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Stepping into the Twilight Zone
TL;DR #167 – 9/29/2018

TL;DR is a weekly look at the news in technology, education, and literacy. I’m seeking to keep you on top of the news so you can be the expert.

This week was spent working on many things behind the scenes.

How A Baltimore Teacher Is ‘Bridging Education And Activism’ (3:39)

Valencia Clay, an 8th grade teacher at the Baltimore Design School, has made headlines for her inspirational teaching style. She shares her lessons on Instagram, pushing her students to think critically about themselves. Clay says her “board is her picket sign.”

Everything we know about Facebook’s massive security breach

Friday afternoon my email and apps across my devices started sending me notifications to let me know that my Facebook credentials were invalid. I soon found out that the social network disclosed that an unprecedented security issue, discovered September 25, impacted almost 50 million user accounts. Facebook responded by immediately logging out all of its 90 million users from the network. Facebook also confirmed that third-party sites that those users logged into with their Facebook accounts could also be affected.

This story is still evolving, but for now…please protect yourself. It’s a good idea to change passwords, enable two-factor authentication, & take a look at times you’ve used social sign-on with Facebook.

You Gave Facebook Your Number For Security. They Used It For Ads

Facebook already had tons of people looking to delete their accounts over previous privacy and security issues. Along with news of this week’s data breach, there are also stories about the company explicitly providing personal information for targeted advertising.

A group of academic researchers from Northeastern University and Princeton University, along with Gizmodo reporters, discovered that Facebook is giving out your phone number to advertisers. The social network is also giving away your “shadow info” to advertisers. Shadow info is the contact and personal information that you may not give to the network…but they pull from information other users may have about you.

The end of Instagram as we know it is here

You may know that Facebook purchased Instagram a little over six years ago. During that time period, Facebook indicated that they were planning on leaving Instagram alone for the most part. Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger stayed on to work with Facebook and lead Instagram. This week all of that changed when Systrom and Krieger stepped down.

For now, we don’t immediately know what will happen to Instagram. But, given the regular questions and problems we have with Facebook, it’ll be interesting to see what will become of the platform.

How Anderson Cooper, Rachel Maddow, and Sean Hannity opened their shows for a week perfectly illustrates how Americans see the news differently

I spend quite a bit of my time researching and teaching about media and information literacy. In this work we often find stories about people having completely different world views, depending on their media and information streams.

This post from Business Insider shares the lead story from three cable news hosts in the U.S. over one week. Even though this is from an American context, I think the same patterns can be seen in other nations. This provides a jumping off point to discuss challenges of the content we all consume.

Technology and Compassion: A conversation with the Dalai Lama

SingularityU The Netherlands recently hosted a dialogue about compassion and technology with His Holiness the Dalai Lama. The video of the event is available here.

In the 21st century, His Holiness said, “There is real possibility to create a happier world, peaceful world. So now we need vision. A peaceful world on the basis of a sense of oneness of humanity.”

Technology’s role in that world is being developed and refined every day, and we must maintain an ongoing awareness of its positive and negative repercussions—on everyone.

Why I’ve just ditched my cloud-based password manager

While you’re reviewing your passwords, you should consider your password system as well. My password system of choice has been LastPass for several years. I have to admit that I’ve increasingly been having problems with LastPass is it is slow, and forgetting passwords.

Doug Belshaw is transitioning over to LessPass and documents this process here. I think I’m going to follow his lead and try out LessPass.

“Stay angry, little Meg,” Mrs Whatsit whispered. “You will need all your anger now.”

Madeleine L’Engle

TL;DR is a summary of all the great stuff from the Internet this week in technology, education, & literacy. Please subscribe to make sure this comes to your inbox each week. You can review archives of the newsletter here.

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