Friday, March 16, 2018

Web is over 29 years Young: Long before Google & MEdia Dragon

The samizdat web is older than the Daughters of the Velvet Revolutions and even EK of Cyber fame ...
(So You Think You Know About the Velvet Revolution - LivingPrague)

Kottke who writes the living story of the web Is Twenty 20 XX ...

Why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me...
- J.K. Rowling

 If you must write, you must do it in the face of all opposition. […] Do not spend too much more time on culture & reading, these are traps. When everything conspires to make the thing impossible, when you are tired, worried, with no time, or money, it is then that things get done.
~ Samuel Beckett to Claude Raimbourg, 16 May 1954

 They say that Christopher Columbus was the first economist. When he left to discover America, he didn't know where he was going; when he got there he didn't know where he was; and it was all done on a government grant.

Quote of Bondi Iceberg's proportions:
"Terrorism financing is an evolving challenge, so fighting it requires innovative and sophisticated solutions that advance faster than the criminals do ..."

Congratulations to the overall winner of #aseancodeathon, Project Iceberg, as well as to all other winners and participants whose innovations help fight cybercrime. #aseaninaus
https://twitter.com/AngusTaylorMP/status/974435721476915200


The Darkest and Coldest Web 

OUR NEW ADVICE MEdia Dragon COLUMNISTS REFUSE TO LEARN FROM THEIR MISTAKES, BUT MAYBE YOU CAN  

Tillerson


This week AP photographer Andrew Harnik was covering Rex Tillerson: “As Tillerson reached the end of the hallway I moved next to the wall and photographed him with a zoom lens and framed him with his reflection in the marble on the wall. Once I was back to my computer, I saw the exit sign hanging above him.”


Kenneth Rogoff concerned by the dark side of the technology revolution Australian Financial Review

The Music of the Beatles | by Ned Rorem | The New York Review of Books

WHY are the Beatles superior? It is easy to say that most of their competition (like most everything everywhere) is junk. More important, their superiority is consistent: each of the songs from their last three albums is memorable. The best of these memorable tunes—and the best is a large percentage (Here, There and Everywhere, Good Day Sunshine, Michelle, Norwegian Wood)—compare with those by composers from great eras of song: Monteverdi, Schumann, Poulenc.






Speech: Frances Adamson on professionalism
"At first blush, it might seem incongruous for a diplomat to be asked to offer some thoughts to the 26th Australian Orthodontic Congress. ... A cynic might argue that the most use a diplomat generally has for his or her teeth is to have something to lie through." (DFAT)

 


DAVID FRENCH: Civility Isn’t Surrender. Nope. And as Robert Heinlein observed, you can be a gentleman and still be a cast-iron son of a bitch when it’s called for.

But I think it’s a fair critique that too many conservatives have seen surrender as a form of civility.



Machines Are Getting Better at Literary Analysis


Algorithms that identify the voices of authors and characters should be celebrated, not scornedDoubtless Mr Keating would have been dismayed to read “The Transformation of Gender in English-Language Fiction”, a paper published last month in the Journal of Cultural Analytics. The authors—Ted Underwood and Sabrina Lee of the University of Illinois, and David Bamman of the University of California, Berkeley—have trained a series of machine-learning models on a broad corpus of 104,000 works of fiction written between 1700 and 2010. The database, which the academics compiled from the HathiTrust Digital Library and the Chicago Novel Corpus, is enormous but not exhaustive. It contains almost all classic novels, but only about half of the books that have been listed in Publishers Weekly, an American trade magazine. Nonetheless, the authors believe that it is a reasonable representation of the overall market for fiction, since the historical share of female authors is similar to that in Publishers Weekly. The algorithms they have trained on the data have allowed them to explore a range of gendered issues (see chart).



