Ben Werdmuller helps leaders at newsrooms, non-profits, and mission-driven organizations to navigate their biggest technology challenges.
I wish there was a conclusive list of “share-to” URLs. For example, here’s the URL you can use to build a “share to Threads” button: https://threads.net/intent/post?text= Here’s the equivalent URL for Reddit: https://reddit.com/submit?url= Every Known site has a URL
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"The Federal Communications Commission today voted to raise its Internet speed benchmark for the first time since January 2015, concluding that modern broadband service should provide at least 100Mbps download speeds and 20Mbps upload speeds." Finally. The previous 25Mbps down 3Mbps up benchmark was pathetic - and even
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Something I've long suspected is often the case: the founder of a data privacy firm also ran dozens of the people search services the firm was set up to remove people from for a fee. "Onerep’s “Protect” service starts at $8.33 per month for individuals
After some to-ing and fro-ing, I finally cracked how using Obsidian is useful. I’d previously been trying to work in the open and update my thoughts for a public website there — but, of course, that’s what my personal site is for! So it didn’t click, because I
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"There’s a reason that some 2,900 newspapers have closed since 2005, and that reason is the ad revenues publishers were hoping for to support what were initially free websites never materialized." What's left: paywalls and patronage. I've become much more bullish about
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"Former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is building an investor group to acquire ByteDance’s TikTok, as a bipartisan piece of legislation winding its way through Congress threatens its continued existence in the U.S." Come on. This is brazen. Whatever you think of TikTok, I'm not
Subsequent conversations have convinced me that I’m right about the assertions I made about the Fediverse for media organizations. There’s a huge need, a huge opportunity, and the underlying technology is there. The thing that’s a bit missing is a first-class Fediverse platform. Mastodon itself has become
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"The House bill, then, is an acknowledgment that algorithmic curation of feeds is a powerful feature that can have a major influence on individuals and society. It at least makes the point that allowing a foreign company, under its own government’s influence, to have some level of control
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Europe once again leads the way by passing meaningful AI regulation. Banned unacceptable-risk uses of AI include facial recognition, social scoring, and emotion recognition at schools and workplaces. "The use of real-time facial recognition systems by law enforcement is permitted “in exhaustively listed and narrowly defined situations,” when the
I’ve been thinking about the risks and ethical issues around AI in the following buckets: * Source impacts: the ecosystem impact of generative models on the people who created the information they were trained on. * Truth and bias: the tendency of generative models to give the appearance of objectivity and
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"The observation room at Boeing Field offers what is arguably America’s best real-time window into our vast network of privately run deportation flights, a system that has generated troubling reports of passenger mistreatment and in-flight emergencies." Important work from some pretty brave activists that sheds light on
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"What I thought would be helpful, instead, is to survey the current state of AI-powered journalism, from the very bad to really good, and try to draw some lessons from those examples. I'm only speaking for myself today, but this certainly reflects how I'm thinking