Month: March 2018

Protecting Credit

50% of all Americans still haven’t checked their credit report since the Equifax breach last year exposed the Social Security numbers, dates of birth, addresses and other personal information on nearly 150M people. If you’re in that 50%, please make an effort to remedy that soon.

Fake news reach

fake news seems to be more “novel” than real news. Falsehoods are often notably different from the all the tweets that have appeared in a user’s timeline 60 days prior to their retweeting them. Fake news evokes much more emotion than the average tweet. The researchers created a database of the words that Twitter users used to reply to the 126k contested tweets, then analyzed it with a state-of-the-art sentiment-analysis tool. Fake tweets tended to elicit words associated with surprise and disgust, while accurate tweets summoned words associated with sadness and trust.

Jeff Goldblum

the thing about Goldblum that puts him next to Bill Murray in the pantheon of cult figures is that he’s just as charismatic, surreal, legendary, eccentric, brilliant, and handsome in person—at least according to 34 of his famous friends, who, along with the man himself, spoke to GQ about the greatness of Goldblum. He’s an icon to icons, inspiring everyone from Woody Allen and Christopher Walken to Sarah Silverman and Paul Rudd to live their most fun, most delightful, most Goldblum-iest lives. We think there might be a few lessons in there for you, too.

Gray Hat

Most of all, Hutchins was bored, and he wanted to work again. “Not having access to my botnet-monitoring stuff is depressing”. While Hutchins declined to discuss details of his case, except to maintain his innocence — the trial is still pending, though such cases often end in settlements — he feared the damage was already done. Cybersecurity is a business based in trust, and he worried that the allegations alone made him unemployable. (He had recently noticed a number of Twitter bots commenting on his case with anti-American bents, which he speculated could be someone trying to use his case to divide the American cybersecurity community.)

Retail Future

All the mockery of the idea of Apple Stores as “town squares” multiplies 10x—though malls, at least, must incorporate public bathrooms. No loitering policies, parental escort policies, and curfews explicitly exclude homeless people and teenagers from the mall. The economic mix of stores and the food options presents an implicit form of exclusion, as does the presence or absence of seating. The new urban malls must be responsible about the semi-public part of the equation.