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Start Making Sense
End of a Start Making Sense era.
Posted by Deanna Zandt on January 13, 2006 at 10:04 AM.
Just a quick note to everyone that we'll be closing down the publicity space and blog for AlterNet's Start Making Sense next week. I'll still be blogging in The Mix, as well as a new AlterNet blog to be unveiled next week. All my blog entries are archived here.
For you RSS folks, make sure you look at all the AlterNet feeds to subscribe to our blogs and our full stories!
Your cellphone records are for sale
Posted by Deanna Zandt on January 13, 2006 at 4:36 AM.
AMERICAblog did a mini-investigation yesterday on a Chicago Sun-Times article stating that companies are selling cellphone records for about a hundred bucks a pop. I first learned about this on NBC's evening news last night, and headed over to see what John's findings were... and as it turns out, he was able to buy the cellphone records of General Wesley Clark within a matter of hours.
What's more is that apparently, the FBI, the Chicago Police Department, one of the top two electronic privacy groups in the nation (EPIC), and even the office of Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) have all known about it for months. Schumer, for his part, has 'introduced' legislation into Congress, but I'm with John on this one -- that's not nearly enough.
How are the companies gaining access to your account? Any number of ways: by faking being you on the phone, or by hacking your account online are just two. (Many service providers allow customers to view account and call information online.) John lists in a previous post about purchasing his own records a sampling of people this phenomenon could be really bad for if something isn't done quick.
I'm shocked at this, really. Even in my most cynical moments as a political geek, I wouldn't have thought this to be possible, and with such little public outcry about it. Can someone please tell me how these companies are able to get away with this with the laws we currently have?
Media still run by white people; Pope still Catholic.
Posted by Deanna Zandt on January 12, 2006 at 7:43 AM.
The New York Observer's weekly media column decided to address the issue of race representation in magazine management with Lizzy Ratner's "Vanilla Ceiling: Magazines Still Shades Of White." Not surprisingly, the industry is one of the whitest in the media, as noted in Ratner's informal survey of the staffs of various magazines located here in New York, where 65% of the population identifies as non-white. Only Katrina van den Heuvel was willing to comment on the issue:
The Nation's publisher and editor, Katrina vanden Heuvel, acknowledged that the veteran weekly "need[s] to do a better job in this area." But, she said, masthead statistics were only part of the magazine's diversity story.
"We are always out looking for more diversity in terms of our writers, in terms of our editors," she said, citing efforts to recruit more minority freelance journalists as well as a recently created Nation Institute fellowship for writers of color and a new conversation series between mystery writer Walter Mosely and other minority writers and activists.
Editors for the other magazines declined to comment on staff diversity.
"'Several industry professionals traced this silence to the fact that magazines are, in the end, just magazines: waxy-paged collections of ads and articles that may provide everything from political analysis to eyebrow-waxing advice, but are hardly essential guardians of the public interest,' Ratner writes. This, then, is the We Also Promote Eating Disorders And A Low Self-Esteem So Why Get Huffy Over Racial Discrimination defense.
'But, on the other hand, there is a diversity of magazines,' Newsweek editor Mark Whitaker tells Ratner. 'So it's just a different kind of diversity exists already.' This one is the Y'all Motherfuckers Got Vibe and Essence So Shut The Hell Up defense.
'There is definitely no sense of shame about not having a diverse staff the way there was 10 years ago,' an anonymous Asian-American glossy-mag editor said. Now we're seeing the Y'all Not Wearing Chains No More, So We're Not Going to Feel Shame No More defense.
And finally, 'I think, in people's minds, it's not like, 'Let's not hire any black people,'' said Hung author Scott Poulson-Bryant, a founding editor of Vibe. 'It's just like, 'I don't really know any black people to hire, and I don't really want to do the work to find out who they are.'' Which is the beloved Where the Hell Are All the Black People When You Need One? defense. "
Action alert: 'Brokeback' banned; China bans Wikipedia
Posted by Deanna Zandt on January 11, 2006 at 7:07 AM.
It doesn't surprise me that this is happening in highly-conservative Utah, but nonetheless, it's important to make a stink about it: via Ironweed Films, I learned that the Megaplex theatre in Sandy, Utah -- owned Larry Miller, who also owns the NBA's Utah Jazz -- has pulled the Brokeback Mountain from their screens. Ironweed has a petition going; you can sign it here, and send it to your friends here.
