#i will not post personal self-identifying information on the internet (affirmations)

[kindledrose]

just quick note for any new followers n all i’m usually very silly!! and very normal!! and don’t make vent posts ever ive just been going through it lately ok? just bear with me for the next week or so and i’ll be back to 24/7 art + sillyposting lol

#i like dont have anyone to talk to so my thoughts go into the void that is this website. haha #like its the first christmas without my dad and my family is like. we're making it through it but it's also been so horribly weird and- #-kind of awful yknow #like its fine and its fine and then my sister is screaming in her room and my mom is crying in the kitchen and. #plus theres all sorts of awful things happening w extended family (we might lose our house? and a lot of our money? idk) #anyways rahhhh i'm normal. i'm normal #i will not post personal self-identifying information on the internet (affirmations) #delete later #it's christmas and we're Going To Be Okay

[nerdygaymormon]

A response to Ed Smart is gay

Elizabeth Smart became well known because she was kidnapped from her home, raped & forced to live as if married to her kidnapper, and rescued. She helped educate the church against dangerous ways against teaching the Law of Chastity, like being a piece of chewed gum, because those very lessons made her feel she was worthless because she’d been raped and no one would want her. 

Ed Smart is her father. While I understand that he’s been out to his family and to others for several years, he wrote a Facebook post to extended family & friends to come out to them. Because of who his daughter is, his coming out has been reported in the Utah newspapers. 

Nathan Kitchen is the president of Affirmation. He wrote a response that I’m sharing below.

———————————————————————

I have remained silent about the Ed Smart article first published in the Deseret News, because frankly, a person’s sexuality is not newsworthy. It is modern-day voyeurism at its worst to gawk at the gay guy making a hard pivot in life. Just because we all got to know the Smarts during their intense publicity surrounding the kidnapping of their daughter, that doesn’t bestow upon us the right of familiarity with the Smart family.

The Smarts deserve their privacy as they make difficult decisions together. There are no sides here. Only a family trying to make sense of decisions made on the best information they had decades ago. Make no mistake about it, I want to be perfectly clear: both Ed AND Lois Smart are victims of homophobia. It is a deep homophobia etched into the very genetics of society and our institutions.

What we need to do, instead of focusing on a sensational story, is instead laser focus on the prejudices and misconceptions about sexual orientation, gender identity and expression. Eliminating those prejudices and misconceptions is in everyone’s interest. Eliminating homophobia and transphobia is not only essential for the health and well-being of LGBTQ+ individuals and their families, it is essential for the health and well-being of institutions, society, and culture at large.

However, I do think this entire situation brings up a very valid point that is game to talk about.

Ed expressed that in this coming out “the church is not a place where I find solace any longer.” I affirm Ed’s personal feelings on the matter. This reflects his experience and I will never qualify, question, or deny the experiences of any of my LGBTQ+ siblings. This statement does us all a favor by starting a conversation. It invites deep reflection and a hard look at ourselves as members and former members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, both LGBTQ+ and non-LGBTQ+ individuals: Is the church a safe place for LGBTQ+ individuals and their families?

For decades this kind of question was addressed from a very straight-centric perspective, stemming from the overarching premise “What does the Church think about LGBTQ+ people?” Hence over time we received lots of clues about what the Church thought about LGBTQ+ people. From the book “The Miracle of Forgiveness” to today’s Mormon and gay website, the standards of the church concerning LGBTQ+ individuals have been delivered to the members in a constant parade of books, talks, websites, and policies. The problem with this overarching premise is that straight people change their views of LGBTQ+ individuals when they get to know them. So this constant parade of church missives and policies change year, after year, after year as stereotypes are erased and the general population becomes educated concerning LGBTQ+ issues.

As the new civil rights movement continues forward, this continual changing perspective of “What the Church thinks” has become a moving target and tiresome to chase. It has given way to a new LGBTQ+ centric perspective: “What do LGBTQ+ people think about the Church?” This is the healthiest of all premises for LGBTQ+ individuals and their families. It is from this vantage point that we should all approach the question “Is the Church a safe place for LGBTQ+ individuals and their families?”

From an LGBTQ+ centric position concerning safety in the church, we must first acknowledge that there is a “rainbow stained-glass ceiling” in the church. This boundary specifically is marriage equality and the self-determination of gender identity by transitioning. It is the bright line set in doctrine and policy. You bump up against this ceiling when you marry someone of your same sex or transition.

If someone were to honestly ask what could make the church safer and welcoming for LGBTQ+ people, the honest answer would be to affirm marriage equality and self-determination of gender identity. However, ultimately this is an organizational revelation issue in the church. This falls squarely to the Brethren to be responsible for deliberation, inquiring, and delivering a doctrinal change. If there is one thing church history can teach us, it is that it will drive one mad to lobby the Brethren about anything.

So as the Brethren take up the question about what to do with LGBTQ+ members, we all can continue to work together to eliminate homophobia and transphobia in our sphere of influence. And we can do this in very LGBTQ+ centric ways.

Everyone understands that the “rainbow stained-glass ceiling” is there. So when we approach the question “Is the church is safe for LGBTQ+ people?” we need to honor LGBTQ+ people in their personal perspectives of what they themselves think about the church.

We cannot make a blanket statement that the church is not safe for LGBTQ+ people. This denies the self-determination of our LGBTQ+ siblings and erases their perspective. Conversely, we cannot make a blanket statement that the church is safe for LGBTQ+ people because that too erases lived experiences.

When you look at the entire spectrum of LGBTQ+ people in the church or those identifying that they are in the church, you will find LGBTQ+ people who find solace, safety, community, and peace. They have answered for themselves the question “What do I think about the church?” They are not self-loathing, they are not delusional, and they are choosing to live in ways that are empowering to them as an LGBTQ+ individual. It costs us nothing to affirm them in their answer in how they choose to access spirituality and community.

There are also LGBTQ+ people who experience conflict, trauma, suicidal ideation, and rejection at their intersection with the Faith. When they answer the question for themselves about what they think about the church, they do not see it as a safe place to be. They are not weak, lacking in faith, offended, or sinners to step away or leave the church. They are choosing to live in ways that are empowering and healthy for them. I would say that it costs us nothing to affirm their choices to step away or leave, but in reality it does cost. It costs the Church their best and most talented humans in a devastating resource drain from the church.

The thing that people get wrong about LGBTQ+ self-determination is that choices made by self-determination are eternal and unchanging. On the contrary, LGBTQ+ people have the right to change their answer to “What do I think about the Church?” at any time. There is fluidity to the answer, depending on so many individual factors. For example an LGBTQ+ person may find safety in the church until they bump up against the rainbow stained-glass ceiling when they marry someone of the same sex or transition. Others go the opposite direction, and after many years away from the church, they return.

People often get so caught up in a Mormon/Ex-Mormon argument loop about other’s choices concerning the church that it obscures the self-determination of the LGBTQ+ individual. There is not one “correct” way to LGBTQ+. The choice of the LGBTQ+ individual trumps all other judgements of other people.

The new frame of reference for us all is to be LGBTQ+ centric and affirm the very personal answer that an LGBTQ+ person has for themselves about what they think about the church. Anything else is just generic religious proselytizing for or against the church.

So from an LGBTQ+ centric position, knowing the rainbow stained-glass ceiling is firmly in place until the Brethren remove it, what can be done right now to make the church safer and more welcoming for LGBTQ+ individuals who answer for themselves that they want to be there? I have four ideas that can be implemented right now with no doctrinal or revelatory changes. I hope you share even more in the comments section.

1. Have uniform treatment of the LGBTQ+ community church-wide. It is no secret that transgender individuals are treated with the most extreme inequality from ward to ward and stake to stake in issues such as excommunication upon transitioning, attendance of second hour classes, speaking in church, and holding a calling. There is also geographical disparity concerning the management of same sex couples who legally marry. Bishops and Stake Presidents vary widely on youth LGB Issues such as handholding, dating, and even kissing.

It would take almost no effort to find the areas in the church where outreach and the welcoming of LGBTQ+ individuals and their families is occurring and universally train leaders across the church using models already utilized in some of the stakes in Zion. End local leadership roulette for the LGBTQ. We live in the age of the internet. LGBTQ+ individuals are highly aware of this inconsistency and it is troubling.

2. Increase transgender care and education. Much ignorance and transphobia abounds concerning the transgender community in the church. It feels that not much has changed in the understanding of transgender individuals since Dalin H. Oaks made a 2015 statement during a press conference that “while we have been acquainted with lesbians and homosexuals for some time, being acquainted with the unique problems of a transgender situation is something we have not had so much experience with, and we have some unfinished business in teaching on that.”

Simple things such as learning basic trans terminology, using someone’s correct name and pronouns, and changing someone’s name on church records when they have legally changed their name in the courts starts to make a dent in the care of transgender individuals and their families. (Also see #1 above.) We all can and need to be allies for our transgender siblings.

3. Stop the excommunications and church discipline for those who marry someone of the same sex or transition. Just call a moratorium on this spiritual act of violence while everyone is working out the unfinished business. Getting rid of LGBTQ+ people through church discipline reminds me of the harmful words of BYU President Ernest Wilkinson who in 1965 told the BYU student body that BYU did not intend to admit any homosexuals, but if there happened to be a homosexual among the student body, “I suggest that you leave the university immediately after this assembly; and if you are honest enough to let us know the reason, we will voluntarily refund your tuition. We do want others on this campus to be contaminated by your presence.”

LGBTQ+ individuals do not contaminate wards or stakes, they bless wards and stakes. They do not contaminate the children or the youth. The threat of excommunication and discipline creates an environment of fear and anxiety. It makes it unsafe for LGBTQ+ members to come and worship. Take this off the table to immediately make the church safer for LGBTQ+ people. Oh, and take off the asterisk on LGBTQ+ member records that were placed solely to identify that person as being a member of the LGBTQ+ community. That is immoral and wrong.

4. Take the time to talk to and really listen to LGBTQ+ individuals…both members and those who are not members of the church. Do not just seek out those who make you feel comfortable because they are Mormonormative and are like you. See those in the LGBTQ+ community who are not mormonandgay dot org approved gays and lesbians. And for heaven’s sake, stop seeking out the celebrity LGBTQ+ Mormons.

Look for and find the depth and breadth of the diverse and vibrant LGBTQ+ community. Build a relationship and maybe you will be trusted to hear some of the most powerful human stories. Find out what is important to these friends. Find out what hurts them. Listen and do not lecture or give advice. As a guest to their story you will learn of humanity in ways that sacredly expand your view of God and what it means to love one another. Then when they tell you their answer to the question, “What do I think about the church?” you will understand what you can do better to support the LGBTQ+ individual in their self-determination in this very mortal experience to find and have joy.

If you are really interested in making the church safer and more welcoming for LGBTQ+ individuals and their families, root each of your actions in the premise that your efforts in eliminating prejudices and misconceptions about sexual orientation, gender identity, and expression will have a profound positive impact for good for everyone. Everyone. You do not need anyone’s permission to start. You do not need anyone’s permission to love.

#nathan kitchen #queerstake

[insatiabletc]

This is Papi Edwards, a 20 year old person from Indianapolis, Indiana. Since their murder, it has been unclear whether Papi identified as a man or woman at the time of their death and there has been confusion on what their pronouns are. To cover all bases, Papi will be referred to in this piece with they/them pronouns. Additionally, you may be wondering why we chose this specific image of Papi to draw. While there is another image of Papi on the internet showing them with long hair and makeup it is a mugshot. Because the police in this case have been so dismissive of Papi and their gender, we wanted to select an image that Papi had control over. This is the only image we could find that Papi took themselves.  

It has been hard to find information about who Papi really was – their likes, dislikes, personality, dreams, and hopes. Outside of this one chaotic and tragic event, Papi seems currently unknown to the internet. We can say for certain, though, that Papi had friends, a family, and people who miss them. They were a human being.

Whether or not Papi identified as a man or a woman, their gender queerness did play a role in the events surrounding their murder. While the timeline of events is confusing, the transphobia of the Louisville Kentucky police force bleats out amid the noise. Even if Henry Gleaves didn’t expressly say “your gender identity is why I am going to kill you,” it likely did impact the police investigation. Please remember as you read the following details that Papi was a complex individual, just like you.

According to an article in Yes! Magazine, “The Human Rights Campaign has estimated that trans women are 4.3 times more likely to become homicide victims than all women, and the vast majority of the victims are Black”* Since 2016, the number of trans women of color who have been murdered has increased.

The Facts of the Case

On January 9th, 2015, Papi Edwards and several friends stopped in at a hotel in Louisville Kentucky, to earn some money before completing their journey back to Indianapolis, Indiana. Papi posted an ad on a website advertising sex services and Henry Gleaves responded, and the two arranged to meet up at the hotel. In the ad, Edwards suggested they were a woman.

Gleaves told his family that he was headed to the hotel to apply for a job. Once at the hotel, Gleaves and Edwards, accompanied by Edwards’ friends, went into a hotel room and Gleaves gave Edwards $50 for a blowjob. Shortly after, Edwards’ friends left the room. Once the blowjob commenced, Gleaves “found out” that Edwards was trans. Gleaves became upset and Edwards’ friends came back into the hotel room.

The defense says that Edwards and their friends attacked and mocked Gleaves, hit him with a sock full of heavy cans, and robbed him of his car keys and his cash.

The prosecution says there is no evidence of a robbery or assault.

Gleaves left the hotel room and went to his car to grab a gun. He then returned to the front desk to continue filling out his job application. It is unclear where Edwards or their friends were at this point. After a bit of time, Gleaves saw Edwards and friends go through the lobby and into the parking lot.

The defense says Gleaves wanted to take down their license plate number to give to authorities.

The prosecution and witnesses say that Gleaves was waiting in the lobby to ambush them.

Gleaves yelled at the group, and seeing Gleaves, Edwards tossed car keys (it is not specified if these are Gleaves’ keys) to a friend and turned back with a sock full of cans to face Gleaves and began to enter the lobby. Gleaves shot Edwards multiple times and fled the scene.

Four days after the shooting, Gleaves was found hiding in his girlfriend’s closet. After his initial arrest, Gleaves called his girlfriend and asked her to destroy evidence on his phone. How do the police know this? Because it was a call from jail the conversation was recorded.

