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Aubrey Plaza has "self control" when it comes to social media.

The 33-year-old actress plays the Instagram obsessed titular character in her upcoming movie 'Ingrid Goes West', and whilst she admits that she allowed herself to "indulge" in the photo sharing app in preparation for her role, she insists she knows when it's "time to get off" in real life.

Speaking to People magazine, Aubrey said: "I did allow myself to indulge in going down those rabbit holes of Instagram and to really look at other people's stuff way too long.

"In my real life I don't do that, I have enough self control to go, 'Okay, I've been on here too long - I don't need to be looking at my ex-boyfriend's girlfriend's page.' When I find myself looking at stranger's pictures and going, 'Oh, I wish I was doing what they were doing,' I'm like, 'Okay that's enough, time to get off.'"

It comes after the 'Parks and Recreation' star said earlier this year that she "feels bad" if she spends too much time online.

She said at the time: "I'm familiar with going online and spending hours on there that ultimately make me feel bad about myself.

"So I think there were definitely times on set when I would just allow myself to go there, to exist in that space that we all are familiar with, but some of us don't really go into full force."

Meanwhile, Aubrey's co-star Elizabeth Olsen - who plays Instagram celebrity Taylor Sloane who is stalked online by Ingrid in the comedy - previously said she would enjoy using social media more herself if she wasn't famous.

Asked if she likes using social media, she said: "I think I'd enjoy it if I weren't an actor. There are a lot of funny things that are shared on it, and a lot of my friends, especially during the election year, would show me really funny things that were being passed around the internet that like, went viral -- I don't know what qualifies something as viral."

Originally posted here:
Aubrey Plaza has 'self control' over social media - Star Local Media

The Sell Sider is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community.

Today's column is written by Alessandro De Zanche, global product and strategy lead, audience activation at GfK.

In the last two or three years, its become increasingly common for publishers to unite to share audience data and extend the reach and quality of their audiences. By creating these alliances, they increase their appeal to brands and media agencies.

Alliances vary, with some focusing on inventory, others on data and some covering both. Examples include Nucleus Marketing Solutions in the US, Pangaea Alliance and Symmachia in the UK, Gravity, Skyline, La Place Media and Audience Square in France, emetriq and the newly launched Login Alliance in Germany and Digital Premium in Brazil.

They can face the triopoly of Facebook, Google and Amazon with more confidence but also platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat. Where individually publishers would struggle to demonstrate dominance online, together, they offer a more attractive digital proposition to brands and media agencies.

Its puzzling to me how marketers see publishers, the triopoly and platforms as mutually exclusive, particularly given that the context of each one and their users state of mind are often completely different and, in many cases, complementary.

I see many benefits of the aggregated offering that a publishers alliance can provide. And I can see why it appeals to some brands and media agencies. This joined-up approach can, for example, provide brands and agencies with quality audiences and context at scale to mitigate issues related to data quality, brand safety and fake news.

For individual publishers, this approach can help them overcome the likelihood of being rejected by a brand or agency because they lack the necessary audience reach.

While publishers alliances can be seen as a good start to overcoming these issues, I cant help feeling that they smack of damage control by the category. Whats more, they are definitely not without their challenges.

The Challenges To Consistency And Data Quality

While five publishers may each contribute a travel audience segment, this wont necessarily add up to a high-quality, representative travel audience. The reason for this is that each audience provided would be the result of the different data sources, tools and techniques implemented by the individual publishers at source.

For example, Publisher A might build its travel segment by collecting data on all site visitors who read travel articles. Publisher B, on the other hand, might base its travel segment on travel articles plus the keywords that people use to search its site. Then theres Publisher C, which not only publishes travel content but also sells travel packages and uses its conversion data to construct segments. So, here you have three travel segments built in distinctly different ways one using page views, one using page views plus search and one adding real conversions to the process.

All three travel segments might be combined under the existing publishers alliance regime, even though each has been built in a completely different way. Inconsistencies in the way the segments are produced can create unreliable targeting, personalization, recommendation, creative optimization or whatever the data is used for, which can impact the end results.

Added to this challenge are the potential issues that stem from the different privacy policies currently implemented by publishers and that are likely to arise from the introduction of Europes General Data Protection Regulation.

A Simple Solution?

I believe that publishers require a leap of faith if they will be able to really compete in the digital world. They must let go and give up some individual, siloed control of their audience data to be competitive and truly valuable as part of an alliance.

This solution appears deceptively simple but, as anyone who works in publishing will tell you, it is not. So, how might the category achieve it?

