757 Matching Annotations
  1. Nov 2019
    1. Uber will not be granted a new licence to operate in London after repeated safety failures, Transport for London (TfL) has said.

      The regulator said the taxi app was not "fit and proper" as a licence holder, despite having made a number of positive changes to its operations.

    1. Loading this iframe allows Facebook to know that this specific user is currently on your website. Facebook therefore knows about user browsing behaviour without user’s explicit consent. If more and more websites adopt Facebook SDK then Facebook would potentially have user’s full browsing history! And as with “With great power comes great responsibility”, it’s part of our job as developers to protect users privacy even when they don’t ask for.
    1. Tea cites Chavisa Woods’s recent memoir of sexism 100 Times, Andrea Lawlor’s Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl and Brontez Purnell’s Since I Laid My Burden Down as examples of books that have fearlessly and artfully tackled themes of power and gender relations, misogyny and sexual violence. “Right now, I think the [publishing] industry is responding to what is happening and saying: ‘Yes we really need these voices, we need these ideas out in the world.’

      So true!

      My review of Chavisa Woods's book is here.

    1. I’m on cloud nine. Look at this glorious keyboard! An Esc key! Inverted-T arrow keys! A millimeter of key travel! Enough spacing between the keys for our fingers to accurately orient themselves! And keystrokes will probably work, 100% of the time, for years!

      What I would give to have this!

    1. half of iPhone users don’t know there’s a unique ID on their phone (called an IDFA, for “identifier for advertisers”) tracking their app activity and sending it to third-party advertisers by default.
    1. From this page:

      AUPresses thinks more readers should be aware of the work they’re doing. That’s why during the organization’s annual University Press Week, it launched a reading list it’s calling READ. THINK. ACT., a list of 75 peer-reviewed books designed to help non-academic readers understand the world and work to make it a better place.

    1. Google has confirmed that it partnered with health heavyweight Ascension, a Catholic health care system based in St. Louis that operates across 21 states and the District of Columbia.

      What happened to 'thou shalt not steal'?

    1. Found a @facebook #security & #privacy issue. When the app is open it actively uses the camera. I found a bug in the app that lets you see the camera open behind your feed.

      So, Facebook uses your camera even while not active.

    1. Speaking with MIT Technology Review, Rohit Prasad, Alexa’s head scientist, has now revealed further details about where Alexa is headed next. The crux of the plan is for the voice assistant to move from passive to proactive interactions. Rather than wait for and respond to requests, Alexa will anticipate what the user might want. The idea is to turn Alexa into an omnipresent companion that actively shapes and orchestrates your life. This will require Alexa to get to know you better than ever before.

      This is some next-level onslaught.

    1. An explosive trove of nearly 4,000 pages of confidential internal Facebook documentation has been made public, shedding unprecedented light on the inner workings of the Silicon Valley social networking giant.

      I can't even start telling you how much schadenfreude I feel at this. Even though this paints a vulgar picture, Facebook are still doing it, worse and worse.

      Talk about hiding in plain sight.

    1. Somewhere in a cavernous, evaporative cooled datacenter, one of millions of blinking Facebook servers took our credentials, used them to authenticate to our private email account, and tried to pull information about all of our contacts. After clicking Continue, we were dumped into the Facebook home page, email successfully “confirmed,” and our privacy thoroughly violated.
    1. In 2013, Facebook began offering a “secure” VPN app, Onavo Protect, as a way for users to supposedly protect their web activity from prying eyes. But Facebook simultaneously used Onavo to collect data from its users about their usage of competitors like Twitter. Last year, Apple banned Onavo from its App Store for violating its Terms of Service. Facebook then released a very similar program, now dubbed variously “Project Atlas” and “Facebook Research.” It used Apple’s enterprise app system, intended only for distributing internal corporate apps to employees, to continue offering the app to iOS users. When the news broke this week, Apple shut down the app and threw Facebook into some chaos when it (briefly) booted the company from its Enterprise Developer program altogether.
    1. If the apparatus of total surveillance that we have described here were deliberate, centralized, and explicit, a Big Brother machine toggling between cameras, it would demand revolt, and we could conceive of a life outside the totalitarian microscope.
    1. The FBI is currently collecting data about our faces, irises, walking patterns, and voices, permitting the government to pervasively identify, track, and monitor us. The agency can match or request a match of our faces against at least 640 million images of adults living in the U.S. And it is reportedly piloting Amazon’s flawed face recognition surveillance technology.

      FBI and Amazon are being sued because of surveillance of people living in the USA.

