Tag Archives: tech

WATCH: The Case for Wiretapping… Jesus? Fiore Cartoon

by Arkady549e Posted on June 27, 2013

Mother Jones

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Mark Fiore is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and animator whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Examiner, and dozens of other publications. He is an active member of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, and has a website featuring his work.

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WATCH: The Case for Wiretapping… Jesus? Fiore Cartoon

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Make Solar Cells in a… Microwave?

by jogakatowicefitness Posted on June 21, 2013

earth911

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Make Solar Cells in a… Microwave?

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Green Building Materials to Reach $254 Billion Market Value by 2020

by Bernadine Posted on June 20, 2013

earth911

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Green Building Materials to Reach $254 Billion Market Value by 2020

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Steubenville Sequel: Can Anonymous Crack a 12-Year-Old Case?

by Cindy Lin Posted on June 11, 2013

Mother Jones

­­A few weeks after Amanda Stevenson was allegedly drugged and gang-raped, the 14-year-old high-school freshman packed a bag and fled her tiny hometown of Laurelville, Ohio, for a new life in suburban Virginia. But memories of that horrific night still haunt her, she says: the party in the hunting cabin deep in the woods. The locked room full of laughing young men. Trying to fight her way out of a fog of tranquilizer to say, “I feel strange” or “Take me home” or even simply “No.” Her naked body flopping like a rag doll as the teens passed her around and fondled her. Blacking out and awakening to find one guy after another climbing atop and penetrating her.

More MoJo Anonymous coverage


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Exclusive: Meet the Woman Who Kicked Off Anonymous’ Anti-Rape Operations


Anonymous Threatens Westboro Baptist Church


Anonymous Hacks Military Megacontractor


Anonymous and Libertarians Protest CISPA; Tech Giants Don’t Give a Damn

Despite the passing of years, Stevenson, now 26, says she still has trouble sleeping, still winces at any mention of the word “rape,” and still sometimes curls up in a corner, sobbing and angry. So one day this past January her fiancé, Tim Tolka, offered to help her go after the rapists, if that what she wanted.

She wasn’t sure it was. But then she read a story about a high-school rape in Steubenville, Ohio, that had become national news thanks to the efforts of Anonymous, the hacker collective. “It was just so similar to what I had experienced,” Stevenson recalls. She decided then and there that her silence made her part of the problem.

The very next day, using a pseudonym, Tolka posted a plea on the Anonymous website AnonNews.org. “I have information about a second case of gang rape by local athletes in a small Ohio town that was squashed by the authorities,” he wrote. The couple went on to post the names, a phone number, and links to the Facebook pages of two of the men Stevenson said had raped her.

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Steubenville Sequel: Can Anonymous Crack a 12-Year-Old Case?

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Spy Kids: The NSA Is Looking for the Next Generation of Sneaky Geeks

by Billy Jobs Posted on June 7, 2013

Mother Jones

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Although the National Security Agency is incredibly secretive and could probably care less what you think, it does have an interest in helping our kids become great mathematicians. The NSA is the largest employer of mathematicians in the country, so, the agency explains, it is “critically dependent on the continuing development of first-class American mathematicians.”

Enter the CryptoKids, the NSA’s band of codemaking and codebreaking cartoon characters. There’s Cyndi, one half of the CyberTwins, a cat with braces, two-tone hair, and what may be Google Glass. Her advice for online-savvy kids: “Mom says that once something is out on the Internet, it will be there forever, and ‘might come back to haunt us one day.'” Her brother Cy, a malware victim, also values his digital privacy and security: “The stuff on my computer is really important to me, and I don’t want anyone getting in and messing it up again!”

The CryptoKids. NSA

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Spy Kids: The NSA Is Looking for the Next Generation of Sneaky Geeks

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Judge at Center of NSA Spying Controversy Attended Expenses-Paid Terrorism Seminar

by OfeliaPPN Posted on June 7, 2013

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the Center for Public Integrity website.

