industryterm:internet giants

  • #pewdiepie leaves #youtube to Stream Exclusively on #blockchain
    https://hackernoon.com/pewdiepie-leaves-youtube-to-stream-exclusively-on-blockchain-352cc707dda

    The no 1 most subscribed youtuber, Pewdiepie, announces that he will exclusively stream on #dlive, a video streaming site running on blockchain. On April 9th, both he and Dlive announced via youtube and twitter that the partnership will commence with the first stream set for April 14th.Youtube is starting to realise they aren’t the only person in the room anymore. For many years they have had the monopoly on the video sharing industry online. In November 2006, youtube became a subsidiary of google further consolidating the stronghold of the internet giants. We have seen time and time again, anyone who becomes successful and could be seen as a competitor is either shut down or bought out by groups like google and amazon. No longer will this occur with such a crippling effect.With the (...)

    #blockchain-adoption

  • The Rise and Fall of #Soft_Power – Foreign Policy
    https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/08/20/the-rise-and-fall-of-soft-power

    In his recent book, Has the West Lost It?, Kishore Mahbubani, a Singaporean academic and former diplomat, calls all this Western hubris. Indeed, hubris may be the only appropriate word for what transpired. Confidence in the potency and legitimacy of soft power was so great that tremendous hard power was deployed in its name. The Iraq War was the most prominent example. And the intervention in Libya, with European support, was the most recent. In both cases, the United States and Europe were left worse off.

    Third, the hubris of soft power led to the illusion that soft power could somehow exist on its own . [...] The idea that soft power could perhaps be effective on its own perhaps underpinned the fatally mistaken belief that Iraq would automatically become a liberal democracy after Saddam Hussein was toppled.

    The European project, perhaps even more so, was built on a false understanding of soft power. For many decades, Europe was essentially a free rider in the soft power game; the United States guaranteed its security, and its economic well-being was reliant on the U.S.-led global economic order. With the United States now less interested in providing either—and focusing more on hard power—Europe is facing real challenges.

    [...]

    When the West was confident of its soft power, it cherished the belief that the more open a society, the better. But now, calls for censorship of parts of internet are heard routinely in the media and in legislative chambers. Internet giants are under tremendous political and social pressure to self-censor their content. And many, including Facebook, YouTube, and Apple, are doing so. And so, one of the bedrocks of liberalism’s soft power—free speech—has fallen from favor.

    Now, hard power is everywhere. The United States is no doubt the biggest player in this game: Fire and fury to North Korea, trade wars on everyone, gutting the WTO, and using domestic laws to punish foreign companies for doing business with a third country. The list goes on. For its part, Europe looks like a deer in headlights. As some, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, call for standing firm against Trump, others, including French President Emmanuel Macron, are looking for peace.

    And, of course, there is Russia. By adroitly using its limited but still considerable hard power, Russia achieved the most significant territorial gain by force since the end of World War II, taking Crimea from Ukraine. Meanwhile, Moscow’s forceful actions in Syria changed the course of the civil war there to its favor.

    [...]

    There is little doubt, in other words, that the era of soft power has given way to an era of hard power—and that is dangerous. For centuries, hard power politics resulted in immeasurable human suffering. Just in the 20th century alone, hard power drove two world wars and a long Cold War that threatened to annihilate mankind.

    It is possible to aspire to something better this time. And this is where China may come in.

    [...]

  • Facebook faces the tragedy of the commons
    https://www.ft.com/content/ec74ce54-d3e1-11e7-8c9a-d9c0a5c8d5c9
    http://prod-upp-image-read.ft.com/f1542870-d52b-11e7-ae3e-563c04c5339a

    It is hard to keep up with the stream of scandals, big and small, involving social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. From unwittingly aiding Russian efforts to subvert elections to finding themselves exploited by extremists and pornographers, they are constantly in trouble.

