SMART Time Vandals

                 On the 19^th of December during the announcements Mr. Klein mentions “continued vandalism” in the labs and announces that they will require a pass to use during SMART time. The labs were used as an open classroom of sorts during SMART time but recently it has apparently been getting a bit hectic.

                 Mrs. Baber, the Technology Facilitator at Kennedy said that there were missing mice and keyboards, sometimes they were even broken, which can cause quite a bit of concern seeing as they cost a bit to replace. On top of the broken equipment, Baber said that “There was food deliberately placed on the computers,” which could lead to some issues with the computers themselves. All of this led to the labs now requiring a pass to use during SMART Time.

                 All of the labs have gotten a sign put on the door that simply states that “Students will need a pass from a teacher in order to work in this lab during SMART Time.”  The passes you need for the labs are simply written passes given by teacher you are doing work for. The labs are now also supervised by a teacher who just makes sure people have passes and that they are working and not just messing around. The teachers also tell the students to keep a low volume when speaking, just like it’s a quiet study. When asked if she thought the passes would prevent more vandalism she responded with “I think it will because there is someone actually supervising kids in there.” Using the labs after the new restrictions seems like its more of an open room any other teacher would hold, but it also seems like a calmer place to get work done in with the teacher making sure people keep their voices down.

                 The computer labs are going to have these rules until the end of the semester on the 11^th of January, after the semester ends there will most likely be more supervision at the labs which will most likely prevent most of the vandalism seen during SMART Time, although we cannot tell until it happens. We just have to wait and see what comes with the new semester that’s just around the corner.

A Reflection of Fake News and Media Law in the Wild West of Journalism

      In the last few weeks, as a class we began learning about Media Law and Fake News. The entire time was interesting from start to end and it helped me figure out where I might want to go with the rest of my life, although I still don't know entirely. A fair few of these concepts I knew of beforehand but some I didn't and I feel like it's right to give them their own spotlight in my reflection.

       Media Law was the one topic I knew the least about, when we started the entire thing I felt confused because I hadn't heard of any of these concepts, such as Shield Law and the moral decisions of protecting a source's anonymity. Shield Law helped me understand a lot about what I can and cannot do when it comes to my own sources, I didn't even know originally that you could use an anonymous source. The moral dilemma that comes with protecting them was something I wasn't sure if I could even do though. I've always been someone who tries to test their morals although I don't really test them in a real life scenario, mostly just in things like games where you can test them and it wont hurt anything around you in the real world, despite it being a game I always feel like I am doing something wrong and I think I can contribute this to not knowing what would be right or wrong in the eyes of most other people, and this is something that Media Law can get touchy on, especially with things like Obscenities where it might not be seen as obscene to you but it is to others. Although the biggest part of obscenity you might be able to see, like in the case of Matthew Fraser's speech which was a very obvious form of obscenity, and sometimes you don't know if something will come off as obscene to some people and you don't know where right or wrong is, especially with your jokes. The main thing I learned from that in the field of avoiding a piece being called obscene is to cut down on  anything that might be offensive, but don't cut down too much.
          You're words as a journalist can have real effects and you need to watch what you say and understand what it could do to another person, and Libel and Slander are a great thing to understand if you're writing a piece about someone. You don't want to be talking bad about someone or telling a lie and then have them come at you for libel. The only way I learned you can be sued for libel is if you can very clearly tell who the person you are talking bad about is and if they can prove what you're saying is false, meaning you should watch your wording when writing about something that could possibly be fake such as with a developing story or when using a source who you don't know well.
         The Fake News portion of class was a really interesting area with all its specification and small things that distinguish it from normal journalism. The movie Shattered Glass showed a great example of fake news and how it's sometimes hard to put fake news apart from real news. It did show that sometimes everything isn't always big and eventful and checking sources for articles is always a good idea. The movie showed journalist Stephen Glass and his life as a journalist. The movie started off with everyone loving him and how his stories are always smash hits, at this point no one knew they were faked. Later in the movie though when his editor got fired and one of Stephens newest articles was put in the spotlight by Forbes, the new editor had asked Stephen for his sources, which he provided, but when he went and checked them he found they were rather suspicious and consisted of things like a poorly made website and a phone number that was in California and not Nevada. It progressed to the state of him being accused by his new editor of making up his stories and their sources. What I mainly got from it was that fake news is very hard to find unless you do your own research, and it can also be used to spread false thoughts around. The other parts of this subject also helped me understand it a bit more than the movie did though.
         Our presentations helped me understand where these kinds of things are spread and how they make it around the world, such as with fake news which disguises itself as actual news. Learning of the different forms of it that exist in the things we use everyday was interesting and learning how to avoid things like bots, and fake news stories was really interesting and it gave me a whole new perspective on the news that I see on websites that I visit on a daily basis. Although I found the presentations helpful it was really the packet we did that helped me understand the whole idea of Fake News, including things I hadn't heard of like Partisan and Sensational News which both showed me how things can be made up and used just to get clicks. The one that I had heard the least of was Partisan news though, before then I had never heard it called that and almost never noticed it, but learning that it was all about some news organisations having a perceived political tie and them showing a bit of a bias towards their political side really made me rethink a lot of things I have read in the recent weeks. With the knowledge I got from this subject really made me think about what I'm reading and what I write as well as who I source for information. Using this I could even find out things that are fake and things that have heavy bias so I can form my own opinion on a subject and keep myself well informed and not spouting things that I've heard from a news organisation that only writes phony articles or extremely biased articles.

A Journey Through Journalism

           A dream sparked from her father’s work in T.V. turned into a lifelong goal for Stacey Haynes-Moore. This goal has lead her on the journey from playing the game of “Interview” as a child to actually doing interviews for a news station, her journey has been filled with difficulty and new things.

