Saturday, December 31, 2016

Heads Up – Disruption at Go To Fact Checking Web Site

This investigative article from Forbes: Heads Up – Disruption at Go To Fact Checking Web Site  leaves readers in a quandry – the status of the fact checking website, Snopes.com is in question due to the disposition of its ownership and the transparency and accountability of its operations.  I do not use the site, so all I can say is proceed with caution moving forward in the use of each and every site that purports to deliver truth in the face of complex, fast moving stories and issues that impact democracy, civil liberties, justice and – research – all facets of research

The power of “yuck!” and “ew!”. Disgust, which comes from our evolutionary fear of germs, goes a surprisingly long way toward explaining our manners, morals, and religion 



For Fact-Checking Website Snopes, a Bigger Role Brings More Attacks New York Times. Fails to note that the latest batch of critical coverage was based on court filings. All doubts about the new designated censors are by definition bogus.
Follow up to recent posting – Oxford English Dictionaries Word of the Year– see  via Singularity Hub – Post-Truth: Technology Is a Big Part of the Problem, But It’s Also a Solution: “It’s unwise to dismiss the genuine and deep-seated grievances at the heart of the rejection of the establishment’s “evidence-based” narrative, which too often talks down to people rather than explaining and can be blind to its own prejudices. But as many have pointed out, post-truth politics is also a product of dramatic changes to the media landscape.”

Juan Williams: The dangerous erosion of facts The Hill. Gah. Low information citizens now being blamed on “fake news”. Have none of these reporters ever seen how people answer basic history and civics questions, like “Who gave the Gettysburg Address” or “When did World War I end”? Typically, more than half the people give the wrong answer….as happened here





The Security Keys are based on Universal Second Factor, an open standard that’s easy for end users to use and straightforward for engineers to stitch into hardware and websites. When plugged into a standard USB port, the keys provide a “cryptographic assertion” that’s just about impossible for attackers to guess or phish. Accounts can require that cryptographic key in addition to a normal user password when users log in. Google, Dropbox, GitHub, and other sites have already implemented the standard into their platforms.
After more than two years of public implementation and internal study, Google security architects have declared Security Keys their preferred form of two-factor authentication. The architects based their assessment on the ease of using and deploying keys, the security it provided against phishing and other types of password attacks, and the lack of privacy trade-offs that accompany some other forms of two-factor authentication.

The vote for Donald Trump may well have been what Michael Moore called the ‘biggest fuck-you ever recorded in human history’, delivered by the white working class to spite ‘the establishment’. But it isn’t just the size of the fuck-you that matters; it’s also who delivers it.  Capitalism in one family




Why Courbet’s ‘Origin Of The World’ Still Has So Much Power After 150 Years



 “HOAXY – beta – Visualize the spread of claims and fact checking [Indiana University] visualizes the spread of claims and related fact checking online. A claim may be a fake news article, hoax, rumor, conspiracy theory, satire, or even an accurate report. Anyone can use Hoaxy to explore how claims spread across social media. You can select any matching fact-checking articles to observe how those spread as well

"Supreme Court Nominations Will Never Be the Same": Law professor Noah Feldman has this essay online today at Bloomberg View