Tuesday, March 31, 2015
Black Television Actors Never Stop Auditioning
From left to right: the cast of Empire; its creators, writers, and executive producers.
Frank Micoletta / FOX
My black actor friends and I sometimes joke that it would be easier to become the first black woman on the Supreme Court than a successful black actor. At least the career path to becoming a Supreme Court justice is a little bit more cut-and-dried. The path to success as an actor is nonlinear and nonsensical, shrouded in secrecy and marked by well-meaning friends and family who love to offer career advice. Why can’t you be on Love and Hip Hop? That’s my show! Don’t you know Tyler Perry?
There is no such thing as a lifetime appointment for any actor. But for black actors, the obstacles we face in auditions don’t magically disappear on set.
I’ve been a professional actor since 2001. I don’t pay the bills by waitressing or bartending, but I’m not wildly successful, rich, and famous either. Most people don’t see those of us in the middle, who look forward to episodic season every fall, who do the Master Cleanse to get ready for pilot season, who go on auditions, and who live their lives as regular people who happen to be actors. Add being a black woman to that mix and you have a whole other dimension of insanity.
I can’t tell you how many auditions I have been on where the character is so obviously written for a white woman. One referred to her blonde hair and lack of a tan, no lie. I called my agents like, Really? The onus is on me, the actor, to go into the audition rooms and make them see the character another way — black. And keep in mind that actors are perhaps the least powerful part of the television production process. But like an anti-racism acting Care Bear, I’m supposed to act so amazingly well, be so pretty, so dazzlingly, so indisputably wonderful, that stars and rainbows and sunshine issue forth from my magical being and make them see a black woman in this role.
So let’s say that my little rainbow trick works and the producers and writers and casting directors all look at each other and go, “She’s not what we envisioned but DID YOU SEE HOW DAZZLING SHE WAS?!?” It’s a wonderful feeling, for everyone. Agents and managers are happy. The powers that be are happy. And as the actor, I’m simply ecstatic.
But then I get on set and I’m the only black face to be seen. No other black actors, no black producers, and no black writers. The onus is still on me to show how the character in their imaginations would be as a black woman.
About five years ago, I was hired to be a play a bartender in a comedy series. Even though it was a supporting role, the producers had wonderful ideas and storylines for the character — including a romance — and everyone seemed to think I was perfect for it.
So when we started filming, I looked forward to each script, whipping open my laptop, devouring every line. But every time, I was disappointed, as it became clear I was the taciturn type of bartender. Here’s your drink; exit stage left. Somebody on set asked me how long I’d been an extra.
When I was growing up in the New York City suburbs, a radio ad for the stage play The Diary of Black Men would come on almost every day. In it, a deep-voiced, dramatic black male intoned “How…do you love…a black woman?” over and over, like a mantra.
That’s kind of how I imagine TV writers (and, let’s be real, most of whom are white and male) trying to write my lines. How…do you write…for a black woman? Most white male writers don’t have a bunch of black women in their lives. Maybe a black guy friend. But a black woman whom they know kinda well? A real one? Just like a normal, everyday black woman who cracks jokes and has a personality, but isn’t just a stereotype of some black woman they saw on TV?
I can understand the challenge before them, really. Let’s say they write a particularly salty one-liner for a black woman. Is that gonna come out racist, the stereotypical “sassy black friend”? And, more important, who do they ask if it is racist? Their one black friend? Isn’t asking him extra racist?
All actors know that as soon as you’re on the show, your next job is to get to know the writers. You talk, you bond, and then one day you tell them a story about your life and discover they’ve put it in the script. I remember trying in vain to connect with the writers. During table reads, I would go up and talk to some of the writers, but they gave me the cold shoulder.
Since they don’t know me — or, I figured, anybody like me — I wondered how invested they would be in writing for my character.
Most of the time I would get a script the night before a table read with a few lines. Sometimes I actually had a part of the story line, but after the table read it was always cut. Naturally, I assumed it was cut because of my poor performance. I asked what I could do better. But I was always given the excuse of “real estate.” There were so many characters and only so much time, and they needed to focus on the other main, regular characters. Of course, real estate wasn’t a problem when they needed to write for a white guest star.
And then, one week, the writers forgot to put me in the first draft of the script altogether. It was part of my contract to be in every episode, so I was added in after the fact, when they realized my character literally didn’t have a single line. I think I ended up delivering somebody a beer.
My character’s utter lack of personality all season long didn’t stop the showrunner from feeding me the line, “What did you say, mothafucka?” while shooting footage for outtakes. “You know, really give it to him,” he directed. Oh, now you want me to be the extra-sassy black girl? That was just about too much to bear. I was not surprised when I was not asked back for Season 2.
During my season on the show, only one writer tried to initiate a conversation with me, about Antoine Dodson, the brother of a the alleged victim of a home intruder rape whose local news interview went viral in 2010. I looked to my right and my left and pointed to myself. Cliché, I know. I started cackling, summoning all my dazzle and thinking, This is it! They actually see me!
The writer awkwardly brought up that he had seen my audition tape, and how good he thought it was. He told me he was just a stand-up from Chicago trying to do the best job he could, and that he wished he could do more for my character. Then he mumbled something about Wanda Sykes and shuffled off. I was left singing “You can run and tell dat, run and tell dat” to no one in particular.