By suggesting that publishers give up their competitive fears, lets be clear that I am not advocating that they give up their competitiveness or any commercial advantage. Im also not proposing that publishers need to pool 100% of their data. Those publishers that have in place a paywall, for example, might have a lot of data from subscriptions and not want to share this information. Of course, they shouldnt have to. And yet, a significant quantity of data does need to be shared, and the actual amount to be shared needs to be agreed upon for the publishers alliances to be effective.

Once publishers have reached an agreement on how the data is handled and how much of it is shared, it should be handed over to an independent entity in the rawest possible form. From here, it can be processed in a consistent and streamlined way for data science, either based on traditional methods or artificial intelligence, to create the final product.

Creating such a shared yet separate entity will be vital for overcoming any competitive fears and data quality issues. All shared audience and content data should flow into it to be assessed by independent data scientists and product managers who are dedicated to the development of high-quality, common data solutions and the protection of users privacy.

I believe publishers should take ownership of this separate entity and not hand it over to a third party to manage. If publishers want to remain relevant and involved, they need to double their efforts and take their future into their own hands.

I also believe that for individual publishers to move beyond those competitive fears that hold their alliances back, they need to rethink their data revenue model, as it is not always easy to identify the most valuable data or quantify the impact of different data sources. Ultimately, if the publishers alliances are to overcome data quality issues, they need to collectively come up with a common data strategy.

Publishers alliances offer a real opportunity for publishers to extend their reach and share of brands and media agencies digital media budgets. However, to fully realize the potential, publishers must work more closely together to provide real value in a more sophisticated way, rather than through marketing stunts or cost-saving exercises. Only then can they overcome the challenges that threaten their survival and success.

It will not be easy, but publishers must give up some short-term competitive advantage to win a brighter future as a category.

Follow Alessandro De Zanche (@fastbreakdgtl), GfK (@GfK) and AdExchanger (@adexchanger) on Twitter.

Continued here:
Publishers' Alliances: Damage Control Or Potential For A Brighter Future? - AdExchanger

Trayvon Martin and his killer, George Zimmerman

*During his 2012 bail hearing George Zimmerman admitted misjudging the age of the black boy, Trayvon Martin, he killed assuming him to be a criminal wearing a hoodie. He thought Trayvon was in his late twenties while he actually was just 17.

Just like Zimmerman, to many white people, black boys seem older than their age. According to one study, people overestimated their ages by four and a half years. However, this does contribute in creating a false perception that black boys are less childlike than their white counterparts.

Similarly, according to another study, it was concluded that black girls need less care, support and guardianship and have more knowledge about sex and other adult topics compared to white girls.

Despite the fact that almost all children today display bad behavior at times, disobey their elders and talk back, it is all considered normal unless a black child acts that way. They are considered less innocent and more adult-like.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to create a social change today in which every child is equal irrespective of their color especially when popular actors and writers of this generation are creating images of innocent white children. It is only resulting in black children being defined as non children.

Uncle Toms Cabin is one such book, published in 1852, which created the angelic white Eva who was completely opposite to Topsy, the mischievous black girl. The book showed that Topsy was innocent at heart but misbehaved because she had been a target of violence and slavery. The success of the novel prompted it to being adopted as a stage show where Topsys character was often played by white women in black face making it look less innocent and more adult-like.

In advertisements run in the early 1900s too, white children received tender caresses while black children toiled. All such images on the television only weaponized childhood innocence as it was made a tool of racial dominance.

While black activists continue to work to remove the libel that their children were not vulnerable and not really children, it is high time to create a language that values justice more than innocence. Yes, every child is innocent but since the idea of innocence itself is part of a history of white supremacy, valuing justice more than innocence would mean protection of all children because they are children and, above all, human.

View post:
Guess Which One is Not Considered a Child Because of His Skin Color? - Eurweb.com

Timothy Carpenter and Timothy Sanders were convicted in federal court on charges stemming from a string of armed robberies in and around the Detroit area. They appealed on the ground that the government had acquired detailed records of their movements through cell site location information (CSLI) from their wireless carriers in violation of the Fourth Amendment. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit turned their appeal aside, finding that [t]he governments collection of business records containing these data is not a search.

The Fourth Amendment states that [t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated. Presumably, when called on to determine whether a Fourth Amendment violation has occurred, courts would analyze the elements of this language as follows: Was there a search? Was there a seizure? Was any such search or seizure of their persons, houses, papers, [or] effects? Was any such search or seizure reasonable?

In cases involving familiar physical objects, they usually do. In harder cases dealing with unfamiliar items such as communications and data, however, courts retreat to the Supreme Courts reasonable expectation of privacy doctrine that emerged from Katz v. United States (1967). The Court has decided to review the important criminal-procedure and digital-privacy issues here.

