13 details and jokes you missed in the 'Game of Thrones' season 8 premiere @ MEdia Dragon 🐉
Friendship between women:
The next day she told her husband that she had slept over at her friend’s house.
The man called his wife’s 10 best friends.
None of them knew about it.
The next day he told his wife that he had slept over at a friend’s house.
The woman called her husband’s 10 best friends.
Eight of them confirmed that he had slept over, and two claimed that he was still there.
The Guardian: “It sounds like something from Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind and his The Cemetery of Forgotten Books: a huge volume containing thousands of summaries of books from 500 years ago, many of which no longer exist. But the real deal has been found in Copenhagen, where it has lain untouched for more than 350 years. The Libro de los Epítomes manuscript, which is more than a foot thick, contains more than 2,000 pages and summaries from the library of Hernando Colón, the illegitimate son of Christopher Columbus who made it his life’s work to create the biggest library the world had ever known in the early part of the 16th century. Running to around 15,000 volumes, the library was put together during Colón’s extensive travels. Today, only around a quarter of the books in the collection survive and have been housed in Seville Cathedral since 1552. The discovery in the Arnamagnæan Collection in Copenhagen is “extraordinary”, and a window into a “lost world of 16th-century books”, said Cambridge academic Dr Edward Wilson-Lee, author of the recent biography of Colón, The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books…”
Hacker has dumped nearly 1B user records over past two months - ZDNet: “A hacker who spoke withZDNet in February about wanting to put up for sale the data of over one billion users is getting dangerously close to his goal after releasing another 65.5 million records last week and reaching a grand total of 932 million records overall. The hacker’s name is Gnosticplayers, and he’s responsible for the hacks of 44 companies, including last week’s revelations. Since mid-February, the hacker has been putting batches of hacked data on Dream Market, a dark web marketplace for selling illegal products, such as guns, drugs, and hacking tools. He’s released data from companies like 500px, UnderArmor, ShareThis, GfyCat, and MyHeritage, just to name the bigger names. Releases have been grouped in four rounds —Round 1 (620 million user records), Round 2 (127 million user records), Round 3 (93 million user records), and Round 4 (26.5 million user records)….
Hackers like Gnosticplayers are part of small underground communities of hackers and data hoarders. They hack companies, steal their data, and then sell it to vetted partners. This data is filtered and organized in various categories. Stolen email addresses are sold to spam botnets. Financial details are sold to groups specialized in online fraud or tax scams. Usernames and cracked passwords are sold to botnet operators specialized in credentials stuffing attacks. This is a lucrative business, and many of these hackers don’t have to sell their data on public marketplaces like Dream Market….”
SOCIAL IMPACT BONDS: The latest bond sale will help fund a four-year youth unemployment program and provide returns as high as 12.4%.
The CIA Scheme That Brought ‘Dr. Zhivago’ To The World
OK, fine, everything we thought was good in art from the 1950s and 1960s was indeed funded by the CIA in some way. As for Dr. Zhivago, “Literary propaganda was a company-wide preoccupation. The scheme went all the way to the top.” – LitHub
Court Russians and Soviet Emigres Yasha Levine, Influence Ops
What Is Freedom? Nathan Robinson, Current Affairs
Investors put $5 million into reducing youth unemployment
Over a third of world trade happens inside multinational corporations
How To Find Old Memories and Websites That Google Won’t Show - Lifehacker – “…Million Short, which allows you to run a search and automatically skip the most popular answers to probe deeper into the web. Wiby.me is a “search engine for classic websites,” made to help people find hobbyist pages and other archaic features of the internet. The Hacker news thread also brings up Pinboard, a minimalist bookmarking service similar to Pocket, which has a key feature for archivists: If you sign up for its premium service — $15 per year — Pinboard will make a web archive of every page you save. If you’re looking at older, unindexed material, such a tool can make it easier to go back to specific parts of the older internet that you may want or need to recall again…”
cnet.com – From pithy tweets to Insta Novels on Instagram, libraries around the world are using social media to entertain and reach their audiences. “:ast summer, the New York Public Library wanted to make classic literature more enticing to young readers. You know, readers who are more likely to scroll through a text message than turn a page. So the NYPL created “Insta Novels,” digitized versions of classics designed to be read on a smartphone. Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland was the first classic to get the treatment. Others, including Charlotte Perkins’ The Yellow Wallpaper and Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, were hot on Alice’s heels. The books, complete with art and animation, are available on the NYPL’s Instagram page. The project, which included New York ad agency Mother, proved a huge success. Shortly after Insta Novels debuted, the NYPL racked up 100,000 new Instagram followers.
via Daniel and Susan
Facebook plays election whack-a-mole
This
month, elections kick off in at least five countries around the world. As a
result, Facebook and other tech platforms have been doing some last-minute
preparation to try to protect their platforms from misinformation.
