Deep Fakes and Dark Ads

The new issue of Logic magazine has an elegant article by Brooklyn Law School’s Sabeel Rahman on the kinds of monopoly power today’s technology platform providers are exercising; it’s well worth a close read.

In the Atlantic, Franklin Foer writes about how the rise of “deep fake” videos and VR spells the “end of reality.” Yes, yes, but where have we heard this phrase before? Oh, right.

Reflecting on the controversy over MSNBC host Joy Reid’s posts on her now defunct blog, The Nation’s Richard Kim eloquently reminds us that back in 2006 the blogosphere was rife with casual homophobia.

Life in Facebookistan: Writing for The Verge, Sarah Jeong puts her finger on exactly why it is so hard for so many people to leave Facebook: it has “replaced much of the emotional labor of social networking that consumed previous generations.” To explain, she traces her own relationship with the platform for the past 12 years. A must-read.

Unlike the two days of Congressional hearings featuring Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg brushing off mostly lightweight questions from technically unsavvy Members, in the UK Parliament the company’s CTO Mike Schroepfer has endured a real grilling. As Natasha Lomas reports for TechCrunch, he’s essentially admitted that the company has a massive problem with “dark ads,” those that can be targeted at individuals without others knowing, and its promised provision of a transparency page for political ads will barely scratch the surface of the problem.

Brave new world: At Hangzhou Zhongheng Electric, workers are required to wear caps that monitor their brain waves for signs of emotional spikes, which management then uses to adjust the pace of production, Stephen Chen reports for The South China Morning Post.

In The Washington Post, Ellen Nakashima and Aaron Gregg profile Dragos, a new cyber-security firm that has identified the first piece of malware clearly designed to kill humans by disabling a chemical plant safety system.

George Joseph of In Justice Today reports on how data from local police departments across the country is being accessed by agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement using a system called COPLINK.

This is civic tech: Big congrats to ProgHackNight for building ClearYourCabinet in partnership with the NY state attorney general’s office. The open-source tool is designed to help people safely get rid of unused medications, and is part of the larger effort to battle the opioid crisis.

Apply: Fearless Cities will be holding its North America Regional Municipalist Summit this July 27-29 (with Civic Hall as a co-sponsor) and they are requesting proposals for workshops, strategy sessions, presentations and panels by May 15.

Apply: 360Giving, the British philanthropy tracking hub, is offering prizes of up to £6,000 for the best data visualizations using it s massive database of 280,000 grants.

Apply: HIVOS is looking to hire a development manager for its global program in transparency and accountability.