Jacob Appelbaum, Tor developer and Wikileaks staffer, resigns amid sex abuse claims Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow Appelbaum, whose work has put him in the crosshairs of his own government and foreign states, resigned from the Tor project on Friday, accompanied by a short note from Tor executive director Shari Steele. Tor Developer Jacob Appelbaum Resigns Amid … Read more
NSA and GCHQ’s crappy Big Data techniques may be killing thousands of innocents Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow Researchers have taken a second look at the NSA SKYNET leaks, as well as theGCHQ data-mining problem book first published on Boing Boing, and concluded that the spy agencies have made elementary errors in their machine-learning techniques, which … Read more
Snapchat: The King of Millennial Micro-Moments All Facebook In 2015, Snapchat put the world on notice that the app is an advertising force to be reckoned with — maybe the advertising force to be reckoned with. NamedAdweek‘s hottest digital brand, Snapchat commanded a reported $750,000 for brands to place ads, and the millennial darling reported more … Read more
The Most-Edited Wikipedia Pages Over The Last 15 Years FiveThirtyEight » Features by Andrew Flowers Wikipedia will turn 15 years old tomorrow. The free online collaborative encyclopedia has grown explosively: from fewer than 500,000 English-language articles in 2005 to more than 5 million in 2015. And as the site has grown, so have the edits to … Read more
Twitter’s Policy Reboot: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly EFF.org Updates by Wafa Ben Hassine January 12, 2016 Update: It is important to note that some of the language that was added to the Twitter Rules on December 30, 2015 is not entirely new and was recycled from other Twitter Help pages, such as the … Read more
181,000 drones have been registered with the FAA in just 14 days The Next Web by Matthew Hussey Over the holidays, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) made drone owners register their vehicles. Since that announcement, more than 180,000 drones have been added to the FAA’s database, says CNN. Dutch reject ‘encryption backdoors’ BBC News | Europe | World Edition The … Read more
IETF approves HTTP error code 451 for Internet censorship Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow The 451 HTTP error code, first proposed in 2012 as a tribute to Ray Bradbury’s classic novel is now an IETF standard and is the preferred error message for a server to send to a browser when content is blocked for legal … Read more
Top 10 Media Publishers for Nov. 2015: Billboard Dominates Twitter Engagement All Facebook In November, U.S. media publishers accounted for 1.4 billion total social actions (likes, comments, shares, retweets, dislikes), with 687 million from Instagram, 632 million actions from Facebook, 51 million from Twitter, and 13 million from YouTube (excluding views). The media publishing industry represents … Read more
The Martian and the Cult of Science Slate Articles by Rachel E. Gross Ridley Scott’s The Martian opens with an unsolvable problem: It’s 2030, and the crew of NASA’s Mars spaceship the Hermes has just left astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon) stranded on Mars. Watney’s situation is not good. Utterly alone, wounded by spaceship debris, and … Read more
Goto’s mother said she could not find the words to describe her son’s ‘very sad death’ [Reuters] Japan mourns as ISIL says journalist is beheaded AL JAZEERA ENGLISH (IN DEPTH) Video purportedly showing the death of Kenji Goto leads to condemnation globally and new fears in the pacifist nation. The BuzzFeed Editorial Standards And Ethics … Read more
Journalist Barrett Brown sentenced to 63 months in federal prison, must pay $890K in restitution Boing Boing by Xeni Jardin The intelligence and security journalist has already served more than two years in prison for charges related to his proximity to sources within the hacktivist entity known as Anonymous. Read the rest Barrett Brown sentenced to 5 Years … Read more
Silk Road Trial Becomes Case Study for Law Enforcement Online All Facebook by Kimberlee Morrison The trial of Ross Ulbricht, alleged admin of The Silk Road (a Tor Network marketplace for the sale and trade of illegal goods), is expected to begin in New York today. The public nature of the trial could result in much discussion … Read more
Detekt: A New Malware Detection Tool That Can Expose Illegitimate State Surveillance EFF.org Updates by Eva Galperin Recent years have seen a boom in the adoption of surveillance technology by governments around the world, including spyware that provides its purchasers the unchecked ability to target remote Internet users’ computers, to read their personal emails, listen in … Read more
Aaron Swartz was no criminal Boing Boing by Dan Purcell Dan Purcell, one of Swartz’ lawyers, writes about the spiteful and unreasonable charges that led to his suicide—and MIT’s gutless support of his prosecutors. Read the rest Porn stars use their assets to discuss net neutrality Mashable! by Adario Strange The debate over net neutrality and the fight … Read more