pastabatman

pastabatman , 3 months ago to Technology in The lock-in problem at the heart of the Apple monopoly lawsuit

I don't understand why people are still buying Apple products.

That's what the article and lawsuit are addressing. Apple deliberately uses tactics meant to lock users into the Apple ecosystem and create artificial barriers to switching to competing devices and services.

pastabatman , 4 months ago to Technology in House panel unanimously approves bill that could ban TikTok

I think you're farther down that slippery slope than you think you are. We have more access to foreign voices from outside the country than we've ever had in history. A lot of that is through social media owned by US companies who are not the target of this legislation.

Twitter has been pretty instrumental in swaying public favor to the Palestinians in Gaza despite Israel (a US ally) trying to paint a different narrative. Now imagine if Twitter was owned by an Israeli company. Would we see all those horrific pictures and videos in Gaza? Would we even know if we weren't seeing them? Would we have any legal or legislative options if we did uncover feed manipulation?

I think maybe the reason you aren't fully on board with this is that you seem to have a strong distrust of the US government. More than our foreign adversaries. That's fair and you are entitled to that. The people on the other side of the issue trust the US government more than foreign adversaries and that changes the calculation.

pastabatman , 4 months ago to Technology in House panel unanimously approves bill that could ban TikTok

Because China has interests that are in opposition to US interests, and they can sway US opinion any way they want by covertly manipulating the feed. They absolutely can do significant harm with this, including but not limited to selecting politicians, inciting chaos and political unrest, and even economic destabilization. I'm not sure that the US government actually has a much higher potential to do you harm than a foreign enemy of the US with a weapon like social media as you stated. You could make a strong argument that the political shitshow we are currently in is partially due to foreign interference through social media, and that is before they owned the actual platforms. The US government is not incentivized to destabilize itself at least.

pastabatman , 4 months ago to Comic Strips in Cool

Nacorn

pastabatman , 7 months ago to Technology in Android isn't cool with teenagers, and that's a big problem

I know Lemmy has a hate boner for Google, but come on. What about Firefox, brave, opera, edge? It's trivially easy to get a browser without Google telemetry on every single platform, and because they are all standards compliant (unlike the Internet explorer days) websites will work just fine on all of them. Chrome isn't even preinstalled in windows, mac, iOS, or most (any?) Linux distros. People aren't being forced to use it, they are downloading it. I promise you this is not humanity's biggest problem right now.

pastabatman , 10 months ago to Technology in Senate confirms Biden FCC nominee, finally giving Democrats a 3-2 majority

"If confirmed, she would give the Democrats a majority at the FCC that would enable them to impose a radical left-wing agenda, including investment-killing and job-killing so-called net neutrality rules, otherwise known as Obamacare for the Internet" Cruz said.

What