Google is a monopoly — and it’s crushing the internet

 

Five to 10 years ago, independent bloggers used to be able to get by on internet advertising, like the broadsheets of yore. But that changed quite quickly, and for two big reasons: Facebook and Google. They now gobble up the vast majority of internet advertising dollars — about 85 percent, as my colleague Jeff Spross writes — and a great many media outlets have been forced to move to direct subscriptions or other business models.

Google and Facebook manage this because they are platform monopolists. They can exert tremendous influence through their control of how people use the internet — and crush productive businesses in the process. Like any monopoly, it is long since time that the government regulated them to serve the public interest.

Over 1 bil. Yahoo accounts breached in largest cyber intrusion ever

Technology giant Yahoo disclosed Wednesday that hackers had broken into more than one billion of its user accounts, starting three years ago, and stolen personal information including addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth and security questions. Yahoo had said in September that 500,000 other accounts were compromised but denied that they included credit card or other financial information.

Google Allegedly Manipulating Search Results to Help Hillary Clinton’s Campaign

 

Tech giant Google is allegedly manipulating its online search results to bury terms that could be damaging to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, according to an analysis conducted by SourceFed, a news website with a prominent YouTube channel.

“SourceFed has discovered that Google has been actively altering search recommendations in favor of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, so quietly that we were unable to see it for what it was until today,” SourceFed’s Matt Lieberman said in a new video posted online Thursday.

Lieberman explained how, for example, if someone types “Hillary Clinton cri” into Google, the site’s auto-complete function, which provides the user search term suggestions while typing into the search bar, shows three potential searches: “Hillary Clinton crime reform,” “Hillary Clinton crisis,” and “Hillary Clinton crime bill 1994.” But when someone types “Hillary Clinton cri” into Yahoo’s search engine, the first search suggestion to appear is “Hillary Clinton criminal charges,” followed by “Hillary Clinton crimes” and “Hillary Clinton criminal.”

Mass Layoffs To Return With A Vengeance

Remember the mass layoffs of 2008-2009? The US economy shed millions of jobs quickly and relentlessly, as companies died and the rest fought for survival.

Then the Fed and the US government flooded the banks and the corporate sector with bailouts and handouts. With those giga-tons of liquidity sloshing around, as well as taking on massive amounts of new cheap debt, companies were able to finance their working capital needs, hire workers back, and even buy-back their shares en mass to make themselves look deceptively profitable. The nightmare of 2008 soon became a golden era of ‘recovery’.

Well, 2016 is showing us that that era is over. And as stock prices cease to rise, and in fact fall within many industries, layoffs are beginning to make a return as companies jettison costs in attempt to reduce losses.

Top Headlines: January 21st, 2016

When time is short throughout some days, there will be a new format in giving you the day’s top geopolitical headlines, in condensed form.

The following are today’s top stories:

 

Russia’s Dark Rider (The Trumpet)

New Book of Putin Quotes Echoes History’s Darkest Dictators (The Trumpet)

Crackas strike again! Xfinity account of John Holdren is breached (SC Magazine)

China’s PLA forces carry out landing drills near Taiwan outpost days after elections (South China Morning Post)

China’s secret plan to use the force of ‘Star Wars’ (Spacewar)

FINANCIAL PANIC: China’s stock markets hit again as fears grow for GLOBAL CRASH (Express)

And Now, the Fallout (Hoover Institution)

A multi-speed Europe (VOXeurop)

Lawmaker: Obama Admin Fueling ‘Campaign to Destroy Israel’ (Washington Free Beacon)

U.S. flies fleet of F-22 stealth fighters to air base in Tokyo (The Asahi Shimbun)

IMF Deputy says Fed will crash markets with promised rate hikes (TruNews)

Could The World Be Headed For A Financial Crisis Worse Than 2007? (TruNews)

Polonium 210: Deadly substance that killed Russian spy for sale online (Express)

Google, Yahoo and other tech companies provided ‘full assistance’ to NSA spying on Americans, says agency lawyer (Natural News)

Top European Court Rules That NSA Spying Makes U.S. Unsafe For Data

The European Union no longer considers the United States a “safe harbor” for data because the National Security Agency surveillance exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden “enables interference, by United States public authorities, with the fundamental rights of persons.”

The EU’s highest court, the Court of Justice, declared on Tuesday that an international commercial data-sharing agreement allowing U.S. companies free-flowing access to large amounts of European citizens’ data was no longer valid.

Google and Facebook are the new NSA

Yes, world, Google and Facebook are as powerful data collectors as the United States’ foremost spy agency, and what’s more, their data collection is legal because, unwittingly or not, users of both give them permission to do so (was there really ever a time Google lived up to its motto of “Don’t be evil”?).As reported by National Journal, both sites – and other social media destinations – continue to vacuum up data nearly as fast as it is created, and all in the name of selling you that next widget or product or service:

The private-sector tech companies that run the social networks and email services Americans use every day are relatively opaque when it comes to their data-collection and retention policies, which are engineered not to preserve national security but to bolster the companies’ bottom lines.

iCloud users’ login details apparently being intercepted in China

Chinese authorities are attacking users who are connecting to Apple’s iCloud website in what appears to be a surveillance push to steal users’ login credentials, according to a Chinese censorship monitoring group.

In the attack, which was first reported over the weekend, less than 24 hours after the new iPhone 6 went on sale in China, connections to iCloud.com were hijacked and stripped of the usual encryption that prevents hackers and government spies from intercepting the username and password typed by someone connecting to the site.

This is another example of what is technically known as a “man-in-the-middle” (MITM) attack, in which an attacker intercepts a connection between a user and a website in order to steal or tamper with the data being exchanged. In the past year alone, China has been accused of intercepting connections with a MITM attack against Github, Google, and, more recently, Yahoo, in what was seen as an attempt to censor information on the Hong Kong protests.

After several users reported the attack online, the anti-Chinese censorship activist group GreatFire tweeted about the MITM attack on Saturday. The group later published more details in a blog post on Monday.