Internet hate forum 8chan has gone dark after web services company Voxility banned the site -- and also banned 8chan's new host Epik, which had been leasing web space from it. From a report: Epik began working with 8chan over the weekend after web services giant Cloudflare cut off service, following the latest of at least three mass shootings linked to 8chan. But Stanford researcher Alex Stamos noted that Epik seemed to lease servers from Voxility, and when Voxility discovered the content, it cut ties with Epik almost immediately. "As soon as we were notified of the content that Epik was hosting, we made the decision to totally ban them," Voxility business development VP Maria Sirbu told The Verge. Sirbu said it was unlikely that Voxility would work with Epik again. "This is the second situation we've had with the reseller and this is not tolerable," she said.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A couple years ago, a friend invited Carl Perez to a virtual world promising online discourse free of Nazis. That world was Germany. Perez, who uses gender-neutral pronouns, didn't fly from their home in Colorado to escape the hatred they saw online. Instead, Perez simply changed their Twitter account location. "Since then, I've seen pretty much no nationalist content," they said. Perez is not alone in trying to escape a sea of hate by virtually jumping ship to Germany. But local residents and researchers say German Twitter is not exactly the internet utopia some imagine.

"We are not the paradise of social media without any hate speech whatsoever," said Stephan Dreyer, a senior media law and governance researcher at the Hans-Bredow-Institut in Germany. While the most obvious expressions of Nazism and racism may be harder to find on Twitter accounts with their locations set to Germany, there is still plenty of coded content that slips through the cracks, Dreyer said. Twitter users often point to the company's content policy in Germany to argue it should be able to identify and remove Nazis from the platform in other regions. When Maureen Colford learned about the location setting "hack" to filter out Nazis, she said she was "amazed that somehow Twitter manages to do this in Germany," and wondered, "why can't they do this everywhere?"

Monzo, a mobile-only bank operating in the UK, admitted today to storing payment card PINs inside internal logs. From a report: The company is now notifying all impacted customers and urging users to change card PINs the next time they use a cash machine. Monzo described the issue as a "bug" that occurred when Monzo customers used two specific features of their Monzo mobile apps -- namely the feature that reminds users of their card number and the feature for canceling standing orders. When Monzo customers used one of these two features, they'd be asked to enter their account PIN, for authorization purposes, but unbeknowst to them, the PIN would also be logged inside Monzo's internal logs. Monzo said these logs were encrypted and that only a few employees had access to the data stored inside. The company said it discovered the bug on Friday, August 2, and spent all weekend removing PIN numbers from its internal logs.

Elon Musk set an aggressive deadline for Tesla to achieve full self-driving capability, but the electric automaker might have an ace up its sleeve that mostly went under the radar: project 'Dojo.' Electrek: Over the weekend, Musk hinted that it could make the difference. During Tesla's Autonomy Day earlier this year, Musk and other Tesla executives gave presentations about what the company is doing to try to achieve full self-driving capability by the end of next year. While most people were focused on the unveiling of Tesla's new HW3 'Full Self-Driving Computer,' which was being explained for the first time and is now installed in all new Tesla vehicles, there was a brief mention of another computer, the Dojo computer, that Tesla is working on and it could be a game-changer.

Last weekend, Musk was asked about the secret project and while the CEO didn't reveal anything new, he did hint that it could make the difference. During Autonomy Day, Musk briefly mentioned the project 'Dojo': "We do have a major program at Tesla which we don't have enough time to talk about today called "Dojo." That's a super powerful training computer. The goal of Dojo will be to be able to take in vast amounts of data and train at a video level and do unsupervised massive training of vast amounts of video with the Dojo program -- or Dojo computer."

