The Offline Report

Friday Sep 20, 2019 A climate protest sign I vehemently disagree with: Hands down best sign #ClimateStrike pic.twitter.com/rsNdhhZjCY — Nathalie Gordon (@awlilnatty) September 20, 2019 Thursday Sep 19, 2019 Not surprising, but very disappointing. This is a field with JOBS for students. Same with cybersecurity. https://t.co/ximUdX1O6x — Jeff Kosseff (@jkosseff) September 19, 2019 Monday Aug 19, 2019 “There’s rarely a printed — and therefore hard-to-change — version to refer back to,” he said.    nytimes.com This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

Below is a 30-minute film that won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short in 1987. It's set to a famous short story set in France in the 1910's through 1947. But given what we now know about planting trees rejuvenating nearby springs, which we've seen happen in places like North Africa, this story must be based on a true character. It's counter-intuitive that planting trees eventually gets dried springs to flow with water. But in many cases that's what happens. This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

Paper media is terrestrially social. No smartphone backside shows to fellow commuters what its owner is reading. But May 2019 was a mixed turning point in the Paper Media Poll. The debut of spring showed a nadir of paper periodicals seen "in the wild" by the Paper Pollster team, tallying just one copy of The Economist for the entire month. With heavy hearts we pressed on. Belatedly, only in hindsight, our team noticed an undeniable climb of paper books seen in the hands of public transit commuters and coffee shop denizens, which included many a GenZ pedestrian. But that same sad month for periodicals that was May showed something else we weren't looking for: UC Berkeley students' posture straightened considerably from mere weeks before when, en masse, they walked hunched over their phones through the end of April. Now they stand straight, look where they're walking and make eye contact. What happened? A late GenZ/early Millenial eastbound commuter spotted rea...

Monday Aug 12, 2019 "Last year, investors accounted for 1 in 5 starter-priced homes, according to data released by CoreLogic on Thursday. The rate of investor purchases of starter homes has been rising and has nearly doubled since 1999."    npr.org "'There is a lot less of that now,' he continued. 'It seems like every warehouse is a pot grow, and now it's even worse because the big real estate investors, they came in and bought up these whole swaths of buildings. '"    sfchronicle.com    📰 Sunday Aug 11, 2019 The techlash has come to Stanford:     slate.com This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

This is a test: Small picture of a kitten, graciously shared by happypetsclub.com Holy CR** it worked! Proper photo attribution is a small form of paying it forward that used to be expected. Now it's seen as a bonus. That needs to change. How to do it: <figure>  <img src="http://happypetsclub.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/kitten-mirror.jpg" alt="Small picture of a kitten" />  <figcaption>  Small picture of a kitten, graciously shared by <a href="http://happypetsclub.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/kitten-mirror.jpg">happypetsclub.com</a>  </figcaption> </figure> This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

Saturday Aug 10, 2019 Jeff Jarvis in 2010 blogged about the "self-appointed privacy police" in a blog post he titled "Privacy Wingnuts".    buzzmachine.com Jeff Jarvis also blogged about the privacy-minded people raising relevant questions in a blog post he bullyingly titled "NY Times technobias".    buzzfeed.com We were alerted to Jeff Jarvis' name-calling by Julia Angwin in her appearance on the Kara Swisher podcast.    vox.com/podcasts    🎙️ In 2010, Angwin opened a story on data privacy webbugs with this line "Hidden inside Ashley Hayes-Beaty's computer, a tiny file helps gather personal details about her, all to be put up for sale for a tenth of a penny."     wsj.com Thursday Aug 8, 2019 "It’s a very parallel process. The propaganda is very similar. The internet itself is a platform. Thirty years ago, marginalized, broken, angry young people had to be met face-to-face to get recruited in...

The LATimes just hired a hot sports columnist who will write about sports, and its influence on fashion culture and politics . The columnist, named LA Granderson, first got the idea to become a writer by sifting through waste in search of words assembled just so: Granderson has nothing against traditional sports columns. Growing up in Michigan and sifting through garbage cans as a kid to find copies of the Detroit Free Press to read the legendary Mitch Albom, Granderson always wanted to be a sports columnist for a newspaper. But his career has carried him — quite successfully, it should be noted — to other things: television (mostly on ESPN), some newspaper work, radio, websites and even a little acting. Paper news is now expensive. Friends in L.A. who get the Sunday paper, please litter benevolently! The rich who can afford it should take care to not dispose of it all into the recycling bin. Leave gems on public transit seats. In laundromats, on dentist coffee tables. Make it terr...

Friday Aug 3, 2019 NYC Subway Officials Move to Crush Last Vestige Of Newspaper Distribution:    ibtimes.com The Reading Brain in the Digital Age:    scientificamerican.com Thursday Aug 1, 2019 "I attended the hearing alongside Max Schrems, an Austrian lawyer and privacy advocate. Six years ago, Schrems filed a complaint against Facebook Ireland for transferring his data to the United States, given the scope of U.S. government surveillance."    justsecurity.org Richard Clarke says CEOs pay ransomware, and we shouldn't deny mayors that option.&Nbsp;   usatoday.com Wednesday July 31, 2019 That the capitalist-celebrating Wired magazine published a bromide on disruption that opens with what-some-called-a-commie folk singer Pete Seger is a sign of something massive.    wired.com New Laws on Data Privacy and Security Are Coming. Is Your Company Ready?:     hbr.org "Debra Donovan, who has ...

News may be a hellscape but the humans who assemble "an issue" hide pockets of relief within. To wit, the erudite Harper's, August issue, under the auspicious title 'Flight Log': ( From the cockpit transcript of a Navy training flight near Seattle, in 2017. The exchange was released in May, following an investigation. Excerpts from the transcript were first published by the Navy Times. ) ELECTRONIC WARFARE OFFICER: Draw a giant penis. That would be awesome. PILOT: “What’d you do on your flight?” “Oh, we turned dinosaurs into sky penises.” E.W.O.: They would be like, “What the fu?” PILOT: I could basically draw a figure eight, and turn around and come back. I’m gonna go down, grab some speed, and hopefully get out of the contrail layer, so they are not connected to each other. That would be so funny, airliners coming back on their way into Seattle. Just this big fu--- Do they get it done? Relieve your curiosity at Harpers.org . People expend effort with you ...

Sunday July 21, 2019 ICE used Oakland Airport to deport thousands of detainees:     mercurynews.com This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .