Ethan Zuckerman

The life concept here is so different from the recent post about the MIT media lab. "I watched two brilliant students organize two massive hackathons to improve the breast pump, challenging assumptions about who gets to invent the future and what problems are worth solving. Another student launched a remarkably successful movement against facial recognition technologies by demonstrating that they often embed significant racial biases. ...And late one night, I saw a young woman walk past my door wearing a massive pair of delicate, filigreed copper angel wings" http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2020/08/15/to-the-future-occupants-…

Ethan Zuckerman has an excellent essay on the film, its context, and some different ways to interpret it: http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2010/01/25/liberia-shock-or-insight…

Just got to see it by using Facebook to redirect the page load: https://m.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bostonglobe.com%2Fmet… The first two paragraphs: > A well-known member of the MIT Media Lab plans to resign over revelations that the research center and its top leader took money from Jeffrey Epstein, the deceased financier who was accused of trafficking in underage girls. > Ethan Zuckerman, director of the lab’s Center for Civic Media, last week told officials at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology of his plans. While looking for a non-paywalled version, I found a Reddit comment that pointed to a more detailed Medium blog post by Ethan Zuckermann that gives more details, and here is the Medium-free version from Zuckermann’s own blog: http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2019/08/20/on-me-and-the-media-lab/ EDIT: just tried loading the FB redirect URL with "Open link in a new private window" and got “The Boston Glove / You’re using a browser set to private or incognito mode.”, but you can avoid it if you disable Javascript before loading the page.

This reminds me very much of the TCP Evil Bit [1]. That is, it seems like the issue of whether anybody would actually set this is essential to the question of whether or not it would work. One could even imagine that governments would want people to live in ignorance of the existence of restrictions. It's 100% the Ethan Zuckerman Cute Cat Theory of Internet Censorship [2]. The government would rather that you have all of YouTube except the subversive content, because then you might not notice the restriction and so will learn not to care. Indeed, from the document: "The use of the 451 status code implies neither the existence nor non-existence of the resource named in the request. That is to say, it is possible that if the legal demands were removed, a request for the resource still might not succeed." That suggests to me that the author is also aware of this problem. It should be noted that Google has done an amazing job in trying to fix this problem by trying to force whole services to be blocked when that's feasible and by transparently explaining (in the UI itself!) when content is unavailable for legal reasons. Kudos to them. For that reason, I would say such an effort is worthwhile even if it won't have much impact: it's quite likely that it will help further the norm that when censorship exists it should exist transparently. That's a cause worth fighting for, even if every step is going to be a huge challenge. [1]…

Ethan had a followup a couple days later at http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2011/01/14/brocks-insights-on-the-t… Josh Shahryar also had a great piece on Enduring America on Friday, after Ben Ali fled the country: "Today, as dismayed as I was, I got an answer to my question: What happens when the media ignores a revolution? Sometimes,the answer is: Nothing. The media can help mobilize support for victims of earthquakes like the one in Haiti. The media can also help create an atmosphere where people can feel that they should care about those overseas. But, when the media refuses to cover a revolution, it really does not carry any impact. That’s what people in Tunisia proved today by forcing their dictator to jump ship and leave the country. In a few hours, those US outlets who paid no heed will tell you how important it is that, for the first time in decades, a country in the Middle East has forced out an autocrat. Then you’ll have analysts telling you how important it is for US interests that this wave continues or maybe doesn't continue. There will be cute little graphs that Anderson Cooper can pull around on those big computer screens. Hey, it’s all going to be happening! But this will be too late. The mainstream will not be part of the global wave of online support who witnessed a ground-breakingly inspirational event that will live on in memories for years to come and that could influence views on the Middle East, democracy, and…

Jeremy Rubin built a proof-of-concept for this over a decade ago for a hackathon and ended up being sued by the state of New Jersey. This blog post[0] has a good summary of the events. [0] https://ethanzuckerman.com/2015/05/28/the-death-of-tidbit-and-why-it-m…

https://archive.is/pX6l6 Also, update on the author's blog here: https://ethanzuckerman.com/2024/05/09/a-brief-update-on-zuckerman-vs-m… The update has links to more coverage.