    The latest is YouTube failing to stop videos of children being commented on by paedophiles, while letting advertisements appear alongside them. Only months after Alphabet’s video platform faced an advertiser boycott over extremist videos and had to apologise humbly, companies such as Diageo and Mars are again removing ads.

    Each scandal produces fresh calls for networks to be treated like publishers of news, who are responsible for everything that appears under their names. Each one forces them further to tighten their “community standards” and hire more content checkers. By next year, Facebook intends to employ 20,000 people in “community operations”, its censorship division.

    Tempting as it is for publications that have lost much of their digital advertising to internet giants to believe they should be treated as exact equivalents, it is flawed: Facebook is not just a newspaper with 2.1bn readers. But being a platform does not absolve them of responsibility. The opposite, in fact — it makes their burden heavier.

    Here lies the threat to social networks. They set themselves up as commons, offering open access to hundreds of millions to publish “user-generated content” and share photos with others. That in turn produced a network effect: people needed to use Facebook or others to communicate.

    But they attract bad actors as well — people and organisations who exploit free resources for money or perverted motives. These are polluters of the digital commons and with them come over-grazers: people guilty of lesser sins such as shouting loudly to gain attention or attacking others.

    As Hardin noted, this is inevitable. The digital commons fosters great communal benefits that go beyond being a publisher in the traditional sense. The fact that YouTube is open and free allows all kinds of creativity to flourish in ways that are not enabled by the entertainment industry. The tragedy is that it also empowers pornographers and propagandists for terror.

    #Médias_sociaux #Facebook #Fake_news #Communs #Tragédie_des_communs

  • The Internet Is Dying. Repealing Net Neutrality Hastens That Death. - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/29/technology/internet-dying-repeal-net-neutrality.html

    Because net neutrality shelters start-ups — which can’t easily pay for fast-line access — from internet giants that can pay, the rules are just about the last bulwark against the complete corporate takeover of much of online life. When the rules go, the internet will still work, but it will look like and feel like something else altogether — a network in which business development deals, rather than innovation, determine what you experience, a network that feels much more like cable TV than the technological Wild West that gave you Napster and Netflix.

    If this sounds alarmist, consider that the state of digital competition is already pretty sorry. As I’ve argued regularly, much of the tech industry is at risk of getting swallowed by giants. Today’s internet is lousy with gatekeepers, tollbooths and monopolists.

    The five most valuable American companies — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft — control much of the online infrastructure, from app stores to operating systems to cloud storage to nearly all of the online ad business. A handful of broadband companies — AT&T, Charter, Comcast and Verizon, many of which are also aiming to become content companies, because why not — provide virtually all the internet connections to American homes and smartphones.

    Together these giants have carved the internet into a historically profitable system of fiefs. They have turned a network whose very promise was endless innovation into one stuck in mud, where every start-up is at the tender mercy of some of the largest corporations on the planet.

    This was not the way the internet was supposed to go. At its deepest technical level, the internet was designed to avoid the central points of control that now command it. The technical scheme arose from an even deeper philosophy. The designers of the internet understood that communications networks gain new powers through their end nodes — that is, through the new devices and services that plug into the network, rather than the computers that manage traffic on the network. This is known as the “end-to-end” principle of network design, and it basically explains why the internet led to so many more innovations than the centralized networks that came before it, such as the old telephone network.

    But if flexibility was the early internet’s promise, it was soon imperiled. In 2003, Tim Wu, a law professor now at Columbia Law School (he’s also a contributor to The New York Times), saw signs of impending corporate control over the growing internet. Broadband companies that were investing great sums to roll out faster and faster internet service to Americans were becoming wary of running an anything-goes network.

    To Mr. Wu, the broadband monopolies looked like a threat to the end-to-end idea that had powered the internet. In a legal journal, he outlined an idea for regulation to preserve the internet’s equal-opportunity design — and hence was born “net neutrality.”

