The Firefox extensions store removed four plugins from Avast/AVG, including two that are supposed to keep users safe from malicious activity because they appeared to be stealing browser histories and… Read the rest of the article: Browser plugins from Avast and AVG yanked for stealing user data
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Cory Doctorow For ten years, activists and theorists have been developing a critique of "algorithms" (which have undergone numerous renamings over the same time, e.g. "filter bubbles"), with the early critiques focusing… Read the rest of the article: Second wave Algorithmic Accountability: from "What should algorithms do?" to "Should we use an algorithm?"
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Cory Doctorow Ken Liu went from university to a software engineering job at Microsoft, then to some startups, then to Harvard Law, where he got a JD and went into practice as… Read the rest of the article: How Ken Liu went from engineer to lawyer to SF writer to the foremost translator of Chinese sf into English
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Cory Doctorow Writing in Marker, David Gauvey Herbert gives us an extended-play version of China's legendary bank-robber, Ren Xiaofeng, a bank official in a small industrial city who tried to make ends… Read the rest of the article: The bizarre story of China's most prolific bank-robbers, who stole literal tons of cash and spent it on losing lotto tickets
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Cory Doctorow There's not really any dispute that the UK Liberal Democrats party sold voter data for £100,000 to the Remain campaign in 2016, though the Information Commissioner's Office tried to suppress… Read the rest of the article: Opendemocracy: the Libdems tried to censor our article about their sale of voter data, then used a forged email to intimidate us
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Cory Doctorow Obama brought McKinsey and Co, the giant management consulting firm, into ICE to effect an "organizational transformation," so they were already in place when Trump took office, and as Trump… Read the rest of the article: McKinsey designed ICE's gulags, recommending minimal food, medical care and supervision
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Cory Doctorow Last March, game devs Alex Schwartz and Ziba Scott gave a presentation at the Game Developers Conference called "1,500 Slot Machines Walk into a Bar: Adventures in Quantity Over Quality… Read the rest of the article: Frustrated game devs automated the production of 1,500 terrible slot machine apps and actually made money
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Cory Doctorow 3D printing is a dumpster fire of stupid, obvious patents, but thankfully many of these are expiring; this year, the stupid patent on putting sides on a 3D printer (extrusion… Read the rest of the article: Make: a non-patent-infringing enclosure for your 3D printer
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Cory Doctorow For years, rogue archivist Carl Malamud (previously) has been scanning and posting proprietary elements of the law, such as standard annotations or building and safety codes developed by outside parties… Read the rest of the article: The Supreme Court just heard the State of Georgia's argument for copyrighting the law and charging for access to it
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Cory Doctorow When Yale research psyhcologist Irving Janis coined the term "groupthink" in 1972, he identified eight symptoms of the pathology: the "illusion of invulnerability"; a "belief in the inherent morality of… Read the rest of the article: Using the Challenger Disaster to illustrate the 8 symptoms of groupthink
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Cory Doctorow Retired journalist John Richard's founded the Apostrophe Protection Society in 2001, its mission to convince people that apostrophe's denote missing letter's and possession, but never plurals.
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Cory Doctorow Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) (previously) is an alternative to neoclassical economics that holds that sovereign states that issue their own currency can't default on debts denominated in that currency (if… Read the rest of the article: MMT: when does government deficit spending improve debt-to-GDP ratios?
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Cory Doctorow Reps Anna Eshoo [D-CA] and Zoe Lofgren [D-CA] have introduced HR 4978, the "Online Privacy Act," which is a comprehensive set of federal rules for privacy, interoperability, and protection from… Read the rest of the article: A sweeping new tech bill from Silicon Valley Democrats promises privacy, interoperability, and protection from algorithmic discrimination and manipulation
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Cory Doctorow Hubert Horan (previously) is a transport industry analyst who has written more than 20 essays for Naked Capitalism as well as two peer-reviewed scholarly articles explaining why Uber is a… Read the rest of the article: Harry Shearer interviews Uber's smartest critic: Hubert "Bezzle" Horan
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Cory Doctorow Last week, just before everything shut down for Thanksgiving, the Republican-appointed Board of Governors of the University of North Carolina handed $2.5m to the white nationalist Sons of Confederate Veterans,… Read the rest of the article: Reading the "victory letter" a white nationalist sent to his followers after getting $2.5m from UNC, it's obvious why he tried to censor it
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Cory Doctorow In The Surprising Breadth of Harbingers of Failure (Sci-Hub mirror), a trio of economists and business-school profs build on a 2015 Journal of Marketing Research paper that claimed that some… Read the rest of the article: "Harbinger households": neighborhoods that consistently buy products that get discontinued, buy real-estate that underperforms, and donate to losing political candidates
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Cory Doctorow T. Greg Doucette is the North Carolina litigator who sleuthed out the incredible, bizarre details of the decision of the University of North Carolina's Republican-appointed governors to hand a group… Read the rest of the article: White nationalists who got a $2.5m payout from UNC abuse the DMCA to censor lawyer's trove of documents about it
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Cory Doctorow In my latest podcast (MP3), I've started a serial reading of my novella Party Discipline, which I wrote while on a 35-city, 45-day tour for my novel Walkaway in 2017;… Read the rest of the article: Podcast: Party Discipline, a Walkaway story (Part 1)
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Cory Doctorow EFF's Behind the One-Way Mirror: A Deep Dive Into the Technology of Corporate Surveillance is a long, comprehensive look at corporate tracking, particularly invisible, third-party tracking, as with ad-networks, license-plate… Read the rest of the article: Behind the One-Way Mirror: EFF's "deep dive into corporate surveillance"
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Cory Doctorow Hans Calmeyer was a left-wing German lawyer — his law license was temporarily suspended when he was accused of being a Communist — who was inducted into the German army… Read the rest of the article: 92-year-old's memoir tells the forgotten story of a German official who sabotaged Nazi deportations and saved more Jews than Schindler