Twitter has announces a feature that will allow you to un-mention yourself, that is, to remove unwanted mentions that other users make of your account by inserting a particular topic in your timeline and thus gaining extra attention.

This is not about somebody mentioning you to tell you something, to comment on a topic they know you are interested in or to start a conversation, all perfectly legitimate uses, but instead is about using mentions as a spam tool, one of the most common abuses on Twitter: putting a list of accounts behind a tweet with a high number of…

A long and very interesting article in the Financial Times, “‘Obedience and fear’: the brutal working conditions behind China’s tech boom”, provides some insight into China’s work culture, summed up as “996” — working from nine in the morning to nine at night, six days a week — as well as asking to what extent businesses rely on these long hours, which is beginning to create wider problems in society and has seen the deaths of numerous workers.

In China, a good worker is somebody who, like the famous Xi’an warrior statues pictured here, works their head off, even if…

The arrival of summer in the northern hemisphere ushers in, as it does every year, natural disasters caused by the progressive warming of our planet. At the moment it’s tornadoes in Chicago, which you may not have heard about unless you live in the area, but tomorrow it will be hurricanes, storms or huge wildfires.

The reason is as simple as it is sadly predictable: our emissions, which continue to increase given the misguided investment priorities of governments everywhere have doubled the amount of heat trapped and retained by our planet over the last fourteen years, generating ever-increasing climate instability…

The announcement last week by El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele that his country would be adopting bitcoin as legal tender, made during a live broadcast at the Bitcoin 2021 conference held in Miami, and subsequently approved four days later by the Central American country’s Parliament, sent the cryptocurrency’s share price up by 5%.

In recent weeks, Bitcoin’s value had been hit by increasingly stringent controls over its use in China, as well as by the FBI’s seizure of a ransom of 75 bitcoins ($4. 4 million) paid by Colonial Pipeline after it was subjected to a cyber attack. The FBI…

The growing number of ransomware cases in recent years highlights the importance of implementing a security culture in organizations, even more so when, due to the pandemic, many people have switched to working from home without taking the right precautions and having thus generated many vulnerabilities. While some of the organizations affected have refused to pay and have been able to save most of their data thanks to the use of backup copies, in many other cases we have seen major interruptions in their operations or the payment of large ransoms.

In Europe, cyber-attacks have doubled over the past year…

An article in The New York Times, “Amazon’s open secret” about how the company’s product recommendations and reviews are increasingly riddled with lies and opinion-buying mafias, brings to mind my recent experience with a particular transaction I think exemplifies the company’s problems very well.

Pictured here is my review of a company that sells seeds. I was curious about trying to grow some particular species of a South African tea, so I located a seller on Amazon and ordered them. After trying to germinate the seeds, at the right time of the year and with just the right growing conditions…

Mmhmm is one of the applications I have benefited most from after moving my classes and lectures online as a result of the pandemic restrictions. The company’s founder, Phil Libin, decided to launch the company after seeing how, when lockdown began, the daily round of videoconferencing became tedious in the extreme, and tried to make it a little more entertaining.

When I Heard about Mmhmm, I was immediately in tune with the idea: at the beginning of the pandemic, when I saw how most classes dragged on for 80 minutes, with a teacher crouching in a corner of the screen…

A group of House Democrats, supported by a few Republicans — unusual in a deeply divided Congress — is introducing five bills that would impose tough regulation of big tech.

The bills include the Ending Platform Monopolies Act, to regulate the ability to disrupt potential conflicts of interest when a company operates a platform but also uses it to sell its products); the Augmenting Compatibility and Competition by Enabling Service Switching Act (reintroduced), to mandate rules to facilitate the portability of user data; the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, to create rules facilitating the portability of user data; the…