In
India, where voters have been
stricken with misinformation in the lead-up to the start of the
general election this week, WhatsApp announced a
new research project aimed at learning how rumors spread on the messaging app.
That move, which launched just last week and was initially billed as a
verification project (it
isn’t), came more
than a year after fact-checkers started debunking hoaxes on their own
institutional accounts.
Also
in India, Facebook added
in February five new fact-checking partners to find and debunk false
stories, images and videos on the platform. It has
removed hundreds of accounts and pages for “coordinated inauthentic
behavior.” And, according
to the Hindustan Times, the company also has 40 teams of 30,000 people
around the world looking for potentially false or problematic content that
could affect elections like the one in India.
In
Indonesia, where for-hire “buzzers” spread deliberately
false information about both presidential candidates on social media,
fact-checkers have been busy debunking political hoaxes ahead of the April 17
election, France
24 reported. In March, Facebook restricted foreign
advertising and shut down several accounts and pages spreading hate speech and
misinformation.
These
attempts vary in size and importance, and all reveal that Facebook seems to
take election misinformation seriously. But is it enough to combat the problem
at scale and on time?
Save
for India, where Facebook reportedly
started working on addressing election misinformation 18 months ago,
most of the actions Facebook has taken to try to prevent election
misinformation have been relatively last-minute.
In
Israel, there’s only one fact-checking outlet debunking false political hoaxes
on Facebook — and they
were brought onto the program just days before Wednesday’s election.
Last week, the company announced
a similar move in Australia, where elections are set to begin next
month. Facebook also
announced that it would restrict foreign advertisements.
Giving
fact-checkers and new anti-misinformation policies only a few weeks before elections
seems like a short time to limit the flow of election misinformation. At the
same time, misinformation is a year-round problem with year-round consequences
— and not all of them are political.
Take,
for example, the
recent measles outbreaks around the world, which have run parallel
to an
influx in anti-vaccine conspiracy theories on platforms like Facebook
and YouTube. Or look to the
rise of vigilante mob violence resulting from the spread of child
kidnapping rumors in France, Mexico and India.
Election
misinformation is surely an important problem to address — but it’s just
one piece of the pie. Going forward, tech and media journalists would do well
to remember that, and hold companies accountable accordingly.
…technology
- Facebook has announced several big updates on how it addresses misinformation on its platform. Among them: Facebook is now reducing the reach of groups that repeatedly spread misinformation, exploring the use of crowdsourcing as a way to determine which news outlets users trust most and adding new indicators to inform users about the content they’re seeing. In other news, the Associated Press has expanded its participation in the company’s fact-checking project.
- Last week, WhatsApp announced that it had launched a tip line for verifying rumors during the Indian election. But turns out it’s not for fact-checking misinformation at all — it’s for research.
- “Welcome to 2019, where it takes just 19 hours for a faked homemade video of Joe Biden to travel from the keyboard of a pseudonymous ‘memesmith’ to the president of the United States,” Charlie Warzel wrote for The New York Times. Here’s what happened.
…politics
- The Asia Internet Coalition, an industry association whose members include Facebook, Google and Twitter, said Singapore’s proposed law against “fake news” poses “significant risks to freedom of expression and speech.” The Washington Post, similarly, asked in an editorial whether Singapore is fighting “fake news” or free speech. Here’s Daniel’s updated guide to what other countries are doing in the misinformation sphere.
- The United Kingdom this week announced its plan to create an independent regulator for “online harms.” It must be approved by Parliament. The BBC detailed the proposal, with analysis from Rory Cellan-Jones who said a whole host of questions still need to be answered. Canada’s going there, too.
- In November, France passed a law that requires tech platforms to publish who has purchased sponsored content or campaign ads and for what price. Now, the French government itself is getting into trouble with that law.
