👓 How to Delete Facebook and Instagram From Your Life Forever | New York Times

Read How to Delete Facebook and Instagram From Your Life Forever by Brian X. ChenBrian X. Chen (nytimes.com)
Lost faith in Facebook and Instagram after data leakages, breaches and too much noise? Here’s a guide to breaking up with the social network and its photo-sharing app for good.
Not as in-depth and informative as I would have expected. I had kind of hoped for more history and background, but this is sort of cut and dried. The fact that there’s an article of this sort in the New York Times does signal a turning point for the quit Facebook movement.

🔖 Open Design Kit: A toolkit for designing with distributed collaborators | Bocoup

Bookmarked Open Design Kit: A toolkit for designing with distributed collaborators by Jess KleinJess Klein (bocoup.com)

Today, we are pleased to announce Open Design Kit – a collection of remixable methods designed to support creativity and problem solving within the context of the agile and distributed 21st century workplace. We are creating this kit to share the techniques we use within our open design practice at Bocoup and teach to collaborators so they can identify and address design opportunities. As of the publication of this post, the kit can be accessed in a GitHub repository and it contains a dozen methods developed by fifteen contributors – designers, educators, developers from in and outside of Bocoup.

Design literacy needs to be constantly developed and improved throughout the software and product development industry. Designers must constantly level up their skillsets with lifelong learning. Engineers often need to learn how to collaborate and incorporate new practices into their workflow to successfully support the integration of design.

Clients and stakeholders are repeatedly challenged by the fact that design is a verb that needs constant attention and not a noun that is handed off.

To address this, Bocoup is openly compiling a suite of learning materials, methods, and systems to help our staff, clients, colleagues, and community better understand how we design and when to roll up their sleeves and get in on the action. It is our hope that this exploration will be useful for other companies and individuals to incorporate into their practice.

👓 Exploring Future’s Past: An IndieWeb NYC Reflection | Greg McVerry

Read Exploring Future’s Past: An IndieWeb NYC Reflection by Greg McVerryGreg McVerry (jgregorymcverry.com)
As I sit in design studio, an optional drop in class for my #edu106 class to sit during a quiet hack hour or to get help, I can finally draw in my reflections on IndieWeb Camp. I left invigorated. Together as a community we want to save the web, rebuild our networks, and wrestle back control from th...

👓 Welcome to Voldemorting, the Ultimate SEO Dis | Wired

Read Welcome to Voldemorting, the Ultimate SEO Dis by Gretchen McCulloch (WIRED)
When writers swap Trump for Cheeto and 45, it's not just a put-down. Removing a keyword is the anti-SEO—transforming your subject into a slippery, ungraspable, swarm.
Surprised she didn’t mention the phenomena of subtweeting, snitch tagging, or dunking which are also closely related to voldemorting.

To my experience, the phrase “bird site” was generally used as a derogatory phrase on Mastodon (represented by a Mastodon character instead of a bird), by people who were fed up by Twitter and the interactions they found there. I recall instances of it as early as April 2017.

In addition to potential SEO implications, this phenomenon is also interesting for its information theoretic implications.

I particularly like the reference in the van der Nagle paper

[…] screenshotting, or making content visible without sending its website traffic – to demonstrate users’ understandings of the algorithms that seek to connect individuals to other people, platforms, content and advertisers, and their efforts to wrest back control.

This seems like an awesome way to skirt around algorithms in social sites as well as not rewarding negative sites with clicks.

👓 Stephen Miller’s Third-Grade Teacher: He Was a “Loner” and Ate Glue | Hollywood Reporter

Read Stephen Miller's Third-Grade Teacher: He Was a “Loner" and Ate Glue (The Hollywood Reporter)
In 1993, Donald Trump's senior political adviser attended Santa  Monica's Franklin  Elementary, where he was "off by himself all the time."
This is sort of sad ad hominem reporting; I’m surprised to see it in the Hollywood Reporter of all places. If true, it does highlight ways in which we need to better support children both in their homes and at school to prevent poor outcomes at later times. This story and its outcome aren’t much different than socially ostracized teen boys who later turn into school shooters, but in this case the outcome is probably far worse.

