What I’m Reading, December 16, 2014

The Comic-Book Guys Quivering in Fear of Cosplay, Noah Berlatsky, The Atlantic, December 10, 2014

The backlash to cosplay is in part guys trying to keep girls out of the male clubhouse. But in this context it can also be seen as feminized guys panicking at yet another in a long line of demonstrations that the male clubhouse isn’t all that male to begin with. You could argue that cosplay’s associations with fashion actually make it more highbrow than comics—the New York fashion runway and the New York gallery scene are more kin than either is to low pulp superhero comics. Cosplay is appropriating superheroes for art, much as pop art has done—and some in comics fear the results.

But they shouldn’t. The truth is that cosplay is not a continuation of pop-art denigration by other means. Instead, it’s an antidote. Pop art’s self-conscious manipulation of comics is only possible, or painful, in a world where comics defines its legitimacy in narrow terms. Lichtenstein is only an outsider co-opting comics if you insist on seeing Lichtenstein as something other than a comics artist himself. Cosplay—like the Batman TV series before it—could be a way for fans to be the pop artists: to cast aside the wearisome performance of legitimacy for a more flamboyant, less agonized fandom. Once you stop neurotically policing boundaries, the question of whether comics or superheroes are masculine or feminine becomes irrelevant. If superheroes and comics are for everyone, that “everyone” automatically includes people of all genders, wearing whatever they wish.

The Real Story Of Apollo 17… And Why We Never Went Back To The Moon, Andrew Liptak, io9, December 12, 2014 Continue reading

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What I’m Reading, December 11, 2014

Fox and Friends had a sad over the DOJ mentioning white privilege at Ferguson talk, Robyn Pennacchia, Death and Taxes, December 9, 2014

Co-host Brian Kilmeade felt that by even acknowledging the fact that white privilege exists, the Department of Justice was “taking sides,” when it was supposed to be neutral. And the neutral position is that white privilege does not exist. At least for the co-hosts of Fox and Friends. Who are all–by sheer coincidence, I’m sure–white people.

***

How is it taking sides to discuss the very real fact of white privilege? There are sides in this? How are there sides?

It’s like a small child closing their eyes and telling everyone “You can’t see me now! I’m invisible!”

You know, this, and the way they talk about “pulling the race card” and “race baiting”–it’s as though they’re thinking “We simply cannot let black people find out about racism, or they are gonna be so pissed.” or “Maybe if we pretend racism and white privilege don’t exist, all the black people will think they’re just imagining it, and then we can all pretend that everything is just fine.”

[Emphasis in original.]

One University Found a New, Awful Way to Talk About Jennifer Lawrence’s Nude Photo Leak, Jordan Valinsky, Mic, December 9, 2014 Continue reading

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Can You Teach an Old Judge New Tricks?

Judge Richard Posner is indisputably one of the most renowned jurists of the modern era, and deservedly so. Even he gets things wrong , though, and when he does, well, I’ll let Cory Doctorow explain further:

Speaking at a Georgetown law cybercrime conference, 7th circuit judge Richard Posner made a series of conscience-shocking, technologically illiterate statements about privacy that baffle and infuriate, starting with: “if the NSA wants to vacuum all the trillions of bits of information that are crawling through the electronic worldwide networks, I think that’s fine.”

Posner went on to say that privacy is “mainly about trying to improve your social and business opportunities by concealing the sorts of bad activities that would cause other people not to want to deal with you.”

On the idea of default full-disk encryption, he added “I’m shocked at the thought that a company would be permitted to manufacture an electronic product that the government would not be able to search.” Continue reading

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Oh, British Nobility

Always behind the times.

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This Is Why You Should Never Walk and Text, Kids

You might inadvertently trigger a security lockdown at an airport.

A man disembarking a flight at Australia’s Sydney Airport was apparently so engrossed in whatever he was watching on his iPad that he couldn’t take his face away from the screen to pay attention to where he was going when he exited the plane into the airport. With the iPad still glued to his face, Sydney Morning Herald reports that the man accidentally wandered through an exit tunnel into a domestic terminal without clearing security. The entire terminal was promptly evacuated, and all the passengers had to be re-screened before being allowed to board their flights.

Here endeth the lesson.

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We Will Be Assimilated

I’m not sure if “Space Station Earth” looks more like the Death Star (as Gizmodo‘s Darren Orf thinks) or like the Earth a few centuries after the Borg take over. Here’s its take on downtown Austin:

(I took a screen capture in case the map doesn’t embed.)

