Showing posts with label March 21. Show all posts
Showing posts with label March 21. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 21, 2017

#Cyberculture agenda: “Don’t Let WikiLeaks Scare You Off of Signal and Other Encrypted Chat Apps

http://ift.tt/2mL6O3T

Despite some initial confusion, the CIA hasn’t undermined Signal and other important end-to-end encrypted apps.

There’s been one particularly misleading claim repeated throughout coverage of CIA documents released by WikiLeaks today: That the agency’s in-house hackers “bypassed” the encryption used by popular secure-chat software like Signal and WhatsApp.

And also maybe unplug your TV while you plot your coup.

WikiLeaks just ignited another powder keg. Julian Assange’s outfit has posted the first of a string of CIA leaks, nicknamed Vault 7, that purports to reveal the agency’s “entire hacking capacity.” The information is said to have escaped an “isolated”…

Wikileaks unleashes ‘Vault 7’ series, the largest ever leak on the CIA


Wikileaks has released a massive stash of confidential documents in what could be the biggest ever leak involving the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The leak marks the very first installment of the Wikileaks’ latest series code-named Vault 7 in which the whistleblowing platform focuses on the CIA’s internal covert operations, including spying protocols and hacking practices. Leader Julian Assange was scheduled to unveil the leak today in a press conference announced earlier yesterday. The presentation, however, was rescheduled following attacks on Assange’s Facebook and Periscope video streams. NOTICE: As Mr. Assange’s Perscipe+Facebook video stream links are under attack his video press conference will be…

Vía Erkan’s Field Diary http://ift.tt/2nvTrcx


Filed under: Uncategorized

Monday, March 21, 2016

Cyberculture agenda: Twitter is 10 #LoveTwitter

http://ift.tt/25fysID

Despite rumblings of a 10,000-character limit on Twitter, the company’s CEOtold The Today Show that the 140-character limit is here to stay.

In an appearance on The Today Show, Jack Dorsey dismissed the rumors of long-form tweets, saying that the company is focused on keeping tweets to 140-characters or less:

Twitter Celebrates 10th Birthday

Millions of people use Twitter every day — everyone from Justin Bieber toPresident Barack Obama.

It has become a powerful platform of self-expression, aided political revolutions and fostered personal connections, 140 characters at a time.

However, before polls and hashtag emojis and throwback Thursdays, the service started simply, with an innocent tweet on March 21, 2006 from co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey.

The 10 most historic tweets from world leaders over the past decade #Twitter10Years

Despite recent growing pains, Twitter still generates a wealth of data that can tell us all kinds of things about its users.

Last week, we examined where the most hateful Twitter users live; this week we take a look at where you’ll find the happiest Twitter users in the world.

 

Big data and creativity: What we can learn from ‘House of Cards’
house of cards
Data and creativity can work really well together. Don’t believe me? On February 1, 2013, a TV series called House of Cards debuted on the video streaming service Netflix. It proved an immediate hit. Two years later, it has a nine out of 10 rating from more than 275,000 reviewers.
Twitter
This week, Twitter turns 10. Over the next five days we’ll be exploring how far the microblogging service has come, the challenges it faces going forward and some of its key moments along the way. March 21 marks ten years since Twitter came to life. Since its 2006 arrival, the platform has arguably changed the way we express ourselves online, keeping our worldly thoughts within its 140 character constraint. checking out twttr — Ev Williams (@ev) March 21, 2006 just setting up my twttr — Jack (@jack) March 21, 2006 What a lot of people don’t realize, Twitter — once…
donald trump
Earlier this week we brought you news that Anonymous was planning to launch “total war” on Donald Trump. Today, the hacktivist’s fired the opening salvo. The group followed through on earlier threats by posting extensive personal information about Trump — including a social security number, home address, birth certificate and phone numbers.
Instagram Engagement Slump Continues (Report)

The engagement rate for posts by brands on Instagram continued to slide in February, as did growth in followers for accounts studied by social analytics and reporting company Locowise.

