Descriptions of Reddit tend to be accurate but unable to capture what it is. Here's a start: The website's struggles have been society’s struggles... Website
Journalism is faster, edgier, needier, angrier. As for its future, the problems are well understood, but solutions hard to see
Amazon Can’t Fix Facial Recognition Cathy O’Neil, Bloomberg. “[T]he whole ecosystem of artificial intelligence is optimized for a lack of accountability.” That’s not a bug. It’s a feature.
New technology uses lasers to transmit audible messages to specific people Phys.org. What could go wrong?
How could the elite media—The New York Times, let’s say—have protected themselves from this event, which has served to reinforce millions of Americans’ belief that traditional journalistic outlets are purveyors of “fake news”? They might have hewed to a concept that once went by the quaint term “journalistic ethics.” Among other things, journalistic ethics held that if you didn’t have the reporting to support a story, and if that story had the potential to hurt its subjects, and if those subjects were private citizens, and if they were moreover minors, you didn’t run the story. You kept reporting it; you let yourself get scooped; and you accepted that speed is not the highest value. Otherwise, you were the trash press.Covington Catholic Is the Terrible Sequel to the Kavanaugh Case
At 8:30 yesterday morning, as I was typing this essay, The New York Times emailed me. The subject line was “Ethics Reminders for Freelance Journalists.” (I have occasionally published essays and reviews in the Times). It informed me, inter alia, that the Times expected all of its journalists, both freelance and staff, “to protect the integrity and credibility of Times journalism.” This meant, in part, safeguarding the Times’ “reputation for fairness and impartiality.”
I am prompted to issue my own ethics reminders for The New York Times. Here they are: You were partly responsible for the election of Trump because you are the most influential newspaper in the country, and you are not fair or impartial. Millions of Americans believe you hate them and that you will causally harm them. Two years ago, they fought back against you, and they won. If Trump wins again, you will once again have played a small but important role in that victory.
How conservative media transformed the Covington Catholic students from pariahs to heroes
FIRST TIME ON THE INTERNET? Stupid people are loud and proud: study.
15 wild fictional predictions about future technology that came true
‘The goal is to automate us’: welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism Guardian
THEY ARE DESTROYING THEMSELVES WITH TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, AND EVEN THE ATLANTIC HAS NOTICED: The Media Botched the Covington Catholic Story. And the damage to their credibility will be lasting. “The full video reveals that these kids had wandered into a Tom Wolfe novel and had no idea how to get out of it.”
Seafood processing water is a surprising source of nutrientsTreeHugger. Resilc: “When do we see fish gutzNstuff kombucha at Whole Foods for $19.99 a pint?”
the scott blog irregular: “This is the third post in my full-stack dev (f-s d) series on the secret life of data. This installment is about a single text message: how it was typed, stored, sent, received, and displayed. I sprinkle in some history and context to break up the alphabet soup of protocols, but though the piece gets technical, it should all be easily understood. The first two installments of this series are Cetus, about the propagation of errors in a 17th century spreadsheet, and Down the Rabbit Hole, about the insane lengths one occasionally needs to go through to track down the source of a dataset…”
Thieves of Experience: How Google and Facebook Corrupted Capitalism Los Angeles Review of Books – Nicholas Carr’s review of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism – The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power By Shoshana Zuboff
About 1 million Japanese, mostly men, have locked themselves in their bedrooms
JOEL KOTKIN: Technological Progress and the Global Sex Recession. The problem is, sex stays the same as it ever was, but the distractions keep getting better every year. This is the problem wherever humans compete with machines.
IT’S THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION THING: Journalists are Character Assassins
John le Carre, the author of the classic spy thrillers Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Spy Who Came in From The Cold, called Ben Macintyre’s latest book “The best true spy story I have ever read.”
Ben Macintyre’s The Spy and the Traitor; The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War is the true story of Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB colonel who spied for the British and later defected to the United Kingdom in 1985.
“Oleg Gordievsky was born into the KGB: Shaped by it, loved by it, twisted, damaged, and very nearly destroyed by it. The Soviet spy service was in his heart and in his blood. His father worked for the intelligence service all his life, and wore his KGB uniform every day, including weekends. The Gordievskys lived amid the spy fraternity in a designated apartment block, ate special food reserved for officers, and spent their free time socializing with other spy families. Gordievsky was a child of the KGB,” Ben Macintyre writes in the beginning of the book.
He went on to state that the KGB – the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnnosti, or Committee for State Security – was the most complex and far-reaching intelligence agency ever created. The KGB had the role of both foreign and domestic intelligence gathering, as well as internal security enforcement and state police. The KGB controlled every aspect of life in the Soviet Union.
Spy and TraitorIf data is for good, then trust is king
MARIA KATSONIS: In the first of a four-part series, The Mandarin examines the opportunities of the great data boom and why gaining community licence is key to protecting people’s information and realising the benefits. (Partner article)
Government needs to better explain information safeguards
PRIVACY: A majority of Australians trust government with their privacy, but agencies need to do a better job of explaining how they use personal information, say a group of ANU researchers.
AWS joins Australia's 'protected' classification club
TECH: A second international tech giant has been certified by the Australian government to host 'protected' classified data on a cloud computing service.
'Growth' of community housing may be an illusion. The cost-shifting isn't
NSW: For the first time, a state government housing agency has effectively contracted out all its operations in some regions, but will this improve stock?
