Technology

Authored by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,

An entire library of articles about Big Tech is coming out these days, and I find that much of it is written so well, and the ideas in them so well expressed, that I have little to add. Except, I think I may have the solution to the problems many people see. But I also have a concern that I don’t see addressed, and that may well prevent that solution from being adopted. If so, we’re very far away from any solution at all. And that’s seriously bad news.

Authored by Roger McNamee, op-ed via The Guardian,

The sad truth is that Facebook and Google have behaved irresponsibly in the pursuit of massive profits. And this has come at a cost to our health...

In an interview this week with Axios, Facebook’s original president, Sean Parker, admitted that the company intentionally sought to addict users and expressed regret at the damage being inflicted on children.

To combat ‘revenge porn’, Facebook is now asking users to send in their nudes, to test a new anti-revenge porn technology.

A pilot program is currently underway in Australia, where one in five women aged 18-45 and one in four Indigenous Australians are victims. It appears, Facebook made the right choice to test out Australian users before a much wider and or global rollout occurs.

Update: COMCAST SAYS XFINITY ISSUES RESOLVED FOR ALMOST ALL CUSTOMERS

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According to DownDetector.com, and numerous twitter complaints, Comcast's internet service, Xfinity, is suffering an outage across the country. DownDetector.com shows XFinity internet being down around the United States, mostly on the east coast, but also in in large west coast cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle. So far, online reports don't suggest that TV service or home phones are affected.

For some context on the unprecedented dominance of the tech sector on the overall market, here is some perspective from BofA's Savita Subramanian on October returns, when Tech continued to lead the other ten sectors, generating +7.8% on a total return basis. This translates into a whopping 75% of the S&P 500's return last month!