Surveilled — Issue 36
Surveilled
Issue 36
A weekly summary of what I’ve found interesting at the intersection of economics, finance and technology.
Headlines
Sir Tim Berners-Lee Expands Startup Aiming to Fix the Internet — the inventor of the World Wide Web is attracting some big names for its quest to develop a “massively scalable, production-quality technology platform”. It’s all still a bit mysterious for now, but looks like this is worth following. Read ($)
Some Crafty Google Searches Turn Up Private WhatsApp Group Chats — the results turn up links the admins of the group can send to other people to join, and in turn they permit anyone who finds the link to join the group as well. It sounds like a trivial omission on WhatsApp’s behalf, they should prevent these links from being indexed obviously, but it’s another good illustration that things are too complex for anyone to grasp all potential vulnerabilities. Read
EU Recommends Staff to Use Signal — the recommendation came out a few weeks ago, and Signal was chosen for its innovative security (refer to last week’s issue for some examples of that) and the fact that is is open source, allowing everyone to see how it works. Unexpected but probably well-deserved endorsement. Read
Context
The gig economy no longer just applies to drivers and delivery, but companies are increasingly using the model for jobs that were previously full-time salaried positions, with all the assorted drawbacks. Read ($)
Silicon Valley ruined work culture by blurring the boundaries between work life and personal life, another pernicious negative externality. Read
That’s it for this week’s edition. As always, thanks for reading and please forward this to anyone who you think might be interested, it would be much appreciated.