/10

A Genocide Incited on Facebook, With Posts From Myanmar’s Military - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/10/16/business/16myanmar-1-print/00myanmar-1-facebookJumbo.jpg?year=2018&h=550&w=1050&sig=0x821870c64d346a91a0145a9a21f8867c

NAYPYIDAW, Myanmar — They posed as fans of pop stars and national heroes as they flooded Facebook with their hatred. One said Islam was a global threat to Buddhism. Another shared a false story about the rape of a Buddhist woman by a Muslim man.

The Facebook posts were not from everyday internet users. Instead, they were from Myanmar military personnel who turned the social network into a tool for ethnic cleansing, according to former military officials, researchers and civilian officials in the country.

The previously unreported actions by Myanmar’s military on Facebook are among the first examples of an authoritarian government’s using the social network against its own people. It is another facet of the disruptive disinformation campaigns that are unfolding on the site. In the past, state-backed Russians and Iranians spread divisive and inflammatory messages through Facebook to people in other countries. In the United States, some domestic groups have now adopted similar tactics ahead of the midterm elections.

#Facebook #Birmanie #Rohingyas #Militaires

Silicon Valley’s Saudi Arabia Problem
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/12/opinion/silicon-valley-saudi-arabia.html

Technology companies can no longer turn a blind eye to the human rights abuses of one of their largest investors. Somewhere in the United States, someone is getting into an Uber en route to a WeWork co-working space. Their dog is with a walker whom they hired through the app Wag. They will eat a lunch delivered by DoorDash, while participating in several chat conversations on Slack. And, for all of it, they have an unlikely benefactor to thank : the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Long before (...)

#BostonDynamics #Google #Softbank #WeWork #Amazon #DoorDash #Uber #anti-terrorisme #écologie #éthique #bénéfices #lobbying (...)

##HumanRightsWatch

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/10/12/opinion/12giridharadas/12giridharadas-facebookJumbo.jpg

Tech Workers Now Want to Know : What Are We Building This For ?
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/07/technology/tech-workers-ask-censorship-surveillance.html

Jack Poulson, a Google research scientist, recently became alarmed by reports that the company was developing a search engine for China that would censor content on behalf of the government. While Dr. Poulson works on search technologies, he had no knowledge of the product, which was code-named Dragonfly. So in a meeting last month with Jeff Dean, the company’s head of artificial intelligence, Dr. Poulson asked if Google planned to move ahead with the product and if his work would (...)

#USDepartmentOfDefense #Google #Microsoft #Amazon #GoogleSearch #Salesforce.com #algorithme #Dragonfly #militarisation #censure #reconnaissance #Maven (...)

##surveillance

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/10/06/business/06valleyworkers-01/06valleyworkers-01-facebookJumbo.jpg

À qui profite le contenu des pages Facebook tunisiennes liées à Israël ? – Inkyfada
▻https://inkyfada.com/fr/2019/06/03/tunisie-facebook-israel

https://inkyfada.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Cover-Pages-FB-MDF-desktop.jpg

Le 16 mai 2019, Facebook annonce la désactivation de 265 pages ou comptes liés à une société israélienne dont le but est d’influencer l’opinion publique, principalement dans des pays africains. En Tunisie, 11 pages sont concernées. Inkyfada a eu accès à la quasi-totalité du contenu publié par ces pages. À qui profitent-elles ? Un candidat se dégage en particulier. Enquête.

Que cette campagne ait été commandée directement par un candidat, des personnes ou des entités qui lui sont favorables, une société en est l’instigatrice, selon Facebook. Il s’agit de la société Israélienne Archimedes Group . Son objectif ? "Changer la réalité" pour "gagner des élections à travers le monde" . 

“CHANGER LA RÉALITÉ”

Archimedes Group opérait principalement en Afrique, mais aussi en Asie du Sud-Est et en Amérique Latine et affichait clairement ses intentions sur son site internet, avant qu’il ne soit lui-même supprimé à la suite de la révélation de ses méthodes par Facebook. 

