Link Roundup June + July 2019

Hawaiian protesters started a school on Mauna Kea to teach local culture to the next generation

Presley Keʻalaanuhea Ah Mook Sang, a Hawaiian language instructor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, said she first came up with the idea to start a community-led school or “teach-in” after witnessing the crowd swell in that first week from hundreds of protesters to thousands. "It was basically me feeling like because we had the resources and knowledge here, that we should utilize it," Ah Mook Sang said.

E3 Expo Leaks The Personal Information Of Over 2,000 Journalists

The Entertainment Software Association, the organization that runs E3, has since removed the link to the file, as well as the file itself, but the information has continued to be disseminated online in various gaming forums. While many of the individuals listed in the documents provided their work addresses and phone numbers when they registered for E3, many others, especially freelance content creators, seem to have used their home addresses and personal cell phones, which have now been publicized. This leak makes it possible for bad actors to misuse this information to harass journalists. Two people who say their private information appeared in the leak have informed Kotaku that they have already received crank phone calls since the list was publicized.

A blind man couldn’t order pizza from Domino’s. The company wants the Supreme Court to say websites don’t have to be accessible

Business groups are lining up behind Domino’s. So far, the Chamber of Commerce, the Restaurant Law Center and the National Retail Federation have submitted friend-of-the-court briefs in support of the pizza company.

A Single Male Cat’s Reign of Terror

In Mandurah, the white, male cat was finally captured on December 12 and, according to local news reports, euthanized by the City. The cat was not microchipped or collared, but it had been neutered.

How to get the old Twitter web interface back

An extension called GoodTwitter, contributed by Zusor, can effectively revert your Twitter interface back to a more old-fashioned look. It is available for both Chrome and Firefox.

U.S. Citizen Who Was Held By ICE For 3 Years Denied Compensation By Appeals Court

Watson had already told them he was a citizen and given them his father and stepmother's names and a phone number to call and confirm. ICE officers didn't call the number. They did attempt to look up his father, Hopeton Ulando Watson, but they confused him with a Hopeton Livingston Watson. Hopeton Livingston Watson — the wrong Hopeton Watson — was not a U.S. citizen. He also lived in Connecticut instead of New York, didn't have a son named Davino and arrived in the U.S. at a different time. But the officers apparently didn't notice the mistakes. Based on the wrong file, they concluded that Watson was not a citizen and marked him for deportation.

Amazon Requires Police to Shill Surveillance Cameras in Secret Agreement

Dozens of police departments around the country have partnered with Ring, but until now, the exact terms of these partnerships have remained unknown. A signed memorandum of understanding between Ring and the police department of Lakeland, Florida, and emails obtained via a public records request, show that Ring is using local police as a de facto advertising firm. Police are contractually required to "Engage the Lakeland community with outreach efforts on the platform to encourage adoption of the platform/app.” In order to partner with Ring, police departments must also assign officers to Ring-specific roles that include a press coordinator, a social media manager, and a community relations coordinator.

‘It was about shaming people’: Philly businessman rebuffed in efforts to clear Pa. kids’ school-lunch debt

Mazur told Platt that he would not accept the offer, Platt said. Mazur said that he believed most of the families that owed money could afford the debt, and that it was their responsibility to pay. “His counter was, ‘These are affluent families who just want to get something for free,’” said Platt. “This wasn’t ever about repayment of a debt. It was about shaming people.” Carmichael agreed that the district is less concerned with its $22,000 and more concerned about humiliating people who struggle.

The YouTubers Union Is Not Messing Around

In 2017 major advertisers organized a boycott of YouTube after learning their ads were running alongside "extremist content” videos and demanded the Google-owned platform implement "brand safety controls.” While the changes kept advertisers on the site, they also changed YouTube channels make money from ad revenue. According to Sprave, the door was now open to more threats of advertiser boycotts as a tactic to gain leverage over Youtube. "Advertisers want control over content that they are displaying against like in magazines,” Sprave told Motherboard. “YouTube previously did not allow this but caved in after the companies threatened to leave."

You Have a Moral Obligation to Claim Your $125 From Equifax

The payouts to individuals are part of the $575 to $700 million settlement that Equifax reached with the Federal Trade Commission, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and 48 states. (Indiana and Massachusetts are still pursuing their own lawsuits against Equifax.) It’s an astonishingly large settlement for a data breach, though some people are still criticizing it as inadequate given the scale of the breach and the number of individuals affected...Each individual is eligible to receive up to $20,000 as part of the settlement; $125 is just the amount you can receive without having to do any extra work or claim any extra losses. The settlement also includes provisions to reimburse you for your lost time at a rate of $25 per hour. If you spent hours on the phone trying to clear up suspicious credit activity or figure out whether you had been affected, go ahead and submit that as well.

Education publisher Pearson to phase out print textbooks

Pearson said students would only be able to rent physical textbooks from now on, and they would be updated much less frequently.

'Black vest' protesters storm Panthéon in Paris

The group called themselves the "black vests" - a reference to the yellow vest protest movement that spread through much of France earlier this year. They waved papers in the air, chanted, and demanded to hold talks with Prime Minister Édouard Philippe over their immigration status.

Revealed: This Is Palantir’s Top-Secret User Manual for Cops

With a name, police can also find a person's email address, phone numbers, current and previous addresses, bank accounts, social security number(s), business relationships, family relationships, and license information like height, weight, and eye color, as long as it's in the agency's database. The software can map out a person's family members and business associates of a suspect, and theoretically, find the above information about them, too.

