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12 Apr 20:48

Chill, parents. Amazon's new dashboard will let you see the content your kids are consuming.

by Nicole Gallucci
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Hey parents, great news! Thanks to Amazon's latest product you can feel slightly less guilty about leaving your child alone with technology instead of spending time with them.

The company's new Parent Dashboard is allowing families to easily monitor the content their children consume and interact with via daily activity reports. It means parents can work, chat on the phone, or just take some much needed relaxation time while still knowing what their kids are up to. The dream.

According to a press release, the Parent Dashboard, released on Wednesday, will be available for free to all Amazon FreeTime users through parents.amazon.com. Read more...

More about Conversations, Families, Parenting, Dashboard, and Update
12 Apr 20:46

How to Illegally Build an Internet-Connected PC in Prison

by Daniel Oberhaus

Last year, a Motherboard editor was roasted by the entire internet for complaining that building a gaming PC was still way too hard. But how hard can building a PC be if a couple of inmates managed to do it in a medium-security prison?

As detailed in a report released today by the Ohio Inspector General's office, five inmates at the Marion Prison managed to build and stash not one, but two internet-connected PCs in the ceiling at the prison. According to Ohio Inspector General Randall Meyer, the inmates had used the computers to steal the identity of another inmate for credit card and tax fraud purposes, as well as to look up pornography and recipes for drugs.

"They were piecemeal computers," Meyer told Motherboard during a phone call. "If you think of a salvage operation, the shell could've been from one computer, the motherboard from another. They were Frankenstein-ed together, but they were fully functional and looked like PCs on the outside."

The inmates' computers were discovered at the prison in July of 2015, but their existence is only being brought to light now due to a failure to report the case immediately to the inspector general after the computers were discovered. Correctional officers at Marion were first tipped off about the computers' existence after Websense, a security platform used by businesses and government, notified system administrators of excessive internet usage by a particular computer on the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction's network.

Further investigation found that the login information for a retired corrections employee was being used to access the network by a machine called –lab9-, which didn't fit the naming protocol for devices connected to the network. In the following days, systems administrators received alerts detailing dozens of attempts to avoid proxies set up by Websense in attempts to access file sharing sites.

Still, it took about a month before staff at the facility were able to locate the actual devices in the ceiling. This was accomplished by tracing the computers' port number to a network switch located near the room where inmates received PC training.

The network switch where the connection to the computers was discovered. Image via Ohio Inspector General.

According to Meyer, the inmates had pieced together the computers by pilfering parts from a computer disassembly program that employed inmates at Marion. The program, now defunct for reasons unrelated to this case, also taught inmates the basic computer skills which were put to use in the assembly of these homebrew computers. Based on a forensic analysis of the devices, their operating systems had been installed on April 1, 2015, meaning the inmates had been using them for nearly four months before their discovery.

Based on the testimonies of the inmates involved with the computers, they were fully functioning when they were brought from the PC disassembly area to the storage closet where they were hidden. The drives used in the computers were obtained from another computer that was used by inmates under supervision.

As one of the inmates described the process to investigators "I imaged the drive…with Acronis…all you gotta do is take that drive, plug it into any computer and it will boot up. I took a network card out of another computer and put it in [the illegal computer], plugged it into the inmate switch. Remote desktop into the computer. And then…bam. I'm on the network."

After running an analysis of the computers' hard drives, it was discovered that the inmates had used them to search through a database of inmates, steal the information of a particular inmate from a different prison, apply for five credit cards using this inmate's identifying information, access to a Bloomberg article on tax refund fraud, as well as issue passes for inmates to gain access to various areas within Marion prison.

Based on the forensic analysis of the devices, the inmates had access to several "malicious tools" to carry out their project, including Cain (a hacking tool for password recovery), Zed Attack proxy (for finding security vulnerabilities), OpenVPN, THC Hydra (a hacking tool for cracking logins), Paros (a pen testing software that can also be used to execute a man in the middle hack), among many others.

"It's like an episode of Hogan's Heroes," said Meyer. "The fact that these inmates were able to take salvaged computer pieces to build two functioning computers and then move them 1100 feet to an administrative portion of the building where they shouldn't have access anyway…it's just not something you'd think would happen in today's correctional facilities."

It's astounding how much these inmates were able to do under surveillance in a medium-security prison, although in the Inspector General's report they inmates were the first to comment on the relatively lax supervision within the prison. Moreover, the rehabilitation program that taught the inmates the computer skills they needed to pull of this feat also gave the inmates a lot of leeway to network their rogue computers.

"The institution was having inmates run cabling for their closed circuit televisions within the institution instead of paying a state of Ohio employee or even a vendor to come and do that," said Meyer. "These guys were self-taught or taught by the institution itself about agile computing and things like that."

Meyer was unable to comment as to whether there was any collusion between prison staff and the inmates while the case prosecution is ongoing. The majority of the inmates involved in the case were serving life sentences and have since been moved to different correctional facilities.

12 Apr 17:22

The Islamic State's Tech Support Is Worried About CIA Hacking Tools

by Joseph Cox

Over the past few weeks Wikileaks has published files allegedly concerning the CIA's hacking capabilities. Cybersecurity company Symantec has since linked some of the tools included in Wikileaks' "Vault 7" series to over 40 hacks around the world.

Plenty of others have been paying close attention to the releases too. Pro-Islamic State social media and Telegram accounts have been sharing a list of takeaways and other information gleaned from the recent alleged CIA dump.

Read more: When ISIS Hackers Call You Out By Name

"The increasing attention to matters of cybersecurity in the last several months may reflect a heightened fear and paranoia that the software and technology that facilitated the organization's stellar rise will ultimately betray them and their ideological aspirations," Jade Parker, senior research associate in VNSA Cybersecurity and Terrorist Use of the Internet at research group TAPSTRI told Motherboard.

In particular, pro-Islamic State accounts have posted links to a "things you should know" piece, laying out what they see as important points in the Wikileaks data. Terrorism analyst Michael S. Smith II shared a screenshot of the top-10 list on Twitter on Tuesday.

"Wikileaks has published thousands of documents that reveal the secrets of the biggest hack of the CIA, and includes the agency's ability to penetrate iPhones, Android, Smart TV, Microsoft, and operating systems Mac and Linux," a Google translated version of the Arabic language list reads.

Specifically, the list highlights the CIA's alleged use of kernel exploits, designed to target the heart of a device's operating system, and how the agency supposedly borrowed code from public malware samples. The post also points to the natural consequence of hacking phones directly—that spies will likely be able to circumvent the encryption on any messaging apps the target happens to be using.

"The CIA has the tools to enable them to have access to the entire phones, which of course leads to bypass the encrypted messaging applications," the post reads. (Although Wikileaks published a press release explicitly mentioning Signal and WhatsApp, and Islamic State supporters appear to have echoed it, no claims about either of those apps are actually included in the released documents).

Other recent Telegram posts include direct links to Wikileaks' press releases on the alleged CIA documents, and descriptions of what versions of Android specific exploits are effective against.

A pro-Islamic State group called Electronic Horizon Foundation, or just Horizons for short, has shared much of the material through it Telegram's channels. Horizons typically provides tutorials, guidance and other material related to information security—in short, a tech help desk.

Of course, how much the Islamic State or its supporters could actually learn from the Wikileaks releases, except being reminded that vulnerabilities in computers and software exist, is debatable.

"For ISIS, reducing the attack surface of their apps and devices from intelligence services are a matter of both physical and ideological survival," Parker said.

Subscribe to pluspluspodcast, Motherboard's new show about the people and machines that are building our future.

12 Apr 17:21

Don’t run commercials designed to trigger smart assistants

by Brian Heater
 A well-known fast food chain – let’s call them Kurger Bing – is debuting a new 15 second ad today set to start running nationally. It starts off simply enough, some dude standing behind the counter of an otherwise empty “restaurant,” addressing the camera. He explains that he doesn’t have the time to fully explain an iconic hamburger to you. Ad time… Read More
12 Apr 14:14

Vast majority of Americans reject mass surveillance to thwart terrorist attacks

by Cory Doctorow

75% surveyed by Ipsos/Reuters said, "they would not let investigators tap into their Internet activity to help the U.S. combat domestic terrorism"(up from 67% in 2013). (more…)

