CNN reports that the NSA has been buying internet data as a way to track Americans without a warrant: [Oregon Democratic Senator Ron] Wyden, one of Congress’ most vocal privacy advocates, said he spent nearly three years pushing to be able to disclose the NSA practice and only succeeded when
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"In 2018, the indie women’s website The Hairpin stopped publishing, along with its sister site The Awl. This year, The Hairpin has been Frankensteined back into existence and stuffed with slapdash AI-generated articles designed to attract search engine traffic." This is one of the worst kinds
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"Proposed legislation would prevent trans people from being able to update driver’s licenses, hold public office, use public restrooms, or take shelter from domestic violence unless they do so according to their sex assigned at birth." I'm grateful, as ever, for The 19th's
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"What we’re sharing today is the result of applying our lessons learned from running a company with transparent salaries for a decade." I've been following Buffer's open salaries initiative since the beginning; this is a great update. An open salary system is smart
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The 19th News Network is "a collective of national, regional and local publishers seeking to advance racial and gender equity in politics and policy journalism." Partners include USA Today, the Texas Tribune, Teen Vogue, The Nation, and Ms. Magazine. Partners get early access to 19th stories, which they
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A robocall used a deepfake of Joe Biden's voice to encourage New Hampshire voters to stay home. "It's important that you save your vote for the November election." It's not a perfect deepfake, but it doesn't necessarily need to be
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Roughly a third of revenue for the Guardian - a firmly British paper - now comes from US readers. The Guardian is free for everyone to read online. There's the promise that paying readers see fewer calls to donate, but the real value proposition is the knowledge that you'
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"NYT is using the open source Ruffle as their Flash emulator. I hope other news outlets follow. It’s great to see my favorite visualizations working again." A lovely way to keep interactive archives alive. A little-known, but perhaps obvious, fact about newsrooms is that a lot
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I hadn't caught that the US's first high-speed railway is going to be built by Network Rail, which runs Britain's railway infrastructure. The San Francisco to Los Angeles route will take under three hours; right now it takes nine hours and thirty minutes.
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"His definition of strength was power, influence, money and his network of important people. [...] I wondered for many years, how all of this could have happened. How people like my grandpa turned into monsters and people around him watched or turned into monsters with him. The last years made
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"Despite their idealist manifesto and their Bill of Rights, I don’t believe they could ever truly be in partnership with their community once they were taking large amounts of venture funding." This is a key challenge with social networks that try and work with a different model:
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"We can conclude that higher-ranked pages are on average more optimized, more monetized with affiliate marketing, and they show signs of lower text quality." SEO as an industry has made search engines much worse to use. People are essentially spamming the web, which undermines the signals search