They are hoarding knowledge and blocking preservation. At some point, the investors who dumped a quarter billion dollars into it will want a return on that investment. Last year, founder Adam D’Angelo indicated they expect to eventually IPO. But market conditions, combined with the results of their ad platform, may force them in different directions — a pivot, merger, or acquisition are always a possibility. When Quora shuts down, and it will eventually shut down one day, all of that collected knowledge will be lost unless they change their isolationist ethos.

Absent that microfilmed archive, maybe Donald Trump could have kept insinuating that Barack Obama had in fact been born in Kenya, and granting sufficient political corruption, that lie might at some later date have become official history. Because history is a fight we’re having every day. We’re battling to make the truth first by living it, and then by recording and sharing it, and finally, crucially, by preserving it. Without an archive, there is no history.

Create agents that monitor and act on your behalf. Your agents are standing by!

Enterprising Angolans have used two free services—Facebook Free Basics and Wikipedia Zero—to share pirated movies, music, television shows, anime, and games on Wikipedia. And no one knows what to do about it. Because the data is completely free, Angolans are hiding large files in Wikipedia articles on the Portuguese Wikipedia site (Angola is a former Portuguese colony)—sometimes concealing movies in JPEG or PDF files. They're then using a Facebook group to direct people to those files, creating a robust, completely free file sharing network.

This is an attempt to categorise different APIs scoured from the web which make their resources available for consumption.

In the latest “Diary of a Song” episode, Lil Nas X is joined by the producer YoungKio — who didn’t even know he was a part of “Old Town Road” until he heard it in a video meme — and Billy Ray Cyrus, who lent the song another layer of novelty and outlaw credibility. The video also features cameos by the influencers @nicemichael and @elitelife_kd, who were crucial to the track’s early rise.

Proponents of Libra are all yabbering on about “serving the world’s unbanked,” as if it were 15 or 20 years ago. For more than a decade, Kenya has already had M-Pesa, a thriving micropayments system based on trading cell minutes!! M-Pesa predates Bitcoin, and has expanded from Kenya through East and Central Africa, and on beyond to the Middle East and India, covering millions of people who most emphatically do not need Mark Zuckerberg sticking his grubby mitts in their wallets. Bitcoin was meant as a curb on the man, perhaps even as a strike against the Man; Libra is the Man.

Eight or nine years down the road, we can be pretty sure that if a tech behemoth suddenly feels like doing something horrible, they just will do it. Please buy paper books.

Read 🌐 online or 📃 print out, ✂️ cut, and 🙏 fold to create a physical copy. 💜 Remix and write your own zine!

Influencer-style pictures are simply the way we document our lives now. Beyond pointing out the fact that the original tweet is a sensational fabrication designed to spark outrage—which is really unfortunate and bad!—this argument seems too simplistic, too much of a “Actually you're wrong, this is fine and how we do things now” hot take. Sure, one can take selfies at sites of tragedy, but we can also question and examine how this all came to be: What is an ‘influencer?’ What effects do they have on audiences and subjects? Is this ‘ruin porn?’ How does publicly available life-documentation (i.e. Instagram) differ from the limited availability of the personal printed photo album of the past?

Through listening to the album and all of the posts everyone has been making here, I put together a comprehensive list of all the differences between the original leak and the new version. Please let me know if I missed something! All songs are less compressed and have a much better mix.

This registry exists to help people discover and share datasets that are available via AWS resources.

"A beautiful space for reading and writing" and pivoting.

We’ve often convinced ourselves in higher education that there is something called “critical thinking” which is some magical mental ingredient that travels, frictionless, into any domain. There are mental patterns that are generally applicable, true. But so much of what we actually do is read signs, and those signs are domain specific. They need to be taught. Years into this digital literacy adventure, that’s still my radical proposal: that we should teach students how to read the web explicitly, using the affordances of the network.

Reporter Kashmir Hill spent six weeks blocking Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple from getting her money, data, and attention, using a custom-built VPN. Here’s what happened.

A Q&A with Twitter's CEO on right-wing extremism, Candace Owens, and what he'd do if the president called on his followers to murder journalists. […] The reason his impassioned defenses of Twitter sound like gibberish is because they are.

What it's like to watch, terrified and helpless, as your partner becomes radicalized by hate on the fringe right.

Looking at the big picture, these are all tiny things, mostly harmless. Considering the amount of harm Amazon does to the environment and the people who work for them, it’s hard to give much of a shit about whether or not there’s a Subscribe & Save option for a bassoon harness. But these little things matter when we’re putting massive amounts of money, personal data (including our kids’ data), and faith into a company that’s falling short of its basic business: running a website that sells stuff.

