150 quotes found
"'They're operating in a mindset that's outside the tautological knowledge structure of most of the people who run the country. Microsoft is getting all this flak for not paying attention to Washington. Why should they? Gates has created an operating system that's become the central nervous system for an entire global culture."
"I thought I would learn faster, and it's a very complicated company. There's a lot of tradition there, and I just wasn't a part of it."
"I think most people either forget or don't know that Microsoft only hires people with I.Q.'s well over 130."
"Our head of HR has taken personal accountability and resigned from GitHub yesterday morning, Saturday, January 16th,"
"Throughout the industry, the quality assurance departments are treated poorly, paid very little, and treated as replaceable cogs"
"Don't bother trying to create a better commercial desktop OS -- it doesn't matter how hard you try, how many engineers you throw at the problem, how much money you spend, or how many years you put into it. Microsoft owns that space and, worse, the public is totally complicit with that fact. People will not stop using Windows. It is a losing battle."
"The Government holds that Microsoft is illegally using the near-monopoly of its Windows operating system to dominate the market for software used to view the World Wide Web. In addition, its lawsuit says the company is doing the same with Internet commerce. The Government insists that traditional antitrust safeguards must be enforced to prevent a dystopian situation in which consumers one day find themselves utterly dependent on Microsoft for all things digital -- not just one product or one industry but all the facets of life that are rapidly being transposed to cyberspace."
"What is different about Microsoft is its distance from Silicon Valley. Rather than trading jobs for a better deal down the block, employees tend to stay put. With only a 7 percent turnover rate, Microsoft will hire 3,000 recruits this year. The insularity helps to reinforce a monolithic culture in which employees cultivate an almost fanatical devotion to their work and to Mr. Gates, whose combative cross-examinations on minute details are as legendary as his accessibility by E-mail to the lowliest employee. ("Even reasonably cynical people get starry-eyed over Bill," observed one of Microsoft's newer managers.)"
"Perhaps the most successful global monopoly is Microsoft, which has succeeded in gaining global market power not only in PC operating systems but in key applications such as browsers. [...] Microsoft's monopoly power leads not only to higher prices but to less innovation. [...] The failure to develop a global approach to global cartels and monopolies is yet another instance of economic globalization outpacing political globalization."
"Microsoft has had two goals. One was to copy the Mac and the other was to copy Lotus' success in the spreadsheet. And over the course of the last 10 years, Microsoft accomplished both of those goals. And now they are completely lost. They were able to copy the Mac because the Mac was frozen in time. The Mac didn't change much for the last 10 years. It changed maybe 10 percent. It was a sitting duck. It's amazing that it took Microsoft 10 years to copy something that was a sitting duck. Apple, unfortunately, doesn't deserve too much sympathy. They invested hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars into R&D, but very little came out They produced almost no new innovation since the original Mac itself."
"We provide customer data only when we receive a legally binding order or subpoena to do so, and never on a voluntary basis. In addition we only ever comply with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers. If the government has a broader voluntary national security program to gather customer data, we don't participate in it."
"While we have seen great success, we are hungry to do more. Our industry does not respect tradition — it only respects innovation. This is a critical time for the industry and for Microsoft. Make no mistake, we are headed for greater places — as technology evolves and we evolve with and ahead of it. Our job is to ensure that Microsoft thrives in a mobile and cloud-first world."
"One of the most painful things in our culture is to watch other people repeat earlier mistakes. We're not fond of Bill Gates, but it still hurts to see Microsoft struggle with problems that IBM solved in the 1960s."
"Bill Gates"
"Steve Ballmer"
"Satya Nadella"
"Facebook's introduction of a new feature that uses [Wikipedia] to combat “fake news” [...] poses arguably the greatest test in years to the volunteer-run online encyclopedia, constituting a massive threat to the internet's largest and ostensibly most trusted source of free knowledge. ... It also highlights the risks posed by Facebook's efforts to seemingly outsource its problems to the online encyclopedia. Indeed, Wikipedia has struggled to defend its standards in the face of its new role as the internet's “good cop.” As more and more tech giants like Facebook and YouTube make use of its content, a new influx of users has flooded the website [–] not all of them well intentioned."
"I think with all technology, people have an idea of how it will be used, but then it has a life of its own and people use it in all kinds of ways. In the same way with Facebook. I doubt when people first created Facebook they imagined it was going to help people in Egypt overthrow a dictator. So it does have a life of its own that we can’t predict."
"On his own Facebook page, Zuckerberg describes his personal mission this way: “I’m trying to make the world a more open place.” There is no mention of ripping apart the social fabric. Tobacco companies once tried marketing like this: “More Doctors Smoke Camels Than Any Other Cigarette!” The difference is, the media called them on it. A glowing cover story in Time magazine from 2014 opens with a photo of Zuckerberg surrounded by a crowd of poor children in India. “Our mission is to connect every person in the world,” Zuckerberg is quoted as saying. The article does briefly note the obvious financial interest Facebook has in hooking every living person on social media. But the piece quickly moves on to suggest that “creating wealth and saving lives” are likely Zuckerberg’s real motives. When elites do focus their attention on Facebook, it’s invariably to demand the company exert even more control over its users. Following the 2016 election, there were widespread calls for Facebook to further restrict the news Americans are allowed to see on the site. According to the Washington Post, Barack Obama took Zuckerberg aside during a meeting of world leaders in Peru and begged him to impose greater censorship. Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein of California made the same demand. “You created these platforms and now they are being misused,” she said. “And you have to be the ones who do something about it—or we will.” If only Obama and Feinstein were as concerned about Facebook’s relentless invasions of the public’s privacy. Or about the millions of addicted users steadily degrading from its use. Or about the rending of the social fabric."
