Shining light into the dark spaces of chat apps

I’m quitting Facebook. Not comfortable with the flood of false information that’s allowed in its political advertising, nor am I confident in its ability to protect its users’ privacy.’

That’s literary legend Stephen King explaining in a tweet why he’s deleting his Facebook FB-3.64% account. 

King, who has 5.6 million followers on his still-active Twitter TWTR-2.23%account, has long been a fierce critic of President Donald Trump and isn’t afraid to voice his political opinions on social media.

Stephen King takes a stand against Facebook, quits over political lies

Elderly residents targeted in their homes by alleged phone and credit card scam

Police have warned the elaborate scam targets consumers over the phone and at their front door, with reported individual losses exceeding $11,000.

A Good Sport Is Hard to Find, Especially in the NFL - WSJ

. How many people remember sportsmanship? I remember it and now think of it chiefly as the element missing from contemporary sports. Sportsmanship was once central to tennis. It was notably practiced by the great Australian generation of Rod Laver, Ken Rosewall, Roy Emerson and John Newcombe. Harry Hopman, the Australian Davis Cup coach between 1939 an 1967, might send a player home for cursing on the court.

Columbia Journalism Review OpEd: “News has migrated from print to the web to social platforms to mobile. Now, at the dawn of a new decade, it is heading to a place that presents a whole new set of challenges: the private, hidden spaces of instant messaging apps. WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, and their ilk are platforms that journalists cannot ignore — even in the US, where chat-app usage is low. “I believe a privacy-focused communications platform will become even more important than today’s open platforms,” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, wrote in March 2019. By 2022, three billion people will be using them on a regular basis, according to Statista. But fewer journalists worldwide are using these platforms to disseminate news than they were two years ago, as ICFJ discovered in its 2019 “State of Technology in Global Newsrooms” survey. That’s a particularly dangerous trend during an election year, because messaging apps are potential minefields of misinformation…”

lhan Omar Asked About the Dreams Student Debt Kills, and the Internet Answered Teen Vogue 

Friends Like These Point Magazine (Anthony L). On liberalism.

Globalization – A sneaky overviewVineyard of the Saker 

Delta will ditch the uniforms many employees call ‘toxic’ CNN

Column: That Wells Fargo accounts scandal was even worse than you can imagine Los Angeles Times 

Is software making car repairs more expensive? 

“An unprecedented scientific effort to LiDAR scan the entire surface of the Earth before it’s too late. The climate crisis threatens to destroy our entire cultural & ecological patrimony. We’ve already lost 50% of the world’s rainforests.  We’re losing 18 million acres of forest each year. Rising sea levels will make whole cities,  countries, and continents unrecognizable. Unless we have a record of these places, no one in the future will even know they existed. LiDAR, Light Detection & Ranging, involves shooting a dense grid of infrared beams from an airplane towards the ground. It’s a high-resolution scan of the earth’s surface & everything on it. Not an actual image, but a dense three-dimensional cloud of points. Earth Archive is both a program of scanning focused on endangered landscapes and an open-source collection of LiDAR scans accessible to scientists around the world. We won’t live long enough to see the full impact of the Earth Archive. Neither will you. But that’s exactly why it’s worth doing.  The Earth Archive is a bet on the future of humankind. A bet that together, collectively, as people & as scientists, that we will face the climate crisis. And that we’ll choose to do right thing. Not just for us today, but to honor those who came before us, and to pay it forward to future generations who will carry on our legacy…”

See also – These Maps Reveal Earth’s Unspoiled Places – A revolution in archaeology is happening just when we need it most.

New web service can notify companies when employees get phished

ZDNet – “Starting today, companies across the world have a new free web service at their disposal that will automatically send out email notifications if one of their employees gets phished. The service is named “I Got Phished” and is managed by Abuse.ch, a non-profit organization known for its malware and cyber-crime tracking operations. Just like all other Abuse.ch services, I Got Phished will be free to use…”


You’ve got snail mail Washington Post: “Targeted online ads are now literally following you home Marketers are using the same technology and data as online advertising companies to decide who gets what flier, postcard or envelope…As people become numb to targeted digital ads that follow them across social media and into their email inboxes, some high-tech marketers are turning to a surprisingly old-school approach to cut through the noise: snail mail. And they’re using the same technology and data as online advertising companies to target who gets what flier, postcard or envelope — even tying people’s online browsing activity to their home address. It means after you research Parachute’s bedsheets online, its ad won’t just follow you around on the Internet. It may also end up as a paper ad in your hands, delivered to your front door…”