My Dad, the Facebook Addict

Laughing Squid: Filmmaker Dylan LeVine hilariously documented his birthday candle-phobic father Vincent‘s obsession with Facebook and in particular, his overwhelming need to build an arsenal of memes, just in case. The elder LeVine shared how he researched and alphabetized every meme to ensure a full state of readiness should an argument ensue, until it became all he could think about. His family expressed repeated concern about the amount of time Vincent was spending online, but it was only after he was put on a three-day Facebook ban that he realized how much time and energy he was wasting in front of the computer.

See also: What is Facebook doing to our politics?

Kruggsmash Plays Dwarf Fortress

Whether you’ve heard of Dwarf Fortress or not, i’m here to take you on adventures within it’s infinite worlds! I hope you’re ready to see exotic locations, battle DEADLY beasts and hunt down long forgotten treasures, because all that and MUCH more awaits here, in the world of DWARF FORTRESS!

Kruggsmash is a YouTuber who plays the graphically simple but highly complex sim Dwarf Fortress and illustrates his world and the stories that unfold.

I’ve never played Dwarf Fortress myself, but I admire the scope of the game and I’m a huge fan of creative gamers like Kruggsmash here.

See also: Your First Fortress: A Dwarf Fortress Crash Course by Kruggsmash

The Internet, as photographed by ​Peter Garritano

Quietly tucked away in a few unassuming buildings in lower Manhattan, massive flows of data pulse through some of the world’s largest and most heavily guarded hubs of global internet infrastructure.

​Peter Garritano is a photographer based in New York City.

See also

• The seven keys to the internet — “It sounds like the stuff of science fiction: seven keys, held by individuals from all over the world, that together control security at the core of the web. James Ball joins a private ceremony, and finds the reality is rather closer to The Office than The Matrix.”
• Ye olde submarine cable map — TeleGeography’s Submarine Cable Map has been updated for 2015. The latest edition depicts 299 cable systems that are currently active, under construction, or expected to be fully-funded by the end of 2015.
• The 10 Immutable Laws of Computer Security, by Scott Culp c.2000

The Great 78 Project

The Outline: The Great 78 Project is preserving our sonic past

The Internet Archive will soon be home to hundreds of thousands of audio recordings that would otherwise be lost forever.

George Blood’s four-armed turntable

Zoë Beery: So, the original set of records that started this project off came from the Internet Archive itself. Since they’re known for hosting so much old stuff, the guy who founded it, Brewster Kahle, has just slowly accumulated 78s over the years, from museums, libraries, collectors, anybody who has it and is like, “Oh, they like old stuff. Maybe I’ll give it to him!”

• The Great 78 Project — a partnership with New York’s Archive of Contemporary Music and the Internet Archive.
• What is the function of music? — “I feel like I should have a really good answer for this, but somehow I also feel that the question is wrong.”
• Extended score for Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan… new on vinyl!

r/place

sudoscript: Last weekend, a fascinating act in the history of humanity played out on Reddit.

For April Fool’s Day, Reddit launched a little experiment. It gave its users, who are all anonymous, a blank canvas called Place.

The rules were simple. Each user could choose one pixel from 16 colors to place anywhere on the canvas. They could place as many pixels of as many colors as they wanted, but they had to wait a few minutes between placing each one.

Over the following 72 hours, what emerged was nothing short of miraculous. A collaborative artwork that shocked even its inventors.

Above, some of my favourite little areas // Below, a static look at the ‘finished’ piece

Read more

• Sudoscript: When Pixels Collide — But at its core, the story of Place is an eternal story, about the three forces that humanity needs to make art, creation, and technology possible.
• Waxy: This Must Be The /r/Place — Every tiny patch of the Place is a story. Every piece of real estate represents a hard-fought battle, drawn from the collective activity of hundreds of smaller communities teaming together, and often against each other.
• The r/place Atlas

How Facebook could reveal your voting record to dramatically improve turnout

Facebook Could Reveal Your Voting Record

A study showed that naming and shaming non-voters could dramatically increase turnout at elections. Evan Puschak explores how Facebook could take this idea one step further.

See also: What is Facebook doing to our politics?

