Tech Waste. An Existential Threat? "Climate Change" is more popular and financially rewarding.

Scientific American: Tech Waste Is a Danger to Us All.

Hardware in general, and smartphones in particular, have taken over our lives so quickly that few of us have had the chance to think about what happens to them when we no longer use them. The answer is that they become a huge environmental and health problem in the Global South’s landfill sites.

We don’t hear much about this problem because it is out of sight, out of mind.

Electronic waste is currently 5 percent of all global waste, and it is set to increase exponentially as more of us own multiple smartphones, laptops and power banks—few of which are likely to be repaired or recycled at the end of their lives.
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There is an almost limitless consumer demand for hardware, and governments do not have bottomless pockets, especially when their green policies are focused on more high-profile issues like carbon emissions.
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Only the manufacturers can fix this, by creating a circular hardware economy.

No, this is not a problem that "only manufacturers can fix". Not any different than blaming manufacturers of plastic and the hysteria of the pearl-clutching-crowd crying for bans on plastic bags and bottles. People use and buy based on their wants, needs and what they feel is a good return for their money. Much of it is packed with plastic.

Do you want that plastic band around your ice cream container so you're assured no one the super market, opened it, licked it and returned it to the freezer? I'm betting no matter how much you hate and want to ban plastic, you like that plastic band.

Look around your house. How much plastic is there is in everything? I'm betting, at some point in their journey, fossil fuels were used in transporting those items to your home. Plastic is versatile and affordable, same for fossil fuel.

Consumers play a large part in tech waste. The question is, is the Tech-Obsessed-Must-Have-the-Latest-Device-Crowd willing to do their part? And a circular hardware economy has a limit, it's not an endless loop.

Tech Waste can wait. We have to solve the Existential Threat of Climate Change first.

I've referenced the stories below in the past and I'll use them again:

Amnesty.org: Child labour behind smart phone and electric car batteries.

GreenTech Media: With demand for cobalt and lithium surging, companies need to be aware of where they’re sourcing from.
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Scientific American Archived
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(Feb. 17, 2020 typo fix "is" to "in")

Facebook employee leaps to death from roof of corporate headquarters.

Daily Mail: Facebook employee jumps to his death from roof of company's Silicon Valley headquarters in apparent suicide.

A Facebook employee has died at the company's headquarters campus in Silicon Valley in what police call an apparent suicide.

Horrified bystanders in Menlo Park, California called 911 at about 11.30am on Thursday after an adult male jumped from the top of a four-story building on the 100 block of Jefferson Drive.

Paramedics rushed to Facebook's sprawling campus and rendered first aid, but the victim was declared dead on the scene.

The deceased individual has not been publicly identified pending family notification, but Facebook confirmed in a statement to DailyMail.com that he was an employee.

Zuckerberg may have to install suicide nets like Apple did in China to prevent employees from leaping to their deaths.

"Our AI wasn't programmed to identify suicidal tendencies."

Parler CEO says Apple won’t let free speech app update unless it censors content. Apple relents.

Reclaim The Net: Apple app update bans Parler.

John Matze, the founder and CEO of free speech social network Parler, says that Apple has given him an ultimatum – ban “offensive” content off Parler or the Parler app will be banned from the App Store. Matze says he refused and now Apple is preventing Parler from updating its app.
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Based on Matze’s claims, Parler won’t be able to push updates to its iOS app until the situation gets resolved which is unlikely if Parler stays committed to allowing “offensive” speech. This means the Parler iOS app will probably become unusable in September when Apple releases iOS 13, a new version of its mobile operating system, because app updates are usually necessary in order for them to continue working with the latest version of iOS.

Apple has relented, at least for now.

Breitbart: Parler Accuses Apple of Slow-Walking App Update.

Free-speech centered social media app Parler recently attempted to roll out an update to their iPhone app, a common event that many app developers do on a regular basis to add new features, fix bugs, update app elements, etc. But Parler found their update stopped dead in its track as Apple stated that it would have to review the app to determine if the update would be allowed to go ahead.