“Nos équipes ont joué un rôle significatif dans de nombreuses campagnes politiques ou publiques, comme des élections présidentielles ou d’autres projets sur les réseaux sociaux à travers le monde”, précisait encore Archimedes. 

https://inkyfada.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Capture-AG.jpg

Capture d’écran de la page "a propos" du site de la société Archimedes Group avant sa suppression.

Pour cela, la société israélienne affirmait avoir développé un ensemble d’outils et méthodes “innovantes” afin de “changer la réalité selon les souhaits de ses clients". Parmi ces outils, Archimedes Group propose à ses clients d’acquérir “Archimedes Tarva” , un produit décrit comme un logiciel de gestion de campagne. 

https://inkyfada.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Capture-AG-1.jpg

“Développé par des experts de premier plan dans le domaine des réseaux sociaux et écrit par nos meilleurs développeurs, il inclut des outils d’automatisation et de gestion de campagnes sur les réseaux sociaux, la création de plateformes à grande échelle et des opérations illimitées de comptes en ligne. 

La licence comprend la formation et la mise en oeuvre sur site, ainsi qu’un service technique 24h/7j”.

Selon plusieurs sources dont l’AIPAC, puissant lobby américain de soutien à Israël, Elinadav Heymann est désigné comme le PDG d’ Archimedes Group. Il est à ce jour difficilement traçable en ligne, sa biographie ayant été supprimée de nombreux sites qui le référençaient depuis la révélation par Facebook de ses activités. L’un d’eux, negociations.ch, le présentait aussi comme un ancien agent du renseignement de l’armée de l’air israélienne.

[Rick Gates Sought Online Manipulation Plans From Israeli Intelligence Firm for Trump Campaign](►https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/08/us/politics/rick-gates-psy-group-trump.html)

Ce n’est pas la première fois qu’une société israélienne gérée par un ancien agent du renseignement est citée pour ce type d’activités. En 2016, Rick Gates, un responsable de la campagne électorale de Donald Trump avait approché la société Psy-Group, alors composée d’anciens agents des services du renseignement israélien, rapporte le New York Times. Un document élaboré par Psy-Group détaillait alors un plan d’action élaboré notamment pour cibler et influencer des milliers de délégué·es républicain·es.

[L’unité militaire 8200, la face longtemps cachée de la high-tech israélienne](▻https://www.letemps.ch/economie/lunite-militaire-8200-face-longtemps-cachee-hightech-israelienne)

Il n’est pas étonnant de trouver des sociétés israéliennes spécialisées dans ces techniques de manipulation de masse, par le biais des réseaux sociaux. Les compétences technologiques développées au sein de l’armée à des fins de cyberdéfense et de contre-espionnage ont dessiné le modèle économique israélien tourné vers le numérique et les nouvelles technologies. Ainsi, confirme Fabrice Epelboin, enseignant au MediaLab de Sciences Po Paris, de nombreuses start-ups y sont créées par des vétérans de l’armée formés au sein des unités du renseignement israélien.

Des sociétés comme Archimedes Group, spécialisées dans la manipulation des masses sur les réseaux sociaux afin d’influencer l’opinion publique sur des sujets souvent politiques peuvent servir des États, des marques mais aussi des groupes politiques de manière décentralisée.

#tunisie #facebook #manipulation #manipulation_en_masse #élections #changer_la_réalité #israël #archimedes_group

The Simplest Way to Drastically Improve Your Life: More Sleep - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/28/smarter-living/how-to-get-better-sleep.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/10/30/nyregion/30smarterliving-SUB/29sl-newsletter1-jumbo.png

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have called sleep deprivation a public health crisis, saying that one-third of adults don’t get enough sleep. Some 80 percent of people report sleep problems at least once per week, and according to a 2016 study, sleep deprivation “causes more than $400 billion in economic losses annually in the United States and results in 1.23 million lost days of work each year.”

If that’s not enough, here is a non-comprehensive list of the ways your sleep deprivation is personally harming you:

Your overall cognitive performance — particularly your visual attention and ability to form memories — deteriorates. (More colloquially, this is that “brain fog” we all experience after a late night.)

Your ability to learn new information is impaired, both by sleep deprivation before you learn new information and afterward.

You’re less likely to correctly read facial expressions, even interpreting some expressions — even neutral ones — as threatening.

