• How to achieve your New Year’s podcast goals

    Before the clock struck midnight and 2018 faded away, we asked you on Twitter to set some intentions, resolution, goals — whatever you wanna call ‘em — for your podcast in 2019. What you wrote was awe-inspiring and motivating for the whole Anchor community, so we wanted to respond with some tips and tricks to help you achieve your resolutions.

    Congrats on taking the leap! Our production team created this handy guide about starting a podcast. And you’re so right — consistency is important when establishing loyal listeners. We find that it is beneficial to set a regular day and time when listeners can expect to hear your show, and be sure to mention when that is on your podcast. We also believe that consistency is important in terms of the tone, format, and topics discussed. In the early stages of your podcast, you may feel like you working to find your voice, and that’s okay. But once you find it and get a positive audience response, stick with it!

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  • The Deliberate Awfulness of Social Media

    Twitter, as everyone knows, is Hell. Its most hellish aspect is a twofold, self-reinforcing contradiction: you know that you could leave at any time and you know that you will not. (Its pleasures, in this sense, are largely masochistic.) My relationship with the Web site, which has, for years now, been the platform most deeply embedded in my daily—hourly, minutely—routine, has come to feel increasingly perverse. It mostly seems to offer a relentless confirmation that everything is both as awful as possible and somehow getting worse. And everyone else on Twitter appears to feel the same way. (You can check this claim right now by doing a Twitter search for phrases including “extremely normal website” and “I’m losing my mind.”) Last month, the writer Julius Sharpe posted the following exquisitely relatable sentiment: “Whenever someone stops tweeting, I feel like Ben Affleck going to Matt Damon’s house at the end of ‘Good Will Hunting.’ So happy for them.”

    So why hasn’t Sharpe done a runner, like Matt Damon lighting out for the territory? And why, more to the point, haven’t I? The obvious answer is that social media is an addiction. The first argument in Jaron Lanier’s recent book, “Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now,” is that the nexus of consumer technologies and submerged algorithms, which forms so large a part of contemporary reality, is deliberately engineered to get us hooked. “We’re being hypnotized little by little by technicians we can’t see, for purposes we don’t know,” he writes. “We’re all lab animals now.”

    The problem, for Lanier, is not technology, per se. The problem is the business model based on the manipulation of individual behavior. Social-media platforms know what you’re seeing, and they know how you acted in the immediate aftermath of seeing it, and they can decide what you will see next in order to further determine how you act—a feedback loop that gets progressively tighter until it becomes a binding force on an individual’s free will. One of the more insidious aspects of this model is the extent to which we, as social-media users, replicate its logic at the level of our own activity: we perform market analysis of our own utterances, calculating the reaction a particular post will generate and adjusting our output accordingly. Negative emotions like outrage and contempt and anxiety tend to drive significantly more engagement than positive ones. This toxic miasma of bad vibes—of masochistic pleasures—is not, in Lanier’s view, an epiphenomenon of social media, but rather the fuel on which it has been engineered to run.

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  • Saving Lives With Tech

    On the Morning of April 11, Abu al-Nour was lounging at home in a small town in Syria’s Idlib Province. It was a pleasant day, and his seven children—ages 2 to 23—were playing outside or studying inside. The house was small, but al-Nour was proud of it. He had built it himself and enjoyed having family and friends over to spend time in the big yard. His wife was cooking lunch in the kitchen.

    Al-Nour is a farmer, as were many of the town’s residents, but since the Syrian civil war started in 2011, fuel and fertilizer prices had shot up well beyond his means. Al-Nour had been getting by with the odd construction job or harvest work here and there. The area had fallen to rebel forces in 2012, and though his village was too tiny for the rebels to bother with much, he’d noticed fighters from the Free Idlib Army and Jaysh al-Izza groups passing through on occasion.

    Being in rebel-held territory meant government air strikes. The bombings began in 2012 and got worse in 2014. Many villagers fled out of fear. Others fell deeper into poverty, their businesses ruined by the relentless conflict. When the first air strike hit al-Nour’s neighborhood, he says, it killed eight people from one family. Al-Nour tried to help with rescue efforts, but instead was overcome with grief, unable to move. Afterward, he couldn’t stop imagining what could happen to his family. Finally, five long years into this reality, he heard about a service called Sentry from a friend. If he signed up, it would send him a Facebook or Telegram message to let him know a government warplane was heading his way.

