Facebook and Google Watch Porn
July 19, 2019
“I am certain there is too much certainty in the world.”
“In the information society, nobody thinks. We expected to banish paper, but we actually banished thought.”
– Michael Crichton
The Ebola Epidemic
On Wednesday the World Health Organization declared the year long Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo a global health emergency, something many public health experts considered long overdue. As of Monday the disease had infected 2,512 people and killed 1,676 of them.
The epidemic hot spot expanded in northeastern Congo near Rwanda and into Uganda. The heavily populated city of Goma, with some two million people, reported its first Ebola case this week. That patient has died.
A transportation hub close to Rwanda, with an international airport, Goma is in a conflict zone under unrelenting peril from warring militias. The fear of violence against health care workers was intensified last week when two Congolese workers were slain in their homes in Beni.
The WHO makes emergency declarations sparingly — only four others have been issued in the past:
- 2009 for pandemic influenza
- 2014 for a polio resurgence
- 2014 for the huge Ebola epidemic in West Africa
- 2016 for the Zika virus epidemic
This time the inability to halt the current outbreak, the length of its duration and its continuing spread convinced WHO officials to make the emergency declaration, which will raise international support and release many more resources.
A Disaster in Japan
- A man in his 40s was taken into custody after he burst into a major Anime Studio in Japan, tossed around a flammable liquid while shouting “die,” and set the building on fire.
- At least 33 people were killed, some in the stairwell as they tried to make their way to the roof of the three story Kyoto Animation building. At least three dozen more people were injured.
- What caused the perpetrator to douse the building isn’t known, but the studio had been receiving threatening emails. (NPR)
- Thousands of Tokyo commuters told to work from home to avoid Olympic crush: Employees will stay home for two weeks as part of mass trial to take pressure off crowded public transport system (The Guardian)
Battleship: 21st Century Real Life
- Iran seized a foreign oil tanker on Sunday it says was smuggling fuel in the Persian Gulf south of Iran’s Larak Island.
- Neither the ship nor its owners were initially identified, but semi-official news agencies suggested the vessel was the Panamanian-flagged MT Riah, a ship that went missing July 14 and appeared to have been taken into Iranian waters in the Strait of Hormuz.
- Nothing has been heard of the ship since it stopped transmitting its location in the early hours of Sunday. (Guardian)
Facebook and Google Watch Porn
- Elena Maris, a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft, is the lead author of a soon-to-be-published study that shows Facebook and Google trackers are populating porn sites.
- The study scanned 22,484 pornography sites and found them riddled with trackers from major technology companies. Other authors of the study found that 93 percent of the pornography websites they scanned sent data to an average of seven third-party domains.
- The authors used webXray, an open source software tool which detects and matches third-party data requests to scan sites. Most of that information — 79 percent of websites that transmitted user data — was sent via tracking cookies from outside companies. “These porn sites need to think more about the data they hold and how it’s just as sensitive as something like health information,” Maris said. (NYT)
- How Pornhub Enables Doxing and Harassment: Pornhub is hosting videos that have been viewed hundreds of millions of times. The women in them say they thought the videos would never reach the internet, and that being doxed has ruined their lives. (Vice)
- 5 Million Bulgarians Have Their Personal Data Stolen in Hack (NYT, $)
- Tech Hearings: Congress Unites to Take Aim at Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google (NYT, $)
- Facebook Cryptocurrency Plans Have a Problem: Facebook’s Reputation (NYT, $)
Additional World News
- New cracks in the global economy as exports tumble: If you were in any doubt that the US-China trade war is having an impact on Asia, look no further than Singapore’s latest export figures. (BBC)
- “It’s going to be staggering, the amount of names”: as the Jeffrey Epstein case grows more grotesque, Manhattan and DC brace for impact: The disgraced financier “collected people,” said a source. Could some of them be implicated in his crimes? Meanwhile, Alan Dershowitz (“He’s a bad person”) and David Boies (“He’s a liar”) are already at war over the case. (Vanity Fair) And The Unraveling of Jeffrey Epstein: The story line is moving quickly. Here’s what to know. (NYT, $)
Profiting on Pain and Misery
Information never seen before publicly has been released as part of the largest civil action in US history. It comes from a database maintained by the Drug Enforcement Administration that tracks the path of every single pain pill sold in the US — from manufacturers and distributors to pharmacies in every town and city.
- The data shows America’s largest drug companies were saturating the country with 76 billion oxycodone and hydrocodone pain pills from 2006 through 2012, even as the nation’s deadliest drug epidemic was spinning out of control. It’s an unprecedented look at the surge of legal pain pills that fueled the prescription opioid epidemic which caused nearly 100,000 deaths.
- An analysis of the database by the Washington Post shows just six companies distributed 75 percent of the pills between 2006 and 2012: McKesson Corp., Walgreens, Cardinal Health, AmerisourceBergen, CVS and Walmart.
- These companies and about 12 more are being sued in a Cleveland federal court by nearly 2,000 cities, towns and counties that allege the companies conspired to flood the nation with opioids. The companies blame the epidemic on overprescribing by doctors and pharmacies and on customers who abused the drugs. (WaPo)
- States Are Making Progress on Opioids. Now the Money That’s Helping Them May Dry Up: Billions in federal grants for treatment and prevention programs are set to end next year. The Trump administration has not said whether it will seek to extend them. (NYT, $)
- Louvre Removes Sackler Family Name From Its Walls (NYT, $)
Additional USA News
- Climate crisis: extremely hot days could double in US, study shows: Amid widespread US heatwave, experts predict dangerous extremes in summer temperatures will only get worse (The Guardian)
- The Economist Who Would Fix the American Dream No one has done more to dispel the myth of social mobility than Raj Chetty. But he has a plan to make equality of opportunity a reality. (The Atlantic)
- Daily Stormer Founder Should Pay ‘Troll Storm’ Victim $14 Million, Judge Says: It would be the second multimillion-dollar judgment against the publisher of the neo-Nazi site, Andrew Anglin, whose location is unknown. (NYT, $)
- How White Nationalists See What They Want to See in DNA Tests: What happens when white supremacists on the hate site Stormfront learn that they’re not as white as they thought? Two researchers investigated. (NYT, $)
I’m (Never) Too Sexy For My Love
Victims of eating disorders were almost always girls and young women. In 1983 popular singer Karen Carpenter starved herself to death, as did many for whom their body was their career, or who simply succumbed to prevailing cultural ideals of beauty. Body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) is a mental disorder characterized by the obsessive idea that some aspect of one’s own body part or appearance is severely flawed and therefore warrants exceptional measures to hide or fix the part(s) that is/are objectionable.
- Muscle dysmorphia is a subset of BDD, but the sufferers are overwhelmingly boys and men in pursuit of the idealized male body. Since the 1980s action heroes like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone have epitomized the ideal male body.
- A whole generation of young men began to slavishly pursue this physical ideal — a version of maleness that is bigger, bulkier, more muscular…and harder to achieve.
- About 30 percent of people with muscle dysmorphia will also have a medically diagnosable eating disorder. Because men with muscle dysmorphia rarely seek treatment, estimating its prevalence in the general population is difficult, but it is believed that 10-12 percent of professional male weightlifters meet the criteria.
And muscle dysmorphia may be on the rise. A study published in June found that 22 percent of men aged 18-24 reported muscularity-oriented disordered eating. “The drive for a bigger, more muscular body is becoming very prevalent,” said one expert. (Guardian)