-
(Lulu)TLDR Episode #7 - It's Rating Men
Lulu is an app that lets women rate guys they've slept with. Was he willing to commit? Was he gassy?
-
The Breaking News Consumer's Handbook
How to not fall for rumors during a breaking news story.
-
credit Kevin Borland/FlickrOn the Media: This Week
Obamacare in Spanish, Cartographers vs. The World and More
-
TLDR #18 - The Army's Recruitment Robot
Meet Sgt. Star - a chatbot that wants to recruit you to the US Army.
-
TLDR #11 - RIP Vile Rat
The story of Vile Rat, the online alter-ego of Sean Smith, one of the four Americans killed in Benghazi.
-
TLDR #9 - The Second Life of Marion Stokes
Preserving 140,000 videocassettes w/35 years of cable news.
-
(Lulu)
TLDR Episode #7 - It's Rating Men
Lulu is an app that lets women rate guys they've slept with. Was he willing to commit? Was he gassy?
-
The Breaking News Consumer's Handbook
How to not fall for rumors during a breaking news story.
-
credit Kevin Borland/Flickr
On the Media: This Week
Obamacare in Spanish, Cartographers vs. The World and More
TLDR #18 - The Army's Recruitment Robot
Meet Sgt. Star - a chatbot that wants to recruit you to the US Army.
The Problem With "Doxxing"
For years an internet term of art for revealing personal information
online, "dox" suddenly entered the popular lexicon last week when Newsweek
claimed it had discovered the founder of Bitcoin. But is this the right
application of the term? What does doxxing actually mean?
TLDR #17 - Hey, Guess What? I Found Truth For Us
Last fall, TLDR covered a bunch of hoaxes. Some we liked, most we didn't. On this episode, we talk to Paulo Ordoveza and Adrienne LaFrance, a couple of people who have devoted themselves to trying to debunk the innumerable falsehoods flying around the internet.
The likely hoax app that requires you to be drunk before you can use it.
Livr is a new social networking app named for the organ you will be
destroying while you use it. You see, you can only access Livr if your
blood alcohol level is above a certain number.
#16 - *Win a Million Dollar Mansion From Your HOME COMPUTER*
"Sweepers" are people who spend their free time entering hundreds of
online sweepstakes -- the contests most of us skip because we're sure
they're all scams. It turns out, we're wrong. Some people win big.
Reporter Laura Mayer takes us into the online sweepstakes universe.
The Internet Has Brought Thousands of People Together to Play Pokemon
In its purest and most noble form, the internet is an experiment in
community building. It allows people who would have no reason to
interact in the real world to come together to work toward, or in some
cases against, a common goal. In the case of Twitch ...
Why the Hasidic Community Loves WhatsApp
Since it is used expressly for peer-to-peer communication, it doesn't
require users to browse the internet, thus potentially exposing them to
material they might not want to see.
Creepy New App Lets People Eavesdrop
Why leave eavesdropping on phone calls to law enforcement? With the new app Crowdpilot, you can invite anyone to listen in.
No, New York Will Not Get 30 Inches Of Snow This Weekend
News outlets are reporting it and sourcing their claims to "social media speculation" (!!!). Good news: It's not true.
OK, Maybe we jumped the gun on the whole Google Glass thing
Last week, PJ wrote an excellent article comparing early aesthetic critiques of Google Glass to those of the Sony's Walkman.
The point was that all technology looks ridiculous and impractical
until it becomes useful, and then it's basically indespensible. But
cartoonist and journalist Susie Cagle pointed ...
TLDR #13 - Slender Man, The Internet's Monster
The Slender Man is
the internet's monster - the subject of countless remixes, tributes,
and parodies. He's so ubiquitous he feels like he's been around for
ages, like folklore. But Slender Man has an owner and a point of origin.
Host Alex Goldman talks to Eric Knudsen, the creator ...
Prince's Troubled Relationship With the Internet
Prince is suing 22 fans, for $1 million a piece, for posting links to bootlegs of his concerts on filesharing sites. This is just the latest volley in Prince's long standing love/hate (well, mostly hate/hate) relationship with the internet.
