Social Media & Platforms — Posts

26 posts on "Social Media & Platforms" by Shlomo Strauss — bilingual writing on technology, science, and business.

• How AI threatens reading yet enables custom printed books — As visual media and AI reduce our reliance on text, generative tools offer a paradoxical solution by creating highly personalized physical books.
• Can Hackers Really Steal Your Fingerprints From Selfies? — While extracting fingerprints from photos is technically possible, modern scanner security and image compression make the actual risk extremely low.
• Anthropic vs. the Pentagon: a $200M contract and a question of who — After Anthropic refused to lift Claude's safety restrictions for the Pentagon, losing a $200M contract, the clash raises hard questions about corporate…
• Pig butchering on a massive scale: the $15 billion Bitcoin seizure — The U.S. Justice Department seized $15 billion in Bitcoin tied to a Cambodian forced-labor fraud network running large-scale pig butchering scams.
• Building an automated Telegram news channel in under two hours — Using RSS feeds, a self-hosted N8N server, and a lightweight AI model, the author automated the translation and publishing of tech and finance headlines…
• 10 principles behind a consistent LinkedIn content presence — A technology consultant ranked among LinkedIn's top content creators shares the ten practical principles — consistency, no AI, no selling — that shaped…
• Fake plant seeds generated by AI are selling online for real money — Scammers are using AI-generated plant images to sell seeds for species that never existed, earning thousands of dollars and eroding trust in real…
• Donate to California wildfire relief and you could appear as a South — Comedy Central has partnered with a California wildfire relief fund, giving donors a chance to win a spot as an animated character in the next season of…
• Friends on Telegram: an Israeli and Iranians raised to be enemies — A personal account of genuine friendship formed online between an Israeli and young Iranians, and the hope of one day hosting them in a freer Middle East.
• The four types of marketing media every business owner should know — A concise breakdown of Paid, Owned, Shared, and Earned Media, illustrated with real-world examples from Apple, Spotify, and Oreo.
• A year on LinkedIn: what the numbers actually mean — A personal reflection on over a year of writing on LinkedIn, exploring the motivations behind posting and the real value of online professional…
• The real advantage is efficiency, not more resources — Using the LED vs. incandescent bulb as a lens, this post argues that smarter allocation of limited time and money beats simply acquiring more of either.
• Elon Musk claims a Diablo 4 world record — and the gaming world is — Musk posted a run that would place him first globally in Diablo 4's level 150, but the gaming community is debating whether the achievement is legitimate.
• Peter Thiel: the tech billionaire behind PayPal, Palantir, and much — A profile of Peter Thiel's career spanning PayPal, Palantir, the first outside investment in Facebook, and a fellowship that helped launch Ethereum and…
• A year of LinkedIn content creation: lessons from the analytics — Thirteen practical lessons drawn from a full year of LinkedIn publishing, covering consistency, content quality, AI pitfalls, and audience respect.
• The IPTV piracy scheme that unraveled because of a YouTube flex — A man who ran an illegal IPTV restreaming operation earning $34 million was caught after flaunting his wealth on YouTube, and sentenced to five and a half
• Beeper brings 14 messaging apps into a single interface — Built on the open, decentralized Matrix protocol, Beeper consolidates WhatsApp, Telegram, and 12 other services into one free app across all major…
• Managing multiple social platforms from one dashboard — a personal — A content creator shares how Zoho Social, bundled within a Zoho One subscription, streamlines posting, scheduling, and engagement across multiple social…
• The bookmarks bar is old and unglamorous — and it's your best — Organizing your bookmarks bar into folders and subfolders eliminates the daily time lost to repeatedly searching for the same sites and files.
• Call or text first? The generational divide over phone etiquette — A Wall Street Journal study highlights a generational gap on whether to ask permission before calling, and when a phone call beats an endless text thread.
• Two websites for a Jerusalem nonprofit: service mapping and two — White Tiger completed a dual-site project for a veteran Jerusalem nonprofit, integrating Google Maps API for service-point navigation and launching…
• Iranian friends, Python, and what really drives online hatred of — A personal account of friendship with young Iranians argues that online hostility toward Israel often stems from ignorance rather than malice, and that…
• A digital iron curtain: the internet is splitting into rival blocs — The TikTok ban and China's removal of WhatsApp are symptoms of a broader fragmentation of the global internet into isolated blocs, with dangerous…
• Why Apple is paying Shutterstock $50 million for AI training data — Apple's deal with Shutterstock is the latest sign that data ownership has become a defining economic advantage in the AI era, reshaping the value of…
• Retail Risks and the Hidden AI Value in Reddit's Unusual IPO — Reddit bypassed institutional investors to offer shares directly to users, but the company's true long-term value may lie in its AI training data.
• Telegram's slow climb from niche app to messaging giant — A personal decade with Telegram traces its technical edge over WhatsApp, its growth to 800 million monthly users, and its gradual crackdown on piracy.