Tag Archives: people

Tired of Remembering Passwords? Try Swallowing Them Instead.

by Keenan11Mzrcnj Posted on April 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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Chances are you’re bad at passwords. Most of us are. A recent statistic offered up by Jonathan LeBlanc, the global head of developer advocacy at PayPal, suggests that nearly 10 percent of people have a password consisting of 123456, 12345678, or, simply, “password.”

LeBlanc has some bold thoughts on improving this state of affairs. As he told the Wall Street Journal last week, “embeddable, injectable, and ingestible devices” are the next step companies will use to identify consumers for “mobile payments and other sensitive online interactions.”

From the Journal:

While there are more advanced methods to increase login security, like location verification, identifying people by their habits like the way they type in their passwords, fingerprints and other biometric identifiers, these can lead to false negative results, where valid users can’t log in to their online services, and false positives, where invalid users can log in.

Mr. Leblanc pointed to more accurate methods of identity verification, like thin silicon chips which can be embedded into the skin. The wireless chips can contain ECG sensors that monitor the heart’s unique electrical activity, and communicate the data via wireless antennae to “wearable computer tattoos.”

Ingestible capsules that can detect glucose levels and other unique internal features can use a person’s body as a way to identify them and beam that data out.

To be fair, LeBlanc told the paper that these specific technologies aren’t necessarily things that PayPal is planning, but he’s been raising the possibility in a presentation he’s been giving, and has said the online dealbroker is “definitely looking at the identity field” as a means of allowing users a more secure way to identify themselves.

You don’t have to be a “mark of the beast” person or a conspiracy theorist to have concerns. Indeed, what could possibly go wrong with a little implanted device that reads your vein patterns or your heart’s unique activity or blood glucose levels just so you can seamlessly buy that cup of Starbucks? Wouldn’t an insurance company love to use that information to decide that you had one too many donuts—so it won’t be covering that bypass surgery after all?

As the Wall Street Journal cautiously notes, “Mr. Leblanc admits that there’s still a ways to go before cultural norms catch up with ingestible and injectable ID devices.”

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Tired of Remembering Passwords? Try Swallowing Them Instead.

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This Video Game Shows What Sexual Harassment Can Feel Like

by MelisaEPGY Posted on April 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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In most video games, the player’s choices determine the ending. In Freshman Year, a short new work by game designer Nina Freeman, your character can wear jeans or a skirt as she prepares for a night out, go alone or with a friend, drink a little or a lot. But all paths lead to the same outcome: a creepy encounter with a man in the dark.

Freshman Year, which is free to play, explores what it feels like to get unwanted sexual attention. Like much of Freeman’s work, it’s autobiographical—based on an experience Freeman had during her first month of college.

“You feel like you’re doing this everyday life thing, and then someone comes in and disrupts that,” Freeman says. “I wanted to reflect that sense of disruption, where you feel like everything is fine, and then suddenly it’s not okay.”

Players take on the role of Nina, a girl making plans to meet her friend Jen at a bar. You navigate the game mostly by selecting conversation bubbles. For example, Nina can respond to a text from Jen with “lets not get as destroyed as last weekend lol” or “i will get you a drink tonight. i owe you like twenty haha.”

No matter what dialogue you choose for Nina, you lose control over the plotline when she ends up alone with the bar’s bouncer, who tells her she’s pretty and cuts her off as she tries to go back into the bar. Things escalate from there. The game has only one ending.

Freeman—whose other games include Ladylike, which focuses on a 12-year-old girl with a hypercritical mother, and Cibele, which is about her experience of having sex for the first time—says she designs games for the same reason some people keep a diary. “I usually want to make games about memories that I have complex feelings about, that I don’t really understand and need to sit down with,” she says.

In college, Freeman wrote and studied poetry. Confessional poets like Elizabeth Bishop and Frank O’Hara gave her a model for the work she wanted to do: “games that help players try and get close to someone else’s lived experience.”

That impulse makes her part of a wave of designers putting out noncompetitive, often narrative-heavy games. Gone Home, in which players solve a family’s mysteries by exploring an abandoned mansion, won a slew of high-profile awards when it came out in 2013; one critic called it “the future of storytelling.” (Freeman didn’t contribute to Gone Home but is currently working on another project with Fullbright, the Portland-based studio that designed it.) The same year, Depression Quest, which simulates the experience of depression, sparked the online culture war known as Gamergate.

Freeman says she feels encouraged by the response she’s gotten in the two weeks since she released Freshman Year. “People will tweet at me after they play it and be like, ‘Wow, I feel really upset now, but that was amazing,'” she says. “It’s good that they’re connecting with that aspect of it. That’s what I was going for.”

