Month: August 2017

👓 Weniger Social Media, mehr Mensch by René Meister

Bookmarked Weniger Social Media, mehr Mensch by René Meister (renem.net)
Seit ein paar Wochen schon mache ich mir Gedanken wie ich der Flut an Informationen in sozialen Netzen entfliehen kann. Wobei Informationen hier vielleicht nicht das korrekte Wort ist, denn der größte Teil was auf Twitter & Co. geteilt und veröffentlicht wird, ist Content nach dem ich überhaupt ...
The title of this piece translates as “Less social media, more people”.

My favorite quote from it, roughly translated from German is:

I would like to see contributions for which I am really interested, which stimulate me to think, in which I can learn something.

This is about as good a reason to join the IndieWeb as one could want​​.

🎞 Arlington Road (Screen Gems, 1999)

Watched Arlington Road from Screen Gems
A gripping thriller about a college professor who begins to suspect that his all-American neighborsmight be terrorists. Or is he just paranoid? An edge-of-your-seat journey that reveals how little we really know about the world around us. Director Mark Pellington Starring: Jeff Bridges, Tim Robbins with Joan Cusack, Hope Davis, Robert Gossett, Mason Gamble
I remember seeing a rough cut screening of this prior to release and loving it. It still holds up incredibly well today, and even has an interesting resonance in our current political climate with the alt-right and domestic terrorists seemingly more scary today than foreign ones.

This had a fantastic screenplay by Ehren Kruger which was brought to life by Mark Pellington with a fantastic cast.

While made on the cusp of the rise of the web there is a short segment where Jeff Bridges’ character does some basic internet stalking before jumping into microfiche stalking. The technology differences aren’t really terribly jarring and actually add to the plot in interesting ways.

Definitely a must see and worth re-watching again if you haven’t seen it recently.

👓 White nationalists are flocking to genetic ancestry tests — but many don’t like their results | Stat News

Read White nationalists are flocking to genetic ancestry tests. Some don’t like what they find by Eric Boodman (Stat News)
It was a strange moment of triumph against racism: The gun-slinging white supremacist Craig Cobb, dressed up for daytime TV in a dark suit and red tie, hearing that his DNA testing revealed his ancestry to be only “86 percent European, and … 14 percent Sub-Saharan African.” The studio audience whooped and laughed and cheered. And Cobb — who was, in 2013, charged with terrorizing people while trying to create an all-white enclave in North Dakota — reacted like a sore loser in the schoolyard. “Wait a minute, wait a minute, hold on, just wait a minute,” he said, trying to put on an all-knowing smile. “This is called statistical noise.”

👓 Steve Bannon thought he wasn’t giving an interview | Axios

Read Steve Bannon thought he wasn't giving an interview by Jonathan Swan (Axios)
Steve Bannon's White House colleagues can't believe what they're reading tonight — and here's the twist: neither can Bannon. The White House chief strategist has told associates he never intended to do an "interview" with an editor at the American Prospect, a left-wing publication. Bannon has told associates that he admired the author's stance on China, and so called the journalist, Robert Kuttner, on Tuesday, to discuss his piece. Apparently Bannon never thought that the journalist might take his (very newsworthy) comments and turn them into a story. It's Anthony Scaramucci all over again (minus the curse words.) The result is not good for Bannon, who is already under pressure, with colleagues lined up against him and a president who agrees with him ideologically but tells associates he thinks Bannon is a leaker.

👓 Why We Terminated Daily Stormer | Cloudflare

Read Why We Terminated Daily Stormer by Matthew Prince (Cloudflare)
Earlier today, Cloudflare terminated the account of the Daily Stormer. We've stopped proxying their traffic and stopped answering DNS requests for their sites. We've taken measures to ensure that they cannot sign up for Cloudflare's services ever again. Our terms of service reserve the right for us to terminate users of our network at our sole discretion. The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology. Our team has been thorough and have had thoughtful discussions for years about what the right policy was on censoring. Like a lot of people, we’ve felt angry at these hateful people for a long time but we have followed the law and remained content neutral as a network. We could not remain neutral after these claims of secret support by Cloudflare. Now, having made that decision, let me explain why it's so dangerous.
Some interesting implications for how the internet works as a result of this piece.

👓 U.S. vs. North Korea: The Winner? China | The American Prospect

Read U.S. vs. North Korea: The Winner? China by Robert Kuttner (The American Prospect)
China has no reason to restrain Kim too soon, or for too modest a price. I keep thinking of the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis. This terrifying episode was a very complicated game of diplomatic maneuvering and military posturing, with a thermonuclear exchange between the U.S. and the USSR as the consequence of a misstep. But that apocalyptic situation had one big advantage over the present one: John Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev, and Fidel Castro were all sane, rational beings. The same cannot be said about the two protagonists to the Korea crisis, Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un. In Kim, Trump has met his match.
This is apparently the article that began Bannon’s ouster from the administration.