Locowise shared its findings in a blog post, including:

 

LGBTQ people and Apple vs FBI

gay-apple.png

Evan from Fight for the Future writes, “Everyone is focused on the high profile fight between Apple and the FBI, which is a good thing, because the outcome of this case will affect all of us.”

 

giphy

More proof that all devices in the modern world are just computers in fancy cases: the FBI’s joint warning issued with the DoT and the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration tells drivers that they’re at risk of local and remote hack-attacks against their cars, and tells them they have to keep their cars’ patch-levels current or they’ll be in serious danger. (more…)

 

If you follow Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump on Twitter, your face has probably been analyzed by a machine to determine your age, ethnicity, and social influence.
Indexing the dark Web offers a way to track crime—and shows that the hidden realm is a refuge for people who fear persecution.
ProtonMail
I often get asked “what email service should I use if I don’t want to use Gmail?” and now I finally have what I think is an excellent answer. ProtonMail is an ad-free, end-to-end encrypted email client that’s been invite-only since 2014 – but it’s now opened its doors to ordinary civilians and is finally live on both Android and iOS – after delays that it’s blamed on the US government. In February, the company explained:
giphy
New York City residents who found themselves tweeting at a bar in 2014 may have actually been contributing to the betterment of machine-learning algorithms.
Apple’s Brief Hits the FBI With a Withering Fact Check

The company pointed out numerous legal and technical errors in the government’s assertions.

Cafes in Europe set to become hotspots for illegal piracy

thepiratebay
Europe’s highest court has just made a preliminary ruling that says owners of public Wi-Fi networks in places like cafes and bars cannot be expected to add passwords or monitor traffic, great news for those who are keen on illegal downloading. This follows a case where Sony in Germany was suing a shop owner for illegal music downloads made on the company’s unsecured hotspot. In a statement that explains why this is a good day for freedom of the internet and open access to information, rather than just a wonderful one for pirates, the ruling says: The Advocate General considers that the imposition of an obligation…

Vía Erkan’s Field Diary http://ift.tt/22ySdbO


Filed under: Uncategorized

Workshop in Ankara on 9 April, open to all: “Social Media in Turkey: Uses and impacts in Social and Political Life

http://ift.tt/1pXb1mW

I am honored to attend the workshop along with the anthropologist Daniel Miller and many other colleagues whom I respect their work…

2016_04_09_POSTER_Workhshop_Socila_Media_web

WORKSHOP: Social Media in Turkey: Uses and impacts in Social and Political Life

09 April 2016 09:30 to 18:00

Co-organised by the British Institute at Ankara and the Social Anthropology Graduate Program of the Middle East Technical University.

Venue: the Middle East Technical University

Convenor: Dr. Elisabetta Costa (BIAA)

The workshop brings together different research on the uses and consequences of social media in Turkey. The papers will illustrate different forms of usage of social media and their social and political implications. What is the impact of social media on people’s relationships? Have social media reinforced or reduced social inequalities? What is the current state of the ‘digital divide’ in Turkey? What is the impact of social media on political participation? Have social media transformed visual communications and photographic practices? The workshop will include a keynote talk by Daniel Miller, Professor of Anthropology at UCL (University College London), who will present the results of Why We Post http://ift.tt/1CTEn7U; http://ift.tt/1oVPfiS, a research project on the uses of social media in 9 different countries around the world.

Workshop Programme:

9:30 – 9:40  Opening and Welcome

9:40- 11:40  Panel 1: Social Media and Social Implications | Chair: Elisabetta Costa
Özlem Savaş, Bilkent University: Defeat of modesty by pleasure: Facebook practices of ‘good life’ in Turkey.
Erkan Saka, Istanbul Bilgi University: Uses and potentials of snapchat in Turkey.
Dağhan Irak, University of Strasbourg: How cultural and social capital drive the Social Media.
Burak Taşdizen, METU: Social Media in a Knitting Community in Ankara, Turkey.

