Alex Goldman

According to a recent study, professors are much more likely to be willing to meet with students who are white and male than they are with minority and female students.

The Wharton School recently tried an experiment where it sent the exact same email to 6,500 professors at 259 schools across the United States, posing as a student requesting a meeting. The only difference was that some of them were from a student named "Brad Roberts," while others had names like "Meredith Roberts, Lamar Washington, LaToya Brown, Juanita Martinez, Deepak Patel, Sonali Desai, Chang Wong," and "Mei Chen." 

The NSA could really use some good PR right now. It has had a rough year, deservedly so. With information about the agency's hoovering of personal information continuing to leak as well as the FISA court's alleged rubber stamping of government requests for surveillance, the revelations by contractor Edward Snowden have cast the NSA in a very negative light. It hasn't helped that the agency's response to the leaks by both the agency and The President was slow, and for the most part unsatisfying. Surprisingly, the first thing I've seen the NSA do correctly in months has arrived in the form of total gibberish.

Marketers are still only lukewarm on the platform, but Amazon thinks its found the key by turning your tweets into one part advertisement, one part buy-it-now button.

 

In 2005, Alex Tew was a high school entrepreneur who wanted to make a million dollars before college. So he created perhaps the most ridiculous website ever to grace the Internet.

Just over two years ago, the Internet (that's big 'I' Internet) launched a coordinated campaign against Congressman Lamar Smith's Stop Online Piracy Act. The bill, it was feared, would kill the open, free Internet as we know it and stifle innovative new technologies and businesses by forcing ISPs to block domains that hosted potentially copyright infringing material. On January 18th, 2012, Wikipedia, Google, Mozilla, Craigslist, and thousands more, blacked out their homepages in protest of SOPA, a move that eventually spurred lawmakers to abandon the change. According to the Wall St. Journal, these heavyweights are considering a reunion tour.

Yesterday, the Onion told the New York Business Journal that it would be producing a parody of sites like Buzzfeed and Upworthy called "Clickhole." Sure, those sites are ripe for a takedown, but how do you parody sites that are already basically self-parody? Here are 20 ways that will astound you.

According to Wired, London's Saatchi gallery has created a gif competition that awards prizes in what it now calls "motion photography." Wired sees this as legitimizing gifs as an artform, but in the process of legitimizing, it completely misunderstands the point of gifs.

Getting attention for your music in the internet age requires a lot of flair, a bit of ingenuity, and maybe some performance art.

There is a strong tradition in contemporary composition of making music from non-musical objects. Musique Concrète, playing the jug, Eugene Chadbourne playing an electric rake. But for some reason, there is a critical mass of "making music by playing weird shit" Kickstarters at the moment. Some much cooler than others.

A Bitcoin Story for People Who Don't Care About Bitcoin

New York librarian Sarah O’Holla is on a mission: to listen to each album in her husband’s vinyl record collection -- all 1500 of them. She’s chronicling her journey on the blog My Hu...

A few weeks ago, we did a TLDR episode about the band Vulfpeck, which had come up with a novel way to fund their tour. They uploaded an album of silence to Spotify called "Sleepify," and asked their fans to stream it while they slept. The royalties from the plays of those songs would allow the band to tour for free.

An hour ago, the band announced on its Facebook page that Spotify has requested that they remove "Sleepify" from Spotify.

This is how the internet handles celebrity, unless of course you're a cat.

Edit: I embarrassingly misspelled Eugenia Williamson "Eugenia Williams" initially. I have now fixed. I regret the error.

Last week, PJ and I wrote an article in response to a failed interview between Boston Magazine writer Eugenia Williamson and former child star-turned Velvet Underground parodist Macaulay Culkin. I read the article as fairly mean spirited, viciously personal, and not particularly illuminating of its subject. But in writing the article about it, I strove to keep my critique measured and specific. The larger internet picked up on the story, and didn't make a similar effort.

Earlier this week, a commenter named Y. Woodman Brown posted his online passwords in the Washington Post comments section to show just how little his online security mattered to him. It was quickly picked up by the press as an example of online security hubris. Naturally, we had to find him. Alex talks to Y. Woodman Brown and the person who hijacked his Twitter account after the passwords were posted.

Does the Man Who Shared His Password with the Internet Regret it? Not really.

In March, I did a story for TLDR about Sgt. Star, the Army website's virtual recruiter that answers questions from potential future soldiers. You can hear that story below.

In that story, we spoke to Dave Maass of the Electronic Frontier Foundation who had sent a FOIA request to the Army for more information on Sgt Star, but had not received any response. But now he has, and he wrote an impressive update on the EFF blog. Among other things, the EFF received every single answer that Sgt Star can give. I spoke to Maass about the things he learned about Sgt Star, like how he was born, his relationship to the CIA and the FBI, and even his astrological sign. Listen to the update below.

Sergeant Star is a chatbot designed to influence potential recruits to enlist. Alex Goldman of our podcast TLDR wasn't sure how he felt about that, so he talked to the Army and a reporter who's covered recruitment abuses to consider the pros and cons of deploying a Siri to guide our decision to go to war. 

This story originally appeared in a longer form on the TLDR Podcast. If you would like to hear a longer version of this story and Alex's update with Dave Maass of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, follow this link.

Music: Kraftwerk - Pocket Calculator. Special thanks to @M0X1 (Mo Xie) for the suggestion on Twitter!

Triple A video game titles (meaning the ones that cost hundreds of millions of dollars and have huge launches) are always trying to push for greater and greater verisimilitude. This is one of the reasons that there is a new round of consoles every 7 years or so, and why sound design in games is ever evolving to better evoke a sense of place. These audio environments are now interesting enough that at least one person has decided to record these habitats for posterity.

When internet writing goes terribly wrong.