GeekNights 061002 - The News
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Where do you get your news?
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Fark. Slashdot. Digg.
Cnn if I am desperate. -
On the topic of child pornography, you reminded me of twelfth grade. I remember that there was this kid in my grade that got arrested for hosting and operating a child pornography website on a server that he had in his house. This isn't as funny as what Scott had to say about child porn, but the way that you said child pornography reminded me of the way that the person telling me the story revealed the reason why this rich, pampered kid got arrested and sent off to jail.
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Actually, a student was kicked out of the dorms and arrested at RIT during our freshman year for child pornography. Apparently he'd had a rather large collection, and an equally large degree of networking ignorance, which led him to sharing the entire thing on the LAN.
The students ran him out of the dorm when they found it. -
My high school also. There was a guy who was semi-cool. He didn't really have a crew of friends, but he was kinda geeky and generally friendly. He was generally friendly and well liked. One day he dissapeared from school. Nobody said anything about it, not even the town newspaper. One person in one class said he was doing some child porn downloading/serving. Never heard from the guy again.NinjaNed said:On the topic of child pornography, you reminded me of twelfth grade. I remember that there was this kid in my grade that got arrested for hosting and operating a child pornography website on a server that he had in his house. This isn't as funny as what Scott had to say about child porn, but the way that you said child pornography reminded me of the way that the person telling me the story revealed the reason why this rich, pampered kid got arrested and sent off to jail.
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There was a teacher at my high school who disappeared about 1 week before finals during my senior year. I was in one of his classes and he was a really awesome teacher. Turns out that he was into boys. Really into boy. He was having relations with a confirmed 6 boys from the middle school across the street. After he was arrested and put in jail he went bat shit insane. Turns out he got syphilis a few years ago and it was never diagnosed.
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I’m an NPR junkie. I find it’s programming has a satisfying amount of depth. It also does a good job of getting people who actually know what they’re talking about. For example they’ll get a pair stem cell researchers from Harvard to weigh in on the stem cell debate. I also love the News and Notes and African American Roundtable (even though I’m white) because instead of getting one token black guy off the street, it gathers four prominent people of color to talk about news relating to race and class.
Some may say NPR stories are boring, the solution is to use their website which steams every story ever, and pick and choose what you find interesting. -
Crap. I completely forgot about NPR. Yeah. I believe that they are the ONLY non-biased news out there.
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Are you serious? I tend to fall in the middle of the political spectrum - and NPR is overly liberal even for me.baltmatrix said:Crap. I completely forgot about NPR. Yeah. I believe that they are the ONLY non-biased news out there.
I get most of my news from the BBC. That's probably because I was a shortwave radio junkie as a kid. -
What he said, plus ESPN. Not so into the in-your-face stuff like Stuart Scott, but I watch sportscenter.baltmatrix said:Fark. Slashdot. Digg.
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Slashdot, El Reg, BBC website, Google news feed on my home page (top stories & us stories)
I've often thought about reading boing-boing, but I have a friend who does, filters out just the good stuff, and sends me links...it's almost as good as having a secretary.
I've started listening to NPR, and it's ok...mostly I just like that I can listen to it on the way to/from work when I'm caught up on podcasts and want to know what's up in the world. -
Rym said:
Actually, a student was kicked out of the dorms and arrested at RIT during our freshman year for child pornography. Apparently he'd had a rather large collection, and an equally large degree of networking ignorance, which led him to sharing the entire thing on the LAN.
Where I used to work, we were testing out a script we'd written to crawl through all of our residential network addresses (the student computers, basically), looking for open windows shares and indexing the contents. We were looking for shared IP, such as mp3s and software. Well, you can probably guess what we found. That was my first introduction to archiving data for use as evidence, and was very enlightening.
Bear in mind that we were basically doing this whole exercise just as a "reasonable effort" to ensure there was no piracy on our network...logging in as Guest with no password to a windows share hardly constitutes investigative work. Why this moron had this data shared in such a fashion is beyond me, and I shudder to think what we might have found had we sicked hydra on all the shares we found. -
Google News seems to be the best general source, as it brings countless sources together. I always have fun seeing how different agencies present their own headlines for the same story.
The BBC is my favourite for in-depth coverage of an issue. -
Rym said:
Google News seems to be the best general source, as it brings countless sources together. I always have fun seeing how different agencies present their own headlines for the same story.
One of the best things about google news is that it seems to pull a random source for whatever stories are listed every time you load the page. This makes reading the same story covered by different international news sources quite simple, and I always find that entertaining. -
Since this thread seems to be slipping into a combination of news/weird school stories, I've got another one. My sociology teacher in senior year told us about a friend of his that was in DC about ten or so years ago doing research in the library of congress. A day or two before he was scheduled to go back to teaching, people stopped hearing from him. It took a while for people to find out what had happened because he was put into the witness protection program. He was at a stoplight late at night behind another car. While he and the other car were waiting for the light to turn, another car pulls up behind the professor. Two large black guys get out, go to the car in front of the professor, and shoot the guy inside of it. Then one of them walks up to his driver side window and makes the "shhh" symbol, ad then they both walk away, leaving this guy stuck between two cars and having just witnessed a murder and having seen the faces of both assailents. He was put into protection for a couple months before he could go back to teaching. Crazy stuff.