11:40 – 12:00 Coffee break (open to all)

12:00 – 13:00 Keynote talk by Daniel Miller
‘Why We Post: the Anthropology of Social Media’

13:00 – 14:30 Lunch break
(provided only for participants – guests/auditors will do their own arrangements)

14:30 – 16:00 Panel II: Social Media, Family and Diaspora | Chair: Mutlu Binark
Gülay Taltekin and Alev Kuruoğlu, Bilkent University: Negotiating Kinship Online: Bridal Homes and Marital Woes on a Facebook Group.
Slavka Karakusheva, Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski: Remembering the Past, Sharing the Present.
Elisabetta Costa, British Institute at Ankara (BIAA): Social media, Family and Kinship in Southeast Turkey.

16:00 – 16:30 Coffee break (open to all)

16:30 – 18:00 PANEL III: Social Media, Politics and Policies | Chair: Erkan Saka
Emre Toros, Atilim University: Do politicians “mind their Ps and Qs” on Twitter? An Analysis on the Incivility of the Candidate Tweets Circling the November 2015 Turkish Election.
Derya Agiş, Ankara University: Social Media Fights Between Academicians in Turkey.
Mutlu Binark, Hacettepe University: New Social Ecology and the Need for New Media Literacy in Turkey.

DOWNLOAD WORKSHOP PROGRAMME IN PDF
______________________________

OPEN TO ALL | REGISTER AT biaa.events@biaatr.org

Vía Erkan’s Field Diary http://ift.tt/22yMu5S


Filed under: Uncategorized

Journalism agenda: http://unfiltered.news/ “A new data viz tool shows what stories are being undercovered in countries around the world…

http://ift.tt/1LAFkd1

Screen Shot 2016-03-18 at 11.45.09 AM

It’s a common lament: Though the Internet provides us access to a nearly unlimited number of sources for news, most of us rarely venture beyond the same few sources or topics. And as news consumption shifts to our phones, people are using even fewer sources: On average, consumers access 1.52 trusted news sources on their phones, according to the 2015 Reuters Digital News Report, which studied news consumption across several countries.

First Draft experts visited the Guardian in mid March to share their expertise and discuss issues of verification in news.

Bellingcat’s Eliot Higgins details advanced geolocation and verification techniques in his presentation below, but don’t forget to check out the other videos:

How can you verify information in the chaos of a terror attack or dig up details about the suspects, like with Dylann Roof’s assault on a church in Charleston, South Carolina, or the multi-site attacks in Paris last November.

Eliza Mackintosh demonstrates the tools and techniques used at Storyful for the recent #FDLive event at the Guardian offices in London.

The public editor is meant to mediate between newsrooms and audiences, but where exactly are newsrooms and audiences today? The pace and scope of press changes are dizzying. Although news websites are still popular online destinations, people increasingly get their news through Facebook and Twitter, with millennials getting political news more from Facebook than anywhere else. Nearly two-thirds of Twitter users and almost 80 percent of Reddit users get news through these platforms. People care deeply about local news, but Twitter does a poor job of surfacing it. News about the Ferguson riots appeared on Twitter, but struggled for visibility on Facebook. And news organizations are now hosting their stories on Facebook servers in a race to make their stories load faster and be shared more. They closely monitor online traffic, use the headline that earns more clicks, encourage journalists to follow story statistics, and wonder how to responsibly cover breaking news already circulating on social media.

Chat bots (and chatty bots) are the new [insert 2015 journalism trend of your choice]. In particular, as the team messaging tool Slack takes over newsrooms, Slack integrations eager to help with this or that productivity thing have proliferated.

Bot or not? Vice’s Motherboard has a piece up today — a “botifesto,” if you will (or if you must) — that gives a comprehensive rundown of just how useful, harmful, and ultimately inescapable bots are to our digital lives.

Bots, “[g]enerally speaking these sets of algorithms are responsible for so much on the backend of the Internet,” are used everywhere from sharing up-to-date information on earthquakes to launching a DDoS attack on a news site followingpublication of an important cover story. They deliver information in Slack, sharing breaking news or helping human editors decide which stories will likely take off on social media. The New York Times’ Election Bot is even helping send 2016 presidential election questions straight to the newsroom.

