Linked: Cities and States Find New Ways to Tax Streaming Services
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Linked: Cities and States Find New Ways to Tax Streaming Services

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

I reject that argument too, and here is why.

In order to be a customer of Netflix, Disney+, etc. you need broadband internet access, which runs through those wireline facilities. The ISP is already paying for using the right of way and passing that expense on to you. Any service, streaming video, audio, websites you visit, etc. is using the connection that has already been paid for and passed on to you. Taxing each individual service simply creates a situation where there is one connection using the infrastructure, being paid for over and over again and then being passed back to you over and over again.

Linked: Crowd-Sourced Suspicion Apps Are Out of Control
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Linked: Crowd-Sourced Suspicion Apps Are Out of Control

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the last couple of years. We tend to think of the “Big Tech” apps and social networks as being the problem in the digital world, but really it’s all these little places too, because, as they describe, they don’t just keep us informed of actual events in our neighborhoods, they keep us informed of every single instance of something that someone finds suspicious.

This, in turn, makes us go from living in a relatively calm neighborhood to believing we are just one or two days away from the Purge.

Linked: CNN Shutting Down Its Facebook In Australia Shows How Removing 230 Will Silence Speech
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Linked: CNN Shutting Down Its Facebook In Australia Shows How Removing 230 Will Silence Speech

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 3 minutes

And this same song and dance will repeat for every single site on the internet until there’s very little left. The only companies with enough resources to actually do all the things that would be required to monitor all content, ironically, would be Google, Facebook, etc.

Gee, it’s almost like giving them a gift, eliminating ALL of the competition. It’s no wonder Facebook has been asking for regulation. They know the rest of us won’t be able to keep up.

Apple’s Image Scanning Tool is, Well, Complicated
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Apple’s Image Scanning Tool is, Well, Complicated

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 3 minutes

At first blush, the idea of scanning images synced up to iCloud for child sexual abuse materials against the hash list of known CSAM images seems like a good idea. As a survivor of childhood sexual abuse myself, I want tech companies to takes some initiative to deal with this issue. They also want to scan images on kids’ phones using AI to see if kids are getting into any trouble with sending or receiving sexual material. Again, that sounds like a good thing. But, as the EFF points out, this all requires a backdoor, and backdoors, once created, almost never remain used for just one purpose.

Linked: Can the ‘right to disconnect’ exist in a remote-work world?
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Linked: Can the ‘right to disconnect’ exist in a remote-work world?

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

Anything the government comes up with might protect workers from being required to work all the time, but the devil in the detail is how to allow workers to choose which hours they do work within that? It gets a bit messy, doesn’t it, and really isn’t that the issue with the government getting involved? It limits the possibilities by putting a defined “work” time, when what is really needed is the flexibility to figure out the best time, and location, that allows a worker to get what needs to be done, done, and still have a life that is outside of work. That’s going to look different for everyone, so there can’t be rules passed down from an outsider, there will need to be an understanding between workers, and management, on what works best for everyone, including when they will disconnect.

That does, of course, require some more effort and imagination. Are you up to it?