News-Politics Archives - Page 21 of 39

FCC plans rules to enforce net neutrality

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski announced today that the FCC will create new rules to prevent carriers from blocking, slowing or favoring particular types of content.

The FCC has used four policy princples since 2005 (download PDF) to make decisions around Net Neutrality. Now two more rules are proposed. The new rules take the positions that broadband operators (both wireless and landline) cannot discriminate against Web content and that operators must make network management transparent.

The new rules are not in effect yet. They will be presented to the FCC in an October meeting. I’m sure we’ll see the opposition to Net Neutrality (Comcast, AT&T and other broadband carriers) step up efforts to prevent this from happening. In the meantime, you can keep up with the folks who advocate net neutrality at Save the Internet.

The Kilogram: Just a Little Off

For the last hundred years or so, a metal cylinder about the size of a souvenir shot glass has been the standard against which all kilograms were measured. Take a look at this Wikipedia provided computer generated image of the kilogram.

The REAL kilogram, the International Prototype Kilogram (IPK) is kept in the International Bureau of Weights and Measures near Paris. Several official clones of this kilogram are kept in various locations around the globe. Every high school and college science lab has sets of weights and measures that are supposed to be exact duplicates of the IPK.

Therein lies the tale. When the various official copies are compared to the official IPK, the weights don’t match up after a period of time. Scientists don’t know whether the official measure is getting heavier or lighter, but something is off. The measures are off by about 50 micrograms. (Goodness knows what discrepancies would arise if the IPK were compared to the one kilo weight at your local high school.)

A microgram is about one millionth of a gram. It takes 1000 grams to make a kilogram, so that means a microgram is a billionth of a kilogram. That may not sound like much to you and me, but scientists are picky about things like that. When they say precise, they mean precise.

Ann Althouse wrote a three sentence post about the kilogram issue at The kilogram. Really, *the* kilogram. This is all she said:

It’s a particular cylinder. Don’t sneeze on it. Be careful washing it. Dislodge a molecule and you throw off all the weights in the world.

She got 20 rather lengthy comments on her three sentence post. The precise measure of a kilogram is a weighty matter to some people.

An NPR story, This Kilogram Has A Weight-Loss Problem which you can listen to in about 5 minutes, explains what some scientists are doing to redifine the kilogram, not as a physical object but as a numerical constant. They’re use a device called a watt balance, which measures electrical and magnetic forces, to attempt a numeric definition of the kilogram.

Badgermama, not one to let the question of the kilogram’s weight problem go unnoticed, got pumped reading Wikipedia. In The elusive kilogram! she describes other ways science is trying to redefine the authentic K.

The kilogram is the only unit not defined off a physical constant – it’s defined from this particular object, the 130-year-old International Prototype Kilogram or IPK. And a whole bunch of other metric units are defined using mass, like newtons, pascals, joules, amperes, couloumbs, volts, teslas, webers, candelas, lumens, and lux. (The plural is not “luxes”. I looked it up.) It was created and then defined as the standard. But some replicas of it were created, like the Kilogram of the Archives, and over time they have diverged from each other. The story of what they’re all made of, and how they’re periodically compared and verified, is pretty cool. And sort of insane. Is that a whole bunch of people’s life work? Making sure that we know how wrong our kilograms might be? Eeeeeee! That’s so hot!!!!!!

And so are multiple bell jars over a brass-looking pedestal thingie! It’s like The International Geek Thingamajig on a Steampunk Cake Stand of Awesome!

Burrow deeply into the kilogram article and you will get to the proposed alternatives that would tie the kilogram to a constant. Atom-counting approaches (I liked the Avogadro project, which would use a silicon sphere); Ion accumulation; and the rather sexy sounding watt balance method: the electronic kilogram!

The watt balance is finding a new home in Ottawa, where conditions are hoped to work toward more precision in defining the kilogram. The Ottawa Citizen reports Canada joins quest to set new kilo: Formula to replace inexact old ingot.

It may take several years before the “inexact old ingot” is replaced by a measure science finds acceptable. In the meantime, do your best not to polish too many molecules off the local neighborhood kilogram.

Cross posted at BlogHer.

Useful Links: Tips, Education, Seeking, good for a laugh

25 + Tips and Tutorials of HTML & CSS at Powerusers has some good links.

Technology as an Educational Need looks at some ways we could be incorporating technology into education.

