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Cory Doctorow

@doctorow

29 Jul

Adding sensors to our computers revolutionized them. I remember buying my first computer paddles, my first mic, my first webcam, and the incredible new features unlocked by giving computers a way to sense and respond to the physical world.

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Today, our devices are stuffed with sensors to beggar the imagination. My latest phone has FOUR cameras, multiple mics, thermal sensors, and, of course, an accelerometer that lets the system measure how it's moving from moment to moment.

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Device security and privacy models treat cameras and mics as sensitive and control how apps access them, but accelerometers are treated as utilities, the kind of thing that apps should be able to tap into at will without risk to the user.

That's a bad assumption.

3/

Read 14 tweets

Cory Doctorow

@doctorow

29 Jul

@propublica

The internet age has certainly transformed journalism; these days we mostly think about investigative journalism's decline, but there are digital investigative outlets that shine like diamonds.

I'm thinking here about @propublica.

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@JustinElliott

Propublica's @JustinElliott and @paulkiel wrote a series of blockbuster stories about the monopolist @Intuit, a business organized as a cult around its then-CEO Brad Smith, engaged in decades' worth of dirty tricks to kill free, IRS tax-prep services.

propublica.org/article/inside…

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Not only did they stay with this story for months on end, digging up incredible stories of corruption, they also shamed the IRS and spurred state AGs into investigating the company.

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Read 23 tweets

Cory Doctorow

@doctorow

29 Jul

I've been writing about the Sackler crime-family for years, as a new generation turned the family's benzo empire into a opioid powerhouse, exceeding the Rockefeller family fortune by pushing Oxycontin and jumpstarting an epidemic that has claimed 800,000 American lives.

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The Sacklers are canny: for years, they laundered their reputation through elite philanthropy, using blood money to paint their names on the world's great cultural institutions and spending comparable sums to threaten journalists and critics into silence about their crimes.

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But no one can run across a river on the backs of alligators forever - eventually, even the fleetest grifter will lose a leg. The Sacklers eventually came into the crosshairs of district attorneys, federal enforcers, bereaved families and recovering addicts.

3/

Read 37 tweets

Cory Doctorow

@doctorow

29 Jul

Die Nibelungen: Siegfried (1924) starring Paul Richter and directed by Fritz Lang. starrywisdomsect.tumblr.com/post/657999128…

Read 8 tweets

Cory Doctorow

@doctorow

28 Jul

Well, Life isn’t always what one likes, is it?
No, it isn’t.

ROMAN HOLIDAY
— Dir. Willam Wyer, 1953.
mckitterick.tumblr.com/post/657947463…

Read 5 tweets

Cory Doctorow

@doctorow

27 Jul

@ClimateTechFin

@ClimateTechFin @KetanJ0 Tesla is a grift whose profitability depends on mining bitcoin and selling carbon credits to the world's most polluting SUV manufacturers. It's run by a con artist who literally paid the company's founders to call him the founder.

@ClimateTechFin

@ClimateTechFin @KetanJ0 It maims workers, busts unions, and tells farcical lies about self-driving cars and spins even more farcical fantasies that cars - not transit - are the future of urban mobility. Musk claims that transit is bad "because you might sit next to a serial killer."

@ClimateTechFin

@ClimateTechFin @KetanJ0 Just as Musk has claimed that he can deliver more bandwidth than the universe has available radio frequency spectrum, he's also claimed that he can nullify the laws of geometry that dictate that private vehicles can't be the default means of transport in livable cities

Read 7 tweets

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