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  • The 50 Best Podcasts to Listen to

    In March of 2017, we recommended 50 of the best podcasts for your listening pleasure. Many of those shows continue to do great work, including Heavyweight, Still Processing, The Read, Dear Sugars and Reply All. And two popular pods from last year’s list, 2 Dope Queens and Pod Save America, snagged HBO TV show deals.

    But since that list dropped, the medium has continued to evolve. The internet devoured S-Town, and The Daily became mandatory listening during the morning commute. Shows like Ear Hustle, recorded inside a prison, and the musical 36 Questions pushed the bounds of podcasting. Documentary series like Making Obama and Slow Burn began examining history to understand the current political landscape. Just this March, Marvel made its first foray into the podcasting genre with Wolverine: The Long Night.

    Between the newcomers and the old stalwarts we missed last year (sorry!),we found another 50 best podcasts you should be listening to right now. Whether you’re a royals obsessive, a true crime detective or a politics nerd, we have a pod for you, listed from A to Z.

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  • How to create a podcast in 2018

    It’s been about six years since I launched my first podcast. It’s been about five since the dust started to settle on my microphones and mixing board.

    Anyone who has ever launched a podcast can tell you it’s harder than it sounds. From conceiving an idea that hasn’t been done before, to recording something that doesn’t sound like it came from an abandoned parking garage, to cutting out the awkward bits using uncooperative editing tools, podcasting is a test of patience, creativity and technique.

    It’s also something I think I would have stuck with if I had access to today’s technology.

    Recording technology has evolved quickly to accommodate aspiring vloggers and podcasters. Where I used a complicated eight-track mixing board, newer tools like the Tascam MiNiSTUDIO (which launched in 2016) make recording much easier. Just plug in two microphones and you’re good to go.

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  • Do the Bright Thing

    I thought I had seen “Stranger Things”, a Netflix show about a quartet of kids battling mutant creatures in small- town America. Then I watched it again on a brand-new TV. A 65-inch monster made by Sony, it dominated my old Samsung the way Orson Welles once dominated conversation, putting the company in the shade with its size and vividness.

    Its quality was especially noticeable at one particular moment. Eleven, a girl with supernatural powers, is wandering through the Upside Down, a copy of the real world that differs from it in one crucial respect: everything’s dead. As she stalks the dark corridors of the local school, details that I hadn’t noticed before popped out of the murk. I’d barely registered the periodic table on the classroom wall, but now I could read every character. I didn’t remember the clock above the blackboard, but this time I noticed that it was just past ten. On my old screen, the portal to the real world that glows at the end of a corridor seemed bright. Now its incandescence threatened to melt the television, and the corona around its edge had a far richer palette of primrose, scarlet, mauve and magenta. As Eleven looked through it, the dust around her face fluorescing like embers, I could pick out every strand of pale down on her cheek.

    It is often said that we’re living in the golden age of television. But whatever you think of the dramatic quality of the shows on Netflix or HBO, one thing’s for sure: they look better than ever. The descriptive power of TV – its ability to render texture, colour and contrast – is growing fast. Directors have advances in screen technology to thank.

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  • ‘Fiction is outperforming reality’

    It was one of January’s most viral videos. Logan Paul, a YouTube celebrity, stumbles across a dead man hanging from a tree. The 22-year-old, who is in a Japanese forest famous as a suicide spot, is visibly shocked, then amused. “Dude, his hands are purple,” he says, before turning to his friends and giggling. “You never stand next to a dead guy?”

    Paul, who has 16 million mostly teen subscribers to his YouTube channel, removed the video from YouTube 24 hours later amid a furious backlash. It was still long enough for the footage to receive 6m views and a spot on YouTube’s coveted list of trending videos.

    The next day, I watched a copy of the video on YouTube. Then I clicked on the “Up next” thumbnails of recommended videos that YouTube showcases on the right-hand side of the video player. This conveyor belt of clips, which auto-play by default, are designed to seduce us to spend more time on Google’s video broadcasting platform. I was curious where they might lead.

