A Day in the Life of Data

According to Albert Einstein, doing the same thing and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity . . .




Lexus: A FUTURISTIC SECRET AGENT

Plea For Reality: Should Bots Have To Declare Their “Fake” Identities?

IDEAS

On July 1st, California became the first state in the nation to try to reduce the power of bots by requiring that they reveal their “artificial identity” when they are used to sell a product or influence a voter.  – The New Yorker

MODERN COMMUNISM: China Is Forcing Tourists to Install Text-Stealing Malware at its Border.

Foreigners crossing certain Chinese borders into the Xinjiang region, where authorities are conducting a massive campaign of surveillance and oppression against the local Muslim population, are being forced to install a piece of malware on their phones that gives all of their text messages as well as other pieces of data to the authorities, a collaboration by Motherboard, Süddeutsche Zeitung, the Guardian, the New York Times, and the German public broadcaster NDR has found.

The Android malware, which is installed by a border guard when they physically seize the phone, also scans the tourist or traveller’s device for a specific set of files, according to multiple expert analyses of the software. The files authorities are looking for include Islamic extremist content, but also innocuous Islamic material, academic books on Islam by leading researchers, and even music from a Japanese metal band.

Tweet of the day

Julie K. Brown tweeted this on Sunday evening:

"I know there is a lot of praise on here for the Herald and myself. But I have to say the REAL HEROES HERE were the courageous victims that faced their fears and told their stories."

 



 

Commonwealth staff should be trained to detect fraud, criminologists say

EYES OPEN: Entities are attractive targets for people willing to commit fraud targeting the programs funded by the government.
 

Consumer Policy Research Centre, May 2019. A Day in the Life of Data

New York Times, Would You Pay $30 a Month to Check Your Email?:

The year is 2019, and the brainy engineers of Silicon Valley are hunkered down, working on transformative, next-generation technologies like self-driving cars, digital currencies and quantum computing.

Meanwhile, the buzziest start-up in San Francisco is … an expensive email app?

A few months ago, I started hearing about something called Superhuman. It’s an invitation-only service that costs $30 a month and promises “the fastest email experience ever made.” Marc Andreessen, the influential venture capitalist, reportedly swore by it, as did tech bigwigs like Patrick and John Collison, the founders of Stripe. The app was rumored to have a waiting list of more than 100,000 people.

“We have the who’s who of Silicon Valley at this point,” Superhuman’s founder, Rahul Vohra, told me in an interview. The waiting list is actually 180,000 people long, he said, and some people are getting desperate. He showed me a photo of a gluten-free cake sent to Superhuman’s office by a person who was hoping to score an invitation. ... Last month, Superhuman raised a $33 million investment round, led by Mr. Andreessen’s firm, Andreessen Horowitz. That valued the company at roughly $260 million — a steep valuation for an app with fewer than 15,000 customers, but one apparently justified by the company’s trajectory and its support among fans, which borders on evangelical.

“Superhuman is the future of work,” said David Ulevitch, the Andreessen Horowitz partner who led the firm’s investment. “Once I started using Superhuman, I couldn’t conceive of relying on anything else.”

• Even if you don’t live in New York City and even if you’ve never ridden the subway, this New York Times report on subway commutes is a master class in using data that services the reader. It’s also a reminder that news outlets provide so much more than stories about Trump and politics.
• A school district in Massachusetts used prisoners to help fix auditorium seats at a cost of $101,800. In an incredibly detailed report, a news outlet asked: Should public schools use prison labor? That news outlet: the student newspaper.
• Maybe I’m biased because I’ve known her for a long time, but The Washington Post’s Sally Jenkins is the best sports columnist in the country and she proves it again with her column about the U.S. World Cup-winning women’s soccer team.

The California coast is disappearing, says The Los Angeles Times. This dazzling project, led by reporter Rosanna Xia, includes graphics, video, photos and even a game (yes, an interactive game) to see if you can save a town.