diversity and culture initiatives, he wrote.

    Before Kalanick could find a new general counsel, he resigned under pressure from investors. Yoo told colleagues last month that she would leave, too, after helping Khosrowshahi find her replacement. He’s currently interviewing candidates. Yoo said she welcomed a break from the constant pressures of the job. “The idea of having dinner without my phone on the table or a day that stays unplugged certainly sounded appealing,” she wrote in an email to her team.

    The next legal chief won’t be able to easily shed the weight of Uber’s past. “Lawyers don’t realize that once they let the client cross that line, they are prisoners of each other from that point on,” said Marianne Jennings, professor of legal and ethical studies in business at Arizona State University. “It’s like chalk. There’s a chalk line: It’s white; it’s bright; you can see it. But once you cross over it a few times, it gets dusted up and spread around. So it’s not clear anymore, and it just keeps moving. By the time you realize what’s happening, if you say anything, you’re complicit. So the questions start coming to you: ‘How did you let this go?’”

    #Uber #USA #Recht

  • Despite Disavowals, Leading Tech Companies Help Extremist Sites Monetize Hate
    https://www.propublica.org/article/leading-tech-companies-help-extremist-sites-monetize-hate

    Because of its “extreme hostility toward Muslims,” the website Jihadwatch.org is considered an active hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League. The views of the site’s director, Robert Spencer, on Islam led the British Home Office to ban him from entering the country in 2013.

    But its designation as a hate site hasn’t stopped tech companies — including PayPal, Amazon and Newsmax — from maintaining partnerships with Jihad Watch that help to sustain it financially. PayPal facilitates donations to the site. Newsmax — the online news network run by President Donald Trump’s close friend Chris Ruddy — pays Jihad Watch in return for users clicking on its headlines. Until recently, Amazon allowed Jihad Watch to participate in a program that promised a cut of any book sales that the site generated. All three companies have policies that say they don’t do business with hate groups.

    Jihad Watch is one of many sites that monetize their extremist views through relationships with technology companies. ProPublica surveyed the most visited websites of groups designated as extremist by either the SPLC or the Anti-Defamation League. We found that more than half of them — 39 out of 69 — made money from ads, donations or other revenue streams facilitated by technology companies. At least 10 tech companies played a role directly or indirectly in supporting these sites.

  • The End of #Cash; The End of Freedom | Ian Welsh
    http://www.ianwelsh.net/the-end-of-cash-the-end-of-freedom

    The obvious point is about taxation; you can tax money you know about. But the less obvious point is about control and #surveillance: if everything is done electronically you can know who is doing what, because spending is doing. Nothing meaningful can be done in the modern world without money following it: people need money to live and money must be used to buy any goods involved.

    If everything can be seen, everything can be controlled. Readers may remember when PayPal, Visa and Mastercard all decided to cut off payments to Wikileaks. I know it’s common on the left now to hate Wikileaks, but only a fool doesn’t understand the power involved in stopping someone from getting money.

  • The Education of a Libertarian | Cato Unbound
    https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian


    Le Credo d’un athée libertaire

    I remain committed to the faith of my teenage years: to authentic human freedom as a precondition for the highest good. I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual. For all these reasons, I still call myself “libertarian.”

    But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. By tracing out the development of my thinking, I hope to frame some of the challenges faced by all classical liberals today.

    As a Stanford undergraduate studying philosophy in the late 1980s, I naturally was drawn to the give-and-take of debate and the desire to bring about freedom through political means. I started a student newspaper to challenge the prevailing campus orthodoxies; we scored some limited victories, most notably in undoing speech codes instituted by the university. But in a broader sense we did not achieve all that much for all the effort expended. Much of it felt like trench warfare on the Western Front in World War I; there was a lot of carnage, but we did not move the center of the debate. In hindsight, we were preaching mainly to the choir — even if this had the important side benefit of convincing the choir’s members to continue singing for the rest of their lives.

    As a young lawyer and trader in Manhattan in the 1990s, I began to understand why so many become disillusioned after college. The world appears too big a place. Rather than fight the relentless indifference of the universe, many of my saner peers retreated to tending their small gardens. The higher one’s IQ, the more pessimistic one became about free-market politics — capitalism simply is not that popular with the crowd. Among the smartest conservatives, this pessimism often manifested in heroic drinking; the smartest libertarians, by contrast, had fewer hang-ups about positive law and escaped not only to alcohol but beyond it.

