October 24, 2016

By The Morning News — 24 Oct 2016

Who votes the most? “The most reliable voters in the U.S. right now, who are getting to the polls at a higher rate than any other, aren’t white men (angry or not) or soccer moms (translation: suburban white women). An astounding 82 percent of African American women over age 18 cast ballots in 2012 (compared to 67 percent of white women).” / nsippets.wordpress.com

“The best way to attract and grow an audience for political content on the world’s biggest social network is to eschew factual reporting and instead play to partisan biases using false or misleading information that simply tells people what they want to hear.” BuzzFeed investigates hyperpartisan Facebook pages for truthfulness, to disconcertingly conclude that the least factual sites are also the most popular. Of posts shared by three right-wing pages, 38 percent were not true. For left-wing pages: 19 percent. / BuzzFeed

Even though a Washington Post investigation showed that Facebook allowed several false news stories to go viral, it hasn’t followed Google’s lead in adding fact-checking icons into posts. / TechCrunch

“Algorithms are always opinions embedded in mathematics.” Indirect has supplanted direct influence, argues Cathy O’Neil, author of Weapons of Math Destruction. She had a first-row seat to the real-time effect of algorithmic training on finance in 2008 and sees it now in social media. / Harmony Institute

“It suggests that his principles are pretty flexible when it comes to him getting paid.” The Trump Organization leased office space to a state-owned Iranian bank that has funneled purchases for the nuclear program and has links to terrorist acts. / The Center for Public Integrity

Last Friday, a coordinated attack of unknown origin brought down a broad swath of the web, cutting down sites from Github to Spotify to Twitter. Unlike thieves who steal data, this hack—known as a DDOS attack—just brings down websites by crippling the reference service called DNS. It’s like ripping up the phonebook. / Wired

From the Radiolab vault: “Darkode,” an episode with the story of a man who helped build botnets before turning his back on hacking. / radiolab.org

“To protect DNS, ICANN came up with a way of securing it without entrusting too much control to any one person. It selected seven people as key holders and gave each one an actual key to the internet.” Every three months since 2010, cryptography officers participate in a secret key ceremony designed to keep the web secure. / Business Insider

“‘Control’ over the entirety of the internet is a concept based on a broken understanding of what the internet is and what it’s become since the first packet switches were installed in UCLA labs in 1969.” Ted Cruz is mad about the United States relinquishing control over the web, but the technically simple task of DNS obscures a “political kudzu” worthy of this longread on ICANN’s genesis and future. / Fusion

ICANN’s most politically contentious area of control is really cosmetic: it controls top-level domains, the postfixes on URLs. Because governments sit on its advisory committees, these domains are politically influenced. For example, Saudi Arabia was able to get.gay rejected. / news.xinhuanet.com

You might hear otherwise, but the Dyn attack had nothing to do with the United States “giving away the internet,” as Republicans have suggested. / NPR

Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, and Somalia—and no one’s talking about it. / theweek.com

When you talk about Slow Food, “you talk about the normal life of a common person in Macedonia.” / vogue.com

An upcoming randomized study in Philadelphia—to learn how much advanced life support is beneficial for victims of penetrating trauma—means that patients will receive different medical attention randomly. / NPR

“The ratio between California and Wyoming is now 66 to 1, yet they have the same sway in the Senate. Could the Founders have envisioned that? And are we OK with that?” Why gun control is doomed: Our short-sighted founding fathers. / The New Republic

What life is like not as a DJ at Whole Foods, but as the guy who books the DJs at Whole Foods. / Insomniac

The camp, home to 6,500 migrants, is being closed on humanitarian grounds. / Reuters

“You can visit the Barack Obama Academy in Plainfield, N.J., or the Barack Obama Male Leadership Academy in Dallas, or the Barack Obama Academy of International Studies in Pittsburgh. You can drive down Barack Obama Avenue in East St. Louis, or Obama Way in Seaside, Calif.” How America has begun to memorialize the Obama presidency. E.g., a California trapdoor spider (Aptostichus barackobamai), or an orange spangled darter (Etheostoma obama). / New York Times

Reportedly the world’s most expensive potato chips—“featuring rare Nordic ingredients”—cost $56 for five chips. / adweek.com

A depressing thought exercise, courtesy of your Monday afternoon white paper: What would the US look like if the extra $3.4 trillion spent on increasing the size of the criminal justice system over the last 30-odd years had been invested elsewhere? / Communities United

As Texas does everything in its power to shut down abortion clinics, it provides millions in state funding every year to “crisis pregnancy centers” that present themselves as medical care centers but distribute misinformation and actively work to prevent often-lower-class women from having abortions. / rewire.news

“A flurry of high-profile robberies, not limited to the Västberga heist, married paper money to security vulnerabilities in the public imagination, and led entities such as the Swedish bank tellers’ union to lobby against cash-handling.” Why and how Sweden is quickly going cashless. / The New Yorker

A new analysis shows that children die at the hands of guns every other day, far more than what’s shown by federal government data. / USA Today

Eight percent of Scotland’s Parliament is LGBTQ, making it the queerest national legislative body in the world. / The New York Times

Easily our favorite new comic / Twitter

“It is quite possible that we are being misled and that the apparent manifestation of dark energy is a consequence of analysing the data in an oversimplified theoretical model.” The discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe won the Nobel Prize, the Gruber Cosmology Prize, and the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics—and it may be wrong. / Phys.org