Showing 119 posts tagged Tech

newyorker: The Story of a Suicide He talked about Tyler’s senior year in high school. “I would characterize him as a child growing up,” he said. “He was getting more into being fashion-conscious. Now, this kid, he had to dress for orchestra—since he was seven, he was wearing suits and ties. But he was getting more trendy, in the last year or so.” Jane Clementi recalled that, not long before his death, Tyler had bought a spectacular new pair of glasses—bright green on the inside of the stems. His father said, “He was definitely trying to express himself.” They never saw any sign of depression, and can’t even see it retrospectively. “As a parent, what it says to me is that what you think you know, you don’t know,” Joseph Clementi said. “And that’s a hard thing, because we all think, I know what my kid’s up to. You don’t.” On the night Jane Clementi learned that Tyler was gay, she said, “I told him not to hurt himself.” Not long before, a girl from his school had committed suicide. “We had talked about it briefly that summer, and for some reason that thought came to mind. And all I said was ‘Don’t hurt yourself,’ and he looked me right in the eye and he laughed, and said, ‘I would never do anything like that.’ ” - In this week’s issue, Ian Parker gives the first in-depth assessment of the Tyler Clementi case, told through a series of exclusive interviews & IM conversations: http://nyr.kr/AeSgrV

newyorker:

The Story of a Suicide

He talked about Tyler’s senior year in high school. “I would characterize him as a child growing up,” he said. “He was getting more into being fashion-conscious. Now, this kid, he had to dress for orchestra—since he was seven, he was wearing suits and ties. But he was getting more trendy, in the last year or so.” Jane Clementi recalled that, not long before his death, Tyler had bought a spectacular new pair of glasses—bright green on the inside of the stems. His father said, “He was definitely trying to express himself.”

They never saw any sign of depression, and can’t even see it retrospectively. “As a parent, what it says to me is that what you think you know, you don’t know,” Joseph Clementi said. “And that’s a hard thing, because we all think, I know what my kid’s up to. You don’t.”

On the night Jane Clementi learned that Tyler was gay, she said, “I told him not to hurt himself.” Not long before, a girl from his school had committed suicide. “We had talked about it briefly that summer, and for some reason that thought came to mind. And all I said was ‘Don’t hurt yourself,’ and he looked me right in the eye and he laughed, and said, ‘I would never do anything like that.’ ”

- In this week’s issue, Ian Parker gives the first in-depth assessment of the Tyler Clementi case, told through a series of exclusive interviews & IM conversations: http://nyr.kr/AeSgrV

“

Obvious question: If white hats are the good guys, why are they picking locks?

“The people who are at this conference are here for the sake of the hack itself,” Javadi said. “What is your data protected with? A lock. People who have the mind-set of finding creative solutions to complicated problems are drawn to the electrical side and the physical side of the problem.”

His group teaches hackers two metaphorically important rules: Don’t pick locks you don’t own, and don’t pick locks in use.

Michael Shea, who works for a software company in California, had picked several locks by lunchtime. He offered this bit of poetry about picking locks and the relationship to hacking: “It’s a Rubik’s Cube for the colorblind.” Beautiful, Mr. Shea.

”

White-hat hackers huddle in D.C. - The Washington Post
  • Washington Post

Database Cinema: An Instant Movie Mashup Generator

Julian Palacz’s Algorithmic Search for Love, an interactive digital media installation, works like a search engine; viewers can search a collection of films for a certain spoken phrase and the program plays back a montage of all those moments in sequence. The program works by parsing the English subtitle tracks of 500 films on a local hard drive, creating an edit similar to the “supercut” sequences that have been so popular on YouTube lately — like this one. This video demonstrates how the program works with the phrases “where are you?” and “holy shit!” (the video contains some adult language and scenes). 

Read more —> The Atlantic

High-res The Hacker is Watching Every online scam begins more or less the same—a random e-mail, a sketchy attachment. But every so often, a new type of hacker comes along. Someone who rewrites the rules, not just the code. He secretly burrows his way into your hard drive, then into your life. Is he following your every move? Read —> GQ

The Hacker is Watching

Every online scam begins more or less the same—a random e-mail, a sketchy attachment. But every so often, a new type of hacker comes along. Someone who rewrites the rules, not just the code. He secretly burrows his way into your hard drive, then into your life. Is he following your every move?

Read —> GQ

  • GQ
High-res The joy of Microsoft’s ‘avoid ghetto’ GPS patent The gist of it seems to be that Microsoft’s GPS—which will reportedly be inserted into Windows Phones in the future—will use input from more varied and up-to-date sources in order to create suggested routes. Among these sources are crime statistics. Which has led some to the thought that this will somehow be an insult to poor neighborhoods. Read more —> CNET News

The joy of Microsoft’s ‘avoid ghetto’ GPS patent

The gist of it seems to be that Microsoft’s GPS—which will reportedly be inserted into Windows Phones in the future—will use input from more varied and up-to-date sources in order to create suggested routes.

Among these sources are crime statistics. Which has led some to the thought that this will somehow be an insult to poor neighborhoods.

Read more —> CNET News

  • CNET

Want to grow a social network to 300 million users? Get journalists to use it, write about it.

soupsoup:

muckrack:

MIT researchers have published some fascinating data on how Twitter grew during its first few years of existence. According to the research, Twitter’s “U.S. growth relied primarily on media attention, geographic proximity of users”.

The story gets particularly interesting when the researchers realized that media attention wasn’t simply a reflection of Twitter’s growth, but a cause of it:

González and Toole said their model of Twitter contagion didn’t fit Cha’s data until they added media influence, based on the number of news stories appearing weekly in Google News searches, data they acquired using Google Insights for Search, which provides historical search-engine data.

This jives with our experience building on Twitter’s API. In late 2008 we founded the Shorty Awards to honor the top content creators on Twitter (now it covers all social media platforms). The Shorty Awards became a trending topic on Twitter within 24 hours of launch, but Twitter itself wasn’t all that big at the time — only 1/3rd the size of Wordpress.com according to Compete. However, since journalists were relying on Twitter to find sources and communicate with each other, they noticed the Shorty Awards, which were quickly covered in the New York Times, BBC and Wall Street Journal without even sending out a press release.

After seeing how many journalists were using Twitter at the Shorty Awards we were inspired to create Muck Rack in 2009 to bring you, as we put it, “Tomorrow’s newspaper, today” — since you could follow second-by-second how journalists at each paper were using Twitter to do their job. We recently followed this with Muck Rack Pro to help journalists communicate with each other, PR people and sources over social media.

If you’re trying to build the next global communications platform, you might want to try to get journalists to use it to do their jobs. Perhaps this is why Google+ and Facebook are both aggressively courting journalists.

Journalists can get listed on Muck Rack and use Muck Rack Pro for free. PR professionals and those seeking to find journalists can try Muck Rack Pro here or request a free demo from our team. 

Huge fan of Muck Rack. Their daily newsletter is one of the most informative and useful things I read every single day.