Huawei is testing a smartphone equipped with Hongmeng, the company's self-developed operating system, which could potentially go on sale by the end of this year, Chinese state-media outlet Global Times reported. From a report: The release of a Hongmeng-powered smartphone would mark a major step for China's Huawei, the world's second-biggest maker of smartphones, as U.S. government actions threaten its access to Google's Android operating system. The device will be priced at around 2,000 yuan ($288), the Global Times said on Sunday, citing unnamed sources. That will place the device toward the low-end segment of the smartphone market. Huawei executives have previously described Hongmeng as an operating system designed for internet-of-things products. Last month the company said the first major devices powered by Hongmeng would be its upcoming line of Honor-brand smart TVs.

There are 188,620 extensions available on the Chrome Web Store, and while you might think this provides a wide variety of choices for Chrome users, in reality, most of these extensions are dead or dwindling, with very few having active installations. From a report: All in all, about 50% of all Chrome extensions have fewer than 16 installs, meaning that half of the Chrome extension ecosystem is actually more of a ghost town, according to a recent scan of the entire Chrome Web Store conducted by Extension Monitor. Further, 19,379 extensions (just over 10%) have zero installs, and 25,540 extensions (13% of the total) have just one user. The scan found that there are very few Chrome extensions that managed to establish a dedicated userbase. According to Extension Monitor, around 87% of all extensions have fewer than 1,000 installs.

"Lyft's Wednesday move to pull all its black and pink electric bikes from the East Bay, San Francisco and San Jose came after flammable battery packs or vandalism caused at least four bikes to catch fire," reports the Bay Area Newsgroup: San Jose city officials are encouraged by the fact no one was injured when a bike caught fire there on Tuesday, said Colin Heyne, a spokesman for the Department of Transportation... "They have no intention of re-introducing the bikes until they know what the problem is and have fixed it," Heyne said. "We'll work with them to get a full picture of what they are doing to investigate these batteries and what they will go through for safety testing before they relaunch the bikes...."

Representatives from Lyft reached out to the city on Wednesday after two fires were reported in San Francisco over the past week, he said, and told them it would deactivate the e-bikes until it could remove them from its fleet...

Lyft spokeswoman Julie Wood declined to answer questions about the incidents, other than to say no one was injured.... Wood on Thursday didn't respond to repeated questions from this news organization about whether there were any fires involving the e-bikes outside of San Francisco.
Lyft told the paper at least one of the fires was causd by vandalism (and not a malfunctioning battery) but acknowledged they weren't sure what caused the next two bike fires.

One frequent cycler wondered why Lyft didn't simply offer their customers regular (non-electric) bicycles? He told the newspaper that the disruption in service was frustrating -- though "I understand the safety concern and I don't want there to be a battery exploding between my legs when I'm riding the bike around."

The paper also notes reports that Lyft "pulled its black electric assist bikes in April after problems with the brakes caused some riders to careen over the handlebars."

"We just sent notice that we are terminating 8chan as a customer effective at midnight tonight Pacific Time," writes Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince.

"The rationale is simple: they have proven themselves to be lawless and that lawlessness has caused multiple tragic deaths. Even if 8chan may not have violated the letter of the law in refusing to moderate their hate-filled community, they have created an environment that revels in violating its spirit." We do not take this decision lightly. Cloudflare is a network provider. In pursuit of our goal of helping build a better internet, we've considered it important to provide our security services broadly to make sure as many users as possible are secure, and thereby making cyberattacks less attractive -- regardless of the content of those websites. Many of our customers run platforms of their own on top of our network. If our policies are more conservative than theirs it effectively undercuts their ability to run their services and set their own policies. We reluctantly tolerate content that we find reprehensible, but we draw the line at platforms that have demonstrated they directly inspire tragic events and are lawless by design. 8chan has crossed that line. It will therefore no longer be allowed to use our services.

Unfortunately, we have seen this situation before and so we have a good sense of what will play out. Almost exactly two years ago we made the determination to kick another disgusting site off Cloudflare's network: the Daily Stormer. That caused a brief interruption in the site's operations but they quickly came back online using a Cloudflare competitor. That competitor at the time promoted as a feature the fact that they didn't respond to legal process. Today, the Daily Stormer is still available and still disgusting. They have bragged that they have more readers than ever. They are no longer Cloudflare's problem, but they remain the Internet's problem.

