Merry almost-Christmas, everyone! I hope your gadget gifts don’t require prolonged firmware-update installations, repeated reboots, or lengthy tech-support interactions–but if they do, please let me know, because there might be a story in that.
12/18/2023: X Lands in the EU’s Crosshairs Over Questionable Policies, Lax Oversight, PCMag
Much of the reaction to the European Commission opening an investigation of the former Twitter for alleged violations of the Digital Services Act has focused on how EU law’s strict provisions over taking down illegal content invite abuses of government power. (See, for instance, my friend Mike Masnick’s dissent at Techdirt.) But the EU’s case also cites areas of misconduct outside of content moderation that speak to a comparable level of carelessness.
12/19/2023: Google Play Store Settlement Should Get You at Least $2, PCMag
The more time I spent reading the fine print about Google’s $700 million settlement (and looking at the fine print in its last quarterly-earnings filing that reported a cash and cash-equivalents balance almost 44 times as large as that sum), the less I liked it.
12/21/2023: How Urban Retail Can Bounce Back, Worth
I filed this feature about how urban retail can deal with challenges of crime and a reduced daytime-worker population back in October–before the National Retail Federation retracted a claim that organized retail crime made up almost half of all “shrink” from stores in 2021. But I hadn’t leaned on that report published in April and instead went with 2022 data on shrink in an NRF report posted in September that didn’t quantify “ORC.” Fortunately, no such qualms have surfaced since publication about the part of this piece (also available in Worth’s Q4 2023 print edition) that endorses mixed-use development to ensure that city neighborhoods don’t rise or fall depending on how many people sit down at desks in offices each morning.
12/22/2023: Twitter Alternative Bluesky Makes Posts Publicly Viewable, PCMag
The social platform that’s become my primary replacement for Twitter took a big step towards exiting its closed-beta status–which should be followed early next year by Bluesky letting anybody sign up, CEO Jay Graber told my Fast Company editor Harry McCracken last week.
12/23/2023: SmartTechCheck Podcast S03 E69, Mark Vena
I joined my industry-analyst friend’s podcast (also available in video form) for the first time since October to talk about our choices for the biggest tech stories of 2023. Since somebody else had picked Musk’s disastrous stewardship of what I sometimes like to call “Xitter,” I brought up the rise of fixed-wireless 5G home broadband.
https://robpegoraro.com/2023/12/24/weekly-output-eu-vs-x-google-play-store-settlement-urban-retails-future-bluesky-updates-mark-vena-podcast/
#Bluesky #BlueskyButterflyIcon #BlueskyPublicView #DSA #ElonMuskTwitter #EUDigitalServicesAct #GooglePlayServiceFees #GooglePlaySettlement #GooglePlayStoreSettlement #MarkVena #NoMa #shoplifting #sideloading #TwitterContentModeration #urbanRetail #XContentModeration
Donncha
Did You Know
UrbanGR
Rob Pegoraro