Did Facebook Change Its Rules to Placate the Right?

Former lobbyist/political advisor Joel Kaplan joined Facebook in 2011 to lead its Washington D.C. outreach, reports BuzzFeed news. But some employees said they were very unhappy with decisions made by both Kaplan and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg: In April 2019, Facebook was preparing to ban one of the internet’s most notorious spreaders of misinformation and hate, Infowars founder Alex Jones. Then…

Biden Sworn In as 46th President

Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was sworn in as the 46th president of the United States on Wednesday, taking office at a moment of profound economic, health and political crises with a promise to seek unity after a tumultuous four years that tore at the fabric of American society. New York Times: With his hand on a five-inch-thick Bible that has been…

House Votes To Impeach President Trump a Historic Second Time

A House majority, including several Republicans, on Wednesday voted to impeach President Trump for “incitement of insurrection.” The New York Times reports: The House had enough votes on Wednesday to impeach President Trump for inciting a violent insurrection against the United States government, as more than a half-dozen members of the president’s party joined Democrats to charge him with high crimes…

US Used Patriot Act To Gather Logs of Website Visitors

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The government has interpreted a high-profile provision of the Patriot Act as empowering F.B.I. national security investigators to collect logs showing who has visited particular web pages, documents show. But the government stops short of using that law to collect the keywords people submit to internet search engines because it…

Craig Wright Doesn’t Have Keys To $8 Billion of Bitcoin

An anonymous reader shares a report: Craig Wright’s lawyer confirmed to Decrypt late last week that Wright does not possess — nor even claim to possess — the private keys that can be used to spend $8 billion of Bitcoin that Satoshi Nakamoto mined in Bitcoin’s early days. Wright filed a statement in the Southern District of Florida late Tuesday asserting…

PopSockets CEO Calls Out Amazon’s ‘Bullying With a Smile’ Tactics

At a House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee on competition in the digital economy, PopSockets CEO and inventor David Barnett described how Amazon used shady tactics to pressure their smartphone accessory company. Mashable reports: “Multiple times we discovered that Amazon itself had sourced counterfeit product and was selling it alongside our own product,” he noted. Barnett, under oath, told the gathered members of…