Cloudy
“The Internet is not a CIA creation,” Sir Tim Berners-Lee tells Reuters, responding to Russian President Vladimir Putin. It is also not a big truck.
For Newsweek, Lauren Walker explains how House Speaker John Boehner killed the FOIA Improvement Act.
Public opinion is “overwhelmingly pro net neutrality” according to a new analysis by data science company Quid for the Knight Foundation, looking at news coverage, blogs, 120,000 tweets using the hashtag #netneutrality, one million public filings to the FCC and a lobbying analysis of 2.500 filing from 2009 to mid-2014.
“’The encyclopedia that anyone can edit’ is at risk of becoming, in computer scientist Aaron Halfaker’s words, ‘the encyclopedia that anyone who understands the norms, socializes him or herself, dodges the impersonal wall of semiautomated rejection and still wants to voluntarily contribute his or her time and energy can edit.’ An entrenched, stubborn elite of old-timers, a high bar to entry, and a persistent 90/10 gender gap among editors all point to the possibility that Wikipedia is going adrift.” That’s David Auerbach in Slate.
Related: 100,000 Wikipedia articles, viewed as a three-dimensional galaxy where every dot represents an article and each article is linked to others that it is closely related to. Try flying in the 3-D view…but be prepared to lose at least a half hour of your day.
Say hello to PubPeer, a forum for anonymous review of scientific research. Say the founders, writing for Wired, “PubPeer works because we allow anonymous comments. Without that anonymity, most scientists would fear professional retribution if they criticized their peer’s–or perhaps their future employers’ work.”
Speaking of anonymity: Micah Lee shreds PandoDaily’s Yasha Levine for an old story hyperventilating about supposed problems with the Tor anonymity network.
The cloud is your friend: David Kravets of ArsTechnica reports that according to a lawsuit against the Baltimore City Police Department, cops tried to cover up a citizen’s recording of police arresting and kicking a man by tasing her and then deleting the video from her phone. The 135-second recording was recovered from her cloud account, the lawsuit says.
Malcolm Gladwell, plagiarist.