Political polarisation between Democrats and Republicans
Political polarisation has been talked about for years. The schism in UK society caused by Brexit has been exhaustively examined including sometimes on this blog. This video is based on research by PRRI, you can see more about the research here. There are a number of outtakes in the data including the different party supporters relative openness to diversity and by implication societal change which was covered by Vox a couple of years ago. Republicans were reluctant to have a trans person in their family. Scott Galloway highlights that prejudice isn’t only about colour or gender identity.
We’re seeing Democrat supporters who believe that their personal identity is intrinsically entwined with their political opinions. They believe that a confrontation with your opinion is the same as a confrontation with your identity. All of which implies an underlying brittleness and lack of resilience to their prejudice rather than ignorance.
When Shinto became a religion
Really interesting video on the history and nature of Shinto, the Japanese belief system.
Artist creates personas for Singapore
I loved this project design that uses iconic every day items to reflect what Singapore might look like as a person. In many respects the items selected also reminded me of everyday live in Hong Kong. Which I guess goes to show that we have more in common than things that separate use.
Pets.com
I was looking at vintage ads as part of a wider internal project at work on Super Bowl advertising. During that time I delved into Pets.com content. One of the things I found was some outtakes that TBWA\Chiat\Day shot for use by San Francisco interactive agency Lot21. (Interactive agency ages this to the late 1990s, back to when the agency wanted to do both CD-ROM type experiences and websites in their agency in case this web thing turned out to be a fad.)
This content was designed to be held on the Pets.com puppet profile page, think a Geocities type page or author profile page on Blogspot or Live Journal. It all feels like the kind of things that brand teams would so for social platforms now.
Koyaanisqatsi
Philip Glass’ soundtrack for movie Koyaanisqatsi gets the 8-bit treatment with a remake by Shiryu. Shiryu calls it a remix, but really its a cover version.
Product design is pain
Mike Glover talks about how he and his colleagues problem solved to come up with the specification for the modern Opscore military helmet. Its an interesting story from a product design point of view.
You can hear about how they modified their old equipment and these alterations were then parleyed into the current industrial design by the manufacturer.
Animoca Brands is the face of a NFT bubble that feels curiously like the dot com era. Will there be a place for NFTs? Possibly. Will Animoca Brands be its Amazon or its Pets.com? I don’t know. But I feel queasy about the Hong Kong NFT wave that Animoca Brands are the poster child for. Particularly when on most other economic and societal metrics Hong Kong is running the other way; with a brain drain and economic decline.
Shedding some light on “dark patterns” and advertising regulation – ASA | CAP – “dark patterns” encompass a range of misleading advertising practices that have long been regulated under the CAP Code, and some of which reflect practices that are banned in all circumstances under consumer protection law. The CAP Code has long applied to online advertising (including companies’ own websites), and many of the common “dark patterns” align with issues that the ASA is well-versed in regulating
Ronn Torossian Admits To “Ethical Lapses” Amid News Site Controversy – PRSA-NY’s board of directors unanimously voted to condemn Torossian and 5WPR in response to the story. “In addition to being a cowardly and blatant violation of PRSA’s Code of Ethics, Ronn’s actions are a stain on our profession and undermine our role as guardians of facts and integrity for those we serve. We strongly condemn his and his firm’s direct role in perpetrating disinformation while pretending to be a legitimate industry news site,” said PRSA-NY’s board said in a statement. Torossian is no stranger to controversy, having been criticized over the years for his aggressive PR tactics, and is taking steps to remain in the public eye amid this one. Doing that has included issuing two press releases since the story broke — one offering Torossian’s list of “PR Rules” and another with marketing podcast recommendations. – so the lesson is basically break the rules while you’re small, apologise with no repercussions when you get larger