You’re likely to be more cranky and react worse when presented with obstacles.

Beyond your severely impaired mental abilities, your body is affected, too: A lack of adequate sleep can contribute to weight gain, puts you at a higher risk of diabetes and heart disease, and makes you far less resistant to the common cold.

That is insane! All of this from just not getting enough sleep!

So what are we to do?
...
First, learn how much sleep you need. Generally, if you’re waking up tired, you’re not getting enough.

#wtf #sommeil

Homelessness in New York Public Schools Is at a Record High: 114,659 Students - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/nyregion/homeless-students-nyc-schools-record.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/10/16/nyregion/16homeless1/16homeless1-facebookJumbo.jpg

The number of school-age children who are homeless has sharply increased in the last eight years along with a rise in homelessness over all.

#Etats-unis

Bruno Latour, the Post-Truth Philosopher, Mounts a Defense of Science
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/magazine/bruno-latour-post-truth-philosopher-science.html

He spent decades deconstructing the ways that scientists claim their authority. Can his ideas help them regain that authority today?

Savantes, indépendantes, nullipares, vieilles, les sorcières de Mona Chollet vous saluent bien
▻https://information.tv5monde.com/terriennes/savantes-independantes-nullipares-vieilles-les-sorcieres-de-mo

https://information.tv5monde.com/sites/info.tv5monde.com/files/assets/images/monacholletportrait.JPG

How Vilification of George Soros Moved From the Fringes to the Mainstream - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/31/us/politics/george-soros-bombs-trump.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/10/31/us/politics/31dc-soros1/31dc-soros1-facebookJumbo.jpg

On both sides of the Atlantic, a loose network of activists and political figures on the right have spent years seeking to cast Mr. Soros not just as a well-heeled political opponent but also as the personification of all they detest. Employing barely coded anti-Semitism, they have built a warped portrayal of him as the mastermind of a “globalist” movement, a left-wing radical who would undermine the established order and a proponent of diluting the white, Christian nature of their societies through immigration.

In the process, they have pushed their version of Mr. Soros, 88, from the dark corners of the internet and talk radio to the very center of the political debate.

“He’s a banker, he’s Jewish, he gives to Democrats — he’s sort of a perfect storm for vilification by the right, here and in Europe,” said Michael H. Posner, a human rights lawyer and former State Department official in the Obama administration.

Mr. Soros has given his main group, the Open Society Foundations, $32 billion for what it calls democracy-building efforts in the United States and around the world. In addition, in the United States, Mr. Soros has personally contributed more than $75 million over the years to federal candidates and committees, according to Federal Election Commission and Internal Revenue Service records.

That qualifies him as one of the top disclosed donors to American political campaigns in the modern campaign finance era, and it does not include the many millions more he has donated to political nonprofit groups that do not disclose their donors.

By contrast, the network of conservative donors led by the billionaire industrialist brothers Charles G. and David H. Koch, who have been similarly attacked by some on the American left, has spent about $2 billion over the past decade on political and public policy advocacy.❞

The closing advertisement for Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign featured Mr. Soros — as well as Janet L. Yellen, the chairwoman of the Federal Reserve at the time, and Lloyd Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, both of whom are Jewish — as examples of “global special interests” who enriched themselves on the backs of working Americans.

If anything, Mr. Soros has been elevated by Mr. Trump and his allies to even greater prominence in the narrative they have constructed for the closing weeks of the 2018 midterm elections. They have projected on to him key roles in both the threat they say is posed by the Central Americans making their way toward the United States border and what they characterized as Democratic “mobs” protesting the nomination of Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

The National Republican Congressional Committee ran an ad in October in Minnesota suggesting that Mr. Soros, who is depicted sitting behind a pile of cash, “bankrolls” everything from “prima donna athletes protesting our anthem” to “left-wing mobs paid to riot in the streets.” The ad links Mr. Soros to a local congressional candidate who worked at a think tank that has received funding from the Open Society Foundations.

Even after the authorities arrested a fervent Trump supporter and accused him of sending the pipe bombs to Mr. Soros and other critics, Republicans did not back away. The president grinned on Friday when supporters at the White House responded to his attacks on Democrats and “globalists” by chanting, “Lock ’em up,” and yelling, “George Soros.”