I Could Spend All Day Looking at the Covers of These LGBTQ Publications

Evidence of the emotional richness of this movement, from joy to righteous anger, can be found in the many LGBTQ publications, both pre- and post-Stonewall uprising, digitized by Reveal Digital in their Independent Voices collection. The LGBTQ series—which is open access and freely available to all—is a tremendous resource for scholars of LGBTQ history and the curious casual reader alike.

Road-tripping with the Amazon nomads

The majority of goods sold on Amazon are not sold by Amazon itself, but by more than 2 million merchants who use the company’s platform as their storefront and infrastructure. Some of these sellers make their own products, while others practice arbitrage, buying and reselling wares from other retailers. Amazon has made this easy to do, first by launching Fulfillment by Amazon, which allows sellers to send their goods to company warehouses and have Amazon handle storage and delivery, and then with an app that lets sellers scan goods to instantly check whether they’d be profitable to sell on the site. A few sellers, like Anderson, have figured out that the best way to find lucrative products is to be mobile, scouring remote stores and chasing hot-selling items from coast to coast.

Facebook ban on white nationalism too narrow, say auditors

Facebook’s new policy banning white nationalism from its site has been undercut by the company’s decision to ignore content that does not use the term “white nationalism”, according to an external audit.

879% drug price hike is one of 3,400 in 2019 so far; rate of hikes increasing

The average price increase per drug was 10.5%, a rate around five times that of inflation. About 40 of the drugs saw triple-digit increases. That includes a generic version of the antidepressant Prozac, which saw a price increase of 879%.

Ghost networks of psychiatrists make money for insurance companies but hinder patients’ access to care

In a recent study, researchers called 360 psychiatrists on Blue Cross Blue Shield’s in-network provider lists in Houston, Chicago, and Boston. Some of the phone numbers on the list were for McDonald’s locations, others were for jewelry stores. When the researchers actually reached psychiatrists’ offices, many of the doctors didn’t take Blue Cross Blue Shield insurance or weren’t taking new patients. After calling every number twice, the researchers were unable to make appointments with 74% of providers on the list. In a similar study among pediatric psychiatrists, researchers were unable to make appointments with 83% of the providers listed as in-network by Blue Cross Blue Shield.

The Problem With HR

When I was in Austin, I asked conference attendees why HR has accomplished so little. Over and over, they gave me a version of the same answer: They don’t have power. They can deliver the trainings and write the policies, they can take reports and conduct investigations, but unless the harasser is of relatively low status within the organization, they have little say in the outcome. Most of the time, if the man is truly important to the company, the case is quickly whisked out of HR’s hands, the investigation delivered to lawyers and the final decision rendered by executives. These executives are under no legal imperative to terminate an alleged offender or even to enforce a particular sanction, only to ensure that the woman who made the report is safe in the future.

Degenerate art: Why Hitler hated modernism

In July 1937, four years after it came to power, the Nazi party put on two art exhibitions in Munich. The Great German Art Exhibition was designed to show works that Hitler approved of - depicting statuesque blonde nudes along with idealised soldiers and landscapes. The second exhibition, just down the road, showed the other side of German art - modern, abstract, non-representational - or as the Nazis saw it, "degenerate".

As San Francisco District Attorney, Kamala Harris’s Office Stopped Cooperating With Victims of Catholic Church Child Abuse

In her seven years as district attorney, Harris’s office did not proactively assist in civil cases against clergy sex abuse and ignored requests by activists and survivors to access the cache of investigative files that could have helped them secure justice, according to several victims of clergy sex abuse living in California who spoke to The Intercept.

Run your own social

Running a social network site is community building first and a technical task second.

How Anti-Immigration Policies Are Leading Prisons to Lease Convicts as Field Laborers

The American food system relies on cheap labor. Today, median income for farm workers is $10.66 an hour, with 33 percent of farm-worker households living below the poverty line. Historically, agriculture has suppressed wages—and eschewed worker protections—by hiring from vulnerable groups, notably, undocumented migrants. By some estimates, 70 percent of agriculture's 1.2 million workers are undocumented. As current anti-immigrant policies diminish the supply of migrant workers (both documented and undocumented), farmers are not able to find the labor they need. So, in states such as Arizona, Idaho, and Washington that grow labor-intensive crops like onions, apples, and tomatoes, prison systems have responded by leasing convicts to growers desperate for workers.

Inside the Secret Border Patrol Facebook Group Where Agents Joke About Migrant Deaths and Post Sexist Memes

Members of a secret Facebook group for current and former Border Patrol agents joked about the deaths of migrants, discussed throwing burritos at Latino members of Congress visiting a detention facility in Texas on Monday and posted a vulgar illustration depicting Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez engaged in oral sex with a detained migrant, according to screenshots of their postings.

Amazon Is Coaching Cops on How to Obtain Surveillance Footage Without a Warrant

As reported by GovTech on Friday, police can request Ring camera footage directly from Amazon, even if a Ring customer denies to provide police with the footage. It's a workaround that allows police to essentially "subpoena" anything captured on Ring cameras.

Yelp is Screwing Over Restaurants By Quietly Replacing Their Phone Numbers

"It is important to keep in mind that we are a marketing platform and, in almost all of these cases, the diner would not have discovered or placed an order with this restaurant without our platform,” Brendan Lewis, a spokesperson for Grubhub, told me in an email. “The order is the result of our marketing efforts.”

U.S. State Department Official Involved in White Nationalist Movement, Hatewatch Determines

James Alex Fields, a man who marched with the neo-Nazi group Vanguard America that day, drove his car into a crowd of antiracist demonstrators, killing a woman named Heather Heyer. Fields was sentenced to life in prison in June for his role in murdering Heyer. Gebert, speaking as “Coach Finstock,” blamed the violence and chaos at the doomed event on the city of Charlottesville and expressed no apparent regret about what transpired.