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Posts from ‘August, 2007’

Cryptome: Using the Web to Challenge Secrecy

Radar: Inside Cryptome, the website the CIA doesn’t want you to see. Young is a mad scientist of secrecy, working with little more than monomaniacal focus and an Internet connection to turn the tables on the spooks and expose what he regards as a worldwide criminal network of intelligence operatives. And the spies don’t like […]

Another Gross Journalistic Failure

UPDATED NY Times: How Missed Signs Contributed to a Mortgage Meltdown. (T)he cast of characters who missed signals like the rise of delinquencies and foreclosures is becoming easier to identify. They include investment banks happy to sell risky but lucrative mortgage debt to hedge funds hungry for high interest payments, bond rating agencies willing to […]

It's Your Stuff? Maybe Not

John Dvorak: Google Pulls Plug, Everyone Misses Point. The scary part is that we are not talking about some flaky, small underfunded company. We’re talking about Google, a behemoth. This tells me that if Google can throw in the towel and abandon one of its online-related services, then anyone can do it—and they will. And […]

Yes, It's "Traditional Media" – Not "Mainstream"

Markos (Daily Kos) has abandoned the expression MSM (“mainstream media”) to call it traditional media. I’ve been doing this for several years now. I guess I should have blogged about it…

Any Plans to Pay Them?

Scott Karp reports “The Huffington Post Allows Top Commenters To Become Bloggers.” I wish he’d asked the obvious question: Will any of these people get paid? As far as I know, Huffington doesn’t pay her bloggers, even the well-known ones. Apparently the topic didn’t come up. Karp defends Huffingon’s no-pay approach in the comments. This […]

AT&T's Phony Denials on Net Neutrality

Timothy Carr, in “AT&T Gets Caught in its Own Spin Cycle,” notes the telecom company’s increasingly “slippery response” when confronted with evidence of snipping out political content on its webcast concerts. The company’s sleazy behavior is no surprise, but nonetheless telling in context of its push to decide what bits will reach customers’ computers in […]

Is Postal Rate Hike for Magazines Fair?

Free Press, a think tank and lobbying group, posts: “Stamp Out the Rate Hike: What’s at Stake.” This is a fervent call for the public to do what it can to change the terms of a postal rate hike for magazines. Postage price increases are nothing new, of course. But the latest hike — somewhat […]

Put the Depositions Online

AP: YouTube Seeks to Depose Jon Stewart. YouTube wants to question Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert as part of its defense against claims the online video-sharing site illegally shows snippets of sports and entertainment videos. YouTube (Google) should post the depositions — with the permission of Stewart and Colbert — on YouTube. That would make […]

Movable Type 4.0 Launches

This is a WordPress blog, but no one who’s looking into starting or upgrading their blogging platform should ignore the latest from SixApart. Based on its description and some reviews, Movable Type 4.0 boasts an astounding number of new features, plus a serious ease-of-use upgrade. I’m going to give it a try over at my […]

Help Us Learn Who's Editing Wikipedia

Wired News, in “See Who’s Editing Wikipedia – Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign,” cites an intriguing new software tool called Wikipedia Scanner: the brainchild of CalTech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith — offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing […]