The petition hit an administrative setback.
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👓 Robert Scoble has allegedly continued to sexually harass women after going sober | Tech Crunch
Venture capitalists Dave McClure, Jason Caldbeck and Chris Sacca, SoFi CEO Mike Cagney and a top Uber engineer have all been accused of sexual impropriety in the last six months as a growing number of women have come forward about the harassment they have endured by those in power. However, Robert …
👓 Convenience — not size — matters at the newly opened Glassell Park Target | The Eastsider LA
GLASSELL PARK — There are no elevators, jammed cartolators or rows of aisles that seem to stretch on for infinity. No, the new Glassell Park Target that quietly opened on Wednesday is not your typical, giant discount store. Instead, the small-format Target, which replaced a Fresh & Easy on Eagle Rock Boulevard at El Paso Drive, is built with convenience and quick-shopping trips in mind. There is still a lot of space — 32,000 square-feet. But’s that’s small compared to a typical Target, which can sprawl over 175,000-square feet for a “super” Target.
👓 VR company Upload settles sexual harassment suit, though some still feel unsettled | Tech Crunch
Upload, formerly UploadVR, the virtual reality startup at the center of a sexual harassment and wrongful termination lawsuit filed earlier this year, has settled the case with its former employee and is aiming to put the ensuing damage behind it. The lawsuit, filed against the startup and its co-fo…
👓 Combating Sexism in Tech With Honesty: The Impact of Upload’s Silence| Medium | Danny Bittman
I was the Creative Producer at Upload until most of the Upload San Francisco staff and I quit after a sexual harassment lawsuit was filed…
👓 Danny Bittman thank you. | Robert Scoble | Medium
I initially supported Will Mason and Taylor Freeman when the UploadVRlawsuit from Elizabeth Scott broke in the press. Part of that support…
👓 Robert Scoble and Me | Quinn Norton | Medium
Foo Camp, the original unconference thrown by O’Reilly every year, is one of my favorite events in the technology world.
👓 Trump offered a grieving military father $25,000 in a call, but didn’t follow through | Washington Post
‘No other president has ever done something like this,’ Trump told the late soldier’s father.
👓 Here’s a hack so you can tweet with 280 characters right now | The Verge
Twitter doubled the character limit of tweets to 280 in a surprise move yesterday, but not every Twitter user will be able to use the new limit just yet. Twitter is rolling out the long tweets feature to select accounts as a test, but Twitter user Prof9 has discovered a workaround to get longer tweets a little early. Here’s how to tweet with 280 characters instead of 140: Download Tampermonkey for your browser of choice (Chrome webstore link) Visit this Github repository, click the “raw” button, then tell tampermonkey to “install” the script (or copy and paste the code into a new script in Tampermonkey) Now visit twitter.com, make sure the script in running in Tampermonkey, then tweet away It’s a simple workaround that will work automatically on Twitter.com every time you use the web client to tweet. Tampermonkey is a widely used userscript manager, and the javascript is a harmless workaround that simply bypasses the tweet button limit. Twitter is slowly testing its 280 character tweet limits with a variety of accounts, so if you don’t want to install Tampermonkey then you might get randomly selected for the test in the coming weeks or months.
👓 The fall of Harvey Weinstein should be a moment to rethink masculinity | Rebecca Solnit | The Guardian
Too many men seem aroused by their ability to humiliate women. But now their victims are being listened to, says writer Rebecca Solnit
👓 Why Facebook is in a hole over data mining | John Naughton | The Guardian
It’s Mark Zuckerberg’s business model that allows Facebook to be manipulated by political activists – no wonder he’s in denial about it
👓 Going Indie. Step 2: Reclaiming Content | Matthias Ott
We have lost control over our content. To change this, we need to reconsider the way we create and consume content online. We need to create a new set of tools that enable an independent, open web for everyone.