However, she’s careful to clarify that her game isn’t meant to speak for everyone who’s endured unwelcome sexual advances. “It’s obviously a game about sexual harassment, but I don’t want it to be a universal game about sexual harassment in general,” she says. “I always want to emphasize to people that this is just my experience.”

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This Video Game Shows What Sexual Harassment Can Feel Like

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Mike Judge Prepares to Heap Fresh Ridicule on "Silicon Valley"

by BerylThielen Posted on April 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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Judge and the Pied Piper crew talk “tip to tip efficiency.” Kyle Platts

Mike Judge is dog tired. It’s 7:30 p.m. in Los Angeles, and he’s headed home after a 13-hour shift directing the second season of his delightfully snide HBO comedy Silicon Valley. He knows the turf well enough. After earning a physics degree from the University of California-San Diego in 1985, Judge, now 52, worked a few tech jobs himself, including a miserable gig as a test engineer for a Silicon Valley hardware maker.

But Judge loved to draw and tinker. On a whim, in 1989, he bought a vintage Bolex camera and used it to make Office Space, an animated short that got picked up by Comedy Central. A subsequent short, Frog Baseball, introduced the world to a pair of depraved young losers, and the rest is history: Beavis and Butt-head became an MTV staple and Judge went on to create, among other hits, King of the Hill and the 1999 feature film Office Space, now a cult classic. Silicon Valley, whose second season premieres Sunday, April 12, follows a crew of misfit hackers whose file-compression algorithm, Pied Piper, sparks a bidding war. The series, packed with hilarious dialogue, makes a mockery of the tech world’s hippie-capitalist hubris, smarmy lawyers, eccentric CEOs, and glaring deficit of X chromosomes.

Check out the original trailer, and then we’ll chat with the director:

Mother Jones: With apps like Titstare, protesters vomiting on Yahoo buses, and tech-libertarian island havens, a satirist hardly needs to exaggerate. Silicon Valley must seem like one big fat target.

Mike Judge: It’s definitely a wealth of material. Titstare actually happened after we had written and shot the Nip Alert episode, but hadn’t aired yet, so sometimes things almost happen simultaneously.

MJ: You make fun of how these companies all claim to be making the world a better place. Do you think they actually believe that?

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Mike Judge Prepares to Heap Fresh Ridicule on "Silicon Valley"

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The People Who Pick Your Organic Strawberries Have Had It With Rat-Infested Camps

by JoannWreford Posted on March 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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When most of us think of Mexican food, we visualize tacos, burritos, and chiles rellenos. But we should probably add cucumbers, squash, melons, and berries to the list—more or less the whole supermarket produce aisle, in fact. The United States imports more than a quarter of the fresh fruit and nearly a third of the vegetables we consume. And a huge portion of that foreign-grown bounty—69 percent of vegetables and 37 percent of fruit—comes from our neighbor to the south.

Not surprisingly, as I’ve shown before, labor conditions on Mexico’s large export-oriented farms tend to be dismal: subpar housing, inadequate sanitation, poverty wages, and often, labor arrangements that approach slavery. But this week, workers in Baja California, a major ag-producing state just south of California, are standing up. Here’s the Los Angeles Times: “Thousands of laborers in the San Quintín Valley 200 miles south of San Diego went on strike Tuesday, leaving the fields and greenhouses full of produce that is now on the verge of rotting.”

In addition to the work stoppage, striking workers shut down 55 miles of the Trans-Peninsular Highway, a key thoroughfare for moving goods from Baja California to points north, the Mexico City newspaper La Jornada (in Spanish) reported after the strike started on March 17.

The blockade has been lifted, at least temporarily. But the “road remains hard to traverse as rogue groups stop and, at times, attack truck drivers,” the LA Times reports. And the strike itself continues. The uprising is starting to affect US supply chains. An executive for the organic-produce titan Del Cabo Produce, which grows vegetables south of the San Quintín Valley but needs to traverse it to reach its US customers, told the Times that the clash is “creating a lot of logistical problems…We’re having to cut orders.” And “Costco reported that organic strawberries are in short supply because about 80% of the production this time of year comes from Baja California,” the Times added. The US trade publication Produce News downplayed the strike’s impact, calling it “minor.”

Meanwhile, the strike’s organizers plan to launch a campaign to get US consumers to boycott products grown in the region, mainly tomatoes, cucumbers, and strawberries, inspired by the successful ’70s-era actions of the California-based United Farm Workers, headed by Cesar Chavez, La Jornada reported Tuesday. And current UFW president Arturo Rodriguez has issued a statement of solidarity with the San Quintín strikers.

Such cross-border organizing is critical, because the people who work on Mexico’s export-focused farms tend to be from the same places as the people who work on the vast California and Florida operations that supply the bulk of our domestically grown produce: the largely indigenous states of southern Mexico. And the final market for the crops they tend and harvest is also the same: US supermarkets and restaurants.

