Yesterday, I blogged about the controversy Uber is in, thanks largely to Business Senior Vice President Emil Michael. Now Congress, including a very prominent US Senator, is getting involved.
The controversy started when VP Michael suggested the media investigate and dig up dirt on a journalist who criticized Uber on her blog. Though this conversation was supposed to be confidential, it leaked out anyway. Mr. Michael apologized for these comments, but that didn’t stop US Senator Al Franken from writing a letter to Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, questioning Uber’s privacy policies. But it’s not just this incident that concerns Senator Franken, who is also Chairman of the Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law. At the infamous dinner party was Uber spokesperson Nairi Hourdajian, who told Michael that such acts would violate Uber’s policies. In a blog yesterday, Nairi Hondajian revealed Uber can access taxi driver and rider data for ‘limited business purposes’, but Senator Franken says the limits weren’t fully described. The Senator checked Uber’s policy on their website, and discovered this policy doesn’t match the policy stated after Mr. Micheal’s slip up. The Senator is troubled by reports of incidents Uber tracking customers. There’s the incident where an employee admitted to using a program called ‘God’s View’ to track a journalist without the journalist’s knowledge or approval. Senator Franken ended the letter with 10 questions for CEO Kalanick to answer and reply to no later than December 15, 2014.
Just when you thought Uber couldn’t get in anymore hot water, now they have one of the most powerful senators in America and his subcommittee to answer to. If these incidents are true, I’m glad Senator Franken is stepping up. Privacy issues have been on the technology forefront for several years now. And it often seems like major corporations have the upper hand. It’s good to have a man in the Senate representing the concerns of many people. If I were CEO Kalanick, I’d get back to Senator Franken before December 15. Could this public relations nightmare get anymore terrifying?
After a disaster of mid-term elections for the Obama Administration, Mr. President got back in the good graces of many by announcing his support of net neutrality, keeping the Internet equally regulated. Some major corporations agree.
Believe it or not, many major corporations support net neutrality. These include Ford Motors, Visa, UPS (United Parcel Service), even Bank of America. These companies urged the FCC for fair, but strict broadband regulations. They’re not going to say it aloud. In fact, when asked, they’ve denied supporting net neutrality. But there is a corporate based advocacy group called Ad Hoc Telecommunications Users Committee. This committee met with the FCC three times. Before the visit, the committee must submit information about it. Through this, we find out Ford, Visa, UPS, and Bank of America are affiliated with this committee. We also find out all four sent representatives to such meetings: UPS sent a senior vice-president, Bank of America sent a senior vice-president, Visa sent a government relations leader and Ford sent a Washington counsel. The FCC is obligated to report the meeting subject matter. Guess what it was for these meetings? Subjects included, ‘protecting and promoting the open Internet’ and ‘terminating access monopolies’. Sounds a lot like net neutrality to me.
Why would they want to keep their support for this issue secret? The majority of Americans are for net neutrality, on both sides of the political aisle. They may have some powerful corporate executives and stockbrokers who disagree, but can’t we at least agree to disagree? I’m also aware Bank of America doesn’t exactly have the best reputation right now, especially among middle Americans. Wouldn’t coming out in support of net neutrality change that? But there is the cynic in me that asking why these mega, mega conglomerates are supporting this cause? And if they’re supporting it, should we?
Facebook leaders let it be known that marketers will have to buy ad space before they reach customers. Effective January 2015, they will change marketers’ post rankings to reduce the number of advertisements fed to around 1.35 billion news feeds around the world. The message seems to be clear: less advertising postings, more buying real ads. If advertisers were smart, they would take heed without complaint. Nearly 20% of the world’s population has a Facebook page. One person’s news feed can see anywhere from 1,500-15,000 new items a day. According to their own research, business ad/marketing posts are the last thing people want to see in their news feed. Brian Boland, Facebook’s Vice President of marketing ad products, said hundreds of thousands have complained about too many promotional posts. On the other hand, Facebook has worked ceaselessly to promote it’s paid advertising plans. One tactic is a pop-up ad that comes on Facebook mobile. In Q3 2014 alone, the demand from advertisers was so great Facebook made nearly $3 billion…in just that quarter!
