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Comment Consistency dictates (Score 1) 166

If you're outraged by Disney deciding not to provide a platform for Oliver, then you should be outraged by YouTube deciding not to provide a platform for certain conservatives. If it's really about the principle and not the party. I'm not naming any names but I see a lot of hypocrisy comparing the comments here to the comments on the PragerU article from earlier today.

Comment hypocrisy (Score 1) 47

Does anyone else find it incredibly hypocritical that on the one hand, Google spends a lot lobbying for net neutrality to force telecom carriers to act as neutral platforms making no distinction between content, but meanwhile Youtube is a giant monopoly that claims the right to censor whatever content it damn well pleases? We need net neutrality for social media monopolies. How do you justify a double standard where the lower levels of the stack are forced to be neutral platforms, but the higher levels aren't?

Comment arrogant and unseemly (Score 4, Insightful) 80

by flogic42 (#59747708) Attached to: Twitter is Testing New Ways To Fight Misinformation

Why should anyone trust twitter to be the ultimate arbiter of truth?

The subtext of all these efforts to purge "misinformation" from social media is that democrats are salty about the 2016 election and want to blame it on the other side lying, even though they lie just as much if not more.

The enforcement will never be unbiased. I could list a million provably false statements that Twitter will never label as such:
* claiming women only earn 78 cents for every dollar men earn "for the same work"
* claiming there are no innate psychological differences between men and women
* blaming black arrest rates on "racist cops" rather than actual crime rate differences.
* claiming that the third world is poor because of colonialism
* claiming that europe is rich because of colonialism
* claiming there is no difference in IQ test scores between ethnic groups.
* claiming that "trickle down theory" ever existed
* blaming the housing bubble on "greed" rather than government policies to subsidize homeownership (increasing demand) while simultaneously blocking new construction (decreasing supply)
* claiming that real communism has never been tried

I could go on for days listing misinformation that Twitter will never label as such.

Comment Men with gendered profiles take even bigger hit (Score 1) 293

by flogic42 (#51485097) Attached to: Women Get Pull Requests Accepted More (Except When You Know They're Women)
Note in the graph at the top of page 15 that having an obviously-gendered profile hurt the acceptance rates of men even more than it hurt the acceptance rates of women. This completely undermines any conclusion that women are being discriminated against in pull request acceptance.
Books

Plagiarizing Wikipedia For Profit 223

Posted by kdawson from the ip-is-on-the-other-foot dept.
An anonymous reader sends word of a dustup involving the publisher John Wiley and Sons and Wikipedia. Two pages from a Wiley book, Black Gold: The New Frontier in Oil for Investors, consist of a verbatim copy from the English Wikipedia article on the Khobar Towers bombing. This is the publisher that touched off a fair use brouhaha earlier this year when they threatened to sue a blogger who had reproduced a chart and a table (fully attributed) from one of their journals.
Communications

Google May Close Gmail Germany Over Privacy Law 368

Posted by CmdrTaco from the well-thats-not-very-good dept.
Matt writes "Google is threatening to shut down the German version of its Gmail service if the German Bundestag passes it's new Internet surveillance law. Peter Fleischer, Google's German privacy representative says the new law would be a severe blow against privacy and would go against Google's practice of also offering anonymous e-mail accounts. If the law is passed then starting 2008, any connection data concerning the internet, phone calls (With position data when cell phones are used), SMS etc. of any German citizen will be saved for 6 months, anonymizing services like Tor will be made illegal."
Privacy

Submission + - States rebel against Real ID Act (lawbean.com)

Submitted by
Spamicles
Spamicles writes: "Four states have passed laws that reject federal rules regarding a national identification system. This casts serious doubt on the future of the 2005 Real ID Act that goes into effect in December 2009. New Hampshire and Oklahoma joined Montana and Washington state in the passage of statutes that refute guidelines set forth in the Act. However, these actions could eventually lead to drivers licenses issued in these states to not be accepted as official identification when boarding airplanes or accessing federal buildings. In addition to these four states, members of the Idaho legislature intentionally left out money in the budget to comply with the Act."
Education