How does YouTube actually work?

Nat and Lo: After making (and uploading) videos to YouTube for about a year, we finally decided to go behind the scenes of YouTube and ask the YouTube engineers how YouTube actually works.

What does YouTube do to your video after you upload it?

What actually happens when you watch a YouTube video?

See also

• YouTube compression — Brandon from RocketJump shares the settings he uses to get the best quality and the smallest file-size video possible before uploading to YouTube.
• YouTube: The Medium Is The Message — The largest ingredient of online video is the awareness that every consumer is a possible creator.
• YouTube Poop — The so-called ‘subversive remix’ is not a new phenomenon.

The Art of Security

A postmodern infographic.

Jack Leonard: The design of this infographic is a tribute to swiss modernism & the postmodern movement. It features Bauhaus style type & distorted illustrations and makes for heavy use of images.

I chose to incorporate pictures of faces and people to play on the stark dissonance between security and people.

See also other posts tagged ‘security’ and ‘infographics’.

US government framework for handling cyberattacks

The Verge: The White House now has a color-coded scale for cybersecurity threats

The Presidential Policy Directive on United States Cyber Incident Coordination builds on the action plan that Obama laid out earlier this year, and it’s intended to create a clear standard of when and how government agencies will handle incidents. It also comes with a new threat level scale, assigning specific colors and response levels to the danger of a hack.

The cyberattack severity scale is somewhat vague, but it’s supposed to make sure that the agencies involved in cybersecurity — the Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, and Office of the Director of National Intelligence — respond to threats with the same level of urgency and investment.

See also

• The 10 Immutable Laws of Computer Security
• The seven keys to the internet

The business of GIFs: Then and now

Vox: The GIF was invented in 1989. And since its beginning, the GIF has been used to make money. At first, GIFs were sold as placeholders for the web of the ’90s and early 2000s. But after web design became informed by professional standards, gifs lost their role as placeholders. Eventually they became tools of expression, turning snippets of video from popular culture into bite size communication devices. Today, a few big tech companies are trying to capitalize on this new use of GIFs, partnering with brands who want their content to be used as communication.

See also

• Reply All episode #61 Baby King — This week, Alex stumbles upon the weirdest gifs ever made, and goes hunting for their creators.
• That emoji does not mean what you think it means
• How to speak on the Internet

How to speak on the Internet

How To Speak On The Internet (MMM™)

Satchell Drakes: After spending quite a few years on Twitter, I’ve had my fair share of getting pulled into toxic moments. I’ve also made some of my closest friends on there. I wanted to put together a resource that might help people share their worldview in a manner that is effective and conscious of their context. Mike McHargue of The Liturgists Podcast essentially did all of the work and tackled this issue the best with a matrix of four questions to help with just that. Here’s essentially an overdramatic Retweet of that matrix.

See also

• That emoji does not mean what you think it means — Since emoji are designed differently across platforms, sometimes your text messages might get lost in translation.
• Why Are You So Angry? — A six-part series on the male gamer’s relationship to feminism.
• This Video Will Make You Angry — How ideas spread as ‘thought germs’ over the internet.

That emoji does not mean what you think it means

Gizmodo: Since emoji are designed differently across platforms, sometimes your text messages might get lost in translation. But how differently might your well-intentioned emoji be displayed?

The most widely misinterpreted is the “grinning face with smiling eyes” emoji, which—depending on the platform—can range from the rosy-cheeked cherubic face of glee to the anguished clenched-teeth look of constipation.

That wide range between sentiment rankings was named “misconstrual” by the researchers. You can see how the 22 emoji tracked across platforms, with “smiling face with open mouth and tightly closed eyes,” “face with tears of joy,” “sleeping face,” and “loudly crying face” all having their own issues of interpretation. But “grinning face with smiling eyes” is still the clear winner when it came to sending the wrong message.

Across-platform sentiment misconstrual scores grouped by Unicode. Each boxplot shows the range of sentiment misconstrual
scores across the five platforms. They are ordered by decreasing median platform-pair sentiment misconstrual, from left to right.