    1. Senior government officials in multiple U.S.-allied countries were targeted earlier this year with hacking software that used Facebook Inc’s (FB.O) WhatsApp to take over users’ phones, according to people familiar with the messaging company’s investigation.
  2. Oct 2019
    1. Per Bloomberg, which cited an memo from an anonymous Google staffer, employees discovered that the company was creating the new tool as a Chrome browser extension that would be installed on all employees’ systems and used to monitor their activities.

      From the Bloomberg article:

      Earlier this month, employees said they discovered that a team within the company was creating the new tool for the custom Google Chrome browser installed on all workers’ computers and used to search internal systems. The concerns were outlined in a memo written by a Google employee and reviewed by Bloomberg News and by three Google employees who requested anonymity because they aren’t authorized to talk to the press.

    1. A highly interesting article where a well-known company prefers blood money to allowing employees to talk about politics. This is capitalism at its core: all profit, no empathy.

    2. GitLab, a San Francisco-based provider of hosted git software, recently changed its company handbook to declare it won't ban potential customers on "moral/value grounds," and that employees should not discuss politics at work.
    3. Meanwhile at Microsoft's GitHub, employees at both companies have objected to GitHub's business with ICE, not to mention Microsoft's government contracts. Employees at Amazon have also urged the company not to sell its facial recognition technology to police and the military.
    4. If you can see how people might respond to IBM, infamous for providing technology that helped the Nazis in World War II, saying, "Who has time to look into the source of this hard German currency?" you can imagine how GitLab's policy amendment has been received.
    1. In 1973, four years before it was published, Philip K. Dick sent his agent, Scott Meredith, an outline of his novel A Scanner Darkly. This cover letter includes an enthusiastic PS.
    1. there's still the issue of user IP addresses, which Tencent would see for those using devices with mainland China settings. That's a privacy concern, but its one among many given that other Chinese internet companies – ISPs, app providers, cloud service providers, and the like – can be assumed to collect that information and provide it to the Chinese surveillance state on demand.
    1. This system will apply to foreign owned companies in China on the same basis as to all Chinese persons, entities or individuals. No information contained on any server located within China will be exempted from this full coverage program. No communication from or to China will be exempted. There will be no secrets. No VPNs. No private or encrypted messages. No anonymous online accounts. No trade secrets. No confidential data. Any and all data will be available and open to the Chinese government. Since the Chinese government is the shareholder in all SOEs and is now exercising de facto control over China’s major private companies as well, all of this information will then be available to those SOEs and Chinese companies. See e.g. China to place government officials inside 100 private companies, including Alibaba. All this information will be available to the Chinese military and military research institutes. The Chinese are being very clear that this is their plan.

      At least the current Chinese government are clear about how all-intrusive they will be, so that people can avoid them. IF people can avoid them.

    1. The Swedish Royal Court has confirmed that it has been receiving abusive faxes from the fanatical Westboro Baptist Church sect.

      More info is found here.

    2. Carl XVI Gustaf

      He's found here in Wikipedia.

      He's an adulterer and a scumbag, but perhaps not popinjay; he doesn't dress well enough to deserve the adjective.

    1. "I know that this is happening all the time. There have been strange faxes containing all sorts of terms of abuse," court spokeswoman Nina Eldh told the newspaper.
    1. Amazon doesn’t tell customers much about its troubleshooting process for Cloud Cam. In its terms and conditions, the company reserves the right to process images, audio and video captured by devices to improve its products and services.
    2. Nowhere in the Cloud Cam user terms and conditions does Amazon explicitly tell customers that human beings are training the algorithms behind their motion detection software.
    3. An Amazon team also transcribes and annotates commands recorded in customers’ homes by the company’s Alexa digital assistant
    4. Dozens of Amazon workers based in India and Romania review select clips captured by Cloud Cam, according to five people who have worked on the program or have direct knowledge of it.
    1. The band was formed in December 2003, in Haninge. Their name comes from a lyric in the song "People" by the Silver Jews.[1]
    1. We recently discovered that when you provided an email address or phone number for safety or security purposes (for example, two-factor authentication) this data may have inadvertently been used for advertising purposes, specifically in our Tailored Audiences and Partner Audiences advertising system. 

      Twitter may have sold your e-mail address to people.

      Twitter has only done this with people who have added their e-mail address for security purposes.

      Security purposes for Twitter = sell your e-mail address to a third-party company.

      Spam for you = security purposes for Twitter.

