Technology

Via Nicholas Colas of DataTrekResearch,

Tis the season for predictions… In fact, it seems to us that the requisite crystal ball gazing gets more popular every year. A nice compact list of bite-sized thoughts makes for easy social media sharing, after all.

But the really interesting thing to us is not “What” a person or organization predicts, but rather two other factors. First, how many different prognosticators agree on a given topic? Second, how do they all come to their conclusions?

Authored by Shelley Kasli via GGI News,

Just days after GreatGameIndia exposed how American and Japanese companies could be hacking Indian elections, a recent Bloomberg report has revealed how a secret unit of Facebook has helped create troll armies for governments around the world including India for digital propaganda to influence elections. Under fire for Facebook Inc.’s role as a platform for political propaganda, co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has punched back, saying his mission is above partisanship.

Roughly one year ago Facebook promised to eradicate "fake news" from its platform by "flagging" articles that were deemed inaccurate by their hand-selected "fact checkers" (A.K.A. "liberal propagandists")...we wrote all about it in a post entitled "Facebook Launches Campaign To Combat 'Fake News'". 

Apple settled long-standing conspiracy theories surrounding claims that the company was purposefully slowing down older iPhones in order to force people into buying newer models - and there's a "perfectly good" explanation.

Batteries

In early December, Reddit user TeckFire posted a report in the iPhone subreddit, noting that after experiencing a painful slowdown on his iPhone 6S, a brand new battery resulted in significant improvement in benchmark scores - as can be seen in photos posted to the thread:

According to a new industry report from PricewaterhouseCoopers, cord-cutting momentum has never been greater in the US, as the number of Americans who are subscribed to cable TV is now tied with the number of Netflix subscribers, and the latter are set to surpass the former.