  • Speaking for Myself

    Death comes in all sizes / — sequoia, oak, and elm / maple, birch, fir, and pine, / elephants and whales / bumble bees and snails, / the Jews in the ovens, / Armenians slaughtered, all the genocides before / and since. I am also dead ..read more
In praise of profanity. Swearing helps us manages stress and build trust. In fact, with proper tone and timing, it’s an  art  
Long before Google


Tim Berners-Lee – It’s dangerous having a handful of companies control how ideas and opinions are shared. A regulator may be needed. “Today [March 12, 2018], the world wide web turns 29. This year marks a milestone in the web’s history: for the first time, we will cross the tipping point when more than half of the world’s population will be online. When I share this exciting news with people, I tend to get one of two concerned reactions:
  1. How do we get the other half of the world connected?
  2. Are we sure the rest of the world wants to connect to the web we have today?
The threats to the web today are real – from misinformation and questionable political advertising to a loss of control over our personal data. But I remain committed to making sure the web is a free, open, creative space – for everyone. That vision is only possible if we get everyone online, and make sure the web works for people. I founded the Web Foundation to fight for the web’s future. Here’s where we must focus our efforts…”


Stephen Hawking - An appreciation by Lord Martin Rees | University of Cambridge


Italy’s first black senator

Book_burn

Computer Weekly March 8, 2018 
The London Digital Security Centre (LDSC) has announced a pilot of the UK’s first police-backed cyber security certification scheme. The national scheme is being launched in partnership with Secured by Design (SBD), the national police crime prevention initiative, and is supported by The Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (Mopac), alongside The Metropolitan and City of London Police. At the heart of the two-part certification scheme is Cyber Essentials, a government-backed industry-supported scheme to help organisations protect themselves against common online threats. Guy Ferguson, chief executive officer at Secured by Design, said: “Police crime prevention initiatives have always responded to developing and emerging crime patterns with innovation and creativity. “We are delighted to be working closely with the London Digital Security Centre to develop new techniques that will better support people and businesses online,” he said.



The Washington Post March 6, 2018
The United Nations panel enforcing trade sanctions against North Korea has been hacked repeatedly by a “nation-state actor,” compromising the email accounts of four current or former members of the panel and a “considerable number” of email messages, according to a U.N. incident report. The Post reviewed a heavily redacted draft of a forthcoming report from the U.N. Panel of Experts that includes the U.N. account of the attack, elements of which had been previously reported. 



Attempts at digital espionage and online political manipulation in Europe are on the rise both in number and in complexity, the Netherlands’ main intelligence agency said Tuesday in its annual report. Adding its voice to fears around the world of a rise in covert digital influence and espionage, the Dutch General Intelligence and Security Service said in its 2017 report a growing number of foreign powers are using cyber espionage “to acquire information that they use for (geo) political gain.” It highlighted Russia, which it said is “extremely driven in the covert digital influencing of (political) decision making processes.” It added that the agency also has seen similar attempts by China.


Making up for lost time: the NYT’s ‘Overlooked’ project

David Beard brings you the new and notable.
 
“It’s sort of like the Virginia Woolf quote, ‘Anonymous was a woman.’”

That’s Jessica Bennett of the New York Times, explaining the paper’s hard light on its own gender bias in obituaries since 1851 — and a first, small step taken Thursday to rectify that. Bennett helped start the “Overlooked” project, which launched with the obituaries of 15 women who should have had been recognized when they died. The Times is asking its readers for more suggestions.
Bennett’s goal: Anonymous no more.
These women “didn’t get their due in the cultural framework, the cultural record,” she told the WNYC-hosted public radio show, “The Takeaway.” Many of their accomplishments, she said, were wrongly attributed to men.
The disparity in gender in obituaries has long been criticized — and it’s a long road to ending that gap. This chart, based on a Mother Jones study, showed the obituary gender gap in 2012. “If a notable woman dies and a major national newspaper doesn’t report it,” writer Dana Liebelson asked, “did it actually happen?”

NYT Obits editor Bill McDonald, writing separately about why most obits have been about white men, admits: “Perhaps the paper’s selection standards in eras past unfairly valued the achievements of the white, male mainstream over those of minorities and women who may have been more on the margins.”
Take a moment to bookmark the Overlooked page — or check out its “new” obits of Ida B. Wells, Qiu Jin or Diane Arbus. The Overlooked project will be growing.
Now, pardon the interruption, here are other stories, some of them overlooked, that you may need to know today.

