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Lost Context: How Did We End Up Here? – NewCo Shift – how did Google  Facebook  Amazon and Apple get to a position similar to that of the gilded age giants?  What can be done to regulate Google Facebook Amazon and Apple?

Online

Facebook (FB) on Russian ads: Our platform doesn’t influence people; people influence people — Quartz – what’s the point of advertising then?

Security

Troy Hunt: Face ID, Touch ID, No ID, PINs and Pragmatic Security – most people are crap at information security. Reducing the friction of signing up and using authentication raises the overall security level of consumers

WeChat confirms that it makes all private user data available to the Chinese government – Moneycontrol.com – not terribly surprising – this is China’s answer to PRISM. Your communications are unencrypted on WeChat so commercially confidential information is at risk from hackers and your local government regardless of whether Tencent hands your data over to the Chinese government

Really interesting design experiment from Chinese university students. It is interesting that they use the ‘goldfish’ as the avatar of the AI. It also asks questions about how we relate to pets and whether augmentation like this would work.

Very interesting student project from Shanghai Jiaotong University, has your pet fish serve as an avatar/front end for a smart device pic.twitter.com/tHDODQHArM

— Naomi Wu (@RealSexyCyborg) September 22, 2017

Software

Business Standard-Bitcoin’s wild ride shows the truth: It is probably worth zero – likely worth nothing

And I think dealing with the foibles of macOS 11 (developer beta) was a hassle

Technology

UK chip designer Imagination bought by Chinese firm – BBC News – but what about the need for a customer base? The MIPS architecture stuff is interesting and probably a bit of a concern for automotive etc

AI Turns UI Designs Into Code – NVIDIA Developer News Center – interesting project where machine learning takes design mock-ups and turns them into working web apps with code

Wireless

Smartphones are dead. Long live smartphones! · Forrester – emphasis away from only ads to also think about experiences – big challenge is the zero growth in aggregate app usage

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