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The World Is Not Falling Apart 208

Posted by Soulskill from the how-not-to-sell-newspapers dept.
An anonymous reader writes: As much as we like complaining, and as much as the big media stations like to focus on the most horrible news of the day, the world is actually becoming a better place. Stephen Pinker and Andrew Mack have an article in Slate going through many of the statistics for things like homicide rates, child abuse, wars, and even autocracy vs. democracy. They're all trending in the right direction. Maybe not fast, or even fast enough, but it's getting better.

They say, "Too much of our impression of the world comes from a misleading formula of journalistic narration. Reporters give lavish coverage to gun bursts, explosions, and viral videos, oblivious to how representative they are and apparently innocent of the fact that many were contrived as journalist bait. Then come sound bites from "experts" with vested interests in maximizing the impression of mayhem: generals, politicians, security officials, moral activists. The talking heads on cable news filibuster about the event, desperately hoping to avoid dead air. Newspaper columnists instruct their readers on what emotions to feel. There is a better way to understand the world. ... An evidence-based mindset on the state of the world would bring many benefits."
The Media

Google News To Shut Down In Spain On December 16th 183

Posted by timothy from the boy-that-google's-a-bully dept.
An anonymous reader writes The news aggregation services offered by Google is set to be no longer available for Spain, starting December 16th, 2014. The decision of Google comes as response to new Spanish legislation that gives publishers the right to claim compensation for republishing any part of their content. This follows news of services of startup Uber being forbidden in countries like Spain as well as Germany and some city councils worldwide like Delhi, or other services like AirBnb being put under pressure to cope with local laws in other jurisdictions.
Security

How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Twitterbot 54

Posted by samzenpus from the yippee-ki-yay-sara-sorcher dept.
An anonymous reader writes Have you ever wondered what it is like to have your online identity hijacked and replaced with a Russian-speaking Bruce Willis impostor? Here's a lesson in online impersonation from Passcode, The Christian Science Monitor's soon-to-launch section on security and privacy in the digital age. From the article: "Weeks prior, I changed my handle from @SaraSorcherNJ to the simpler @SaraSorcher when I left my job at National Journal covering national security to join The Christian Science Monitor to help lead our new section on, somewhat ironically considering the situation, security and privacy. Apparently within days of that change, someone - or a bot - had taken over my former work identity. My real account, @SaraSorcher, still existed. In my picture, I was still smiling and wearing a gray suit. The @SaraSorcherNJ account — Fake Me — sported a smirking, balding Willis in a track suit and v-neck white tee. I tweet about news and wonky security policy issues. Fake Russian-speaking Me enjoys 'watching Hannibal, eating apples and pondering the nature of existence.'"
The Media

Facebook Founder Presents Vision For The New Republic, Many Resign In Protest 346

Posted by Soulskill from the unfriending-in-real-life dept.
SkiTee94 writes: Chris Hughes, one of the original founders of Facebook, is in damage control mode to save his recently acquired, century-old publication The New Republic. In response to Hughes' vision to turn the highly respected, and most would say old school, publication into a "digital media company," about a dozen senior editors and writers simply quit (out of a 54-person staff). One of the editors who quit said, "The narrative that they are putting out there is that it is the 21st century and we have to innovate and adapt. ... We don’t know what their vision is. It is Silicon Valley mumbo jumbo buzzwords that don’t mean anything." Is Hughes a visionary cleaning out dead wood or a clueless tech star leaving destruction in his wake?
The Media

Is Chernobyl Still Dangerous? Was 60 Minutes Pushing Propaganda? 409

Posted by Soulskill from the reply-hazy-try-again dept.
An anonymous reader writes: This article has an interesting take on how the media is presenting the current Chernobyl situation. Its author, Ron Adams, is a long time nuclear advocate, so read with that in mind. Adams critiques a recent CBS 60 Minutes broadcast that took pains to show how dangerous the area still is. He writes, "The show is full of fascinating contrasts between what the cameras show to the audience and what the narrator tells the audience that they should believe. ... I correspond with a number of experts in fields related to radiation, radioactive waste management, site restoration, and the health effects of low level radiation. There has been quite a bit of discussion about the misinformation propagated by this particular 60 Minutes segment."
The Media