    1. But now you only call meWhen you're feeling depressedWhen you feel happy I'mSo far from your mind
    1. In case you wanted to be even more skeptical of Mark Zuckerberg and his cohorts, Facebook has now changed its advertising policies to make it easier for politicians to lie in paid ads. Donald Trump is taking full advantage of this policy change, as popular info reports.
    2. The claim in this ad was ruled false by those Facebook-approved third-party fact-checkers, but it is still up and running. Why? Because Facebook changed its policy on what constitutes misinformation in advertising. Prior to last week, Facebook’s rule against “false and misleading content” didn’t leave room for gray areas: “Ads landing pages, and business practices must not contain deceptive, false, or misleading content, including deceptive claims, offers, or methods.”
    1. This is a small attempt to provide an amount of comfort by bringing together and sharing ways he connected with his audience and to document a dispersed part of who he was.

    1. A recently-unearthed performance from David Berman, reading a poem while accompanied by Bloomington, IN legends the Impossible Shapes, at Second Story, 2005.

    1. CH1009: SCUD MOUNTAIN BOYS: Pine Box LP "This time of year the light comes through the pines in flat beams and spark points, glancing off the frost that decorates the grounds of the light-studded medical cities. For a six-sided second I feel like I'm back in the haunted Piedmonts, a decorated major in the Japanese Inner Space Program, renewing my vow to bear down on the truth even if there is none for the hundredth time. After the exodus of the Calm Reflectors I had started seeing the Scud Mountain Boys around town with their Baltimore haircuts, the guitarist's guitarist carrying his 1873 'trapdoor' Springfield rifle, the progeny of the muzzle-loading French Charleville muskets that had whacked so many Redcoats around these hills. I had heard it was the band's tradition to lay dinner on the table uncooked and then set the table on fire.I was out for a walk with Mr. Fiddler the other night, when he turned to me and said, 'this is the time of year when the region is at peace with itself.' I turned to laugh in his face when the impulse subsided. He had been right of course. I'd already seen it happen in the slide projector's cone of lit dust: the November sky hovering over lives of dark employment like a televised clay bank, breech-loaders replacing muzzle-loaders, crows wired to the sky like marred pixels, portraits cubed into accordioned life while every single object of perception waited for us in the air conditioning. Yes, tennis crested in the seventies, killing Eddie Money and the last of the Holmby Hills Rat Pack, but how many times did we have to witness the L.A. fireplaces reflected in L.A. wineglasses before it ended?You meet these suburban kids with Biblical names, but there are walls behind their eyes, strange mathematical mountains at whose base we sit playing our native keyboards and rinsing our teeth with digital snow. I'm starting to believe that the inscription above the portal describes this side, not the next. Few people know that George Washington's favorite song was 'The Darby Ram,' or stop to think that before he was a statue he scratched his weld, got the hiccups, and danced alone in his room. All the 'human things.' He must have been scared when he fought in the woods, hiding in the dormant Christmas trees, his hand gripping the black walnut musket stock. In those times and these we turn to the pacifics of a Gamelan orchestra for transport and release. We stand by the hind legs of a K car, listening to the new city cassettes, searching for some sign of human residence here beneath the justifiably uncelebrated Massachusetts sky. This treasured early work brought calm forecasts and sad peace to our house. I hope you take it with you when you go. - D.C. Berman, Original Liner Notes to 'Pine Box' LP
  3. Sep 2019
    1. Det är ju så dumt, det är naturligtvis uttalet som han hakar upp sig på. Om man lyssnar på hennes svenska, hennes grammatik, hennes ordförråd, så är det så gott som perfekt, säger Abelin.
    2. Men kungen är min favorit. Av det man har sett och hört så verkar han vara en riktigt go gubbe
    1. This is definitely from an incel's perspective, and I also realize it's also the ultimate neo-liberal love song, as we sit in a place of peak individualism. It's not the kind of message I'm proud to spread. I don't intend it to be a love song to the self — it's more of an 'I'm stuck with myself' song. If no one wants to fuck you, it's your fault.

      I still miss David Berman so very, very much, and I know I will continue to miss him for as long as I live.

    1. On social media, we are at the mercy of the platform. It crops our images the way it wants to. It puts our posts in the same, uniform grids. We are yet another profile contained in a platform with a million others, pushed around by the changing tides of a company's whims. Algorithms determine where our posts show up in people’s feeds and in what order, how someone swipes through our photos, where we can and can’t post a link. The company decides whether we're in violation of privacy laws for sharing content we created ourselves. It can ban or shut us down without notice or explanation. On social media, we are not in control.

      This is why I love personal web sites. They're your own, you do whatever you want with them, and you control them. Nothing is owned by others and you're completely free to do whatever you want.

      That's not the case with Facebook, Microsoft, Slack, Jira, whatever.

    1. Goodreads is nearly useless for finding recommendations

      I believe that the point of Goodreads—since Amazon bought the site—is lost here.