    The answer was a slew of videos of men mocking distraught teenage fans of Logan Paul, followed by CCTV footage of children stealing things and, a few clicks later, a video of children having their teeth pulled out with bizarre, homemade contraptions.

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  • Inside Silicon Valley’s Secretive Dark Side

    About once a month, on a Friday or Saturday night, the Silicon Valley Technorati gather for a drug-heavy, sex-heavy party. Sometimes the venue is an epic mansion in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights; sometimes it’s a lavish home in the foothills of Atherton or Hillsborough. On special occasions, the guests will travel north to someone’s château in Napa Valley or to a private beachfront property in Malibu or to a boat off the coast of Ibiza, and the bacchanal will last an entire weekend. The places change, but many of the players and the purpose remain the same.

    The stories I’ve been told by nearly two dozen people who have attended these events or have intimate knowledge of them are remarkable in a number of ways. Many participants don’t seem the least bit embarrassed, much less ashamed. On the contrary, they speak proudly about how they’re overturning traditions and paradigms in their private lives, just as they do in the technology world they rule. Like Julian Assange denouncing the nation-state, industry hotshots speak of these activities in a tone that is at once self-congratulatory and dismissive of criticism. Their behavior at these high-end parties is an extension of the progressiveness and open-mindedness—the audacity, if you will—that make founders think they can change the world. And they believe that their entitlement to disrupt doesn’t stop at technology; it extends to society as well. Few participants, however, have been willing to describe these scenes to me without a guarantee of anonymity.

    If this were just confined to personal lives it would be one thing. But what happens at these sex parties—and in open relationships—unfortunately, doesn’t stay there. The freewheeling sex lives pursued by men in tech—from the elite down to the rank and file—have consequences for how business gets done in Silicon Valley.

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  • The Tech Industry’s Gender Problem

    One day in 2013, AJ Vandermeyden drove to Tesla’s corporate headquarters, in Palo Alto, California, sat down on a bench outside the main entrance, and waited, in the hope of spotting someone who looked like a company employee. Vandermeyden, who was thirty years old, had been working as a pharmaceutical sales representative since shortly after college, but she wanted a different kind of job, in what seemed to her the center of the world—Silicon Valley. She knew that Tesla’s ambitious, eccentric co-founder Elon Musk was managing companies devoted to space flight and solar energy, in addition to running Tesla, which was producing electric cars, and she was inspired by his mission. Tesla was growing quickly and offered numerous opportunities for employees to advance. The company, Musk liked to say, was a “meritocracy,” and Vandermeyden wanted to be a part of it.

    Vandermeyden saw a man wearing a Tesla T-shirt and walked over to introduce herself. After she found out that he worked in sales, the department she wanted to join, she decided to deliver her pitch to him right then. He seemed impressed by her nerve. A few weeks later, she was hired at Tesla as a product specialist in the inside-sales department.

    At first, Vandermeyden thrived at Tesla. After almost a year, she was promoted to the job of engineering project coördinator in the paint department. The new position involved working out of Tesla’s automotive manufacturing facility in Fremont, California, where hundreds of apple-red robot arms assembled Tesla vehicles on a white factory floor. The whirr of the robots in motion gave the plant the feel of something out of science fiction.

    But even in this futuristic environment there was something about life at Tesla that seemed distinctly atavistic—and deeply wrong. Vandermeyden, who worked closely with a group of eight other employees, soon learned that her salary was lower than that of everyone else in the group, including several new hires who had come to Tesla straight out of college. She was, as it happened, the only woman in the group. Her supervisors, and her supervisors’ supervisors, were male, all the way up the chain, it seemed, to Musk himself.

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  • Social media: from fact to fiction

    Hours after the Las Vegas massacre, Travis McKinney’s Facebook feed was hit with a scattershot of conspiracy theories. The police were lying. There were multiple shooters in the hotel, not just one. The sheriff was covering for casino owners to preserve their business.

    The political rumors sprouted soon after, like digital weeds. The killer was anti-Trump, an “antifa” activist, said some; others made the opposite claim, that he was an alt-right terrorist. The two unsupported narratives ran into the usual stream of chatter, news and selfies.