US District Judge Roger Vinson, who signed an order requiring Verizon to give the National Security Agency telephone records for tens of millions of American customers, attended an expenses-paid judicial seminar sponsored by a libertarian think tank that featured lectures from a vocal proponent of executive branch powers.

More on the NSA’s electronic surveillance program.


NSA Spying: An Obama Scandal?


The Domestic Surveillance Boom, From Bush to Obama


Justice Department Fights Release of Secret Court Opinion Finding Unconstitutional Surveillance


Judge at Center of NSA Spying Controversy Attended Expenses-Paid Terrorism Seminar


What Is the NSA Doing With All Those Phone Records?

Vinson, whose term on the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court began in 2006 and expired last month, was the only member of the special court to attend the August 2008 conference sponsored by the Foundation for Research on Economics & the Environment, according to disclosure records filed by the federal judge.

The Center for Public Integrity collected the disclosure records as part of an investigative report that revealed how large corporations and conservative foundations routinely sponsor ideologically driven educational conferences for state and federal judges.

It’s unclear which lectures Vinson attended during the “Terrorism, Civil Liberty, & National Security” seminar. FREE’s website only provides a general agenda for the program and no lecture transcripts.

But Eric Posner, a University of Chicago law professor who delivered two lectures, argued in a 2007 book he co-wrote — Terror in the Balance: Security, Liberty, and the Courts—that “the executive branch, not Congress or the judicial branch, should make the tradeoff between security and liberty.”

The book also asserts that while “no one doubts that injustices occur during emergencies, the type of judicial scrutiny that would be needed to prevent the injustices that have occurred during American history would cause more harm than good by interfering with justified executive actions.”

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Judge at Center of NSA Spying Controversy Attended Expenses-Paid Terrorism Seminar

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WATCH: What If Regular People Tried Using Apple’s Tax Tricks? Fiore Cartoon

by y0afvun Posted on June 6, 2013

Mother Jones

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Mark Fiore is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and animator whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Examiner, and dozens of other publications. He is an active member of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, and has a website featuring his work.

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WATCH: What If Regular People Tried Using Apple’s Tax Tricks? Fiore Cartoon

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Silicon Valley’s Awful Race and Gender Problem in 3 Mind-Blowing Charts

by s1cx54s Posted on June 6, 2013

Mother Jones

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Catherine Bracy moved to San Francisco from Chicago during the 2012 campaign to run Team Obama’s technology field office, a first-of-its-kind project that enlisted Silicon Valley’s whiz-kid engineers to build software for the campaign. (That tech savvy, of course, played a pivotal role in Obama’s victory.) What struck Bracy about the tech-crazed Bay Area, she recounted Thursday in a talk at the Personal Democracy Forum tech conference, was the jarring inequality visible everywhere in Silicon Valley—between rich and poor, between men and women, between white people and, well, everyone else.

Bracy’s talk featured some eye-popping charts on Silicon Valley’s race and gender divide. Here are three of them.

In 2010, the latest year for which Bracy could find data, 89 percent of California companies that got crucial seed funding were founded by men. What percentage were all-female founding teams? Just three percent.

CB Insights, Venture Capital Human Capital Report, January-June 2010

Bracy looked at that funding breakdown by race—and there’s even less diversity. In 2010, less than 1 percent of the founders of Silicon Valley companies were black, a figure so small Bracy didn’t put it on her white-guy-dominated pie chart.

CB Insights, Venture Capital Human Capital Report, January-June 2010

And when looking at the economic winners and losers in Silicon Valley, that racial disparity really pops out. From 2009 to 2011, income for blacks living in Silicon Valley dropped by 18 percent, compared to a decrease of 4 percent nationally. Hispanics fared badly, too. The big winners were whites and Asian Americans.