    Though it has been through a barrage of legal challenges and resurrections, some form of net neutrality has been the governing regime on the internet since 2005. The new F.C.C. order would undo the idea completely; companies would be allowed to block or demand payment for certain traffic as they liked, as long as they disclosed the arrangements.

    But look, you might say: Despite the hand-wringing, the internet has kept on trucking. Start-ups are still getting funded and going public. Crazy new things still sometimes get invented and defy all expectations; Bitcoin, which is as Wild West as they come, just hit $10,000 on some exchanges.

    Well, O.K. But a vibrant network doesn’t die all at once. It takes time and neglect; it grows weaker by the day, but imperceptibly, so that one day we are living in a digital world controlled by giants and we come to regard the whole thing as normal.

    It’s not normal. It wasn’t always this way. The internet doesn’t have to be a corporate playground. That’s just the path we’ve chosen.

    #Neutralité_internet #Vectorialisme

  • The Geopolitical Economy of the Global Internet Infrastructure on JSTOR
    https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jinfopoli.7.2017.0228

    Article très intéressant qui repositionne les Etats dans la gestion de l’infrastructure globale de l’internet. En fait, une infrastructure globale pour le déploiement du capital (une autre approche de la géopolitique, issue de David Harvey).

    According to many observers, economic globalization and the liberalization of telecoms/internet policy have remade the world in the image of the United States. The dominant roles of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google have also led to charges of US internet imperialism. This article, however, argues that while these internet giants dominate some of the most popular internet services, the ownership and control of core elements of the internet infrastructure—submarine cables, internet exchange points, autonomous system numbers, datacenters, and so on—are tilting increasingly toward the EU and BRICS (i.e., Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) countries and the rest of the world, complicating views of hegemonic US control of the internet and what Susan Strange calls the knowledge structure.

    This article takes a different tack. It argues that while US-based internet giants do dominate some of the middle and top layers of the internet—for example, operating systems (iOS, Windows, Android), search engines (Google), social networks (Facebook), online retailing (Amazon), over-the-top TV (Netflix), browsers (Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Microsoft Explorer), and domain names (ICANN)—they do not rule the hardware, or material infrastructure, upon which the internet and daily life, business, governments, society, and war increasingly depend. In fact, as the article shows, ownership and control of many core elements of the global internet infrastructure—for example, fiber optic submarine cables, content delivery networks (CDNs), autonomous system numbers (ASN), and internet exchange points (IXPs)—are tilting toward the rest of the world, especially Europe and the BRICS (i.e., Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). This reflects the fact that the United States’ standing in the world is slipping while an ever more multipolar world is arising.

    International internet backbone providers, internet content companies, and CDNs interconnect with local ISPs and at one or more of the nearly 2000 IXPs around the world. The largest IXPs are in New York, London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Seattle, Chicago, Moscow, Sao Paulo, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. They are core elements of the internet that switch traffic between all the various networks that comprise the internet system, and help to establish accessible, affordable, fast, and secure internet service.

    In developed markets, internet companies such as Google, Baidu, Facebook, Netflix, Youku, and Yandex use IXPs to interconnect with local ISPs such as Deutsche Telecoms in Germany, BT or Virgin Media in Britain, or Comcast in the United States to gain last-mile access to their customers—and vice versa, back up the chain. Indeed, 99 percent of internet traffic handled by peering arrangements among such parties occurs without any money changing hands or a formal contract.50 Where IXPs do not exist or are rare, as in Africa, or run poorly, as in India, the cost of bandwidth is far more expensive. This is a key factor that helps to explain why internet service is so expensive in areas of the world that can least afford it. It is also why the OECD and EU encourage developing countries to make IXPs a cornerstone of economic development and telecoms policy work.

