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The Trump-Xi Beijing Summit: What the Smiling Handshakes Won't Tell You

On Thursday, Donald Trump will walk into the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, shake Xi Jinping's hand, and declare it a great meeting. There will be announcements. There will be numbers — billions of dollars in Chinese purchase commitments, a new bilateral mechanism with an important-sounding name, possibly a joint statement on Iran. Trump will post on Truth Social. Markets will rally briefly. Pundits will argue about who won. None of that will tell you what actually happened. What is actually happening in Beijing this week is something more consequential and more uncomfortable than the summit theatre will reveal: two leaders of two deeply mutually dependent superpowers, both of whom need this meeting to succeed for entirely different reasons, sitting across a table in a world that has already moved past the assumptions that defined their last nine months of negotiations. The Iran war changed the equations. The rare earth gambit changed the power balance. Taiwan is sitting in...

Facebook Places: Ability to tag users without their permission

Facebook places currently available in the US, allows users to tag other without their prior express permission. How and why is this a problem and what impact does this really have. Consider this scenario for a moment, you have invited all your friends out for dinner and innocently tag everybody at that diner in a Facebook Places update and share with all your friends on Facebook. Innocent enough, imagine the various impacts it might have. How many people have made excuses to be there for the dinner; maybe a friend has left work early, telling his boss there is an emergency. His Boss could be his friend on Facebook - result fried. Each person sitting on that dinner table might have made some excuse to have made time to be there; telling their partners and co-workers half-truths to make themselves available. So now everyone knows where they really are based on an update from a friend. So what is wrong with Facebook places. This is just one broad case scenario, there are definitely 1000s...