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I Paid a Bribe and Similar Corruption-Exposing Sites Spread - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...n-petty-bribery-worldwide.html corruption social media reform development
shared by Javier E on 07 Mar 12 - Cached
  • social media had given the average person powerful new tools to fight endemic corruption. “In the past, we tended to view corruption as this huge, monolithic problem that ordinary people couldn’t do anything about,” Mr. Elers said. “Now, people have new tools to identify it and demand change.”
  • Since no names are given on the sites, in part to avoid potential issues of libel and defamation, it is impossible to verify the reports, but Mr. Elers and others experienced in exposing corruption say many of them ring true.
  • They are, however, only a reporting mechanism. “In their own right, they don’t change anything,” Mr. Elers said. “The critical thing is that mechanisms are developed to turn this online activity into offline change in the real world.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • “My real goal, though,” he added, “is to change just one government department and how it does business.” That is what happened in Bangalore, where Bhaskar Rao, the transport commissioner for the state of Karnataka, used the data collected on I Paid a Bribe to push through reforms in the motor vehicle department.
  • Mr. King said the sites also were likely to have a deterrent effect that was difficult to measure. “As the information because more public over time and awareness of such reporting grows,” he said, “I suspect those who might have been tempted to engage in this type of corruption are less likely to because the risk of being caught is much greater.”
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China Is Said to Use Powerful New Weapon to Censor Internet - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...weapon-to-censor-internet.html china internet cybersecurity surveillance weapon
shared by Javier E on 11 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • The Great Cannon, the researchers said in a report published on Friday, allows China to intercept foreign web traffic as it flows to Chinese websites, inject malicious code and repurpose the traffic as Beijing sees fit.
  • With a few tweaks, the Great Cannon could be used to spy on anyone who happens to fetch content hosted on a Chinese computer, even by visiting a non-Chinese website that contains Chinese advertising content.
  • “The operational deployment of the Great Cannon represents a significant escalation in state-level information control,” the researchers said in their report. It is, they said, “the normalization of widespread and public use of an attack tool to enforce censorship.”
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • The device has the ability not only to snoop on Internet traffic but also to alter the traffic and direct it — on a giant scale — to any website, in what is called a “man in the middle attack.”
  • The American system, according to the documents, which were published by The Intercept, can deploy a system of programs that can intercept web traffic on a mass scale and redirect it to a site of their choosing. The N.S.A. and its partners appear to use the programs for targeted surveillance, whereas China appears to use the Great Cannon for an aggressive form of censorship.
  • The similarities of the programs may put American officials on awkward footing, the researchers argue in their report. “This precedent will make it difficult for Western governments to credibly complain about others utilizing similar techniques,” they write.
  • the Chinese program illustrates how far officials in Beijing are willing to go to censor Internet content they deem hostile. “This is just one part of President Xi Jinping’s push to gain tighter control over the Internet and remove any challenges to the party,
  • Beijing continues to increase its censorship efforts under its State Internet Information Office, an office created under Mr. Xi to gain tighter control over the Internet within the country and to clamp down on online activism. In a series of recent statements, Lu Wei, China’s Internet czar, has called on the international community to respect China’s Internet policies.
  • “The position of the Chinese government is that efforts to serve what it views as hostile content inside China’s borders is a hostile and provocative act that is a threat to its regime stability and ultimately its national security.”
  • by sweeping up Baidu’s would-be visitors in its attacks, researchers and foreign policy experts say, Beijing could harm the company’s reputation and market share overseas.
  • “Because both the Great Cannon and Great Firewall are operating on the same physical link, we believe they are both being run under the same authority,
  • researchers’ fear is that the state could use its new weapon to attack Internet users, particularly dissidents, without their knowledge. If they make a single request to a server inside China or even visit a non-Chinese website that contains an ad from a Chinese server, the Great Cannon could infect their web communications and those of everyone they communicate with and spy on them.
  • Ultimately, researchers say, the only way for Internet users and companies to protect themselves will be to encrypt their Internet traffic so that it cannot be intercepted and diverted as it travels to its intended target.“Put bluntly,” the researchers said, “unprotected traffic is not just an opportunity for espionage but a potential attack vector.”
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When Silicon Valley Took Over the 'New Republic' - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...534195 journalism media news tech audience traffic crisis culture
shared by Javier E on 08 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • Dependence generates desperation—a mad, shameless chase to gain clicks through Facebook, a relentless effort to game Google’s algorithms. It leads media outlets to sign terrible deals that look like self-preserving necessities: granting Facebook the right to sell their advertising, or giving Google permission to publish articles directly on its fast-loading server. In the end, such arrangements simply allow Facebook and Google to hold these companies ever tighter.
  • What makes these deals so terrible is the capriciousness of the tech companies. Quickly moving in a radically different direction may be great for their bottom line, but it is detrimental to the media companies that rely on the platforms. Facebook will decide that its users prefer video to words, or ideologically pleasing propaganda to more-objective accounts of events—and so it will de-emphasize the written word or hard news in its users’ feeds.
  • The problem isn’t just financial vulnerability, however. It’s also the way tech companies dictate the patterns of work; the way their influence can affect the ethos of an entire profession, lowering standards of quality and eroding ethical protections.
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  • t the beginning of this century, journalism was in extremis. Recessions, coupled with readers’ changing habits, prodded media companies to gamble on a digital future unencumbered by the clunky apparatus of publishing on paper. Over a decade, the number of newspaper employees dropped by 38 percent. As journalism shriveled, its prestige plummeted. One report ranked newspaper reporter as the worst job in America. The profession found itself forced to reconsider its very reasons for existing. All the old nostrums about independence suddenly seemed like unaffordable luxuries.
  • My master was Chartbeat, a site that provides writers, editors, and their bosses with a real-time accounting of web traffic, showing the flickering readership of each and every article. Chartbeat and its competitors have taken hold at virtually every magazine, newspaper, and blog. With these meters, no piece has sufficient traffic—it can always be improved with a better headline, a better approach to social media, a better subject, a better argument
  • Upworthy would write 25 different headlines, test all of them, and determine the most clickable of the bunch. Based on these results, it uncovered syntactical patterns that almost ensured hits. Classic examples: “9 out of 10 Americans Are Completely Wrong About This Mind-Blowing Fact” and “You Won’t Believe What Happened Next.” These formulas became commonplace on the web, until readers grew wise to them.
  • The core insight of Upworthy, BuzzFeed, Vox Media, and other emerging internet behemoths was that editorial success could be engineered, if you listened to the data. This insight was embraced across the industry and wormed its way into the New Republic.
  • Jonah Peretti, the founder of BuzzFeed, had put this way: R = ßz. (In epidemiology, ß represents the probability of transmission; z is the number of people exposed to a contagious individual.) The equation supposedly illustrates how a piece of content could go viral. But although Peretti got the idea for his formula from epidemiology, the emerging science of traffic was really a branch of behavioral science: People clicked so quickly, they didn’t always fully understand why. These decisions were made in a semiconscious state, influenced by cognitive biases. Enticing a reader entailed a little manipulation, a little hidden persuasion.
  • The new generation of media giants has no patience for the old ethos of detachment. It’s not that these companies don’t have aspirations toward journalistic greatness. BuzzFeed, Vice, and the Huffington Post invest in excellent reporting and employ first-rate journalists—and they have produced some of the most memorable pieces of investigative journalism in this century. But the pursuit of audience is their central mission. They have allowed the endless feedback loop of the web to shape their editorial sensibility, to determine their editorial investments
  • this is just a digitally enhanced version of an old-fashioned media pile-on. But social media amplify the financial incentive to join the herd. The results are highly derivative. Joshua Topolsky, a founder of The Verge, has bemoaned this creeping homogenization: “Everything looks the same, reads the same, and seems to be competing for the same eyeballs.”