In 2016, Gleaves was found guilty of manslaughter, as the jury felt his shooting of Edwards was done in some sort of self-defense.

Self Defense

We always feel a little icky questioning self-defense, as we are aware of how complicated self-defense can be. However, there are so many lingering questions about this case, and we wish we could have seen the trial transcript for ourselves. Unfortunately, documents are not available to the public as far as we can tell.

So, here are our big questions:

·       The defense painted Edwards’ sock of cans as a menacing tool for robbery. Another interpretation is that Edwards used this as self-defense when meeting with unknown clients. Based on how dangerous sex work can be, we find that to be plausible. Why is Gleaves’ gun only interpreted as a method of self-defense and not a menacing tool for murder?

·       If Gleaves followed the group out to the parking lot to “get their license plate number” to report them to authorities…why didn’t he call 911 immediately? Sources do not say how long he spent filling out that application and getting his gun from his car, but it seems like enough time would have passed for him to call the authorities. We understand that calling the police is not always a safe option for people of color, but he was planning on calling them anyway! Was he thinking that he would report the crime anonymously later? We think that actually could make sense, as maybe Gleaves was worried about being prosecuted for engaging in prostitution.

·       Why didn’t he report the robbery to the front desk? Were there people at the front desk? Did he have to request the job application from a human? Maybe he really did want a job at the hotel and thought the whole event would taint his chances at being hired. Though, Gleaves did tell authorities that he just filled out the application to keep up appearances for his family.

It appears that there are a couple of points in the timeline where Gleaves was ramping up the conflict. If he wanted to get the group’s license plate number to later report the robbery, why did he yell? He could have quietly watched what car they got into and jotted down the number. It seems like Gleaves was instigating a response from Edwards.

 The Investigation & Dwight Mitchell

Dwight Mitchell was (and is) the spokesperson for the Louisville Kentucky police force. Here are some quotes from Mitchell on Papi Edwards:

“As far as I am concerned, that was a man that was shot. It was always a man…It’s obviously a man, right? He doesn’t have a female name. I am not going to get into a debate about if he was transgender or not.”

Mitchell also referred to being trans as a “condition.” **

Why does Mitchell’s opinion on Edwards’ gender matter?

If you are someone who feels well represented and respected by your local authorities, imagine if that local authority’s spokesperson denied and mocked your existence. Imagine asking for help from an organization that says your identity is a “condition.” Imagine how alienating that would be. This is a message, intentional or not, to trans people that they are not seen. That their reality is denied and denigrated. This matters because Papi was a sex worker, and sex workers are already operating with the assumption that the police are not there to help them. When members of society feel that they cannot trust its institutions, they become more vulnerable to those that society does accept. Our words and how we use them matter, especially when speaking as the voice for many.

When Edwards’ murder was first being investigated, a witness told authorities point-blank that Edwards was murdered because they were trans. The witness said Edwards was shot directly after saying “I’m a tranny.”*** Despite this information, Louisville police not only refused to say it was a hate crime (we’ll explore that in a second) but also refused to say Edwards was trans and that gender was a factor in their murder. Even though they had a witness telling them that was the motive. In fact, video was leaked to the media of a witness explaining this clearly to an officer and the officer verbally affirming that he understood the witness to be saying that Edwards’ gender was key in the murder. This video was taken before Mitchell uttered the above quotes.

Why wouldn’t the police bureau admit gender was a factor in the crime? In a Buzzfeed article about the case, it was mentioned that Kentucky lacks a hate crime law that covers gender. Maybe officers were trying to paint a specific picture of the crime for better prosecution? What doesn’t make sense though, is that a hate crime does not need to occur for a murder to be prosecuted. So why shy away from and deny the gender aspect of the murder?

We are dismayed that Mitchell is still acting as a spokesperson for the Louisville police department and we were unable to ascertain whether his views of gender have changed. For the good of the Louisville community, we hope so.

*taken from this article: https://www.yesmagazine.org/social-justice/2019/11/12/black-trans-women-pay/

**Quotes taken from this article:  https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/dominicholden/evidence-contradicts-police-account-of-possible-anti-transge#.wcNq26PaR 

***Why didn’t we include this information in the timeline? Well, this witness later changed their story about the events once the case got to trial. It is included here, however, as the authorities did not know the timeline at the start of the investigation.

 Want to Learn More about Missing and Murdered Trans Women of Color? Here are some great sources that we have come across:

·        The Trans Obituaries Project: Honoring the Trans Women of Color Lost in 2019 (USA - obituaries written by Raquel Willis, illustrations done by Jacob Stead): https://www.out.com/print/2019/11/20/trans-obituaries-project-honoring-trans-women-color-lost-2019#media-gallery-media-1

·        The Human Rights Campaign: https://www.hrc.org/blog/topic/transgender

#louisville #kentucky #translivesmatter #transpoc #illustration #portrait #art #true crime #truecrime

[charlotteroseessex-blog]

Paedophile Hunters, how bow dah?

Everyone loves a little bit of online gratification, to have a successful post probably means more to you than getting a Facebook comment from your mum telling you what a 'wonderful young woman' you've turned into. A hundred or so likes on a photo maybe, ten or twenty shares on a Facebook post or maybe even a few hundred new subscribers on your YouTube channel is craved more nowadays than any other form of complementation. 

But when does this desire to be 'liked' stop? When will the obsession to get fulfilment through the intangible consumption of likes be officially granted as the pointless self-gratification it truly is. I mean, likes aren't reflected in person. They're simply an effortless gesture of a double tap on a shameless selfie which then proceeds to enhance the dopamine of the 'poster' to gage temporary happiness, unattainable by a real life, real time, REAL COMPLIMENT given by an individual consuming more importance than 3/4 of the followers maintained on the account. Why do we all require such desperation to get affirmation from people, let's be honest, we don't really care about? It's an addiction. We, as the suffering generation of online gratification, need to be 'hit' every so often with the social media drug also known as dopamine.

Virality is a socially constructed repercussion (mostly) of when a social media post blows up and becomes a legendary product through the power of sharing. Despite the fact that not every video or photo that goes viral does so due to it's shocking or crude content, it is however a rarity these days to discover a genuinely enlightening or admirable post that would receive the same amount of attention as something that would raise eyebrows rather than hands (in applaud). It is fair to say that social networking platforms encourage and allow the ability of an individual to create a profile whereby they feel free to express themselves separate from the realms of reality. Users may post or share content they found entertaining in the hope that the same gratification is met for their followers. Through the mechanism of sharing, popular posts pursue the process of diffusion whereby they are more likely to have increasing views in a shorter duration of time.

Now, undeniably not every post will embark on the journey of virality. Who's to say what videos will be popular or not? It is not always easy to recognise the specific elements of a post which increases its potential of virality when posted online as, truthfully, we are all viewers and have as much power as the next person reacting to the same post. However - and almost in the same breath - it is more easily identifiable which content is most likely to provoke popularity amongst which groups due to our interests and influences posed upon us by who we follow.

The internet enables society to have access to an abundance of information which allows for individuals to broaden their knowledge around desired topics. Through the normalisation of being online and the excess of such we indulge ourselves in, we have now opened ourselves up to an information rich world whereby the amount of content discoverable by one simple search stereotypically provides us with around 150M search results in 0.6 seconds.

In outlining the obvious realms of virality and the content shared for entertainment, it is important to also recognise the usefulness of pages and organisations which rely on the concept of virality to engage supporters and increase awareness of underlying issues. The recent online phenomenon, known as the Paedophile Hunters, take the purpose of virality to a whole new level by using the application of Facebook to seek and achieve lawful justice. Across the UK there are around 566k Facebook pages working as exposure platforms and ensuring the safety of their local community, but more specifically, children.

The groups actively function as a justice system and upload live stings of suspected paedophiles operating in their area in order to provide a safer online experience for children. These specific pages, operated by who the police describe as vigilante's, have seen a dramatic rise in the last decade when public dissatisfaction was placed upon the police force and their capturing of child predators. 

Facebook is used to broadcast live stings once a suspected paedophile is approached as the reliance on virality is the main concept which enables these vigilantes to expose the individuals and prosper in keeping their community safe. Paedophile Hunters gain huge followings and viewing audiences through their live exposures of suspected predators in order to broadcast otherwise undetected criminals to the police. In uploading content to Facebook, viewers - most likely those occupying in the featured community of the video - are able to share the content and in doing so are making their audience aware of the information they feel important to expose to more viewers.  

The diffusing of information allows for videos to embark on the journey of virality and access a broader audience than those it was originally made viewable for, like followers or likes and the first audiences exposed to the video through sharing. Viral videos are created by the diffusion process and through the effects of this, causes the community to support such groups as Paedophile Hunters, in raising awareness intended for a national level to make a change in increasing police action. In videos that receive the impact of virality, it engages more people with the dangers prevalent in their local communities and solidifies further support in future stings which intends to force the police in recognising the growing demand and attention for such crimes against children.

Paedophile Hunters in a nut shell:

Paedophile Hunters present in various areas of the country distribute various job roles in gaging leads in potential offenders, one of which being an individual, usually a woman, to pose as a young child online in order to attract the men. In order to avoid the police accusing the vigilantes of entrapment, they await their fake profiles to be actively contacted by predators and then pursue the case after communication is instigated. To successfully carry out the process of catching suspected paedophiles, vigilante groups will engage in online chats with the suspect over the course of several conversations which then provides the police with solidified evidence in the form of chat histories, once they are exposed during a live Facebook sting. Once this happens, the case and all relevant findings are passed over to the police in order for true law and order to be enforced. 

(Or this is what they hope to achieve anyway as many cases fail in succeeding courts as the accusations of vigilantes are often portrayed as a nuisance to police and the groups are regularly warned against continuing their services with a fine or caution.)

As the crime of Paedophilia rises citizens clearly feel required to take on the job of policing themselves. Since the rise of vigilantes, the rate in imprisonment of sex offenders has taken an unprecedented rise so therefore, without speculation, the work of vigilantes should not to be undermined. Despite the police force opposing the element of live Facebook stings when targeting a suspect, it must be outlined that the footage is then provided as evidence or used as protection if the suspected person was to create false allegations in the treatment of his citizens arrest, endangering the ethics and validation of vigilante evidence. Therefore documenting stings prevail a saviour for the vigilante groups as well as exposing identities of the paedophiles to the community.

Virality is a powerful tool which controls the material that receives the most attention in the smallest amount of time. Content which proceeds the diffusion process allows the exposure of important information to those concerned and vulnerable to the matter, most specific to Paedophile stings are groups like parents and local schools. The effects of uploading any viral video can receive masses of welcome or unwelcome attention - depending on the video itself. 

Popular videos like Danielle Bregoli's featuring on the Dr. Phil Show, where her proclaimed phrase 'cash me outside, how bow dah' made Danielle famous (now known as Bhad Bhabie) with a net worth of $600k. Since the clip of her on the show went viral, she has launched her music career by featuring in Kodak Black's song 'Everything 1k' as well releasing a few of her own songs like 'Trust me' and 'These Heaux' (yeah, I haven't heard of them either)… 

In outlining the impact of virality, pages like the Paedophile Hunters expose individuals on a regular basis so it is important to appreciate the power of such stings on unsuspecting local people. As of recently, the consequences of exposing innocent people has made headlines as well as the pursuit of inexperienced civilians taking the law into their own hands. In such cases whereby the concept of embracing the right of a citizen's arrest and retaining a supposed criminal fails to preserve the justice desired. Some people have acted out in taking not only the law into their own hands but the lives of the accused. Through the dangers of virality and propagation falling into the wrong hands, the chances of a successful reconstruction is unlikely due to inexperience and naivety which is especially risky with groups mimicking the process of Paedophile exposures. 

An incident reported in May 2016 revealed the act of a 15 year old girl ending the life of an innocent 42 year old man, Darren Kelly, based on false convictions and entrapment. The 15 year old used the dating profile of her own mother to lure a man into meeting what he thought was a woman his own age, due to her preconceptions that he was in fact a paedophile. Despite Kelly pursuing the meet up with the assumption he was meeting an adult female, and NOT in fact an underage girl, the 15 year old had already arranged for a mob of 4 men to strip, beat and then stab the man to death which was recorded on camera. Through the method of recorded stings, it is obvious that the girl conjured inspiration from observed live exposures as posted by vigilantes on Facebook prior to the attack.

The consequences of pursuing false or inaccurate information can be detrimental to those falsely accused and can (and have) cause tragic life changing circumstances, much like the case of Darren Kelly. It could be suggested that the element of virality encouraged the young girl to embark on this specific case of injustice, merely through previous vigilante videos which attempted to enlighten the internet on police failures in protecting children against sex offenders. However it can be seen in this murder case that if the young girl hadn’t of been exposed to such live Facebook stings, she may not have taken as such drastic measures as she did in using such explicit techniques in recording the murder - but that’s just speculation. 

Virality is a powerful mechanism in spreading and sharing information found to be entertaining or useful to other people. In the case of Paedophile Hunters, it is justifiable to ascertain the usefulness of their videos reaching a virality status in urging for change and exposing issues currently hidden from the public. Despite the dangers of virality it is important to understand that the internet only gages a crisis when the content shared is harmful or threatening to others. Unlike in the clip below whereby the only posed dangers are for those susceptible to falling victim to the predator... 

LIVE STING: DARK JUSTICE

[interestingarticlesforme]

An overview of the third-party cookie crackdown

n March 2021, Google announced on its Ads & Commerce blog that it was “Charting a course towards a more privacy-first web”. The blog post was a re-affirmation of Google’s commitment, first revealed in January 2020, to remove support for third-party tracking cookies in Chrome from 2022, and contained further details about how it plans to protect user anonymity once these are phased out. But it was also a sign of just how much the conversation around third-party cookies has shifted over the past few years.

The debate around third-party cookies, which for years have been heavily relied-on by the marketing and advertising industry to compile records of a user’s browsing history and build up a profile of their interests, preferences and habits, stretches back as far as 2013, when Firefox, Safari and even Internet Explorer all began implementing some form of default blocking of third-party cookies or ad tracking.

At the time, this decision to disallow third-party cookies – even coming from most of the major internet browsers – was highly controversial among industry commentators. They argued that cookies were necessary for the ad campaigns that fuel the internet to function, or that cookies – at their heart simply a piece of technology designed to retain preferences by identifying when the same user returns to a website – are not inherently intrusive, rather that certain applications of them are.

