New York Times
Google’s Legal Peril Grows in Face of Third Antitrust Suit
More than 30 states added to Google’s mushrooming legal woes, accusing the company of illegally arranging its search results to push out smaller rivals. The bipartisan group of state prosecutors said in a lawsuit that Google downplayed websites that let users search for information in specialized areas like home repair services and travel reviews. The prosecutors also accused the company of using exclusive deals with phone makers like Apple to prioritize Google’s search service over rivals like Firefox and DuckDuckGo.
Facebook reverses postelection algorithm changes that boosted news from authoritative sources. (New York Times)
Submitted by benton on Thu, 12/17/2020 - 10:25Kamala Harris should be the de facto secretary of rural development, in charge of closing the connectivity gap
Vice President-elect Kamala Harris is too smart and energetic to be just the vice president, a position with few official responsibilities.
Senator Jon Tester on Democrats and Rural Voters: ‘Our Message Is Really, Really Flawed.’ Need to talk infrastructure/broadband (New York Times)
Submitted by benton on Wed, 12/16/2020 - 13:22Scope of Russian Hack Becomes Clear: Multiple US Agencies Were Hit
The scope of a hack engineered by one of Russia’s premier intelligence agencies became clearer when some Trump administration officials acknowledged that other federal agencies — the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and parts of the Pentagon — had been compromised. Investigators were struggling to determine the extent to which the military, intelligence community, and nuclear laboratories were affected by the highly sophisticated attack.
William Barr Is Out as Attorney General (New York Times)
Submitted by benton on Tue, 12/15/2020 - 07:11Google Dominates Thanks to an Unrivaled View of the Web
In 2000, just two years after it was founded, Google reached a milestone that would lay the foundation for its dominance over the next 20 years: It became the world’s largest search engine, with an index of more than one billion web pages. The rest of the internet never caught up, and Google’s index just kept on getting bigger.