Cato and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, joined by Reason Foundation and the Committee for Justice, filed anamicus brief urging the Court to return to the text of the Fourth Amendment. The reasonable expectation of privacy test is outdated because it lacks a strong connection to the text and asks courts to conduct a sociological exercise rather than a judicial one. This is especially true in the context of new technology, where societal expectations have not been fully formed yet and will change based on the Courts judgment, leading to circular reasoning.

Courts have also used the reasonable expectation of privacy test to undermine the very things the Fourth Amendment was designed to protect. For instance, dog sniffs looking for drugs have been said to not compromise any legitimate interest in privacy because they are only looking for contraband. But just because a search is designed to look for illegal activity doesnt mean that the Fourth Amendment is inapplicable.

Likewise with the third-party doctrine, which holds that constitutional protections stop when protected information is shared.

The Carpenter case deals with information about a persons location for more than 100 days, and yet the government claims that no privacy is violated when it seizes and searches that data. The Court should return to the text of the Fourth Amendment and recognize that data and digital communication are property that are protected by the papers and effects part of the Fourth Amendment, as it did in Riley v. Californiathe 2014 case where the justices unanimously required a warrant for searching a phone seized during an arrest.

Here, the government ordered the information on Mr. Carpenters location turned over (a seizure) and then processed that data for the location of the defendants (a search). The defendants had a contract with the phone company prohibiting the distribution of the data and the Court should recognize the property interest that the defendants had based on that contract.

In sum, the Fourth Amendment presumes that a warrant is required but for exceptional circumstances. There was no exigency that threatens the destruction of the data here, threat to officer safety, or any other reason that law enforcement officers could not get a warrant if they had probable cause. Focusing on the actual text of the Fourth Amendment demonstrates that the governments actions here violated the Fourth Amendment.

The Supreme Court will hearCarpenter v. United States this fall.

View original post here:
To Apply the Fourth Amendment in the Digital Age, Go Back to Its Text - Cato Institute (blog)

Enlarge / Part of a booby-trapped Microsoft Word document that was sent to multiple hotels. Once infected, computers would attempt to compromise other computers connected to the same network.

FireEye

A Russian government-sponsored group accused of hacking the Democratic National Committee last year has likely been infecting other targets of interest with the help of a potent Windows exploit developed by, and later stolen from, the National Security Agency, researchers said Friday.

Now, researchers at security firm FireEye say they're moderately confident the Russian hacking group known as Fancy Bear, APT 28, and other names has also used Eternal Blue, this time in a campaign that targeted people of interest as they connected to hotel Wi-Fi networks. In July, the campaign started using Eternal Blue to spread from computer to computer inside various staff and guest networks, company researchers Lindsay Smith and Ben Read wrote in a blog post. While the researchers didn't directly observe those attacks being used to infect guest computers connected to the network, they said a related campaign from last year used the control of hotel Wi-Fi services to obtain login credentials from guest devices.

In the earlier attack, the APT 28 members used a hacking tool dubbed Responder to monitor and falsify NetBIOS communications passed over the infected networks.

"Responder masquerades as the sought-out resource and causes the victim computer to send the username and hashed password to the attacker-controlled machine," the FireEye researchers wrote. "APT 28 used this technique to steal usernames and hashed passwords that allowed escalation of privileges in the victim network." The researchers continued:

In the 2016 incident, the victim was compromised after connecting to a hotel Wi-Fi network. Twelve hours after the victim initially connected to the publicly available Wi-Fi network, APT28 logged into the machine with stolen credentials. These 12 hours could have been used to crack a hashed password offline. After successfully accessing the machine, the attacker deployed tools on the machine, spread laterally through the victim's network, and accessed the victim's OWA account. The login originated from a computer on the same subnet, indicating that the attacker machine was physically close to the victim and on the same Wi-Fi network.

We cannot confirm how the initial credentials were stolen in the 2016 incident; however, later in the intrusion, Responder was deployed. Since this tool allows an attacker to sniff passwords from network traffic, it could have been used on the hotel Wi-Fi network to obtain a users credentials.

The attack observed in July used a modified version of Eternal Blue that was created using the Python programming language and later made publicly available, Fire Eye researchers said in an e-mail. The Python implementation was then compiled into an executable file using the publicly available py2exe tool.

Fancy Bear used a spear phishing campaign to distribute a booby-trapped Microsoft Word document to several unnamed hotels, FireEye said. When the document was opened on computers that allowed Word macros to execute, the machines were infected by Fancy Bear malware known as Gamefish. Once a computer was infected, it attempted to infect other computers connected to the same Wi-Fi network.

See more here:
Russian group that hacked DNC used NSA attack code in attack on hotels - Ars Technica