http://nymag.com

Why We Should Ban Facial Recognition Technology
▻http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/01/why-we-should-ban-facial-recognition-technology.html

The city, stepping into a debate over privacy, says it will use real-time facial recognition technology “to tackle serious crime.” Of the many unsettling aspects to Clearview AI, a shadowy facial-recognition-software company providing users access to a database of 3 billion photographs scraped from social media and video streaming sites, the one that has most unsettled me is the pervasive sense that there is nothing we can do about it. A quote from one of Clearview’s investors, David Scalzo, (...)

#Clearview #algorithme #biométrie #technologisme #criminalité #facial #reconnaissance

##criminalité

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Tensions Rise at First Look Media Over Company’s Direction | Sarah Jones
▻http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/07/tensions-rise-at-first-look-media-over-companys-direction.html

Employees are worried that one of the nation’s largest and most prominent left-of-center media companies, First Look Media, has lost its way. After the company shuttered two marquee outlets, dozens of employees signed a letter to the board of directors in protest. The letter also asks whether the company has acquired Passionflix, a romance-focused streaming video service started by Elon Musk’s sister. Source: New York Mag’

The Fed - Distributional Financial Accounts Overview
▻https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa

Analysé ici:
The Fed Just Released a Damning Indictment of Capitalism
▻http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/the-fed-just-released-a-damning-indictment-of-capitalism.html

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The One Percent Have Gotten $21 Trillion Richer Since 1989. The Bottom 50% Have Gotten Poorer.

#etats-unis #capitalisme #riches #pauvres #inégalités #data #données

The Shadow Workforce of Facebook’s Content Moderation
▻http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/the-shadow-workforce-of-facebooks-content-moderation.html

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As in Omelas, however, the joyousness of Facebook’s hundreds of thousands of advertisers depends wholly on the misery of a small number of other people: its content moderators. For his article, Newton spoke with several current and former employees of Cognizant, a “professional services vendor” contracted by Facebook to moderate its platform, removing the content that violates Facebook’s terms of service. In practice, this can mean spending your days scrolling through post after post of graphic porn, hate speech, and videos of death and violence. “People develop severe anxiety while still in training,” Newton writes, “and continue to struggle with trauma symptoms long after they leave,” but are given minimal support and job stability — each employee gets nine “wellness time” minutes per day, to be used if they feel traumatized and need to stop moderating. Meanwhile, “the conspiracy videos and memes that they see each day gradually lead them to embrace fringe views.” For their trouble, they are paid $28,800 a year, around 12 percent of the average salaried Facebook employee’s total compensation of $240,000.
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The moderators sign nondisclosure agreements that prevent them from talking about what they’d done for Facebook — or even, apparently, that they’d worked for Facebook at all. This theoretically protects private Facebook user data from leaking out. But it also has the effect of hiding the 1,500 content moderators from the outside world, preventing them from even describing the difficulty of their jobs, let alone agitating for better working conditions. Even full-time Facebook employees are apparently unaware of the extent to which Facebook contracts out its content moderation, and the conditions under which that moderation is taking place, despite its importance. “Why do we contract out work that’s obviously vital to the health of this company and the products we build?” one employee asked on an internal company message board.

Rather than address its various mounting content issues with dedicated staff hires, the company farmed out moderation work to contractors, needing to maintain a cost structure that relied on low labor costs, and believing that eventually an “engineering solution” could be developed to keep the platform clean and safe. This bargain has worked out well for Facebook, which by 2016 was raking in an incredible $600,000 per full-time employee in net profit. It has worked out rather less well for the rest of us — particularly the contactor moderators with PTSD-like symptoms. (Facebook’s profit margins have been thinning over the last two years, naturally, as it expands its “security” team, which includes moderators.)

The idea that you can keep your labor costs low by relying on software automation, creating the eye-popping profit margins that venture capitalists approvingly call “software margins,” is a foundational belief of 21st-century Silicon Valley. Albergotti quotes the mantra COO Sheryl Sandberg brought to Facebook from Google: “People don’t scale.” And it’s true that there are some tasks — like selling and placing digital ads — that are more efficiently and profitably done by software programs. But there aren’t that many tasks that programs can do as well as human beings, and not many programs that can be automated without the help and work of humans. Which means that any company bragging about automated solutions is likely hiding a much larger shadow workforce supporting those solutions, like the one Facebook employs through Cognizant.