    The network of networks that make up the internet constitute a sprawling, general purpose platform upon which financial markets, business, and trade, as well as diplomacy, spying, national security, and war depend. The world’s largest electronic payments system operator, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications’ (SWIFT) secure messaging network carries over 25 million messages a day involving payments that are believed to be worth over $7 trillion USD.59 Likewise, the world’s biggest foreign currency settlement system, the CLS Bank, executes upward of a million trades a day worth between $1.5 and $2.5 trillion over the global cable systems—although that is down by half from its high point in 2008.60 As Stephen Malphrus, former chief of staff to the US Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, observed, when “communications networks go down, the financial services sector does not grind to a halt, rather it snaps to a halt.”61

    Governments and militaries also account for a significant portion of internet traffic. Indeed, 90 to 95 percent of US government traffic, including sensitive diplomatic and military orders, travels over privately owned cables to reach officials in the field.62 “A major portion of DoD data traveling on undersea cables is unmanned aerial vehicle video,” notes a study done for the Department of Homeland Security by MIT scholar Michael Sechrist.63 Indeed, the Department of Defense’s entire Global Information Grid shares space in these cables with the general public internet.64

    The 3.6 billion people as of early 2016 who use the internet to communicate, share music, ideas and knowledge, browse, upload videos, tweet, blog, organize social events and political protests, watch pornography, read sacred texts, and sell stuff are having the greatest influence on the current phase of internet infrastructure development. Video currently makes up an estimated two-thirds of all internet traffic, and is expected to grow to 80 percent in the next five years,69 with US firms leading the way. Netflix single-handedly accounts for a third of all internet traffic. YouTube is the second largest source of internet traffic on fixed and mobile networks alike the world over. Altogether, the big five internet giants account for roughly half of all “prime-time” internet traffic, a phrasing that deliberately reflects the fact that internet usage swells and peaks at the same time as the classic prime-time television period, that is, 7 p.m. to 11 p.m.

    Importance des investissements des compagnies de l’internet dans les projets de câbles.

    Several things stand out from this analysis. First, in less than a decade, Google has carved out a very large place for itself through its ownership role in four of the six projects (the SJC, Faster, Unity, and Pacific Cable Light initiatives), while Facebook has stakes in two of them (APG and PLCN) and Microsoft in the PLCN project. This is a relatively new trend and one that should be watched in the years ahead.

    A preliminary view based on the publicly available information is that the US internet companies are important but subordinate players in consortia dominated by state-owned national carriers and a few relatively new competitors. Keen to wrest control of core elements of the internet infrastructure that they perceive to have been excessively dominated by United States interests in the past, Asian governments and private investors have joined forces to change things in their favor. In terms of the geopolitical economy of the internet, there is both a shift toward the Asia-Pacific region and an increased role for national governments.

    Return of the State as Regulator of Concentrated Markets

    In addition to the expanded role of the state as market builder, regulator, and information infrastructure policy maker, many regulators have also rediscovered the reality of significant market concentration in the telecom-internet and media industries. Indeed, the US government has rejected several high-profile telecoms mergers in recent years, such as AT&T’s proposal to take over T-Mobile in 2011, T-Mobile’s bid for Sprint in 2014, and Comcast’s attempt to acquire Time Warner Cable last year. Even the approval of Comcast’s blockbuster takeover of NBC Universal in 2011, and Charter Communications acquisition of Time Warner Cable last year, respectively, came with important strings attached and ongoing conduct regulation designed to constrain the companies’ ability to abuse their dominant market power.87 The FCC’s landmark 2016 ruling to reclassify broadband internet access as a common carrier further indicated that US regulators have been alert to the realities of market concentration and telecoms-internet access providers’ capacity to abuse that power, and the need to maintain a vigilant eye to ensure that their practices do not swamp people’s rights to freely express themselves, maintain control over the collection, retention, use, and disclosure of their personal information, and to access a diverse range of services over the internet.88 The 28 members of the European Union, along with Norway, India, and Chile, have adopted similar “common carriage/network neutrality/open network”89 rules to offset the reality that concentration in core elements of these industries is “astonishingly high”90 on the basis of commonly used indicators (e.g., concentration ratios and the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index).

