Ged Carroll

Category: legal | 合法的 | 법률학 | 法的

Legal is defined as everything connected with the system of law within a country or area. The definition Law is a system of rules created and enforced to regulate behaviour, usually it belongs to a country or an area.

Online and innovation have often evolved way in advance of laws and the legal system’s ability to cope.

The emphasis that different systems have produces a number of challenges. China’s systems are locked down under their view of cyber sovereignty to avoid a contagion of western ideas. Yet they and other authoritarian regimes treat the open western systems as a battle space to destabilise other countries and attack their critics.

The US system favours free speech over privacy, which directly clashes with European values. Much of these European values were shaped in the aftermath of having lived under Warsaw Pact era authoritarian regimes.

There is a clash of the ages undertaken over ethics and power and what’s legal. The law offers up more questions and ethical traps than answers. It’s into this legal morass that my posts tend to land, usually at the point of intersection between ethics, the law and technology.

When I started using the web I believed that it was a unique extra-legal space similar to what John Perry Barlow outlined at the start of the ‘web’ as we now know it.  The reality is that the net has already been staked out by businesses that look rather similar to the robber barons of the gilded age. Authoritarian regimes found it surprisingly easy to bend to their will and now sell their expertise around the world.

  • Venture capital, clean tech + more

    Venture Capital and Cleantech: The Wrong Model for Clean Energy Innovation by Gaddy, Sivaram and O’Sullivan – venture capital investment is very inefficient according to this MIT paper. More venture capital related posts here.

    Why business in Hong Kong should be worried | The Economist – Hong Kong is trapped like the grips of vice. Its economy is dominated by finance and rent-seeking businesses – Simon Cartledge for Gavekal Dragonomics, a consultancy, because these firms are over-represented in government, “Hong Kong’s single biggest disincentive to risk-taking and entrepreneurship—its high costs, especially for property—cannot be tackled.” That is why the back-to-business message is unlikely to resonate with ordinary Hong Kongers. This is probably why Hong Kong start-ups like DJI moved to Shenzhen to found their businesses. (Frank Wang did a lot of the key work on DJI drones whilst studying at HKUST. And even benefited from a small HKUST grant. But he moved across to Shenzhen to found the business itself in 2006.) Fintech has been a bit of a busted flush. It was the latest in a long line of business ideas like wine trading, the arts and medical tourism as failed niches for Hong Kong. Singapore seems to have been much more successful in business creation and seems to be seeing more venture capital interest. Current sectors in Hong Kong likely to be affected include the legal practices specialising in commercial arbitration. Without trustworthy commercial arbitration in Hong Kong doing business in China looks much less attractive. Singapore is trying to bridge the gap, but I suspect that there might be long term corrosion of Chinese business dealings. Digital companies and foreign banks face big worries. Between the Hong Kong Autonomy Act and the Hong Kong National Security Law – Helping America to enforce sanctions would violate the security law. Not doing so would incur American penalties

    The untold story of Stripe, the secretive $20bn startup driving Apple, Amazon and Facebook | WIRED UK – what’s more interesting about Stripe is the brothers reading list

    Remarks to the Economic Club of New York – United States Department of State – interesting speech by Mike Pompeo

    What It’s Like to Escape the Mindset of a Conspiracy Theorist – Vice – fascinating psychology

    Barr warns against corporate America’s China ‘appeasement’ | Financial Times – “You should be alert to how you might be used, and how your efforts on behalf of a foreign company or government could implicate the Foreign Agents Registration Act,” he said, referencing a 1938 law that requires foreign agents to publicly identify themselves – those comments hit US banks, Apple and other US multinationals. Attorney General William P. Barr Delivers Remarks on China Policy at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum | OPA | Department of Justice – the US C-suite executives must be getting very worried about this

    The State of Strategy. A view from the Frontline | Noteworthy – The Journal Blog – great read and nails the issues affecting strategy and planning at the moment

