I need y’all to wish me luck. I have to dance with the devil this coming Friday. I’m on with Mark Starling, Seth, John, and the First News 570 crew. This week, Facebook adds podcasts to its products, the long arm of John Law finds Commander X in Mexico, and a bipartisan bill barrage threatens tech dominance. You can listen to Mark and I point and laugh while talking about the wild and crazy technology world every Thursday morning, LIVE at 6:43am Eastern.
In less than a week’s time, the US Congress has launched a bipartisan-backed salvo of bills aimed at chipping away the power of technology companies. The bills are aimed at forcing tech companies to sell away parts of their businesses if they grow to big, disallow favoring their own bundled services in search results, and charging higher filing fees for mergers so antitrust lawyers have a bigger budget. These bills are stemming from 16 months of congressional investigations on Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. I’m not convinced we’ll see much action on these bills, but we’ll have to see.
In another bipartisan move, technology critic, Lina Khan, was selected as the Biden administration’s chair of the FTC. The Senate confirmed in…two hours.
Hactivist, Chris “Commander X” Doyon was arrested by Mexican police. The homeless hacker had lived an elusive life by evading authorities for 10 years after performing a massive denial of service attack on computers owned and managed by the city of Santa Cruz, California. Commander X has been hanging out on Twitter, wrote a memoir, appeared on documentaries and has met a couple of journalists telling his story. Mexican police arrested Commader X on June 11th. He was arrested for the 2010 take down of Santa Cruz computers and subsequently skipped bail going on the lamb until June 11th.
Just as we finished talking about tech companies getting too big, Facebook has been shouting from the roof tops about how they will begin offering a podcast service to their products. Facebook will be providing tools for listeners and content creators on their platform. Facebook encouraging content creators to choose their platform by providing a product called Clips that makes it easier to create sound bytes for easy sharing. Facebook is billing itself as THE place to listen to podcasts because they’ll be shareable in the big blue app like every thing else. One strange thing about FB’s licensing is that they are asking for rights to make derivative works. I swear.