Apex Legends lead designer fired over old racist and sexist comments | Rock Paper Shotgun:

I don’t have a ton of pity for people in this situation… We all knew this kind of commentary was toxic 14 years ago, 20 years ago, and far beyond that. The only difference is that people are actually being held accountable for some portion of it now.

I think the best answer, if you know you have social-media-skeletons like this, is to make your own mea culpa - Before someone else airs that laundry for you, expose them yourself with an explanation of how you have grown past them and apologize for you actions before someone else has to bring them into the light.

I am having the same issue with James Gunn right now with his return to the spotlight over Suicide Squad… because I don’t feel like he ever actually apologized for his own toxic social media past, only for it being discovered and possibly affecting the people he’s worked with.

Daring Fireball: Apple’s New ‘Child Safety’ Initiatives, and the Slippery Slope:

All of these features are fairly grouped together under a “child safety” umbrella, but I can’t help but wonder if it was a mistake to announce them together. Many people are clearly conflating them, including those reporting on the initiative for the news media. E.g. The Washington Post’s “never met an Apple story that couldn’t be painted in the worst possible light” Reed Albergotti’s report, the first three paragraphs of which are simply wrong1 and the headline for which is grossing misleading (“Apple Is Prying Into iPhones to Find Sexual Predators, but Privacy Activists Worry Governments Could Weaponize the Feature”).

Not surprisingly, this is the first really good, non-hyperbolic summary of everything Apple announced they’re doing on the topic.

• On-device, in the Messages app, neural analysis of images for possible sensitive content sent or recieved... If the user is under 12, parents can opt-in to recieve a warning, over 12 the user can be notified but parents won't be... And none of this is ever reported to any kind of authories, nor is any content sent to Apple or anyone else.

• Likewise on-device updates to Siri and Search around sensitive content, with the same kind of parental opt-in notifications for under 12 users, or just the users otherwise, similar to above.

• Most misunderstood... CSAM image fingerprint comparisons. Not sending images, not even scanning content of images, but creating a verifiable hash of images which can be compared with fingerprints in the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) systems... And if enough of those match the MCMEC system triggering a human review of those fingerprints for confirmation, before finally potentially raising further alarms. These cryptographic hashes, depending on the algorythm, should be entirely unique to any given image and so should be worse than lottery odds of ever creating a single false positive that a photo in your library matches a sensitive image in the NCMEC database, much less enough to trigger further action.

These seem to be exteremely well thought out, best compromise answers to really difficult problems and by far the most pprivacy forward answers of anyone in the tech world so far.

I’m sure that’s a good look - “WhatsApp - The platform that’ll protect your kiddy porn”

Facebook’s WhatsApp Takes Aim At Apple Over Child Safety Software Plan:

Facebook's WhatsApp messaging unit blasted Apple's plan to monitor sexually exploitative images of children on iPhones as bad for privacy, opening a new front in the battle between two of the world's biggest tech companies. From a report: "This approach introduces something very concerning into the world," Will Cathcart, the head of WhatsApp, said Friday. "We will not adopt it at WhatsApp." Apple a day earlier said it planned to release an update for U.S. users later this year designed to identify and report collections of sexually exploitative images of children, as part of a series of changes it is preparing for the iPhone to protect children from sexual predators.

WhatsApp’s position deepens the battle between Facebook and Apple about data. Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has long bemoaned what he sees as too much power Apple has over the social-media giant’s business. Apple has made the protection of user information on the iPhones and some other devices a key part of its pitch to consumers and taken shots at Facebook for its data-collection practices. Tensions have intensified in recent months as Apple rolled out a new privacy feature for the iPhone that restricts Facebook’s ability to collect data. Mr. Zuckerberg said Apple was using its platform to interfere with how Facebook apps work. At the heart of the latest dispute is the question of whether tech companies can insert software that identifies inappropriate or illegal content without compromising privacy. Apple claims to have found a way to do this. WhatsApp, and Apple’s critics, liken this software to a surveillance system.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Boycotts Don’t Work, Do This Instead:

I disagree with the premise - Ask Papa Johns if a boycott can change company behavior… But the graphic does give good ideas on how to extend a boycott with wider behaviors… In particular, Atomic Mass (and by proxy Asmodee slash Fantasy Flight Games) mini games like Star Wars Legion or Marvel Crisis Protocol are really well worth the time.

