Google

While most of us have been busy thinking about net neutrality, guess what Google has been doing. The leading search engine has decided to change the criteria it uses for ranking content on the internet, so that content will no longer be ranked by popularity, as it has been since the beginning.

Orwell simply had no idea. “The media is the right arm of anarchy,” thus spake Dan Brown. Can I hear an “Amen!”? They still enjoy cover from the hoary and anachronistic that they and we share concomitantly an interest in news proliferation. Accurate at that.

Google’s gargantuan presence on the Internet, be it in terms of search engines, archived data and the use of email, has become a problem.  Given that it traffics in information of virtually every shade and colour, it was bound to be on the attractive hit list for law enforcement authorities. Those who use its services had to be aware that, at some point, their subscriber information would become attractive.

Google Inc.’s 2013 book The New Digital Age, authored by Google chairman Eric Schmidt and Google Ideas director Jared Cohen, was showered with praise by many, but attacked in a review by Julian Assange for the New York Times, where it is described as a “love song” from Google to the US state.

In the past couple of days both Google1 and Apple2 have announced that they’re enabling default encryption on their mobile devices so that only the user possessing a device’s password can access its local files. The public relations team at Apple makes the following claim:

by Helen Wallace, GeneWatch UK The new Chief Executive of the National Health Service (NHS) in England, Simon Stevens, was recently reported arguing that the NHS must be transformed to make people’s personal genetic information the basis of their treatments (1). His proposition is unsurprising since it is in line ...

According to Google, the self-driving cars will reduce road traffic accidents by over 90% Google’s newest self driving car looks like a toy, but fits two people and drives by using only the on-board computers and exterior sensors. The project is currently…Read more →

The government should take over the VA Hospital, and Boko Haram most be stopped with oil companies? Eric Schmidt and General Keith Alexander are bros. Flash boys mystery is solved, and Afghan torturer has retired …

Peter B. Collins Presents Journalist Jason Leopold

Readers of Time were recently treated to an absurd take on Ukraine, Putin, “the West” and a bunch of other stuff by journalist Robert D. Kaplan, “chief geopolitical analyst” of Strategic Forecasting, Inc., popularly known as Stratfor.