      The point of Goodreads is to make people buy books from Amazon. They're capitalists. They don't care about the common good, or about making people find books that they can truly benefit from.

    1. I feel by far less distracted. My attention span feels more robust than it ever has. I also clocked in at 1000 consecutive days of meditation this past year so I’m not sure which can lay claim to more of these benefits, but my hunch is that getting rid of social media helped.

      No Facebook/Instagram/"social media" better concentration. I'm quite sure that this adheres to a lot of people.

    1. This phrase book is aimed to help newcomers to the U.S understand what some popular local idioms really mean.

      A nice little phrase guide to US English.

    1. There is already a lot of information Facebook can assume from that simple notification: that you are probably a woman, probably menstruating, possibly trying to have (or trying to avoid having) a baby. Moreover, even though you are asked to agree to their privacy policy, Maya starts sharing data with Facebook before you get to agree to anything. This raises some serious transparency concerns.

      Privacy International are highlighting how period-tracking apps are violating users' privacy.

  4. Aug 2019
    1. the guitar frustrates me a lot because I'm not good enough to play it sometimes so I get mad and throw a moody.
    1. This book is on sale 2019-10-15.

      It is found here on the author's own web site.

    2. Soon Ja Du

      Ice Cube wrote a racist and nationalist song named Black Korea which is most likely highly inspired by this.

      So don't follow me up and down your market Or your little chop suey ass'll be a target Of the nationwide boycott Juice with the people, that's what the boy got So pay respect to the black fist Or we'll burn your store right down to a crisp

    1. I think Netflix would’ve avoided this controversy if it had plainly told subscribers what it was doing somewhere in the app or with a notification. Instead, people discovered that Netflix was utilizing Android’s physical activity permission, which is strange behavior from a video streaming app. In some instances, it was doing this without asking users to approve the move first, as was the case for The Next Web’s Ivan Mehta. You’ve got to be transparent if you want to monitor anyone’s movements. Netflix was unable to immediately answer whether it will be removing the physical activity recognition permission from its app now that the test is done.

      It's great that sites like The Verge and The Next Web are calling surveillance capitalists out.

    1. Terry Gilliam was the voice of the old ways when he said, “I feel sorry for someone like Matt Damon, who is a decent human being. He came out and said all men are not rapists, and he got beaten to death. Come on, this is crazy!” Matt Damon has not actually been beaten to death.

      This article by The Verge is poignant.

    2. The Daily Beast got it right with a subhead about a recent right-wing terrorist, the one who blew himself up in his home full of bomb-making materials: “Friends and family say Ben Morrow was a Bible-toting lab worker. Investigators say he was a bomb-building white supremacist.”

      The Daily Beast quote is found here.

    3. quiet, ‘nerdy’ young man who came from ‘a tight-knit, godly family

      Found here and also on their site.

    4. a gentle loner

      Here is the quote, later changed to "a loner".

    5. a column

      This is the column.

    6. climate waffler Bret Stephens

      This is but one example of many where Bret Stephens has been corrected.

    7. women who have abortions should be hanged
    8. Kevin Williamson

    9. Howard Zinn
    10. Noam Chomsky
    11. Naomi Klein
    12. Solnit
    1. Research from Chelsea and Westminster Hospital has found that placing art in the NHS trust has helped to improve patient wellbeing, decrease hospital stays and reduce anxiety, depression and pain.
    1. When researchers at Johns Hopkins gave psilocybin to healthy participants with no history of hallucinogen use, nearly eighty percent reported that their experiences "increased their current sense of personal well-being or life satisfaction 'moderately' or 'very much'"—effects that persisted for more than a year.‌
    2. Similarly, while psilocybin has shown potential as a treatment for depression and anxiety, physicians could also prescribe the drug to promote the well-being of healthy individuals.
    3. if MDMA gains approval as a treatment for PTSD, psychiatrists could prescribe the drug for very different purposes.
    1. Last March, ProPublica published an extensive investigation that found IBM had fired an estimated 20,000 U.S. employees ages 40 or older in the past five years.
    2. The company started firing older workers and replacing them with millennials, who IBM’s consulting department said “are generally much more innovative and receptive to technology than baby boomers.”
    3. International Business Machines Corp. has fired as many as 100,000 employees in the last few years in an effort to boost its appeal to millennials and make it appear to be as “cool” and “trendy” as Amazon and Google, according to a deposition from a former vice president in an ongoing age discrimination lawsuit.

      IBM has a long history of working against humanity, e.g. when colluding with the Nazis.

  5. Jul 2019
    1. So the solution for the U.S.’s relatively high poverty rate will probably rely little on personal responsibility and moral rectitude. Instead, the U.S. should look to European countries, or to Australia and Canada, for ideas on how to reduce poverty. There’s just no substitute for a strong social safety net.