    These developments indicate a new phase in internet governance and control. In the first phase, circa the 1990s, technical experts and organizations such as the Internet Engineers Task Force played a large role, while the state sat relatively passively on the sidelines. In the second phase, circa the early to mid-2000s, commercial forces surged to the fore, while internet governance revolved around the ICANN and the multi-stakeholder model. Finally, the revelations of mass internet surveillance by many states and ongoing disputes over the multi-stakeholder, “internet freedom” agenda on the one side, versus the national sovereignty, multilateral model where the ITU and UN system would play a larger role in internet governance all indicate that significant moves are afoot where the relationship between states and markets is now in a heightened state of flux.

    Such claims, however, are overdrawn. They rely too heavily on the same old “realist,” “struggle for control” model where conflict between nation-states has loomed large and business interests and communication technologies served mainly as “weapons of politics” and the handmaidens of national interests from the telegraph in the nineteenth century to the internet today. Yet, nation-states and private business interests, then and now, not only compete with one another but also cooperate extensively to cultivate a common global space of economic accumulation. Communication technologies and business interests, moreover, often act independent of the nation-state and via “private structures of cooperation,” that is, cartels and consortia, as the history and contemporary state of the undersea cable networks illustrate. In fact, the internet infrastructure of the twenty-first century, much like that of the industrial information infrastructure of the past 150 years, is still primarily financed, owned, and operated by many multinational consortia, although more than a few submarine communications cables are now owned by a relatively new roster of competitive players, such as Tata, Level 3, Global Cloud Xchange, and so forth. They have arisen mostly in the last 20 years and from new quarters, such as India in the case of Tata, for example.

    #Economie_numérique #Géopolitique #Câbles_sous_marins

  • Trump signs ’no privacy for non-Americans’ order – what does that mean for rest of us ?
    https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/26/trump_blows_up_transatlantic_privacy_shield

    Europe’s Privacy Shield shaken by US prez US President Donald Trump may have undermined a critical data sharing agreement between the United States and Europe that internet giants rely on to do business overseas. In an executive order focused on illegal immigrants that was signed by the president this week, one section specifically noted that privacy protections would not be extended past US citizens or permanent residents in (...)

    #Privacy_Shield #données

  • Russian data law fuels web surveillance fears | World news | The Guardian
    http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/01/russia-internet-privacy-laws-control-web

    A new law has been implemented in Russia that in theory demands companies store data about Russian citizens on Russian territory, throwing thousands of firms with online operations into a legal grey area.

    The law, which came into operation on Tuesday, is part of an attempt to wrest control of the internet, which president Vladimir Putin has called a “CIA project”. The Russian authorities are keen to ensure greater access for domestic security services to online data, and lessen the potential for foreign states, especially the US, to have the same access.

    The law has created disquiet among internet giants such as Facebook, Twitter and Google, which would have to move data on Russian users to servers inside Russia and notify the Russian internet watchdog, Roskomnadzor, about their location.

    As is often the case with Russian legislation, the exact scope of the law is unclear. It could be left largely unimplemented, but always available as a tool to use when required.
    […]
    Transnational internet giants are not the main object of attention for this law. It’s more about the banking sphere, air travel, hotels, mobile operators, e-commerce. This is what is important,” Roskomnadzor’s spokesman, Vadim Ampelonsky, told Kommersant-FM radio. However, while insisting there were no plans to bring Facebook and other major companies to book in the short-term, he implicitly left open the possibility it could happen later.

    We are not saying that if they don’t move their data to Russia, we’ll close them down, and in 2015 we definitely won’t say that. The plan for checks for 2015 has already been drawn up, and Facebook, Twitter and Google are not part of it,” he said.

