Tag: big tech

Culture Shift: Google Calendar Removes Pride, Black History Month, Other DEI Dates

Google Calendar has erased so called ‘cultural’ dates including Pride, Black History Month, Indigenous People Month, and Hispanic Heritage, and will only display official public holidays and national observances going forward.

Over 500 million people who use Google Calendar will no longer see the DEI dates popping up with a spokesman for the company explaining that “maintaining hundreds of moments manually and consistently globally wasn’t scalable or sustainable.”

In other words, there are too many made up woke ‘holiday’ dates to keep up with.

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“Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right”: Meta emails unsealed

Last month, Meta admitted to torrenting a controversial large dataset known as LibGen, which includes tens of millions of pirated books. But details around the torrenting were murky until yesterday, when Meta’s unredacted emails were made public for the first time. The new evidence showed that Meta torrented “at least 81.7 terabytes of data across multiple shadow libraries through the site Anna’s Archive, including at least 35.7 terabytes of data from Z-Library and LibGen,” the authors’ court filing said. And “Meta also previously torrented 80.6 terabytes of data from LibGen.”

“The magnitude of Meta’s unlawful torrenting scheme is astonishing,” the authors’ filing alleged, insisting that “vastly smaller acts of data piracy—just .008 percent of the amount of copyrighted works Meta pirated—have resulted in Judges referring the conduct to the US Attorneys’ office for criminal investigation.”

Seeding expands authors’ distribution theory

Book authors had been pressing Meta for more information on the torrenting because of the obvious copyright concern over Meta seeding, and thus seemingly distributing, the pirated books in the dispute.

But Meta resisted those discovery attempts after an order denied authors’ request to review Meta’s torrenting and seeding data. That didn’t stop authors from gathering evidence anyway, including a key document that starts with at least one staffer appearing to uncomfortably joke about the possible legal risks, eventually growing more serious about raising his concerns.

“Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right,” Nikolay Bashlykov, a Meta research engineer, wrote in an April 2023 message, adding a smiley emoji. In the same message, he expressed “concern about using Meta IP addresses ‘to load through torrents pirate content.'”

By September 2023, Bashlykov had seemingly dropped the emojis, consulting the legal team directly and emphasizing in an email that “using torrents would entail ‘seeding’ the files—i.e., sharing the content outside, this could be legally not OK.”

Emails discussing torrenting prove that Meta knew it was “illegal,” authors alleged. And Bashlykov’s warnings seemingly landed on deaf ears, with authors alleging that evidence showed Meta chose to instead hide its torrenting as best it could while downloading and seeding terabytes of data from multiple shadow libraries as recently as April 2024.

Meta allegedly concealed seeding

Supposedly, Meta tried to conceal the seeding by not using Facebook servers while downloading the dataset to “avoid” the “risk” of anyone “tracing back the seeder/downloader” from Facebook servers, an internal message from Meta researcher Frank Zhang said, while describing the work as being in “stealth mode.” Meta also allegedly modified settings “so that the smallest amount of seeding possible could occur,” a Meta executive in charge of project management, Michael Clark, said in a deposition.

Now that new information has come to light, authors claim that Meta staff involved in the decision to torrent LibGen must be deposed again because the new facts allegedly “contradict prior deposition testimony.”

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Intelligence Community Directive 406 Expands US Spy Agencies’ Ties with Big Tech

Intelligence Community Directive 406 was signed in the dying days of the Biden Administration – on January 16 – essentially, yet another part in a recent big drive, pushed particularly strongly during the recent WEF meetings in Davos, to promote “public-private” partnerships. The significance of Intelligence Community Directive 406 cannot be overstated.

The directive, as Ken Klippenstein reports signed by the then director of national intelligence, was focused on encouraging US intelligence agencies to “partner” with those privately owned corporations that already have troves of data at their disposal – such as, for example, tech corporations behind social platforms, but also those developing AI. The impact of Intelligence Community Directive 406 on these partnerships is critical.

A new administration has taken over in the US, and as of this time, it remains unclear how or if it intends to implement and use these newly introduced powers.

The order’s key provisions are to facilitate how spy agencies can use both data and expertise that corporations have. The misgivings about this particular policy view have to do with how vast both these categories have become, and how they have fueled financial success of tech companies, and therefore their role.

It could also be read as one last ditch effort to compromise the credibility of Big Tech, and put a question mark over some new trends, involving a number of these corporations openly turning against their “tormentors” of many years, and embracing the new administration.

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EU Launches “Democracy Shield” Initiative to Tighten Controls on Tech Giants and Enforce “Hate Speech” Compliance

EU’s new “European Union Democracy Shield (EUDS)” committee, which aims to impose more control over tech giants now perceived as aligned with US President Trump, and promote their compliance with “hate speech” laws while imposing more “fact-checking” has gained its chair – French member of European Parliament (MEP) and French President Macron-allied politician Nathalie Loiseau.

