Look At That Basic Bitch

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Thu, 23 May 2013 04:57:41 -0700

"MySpace was where you went in the past, WordPress and Movable Type were where people went if they..."

Thu, 23 May 2013 04:55:56 -0700

“MySpace was where you went in the past, WordPress and Movable Type were where people went if they had the patience and writing output to maintain a traditional blog, Facebook was where you went to define yourself by schools and checkboxes, and Tumblr was where you went to make your own identity and express your creativity.”

- Marco Arment (one of Tumblr’s early developers) in a nice little ode to David Karp and Tumblr, on Tumblr’s history and why he’s hopeful about Yahoo’s acquisition. If you’re still wary about the whole deal, it’s a nice read. (via futurejournalismproject)

STFU, Conservatives: The Red State Republican "Screw Everybody Else" Mentality

Thu, 23 May 2013 04:54:15 -0700

STFU, Conservatives: The Red State Republican "Screw Everybody Else" Mentality:

liberalsarecool:

Oklahoma currently ranks third in the nation … in terms of total federal disaster and fire declarations. This is not a new trend, every year OK needs Federal help.

Enter Republican Sens. Jim Inhofe and Tom Coburn who are fiscal hawks who have repeatedly voted against…

aljazeera: Many are being forced to flee conflict again, years...

Thu, 23 May 2013 04:49:57 -0700

aljazeera:

Many are being forced to flee conflict again, years after having sought refuge in Syria from civil war back home.

aljazeera: Is Obama squeezing media freedom? We ask if the...

Thu, 23 May 2013 04:48:39 -0700

aljazeera:

Is Obama squeezing media freedom?

We ask if the White House is abusing concerns about national security to pressure journalists to give up their sources.

futurejournalismproject: To Strongbox or Not to Strongbox Last...

Thu, 23 May 2013 04:47:47 -0700

futurejournalismproject:

To Strongbox or Not to Strongbox

Last week we noted that the New Yorker launched Strongbox, an online system meant to preserve the anonymity of leakers submitting sensitive material to the magazine.

Strongbox is based on the work of Aaron Swartz and Kevin Poulsen and, as Amy Davidson noted when announcing its implementation, “Even we won’t be able to figure out where files sent to us come from. If anyone asks us, we won’t be able to tell them.”

Which is a good thing given recent news about the Justice Department’s surveilling of journalists and news organizations.

But can it be be a newsroom boon?

Writing at CSO Online, John P. Mello argues that while Strongbox “provides strong protection of the identity of a source, it removes an important element in the process: authentication.”

Here’s what he means:

A system where anonymous leakers are dropping documents into a folder has advantages when government investigators start probing a story’s sources, but it also creates tremendous disadvantages. “The government can’t come after you to find out who gave you the document because you have no way of knowing,” [Northeastern University assistant journalism professor Dan] Kennedy said.

“That gives more protection to the source, but it makes it harder to vet the document because you don’t know who gave it to you,” he said…

…”All sources, anonymous or not, have to be evaluated. That’s impossible to do without context. “Knowing your source’s motivations helps contextualize the information,” said Mark Jurkowitz, associate director for the Pew Research Project for Excellence in Journalism.

“A solution that prevents the news organization from knowing the identity of a confidential source has value, but it’s not an ideal solution because it is important to know the identity of the source to weigh the information,” he told CSO.

“Information supplied by a confidential source needs to be evaluated, weighed and understood in the same way that information of somebody speaking on the record does,” he added.

FJP: A tool is a tool. While Mello illustrates important drawbacks, if the alternative is no documents to work with then you work with the tools available. It’s just important to know going in what their limitations are.

Images: Independent Twitter posts via Nicholas Thomson and Kevin Anderson.

aljazeera: Is Obama squeezing media freedom? We ask if the...

Thu, 23 May 2013 04:45:27 -0700

aljazeera:

Is Obama squeezing media freedom?

We ask if the White House is abusing concerns about national security to pressure journalists to give up their sources.

inthesetimesmag: Out of the tragedy of the massive garment...