Is a "Wikipedia For News" Feasible? 167

Posted by Soulskill from the DIY-journalism dept.
Larry Sanger writes: Online news has become ridiculously confusing. Interesting bits are scattered among repetitive articles, clickbait, and other noise. Besides, there's so much interesting news, but we just don't have time for it all. Automated tools help a little, but give us only an unreliable selection; we still feel like we're missing out. Y'know, back in the 1990s, we used to have a similar problem about general knowledge. Locating answers to basic questions through the noise of the Internet was hit-and-miss and took time. So we organized knowledge with Wikipedia ("the encyclopedia that Slashdot built"). Hey, why don't we do something similar for the news? Is it possible to make a Wikipedia for news, pooling the efforts of newshounds everywhere? Could such a community cut through the noise and help get us caught up more quickly and efficiently? As co-founder of Wikipedia, I'm coming down on the "yes" side. I have recently announced an open content, collaborative news project, Infobitt (be gentle, Slashdot! We are still in early stages!), and my argument for the affirmative position is made both briefly and at length.
The Media

Nature Makes All Articles Free To View 97

Posted by Soulskill from the it's-called-progress dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Scientific journal publishers have been under pressure recently by both scientists and the public to relax their restrictive rules on the sharing of information. Now, Macmillan has announced that its Nature Publishing Group will make all research papers free to read. This will require the use of proprietary viewing software, but it's a step in the right direction. "Initial reactions to the policy have been mixed. Some note that it is far from allowing full open access to papers. "To me, this smacks of public relations, not open access," says John Wilbanks, a strong advocate of open-access publishing in science and a senior fellow at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, Missouri. 'With access mandates on the march around the world, this appears to be more about getting ahead of the coming reality in scientific publishing. Now that the funders call the tune and the funders want the articles on the web at no charge, these articles are going to be open anyway,' he says. But Peter Suber, director of the Office for Scholarly Communication at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, says that the program is a step forward in that it eliminates the six-month embargo that NPG demands for free archiving of manuscripts."
Advertising

Google Launches Service To Replace Web Ads With Subscriptions 319

Posted by Soulskill from the what-everyone-says-they-want-but-nobody-actually-wants dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Everyone understands by now that ads fund most of the sites on the web. Other sites have put up paywalls or started subscription bonuses, with varying success. Google, one of the web's biggest ad providers, saw a problem with that: it's a huge pain for readers to manage subscriptions for all the sites they visit — often more trouble than it's worth. And, since so few people sign up, the subscription fees have to be pretty high. Now, Google has launched a service called Contributor to try to fix this situation.

The way Contributor works is this: websites and readers can opt in to the service (and sites like Imgur, The Onion, and ScienceDaily already have). Readers then pay a fee of $1-3 per month (they get to choose how much) to gain ad-free access to all participating sites. When the user visits one of the sites, instead of showing a Google ad, Google will just send a small chunk of that subscription money to the website instead.
The Media

Uber Threatens To Do 'Opposition Research' On Journalists 299

Posted by timothy from the is-any-publicity-good-publicity dept.
Nerval's Lobster writes A senior executive at Uber reportedly told a Buzzfeed writer that the company "should consider hiring a team of opposition researchers to dig up dirt on its critics in the media — and specifically to spread details of the personal life of a female journalist who has criticized the company." As detailed by the executive, Uber would spend a million dollars on the effort, which would involve "four top opposition researchers and four journalists," and dig into personal lives and families. Uber has pushed back against the report, insisting that it's never done opposition research, but the idea of any company engaging in such practices seems more like something Nixon would have dreamed up at his worst than a strategy by a "disruptive" startup.
The Military

Alleged Satellite Photo Says Ukraine Shootdown of MH17 340

Posted by timothy from the if-the-glove-won't-fit dept.
theshowmecanuck (703852) writes A group calling itself the Russian Union of Engineers has published a photograph, picked up by many news organizations (just picked one, Google it yourself to find more), claiming to show that MH17 was shot down by a Ukrainian fighter plane. The interesting thing is the very quick ad hoc crowd sourced debunking of the photograph using tools from Google maps, online photos/data, to their own domain knowledge backed up with the previous information. It would be interesting to understand who the "Russian Union of Engineers" are and why they in particular were chosen to release this information.
Sony

