Jeff Bezos To Step Down as Amazon CEO

Amazon announced on Tuesday that AWS CEO Andy Jassy will replace Jeff Bezos as CEO during the third quarter of this year. Bezos will transition to executive chair of Amazon’s board. In a statement, Bezos said: I’m excited to announce that this Q3 I’ll transition to Executive Chair of the Amazon Board and Andy Jassy will become CEO. In the Exec…

Snopes.com Exposes 4chan Campaign to ‘Kindle Mistrust in Snopes’

“This is the perfect moment to do this. This is an age of conspiracies for boomers… Let’s kindle their mistrust in Snopes and other fact checkers,” wrote one 4chan poster. Snopes.com later reported:
In October 2020, a series of threads was posted to the anonymous internet forum 4Chan as part of operation “Snopes-Piercer,” a smear campaign with the stated goal of “red-pilling…

Why Goodreads is Bad For Books

After years of complaints from users, Goodreads’ reign over the world of book talk might be coming to an end. From a report: Goodreads started off the way you might think: two avid readers, in the mid-Noughties, wanting to build space online for people to track, share, and talk about books they were reading. Husband and wife Otis and Elizabeth Chandler…

Microsoft Surface Duo Review: Two Screens, Too Many Problems

Joanna Stern, reviewing the Surface Duo for the Wall Street Journal: It isn’t always clear when something is ready. Take my grilling. Sometimes I remove steak well before or after I should’ve. You might say it’s a “tough” call. But there’s nothing tough about stating this: The new two-screen Surface Duo is undercooked. Microsoft’s new $1,400 book-like phone-tablet thingy is not…

An Amazon Ad Prompted Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller To Block In-App Purchases of Kindle Books On iOS

According to a collection of internal emails recently released by lawmakers, as part of the House Judiciary Committee’s antirust probe into Apple, a series of Amazon advertisements prompted Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller to block in-app purchases of Kindle books on iOS. 9to5Mac reports: As it stands today, the Kindle app for iPhone and iPad does not allow users to purchase…

Amazon Says Police Demands For Customer Data Have Gone Up

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Amazon has said the number of demands for user data made by U.S. federal and local law enforcement have increased more during the first half of 2020 than during the same period a year earlier. The disclosure came in the company’s latest transparency report, published Thursday. The figures show that Amazon received 23%…

Amazon Stops Selling ‘Active Content’ Games in Kindle Reader’s Store

Once upon a time, you could play Scrabble on your black-and-white Kindle readers. Or chess or sudoko, or even solve New York Times Crossword Puzzles. Amazon’s Kindle Store had included 500 slick Java-based “Active Content” downloads… Electronic Arts even produced Kindle-specific versions of Monopoly, Yahtzee, and Battleship, while Amazon created original games with titles like Every Word and Pirate Stash —…

Musk Says ‘Time To Break Up Amazon,’ Escalating Feud With Bezos

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk said it’s “time to break up Amazon” in a tweet Thursday, escalating a rivalry with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, another billionaire investing in space exploration. “Monopolies are wrong,” Musk tweeted while tagging Bezos, the world’s wealthiest man. Musk’s post came in response to a tweet from a…

Almost Every Website You Visit Records Exactly How Your Mouse Moves

Medium’s technology blog OneZero reports that many websites today use a service that collects all of your mouse movements, enabling “replays” of every move. “What surprised me was that the software even recorded when I shook my mouse around while deciding what to click on. It felt like observing digital body language.” Session replay services have been around for over a…