TLDR #12 - Hunting for Youtube's Saddest Comments
YouTube's infamous for having one of the worst comment sections on
the internet. There's no reason to ever read them. Unless you’re writer
& filmmaker Mark Slutsky.
Mark spends hours scouring the comments section on YouTube, and
occasionally, scattered in the dross, he finds small poignant stories
for his ...
Revenge Porn Pioneer Hunter Moore Indicted
UPDATE: read indictment below.
Time Magazine is reporting that Hunter Moore has been indicted by a grand jury for conspiracy to “access a protected computer without authorization to obtain information for private financial gain.” There aren't many details available and I haven't seen a copy of the indictment ...
Time Magazine is reporting that Hunter Moore has been indicted by a grand jury for conspiracy to “access a protected computer without authorization to obtain information for private financial gain.” There aren't many details available and I haven't seen a copy of the indictment ...
Behold! The Internet's Beauty Catalogued
If there is one idea that PJ and I drive towards both on the TLDR blog and on the podcast,
it's that the internet can be a beautiful, magical place. It is the
staging ground for so much cleverness and creativity and humanity. So,
imagine my delight this ...
Twitter Tries to Cash in on Large Minority Userbase
Ther have been two wholly unrelated truths about Twitter almost since
the service premiered. The first is that it has a black and Hispanic
userbase that is much larger than the internet as a whole. The second is the service remains unprofitable. Twitter is hoping to ...
Yesterday, The Internet Solved 20-Year-Old Mystery
The internet helps a woman decipher the confounding, decades old notes of her dying grandmother.
The Feds Have $25 Million In Bitcoin From the Silk Road. Now What?
Yesterday, the US District Attorney's Office for the Souther District of New York announced the forfeiture of
29,655 bitcoins from the servers it seized from Ross Ulbricht, the
owner of defunct internet drug marketplace Silk Road. According to this bitcoin converter, that is about $24.5 million dollars worth ...
A Weird, Gwen Ifill-Related Twitter Mystery is Happening Right Now (Update: Solved!)
At 2:01 this afternoon, a bunch of journalism-related Twitter
accounts suddenly started tweeting this cryptic message: "f gwenifill."
If you search twitter for the phrase, you see that it's very widespread, and that no one really seems to know what's going on.
Businesses Might Suffer If They Google Prospective Employees
Scientific American reports on a study that
shows job applicants who know their prospective boss viewed their
social media profiles are more likely to think that their hiring process
was unfair. This is even true in cases where the applicant gets the
job.
Leaving Negative Reviews Online is Not As Safe As It Used To Be
There was a time when leaving negative reviews of a business on the
internet was a no risk proposition. If a company burned you, or even if
you were a competitor leaving a fake review, the business couldn't
really do anything about it. That appears, however slowly, to be
changing.
Sometimes, Native Advertising is Actually Pretty Good
I am generally not a fan of advertising of any kind. Print,
billboards, TV - no matter how creative you are, I find it an annoying
distraction that I try to tune out. But there have been a couple of
smart attempts at online advertising recently that were great not ...
The Aptly Named New Technology That Tracks Everything You Do
With all the alerts and tracking your cell phone does, it can feel a
bit like an overbearing mother. At this year's Consumer Electronic Expo,
a company called Sense is exhibiting a product actually called Mother, designed to stick its virtual nose into just about everything you do.
What did we learn from Cracked's "Worst online dating profile ever"? Not much.
One of yesterday's big viral stories was by Cracked reporter Alli Reed, who used OkCupid to create the self-described "Worst Online Dating Profile Ever."
Reed used pictures of a model friend of hers, and then loaded the
profile with nods to the fictional woman being manipulative, ...
Every Edit You've Ever Made to a Facebook Post Is Visible
Anyone who can see your post can see a full history of its edits. All
they have to do is click the gray text that reads "Edited" at the
bottom of your comment, just to the left of the "Like" button.
If you're using a picture you find on the internet, you might want to know where it came from
See the picture that leads this article? It's pretty intense, right? Techdirt shared a story this morning from a couple weeks ago about an anti-immigrant conservative Florida political group that posted this image on its Facebook. The only problem is that the image was lifted from the video game Bioshock Infinite, ...
