Tag: Apple

Ukraine: How British Intelligence Globalized Online Trolling

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Tuesday, 6 September 2022 — Internationalist 360°

Kit Klarenberg

Since the conflict in Ukraine began, numerous commentators have drawn attention to the blatant weaponization of social media in service of the proxy war.

Legions of users on Facebook, Twitter, and other major platforms, many anonymous and recently registered, have relentlessly propounded pro-intervention, pro-Ukraine propaganda, viciously attacking all those deviating even slightly from established Western narratives. It has created an unprecedented situation, which writer Caitlin Johnstone calls “the most aggressively trolled war of all time.”

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Tech giants help Israel muzzle Palestinians

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5 June 2021 — The Electronic Intifada – Jonathan Cook

[Note: Jonathan Cook’s website is currently offline (as is his domain) and this has happened a  couple of times over the past weeks. Accident or design? WB]

By Jonathan Cook

Benjamin Netanyahu touches a finger to his faceIsraeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has tried to shut down social media posts critical of Israel – Amir Cohen Reuters

Israel’s caretaker prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, sought to shut down all use of the popular video-sharing app TikTok in Israel last month.

The attempt to censor TikTok, details of which emerged last weekend, is one of a number of reported attempts by Israel to control social media content during last month’s military assault on the Gaza Strip.

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Breaking the glass screen – framing monopoly capitalism in global commodity chains

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6 January 2021 — Monsoon Storms

PROLOGUE

In 2007 – a digital time not spatially long ago – a month before the iPhone was production scheduled, the late Steven Jobs took some of his staff to an office. He had been carrying a prototype of the device in his pocket daily for weeks.

Mr. Jobs angrily held up his iPhone so that everyone could see the dozens of tiny scratches marring its plastic screen. He then pulled his keys from his jeans.

People will carry this phone in their pocket, he was quoted to say.
“I won’t sell a product that gets scratched,” he said tensely.

The only solution was to use unscratchable glass instead.

“I want a glass screen, and I want it perfect in six weeks.”

(Duhigg, C and Bradsher, K. “How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work“, The New York Times, published January 21st., 2012).

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Notebook #2: The Rate of Exploitation: The Case of the iPhone

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26 September 2019 — MR Online –Tricontinental

The Rate of Exploitation - The Case of the iPhone

As readers will notice, this is an excellent piece of work by our comrades at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. We have done our best to layout the Notebook in HTML format but we highly recommend the PDF version (click here to download), which has been laid out beautifully for the purpose of education and discussion.

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On TEDx, Gene Therapy, Profits, and Criminal Thinking By Phil Butler

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7 March 2019 — New Eastern Outlook

FBTD65222

And the headlines read, “Putin wants his own private internet.” This genius stroke of Neanderthal mass information came from TechRadar via the golden string of stupidity that emanates from Bloomberg. This “thread” I speak of is the connective tissue of the most ominous force in the history of our planet. How’s that for sensational? Now let me show you why America’s propaganda machine will be the end of us all. Very soon, thinking at all will be a crime.

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Media: Tom Friedman's Apple Hunch By Peter Hart

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20 February 2013 — FAIR Blog

New York Times columnist Tom Friedman is, for reasons that remain entirely unclear, considered a wise man in elite media circles. His columns and books are read by others in the business, who then turn around and pretend they know something because they read it in a Tom Friedman column.

Thomas Friedman

NYT’s Friedman

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Apple’s China Comes Home to Haunt Us By Robert Scheer

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15 February, 2012 — Truthdig – Robert Scheer

Four decades ago Richard Nixon, a once famously hawkish Republican president, cut a deal with the Communist overlords of China to reshape the world. The result was a transformation of the global economy in ways that we are only now, with the sharp critiques of Apple’s China operation, beginning to fully comprehend.

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Video: The Truth of the Apple iPad Behind Foxconn's Lies

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13 February, 2012 — The Real News Network

As someone who has been using a Mac since 1984, the thought that it’s made with parts assembled with virtual slave labour, doesn’t sit well with me. Yet, can anything different be said of the many millions more computers and other consumer products assembled with parts made in China? Or for that matter any of the other cheap labour production centres scattered across the planet? Seems to me that opposition to Apple is highly selective. We’ve been living off the labour of most of the planet for the past five centuries and continue to do so without too many complaints from us privileged people. Surely the focus should be on Capitalism not China? Let the Chinese workers deal with their end. The fact is, if we were to have to pay the real price for all the marvels of consumer capitalism, how many pcs do you think there would be in people’s homes and workplaces? See Apple Asks Outside Group to Inspect Factories, NYT, 14 February 2012

Video produced by Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior

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An update on InI and other ramblings By William Bowles

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20 August 2011

The first piece to appear on this WordPress Blog is dated 17 May, 2007 but the site has been here since 14 March, 2003 when the first essay appeared on InI[1]. I know, it’s confusing but that’s computers for you as in reality InI is two sites in one; the old, ‘flat’ InI and the new, database-driven WordPress Blog. And never the twain shall meet, unless I want to build a complicated Index that leads to all the old pages. Thousands of them. Forget it. Search the site instead if you know what you are looking for.

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In your Face! By William Bowles

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26 May 2011 — Strategic Culture Foundation

Facebook transforms who you are, your likes, dislikes, beliefs and fantasies, all of it into a commodity that it alone owns, 600 million intimate profiles of people like you and me

Many moons ago, when the Web was still in its infancy I wrote that the way the Web was evolving led inevitably to the emergence of monopolies, whether of content or access to information. In the early days it was Portals, or the ‘place’ where you entered the Web eg, Netscape, Microsoft, CNN or whatever, that commanded ‘value’. Success, and hence an implied value, was measured in terms of ‘hits’ or to paraphrase, the proverbial ‘boots on the page’. It was assumed that advertising would be the revenue stream as users clicked on links and hopefully bought stuff.

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As Smartphone Scandal Grows, Tech Firms Run for Cover, Reap Windfall Profits

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1 April 2011 — Anti-Fascist Calling…

Recent revelations that Apple’s iPhone and iPad, Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 operating systems collect, store and transmit records of users’ physical locations to central databases–secretly, and without consent–have ignited a firestorm over Americans’ privacy rights in an age of hypersurveillance.

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