And for all that steps to block third-party cookies were taken by web browsers very early on, it took several more years for some of them to implement comprehensive blocking, as well as for the web browser with the largest share of the market – Google Chrome – to join them. During that time, cookies remained pivotal to the way that marketers tracked, targeted and measured the impact of their campaigns; but the conversation around privacy on the web, particularly as it related to advertising, was changing.

Fast forward to 2021, and the demise of the third-party cookie (nicknamed the “cookiepocalypse”) is now an accepted fact, with discussions turning instead to how marketers can prepare, and what kinds of solutions and alternatives should be adopted. But how did we get to the point where one of the biggest web advertising heavyweights is withdrawing its support for third-party cookies, and where do we go from here? In this briefing, I’ll look at the recent developments that led to our current situation, the stances being taken by key industry players, and the alternatives that promise to balance privacy with marketing effectiveness.

Covered in this briefing:

The cookiepocalypse: a timeline

An end to cookies, but not to behavioural targeting

Alternatives to third-party cookies: what should marketers use?First, second and zero-party data Contextual targeting Alternative forms of measurement

A more positive – and private – future

The cookiepocalypse: a timeline

While 2019 was by no means the beginning of the debate about cookies – as we’ve established – it was in many ways when the tide really began to turn against third-party tracking cookies, with a number of huge developments taking place in a short space of time. And while the calamitous impact of the Covid-19 pandemic overtook the global conversation early into 2020, significant developments on the privacy and tracking front still took place in 2020 and early 2021 as players like Apple and Mozilla entrenched their established positions and moved to block additional forms of tracking.

March 2019: Apple releases Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) 2.1 for Safari, the latest version of a feature designed to prevent cross-site tracking by placing limitations on cookies and other website data. First introduced in 2017, ITP prevented cookies from being used in a third-party context after 24 hours, and purged website data and cookies altogether after 30 days if the user hadn’t interacted with the website again during that time.

Adtech companies responded to the implementation of ITP by finding ways to make third-party cookies behave like first-party cookies, circumventing the block. So, with ITP 2.1, Safari squashed this workaround by wiping first-party cookies after seven days. In May 2019, it upped the ante with ITP 2.2, which deleted certain types of first-party cookies after just 24 hours, further closing the loophole. This seriously rattled advertisers, as Safari is the world’s second-most popular browser (with a current market share of 19.14%, according to GlobalStats) and the default for anyone using a Mac, Macbook, iPad or iPhone.

May 2019: At Google’s annual developer conference, Google I/O, the Chromium team announces upcoming changes that will give users more visibility over the types of cookies being set in their browser and options to block them. It also announces plans to “reduce the ways in which browsers can be passively fingerprinted” – fingerprinting being a catch-all term for more difficult to detect methods of user tracking that subvert cookie controls.

July 2019: The ICO publishes stringent new guidance that rules out many of the pretexts that advertisers have been using to set cookies in users’ browsers without actively obtaining their consent. The guidance specifies that websites:

Cannot rely on implied consent for the use of cookies

Do need to obtain consent for analytics cookies (which are not considered essential to the functioning of the site)

Cannot use a ‘cookie wall’, which restricts access to the site until users consent to cookies being set

Cannot rely on legitimate interests, a lawful basis for processing personal data under GDPR, to set cookies without consent.

August 2019: A study by researchers from the University of Michigan and Ruhr-University Bochum finds that 86% of cookie consent notices offer no other options than a consent button, while 57% are found to use dark patterns in order to influence a user into consenting.

September 2019: Mozilla announces that Enhanced Tracking Protection (ETP), which blocks third-party tracking cookies and cryptominers, will be enabled by default in Firefox on desktop and Android. It had previously enabled ETP by default for new users in June; the September update deploys it for all Firefox users across the board. While Firefox has a much smaller market share than Chrome or Safari (currently standing at 3.76% worldwide), it is still the world’s third-most used web browser and its implementation of cookie blocking by default is another blow for marketers and advertisers.

Apple also releases ITP version 2.3 for Safari, which blocks two additional workarounds that ad companies have been using to track users: localStorage and document.referrer.

October 2019: The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) rules that pre-checked consent boxes for the use of cookies are not valid, and that consent requires an active opt-in. It also rules that users must be provided with information on cookie duration and whether third parties have access to them. Given the findings of the August study by researchers in Michigan and Bochum, this means that the vast majority of websites are contravening EU law by not giving users the option to decline cookies.

January 2020: The loudest death toll yet sounds for third-party cookies as Google announces that it will withdraw support for third-party cookies in Chrome by 2022. Executives at the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4As) issue a joint statement warning that, “Google’s decision to block third-party cookies in Chrome could have major competitive impacts for digital businesses, consumer services, and technological innovation”, and that it “would threaten to substantially disrupt much of the infrastructure of today’s Internet without providing any viable alternative.”

March 2020: Apple confirms “full third-party cookie blocking” in iOS, iPadOS and Safari, blocking cookies for cross-site resources by default across the board. John Wilander, the WebKit engineer behind Safari’s ITP, writes that, “This is a significant improvement for privacy since it removes any sense of exceptions or “a little bit of cross-site tracking is allowed.”” He celebrates that Safari is now “the first mainstream browser to fully block third-party cookies by default.”

In the same month, AdExchanger reports that an unnamed business group within the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is petitioning Google to delay the phase-out of third-party cookies in Chrome in light of the unfolding coronavirus pandemic. Google product manager Marshall Vale later writes to the W3C to say that it is “premature” to discuss any adjustment to the cookie phase-out timeline, although he promises that Google will “revisit” the topic as the situation evolves.

June 2020: At WWDC20 – Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference – Apple announces that the next version of iOS (iOS 14) will ask users whether they want to be tracked by any given app, and that app developers will be required to self-report the kinds of permissions that their apps require. This development, called App Tracking Transparency or ATT, was later pushed back beyond the launch of iOS 14 to give developers additional time to prepare; it will now form part of iOS 14.5, which entered developer beta on 1st February, and is expected to be deployed fully at some point in March.

While not directly related to cookies, Apple’s move to require apps to disclose the data they track is in line with its broader push towards protecting user privacy, and is particularly relevant to the question of whether and how users can be tracked within mobile apps, where cookies (which are browser-based) cannot be set.

November 2020: Apple announces further enhancements to ITP to defend against something called CNAME Cloaking – a tactic that maps an internal domain to an external one and allows a tracker to circumvent the division between first-party and third-party cookies, giving it the same level of access as a first-party cookie.

February 2021: Firefox introduces “Total Cookie Protection” as a feature of ETP Strict, an optional, more privacy-conscious version of ETP.

According to the blog post published by Mozilla, Total Cookie Protection “works by maintaining a separate “cookie jar” for each website you visit. Any time a website, or third-party content embedded in a website, deposits a cookie in your browser, that cookie is confined to the cookie jar assigned to that website, such that it is not allowed to be shared with any other website.” It goes on to add that Total Cookie Protection “makes a limited exception for cross-site cookies when they are needed for non-tracking purposes, such as those used by popular third-party login providers … Such momentary exceptions allow for strong privacy protection without affecting your browsing experience.”

Meanwhile, Bloomberg reports that “according to people with knowledge of the matter”, Google is exploring an Android version of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency. To this end, it is “seeking input” from stakeholders such as developers and advertisers in a bid to find a solution that does not compromise their ability to generate revenue. The report goes on to state that Google’s solution “is likely to be less strict and won’t require a prompt to opt in to data tracking like Apple’s … The exploration into an Android alternative to Apple’s feature is still in the early stages, and Google hasn’t decided when, or if, it will go ahead with the changes.”

March 2021: Google reveals further details on how it plans to handle user identification and tracking in the blog post ‘Charting a course towards a more privacy-first web’. In particular, it confirms that it does not have any plans to create “alternate identifiers” that would track users around the web – which many marketers, publishers and content creators see as a betrayal of their interests. Instead, Google intends to draw on the vast amount of first-party data at its disposal – thanks to its ownership of properties like Youtube, Google Maps, and of course Google Search – to target users, which will further entrench its dominant position as one of the most powerful online advertisers.

Google has also not made any commitments to phasing out the use of Google Advertising IDs, or GAIDs, which are used to anonymously track user ad activity on Android devices, in a similar fashion to a third-party cookie. Given that increasing amounts of activity take place within mobile apps and away from the open web, this would arguably be a bigger concession for Google – and while there have been hints that Google may implement an ATT-style solution on Android, it is still ultimately in Google’s interests to be able to track users and the effectiveness of its own advertising, whatever that entails.

An end to cookies, but not to behavioural targeting

While Google has been making all the right noises in its cookie-related announcements about the need for privacy on the web, in reality it is not about to do anything that would seriously compromise its own ability to effectively target and drive conversions from advertising. Marketers always knew this, of course – but had hoped that Google would throw its considerable weight behind one of a number of proposed industry solutions such as Unified ID, an initiative with widespread support among adtech providers that uses an email-based identifier to target users while purportedly giving them more control over how their data is shared.

Instead, Google has made it clear that it is only interested in implementing home-grown solutions like Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) – an interest-based targeting method that Google claims will provide “at least 95% of the conversions per dollar spent when compared to cookie-based advertising”. Marketers are waiting to see whether this claim is borne out – but what is evident is that while cookies may be going away, behavioural targeting will not.

FLoC is a more anonymised method of targeting than third-party tracking cookies in that it uses machine learning to divide users into groups with similar interests and target ads based on those interests. As Google puts it, this method “effectively hides individuals “in the crowd” and uses on-device processing to keep a person’s web history private on the browser.” Users may not be tracked across browsers or across devices, but their activity within Chrome will still be tracked and used for ad targeting, with presumably no capacity to opt out (except by using another browser). This has not gone over well with privacy advocates, and privacy-conscious users may see it as little improvement over third-party tracking cookies.

Meanwhile, as marketers wait to discover more information about the effectiveness of FLoC, some of the drawbacks are already becoming clear: FLoC’s interest-based groups will not be precise enough to measure interest in a specific product, which jeopardises advertising methods like product-specific retargeting. FLoC will also make attribution and measuring campaign effectiveness much more difficult, with metrics like viewability potentially taking precedence over conversions.

There’s also the issue that the introduction of FLoC only promises to further entrench Google’s position as the dominant force in web advertising. Google’s blog post was a reminder that in a world without third-party cookies, first-party data will reign supreme – and fortunately for Google, it has access to a wealth of it, through properties like Search, Youtube and Maps. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has already launched a probe into Google for “suspected breaches of competition law” over its plan to phase out third-party cookies in Chrome, following complaints that Google’s plans for a replacement would “abuse a dominance position” in advertising.

Marketers have known for some time that the mass withdrawal of support for third-party tracking cookies by the major web browsers would require changes to the way they track and measure campaigns, and many have been preparing for the change for some time. Nevertheless, a considerable number have been left dismayed by the approach that Google has chosen to take instead.

With Google retreating further behind its own walled garden with the introduction of FLoC, and the second- and third-most-used browsers (Safari and Firefox) blocking identity-based tracking of almost every kind, where should marketers go from here?

Alternatives to third-party cookies: what should marketers use?

As it became increasingly clear that the writing was on the wall for third-party cookies, the industry has been abuzz with talk of alternatives: alternative identifiers, alternative forms of measurement, alternative data sources, and alternative forms of advertising.

Some of these are more viable than others. Many alternative identifiers, for instance, encounter the issue of the need for universal adoption: while Unified ID has attracted widespread support from adtech players, Google’s refusal to support it has thrown its future into question, and there are also doubts as to whether consumers would agree to adopt it. Another potential cookie alternative, digital fingerprinting (which uses attributes like operating system, web browser type and version, language setting and IP address to identify and track a user’s device), is seen as even more intrusive than cookies, and Safari, Firefox and Chrome have all either taken steps to block digital fingerprinting methods or have pledged to reduce the ways that users can be targeted by them. And device-level IDs, like GAIDs or Apple’s IDFA (ID for Advertisers), still present problems with regard to privacy and with cross-device tracking.

But identifiers aren’t the only means of personalising advertising for users in a meaningful way, or of measuring campaign effectiveness. With the eradication of cookies, marketers have known they’ll need to get creative, and possibly employ a variety of methods to achieve the same results that they were able to obtain with cookies. However, there are also benefits to using these alternatives. Let’s take a look at some alternatives to cookie-based targeting and measurement, and the reasons why marketers should employ them.

First, second and zero-party data

“First-party relationships are vital,” wrote Google in its Ads & Commerce blog post, and this statement isn’t just true for Google – it’s true for marketers, publishers, and businesses of every stripe. First-party data is data a business collects from its users directly, and can take a wide variety of forms, from things like internal searches carried out on an ecommerce site to previously purchased items, CRM data, loyalty programme data, and much more. All of these pieces of information can enable businesses to tailor marketing and the customer experience in a way that feels genuine and helpful rather than intrusive.

A subset of first-party data that has attracted considerable industry interest in the wake of regulations like the GDPR is ‘zero-party data’. This refers specifically to data that the consumer has shared proactively, such as profile information (which can include demographic data like date of birth and gender), content preferences, responses to polls and quizzes, and many other varieties. Again, this can be used to more authentically personalise a consumer’s experience, but without the need to infer preferences from their behaviour.

One advantage of the cookie crackdown is that it is prompting marketers and brands to look more closely at the relationships they have with their own customers, review the data they already have at their disposal, and think about smart ways to use it in marketing and advertising campaigns. And while larger businesses may seem to have an unfair advantage in that they have access to significantly more first-party data than smaller businesses, small amounts of first-party data can still be used for predictive modelling, analysed, and built out into audiences. Forming data partnerships with another organisation (data obtained in this way is known as second-party data) is another solid strategy and a way of evening out the playing field.

In other words, cookie data is far from the be-all and end-all – and using other data sources will lead to improved relationships with customers, better personalisation and more accurate results.

Contextual targeting

Contextual ad targeting, a method of delivering relevant ads based on the content of the page a user is viewing rather than who the user is (or is thought to be) has enjoyed increased attention with the looming cookiepocalypse throwing the future of behavioural targeting into question.

And although the likes of Google have signalled their intention to continue targeting users based on behaviour (just in a slightly less precise way), contextual targeting is still an option worth exploring, offering many of the same benefits in terms of ad relevance as behavioural targeting, plus some arguable advantages from a user perspective. After all, a user who reads about marketing technology for their day job might not be interested in having martech ads follow them around off the clock – but they might be interested in an ad relevant to the hobby-related article they are reading for fun.

Contextual targeting on the web has been around for decades, and to some marketers, might seem like a rather basic and outdated method of ad targeting compared with more precise cookie-based methods of targeting. However, as Patricio Robles wrote for the Econsultancy blog, “Contextual advertising in the 2020s will be more sophisticated … Better technology allows marketers to apply their first-party data to contextual ads, and they will also be able to target by various non-unique attributes, including device type, location, and time of day, many of which can impact the effectiveness of campaigns.”

Alternative forms of measurement

Measurement and attribution were already challenging enough for marketers before the demise of the third-party cookie. In an online world that has fragmented into countless touchpoints, channels and devices, how can marketers determine exactly which of their actions moved the needle or resulted in a conversion?

But many have seen this as a positive opportunity: cookies were far from a perfect solution to marketing measurement, particularly in the age of mobile where so many interactions already take place away from browsers. And while there isn’t one single, ideal measurement solution that will allow marketers to comprehensively measure campaign performance in the post-cookie age, a variety of methods exist with different strengths marketers can call on in different circumstances to achieve their goals. Here are just a few of those methods:

Econometrics/Marketing Mix Modelling

Econometrics, also called Marketing Mix Modelling, is a method of using statistical analysis to understand the impact of a range of different variables – from sales promotions to the weather or the economy – on marketing KPIs.

It pulls in data from a wide range of different sources, meaning that it depends relatively little on third-party cookie data, but it is also most effective when run over time, using a large number of data points. This makes it less of a viable option for marketers who don’t already have a lot of data. Marketing Mix Modelling is useful for informing high-level decisions like budget split between channels, but can’t inform granular decisions like how to optimise bids.

Incrementality testing

Incrementality testing is a specific variety of A/B testing that allows marketers to measure the lift provided by a particular type of advertising by comparing the conversion rate of one group, which was not exposed to that advertising, with the conversion rate of another that was. The difference between the two groups’ conversion rates can be used to calculate the incremental lift provided by that advertising – assuming that all other variables between the two groups are the same.

In other words, incrementality testing is most effective when you can control all of the variables that are likely to impact on uplift – otherwise you might be attributing conversions to the wrong one. Incrementality testing can be useful for determining the true impact of a particular piece of advertising, channel or campaign on conversions and finding out whether it offers value (and how much) or just takes ‘credit’ for an action that would have occurred anyway.

Brand lift studies

Brand lift studies are a type of market research that surveys consumers to find out whether their level of awareness, their perception of a brand, and/or their likelihood of making a purchase has changed after being exposed to an ad. Many ad providers, including Facebook and Google, offer native brand lift tools to help marketers measure the impact of their ad campaigns.

Brand lift studies are useful for providing detail on the effectiveness of a specific campaign or channel, but are difficult to generalise beyond that. Wider brand studies can also be carried out as a means of obtaining consented, first-party data; providing a benchmark that future brand lift studies can be measured against; and obtaining more in-depth insights from consumers like their opinions on the category as a whole.

More detail on other cookie-less methods of measurement, including attribution analysis, controlled and uncontrolled audience testing, and geo-testing, can be found in Daniel Gilbert’s insightful post, How to measure marketing in a world without cookie tracking, as well as in Econsultancy’s Measuring Digital Marketing Effectiveness Best Practice Guide.

A more positive – and private – future

The announcement by Apple that it will be prompting users for their consent to share data with apps, and by Google that it will not be supporting an identity-based alternative to cookies going forward, has collectively galvanised the industry into searching for sustainable alternatives to the old methods of targeting and measuring ads. This has not been – and will not be – an easy transition for marketing, but many believe the outcome will be beneficial for marketers and consumers alike. At the end of 2020, Harmony Murphy, GM Advertising at Ebay UK, gave her views on the ‘post-cookie’ future for marketing in a 2021 predictions roundup for Econsultancy, saying,

“Instead of relying on quick wins, a cookie-less, premium, user first experience is a move in the right direction for brands. After all, this is what advertising is about: quality engagement with consumers that helps them and genuinely delivers ROI for the brand. It’s about engagement and relevance, not irritation.”

[stretchjournalemerson]

Turn and Face the Strange: Academia’s Failure to Account For Changes in Current LGBT+ Culture

By Matt Pifko 

In the world of academic writing, there is no dearth of queer writing. Whether coming from authors belonging to the LGBT community or focusing on the community itself (such pieces often inhabit both spaces), this sort of academic discourse is prevalent. Countless journals are entirely dedicated to sexuality, queer communities, queer texts, and the general study of queer culture. Despite all of this writing, I see a gap in the academic sphere. I see a blank space, a disparity between the world I see every day and the world represented in these journals. There are essential modern queer texts almost entirely absent from the conversation, iconic figures that have yet to be mentioned by slothlike academia, and important features of the community mentioned only by non-scholarly pop culture magazines and niche community websites. In other words, these academic journals that proclaim to deep dive into queer communities with authority and accuracy appear to fail to illuminate and investigate the vibrant, ever-evolving community.

To explain the gap I perceive, I must first explain the other half of the equation. In other words, I must explain the life experiences I have had over the course of the past year. After graduating from my small, homogenized, exceedingly white and conservative high school, I was thrust into that age-old, all too familiar cliche - a wacky arts school in a major city. Emerson College, despite its notorious lack of racial diversity, was a culture shock to me, mostly due to its famous inclusive and vibrant queer community. Here, I was introduced to people of all kinds of sexualities, genders, philosophies, and nationalities. It was here that I was educated in a new language - that of queer culture.

I had been familiar with the LGBT community’s most beloved celebrities and most popular terminology, thanks to the internet and the widespread appropriation of this terminology (which is an entirely different and important discussion best saved for another occasion), but Emerson gave me a whole new vantage point. Here, I could watch other queer people discuss celebrities, films, TV shows, literature, and all varieties of pop culture that they valued. Thus, when I entered the academic sphere, which seemingly includes so many queer voices, I was perplexed to find very few voices discussing the same “icons” I had heard about in person at Emerson.

To understand this relationship between the current LGBT culture I perceive and the culture discussed in academic journals, we must first establish the context in which this relationship exists. The context, in this case, would be LGBT culture of the past, and the general concept of this culture. This culture is both incredibly storied and often hidden/undocumented, a result of the stigma around homosexuality and other “deviant” sexualities in almost every historical society. Given that LGBT individuals existed throughout history in every time period and every region, there has been a lot of lost culture.

It is most useful to examine LGBT culture in the last few decades, in that it is the most similar to the culture of today’s community, and additionally, most information available pertains to this period. LGBT “culture” is not merely a underground collection of gay-themed media, but rather, more like a vast web of mainstream media that is selectively chosen and incorporated into the community, combined with certain works that directly deal with LGBT

themes. Historically, music has been particularly important to the community. In his extensively researched article about gay and lesbian music tastes in the Belgium queer community, Alexander Dhoest (and his assistant researchers) gives some background, explaining that “music contributed to the evolution of lesbian and gay cultures on several levels... it not only provided means to meet other lesbians and gays, whether belonging to a community and the construction of lesbian and gay identities” (e.g. Chauncey, 1994; Taylor, 2012)” (Dhoest et al., 208).

Furthermore, Dhoest notes that lesbian and gay tastes can vary from one another, but there are certainly overlapping artists and sensibilities. Particularly important to the LGBT community is “camp”, a style connected to gay culture that can be described, in the briefest, simplest terms, as a heightened parody of the feminine and “tasteful” society. Such culture is showcased in drag queens and the worship of pop divas. Dhoest elaborates, claiming “In a musical context, camp can be identified not only at the level of the performer and their stage performance; it is also audible through lyrics and musical execution.” Examples of such campy divas include Judy Garland, Madonna, and Whitney Houston (Dhoest et al., 209). LGBT culture is vast and dense, and campy pop singers constitute a small fraction of the bigger picture. Other genres can fall under the lens of camp, such as punk and disco. Additionally, from observations and life experience, I have noted there is a historical admiration in the community for female performers in all musical genres, such as Bjork, Blondie (Debby Harry), and Fleetwood Mac (Stevie Nicks). Historically, camp has also existed in the world of film, in everything from What Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) to the more overtly queer John Waters “Trash Trilogy” (Pink Flamingoes) (1972), Female Trouble (1974), and Desperate Living (1977) (Snider).

So, where has queer culture gone since the 20th century? In an age where the community has been increasingly more accepted and visible, especially in western culture, what content has emerged? In Lauren McInroy and Shelley Craig’s article “Perspectives of LGBTQ Emerging Adults on the Depiction and Impact of LGBTQ Media Representation,” a valuable cross-section of early 2010s LGBT culture is illuminated. As the title suggests, the researchers interviewed various self-identifying members of the community whose ages ranged from 18 to 22 (all located in a Canadian city where McInroy works as a professor) on the subject of LGBT representation in media, particularly TV and film.

In terms of representative shows, the researchers found the following to be the most commonly mentioned/popular among LGBT interviewees: Queer As Folk, The L Word, Degrassi, and Glee. Movies included Brokeback Mountain (2005), Boys Don’t Cry (1999), A Single Man (2009), and Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001) (mistitled “Hedwig and the Angry Itch” in the article). Already, it is clear that LGBT culture in the 2000s and early 2010s revolved much more around properties with actual LGBT characters in the narratives. Moreover, the musicians the community supported more openly supported the community in return, as is the case with musician Lady Gaga. Gaga was a favorite due to her larger-than-life media persona and biting wit, but she affirmed the community in return, notably premiering the LGBT pride centered track “Born This Way” in 2011. In these interviews, the LGBT emerging adults (who, it

must be said, were overwhelmingly white and LGB) noted the improved media representation but struggled to name a character or show/film they consumed that displayed queer people in a completely accurate light. Many of the emerging adults preferred new media, i.e. blogs and social media, for LGBTQ representation, because on these platforms the community can represent itself authentically and not be forced to appeal to mass audiences (McInroy). Unfortunately, the 2016 article fails to mention specific new media or new media celebrities, leaving the reader to guess at what exactly the subjects consume.

Regardless of in which era LGBT individuals consumed media, what they consumed, or why they consumed it, it is very clear that this media has an enormous impact, especially when it features some kind of direct representation. In a 2011 study at the Austin Pride Festival, an overwhelming amount of GLB individuals identified media figures as instrumental in their coming-out process (Gomillion et al.). In other words, through these storylines and characters, members of the community can see their own stories, which in turn legitimized and clarified their own hidden experiences and emotions. In a community like the LGBT community, where members typically grow up isolated in heteronormative households/communities, media representation is absolutely essential - for many, including myself, it is a bridge to understanding and acceptance.

Thus, the discrepancy I see between the current LGBT youth culture and the academic sphere does not have anything to do with this underlying understanding. Academic writers understand and have proven through empirical research that media is important to the LGBT community - it’s just that they fail to keep up with, or rather, fail to process this constantly evolving culture in meaningful ways. Each of the academic pieces I have cited contain valuable information, and yet, they all have significant shortcomings. Namely, they are out of date. To a degree, this cannot be helped, as the articles were published in 2015, 2016, and 2011, respectively. That said, the articles do not reference any representative films that were released post-2009, and the most recent TV show referenced began in 2010. Furthermore, these articles are some of the only LGBT-centered academic writing I could locate that deals with the actual community. After scouring the internet and using all the means provided to be as a student at a well-funded communications college, I found that almost all the well-researched, quantitative data on LGBT media and its impact on the community dated back to 2016 or earlier.

To a degree, this is not so much an issue specific to queer academic writing as much as it is emblematic of the faults of the academic genre as a whole. The peer-reviewed, extensively examined processing of academic papers serves as quality assurance, but it also ignores factors such as urgency or influence. This is not to say that academic writing is completely ineffectual in its antiquity and specificity - rather, I believe academic writing is incredibly important, and that the haste with which new material and new research is released should reflect that. In the case of research on LGBT narratives and their effects on the community, perhaps these articles need to be released more expeditiously and become more readily available to the LGBT youth who are

concerned with such matters. Articles like “Radical Love in a time of Heteronormativity: Glee, Gaga, and Getting Better” simply lose relevance in only a few years time.

Therefore, when the cultural items that are examined are no longer essential topics of conversation in the LGBT community, much of the research loses its teeth, and conclusions reached about the community itself can seem inaccurate or outdated. This is not to say that the history of the community cannot be documented, nor are older cultural items like “Glee” unimportant to the visibility of the community. Rather, these simply do not reflect the current values and shared culture of the community, especially for LGBT youths who joined the community long after Madonna and Glee had phased out of popularity. Even in the academic world, timing must be considered. Research regarding an evolving world has to evolve with it and remain relevant, or else the authority of academia will wane further.

Moreover, in the world of academic writing, specifically that which was available to me through my liberal arts style institution, I see two misguided avenues which queer academia often heads down. The first is that of the misguided research. If academic research is to illuminate the influences of media on LGBT individuals, it is essential that the researchers actually interact with LGBT individuals. It is not enough for the researchers to be queer themselves (as is the case with many of the aforementioned articles) - the subjects must be as well. In the piece “Sexuality and Teen Television: Emerging Adults Respond to Representations of Queer Identity on Glee” by Michaela D.E. Meyer and Megan M. Wood, an empirical study is conducted by interviewing various students at a college about their experiences with the TV show Glee. In their opening statement, the authors stress that while previous research has established that queer media can have an impact on emerging adults, they wanted to focus on how these adults are impacted, and in what ways their identities can benefit. This is a valuable vein of research that has yet to be touched, and yet, the researchers miss the mark by solely interviewing straight-identifying individuals. In a study about LGBTQ representation in a show famously important to the community, the researchers allowed for their 97 fans of Glee to be unanimously heterosexual. While the data itself is well organized and analyzed, this oversight renders the data useless in terms of LGBT impact. When the world of academic writing is already so exclusive and, for lack of a better term, narrow, a journal like “Sexuality & Culture: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly” in which this study was published should be providing more accurate and insightful data.

