#bigtech

"At their strongest, Hao’s claims are rooted in both place and people, backed by her reporting on AI developments in half a dozen countries. In Colombia, Hao profiles a refugee fighting for pennies on gig-work platforms while labeling the data used to train generative AI models. In Chile and Uruguay, she introduces us to activists fighting off proposed data centers, which threaten to usurp land and siphon potable drinking water from communities facing drought. In Kenya, she meets an outsourced worker who was paid just a couple of dollars an hour to filter through the most violent and toxic content produced by ChatGPT.

Hao’s reporting strips away the veneer of total automation that has been lathered onto generative AI products. She lays bare how precarious the human labor and vital natural resources are that power these products, and how the rise of the AI industry in Silicon Valley has impacted communities throughout its global supply chain. She also goes one step farther and proposes a diagnosis for what ails OpenAI and the ethos that has infected the industry at large. And she names it outright: the pursuit of scale.

Hao paints scaling as a core tenet of the company’s business model and Altman’s leadership agenda. OpenAI has hinged its success on exponential, unencumbered growth. This hunger for larger models—and, in turn, more data, more water, and more land to develop them—echoes the expansionist ideologies that underlay European imperial projects. And like those projects, OpenAI’s expansion has come at a human cost."

https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/open-ai-karen-hao/

#AI #GenerativeAI #OpenAI #Automation #Neocolonialism #BigTech #SiliconValley

"Meta has used back-to-school pictures of schoolgirls to advertise one of its social media platforms to a 37-year-old man, in a move parents described as “outrageous” and “upsetting”.

The man noticed that posts encouraging him to “get Threads”, Mark Zuckerberg’s rival to Elon Musk’s X, were being dropped into his Instagram feed featuring embedded posts of uniformed girls as young as 13 with their faces visible and, in most cases, their names.

The children’s images were used by Meta after their parents had posted them on Instagram to mark their return to school. The parents were unaware that Meta’s settings permitted it to do this. One mother said her account was set to private, but the posts were automatically cross-posting to Threads where they were visible. Another said she posted the picture to a public Instagram account. The posts of their children were highlighted to the stranger as “suggested threads”.

The recipient told the Guardian the posts felt “deliberately provocative and ultimately exploitative of the children and families involved”.

The father of a 13-year-old who appeared in one of the posts said it was “absolutely outrageous”. The images were all of schoolgirls in short skirts with either bare legs or stockings.

“When I found out an image of her has been exploited in what felt like a sexualised way by a massive company"

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/sep/20/parents-outraged-meta-uses-photos-schoolgirls-ads-man

#SocialMedia #Meta #Threads #BigTech #SiliconValley

@developer @linuxfoundation

Waarom post de Linux Foundation content op Youtube?

Kan ik de video ook op een privacyvriendelijk platform zien? Ik wil niet door #BigTech geprofileerd worden.

Het is tijd voor een #PeerTube instance van overheid.nl.

@tomootes

https://www.europesays.com/uk/441674/ EU Barring Tech Giants From Financial Data System #Banking #BigTech #Data/Privacy #DataSharing #EU #Europe #European #FinancialDataAccess #News #PYMNTSNews #What'sHot

"Thiel is not a theologian, scholar, or prophet. So why pay attention to his biblical musings? Because Thiel is one of the world’s most influential men and his Antichrist speeches reveal his deep belief that religion is a weapon for political warfare—and he’s right.

Thiel’s Antichrist fixation fits a long tradition in American politics. Since the nation’s founding, Americans have sought to name the Antichrist—usually by pointing the finger at their political enemies. “The symbol of the Antichrist has played a surprisingly significant role in shaping Americans’ self-understanding,” wrote historian Robert Fuller in 1995’s Naming the Antichrist: The History of an American Obsession. “Because they tend to view their nation as uniquely blessed by God, they have been especially prone to demonize their enemies.”

Over time, the identity of Satan’s Little Helper has shifted from Native Americans to Communists, Hitler and Saddam Hussein and Barack Obama—even barcodes and microchips have been implicated. From colonial days to the AI era, the hunt for the Antichrist continues. Today’s QAnon conspiracy theorists believe they are battling a cabal of cannibalistic Satanists. Unhumans, a 2024 book praised by JD Vance, equated progressives with bloodthirsty “unhuman” creatures. This turns politics into a zero-sum holy war.

“Once we label our adversaries in these cosmic terms—all good versus all evil—now there’s going to be no compromise,” said Fuller.