  • Donald Trump is the culmination of the era. He understood how, more than at any other moment in recent history, the media need to give the public the circus that it desires. Even if the media disdained Trump’s outrages, they built him up as a plausible candidate, at which point they had no choice but to cover him. Stories about Trump yielded the sort of traffic that pleased the data gods and benefited the bottom line.
  • We were idealistic about our shared idealism. But my vision of the world was moralistic and romantic; his was essentially technocratic. He had faith in systems—rules, efficiencies, organizational charts, productivity tools
  • Makers of magazines and newspapers used to think of their product as a coherent package—an issue, an edition, an institution. They did not see themselves as the publishers of dozens of discrete pieces to be trafficked each day on Facebook, Twitter, and Google.
  • Thinking about bundling articles into something larger was intellectually liberating. Editors justified high-minded and quixotic articles as essential for “the mix.
  • Journalism has performed so admirably in the aftermath of Trump’s victory that it has grown harder to see the profession’s underlying rot. Now each assignment is subjected to a cost-benefit analysis—will the article earn enough traffic to justify the investment? Sometimes the analysis is explicit and conscious, though in most cases it’s subconscious and embedded in euphemism. Either way, it’s this train of thought that leads editors to declare an idea “not worth the effort” or to worry about whether an article will “sink.”
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Before the Capitol Riot, Calls for Cash and Talk of Revolution - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...capitol-riot-funding.html Riot Capitalpolice
shared by xaviermcelderry on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • In online videos, the 41-year-old Texan pointed out the flimsiness of the fencing. He cheered the arrival, long before President Trump’s rally at the other end of the mall, of far-right militiamen encircling the building. Then, armed with a bullhorn, Mr. Lee called out for the mob to rush in, until his voice echoed from the dome of the Rotunda.
  • By far the most visible financial backer of Women for America First’s efforts was Mike Lindell, a founder of the MyPillow bedding company, identified on a now-defunct website as one of the “generous sponsors” of a bus tour promoting Mr. Trump's attempt to overturn the election. In addition, he was an important supporter of Right Side Broadcasting, an obscure pro-Trump television network that provided blanket coverage of Trump rallies after the vote, and a podcast run by the former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon that also sponsored the bus tour.
  • Wild Protest linked to three hotels with discounted rates and another site for coordinating travel plans. It also raised donations from thousands of individuals, according to archived versions of a web portal used to collect them. The website has since been taken down, and it is not clear what the money was used for.
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  • “American citizens feel like they’ve been attacked. Fear’s reaction is anger, anger’s reaction is patriotism and voilà — you get a war,” said Mr. Lee’s co-host, who gave his name as Rampage.
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High Debt and Falling Demand Trap New Veterinarians - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nd-trap-new-veterinarians.html veterinary demand economics pets
shared by Javier E on 25 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • the total population of pets is going down, along with the sums that owners are willing to spend on the health care of their animals, one of the lesser-known casualties of the recession.
  • “We’re calling for more bodies coming through the veterinary educational pipeline at higher and higher cost at the very point in time that we need fewer and fewer,” says Dr. Eden Myers, a vet in Mount Sterling, Ky., who runs the Web site JustVetData, where she crunches numbers about the profession. “And they are going to get paid less and less.”
  • About 36.1 million households owned at least one cat in 2011, down 6 percent from 2006. During that period, the number of cat visits to the vet declined 13.5 percent. In the business, this is known as “the cat problem.”
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  • Not only are there fewer dogs — from 2006 to 2011, the number of dogs in the country dropped for the first time, albeit slightly, to 70 million from 72 million, according to the American Veterinary Medical Association Sourcebook survey — but the amount owners paid to vets fell, too. Owners reported they spent about $20 less a year in inflation-adjusted terms in that five-year span
  • “The estimates are that the horse population is down about 30 percent since 2008,
  • it is hard to talk anyone out of vet school. Many students, like Dr. Schafer, set their hearts on the job at an early age. If you are doing what you have always wanted, and you find it fulfilling, the numbers don’t seem relevant. At least initially.
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The Bad History Behind 'You Didn't Build That' - Bloomberg - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...nd-you-didn-t-build-that-.html history wealth economics european Malthus
shared by Javier E on 06 Aug 12 - Cached
  • “Bourgeois Dignity” is both the title of a recent book by the economic historian Deirdre N. McCloskey and, she argues, the attitude that accounts for the biggest story in economic history: the explosion of growth that took northern Europeans and eventually the world from living on about $3 a day, give or take a dollar or two (in today’s bu
  • ing power), to the current global average of $30 -- and much higher in developed nations
  • That change, she argues, is way too big to be explained by normal economic behavior, however rational, disciplined or efficient
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  • the usual stories of utility maximization and optimal pricing “can’t explain the rise in the whole world’s (absolute) advantage from $3 to $30 a day, not to speak of $137 a day.”
  • McCloskey’s explanation is that people changed the way they thought, wrote and spoke about economic activity. “In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,” she writes, “a great shift occurred in what Alexis de Tocqueville called ‘habits of the mind’ -- or more exactly, habits of the lip. People stopped sneering at market innovativeness and other bourgeois virtues.” As attitudes changed, so did behavior, leading to more than two centuries of constant innovation and rising living standards.
  • Most of “Bourgeois Dignity” is devoted to knocking down alternative explanations for the sudden and enormous escalation in living standards. In particular, McCloskey draws on the last half-century of economic-history scholarship to debunk what most people outside the field assume was the critical ingredient: savings and wealth accumulation. We might call this explanation “capital-ism.” Whether derived from Karl Marx, Max Weber, Karl Polyani, or, in a more-recent incarnation, Fernand Braudel, she argues, the emphasis on capital simply gets the facts wrong. It is empirically false.
  • savings rate of at least 12 percent, compared with no more than 10 percent to 20 percent in modern industrial economies. And, contrary to Weber’s story about a new Protestant Ethic, savings rates were roughly the same in Catholic and Protestant countries or, for that matter, in China.
  • Besides, as economic historians discovered in the 1960s, the economic takeoff didn’t actually require large amounts of capital. Early cotton mills, for instance, were relatively cheap to set up. “The source of the industrial investment required was short-term loans from merchants for inventories and longer- term loans from relative
  • What was different, she maintains, is how people thought about new ideas. Creative destruction became not only accepted but also encouraged, as did individual enterprise. “What
  • ade us rich,” she writes, “was a new rhetoric that was favorable to unbounded innovation, imaginatio
  • ness, persuasion, originality, with individual rewards often paid in a coin of honor or thankfuln
  • McCloskey’s book is not only a useful survey of how scholars answer the biggest question in economics: What causes growth? It is also a timely reminder that prosperity depends on more than effort or resources or infrastructure or good laws. Attitudes matter, too. You don’t build a wealthy society by deriding bourgeois enterprise -- or the people who take pride in it.
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Acxiom, the Quiet Giant of Consumer Database Marketing - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nsumer-database-marketing.html consumer database cybersecurity data marketing transparency
shared by Javier E on 17 Jun 12 - Cached
  • Acxiom. But analysts say it has amassed the world’s largest commercial database on consumers — and that it wants to know much, much more. Its servers process more than 50 trillion data “transactions” a year. Company executives have said its database contains information about 500 million active consumers worldwide, with about 1,500 data points per person. That includes a majority of adults in the United States.
