James Blair, National Geographic, London 1966. Women use compact mirrors to catch sight of the queen.
via:
Sunday, December 21, 2014
The Year of Outrage
Following the news in 2014 is a bit like flying a kite in flat country during tornado season. Every so often, a whirlwind of outrage touches down, sowing destruction and chaos before disappearing into the sky.
These conditions are hardly new. Over the past decade or so, outrage has become the default mode for politicians, pundits, critics and, with the rise of social media, the rest of us. When something outrageous happens—when a posh London block installs anti-homeless spikes, or when Khloé Kardashian wears a Native American headdress, or, for that matter, when we read the horrifying details in the Senate’s torture report—it’s easy to anticipate the cycle that follows: anger, sarcasm, recrimination, piling on; defenses and counterattacks; anger at the anger, disdain for the outraged; sometimes, an apology … and on to the next. Twitter and Facebook make it easier than ever to participate from home. And the same cycle occurs regardless of the gravity of the offense, which can make each outrage feel forgettable, replaceable. The bottomlessness of our rage has a numbing effect.
This desensitization makes it tough to clock exactly how modern outrage functions. Is it as awful as it sometimes feels? More useful than it might seem? Should we be rending our garments about our constant rending of garments? Or should we embrace the new responsiveness of the social and hypersensitive Web?
And so—in an effort to answer these and other questions—we resolved to keep track of what people got outraged about every day of 2014. Since January, a phalanx of editors, writers, and interns has been scanning the horizons for funnels of fury. They used a Google doc and a bot that reminded us about the project any time someone used the word outrage on IM. The rage-a-day calendar above contains the fruits of their labor: a comprehensive listing of what was outrageous and whom it outraged, for every single day of the year.
The results, we think, are illuminating. People were upset about TV stars and wheelchairs and lattes and racism and war. Some days, people were upset about Slate. (Other days, we caught the outrage current and rode it a ways ourselves, as Jordan Weissmann details below.) Though it can be jarring to see something as nation-shaking as Ferguson alongside something as trifling as the cover of a magazine, it’s fascinating to look at how our collective responses skipped from the serious to the picayune without much modulation in pitch. So please explore the calendar above. Vote on which outrages still outrage you, and which you can’t believe anyone ever cared about. And read the thoughtful essays below, each of which examines some aspect of outrage culture, and explore the way it shapes our world.
by Julia Turner, Slate | Read more:
Image: Interactive by Allison Benedikt, Chris Kirk, and Dan Kois. Art by Holly Allen, Juliana Jimenez, Derreck Johnson, Lisa Larson-Walker, Natalie Mattews-Ramo, Vivian Selbo, and Ellie Skrzat
Why the Sony Hack is Unlikely to be the Work of North Korea.
Everyone seems to be eager to pin the blame for the Sony hack on North Korea. However, I think it’s unlikely. Here's why:
1. The broken English looks deliberately bad and doesn’t exhibit any of the classic comprehension mistakes you actually expect to see in “Konglish”. i.e it reads to me like an English speaker pretending to be bad at writing English.
2. The fact that the code was written on a PC with Korean locale & language actually makes it less likely to be North Korea. Not least because they don’t speak traditional “Korean” in North Korea, they speak their own dialect and traditional Korean is forbidden. This is one of the key things that has made communication with North Korean refugees difficult. I would find the presence of Chinese far more plausible.See here – http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/30/world/asia/30iht-dialect.2644361.html?_r=0
here – http://www.nknews.org/2014/08/north-korean-dialect-as-a-soviet-russian-translation/
and here – http://www.voanews.com/content/a-13-2009-03-16-voa49-68727402/409810.html
This change in language is also most pronounced when it comes to special words, such as technical terms. That’s possibly because in South Korea, many of these terms are “borrowed” from other languages, including English. For example, the Korean word for “Hellicopter” is: 헬리콥터 or hellikobteo. The North Koreans, on the other hand, use a literal translation of “vehicle that goes straight up after takeoff”. This is because such borrowed words are discouraged, if not outright forbidden, in North Korea – http://pinyin.info/news/2005/ban-loan-words-says-north-korea/
Lets not forget also that it is *trivial* to change the language/locale of a computer before compiling code on it.
3. It’s clear from the hard-coded paths and passwords in the malware that whoever wrote it had extensive knowledge of Sony’s internal architecture and access to key passwords. While it’s plausible that an attacker could have built up this knowledge over time and then used it to make the malware, Occam’s razor suggests the simpler explanation of an insider. It also fits with the pure revenge tact that this started out as.
4. Whoever did this is in it for revenge. The info and access they had could have easily been used to cash out, yet, instead, they are making every effort to burn Sony down. Just think what they could have done with passwords to all of Sony’s financial accounts? With the competitive intelligence in their business documents? From simple theft, to the sale of intellectual property, or even extortion – the attackers had many ways to become rich. Yet, instead, they chose to dump the data, rendering it useless. Likewise, I find it hard to believe that a “Nation State” which lives by propaganda would be so willing to just throw away such an unprecedented level of access to the beating heart of Hollywood itself.
5. The attackers only latched onto “The Interview” after the media did – the film was never mentioned by GOP right at the start of their campaign. It was only after a few people started speculating in the media that this and the communication from DPRK “might be linked” that suddenly it became linked. I think the attackers both saw this as an opportunity for “lulz” and as a way to misdirect everyone into thinking it was a nation state. After all, if everyone believes it’s a nation state, then the criminal investigation will likely die.
Wired has just covered this exact point – http://www.wired.com/2014/12/evidence-of-north-korea-hack-is-thin/
6. Whoever is doing this is VERY net and social media savvy. That, and the sophistication of the operation, do not match with the profile of DPRK up until now.
2. The fact that the code was written on a PC with Korean locale & language actually makes it less likely to be North Korea. Not least because they don’t speak traditional “Korean” in North Korea, they speak their own dialect and traditional Korean is forbidden. This is one of the key things that has made communication with North Korean refugees difficult. I would find the presence of Chinese far more plausible.See here – http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/30/world/asia/30iht-dialect.2644361.html?_r=0here – http://www.nknews.org/2014/08/north-korean-dialect-as-a-soviet-russian-translation/
and here – http://www.voanews.com/content/a-13-2009-03-16-voa49-68727402/409810.html
This change in language is also most pronounced when it comes to special words, such as technical terms. That’s possibly because in South Korea, many of these terms are “borrowed” from other languages, including English. For example, the Korean word for “Hellicopter” is: 헬리콥터 or hellikobteo. The North Koreans, on the other hand, use a literal translation of “vehicle that goes straight up after takeoff”. This is because such borrowed words are discouraged, if not outright forbidden, in North Korea – http://pinyin.info/news/2005/ban-loan-words-says-north-korea/
Lets not forget also that it is *trivial* to change the language/locale of a computer before compiling code on it.
3. It’s clear from the hard-coded paths and passwords in the malware that whoever wrote it had extensive knowledge of Sony’s internal architecture and access to key passwords. While it’s plausible that an attacker could have built up this knowledge over time and then used it to make the malware, Occam’s razor suggests the simpler explanation of an insider. It also fits with the pure revenge tact that this started out as.
4. Whoever did this is in it for revenge. The info and access they had could have easily been used to cash out, yet, instead, they are making every effort to burn Sony down. Just think what they could have done with passwords to all of Sony’s financial accounts? With the competitive intelligence in their business documents? From simple theft, to the sale of intellectual property, or even extortion – the attackers had many ways to become rich. Yet, instead, they chose to dump the data, rendering it useless. Likewise, I find it hard to believe that a “Nation State” which lives by propaganda would be so willing to just throw away such an unprecedented level of access to the beating heart of Hollywood itself.
5. The attackers only latched onto “The Interview” after the media did – the film was never mentioned by GOP right at the start of their campaign. It was only after a few people started speculating in the media that this and the communication from DPRK “might be linked” that suddenly it became linked. I think the attackers both saw this as an opportunity for “lulz” and as a way to misdirect everyone into thinking it was a nation state. After all, if everyone believes it’s a nation state, then the criminal investigation will likely die.
Wired has just covered this exact point – http://www.wired.com/2014/12/evidence-of-north-korea-hack-is-thin/
6. Whoever is doing this is VERY net and social media savvy. That, and the sophistication of the operation, do not match with the profile of DPRK up until now.
by Marc Rogers, Marc's Security Ramblings | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Shot of the Year
There’s a single shot in Jean-Luc Godard’s Goodbye To Language so astonishing that the sold-out crowd I saw the film with gasped in unison. Perhaps a generation of blockbuster entertainment and stock response has deadened the word, but the only way I can think to describe it is “awesome,” in the literal sense. It inspires awe. At the thousand-seat Ryerson Theater, where the film made its North American première this September, the surprise and delight were audible, in the form of exclamations and spontaneous applause. For a moment, it was less like a movie than a magic show. I sat mouth agape, stupefied. I felt like I’d just seen someone levitate.
Here’s what happens: A young woman, Ivitch (Zoé Bruneau), and an older man, Davidson (Christian Gregori), sit together on a park bench near the water, flipping through a book of paintings by French abstract landscapist Nicolas de Staël, when suddenly Ivitch’s husband pounces into the frame and hauls her out. The two cameras that compose the 3-D image diverge, and the shot seems to split into two: one tracks Ivitch as her husband circles her and brandishes a pistol, the other remains fixed on Davidson, until at last Ivitch returns to Davidson’s side and the two images converge into one. Seen in 3-D, each image is relegated to an eye: Ivitch on the right, Davidson on the left, leaving viewers to “cut” between them by keeping one eye closed and the other open. (David Ehrlich, reviewing the film for The Dissolve, called it a “choose your own adventure” device.) It’s montage taken to its logical extreme: in-eye editing.
This isn’t simply a great shot—it’s a new kind of shot altogether.
by Calum Marsh, Dissolve | Read more:
Image: Jean-Luc Godard and Fabrice Aragno
How To Pack A Backpack
[ed. I've been reading Cheryl Strayed's "Wild", an epic adventure that starts out almost completely contrary to the advice given below.]A typical checklist for backpacking:
- Tent
- Sleeping Pad
- Sleeping Bag
- Layers
- Flashlight
- Stove and fuel (we recommend a cat food can and denatured alcohol)
- Metal mug w/lid
- Lighter
- Knife
- First Aid Kit
- Spare Socks
- Sunscreen
- Food
- Map
- Compass
- Hand sanitizer
- Trash Bag
- Trowel
- Baby Wipes
- Toothbrush and paste
The standard recommendation is no more than 1/3 your bodyweight on your back. I'm 190lbs and 1/3 my bodyweight is an absurd 62lbs. Typically, I target 25 or 30lbs for an all-up weight. Doing so makes hiking not just easier, but actually fun.
You can spend an insane amount of money to get weight down. For instance, for next week's trip I'll be testing a new sleeping (tent, bag, pad) system that adds up to only 5lbs total while sleeping more luxuriously than I'm used to. Total price for that is $1,200 though, which is outside my budget just like it's likely outside yours. A more achievable goal should be to acquire quality, multi-use gear that can be easily carried. Build up a system over time and it won't be a huge financial burden. Trying to buy all this stuff at once is going to be expensive any way you cut it, even if you're buying cheap crap. And, an item of gear with which you have experience, which you know works and which you know how to use is going to be a lot better companion on the trail than a fancy new gadget that's an unknown. I shudder at the thought of heading out for a trip with all-new gear; that's just a lot that could go wrong.
by Wes Siler, Indefinitely Wild | Read more:
Image: Carlos Torres
YouTube Hitting a New ‘Play’ Button
This fall, Susan Wojcicki, the chief executive of YouTube, appeared on a panel at Vanity Fair’s inaugural technology conference in San Francisco. Sitting on the same stage at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts where Steve Jobs once introduced the iPad to the world, she discussed the future of the media with Richard Plepler, the chief executive of HBO.
At one point, the moderator asked Ms. Wojcicki if she thought cable television would still be around in 10 years. She paused for a moment before answering, with a bit of a sly smile, “Maybe.” The crowd laughed, even though just about everyone in the packed auditorium knew she was only half-joking.
If cable TV is gone in a decade, Ms. Wojcicki and the global digital video empire over which she presides will be one of the main causes. YouTube, founded in 2005 as a do-it-yourself platform for video hobbyists — its original motto was “Broadcast Yourself” — now produces more hit programming than any Hollywood studio. (...)
Every day, one billion people around the world watch more than 300 million hours of videos on YouTube. In November, 83 percent of Internet users in the United States watched a video on YouTube, according to comScore.
Yet for all of its influence as a cultural force, YouTube is still finding its way as an economic one. Viewers may be migrating online in droves from traditional television, but the advertising dollars have not yet followed. The marketing research company eMarketer estimates that YouTube will log about $1.13 billion in ad revenue in 2014, a small fraction of the $200 billion global TV advertising market. CBS, for instance, brought in nearly $9 billion last year.
It’s not that corporations aren’t eager to advertise online; they’re desperate to reach the younger demographic that chooses digital video over cable or broadcast TV. But advertising on YouTube isn’t like advertising on television. Subscribers don’t translate neatly into viewers. Airtime on TV is finite. Airtime on YouTube is effectively unlimited — 300 hours of new content are uploaded to the site every minute — which suppresses the value of ads across the platform.
Above all, the quality of most YouTube programming is too unpolished to draw big investments from many blue-chip advertisers. “Despite YouTube’s size, a tiny fraction of it is what we call ‘TV replaceable,’ content where we would take TV money and swap it over to YouTube,” said one ad executive who spoke on condition of anonymity because he does business with YouTube. “It’s a funny thing to be sitting on top of something this massive and not really be able to totally control what you’re selling advertising against.”
YouTube creators, meanwhile, complain that the company takes too much of the ad revenue — as much as 49 percent — and does too little to market and promote its stars, which makes it hard for them to leverage their celebrity. The danger for YouTube is that it will become a kind of farm system, developing talent that is picked off by other distributors that are willing to make bigger investments in it. Netflix has already been trying to lure away YouTube creators, as has Vessel, a web video start-up founded by a former chief executive of Hulu.
Right now, YouTube’s red-and-white “play” button is everywhere; the site dominates online video. But competition for eyes and advertisers is coming from pretty much every direction. Not only are traditional TV networks like CBS and HBO moving content online, but digital media like Instagram and Twitter are increasing their video offerings. So is Facebook, with its vast numbers of users and global presence. Some of YouTube’s most popular channels feature people playing video games; to protect this franchise, Google, YouTube’s owner, recently tried to buy Twitch, an enormously successful video game streaming site. It was outbid by Amazon.
These are some of the known quantities. There are also unknown ones: the legions of young, tech-knowledgeable entrepreneurs who were raised on YouTube and think they can build something better. It’s worth remembering that the idea for YouTube was hatched at a dinner party in San Francisco less than 10 years ago. Just as abruptly as it changed how we watch TV, it could become the victim of disruption itself.
by Jonathan Mahler, NY Times | Read more:
At one point, the moderator asked Ms. Wojcicki if she thought cable television would still be around in 10 years. She paused for a moment before answering, with a bit of a sly smile, “Maybe.” The crowd laughed, even though just about everyone in the packed auditorium knew she was only half-joking.
If cable TV is gone in a decade, Ms. Wojcicki and the global digital video empire over which she presides will be one of the main causes. YouTube, founded in 2005 as a do-it-yourself platform for video hobbyists — its original motto was “Broadcast Yourself” — now produces more hit programming than any Hollywood studio. (...)Every day, one billion people around the world watch more than 300 million hours of videos on YouTube. In November, 83 percent of Internet users in the United States watched a video on YouTube, according to comScore.
Yet for all of its influence as a cultural force, YouTube is still finding its way as an economic one. Viewers may be migrating online in droves from traditional television, but the advertising dollars have not yet followed. The marketing research company eMarketer estimates that YouTube will log about $1.13 billion in ad revenue in 2014, a small fraction of the $200 billion global TV advertising market. CBS, for instance, brought in nearly $9 billion last year.
It’s not that corporations aren’t eager to advertise online; they’re desperate to reach the younger demographic that chooses digital video over cable or broadcast TV. But advertising on YouTube isn’t like advertising on television. Subscribers don’t translate neatly into viewers. Airtime on TV is finite. Airtime on YouTube is effectively unlimited — 300 hours of new content are uploaded to the site every minute — which suppresses the value of ads across the platform.
Above all, the quality of most YouTube programming is too unpolished to draw big investments from many blue-chip advertisers. “Despite YouTube’s size, a tiny fraction of it is what we call ‘TV replaceable,’ content where we would take TV money and swap it over to YouTube,” said one ad executive who spoke on condition of anonymity because he does business with YouTube. “It’s a funny thing to be sitting on top of something this massive and not really be able to totally control what you’re selling advertising against.”
YouTube creators, meanwhile, complain that the company takes too much of the ad revenue — as much as 49 percent — and does too little to market and promote its stars, which makes it hard for them to leverage their celebrity. The danger for YouTube is that it will become a kind of farm system, developing talent that is picked off by other distributors that are willing to make bigger investments in it. Netflix has already been trying to lure away YouTube creators, as has Vessel, a web video start-up founded by a former chief executive of Hulu.
Right now, YouTube’s red-and-white “play” button is everywhere; the site dominates online video. But competition for eyes and advertisers is coming from pretty much every direction. Not only are traditional TV networks like CBS and HBO moving content online, but digital media like Instagram and Twitter are increasing their video offerings. So is Facebook, with its vast numbers of users and global presence. Some of YouTube’s most popular channels feature people playing video games; to protect this franchise, Google, YouTube’s owner, recently tried to buy Twitch, an enormously successful video game streaming site. It was outbid by Amazon.
These are some of the known quantities. There are also unknown ones: the legions of young, tech-knowledgeable entrepreneurs who were raised on YouTube and think they can build something better. It’s worth remembering that the idea for YouTube was hatched at a dinner party in San Francisco less than 10 years ago. Just as abruptly as it changed how we watch TV, it could become the victim of disruption itself.
by Jonathan Mahler, NY Times | Read more:
Image: YouTube
Saturday, December 20, 2014
The Orphan Master's Son
[ed. So, North Korea is in the news again, shrouded in mystery. If you've ever wondered what life might really be like there, pick up The Orphan Master's Son, it comes as close to anything I've ever read that answers that question (and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction). Here's one review of the book: "I haven’t liked a new novel this much in years, and I want to share the simple pleasure of reading the book. But I also think it’s an instructive lesson in how to paint a fictional world against a background of fact: The secret is research. Johnson spent six years working on “The Orphan Master’s Son,” reading everything he could about North Korea, ingesting the oral histories of defectors and eventually visiting the country. He had to investigate the actual place with enough care that he could begin to invent his own version. It’s this process of re-imagination that makes the fictional locale so real and gives the novel an impact you could never achieve with a thousand newspaper stories."]
North Korea, the Stalinist “hermit kingdom” and one of the world’s most backward and isolated countries, is also a realm where fiction making — state-sponsored storytelling, that is — reigns supreme. At least, that’s how Adam Johnson depicts the dictatorial Communist state in his harrowing and deeply affecting new novel, “The Orphan Master’s Son,” which recounts the picaresque adventures of its title character, Jun Do, a soldier turned kidnapper turned surveillance officer, who tries to stay alive as he stumbles his way through the government bureaucracy.Set in the recent past, when the country’s eccentric strongman Kim Jong-il (who died in December) still ruled with an iron whim, the novel conjures an Orwellian world in which the government’s myths about the country — its success, its benevolence, its virtues in taking on the evils perpetrated by the United States, South Korea and Japan — are not only tirelessly drilled into the citizenry through propaganda broadcasts but have also become an overarching narrative framing everyone’s lives. As Jun Do learns, people’s identities are subordinate to the roles the state expects them to fulfill, and even words or acts that inadvertently cast doubt on the greatness and goodness of the government can lead to death or prison or torture.
“Where we are from,” says one character, “stories are factual. If a farmer is declared a music virtuoso by the state, everyone had better start calling him maestro. And secretly, he’d be wise to start practicing the piano. For us, the story is more important than the person. If a man and his story are in conflict, it is the man who must change.” (...)
In both “Emporium” (set largely in America) and “The Orphan Master’s Son” there is a heightened apprehension of the precariousness of life, the randomness of fate, the difficulty of emotional connection. Because the hardships of real life in North Korea, described by defectors, can be Kafkaesque in their surreal horror, it’s harder to tell in these pages where Mr. Johnson’s penchant for exaggeration leaves off. (...)
The North Korean prisons here seem designed to erase identity and all that makes one human. “In Prison 33, little by little, you relinquished everything, starting with your tomorrows and all that might be,” Mr. Johnson writes. “Next went your past, and suddenly it was inconceivable that your head had ever touched a pillow, that you’d once used a spoon or a toilet, that your mouth had once known flavors and your eyes had beheld colors beyond gray and brown and the shade of black that blood took on.”
As for Mr. Johnson’s hero, Jun Do, he goes from being an instrument of the state — kidnapping an assortment of people on official orders and eavesdropping on foreign radio transmissions — to becoming one of its victims. Along the way he commits terrible acts that will haunt the rest of his days, and yet he doggedly clings to the goal of survival.
And then, unexpectedly, he meets and falls in love with Sun Moon, the country’s most famous actress, “the only person who could take away the pain he’d suffered.” His love for her will alter the trajectory of his story and give him the chance to commit a selfless act — inspired, weirdly, by the movie “Casablanca” — that might redeem his life.
In recounting Jun Do’s peregrinations, Mr. Johnson does an agile job of combining fablelike elements with vivid emotional details to create a story that has both the boldness of a cartoon and the nuance of a deeply felt portrait. He captures the grotesque horrors that Jun Do is involved in, or witness to, even as he gives us a visceral sense of the world that his characters inhabit. It’s a world in which anyone may be an informer, and suspicion poisons relationships between parents and children, husbands and wives. Here, even love is considered a liability, an emotion that gives the government leverage over would-be defectors: one more thing it can take away.
by Michiko Kakutani, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Korean News Service
You’re 16. You’re a Pedophile. You Don’t Want to Hurt Anyone. What Do You Do Now?
We have a few go-to archetypes when it comes to pedophilia: There is the playground lurker, the chat-room predator, and the monstrous (often religious) authority figure. These men are usually middle-aged, unrepentant serial abusers who are caught only after remaining undetected for years. But what about the preceding decades? When do these urges first begin to manifest?
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders defines a pedophile as an individual who “over a period of at least six months” has “recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors involving sexual activity with a prepubescent child or children.” This person also has to have “acted on these sexual urges, or the sexual urges or fantasies cause marked distress or interpersonal difficulty,” and be “at least age 16 years and at least five years older than the child or children” involved.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that most pedophiles first notice an attraction toward children when they themselves are between 11 and 16, mirroring that of any other sexual awakening. It can be a confusing time for any of us, but imagine realizing that you’re attracted to little kids. How do these young men and women negotiate that with no viable role models or support network? There is no It Gets Better for pedophiles. Are they all fated to end up as child molesters? Or is it possible for them to live a life without hurting children at all?
I spoke with experts and asked around online. I came across a site for self-described pedophiles who acknowledged their attraction and wanted help dealing with it. But the men I met were in their 50s and 60s, and I’d hoped to speak with someone younger, someone still coming to terms with what he was learning about himself. I asked them if they knew anyone like that, and a few weeks later I received an email.
“My name is Adam,” it read. “I’m 18 and non-exclusively attracted to boys and girls of all ages (particularly very young ones). I am the leader of a support group for non-offending pedophiles around my age… I would be very happy to talk with you.” (...)
There is currently no mechanism for treating someone who has pedophilic urges and hasn’t acted on them. A major roadblock is the existence of mandatory reporting laws, which dictate that people in certain professions must report suspicion of child abuse and neglect to Child Protective Services. (The individuals required to make a report varies from state to state; it can include all citizens but is usually restricted to those whose work puts them in regular contact with children, such as teachers, police, and psychologists.)
Mandated reporting revolutionized the way child abuse is handled in the U.S. and has brought many incidents to light, but it can be problematic for young men like Adam who haven’t abused children. The civil and criminal liabilities facing those who fail to report someone who goes on to molest a kid, combined with the fact that it need only be based on suspicion and not probable cause, means a report could be triggered when well-intentioned individuals reach out for help. The overwhelming number of minor-attracted men I spoke with said this was too much of a deterrent. Which also makes it harder to learn more about them.
There is a lot we still don’t know about pedophilia—one researcher described our scientific understanding of it as a series of “pretty big black holes.” We don’t know, for example, how someone comes by an attraction for prepubescent children in the first place. The research we do have, and this is derived from very small sample sizes, suggests that those attracted to kids tend to be shorter, left-handed, and have a lower IQ than the broader population. Another study found that being knocked unconscious before the age of 13 might be a factor. This may sound like quackery, but it points toward biological causation. In other words, it’s likely that pedophiles are born this way.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders defines a pedophile as an individual who “over a period of at least six months” has “recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors involving sexual activity with a prepubescent child or children.” This person also has to have “acted on these sexual urges, or the sexual urges or fantasies cause marked distress or interpersonal difficulty,” and be “at least age 16 years and at least five years older than the child or children” involved.Anecdotal evidence suggests that most pedophiles first notice an attraction toward children when they themselves are between 11 and 16, mirroring that of any other sexual awakening. It can be a confusing time for any of us, but imagine realizing that you’re attracted to little kids. How do these young men and women negotiate that with no viable role models or support network? There is no It Gets Better for pedophiles. Are they all fated to end up as child molesters? Or is it possible for them to live a life without hurting children at all?
I spoke with experts and asked around online. I came across a site for self-described pedophiles who acknowledged their attraction and wanted help dealing with it. But the men I met were in their 50s and 60s, and I’d hoped to speak with someone younger, someone still coming to terms with what he was learning about himself. I asked them if they knew anyone like that, and a few weeks later I received an email.
“My name is Adam,” it read. “I’m 18 and non-exclusively attracted to boys and girls of all ages (particularly very young ones). I am the leader of a support group for non-offending pedophiles around my age… I would be very happy to talk with you.” (...)
There is currently no mechanism for treating someone who has pedophilic urges and hasn’t acted on them. A major roadblock is the existence of mandatory reporting laws, which dictate that people in certain professions must report suspicion of child abuse and neglect to Child Protective Services. (The individuals required to make a report varies from state to state; it can include all citizens but is usually restricted to those whose work puts them in regular contact with children, such as teachers, police, and psychologists.)
Mandated reporting revolutionized the way child abuse is handled in the U.S. and has brought many incidents to light, but it can be problematic for young men like Adam who haven’t abused children. The civil and criminal liabilities facing those who fail to report someone who goes on to molest a kid, combined with the fact that it need only be based on suspicion and not probable cause, means a report could be triggered when well-intentioned individuals reach out for help. The overwhelming number of minor-attracted men I spoke with said this was too much of a deterrent. Which also makes it harder to learn more about them.
There is a lot we still don’t know about pedophilia—one researcher described our scientific understanding of it as a series of “pretty big black holes.” We don’t know, for example, how someone comes by an attraction for prepubescent children in the first place. The research we do have, and this is derived from very small sample sizes, suggests that those attracted to kids tend to be shorter, left-handed, and have a lower IQ than the broader population. Another study found that being knocked unconscious before the age of 13 might be a factor. This may sound like quackery, but it points toward biological causation. In other words, it’s likely that pedophiles are born this way.
by Luke Malone, Matter | Read more:
Image: Simon Prades
Hiding and Seeking: Vivian Maier
[ed. See also: here and here.]
Sitting on the ground, the homeless man curls himself into an elegant spiral: knees raised, arms wrapped, head lowered so that nothing shows but the round top of his cloth cap. His light-colored suit and hat are dirty, but he wears good shoes, and there is a ring on his hand. Huddled on the sidewalk, he turns himself into his own protective shell; he draws himself inward, hiding, yet makes a shape that arrests the eye.
Still pictures are more secretive than moving pictures. The power of great photographs comes from the tension between what they reveal and what they withhold. Cut off from time before and after, they have the excitement of mysteries forever on the verge of being solved. A young black man dressed in white rides a dark horse bareback under the shadow of the El: the picture lingers in the mind like a cryptic poem. The street is empty, the horse walks calmly, and the boy sits on its back with easy grace.
Documentary films about photographers are caught between images that flow and images that freeze; talking heads unpack the significance of iconic images seen all too fleetingly. Still photography turns a fugitive glimpse into a permanent record that can be studied for any length of time. A beautiful woman with dark-rimmed eyes, seen from the window of a passing bus, becomes a monument as enduring as the marble front of the Public Library rising behind her. Film returns these images to the tyranny of time, giving them context at the price of their independence.
Finding Vivian Maier investigates the case of a provokingly secretive woman who took thousands of photographs but kept them locked away, never showing or selling them during her lifetime. The documentary features interviews with people who knew Maier, including those who employed her as a nanny or who as children were her charges. They construct a fascinating, contradictory, unsettling verbal portrait of the artist, complicating rather than simplifying our understanding of her. It seems she was conscious of being a puzzle, even gleefully so: one speaker quotes Maier calling herself “the mystery woman.”
Vivian Maier was a strange, difficult person, and those who knew her have spent a lot of time trying to understand her. But when people in the film say, “Why was a nanny taking all these photographs?” or “What’s the use of taking it if no one sees it?” they reveal less about Maier than about common assumptions of what art is for, and who artists are. Maier’s photographs, to which she devoted herself rigorously but for which she never sought recognition, illustrate the paradox of someone who wanted to stay hidden yet obsessively documented her existence, a solitary outsider who could form profound, fleeting connections with strangers. One interviewee speculates that Maier would have been upset at having her privacy violated by the documentary’s delving. But the film’s fascination with its subject, at once intrusive and compassionate, feels very much like Maier’s own eye, stalking people in the street, yet seeming not to expose them so much as to grant them the flattery of rapt attention.
by Imogen Sara Smith, Threepenny Review | Read more:
Image: Vivian Maier
Sitting on the ground, the homeless man curls himself into an elegant spiral: knees raised, arms wrapped, head lowered so that nothing shows but the round top of his cloth cap. His light-colored suit and hat are dirty, but he wears good shoes, and there is a ring on his hand. Huddled on the sidewalk, he turns himself into his own protective shell; he draws himself inward, hiding, yet makes a shape that arrests the eye.Still pictures are more secretive than moving pictures. The power of great photographs comes from the tension between what they reveal and what they withhold. Cut off from time before and after, they have the excitement of mysteries forever on the verge of being solved. A young black man dressed in white rides a dark horse bareback under the shadow of the El: the picture lingers in the mind like a cryptic poem. The street is empty, the horse walks calmly, and the boy sits on its back with easy grace.
Documentary films about photographers are caught between images that flow and images that freeze; talking heads unpack the significance of iconic images seen all too fleetingly. Still photography turns a fugitive glimpse into a permanent record that can be studied for any length of time. A beautiful woman with dark-rimmed eyes, seen from the window of a passing bus, becomes a monument as enduring as the marble front of the Public Library rising behind her. Film returns these images to the tyranny of time, giving them context at the price of their independence.
Finding Vivian Maier investigates the case of a provokingly secretive woman who took thousands of photographs but kept them locked away, never showing or selling them during her lifetime. The documentary features interviews with people who knew Maier, including those who employed her as a nanny or who as children were her charges. They construct a fascinating, contradictory, unsettling verbal portrait of the artist, complicating rather than simplifying our understanding of her. It seems she was conscious of being a puzzle, even gleefully so: one speaker quotes Maier calling herself “the mystery woman.”
Vivian Maier was a strange, difficult person, and those who knew her have spent a lot of time trying to understand her. But when people in the film say, “Why was a nanny taking all these photographs?” or “What’s the use of taking it if no one sees it?” they reveal less about Maier than about common assumptions of what art is for, and who artists are. Maier’s photographs, to which she devoted herself rigorously but for which she never sought recognition, illustrate the paradox of someone who wanted to stay hidden yet obsessively documented her existence, a solitary outsider who could form profound, fleeting connections with strangers. One interviewee speculates that Maier would have been upset at having her privacy violated by the documentary’s delving. But the film’s fascination with its subject, at once intrusive and compassionate, feels very much like Maier’s own eye, stalking people in the street, yet seeming not to expose them so much as to grant them the flattery of rapt attention.
by Imogen Sara Smith, Threepenny Review | Read more:
Image: Vivian Maier
Can Couples Therapy Make Me Less of an Emotional Cavewoman?
In previous columns, I have written, in lengthy and pathetic detail, about the traumatic breakup I went through at the end of July. In addition to publishing multiple essays about the perils of heartbreak, I’ve also been privately campaigning to get my ex back: shameless, 2,000-word emails listing all the ways I’m prepared to change; sappy, “you complete me”-esque text messages; I even showed up at her apartment crying in a silk slip one evening, like a crazy woman from a Marcello Mastroianni movie. My ex rebuffed all my efforts with the same response: Though she still loved me, she just didn’t feel safe in our relationship. (The result, apparently, of my recurring pressures to open our relationship throughout our two years together—my bad?) By November, after four months of trying to negotiate with her, I was beginning to give up hope. But then I got an email: “I’m willing to try to work things out, under one condition: We have to begin couples therapy.”
I’ll start by saying that I realize this whole situation is embarrassing. Couples therapy just seems like one of those things other people do. Specifically, other people in their 50s, with two kids and a house, for whom separating would dismantle their entire lives. Lessa and I, on the other hand, began dating only two years ago, and we are in our 20s. The only property we’ve ever shared were the communal toothbrushes at our respective apartments. Many would argue that needing to see a therapist at this stage is a sign that we should just break up. I also understand that, by dragging ourselves back into a messy relationship we just spent months trying to get over, we risk suffering heartbreak all over again. But I’m lovesick and desperate, and therefore can’t be held accountable for my decisions.
I’ve always been kind of skeptical of therapy. I grew up in a conservative, traditional Italian Catholic family. Where I come from, when you’re sad, you get smacked in the face and told to cheer up. I can’t remember anyone in my family talking openly about their feelings—we barely talked at all, unless it concerned Jesus or sports. Needing to see a therapist was viewed as a sign of weakness. And although there were a couple of times during depressive periods of my life when I considered seeing a psychologist, I always ultimately decided against it, deeming it too self-indulgent. Of course, there are situations when therapy seems appropriate—after a serious loss or trauma, for example. But am I really going to pay a stranger thousands of dollars to listen to me whine about the stresses of my blogger life? Tragic. (...)
Our first session was six weeks ago. Somewhat worryingly, on the day of, my primary concern was what to wear. I wanted to make a good impression on the therapist by looking pretty, but also virtuous—ya know, “the good guy” in the relationship—and so I chose a white, crew-neck wool dress with gold buttons that I felt made me look particularly angelic. The therapist wasn’t exactly what I expected. Having been a fan of HBO’s In Treatment, the stock image of a therapist in my mind is of a dark and handsome, pensive, Gabriel Byrne–type with whom patients always feel a muted sexual tension. Our therapist (I’ll call her Kate), however, was a 60-something woman in white jeans and trendy, knee-high leather boots, smiling enthusiastically in her shabby-chic Upper East Side office. Peppy and progressive, she’s like the cool mom you always wished you had.
As a first step, both Lessa and I were asked to explain why we were in couples therapy. Surprisingly, Kate did not think “Because she made me do it” was either a funny or a valid response. Lessa, on the other hand, has been in therapy since she was young (typical Jew), and is well-versed in this sort of thing. She explained that we have pretty serious trust and jealousy issues, many of which are left over from our year in a poorly managed open relationship. And the fact that we both cheated once didn’t help. Also, Lessa seems to think I have an “anger problem” (I prefer to think of myself as “passionate”), and that I need to learn to communicate my feelings rather than be an emotional cavewoman (my parents’ fault).
Jealousy sucks. It’s stressful and unattractive, and once it gets hold of you, it can be hard to control. Talking about your feelings is difficult enough, but the sensitive subjects of trust and jealousy are two of the hardest to broach. Usually, when I feel upset or insecure in a relationship, my default reaction is to retaliate in order to make the other person feel as bad as I do. It’s just way easier to be a bitch than it is to admit, “It makes me feel insecure when you talk to your ex.” Retribution is more appealing than fixing the problem, because the latter usually entails making yourself vulnerable. And thanks to my ego, I’ve never been very comfortable with vulnerability. Lessa’s reaction to a problem, meanwhile, has always been to run away—hence her eventual decision to break up. Before we split, we were having the same stupid fight over and over again. Eventually, I’d go into vengeful bitch mode, and she’d walk out. Nothing ever got solved.
I’ll start by saying that I realize this whole situation is embarrassing. Couples therapy just seems like one of those things other people do. Specifically, other people in their 50s, with two kids and a house, for whom separating would dismantle their entire lives. Lessa and I, on the other hand, began dating only two years ago, and we are in our 20s. The only property we’ve ever shared were the communal toothbrushes at our respective apartments. Many would argue that needing to see a therapist at this stage is a sign that we should just break up. I also understand that, by dragging ourselves back into a messy relationship we just spent months trying to get over, we risk suffering heartbreak all over again. But I’m lovesick and desperate, and therefore can’t be held accountable for my decisions.I’ve always been kind of skeptical of therapy. I grew up in a conservative, traditional Italian Catholic family. Where I come from, when you’re sad, you get smacked in the face and told to cheer up. I can’t remember anyone in my family talking openly about their feelings—we barely talked at all, unless it concerned Jesus or sports. Needing to see a therapist was viewed as a sign of weakness. And although there were a couple of times during depressive periods of my life when I considered seeing a psychologist, I always ultimately decided against it, deeming it too self-indulgent. Of course, there are situations when therapy seems appropriate—after a serious loss or trauma, for example. But am I really going to pay a stranger thousands of dollars to listen to me whine about the stresses of my blogger life? Tragic. (...)
Our first session was six weeks ago. Somewhat worryingly, on the day of, my primary concern was what to wear. I wanted to make a good impression on the therapist by looking pretty, but also virtuous—ya know, “the good guy” in the relationship—and so I chose a white, crew-neck wool dress with gold buttons that I felt made me look particularly angelic. The therapist wasn’t exactly what I expected. Having been a fan of HBO’s In Treatment, the stock image of a therapist in my mind is of a dark and handsome, pensive, Gabriel Byrne–type with whom patients always feel a muted sexual tension. Our therapist (I’ll call her Kate), however, was a 60-something woman in white jeans and trendy, knee-high leather boots, smiling enthusiastically in her shabby-chic Upper East Side office. Peppy and progressive, she’s like the cool mom you always wished you had.
As a first step, both Lessa and I were asked to explain why we were in couples therapy. Surprisingly, Kate did not think “Because she made me do it” was either a funny or a valid response. Lessa, on the other hand, has been in therapy since she was young (typical Jew), and is well-versed in this sort of thing. She explained that we have pretty serious trust and jealousy issues, many of which are left over from our year in a poorly managed open relationship. And the fact that we both cheated once didn’t help. Also, Lessa seems to think I have an “anger problem” (I prefer to think of myself as “passionate”), and that I need to learn to communicate my feelings rather than be an emotional cavewoman (my parents’ fault).
Jealousy sucks. It’s stressful and unattractive, and once it gets hold of you, it can be hard to control. Talking about your feelings is difficult enough, but the sensitive subjects of trust and jealousy are two of the hardest to broach. Usually, when I feel upset or insecure in a relationship, my default reaction is to retaliate in order to make the other person feel as bad as I do. It’s just way easier to be a bitch than it is to admit, “It makes me feel insecure when you talk to your ex.” Retribution is more appealing than fixing the problem, because the latter usually entails making yourself vulnerable. And thanks to my ego, I’ve never been very comfortable with vulnerability. Lessa’s reaction to a problem, meanwhile, has always been to run away—hence her eventual decision to break up. Before we split, we were having the same stupid fight over and over again. Eventually, I’d go into vengeful bitch mode, and she’d walk out. Nothing ever got solved.
by Karley Sciortino, Vogue | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Friday, December 19, 2014
What Happened When Marissa Mayer Tried to Be Steve Jobs
Eric Jackson was sitting in his hotel room on Sea Island, Ga., watching his kids splash around in the pool, when he clicked “publish” on his latest blog post for Forbes.com. Jackson, an influential hedge-fund manager, had become fixated on Yahoo and the efforts of its chief executive, Marissa Mayer, to turn around the enormous yet floundering Internet company. It was July 21, 2014, almost exactly two years to the day since Mayer took over, arriving at Yahoo’s headquarters to an unfurled purple carpet and Shepard Fairey-style “HOPE” posters bearing her face. During those 24 months, Mayer eliminated dozens of products and rebooted others. She acquired 41 start-ups and even hired Katie Couric. But just one week earlier, Mayer announced the company’s lowest quarterly earnings in a decade. Jackson argued in his post that Yahoo no longer made sense as an independent entity. Instead, it might be a nice takeover target for one of the tech industry’s Big Four: Apple, Facebook, Amazon or Google.
Jackson’s conclusion wasn’t based simply on a discouraging quarter. It was a result of an eye-opening calculation he had performed — what’s known on Wall Street as a sum-of-the-parts valuation. Yahoo had a market value of $33 billion at the time, but that figure owed largely to its stake in Alibaba, the Chinese Internet conglomerate. According to Jackson’s valuation, Yahoo’s stake in Alibaba was worth roughly $37 billion. But if you subtracted that position, the entirety of Yahoo’s core business, all its web products and content sites, actually had a market valuation of negative $4 billion. A conquering company could theoretically buy Yahoo, sell off its Asian assets and absorb its business units free. This sort of sale would make a lot of money for Yahoo’s shareholders, Jackson wrote, even if it meant gutting the company and losing Mayer as C.E.O. after only two years.
A day after his post, Jackson received an unusual email. A major Yahoo shareholder had written to explain that he and many other investors, along with numerous employees and advertisers, had themselves become extremely frustrated with Mayer. Her turnaround plan, he said, had failed. The start-ups she acquired (most notably the social blogging platform Tumblr, which Yahoo bought for $1.1 billion in 2013) had failed to revive the company’s flat revenues of roughly $5 billion per year. Nor had Mayer succeeded, despite her track record overseeing Google’s search engine, in turning any of Yahoo’s many products into an industry leader. There were also a number of embarrassing management setbacks. The best outcome for Yahoo, the shareholder said, might be to sell the company. (...)
Dynamic and wildly profitable Internet companies like Facebook and Google may get most of the attention, but Silicon Valley is littered with firms that just get by doing roughly the same thing year after year — has-beens like Ask.com, a search engine that no longer innovates but happily takes in $400 million in annual revenue, turning a profit in the process. Mayer, who is 39, was hired to keep Yahoo from suffering this sort of fate. She believed it could again become a top-tier tech firm that enjoyed enormous growth and competed for top talent. And two years in, Mayer, who has a tendency to compare herself with Steve Jobs, wasn’t about to abandon her turnaround plan. On the afternoon of Oct. 21, she entered a web TV studio on Yahoo’s garrisonlike campus to present the company’s latest quarterly results. But the presentation effectively became a response to Starboard’s campaign. Even though Yahoo’s revenue had decreased in five of the past six quarters, Mayer attested that she had “great confidence in the strength of our business.”
Mayer’s resolve was consistent with other remarks she had made at the time, in both public and private. She highlighted various signs of promise. Yahoo’s mobile revenues, while still small, had doubled from the previous year. Display advertising revenue was down 6 percent, but the number of ads sold had actually increased by 24 percent. Yahoo was engaging more mobile users than ever before. Mayer didn’t bother talking about a potential AOL takeover. Her goal was nothing less than to return her company to the level of the Big Four. “We believe deeply in the future potential of Yahoo,” she said into the camera, “and the transformation we are pursuing to bring an iconic company back to greatness.”
Generally speaking, there are only a few ways to make money on the Internet. There are e-commerce companies and marketplaces — think Amazon, eBay and Uber — that profit from transactions occurring on their platforms. Hardware companies, like Apple or Fitbit, profit from gadgets. For everyone else, though, it more or less comes down to advertising. Social-media companies, like Facebook or Twitter, may make cool products that connect their users, but they earn revenue by selling ads against the content those users create. Innovative media companies, like Vox or Hulu, make money in much the same way, except that they’re selling ads against content created by professionals. Google, which has basically devoured the search business, still makes a vast majority of its fortune by selling ads against our queries.
Yahoo essentially invented the online-advertising business. In 1994, two graduate students at Stanford, Jerry Yang and David Filo, dreamed up a way to help early users navigate the web. They picked URLs that they each liked — beginning with around 100 links, including one for Nerf toys and one dedicated to armadillos — and listed them on a page called “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web.” Within a year, their guide had to be divided into 19 categories (art, business, etc.) and was generating one million clicks a day. In 1995, the year Yahoo started selling ads, a former company executive estimated that the entire market was about $20 million. By 1997, Yahoo’s ad revenues alone were $70.4 million. The next year, they were $203 million.
To keep up with the growth, Yahoo quickly expanded beyond its directory to create a multitude of ad-supported products. The company aimed to be all things to all web users, and for most of a decade, it was a wildly successful strategy. In 1997, Yahoo added chat rooms, classified ads and an email service. In 1998, it introduced sports, games, movies, real estate, a calendar, file sharing, auctions, shopping and an address book. Even during the crash of the Internet bubble, a profusion of more traditional advertisers began to migrate from print to digital. The search business, in particular, was growing enormously. In 2002, Yahoo’s first full year monetizing search results with attendant ads, its revenues reached $953 million. In 2003, they eclipsed $1.6 billion. In 2004, they grew again to $3.5 billion. At its peak, Yahoo’s market capitalization reached $128 billion. It was $20 billion larger than Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett’s holding company.
But this growth obscured a looming problem. While Yahoo was busy enlarging its portfolio, a new generation of start-ups was focusing on perfecting one single product. Soon enough, Yahoo was losing out to eBay in auctions, Google in search and Craigslist in classifieds. Then Facebook came along, replacing Yahoo as the home page for millions of people. The advertising dollars soon followed, and Yahoo’s revenue flattened. Between 2007 and 2012, the company churned through four C.E.O.s. The last of them, Scott Thompson, resigned in disgrace after five months when a large activist shareholder, Dan Loeb, published an open letter accusing him of fabricating a computer-science degree. After Thompson’s resignation, in May 2012, Yahoo was worth less than $20 billion on the public markets.
Jackson’s conclusion wasn’t based simply on a discouraging quarter. It was a result of an eye-opening calculation he had performed — what’s known on Wall Street as a sum-of-the-parts valuation. Yahoo had a market value of $33 billion at the time, but that figure owed largely to its stake in Alibaba, the Chinese Internet conglomerate. According to Jackson’s valuation, Yahoo’s stake in Alibaba was worth roughly $37 billion. But if you subtracted that position, the entirety of Yahoo’s core business, all its web products and content sites, actually had a market valuation of negative $4 billion. A conquering company could theoretically buy Yahoo, sell off its Asian assets and absorb its business units free. This sort of sale would make a lot of money for Yahoo’s shareholders, Jackson wrote, even if it meant gutting the company and losing Mayer as C.E.O. after only two years.A day after his post, Jackson received an unusual email. A major Yahoo shareholder had written to explain that he and many other investors, along with numerous employees and advertisers, had themselves become extremely frustrated with Mayer. Her turnaround plan, he said, had failed. The start-ups she acquired (most notably the social blogging platform Tumblr, which Yahoo bought for $1.1 billion in 2013) had failed to revive the company’s flat revenues of roughly $5 billion per year. Nor had Mayer succeeded, despite her track record overseeing Google’s search engine, in turning any of Yahoo’s many products into an industry leader. There were also a number of embarrassing management setbacks. The best outcome for Yahoo, the shareholder said, might be to sell the company. (...)
Dynamic and wildly profitable Internet companies like Facebook and Google may get most of the attention, but Silicon Valley is littered with firms that just get by doing roughly the same thing year after year — has-beens like Ask.com, a search engine that no longer innovates but happily takes in $400 million in annual revenue, turning a profit in the process. Mayer, who is 39, was hired to keep Yahoo from suffering this sort of fate. She believed it could again become a top-tier tech firm that enjoyed enormous growth and competed for top talent. And two years in, Mayer, who has a tendency to compare herself with Steve Jobs, wasn’t about to abandon her turnaround plan. On the afternoon of Oct. 21, she entered a web TV studio on Yahoo’s garrisonlike campus to present the company’s latest quarterly results. But the presentation effectively became a response to Starboard’s campaign. Even though Yahoo’s revenue had decreased in five of the past six quarters, Mayer attested that she had “great confidence in the strength of our business.”
Mayer’s resolve was consistent with other remarks she had made at the time, in both public and private. She highlighted various signs of promise. Yahoo’s mobile revenues, while still small, had doubled from the previous year. Display advertising revenue was down 6 percent, but the number of ads sold had actually increased by 24 percent. Yahoo was engaging more mobile users than ever before. Mayer didn’t bother talking about a potential AOL takeover. Her goal was nothing less than to return her company to the level of the Big Four. “We believe deeply in the future potential of Yahoo,” she said into the camera, “and the transformation we are pursuing to bring an iconic company back to greatness.”
Generally speaking, there are only a few ways to make money on the Internet. There are e-commerce companies and marketplaces — think Amazon, eBay and Uber — that profit from transactions occurring on their platforms. Hardware companies, like Apple or Fitbit, profit from gadgets. For everyone else, though, it more or less comes down to advertising. Social-media companies, like Facebook or Twitter, may make cool products that connect their users, but they earn revenue by selling ads against the content those users create. Innovative media companies, like Vox or Hulu, make money in much the same way, except that they’re selling ads against content created by professionals. Google, which has basically devoured the search business, still makes a vast majority of its fortune by selling ads against our queries.
Yahoo essentially invented the online-advertising business. In 1994, two graduate students at Stanford, Jerry Yang and David Filo, dreamed up a way to help early users navigate the web. They picked URLs that they each liked — beginning with around 100 links, including one for Nerf toys and one dedicated to armadillos — and listed them on a page called “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web.” Within a year, their guide had to be divided into 19 categories (art, business, etc.) and was generating one million clicks a day. In 1995, the year Yahoo started selling ads, a former company executive estimated that the entire market was about $20 million. By 1997, Yahoo’s ad revenues alone were $70.4 million. The next year, they were $203 million.
To keep up with the growth, Yahoo quickly expanded beyond its directory to create a multitude of ad-supported products. The company aimed to be all things to all web users, and for most of a decade, it was a wildly successful strategy. In 1997, Yahoo added chat rooms, classified ads and an email service. In 1998, it introduced sports, games, movies, real estate, a calendar, file sharing, auctions, shopping and an address book. Even during the crash of the Internet bubble, a profusion of more traditional advertisers began to migrate from print to digital. The search business, in particular, was growing enormously. In 2002, Yahoo’s first full year monetizing search results with attendant ads, its revenues reached $953 million. In 2003, they eclipsed $1.6 billion. In 2004, they grew again to $3.5 billion. At its peak, Yahoo’s market capitalization reached $128 billion. It was $20 billion larger than Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett’s holding company.
But this growth obscured a looming problem. While Yahoo was busy enlarging its portfolio, a new generation of start-ups was focusing on perfecting one single product. Soon enough, Yahoo was losing out to eBay in auctions, Google in search and Craigslist in classifieds. Then Facebook came along, replacing Yahoo as the home page for millions of people. The advertising dollars soon followed, and Yahoo’s revenue flattened. Between 2007 and 2012, the company churned through four C.E.O.s. The last of them, Scott Thompson, resigned in disgrace after five months when a large activist shareholder, Dan Loeb, published an open letter accusing him of fabricating a computer-science degree. After Thompson’s resignation, in May 2012, Yahoo was worth less than $20 billion on the public markets.
by Nicholas Carlson, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Matt Dorfman. Photographs by Getty Images
Open Bay Lets You Run Your Own Copy of The Pirate Bay
Legendary file-sharing site The Pirate Bay may have finally been forced offline, but that doesn’t mean that the less-than-legal file-sharing scene has slowed down—the shady BitTorrent hydra has many more heads to take The Pirate Bay’s place. In fact, if the folks at torrent site Isohunt have their way, there will very soon be many, many more heads: the site has released an open sourced "copy" of The Pirate Bay called "Open Bay" that anyone with access to a Web server can install and run.
The Open Bay project maintainers have set up a GitHub repository for the Open Bay application and written instructions covering how to get your very own Open Bay site up and running—complete with example configuration files. To make it work, you need at minimum a Web server running Apache or Nginx and PHP (either with mod_php or PHP-FPM or whatever other PHP method you prefer); since we’ve got one of those in our closet, we decided to take a crack at installing the application to see how it works.
What Open Bay is not
I was hoping that Open Bay would be a full-featured Bittorrent site wherein I could both search for and also add torrents; I’d planned on setting everything up and then offering out a complete set of Linux ISO torrent links to prove that it worked. However, it’s important to be clear at the outset that Open Bay’s primary purpose is to be a copy of The Pirate Bay.
The key word here is "copy," because to really make Open Bay work for you, you either need to use Isohunt’s remote torrent database—which makes Open Bay really just a self-hosted front end rather than a full featured torrent site—or you need to download an almost 900MB torrent database dump (which comes as a 441MB gzipped CSV file with about 8 million torrents and their associated magnet link hashes, sourced from The Pirate Bay as well as other torrent sites). The intent is that you first set up the Open Bay application, then either point it at Isohunt’s database or dump the CSV file into your own MySQL database. Once you’ve brought these two halves together, the resultant whole is a torrent search site with about 8 million working torrents you can search through and download.
What you can’t do is list your own torrents—at least, not without directly adding them to the MySQL database. This definitely helps keep the Open Bay application simpler both from a development perspective and also for would-be Open Bay administrators to install and configure, but it also limits the application’s usefulness. For right now, it’s really good for only one thing: running a static sort-of copy of The Pirate Bay.
I was hoping that Open Bay would be a full-featured Bittorrent site wherein I could both search for and also add torrents; I’d planned on setting everything up and then offering out a complete set of Linux ISO torrent links to prove that it worked. However, it’s important to be clear at the outset that Open Bay’s primary purpose is to be a copy of The Pirate Bay.
The key word here is "copy," because to really make Open Bay work for you, you either need to use Isohunt’s remote torrent database—which makes Open Bay really just a self-hosted front end rather than a full featured torrent site—or you need to download an almost 900MB torrent database dump (which comes as a 441MB gzipped CSV file with about 8 million torrents and their associated magnet link hashes, sourced from The Pirate Bay as well as other torrent sites). The intent is that you first set up the Open Bay application, then either point it at Isohunt’s database or dump the CSV file into your own MySQL database. Once you’ve brought these two halves together, the resultant whole is a torrent search site with about 8 million working torrents you can search through and download.
What you can’t do is list your own torrents—at least, not without directly adding them to the MySQL database. This definitely helps keep the Open Bay application simpler both from a development perspective and also for would-be Open Bay administrators to install and configure, but it also limits the application’s usefulness. For right now, it’s really good for only one thing: running a static sort-of copy of The Pirate Bay.
Forging ahead anyway
But, what the heck, it’s Friday, so we set it up anyway—though without importing the large database dump needed to really fill out its functionality.
by Lee Hutchinson, Ars Technica | Read more:
Image: uncredited
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