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You lucky Interweb kids...
Why when I was a kid the only child porn I got to see was either
1) in the mirror
OR
2) family pictures of kids getting baths in the kitchen sink...
I used to use Google News but I can't get my Belgium news from them anymore... -
I've been to some trainings on internet security (for police and prosecutors) that are just amazing. Some of the stuff that I've seen is absolutely mind-blowing, including former hackers that come in and show their tricks. One little secret is how many times companies get hacked and bury the fact that they did. If they get ripped off, they just eat the loss (and often "fix" your account to make it whole again) in order to avoid the bad press.
In March, I'm going to a training on child pornography, internet child luring, etc. It should be quite interesting. Basically, it's about protecting children when it comes to the internet.
I've had a couple of child pornography cases that I've prosecuted. There is an office that is a nationwide clearinghouse for child pronography images. They identify the children that are in the images, since you have to show that it is an actual child (and not a computer generated image). Imagine that job??!!! Some of the stories are just sick. More often than not, it is a parent that took the photos - including some of the most graphic ones.
In a few years, I'll be struggling with the fact that my own children will be using the internet. It's a real delicate issue for me. I want them to have access to a lot of information, but I also want to protect them.
When it comes to kids getting in trouble, in my experience, it usually starts with chat rooms. I've never been one for chatting, but with AIM, Skype, etc, it can be a scary place. It appears to me to be difficult to protect your children when it comes to chat rooms. After all, pedophiles can take up residence in some pretty benign looking chat rooms. -
kilarney said:
When it comes to kids getting in trouble, in my experience, it usually starts with chat rooms. I've never been one for chatting, but with AIM, Skype, etc, it can be a scary place. It appears to me to be difficult to protect your children when it comes to chat rooms. After all, pedophiles can take up residence in some pretty benign looking chat rooms.
As with many things, the best way to protect your kids is to educate them. They will run into perverts on the intarwebs sooner or later, and there's no way to stop it. Forbid it, and it becomes alluring as a taboo. Discuss and educate, and you'll arm them.
<aside>This discussion's gotten waaaaay off base</aside> -
Okay... to bring this back to a discussion of the news...
I'm going to give away a multi-million dollar idea. Just give me a little something when you get rich off of this.
Here is what we need in the world of podcasting. Something akin to my.yahoo.com. A service where you can select what news and entertainment you want, and in what order. A program will put the news together into one mp3 file and give you a unique RSS feed. This would put terrestrial news radio out of business! Just plug this into your car and have what you want when you want. You can even structure it so it is the same length as your commute. -
You might be interested in Podango. I e-mailed them about some Creative Commons concerns I have, but they have yet to reply.kilarney said:Okay... to bring this back to a discussion of the news...
I'm going to give away a multi-million dollar idea. Just give me a little something when you get rich off of this.
Here is what we need in the world of podcasting. Something akin to my.yahoo.com. A service where you can select what news and entertainment you want, and in what order. A program will put the news together into one mp3 file and give you a unique RSS feed. This would put terrestrial news radio out of business! Just plug this into your car and have what you want when you want. You can even structure it so it is the same length as your commute. -
I'm a reporter and editor, so I make the news. That also hooks me up immediately to the AP and other wire services. From my position, I can tell you that nearly all news writers are very, very opinionated but refuse to allow their views to seep into their reporting. I've written shining reviews for politicians I can't stand. The news is rarely a matter of slanting it right or left - just slanting it toward the dollar signs. Lots of people tend to forget that it's a business and we have to make it sell. Now, that doesn't equal sensationalism, though there are some publications and broadcasts that do sensationalize. It just means finding an angle that will catch interest.
And yes, I often get guilty over how giddy I am when someone is murdered. It's good news, and there are reporters who fight over who gets to cover disasters and tragedies.
There's not so much fighting over who gets to cover politics and policy, because you're going to catch flack and hate mail no matter how you report. I've written stories that have caused people on opposite ends of the political spectrum to send me threats and yell and scream and bluster - because both sides believed the story was slanted in favor of the other side.
As for Fox being slanted to the conservative side, it is. But that's not about ideology. It's about capturing a previously ignored demographic. It's no secret that the Big Three networks have long produced very liberal, progressive news. Rupert Murdoch wanted to capitalize on that and capture the viewers who were discontent with being force-fed leftist news. -
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I think what he's saying is that the people working for those big three networks aren't necessarily liberals. They don't always agree with the liberal, progressive news they report. They just think that reporting in a liberal, progressive fashion is the way to make more moneys.
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NPR, AP Wire, Google News, friends, occasionally television.
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NPR Hourly newscast on their site, sometimes Morning Edition and All Things Considered casts.
