[AxisOfEasy] Canadian Crypto-Exchange Bankrupt, Freezing $180 Million In Customer Assets

German anti-trust regulator bans Facebook’s entire business model This one was via a reader who forwarded the news to me that Germany’s Federal Cartel Office, that country’s anti-trust regulator passed a ruling last week that “[Facebook] was exploiting consumers by requiring them to agree to this kind of data collection in order to have an account, and has prohibited the practice going forward. Facebook will no longer be allowed to force its users to agree to the practically unrestricted collection and assigning of non-Facebook data to their Facebook user accounts,” Which is essentially, the entire Facebook business model. The DNS Privacy Debate You might have to be a bit of a DNS geek to get full appreciation of this one, but it’s a detailed and lengthy overview of a panel on DNS and privacy at the FOSDEM event, as retold by PowerDNS creator Bert Hubert. This is all about DNS resolvers, those are the servers anybody has to use to conduct all of their DNS lookups – and the growing array of public DNS resolvers like Google (8.8.8.8), Cloudflare (1.1.1.1), Quad9 (9.9.9.9) et al (contrast with authoritative DNS servers, which answer queries for specific domains, the business easyDNS is in). It is important to bear in mind that your DNS lookups leave a trail of breadcrumbs across the internet about your activities. Anybody offering free DNS resolution services is doing it for a reason. The DNS privacy debate revolves around understanding who you are using for DNS resolution and why that party is offering to resolve your DNS – doing so offers the ability to further track and aggregate data about you. There are some privacy enhanced DNS lookup options, which are also discussed. (EasyDNS for some time offered a resolver service which we shuttered for various reasons. We are considering launching an open source decentralized, on-board DNS resolver project. Read the article and if you would be interested in participating in this sort of initiative, let me know.) Reddit users revolt over Tencent investment Tencent is known among tech hubs as “the Chinese Censorship Giant” owing to their role in building and maintaining the “Great Firewall of China” which blocks much of the content we take for granted here in the West from Chinese citizens, like images of Winnie The Pooh and words like “democracy” and “human rights”. Reddit bills itself as “The Front Page of the Internet” and built its rep on a largely ‘anything goes’ type forums for discussions of all types. When the news broke that Reddit has accepted a $150 million investment from Tencent, the users began an open revolt, posting memes known to violate Great Firewall of China rules and voicing their objections. Tim O’Reilly on the tech unicorn economy It’s refreshing when a pillar of the industry like Tim O’Reilly comes out with a sober analysis of the trade offs and realities of growing a company organically, like O’Reilly did with his company, or “Blitzscaling” – the term used by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman in his book wherein start-ups scale up super-fast taking on tonnes of venture capital, eat the entire market …usually losing money all the way, before getting their payoff in some big IPO or being acquired. “Is it a business or a financial instrument?” O’Reilly muses – and that is the defining characteristic of our age. It’s also a topic I delve into in-depth on my Guerrilla-Capitalism blog. Read: https://guerrilla-capitalism.com/articles/the-transition-overview-building-companies-that-matter/ easyMail users: please check your mail client settings We’ve made some recent upgrades to the easyMail IMAP cluster that requires you updating the server settings in your email clients, if you have old settings. Change your IMAP server from mx.easymail.ca to imap.easymail.ca because mx.easymail.ca is going away.