I have little doubt we'll see the same happen with 8chan.
Prince adds that since terminating the Daily Stormer they've been "engaging" with law enforcement and civil society organizations to "try and find solutions," which include "cooperating around monitoring potential hate sites on our network and notifying law enforcement when there was content that contained an indication of potential violence." Earlier today Prince had used this argument in defense of Cloudflare's hosting of the 8chan, telling the Guardian "There are lots of competitors to Cloudflare that are not nearly as law abiding as we have always been." He added in today's blog post that "We believe this is our responsibility and, given Cloudflare's scale and reach, we are hopeful we will continue to make progress toward solving the deeper problem."

"We continue to feel incredibly uncomfortable about playing the role of content arbiter and do not plan to exercise it often.... Cloudflare is not a government. While we've been successful as a company, that does not give us the political legitimacy to make determinations on what content is good and bad. Nor should it. Questions around content are real societal issues that need politically legitimate solutions..."

"What's hard is defining the policy that we can enforce transparently and consistently going forward. We, and other technology companies like us that enable the great parts of the Internet, have an obligation to help propose solutions to deal with the parts we're not proud of. That's our obligation and we're committed to it."

Is Google making the wrong response to the DataSpii report on a "catastrophic data leak"? The EFF writes: In response to questions about DataSpii from Ars Technica, Google officials pointed out that they have "announced technical changes to how extensions work that will mitigate or prevent this behavior." Here, Google is referring to its controversial set of proposed changes to curtail extension capabilities, known as Manifest V3.

As both security experts and the developers of extensions that will be greatly harmed by Manifest V3, we're here to tell you: Google's statement just isn't true. Manifest V3 is a blunt instrument that will do little to improve security while severely limiting future innovation... The only part of Manifest V3 that goes directly to the heart of stopping DataSpii-like abuses is banning remotely hosted code. You can't ensure extensions are what they appear to be if you give them the ability to download new instructions after they're installed.

But you don't need the rest of Google's proposed API changes to stop this narrow form of bad extension behavior. What Manifest V3 does do is stifle innovation...
The EFF makes the following arguments Google's proposal:

• Manifest V3 will still allow extensions to observe the same data as before, including what URLs users visit and the contents of pages users visit
• Manifest V3 won't change anything about how "content scripts" work...another way to extract user browsing data.
• Chrome will still allow users to give extensions permission to run on all sites.

In response Google argued to Forbes that the EFF "fails to account for the proposed changes to how permissions work. It is the combination of these two changes, along with others included in the proposal, that would have prevented or significantly mitigated incidents such as this one."

But the EFF's technology projects director also gave Forbes their response. "We agree that Google isn't killing ad-blockers. But they are killing a wide range of security and privacy enhancing extensions, and so far they haven't justified why that's necessary."

And in the same article, security researcher Sean Wright added that Google's proposed change "appears to do little to prevent rogue extensions from obtaining information from loaded sites, which is certainly a privacy issue and it looks as if the V3 changes don't help."

The EFF suggests Google just do a better job of reviewing extensions.

Long-time Slashdot reader shanen remembers the days of one-time software purchases, before companies began nudging customers to a subscription-based "software as a service" model: New bugs and security vulnerabilities keep being discovered, which means the product cannot EVER be regarded as completed. Whatever the original cost, no matter what the software was supposed to do, it needs unending support. Right now I'm unable to see any other solution than SaaS!

Not limited to Microsoft, of course. Perhaps Apple was the original source of the approach... Slashdot reader dryriver sees a dire trend: Current computing younglings may never know a future where you can actually run software locally on a PC you own, and/or not pay for it as SaaS. All perpetual software licenses may go away in the next six years. Autodesk and Adobe have already moved to SaaS-only.
But is there a case to made for ongoing payments to fund ongoing support? Or is SaaS just an exploitative business model that's bad for customers but good for software vendors? Share your own thoughts in the comments.

And do you prefer one-time purchases or SaaS subscriptions?