    Mark Ritson: In a virtual marketplace, only the strongest brands will survive – Companies see better profit margins and an almost unlimited customer base but miss the drastic reduction in barriers to entry. – so brand hyper-competition will ensue and the winner takes all model will extend beyond tech. Expect venture capital money to pour all kinds of weird industry niches as they try to pick category winners

    WeChat users in the US say a potential ban of the app would cut them off from friends and family in China | South China Morning Post – Banning it might be a mistake. It would be more worthwhile using WeChat data to investigate Chinese in the US with ‘anti American’ sentiment as it’s easy to surveill in comparison to other platforms. WeChat sends messages in the clear with no encryption at all. You then start using the Espionage Act or the Patriot Act prosecutions

    Chinese liquor group Kweichow Moutai tumbles after graft news report | Financial Times – Moutai sales are linked to gifting and lavish consumption and some have linked the share price increase with a corresponding uplift in sales and by implication graft. The damaging bit in the article is that Moutai’s former chairman Yuan Renguo quoted saying in private that sales linked to corruption are “a normal part of business” and that China’s corruption clampdown would not reach far enough to affect the company’s business

    Banning junk food from TV an ‘irrelevant symbolic gesture’ that won’t reduce obesity | The Drum – the argument whilst true won’t be believed by regulators. Their rationale would be why would junk food companies advertise if it didn’t work? The distinction of this is junk food brand fighting out with similar brands in its category won’t wash. Secondly, advertising bans worked in the past on tobacco products over time

    The party’s grip – Under a new national-security law, Hong Kong is already a changed city | The Economist – you have to wonder about the share run and will the pop of the bubble be blamed on ‘foreign interference’?

    Outrage Over China’s Treatment of Hong Kong Galvanizes the West – WSJ – Complaints about China have piled up in Western capitals in recent years, but it took Beijing’s new curbs on Hong Kong’s autonomy to galvanize them around something approaching a common cause. – In many respects its like boiling a frog in reverse, it is likely that China didn’t expect the frog to jump out of the pot, given that the heat had been on so long

    Opinion | A Coronavirus Care Package From China – The New York Times – After the Communist takeover in 1949, traditional Chinese medicine was institutionalized. Folk remedies helped fulfill both a tangible need — credentialed doctors were scarce — and an ideological end: That system of knowledge is quintessentially and uniquely Chinese.  Today, the Chinese government sees a political opportunity in the continuing emotional appeal of traditional medicine. If Chinese people can embrace an Eastern alternative to Western medicine, they might also be more likely to accept the Communist Party’s governance model and reject liberal democracy

    Speaking in Tongues – Chinese Storytellers – such a great essay on the current challenge facing Chinese (and in particular Hong Kongers) writing for foreign audiences: a Chinese storyteller telling stories for an English-speaking audience in a divided world. As a writer who has called Hong Kong, Beijing and New Haven home, I find myself often in the position of what Zadie Smith once called “speaking in tongues”: equivocating between the lens of the insider and the outsider, examining the places I call home with both the “objective,” parachuted gaze of the foreign correspondent, and the emotionally implicated and invested eye of the local storyteller. Increasingly, that has felt impossible

    Google considers alternatives to Hong Kong for undersea cable | Financial Times – Hong Kong has – become less critical for not only US cloud providers but also their Chinese rivals, according to Tao Wu, a senior research analyst for Gartner, a tech research firm. “Singapore has become much more important than Hong Kong from a location and population perspective,” Ms Wu said. “Other top cloud providers such as Alibaba Cloud are much more focused on south-east Asia to go global than expanding in Hong Kong.” – this will have a big impact for those property developers who’ve invested in data centres (internet hotels). Hong Kong’s financial position for international trading desks will also be diminished if international telecoms infrastructure starts to divert away from Hong Kong. From a pure connectivity point of view Korea, Singapore and even the Philippines start to look really good

