http://fusion.net

The FBI convicted this man using hair analysis. It was a dog’s hair.
▻http://fusion.net/the-fbi-convicted-this-man-using-hair-analysis-it-was-1793847259

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Meet Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the mother of rock and roll
▻http://fusion.net/story/107215/meet-sister-rosetta-tharpe-the-black-woman-who-invented-that-rock-and-roll-s

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These startups want to kill the coffin | Fusion
▻http://fusion.net/story/273934/funeral-startups-green-natural-burials

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The Capsula Mundi burial project by Italian designers Anna Citelli and Raoul Bretzel combines the idea of human composting with that of a burial suit. Citelli and Bretzel are creating “seeds” or pods that will hold the body in fetal position, where it will be buried underneath a newly planted tree.

They told me over email that they landed on this idea after asking themselves why design cannot help humanity better approach the issue of death.

“We decided to dedicate our work to overcoming a major taboo in our society: the coffin,” they wrote in an email.

They noted how in some countries, such as England, the funeral industry has already changed as green cemeteries have become increasingly popular, thus offering “a wide variety of natural burials.”

“Death is not only a physical event, it is a physiological experience and we are convinced that people feel the need to reconnect themselves with death,” they wrote. “There is no obstruction, deprivation or annihilation from death. We return to the earth and the earth will always generate new forms of life.”

UVM’s Black Lives Matter flag controversy | Fusion, 9/26/16

A university raised a Black Lives Matter flag next to the American flag — and people lost their minds

▻http://fusion.net/story/350851/black-lives-matter-university-of-vermont-flag

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Last Thursday, school officials from the University of Vermont and representatives from the school’s student government agreed that it would be appropriate to hoist a Black Lives Matter flag alongside the American and state flags on campus in a show of solidarity with the people who are “struggling with the violence and search for justice in this country.”

“The Student Government Association is sponsoring the flag at this time to show symbolic support for our community,” said Student Government president Jason Maulucci.”It is fitting that the flag flies adjacent to the recently engraved benches that pronounce the values of Our Common Ground – Respect, Integrity, Innovation, Openness, Justice, and Responsibility.”

The flag caused controversy almost immediately. Some, like sophomore Akilah Ho-Young, were elated.

“Can I tell you I wanted to cry when I saw this,” Ho-Young wrote in a now viral Facebook post. “My body filled with lots of joy to know that my predominantly white University is paying tribute to the deaths in the black community. Its the littlest thing that just means so much to me.”

Others, though, took issue with the flag and asserted that “all lives matter” would have been a more appropriate, inclusive message for the university to have endorsed.

“[Black Lives Matter] has proved time and time again they are a racist hate group,” UVM alumnus Chris Dietze wrote on Facebook. “If they really cared about police brutality they’d be mad when someone of any color gets shot and killed by police who were unarmed.”

While this particular debate is nothing new when it comes to Black Lives Matter, the controversy over the university’s flag took a turn over the weekend when someone physically took it down without the administration’s knowing.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Maulucci described how the initially positive reaction to the flag quickly turned negative and he began to receiving complaints and threatening e-mails from people angry at the display. As disappointing was that the flag was removed, Maulucci said, it wasn’t surprising.

“It was upsetting that someone stole it, but I think it underscored the necessity for raising in the first place,” Maulucci said. “We’re proud of the fact that we’re contributing to that conversation. You can’t make progress unless you acknowledge that there’s a problem.”

Even through the first Black Lives Matter flag was pulled down, it didn’t take long for a replacement to be hoisted into the air courtesy of Pat Brown, the school’s director of student life, who bought another flag and painted it along with his wife.

#Black_Lives_Matter #University_of_Vermont #US #violences_policières

Homeland Security to review privatized immigration detention

The Department of Homeland Security is considering curbing private immigration detention operations, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson announced Monday.

▻http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/private-immigration-detention-homeland-security-227507

#USA #Etats-Unis #détention_administrative #rétention #migrations #privatisation

Police asked 3D printing lab Arora to recreate a dead man’s fingers to unlock phone

▻http://fusion.net/story/327145/3d-print-dead-mans-fingers-to-unlock-his-phone

A 3D printed finger alone often can’t unlock a phone these days. Most fingerprint readers used on phones are capacitive, which means they rely on the closing of tiny electrical circuits to work. The ridges of your fingers cause some of these circuits to come in contact with each other, generating an image of the fingerprint. Skin is conductive enough to close these circuits, but the normal 3D printing plastic isn’t, so Arora coated the 3D printed fingers in a thin layer of metallic particles so that the fingerprint scanner can read them.

[...]

“We don’t know which finger the suspect used,” he told me by phone. “We think it’s going to be the thumb or index finger—that’s what most people use—but we have all ten.”