The Guardian learned that the suspected mass shooter at an El Paso, Texas Walmart "is believed to also have posted a white nationalist rant on 8chan" -- then interviewed the CEO of the company hosting it. If the connection between the 21-year-old suspect in Saturday's massacre and the 8chan document is confirmed -- and law enforcement sources told NBC News that they are "reasonably confident" that they are linked -- then the El Paso attack will mark the third mass shooting in less than six months that was announced in advance on the message board... Throughout the day on Saturday, 8chan users discussed the massacre and the suspect, with many referring to the alleged shooter as "our guy" and praising the number of people killed...
UPDATE: 8:25 p.m. PST: Cloudflare's CEO announced that they are in fact terminating 8chan, effective at midnight PST.

Here are his remarks to the Guardian less than 24 hours earlier... "If I could wave a magic wand and make all of the bad things that are on the internet go away -- and I personally would put the Daily Stormer and 8chan in that category of bad things -- I would wave that magic wand tomorrow," [Cloudflare CEO Matthew] Prince said. "It would be the easiest thing in the world and it would feel incredibly good for us to kick 8chan off our network, but I think it would step away from the obligation that we have and cause that community to still exist and be more lawless over time."

Prince argued that keeping "bad" sites within Cloudflare's network means that the company is able to help monitor activity and flag illegal content to law enforcement. While he would not comment on specifics, he said that Cloudflare receives "regular requests" from law enforcement not to ban certain sites. "There are lots of competitors to Cloudflare that are not nearly as law abiding as we have always been," he said. "The minute that someone isn't on our network, they're going to be on someone else's network...." Prince also rejected any implication that Cloudflare's position is self-interested. "The right answer from a pure business perspective is just to kick them off," he said of 8chan. "Of the 2 million-plus Cloudflare customers, they don't matter, and the pain that they cause is well beyond anything else."

Keeping 8chan within its network is a "moral obligation", he said, adding: "We, as well as all tech companies, have an obligation to think about how we solve real problems of real human suffering and death. What happened in El Paso is abhorrent in every possible way, and it's ugly, and I hate that there's any association between us and that... For us the question is which is the worse evil? Is the worse evil that we kick the can down the road and don't take responsibility? Or do we get on the phone with people like you and say we need to own up to the fact that the internet is home to many amazing things and many terrible things and we have an absolute moral obligation to deal with that."

"Facebook still can't avoid widespread outages, it seems," writes Engadget: Numerous reports have surfaced of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp being unavailable to various degrees on the morning of August 4th. The failure doesn't appear to have been as dramatic as it was in July, when image services were out for several hours (we had at least some success visiting them ourselves). Still, it likely wasn't what you were hoping for if you wanted to catch up on your social feeds on a lazy Sunday morning.
UPI has more information: Some Instagram users could not log into their accounts while Facebook users globally could not use sharing features, upload photos and comment, The Mirror reported. Others received messages stating that the site needed maintenance and would be up again soon.

The Express said that the outage monitoring website Down Detector logged more than 7,000 reports issues on Facebook. Down Detector said that Facebook started having problems about 9:30 a.m., Eastern time. About 34 percent of the complaints said they faced "total blackout." Another 33 percent of the complainants said there were issues with its newsfeed while 32 percent said they could not log in.

CNet.com reported that users across the United States, Canada, Australia and parts of Asia claimed that had lack of access Sunday morning

A while back some "bored developers and designers" started uploading their ideas for the worst volume control interface in the world. But now Slashdot reader dryriver asks a more serious question: You follow a news story on CNN or BBC or FoxNews or Reuters. The frontpage of the news site changes so frequently that you wish there was a "News Timeline" UI element at the top of the page, letting you scrub back and forward in time (by hours, days, weeks, years) so you can see previous states of the frontpage and get a better sense of how the story developed over time. How many major news websites have this scrubbable Timeline UI element? Currently none do.

Or you go on Youtube. Hundreds of millions of videos for you to browse. Except that there are only 3 basic UI elements you can use -- keyword search, automated recommendations panel on the right, or a sortable list of a specific channel's uploaded videos.