In a stunning four-part series last year, LA Times reporter Richard Marosi documented the harsh conditions that prevail on the Mexican farms that churn out our food. He found:

Many farm laborers are essentially trapped for months at a time in rat-infested camps, often without beds and sometimes without functioning toilets or a reliable water supply.
Some camp bosses illegally withhold wages to prevent workers from leaving during peak harvest periods.
Laborers often go deep in debt paying inflated prices for necessities at company stores. Some are reduced to scavenging for food when their credit is cut off. It’s common for laborers to head home penniless at the end of a harvest.
Those who seek to escape their debts and miserable living conditions have to contend with guards, barbed-wire fences, and sometimes threats of violence from camp supervisors.
Major US companies have done little to enforce social responsibility guidelines that call for basic worker protections such as clean housing and fair pay practices.

As for their counterparts to the north, migrant-reliant US farms tend to treat workers harshly as well, as the excellent 2014 documentary Food Chains demonstrates. The trailer, below, is a good crash course on what it’s like to be at the bottom of the US food system. In honor of National Farm Worker Awareness Week, the producers are making it available for $0.99 on iTunes. And here‘s an interview with the film’s director, Sanjay Rawal, by Mother Jones‘ Maddie Oatman.

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The People Who Pick Your Organic Strawberries Have Had It With Rat-Infested Camps

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Everything Changed on 9/11, Starting With Ted Cruz’s Musical Taste

by CorinaBadilla Posted on March 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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During a segment of CBS’s This Morning show, Senator Ted Cruz attempted to explain how the attacks on September 11 moved him to shun the soulless genre of rock music and pick up country:

You know, music is interesting. I grew up listening to classic rock and I’ll tell you sort of an odd story. My music tastes changed on 9/11. And it’s a very strange—I actually, intellectually, find this very curious, but on 9/11, I didn’t like how rock music responded. And country music collectively, the way they responded, it resonated with me and I have to say, it—just as a gut level, I had an emotional reaction that says, “These are my people.” And so ever since 2001 I listen to country music, but I’m an odd country music fan because I didn’t listen to it prior to 2001.

September 11, the day the music died for our only declared presidential candidate and now the phoniest dude you’ll run into at a country concert. This is going to be a wildly entertaining road to 2016.

(h/t Slate)

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Everything Changed on 9/11, Starting With Ted Cruz’s Musical Taste

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We’re Pumping So Much Groundwater That It’s Causing the Oceans to Rise

by KennithDjs Posted on March 19, 2015

Mother Jones

Irrigation in California’s San Joaquin Valley GomezDavid/iStock

This article was originally published by Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Pump too much groundwater and wells go dry—that’s obvious.

But there is another consequence that gets little attention as a hotter, drier planet turns increasingly to groundwater for life support.

So much water is being pumped out of the ground worldwide that it is contributing to global sea level rise, a phenomenon tied largely to warming temperatures and climate change.

It happens when water is hoisted out of the earth to irrigate crops and supply towns and cities, then finds its way via rivers and other pathways into the world’s oceans. Since 1900, some 4,500 cubic kilometers of groundwater around the world—enough to fill Lake Tahoe 30 times—have done just that.

Geophysical Research Letters

“Long-term groundwater depletion represents a large transfer of water from the continents to the oceans,” retired hydrogeologist Leonard Konikow wrote earlier this year in one article. “Thus, groundwater depletion represents a small but nontrivial contributor to SLR sea-level rise.”

Sea levels have risen 7 to 8 inches since the late 19th century and are expected to rise more rapidly by 2100. The biggest factors are associated with climate change: melting glaciers and other ice and the thermal expansion of warming ocean waters.

Groundwater flowing out to sea added another half-inch—6 to 7 percent of overall sea level rise from 1900 to 2008, Konikow reported in a 2011 article in Geophysical Research Letters. “That really surprised a lot of people,” he said in a recent interview with Reveal.

Konikow also has reported that 1,000 cubic kilometers—twice the volume of Lake Erie—were depleted from aquifers in the US from 1900 to 2008, and the pace of the pumping is increasing.

Geophysical Research Letters

In California, so much groundwater has been pumped from aquifers in parts of the San Joaquin Valley that the land itself is starting to sink like a giant pie crust, wreaking havoc with roads, bridges and water delivery canals.

Not only is groundwater growing scarce, but we’re pumping out older and older water. In parts of California, cities and farms are tapping reserves that fell to Earth during a much wetter climatic regime—the ice age, a phenomenon that Reveal covered earlier this month and which raises questions about future supplies as the climate turns drier.

