Heading toward the end of a year which has no doubt proven trying for practically all of the online "giants," Google, perhaps the biggest of all, is facing yet another anti-trust investigation, this time brought against it by a nationwide group of states, including DC and Puerto Rico. The investigation appears to be following a [...]
It's not just Facebook who has been facing the regulators for their business practices. Google property YouTube has been under investigation by the same Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, by collecting data on children under the age of 13. The issue has apparently been resolved by a negotiated [...]
According to data compiled by marketing firm Miniwatts, and sourced from Nielsen Online, the International Telecommunications Union, GfK and local regulators, an estimated 525 million people on the African continent went online last month. More than internet users in North America and the Middle East combined, despite the lowest level of internet penetration. The only [...]
Late last month, following an on-going series of leaks about the project, Facebook officially announced its plans to launch their own, in-platform cryptocurrency, to be known as Libra, scheduled for 2020. According to the Libra Whitepaper released by Facebook, their mission is to "enable a simple global currency and financial infrastructure that empowers billions of [...]
At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing earlier this month, Karan Bhatia, Google's VP of Public Policy, admitted that the company's controversial plan to re-launch its search engine in China while complying with the country's restrictive internet censorship laws had been underway, but said that that it had been cancelled. The new Chinese version of Google [...]
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, Facebook Chairman, and controlling shareholder, has always made a point of ensuring that his power over Facebook is effectively unassailable, an approach that many have felt unfair at best, and totalitarian at worst. Now, in the wake of consecutive years of scandals involving the social media giant on everything from their [...]
At the end of last month, Facebook announced that it would be getting what will probably be the biggest ever redesign of the platform in 15 years. The new look was officially revealed at the annual Facebook Developers conference, (F8) in California. The new design will remove the ubiquitous blue menu bar, and replace it [...]
Earlier this month, researchers released information revealing a flaw in almost every Intel chip manufactured since 2011 that made it possible to harvest sensitive data, including account tokens, keys and passwords, from the processor. Microarchitectural data sampling results from a flaw in the physical design of the chip, and in response, software firms have stepped [...]
The internet has traditionally been seen as largely "ungovernable" thanks to its decentralised nature and the potential (fast decreasing) for anonymity. A popular description for it has been that it's like the Wild West, which has struck me as amusing for years, since I remember when the internet really was a lawless and wild place, [...]
After the relatively recent Cambridge Analytica scandal which saw Facebook user data being harvested and used for political campaign purposes, the Federal Trade Commission in the US began investigating the social media platform, for a potential breach of a 2011 agreement with the platform regarding consumer privacy. Of course, that's only one of a number [...]
