Alex Goldman

Ok, well he didn't exactly say that. Bazooka from GI Joe said that. Still Pope Francis, while calling the internet a "gift from God," said that us younguns waste too much time on it. Via the AP:

"Maybe many young people waste too many hours on futile things," the pope said in a short speech to the altar servers - young people who help the priest during religious services - who had come to Rome on a pilgrimage.

"Our life is made up of time, and time is a gift from God, so it is important that it be used in good and fruitful actions."

...

[he] also cautioned that high-speed world of digital social media needed calm, reflection and tenderness if it was to be "a network not of wires but of people".

He has a point. If I could have all the time back I spent furnishing my house in Animal Crossing or building massive ships in Captain Forever, I might have been able to apply that time to good and fruitful actions. Still, as we attempt to prove again and again on TLDR, the internet's network of wires is frequently utilized to create or strengthen human connections. It's not the network itself, it's how you use it.

It has been well established throughout the history of TLDR that I am a fan of what one could call "difficult" music. And even for me, Noreweigan Black Metal is a little out there. Not simply because it's totally brutal and unrelenting, it is also infamous for being a culture of Satanism, suicide, and church burning. Varg Vikernes, who records under the name Burzum, is often cited as a poster child for all that is ugly about the genre, having burned several churches and spent 21 years in prison for murdering fellow Black Metal artist Euronymous in the mid 90's. It's all pretty gross. So is that why eBay is making it impossible to purchase his music?

Look, I run for exercise, but I don't like it. Sure, I love the feeling of accomplishment, but I think my biggest problem with it, aside from the fact that I am not all that athletic, is that it's just boring. I try to spice it up with high energy running mixes and, of course, listening to podcasts, but I just haven't found a way to make it entertaining. I guess that's because I'm not as enterprising as copywriter Claire Wyckoff, whose new blog, "Running Drawing" may have finally come up with a way to make running fun.

On last week's episode of TLDR, we spoke to OkCupid President and founder Christian Rudder about the company's recent disclosure that it had been running an ethically questionable experiment on its users. 

In the experiment, the company took users who the site's algorithm found were bad matches (based on a battery of questions users answer) and told them they were actually good matches, and vice versa. In the interview I took issue with this experiment for a number of reasons. One of those reasons is because buried in the list of questions users get on OkCupid is this question: "Do you feel there are any circumstances in which a person is obligated to have sex with you?" I argued that this could lead to unsafe dating situations, to which Rudder replied "I mean there's also a lot of stuff we don't ask, I mean, y'know, so like, we don't know any of our users. Y'know so like we make no claim to the safety for anyone, and obviously we do everything we can to encourage a safe environment. But like, I think it's disingenuous to suggest that we're setting up people in dangerous situations." 

One enterprising hacker named Meitar Moscovitz (AKA Maymay) has developed a plugin to try and detect potentially dangerous situations before they occur.

Some users of dating site OkCupid are upset at revelations that it was deliberately experimenting on its users by taking people who were bad matches telling they were actually good...

PJ Vogt and Alex Goldman talk about On The Media’s TLDR podcast and blog and the kind of media issues it covers.

 

The co-host of TLDR tells us what isn't too long for him to read. 

Cory Arcangel is an artist whose work often deals with the way we interact with technology. His latest project is a book comprised entirely of people tweeting about how they're working on their novels. You will be not at all surprised to learn that it is called Working On My Novel.

The Internet you experience depends on who the Internet thinks you are.

What happened when a black woman writer went online disguised as a white man? She got a lot fewer death threats, for one thing.    

Last month, Facebook announced that it had conducted an experiment in which it purposely showed a group of users only negative posts from their friends' news feeds. The premise was to test what the academics behind the research of "emotional contagion," the notion that moods can spread across networks. Well, everyone was annoyed at being manipulated, and the lead researcher in the study has apologized. The Electronic Privacy Information Center has asked for an investigation from the FTC, saying Facebook was duplicitous, manipulative, and failed to inform users of the experiment. Now, Maryland Law Professor (and friend of TLDR) James Grimmelmann, along with colleague Leslie Meltzer Henry and the faculty of the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University have asked the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences to retract the Facebook study.

On the most recent TLDR, I spoke to Max Seddon, foreign correspondent for Buzzfeed, about some recently unearthed documents that show a massive online pro-Russia propaganda effort with ties to The Kremlin. 

In that interview, Max made it clear that Russia is far from the only government that does this sort of opinion influencing, citing an AP report from a couple months ago about US efforts to sway public opinion in Cuba by creating its own "fake twitter." from the interview:

USAID set up an entire fake social network for cuban people to get around all the internet filters to Cuba that was meant to create some sort of thing that they could use to influence popular opinion in Cuba, which is closed off to the US, and it's very difficult to do well. because On the internet, people are smart, it's very easy to compare things, and use multiple sources of information and come to the right conclusions. They can tell when something is fake.

On Monday, Glenn Greenwald's The Intercept produced another example of this governmental internet meddling, this time from Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). 

What can we learn from Tumblr's disastrous DashCon fan convention last weekend?

Today, Wall Street Journal technology columnist Christopher Mims boldly declared that the password is irrelevant and dying. How boldly, you probably weren't asking yourself? Well, so boldly that he posted his twitter password in the article.

The FTC wants to make it harder for children to make purchases in tablet and smartphone games.

On TLDR #20, I spoke to Jack Stratton of the band Vulfpeck, who released an album of complete silence on Spotify called Sleepify and asked listeners to stream it while they slept so the band could tour without charging for shows.

The gambit was a surprising success, garnering quite a bit of press attention, and eventually arousing the ire of Spotify, who asked the band to remove the album from its service. In the aftermath, I was curious what kind of payout the band ended up getting for its efforts, so I got in touch with Stratton to see how it went. Turns out it went pretty well.

Recently, Netflix royally pissed off Verizon by calling out the ISP for slow streaming video. The two companies went back and forth for a while, with Verizon demanding that Netflix cut it out, and Netflix essentially saying "Ok, fine. But we might bring them back. You should serve your customers better." Now Google is offering an even more granular service called the "Video Quality Report," which will allow users to check out their YouTube streaming quality and compare to other providers in the area.

Playing video games online, you're likely to run into cheaters. Aimbot, wallhacks, NoClip, they can render a server unplayable. However, they're little more than a pain in the ass, and penalties for getting caught can be pretty severe, including having accounts that cost a lot of money banned from using certain games. In Japan, they'll just arrest you.

To help sway public opinion, a company called the Internet Research Agency pays people in Russia to go to an office and post pro-Kremlin comments all day.

Since its inception, the streaming service has faced a barrage of lawsuits from broadcasters saying that it violates copyright law's prohibition against "public performance" of their ...