After Parler attempted to launch the update, company CEO John Matze says he was contacted by an Apple employee via the App Store Connect portal. The employee explained that the Parler app was likely in violation of the App store rule 1.1.1 which prohibits:

    ["]Defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited content, including references or commentary about religion, race, sexual orientation, gender, national/ethnic origin, or other targeted groups, particularly if the app is likely to humiliate, intimidate, or place a targeted individual or group in harm’s way. Professional political satirists and humorists are generally exempt from this requirement.["]
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Last night, the app update was finally approved the delay.

Apple Führer Tim Cook

iTunes KILLED! Funeral planned.

Newshub: Apple pulling the plug on iTunes.

Apple iTunes' days are reportedly numbered, with chief executive Tim Cook looking to announce the retirement of the revolutionary multimedia software next week.

iTunes, the media player and store that led the way in popularising mp3 downloads and the digital storage of music, was launched in 2001.

However, it has recently been garnering criticism for moving away from its original music-based purpose and into films, television, games, podcasts, ebooks, and other features.

Now it looks to be killed off, with Bloomberg reporting that its retirement will be announced at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose, California on Monday (local time).

Apple will reportedly replace it with three apps - Music, TV, and Podcasts - for Mac, similar to its decentralised strategy on its iOS devices. It's unknown what will happen to movie downloading.

The Music app will take over for most of iTunes features, though as streaming becomes more popular, it has been speculated Apple will end mp3 downloads and focus only on its AppleMusic subscription services.

Do we add the killing of iTunes to the Clinton Body Count?

Your iPhone is spying on you while you sleep.

No one saw this coming. No one.

The Jeff Bezos Peoples' Republic via 9to5Mac: Washington Post finds 5,400 app trackers sending data from an iPhone.

Monitoring software used by The Washington Post on an ordinary iPhone found that no fewer than 5,400 app trackers were sending data from the phone – in some cases including sensitive data like location and phone number.

    "It’s 3 a.m. Do you know what your iPhone is doing?

    "Mine has been alarmingly busy. Even though the screen is off and I’m snoring, apps are beaming out lots of information about me to companies I’ve never heard of. Your iPhone probably is doing the same — and Apple could be doing more to stop it."
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     [The] biggest concern is transparency: If we don’t know where our data is going, how can we ever hope to keep it private?

The same story at OregonLive mentions one additional detail not noted in the above article:

[My iPhone] was receiving a message that included my IP address -- once every five minutes.

How many Dems will condemn Tim Cook's earnings?

Answer to post title: None.

This Is Money: Apple boss Tim Cook's BIGGEST BONUS EVER.

Apple boss Tim Cook collected his biggest ever bonus just weeks before the iPhone maker cut production due to poor sales.

The 58-year-old trousered £12.3million in 2018, including a £2.4million salary and a £9.4million bonus.

It was a 22 per cent pay rise for a year that saw Apple post record revenue and profit.

But it came just weeks before it dropped a bombshell, saying demand for its latest iPhones failed to meet expectations.

I have no problem with any CEO making a ton of money. I do have a problem with corporations with business ties in countries that exploit and use forced child labor for mining cobalt and lithium and any other resource. Don't tell me these companies "don't know". Years ago, Apple had to install suicide nets in their China manufacturing facilities because workers preferred leaping to their deaths rather than work at their job.

Green Tech Media: The Hidden Risks of Batteries: Child Labor, Modern Slavery.

Shockingly, 40,000 children are estimated to be employed in artisanal mines in southern DR Congo, including in cobalt extraction. Verisk Maplecroft’s cobalt risk assessment -- part of its commodity risk service -- reveals that human rights abuses are widespread in the sector and can occur within both industrial and artisanal mines.

Bloomberg: 2018: Apple negotiating to buy cobalt direct from miners in DR Congo.