"FB isn’t a social media company, it is a data tracking company. Why care that they track this data? Think the future, not just today. ... It isn’t just Facebook and what they will do with this data, but this data’s existence is a threat to our privacy and freedom."
"Regardless, this new research shows that Wikipedia editors of different opinions have strived for consensus over time. That's opposed to Facebook or Twitter, where people are siloed into their own self-reinforcing echo chambers. ... Consider this a version of the “miracle of aggregation” – that large groups of people are able to act rationally and solve problems despite having vastly different interests."
"Facebook has now firmly established itself as a hub on the internet, making it a destination for surfers to do multiple tasks such as communications, gaming, shopping, photo-sharing and information gathering."
"I would ask [Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg], 'Can you explain to me the reasoning why such broad access to user data is granted, especially friends' data?"
"This power over our egos has granted Facebook what we can think of as bullying rights. It routinely attempts to bully people into compliance with its rules on the boundaries of free speech, using tactics such as arbitrarily blocking users or reducing the visibility level of particular posts and videos."
"The hard reality is that the more you interact with Facebook, the more control it will assert over you. The company’s tactic is to encourage people to comply by intimidating them enough to internalize Facebook’s way of thinking. Users are reluctant to walk away from the platform because they have invested time and energy in it and are unwilling to abandon their relationships."
"A big part of Facebook's pitch is that it has so much information about its users that it can more effectively target ads to those who will be responsive to the content. If Facebook can prove that theory to be true, then it may not worry so much about losing its cool cachet."
"Facebook is the backbone of small business in America"
"Now let me pull out so we’re clear about the problem we all face and how we got here. The attacks against us in Rappler began 5 years ago when we demanded an end to impunity on two fronts: Duterte’s drug war and Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook. Today, it has only gotten worse – and Silicon Valley’s sins came home to roost in the United States on January 6 with mob violence on Capitol Hill. What happens on social media doesn’t stay on social media. Online violence is real world violence. Social media is a deadly game for power and money, what Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism, extracting our private lives for outsized corporate gain. Our personal experiences are sucked into a database, organized by AI, then sold to the highest bidder. Highly profitable micro-targeting operations are engineered to structurally undermine human will – a behavior modification system in which we are Pavlov’s dogs, experimented on in real time with disastrous consequences in countries like mine, Myanmar, India, Sri Lanka and so many more. These destructive corporations have siphoned money away from news groups and now pose a foundational threat to markets and elections. Facebook is the world’s largest distributor of news, and yet studies have shown that lies laced with anger and hate spread faster and further than facts on social media. These American companies controlling our global information ecosystem are biased against facts, biased against journalists. They are – by design – dividing us and radicalizing us. Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without trust, we have no shared reality, no democracy, and it becomes impossible to deal with our world’s existential problems: climate, coronavirus, the battle for truth."
"Comparisons to the lies and tactics of Big Tobacco in the 20th century are wholly justified. Facebook, and the politicians benefiting from it, know full well the harms they are unleashing on the public. Facebook is the world’s largest distributor of news, yet studies have shown that on social media, lies laced with anger and hatred spread faster and farther than facts."
"I believe that Facebook represents one of the gravest threats to democracies around the world, and I am amazed that we have allowed our freedoms to be taken away by technology companies’ greed for growth and revenues."
"The tools Facebook provides make discrimination easy. Facebook has monopoly profit margins, so it could easily provide real staffing to protect against discrimination, if it wanted to. It doesn’t want to."
"Facebook likes to present itself as a tech company, but often appears more like an advertising corporation that happens to use digital technology in order to conduct its core business. [...] Facebook represents a new kind of corporate power, the dimensions of which are only now becoming apparent."
"Facebook mistreats its users. Facebook is not your friend, it is a surveillance engine. For instance, if you browse the Web and you see a 'like' button in some page or some other site that has been displayed from Facebook. Therefore, Facebook knows that your machine visited that page. So, Facebook carries out surveillance over visitors to thousands of different Websites, even for people who are not Facebook users. I hope we will have something for free browsers to block Facebook 'like' buttons so that people won't be under surveillance. In any case, this is why I ask people not to put photographs of me on Facebook, because Facebook collects data about the names of people in photos. It might as well be working directly for Big Brother. Facebook collects a lot of data from people and admits it. And it also collects data which isn't admitted. And Google does too. As for Microsoft, I don't know. But I do know that Windows has features that send data about the user."
"I have one friend whose Facebook updates are exclusively complaining about Facebook."
"I doff my fedora to this Facebook! It's the smartest way to keep people dumb since we started fluoridating the water."
"I think MySpace is doomed, I give them about two more years. [...] I think Facebook is the next Microsoft in both the bad and the good senses. That's an amazing company that is going to do a lot of good and bad things."
"The civic tech expert Ed Saperia used as his parable the difference between Wikipedia and Facebook. Jimmy Wales’s big experiment, which started life in 1999 as Nupedia, has created an open-source collection of human knowledge in hundreds of languages that is essentially trustworthy. If a mistake creeps in through the gates of human generosity, it gets corrected in the same way. If malicious actors try to slander their foes, the punishment is not cancellation, but more like lifelong ridicule, which is proportionate, given how long a slanderous person is likely to carry on doing ridiculous things. In other words, it is the best of humanity, all natural desire to help each other with cross-pollinated knowledge concentrated in one place. Facebook, for brevity, takes the same raw material – all the people in the world – and finds the worst in it. Facebook manages to winkle out things we didn’t know we were capable of – levels of vitriol, gullibility and hysteria – in between a scare ad for dark politics and a mesmerising video of five types of mince baked around a kilo of cheese. (I am paraphrasing a bit; I don’t think civic tech gurus dwell much on the cheese.)"
