av Mikael Winterkvist | jul 30, 2019 | Lästips

From the Gulf crisis to the Khashoggi affair, Al Jazeera investigates how bots influence online conversations.
In this series of articles, Al Jazeera examines how Twitter in the Middle East has changed since the Arab Spring.
Government talking points are being magnified through thousands of accounts during politically fraught times and silencing people on Twitter is only part of a large-scale effort by governments to stop human rights activists and opponents of the state from being heard.
Nine months after his death, the Twitter feed of murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi has become a time capsule.
Khashoggi’s last tweet to his audience of 1.7 million is dated October 2, 2018, the day he was killed in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
In the time after his death, the Saudi-born Washington Post columnist would remain an important topic on the social media platform.
Källa: The Khashoggi affair: Twitter manipulation in the Gulf
av Mikael Winterkvist | jul 29, 2019 | Lästips

The notorious Mydoom email worm, considered to be one of the most damaging malware strains ever developed, is still doing rounds on the Internet, working on autopilot and actively targeting email users all over the world.
Mydoom (also known as Novarg, Mimail, and Shimg) is a malware family known to be active since at least 2004 [1, 2, 3, 4] , with worm capabilities designed to spread to other victims using a mass e-mailing approach, with some of its variants also capable of infecting targets through peer-to-peer networks.
After infecting a computer, the MyDoom worm opens a backdoor on TCP ports 3127 through 3198, thus enabling the attackers to remotely access the compromised systems, to distribute other malicious payloads, and, in the case of some variants, to launch denial of service (DoS) attacks.
Källa: Notorious MyDoom Worm Still on AutoPilot After 15 Years
av Mikael Winterkvist | jul 21, 2019 | Lästips

Not long ago, my co-worker Josh Rothman and I each listened to several hours of audio erotica—a broad swath of podcasts and such—as research for a proposed story about “sexy self-care.” Erotic podcasts, like many genres of podcast, have been booming in recent years, and, in theory, it was a fun story idea. Josh likes radio shows and romance novels; I like podcasts and all kinds of frothy things. But in practice it was a bad scene. When we compared notes, we discovered that we’d had the same reaction to what we’d heard: recoiling.
The reason was simple. Good erotica is hard to write; graceful and convincing audio drama is hard to produce; and the awkwardness of flawed attempts at both is excruciating. Think of the wrong-note sex scenes you’ve read in books, or in those bad-sex-writing awards that come out every year, or in excerpts from embarrassing novels by disgraced public figures. Reading them silently, you might chuckle and wince. Now imagine a stranger’s voice unctuously reading them right into your ears. The only appropriate response is heebie-jeebies.
Källa: The Audio App That’s Transforming Erotica
av Mikael Winterkvist | jul 14, 2019 | Lästips

Dagen före examen tog de fyra ungdomarna sig in på den gena skolan sprayade väggarna med rasistiska och homfobiska slagord. För skolans personal kom till skolan dagens efter så möttes de av en svastika. De fyra kunde gripas sedan det visat sig att de loggat in på skolans nätverk medan de vandaliserade lokalerna.
I Glenelg High School har alla studenter ett eget ID som även används för att logga in på skolan nätverk, vilket görs automatiskt. När utredningen av vandalernas framart skulle utredas så fick polisen ett tämligen enkla jobb. De kolla loggfilerna för det lokala nätverket, jämförde med tiderna för när skolans vandaliserades och hittade flera inloggningar för de fyra ungdomarna.
He turned a corner and saw something written in large capital letters on the sidewalk: “BURTON IS A NIGGER.”
He paused only for a moment, looking at the words, trying to comprehend that all of this was real.
Later, school district officials, county administrators and prosecutors would have a name for what happened here. They would repeat it, condemn it and vow to prevent it from occurring again. Hate crime. The phrase has become inescapable as hate-fueled incidents have spiked across the country. A quarter of all hate crimes reported to the FBI, more than any other category, are similar to the attack discovered at Glenelg on May 24, 2018. Vandalism and destruction of property, a physical marking of an age-old threat: You don’t belong here.
Washington Post
Förutom det rent tekniska i utredningen rymmer den här historien också en svart rektors reaktioner och fyra ungdomar som försöker förstå hur det som skulle vara ett pojkstreck så snabbt urartade till ett hatbrott.
av Mikael Winterkvist | jul 13, 2019 | Lästips

Why complicate things with unproven bleeding-edge tech? Jim Kerstetter, deputy tech editor, also shops local and stays away from Uber and Postmates.
How do New York Times journalists use technology in their jobs and in their personal lives? Jim Kerstetter, deputy technology editor in San Francisco, discussed the tech he’s using.
Källa: How a Longtime Tech Editor Keeps His Tech Use Simple
av Mikael Winterkvist | jul 9, 2019 | Lästips

Our latest privacy experiment found Chrome ushered more than 11,000 tracker cookies into our browser — in a single week. Here’s why Firefox is better.
You open your browser to look at the Web. Do you know who is looking back at you?
Over a recent week of Web surfing, I peered under the hood of Google Chrome and found it brought along a few thousand friends. Shopping, news and even government sites quietly tagged my browser to let ad and data companies ride shotgun while I clicked around the Web.
This was made possible by the Web’s biggest snoop of all: Google. Seen from the inside, its Chrome browser looks a lot like surveillance software.
Lately I’ve been investigating the secret life of my data, running experiments to see what technology really gets up to under the cover of privacy policies that nobody reads. It turns out, having the world’s biggest advertising company make the most popular Web browser was about as smart as letting kids run a candy shop.
Källa: Washington Post