On the other hand, academic writing can miss the mark by focusing too much on the thematic analysis of queer media. After finding article after article about the state of the community written in 2015 or earlier, I began to look for specific articles about current LGBT cultural items of which I knew, those that I had heard in conversations with actual LGBT emerging adults. Researching these items, I found some peer-reviewed entries (there were significantly more entries on queer film/TV as opposed to queer music, despite music’s aforementioned important role in the community), and yet, these were almost always a thematic analysis of the text. Specifically, “Beating Hearts: Compassion and Self-Discovery in Call Me By Your Name” by Joanna Di Mattia and “Call Me By Your Name: Not Pedophilia, Still Problematic” by Renee Sorrentino and Jack Turban are examples of such analytical articles about a relevant LGBT cultural item. Call Me By Your Name, a 2017 film based on the book of the same name, has been immensely popular due to its sensitive and visually splendorous take on gay romance, and therefore, would be a fantastic artifact to conduct research on. That said, these authors, despite writing for publications such as “Screen Education” and “Psychiatric Times,” offer up little more than their review of the material through slightly different lenses. The articles vary in their opinion on the quality of the representation, but each neglects to investigate the actual effects of the material on the represented people. “Beating Hearts” almost purely focuses on the technical and narrative elements of CMBYN, while Sorrentino and Turban’s article makes a surface level connection between modern LGBT youths who use hookup apps and the main character of the film’s experiences. Thematic analysis and opinion based evaluation is not without merit, but there are plenty of conversations on film analysis and queer themes already going on outside of the academic sphere. In order for academia to be necessary and essential in today’s world, it must differentiate itself by providing the kind of empirical data and findings that art journalism cannot cover.

If the goal of the academic sphere is to educate other academics, then researchers must make an effort to reach out of the academic world and learn about things outside of their domain. If the goal of the academic sphere is to educate students my age, then research that is genuinely reflective of the world in which we live must be made available to us. Many of these articles are valuable in certain respects, and on the whole, this body of research constitutes a wealth of useful information when cross-referenced with one another to fill in the gaps. Nonetheless, we, as a community and as young people with a thirst for information, deserve better. Ultimately, the most crucial oversight in the queer academic community is simple - there is a lack of new voices with new information. Whether in the form of impactful texts or influential figures within the community, these perspectives must be addressed and must be heard. Meaningful research must be done that intimately involves these voices in the process itself. It is not easy to change gears within the academic community, to ask a sloth to move faster, but valuable change is never easy. Strong academics do not teach and communicate because it is easy, but rather, because they understand that knowledge and perspective is unimpeachably important. Perhaps, academics can understand that communicating with the current culture themselves is the first step towards communicating this knowledge to others.

Works Cited

Bingman, Andrew. Influence of Media on Gay and Bisexual Identity Formation. 2016.

EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsbas&AN=edsbas.D7683790&site= eds-live.

Boyer, Sabrina, and Erin Brownlee Dell. € ̃Pop Culture Is Our Religionâ€TM: Paulo Freire, LGBTQ Rights and Radical Love. 2015. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsbas&AN=edsbas.EED4E14&site=e ds-live.

Dhoest, Alexander, et al. “Into the Groove: Exploring Lesbian and Gay Musical Preferences and ‘LGB Music’ in Flanders.” Observatorio (OBS*), no. 2, 2015, p. 207. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edssci&AN=edssci.S1646.595420150 00200011&site=eds-live.

Di Mattia, Joanna. “BEATING HEARTS: Compassion and Self-Discovery in Call Me by Your Name.” Screen Education, no. 91, 2018, p. 8. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsgao&AN=edsgcl.576220095&sit =eds-live.

Kies, Bridget, and Thomas J. West, III. "Queer nostalgia and queer histories in uncertain times."

Queer Studies in Media & Pop Culture, vol. 2, no. 2, 2017, p. 161+. Contemporary Women's Issues, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A496450962/CWI?u=ecl_main&sid=CWI&xid=b2c 1e0b. Accessed 8 Apr. 2019.

Meyer, Michaela D. E., and Megan M. Wood. “Sexuality and Teen Television: Emerging Adults Respond to Representations of Queer Identity on Glee.” Sexuality & Culture, vol. 17, no. 3, 1 Sept. 2013, pp. 434–448. PsycINFO, Emerson College, doi:10.1007/s12119-013-9185-2.

Mcinroy, Lauren B., and Shelley L. Craig. “Perspectives of LGBTQ Emerging Adults on the Depiction and Impact of LGBTQ Media Representation.”

Journal of Youth Studies, vol. 20, no. 1, 19 May 2016, pp. 32–46. Taylor & Francis Online, Emerson College, doi:10.1080/13676261.2016.1184243.

Snider, Sarah. “The John Waters Trash Trilogy.” Culture Wars, 19 June 2007,

www.culturewars.org.uk/2007-06/trash.htm. Sorrentino, Renee, and Jack

#academia #lgbtq #research #matthew pifko #stretch2019

[madilikethebug]

More Mindsets: Money

There are some common threads among the topic of what people want more of. Often they want more money, more mental or physical health, more motivation or discipline, or maybe even more capability within themselves. As a society we are obsessed with wanting more and that’s okay. However, our attachment to it just keeps it away. So, I want to address each of these common lack mindsets, give you some ideas of what your limiting beliefs may be, and provide direct-use affirmations so you can begin changing your mindset and getting more out of life.

This will be a six week series so I can dedicate enough time to each topic in it’s own right. This week we are tackling the desire for more money. I think money is one of the most-common desires among american people because it can bring security and freedom in the same check. Yet, many people still feel lacking. Therefore, it shouldn’t be a shock to hear the second leading cause of divorce is money, most people live paycheck to paycheck, and one in four families did not talk to their kids about finances.

From this information, we can assume that conversations around money are taboo and clumsy for the majority. I know they used to be that way for me. The lack of education on the topic mixed with the major financial recessions of our time could make it a difficult and political topic. I know these experiences shaped my view of money significantly and it has taken work to shift my perspective. Don’t worry, it is possible.

In my own experience, many of my limiting beliefs come from fear of keeping money. I’ve always known I was capable of earning and accepting money, but fear my ability to keep it or have it continuously. What this is like conversationally and in practice:

“I need more financial discipline.”

“We kind of lost everything in 2007/08.”

*Pays all bills on check day or might have overdraft fees*

*Struggles to save money because my lizard-brain likes the devil it knows*

*Spends all the money I have left on small things*

Although that is my experience, I also know others who have issues feeling worthy of money, who think it’s normal to have less than you want, and other poor mindsets. These might look like this:

“We just never had extra money growing up.”

“I never got an allowance. I was allowed to live under my parent’s roof.”

“That’s so expensive.” “That’s so excessive.” “You buy the brand-name?”

“I wish we lived on a trade system.” “I wish money didn’t exist.”

“I never have the money I need.” “Money is scarce.”

“I need to work hard to have money.”

“Money is the root of all evil.”

“I’d rather be happy than rich.” (Spoiler Alert: they’re not mutually exclusive).

“I don’t deserve to be wealthy.” “I don’t know how to make money.”

“Rich people are greedy, corrupt, etc.”

Now, don’t get discouraged. The best thing about finding and understanding our limiting beliefs is that we can have a mindset shift. We can start to build affirmations and references that support our new beliefs. That way we can begin to attract the things we want more of, rather than attracting the stuff we don’t want.

To start understanding your own limiting beliefs, ask yourself reflective questions, listen to yourself when you talk about money, and ask those who are close to you what language you use when talking about money. Also, check out this post on creating light-bulb moments in your manifestation journey.

Now that you’ve identified what your limiting belief is, it’s time to talk about transforming into an empowering affirmation that will put you in a more resourceful state. There are some power words that should help you, especially in the creation of money-focused affirmations. Choose words like:

Choose

Claim

Give

I Am

I Have

Abundance

Wealth

Money

Resources

Knowledge

When they’re all done, they might look like these:

I choose to have extra money available.

I am grateful I have all the money I need.

Money is a tool that I am proficient with.

I claim wealth.

There is an abundance of money.

I choose to be happy and rich.

I have the resources and knowledge to make and keep money.

I am worthy of wealth.

I choose to give because I am rich and philanthropic.

If you’re not sure how to transform your limiting belief, drop a comment down below and I will help you work through it. Or, use one of the new beliefs from above as your starting point and adjust it to match your needs.

Once you have a new belief, it is time to start building references for that belief. You need them to be emotionally strong. As an example, my money affirmations from My 2021 Daily Mantra are; be resourceful, I claim wealth, I give more, and I am capable. I have a reference for each of them that helps me to believe it is the truth.

Be resourceful: I use the internet, social media, and books to learn the skills I need. I have learned a ton about social media marketing, SEO, and photography this way.

I claim wealth: I wrote down a monthly income at the beginning of this year and I have been receiving that income since.

I give more: I donate 10% of every check to charities of my choice. This is significantly more than I used to donate.

I am capable: My loved ones constantly reassure me of my capability. When I apply my resources, I find that I am capable.

Here are some actions you can take to prove your new truth:

Start saving money

Practice gratitude for any and all increase in money.

Learn money management skills

Start taking responsibility for your wealth by applying your new skills

Recognize how much money is in the world by realizing how many people are millionaires or billionaires.

Take time to do something that makes you happy when you have money. Be grateful you can have both.

Donate a percentage of your income on a regular basis

Build personal value and self-image to feel more worthy of money

Lastly, check out these related posts to help yourself on this journey.

More Mindsets: Health

February 3, 2021

More Mindsets: Motivation

February 10, 2021

More Mindsets: Love and Connection

February 17, 2021

To simplify, money is a tough topic, but by recognizing your limiting beliefs surrounding money you are able to take the first step towards financial freedom. Once you’ve found your limiting beliefs you need to transform them to empowering ones and build references that prove their truth. There are many money skills you can learn to help you get there. What have you learned about money? Drop a comment below to help others out or connect with me on social media to continue the conversation.

[bstc2020-blog]

