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President John F. Kennedy Files Released

John F Kennedy
Jason Tate

The National Archives have released 2,891 new documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The New York Times explains:

The papers were posted online by the National Archives and Records Administration around 7:30 p.m. Thursday in compliance with a 1992 law, and represent a treasure trove for investigators, historians and conspiracy theorists who have spent more than half a century searching for clues to what really happened in Dallas on that fateful day in 1963.

And:

“We’re not going to find some secret memo from J. Edgar Hoover drawing out the escape path for Lee Harvey Oswald,” he said. “The public expectations are very high — they’ve heard about secret files, they know they’ve been locked up for all these years. The average person may think there’s a bombshell in there.”

But Mr. Posner said the files might draw a fuller picture of the early 1960s beyond the specific questions about the assassination. “This is all about the Cold War and spooks and spies and Mexico City,” he said. “This is about a time when we know the government was in league with the mob to kill Castro. Cold War scholars and historians may find this as interesting as Kennedy assassination researchers.”

10-Year-Old Immigrant Is Detained After Agents Stop Her on Way to Surgery

The New York Times
Jason Tate

The New York Times:

A 10-year-old girl with cerebral palsy has been detained by federal immigration authorities in Texas after she passed through a Border Patrol checkpoint on her way to a hospital to undergo emergency gall bladder surgery.

The girl, Rosamaria Hernandez, who was brought over the border illegally to live in Laredo, Tex., when she was three months old, was being transferred from a medical center in Laredo to a hospital in Corpus Christi around 2 a.m. on Tuesday when Border Patrol agents stopped the ambulance she was riding in, her family said. The agents allowed her to continue to Driscoll Children’s Hospital, the family said, but followed the ambulance the rest of the way there, then waited outside her room until she was released from the hospital.

What the fuck are we doing as a country? This is absurd.

Reddit Is Removing Nazi and Alt-Right Groups

BuzzFeed
Jason Tate

Brianna Sacks, writing for Buzzfeed:

Reddit is purging Nazi, white supremacist, and other hate-based groups from its site as part of a new policy change announced Wednesday that targets and bans certain violent material.

The popular discussion site, which has struggled with how to monitor and remove vitriolic and offensive content in the past, said in a statement that it had decided to retool certain rules and regulations that were “too vague” and ban material that “encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual or a group of people.”

Gee, what a concept.

Billboard Charts to Adjust Streaming Weighting in 2018

Billboard
Jason Tate

Billboard:

Beginning in 2018, plays occurring on paid subscription-based services (such as Amazon Music and Apple Music) or on the paid subscription tiers of hybrid paid/ad-supported platforms (such as SoundCloud and Spotify) will be given more weight in chart calculations than those plays on pure ad-supported services (such as YouTube) or on the non-paid tiers of hybrid paid/ad-supported services.

The Mathematical Genius of Auto-Tune

Jason Tate

Zachary Crockett, writing at Priceonomics:

But often lost in this narrative is the story of the invention itself, and the soft-spoken savant who pioneered it. For inventor Andy Hildebrand, Auto-Tune was an incredibly complex product — the result of years of rigorous study, statistical computation, and the creation of algorithms previously deemed to be impossible.

Hildebrand’s invention has taken him on a crazy journey: He’s given up a lucrative career in oil. He’s changed the economics of the recording industry. He’s been sued by hip-hop artist T-Pain. And in the course of it all, he’s raised pertinent questions about what constitutes “real” music.

The War to Sell You a Mattress Is an Internet Nightmare

Fast Company
Jason Tate

David Zax, writing for Fast Company:

In January 2015, Krim wrote Mitcham that while he supported objective reviews, “it pains us to see you (or anyone) recommend a competitor over us.”

Krim went on: “As you know, we are much bigger than our newly formed competitors. I am confident we can offer you a much bigger commercial relationship because of that. How would you ideally want to structure the affiliate relationship? And also, what can we do to help to grow your business?”

This entire story is bonkers.

Serious Flaw in WPA2 Protocol

Jason Tate

Dan Goodin, writing for Ars Technica:

Researchers have disclosed a serious weakness in the WPA2 protocol that allows attackers within range of vulnerable device or access point to intercept passwords, e-mails, and other data presumed to be encrypted, and in some cases, to inject ransomware or other malicious content into a website a client is visiting.

The proof-of-concept exploit is called KRACK, short for Key Reinstallation Attacks.

This is bad.

Rene Ritchie, writing for iMore:

Apple has confirmed to me that the KRACK exploit has already been patched in iOS, tvOS, watchOS, and macOS betas. As soon as the updates leave beta, they’ll be pushed out to everyone. We’ll have to wait and see how fast other manufacturers are to respond, and how many of our connected devices receive updates.

Spotify’s Discover Weekly: How Machine Learning Finds Your New Music

Jason Tate

Sophia Ciocca, writing for Hacker Noon:

The exact mechanisms behind NLP are beyond the scope of this article, but here’s what happens on a very high level: Spotify crawls the web constantly looking for blog posts and other written texts about music, and figures out what people are saying about specific artists and songs — what adjectives and language is frequently used about those songs, and which other artists and songs are also discussed alongside them.

