Here are some web trends for 2020:
Responsive web design in 2020 should be a given because every serious project that you create should look good and be completely usable on all devices. But there’s no need to over-complicate things.
Web Development in 2020: What Coding Tools You Should Learn article gives an overview of recommendations what you learn to become a web developer in 2020.
You might have seen Web 3.0 on some slides. What is the definition of web 3 we are talking about here?
There seems to be many different to choose from… Some claim that you need to blockchain the cloud IOT otherwise you’ll just get a stack overflow in the mainframe but I don’t agree on that.
Information on the web address bar will be reduced on some web browsers. With the release of Chrome 79, Google completes its goal of erasing www from the browser by no longer allowing Chrome users to automatically show the www trivial subdomain in the address bar.
You still should target to build quality web site and avoid the signs of a low-quality web site. Get good inspiration for your web site design.
Still a clear and logical structure is the first thing that needs to be turned over in mind before the work on the website gears up. The website structure for search robots is its internal links. The more links go to a page, the higher its priority within the website, and the more times the search engine crawls it.
You should upgrade your web site, but you need to do it sensibly and well. Remember that a site upgrade can ruin your search engine visibility if you do it badly. The biggest risk to your site getting free search engine visibility is site redesign. Bad technology selection can ruin the visibility of a new site months before launch. Many new sites built on JavaScript application frameworks do not benefit in any way from the new technologies. Before you go into this bandwagon, you should think critically about whether your site will benefit from the dynamic capabilities of these technologies more than they can damage your search engine visibility. Well built redirects can help you keep the most outbound links after site changes.
If you go to the JavaScript framework route on your web site, keep in mind that there are many to choose, and you need to choose carefully to find one that fits for your needs and is actively developed also in the future.
JavaScript survey: Devs love a bit of React, but Angular and Cordova declining. And you’re not alone… a chunk of pros also feel JS is ‘overly complex’
Keep in mind the recent changes on the video players and Google analytics. And for animated content keep in mind that GIF animations exists still as a potential tool to use.
Keep in mind the the security. There is a skill gap in security for many. I’m not going to say anything that anyone who runs a public-facing web server doesn’t already know: the majority of these automated blind requests are for WordPress directories and files. PHP exploits are a distant second. And there are many other things that are automatically attacked. Test your site with security scanners.
APIs now account for 40% of the attack surface for all web-enabled apps. OWASP has identified 10 areas where enterprises can lower that risk. There are many vulnerability scanning tools available. Check also How to prepare and use Docker for web pentest . Mozilla has a nice on-line tool for web site security scanning.
The slow death of Flash continues. If you still use Flash, say goodbye to it. Google says goodbye to Flash, will stop indexing Flash content in search.
Use HTTPS on your site because without it your site rating will drop on search engines visibility. It is nowadays easy to get HTTPS certificates.
Write good content and avoid publishing fake news on your site. Finland is winning the war on fake news. What it’s learned may be crucial to Western democracy,
Think to who you are aiming to your business web site to. Analyze who is your “true visitor” or “power user”. A true visitor is a visitor to a website who shows a genuine interest in the content of the site. True visitors are the people who should get more of your site and have the potential to increase the sales and impact of your business. The content that your business offers is intended to attract visitors who are interested in it. When they show their interest, they are also very likely to be the target group of the company.
Should you think of your content management system (CMS) choice? Flexibility, efficiency, better content creation: these are just some of the promised benefits of a new CMS. Here is How to convince your developers to change CMS.
Here are some fun for the end:
Did you know that if a spider creates a web at a place?
The place is called a website
Confession: How JavaScript was made.
2,361 Comments
Tomi Engdahl says:
Saavutettavuus on prosessi – ja näin pääset siinä alkuun
https://www.frantic.com/fi/blogi/saavutettavuus-on-prosessi-ja-nain-paaset-siina-alkuun
Saavutettavuus on digitaalisten tuotteiden ja palveluiden laadullinen ominaisuus ja se tulee ottaa huomioon läpi palveluiden elinkaaren.
Saavutettavuutta ei kannata toteuttaa niin, että palvelu tuotetaan saavutettavaksi kerran ja sitten unohdetaan, vaan työn on oltava jatkuvaa. Saavutettavuus ei ole projekti vaan prosessi – sitä tulee ylläpitää koko ajan ja tehdä aktiivisesti töitä sen eteen läpi organisaation toiminnan.
Tomi Engdahl says:
CAN AN AI MONKEY UNDERSTAND YOUR WEBSITE?
https://blog.attractive.ai/2021/09/can-ai-monkey-understand-your-website.html
Many of you might already be familiar with Poe, Attractive’s AI web expert, who tirelessly tests and analyses websites. But how many of you knew he also has a pet space monkey, MeMe? Like all monkeys, MeMe likes to take part in everything, often causing havoc along the way. Occasionally Poe forgets his computer open, offering MeMe the irresistible opportunity to play the expert.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Et ole Shakespeare, joten testaa viestisi ennen sen valitsemista
https://www.meom.fi/venture/blogi/et-ole-shakespeare-joten-testaa-viestisi-ennen-sen-valitsemista/
Kaikkien aikojen kirjainkuningas on kiistatta William Shakespeare. Hän rikastutti verrattomalla sanavarastollaan englannin kieltä enemmän kuin kukaan muu. Shakespeare käytti tuotannossaan yhteensä 17 677 uniikkia sanaa ja näistä yli 7 000 käytettiin vain kerran. Jotta saisit asiaan vähän perspektiiviä, Shakespearen tuotannossa on kerran käytettyjä sanoja enemmän kuin Kuningas Jaakon Raamatussa erilaisia sanoja ylipäätään.
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.namecheap.com/blog/ssl-green-bar-disappearance/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Understanding How Facebook Disappeared from the Internet
https://blog.cloudflare.com/october-2021-facebook-outage/
Tomi Engdahl says:
‘We need to admit reality,’ Facebook whistleblower says. Here’s what might happen next
https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/03/media/facebook-whistleblower-reliable-sources/index.html
Frances Haugen was a product manager on Facebook’s civic misinformation team. “During her time at Facebook,” her bio says, “Frances became increasingly alarmed by the choices the company makes prioritizing their own profits over public safety — putting people’s lives at risk. As a last resort and at great personal risk, Frances made the courageous act to blow the whistle.”
Haugen now identifies herself as “an advocate for public oversight of social media.” She rolled out a new website, Twitter profile and online identity in the minutes before her blockbuster “60 Minutes” interview aired on CBS.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Update about the October 4th outage
https://engineering.fb.com/2021/10/04/networking-traffic/outage/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Modulaariset sivupohjat verkkosivuilla: niiden 6 etua ja 9 haastetta
https://www.karhuhelsinki.fi/blogi/modulaariset-sivupohjat-verkkosivuilla-niiden-6-etua-ja-9-haastetta
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram are slowly returning. Why did they disappear to begin with?
It’s always DNS, except when it’s BGP
https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/04/facebook-whatsapp-instagram-return/
Tomi Engdahl says:
These Three Letter Tech Acronyms Are Likely Behind Today’s Mega Outage At Facebook
https://www.forbes.com/sites/martingiles/2021/10/04/dns-and-bgp-these-acronyms-are-behind-facebooks-mega-outage/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Zuckerberg Loses $5.9 Billion In A Day As Facebook Faces Rare Outage, Whisteblower Testimony
https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2021/10/04/zuckerberg-net-worth-billionaire-facebook-stock-outage/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus are down. Here’s what we know [Updated]
The root cause of the worldwide outage appears to be a flubbed BGP route update.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/10/facebook-instagram-whatsapp-and-oculus-are-down-heres-what-we-know/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://engineering.fb.com/2021/10/04/networking-traffic/outage/
https://blog.cloudflare.com/october-2021-facebook-outage/
Tomi Engdahl says:
SPA’s are catching up fast among website users for their fluid experience, this is why, you should choose them.