  • But privacy advocates say they are more troubled by data brokers’ ranking systems, which classify some people as high-value prospects, to be offered marketing deals and discounts regularly, while dismissing others as low-value — known in industry slang as “waste.”
  • Julie Brill, a member of the Federal Trade Commission, says she would like data brokers in general to tell the public about the data they collect, how they collect it, whom they share it with and how it is used. “If someone is listed as diabetic or pregnant, what is happening with this information? Where is the information
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  • It has recruited talent from Microsoft, Google, Amazon.com and Myspace and is using a powerful, multiplatform approach to predicting consumer behavior that could raise its standing among investors and clients.
  • Acxiom has its own classification system, PersonicX, which assigns consumers to one of 70 detailed socioeconomic clusters and markets to them accordingly. In this situation, it pegs Mr. Hughes as a “savvy single” — meaning he’s in a cluster of mobile, upper-middle-class people who do their banking online, attend pro sports events, are sensitive to prices — and respond to free-shipping offers.
  • Analysts say companies design these sophisticated ecosystems to prompt consumers to volunteer enough personal data — like their names, e-mail addresses and mobile numbers — so that marketers can offer them customized appeals any time, anywhere.
  • Acxiom maintains its own database on about 190 million individuals and 126 million households in the United States. Separately, it manages customer databases for or works with 47 of the Fortune 100 companies. It also worked with the government after the September 2001 terrorist attacks
  • This year, Advertising Age ranked Epsilon, another database marketing firm, as the biggest advertising agency in the United States, with Acxiom second.
  • it’s as if the ore of our data-driven lives were being mined, refined and sold to the highest bidder, usually without our knowledge — by companies that most people rarely even know exist.
  • if marketing algorithms judge certain people as not worthy of receiving promotions for higher education or health services, they could have a serious impact.
  • “Over time, that can really turn into a mountain of pathways not offered, not seen and not known about,”
  • Unlike consumer reporting agencies that sell sensitive financial information about people for credit or employment purposes, database marketers aren’t required by law to show consumers their own reports and allow them to correct errors.
  • ACXIOM’S Consumer Data Products Catalog offers hundreds of details — called “elements” — that corporate clients can buy about individuals or households, to augment their own marketing databases.
  • the catalog also offers delicate information that has set off alarm bells among some privacy advocates, who worry about the potential for misuse by third parties that could take aim at vulnerable groups. Such information includes consumers’ interests — derived, the catalog says, “from actual purchases and self-reported surveys” — like “Christian families,” “Dieting/Weight Loss,” “Gaming-Casino,” “Money Seekers” and “Smoking/Tobacco.” Acxiom also sells data about an individual’s race, ethnicity and country of origin. “Our Race model,” the catalog says, “provides information on the major racial category: Caucasians, Hispanics, African-Americans, or Asians.” Competing companies sell similar data.
  • “At the same time, this is ethnic profiling,” he says. “The people on this list, they are being sold based on their ethnic stereotypes. There is a very strong citizen’s right to have a veto over the commodification of their profile.”
  • race coding may be incorrect. And even if a data broker has correct information, a person may not want to be marketed to based on race.
  • In its system, a store clerk need only “capture the shopper’s name from a check or third-party credit card at the point of sale and then ask for the shopper’s ZIP code or telephone number.” With that data Acxiom can identify shoppers within a 10 percent margin of error, it says, enabling stores to reward their best customers with special offers. Other companies offer similar services. “This is a direct way of circumventing people’s concerns about privacy,” says Mr. Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy.
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Eli Pariser on the future of the Internet - War Room - Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/...index.html personalization filtering bubble politics values net-neutrality
shared by Javier E on 11 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Increasingly on the Internet, websites are personalizing themselves to suit our interests. We all see this happening at Amazon, where if you order a book, Amazon will send you the next book. We see it happening in Netflix, but it's also happening in a bunch of places where it's much less visible. For example, on Google, most people assume that if you search for BP, you'll get one set of results that are the consensus set of results in Google. Actually, that isn't true anymore. Since Dec. 4, 2009, Google has been personalized for everyone. So when I had two friends this spring Google "BP," one of them got a set of links that was about investment opportunities in BP. The other one got information about the oil spill. Presumably that was based on the kinds of searches that they had done in the past. If you have Google doing that, and you have Yahoo doing that, and you have Facebook doing that, and you have all of the top sites on the Web customizing themselves to you, then your information environment starts to look very different from anyone else's. And that's what I'm calling the "filter bubble": that personal ecosystem of information that's been catered by these algorithms to who they think you are.
  • What it's looking like increasingly is that the Web is connecting us back to ourselves. There's a looping going on where if you have an interest, you're going to learn a lot about that interest. But you're not going to learn about the very next thing over. And you certainly won't learn about the opposite view. If you have a political position, you're not going to learn about the other one. If you Google some sites about the link between vaccines and autism, you can very quickly find that Google is repeating back to you your view about whether that link exists and not what scientists know, which is that there isn't a link between vaccines and autism. It's a feedback loop that's invisible. You can't witness it happening because it's baked into the fabric of the information environment.
  • The Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, likes to tell people this statistic: From the beginning of civilization to 2003, if you took all of human intellectual output, every single conversation that ever happened, it's about two exabytes of data, about a billion gigabytes. And now two exabytes of data is created every five days
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • So there's this enormous flood of bits, and we need help trying to sort through it. We turn to these personalization agents to sift through it for us automatically and try to pick out the useful bits. And that's fine as far as it goes. But the technology is invisible. We don't know who it thinks we are, what it thinks we're actually interested in. At the end, it's a set of code, it's not a person, and it locks us into a specific kind of pixelated versions of ourselves. It locks us into a set of check boxes of interest rather than the full kind of human experience. I don't think with this information explosion that you can go back to an unfiltered and unpersonalized world. But I think you can bake into the code a sense of civic importance. You can have a sense that there are some things that we all need to be paying attention to, that we all need to be worried about, where you do want to see the top link on BP for everyone, not just investment information if you're interested in investments.
  • change happens on a bunch of levels, and the first is on an individual level. You can make sure that you're constantly seeking out new and interesting and provocative sources of information. Think of this as your information diet. The narcissistic stuff that makes you feel like you have all the right ideas and all the right opinions -- our brains are calibrated to love that stuff because in nature, in normal life, it's very rare. Now we have this thing that's feeding us lots of calories of that stuff. It takes some discipline to forgo the information junk food and seek out stuff that's a little more challenging.
  • the second piece is we've had institutions that have been mediating what we get to know for a long time. For most of the last century they were newspapers that produced about 85 percent of the news in that model. They were always commercial entities. But because they were making so much money, they were able to afford a sense of civics, a sense that the New York Times was going to put Afghanistan on the front page, even if it doesn't get the most clicks. So newspapers found this kind of happy medium that didn't always work perfectly, but it worked better than the alternative. I think now the baton is passing to Google, to Facebook, to the new filters to develop the same kind of sense of ethics about what they do. If you talk to the engineers, they're very resistant because they feel like this is just code, it doesn't have values, it's not a human thing. But of course they're writing code, and every human-made system has a sense of values.
  • the Internet was built on the principle that it would carry all different types of data. And it didn't really care what kind of data it was carrying. It was going to make sure that it got from Point A to Point B. That's the Internet: There's kind of a social contract between all the machines on the Internet that says, "I'll carry your data if you carry my data, and we'll leave it to the people on the edges of the network -- to your home PC or the PC that you're sending something to -- to figure out what the data means." That's the net neutrality principle.
