Focus on the user + more

2 minutes estimated reading time

Focus On The User – interesting lobby and direct consumer action that is very EU focused. The idea of Focus On The User brings to mind past antitrust remedies against Google and Microsoft. It will be interesting to see where Focus On The User goes. More posts related to antitrust in the EU specifically here

Why WhatsApp scrapped its $1 annual subscription fee | VentureBeat – no more shadowy gateways you buy online for marketing messaging but proper corporate accounts that you pay for – only years behind LINE, KakaoTalk and WeChat…

People trust Google for their news more than the actual news | Quartz – its a reputation engine rather than just a search engine

Recovering Teletext data from VHS recordings / Boing Boing – it takes such “phenomenal processing power” to accurately and reliably scan VHS recordings of text that we’re only now on the cusp of being able to do so. That hundreds, even thousands of frames of each teletext page are required to OCR each one is also a powerful tribute to just how astoundingly awful VHS is.

GM says you don’t own your car, you just license it / Boing Boing – which will affect the right to repair or modify your car and possibly even resell it

MI5 agent on how surveillance of Islamic State terrorists works – Business Insider – Because they’ve had this golden opportunity with technology and the internet, because they could and did hoover up as much info as they can, that’s actually hampering their work and damaging national security.

Burson·Marsteller | World leaders on Facebook – nice collection of government usage examples on Facebook

Microsoft decrees that new PCs will ONLY be able to run Windows 10 | SiliconAngle – Microsoft is stepping up its efforts to push the world onto Windows 10 by revising its support policy in a way that means newly purchased PCs will no longer support older editions of its OS. Given how much of China is on cracked versions of XP; expect legal trouble ahead

Nobel Prize-Winning Economist: We’re Headed for Oligarchy – The Atlantic – this is so like William Gibson’s latest novel The Peripheral

Chinese factory replaces 90% of humans with robots, production soars – TechRepublic – but does have some limitations

How Tumblr Can Save Yahoo — Thoughts on Media — Medium – there is delicious irony to this post being hosted on Medium. The problem is that a lot of the magazine content which has failed is also hosted on tumblr, how could Yahoo! be trusted to monetise third party content any better