"Facebook allowed the president of Honduras to artificially inflate the appearance of popularity on his posts for nearly a year after the company was first alerted to the activity. The astroturfing – the digital equivalent of a bussed-in crowd – was just one facet of a broader online disinformation effort that the administration has used to attack critics and undermine social movements, Honduran activists and scholars say. Facebook posts by Juan Orlando Hernández, an authoritarian rightwinger whose 2017 re-election is widely viewed as fraudulent, received hundreds of thousands of fake likes from more than a thousand inauthentic Facebook Pages – profiles for businesses, organizations and public figures – that had been set up to look like Facebook user accounts."
"לא לדאוג, אנחנו על זה #פייסבוק_מתה"
"If the people who ran Facebook were monsters, I wouldn’t have worked there."
"We believe that a key part of combating extremism is preventing recruitment by disrupting the underlying ideologies that drive people to commit acts of violence. That's why we support a variety of counterspeech efforts."
"We stand against all forms of hate including hate targeting the Muslim community. We do not allow people to attack anyone based on their race, ethnicity, national origin or religion, and we remove this hate speech as soon as we become aware of it...Facebook “appreciate[s] feedback from governments, experts and communities as we work to keep our platform safe."
"[Facebook had removed the president's posts] because we judged that their effect - and likely their intent - would be to provoke further violence."
"The proposed law fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between our platform and publishers who use it to share news content."
"It has left us facing a stark choice: attempt to comply with a law that ignores the realities of this relationship, or stop allowing news content on our services in Australia. With a heavy heart, we are choosing the latter."
"We've been combatting human trafficking] on our platform for many years and our goal remains to prevent anyone who seeks to exploit others from having a home on our platform."
"Our goal is to help deter people from searching for this type of content."
"[the existing brand could not] possibly represent everything that we're doing today, let alone in the future."
"Google Analytics is a measurement product that helps businesses better understand their web and app performance. Any data in Google Analytics is obfuscated, meaning it is not tied back to an individual and our policies prohibit customers from sending us data that could be used to identify a user. Additionally, Google has strict policies against advertising to people based on sensitive information."
"We use purpose-built technology and work with child safety organisations to find, remove and report it, because we never want this material to appear in our search results. We are working with experts on effective ways to deter anyone tempted to look for this sickening material."
"Don't use the camera or microphone to cross-reference and immediately present personal information identifying anyone other than the user, including use cases such as facial recognition and voice print. Applications that do this will not be approved at this time."
"We also have clear policies that prohibit videos promoting medically unsubstantiated methods to prevent the coronavirus in place of seeking medical treatment, and we quickly remove videos violating these policies when flagged to us."
"In some ways the higher echelons of Google seemed more distant and obscure to me than the halls of Washington. We had been locking horns with senior US officials for years by that point. The mystique had worn off. But the power centers growing up in Silicon Valley were still opaque and I was suddenly conscious of an opportunity to understand and influence what was becoming the most influential company on earth."
"If the future of the internet is to be Google, that should be of serious concern to people all over the world—in Latin America, East and Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, the former Soviet Union, and even in Europe—for whom the internet embodies the promise of an alternative to US cultural, economic, and strategic hegemony."
"Google is winning the game, and they are winning because the quality of their services beats the competition."
"We're agreed that child sexual imagery is a case apart, it's illegal everywhere in the world, there's a consensus on that. It's absolutely right that we identify this stuff, we remove it and we report it to the authorities."
"May I recommend, if you're doing your own homework, don't do a Google search. Seems to me that Google is pretty deeply in bed with the government. Maybe this is explaining why Google is being kicked out of all the other countries? Are they just a shill now for the United States government? Who is Jared Cohen? Is he private citizen or government operative? And isn't this the second Google guy we've found? This is the second Google executive now being exposed as an instigator of a revolution."
"Google users trust our systems to help them with important decisions: medical, financial and many others. Our search results are the best we know how to produce. They are unbiased and objective, and we do not accept payment for them or for inclusion or more frequent updating. We also display advertising, which we work hard to make relevant, and we label it clearly. This is similar to a well-run newspaper, where the advertisements are clear and the articles are not influenced by the advertisers’ payments. We believe it is important for everyone to have access to the best information and research, not only to the information people pay for you to see."
"You’re actually socially isolating yourself with your phone. I feel like it’s kind of emasculating. This Google Glass really takes away that excuse.… It really opened my eyes to how much of my life I spent secluded away in email or social posts. My vision when we started Google 15 years ago was that eventually you wouldn’t have to have a search query at all — the information would just come to you as you needed it. This is the first form factor that can deliver that vision."
"Celebrities always get a lot of interest and the passing of well-known figures makes people want to learn more about them. Despite that, some of the more traditional aspects of British life, from the Grand National to the royal birth, have generated many Google searches and will be remembered as events that have characterized the year."
"I use Google all the time, I’m happy it’s there. But just as when I read The New York Times or the Washington Post, or the Wall Street Journal knowing that they have ways of selecting and shaping the material that reaches you, you have to compensate for it. With Google, and others of course, there is an immense amount of surveillance to try to obtain personal data about individuals and their habits and interactions and so on, to shape the way information is presented to them. They do more [surveillance] than the NSA."