Depicting older people in ads – ASA | CAP – Communicating about ageing and older people in a positive way can help to tackle negative perceptions of ageing, and older people, but negative and offensive stereotypes about ageing and older people are still common. Using stereotypes about age in advertising may breach the CAP Code, and our guidance is designed to help advertisers ensure that they do not include offensive depictions of, or references to age in their advertising. – but is this really going to change in the ad industry when ageism is endemic from the top down in the industry – from hiring policies and representation to board level views held by the likes of Mark Read
FMCG
Advertising zero alcohol products – ASA | CAP – Marketers should, however, take care not to mislead consumers by implying that a product contains no alcohol at all if it contains any. For some consumers, whether for health, religious, or other reasons, the presence of a small amount of alcohol may be material information and therefore required to be present with reasonable prominence. Although the ASA has not formally ruled on such a circumstance, marketers are best advised to take a cautious approach when marketing a drink that is usually alcoholic (such as a non-alcoholic beer) but has been adjusted to bring it below the 0.5% ABV threshold. For instance, we would strongly recommend that ads contain a reference to the ABV alongside any ‘alcohol free’ or similar claims. – interesting that the ASA felt the need to put this notice out
Lecturers admit self-censoring classes with Chinese students | The Times – Academics are self-censoring to avoid causing offence to students from authoritarian states such as China, a new report has said. Two thirds said they believed that academic freedom was under threat in higher education and more than two fifths felt the same about their freedom to select teaching content. The survey of 1,500 social science faculty members across a range of British institutions was conducted by academics from Oxford, Exeter and Portsmouth universities.
Toronto bakery is burnt by a cultural appropriation feud | Financial Times – it is interesting to read about how Chinese cultural appropriation of Korean intangible national treasures has spilled over on to the western social networks. Naturally Vancouver seems to be at the centre of this maelstrom
Inside Facebook’s $10 Billion Breakup With Advertisers – WSJ – Apple’s privacy settings have affected e-commerce advertising on Facebook and advertising sales have dropped. It would be interesting to see if there was a geographic breakdown on this. If this is people like the Chinese online direct to consumer commerce and drop shippers, thats a big issue for Facebook. It already has issues with big brands in terms of ad quality, brand safety and skepticism over the reliability of Facebook’s ad metrics that is based on past behaviour
Online
Google Search Is Dying | DKB – interesting discussion on the Google search experience for early adopters. It is the kind of things that I have complained to friends about. It also shows the relative power of Reddit – which brings us back to the Yahoo! ideas around knowledge search circa 2005/6
TikTok Wants to Avoid Facebook’s Mess. Its Corporate Culture Could Complicate That — The Information – Two years ago, a team of TikTok employees in China—where the hit video-sharing app’s parent company, ByteDance, is based—were excited to show their colleagues in the U.S. a preview of some new features they’d been working on. But the Americans were troubled when they saw one of them, which would let TikTok users darken or lighten their skin tone—a feature the U.S. employees feared would spur the creation of culturally insensitive videos featuring blackface, according to three people with direct knowledge of the matter. In another meeting, the China TikTok team showed their American counterparts a different feature that used an algorithm to scan users’ faces and tell them whether they were “beautiful” or not, according to one person who saw the presentation. After some employees raised concerns about the features, TikTok decided against launching them in the U.S.
Ghost ships tankering black market oil to and from sanctioned countries around the world
Tanker companies warn of rise in armada of ghost ships | Financial Times – older ships are being bought and then used for sanctions running as these ghost ships. Ghost ships have safety implications due to their age. Given that these ghost ships are operated on the down low, they won’t have the same maintenance and you don’t know how their sailors are treated. What’s also interesting is the economic data implied by the ghost ships. Looking at this article black market oil (excluding pirate ships stolen in places like the Straits of Malacca) shipped by the ghost ships fleet is running at about 10 percent of all oil consumed worldwide. The fleet of ghost ships must have suddenly increased if the supply of ships being sent to be scrapped has dropped in the way it has. How have the operators of ghost ships managed to short circuit the ship breaking business? How are the ghost ships avoiding the world’s largest navies and surveillance networks? Will the number of ghost ships continue to grow?
