RafaelFajardo
March 2017
Donald Ian McCaw’s Solution for Preserving Art: Bury It
THE DAILY PIC (#1743): Certain spoofs need to be
utterly deadpan to work, and a new one by the Canadian artist Donald Ian
McCaw qualifies. He has created the fictional company Mba Fabrications Inc.,
which declares itself in the process of building something called the
Deep Earth Asset Depository. That’s a (fictional) high-tech storage
facility buried 1,161 meters down in an abandoned nickel mine in
Ontario. Art collectors are supposed to rent space in this ultra-secure,
environmentally-stable facility so that their art can live there
forever, perfectly guarded from all possible change or damage. Should
they be fussy enough to actually want to enjoy the presence of
their aesthetic treasures in their own homes (or private museums), McCaw
offers perfect facsimiles of the holdings they’ve sent down his mine.
You need to watch video of him pitching the Depository to get the full effect of his soft-sell. (McCaw is launching another Mba Inc. “product” at Heron Arts in San Francisco on March 11.)Perfect trompe-l’oeil has always delivered guaranteed
pleasure. McCaw has created a trompe-l’oeil vision of our current
intersection of science, business, finance and art – and shown that
esthetics are barely part of the equation. Someone needs to burn his
video onto an everlasting gold DVD and send it down his mine for
safekeeping.The Daily Pic also appears at ArtnetNews.com.
For a full survey of past Daily Pics visit blakegopnik.com/archive.
Our initial product testings showed that collaboration and discussion were left out if there was too much information on the cards, as people got stuck reading.
Coca-Cola Wants to Use AI Bots to Create Its Ads
Coca-Cola Wants to Use AI Bots to Create Its Ads
How Uber Used Secret Greyball Tool to Deceive Authorities Worldwide
How Uber Used Secret Greyball Tool to Deceive Authorities Worldwide
When Uber moved into a new city, it appointed a general manager to lead the charge. This person, using various technologies and techniques, would try to spot enforcement officers.
One technique involved drawing a digital perimeter, or “geofence,” around the government offices on a digital map of a city that Uber was monitoring. The company watched which people were frequently opening and closing the app — a process known internally as eyeballing — near such locations as evidence that the users might be associated with city agencies.
Other techniques included looking at a user’s credit card information and determining whether the card was tied directly to an institution like a police credit union.
Enforcement officials involved in large-scale sting operations meant to catch Uber drivers would sometimes buy dozens of cellphones to create different accounts. To circumvent that tactic, Uber employees would go local electronics stores to look up device numbers of the cheapest mobile phones for sale, which were often the ones bought by city officials working with budgets that were not sizable.
In all, there were at least a dozen or so signifiers in the VTOS program that Uber employees could use to assess whether users were regular new riders or likely to be city officials.
If such clues were not enough to confirm a user’s identity, Uber employees would search social media profiles and other information available online. If users were identified as being connected to law enforcement, Uber Greyballed them by tagging them with a small piece of code that read “Greyball” followed by a string of numbers.
When someone tagged this way called a car, Uber could scramble a set of ghost cars inside a fake version of the app for that person to see, or show that no cars were available. Occassionally, if a driver accidentally picked up someone tagged as an officer, Uber called the driver with instructions to end the ride.
[…]
At a time when Uber is already under scrutiny for its boundary-pushing workplace culture, its use of the Greyball tool underscores the lengths to which the company will go to dominate its market. Uber has long flouted laws and regulations to gain an edge against entrenched transportation providers, a modus operandi that has helped propel it into more than 70 countries and to a valuation close to $70 billion.
Yet using its app to identify and sidestep the authorities in places where regulators said Uber was breaking the law goes further toward skirting ethical lines — and, potentially, legal ones.
npr:
This is Sister Norma Pimentel, the Executive Director for Catholic Charities in the Rio Grande Valley. She’s standing in the Parish Hall of the Sacred Heart Church in McAllen, which she converted to a makeshift supply center for migrant families in 2014. At that time the surge of unaccompanied minors from Central America had overloaded Border Patrol facilities, and they were releasing families where the parents were present in order to make room for the unaccompanied kids.
Sister Norma opened this center so those families would have somewhere to come for clothing, food, water, and showers, before continuing their journey.
“We welcome them the moment they walk through those doors of Sacred Heart Parish Hall. We have our volunteers clap and say ‘welcome, bienvenidos.’ And just that moment starts a transformation of the family where they feel for the very first time they matter, that their lives are important to others…And they feel overwhelmed with gratefulness because of the fact that for the very first time in their journeys, of what they’ve been through, they finally arrive to a place that’s caring and compassionate. And the volunteers are wonderful in making sure they get everything they need so that they can truly restore their dignity after the great journey and hardships that they went through.”
– Ravenna
(Photo: Samantha Balaban/NPR)
Meet Sister Norma Pimentel. -Emily