Dear HR: What Skin Color Emoji Am I Supposed to Use? - McSweeney’s Internet Tendency:

👍 Originally “Simpsons yellow” was clearly the safest choice. It signified the “everyman” of the emoji. But is this a cop-out? Does the yellow represent the cowardice of Homer (the cartoon, not the poet) and his people? Am I making a statement by trying not to make a statement? And what about Apu and Carl, why were they not yellow?! Where’s their statement?

👍🏻 This is just for white people, right? Like, if your name is Brock and you don’t want to get into trouble with other white people, you pick this? Like, you know what you did and you’re ashamed. But how white is this one? Dying-by-gently-coughing-blood-into-a-handkerchief white or detonating-thirty-gallons-of-gasoline-at-a-baby-gender-reveal-party white? Because those are two different kinds and that doesn’t seem fair.

He-Man fans hate the new series because it has too much Teela in it | Boing Boing:

But the fans hate it anyway, because the opening "Search for He-Man" plot arc features too much Teela and is too "woke". The show's been review-bombed online. Smith is reduced to denouncing He Man's angry fans in Variety magazine.

The best way to fight back against crap like this is to watch it, praise it, and make sure the loudest voices in the room aren’t the childish conservative snowflakes.

I Had Stopped Masking—Until Delta - The Atlantic:

But the pandemic is once again entering a new phase that feels more dangerous and more in flux, even for the people lucky enough to have received their lifesaving shots. A more transmissible variant—one that can discombobulate vaccine-trained antibodies—has flooded the world. It’s wreaking havoc among the uninoculated, a group that still includes almost half of Americans and most of the global population. After a prolonged lull, the pandemic’s outlook is grimmer than it’s been in months. I am, for the foreseeable future, back to wearing masks in indoor public places, and there are four big reasons why.

I personally haven’t felt like I could stop with masks in public… Despite being vaccinated, one of my two kids can’t be for a while… So when the vacicnation rate among eligible people basically stopped with less than half done, I have felt like we can’t change behaviors as if the threat was resolved…

The YouTubers who blew the whistle on an anti-vax plot - BBC News:

A mysterious marketing agency secretly offered to pay social media stars to spread disinformation about Covid-19 vaccines. Their plan failed when the influencers went public about the attempt to recruit them.

W.T.A.F… This presents one of the core issues with “citizen journalism” and the fuzzy state non-traditional “news” lives in… Because we only know this happened because a few people spoke up… But we don’t have any way of knowing who didn’t, or how many other campaigns there are like this for other topics.

jwz: Facebook is Killing People:

The life cycle of a COVID-19 vaccine lie | MPR News:

Misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines can appear almost anywhere: From an uncle's social media post to a well-trusted news commentator. But where does it come from and why do some myths spread further than others?

With the help of the Internet research firm Graphika, NPR analyzed the rise of one persistent set of lies about COVID-19 vaccines:

Reaching people on the internet in 2021 - The Oatmeal:

Everything has been downhill from here…

More seriously - If you don’t follow The Oatmeal one way or another, you really should. They still have an RSS feed, and now email subscription… For those of us that resist the Facebook.

Alex Schroeder: 2021-07-01 How to make conversation:

Anyway. All of this to say that we need to imagine positive outcomes for the things we say. It’s a bit like chess. There’s a thing somebody said. There’s the thought we’re holding in our mind. We’re ready to give that reply. Now, quick: imagine how the other person is going to react. Is this going to turn into an interesting conversation? If not, I’m already bored. Talk to somebody else. At the very least, ask a question. If you’re going to produce insults, or implied insults, or trying to score points on technicalities, I’m not interested. Learn about interacting with people, first.

The Rotting Internet Is a Collective Hallucination - The Atlantic:

Rather than a single centralized network modeled after the legacy telephone system, operated by a government or a few massive utilities, the internet was designed to allow any device anywhere to interoperate with any other device, allowing any provider able to bring whatever networking capacity it had to the growing party. And because the network’s creators did not mean to monetize, much less monopolize, any of it, the key was for desirable content to be provided naturally by the network’s users, some of whom would act as content producers or hosts, setting up watering holes for others to frequent.

If you care about The Internet, capital I, this is worth a read and think… The systems that underpin everything outside the corporate theme parks of Facebook and Google have stayed alive almost miraculously, but need help…

And yet… The fact that this was posted on The Atlantic may well mean that some visitors will be paywalled from seeing it, one of the great harms that I didn’t see in the essay.