Quick hits

WHEN TRUTH DOESN’T PREVAIL: False news moved through Twitter “farther, faster, deeper and more broadly” than the truth, according to a study of tweets from 2006 to 2017. The basis of the MIT study? The Twitter rumor mill. Even the farthest-reaching true rumors rarely spread to more than 1,000 people. But the top 1 percent of falsehoods routinely had audiences of 1,000 to 100,000 people, the study authors reported.
LOCAL SCOOP GOES NATIONWIDE: Last week, The Citizen Times, the local newspaper in Asheville, North Carolina, obtained and published online the bodycam video of police beating a black man on his way home from work. It created an uproar. One police officer has quit, the police chief has offered to resign and the FBI is now investigating the attack, which began as a purported jaywalking stop. In last week’s story, the Gannett newspaper knocked down the whole jaywalking angle, noting the “stop” took place near a ballpark where “hundreds of pedestrians cross Biltmore Avenue without using a crosswalk before and after baseball games.”
‘THE NEWS FORGETS, VERY QUICKLY’: How Parkland students moved beyond talk to action — on protests in Tallahassee, marches to Washington and calls to boycott some of America’s biggest companies.
UNHOLY ALLIANCE: Why do blue-collar voters like self-dealing billionaires who think of public service as a profit center? Is there any consequence of greed in the Trump coalition? Amy Chua examines the connection between “the traditional, deeply rooted American dream and the glitziest, celebrity-obsessed aspects of modern culture.”
UNHOLY EDITORIALIST: He was, as Quartz once put it, “the Russian oligarch who paid Trump’s former campaign manager to help Putin.” Oleg Deripaska, who agreed in 2006 to pay Paul Manafort $10 million a year, seems an unlikely candidate to gain an op-ed perch to criticize special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s probe into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election. Yet the conservative Daily Caller gave the foreign agent and close associate of Vladimir Putin his own mouthpiece for Mueller bashing. Both sides?
WHILE WE’RE ON THE TOPIC: Deripaska’s former employee, Paul Manafort, pleaded not guilty on Thursday to tax and fraud charges in the second Russia case brought against him by Mueller. Manafort must wear a GPS monitor and be confined to his home until trial this summer. His business partner, Rick Gates, has pleaded guilty in D.C. to conspiracy and lying to the FBI.

IN RELATED NEWS: Russian trolls flooded social media in America to try to stop Trump from appointing Mitt Romney as secretary of state, the Wall Street Journal reported. Moscow also organized a protest of Romney outside Trump Tower to persuade the president-elect to choose someone friendlier to Putin’s ambitions, such as Rex Tillerson. // Also, mainstream media unwittingly amplified comments from Russian propagandists, believing they were merely Americans who supported Trump, CJR reports.






THE NOTTING HILL MOVE: Everybody wants to talk to Peter Thiel, a supporter of Trump in his 2016 campaign and Facebook board member during the Russia controversy. Recode’s Kara Swisher tried the Julia Roberts approach in inviting the Silicon Valley icon her tech conference in May. Adapting the actress’s key scene in the 1990s Hugh Grant romcom, Swisher tweeted:” I’m just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to outdebate her at a fancy confab.” She pledged “frank hardball,” not this NYT “softball” or “knitting circle.” No word from Swisher nor from Thiel, who has tweeted once.
HAHA: Now we know why Amazon’s Alexa is creeping out owners by a jarring cackling at seemingly random moments. The voice-activated streaming speaker device mistakenly “hears” an audio command it interprets as “Alexa, laugh,” the company said. The solution? Changing the audio prompt to “Alexa, can you laugh?) Slightly related fact: Alexa’s creator,” Amazon chief and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, also has an unsettling laugh. His biographer, Brad Stone, calls it “a startling, pulse-pounding bray that he leans into while craning his neck back, closing his eyes, and letting loose with a guttural roar that sounds like a cross between a mating elephant seal and a power tool."
FOUNDING FATHER TWITTER ISSUES: How can President Trump not be bothered by troublesome Twitter followers but still be in the good graces of the First Amendment? A judge has a suggestion: Mute, don’t block, those tweets. Constitutional scholars: Is it really that easy?