05 Apr 17:42

Comcast Launches New 24/7 Workplace Surveillance Service

by EditorDavid
America's largest ISP just rolled out a new service that allows small and medium-sized business owners "to oversee their organization" with continuous video surveillance footage that's stored in the cloud -- allowing them to "improve efficiency." An anonymous reader quotes the Philadelphia Inquirer: Inventory is disappearing. Workplace productivity is off. He said/she said office politics are driving people crazy. Who you gonna call...? Comcast Business hopes it will be the one, with the "SmartOffice" surveillance offering formally launched this week in Philadelphia and across "70 percent of our national [internet] service footprint," said Christian Nascimento, executive director of premise services for the Comcast division. Putting a "Smart Cities" (rather than "Big Brother is watching you") spin on "the growing trend for...connected devices across the private and public sectors," the SmartOffice solution "can provide video surveillance to organizations that want to monitor their locations more closely," Nascimento said... The surveillance cameras are equipped with zoom lenses, night-vision, motion detection, and wide-angle lenses, while an app allows remote access to the footage from smartphones and tablets (though the footage can also be downloaded, or stored online for up to a month). Last year Comcast was heavily involved in an effort to provide Detroit's police department with real-time video feeds from over 120 local businesses, which the mayor said wouldn't have been successful "Without the complete video technology system Comcast provides."

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30 Mar 21:15

Verizon mandates pre-installed spyware for all its Android customers

by Cory Doctorow

"Appflash" will come pre-installed on all Verizon Android handsets; it's a Google search-bar replacement, but instead of feeding telemetry about your searches, handset, apps and activities to Google, it will send them to Verizon. (more…)

30 Mar 21:12

Pruitt chooses not to ban pesticide after scientists find neurotoxicity

by Beth Mole

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Jack Clark)

Scott Pruitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, announced late Wednesday that a widely used pesticide will remain available to farmers, despite agency scientists recommending last year that it be banned due to neurotoxicity risks to farm workers and children.

The pesticide, chlorpyrifos, made by Dow Chemical, is used on tens of thousands of farms in the country to protect dozens of different crops from a variety of insects. However, decades of research following its 1965 debut has found that the pesticide can harm the human respiratory, cardiovascular, and nervous systems. Animal and human studies have linked exposure to declines in learning and memory. When chlorpyrifos was commonly used in household bug sprays, babies exposed prenatally via cord blood showed structural abnormalities in brain regions linked to attention, memory, language, and impulse control.

In 2000, the EPA banned its use from most household products. The agency also began tightening restrictions on its use on farms. In 2007, the Natural Resources Defense Council and Pesticide Action Network North America filed a petition to have chlorpyrifos banned altogether. After more research and some debate from an expert scientific review panel of academic scientists, EPA scientists concluded that chlorpyrifos was causing significant health risks, particularly to farm workers and children, and should be banned.

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30 Mar 21:07

The Uncertain Science Behind Your Phone’s Blue Light Dimmer

by Matt Simon
The Uncertain Science Behind Your Phone’s Blue Light Dimmer
Does blue light make you more alert? Yep. But does removing it from your phone's screen help you fall asleep? That hasn't actually been proven yet. The post The Uncertain Science Behind Your Phone's Blue Light Dimmer appeared first on WIRED.
30 Mar 21:07

The World’s Biggest Porn Site Goes All-In on Encryption

by Brian Barrett
The World’s Biggest Porn Site Goes All-In on Encryption
Now that Pornhub's going HTTPS, your private browsing will be a lot more private. The post The World's Biggest Porn Site Goes All-In on Encryption appeared first on WIRED.
30 Mar 19:47

This Is Almost Certainly James Comey’s Twitter Account

by Ashley Feinberg on Gizmodo, shared by Barry Petchesky to Deadspin

Digital security and its discontents—from Hillary Clinton’s emails to ransomware to Tor hacks—is in many ways one of the chief concerns of the contemporary FBI. So it makes sense that the bureau’s director, James Comey, would dip his toe into the digital torrent with a Twitter account. It also makes sense, given…

Read more...

11 Mar 22:34

Republican bill would let employers demand workers’ genetic test results

by STAT
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A little-noticed bill moving through Congress would allow companies to require employees to undergo genetic testing or risk paying a penalty of thousands of dollars, and would let employers see that genetic and other health information.

Giving employers such power is now prohibited by legislation including the 2008 genetic privacy and nondiscrimination law known as GINA. The new bill gets around that landmark law by stating explicitly that GINA and other protections do not apply when genetic tests are part of a “workplace wellness” program.

The bill, HR 1313, was approved by a House committee on Wednesday, with all 22 Republicans supporting it and all 17 Democrats opposed. It has been overshadowed by the debate over the House GOP proposal to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, but the genetic testing bill is expected to be folded into a second ACA-related measure containing a grab-bag of provisions that do not affect federal spending, as the main bill does. Read more...

More about Insurance, Medicine, House Of Representatives, and Us World
11 Mar 22:25

Smart meters can overbill by 582%

by Cory Doctorow

A team from the University of Twente and the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences have published a paper demonstrating gross overbillings by smart energy meters, ranging from -32% to +582% of actual power consumption. (more…)

20 Feb 20:05

Squirrels outrank hackers as threat to U.S. electrical grid

by Martin Anderson

ukraine-electrical-grid

According to an expert on the integrity of national electric grid systems, the recent years of paranoia about the potential of state hackers to undermine infrastructure have greatly over-emphasised the risks of nation state attacks on infrastructure. Marcus Sachs, CSO of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), told an RSA conference last week that...

The article Squirrels outrank hackers as threat to U.S. electrical grid, by Martin Anderson originally appeared on The Stack.

20 Feb 16:28

The Cognitive Bias President Trump Understands Better Than You

by Emily Dreyfuss
The Cognitive Bias President Trump Understands Better Than You
The human brain has a built-in tendency to conflate the aberrant with the norm. The news industry—and certain politicians—know this all too well. The post The Cognitive Bias President Trump Understands Better Than You appeared first on WIRED.
20 Feb 16:28

Hero mom sends her son a care package full of garbage

by Chloe Bryan
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Connor Cox will never forget to take out the trash again.

Late last month, the Westminster College student received a care package from his mother shortly after beginning his second semester of school. Exciting, right? 

But this wasn't just any care package. It was a care package stuffed to the brim with crumpled garbage.

Thought my mom was sending me a care package... but instead she sent me a box of trash i was supposed to take outpic.twitter.com/UetdT5UoVP

— Connor Cox (@thedeal_5) January 30, 2017

Turns out, Connor had forgotten to take out the trash from his room before he headed back to school for his second semester. So, in a truly brutal own, his mom decided to mail it to him. Read more...

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20 Feb 15:52

Ex-Uber engineer describes her year of being sexually harassed at Uber

by Mark Frauenfelder
Jvitak

In today's edition of "What grinds my gears..."

Susan J. Fowler joined Uber as a site reliability engineer in November 2015. She was sexually harassed at work and Uber's human resources punished her for reporting it. She says other women at Uber have had similar experiences and that many have quit in disgust.

After the first couple of weeks of training, I chose to join the team that worked on my area of expertise, and this is where things started getting weird. On my first official day rotating on the team, my new manager sent me a string of messages over company chat. He was in an open relationship, he said, and his girlfriend was having an easy time finding new partners but he wasn't. He was trying to stay out of trouble at work, he said, but he couldn't help getting in trouble, because he was looking for women to have sex with. It was clear that he was trying to get me to have sex with him, and it was so clearly out of line that I immediately took screenshots of these chat messages and reported him to HR.

Uber was a pretty good-sized company at that time, and I had pretty standard expectations of how they would handle situations like this. I expected that I would report him to HR, they would handle the situation appropriately, and then life would go on - unfortunately, things played out quite a bit differently. When I reported the situation, I was told by both HR and upper management that even though this was clearly sexual harassment and he was propositioning me, it was this man's first offense, and that they wouldn't feel comfortable giving him anything other than a warning and a stern talking-to. Upper management told me that he "was a high performer" (i.e. had stellar performance reviews from his superiors) and they wouldn't feel comfortable punishing him for what was probably just an innocent mistake on his part.

I was then told that I had to make a choice: (i) I could either go and find another team and then never have to interact with this man again, or (ii) I could stay on the team, but I would have to understand that he would most likely give me a poor performance review when review time came around, and there was nothing they could do about that.

Image: Pexels

20 Feb 15:52

It's very hard to maintain an anonymous Twitter account that can withstand government-level attempts to de-anonymize it

by Cory Doctorow

It's one thing to set up an "anonymous" Twitter Hulk account whose anonymity your friends and colleagues can't pierce, because the combination of your care not to tweet identifying details, the stilted Hulk syntax, and your friends' inability to surveil the global internet and compel phone companies to give up their caller records suffice for that purpose. (more…)

17 Feb 18:09

Trump Called A Press Conference Because The Tweets Weren't Working

by Albert Burneko on The Concourse, shared by Albert Burneko to Deadspin

Here is a ... well, here is something:

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17 Feb 18:07

Riseup Will Encrypt All Emails to Prevent FBI Searches

by Joseph Cox

Late last year, popular activist-focused email service Riseup failed to update its warrant canary. At the time, no additional information was provided. But the move raised suspicion, as warrant canaries are cryptographically signed messages that, when not updated per an expected schedule, are intended to warn users that a company or service is facing some sort of legal battle, but is also under a gag order and can't address it publicly.