Here’s a picture of Chinese tanker vessel, just to give you an appreciation of how big each of the ghost ships must be.
China’s Self-Defeating Economic Statecraft | Foreign Affairs – Observers routinely worry that by throwing around its ever-growing economic weight, the country is managing to buy goodwill and influence. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Beijing has exploited its dominance of manufacturing supply chains to win favor by donating masks and now vaccines to foreign countries. And it has long used unfair state subsidies to tilt the playing field in favor of Chinese companies. – the lesson that China seems to take away is that bullying works. Until China sees that bullying doesn’t work it won’t listen
Enemies of My Enemy | Foreign Affairs – The strongest orders in modern history—from Westphalia in the seventeenth century to the liberal international order in the twentieth—were not inclusive organizations working for the greater good of humanity. Rather, they were alliances built by great powers to wage security competition against their main rivals. Fear and loathing of a shared enemy, not enlightened calls to make the world a better place, brought these orders together. Progress on transnational issues, when achieved, emerged largely as a byproduct of hardheaded security cooperation. That cooperation usually lasted only as long as a common threat remained both present and manageable. When that threat dissipated or grew too large, the orders collapsed. Today, the liberal order is fraying for many reasons, but the underlying cause is that the threat it was originally designed to defeat—Soviet communism—disappeared three decades ago. None of the proposed replacements to the current order have stuck because there hasn’t been a threat scary or vivid enough to compel sustained cooperation among the key players – until now China’s belligerence in East Asia and wider
‘Lying flat’: Why some Chinese are putting work second – BBC News – there are young rural migrants in Beijing or Shanghai, who now realise “how far behind they are, in terms of being able to make enough money to buy a house, or compete with the city kids who grew up speaking English and wearing sophisticated clothing”. Dr Johnston explains some of this group may now be thinking of returning to their home towns and taking lower-paid jobs instead to be with their families. On the other side, there are the children of richer, successful parents who are not “as hungry as the super-achieving kids from poorer families”. Dr Johnston thinks China’s so-called “tiger” culture is an added barrier, where parents feel under intense pressure to help their child achieve, that school on its own is not enough
The Pandemic Changed Youth Culture in the Asia Pacific – What Does that Mean for Brands? – “proactively making fundamental life changes to shape a new future in a post-pandemic world which will never be the same again,” says Vice Media. ‘The Next Chapter – Re-Emergence’ is the latest from VICE Media Group’s ongoing series of youth culture tracking studies which monitors behavioural change to forecast the future of culture. The online quantitative study of 1,740 Gen Z and Millenials was conducted via VICE, Refinery29, i-D websites and social channels in Australia, India, China, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. – it looks like they expect to change how they work. If that means greater balance it might go down badly with Chinese and Vietnamese authorities who would be concerned that this looked like ‘lying down’
Pandemic triggers exodus of older people from UK workforce | Financial Times – interesting that businesses aren’t adapting to these new dynamics in the workforce, much of what is in the article is also echoes in this US IBM case. IBM Execs Call Older Workers ‘Dinobabies’ in Age Bias Lawsuit – Internal emails show IBM executives calling older workers “dinobabies” and discussing plans to make them “an extinct species,” according to a Friday filing in an ongoing age discrimination lawsuit against the company. The documents were submitted as evidence of IBM’s efforts “to oust older employees from its workforce,” and replace them with millennial workers, the plaintiff alleged. It’s the latest development in a legal battle that first began in 2018, when former employees sued IBM after the company fired tens of thousands of workers over 40-years-old. One high-ranking executive, whose name was redacted from the lawsuit, said IBM had a “dated maternal workforce.” “This is what must change,” the email continues, per the filing. “They really don’t understand social or engagement. Not digital natives. A real threat for us.”
