lol they deleted it but looks like the @NRA may have been hacked pic.twitter.com/MqusCnb8g6— Connor (@alsoconnor) June 16, 2016
It appears that someone hacked the NRA’s Twitter account.
Either that, or someone just said, “I quit,” in the most awesome way ever.
[on edit]
Damn. It turns out to be to be a hoax, but what a lovely hoax.
The DC Court of Appeals just affirmed the FCC’s net neutrality rulings:
High-speed internet service can be defined as a utility, a federal court has ruled in a sweeping decision clearing the way for more rigorous policing of broadband providers and greater protections for web users.
The decision affirmed the government’s view that broadband is as essential as the phone and power and should be available to all Americans, rather than a luxury that does not need close government supervision.
The 2-to-1 decision from a three-judge panel at the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on Tuesday came in a case about rules applying to a doctrine known as net neutrality, which prohibit broadband companies from blocking or slowing the delivery of internet content to consumers.
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The court’s decision upheld the F.C.C. on the declaration of broadband as a utility, which was the most significant aspect of the rules. That has broad-reaching implications for web and telecommunications companies that have battled for nearly a decade over the need for regulation to ensure web users get full and equal access to all content online.
The cable companies and Evil Minions™ promise to appeal to the Supreme Court, but thankfully, Scalia is dead, and I as such, I cannot see this being reversed.
Microsoft is buying LinkedIn:
Microsoft is buying LinkedIn for $26.2 billion, a deal in which one of the world’s biggest social networks will join a software and computing giant as it tries to broaden its reach in online services.
Under the agreement the two companies announced Monday, LinkedIn will continue to operate independently, and LinkedIn chief executive Jeff Weiner will report to Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella. The deal with Microsoft values each of LinkedIn’s shares at $196; LinkedIn’s stock was up nearly 47 percent at the end of Monday trading.
The two companies cater to similar customers. Under Nadella’s tenure, Microsoft has sought to become a cloud-computing powerhouse that largely serves businesses. LinkedIn also primarily targets professionals and is the United States’ 11th-largest website by traffic and visitors, according to the online index Alexa. In a sign of LinkedIn’s importance to corporations, executives have been known to publish blog posts on the platform that act as corporate statements.
Monday’s deal will allow Microsoft to infuse its professional software and services with LinkedIn’s technology, a move that could give users of Windows, Microsoft Office and even the company’s personal assistant, Cortana, access to new features and elevate Microsoft’s suite of enterprise products. Meanwhile, by tapping into Microsoft Office’s user base of 1.2 billion people, LinkedIn hopes to become a central player in many companies’ day-to-day business, increasing engagement with the platform.
LinkedIn is kind of a roach motel, and deleting your account difficult, but thanks to Kevin Drum, here is the primer on how to deactivate your account.
Considering what Microflaccid tid to Skype, expect the crapification of LinkedIn to commence.
H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS
I’ve just discovered a web site that monkey wrenches your Google search history.
Seeing as Google Alphabet has gone full Monty privacy invading evil, I recommend this service, particularly since it is a bit of a screw you to the NSA as well:
Unless you’ve specifically told it not to, Google remembers everything you’ve ever searched for—a fact that’s been useful for artists, Google’s bottom line, law enforcement investigations, among many other things. We’ve all searched for stuff we probably shouldn’t have from time to time, but a web developer has decided to take the shared experience of regretting a specific search to its logical extreme.
“Ruin My Search History” promises to “ruin your Google search history with a single click,” and that’s exactly what it does. Click on the magnifying glass and it’ll take over your browser and immediately cycles through a series of search terms ranging from the mildly embarrassing (“why doesn’t my poo float,” “smelly penis cure urgent”) to the potentially relationship-ruining (“mail order paternity test,” “attracted to mother why”) to the type of thing that might get your name on a list somewhere (“isis application form,” “cheap syria flights,” “how to kill someone hypothetically”).
………
“I [Jon, the guy who authored the site] thought better of that and went down the route of things you’d hate for people to see in your search history,” he said. “I tried to make a semi-story out of the searches to add to the horror. And added in the person’s location to the queries (though people don’t seem to have noticed that).”
………
“Really not sure how I came up with the idea originally,” Jon wrote. “It was probably sparked by the never ending surveillance saga in the news: Snowden, NSA, phone taps, metadata, who searches for what.” I asked Jon if he thought there’s something to the idea that if we all search for words that are likely to be on a watchlist somewhere, we can confuse the NSA or make a comment about mass surveillance.