Single Page Applications and Why Should You Choose Them?
https://framian.fi/blog/spa-applications/?fbclid=IwAR2vTXHk-q1A6sWvxsze1bGWG2_ehx5txEIMoyeuuFfcVx2uu6coD2dkWEc
Single Page Applications (SPA) are catching up fast among website users for their fluid experience. But users may be oblivious of the technology because the user is never the one who usually thinks of electricity when turning on a light bulb but the technology enabler.
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2020/07/referrer-policy-new-chrome-default
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ivana Saric / Axios:
Whistleblower Frances Haugen accepts an invitation to brief Facebook’s Oversight Board, which she claims Facebook has lied to “repeatedly” — Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen said Monday she will meet with the social media company’s Oversight Board sometime in the coming weeks.
Facebook whistleblower to brief Facebook Oversight Board, U.K. parliament
https://www.axios.com/facebook-whistleblower-oversight-board-uk-parliament-5bc9b7e9-0b66-4b63-a20c-ddce866c8777.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
New York Times:
Internal messages, documents, and a Zuckerberg Q&A show Facebook’s attempts to calm staff, including sending out talking points and holding briefing sessions
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/10/technology/facebook-whistleblower-employees.html
Bruce Haring / Deadline:
Nick Clegg says that Facebook will put “more friends, less politics” in News Feed and will “nudge” teens away from toxic Instagram content
Facebook To Limit Politics, Boost Friends, Says Spokesman On ‘Meet The Press’
https://deadline.com/2021/10/facebook-meet-the-press-nick-clegg-boost-friends-limit-politics-1234853623/
Fighting back after a whistleblower’s damning testimony earlier this week before a Congressional committee, Facebook spokesman Nick Clegg said on NBC’s Sunday Meet The Press that changes are coming to the social media outlet and to its cousin, Instagram.
Clegg, the former UK deputy prime minister who is now vice president for global affairs and communications at Facebook, said the company will reduce the presence of politics on people’s feeds after it lifted safety measures implemented for the 2020 US election. He claimed the move stems from user feedback seeking “more friends, less politics.”
Facebook’s chief spokesman says the social media giant is going to institute new guards for younger Instagram users in the face of criticism from a whistleblower’s charges that the company puts profits ahead of users’ well being.
Later, in an interview on CNN’s State of the Union, Clegg said Instagram will also undergo some changes designed to better address youngsters amid claims that the service is damaging their mental health.
“But we understand the concerns of some that we need to press pause, listen to experts, explain our intentions and so on,” he said. “We’re going to introduce new controls for adults of teens on an optional basis, obviously, so adults can supervise what their teens are doing online.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Karissa Bell / Engadget:
Instagram says it is testing Activity Feed notifications in the US that will alert users of service outages and technical issues — One week after a massive Facebook outage that took all of the social network’s apps offline for more than six hours, Instagram says it’s testing notifications …
Instagram is testing in-app notifications for service outages
The app is also adding a new ‘account status’ feature for personalized notifications.
https://www.engadget.com/instagram-test-notifications-outages-account-status-210940030.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sam Biddle / The Intercept:
The Intercept publishes Facebook’s secret blacklist of ~4,000 “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations” that users are barred from speaking favorably about — To ward off accusations that it helps terrorists spread propaganda, Facebook has for many years barred users …
Revealed: Facebook’s Secret Blacklist of “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations”
https://theintercept.com/2021/10/12/facebook-secret-blacklist-dangerous/
Experts say the public deserves to see the list, a clear embodiment of U.S. foreign policy priorities that could disproportionately censor marginalized groups.
To ward off accusations that it helps terrorists spread propaganda, Facebook has for many years barred users from speaking freely about people and groups it says promote violence.
The restrictions appear to trace back to 2012, when in the face of growing alarm in Congress and the United Nations about online terrorist recruiting, Facebook added to its Community Standards a ban on “organizations with a record of terrorist or violent criminal activity.” This modest rule has since ballooned into what’s known as the Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy, a sweeping set of restrictions on what Facebook’s nearly 3 billion users can say about an enormous and ever-growing roster of entities deemed beyond the pale.
In recent years, the policy has been used at a more rapid clip, including against the president of the United States, and taken on almost totemic power at the social network, trotted out to reassure the public whenever paroxysms of violence, from genocide in Myanmar to riots on Capitol Hill, are linked to Facebook. Most recently, following a damning series of Wall Street Journal articles showing the company knew it facilitated myriad offline harms, a Facebook vice president cited the policy as evidence of the company’s diligence in an internal memo obtained by the New York Times.
Facebook’s DIO policy has become an unaccountable system that disproportionately punishes certain communities.
A range of legal scholars and civil libertarians have called on the company to publish the list so that users know when they are in danger of having a post deleted or their account suspended for praising someone on it. The company has repeatedly refused to do so, claiming it would endanger employees and permit banned entities to circumvent the policy. Facebook did not provide The Intercept with information about any specific threat to its staff.
Despite Facebook’s claims that disclosing the list would endanger its employees, the company’s hand-picked Oversight Board has formally recommended publishing all of it on multiple occasions, as recently as August, because the information is in the public interest.
The Intercept has reviewed a snapshot of the full DIO list and is today publishing a reproduction of the material in its entirety, with only minor redactions and edits to improve clarity. It is also publishing an associated policy document, created to help moderators decide what posts to delete and what users to punish.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dave Michaels / Wall Street Journal:
Frances Haugen’s lawyer says the SEC has been communicating with her lawyers, but experts say her allegations don’t resemble a typical securities fraud case — Whistleblower allegations don’t resemble a typical securities-fraud case, but the pressure to investigate is strong
Facebook Whistleblower’s Claims Test SEC’s Reach
Allegations don’t resemble a typical securities-fraud case, but the pressure to investigate is strong
https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-claims-test-secs-reach-11634040180?mod=djemalertNEWS
WASHINGTON—The controversy over what Facebook Inc. has said about social and emotional hazards stemming from its products could become a test of regulators’ growing interest in policing corporate risks that hurt reputations more than profits.
The Securities and Exchange Commission has been communicating with attorneys for Frances Haugen, the former Facebook product manager who blew the whistle on the company’s efforts to grapple with problems it played down in public, according to John Napier Tye, a lawyer representing her. Facebook didn’t respond to a request for comment and the SEC declined to confirm whether it is probing Ms. Haugen’s allegations.
But the agency is almost certain to be doing so, according to Marc Fagel, a former director of the SEC’s San Francisco office. “Given how much play this has gotten, especially with the revelation that the whistleblower went to the SEC, there is no way they are not looking at this and feeling pressure to bring some sort of case,” Mr. Fagel said.
Facebook has come under criticism for its targeting of young people and how it responds to misuse of its products since The Wall Street Journal began publishing a series of stories based in part on documents gathered by Ms. Haugen.
The Journal’s reporting detailed the company’s internal research linking teenagers’ use of Instagram to anxiety and depression. In public, Facebook has consistently played down the social platform’s negative effects on teens. While the company hasn’t generally made its research public or available to academics or lawmakers who have asked for it, Facebook in late September published an annotated version of two research decks.
The reporting also showed how Facebook’s efforts to curb the misuse of its platforms by drug cartels and entities linked to human trafficking fell short. Such problems were particularly acute in some developing countries, where Facebook’s user base is large and expanding.
Any securities-enforcement action would likely focus on whether the company or its executives told investors one story about known business risks or trends, while concealing worse news that they shared only internally. Any misleading statements would have to be material, meaning they could be expected to influence a trading decision or a vote on a corporate proxy ballot.
tions don’t resemble a typical securities-fraud case, but the pressure to investigate is strong
Facebook has come under criticism for its targeting of young people and how it responds to the misuse of its products.
Photo: Erkan Akkaya/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
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Updated Oct. 12, 2021 11:22 am ET
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WASHINGTON—The controversy over what Facebook Inc. has said about social and emotional hazards stemming from its products could become a test of regulators’ growing interest in policing corporate risks that hurt reputations more than profits.
The Securities and Exchange Commission has been communicating with attorneys for Frances Haugen, the former Facebook product manager who blew the whistle on the company’s efforts to grapple with problems it played down in public, according to John Napier Tye, a lawyer representing her. Facebook didn’t respond to a request for comment and the SEC declined to confirm whether it is probing Ms. Haugen’s allegations.