Which London-listed Russian firms could be hit by sanctions? | Russia | The Guardian – Under the most extreme scenario, companies operating in the UK, US or EU – including most of the world’s major financial institutions – could be forbidden from any transactions with sanctioned entities. That could mean the indefinite suspension of their shares, and an inability to issue new debt or shares in London. Asked whether the UK was likely to impose sanctions that would damage the interests of big British companies, Bernardine Adkins, a partner at the London law firm Gowling WLG, said: “I’ll believe it when I see it.” “The modern way of sanctions tends to be very focused, and they’re not sweeping to hurt the economy,” she added.
Norton Rose directs Hong Kong office to make China pivot | Financial Times – Norton Rose, whose biggest clients include HSBC and AIG, is the latest international business to reconsider its Hong Kong strategy. Both the Mandarin Oriental hotel group and Pernod Ricard have asked executives to move temporarily out of Hong Kong in response to strict pandemic restrictions. Bank of America is reviewing whether to relocate some of its staff to Singapore. The head of a large recruitment consultancy in Hong Kong said similar changes were happening at other global companies. “As expats retire they are most likely to be replaced by Mandarin-speaking people,” he said. “The old set-up of having a local team who speak Mandarin doing the deal, but the guy at the top is white, that will change across the board.” – Hong Kong refocusing on being just another city in China – Chinese banks’ Hong Kong ranks on track to outnumber global rivals | Financial Times
Next China: Hong Kong Elections Uncertain as Covid Crisis Spirals – Bloomberg – there was little surprise this week when Tam Yiu-chung, Hong Kong’s sole representative member of China’s top legislative body, suggested postponing the election. His logic was simple: Some of those who might run will be too busy dealing with the outbreak to campaign. If more voices begin jumping in with the same line, a delay could very quickly become fait accompli. – way before COVID got out of control there were no candidates putting themselves out there. Even self publicist CY Leung hadn’t throw his hat in the ring
Why Are Luxury Labels Cheaper Online? – The Chosun Ilbo (English Edition): Daily News from Korea – Business > Business – According to Statistics Korea, purchases through overseas online retailers last year surpassed W5 trillion for the first time ever and surged 26.4 percent compared to 2020. Clothing and accessories accounted for W2 trillion of the total. The Korea Consumer Agency said a survey last year showed consumers here believe products are around 25 percent cheaper from foreign online retailers than in Korea. Yet importers insist they have no choice but to slap huge margins on goods due to high operating costs as well as tariffs and delivery fees. One staffer with a major importer said, “Department stores charge 20 to 30 percent in fees to sell our products, plus we have to cover advertising and store overheads.” But industry insiders say big businesses and department stores in Korea compete fiercely for exclusive import deals with foreign luxury brands, which ends up costing them a lot of money. They end up agreeing to unrealistic volumes and expensive advertising to bring in popular luxury brands and pass the cost on to the customer. Another reason is simply that demand seems insatiable, so people will pay whatever is asked. The head of a foreign luxury brand’s Korean branch said, “The market is changing in Korea and China where the more expensive products are, the higher the demand is. For instance, handbags must cost at least W9 million and coats more than W4 million to be considered a ‘luxury’ product. That means lower-tier brand prices are also rising.”
Musicians like Neil Young lack the market power to force Spotify’s hand over Joe Rogan – It’s a simple case of gigantic supply and relatively limited distribution. As the world turns to music streaming, only a handful of global players led by Spotify, Apple and Amazon control the market. Five companies represent 80% of the global streaming opportunity. Now, turn that around and think about it from an artist’s point of view. Spotify currently has 70 million songs and adds an additional 60,000 each and every day. These stupendous numbers have two implications. First, even when an artist like Young pulls his music from the service there are literally millions of potential replacements to fill the gap in a listener’s playlist. Second, artists cannot fuck with any of the big distributors of their music, because losing access to 31% of the market is the difference between success and failure for many of the record companies that run these artists
Foreign money funding ‘extremism’ in Canada, says hacker | Canada | The Guardian – A hacker who leaked the names and locations of more than 90,000 people who donated money to the Canadian trucker convoy protest has said it exposed how money from abroad had funded “extremism” in the country. In an exclusive interview, the hacker told the Guardian that Canada was “not safe from foreign political manipulation”. “You see a huge amount of money that isn’t even coming from Canada – that’s plain as day,” said the hacker, who belongs to the hacktivist group Anonymous. The leaked data showed that more than 90,000 donations were made via GiveSendGo, with most funds appearing to come from Canada and the US. According to the data, individuals in countries including the UK, the Netherlands, Ireland and Denmark also donated. Amarnath Amarasingam, a professor at Canada’s Queens University and an expert in extremism and social movements, tweeted that of the 92,844 donations, “51,666 (56%) came from the US, 36,202 (29%) came from Canada, and 1,831 (2%) came from the UK.” US-based donations totalled US$3.62m, while Canadians donated US$4.31m, he added.