"About 650 Google workers have signed a petition asking the company to protect users' abortion-related location data and search history. The move comes over concerns that law enforcement agencies will seek such data from Google to prosecute abortion seekers. Workers sent the petition Wednesday to Google-parent Alphabet's top executives, including CEO Sundar Pichai. Most of the workers belong to the Alphabet Workers' Union, according to Bambi Okugawa, a spokesperson for the group. "If Google or Facebook or any tech company wants to present the face of being a compassionate company and an ally for people that need reproductive health care or gender affirming health care, then they need to back that up in their actions by protecting privacy," said Okugawa, who works at a data center in Tennessee, where a law is going into effect this month that will outlaw abortion."
"Okugawa said tech companies like Google have become key information providers and embedded in people's lives. So workers' demands provide an opportunity for the company to innovate. "There are situations where a woman could die if she does not receive certain healthcare services," she said. "It's on the shoulders of tech companies to do what they can to protect them." In July, Google said it automatically purges information about users who visit abortion clinics or other locations that could lead to legal problems. Each year, Google responds to thousands of subpoenas and search warrants by providing user location and search data to law enforcement investigators. The workers also demanded that the company provide travel benefits to contract staff who need to go out-of-state to get abortion services. "It's very fair for us as a union to say you should provide to contractors — security staff and vendors — the same benefits that we get," Okugawa said, on behalf of Alphabet Workers' Union members."
"This attack has a little bit of everything. It has unique social engineering at the front end. It leverages a legitimate site to help get into the inbox. It uses trickery and obfuscation to confuse security services."
"Elizabeth Warren is saying we should break up Google. And like, I love her but she’s very misguided, like that will not make it better it will make it worse, because all these smaller companies who don’t have the same resources that we do will be charged with preventing the next Trump situation, it’s like a small company cannot do that. .. We all got screwed over in 2016, again it wasn’t just us, it was, the people got screwed over, the news media got screwed over, like, everybody got screwed over so we’re rapidly been like, what happened there and how do we prevent it from happening again. .. We’re also training our algorithms, like, if 2016 happened again, would we have, would the outcome be different? The reason we launched our A.I. principles is because people were not putting that line in the sand, that they were not saying what’s fair and what’s equitable so we’re like, well we are a big company, we’re going to say it. .. We have gotten accusations of around fairness is that we’re unfair to conservatives because we’re choosing what we find as credible news sources and those sources don’t necessarily overlap with conservative sources"
"Vaccine misinformation appears globally, it appears in all countries and cultures."
"Supporting Wikipedia is [...] a shrewd business decision that will likely benefit Google for years to come."
"This is an exciting development for preventive healthcare industry. It is likely to spur a range of other innovations towards miniaturizing technology and using it in wearable devices to help people monitor their bodies better."
"[YouTube,] a megacorporation with billions of dollars and thousands of brilliant employees is relying on a volunteer-run platform anyone can edit to fact-check information? It is odd. But it's also a validation of Wikipedia's mission and a reminder of its importance."
"Google's vision of the future is pure atom-age 1960s Jetsons fantasy, bubble-dwelling spiritless sexists above a ruined earth."
"The destiny of Google's search engine is to become that Star Trek computer, and that's what we are building."
"Search is not used to set a political agenda, and we don't bias our results toward any political ideology. We never rank search results to manipulate political sentiment."
"When people are looking for abortion services, they often turn to Google, searching a phrase like "abortion clinic near me" or "planned parenthood." Yet the ads they'll see at the top of the Google search results are often not abortion providers at all, but instead misleading ads for anti-abortion "crisis pregnancy centers" — facilities that use various tactics to dissuade or delay pregnant people from getting an abortion. Any delay or confusion can have serious consequences: Strict bans in much of the country mean people seeking surgical abortions may have to travel hundreds of miles, and ordering abortion pills by mail can be legally thorny. These ads on Google are no small business, according to a new report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a U.S.- and U.K.-based nonprofit focused on research, campaigns and policy to counteract hate and disinformation. The group finds that anti-abortion pregnancy centers in the U.S. spent an estimated $10.2 million on Google Search ads over a two-year period, and those ads were clicked on an estimated 13 million times. The group's researchers began by identifying 976 websites for anti-abortion pregnancy centers. Using the enterprise analytics tool Semrush, they found that 188 of the centers had actively run Google search ads between March 2021 and February 2023. They assessed those centers' ads, websites and the keywords for which they bought paid advertising. Among the organization's findings: 38% of the centers that advertised on Google in this period had no homepage disclaimer stating that they don't provide abortions. That appears to violate a Google policy prohibiting ads or destinations concealing or misstating information about the advertiser's business, product or service. Researchers found that the anti-abortion pregnancy centers targeted more than 15,000 queries related to abortion, including phrases like "telehealth abortion pill texas" and "how much is an abortion in california.""
"Digital marketing firms that specifically cater to anti-abortion pregnancy centers make the ad-buying strategy clear. One such firm, Choose Life Marketing, has a guide that urges the centers to buy Google keywords using abortion terms. "It's vital to reach women on their phones early in the search process, before the abortion clinic can reach them," it says. Choose Life Marketing's guide recommends that centers note on their websites that they do not provide or refer abortions, while suggesting ad language that's vague about what the center does provide. "You can also be creative and instead use abortion terms in your ads without using them to describe a service offering: 'Get the facts before scheduling an abortion...' or 'Considering Abortion?' " it says. "Reaching abortion-minded women requires centers to be very strategic in all areas of marketing, but especially in Google advertising." In a guide focused on reaching women in states with restrictive abortion laws, Choose Life recommends that anti-abortion centers "bid on keywords related to the next city or town where abortion is available." Paid advertising, it says, "can help reach her in the knick [sic] of time. This is especially critical for reaching women before they travel for abortion.""