Google’s messaging mess: a timeline - The Verge:

If anything is clear in 2021, it’s that Google’s messaging future will likely remain muddled for quite some time.

via - Daring Fireball

Facebook touts itself in this case as protecting small businesses, and that couldn’t be further from the truth. Facebook has locked them into a situation in which they are forced to be sneaky and adverse to their own customers. The answer cannot be to defend that broken system at the cost of their own users’ privacy and control.  — Read on www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/facebooks-laughable-campaign-against-apple-really-against-users-and-small

It’s an unfortunate quirk of the English language that free as freedom and free as in beer are very different meanings of free. But when you see an ad headlined “Apple vs. The Free Internet”, most people would assume they’re about to hear an argument about free as in freedom.

Not Facebook. They’re arguing about free as in beer. I mean, they’re alleging that Apple is taking away freedom — the freedom of small business advertisers to benefit from unrestricted tracking for ad targeting — but their argument to the public is that such privacy initiatives will cost users their free beer. — Read on daringfireball.net/2020/12/facebook_free_as_in_bullshit

https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/joe-bidens-election-branding-was-both-traditional-and-trippy-and-it-looks-like-the-future-of-politics/

Via - https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/12/16/biden-branding

Daring Fireball: Online Privacy Should Be Modeled on Real-World Privacy — Read on daringfireball.net/2020/09/online_privacy_real_world_privacy

<snip>

If you don’t punish cheaters and liars you’re rewarding them. Far from being biased against Republicans in the U.S. and right-wing nationalists and authoritarians around the globe, Facebook has been biased for them.

</snip>

daringfireball.net/2020/06/working_the_refs_worked_facebook_and_trump

So Facebook’s “Integrity Teams” can’t enforce integrity if it upsets the side of the U.S. political fence that is, quite obviously, more lacking in integrity. — Read on daringfireball.net/linked/2020/05/27/wsj-facebook-divisiveness

There’s certainly a debate to be had regarding the NSO Group and its services, but Facebook’s stated intention for this software was to use it for mass surveillance of its own honest users. That is profoundly fucked up — sociopathic. — Read on daringfireball.net/linked/2020/04/04/facebook-nso-group

The Prodigal Techbro | The Conversationalist:

Ex-Google lobbyist Ross Lajeunesse left the company in 2019 over its censored search engine for China and also because of homophobic, sexist and racist work practices. He’s now running for a Democratic senate nomination, and recently wrote a classic of the ‘scales have fallen from my eyes’ genre, called “I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left.” Its lede is “The company’s motto used to be “Don’t be evil.” Things have changed.”

Really? Has Google really changed? Lajeunesse joined in 2008, years into Google’s multi-billion dollar tax avoidance, sexist labor practices and privacy hostility and continued to work there through the years of antitrust fines, misuse of personal health data, wage fixing, and financially pressuring think tanks. Google didn’t change. It just started treating some of its insiders like it already treated outsiders. That only looks like radical change if you’ve never thought too hard about what you are doing and to whom.

Via: www.jwz.org/blog/2020…

For a closed system, those kinds of open connections are deeply dangerous. If anyone on Instagram can just link to any old store on the web, how can Instagram — meaning Facebook, Instagram’s increasingly-overbearing owner — tightly control commerce on its platform? — Read on anildash.com/2019/12/10/link-in-bio-is-how-they-tried-to-kill-the-web/

Contract for the Web: Tim Berners-Lee calls on world governments (and us all) to make the web a force for good / Boing Boing:

Governments that sign on are asked to promise to "ensure everyone can connect to the internet," to "keep all the internet available all the time," and to "respect and protect people’s fundamental online privacy and data rights."

Corporate signatories promise that they will “make the internet affordable and accessible to everyone,” “respect and protect people’s privacy and personal data to build online trust,” and “develop technologies that support the best in humanity and challenge the worst.”

Individuals are asked to “be creators and collaborators on the Web,” “build strong communities that respect civil discourse and human dignity,” and “fight for the Web.”

My changing gears from Facebook to Wordpress and other outlets started before this contract was posted, but absolutely in that spirit.

I don’t know that anyone is noticing, but I know…

Minnesota Public Radio sent us one of the weirdest legal threats we’ve ever received (and they won’t explain it) / Boing Boing: