Showing 1 - 10 of 42
Give people a chance to sell their data to FB
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 01/02/2019
» It's easy to be outraged by the revelation that Facebook has been paying users between the ages of 13 and 35 up to US$20 (624 baht) a month to allow practically unlimited access to their smartphone usage data. But outrage about the social media giant is so 2017. The latest dubious practice could be an opportunity to consider a more finely tuned business model.
Putin lacks the clout to cut isles deal with Abe
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 24/01/2019
» The window of opportunity for Russia and Japan to officially end World War II with a peace treaty narrowed again after Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's visit to Moscow on Tuesday failed to end in a breakthrough. There's still time for Mr Abe to secure his legacy, but a lot depends on President Vladimir Putin's increasingly shaky domestic standing.
The year of the woeful world leaders
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 28/12/2018
» The dictionaries have decided on their 2018 words of the year. Oxford picked "toxic". Merriam-Webster went for "justice". Collins chose "single-use". However, I'd zero in on "misgovernment". Surely, 2018 saw a number of countries misruled by the worst crop of world leaders in recent memory.
Europe is helping Uber to improve
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 03/10/2018
» On Monday, Uber returned to Dusseldorf, Germany, a city it was forced to abandon in 2015. This is a victory both for German regulators and for Uber, or rather, for its new version under Chief Executive Dara Khosrowshahi. It shows that the San Francisco-based company can actually function as a tech platform, rather than as a taxi business that pretends to be a tech platform.
Death, diamonds, Russia and Africa
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 06/08/2018
» The murder of three Russian journalists last week in a remote area of the Central African Republic, the world's poorest country according to the World Bank, has turned a spotlight on what looks like a big Kremlin play for influence and resources in Africa. Where China has spent decades and billions of dollars trying to entrench itself there, Russia is offering its brute force and strong appetite for risk. It's already making headway.
MeToo camp hits a wall in Russia
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 09/03/2018
» The #MeToo movement has finally reached Russia. Unfortunately, it's sad and astonishing for the women involved and for anyone who supports them. Russia's current atmosphere is conducive to all sorts of power abuses, and the scandal in its parliament proves that nothing's about to change.
Crypto markets aren't all the same
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 23/01/2018
» There's a compelling reason to consider what's going on with cryptocurrencies a purely speculative boom-and-bust roller-coaster: Over a three-month period, the prices of all the top coins and tokens are rather strongly correlated, going up and down in unison. What does that make them if not the 21st-century incarnation of tulip bulbs?
Facebook's new mission looks well nigh impossible
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 17/01/2018
» If Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg is sincere in a recent post about gradually taking the media element out of "social media", he's striking a powerful blow for tech self-regulation, as well as preparing to pay a heavy price for the evolution of his vision. But getting the genie back into the bottle may be too difficult even for Mr Zuckerberg, and, in any case, his creation's problems go far beyond his proposed fix.
The cyber whodunnit and the global blame game
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 21/12/2017
» The US government has officially attributed to North Korea the WannaCry ransomware attack, which encrypted hundreds of thousands of computer drives around the world in May, 2017. And yet as with a series of other highly public cyberattack attributions, little evidence for the claim was made public. It's time for the cybersecurity world to follow the advice of the Rand Corporation and set up an unbiased international consortium that would seek to attribute attacks based on a common set of rules.
Merkel's lacklustre win is good for the nation
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 26/09/2017
» The sour faces of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's allies after the first exit poll results for the federal election were announced on Sunday night will prompt much talk of a Pyrrhic victory for Ms Merkel. But the outcome of Sunday's election could be good both for her and for German democracy: It has clarified the options for the next governing coalition, and it has made sure there will be vocal opposition to the government from both the left and the right.