Andrew Orr

Google wants to create a censored version of its search engine for China. And China has recently shared laws on speech suppression that Google will likely have to use to achieve its Muslim persecution.

Article 28 of the new laws orders telecommunications operators to “put in place monitoring systems and technological prevention measures for audio, messages, and communication records” that may have “extremifying information.”

Forms of “extremification,” as laid out in the laws, are vague. They include “interfering” with people’s ability to interact with people of other ethnicities or faiths and “rejecting or refusing public goods and services.”

Don’t be evil, Don’t be evil, Don’t be evil, Don’t be evil, Don’t be evil, Don’t be evil.

Vogue editor Anna Wintour interviewed Jony Ive at Wired‘s 25th anniversary event. They talked about innovation, Apple’s secrecy. and civic duties of tech companies.

I’ve been doing this for long enough where I actually feel a responsibility to not confuse or add more noise about what’s being worked on because I know that it sometimes does not work out.

Unfortunately there isn’t a video interview but if Wired releases one I’ll add a link.

Graduate student Urmila Mahadev has solved a quantum verification problem. Quantum verification answers the question: How do you know whether a quantum computer has done something quantum? Redditor u/Wolgoz has an ELI5 (Explain Like I’m 5) explanation:

There are different kinds of problems in computer science, closely related is the class of problems where you can easily verify if the answer is correct, but it’s hard to find the answer. This is however about the class of problems where you can’t easily check it with a normal computer, but can check it with a quantum computer.

She made a protocol that allows you to use a quantum device to check the answer, without the uncertainty of quantum mechanics. She does however make an important assumption, so it’s not certain if this will work.

macOS Mojave brought a Mac App Store update, but developers aren’t fully satisfied by Apple’s changes.

Digging into survey answers, the biggest issues developers still have are ones that have been identified multiple times over the years: inability to offer trials or priced upgrades, as well as a lack of analytics. Lengthy app reviews and sandboxing rules have been issues for some developers, as well. Though the former has seen marked improvement in 2018, 33 percent of MAS developers still rate “faster approval” as a desired improvement, and 65 percent of non-MAS developers cite the approval process as a reason for staying out.

Apple can’t treat the MAS like the iOS App Store. If Apple wants the MAS to be the sole source of Mac apps, it has to give developers enough incentives to favor it over their own websites.

Big Data is a huge money making business, and a big example of this is AOL. No longer an ISP, AOL is now a data broker.

The collected data has value because of how it’s used in online advertising, specifically targeted advertising: when a company sends an ad your way based on information about you, such as your location, age, and race. Targeted ads, the thinking goes, are not only more likely to result in a sale (or at least a click), they’re also supposed to be more relevant to consumers.

While some people might want better ads that are more relevant to them, the article makes a good point: “I have targeted ads that are more attuned to my desires and my wants… But if you have someone who has an alcohol abuse problem getting a liquor store ad…” 

And I’m cynical enough to believe that the average advertiser wouldn’t care about that in the slightest.

Smart speakers like the Amazon Echo take advantage of Wikipedia, and Wikipedia deservers way more of our money.

But it’s not just the fact that this donation is, in the scheme of things, paltry. It’s that this “endowment” is dwarfed by what Amazon and its ilk get out of Wikipedia—figuratively and literally. Wikipedia provides the intelligence behind many of Alexa’s most useful skills, its answers to everything from “What is Wikipedia?” to “What is Slate?” (meta). Tech companies that profit from Wikipedia’s extensive database owe Wikimedia a much greater debt.

Amazon recently donated US$1 million to Wikimedia, but that’s a drop in the bucket when you think just how many people and services use Wikipedia. Especially since it’s a non-profit organization that gets most of its money through donations.

Privacy search engine DuckDuckGo announced it has reached 30 million daily searches. This is good news, because unlike other search engines DuckDuckGo doesn’t track you.

We’ve been growing by approximately 50% a year pretty consistently so at a macro level it isn’t too surprising, just the numbers are getting bigger! That said it has been even increased on top of that this year, especially in the past two months.

I’ve been using DuckDuckGo exclusively for a couple years now, and its gotten much better in that time. I don’t miss Google at all.

Jason Kehe writes about an interesting trope in fantasy books: wizard schools. Specifically, orphans who go to wizard school, meet friends along the way, and finally defeat a villain.

Authors change; the story stays the same. In the darkness a child is born. The child suffers, but he has mysterious power. Posthaste, destiny leads the child to the same place it herds all the courageous orphan-protagonists of speculative fiction: a storied and exclusive institution of magical learning, where he unnerves the faculty, demonstrates arrogance, and forms lasting friendships on his way to vanquishing evil.

Google+ recently suffered an incident where a bug potentially exposed the data of thousands of users. Now we’re seeing a bipartisan push to reign in tech companies after a deluge of leaks.

At a Senate hearing Wednesday, Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune (R., S.D.) said it is increasingly clear from Google+ as well as Facebook Inc.’s earlier Cambridge Analytica scandal that industry self-regulation is no longer sufficient to protect users’ privacy.

We should never have trusted corporations to be able to self-regulate in the first place. That’s like telling a criminal to voluntarily turn themselves in.