NBC: Nextdoor gave me neighborhood paranoia. The only cure was meeting my neighbors in real life instead of online.. “I joined the website Nextdoor.com this past spring, after a friend said it was better than Craigslist for buying used furniture. Having been a ‘neighbor’ on Nextdoor for the last six months, I will add that […]
MIT Technology Review: Seven New Year’s resolutions for Big Tech in 2019. “Every January, Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, likes to go public with a resolution for the year ahead. His 2018 one to ‘fix Facebook’ has clearly been an epic fail, given the stream of privacy scandals that have dogged the social-media behemoth over the […]
Ars Technica: Feds won’t build license plate database—they just want access to one. “Just over a year ago, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) sought a contractor to build and operate a national license plate reader database. After some controversy, that plan was eventually pulled. According to a new ad posted Thursday, the agency now […]
Phys .org: French start-up offers ‘dark web’ compass, but not for everyone . “For years criminal websites shrouded in secrecy have thrived beyond the reach of traditional search engines, but a group of French engineers has found a way to navigate this dark web—a tool they don’t want to fall into the wrong hands.”
Slate: Art From 1923 Is About to Enter the Public Domain. According to Critics From 1923, Here’s the Worst of It. “The vast majority of art created in 1923 was terrible, just like any other year, and some of it should probably be left right where it is. To find out which newly-public-domain works from […]
Ars Technica: Book tells the inside story of how Reddit came to be the Internet’s “id”. “Entrepreneurs Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman famously founded Reddit as college roommates in 2005. Tech journalist Christine Lagorio-Chafkin’s recent book, We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet’s Culture Laboratory, follows their sometimes rocky […]
New York Times: Facebook Data Scandals Stoke Criticism That a Privacy Watchdog Too Rarely Bites. “Last spring, soon after Facebook acknowledged that the data of tens of millions of its users had improperly been obtained by the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, a top enforcement official at the Federal Trade Commission drafted a memo about […]
Mashable: 4 free sites for creating your own comics. “In the days of cold, hard newsprint, only people who could draw were successful comic strip authors. In some cases, this resulted in comic strips that had very nice pictures, but weren’t all that funny (cough, Blondie). Thankfully, the internet has taught us not to accept […]
MakeTechEasier: Five Ways to Easily Convert Audio Files to Text. “There are so many uses out there for text-to-speech software as well as speech-to-text software. Whether you want to narrate stories, give dictation or use voice search, these apps help you do a good job. However, there are times when you need to convert an […]
Engadget: Bangladesh shuts off mobile internet ahead of election. “The Bangladeshi government isn’t just counting on Facebook and Twitter crackdowns to protect its December 30th parliamentary election. The country’s Telecommunication Regulatory Commission has shut down 3G and 4G mobile data to ‘prevent rumors and propaganda’ from skewing the vote. The measure took effect immediately and […]
Ecns: China’s first Mongolian language search engine begins operation. “Northern China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region launched China’s first Mongolian language search engine Friday, according to the region’s ethnic affairs committee.”
BetaNews: Major US newspapers hit by cyberattack, disrupting printing and distribution. “A number of major US newspapers — including the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Wall Street Journal and New York Times — have been hit by a cyberattack that is said to originate from another country.”
Washington Post: 2018 was the year of online hate. Meet the people whose lives it changed . “It cost a school-shooting victim the safety of home. It cost an athlete the joy of a victory. It cost the family of a gay teen a battle with their community. In 2018, online hate spiraled into an […]
Phys .org: Austria to press ahead with digital tax: chancellor . “Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz vowed Saturday to press ahead with a tax on large internet and technology companies, following France’s example, as the European Union struggles to finalise a new EU-wide levy.”
Wired: Going Dumb: My Year With a Flip Phone. “We are the first generation of cyborgs, and our soft, slack bodies are rejecting the foreign technology. You can feel the invasion, a monstrous new lifeforce-leeching limb—the glass plus silicon multiplied by cloudmagic that equals the thousand-dollar device sitting pretty in your pocket. Everything else, even […]