Companies Of The United States

"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."

"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."

"It's the oldest institution of its kind and, as such, many people refer to it as the Harvard of Internet colleges."

"I am proud to serve as the new president of University of Phoenix, and deeply grateful for the opportunity to build on the legacy of Dr. Pepicello. University of Phoenix has pioneered change throughout higher education, and I'm excited to lead this groundbreaking and innovative institution.I am passionate about higher education and strongly believe in the important role it plays in preparing our future leaders and helping to solve many of our most vexing societal challenges. I am committed to helping preserve and enhance the investment our students are making in their education, and ensuring they have the support and innovation from University of Phoenix they need to achieve their education and career goals."

"The University of Phoenix, the publicly traded grand-daddy of for-profit colleges, made headlines a few weeks ago with the revelation that the company's enrollment had dropped 50 percent over the past five years. … John Murphy, a co-founder of the University of Phoenix, isn't surprised by any of this news. Murphy argues that the company lost its direction when it abandoned its roots, which were serving working adults, not recent high school graduates. … [I]t was the combination of chasing stock prices with the temptation of the open spigot of federal loans."

"How did the institution that we would call career college or trade school transform itself into a $32-billion-a-year business? Mainly by "milking" the government for profit, and taking advantage of student-loan programs designed to help those on the bottom of the economic pyramid continue their studies beyond high school. The Apollo Group, which owns the University of Phoenix, derives almost 89 percent of its revenues from the federal government, and Kaplan Higher Education, owned by Graham Holdings (formerly the Washington Post Group), almost 88 percent."

"[The release of the documents would contribute] constructively to the ongoing public discussion around w:online privacy"

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

"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! 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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Ben Hammersley has written a curious article that is decidedly in favour of Yahoo over Google"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

"[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."

"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."

"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.""

"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.""

"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.""

"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."

"The destiny of Google's search engine is to become that Star Trek computer, and that's what we are building."

"Google's vision of the future is pure atom-age 1960s Jetsons fantasy, bubble-dwelling spiritless sexists above a ruined earth."

"[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."

"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."

"Supporting Wikipedia is [...] a shrewd business decision that will likely benefit Google for years to come."

"Vaccine misinformation appears globally, it appears in all countries and cultures."

"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"

"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."