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This morning the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on encryption and “lawful access.” That’s the fanciful idea that encryption providers can somehow allow law enforcement access to users’ encrypted data while otherwise preventing the “bad guys” from accessing this very same data.But...
When I ended up single in a small town, I turned to a dating app. But finding someone fully and messily human was harder than I thought
Murder, torture, child abuse: each day we see things that keep us awake at night. Yet Mark Zuckerberg calls us ‘overdramatic’, says former Facebook moderator Chris Gray
The country's president wants a state-controlled intranet to replace the internet.
Evan from Fight for the Future writes, “A new investigation from Gizmodo just revealed that anyone, anywhere can get geographic coordinates of Ring devices from Amazon’s Neighbors App. Not on…
Rima Sghaier is a human rights activist and researcher who works at the intersection of technology and human rights, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa. Rima grew up in Tunisia under the regime of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, which lasted for twenty-four years. Although Tunisia was among the earliest countries in its region to connect to the internet (in 1991), its use by dissidents and subcultures led to the government increasingly restricting access to information and communications tools.
Laura Kalbag discusses the gift of personal data we give to Big Tech when we share information on its platforms, and how reviving ye olde personal website can be one way to stay in control of the content we share and the data we leak. Christmas is a time for giving, but know what you’re giving to whom.
Groups are inherently social, and Signal is a social app. Whether you’re planning a surprise party, discussing last night’s book club meeting, exchanging photos with your family, or organizing something important, group messaging has always been a key feature of Signal. Signal provides private groups: the Signal service has no record of your group memberships, group titles, group avatars, or group attributes. We’ve been working on new private group technology that will enable group administrators and access control, improve group scalability, and set the stage for a much richer group experience – all while maintaining Signal’s unique group security and privacy properties. We’re moving into the future while keeping what we loved about the past.
Vijftien jaar lang heb ik, met duizenden anderen wereldwijd verbonden programmeurs, toepassingen voor Google Earth gemaakt. In één keer dumpt Google al onze creaties, zonder enige uitleg, in een coup
Idealisten bijten soms in hun eigen staart. Een paar weken geleden werd bij deze krant een commerciële bijlage gevoegd over medische preventie en een gezonde levensstijl. Ik las daarin dat mensen hun hele denken moeten omgooien. Ze willen niet sporten, maar dat moeten ze wel. Roken willen ze juist wel, maar moeten ze niet. Eten? Willen wel. Moeten niet. Drinken? Willen ja, moeten nee.Om op dit…
School shootings have driven a booming school security industry. Parents and students are still grappling with this new surveillance and its impact on a generation of kids
As families worry for their children’s futures, a district has instituted a yearly data purge
Door Marjolein Lanzing (TU Eindhoven) “Yet why do I say this? I have myself been blasted in these hopes, yet another may succeed.” …
A few weeks ago, U.S. Attorney General William Barr joined his counterparts from the U.K. and Australia to publish an open letter addressed to Facebook. The Barr letter represents the latest salvo …
A few weeks ago, U.S. Attorney General William Barr joined his counterparts from the U.K. and Australia to publish an open letter addressed to Facebook. The Barr letter represents the latest salvo …
What happened to the guy who told his Muslim employees in 2015 that he would “fight to protect your rights and create a peaceful and safe environment”?
Column Robbert Dijkgraaf: Persoonlijke digitale gegevens en biomedische data zijn het verdienmodel van techbedrijven. De volgende crisis zal om datamisbruik draaien.
Hoe bepaal je of het gebruik van nieuwe technologieën ethisch verantwoord is? Simpele antwoorden zijn er niet, wel een uitgewerkte aanpak, schrijven Peter-Paul Verbeek en Daniël Tijink.
Kick Out Zwarte Piet heeft Nederland en vooral Zwarte Piet in vijf jaar tijd veranderd. Het tegenprotest wordt grimmiger, maar de activisten weten: ‘Als wij één veertje teruggooien, is alles voor niets geweest.’