👓 I Was Reported to Police as an ‘Agitated Black Male’ — for Simply Walking to Work | ACLU

Read I Was Reported to Police as an 'Agitated Black Male' — for Simply Walking to Work by Reginald Andrade (American Civil Liberties Union)
Last month, I walked across the campus of the University of Massachusetts Amherst to get to work. It was an ordinary stroll. But to a bystander, the sight of an educated Black professional going about his day was apparently cause for alarm.That bystander called the police. My workplace was shut down. I was, and remain, humiliated.Racial profiling at predominantly white institutions is nothing new, and this wasn’t the first time that I had to grit my teeth through a degrading interaction with police at the university.
Stories like this pain me greatly. We need to have a reverse mechanism to have some sort of consequences come back to the reporting parties, particularly in cases where it is repeatedly done and patently obvious there was nothing untoward going on. It might be likened to the equivalent of people not being able to claim free speech when yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater. Without any repercussions at all, we only allow this type of activity to fester. Repeated offenses should certainly be more harshly punished.

Similar examples of this in our culture include falsely reporting bomb threats, falsely pulling fire alarms, and even recent incidences of “SWATting“. Swatting is typically a situation in which a party that feels wronged by another will call in a terrorist related threat resulting in the dispatching of a SWAT team to an innocent person’s location. This can occasionally lead to the accidental death of an innocent person. We’re prosecuting against these types of crimes (all examples of dangerous false claims) , so why not prosecute or require restitution in cases like Reginald Andrade’s?

I recall a related case like this in July when a white neighbor called the police  multiple times on an African American boy for mowing a lawn. The national media attention called to the issue likely helped to shame the perpetrators of the situation into never allowing it to happening again, but this type of public shaming often doesn’t occur in the majority of these cases. In Andrade’s case, much of the shame only falls unfairly on Andrade and, potentially worse, on the broader University of Massachusetts Amherst community at large (and in the long run will tend to discourage diversity there in general–part of the intended effect) and not on the particular person who made the false report.

Why don’t we come up with a better name for this type of harassment to call attention to it and help put a stop to it? Giving swatting a sensationalist name has seemingly helped to curtail it. Perhaps “racial terrorism”? or, better, maybe “community terrorism” which includes not only the terrorism inflicted on the individual target but on the broader community which is heavily damaged as well. Is there a way to take anti-swatting laws and have them apply to these cases?

👓 Voting Rights Become A Flashpoint In Georgia Governor’s Race | WABE

Read Voting Rights Become A Flashpoint In Georgia Governor's Race by Associated Press (90.1 FM WABE)
Marsha Appling-Nunez was showing the college students she teaches how to check online if they're registered to vote when she made a troubling discovery. Despite being an active Georgia voter who had cast ballots in recent elections, she was no longer registered. "I was kind of shocked," said Appling-Nunez, who moved

👓 Trump, no longer ratings gold, loses his prime-time spot on Fox News | Politico

Read Trump, no longer ratings gold, loses his prime-time spot on Fox News (POLITICO)
In a crucial period with the midterms less than a month away, some in the White House are worried that the president is losing a prime-time megaphone to his base.
Perhaps I’m wrong, but in the past I don’t recall any of the networks carrying full coverage of any rallies like these except perhaps the nominating conventions; even then they did it somewhat begrudgingly or only with partial coverage? At best, the coverage of these was small individual soundbites of candidates. Fox news has obviously and sadly been using them more for entertainment value than for any news value they might have had. Could this new coverage be coined liefotainment? There certainly isn’t any journalistic value in full coverage. I wonder if they’ll be carrying flaming-cross to flaming-cross coverage of KKK rallies next?