- There is no visual network or node-diagram UI that would let you browse videos by association.

- There is no browsing by category (e.g. sports > soccer > amateurs > kids ) or by alphabetic order.

- There is no master index or master list of videos -- like a phonebook -- that you can call up to find videos you haven't come across yet.

And yet these UI elements are not very difficult to put in the user's hands at all. Why do websites with tens of millions of daily visitors and massive web development resources do so little to allow more sophisticated browsing for those users who desire it?
"Is there a cogent reason to restrict website navigation to 'simple, limited and dumb'," asks the original submission, "or do these websites simply not care enough or bother enough to put more sophisticated UIs into place?" Share your own thoughts in the comments.

Why do popular web sites have bad UI navigation?

On Friday technologist Bruce Schneier wrote that after reviewing responses from WhatsApp, he's concluded that reports of a pre-encryption backdoor are a false alarm. He also says he got an equally strong confirmation from WhatsApp's Privacy Policy Manager Nate Cardozo, who Facebook hired last December from the EFF. "He basically leveraged his historical reputation to assure me that WhatsApp, and Facebook in general, would never do something like this."

Schneier has also added the words "This story is wrong" to his original blog post. "The only source for that post was a Forbes essay by Kalev Leetaru, which links to a previous Forbes essay by him, which links to a video presentation from a Facebook developers conference." But that Forbes contributor has also responded, saying that he'd first asked Facebook three times about when they'd deploy the backdoor in WhatsApp -- and never received a response.

Asked again on July 25th the company's plans for "moderating end to end encrypted conversations such as WhatsApp by using on device algorithms," a company spokesperson did not dispute the statement, instead pointing to Zuckerberg's blog post calling for precisely such filtering in its end-to-end encrypted products including WhatsApp [apparently this blog post], but declined to comment when asked for more detail about precisely when such an integration might happen... [T]here are myriad unanswered questions, with the company declining to answer any of the questions posed to it regarding why it is investing in building a technology that appears to serve little purpose outside filtering end-to-end encrypted communications and which so precisely matches Zuckerberg's call. Moreover, beyond its F8 presentation, given Zuckerberg's call for filtering of its end-to-end encrypted products, how does the company plan on accomplishing this apparent contradiction with the very meaning of end-to-end encryption?

The company's lack of transparency and unwillingness to answer even the most basic questions about how it plans to balance the protections of end-to-end encryption in its products including WhatsApp with the need to eliminate illegal content reminds us the giant leap of faith we take when we use closed encryption products whose source we cannot review... Governments are increasingly demanding some kind of compromise regarding end-to-end encryption that would permit them to prevent such tools from being used to conduct illegal activity. What would happen if WhatsApp were to receive a lawful court order from a government instructing it to insert such content moderation within the WhatsApp client and provide real-time notification to the government of posts that match the filter, along with a copy of the offending content?

Asked about this scenario, Carl Woog, Director of Communications for WhatsApp, stated that he was not aware of any such cases to date and noted that "we've repeatedly defended end-to-end encryption before the courts, most notably in Brazil." When it was noted that the Brazilian case involved the encryption itself, rather than a court order to install a real-time filter and bypass directly within the client before and after the encryption process at national scale, which would preserve the encryption, Woog initially said he would look into providing a response, but ultimately did not respond.

Given Zuckerberg's call for moderation of the company's end-to-end encryption products and given that Facebook's on-device content moderation appears to answer directly to this call, Woog was asked whether its on-device moderation might be applied in future to its other end-to-end encrypted products rather than WhatsApp. After initially saying he would look into providing a response, Woog ultimately did not respond.
Here's the exact words from Zuckerberg's March blog post. It said Facebook is "working to improve our ability to identify and stop bad actors across our apps by detecting patterns of activity or through other means, even when we can't see the content of the messages, and we will continue to invest in this work. "

"Firewalls can be notoriously and fiendishly difficult to configure correctly, and often present a target-rich environment for successful attacks," writes long-time Slashdot reader Lauren Weinstein.

