LinkedIn needs to work on pervasive phishing and identity theft. I recently found out about an account that copied my profile photo, name, and CV information and used that to connect to 500+ people at my company and elsewhere, using my reputation to pitch people on some blockchain diamond Ponzi scheme. The account has been shut down, but I have no idea if the connections have been warned that this was a fake account trying to scam them, who the account had connected to, and if anyone was victimized. Speaking with coworkers, these kinds of scams are common. It doesn't seem like there is even a basic automated check during user signup to see if the account is impersonating someone else who is already in the system.
"Local newspapers hold their governments accountable. We examine the effect of local newspaper closures on public finance for local governments. Following a newspaper closure, we find municipal borrowing costs increase by 5 to 11 basis points in the long run. Identification tests illustrate that these results are not being driven by deteriorating local economic conditions. The loss of monitoring that results from newspaper closures is associated with increased government inefficiencies, including higher likelihoods of costly advance refundings and negotiated issues, and higher government wages, employees, and tax revenues."
The first newspapers were expensive niche publications that provided businesspeople, politicians, and other elites with the information they needed. Mass market newspapers (and ultimately the mass market news industry) relied on advertising dollars to subsidize the costs of news production. With advertising dollars moving away from news production, there is no longer enough incentive to produce news for the average person. There has to be some subsidy in place to pay for news that regular people can't pay for. This is particularly bad in local markets, where news deserts are spreading. Without beat reporters, there's no way to know basic facts about what's going on around you.
Mass market news allowed for the professionalization of journalism, with a set of ethics that demanded (attempts at) objectivity. With mass market news dying, there isn't enough money to support a large professional journalism class. In its absence, we are left with propagandists that publish publicly for free or at discounted rates and consultants that publish objective information privately at high rates that only businesses, politicians, or the wealthy can afford.
BayLeaks partnered with the San Francisco Bay Guardian, before it went under. My co-founder was a long-time San Francisco journalist and I was able to collaborate with her on several stories and get introductions to journalists and editors for stories I was doing independently. But of course, you could always just investigate stuff, find the email of an editor at an outlet that seems to publish that kind of thing, and write an email pitch. If they're interested, you send your story, and they'll tell you how much they would pay to publish with them.
I majored in creative writing, but the MFA career path looked like a pyramid scheme, so I switched to web development. After working in the field for several years, I started running the technical side of a local leaks platform called BayLeaks. (It's defunct now, but was cutting edge at the time, basically the third SecureDrop instance after The New Yorker and Wired.) I got more involved in the research and writing side, since it turned out the big problem in journalism wasn't a lack of technology, it was a lack of time and money to do research.
Eventually, I made the switch to full-time freelance investigative reporting. It was hugely rewarding at a personal level and made a positive impact on people's lives, but it was also a financial catastrophe that I'm still paying for. I could no longer justify as I was approaching my 30s and planning to get married.
I switched back to programming, eventually landed my current full-time job doing blockchain stuff, and really enjoy it. I miss investigative reporting, but still do a bit of research for activist friends in my free time. Eventually I'd like to make enough from my technology work to become the publisher of a small investigative outlet where I could pay other people to research and write. Given the dire economics of journalism, making a bunch of tech money to subsidize a publication would be more impactful than slogging away in poverty on my own.
There's a lot of evidence that the costs of government go up as local journalism recedes, because there is no one to objectively report on waste, corruption, and inefficiency. I think that tax dollars should be set aside to fund journalism, since journalism ultimately saves money for everyone. I don't see any other big solutions that would solve this systemic problem. We're moving to a state where only the rich can afford good information and everyone else is in the dark.
I just pinged you on Twitter, @jdshutt. I know a lawyer who specializes in tax law and is very interested in cryptocurrencies. If you want to get in touch with her, you can reach me at [email protected] and I'll send her e-mail.
I'm on board with everyone saying that you need to talk to a lawyer sooner rather than later, and should work with someone who knows the area.
Hi, HN! I'm a full-stack web developer, looking to take on interesting freelance projects. I enjoy using Ruby, Rails, PostgreSQL, SASS, RSpec, and CoffeeScript/jQuery, but I always try to find the best tools for the job at hand. Recent projects of mine include a GitHub recommendations service and a rewrite of the Open Library gem.
You also have to think about tracking on the readers' side of things. If you read something on Facebook or Google+, you can count on that being tracked and added to that system's profile of you. If you read something on a blog, and block things like Google Analytics, it's harder to passively track.
The distortion around his contribution to RSS is strongest in mainstream news articles written by people who don't really understand the history. When you read pieces by people in technology, activist, and art circles, especially people who actually knew and worked with him, you find many other projects he created or contributed to. And if you're fully aware of that, I think it's disingenuous to point to what a confused journalist thinks Aaron Swartz did and act like that's the full story.
Which again makes me wonder why the tech world has been a week of adulation of Aaron Swartz, whose two greatest accomplishments (if you follow the lede of every story about him) were that he was pushed on the Reddit founders by PG after his own project failed (then exiting before them), and that he was one of a dozen plus people who authored a revision to a brutishly simplistic RSS 1.0 spec, his single celebrated attribute being his age.
Is that honestly all you took away from the stories about him? The only way I could see someone forming this opinion is if they had read only the lede of a piece about him before closing the tab.
If he was advocate for more open access to government records, why is it surprising that he would be concerned about the Aaron Swartz case? I agree that this letter could be seen as part a larger battle between Republicans and the Obama DoJ, but does that mean that questions about Aaron Swartz' prosecution are only valid if they come from Democrats?
The Internet Archive, probably. They have a long-term view toward preserving Internet content, and the resources to support permanent memorials would be negligible for them. It would be similar to a university library preserving the papers of an important writer. I can't imagine a more appropriate custodian.
If you want a legislative response, now is the time to write to your representatives. The EFF has an easy tool to send the appropriate people a message:
The prefilled text is about the CFAA, but you can change it to say whatever you want before sending it. Don't feel apathetic, or think that you can't make a difference. One thing Aaron Swartz showed us is that Congress can be made to listen to the public, if we are loud enough.
Two days ago, as I'm sure you are aware, brilliant programmer, writer, and activist Aaron Swartz committed suicide. At the time of his death, he was being threatened with a 35-year federal prison sentence and millions of dollars in fines for allegedly downloading academic articles with the plan to distribute them freely to scholars everywhere.
Even though the alleged victim, JSTOR, did not wish to press any charges, U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz and Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Heymann pressed forward aggressively, treating Mr. Swartz the same as a bank robber, phishing artist, or hacker of military secrets. Mr. Swartz's family believes that this overzealous and unreasonable prosecution contributed to his suicide.
Rep. Polis, as an Internet entrepreneur and investor, you understand the issues at hand better than most. And as a member of the House Judiciary Committee, you are well positioned to investigate the circumstances of this prosecution, and revisit the decades-old laws that made it possible.
I never knew Aaron Swartz, but like many others, I was a great admirer of his work and felt his loss deeply. I beg you to look into this case.
I was confused by the extended metaphor, too, until I saw the notice at the bottom that the author is writing a book about how to think like Sherlock Holmes. It's useful when reading this kind of essay to find out what the author is selling, although it usually isn't this obvious.
> The current trend is for computing power to get smaller and cheaper, rather than getting more computing power.
I think it's a mistake to compare specific devices from different eras, like a 2007 desktop and a 2012 desktop. In order to find total computing power, you need to add your phone, tablet, desktop, laptop, and cloud services together. When you do that, you see that we all have far more computing power than we did in the past, but we've chosen to spread that power over a variety of different devices.