A Las Vegas family called police to report two giant aliens in the backyard. https://www.8newsnow.com/investigators/las-vegas-family-claims-to-see-aliens-after-several-report-something-falling-from-sky/ #Nevada #UFO
"The air quality is unhealthy for everyone," declares Fairfax County, #Virginia. https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/air-quality-alert
Today I was on NPR Marketplace talking about Prince's decision (30 years ago today!) to change his name to an unpronounceable symbol on his 35th birthday. I tried to get to the cultural & political context. (at 5:30) https://open.spotify.com/episode/4UY5KecU8FJM0fC1FKZJ7z?si=d8de5dc6bbdb4a2d
5) During this work, we discovered the scanning for known CSAM was broken on Twitter. We notified them and it got fixed.
6) Due to this work, Instagram discovered that their system for accounts being reported for child exploitation was broken and that tickets were being closed without resolution. That has been fixed.
7) Instagram has started taking down thousands of accounts related to this work.
8) We will be encouraging a cross-platform collaboration on SG-CSAM via the Tech Coalition.
I need to thank my incredible colleagues and co-authors, @det and @Noupside, and our Stanford colleagues (and bosses) Professors Jeff Hancock and Nate Persily for their support in doing this kind of difficult research.
We have built a bunch of systems to reduce the risks of doing child safety work in academia, including CSAM detection across our entire intake pipeline. We are happy to share these with other academic groups. I'm at stamos@stanford.edu.
@Em0nM4stodon I wish that when people discuss pros and cons of Signal, they mentioned that there is absolutely no backup option on iOS. Lots of iOS users get burned when they lose their phone or accidentally uninstall the app and find messages with loved ones are completely gone. If reviewers would mention this, fewer people would get burned by the issue.
You could add to this post itself that Signal is not a good option for iOS users who care about preserving their messaging history.
ICYMI: I wrote about Chris Licht - and a pervasive worldview among self-proclaimed “moderate” elites that always naturalizes existing power relations and only accepts the status quo as reasonable.
The Status-Quo Fundamentalism of the “Moderate” Arbiters of Reason:
https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/the-status-quo-fundamentalism-of
Twitter is the fourth most hated brand in the US after Fox News, FTX and the Trump Organization. A truly impressive degree of brand destruction in less than a year.
In my first story for Texas Monthly, I wrote about @paul and @mark, founders of @tapbots, whose livelihoods were threatened when Twitter unceremoniously revoked their app Tweetbot. Now, they’re betting their futures on their latest creation @ivory, a third-party client for @Mastodon.
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/texas-tweetbot-developers-fighting-twitter/
“An email to Twitter returned an automated reply with a poop emoji.”
https://www.reuters.com/article/twitter-management-idUSKBN2XN3WY
@andrew Brilliant, I think you are right, I am going to dig deeper into this. Thanks!
@kyle Wow fascinating. I’ve thought for a while that we will find more and more conditions turn out to have an autoimmune response behind them.
@andrew great stuff I’ve actually been searching for a post like this recently and that’s awesome.
If you ever want to go to next level- there are some use cases where people want to route or geocode without sending the data to another service (eg you have confidential data and cannot share it). I’d love to see someone show how to do these things locally. I saw there is an R package called dodgr that should be able to do this with osm data but haven’t seen it being implemented.
FTC: Amazon/Ring workers illegally spied on users of home security cameras
Amazon agrees to Ring and Alexa settlements but didn't admit violating any laws.
We're hiring someone to lead mozilla.social
Making this space safe and welcoming for all people is of utmost importance to us, and it starts with a product leader who is dedicated to driving positive change.
We're looking for people who are passionate about transforming online participation and enabling an engaging social experience that prioritizes health, safety and inclusivity. Please share with your networks and anyone who comes to mind!
#hiring #jobs
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/careers/position/gh/5082141/
FTC announces it has reached a $25 million settlement with #Amazon (market cap: $1.24 trillion) for its Alexa app keeping childrens’ voices and geolocation data for years and using it for its own purposes. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/05/ftc-doj-charge-amazon-violating-childrens-privacy-law-keeping-kids-alexa-voice-recordings-forever
Economist. Antitrust policy; industrial organization; history of economics