Category Archives: Internet

The strange case of Alibaba’s Jack Ma and his three-month vanishing act

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The ebullient tech tycoon embarrassed China’s leaders and went missing. Now he’s back, but seems far less outspoken

Wearing burgundy lipstick and a long peroxide wig, the diminutive entrepreneur who would soon become China’s richest man took to the stage and belted out Can You Feel the Love Tonight? from Disney’s The Lion King.

Jack Ma, chief executive of e-commerce giant Alibaba, had earned the right to make a spectacle of himself. On that day in September 2009, in front of 16,000 adoring employees packed into Hangzhou’s Yellow Dragon stadium, the eccentric but iron-willed former English teacher was celebrating. He had built a bona fide tech champion, China’s answer to Amazon, eBay and PayPal rolled into one.

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Von der Leyen: big tech firms need to be reined in despite Trump’s exit

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Internet giants that spread hate speech and conspiracy theories should face ‘democratic limits’, says European commission president

The end of Donald Trump’s tenure in the White House was celebrated by the EU’s Ursula von der Leyen on Wednesday, as she warned that the former US president’s rise highlighted the need to confront the internet giants who helped him spread “conspiracy theories and fake news”.

The European commission president spoke of her relief at Trump’s departure, but warned that the outgoing leader’s movement still existed, and that the digital platforms used to spread hate needed to be tackled.

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When film stars attack: Russell Crowe’s reaction to criticism could set a trend

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The actor’s unexpected response to a complaint about an 18-year-old film could pave the way for big-name actors to personally insult Twitter users

One of the most surprising new avenues to have formed for celebrities over the course of the pandemic has been Cameo. For the uninitiated, Cameo is a service where celebrities can create personalised messages for their fans. For £75, Hodor from Game of Thrones will wish you a happy birthday or – if you have £750 lying around – Richard Dreyfuss will put on a Jaws shirt and struggle to pronounce your name.

But maybe this isn’t enough for you. Maybe you want to find direct engagement, with a much bigger star than Cameo offers, and for free. If that’s the case, I can heartily endorse not liking a Russell Crowe movie. Because, even if it takes him a while, Crowe will do his best to respond to your criticism. And if you’re really lucky, he’ll sound like an out-of-touch bus stop crackpot in the process. Here’s what happened.

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Revealed: Tory MPs and commentators who joined banned app Parler

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Nadine Dorries, James Cleverly and Michael Gove joined the platform favoured by Trump supporters

At least 14 Conservative MPs, including several ministers, cabinet minister Michael Gove and a number of prominent Tory commentators joined Parler, the social media platform favoured by the far right that was forced offline last week for hosting threats of violence and racist slurs.

Parler was taken offline after Amazon Web Services pulled the plug last Sunday, saying violent posts and racist threats connected to the recent attack on the US Capitol violated its terms.

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‘Internexit’ for Leave.EU as domain name temporarily suspended

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Error message greets visitors to site registered in name of Irish businessman who claims he does not know campaign group

Leave.EU has been forced to “Internexit” after the group’s EU domain name was temporarily suspended. It comes after the Irish businessman in whose name the pro-Brexit campaign group’s domain name is registered denied having any involvement with the organisation.

Now visitors to the site are greeted with an error message, and the EU’s online registry marks the domain as under a server hold, meaning it is “temporarily inactive and under investigation”.

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Wikipedia at 20: last gasp of an internet vision, or a beacon to a better future?

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The naysayers said the user-written encyclopedia would never work. Now it boasts 55m articles and 1.7bn visitors a month

Twenty years ago today, a tech startup called Nupedia launched a side project. The company had been hard at work producing a free online encyclopaedia, but it was slow going: its strict editing process, comprehensive peer review and focus on expert authors meant it finished only 21 articles in its first year.

The side project would do away with all of that. Instead, anyone would be able to write and edit articles. Nupedia’s founders were split over whether the trade-off – more content with a lower barrier to entry – was worth it, but by the end of its first year, the side project had amassed articles on more than 18,000 topics. Nupedia, by the time it shut in 2003, had finished just 25.

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Amazon.com and ‘Big Five’ publishers accused of ebook price-fixing

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Class action lawsuit filed in US claims the houses have colluded with the online giant to keep prices artificially high

Amazon.com and the “Big Five” publishers – Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan and Simon & Schuster – have been accused of colluding to fix ebook prices, in a class action filed by the law firm that successfully sued Apple and the Big Five on the same charge 10 years ago.

The lawsuit, filed in district court in New York on Thursday by Seattle firm Hagens Berman, on behalf of consumers in several US states, names the retail giant as the sole defendant but labels the publishers “co-conspirators”. It alleges Amazon and the publishers use a clause known as “Most Favored Nations” (MFN) to keep ebook prices artificially high, by agreeing to price restraints that force consumers to pay more for ebooks purchased on retail platforms that are not Amazon.com.

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Noxious internet drama makes me nostalgic for the good old days of passive aggressive notes | Brigid Delaney

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TikTok artist Lubalin brilliantly captures the drama of low stakes online fights. But internet discord is increasingly spilling into everyday life

It was summer 2016 and I was looking after a friend’s flat in Kirribilli.

Out the back was a communal laundry and clothesline.

