The FJP

May 21

“We knew what the people wanted: the same thing the Doors wanted. Freedom.” —

Ray Manzarek, legendary Doors co-founder and keyboardist, who passed away yesterday. RIP.

Doors co-founder and keyboardist Ray Manzarek died today in Rosenheim, Germany, after a long battle with bile duct cancer. He was 74.

“I was deeply saddened to hear about the passing of my friend and bandmate Ray Manzarek today,” Doors guitarist Robby Krieger said in a statement. “I’m just glad to have been able to have played Doors songs with him for the last decade. Ray was a huge part of my life and I will always miss him.”

Manzarek grew up in Chicago, then moved to Los Angeles in 1962 to study film at UCLA. It was there he first met Doors singer Jim Morrison, though they didn’t talk about forming a band until they bumped into each other on a beach in Venice, California, in the summer of 1965 and Morrison told Manzarek that he had been working on some music. “And there it was!” Manzarek wrote in his 1998 biography, Light My Fire. “It dropped quite simply, quite innocently from his lips, but it changed our collective destinies.”

Read on.

A Coder’s Fury

Image: Page source, Slidedeck. Select to embiggen.

May 20

Just Write What the Government Tells You

The News: The Justice Department tracked Fox News’ correspondent James Rosen in an attempt to tie leaks on North Korea to a government advisor.

Via Glenn Greenwald:

If even the most protected journalists - those who work for the largest media outlets - are being targeted [for leaks by the Justice Department], and are saying over and over that the Obama DOJ is preventing basic news gathering from taking place without fear, imagine the effect this all has on independent journalists who are much more vulnerable.

Image: Twitter post from Karen Tumulty

Views on Generational Trust & Generosity

Looks like students and millennials have less faith in people. See more findings on college students’ aspirations and expectations over at the Society Pages. For example: students generally have higher demands on the world, and they are more likely than workers to say it is important or essential to have a prestigious career with which they can make an impact, but wealth is less important than prestige or impact.

See Net Impact’s full report here: What Workers Want in 2012.

How to Legalize Pot -

Kleiman is leading the team hired to advise Washington State as it designs something the modern world has never seen: a fully legal commercial market in cannabis. Washington is one of the first two states (Colorado is the other) to legalize the production, sale and consumption of marijuana as a recreational drug for consumers 21 and over. The marijuana debate has entered a new stage. Today the most interesting and important question is no longer whethermarijuana will be legalized — eventually, bit by bit, it will be — but how.

Challenges include: the DOJ, since anyone who trades in cannabis is still a felon according to federal law; big profiteers, since the cannabis industry could easily become controlled like Big Tobacco; and how to measure drugged driving, since the government hasn’t funded too much research on the chemistry of weed in the human body.

You can read Kleinman’s proposal to Washington State here.

“We now live in a world where we have public lives and private lives — and for over a century now, since roughly the point at which the above article appeared, the portion of our lives considered “public” has been expanding, while the portion of our lives we can consider “private” has been contracting.” —

Felix Salmon, How Technology Redefines Norms, Reuters.

What’s more, Jarvis himself is a prominent proponent of the idea that we should maximize the speed at which we move our lives into the public realm; he also equates a desire for privacy with being “scared of the public” .

Never before have we faced so many opportunities to turn the formerly-private into the newly-public. As those opportunities arise, many people adopt them, and turn “public” into the new norm for such activities. Eventually, the norms become societally entrenched, to the point at which it is now utterly unobjectionable for those who once would have been labeled “kodak fiends” to take photographs outside a Newport tennis tournament.

My point here is that technology has a tendency to create its own norms.

Which means, according to Salmon, that if wearable computing (like Google Glass) is successful, norms about what is public and private will continue to change, so if you are attached to what’s normal now, it’s better not to be, or you have every reason to worry.

Groundhog's Day: DOJ Tracks Fox Reporter's Phone Records -

Last week’s news was that the Justice Department seized two months of Associated Press phone records.

This week’s begins with a report that the DOJ surveilled Fox News’ chief Washington correspondent James Rosen, tracking his visits to the State Department in an apparent attempt to link a 2009 leak of classified information about North Korea to government adviser Stephen Jin-Woo Kim

Via the Washington Post:

When the Justice Department began investigating possible leaks of classified information about North Korea in 2009, investigators did more than obtain telephone records of a working journalist suspected of receiving the secret material.

They used security badge access records to track the reporter’s comings and goings from the State Department, according to a newly obtained court affidavit. They traced the timing of his calls with a State Department security adviser suspected of sharing the classified report. They obtained a search warrant for the reporter’s personal e-mails.

