av Mikael Winterkvist | nov 24, 2020 | Lästips

En mindre grupp användare i sociala medier ligger bakom stora delar av all den desinformation som spridits med pågående om ett omfattande valfusk i det amerikanska valet. En av ”superspridarna” är Eric Trump, Trumps son, skriver News York Times.
På morgonen den 5 november drog Eric Trump igång, vad som utvecklats till en egen kampanj, på twitter med påståenden om valfusk, manipulerade rösträkningsdatorer och med krav om att röster ska räknas om. Påståenden som saknar grund:
https://twitter.com/EricTrump/status/1324477977044963328?s=20
Inledningen
New research from Avaaz, a global human rights group, the Elections Integrity Partnership and The New York Times shows how a small group of people — mostly right-wing personalities with outsized influence on social media — helped spread the false voter-fraud narrative that led to those rallies.
That group, like the guests of a large wedding held during the pandemic, were “superspreaders” of misinformation around voter fraud, seeding falsehoods that include the claims that dead people voted, voting machines had technical glitches, and mail-in ballots were not correctly counted.
“Because of how Facebook’s algorithm functions, these superspreaders are capable of priming a discourse,” said Fadi Quran, a director at Avaaz. “There is often this assumption that misinformation or rumors just catch on. These superspreaders show that there is an intentional effort to redefine the public narrative.”
New York Times har kartlagt vilka som spridit uppgifterna, var spridningen startade och vilka som varit mest aktiva.
New York Times
av Mikael Winterkvist | nov 23, 2020 | Lästips

What the EU Gets Right—and the US Gets Wrong—About Antitrust
THERE’S A GROWING bipartisan consensus in the US to rein in the massive power accumulated by dominant tech firms. From state capitals to Congress, officials have launched multiple investigations of whether the big four of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google are now forces more for harm than good and whether their size and scale demand government action to curtail them or potentially break them up.
US regulators have not yet shown all their cards, but they should pause before arguing that too big equals anticompetitive, or seeking to break up or substantially restructure the tech giants. Instead, they might want to look to Europe.
Källa: What the EU Gets Right—and the US Gets Wrong—About Antitrust
av Mikael Winterkvist | nov 23, 2020 | Lästips

Apples satsning på AR, Augmented Reality, är ingen hemlighet och trots att det är Apples hemliga vapen så har du redan AR – i din iPhone.
Sometime in the not-too-distant future, Apple will reportedly unveil an augmented- or mixed-reality headset. Apple hasn’t discussed any headgear yet. But augmented reality is alive and well on the iPhone — and it’s getting better fast.
Apple began its AR journey in 2017, making a splash with virtual Ikea furniture and realistic-looking outdoor Pokemon Go battles. This year, I’ve been standing on street corners scanning fire hydrants with Apple’s new iPhone 12 Pro. I’ve mapped my house’s interior. I’ve navigated lava rivers on my floors.
In many ways, Apple’s depth-sensing lidar sensor on the latest iPhones and iPads, with its advanced 3D-scanning possibilities, feels like the backbone of the Apple headsets of the future.
CNet
av Mikael Winterkvist | nov 13, 2020 | Lästips
På torsdagskvällen lanserade Apple macOS Big Sur och fick samtidigt stora problem med ett av sina säkerhetssystemen – en funktion som kontrollerar de program du startar i din Mac.
macOS kontrollerar nämligen program som du startar och det görs med kommunikation med Apple – om datorn är uppkopplad. Jeffrey Paul är säkerhetskonsult, hackare och grundare av EEQJ, ett konsultföretag.
It’s here. It happened. Did you notice?
I’m speaking, of course, of the world that Richard Stallman predicted in 1997. The one Cory Doctorow also warned us about.
On modern versions of macOS, you simply can’t power on your computer, launch a text editor or eBook reader, and write or read, without a log of your activity being transmitted and stored.
It turns out that in the current version of the macOS, the OS sends to Apple a hash (unique identifier) of each and every program you run, when you run it. Lots of people didn’t realize this, because it’s silent and invisible and it fails instantly and gracefully when you’re offline, but today the server got really slowand it didn’t hit the fail-fast code path, and everyone’s apps failed to open if they were connected to the internet.
Jeffrey Paul
Tack till Christoffer för tipset.
av Mikael Winterkvist | okt 29, 2020 | Lästips

Sara Silverman är en av USAs mest kända komiker – hon har en egen show, syns ofta i tv-sofforna när hon inte gästspelar i filmer och tv-serier. 2007 fick hon hård kritik för att några år tidigare målat sig svart – blackface – i en sketch. Kritiken och upprördheten kostade henne en filmroll.
Frågan är när är det tid för att förlåta, låta saker vara och gå vidare?
Sarah Silverman has argued in favour of a “path to redemption” for people facing instances of “cancel culture”.
The comedian herself has faced backlash for wearing blackface in a 2007 sketch. She said last year that she lost out on a movie role due to a resurfaced photo of the sequence.
She referred to Christian Picciolini, a former skinhead who left a white supremacist movement in 1996 and has since worked as an activist against hate groups. Silverman interviewed Picciolini in an episode of her series I Love You, America in 2017.
The Independent
av Mikael Winterkvist | okt 25, 2020 | Lästips
EVEN WITH A knee injury, Maddie Stone is formidable. As she sets up to do modified circuits at her San Francisco Olympic weightlifting gym—essentially a glorified garage and driveway that have been converted into an indoor/outdoor workout space—she’s totally at ease, even gleeful despite the chilly January fog. I joke nervously that if I end up puking in a trash can while Maddie is crushing reps, it’ll at least make for a good anecdote. Casually setting the clips on her loaded barbell she flashes one of her trademark grins. “You could probably make it happen!”
Stone’s smile and easy laugh may be her most recognizable traits, but her determination reveals itself quickly, too. Her bum knee has been keeping her from doing her preferred workouts—everything from wall stands to the rowing machine is now off limits—so she settles for modified lifts and grinds away on upper-body machines. (“Now is the time to get Michelle Obama arms.”) After years playing competitive tennis in her youth, Stone, now 29, is more used to knee surgeries than she would like. Moving her focus to Olympic lifting and hiking during her twenties didn’t help. Last year she even summited Mount Kilimanjaro.
Wired