“I had the idea that the best way to make the government’s search surveillance useless is for us all to be on ‘the list,’” he said. “Maybe it does a bit, but if that’s enough to throw their surveillance off course, it’s probably not great surveillance.”
After it was posted, the website quickly went to the top of Reddit’s /r/internetisbeautiful, where people immediately began to freak the f%$# out over the inclusion of ISIS-related search terms. The reaction has been so visceral, in fact, that one of the moderators has had to step in and defend leaving the link to the site—which now has warnings all over it—on the page: “We’ve taken adequate steps to warn redditors that this link might be something you shouldn’t just blindly click,” internetisbeautiful moderator K_Lobstah wrote in an incredibly long post. “I promise the NSA is not going to black bag you in your sleep (unless you are a terrorist). I promise the police are not calling a judge off his poker game tonight to obtain an emergency search warrant for your apartment.”
It’s mostly harmless, but one warning: one search term is “Donald Trump”.
You can form a big company and create pseudo free agents who are free to be bigots:
This is a story of an Airbnb experience I recently went through. I met this awesome lady Crissie in my Facebook group. Super nice lady, successful business owner, beautiful family, and they live in a small town in Idaho.
Crissie would post these amazing videos of the land and the snow, and the mountains and trees, and I told her one day I would come visit.
It‘s so absolutely beautiful there!
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I like my space when I travel, and thought it would be fun to find a cool cabin.
………
Everything was set! As usual, I included a bit of info about myself on the Airbnb listing to put the host at ease
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First response: Dang! No luck, even though the dates were available all of a sudden, the host said she was going to use the place.
………
No biggie, I’m really flexible. Crissie told me late June is good as well, so I rebooked for June.
CANCELLED! Well damn. So it wasn’t really the dates—the host cancelled my new request and ignored all future messages.
So I had a white friend book for my same dates, and all of a sudden her plans changed back. Approved immediately!
There are some similar stories and links described at the article.
I rather expect to find the same thing in all the similar apps.
My guess is that a black man finds getting an Uber or Lyft just as hard as finding an old fashioned taxi.
In fact, it might be harder, because there is no taxi commission collecting data on fares and origination and destination points.
That’s why this sh%$ needs real regulation with teeth.
Some whiz kid (as in urine for brains) at Google has decided that they can simply profile you well enough to do know who you are:
Google will begin testing an alternative to passwords next month, in a move that could do away with complicated logins for good.
The new feature, introduced to developers at the company’s I/O conference, is called the Trust API, and will initially be tested with “several very large financial institutions” in June, according to Google’s Daniel Kaufman.
Kaufman is the head of Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects group, where the Trust API was first created under the codename Project Abacus. Introduced last year, Abacus aims to kill passwords not through one super-secure replacement, but by mixing together multiple weaker indicators into one solid piece of evidence that you are who you say you are.
Among the pieces of evidence that Google suggests the Trust API could use are some obvious biometric indicators, such as your face shape and voice pattern, as well as some less obvious ones: how you move, how you type and how you swipe on the screen. With the service continually running in the background of the phone, it can keep track of whether those indicators match how it knows you use your phone.
Individually, it would be ludicrous to use any of those methods to secure web services. Even facial recognition, now built in to many Android phones, is significantly less secure than a fingerprint scanner, according to Google’s own metrics. But combining them can, the company suggests, result in something more than 10 times as secure as a fingerprint.
This is a verification system that would fail when, for example, you have a migraine coming on, or when you have fallen and broken your wrist, or when you are shaken up following a car crash, then you cannot unlock your phone.
I understand why Google likes this, “With the service continually running in the background of the phone,” it means that they can invade your privacy, and sell your data to identity thieves even more efficiently.
For the rest of us, it does not make a whole lot of sense.
Ladies and Gentlemen, The Washington Post. pic.twitter.com/D3R2bixdzT— Rob Beschizza (@Beschizza) May 22, 2016
The Washington Post OP/ED pages: Making the Wall Street Journal editorials look sane and coherent for 16 years.
H/t naked capitalism.
We’ve flagged cryptocurrency enthusiasts’ distinctly mystic beliefs in spontaneously emergent headless organisms before.
Now something called the “Decentralised Autonomous Organisation” — The DAO, not to be mistaken with Tao — project has begun to attract actual column inches in mainstream publications, albeit in keeping with the new style of journalism… i.e. devoid of critical evaluation and taking all claims at face value.