  • EXP TV + more stuff

    EXP TV – not quite sure how to describe it; EXP TV is just tremendous. In their words “EXP TV daytime programming is called “Video Breaks”—a video collage series featuring wild, rare, unpredictable, and ever-changing archival clips touching on every subject imaginable. Similar to how golden era MTV played music videos all day, daytime EXP TV streams non-stop, deep cut video clips filtered through our own distinct POV. Our Nite Owl programming block features specialty themed video mixes and deep dives on everything under the sun: Bigfoot, underground 80s culture, Italo disco, cults, Halloween hijinks, pre-revolutionary Iranian pop culture, midnight movies, ‘ye ye’ promo films, Soviet sci-fi, reggae rarities, psychedelic animation and local news calamities. On any given night you could watch something like our Incredibly Strange Metal show followed by a conceptual video essay like Pixel Power—our exploration of early CGI art. Aside from our unique tone and deep crate of video materials, one thing that really sets us apart in 2020 is our format. We are *not* on demand, we are *not* interactive—just like old TV! You can tune in anytime and something cool will be on. That’s EXP TV in a nutshell. It’s funny, it’s art, it’s music, it’s infotainment, it’s free and it’s 24/7.” EXP TV reminded me a lot of the pioneering night time TV programming that used to run on British TV.

    Gen Z wants brands to be ‘fun,’ ‘authentic’ and ‘good,’ study says | Marketing Dive – Gen Zers prefer brands that are authentic, with 82% saying they trust a company more if it uses images of real customers in its advertising, while 72% said they’re more likely to buy from a company that contributes to social causes. Product quality, positive ratings and reviews and customer service are the top three characteristics that establish trust in a brand among Gen Zers – really? I am sure if you asked any cohort through time of the same age that would have come out as the result. More on ‘generations‘ here

    Why Corporate America Gave Up on R&D – Marker – great conversation about basic research and its place in the economic life of a business

    The Changing Structure of American Innovation: Some Cautionary Remarks for Economic Growth – basically US innovation is dying out as corporate basic research is no longer happening. It echoes the work that people like Judy Estrin has done in the past

    Produce your own physical chips. For free. In the Open – FOSSi Foundation – interesting that Google is supporting open source silicon prototyping on 130nm process – not cutting edge but moving things forward massively for electronics designers

    China ‘trying to influence elite figures in British politics’, dossier claims | Politics News | Sky News – not terribly surprising. I’d be surprising if Chna wasn’t trying these things. More fool the UK for allowing it to happen passively

    Exclusive: Digital natives see PR as ‘press releases and gin-soaked lunches’ – Sorrell | PR Week – depending on the industry its probably pretty fair, though probably less gin than there was previously

    What’s really behind “tech” versus “journalism” | Revue – really management vs employees – it seems to have got much more toxic than when I worked at Yahoo!

    MullenLowe merges Profero and Open in UK – surprised that that this wasn’t on the cards sooner to be honest with you

    Lessons from the fall of luxury e-tailer Leflair – Vietnam based luxury start-up goes under with $280,000 in unpaid goods

    TikTok to pull out of Hong Kong – Axios – interesting how they got out ahead of Facebook, WhatsApp etc. TikTok might feel its mainland app Douyin can be swapped in. It is an interesting canary in the coal mine for Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp etc

    Holographic Optics for Thin and Lightweight Virtual Reality – Facebook Research and Alphabet buys a rival company North who do similar technology Our focus on helpful devices: Google acquires North – more related posts here.

    Interesting French short film about the future from 1947. In some ways it is a better predictor of technology usage than Star Trek some two decades later.

    La Télévision, œil de demain (1947) – J.K Raymond Millet

    ‘What Big Tech does to discourse, and the forgotten tech tool that can make tech less big’ with Cory Doctorow – It is a conspiracy is to have an energetic mastery of wrong information. And sometimes that information in fact provides a good, not evidentiary basis, but a good fact pattern to support skepticism of a regulator – Cory Doctorow’s speech is long but well worthwhile.