Thu, 23 May 2013 04:32:34 -0700

inthesetimesmag:

Out of the tragedy of the massive garment factory collapse in Bangladesh, workers have now won two major reforms:

1) A panel to raise the minimum wage in the garment industry and

2) The right to form trade unions without prior permission from factory owners.

Still, more pressure—and responsibility—need to be placed upon America’s big-brand companies to win further protections.

Two Wins for Bangladesh Garment Workers, But the Fight Isn’t Over

thepoliticalfreakshow: Drones-R-Us: US Government Admits It...

Thu, 23 May 2013 04:32:19 -0700

thepoliticalfreakshow:

Drones-R-Us: US Government Admits It Drones American Citizens, Including Anwar al-Awlaki

The U.S. government admitted for the first time Wednesday that it intentionally droned American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen in 2011, and that it unintentionally droned three other Americans, including al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son. Attorney General Eric Holder admitted it in a letter to Congress, The New York Times’ Charlie Savage reports. The letter comes the day before President Obama gives a speech at the National Defense University that will justify the drone strikes carried out since he took office, plus “review our detention policy and efforts to close the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay; and he will frame the future of our efforts against Al Qaeda, its affiliates and adherents,” an administration official told The New York Times’ Scott Shane.

Obama, who has a “kill list” of terrorist suspects, was inspired by the threat of losing reelection to create rules for the next president for when lethal force by drone is justified. It’s possible, given the sudden effort to follow through on the president’s State of the Union promise for transparency in the face of mounting criticism about the assassinations, that Thursday’s speech will lay out those rules. Drone strikes peaked in 2010 in Pakistan, the Times reports, and the rate of strikes in Yemen was cut by half this year compared to 2012. Anwar al-Awlaki, the New Mexico-born cleric turned al-Qaeda operative, was killed in September 2011, perhaps the most controversial drone strike in the Obama administration’s targeted killing program.

The letter also said that the United States had killed three other Americans: Samir Khan, who was killed in the same strike; Mr. Awlaki’s son Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, who was also killed in Yemen; and Jude Mohammed, who was killed in a strike in Pakistan.

lilitv: lipstickandligature: fuckyeahsexpositivity: I love...

Thu, 23 May 2013 04:29:07 -0700

lilitv:

lipstickandligature:

fuckyeahsexpositivity:

I love this routine, because it’s not a rape joke. It’s a rape culture joke. It’s not making fun of the people who have been raped, but of both rape culture (not being able to just jog because it’s not safe) but of the idea that the only thing of value in a woman is her vagina.

—BB

Really this is brilliant. So brilliant.

Life could be a dream

futurejournalismproject: We Promise Not to Screw Quick, someone...

Mon, 20 May 2013 14:04:59 -0700

futurejournalismproject:

We Promise Not to Screw

Quick, someone teach the Yahoo social team how to use the Tumblr Twitter box. STAT.

Image: Automated tweet from Yahoo’s Tumblr to Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s Twitter account.

Groundhog's Day: DOJ Tracks Fox Reporter's Phone Records

Mon, 20 May 2013 14:04:45 -0700

Groundhog's Day: DOJ Tracks Fox Reporter's Phone Records:

futurejournalismproject:

Last week’s news was that the Justice Department seized two months of Associated Press phone records.

This week’s begins with a report that the DOJ surveilled Fox News’ chief Washington correspondent James Rosen, tracking his visits to the State Department in an apparent attempt to link a 2009 leak of classified information about North Korea to government adviser Stephen Jin-Woo Kim

Via the Washington Post:

When the Justice Department began investigating possible leaks of classified information about North Korea in 2009, investigators did more than obtain telephone records of a working journalist suspected of receiving the secret material.

They used security badge access records to track the reporter’s comings and goings from the State Department, according to a newly obtained court affidavit. They traced the timing of his calls with a State Department security adviser suspected of sharing the classified report. They obtained a search warrant for the reporter’s personal e-mails.