The EUDS initiative was first unveiled by EU Commission’s Executive VP Henna Virkkunen, and Loiseau appears to have been given the job in true unelected-Brussels-bureaucracy fashion: this was known before a vote on her nomination took place.

“Nathalie Loiseau will be elected this evening at 6 pm,” it was announced early on Monday by La Lettre (this effective appointment has in the meantime been confirmed).

And it gets worse – another French MEP, Virginie Joron, said that Loiseau had announced she would be elected “the weekend before” those electing her had a chance to vote.

Stalin could never.

However – given the role that “Democracy Shield” is expected to play, namely, control speech/opinions, this odd process is seen by some as basically symbolic of the body’s purpose – albeit it happens to be one that is “denying democracy.”

Loiseau is a member of the European Parliament’s Renew group, whereas Joron is from the Patriots for Europe (PfE); the manner in which the EUDS selected its chief was particularly offensive to the latter since the PfE had hoped to have its own candidate, Antonio Tanger Correa – but that was rendered pointless by the manner in which Loiseau was appointed.

Correa denounced it as a “sham democracy” while Joron slammed the European Parliament’s “theater” where one can get “elected” before the vote.

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FBI Nominee Kash Patel Vows to End Censorship Collusion, Slams Wiretaps, and Pledges Section 230 Work

FBI Director nominee Kash Patel’s Senate confirmation hearing on Thursday was a chance to learn about the direction the agency would take after a number of years filled with controversies linked to online censorship.

Patel addressed several of these issues, including the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop stories and the FBI’s role in the scandal – which he said would not repeat going forward.

Patel also spoke against the FBI attempting to pressure Big Tech to get these companies to censor content, as well as against wiretapping political candidates and their staff – but also pledged to work with Senator Richard Blumenthal in order to bring potentially controversial changes to Section 230 that could jeopardize end-to-end encryption.

Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican, was on the confirmation hearing panel and recalled that in October 2020 – a month before the election – the FBI was among those who worked to falsely present Hunter Biden laptop story as “Russian disinformation.”

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Evidence in new case suggests Obama admin colluded with Big Tech to steal invention that led to Chinese dominance

Jeff Parker, the CEO of the small Florida-based technology company ParkerVision, explained to Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck Thursday how tech giant Qualcomm allegedly stole one of the most revolutionary patented innovations in American history with the help of elements of the Obama administration — technology that was ultimately offshored to China, possibly giving America’s pre-eminent adversary a competitive edge.

“We are at the beginning of seeing corruption exposed like never before in America,” said Beck.

Long war

ParkerVision has spent around 11 years fighting Qualcomm over the tech giant’s alleged infringement of its patented technology concerning “down-converting” electromagnetic signals — a process now used in virtually every phone, wireless device, and Bluetooth device.

Representatives of the two companies apparently met in the early 2000s, with Qualcomm expressing an interest in acquiring rights to ParkerVision’s invention, which would have helped it connect phones to the internet. Qualcomm, a multinational company headquartered in San Diego, reportedly signed multiple special nondisclosure agreements in order to learn about how ParkerVision’s down-converting system worked, particularly its energy sampling technique, which differed from the voltage sampling technique previously used in conventional down-converting systems.

According to Parker, the two companies were unable to reach a licensing agreement and went their separate ways. A few years later, Qualcomm started using a revolutionary new chip for smartphones that created major waves, apparently taking the company from around 30% to roughly 90% market share. The phones that drove this growth allegedly relied on ParkerVision’s patented technology.

After spotting what appeared to be its technology discussed in a Qualcomm conference paper, ParkerVision launched an investigation and determined, partly on the basis of reverse engineering, that its patented technology had been stolen. ParkerVision filed a lawsuit against Qualcomm in 2011.

Parker told Beck that emails exposed during discovery showed frustrated Qualcomm engineers who were facing pressure to make a third-generation chip discussing a return to the ParkerVision technology.

Court documents reveal that the jury that saw that and other internal communications returned a unanimous verdict in 2013 “finding that Qualcomm directly and indirectly infringed” upon multiple claims across four asserted patents and awarded ParkerVision $173 million in damages.

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Meta to spend up to $65 bln this year to power AI goals, Zuckerberg says

Meta Platforms plans to spend between $60 billion and $65 billion this year to build out AI infrastructure, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Friday, joining a wave of Big Tech firms unveiling hefty investments to capitalize on the technology.

As part of the investment, Meta (META.O) will build a more than 2-gigawatt data center that would be large enough to cover a significant part of Manhattan. The company — one of the largest customers of Nvidia’s (NVDA.O) coveted artificial intelligence chips — plans to end the year with more than 1.3 million graphics processors.

“This will be a defining year for AI,” Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post. “This is a massive effort, and over the coming years it will drive our core products and business.”

