Portside

• Independent Press is Under Siege as Freedom Rings – Jim Rutenberg (New York Times)
• How Apple’s iPhone Changed the World: 10 Years in 10 Charts – Rani Molla (Recode)
• Facebook’s Secret Censorship Rules Protect White Men from Hate Speech But Not Black Children – Julia Angwin, ProPublica, and Hannes Grassegger (ProPublica)
• Amazon Is Trying to Control the Underlying Infrastructure of Our Economy – Stacy Mitchell (Motherboard)
• The Era of Chaos-Inducing Ransomware Is Here and It's Scary as Hell – Adam Clark Estes (Gizmodo)
• New Yorkers are Using Underground Wi-Fi to Vent About the Broken Subway — and It’s Working – Andrew J. Hawkins (The Verge)

Independent Press is Under Siege as Freedom Rings

By Jim Rutenberg
July 2, 2017
New York Times

The stakes are higher now, as the anti-press sentiment veers into calls for more action against journalists, if not against journalism itself.
What’s most extraordinary in all of this is how many people calling for curtailments on the free press are such professed “constitutionalists” and admirers of the founders.
The founders didn’t view the press as particularly enlightened, and from the earliest days of the republic it certainly wasn’t. But they drafted the founding documents to enshrine press freedom for good reason.

How Apple’s iPhone Changed the World: 10 Years in 10 Charts

By Rani Molla
June 26, 2017
Recode

Apple’s first iPhone was released 10 years ago this week — on June 29, 2007. While it wasn’t the first smartphone, it leapfrogged far beyond the competition and launched the mobile revolution. Few industries or societies have been left unchanged.
Here are 10 charts that show some of the profound effects the iPhone-led — and Google Android-fueled — mobile boom have caused over the past decade.

Facebook’s Secret Censorship Rules Protect White Men from Hate Speech But Not Black Children

By Julia Angwin, ProPublica, and Hannes Grassegger
June 28, 2017
ProPublica

A trove of internal documents reviewed by ProPublica sheds new light on the secret guidelines that Facebook’s censors use to distinguish between hate speech and legitimate political expression. The documents reveal the rationale behind seemingly inconsistent decisions.
The documents suggest that, at least in some instances, the company’s hate-speech rules tend to favor elites and governments over grassroots activists and racial minorities. In so doing, they serve the business interests of the global company, which relies on national governments not to block its service to their citizens.
 

Amazon Is Trying to Control the Underlying Infrastructure of Our Economy

By Stacy Mitchell
June 25, 2017
Motherboard

It's not just that Amazon does many things besides sell stuff—that it manufactures thousands of products, from dress shirts to baby wipes, produces hit movies and television shows, delivers restaurant orders, offers loans, and may soon dispense prescription drugs. Jeff Bezos is after something so much bigger than any of this. His vision is for Amazon to control the underlying infrastructure of the economy. Amazon's website is already the dominant platform for digital commerce. Its Web Services division controls 44 percent of the world's cloud computing capacity and is relied on by everyone from Netflix to the Central Intelligence Agency. And the company has recently built out a vast network of distribution infrastructure to handle package delivery for itself and others.
 

The Era of Chaos-Inducing Ransomware Is Here and It's Scary as Hell

By Adam Clark Estes
June 28, 2017
Gizmodo

Ransomware attacks are on the rise and criminals are raking in the bitcoin, but some experts believe the goal of Tuesday’s ransomware attack went beyond collecting cryptocurrency. They say the hackers wanted to disrupt information technology not only in Ukraine, where the attack started, but also across the world. The hackers wanted to pour a bit of chaos into the system.
This is the batshit-crazy future of cyber attacks. As more sophisticated weapons make it out into the wild, it’s becoming easier and easier for blackhats to deploy malware and shut down computers all over the globe in exchange for a few bitcoins. But by proxy, it’s also easier for hackers to use the same techniques to cause pure chaos, whether they get paid for it or not.

New Yorkers are Using Underground Wi-Fi to Vent About the Broken Subway — and It’s Working

By Andrew J. Hawkins
June 29, 2017
The Verge

Gov. Cuomo’s the effort to install Wi-Fi in the subway system has blown up in his face. Instead of downloading the latest free e-book (thanks to a partnership between the MTA and the New York Public Library) like the governor was probably hoping, riders are instead venting their frustration over the litany of delays and breakdowns they are subjected to daily.
And for once, they are directing their ire toward the guy has it in his power to make it better.