Cyberculture agenda: “A Victory for Privacy and Transparency: HRW v. DEA… “Facebook, Twitter and Google pledge to increase hate speech moderation efforts in Germany…

In a victory for millions of people in the U.S. who have placed telephone calls to locations overseas, EFF and Human Rights Watch have confirmed that the Drug Enforcement Administration’s practice of collecting those records in bulk has stopped and that the only bulk database of those records has been destroyed.

Facebook real name
Facebook’s real name policy saga has been rumbling on for more than three years now, when it first claimed this wasn’t going to rolled out on a broad scale. Since then, they’ve asked our US editor Natt Garun to provide a pronunciation of her name, been ordered to allow Germans to use whatever name they want, shut down someone who was truly called Ai Overdrive and been phucked over by someone not called Phuc. Given the company decided to do this in the first place because its share price dropped after it was revealed there were 83 million fake Facebook accounts online, it’s not…
FACEBOOK FLAG FILTER
Today in Germany, Facebook, Google and Twitter reached an accord in an attempt to control hate speech on each of the respective platforms. All have agreed to delete content that constitutes hate speech within 24 hours. The new agreement makes it easier for users or anti-racism groups to report hate speech violations to specialists at the three companies. The deal should ease some of Facebook’s tension in Germany, where it has seen a total of four executives investigated in the past few months. Its European head, Martin Ott, was the latest. After World War II, Germany has long had some of the…

From the 1990s to 2013, the DEA secretly and illegally collected billions of records of Americans’ international calls to hundreds of countries around the world. In April 2015, we filed a lawsuit on behalf of our client, Human Rights Watch, challenging the constitutionality of the program and seeking to have the records purged from the government’s possession.

Slack Is Investing $80 Million in Slack Bot Startups

Slack doesn’t want chat to be just chat. It wants to be the way you do everything at work.

Hacker Lexicon: Botnets, the Zombie Computer Armies That Earn Hackers Millions

Botnets are machines infected with malware that allows an attacker to take remote control of them individually or simultaneously.

This Cat Calendar Is Making the Russian Orthodox Church Go Viral

The October page of the quirky calendar features hieromonk Theodorit and his cat Monya. Image from pravmir.ru.

The October page of the quirky calendar features hieromonk Theodorit and his cat Monya. Image from pravmir.ru.

Why 2015 was the year of emoji

Emoji-thumb

Let’s do an experiment. Grab your phone and open up your text messages. Scroll through a text thread until you land on an emoji. Chances are you didn’t have to scroll very far if at all, right?

Online media: personal data collection as a source of revenue?

The limits of the ad-based revenue model are starting to show. Should we worry about online publishers getting involved in personal data collection in order to maintain income?

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Online advertising process as described by Internet Advertising Bureau, October 2015.

‘We are all Muslim’: Michael Moore is starting a movement against Trump

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Director Michael Moore stood in front of Trump Towers on Wednesday holding a sign denouncing the anti-Muslim proposed policies of presidential hopeful Donald Trump.

 

Anonymous Launches #OpTrump to Teach the Donald a Lesson

Anonymous Launches #OpTrump to Teach the Donald a Lesson

It’s a weird, wide world out there.

The Hacktivist War on ISIS?

There’s a reason Anonymous is named after a tactic, not a cause. Hackers acting under the Anonymous banner tend to share certain values, like Internet freedom and anti-authoritarianism. But the purpose and motivation of any given Anonymous operation isn’t always obvious. When Anonymous went up against the Church of Scientology and security software maker HBGary, the dynamic was pretty clear: These groups had antagonized Anonymous (taunting it, in HBGary’s case) and Anonymous wanted to strike back. Anonymous did so by trying to expose the secrets and damage the reputations of its targets.  In the Steubenville rape case, when a member of Anonymous outed the then-alleged and since-convicted rapists, the motivation was one of outrage, but the tactic of exposure remained the same.

Electronic Surveillance of Mobile Devices

Explores the challenges surrounding law enforcement use of user data collected through mobile phones and describes a prototype tool that could aid in understanding what types of mobile data exist and applicable legal protections.
We’re always connected, we’re constantly tuned in to the latest news and updates – information reaches us at a much faster rate than it has in generations past. But that connectivity, and our growing reliance on our social media feeds, could also be used against us.
You’ve got 140 characters per tweet – if you want to make the most of your messages you need to make every one count.
Screen Shot 2015-12-10 at 11.21.05
Working on making Buffer an inclusive place where all kinds of people feel they belong and thrive is one of my favorite things. It’s a unique time to be working on diversity goals at a tech startup. On the one hand, there is quite a bit of work to do to make the strides we’d all like to make. On the other hand, there is so much hope and so many cool innovations, programs, and even tools that can help move us toward where we want to be. We’ve shared a lot of our thoughts, strategies and mistakes so far.…

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