Four short links: 15 December 2016
Secure Yourself, Limits of Transparency, Disruption Blindness, and Factiness in Podcasts
- Defending Accounts Against Common Attacks — This collection of resources and learning materials will walk you through practices recommended by security specialists for defending your newsroom against common attacks on your accounts. Give this to normal people to help them secure themselves.
- Seeing Without Knowing — paper on the limitations of the transparency ideal and its application to algorithmic accountability. (via Kate Crawford)
- Big Company Execs Disruption Quotes (CB Insights) — fine set of clippings of unjustified hubris. E.g., “Amazon.com is a very interesting retail concept, but wait till you see what Walmart is gearing up to do,” he said [IBM Chairman, Louis V. Gerstner Jr.]. Mr. Gerstner noted that last year IBM’s internet sales were five times greater than Amazon’s. Mr. Gerstner boasted that IBM “is already generating more revenue, and certainly more profit, than all of the top internet companies combined.” Last year, Amazon’s revenue was 107B. IBM: 82B.
- Podcast Out — infotainment is full of statements that sound like facts—what social media theorist Nathan Jurgenson calls “factiness”—that do nothing more than reinforce and rationalize the listeners’ already formed common sense, rather than transforming it: what you believed to be true before the show started was not wrong, it just lacked the veneer of factiness. Each show delivers an old anecdote from an economist or a new study from a team of neuroscientists that shows “we may actually be hardwired to do” exactly what we feel comfortable doing. Ouch it stings because it hits home.
