I don’t blame him, but Ian Dunt started his column last week with this:

Somewhere along the line, technology went from something hopeful to something threatening.

Given the continued overreach of the trillion Dollar companies (Meta, Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon) this is understandable. Whether we like it or not, these companies have an outsized influence on the technologies we use. Their success allows them to push into even more niches, from your phone, to your watch, to your speakers, to your car, to your fridge. When they collectively decided that AI was the next big thing, they subjected us to it, whether we wanted it or not. These companies farm your personal information so they can sell advertising¹, and obscure what they do to make it impossible to opt-out or give informed consent.

I’m not a big fan of Facebook. And the odd thing is that it feels like Steven Levy isn’t either¹.

I’ve read most of Levy’s previous books and, while he’s never been uncritical, there has always been a mostly positive spin. From Apple¹, to Google¹, to the “hacker culture¹” (including Stallman) I don’t recall any of his previous works quite being so down on their subjects.

It’s to the credit of Zuckerberg and his crew, then, that they were so involved in its creation. All the big names were interviewed on the record and, frankly, few come off well. Zuckerberg himself comes across as petty, jealous, arrogant and not terribly likeable. Even Steve Jobs had a fun, mischievous side.

Ever since upgrading from OS X 10.9 to Yosemite (10.10) I’ve been getting the above error message periodically. As far as I know I have no software that needs Java to run.

When I asked on Twitter, the most common suggestion was that it was the Adobe updater. But I don’t have PhotoShop or anything else likely installed.

This is really starting to bug me. Nearly a week after Facebook’s IPO and the papers are still saying that it was a failure. It wasn’t, or at least, whether or not is was depends on who you are. And I suspect you prefer the winner to the so-called losers.

Let’s start with the basics. What is an IPO? It’s simple: a company sells a part of itself in exchange for cash. In the physical world, that’s the same as me making something and selling it to you. For the sake of this example, let’s say that I sell it to you for £1.