The price of cobalt has more than tripled in the past 18 months to trade above $80,000 a metric ton. Two-thirds of supplies come from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where there has never been a peaceful transition of power and child labor is still used in parts of the mining industry.

Apple isn't the only maker of electronics that obtains cobalt and lithium from countries and sources that use forced child labor. Conducting business with countries and companies that deliberately look the other way on all types of child labor is appalling and must be stopped. What is Tim Cook going to do about it? What are you/we going to do about it? Yes, there's lithium and cobalt in your, and my, lap top, desk top, IPad, phone and everything else. What degree of responsibility belongs to those of us who use these devices?

While all activity or work contains some degree of risk, (simply being alive carries with it the inherent risk of death), and while we can each rationalize what we do in life and assess various degrees of risk we are willing to take, profit should never come at the expense of human life and health. This is mantra to every reasonable, free-thinking individual. But it is held in absolute holy righteousness by The Left. So, why am I not surprised that The Left maintains a silent vigil on this issue when it comes to Tech?

One could correctly call the cobalt and lithium industry the "new" Exxon or Standard Oil. But The Left never will.

Tech News

Future of Life Institute - The Pledge Against Lethal Autonomous Weapons:

...we the undersigned agree that the decision to take a human life should never be delegated to a machine. There is a moral component to this position, that we should not allow machines to make life-taking decisions for which others – or nobody – will be culpable. There is also a powerful pragmatic argument: lethal autonomous weapons, selecting and engaging targets without human intervention, would be dangerously destabilizing for every country and individual.

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The Seattle Times - Your passwords have probably been hacked and what to do about it:

An Australian security guru named Troy Hunt spends his days looking in dark corners of the Internet to add hacked data to this free site. It now totals half a billion exposed passwords and 5 billion hacked accounts. Hunt can hardly keep up.

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I love her because Apple and Google hate her.  Gadgets Now:

[Apple CEO Tim] “lectured her on corporate tax”, according to the Wired. Once the decision was out, Cook allegedly in private said that it was “political crap.”

Fuck. Tim. Cook.
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Tech News World - Is your Smart TV spying on you?

Did you know that fancy smart TV sitting in your living room, kitchen, bedroom or bathroom actually may be watching you?
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If you are a marketer, you love it. You can get loads of user data for your marketing. However, if you are a consumer who cares about protecting your privacy, you feel invaded.

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Naked Security - hacker code leads to avatar gang rape:

...a whole lot of people unfamiliar with gaming rape culture found out earlier this month, when [an avatar] was gang-raped on a playground by two male avatars in the hugely popular, typically family-friendly game [Roblox].

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(MF'g Google. SOBs). C|Net - Google tries to hi-jack DuckDuckGo.com:

Google owns Duck.com, which has been driving rival search engine DuckDuckGo up the wall for over six years. Because when you type "duck.com" into a web browser, you get Google.com. Doesn't make a lot of sense, yes?

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Tech Dirt - India embraces net neutrality. U.S. run in opposite direction:

...the United States walks away from the concept of net neutrality, India just passed some of the toughest net neutrality rules in the world.
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Facebook engaged in some shady behavior, at one point trying to trick Indian citizens into supporting its plans and opposing meaningful net neutrality protections. 

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PC Authority: Game potions are classified as real drugs?

["Joy"] isn’t the first drug-related run-in with the Australian Classification Board that videogames have had. One of the last infamous interactions occurred when Fallout 3 attempted to be classified here, but needed to be altered to remove references to morphine in-game.

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WccfTech: Vulnerability in Grammarly exposed user details:

To offer you writing assistance, Grammarly requires access to everything you type. From your social media posts to technical reports, everything is accessed by the extension to be able to catch the typos. However, this also means that any security flaw affecting Grammarly puts user data at risk of exposure.

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The Outline - What really scares teens?

I took to Reddit, texted my friend’s younger brother, and enlisted a handful of people under 20 to watch my “favorite” Gen Z horror movies and the trailers for those upcoming films, and then tell me about their experiences.