  • big companies like Verizon and Comcast are looking at how the Internet is eroding their profit margins. They're saying to themselves, what can we do to get a piece of this growing pie? They want a tiered Internet where you can pay them to go to the front of the line with your data. That will really erode that amazing thing we all know the Internet facilitates: that anyone with an idea can reach the world. You talk to venture capitalists and they're scared. They say a new start-up is just never going to be able to buy the speed that a Google or a Microsoft will be able to. Incumbent industries will be able to get their data to you quickly and new start-ups won't have a chance. And as a result, you'll have a drying up of the entrepreneurialism that's happened on the Internet. And you'll have a drying up of the Wikipedias, the nonprofit projects. Wikipedia works because it's just as fast as Google. When Wikipedia starts to slow way down relative to Google, you're more likely to just go to Google
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A Million First Dates - Dan Slater - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...309195 relations commitment marriage monogamy online dating
shared by Javier E on 04 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • The positive aspects of online dating are clear: the Internet makes it easier for single people to meet other single people with whom they might be compatible, raising the bar for what they consider a good relationship. But what if online dating makes it too easy to meet someone new? What if it raises the bar for a good relationship too high? What if the prospect of finding an ever-more-compatible mate with the click of a mouse means a future of relationship instability, in which we keep chasing the elusive rabbit around the dating track?
  • the rise of online dating will mean an overall decrease in commitment.
  • I often wonder whether matching you up with great people is getting so efficient, and the process so enjoyable, that marriage will become obsolete.”
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • “Historically,” says Greg Blatt, the CEO of Match.com’s parent company, “relationships have been billed as ‘hard’ because, historically, commitment has been the goal. You could say online dating is simply changing people’s ideas about whether commitment itself is a life value.” Mate scarcity also plays an important role in people’s relationship decisions. “Look, if I lived in Iowa, I’d be married with four children by now,” says Blatt, a 40‑something bachelor in Manhattan. “That’s just how it is.”
  • “I think divorce rates will increase as life in general becomes more real-time,” says Niccolò Formai, the head of social-media marketing at Badoo, a meeting-and-dating app with about 25 million active users worldwide. “Think about the evolution of other kinds of content on the Web—stock quotes, news. The goal has always been to make it faster. The same thing will happen with meeting. It’s exhilarating to connect with new people, not to mention beneficial for reasons having nothing to do with romance. You network for a job. You find a flatmate. Over time you’ll expect that constant flow. People always said that the need for stability would keep commitment alive. But that thinking was based on a world in which you didn’t meet that many people.”
  • “You could say online dating allows people to get into relationships, learn things, and ultimately make a better selection,” says Gonzaga. “But you could also easily see a world in which online dating leads to people leaving relationships the moment they’re not working—an overall weakening of commitment.”
  • Explaining the mentality of a typical dating-site executive, Justin Parfitt, a dating entrepreneur based in San Francisco, puts the matter bluntly: “They’re thinking, Let’s keep this fucker coming back to the site as often as we can.” For instance, long after their accounts become inactive on Match.com and some other sites, lapsed users receive notifications informing them that wonderful people are browsing their profiles and are eager to chat. “Most of our users are return customers,” says Match.com’s Blatt.
  • The market is hugely more efficient … People expect to—and this will be increasingly the case over time—access people anywhere, anytime, based on complex search requests … Such a feeling of access affects our pursuit of love … the whole world (versus, say, the city we live in) will, increasingly, feel like the market for our partner(s). Our pickiness will probably increase.” “Above all, Internet dating has helped people of all ages realize that there’s no need to settle for a mediocre relationship.”
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Harvard and M.I.T. Offer Free Online Courses - NYTimes.com - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...offer-free-online-courses.html online learning harvard
shared by Javier E on 03 May 12 - Cached
  • Harvard and M.I.T. have a rival — they are not the only elite universities planning to offer free massively open online courses, or MOOCs, as they are known. This month, Stanford, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan announced their partnership with a new commercial company, Coursera, with $16 million in venture capital.
  • The technology for online education, with video lesson segments, embedded quizzes, immediate feedback and student-paced learning, is evolving so quickly that those in the new ventures say the offerings are still experimental.
  • M.I.T. and Harvard officials said they would use the new online platform not just to build a global community of online learners, but also to research teaching methods and technologies.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • if I were president of a mid-tier university, I would be looking over my shoulder very nervously right now, because if a leading university offers a free circuits course, it becomes a real question whether other universities need to develop a circuits course.”
  • The edX project will include not only engineering courses, in which computer grading is relatively simple, but also humanities courses, in which essays might be graded through crowd-sourcing, or assessed with natural-language software. Coursera will also offer free humanities courses in which grading will be done by peers.
  • “What faculty don’t want to do is just take something off the shelf that’s somebody else’s and teach it, any more than they would take a textbook, start on Page 1, and end with the last chapter,” he said. “What’s still missing is an online platform that gives faculty the capacity to customize the content of their own highly interactive courses.”
  • anonymous on 11 May 12
     
    I think that Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Princeton, UP, and Michigan have a great idea in establishing these free online courses. When such high level courses are provided online and for free, there really is no excuse not to pursue greater knowledge. The only ingredient not provided is self-motivation. After both sites, Coursera seems to be developing much more rapidly then edX. Coursera is constantly updating their site with new courses. Also, after sifting through a few of the courses offered, I noticed that many teachers are willing to stream some online students in through video conferencing. These online students can virtually interact with their counterparts in the classroom at the given elite university. In other words, the intimate relationship found through interacting with other students and professors in a classroom setting is not completely lost.
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The Dying of the Whites - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-dying-of-the-whites.html white despair death rate suicide culture economics
shared by Javier E on 08 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • To many conservatives, the mortality rate shock is the latest indictment of modern liberalism’s mix of moral permissiveness and welfare-state paternalism: The first undercuts the rootedness, discipline and purpose that marriage and religion once supplied, and the latter eases people into a life of dependence and disability payments that only encourages drug abuse and suicidal thoughts.
  • But if the problem is social liberalism and the welfare state, progressives object, then why is the working class death rate only rising starkly in the United States? In the more secular and socialist territory of the European Union, Deaton and Case are at pains to note, white mortality rates have continued to decline.
  • This buttresses the longstanding liberal argument that the American working class has fallen victim, not to dependency and libertinism, but to a punishing economic climate — stagnant wages, a fraying safety net, and Republican economic policies that redistribute wealth upward
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  • Hence the European contrast: If we had the same institutions as France and Germany, our working class might still be struggling, but at least it would be protected from immiseration and despair.
  • if economic stress were all, you would expect the mortality crisis to manifest itself more sharply among black and Hispanic Americans — who have consistently higher unemployment rates than their white neighbors, and lag whites in wealth by far.
  • But in fact the mortality rate for minorities in the U.S. continued to fall between 1999 and 2013, mirroring the trend in Europe, and the African-American death rate in particular fell hugely
  • But in an era of stagnating wages, family breakdown, and social dislocation, this logic no longer seems to make as much sense. The result is a mounting feeling of what the American Conservative’s Rod Dreher calls white “dispossession” — a sense of promises broken, a feeling that what you were supposed to have has been denied to you.
  • white social institutions, blue-collar as well as white-collar, have long reflected a “bourgeois moral logic” that binds employment, churchgoing, the nuclear family and upward mobility.
