Tag: technology

Google donated $5k to GOP Senator who “joked” about attending a lynching with her Black opponent [Cory Doctorow/Boing Boing]

Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith is a Mississipi GOP Senator is going into a runoff election against her Democratic opponent, a Black man named Mike Espy who might end up the first Black Mississipi Senator since 1883. She made headlines last week with a joke about attending a “public hanging.” She also made public comments in favor of voter suppression.

Google donated $5,000 to her campaign.

Google says they made the donation before they heard about her comments and they never would have donated had they known. However, she espoused hateful views before her recent comments, and Google isn’t asking for its money back.

Del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter tells the story of his pioneering social sharing platform

Did I Make a Mistake Selling Del.icio.us to Yahoo? (New York Magazine)

Much as I loved del.icio.us – and I continue to use del.icio.us clone Pinboard.in – del.icio.us was never going to be Facebook- Google- or even Twitter-big. People like images and design; a bare-bones text-only site was always going to be a niche.

(Oh, yeah, is that so, respond Reddit and Craigslist, sarcastically.)

Apple is using financial engineering to exploit Trump’s tax cuts, diverting wealth from workers, who create value, to investors.

“Apple’s world-beating financial engineering is teaching the corporate world how to exploit Trump’s tax cuts.” [Cory Doctorow/Boing Boing]

Police think Alexa may have witnessed a New Hampshire double homicide. Now they want Amazon to turn her over.

Police want courts to compel Amazon to turn over Alexa recordings from the scene of a grisly double murder in a New Hampshire home – if those recordings even exist. [Meagan Flynn/The Washington Post]

Unplugged young

Affluent parents, including many in Silicon Valley who work in tech, are limiting or eliminating their kids’ screen time. “It could happen that the children of poorer and middle-class parents will be raised by screens, while the children of Silicon Valley’s elite will be going back to wooden toys and the luxury of human interaction.” (Nellie Bowles/NYTimes)

Machine learning systems learn to cheat

A catalog of ingenious cheats developed by machine-learning systems “AI trained to classify skin lesions as potentially cancerous learns that lesions photographed next to a ruler are more likely to be malignant.” [Cory Doctorow/Boing Boing]

Digitizing history

The New York Times is using Google AI to digitize 5-7 million historical photos.

The newspaper’s “morgue” has 5 million to 7 million photos dating back to the 1870s, including prints and contact sheets showing all the shots on photographers’ rolls of film. The Times is using Google’s technology to convert it into something more useful than its current analog state occupying banks of filing cabinets.

Specifically, it’s using Google AI tools to recognize printed or handwritten text describing the photos and Google’s storage and data analysis services, the newspaper said. It plans to investigate whether object recognition is worthwhile, too.

[Stephen Shankland/CNET]

You can’t fix journalism by sprinkling blockchain magic beans on it.

Alas, the Blockchain Won’t Save Journalism After All (NYTimes)

I’m intrigued by the potential of blockchain. But there are an awful lot of bullshit blockchain business plans out there, and it seems like this plan is one of them. It finds a problem that doesn’t actually exist, and suggests a solution that won’t fix the problem.