    As one fast-forwards to 2009, the prospects for a libertarian politics appear grim indeed. Exhibit A is a financial crisis caused by too much debt and leverage, facilitated by a government that insured against all sorts of moral hazards — and we know that the response to this crisis involves way more debt and leverage, and way more government. Those who have argued for free markets have been screaming into a hurricane. The events of recent months shatter any remaining hopes of politically minded libertarians. For those of us who are libertarian in 2009, our education culminates with the knowledge that the broader education of the body politic has become a fool’s errand.

    Indeed, even more pessimistically, the trend has been going the wrong way for a long time. To return to finance, the last economic depression in the United States that did not result in massive government intervention was the collapse of 1920–21. It was sharp but short, and entailed the sort of Schumpeterian “creative destruction” that could lead to a real boom. The decade that followed — the roaring 1920s — was so strong that historians have forgotten the depression that started it. The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.

    In the face of these realities, one would despair if one limited one’s horizon to the world of politics. I do not despair because I no longer believe that politics encompasses all possible futures of our world. In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms — from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called “social democracy.”

    The critical question then becomes one of means, of how to escape not via politics but beyond it. Because there are no truly free places left in our world, I suspect that the mode for escape must involve some sort of new and hitherto untried process that leads us to some undiscovered country; and for this reason I have focused my efforts on new technologies that may create a new space for freedom. Let me briefly speak to three such technological frontiers:

    (1) Cyberspace. As an entrepreneur and investor, I have focused my efforts on the Internet. In the late 1990s, the founding vision of PayPal centered on the creation of a new world currency, free from all government control and dilution — the end of monetary sovereignty, as it were. In the 2000s, companies like Facebook create the space for new modes of dissent and new ways to form communities not bounded by historical nation-states. By starting a new Internet business, an entrepreneur may create a new world. The hope of the Internet is that these new worlds will impact and force change on the existing social and political order. The limitation of the Internet is that these new worlds are virtual and that any escape may be more imaginary than real. The open question, which will not be resolved for many years, centers on which of these accounts of the Internet proves true.

    (2) Outer space. Because the vast reaches of outer space represent a limitless frontier, they also represent a limitless possibility for escape from world politics. But the final frontier still has a barrier to entry: Rocket technologies have seen only modest advances since the 1960s, so that outer space still remains almost impossibly far away. We must redouble the efforts to commercialize space, but we also must be realistic about the time horizons involved. The libertarian future of classic science fiction, à la Heinlein, will not happen before the second half of the 21st century.

    (3) Seasteading. Between cyberspace and outer space lies the possibility of settling the oceans. To my mind, the questions about whether people will live there (answer: enough will) are secondary to the questions about whether seasteading technology is imminent. From my vantage point, the technology involved is more tentative than the Internet, but much more realistic than space travel. We may have reached the stage at which it is economically feasible, or where it soon will be feasible. It is a realistic risk, and for this reason I eagerly support this initiative.

    The future of technology is not pre-determined, and we must resist the temptation of technological utopianism — the notion that technology has a momentum or will of its own, that it will guarantee a more free future, and therefore that we can ignore the terrible arc of the political in our world.

    A better metaphor is that we are in a deadly race between politics and technology. The future will be much better or much worse, but the question of the future remains very open indeed. We do not know exactly how close this race is, but I suspect that it may be very close, even down to the wire. Unlike the world of politics, in the world of technology the choices of individuals may still be paramount. The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.

    For this reason, all of us must wish Patri Friedman the very best in his extraordinary experiment.

    Editor’s Note: Mr. Thiel has further elaborated on the question of suffrage here. We copy these remarks below as well:

    I had hoped my essay on the limits of politics would provoke reactions, and I was not disappointed. But the most intense response has been aimed not at cyberspace, seasteading, or libertarian politics, but at a commonplace statistical observation about voting patterns that is often called the gender gap.

    It would be absurd to suggest that women’s votes will be taken away or that this would solve the political problems that vex us. While I don’t think any class of people should be disenfranchised, I have little hope that voting will make things better.

    Voting is not under siege in America, but many other rights are. In America, people are imprisoned for using even very mild drugs, tortured by our own government, and forced to bail out reckless financial companies.

    I believe that politics is way too intense. That’s why I’m a libertarian. Politics gets people angry, destroys relationships, and polarizes peoples’ vision: the world is us versus them; good people versus the other. Politics is about interfering with other people’s lives without their consent. That’s probably why, in the past, libertarians have made little progress in the political sphere. Thus, I advocate focusing energy elsewhere, onto peaceful projects that some consider utopian.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel

    #disruption #religion #singularité #capitalisme #Trump

  • Why There Are No New Social Networks – The Ringer
    https://theringer.com/social-media-invention-facebook-twitter-snapchat-tech-e40178df183

    “Social apps are now focused on messaging, and certainly it’s a vibrant area of innovation and advancement,” Blau told me. “So I wouldn’t say that all social apps are stagnating.” Maybe the copycat cycle will just push us away from public-facing social apps altogether and into private messaging, an arguably more inventive (and in some cases, nicer) space. It seems that the only time someone is able to create a new social network, it’s by accident. Venmo is not a social app — at least, it wasn’t intended to be. The PayPal-owned payment system was launched as a dead simple way to share money, complete with a few lighthearted features like emoji and a real-time feed of users’ transactions. This feed ultimately became a sort of social network within the app: It fuels FOMO, forces us to consider the financial side of dating, and even acts as a window into modern drug culture.

    Venmo didn’t set out to be a better Twitter or a Facebook alternative; it took a fact of daily life that wasn’t all that interesting and certainly not very “social,” and created new digital communication behaviors. It was accidentally inventive.

    Product Hunt’s social editor and writer, Niv Dror, says there’s something else keeping this market stagnant. “Once an app becomes significant enough to pose a threat to the big players, they either get acquired or significantly handicapped by a competitive feature or restricted access,” he told me via email. He cites Meerkat, a huge 2015 hit I’d nearly forgotten about, which was one of the originating apps in the now-ubiquitous livestreaming trend. Dror worked at Meerkat until the app was forced to shutter. “On my second day working at Meerkat, Twitter decided to cut off our access to the social graph (since they acquired Periscope), which really hurt us in the long run.”

    #médias_sociaux

  • Life in the People’s Republic of WeChat - Bloomberg
    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-09/life-in-the-people-s-republic-of-wechat

    More than 760 million people use it regularly worldwide; it’s basically how people in China communicate now. It’s actually a lot of trouble not to use WeChat when you’re there, and socially weird, like refusing to wear shoes.

    In China, 90 percent of internet users connect online through a mobile device, and those people on average spend more than a third of their internet time in WeChat. It’s fundamentally a messaging app, but it also serves many of the functions of PayPal, Yelp, Facebook, Uber, Amazon, Expedia, Slack, Spotify, Tinder, and more. People use WeChat to pay rent, locate parking, invest, make a doctor’s appointment, find a one-night stand, donate to charity. The police in Shenzhen pay rewards through WeChat to people who rat out traffic violators—through WeChat.

    On the train, I notice a woman moving methodically down the car, stopping to talk to the other passengers. Is she begging? Testifying? Only when she stops before the woman next to me do I get it: She’s asking for QR scans, trying to get followers for a WeChat official account.

    #wechat #Tencent #messagerie

  • Why Some Silicon Valley Tech Executives Are Bunkering Down For Doomsday
    http://www.npr.org/2017/01/25/511507434/why-some-silicon-valley-tech-executives-are-bunkering-down-for-doomsday

    Max Levchin who was a co-founder of PayPal, is the CEO of Affirm, a lending startup, who is opposed actually to this trend of survivalist thinking but is surrounded by it. He said what people worry about is, to use Max’s word, “the pitchforks,” and by that he means the idea that the sort of tension that we saw with the Occupy movement a few years ago would take on a wider, more virulent form.

    [...]

    To give you an example, he said, “The food that’s on the shelves in our grocery stories depends on a supply chain that depends on GPS and GPS, the Global Positioning System, depends to some degree on the Internet, and the Internet depends to some degree on another system known as DNS, and each one of those is vulnerable in its own way.”...

    He’s a highly rational person. ... He said, “Look, I’m not rushing out and declaring that the end of the world is near, but what I am saying is that it is,” in his view, “logically rational to talk about the fragility of these digital and electrical systems, which are really second nature and largely unexamined as we go about our daily lives.”

    https://16553.mc.tritondigital.com/NPR_381444908/media-session/baec9d8b-055b-4a34-83ce-f08d4950f04a/anon.npr-podcasts/podcast/381444908/511658475/npr_511658475.mp3

    Ou comment quelques pontes de la Silicon Valley se préparent au « doomsday », doutant entre autre de la solidité du système technique qu’ils dirigent face aux conséquences de la destruction du système politique et social que d’une certaine manière ils organisent.