    The law is not meant to be taken literally,” said Andrei Soldatov, an investigative journalist and co-author of The Red Web, an upcoming book about the internet in Russia. “The idea is to have a pretext to force these big global companies to talk to the Kremlin. It could also force them to open offices here, which would make them more amenable to pressure from authorities.

  • la blague du #DNT continue…

    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/27/opinion/the-slow-death-of-do-not-track.html
    The Slow Death of ‘Do Not Track’ - NYTimes

    an industry working group is expected to propose detailed rules governing how the privacy switch should work. The group includes experts but is dominated by Internet giants like Adobe, Apple, Facebook, Google and Yahoo. It is poised to recommend a carve-out that would effectively free them from honoring “Do Not Track” requests.

    If regulators go along, the rules would allow the largest Internet giants to continue scooping up data about users on their own sites and on other sites that include their plug-ins, such as Facebook’s “Like” button or an embedded YouTube video. This giant loophole would make “Do Not Track” meaningless.

    The outcome could be worse than doing nothing at all.

    #publicité

  • Google admits that advertisers wasted their money on more than half of internet ads
    http://qz.com/307204/google-admits-that-advertisers-wasted-their-money-on-more-than-half-of-internet-

    Online advertising is a fickle thing. It accounts for 20% of the ad industry’s total spending, and over 90% of revenue for the internet giants #Google and #Facebook. That said, no one seems to have any idea whether it actually works.

    That uncertainty reached a new high this week, as Google announced that 56.1% of ads served on the internet are never even “in view”—defined as being on screen for one second or more. That’s a huge number of “impressions” that cost money for advertisers, but are as pointless as a television playing to an empty room.

    #publicité

  • Au rayon rachat de conscience :

    Internet Giants Erect Barriers to Spy Agencies (mouais)
    NYTimes, 6 June 2014 by DAVID E. SANGER and NICOLE PERLROTH
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/07/technology/internet-giants-erect-barriers-to-spy-agencies.html

    Facebook and Yahoo have also been encrypting traffic among their internal servers. And Facebook, Google and Microsoft have been moving to more strongly encrypt consumer traffic with so-called Perfect Forward Secrecy, specifically devised to make it more labor intensive for the N.S.A. or anyone to read stored encrypted communications.

    One of the biggest indirect consequences from the #Snowden revelations, technology executives say, has been the surge in demands from foreign governments that saw what kind of access to user information the N.S.A. received — voluntarily or surreptitiously. Now they want the same.

    At Facebook, Joe Sullivan, the company’s chief security officer, said it had been fending off those demands and heightened expectations.

    Until last year, technology companies were forbidden from acknowledging demands from the United States government under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. But in January, Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Microsoft brokered a deal with the Obama administration to disclose the number of such orders they receive in increments of 1,000.

    As part of the agreement, the companies agreed to dismiss their lawsuits before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

    “We’re not running and hiding,” Mr. Sullivan said. “We think it should be a transparent process so that people can judge the appropriate ways to handle these kinds of things.”

    The latest move in the war between intelligence agencies and technology companies arrived this week, in the form of a new Google encryption tool. The company released a user-friendly, email encryption method to replace the clunky and often mistake-prone encryption schemes the N.S.A. has readily exploited.
    Cf. http://seenthis.net/messages/263784
    http://www.wired.com/2014/06/end-to-end

    But the best part of the tool was buried in Google’s code, which included a jab at the N.S.A.’s smiley-face slide. The code included the phrase: “ssl-added-and-removed-here-; - )”

    #surveillance #cybersécurité #tech_companies

  • N.S.A. May Have Penetrated Internet Cable Links - NYTimes.com
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/26/technology/a-peephole-for-the-nsa.html?ref=technology

    Although the Internet is designed to be a highly decentralized system, in practice a small group of backbone providers carry almost all of the network’s data.

    Security experts say that regardless of whether Level 3’s participation is voluntary or not, recent N.S.A. disclosures make clear that even when Internet giants like Google and Yahoo do not hand over data, the N.S.A. and its intelligence partners can simply gather their data downstream.