On Thursday, Riseup clarified what happened. The FBI had served two warrants onto Riseup, which the service complied with. In response, Riseup said it is now implementing encrypted storage so it won't be in a position to handover useful data again.

"After exhausting our legal options, Riseup recently chose to comply with two sealed warrants from the FBI, rather than facing contempt of court (which would have resulted in jail time for Riseup birds and/or termination of the Riseup organization)," a Riseup statement reads. ("Riseup birds" are volunteers that help maintain the service.)

To be clear, those warrants did not relate to activism. According to Riseup, the first concerned the contact email address for a DDoS extortion ring, and the second was related to a ransomware campaign.

"Extortion activities clearly violate both the letter and the spirit of the social contract we have with our users: We have your back so long as you are not pursuing exploitative, misogynist, racist, or bigoted agendas," Riseup's statement continues.

Riseup was unable to inform its users of the warrants because of related gag orders, although it did say in a November 2016 interview with The Intercept that the case did not concern a National Security Letter—controversial legal demands for data that the FBI often uses.

Regardless, this event has inadvertently shown that Riseup's warrant canary was perhaps not phrased in the best way.

"A Canary is supposed to signal important risk information to users, but there is also danger in signaling the wrong thing to users or leading to general fear and confusion for no good reason," the statement adds. Now, the canary has been tweaked to only apply to "significant events that could compromise the security of Riseup users."

Most importantly, Riseup is now going to store user emails in such a way that, theoretically, even the service's administrators won't be able to read their contents.

"Starting today, all new Riseup email accounts will feature personally encrypted storage on our services, only accessible by you," the statement reads.

This isn't end-to-end encryption: your data may still be read if intercepted in transit. But it should protect user emails if a server is physically seized, or if Riseup is legally compelled to hand over info.

09 Feb 23:11

Government ethics website crashes after 'extraordinary' number of requests from public

by Marcus Gilmer
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In a series of tweets posted Thursday afternoon, the U.S. Office of Government Ethics (OGE) said that its website, email and phone systems have crashed due to "an extraordinary volume of contacts from citizens about recent events."

While none of the tweets specifically named President Trump or any of his associates involved in stories surrounding questionable ethics this week — including wife Melania Trump, daughter Ivanka Trump, and White House aide Kellyanne Conway — the timing of the flood of inquiries implies a connection to recent controversies. As do additional statements made in tweets by the office. Read more...

More about Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump, Office Of Government Ethics, Ethics, and Kellyanne Conway
07 Feb 14:09

Sophie Turner from 'Game of Thrones' goes full Sansa on Donald Trump

by Jerico Mandybur
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You may have already had an inkling, but in case there was any doubt: Sophie Turner is a savage. 

The Game of Thrones star has long been known for being funny and chill as hell, but recently, her best Twitter burns have been reserved for one man. Donald Trump, obviously. 

In case you missed it, here's a recap of the subtle but no less brutal shade Turner has been throwing in the president’s direction. 

Back in May of last year, she brought up the then-presidential candidate in a discussion about whose mind she'd like to take over for a day. "I'd control him to go on a plane and get out of America and go somewhere very far away, where no one will ever find you," she said.   Read more...

More about Twitter, Donald Trump, Got, Game Of Thrones, and Sansa Stark
07 Feb 14:08

Holy Shit, LeBron

by Timothy Burke on Screengrabber, shared by Timothy Burke to Deadspin
Jvitak

Holy shit indeed.

LeBron James forced overtime against Washington with a shot that ranks among the most legendary in his career. Incredible.

Read more...

07 Feb 13:53

Trump becomes a mad medieval king in this brilliant Twitter parody

by Gianluca Mezzofiore
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There are many great Twitter parodies of Donald Trump, from "Bridget Trump's Diary" to "Trump Draws"

But one in particular stands out for cultural and historical ingenuity, at least from a UK-centric point of view. 

"Donaeld The Unready" pokes fun at the U.S. president while teaching us precious lessons on Britain's early medieval age, when the country was divided into the Heptarchy of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. 