Last week, NASA senior water scientist Jay Famiglietti warned that “the state has only about one year of water supply left in its reservoirs, and our strategic backup supply, groundwater, is rapidly disappearing.”

According to Konikow, groundwater overdraft in the US accounted for about 22 percent of global groundwater depletion from 1900 to 2008, contributing about an eighth of an inch to global sea level rise.

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We’re Pumping So Much Groundwater That It’s Causing the Oceans to Rise

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Vanuatu’s President: "Yes, Climate Change Is Contributing to This"

by Niki0875asxwik Posted on March 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared at the Guardian and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The president of Vanuatu says climate change is contributing to more extreme weather conditions and cyclone seasons, after cyclone Pam ripped through the island nation.

The damage from the Category 5 storm to the island nation has been extensive, and is still being assessed as aid workers scrambled to get to affected areas on Monday morning.

The official death toll remains at six, with many more injured, and is expected to rise as communication begins to be restored.

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Vanuatu’s President: "Yes, Climate Change Is Contributing to This"

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Why a German Court Just Ordered A Vaccine Skeptic to Pay $100K

by DixieHarden Posted on March 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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Four years ago, vaccine-skeptical German biologist Stefan Lanka posed a challenge on his website: Prove to him that measles is, in fact, a virus. To the first person who could do that, he promised a whopping 100 thousand Euros (about $106,000).

Despite loads of long-standing medical evidence proving the existence of the measles virus, Lanka believes that measles is a psychosomatic disease that results from trauma. “People become ill after traumatic separations,” he told a German newspaper.

German doctor David Barden took him up on the challenge. Barden gathered six separate studies showing that measles is indeed a virus. Lanka dismissed his findings.

But today, a district court in southern Germany found that Barden’s evidence provides sufficient proof to have satisfied Lanka’s challenge. Which means Lanka now has to cough up the promised cash.

This issue has taken on new urgency due to a measles epidemic in Berlin that began in October. Health officials announced last Friday that 111 new cases had been reported in the previous week, bringing the total number to 724. The majority of those affected are unvaccinated; last month an 18-month-old died of the disease.

Lanka said he plans to appeal the court’s decision.

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Why a German Court Just Ordered A Vaccine Skeptic to Pay $100K

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This Fake App Just Summed Up Everything That’s Wrong With Silicon Valley

by AlyciaHeck Posted on March 12, 2015

Mother Jones

In Silicon Valley, a group of mostly white, mostly male twentysomethings have built a multibillion-dollar empire of sharing apps: shared housing (AirBnB), shared cars (Uber), shared dog-sitting (DogVacay)…you get the idea. But the so-called “sharing economy” doesn’t actually share equally with everyone. One fake app wants to change that.

WellDeserved is an app that helps you “monetize” your privilege—be it racial, gender-based, or socioeconomic—by sharing it (temporarily, of course) with other people. The fictional app was the winning entry at last month’s Comedy Hack Day in San Francisco, where creative agency Cultivated Wit challenged contestants to come up with a comedic app idea and pitch it to judges, all in 48 hours.

The app’s promo video will make you laugh and cry: A Google employee sells his free Google lunch to a guest for $10, a dude charges a black man $5 to hail a cab on his behalf, and another guy walks a woman home so she won’t get catcalled, asking himself, “Why don’t I walk with them, spare them the harassment, and charge ’em like five bucks?”

The creators’ (fake) plan for making the (fake) app work is summed up perfectly: “Our business plan is that VCs will just give us money. Because this is San Francisco, and we have an idea.”

This post has been updated.

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This Fake App Just Summed Up Everything That’s Wrong With Silicon Valley

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Uber wants to empower women using … Uber

by ZDISammieivpwm Posted on March 10, 2015

Uber wants to empower women using … Uber

By on 10 Mar 2015commentsShare

Right now, plenty of people are down on Uber for things like disregarding the safety of women, having a douche-y nightmare human as a CEO, and destroying (consensual!) taxi sex. So it’s sort of surprising that the mega-startup announced today, in partnership with U.N. Women, that it’s committed to creating 1 million Uber-driving jobs for women around the world over the next five years.

On one hand, yes: Creating opportunities for women to support themselves financially, especially in developing countries where said opportunities may be few and far between, is a really, really worthy goal. Also, having more women drivers is an excellent step toward the increased safety of female passengers. On the other hand, there have been many protests that Uber drivers can’t support themselves on what they make from the startup alone and that these types of “disruptive,” “sharing economy” startups are nothing new at all, in terms of exploitation of labor. In light of all that, this offer seems a little … lackluster.

Read Uber’s (rather sparse) announcement of its new initiative here, or watch the video below. Just like when your shitty ex-boyfriend promises that things will be totally different this time around, I might recommend a little healthy skepticism.

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Uber wants to empower women using … Uber

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