Author: Toby Shapshak

Towards the end of last year, a major bank gave each lunch guest a bag of presents made in South Africa bearing the label “buy local”. It would be wonderful if that applied to more of the South African economy. The label suggests that consumers should buy from a local greengrocer or retailer — and imagine if we used only local digital services. But while the operating costs of these services benefit the economy, the profits go into a bank account in Ireland, where most US tech firms are based because of its lax corporate tax regulations. The media plays…

Substack has missed the point. Preventing Nazis from spewing venomous hate speech is not censorship. This is not a conversation about free speech – and framing it as such is intellectually lazy and just plain wrong. Nazism is an evil, genocidal ideology that killed 6 million Jews and between 35 million and 60 million people in World War 2. The evil man espousing it, Adolf Hitler, caused a brutal war that dragged the whole world into it. It not only decimated Europe for decades but caused economic destruction that had decades-long effects for hundreds of millions of people around the…

In a portent of things to come in 2024, Google lost the first of many major antitrust lawsuits on 11 December 2023. After a month in a San Francisco courtroom, Google was found guilty of all 11 counts of anticompetitive behaviour by a jury, in a case brought by Fortnite-maker Epic Games. Further arguments will be made this month but that decision is likely to have a major – potentially existential – impact on Google’s Android business. It charges app developers a 30% fee for sales through its Play store for mobile apps – something that the jury found had…

Cambridge Dictionary picked “hallucinate” as its word of the year for 2023. It’s not a throwback to the acid-popping sixties, but the bizarre choice for when this new generation of AI chatbots, well, makes shit up. But, as Naomi Klein wrote in May, “Why call the errors ‘hallucinations’ at all? Why not algorithmic junk? Or glitches?” I can‘t agree more. Talk about cultural appropriation. The hippies would sue if they, well, like, were able to get it together after all these years. Hallucination, says Klein, refers to the “mysterious capacity of the human brain to perceive phenomena that are not…

After whistleblower Frances Haugen revealed how Facebook, now Meta, knew about the dangers to teenager’s mental health using Instagram, it continued to “prioritise profit over safety”. The social media giant claimed otherwise, and that these results in the picture-sharing app were unintentional. But several new court cases filed by the US government, and more explosive whistleblower testimony to US Congress, argue that Facebook “intentionally” designed “manipulative features that make children addicted to their platforms while lowering their self-esteem”. The latest revelations follow the latest court case brought by the US government to hold Meta accountable for knowingly harming the mental…

Google pays Apple a whopping 36% of the advertising revenue it generates from its deal as the exclusive search engine for Safari. This gobsmacking revelation was made last month in the US government’s anti-monopoly court case against Google – which both Apple and Google have tried to keep from going public. University of Chicago economics professor Kevin Murphy, called by Google as its main economics expert, made the shock admission – over which the search giants’ lawyer John Schmidtlein was seen cringing. Oh dear, the cat is truly out of the bag now. “Probably the biggest slip of the entire…

Not since the valiant Ukrainian soldiers on Snake Island swore at a Russian warship, has the phrase “go fuck yourself” reverberated so loudly around the world. This time, it was Twitter/X.com owner Elon Musk saying it – not to a warship that threatened to bomb the soldiers (who it turns out were taken hostage) – but to the source of his business’s revenue. As a way to draw attention to himself and make him the centre of that attention – like going to Israel to the site of a massacre, but not apologising for an antisemitic tweet – it has…

Roaming on cellular data overseas can be a painful and costly experience. Most people, burnt by bill shock, have found alternatives – like using free Wi-Fi hotspots or buying local SIM cards. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. Free Wi-Fi is, well, free. But it is hardly secure and can easily be used to syphon off your passwords and other personal details. If you are using free public Wi-Fi, you should always be using a VPN. Read More: A VPN is a crucial addition when travelling – Here’s why and which to consider Buying a SIM is just technical enough…

One of the most useful travel tricks I have discovered over the last few years (except for all of 2022 and 2021) is Google Maps’ offline maps. This setting lets you download maps for cities and countries to your smartphone and use them while travelling. As much as I have now solved my travel connectivity through that clever KnowRoaming.com services and its eSIMs, there is no point downloading the maps themselves when you can save them offline. But it’s a waste of cellular data to be pulling the data down when you can preload it using Wi-Fi, which is what…

Although late to the chatbot party, Amazon has unveiled a newcomer in the artificially intelligent space called Q. Unlike ChatGPT, Amazon’s attempt is aimed at Amazon Web Services (AWS) business customers, using their own data securely. “We think Q has the potential to become a work companion for millions and millions of people in their work life,” AWS CEO Adam Selipsky told The New York Times. Enter Q https://youtu.be/1r3MVD1xVRk AWS is the largest cloud computing provider, followed by Microsoft’s Azure, which calls its own AI offering Copilot. This is based on OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Microsoft’s 49% shareholding through its $13…