onfocus

Wyden suggested that the intelligence community might be helping data brokers violate an FTC order requiring that Americans are provided "clear and conspicuous" disclosures and give informed consent before their data can be sold to third parties. In the seven years that Wyden has been investigating data brokers, he said that he has not been made "aware of any company that provides such a warning to users before collecting their data."

If you’re curious about why we need much stronger privacy laws in the US, this article is a good start. Thanks Senator Wyden for fighting the good fight.

The researchers warn that this rankings war is likely to get much worse with the advent of AI-generated spam, and that it genuinely threatens the future utility of search engines: "the line between benign content and spam in the form of content and link farms becomes increasingly blurry—a situation that will surely worsen in the wake of generative AI. We conclude that dynamic adversarial spam in the form of low-quality, mass-produced commercial content deserves more attention."

I think domain-specific link curation is going to be extremely important very soon. But I've always thought that so who knows?

California Senate candidate and Congressmember Adam Schiff is calling for a major overhaul of American institutions, including getting rid of the Electoral College, expanding the Supreme Court and eliminating the filibuster.

More like this, please.

Based on the measures developed for the study, the researchers find that in aggregate, after one year online attention towards a deplatformed personality is reduced by 64% on Google and by 43% on Wikipedia.

Deplatforming is an important tool that we shouldn’t throw out as useless.

Ladapo’s colleagues in science and medicine face the challenge of understanding what drives someone with Ladapo’s credentials — a Harvard education and a stint on the medical faculty at UCLA — to descend so deeply into professional irresponsibility.

The death cult brain worms never rest. We need to continually work to remove dangerous people from positions of power. Please vote accordingly, even in Florida.

As North Carolina and Montana enact new age verification laws effective January 1, residents can’t view sites in Pornhub’s parent company network.

Interesting Republican effort to raise awareness and use of VPNs in red states.

Members of congress who supported objection to counting Biden’s electoral votes are running for reelection. Here they are, drawn together.

If you need a list of people not to vote for, this is a good start.

The decline in crime contrasts with perceptions, driven in part by social media videos of flash-mob-style shoplifting incidents, that urban downtowns are out of control. While figures in some categories of crime are still higher than they were before the pandemic, crime overall is falling nationwide, including in cities often singled out by politicians as plagued by danger and violence.

Questions not covered here: who does rising crime stories serve? Why is the media more eager to report rising crime compared with declining crime?

Helping Nazis grow subscription newsletter businesses is ultimately best for the world, reasons Hamish McKenzie.

Nazi sympathizers going bankrupt is ultimately best for the world. Please delete your Substack account and encourage people using it to go elsewhere.

I link to the Substack domain here a lot. There is a bunch of good indie writing there but I can’t link to it anymore. I know this site doesn’t drive any traffic anywhere, so no loss to Substack. But it is a loss to me to support these awful people in any small way. Anyway, the people at the top of these venture backed Silicon Valley companies are not helping create a better place for us.

The Colorado Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that former President Donald Trump is disqualified from holding the presidency under the Constitution's so-called insurrection clause and ordered the secretary of state to exclude his name from the state's Republican presidential primary ballot.

Finally some consequences for the top traitor. We should do the same for members of congress who provided support for the insurrection.

When one hears about the rise of elimination, one wonders how it was allowed to happen. How did people permit it? I think it looks exactly like the Huckinses. Perfectly nice people I’m sure, who have decided that the existence of other people is a danger they shouldn’t have to endure, and who, rather than paying the costs of creating a sustainable society that supports all, demands the elimination of everyone who compromises their comfort.

A.R. Moxon dissects the false equivalency the media uses to discuss political polarization. Once you buy into the idea that some people are victims because their violent demands aren't being met you're empowering supremacists.

“I think we’ve been conditioned, and we have no way of countering the idea” that crime is rising,” Asher said. “It’s just an overwhelming number of news media stories and viral videos — I have to believe that social media is playing a role.”

Crime is down but the perception of rising crime is up. Thanks a lot, media.