Clay Shirky: Society doesn't need newspapers, it needs journalism This is an extract from Clay Shirky's article, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable. The full essay can be read here. If you want to know why newspapers are in such trouble, the most salient fact is this: Printing presses are terrifically expensive to set up and to run. This bit of economics, normal since Gutenberg, limits competition while creating positive returns to scale for the press owner, a happy pair of economic effects that feed on each other. For a long time, longer than anyone in the newspaper business has been alive in fact, print journalism has been intertwined with these economics. The competition-deflecting effects of printing cost got destroyed by the internet, where everyone pays for the infrastructure, and then everyone gets to use it. Print media does much of society's heavy journalistic lifting, from flooding the zone — covering every angle of a huge story — to the daily grind of attending the city council meeting, just in case. I don't know.
blog » Multisystem Trojan Janicab attacks Windows and MacOSX via scripts On Friday, July 12th a warning from an AVAST fan about a new polymorphic multisystem threat came to an inbox of AVAST. Moreover, an archive of malicious files discussed here were attached. Some of them have been uploaded to Virustotal and therefore they have been shared with computer security professionals on the same day. A weekend had passed by and articles full of excitement about a new Trojan for MacOs started to appear on the web. Windows version A chain of events that installs a malicious Visual Basic script on Windows platform looks like this: In the beginning there is a malicious Office Open XML Document containing two embedded binary files. The step that follows is decrypted from the second embedded binary with a name ActiveX1.bin. The dropper simply loads and executes two files in resources that are unencrypted. Seeking the pattern on the web in cached YouTube pages it turned out that an expression “111.90.152.210/cc” could have been returned as a C&C server address.
Why plagiarize when you can rip off a writer's thoughts? I could frame this piece about plagiarism by starting with a little verse about a renowned professor who won his fame by appropriating the work of another: Let no one else’s work evade your eyes Remember why the good Lord made your eyes So don’t shade your eyes But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize… Only be sure always to call it please ‘research.’ I might credit the author of those lines, the satirist and folk singer Tom Lehrer, but you’d likely think me less clever for merely quoting someone when I could have used an idea of my own. Perhaps I should start off with what put plagiarism back in journalism’s center court—a series of allegations against prominent writers such as CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, The New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell, and BuzzFeed’s Benny Johnson. Surely I could get away with quoting from the allegations without any attribution because the two bloggers who investigated the journalists have remained anonymous. Those last two sentences, I admit, are not mine.
On The Decline Of Magazines People love a good a good funeral (and as David Hepworth put it "in the digital age they don't even have to dress for it"). In only the past few days I've read two articles that pronounce the 'death' of marketing (only to then go on to explain how marketing is still very much alive, albeit changing. *Sigh*). David Carr's piece in the New York Times focuses on the difficulties at Newsweek but makes a broader point about how magazines, like newspapers, have been in a steady slide that has now brought them to "the edge of a cliff". Publishers tradionally have two major revenue streams: circulation (newstand, subscription) and advertising. My favourite writer on the magazine industry, David Hepworth, noted that the CEO of Hearst Magazines in the US recently told the Economist that magazines already need five or six revenue streams in order to be successful. Finding a solution to this dilemma undoubtedly requires different thinking. Clay Shirky once wrote "Society doesn't need newspapers.
Sterft, gij oude journalistieke organisaties 13 januari 2012 | door: Geert-Jan Bogaerts, journalist, blogger, webontwikkelaar en docent aan de Universiteit van Groningen "De meeste journalisten jakkeren liever als een blind paard door op het pad dat ze het beste kennen." Onlangs werd ik door een artikeltje in de Guardian geattendeerd op een essay van Clay Shirky, de Amerikaanse professor die twee van de beste boeken over digitale cultuur heeft geschreven die ik ken. Here comes everybody en zijn opvolger Cognitive Surplus hebben mij veel geleerd over de manier waarop het internet onze economie, onze maatschappij, cultuur en politieke besluitvorming beïnvloeden. Shirky is een optimist – wat aardig aansluit bij mijn eigen levensvisie – en daarom ziet hij de toekomst rooskleurig in. Onheilsprofeten die waarschuwen dat het einde van de wereld nadert, neem je iets minder serieus. Optimalisatie We maken dagelijks een krant, niet wekelijks een magazine. Conservatief Shirky's duidelijke antwoord: nee, tenzij. Radicaliteit binnen een instituut
Equal-opportunity malware targets Macs and Windows Researchers have uncovered a family of malware that targets both Windows and OS X. Janicab.A, as the trojan is known, is also unusual because it uses a YouTube page to direct infected machines to command-and-control (C&C) servers and follows a clever trick to conceal itself. The threat first came to light last week, when researchers from F-Secure and Webroot documented a new trojan threatening Mac users. Like other recently discovered OS X malware, Janicab was digitally signed with a valid Apple Developer ID. It also used a special unicode character known as a right-to-left override to make the infection file appear as a PDF document rather than a potentially dangerous executable file. On Monday, researchers from Avast published a blog post reporting that Janicab can also infect computers running Windows. Like the Mac versions, Janicab randomly chooses a YouTube link from a hard-coded list to find the C&C server that issues updates and instructions.
Lines on Plagiarism Blur for Students in the Digital Age “Now we have a whole generation of students who’ve grown up with information that just seems to be hanging out there in cyberspace and doesn’t seem to have an author,” said Teresa Fishman, director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Clemson University. “It’s possible to believe this information is just out there for anyone to take.” Professors who have studied plagiarism do not try to excuse it — many are champions of academic honesty on their campuses — but rather try to understand why it is so widespread. In surveys from 2006 to 2010 by Donald L. McCabe, a co-founder of the Center for Academic Integrity and a business professor at Rutgers University, about 40 percent of 14,000 undergraduates admitted to copying a few sentences in written assignments. Perhaps more significant, the number who believed that copying from the Web constitutes “serious cheating” is declining — to 29 percent on average in recent surveys from 34 percent earlier in the decade. Ms. Photo Ms. In the view of Ms.
So you still think the internet is free... From 'why?' to 'why not?', the internet revolution | Media The near future of the web is tied up with the logic of present media practice, and the logic of present media practice dates back to Gutenberg's invention of movable type in the mid-1400s. The problem Gutenberg introduced into intellectual life was abundance: once typesetting was perfected, a copy of a book could be created faster than it could be read. Figuring out which books were worth reading, and which weren't, became one of the defining problems of the literate. This abundance of new writing thus introduced a new risk as well: the risk of variable quality. Subsequent centuries saw further inventiveness in media. Though there are obvious internal complexities in this - editing is a type of creation as well as filter - the division of labour was clear: professionals managed the creation and filtering of media, both selecting and improving it; amateurs consumed and discussed it. The internet is, in a way, the first thing to deserve the label "media".
nelletorres's blurblog It’s another whimsical Sunday morning, a perfect time to re-examine assumptions, and the one I’m working on this morning is when smaller business is actually better, where by “better” I might mean from the perspective of someone inside the business or from the perspective of the public. I came to this question by way of two articles I’ve read recently. Women CEO’s First up we havethis article from the Wall Street Journal, written by Sharon Hadary, which is entitled, “Why Are Women-Owned Firms Smaller Than Men-Owned Ones?” Hey, that seems super irrational of women! But you know what? Women start businesses to be personally challenged and to integrate work and family, and they want to stay at a size where they personally can oversee all aspects of the business. Well that was kind of too easy. Of course, that mindset is not the entire story. CEO pay Now let’s move to a New York Times article, or really a series of articles, about CEO pay and how it’s big and only getting bigger.