Such arrangements are endlessly common in Silicon Valley. Magically convenient services and devices are often subsidized not just by money-burning investors but also by exploitative labor arrangements. Amazon purchases arrive quickly in part because the company’s warehouse workers are relentlessly tracked and don’t take bathroom breaks; Uber rides are cheap in part because the median hourly wage of an Uber driver is $10. Obviously, being a paid Uber driver is no closer to being a chained-up child than riding in an Uber is to being in paradise, but you can begin to understand the bargain being struck by the citizens of Omelas in Le Guin’s story.

The truth is that “software margins” (or what investors hope will eventually be software margins) are rarely achieved solely through automation and innovation. Most Silicon Valley titans, especially the software giants that have arisen over the last two decades, have become adept at externalizing their costs. Users contribute content for free. Contractors work for cheap. The burden of moderating content has for the last ten years been borne by someone — in some cases under-compensated contractors, in some cases users moderating content themselves for free, in some cases the victims of abuse or harassment, and, in some cases, the public sphere as as whole. Just rarely Facebook. If Facebook’s shadow-workforce practices — which have been widely reported by journalists and studied by academics well before the Verge’s story this week, and which are no different than content-moderation practices on many social networks — are being singled out now, it may be because the platform’s conveniences no longer seem worth the full social cost.

#Digital_Labor #Facebook #Modération #Externalisation

Criminal Shocked When Congresswoman Says His Crimes Out Loud
▻http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/criminal-shocked-when-congresswoman-says-his-crimes-out-loud.html

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America loves a feel-good story. How else to explain our government’s appetite for redemption arcs? Elliott Abrams was once convicted of lying to Congress and on Wednesday, he got to testify before Congress again, this time in his capacity as our special envoy to Venezuela. But not everyone was happy to see him. Representative Ilhan Omar, a Democrat from Minnesota, questioned the former Assistant Secretary of State about his old misdeeds. “In 1991, you pleaded guilty to two counts of withholding information from Congress regarding your involvement in the Iran-Contra affair, for which you were later pardoned by President George H.W. Bush,” Omar began, before asking Abrams why the committee should believe anything he had to say.

A spluttering Abrams complained that Omar did not give him a chance to respond, but the congresswoman continued. “You dismissed as ‘communist propaganda’ reports about the massacre of El Mozote in which more than 800 civilians, including children as young as 2 years old, were brutally murdered by U.S.-trained troops,” she said. “You later said the U.S. policy in El Salvador was a ‘fabulous achievement.’ … Do you think that massacre was a ‘fabulous achievement?”

How Much of the Internet Is Fake ? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually.
▻http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/how-much-of-the-internet-is-fake.html

How much of the internet is fake ? Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human ; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot. For a period of time in 2013, the Times reported this year, a full half of YouTube traffic was “bots masquerading as people,” a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube’s systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real (...)

#Google #Facebook #YouTube #algorithme #cookies #manipulation #publicité

##publicité

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American Exceptionalism Is a Dangerous Myth
▻http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/01/american-exceptionalism-is-a-dangerous-myth.html

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Having a global hegemon that preaches human rights — while propping up dictators and incinerating schoolchildren — is bad. But having one that does those things while preaching nihilism is worse; not least because even a nominal commitment to liberal values can function as a constraint against their violation. Trump’s distaste for the whole “shining city on a hill” shtick has, among other things, enabled the Pentagon to tolerate higher levels of civilian casualties in the Middle East, the Israeli government to accelerate settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank, and the Saudi crown prince to take a bonesaw to international law.

#etats-unis

Retailers Are Using Facial-Recognition Technology Too
▻http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/retailers-are-using-facial-recognition-technology-too.html

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“They’re all in a panic,” he said. “How do we bring relevance back to our brick-and-mortar?” Facial recognition, he said, along with location tracking on smartphones, could make the “physical cookie” possible.

#e-trace

Like Iran, U.S, Contributes to Terrorism in Middle East
▻http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/08/iran-us-contribute-terrorism-middle-east.html

(Au minimum)

It’s hard for the U.S. to credibly condemn Iran for supporting terrorism when every time we involve ourselves in a Middle Eastern conflict, we find ourselves contributing — directly or indirectly, wittingly or unwittingly — to instability, violence, and yes, terrorism. The means of our foreign policy in the Middle East are at odds with its supposed ends. Our invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, our attempts to tip the scales of the conflicts in Libya and Syria, and our intervention in Yemen have only exacerbated the region’s ills.