But the agency is almost certain to be doing so, according to Marc Fagel, a former director of the SEC’s San Francisco office. “Given how much play this has gotten, especially with the revelation that the whistleblower went to the SEC, there is no way they are not looking at this and feeling pressure to bring some sort of case,” Mr. Fagel said.
Facebook has come under criticism for its targeting of young people and how it responds to misuse of its products since The Wall Street Journal began publishing a series of stories based in part on documents gathered by Ms. Haugen.
The Journal’s reporting detailed the company’s internal research linking teenagers’ use of Instagram to anxiety and depression. In public, Facebook has consistently played down the social platform’s negative effects on teens. While the company hasn’t generally made its research public or available to academics or lawmakers who have asked for it, Facebook in late September published an annotated version of two research decks.
Whistleblower Says Facebook’s Choices Are ‘Disastrous’ for Children, Democracy
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Whistleblower Says Facebook’s Choices Are ‘Disastrous’ for Children, Democracy
Whistleblower Says Facebook’s Choices Are ‘Disastrous’ for Children, Democracy
Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen detailed the internal documents she gathered showing negative impacts from the company’s products and urged lawmakers to consider tougher regulations. Photo: Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg News
The reporting also showed how Facebook’s efforts to curb the misuse of its platforms by drug cartels and entities linked to human trafficking fell short. Such problems were particularly acute in some developing countries, where Facebook’s user base is large and expanding.
Any securities-enforcement action would likely focus on whether the company or its executives told investors one story about known business risks or trends, while concealing worse news that they shared only internally. Any misleading statements would have to be material, meaning they could be expected to influence a trading decision or a vote on a corporate proxy ballot.
The issues cited by Ms. Haugen in her allegations may be material in the eyes of regulators, but they aren’t all traditional securities-fraud claims, according to lawyers. In one whistleblower tip provided to the SEC, Ms. Haugen and her lawyers wrote that Facebook made “multiple material misstatements and omissions on the question of whether Facebook and Instagram impact teenage users,” according to a copy seen by the Journal.
The complaint said Instagram’s side effects matter to investors because a consumer backlash against the product could be expected to reduce user engagement and advertising revenue.
“Traditionally this is not the kind of thing the SEC would be looking at,” said David Rosenfeld, a former senior SEC enforcement official now teaching law at Northern Illinois University, adding that the agency “would typically be looking at things that go to the more current financial condition of the company.”
The SEC can allege disclosures were simply misleading, without having to tie statements to financial trends.
Photo: SAUL LOEB/agence france-presse/getty images
The classic securities enforcement case usually involves claims that a public company fudged its accounting or other metrics followed by investors or failed to disclose key facts that explained its performance. But the SEC can allege disclosures were simply misleading, without having to tie statements to financial trends. This tactic has expanded the type of cases the SEC has brought in recent years, Mr. Rosenfeld said.
Two years ago, for instance, Facebook agreed to pay $100 million to the SEC to resolve allegations that it didn’t disclose the misuse of user data by consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. Facebook settled without admitting or denying the claims.
“You could ask, ‘What do these revelations of misuse of customer data have to do with the company’s profitability?’ But they turned it into an enforcement action,” Mr. Fagel said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
http://www.soberingmirror.com/2021-10-12-How-to-win-an-argument-online/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Will Oremus / Washington Post:
Regulating social media algorithms, an increasingly appealing idea among US lawmakers, is very hard to get right without running afoul of the First Amendment — Whistleblower Frances Haugen says the software that decides what we see in our social feeds is hurting us all. But reforming it won’t be easy.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/12/congress-regulate-facebook-algorithm/
Dave Michaels / Wall Street Journal:
Frances Haugen’s lawyer says the SEC has been communicating with her lawyers, but experts say her allegations don’t resemble a typical securities fraud case
Facebook Whistleblower’s Claims Test SEC’s Reach
Allegations don’t resemble a typical securities-fraud case, but the pressure to investigate is strong
https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-claims-test-secs-reach-11634040180?mod=djemalertNEWS
Tomi Engdahl says:
you need a website RIGHT NOW!! (create a website for FREE)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwUz3E9AW0w
Why don’t you have a website? I think EVERYONE needs a website, especially if you are trying to get a job in information technology!! Not convinced?? In this video, I give you my top 3 reasons why you need a website and I’ll show you how to build a website for free.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Todd Spangler / Variety:
Facebook says it now counts activists and journalists as “involuntary” public figures to help protect them and will remove sexual content targeting celebrities — Facebook said it will remove “severe sexualizing content” targeting public figures — including celebrities …
Facebook Says It Will Start Removing ‘Sexualized Attacks’ on Celebrities as Part of Anti-Harassment Policy Update
https://variety.com/2021/digital/news/facebook-removing-sexualized-attacks-celebrities-1235088091/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Groups launch “How to Stop Facebook” effort
https://www.axios.com/groups-launch-how-to-stop-facebook-effort-e1cbf49e-3914-49ee-8ebe-57a36f99d677.html
A coalition of nonprofits on Wednesday debuted HowToStopFacebook.org, a fresh push to encourage greater government regulation of the social networking giant aimed at forcing the company to change its business model.
Why it matters: The campaign hopes to take the outrage expressed by legislators over the revelations of whistleblower Frances Haugen and translate it into action.
The campaign is pushing for two goals:
A Congressional investigation with subpoena power into harms caused by Facebook; and
A strong federal data privacy law that makes it illegal for companies like Facebook and YouTube to collect the vast amounts of data they use to personalize recommendations.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Well they’re fighting the basic drug pusher industry.
But more power to them; Addiction isn’t easy to kick.
https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2018/dopamine-smartphones-battle-time/
Tomi Engdahl says:
”Tämä sivusto käyttää evästeitä, paina ok”.
Tuttu ilmoitus, mutta riittämätön uusimpien ohjeiden mukaisesti!
Kyberturvallisuuskeskus julkisti 13.9.2021 uuden ohjeistuksen koskien evästeiden tallentamista käyttäjän laitteelle ja näiden laitteella olevien tietojen käyttöä.
Ohjeistus koskee kaikkia verkossa toimivia yrityksiä, jotka keräävät ja käsittelevät henkilötietoja verkko- ja sähköisissä palveluissaan.
Juuri nyt on aika tarkistaa, että yrityksesi evästekäytännöt ovat ajan tasalla.
Lue, mitä uudet suositukset tarkoittavat palveluntarjoajien näkökulmasta ja kuinka yrityksesi voi reagoida toimiakseen lain edellyttämällä tavalla.
Evästeseurannan uusi ohjeistus on julkaistu – Onhan evästekäytänteesi ajan tasalla?
https://www.digimarkkinointi.fi/blogi/evasteseurannan-uusi-ohjeistus-on-julkaistu?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social-paid&utm_campaign=SDM+%7C+Cold+%7C+Uusi+ev%C3%A4steohjeistus+-blogi&utm_content=Uusi+ev%C3%A4steohjeistus+-blogi+%7C+Cold+%7C+Kiinnostukset+johtaminen%2C+liiketoiminta+ja+talous%2C+markkinointi&fbclid=IwAR2Mu8DcoImfewqhyzkTp-KH5a3PAi0jGZj4mc51eUlG7S560JYE6O2b_d4
Mitä Traficomin uudet evästekäytännesuositukset tarkoittavat palveluntarjoajien näkökulmasta ja kuinka yrityksesi voi reagoida suosituksiin toimiakseen lain edellyttämällä tavalla?
Traficomin Kyberturvallisuuskeskus julkisti 13.9.2021 uuden ohjeistuksen koskien evästeiden tallentamista käyttäjän laitteelle ja näiden laitteella olevien tietojen käyttöä. Uusien ohjeiden myötä sekä loppukäyttäjille että palveluntarjoajille on saatavilla selkeät toimintaohjeet evästekäytäntöihin liittyen.