    Luckin Coffee investors oust founder | Financial Times – this looks very similar to WireGuard. The problem is that audited books can’t be trusted due to local law. And locally written analyst reports have to self-censor allowing this kind of thing to happen. China doesn’t seem to be moving to change its law in the same way that Germany is to try and protect shareholders

    Facebook Suspending Review of Hong Kong Requests for User Data – WSJ – based on the Xi administration’s concerns about national security and cyber sovereignty; one can expect China to extend Great Firewall into Hong Kong with this. Which will then impact multinational companies who have traditionally used Hong Kong as an exit point for China operation VPNs. It will also affect Hong Kong’s position as a regional base. Firms would no longer want to use the data centres and backbone networks that Hong Kong has. More from the FT: Facebook and Twitter block Hong Kong authorities from accessing user data | Financial Times – WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter and Telegram have all given the Chinese Communist Party the finger. They have a strong incentive to. Chinese drop shipping businesses like Shein or Wish will suffer more than Facebook. And it plays well in parliaments and distracts from the other troubles that they may have. China gets burnt because of its information warfare games on these platforms. Facebook et al provide Chinese marketing teams a gateway into markets around the world that WeChat and TikTok don’t – which dings the Chinese government’s economic goals

    ‘Abolish Silicon Valley’ vs. ‘Always Day One’: Who’s Right About Fixing the Tech Industry? | OneZero – this conversation wouldn’t have even happened 10 years ago, but its needed. If not from ethics perspective, then from its failing in innovation as outlined many years ago by Judy Estrin.

    Encryption-Busting EARN IT Act Advances in Senate | WIRED  – if you care about privacy, this is frankly terrifying

    Above Avalon: Apple Is Pulling Away From the Competition – the obvious candidates missing here are Huawei, Xiaomi and the BBK firms (Oppo, Vivo etc) which have driven the smartphone market into the middle in China and opened a can of whoop ass on the premium sector overall

    Philip K Dick’s Metz speech is mind blowing. It was done at an international science fiction festival in 1977, held in Metz, France.

    Did China Steal Canada’s Edge in 5G From Nortel? – Bloomberg – short answer yes. Though it probably didn’t help that they had a management team that had failed to act when they were warned about infiltration, a infrastructure business reliance on the frame relay network market and partnered with Microsoft on a lot of enterprise technology. Some fantastic stuff in this article – Did a Chinese hack kill Canada’s greatest tech company? – BNN Bloomberg – in the late 1990s, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, the country’s version of the CIA, became aware of “unusual traffic,” suggesting that hackers in China were stealing data and documents from Ottawa. “We went to Nortel in Ottawa, and we told the executives, ‘They’re sucking your intellectual property out,’ ” says Michel Juneau-Katsuya, who headed the agency’s Asia-Pacific unit at the time. “They didn’t do anything.” By 2004 the hackers had breached Nortel’s uppermost ranks. The person who sent the roughly 800 documents to China appeared to be none other than Frank Dunn, Nortel’s embattled chief executive officer. Four days before Dunn was fired — fallout from an accounting scandal on his watch that forced the company to restate its financial results — someone using his login had relayed the PowerPoints and other sensitive files to an IP address registered to Shanghai Faxian Corp. It appeared to be a front company with no known business dealings with Nortel. The thief wasn’t Dunn, of course. Hackers had stolen his password and those of six others from Nortel’s prized optical unit, in which the company had invested billions of dollars. Using a script called Il.browse, the intruders swept up entire categories from Nortel’s systems: Product Development, Research and Development, Design Documents & Minutes, and more. “They were taking the whole contents of a folder — it was like a vacuum cleaner approach,” says Brian Shields, who was then a senior adviser on systems security

    Why China’s Race For AI Dominance Depends On Math | The National Interest – concerns about STEM education outside China

    “Who Sells Bricks in Hong Kong” Hopes to Introduce New Actors | JayneStars – as dark as things are for Hong Kong’s film industry, ViuTV drama looks to Hong Kong film past for inspiration

