Project Include — a "group effort to accelerate diversity and inclusion solutions in the tech industry" — has announced that it will no longer work with the Y Combinator accelerator because of its ties to Peter Thiel, the billionaire Facebook investor who has backed Donald Trump and donated $1.25M to his campaign.

Sarah Jeong's covering the Oracle v. Google trial, whereby the two companies are fighting over Java, copyright and the difficulty of explaining things like APIs to "normals." Most interesting is how the trial reveals not only how completely alien "nerd subculture" is, but that normal people — judges! — Read the rest

Sarah Jeong continues her excellent series of critical perspectives on technology with a piece on the way that technology is being used to let computers control their users, on behalf of the corporations who make and sell these tools.

On Wednesday, former Reuters.com social media editor Matthew Keys received a two year prison sentence for computer hacking. That's a sentence of 24 months, for a website defacement that lasted only 40 minutes, which Keys himself didn't even execute.

Earlier today in an unrelated high-profile case, the "affluenza teen" who actually murdered people also got two years in jail. — Read the rest

The Atlantic had the excellent idea of commissioning Sarah Jeong, one of the most astute technology commentators on the Internet (previously), to write a series of articles about the social implications of technological change: first up is an excellent, thoughtful, thorough story on the ways that the "cashless society" is being designed to force all transactions through a small number of bottlenecks that states can use to control behavior and censor unpopular political views.

Microsoft Research deployed a tween-simulating chatbot this week, only to recall it a few hours later because it had turned into a neo-Nazi, and the next day, they published a bewildered apology that expressed shock that it had been so easy for trolls to corrupt their creation.

The House Judiciary committee hearing today titled, "The Encryption Tightrope: Balancing Americans' Security and Privacy" ended up being full of drama, and riveting moments of confrontation–along with a cavalcade of inept analogies for encryption and hardware security. — Read the rest

Sarah Jeong reports on how Twitter has begun to take control of the hatred, harassment and general horseshit posted on its site.

Twitter talked some big talk, but it has buckled under both lawsuits and media outrage, tweaking and changing the Rules around speech whenever something threatened its bottom line.

Sarah Jeong had me standing up and cheering with her comparison of kudurrus — the ancient Mesopotamian boundary stones used to mark out territorial land-grants — and the way that laws like the US DMCA protect digital rights management systems.

Sarah Jeong led an absolutely brilliant Twitter seminar this morning on the subject of DCFAPITM and how it relates to copyright (if at all).

Jargon for the XXIth C. [via Sarah Jeong]

The Washington Post editorial board lost its mind and called on the National Academy of Sciences to examine "the conflict" over whether crypto backdoors can be made safe: the problem is, there's no conflict.

Sarah Jeong reports on the bizarre and public wrangling over Reddit, whose free-for-all atmosphere blew up just in time to singe new investors expecting rapid growth. A labor problem, hidden in free speech posturing…

To outsiders, it looks like a form of collective insanity, a sign that Reddit itself is overrun with the denizens of r/CoonTown, utterly broken beyond repair.

The embattled interim CEO of Reddit, who became all the more embattled after the sacking of a popular admin left unpaid mods outraged, is leaving the company.

Ross Ulbricht, the 29-year-old man accused of running billion-dollar drug bazaar Silk Road, gets his day in court today.

Online harassment is real, it's terrible, and tech companies can and should do more about it — but when the normally sensible Jessica Valenti wrote in the Guardian that tech companies could solve online harassment in a snap by implementing a system like Youtube's Content ID, she wasn't just wrong, she was dangerously wrong.

Glenn Fleishman explains Twitter's blocking system and its freshly-fortified abuse-reporting tools.

Glenn Fleishman reports on how the platform could fix its harassment problem.

85% of domestic violence shelters work with women who have been GPS-tracked by their abusers; 75% have clients who were attacked with hidden mobile surveillance apps; cops routinely steal and share nude selfies from the phones of women pulled over in traffic stops, and NSA spies used agency's massive, illegal surveillance apparatus to stalk women they were sexually attracted to, a practice that was dubbed "LOVEINT."

Sarah Jeong has the absolute funniest mockery of NYT columnist Maureen Dowd's silly "I ate 16 times too much marijuana while alone in a hotel room therefore drugs are bad" column.

Jeong assumes the persona of Malcolm Gladwell on ketamine, Thomas L Friedman after noshing weed brownies, Gail Collins rolling on ecstasy, Ross Douthat on psilocybin mushrooms, and Paul Krugman snorting up crushed Adderall. — Read the rest