Since its publication in August, Anand Giridharadas's Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World has been tearing through the world, changing the way we think about inequality,… Read the rest of the article: How "philanthropy" is a way for rich people to preserve the inequality that benefits them
Back in 2012, Symantec researcher Bryan Varner bought some used US voting machines on Ebay and found them to be incredibly insecure and full of real, sensitive election data; in… Read the rest of the article: Ebay is full of used voting machines full of real electoral data and riddled with security defects
If you ever hear an announcement on a Disneyland or Walt Disney World PA calling for a "HEPA cleanup" it means that someone has just dumped a dead person's ashes… Read the rest of the article: Disney theme parks have a serious problem with cremain-scattering
Cathay Pacific started investigating a potential breach in March; by May they'd learned of breaches to a system with 9.4 million travelers' data on it, then for some reason they… Read the rest of the article: Cathay Pacific leaks 9.4 million travelers' passport numbers and other data
Steve King is a virulent, ardent, violent, authoritarian member of the
Wolf Intelligence is a German state surveillanceware company founded by Manish Kumar, selling tools that independent researchers described as "very shitty and it's just copy paste from open source projects,"… Read the rest of the article: State surveillance company leaked its own data, its customers' data, and its customers' victims' data
Alex Stamos stepped down as CSO for Facebook in August, after a career in which he rather fearlessly and bluntly warned about deficiencies in Facebook's security (this was totally in… Read the rest of the article: Facebook's former security head: making Facebook moderate content will cement its dominance
The Bklyn BookMatch is a free service that matches readers with custom lists of recommendations: fill in a webform with "the titles, authors, and/or types of books you enjoy, and… Read the rest of the article: You can request hand-crafted reading-list recommendations from the Brooklyn public library online
A recent Pew poll challenged subjects to distinguish between factual statements and statements of opinion in news articles; it found that there is a large gap in accuracy between 18-… Read the rest of the article: In America, the young find distinguishing fact from opinion easier than their elders
The students in David Stein's Political Statistics class at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Maryland have built a statistical model for predicting the outcomes of the upcoming midterm… Read the rest of the article: High school class's electoral predictions model is a model for electoral predictions
For years we have chronicled the tireless fight of rogue archivist Carl Malamud (previously) whose Public.Resource.org has devoted itself to publishing the world's laws, for free, where anyone can see… Read the rest of the article: Public domain scores a huge appeals court victory: the law cannot be copyrighted (UPDATED)
The assassination and dismemberment of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi (previously) finally accomplished what decades of detailed reports of human rights abuses and years of increasingly grave details of a brutal… Read the rest of the article: Mister Bone Saw got a standing ovation at Davos in the Desert
The tombstones at the Haunted Mansions in Disney's themeparks are a kind of credit reel that pay tribute to the Imagineers who made the Mansion possible; in this short Disney… Read the rest of the article: The stories behind the names on the Haunted Mansion's tombstones
To Whom It May Concern:
David Irvine (AKA gnarledbranch) sent us a selection of photos of his delightful Halloween ornaments painted on salvaged lightbulbs.
San Francisco's housing crisis is also (of course) a homelessness crisis, and homelessness crises beget public defecation crises — and San Francisco has a serious public defecation crisis.
When the EU voted for mandatory copyright censorship of the internet in September, Italy had a different government; the ensuing Italian elections empowered a new government, who oppose the filters.
Despite an uprising of Amazon employees over the use of the company's AI facial recognition program ("Rekognition") in law enforcement, the company is actively courting US Immigration and Customs Enforcement… Read the rest of the article: Amazon is actively pitching face-recognition to ICE
On September 12th, GM's director of global digital transformation Saejin Park gave a presentation to the Association of National Advertisers in which he described how the company had secretly gathered… Read the rest of the article: Every minute for three months, GM secretly gathered data on 90,000 drivers' radio-listening habits and locations
A new generation of commercial trackers from companies like Adjust, AppsFlyer, MoEngage, Localytics, and CleverTap allow app makers like Bloomberg, T-Mobile US, Spotify Technology, and Yelp to covertly track when… Read the rest of the article: Apps are using "silent notifications" to track you after you uninstall them
