Five years ago, some of the most powerful players in television banded together to introduce Hulu, a streaming service intended to revolutionize the TV industry. This week, Hulu will look more like a traditional network than an Internet pioneer. At a presentation on Thursday in New York, Hulu, created as a service for watching […]
Na Imprensa Internacional
The search giant’s head of news products thinks we need to rethink how the news is architected and how information gets produced. Editor’s note: At TechRaking 2012 today — a conference at the Googleplex in Mountain View, sponsored by Google and the Center for Investigative Reporting — a group of journalism doers and thinkers […]
IT WOULD look like the trading floor of a bank, were it not for the casual clothes and dorm-room atmosphere. The cavernous open-plan headquarters of Barack Obama’s re-election campaign houses over 300 workers seated in serried rows, jabbering into phones and tapping purposefully at computer keyboards. Haphazard decorations—a Justin Bieber poster, a team flag […]
YVETTE VICKERS, A FORMER Playboy playmate and B-movie star, best known for her role in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, would have been 83 last August, but nobody knows exactly how old she was when she died. According to the Los Angeles coroner’s report, she lay dead for the better part of a […]
In the late 1980s public-television stations aired a talking-heads series called Ethics in America. For each show more than a dozen prominent citizens sat around a horseshoe-shaped table and tried to answer troubling ethical questions posed by a moderator. The series might have seemed a good bet to be paralyzingly dull, but at least […]
British popular journalism has in effect been on trial for the past five months. Since the Leveson Inquiry hearings opened in November 2011, it has rarely been out of the news. Announced in July last year by the prime minister after it became clear that the News of the World, and perhaps other newspapers, […]
For years, Mac users have been told that not only are they cooler than their PC counterparts, they are safer too. Apple has always held that computer viruses and malware only dogged its competitors. That is no longer the case. This week, security researchers discovered a new computer virus had infected half a million […]
For months now, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and its allies in the contraception and abortion wars have complained that the Obama administration showed anti-Catholic bias when it declined to renew the conference’s contract to aid victims of human trafficking. In fact, the contract was not renewed because the bishops’ group was […]
The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. By Charles Duhigg. Random House; 371 pages; $28. William Heinemann; £12.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk DON DRAPER, the womanising star of “Mad Men”, an ad-agency TV drama, is a mere piker compared with Claude Hopkins. Hopkins was the most flamboyant […]
Type in a Google search for the words “immigration reform,” and in the split second it takes for your results to pop up, the president’s reelection campaign may begin courting you. Up comes an ad for barackobama.com, next to the search results. And if you take the next step and click through to the […]
Law enforcement tracking of cellphones, once the province mainly of federal agents, has become a powerful and widely used surveillance tool for local police officials, with hundreds of departments, large and small, often using it aggressively with little or no court oversight, documents show. The practice has become big business for cellphone companies, too, […]
AT THIS year’s SXSW festival held in March in Austin, I ran into a social-media wonk from New York and asked him how he had been enjoying it. He said it was great: he had won five badges from Foursquare, a geosocial service that lets users check in at various locations, securing the mayorship […]
THE Justice Department is building its case against Megaupload, the hugely popular file-sharing site that was indicted earlier this year on multiple counts of copyright infringement and related crimes. The company’s servers have been shut down, its assets seized and top employees arrested. And, as is usual in such cases, prosecutors and their allies […]
At first, the nationwide ‘‘hoodie’’ protest over Trayvon Martin’s death — in which Americans donned sweatshirts in solidarity with the slain teenager and his family — felt shallow and reflexive, a consumerist reaction. What’s this? I wondered. Is Abercrombie & Fitch now in the business of underwriting our moral outrage? Then I saw Bobby […]
One roof at a time, Preston Rhea is casting an invisible net across Mount Pleasant. The 26-year-old field researcher for the Washington-based think tank New America Foundation has spent the past nine months nudging his neighborhood into a community wireless network. Routers, installed on six rooftops so far, open up people’s wireless connections to […]
Quando morrem personalidades, lembro de Juan José Sebreli, sociólogo argentino que visitou Porto Alegre tempos atrás. Na obra Comediantes e Mártires – Ensaio Contra os Mitos, ele questiona nomes até então intocáveis em seu país. Fiquei impressionado. Ele fala, sem papas na língua, de gente como Evita Perón, Che Guevara, Carlos Gardel e Maradona. Segundo […]
Enfim, terminou mais uma edição do aclamado/difamado Big Brother Brasil. Doze anos depois, a produção global continua estereotipando homens e mulheres que deveriam representar a diversidade cultural brasileira. Além de uma briga entre “jogadores”, a atração torna-se também uma disputa entre egos, personalidades e, por que não dizer, gêneros. Bem, mas não é sobre isso […]
If you “like” something, does that mean you care about it? It’s an important distinction in an age when you can accumulate social currency on Facebook or Twitter just by hitting the “like” or “favorite” button. The ongoing referendum on the Web often seems more like a kind of collective digital graffiti than a […]
Religious institutions have constitutional protections, but they are not above the law. Unfortunately, that has not stopped the Roman Catholic Church and other religious groups from arguing that the First Amendment shields them from civil lawsuits for negligent supervision and retention of employees who sexually abuse children. Most state courts that have considered the […]
The origins of new internet fashions can usually be traced back to the technology elite of Silicon Valley or the digital media aficionados of New York – not to women in the small towns of the American Midwest. That makes the sudden rise of Pinterest, a website for collecting and sharing images, an intriguing […]