/etc/apt/listchanges.conf
Former moderator suing social network in Ireland over health impact of scouring website
De politie zoekt de laatste jaren stelselmatig de grenzen van haar bevoegdheden op, en overschrijdt deze geregeld. Denk aan: ‘persoonsgericht’ preventief fouilleren, doorzoeken van smartphones, bewaren van foto’s van gezichten. En bij een overschrijding volgen nauwelijks consequenties. Dus heeft de politie een grote mate van vrijheid om de grenzen van de wet verder op te zoeken.
Data portability is friendly to consumers, but it has very little to do with encouraging competition, at least relative to interoperability.
Perhaps you’ve heard of WireGuard - the new VPN protocol that utilizes state-of-the-art cryptography. It’s super fast, extremely simple and considerably more...
The “Liam Bot” teaches employees what to say if friends or family ask difficult questions about the company over the holidays.
Want to learn how to install and setup CloudFlare in WordPress? Here's the step by step guide with best Cloudflare settings for security and speed.
An anonymous reader quotes the BBC:
Facebook has added a correction notice to a post that Singapore's government said contained false information. It is the first time Facebook has issued such a notice under the city-state's controversial "fake news" law. Singapore claimed the post, by fringe ne...
Facebook has added a correction notice to a post that Singapore's government said contained false information. It is the first time Facebook has issued such a notice under the city-state's controversial "fake news" law. Singapore claimed the post, by fringe ne...
A brief write-up of my talk at the EU Parliament last week with embedded videos of my talk and a link to my slides.
The Warren-style critique of big tech accepts that smaller tech is on the horizon – and rests on a powerful myth of domestic politics gone wrong
Democracy is on shaky ground, and unwittingly, investigative journalism might be undermining the very system it exists to safeguard. Perhaps it’s time journalists take up other issues and ditch their usual cynicism about politics – we have Donald Trump and Boris Johnson for that.
to learn something new. I've built an AI for my home, run 365 miles, visited every US state, read 25 books, and learned Mandarin. Last year, I focused almost all my time on addressing important issues around elections, speech, privacy, and well-being. Facebook is a different company now than it was a couple of years ago because of a much greater focus on these questions. These issues are complex and we will continue focusing on them for years to come. There are so many big questions about the world we want to live in and technology's place in it. Do we want technology to keep giving more people a voice, or will traditional gatekeepers control what ideas can be expressed? Should we decentralize authority through encryption or other means to put more power in people's hands? In a world where many physical communities are weakening, what role can the internet play in strengthening our social fabric? How do we build an internet that helps people come together to address the world's biggest problems that require global-scale collaboration? How do we build technology that creates more jobs rather than just building AI to automate things people do? What form will this all take now that the smartphone is mature? And how do we keep up the pace of scientific and technological progress across fields? My challenge for 2019 is to host a series of public discussions about the future of technology in society -- the opportunities, the challenges, the hopes, and the anxieties. Every few weeks I'll talk with leaders, experts, and people in our community from different fields and I'll try different formats to keep it interesting. These will all be public, either on my Facebook or Instagram pages or on other media. This will be intellectually interesting, but there's a personal challenge for me here too. I'm an engineer, and I used to just build out my ideas and hope they'd mostly speak for themselves. But given the importance of what we do, that doesn't cut it anymore. So I'm going to put myself out there more than I've been comfortable with and engage more in some of these debates about the future, the tradeoffs we face, and where we want to go. I'm looking forward to another year of learning and personal improvement, and to discussing a lot of important questions with all of you!
SRSLY Wrong is a “research-based comedy podcast” run by a pair of Canadian fellas with a background in radical politics, occupy, and the Pirate Party; in a three part series, hosts Aaro…
Sale comes within months of DNS overseer pushing through controversial contract change
Racisme: Het geweld tegen Kick Out Zwarte Piet is ook een aanval op de democratie, schrijven vijf leden van Kick Out Zwarte Piet. Door te zwijgen kiest premier Rutte de kant van de onverdraagzamen. „Hoe zou u reageren als hooligans een VVD-congres aanvielen?”
