Sep 29, 2021 | games & graphics, justice & equality
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In 2020, type designer Julius Hui flew back to his native Hong Kong. The previous year, he’d quit his “too comfortable and steady” job at Monotype, one of the world’s largest type foundries, and moved to Munich. Now, forced to head home by the pandemic after only six months, he found himself with little paid work, but finally able pursue a passion project that he’d been sitting on for more than six years: Ku Mincho, a radical rethinking of Chinese type.
Source: Revolutionary type: Meet the designer decolonizing Chinese fonts
Sep 29, 2021 | justice & equality, mobile, networking
![](https://wp.towson.edu/proximity/files/2021/09/Homepage-Video-1-FallbackImage-1600x900-1.jpg)
The platform work model is reshaping entire economies, sectors, lifestyles, and livelihoods.
Source: Gig workers are uncertain, scared, and barely scraping by
Sep 28, 2021 | justice & equality, networking
Facebook is acting like a hostile foreign power; it’s time we treated it that way.
Source: The Largest Autocracy on Earth
Aug 25, 2021 | algo, justice & equality, networking
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For many Afghans, this week has laid bare the worst-case scenario for a country running on legacy financial rails: A nationwide cash shortage, closed borders, a plunging currency, and rapidly rising prices of basic goods. In some ways, it’s a perfect test case for the usefulness of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. CNBC spoke with several Afghans who are using crypto to learn how they got into it, how it’s helping them, and barriers to further adoption.
Source: Inside Afghanistan’s cryptocurrency underground as the country plunges into turmoil
Aug 23, 2021 | justice & equality, networking
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Many service workers at Silicon Valley tech campuses aren’t sure whether the delta variant will delay their returns even longer or even jeopardize their jobs entirely if in-office work becomes less critical than it once was. As many white-collar workers have settled into a work-from-home routine, blue-collar workers are struggling even more for answers after more than a year of unpredictability.
Source: Big tech blue collar workers cling to hope for return to work soon
Aug 23, 2021 | justice & equality, networking
Slang for doc-dropping, doxing is the process of making someone’s address, contact information, identity, or other information public, usually in order to intimidate, harass, or incite public outrage. The term dates back to the mid-2000s, but doxing has since become a well-known harassment tactic. There aren’t clear statistics on how many people have been doxed, but a 2021 report from the Anti-Defamation League estimates 9 percent of Americans have experienced doxing.
Source: Should Doxing Be Illegal? – The Markup
Aug 20, 2021 | justice & equality, networking
Organizers of a GoFundMe fundraiser to help queer and trans individuals in Afghanistan have been barred from withdrawing the money they raised, they said, leaving vulnerable Afghans in peril amid the Taliban’s takeover of the country and raising questions about the popular fundraising platform’s policies.
Source: Organizers Of A GoFundMe To Help Queer And Trans Afghans Say The Platform Won’t Allow Them To Access The Money
Aug 17, 2021 | audio, justice & equality, mobile, networking, video
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Every photo and every data point is a link to the old way of life in Afghanistan – and a reason for Taliban retribution
Source: Afghans are racing to erase their online lives
Aug 14, 2021 | audio, justice & equality, networking, trends, video
Public interest journalism may not be salvageable. But more than being saved, it needs to be radically rethought.
Source: The News Is Dead, Long Live the News!
Aug 13, 2021 | justice & equality, networking
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How a handful of volunteer moderators have kept one of the platform’s premier dating subreddits from becoming a recruitment portal for the manosphere
Source: A Red-Pill Army’s Insidious Battle to Take Over Reddit’s Largest Dating Forum
Aug 9, 2021 | algo, justice & equality, networking
Colombia-based call center workers who provide outsourced customer service to some of the nation’s largest companies are being pressured to sign a contract that lets their employer install cameras in their homes to monitor work performance, an NBC News investigation has found.
Source: Big Tech call center workers face pressure to accept home surveillance
Aug 7, 2021 | algo, justice & equality, networking
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Robinhood traders have earned the most attention, but they’re only part of a larger story about class stagnation and distrust.
Source: America’s Investing Boom Goes Far Beyond Reddit Bros
Aug 7, 2021 | justice & equality, networking
Online advertisers are always trying to sell you something, and in the case of slip-on sneakers or leather handbags, that something is pretty clear. But other times, the motive behind a sponsored post is less transparent. Why, for instance, are oil companies buying prime space in your social media feed to prattle on about “innovative” climate solutions and visions of a “lower-carbon future”?
Source: Big Oil spent $10 million on Facebook ads — to sell what, exactly?
Aug 6, 2021 | algo, justice & equality, mobile
With a new capability to search for illegal material not just in the cloud but on user devices, the company may have opened up a new front in the encryption wars.
Source: Apple Walks a Privacy Tightrope to Spot Child Abuse in iCloud
Aug 6, 2021 | justice & equality, trends
At a laboratory inside a Google data center in Mayes County , Oklahoma, researchers spent the fall of 2019 disassembling old hard disk drives by hand in order to extract a 2-inch-long component known as the magnet assembly. Consisting of two powerful rare earth magnets, the magnet assembly is a critical muscle within the hard drive, controlling an actuator arm that allows the device to read and write data.
Source: Can you recycle a hard drive? Google is quietly trying to find out
Aug 5, 2021 | justice & equality, networking
Before he’d become a posthumous social media symbol of Reddit-ish male angst, Bukowski wrestled with the pros and cons of a digital world. Social media users are again debating the merits of Charles Bukowski, the late Los Angeles-based writer known for his poetry describing a coarse, often boorish version of American masculinity replete with drinking, gambling, and not-always-successful womanizing.
Source: Charles Bukowski: poet, Twitter punch line—and internet visionary
Aug 3, 2021 | algo, justice & equality, networking
Twitter is applying the bug bounty model to machine learning. The micro-blogging site has launched the industry’s first algorithmic bias bounty competition. The challenge was created to identify potential harms in Twitter’s notorious image cropping algorithm, which was largely abandoned after exhibiting gender- and race-based biases.
Source: Why Twitter wants ethical hackers to fix its algorithmic biases
Aug 3, 2021 | audio, justice & equality, video
The Roots drummer discusses Summer of Soul, his new documentary about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, and the ongoing fight to give Black musicians their rightful due.
Source: Questlove on Restoring Black Music History and Making One of the Year’s Best Films
Aug 2, 2021 | algo, justice & equality, networking
If you’ve ever read a privacy policy, you may have noticed a section that says something about how your data will be shared with law enforcement, which means if the police demand it and have the necessary paperwork, they’ll likely get it.
Source: Here’s how police can get your data — even if you aren’t suspected of a crime
Aug 1, 2021 | algo, justice & equality, networking
One night in the Twin Cities, shortly after the killing of George Floyd, someone set a fire in a Goodwill. That led to an international search for the culprits — and it exposed a growing system of global surveillance.
Source: Banned Chinese Facial Recognition Technology Was Used to Search for Minneapolis Protesters