Posts tagged FJP

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.

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.”

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.

cnet:

Apple passes 50 billion App Store downloads

FJP: via CNET, “The person who downloaded the 50 billionth app will get a $10,000 App Store gift card from Apple, and the 50 people who downloaded apps right after that each will receive a $500 gift card.”

Yes, You Can Win This Cinetics miniSkates Tripod

And now for something new: The first ever FJP Photo Contest.

Back in March Peter went to SXSW and met Justin Jensen, founder of Cinetics, a company he started from the MIT Media Lab to create portable cinematic systems. Peter loved what they’re doing and Justin and Co were kind enough to donate the miniSkates tripod as the prize for our first photo contest. (You can see the tripod in action in Justin’s original 2011 Kickstarter video.)

The Contest

The theme for this contest is “Daily Commute”.

You are welcome to interpret the theme however you like but here are some ideas to help get you started:

• the essence of your commute;
• something you notice that you think others pass by;
• motion;
• the places you commute to, from or through;
• the idea of what a commute is;
• something not mentioned above cause we didn’t think of it.

How to Enter

1. Take a great photo based on our “Daily Commute” theme;
2. Submit your photo on our Facebook contest page;
3. Win the coolest tripod on wheels!

Deadline: May 31, 2013

Other things you can do: Share this with your friends.

If this contest is successful we think we can get other companies to come together and offer contest prizes for The FJP community.

Many thanks. Start taking your photos and submit them to us over on Facebook. We look forward to seeing them!

The Ultimate Nerd Assignment

Slate’s Matthew Yglesias watches every movie and every episode of every Star Trek and reports back on what it all means.

Bing Now Translates Klingon Language 

Bing has just added Klingon, the language spoken by the Klingon warrior race of the Star Trek universe, to its language translator.

Via Mashable: 

Bing worked with the linguistics Ph. D. Marc Okrand who developed the language for the series. It also turned to 10 people who are fluent in the language to train the systems, as well as the Klingon Language Institute who assisted in the process.

Bing users can now even translate entire websites into Klingon.

FJP: I think I speak for everyone when I say: HIja’ tlhuchtlh! — Krissy

Image: Today I Found Out

The History of Cuss Words

Salon’s featured excerpt of Melissa Mohr’s Holy Shit: A Brief History of Swearing, provides an in depth look at commonly used swear words of the 18th and 19th centuries.

According to Mohr, a cuss word is defined by its impact:

Along with grammatical flexibility, this figurativeness is the hallmark of a fully obscene word, a word used not as a literal descriptor but to shock, offend, or otherwise carry emotion — a swearword.

Some of the popular curse words and phrases from Mohr’s excerpt include the following: 

• “Arse-opener,” “arse-wedge,” “beard-splitter,” ”chinkstopper,” and ”plugtail” were used to describe the act of ”splitting the woman’s anatomy” or “plugging a hole.”
• “Bloody” was one of the most popular swear words of the time, but it’s hard to pinpoint its exact origins. It’s assumed that it’s derived from “the adjective bloody as in ‘covered in blood’ or, as the OED proposes, it referred to the habits of aristocratic rabble-rousers at the end of the 17th century, who styled themselves ‘bloods.’”
• “Breasts,” “bubbies,” and ”diddeys,” were common words for boobs;  ”bushelbubby” specifically referred to a woman with large breasts. “Tit” didn’t catch on until the early 20th century as a variation of ”teat” which was used in the Middle Ages.
• “Bugger” referred to a person giving anal penetration.
• “Burning shame” was a term that meant “a lighted candle stuck into the parts of a woman, certainly not intended by nature for a candlestick.” 
• “Burnt-Arsed whore” was used during the Renaissance and literally meant “infected with venereal disease.”
• “Fartleberry” is the early version of the modern “dingleberry,” which refers to the fecal matter that hangs from hairs around the butt-hole. 
• “Gamahuche” meant “mouth on genitals” for both cunnilingus and fellatio. 
• “Godemiche” was a word imported from France meaning “dildo.” 
• “Larking” could have meant blow job or the act of “having sex with the man’s penis between the woman’s breasts.”
• “Lobcock” referred to a large, “dull, inanimate” penis and “pego” was a popular word for dick. 
• “Monosyllable,” “quim,” “pussy,” “madge,” and “a woman’s commodity” were all names for vagina. 
• “Nackle-ass” was an adjective that meant “poor, mean, inferior, paltry: applied as a term of contempt to both persons and things indifferently.” 
• “Rantallion” referred to a scrotum that sags lower than the shaft of a man’s penis.
• Slang for sexual intercourse included: “roger,” “screw,” and “have your greens.”
• “Tip the velvet” originally meant “french kiss,” but after a hundred years passed, it also referred to the act of preforming cunnilingus. 
• “To bagpipe” meant to give a blow job. 

FJP: More bloody fun: Nine Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Swear Words. You should also check out, FUCK — the documentary about “fuck’s” origins and uses. If you don’t — it will surely be a “burning shame.” Figuratively, of course. (Let’s hope.) — Krissy

Image: Screenshot from The Fantastic Mr. Fox.

Leaks, The Justice Department and the Associated Press

Attorney General Eric Holder responded yesterday to the news that the Justice Department seized two months of Associated Press phone records. Security!

This was a very serious leak and a very, very serious leak. I’ve been a prosecutor since 1976 and I have to say that this is among, if not the most serious, it is within the top two or three most serious leaks I’ve ever seen. It put the American people at risk. That’s not hyperbole. It put the American people at risk.