Seeking: How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why that’s dangerous. This article at Salon quotes a number of scientists who posit that the human seeking behavior releases chemicals that lead us to repeat actions we like over and over. Like checking Twitter 500 times a day. They consider that harmful. You can draw your own conclusions.

Tech Support Cheat Sheet is funny. At xkcd.

350.org gets the Colbert treatment

Here’s something just for grins today.

Okay, actually, it’s really serious, but it’s Colbert, so what can I say?

Bill McKibben from 350.org went on the Colbert Report. It’s not easy to stay on point with Colbert asking the questions, but McKibben did well while Colbert managed to be his usual off-the-wall self.

The Colbert Report

Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Bill McKibben

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

Health Care Protests

Password Security Issues Raised when Twitter Hacked

The New York Times reported in Twitter Hack Raises Flags on Security that a hacker had broken into confidential information about Twitter by breaking into a Twitter employee’s email account.

Once in the email account, the hacker gained access to the employees Google Docs information, where much of the confidential data about Twitter is stored. Then the hacker sent the confidential information to Michael Arrington at Tech Crunch. Tech Crunch published some of the documents. A controversy arose over whether Tech Crunch was right to publish stolen documents, but I’m going to leave that topic alone for now.

Instead, I want to focus on what you can do to protect yourself from password hackers.

When a whole business can be exposed based on the vulnerability of one employee’s password, it’s time to think about making your passwords more secure. As SEO Techniques and Tips explains in Twitter Hacked! More online security concerns crop up,

The techniques used by the attackers are just a small part of a broader trend promoted by different technology companies toward storing more data online, instead of computers under your control.

The shift toward doing more over the Web – a practice known as “cloud computing” – means that mistakes employees make in their private lives can do serious damage to their employers, because a single e-mail account can tie the two worlds together.

You’re probably a blogger, or on Twitter. You’re revealing your name, your city, your kid’s names, your dog’s name, your birthday. All that is now public information. So the first rule of safe password building is don’t use anything obvious and personal like your kid’s name.

You have to come up with something unique and not related to your personal information.

When Megan Smith asked BlogHers what they do to keep track of passwords, one suggestion from TW was to use song lyrics.

Solution: Song lyrics. For example baa baa black sheep have you any wool? becomes Bbbshyaw00l?

This is a great idea for random character generation for passwords, particularly if you replace some of the letters with numbers and use a mix of upper and lower case as TW’s example shows.

Now that you have a random password you can remember, you can use it everywhere, right? Nope. Wrong. Do not use the same password everywhere. Particularly with important sites like banks, Google Docs or other storage in the cloud, PayPal, and your credit card company. You need a strong and unique password for each important site you visit.

What constitutes a secure password? In this article on Passwords at Time Goes By, I suggested 7 characters. My programmer friend Taylor came along and responded that you need at least 8 characters.

The first thing is password length. Be sure your passwords are at least 8 characters not 7 as the article suggests. The difference between 7 and 8 is significant. Given a character set is roughly 52 alpha characters (upper/lower) + 10 digits + ~12 symbols or 74 characters total:

7 char password gives 12,151,280,273,024

8 char password gives 899,194,740,203,776

What that means is it will take a good deal longer for someone to try to brute force crack the 8 char password.

If the site is important (eg. banking) and supports more than 8 characters then use the extra characters. Many banks support up to 16 now days.

If you’re like me, you are running into memory issues about now. Unique passwords of 8 characters or more that are random sets of characters for all your important sites—how do you track all that?

Software is the answer for many people. Taylor suggested the free choice GnuPG. Miraz at MacTips suggests 1Password. In Share files easily with Dropbox, Miraz says,

I use the fabulous 1Password to store all my passwords.

1Password is available as an iPhone app. To get into it on your phone, you need a PIN and a master password. Make sure both of these are secure.

Some people write all their passwords down in a notebook and store the notebook in a secure location like a safe or a bank safety deposit box. This is a good practice if your relatives know where the notebook is, because they may need to access the accounts in the event of your death. A secure location for the notebook is not in the same carrying case that you use to lug your computer through the airport, or under the keyboard of your computer.

Tell that one trusted relative with a need to know how to find your passwords in the case of an emergency.

Cross-posted at BlogHer.

Useful Links: Aviary, What not to do on Facebook, HTML5 Cheat Sheet

5 Things You Can Do with Aviary Screen Capture at Web Worker Daily gives a good summary of a new feature of Aviary. I’ve written about Aviary before in Updates on Aviary and An Early Look at Aviary.