Sony To Take On Netflix With Playstation Vue 130

Posted by samzenpus from the changing-channels dept.
stephendavion writes "Sony is planning to launch PlayStation Vue, a TV service for PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 consoles providing on demand programs and live content. The company will roll out the service to selected customers in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and is expected to feature content from CBS, Fox, NBC Universal, Discovery Communications and 75 other channels. The service is expected to allow users to save their programs for up to 28 days."
The Media

Assassin's Creed: Unity Launch Debacle Pulls Spotlight Onto Game Review Embargos 474

Posted by timothy from the hey-can-you-hold-this? dept.
RogueyWon (735973) writes "The latest entry in the long-running Assassin's Creed game series, Assassin's Creed: Unity released this week. Those looking for pre-release reviews on whether to make a purchase were out of luck; the publisher, Ubisoft, had provided gaming sites with advance copies, but only on condition that their reviews be withheld until 17 hours after the game released in North America. Following the game's release, many players have reported finding it in a highly buggy state, with severe performance issues affecting all three release platforms (PC, Playstation 4 and Xbox One). Ubisoft has been forced onto the defensive, taking the unprecedented step of launching a live-blog covering their efforts at debugging the game, but the debacle has already had a large impact on the company's share value and the incident has drawn widespread attention to the increasingly common practice of review embargoes."
The Media

2600 Profiled: "A Print Magazine For Hackers" 71

Posted by Soulskill from the not-the-atari-2600 dept.
HughPickens.com writes: Nicolas Niarchos has a profile of 2600 in The New Yorker that is well worth reading. Some excerpts: "2600 — named for the frequency that allowed early hackers and "phreakers" to gain control of land-line phones — is the photocopier to Snowden's microprocessor. Its articles aren't pasted up on a flashy Web site but, rather, come out in print. The magazine—which started as a three-page leaflet sent out in the mail, and became a digest-sized publication in the late nineteen-eighties — just celebrated its thirtieth anniversary. It still arrives with the turning of the seasons, in brown envelopes just a bit smaller than a 401k mailer."

"There's been now, by any stretch of the imagination, three generations of hackers who have read 2600 magazine," Jason Scott, a historian and Web archivist who recently reorganized a set of 2600's legal files, said. Referring to Goldstein, whose real name is Eric Corley, he continued: "Eric really believes in the power of print, words on paper. It's obvious for him that his heart is in the paper."

"2600 provides an important forum for hackers to discuss the most pressing issues of the day — whether it be surveillance, Internet freedom, or the security of the nation's nuclear weapons—while sharing new code in languages like Python and C.* For example, the most recent issue of the magazine addresses how the hacking community can approach Snowden's disclosures. After lampooning one of the leaked N.S.A. PowerPoint slides ("whoever wrote this clearly didn't know that there are no zombies in '1984' ") and discussing how U.S. government is eroding civil rights, the piece points out the contradictions that everyone in the hacking community currently faces. "Hackers are the ones who reveal the inconvenient truths, point out security holes, and offer solutions," it concludes. "And this is why hackers are the enemy in a world where surveillance and the status quo are the keys to power."
Government

Ex-CBS Reporter Claims Government Agency Bugged Her Computer 235

Posted by samzenpus from the watching-you dept.
RoccamOccam writes A former CBS News reporter who quit the network over claims it kills stories that put President Obama in a bad light says she was spied on by a "government-related entity" that planted classified documents on her computer. In her new memoir, Sharyl Attkisson says a source who arranged to have her laptop checked for spyware in 2013 was "shocked" and "flabbergasted" at what the analysis revealed. "This is outrageous. Worse than anything Nixon ever did. I wouldn't have believed something like this could happen in the United States of America," Attkisson quotes the source saying.
Government

Journalists Route Around White House Press Office 111

Posted by samzenpus from the indirect-route dept.
Tailhook writes Pool reports written by White House correspondents are distributed to news organizations via the White House Press Office. Reporters have alleged that the Obama White House exploits its role as distributor to "demand changes in pool reports" and has used this power to "steer coverage in a more favorable direction." Now a group of 90 print journalists has begun privately distributing their work through Google Groups, independent of the Press Office. Their intent is to "create an independent pool-reporting system for print and online recipients."
Microsoft

