Weekend Reads: Burger King, Netflix's 2021 Schedule, "Big Tech" Bans, White Evangelical Crap, "Star Wars"
Recommended weekend reading material for January 16, 2021.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
Burger King has rebranded and I’m suddenly in the mood for a Whopper Jr. with cheese.
For Burger King’s first global rebrand in more than two decades, we set out to make the brand feel less synthetic and artificial, and more real, crave-able and tasty. We were inspired by the brand’s original logo and how it has grown to have an iconic place in culture. The new logo pays homage to the brand’s heritage with a refined design that’s confident, simple and fun.
Personally, I love it. The retro vibe is definitely an ode to the Burger King logo that I grew up with but it feels fresh rather than simply nostalgic. (Is that what they mean by “crave-able and tasty”?) On the other hand, I’m not so sure about the typeface (Flame Sans) they’re using on all of their packaging. I get why they went with it but at the same time, it looks… goofy.
Burger King isn’t the only major organization to rebrand recently. GM updated their look to match their focus on electric vehicles, Pfizer updated their brand to look more cutting edge, and the CIA’s new look is an appeal to younger, more diverse recruits.
Via Typewolf.
Netflix has announced every single movie that it’s releasing in 2021 (though not every movie has an announced release date). Some highlights: Don’t Look Up (starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence), Escape From Spiderhead (starring Chris Hemsworth and Miles Teller), The Last Mercenary (starring Jean-Claude van Damme), Red Notice (starring Dwayne Johnson, Gal Gadot, and Ryan Reynolds), The White Tiger (starring Adarsh Gourav, Rajkummar Rao, and Priyanka Chopra Jonas), and The Woman In the Window (starring Amy Adams and Gary Oldman).
Speaking of movies, the invasion of the nation’s Capitol might’ve looked like something out of one. But Alissa Wilkinson points out the flaws in such thinking.
Watching them play their designated parts in their movie late on the evening of January 6, one thing was clear: They’d gotten the story beats all wrong. The senators and Congress members and vice president and president-elect hope, with all their might, that their speeches were the start of the movie’s third act, the point where the crisis has been averted and the denouement could begin.
That would be great, but I don’t think it’s true. The evening of January 6, with its speeches about how the apocalypse had been averted, was the start of Act 2. The action is just starting to rise toward the climax.
That wall of lava lamps in Cloudflare’s lobby isn’t just there for trippy decoration. It’s also part of their process for keeping the internet secure.
At Cloudflare, we have thousands of computers in data centers all around the world, and each one of these computers needs cryptographic randomness. Historically, they got that randomness using the default mechanism made available by the operating system that we run on them, Linux.
But being good cryptographers, we’re always trying to hedge our bets. We wanted a system to ensure that even if the default mechanism for acquiring randomness was flawed, we’d still be secure. That’s how we came up with LavaRand.
The article gets pretty technical in places, but the idea of using the real world to generate truly random numbers — which are essential for encryption — is really cool. Via Kottke.
Parler billed itself as a haven for free speech. However, it had some pretty shoddy programming that allowed hackers to download all of its public data.
By Monday, rumors were circulating on Reddit and across social media that the mass disemboweling of Parler’s data had been carried out by exploiting a security vulnerability in the site's two-factor authentication that allowed hackers to create “millions of accounts” with administrator privileges. The truth was far simpler: Parler lacked the most basic security measures that would have prevented the automated scraping of the site’s data. It even ordered its posts by number in the site’s URLs, so that anyone could have easily, programmatically downloaded the site's millions of posts.
Another one of Parler’s development sins was that it didn’t scrub geolocation metadata from any photos or videos that were uploaded to the site. Which means it’s trivial for hackers to find the locations of many Parler users.
M.G. Siegler addresses the controversy of Twitter and other tech companies banning Donald Trump.
I obviously get why people are reacting as they are to the banishment of Trump from Twitter. It’s a big deal. He’s still the President of the United States. For now. And the issue strikes several nerves that are exposed in our current political environment — across a few different constituencies. Big Tech. Free Speech. The 2020 Election. Etc. But let’s not over-think this.
Take a deep breath and a step back. Twitter is a private enterprise. They can set their own rules for what they want or do not want on their service. Including whom they want or do not want on their service. Full stop.
Via Frosted Echoes, who’s also posted some good thoughts on this topic.