    “This stuff was coming in from all over my network of 300 to 400” friends and followers, said Mr. McKinney, 52, of Suffolk, Va., and some posts were from his inner circle.

    But he knew there was only one shooter; a handgun instructor and defense contractor, he had been listening to the police scanner in Las Vegas with an app. “I jumped online and tried to counter some of this nonsense,” he said.

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  • Fighting to Death for a Free Internet

    IN 2003, WHEN Jon Phillips was 24, he met someone who changed everything about how he perceived the world. At the time, Phillips was a graduate student in computer science and visual art at the University of California, San Diego. Rather than work for a big tech company, as most of his friends were doing, he wanted to use his computing skills to “build society and community.” So he turned to open software, collaborating with strangers every day on Internet Relay Chat, a platform that software developers use to chat in real time while working on projects together. One day, while he was on an IRC channel developing an open source clip art site, someone with the username Bassel popped up.

    Bassel wrote a patch for the site, then went on to develop a software framework for a blog platform that he and Phillips called “Aiki,” which was also the name of Bassel’s pet turtle. Phillips had no idea who Bassel was, where he lived, or what he looked like, but they spent hours hacking together, and eventually Phillips picked up more details: Besides the pet turtle, he learned that his collaborator lived in Damascus and was of Palestinian and Syrian descent; he taught Phillips that the Arabic term inshallah, “God willing,” could also mean “no.” He would joke with Phillips while hacking, “Don’t say inshallah, dude, don’t hex it, inshallah means it’ll never happen!” Eventually, Phillips learned his full name: Bassel Khartabil, though he went by Bassel Safadi online, a reference to his Palestinian origins in the town of Safad.

    Phillips and Khartabil met at a time of great optimism for “open culture” advocates like them. Both men became active in the Creative Commons, a movement dedicated to open source programming and a culture of sharing knowledge across the world. Khartabil saw the internet and connectedness in grand, almost utopian terms, and in November 2009, he and Phillips organized an event at the University of Damascus called Open Art and Technology. It was the first significant “free culture” event in Syria—and the first time Phillips and Khartabil met in person. They invited a variety of artists, including the Syrian sculptor Mustafa Ali. After a speech given by the CEO of Creative Commons, who had traveled from the United States to Damascus, the artists stood up one by one and pledged to put their art in the commons, licensed for sharing, open to all.

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  • Paperback sale outperform digital

    At the start of this decade publishers feared the death of the paperback. Britons abandoned bookshops at an alarming rate, seduced by e-readers and cheap digital books.

    Even Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder, was shocked by the speed of readers’ defection when Kindle downloads outsold hard copies on the website for the first time in 2011. “We had high hopes this would happen eventually, but we never imagined it would happen this quickly,” he said at the time.

    But the ebook story has turned out to have a twist in the tale. Sales of physical books increased 4% in the UK last year while ebook sales shrank by the same amount. Glance around a busy train carriage and those passengers who aren’t on their phones are far more likely to have a paperback than a Kindle.

    The e-reader itself has also turned out to have the shelf life of a two-star murder mystery. Smartphones and tablets last year overtook dedicated reading devices to become the most popular way to read an ebook, according to the research group Nielsen.

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  • YouTube: $35 internet TV service

    After years of boasting that it’s bigger than TV, YouTube has joined the TV business

    The Google-owned video giant has launched YouTube TV, a live TV service that seeks to compete with other internet-based TV services such as Dish Network’s Sling TV, AT&T’s DirecTV Now and Hulu’s upcoming service — as well as the broader pay-TV ecosystem. For $35 per month, YouTube gets you more than 40 channels including all of the major broadcast networks as well as popular cable networks such as ESPN, FX and Fox News. Soon, the lineup will add 10 more channels, including AMC, IFC and BBC, at no additional cost. At launch, the service is available in five cities including New York and Los Angeles.

    Fundamentally, YouTube TV isn’t all that different from Sling TV or DirecTV Now, which also offer bundles of TV channels at an affordable price. It’s also a business worth jumping into, as Sling TV and DirecTV Now have attracted 1 million and 200,000 subscribers at a time when cord-cutting is on the rise.

