Lischer-Katz, Z. (2020). Archiving experience: An exploration of the challenges of preserving virtual reality. Records Management Journal, 30(2), 253–274. https://doi.org/10.1108/RMJ-09-2019-0054
Virtual reality (VR) technologies are complex configurations of computer hardware, software and file formats
In the context of digital materials, and all materials, given a long-enough time scale, preservation is an ongoing process, rather than a singular event that ensures eternal access to information.
alternative perspectives, e.g. phenomenology and media materiality, are necessary for
addressing the archival challenges of VR.
The Concordia University researcher Marc-André Argentino has a name for people like Schrandt: “Pastel QAnon.” These women—they are almost universally women—are doing the work of sanitizing QAnon, often pairing its least objectionable elements (Save the children!) with equally inoffensive imagery: Millennial-pink-and-gold color schemes, a winning smile. And many of them are members of multilevel-marketing organizations—a massive, under-examined sector of the American retail economy that is uniquely fertile ground for conspiracism. These are organizations built on foundational myths (that the establishment is keeping secrets from you, that you are on a hero’s journey to enlightenment and wealth), charismatic leadership, and shameless, constant posting. The people at the top of them are enviable, rich, and gifted at wrapping everything that happens—in their personal lives, or in the world around them—into a grand narrative about how to become as happy as they are. In 2020, what’s happening to them is dark and dangerous, but it looks gorgeous.
At first blush, privacy and antitrust might seem like separate issues—two different chapters in a textbook about big tech. But the decline in Facebook’s privacy protections plays a central role in the states’ case. Antitrust is a complicated field built on a simple premise: When a company doesn’t face real competition, it will be free to do bad things.
a conceptual breakthrough on that front. In a paper titled “The Antitrust Case Against Facebook,” the legal scholar Dina Srinivasan argued that Facebook’s takeover of the social networking market has inflicted a very specific harm on consumers: It has forced them to accept ever worse privacy settings. Facebook, Srinivasan pointed out, began its existence in 2004 by differentiating itself on privacy. Unlike then-dominant MySpace, for example, where profiles were visible to anyone by default, Facebook profiles could be seen only by your friends or people at the same school
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Facebook hit with antitrust probe for tying Oculus use to Facebook accounts
Message to SDSU students regarding RESPONDUS software. #1 We will not rely solely on faculty interpretation of video evidence from Respondus when evaluating claims of academic dishonesty. #2 – Beginning in Jan 2021, IT will not support the campuswide use of Respondus by faculty. pic.twitter.com/I2Ssim4LVW
U.S. Policy on China May Move from ‘America First’ to America & Co.
A tech entrepreneur in the State Department is using network theory to counter Chinese pressure.
According to Krach, the Clean Network includes 180 telecom companies and 50 national governments that represent two-thirds of the world’s gross domestic product. Although that’s impressive, all countries aren’t equally committed.
The task of forming networks to counter China’s influence has been made easier by China itself, which has frightened and angered trading partners with its “wolf warrior” diplomacy, a newly belligerent pursuit of China’s national interests.
The Clean Network is to China what George Kennan’s “long telegram” [PDF] of 1946 was to the Soviet Union, wrote David Fidler, adjunct senior fellow for cybersecurity and global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, in a blog post in October.
But trade deals alone are not enough, says Martijn Rasser, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. For instance, they wouldn’t stop China from exporting its surveillance technology to countries such as Venezuela and Uganda, where it’s been used to target political activists, he says.