The Public Access Weekly: Same love
It’s Pride Weekend in San Francisco, which means there will be over a million extra rainbow clad lovelies parading, dancing and celebrating in the streets and that’s always fun. There’s nothing San Francisco loves more than shutting down a street for a party, and SF residents take particular pride in the city’s history of acceptance, tolerance and love. I hope that everyone has a safe and amazing Pride, remember to hydrate and wear sunscreen!
Over in community news, remember that Q&A contest post I kept promising? It’s live! Click here to get the goods, but the TL; DR version is: you guess all the references to the Public Access Weekly titles, you get to be our next Q&A interviewee. We’ll be accepting answers until next month, good luck to everyone who enters!
Also, it’s been a little while since we cross-posted anything to the Engadget home page. So just a reminder that outstanding, well-written original posts will often get promoted to our home page for all of our readers to see and comment on. If you want to see your work appear on the Engadget home page, make sure you are following all the Community Guidelines, you’ve fact-checked and linked appropriately (no SEO. Ever.), everything is correctly spelled and you’ve got a cogent, clear article with support for your statements. Oh yeah, and you absolutely must have an image (which is legally used and appropriately cited).
Next week will be our last week of anniversary posts and celebrations and I’ll be releasing be some special topic suggestions. Those of you who have been frequent posters will get access to exclusive writing prompts. Those of you out there who haven’t logged in over a year will also get a prompt with a list of recent topic suggestions and must-read articles, and those of you who have never logged in … Who are you? Where have you been? Did you change your mind? We will be in touch.
Looking for something to read? Check out:
Managing Editor Dana Wollman gives us a run through of MacOS Sierra with this detailed hands-on that includes info on new features like picture-in-picture mode and “invisible ink” messaging.
Mona’s interview with Robert Stromberg (The Martian, Avatar, Maleficient) on how VR is changing the way the entertainment industry creates and tells stories is a compelling look at how technology alters more than just the gear that is used — it changes everything down to the story itself.
Facebook wants you to use Messenger, really, really badly. So badly in fact that the Android SMS For Messenger app may actually violate Googles policies about “deceptive device settings changes” by hiding the opt-out choice behind a tiny “settings” button. To add insult to injury, some commenters are saying that trying to opt-out of the SMS/Messenger integration feature is giving them a “Not now” screen.
Looking for something to write about? Mull over:
A group of nearly two hundred musical artists, including Taylor Swift and Paul McCartney, want Congress to reform the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act). The DMCA provides a safe harbor for websites whose users may upload content that potentially violates copyright infringement laws. The comments to this story are rife with strong opinions so here’s your chance to tell us in detail: Should the DMCA be revised or updated? If so, how? Do artists deserve to protect their works, and should websites be held responsible in any way for the activity of their users?
Regardless about how you feel about gun control (and if you have strong opinions, feel free to weigh in in the lengthy comments thread), it is striking that these Democratic lawmakers are using social media to broadcast government activities. “The sit-in says a lot about the difficulty of trying to control the media in the internet era.” More and more, the cameras on smartphones are being used to broadcast citizen journalism — even, it would appear, from members of the government. The question here is: How should lawmakers use social media to help them perform their jobs? In what ways should technology and government interact in order to better serve the people?
There was a good amount of talk this week about Mark Zuckerberg’s laptop camera and mic –A savvy Twitter user noticed that a recent picture taken of the Facebook founder revealed that he tapes over his laptops camera and mic. This lead to opposing reactions from news media (“Mark Zuckerburg Covers His Laptop Camera. You should consider it too.” from the New York Times vs. “Wow, Mark Zuckerberg Is Paranoid As Fuck” from Gizmodo). Our question to you is: Do you tape over your laptops camera? Or mic? What about your smartphone camera? Why or why not? And is this overly paranoid?
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