He was just one guy trying to make a difference in a room where nobody was on the same page. But the truth is, if you are a white writer who is tasked with the job of “writing for a black woman,” your first attempts will be clumsy at best. They might be — dare I say — racist.
The difference is that writers can afford to get it wrong, and try again. As an actor of color, I’m stuck doing my Care Bear song and dance. (Hence why I’m writing this anonymously.)
Lots of people are making a concerted effort to make television more diverse — and a handful of them are succeeding brilliantly. My only hope is that writers don’t fail their actors of color out of fear of failing. To that end, I want to let you in on a little secret: A surefire way to prove to yourself you’re not a racist is to stop being afraid of sounding racist. Instead, listen to feedback and be open to change. Too many writers don’t know where to start and so never do.
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22 Quotes That Will Make You Fall In Love With Ewan McGregor
Possibly the greatest guy in Hollywood.
Ewan McGregor is that perfect mix of cool, funny, and hot. He's just a really chill guy.
DreamWorks / deanwinchesterprays.tumblr.com
So, to celebrate his 44th birthday here are 22 quotes that will convince those of you who need a little push that Ewan is the greatest guy around.
Fox 2000 Pictures / tumblr.com
"I've never found acting that difficult. If you ask me, it's all rather easy if you keep it simple. But as soon as you lose that original drive, it's not fun...The fear of being crap is always what makes you good, I think." - Interview Magazine
Jason Merritt / Getty Images
"I think if you can encourage people to do something, if it is to go out and explore the world and see parts of the world that you might not otherwise see, and appreciate that people’s lives are very different from ours here in Europe and in America, then I think that is a good thing to do. "
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Snow mountain in the cloud by steven-lw
How The Screenshort Could Save Us From Horrible Headlines
So far screenshorts — screenshots of text shared on social media — have had an excellent 2015. They’re bleeding from their origins on Twitter and Instagram out into Facebook and across the web as the most effective way to share blurbs of text. Media companies have noticed and have begun professionalizing the screenshort. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Medium, and BuzzFeed have all built formal internal screenshort tools. Twitter veterans Jason Goldman and Ian Ownbey rolled out OneShot, a stand-alone screenshort app that allows anyone to elegantly share passages of their liking. Instapaper built screenshorting in as a function of its newest app. They’re everywhere.
There are a few reasons for this: It’s an intimate, user-instigated behavior that still feels organic, and it’s an extremely efficient way to share digestible chunks of text that get around Twitter’s character limits and Facebook’s truncation. But perhaps more important, taken together, these elements begin to provide an even greater service in the fractured and frenetic new-media ecosystem: Screenshorts could be a real solution to bizarre, nü-internet–style headlines. The Way We Write Headlines Now is terrible and the rise of the screenshort is largely due to the fact that screenshorts give us a better way to tease and share stories.
The social web has a strange relationship with headlines. The one-size-fits-all canonical newspaper-style headline rarely exists anymore as readers increasingly get their news from feeds and streams, rather than on homepages or in print. As John Herrman wrote for BuzzFeed News in 2013:
Online, headlines are not part of stories; they exist outside of stories. Their former three-pronged role, as place-marking buoys and summaries and introductions, has been largely mooted: The place-marking is done on a front page, on Twitter, on Facebook or elsewhere; the summarization can be taken care of with a dek or dedicated intro (which is written accurately and in grammatical English, not headlinese) or a first line; and the introduction, at this point, has already been made with the remote headline.
Headlines are rarely written for the pages they live on anymore. Instead, they live remotely on aggregation sites, and social media. Rather than informing the reader, the headline is often little more than an attempt to get someone’s attention — someone who is somewhere else, away from the publication itself — and draw them back to the site. This practice has resulted in an evolving series of internet-style headlines that range from intolerable robot-speak to peculiar and colloquial overly excited-best-friend pleas to read a story.
All are attempts to hook readers moving at a healthy clip through any number of link roundups, newsletters, social streams, and push notifications. Like any good lure, some are more successful than others, and every web editor worth a page view knows what they are. That, in turn, has led headlines to become incredibly formulaic. When something starts working, others copy it. Again, and again, and again. Which leads to ultimately, an endless series of the same. goddamn. headlines.
And yet, these clicky headlines are often useless. While they may serve the click, they often do not serve the reader. Things have gotten so bad that some aggregators — most notably Techmeme — rewrite headlines to make them more informative.
Want to see just how bad things are? As an experiment, BuzzFeed News asked Digg CTO Michael Young to scan the archive of stories selected by Digg editors (stories chosen because they’re not only clickable, but also good!) over the last two years for overused headline conventions.
A few notable finds:
* 5,084 stories with some variation of “How The” in the headline or subheadline.
* 385 stories featuring a “Meet The” in the headline or subheadline.
* 481 stories with some version of “Inside The” in the headline or subhead.
* There were also a few surprises, including only 28 debunking headlines that started with a “No,”.
The good news is that screenshorts help to finally get us out of our headline rut.
Screenshorts are far more personal than headlines. Mobile screenshots of any kind are immediately engaging and provide a level of intimacy, offering a glimpse into someone’s most personal possession: their phone.