An Iron Maiden Hoax Too Boring To Check
If you weren’t on the internet last week (apparently there
were holidays) you might’ve missed this small story about Iron Maiden. A
blog called citeworld wrote that the band was using data about where their music was most pirated in order to plan their tours.
No, Facebook is Not Dying.
If 2014 is the year we read a never-ending parade of stories about the Death of Facebook,
you can probably safely ignore them. The first sign that Facebook’s
actually in trouble will be when it's no longer popular enough to earn
clickbait pieces about its imminent death.
Rap Genius Learns Wrath of Google is Still Very, Very Real
Following Google’s decision to knock Rap Genius way down in its search
results, traffic at the site has plummeted. We go inside Google with the
guys who set the search rules—and can make or break your company.
Support On the Media!
Chip in to support On The Media! go to onthemedia.org/give and
choose an amount that's right for you, or text 'otm' to 25383 and a $10
donation will appear on your phone bill (standard message rates apply).
Thanks for listening and thanks for your support.
...
...
Why It's Silly to Make Rules About What Your Employees Can Say Online
In September, after the Navy Yard shooting, a journalism professor at Kansas University posted the following tweet:
Would You Like A Canadian Politician To Say Hi To You?
Yesterday, the Ottawa Citizen posted a link to a website that featured a scandal-tainted Canadian Senator named
Mike Duffy doing a fundraising pitch. Given ongoing accusations that
Duffy was misappropriating government funds, it was an interesting piece
of web-arcana that the conservative party certainly wouldn't want to
draw attention to. But what made ...
The Apple Ad Everyone's Crying About
Apple has a new iPhone ad that's really an ad for the idea of smartphones.
That Bomb-Hoaxing Harvard Student Was Using Tor, But They Caught Him Anyway
Kim sent the threatening emails using a Tor browser, which anonymizes
your web browsing, paired with an anonymous email program called
Guerilla Mail. That actually could have been enough to protect his
identity, except that he did all of this on Harvard's wireless internet.
The Weird Allure of Stories about Hypothetical Twitter and Facebook Changes
Yesterday, blogger Matthew Keys published the kind of nerdy exclusive
that excites a small percentage of geeks (present company included).
Twitter, Keys wrote, was going to add an “edit” button in the near
future.
No One Outside the NSA Seems Particularly Happy with the 60 Minutes NSA Story
The piece doesn't include any on camera interviews with critics of
the NSA, and interviews with NSA employees were overseen by a team of
minders.
White House e-Petitions Work More Often Than You'd Think
Last Friday, I marveled at the news that an e-petition to the White House had actually created a policy change.
An Online White House Petition Actually Worked!?
NPR reported yesterday on
a deal between the FCC and cell phone companies that will continue to
allow consumers to legally unlock their cellphones. Unlocking had been
legal, then briefly illegal, and now it's ok again.
Could Copyright Law Be the Best Solution to Revenge Porn?
Yesterday, I wrote a post about how the trend in revenge porn prosecutions (there's been more of them) seems like a good sign in the overall war on revenge porn.
About Twitter's Block Changes and Harassment
Last night, Twitter abruptly changed the way its block function works.
TLDR #9 - The Second Life of Marion Stokes
Marion Stokes was a hoarder. When she died last year, her
family had to figure out what to do with 9 separate residences and 3
storage locations full of stuff. This is the story of how they found a
home for the strangest artifact in her collection — 140,000
videocassettes ...
Driving While Holding an iPhone-Shaped Cookie to Your Ear
Randy Liedtke, the guy behind the Pace Picante hoax, has gone viral again. This time, it's because he's baked a bunch of cookies that look like iPhones so that he can get wrongly pulled over for driving while talking.
President Obama Took a Funeral Selfie.
If you still think funeral selfies need defending, at the very least
this is no longer something you can blame on millennials. Also, someone
needs to track down this actual selfie.
Today's Hoax: The Screaming Google Employee
Last week, we threw up our hands in the face of the endless deluge of
viral hoaxes. Then, we tried to make peace with living in a fake world
and even found a lie that we liked. Well, it's Monday, and just like you
and I, viral internet hoaxes are ...
