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Daily Archives: October 21, 2016

Heleo – Keith Houston Investigates the Long, Strange History of Books

Most people who are involved in making books, or writing them, are acutely aware that there’s a very big shift happening.”

“…The thing that I hadn’t appreciated was that so much of the history of the book came from elsewhere, from China mostly. Just the invention of paper, which is absolutely vital, and then printing. I visited the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz, which is a printing history museum. They have a type case full of Chinese movable type, and it’s gigantic. Western ones are about the same size as a writing desk. This Chinese type case, it wraps around you, like standing in a circular telephone booth entirely filled with type. To learn that that had come out of China was quite surprising, and it was quite nice to be able to take an excursion from the Gutenberg story, which is quite widely written about…”

ProPublica – Google Has Quietly Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking

Julia Angwin: “When Google bought the advertising network DoubleClick in 2007, Google founder Sergey Brin said that privacy would be the company’s “number one priority when we contemplate new kinds of advertising products.” And, for nearly a decade, Google did in fact keep DoubleClick’s massive database of web-browsing records separate by default from the names… Continue Reading

Extensive botnet DDoS attacks take major sites offline

TechCrunch: “Several waves of major cyberattacks against an internet directory service knocked dozens of popular websites offline today, with outages continuing into the afternoon. Twitter, SoundCloud, Spotify, Shopify, and other websites have been inaccessible to many users throughout the day. The outages are the result of several distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on the DNS provider… Continue Reading

Brookings – Black-white disparity in student loan debt more than triples after graduation

Brookings – “The moment they earn their bachelor’s degrees, black college graduates owe $7,400 more on average than their white peers ($23,400 versus $16,000, including non-borrowers in the averages). But over the next few years, the black-white debt gap more than triples to a whopping $25,000. Differences in interest accrual and graduate school borrowing lead… Continue Reading