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The Drive - The $200,000 air-ride Hummer:

...just about everything aside from the H1's original frame saw an upgrade. Mil-Spec put a ton of focus into adding sound-deadening and making the Hummer much more livable than General Motors ever did. Now, the shop has come out with another build that ups the comfort ante by including air-ride technology.

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Threat Post - Airport Ranking by the Most Risky Wi-Fi:

...WiFi security is often sacrificed by airport operators in exchange for consumer convenience, leaving networks unencrypted, unsecured or improperly configured[.]

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HackRead - LabCorp suffers massive data breach:

...cybercriminals have managed to breach the security of America’s leading clinical laboratory and medical diagnostics center LabCorp that can put health records of not thousands but millions of patients at risk.
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[LabCorp] is responsible for performing routine and specialty diagnostic tests including HIV tests, bloodwork and urine analysis.

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WIRED - You can’t sue your way to a solution for global warming.

Facing billions of dollars in climate change-related damage in the coming years, New York was hoping to extract some money from the transnational companies that extract the oil that people burn for energy[.]

States, cities, municipalities - all most overspending and all desperately looking for more revenue money. There's no one else left to sue. May I suggest "drastic budget reductions"?
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Technology Review - Google looking to help speed up quantum computing:

[Google's] Cirq, is a software toolkit that lets developers create algorithms without needing a background in quantum physics.
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For now, developers can use Cirq to create quantum algorithms that run on simulators. But the goal is to have it help build software that will run on a wide range of real machines in the future.

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Info World - Powering AI:

The range of innovative AI hardware-accelerator architectures continues to expand. Although you may think that graphic processing units (GPUs) are the dominant AI hardware architecture, that is far from the truth.

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WHAT are they? Tech E Blog: The coolest cabins ever.

朋友; 伙伴; 同志 (Comrade) Cooks helps China Gov Censor Citizens

Apple  友; 伙伴; 同志 CEO Tim Cook  makes no apologies for promoting and buckling under to the Chinese government in censoring its internet. Quartz:

Apple removed dozens of virtual private network (VPN) apps from its Chinese app store, depriving many users of tools that are critical to jumping the country’s Great Firewall. The move marked a major capitulation to China’s censorship regime, and follows similar requests to block various apps and content in the country.

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Mark Zuckerberg, meanwhile, has defended his company’s compliance with censorship requests in countries like Pakistan and Thailand by arguing that it serves citizens’ best interests to “continue operating” rather than risk getting shut down for not blocking content.

Is this part of the reason they own $52.6 Billion in U.S. Treasuries?

And with Zuckerberg and Pakistan and Thailand, this is nothing new.

Remember Google, the "Do No Evil" company and how they promised, in 2007, to fight global internet censorship?

Then, January 2010, Google threatened to yank their business out of China if they couldn't resolve their censorship restrictions with the Chinese Government.

Come March 2010, Google shut down their China service, redirecting to its server in Hong Kong.

Eventually, Google gave up in January, 2013.

Even CNN  couldn't put a positive spin on Google in January, 2015. Same link, Google also kowtowed to censorship by the Turkish government.

By December of 2014, the Chinese Government pulled the plug  on Google Gmail, Google Drive and many other Google services.

Besides, Google is not evil, are they?

Or are they?

Well, they dropped the "Don't be Evil" motto, so maybe they are?

Dotcom companies certainly aren't the only industries that play ball with repressive governments.

Then again, dotcom companies, especially the search engine and social media platforms, are companies that exist in a special area, unlike companies in manufacturing or other industries that work within the confines of a country like China or Turkey who control unfiltered information available in their country.

Email and social media companies are specifically in the business of communication(s), speech and information. Ideally, yes, everyone om earth would have the freedom to have unfiltered access to the information available on the web. What are the ethical obligations, if any, of communication companies agreeing with governments who censor the information available to its citizens?

I'm not sure I have any answers right now. Do you?