Uusi ohjeistus koskee kaikkia verkossa toimivia yrityksiä, jotka keräävät ja käsittelevät henkilötietoja verkko- ja sähköisissä palveluissaan. Henkilötietojen käsittelyssä on noudatettava aina tietosuojalainsäädännön mukaisia tietosuojaperiaatteita. Tässä blogissa käyn läpi, mitä Traficomin uudet evästekäytännesuositukset tarkoittavat palveluntarjoajien näkökulmasta ja kuinka yrityksesi voi reagoida näihin ohjeistuksiin ja suosituksiin toimiakseen lain edellyttämällä tavalla.
Evästeneuvontamme on uusittu
https://www.kyberturvallisuuskeskus.fi/fi/ajankohtaista/evasteneuvontamme-uusittu
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.digimarkkinointi.fi/tiktok-mainonta
Tomi Engdahl says:
Wall Street Journal:
Internal documents: Facebook’s AI has minimal success enforcing its rules against problematic content, including removing just an estimated 3%-5% of hate speech — AI has only minimal success in removing hate speech, violent images and other problem content, according to internal company reports
Facebook Says AI Will Clean Up the Platform. Its Own Engineers Have Doubts.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-ai-enforce-rules-engineers-doubtful-artificial-intelligence-11634338184?mod=djemalertNEWS
AI has only minimal success in removing hate speech, violent images and other problem content, according to internal company reports
Facebook Inc. executives have long said that artificial intelligence would address the company’s chronic problems keeping what it deems hate speech and excessive violence as well as underage users off its platforms.
That future is farther away than those executives suggest, according to internal documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Facebook’s AI can’t consistently identify first-person shooting videos, racist rants and even, in one notable episode that puzzled internal researchers for weeks, the difference between cockfighting and car crashes.
On hate speech, the documents show, Facebook employees have estimated the company removes only a sliver of the posts that violate its rules—a low-single-digit percent, they say. When Facebook’s algorithms aren’t certain enough that content violates the rules to delete it, the platform shows that material to users less often—but the accounts that posted the material go unpunished.
The documents reviewed by the Journal also show that Facebook two years ago cut the time human reviewers focused on hate-speech complaints from users and made other tweaks that reduced the overall number of complaints. That made the company more dependent on AI enforcement of its rules and inflated the apparent success of the technology in its public statistics.
“The problem is that we do not and possibly never will have a model that captures even a majority of integrity harms, particularly in sensitive areas.”
— Facebook senior engineer and research scientist
According to the documents, those responsible for keeping the platform free from content Facebook deems offensive or dangerous acknowledge that the company is nowhere close to being able to reliably screen it.
“The problem is that we do not and possibly never will have a model that captures even a majority of integrity harms, particularly in sensitive areas,” wrote a senior engineer and research scientist in a mid-2019 note.
He estimated the company’s automated systems removed posts that generated just 2% of the views of hate speech on the platform that violated its rules. “Recent estimates suggest that unless there is a major change in strategy, it will be very difficult to improve this beyond 10-20% in the short-medium term,” he wrote.
Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said that these percentages referred to posts that were removed using AI, and didn’t include other actions the company takes to reduce how many people view hate speech, including ranking posts lower in news feeds.
The statistics contrast starkly with the confidence in AI presented by Facebook’s top executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who previously said he expected Facebook would use AI to detect “the vast majority of problematic content” by the end of 2019.
The company often says that nearly all of the hate speech it takes down was discovered by AI before it was reported by users. It calls this figure its proactive detection rate, and it had reached nearly 98% as of earlier this year.
Civil rights groups and academics have long been skeptical that the AI detection rate shows meaningful progress, saying it doesn’t seem to match user experiences or their own studies.
Facebook says five out of every 10,000 content views contained hate speech, an improvement from roughly 10 of every 10,000 views in mid-2020
“Within our total budget, hate speech is clearly the most expensive problem,” a manager wrote of the effort in a separate document, declaring that the cost of policing slurs and the denigration of minority groups, which Facebook rules bar, “adds up to real money.”
Roughly 75% of the costs came from employing people to review user complaints, the vast majority of which were deemed, after review, to not be hate speech, the documents show. In 2019, beyond simply cutting the number of contractor hours dedicated to reviewing hate speech, the company began employing an algorithm that led them to ignore a larger percentage of user reports that the system deemed unlikely to be violations.
The performance of Facebook’s automated systems illustrates how difficult it is for Facebook and other tech companies to build systems that reliably and comprehensively detect content that breaks their rules.
“This is one of the hardest problems in machine learning,” said J. Nathan Matias, an assistant professor at Cornell University. “It’s also an area that so many companies and policy makers have just decided was going to be the solution—without understanding the problem.”
The discrepancy between Facebook’s public claims about the effectiveness of its AI and the reality of the user experience has long puzzled researchers and other heavy users of the platform.
Fadi Quran, a researcher at the human-rights group Avaaz, which advocates for citizen action in areas such as climate change and poverty, said he has repeatedly asked Facebook employees if they understood how much hate speech was on their platform and how much they acted on. “They said verbatim that that was almost impossible, and they can only report with certainty on what they detect,” he said.
“By hiding the problem and giving the opposite impression—that the issue is under control—they’re actually complicit in allowing those community violations to go forward with minimal accountability,” he said.
In its quarterly public reports on how it enforces its policies, Facebook measures the prevalence of certain types of content, like hate speech, by the number of views that content attracts. The company says this is a more accurate way of measuring the true impact of a piece of content that violates its policies. In other words, hate speech viewed a million times is more of a problem than hate speech viewed just once.
“As it stands, they have barely enough content to train and maintain the Arabic classifier currently—let alone breakdowns,”
In January, a Facebook employee reported that hate speech was one of the top “abuse categories” in Afghanistan, but the company took action against just 0.23% of the estimated hate speech posts in the country.
In March, employees gearing up for regional elections in India said hate speech was a major risk in Assam, where there is growing violence against Muslims and other ethnic groups. “Assam is of particular concern because we do not have an Assamese hate-speech classifier,” according to one planning document.
While Facebook removes a tiny fraction of the content that violates its rules, executives are particularly sensitive to what it calls “over-enforcement,” or taking down too many posts that don’t actually violate hate-speech rules, according to people familiar with the matter.
Globally, users ranked inaccurate content removals last among a series of problems, while hate speech and violence topped the list. American users were more concerned by inaccurate removals, but still rated the problem behind hate speech and violence, the survey shows.
“Each half [year] we make incremental progress on the amount of content we’re able to proactively detect. But an incremental increase on a very small number is still a very small number.”
— Facebook data scientist
The outgoing data scientist noted that despite intense investment by Facebook, the company’s success rate at removing banned content remained dismal. “Each half [year] we make incremental progress on the amount of content we’re able to proactively detect,” he wrote. “But an incremental increase on a very small number is still a very small number.”
“We might just be the very best in the world at it,” he wrote, “but the best in the world isn’t good enough to find a fraction of it.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.wsj.com/live-qa/ask-wsj-a-look-inside-the-facebook-files/AC3FC998-84ED-47B1-9269-1FA02681A72F?mod=series_facebookfiles
Tomi Engdahl says:
Kim Lyons / The Verge:
Facebook disputes WSJ report, saying the prevalence of hate speech on the platform dropped by 50% over the past three years to about 0.05% of content viewed — The Wall Street Journal said in a new report that Facebook’s AI is not consistently successful at removing objectionable content
Facebook disputes report that its AI can’t detect hate speech or violence consistently
https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/17/22731214/facebook-disputes-report-artificial-intelligence-hate-speech-violence?scrolla=5eb6d68b7fedc32c19ef33b4
The Wall Street Journal said in a new report that Facebook’s AI is not consistently successful at removing objectionable content
Tomi Engdahl says:
New York Times:
Internal docs: Instagram spent the majority of its global annual marketing budget since 2018 targeting teenagers, as it worries about losing its user “pipeline” — The app, hailed as Facebook’s growth engine, has privately wrestled with retaining and engaging teenagers, according to internal documents.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/16/technology/instagram-teens.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tripp Mickle / Wall Street Journal:
A look at YouTube’s in-house creator partnerships team, which has over 1,000 employees across 45 countries offering advice and guidance to about 12,000 creators
How YouTube Makes Sure Its Hitmakers Don’t Stumble
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-youtube-copied-hollywood-to-win-video-makers-loyalty-11634290200?mod=djemalertNEWS
The site has spent more than a decade building an in-house agency for digital superstars, drawing ad sales, sponsorships and other revenue
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://framian.fi/blog/spa-applications/?fbclid=IwAR3Hi-Ke6hLPNBHmIlrFxge1yuw0QDauT9VmQci2fx7NyfAAZqnqb5dq9sA
Tomi Engdahl says:
Play DOOM Using Web Browser Checkboxes (Finally)
https://hackaday.com/2021/10/18/play-doom-using-web-browser-checkboxes-finally/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Thousands of People Are Trying to Leave QAnon, but Getting Out Is Almost Impossible
In a Cosmo exclusive, women on both sides—the former believers and the doctors they’re turning to—show us what it takes to escape.