    L’article original du New Yorker (Evan Osnos) :
    http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-super-rich

    Le Survival Condo :
    http://survivalcondo.com

    #Donald_Trump #Numérique #Politique #Silicon_Valley #Survivalisme #États-Unis

  • They Have, Right Now, Another You
    http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/12/22/they-have-right-now-another-you

    Stephen Crowley/The New York Times/Redux Peter Thiel speaking at the Republican National Convention, Cleveland, July 2016. Thiel, the first outside investor in Facebook and a cofounder of #PayPal, is a founder of #Palantir, a #Silicon\Valley firm funded by the #CIA, whose algorithms allow for rapid analysis of voluminous data that it makes available to intelligence agencies and numerous police forces as well as to corporations and financial institutions.

    Advertisements show up on our #Internet browser or #Facebook page or #Gmail and we tend to think they are there because some company is trying to sell us something it believes we want based on our browsing history or what weʼve said in an #e-mail or what we were searching for on #Google. We probably donʼt think they are there because we live in a particular neighborhood, or hang out with certain kinds of people, or that we have been scored a particular and obscure way by a pointillist rendering of our lives. And most likely, we donʼt imagine we are seeing those ads because an algorithm has determined that we are losers or easy marks or members of a particular ethnic or racial group.

    As OʼNeil points out, preferences and habits and zip codes and status updates are also used to create predatory ads, “ads that pinpoint people in great need and sell them false or overpriced promises.” People with poor credit may be offered payday loans; people with dead-end jobs may be offered expensive courses at for-profit colleges. The idea, OʼNeil writes, “is to locate the most #vulnerable people and then use their private #information against them. This involves finding where they suffer the most, which is known as the ‘#pain_point.

    #algorithme #délétère #données #data

  • Shadow Regulations
    https://www.eff.org/issues/shadow-regulation

    Shadow Regulations are voluntary agreements between companies (sometimes described as codes, principles, standards, or guidelines) to regulate your use of the Internet, often without your knowledge.

    Shadow Regulation has become increasingly popular after the monumental failure of restrictive Internet laws such as ACTA, SOPA and PIPA. This is because Shadow Regulation can involve restrictions that are as effective as any law, but without the need for approval by a court or parliament. Indeed, sometimes Shadow Regulation is even initiated by government officials, who offer companies the Hobson’s choice of coming up with a “voluntary” solution, or submitting to government regulation.

    How Big Pharma’s Shadow Regulation Censors the Internet
    https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/09/how-big-pharmas-shadow-regulation-censors-internet

    This particular Shadow Regulation network contains a confusing web of similar-sounding organizations with overlapping memberships, such as the Alliance for Safe Online Pharmacies (ASOP) and the Center for Safe Internet Pharmacies (CSIP). In simple terms the former is comprised mostly of the pharmaceutical industry, whereas the latter pulls in its partners such as Internet platforms (Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!), payment processors (PayPal, Mastercard, and American Express), delivery providers (UPS), and domain name companies (GoDaddy and Rightside). A third key player is LegitScript, which was instrumental in the formation of both ASOP and CSIP, and carries out most of the operational level arrangements that are agreed at a level of principle by those organizations. Internet users are not represented at board level in either ASOP, CSIP, or LegitScript.

    A hallmark of Shadow Regulation is that government is also often quietly involved behind the scenes, and so it is here. The formation of the CSIP was announced at a White House-hosted industry event [PDF] on October 14, 2010, following months of talks between the administration and the CSIP’s founding industry members. Similarly, LegitScript is led by the former Associate Deputy Director Office of National Drug Control Policy, and subsists on lucrative contracts from government as well as from private industry. With this framework in place, the “voluntary” adoption by Internet intermediaries of measures that primarily benefit the pharmaceutical industry suddenly becomes very easily explicable.

    #Etats-Unis #démocratie #farce #big_pharma

  • Muckrock and Motherboard launch $2,000 Thiel Fellowship to FOIA the crap out of Peter Thiel / Boing Boing
    http://boingboing.net/2016/09/16/muckrock-and-motherboard-launc.html

    Muckrock today announced a $1,000 grant for projects to increase public understanding of noted Donald Trump supporter and anti-Gawker-lawsuit-funder Peter Thiel. Motherboard matched the Muckrock reporting grant funds, and now the grant is $2,000.