See also

• Grouplens: Investigating the Potential for Miscommunication Using Emoji (Paper [PDF])
• Emoji masks — “The most LOLZ you’ve ever had for $5”
• 100 new emoji designs by Avery Monsen.
• Twitter’s emoji for the web — Open source emoji goodness.

See also

Mapping the Online World — an atlas redrawn according to the number of registrations within each country’s internet domain* — whether .uk for the UK, .de for Germany, .cn for China, and so on.

On a map of the world scaled to the most popular top-level domains, the Pacific island of Tokelau reigns supreme.

Wired: With more than 31 million .tk websites, the tiny New Zealand territory has more domain registrations than any other nation or territory in the world. It might measure just four square miles and have little over 1,400 residents, but Tokelau’s .tk dwarfs the rest of the world.

Domain map of the world

‘Online Europe’ is so much larger than geographic Europe because of the high rates of internet adoption by countries in this region. The UK, for example, is only the 21st largest country in the world by population, and the 78th by area. But in terms of internet use, it’s right at the top of the table.

Domain map of Europe

The USA, on the other hand, is an anomaly. Despite having high levels of internet use, e-commerce and online innovation, there are comparatively few registrations under .us, its official country-code domain. Americans and American businesses tend to prefer .com, which at around 123 million registrations is the world’s most common domain.

• Ye olde submarine cable map — TeleGeography’s Submarine Cable Map; the physical internet.
• Tor Flow: Mapping the Tor network — a visualization of the vast amounts of traffic streaming between its many nodes, delineating a map of the internet as it can’t otherwise be seen.

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This ‘Tor Flow’ visualization shows information flow between relay servers of the Tor network for a selected day.

The Tor network is a group of volunteer-operated servers (relays) that allows people to improve their privacy and security on the Internet. Tor’s users employ this network by connecting through a series of virtual tunnels rather than making a direct connection, thus allowing both organizations and individuals to share information over public networks without compromising their privacy.

(via Boing Boing)

See also: Drone strikes: an infographic; Edward Snowden on freedom; ‘1984’ stealth fashion for the under-surveillance society; Paranoid Android: Silent Circle’s Blackphone 2.

YouTube: The Medium Is The Message

It’s no surprise that the great triumph of television is the triumph of advertising. What could possibly be more attuned to the medium of television than commercials?

The largest ingredient of online video is the awareness that every consumer is a possible creator.

Why Are You So Angry?

Ian Danskin (aka Innuendo Studios) has just posted the final part in his six-part series on the male gamer’s relationship to feminism.

Part 1: A Short History of Anita Sarkeesian

The internet is full of Angry Jacks, and Jack is not exclusively, but is typically, male. He’s also commonly white, and/or straight, and/or cis, and/or raised middle class. Which is to say, he usually looks like me.

To people who look like me, Jack is often a nuisance. To people who don’t look like me, Jack is frequently dangerous.

Part 2: Angry Jack

[…] And you’re thinking, or maybe even starting to say, “I shouldn’t have to have this debate right now. I just wanted to go to a fucking party. I’m normal! This is a normal thing to do!” And all she said was “no thanks, I don’t drink,” but that doesn’t matter, what you heard was “you’re a bad person.”

Russia’s “Internet Research Agency” troll farm

The New York Times looks into ‘The Agency’, a pro-Kremlin propaganda operation that has “industrialized the art of trolling”.

The Columbian Chemicals hoax was not some simple prank by a bored sadist. It was a highly coordinated disinformation campaign, involving dozens of fake accounts that posted hundreds of tweets for hours, targeting a list of figures precisely chosen to generate maximum attention. It must have taken a team of programmers and content producers to pull off.

Ludmila Savchuk worked at the agency for two months.

The first thing employees did upon arriving at their desks was to switch on an Internet proxy service, which hid their I.P. addresses from the places they posted. Savchuk would be given a list of the opinions she was responsible for promulgating that day.