Facebook once built an internal app that let employees identify people using facial recognition and their phone cameras, Business Insider reported Friday. From the report: The app, which was developed between 2015 and 2016, utilised Facebook's vast collection of user identities to automatically reco...
A sophisticated new electronic warfare system is being used at the world’s busiest port. But is it sand thieves or the Chinese state behind it?
There needs to be a radical transformation of Facebook and Google's surveillance business model as it poses a systemic threat to human rights,
I was studying the effectiveness of a head-mounted device to stop motion sickness in driverless cars when something unexpected happened. One of the participants in my experiment reported that her tinnitus had dramatically improved, she scored 100% for motion sickness susceptibility so was of interes
The past couple years has seen a rise in prison profiteers who strike deals with state corrections departments to provide “free” tablets to prisoners (these being the flimsiest, cheapes…
Pakweg tien jaar geleden moest je er niet aan denken het woord ‘racisme’ hardop te noemen in Nederland. Nu lijkt het tij gekeerd en strijden steeds meer mensen tegen het monster dat institutioneel racisme heet. Vorige week
Ik wilde deze column niet schrijven. Dus ruimde ik het huis op, deed de was, speelde met mijn kater Flamouche. Maar sinds de weerzinwekkende aanval op antizwartepietactivisten, denk ik aan niets anders. Het kan slechter, hoor je wel eens over raciale ongelijkheid in Nederland. Omdat er bijvoorbeeld niet, zoals in de VS, onschuldige zwarte burgers door politieagenten neergeschoten worden. Alsof het…
A network of cooperative alternatives are replacing rampant exploitation with decent work.
CDA en D66 willen meer en duidelijkere regelgeving rondom gezichtsherkenningssoftware. Nu is het volgens de partijen nog te vaak onduidelijk wie de techniek inzet, en met welk doel.
Er meldde zich een ontdekkingsreiziger om te praten over de wildernis. Langzamerhand verbazen de onderwerpen me niet meer waarover mensen in gesprek willen. God, richtlijnen inzake het hergebruik van overheidsinformatie, romankunst, seks. Koffie drinken is in zo’n geval het beste. En dus zaten de onbekende man en ik in de betongrijze hal van een universiteitsgebouw, omdat ik daar toevallig toch…
Seven hundred pages of leaked documents reveal how Iranian spies have infiltrated every aspect of Iraqi political life.
5-min read
Survival — the pursuit of more time — is the most basic instinct. Procreation is a distan...
Survival — the pursuit of more time — is the most basic instinct. Procreation is a distan...
foster/ˈfɒstə/verb 1. Encourage the development of (something, especially something desirable). “the teacher’s task is to foster learning” TLDR: I made a personal bookshelf management web application and named it Foster and you can find it here. Here’s what I did (with gifs), so you might build your own. Name I named it Foster. Because of …
CodeFund is an open source platform that helps fund maintainers, bloggers, and builders through non-tracking ethical ads
More tactical diversity from the Hong Kong protests: “trilithons” — little stonehenges made of bricks or pavers that impede police vehicles. (Image: thumbnail from Ryan Ho Kilpatr…
“We might as well go down fighting.”
Small Technology Foundation Personal Web Prototype-01: an always-connected portable personal web server that fits in your pocket.
Imagine holding your personal web site in the palm of your hand. Imagine carrying the digital aspects of your self in your pocket instead of having them on some abstract cloud under the watchful eye of some faceless multinational corporation1.
Personal Web Prototype-01 from Small Technology Foundation R&D achieves the former using widely available off-the-shelf parts and Site.
Imagine holding your personal web site in the palm of your hand. Imagine carrying the digital aspects of your self in your pocket instead of having them on some abstract cloud under the watchful eye of some faceless multinational corporation1.
Personal Web Prototype-01 from Small Technology Foundation R&D achieves the former using widely available off-the-shelf parts and Site.
Google’s reputation has remained relatively unscathed despite behaviors similar to Facebook’s. This could be the tipping point
China’s state disinformation campaigns against the Hong Kong protesters are unwelcome on Youtube, Twitter and Facebook, with the mainstream platforms shutting down accounts that spread propag…