  • Autopilot Whopper + more things

    Burger King’s Autopilot Whopper campaign reminds me of a lot of the classic work that Crispin Porter Bogusky have done for Burger King over the years. The Autopilot Whopper is based on the insight that Tesla cars machine learning powered vision system that helps with self driving function mistakes the Burger King logo for a Stop sign.

    https://youtu.be/A0cb7wZVFf4

    Autopilot Whopper entertaining with this schadenfreude around Tesla technology. And it also lands the message that the Burger King drive through is as good a place to stop as any.

    YouTube announced the winners of its 2020 YouTube Works awards. I would strongly recommend that any brand planners bookmark this in their browser and dip in on a regular basis.

    The one that really piqued my interest the most was Hulu’s campaign for live sports that tapped into a growing consumer cynicism around influencers. The sports linkage was using NBA basketball players as the influencers.

    The iconic Zero Halliburton briefcase stuffed with cash, that more money is thrown into as ‘Hulu has live sports’ is mentioned riffs on the old McDonald’s initiative. The McDonald’s scheme that paid rappers for name checks on songs and mixtapes. It also tapped into how consumers view influencers.

    Public Enemy came back when we most need them. Flavor Flav seems to have patched up his beef with Chuck D. Public Enemy have partnered with DJ Premier to capture the zeitgeist. Black Lives Matter, COVID19 and chaotic leadership feature in State Of The Union (STFU). DJ Premier’s product references earlier Public Enemy works scratching in sounds of early Public Enemy vocals in this track. The beat is more laid back than what one would expect from the Bomb Squad production team. But the Public Enemy fire in the belly is still there.

    The step chickens are a meme driven ‘cult’ that have sprung up on TikTok. More accurately they are a directed community. Here’s the founder on how they came about. Their heat has been parleyed in a community for a new app. From a product point-of-view, this means that something like TikTok could lose chunks of its user base IF the step chickens phenomenon was widely and successfully replicated. Given that it was a mix of smarts, happenstance and pure luck it isn’t likely: sorry brands.

    German China-focused think-tank MERICS had a thoughtful presentation put together on the Hong Kong national security law. The presentation focused on the impact for the financial services sector. But there similar lessons to be drawn for professional services (accounting, management consultancy, legal firms). And only for a a slightly lesser effect on the strategy and planning functions of creative agencies, or counsel based PR functions.

    On reflection, I would be concerned about how some of the creative briefs for China-focused campaigns that I have written would have faired against the Hong Kong national security law. Probably not that well.

    What immediately becomes apparent is the implications for quality research into companies and economics won’t meet international standards. Which means more fodder for the likes of Muddy Waters Research LLC. It likely indicates a conscious effort for China to decouple from the international financial system.

    The calculus behind the Hong Kong national security law seems to be that the Chinese government think yet another (internal) market for Chinese stocks will be a better deal than the traditional gateway to and from China Hong Kong has provided. I am not sure what this bet will mean. Shenzhen already has a robust stock market by Chinese standards; would China really need Hong Kong? Without the gateway role, Hong Kong would also find it harder to be the point of capital departure from China for high net worth citizens. Dampening capital flight would definitely hold some attraction to the Xi administration.

  • The OSS post

    I guess where I should start this post in OSS is by going back. This time 20 years ago, we were in a time of economic irrational exuberance so large as to be like a fairy tale in comparison to Brexit and the coronavirus.

    Irrational exuberance

    Everyone believed that the future was going to be rebuilding the catalogue shopping business online. Consumers would have a raft of choice.

    Japanese newsprint

    Advertisers were going to swap print and TV advertising for banner ads. Something that looked like small advertisements on the pages of newspapers at the time. Because of this, online display advertising was over-priced and everyone was happy.

    In order to do these businesses, you needed a lot of servers and a lot of software. If you had the money you bought really good software and servers from Silicon Valley. Companies like Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics or Digital Equipment Corporation. These all ran variants of the Unix operating system.

    If you were less fortunate you might be running on an Intel server running Windows NT, anything by IBM or repurposing a Mac from the design studio. The Mac made a surprisingly robust server solution mainly because the computer was so ‘dumb’. There wasn’t a lot that hackers could do to it at the time.

    True hackers

    People who were hackers in the truest sense realised that you didn’t have to pay for software to run on servers. If you knew where to go and had the right technical chops, you could have robust server software. You could end up paying good money to Microsoft and still need to use three times the amount of servers for a given load because Windows didn’t handle multiple threads as well. It couldn’t do as much ‘work’ as free software. You would get even more benefit if you were skilled enough to see how you could tweak it to meet your needs. Online communities also meant that you would find fellow travellers interested in similar tweaks and would collaborate with you.

    A classic example of this would be Hotmail. Hotmail was founded on NetBSD servers and it took years for Microsoft to migrate away from it due to performance and scaling issues with Microsoft’s own software.

    Yahoo! which used and contributed to various OSS projects including:

    • Debian Linux and later moved to an adapted version of Red Hat Linux
    • FreeBSD
    • PHP

    A peer of Yahoo!’s founders David Filo and Jerry Yang, decided to make hacking together servers and web services easier for businesses and technologists. The founder was called Larry Augustin and the company he founded was VA Linux. VA Linux built workstations and servers for websites. VA Linux is now most famous for the largest opening day price increase on the NASDAQ; but they made seem really great computers.

    For smaller businesses, a small start-up called Cobalt Networks came up with a relatively friendly server that could sit in the corner of an office called the Qube. This was popular in a number design offices as a file server and also ran numerous websites. As well as the cute form-factor, it made OSS more approachable for a lot of businesses and changed expectations about IT complexity.

    Cobalt Qube 2

    I was working on a mix of telecoms, enterprise and consumer technology clients. One of my clients . By the time I was working with VA Linux in April 2000, open source software (OSS) was a hot ticket. And both Cobalt Networks and VA Linux were at the forefront.

    At this time OSS, in particular the Linux operating system was endorsed by IBM with a $1 billion investment in the community. This helped adoption by other large business technology companies including Oracle, SAP and Sun Microsystems.

    Suddenly it was OSS everywhere. My client Palm was trying to move its photo-smartphone operating system to Linux underpinnings.

    Where was Microsoft in all this?

    Its hard to explain to someone under 30 how dominant Microsoft was a business at the time. They were steadily working towards a goal outlined by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in the mid-1970s

    A computer on every desk, and in every home, running Microsoft software.

    Paul Allen and Bill Gates, 1974 – 1975

    Bill Gates wasn’t a cuddly billionaire who wanted to give the world toilets, but a dodgy looking technocrat who made Mark Zuckerberg seem human.

    Microsoft had won the PC industry and was looking to extend itself into every aspect of business and home life. Microsoft injected investment into Apple at a time when the company was days away from bankruptcy. This made sense for a number of reasons:

    • The Apple Microsoft Office business was worth more than the investment into Apple
    • The deal allowed Microsoft to settle a number of patent disputes
    • It was a cheap distribution deal for the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser

    The disappearance of Apple would have had serious issues in terms of antitrust regulation in the US into Microsoft’s core Windows business.

    They’ve done a great job. They’re a company that’s done a great job. If you go back to 1997, when Steve came back, when they were almost bankrupt, we made an investment in Apple as part of settling a lawsuit. We, Microsoft made an investment. In a way, you could say it might have been the craziest thing we ever did. But, you know, they’ve taken the foundation of great innovation, some cash, and they’ve turned it into the most valuable company in the world.

    Former Microsoft executive Steve Ballmer on the Apple investment

    Back then Bill Gates was the Mark Zuckerberg or the Sergei Brin of his day and even he almost missed the importance of the world wide web and the internet. Gates was paranoid about the next thing coming along and sweeping all his success away.

