Free Republic

<p>Call 2018 the “Year of Deplatforming.” The internet was once celebrated for allowing fresh new voices to escape the control of gatekeepers. But this year, the internet giants decided to slam the gates on a number of people and ideas they don’t like. If you rely on someone else’s platform to express unpopular ideas, especially ideas on the right, you’re now at risk. This raises troubling questions, not only for free speech but for the future of American politics and media.</p>

Unfortunately, most political conversation these days occurs not on the “free” internet, where independent sites like Power Line reside, but rather on social media–Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and so on. Other players include Google (in its search capacity), Apple, Pinterest, Spotify, etc. Happily–if you are a leftist–all of these tech companies are run by liberals. And because they are private companies, they are not constrained by the First Amendment. They can restrict or ban conservative communications on the ground that they are “hate speech,” or on no grounds whatsoever, with impunity.

I'm relatively new to "social networks" in the truest sense of the word. My sister raves about Pinterest, and tried to get me interested, but I'm not seeing any usefulness in it. What is it, what does it do, how does it advance my place in the universe, and who cares? It looks like a bunch of pictures to me. Pretty shallow. I'm thinking it might be useful for widening exposure to some items I'm selling on Etsy, but don't know. Anyone with hands-on knowledge?

'Idiotic' doesn't even come close to describing this Mark Zuckerberg’s Twitter and Pinterest accounts were hacked over the weekend. The breach apparently happened after the Facebook boss’s login details were exposed via the recent LinkedIn password dump. This implies Zuckerberg reused passwords across multiple sites or perhaps that the format of the password he chose for other sites was guessable after breaking his LinkedIn login credentials. Zuckerberg’s Facebook account was not affected. A previously unknown prankster hacking group called Ourmine boasted about the alleged hacks, The hackers claimed that they found his password – dadada – in the LinkedIn dump....

Speed kills, and the iPhone goes from 0 to a good picture faster than anything else I was at Intel’s CES booth, composing a photo with my Android smartphone, when a pair of anonymous hands thrust a shining iPhone 6 Plus into my line of vision. A nonchalant tap of the camera shutter button later, the hands were pulling back, having captured a stupendously clear and sharp picture on the first attempt. By the time I’d completed my routine of setting proper focus and steadying myself, the dude who’d beaten me to a better shot with none of the effort...