Incumbents almost always prevail with sustaining innovation

In disruptive circumstances, the entrants are likely to beat the incumbents

H/t Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Solution

The National Security Agency has just released an important set of rules and procedures for electronic surveillance by the DOD (of which NSA is a

It is a big-deal doc but it also appears to be more a housekeeping update of the previous one rather something that makes major substantive changes, unless I’m missing something, so my current plan is to tweet for specialists rather than write a NYT article for general readers./2

These procedures govern, at a 30,000-foot level, DOD/NSA surveillance that is authorized by Executive Order 12333 because it uses techniques that fall outside the sort of national-security wiretapping that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) regulates. /3

FISA covers collection inside the US from a wire of coms w/ at least one end on domestic soil. So this is for all the other stuff, like collection abroad, certain satellite interceptions, & warrantless bulk collection of foreign-to-foreign coms as they transit the US network./4

The previous procedures date back to 1988 and were signed by then-AG Edwin Meese and then-deputy secretary of defense William Taft. (They were released in 2014 as part of the Snowden

Stephen, why are you so critical of Facebook and not the other big tech companies?

A 🧵 for well-intentioned engineers about how to navigate the complexities of big tech.

There's a simple inescapable truth about the distinction in kind between Facebook and the others.

Google could fix its content moderation and stop its military contracts and its business model would still be Google. (1/)

Apple could fix up its supply chain, raises the unit prices on its products for more sustainable and environmentally sound sourcing, and its business model would still be Apple. (2/)

Amazon could treat its workers better and stop self-dealing in adjacent markets with its own products, and its business model would still be Amazon. (3/)

Netflix could ... actually don't really have here to complain about here really. Maybe less Tiger King. (4/)

The Discourse on the post-coup tech platform rejection of violent fascism is giving me hives so I just have to get my ~hot take~ in here.

Sorry for the massive thread; Pascal’s apology applies.

Everybody loves to talk about “precedent” when a decision is made like kicking tr*mp off Twitter or pa*ler off of AWS, usually when making some fallacious slippery slope argument about what this “precedent” will mean for some completely non-comparable follow-up situation.

In some narrow colloquial sense, I admit there’s a precedent being set, in that when an analogous situation arises, the decision makers in that situation might do their research and look at this preceding (hence: “precedent”) event, and base some reasoning on it.

But this is a rhetorical trick—maybe one that those making the argument are playing on themselves as much as they’re playing it on you—because they’re trying to get you to consider the word in its legal-jargon sense: that future decision makers *must* consider these events.

This often goes along with the frankly bananas implication that by “setting the precedent” the decision makers (tech platforms or whoever) are arrogating to themselves a power which they did not *already have*, and it is thus dangerous and opens the door for future abuses.

Deconstructing AH’s ‘bot’ list - A Thread 🤖
#JusticeForJohnnyDepp
#AmberHeardIsALiar

First things first here’s Amber’s first claim of ‘bots’ included in her Counterclaim (Aug 2020)

“Smear and harass Ms.Heard while simultaneously promoting and praising Mr Depp’s agent and attorney, Adam Waldman.” - This part is specifically important.

There’s 209 accounts listed so I broke them up into 7 groups:
• No Longer exists
• No Connection at all
• P*rn accounts
• Depp Fan accounts
• Only 1 tweet with any link
• Other
• and finally @adam_waldman 🤣

Side note - When I searched the accounts that didn’t obviously show JD tweets (eg fan accs) I searched with the words/#’s
#JusticeForJohnnyDepp, Justice, Johnny, Depp, Amber and Heard

I used all the most commonly used terms with this case so it would throw up anything connected

I can’t search what people have Retweeted but on accounts where there were no tweets to be found, I scrolled back through their profiles for a while to make sure I wasn’t missing anything.

Great report by @satariano on a fake network that @Graphika_NYC (and others) found in December.

