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Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

In August, local police arrived at Clare Sorrenti’s apartment in London, Ontario with a search warrant, which they used to confiscate her computer, her cellphone, and some other possessions. Sorrenti, a trans political commentator who streams on Microsoft’s Twitch network, says she was held for 11 hours, and questioned about an email a number of local city councillors said they received that used her former name. The email contained a photo of a handgun and allegedly made threats of harm. Sorrenti, who was released without charges, believes the fake email was a “swatting” attempt—a tactic some online trolls use to attack their enemies, by calling in threats designed to trigger a visit by police or SWAT teams. Although the identity of the email sender remains unknown, Sorrenti had warned local police that a swatting attempt might occur, because of the abuse she had received from users of an online forum known as Kiwi Farms. She said she was repeatedly doxxed (had her personal information, including her physical address, posted onlne) and had also a number of her online accounts hacked by unknown actors.

Ben Collins and Kat Tenbarge of NBC News describe Kiwi Farms as “an internet message board known for being an epicenter of vicious, anti-trans harassment campaigns.” The forum, previously known as CWCki Forums, is an offshoot of 8chan, another notoriously lawless online community that helped give birth to the QAnon conspiracy movement. Collins and Tenbarge say Kiwi Farms has become known for targeting trans and gay personalities by doxxing and swatting, and is also infamous for collecting and archiving the racist and homophobic “manifestos” written by mass shooters. After being swatted, Sorrenti and her supporters started lobbying Cloudflare, a company that provides hosting and security services to websites, asking it to cut off Kiwi Farms. At first, the company said it would not do so: Matthew Prince, the CEO, wrote in a blog post that removing services from even reprehensible content “is the equivalent argument in the physical world that the fire department shouldn’t respond to fires in the homes of people who do not possess sufficient moral character,” calling it “a dangerous precedent.”

Just a few days later, however, Prince changed his mind, and wrote in a new blog post that Cloudflare had removed its security protections from Kiwi Farms, opening the site up to attacks such as a distributed denial of service (Prince also noted that Cloudflare had never provided hosting services to Kiwi Farms). “This is an extraordinary decision for us to make and, given Cloudflare’s role as an Internet infrastructure provider, a dangerous one that we are not comfortable with,” Prince wrote. The decision was made not because of Sorrenti’s lobbying campaign, he said, but because “the rhetoric on the Kiwifarms site and specific, targeted threats have escalated over the last 48 hours to the point that we believe there is an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life.” Cloudflare’s about-face was hailed by Sorrenti and others as a victory for human rights, among other things, since it likely means that Kiwi Farms has been removed from the internet. But it also raises difficult questions, including who gets to decide what content we see.

Continue reading “Cloudflare, Kiwi Farms, and the challenges of deplatforming”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Swearing varies a lot from place to place, even within the same country, in the same language. But how do we know who swears what, where, in the big picture? We turn to data – damn big data. With great computing power comes great cartography, writes Stan Carey from the Strong Language blog. Jack Grieve, lecturer in forensic linguistics at Aston University in Birmingham, UK, has created a detailed set of maps of the US showing strong regional patterns of swearing preferences. The maps are based on an 8.9-billion-word corpus of geo-coded tweets collected by Diansheng Guo in 2013–14 and funded by Digging into Data.

Peter Eckersley made the internet a safer place for everyone

Technologist, activist, and cybersecurity expert Peter Eckersley passed away suddenly last week after being diagnosed with colon cancer. Peter worked at the Electronic Frontier Foundation for a dozen years and was the EFF’s Chief Computer Scientist for many of those. “The impact of Peter’s work on encrypting the web cannot be overstated,” wrote Cindy Cohn of the EFF. “The fact that transport layer encryption on the web is so ubiquitous that it’s nearly invisible is thanks to the work Peter began. It’s a testament to the boldness of his vision that he decided that we could and should encrypt the web, and to his sheer tenacity that he kept at it.”

Continue reading “Mapping the United Swears of America”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Evan Kail collects historical memorabilia. He recently found a book he believed contained never-before-seen photos of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre. The first 20 pages appear to be from a U.S Navy service member sent to China around 1938. But after that he found black and white photos showing piles of bodies, beheadings, and other acts of torture. “Somehow that guy who took those photos was present for the Rape of Nanjing,” Kail said. But Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse, a research historian and creator of the Fake History Hunter account on Twitter said that while the photos may be authentic, she doesn’t believe they are from the Nanjing massacre.

