Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present by Johanna Drucker, 2022
The first comprehensive intellectual history of alphabet studies. Inventing the Alphabet provides the first account of two-and-a-half millennia of scholarship on the alphabet.
Künstliche Intelligenz wird Wirtschaft und Alltag immer mehr bestimmen. Dominiert wird die Entwicklung von den großen US-Technologie-Konzernen. Ist das Rennen für Europas Tech-Branche verloren? Von Thomas Spinnler.
The shitmongers running Google and Big Tech in general are the actors directly responsible for the decline of the internet in the name of growth and profit, as well as the side effects this has had on society in general, but the root cause is that these psychopaths are rewarded handsomely by investors for their toxic behaviour.
This is why I would never work for a publicly traded company again. I did once and realised that even if I wanted to that I would eventually be laid off in a round of job cuts (again) or fired due to being unmanageable or some such thing.
@newt the irony is not lost on me. Opening this link on my #PinePhone quickly turned the poor old fondleslab into a hand warmer and drained like 10% of the battery in the time it took to read it.
Google did this. Google did all of this, and yes the linked website is complicit in it.
And if you follow the stock price of #Alphabet lately you can see investors continue to reward them more than ever.
I remember folks in the web community shunning me when I first started speaking out against Big Tech – because I was criticising their friends who worked at Google, Facebook, etc. – saying I was exaggerating things.
I wonder what the same folks think now given what we know about these very same corporations; given a number of them are actively enabling a genocide.
Am I still an alarmist?
(I understand if some of you are too busy working at one or debating the minutiae of CSS syntax to reply.)
If Google is going to be aggressively fighting against ad blocking, they should be held to a far higher, potentially legal, standard for ensuring safe advertisements.
Because one of the really important reasons for using ad blocking is safety from scams and malware. And Google owns THE largest ad network, and it serves malicious ads every day.
It gets to me when big companies abuse their power. I watched the latest video from @anderspuck, where he presents an analysis on the Moscow terror attack.
It is a good video, and 148,000 have watched it.
But subsequently YouTube has demonetized his video for "exploiting a sensitive event". So because he is talking about a terror attack, YouTube holds back the payment for his work.
You read that right: the monopoly punishes a content creator for commenting on… reality.
@randahl
This is why I support creators directly through memberships, subscriptions, donations, etc. You & @anderspuck should consider setring up something on #Patreon or #KoFi to help offset the whims of #Alphabet & their advertisers & algorithms.
EU launches probe into Meta, Apple and Alphabet under sweeping new tech law.
CNBC reports: "The first two probes focus on Alphabet and Apple and relate to so-called 'anti-steering rules.' Other investigations are looking into whether Google favored its own services over rivals when showing search results, potential issues with Apple’s iOS, and Meta’s 'pay or consent' model."
EU-Kommission eröffnet Verfahren gegen Apple, Meta und Alphabet
Die EU-Kommission eröffnet ein Verfahren gegen Apple, die Google-Mutter Alphabet und Facebooks Mutterkonzern Meta. Es solle geprüft werden, ob die Konzerne gegen neue EU-Regeln verstoßen haben.
The #DigitalMarketsAct mandates Meta to "enable end users to freely choose to opt-in to [combining or cross-using personal data] by offering a less personalised but equivalent alternative".
When I pointed out to Meta that by offering users to either #consent to #SurveillanceAds or pay € 275 per year for #Instagram & #Facebook isn't "equivalent alternative" they said, Meta has to do that because of #GDPR 😤 Really??
Wow, #Google's engineering lead claims that they had 3,000 employees working for 2 years full-time to implement the #DMA's article 5(2) prohibition of cross-sharing or combining people's personal data across services without #consent.
tl;dr wrap-up from my 3rd day of #DMA compliance workshops with #gatekeepers: while #Google / #Alphabet seems to fare slightly better than #Apple in terms of compliance plans (from a digital rights perspective that is, I'm sure price comparison and hotel industries would disagree), there is still some way to go before the proposed changes can be called satisfactory. 🙊
And just to be clear: Google is still a terrible #privacy violator, the DMA will hardly change that.