“The foundation of Groklaw is over. I can’t do Groklaw without your input”, Pamela Jones writes today. “It really was a collaborative effort, and there is now no private way, evidently, to collaborate”.
She responds to recent revelations that the U.S. government reads your email: “The owner of Lavabit tells us that he’s stopped using email and if we knew what he knew, we’d stop too. There is no way to do Groklaw without email”.
We’re doing the worst thing people can do: lying to our young. Nobody, not even this president, who was swept to victory in large part by the raw enthusiasm of college kids, has the stones to tell the truth: that a lot of them will end up being pawns in a predatory con game designed to extract the equivalent of home-mortgage commitment from 17-year-olds dreaming of impossible careers as nautical archaeologists or orchestra conductors.
One former law student I contacted for this story had a nervous breakdown while struggling to pay off six-figure debt. It wasn’t until he tapped into one of the few growth industries open to young Americans that his outlook brightened. ‘I got my life back on track by working for a marijuana delivery service in Manhattan’, he says.
Matt Taibbi
Today, in the Guardian, former CIA analyst John Kiriakou accuses the Obama Administration of abusing the 1917 Espionage Act, claiming that “only 10 people in American history have been charged with espionage for leaking classified information, seven of them under Barack Obama”.
From Day One, the Obama Administration sought to plug any leaks. What’s said in the Oval Office stays in the Oval Office. That’s context for understanding the aggressive approach to whistleblowers. It’s philosophical. The current White House sees leaks as betrayals, so why not view whistleblowing as treason?
Last night I came home from San Diego Comic-Con Day 1 to find the newest Rolling Stone open, facedown on the living room carpet; the controversial cover, with Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, stared up like Jim Morrison. I had heard about the controversy over the photo, and accusations that the magazine somehow glorified the bomb suspect, for days. So had my wife, who finished Janet Reitman’s riveting account, soon as we both settled in for the evening.
Anne never reads Rolling Stone. But the cover caught her attention enough that she consumed this one article, neglecting the New Yorker, which also arrived in the mail yesterday, coincidentally containing a smart editorial defending RS editors. She doesn’t approve of the cover, and yet it clearly was effective enough. As an editor, I must commend Rolling Stone for doing with a picture what tabloids like the New York Post or online aggregator Huffington Post does with snarky headlines: Get people to read the story.
My last post on this site is dated December 2010. Luckily no squatters took residence in my absence. I stopped writing here simply because I didn’t have time. My responsibilities for BetaNews commanded too much of me, and I shifted personal blogging to Google+. Both are fine places to live—shared common areas—but I seek solitude and escape from the daily news grind; also, I’m sick to death of tech.
I’m not a computer or gadget geek. It’s just my career path. Twenty years ago this autumn, what was then Washington Journalism Review, now American Journalism Review, posted a story that changed my life: “The Future is Now” by Kate McKenna.
All journalism is advocacy journalism. No matter how it’s presented, every report by every reporter advances someone’s point of view…to pretend there’s such a thing as journalism without advocacy is just silly; nobody in this […]
The apartment was strangely silent last night and darker than usual. Gone was the flickering light filling the center room as one of us scanned the program guide. A year later than planned, we dismantled the TV shrine and took back the living room from the false idol. Henceforth, we will worship at a different altar. Finally, I cut cable’s cord—IPTV, really, but we all call it the other, eh?
I feel anxiety and elation at the dramatic change, which allowed us to rearrange the furniture such that the living room is more open, more inviting, and more suited to entertaining real people. The television now resides in the bedroom, more for the benefit of my wife’s sleepless nights (the thing is narcotic). We’ll stream from Amazon Prime, Hulu, and Netflix primarily—haha, maybe even iTunes. I had planned Google Play by way of Nexus Q, but the search giant nixes that option.
I am at IKEA and some guy asks for change. But I rarely carry cash and tell him so. I reach in my pocket and pull out four pennies. He looks and says, “I’ll ask […]
BlackBerry’s aggressive response to Detwiler Fenton claims of high z10 return rates is shocking and refreshing. CEO Thorsten Heins statements that return rates are “right in line with the industry” while calling the report a […]
Fourteen days using Google’s first computer, my decision is made: I would buy one and will someday (income taxes are brutal, so my options are limited short-term). I firmly believe that most buyers willing to spend $1,299 (32GB WiFi) or $1,449 (64GB 4G LTE) will be satisfied with Chromebook Pixel. That’s because I presume they wouldn’t dole out that much without really examining how the computer would fit their lifestyle; also, Google seeks the same people coming from Windows who might buy MacBook Pro 13-inch.
Seven days ago, in my hands-on review, I looked at the overall experience and price benefits from the perspective of hardware. Here, I start to answer larger question: Can Pixel be your main and only machine? For most people, the answer is an unequivocal “No”. But “most people” isn’t Google’s target market.
Kuma sits with me in our courtyard, autumn 2011, back when I still used Windows and before we lost him. I’m not sure what’s up with his expression, which is unbecoming. But I like the […]
Five years ago today, my wife, daughter, and I relocated to #sandiego . We came here to be close to my father-in-law, who turns 91 before this year ends. Much has changed since Oct. 15, 2007.