    The internet represented one such threat.

    Gates is as fearful as he is feared, and these days he worries most about the Internet, Usenetand the World Wide Web, which threaten his software monopoly by shifting the nexus of control from stand-alone computers to the network that connects them. The Internet, by design, has no central operating system that Microsoft or anybody else can patent and license. And its libertarian culture is devoted to open—that is to say, nonproprietary—standards, none of which were set by Microsoft. Gates moved quickly this year to embrace the Net, although it sometimes seemed he was trying to wrap Microsoft’s long arms around it.

    Headliners: Bill Gates. – Time magazine. December 25, 1995

    OSS represented a second such threat. Microsoft’s sales of enterprise software for businesses and other organisations was a high margin business. OSS was a threat to that business. Back in 2001, I started working with colleagues at an agency who were asked to deposition OSS products and the the underlying legal agreement (the GPL).

    I was asked by my colleagues to write a briefing document of what OSS actually meant. It didn’t g0 down that well as it outlined the challenge of assailing an idea and a committed community. That didn’t stop our client Microsoft trying, mostly at the C-suite and policy level.

    The problem was that it didn’t offer a better alternative. And so we come forward 20 years: Microsoft: We Were on ‘The Wrong Side of History’ With Open Source – ExtremeTech which captures the highlights of Microsoft president Brad Smith talking at MIT a week ago.

    More information

    Yahoo: The Linux Company | ZDNet

    A Brief History of Search Advertising | Searchengineland

    MS Hotmail servers begin switch from FreeBSD to Win2k | The Register and Microsoft Hotmail still runs on U**x | The Register – this give you an idea of how critical and high-performing NetBSD is as an operating system.

    Barbarians led by Bill Gates by Jennifer Edstrom

    Report Flays Open-Source Licenses | Wired

  • Adult entertainment + more things

    Adult entertainment transforms during pandemic – Axios – accelerated move towards interactive and custom adult entertainment production. But US legal issues are getting in the way – Is OnlyFans Deleting Sex Workers’ Accounts? – Rolling Stone 

    Publishers and journalists on TikTok – Google Sheets – in case your dystopian life needs more dystopia

    Decoding Xi Jinping’s Speech at the World Health Assembly – The Diplomat – The main target of Xi Jinping’s speech is the “global South” and, more specifically, the African continent. The terrain lost in Western democracies amid the pandemic will be hard to win back. However, in terms of global influence, the role of the global South and Africa is vital for China. There also, the image of China has been severely damaged. For the first time, African ambassadors to the PRC had to write a joint letter to protest how African residents were being treated in the PRC

    Investigating China: COVID-19 and the CCP – The Diplomat – capitalizing on the growing crisis in the United States and Europe, the official media in China has been trumpeting China’s purported success in controlling the disease. China has also sent medical missions to countries such as Italy. Sending medical missions abroad had been a strategy the PRC used during the Cold War to promote a new international order: a “people’s revolutionary movement” against colonialism, imperialism, and hegemonism

    The Chinese luxury market after COVID-19 | Daxue Consulting – interesting how the retailing experience is being adversely affected by COVID precautions

    Mixed reactions to current brand comms | YouGov – With the large number of brands clearly defaulting to the ‘all in this together’ message, it’s worth asking: ‘How well does this actually align with their brand values and how they are responding to the current crisis?’ Our research shows that 43% of Brits agree that brands/companies’ current messages and advertising are inauthentic. This figure increases to 52% of males (vs 35% of females). Furthermore, half of respondents (50%) disagree that brands/companies are putting their employees and their customers first and before the company and its profits.