Seeing a snap of someone’s homescreen or a highlighted screenshort feels indescribably personal. That somebody took the time to highlight and screenshot a passage of text from their phone is a ringing endorsement of that passage; both because it a personal recommendation and because it’s also a sort of cumbersome thing to do. It takes a little time to cobble together a screenshort, which implies that the passage in question is important and worth one’s time.
Second, much like so many of Twitter’s features (hashtags, @replies) the screenshort is an organic, user-created behavior. Jason Goldman, one of OneShot’s creators and a former VP of product at Twitter and product manager at Blogger, told BuzzFeed News that the decision to build out a screenshort product came when he and Ownbey realized that mobile screenshotting was not just a geek behavior, but something that kids and most savvy mobile humans were doing to share moments from their phones. Goldman began to see it as a way for readers to share a story while crafting their own headlines and retaining a little bit of autonomy.
"I think its a more user-centered user value way of creating content," he said. "It’s saying, ‘Look, I’m going give you the best part. It’s not a clickbait headline; it’s what I think is the most interesting part.’ It’s more humane, more user-respectful. You are saying, ‘I want you to make an informed decision about what lies behind the click.’"
Above all though, the screenshort takes pressure off the actual headline by providing a longer preview that’s not unlike the standard subheadline or dek. It’s a work-around to Twitter’s 140-character limit that doesn’t abuse the constraint as much as enhance it. And it seems to work. First, there’s the engagement on the tweets and Facebook posts themselves, which many have noted is markedly better.
And, at least anecdotally, it seems that providing the option of saving a reader a click seems to be a good way to get them to, well, click.
“Talking to folks who’ve implemented their own screenshot tools, the fear was that you were going to cannibalize page views and give too much away for free,” Goldman told BuzzFeed News. “But those I’ve talked to are saying it seems to work as, like, a movie trailer for the content and gets people pulled in, and then they want to see the story. That’s a bit unexpected.”
Take this tweet, which highlights a passage using OneShot. It is presented without any commentary or user-generated headline. Instead, the user has selected a relevant passage from a longer article that draws the reader in, letting the writer’s work speak for the piece, rather than relying on user commentary, stock headlines, or a reimagined headline.
As Herrman noted, nü-internet–style headlines are just pitches and pleas and often times bastardizations of the actual article content. And they’re why anyone who spends too much time online is tired of going Inside X To Meet The Man Behind X and finds that being asked to Take A Minute To Watch This Video to be reminded of Everything They Need To Know About X is growing stale.
But while the headlines we choose don’t always do justice to the body of the articles, the best headlines are hidden in the story — they’re just not headlines in the way we traditionally think of them.
Instead, they’re miniature article teasers, personalized organic-feeling recommendations in the form of screenshot text. They say, ‘Hey, we respect your time and intelligence and here’s this thing we would love for you to read — totally your call but here’s all the information.’
It’s early yet, but perhaps screenshorts will actually change headlines for the better. A good screenshort takes all the pressure off the headline to hook the reader, leaving the writer and editors to play with form and maybe even come up with interesting/funny/exciting/artistic headlines that people enjoy writing and reading. If nothing else, we can at least stop spending so much time agonizing over and writing them. They’ve been right in front of us all along.
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How The Screenshort Could Save Us From Horrible Headlines
So far screenshorts — screenshots of text shared on social media — have had an excellent 2015. They’re bleeding from their origins on Twitter and Instagram out into Facebook and across the web as the most effective way to share blurbs of text. Media companies have noticed and have begun professionalizing the screenshort. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Medium, and BuzzFeed have all built formal internal screenshort tools. Twitter veterans Jason Goldman and Ian Ownbey rolled out OneShot, a stand-alone screenshort app that allows anyone to elegantly share passages of their liking. Instapaper built screenshorting in as a function of its newest app. They’re everywhere.
There are a few reasons for this: It’s an intimate, user-instigated behavior that still feels organic, and it’s an extremely efficient way to share digestible chunks of text that get around Twitter's character limits and Facebook’s truncation. But perhaps more important, taken together, these elements begin to provide an even greater service in the fractured and frenetic new-media ecosystem: Screenshorts could be a real solution to bizarre, nü-internet–style headlines. The Way We Write Headlines Now is terrible and the rise of the screenshort is largely due to the fact that screenshorts give us a better way to tease and share stories.
The social web has a strange relationship with headlines. The one-size-fits-all canonical newspaper-style headline rarely exists anymore as readers increasingly get their news from feeds and streams, rather than on homepages or in print. As John Herrman wrote for BuzzFeed News in 2013:
Online, headlines are not part of stories; they exist outside of stories. Their former three-pronged role, as place-marking buoys and summaries and introductions, has been largely mooted: The place-marking is done on a front page, on Twitter, on Facebook or elsewhere; the summarization can be taken care of with a dek or dedicated intro (which is written accurately and in grammatical English, not headlinese) or a first line; and the introduction, at this point, has already been made with the remote headline.
Headlines are rarely written for the pages they live on anymore. Instead, they live remotely on aggregation sites, and social media. Rather than informing the reader, the headline is often little more than an attempt to get someone’s attention — someone who is somewhere else, away from the publication itself — and draw them back to the site. This practice has resulted in an evolving series of internet-style headlines that range from intolerable robot-speak to peculiar and colloquial overly excited-best-friend pleas to read a story.
All are attempts to hook readers moving at a healthy clip through any number of link roundups, newsletters, social streams, and push notifications. Like any good lure, some are more successful than others, and every web editor worth a page view knows what they are. That, in turn, has led headlines to become incredibly formulaic. When something starts working, others copy it. Again, and again, and again. Which leads to ultimately, an endless series of the same. goddamn. headlines.
And yet, these clicky headlines are often useless. While they may serve the click, they often do not serve the reader. Things have gotten so bad that some aggregators — most notably Techmeme — rewrite headlines to make them more informative.
Want to see just how bad things are? As an experiment, BuzzFeed News asked Digg CTO Michael Young to scan the archive of stories selected by Digg editors (stories chosen because they're not only clickable, but also good!) over the last two years for overused headline conventions.
A few notable finds:
* 5,084 stories with some variation of "How The" in the headline or subheadline.
* 385 stories featuring a "Meet The" in the headline or subheadline.
* 481 stories with some version of "Inside The" in the headline or subhead.
* There were also a few surprises, including only 28 debunking headlines that started with a "No,".
The good news is that screenshorts help to finally get us out of our headline rut.
Screenshorts are far more personal than headlines. Mobile screenshots of any kind are immediately engaging and provide a level of intimacy, offering a glimpse into someone’s most personal possession: their phone.
Seeing a snap of someone’s homescreen or a highlighted screenshort feels indescribably personal. That somebody took the time to highlight and screenshot a passage of text from their phone is a ringing endorsement of that passage; both because it a personal recommendation and because it's also a sort of cumbersome thing to do. It takes a little time to cobble together a screenshort, which implies that the passage in question is important and worth one's time.
Second, much like so many of Twitter's features (hashtags, @replies) the screenshort is an organic, user-created behavior. Jason Goldman, one of OneShot's creators and a former VP of product at Twitter and product manager at Blogger, told BuzzFeed News that the decision to build out a screenshort product came when he and Ownbey realized that mobile screenshotting was not just a geek behavior, but something that kids and most savvy mobile humans were doing to share moments from their phones. Goldman began to see it as a way for readers to share a story while crafting their own headlines and retaining a little bit of autonomy.
"I think its a more user-centered user value way of creating content," he said. "It's saying, 'Look, I'm going give you the best part. It's not a clickbait headline; it's what I think is the most interesting part.' It's more humane, more user-respectful. You are saying, 'I want you to make an informed decision about what lies behind the click.'"
Above all though, the screenshort takes pressure off the actual headline by providing a longer preview that's not unlike the standard subheadline or dek. It's a work-around to Twitter's 140-character limit that doesn't abuse the constraint as much as enhance it. And it seems to work. First, there’s the engagement on the tweets and Facebook posts themselves, which many have noted is markedly better.
And, at least anecdotally, it seems that providing the option of saving a reader a click seems to be a good way to get them to, well, click.
“Talking to folks who’ve implemented their own screenshot tools, the fear was that you were going to cannibalize page views and give too much away for free,” Goldman told BuzzFeed News. “But those I’ve talked to are saying it seems to work as, like, a movie trailer for the content and gets people pulled in, and then they want to see the story. That's a bit unexpected.”
Take this tweet, which highlights a passage using OneShot. It is presented without any commentary or user-generated headline. Instead, the user has selected a relevant passage from a longer article that draws the reader in, letting the writer's work speak for the piece, rather than relying on user commentary, stock headlines, or a reimagined headline.
As Herrman noted, nü-internet–style headlines are just pitches and pleas and often times bastardizations of the actual article content. And they're why anyone who spends too much time online is tired of going Inside X To Meet The Man Behind X and finds that being asked to Take A Minute To Watch This Video to be reminded of Everything They Need To Know About X is growing stale.
But while the headlines we choose don't always do justice to the body of the articles, the best headlines are hidden in the story — they're just not headlines in the way we traditionally think of them.
Instead, they're miniature article teasers, personalized organic-feeling recommendations in the form of screenshot text. They say, 'Hey, we respect your time and intelligence and here's this thing we would love for you to read — totally your call but here's all the information.'
It’s early yet, but perhaps screenshorts will actually change headlines for the better. A good screenshort takes all the pressure off the headline to hook the reader, leaving the writer and editors to play with form and maybe even come up with interesting/funny/exciting/artistic headlines that people enjoy writing and reading. If nothing else, we can at least stop spending so much time agonizing over and writing them. They've been right in front of us all along.
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There' Actually Is An Original "Ignition" That Isn't The Remix
I wish I didn’t know about it to be honest.
Obviously you know "Ignition (Remix)" and if you don't I feel bad for you and the life you are living.
Andy Dean / Getty Images
That is until NOW (or maybe earlier if you've known about this). This is the original "Ignition." NOT THE REMIX.
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Here Are 15 Movies Turning 15 In Summer 2015
Yes, we’re all very old now.
Gladiator
Released: May 5, 2000
Fun fact: Mel Gibson was apparently the original choice to play Maximus (Russell Crowe), but he passed on the part. At 43, Gibson didn't know if he could take on such a physically demanding role.