Helpful Problem Solving

Abstract This article introduces the educational alternatives module of the world's most recent personal and professional situation solving site, describing competitive offerings, the customer profile, problem-oriented solutions, target markets, product offerings, and usability characteristics. It concludes that the module is a major contribution to information superhighway. Introduction The aim of this article is to introduce towards the world the BSTC 2020 solutions module of the world's most up to date personal and professional problem solving site. The article will be addressed to those readers who may have an educational dilemma bogging them and who may therefore be buying way out of their predicament. The reader may be a parent, children, or student. It is a common fact of life that we all all have problems and that we are often frustrated as well as we tend to lash out because of our inability to search out accessible and reliable information about our problems. This special site fills this need - as our matter-of-fact friend for solving our educational problems. To be belonging to the greatest use to people a problem solving site have got to combine pragmatic discussions of their personal or professional predicament with merchant products that provide more detailed information. Typically, the web page will provide free information in the form of news, articles, and help and advice, which direct the visitor on what to do to solve her situations. Complementing this, the web site will also provide merchant products which will discuss in detail how the visitor can go about resolving the woman problem. This means that the most effective, visitor-oriented problem-solving site will be the information-packed commercial site - and so is the world's latest personal and professional problem solving site and its consultant sites. The approach that we have adopted below will be to describe competitive offerings, the customer profile, problem-oriented solutions, goal markets, product offerings, and usability features. Competitive Stock offerings The following are the top educational sites on the Internet, along with their offerings. US Department of Education. It defines the US education insurance and provides information on financial aid, educational research and statistics, awards and contracts, and teaching and learning resources. Instructive Testing Service. It provides a range of test resources. FunBrain. com. It provides educational games for K-8 kids. PrimaryGames. com. It provides fun learning tools and games for boys and girls. GEM. It provides educational resources such as lesson plans along with other teaching and learning resources. Education World. It provides suggestions about lesson plans, professional development, and technology integration. NASA Education Enterprise. It provides educational materials and information with regards to space exploration. Spartacus Educational. It is a British online encyclopedia that focuses on historical topics. Department for Education plus Skills. It is a UK government department site that offers advice and advice on various educational and skills topics. Conditions Educational Supplement. It offers teaching news, teaching & enlightening resources, and active forums to help UK teachers. Each one of these sites are useful in the domains that they cover. Their essential limitations are as follows: 1 . They tend to cover only one very narrow segment of the educational market. 2 . They do not take as their starting point the daily educational demands of the typical family. 3. They lack a problem target; i. e., they do not formulate the typical learning and helpful problems that pupils, students, and parents face on a daily basis. contemplate. As a result of the preceding point, the solutions offered usually are not as incisive (i. e. as problem-centred) as they could possibly be. 5. They do not offer merchant products that deepen any visitor's understanding of her problem and of the consequent products. The educational solutions module of the world's most recent particular and professional problem solving site addresses these challenges by targeting a multiplicity of market segments, adopting a customer profile that fits the typical education-pursuing family, to access specific needs or problems that this family may experience, offering incisive (problem-centred) solutions to the various problems, and selling a range of merchant products that deepen the visitor's understanding of her problems and of the solutions that are related to them. Customer Profile The customer profile or target visitor to your site characteristics of the educational solutions module is the same as for all expert sites of the world's most recent personal and professional condition solving site. The site has been designed to meet the needs regarding visitors who have an educational problem bogging them. It will be designed for both males and females, even though it is often convenient to refer to one sex when writing. This visitor uses search engines to analyze information about her personal or professional problem, with the intention of finding solutions to it. The visitor is serious about solving her problem and is therefore willing to buy products which will help her to achieve her mission, provided that she are able to find reliable and honest information about relevant products so that your sweetheart can make an informed decision about which ones to acquire. This information may help her to apply her finances economically, and hence avoid misusing money. The visitor will want a money-back guarantee so that in case a product does not live up to expectations or if she happen to be misled into buying a product she can get a discount. Such a guarantee absolves her of purchase risks. The customers is intelligent (without necessarily being a genius), educated (without necessarily being a PhD), computer literate (without necessarily learning to be a computer guru), and money-minded (without necessarily being a freebie hunter or an unemployed person). This of course won't mean that freebie hunters or unemployed persons cannot develop a thing from the site. To the contrary, there is a great deal of free of charge information on the site. Just that it is hard to see how any individual can gain the full benefits of the site without buying programs. The visitor wants high quality information products (usually in digital form) and wants to pay the cheapest price for these (without paying so much emphasis on price that she compromises quality). The visitor also wants free bonus offers that are placed on the purchased goods. The visitor is self-reliant and can deal with on her own by reading, digesting, and applying help about her problem until she solves it or possibly discovers that she needs help from a professional, for point her acquired knowledge will help her to reduce him / her consulting fees. As a result of the knowledge gained, the visitor will be able to determine consultants in order to avoid incompetent or fraudulent ones. Problem-Centred Products Our free solutions are organised in the form of pragmatic posts that are written by top experts. Each article addresses a precise daily problem, but does not go into detail. It clarifies the problem and tells the visitor what she must do to fix her problem. However , it does not tell the visitor how your lover must solve it - this is too much for an content. To find out about the how, the visitor must buy a product (usually an e-book or e-book set) that goes into larger depth. The set of educational articles that we have particular, to provide initial solution to a visitor's problem are the following: Signs of a Gifted Child - Informs parents on what to identify whether or not their children are gifted. Essential Infant Lessons for Enriching Your Child's Education - Teaches mothers and fathers how to enhance their child's education. Using Positive Statements and affirmations to Be a Better Student - Teaches students how to utilize positive affirmations to improve their performance. They Are Just Terrified of Writing - Teaches writing skills to pupils How Can Parents Encourage Their Children to Read? - Demonstrates parents how they can improve their children's reading skills. Test out Preparation Tutoring - Discusses the topic of tutoring students to prep for tests or exams. Test Taking Strategies - Discusses various strategies for taking and passing tests and / or exams Playing and Winning the Scholarship Game : Describes how to win scholarships. How to Get a Scholarship to some UK University - Describes how to win scholarships towards a UK university. Saving Money for College - Instructs enrollees on how they can save money in preparation for college. Figuratively speaking: When Your Educational Dreams Can't Compete with the Cost - Clarifies to students the benefits of a student loan. Education Loans Will be able to Fund a Higher Degree to Boost Your Career - Also talks about to students the benefits of a student loan. The Secret to PEOPLE Department of Education Loans - Teaches students learn how to get a US DoE loan to finance their higher education. Student Loan Consolidation - Save Money, Pay Less, Spend More -- Explains to graduates how to make use of loan consolidation to minimize their student loan repayments. Higher Education: Finding the Right College for You - Explains to students how to find the right college or university for their advanced schooling studies. Mobile Learning - An Alternative Worth Considering - Talks about the concept of mobile learning and its place in education. Online College diplomas - Is Online Education Right for You? - Studies the merits of online learning as compared to traditional finding out. An Online College Education Overview - Reviews your entire concept of online learning. Finding the Right Quotation for Your Paper or perhaps Speech Online - Shows writers and speakers where to get the right quotation to use in their writings or speeches. Effort: An Important Leadership Development Skill - Explores the important concept of collaboration and its role in leadership development. At the conclusion of each article is a list of merchant products that supplementation the article's content. A link is also included for finding the educational product catalogue. Target Markets and Supplement Offerings Now let us turn to the target markets and the associated product offerings. We have positioned the segments to handle the various needs of a visitor over a period of time, and the next a customer may belong to one or more of the market segments. You can get three general classes of products offered: ClickBank services, Google products, and eBay products. Google and as well as products are presented on each page of the web-site. ClickBank products are grouped into product categories the fact that match the target markets. These categories and their trading markets are as follows. Children and Parenting. This consists of prospects who want parenting solutions for improving their children's upbringing. Their needs are met through the Children and Nurturing section of the educational product catalogue. Difficult Admissions. This specific consists of visitors who want to learn how to get admission into finest universities. Their needs are met through the Difficult Admissions section of the educational product catalogue. Esoteric Needs. It consists of visitors with unusual needs. Their needs will be met through the Esoteric Needs section of the educational products catalogue. Financial Aid. This consists of visitors looking for scholarships, permits, or loans. Their needs are met through the Money for college section of the educational product catalogue. Leadership Skills. This unique consists of visitors looking to develop their leadership skills. The needs are met through the Leadership Skills section of the particular educational product catalogue. Learning. This consists of visitors who want to improve their learning ability. Their needs are realized through the Learning section of the educational product catalogue. Psychological Speed. This consists of visitors who want to explode their psychological speed. Their needs are met through the Mental Rate section of the educational product catalogue. Positive Affirmations. The consists of visitors who want to transform their negative dispositions right positive mindset in order to improve their performance. Their desires are met through the Positive Affirmations section of the instructive product catalogue. Speaking. This consists of visitors looking to strengthen their speaking skills. Their needs are met because of the Speaking section of the educational product catalogue. Tests as well as Exams. This consists of visitors looking to master exam practice. Their needs are met through the Tests and Assessments section of the educational product catalogue. Writing. This comprises of visitors looking to improve their writing skills. Their really needs are met through the Writing section of the educational supplement catalogue. Usability Considerations Usability has been enhanced to make the software easy for the visitor to find solutions to her problem, by using these steps: 1 . The first thing the visitor sees are a list of articles whose titles represent the specific problem area individuals address. The articles are accessed from the Educational Condition Solving menu of the navigation bar to the left of the display screen or from the Educational Problem Solving main page. Through scanning these articles the visitor can identify whether or not the problem is covered. If not the visitor can check typically the educational product catalogue through the Product Catalogues menu from the same navigation bar, to see whether a product exists who answers her query. If she finds nothing the woman knows that her problem is not addressed. She will be able to proceed to the Related Sites pages, which are accessible out of your left navigation bar. 2 . If the visitor finds content that addresses her problem then she can begin for you to explore that; at the end of the article she will find goods that discuss her problem more deeply. She can also accessibility the educational product catalogue through an article page. Decision This article has introduced the educational solutions module of your world's most recent personal and professional problem solving websites. The article has examined competitive offerings, the target customer introduction, problem-oriented solutions, target markets, product offerings, and functionality considerations. It concludes that the module is a major side of the bargain to the information superhighway.

#BSTC 2020

[chocolate-brownies]

Dr. Deanna Minich is just one of the luminaries you can learn from at Wellspring. For tickets and more information, click here. 

The first thing that’s noticeable about Dr. Deanna Minich is that she’s glowing. Even through a computer screen, bathed in the blue-green light of our video call, she was radiating. She was taking my call from a room with wooden ceilings, presumably that smelled of pine, a stack of brightly-painted canvases propped against a pale yellow wall. All this to say, Deanna lives glowingly, surrounded by color.

It’s no wonder that she—an internationally-recognized lifestyle medicine expert who holds a Ph.D. in Human Nutrition and Metabolism, and is a current Fellow at the American College of Nutrition—has applied her colorful approach to nutrition and wellness teachings. Through a framework that requires readers to investigate their own body, habits, and challenges, Deanna’s most recent book, Whole Detox, A 21-Day Personalized Program to Break Through Barriers in Every Area of Your Life, provides a blueprint to begin a personal journey to holistic health through the body’s energy systems.

This blueprint isn’t based on one singular modality. A Certified Functional Medicine practitioner as well as certified yoga teacher, Deanna is more interested in combining timeworn wisdom with modern science—finding something that works—than subscribing to a label or school of thought. Whole Detox walks readers through the seven energy systems in the body, to identify which may be out of balance and causing a more general imbalance within the body as a whole.

Yogis will recognize these seven energy systems as chakras, yet Deanna believes it’s important to be inclusive with language. When she’s lecturing to a medical audience, for example, she refers to the seven systems as the psycho-neuro-endocrine systems. “There is inherent truth of healing in these systems and everything that they can offer,” she says. “I’m not going to let language and ego stand in the way … All of the ancient systems embraced a really elemental way of seeing the body.”

Radical Self-Reliance of Integration

Deanna believes that the integration of several modalities is essential to getting a clear understanding of how our systems work—and how to heal them. “The construct is different,” she says, “but we’re all heading up the same mountain.” Whole Detox aims to look at the body, physically, psychologically, and even metaphorically, with a particular focus on food.

“If you have root, and immune system issues,” she says, “that tells me something about fear, boundaries, safety, and security.” In this case, functional medicine would propose the solution lies in fixing a leaky gut. Deanna would look at this and incorporate those treatments—alongside nutritional and emotional solutions as well.

Deanna recognizes, however, that exploration of all these different modalities can take daunting amounts of time and energy, and that this may cause many people to simply stick with the status quo.

“I have an aunt who has a number of health conditions. She’s a nurse, and so she’s aware of the shortcomings of the medical system. She wants to try other things, but she’s so encumbered by her … conditions that it’s almost like a little mini part-time job to really figure out all the things out there,” says Deanna. That’s why Whole Detox is so radical—it places the onus of not only exploration but experimentation on the individual.

Deanna’s emphasis on radical self-reliance extends beyond the prescriptions in her book—she encourages her patients to take their health into their own hands. With lots of free content available on the Internet, she says, this can be a great place to start exploring. People can attend health fairs to learn what’s out there, and take up chiropractors and the like on free first visits. Trusting oneself is a crucial part of the journey; though Deanna acknowledges that we all have blind spots. “Truth and trust are kind of like two sides of the same coin,” she says.

Takeaways from the Detox

Deanna, of course, has done the Whole Detox many times. When she first came to yoga—began “looking under the hood of ancient traditions,” she says—she had been suffering long-term from reproductive issues and irritable bowel syndrome.

“I had a lot of things that coincide with the flow chakra, or the sacral chakra, and it was really about my own sense of flow and feeling uninhibited and feeling feminine and feeling open to express,” she says. “One of things that helped me and led to Whole Detox was that in conjunction with nutrition and lifestyle, I started painting, and I got into my own sense of creativity.” Hence the paintings propped up behind her.

Painting—encouraging and indulging her creativity—is what led Deanna to a greater sense of holistic health, but she lays out seven things in Whole Detox to encourage people to balance their energy systems. They are:

Nutrition

Emotional work

Journaling and thought work

Physical movement

Affirmations

Visualization

Meditation

When we examine our seven energy centers and attempt to find balance throughout, we begin to notice inconsistencies in each, and can better understand how best to treat those. Deanna notes that while nutritional or emotional medicine may work better for some, other imbalances may require a more physical approach, like walking in the forest.

An Evolving Approach

Walking in the forest is a treatment that may particularly help an imbalance in our fourth energy center, our heart chakra, associated with the color green. Engaging in this treatment in no way means, however, that we’ve solved all issues with that energy center. Whole Detox—and Deanna’s programs as a whole—consider the body in constant evolution. Where we may need help one day, we may feel completely healed the next. What we consider to be our greatest area of strength, can become compromised.

“We’re constantly morphing,” says Deanna—a fact that she takes into consideration with her opening questionnaire in Whole Detox, which allows the reader to begin creating that blueprint for personalized treatment. She encourages patients to retake the questionnaire every week, because as they move through the program, they’re making changes and shifts within their body.

“I could take it today, and I might come up as imbalanced in my root, maybe overactive heart, whatever it is. Next week, and I might be overactive insight or overactive fire. It could be very different, and so, it’s like, that’s like the beauty of this dynamic flow of seven systems is that they all kind of talk to each other and different things come up at different times to work on,” says Deanna.

Like painting, learning the body and how it responds to energetic wisdom and systems, is a creative exploration in colorful living. We’ll always be a work in progress.

For more on Deanna and her program, check out her website and her Food + Spirit Program. When you’re ready to make the commitment to holistic living, click here to purchase a copy of Whole Detox. Let us know how it goes for you in the comments below!

—

Lisette Cheresson is a writer, storyteller, yoga teacher, and adventuress who is an avid vagabond, homechef, dirt-collector, and dreamer. When she’s not playing with words, it’s a safe bet that she’s either hopping a plane, dancing, cooking, or hiking. She received her Level II Reiki Attunement and attended a 4-day intensive discourse with the Dalai Lama in India, and received her RYT200 in Brooklyn. She is currently the Director of Content at Wanderlust Festival. You can find her on Instagram @lisetteileen.

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The post A Whole Body Detox (It’s Not What You Think) appeared first on Wanderlust.

#sleep sounds #sleep music #white noise app #nature sounds #relaxing sounds #rain sounds for sleeping

[glitteryruinsnerds-blog]

White Genocide and Fake News

New media has allowed for user-generated content to be at an all time high. The main component of the internet is its ability to share content that is created within a free environment. However, without  any gatekeeping structures in place, the internet turns into a haven for the creation of incorrect news and false beliefs that are then popularized.  It gives a platform for members of society to express their concerns about changing political, social or economic circumstances. That is how the idea of a white genocide in South Africa has come about. A mixture of white anxiety within a society that is attempting to change its power relations and fake news.

Fake News

Fake news has been popularized in most recent years due to American president, Donald Trump, having used it so often. Trump declares a lot of media that may put him in a negative light as ‘fake news.’ Fake news is the creation of incorrect information that is spread with the ‘intent to deceive’. (Moore, 2016. 4) The reason for this is to ‘generate clicks and revenue’. (Moore, 2016. 4) Fake news is difficult to recognize as well as stop the dissemination and creation of. This is said because it has been happening for years through the mass media with an extensive agenda-setting power meaning that news is fabricated or manipulated to capture the attention of society and to distract them from another issue. Fake news can come in the form of “unintentional false reporting, rumors, conspiracy theories, satire, misleading reports [and] false statements by politicians”. (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017. 214) Due to this extensive list of possible fake news examples, it makes it even harder to identify.

With the expansion of social media, the creation and dissemination of fake news has been exaggerated especially since the 2016 US election. It is also problematic due to the lack of ‘fact-checking or editorial judgement.’ (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017. 211) Apart from fake news being unable to define, also brings the difficulty in being aware of it and so it does not influence society’s decisions and behaviors but unfortunately, it does. The repetition of such news can call for the doubtful reaction to all media sources as well as leaning towards society believing the false media.