  • it was only white Americans who turned increasingly to drugs, liquor and quietus.
  • For obvious historical reasons, though, Hispanic and (especially) black communities have cultivated a different set of expectations, a different model of community and family (more extended and matriarchal), a different view of success and the American story writ large
  • they may create a kind of resilience, a capacity for dealing with stagnation and disappointment (and elite indifference or hostility), which many working-class white Americans did not necessarily expect to ever need.
  • If this possibility has policy implications, it suggests that liberals are right to emphasize the economic component to the working class’s crisis. But it cautions against the idea that transfer payments can substitute for the sense of meaning and purpose that blue-collar white Americans derived from the nexus of work, faith and family until very recently
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Russia Strengthens Its Internet Censorship Powers - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...internet-censorship-putin.html politics Russia Censorship internet
shared by kennyn-77 on 22 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • On March 10, Twitter users in Russia suddenly experienced a sharp slowdown in the service.
  • Russian authorities wanted Twitter to remove more than 3,000 “illegal” posts, which human rights groups saw as an effort to stifle dissent.
  • When Twitter did not comply, the government was ready. It deployed a new technology so it could do the job itself.
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  • Sometimes caged behind lock and key, the new gear linked back to a command center in Moscow, giving authorities startling new powers to block, filter and slow down websites that they did not want the Russian public to see.
  • Under President Vladimir V. Putin, who once called the internet a “C.I.A. project” and views the web as a threat to his power, the Russian government is attempting to bring the country’s once open and freewheeling internet to heel.
  • It affects the vast majority of the country’s more than 120 million wireless and home internet users, according to researchers and activists.
  • The world got its first glimpse of Russia’s new tools in action when Twitter was slowed to a crawl in the country this spring. It was the first time the filtering system had been put to work, researchers and activists said. Other sites have since been blocked, including several linked to the jailed opposition leader Alexei A. Navalny.
  • “Russia’s censorship model can quickly and easily be replicated by other authoritarian governments.”
  • Surveillance systems monitor people’s online activities, and some bloggers have been arrested. In 2012, the country passed a law requiring internet service providers to block thousands of banned websites, but it was hard to enforce and many sites remained available.
  • It has threatened to take down YouTube, Facebook and Instagram if they do not block certain content on their own. After authorities slowed down Twitter this year, the company agreed to remove dozens of posts deemed illegal by the government.
  • “It’s striking that this hasn’t gotten the attention of the Biden administration,”
  • Google, which owns YouTube, and Twitter declined to comment. Apple did not respond to requests for comment. In a statement, Facebook did not address Russia specifically but said it was “committed to respecting the human rights of all those who use our products.”
  • Many see YouTube as a future target because of its use by independent media and critics of the Kremlin, which could cause a backlash.
  • In recent years, governments in India, Myanmar, Ethiopia and elsewhere have used internet blackouts to stifle pockets of dissent. Russia had internet shutdowns during anti-government protests in the southern region of Ingushetia in 2018 and Moscow in 2019.
  • In September, after the government threatened to arrest local employees for Google and Apple, the companies removed apps run by supporters of Mr. Navalny ahead of national elections.
  • equipment loaded with software for the government to track, filter and reroute internet traffic without any involvement or knowledge from the companies.
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U.S. Internet Users Pay More for Slower Service - Bloomberg - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...y-more-for-slower-service.html internet policy competition regulation telecom access
shared by Javier E on 01 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • The arrival of commercial Internet communications in the mid-1990s posed a threat to both the phone and cable companies; eventually, the FCC deregulated the entire sector, thinking that competition among various modalities of Internet access --cable, phone, wireless, satellite -- would protect Americans. And in 2002, when the five-year period of deregulation began, there was indeed rough parity in speed and price between the cable companies and telephone companies providing Internet access.
  • Soon, however, cable companies found a way to upgrade their networks to provide connections perhaps 100 times faster than what was possible over copper wires, and at much lower expense than the phone companies incurred replacing their phone lines. Goodbye, Copper The American copper wire telephone system is, in fact, becoming obsolete. The physical switches used in the network are reaching the end of their useful lives. But now that cable has won the battle for wired Internet service and consumers are moving to mobile phones for voice service, the telephone companies are looking to shed the obligation to maintain their networks at all.
  • Meanwhile, the U.S. is rapidly losing the global race for high-speed connectivity, as fewer than 8 percent of households have fiber service. And almost 30 percent of the country still isn’t connected to the Internet at all.
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  • Other countries have different goals. The South Korean government announced a plan to install 1 gigabit per second of symmetric fiber data access in every home by 2012. Hong Kong, Japan and the Netherlands are heading in the same direction. Australia plans to get 93 percent of homes and businesses connected to fiber. In the U.K., a 300 Mbps fiber-to-the-home service will be offered on a wholesale basis.
  • In a sense, the FCC adopted the cable companies’ business plan as the country’s goal. The commission’s embrace of asymmetric access -- slower upload than download speeds -- also serves the carriers’ interests: Only symmetric connections would allow every American to do business from home rather than use the Internet simply for high-priced entertainmen
  • The first step is to decide what the goal of telecommunications policy should be. Network access providers -- and the FCC -- are stuck on the idea that not all Americans need high-speed Internet access. The FCC’s National Broadband Plan of March 2010 suggested that the minimum appropriate speed for every American household by 2020 should be 4 megabits per second for downloads and 1 Mbps for uploads. These speeds are enough, the FCC said, to reliably send and receive e-mail, download Web pages and use simple video conferencing.
  • Think of it this way: With a dialup connection, backing up 5 gigabytes of data (now the standard free plan offered by many storage companies) would take 20 days. Over a standard (3G) wireless connection, it would take two and a half days. Over a 4G connection it would be more than seven hours, and over a cable DOCSIS 3.0 connection, an hour and a half. With a gigabit fiber-to-the-home connection, it can be done in less than a minute.
  • If the U.S. had a fully fiber-based network, Hollywood blockbusters could be downloaded in 12 seconds, video conferencing would become routine, and every household could see 3D and Super HD images. Americans could be connected instantly to their co-workers, their families, their teachers and their health-care monitors. To make this happen, though, the U.S. needs to move to a utility model, based on the assumption that all Americans require fiber-optic Internet access at reasonable prices. How much would it cost to bring fiber to the homes of all Americans? Corning Inc. (GLW), the American glass manufacturer, and others have estimated that it would take between $50 billion and $90 billion.
  • The Internet has taken the place of the telephone as the world’s basic, general-purpose, two-way communication medium. All Americans need high-speed access, just as they need clean water, clean air and electricity. But they have allowed a naive belief in the power and beneficence of the free market to cloud their vision. As things stand, the U.S. has the worst of both worlds: no competition and no regulation.
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Bhaskar Sunkara, Editor of Jacobin Magazine - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ditor-of-jacobin-magazine.html role journalism marx leftist magazine business
shared by Javier E on 22 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • in 2009, during a medical leave from his sophomore year at George Washington University, Mr. Sunkara turned to Plan B: creating a magazine dedicated to bringing jargon-free neo-Marxist thinking to the masses.
  • “I had no right to start a print publication when I was 21,” he said in an interview in a cafe near his apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. “Looking back, I see it as a moment of creative ignorance. You have to have enough intelligence to execute something like this but be stupid enough to think it could be successful.”
  • Since its debut in September 2010 it has attracted nearly 2,000 print and digital subscribers, some 250,000 Web hits a month, regular name-checks from prominent bloggers, and book deals from two New York publishers.