Where to watch: Amazon, Google Play, iTunes
DreamWorks Pictures / Via impawards.com
Center Stage
Released: May 12, 2000
Fun fact: Maureen is supposed to be the American Ballet Academy's prima ballerina, but she doesn't do much dancing on screen. That's because actress Susan May Pratt was the only cast member without any formal dance training.
Where to watch: Amazon, Google Play, iTunes
Columbia Pictures / Via fanpop.com
Road Trip
Released: May 19, 2000
Fun fact: Director Todd Phillips makes a cameo as the "foot lover on the bus." Phillips would, of course, go on to direct Old School and The Hangover films.
Where to watch: Amazon, iTunes
DreamWorks Pictures / Via imgkid.com
Big Momma's House
Released: June 2, 2000
Fun fact: Big Momma's House is one of only four movies to be released on Enhanced Versatile Disc, or EVD, a short-lived Chinese rival to the DVD.
Where to watch: Amazon, Google Play, iTunes
20th Century Fox / Via flickfacts.com
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Tim Cook Puts His Dent In The Universe
By taking public stands on social issues, Apple’s CEO is forging a role as his own kind of visionary leader.
Apple CEO Tim Cook kicks off an Apple event on Monday, March 9 in San Francisco. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)
Eric Risberg / AP
"We’re here to put a dent in the universe. Otherwise why else even be here?"
—Steve Jobs
Apple CEO Tim Cook’s Monday Washington Post op-ed decrying Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act was remarkable for a number of reasons — foremost because Cook took a public stand on such a contentious issue just weeks ahead of what may well be the most important product launch of his career. But also because it answers a question that has nagged Apple since co-founder Steve Jobs died in 2011: “Can a great company remain great without its visionary leader?”
For those who worried that Jobs set an unmatchable standard for Cook to meet, the past few months have been a pointed rebuttal. With Jobs’s passing, Apple may have lost a visionary leader. But in Cook, his handpicked successor, it may well have another. Different, but visionary just the same — a CEO who’s willing to weigh in on political and human rights issues and to bring Apple’s corporate might to bear on them at a time when the company commands the world’s attention.
Shortly after unveiling the Apple Watch in September, Cook publicly came out as gay in an editorial published by Bloomberg Businessweek. “…if hearing that the CEO of Apple is gay can help someone struggling to come to terms with who he or she is, or bring comfort to anyone who feels alone, or inspire people to insist on their equality, then it’s worth the trade-off with my own privacy,” he wrote.
On Monday, Cook blasted Indiana’s days-old religious-objections law, arguing that such legislation is an affront to human freedom and equality. “This isn’t a political issue. It isn’t a religious issue,” he wrote. “This is about how we treat each other as human beings. Opposing discrimination takes courage. With the lives and dignity of so many people at stake, it’s time for all of us to be courageous.”
But by definition this is a political issue — perhaps it shouldn’t be, but it is. Which makes it very dangerous for the CEO of any publicly traded, consumer-facing company to weigh in on. Because when Cook says something, it effectively means that the words are Apple’s.
Cook has long been an advocate for human rights and equality. With these two op-eds, he’s made Apple one as well. Both make it very clear that he’s speaking as Apple’s CEO or, in the case of the Washington Post piece, literally on behalf of Apple. Cook’s call for social progress is now Apple’s as well. And Apple, by joining him to make it, has smartly recognized that this is how Cook emerges from Jobs’ shadow to become an iconic company leader in his own right.
None of this is coincidence. Note that this is all happening ahead of Apple’s biggest product launch since iPad. Note too, that until mid-2014, Cook had been a very private person. Indeed, in his Bloomberg editorial he cites his desire for privacy as a key reason for not coming out as gay sooner. By penning these op-eds and participating in these interviews he’s forfeiting that privacy. And in doing so, he’s allowing Apple to shape public perception of him as a leader — an altruist, a philanthropist, and a CEO every bit as worthy of leading Apple as Jobs.
As a strategy, it’s potentially fraught — critics are already asking why Cook hasn’t taken a similarly firm stance on human rights issues like these in China and posit Apple’s business interests there as a possible answer. But as much as that’s a question worth asking, it undermines the simple truth of the thing: Tim Cook, the out gay CEO of the world’s most valuable company just said pro-discrimination “religious freedom” laws could undo “decades of progress” the country has made toward equal rights.
And that’s a dent-the-universe moment, just as the Bloomberg editorial was before it. Giving it further heft, a new book about Steve Jobs — written with Apple’s participation — reveals Cook offered an ailing Jobs a portion of his liver, and in a lengthy Fortune profile Cook discloses plans to donate his considerable fortune to charity — after he pays for his nephew’s education.
As CEO of Apple, Cook certainly does “lead different” from Jobs, as Fortune observes in a headline spin on the company’s old “Think Different” slogan. But in the sense of “think different” as a declaration of Apple’s values, Cook and Jobs are clearly of the same mind. For Jobs, think different meant don’t be afraid to change the world, because you can. Consider how he once explained it to PBS:
When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money.
That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is - everything around you that you call life, was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.
The minute that you understand that you can poke life and actually something will, you know if you push in, something will pop out the other side, that you can change it, you can mold it. That’s maybe the most important thing. It’s to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you’re just gonna live in it, versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it.
I think that’s very important and however you learn that, once you learn it, you’ll want to change life and make it better, cause it’s kind of messed up, in a lot of ways.
