Today we reinstated youtube-dl, a popular project on GitHub, after we received additional information about the project that enabled us to reverse a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown.
Category: Technology
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In the 2020 CBC Massey Lectures, bestselling author and renowned technology and security expert Ronald J. Deibert exposes the disturbing influence and impact of the internet on politics, the economy, the environment, and humanity.
Digital technologies have given rise to a new machine-based civilization that is increasingly linked to a growing number of social and political maladies. Accountability is weak and insecurity is endemic, creating disturbing opportunities for exploitation.
Drawing from the cutting-edge research of the Citizen Lab, the world-renowned digital security research group which he founded and directs, Ronald J. Deibert exposes the impacts of this communications ecosystem on civil society. He tracks a mostly unregulated surveillance industry, innovations in technologies of remote control, superpower policing practices, dark PR firms, and highly profitable hack-for-hire services feeding off rivers of poorly secured personal data. Deibert also unearths how dependence on social media and its expanding universe of consumer electronics creates immense pressure on the natural environment. In order to combat authoritarian practices, environmental degradation, and rampant electronic consumerism, he urges restraints on tech platforms and governments to reclaim the internet for civil society.
Canada’s #MasseyLectures is among the anglosphere’s great lecture series, on par with BBC’s #ReithLectures. This year’s lecturer is @RonDeibert, whose @citizenlab provides forensics and protection for civil society from despots and corporate bullies.https://t.co/Zbw5HI4QYK
— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) November 10, 2020
cc: Zapier, Integromat, n8n
A few short notes from the September 2020 Domain of One’s Own Meetup
The zoom room is open. We’ll be starting the Domain of One’s Own meetup in a moment. https://events.indieweb.org/2020/09/domain-of-one-s-own-meetup-september-2020–908ut7UmA2T3 @DavidDLaCroix @Cambridgeport90 @bixtra @tElizaRose @EduBabble @MorrisPelzel @jimgroom @willtmonroe @macgenie @KatieHartraft @poritzj @amanda_went_oer
Thanks to the #IndieWeb community for helping to host our infrastructure for the meetup today. https://indieweb.org/ The notes for today’s meeting can be found at https://etherpad.indieweb.org/2020-09-22-dooo
Giving a live demo of Mattermost on the Reclaim Cloud
Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2020 at 12:00 PM Eastern / 9:00 AM Pacific
https://events.indieweb.org/2020/09/domain-of-one-s-own-meetup-september-2020–908ut7UmA2T3
The reason careless errors like this are important is because, as science and technology scholars teach us, tech is not created in a social vacuum. It is built within, and often reifies, power structures. By ignoring that lesson, we keep those power structures in place https://t.co/zMLeLb44MQ
— Becca Lewis (@beccalew) September 16, 2020

Trying to understand OAuth often feels like being trapped inside a maze of specs, trying to find your way out, before you can finally do what you actually set out to do: build your application. https://aaronparecki.com/2019/12/12/21/oauth-maze.png While this can be incredibly frustrating, it’s no ...
I’m thinking monthly to start, but I’m curious what days of the week and times might work best for people, especially across time zones?
Let me know if you’re interested in helping to organize or would like to join us to participate.
Featured image: Hard Drive Repair flickr photo by wwarby shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
A Short Essay on the Relationship of STEM and Racist Ideas
I find myself seeing some immediate and excellent historical examples in Dr. Ibram X. Kendi‘s book Stamped from the Beginning. In chapter nine of the book he discusses the variety and flavors of racism espoused by Thomas Jefferson in his book Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), which would become the most consumed American nonfiction book until well into the mid-nineteenth century.
Shortly afterward Samuel Stanhope Smith countered portions of Jefferson’s racist ideas in the 1787 annual oration to the august American Philosophical Society. This annual lecture was already one of the most heralded scholarly lectures in America and was attended by the wealthy and elite leaders and thinkers in the country. The lecture would be published as the influential Essay on the Causes of Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species.
Samuel Stanhope Smith joined those preeminent intellectuals in Boston’s American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Philadelphia’s American Philosophical Society in attacking polygenesists, in reviving climate theory in America. His scholarly defense of scripture was quickly printed in Philadelphia, in London, and in Lord Kames’s back-yard, Edinburgh. By the time he sat down in Princeton’s presidential chair in 1795, he had amassed an international scholarly reputation.
