Notes From An Emergency by Maciej Ceglowski ...their software and algorithms affect the lives of billions of people. Decisions about how this software works are not under any kind of democratic control. In the best case, they are being made by idealistic young people in California with imperfect knowledge of life in a faraway place like Germany. In the worst case, they are simply being read out of a black-box algorithm trained on God knows what data. This is a…
Internet
Social Media, Rutherford B. Hayes, and the plot to steal the US election
Posted on 15th April 2018( ) Thank you Nicola for the link.…
Defending Internet Freedom through Decentralization: Back to the Future? by The Center for Civic Media & The Digital Currency Initiative MIT Media Lab, August 2017. Chelsea Barabas, Neha Narula, Ethan Zuckerman (dci.mit.edu) In this report, we explore two important ways structurally decentralized systems could help address the risks of mega-platform consolidation: First, these systems can help users directly publish and discover content directly, without intermediaries, and thus without censorship. All of the systems we evaluate advertise censorship-resistance as a major…
We cut the cord years ago—where we live, over the air signals are good enough for the broadcast networks, and combining Netflix & Hulu Plus gave us more than enough viewing options. Even subscribing to both of those, we cut our TV bill by a little more than 80 percent. Throw in Amazon Prime, and we’re still saving money month to month.David J. Loehr A few years ago I considered canceling the cable port of our Comcast XFINITY subscription but…
The discovered weakness could allow hackers to spy on the targets by watching video and "hot-mike" audio on the cameras, inject fake videos into the surveillance startup in an effort to hide their malicious activities and use the compromised system to attack network. via Web-based DropCam Surveillance Systems Vulnerable to Hackers Ah. Yes, the Internet of Things. The device runs an outdated and unpatched version of an open source Unix toolkit BusyBox, that may not even receive updates, and the…