Musings of a Modern Day Cyberneticist
Ton Zijlstra (zylstra.org)Today at 14:07, sixteen years ago I published my first blogpost. The first few months I posted on Blogger, but after 6 months, deciding having a blog was no longer just an experiment, I moved to my own domain and where it has since resided. First it was hosted at a server I ran from my home, later I...
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Syndicated copies to:From a new Supreme Court ruling to a census question about citizenship, the campaign against illegal registration is thriving. But when the top proponent was challenged in a Kansas courtroom to prove that such fraud is rampant, the claims went up in smoke.
I knew the voter fraud panel Trump convened had fizzled, but I didn’t hear that there was a court case and the concept flopped so painfully. This is some fantastic reporting. Glad I ran back across it while looking at the midterm elections results relating to Georgia and the massive voter suppression efforts that have been happening there this year.
Syndicated copies to:If the governor’s race had taken place in another country, the State Department would have questioned its legitimacy.
Voters in the affluent Northern Virginia suburban district have sent Republicans to Congress for 60 of the past 66 years.
Breathing a tad easier in math class tonight now…
Syndicated copies to:fisking is the practice of reposting an article and interpolating commentary on between lines of it, often to mock or rebut the arguments in it..
The latest controversy over Trump’s final campaign ad, explained.
US law enforcement contacted us about online activity that they recently discovered and believe may be linked to foreign entities.
This seems like a lot of lip service to me. I can’t imagine they’re doing much more than scratching the surface of what they should be doing.
Syndicated copies to:In 1994, Ron Clarke, a paleoanthropologist at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, was looking through some museum boxes filled with fossil specimens from the Sterkfontein caves, located about 40 kilometers northwest of the city. Beginning in the 1930s, a number of hominin fossils had been found there, mostly australopithecines, in what South Africans call the Cradle of Humankind. Clarke quickly realized that four of the fossils, all small toe bones, had been misidentified as belonging to monkeys. They actually belonged to an early hominin, most likely another australopithecine. It quickly became known as "Little Foot."
Millions of American children were placed in orphanages. Some didn’t make it out alive.
Finally getting back to read the second half of this harrowing article. People can be horrid, but it really pains me that the Catholic Church could have been this violently horrible. This makes the Inquisition look like a field day.
Syndicated copies to:A major, two-night investigation of the powerful social media platform’s impact on privacy and democracy in the U.S. and around the world.
SEASON 37: EPISODE 4: The promise of Facebook was to create a more open and connected world. But from the company’s failure to protect millions of users’ data, to the proliferation of “fake news” and disinformation, mounting crises have raised the question: Is Facebook more harmful than helpful? On Monday, Oct. 29, and Tuesday, Oct. 30, 2018, FRONTLINE presents The Facebook Dilemma. This major, two-night event investigates a series of warnings to Facebook as the company grew from Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm room to a global empire. With dozens of original interviews and rare footage, The Facebook Dilemma examines the powerful social media platform’s impact on privacy and democracy in the U.S. and around the world.
This documentary focuses on just one of the major failings of Facebook and its attendant effects on society. If you’re using Facebook, you should watch both parts before continuing to support them.
I’m not quite sure what to label this particular type of failure. Tragedy of the commons? It’s painfully obvious that Facebook not only has no real idea how to solve this problem, but it’s even more telling that they don’t seem to have any desire or drive to solve it either. The more I watch what they’re doing to their product and their users, the more I think that they have absolutely no ethics or morality at all. In particular Mark Zuckerberg is completely tone deaf in these areas, and as a result the entire fish stinks from the head.
The only solution may be massive regulation. The sadder part is that with both their financing and lobbying power, not to mention their social influence power which could be leveraged completely via dark posts, they could have a painfully out-sized influence on elections to get their own way.
I’m really worried that things will get far worse before they get better.
Syndicated copies to:The president of Baltimore’s police union didn’t find a “Saturday Night Live” sketch funny, but instead of just shaking his head and grumbling to the person next to him and moving on, he took a bold and very public step. He wrote a letter to the show’s creator, Lorne Michaels, expressing “great disappointment over the distorted representation of Baltimore Police Officers.”
It was last Saturday when it hit me that my entire life has been framed by violence. I don’t remember being born on Jan. 28, 2000, and I don’t remember being a year and a half old when 9/11 happened. I don’t remember the panic of my mother as she stepped outside our house in Washington and smelled the smoke of the burning Pentagon. I don’t remember her knowing I would grow up in a changed world.
Organising the schedule for Indie Web Camp Berlin. Each session has a hashtag. Fun fact: this is literally why hashtags were invented (tagging sessions at an unconference). cc @ChrisMessina
Wish I could have been there…
Syndicated copies to:Flickr, like all successful social software, is different things to different people. When something is done well, we internalize the communities that we interact with on it as part of the character of the place. Just two average guys, minding their own business, walking down the street in SF. The u...
I’m a fan of feeds. Whether is a curated RSS feed, a nice Twitter account or a great newsletter. All these are great tools to stay always up to date with things I care about and don’t miss out on “important news”.
While this seems like an interesting take on doing things, I view my feeds in my feed reader much the same way as I view the recordings on my DVR. They’re there waiting for the day or time I feel like visiting a particular channel and catching up. I definitely don’t look at it like a queue of things I might either miss out on or that I have to consume. They’re just there when I care to dip in and read a bit.
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