Life is kind of messed up. Change it. Make it better.
In making these public calls for social progress, Cook is doing just that, but in his own way. And by making them at this moment in time — ahead of the retail debut of Apple’s first truly post-Steve Jobs device — the company is bringing him into his own an iconic leader, and vaporizing the Haunted Empire hand-wringing and “What Would Steve Do” yammering that’s nagged the company for years.
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How Addicted Are You To Your Devices?
It’s OK, we’ve felt phantom rings, too.
We're surrounded by screens everywhere we go.
Answer these questions about the tech in your life and see how you compare to others.
NBC / Via zap2it.com
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Tim Cook Puts His Dent In The Universe
By taking public stands on social issues, Apple’s CEO is forging a role as his own kind of visionary leader.
Apple CEO Tim Cook kicks off an Apple event on Monday, March 9 in San Francisco. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)
Eric Risberg / AP
"We're here to put a dent in the universe. Otherwise why else even be here?"
—Steve Jobs
Apple CEO Tim Cook's Monday Washington Post op-ed decrying Indiana's Religious Freedom Restoration Act was remarkable for a number of reasons — foremost because Cook took a public stand on such a contentious issue just weeks ahead of what may well be the most important product launch of his career. But also because it answers a question that has nagged Apple since co-founder Steve Jobs died in 2011: "Can a great company remain great without its visionary leader?"
For those who worried that Jobs set an unmatchable standard for Cook to meet, the past few months have been a pointed rebuttal. With Jobs's passing, Apple may have lost a visionary leader. But in Cook, his handpicked successor, it may well have another. Different, but visionary just the same — a CEO who's willing to weigh in on political and human rights issues and to bring Apple's corporate might to bear on them at a time when the company commands the world's attention.
Shortly after unveiling the Apple Watch in September, Cook publicly came out as gay in an editorial published by Bloomberg Businessweek. "...if hearing that the CEO of Apple is gay can help someone struggling to come to terms with who he or she is, or bring comfort to anyone who feels alone, or inspire people to insist on their equality, then it's worth the trade-off with my own privacy," he wrote.
On Monday, Cook blasted Indiana's days-old religious-objections law, arguing that such legislation is an affront to human freedom and equality. "This isn't a political issue. It isn't a religious issue," he wrote. "This is about how we treat each other as human beings. Opposing discrimination takes courage. With the lives and dignity of so many people at stake, it's time for all of us to be courageous."
But by definition this is a political issue — perhaps it shouldn't be, but it is. Which makes it very dangerous for the CEO of any publicly traded, consumer-facing company to weigh in on. Because when Cook says something, it effectively means that the words are Apple's.
Cook has long been an advocate for human rights and equality. With these two op-eds, he's made Apple one as well. Both make it very clear that he's speaking as Apple's CEO or, in the case of the Washington Post piece, literally on behalf of Apple. Cook's call for social progress is now Apple's as well. And Apple, by joining him to make it, has smartly recognized that this is how Cook emerges from Jobs' shadow to become an iconic company leader in his own right.
None of this is coincidence. Note that this is all happening ahead of Apple's biggest product launch since iPad. Note too, that until mid-2014, Cook had been a very private person. Indeed, in his Bloomberg editorial he cites his desire for privacy as a key reason for not coming out as gay sooner. By penning these op-eds and participating in these interviews he's forfeiting that privacy. And in doing so, he's allowing Apple to shape public perception of him as a leader — an altruist, a philanthropist, and a CEO every bit as worthy of leading Apple as Jobs.
As a strategy, it's potentially fraught — critics are already asking why Cook hasn't taken a similarly firm stance on human rights issues like these in China and posit Apple's business interests there as a possible answer. But as much as that's a question worth asking, it undermines the simple truth of the thing: Tim Cook, the out gay CEO of the world's most valuable company just said pro-discrimination "religious freedom" laws could undo "decades of progress" the country has made toward equal rights.
And that's a dent-the-universe moment, just as the Bloomberg editorial was before it. Giving it further heft, a new book about Steve Jobs — written with Apple's participation — reveals Cook offered an ailing Jobs a portion of his liver, and in a lengthy Fortune profile Cook discloses plans to donate his considerable fortune to charity — after he pays for his nephew's education.
As CEO of Apple, Cook certainly does "lead different" from Jobs, as Fortune observes in a headline spin on the company's old "Think Different" slogan. But in the sense of "think different" as a declaration of Apple's values, Cook and Jobs are clearly of the same mind. For Jobs, think different meant don't be afraid to change the world, because you can. Consider how he once explained it to PBS:
When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money.
That's a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is - everything around you that you call life, was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.
The minute that you understand that you can poke life and actually something will, you know if you push in, something will pop out the other side, that you can change it, you can mold it. That's maybe the most important thing. It's to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you're just gonna live in it, versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it.
I think that's very important and however you learn that, once you learn it, you'll want to change life and make it better, cause it's kind of messed up, in a lot of ways.
Life is kind of messed up. Change it. Make it better.
In making these public calls for social progress, Cook is doing just that, but in his own way. And by making them at this moment in time — ahead of the retail debut of Apple's first truly post-Steve Jobs device — the company is bringing him into his own an iconic leader, and vaporizing the Haunted Empire hand-wringing and "What Would Steve Do" yammering that's nagged the company for years.