Humpback whales pass their songs across oceans

One of the most remarkable things about our species is how fast human culture can change. It turns out that humpback whales have their own long-range, high-speed cultural evolution, and they don’t need the internet or satellites to keep it running. In a study published on Tuesday, scientists found that humpback songs easily spread from one population to another across the Pacific Ocean. It can take just a couple of years for a song to move several thousand miles. “Half the globe is now vocally connected for whales,” said marine biologist Ellen Garland. “And that’s insane.”

Continue reading “Did this TikToker find unseen photos of a 1937 massacre?”

A poem by Fernando Pessoa

Ah, the freshness in the face of leaving a task undone!
To be remiss is to be positively out in the country!
What a refuge it is to be completely unreliable!
I can breathe easier now that the appointments are behind me.
I missed them all, through deliberate negligence,
Having waited for the urge to go, which I knew wouldn’t come.
I’m free, and against organized, clothed society.
I’m naked and plunge into the water of my imagination.
It’s too late to be at either of the two meetings where I should have been at the same time,
Deliberately at the same time…
No matter, I’ll stay here dreaming verses and smiling in italics.
This spectator aspect of life is so amusing!
I can’t even light the next cigarette… If it’s an action,
It can wait for me, along with the others, in the non-meeting called life.

© Translation: 1998, Richard Zenith
From: Fernando Pessoa & Co. – Selected Poems
Publisher: Grove Press, New York, 1998

Had to post this from Helena Fitzgerald’s great Substack newsletter, Griefbacon. Helena is such a great writer that I am more than willing to read her writing about any topic, no matter how boring, including air conditioning — which is really (as most of Helena’s pieces are) about life, and loss, and desire:

“Westfield is like if a mall dressed as a mall for Halloween, like if three malls stood on each other’s shoulders in a trench-coat to try to fake their way into a job as a mall. Everything in it is too blank and too white and too vast. Everything at Westfield seems to want to make you comfortable and actually wants to make you angry. Soft music is always playing, and a child is always throwing up near you, and something is always on sale. You can always smell food and the food smells just ok yet still makes you hungry even though you’re not actually hungry.

Everything at Westfield is about want, and nothing is about bodies. Mall air-conditioning is the dream of being able to want things without having to admit it is your sticky, sweaty, soggy body doing the wanting. This is the same dream as money, desire unweighted and without human consequences, always sowing and never reaping. When I leave the mall, for a few minutes I am overjoyed to be back outside in the weather and aware of my own skin. Outside, it’s a thrill to be able to experience consequences again. That’s what the body is, after all: an endless slapstick staircase of consequences, banana peel after banana peel. We accumulate our own lives and eventually they show on our faces, in our posture, in our torn-up feet and our bad knees. Mall air-conditioning says all of this is optional.”

Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

Last week, members of both houses of Congress—including Amy Klobuchar, the Democratic senator from Minnesota; John Kennedy, the Republican senator from Louisiana, and David Cicilline, the Democratic member of the House of Representatives for Rhode Island—introduced a revised version of a bill they say will allow news outlets to bargain for “fair terms from gatekeeper platforms that regularly access news content without paying for its value.” The bill, called the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, was originally introduced by Klobuchar last year; that in turn was based on a similar bill with an identical name, which Cicilline introduced in the House in 2018. The law would allow media outlets to negotiate as a group with platforms such as Google and Facebook for compensation, in return for allowing the platforms to aggregate and/or distribute their articles. Competitors coordinating their behavior would normally be collusion, but the JCPA gives media companies “safe harbor” from antitrust laws.

The act is similar to an Australian law known as the News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code, which that country passed last year amid a storm of controversy. Before the code became law, Facebook tried to dissuade Australia’s parliament from passing it by blocking the country’s news publishers from posting their content, and even blocked Facebook users in Australia from posting news provided by non-Australian outlets (Google showed users a warning popup saying their internet experience would be degraded by the law). Like the Australian law, the bill proposed by Klobuchar and Cicilline requires Google and Facebook to enter into negotiations—either with individual media outlets or with groups of outlets—over payment for their news content. If the two sides are unable to reach an agreement, both the Australian law and the US version require the digital platforms to submit to binding arbitration (there have been no cases of arbitration since the Australian law was passed in March of 2021).