#Antisémitisme #Georges_Soros #Néo_fascisme #USA

Your Kid’s Apps Are Crammed With Ads
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/30/style/kids-study-apps-advertising.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur

In a new study of the most downloaded apps for children ages 5 and younger, researchers found advertising in almost all of them. Many developers market apps for children as being educational. So Jenny Radesky, a pediatrician who wrote the American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines for children and media, wanted to check that out. “One of my big concerns about why apps might not be educational was because of the presence of distracting features such as banner ads that sit along the top of (...)

#GooglePlay #smartphone #tablette #enfants #publicité

##publicité

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/10/29/fashion/news/screenstudy/screenstudy-facebookJumbo.jpg

A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/style/phones-children-silicon-valley.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/10/28/fashion/26NoTech-1/26NoTech-1-facebookJumbo-v2.jpg

SAN FRANCISCO — The people who are closest to a thing are often the most wary of it. Technologists know how phones really work, and many have decided they don’t want their own children anywhere near them.

A wariness that has been slowly brewing is turning into a regionwide consensus: The benefits of screens as a learning tool are overblown, and the risks for addiction and stunting development seem high. The debate in Silicon Valley now is about how much exposure to phones is O.K.

“Doing no screen time is almost easier than doing a little,” said Kristin Stecher, a former social computing researcher married to a Facebook engineer. “If my kids do get it at all, they just want it more.”

Among those is Chris Anderson, the former editor of Wired and now the chief executive of a robotics and drone company. He is also the founder of GeekDad.com.

“On the scale between candy and crack cocaine, it’s closer to crack cocaine,” Mr. Anderson said of screens.

Technologists building these products and writers observing the tech revolution were naïve, he said.

“We thought we could control it,” Mr. Anderson said. “And this is beyond our power to control. This is going straight to the pleasure centers of the developing brain. This is beyond our capacity as regular parents to understand.”

He has five children and 12 tech rules. They include: no phones until the summer before high school, no screens in bedrooms, network-level content blocking, no social media until age 13, no iPads at all and screen time schedules enforced by Google Wifi that he controls from his phone. Bad behavior? The child goes offline for 24 hours.

“I didn’t know what we were doing to their brains until I started to observe the symptoms and the consequences,” Mr. Anderson said.

#Addiction #Education #Ecrans #Enfants

Apple News’s Radical Approach: Humans Over Machines - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/technology/apple-news-humans-algorithms.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/10/28/business/28applenews/28applenews-facebookJumbo.jpg

Apple has waded into the messy world of news with a service that is read regularly by roughly 90 million people. But while Google, Facebook and Twitter have come under intense scrutiny for their disproportionate — and sometimes harmful — influence over the spread of information, Apple has so far avoided controversy. One big reason is that while its Silicon Valley peers rely on machines and algorithms to pick headlines, Apple uses humans like Ms. Kern.

The former journalist has quietly become one of the most powerful figures in English-language media. The stories she and her deputies select for Apple News regularly receive more than a million visits each.

Their work has complicated the debate about whether Silicon Valley giants are media or technology companies. Google, Facebook and Twitter have long insisted they are tech entities and not arbiters of the truth. The chief executive of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, and others have bet heavily on artificial intelligence to help them sort through false news and fact-based information. Yet Apple has unabashedly gone the other direction with its human-led approach, showing that a more media-like sensibility may be able to coexist within a technology company.

There are ambitious plans for the product. Apple lets publishers run ads in its app and it helps some sign up new subscribers, taking a 30 percent cut of the revenue. Soon, the company aims to bundle access to dozens of magazines in its app for a flat monthly fee, sort of like Netflix for news, according to people familiar with the plans, who declined to be identified because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. Apple also hopes to package access to a few daily-news publications, like The Times, The Post and The Wall Street Journal, into the app, the people said.

Apple’s executives grandly proclaim that they want to help save journalism. “There is this deep understanding that a thriving free press is critical for an informed public, and an informed public is critical for a functioning democracy, and that Apple News can play a part in that,” Ms. Kern said.