"The thing is, firewall vulnerabilities are not headline news -- they're an old story, and better solutions to providing network security already exist." In particular, Google's "BeyondCorp" approach is something that every enterprise involved in computing should make itself familiar with. Right now! BeyondCorp techniques are how Google protects its own internal networks and systems from attack, with enormous success.

In a nutshell, BeyondCorp is a set of practices that effectively puts "zero trust" in the networks themselves, moving access control and other authentication elements to individual devices and users. This eliminates traditional firewalls (and in nearly all instances, VPNs) because there is no longer any need for such devices or systems that, once breached, give an attacker access to internal goodies.

If Capital One had been following BeyondCorp principles, there'd likely be 100+ million fewer potentially panicky people today.

"Google has finally chopped the 'www' from Chrome's address bar after delaying the controversial move due to a backlash," reports TechRepublic: The move to remove 'www' was initially planned for last year, when Google announced it would cut "trivial subdomains" from the address bar in Chrome 69. Now Google has begun truncating the visible URL in Chrome for desktop and Android, rolling out the change in version 76 of the browser, released this week. By default sites in Chrome now no longer display the "https" scheme or the "www" subdomain, with the visible address starting after this point. To view the full URL, users now have to click the address bar twice on desktop and once on mobile. Google has argued the move is driven by a desire for greater simplicity and usability of Chrome...

However the announcement provoked a fresh wave of criticism, from those who say the move will confuse users and even potentially make it easier for them to inadvertently connect to fake sites... There are also some who claim Google's motivation in changing how the URL is displayed may be to make it harder for users to tell whether they are on a page hosted on Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages subdomain...

Google says it has also built a Chrome extension that doesn't obfuscate the URL to "help power users recognize suspicious sites and report them to Safe Browsing". Despite the backlash from some online, Chrome isn't the first browser to truncate the URL in this way, with Apple's Safari similarly hiding the full address.

GNOME and KDE are co-hosting this year's Linux App Summit (LAS) in Barcelona from November 12th to 15th.

An anonymous reader shared the big announcement: LAS is the first collaborative event co-hosted by the two organizations since the Desktop Summit in 2009. Both organizations are eager to bring their communities together in building an application ecosystem that transcends individual distros and broadens the market for everyone involved.

KDE and GNOME will no longer be taking a passive role in the free desktop sector. With the joint influence of the two desktop projects, LAS will shepherd the growth of the FOSS desktop by encouraging the creation of quality applications, seeking opportunities for compensation for FOSS developers, and fostering a vibrant market for the Linux operating system.

• "I am excited to see GNOME and KDE working together on LAS, and I believe that the event will help lay down strong foundations for collaborative cross-project development that would benefit Linux users across all distributions and on any compatible device." -- Christel Dahlskjaer, Private Internet Access and freenode Project Lead.

• "Together with GNOME, counting with the collaboration of many distributions and application developers, we'll have the opportunity to work side by side, share our perspectives and offer the platform that the next generation of solutions will be built on." -- Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE e.V Vice-President says about the inaugural effort about LAS.

• "By partnering with KDE we show the desire to build the kind of application ecosystem that demonstrates that Open Source and Free Software are important; the technology and organization we build to achieve this is valuable and necessary." -- GNOME executive director, Neil McGovern

• "The desktop wars is not really a thing any more. It makes more sense to work together and pool resources." -- Paul Brown, a KDE Communications Specialist (quoted by ZDNet)

ZDNet called the collaboration "a major step forward," giving their story the headline "GNOME and KDE work together on the Linux desktop." But the Twitter feed for the KDE community quickly clarified that KDE "is working with GNOME to create a common, fair, sustainable and open app ecosystem, not a desktop."

"The GNOME and KDE communities want to provide users with free and open applications that will respect their privacy and rights. That is what Linux App Summit is about."