      Poverty is not due to individuals, especially when class mobility in the USA does not exist anymore.

    2. Children are going hungry too. Almost 14% of kids, or some 3.5 million in all, are estimated to live in poverty -- and that’s already down from a peak of more than 16% in 2012. To combat the problem, local governments around the country are opening thousands of cafeterias where children can eat for free.
    3. Given all of this good behavior, conservatives might expect that Japan’s poverty rate would be very low. But the opposite is true; Japan has a relatively high number of poor people for an advanced country.
    1. Even if we never see this brain-reading tech in Facebook products (something that would probably cause just a little concern), researchers could use it to improve the lives of people who can’t speak due to paralysis or other issues.
    2. That’s very different from the system Facebook described in 2017: a noninvasive, mass-market cap that lets people type more than 100 words per minute without manual text entry or speech-to-text transcription.
    3. Their work demonstrates a method of quickly “reading” whole words and phrases from the brain — getting Facebook slightly closer to its dream of a noninvasive thought-typing system.
    1. I truly wish that this will lead to a service that allows users to transfer their data from one of the big corporations to the decentralised web. If that's even going to be possible, considering the security implications. It's manageable, though: the question is whether the big corporations will let it happen.

    1. HUR FAN KAN DU GÖRA SÅ DÄR? väste den prydliga medelålders mannen i Mölnvik när jag la en slant i en EU-kopp, och ja, det var sommaren 2015, inga konstigheter.
    1. STEALING large bunches of lavender from a farmer’s field is not “cute”, it’s not a “memento”, it’s not “helping to put the place on the map” – it’s THEFT, following a spell of TRESPASS onto that owner’s land.

      An interesting look at "influencer morality".

    1. SZ: We are not users. I say we are bound in new psychological, social, political, as well as, economic interests. That we have not yet invented the words to describe the ways that we are bound. We have not yet invented the forms of collective action to express the interests that bind us.  And that that is a big part of the work that must follow in this year and the next year and the year after that, if we are to ultimately interrupt and outlaw what I view as a pernicious rogue capitalism that has no business dominating our society.
    1. “We are a nation with a tradition of reining in monopolies, no matter how well-intentioned the leaders of these companies may be.”Mr. Hughes went on to describe the power held by Facebook and its leader Mr. Zuckerberg, his former college roommate, as “unprecedented.” He added, “It is time to break up Facebook.”
    1. The scientists were astonished by the results: selective noradrenaline release re-wired the connectivity patterns between different brain regions in a way that was extremely similar to the changes observed in humans exposed to acute stress. Networks that process sensory stimuli, such as the visual and auditory center of the brain, exhibited the strongest increase in activity. A similar rise in activity was observed in the amygdala network, which is associated with states of anxiety.
    1. If Bluetooth is ON on your Apple device everyone nearby can understand current status of your device, get info about battery, device name, Wi-Fi status, buffer availability, OS version and even get your mobile phone number
    1. Amazon.com Announces Second Quarter Sales up 20% to $63.4 Billion

      Do note that this page mentions nothing on worker rights nor worker wages.

      See this page on the matter.

    2. AWS announced the general availability of Amazon Personalize, a fully-managed machine learning service that trains, tunes, and deploys custom, private machine learning models.

      Is this more of commoditising human experience so that Jeff Bezos can be even more rich?

    3. Amazon announced that it will hire nearly 12,000 new employees across Europe in 2019, taking its permanent workforce in Europe to nearly 95,000 by the end of 2019. Amazon pledged to upskill 100,000 of its employees across the U.S. by 2025, dedicating over $700 million to provide employees across its corporate offices, tech hubs, fulfillment centers, retail stores, and transportation network with access to training programs that will help them move into more highly-skilled roles within or outside of the company. Programs include Machine Learning University, Amazon Technical Academy, and Career Choice.

      More workers that can practically be enslaved in 55-hour-work weeks and sleep standing up: yeay!

    4. The number of Alexa-compatible smart home devices continues to grow, with more than 60,000 smart home products from over 7,400 unique brands
    5. Amazon introduced the all-new Echo Show 5
    6. Amazon introduced the all-new Kindle Oasis

      This Mashable review says it all:

      Amazon barely tried [...] With the exception of a new warm light feature, Amazon's 2019 Kindle Oasis is virtually unchanged, which is extremely disappointing.

    1. Döpfner: Last week we had Bill Gates for dinner here and he said in a self-ironic manner that he has a ridiculous amount of money and it is so hard to find appropriate ways to spend that money reasonably and to do good with the money. So what does money mean for you, being the first person in history who has a net worth of a three-digit amount of billions. Bezos: The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel. That is basically it.