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  • Jacobin’s success, he said, springs from the highly cohesive politics of the four co-editors he has recruited and their shared commitment to advancing a critique of liber
  • alism that is free of obscurantist academic theory or “cheap hooks.”
  • it was a packed Jacobin-organized panel on the Occupy movement, held in a downtown Manhattan bookstore three weeks after the protests began in Zuccotti Park in September 2011, that really put the magazine on the map, drawing attention from Politico and Glenn Beck.
  • the magazine was also attracting attention from more established figures on the left, who saw it as raising fundamental questions that had been off the table since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
  • Mr. Sunkara, the son of middle-class South Asian immigrants who was voted “most likely to succeed” in high school, traces his politics less to experience than to reading. In seventh grade a stray reference in an introduction to “Animal Farm” sent him to Trotsky’s own writings. By his freshman year of college he was editing a blog for Democratic Socialists of America and writing for Dissent.
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Upending Anonymity, These Days the Web Unmasks Everyone - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...21anonymity.html online anonymity privacy freedom
shared by Javier E on 21 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • The collective intelligence of the Internet’s two billion users, and the digital fingerprints that so many users leave on Web sites, combine to make it more and more likely that every embarrassing video, every intimate photo, and every indelicate e-mail is attributed to its source, whether that source wants it to be or not. This intelligence makes the public sphere more public than ever before and sometimes forces personal lives into public view.
  • the positive effects can be numerous: criminality can be ferreted out, falsehoods can be disproved and individuals can become Internet icons.
  • “Humans want nothing more than to connect, and the companies that are connecting us electronically want to know who’s saying what, where,” said Susan Crawford, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. “As a result, we’re more known than ever before.”
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  • This growing “publicness,” as it is sometimes called, comes with significant consequences for commerce, for political speech and for ordinary people’s right to privacy. There are efforts by governments and corporations to set up online identity systems.
  • He posited that because the Internet “can’t be made to forget” images and moments from the past, like an outburst on a train or a kiss during a riot, “the reality of an inescapable public world is an issue we are all going to hear a lot more about.”
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Top British Spy Warns of Terrorists' Use of Social Media - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-tech-companies-militants.html social media terrorism islamist tech spying security
shared by Javier E on 05 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • One of Britain’s highest-ranking intelligence officials on Tuesday castigated the giant American companies that dominate the Internet for providing the “command-and-control networks of choice for terrorists and criminals” and challenged the companies to find a better balance between privacy and security.
  • the accusation went beyond what United States officials have said about Apple, Google and others that are now moving toward sophisticated encryption of more and more data on phones and email systems.
  • But the companies, saying they are responding to demand from their users, show no signs of backing down. Recently the chief executive of Apple, Tim Cook, said governments that want data should deal with the users of the technology, not with the providers of the hardware and services.
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  • companies like his “will move to strengthen encryption,” and require governments to get court orders if they want data.
  • Mr. Hannigan, in an opinion article on Tuesday in The Financial Times, singled out the Islamic State, the radical group also known as ISIS and ISIL, as one “whose members have grown up on the Internet” and are “exploiting the power of the web to create a jihadi threat with near-global reach.”
  • Increasingly encrypted products and services are “a challenge,” Admiral Rogers said. “And we’ll deal with it.”But he also pushed for better sharing of data between the intelligence community and private technology companies. Moves to set up a formal information-sharing system have stalled in Congress in the face of objections from the private sector.
  • But Mr. Hannigan’s comments, calling for “a new deal between democratic governments and the technology companies in the area of protecting our citizens,” seemed to urge a further review of the balance between civil liberties and national security. Britain, like other European nations, has been increasingly concerned about online recruitment of potential fighters from within its borders by radical groups.
  • Facebook said in a company blog post that requests by governments for user information were rising steadily, by about a quarter in the first half of the year over the second half of last year.“In the first six months of 2014, governments around the world made 34,946 requests for data,” the post said. “During the same time, the amount of content restricted because of local laws increased about 19 percent.”
  • Twitter received more than 2,000 requests for information about user accounts from roughly 50 countries in the first six months of 2014, according to a company statement. The number of requests represented a 46 percent increase compared with the same period last year, and more than 60 percent of the requests came from the United States government.
  • In the past, Al Qaeda and its affiliates, which have broken with the Islamic State, “saw the Internet as a place to disseminate material anonymously or meet in ‘dark spaces,’ ” Mr. Hannigan wrote, while the Islamic State “has embraced the web as a noisy channel in which to promote itself, intimidate people and radicalize new recruits.”The opinion article by Mr. Hannigan referred specifically to messaging and social media sites and apps such as Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp.“There is no need for today’s would-be jihadis to seek out restricted websites with secret passwords: They can follow other young people posting their adventures in Syria as they would anywhere else,” he wrote.
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What Mark Zuckerberg Didn't Say About What Facebook Knows About You - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...ook-knows-about-you-1523726008 facebook data privacy
shared by Javier E on 15 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • When testifying before the Senate Tuesday, Mr. Zuckerberg said, “I think everyone should have control over how their information is used.” He also said, “You have full access to understand all—every piece of information that Facebook might know about you—and you can get rid of all of it.”
  • Not exactly. There are important classes of information Facebook collects on us that we can’t control. We don’t get to “opt in” or remove every specific piece. Often, we aren’t even informed of their existence—except in the abstract—and we aren’t shown how the social network uses this harvested information.
  • The website log is a good example, in part because of its sheer mass. The browsing histories of hundreds of millions—possibly billions—of people are gathered by a variety of advertising trackers, which Facebook has been offering to web publishers ever since it introduced the “Like” button in 2009.
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  • They’ve become, as predicted, a nearly web-wide system for tracking all users—even when you don’t click the button.
  • “If you downloaded this file [of sites Facebook knows you visited], it would look like a quarter to half your browsing history,” Mr. Garcia-Martinez adds.
  • Another reason Facebook doesn’t give you this data: The company claims recovering it from its databases is difficult.
  • In one case, it took Facebook 106 days to deliver to a Belgian mathematician, Paul-Olivier Dehaye, all the data the company had gathered on him through its most common tracking system. Facebook doesn’t say how long it stores this information.
  • When you opt out of interest-based ads, the system that uses your browsing history to target you, Facebook continues tracking you anyway. It just no longer uses the data to show you ads.
  • There is more data Facebook collects that it doesn’t explain. It encourages users to upload their phone contacts, including names, phone numbers and email addresses
  • Facebook never discloses if such personal information about you has been uploaded by other users from their contact lists, how many times that might have happened or who might have uploaded it.
  • This data enables Facebook not only to keep track of active users across its multiple products, but also to fill in the missing links. If three people named Smith all upload contact info for the same fourth Smith, chances are this person is related
  • Facebook now knows that person exists, even if he or she has never been on Facebook. And of course, people without Facebook accounts certainly can’t see what information the company has in these so-called shadow profiles.
  • “In general, we collect data on people who have not signed up for Facebook for security purposes,” Mr. Zuckerberg told Congress
  • There’s also a form of location data you can’t control unless you delete your whole account. This isn’t the app’s easy-to-turn-off GPS tracking. It’s the string of IP addresses, a form of device identification on the internet, that can show where your computer or phone is each time it connects to Facebook.
  • Facebook says it uses your IP address to target ads when you are near a specific place, but as you can see in your downloaded Facebook data, the log of stored IP addresses can go back years.