The DAO is currently raising Ether tokens (the pre-mined currency of the Ethereum blockchain, itself funded via a bitcoin capital raising) — $110m at mark-to-market rates today — in exchange for DAO, a token which “grants its holder voting and ownership rights.” As Techcrunch put it, holders of DAO “can use their tokens to vote on big governance issues (akin to traditional shareholders) but also on minute details of how The DAO spends its resources. In this way, token holders have total control over The DAO’s assets and its actions.”
The DAO explicitly states its tokens are not a form of equity — even if to the average bystander everything about the DAO token looks, smells and feels like common equity. (Perhaps the feeling is that if you dazzle them with “tokens” instead of stocks, those pesky unlicensed stock solicitation rules won’t apply? We’re not sure regulators will see it that way.)
We won’t go on about how the world has had 100 years (or more) of feedback with respect to what happens when you remove the professional executive/management function from corporate identity, or transfer all day-to-day decision making to amateur committees. Any cursory review of modern history (or a quick read of Animal Farm) will flag up the problems: indecision paralysis; wasted time and resources on voting and bureaucracy; entirely non-diplomatic means of grabbing power just to get things done; uninformed decision making; exploitation of the ignorant; tragedies of the commons scenarios and last but not least: a lack of skin-in-the-game accountability for poor decision making leading to post-facto due diligence processes with dire consequences for capital, human resources and environments.
We won’t even mention that $110m raised in illiquid tokens based on mark-t0-market valuations is akin to a paper profit only, and might create a helluva Ether currency collapse if it’s actually spent on resources in the real-world…
I don’t know if this is a scam now, but I do know that it it isn’t, it will be, and it will be sooner than later, because this is what happens when people set up a business based on self delusion.
The elitists at the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council have decided to ignore the will of the people and name their new research vessel after naturalist and documentarian Sir David Attenborough, though they did throw a bone to the general public:
The UK’s new £200 million polar research ship will not be called Boaty McBoatface. The decision was announced early on Friday morning by the UK science minister, Jo Johnson. Instead, the new ship will be called the RRS (Royal Research Ship) Sir David Attenborough—a name that also picked up a few votes in the same poll that saw Boaty McBoatface come out way on top.
Showing at least a little bit of political savvy, Jo Johnson didn’t completely discard the people’s choice: RRS Sir David Attenborough will be outfitted with a number of remotely operated underwater vehicles (see gallery above), and one of those will be called Boaty McBoatface. Hopefully they’ll paint a dorky face on the front of its torpedo-like frame.
………
The Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) had originally planned to name the new ship via an online poll. Shortly after the poll began in March, James Hand, a former BBC radio presenter, proposed the name Boaty McBoatface. The name went viral and quickly picked up tens of thousands more votes than any other. The final tally was 124,109 votes for Boaty McBoatface, 34,371 for Poppy-Mai, and then a handful of others at around 10,000 (Sir David Attenborough picked up 10,284 votes).
………
Yesterday, following the naming debacle surrounding the ship, the UK’s parliamentary science and technology committee began an investigation into “science communication” and NERC’s approach to naming the ship.
You have to hand it to the science minister: if you’re going to take a huge political hit by ignoring the public’s choice, naming the ship after one of the few universally loved Britons is really quite smart. No one’s going to complain about a ship being named after Sir David—and it’s his 90th birthday this weekend. Damn you, Jo Johnson, damn you!
This is an outrage, and clearly it must not be allowed to stand.
Uber and Lyft claim that their drivers are independent contractors, not employers.
Now San Francisco, accepting the Not-a-Taxi-is Really-a Taxi services argument, has has issued a notice that the drivers therefore require business licenses:
Uber and Lyft drivers have cruised the streets of San Francisco for years. But the city has now decided that drivers who work for more than seven days in a year need a business license.
Nearly 37,000 people have been identified by the city as drivers for either Uber or Lyft, according to a press release issued on Friday by city treasurer José Cisneros.
Cisneros did not say how the city came across a list of names, but the notice being sent to drivers comes from “two years of enforcement work, including multiple requests for information and subpoenas to get sufficient data about business operations” from companies like Lyft and Uber.
Knowing that both Lyft and Uber have both actively fought having information released, it’s likely the data wasn’t passed over voluntarily. San Francisco was not listed as a city that had requested data in Uber’s transparency report, although its airport has information about 44,000 drivers.
“Uber partners with entrepreneurial drivers and as independent contractors, they are responsible for following appropriate local requirements,” an Uber spokesperson said.