Our close relationship with Saudi Arabia, which easily rivals Iran as an inspiration, sponsor, and financier of terrorism, is a big part of the problem. By supporting Saudi hegemony in the greater Middle East, we have abetted the proliferation of a radical Islamist ideology no less toxic than that of the Iranian mullahs. Moreover, by keeping Iran in a constant state of threat, we justify its leaders’ paranoia and motivate them to counter the Saudis with weapons proliferation and terrorist activities of their own.

#etats-unis

▻http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/08/canada-saudi-arabia-feud-9-11-tweet.html · think tank arabe · Disqus
▻https://disqus.com/home/discussion/channel-thinktankarabe/httpnymagcomdailyintelligencer201808canada_saudi_arabia_feud_9_11_tweethtml

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Natalie Portman and the Crisis of Liberal Zionism
▻http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/04/natalie-portman-and-the-crisis-of-liberal-zionism.html

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This month, Israeli snipers shot hundreds of Palestinian protesters — including one journalist wearing a vest marked “PRESS” — who posed no life-threatening danger to them, or to the people they’re meant to protect. Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman then justified these shootings on the grounds that “there are no innocent people in the Gaza Strip,” suggesting that the area’s 1.8 million Palestinian men, women, and children are all legitimate targets of state violence. Meanwhile, Israel reneged on an agreement with the United Nations to grant legal status to 40,000 African asylum-seekers (whom the Netanyahu government had previously intended to jail en masse or deport), leaving those long-suffering refugees in a state of limbo.

#israël #bds #palestine

An Apology for the Internet — From the People Who Built It
▻http://nymag.com/selectall/2018/04/an-apology-for-the-internet-from-the-people-who-built-it.html

We need a law that requires every system to be designed in a way that achieves its basic goal with the least possible collection of data. Let’s say you want to ride in a car and pay for the ride. That doesn’t fundamentally require knowing who you are. Source: NYMag

Short-termism led the Democratic Party to let unions die, and now they’ve lost their base / Boing Boing
▻https://boingboing.net/2018/01/27/solidarity-forever.html

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For decades, Democrats in power and in opposition have traded away labor laws and rules that protected unions in order to gain short-term advantages in political horse-trades, and now, with union membership down from 26 to 10.7% since the Reagan years, districts that formed Democrats’ “blue wall” have been poverty-struck and have flipped for Trump.

A new NBER study quantifies the effect that union membership has on Democratic support, comparing counties that cross state lines, with one half in a ’right-to-work’ state and the other in a state that protects unions, finding that the difference that unionization makes in Democratic support would have been enough to deliver the presidency to Democrats in 2016.

As New York Magazine’s Eric Levitz points out, Republicans know this, even if Democrats don’t (his aphorism: “The GOP understands how important labor unions are to the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party, historically, has not”).

This could have been a golden age for American liberalism. The Democratic Party — and the progressive forces within it — have so much going for them. The GOP’s economic vision has never been less popular with ordinary Americans, or more irrelevant to their material needs. The U.S. electorate is becoming less white, less racist, and less conservative with each passing year. Social conservatism has never had less appeal for American voters than it does today. The garish spectacle of the Trump-era Republican Party is turning the American suburbs — once a core part of the GOP coalition — purple and blue.

If the Democratic Party wasn’t bleeding support from white working-class voters in its old labor strongholds, it would dominate our national politics. Understandably, Democratic partisans often blame their powerlessness on such voters — and the regressive racial views that led them out of Team Blue’s tent. But as unions have declined across the Midwest, Democrats haven’t just been losing white, working-class voters to revanchist Republicans — they’ve also been losing them to quiet evenings at home. The NBER study cited by McElwee found that right-to-work laws reduce voter turnout in presidential elections by 2 to 3 percent.

From the Bargaining Table to the Ballot Box: Political Effects of Right to Work Laws [James Feigenbaum, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, and Vanessa Williamson/National Bureau of Economic Research] ▻https://jamesfeigenbaum.github.io/research/pdf/fhw_rtw_jan2018.pdf

Democrats Paid a Huge Price for Letting Unions Die [Eric Levitz/New York Magazine] ▻http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/01/democrats-paid-a-huge-price-for-letting-unions-die.html

#USA #syndicalisme #politique

Report : Haley Duped by Prank Call From Fake Polish Leader
▻http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/12/report-haley-duped-by-prank-call-from-fake-polish-leader.html

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“Yes, this is Nikki. How are you Mr. Minister?” Haley (ostensibly) says. “Let me start with very much thanking you for the support we’ve received on the vote today. We will never forget it.”

After discussing tensions between Ukraine and Russia, the fake Polish leader asks about America’s stance on Putin’s recent actions in (nonexistent) Binomo.

