UC Davis spent thousands to scrub pepper-spray references from Internet
Sacramento Bee
For some reason University of California, Davis wanted to clean up it’s online reputation. Oh wait, they make the reason quite clear: to make the college’s chancellor, Linda Katehi, look better after the scumbag Lt. John Pike pepper sprayed unarmed protestors on campus. Don’t worry about him though: he was awarded $38,000 in worker’s comp for his “psychiatric trauma“.
UC Davis (a public, government funded university) spent at least $175,000 on contracts with online reputation management companies because of Katehi’s hurt feelings. Maybe she was psychiatrically traumatized as well? I can’t say that I would forget that event happened were I applying there as a student, but perhaps they thought that attendance would suffer due to “venomous rhetoric” about the chancellor.
It’s not to say that online reputation management is a bad thing. Jon Ronson, author of ‘So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed’ talks about the good that they can do, and how the lack of consequences for internet commentators, myself included, can put unfair burden on the targets of harassment. Ronson himself has been attacked online, and even impersonated extensively. Still, maybe sometimes it’s not just sniping from afar, but reminding people that standards that we would be kept to can be maintained for others, and public money might be better spent than keeping government employee feelings from getting hurt while causing real damage to others.
Thanks to Matt Cutts, head of webspam for Google, for pointing out this story. So much for that reputation management, UC Davis.
Facebook Has Seized the Media, and That’s Bad News for Everyone But Facebook
Julia Greenberg, Wired
Facebook has done a ton to keep people hooked on their site. The additions of features such as instant articles, 360 degree video, and the hyped AI chatbot, M, are geared around keeping you on Facebook longer, for more things. If you plan on getting news and entertainment, the reasoning goes, you should get it through us.
The issue at hand is how this de facto ownership of media can sway what is being said and how. Facebook creates a new feature, and newsrooms across the world move budgets around to accommodate. The allure of the views that await is intoxicating, and the danger of missing user screen time is a financial fear driving decisions. There’s a bandwagon created for media outlets to hop on and ride to active engagement time. The question is if there’s a better way to drive new development around stories and newsworthiness, rather than shiny features.
Why my videogame chooses your character’s race and gender for you
Garry Newman, The Guardian
We understand this is a sore subject for a lot of people. We understand that you may now be a gender that you don’t identify with in real-life. We understand this causes you distress and makes you not want to play the game anymore. Technically nothing has changed, since half the population was already living with those feelings. The only difference is that whether you feel like this is now decided by your SteamID instead of your real life gender.
Online video game Rust, a survival title, has added a new feature to character creation. Where once it was just your race that was programmatically selected based on your Steam ID, your character’s gender is as well. It’s almost painfully obvious that certain people who treat games as the end all of life, with women trying to destroy that bastion of ubermale fantasy freedom, will get offended.
The lead developer of the game spoke up in advance of the change, well aware of how some people would react. He pointed out that some players, a large portion of them, were being forced to play as the opposite gender in the past, and it seemed to be a less spoken issue until forced game gender was an equal opportunity endeavor. He didn’t point out that female players have very little to choose from in almost every major game title, but why does that matter when almost half of gamers are women, a number that is steadily rising?
A Scheme to Encrypt the Entire Web Is Actually Working
Andy Greenberg, Wired
Let’s Encrypt is moving out of beta! The certificate authority, funded by Mozilla, EFF, Akamai, and other web giants, provides free TLS certificates to end users. Let’s Encrypt has been in public beta for less than six months, but already it’s become the third largest certificate authority in the world, serving up certificates for over 3.8million sites. The goal is to encrypt the entire web, making it more secure and safe for ever user, and this is a great start.
Is TLS Fast Yet? You bet it is 🙂
Tesla Mario Kart Rainbow Road Easter Egg
Contributor Lisa Melegari thinks that this has to be a late April Fool’s joke, and I’d be inclined to agree. Evidently, putting the Model S and Model X Teslas into autopilot four times in a row triggers a Rainbow Road driving animation on the vehicle display. Is that more or less dangerous as a distraction than insane mode?
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