Tag: News
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Do Mobile News Alerts Undermine Media’s Role in Democracy? Madelyn Sanfilippo at CITP
Why do different people sometimes get different articles about the same event, sometimes from the same news provider? What might that mean for democracy? Speaking at CITP today is Dr. Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo, a postdoctoral research associate here at CITP. Madelyn empirically studies the governance of sociotechnical systems, as well as outcomes, inequality, and consequences…
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All the News That’s Fit to Change: Insights into a corpus of 2.5 million news headlines
[Thanks to Joel Reidenberg for encouraging this deeper dive into news headlines!] There is no guarantee that a news headline you see online today will not change tomorrow, or even in the next hour, or will even be the same headlines your neighbor sees right now. For a real-life example of the type of change…
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Sloppy Reporting on the "University Personal Records" Data Breach by the New York Times Bits Blog
This morning I ran across a distressing headline while perusing my RSS feeds. The New York Times’ Bits Blog proclaimed that, “Hackers Breach 53 Universities and Dump Thousands of Personal Records Online.” I clicked, and was informed that: Hackers published online Monday thousands of personal records from 53 universities, including Harvard, Stanford, Cornell, Princeton, Johns…
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Did the Sanford E-Mail Tipster or the Newspaper Break the Law?
Part of me doesn’t want to comment on the Mark Sanford news, because it’s all so tawdry and inconsistent with the respectable, family-friendly tone of Freedom to Tinker. But since everybody from the Gray Lady on down is plastering the web with stories, and because all of this reporting is leaving unanalyzed some Internet law…
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FBI's Spyware Program
Note: I worked for the Department of Justice’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section (CCIPS) from 2001 to 2005. The documents discussed below mention a memo written by somebody at CCIPS during the time I worked there, but absolutely everything I say below reflects only my personal thoughts and impressions about the documents released to…
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Will cherry picking undermine the market for ad-supported television?
Want to watch a popular television show without all the ads? Your options are increasing. There’s the iTunes store, moving toward HD video formats, in which a growing range of shows can be bought on a per-episode or per-season basis, to be watched without advertisements on a growing range of devices at a time of your…
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Greece Bans Electronic Games
CNet reports that Greece has banned all electronic games, including ones that run on PCs or on mobile phones, apparently in an effort to crack down on gambling. This is yet another example of the inflationary theory of censorship. A ban on gambling would be too hard to enforce, because there is no way to…