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Monday, March 30, 2015
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Anti-Censorship Site Says They Were Hacked By Chinese Government
“Very clearly, the Cyberspace Administration of China is behind both of the recent DDoS attacks,” one of the site’s founders tells BuzzFeed News.
Wang Zhao / Getty Images
A non-profit devoted to battling censorship in China says that it has been hacked by the Chinese government.
GreatFire.org, whose name is a reference to the “Great Firewall of China” that Beijing has deployed to censor access to news and social media sites has provided users with a way to get around the digital blockade for years. Now the organizations’ website, along with that of CN-NYTimes — a site that mirror’s the content of the NY Times in Chinese — is the presumed target of a series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that targeted host GitHub on Thursday. The attacks have continued into Monday, shifting as GitHub has changed its defenses.
"Very clearly, the Cyberspace Administration of China is behind both of the recent DDoS attacks," Charlie Smith, co-founder of GreatFire.org, said in a statement provided to BuzzFeed News. "Hijacking the computers of millions of innocent internet users around the world is particularly striking as it illustrates the utter disregard the Chinese authorities have for international as well as even Chinese internet governance norms."
The website had previously avoided speculating about the origin of the attack. Now, Smith who uses a pseudonym to remain anonymous — said that the organization had the proof needed to identify the source of the attack. “We believe this is a major cyber-security and economic threat for the people of China,” Smith wrote in a blog post on the site.
Using mirror websites hosted on large servers such as Amazon’s Cloud Front, GreatFire.org is able to allow users within China to dodge around the censored sites and search terms the Chinese government has erected. According to a researcher at Insight Labs, the attack was made possible through a strain of JavaScript being inserted into users’ browsers when visiting Baidu, a popular Chinese search engine. “When individuals visited Baidu, their browser would submit a request to both http://bit.ly/1MpM4Kg and http://bit.ly/1NvyikK, overwhelming each site with so much traffic that they would be knocked offline,” the International Business Times explained.
GreatFire.org confirmed that distribution method in an 11 page report released on Monday afternoon. In it, the organization claims that around half of all of the DDoS requests came from users located near Taiwan and Hong Kong. In particular, the report says, “the tampering seems to take place when traffic coming from outside China reaches the Baidu’s servers,” unwittingly targeting “not thousands, but millions of computers around the world, which in their turn attack Amazon infrastructure.”
The result was GreatFire.org on Thursday receiving 2.6 billion requests an hour for its mirrored websites, “which is about 2500 times more than normal levels.” That in turn is preventing users inside of China from using GreatFire.org’s pathways to access banned sites such as Facebook, Gmail, and news websites. While GitHub is currently operating at 100%, the attack remains ongoing, according to its website devoted to status updates.
Founded by three anonymous anti-censorship activists in 2013, GreatFire.org has received funding from the U.S. State Department for the website, though they deny that they are, as China’s government has recently claimed, “anti-China.”
LINK: Read the full report from GreatFire.org here.
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Anti-Censorship Site Says They Were Hacked By Chinese Government
“Very clearly, the Cyberspace Administration of China is behind both of the recent DDoS attacks,” one of the site’s founders tells BuzzFeed News.
Wang Zhao / Getty Images
A non-profit devoted to battling censorship in China says that it has been hacked by the Chinese government.
GreatFire.org, whose name is a reference to the "Great Firewall of China" that Beijing has deployed to censor access to news and social media sites has provided users with a way to get around the digital blockade for years. Now the organizations' website, along with that of CN-NYTimes — a site that mirror's the content of the NY Times in Chinese — is the presumed target of a series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that targeted host GitHub on Thursday. The attacks have continued into Monday, shifting as GitHub has changed its defenses.
"Very clearly, the Cyberspace Administration of China is behind both of the recent DDoS attacks," Charlie Smith, co-founder of GreatFire.org, said in a statement provided to BuzzFeed News. "Hijacking the computers of millions of innocent internet users around the world is particularly striking as it illustrates the utter disregard the Chinese authorities have for international as well as even Chinese internet governance norms."
The website had previously avoided speculating about the origin of the attack. Now, Smith who uses a pseudonym to remain anonymous — said that the organization had the proof needed to identify the source of the attack. "We believe this is a major cyber-security and economic threat for the people of China," Smith wrote in a blog post on the site.
Using mirror websites hosted on large servers such as Amazon's Cloud Front, GreatFire.org is able to allow users within China to dodge around the censored sites and search terms the Chinese government has erected. According to a researcher at Insight Labs, the attack was made possible through a strain of JavaScript being inserted into users' browsers when visiting Baidu, a popular Chinese search engine. "When individuals visited Baidu, their browser would submit a request to both http://bit.ly/1MpM4Kg and http://bit.ly/1NvyikK, overwhelming each site with so much traffic that they would be knocked offline," the International Business Times explained.
GreatFire.org confirmed that distribution method in an 11 page report released on Monday afternoon. In it, the organization claims that around half of all of the DDoS requests came from users located near Taiwan and Hong Kong. In particular, the report says, "the tampering seems to take place when traffic coming from outside China reaches the Baidu's servers," unwittingly targeting "not thousands, but millions of computers around the world, which in their turn attack Amazon infrastructure."