"Google has specific policies for advertisers running ads on abortion queries. To run ads on such queries in the U.S., U.K. or Ireland, Google dictates "you will first need to be certified as an advertiser that either provides abortions or does not provide abortions. If you are not certified, you won't be able to run ads using queries related to getting an abortion." If the advertiser provides abortions or is a certified online pharmacy providing abortion pills, the Google ads will include a disclosure that says "Provides abortions." If it is an advertiser that does not actually provide abortions, the disclosure on the ad will say "Does not provide abortions.""
"Google says it removes or blocks ads that violate its policies. "We know that people come to Google looking for information they can trust during deeply personal moments and are committed to ensuring advertisements on this topic are clear and easily understood," the company said in a statement to NPR. After the Center for Countering Digital Hate released a report last year on similar issues with paid Google advertising — such as Google Maps results that would direct those seeking abortions to anti-abortion clinics — Google says it "took immediate action" on ads violating its policies, including those that misrepresented the services they actually provide. The company says it regularly reviews its policies and updates its list of "in-scope abortion queries" as needed. To ensure that people seeking abortions don't get taken in by misleading ads, the Center for Countering Digital Hate is calling on legislators to ban misleading advertising on abortion. It's also asking Google to make all ads from anti-abortion pregnancy centers bear the disclaimer "does not provide abortions," to require the centers' websites to display clear disclaimers — and for Google's search results to highlight actual abortion clinics."
"[W]e are concerned that, in a world in which abortion could be made illegal, Google’s current practice of collecting and retaining extensive records of cell phone location data will allow it to become a tool for far-right extremists looking to crack down on people seeking reproductive health care. That’s because Google stores historical location information about hundreds of millions of smartphone users, which it routinely shares with government agencies."
"While Google collects and retains customer location data for various business purposes, including to target online ads, Google is not the only entity to make use of this data. Law enforcement officials routinely obtain court orders forcing Google to turn over its customers' location information. This includes dragnet “geofence” orders demanding data about everyone who was near a particular location at a given time. In fact, according to data published by Google, one quarter of the law enforcement orders that your company receives each year are for these dragnet geofence orders; Google received 11,554 geofence warrants in 2020."
"No law requires Google to collect and keep records of its customers’ every movement. Apple has shown that it is not necessary for smartphone companies to retain invasive tracking databases of their customers’ locations. Google’s intentional choice to do so is creating a new digital divide, in which privacy and security are made a luxury. Americans who can afford an iPhone have greater privacy from government surveillance of their movements than the tens of millions Americans using Android devices."
"While Google deserves credit for being one of the first companies in America to insist on a warrant before disclosing location data to law enforcement, that is not enough. If abortion is made illegal by the far-right Supreme Court and Republican lawmakers, it is inevitable that right-wing prosecutors will obtain legal warrants to hunt down, prosecute and jail women for obtaining critical reproductive health care. The only way to protect your customers’ location data from such outrageous government surveillance is to not keep it in the first place."
"The Web site started out as Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web but eventually received a new moniker with the help of a dictionary. The name Yahoo! is an acronym for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle, but Filo and Yang insist they selected the name because they liked the general definition of a yahoo: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth." Yahoo! itself first resided on Yang's student workstation, "Akebono," while the software was lodged on Filo's computer, "Konishiki" - both named after legendary sumo wrestlers."
"Ben Hammersley has written a curious article that is decidedly in favour of Yahoo over Google"
"The United States should lead the world when it comes to transparency, accountability, and respect of civil liberties and human rights. We filed the [law]suit today because we are not authorised at present to break out the number of requests, if any, that we receive for user data under specific national security statutes. We believe that the US government's important responsibility to protect public safety can be carried out without precluding internet companies from sharing the number of national security requests they may receive."
"I originally wrote The w:ONElist File in 2001/2002. It started as my attempt to collect and save as much collateral from ONElist as possible, including emails, press releases, articles, etc. I eventually wrote the story of the first year and a half of ONElist, from the time I thought of the idea, through our Series A venture funding. I haven’t touched it since then; I’m reformatting it now for the new blog."
"It took a tongue-lashing from Congress before these high-tech titans did the right thing and coughed up some concrete assistance for the family of a journalist whom Yahoo! had helped send to jail...What a disgrace."
"Yahoo! had a choice. It chose to provide an e-mail service hosted on servers based inside China, making itself subject to Chinese legal jurisdiction. It didn't have to do that. It could have provided a service hosted offshore only."
"I want to reiterate what we have said in the past - Yahoo has never given access to our data centres to the NSA or to any other government agency. Ever. There is nothing more important to us than protecting our users' privacy."
"Yahoo was Jerry Yang’s baby. He did a great job creating the baby. Unfortunately, some of the key executives after the foundation of the company couldn’t keep up with the technology innovation of the industry. They thought that Yahoo should become a media company."
"If they had listened to me and had equal partnerships in China, the U.K., Germany and Brazil, maybe Yahoo in those countries could have become positioned like Yahoo Japan."
"The early story of Yahoo is now Silicon Valley mythology. As graduate students at the Stanford School of Engineering in 1994, Yang, a math-oriented Taiwanese immigrant, and Filo, a quiet programmer from Louisiana, created a directory of links called Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web. It was a handy map to what was then an unnavigable digital landscape, and web surfers loved it. The following year, when w:Sequoia Capital invested in the newly renamed startup, it brought in a former Motorola executive named Tim Koogle to be CEO."
