It’s about time facial recognition tech firms took a look in the mirror | John Naughton

Most of us had never heard of Clearview until January 2021 when Kashmir Hill, a fine tech journalist, revealed its existence in the New York Times. It was founded by a tech entrepreneur named Hoan Ton-That and Richard Schwartz, who had been an aide to Rudy Giuliani when he was mayor of New York and still, er, respectable. The idea was that Ton-That would supervise the creation of a powerful facial-recognition app while Schwartz would use his bulging Rolodex to drum up business interest.

A big turn offAbout Those Kill-Switched Ukrainian Tractors is an acerbic blog post on Medium by Cory Doctorow on the power that John Deere has to remotely disable not only tractors stolen by Russians from Ukraine, but also those bought by American farmers.