But there are early signs that Apple is not the industry’s savior. Many publishers have made little on ads in Apple News, and Apple’s 30 percent cut of subscriptions it helps sell does not help. Having experienced Google’s and Facebook’s disruption of their industry, many publications are wary of Apple, according to conversations with executives from nine news organizations, many of whom declined to comment on the record for fear of upsetting the trillion-dollar corporation. Some were optimistic that Apple could be a better partner than other tech giants, but were leery of making the company the portal to their readers.

The rise of Google and Facebook in news was partly driven by algorithms that provided enormous scale, enabling them to surface millions of articles from thousands of sources to their billions of users. The algorithms were largely designed to keep users engaged and clicking, meaning they tended to promote posts that drew clicks and shares, which often meant the sensational. That elevated fringe and partisan sites that produced intentionally misleading, highly partisan or downright false content.

(A Google spokeswoman said the company aimed to avoid misinformation by screening publishers before letting them into Google News. She added that Google this year began helping news organizations sell subscriptions. A Facebook spokeswoman said the company helps publishers reach more readers, earn ad revenue and sell subscriptions. She said Facebook’s algorithm recently decreased the visibility of pages that share clickbait.)

Into that environment came Apple. In late 2015, the iPhone maker released a free news app to match users with publications they liked. People selected their interests and favorite publications, and the app returned a feed of relevant stories.

The announcement attracted little fanfare. Three months later, Apple announced an unusual new feature: humans would pick the app’s top stories, not algorithms.

Not all of the stories in Apple News are handpicked. Algorithms still deliver stories based on which new sources or topics users have followed, such as sports, cars or entertainment. Algorithms also pick the five prominent “trending” stories below Ms. Kern’s team’s curated stories. Those items tend to focus on Mr. Trump or celebrities. Making the list on Oct. 2: a People magazine headline reading “Kate Middleton Is Back from Maternity Leave — with a New Haircut and Old Boots!”

Daniel Hallac, chief product officer for New York Magazine, said traffic from Apple News has doubled since December to now account for nearly 12 percent of visits to the magazine’s website. Traffic from Facebook has dropped about a third, to 8 percent of visits, while Google’s share has increased slightly to nearly half of the site’s traffic. “I’m optimistic about Apple News,” he said.

But in return for that traffic, publishers are stuck with Apple’s less-than-ideal terms. Apple News readers typically stay in Apple’s app, limiting the data that news organizations learn about them and curbing their ad revenues. Slate reported last month that its Apple News readers had roughly tripled over the past year but that, on average, it earned more money on 50,000 views on its site than the six million views it averaged per month in Apple News.

Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president who oversees its services push, said publishers can run their own ads alongside their stories in Apple News and keep all of the revenue. “That’s very rare,” he said. He noted most major publishers take advantage of that feature. Apple also places ads for publishers for a 30 percent cut.

But news publishers said selling ads for Apple News is complicated, and that advertisers’ interest was limited because of the lack of customer data. Slate also attributed its issues to minuscule revenue from the ads Apple placed. Apple recently made it easier for publishers to place their own ads, but Mr. Cue conceded Apple is not terribly good — or interested — in advertising.

#Apple #Journalisme #Médias #Apple_news #Editorialisation

Urban Planning Guru Says Driverless Cars Won’t Fix Congestion - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/27/technology/driverless-cars-congestion.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/10/28/business/25CALTHORPE03/25CALTHORPE03-facebookJumbo.jpg

Mr. Calthorpe is a Berkeley-based urban planner who is one of the creators of New Urbanism, which promotes mixed-use, walkable neighborhoods. His designs emphasize the proximity of housing, shopping and public space.

He is not opposed to autonomous vehicles. Mr. Calthorpe’s quarrel is with the idea that the widespread adoption of personally owned self-driving cars will solve transportation problems. In fact, he worries it will lead to more urban congestion and suburban sprawl.

“One thing is certain: Zero- or single-occupant vehicles,” even ones that can drive themselves, “are a bad thing,” he and the transportation planner Jerry Walters wrote in an article last year in Urban Land, an urban planning journal. “They cause congestion, eat up energy, exacerbate sprawl and emit more carbon per passenger-mile.”