      Why fix the issues with how many Amazon workers are basically wage slaves, working 55-hour weeks, while falling asleep during work?

      For more information:

    1. Amazon (AMZN) disclosed in a filing Wednesday that the median pay for its employees was just $28,446 in 2017. Put another way: half of Amazon's employees earned less than that amount.
    1. they are calling for better working conditions, pay and health benefits.
    2. hundreds of Amazon workers in Italy and Germany went on strike, saying they were under “high pressure to create more and more in less time."
    3. labor unions have been on the front lines of calling for workers' rights at the company’s warehouse facilities, where physical demands can be grueling and temperatures can reach extremes.
    1. British election laws are not fit for purpose

      More about this is found here.

    2. asked “So you are the victim in all of this?” and answer “Yes”

      Here's a Rolling Stone article on the matter.

    3. Alexander Nix

      His Wikipedia page is here.

    4. Project Alamo

      The Wikipedia page for this is found here.

    5. Brittany Kaiser

      An interview with The Guardian is found here.

    6. CA enabled Ted Cruz’s campaign trail

      More on the matter is found here.

    7. Shoshanna Zuboff's comment on this documentary is available here.

    8. Carole Cadwalladr

      Her Wikipedia page is here.

      Articles that she has written for The Guardian are available here.

    9. SCL

      SCL is an acronym for Strategic Communication Laboratories; even the name is shady. Here's their Wikipedia article.

    1. “Urgent action must be taken by the UK’s governments to ensure that the tools used to regulate political campaigning online continue to be fit for purpose in a digital age,” said Sir John Holmes, chair of the Electoral Commission.
    1. According to Shoshana Zuboff, professor emerita at Harvard Business School, the Cambridge Analytica scandal was a landmark moment, because it revealed a micro version “of the larger phenomenon that is surveillance capitalism”. Zuboff is responsible for formulating the concept of surveillance capitalism, and published a magisterial, indispensible book with that title soon after the scandal broke. In the book, Zuboff creates a framework and a language for understanding this new world. She believes The Great Hack is an important landmark in terms of public understanding, and that Noujaim and Amer capture “what living under the conditions of surveillance capitalism means. That every action is being repurposed as raw material for behavioural data. And that these data are being lifted from our lives in ways that are systematically engineered to be invisible. And therefore we can never resist.”

      Shoshana Zuboff's comments on The Great Hack.

    1. Arne Melbergs översättning av ”Melankolins anatomi” skulle kunna liknas vid den första atlantkabeln. Plötsligt blev ett stort avstånd lätt att överbrygga.

      Vad vackert skrivet det här är.

    1. Two years ago, when he moved from Boston to London, he had to register with a general practitioner. The doctor’s office gave him a form to sign saying that his medical data would be shared with other hospitals he might go to, and with a system that might distribute his information to universities, private companies and other government departments.The form added that the although the data are anonymized, “there are those who believe a person can be identified through this information.”“That was really scary,” Dr. de Montjoye said. “We are at a point where we know a risk exists and count on people saying they don’t care about privacy. It’s insane.”
    2. Scientists at Imperial College London and Université Catholique de Louvain, in Belgium, reported in the journal Nature Communications that they had devised a computer algorithm that can identify 99.98 percent of Americans from almost any available data set with as few as 15 attributes, such as gender, ZIP code or marital status.

      This goes to show that one should not trust companies and organisations which claim to "anonymise" your data.

    1. With the slow pace of hurricane recovery exacerbating the lingering mental health crisis of the island’s residents, anger at the local government, and fury toward the federal government adding to the island’s deep troubles—including over $70 billion in debt—the people of Puerto Rico have clearly had enough, and many are beginning to demand radical changes beyond the cry of “Ricky Renuncia,” or “Ricky Resign.”
    2. The protests were mainly galvanized by a spectacular, nearly 900-page leak known as “RickyLeaks” containing text messages between Governor Ricardo Rosselló and his private circle that were sent in December 2018 and January 2019. The leaks were filled with vulgar, homophobic and misogynistic messages about other politicians, media members, celebrities, and a range of other Puerto Ricans. While some of the leaked chats read like drunken rambling, many of the messages have touched the sore nerves of various segments of the Puerto Rican population. In one message, Rosselló calls Melissa Mark-Viverito, the Puerto Rico-born former speaker of the New York City Council, a “whore.” (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); In another exchange, government critic and popular San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz also comes under harsh fire from Christian Sobrino Vega, then Puerto Rico’s chief fiscal officer, who says, “I am salivating to shoot her.” The governor responds: “You’d be doing me a grand favor.”

