Hackerman 101
Hello everyone! Another week and here I am again. This week was quite busy and the rest of it not going to let me catch my breath. So, let’s just jump into it.
This Friday, I’m going to add another title under my freelance career: Guest Lecturer. New Media department of Bahçeşehir University in İstanbul invited me to teach Digital Security classes to their undergrads and this week I’m going to teach my first class. Although I gave many trainings and been in a position of educator, this is going to be the first time I’ll be a teacher in an official sense.
There are of course some parts of it seems funny to me. First of all, I’m still in the process of writing my Masters Thesis and usually, it’s hard for someone in my position to teach a class in Turkish universities. Also, I just finished my Masters classes couple months ago, so going from that to this is going to be interesting. Second part is the fact that I don’t have any official education or degree in digital security or anything related to computers. I’m just a huge nerd and somehow managed to make people in media listen what I’m saying. And now I’m going to corrupt bunch of young minds too!
And the final funny part is related to the main reason why I haven’t mentioned this anywhere until now. I was not sure if enough students will select my class. Because the university has a minimum student limit for selective classes, there was a chance this class might never happen. Funny part is my class is full. But the scary part is there are students from computer science department in my class too. I don’t know why they thought this was a good idea but somehow I’ll be also teaching some comsci and couple of engineering students this semester and I’m really curious about the outcome of it.
The main message of this part is: Wish me luck!
PS: If you’re curious about my syllabus let me know and I’ll share the PDF with you.
From the Blog
Right after writing the above part Shuri decided to jump onto my laps, take over the keyboard and stared the same screen for about ten minutes. I offered her to guest write the rest of it but she didn’t replied. My guess she has plans for a solo newsletter.
I think one of the most important things happening this week is UN Climate Summit. Not that I’m really hopeful about governments and politicians coming with something really good for all of us but the action and activism happening around that event gives me hope.
One of those actions I’m a part of is Covering Climate Now project. The outlet I’m part of, NewsLabTurkey, is the first partner from Turkey and since Monday, we’re putting out new articles about climate crisis and climate journalism.
This project is also important because basically hundreds of media outlets around the world said “Climate crisis is a serious matter (duh!) and we’re going to use our tools, platform and power to fight against this issue and support people who wants to do something.” This type of journalism is something we really need, especially in topics like this one.
WaDI Filter
“There is every chance we will miss the mark, but every fraction of a degree warming that we are able to hold off is a victory and every policy that we are able to win that makes our societies more humane, the more we will weather the inevitable shocks and storms to come without slipping into barbarism.” — Naomi Klein
“Consider this newsletter. It took us five weeks to find an email provider that would disable the tracking technology in this message. We looked into eight different companies before finding this one.” — Julia Angwin
“ImageNet contains a number of problematic, offensive and bizarre categories - all drawn from WordNet. Some use misogynistic or racist terminology. Hence, the results ImageNet Roulette returns will also draw upon those categories. That is by design: we want to shed light on what happens when technical systems are trained on problematic training data. AI classifications of people are rarely made visible to the people being classified. ImageNet Roulette provides a glimpse into that process – and to show the ways things can go wrong.” — ImageNet Roulette (In case you’re wondering, both of my selfies returned the term ‘beard’.)
There are many new faces around here, so I should remind you all how this newsletter is working (because since it’s published on Substack you might ask whether there will a be paid version etc.). Short answer is no. Because Substack works with Stripe and Stripe doesn’t work in Turkey, I can’t start a subscription model even if I wanted to.
But also I don’t want to. I already have a Patreon going on and there are things I’m planning and working on for that place right now. Plus, Patreon supports everything else I’m doing online, such as this newsletter and my blog. So if you ever think about supporting my work, you can always click this button:
That’s all I have for this week. Take care of yourselves and the loved ones and see you all next week!
Who Writes This?
Ahmet A. Sabancı (that's me), writer, journalist and researcher. Writing about many things including technology, surveillance, censorship, philosophy, science fiction and futures and occasionally about politics and Turkey. There’s a good chance you found me through my blog or Twitter or maybe some nice people recommended this newsletter to you. You can find more about me here and small selection of my writings here.