Internet Politics

The most hacked band password is ‘Blink-182’

The most hacked band password is ‘Blink-182’

The world is awash in '90s nostalgia — and it's even showing up in our passwords.

A new study from the UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has revealed the world's most easily hacked passwords, CNN reports. The top no-brainer passwords overall are impersonal number combinations, like 12345. But in the category of "bands," the most breached password is the name of the popular '90s pop-punk outfit, Blink-182.

This gut doctor begs every American to throw out this vegetable now – Vox

This gut doctor begs every American to throw out this vegetable now – Vox

There is a gut doctor, and he begs Americans: “Throw out this vegetable now.” This news is accompanied by a different image nearly every time. This morning, the plea appeared at the bottom of an article on Vox next to a photo of a hand chopping up what appears to be a pile of green apples. At other times, it has been paired with a picture of a petri dish with a worm in it. Other times, gut bacteria giving off electricity. The inside of a lotus root. An illustrated rendering of roundworms. The gut doctor’s desperation pops up over and over, on websites like CNN and the Atlantic (and as I said, this one), in what are known colloquially as “chumboxes.” These are the boxes at the bottom of the page that have several pieces of clickbaity “sponsored content” or “suggested reading.” They’re generated by a variety of companies, but the largest two are Taboola ($160 million in funding) and Outbrain ($194 million in funding), both founded in Israel in the mid-aughts.

If you don't want to read the article, apparently that evil gut vegatable is good ol' fashion sweet corn. 🌽 Apparently, it has a lot of sugar in it, and its hard for humans to digest the cellous on the outside of the kernel. But that misses the point of what article is about -- how click bait or chum is becoming  a bigger part of the Internet.

How platforms alter history

How platforms alter history

"What’s behind that impulse to delete? When it comes to acts of violence, taking down profiles may help stem the impulse to try and build a logical case for an act where logic played no role. Distancing a platform from a senseless act of violence may be a public relations move, or a matter of taste, or maybe meant to discourage a profile from becoming a shrine for copycats. But the act has rare precedence in less recent history, and even carries negative connotations with non-online examples β€” say, if no one were allowed to read the Unabomber’s letters."

"Norms around social media are still evolving, and the urge to delete the profiles of wrongdoers has evolved over time. Surprisingly, the Twitter account of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the two brothers who bombed the Boston Marathon in 2013, was never taken down, even after he received the death penalty in 2015."