Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook should be broken up

[Fergasun]

80s kid here.  Learned MS-DOS.  Pretty tech saavy.  I never jumped into Facebook and social networks.  This forum and a few others are all I've got for a digital footprint.  

 

I still don't understand why people don't just pay for a personal domain name / hosting service and do all the webhosting themselves.  It can't cost more than $60 a year nowadays.  You could also password protect anthing as well.  

 

The only social network I have is text, email and word of mouth (and stuff like this if it counts).  Sure, I don't bump into random people from my past -- both good and bad, but I don't get into any online trouble nor do I see how stupid some people I interact with on a regular basis are. 

[TradeTheBeal!]

 

[No Nonsense]

6 minutes ago, TryTheBeal! said:

 

It’s back up.

[TradeTheBeal!]

16 minutes ago, No Nonsense said:

It’s back up.

Well, that was fun while it lasted.  Imagining a future without Facebook was very pleasing.

[skinsmarydu]

Not ever knowing one is even better. 

[China]

Zuckerberg loses $7 billion in hours as Facebook plunges

 

Mark Zuckerberg's personal wealth has fallen by nearly $7 billion in a few hours, knocking him down a notch on the list of the world's richest people, after a whistleblower came forward and outages took Facebook's flagship products offline.

 

A selloff sent the social-media giant's stock plummeting around 5% on Monday, adding to a drop of about 15% since mid-September.

 

The stock slide on Monday sent Zuckerberg's worth down to $120.9 billion, dropping him below Bill Gates to No. 5 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He's lost about $19 billion of wealth since Sept. 13, when he was worth nearly $140 billion, according to the index. 

 

Click on the link for the full article

[tshile]

14 hours ago, TryTheBeal! said:

 

um. It means someone advertised route deletions/withdrawals  to the BGP.

 

although there were also issues routing directly to Facebook via IP as well. So. Idk. 
 

it’ll be weird if it’s linked to the voip attacks a few days ago. 
 

if it was any other tech company I’d expect a post mortem in a few days. But. Facebook isn’t like the other ones so…

[LD0506]

[China]

50 minutes ago, LD0506 said:

 

That's what happens when the body snatchers get to you...

 

 

 

[Cooked Crack]

 

 

 

Mark Zuckerberg thinks you're an idiot.

[TheGreatBuzz]

1 hour ago, Cooked Crack said:

Mark Zuckerberg thinks you're an idiot.

 

Compared to him, people are.

[China]

Facebook Is Not the Town Square

 

The cavalcade of evidence that Facebook is a monstrosity is hard to keep up with these days. It’s not even shocking anymore. Okay, maybe it can still be a little shocking. But what can we do? We tried nothing and now we’re all out of ideas!

 

Besides, everyone knows that Facebook is just our new, digital Town Square, right? You can’t blame Facebook if it’s just a distillation of all our worst and best impulses.

Except that it’s not.

 

Look, I hear this “Town Square” analogy all the time and it always rubs me wrong. Have you ever been to an actual town and visited its square?

 

Let’s compare them:

In a real town square, you can fit, at most, a few hundred people. If you’re in the square of a giant, world-historic city in Russia or China, you might be able to squeeze in 600,000 people.

On Facebook, you have . . . everyone on planet Earth!

 

In a real town square, you can see people’s faces and usually you know them already. You can also hear their voices and utilize hundreds of thousands of years of human social evolution to understand the nuanced, non-verbal indicators that contextualize what people are saying.

 

On Facebook, you’re dumped into a group of “friends” you’ve never met, or interacted with—many of whom might not even be actual human beings. And the only help you get in determining social context is a combination of text, emojis, and gifs.

 

If a real town square were suddenly overrun with Adidas tracksuit-wearing strangers who said all sorts of provocative bull**** with heavy Russian accents—well, you’d probably suspect something was amiss.

 

On Facebook, you may be arguing with hired Russian trolls who are actively employed by Vladimir Putin to sow discord in the world.

 

Click on the link for the rest

[tshile]

11 hours ago, Cooked Crack said:

Mark Zuckerberg thinks you're an idiot.

It’s the same game he played when testifying before Congress. 

 

worked wonders for him there. 
 

[Renegade7]

[Renegade7]

Google will prevent climate change deniers from making money from ads

 

https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/07/tech/google-climate-change-denial-ads/index.html

 

Quote

(CNN Business)Google is cracking down on the ability of climate change deniers to make money off its platforms and to spread climate misinformation through advertisements.

 

The company said Thursday it will no longer allow advertising to appear alongside "content that contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change." Google (GOOG) will also prohibit advertisements that deny the reality of climate change.

The policy, which goes into effect next month, applies to any content on YouTube and other Google platforms that refers "to climate change as a hoax or a scam," as well as denials that "greenhouse gas emissions or human activity contribute to climate change."

 

[CousinsCowgirl84]

I was just listening to the tail end of smerconish talking about facebook and 220 that gives them protection like Verizon, and that he thinks 220 needs to be repealed.