[...]

a password that you have memorized may be protected by the Fifth Amendment. Your fingerprints aren’t.

but a judge argues that

phones should be considered extensions of our minds and should be protected under the Fifth Amendment (protection against self-incrimination) and not just the Fourth Amendment (protection against illegal search and seizure). He argues that cell phones are unlike almost anything else we own.

#authentication
#fingerprint
#security
#privacy

Gretna, Louisiana: The arrest capital of the United States | Fusion
▻http://fusion.net/story/256788/gretna-louisiana-arrest-capital-america

Via Achile Mbembe sur FB

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When you cross into the New Orleans suburb of Gretna, Louisiana, over the Crescent City Connection bridge there is no sign that says, “Welcome to the Arrest Capital of the United States.”

There is no cutout of a smiling cop telling you to be careful and not violate any local laws. There is no warning telling you that of all the large cities and mid-sized towns in the country, this is the one in which you are most likely to be arrested.

In fact, it is.

#racisme #Police #violence #états_unis #nouvelle_orléans

Airbnb’s racism problem isn’t going away any time soon

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Some users have found ways around biased hosts on Airbnb. Two years ago, Khadijah, a New Jersey professor, was traveling to Sausalito, Calif. for a friend’s wedding. There were plenty of homes in the area that showed up as available for the weekend of the wedding, but every time she tried to book, she was ignored or told the home was not available.

“I started tailoring my messages to drop as much respectability into the narrative as I could, emphasizing that I was a professor,” Khadijah told Fusion. “I thought if I sounded more respectable, it would help me book a room, but it wasn’t effective.”

So Khadijah asked her Facebook friends if anyone who was white would be willing to let her use their face.

“A friend in her 60s, a white woman in Philadelphia, lent me her photo,” Khadijah told us. “I got a room pretty quickly after that.”

▻http://fusion.net/story/308759/airbnbs-racism-problem-isnt-going-away-any-time-soon

No law and order: The growing massacre over Brazilian land rights | Fusion
▻http://fusion.net/story/319654/in-brazil-land-disputes-are-growing-more-deadly

United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Vicky Tauli-Corpuz, made a visit to Brazil earlier this year and declared that the expansion of the agricultural frontier deeper into the Amazon had resulted in “open warfare” between farmers and indigenous groups, which are often the victims of this violence. Between 2003 and 2014, the Indigenous Missionary Council estimates that 754 indigenous people were killed in Brazil.

Aside from inciting land conflict, even when legally obtained, extractive industries have left their mark on the environment. Deforestation has slowed in recent years, but between August 2012 and July 2013, the state of Tocantins lost nearly 30 square miles of forest. The largest pressure, according to the state ministry of environment, is the expansion of soy plantations already prominent in neighboring states of Maranão and Bahia. Traditional communities that border such operations are affected by groundwater pollution and drifting chemicals used on the crops.

#assassinats #meurtres #peuples_autochtones #activistes #terres #foncier

Facebook is using your phone’s location to suggest new friends—which could be a privacy disaster
▻http://fusion.net/story/319108/facebook-phone-location-friend-suggestions

Facebook’s ability to discern with creepy accuracy the “people we may know” has surprised, delighted, and horrified its users for years. While the magic sauce behind friend suggestions has always been a bit mysterious, it now includes some potentially unsettling information. Thanks to tracking the location of users’ smartphones, the social network may suggest you friend people you’ve shared a GPS data point with, meaning your friend suggestions could include someone whose face you know, but (...)

#Facebook #GPS #géolocalisation #smartphone

If you use Waze, hackers can stalk you
▻http://fusion.net/story/293157/waze-hack

Millions of drivers use Waze, a Google-owned navigation app, to find the best, fastest route from point A to point B. And according to a new study, all of those people run the risk of having their movements tracked by hackers. Researchers at the University of California-Santa Barbara recently discovered a Waze vulnerability that allowed them to create thousands of “ghost drivers” that can monitor the drivers around them—an exploit that could be used to track Waze users in real-time. They (...)

#Google #Waze #GPS #géolocalisation

How a Senator used Facebook ads to influence employees in a single D.C. building
▻http://fusion.net/story/293627/facebook-ads-geotargeting-political-lobbying

What happens when #GeoIP maps its default location to your physical address
▻http://fusion.net/story/287592/internet-mapping-glitch-kansas-farm #IP #Internet #geography #Kansas

Panama Papers reveal how rich use art market to get richer | Fusion
▻http://fusion.net/story/288515/panama-papers-leak-art-market

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Yves Bouvier is connected to five different Mossack Fonseca companies (Rybolovlev is comparatively modest, with a mere two), and would mark up the paintings he was selling by astonishing amounts. As Sam Knight has reported for The New Yorker, Bouvier started off by buying a Gauguin for $9.5 million and then selling it for $11.3 million, but soon got more ambitious. He bought a Picasso for $4.8 million and then flipped it to Rybolovlev for $34.4 million. He sold the oligarch a Klimt masterpiece for $183 million, including a $60 million profit for himself. There was also a Rothko that he bought for $80 million and sold for $189 million.