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  • The internet warriors

    Why do so many people use the internet to harass and threaten people, and stretch the freedom of speech to its limits? Director Kyrre Lien meets a group of strongly opinionated individuals all across the world, who spend their time debating online on the subjects they care most strongly about. They feel like warriors for their own personal causes, often feeling left behind by offline society, feeling like they are the ones who have all the right answers. Online platforms are their favourite tools to express the opinions that others might find objectionable in language that often offends. Do they behave in the same way when they come offline?

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  • Can .art boost art business online?

    London’s Institute of Contemporary Art adopted the new .Art suffix last week, a sign that the art and culture business may at last be starting to come to terms with its future in the digital realm. The hip arts organisation ditched its fusty ica.org.uk web domain for the more streamlined and descriptive ica.art. The move may soon be followed at other prestigious art institutions around the world, the ICA says, including the Tate in London, Guggenheim in New York, the Pompidou Centre in Paris and Lacma in Los Angeles.

    The ICA director, Stefan Kalmár, said the change of web address was not only logical but underlined the ICA’s position as an institution “that has always thought globally and opposes the current re-emerging of nationalism in the UK and elsewhere”.

    Five years ago, the body in charge of names on the internet, ICANN, swept away regulations and opened up a new world of additional web address suffixes, or top-level domains, including .art.

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  • A Video Game Help Preserve Inuit Culture?

    For more than three thousand years, the Iñupiat people of Alaska have passed on stories to their children. Like all enduring fiction, the stories deliver truths that transcend cultural shifts. They act as seeds of moral instruction and help to define and preserve the community’s identity. The story of Kunuuksaayuka, for example, is a simple tale of how our actions affect others: a boy named Kunuuksaayuka goes on a journey to identify the source of a savage blizzard. In the calm eye of the storm, he finds a man heaving shovelfuls of snow into the air, oblivious that they gather and grow into the squalls battering Kunuuksaayuka’s home downstream.

    The Iñupiat’s oral tradition, however, is at risk. Over the past few decades, advances in technology and communication have opened up the community to a flood of other stories delivered in new ways. “As is common for indigenous peoples who are also part of a modern nation, it’s been increasingly difficult to maintain our traditions and cultural heritage,” Amy Fredeen, the C.F.O. of E-Line Media, a publisher of educational video games, and of the Cook Inlet Tribal Council (C.I.T.C.), a nonprofit group that serves the Iñupiat and other Alaska Natives, said. “Our people have passed down knowledge and wisdom through stories for thousands of years—almost all of this orally—and storytellers are incredibly respected members of society. But as our society modernizes it’s become harder to keep these traditions alive.”

    For the C.I.T.C., the challenge was to find a way to preserve the community’s stories in a way that could withstand modernity. As the team pondered the problem over lunch a few years ago, the council’s C.E.O., Gloria O’Neill, suggested a video game. O’Neill had been looking at examples of indigenous communities expressing their heritage through modern forms—such as the film “Whale Rider,” which explores gender roles in Maori culture—and was considering whether the medium could help to preserve the Iñupiat’s cultural heritage. “We all agreed that, if done well, a video game had the best chance of connecting Native youth with their cultural heritage,” Fredeen said.

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  • Deepening Our Cultural Echo Chambers?

    When “One Day at a Time” started its run on CBS in December 1975, it became an instant hit and remained so for almost a decade.

    In its first year, “One Day at a Time,” a sitcom about working-class families produced by the TV impresario Norman Lear, regularly attracted 17 million viewers every week, according to Nielsen. Mr. Lear’s other comedies were even bigger hits: One out of every three households with a television watched “All in the Family,” for instance.

    Last week, a new version of “One Day at a Time” started on Netflix. Critics praised the remake for its explorations of single parenthood and class struggle, a theme that has faded from TV since Mr. Lear’s heyday.

    Yet, well intentioned and charming as the new streaming version may be, there’s a crucial aspect of the old “One Day at a Time” that it will almost certainly fail to replicate: broad cultural reach.