Twitter accounts with GAN faces, boosting Huawei, boosted by Huawei execs, and attacking Belgium's 5G policies.

Not enough evidence to prove who ran them.

We found this network when it was boosted by Spamouflage, a pro-China operation.

Independently, @mvanhulten of @TI_EU and @ArbiterOfTweets of @Knack found it with different methods.

It's not a friendly environment for fake campaigns,

This was the first account we found.

"Alexandre, PhD", apparently a CEO.

But no surname, no indication of what he's a CEO of, and a GAN-generated profile pic.

Alexandre's had a bit of an obsession with Belgium and #5G recently.

Especially, Belgium's security limitations on 5G providers, which are reportedly mainly about Huawei and ZTE.

Alexandre didn't like the Belgian approach much.

The account was created in 2017. It only started tweeting in early December, 2020, but its first posts were retweets of tweets from November 2017-18.

They were meant to be about VR, as in virtual reality. Oddly, one was actually about Victorian Railways in Australia. Awkward.

Thank you members of the Commerce Committee for the opportunity to speak with the American people about Twitter and §230. My remarks will be brief to get to questions. §230 is the most important law protecting internet speech. Removing §230 will remove speech from the internet.

§230 gave internet services two important tools. The first provides immunity from liability for user’s content. The second provides “Good Samaritan” protections for content moderation and removal, even of constitutionally protected speech, as long as it’s done “in good faith.”

That concept of “good faith” is what’s being challenged by many of you today. Some of you don’t trust we’re acting in good faith. That’s the problem I want to focus on solving. How do services like Twitter earn your trust? How do we ensure more choice in the market if we don’t?

There are three solutions we’d like to propose to address the concerns raised, all focused on services that decide to moderate or remove content. They could be expansions to §230, new legislative frameworks, or a commitment to industry wide self-regulation best practices.

The first is requiring a service’s moderation process to be published. How are cases reported and reviewed? How are decisions made? What tools are used to enforce? Publishing answers to questions like these will make our process more robust and accountable to the people we serve.

Imagine being a German EV driver, not having to register with several of the 400+ EV charging operators just to get energy on the road, but paying with a “Watts” token accepted by any of them.

What would that mean to users and operators?
Thread 1/12👇

2/12 Based on IOTA “coloured coins”, “Watts” could be coupled to fiat currency or energy units (e.g. kW)

If "minted" by a consortium of EV charging operators, drivers would only have to register with ONE of them to get "Watts" but be able to use them to pay on ALL charging poles

3/12 "Watts" could additionally be sold in "gas" stations or supermarkets like todays' vouchers (cellphone credits, Google Play Store, PSN, Steam, etc).

Sold as vouchers for cash, buying "Watts" would even be (nearly) anonymous.

4/12 If “1 Watts” would be equivalent to 1 cent, minting tokens worth 5 billion € would cost the operators just ~1,500 €.

That’s "dirt cheap" in terms of infrastructure cost, especially when considering that “Watts” could be transferred infinitely w/o ever incurring any fees

5/12 A major headache when it comes to digital (cc) payments usually is "control".

With IOTA-based "coloured tokens", the operator consortium would stay in full control of their "Watts" token. In case they need more than 5 bn worth of them, they could create "Watts" v2 any time

New from me: Co-op is quietly using facial recognition cameras to scan everyone entering shops. The tech is being in 18 stores and has been used for about 18 months. It's using tech from Facewatch, which says Co-op has the "best" watchlist in the UK

Adding some more details since this is getting some attention.