Zuckerberg expects Meta’s AI assistant — available across its services, including Facebook and Instagram — to serve more than 1 billion people in 2025, while its open-source Llama 4 would become the “leading state-of-the-art model”.

Shares of the company were 1.6% higher in early trading.

Big technology companies have been investing tens of billions of dollars to develop AI-related infrastructure after the meteoric success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT highlighted the potential for the technology.

U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday announced that OpenAI, SoftBank Group (9984.T) and Oracle (ORCL.N) will form a venture called Stargate and invest $500 billion in AI infrastructure across the United States.

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EU Updates Digital Rules Requiring Big Tech To Allow ‘Reporters’ To Monitor Hate Speech

Under a revised code of conduct on online speech, the European Commission says that Big Tech signatories need to allow a network of “monitoring reporters” to regularly monitor hate speech notices.

On Jan. 20, the European Commission announced that updated hate speech guidelines will be folded into the Digital Services Act (DSA).

The DSA is an EU-wide regulation that regulates the obligations of digital services.

Part of this requires social media platforms to remove, and take other specified steps to deal with, what is deemed disinformation. The DSA fully came into force in 2024.

Under the revised code, companies that are signed up must allow a network of “monitoring reporters” that are nonprofit or public entities with expertise on illegal hate speech to regularly monitor how the signatories are reviewing hate speech notices.

They will have to review at least two-thirds of hate speech notices received from monitoring reporters within 24 hours.

The EU said that the updated code of conduct, a voluntary instrument, builds on a 2016 code on “countering illegal hate speech online.”

European Commission Spokesperson Thomas Regnier told The Epoch Times by email that Facebook, Instagram, and X are among the signatories of the new code of conduct. These platforms were also part of the previous code of conduct, initiated in 2016, he said.

It was also signed by Dailymotion,  Jeuxvideo.com, LinkedIn, Microsoft-hosted consumer services, Snapchat, Rakuten Viber, TikTok, Twitch, and YouTube.

The EU also wants signatories to present “country-level data broken down by the internal classification of hate speech (such as race, ethnicity, religion, gender identity or sexual orientation).”

Some of the monitoring reporters include Amnesty International Italia, German organisation HateAid, and the French Ministry of the Interior’s dedicated portal to cybercrime, PHAROS.

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HHS Secretary Becerra Defends Biden Admin’s Big Tech Censorship, Blames Disinformation for Public Distrust

US Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Xavier Becerra is about to step down, along with the rest of the Biden administration. Not only that, but it also seems likely that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will take over that post.

Ouch.

That aside – the exit of Becerra might be the end, and the conclusion of a “synopsis” of this particular political drama – but the start goes way back to 2020, the pandemic, its (mis)handling, and all the wrongs that impacted both people’s physical and mental health, and facilitated rampant online censorship, for many years.

It makes for an interesting read that the Washington Post decided to give Becerra a lot of space to state his case – but less so because of anything the soon-to-be former official actually had to say, or any ideologically heavy narrative the media outlet in question itself, felt the need to peddle in this context, one more time.

(There’s a point in the article where the Covid pandemic is described – now in January 2025 – as merely “receding”?)

These seemingly last-ditch delusional efforts are being made all over the place and this one has Becerra at one point addressing the elephant in the supposedly purely scientific room – what about the rampage of online censorship around Covid?

Believe it or not, it’s the victim card that Becerra chose to play here. “I can’t go toe to toe with social media,” he is quoted as lamenting by the Washington Post, bringing up things like “instantaneous misinformation” as the culprit for citizens now expressing low trust in the outgoing government.

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Celebrities and Tech Leaders Launch Campaign, Asking For Donations To Fund New Social Media Agenda

A coalition of celebrities and tech figures—including actors Mark Ruffalo and Alex Winter, author Cory Doctorow, musician Brian Eno, journalist Carole Cadwalladr, writer and podcaster Akilah Hughes, and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales — have launched the Free Our Feeds initiative and are asking for donations to fund their idea. Their mission is to reclaim and expand the AT Protocol, the decentralized framework Bluesky operates on, in an effort to wrestle control from billionaires and corporate interests.

But what do these celebrities have in mind? Free speech? Likely not.

Bluesky, originally conceived within Twitter as a censorship-resistant social media platform, has drifted far from its founding principles. Designed to offer users an open, decentralized space for free expression, Bluesky was intended to prevent centralized control over online discourse. However, it has increasingly been influenced by advocates for stricter content moderation, undermining its foundational goal of safeguarding free speech.

Despite these intentions, the Free Our Feeds campaign might raise some eyebrows. The group is asking for $30 million over three years—starting with $4 million through a GoFundMe campaign—to fund a public-interest foundation. While decentralization is a promising concept, past examples like Mastodon and even Bluesky reveal how these platforms can quickly fall under the sway of those who seek to control speech. Decentralized technologies have been used to censor content and sever connections between platforms that support free speech, raising doubts about how truly independent these systems can remain.

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