  • Location is a powerful signal for Facebook, allowing it to infer how you are connected to other people, even if you don’t identify them as family members, co-workers or lovers
  • All this data, plus the elements Facebook lets you control, can potentially reveal everything from your wealth to whether you are depressed.
  • That level of precision is at the heart of Facebook’s recent troubles: Just because Facebook uses it to accomplish a seemingly innocent task—in Mr. Zuckerberg’s words, making ad “experiences better, and more relevant”— doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be worried.
  • Regulators the world over are coming to similar conclusions: Our personal data has become too sensitive—and too lucrative—to be left without restraints in the hands of self-interested corporations.
  • Facebook, Alphabet Inc.’s Google and a host of smaller companies that compete with and support the giants in the digital ad space have become addicted to the kind of information that helps microtarget ads.
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'Its Own Domestic Army': How the G.O.P. Allied Itself With Militants - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tias-republicans-michigan.html michigan militia extremist gop politics trump history
shared by Javier E on 09 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • Following signals from President Donald J. Trump — who had tweeted “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” after an earlier show of force in Lansing — Michigan’s Republican Party last year welcomed the support of newly emboldened paramilitary groups and other vigilantes. Prominent party members formed bonds with militias or gave tacit approval to armed activists using intimidation in a series of rallies and confrontations around the state. That intrusion into the Statehouse now looks like a portent of the assault halfway across the country months later at the United States Capitol.
  • “We knew there would be violence,” said Representative Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat, about the Jan. 6 assault. Endorsing tactics like militiamen with assault rifles frightening state lawmakers “normalizes violence,” she told journalists last week, “and Michigan, unfortunately, has seen quite a bit of that.”
  • The chief organizer of that protest, Meshawn Maddock, on Saturday was elected co-chair of the state Republican Party — one of four die-hard Trump loyalists who won top posts.
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  • Ms. Maddock helped fill 19 buses to Washington for the Jan. 6 rally and defended the April armed intrusion into the Michigan Capitol. When Representative Rashida Tlaib, a Michigan Democrat, suggested at the time that Black demonstrators would never be allowed to threaten legislators like that, Ms. Maddock wrote on Twitter, “Please show us the ‘threat’?”“Oh that’s right you think anyone armed is threatening,” she continued. “It’s a right for a reason and the reason is YOU.”
  • The lead organizer of the April 30 armed protest, Ryan Kelley, a local Republican official, last week announced a bid for governor. “Becoming too closely aligned with militias — is that a bad thing?” he said in an interview.
  • In the first major protest in the country against stay-at-home orders, thousands of cars, trucks and even a few cement mixers jammed the streets around the Statehouse in Lansing, in what Ms. Maddock called Operation Gridlock. About 150 demonstrators left their vehicles to chant “lock her up” from the Capitol lawn — redirecting the 2016 battle cry about Hillary Clinton against Ms. Whitmer. A few waved Confederate flags. About a dozen heavily armed members of the Michigan Liberty Militia turned up as well
  • woven through Michigan’s militia timeline is a persistent strand of menace. In the early 20th century, the Black Legion, a paramilitary group that included public officials in Detroit and elsewhere, began as an offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan and was linked to numerous acts of murder and terrorism.
  • Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, who killed 168 people in the Oklahoma City bombing, were reported to have associated with militia members in Michigan, though Mr. Olson said they had been turned away because of their violent rhetoric. In the aftermath, militias were largely exiled to the fringes of conspiracy politics, preparing for imagined threats from the New World Order.
  • in recent years, as the Republican Party has drifted further to the right, these groups have gradually found a home there, said JoEllen Vinyard, an emeritus professor of history at Eastern Michigan University who has studied political extremism. Much of their cooperation is centered on defending gun ownership, she said
  • epublicans have controlled both houses of the Michigan Legislature for a decade and held the governor’s mansion for the eight years before Ms. Whitmer took office in 2019. Mr. Trump’s brash nationalism had alienated moderate Republicans and independents while pushing the party to the right.
  • Surrounded by militiamen about two weeks later in Grand Rapids, at an event also organized by Mr. Howland and Mr. Kelley, the senator said in a speech that they had taken him to task for his “jackasses” comment and he effectively retracted it.
  • Ms. Maddock declared Michigan a “tyranny” that night on the Fox News Channel, though she later distanced herself from the armed men. “Of course the militia is disappointing to me, the Confederate flag — look, they’re just idiots,
  • When local armed groups in Michigan began discussing more demonstrations, most Republicans shunned them at first. “They were scared of the word ‘militia,’” recalled Phil Robinson, a member of the Liberty Militia.
  • As the Legislature met on April 30 to vote on extending the governor’s restrictions, Mr. Kelley and his militia allies convened hundreds of protesters, including scores of armed men, some with assault weapons. One demonstrator hung a noose from the back of his pickup. Another held a sign warning that “tyrants get the rope.” Dozens entered the Capitol, some angrily demanding entrance to the lower chamber.
  • “We were harassed and intimidated so that we would not do our jobs,” said Representative Donna Lasinski, leader of the Democratic minority. Lawmakers were terrified, she added.
  • Mr. Maddock, the Republican legislator and Ms. Maddock’s husband, recognized some of the intruders and left the House floor to confer with them. “I like being around people with guns,” he later told The Detroit News.
  • Mr. Trump sided with them, too. “The Governor of Michigan should give a little, and put out the fire,” he tweeted. “These are very good people.”
  • Roughly a dozen to 18 armed groups are scattered across Michigan in mostly rural counties, their membership fluctuating with political and economic currents. Estimates of active members statewide are generally in the hundreds.
  • “I was able to see that they are patriots that love their country like the rest of us,” she said, adding that they are “all Republicans.”
  • Other Republicans also came to accept the presence of armed activists. Ms. Gatt, who took part in protests organized by Mr. Kelley and Ms. Maddock, said she felt “intimidated by the militia when I first started getting involved,” but soon changed her mind.
  • The state G.O.P. quickly jumped into the fight. In June, a nonprofit group linked to the Republican Party began providing more than $600,000 to a new advocacy group run in part by Ms. Maddock that was dedicated to fighting coronavirus restrictions. A charity tied to Mr. Shirkey kicked in $500,000.
  • Critics argued that race was an unstated factor in the battle over the stay-at-home order. The Republicans who rallied against the rules were mostly white residents of rural areas and outer suburbs. But more than 40 percent of the deaths in Michigan early on were among African-Americans, concentrated in Detroit, who made up less than 15 percent of the state’s population
  • The Black Lives Matter protests in Michigan were rarely violent or destructive, and the largest took place in Detroit. But Republicans in the rest of the state reacted with alarm to the flashes of violence elsewhere around the country, and President Trump reinforced their fears with his warnings about “antifa.”
  • “Liberals look for trouble and civil unrest and conservatives PREPARE for it,” Gary Eisen, a Republican state legislator and owner of a concealed-weapon training business, wrote on his Facebook page. “I thought maybe I would load up a few more mags,” he added, later saying he had been joking
  • He accused Democrats of encouraging violence. “The Democrats have got antifa; they have got BLM,” he said. “The Democrats championed all of this stuff from a leadership level.”
  • More prominent Michigan Republicans portrayed the Black Lives Matter movement as a looming threat, too. Ms. Maddock told the news site MLive.com that the “destruction” caused by the protests was “absolutely devastating” and “inexcusable.”
  • At the peak of the protests against police violence, though, Mr. Kelley’s American Patriot Council still aimed its sharpest attacks at Governor Whitmer and her stay-at-home order. It released public letters urging the federal authorities to arrest her for violating the Constitution by issuing a stay-at-home order. “Whitmer needs to go to prison,” Mr. Kelley declared in a video he posted on Facebook in early October that was later taken down. “She is a threat to our Republic.”