“You know Binomo?” he asks.

“Yes, yes,” Haley assures him.

“They had elections and we suppose Russians had its intervention.”

“Yes, of course they did, absolutely,” Haley agrees. “Let me find out exactly what our stance is on that, and what if anything the U.S. is doing or thinks should be done and I will report back to you on that as well.”

#Etats-Unis #affaires_étranges

Open Markets Institute: Antitrust for #Silicon_Valley
▻http://nymag.com/selectall/2017/12/open-markets-institute-antitrust-for-silicon-valley.html

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Un prof de Stanford explique pourquoi il y autant de connards en 2017 | Slate.fr
▻http://www.slate.fr/story/151670/multiplication-connards

Le professeur de management de Stanford Robert Sutton est connu pour avoir écrit en 2007 un livre intitulé Objectif zéro sale con. Dix ans plus tard, il revient avec un nouvel opus sur le sujet, The Asshole Survival Guide : How to Deal with People Who Treat You Like Dirt : un guide de survie pour gérer les connards, aussi bien au travail que dans la vie. L’ouvrage a été écrit avant l’élection de Donald Trump, mais Sutton pense que nous vivons actuellement une sorte d’âge d’or des connards. « Les comportements irrespectueux, blessants et méchants sont pires que jamais », expliquait-il récemment au New York Magazine.

Mrs, Ms ou Miss? - Londres calling
▻http://londrescalling.canalblog.com/archives/2011/09/29/22182215.html

Ms Que l’on prononce... Mizz. Ce terme est l’équivalent exact de Mr, dans le sens ou il ne précise pas le statut matrimonial de la femme. Ms a la même étymologie que les deux autres options, mais avait un peu été délaissé. Et cela jusque dans les années 1970 (et oui la France a 40 de retard !) lorsque les féministes américaines décident de le récupérer (…). Aujourd’hui c’est le terme le plus utilisé dans les lettres ou le business dans les pays anglo-saxons.

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Le Musée de l’Holocauste retire une étude sur l’inaction d’Obama en #Syrie | The Times of Israël
▻http://fr.timesofisrael.com/le-musee-de-lholocauste-retire-une-etude-sur-linaction-dobama-en-s

Le rapport [...] a déterminé qu’une intervention américaine après l’attaque chimique de 2013 contre Ghouta n’aurait pas réduit les atrocités dans le pays et aurait même pu y contribuer, selon Tablet.

Un message publié sur le site du musée indique que « la semaine dernière, le Centre Simon-Skjodt pour la prévention des génocides du Musée mémorial de l’Holocauste a publié une étude qui examinait plusieurs décisions prises pendant le conflit syrien. Depuis sa publication, plusieurs personnes avec qui nous avons étroitement travaillé sur la Syrie depuis l’éclatement du conflit ont fait part de leur inquiétude au sujet de cette étude. Le Musée a décidé de supprimer l’étude de son site internet le temps que nous examinions ces retours. »

Here Is the Syria Report the Holocaust Museum Unpublished
▻http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/09/here-is-the-holocaust-museum-syria-report.html

Trump ‘Advisor’ Sebastian Gorka Ousted From White House
▻http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/08/trump-adviser-sebastian-gorka-ousted-from-white-house.html

Controversial Trump advisor Sebastian Gorka has been forced from his role as a deputy assistant to the president, White House.
[…]
Gorka claimed in his resignation letter that he wanted to leave because, after observing recent changes at the White House, he realized that he could best serve President Trump as an outsider. But it remains unclear what Gorka actually did as an insider.
[…]
Gorka, whose fringe criticism of Islam as an inherently violent religion is pretty much the definition of Islamophobia, also released a bestselling book last year called Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War. But critics have pointed out that Gorka does not speak Arabic, has not lived, worked, or even spent much time in the Middle East, and has extremely limited foreign policy or intelligence credentials. Instead, Gorka’s primary experience seems to have been as a professor, questionable scholar, and right-wing media personality. Prior to joining the Trump campaign, Gorka worked as an international news editor at Breitbart under Bannon, and has been a regular pundit on television over the past few years.

On top of all that, Gorka, an American citizen who was born in the U.K. to Hungarian parents, had supported Hungarian ultra-nationalists and was reported to be a member of Hungary’s far-right, Nazi-linked Vitézi Rend party.

Le New York Magazine ne regrette pas franchement son départ…

When Will Climate Change Make the Earth Too Hot For Humans?
▻http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html

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Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak — sooner than you think.

#climat #terre