 

 

Obviously though, the difference between Verizon and Facebook is that Verizon just provides you a path to whatever is on the internet. Facebook however, builds the path through what it chooses to put on your newsfeed.

 

I don’t think 220 needs to be repealed. How it is enforced does though. If you are actively deciding what is on a webpage though, you aren’t really just a platform.

[China]

Israel eyes making Facebook legally liable for content on its platform — report

 

A team of government-appointed Israeli experts are expected to examine far-reaching measures to rein in global social media companies and may seek to hold Facebook legally accountable for posts on its platform, according to a Sunday television report.

 

The team, currently being selected by Communications Minister Yoaz Hendel, could seek to compel Facebook to reveal its policies on censorship, banning, and how posts are placed in its algorithm, Channel 12 news reported.

 

Currently, when content or users are removed from the platform, Facebook does not have to provide details explaining the move.

 

The proposed measures also include having social media giants become liable for incitement or libel posted on their platforms, which would be practically unprecedented worldwide, according to the report.

 

Facebook and other social media sites are currently not legally liable for untrue or harmful content that appears on their platforms, unlike newspapers and other traditional publishers.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

 

[China]

Scammers abused Apple developer program to steal millions from victims on Tinder, Bumble, Grindr, Facebook Dating

 

Sophos has released a new report this week about a dating app scam that led to the theft of millions of dollars from people on Tinder, Bumble, Grindr, Facebook Dating and similar apps.

 

After gaining their trust on these dating apps, scammers convinced victims to download fake crypto apps, where they duped them into investing money before freezing the accounts. 

 

The scammers were somehow able to easily game Apple's Developer Enterprise program -- and the Apple Enterprise/Corporate Signature -- to distribute these fraudulent crypto apps, which were masquerading as Binance and other legitimate brands. Sophos said its threat hunters observed the scammers abusing Apple's Enterprise Signature to manage victims' devices remotely.

 

Apple did not respond to requests for comment. Sophos also contacted Apple about the issue and did not get a response. 

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

Amazon copied products, rigged search to push own brands: Reuters

 

Amazon.com Inc has been repeatedly accused of knocking off products it sells on its website and of exploiting its vast trove of internal data to promote its own merchandise at the expense of other sellers. The company has denied the accusations.

 

But thousands of pages of internal Amazon documents examined by Reuters news agency – including emails, strategy papers and business plans – show the company ran a systematic campaign of creating knockoffs and manipulating search results to boost its own product lines in India, one of the company’s largest growth markets.

 

The documents reveal how Amazon’s private-brands team in India secretly exploited internal data from Amazon.in to copy products sold by other companies, and then offered them on its platform. The employees also stoked sales of Amazon private-brand products by rigging Amazon’s search results so that the company’s products would appear, as one 2016 strategy report for India put it, “in the first 2 or three … search results” when customers were shopping on Amazon.in.

 

Among the victims of the strategy: a popular shirt brand in India, John Miller, which is owned by a company whose chief executive is Kishore Biyani, known as the country’s “retail king”. Amazon decided to “follow the measurements of” John Miller shirts down to the neck circumference and sleeve length, the document states.

 

The internal documents also show that Amazon employees studied proprietary data about other brands on Amazon.in, including detailed information about customer returns. The aim: to identify and target goods – described as “reference” or “benchmark” products – and “replicate” them.

 

As part of that effort, the 2016 internal report laid out Amazon’s strategy for a brand the company originally created for the Indian market called “Solimo”. The Solimo strategy, it said, was simple: “Use information from Amazon.in to develop products and then leverage the Amazon.in platform to market these products to our customers.”

 

The Solimo project in India has had an international effect: scores of Solimo-branded health and household products are now offered for sale on Amazon’s United States website, Amazon.com.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[Cooked Crack]

 

[Llevron]

I don’t see how that helps them people know what’s up now 

[tshile]

1 hour ago, Llevron said:

I don’t see how that helps them people know what’s up now 

Yeah that’s always the response yet it clearly does help. 
 

Comcast did the same thing with xfinity

 

snyder did the same thing with Redskins’s. 
 

[balki1867]

After they do the rebrand, they should consider having a hastily planned jersey retirement ceremony the next time they get in trouble.

[Llevron]

2 hours ago, tshile said:

Yeah that’s always the response yet it clearly does help. 
 

Comcast did the same thing with xfinity

 

snyder did the same thing with Redskins’s. 
 

 

Ultimately you are right, there is a new idiot born every day so they will benefit somewhat from rebrand in the form of continued/new membership. But I feel like right now their problem is very much becoming into a congressional thing more than it is an image thing. And I don't think a rebrand will help them with that. They made enemies of the one group that can do something to them and just got outed as knowingly promoting illegal activity. And they didn't even deny it. I guess thats what I was talking about more then just continuing to get new users which is all I think a rebrand is going to help them with in the long run. 

 

Obviously I don't get marketing on that level, and I'm not going to pretend I do, so I could be dead wrong.