Keep on top of your to-do list with these apps that can help you be more efficient at work

Report: 2016 will be critical for growth of VR in journalism

A report out Sunday from the Knight Foundation and the USA Today Networksays 2016 is shaping up to be a significant year for virtual reality journalism as more outlets continue to experiment with VR as they recognize its enormous potential, even though there are concerns over the format’s longterm viability.

Editor’s note: Our friend Alberto Cairo is one of the world’s true experts on data visualization in journalism. He’s got a new book out, The Truthful Art: Data, Charts, and Maps for Communication (a followup to his earlier The Functional Art), in which he “explains in clear terms how to work with data, discover the stories hidden within, and share those stories with the world in the form of charts, maps, and infographics.”

Check out this comprehensive manual for making the most of the platform’s 140 characters

On July 16, 2014, the Ukrainian Military of Defense’s television channel aired footage that showed Buk-M1 missile launchers and radar units deployed in the field. The next day, a Buk-M1 missile launcher shot down Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine.

Many – especially in the Russianmedia – believed this video footage was damning to the Ukrainians, showing what could be the anti-aircraft equipment that downed the passenger plane.

Apple News opens up to everyone

Publishers of all sizes, including parties of one, will be able to distribute their content on Apple News, the company announced Tuesday. From Apple’s site:

You can author once and News will optimize your content for all iOS devices, so your readers will have a great experience no matter which device they use. It’s easy to connect to existing content management systems, and you get access to a rich suite of tools to measure user engagement with your content.

Who’s actually adding to the civil discourse/garbage fire that is the comments section of news sites (the sites that still keep open a place for such reader contributions, at least)?

When Philip Balboni sold his international news website GlobalPost to WGBH’sPublic Radio International last year, he could have exited journalism as well. After all, he’s been in the business for 49 years now. But “I realized, unexpectedly, that I wasn’t ready to leave my profession,” Balboni said.

The Coral Project unveils its first product to make comments better

On Monday at SXSW, The Coral Project provided more details about the first product it’s developing to help news organizations better manage comments.

CoralProjectScreenShot

In 15 states across the U.S. and 9 countries around the world, you can find gay bars with names that are some variation of the word “Eagle.” They have no formal relationship to one another, but they’re the closest thing, Ken Schwenckewrites, “gay men have to a global franchise.” Schwencke’s piece “In Search of the Eagle,” published on a new site called The Thrust, is an exploration of the history of these bars and how they got their collective name — but also how Schwencke compiled this list of Eagle bars.

The outlet has also been experimenting with Slack bots, aiming to enable collaboration in the newsroom

The New York Times is continuing its digital expansion in niche products, announcing Thursday that it was launching Watching, a standalone TV and movie site and newsletter and expanding Well, the Times’ health section. We were first to tell you about the new TV/movie section back in January.

The projects were developed by NYT Beta, the in-house group that’s created efforts such as The New York Times en Español and NYT Cooking. These types of products are key to the Times’ future as it looks to build new products that attract new readers — who can eventually be converted into new subscribers.

Users — and publishers — were complaining about news sites’ slow load times long before initiatives like Facebook’s Instant Articles or Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages came along with plans to cut drastically pageload times.

“Mobile web performance is bad — I challenge you to find someone who disagrees with that,” Mic’s chief strategy officer Cory Haik told me last monthwhen we chatted about the official rollout of Google AMP. “When our pages load too slowly on mobile, as a publisher, we’re losing an audience, and that is painful.”

As the campaign in New Hampshire intensified leading up to the state’s presidential primary, New Hampshire Public Radio reporter Brian Wallstinwanted to understand more about the glut of political ads that were blanketing the state’s TV stations.

Did a passenger film the terrifying moment turbulence struck a flight from Florida to Italy in January? Did Daesh gun down 200 children in a mass execution? Did a Syrian boy save a girl from under a hail of bullets? Did a golden eagle swoop in to carry a young child away from his family in a park in Montreal?

The answer to all these questions is no, despite video footage claiming to show the events as real. This didn’t stop multiple news organisations publishing the videos as true, however. Despite advances in verification tools and techniques, spotting fake videos is still a particularly difficult nut to crack.

