All Things Alt-Tech

Where we’re going, is to towards a censored, sanitized, corporate,Read more  "Podcast: Big Tech’s Great Leap Forward: Towards a Chinese Style Internet" The post Podcast: Big Tech’s Great Leap Forward: Towards a Chinese Style Internet first appeared on nyman.media.

Yet again, fact is stranger than fiction, as more andRead more  "Hail the new ministry of truth: Big Tech" The post Hail the new ministry of truth: Big Tech first appeared on nyman.media.

In the USSR, to maintain the various official government narratives,Read more  "Censorship in the Soviet Union vs the US: is history repeating?" The post Censorship in the Soviet Union vs the US: is history repeating? first appeared on nyman.media.

Is the economy recovering or deteriorating? Does wearing masks help?Read more  "2020: News is now a branded entertainment product" The post 2020: News is now a branded entertainment product first appeared on nyman.media.

What do most Big Tech companies have in common? Let’sRead more  "The fraudulent dot-com 2.0 economy: from zero-asset businesses to zero-product businesses" The post The fraudulent dot-com 2.0 economy: from zero-asset businesses to zero-product businesses first appeared on nyman.media.

We to go back to dissect the big tech hearing in the us congres, where Bezos, Pichai, Zuckerberg and Tim Cook were summoned and questioned. The big tech leaders knew very well about two core issues at hand: 1. Antitrust: they are, in essence monopolies of their respective spaces, and that’s why they came prepared with [...]

A lot has been said about how the twitter and Facebook algorithms tailored to stoke aggression and provoke conflict. If you’re Facebook, and you are optimizing for time on site and page views, it's hardly surprising they end up surfacing polarizing content. If it's engagement you want, then showcasing content that plays on primal emotions [...]

A list of 400 big businesses have decided to boycott Facebook and pause their Facebook ad campaigns. This is in protest to Facebook’s so called enabling of hate speech. They are demanding that Facebook establish a permanent civil rights infrastructure to evaluate Facebook's products and policies for discrimination, bias, and hate. They are demanding that Facebook remove [...]

Most recently, Twitter censored Trump over his warnings to protestors seeking to set up an anonymous zone in Washington DC. He said ‘if they try, they’ll be met by serious force’. Apparently, that message was not allowed by the Twitter. Because, apparently, Twitter gets to decide which of the messages of a president are fit [...]

Hodler bias: you want something to go up in price, so you disagree with all the bearish facts. You see investors perform mental gymnastics around the uncomfortable facts, and this is something that unites Bitcoiners, Tesla 'investors' and Wirecard victims alike. Bitcoin will play some sort of role, but it’s not obvious that it will [...]

City living seems to have become more and more unpredictable if not outright dangerous. Unrest and large scale protests that devolve into riots, arson, fist fights and even shootings. You would imagine a lot of business owners in the central districts of cities like Seattle are now considering their options. Meanwhile, with today’s communications technology, [...]

Trump has put forth an Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship. It’s seeking to empower federal regulators to strip social media companies' authority to moderate speech. Corporations should not be able to selectively throttle the transfer of data across the Internet. In a similar fashion, we shouldn't allow a limited number of online platforms to throttle [...]

Musk is in the headlines yet again, and once more, it’s not good publicity as of late. Call it what you like, but his antics are stirring up controversy. All that aside, he’s still largely heralded as a great genius; as an unprecedented businessman with unique features. But is he really unique, and is he [...]

In the late 1990’s, many prominent figures in business, technology and economics started worrying about the so called year 2000 problem, also known as the Millennium bug or Y2K. This problem refers to how computers back then stored calendar dates with only two digits, making the year 2000 indistinguishable from 1900. Therefore, many people were anticipating critical [...]

During the Blitz in World War II; British cities were bombed relentlessly by the Luftwaffe in an attempt to destroy, kill and spread panic and fear. At least 40k people died in the city of London alone, which at the time had a population around 8M people living in it, meaning around 0.5% of the [...]

It looks like our friendly overlords in big tech are here to save us once again. That’s right, the benevolent masters over at Google and Apple are now looking to to use your location data to piece together just how well everyone obeying the social distancing recommendations, and who has been exposed to the dreaded [...]

What’s happening to money in this brave new chapter following the Cerveza Sickness? Things are moving very fast, and there are quite a few themes to keep track of. First off, authorities now have yet another excuse to ban paper currency, because it supposedly helps spread the disease. That might be true, but it’s likely [...]

Digital nomadism is dead — at least for now. It seems like a thing of the past; something people did years ago. The thought of a gallivanting programmer circling the globe, or an Instagram travel influencer sampling luxury hotels — it seems like an almost alien concept at this point. It’s hard to think that [...]

What we’re seeing now in the Covid media coverage is starting to resemble an absolute frenzy. When too many people are on the same side of the boat, it's time to start asking questions — its's usually a sign of people abandoning their critical thinking faculties, and are just lazily embracing the consensus. We are not [...]

Many tech businesses, and particularly the behemoths such as Facebook and Google, have built their business model squarely around advertising. Advertising is heavily sensitive to the business cycle — it tends to be the first expense to tack on in an expanding market and when the times are good and improving. It’s also the first [...]

With all the looming quarantine and lockdown measures in place, we’re about to see some rather pronounced changes in our world, and some of them could even turn out to be long-lasting. First off, we’re about to see a grand experiment in working from home. Disclaimer: this is not financial or trading advice! Are most people [...]