Along with fake news being the contributor to the spreading of incorrect situations is also the societal power relations at threat in a multicultural South Africa. There is a created identity of ‘us’ and ‘them’ between the white Afrikaner population and other communities. Group-identity theory is the creation of an exclusive circle that excludes any individual that has different identity characteristics which creates an ‘other’. Hall (2001) believes that otherness is created when somebody is different to the self causing confusion and binary oppositions. The Afrikaner population, the apparent victims of this ‘white genocide,' has become a result of fear of losing power within a majority black society. (Calitz, 2014) 

In post-apartheid South Africa, there has been a “recurring myth in white public discourse [in] the idea that whites [have] been significant and almost crucial to the development of South Africa”. (Calitz, 2014) 

So in a society whereby the majority population was succumb to poor treatment and abuse by the minority population was not crucial to the development of South Africa?

The Red October protest was a political protest to bring ‘white oppression’ to attention. It was controlled by activists and singers, Steve Hofmeyr and Sunnette Bridges. “They demanded that the government must act against 'the inhumane slaughter and oppression of the white South African ethnic minority’”. ( IOL. 2013)

As a white South African, I can clearly say that this is fake news. I AM STILL VERY MUCH ALIVE.

There has been an interpreted “war being waged against whites in the new South Africa and with the help of Red October protest is meant to put an end to it by bringing the issue to global attention.” (Calitz, 2014) This shows the level of entitlement that white people in the country hold over the majority population and cannot handle the idea of a loss of privilege in a country that they ran through structures of racism. Such ideals have come from a sense of “being unwanted in the new South Africa, which creates a fear of not knowing where they belong”. (Calitz, 2014)

This idea of white genocide in South Africa has come along with the white minority  losing power after Apartheid and black South Africans being in control, attempting to make the country equal after its horrendous history. Yet, the creation of the white victim has come about. 

This extremist ideal has been accelerated through the use of social media to create a moral panic alongside this fake news. Stanley Cohen (2001) says that moral panics occur when a “condition, episode, person or group of people emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests”. In this case, black people are believed to be the threat to the white minority. This disrupts the worldly order of race relations as white people are believed to be more superior than other subordinate groups. This arises from histories of colonial expansion and imperial domination. It is also made to be believable to the white population being a minority which makes them appear to be small and powerless. However, the structures of apartheid still loom over the society.

Through social media, the myth of white genocide spread and caught the attention of US president, Donald Trump.

However, Donald Trump has his own controversial opinions on race so are we really believing him?

This information also got to Australia where their immigration department was said to fast-track white South African visas as they need to “escape” this “genocide”. This caught a lot of attention on Twitter, especially from the shocked South African citizens that knew this information was false. It is simply a conspiracy theory. 

Therefore, fake news and incorrect information can be built into something much greater than it is through social media. It can reach a much larger audience and become a “broken telephone” of information. Fake news needs to be taken seriously as this topic isn't something to be taken lightly, it is causing much worldwide moral panic despite being untrue.

READ: https://www.timeslive.co.za/news/south-africa/2018-03-16-australia-insists-refugee-programme-non-discriminatory-as-sa-outrage-mounts/ 

WATCH: https://www.news24.com/Analysis/watch-the-far-rights-myth-of-south-african-white-genocide-20180907

Sources: 

Allcott, H., & Gentzkow, M. (2017). ‘Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election’. Journal of Economic Perspectives. 31.2, pp. 211-236. 

Calitz, W. (2014). Rhetoric in the Red October Campaign: Exploring the white victim identity of post-apartheid South Africa. MSc dissertation, University of Oregon, p.p. 51-59. 

Cohen, S. (2011). Folk Devils and Moral Panics. London: Routledge.

Hall, S., 2001. The Spectacle of the Other. Discourse theory and practice: A reader, pp. 324 - 344.

IOL.CO.ZA. (2013) Red October protests white ‘oppression’. Retrieved from: https://www.iol.co.za/news/politics/red-october-protests-white-oppression-1590352 

Moore, M.M. (2017). ‘Submission to: Inquiry into Fake News Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee’. Centre for the Study of the Media, Communication and Power. London: Kings College. 

Wambugu, J. (2005). ‘When tables turn: Discursive constructions of whites as victims of affirmative action in a post-apartheid South Africa.’ Psychology in Society 31, p.p 57-70

[4metricks]

Explore and know if your web browser like Google Chrome is hacked. Learn how to check if the browser is hacked & fix hacked browser with easy to understand guide. Hijacking browser is not tolerable especially when your personal & other login information is at risk. Fix browser hacked including Chrome, IE, Firefox etc.

Actually it’s not that difficult to find if your web browser is hacked. Web browser hijacking is a very serious issue, especially when your personal and other login information is beneficial for someone. Hackers can penetrate into your browser and make it remotely controllable. As a result, you can lose your personal and confidential login information.

This is the major reason I always insist to use most secure web browser for PC. Smartphone Browser hacking could also expose your personal information and credit card details present in your Smartphone. To combat this, I recommend to use secure and private web browser for Smartphone.

Anyways, here I’ll discuss the procedure and simple tips that you can use to identify if your web browser is hacked or not, irrespective which web browser or on what Operating System you’re using it at.

If your browser’s security is already compromised then you’ll notice an unfamiliar behavior by your browser. I will discuss common issues and observations which affirms the web browser hacking.

This help will be applicable on browsers like Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera, Yandex, UC Browser and many others, on platform like Windows, Android, and iOS machines. So, let’s get start!

5 Signs when Your Browser is Hacked & Simple Fixes

No. 1: When a Browser Opens a Different Homepage

Most of us has set Google.com as our browser’s homepage. But sometimes we observe that our homepage is changed automatically with some other search engine or unknown web page. We simply ignore it and change it back to google.com from browser’s settings option. So what do you think what made your browser to had that change?

Web browser is not smart enough to initiate a self-decided homepage change. It means there is something fishy somewhere in your system that took control over your browser settings and made that change. This is the first and most common alarm that your browser security is compromised.

Solution: Whenever you observer any such change. Go to control panel of your click on uninstall a program link (for windows users). It will open a list of software that you’ve installed so far. Look into the list and locate those software that you’re not familiar with. Or find those which are showing any similarity with the changed homepage of your browser. Pick them up and click on uninstall button.

Sometimes it’s very hard to locate malware program especially when you’ve a really big list of installed software. In this situation, right click on this control panel page and sort items according to the installation date and time. Now the items which are recently installed will appear at top. Select them and uninstall them.

No. 2: When Your Browser  Insists on URL Redirecting

This is another common thing that indicated browser hacking. Sometimes when you enter a URL it open an unfamiliar webpage instead of the desired one. For example, you intended to open Gmail.com but it ends up in opening a webpage which is eagerly inviting you install a software because your PC is at high security risk.

Or it’ll be giving a really nice discount on your favorite products etc. A few days back same thing happened with me when I was trying to open my FB but ended up on a blog post which was promising to minimize my electricity charges if I install that software.

Solution: In this situation, don’t try to reload webpage. It’ll open the same page again and again. Just close it and retype the URL of destination webpage that you wanted open. If it again open the same scam page then just quite your browser and follow previously mentioned control panel method to uninstall malware software. After uninstalling, reboot your device. I hope it’ll solve your problem.

No. 3: When Browser Shows Annoying Popups

Sometimes we observe different kinds of popup notifications. Usually asking to install a plugin of sort of stuff. It’s really annoying when we’re doing some serious work. It diverts concentration because we’ve to manually close these small windows.

Sometimes there is not even a visible close option. We click on and divert to some other webpage. This also indicates that our web browser security is compromised.

Solution: Install a good popup blocker extension in your browser. Also go to your browser extensions and see if there is any unfamiliar extension or plugin which automatically got installed. If so then remove it immediately. It might be the cause of these annoying popups.

No. 4: When Browser Shows Random Security Alerts

This is also something similar to popup notifications, but much dodgy in fact. Because these security alerts usually appear to be very appealing. Many users fall into their traps because of their convincing look. For example, it may be showing a link to install an antivirus which will scan and protect your computer form malware.

It may show a fake system alert showing red colored indicator that your computer is at high risk. Whatever they show, just don’t pay attention. Why would they be so careful about your system security? They just want to install their program so that they can control your browser or PC or make it suitable to automatically install further programs from them.

Solution: Don’t ever install any such software or program. Don’t even click on any security alert or popup notification. If you accidently installed anything then simply go to control panel and uninstall it ASAP.

If you think you can’t sort out the problem and your browser continues behaving unfamiliarly then simply uninstall your browser and install it again. Following are some tips and suggestion that will help you regarding your browser’s and system’s security.

Always perform full system scan usually after one week.

Keep checking settings and extensions of your web browser and observe if any unfamiliar thing get installed automatically.

Keep your browser updated to the latest version

Install a good ad blocker and popup blocker extension

Keep checking windows’ PC issues flag (in taskbar).

#Blogger

[amberdscott2]

New EU Privacy Law May Weaken Security

Companies around the globe are scrambling to comply with new European privacy regulations that take effect a little more than three months from now. But many security experts are worried that the changes being ushered in by the rush to adhere to the law may make it more difficult to track down cybercriminals and less likely that organizations will be willing to share data about new online threats.

On May 25, 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) takes effect. The law, enacted by the European Parliament, requires technology companies to get affirmative consent for any information they collect on people within the European Union. Organizations that violate the GDPR could face fines of up to four percent of global annual revenues.

In response, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICAAN) — the nonprofit entity that manages the global domain name system — is poised to propose changes to the rules governing how much personal information Web site name registrars can collect and who should have access to the data.

Specifically, ICANN has been seeking feedback on a range of proposals to redact information provided in WHOIS, the system for querying databases that store the registered users of domain names and blocks of Internet address ranges (IP addresses).

Under current ICANN rules, domain name registrars should collect and display a variety of data points when someone performs a WHOIS lookup on a given domain, such as the registrant’s name, address, email address and phone number. (Most registrars offer a privacy protection service that shields this information from public WHOIS lookups; some registrars charge a nominal fee for this service, while others offer it for free).

In a bid to help domain registrars comply with the GDPR regulations, ICANN has floated several proposals, all of which would redact some of the registrant data from WHOIS records. Its mildest proposal would remove the registrant’s name, email, and phone number, while allowing self-certified 3rd parties to request access to said data at the approval of a higher authority — such as the registrar used to register the domain name.

The most restrictive proposal would remove all registrant data from public WHOIS records, and would require legal due process (such as a subpoena or court order) to reveal any information supplied by the domain registrant.

ICANN’s various proposed models for redacting information in WHOIS domain name records.

The full text of ICANN’s latest proposed models (from which the screenshot above was taken) can be found here (PDF). A diverse ICANN working group made up of privacy activists, technologists, lawyers, trademark holders and security experts has been arguing about these details since 2016. For the curious and/or intrepid, the entire archive of those debates up to the current day is available at this link.

WHAT IS THE WHOIS DEBATE?

To drastically simplify the discussions into two sides, those in the privacy camp say WHOIS records are being routinely plundered and abused by all manner of ne’er-do-wells, including spammers, scammers, phishers and stalkers. In short, their view seems to be that the availability of registrant data in the WHOIS records causes more problems than it is designed to solve.

Meanwhile, security experts are arguing that the data in WHOIS records has been indispensable in tracking down and bringing to justice those who seek to perpetrate said scams, spams, phishes and….er….stalks.

Many privacy advocates seem to take a dim view of any ICANN system by which third parties (and not just law enforcement officials) might be vetted or accredited to look at a domain registrant’s name, address, phone number, email address, etc. This sentiment is captured in public comments made by the Electronic Frontier Foundation‘s Jeremy Malcolm, who argued that — even if such information were only limited to anti-abuse professionals — this also wouldn’t work.

“There would be nothing to stop malicious actors from identifying as anti-abuse professionals – neither would want to have a system to ‘vet’ anti-abuse professionals, because that would be even more problematic,” Malcolm wrote in October 2017. “There is no added value in collecting personal information – after all, criminals are not going to provide correct information anyway, and if a domain has been compromised then the personal information of the original registrant isn’t going to help much, and its availability in the wild could cause significant harm to the registrant.”

Anti-abuse and security experts counter that there are endless examples of people involved in spam, phishing, malware attacks and other forms of cybercrime who include details in WHOIS records that are extremely useful for tracking down the perpetrators, disrupting their operations, or building reputation-based systems (such as anti-spam and anti-malware services) that seek to filter or block such activity.

Moreover, they point out that the overwhelming majority of phishing is performed with the help of compromised domains, and that the primary method for cleaning up those compromises is using WHOIS data to contact the victim and/or their hosting provider.

Many commentators observed that, in the end, ICANN is likely to proceed in a way that covers its own backside, and that of its primary constituency — domain registrars. Registrars pay a fee to ICANN for each domain a customer registers, although revenue from those fees has been falling of late, forcing ICANN to make significant budget cuts.

Some critics of the WHOIS privacy effort have voiced the opinion that the registrars generally view public WHOIS data as a nuisance issue for their domain registrant customers and an unwelcome cost-center (from being short-staffed to field a constant stream of abuse complaints from security experts, researchers and others in the anti-abuse community).

“Much of the registrar market is a race to the bottom, and the ability of ICANN to police the contractual relationships in that market effectively has not been well-demonstrated over time,” political blogger Andrew Sullivan observed.

In any case, sources close to the debate tell KrebsOnSecurity that ICANN is poised to recommend a WHOIS model loosely based on Model 1 in the chart above.

Specifically, the system that ICANN is planning to recommend, according to sources, would ask registrars and registries to display just the domain name, city, state/province and country of the registrant in each record; the public email addresses would be replaced by a form or message relay link that allows users to contact the registrant. The source also said ICANN plans to leave it up to the registries/registrars to apply these changes globally or only to natural persons living in the European Economic Area (EEA).

In addition, sources say non-public WHOIS data would be accessible via a credentialing system to identify law enforcement agencies and intellectual property rights holders. However, it’s unlikely that such a system would be built and approved before the May 25, 2018 effectiveness date for the GDPR, so the rumor is that ICANN intends to propose a self-certification model in the meantime.

ICANN spokesman Brad White declined to confirm or deny any of the above, referring me instead to a blog post published Tuesday evening by ICANN CEO Göran Marby. That post does not, however, clarify which way ICANN may be leaning on the matter.

“Our conversations and work are on-going and not yet final,” White wrote in a statement shared with KrebsOnSecurity. “We are converging on a final interim model as we continue to engage, review and assess the input we receive from our stakeholders and Data Protection Authorities (PDAs).”

