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January 14, 2015

5IT: debacle

1. Hollywood studio courts "cybersecurity influencers" to promote new hacker movie, Blackhat.

"Last week, a bunch of real-world hacker types got an advance look at the film in San Francisco. It was thanks not to their cracking into Michael Mann’s computer, but to a screening Universal Studios organized for Silicon Valley’s cybersecurity elite, including security engineers from Google, Facebook, Dropbox, Twitter, Tesla and Yahoo. Hollywood wanted to know if the film would pass muster with “cybersecurity influencers” — Universal’s term for the group — and surprisingly, it did."

2. The Teamsters want to represent SF-SV bus drivers.

"The union hopes to make Facebook and Loop a model for the other companies. It is pressuring the brand-name companies, even though they don’t employ the bus drivers, in the hope that they will support unionization and agree to pay more to the bus operators, so that they in turn can raise wages. The union says the drivers now make $18 to $20 per hour, but typically are forced to work separate morning and evening shifts that extend their workday to 12 hours or more. Aloise said revising contracts so the bus companies can pay drivers more might cost each tech company less that $10 million a year. 'They probably spend that every year on ping pong balls,' he said."

3. Broad City's Internet origin story.

"The reason that Broad City attracted the likes of Poehler — or really any industry attention at all — was that it was truly one of the first online sitcoms, or at least one whose creators took their digital work as seriously as if they had already been given a network deal. Though a few low-fi series had popped up on the web (The Burg, Lena Dunham’s jangly Delusional Downtown Divas), Glazer and Jacobson were at the forefront of something brand new — they were cultural entrepreneurs. In this way, their path to fame is unlikely to be replicated — in the time since Broad City launched, several high-quality shows have debuted online (The Outs, High Maintenance) and scored development deals, but now the field is so crowded that it is tough to stand out."

+ This show is v. good. As is High Maintenance.

4. The views from famous works of art is museums.

"You visit museums to see works of art. Have you ever wondered what they see instead?"

5. A bot "looks" at abstract art and offers its own captions.

"'I was curious about its interpretation of abstract art as such art is very subjective and open to interpretation, it invites interpretation rather than dictate it,' Plummer-Fernandez said in an email interview with the Daily Dot. 'There is no right or wrong way to experience such art, so an algorithm's understanding of it would be equally valid. Also I was imagining that such a system would provide a more innocent and honest reading of art, without being burdened by art history, peer reviews, and collective consensus.'"

Today's 1957 American English Language Tip
decimate meant originally to kill every tenth man as a punishment for cowardice or mutiny. Its application is naturally extended to the destruction in any way of a rather large proportion of anything reckoned by number, e.g. a population is decimated by the plague. Anything that is directly inconsistent with the proper sense (A single frosty night decimated the currents by as much as 80%) must be avoided.
The Credits:  1. fusion.com 2. blogs.wsj.com 3. grantland.com  4. whattheysee.tumblr.com / @AdrienneLaF 5. dailydot.com

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