Some of my favorite quotes from the piece:
Having your own website surely is a wonderful thing, but to be relevant, useful, and satisfactory, it needs to be connected to other sites and services. Because ultimately, human interactions are what fuels social life online and most of your friends will still be on social networks, for now.
…what the IndieWeb movement is about: Creating tools that enable a decentralized, people-focused alternative to the corporate web, putting you back in control, and building an active community around this idea of independence.
Tim Kadlec reminded us of the underlying promise of the web:
Wilson Miner put it in his 2011 Build conference talk:
“The things that we choose to surround ourselves will shape what we become. We’re actually in the process of building an environment, where we’ll spend most of our time, for the rest of our lives.”
This also reminds me that I ought to swing by room 3420 in Boelter Hall on my way to math class this week. I forget that I’m always taking classes just a few floors away from the room that housed the birth of the internet.
👓 Two alternatives to #WomenBoycottTwitter that don’t rely on women’s silencing | Another Angry Woman
After Twitter extending their risible “abuse” policy to a suspension of a celebrity white woman speaking out against sexual violence, the problems in their model have been laid bare, and to my pleasant surprise, people are talking about taking action (I’d been pessimistic about this). Unfortunately, it’s entirely the wrong kind of action: a women’s boycott. This is a problem, because once again, it forces us to do the heavy lifting. And once again, it forces us to silence ourselves: the very opposite of what we should be doing. So, here’s two things that can be done. One is an activity for men who consider themselves allies. The other is for all of us. Especially women.
This particular post has some seemingly interesting methods for fighting against the status quo on Twitter for those who are entrenched though. The first #AmplifyWomen sounds a lot like the great advice I heard from Valerie Alexander a few months ago at an Innovate Pasadena event.
Some of the others almost seek to reverse-gamify Twitter’s business model. People often complain about silos and how they work, but few ever seek to actively subvert or do this type of reverse-gamification of those models. This is an interesting concept though to be as useful tools as they might be, it may be somewhat difficult to accomplish in some cases and may hamper one’s experience on such platforms. This being said, having ultimate control over your domain, data, and interactions is still a far preferable model.
And while we’re thinking about amplifying women, do take a look at some of Zoe’s other content, she’s got a wealth of good writing. I’ll be adding her to my follow list/reader.
h/t Richard Eriksson
👓 Towards a more democratic Web | Tara Vancil
Many people who have suffered harassment on Twitter (largely women), are understandably fed up with Twitter’s practices, and have staged a boycott of Twitter today October 13, 2017. Presumably the goal is to highlight the flaws in Twitter’s moderation policies, and to push the company to make meaningful changes in their policies, but I’d like to argue that we shouldn’t expect Twitter’s policies to change.
It’s not going to get better.
I think there are a lot of people, including myself, who also think like she does here:
I want online media to work much more like a democracy, where users are empowered to decide what their experience is like.
The difference for her is that she’s actively building something to attempt to make things better not only for herself, but for others. This is tremendously laudable.
I’d heard of her project Beaker and Mastodon before, but hadn’t heard anything before about Patchwork, which sounds rather interesting.
h/t Richard Eriksson for highlighting this article on Reading.am though I would have come across it tomorrow morning likely in my own feed reader.
👓 Twitter CEO promises to crack down on hate, violence and harassment with “more aggressive” rules | Tech Crunch
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey took to…Twitter today to promise a “more aggressive” stance in its rules and how it enforces them. The tweet storm was based in a response to the #WomenBoycottTwitter protest, as well as work that Dorsey says Twitter has been working ‘intensely’ on over the past few months. Dorsey says that critical decisions were made today in how to go about preventing the rampant and vicious harassment many women, minorities and other users undergo daily on the platform. “We decided to take a more aggressive stance in our rules and how we enforce them,” Dorsey says. “New rules around: unwanted sexual advances, non-consensual nudity, hate symbols, violent groups, and tweets that glorifies violence. These changes will start rolling out in the next few weeks. More to share next week.”