"During the 2000s, Yahoo’s biggest mistakes were failures of will. Semel, billed as a “deals guy” from Hollywood, could have bought Google in 2002, as Fred Vogelstein reported in Wired. Yahoo also came close to buying Facebook in 2006, until Semel lowered his offer from $1 billion to $850 million after a disappointing earnings report, alienating an already reluctant Mark Zuckerberg in the process, according to David Kirkpatrick’s book, The Facebook Effect."
"[The release of the documents would contribute] constructively to the ongoing public discussion around w:online privacy"
"At Yahoo, we believe in the transformative power of the Internet. That's why we are so committed to working to support free expression and privacy around the world."
"I kept bugging Dave to show me the sites he had found. So he made his hot-list, and I made my hot-list, and he wrote some software to combine both our lists."
"We’re shutting down the Yahoo Groups website on December 15, 2020 and members will no longer be able to send or receive emails from Yahoo Groups. Yahoo Mail features will continue to function as expected and there will be no changes to your Yahoo Mail account, emails, photos or other inbox content. There will also be no changes to other Yahoo properties or services. You can find more information about the Yahoo Groups shutdown and alternative service options on this help page."
"Specific threats of violence or wishing for serious physical harm, death, or disease to an individual or group of people is in violation of our policies. Our new changes include more types of related content including: Accounts that affiliate with organizations that use or promote violence against civilians to further their causes. Groups included in this policy will be those that identify as such or engage in activity — both on and off the platform — that promotes violence. This policy does not apply to military or government entities and we will consider exceptions for groups that are currently engaging in (or have engaged in) peaceful resolution."
"We are deeply sorry about the pain these statements, and the attention they are drawing, are causing the family, we've been working to expand existing product features and policies so we can more effectively address things like this going forward, and we hope to have those changes in place shortly."
"Twitter is actively preparing to support the transition of w:White House institutional Twitter accounts on January 20th, 2021. As we did for the presidential transition in 2017, this process is being done in close consultation with the w:National Archives and Records Administration."
"Voter fraud of any kind is exceedingly rare in the US, election experts confirm"
"! This claim about election fraud is disputed"
"As a result of the unprecedented and ongoing violent situation in Washington, D.C., we have required the removal of three @realDonaldTrump Tweets that were posted earlier today for repeated and severe violations of our Civic Integrity policy"
"This means that the account of @realDonaldTrump will be locked for 12 hours following the removal of these Tweets. If the Tweets are not removed, the account will remain locked."
"After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them — specifically how they are being received and interpreted on and off Twitter — we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence"
"Elon’s appointment to the board was to become officially effective on 4/9, but Elon shared that same morning that he would not be joining the board. I believe this is for the best."
"HB20 would compel platforms to disseminate all sorts of objectionable viewpoints, such as Russia’s propaganda claiming that its invasion of Ukraine is justified, ISIS propaganda claiming that extremism is warranted, neo-Nazi or KKK screeds denying or supporting the Holocaust, and encouraging children to engage in risky or unhealthy behavior like eating disorders."
"I don’t have confidence in management."
"Too many twits make a twat."
"I Don't Look at Twitter Because It Doesn't Tell Me Anything."
"Twitter hates comedy. It hates truth. It hates free speech. And it hates the American People, because they refuse to be docile sheep."
"They [Twitter] are not principled in this. They have so much garbage and filth on that platform all the time. They did not censor people when they are using those platforms or the rioting that occurred over the summer."
"A million fucking message boards, email, Twitter, any number of free tools, being limited only by time and your imagination? If I’d had the internet in 1988 I WOULD OWN AN ENTIRE COUNTRY BY NOW AND WOULD PUT HUNDREDS OF YOU TO DEATH EACH DAY JUST FOR FUN AND IT WOULD BE THE LAW."
"That is the central tenet of twenty- first-century Western philosophy: ‘I tweet, therefore I am.’"
"Running an ad-free website where millions of people gather every day to discuss facts and update scores of pages is a monumental task. It’s incredible that Wikipedia doesn’t often go down and has few technical problems. Most of the time, Wikipedia works without issue. The same is not true for X (formerly known as Twitter)."
"That you cannot argue with 30 million people on Twitter I will grant you, which is why nobody is asking anybody to do that. But do you know what you can do with 30 million people on Twitter? You can wait one afternoon. People can be ruthless on social media, but they also have the long-term memory of goldfish. The whole cycle—the controversy, the apology, the rash of takes about the apology, the rash of takes about the takes about the apology, and the redemption—lives its lifespan so quickly you could miss one completely if you flew from New York to LA and didn’t spring for the Gogo in-flight WiFi. If you make a piece of art, and Twitter registers its displeasure with it, you can either stomp your feet and quit the game forever, or—I promise you this is true—go to the gym for a couple hours."
"The offensive attitudes and statements discovered on James' Twitter feed are indefensible and inconsistent with our studio's values, and we have severed our business relationship with him."
"No official directive at all, and I don’t think I’ve ever tweeted anything that bad. But it’s nine years of stuff written largely off the cuff as ephemera, if trolls scrutinizing it for ammunition is the new normal, this seems like a “why not?” move."
"I think there are times that the other side does it to get you caught."
"There’s no way that this is just happening randomly."
"I do think it was not correct to ban Donald Trump"
"Without significant subscription revenue, there is a good chance Twitter will not survive the upcoming economic downturn. We need roughly half of our revenue to be subscription."
"Much of the stuff on Twitter or in op-ed pieces is all the more embarrassing for having been written from a presumed position of great intellectual superiority..."
"People are always criticizing Twitter. "Twitter is crazy!" they say. I think that's misguided. Twitter is simply an avenue -- there are many -- by which people reveal who they are."
"I complained to Twitter about the man who, pretending to be me, commended the Charleston racist murderer. Twitter responded: “We have determined that it’s not in violation of Twitter’s impersonation policy.” I felt a flash of rage. Every time an online shaming occurred Twitter and Google made money. Whereas those of us doing the actual shaming? We got nothing. Twitter suddenly felt uncaring, intimidating, even dangerous. We were unpaid shaming interns for a company that didn’t care about us. I quit Twitter. The world outside Twitter was great. I read books. I reconnected with people I knew from real life and met them for drinks in person. Then I drifted back on to Twitter."
"If Shakespeare were alive today, he might be writing on Twitter."
"Twitter is the people’s tool, the tool of the ordinary people, people who have no other resources."
"If you’ve ever been to the monkey house in one of those awful downscale zoos, you know what monkeys — these particular monkeys — are like: They jerk off and fling poo all day, generally using the same hand for both, and they don’t do a hell of a lot else, unless there’s McDonald’s. All day: jerk off, fling poo, jerk off, fling poo, jerk, fling, jerk, fling. Twitter, basically."
"The big tech companies understood that the government had not only damaged American principles, it had hurt their businesses."
"Big Tech — like other large US companies — benefited from corporate tax cuts implemented under President Donald Trump. In many cases, the smaller tax payments helped boost their profits. However, not all of Trump's policies and actions during his first term have played well with Big Tech."
"The effect of this is there is no longer a free and open social media company or site for any American to get on any longer. Because these big companies—Apple, Amazon, Google—they have just destroyed what was likely a billion dollar company, and, poof, it's gone...But it's more than the just the financial aspect of that. Republicans have no way to communicate. It doesn't even matter if you're Republican or conservative, if you don't want to be regulated by left-wingers that are at Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, where you get shadow-banned and nobody gets to see you and they get to decide what's violent or not violent, it's preposterous."
"The Social Democratic Party (SPD) of Germany successfully used online voting for the first time during their recent internal consultation related to the government’s new coalition. From February 20 to March 3, the SPD allowed its party members living abroad to vote online with Scytl’s online voting system."
"Servers in Frankfurt were used for a specific project for the European Parliament in 2019. These back-up servers were closed in September 2019."
"Sunday I had information from some of our former intel people that there was extremely compelling evidence that can be gleaned from Scytl. That's S-C-Y-T-L. That's a company headquartered in Barcelona Spain that was responsible for aggregating all of our, all the information from all the machines and whatnot. Uh, but now the main headquarters had moved to Frankfurt. You know Frankfurt: where Merkl, uh, in Germany, had said the day after the election that Trump needed to go ahead and concede. Well, uh, they're going through bankruptcy, but they, that information as to how many votes were switched from Republican to Democrat, would've been easily established by the information that Scytl gathered. And y'know how, what were the votes going in, and which ones were changed going out. And he said "can you send me exactly the information we need to gather?" and so I got that information and sent it the wee hours of Monday morning and before he would've had a chance to, uh, make a request to get any of that information, uh, it turns out... I don't know the truth... I know that there was a German tweet in German saying that on Monday, uh, U.S. army forces went into Scytl and grabbed their server. There's some that believe this is the US intelligent that manipulated all this in order to cover their own rear ends but it's a little disturbing to just contemplate just how corrupt the government has gotten with the whole Russia hoax, the framing of Mike Flynn, and so many others: Carter Page, Papadapalous. So this is a desperate time for our country"
"The servers at Scytl in Germany were confiscated the other day. I’m hearing it was our forces that got those servers, so I think the government is now working on an investigation of what really happened."
"Consider California. Its wealth was initially built on gold mines. But today it is built on silicon and celluloid - Silicon Valley and the celluloid hills of Hollywood."
"The décor was standard-issue Silicon Valley tech: industrial shag carpet, exposed ceilings revealing ventilation ducts and fire-retardant-covered steel beams, and the odd piece of home-brewed installation art: an imposing Lego wall featuring the blocky murals left by employees, another wall papered with the vaguely Orwellian posters the in-house printshop churned out."
"The chip industry gave the region a new name when Don Hoefler, a columnist for the weekly trade paper Electronic News, began a series in January 1971 entitled "Silicon Valley USA." The forty-mile Santa Clara Valley, which stretches from South San Francisco through Palo Alto to San Jose, has as its commercial backbone El Camino Real, the royal road that once connected California's twenty-one mission churches and is now a bustling avenue that connects companies and startups accounting for a third of the venture capital investment in the United States each year. "Growing up, I got inspired by the history of the place," Jobs said. "That made me want to a part of it.""
"Design came to Silicon Valley on the heels of engineering, and there were no reliable guides or even a clear sense of what it meant to "design" a variable attenuator or a helical-scan video recorder—much less of their relevance to the consumer market. Steinhilber reflected that "When I started out in the design field in New York most of our work was for the "white goods" industry (major appliances). When I moved to Ohio I had to learn the language of the machine-tool industry. But here was an infant field whose vocabulary was still in gestation. They were making it up as they went along." ... The first generation of practitioners approached this terra incognita on the basis of creativity, intuition, instinct, and taste, and they sought out inspiration from wherever they could find it: HP's Carl Clement traveled to MIT to experience "creative engineering"; Myron Stolaroff retreated to a cabin in the Sierra Nevada where he administered LSD to eight fellow Ampex engineers in an effort to unlock their latent creativity. At the Stanford Research Institute, computer pioneer Douglas Engelbart dabbled in the human potential movement and enrolled his unwitting staff in est seminars. ... With every new technological lurch the need for a more specialized set of professional skills became apparent, but also, paradoxically, for a wider vision."