Thiel understands this. He frames his interest in the Antichrist as part of his own “political theology,” a term he borrows from Carl Schmitt, a Nazi philosopher who defined the practice of politics as a struggle against an existential enemy, arguing that politics is just religion in disguise. Thiel also draws on René Girard, a Catholic thinker (and one of Thiel’s Stanford professors) who warned that human societies tend to spiral toward violence in a hunt for scapegoats."

https://newrepublic.com/article/200471/peter-thiel-obsession-antichrist-religion
#SiliconValley #BigTech #Religion

"U.S. allies expressed concern and their nationals abandoned holidays, business trips and plans to see family as they raced back to America before the new rules took effect Sunday."

"Tech companies and banks sent urgent memos to employees advising them not to leave the country. Bags were packed, tickets bought, and families left behind as visa holders scrambled to beat what they believed was a looming deadline."

NBC: New $100,000 visa fee sets off panic and confusion https://www.nbcnews.com/world/asia/trump-h1b-visa-fee-travel-tech-workers-india-china-immigration-rcna232695 @NBCNews #BigTech

"Indem sie weiterhin interagieren, kommentieren und teilen, stärken sie das System, das sie eigentlich ablehnen. Sie tragen zur Verbreitung von Inhalten bei, die das Geschäftsmodell der Plattformen unterstützen, anstatt es zu schwächen. Dieser Teufelskreis kann nur durch einen bewussten Rückzug und das Entziehen der Aufmerksamkeit durchbrochen werden."

https://www.kuketz-blog.de/warum-das-argument-man-muesse-in-sozialen-netzwerken-bleiben-um-opposition-zu-leisten-voelliger-unsinn-ist/

#twitter #x #sozialeNetzwerke #bigtech #Gesellschaft #Politik #Journalisten

“Samsung is committed to innovation and enhancing every day value for our home appliance customers,” said a Samsung spokesperson.

There is no reason that your expensive device that you paid for with your hard-earned money should ever have ads on them. Smart appliances like fridges don’t even need to be “smart”. Their job is to keep your food and drinks cold.

These companies are predators.

https://www.androidauthority.com/samsung-confirms-smart-refrigerator-ads-are-coming-3598848/

#Samsung #SmartHome #BigTech #Advertising #Privacy #Security #Technology

Big Tech beheerst 75% van onze data en bepaalt wat we zien. Tijd voor verandering! Stap voor stap onafhankelijk worden? Begin met privacy vriendelijke e-mail & agenda. #Privacy #BigTech https://www.bitsoffreedom.nl/campagnes/stap-af-van-big-tech/

For a moment I thought this was a talk about Adobe Illustrator…

#adobe #illustrator #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #LLM #LLMs #MachineLearning #tech #technology #BigTech #GenAI #generativeAI #china #chinese #Meta #Google #OpenAI #ChatGPT #news

What a feeling of satisfaction after receiving a call via my own #XMPP server from my partner, who is at the time in a commercial flight.

The call quality was flawless.

And no need of #bigTech!

#selfhosting

Cobalt Comes at a Cost

#CobaltMines #ChildLabor #EnvironmentalJustice #TheInternetIsCrack #podcast #bigtech #humanrights

Actually not astonishing at all. Most things I’ve encountered with #BigTech takes an age to resolve. They promise two days for their systems to do something and six months later, it’s still stuck. Facebook still doesn’t work properly and they’ve been around for 21 years.

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/09/20/the-verge-nest-is-dead-long-live-google-home/

"I think this is the most exciting time in America ever"

Fascism is Capitalism in crisis.

#USPol #Microsoft #Google #Meta #oracle #bigtech

None tech, techy.
All you see, read, and hear people talk about is AI. Everyone wants the latest phone with AI baked in, feeding those models with every step you take and every conversation you make. And honestly? I don’t get it.
For me, AI is a search tool. A new “Google it.” Something to nudge me at work when I forget how to do something — which is about 99% of the time because my brain is like a sieve. Say something to it and it’s gone in 60 seconds.
So yeah, I don’t see why people spend a fortune on features they’ll barely touch. But hey, I’m not judging. I’m happy with my iPhone SE 3rd gen.

#ai #apple #iphone #tech #writerscoffeeclub #bigtech

Our January podcast episode with @joecardillo is pretty relevant to explore again!

With the #TikTok deal an obvious ploy to surprise speech, we talked about what we do next. #BigTech doesn’t control us, we can make new choices. #media #uspol #socialmedia

https://pca.st/episode/b338d7ef-421c-4491-944a-2e29fffc1b87

A "proclamation?" Are you listening, Big Tech? You asked for this.

In addition to the outrageous amount for hiring highly-skilled foreign workers, "wealthy individuals" can get a $1 million “gold card” visa as a pathway to U.S. citizenship, also known as the "trump card."

AP: Trump signs proclamation adding $100K annual fee for H-1B visa applications https://apnews.com/article/h1b-visa-trump-immigration-8d39699d0b2de3d90936f8076357254e @AssociatedPress #BigTech