Only helpful for those local to Toronto, but it’s great for those of us that are. I particularly enjoy Pilot and Propeller, though admit that my favorite place to get coffee these days is from Ideal Coffee (the Red Sea beans are absolutely terrific). Still, I look forward to trying the whole list and determining if there is a company that can unseat Ideal Coffee or Pilot and Propeller!
Roger Ailes Got Us To Mistrust Everyone—Including Himself:
The best evidence that Ailes no longer wields the power he once did? If reports are to be believed, Ailes himself is about to step down from the network he defined. On its surface, the reasons have nothing to do with Fox News’ diminishing political influence. Gretchen Carlson, a former anchor, has accused Ailes of harassment, and apparently a number of other women—including Kelly—have come forward with their own accusations. James and Lachlan Murdoch, Rupert’s sons, have long looked to boot Ailes, and now they seem to have found the opportunity to do so. Still, it’s hard to imagine that Ailes would be so vulnerable if his role as GOP kingmaker were still secure.
He wouldn’t be ‘vulnerable’ to being fired for sexual misconduct if he still was influential in, or with, the Republican Party. This is the definition of casual sexism in journalism.
Scientists Release Air that Has Been Trapped for 800 Million Years:
“There was a lot of debate as to what the oxygen content was 800 million or more years ago,” said Blamey in a statement. “We’ve come up with a direct method of analyzing the content of those trapped fossil gasses in the atmosphere and found that the oxygen level was approximately half of what it is today.”
To get a nice healthy wiff of that nearly billion-year-old atmosphere, the team placed halite crystals from southwest Australia in a vacuum chamber and crushed them, releasing the actual air that circulated during this bygone era in our planet’s history.
“It’s a direct measurement of the atmosphere of that time, not an interpretation,” emphasized study co-author Uwe Brand.
Modern science is amazing.
Over the longer term, it’s likely that personal or sensitive data will continue to be hacked and released, and often for political purposes. This in turn raises a set of questions that we should all consider, related to all the traditional questions of openness and accountability. Weaponized transparency of private data of people in democratic institutions by unaccountable entities is destructive to our political norms, and to an open, discursive politics.
Weaponized transparency, especially when it affects the lives of ordinary persons who take an interest in the political process, is dangerous for a range of reasons. And responsible journalists – to say nothing of publishers such as Wikileaks – ought to be condemned when they fail to adequately protect the private interests of such ordinary persons.
This article discusses how, following the Second World War and advent of the Cold War, the United States and British governments worked with oil companies to plan ‘denial’ operations should the USSR invade the Middle East. Core to the plan was for combined CIA and military, along with corporate employees, efforts to strategically blow up parts of the refineries such that the Soviets would be unable to take advantage of the oil reserves and thus empower the West to invade and ideally retake the strategic resource.
The efforts were developed and iterated on for almost a decade, though towards the end the focus shifted from the USSR and towards nationalist governments in the region. Moreover, what started as a denial approach transformed into one where oil production would be maintained: the thirst for oil on the part of the United States and Britain meant that turning off the taps could be a serious blow to their economic and military efforts.
These were contingency operations but they were taken seriously. Explosives were moved and put in place and the British even established plans for nuclear assaults to prevent the fields from falling into non-Western hands. It raises the question of whether similar kinds of activities are planned, today, or whether cooler heads now are responsible for establishing contingency plans when it comes to core resources that contemporary Western economies rely upon. And would nuclear or other explosives be used, now, or is this where we would see a first and genuinely far-reaching aspect of hard ‘cyber’ power?
In Toronto there’s a small group of people that are responsible for spending big and not thinking about the longer-term implications of their decisions now. This article highlights the current life that one such person has, with lots of time spent on how much he travels and drinks and parties while he travels. The subject of the piece consistently devalues experiences that are inexpensive, a devaluation of those who decide to have a family, and a broader (incorrect) focus on life just being about what wine you drink or what car you (temporarily) drive. It’s definitely one of the lowest ‘hate reads’ I’ve come across in recent memory.
