Thursday 15th August, 2019 #
- Google, Samsung, EU invest in Belgium's MolenGeek - We need more projects like this, really great example of how tech can help to regenerate sketchy neighbourhoods and bring communities, youth and cultures together
- Twitter is thinking to introduce a feature to follow topics of interest
- Freakonomics Podcast - How Much Does Your Name Matter? - A pretty thorough exploration of naming in America, I wish more places in the world did this sort of thing
- Stuff You Should Know Podcast - Iran-Contra Affair: Shady in the 80s (Part 1) - Just in case you thought that the US never does shady stuff internationally, this two parter does a fantastic job of exploring what happened in this case, it's also interesting that it's even possible to have this sort of retrospective podcast, I haven't heard any similar podcasts originating from other parts of the world - Also Iran used to be like London in the swinging 60s
- Webkit which is the web browser engine used by the Safari announces the WebKit Tracking Prevention Policy - It's quite a good read to get a clear picture of what areas of your web browsing are trackable
- Huawei Technicians Helped African Governments Spy on Political Opponents - I didn't make it through this whole article, there is some interesting information in it, but it's quite one-sided, even some of the diagrams are clearly very biased, it makes me wonder if it would be a good idea to have some zones on the planet that are completely free from any sort of technology, because when technology is everywhere how will we know what things were like before, it might be very very difficult (maybe impossible) to roll back these surveillance systems, and what if they actually make things a lot worse, there are areas where computers make things better, but it's also rather clear that they can also be whirlpool of frustration, and you wouldn't want that to happen at the city of state level
- Facebook makes a really confusing change to it's groups settings, it's now possible to have a group that is both private and visible, privacy is no longer privacy, IMO it would have been better to add a flag called "findable", rather than break the privacy concept
- Neuralink Launch Event - Looks like we're becoming sort of vulkans with AI, what they aren't telling you is that the AI will be based on Vicky Pollard from Little Britain