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  • Denton, Thiel, & Plot to Murder Gawker

    One day in September 2014 the publisher of Gawker Media, Nick Denton, sent an e-mail to Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist and billionaire. It could easily have been a message to a friend, or at least a kindred spirit, for, as many people who know them both have noted, the two have so much in common.

    They are contemporaries: Denton turned 50 this past August, and Thiel 49 two months later. Both were born in Europe—Denton in England and Thiel in Germany. Both graduated from fancy universities—Denton from Oxford and Thiel from Stanford. Both made their fortunes in the digital world; in fact, it had brought them together in San Francisco a dozen or so years earlier. Both are gay, and both came out relatively late. Both are libertarians, and nonconformists, and visionaries, and science-fiction fans, and workaholics, and wonks. Both have resisted getting old, Denton by attitude, Thiel through human growth hormones. Both have a cultish kind of appeal. Both were wealthy still in 2014, though as winner of one of Silicon Valley’s greatest daily doubles—he co-founded PayPal and was Facebook’s first big investor—Thiel was exponentially more so, a fact that stuck in the ultra-competitive Denton’s craw. “Nauseatingly successful” was how Denton once described him. “Does Nick Denton wish he were Peter Thiel?” a headline on Denton’s own gawker.com once asked.

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  • Social Media into the Minds of ISIS

    Rukmini Callimachi is arguably the best reporter on the most impor­tant beat in the world. As a New York Times correspondent covering terrorism, her work explores not just what jihadists do but how they do it. You’ve read her stories on ISIS’s use of birth control to maintain its supply of sex slaves, or the Kouachi brothers’ path to the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, or the nature of lone-wolf attacks like the recent mass shooting in Orlando. Her byline often appears on the front page of the paper; at just 43, she’s received three Pulitzer Prize nominations. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Callimachi, though, is how she gets her insights into the world’s most hostile and secretive organizations. Sure, she spends months every year out of the country reporting, but increasingly her work requires just as much time staring at her phone and computer screen. Social media enables Callimachi to access what she calls the “inner world of jihadists”; she lurks in Telegram chat rooms, navigates an endless flood of tips on Twitter, and carefully tracks sources and subjects all over the Internet. Her cell phone battery dies up to four times a day. The truth, she has found, is as much online as it is on the ground.

    WIRED: How did you start covering terrorism?

    CALLIMACHI: In December 2006, I became the West Africa correspondent for the Associated Press. As it happened, that was the year that a group there pledged allegiance to al Qaeda and became their North African branch. Very quickly, large swaths of their area were deemed too dangerous for a Westerner to visit, and I saw my own world shrink as a result.

    Then in 2012 they succeeded in taking over northern Mali. The area that they controlled with two other groups was enormous, the size of Afghanistan. They imposed Sharia law, cut off people’s hands. An adulterous couple was stoned to death, and women had to be veiled. It was one of the biggest stories on my beat, but it was frustrating because I couldn’t go there, so I was covering it by phone. Then in 2013 the French went in to push back the jihadis, and suddenly reporters were able to go in behind them.

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  • Egypt: App to combat forced disappearances

    For Egyptians, the risk of being snatched from the street and forcibly disappeared by the country’s security forces has never been greater. In the first eight months of 2015, 1,250 people disappeared, according to a report by the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms (ECRF).

    In response, the organisation has created I Protect, an app that allows Android phone users to key in a code when they are being detained, which sends three text messages to contacts and an email containing the location of their arrest to the ECRF.

    The group hopes the messages will aid a quick reaction during the first 24 hours of an arrest, key to stopping people being transferred from a police station to a larger facility, making them harder to find.

    Mohammed Lotfy, executive director of ECRF, said: “Being able to speak out about the arrest of an activist or protestor in the first hours contributes to the person’s transfer from police to prosecution during the legal time from of 24 hours.

    “This prevents their detention incommunicado, or worse their forced disappearance, and therefore reduces the risks of being subjected to torture or other ill treatment.”