In case anyone in your life or classroom needs a reminder that everything you say and do on the Internet can come back to haunt you, here’s a little morality story to that effect. Wife blows MI6 chief’s cover on Facebook. Well, hmmm, didn’t Facebook just make a big announcement about changes to their Privacy Policy—guess she missed the news.

Smashing Magazine put together a nice handout for your classroom. An HTML5 Cheat Sheet in PDF format.

Spreading the News

Remember how remarkable it seemed several months ago when a plane sat down in the Hudson River and the first news and photos of the crash came from Twitter? Then the fly ash spill in TVA’s Kingston plant was covered first on Twitter. That was about the time that articles about how the old media just didn’t get digital media started appearing.

An economic meltdown that dumped publishing and media into a period of hard times along with the rest of society came next, bringing a series of new articles and speculation about how media was going to survive and adapt. Newspapers are closing or moving to web only operations, or just struggling along hoping the weather the economic situation.

Media was big news again with the Iran election. Many mainstream media outlets were getting their news from blogs, YouTube, and Twitter. With journalists scarce in Iran, the “organized” media outlets were struggling to get the story by following what they could from the people on the ground who were tweeting and uploading video to YouTube.

Which brings us to the celebrity deaths in the past week, particularly the death of Michael Jackson. TMZ a gossip site with a reputation as trash, broke the story of Jackson’s death. Tweets went out within seconds and the quest for news on the topic was immediate and overwhelming. But nobody wanted to take the word of TMZ. News people wanted to hear from The LA Times or some other big media outlet that they considered “trustworthy.”

That’s a long lead-up to the topic I want to discuss. What are people thinking and saying about the media and the reporting of events regarding Michael Jackson? Here are a few comments.

Pauline from webgrrls reports that she was at the nail salon. In Cyberspace Behavior when Celebrities Die she said,

I was at my local nail salon when the headlines on television caught everyone’s attention: Michael Jackson passed away. As I sat in my massage chair getting a pedicure, I automatically reached for my phone, but unfortunately had no Internet service in that area. I received texts and made a phone call to a friend, while looking up at the television screen to see the news unfold. Other women around me pulled out their phones to call and text the news at a frantic pace. While the shock was palpable in the salon, I started thinking about what was going on in cyberspace.

I first heard the news from Twitter. I told my two grandchildren and they both immediately called their mothers to tell them. As soon as the calls were finished, they started texting friends. But, like Pauline, my thoughts went immediately to how the story was being reported. We had Ryan Seacrest on the radio in the car—oh, the things you must listen to when driving your grandkids—and he was hesitant to confirm TMZ, he quoted CNN’s more tentative reports that it was a coma for several more minutes.

Not to make less of people’s memories of Michael Jackson, but I was interested in the social media aspect of the story from the very first.

TMZ breaks news Michael Jackson is dead; does that also spell the death of traditional media showbiz coverage? from TampaBay.com:

It also raises yet another challenge for traditional news outlets, still scrambling to keep pace with a younger pop culture press moving quicker to break and advance the hottest showbusiness news.

Early in the reporting, people attached caveats to the news. At Written, Inc’s Michael Jackson dead, the comment was,

Ooh, it’s turning into a really bad week for celebrities – if the report from gutter-grabbing celeb “news” site TMZ.com is true.

At BNET, Catherine P. Taylor wrote Michael Jackson’s Death Illustrates How Much Media Has Changed. Her points, which I abbreviate here, are:

1. That, unfortunately, the notion of confirming a story is becoming quaint.
2. That almost everyone wanted in on the story in the name of traffic (I suppose you could include this blog in that … go ahead).
3. That if real-time search has a business model it’s in these huge, spiking news stories, particularly news stories with a heavy commercial angle. While there’s no real commerce to be had in the Iran protests, nor should there be, the sudden interest in a dead celebrity’s entertainment output should mean dollar signs for media.
4. That user-generated content shows the problems with the TMZ age writ-large, when anyone can publish anything, if they feel like it — and distribute it to millions.

Catherine’s points mentioned search. According to Search Engine Journal’s early article called Michael Jackson Dead: Microsoft Bing FAILS in Coverage, Twitter and Facebook Break News, the search engine response to the story was very slow.