    Apply to MuckRock’s Thiel Fellowship
    https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2016/sep/16/apply-thiel-fellowship

    Apply to MuckRock’s Thiel Fellowship
    One Year. $2,000*. Some requests just can’t wait.
    Written by Michael Morisy
    Edited by JPat Brown

    Peter Thiel - co-founder of both PayPal and Palantir and an early Facebook investor - has profoundly reshaped industry after industry and, ultimately, remade the world to fit his radical vision of the future. Unfortunately, despite his impact in industries ranging from digital payments and mass government surveillance to radical life extension and seasteading, the media has done relatively little reporting on the details of his companies, often leaving the public in the dark on his contributions to society.

    But maybe you can change that.

    With MuckRock’s Thiel Fellowship, we want to help journalists and researchers better understand this pivotal figure’s work and share what they learn with the world.

    #USA #disruption #activisme

  • DJ Paypal’s #Footwork of the Absurd
    http://pitchfork.com/features/rising/9752-dj-paypals-footwork-of-the-absurd

    Co-signed by Chicago’s Teklife crew and Flying Lotus’ Brainfeeder imprint, this elusive producer is spinning footwork in novel new directions, highlighting the genre’s undervalued sense of playfulness in the process. By Meaghan Garvey. DJ Paypal’s apartment in Berlin hasn’t had Wi-Fi in weeks. For this young artist, the impact of such a loss is especially acute—akin to Samson getting a haircut or Rick Ross developing a life-threatening shellfish allergy. The elusive footwork and juke producer, (...)

    #Sur_le_web

    / #Musique, Footwork

  • Peter Thiel on funding Gawker lawsuit - Business Insider Deutschland
    http://www.businessinsider.de/peter-thief-speaks-about-gawker-lawsuit-hulk-hogan-2016-5


    Le milliardaire libertaire Peter Thiel investit dans la censure juridique.

    Billionaire Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel has acknowledged that he secretly financed Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker Media in an effort to put the news website out of business, according to The New York Times.

    In an interview published Wednesday by The Times, Thiel said “it was worth fighting back” against the outlet, which in 2007 published an article titled “Peter Thiel is totally gay, people.”

    Thiel, who cofounded PayPal and sits on Facebook’s board of directors, provided millions of dollars for Hogan’s lawsuit and is apparently funding other cases.

    The Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin noted that Thiel declined to reveal which other cases he supported.

    “It’s less about revenge and more about specific deterrence,” Thiel told the newspaper in his first interview since the rumors that he funded the lawsuit reached a tipping point on Tuesday.

    “I saw Gawker pioneer a unique and incredibly damaging way of getting attention by bullying people even when there was no connection with the public interest,” Thiel said.

    Source : http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/26/business/dealbook/peter-thiel-tech-billionaire-reveals-secret-war-with-gawker.html

    #droit #politique #disruption

  • The Immortality Hype - Issue 36: Aging
    http://nautil.us/issue/36/aging/the-immortality-hype

    It’d be easy to miss the unobtrusive brown door to Joon Yun’s second floor office, tucked away next to a dry cleaners and a hair salon in downtown Palo Alto, California. But the address itself speaks loud enough. Four-hundred-seventy University Avenue is located in the heart of a neighborhood that holds a special place in the lore of Silicon Valley start-up culture. A few minutes’ walk away are the early homes of PayPal, Facebook, and Google. Yet the early ambitions of these famous companies are modest when compared to the ideas I’ve come to discuss with Yun. I’ve been led here by Sonia Arrison, a Silicon Valley local and author of 100-Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family and Faith. Arrison has agreed to show me around her (...)

  • #Propriétarien

    1.6 L’idéologie de Facebook – ce n’est pas fait par un étudiant cool.
    https://sortirdefacebook.wordpress.com/#sec-1-6

    En ces temps où on veut toujours nous faire croire que les débuts de l’internet étaient seulement portés par une idéologie californienne libératrice, il est salutaire de lire ou relire l’article de Tom Hodgkinson sur Facebook paru dans le Guardian en janvier 2008. Prémonitoire et on ne peut plus d’actualité près de [trois] ans plus tard, soit une éternité à l’échelle temporelle du web.

    Quelques extraits :

    « #Facebook est un projet bien établi, et les personnes derrière le financement sont un groupe de spécialistes du capital-risque de la #Silicon_Valley, qui ont clairement pensé l’idéologie qu’elles souhaitent diffuser dans le monde entier. (..)