Eleven months after its launch, Politico Europe is looking to expand its audience outside of Brussels, in cities such as London and Berlin

16 women paving the way in digital media and technology

Our pick of some of the most inspiring women in media and tech, plus some suggestions from our community on Twitter

Ah, the art of the broadsheet Page One, with its mystical above-the-fold, below-the-fold double secret handshake code, its photo telegraphing The Big Story, its fonts delivering nuance, and its italics offering their own sweet siren song of understanding? Our never-thought-about assumption: this is what newspapers should look like, and they did, city to city, nation to nation. We hardly considered it design; it just was.

As Facebook prepares to roll out Instant Articles to all publishers next month, the company said Monday that it’s partnering with WordPress.com’s parentAutomattic to release an Instant Article WordPress plugin.

The plugin creates a special RSS feed that automatically optimizes posts to appear as Instant Articles. The plugin is open-source and customizable. Its documentation is available here on Github.

‘Our biggest competitors these days aren’t The New York Times or CNN. They are Hulu, Netflix and any place a user might spend their time’

Since he arrived at The New York Times in 1999, Steve Duenes has seen a lot of change.

The Times associate managing editor for graphics finds himself in the midst of multiple revolutions. “Graphics” have moved from their supplemental role in the old world to center-stage on our smartphones and laptops. Smartphones themselves now demand unprecedented thinking in miniaturized storytelling. The newsroom itself has become a different place, with budding collaboration slowly easing out members of competing desks.

IAB releases a primer to help publishers deal with adblockers

This week — as The New York Times began testing a campaign against adblockers— the IAB Tech Lab released a “primer describing the tactics available to publishers in response to adblocking.”

IAB doesn’t venture to make any one specific recommendation, but suggests publishers follow a process it calls DEAL:

On Thursday, after more than a year and a half of reporting, The Washington Post published a story on a Marine’s attempt to clear his name after a sexual assault investigation. The piece, by reporter John Woodrow Cox, is long — more than 8,000 words, divided into seven chapters — so the Post introduced a number of new features in its online presentation to try to make it more manageable for readers on both desktop and mobile.

Vía Erkan’s Field Diary http://ift.tt/1LAFn8R


Filed under: Uncategorized

Goodbye:( Hasnain Kazim, the SPIEGEL Correspondent Forced to Leave Turkey…

http://ift.tt/1ScseBX

Hasnain Kazim, bisheriger Türkei-Korrespondent des Nachrichtenmagazins «Der Spiegel», posiert am 01.03.2016 in Istanbul, Türkei. Foto: Can Merey/dpa (zu dpa «Keine Akkreditierung: «Spiegel»-Korrespondent verlässt die Türkei» vom 16.03.2016) +++(c) dpa - Bildfunk+++

Hasnain Kazim, bisheriger Türkei-Korrespondent des Nachrichtenmagazins «Der Spiegel», posiert am 01.03.2016 in Istanbul, Türkei. Foto: Can Merey/dpa (zu dpa «Keine Akkreditierung: «Spiegel»-Korrespondent verlässt die Türkei» vom 16.03.2016) +++(c) dpa – Bildfunk+++

 

SPIEGEL ONLINE – Mar 19, 8:34 AM

On our last day in Turkey, my family and I are not in the mood to go, but we have to leave the country. After several torturous months of uncertainty and concern, we have no other option. We fear for our safety. The bags are packed. The furniture…

***********

Nowruz celebrations mark beginning of spring

New Year celebrated in colourful ways in countries including Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, Iraq and Azerbaijan.
İstiklal street is İstanbul’s one of the most crowded centers that is populous every hour. It is quite empty after the suicide attack launched in front of sub-Governorship building at around 11 a.m. on March 19.
The government sets up and supports government-oriented ‘NGOs’ and increasingly sees the rest as a threat, says the head of Turkish civil society monitoring group. The space for civil society is shrinking under AKP rule, TÜSEV’s Tevfik Başak Ersen told the Hürriyet Daily News

Vía Erkan’s Field Diary http://ift.tt/1R9DGPR


Filed under: Uncategorized