“The key distinction is the number of people per vehicle,” said Mr. Walters, a principal at Fehr & Peers, a transportation consultancy in Walnut Creek. “Without pretty radically increasing the number of people per vehicle, autonomous systems will increase total miles traveled.”

He used his software to show that by changing just commercial zoning to permit higher density along El Camino Real — the 45-mile boulevard that stretches through the heart of Silicon Valley from San Francisco to San Jose — it would be possible add more than a quarter-million housing units.

The Valley’s housing crisis can be explained in data that shows that since 2010, the region has added 11 jobs for every new home built; the median home price has reached $934,000; and rents have gone up 60 percent since 2012. One of the consequences of the growing imbalance between housing and jobs is the increasing traffic and congestion, according to an Urban Footprint report.

To avoid congestion, the plan requires efficient mass transit. Mr. Calthorpe has proposed an alternative — autonomous rapid transit, or ART — using fleets of self-driving vans in reserved lanes on main arteries like El Camino Real. Those lanes would allow the vehicles to travel faster and require a lower level of autonomous technology. And the vans could travel separately or be connected together.

Mr. Calthorpe’s plan is an evolution of the concept of “transit-oriented development” he pioneered while teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, in the late 1980s. It focuses on designing urban communities that encourage people to live near transit services and decrease their dependence on driving.

“You have to redesign the street itself,” he said. “You need to add autonomous transit, and you need to get rid of parallel parking and put in bikeways and better sidewalks.”

#Mobilité #Automobile #Communs_urbains

Tony Joe White, ‘Swamp Rock’ Singer and Songwriter, Dies at 75 - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/obituaries/tony-joe-white-dead.html?emc=edit_th_181027&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=2593252

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/10/27/obituaries/27WHITE-OBIT/26WHITE1-facebookJumbo.jpg

Tony Joe White, the Louisiana singer and songwriter who wrote Brook Benton’s Top 10 hit “Rainy Night in Georgia” and had a Top 10 hit of his own with “Polk Salad Annie,” died on Wednesday in Nashville. He was 75.

Mr. White’s style, a mix of blues, country and rock ’n’ roll sung in a deep, growling voice, came to be known as swamp rock and earned him the nickname Swamp Fox. His songs were covered by Elvis Presley, Tina Turner, Waylon Jennings and many others.

J’avais eu l’occasion de la voir sur scène à Caen. Un style si particulier, immédiatement reconnaissable.
Les rockers ne mourant pas toutes et tous à 27 ans, on va avoir une liste qui va s’allonger sérieusement dans les années qui viennent ; les sixties commencent à dater.

J’adore les anecdotes :

Mr. White worked with Tina Turner on her critically acclaimed album “Foreign Affair” (1989), contributing four songs and playing guitar and harmonica. He said in 2006 that Ms. Turner was taken aback when they first met.

“She turned around and looked at me and started hysterically laughing and couldn’t get her breath,” he recalled. “She was doubling over, and I thought, ‘Are my pants unzipped or something?’ Finally she got her breath and came over to me and gave me a big hug and said: ‘I’m sorry, man. Ever since “Polk Salad Annie” I always thought you were a black man.’ ”

#Musique

Intimate and Glamorous Portraits of Parisian Transgender Women
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/lens/intimate-and-glamorous-portraits-of-parisian-transgender-women.html

Christer Strömholm’s photos of the women he lived with make up an intimate and sensitive portrayal of transgender women decades before such depictions were widely seen.

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/10/26/lens/26stromholm5/26stromholm5-jumbo.jpg?quality=90&auto=webp

How Google Protected Andy Rubin, the ‘Father of Android’
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/technology/google-sexual-harassment-andy-rubin.html

The internet giant paid Mr. Rubin $90 million and praised him, while keeping silent about a misconduct claim. Google gave Andy Rubin, the creator of Android mobile software, a hero’s farewell when he left the company in October 2014. “I want to wish Andy all the best with what’s next,” Larry Page, Google’s chief executive then, said in a public statement. “With Android he created something truly remarkable — with a billion-plus happy users.” What Google did not make public was that an employee (...)