Microsoft Paid NFL $400 Million To Use Surface, But Announcers Call Them iPads 405

Posted by Soulskill from the free-advertising dept.
mpicpp sends this news from Business Insider: Prior to the season, Microsoft and the NFL struck a 5-year, $400 million deal with one of the major components being that the Microsoft Surface would become "the official tablet of the NFL," with coaches and players using the Surface on the sidelines during games. But Microsoft and the league ran into a problem during week one of the season when at least two television announcers mistakenly referred to the tablets as iPads, giving a huge rival some unexpected exposure. The biggest blunder for the league came during the nationally televised Monday Night Football game when ESPN's Trent Dilfer joked about how long it took Cardinals assistant head coach Tom Moore to "learn how to use the iPad to scroll through the pictures." In a separate incident, Drew Brees of the New Orleans Saints was spotted by Fox commentator John Lynch using a Surface on the sideline. Lynch remarked that Brees was "not watching movies on his iPad.
The Media

Anand Lal Shimpi Retires From AnandTech 152

Posted by Soulskill from the much-respect dept.
An anonymous reader writes: If you've built a PC in the past 17.5 years, chances are you read some hardware reviews on AnandTech at some point. The site's creator, Anand Lal Shimpi, has announced that he is retiring from the tech writing business. He said, "AnandTech started as a site that primarily reviewed motherboards, then we added CPUs, video cards, cases, notebooks, Macs, smartphones, tablets and anything else that mattered. The site today is just as strong in coverage of new mobile devices as it is in our traditional PC component coverage ... To the millions of readers who have visited and supported me and the site over the past 17+ years, I owe you my deepest gratitude. You all enabled me to spend over half of my life learning more than I ever could have in any other position. The education I've received doing this job and the ability to serve you all with it is the most amazing gift anyone could ever ask for. You enabled me to get the education of a lifetime and I will never be able to repay you for that. Thank you."
Businesses

Amazon To Buy Twitch For $970 Million 61

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the about-that-previous-speculation... dept.
Dave Knott (2917251) writes Amazon has agreed to acquire the live game-streaming service Twitch for approximately $970 million in cash, a move that could help Amazon bolster its position in the fast-growing business of online gaming and give it technology to compete with video-streaming rivals Netflix and YouTube. The acquisition, which has been approved by Twitch's shareholders, is expected to be completed by the end of the year. Google had for some time been reported to have interest in acquiring Twitch, but those talks cooled in recent weeks. Google was unable to close the deal, said sources familiar with the talks, because it was concerned about potential antitrust issues that could have come with the acquisition.
The Media

News Corp Australia Doesn't Want You To Look Closely At Their Financials 132

Posted by timothy from the but-they're-australian-dollars dept.
Presto Vivace writes with news of an embarrassing discovery for Rupert Murdoch's News Corp about the company's financial state, which might draw less attention if News Corp hadn't tried to prevent people from using the information: "The existential crisis that has gripped Rupert Murdoch's Australian arm began with a rude discovery just after 2pm on Wednesday afternoon. The Crikey news website had stumbled across some of News Corp's most intimate lingerie, and had just put it all up on the the net. ... The 276-page document is called the Blue Book, a weekly and year-to-date rundown of results at June 30, 2013 for every News Corp business in the country. ... The great newspaper engine which was Rupert Murdoch's original springboard to take over the world was already under stress. In 2013, 70 per cent of its earnings disappeared, leaving operating income precariously balanced at $87.6 million. As Crikey pointed out, trying hard not to gloat, another year even half as bad as 2013 could put News Australia into the red." Crikey took the documents off line after legal threats, but it seems not before business reporters all over the world had a chance to download them."
The Media

The Making of the Making of Nihilumbra 16

Posted by timothy from the has-it-ever-recurred-to-you dept.
SlappingOysters (1344355) writes "Digital magazine outlet Grab It has been pushing the boundaries of what can be achieved with media on touchscreens, which includes an experimental special edition of its publication focused on indie platformer Nihilumbra from BeautiFun Games. In this blog entry, the editor talks about how the digital format can be used to create reading experiences that you physically play just like it is the game. The app is available on iPad, but the article itself is an intriguing read for those wondering where the future of digital magazines can head."

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