04
May 10
The WaPo headline, “Report: No spying in Pa. school laptops case,” strains the limits of credibility after Lower Merion School District’s admission that “lax policies led [the district] to capture 58,000 images.”
The honest take is buried at the end of the article:
The report said the tracking system was intended to help recover stolen computers and the district used it successfully for that purpose. But it said the district also used the system for missing computers and for unknown purposes and left it activated for long periods in cases “in which there was no longer any possible legitimate reason” for capturing images.
But they weren’t spying. Oh, and ignore this:
[E]mployees with access to the images marveled at the tracking software. It was like a window into “a little LMSD soap opera,” a staffer is quoted as saying in an e-mail to Carol Cafiero, the administrator running the program.
“I know, I love it,” she is quoted as having replied.
04
May 10
In the last two years, Microsoft’s browser share has fallen precipitously, while Firefox and Chrome posted strong gains:
Although Firefox’s share of traffic has dropped from its zenith, it remains the browser of choice for 57% of this site’s visitors. It’s a very specific open-source triumph.
03
May 10
Twitter is 254% black.
The article posits some theories as to why blacks are proportionally overrepresented, including celebrity role models, mobile Internet adoption, and youth. The celebrity argument doesn’t pass the sniff test, but the other two seem plausible. Also, I don’t claim to have an explanation for this, but I’ve also noticed that the non-news-driven trending topic hashtags are usually dominated by black Twitterers (Exceptions in Monday afternoon’s trending topics: #DearJonasBrothers and Justin Bieber).
Naturally, on a topic this anodyne, reasonable discourse prevails.
03
May 10
James Fallows notes an interview with Rafi Sela, the “former chief security officer of the Israel Airport Authority and a 30-year veteran in airport security and defence technology, [who] helped design the security at Ben Gurion [International Airport],” who considers full-body scanners expensive, ineffective, and unnecessary (not to mention invasive).
Although I’m normally an unabashed fan of electronic gimcrackery, spending that kind of scrilla on devices that have been proven not to work is pretty hard to understand–until you remember that some contractor stands to make millions and millions of dollars showing off your naked body.