The case of Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, the government adviser, and James Rosen, the chief Washington correspondent for Fox News, bears striking similarities to a sweeping leaks investigation disclosed last week in which federal investigators obtained records over two months of more than 20 telephone lines assigned to the Associated Press…

…Court documents in the Kim case reveal how deeply investigators explored the private communications of a working journalist — and raise the question of how often journalists have been investigated as closely as Rosen was in 2010. The case also raises new concerns among critics of government secrecy about the possible stifling effect of these investigations on a critical element of press freedom: the exchange of information between reporters and their sources.

Washington Post, A rare peek into a Justice Department leak probe.

We Promise Not to Screw

Quick, someone teach the Yahoo social team how to use the Tumblr Twitter box. STAT.

Image: Automated tweet from Yahoo’s Tumblr to Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s Twitter account.

“We promise not to screw it up.” —

Marissa Mayer, Yahoo CEO, announcing the company’s agreement to acquire Tumblr. On Tumblr, of course. Tumblr. + Yahoo! = !!

FJP: We’re wary, but let’s hope so.

May 19

Scaling Mt. Everest

Twenty-five-year-old Raha Moharrak is the first Saudi Arabian woman, and youngest Arab ever, to reach the summit of Mt. Everest. She accomplished the feat with the first Qatari and Palestinian men to ever reach the peak, and an Iranian man.

The group calls itself Arabs with Altitude and the expedition was made in an attempt to raise $1 million for education projects in Nepal.

Image: Raha Moharrak on being “first”. Mt. Everest aerial view via Wikimedia Commons. Select to embiggen.

May 18

Rupert Murdoch, offering advice to Facebook, via Twitter.

Murdoch’s News Corp (in)famously bought Myspace in 2005 for $580 million and sold it in 2011 to Specific Media for $35 million. During a 2011 annual meeting, he admitted that News Corp managed to “mismanage it in every possible way.”

“To speak with an incarcerated loved one for just an hour a week would cost $240 a month — and that’s on top of the regular phone bill.” — Step Up FCC: Lower the Cost of Prison Phone Rates, Free Press.

May 17

Is Yahoo Trying to Acquire Tumblr?

All Things D reports that Yahoo is trying to get its cool on with a potential Tumblr acquisition:

Earlier this week, Yahoo CFO Ken Goldman spoke at JP Morgan’s Global Technology conference and underscored the need for the aging Silicon Valley Internet giant to attract more users from the coveted 18-to-24-years-old age bracket. Along with more marketing, he explicitly said Yahoo needed to be “cool again.” …According to sources close to the situation, that could mean a strategic alliance and investment in or outright buy of perhaps the coolest Internet company of late: Tumblr.

Adweek follows up saying a deal could be done by this weekend, adding:

Such an acquisition could be just what CEO [Marissa] Mayer has been looking for to turn around Yahoo’s momentum; Tumblr has the potential to excite the engineering/Silicon Valley community (even though it’s based in New York) while recapturing the imagination of advertisers, who have grown to view Yahoo as big but stale.

While its revenue is modest, Tumblr has positioned itself as one of the few players in the digital ad world that is well suited for brand advertising. And Tumblr is also the domain of the young, cool and creative crowd—not currently a Yahoo sweet spot.

From Tumblr’s point of view, the deal also would seem to make a lot of sense. The company has been looking to make a big exit to justify its huge valuation.

Over at GigaOm, Om Malik suggests Facebook might try to swoop in on a deal.:

We have heard that Yahoo is worried that Facebook could swoop in at the last minute and beat it to the buzzer. If the Instagram acquisition was any indication, then we shouldn’t doubt [Mark] Zuckerberg’s salesmanship. [Tumblr’s David] Karp is said to have a close relationship with Facebook and was recently spotted at the Facebook Home launch. Facebook could use the much needed younger 18-to-24 year old demographic, something it (successfully) tried to acquire with Instagram. A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment.

Word of warning via 37signals: What happens after Yahoo acquires you:

Whether it’s Flickr, Delicious, MyBlogLog, or Upcoming, the post-purchase story is a similar one. Both sides talk about all the wonderful things they will do together. Then reality sets in. They get bogged down trying to overcome integration obstacles, endless meetings, and stifling bureaucracy. The products slow down or stop moving forward entirely. Once they hit the two-year mark and are free to leave, the founders take off. The sites are left to flounder or ride into the sunset. And customers are left holding the bag.

Sweet.

May 15

“At Bloomberg, reporters could sit at their desks and use a keyboard function to see the last time an official of the Federal Reserve logged on. And the Justice Department obtained the records of The Associated Press from phone companies with no advance notice, giving it no chance to challenge the action. The absence of friction has led to a culture of transgression. Clearly, if it can be known, it will be known.” — David Carr, Snooping and the news media: it’s a two way street (via soupsoup)

(via onaissues)