Google and Facebook quickly signed deals with news publishers and broadcasters after the code became law, including one where Google pays Nine Entertainment—which owns a TV channel, radio stations, the Sydney Morning Herald, and The Age in Melbourne—$22 million a year for five years (Facebook agreed to pay the same company about $15 million). Critics argued the law would benefit only large entities such as those owned by News Corp. (which got an estimated $50 million), but supporters say that hasn’t been the case. Bill Grueskin, a professor in Columbia University’s School of Journalism, wrote in a recent report on Australia’s media industry that some local journalists believe the law has revived the news business. Monica Attard, a journalism professor, “says she can’t persuade many students to take internships these days because it’s so easy for them to land full-time job—and that change coincides with the gusher of code money,” Grueskin wrote. Attard added: “I swear to God, I have not seen it like this in twenty years.”

Continue reading “The Journalism Competition Act and the media industry”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

The last remaining member of an uncontacted indigenous group in Brazil has died, officials say. The man, whose name was not known, had lived in total isolation for the past 26 years. He was known as Man of the Hole because he dug deep holes, some of which he used to trap animals while others appear to be hiding spaces. His body was found on 23 August in a hammock outside his straw hut. There were no signs of violence. He is thought to have died of natural causes.

This Dutch city has the world’s smartest traffic lights

Hidden down at the southern end of the Netherlands lies a small city of 150,000 with, quite possibly, the world’s greatest traffic lights. Doesn’t sound like particularly high praise at first, but the more you learn about the traffic lights in the town of Hertogenbosch, the more you wish you had them. Because these signals go out of their way to make everyone’s lives better—from bus riders to bicyclists to automobile drivers.

Continue reading “Last member of uncontacted tribe dies in Brazil”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

For centuries, rumors have circulated about an ancient kingdom called Cantre’r Gwaelod that once existed in Wales’ Cardigan Bay, before it sank beneath the waves to become the basis for a legendary “Welsh Atlantis.” Now, a pair of researchers present new evidence that two islands did once exist in the bay, based on an analysis of a medieval map, folkloric accounts, field studies, and geological surveys.

What the art of death masks can teach us about mourning

Nick Reynolds spent his childhood on the run in Mexico with his father, the infamous Great Train Robbery mastermind Bruce Reynolds, and now he is an artist who specializes in making death masks. He has been casting the faces of the dead for over twenty years, and is the only person doing it (commercially, anyway) in the UK.

Continue reading “A medieval map has revealed the location of a lost ‘Atlantis’”

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free

by Wendell Berry

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Europe is once again in the midst of a historically severe drought. Now an ancient site known as the “Spanish Stonehenge”—submerged underwater by a reservoir for decades—has been fully exposed for the second time since 2019 due to low water levels. The site is also known as the Dolmen of Guadalperal, a circular grouping of 150 large vertical granite stones (called orthostats) dating back to between 2000 and 3000 BCE. A team led by German archaeologist Hugo Obermaier discovered it in 1926.

Suspects in Alabama Shooting Posted New Age Conspiracies

“2 Goddess and a starseed are stranded in Colorado,” Yasmine Hider wrote in a frantic Instagram post on May 23. “Went to go camping out in the mountains and got snowed in.” She posted a photo of a snowy mountain scene, and then a second image of herself alongside a woman named Krystal Pinkins and Pinkins’ five-year-old son. All three beam into the camera, the women grinning, the boy’s arms outstretched. Four months later, Hider and Pinkins are in custody in county jail in Ashland, Alabama, charged with murder, kidnapping, and robbery after a violent alleged attack on two college students in the woods of Alabama.

Continue reading ““Spanish Stonehenge” emerges from watery grave for second time”

Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

On Tuesday, the Washington Post and CNN simultaneously published stories alleging that Parag Agrawal, the CEO of Twitter, and other senior executives deliberately misled federal regulators about how secure the company’s operations were, and also that these executives gave foreign agents access to the Twitter data of individual users. The allegations came from Peiter Zatko, the former head of security at Twitter, in a lengthy document that was shared with both the Post and CNN. The document was also sent to several members of Congress, the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Justice Department, and the Senate Intelligence Committee. The Post says the complaint “depicts Twitter as a chaotic and rudderless company beset by infighting, unable to properly protect its 238 million daily users, including government agencies, heads of state, and other influential public figures.”

