First the North Koreans threaten to nuke us. Now, the Anonymous beehive is pledging to rain down chaos in retribution against the US Department of Justice for strong-arming Internet guru Aaron Swartz, compelling him to commit suicide.
Anonymous hacked the U.S. Sentencing Commission website on Saturday and implanted this video warning. Lord knows, the Department of Justice is hardly a paragon of justice. But it’s impossible to take the Anonymous cyber Robin Hoods seriously when they hold forth riff and raff like Julian Assange and Bradley Manning as their idols. Go ahead boys, hotwire a Cheetos factory and strike a blow for global freedom. H/T Small Dead Animals
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How has Mediaite, a popular news and opinion blog that covers politics and entertainment in the media industry, found a large and loyal audience in an era of dwindling demand for the mainstream press? Mediaite editors Andrew Kirell and Noah Rothman point to their website’s willingness to challenge bedrock notions of what journalism is supposed to be. For instance, where legacy media still pushes an increasingly unbelievable belief in its reporters’ “objectivity,” the Mediaite staff is open about their ideological leanings.
Reason‘s Kennedy sat down with Kirell and Rothman to discuss the rise of Mediaite, their embrace of “parasitic” journalism, and whether their personal politics make them better reporters.
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A friend of the late Aaron Swartz blames the federal government for driving the computer programmer, hacker and activist to commit suicide last week. “The idea that an agent of the federal government would be able to pick out a person and threaten to ruin their life is not the kind of thing that we hope for in a justice system,” says Parker Higgins, an internet activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Swartz helped create the web syndication process RSS. He also was instrumental in founding the popular social media site REDDIT and organizing the successful campaign against the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA). He was facing up to 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines for downloading more than 4 million academic articles from the database JSTOR. H/T Reason.TV
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Everyone wants to be ahead of the future curve. Now, you can take a quantum leap forward with some snazzy new computer peripherals unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Trisha Herschberger from SourceFed introduces the most eye-popping of these computer accessories.
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As you’re all aware, hackers can easily compromise your computers. But what you may not know is how easy it’s becoming to lift sensitive data — financial records, medical charts, company trade secrets or even compromising vacation photos — off your printers, scanners and other similar devices. H/T Journeyman Pictures
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Only five experts around the world are authorized to handle the Dead Sea Scrolls. But now anyone with Internet access can read the Scrolls as technology giant Google and the Israeli Antiquities Authority have created online English and Hebrew versions of the 2,000 year-old documents. A special laboratory has been created where NASA technology was used to photograph every scroll fragment 28 times in 12 different wavelengths of light, allowing users to see each and every crease and ink spill as well as words previously unintelligible to the human eye. H/T JewishNewsOne
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When Compuserve introduced the Graphics Interchange Format to an unsuspecting world, few thought that the format would still be with us a quarter of a century later. But here we are, after the passage of 25 years, and the GIF (pronounced just like the peanut butter) still dazzles and entertains. Legs Media, an award-winning multimedia studio in Los Angeles and New York, created this animated short to celebrate the GIF’s brevity in format as well as its surprising longevity. H/T Kuriositas
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Want to leverage social media to succeed in the new economy? Don’t think. Don’t work. Never inject an ounce of effort into it. H/T IMAO
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