Want to buy an Ineos Grenadier? Here’s how | CAR Magazine – In some very rural parts of the UK, for example, we will partner with companies whose franchises are agricultural franchises – JCB, Massey Ferguson, those kind of franchises. They are next to auction centres and livestock centres. Their neighbours are NFU regional offices, that kind of thing. Because that is where the customers go and they live and they work.
On Monday afternoon, the buzz amongst my colleagues in New York was the Super Bowl from the night before. In particular the advertising and one advert by Coinbase sparked more discussions than others. The advert was divisive. Some people that there was something wrong with their smart TV which had triggered a dodgy screensaver. One person even first thought that the QRcode would take them through to a site that might explain whatever ransomware had hijacked their TV.
They scanned the QRcode but it didn’t work properly. The reasons for it not working were twofold:
The contrast in the QRcode background and foreground wasn’t large enough for certain colours and so wouldn’t scan
The coinbase website fell over. This would be spun as unprecedented demand, but the reality was poor execution
A game console style ROM screen revealed at the end that it was Coinbase. The management would likely pass the whole car crash off as growth hacking.
Growth hacking
Growth hacking as a term was attributed to a blog post by Sean Ellis back in 2010. But as a concept it goes back much further. A classic example of growth hacking could be considered to be FMCG staple of ‘buy one, get one free’ or BOGOF. The master of the growth hack was David Wallerstein came up with the idea of supersizing popcorn servings in the 1960s. Wallerstein came up with a behavioural change experiment as business idea based on the insight of that people might want to buy and eat more popcorn, but were simply ashamed of buying two bags at the cinema. Wallerstein was successful in his experiment. Wallerstein was appointed by Ray Kroc to the board of McDonalds in 1968 and then rolled out larger servings in McDonalds restaurants, if you’ve ever been asked if you want a ‘large meal’ with your burger Wallerstein was responsible. This created a whole range of products in restaurants and supermarkets called expandables, from large meals to multi-packs of products.
A more recent example would be the signature on hotmail.com emails that encouraged whoever received them to get their own email address at hotmail.com. This was effective back when most people had a work or college email address and wanted a home account for personal communications like finding a new job. Gmail took a slightly different approach with an invite scheme that saw early adopters clamouring like they were trying to get in the door of Studio 54 on a Saturday night.
The original idea of growth hacking is to try a small marketing tactic and refine it based on the feedback that you get. In reality that gets translated into poor thought out showy tactics focused on the short term. The reason for this is that test and learn is done over a short time period and doesn’t incorporate marketing science. The Coinbase advert was a classic example of this.
Buzz marketing
Growth hacking is influenced by a number of things. One of which was the concept of ‘scrappiness’ in start-up marketing.
Startup scrappiness
During the original dot com boom new online businesses wasted a fantastic amount of money on ineffective advertising. The most iconic example of this would be the pets.com sock pocket advert that featured in the 2000 version of the Super Bowl.
Courtesy of Yahoo! Inc. Co founder David Filo is hanging from the rear of the car.
You saw some businesses like Yahoo! try to do brand building advertising in a more cost effective way. This was known internally at Yahoo! as buzz marketing and in the US, it had its own team.