Savchuk told me she shared an office with about a half-dozen teammates. It was smaller than most, because she worked in the elite Special Projects department. While other workers churned out blandly pro-Kremlin comments, her department created appealing online characters who were supposed to stand out from the horde. Savchuk posed as three of these creations, running a blog for each one on LiveJournal. One alter ego was a fortuneteller named Cantadora. The spirit world offered Cantadora insight into relationships, weight loss, feng shui — and, occasionally, geopolitics. Energies she discerned in the universe invariably showed that its arc bent toward Russia. She foretold glory for Vladimir Putin, defeat for Barack Obama and Petro Poroshenko. The point was to weave propaganda seamlessly into what appeared to be the nonpolitical musings of an everyday person.

Savchuk’s revelations about the agency have fascinated Russia not because they are shocking but because they confirm what everyone has long suspected: The Russian Internet is awash in trolls.

Previously: A professional Russian propaganda troll tells all

Facebook’s Little Red Book

In his time working for Facebook (2008–2014), Ben Barry did a lot of really nice design work for the company. Luckily for us, he has posted it on his website. Below I’ve selected just some of my favourite examples.

“As the company of Facebook grew, we faced a lot of challenges. One of them was explaining our company’s mission, history, and culture to new employees. We wanted to try to package a lot of those stories and ideas in one place to give to all employees.”

The Next Web: Here’s our first peek inside the little red book Facebook gives to employees

Barry and Everett Katigbak co-founded Facebook’s Analog Research Lab , a print studio that is near Facebook’s original Menlo Park building. In his time at Facebook, Barry was famous for his focus on the company’s brand, even to the point that he was dubbed the company’s “propaganda minister” internally.

Facebook Visual Identity

This page features a wealth of design concepts, including this revision to the famous wordmark which Facebook approved but have not (yet) implemented.

“Facebook as a product and organization evolves very fast, and it was a challenge trying to design a system that was flexible across many mediums and contexts. Separate from the visual design work, there was the incredible task of creating awareness, gaining support, and ultimately creating a cross-functional team to approve and implement these changes.”

Facebook Analog Research Laboratory

The Facebook Analog Research Laboratory is a printing studio and workshop. Its primary mission is to produce work that reinforces the values of Facebook.

Facebook Posters & Ephemera

Finally, there are these posters and other miscellaneous designs produced by Barry, usually for internal hackathons.

Lovely, lovely work, all of it.

See also: A Facebook board game!

A professional Russian propaganda troll tells all

Dmitry Volchek and Daisy Sindelar talk to former professional Russian troll Marat Burkhard about his well paid work perpetuating a pro-Kremlin dialogue online:

There are thousands of fake accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, and vKontakte, all increasingly focused on the war in Ukraine. Many emanate from Russia’s most famous “troll factory,” the Internet Research center, an unassuming building on St. Petersburg’s Savushkina Street, which runs on a 24-hour cycle. In recent weeks, former employees have come forward to talk to RFE/RL about life inside the factory, where hundreds of people work grinding, 12-hour shifts in exchange for 40,000 rubles ($700) a month or more.

St. Petersburg blogger Marat Burkhard spent two months working at Internet Research in the department tasked with clogging the forums on Russia’s municipal websites with pro-Kremlin comments.

RFE/RL: How many departments are there at Internet Research?

Burkhard: It’s a modern building, four floors. There’s a LiveJournal department, a news department, a department where they create all sorts of images and demotivators (Editor’s Note: Demotivators are satirical graphics that tend to undermine their subject matter), a department where they make videos. But I was never in those departments. Each of them has its own office, tables, and computers, and no one prowls around from place to place. Everyone stays in their spot.

The entire article is fascinating and includes multiple example case studies. These trolls work in teams of three — a troika with a well defined process: Villain Troll > Link Troll > Picture Troll.

Burkhard: Our department commented on posts. Every city and village in Russia has its own municipal website with its own comments forum. People would write something on the forum — some kind of news — and our task was to comment on it. We did it by dividing into teams of three. One of us would be the “villain,” the person who disagrees with the forum and criticizes the authorities, in order to bring a feeling of authenticity to what we’re doing. The other two enter into a debate with him — “No, you’re not right; everything here is totally correct.” One of them should provide some kind of graphic or image that fits in the context, and the other has to post a link to some content that supports his argument. You see? Villain, picture, link.

