A Brief History of the End of the Comments | WIRED
Earlier this week, Vice’s technology and science news site Motherboard dropped its comments section, opting to replace it with an old school “letters to the editor” feature. Then Reddit launched a news site called Upvoted thatdidn’t include a comments section. (You can still comment on the stories on Reddit itself.)
What’s going on here? For years, comment boxes have been a staple of the online experience. You’ll find them everywhere, from The New York Times to Fox News to The Economist. But as online audiences have grown, the pain of moderating conversations on the web has grown, too. And in many cases, the most vibrant coversations about a particular article or topic are happening on sites like Facebook and Twitter. So many media companies are giving up on comments, at least for now. So far this year, Bloomberg, The Verge, The Daily Beast and now Motherboard have all dropped their comments feature.
(Source: Wired)
Google Sends Reporter a GIF Instead of a ‘No Comment’ | WIRED
This adorable animated GIF is apparently the official answer Google sent to a Daily Dot reporter in response to his seeming scoop on a new YouTube livestreaming plan. Richard Lewis reported that Google-owned YouTube was going to take a new swing at “eSports”—a.k.a. watching other people play videogames—as services like Amazon’s Twitch gain popularity.
In an update to the story today (h/t Business Insider), Lewis wrote that a YouTube spokesperson sent him an animated GIF in response to a request for comment. He assumed it was a joke. “Earlier today, the rep assured us it was not,” Lewis said.
“‘The GIF really was our official response,'” Lewis quotes the rep as saying.
(Source: Wired)
Meet the Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of your Facebook Feed, Wired:
Baybayan is part of a massive labor force that handles “content moderation”—the removal of offensive material—for US social-networking sites. As social media connects more people more intimately than ever before, companies have been confronted with the Grandma Problem: Now that grandparents routinely use services like Facebook to connect with their kids and grandkids, they are potentially exposed to the Internet’s panoply of jerks, racists, creeps, criminals, and bullies. They won’t continue to log on if they find their family photos sandwiched between a gruesome Russian highway accident and a hardcore porn video.
We all know these stories of sources who take a risk to approach an institution and that institution doesn’t publish the information. I think that the existence of the Intercept or WikiLeaks or other outlets that are willing to publish that information creates a different media landscape…
…I don’t think what we’re doing is radical. I think it’s radical to censor information because the government asks you to. That’s radical.
Laura Poitras, Director and Producer, CitizenFour, to Wired. Laura Poitras on the Crypto Tools That Made Her Snowden Film Possible.
Context: Poitras is referring to the New York Times which withheld publication of the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program for a year at the administration’s request.
The Tools: Poitras says she couldn’t have reported CitizenFour, her documentary on Edward Snowden and the NSA leaks, without a number of Open Source tools. These included, according to Wired, “the anonymity software Tor, the Tor-based operating system Tails, GPG encryption, Off-The-Record (OTR) encrypted instant messaging, hard disk encryption software Truecrypt, and Linux.”
Additionally, Poitras used the anonymizing operating system Tails on a computer dedicated solely for communicating with Snowden, according to Wired.
(via futurejournalismproject)
WIRED’s James Bamford spent three days with Edward Snowden, the most time any journalist has spent with Snowden since he arrived in Russia in June 2013.
Read Bamford’s full account of his time with the whistleblower in The Most Wanted Man in the World | WIRED
Not much happens in Geraldine, a small farming community in the interior of the South Island of New Zealand, about 85 miles from Christchurch. So when Hayden MacKenzie, a fourth-generation farmer there, picked up the phone last Tuesday and got a request to participate in a secret project—one that he wouldn’t even learn about until he signed a vow of silence—he and his wife Anna figured that they’d take a shot. That evening, two men showed up at his cozy farmhouse. They bore a peculiar red device, a sphere slightly bigger than a volleyball perched on a short collar, and attached it to his roof. Then they left.
Only when the men returned the next day did they reveal what they were up to. Inside the red ball was an antenna that would give the MacKenzies Internet access. It was custom-designed to communicate with a similar antenna that would be floating by in the stratosphere, over 60,000 feet above sea level. On a solar-powered balloon.
Oh, and the men work for Google.
[MORE - EXCLUSIVE: How Google Will Use High-Flying Balloons to Deliver Internet to the Hinterlands]
Wired reporter, Spencer Ackerman (@attackerman), conducts an interview with wanted American jihadi Omar Hammami exclusively through direct messages on Twitter in ‘There’s No Turning Back’: My Interview With a Hunted American Jihadist.
The story also demonstrates another example of how national security experts are leveraging social networks like Twitter to engage security threats.
Hammami engages with American security professionals who ask him about his current views on jihad, and he jumps into their discussions of counterterrorism. There’s a notable absence of rancor, and even some constructive criticism, however inadvertent. When Hammami criticized State Department initiatives at confronting extremists like him online, he said those efforts came across as tin-eared. [J.M.] Berger and Hammami have an extended, public colloquy about the justification and the efficacy of using violence to pursue jihad. All this comes leavened with Star Wars references. Berger wonders if this sort of collegial jihadi-counterterrorist dialogue is “the wave of future, when everyone’s on Twitter.”
Read more: 'There’s No Turning Back’: My Interview With a Hunted American Jihadist | Wired.com
The Meta-Story: How Wired Published Its GitHub Story on GitHub | Wired.com
“When we uploaded the story to GitHub, we published it under a Creative Commons license, and this allowed GitHub’s 1.3 million users to do what they do best: download their own version of the article — called a fork in GitHub parlance — mess around with it, and then offer the changes back to us via the website.
Read how the experiment went on Wired.
Image: GitHub
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