As the Twitter description says, Donaeld is "the best medieval King out there" of Mercia, which from the mid-7th century onwards was the most powerful of these kingdoms.  Read more...

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07 Feb 13:52

FBI Will Revert To Using Fax Machines, Snail Mail For FOIA Requests

by BeauHD
blottsie writes: Starting next month, the FBI will no longer accept Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests via email. Instead, the U.S. agency will largely require requests be made via fax machine or the U.S. Postal Service. [The FBI will also accept a small number of requests via an online portal, "provided users agree to a terms-of-service agreement and are willing to provide the FBI with personal information, including a phone number and physical address."] The Daily Dot reports: "It's a huge step backwards for the FBI to switch from a proven, ubiquitous, user-friendly technology like email to a portal that has consistently shown problems, ranging from restricting how often citizens can access their right to government oversight to legitimate privacy concerns," says Michael Morisy, co-founder of MuckRock, a nonprofit that has helped people file over 28,271 public records requests at more than 6,690 state, federal, and local agencies. "Given that email has worked well for millions of requests over the years, this seems like a move designed to reduce participation and transparency, and we hope that the FBI will reverse course," Morisy added.

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03 Feb 22:28

How motivated skepticism strengthens incorrect beliefs

by David McRaney

This is part two in my "The Backfire Effect" series. This one focuses on motivated reasoning, specifically something called motivated skepticism. In addition, it features interviews with the scientists who coined the backfire effect term itself and who have extended their original research outside of politics and into health issues.

By now you’ve likely heard of confirmation bias. As a citizen of the internet the influence of this cognitive tendency is constant, and its allure is pervasive.

In short, when you have a hunch that you might already understand something, but don’t know for sure, you tend to go searching for information that will confirm your suspicions.

When you find that inevitable confirmation, satisfied you were correct all along, you stop searching. In some circles, the mental signal to end exploration once you feel like your position has sufficient external support is referred to as the wonderfully wordy “makes sense stopping rule” which basically states that once you believe you’ve made sense of something, you go about your business satisfied that you need not continue your efforts. In other words, just feeling correct is enough to stop your pursuit of new knowledge. We basically had to invent science to stop ourselves from trying to solve problems by thinking in this way.

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You could, instead, try and disconfirm your assumptions, to start your investigations by attempting to debunk your beliefs, but most of the time you don’t take this approach. That’s not your default method of exploring the natural world or defending your ideological stances.

VaxxFor instance, if you believe that vaccines cause autism, and then you go searching for data that backs up that hypothesis, with the power of search engines you are guaranteed to find it. That’s true for just about everything anyone has ever believed whether it’s the moon landing was a hoax, the Denver airport is a portal to Hell, or that there is a fern that produces small animals that eat grass and deliver their nutrients into the plant via an umbilical vine.

We even reason through a confirmation bias when searching our memories. In one study, subjects read a story about a woman named Jane. In it, she exhibited some behaviors that could be interpreted as introverted, and some that seemed more extroverted. Several days later, psychologists divided those same subjects into two groups. They told one group that Jane was thinking about applying for a job as a real estate agent, and asked if they thought she was suited to the work. Most people said she would be great at it, and when asked why, those subjects recalled all the extroverted behavior from their memories, citing those parts of the narrative as evidence for their belief. The scientists then said that Jane was also considering a job as a librarian. The subjects groused upon hearing this, saying that Jane was too outgoing for that kind of environment. For the other group, the order was flipped. They first asked if Jane should take a job as a librarian. Just like the other group, most of the subjects said “yes!” right away, taking an affirmative position by default. When asked why they felt that way, they too searched their memories for confirmation that their hunches were correct and cited all the times they remembered Jane had acted shy. When scientists asked this second group if Jane should go for a real-estate job instead, they were adamantly opposed to the idea, saying Jane was obviously too reserved for a career like that.

Confirmation bias is an active, goal-oriented, effortful process. When tasked to defend your position, even if you just took it, even if you could have taken another, you tend to search for proof, pushing past a threatening, attitude-inconsistent thicket to cherry-pick the fruit of validation.

There is another process though that is just as pernicious but that runs in the background, passive, waiting to come online when challenging information is unavoidable, when it arrives in your mind uninvited. This psychological backup plan for protecting your beliefs is called motivated skepticism.