  • A few days later, federal agents arrested more than a dozen Michigan militiamen, charging them in a plot to kidnap the governor, put her on trial and possibly execute her.
  • It was the culmination of months of mobilization by armed groups, accompanied by increasingly threatening language, and Mr. Trump declined to condemn the plotters. “People are entitled to say, ‘Maybe it was a problem, maybe it wasn’t,’” he declared at a rally in Michigan.
  • Hours after the Nov. 3 election, Ms. Maddock wrote on Facebook: “35k ballots showed up out of nowhere at 3 AM. Need help.” She urged Trump supporters to rush to “monitor the vote” at a ballot-counting center in Detroit. “Report to room 260 STAT.”
  • Mr. Kelley, with Mr. Howland and their armed militia allies, showed up for a rowdy protest outside the ballot counting. Later that month Mr. Kelley told a rally outside the Statehouse that the coronavirus was a ruse to persuade the public to “believe Joe Biden won the election,” The Lansing State Journal reported. One woman held a sign saying “ARREST THE VOTE COUNTERS.”
  • When attempts to stop the counting failed, Ms. Maddock in December led 16 Republican electors trying to push into the Michigan Capitol to disrupt the casting of Democratic votes in the Electoral College. During a “Stop the Steal” news conference in Washington the next day, she vowed to “keep fighting.”
  • Mr. Kelley and Mr. Howland were filmed outside the U.S. Capitol during the riot. Both men said they did not break any laws, and argued that the event was not “an insurrection” because the participants were patriots. “I was there to support the sitting president,” Mr. Kelley said.
  • Mr. Shirkey, the Michigan Senate leader who came around to work with the militias, declined to follow the movement behind Mr. Trump all the way to the end. Summoned to the White House in November, Mr. Shirkey refused the president’s entreaties to try to annul his Michigan defeat.
  • But in an interview last week, the lawmaker said he nonetheless empathized with the mob that attacked Congress.“It was people feeling oppressed, and depressed, responding to what they thought was government just stealing their lives from them,” he said. “And I’m not endorsing and supporting their actions, but I understand where they come from.”
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Coronavirus Surge in Mail Voting Likely to Lead to More Rejected Ballots - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...e-rejected-ballots-11601827201 voting wsj trump politics policy crisis us
shared by leilamulveny on 06 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Around 1% of them were rejected nationally in the 2016 general election, according to the federal U.S. Election Assistance Commission. Common reasons include ballots being received after the deadline or voters not signing the ballot envelope or supplying a signature that doesn’t match state records.
  • The state’s Supreme Court ruled last month that those mailed without the secrecy envelope, also called “naked ballots,” should be disqualified.
  • Republican and Democratic parties are engaged in legal battles in many states over voting rules.
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  • “Many voters are casting their ballots by mail for the first time, so some mistakes are expected,”
  • North Carolina, along with more than 30 other states, offer voters who make certain errors that would invalidate their ballots—such as missing or mismatched signatures—a chance to correct them.
  • . For the presidential race, the Trump and Biden campaigns have vowed full-scale efforts to monitor voting and ballot counting
  • In North Carolina, more than 300,000 people have already successfully cast ballots by mail in the general election through Thursday, more than the total cast by mail in 2016. Still, around 3.4% of ballots returned had errors, so far slightly higher than four years ago, the State Board of Elections said.
  • In the June primary in New York City, thousands of ballots were rejected for not being postmarked on time, for voters failing to sign the backs of envelopes and for other reasons, according to candidates
  • Mr. Smith’s research has found mail-in ballot rejections tended to disproportionately affect younger or inexperienced voters and racial minorities in previous elections. Those voters generally lean Democratic.
  • For the general election, voters have already cast 2,105,553 mail-in ballots and 94,338 early in-person votes, based on data from 22 states collected by the Associated Press as of Friday.
  • Democrats are urging voters to vote early, whether by mail or in person. “Ensuring voters know all the multiple options for voting—in person and by mail—is a central focus down the stretch,” said Biden campaign spokesman T.J. Ducklo.
  • Academic studies—such as ones from Dartmouth College and New York University’s School of Law—have found no evidence of widespread fraud in recent U.S. elections.
  • estimated in a publicly released letter to state lawmakers that 100,000 voters statewide could be disenfranchised this election over these “naked ballots.”
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A Revealing Look At Zuckerberg | Talking Points Memo - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...a-revealing-look-at-zuckerberg facebook zuckerberg ego winning profit right-wing vietnam
shared by Javier E on 27 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • these tradeoffs get to the heart of Facebook’s problem and the heart of what the site is. The harm is inherent to Facebook’s business model. When you find ways to reduce harm they’re almost always at the expense of engagement metrics the maximization of which are the goal of basically everything Facebook does. The comparison may be a loaded or contentious one. But it is a bit like the Tobacco companies. The product is the problem, not how it’s used or abused. It’s the product. That’s a challenging place for a company to be.
  • Facebook now makes up a very big part of the whole global information ecosystem. In many countries around the world Facebook for all intents and purposes is the Internet. The weather patterns of information as we might call them are heavily shaped by Facebook’s algorithms and the various tweaks and adjustments it makes to them in different countries. Facebook may not create the misinformation or hate speech or hyper-nationalist frenzies but its algorithms help drive them.
  • the guiding light for those algorithms is first to maximize engagement.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • That part we know. That’s the business model. But in a different way they are driven by goals and drives of this one guy, Mark Zuckerberg
  • my read is that it was more the ‘winning’ part than the money, though of course the two become somewhat indistinguishable. So Zuckerberg is a near free speech absolutist, as the story conveys. Except when it might mean going dark in a medium-to-large-sized country.
  • One interesting anecdote in the article comes out of Vietnam, where Facebook is estimated to make about $1 billion a year. A few years ago Vietnam demanded that Facebook start censoring anti-government posts or really any criticism of the government or be taken off line in the country. Essentially Vietnam insisted that Facebook delegate content moderation within Vietnam to the government of Vietnam. Zuckerberg personally made the decision to agree to the demands.
  • his article and much else makes pretty clear that it really is still Mark Zuckerberg that runs the show. And what drives him? This article and much else suggests that what shapes Zuckerberg’s goals are perhaps three things in descending order: 1) to win (in all its dimensions), 2) to maximize profits and 3) to cater to the complaints of the right which is most effective and aggressive about complaining about purported mistreatment.
  • He apparently justified this on the reasoning that Facebook disappearing in Vietnam would take away the speech rights of more people than the censorship would. If that sounds like self-justifying nonsense thank you for reading closely.
  • this is just too much power for one person to have. But it’s more that the win, win, win!!! mentality which certainly lots of CEOS and especially Founder-CEOS have in spades is here harnessed to an engine that does a lot of damage.
  • Back in 2018 I wrote about a distinct but related issue. No big tech company has been worse at launching off on new ventures or ideas, having whole cottage industries grow up around those ventures, and then shifting gears and having countless partner businesses go belly up
  • there is a related indifference or oblivious to the impact or social costs of what Facebook does, if in many case only because of its sheer scale.
  • This isn’t just corporate culture, or perhaps Zuckerberg himself. A lot of it is tied to Facebook’s relationship to the rest of the web. Google is structurally much more connected to and reliant on the open web. Facebook is much more a closed system which remains highly profitable regardless of the chaos it may create around it.
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