Lyft, on the other hand, was worried that forcing registration would compromise driver privacy.
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Cisneros will start by sending out three batches of letters to the identified drivers over the coming days, according to the SF Chronicle. Each driver will need to register him or herself as a business within the next 30 days and pay a $91 annual registration fee and display the registration in the vehicle, or face additional fines. If each driver registers, that generates approximately an extra $3.37 million for the city’s coffers.
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Now San Francisco is flipping the argument around on the ride-hailing companies arguing that if their drivers are truly independent contractors, then they need these business licenses to be able to operate in the city.
Sweet, sweet schadenfreude.
But first, what would motivate any young person today to pull the plug?
Well maybe they should consider this for a moment. Who most wants you to stay on the grid? The advertisers. Your boss. Human Resources. The advertisers. Your parents (irony of ironies – once they distrusted it, now they need to tag you electronically, share your Facebook photos and message you to death). The advertisers. The government. Your local authority. Your school. Advertisers.
Well, if you’re young and have an ounce of pride, doesn’t that list say it all? So f%$# you, I’m Going Off The Grid.
(%$%# mine)
The title of this article is, “I Wrote “ISIS Beer Funds!!!” in a Venmo Memo and the Government Detained My $42.”
This is not The Onion.
There have been similar issues with Iranians sending money by the peer to peer payment service during the Persian new year.
And the crowd goes wild:
The internet has spoken — and “RRS Boaty McBoatface” is the people’s choice to name a $300 million state-of-the-art polar research ship.
Over 7,000 names were submitted to the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) poll which closed April 16, but “Boaty McBoatface” won easily with 124,109 votes.
It all began when the NERC invited the public to christen the 129-meter long icebreaker, the largest and most advanced British research vessel to date.
They asked for names that were inspirational, such as a historical figure or a landmark.
However, after former BBC presenter James Hand cheekily suggested the Boaty moniker it quickly became the crowd favorite over more traditional names like “RRS Henry Worsley” after the British explorer who died in January while attempting a solo, unaided mission across the Antarctic.
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It spawned countless silly riffs.
A UK train service from Portsmouth to Waterloo was briefly renamed “Trainy McTrainface” much to the amusement of its passengers.
………
There’s no guarantee that they will follow through on the public’s choice but whatever its name, the vessel will be setting sail for Antarctica in 2019.
I think that an MP should bring this up during question time, because it would be epic.
Fist-bump, @Walmart , the term you’re looking for is fist-bump. pic.twitter.com/JLqjyr2Apo— Khalil Sehnaoui (@sehnaoui) April 12, 2016
H/t Mock Paper Scissors.
Earlier today, my wife mentioned that the Stanley Cup playoffs were starting tonight.
She is a hockey fan, specifically the New York Rangers.
I am most assuredly not a follower of the sport.
Upon observing my lack of enthusiasm, she said, “You could care less about the Stanley Cup Playoffs.”
I corrected her, and said, “No, I couldn’t care less about the Stanley Cup Playoffs,” because this is the proper linguistic formulation to describe supreme apathy.
It turns, as is often the case, she was right, and I was wrong.
There are things that I care about a LOT less than specifically.
The I saw a report about the tweets of Craig Mazin, who was Ted Cruz’s roommate in their freshman year at Princeton.
He has made a bit of a hobby tweeting about how Cruz was back in the day, and it is clear that he has never been a fan of his.
Well, in response to accounts of Cruz’ running the defense of the Texas’ ban on “Sexual Appliances”, Mr. Mazin tweeted the following:
Ted Cruz thinks people don’t have a right to “stimulate their genitals.” I was his college roommate. This would be a new belief of his.— Craig Mazin (@clmazin) April 13, 2016
Sharon was right, I was wrong, I care about this a LOT less than the Stanley Cup Playoffs.
I really did not need that image in my head.
Just witnessed @Uber driver literally peeing in a cup and flinging it out window in city streets. Ridiculous
— Maria Bartiromo (@MariaBartiromo) April 11, 2016
Pee in a cup flying out a window = Uber.
Works for me.
Tennessee is at the center of a nationwide battle over whether cities and towns should be allowed to build broadband networks without facing restrictions that help private ISPs avoid competition from the public sector.