Leaks! The government doesn’t like them. And Holder’s Justice Department has prosecuted more alleged leakers under the World War 1-era Espionage Act than all his predecessors combined.

In this case, the alleged leak lead to the AP reporting on a Yemeni-based plot to blow up an airplane.

Here’s some of what we’re reading on the story.

Glenn Greenwald, The Guardian: Justice Department’s pursuit of AP’s phone records is both extreme and dangerous.

The legality of the DOJ’s actions is impossible to assess because it is not even known what legal authority it claims nor the legal process it invoked to obtain these records. Particularly in the post-9/11 era, the DOJ’s power to obtain phone records is, as I’ve detailed many times, dangerously broad. It often has the power to obtain those records without the person’s knowledge (as happened here) and for a wildly broad scope of time (as also happened here). There are numerous instruments that have been vested in the DOJ to obtain phone records, many of which do not require court approval, including administrative subpoenas and “national security letters” (issued without judicial review); indeed, the Obama DOJ has previously claimed it has the power to obtain journalists’ phone records without subpoeans using NSLs, and in its relentless pursuit to learn the identity of the source for one of New York Times’ James Risen’s stories, the Obama DOJ has actually claimed that journalists have no shield protections whatsoever in the national security context. It’s also quite possible that they obtained the records through a Grand Jury subpoena, as part of yet another criminal investigation to uncover and punish leakers.

None of those processes for obtaining these invasive records requires a demonstration of probable cause or anything close to it. Instead, the DOJ must simply assert that the records “relate to” a pending investigation: a standard so broad that virtually every DOJ desire will fulfill it.

Emily Bazelon, Slate: Obama’s War on Journalists:

Whether a leak threatens national security is clearly not the standard Holder and his department are using. And the problem is that the standard is up to them. The 1917 Espionage Act, the basis for most of these cases, was written to go after people who compromised military operations. Back in 1973, the major law review article on that statute concluded that Congress never intended to go after journalists with it, or even their sources. Since then, legal scholars have proposed various ways of narrowing the Espionage Act—University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone wants to limit the law’s reach to cases in which there’s proof that a reporter knows publication will wreck national security without contributing to the public debate. But Congress has done nothing of the sort. Wouldn’t it be nice if the Republicans who are indignant over the AP investigation got serious about reform? Somehow, I doubt it. Instead, with a Democratic White House leading the charge, it’s hard to see who will stop this train.

Timothy Lee, Washington Post: In AP surveillance case, the real scandal is what’s legal

But here’s what’s really scary: The Justice Department’s actions are likely perfectly legal.

U.S. law allows the government to engage in this type of surveillance—on media organizations or anyone else—without meaningful judicial oversight.

The key here is a legal principle known as the “third party doctrine,” which says that users don’t have Fourth Amendment rights protecting information they voluntarily turn over to someone else. Courts have said that when you dial a phone number, you are voluntarily providing information to your phone company, which is then free to share it with the government.

Brian Fung, National Journal: What the AP Subpoena Scandal Means for Your Electronic Privacy.

It’s not just journalists and their sources who stand to suffer from an erosion of the legal barriers between government and businesses. Here’s a short list of your personal information companies can hand over to the feds without repercussion, and on little more than a subpoena: geolocation data, the PCs you’ve accessed, emails you’ve sent and text messages and content you’ve placed on cloud services like Dropbox.

Image: Boiling Water, by Tom Tomorrow, March 2011. Since this cartoon, the government has prosecuted a sixth alleged leaker under the Espionage Act. Select to embiggen.

Selling Data, Taking Things in Your Hands Edition

A common truism says that if it’s free and on the Web, you’re not the customer but the product being sold. Also common is the following reaction: what can I do about that. The less common reaction: How can I get in on that?

Try this one on as a thought experiment.

Via Slate:

In a world of privacy-invading smartphone apps and government-grade spyware, keeping personal data personal online can seem like a difficult task. But could you make money by choosing to give away logs of your most intimate data?

Federico Zannier is trying to find out. Emails, chat logs, location data, browser history, screenshots—you name it, the New York-based software developer is selling it all.With a Kickstarter campaign launched earlier this month, Zannier, a 28-year-old Italian-born master’s student at NYU, is offering to hand over a day’s digital footprint for a measly $2. He says he “violated his own privacy” starting back in February for about 50 days straight, recording screenshots and webcam snaps of himself every 30 seconds and tracking his every footstep using GPS technology. He logged the address of each Web page he visited—storing some 3 million lines of text—and accumulated a massive trove of 21,124 webcam photos and 19,920 screen shots.

Zannier’s aim, somewhat paradoxically, is to take ownership of his own data by selling it. He points out that we often hand over our private data unwittingly, given that few people take the time to read the terms and conditions of apps and online services. Companies rake in millions of dollars selling our information to marketing firms while we receive little in return. But Zannier’s Kickstarter is not just out to make a statement about online privacy—he plans to use the funds to create a browser extension and a smartphone app that he says will help others sell their own data. “If more people do the same, I’m thinking marketers could just pay us directly for our data,” he writes on his Kickstarter page. “It might sound crazy, but so is giving all our data away for free.”

So, just as the Web often disrupts, let’s cut out the middle man.

Image: It’s Free, But They Sell Your Information, via Telco 2.0.

Now The Internet Will Write My Essay For Me

Via Reddit/quickmeme.