Every year, I record a short podcast with my daughter, Poesy. Originally, we'd just sing Christmas carols, but with Poesy being nearly 12, we've had a moratorium on singing. This… Read the rest of the article: My annual Daddy-Daughter Xmas Podcast: interview with an 11-year-old
The election of the violent Philippine autocrat Rodrigo Duterte and the subsequent widespread extrajudicial killings, torture, and other crimes against humanity was a blow to the rule of law in… Read the rest of the article: Mass convictions of local warlords for 2009 massacre revive faith in Philippines' justice system
Japanese artist Mozu makes incredible, miniature dioramas with tiny, winking electronic devices; their latest piece is The Secret Base of Kubito, a tiny workroom hidden behind an electrical outlet. Mozu… Read the rest of the article: Spectacular, tiny room hidden behind a hinged electrical outlet cover
Columbia Journalism School's Tow Center has published the results of a longrunning investigation into a network of shadowy "local news" sites whose bulk content is composed of algorithmically generated stories… Read the rest of the article: A vast network of shadowy news sites promote conservative talking points mixed with floods of algorithmically generated "news"
Andrew Taylor lives in Canterbury on New Zealand's South Island; when he grew frustrated with the local park's lack of good throwing sticks with which to amuse his dog, he… Read the rest of the article: Volunteer "stick library" is a hit with neighborhood dogs
Fudan University, one of China's elite centers of higher learning, has had its charter altered to remove "freedom of thought" from its values. In its place, the charter now promotes… Read the rest of the article: Students at elite Shanghai university protest the removal of "freedom of thought" from the school charter
While NIST doesn't speculate as to why, it did find that the performance of 189 facial recognition algorithms from 89 different vendors varied by "race, sex and age" — that… Read the rest of the article: NIST confirms that facial recognition is a racist, sexist dumpster-fire
Betsy DeVos is the religious fanatic whose access to two unearned fortunes — one from the Amway Ponzi scheme, founded by her husband's father; the other from her own father's… Read the rest of the article: Betsy DeVos quietly spends millions to promote the unpopular policies she hopes to enact as a federal official
Bernie Sanders commissioned the Government Accountability Office to study the consequences of the high degree of indebtedness borne by Millennials; the GAO's report concludes that Millennials dreams are being "crushed"… Read the rest of the article: Bernie Sanders got the GAO to study the life chances of millennials, and the report concludes that debt is "crushing their dreams"
On this week's Intercepted podcast (MP3) (previously), host Jeremy Scahill (previously) takes a long, deep look at the history of McKinsey and Company, whose consultants are the architects of ICE's… Read the rest of the article: From Enron to Saudi Arabia, from Rikers Island to ICE's gulag, how McKinsey serves as "Capitalism's Consigliere"
Cliff Stoll (previously) is a computing legend: his 1989 book The Cuckoo's Egg tells the story of how he was drafted to help run Lawrence Berkeley Lab's computers (he was… Read the rest of the article: A profile of Cliff "Cuckoo's Egg" Stoll, a pioneering "hacker hunter"
Mitch Wagner writes, "My colleague Iain Morris takes a hammer to 5G hype in an article that's so, so good. The world went bonkers in 2019 and 5G hype is… Read the rest of the article: With 5G, 2019 reached peak bullshit
When Steve Beshear was governor of Kentucky, he told experts to go fuck themselves and instead allowed the Australian investment bank Macquarie Capital to manage Kentuckywired, a program to build… Read the rest of the article: Kentucky's governor insisted that investment bankers could provide broadband. He was wrong.
The historical excuse for pharma monopolists who conspired to rig prices on insulin was that hardly anyone paid full price — everyone got their life-saving, non-optional medicine through health plans… Read the rest of the article: Insulin prices doubled between 2012 and 2016
Dten is a "certified hardware provider" for Zoom, making smart screens and whiteboards for videoconferencing; a Forescout Research report reveals that Dten committed a string of idiotic security blunders in… Read the rest of the article: Idiotic security mistakes in smart conferencing gear allows hackers to spy on board rooms, steal presentations
Bernie Sanders' record-setting fundraising isn't just notable for how much he raised, it's also notable for how he raised it — Sanders is the only leading candidate in the Democratic… Read the rest of the article: Bernie Sanders is the only leading Democrat who hasn't taken money from billionaires
Scott Budnick (producer of the "Hangover" movies) is embroiled in a complicated feud with an LA homicide cop named Sgt. Richard Biddle; Biddle has pursued his investigation against Budnick by… Read the rest of the article: Search-warrant demands that Google turn over account info, Android info, all accounts and passwords, calendar, contacts, cloud docs, financial data, photos, location history, search history, call records, etc
Activists from Fight for the Future prowled the halls of Congress in "jumpsuits with phone strapped to their heads conducting live facial recognition surveillance" to "show why this tech should… Read the rest of the article: Privacy activists spent a day on Capitol Hill scanning faces to prove that scanning faces should be banned
When Donald Trump and then-Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker announced a plan to give billions of dollars to the notorious Taiwanese sweatshop operator Foxconn to build a super-factory in Wisconsin, knowledgeable… Read the rest of the article: Foxconn wants Wisconsin to keep paying it billions, but it won't disclose what kind of factory it will build
The whistleblowers who brought us The Paradise Papers and The Panama Papers risked their freedom and even their lives (Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was assassinated for reporting on the… Read the rest of the article: Citing the Panama Papers, Elizabeth Warren proposes sweeping anti-financial-secrecy rules
