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Is This The Real Life? Here’s Civic Hall’s incoming classes of Organizers-in-Residence and Entrepreneurs-in-Residence. The Organizers-in-Residence program is supported by the Craig Newmark Foundation and includes a biweekly leadership skills development workshop taught by Seth Godin.
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Open Your Eyes, Look Up To the Skies: The agenda for Taiwan’s international Civic Tech Fest is up and the three-day event in early September looks like a must-attend.
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Really Matters: The good folks at g0v, Taiwan’s civic hacker community, are launching a weekly newsletter covering major developments in the field from around the world. Check out a preview here.
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My Time Has Come: 2018 may be a boom year for scientists running for Congress, Tim Murphy reports for Mother Jones. That’s just part of the wave of 6,000 scientists who have signed up with 314 Action, a PAC for scientist-candidates, to explore running for office at all levels, he notes.
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I Sometimes Wish I’d Never Been Born At All: A couple of sleuths on Twitter figured out that a Republican staffer behind a new Hillary Clinton-bashing legislative proposal (yes, they want to investigate her some more!) had turned to the conspiracy-theory sub-reddit r/The_Donald for research help, Ashley Feinberg reports for Wired.
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I See a Little Silhouetto of a Man: A British email prankster who refers to himself as a “lazy anarchist” managed to get the White House homeland security adviser in charge of cybersecurity to respond to an email claiming to be from Jared Kushner, Jake Tapper reports for CNN. He also managed to get outbound White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci to respond to a fake email from outbound chief of staff Reince Preibus.
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Thunderbolt and Lightening: The Washington Post reports that President Trump personally dictated his son Donald’s initial misleading statement about his meeting with a Russian lawyer last year. “The extent of the president’s personal intervention in his son’s response, the details of which have not previously been reported, adds to a series of actions that Trump has taken that some advisers fear could place him and some members of his inner circle in legal jeopardy,” Ashley Parker, Carol Leonnig, Philip Rucker and Tom Hamburger report.
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Very, Very Frightening: Republican Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona writes in Politico that it’s up to Congress to do something about “an executive branch in chaos.”
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I’m Just a Poor Boy: Political nonprofits funded by secret donors have been spending millions in support of President Trump’s legislative agenda, Fredreka Schouten reports for USA Today.
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We Will Not Let You Go: Tracy Jan and Elizabeth Dwoskin report for The Washington Post on the endemic problems the company has with handling hate speech. Frequently, minority users sharing stories of racial abuse find Facebook deleting their posts or even locking them in “Facebook jail” (by suspending their accounts). Jan and Dowskin note: “Many activists who write about race say they break Facebook rules and keep multiple accounts in order to play a cat-and-mouse game with the company’s invisible censors, some of whom are third-party contractors working on teams based in the United States or in Germany or the Philippines. Others have started using alternate spellings for ‘white people,’ such as ‘wypipo,’ ‘Y.P. Pull,’ or ‘yt folkx’ to evade being flagged by the platform activists have nicknamed ‘Racebook.'”
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Mamma Mia, Mamma Mia: Woebot is a chatbot that runs inside Facebook Messenger and wants to help you if you’re feeling sad. This is a good idea, as research has shown that the more you use Facebook, the less happy you are.
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So You Think You Can Stone Me: Amnesty International Tanya O’Carroll warns in Vice’s Motherboard that Turkey’s arrest and detention of several international security trainers who were helping Turkish NGOs improve their digital security should be of concern to us all.
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Just Gotta Get Right Outta Here: Senators Mark Warner (D-VA) and Corey Gardner (R-CO) are pushing legislation that would strengthen security standards for the Internet of Things, Tony Romm reports for Recode. The senators are especially worried about all the web-connected devices owned by government.
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Your moment of zen.
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