    That much was true last summer when United States authorities first began tracking Mr. Snowden’s movements after he left Hawaii for Hong Kong with thousands of classified documents. In May, authorities contacted Ladar Levison, who ran Lavabit, Mr. Snowden’s email provider, to install a tap on Mr. Snowden’s email account. When Mr. Levison did not move quickly enough to facilitate the tap on Lavabit’s network, the Federal Bureau of Investigation did so without him.

    Mr. Levison said it was unclear how that tap was installed, whether through Level 3, which sold bandwidth to Lavabit, or at the Dallas facility where his servers and networking equipment are stored. When Mr. Levison asked the facility’s manager about the tap, he was told the manager could not speak with him. A spokesman for TierPoint, which owns the Dallas facility, did not return a call seeking a comment.

    Verizon has said that it and other carriers are forced to comply with government requests in every country in which they operate, and are limited in what they can say about their arrangements.

    “At the end of the day, if the Justice Department shows up at your door, you have to comply,” Lowell C. McAdam, Verizon’s chief executive, said in an interview in September. “We have gag orders on what we can say and can’t defend ourselves, but we were told they do this with every carrier.”

    #nsa #masssurveillance #prism #bullrun #snowden #level3 #google #yahoo #lavabit #datacenter #backbone

  • ’Tech’ Is Misnomer for Internet Giants | Business
    http://www.washingtonspectator.org/index.php/Economics/tech-is-a-misnomer-for-internet-giants.html

    The British humorist Douglas Adams once summed up the trajectory of computers and the internet in four teleological sentences: "First, we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII—and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television." Finally, observed Adams, "with the World Wide Web, we’ve realized it’s a brochure."

    They aren’t about math and science and building things. They are about acquiring, processing, and selling information to steer consumers toward a purchase.
    Of course, the computer is all these things today, and now with ubiquitous wireless networks, the computer has become the all-in-one mobile device. It’s the phone-camera-computer-walkman-TV-gameboy-GPS all in one.

    Je découvre ces « teleological sentences » de D. Adams et je les trouve belles.

    With one #algorithm Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin built an advertising giant the likes of which the world has never seen. The first step, in classic Silicon Valley tech form, was to patent the invention in order to create an extremely valuable monopoly. Patent No. 6,285,999, a “method for node ranking in a linked database,” did the trick. Stanford University owned the rights and licensed the invention to Page and Brin (who conveniently put the president of the university on their company’s board of directors). The terms of that license remain undisclosed, but it has #Google paying #Stanford a pretty penny. That single patented equation allowed Google to offer a search engine that provided, on average, search results that were of seemingly higher quality, and more relevant to users.

    Then in a flurry of activity that has never stopped, Google’s code writers proceeded to file 228 distinct #patents based directly on the original “method for node ranking in a linked database” invention. On top of this, the company filed another 3,079 patents, the majority of which are intended to monopolize infinitely more clever means of gathering and processing the personal and social information of web users so as to sell ads at higher and higher rates.

    So why do we call Google a “tech” company if most of what it does is advertising? (...) Perhaps then #Silicon_Valley ’s finest should be called the new ad industry?

    #tech_companies #publicité

  • NSA has direct access to tech giants’ systems for user data, secret files reveal | World news | The Guardian
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data

    The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of #Google, #Facebook, #Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian.

    The #NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed program called PRISM, which allows officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats, the document says.

    The Guardian has verified the authenticity of the document, a 41-slide PowerPoint presentation – classified as top secret with no distribution to foreign allies – which was apparently used to train intelligence operatives on the capabilities of the program. The document claims “collection directly from the servers” of major US service providers.

    On s’en doutait, sacrément. On a la preuve, désormais. Mails fouillés, chats espionnés, conversation sous contrôle. Tout est en place.

    #surveillance #nsa #flicage #données