In other banning news, this one via Slashdot, China has banned access to the Wikipedia for the third time in two years. It's evidently been happening for ten weeks now, which no indication whether it's temporary or permanent. Luckily for its PR, Microsoft wasn't involved in this round of censorship.
Updated on the Wikipedia's slang words for women
Posted by Deanna Zandt on January 10, 2006 at 7:03 AM.
Evan reported yesterday on the entry for "woman" in the Wikipedia, which contained slang words for women in the entry, most of which were of the offensive sort. With my feminist linguistic gene tickled, I looked last night into how this might either be equalized with the entry for "man," which contained no slang terms offensive or otherwise, or repaired in a way that stayed true to the nature of the Wikipedia.
It's difficult to work with the Wikipedia idea sometimes, where you have to maneuver through a paradigm of sharing and cooperating that most of us haven't seen since grade school. When we read something we don't like or don't agree with, our instinct is to edit out the offending material (as was mine yesterday, at first). In the case of these slang terms for women, after I took a step back and thought about the situation, though, it made more sense to just add slang terms to the entry for men. Wikipedia's response to "m," as documented by Evan, resonated with me: they're trying to document all human knowledge, which certainly includes slang terms for both genders.
So, off I went to edit the Wikipedia, but when I went to check the entry for Woman for formatting, I found a note: "For terms for women often considered offensive, see Misogyny." Reading the "discussion/talk" page, where users discuss the merits of the entry, I found a lively discussion at the bottom of the page about the offending terms.
In the end, all the users participating agreed that Misogyny was the best place for the slang terms, since the character of "woman" is a debatable topic that doesn't belong necessarily in the definition of what it means to be a woman. Looking through the rest of the entry, it's quite a success story for the Wikipedia overall, despite all the recent bad PR. The references to transgendered folks, sexism, and culture roles aren't things I'd necessarily find in a regular encyclopedia edited in a top-down, hierarchical fashion.
It takes the wisdom of a large community to document our collective knowledge, which is not the easiest and most painless experience. It challenges us to rethink our paradigm of who holds the "key" to knowledge and expertise, and question why we empower others to be gatekeepers of information. Have you edited your Wikipedia yet today?
Tracking: it's not just for the NSA anymore
Posted by Deanna Zandt on January 9, 2006 at 11:03 AM.
A couple of weeks ago, it was reported that the NSA used something called "persistent cookies" on their website to track the behavior of users visiting the site. Now, CNet has a report up saying that it's not just the NSA that that's keeping an eye on you -- it's dozens of governmental agencies, all misusing cookies and storing various levels of behavior and information on you.
Three questions pop up immediately: 1.) what are persistent cookies, 2.) why is it a big deal, and 3.) what does it mean for me? I'll try to tackle each of these as best I can:
1. What are "persistent cookies?" First, a quick definition of cookies: they're small text files that a website places on your computer for a number of reasons, from tracing your behavior while you're on the site to letting you personalize how you view the site. (More on cookies from Wikipedia, thankfully gender-slur-free.) Persistent cookies are ones that have been given a date to expire a long time from now, such as 30 years; other cookies delete themselves when you close your browser, or other similar temporary time-limits.
2. Why is this a big deal? You may remember, from the early days of popular web-browsing, the first furor over the use of cookies by advertising sites to document a user's performance and thus target them with appropriate ads. Since then, rules have been set in place about what cookies are allowed to do and not do. While it may be difficult in our heads to leave it up to a company to comply with those privacy rules, most don't want to risk a PR disaster by doing things that break those rules.
The thing about the NSA using persistent cookies is that, oh... it's illegal. Government agencies aren't allowed to use them, unless there's "sufficient need," in which case they have to display their use of cookies very clearly on the site. As Peter Swire said in the AP article, "...Vague assertions of national security, such as exist in the NSA policy, are not sufficient."
Read the rest of the post on the flip side »
Friends don't let friends surf alone
Posted by Deanna Zandt on January 6, 2006 at 6:16 AM.
Friday geek-culture, break! Via Lifehacker (a tremendously useful blog for simplifying life through technology), I learned about an extension for Firefox called Yakalike. It allows users visiting a website to chat with each other in a basic chatroom interface right there in the browser, in a small window that opens up on the bottom of the screen. This seems like a brilliant (albeit temporary -- Yakalike doesn't save transcripts) complement to comments and other interactivity elements that have been introduced to sites over the last couple of years.
When I tried it out in the wee hours of the morning, there was unfortunately no one to chat with... oh, the loneliness of bleeding edge technology! So, I'm going to hang out here on AlterNet off and on all day and see who pops in to say hi. Note that permanent nickname registration at the Yakalike site is disabled right now, but you can use a temporary nickname when you open the chat window. Happy chatting, and play nice!
Microsoft takes down Chinese blog
Posted by Deanna Zandt on January 4, 2006 at 6:27 AM.
Remember that Internet portal that Microsoft deployed in China last summer? (I blogged about it in PEEK.) To recap, there were certain words and phrases that were going to be banned from use... like "democracy" and "freedom."
Now they've taken it a step further-- they've taken down the blog of one of China's most outspoken journalists. Rebecca MacKinnon has had her eye on this story since the beginning:
Anti is one of China’s edgiest journalistic bloggers, often pushing at the boundaries of what is acceptable. ... His old blog at the U.S.-hosted Blog-city is believed to have caused the Chinese authorities to block all Blog-city blogs. In the final days of December, Anti became a vocal supporter of journalists at the Beijing Daily News who walked off the job after the top editors were fired for their increasingly daring investigative coverage, including some recent reporting on the recent police shootings of village protestors in the Southern China.
Women's Media Center is alive!
Posted by Deanna Zandt on January 3, 2006 at 7:51 AM.
I'd heard rumors about this center starting in New York City, but via Bitch Ph.D. this morning, the Women's Media Center has been happily found. From their About Us section:
The exclusion of women at the highest levels of media has created a crisis of representation and narrow, inaccurate, or misrepresentative news reporting. Currently, women hold only 3% of of 'clout' positions in mainstream media, comprise less than a quarter of newspaper opinion writers--and are all but absent as columnists at the major national print or online media outlets. Women experts are still rarely called upon to comment on the serious events in the world. Globally, news stories that include women tally less than 15%.
WMC will work to correct these imbalances through its state-of-the-art, interactive website for women's media (coming early next year), and its many projects and partnerships. WMC will offer media training; a Rapid Response System to breaking news; the WMC Guidebook--a continually updated online guide for accurate language and talking points; and forums for media professionals.
Coldplay to fans: don't actually listen to this CD
Posted by Deanna Zandt on January 2, 2006 at 9:26 AM.
Boing Boing's got the scoop on an insert included in the most recent Coldplay release:
Coldplay's new CD comes with an insert that discloses all the rules enforced by the DRM they included on the disc. Of course, these rules are only visible after you've paid for the CD and brought it home, and as the disc's rules say, 'Except for manufacturing problems, we do not accept product exchange, return or refund,' so if you don't like the rules, that's tough.
What are the other rules? Here are some gems: 'This CD can't be burnt onto a CD or hard disc, nor can it be converted to an MP3' and 'This CD may not play in DVD players, car stereos, portable players, game players, all PCs and Macintosh PCs.' Best of all, the insert explains that this is all 'in order for you to enjoy a high quality music experience.' Now, that's quality.
Women outnumber men online; Amazon adds author blogs...
Posted by Deanna Zandt on December 30, 2005 at 5:10 AM.
Slashdot has had some pretty insightful posts in the last few days, so I'm taking a moment to play like PEEK and give you all a little poli-cultural tech roundup courtesy of my favorite geek news site:
Bush hittin' the sauce again?
Posted by Deanna Zandt on December 29, 2005 at 5:17 AM.
This one's a few days old, I know, but it was just sent to me by a conservative pal who shall remain nameless... Craig Ferguson's "Late Late" show has played with a video to give us the impression that The Wagon is no longer in the administration's fleet. Absolutely hilarious and not to be missed. Links: to Crooks and Liars, or over to iFilm.com.
Vigilante right-wing PR
Posted by Deanna Zandt on December 28, 2005 at 9:10 AM.
Seeing that the Republican echo chamber is floundering in the WMD department, our old pals over at Move America Forward are up to their wacky antics again. Remember boycotting "Fahrenheit 9/11?" Attacking Cindy Sheehan? And the wingnut radio host tour of Iraq? Well, now they're claiming that they've got documents that the military and intelligence agencies don't, showing clearly that there are WMD in Iraq. From the Wall Street Journal:
"The White House has really done a poor job of getting the message out, which is why we've had to step into the breach," says California-based Republican political strategist Sal Russo, one of the group's three founders. "They should do a better job of coordinating with those willing to get out and tell the story. We shouldn't be the only ones out here fighting."
Sex sells in the virtual world, too
Posted by Deanna Zandt on December 27, 2005 at 9:14 AM.
Settling in for a hopefully quiet week after some hectic holidays, I perused Wired News to find this little gem about cyberporn. I try not to use any word prefixed by "cyber-", but it seems there's no other way to describe a porn magazine being sold in an online world, displaying images entirely of computer-generated women.
Some background information: Second Life is an online game somewhat similar to The Sims, where you join a community and build a life inside the community, interacting with all the other (real) people in it, who are represented by avatars. There's a system of money, and all kinds of commerce happens inside and outside the community.
And now there's porn! For a small fee, readers can view a porn magazine called Slustler. Some notes about Slustler: 1. all the images in the magazine are women; 2. all those women have Charlie-Chaplin-style pubic hair. It's not clear whether the images are generated by the magazine's editor or submitted by citizens, but my guess it that it's a combination of both.
I'll admit that when I opened up the images on the Wired article (not safe for work), I was expecting the worst; Second Life is certainly known in the geek world for its loads of adult content and activity. Given the chance to create "ideal" women in "ideal" positions and situations with little to no restrictions, I would've expected much more exploitative and/or violent images. So, seeing mostly pictures of women in exotic but benign settings -- albeit impossibly groomed and shaped -- was somewhat of a relief.
The editor of Slustler notes that there are many more female avatars in the game than male because the female avatars are much more customizable in interesting ways than the males; this results in a large number of men representing themselves as women online. That's the reason? Maybe these are the guys that desperately wanted to play with Mommy's makeup as kids. Maybe they're clued into the idea that fashion (and specifically, women's fashion) isn't totally oppressive and can be creative and interesting.
Which leads to Big Question that often revolves around gaming: does acting out behaviors within a game setting (even as some argue that Second Life isn't a game, but a community) serve to encourage the behavior in real life, or is it a much-needed outlet for otherwise repressed feelings and thoughts? Creating porn that would be otherwise impossible to produce with real women has the potential to get people off in a safe way, but could also plant some pretty negative ideas about sex and body image that folks might otherwise not have. It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg argument: which comes first, the thought or the porn?
Racism, sexual favors and national healthcare
Posted by Deanna Zandt on December 22, 2005 at 7:52 AM.
Evan's comprehensive blog roundup of the strike and the article from Judith Mahoney Pasternak about the morality of it reach far and wide, and I'm taking a moment to fill in some of the nooks and crannies of other interesting tidbits and commentaries I've found.
Wired News has an article about the use of craigslist as a medium for ride-sharing, nightly apartment renting and more. What wasn't talked about there was the use of the rants and raves forum as a place to blow out blatantly racist spew against the workers. I'm not a regular in that forum, so I don't know if the racist overtones are normal or not (it seems from the non-strike-related posts that they are)... but it was pretty striking to read. Then again, considering Maria Luisa's article this week on a Whiter Shade of Christmas, maybe I shouldn't be so surprised...
Also entertaining are the posts asking for sexual favors in exchange for rides and places to stay. So enterprising of those lonely New Yorkers.
Lastly, but perhaps most importantly, I want to call attention to a comment that was left on my blog post from Tuesday about the strike:
It's amazing to me that while everyone is in a tizzy over whether the TWU or the MTA is the more evil, corrupt organization, and whether the workers are benefitting, the strike is reasonable, etc., no one has proposed what seems the most obvious solution: join together (along with other union-dominated industries, like airlines, car manufacturers and energy companies) and use their incredible wealth and clout to demand a national health care system.
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