“Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology joined forces to award $750,000 to seven organizations, including ones that help detect deepfakes and promote open access of government data. Last week, Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and the MIT Media Lab announced seven winners of their first “AI and the News: An Open… Continue Reading
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Monthly Archives: March 2019
Google training journalists to identify fake news
Google blog: “In the last year our News Lab has trained nearly 300,000 journalists in person and online around the world on digital tools for journalism, with a goal to reach 500,000 journalists by 2020. We’ve partnered with the International Fact Check Network and dozens of newsrooms worldwide to quell the spread of misinformation, especially… Continue Reading
New paid Apple News service said to feature The Wall Street Journal
The New York Times: ““The Wall Street Journal plans to join a new paid subscription news service run by Apple, according to two people familiar with the plans, as other publishers chafe at the terms that the Silicon Valley company is demanding of its partners,” Mike Isaac reports for The New York Times. “Other major… Continue Reading
The Sad State of Happiness in the United States and the Role of Digital Media
“This is the 7th World Happiness Report. The first was released in April 2012 in support of a UN High level meeting on “Wellbeing and Happiness: Defining a New Economic Paradigm”. That report presented the available global data on national happiness and reviewed related evidence from the emerging science of happiness, showing that the quality… Continue Reading
Public Sees an America in Decline on Many Fronts
Looking to the Future, Public Sees an America in Decline on Many Fronts – Majorities predict a weaker economy, a growing income divide, a degraded environment and a broken political system “When Americans peer 30 years into the future, they see a country in decline economically, politically and on the world stage. While a narrow… Continue Reading
Facebook Stored Hundreds of Millions of User Passwords in Plain Text for Years
Krebs on Security – “Hundreds of millions of Facebook users had their account passwords stored in plain text and searchable by thousands of Facebook employees — in some cases going back to 2012, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. Facebook says an ongoing investigation has so far found no indication that employees have abused access to this data.… Continue Reading
Seeing Justice Done: The Impact of the Judge on Sentencing
“The recent sentencing of Paul Manafort by federal judges in two different district courts has renewed interest in the sentencing practices of individual judges. Countless studies over the years have documented a basic fact: while decisions should be determined by the law and the facts, in reality there is a third very important force at… Continue Reading
It’s Scary How Much Personal Data People Leave on Used Laptops and Phones
Gizmodo: “A recent experiment by Josh Frantz, a senior security consultant at Rapid7, suggests that users are taking few if any steps to protect their private information before releasing their used devices back out into the wild. For around six months, he collected used desktop, hard disks, cellphones and more from pawn shops near his… Continue Reading
Who Still Buys Wite-Out, and Why?
Go on – admit it – you still use this product after even after all these years (fill in the blank) – I also still use that nifty correction tape roller – Via The Atlantic: Correction fluids have improbably outlasted the typewriter and survived the rise of the digital office. “…The sticky, white fluid and… Continue Reading
Experts, authors and Guardian readers who illegally download books assess the damage
The Guardian – The UK Intellectual Property Office estimates that 17% of ebooks are consumed illegally. “…The UK government’s Intellectual Property Office estimates that 17% of ebooks are consumed illegally. Generally, pirates tend to be from better-off socioeconomic groups, and aged between 30 and 60. Many use social media to ask for tips when their… Continue Reading
Politico – The Federal Courts Are Running An Online Scam
The website everyone uses to follow the Mueller probe is a hopeless, costly disaster. By Seamus Hughes, deputy director of George Washington University’s Program on Extremism. He also runs a company providing services on navigating the federal court records system. “Every day, dozens of hungry reporters lurk inside something called PACER, the online records system… Continue Reading
Database leaks 250K legal documents, some marked ‘not designated for publication’
ZDNet: “A database containing 257,287 legal documents, with some marked as “not designated for publication,” was left exposed on the public internet without a password, allowing anyone to access and download a treasure trove of sensitive legal materials. The database, which was left online for roughly two weeks, contained unpublished legal documents relating to US… Continue Reading
