Weekly Roundup: Zuckerberg defends Oculus in court, Obama commutes Chelsea Manning sentence
Summary
Minutes after the inauguration, the White House’s LGBT rights page disappeared, as well as any mention of the terms “climate change” and “global warming.” The @POTUS Twitter account has been handed over to Trump and the first thing he tweeted was a Facebook link. Tech politics aside, protests at Palantir over a supposed Muslim registry list occurred, Google acquired Fabric away from Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg appeared in a Dallas courtroom in defense of Oculus in an explosive $2 billion lawsuit. The court analyzed the help that Oculus founder Palmer Luckey sought from the employee of ZeniMax-owned games company id Software, John Carmack, when he was building his initial VR headset product. 10) A group of security researchers, including academic Zeynep Tufekci, have co-signed an open letter calling for the Guardian to retract a story it published claiming that WhatsApp contains a backdoor. Concerns come from the notion that Palantir and its co-founder and Trump advisor Peter Thiel could profit off the makings of such a citizen database that could be used against those identified as followers of Islam in the U.S. 12) Uber has brought on a high-profile hire.