    Bien que le projet ait été au départ conçu par le très médiatisé #Mark_Zuckerberg, le vrai dirigeant derrière Facebook est le philosophe #Peter_Thiel, spécialiste du capital-risque et futurologue de la Silicon Valley, âgé de 40 ans. Il y a seulement trois membres du conseil de direction sur Facebook : Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg et #Jim_Breyer, appartenant au groupe de capital risque #Accel_Partners. (..)

    Mais Thiel est plus qu’un capitaliste intelligent et avare. C’est un philosophe du futur et un activiste des néoconservateurs. Il est diplômé de philosophie à Stanford, en 1998 il coécrit un livre appelé « Le mythe de la diversité », qui est une attaque détaillée sur l’idéologie multiculturelle qui domine Stanford. Il estime que le multiculturalisme a conduit à une diminution des libertés individuelles. Alors qu’il était étudiant à Stanford, Thiel fondait un journal de droite, encore en service actuellement, appelé « Que la lumière soit ». Thiel est un membre de #TheVanguard.Org, un groupe de pression néoconservateur sur Internet, qui a été créé pour attaquer MoveOn.org, un groupe de pression de gauche qui travaille sur le Web. (..)

    L’Internet [personnification étrange…]fait immensément appel aux néoconservateurs tels que Thiel, parce qu’il promet une certaine forme de liberté dans des relations humaines et dans les affaires : absence de droits nationaux embêtants, suppression des frontières, etc. L’ #Internet est le cheval de Troyes du libre-échange et de l’expansion du laissez faire. Peter Thiel semble également soutenir les paradis fiscaux en mer, et réclame que 40 % de la richesse du monde réside dans les endroits tels que Vanuatu, les Îles Cayman, Monaco et les Barbade. Je pense qu’il est réaliste d’indiquer que Thiel, comme Rupert Murdoch, est contre l’impôt et les taxes. Il aime également la mondialisation de la culture numérique parce qu’elle rend les banquiers mondiaux difficiles à attaquer. « Vous ne pouvez pas avoir une révolution des ouvriers contre une banque, si la banque est domiciliée au Vanuatu, » estime t-il… (..)

    Ainsi, Peter Thiel essaye de détruire le monde réel, qu’il appelle aussi « nature », pour le remplacer par un monde virtuel, et c’est dans ce contexte que nous devons regarder le succès de Facebook. Facebook est une expérience délibérée dans la manipulation globale, et Peter Thiel est une lumière pleine de promesse pour les néoconservateurs, avec un penchant pour les folies utopiques de la technologie. Pas vraiment quelqu’un que je souhaite aider à devenir riche pour ses projets…(..)"

    • With friends like these ...
      https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook

      Although the project was initially conceived by media cover star Mark Zuckerberg, the real face behind Facebook is the 40-year-old Silicon Valley venture capitalist and futurist philosopher Peter Thiel. There are only three board members on Facebook, and they are Thiel, Zuckerberg and a third investor called Jim Breyer from a venture capital firm called Accel Partners (more on him later). Thiel invested $500,000 in Facebook when Harvard students Zuckerberg, Chris Hughes and Dustin Moskowitz went to meet him in San Francisco in June 2004, soon after they had launched the site. Thiel now reportedly owns 7% of Facebook, which, at Facebook’s current valuation of $15bn , would be worth more than $1bn. There is much debate on who exactly were the original co-founders of Facebook, but whoever they were, Zuckerberg is the only one left on the board, although Hughes and Moskowitz still work for the company.

      Thiel is widely regarded in Silicon Valley and in the US venture capital scene as a libertarian genius. He is the co-founder and CEO of the virtual banking system PayPal, which he sold to Ebay for $1.5bn, taking $55m for himself. He also runs a £3bn hedge fund called Clarium Capital Management and a venture capital fund called Founders Fund. Bloomberg Markets magazine recently called him “one of the most successful hedge fund managers in the country”. He has made money by betting on rising oil prices and by correctly predicting that the dollar would weaken. He and his absurdly wealthy Silicon Valley mates have recently been labelled “The PayPal Mafia” by Fortune magazine, whose reporter also observed that Thiel has a uniformed butler and a $500,000 McLaren supercar. Thiel is also a chess master and intensely competitive. He has been known to sweep the chessmen off the table in a fury when losing. And he does not apologise for this hyper-competitveness, saying: “Show me a good loser and I’ll show you a loser.”