According to The Information, Facebook is planning to add its name to both Instagram and WhatsApp. "The social network will rebrand the apps to 'Instagram from Facebook' and 'WhatsApp from Facebook,'" the report says, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: Employees for the apps were recently notified about the changes, which come as antitrust regulators are examining Facebook's acquisitions of both apps. The app rebranding is a major departure for Facebook, which until recently had allowed the apps to operate and be branded independently. The distance has helped both apps avoid being tarnished by the privacy scandals that have hurt Facebook. The move to add Facebook's name to the apps has been met with surprise and confusion internally, reflecting the autonomy that the units have operated under.

But Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has also been frustrated that Facebook doesn't get more credit for the growth of Instagram and WhatsApp. Associating those apps with Facebook could improve the overall companies' brand with consumers. The 'from Facebook' branding will be visible inside the apps -- users will see it when they log on, for instance -- and elsewhere, such as in app stores. The report also mentioned that Facebook is bringing employees responsible for Instagram's messaging feature called Direct into the team behind Facebook's standalone Messenger app.

According to The Financial Times, Google's parent company Alphabet has overtaken Apple to become the most cash-rich company in the world. As of the second quarter of this year, Alphabet holds $117 billion in liquid reserves, compared to $102 billion net of debt, for Apple. The Verge reports: Despite the obvious benefits of hoarding so much cash, earning the title of "Cash Kings" might not give much cause for celebration. As the FT notes, such a conspicuous display of wealth could increase pressure from shareholders who'd like to see the company spend more of its money on share buybacks or dividends, and could lead to increased scrutiny from regulators concerned with Google's dominance. Google and its parent company have been hit with around $9.05 billion in antitrust fines by the EU in the past two years, and the company is also facing heavy scrutiny by U..S lawmakers.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: The New York Times published an anti-Google screed by billionaire Peter Thiel last night but failed to mention a fun fact that readers might find relevant: Thiel sits on the board of Facebook, one of Google's largest competitors. Thiel first blasted Google as "treasonous" last month, saying that the FBI and CIA should investigate the company for working with the Chinese government. The tech investor even asked if Google had been infiltrated by Chinese spies, a highly inflammatory charge that he didn't substantiate. Thiel has now followed up his anti-Google remarks in a new piece for the Times praising President Donald Trump and railing against "globalization."

Thiel's central argument is that anyone helping China to develop artificial intelligence technologies is assisting China's military because, he says, all AI should be seen first and foremost as having military applications: "A.I. is a military technology. Forget the sci-fi fantasy; what is powerful about actually existing A.I. is its application to relatively mundane tasks like computer vision and data analysis. Though less uncanny than Frankenstein's monster, these tools are nevertheless valuable to any army -- to gain an intelligence advantage, for example, or to penetrate defenses in the relatively new theater of cyberwarfare, where we are already living amid the equivalent of a multinational shooting war." Thiel, who in 2017 sold the majority of his Facebook shares but remains on its board of directors, goes on to characterize Google as "naive" for opening an AI lab in China while deciding to not renew a contract for its work on Project Maven, a U.S. military initiative for which the company was developing an AI system to analyze drone footage, following employee backlash. Thiel also acknowledges that AI can be used for civilian purposes, but he claims that it doesn't matter. He calls Google's actions "shocking": "A.I.'s military power is the simple reason that the recent behavior of America's leading software company, Google -- starting an A.I. lab in China while ending an A.I. contract with the Pentagon -- is shocking. As President Barack Obama's defense secretary Ash Carter pointed out last month, 'If you're working in China, you don't know whether you're working on a project for the military or not.'"

He continues: "How can Google use the rhetoric of 'borderless' benefits to justify working with the country whose 'Great Firewall' has imposed a border on the internet itself? This way of thinking works only inside Google's cosseted Northern California campus, quite distinct from the world outside. The Silicon Valley attitude sometimes called 'cosmopolitanism' is probably better understood as an extreme strain of parochialism, that of fortunate enclaves isolated from the problems of other places -- and incurious about them."

At the end of the op-ed, where it says "Peter Thiel is an entrepreneur and investor," would be a great place to note that Peter Thiel is also on the board of Facebook.