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  • How technology disrupted the truth

    One Monday morning last September, Britain woke to a depraved news story. The prime minister, David Cameron, had committed an “obscene act with a dead pig’s head”, according to the Daily Mail. “A distinguished Oxford contemporary claims Cameron once took part in an outrageous initiation ceremony at a Piers Gaveston event, involving a dead pig,” the paper reported. Piers Gaveston is the name of a riotous Oxford university dining society; the authors of the story claimed their source was an MP, who said he had seen photographic evidence: “His extraordinary suggestion is that the future PM inserted a private part of his anatomy into the animal.”

    The story, extracted from a new biography of Cameron, sparked an immediate furore. It was gross, it was a great opportunity to humiliate an elitist prime minister, and many felt it rang true for a former member of the notorious Bullingdon Club. Within minutes, #Piggate and #Hameron were trending on Twitter, and even senior politicians joined the fun: Nicola Sturgeon said the allegations had “entertained the whole country”, while Paddy Ashdown joked that Cameron was “hogging the headlines”. At first, the BBC refused to mention the allegations, and 10 Downing Street said it would not “dignify” the story with a response – but soon it was forced to issue a denial. And so a powerful man was sexually shamed, in a way that had nothing to do with his divisive politics, and in a way he could never really respond to. But who cares? He could take it.

    Then, after a full day of online merriment, something shocking happened. Isabel Oakeshott, the Daily Mail journalist who had co-written the biography with Lord Ashcroft, a billionaire businessman, went on TV and admitted that she did not know whether her huge, scandalous scoop was even true. Pressed to provide evidence for the sensational claim, Oakeshott admitted she had none.

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  • Sites automatically block extremist videos

    Some of the web’s biggest destinations for watching videos have quietly started using automation to remove extremist content from their sites, according to two people familiar with the process.

    The move is a major step forward for internet companies that are eager to eradicate violent propaganda from their sites and are under pressure to do so from governments around the world as attacks by extremists proliferate, from Syria to Belgium and the United States.

    YouTube and Facebook are among the sites deploying systems to block or rapidly take down Islamic State videos and other similar material, the sources said.

    The technology was originally developed to identify and remove copyright-protected content on video sites. It looks for “hashes,” a type of unique digital fingerprint that internet companies automatically assign to specific videos, allowing all content with matching fingerprints to be removed rapidly.

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  • Photos Essential To Storytelling

    The question — “Pictures on the radio?” — was raised, not just by outsiders, but also by some within NPR early on, Somodevilla said, adding that Gilkey confided that he felt some colleagues were less than welcoming early on, not understanding the value of video and images. He said that was one of the biggest accomplishments of Gilkey and his NPR Visuals team colleagues (who number about a dozen people): “Making people at NPR believers in visual storytelling.”

    Michael Oreskes, NPR’s news chief, told me that when Gilkey was hired, NPR “recognized that no news organization can be only in one form of distribution. We have to be in digital, and digital now means half a dozen different things. So our roots are in radio and we are still very focused on radio, but NPR.org has 30- something million viewers every month, and that’s a visual platform. Yes, it’s true that radio is for your ear and the visuals on radio are the pictures we paint with our words. But there are lots of people who want our kind of journalism, but they want to get it in a different way.”

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  • The Future of Virtual Reality

    This may come as a surprise to no one, but I never expected to be CEO of a technology company.

    My unlikely journey to this point began when, as a child, I discovered my first love: music. To this day, nothing makes me feel as much as instruments and voices coming together to cast a spell, tell a story, or travel me back in time, into a memory.

    Foolishly, I became a filmmaker instead of a musician. All the while, I was searching for ways to evoke in others the same depth of feeling as music gave me.

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  • VR to inspire humanitarian empathy

    It is one thing to say that you understand someone’s pain and worries, but quite another to experience them. From living in a refugee tent to facing the Ebola epidemic, the United Nations is using virtual reality to create awareness of humanitarian crises around the world in hopes of changing how a person acts towards others.

    “Virtual reality is the ability to really take part in a story that usually you’re only a passive spectator on. And it’s giving you the possibility to walk in another person’s shoes,” said Gabo Arora, Creative Director and Special Adviser to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Action Campaign.

    The campaign is a special initiative of Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to empower and inspire people to support their Governments to implement the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the 17 SDGs that aim to alleviate poverty, provide universal education and help the environment.

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