Submission + - History of MECC and Oregon Trail

Submitted by Gammu
Gammu writes: For the past thirty years, many children have been raised with a heavy diet MECC games like Oregon Trail, Odell Lake and Lemonade Stand. These products weren't developed by a major game developer. Rather, they were developed by the state of Minnesota for use in their schools. What began as an initiative to get Minnesota students ready for the micro-computer age turned into a multi-million dollar a year business whose products are still used in US schools even a decade after MECC was sold off to another developer. Read about the history of MECC (and especially Oregon Trail) at Silicon User.
Music

RIAA Uses Local Cops In Oregon Raid 371

Posted by kdawson from the farming-out-the-dirty-work dept.
newtley writes "Fake cops employed by the RIAA started acting like real police officers quite a while ago — one of the earliest examples unfolded in Los Angeles in 2004. From a distance, the bust, 'looked like classic LAPD, DEA or FBI work, right down to the black "raid" vests the unit members wore,' said the LA Weekly. That their yellow stenciled lettering read 'RIAA' instead of something from an official law-enforcement agency, 'was lost on 55-year-old parking-lot attendant Ceasar Borrayo.' But it's also SOP for the RIAA to wield genuine officers paid for entirely from citizen taxes as copyright cops. Police were used in an RIAA-inspired raid at two flea markets in Beaverton, Oregon. 'Sgt. Paul Wandell, Beaverton police spokesman, said officers seized more than 50,000 items worth about $758,000,' says The Oregonian. But this is merely the tiny tip of an iceberg of absolutely staggering dimensions, an example of the extent coming in a GrayZone report slugged RIAA Anti-Piracy Seizure Information."

Library Chief Criticized for Requiring Subpoena 715

Posted by CowboyNeal from the by-the-book dept.
sudnshok writes "Hasbrouck Heights (NJ) Library Director Michele Reutty is under fire for refusing to give police library circulation records without a subpoena. Her lawyer explained, 'Reutty did the right thing... At no time did Michele Reutty say to any police officer or anybody else that she would not give the information if it was properly requested.' However, borough labor lawyer Ellen Horn, who also represented the library trustees, said Reutty was 'more interested in protecting' her library than helping the police. 'It was an absolute misjudgment of the seriousness of the matter,' Horn said."

Another Microsoft Exec Steps Down 315

Posted by CmdrTaco from the another-one-bites-the-dust dept.
Arcanimus writes "On Tuesday, the corporate vice president of Windows Live and MSN marketing, Martin Taylor, announced that he is leaving Microsoft. Just three months ago, Taylor was appointed to his new position to manage the marketing of Windows Live. In his 13 years with the company, Taylor even worked directly with CEO Steve Ballmer."

Interview with IE Lead Program Manager 289

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the through-the-looking-glass dept.
crackman writes "Matasano Security is running an excellent interview with Christopher Vaughan, a lead PM on the IE team. Christopher has worked on every release of Internet Explorer since version 2. He discusses IE7, security lessons learned from IE6, the future of .NET managed code in IE, and more."

WSJ on CraigsList and Zen of Classified Ads 278

Posted by timothy from the less-is-more dept.
prostoalex writes "Wall Street Journal profiles one of the Valley's most mysterious and secretive Web companies. A leader in online classifieds space and by some measures one of Web's top sites, CraigsList is ostensibly anti-ad and anti-self-promotion. From the article: "One industry analyst has estimated that Craigslist could generate 20 times that $25 million just by posting a couple of ads on each of its pages. If the estimate is to be believed, that's half a billion dollars a year being left on the table. What kind of company turns up its nose at $500 million?""

Overly Sanitized Environments Lead to Poor Health? 352

Posted by timothy from the are-you-gonna-finish-that? dept.
bignickel writes "A recently-released study examined the health implications of living in an overly hygienic environment. According to the 'hygiene hypothesis,' living in such an environment early in life can lead to problems with allergies and autoimmune diseases. The study compared lab rodents with rats and mice living in the wild. Time to stop Lysol-bombing the house?"

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