      Wow. Misogyny, homophobia, and other signs that these men must resign.

      I can't tell you hur much pride I feel to be human as Puerto Ricans protest this.

    1. I am the product of male gaze – we all are. I've spent my life loving films that sometimes hated me, identifying with Superman, for example. Female gaze is a hybrid – it’s really about knowing both of these worlds. I am a lesbian, and I know how to live in a male-dominated environment. But the question is, can they?

      I love this quote. If one feels threatened by it, one needs to check itself.

    1. the question we should really be discussing is “How many years should Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg ultimately serve in prison?”
    2. how many fake accounts did Facebook report being created in Q2 2019?  Only 2.2 billion, with a “B,” which is approximately the same as the number of active users Facebook would like us to believe that it has. A comprehensive look back at Facebook’s disclosures suggests that of the company’s 12 billion total accounts ever created, about 10 billion are fake.  And as many as 1 billion are probably active, if not more. (Facebook says that this estimate is “not based on any facts,” but much like the false statistics it provided to advertisers on video viewership, that too is a lie.)

      I truly wonder how many Facebook accounts are real.

    3. “those who were responsible for ensuring the accuracy ‘did not give a shit.’” Another individual, “a former Operations Contractor with Facebook, stated that Facebook was not concerned with stopping duplicate or fake accounts.”
    4. The last time Mark suggested that Facebook’s growth heyday might be behind it, in July 2018, the stock took a nosedive that ended up being the single largest one-day fall of any company’s stock in the history of the United States
    5. Facebook is not growing anymore in the United States, with zero million new accounts in Q1 2019, and only four million new accounts since Q1 2017

      Facebook is stagnant. Yes!

    1. there'sanextraordinarydemocraticstructureinsideconcentrationcamps

      This is just a fatally stupefying statement.

      This video segment shows this as WBJ says it.

    2. Iwasbeingsarcastic.Yeah.WhatIwastalkingabout,yeah,notonlysarcas·tic,butalsowrong

      Seen just here in this video.

    3. whattheBerrigans(?)havedoneforexample,atTatensville,ini'2{Jui/Milwaukee,IthinkisveryheroicRXandinfact

      This is written about in this Wikipedia article.

    4. MayIsaysomething
    5. Butdon'tyourealizethatinyourbook,andelsewhere,BU:youtrenotwillingtobeconsistentincarryingoutthis,argument.
    6. FIRINGLINE-#143-page26
    7. Andofwhatbroughtusto/Vietnaminthefirstinstance,inmyjudgment,wasclearlyanmninterested
    8. Bu:tI,asamatterofprinciple,almost,XHXP~RXXrestrictmyselftothediscussionofAmericanterror.
    1. 5.3 New version (2017-05-16) NEW - New Office 365 connector for retrieving information from Microsoft Office 365 Cloud Services
    1. A new study published this year in the American Psychologist finds that this well-established bystander effect may largely be a myth. The study uses footage of more than 200 incidents from surveillance cameras in Amsterdam; Cape Town; and Lancaster, England.

      The study suggests that people are willing to self-police to protect their communities and others.

