Link Roundup December 2018

[wepon]

State Dept. official: China holding 800k Muslim minorities in internment camps

Busby referenced the testimony of Mihrigul Tursun, a Uighur mother who survived one of the Chinese re-education camps and spoke before the Congressional-Executive Commission on China last week. Tursun told the committee how she was tortured and interrogated during her internment, as well as how one of her young children died while in government custody.

When Tumblr bans porn, who loses?

But a former staff engineer, who recently left Tumblr and asked to remain anonymous for professional reasons, tells Vox that the NSFW ban was “in the works for about six months as an official project,” adding that it was given additional resources and named “Project X” in September, shortly before it was announced to the rest of the company at an all-hands meeting. “[The NSFW ban] was going to happen anyway,” the former engineer told me. “Verizon pushed it out the door after the child pornography thing and made the deadline sooner,” but the real problem was always that Verizon couldn’t sell ads next to porn. (Reached for comment on this timeline, an Oath representative pointed me to the phrase, “Over the past several months and inspired by our storied past, we’ve given serious thought to who we want to be our community moving forward,” from D’Onofrio’s blog post.)

Tumblr’s nudity ban removes one of the last major refuges for pornography on social media

On Monday, searches for sexually explicit terms on Tumblr did not turn up any results, while racist and white supremacist content, including Nazi propaganda, was easily surfaced, despite the company’s prohibition on “hate speech.” The company has been changing its search policies over the years to filter out more adult content, but it was not immediately clear if it had made any more changes in recent weeks.

A Quiet War Rages Over Who Can Make Money Online

Organizers of the campaign against sex workers continue to refine their tactics. As of Wednesday evening, much of the discussion among harassers on platforms like Twitter centered around streamlining reports to payment services providers like Cash App, PayPal, and Venmo. In one thread on the subject, an active member of the ThotAudit campaign detailed tactics he said would expedite the reporting process, including spamming webforms with multiple reports, including links to illustrate the breach of the company’s terms of service, and threatening to report the breach to the media if the company did not immediately ban the sex worker.

Butterfly sanctuary expected to be plowed over for Trump's border wall

MISSION, Texas -- A protected habitat of butterflies along the Rio Grande is expected to be plowed over to clear the way for President Trump's border wall after the U.S. Supreme Court rebuffed a challenge by environmental groups. The justices this week upheld a District Court ruling to allow the Trump administration to bypass 28 federal laws, including the Endangered Species Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Clean Air Act, to be waived for southern border wall construction.

Kotex Recalls Some Tampons After Reports Of Unraveling Inside Body

On Kimberly-Clark's website, the reviews for the U by Kotex Sleek Tampons show that some customers have long been complaining about the product unraveling. "The last box I got a few of them pulled apart coming out," one reviewer wrote two years ago. "Really not happy."

Facebook contractors faced Christmas ultimatum: accept wage offer or lose jobs

Then on Thursday, a Facebook FTE posted an update on the situation, stating that Filter had responded to the worker letter by holding a series of one-on-one meetings with the workers before sending them a group email on Wednesday evening. The email, which the Guardian has seen, stated that the workers had to accept Filter’s terms of employment for 2019 or leave the company: “As we discussed in our meetings, the Facebook contract renews in January. Therefore, for business planning purposes we need to hear from each of you regarding whether you wish to continue working for Filter on this engagement … If you do not return the signed offer letter by that time, we will assume you do not wish to continue your employment with Filter.”

Senate passes bill making lynching a federal crime

The Justice for Victims of Lynching Act, which passed unanimously, was introduced earlier this year by the chamber's three African-American senators: California Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris, New Jersey Democratic Sen. Cory Booker and South Carolina Republican Sen. Tim Scott. The proposal outlines the specific act of lynching -- a mob killing without legal authority -- and would add lynching to the federal list of hate crimes.

Why It's Hard to Escape Amazon's Long Reach

The company is known as the “everything store,” but in its dogged pursuit of growth, Amazon has come to dominate more than just ecommerce. It’s now the largest provider of cloud computing services and a maker of home security systems. Amazon is a fashion designer, advertising business, television and movie producer, book publisher, and the owner of a sprawling platform for crowdsourced micro-labor tasks. The company now occupies roughly as much space worldwide as 38 Pentagons. It has grown so large that Amazon’s many subsidiaries are difficult to track—so we catalogued them all for you. This is our exhaustive map of the Kingdom of Amazon.

Prison Food Is Making U.S. Inmates Disproportionately Sick

Most jails and prisons simply weren’t built to accommodate efficient food service, and Cornyn says that even in newly constructed facilities, the kitchens are designed almost as an afterthought—“the cheapest way possible.” That can be a huge mistake, he says, because prison kitchens typically need to be even larger than their commercial counterparts. In situations where “sharps”—knives attached to wire cables—are in use, inmate workers must be placed many feet apart. And many facilities don’t take advantage of space- and labor-saving machinery that speed up prep times in civilian restaurants—the whole point is to provide opportunities for manual labor. All these make larger kitchens necessary, and in cramped confines the work takes much longer than it should—setting the stage for potential food-safety hazards.