Silicon Valley Foundation/Joint Venture Silicon Valley, 2013 Silicon Valley Index

Oh, one more thing: According to Bracy, women make 49 cents for every dollar men make in Silicon Valley. You don’t need a chart to feel the force of that statistic.

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Silicon Valley’s Awful Race and Gender Problem in 3 Mind-Blowing Charts

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Here’s What Antarctica Looks Like Under All That Ice

by Aaron Duff Posted on June 6, 2013

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the Wired website and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Check out the most detailed map of a continent never truly seen by human eyes: the de-iced surface of Antarctica. By virtually peeling back the frozen ice sheet and studying the land beneath, researchers can get a better sense of how the southern pole of our planet could react to climate change.

Bedmap2 was created by the British Antarctic Survey, and used decades of data to produce this detailed view of the frozen continent. NASA’s contribution to the dataset includes surface measurements from its now-retired orbiting Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat), and results from several years of flyovers by specialized aircraft that collected radar and other data measuring changes in the thickness of sea ice, glaciers, and ice sheets as part of Operation IceBridge.

The work improves on the decade-old Bedmap project, which virtually thawed the continent, but at lower resolution. Both maps combine information on ice thickness, bedrock topography, and surface elevation. Bedmap2 added millions of extra data points and also covers a wider swath of land than its predecessor. Over on NASA’s site, you can compare the two datasets by sliding between them.

Researchers need good information about the under-ice ground of Antarctica to better simulate its response to changing environmental conditions. Antarctica’s ice is not static but constantly flows to the sea. Knowing the shape of the bedrock and the thickness of the ice allows scientists to model these movements and predict how they could change in the future.

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

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Here’s What Antarctica Looks Like Under All That Ice

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Weekend Longreads: Tech Optimists, Cyberhavens, and Silicon Valley Politics

by Cynthia Trevino Posted on June 1, 2013

Mother Jones

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When all the big names in tech—Google, Twitter, Facebook, every website you visit regularly—got together and defeated the Stop Online Piracy Act last year, it was heralded as Silicon Valley’s political awakening. But Northern California’s particular strain of optimism and libertarianism doesn’t play well with the reality of DC politics. Just last month, Paypal founder Elon Musk pulled out of Mark Zuckerberg’s new political action group FWD.us after it ran ads in support of Arctic drilling.

Technology can change the world—for the better, as Silicon Valley likes to say. But it is still bound by laws and bureaucratic politics, and conflicts come up time and again, whether the task at hand involves laying underground cables, making Chicago a paperless city, regulating taxis, or attempting to create your own micronation.

For more longreads from Mother Jones check out our archive. And, of course, if you’re not following @longreads and @motherjones on Twitter yet, get on that.

“Change the World” | George Packer | The New Yorker | May 2013

New Yorker staffer George Packer grew up in Silicon Valley. Decades later he returns to find the shops along University Avenue replaced with headquarters of Google, Facebook, and PayPal. But even as America’s wealth has shifted to the West Coast, political power is a different story. Parker traces the libertarian strains of thinking in the Valley, which can seem uninterested in solving bigger problems:

“San Francisco is a place where we can go downstairs and get in a Uber and go to dinner at a place that i got a restaurant reservation for halfway there,” Path founder Dave Morin said. “And, if not, we could go to my place, and on the way there I could order takeout food from my favorite restaurant on Postmates, and a bike messenger will go and pick it up for me. We’ll watch it happen on the phone. These things are crazy ideas.”
It suddenly occurred to me that the hottest tech start-ups are solving all the problems of being twenty years old, with cash on hand, because that’s who thinks them up.

Also worth reading: this response by writer Steven Berlin Johnson (who is name-checked in the New Yorker piece)—and Packer’s response to that. For those interested in a historical (by tech standards) perspective, Paulina Borsook identified a similar problem in her 1996 essay “Cyberselfish.”

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Weekend Longreads: Tech Optimists, Cyberhavens, and Silicon Valley Politics

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