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Poland plans to make censoring of social media accounts illegal

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Following Trump’s Twitter ban, Polish government wants to protect posts that do not break nation’s laws

Polish government officials have denounced the deactivation of Donald Trump’s social media accounts, and said a draft law being readied in Poland will make it illegal for tech companies to take similar actions there.

“Algorithms or the owners of corporate giants should not decide which views are right and which are not,” wrote the prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, on Facebook earlier this week, without directly mentioning Trump. “There can be no consent to censorship.”

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Twitter chief says Trump ban was right decision but sets ‘dangerous precedent’

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  • Jack Dorsey: ‘I do not celebrate having to ban Donald Trump’
  • ‘A ban is a failure of ours to promote healthy conversation’

Jack Dorsey, the chief executive of Twitter, has said that banning Donald Trump from the platform was the “right decision” but that it sets a dangerous precedent.

Related: Donald Trump becomes the first US president to be impeached for a second time – live

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Blocked: how the internet turned on Donald Trump

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From Facebook and Twitter to Reddit and Amazon, tech firms are moving to silence the president, and his QAnon supporters

Twitter’s decision to suspend Donald Trump’s account on Wednesday evening has opened the floodgates for tech companies and platforms to remove the outgoing US president from their services.

Twitter’s suspension was followed by Facebook, which a day later announced the move would be “indefinite”. Twitter then announced a “permanent” suspension of Trump’s account.

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Twitter suspends 70,000 accounts sharing QAnon content

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The network said it acted after ‘violent events in Washington’ when a pro-Trump mob stormed the US Capitol

Twitter has said it has suspended more than 70,000 accounts since Friday that were primarily dedicated to sharing QAnon content as the social media site continued to crack down on content after supporters of Donald Trump stormed the US Capitol.

“Given the violent events in Washington DC, and increased risk of harm, we began permanently suspending thousands of accounts that were primarily dedicated to sharing QAnon content on Friday afternoon,” Twitter said in a blog late on Monday.

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Opinion divided over Trump’s ban from social media

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Actions spark debate on free speech and whether chief executives of tech firms are fit to act as judge and jury

As rioters were gathering around the US Capitol last Wednesday, a familiar question began to echo around the offices of the large social networks: what should they do about Donald Trump and his provocative posts?

The answer has been emphatic: ban him.

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Trump Twitter: Republicans and Democrats split over freedom of speech

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Twitter’s decision to permanently suspend Donald Trump’s account in the wake of the storming of Capitol Hill on Wednesday continues to stoke fierce debate, supporters and critics split on partisan lines as they contest what the suspension means for a cherished American tradition: freedom of speech.

Related: Insurrection Day: when white supremacist terror came to the US Capitol

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Fat felines: we all love a ‘chonky’ cat – but the online trend has to end

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Over the last few years, the internet has thrilled to pictures of chubby pets. But now experts are calling for a new era of cat shaming and determined dieting

Name: Fat cats.

Age: Probably no older than 10, given their propensity to die young.

Appearance: Fat.

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Analysis of Covid search terms reveals Britons’ hopes and fears in 2020

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Although preoccupations changed over year, Britons’ thirst for Covid-related information continued to outstrip that for all other health topics

At the peak of the pandemic, Britons were searching for coronavirus-related information six times a day on average, an analysis of search engine data reveals. And although our preoccupations have changed over the months, our thirst for Covid-related information continues to outstrip that for all other health and social care-related topics.

2020 has been an extraordinary year. Never before have we been so united in our concerns and interests as we roller-coasted through the months. To better understand what that psychological journey looked like, Kaiasm, a Somerset-based data intelligence company, crunches the searches people make on Google, Bing and other internet sites. But rather than analysing the top search terms people use, it groups these together into underlying concepts, to better understand people’s needs and interests.

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Dozens sue Amazon’s Ring after camera hack leads to threats and racial slurs

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Class action claims weak security allowed hackers to take over the smart cameras used on doorbells and in homes

Dozens of people who say they were subjected to death threats, racial slurs, and blackmail after their in-home Ring smart cameras were hacked are suing the company over “horrific” invasions of privacy.

A new class action lawsuit alleges that lax security measures at Ring, which is owned by Amazon, allowed hackers to take over their devices. Ring provides home security in the form of smart cameras that are often installed on doorbells or inside people’s comes.

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Trolls and social media platforms face huge fines in Australia for failing to remove abuse material

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Proposed legislation would also give government power to unmask identities of anonymous accounts

Australian internet service providers, social media companies and other online platforms will need to remove severely harmful, abusive or bullying content within 24 hours or risk being blocked and fined $555,000 under the federal government’s proposed online safety legislation.

Currently, takedown notices for image-based abuse, cyber-abuse, cyberbullying, and seriously harmful online content needs to be actioned within 48 hours.

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Revealed: how abusive texts led to discovery of hacking of Al Jazeera

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Threatening messages led to monitoring of phone that unearthed evidence of cyber-attack against Qatar-based network

A series of abusive text messages sent to an Al Jazeera investigative programme were the first crumbs that eventually led to the discovery of an unprecedented hacking operation against dozens of staff from the Qatar-based media network, according to one of the journalists who was targeted.

Researchers at Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto claimed on Sunday that the UAE and Saudi Arabia used spyware sold by an Israeli private intelligence company to access the phones of at least 36 journalists, producers and executives from Al Jazeera, as well as that of a London-based reporter with the Al Araby network.

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