https://www.cosmopolitan.com/lifestyle/a37696261/leaving-recovering-from-q-anon/
it felt like she was suffocating. The 33-year-old holistic health entrepreneur would spend hours consumed with conspiracy theories—about sex trafficking, children secretly being sold on a furniture website, the multimillionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. There was always another video to watch, another media lie to investigate, another stranger to enlighten. Things that once fulfilled her—exercise, her meal-prep business—no longer seemed to matter. Instead, she dug deeper and deeper into the horrors the internet presented her every day, feeling obligated, as a sexual abuse survivor, to “be the adult I needed as a child,” she says.
For Anna*, a 23-year-old pharmacy student in Pennsylvania, it felt like being trapped in a vortex of fear. “I had feelings of hope, but at the same time, I was incredibly scared, distressed, and anxious and even had panic attacks,” she says. She spent as many as eight hours a day poring over feeds on Telegram and Gab, listening to fringe podcasts. “Doing just about anything else,” she admits, “was really hard.”
“It,” for all three, was QAnon, the infamous and violent pro-Trump conspiracy theory whose followers mushroomed during the pandemic to include suburban moms, yoga teachers, grandmas, and seemingly half of your Facebook feed. The movement was so easy to get into—a provocative post by an acquaintance, a few clicks, a video that rang true, which then surfaced other videos—but would prove to be much harder to get out of.
After the 2020 presidential election, followers disillusioned by Q’s false predictions of an overwhelming Trump victory flocked to Reddit message boards like QAnonCasualties and ReQovery, their posts tinged with vulnerability and desperation.
They swapped articles, books, podcasts (commonly the New York Times’ Rabbit Hole series), and tips on how to let go of conspiratorial beliefs. They numbered more than 200,000.
Theirs is the QAnon story you haven’t yet heard—the one about the people left struggling and psychologically vulnerable in its wake. Who can’t move on. Who feel duped, angry, and confused. “How do I recover from Q?”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Easy JavaScript Game Development with Kaboom.js (Mario, Zelda, and Space Invaders) – Full Course
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OaHB0JbJDI
Kaboom is a Javascript game programming library that helps you make games fast and fun.
https://kaboomjs.com/
Tomi Engdahl says:
OWASP’s 2021 List Shuffle: A New Battle Plan and Primary Foe https://thehackernews.com/2021/10/owasps-2021-list-shuffle-new-battle.html
In this increasingly chaotic world, there have always been a few constants that people could reliably count on:. The sun will rise in the morning and set again at night, Mario will always be cooler than Sonic the Hedgehog, and code injection attacks will always occupy the top spot on the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) list of the top ten most common and dangerous vulnerabilities that attackers are actively exploiting. Lisäksi: https://owasp.org/Top10/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Adi Robertson / The Verge:
Facebook will start demoting all Groups content from users who have violated policies elsewhere on the site, and will let admins review flagged content — It’s also got a new moderation tool for admins — Facebook will start demoting all Groups content from people who have violated its policies elsewhere across the platform.
Facebook will start downranking your Groups posts if you break its rules
It’s also got a new moderation tool for admins
https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/20/22736301/facebook-demote-groups-content-policy-violations-update?scrolla=5eb6d68b7fedc32c19ef33b4
Facebook will start demoting all Groups content from people who have violated its policies elsewhere across the platform. The move is supposed to limit rulebreakers from reaching other people in a community, and it builds on existing policies that prevent them from posting, commenting, or inviting others.
In a blog post, Facebook says it will also add a new “Flagged by Facebook” feature that shows group administrators content that’s been flagged for removal. The admins can choose to remove the content or to ask for a review if they believe it’s appropriate, with the goal of getting administrators involved before Facebook steps in and issues a strike that could affect the group itself.
Facebook has paid increasing attention to groups since the 2020 US presidential election, where they were used to spread false information about voting. It’s also facing increased scrutiny over extremism and other harmful content on the platform thanks to documents leaked by former Facebook employee Frances Haugen, who recently testified before Congress. Earlier this week, Facebook indicated that it’s also expecting a slew of new stories based on “thousands of pages of leaked documents.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ian Bremmer / Foreign Affairs:
How Facebook, Apple, Google, Amazon, and others increasingly rival states for geopolitical influence and are reshaping the global order as we know it
The Technopolar Moment
How Digital Powers Will Reshape the Global Order
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/world/2021-10-19/ian-bremmer-big-tech-global-order
After rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, some of the United States’ most powerful institutions sprang into action to punish the leaders of the failed insurrection. But they weren’t the ones you might expect. Facebook and Twitter suspended the accounts of President Donald Trump for posts praising the rioters. Amazon, Apple, and Google effectively banished Parler, an alternative to Twitter that Trump’s supporters had used to encourage and coordinate the attack, by blocking its access to Web-hosting services and app stores. Major financial service apps, such as PayPal and Stripe, stopped processing payments for the Trump campaign and for accounts that had funded travel expenses to Washington, D.C., for Trump’s supporters.
The speed of these technology companies’ reactions stands in stark contrast to the feeble response from the United States’ governing institutions. Congress still has not censured Trump for his role in the storming of the Capitol. Its efforts to establish a bipartisan, 9/11-style commission failed amid Republican opposition. Law enforcement agencies have been able to arrest some individual rioters—but in many cases only by tracking clues they left on social media about their participation in the fiasco.
States have been the primary actors in global affairs for nearly 400 years. That is starting to change, as a handful of large technology companies rival them for geopolitical influence. The aftermath of the January 6 riot serves as the latest proof that Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Twitter are no longer merely large companies; they have taken control of aspects of society, the economy, and national security that were long the exclusive preserve of the state. The same goes for Chinese technology companies, such as Alibaba, ByteDance, and Tencent. Nonstate actors are increasingly shaping geopolitics, with technology companies in the lead. And although Europe wants to play, its companies do not have the size or geopolitical influence to compete with their American and Chinese counterparts.
Most of the analysis of U.S.-Chinese technological competition, however, is stuck in a statist paradigm. It depicts technology companies as foot soldiers in a conflict between hostile countries. But technology companies are not mere tools in the hands of governments. None of their actions in the immediate aftermath of the Capitol insurrection, for instance, came at the behest of the government or law enforcement. These were private decisions made by for-profit companies exercising power over code, servers, and regulations under their control. These companies are increasingly shaping the global environment in which governments operate. They have huge influence over the technologies and services that will drive the next industrial revolution, determine how countries project economic and military power, shape the future of work, and redefine social contracts.
Technology companies are shaping the global environment in which governments operate.
It is time to start thinking of the biggest technology companies as similar to states. These companies exercise a form of sovereignty over a rapidly expanding realm that extends beyond the reach of regulators: digital space. They bring resources to geopolitical competition but face constraints on their power to act. They maintain foreign relations and answer to constituencies, including shareholders, employees, users, and advertisers.
Political scientists rely on a wide array of terms to classify governments: there are “democracies,” “autocracies,” and “hybrid regimes,” which combine elements of both. But they have no such tools for understanding Big Tech. It’s time they started developing them, for not all technology companies operate in the same way. Even though technology companies, like countries, resist neat classifications, there are three broad forces that are driving their geopolitical postures and worldviews: globalism, nationalism, and techno-utopianism.