…the future of news
- A House Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday in which Facebook and Google officials testified on online hate broke down into partisan sniping; adding to the tension was the fact that a YouTube livestream of the hearing drew racist and anti-Semitic comments.
- Snopes is launching its first-ever paid membership program. It has also stopped using the Schema.org ClaimReview markup, which Google uses to surface fact-checking articles in search results. Why? “I want them to license the claim review data or prove the rich snippets they create with it are beneficial to the publisher,” Vinny Green, vice president of operations, wrote in a tweet.
- Our own desire to justify our decisions, and our flexibility in making up our minds, can contribute to our absorption of “fake news,” author and brain scientist Jeff Stibel wrote in USA Today this week.
Each
week, we analyze five of the top-performing fact checks on Facebook to see how
their reach compared to the hoaxes they debunked. Check Poynter.org on Friday
for more on this week’s numbers.
- Factcheck.org: “Concocted Claim of McCain’s ‘Treason’”(Fact: 5.5K engagements // Fake: 2.9K engagements)
- Maldito Bulo: “No, neither Muslims nor immigrants receive free medicines” (Fact: 3K engagements // Fake: 117K engagements)
- Liputan 6: “Are Circulating Photos of Ocean of Humans in Jokowi’s Campaign in Lampung Real?” (Fact: 693 engagements // Fake: 505 engagements)
- PolitiFact: “No, gun control regulation in Nazi Germany did not help advance the Holocaust” (Fact: 604 engagements // Fake: 735 engagements)
- Africa Check: “Beware false cancer cures from ‘Dr Gupta’ on Facebook” (Fact: 300 engagements // Fake: 15K engagements)
Our
choice this week is not a specific fact-check but a collection of them, all on
the same topic.
In
remarks Tuesday in the Oval Office, U.S. President Donald Trump said the
practice of separating migrant children at the southern border took place under
the Obama administration. A number of American fact-checkers debunked the claim
immediately – and they were able to do so more quickly than usual.
Why?
Because this assertion has been checked before.
The
New York Times called
the claim “outright revisionist history.” The Washington Post’s
Fact-Checker noted that
it had previously assigned four Pinocchios to the claim. CNN
said it is “false and requires context.” The claim, said
NPR, has been “frequently refuted.” The Associated
Press said the president was “wholly misrepresenting” the policy.
Even
Trump-friendly Fox News noted the claim, then said “Here are the facts.” That
alone prompted stories from The
Hill and The
Daily Beast.
Politicians’
repetition of false claims – even when fact-checkers have already called them
on it – is both friend and foe of fact-checkers. It makes the checking faster
and easier, since the work has already been done. But it can be disheartening
because it suggests the politicians either don’t care that they’ve been
debunked or aren’t paying attention.
The
Washington Post’s Erik Wemple discussed this phenomenon Tuesday in a column about the repetition of falsehoods regarding the
child separation policy. The Post last year gave Trump the “bottomless Pinocchio” award for repeating
false claims, often about immigration.
What
we liked: It may
feel repetitive when a number of fact-checkers all focus on the same statement.
But while fact-checkers are competitive, they often don’t worry about whether
someone else has done a story. We think that’s a good thing.
In
cases like this, where a politician’s comments are so blatantly false, there is
strength in numbers. A broad consensus among fact-checkers on the veracity of a
claim can really drive the conclusion home among readers across the country.
- It’s no surprise that lack of good information is bad for democracy. But three academics, writing in The Washington Post, explain why. Their identification of a “danger zone” of transparency is particularly relevant today.
- The Los Angeles Times dispelled some of the misconceptions about the U.S.-Mexico border.
- Of all the takes on Trump’s windmills-cause-cancer comments, one of the most thorough was from BuzzFeed News.
- Africa Check is seeking a deputy director, following Noko Makgato’s promotion to director last month.
- Platforms have taken a number of steps to block misinformation about vaccines. The Associated Press put them to the test and found they came up short.
- This browser extension lets people check whether or not someone actually tweeted a key phrase.
- Duke University is starting them young. Senior Bill McCarthy recently won an annual award for local journalism for his work with the North Carolina Fact-Checking Project.
- Daniel spoke to a comedian who duped several American media outlets into covering a bogus health company selling $80 used tissues.
- Nieman Lab wrote about how news organizations can use metadata to combat misinformation.
- BuzzFeed News reported on a Facebook page that ran almost 5,000 ads for a bogus rebate scam.