Facebook Data Shows Having Rich Friends and Media Dragons Helps Gizmodo: “New research measuring over 21 billion Facebook friendships seemingly confirms something you probably already inherently knew: having rich friends helps.
Researchers at Harvard’s Opportunity Insights used a massive Facebook datasetbased on over 72 million users to analyze the ways certain types of social conditions impact economic mobility in a pair of paperspublished in Nature on Monday. The first paper focused in on “economic connectedness” a term researchers use to describe the level of close friendships between users of lower and higher income levels.
According to the research, lower-income children were more likely to experience economic gains as adults if they had close connections to high-income individuals. The second paper meanwhile dug into more specific examples of how those cross-class interactions play out in the real world…”
TechDirt Why The Massive China Police Database Hack Is Bad News For Surveillance States Everywhere: “A couple of weeks ago, Techdirt wrote about how an anonymous user had put up for sale the data of an estimated one billion Chinese citizens, probably obtained from the Shanghai police. Back then, what exactly had happened was a little unclear — not least because the Chinese authorities were shutting down any discussion of the massive and embarrassing leak.
The Wall Street Journal has written a follow-up piece on the incident that clarifies the situation and puts things in a wider context (paywall alert):
The Wall Street Journal has since found dozens more Chinese databases offered for sale, and occasionally free, in online cybercrime forums and Telegram communities with thousands of subscribers. Four of the stolen caches contained data likely taken from government sources, according to a Journal review, while several others were advertised as containing government data.
Tens of thousands more databases in China remain exposed on the internet with no security, totaling over 700 terabytes of data, the largest volume of any country, according to LeakIX, a service which tracks such databases…”
Lifehacker: “Why are you reading this article? Wait, don’t click away—what I mean is, why are you reading this article? Chances are, you visited this article from your smartphone, like so many of us do. Whether you have an iPhone or an Android, you can make your phone read text out loud to you, so you never need to read it yourself again.
The feature is called text to speech, or TTS. TTS highlights text or portions of your screen and reads those portions out loud. It’s a great accessibility feature in its own right, but it’s also useful to anyone who wants their phone to read to them. TTS is a fun option and isn’t difficult to activate, but it is a bit hidden…”
You Can Make Your Smartphone Read Out Loud to You Lifehacker