These categories illuminate the choices facing the biggest technology firms as they work to shape global affairs. Will we live in a world where the Internet is increasingly fragmented and technology companies serve the interests and goals of the states in which they reside, or will Big Tech decisively wrest control of digital space from governments, freeing itself from national boundaries and emerging as a truly global force? Or could the era of state dominance finally come to an end, supplanted by a techno-elite that assumes responsibility for offering the public goods once provided by governments?
BIG TECH IS WATCHING YOU
To understand how the struggle for geopolitical influence between technology firms and governments will play out, it is important to grasp the nature of these companies’ power. The tools at their disposal are unique in global affairs, which is why governments are finding it so hard to rein them in. Although this isn’t the first time that private corporations have played a major role in geopolitics—consider the East India Company and Big Oil, for example—earlier giants could never match the pervasive global presence of today’s technology firms. It is one thing to wield power in the smoke-filled rooms of political power brokers; it is another to directly affect the livelihoods, relationships, security, and even thought patterns of billions of people across the globe.
Today’s biggest technology firms have two critical advantages that have allowed them to carve out independent geopolitical influence. First, they do not operate or wield power exclusively in physical space. They have created a new dimension in geopolitics—digital space—over which they exercise primary influence. People are increasingly living out their lives in this vast territory, which governments do not and cannot fully control.
The implications of this fact bear on virtually all aspects of civic, economic, and private life. In many democracies today, politicians’ ability to gain followers on Facebook and Twitter unlocks the money and political support needed to win office. That is why the technology companies’ actions to deplatform Trump after the Capitol Hill riot were so powerful.
For a new generation of entrepreneurs, Amazon’s marketplace and Web-hosting services, Apple’s app store, Facebook’s ad-targeting tools, and Google’s search engine have become indispensable for launching a successful business. Big Tech is even transforming human relationships. In their private lives, people increasingly connect with one another through algorithms.
Technology companies are not just exercising a form of sovereignty over how citizens behave on digital platforms; they are also shaping behaviors and interactions. The little red Facebook notifications deliver dopamine hits to your brain, Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms complete sentences while you type, and Amazon’s methods of selecting which products pop up at the top of your search screen affect what you buy. In these ways, technology firms are guiding how people spend their time, what professional and social opportunities they pursue, and, ultimately, what they think. This power will grow as social, economic, and political institutions continue to shift from the physical world to digital space.
The second way these technology companies differ from their formidable predecessors is that they are increasingly providing a full spectrum of both the digital and the real-world products that are required to run a modern society. Although private companies have long played a role in delivering basic needs, from medicine to energy, today’s rapidly digitizing economy depends on a more complex array of goods, services, and information flows. Currently, just four companies—Alibaba, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft—meet the bulk of the world’s demand for cloud services, the essential computing infrastructure that has kept people working and children learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. The future competitiveness of traditional industries will depend on how effectively they seize new opportunities created by 5G networks, AI, and massive Internet-of-Things deployments. Internet companies and financial service providers already depend heavily on the infrastructure provided by these cloud leaders. Soon, growing numbers of cars, assembly lines, and cities will, too.
Along with owning the world’s leading search engine and its most popular smartphone operating system, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, dabbles in health care, drug development, and autonomous vehicles. Amazon’s sprawling e-commerce and logistics network furnishes millions of people with basic consumer goods. In China, Alibaba and Tencent dominate payment systems, social media, video streaming, e-commerce, and logistics. They also invest in projects important to the Chinese government, such as the Digital Silk Road, which aims to bring to emerging markets the undersea cables, telecommunications networks, cloud capabilities, and apps needed to run a digital society.
Private-sector technology firms are also providing national security, a role that has traditionally been reserved for governments and the defense contractors they hire. When Russian hackers breached U.S. government agencies and private companies last year, it was Microsoft, not the National Security Agency or U.S. Cyber Command, that first discovered and cut off the intruders. Of course, private companies have long supported national security objectives. Before the biggest banks became “too big to fail,” that phrase was applied to the U.S. defense company Lockheed Corporation (now Lockheed Martin) during the Cold War. But Lockheed just made the fighter jets and missiles for the U.S. government. It didn’t operate the air force or police the skies. The biggest technology companies are building the backbone of the digital world and policing that world at the same time.
Big Tech’s eclipse of the nation-state is not inevitable. Governments are taking steps to tame an unruly digital sphere: whether it is China’s recent moves targeting Alibaba and Ant Group, which derailed what would have been one of the world’s biggest-ever initial public offerings; the EU’s attempts to regulate personal data, AI, and the large technology companies that it defines as digital “gatekeepers”; the numerous antitrust bills introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives; or India’s ongoing pressure on foreign social media companies—the technology industry is facing a political and regulatory backlash on multiple fronts.
People are increasingly living out their lives in digital space, which governments cannot fully control.
But as technology grows more sophisticated, states and regulators are increasingly constrained by outdated laws and limited capacity. Digital space is ever growing. Facebook now counts nearly three billion monthly active users. Google reports that over one billion hours of video are consumed on YouTube, its video-streaming platform, each day. Over 64 billion terabytes of digital information was created and stored in 2020, enough to fill some 500 billion smartphones. In its next phase, this “datasphere” will see cars, factories, and entire cities wired with Internet-connected sensors trading data. As this realm grows, the ability to control it will slip further beyond the reach of states. And because technology companies provide important digital and real-world goods and services, states that cannot provide those things risk shooting themselves in the foot if their draconian measures lead companies to stop their operations.
Governments have long deployed sophisticated systems to monitor digital space: China created the so-called Great Firewall to control the information its citizens see, and the United States’ spy agencies established the echelon surveillance system to monitor global communications. But such systems can’t keep tabs on everything. Fines for failing to take down illegal content are a nuisance for businesses, not an existential threat.
That is not to say that Big Tech is massively well liked. Even before the pandemic, public opinion polls in the United States showed that what once was the most admired sector in the country was losing popularity among Americans. A majority of Americans are in favor of stricter regulations for big technology companies, according to a February 2021 Gallup survey. Global trust in those companies—especially social media firms—has also been hit hard during the pandemic, according to the annual Trust Barometer published by Edelman, a public relations consultancy.
But even if getting tough on Big Tech is one of the few things on which both Democrats and Republicans agree, the fact that there hasn’t been a major crackdown yet is telling.
In the United States, a combination of congressional dysfunction and Silicon Valley’s potent lobbying power will likely continue to preclude expansive new regulations that could pose a serious threat to the digital giants. It is different in Europe, where the lack of homegrown cloud, search, and social media conglomerates makes passing ambitious legislation easier. And it is certainly different in China, where a recent round of regulatory crackdowns has sent shares of the country’s own technology heavyweights reeling.
In both Brussels and Beijing, politicians are trying to channel the power of the biggest technology companies in pursuit of national priorities. But with the cloud, AI, and other emerging technologies set to become even more important to people’s livelihoods—and to the ability of states to meet their people’s basic needs—it is far from certain that the politicians will succeed.
The most important question in geopolitics today might be, Will countries that break up or clamp down on their biggest technology firms also be able to seize the opportunities of the digital revolution’s next phase, or will their efforts backfire? The EU, alarmed that it has not given rise to digital giants the way the United States and China have, appears intent on finding out. It is at the forefront of democratic societies pushing for greater sovereignty over digital space. In 2018, the EU passed a sweeping data protection law that restricts transfers of personal data outside the 27-member bloc and threatens steep fines on companies that fail to protect EU citizens’ sensitive information.
A new regulatory package advancing in Brussels would give the European Commission new powers to fine Internet platforms over illegal content, control high-risk AI applications, and potentially break up technology companies that EU bureaucrats deem too powerful. The EU and influential member states, such as France, are also calling for technology-focused industrial policies—including billions of euros of government funding—to encourage new approaches to pooling data and computing resources. The goal is to develop alternatives to the biggest cloud platforms that, unlike the current options, are grounded in “European values.”