    The Crypto Price-Innovation Cycle – Andreessen Horowitz – crypto winters tend to indicate that like AI approaches before it, its not ready for adoption as a technology / use case. Success hasn’t really been in banking or logistics, where’s the adult entertainment play (which drove a lot of other technologies from 16mm cinema film to VHS and web video)

    Norske offiserer og soldater avslørt av mobilen – Norge – Norwegian military personnel location data found to be for sale

    Why Luxury Brands Are Raising Prices in a Pandemic | BoF Professional, This Week in Fashion | BoF – Luxury brands such as Chanel and Louis Vuitton are raising their prices. This appears to be a strategic move to increase profit margins, offset the effects of reduced sales, and take advantage of the economic recovery in China.

    Electric Vehicles Continue The Same Wasteful Mistakes That Limit Longevity | Hackaday – interesting meditation on software, hardware, design, complexity and quality. Or why a Tesla isn’t as great as Elon makes out

    Thailand’s travel industry readies for relaunch | Financial Times – really interesting design hacks being deployed by the Thai tourism industry. It would be great if this positively moves the needle on Thailand’s reputation as a destination for miserly backpackers and adult entertainment

    Millennials stand out for their technology use | Pew Research Center – Millennials stand out for their technology use, but older generations also embrace digital life

    China’s ‘OK Boomer’: Generations Clash Over the Nation’s Future – The New York Times – China’s baby boomers, born in the 1960s and 70s, experienced a period of great opportunity, similar to American boomers post-WWII. After decades of political unrest and poor economic management under Mao Zedong, China was opening up, leading to abundant jobs and affordable housing. While the government maintained political control, society became more receptive to new ideas and access to information, including international websites, was available. This era offered a promising future.

    In stark contrast, China today is very different, especially for Generation Z (those born after 1990). The economy recently experienced its first contraction since the Mao era due to the coronavirus pandemic, with unemployment estimated at 20%. Additionally, housing in major cities is now largely unaffordable for Gen Z, mirroring challenges faced by their counterparts in cities like New York and San Francisco.

    Merkel cites ‘hard evidence’ Russian hackers targeted her | AFP.com – German Chancellor Angela Merkel expressed her deep distress over evidence of Russian cyberattacks against Germany, stating that these actions undermine her efforts to improve relations with Russia. She described the attacks as “more than uncomfortable” and warned that sanctions could be imposed if this malicious activity continues. Merkel also highlighted that German intelligence services have consistently reported Russian hackers attempting to spy on German lawmakers and politicians.

    Troy Hunt: The Unattributable “db8151dd” Data Breach – interesting, looking at the headers, it looks like a wider scrape from multiple sources. It connects multiple social platform profile IDs alongside real world address data. Possibly a large CRM breach???

    Exclusive: As China Hoarded Medical Supplies, the CIA Believes It Tried to Stop the WHO from Sounding the Alarm on the Pandemic – A CIA report suggests that China attempted to stop the World Health Organization (WHO) from issuing a global alert about the coronavirus outbreak in January. This was reportedly at a time when China was accumulating medical supplies globally.

    The report, confirmed by U.S. intelligence officials, claims that China threatened to withhold cooperation from the WHO’s coronavirus investigation if the agency declared a global health emergency. This is the second such report from a Western intelligence service, and it’s expected to worsen already strained relations between the United States and China concerning the pandemic, which has caused 280,000 deaths worldwide, with a quarter of those in the U.S.

    Even if these allegations are not entirely accurate, their dissemination is negatively impacting the relationship between China and the U.S.

    How to arrange the perfect bookshelf – probably the most cynical depressing thing I’ve read in a while

    Wendy Carlos on her production process that pioneered electronic music as we now know it.

    Amazon releases Kendra to solve enterprise search with AI and machine learning | TechCrunch – interesting that Amazon is not offering Kendra in a box like Google did its enterprise search appliance. I suspect this about moving file servers on to the cloud rather than Amazon into the enterprise

    The VR winter — Benedict Evans – we haven’t worked out what you would do with a great VR device beyond games (or some very niche industrial application), and it’s not clear that we will. We’ve had five years of experimental projects and all sorts of content has been tried, and nothing other than games has really worked. Hell, even adult entertainment has worked as a driver