As with every key issue in the Internet age, there are two diametrically opposed views that are starting to form; two warring tribes that draw different conclusions and relentlessly mock and ridicule each other. Global warming believers vs. deniers, pro- vs. anti-Trumpers, Bitcoiners vs. anti-Bitcoiners, Tesla vs. TeslaQ, etc. -- they all essentially represent dichotomies. [...]

Alt-Tech platforms seem to have one thing in common, namely that they cherish free speech and open communication, without censorship or de-platforming. In fact, that’s what’s attracting many of the users to the various alt-tech platforms today. The alt-tech platforms represent a renewed grand experiment, going back to open communication, and it has so far [...]

I recorded a podcast on government statistics and how the media propagates them without question, also covering some of the developments around the Coronavirus. Traffic to my site spiked in the days after publishing the podcast. It turns out the lion’s share of the visits were from China, and specifically they seem to originate from [...]

It's time to reassess the coronavirus situation, as there has been more data coming out. The situation is far more dire: China acted too little, too late, and the numbers they put out are questionable. So, the Chinese government released an updated figure on the infected: they skyrocketing overnight on Thursday. This appears to be [...]

In the past, a common reason to migrate was to look for a job, in other words, you went to were there were opportunities to compete for. This is still the case today, if you want to move to a large city. You’ll have to really want it, and you’ll have to put out, and [...]

Everyone would have certainly heard about the corona virus by now. So, is there reason to fear? The media is having a field day with the ever-emerging breaking news on how the virus is spreading and the lives its claiming. The Corona virus is an endless source of juicy, frightening statistics and developments, but what [...]

In this episode we talk about different way you can monetize a sites and social networks: the obvious and not so obvious ones. Ads, subscription fees, micro-transactions, what else is there? We also look at some recent monetization within alt-tech; namely, Minds.com have recently launched their Pro pages. Charging $50 per month, they now let [...]

This week we talk about the increasing difficulties with preserving your digital sovereignty and staying off the surveillance grid. We also dip into how the digitalization of currencies ensure there's a permanent record of your transactions. Can this be used against you, and do you have anything to worry about? The REAL ID Act of [...]

In this episode, we talk about a different kind of alternative technology; not software, but electric cars, and specifically, #Tesla. The red flags abound with this company, and we take a look at what this company actually puts out there vs. what it has promised to deliver in its countless product ‘launches’.  First odd thing [...]

We take a look at yet another couple of alternative social networks, discuss some sounder approaches to privacy and running social networks, and the creation of a potential social standard. Mewe.com functions very well, but it is largely a Facebook clone with more sound approach to privacy. But if they were really serious and obsessive [...]

COPPA (Children's Online Privacy Protection Act) Is a federal law that seeks to regulate how websites and online assets could gather information from children, and it is enforced by the FTC. The goal of COPPA is to prevent the deceptive targeting of children with campaigns to extract personal information -- but is that what it [...]

In this episode, we talk about YouTube's new policy regarding termination of accounts and how the platform is quickly losing its original appeal. We also touch on Facebook's Atlantic Council partnership, Facebook throttling mentions of Minds.com and the de-platforming of Daniel McAdams. YouTube has a new policy regarding termination of accounts. The key point is [...]

Time to talk about anticompetitive behavior in big tech. There’s actually been some hard evidence surface over the past few days, and it’s pretty damning for Facebook. We take a look at their history of anticompetitive stunts over the past decade: their acquisition of Instagram, their attempted takeover of Snapchat, the WhatsApp deal and more. [...]

The online ecosystem is concentrated on a number of fronts: search, social, video, news, browsers, etc. Why is this? In this episode, we take a look at why seemingly all aspects of the online world are dominated by just a select few players. One study that Google ran internally was to see how users ranked [...]

This is a quick episode on how the news landscape is shifting and how it's now nearly unrecognizable to what it was only a decade ago. Legacy news networks have figured out that investigative journalism is costly and requires lots of legwork, while independent YouTubers are now commanding immense audiences. What's next? As the traditional [...]

In this episode, we look at the upcoming antitrust case against Google and anticompetitive behavior in the tech space. What has Google done to be called a monopoly and should governments be intervening in the market? Google dominate mobile advertising, display advertising, small business analytics, email, file storage as well — it’s no secret that [...]

In this episode, we look at the document dump provided to Project Veritas. The documents contain references to partisanship, psychological research, fake news, politics, machine learning 'fairness' and more. For some reason (although not surprisingly), these have not been thoroughly disseminated anyone in the media -- so, let's delve in. What is 'twiddling'? Re-ranking of [...]

Looking for an alternative to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube? We take a look at some of the upcoming alternatives: Minds.com, Bitchute, Gab.com, and others. What does it take to successfully get a new network off the ground? Why would anyone look for alternative social networks? Most of your friends are already on FB & [...]

The current online economy is a strange and perverted one, with content creators generally try to monetize their content using ads. In other words, right from the get-go, you present your users on your with with the paradoxical choice of viewing your content, or navigating away from your site, to the advertisers’ content. So what's [...]

A first look at the Brave Browser — from an advertiser’s perspective… Brave is an ad-free browser that blocks 3rd party ads and trackers, and Brave allows users to earn BAT (their native cryptocurrency), as well as support content creators using the currency as well. Brave has it’s own ads -- but are they any [...]

Cryptocurrencies are great -- or are they? Let's explore some of the potential shortcomings of cryptocurrencies, as well as some of the characteristics of crypto's that are often naively glossed over or simply misunderstood.