Announced within days of one another, two developments, one bureaucratic, one nefarious, showcased the growing chasm between the dream and the reality of our increasingly interconnected world. On December 4, 2020, President Trump signed into law the “Internet of Things Cybersecurity Improvement Act of 2020,” which establishes security […]
If we think about drones, we probably think about remote-controlled assassination machines manned by the Mossad or “fly-through” tours of the homes of the rich and famous. What we (or at least I) didn’t think about were artificially intelligent police drones that can be sent out by 911 […]
“We are the Borg. Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own. Resistance is futile.” Now, I would never be mistaken for a Trekker, but there are some lines from the series that everyone of a certain age knows and this is one of them. […]
Many of us have not read about China’s near-nationalization of payment and chat apps to fight the spread of COVID-19. Widely-reported but little noticed, China has required citizens to use software on the chat and payment apps WeChat and Alipay that dictates whether they should be quarantined or […]
There’s an old Yiddish saying, passed down to me from my grandparents, that is worth recalling in these uncertain and potentially infectious times: “When three people say you’re drunk, go lie down in the gutter.” So, when my brother the doctor (he’s the smart one) texted the family […]
I woke up this morning to a text from a close friend wondering how long it would take me to write about the fact that as of this writing, we still do not have results from the Iowa caucuses last night due to problems with its untried voting […]
Two weeks ago, VISA announced that signed an agreement to acquire Plaid, a fintech that allows consumers to connect their bank accounts to apps like Venmo to enable mobile payments, among other things. By all accounts, VISA paid a significant premium to buy Plaid, shelling out $5.3 billion, […]
When I see stories about continuing data spats between banks, fintechs and other players in the payments ecosystem, I tend to muse about how the more things change the more they stay the same. And so it is with this story about a bank, PNC, shutting off the […]
Pick your aphorism. Nature abhors a vacuum. Markets hate uncertainty. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. Small is beautiful. Whichever one you choose, my prediction for 2020 is the same: we will see state legislatures acting to protect their citizens (and lure corporate taxpayers) by passing […]
There are so many intertwining threads in this story about this “re-educational” Chinese app, we could make some very high-quality bedsheets. The ineffectiveness of “consent”. Tech as a force-multiplier for the state. The opacity of the black boxes we increasingly rely on to run our lives. Big Brother, […]