"... I really do think, and not just because I happen to be writing a book about it, that the business of creating and foisting new technologies upon others that goes on in Silicon Valley is near the core of the American experience. The United States obviously occupies a strange place in the world. It is the capital of innovation, of material prosperity, of a certain kind of energy, of certain kinds of freedom, and of transience. Silicon Valley is to the United States what the United States is to the rest of the world. It is one of those places, unlike the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but like Las Vegas, that are unimaginable anywhere but in the United States."
"Ronald Reagan was right. The high-tech revolution was an only-in-America story. And he and so many others were right to laud people like Jobs and Gates and Hewlett and Packard as entrepreneurial heroes. Silicon Valley could never have come to be without the presence of visionary, audacious business leaders. Reagan and his conservative allies also were right when they argued that overly regulated markets and nationalized industries could present big hurdles to entrepreneurial markets—many of the globe's would-be Silicon Valleys attest to that. Yet, in its celebration of the free market, the individual entrepreneur, and the miracles of a wholly new economy, the Silicon Valley mythos left out some of the most interesting, unprecedented, and quintessentially America things about the modern tech industry. For these entrepreneurs were not lone cowboys, but very talented people whose success was made possible by the work of many other people, networks, and institutions."
"... I realize that my career at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (better known as Xerox PARC) has afforded me a much wider view of civilization. In particular, it has provided me with endless opportunities to meet with visitors from all parts of the world and in turn to visit nearly all parts of the world. Everyone takes Silicon Valley seriously now. With these visits, hardly a day goes by that I don't get asked to explain the magical brew that makes up Silicon Valley. What is it? What makes it so special? Can it be copied? If not, why not? And if yes, how? And what about that famous culture? What does it feel like to work for a large East Coast company and yet be a part of the Valley? Does this give me a different perspective—having to bridge those two quite different cultures daily? And how are those cultures different?"
"... I am always skeptical of copying things. ... Just like you shouldn't try to copy Microsoft or Facebook, copying Silicon Valley is probably also the wrong idea. ... One reason it's the wrong idea is that we don't even actually know what makes Silicon Valley work. Maybe it's the weather. Maybe it's non-compete agreements are not enforced in California. Maybe it is that there are these crazy network effects. ... All kinds of different explanations ... one can give. Even if we wanted to, I am not sure we know what makes it work. And then, I think, even more fundamentally when you are copying something, you are setting yourself up to be defined in a lesser way. If you are the Oxford of Iceland, that's not quite Oxford ... The something of somewhere is often the nothing of nowhere."
"In the Silicon Valley, there is the view that is widely shared in the world. And it is materialist and reductionist, for which the human being is a machine and reality is describable by the classical physics]] of objects moving in space-time. It is also the deception of today's artificial intelligence, which is more 'logo' to sell than the real thing. In this view, consciousness and experience are classified as simple phenomena that can be measured and described mathematically, when in fact they are not. This is why the current description of artificial intelligence is actually misleading."
"Several Republicans including Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan and Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) criticized Texas’ near-total ban on abortion Sunday because of its provision empowering private citizens to sue those who aid and abet abortions—potentially signaling the legal tactic could face resistance from within the GOP as more states plan to copy Texas’ law. The Maryland governor specifically pointed to the law’s “problem of bounties,” as the Texas law—known as Senate Bill 8 (SB 8)—says government officials cannot enforce the law, but rather directs private citizens to file lawsuits against anyone who “aids and abets” an abortion and stipulates they can earn at least $10,000 in damages if they win. Kinzinger said on CNN that while he’s “pro-life,” what he “doesn’t like to see” is letting “everyone being able to tattle” and the fact that under SB 8, private citizens are “deputized to enforce this abortion law” against even potentially Uber drivers that transport a Texan to their abortion."
"Authorities in the Indian capital, Delhi, have banned international taxi-booking service Uber after a driver allegedly raped a female passenger. A transport department official said the company had been "blacklisted" for "misleading customers"."
"Uber, which is growing in popularity in India, has been accused of failing to conduct adequate checks on its drivers. "(The) Transport Department has banned all activities relating to providing any transport service by the www.Uber.com with immediate effect," news agency AFP reported, quoting from a government statement. The ban means any Uber taxi in Delhi will now attract a fine or even be impounded, officials say. The company is still accepting bookings on its app and it is not yet clear how the ban will be enforced since Uber taxis do not carry any visible branding. Before the ban was announced, Uber described the incident as "horrific" and said it would do everything "to help bring this perpetrator to justice". "Our entire team's hearts go out to the victim of this despicable crime. We will do everything, I repeat, everything to help bring this perpetrator to justice and to support the victim and her family in her recovery," Uber CEO Travis Kalanick said in a statement. He said Uber would "work with the government to establish clear background checks currently absent in their commercial transportation licensing programs"."
"Change is not easy, and some resisted. However, after it became a rule, every lecturer adjusted and universities have changed to use a model platform. Covid-19 became like an accelerator,”"
"Parents need awareness to know the benefits of technology and support their children. Technology is based on two things; skills and equipment. But it was good to see parents working hard to support their children through the technology learning journey. It was not easy, but during Covid-19 people learnt a lot,”"
"Girls should be passionate about what they study as passion drives them to thrive in the field. I assure them that hard work pays and nothing comes without trying. It is important to be confident, have a persistent spirit, and collaborate with others."