The most active instance, Pawoo, was started by Pixiv after Twitter banned lolicon. Pawoo is blocked/silenced by many instances in the west. Pawoo is no more the property of Pixiv since 2020. https://ethanzuckerman.com/2017/08/18/mastodon-is-big-in-japan-the-rea… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixiv

For literally anyone who wants to setup a mastodon instance but hasn't yet, read this please: https://ethanzuckerman.com/2017/08/18/mastodon-is-big-in-japan-the-rea…

I think you are just missing the backstory. Of course if you are approaching what Facebook does with naivety you end up sounding.. naive. The whole reason this report was put out by Facebook in the first place is because people used their own tool Crowdtangle to point out how the most popular pages of all were pushing political and medical misinformation to billions and were run by foreign spam mills. So they gutted Crowdtangle and published this report cleansed of any reference to "questionable" pages. But as a previous submission [1] showed, the numbers they state don't add up. And as this submission shows, if you dig into what Facebook wants to tell you is popular, it's all still the most garbage, devoid of value scam content - and it is their algorithm that is promoting it above all. 1: https://ethanzuckerman.com/2021/08/18/facebooks-new-transparency-repor…

Ethan Zuckerman explicitly resigned due to MIT’s and the Media Lab’s involvement with Epstein and is thus the reason why he is leaving his office. So the comment you replied to is not unrelated nor a tangent. http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2019/08/20/on-me-and-the-media-lab/

These people also socialized with him and when they accepted money from him it was after he was a convicted sex offender. Look at Ethan Zuckerman's post on leaving MIT where you can see he urged Joi Ito to not get involved with Epstein because it was already well known that he was abusing underage girls: http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2019/08/20/on-me-and-the-media-lab/

> seems like people are assuming he did know about that past, which is unclear to me. According to Ethan Zuckerman, he "urged [Joi] not to meet with [Epstein]". Presumably Epstein's past was the reason for that urging. http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2019/08/20/on-me-and-the-media-lab/

Not to mention that, if you believe Ethan Zuckerman’s account of events (http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2019/08/20/on-me-and-the-media-lab/… he specifically warned Ito about Epstein’s history in 2014.

http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2019/08/20/on-me-and-the-media-lab/ "Joi asked me in 2014 if I wanted to meet Epstein, and I refused and urged him not to meet with him."

(1) There is a pretty big difference between shaking hands with someone and allowing someone to tie their financial stake in with yours via a quarter million dollars in investment money. (2) The idea that anyone with this large of an involvement with Epstein was unaware that he had been convicted in 2008 strains one's credulity, to say the least. If at any point after Ito met Epstein, he had casually googled Epstein's name, he would have been inundated with information about his conviction. Not to mention that in his resignation letter, Ethan Zuckerman explicitly mentions that he told Ito not to meet with Epstein back in 2014. (http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2019/08/20/on-me-and-the-media-lab/…

Also, Ethan Zuckerman and his Center for Civic Media is going to exit the lab as he can't in good conscience remain: http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2019/08/20/on-me-and-the-media-lab/

And more here: http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2013/04/29/cute-cats-to-the-rescue-…

Decentralized projects never seem to gain steam until mainstream users are forced away from centralized services. Take a look at this recent article looking at why the majority of mastodon users are from Japan: http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2017/08/18/mastodon-is-big-in-japan…

Same author created Ad Nauseum to click on every ad you encounter as opposed to selectively blocking them http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2014/10/06/helen-nissenbaum-on-ad-n… Obfuscation won't slow down data scientists. To see this in action open your gmail account and notice there's (likely) no spam in your primary inbox. Those spammers spend considerable resources to obfuscate themselves from Google's filters yet still fail.

This is accurate. Ethan Zuckerman has more commentary on the topic here: http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2011/12/28/exploring-the-chinese-in…

Yes! I had the same search a few months ago. Its called "The Cute Cat Theory" by Ethan Zuckerman. http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2008/03/08/the-cute-cat-theory-talk…

Hulu is only available in the US You can work around this with Blossom: http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2006/04/06/blossom-tor-and-touring-…

I don't recall exactly where I saw it, but I remember reading something where some tech guy "solved" the problems with prison with some nightmarish scheme of solitary confinement, Soylent(tm), and VR that he probably spend all of then minutes thinking through. That was held up an an example of how clueless and unintentionally malevolent tech people can sometimes be when they let their enthusiasm for technological solutions go unchecked by anything else. So now that might become a real thing, brought to you by one of the shittiest and exploitative companies in existence. Edit: here's the original article https://medium.com/@shanesnow/how-soylent-and-oculus-could-fix-the-pri… and this might be the critique I read: https://ethanzuckerman.com/2016/06/22/the-worst-thing-i-read-this-year…

Claude Shannon defined information in part by its ability to distinguish from noise. Certain objects are so ubiquitous and their signaling so minimal, it’s to the point of background noise and contextlessness. The Casio F-91W is one such object. The monobloc chair is another[1]. The community jokes a CIA analyst looking at a gritty Polaroid of a monobloc will have no ability to discern if the picture was taken in Djibouti or Denmark. In a certain, Cayce Pollard / William Gibson “CPU” aesthetic, there is cachet and delight in signalling contextlessness - and a small cult has grown around these objects. They collectively call objects that share this anonymous property “monoblocs“ for short and their is a bit of fun in acquiring the most base form (counter to our every instinct!) I liked your article’s tangent on incompressibility. As, like fluid, noise is incompressible and by reinforcing your F-91W, you have made it doubly so. [1] http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2011/04/06/those-white-plastic-chai…