Political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler saw the power of motivated skepticism when they confronted anti-vaxxers with a variety of facts aimed at debunking myths concerning a connection between the childhood MMR vaccine and autism. In this episode of the You Are Not So Smart Podcast, they explain how they were successful at softening those subjects’ beliefs in those misconceptions, yet those same people later reported that they were even less likely to vaccinate their children than subjects who received no debunking information at all. The corrections backfired.

As I’ve written before, “when your deepest convictions are challenged by contradictory evidence, your beliefs get stronger.” In this episode of the You Are Not So Smart podcast, the second in a series on the The Backfire Effect, we explore how motivated skepticism fuels this bizarre phenomenon by which correcting misinformation can cause people to become even more certain in their incorrect beliefs. (This is a link to part one in the series).

This episode’s cookie is espresso dark chocolate sent in by Sarah Hendrickson.

Links and Sources

• The Makes-Sense Stopping Rule: Perkins, D. N., Farady, M., & Bushey, B. In Voss, J. F., Perkins, D. N., & Segal, J. W. (1991). Informal reasoning and education. Hillsdale, N.J: L. Erlbaum Associates.

• Jane Confirmation Bias Study: Snyder, Mark, and Nancy Cantor. “Testing Hypotheses about Other People: The Use of Historical Knowledge.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 15.4 (1979): 330-42.

• Vaccine Corrections Study: Nyhan, B., J. Reifler, S. Richey, and G. L. Freed. “Effective Messages in Vaccine Promotion: A Randomized Trial.” Pediatrics 133.4 (2014).

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Previous Episodes

Part One of this Series

Boing Boing Podcasts

Cookie Recipes

The Backfire Effect

Effective Messages in Vaccine Promotion: A Randomized Trial

Study: You Can’t Change an Anti-Vaxxer’s Mind

Vaccine Opponents Can Be Immune to Education

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03 Feb 22:12

Trump administration begins altering EPA climate change websites

by Andrew Freedman
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In his poem "The Hollow Men," T. S. Eliot famously wrote: "This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper." It seems the Trump administration may be taking a cue from this prose, potentially killing off climate change programs not with the flourish of announcements and speeches but with behind-the-scenes tinkering instead.

This is becoming clear thanks to scientists' careful tracking of the administration's websites and data centers. A report from the nonprofit Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI), which is closely tracking federal climate science websites under Trump, and first reported by Climate Central on Thursday, shows that there have already been many changes to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) websites related to climate change.  Read more...

More about Science, Climate Adaptation, Climate Mitigation, Climate Policy, and Rex Tillerson
03 Feb 21:50

FCC rescinds claim that AT&T and Verizon violated net neutrality

by Jon Brodkin

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Kheng ho Toh)

The Federal Communications Commission's new Republican leadership has rescinded a determination that AT&T and Verizon Wireless violated net neutrality rules with paid data cap exemptions. The FCC also rescinded several other Wheeler-era reports and actions.

The FCC released its report on the data cap exemptions (aka "zero-rating") in the final days of Democrat Tom Wheeler's chairmanship. Because new Chairman Ajit Pai opposed the investigation, the FCC has now formally closed the proceeding.

The FCC's Wireless Telecommunications Bureau sent letters to AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile USA notifying the carriers "that the Bureau has closed this inquiry. Any conclusions, preliminary or otherwise, expressed during the course of the inquiry will have no legal or other meaning or effect going forward." The FCC's Wireline Competition Bureau also sent a letter to Comcast closing an inquiry into the company's Stream TV cable service, which does not count against data caps.

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03 Feb 21:49

Sweden's deputy PM is trolling Trump so hard with this picture

by Sasha Lekach
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The internet has exploded with memes mocking Donald Trump for signing bills and controversial executive orders, but in Sweden they've found a different way to make a point.

Over there, politicians have released a very similar photo with one significant difference. 

Swedish deputy prime minister and climate minister Isabella Lovin posted a photo of her signing a climate change bill to her social media accounts Friday. Behind her stood a row of women, one of whom is even noticeably pregnant.

If it looks familiar it's because Trump blasted out a very similar looking photo last month. But instead of enacting progressive, forward-thinking legislation, he was signing into effect the global gag order — with a gaggle of older, white men behind him. Read more...

More about Donald Trump, Sweden, Executive Order, Social Media, and Politics
30 Jan 16:05

Justin Tucker Nails Field Goal Through Basketball Hoop From 50-Yard Line

by Emma Baccellieri

Earlier this week, we got to watch Justin Tucker make a 75-yard field goal. Impressive, sure, but not quite as impressive as this.

Read more...