So in just a few pages Kendi lays out some serious evidence of the direct spread of a wide variety of racist ideas by not only by the academic elite, but the leaders of multiple influential universities and scientific and philosophical institutions in America. The reverberating echos of these wrongs are still haunting us today. They still need to be addressed and righted. We need to use our moral alembic and distill these racist ideas out of science in America.
Lest one wonder about the influence of Samuel Stanhope Smith’s essay, I’ll note that Noah Webster cited Smith directly in Webster’s 1828 Dictionary in the definition of philosophy. The citation was from Smith’s second edition of his Essay on the Causes of Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species (1810). The quote as given: “True religion, and true philosophy must ultimately arrive at the same principle.”
We’re obviously still seeking both true religion and true philosophy.
While you’re thinking about #shutdownSTEM on June 10th and long thereafter, I recommend you spend some time sitting with the ideas that have been handed down to us and question them closely, for this is what science and philosophy are all about. If you find you can’t do that hard work–and it is hard, then perhaps read a bit of Dr. Kendi’s excellent and ardent text Stamped from the Beginning.
It doesn’t seem to be available everywhere just yet.
SearchEngineLand notes that this could have an impact on the ad market, since a website’s visitors may be automatically scrolled down past its ads to the relevant content. The publication notes that sites may need to change the location of their ads in light of Google’s latest feature. ❧
And of course there will be crazy implications for the adtech space.
Annotated on June 04, 2020 at 09:30AM
Clicking the snippet still takes you to the webpage that it pulled the information from, but now the text from the snippet will be highlighted in yellow, and the browser will automatically scroll down to the section in question. ❧
This is a feature that’s been implemented in most browsers for a while as fragmentions.
Hypothes.is has supported this sort of functionality for a few years now as well.
I’m curious how these different implementations differ?
Annotated on June 04, 2020 at 09:36AM
and started testing the functionality on HTML pages last year ❧
According to Kevin Marks, this is the GitHub Repo they’ve been using for creating this work: https://github.com/WICG/scroll-to-text-fragment#:~:text=the%20worst&text=a%20Google&text=serious%20breakage&text=behavior
Annotated on June 04, 2020 at 12:08PM
Helpdesk support back in the day of the middle age with English subtitles. Original taken from the show "Øystein og jeg" on Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK)in 2001. With Øystein Backe (helper)and Rune Gokstad (desperate monk). Written by Knut Nærum.
I often pull my own annotations to my personal website similar to your own Memex and publish them there (example: https://boffosocko.com/kind/annotation/)
Incidentally you can also annotate documents stored locally on your computer, but viewed through a browser as well as collaboratively annotating with others.
The challenge of flexibility.
It’s important to note that the goal of HyFlex is two make both the online and in-person experiences equal. ❧
There are some pieces of this that immediately make me think that this model is more of a sort of “separate, but equal” sort of modality. Significant resources will need to go toward the equality piece and even then it is likely to fall short from a social perspective.
Annotated on May 21, 2020 at 01:27PM
Finally, the best HyFlex classrooms have someone assisting the faculty member. ❧
This is the understatement of the year. Faculty members will require extensive training and LOTS of assistance. This assistance SHOULD NOT come from student assistants, graduate students (who are likely to be heavily undertrained), or other “free” sources.
Annotated on May 21, 2020 at 01:35PM
These assistants could also be work-study students who are assigned a particular classroom (or digital space) or they might be volunteers from class who are given credit for assisting in the delivery of the course. ❧
And of course, the first pivot (even in the same paragraph!) is exactly to these “free” or cheap sources which are likely to be overlooked and undertrained.
If a school is going to do this they need to take it seriously and actually give it professional resources.
Annotated on May 21, 2020 at 01:38PM
Incidentally there is some pre-existing research about the measurable fairness of court proceedings being held online that would tend to negate the equality that might be dispensed in online courseware.
See https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/are-online-courts-less-fair-on-the-media for some references. ❧
Annotated on May 21, 2020 at 02:42PM
This fall needs to be different. We need to ask students to be part of the solution of keeping learning flourishing in the fall. This includes asking them to help manage the class if it has a virtual component. ❧
This is moving education in exactly the WRONG direction. Students are already ill-prepared to do the actual work and studying of education, now we’re going to try to extract extra efficiency out of the system by asking them to essential teach themselves on top of it? This statement seems like the kind of thing a technology CEO would pitch higher education on as a means of monetizing something over which they had no control solely to extract value for their own company.
If we’re going to go this far, why not just re-institute slavery?
Annotated on May 21, 2020 at 02:46PM