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NexrGov: The creation process of Wikipedia is largely transparent – “Founded in 2001, Wikipedia is on the verge of adulthood. It’s the world’s fifth-most popular website, with 46 million articles in 300 languages, while having less than 300 full-time employees. What makes it successful is the 200,000 volunteers who create it, said Katherine Maher, the …
Popular Mechanics: “Twenty-five years ago today, the World Wide Web announced that it was for everybody. On April 30, 1993, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) put the web into the public domain a decision that has fundamentally altered the past quarter-century. While the proto-internet dates back to the 1960s, the World Wide Web …
Bloomberg: “Twitter Inc. sold data access to the Cambridge University academic who also obtained millions of Facebook Inc. users’ information that was later passed to a political consulting firm without the users’ consent. Aleksandr Kogan, who created a personality quiz on Facebook to harvest information later used by Cambridge Analytica, established his own commercial enterprise, …
Pew Report – At the same time, the contours of connectivity are shifting: One-in-five Americans are now ‘smartphone only’ internet users at home: “Americans tend to view the impact of the internet and other digital technologies on their own lives in largely positive ways, Pew Research Center surveys have shown over the years. A survey …
Fast Company – In a world of fake news, the only antidote is our ability to judge the reputation of the people supplying us with information: “There is an underappreciated paradox of knowledge that plays a pivotal role in our advanced hyper-connected liberal democracies: the greater the amount of information that circulates, the more we …
EFF: “Facebook took a step toward greater accountability this week, expanding the text of its community standards and announcing the rollout of a new system of appeals. Digital rights advocates have been pushing the company to be more transparent for nearly a decade, and many welcomed the announcements as a positive move for the social …
“U.S. Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and John Kennedy (R-LA) [on April 24, 2018] announced privacy legislation that will protect consumers’ online data. Social media and other online platforms routinely capture users’ behavior and personal information, which is then used to help advertisers or other third parties target those users. The bipartisan legislation would require companies …
Washington Post: “On Amazon, customer comments can help a product surge in popularity. The online retail giant says that more than 99 percent of its reviews are legitimate because they are written by real shoppers who aren’t paid for them. But a Washington Post examination found that for some popular product categories, such as Bluetooth headphones …
Page previews, deployed today, is one of the largest changes to desktop Wikipedia made in recent years. “If you’re on a computer, or have access to one, go to Wikipedia and check out your favorite article. At first, what you see there will be very familiar—the core reading experience on the site hasn’t changed much …
False Information on Web and Social Media: A Survey. Srijan Kumar, Neil Shah (Submitted on 23 Apr 2018) Cornell University Library. arXiv.org > cs > arXiv:1804.08559 “False information can be created and spread easily through the web and social media platforms, resulting in widespread real-world impact. Characterizing how false information proliferates on social platforms and …
You have precious little privacy on the web – whether you are browsing, using Facebook or Gmail, public WiFi, disk cleaning applications, or using the same “strong” passwords on multiple sites. USAToday reports – Many of us think we’re taking the right precautions, when in fact we’re putting our info at risk. The following are …
Remember this? I sure do…Wired: “1993: NCSA Mosaic 1.0, the first web browser to achieve popularity among the general public, is released. With it, the web as we know it begins to flourish. The web in the early 1990s was mostly text. People were posting images, photos, and audio or video clips on web pages. …
