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Wednesday, November 29, 2017

No, you’re not being paranoid. Sites really are watching


Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is. That afternoon nothing new came to Thea Kronborg, no enlightenment, no inspiration. She merely came into full possession of things she had been refining and perfecting for so long. Her inhibitions chanced to be fewer than usual, and, within herself, she entered into the inheritance that she herself had laid up, into the fullness of the faith she had kept before she knew its name or its meaning.
— Willa Cather, The Song of The Lark

These were not entertaining stories, there was none of the sense you get in Agatha Christie of a perfect world, its calm shattered briefly by violence, but by the end everything mended and made orderly again. This was reality, not escapism, this was the messiness of human beings and our strange nature. 


What Aussie brands are doing to build an emotional connection with customers
We asked three of Australia’s leading consumer marketers to share how they’re bringing personalisation, marketing automation and digital capability together in order to better engage with customers.


State secrets: how Australians use FOI.
The first nationwide leaderboard shows who let the dog eat their FOIs. Part of Australia’s Open Government Partnership commitments, the idea is to promote transparency by showing a general picture of the current state of play.


Sam Dastyari defended China's policy in South China Sea in defiance of Labor policy, secret recording reveals - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)


An explosive tape recording shows for the first time that Senator Sam Dastyari delivered a scripted, deliberate and detailed defence of the Chinese government's aggressive land grab in the ...

No, you’re not being paranoid. Sites really are watching your every move ars technica (BC). Lambert features a related story in WC
One man dead, two injured in track collapse at Wentworth Falls in Blue Mountains



If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out


Good job by, yes, The Post in apparently unmasking Project Veritas and its right-wing leader, James O'Keefe, who revels in stings against liberal groups.


"A woman who falsely claimed to The Washington Post that Roy Moore, the Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Alabama, impregnated her as a teenager appears to work with an organization that uses deceptive tactics to secretly record conversations in an effort to embarrass its targets."


"In a series of interviews over two weeks, the woman shared a dramatic story about an alleged sexual relationship with Moore in 1992 that led to an abortion when she was 15. During the interviews, she repeatedly pressed Post reporters to give their opinions on the effects that her claims could have on Moore’s candidacy if she went public."

Alas, alack, "on Monday morning, Post reporters saw her walking into the New York offices of Project Veritas, an organization that targets the mainstream news media and left-leaning groups. The organization sets up undercover 'stings' that involve using false cover stories and covert video recordings meant to expose what the group says is media bias."

Kudos to a joint effort of its national staff and a new rapid-fire investigative unit, with this particular assemblage including Stephanie McCrummen, Alice Crites, Shawn Boburg and Aaron Davis. The gulf between The Post and The New York Times, on the one hand, and the rest of the newspaper industry, on the other, proceeds apace. It makes the Spielberg movie seem all the more a testament to institutional nerve and revival.


More Studies Say Using Laptops In Class Leads To Less Learning


"A growing body of evidence shows that over all, college students learn less when they use computers or tablets during lectures. They also tend to earn worse grades. The research is unequivocal: Laptops distract from learning, both for users and for those around them. It’s not much of a leap to expect that electronics also undermine learning in high school classrooms or that they hurt productivity in meetings in all kinds of workplaces." … [Read More]

"Our current built environment squanders too much fresh water and other vital resources, and tips too many poisonous substances into our surroundings. To develop a more sustainable relationship with the natural world, we need to allow chemical exchanges that take place within our living spaces, and between the inside and the outside. We need to embrace permeability." … [Read More]







As Orwell knew only too well, if the concept of objective truth is moved into the dustbin of history there can be no lies. And if there are no lies there can be no justice, no rights and no wrongs.




Uber Hid 2016 Breach, Paying Hackers to Delete Stolen Data New York Times. Bill B:

Wow! *Not a peep* about Amazon Web Services, which is arguably the larger
story. Witness the parade of breaches:
For example, an NGA contractor from Booz leaves a load of agency
intelligence in a S3 bucket.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/05/defense-contractor-stored-intelligence-data-in-amazon-cloud-unprotected/
Then a group of quants hired by the GOP leak data on 200 million voters.
http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/19/technology/voter-data-leaked-online-gop/index.html
And finally someone finds a Pentagon stockpile of social media intel.
http://money.cnn.com/2017/11/17/technology/centcom-data-exposed/index.html
People used to fear that men in black would come and steal their computers.
Now people are giving them both the data and the OS is rode in on.