HERE are some interesting thoughts for the week.
As we progress technically, laws will change. There was a time when Americans and people worldwide shuddered at the thought and demanded that for police to search your house or premises, they needed to have a court-issued search warrant.
Now, another survey finds that most Americans think or would prefer that police should not be empowered to look at the contents of their cellphone without a search warrant.
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President Trump has just signed a law which prohibits the government to use Kaspersky Lab Software. If you recall, Kaspersky a few years ago was among the hottest anti-virus and firewall software to hit the market. It was even endorsed by Jackie Chan.
People bought it because it was fast, efficient, and effective. That it was created by a Russian company actually increased its mystique and appeal. Then something happened.
The son of the Kaspersky creator was kidnapped. It was said that the Russian agents were key to the rescue of his son, and as a result, Mr. Kaspersky started working more together with the Russian government on cybersecurity.
Because of this, there is always the suspicion that the software that they are releasing contains a backdoor which will allow the Russians to probe into security, especially in American and European governments.
Although this has been asserted, I am not aware of any proven thing about this. But maybe the American government is exercising caution, particularly in light of serious concerns that Russia unduly influenced the US presidential election results.
Kaspersky is still being sold in most markets, including in the United States. It is just the American government that cannot use it.
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Here’s another interesting one. Last month, Twitter, after a few years, thought that instead of the long standing 140-character limit, now gives you twice as many – 280 characters. This was criticized since the appeal of Twitter is supposed to be its brevity.
Initial figures show that people loved being able to have longer tweets. SocialFlow, a social media analysis firm, said that among the 30,000 tweets that they studied, they found that tweets that were longer than 140 characters were retweeted and liked almost twice as much as the shorter ones.
So it may be likely that the longer tweet will be here to stay. The company has more or less concluded that people who wrote longer tweets get more followers, like, retweets, and also consequently, spend longer time on Twitter.