      But Thiel is more than just a clever and avaricious capitalist. He is a futurist philosopher and neocon activist. A philosophy graduate from Stanford, in 1998 he co-wrote a book called The Diversity Myth, which is a detailed attack on liberalism and the multiculturalist ideology that dominated Stanford. He claimed that the “multiculture” led to a lessening of individual freedoms. While a student at Stanford, Thiel founded a rightwing journal, still up and running, called The Stanford Review - motto: Fiat Lux ("Let there be light"). Thiel is a member of TheVanguard.Org, an internet-based neoconservative pressure group that was set up to attack MoveOn.org, a liberal pressure group that works on the web. Thiel calls himself “way libertarian”.

      TheVanguard is run by one Rod D Martin, a philosopher-capitalist whom Thiel greatly admires. On the site, Thiel says: “Rod is one of our nation’s leading minds in the creation of new and needed ideas for public policy. He possesses a more complete understanding of America than most executives have of their own businesses.”

  • Now it is official: Cuba re-colonization via US Internet firms – Information Observatory
    http://informationobservatory.info/2016/03/27/now-it-is-official

    Last November, we wrote on how US tech firms with support from the US government, were moving into Cuba, occupying the country’s information sector ahead of any political détente with the US and threatening Cuba’s national sovereignty.[1] This week, US President Barack Obama made a three-day state visit to Cuba, the first US president to visit since President Calvin Coolidge in 1928. On this “historic trip,” the US president didn’t go alone. Along with his family, Obama was accompanied by a phalanx of executives from US firms including Google, Xerox, Airbnb, Priceline Group, PayPal, Xerox, Stripe, and Kiva[2] – as well as nearly 40 members of Congress.[3]

    (...) The U.S. strategy, it is evident, is to exploit the promise of modernizing Cuba’s information and communication infrastructure, in order to re-annex chunks of the country’s economy. Under the pretence of freeing the flow of information (obligingly symbolized by the superficially defiant Rolling Stones) it is actually U.S. capital that is to be set free, to work its will upon a small country that has stood up against the full measure of US power since 1959.

    #silicon_army #cuba via @cryptome

  • Dorkbot

    https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/alerts/TA15-337A

    Dorkbot is designed to steal passwords for online accounts, including social networks like Facebook and Twitter, as well as to install additional malware that can turn infected endpoints into nodes in a DDoS attack or part of a spam relay.

    Dorkbot is commonly spread via malicious links sent through social networks, instant message programs or through infected USB devices.

    Dorkbot is operated via IRC, and exists since 2011.

    Dorkbot Botnets Get Busted (4 December 2015)

    http://www.bankinfosecurity.com/dorkbot-ddos-botnets-get-busted-a-8728/op-1

    #dorkbot #ngrbot
    #botnet

  • Greek bank curbs hit children’s charities just as needs soar | Reuters
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/07/21/eurozone-greece-charity-idUSL5N1012JA20150721

    “The Smile of the Child” needs around 1.3 million euros ($1.4 million) a month to operate fully but has only around 400,000 euros in the bank.

    A new deal struck between Greece and its international creditors last week could also push up demand for volunteer-run clinics and food banks across Greece.

    The cost of living already rose on Monday with value-added tax raised to 23 percent on public transport and a range of foodstuffs. Cuts to pensions, further tax increases and reductions in public spending will follow under a third bailout programme for Greece.

    “The Smile of the Child” already expects to help around 50 percent more children this year than in 2014, with around 120,000 under-18s expected to benefit, up from 83,000 in 2014.

    In 2011, only around 20,000 babies and youngsters were being supported, a sign of the social crisis following years of high unemployment and cuts to areas such as health and education.

  • #PayPal User Agreement: New TOS lets company call and text you anytime | BGR
    http://bgr.com/2015/06/02/paypal-user-agreement-robocall-robodial-autotext-text

    Ahead of its planned split from eBay, PayPal is planning to roll out a new terms of service agreement for its customers which would allow the company to pepper its userbase with robocalls and text messages. What’s more, the updated terms of service would allow PayPal to contact users at either their designated phone number or even an undisclosed number PayPal managed to obtain through other means. Set to go into effect on July 1, PayPal’s updated user agreement is not an opt-in type of deal, which makes it all the more worrisome.

    Ils sont fous

  • #IOJS, and #NodeJs foundation —

    La fin prochaine du « spork » ?