The RCMP Is Trying to Sneak Facial and Tattoo Recognition Into Canada:
“That the RCMP is looking at purchasing this kind of capability is in line with what the FBI and other [law enforcement agencies] around the world are doing,” said Christopher Parsons, a postdoctoral fellow at Toronto-based surveillance research hub Citizen Lab.
A previously published RCMP document notes that all of the new system’s scanners for fingerprints and facial images “must have undergone testing by the FBI and be listed on the FBI Certified Products List.”
“However,” Parsons continued, “in all of those jurisdictions there are significant privacy concerns, concerns about the general efficacy of the technology, concerns about whether too much data is collected in the first place, and concerns linked to the risks associated with information sharing between departments.”
The FBI’s biometric database, called the Next Generation Identification (NGI), has been widely criticized by civil rights groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union due to the potential for abuse by officers. As numerous incidents in the UK and US have shown, police are sometimes unable to resist the urge to dip into a database of personal information to settle their own very personal scores.
There may be an additional privacy risk in Canada, Parsons wrote, thanks to recent legislation that made it even easier for federal agencies to share information. A January 2016 email sent to S/Sgt. Michael Leben, manager of RCMP latent fingerprint operations in Ottawa, states that the force’s new AFIS system is part of a joint venture with Canada Border Services Agency to identify people entering Canada.
The RCMP has a bid out where companies would have to be able to add-on facial recognition capabilities to the primary fingerprint-biometric system. And the RCMP currently lacks the authority to engage in such facial and bodily recognition. But that’s not stopping it from planning for the future…
The Megaupload saga has a new chapter, as the only person convicted by the US in relation to Mega’s file sharing system has broken his silence. Tänavsuu’s article is an in-depth interview with Andrew Nõmm, who did programming for the site and service. Nõmm takes strong issue with Kim Dotcom — he asserts regularly the Kim did nothing to assist Nõmm in his legal efforts — as well as with the Estonian government for their lack of support.
This is a relatively unique piece, insofar as it discusses the experiences of people within the Kim Dotcom empire, and from the perspective of someone who has directly suffered as a result of their association with the project and company. It’s worth the read, if only to understand how the US system deals with persons found guilty of significant copyright violation and some of the inner workings of the Mega projects.
In Germany it isn’t enough to say ‘no’ during intercourse: a person must actively resist, and that resistance be overcome, for the person to legally claim to have been raped. As a result of this Germanic understanding of rape a woman who alleges she was raped was found by a judge to have falsely accused her attackers and, as a result, led to renewed calls in the country to update its sexual assault and abuse laws.
This piece is excellent if incredibly depressing: for funding reasons (or, more cynically, failure of predominant male politicians to raise this issue on the political agenda…) women who are assaulted are often unable to access rape kits. These kits are used to collect evidence for potential criminal investigations pertaining to the assault.
But the end of the (very long, and detailed) article ends with an important reminder for readers who have gotten to the end:
Rape kits, ultimately, are only a small piece of a bigger problem with the justice system, says Hilla Kerner, a front-line worker at Vancouver’s Rape Relief Shelter.
She said rape kits are only helpful in cases that the attacker denies any sexual contact and DNA evidence can contradict that claim. It’s rare that this is a line of defense, she said—but when it is, the evidence gathered with a rape kit is vital.
Basically, if the accused’s DNA is found on the complainant’s body, it removes the line of defence of: ‘I don’t know her, I’ve never seen her before.’
“We shouldn’t fool ourselves that a rape kit is the solution to getting more cases through the criminal justice system,” Kerner said. “There is a need for urgent reform in the criminal justice system, and rape kits are just one element of the whole transformation that needs to happen.”
In other words, though we need to improve access to forensic services, we shouldn’t imagine that such access alone will alleviate the incredibly hostile approach the criminal justic system takes towards the victims of rape and sexual assault.
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