Category: internet-2

To Understand Facebook, Study Capgras Syndrome

We start with the case of a woman who experienced unbearable tragedy. In 1899, this Parisian bride, Madame M., had her first child. Shockingly, the child was abducted and substituted with a different infant, who soon died. She then had twin girls. One grew into healthy adulthood, while the other, again, was abducted, once more replaced with a different, dying infant. She then had twin boys. One was abducted, while the other was fatally poisoned.

Madame M. searched for her abducted babies; apparently, she was not the only victim of this nightmarish trauma, as she often heard the cries of large groups of abducted children rising from the cellars of Paris.

As if all this pain was not enough, Madame M.’s sole surviving child was abducted and replaced with an imposter of identical appearance. And soon the same fate befell Madame M.’s husband. The poor woman spent days searching for her abducted loved ones, attempting to free groups of other abducted children from hiding places, and starting the paperwork to divorce the man who had replaced her husband.

 

Nautilus

The Secret Life of America’s Greatest Swinger

Say you’re a guy who’d like some other guy to bed your wife. No? Well, it happens. And when it does, Dave’s the sort of man you call. He’s a demure doctor from a quiet neighborhood. But thanks to some rare talents and ubiquitous technologies, he’s also a star in the bedrooms of others—and a helpful guide to the joyful, lusty life of the truly modern hedonist.

….

In an era when the Internet and hookup apps customized to every taste are unleashing sexuality in unprecedented ways, Dave usually needs a few hours just to juggle the weekend’s many possibilities. He is in his early 40s, a soft-spoken primary-care doctor, a tall and muscular black man with tattoos and a disarmingly boyish face—all of which has made him particularly sought-after in this wealthy part of Phoenix.

GQ

This is how the government is catching people who use child porn sites

As criminals become more savvy about using technology such as Tor to hide their tracks, investigators are turning to hacking tools to thwart them. In some cases, members of law enforcement agencies are placing malware on sites that might have thousands of users. Some privacy advocates and analysts worry that in doing so, investigators may also wind up hacking and identifying the computers of law-abiding people who are seeking to remain anonymous, people who can also include political dissidents and journalists.

“As the hacking techniques become more ambitious, failure in execution can lead to large-scale privacy and civil liberties abuses at home and abroad,” said Ahmed Ghappour, a professor at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law. “It’s imperative that Congress step in to regulate exactly who and how law enforcement may hack.”

But Justice Department officials said that the government investigates crimes based on evidence of illegal activities. “When we obtain a warrant, it’s because we have convinced a judge that there is probable cause that we’ll be able to find evidence in a particular location,” said a senior department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the department.

Washington Post

The Shame Game

Officials appear to have designed Flush the Johns to maximize the potential for public attention—and to exploit men’s fear of being found out, not just by the police but also by their own families. “You’re going to be caught, and your mug shot could end up right like these men,” Rice warned during the press conference.

A slew of other cities have embraced john-shaming as a way to combat prostitution: Colorado Springs; Albany, New York; Flint, Michigan; Prince George’s County, Maryland, outside D.C.; and a number of places in California—Oakland, Richmond, Fresno, and Orange County. Some have published the names and photos of accused johns upon arrest on designated web sites and social media, or in press conferences; others have waited until they’ve actually been convicted. But the upshot seems to be the same: Shame isn’t just the side effect of catching and prosecuting criminals in an open society with an active press corps, but an end goal that is officially sanctioned.

Tapping into the new power of the internet, along with our very old obsession with transgressive sex, these officials hope to wield the fear of public judgment in the name of the public good, arguing that prostitution is linked to far more serious crimes than we ever thought. But by taking punishment out of the hands of law enforcement and placing it in the hands of the public, whose emotions and reactions lie beyond their control, shaming campaigns can also be messy and unpredictable. And the resulting stigma can last indefinitely. “Guilt punishments make the statement, ‘You committed a bad act,’ ” writes philosopher Martha Nussbaum in her book Hiding From Humanity. “Shame punishments make the statement: ‘You are a defective type of person.’ ” Or as Yale law professor James Whitman told me, shaming “allows the general public to do the dirty work.”

New Republic

Paedophiles use secret Facebook groups to swap images

Settings on the social network mean the groups are invisible to most users and only members can see the content.

Children’s Commissioner for England Anne Longfield said Facebook was not doing enough to police the groups and protect children.

Facebook’s head of public policy told the BBC he was committed to removing “content that shouldn’t be there”.

A BBC investigation found a number of secret groups, created by and run for men with a sexual interest in children, including one being administered by a convicted paedophile who was still on the sex offenders’ register.

The groups have names that give a clear indication of their content and contain pornographic and highly suggestive images, many purporting to be of children. They also have sexually explicit comments posted by users.

BBC

The sad economics of internet fame

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 question sent Ashley into a depressive spiral. Hers just wasn’t the breezy, glamorous life people expected from her. Customers had approached her at work before, starstruck but confused. Why would someone with 90,000 Instagram followers be serving brunch?

Simple: because Ashley needed the money.

 

Fusion.Net

Bad girls and gone girls: Why the media tired of ‘missing white women’

You remember their names, because the media wouldn’t let you forget them: Laci Peterson, Natalee Holloway, Elizabeth Smart, Chandra Levy, Lori Hacking — young women who disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Gone girls.

Then there were the bad girls. Young women accused of murder — Amanda Knox, Casey Anthony,Jodi Arias. The long-running investigations into their alleged crimes were the stuff of equally obsessive coverage.

But as 2015 creeps toward a close, the gone girls and bad girls have all but disappeared from the media map. The era in which the national news media regularly manufactured folk heroines and anti-heroines from the crime blotter seems to have passed.

WashingtonPost

Online Dating Made This Woman a Pawn In a Global Crime Plot

AUDREY ELAINE ELROD was in rough financial shape as the 2012 holiday season drew near. She’d been out of work for a year, ever since quitting her longtime clerical job at the county public health department in Charlotte, North Carolina. The 45-year-old divorcée and junior-college dropout now lived in Bluefield, West Virginia, a fading town near the Appalachian coalfields where she’d been raised. In addition to collecting $344 in unemployment benefits each week, Elrod made ends meet by hustling: She resold packages of discount toilet paper and peddled small quantities of prescription drugs. She scraped together just enough to rent a 676-square-foot garage apartment that she shared with a roommate, a gangly buffet cook a dozen years her junior.

On the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, Elrod opened a checking account at a First Community Bank branch located just across the state line in the twin town of Bluefield, Virginia. Despite her hand-to-mouth circumstances, Elrod’s new account soon began to receive a series of sizable wire transfers, many of which originated abroad. Over the course of one December week, for example, almost $30,000 arrived from Norway; on January 2, someone in France sent $16,977. Elrod never let this money linger: She always showed up at the bank a few hours after a transfer cleared, to withdraw as much as $9,500 in cash. She would then return on subsequent days to make additional four-figure withdrawals until the account was nearly empty.

WIRED