Mike's Daily Comment

Still No Ridesharing in BC

Calgary and Edmonton should be laughing at this one. Toronto too. Despite many promises – Vancouver and BC don’t have ride sharing. And amazingly – “progressive” politicians tell us to ignore one of the biggest changes in society – the advent of the sharing economy.

The 10 most desired tech gifts of the 1970s, year by year

From Atari to the DustBuster, gadgets were awesome in the 1970s.

The Seventies were truly the start of the digital age. Electric watches and calculators glowed with red LED displays. Video arcades began to replace pinball. Television and cameras were suddenly pocket-sized. You could record The Love Boat and watch it later.

Some people have to have the latest gadget. As soon as it hits the stores. The following items may not have all been the best-selling items that…Click here for full article.

How Google’s Fitbit Acquisition Is Already Posing Some Problems

A certain number of Fitbit Inc FIT users aren’t happy the fitness tracker and smartwatch maker sold itself to Alphabet Inc according to CNBC.

What Fitbit Users Are Saying

Alphabet’s Google unit said in November it will buy Fitbit in a $2.1 billion deal to gain better exposure to the health and wellness space. Nultiple users have expressed privacy related concerns and have no interest in being part of the Google ecosystem.

A Fitbit user named Mike Carpenter told CNBC he’s concerned what Google will do with all the data it collects “once their AI advances in 10 or 20 years.” Google will have a trove of data that “health insurance companies would love to get their hands on.”

“I only recently got it and now I’m thinking I don’t need Google watching literally my every step or my every heart beat,” Fitbit user Dan Kleinman told CNBC….CLICK for complete article

Will Bezos Buy The Seattle Seahawks?

While it appears that giant Amazon has lost a tax battle in Seattle, it might win the “big game,” with its billionaire owner Jeff Bezos considering buying an NFL team. Amazon poured nearly $1.5 million into last week’s Seattle city council elections, aiming to defeat politicians who supported a tax on big business that Amazon and other big companies oppose.

Democratic presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders accused Amazon of trying to buy the council.

Well, the lobbying didn’t work anyway.

Only two of the seven candidates endorsed by Amazon and other companies emerged as winners.

One of the winners was Kshama Sawant, a self-described socialist and Amazon’s fiercest critic on the council.

The backstory is that last year, the Seattle city council voted to levy a new tax on large businesses of about $275 per employee, calling it a “head tax.” The tax was designed to raise at least $45 million a year to build more affordable housing and help support a homeless population.

However, less than a month later, Amazon and other Seattle businesses succeeded in pushing local leaders to repeal the tax…CLICK for complete article

Twitter: The Saudi Spy Tool To Bring Down Dissidents

In 2017, Saud al-Qahtani–advisor to the Saudi Crown Prince–was rather active on social media.

In one Twitter post, he stated: “Does a pseudonym protect you from #the_black_list? No 1) States have a method to learn the owner of the pseudonym 2) the IP address can be learned using a number of methods 3) a secret I will not say.”

While it should be understood that once you put something out on social media, it’s there for anyone to use against you. But it’s quite another thing when the threat is coming from a figure who served as director the Saudi Federation for Cyber Security and Programming, legal advisor and a media consultant for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS).

That’s who Saud al-Qahtani was when he made his Twitter debut.

And what he was talking about in his 2017 tweet was a campaign to harass and target dissidents of the regime. To that end, he started the hashtag “#The_Black_List” in which he called on Saudis to suggest online critics to target. Now, just one week after Twitter management decided to stop all political advertising, two former employees and their handler were charged by the US government for espionage. For Saudi Arabia…CLICK for complete article