Facebook, Twitter, et al. banning Trump has renewed the discussion surrounding those platforms moderating their users’ content. In that regard, this lengthy Techdirt article on Section 230, which Trump has often criticized, is very instructive.
If you said “Once a company like that starts moderating content, it’s no longer a platform, but a publisher”
I regret to inform you that you are wrong. I know that you’ve likely heard this from someone else — perhaps even someone respected — but it’s just not true. The law says no such thing. Again, I encourage you to read it. The law does distinguish between “interactive computer services” and “information content providers,” but that is not, as some imply, a fancy legalistic ways of saying “platform” or “publisher.” There is no “certification” or “decision” that a website needs to make to get 230 protections. It protects all websites and all users of websites when there is content posted on the sites by someone else.
To be a bit more explicit: at no point in any court case regarding Section 230 is there a need to determine whether or not a particular website is a “platform” or a “publisher.” What matters is solely the content in question. If that content is created by someone else, the website hosting it cannot be sued over it.
Forgive the additional editorializing but the debate surrounding “Big Tech” banning Trump and others is so fascinating because it touches on several issues — e.g., free speech, technology’s role in our lives, the channels we use to get information online — that I personally find very interesting.
Like Siegler, I have zero problems with private companies like Facebook and Twitter banning any user if they run afoul of the TOS — and neither should any conservative who swears by the free market. Any site (Facebook, Twitter, your own personal blog) should be able to set up any user/content moderation policy that they want (obviously in accordance with existing laws). And they should be allowed to enforce it as they see fit. And naturally, they should enforce their policy as fairly, consistently, and transparently as possible.
One of the main reasons why people are so frustrated with Facebook et al., however, is that they’ve done a poor job of being consistent and then explaining why they’re inconsistent. Policing content is a Herculean task, especially at the scale at which Facebook and Twitter operate. As such, I’m occasionally tempted to feel sorry for Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, but they really do themselves no favors with their own mealy-mouthed explanations and weaksauce appeals to free speech.
And to be clear, “Big Tech” banning you does not constitute an infringement of your First Amendment rights.
Lastly, this kerfuffle is a reminder that, regardless of where you fall on the ideological spectrum, companies like Facebook and Twitter do, indeed, exert a lot of influence over what we see via their secret algorithms. Which is why I’m a firm believer that if you have a message you truly want to get out there, then you should have your own independent website.
We’re so used to Facebook et al., that we can’t even conceive of other ways to share content online. Which is absolutely wrong. In other words, if you feel like “Big Tech” is being unfair to your content, start your own website and post your content there.
Now, back to the links…
From Timothy Thomas: Black America has been warning the rest of us about the dangers of Trump for years.
This isn’t meant to diminish or demean the warnings that came from our brothers and sisters of European descent. This is only meant to highlight the overwhelming differences of discernibility between our communities (and that such a disclaimer is required only belabors the point). The differences in the African American community’s ability to discern danger rooted in White supremacy is directly related to our concrete historical experiences of injustice. Though it’s fairly easy to say, “We told you so!” out of spite, it will be more helpful to take a look back at old warnings from Black America as a roadmap for where we might go from here.
My friend Jake Meador explains what he means when he talks about “White Evangelical Crap,” beginning with the rise of “folk civil religion.”
For many of our nation’s white evangelicals, their patriotic commitments as Americans are so intertwined with their Christian faith that it is very hard for them to imagine a scenario where Christian fidelity actually requires them to reject standard American ideas about identity, wealth, success, and so on.
There’s been a lot of heavy news lately, so I’m going to end this newsletter with something delightful. Back in 2006, a game company wanted to test the theory of six degrees of separation and asked people to find a person based solely on his name and a single photograph. Fourteen years and multiple dead-ends later, his identity was finally discovered. It’s a fun story but make sure you read to the very end for one final, wonderful twist.
From the Blog
I recently got around to playing Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, which was a welcome break from politics — and expands and enhances the Star Wars universe in some cool ways.
Given that it’s set between the events of Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, Fallen Order contains plenty of familiar ideas, concepts, and characters. You’re still battling the Empire with a lightsaber and the Force, you hang out with Wookiees, you’ve got a cute little droid companion who speaks in bleeps and bloops, and some recognizable names and faces (e.g., Saw Gerrera, Jocasta Nu, a certain Dark Lord of the Sith) pop up here and there.
But Fallen Order is a good example of how to take the familiar and use it as a means to an end, i.e., telling a broader, more vast story that adds to the existing universe instead of simply remaining beholden to it.
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