But with the GDPR compliance deadline looming, some registrars are moving forward with their own plans on WHOIS privacy. GoDaddy, one of the world’s largest domain registrars, recently began redacting most registrant data from WHOIS records for domains that are queried via third-party tools. And it seems likely that other registrars will follow GoDaddy’s lead.

ANALYSIS

For my part, I can say without hesitation that few resources are as critical to what I do here at KrebsOnSecurity than the data available in the public WHOIS records. WHOIS records are incredibly useful signposts for tracking cybercrime, and they frequently allow KrebsOnSecurity to break important stories about the connections between and identities behind various cybercriminal operations and the individuals/networks actively supporting or enabling those activities. I also very often rely on WHOIS records to locate contact information for potential sources or cybercrime victims who may not yet be aware of their victimization.

In a great many cases, I have found that clues about the identities of those who perpetrate cybercrime can be found by following a trail of information in WHOIS records that predates their cybercriminal careers. Also, even in cases where online abusers provide intentionally misleading or false information in WHOIS records, that information is still extremely useful in mapping the extent of their malware, phishing and scamming operations.

Anyone looking for copious examples of both need only to search this Web site for the term “WHOIS,” which yields dozens of stories and investigations that simply would not have been possible without the data currently available in the global WHOIS records.

Many privacy activists involved in to the WHOIS debate have argued that other data related to domain and Internet address registrations — such as name servers, Internet (IP) addresses and registration dates — should also be considered private information. My chief concern if this belief becomes more widely held is that security companies might stop sharing such information for fear of violating the GDPR, thus hampering the important work of anti-abuse and security professionals.

This is hardly a theoretical concern. Last month I heard from a security firm based in the European Union regarding a new Internet of Things (IoT) botnet they’d discovered that was unusually complex and advanced. Their outreach piqued my curiosity because I had already been working with a researcher here in the United States who was investigating a similar-sounding IoT botnet, and I wanted to know if my source and the security company were looking at the same thing.

But when I asked the security firm to share a list of Internet addresses related to their discovery, they told me they could not do so because IP addresses could be considered private data — even after I assured them I did not intend to publish the data.

“According to many forums, IPs should be considered personal data as it enters the scope of ‘online identifiers’,” the researcher wrote in an email to KrebsOnSecurity, declining to answer questions about whether their concern was related to provisions in the GDPR specifically.  “Either way, it’s IP addresses belonging to people with vulnerable/infected devices and sharing them may be perceived as bad practice on our end. We consider the list of IPs with infected victims to be private information at this point.”

Certainly as the Internet matures and big companies develop ever more intrusive ways to hoover up data on consumers, we also need to rein in the most egregious practices while giving Internet users more robust tools to protect and preserve their privacy. In the context of Internet security and the privacy principles envisioned in the GDPR, however, I’m worried that cybercriminals may end up being the biggest beneficiaries of this new law.

from Amber Scott Technology News https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/02/new-eu-privacy-law-may-weaken-security/

[wolfgangweston5-blog]

A Dogs Want

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[barbpitcher4-blog]

Spanish Love Sayings

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Our experts can easily use them to be happy if we let the stress and anxiety from these conditions stimulate our company. Our good friends do need to stock up on calories to earn this with those long cool winter months evenings. She is actually pretty, she is actually a skilled singer and also professional dancer which she has been able to exploit and create a lot of amount of money of, she is a famous person she also possesses youngsters. I would be over satisfied to perform just what I can to confirm to you my genuineness on this issue. More than anything in a partnership, a lady should feel appreciated to become happy. Create one thing unique for your man at least on the weekend break, when you have adequate time to devote with each other. You may be actually intending an 80th special day event for an evening owl which has additional power than the common teenager. The pleased microbes could be inhaled or taken in through the skin layer while gardening. This is actually certainly not always as simple as recognizing just what you enjoy, and afterwards figuring out techniques to create money performing it. If you like to wash cars, you could make a nice residing by beginning an auto cleaning business. When you are going to acquire that something you are going to definitely be pleased, how many times did you prefer for one thing and you simply recognized that. Likewise if you concentrate on things in your life that you are happy for not only do you experience more pleased yet you likewise start to bring in even more things that create you happy. I commonly locate on my own drawing up a web page from delighted traits when I reside in a great and satisfied location and also I am actually worried it is actually heading to come to an end very soon. When you want to receive your ex lover sweetheart back as soon as possible, you usually make the exact same mistake as most guys perform, and also you also understand that this is actually certainly not visiting function. Getting to grasps with discovering mugs as well as saucers for the house design, trying brand new systems for table leadings and also floor coverings along with seat seatings; substantial enough to obtain you a common rating of 20/20 producing yourself pleased. Create a declaration out loud to each various other specifying your intention to discover additional beneficial and also quiet methods from interacting to make sure that you correspond a lot better, have a lot less arguments, and more useful dialogues. You have a desire to stand up again as well as try - that will certainly make you a truly pleased person. While there are actually obviously traits that happen in your life that create you think either delighted or even unhappy, the fact is that these take ins come as well as they go. The better equipped you end up being at dealing with the celebrations that induce you stress the a lot less effect it are going to have on your wellness as well as joy and happiness. If you liked this report and you would like to acquire additional facts concerning yellow pages uk jobs - browse this site - kindly visit our own page. However, it costs pursuing so spend some time to identify your enthusiasms (the work-type points you truly delight in), do your investigation, make programs and also carry out whatever you need to do to earn the transition to your personal tremendously task". The bad sentence structure and spelling in this particular file sufficients to earn me doubt the veracity of the writer's insurance claims.

[jobisite11]

Accounts Receivable Coordinator Raleigh, NC with Tecan

The position listed below is not with North Carolina Interviews but with TecanNorth Carolina Interviews is a private organization that works in collaboration with government agencies to promote emerging careers. Our goal is to connect you with supportive resources to supplement your skills in order to attain your dream career. NorthCarolina Interviews has also partnered with industry leading consultants & training providers that can assist during your career transition. We look forward to helping you reach your career goals! If you any questions please visit our contact page to connect with us directlyTecan is a leading player in the fast growing global life sciences equipment and supply industry. We are specialized in the development, production and distribution of automation solutions for laboratories in the market segments of life sciences, clinical diagnostics and forensics. We offer you the opportunity to work in a dynamic and innovative company and to be an active member to participate in our business. For the Finance Department we are looking for an: Accounts Receivable CoordinatorLocation: Raleigh, NC Essential Functions - Process daily cash receipts. This includes processing checks for deposit (either via Remote Deposit Capture or manually to take to the bank), obtaining Wire/ACH information, posting to the customer's account, and reconciling cash with SAP daily. 35% - Thorough review and system application of customer payments and deductions. Deductions must be identified by type as well as by reference number. Maintain proper documentation to ensure timely processing of credit requests. 35% - Scan daily cash receipts on the I drive. 5% - Respond to customer requests for both external and internal customers. This includes working closely with Order Entry and Customer Service regarding invoice questions such as but not limited to sales and use tax, PO#, PO amount, short payment debit memos, etc. 10% -Apply credit memos to correct invoices. 1% - Review printed invoices and mail. 2% - Process electronic invoices via vendor or customer web-sites. 15% - Responsible for timely payment of electronic invoices. Must contact customers if invoices are rejected or not accepted by electronic system and then coordinate the resolution. The resolution may entail adjusting the invoice on the web site, researching the issue in cooperation with other departments at Tecan, or whatever efforts are needed to have the invoice accepted for payment. 15% - Backup for Receptionist (lunch, breaks, & vacations) - Be the backup for processing new customer credit requests. This would include running DNBi reports, obtaining bank and vendor confirmations (when needed), and general research via the internet. 4% - Process month end reports as requested including printing and mailing monthly past due statements to customers. 3% - Process monthly intercompany reconciliations. 3% - Process monthly intercompany rebills. 3% - File cash receipts and intercompany rebills and confirmations. 1% - Process electronic invoices per customer requirements. 15% - Maintains customer accounts within SAP by converting a prospect to a customer, adding a "ship-to" address, adding a "bill-to" address, sales tax exemptions, salesperson, or other items as needed. 3% - Complete and return customer written requests such as W-9, supplier info, electronic payment requests, etc. 10% - Ability to work overtime to assist during the year-end financial audit or at other times as required. - Special projects as determined by self (approved by supervisor), supervisor, or Tecan management. Skills - Strong organization skills. - Posses strong interpersonal skills. Able to resolve discrepancies with Accounting, Purchasing and Operations departments. Other internal interaction with employees regarding Expense Report payments or discrepancies. - Professional phone etiquette required. (Extensive phone contact with customers, end users along with Tecan's Customer Service, and Operations Department). - Ability to recognize potential problem areas and resolve them with integrity. - Ability to treat confidential information in a professional manner, and discussed only with my supervisor, the HR manager, CFO, or president, or a person designated by them. Any knowledge of confidential information is to be used only in the conduct of official business of Tecan. - Excellent written and oral communication skills, ability to interact effectively with diverse groups inside and outside of the organization. - Attention to detail a must. - Must be a self starter. - Ability to work well under pressure, to multi task. - High level of commitment and initiative. - A desire to make the difference! - Proven team player Experience - Associate degree in Accounting, or equivalent - 2-3 years payables experience - Must have a good understanding of general accounting and internal control policies, and work in conjunction with management to implement and maintain these policies. - Expense processing helpful. - SAP experience desired. - Working knowledge of Excel, Work and accounting systems. Please apply online and submit your resume to: ***************************************************************** & ccId=********_****** & type=MP & lang=en_US Equal Opportunity Employer/Affirmative Action/Minority/Female/Sexual Orientation/Gender Identity/Disabled/Veteran. If you need assistance applying for this position please call Human Resources at ************** or email ***************  AccountsReceivableCoordinator(Raleigh,NC)withTecan from Job Portal http://www.jobisite.com/extrJobView.htm?id=82936

[usajobsite]

Accounts Receivable Coordinator Raleigh, NC with Tecan

The position listed below is not with North Carolina Interviews but with TecanNorth Carolina Interviews is a private organization that works in collaboration with government agencies to promote emerging careers. Our goal is to connect you with supportive resources to supplement your skills in order to attain your dream career. NorthCarolina Interviews has also partnered with industry leading consultants & training providers that can assist during your career transition. We look forward to helping you reach your career goals! If you any questions please visit our contact page to connect with us directlyTecan is a leading player in the fast growing global life sciences equipment and supply industry. We are specialized in the development, production and distribution of automation solutions for laboratories in the market segments of life sciences, clinical diagnostics and forensics. We offer you the opportunity to work in a dynamic and innovative company and to be an active member to participate in our business. For the Finance Department we are looking for an: Accounts Receivable CoordinatorLocation: Raleigh, NC Essential Functions - Process daily cash receipts. This includes processing checks for deposit (either via Remote Deposit Capture or manually to take to the bank), obtaining Wire/ACH information, posting to the customer's account, and reconciling cash with SAP daily. 35% - Thorough review and system application of customer payments and deductions. Deductions must be identified by type as well as by reference number. Maintain proper documentation to ensure timely processing of credit requests. 35% - Scan daily cash receipts on the I drive. 5% - Respond to customer requests for both external and internal customers. This includes working closely with Order Entry and Customer Service regarding invoice questions such as but not limited to sales and use tax, PO#, PO amount, short payment debit memos, etc. 10% -Apply credit memos to correct invoices. 1% - Review printed invoices and mail. 2% - Process electronic invoices via vendor or customer web-sites. 15% - Responsible for timely payment of electronic invoices. Must contact customers if invoices are rejected or not accepted by electronic system and then coordinate the resolution. The resolution may entail adjusting the invoice on the web site, researching the issue in cooperation with other departments at Tecan, or whatever efforts are needed to have the invoice accepted for payment. 15% - Backup for Receptionist (lunch, breaks, & vacations) - Be the backup for processing new customer credit requests. This would include running DNBi reports, obtaining bank and vendor confirmations (when needed), and general research via the internet. 4% - Process month end reports as requested including printing and mailing monthly past due statements to customers. 3% - Process monthly intercompany reconciliations. 3% - Process monthly intercompany rebills. 3% - File cash receipts and intercompany rebills and confirmations. 1% - Process electronic invoices per customer requirements. 15% - Maintains customer accounts within SAP by converting a prospect to a customer, adding a "ship-to" address, adding a "bill-to" address, sales tax exemptions, salesperson, or other items as needed. 3% - Complete and return customer written requests such as W-9, supplier info, electronic payment requests, etc. 10% - Ability to work overtime to assist during the year-end financial audit or at other times as required. - Special projects as determined by self (approved by supervisor), supervisor, or Tecan management. Skills - Strong organization skills. - Posses strong interpersonal skills. Able to resolve discrepancies with Accounting, Purchasing and Operations departments. Other internal interaction with employees regarding Expense Report payments or discrepancies. - Professional phone etiquette required. (Extensive phone contact with customers, end users along with Tecan's Customer Service, and Operations Department). - Ability to recognize potential problem areas and resolve them with integrity. - Ability to treat confidential information in a professional manner, and discussed only with my supervisor, the HR manager, CFO, or president, or a person designated by them. Any knowledge of confidential information is to be used only in the conduct of official business of Tecan. - Excellent written and oral communication skills, ability to interact effectively with diverse groups inside and outside of the organization. - Attention to detail a must. - Must be a self starter. - Ability to work well under pressure, to multi task. - High level of commitment and initiative. - A desire to make the difference! - Proven team player Experience - Associate degree in Accounting, or equivalent - 2-3 years payables experience - Must have a good understanding of general accounting and internal control policies, and work in conjunction with management to implement and maintain these policies. - Expense processing helpful. - SAP experience desired. - Working knowledge of Excel, Work and accounting systems. Please apply online and submit your resume to: ***************************************************************** & ccId=********_****** & type=MP & lang=en_US Equal Opportunity Employer/Affirmative Action/Minority/Female/Sexual Orientation/Gender Identity/Disabled/Veteran. If you need assistance applying for this position please call Human Resources at ************** or email ***************  AccountsReceivableCoordinator(Raleigh,NC)withTecan from Job Portal http://www.jobisite.com/extrJobView.htm?id=82936

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