After the Facebook / Cambridge Analytica catastrophe and recent Twitter news (and retraction) about support for 3rd party clients, I found myself wondering about Micro.blog again, after hearing about it on Kickstarter a little over a year ago. On the surface, it’s an indie Twitter-like app, in th...
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👓 Cathy Fisher on fixing Fb: Go back to your 2001 fan site | Kimberly Hirsh
Cathy Fisher, a Business Professional on Twitter (Twitter) “My idea for fixing Facebook: shut down Facebook and everyone goes back to the weird niche fan site forum they were on in 2001, where they then form a really deep friendship with a teen who lives in Poland” This is basically what I’m ...
👓 Sean Hannity Is Named as Client of Michael Cohen, Trump’s Lawyer | New York Times
Lawyers for Mr. Cohen, the president’s personal lawyer, had sought to keep Mr. Hannity’s identity a secret in a court challenge of an F.B.I. search of Mr. Cohen’s office.
👓 What Makes a Vowel a Vowel and a Consonant a Consonant | Today I Found Out
ou already know that vowels in the English alphabet are a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y, while the rest of the letters are called consonants. But did you ever ask yourself why the letters were divided into two separate groups?
👓 Why We Use “X” as the Unknown in Math | Gizmodo
For hundreds of years, x has been the go-to symbol for the unknown quantity in mathematical equations. So who started this practice?
👓 Privacy sentences to ponder | Marginal Revolution
The increasing difficulty in managing one’s online personal data leads to individuals feeling a loss of control. Additionally, repeated consumer data breaches have given people a sense of futility, ultimately making them weary of having to think about online privacy. This phenomenon is called “privacy fatigue.” Although privacy fatigue is prevalent and has been discussed by scholars, there is little empirical research on the phenomenon. A new study published in the journal Computers and Human Behavior aimed not only to conceptualize privacy fatigue but also to examine its role in online privacy behavior. Based on literature on burnout, we developed measurement items for privacy fatigue, which has two key dimensions —emotional exhaustion and cynicism. Data analyzed from a survey of 324 Internet users showed that privacy fatigue has a stronger impact on privacy behavior than privacy concerns do, although the latter is widely regarded as the dominant factor in explaining online privacy behavior.Emphasis added by me. That is by Hanbyl Choi, Jonghwa Park, and Yoonhyuk Jung, via Michelle Dawson.
The past weeks have indicated that we really do need some regulations. It’s not just Facebook, but major, unpunished leaks from data brokers like Experian (which seemingly actually profited from it’s data leak) or even those of companies like Target. Many have been analogizing data as the “new oil”, but people shouldn’t be treated like dying sea birds trapped in oil slicks.
I’m bookmarking this journal article to read: The role of privacy fatigue in online privacy behavior. 1
References
👓 Fox’s Hannity, named as a client of Michael Cohen, spent days attacking FBI raid | Politico
The host cited the seizure of Michael Cohen’s documents to blast Mueller’s Russia investigation.
👓 Building a Text Editor for a Digital-First Newsroom | Times Open (Medium)
An inside look at the inner workings of a technology you may take for granted
h/t Jorge Spinoza
👓 Climate Change Is Messing With Your Dinner | Bloomberg
The future of food looks like lots of lobsters, Polish chardonnay and California coffee.
I can imagine Jeremy Cherfas doing something interesting and more personalizing with this type of story via his fantastic interviews on Eat This Podcast.
h/t Jorge Spinoza
👓 Mathematicians Explore Mirror Link Between Two Geometric Worlds | Quanta Magazine
Decades after physicists happened upon a stunning mathematical coincidence, researchers are getting close to understanding the link between two seemingly unrelated geometric universes.
After having spent the last couple of months working through some of the “rigidity” (not the best descriptor in the article as it shows some inherent bias in my opinion) of algebraic geometry, now I’m feeling like symplectic geometry could be fun.
👓 A letter to readers from the editor | The Economist
Dear Reader, This year The Economist celebrates its 175th anniversary. James Wilson, a hatmaker from Scotland, founded this newspaper in September 1843 to argue against Britain’s Corn Laws, which imposed punitive tariffs on grain. We have advocated free trade, free markets and open societies ever since.
👓 Old School: Torpor and Stupor at Johns Hopkins | 3quarksdaily
Also known as Tottle and Stutter. But the real name was Tudor and Stuart: The Tudor and Stuart Club.
The Tudor and Stuart Club was a literary society at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore – yes, they insist upon that “the” before “Johns” – and I was the club secretary for several years back in the late 1960s and 1970s. I don’t know just how that honor came to me. But I’d taken many literature courses as an undergraduate, half of them or so with (the now legendary) Richard Macksey and the others with members of the English Department: Earl Wasserman, Donald Howard, D. C. Allen, and J. Hillis Miller. They must have decided that I had a future as a literary critic and so deserved this honor, though, naturally, it came trailing a few pedestrian duties. I was pleased. I’m pretty sure it was Dick Macksey who told me.
👓 How to see if Cambridge Analytica got your Facebook info | CNBC
How to see if your Facebook data was shared with Cambridge Analytica.
👓 Gmail is getting a ‘confidential mode’ that prevents users from printing or forwarding your email | CNBC
Gmail is getting a new confidential mode that reportedly prevents recipients from forwarding or printing email messages.
👓 IndieAuth for WordPress | David Shanske
Part of my own project for this week, while taking off for the holiday, was to complete work on an Indieauth endpoint for WordPress.
IndieAuth is layer on top of OAuth 2.0, a standard that grants websites or applications access to their information on other websites but without providing passwords.
OAuth is already being used by a variety of services…Login with Facebook or Login with Google options on sites are usually OAuth based. The difference is that for IndieAuth, users and clients are all represented by URLs.