Examples of buzz marketing included wrapping employees cars that had been volunteered in the Yahoo! brand. This was listed in the employee handbook as a free ‘perk’ of working at Yahoo!. There were some conditions like you had to keep the wrap on for year and a good behaviour clause.
There were also some sponsorships like the ice machine at the San Jose Sharks stadium and some high traffic billboards. Yahoo! used to have a billboard alongside the 101 freeway going into San Francisco and another in Time Square, New York.
While the lesson of ‘go for business models that make financial sense’ seems to have been lost as we left the dot.com era further behind. The idea of ‘scrappiness’ stuck. It fitted with the wider concept of ‘struggle culture’ in entrepreneurship.
In technology, marketing = sales
On one level, the problem isn’t Coinbase but the technology sector. The truth is that for the most part technology companies don’t do good marketing. My hypotheses around the reasons for this are:
Technologists aren’t marketers. For the original technology firms, the products found their own market. Over time a salesforce was introduced and for complex products there might be pre-sales and post sales consultancy. They don’t really know much about marketing science. The sales funnel is the one ‘marketing model’ that managed to make it into Microsoft® PowerPoint® says a lot about the nature of this understanding.
To a technologist, every problem looks like a technology challenge. So the answer for great marketing is either in kludges aka hacks, like the Coinbase advert, or algorithmic in nature. And those algorithms are usually based on a poor understanding of marketing featured in the point above
Technologists think short term. Brands are transitory if you are looking to be bought out, or are built ‘organically’ in the hands of the victors (Oracle, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, Apple, Amazon, Tencent or Alibaba). So building a brand is an alien concept. Why build a brand in a world when you believe in disrupt, or be disrupted? Contrast that with the FMCG world where brands have considerably longer lives. The Nestlé Kit Kat chocolate bar is 86 years old at the time of writing. Procter & Gamble’s Bold washing powder (laundry detergent) is a spritely 57 years old. Baileys Irish Cream liqueur is 48 years old, as is the Mobil 1 range of synthetic engine oils, oil filters, chassis grease, transmission fluids, and gear lubricants. If we think of technology brands with that kind of longevity its likely to be the incumbent telecoms companies, Fujitsu, Hitach and IBM. At the younger end would be the likes of Verbatim, AMD, Intel, Oracle, Western Digital, Microsoft, Apple, Acer and Atari.
Disrupt or be disrupted creates delusion. If you believe in the disrupt or be disrupted manifest destiny of technology you probably believe that your ability to market is better than established brands that are actually marketing organisations
I would guess that Coinbase marketers would tick at least some of these hypotheses. It probably doesn’t help that organisations who should know better are starting to buy into this ‘disrupt or be disrupted’ model.
Cost of reach
So, if you’re a technology company like Coinbase, who believes in disruption and ‘knows’ how to market better than marketers? The simple answer is that while digital has managed to get marketers to use its platforms, it has failed to offer the most competitive cost per reach. To achieve the same goals Coinbase would have had to spend an order of magnitude more on YouTube than TV to reach an equivalent audience.
Brand building
Finally the reason why the advert contrasted so sharply with the other content that ran during the Super Bowl was because everyone else focused on brand building rather than on brand activation. The reason why they are going for brand building is that the work will keep paying dividends for years. This is something that digital transformation doesn’t reflect well through its algorithms. The Coinbase approach was the equivalent of a TV ad that said click here.
Warning: Stamps that say ‘1st’ or ‘2nd’ class are going to become unusable from 31 January 2023 – each stamp will have a proprietary QRcode type glyph. The stamp’s glyph will be linked to a digital twin. This isn’t to be used for tracking the letters and the packages that they are affixed to; but purely as a security measure on the stamps. How much effort is this going to take and is it really going to be cheaper than conventional printing technologies to limit stamp fraud? How much of a black economy is there in stamps anyway? While the Royal Mail promises innovative services enabled by the stamps, it isn’t clear what they will be at the moment. Looking at Amazon, the ‘barcode stamps’ as the Royal Mail call them don’t seem to be widely available yet. The Royal Mail has announced but not launched a scheme to swap out your existing stamps for the new design.