#Google #Android #harcèlement #viol

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/10/26/business/26google-promo/26google-promo-facebookJumbo.jpg

Opinion | Mikhail Gorbachev : A New Nuclear Arms Race Has Begun - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/opinion/mikhail-gorbachev-inf-treaty-trump-nuclear-arms.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/10/25/opinion/25gorbachev/25gorbachev-facebookJumbo.jpg

Op-ed par Mikhael Gorbatchev (un héros, qui a provoqué une révolution sans verser une goutte de sang... pas mal !)

There are still too many nuclear weapons in the world, but the American and Russian arsenals are now a fraction of what they were during the Cold War. At the Nuclear Nonproliferation Review Conference in 2015, Russia and the United States reported to the international community that 85 percent of those arsenals had been decommissioned and, for the most part, destroyed.

Today, this tremendous accomplishment, of which our two nations can be rightfully proud, is in jeopardy. President Trump announced last week the United States’ plan to withdraw from the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty and his country’s intention to build up nuclear arms.

A new arms race has been announced. The I.N.F. Treaty is not the first victim of the militarization of world affairs. In 2002, the United States withdrew from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty; this year, from the Iran nuclear deal. Military expenditures have soared to astronomical levels and keep rising.

Is it too late to return to dialogue and negotiations? I don’t want to lose hope. I hope that Russia will take a firm but balanced stand. I hope that America’s allies will, upon sober reflection, refuse to be launchpads for new American missiles. I hope the United Nations, and particularly members of its Security Council, vested by the United Nations Charter with primary responsibility for maintaining international peace and security, will take responsible action.

Faced with this dire threat to peace, we are not helpless. We must not resign, we must not surrender.

#Nucléaire #Guerre #Gorbatchev

Twitter Posts Another Profit as User Numbers Drop - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/technology/twitter-quarterly-earnings.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/10/26/business/26TWITTER-01/26TWITTER-01-facebookJumbo.jpg

On Thursday, the social networking service said it had 326 million monthly active users, down nine million over the last three months and four million from a year ago. It was the second consecutive quarterly user decline for the company, even as President Trump and other public figures regularly take to Twitter to express their views and engage their followers.

Despite the fall in users, Twitter said its third-quarter revenue rose 29 percent from a year earlier, to $758 million. Net income totaled $789 million, compared with a loss a year earlier, in what was the fourth straight quarter of profits for the company. (Excluding a tax-related accounting gain, the quarter’s profit amounted to $106 million.)

Investors did not seem to mind the drop in monthly users: Twitter’s stock rose 15.5 percent on Thursday.

#Twitter #Economie_numérique

Saudis’ Image Makers : A Troll Army and a Twitter Insider - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/20/us/politics/saudi-image-campaign-twitter.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/10/21/us/politics/21dc-saudi1/21dc-saudi1-facebookJumbo.jpg

L’Arabie saoudite a acheté un employé de Twitter, selon le New York Times, et cette taupe accédait à des infos sur les twittos, dont les IP et les numéros de téléphone. Le régime entretiendrait des centaines de trolls pour pourrir les dissidents #Khashoggi

In Khashoggi Disappearance, Turkey’s Slow Drip of Leaks Puts Pressure on Saudis - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/19/world/europe/turkey-khashoggi-saudi-arabia.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/10/19/world/19turkey-media1/19turkey-media1-facebookJumbo.jpg

Political analysts noted that Mr. Erdogan seemed to increase the pressure by releasing descriptions of audio recordings after it appeared that President Trump would offer cover to Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, known as M.B.S., by promoting the Saudi line that the death had been the work of “rogue killers.”

[...]

"Initially, it seemed Turkey was seeking a bargain with or financial support from Saudi Arabia,” said Amanda Sloat, a former State Department official now at the Brookings Institution. “But it increasingly appears that Turkey is seeking to inflict maximum damage on M.B.S.”

It is not clear what Mr. Erdogan is demanding, but the policy of official leaks has been clearly to prevent a complete whitewash of the disappearance. Pro-government columnists have called for the Saudi crown prince to go.

#Turquie