Tech

The student body president of the University of Connecticut (UConn) has fallen under fire by his peers in student government over his support of pro-free speech legislation on campus.

The University of Washington (UW) has announced that it will be launching a “Center for Antiracism in Nursing” that will focus on addressing “systemic racism” in healthcare.

Apple is facing an antitrust investigation from UK regulators over its App Store rules, according to a report by CNBC.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX recently launched and landed a third Starship test vehicle, the SN10, but shortly after returning to the ground the ship exploded into a fireball. Musk claims the starship will be safe for human transport by 2023.

Social media giant Facebook has finally lifted its ban on political ads this week, ending a months-long restriction set by the site after the November 2020 general election.

China’s state-run Global Times boasted in an article on Thursday that Chinese people are increasingly becoming accustomed to the use of “emotion recognition technology,” artificial intelligence that allows the government to track human feelings, as part of everyday life.

Top Chinese political adviser Tan Jianfeng on Tuesday called for the establishment of a national “data bank” of biometric data, including facial and fingerprint recognition data, to protect Chinese “national security” and “information security.”

We asked Facebook’s Oversight Board to end the censorship of former President Trump and allow him back onto the platform. We told its “Oversight Board” that the decision to suspend Trump is an affront to free speech and transparency.

Wikipedia’s page on the term “big lie” has been expanded with mention of Donald Trump’s claims of fraud in the 2020 Presidential election. Previously, the page focused on the Nazi Party using the term to describe what they claimed were false allegations Jews spread to vilify Germany following World War I, which helped fuel antisemitic sentiment in Germany and led to the mass slaughter of Jews during the Holocaust. Attempts at removing mention of Trump’s claims in the Wikipedia article have been repeatedly undone.

Utah state lawmakers have proposed a joint resolution “to protect Utah’s institutions of higher education from Chinese Communist Party influence.” The resolution seeks to close the remaining Confucius Institutes located at universities and colleges in the state.

Popular gay dating app Grindr is joining in on the original scripted content world with its new Bridesman series, which is set to begin production this month and air in Fall 2021.

Lobbyists for Apple and Google have reportedly descended on Arizona as the state considers legislation that would allow app developers to use third-party payment systems to circumvent the 15 to 30 percent cut that Apple and Google demand from app sales.

Social media platform Parler dropped its lawsuit against Amazon on Tuesday. The move comes after a two-month effort to get Amazon Web Services (AWS) to reinstate its hosting account.

Freedom of speech on the internet did not lead to a rise in “hate crimes,” according to a report sent from the U.S. Department of Commerce to Congress in January — a report that has yet to appear on any government website.

Google is planning to phase out the use of technology that tracks users as they move from website to website around the internet, in a move that it says is intended to better protect users’ privacy.

E-commerce giant Amazon recently updated its app icon to resemble a cardboard box with blue tape on it; now the Masters of the Universe have updated the icon again after some claimed the design resembled Adolf Hitler’s mustache.

Tech giant Microsoft has warned customers that a new China state-sponsored hacking group is exploiting previously undisclosed security flaws in Microsoft’s Exchange Server email product. The hackers accessed the email systems of a wide range of organizations including defense contractors and infectious disease researchers.

Takeout and delivery orders have offered many restaurants a financial lifeline during the coronavirus lockdown. But some dining establishments are falling prey to a new kind of dine and dash in which customers dispute legitimate credit card charges related to an order, forcing the restaurant to foot the entire bill.

The same Washington establishment that championed the Common Core standards and encouraged more federal involvement in education has endorsed a civics initiative that seeks to indoctrinate K-12 students into woke “action” political organizing, under the guise of restoring “unity.” In

Facial recognition technology in the Moscow Metro has aided in the arrest of more than 900 people over the past six months, the Metro press service told Russian state media outlet Tass on Tuesday.

Two students are suing St. Francis High School in Mountain View, California, alleging that administrators confused their green acne facial treatments with “blackface,” and then forced them out of the school. The lawsuit claims that even after the school’s administrators were informed of the truth, they “continued to defame and scapegoat” the students.

Gab, the social network known for its Christian values and uncompromising stance on freedom of speech, says it has been deplatformed from three different banks over negative coverage in the legacy media. The latest actions are part of a multiyear wave of blacklisting by tech companies and financial institutions intent on shutting Gab down.

Amazon, the world’s dominant online retailer, quietly changed its content policy sometime after August 10 last year to include a ban on “hate speech,” according to reports.

According to a recent survey, more than forty percent of Americans distrust Facebook and TikTok, but sixty-five percent believe Google to be trustworthy.

A recent report from the New York Times states that the stock trading platform Robinhood is facing almost 50 lawsuits directly related to the recent GameStop trading frenzy.

Social media giant Twitter announced this week that it will begin labeling tweets that share “misleading information” about the coronavirus vaccine and will implement a strike system for repeat offenders of the “misinformation policy.”

A Harvard CAPS-Harris poll released Monday suggests the next thing Americans want to “cancel” is the trend itself.