By those standards, the deal that caused the end of his relationship with Rybolovlev had a relatively low markup: Bouvier bought a Modigliani from Steve Cohen for $93.5 million, and then sold it to the Russian for $118 million. Add it all up, and Rybolovlev’s lawyers estimate that Bouvier overcharged his client by the hilariously specific, yet eye-poppingly enormous, sum of $1,049,465,009. Call it a nice round billion. (Rybolovlev declined the ICIJ’s request for a comment. A representative for Bouvier told ICIJ’s Bernstein that “his client used offshore companies for well-established legal purposes.” Mossack Fonseca has not yet commented on its involvement in art holdings, but has responded at length to the Panama Papers.)

Whether they were legal or not, those kind of markups could never be found in a transparent market. When everybody has the same information at the same time – in the stock market, for instance – dealers can get away with only the tiniest markups between where they’re buying and where they’re selling. In other areas where you’re selling unique and illiquid assets, like real estate, the markups are bigger, but still not enormous: The intermediary will normally end up collecting somewhere in the 2 to 3 percent range.

In the art world, by contrast, the most transparent companies of all – the auction houses – typically charge sellers about 12 percent, and buyers about 20 percent, for a total commission of more than 30 percent. And in private transactions, the slice taken by the middleman can be bigger still – even when prices get up into the $100 million range, as can be seen with the Bouvier-Rybolovlev transactions.

Giant Leak of Offshore Financial Records Exposes Global Array of Crime and Corruption · ICIJ
►https://panamapapers.icij.org/20160403-panama-papers-global-overview.html

A massive leak of documents exposes the offshore holdings of 12 current and former world leaders and reveals how associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin secretly shuffled as much as $2 billion through banks and shadow companies.

The leak also provides details of the hidden financial dealings of 128 more politicians and public officials around the world.

The cache of 11.5 million records shows how a global industry of law firms and big banks sells financial secrecy to politicians, fraudsters and drug traffickers as well as billionaires, celebrities and sports stars.

These are among the findings of a yearlong investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and more than 100 other news organizations.

The files expose offshore companies controlled by the prime ministers of Iceland and Pakistan, the king of Saudi Arabia and the children of the president of Azerbaijan.

They also include at least 33 people and companies blacklisted by the U.S. government because of evidence that they’d been involved in wrongdoing, such as doing business with Mexican drug lords, terrorist organizations like Hezbollah or rogue nations like North Korea and Iran.

One of those companies supplied fuel for the aircraft that the Syrian government used to bomb and kill thousands of its own citizens, U.S. authorities have charged.

#paradis_fiscaux #corruption

Guns are killing Americans at the same rate as car crashes | Fusion
▻http://fusion.net/story/246822/gun-death-rate-same-as-car-crashes
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The number of fatal car crashes has dropped precipitously in the last 50 years or so due in large part to stricter laws regarding car safety and general technological innovation. Together, drunk driving laws, seatbelt laws, and universal airbags brought car-related deaths down from 25 per 100,000 people to about 10.

With guns, though, it’s the opposite. While the uptick in gun-related deaths hasn’t been as dramatic as the drop in car-related fatalities, the change over time is similarly related to changes in legislation.

#armes #lois #états-unis

Get rich or die vlogging: The sad economics of internet fame
►http://fusion.net/story/244545/famous-and-broke-on-youtube-instagram-social-media

It was all so painfully awkward. That night, Brittany Ashley, a lesbian stoner in red lipstick, was at Eveleigh, a popular farm-to-table spot in West Hollywood. The restaurant was hosting Buzzfeed’s Golden Globes party. For the past two years, Ashley has been one of the most visible actresses on the company’s four YouTube channels, which altogether have about 17 million subscribers. She stars in bawdy videos with titles like “How To Win The Breakup” or “Masturbation: Guys Vs. Girls,” many of which rack up millions of views.

The awkward part was that Ashley wasn’t there to celebrate with Buzzfeed. She was there to serve them. Not realizing that her handful of weekly waitressing shifts at Eveleigh paid most of her bills, a coworker from the video production site asked Ashley if her serving tray was “a bit.” It was not.

The sad economics of being famous on the internet
►http://fusion.net/story/244545/famous-and-broke-on-youtube-instagram-social-media
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Robots dream up hilarious cooking recipes
▻http://fusion.net/story/225414/robots-cooking
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One chart explains why Syrian refugees aren’t dangerous | Fusion
▻http://fusion.net/story/234172/syrian-refugee-chart-explains-everything

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Despite state opposition, the U.S. still plans to accept approximately 10,000 Syrian refugees over the next fiscal year. So if your governor, or another elected official in your state needs a reminder of why accepting Syrian refugees isn’t an invitation to terrorism—but rather a humanitarian gesture to citizens of a country that has been torn apart by extremist violence—you can feel free to send them the chart above.

#réfugiés