China
What is most interesting about Eileen Gu isn’t that she switched countries but the narrative of western decline that China is wrapping around this: Cold warrior: why Eileen Gu ditched Team USA to ski for China | The Economist and Winter Olympics: Eileen Gu and the Chimerican Dream – The Olympic freestyle skier has stirred controversy for representing China. She is the product of a vanishing shared space between the Chinese and American elite. As for Gu’s Mum’s background, it would be an ideal model if a screen writers was adapting The Americans as Chinese sleeper agents instead
Wang Huning’s career reveals much about political change in China | The Economist – As its chief of ideology and propaganda, he is in charge of crafting a very different message: that China practises true democracy, that America’s is a sham and that American power is fading. For a party locked in an escalating ideological war with America, this line is unsurprising. Mr Wang’s role in the struggle is more so. His early writing did not suggest narrow-minded nationalism. He saw weaknesses in America’s system, but did not exaggerate them. He saw problems, too, in China’s. Even more remarkably, he has been crafting the party’s message under three successive leaders.
What’s interesting about the future of the ideas that aren’t hinged in culture, is how similar they relate to 10 year predictions back in the late 1990s and early 2000s – Internet in 2035 | Pew Research Center
The Plausibly Deniable DataBase (PDDB) « bunnie’s blog – Most security schemes facilitatethe coercive processes of an attacker because they disclose metadata about the secret data, such as the name and size of encrypted files. This allows specific and enforceable demands to be made: “Give us the passwords for these three encrypted files with names A, B and C, or else…”. In other words, security often focuses on protecting the confidentiality of data, but lacks deniability.
A scheme with deniability would make even the existence of secret files difficult to prove. This makes it difficult for an attacker to formulate a coherent demand: “There’s no evidence of undisclosed data. Should we even bother to make threats?” A lack of evidence makes it more difficult to make specific and enforceable demands.
Thus, assuming the ultimate goal of security is to protect the safety of users as human beings, and not just their files, enhanced security should come hand-in-hand with enhanced plausible deniability (PD). PD armsusers with a set of tools they can use to navigate the social landscape of security, by making it difficult to enumerate all the secrets potentially contained within a device, even with deep forensic analysis
Korea Herald – After being called feminists, these women faced online harassment – One in 2 men in their 20s in South Korea tends to be anti-feminist, according to a 2018 study released by the Korean Women’s Development Institute, a government think tank. In the same survey, only 1 in 4 young men saw women as “weaker than men” or needing protection. But such strong antagonism against feminism has puzzled many looking from the outside at a country that has the highest gender wage gap among OECD countries. Women also feel less safe than men in the country, according to a 2021 report from the Gender Equality Ministry. Only 21.6 percent of women said they felt safe from crime, as opposed to 32.1 percent of men.
On Meta’s ‘regulatory headwinds’ and adtech’s privacy reckoning | TechCrunch – “The investigation shows that gambling platforms do not operate in a silo. Rather, gambling platforms operate in conjunction with a wider network of third parties. The investigation shows that even limited browsing of 37 visits to gambling websites led to 2,154 data transmissions to 83 domains controlled by 44 different companies that range from well-known platforms like Facebook and Google to lesser known surveillance technology companies like Signal and Iovation, enabling these actors to embed imperceptible monitoring software during a user’s browsing experience. The investigation further shows that a number of these third-party companies receive behavioural data from gambling platforms in realtime, including information on how often individuals gambled, how much they were spending, and their value to the company if they returned to gambling after lapsing.”
Professional specific support – Self-Care Catalyst – is aimed at stressed and burnt out nurse practitioners in the US. I heard about it from my US colleagues and imagine that we will see similar businesses soon