This is a massive gamble. Europe, acting from a position of weakness, is betting that it can corral the technology giants and unleash a new wave of European innovation. If it turns out instead that only the biggest technology platforms can muster the capital, talent, and infrastructure needed to develop and run the digital systems that companies rely on, Europe will have only accelerated its geopolitical decline.
Big Tech is transforming human relationships.
It is expensive to create and maintain digital space on a massive scale. Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft plowed a combined $109 billion into research and development in 2019. That is roughly equal to Germany’s total public and private R & D spending in the same period and more than double the amount spent that year by the United Kingdom’s government and private sector put together. If European states want greater control of the technology sector, they’re going to have to invest much more money. But even if governments were willing to finance these digital capabilities themselves, money is only part of the picture. They would likely struggle to bring together the engineering and other talent required to design, maintain, operate, and grow the complex cloud infrastructure, AI applications, and other systems that make these technologies work at scale.
Achieving and maintaining global leadership in fields such as cloud computing or semiconductors requires huge and sustained investments of financial and human capital. It also requires close relationships with customers and other partners across complex global supply chains. Today’s modern semiconductor plants can cost in excess of $15 billion apiece and require legions of highly trained engineers to set them up and run them. The world’s leading cloud service providers can invest billions of dollars in R & D each year because they are continually refining their products in response to customers’ needs and funneling their profits back into research.
The next decade will test what happens as the politics of digital space and physical space converge. Governments and technology companies are poised to compete for influence over both worlds
THE STRUGGLE WITHIN BIG TECH
Technology companies’ orientations are no less diverse than the states with which they compete. Strands of globalism, nationalism, and techno-utopianism often coexist within the same company. Which outlook predominates will have important consequences for global politics and society.
First are the globalists—firms that built their empires by operating on a truly international scale. These companies, including Apple, Facebook, and Google, create and populate digital space, allowing their business presence and revenue streams to become untethered from physical territory. Each grew powerful by hitting on an idea that allowed it to dominate an economically valuable niche and then taking its business worldwide.
The likes of Alibaba, ByteDance, and Tencent emerged at the top of China’s massive domestic market before setting their sights on global growth. But the idea was the same: set up shop in as many countries as possible, respect local rules and regulations as necessary, and compete fiercely.
Then there are the national champions, which are more willing to align themselves explicitly with the priorities of their home governments. These firms are partnering with governments in various important domains, including the cloud, AI, and cybersecurity. They secure massive revenues by selling their products to governments, and they use their expertise to help guide these same governments’ actions. The companies hewing closest to the national-champion model are in China, where firms have long faced pressure to further national goals. Huawei and SMIC are China’s core national champions in 5G and semiconductors.
More than perhaps any other country, China has enlisted its technology giants during the pandemic, leaning heavily on digital services—including videoconferencing and telemedicine—and even using them to enforce lockdowns and other travel restrictions as the pandemic took hold.
Today, even historically globalist U.S. companies are feeling the pull of the national-champion model. Microsoft’s growing role in policing digital space on behalf of the United States and allied democracies and targeting misinformation spread by state actors (particularly China and Russia) and international crime syndicates is leading it in that direction. Amazon and Microsoft are also competing to provide cloud-computing infrastructure to the U.S. government.
The forces of globalism and nationalism sometimes clash with a third camp: the techno-utopians. Some of the world’s most powerful technology firms are headed by charismatic visionaries who see technology not just as a global business opportunity but also as a potentially revolutionary force in human affairs. In contrast to the other two groups, this camp centers more on the personalities and ambitions of technology CEOs rather than the operations of the companies themselves. Whereas globalists want the state to leave them alone and maintain favorable conditions for global commerce, and national champions see an opportunity to get rich off the state, techno-utopians look to a future in which the nation-state paradigm that has dominated geopolitics since the seventeenth century has been replaced by something different altogether.
Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, is the most recognizable example, with his open ambition to reinvent transportation, link computers to human brains, and make humanity a “multiplanetary species” by colonizing Mars. Yes, he is also providing space lift capacity to the U.S. government
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, has similar tendencies, even if he has become more open to government regulation of online content. Diem, a Facebook-backed digital currency, had to be scaled back dramatically after financial regulators almost universally raised concerns.
Ethereum, the world’s second most popular blockchain after Bitcoin, is rapidly emerging as the underlying infrastructure powering a new generation of decentralized Internet applications. It may pose an even greater challenge to government power than Diem. Ethereum’s design includes smart contracts, which enable the parties to a transaction to embed the terms of doing business into hard-to-alter computer code. Entrepreneurs have seized on the technology and the surrounding hype to cook up new businesses, including betting markets, financial derivatives, and payment systems that are almost impossible to alter or abolish once they have been launched.
Although much of this innovation to date has been in the financial realm, some proponents believe that blockchain technology and decentralized apps will be the keys to unlocking the next big leap forward for the Web: the metaverse, a place where augmented and virtual reality, next-generation data networks, and decentralized financing and payment systems contribute to a more realistic and immersive digital world where people can socialize, work, and trade digital goods.
OUR DIGITAL FUTURES
As technology companies and governments negotiate for control over digital space, U.S. and Chinese technology giants will operate in one of three geopolitical environments: one in which the state reigns supreme, rewarding the national champions; one in which corporations wrest control from the state over digital space, empowering the globalists; or one in which the state fades away, elevating the techno-utopians.
In the first scenario, the national champions win, and the state remains the dominant provider of security, regulation, and public goods. Systemic shocks, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, and long-term threats, such as climate change, coupled with a public backlash against the power of technology firms, entrench government authority as the only force that can resolve global challenges. A bipartisan push for regulation in the United States rewards “patriotic” companies that deploy their resources in support of national goals.
U.S. allies and partners find it much harder to balance their ties with Washington and Beijing. Europe is the big loser here, as it lacks technology companies with the financial capacity or technological wherewithal to hold their own against those of the two major powers.
As the United States and China decouple, companies that can recast themselves as national champions are rewarded.
The increasingly fragmented nature of the Internet, meanwhile, makes operating on a truly global scale increasingly difficult: when data, software, or advanced semiconductor technology can’t move across borders because of legal and policy barriers or when computers or phones made by U.S. and Chinese companies can’t talk to one another, it raises costs and regulatory risks for companies.
Amazon and Microsoft might not find it hard to adapt to this new order, as they are already responding to growing pressure to support national security imperatives. Both companies already compete to provide cloud services to the U.S. government and intelligence agencies. But Apple and Google could find working with the U.S. government more uncomfortable
Facebook might have the hardest time navigating a landscape that favored national champions if it is seen as providing a platform for foreign disinformation without also offering useful assets for the government, such as cloud computing or military AI applications.
This would be a more geopolitically volatile world, with a greater risk of strategic and technological bifurcation. Taiwan would be a major concern, as U.S. and Chinese companies continue to rely on the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company as a major supplier of cutting-edge chips.
A world of national champions would also impede the international cooperation needed to address global crises—whether a pandemic disease more lethal than COVID-19 or a surge of global migration induced by climate change. It would be ironic if technology nationalism made it harder for governments to address these problems
In the second scenario, the state holds on but in a weakened condition—paving the way for the ascendancy of the globalists. Unable to keep pace with technological innovation, regulators accept that governments will share sovereignty over digital space with technology companies. Big Tech beats back restrictions that could curtail its overseas operations, arguing that the loss of market opportunities will harm innovation and, ultimately, governments’ ability to create jobs and meet global challenges. Rather than accept a technological cold war, companies pressure governments to agree on a set of common rules that preserve a global market for hardware, software, and data.
Apple and Google would arguably have the most to gain from this outcome.
The triumph of globalism would also help Alibaba, which hosts the world’s largest e-commerce websites.
The globalists need stability to succeed over the coming decade. Their worst fear is that the United States and China will continue to decouple, forcing them to choose sides in an economic war that will raise barriers to their attempts to globalize their businesses. Their fortunes would improve if Washington and Beijing decided that overregulation risks undercutting the innovation that drives their economies.
