The 154th Block: Privacy, security threats
Twitter is breaking down, we know; Substack's ethics is questionable at best, we know
This week…
I’m still looking for someone to rent my apartment in Malaysia. Boggles my mind when people string you along and then ghost you?
Anyway, a selection of top stories on my radar, a few personal recommendations, and the chart of the week.
Twitter Circle tweets are not that private anymore
Amanda Silberling for Tech Crunch:
PSA: Do not post your deepest darkest secrets on your Twitter Circle.
Numerous Twitter users are reporting a bug in which Circle tweets — which are supposed to reach a select group, like an Instagram Close Friends story — are surfacing on the algorithmically generated For You timeline. That means that your supposedly private posts might breach containment to reach an unintended audience, which could quickly spark some uncomfortable situations.
Conspiracy theorists made Tiffany Dover into an anti-vaccine icon. She’s finally ready to talk about it
Brandy Zadrozny for NBC News:
Tiffany Dover is alive. Sitting across from Tiffany at her kitchen table, this is obvious. She breathes in and out. She gestures with her hands. She laughs generously. Dimples carve into both cheeks when she smiles, which she does a lot. Her eyes are wide and bright and terribly blue.
“I didn’t die that day,” Tiffany tells me. “But the life I knew did.”
I’d been following Tiffany since that day, Dec. 17, 2020. Like thousands of others, I first saw her on a livestream during the national rollout of Covid vaccines to front-line workers, where Tiffany became one of the first people in the U.S. to get a shot. I was also watching when she fainted immediately after, launching a wave of misinformation and conspiracy theories that would eventually unravel her life.
Experts warn of new spyware threat targeting journalists and political figures
Stephanie Kirchgaessner for The Guardian:
Security experts have warned about the emergence of previously unknown spyware with hacking capabilities comparable to NSO Group’s Pegasus that has already been used by clients to target journalists, political opposition figures and an employee of an NGO.
Researchers at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School said the spyware, which is made by an Israeli company called QuaDream, infected some victims’ phones by sending an iCloud calendar invitation to mobile users from operators of the spyware, who are likely to be government clients. Victims were not notified of the calendar invitations because they were sent for events logged in the past, making them invisible to the targets of the hacking. Such attacks are known as “zero-click” because users of the mobile phone do not have to click on any malicious link or take any action in order to be infected.
What I read, listen, and watch…
I’m reading the IMF’s growth forecast.
I’m listening to Decoder with Nilay Patel. In this episode, Substack CEO Chris Best was asked a simple question about moderating hate speech and wouldn’t answer.
I’m watching Timnit Gebru’s talk on eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence.
Reviews, opinion pieces, and other stray links:
Author tracked down reviewer who kept giving him one-star book reviews by Anish Vij for Lad Bible. You can count on a criminologist to be able to pull this off, and you can always count on the fact that it’s a fellow academic who would be so envious.
What is ‘algospeak’? Inside the newest version by Roger J. Kreuz for The Conversation.
Inside Rupert Murdoch’s Succession drama by Gabriel Sherman for Vanity Fair.
Poliamor y amores varios: contra el cuento de hadas del romanticismo by Carrie Jenkins for El País.
Chart of the week
From my reading list above, the latest world economic outlook growth projections according to the IMF:
And one more thing
Tina Yong’s TEDx talk on the rise of the “trauma essay” in college applications:
Not just college application, even my high school English course that I took last year was heavy on the “trauma essay,” although masked as “resilience.”
if you hate twitter so much jsut delete it all you do is whine about it