In terms of search relevance and breaking news, even with conflicting news amongst various media outlets and social media, Google has not caught up to the rush of Michael Jackson news. Google is showing only ONE headline in its Google News Universal Search Onebox about the rumored passing of Jackson . . .

Yahoo Search News Shortcuts, on the other hand, is right on top of the news. . . .

Is Google Search lagging in breaking news coverage? Indeed it is. Microsoft BING however, has ABSOLUTELY FAILED in their coverage of the passing of Michael

Once the news was finally accepted as real by mainstream media, they went on a reporting frenzy of their own that continues to unfold. Twitter almost crashed from all the comments about Michael Jackson that people wanted to share. Twitter was so full of Jackson tweets that people began complaining that other things were more important. Laura Fitton, aka @Pistashio, commented,

Pistachio But see, Twitter’s about “what do we have in common.” 500 million have just Thriller in common, let alone the rest of his life/career…

We all have pop culture in common, but I think we need to remember that news about Iran’s election was big, too. And when the fly ash story broke it was pre-Oprah, pre-Ashton Kutcher, pre Twitter goes mainstream. Twitter didn’t almost crash over the plane in the Hudson, either. But Twitter has been growing so fast you can’t really compare one event to another one months later in terms of tweets because of increased membership on Twitter.

Big media had defenders for its reluctance to accept the word of TMZ with stories like What the Michael Jackson / TMZ news timing teaches us about credibility at Eat Sleep Publish.

If anything, what this incident proves is that credibility is a very valuable quality. TMZ bet on the accuracy of their story, and they won that bet. Why make the bet? They want to earn a reputation for credibility.

And you know what “old media” has in droves right now? Credibility. Michael Jackson wasn’t, as far as I could tell, widely considered dead until the LA Times independently reported that doctors had pronounced him dead.

It’s not true until I say it’s true. That’s power.

News as a social medium at the San Francisco Chronicle said,

Jeff Jarvis, director of the interactive journalism program at City University of New York and author of the media blog BuzzMachine, said the growing popularity of social-media sites is recasting the job of traditional journalists. He sees them as curating, vetting and giving context to news that bubbles up from teams of reliable amateurs they’ve already recruited.

Curating and vetting. That’s what we saw with the news from Iran. The man in the street tweets something and the journalists curate and vet. Social media feeds the mainstream media. It used to be the other way around. CNN even has a site for citizen journalism called iReport.

In Is Faster Better? Or is it Just Faster? Sarah Perez argues,

You see, I actually watched the CNN coverage and it was good. . . .

It also was a lot more interesting that watching a million “RIP MJ” tweets stream by.

Sarah’s comments relate to the story after it was confirmed by traditional media. Does that mean quality is measured by depth (aka curating and vetting.) Or is it turning into something more immediate? There’s the initial moment when we think, “OMG, Michael Jackson died,” and then there’s the feeding frenzy for details that follows. I think I’m more interested in the “OMG” moment in this article, and not so much in how the week played out after the news was blessed by big media.

An interesting perspective on the overloading of websites relates back to the previous quote from Laura Fitton. In Michael Jackson, Media Convergence and The Decline of the Global Superstar we find:

The mass media’s dependence on new media, especially of this nature, is pointing to a new media convergence that is both liberating and alarming. Do we need this many perspectives to contend with, and how much is verified before stated on air? Immediacy in any breaking event is always a waste of time because details will settle and change, and these social networking platforms are probably the most immediate forms of media there ever were. The crash of these technology-based social networks ostensibly shows an active rather than passive collectivity, meaning rather than experiencing a historical moment together via the exact same channels (limited to a few mass media networks), people wanted to reach out and create their own moment, their own reportage and rapport; however, this crash of systems also points to some intense displays of cultural capital, something a lot of these social networks are built upon.

Waxing Philosophical took a different approach in 3 Unexpected Economic Effects of Michael Jackson’s Death. She talked about money, and her points (which I again abbreviate) are:

1. If Michael Jackson’s death can break the internet, what will we do when there’s a global meltdown for reals?
2. Even a millionaire (billionaire?) needs a budget.
3. Jackson’s debt-ridden estate might just be saved by an unexpected run on iTunes.

In the next news cycle or during the next big story, will mainstream media remain inclined to wait for confirmation from the AP or The New York Times? Or will we begin to accept the word of sources that may be regarded as sleazy some of the time? Is news turning into the world according to Twitter?