Google News
Slashdot
Some liberal blogs like One Good Move and Crooks and Liars only for the latest Jon Stewert/Stephen Colbert clips and random news clips. Their actual "news" posts are usually biased and trash. -
I use Digg and occasionally Fark for the "unconventional" news (news that probably wouldn't be on, well, the news), while I also use CNN for the other stuff (politics, Iraq, Bush, things like that).
As for how i get to them, I have an RSS feed extension for Firefox which I find very useful for news.
Oh! And GN, of course! I can't say I get no news from that :-) -
Apreche said:
I think what he's saying is that the people working for those big three networks aren't necessarily liberals. They don't always agree with the liberal, progressive news they report. They just think that reporting in a liberal, progressive fashion is the way to make more moneys.
Yup. And while I won't let my opinion enter into the equation when I write, my boss (or my boss' boss' boss) might. There is always a company line to tow, and company editorial stances. Plus, the owner will often hand down issues that they want covered. Sometimes it's not how something is reported that is slanted, it's what is assigned to be reported, or the weight that it receives, where it appears in a newspaper or on a television broadcast, or even what fonts are used in the headline. When it comes down to it, the reporter's writing is only a very small portion of the total product. Slanting news is almost always a managerial decision, like post-production on a movie. -
Weren't you going to do a day against drm podcast on monday?
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blast flame said:
Weren't you going to do a day against drm podcast on monday?
Well, they mentioned stuff on Tuesday... *shrugs*
I get most of my news from, er, Radio National, I guess. They're run by the ABC, I think. Plus the internet in general when people link me. And The Australian (newspaper) because they have an awesome deal going for students at my university ($15 = papers for the whole year including weekend deliveries :D) but they are a bit...Liberals sympathetic (I think in America that makes them not Liberal though. Liberal in Australia means right-wing. Different in the US, yes?). And now Geeknights. :B -
Mamath said:
Liberals sympathetic (I think in America that makes them not Liberal though. Liberal in Australia means right-wing. Different in the US, yes?).
I don't know what makes a paper liberal or not. Quite frankly the thing the news is guilty of is it is biased towards sensational things. Liberal or conservative bias be damned. It's the fact they spent a month talking about a missing rich white woman when hundreds of other people disappear but are too poor or whatever and are ignored. (I mean there is a genocide going on!) That's what all the news has a problem with. The reason the BBC and NPR tend to be better is because they don't focus as much on the MRWW and tend to look at international issues and other things. -
Yes, they're definitely just generally bias as well. So is the Courier Mail and every other newspaper owned by the exact same guy... and probably the rest of them too. >_> But sometimes there will be stuff written in The Australian that just makes me go "OMG Liberals much?". On the other hand sometimes the ABC will get the opposite reaction. SBS news is great for looking and things that...aren't America.
Although really I prefer papers from other countries for international news... it's great to read them together with Australian articles on the same topic and just see the COMPLETELY different spin holy crap. Like this stuff: http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,543844,00.html I remember at the time Australian media played up the "Oh noes refugees are invading" bit but the rest of the international community thought the captain of the ship was a hero. Even the companies whose cargo he ended up not delivering didn't seem to mind (although that may have been as much peer pressure and desire to look good as anything else).
I just wish I could read some languages other than English. -
All this talk about Digg, does anyone read the Weekly Dig? It’s a Boston Humor Magazine that specializes in reporting the idiocy of locals, politicians and local politicians.
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Amen. Have we forgotten the "summer of the shark? 95% of newscasts such as the "Today Show" are full of complete crap. A segment on making an omelet just doesn't belong on a news show. That stuff has its place, but I'll never consider a show that features it a serious news show.
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I've never really understood why it is that on slow news days a lot of "news shows" will do segments on, say, a kitten that got stuck in a drain. Or omelletes. And celebrities. Probably celebrities making omelettes. Why not talk about some of the stuff happening overseas? There's so much stuff they could put there. I don't want happy news if it's going to be about kittens. I can find my own kitten stories, thank you. I'm of the opinion happy news should be something grand that restores my faith in humanity. :D
But that's just me. There must be a lot of people out there who think omelettes are CRITICAL.
Also my faith in humanity is pretty good really. -
I almost (well, did) forget about C-SPAN! Now that I'm working a 9-5 job, I don't get to watch it all that much, but it (and C-SPAN 2 &3) can be pretty enlightening.
OTOH, my mother has always made a habit of watching the local news, and I've never been able to stand that dreck. National sensationalism, local sensationalism, feel-good piece, teaser about how cosmetic samplers at department stores contain a hidden danger (no, not kidding, that was a local piece I saw recently. The hidden danger? germs.) -
Well when it comes to international news I get it from the BBC. As for local and national, I just read the newspaper. Though honestly I don't really pay too much attention to the news.
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One major flaw of televised news is that it is for a set period of time. If they can't fill the hour... well... they just have to fill it.
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Also, viewers are fatigued with the real hard news. Honestly, most Americans don't want to know the details of Iraq or North Korea or Iran. Blame it on shoddy public education if you must, but I blame MTV.
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