A world in which the globalists reign supreme would give Europe a chance to reassert itself as a savvy bureaucratic player capable of designing the rules that allow technology companies and governments to share sovereignty in digital space. Washington and Beijing would still be the two dominant global powers, but the failure of the former’s industrial policy push and the latter’s quest to elevate national champions would loosen the two powers’ grip on geopolitics, increase the demand for global governance, and create more opportunities for global rule setting.
In the final scenario, the oft-predicted erosion of the state finally comes to pass. The techno-utopians capitalize on widespread disillusionment with governments that have failed to create prosperity and stability, drawing citizens into a digital economy that disintermediates the state. Confidence in the dollar as a global reserve currency erodes—or collapses. Cryptocurrencies prove too much for regulators to control, and they gain wide acceptance, undermining governments’ sway over the financial world. The disintegration of centralized authority renders the world substantially less capable of addressing transnational challenges. For technological visionaries with vaulting ambitions and commensurate resources, the question of patriotism becomes moot. Musk plays an ever-greater role in deciding how space is explored. Facebook substitutes for the public square, civil society, and the social safety net, creating a blockchain-based currency that gains widespread usage.
The implications of a world in which techno-utopians call the shots are the hardest to tease out, in part because people are so accustomed to thinking of the state as the principal problem-solving actor. Governments would not go down without a fight. And the erosion of the U.S. government’s authority would not give techno-utopians free rein; the Chinese state would also need to suffer a collapse in domestic credibility. The less that governments stand in their way, the more techno-utopians will be able to shape the evolution of a new world order, for good and for ill.
Governments and technology companies are poised to compete for influence.
A BRAVE NEW DIGITAL WORLD
A generation ago, the foundational premise of the Internet was that it would accelerate the globalization that transformed economics and politics in the 1990s. Many hoped that the digital age could foster the unfettered flow of information, challenging the grip of authoritarian holdouts who thought they could escape the so-called end of history. The picture is different today: a concentration of power in the hands of a few very large technology firms and the competing interventions of U.S.-, Chinese-, and EU-centered power blocs have led to a much more fragmented digital landscape.
The consequences for the future world order will be no less profound. Right now, the world’s largest technology firms are assessing how best to position themselves as Washington and Beijing steel themselves for protracted competition. The United States believes that its foremost geopolitical imperative is to prevent its displacement by its techno-authoritarian rival. China’s top priority is to ensure that it can stand on its own two feet economically and technologically before a coalition of advanced industrial democracies stifles its further expansion. Big Tech will tread cautiously for now to make sure it does not further compound government insecurity about losing authority.
The globalists will argue that governments will be unable to sustain economic and technological competitiveness over the long haul if they turn inward and adopt a bunker mentality.
And the techno-utopians? They will be happy to work quietly, biding their time. While the national champions and the globalists duke it out over who will shape government policy, the techno-utopians will use traditional companies and decentralized projects, such as Ethereum, to explore new frontiers in digital space, such as the metaverse, or new approaches to providing essential services. They will strike an understanding tone when the U.S. government hauls them in before Congress every now and then, per usual, to denounce their egos and power, taking minimal steps to appease policymakers but deploying aggressive lobbying efforts to undermine any efforts by Washington to bring them to heel.
This does not mean that societies are heading toward a future that witnesses the demise of the nation-state, the end of governments, and the dissolution of borders. There is no reason to think these predictions are any more likely to come true today than they were in the 1990s. But it is simply no longer tenable to talk about big technology companies as pawns their government masters can move around on a geopolitical chessboard. They are increasingly geopolitical actors in and of themselves.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Onko verkkosivustosi pullollaan tuotteita? Tuo ne oikeiden ihmisten eteen dynaamisella Facebook-mainonnalla
https://www.digimarkkinointi.fi/blogi/dynaaminen-mainonta-facebookissa
Dynaaminen Facebook-mainonta on parhaimmillaan jatkuvaa tuottoa tuova, lähes automaattinen osa digimarkkinoijan työkalupakkia.
Tuleeko sinulle vastaan Facebookia tai Instagramia selatessasi mainoksia tuotteista, joita olet juuri katsellut esimerkiksi verkkokaupassa? Tuntuuko, että Facebook osaa mainostaa sinulle usein juuri oikeaa tuotetta tai vähintään oikean tuotekategorian tuotetta, mikä saa kiinnostuksesi heräämään? Mikäli vastasit näihin kyllä, on mainostaja mitä todennäköisimmin toteuttanut tehokasta dynaamista mainontaa. Dynaaminen Facebook-mainonta on parhaimmillaan jatkuvaa tuottoa tuova, lähes automaattinen osa digimarkkinoijan työkalupakkia.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Donald Trump’s social media app ‘Truth Social’ hijacked by fake account before launch
https://lm.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.independent.co.uk%2Fnews%2Fworld%2Famericas%2Fus-politics%2Fdonald-trump-truth-social-hacked-b1942671.html%3Futm_content%3DEchobox%26utm_medium%3DSocial%26utm_source%3DFacebook%23Echobox%3D1634820994&h=AT20qa9V57Mx07Pt7QGkd5m_LB70w9lyxA671hOVhB9xnwafYanK-FU1U_58vNOGZJMkQVkva9jCwTZe6EnUeGLUiZ3SCYcq4juZMFqoYvJ_ZgA-5Bl-TQ7lvlMxGGlKWcC6OXNS79_Jlo33YA
Former president says new media network is effort to ‘stand up to the tyranny of Big Tech’
Tomi Engdahl says:
Apple’s Safari browser runs the risk of becoming the new Internet Explorer – holding the web back for everyone
WebKit engine is well behind the competition
https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/22/safari_risks_becoming_the_new_ie/
The legacy of Internet Explorer 6 haunts web developer nightmares to this day. Microsoft’s browser of yore made their lives miserable and it’s only slightly hyperbolic to say it very nearly destroyed the entire internet. It really was that bad, kids. It made us walk to school in the snow. Uphill. Both ways. You wouldn’t understand.
Or maybe you would. Today developers who want to use “cutting-edge” web APIs find themselves resorting to the same kind of browser-specific workarounds, but this time the browser dragging things down comes from Apple.
Apple’s Safari lags considerably behind its peers in supporting web features.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Trump’s social network has 30 days to stop breaking the rules of its software license
Truth Social ripped off open-source platform Mastodon
https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/22/22740354/trump-truth-social-network-spac-mastodon-license-software-freedom-conservancy
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://attractive.ai/en/monitoring
Tomi Engdahl says:
How to win an argument online
http://www.soberingmirror.com/2021-10-12-How-to-win-an-argument-online/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Avoin kutsu juhlaseminaariin:
SEMANTTINEN WEB SUOMESSA 20 VUOTTA
(Semantic Web 20 Years in Finland Jubilee)
Tiistaina 2.11.2021, 13:00–17:00 (CET 12:00-16:00)
https://seco.cs.aalto.fi/events/2021/2021-11-02-sw20/
This seminar will be in Finnish except the keynote presentation of professor Pascal HItzler at 16:00–17:00 (15:00–16.00 CET),
Tomi Engdahl says:
Inside the fraught effort to create a Christian nationalist internet
Booted from mainstream social media websites, outraged Christian nationalists are creating some of their own.
https://religionnews.com/2021/10/19/inside-the-fraught-effort-to-create-a-christian-nationalist-internet/
(RNS) — It was late September when Andrew Torba, founder of the social media platform Gab, tapped out a message to his users declaring the website would update its online infrastructure. Upgrades are common in the tech industry, but Torba’s reasoning for expanding Gab’s data center was anything but: He wanted to touch up the tech, he said, to “preserve a parallel Christian society on the internet for generations to come.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Florida man accused of breaking Mastodon’s open-source license with botched social network launch
Golf enthusiast given 30 days to cough up code
https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/23/software_freedom_conservancy_mastodon/
Donald Trump’s social media platform hacked just hours after it was announced, reports say
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2021/10/22/donald-trumps-social-media-platform-truth-social-hacked-anonymous/6138301001/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.kyberturvallisuuskeskus.fi/fi/ajankohtaista/evasteneuvontamme-uusittu