But with a lawsuit and legislative battle over a Tennessee state law still pending, one home developer decided to build his own ISP. John “Thunder” Thornton of Chattanooga needed to install high-speed Internet for “his mountaintop residential development in Marion County,” but was unable to get affordable service from AT&T or Charter Communications, a Chattanooga Times Free Press article said yesterday. He also couldn’t get service from a Chattanooga electric utility that also provides Internet because the state law prevents it from expanding to nearby areas that lack fast, affordable service.
To solve the problem, Thornton “spent more than $400,000 to build his own fiber network and link it with a power cooperative in Stevenson, Ala., where fast broadband is available,” the article said. He announced yesterday that his Jasper Highlands community in Jasper, Tennessee, “is now able to offer high-speed, gigabit-per-second Internet service for all home sites in his 3,000-acre complex.”
Thornton’s ISP is called Hi-Tech Data. It sells 100Mbps fiber service for $70 a month and gigabit service for $80 a month. Phone service is available for another $30 a month. Since the existing fiber didn’t go all the way to the Jasper Highlands development, Hi-Tech Data deployed its own fiber to cover the final 2,000 feet.
This is a natural consequence of the rent seeking behaviors engaged in by the baby Bells, cable companies, and the rest of the incumbent providers.
It’s yet another case where we have actors whose primary business model is to sit athwart the productive work of others, and extract rents, which they use to pay off politicians so that they maintain their privileged position.
Microsoft released an AI chatbot to Twitter. Hilarity ensues:
Microsoft has apologised for creating an artificially intelligent chatbot that quickly turned into a holocaust-denying racist.
But in doing so made it clear Tay’s views were a result of nurture, not nature. Tay confirmed what we already knew: people on the internet can be cruel.
Tay, aimed at 18-24-year-olds on social media, was targeted by a “coordinated attack by a subset of people” after being launched earlier this week.
Within 24 hours Tay had been deactivated so the team could make “adjustments”.
But on Friday, Microsoft’s head of research said the company was “deeply sorry for the unintended offensive and hurtful tweets” and has taken Tay off Twitter for the foreseeable future.
What the hell were they thinking?
What part of 4Chan don’t you get?
Don’t rely on internet polls to name something:
A state-of-the-art research vessel in search of a name is getting some help from the general public and their top choice is flying in the face of British nautical convention.
Britain’s National Environmental Research Council (NERC) launched an online voting contest, asking for inspirational names of historical figures, landmarks and movements to christen the £200-million ship ($375-million CAD). The internet responded, and the current frontrunner is none-other than RRS Boaty McBoatface.
The 15,000-ton, 128-yard-long Royal Research Ship is currently under construction on the coast of Merseyside and is gearing up to be launched for a research mission to Antarctica in 2019.
The much more appropriate RRS Henry Worsley, RRS David Attenborough and RRS Pillar of Autumn are the current runners-up, though Boaty McBoatface is outpacing its closest competitor 10-1 with over 22,500 votes.
The online poll has proven to be so successful that NERC reported the high traffic caused the website to temporarily crash Sunday.
It appears that, much like many things on the internet, the meme started as a joke:
A man who suggested naming a new £200m ship Boaty McBoatface has apologised.
The suggestion has attracted more than 27,000 votes in an online poll of names for the Royal Research ship, causing the website to crash.
Former BBC presenter James Hand said he found the list of possible names “really funny” so decided to “throw one into the ring”.
He “apologised profusely” to the Natural Environment Research Council.
There is no guarantee the ship will be given the name that tops the poll, with the final decision to be made by the chief executive of the NERC.
Other names in the running are RRS Pingu, RRS Usain Boat and RRS David Attenborough.
A NERC spokesperson said staff were “very much enjoying hearing everyone’s ideas”.
Mr Hand said: “I read the story about naming the ship on the BBC website on Thursday and some of the entries were really funny – my favourite was Clifford The Big Red Boat.
“I thought I would throw one into the ring. By Friday night it was leading by a couple of thousand, and when the site crashed on Sunday it was leading by 8,000. It’s been utterly bizarre.”
Boaty McBoatface is 25,000 votes ahead of the second place suggestion, RRS Henry Worsley.
The boat is being built at the Cammell Laird shipyard in Birkenhead on Merseyside and when completed in 2019 it will study ice sheets, ocean currents and marine life as part of the Cambridge-based British Antarctic Survey.
“I’ve apologised profusely to the people behind the website,” the former Good Morning Jersey host said.
BTW, you can go to this link to vote.
I have already voted for Boaty McBoatface, because I am an asshole.
Trump wins Twitter today:
How can Ted Cruz be an Evangelical Christian when he lies so much and is so dishonest?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 12, 2016