Tuesday, 10. January 2017

Gelungen: Die ARD präsentiert das Darknet


Die ARD nähert sich dem Phänomen „Darknet“ mit einer TV-Dokumentation. Die ist gelungen und zeigt die Ambivalenz von Anonymisierungs- und Verschlüsselungstechnologien mit einem Schwerpunkt auf die Durchsetzung und den Schutz von Menschenrechten.

netzpolitik.org

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Why Amsterdam’s coffee shops are closing


ON DECEMBER 31st the world’s oldest coffee shop, Mellow Yellow, in Amsterdam, was forced to roll down its bright yellow shutters one last time. Over the past half-century, many a foreigner has smoked their first spliff at this cosy cafe, which sat perfectly on the route between two tourist favourites, the Heineken Brewery and Rembrandt Square. Mellow Yellow is the latest in a string of Amsterdam coffee-shop closures, a development that is worrying health workers, law enforcement officials and potheads equally because it may push drugs back onto the street. The number of coffee shops in the Dutch capital has fallen by half since 1995, from 350 to just 167. Why are so many Amsterdam coffee shops closing?

economist.com

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Mesmerizing Timelapse Video From ‘Planet Earth II’ Reveals The Psychedelic World Of Fungi


Fungi are already interesting themselves, but when you have the chance to see some unusual ones blooming at night in a stunning timelapse, then that’s truly mind-blowing. This footage from Planet Earth II, shot by Steve Axford, even includes a few specimens of this psychedelic world that were captured for the very first time.

tranquilmonkey.com

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Cops Using FAKE Drug Tests To Convict Hundreds Of Thousands – Redacted Tonight


Faulty results from cheap roadside drug tests are sending tens of thousands of innocent people to jail or prison and ruining their futures. So why do police departments rely so heavily on a test that’s so obviously flawed? Correspondent Natalie McGill uncovers this highly gross miscarriage of justice and more on Redacted Tonight.

trofire.com

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'Hollyweed' sign prankster arrested


Los Angeles police on Monday arrested a local artist suspected of a New Year's Day prank in which he altered the letters of the famous Hollywood sign to read "Hollyweed." Pranksters change iconic Hollywood sign to 'Hollyweed' Zachary Cole Fernandez, 30, was booked on a misdemeanor charge when he voluntarily surrendered to the authorities with his attorney at his side. He was released on his own recognizance and ordered to appear in court on February 15, a police spokesman said.

abs-cbn.com

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Travel To The Moon With David Bowie 360 Video


NPR's YouTube channel, Skunk Bear, answers your science questions — and this week we picked one in honor of David Bowie. Bowie was born on January 8 - the artist would have been 70 on Sunday. Today, January 10, marks the first anniversary of his death. Bowie filled his songs with references to space, and his first big hit, "Space Oddity," was released just days before humans first walked on the moon.

npr.org

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Emperor Trump! How the President-Elect Acts Just Like a Roman Ruler


In the middle of Rome, just next to the tomb of the Emperor Augustus, there’s a high wall engraved with hundreds of lines, written in Latin. This is the Res Gestae Divi Augusti—”The Deeds of Divine Augustus,” a mini-autobiography composed by the Emperor before his death in 14 AD. Augustus, the first of the Roman emperors, wasn’t lacking in self-confidence. Here’s a taste of what he wrote: “Twice I triumphed with an ovation, and three times I enjoyed a curule triumph and 21 times I was named. I paid to the Roman plebs 300 sesterces each from my father’s will.

heatst.com

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Thinking About Fascism


The 2016 presidential election made me think about 1933 and Hitler's rise to power. I've known that he came to power through constitutional means and then used that power from the inside to destroy a constitutional system of government. This seemed like a good time to better understand the way that someone who was a megalomaniac, not taken seriously by elites, brought to power by pandering to people's fears, could take control of the levers of power. I just read Robert O. Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism. For me it helped clarify the tasks before us. In discussing Hitler's and Mussolini's rise to power Paxton says it is important to look at the means through which these fascists translated an ability to mobilize popular discontent into an almost unlimited ability to control the machineries of governmental power.

commondreams.org

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Snowden: “Right and Wrong is a very different standard from Legal and Illegal”


There are times when you have tons of historical research lined up for a column about legal structures making bad assumptions based on facts that are no longer true, and then something just comes along that makes you wipe your desk and say “no. scrap all of this work. This. I need to post this, and I need to post this now.” Right now is such a time. The topic of cost structures of publishing in the 1800s will wait for another day (it’s already waited for over 200 years, after all).

privateinternetaccess.com

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Swaziland or Switzerland? FBI silent about peculiarities in Russian hack documentation


There are several peculiarities in the technical documentation that FBI has laid out as documentation for Russian hacker attacks on the USA.

The documentation given by FBI and Homeland Security in an attempt to prove Russian hacking of American politicians, organizations and businesses are marked by several deviations that seem to be trivial typing errors. This is what a check made by the Danish IT website Version2 of the attached IP address lists in the report by the authorities shows. The report lists 876 IP addresses that the American authorities believe Russian hacker groups used in connection with attacks on the USA in recent years.

www.version2.dk

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