Rebecca Hahn, a Twitter spokesperson, told the Post that Zatko was fired after 15 months, for “poor performance and leadership,” and that his allegations were “riddled with inaccuracies.” She added that Twitter has tightened up its security processes since 2020, and that it also has rules about who can access company systems and data. Hahn said that Twitter removes more than a million spam accounts every day, and that the company “fully stands by” its SEC filings. According to the Post‘s report, “a person familiar with Zatko’s tenure said the company investigated Zatko’s security claims during his time there and concluded they were sensationalistic and without merit.” Zatko is being represented by Whistleblower Aid, the same nonprofit legal organization that represented Frances Haugen, the former Facebook staffer turned whistleblower. In an interview with the Post, Zatko said he “felt ethically bound” to blow the whistle on Twitter because of the potential security implications of the company’s behavior.

According to CNN’s report, Zatko, 51, is a well-respected hacker and security expert who “led an influential cybersecurity grantmaking program at the Pentagon, worked at a Google division for developing cutting-edge technology, helped build the cybersecurity team at fintech firm Stripe, and advised US lawmakers and officials on how to plug security holes in the internet” before he joined Twitter. The Post says that by the time he was 30, Zatko had “written one of the most powerful tools for cracking passwords, testified to Congress under his hacker handle about the susceptibility of the internet to drastic hacks, and co-founded one of the first hacking consultancies backed by venture capital.” Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and former CEO of Twitter, hired Zatko in late 2020 after a hacker gained access to the Twitter accounts of famous users such as Barack Obama.

Continue reading “Whistleblower’s allegations could mean trouble for Twitter”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Twitter executives deceived federal regulators and the company’s own board of directors about “extreme, egregious deficiencies” in its defenses against hackers, as well as its meager efforts to fight spam, according to an explosive whistleblower complaint from its former security chief. The complaint from former head of security Peiter Zatko, a widely admired hacker known as “Mudge,” depicts Twitter as a chaotic and rudderless company beset by infighting.

The Hollow Core of Kevin Kelly’s “Thousand True Fans” Theory

Dave Karpf takes a look at the foundations of former Wired editor Kevin Kelly’s “thousand true fans” theory, and finds that it hasn’t aged very well. Niche artists can find audiences and make a living by doing so, he says, but: “As the network gets bigger, the platforms develop algorithms to help people discover what they are looking for/what they want but might not be looking for yet. It results in a power law/rich-get-richer phenomenon, driving attention and audiences toward the biggest successes and away from the niches.”

Continue reading “Whistleblower says Twitter executives lied to regulators about security”

Dave Karpf takes a look at the foundations of former Wired editor Kevin Kelly’s “thousand true fans” theory, and finds that it hasn’t aged very well:

A Thousand True Fans is a rallying cry for our current podcast/youtube/Substack economy. Kelly declares that the digital revolution has made it more possible than ever to find your audience, build a relationship with them, and make a good living doing something you love. Thousand True Fans tells us that a better world is possible if we just believe in ourselves, trust each other, and embrace the wonderful opportunities the internet provides. In Thousand True Fans, Kelly writes, “A fundamental virtue of a peer-to-peer network (like the web) is that the most obscure node is only one click away from the most popular node.”

In other words, the most obscure under-selling book, song, or idea, is only one click away from the best selling book, song or idea. However, Karpf notes that this is only true when the peer-to-peer networks are small. “As the network gets bigger, the platforms develop algorithms to help people discover what they are looking for/what they want but might not be looking for yet. It results in a power law/rich-get-richer phenomenon, driving attention and audiences toward the biggest successes and away from the niches.”

There are other problems with the theory, Karpf writes, including the fact that “We’re also less disintermediated than Kevin Kelly thought. Thousand True Fans is premised on the assumption that you can develop a direct relationship with your “true fans.” That rarely turns out to be the case, though — iTunes and other digital distributors take a 30% cut of everything sold on their platforms. Spotify replaced iTunes as the go-to music platform, and they pay in fractions of a penny per stream.)”