The case of Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, the government adviser, and James Rosen, the chief Washington correspondent for Fox News, bears striking similarities to a sweeping leaks investigation disclosed last week in which federal investigators obtained records over two months of more than 20 telephone lines assigned to the Associated Press…

…Court documents in the Kim case reveal how deeply investigators explored the private communications of a working journalist — and raise the question of how often journalists have been investigated as closely as Rosen was in 2010. The case also raises new concerns among critics of government secrecy about the possible stifling effect of these investigations on a critical element of press freedom: the exchange of information between reporters and their sources.

Washington Post, A rare peek into a Justice Department leak probe.

vicemag: Hearing from Three Guantanamo Bay Prisoners Who’ve...

Mon, 20 May 2013 14:03:04 -0700

vicemag:

Hearing from Three Guantanamo Bay Prisoners Who’ve Been on Hunger Strike for 100 Days

On the 7th of February, 2013, there was a dispute inside Guantanamo Bay over prison guards searching Qur’ans. For the following two days, inmates ate the remainder of the food they had—including stuff that was reportedly two years out of date—and, once finished with all of their decomposing rations, embarked on a hunger strike. Yesterday was the 100th day of the inmates’ protest against their treatment and, out of the 166 still being held at Guantanmo, 102 are on hunger strike, with 30 being force fed.

Authorities at the prison camp have revised their guidelines to allow them to shackle hunger-strikers to a chair, before fitting them with masks and inserting tubes through their noses and into their stomachs to force feed them for up to two hours at a time. Despite these efforts, some prisoners claim to weigh as little as 85lbs.

Several attempts have been made to punish or dissuade inmates against their starvation efforts.According to Shaker Aamer (the last British resident being held in Guantanamo) prison wardens have begun inflicting sleep deprivation on inmates, as well as adopting a new practice where, instead of shackling their hands and legs and pushing them along from behind, they’re now clipping cloth dog leashes to inmates’ waists and dragging them around like animals.

Aamer is one of 86 inmates who have been cleared for release but are still being held inside the facility. Something that, according to Clive Stafford Smith—a lawyer representing inmates at the prison—is completely irrational. “Any prison, even in the most despotic dictatorship, should not have 86 of 166 [52 percent] prisoners cleared for release,” he told me, before adding, “Obama hasn’t shown the political will to do the right thing.”

Stafford Smith provided me with testimonies from three Guantanamo hunger-strikers in order to gain a little more insight into the Cuban detention camp that President Obama promised to close within a year back in 2009.

Continue

How to Legalize Pot

Mon, 20 May 2013 14:01:28 -0700

How to Legalize Pot:

futurejournalismproject:

Kleiman is leading the team hired to advise Washington State as it designs something the modern world has never seen: a fully legal commercial market in cannabis. Washington is one of the first two states (Colorado is the other) to legalize the production, sale and consumption of marijuana as a recreational drug for consumers 21 and over. The marijuana debate has entered a new stage. Today the most interesting and important question is no longer whethermarijuana will be legalized — eventually, bit by bit, it will be — but how.

Challenges include: the DOJ, since anyone who trades in cannabis is still a felon according to federal law; big profiteers, since the cannabis industry could easily become controlled like Big Tobacco; and how to measure drugged driving, since the government hasn’t funded too much research on the chemistry of weed in the human body.

You can read Kleinman’s proposal to Washington State here.

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Mon, 20 May 2013 13:59:18 -0700

Syria: Atrocities on both sides?

Mon, 20 May 2013 13:57:52 -0700

aljazeera:

We look at whether the abuses allegedly committed by Syrian opposition fighters are merely isolated incidents.

Congratuations Yahoo!, you bought $1 billion worth of gifs, cute animals, angst and pr0n.

Mon, 20 May 2013 13:57:02 -0700

Congratuations Yahoo!, you bought $1 billion worth of gifs, cute animals, angst and pr0n.

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Mon, 20 May 2013 13:54:25 -0700

scottrossi: hahahhaa i don’t usually jump on the atheism circle...

Mon, 20 May 2013 04:56:07 -0700

scottrossi:

hahahhaa i don’t usually jump on the atheism circle jerk anymore, but these two comics had me LOLing.

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Mon, 20 May 2013 04:53:03 -0700