The NSA Spies on Gamers, too
The Guardian reported this morning that the NSA and their UK sister agency, the GCHQ, are spying on gamers.
TLDR #8 - THE PACE PICANTE SALSA ROBOT HAS GONE HAYWIRE
This has been a crazy season for internet hoaxes. This week, we investigate one we actually deeply enjoyed being fooled by --
about a social media bot for Pace Picante Salsa going insane and
inadvertently revealing an entire world of corporate conspiracy.
Should The Internet Track Down One Man's Manic Pixie Dream Girl? (Probably Not.)
At Slate, Amanda Hess argues the internet ought
to halt its quest to track down one guy's manic pixie dream girl. The
guy in question is a New Zealander who met an American woman in Hong
Kong on New Year's Eve last year:
Everyone Struggles to Define "Quality" after Facebook Changes Algorithm
Facebook announced plans this week to tweak their news feed algorithm to serve users more high quality content and less of what Facebook called “the latest meme.”
Another Thought On Viral Hoaxes
Over at his tumblr Just North Of Something Important, writer Michael Barthel has a smart response to my post from yesterday where I said I don't feel very outraged about living in a world of peak hoax.
The Internet Is Monetizing Lies and I Am Mostly Out of Outrage
So that Diane story, about a guy proudly live tweeting his bullying of an upset airline passenger, has turned out to be a fraud.
Musings of A Salinger Thief
Like a lot of people, I’ve loved JD Salinger since junior high. I grew up hanging out on a street corner
in Wayne, Pennsylvania, down the street from Salinger’s old high
school, Valley Forge Military Academy, which he seems to have based Catcher in the Rye’s Pencey Prep ...
Why Facebook Messenger Wants Access To Your Phone's Microphone
There's an Infowars story that's beginning to circulate widely about a seemingly very Orwellian move by Facebook.
Goldieblox Took That "Girls" Ad Down
Today, Goldieblox wrote an open letter response to the Beastie Boys open letter (relatedly, everyone knows you can privately mail a letter too, right?) saying that they have taken that "Girls" parody ad down.
The gay waitress who says she was discriminated against may have lied. Now what?
Perhaps you saw this incredibly viral story. A gay waitress in New
Jersey is stiffed on a tip. On the receipt, the customer explains that
they can't pay her because they "do not agree with her lifestyle."
The NSA Spies on People's Porn Habits
Glenn Greenwald pops up in The Huffington Post today, with a new Snowden leak story. This one is about how the NSA has spied on the porn viewing habits of six unidentified Muslim targets.
Goldieblox v. Beastie Boys: Let's Ask An Actual Expert
You’ve probably seen this by now.
Goldieblox, a company that makes toys designed to get young girls
excited about engineering , is suing the Beastie Boys for the right to
use a parody of the song “Girls” in a YouTube ad for their toys.
Winamp Might Survive, Actually
On Wednesday, AOL announced plans to shut down Winamp, which was the first decent MP3 player for many early adopters of online music.
How JFK’s Death Helped Inspire the Kitty Genovese Myth
One of my favorite OTM interviews is one from a few years ago between Brooke and a Queens historian named Joseph De May.
Creeping Through Ross Ulbricht's Bookmarks
Ross Ulbricht, the alleged creator of the Silk Road, was
denied bail yesterday. Prosecutors also released additional evidence
against Ulbricht. The big headline was the allegation that Ulbricht has ordered as many as 6 murders, up from the previously alleged 2.
You Should Follow JFK on Twitter today
The JFK library has been running a project this year where they tweet Kennedy's last year alive, 1963.
Why This Google Books Ruling is Important
Producer Alex Goldman on why last week's ruling on the Google Books project is important.
About That #Roofbreakup Story
Over the weekend, New York comedian Kyle Ayers livetweeted the conversation of a couple as they broke up on the roof next to him.
A Spam Filter You Use On Your Friends
Rather is a new Chrome extension that promises to filter your Facebook and Twitter streams for you, replacing content you hate with content you like.
Snapchat's Snaps are Beating Facebook Photos (Corrected!)