👓 The Cybersec World Is Debating Who to Believe in This Story About a Massive Hack | Motherboard | Vice

Read The Cybersec World Is Debating Who to Believe in This Story About a Massive Hack (Motherboard)
No one is really sure who to believe after Businessweek's bombshell story on an alleged Chinese supply chain attack against Apple, Amazon, and others.

👓 The breach that killed Google+ wasn’t a breach at all | The Verge

Read The breach that killed Google+ wasn’t a breach at all by Russell Brandom (The Verge)
A bug in the rarely used Google+ network has exposed private information for as many as 500,000 users. Should Google have shared more sooner?

👓 The Times Trump investigation and the power of the long game | Columbia Journalism Review

Read The Times Trump investigation and the power of the long game by Kyle Pope (Columbia Journalism Review)
WE LIVE AT A TIME WHEN JOURNALISM can land with great force. The epic investigation published Tuesday by The New York Times, on the fraud that is the Trump family business, is such a story. The piece, which took three reporters—David Barstow, Susanne Craig, and Russ Buettner—18 months, 15,000 words, and eight pages in the print edition, has been roundly, and rightly, praised. One of its great benefits, to my mind, is that it transcends the headlines of the day, focusing on an elemental, fundamental aspect of this man and this presidency that, it turns out, is even more divorced from our common understanding than we might have previously thought. It is an example of journalism as long game, a sport that more of us need to be playing.

👓 China Used a Tiny Chip in a Hack That Infiltrated U.S. Companies | Bloomberg

Read The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies by Jordan Robinson, Michael Riley (Bloomberg)
The attack by Chinese spies reached almost 30 U.S. companies, including Amazon and Apple, by compromising America’s technology supply chain, according to extensive interviews with government and corporate sources. In 2015, Amazon.com Inc. began quietly evaluating a startup called Elemental Technologies, a potential acquisition to help with a major expansion of its streaming video service, known today as Amazon Prime Video. Based in Portland, Ore., Elemental made software for compressing massive video files and formatting them for different devices. Its technology had helped stream the Olympic Games online, communicate with the International Space Station, and funnel drone footage to the Central Intelligence Agency. Elemental’s national security contracts weren’t the main reason for the proposed acquisition, but they fit nicely with Amazon’s government businesses, such as the highly secure cloud that Amazon Web Services (AWS) was building for the CIA.

👓 Project Strobe: Protecting your data, improving our third-party APIs, and sunsetting consumer Google+ | Google

Read Project Strobe: Protecting your data, improving our third-party APIs, and sunsetting consumer Google+ (Google)
Findings and actions from Project Strobe—a root-and-branch review of third-party developer access to Google account and Android device data and of our philosophy around apps’ data access.

👓 Google+ to shut down after coverup of data-exposing bug | Tech Crunch

Read Google+ to shut down after coverup of data-exposing bug (TechCrunch)
Google is about to have its Cambridge Analytica moment. A security bug allowed third-party developers to access Google+ user profile data since 2015 until Google discovered and patched it in March, but decided not to inform the world. When a user gave permission to an app to access their public pro…

👓 Virginia Museum Does What Pasadena Museum Won’t: Gives Back Nazi-Looted Artwork to Heir of Owner | Pasadena Now

Read Virginia Museum Does What Pasadena Museum Won’t: Gives Back Nazi-Looted Artwork to Heir of Owner (pasadenanow.com)
In contrast to the decades-long court battle fought by a Pasadena museum with the heir of an art dealer to keep a pair of $24 million, 400-year-old paintings which had been seized by a Nazi leader during World War II, the Virginia Museum of Fine Art Board voted last week to return a valuable painting it had acquired under similar circumstances. The masterpieces in both cases had been taken in forced sales from Amsterdam art dealer Jacques Goudstikker in 1940 by Hermann Göring, Hitler’s henchman who created the Gestapo, the feared Nazi secret police.