NOTE: Last week, I mis-scheduled the publication time for The 10th Block. If that meant that it got buried in your inbox and you never opened it, please find it here.
Raphael Satter for Reuters: Deepfake used to attack activist couple shows new disinformation frontier. “His half dozen freelance editorials and blog posts reveal an active interest in anti-Semitism and Jewish affairs, with bylines in the Jerusalem Post and the Times of Israel. The catch? Oliver Taylor seems to be an elaborate fiction. […] The Taylor persona is a rare in-the-wild example of a phenomenon that has emerged as a key anxiety of the digital age: The marriage of deepfakes and disinformation.”
BBC announced that, along with other members of the Trusted News Initiative including AFP, CBC/Radio-Canada and Reuters, it would begin adding a digital watermark to its content to guard against disinformation in the run-up to the 2020 US election.
The Tab’s Greg Barradale speaks to Tuba Geçkil – the Turkish cake artist behind the ‘everything is cake’ meme. Emma Betuel of Inverse speaks to scientists who explain why the hyper-realistic art trend creates a strange dissonance in our brains.
What the hack is going on? Tick-tock, time’s running out, we need an answer!
A throwback to the time I provided my biometrics to the [redacted] government and my whole life was digitised. No turning back.
The US wants to ban TikTok because of its ‘national security threat’, but then the most scandalous hack unfolded on Twitter: High profile verified accounts including those of Barack Obama, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates sent out scam messages asking for bitcoin in return for more bitcoin. It may have been an inside job.
Larry Cermak for The Block Crypto provides a play-by-play: “The Twitter account hacks – a comprehensive timeline of events”.
Is it just about the money? Most likely not. Twitter reported that compromised accounts may have had their personal data downloaded. And it’s not over. The FBI is now investigating the hack.
Perhaps India’s recent ban on TikTok made the idea more acceptable in the US and elsewhere, but if the concern is “security threat,” then a ban alone is insufficient without addressing the threat to data and democracy on any other online platforms, including these American-based ones.
Plus, the EU doesn’t think too highly of the US’ privacy laws, rejecting data transfer tool in the Max Schrems case.
What I read, watch and listen to…
I’m reading Wonder Tools, a weekly newsletter on digital tools by journalist and educator Jeremy Caplan. Although curated for journalists, it has plenty of resources for anyone who is interested in apps and tools for productivity and creativity.
I’m watching and taking notes:
Chart of the week
The Reuters Institute at Oxford University published the annual Digital News Report. Of all the trends that were presented, what stole my heart was the encouraging news that more people are now receiving their news through newsletters.
Orang muda dan Bahasa Melayu dalam media sosial
Saya akan membuat rumusan dan ulusan lanjut dalam edisi akan datang tentang pembentangan Prof Dato’ Dr Teo Kok Seong dalam siri Wacana Ilmu 2020 oleh Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka. Tapi buat masa sekarang, tontonilah:
Transcript for audio
In last week’s newsletter, I wrote about letter-writing – a dying practice that I am still clinging on to. And I’m still thinking about it today, and particularly about something I read seven years ago.
In 2013, Maria Popova wrote “The letter is dead, long live the letter,” on her popular online publication, Brain Pickings. In it, she shared, amongst other things this quote by Demetrius I of Macedon: “Everyone writes a letter in the virtual image of his own soul. In every other form of speech it is possible to see the writer’s character, but in none so clearly as in the letter.”
Popova’s article asked what exactly is it about a letter that reaches such great depths of a person’s character. It went on to quote author Simon Garfield, who wrote the book “To the Letter: A Celebration of the Lost Art of Letter Writing.” In his book, Garfield wrote: “Some of this has to do with the application of hand to paper, or the rolling of the paper through the typewriter, the effort to get things right the first time, the perceptive gathering of purpose.”
The perceptive gathering of purpose – I thought about that line a lot, it’s rather affecting.
In the age of COVID-19, we are now more than ever living in the digital realms. Most of my bills, some of which were previously still sent through the mail, are now received via email. My mailbox is now almost always empty, it feels quite strangely metaphorical.
There has to be a word to describe the feeling of receiving a letter – not bills or notices in generic white envelops without personality – but a letter you poured you heart’s out onto, one that then travelled through various other individuals, modes of transportation and storage, multiple checkpoints and borders before reaching your mailbox. Thinking of that in the age of COVID-19, of course, can induce some levels of hypochondria but surely a letter from a loved one is an antidote to something else?
And there has to be a word to describe the feeling of making the last pen stroke on a page, waiting for the ink to dry and having the page carefully folded and enclosed in an envelope, having the envelope sealed and stamped, dropping the letter off... and hoping a safe trip for your penned thoughts and emotions, to arrive at its intended destination, in your place, perhaps – a compromise we have to settle with for now. The beaten-up letter took a journey it can never tell anyone else about, but at least it bears within it a story from one heart to another.
The 11th Block: What the hack is going on?