The Offline Report

Saturday April 6, 2019 Lyft is threatening litigation against Morgan Stanley, accusing the firm of supporting short-selling:     cnbc.com "Someone once said that talking about music is like dancing about architecture."    newstatesman.com "But in my more romantic days, there was an intimacy between you and the half sheet."    patch.com A retired scribe who saved his name in hot lead linotype says "I wouldn’t revert to those old mechanical ways even if I could. But ever since computers took over, my words have never seemed as weighty as they used to."    chronicle.com "In response to the changing data privacy landscape created by the enactment of the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) last year, CPO Magazine has released a comprehensive report outlining the challenges and priorities of data protection and privacy officers around the world in 2019."    cpomagazine.com Infographic illustrating "those enriched by pr

Saturday Mar 30, 2019 Someone campaigning for Trump courts the African American vote.    twitter.com Zynep Tufekci said, "No worries, folks. Academics have kept a full record including transcripts of all his interviews/videos. You can thank @michaelzimmer who runs the project and who had the foresight. Here you go. https://www.zuckerbergfiles.org"    twitter.com "Three excellent websites for educating consumers about online and digital privacy are privacytools.io, thinkprivacy.io, and privacy.haus" this person calling himself Richard Schwartz just said.    twitter.com Friday Mar 29, 2019 "It gets harder and harder to give Facebook the benefit of the doubt. On anything."    twitter.com Thursday Mar 28, 2019 Examples of design to present GDPR privacy choices.    subtraction.com "Although some news workers recognize the risk of losing content, they continue to rely on a content management systems or cloud-based servers to store their wo

"Rick" came of age delivering the Atlanta's afternoon paper, the Journal ("now the Atlanta Journal-Constitution," he said,) from his bicycle after school. He's a computer programmer who no longer buys the San Jose Mercury News. His two laptops and phone are strictly for coding and work. But Rick associates his $50 Kindle Fire with prose during lunch. "I didn't have it the other day and I was really irritated." Rick admits he'd sometimes spend a year without completing a book." " I just had no habit of reading. But I do have a habit of eating lunch!" He now completes several books. "I just finished 'Lab Rats'," he told the paper pollster. He likes that the hardcovers and paperbacks no longer hold space on his shelves. "It was especially painful having to see all of those books that I never finished!" Rick does not consume newspapers on his Kindle, he said. <-- Paper Media Poll: Lay Reade

Huge fish found washed up along the Coorong near mouth of the Murray River By Camron Slessor Posted about 3 hours ago "A sunfish has been found washed ashore near the mouth of the Murray River in South Australia over the weekend, and one expert believes it is the Mola mola species." The "Fish Collection Manager" in the area said of all three sunfish species, the Mola mola was the rarest for the area. The one washed ashore (pictured above) is "average" size for that subspecies. "They can get twice as big," the manager told the newspaper. (... full story at abc.net.au ) This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License . hyphen: - en: – em: —

Sweet frosting without the bitter cake it covers is not news. A PR strategy when you're having a bad week is to save a positive card in your back packet to frost over the bad news to those just tuning in over the weekend after a long workweek. — AJ Fish (@aljfish) March 17, 2019 Facebook removed 1.5 million videos of New Zealand terror attack https://t.co/WABbTCU5iu pic.twitter.com/WUyUa42zAC — CBS News (@CBSNews) March 18, 2019 This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License . hyphen: - en: – em: —

These steps can curb severe Twitter addiction: 1. Get any Twitter app off your phone if you can. Use the phone's web browser to get to Twitter. 2. On your laptop use a browser Timeout plugin. I like the "StayFocused" plugin for Chrome browser. 3. As you search for plugins for the remaining browsers like Microsoft Edge, Safari or Firefox, turn Twitter to "night mode." 4. In Settings, turn on the "data saving" feature to shut off images. Images and autoplay video can be very distracting. This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License . hyphen: -     en: –     em: —

Saturday Mar 23, 2019 They flee to what they know, their screens.    artplusmarketing.com Human contact is now a luxury.    nytimes.com Anne Lamott values paper.    soundcloud.com A brand of pen records both audio and an image of the notes you take as you take them, which "allows you to go back to any point in your notes and listen to the audio from that point, which is great for finding the best quote from an interview."    nytimes.com Bill Maher names innovating for the sake of "reverse improvement."    youtube.com Recording shows oil executives talking about access to a president.    rollingstone.com Kids enter app fair in Orange County.    coolestprojects.org Facebook requested user phone numbers for account security, then exposed those users to other people looking them up by phone number, and "doesn't give you an option to opt-out."    techcrunch.com Marc Maron and Amy Sedaris talk reception TV and landlines.    wtfpod.com

My Scottish grandfather held the Irish in contempt. "They were only good for one thing, the wheelbarrow!" He passed 33 years before a genetic test revealed no racial inferiority in the Irish relative to the English. Today is only twelve years since the Irish were given scientific proof. An unforgettable OpEd from that time showed it would be years before they'd unwind the stereotypes, the prejudices, the shame: When English Eyes Are Smiling By WES DAVISMARCH 11, 2007 New Haven STUDENTS in the Irish literature seminar I teach latched onto some satisfying news last week, when this newspaper reported that scientists had found no significant genetic difference between the Irish and English. Midway through a semester spent wrestling with fictional representations of the troubled relationship between the two nations, here was scientific confirmation that an assumption long used to justify the inequality of that relationship was itself a fiction. The discovery that the I

People employed to report news pulsate to a daily rhythm. They "file" on deadline. The first draft of history -- the first cycle of news -- is set by the dailies (daily print newspapers.) Second-cycle outlets like The Atlantic, New Yorker or the Los Angeles Times' corrections synthesize insight and clarity. Radio reporters follow print media's lead; they write and read -- sometimes even report -- scripts to broadcast "top of the hour" updates. News consumers were already joining a game of double-dutch before the Internet Age. It's 2019, and the news business' inherent bugs are baking in toward the root . Stories proliferate across shared media before the second-cycle takes hold. We citizens must update how we consume news and report it. -------------------------- Further Reading: It all starts with newspapers, John Oliver reported in 2016.    youtube.com City Prepares for CyberAttacks in Downtown Brooklyn:     brooklyneagle.com

A new contact asked how I "keep up" on events relevant to a certain business/social/political issue we share an interest in. After thinking long and hard, I have an answer: the internet, magazines, newspapers, books, talking to people, scientific experiments, life experiences, podcasts, broadcasts and movies. This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

Saturday Mar 16, 2019 "It marks one of the worst weeks in Facebook's history." "Federal prosecutors in the northern district of California are investigating Facebook's claims that it didn't know about Cambridge Analytica's abuse of data until it was told by a Guardian reporter, the New York Times reported Friday."    theguardian.com    ➰ "In another twist, Kogan told the New York Times on Friday that he intends to sue Facebook for defamation for claiming that he deceived the company about how he intended to use the data."    theguardian.com    ➰ Zeus, a platform that lets people rent out their homes as long-term corporate housing, says it has raised a total of $24M via seed, Series A, and debt financing:     techcrunch.com    ➰ "We are all in the same boat. That boat is taking on water."    usatoday.com    🐦 "One of the aspects of the case that has inspired particular outrage is that the parents who took part in the

Tech workers laid off and replaced by lower-paid H1B workers may be less loyal and dedicated to their next employer, if the anecdote at the bottom of this blog post is of a pattern. And foreign workers have fewer workers' rights than native workers. Together, these facts could trap America's technology sector in a Trump double-bind. Why? Because President Trump teased native tech workers with talk he planned to scale back H4 work visas and H1B visas granted to non-citizen workers. (President Obama's administration both increased the number of H1B visas and added work permissions to H4 resident visas . ) If this were more than a blog post, the reporter of this story would track down whether President Trump walked his talk on scaling back foreign worker visas. If President Trump did as he said -- or merely refrains from announcing he didn't -- he'll earn under-the-radar appreciation from "native" techies (a group that includes Indian-American worke

Bruce Schneier is leading a session on the role of technologists in public policy. Stream link is found here . When we don't have diversity "we get really bad tech." He'll be speaking tomorrow in a session on technologists in public policy along with attorney Gigi Sohn, technologist Ashkan Soltani, and others. Session takes place at this week's RSA conference in San Francisco. But more about "diversity." People think it's just about race or ethnicity (and of course it is.) But diversity also includes *age*, nationality, *class*, hometown, sex, *vantage point*, work experience, what else? And diversity without talent is no guarantee of good tech. But with talent, it *can* make for great tech. ----------------------- Further Reading: Hacking in the Public Interest:     axios.com This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

Saturday Mar 9, 2019 "This one stood out to me: Zuckerberg requested that the privacy team make the “Only Me” audience setting unsticky so that over time, Facebook would lapse the privacy control."    twitter.com     github.com Women under-represented in Voyager playlist.    laphamsquarterly.org Friday Mar 8, 2019 "Service providers attribute the disruption to technical problems, but organizations like Internet without Borders say that the government has ordered mobile phone companies to cut internet access."    globalvoices.org   ➰ "By the time he was caught, his extraordinary avarice had become so commonplace that not even a federal judge could blame him for it."    theatlantic.com "Yes, Zuckerberg created Facebook to help socially awkward kids like himself meet girls—but he was also intent on growing an online village designed to break down the barriers between people by changing our conceptions of privacy."    theatlantic.com &

On his person, my older brother held his copy of The Economist in paper device format. As we taxied him from Oakland airport to the latest family gathering, my mother proffered a subscription for my birthday. I'd love one. But who's writing their stories? "For example Gretchen Morgenson, when I saw her name" in the New York Times, "I'd read past the first paragraph," I said. "I haven't seen her lately" my mother said. "I liked her work too" concurred my brother, who considers regional dailies quaint and passe. He, like my mother never worked in news. Infosecurity for big banks is his jam. I only reported for two years at a local newspaper. Regardless, being the closest thing to a family media "insider," I schooled them: "she might still be there, but the Times stopped displaying bylines." A long pause followed. (Said my inner critic, know your place, last-born. ) I since read Morgenson is covering fina

Writing well takes energy. Writing well about moderates employs craft. Writing well about moderates while delivering ratings & circulation mandates traits competing for the top requirement: talent and tenure . (Building a non-clickbait audience is a slow burn.) Conversely? Restricting coverage to flanking shiny objects can juice the careers of ambitious journalists (and editors) (and publishers) spanning quality spectrum. A reader caught the New York Times doing something right : To the Editor: Re “ The Moderates Take a Grilling Back at Home ” (front page, Feb. 25): Well, saints be praised! The New York Times ran an article about moderate Democrats! You’d think by your coverage that we had all vanished from the earth. Please start giving fair time to the middle-leaning voices in our party. Too many articles about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the progressives. Not all of us lean that far left. Start talking about what the moderates are doing and where they stand on issu