Business Insider reports that, as of this month, Snapchat users are sharing more Snaps than Facebook users are sharing photos.
Rap Genius Will Probably Survive
Over at ATD, Peter Kafka reports that Rap Genius, the
website that applies Talmudic analysis to hip hop lyrics, has made a
licensing deal with Sony/ATV, the world's biggest music publisher.
Should We Pay Attention To Assassination Markets?
Forbes' Andy Greenberg has a piece today profiling someone who calls themself Kuwabatake Sanjuro, the founder of the website Assassination Market.
Leave Work Early With A Fake Computer Virus
This is cute. Happy Hour Virus is
a website that'll let you choose a fake virus for your computer to be
afflicted with, so that you can sigh exasperatedly and leave work
early.
There are no invisible bike helmets. There are no invisibility cloaks.
If your Facebook feed is anything like my Facebook feed,
the most ubiquitous story right now is about an invisible bike helmet
invented by Swedish university students.
Replace Your Online Self With A Bot!
One of the things that people who loved the Twitter account horse_ebooks loved about it was that it took the language of internet spam and created something that sometimes felt like a poetic artifact.
The War On Lyrics Sites
The Daily Dot reports that the National Music Publishers Association is going after lyrics websites for copyright infringement.
A New Kind of Kickstarter Scam (From A Backer!) (UPDATED)
Kickstarter's based on trust. You give someone money, and you hope
that they'll build the thing they said they would, and not just steal
your money. Stories about scams are rarer than you'd think.
Here's One of the Guys Silk Road's Founder Allegedly Tried to Murder
His name is Curtis Clark Green and he's a 47-year-old grandfather from Spanish Fork, Utah.
TLDR Episode #6 - Ghost Town
Before the Internet as we know it today, there were text-based
bulletin board systems all over the country that people could dial into.
Producer Alex Goldman revisits the BBS he used to log into more than 20
years ago and finds out it's still up and running.
Silk Road 2.0 Is Here
AllThingsVice reports today that an anonymous group has started the Silk Road 2.0. They've even adopted the Dread Pirate Roberts moniker.
Goodbye, Blockbuster
You know you’re old, or at least a little old, when you start to love obsolete things for their uselessness.
Amazon Would Like Independent Bookstores To Sell Kindles
Amazon announced a new program this week for independent booksellers.
The deal: bookstores sell Kindles, and Amazon gives them a small cut of
the sale plus commission on the buyers' first two years of eBook
purchases.
How Canadian Niceness (And Terrible Accountability Laws) Helped A Crack-Smoking Mayor Get Away With It For Six Months
Toronto Mayor Rob Ford has finally admitted that he has smoked crack. Back in May, Gawker broke the story of a video that allegedly
(can we stop saying allegedly yet?) showed the mayor smoking crack, but
those reports had done little to damage his credibility.
Lavabit Founder Would Like You To Send Him Some More Money
Ladar Levison, founder of the encrypted email service Lavabit, would like some more money. Levison became a hero online after shutting down Lavabit in the face of government pressure to allow snooping on his users.
Anonymous Plans a Million Mask March
Tomorrow is Anonymous’s Million Mask March. It’s designed as a global series of multi-city demonstrations, although it’s not clear what’s being demonstrated.
TLDR #5 - Goodbye, Secret, Invisible Internet
Up until this fall, there was a secret internet. You probably
heard about one part of it, the Silk Road, but that was just one secret
website among many. On the latest episode of TLDR, we talk to Gawker's
Adrian Chen about the rest of the dark part of the ...
- Why a Large Part of the Internet Is Mad at Stephen Colbert
- Obamacare In Spanish, Cartographers vs. The World, and More
- A Six Year Old Explains New Yorker Cartoons
- When Your Favorite TV Show Jumped the Shark, In Graph Form
- The World According to Google Maps
- A Crisis of Cartographic Proportions
- The History of the Quiz
- I Accidentally Catfished Someone In Grand Theft Auto Last Night
- A Candidate for European Parliament Is Running Her Campaign On Grindr
- Why It's Crazy to Force Google to Censor 'Innocence of Muslims'
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please leave a comment-- or suggestions, particularly of topics and places you'd like to see covered