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Thursday, June 28, 2018

MEdia Dragon Ross Gittins: A brief history of the internet and May LVIII Baby Dragon


Reality demands
we also state the following:
life goes on.
It does so near Morava River and the Harbour Bridge,
at Bra and Latitude.

"Life, like this typewriter, has no backspace. Type strongly and don’t look back.”

After 40 years in my job at the Herald, this is what I've learnt

The greatest misjudgment of my working life was concluding that economics was hopelessly unrealistic and boring

Have you ever in your work as the Unkind Editor told someone they should quit writing? Which may be another way of asking if you believe there may be those without the necessary abilities to write, to be published, or to be successful as an author; someone with delusional thinking who needs an unkind, direct encounter with this difficult truth.

A brief history of the internet and May LVIII Baby Dragon - Science Node: “February 7, 1958 was the day Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy signed Department of Defense Directive 5105.15. His signature launched the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), now known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The creation of the agency is an important moment in science history because it led to the creation of the internet we recognize today…”

Has Julia Kristeva's reputation been damaged by revelations that she used to work for Bulgarian intelligence? In truth, the damage was done long ago  Bulgarism 


Vanessa’s blog, All Generalizations are False – Home of the Media Bias Chart: Part 2 of 4: Why Measuring Political Bias is So Hard, and How We Can Do It Anyway: The Media Bias Chart Horizontal Axis
How to Define Political Bias in a Meaningful, Useful Way – In part one of this series I laid out some problems with existing ways of measuring bias and outlined a proposed new methodology for rating such bias in news sources within a defined taxonomy (the horizontal axis of the Media Bias Chart). In this post, I’ll first define what the terms “partisanship” and “political bias” in this taxonomy (“partisanship” and “political bias” are used somewhat interchangeably here, though they are distinguishable in some aspects).



How to Keep Google Home and Chromecast From Giving Hackers Your Location - Krebs on Security: “…Craig Young, a researcher with security firm Tripwire, said he discovered an authentication weakness that leaks incredibly accurate location information about users of both the smart speaker and home assistant Google Home, and Chromecast, a small electronic device that makes it simple to stream TV shows, movies and games to a digital television or monitor. Young said the attack works by asking the Google device for a list of nearby wireless networks and then sending that list to Google’s geolocation lookup services…Earlier this year, KrebsOnSecurity posted some basic rules for securing your various “Internet of Things” (IoT) devices. That primer lacked one piece of advice that is a bit more technical but which can help mitigate security or privacy issues that come with using IoT systems: Creating your own “Intranet of Things,” by segregating IoT devices from the rest of your local network so that they reside on a completely different network from the devices you use to browse the Internet and store files…For more on setting up a multi-router solution to mitigating threats from IoT devices, check out this in-depth post on the subject from security researcher and blogger Steve Gibson…”



Twitter is where people blurt out anger, get their self-righteousness reinforced by others, have the gift of an equally stupid opposition, and become despondent when tomorrow does not bring uprisings that overturn the current regime.

Best web browsers 2018: Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Opera go head-to-head PCWorld takes a look at the performance and features of the big four internet browsers to see which one will serve you best. “The web browser is by far the most important piece of software on your PC—at least for most users. Unless you’re at a workstation crunching numbers or editing the next Star Wars you probably spend the majority of your computer time staring at a web app or a website. That’s why it’s important to make sure you’ve always got the best tool for the job, and in 2018 that does not include Internet Explorer. If you still want the built-in option for Windows, that would be Edge—but it’s hard to stick strictly with Edge when you’ve got other choices including Google’s Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera.  Let’s take a look at the four major (and modern) browsers to see how they stack up in mid-2018…”

When tragedy strikes, what do journalists owe sources - Max RobinsonColumbia Journalism Review: ” Three weeks ago a devastating flood swept through sleepy Ellicott City, Maryland, shaking up the lives of residents and business owners and pouring them out for the world to see. Trapped in the flood, my instinctive response—as a part-time journalist and full-time millennial scum—was to document the scene. I took video of the waist-deep water magically held at bay by a thin apartment building door, and photographed the cars unlucky enough to be caught in the pull of the world’s largest draining bathtub. I was holed up in a stranger’s empty apartment, looking at the river that used to be my street, when I was contacted by a production associate at “Good Morning America” via Twitter. With the determination of a fixer trying to get me on the last helicopter out of Saigon, he wrote that a woman named Christina would call me on Skype for a video interview. I’d agreed to talk, but as the lights flickered and then died in the apartment, I replied that I needed to conserve my prehistoric iPhone’s battery. The producer reassured me that two minutes is all they would need—a sort of apologetic, conversational sherpa-ing that I’ve done before, to lead a reluctant subject to an interview…In the days that followed the flood, I answered phone calls or Facebook messages from reporters and media-types, asking me to recount what happened and politely requesting that I distill fuzzy memories and unsure feelings down to a handy quote. I tried to answer as many as possible. At a certain point, however, you hit a wall. The background radiation that stays with you after a traumatic event sticks around for hours, days, weeks. It’s a struggle to answer questions like “What were you thinking at that time?” and “How high would you say the water got?”—to say nothing of offering whatever deep thoughts on the economic and political fate of your town…”

Ars Technica: “Verizon and AT&T have promised to stop selling their mobile customers’ location information to third-party data brokers following a security problem that leaked the real-time location of US cell phone users. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) recently urged all four major carriers to stop the practice, and today he published responses he received from Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile USA, and Sprint. Wyden’s statement praised Verizon for “taking quick action to protect its customers’ privacy and security,” but he criticized the other carriers for not making the same promise.

Analytics.USA.gov: "This data provides a window into how people are interacting with the government online. The data comes from a unified Google Analytics account for U.S. federal government agencies known as the Digital Analytics Program. This program helps government agencies understand how people find, access, and use government services online. The program does not track individuals, and anonymizes the IP addresses of visitors. Not every government website is represented in this data. Currently, the Digital Analytics Program collects web traffic from around 400 executive branch government domains, across about 5,700 total websites, including every cabinet department. We continue to pursue and add more sites frequently; to add your site, email the Digital Analytics Program. This open source project is in the public domain, which means that this website and its data are free for you to use without restriction. You can find the code for this website and the code behind the data collection on GitHub. We plan to expand the data made available here. If you have any suggestions, or spot any issues or bugs, please open an issue on GitHub or contact the Digital Analytics Program.”