Regardless, Mapbox Studio seems like a pretty awesome website.

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Bent iPhone Syndrome

Do you know how many people have actually reported a bent iPhone 6 to Apple (according to Apple, anyway)?

Nine.

That’s nine out of over ten million. Even if you only look at the 1.1 million units of the iPhone 6 Plus, Kif Leswing at GigaOm helpfully does the math for me and points out that this is a bending rate of 0.0008%. It’s possible, I suppose, that many more phones have bent, but that none of those people have actually notified the one entity that is in any real position to help them.

Leswing goes on to note:

In fact, the attention around what some have called Bendgate or Bendghazi says more about the media’s insatiable appetite for Apple stories than it does the latest iPhone. The story first picked up steam when a few blogs noticed a single anecdote posted to the Mac Rumors forum. Subsequent calls for other reports turned up two other stories and pictures. But the story really blew up when a popular YouTube channel, Unbox Therapy, posted a video in which the narrator sacrificed his device and purposely tried to bend the iPhone. Not surprisingly, when a grown man actively tries to break a fragile electronic device, he usually succeeds. [Emphasis added.]

Now, to be fair, the iPhone 6 will bend under pressure—Consumer Reports did science to one and found that it can only withstand up to 70 pounds of pressure. I don’t know how much pressure is in your pocket, but 70 pounds sounds like a lot.

The media just love a good tech-fail story, and a story about a phone that bends where it’s not supposed to bend is probably easier to write than one about significant problems with an iOS update.

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Let Local Government Compete!

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has claimed that it has the authority to nullify state laws in Tennessee and North Carolina that would prevent municipalities from creating their own broadband services if they “restrict competition.”

At issue are laws that are preventing the cities of Chattanooga, TN and Wilson, NC from building broadband networks that would compete with networks operated by private-sector companies. You can probably guess who supports these laws and opposes the FCC. Companies like Netflix are calling on the FCC to exercise its power:

The cities of Chattanooga, Tenn., and Wilson, N.C. — which have asked the FCC to invalidate state laws preventing their government-run Web services from expanding — “should not be hamstrung by state laws enacted at the urging of incumbent broadband providers seeking to maintain market dominance,” Netflix added.

***

Public interest groups have urged the agency to go ahead, but Web providers, the National Governors Association and some Republicans in Congress have warned it to back off.

Interfering with state laws would be a federal overreach, critics say, and regulators ought to respect the will of the states.

Let me get this straight: it would be “federal overreach” for the FCC to nullify state laws, but it’s okay for state laws to nullify municipal actions? Once again, business interests define “federal overreach” solely as things they don’t like.

What exactly is the problem with the two cities’ plans, anyway? They don’t appear to be placing any additional regulatory restrictions on the private broadband players. They’re just trying to enter the market—the free market, as I recall it being called. If government is so incompetent at everything it does, this should not be a threat to the private companies. Which is why the fact that they are obviously so terrified of a “public option” (see what I did there?) is so interesting.

You can submit comments to the FCC here and here.

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This Week in WTF, September 5, 2014

– Never get poisoned again: Baidu, a large Chinese company, has developed “smart chopsticks.”

Chinese internet giant Baidu has unveiled a pair of ‘smart chopsticks’ that can detect contaminants in food and report back to smartphone and desktop apps.

The compapny (often known as ‘China’s Google’) says the prototype device is currently designed to detect temperature and whether food was produced using ‘gutter oil’ – reused cooking oil that’s potentially toxic – but that future models could also flag up contaminated water and measure salt levels.

I had not heard of “gutter oil” before, and now I really wish I hadn’t. You might have thought that I selected this story for “WTF” treatment because of the “smart chopsticks,” but you would be wrong. It was because such an invention appears to be very, very, very, very, very, very, very necessary.

– I don’t get it, but I don’t need to: Some new mothers want to eat their placentas (placentae?), but hospitals won’t let them because of medical waste laws.

No further commentary offered.

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What Were You Thinking???

You might have missed the news, but Home Depot is investigating a possibly-massive security breach that may have compromised the financial information of people who shopped at one of their stores from May through August of this year. Last year’s breach of Target’s computers was one of the biggest cybersecurity breaches in history, affecting around 40 million customers. This one might be bigger.

Last month, Albertson’s was hacked. CNN Money is now keeping a list of businesses where your financial data might have been compromised.

Yet no one blames consumers, first and foremost, for putting their personal financial data out there online. Just sayin’.

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