Translation: Ukraine, rise up! Southeast, sit down, don’t make a fuss, and put up with it.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty: One Professional Russian Troll Tells All (via)

See also

• Teens, social media and privacy
• The adventures of Russian Man
• This video will make you angry

See also

TeleGeography’s 2015 submarine cable map

TeleGeography’s Submarine Cable Map has been updated for 2015. The latest edition depicts 299 cable systems that are currently active, under construction, or expected to be fully-funded by the end of 2015.

The map provides latency from the United States, United Kingdom, and Hong Kong to several other countries, presented in milliseconds of round trip delay.

The map is adorned with images of common causes of cable faults, including fishing vessels, anchors, and trenches on the ocean floor, as well as cable maintenance vessels responsible for repairs. In homage to vintage maps, it also includes ornate illustrations of mythical sea monsters.

Inset illustrations depict steps in the cable laying process, including the receiving of a submarine cable on shore and the coiling of cable within a ship’s tank.

Inset infographics provide lit capacity data from 2002-2013 for the trans-Atlantic, trans-Pacific, US-Latin America, and Europe-Asia via Egypt routes.

The map depicts routes of 278 in-service and 21 planned undersea cables. Capital cities for each country are also provided.

(via Vox)

• Climate change map of the world
• Richard Edes Harrison: Mapping the world at war
• Canyonlands National Park texture and shaded relief map

This Video Will Make You Angry

CGP Grey on how ideas spread as ‘thought germs’ (memes in the traditional sense) over the internet, how these ideas use our emotions to survive longer and how ‘opposing thought germs’ (divisive ideas) can survive indefinitely.

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In a similar vein, here is a near-future startup promo video by Tom Scott:
The Bubble: imagine the web without trolls, or shocks, or spam

What if you could have a perfect filter for the web? Anything you’d regret seeing or reading: it’s gone before you even see it. Welcome to the Bubble.

The 4 types of audio that people share online

Public radio produces a lot of audio — but it doesn’t always get the attention on sharing platforms that it might deserve. Our friends at NPR Digital Services want to fix that, which has led to a series of experiments. Here, NPR’s Eric Athas shares some of what they’ve found.

Nieman lab: From explainers to sounds that make you go “Whoa!”: The 4 types of audio that people share

See also: What can make audio go viral? NPR experiments with building earworms for social media

How to sound smart in your TEDx talk

Will Stephen: How to sound smart in your TEDx talk

In a hilarious talk capping off a day of new ideas at TEDxNewYork, professional funny person Will Stephen shows foolproof presentation skills to make you sound brilliant — even if you are literally saying nothing. (Full disclosure: This talk is brought to you by two TED staffers, who have watched a LOT of TED Talks.)

Perfect!

(via @ianisted)

Making podcasts: Great advice from the professionals

Various professional podcasters talk about how they make great podcasts…

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Jason Snell is a tech writer who hosts several podcasts while guesting on many more. He has written several excellent blog posts about podcasting, starting with some general advice: Don’t be intimidated.

“The great thing about podcasting is that anyone can do it. You don’t need to have access to a broadcasting company’s radio transmitter and studios packed with equipment. You can reach people with your voice right now.”

QuickTime Player is a great podcast recording tool, and it’s on every Mac.

Jason then followed up with How I podcast: Recording and Editing, two posts full of practical advice.

“Not to get all philosophical on you, but editing audio is a lot of work, and depending on what kind of a podcast you’re producing, most of it is probably not necessary. Just because you can edit a podcast within an inch of its life—clearing out pauses, removing every um and uh and awkward pause and spoken digression—doesn’t mean you must.”

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Marco Arment has some strong opinions on the importance of improving the technical quality of your podcast:

“Making your podcast easy to listen to is worth some effort.”

“Just as blogs need sensible fonts, colors, layouts, and spacing to be comfortably readable, podcasts need to be listenable. And you can’t make easily listenable podcasts without at least basic equipment and production.”

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Dan Benjamin is founder of the 5by5 podcast network and has shared a great deal of information at podcastmethod.co. There’s a comprehensive equipment guide, a series of podcasts (of course) and this video on proper microphone technique…

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Alex Blumberg is a public radio producer known for his work with This American Life and Planet Money. He recently co-founded Gimlet Media, a podcast network. Alex documented the early days of his new company in the network’s first podcast, StartUp).

