Thursday, March 28, 2019

Data Documents and Discipline

And now MEdia Dragon is followed even more with his new swipe cards ♦️ building pass ;-) [ Political Dirt Units Surveillance Galore / Hitler and Stalin would love the latest Big Sister and Brother Tools]  


In Australia unlike democratic Europe there is no general common law right to privacy. There have been two High Court cases where the existence of such a general right was discussed and held not to exist. Although the High Court in Australian Broadcasting Corporation v Lenah Game Meats [2001] HCA 63 left open the development of a concept of common law privacy a general right to privacy has not been established. 

FT.com free data visualization tool

Center for Data Innovation: “The Financial Times has released a free data visualization tool called FastCharts to help people make professional charts with their data in less than a minute. Users can paste in their data in CSV or TSV format and the tool will automatically create an area, bar, column, or line chart with labels and a title. Once the tool creates a chart, users can customize their chart through actions such as highlighting specific data on the chart or changing the scale.”


We are shocked  😨 😮  Nearly all Bitcoin trades are fake, apparently MIT Technology Review 


Hacking Lawyers or Journalists Is Totally Fine, Says Notorious Cyberweapons Firm Gizmodo



The Homeless 8-Year-Old Chess Champion and Other Horrific ‘Uplifting’ Stories FAIR 









NYT online Library hosts in-house documents so that they could be shared across the newsroom

The New York Times – We Built a Collaborative Documentation Site. Deploy Your Own With the Push of a Button. Library is searchable and renders content from Google Docs: “Maintaining useful documentation is hard. Whether it’s tips for running a program, publication guidelines or company rules, keeping track of resources can quickly become unwieldy. This is especially true at larger organizations where thousands of people care about similar tasks: It’s easy to end up with silos of duplicated instructions that only small groups of people know about.


The New York Times is no different. Several years ago, it was common for each desk to have an internal wiki that they used to collect these instructions. As the use of Google Docs grew within the newsroom, the wikis began to be used and maintained less frequently, and knowledge of existing documentation became scarce. When the older wikis were shut down in 2017, several teams that often collaborate realized we no longer had an effective strategy for sharing documents across the newsroom. We realized we could do better, and decided to build a centralized tool, called Library, that would host our documents in a way that could be shared across the newsroom.

Our solution to this problem has worked well for us. We hope others will find value in the technology we built, so we’re releasing Library to the open source community…”


Interactive tools to visualize change, secrets to finding contact information online and a quiz to solve journalism’s vexing issues














CRS – Congressional Access to the President’s Federal Tax Returns


Secrecy News: “By refusing to disclose his tax returns, President Trump has breached — and may have demolished — the longstanding norm under which sitting presidents and presidential candidates are expected to voluntarily disclose their federal tax returns. At the same time, there is reason to think that new norms of disclosure can be created. The conditions under which Congress could legally obtain President Trump’s federal tax returns were reviewed in a new assessment from the Congressional Research Service.
CRS “analyzes the ability of a congressional committee to obtain the President’s tax returns under provisions of the Internal Revenue Code (IRC); whether the President or the Treasury Secretary might have a legal basis for denying a committee request for the returns; and, if a committee successfully acquires the returns, whether those returns legally could be disclosed to the public.” See Congressional Access to the President’s Federal Tax ReturnsCRS Legal Sidebar, March 15, 2019.”



Sydney like NY,  More than a third of New Yorkers say they can’t afford to live here.

It’s Scary How Much Personal Data People Leave on Used Laptops and Phones Gizmodo: “A recent experiment by Josh Frantz, a senior security consultant at Rapid7, suggests that users are taking few if any steps to protect their private information before releasing their used devices back out into the wild. For around six months, he collected used desktop, hard disks, cellphones and more from pawn shops near his home in Wisconsin. It turned out they contain a wealth of private data belonging to their former owners, including a ton of personally identifiable information (PII)—the bread and butter of identity theft.




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‘I Lost My Job Over a Facebook Post – Was that Fair?’ Discipline and Dismissal for Social Media Activity (October 31, 2018). 2019 International Journal of Comparative Labour Law and Industrial Relations; Faculty of Laws University College London Law Research Paper No. 2/2018. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3276055



“Is it fair to be dismissed for social media activity, and are there any limitations to the employer’s managerial prerogative? These are the questions that this article addresses by examining the compatibility of discipline or dismissal with human rights law, with a primary focus on United Kingdom (UK) and European human rights law. It argues that UK courts and tribunals erroneously accept the lawfulness of such dismissals most of the time. This is due both to weaknesses in the English law of unfair dismissal, and to courts’ and tribunals’ limited engagement with human rights at work. Technical aspects of social media usage, with which courts and tribunals are often unfamiliar, add a further layer of complexity. Two factors make dismissals for social media activity particularly challenging for courts: first, the fact that social media are online platforms that everyone can potentially access, and hence public rather than private space; second, that expression on social media, often spontaneous and thoughtless, is not viewed as a particularly valuable form of speech. The argument of the article is that both the right to private life and the right to free speech are implicated in dismissals for social media activity, and that they should be viewed as lawful in very limited occasions, for employers should not have the right to censor the moral, political and other views and preferences of their employees even if it causes business harm.”