The result was GreatFire.org on Thursday receiving 2.6 billion requests an hour for its mirrored websites, "which is about 2500 times more than normal levels." That in turn is preventing users inside of China from using GreatFire.org's pathways to access banned sites such as Facebook, Gmail, and news websites. While GitHub is currently operating at 100%, the attack remains ongoing, according to its website devoted to status updates.
Founded by three anonymous anti-censorship activists in 2013, GreatFire.org has received funding from the U.S. State Department for the website, though they deny that they are, as China's government has recently claimed, "anti-China."
LINK: Read the full report from GreatFire.org here.
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Two Federal Agents Charged In Massive Bitcoin Theft
Agents from the FBI and Secret Service who were working on the Silk Road case allegedly attempted to pocket hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of seized bitcoins.
The Silk Road, the notorious online black market, has been closed for a year and half.
And yet illegal activity linked to the Dark Web’s most infamous site, which did over $200 million in transactions, continues to crawl out: A criminal complaint unsealed Monday charged two federal agents with wire fraud and money laundering, committed while part of a task force assigned to investigate the Silk Road.
According to the complaint, both Carl Mark Force IV of the Drug Enforcement Administration and Shaun Bridges of the Secret Service, “abused their positions as federal agents and engaged in a scheme to defraud a variety of third-parties, the public, and the government, all for their financial enrichment.”
They did so, according to a federal affidavit signed by IRS investigator Tigran Gambaryan, by using their positions on the Baltimore Silk Road Task Force, to seize large quantities of bitcoins — the cryptocurrency that was the primary unit of exchange on the Silk Road — and move them into their personal bank accounts.
According to the affidavit, Force “stole and converted to his own personal use a sizable amount of bitcoins…rather than turning those bitcoin over the government”; meanwhile, Bridges “despite having personally benefitting in the amount of $820,000 from a Mt. Gox account…two days later served as the affiant on a multi-million dollar seize warrant for Mt. Gox and its owner’s bank accounts.”
The FBI took down the Silk Road, which at its peak listed 10,000 products for sale, 70% of which were drugs, in October 2013. And last month, a federal jury in New York convicted Ross Ulbricht on seven drug and conspiracy charges related to its operation.
But today’s complaint, filed in the United States District Court in San Francisco demonstrates that not even the government agents assigned with investigating the Silk Road were immune to the temptations presented by the anonymous black market.
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Two Federal Agents Charged In Massive Bitcoin Theft
Agents from the FBI and Secret Service who were working on the Silk Road case allegedly attempted to pocket hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of seized bitcoins.
The Silk Road, the notorious online black market, has been closed for a year and half.
And yet illegal activity linked to the Dark Web's most infamous site, which did over $200 million in transactions, continues to crawl out: A criminal complaint unsealed Monday charged two federal agents with wire fraud and money laundering, committed while part of a task force assigned to investigate the Silk Road.
According to the complaint, both Carl Mark Force IV of the Drug Enforcement Administration and Shaun Bridges of the Secret Service, "abused their positions as federal agents and engaged in a scheme to defraud a variety of third-parties, the public, and the government, all for their financial enrichment."
They did so, according to a federal affidavit signed by IRS investigator Tigran Gambaryan, by using their positions on the Baltimore Silk Road Task Force, to seize large quantities of bitcoins — the cryptocurrency that was the primary unit of exchange on the Silk Road — and move them into their personal bank accounts.
According to the affidavit, Force "stole and converted to his own personal use a sizable amount of bitcoins...rather than turning those bitcoin over the government"; meanwhile, Bridges "despite having personally benefitting in the amount of $820,000 from a Mt. Gox account...two days later served as the affiant on a multi-million dollar seize warrant for Mt. Gox and its owner's bank accounts."
The FBI took down the Silk Road, which at its peak listed 10,000 products for sale, 70% of which were drugs, in October 2013. And last month, a federal jury in New York convicted Ross Ulbricht on seven drug and conspiracy charges related to its operation.
But today's complaint, filed in the United States District Court in San Francisco demonstrates that not even the government agents assigned with investigating the Silk Road were immune to the temptations presented by the anonymous black market.
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Coachella And Lollapalooza Are The Latest Venues To Ban Selfie Sticks
You’re gonna have to work for that perfect Instagram shot.
Selfie sticks — like weapons, fireworks, and drugs —will not be allowed at this year's Coachella or Lollapalooza music festivals.
Chris Pizzello / AP
According to NME, major venues in the U.K., including O2 Academy Brixton, O2 Arena, and the SSE Wembley Arena have banned selfie stick for months. At issue was their tendency to block other concert goers' views as well as the possibility for the sticks to hit bystanders in the head.
International tourist attractions have also taken a stand against the sticks. The Palace of Versailles banned them citing a need to protect artwork and visitors. Museums including the Albertina in Austria, the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. and the Museum of Modern Art in New York no longer allow selfie sticks, and Brazilian sports stadiums have feared the rods could be used as weapons by groups of rival fans.
Coachella specifically called out any would-be selfie stick users by additionally banning "narsisstics."
By the way, you'll want to leave your drones at home too.
Coachella
Lollapalooza additionally banned other professional photo equipment such as tripods from general admission. Selfie sticks, sometimes called monopods, didn't make the cut.
Lollapalooza
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