Tim Ferriss interviewed Blumberg for his own podcast: How to Create a Blockbuster Podcast. It’s a special two-part episode, and the second part is a 40 minute excerpt from a masterclass Alex taught on creativeLIVE, on the art of the interview, what to ask, the power of the right question, and more.

Amongst other things Blumberg advises that you don’t ask yes or no questions, instead ask “tell me about the time when…” or “tell me the story of…” questions.

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Those links again:

• Jason Snell: Want to do a podcast? Don’t be intimidated
• Jason Snell: How I podcast: Recording
• Jason Snell: How I podcast: Editing
• Marco Arment: Easy Listening
• Dan Benjamin: The Podcast Method
• Alex Blumberg: How to Create a Blockbuster Podcast
• Alex Blumberg: StartUp

See also: How to script and record narration for video.

You are not a “content creator”

Jonathan Mann on the objectionable term ‘content creator’.

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“I am confident that enchanted objects will change how we live. They will change health. They will change transportation. They will change housing. They will change how we understand our own habits around energy and resource conservation, and they will even help us with creativity and expression. I’m confident there’s a promising future in terms of this new way of interacting and positioning ourselves relative to technology. I think one of the biggest challenges is to not think about this as computing. I don’t think there is a ‘future of computing’.”
David Rose on the IoT’s impact on our relationship with technology.

Amazon: Enchanted Objects: Design, Human Desire, and the Internet of Things by David Rose.

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Boing Boing: Molly Crabapple’s 14 rules for creative success in the Internet age

I really like some of these:

1. The number one thing that would let more independent artists exists in America is a universal basic income.

2. Companies are not loyal to you. Please never believe a company has your back. They are amoral by design and will discard you at a moment’s notice.

3. I’ve cobbled together many different streams of income, so that if the bottom falls out of one industry, I’m not ruined.

5. I’ve never had a big break. I’ve just had tiny cracks in this wall of indifference until finally the wall wasn’t there any more.

9. Never trust some Silicon Valley douchebag who’s flush with investors’ money, but telling creators to post on their platform for free or for potential crumbs of cash.

13. Don’t work for free for rich people. Seriously. Don’t don’t don’t.

See also: OpPornPixie: Molly Crabapple’s self-portrait, defaced with the hateful things people say about her on the Internet

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Emoji masks

See also:

Onion Pi: A Raspberry Pi Tor proxy

Feel like someone is snooping on you? Browse anonymously anywhere you go with the Onion Pi Tor proxy. This is fun weekend project that uses a Raspberry Pi, a USB WiFi adapter and Ethernet cable to create a small, low-power and portable privacy Pi.

Using it is easy-as-pie. First, plug the Ethernet cable into any Internet provider in your home, work, hotel or conference/event. Next, power up the Pi with the micro USB cable to your laptop or to the wall adapter. The Pi will boot up and create a new secure wireless access point called Onion Pi. Connecting to that access point will automatically route any web browsing from your computer through the anonymizing Tor network.

• Use a Raspberry Pi as an Ad Blocking Access Point!
• I have a few other posts on this blog tagged Raspberry Pi about using the Pi as a camera.
• Wildly successful crowdfunded ‘anonabox’ router accused of lying to customers – I found out about the Onion Pi a when the Anonabox backlash hit.

This is Phil Fish

This is Phil Fish, a case study in internet celebrity by Innuendo Studios:

I’m not entirely sure what to expect from having this online. I suspect it’s either going to be really contentious, or go largely unnoticed. Unnoticed, because, hey, it’s YouTube. Contentious because I don’t come down on the side of “Phil is an asshole,” largely because whether or not Phil is an asshole is irrelevant to the point I’m making (and similarly irrelevant to my life), but talking about Phil and saying anything other than “Phil is an asshole” tends to make you a lot of enemies. Sorta like how not blowing smoke up the PS4’s ass proves that you’re a Microsoft stooge.

Whatever. Enjoy!

(via @viticci)