Ben Werdmuller helps leaders at newsrooms, non-profits, and mission-driven organizations to navigate their biggest technology challenges.
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"When it was his time to leave, McKay swapped out his existing profile picture for one that resembled an angrier version of Slackbot’s actual icon. He also changed his name to “Slackbot.”" Genius. Serious talk: this is actually a pretty common trick. You can't change
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The Markup found that Instagram is removing content about Israel and Palestine: "Our investigation found that Instagram heavily demoted nongraphic images of war, deleted captions and hid comments without notification, erratically suppressed hashtags, and denied users the option to appeal when the company removed their comments, including ones about
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"In one of the most viral moments from this year’s conference, conservative personality Jack Posobiec called for the end of democracy and a more explicitly Christian-focused government. While Posobiec later said his statements were partly satire, many CPAC attendees embraced his and others’ invocations of the Jan.
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"Overall, the analysis found that RTO mandates did not improve a firm's financial metrics, but they did decrease employee satisfaction." The finding is unsurprising, but good to have data. It goes on: "Specifically, after an RTO mandate, employees' ratings significantly declined on overall job
Hunter Walk writes: The checks being cut to ‘owners’ of training data are creating a huge barrier to entry for challengers. If Google, OpenAI, and other large tech companies can establish a high enough cost, they implicitly prevent future competition. Not very Open. It’s fair to say that I’
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"The prospect of this data, including Near’s collection of location data from sensitive locations such as abortion clinics, being sold off in bankruptcy has raised alarms in Congress." As it should - although, of course, fire sales are not the only way this data gets sold and transferred.
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"The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled that laws requiring crippled encryption and extensive data retention violate the European Convention on Human Rights." This renders some of the EU's own proposed legislation illegal. More importantly, client-side scanning and backdoors become illegal in themselves,
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Print newspaper subscriptions of the top 25 titles continue to steeply fall. But digital subscriptions are up. Newspaper is just a technology; the journalism it carries continues to be valuable. One concern is how to maintain accessibility: a print newspaper can be read by anyone with access to the physical
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I'm pretty critical of the NYT's coverage these days - I wish they'd do much better on trans issues and on being more critical on America's involvement in global conflicts - but this is a fascinating, illuminating interview. It's honestly very refreshing
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A glimpse into a surprising design problem created by constitutional monarchy: the need to update the crown in your logo when a new King has taken the throne. "On each accession, the monarch will choose a Royal Cypher, or symbol to represent their personal authority. You can see the
Breaking the News, the documentary about The 19th, aired on PBS last night and is available to watch for free on YouTube for the next 90 days. It’s both a film about the news industry and about startups: a team’s journey to show that journalism can and should
This weekend I realized that I’m kind of burned out: agitated, stressed about nothing in particular, and peculiarly sleepless. It took a little introspection to figure out what was really going on. Here’s what I finally decided: I really need to pull back from using social media in