    2. It’s one of the most enduring urban myths of all: If you get in trouble, don’t count on anyone nearby to help. Research dating back to the late 1960s documents how the great majority of people who witness crimes or violent behavior refuse to intervene.
    1. Noam Chomsky: One of the most appropriate comments I’ve seen on Trump’s foreign policy appeared in an article in The New Republic written by David Roth, the editor of a sports blog: “The spectacle of expert analysts and thought leaders parsing the actions of a man with no expertise or capacity for analysis is the purest acid satire — but less because of how badly that expert analysis has failed than because of how sincerely misplaced it is … there is nothing here to parse, no hidden meanings or tactical elisions or slow-rolled strategic campaign.” That seems generally accurate. This is a man, after all, who dismisses the information and analyses of his massive intelligence system in favor of what was said this morning on “Fox and Friends,” where everyone tells him how much they love him. With all due skepticism about the quality of intelligence, this is sheer madness considering the stakes.
    1. Dodwell is right in one respect; Morrissey still has many fans. Many profess to have no interest in his political views, regarding him solely as a musical content provider, a beat maker, a purveyor of vocals. This is bollocks, of course; they're clearly hugely invested in him. In any case, if you're capable of blithely setting aside his views, then there's something badly missing in you.
    2. "everyone ultimately prefers their own race."
    3. Complaining to Tim Jonze in The Guardian about the "high cost" of immigration, in his imagination, to "British identity" as he conceived it from afar. Wearing a pin in support of far right group For Britain, led by anti-Islam activist Anne Marie Waters, for whom he has kind words - he rejects the "childish" label of racism; "I don't believe the word 'racist' has any meaning any more", he has said, a statement only the most obtuse and whitest of white men could come out with. Most recently, after Stormzy's triumphant Glastonbury headlining set, Morrissey shared a YouTube video in which some bloke attacks the rapper, using the headline "Nothing But Blue Skies For Stormzy … the gallows for Morrissey."
    4. Then I came up against 'Bengali In Platforms'. This, and later 1991's 'Asian Rut', I deplored; I found 'Bengali In Platforms' possibly well-meaning but deeply patronising and utterly out of touch with the sensibilities of his very hip Asian fans. I knew. I was married to a Sikh woman at this time; her brother, Gurbir Thethy, adored The Smiths, subversively basing his dance at Sikh weddings on that of Morrissey.
    5. And then, in 1986, Morrissey was interviewed by Frank Owen in Melody Maker and insisted that there was a conspiracy to maintain the presence of black music in the charts. He'd already remarked on the vileness of reggae, the awfulness of Diana Ross.
    6. It was a given that The Smiths were of the left; you didn't even need to ask.
    7. The Smiths were necessary.
    8. This is the sort of ambiguous comment which seems to invite an assenting nod of the head but could easily have been uttered by Nigel Farage. Similarly, 'Irish Blood, English Heart', in which he sang, I've been dreaming of a time when/ To be English is not to be baneful /To be standing by the flag not feeling shameful/ Racist or partial/ Irish blood, English heart, this I'm made of /There is no one on earth I'm afraid of/ And I will die with both of my hands untied."

      I must confess, that until today, I've not thought about how nationalistic Morrissey's "Irish Blood, English Heart" is in his nowadays context.

  6. Jun 2019
    1. The cryptocurrency, called Libra, will also have to overcome concern that Facebook does not effectively protect the private information of its users — a fundamental task for a bank or anyone handling financial transactions.
    2. The company has sky-high hopes that Libra could become the foundation for a new financial system not controlled by today’s power brokers on Wall Street or central banks.

      Facebook want another way to circumvent government? Well, let's circumvent Facebook.

    1. The unsealing of an application for a search warrant by the federal government on 8chan’s servers has unintentionally revealed that a federal agent has been trolling the site and attempting to redirect the users’ conspiracy theories against the Russian government instead of the CIA or Mossad.
    1. Wong and Gerras did a frightening study of the need for Army officers to lie routinely

      The original PDF is currently unavailable, but Google has cached it here.

    1. By comparison, Amazon’s Best Seller badges, which flag the most popular products based on sales and are updated hourly, are far more straightforward. For third-party sellers, “that’s a lot more powerful than this Choice badge, which is totally algorithmically calculated and sometimes it’s totally off,” says Bryant.

      "Amazon's Choice" is made by an algorithm.

      Essentially, "Amazon" is Skynet.

  7. May 2019
    1. The aim of this book is to give you the knowledge and tools to write microcopy; and no, you don’t need to be a copywriter or content writer.

      This sentence is proof of the need for copyeditors.

    1. The former Smiths frontman has become an increasingly controversial figure in recent years for a string of remarks and his support for the far right. He voiced support for EDL founder Tommy Robinson in the wake of his sentencing for contempt of court, saying: “It’s very obvious that Labour or the Tories do not believe in free speech … I mean, look at the shocking treatment of Tommy Robinson.” He described halal meat preparation as evil and “requires certification that can only be given by supporters of Isis”; he told the NME in 2007 that “the higher the influx into England the more the British identity disappears … the gates of England are flooded. The country’s been thrown away”; and in 2010 described Chinese people as a “subspecies”.
    1. Newport’s basic theme: we fell into our habits of using phones, social media, email, web-browsing etc without making conscious decisions about what our priorities were.

      I can wholeheartedly recommend Sarah Bakewell's brilliant book At the Existentialist Café in regards to this book.

      Some of the main existentialists thought it imperative to live through every single experience—including the minute—as though one were for the first time, and humanity were depending on you to interpret it for us.

    1. They’ve learned, and that’s more dangerous than caring, because that means they’re rationally pricing these harms. The day that 20% of consumers put a price tag on privacy, freemium is over and privacy is back.

      Google want you to say yes, not because they're inviting positivity more than ever, but because they want you to purchase things and make them richer. This is the essence of capitalism.

    1. Unsurprisingly living up to its reputation, Facebook refuses to comply with my GDPR Subject Access Requests in an appropriate manner.

      Facebook never has cared about privacy of individuals. This is highly interesting.

    1. a visual acuity of 20/200. As it so happens, this is the legal definition of blindness for drivers in the United States