Meet the Great Slate — a fundraising campaign that raised nearly a million dollars in 2017, mostly through Twitter, for eight seemingly random Congressional candidates from across the country. The Great Slate has no splashy slogans, no slick logos: just a bare-bones website, a donate button, and a lot of jokes on Twitter.

This is about whether it’s okay to create collateral damage by deliberately denying people access to web features in order to further a completely separate agenda. This isn’t about you or me. This is about all those people who could potentially become makers of the web. We should be welcoming them, not creating barriers for them to overcome.

We’re building on a web littered with too-heavy sites, on an internet that’s unevenly, unequally distributed. That’s why designing a lightweight, inexpensive digital experience is a form of kindness. And while that kindness might seem like a small thing these days, it’s a critical one. A device-agnostic, data-friendly interface helps ensure your work can reach as many people as possible, regardless of their location, income level, network quality, or device.

Historically, we haven’t advocated for using Cloak full-time at home. In general, we think that you should trust your home network; if you don’t, you probably have bigger fish to fry. Alas, if this resolution becomes law, there may be no alternative. We might genuinely start telling our customers “yes, you should use Cloak at home, all day, every day”. From our perspective, that day will be an unhappy day indeed.

Studies suggest that, like the RateMyProfessors rankings, student evaluations too reveal predictable patterns of gender bias (and likely biases regarding race, age, and sexual orientation as well), and yet it’s mandatory for instructors to submit to their assessment. Student evaluations are deeply embedded in the body of educational institutions both logistically and ideologically — so much so that one can’t even begin to critique them without seeming like one is trying to defraud students somehow, deny them an oversight that feels somehow to be “rightfully” theirs. Even as I write this I feel the need to perform within the ideological space they inscribe: I want to showcase their deliciously quantifiable numbers, the ones that prove that I’m a good instructor, or at least above average. These numbers are available to the system; they help me to keep my job. It’s going to be hard, over the next four years, to have a conversation about gender bias in student evaluations or about the conditions of part-time contingent faculty or about doing the hard work of making the tools of a liberal education more accessible to marginalized populations. It’s going to be hard, because it’s hard to have difficult conversations when it feels like you’re under assault; it’s hard to look critically at your colleagues when it feels like it’s time to lock arms against the oafish villains roaring at you.

Fantano is not unaware of his detractors, who range from viewers who think he doesn’t know what he’s talking about to fellow critics who think he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The things that make him a successful vlogger—his speed, his unpretentious humor, his willingness to review everything regardless of his genre fluency, his refusal to assume a deep understanding of an artist’s politics or feelings—are at odds with traditional print and online criticism. He brought up an interaction with a Pitchfork writer who eagerly introduced himself at South by Southwest. The writer told Fantano he was only joking when he previously wrote on Twitter, “Anthony Fantano makes me want to quit my job.” Every music writer we spoke to is at least aware of Fantano’s work—some of them find it dumb, and at any rate, don’t want to talk about it on the record. It doesn’t bother Fantano too much, but it does bother him. “It obviously took time and took a lot of effort,” he says of his work. “I would at least like to be treated with the same amount of legitimacy. That’s all.”

If Trump’s rallies operated according to affective dynamics, should we assume that online spaces work differently? Trump supporters did not vote for him because they were misinformed online—rather, they consumed and circulated misinformation because they loved Trump, because it was an enormously pleasurable thing to do, and because they imagined (correctly) that it drove the educated classes crazy. Like the rest of us, they deployed their abilities to reason and select information in accord with their affective investments, worldview, and sense of self. For better and for worse, digital technologies are rechanneling and amplifying these aspects of human nature that we all recognize, but have a difficult time integrating into our “infocentric” research models.

Curated directory of the best store pages

Below is a list of common issues in the ever popular internet quiz style to help you determine if yourself or someone else might be a bad ally.

Who among us hasn’t logged into Twitter only to find friends one-upping each other with meta-meta-meta-ironic jokes about something that happened five minutes ago, and no longer is anyone actually mentioning the thing they’re joking about? Who among us has not followed someone because of a really excellent viral photo or tweet, and then hundreds of posts later it’s like Oh my God, stop talking about your cat, or your car, or your loneliness?

A roundup of an heroes who all took the red pill and helped the fire rise for top keks by protecting free speech from SJWs.

Makerbase was built to allow anyone to edit it — here’s how we’ve tried to stop abuse of that power before it starts. The biggest lesson here is that it is possible to build social platforms where abuse and harassment are not the norm.