I think Facebook is doing this for both reasons. One is to respond to customer complaints of being flooded by advertising posts. The second is to add even more to their ad revenue by virtually forcing marketers to pay for ad space. The first reason is more honorable than the second, but I see why the second reason is sufficient. I can see why small businesses with limited budgets would want to use ad postings to get their business out. Facebook is a good tool and I think they should go easy on them. But for mega corporations worth billions…come on! Pony up and pay for for the ad space. If they can afford to give major bonuses to their CEOs, they can afford to pay for advertising. So why shouldn’t they?
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer isn’t what it used to be. Maybe it never was. And now, an IBM research team found a flaw that goes as far back as the Windows 95 era.
Tech giant IBM’s X-Force Research team found a data manipulation venerability called CVE-2014-6332. It’s nicknamed the unicorn bug. It’s a rare bug IE depends on but a hacker can use it for attacks that force codes to run remotely and take over the user’s machine. Don’t let the name 2014 fool you. This venerability has been around since the mid-1990s. This bug became exploitable when IE 3.0 and Visual Basic Script was released back in 1996. Hackers can use these remote codes to install malware, which can lead to keylogging, screen-grabbing, exploiting remote address, and other malware problems. IBM X-Force revealed the problem in spring 2014, even talked about it at this year’s Black Hat USA Conference. When the bug was found, they didn’t find it harmfully active, but there’s still room for caution. Exploitation is tricky, but when it’s successful, it can cause data attacks that can wipe out important files and destroy any system.
This explains a lot. The quality of Internet Explorer over the years has been downhill and I see little improvement in sight. Plus, web browser competitors like Firefox and Google Chrome are becoming more and more popular, probably because IE is slipping in quality. The other disturbing thing is that it took nearly twenty years for this problem to be exposed.? And it took an outside company to expose the Windows venerability. And why isn’t mainstream media talking about this? For a problem to be plaguing one of the largest Internet conglomerates for nearly two decades; that should be breaking news. I think IE is lucky nobody really exploited this issue. If they did, it probably would have cause the whole Internet as we know it to near collapse. Is this venerability the reason IE isn’t what it used to be?
The message says that mega cable and Internet conglomerates should not decide which sites the consumer can or can’t visit. Though President Obama stressed the FCC is an independent organization, let’s read behind the lines. He’s really giving FCC Tom Wheeler and his sympathizers the green light to take no prisoners when it comes to net neutrality issues. Earlier this year, Wheeler tried to come up with a compromise, allowing Internet companies to sell faster service to anyone willing to pay. But the President’s statement is a win for Internet activists everywhere, and for small Internet companies who can’t afford to pay for faster service, much less compete with the big boys. The set of rules the President asked for include the following: no blocking (your Internet service provider can’t block a website so long as that website is legal), no throttling (they can’t slow down websites and speed up others at their choosing), and ‘no paid prioritization’ (no service should be stuck in a slow lane because of inability to pay). You know major cable companies aren’t happy about this. I’m sure come 2015, they’re going to send lobbyist to plea with the newly controlled Republican congress do swing this in their favor.
But the FCC is an independent organization, remember? So what good is lobbying and bribing going to do? I’m glad President Obama made this statement. The Internet has been open and free for all for around twenty years. Shouldn’t we leave well enough alone? If net neutrality isn’t enforced, major corporations are bound to censor what we can or can’t watch, download, or where we can’t do business, not because of racy content, but because it doesn’t line up with their already fat bank accounts. Shouldn’t the Internet be fair for all humanity and all competitors? Doesn’t corporate America have enough control over our lives?
We can take for granted the English language being all over the Internet. But did you know only 5% of the world speak English as a first language and only 21% speak/understand it at all?
Yet 55% of the Internet is in English. This is a huge problem for those trying to make Internet access global. Take a nation like India, one of the fast rising players on the international stage. India alone has 22 official languages and over 300 unofficial ones. China, now the world’s top economic powerhouse, has Cantonese and Mandarin as official languages, but official languages include Uyghur, Tibetan, Mongolian, and Zhuang. Then there are scores of unofficial languages. In fact, most of the Internet is dominated by only ten languages: English, Spanish, German, French, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Arabic, Korean and Portuguese.
But I understand the other side. You see, 96% of Internet users speak these at least one of these major ten languages. And in places which others languages are used, they barely have Internet access anyway. But that’s changing, and many tech leaders are seeing to it. So if they’re going to make the Internet available to all, they should work on some kind of translation. There is language software already in place. But there just needs to be accessible and affordable to all languages and people. That’s a start. What else can be done to combat the Internet language problem?