While I don’t know the specifics of how Spotify chooses to then process their scraped data, I can give you an understanding of how the Echo Nest used to work with them. They would bucket them up into what they call “cultural vectors” or “top terms.” Each artist and song had thousands of daily-changing top terms. Each term had a weight associated, which reveals how important the description is (roughly, the probability that someone will describe music as that term.)

Allegations of Sexual Misconduct by Ex-Real Estate Guitarist Detailed by Seven Women

Real Estate
Jason Tate

Andy Cush, writing for Spin:

In the months leading up to the publication of SPIN’s initial story, we spoke with multiple women who gave accounts of alleged sexual misconduct from Mondanile. In the following days, more women came to us with stories of his behavior. These on-the-record accounts, from seven women in total, largely involve allegations of Mondanile touching, kissing, and groping them without their consent. Two women alleged that Mondanile groped them while they were sleeping, and a third said that he did so while she was trying to sleep.

Kendrick Lamar Interviewed by I-D

Kendrick Lamar
Jason Tate

Kendrick Lamar recently sat down for an interview with I-D:

Kendrick lives a life that befits the king of hip-hop, if you think what truly befits the king of hip-hop is to basically live in the studio looking for the perfect beat and the ultimate rhyme. “I can sometimes cut the whole world off to write a verse that is perfect to me,” he says. “I could be in the studio all day and turn the phone off and completely zone out, because I feel like this was what I was chosen to do. And I can’t let anyone get in between that.”

Movies Anywhere App Launches With Joint Studio Backing

Jason Tate

Stephanie Prange, writing for Variety:

Five of the six major Hollywood studios have joined forces to make digital movie collecting easier than ever.

Movies Anywhere, a free app and website digital locker service, launches tonight at 9 p.m. PT, backed by four top digital retailers and content from Walt Disney (including Pixar, Marvel Studios and Lucasfilm), Sony Pictures Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox Film, Universal Pictures and Warner Bros. Entertainment — a combined library of more than 7,300 digital movies.

Movies can be redeemed through digital retailers Amazon Video, Google Play, iTunes and Vudu (owned by Walmart).

D.R.U.G.S. Are Not Reuniting in 2018

DRUGS
Jason Tate

Substream has confirmed that D.R.U.G.S. are not reuniting next year and someone has taken control of the band’s Twitter account without their knowledge:

According to another person connected to the band that we spoke with, whose name we are protecting upon request, the members of D.R.U.G.S. have not had access to the account in some time. “There was a phishing scheme,” the contact told us. “Something involving a fake charity.” This contact also provided Substream with the name and contact information of the person the believed to currently be controlling the account.

Martin Scorsese on Rotten Tomatoes and Box Office Obsession

Film
Jason Tate

Martin Scorsese, writing at The Hollywood Reporter:

There is another change that, I believe, has no upside whatsoever. It began back in the ’80s when the “box office” started to mushroom into the obsession it is today. When I was young, box office reports were confined to industry journals like The Hollywood Reporter. Now, I’m afraid that they’ve become…everything. Box office is the undercurrent in almost all discussions of cinema, and frequently it’s more than just an undercurrent. The brutal judgmentalism that has made opening-weekend grosses into a bloodthirsty spectator sport seems to have encouraged an even more brutal approach to film reviewing. I’m talking about market research firms like Cinemascore, which started in the late ’70s, and online “aggregators” like Rotten Tomatoes, which have absolutely nothing to do with real film criticism. They rate a picture the way you’d rate a horse at the racetrack, a restaurant in a Zagat’s guide, or a household appliance in Consumer Reports. They have everything to do with the movie business and absolutely nothing to do with either the creation or the intelligent viewing of film. The filmmaker is reduced to a content manufacturer and the viewer to an unadventurous consumer.

He’s not wrong.

And as film criticism written by passionately engaged people with actual knowledge of film history has gradually faded from the scene, it seems like there are more and more voices out there engaged in pure judgmentalism, people who seem to take pleasure in seeing films and filmmakers rejected, dismissed and in some cases ripped to shreds.

Sounds a little like popular music criticism as well.

Travis Barker and More Open Up on Fighting Addiction and Depression

Travis Barker
Jason Tate

Steve Baltin, writing for Forbes, interviews a variety of artists on fighting addiction and depression:

Travis Barker: Sobriety saved my life. My only my regret is it didn’t happen sooner. It was sad that it took a plane crash and almost dying to finally sober up. My second chance at life and my kids was enough to never touch drugs again. Being present and sober is something I wouldn’t trade for anything. Music is my drug.

And:

Anthony Green: I don’t have the answers for what we do, but I know that in Circa Survive and with my situation, the forefront with everything in the band is each other. That stuff comes before making money. From the beginning of the band we wanted it to be a family that cared about each other. So when I needed to go to rehab and I needed to have my mental health issues addressed, the band got put on hiatus and pause. I think that a lot of these guys are in situations where they’re afraid to stop the train from rolling because a lot of people depend on them financially. I think putting the idea of your mental health in front of making money is one thing you can do.

Today is World Mental Health Day and there’s some great insights from a variety of people in this piece.1

  1. I hate trying to use Forbes’ website though, so I’m sorry about that.↩