    Joyent, Inc., the container infrastructure software company and corporate steward of the Node.js open source project, today announced that it will move to establish a formal open governance model for Node.js with the creation of an independent foundation. Joyent will join forces with IBM, PayPal, Microsoft Corp, Fidelity and The Linux Foundation to establish the Node.js Foundation, which will be committed to the continued growth and evolution of Node.js, while maintaining a collaborative environment to benefit all users.

    http://www.marketwired.com/press-release/joyent-moves-to-establish-nodejs-foundation-1990402.htm

    Notons la présence de #Microsoft (et l’absence de #Mozilla, faisait-on remarquer sur twitter) et de la #Linux_Foundation.

    Plus d’infos vis à vis d’IOJS :

    https://medium.com/@iojs/io-js-and-a-node-js-foundation-4e14699fb7be

    #javascript

    Voir aussi : http://seenthis.net/messages/330084

  • Paypal bloque le financement de ProtonMail. Sur ordre de qui à votre avis ? « Korben
    http://korben.info/protonmail.html

    Jusqu’à présent, 275 000 $ ont été collectés sur un compte PayPal et BIZARREMENT, depuis hier, PayPal a décidé de bloquer le compte de ProtonMail.

    Effectivement, de quel gouvernement le représentant de PayPal parle-t-il ? Et depuis quand est-ce interdit de chiffrer ? Y compris dans les lois américaines ? Ensuite pourquoi la société PayPal fait-elle la police directement ?

    http://thehackernews.com/2014/07/paypal-freezes-275000-campaign-funds-of.html

    https://protonmail.ch

  • Palantir : Unlocking Secrets, if Not Its Own Value - NYTimes.com
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/business/unlocking-secrets-if-not-its-own-value.html

    Founded in 2004, in part with $2 million from the Central Intelligence Agency’s (#CIA) venture capital arm (#IN-Q-Tel), #Palantir makes software that has illuminated terror networks and figured out safe driving routes through a war-torn Baghdad. It has also tracked car thieves, helped in disaster recovery and traced salmonella outbreaks. United States attorneys deployed its technology against the hedge fund SAC Capital, which was also an early investor in the company.

    (...) Its advisers include James Carville, the Democratic strategist; Condoleezza Rice, the former secretary of state; George J. Tenet, the former C.I.A. director; and Michael Ovitz, the former head of Disney Studios and Hollywood superagent.

    (...) difficile de faire plus #silicon_army que ça, mais ce sont quand même des « idéalistes » qui veulent « sauver le monde » :

    “When you are saving the world, fighting fraud and slave labor, you can do great things,” Mr. Karp said. Palantir does not charge for most humanitarian work, which is a source of internal pride. “What concerns me,” he said, “is working with commercial entities, and non-U.S. governments.”

    (...) Palantir has worked to recover from its own ethical lapses, but Mr. Karp acknowledges that it cannot control the ethics of its customers.

    (...) Palantir is not the first company dealing with big data that has been conflicted between ideals and commerce.

    Palantir began in the mind of Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley investor and PayPal founder

    sur l’affaire Anonymous :

    In 2011, the world got a taste of what could go wrong with Palantir’s confluence of commerce and surveillance. Along with two Beltway intelligence firms, a Palantir employee had pitched a Washington law firm on ways that it could expose the workings of WikiLeaks, the group that publishes secret government and private-sector information. The pitch included the idea of using disinformation and cyberattacks.

    The idea fizzled, but Anonymous, the loosely associated network of cyberactivists, posted both the pitch and emails indicating that Palantir also proposed creating misinformation about journalists, including Glenn Greenwald, who wrote in support of WikiLeaks and who recently shared a Pulitzer Prize for his articles on Edward J. Snowden’s leaking of National Security Agency spying documents.

    Mr. Karp publicly apologized to Mr. Greenwald. On the recommendation of an outside law firm, the employee was suspended for a while, but still works at Palantir.

    et encore, à propos des capacités de google :

    Courtney Bowman, a former Google employee, works at a Palantir as a “civil liberties engineer,” (...): “I was a quantitative analyst at Google, doing ad auction design and targeting,” he says. “I had access to ways of deriving personal identity information without breaking any laws. It was a constant anxiety to me.”

    #fichage #surveillance #privacy #data-mining et un article que @cryptome juge (à mon avis à juste titre) grotesque. En lien aussi avec Barrett Brown