Here's how it works:

– CCTV captures people’s faces as they enter shops. These images are converted to a faceprint. This is basically a string of data, which is compared against a watchlist. Matches are flagged

– All the stores have signage about the tech, the company says
– The system doesn't retain everyone's data, it only keeps info about people who are added to watchlists

– The Co-ops in question are all part of the Southern Co-op franchise. It says the ones using FR are inner-city stores, with high crime levels
– The justification is crime against staff has risen. Since the tech has been used it says 3,000 incidents of theft have been diverted

– The watchlists used are created by Co-op and include images of people "known to have offended within our premises, including those who have been banned/excluded". Co-op decides who is put on the watchlist. Data on watchlists is stored for two years

Questions are a disruptive technology. A thread. 1/

We see the most recent wave of disruptive technologies. E-commerce. Smart phones. Ride-sharing. Blockchain. We are often blind to the disruptive technologies and techniques that have been with us for a long, long time, but are still disruptive and disrupting. /2

Ancient but still disruptive tech: music, migration, out-marriage, ink, questions. /3

Questions change lives. They bring people together, tear them apart. They open doors. And minds. They are the seed of adventure. They acknowledge the chaos inside and around us. They are a transfer of power, trusting that the power will come back in time, improved. /4

What is a question? We use them so frequently, so thoughtlessly. It is easy to overlook their strangeness, and the nature of their power. /5

I have some thoughts re: the responses that @GameMinimalist got yesterday when he expressed his discomfort with history-based conflict games, their Euro-centric nature, and imperialist overtones/undertones. 1/

There are many people who are uncomfortable with wargames (the term I'm going to use as shorthand for "games that attempt to engage seriously with, or to model, some aspect of history in some way"). And that's okay. 2/

If someone is expressing that discomfort, I personally think the first and in some cases only thing one can or should do is *acknowledge* that. Listen to them and their concerns. 3/

If they're misinformed - a lot of folks seem to think that wargames are about gore and violence and bloodlust, that they act as a pressure release for dark impulses, which simply isn't true. I mean, converting numbers to an odds ratio isn't exactly drenched in viscera -- 4/

go ahead and correct that misinformation, while understanding that they might still be uncomfortable with it, and it's perfectly valid for that to be the case.

This reminds me of my grandfather. 5/

https://t.co/LjpdlHa0C7 is getting a good face-lift.
Samples now have variant tables with annotation on their impact to the gene.
There is also an IGV integration. You need IGV installed locally but the Start|Jump links will open up you BAM file in IGV.

You must have IGV open and then click the start link.
The sample's BAM will show up for viewing in IGV.
Once open, you can use the jump link to move swiftly around to each variant. This is a variant in THCAS.

You can jump to other variants in the same gene. In this case we have one non-synonymous variant in phase with a synonymous variant in THCAS.

Cannabinoid synthase genes are cute but some folks can answer those questions with HPLC.
How about flowering genes?

This sample has a disruptive in frame deletion on a late flowering gene. And it's very rare in the population.

Looks to be heterozygous....
But its never this simple in cannabis.

Let's look at what other damaging variations it has.

LIVE at 1pm: @AjitPaiFCC joins @AEItech for his final speech as Chairman of the FCC. He'll discuss the tough choices he made that shaped U.S. communications policy.

Tune in:

.@AjitPaiFCC: I'll "walk you through four of the most challenging calls I had to make over the past four years.
The details and circumstances of these episodes vary, but I think it’s important to say up front that the underlying principle guiding my decisions never changed."

"I said repeatedly that every decision I would make at the FCC would be an independent one, based on the facts and the law. Nothing more. Nothing less. In my view, that must be the lodestar for any FCC leader." - @AjitPaiFCC

"Net neutrality advocates approached the issue with a religious fervor, and the press corps covering the issue was broadly sympathetic to their position." - @AjitPaiFCC

"It was clear that there was no real political upside for me to re-open this fight. ... But investment in high-speed networks had declined for two straight years for the first time outside of a recession in the Internet era." - @AjitPaiFCC

🧵 Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, Cerner, Epic Systems, Mitre Corporation y Mayo Clinic, anunciaron el jueves q estan desarrollando estándares tecnológicos para permitir obtener y compartir registros de vacunación a través un “pasaporte de