            Her father worked Media Consultant where he would travel and meet news reports from all over the country and talk to them about how they chose to report on stories, at home though she would always be surrounded by the news simply because it was a part of her father’s job. This is what all sparked this passion for the news and her interest of writing all throughout elementary and middle school which led her to become a student editor on her high school newspaper. During her high school years Haynes-Moore took all the classes she could with news. The one class she didn’t take though was Yearbook, while she doesn’t have anything against it she never found it to have much interest, but that didn’t stop her from being friends with the kids who took it. Haynes-Moore even went to a Journalism camp at the University of Iowa, which she says helped her learn a lot about Journalism in general. In pursuit of her dream she attended the University of Missouri and majored in Broadcast Journalism until later changing her major to Print Journalism because she enjoyed writing more and didn't want to be a “TV talking head” and found more substance in writing articles.

Once she wrapped up her University life she moved to Kirksville, Missouri and became a reporter for the Kirksville Daily Express. Working there came with its difficulty though, she worked through most of the day and worked on every day of the week, this included holidays. Around a year after she joined she quit because she was overworked and needed some freetime. Having seen Missouri for a good part of her life she moved to Mt. Vernon, Iowa and became an editor on the weekly paper the Mt. Vernon Sun. She later joined a small online magazine company where she had to learn a bit about the internet. She liked working with the small company because they got along well but when it ended up being bought out by a bigger company she left because she didn’t want to work for it just because it was a large company.

Haynes-Moore started to feel like she wanted to do something instead of journalism that still had the aspects of it, so she decided to go back to school and study to be a Language Arts teacher because of her love for the subject, working with people, and it’s general idea of writing. She first ended up teaching L.A. 9 at Jefferson for her first job which lasted around 10 years. Then after a bit she ended up at Kennedy as an L.A. teacher and the leader of Kennedy Torch, a magazine that covers most topics a newspaper would cover. One of her favorite parts of Torch is hanging out and having fun with the members on long nights, sometimes on which they blare music from all sorts of bands including Weezer, one of her personal favorites. When we asked if she would go back to doing Print Journalism and/or Broadcasting, she responded with, “I have sort of a really great career right now. It sort of blends what I like to do, which is working with students [and] working still in media.”

Social Media and Your Privacy

                                                                                                                                                     10/19/18

                                                     Social Media and Your Privacy

    Most teenagers use social media, around 94% of teens use it, and this leads to large databases of these many users information, but do you ever notice the Terms of Service that flashes to you when creating an account on these sites? Reading through the Terms of Service (or ToS for short) can you help you out in the long run because what it has in it.

    Whenever you make an account on any website, you are told to agree to the terms of service which states what information you will give to a website, most of the time it's just basic stuff like what you can and can't do such as copying their content. The most information this usually asks for is your IP address which is used for several things like localizing content you are shown and IP Bans if you are banned for breaching the ToS. These terms are often made just to tell you what you are agreeing to before you agree to it (Like a contract) but sometimes these things change and sometimes they change for the worse.

    On Thursday of this week it came to many Discord users attention that Discord had changed their terms of service, but they didn't learn this from Discord themselves, instead they learned of this change through the Discord API server meaning it wasn't sent out in masses even though the change was massive. You may be wondering what this change was, well it was a change that made it impossible to sue the company if your information gets leaked from their databases. Specifically they made it so you cannot sue as a collective or launch a class action lawsuit, basically meaning if a large population of people has their information leaked, like what happened to Sony in 2014 except instead of employees it would be users, you could not sue as a collective group only individually through an arbitrator which heavily favors companies over consumers.

    This change in their Terms could lead to an issue like what happened with Facebook where they were selling user information but instead the people can't do much against it. This doesn't just affect Discord users though because it gives an example of what some companies could do just so they can save themselves if a data breach ever occurs. Discord made an official statement and said that the change was made because class action lawsuits only get the user "anywhere from ten cents to a couple dollars." But this doesn't exactly get the point of suing a company for leaking your personal information and they just seemed to keep saying that they made the change for the good of the user in their official response on Reddit.

    This change in their Terms of Service can mean more than Discord changing their ToS, it sets the example of what a service can do with your information that you provide to them. You should always watch out for whats going on with a service you are using, may it be Twitter, Instagram, or even Snapchat, these are apps that are able to do so much more with information and it makes a point that you should be watching out for whats going on with Social Media applications and with what you can do to protect your private information online.

EA and Belgium

                                                             EA and Belgium

Gambling is a highly addictive habit from what we have seen, recently though its been making a move in the gaming world in the form of “Loot boxes”. Loot boxes are items that can be opened like a pack of Pokémon cards and has random items for the game it is in. Some people might not have an issue with this but Belgium seems to be having a bit of an issue with it.  According to an article named “Belgium Investigates EA for Loot Box Saga” the country seems to be taking the problem of them to a higher level by launching a criminal investigation on the developer for its use of Loot Boxes in its FIFA game series. What made the government of Belgium decide to launch an entire investigation on this developer is my main question.  The developer EA has been known to love money and their sources of revenue as seen in Battlefront 2 (2017) and in their push for yearly games like FIFA, and most importantly they are very protective of their microtransations to the point where they denied to remove the lootboxes in FIFA when requested to by the Belgium Government: “However while all other developers have agreed to remove the loot boxes from the Belgian versions of their games, EA has refused to meet this request.” The biggest question here is why they are denying to remove something that other developers have removed in their games.  EA seems to be very protective of these lootboxes as well to the point where their own CEO stated that they were not gambling and has been very protective of this claim. After some time the company was then put under a criminal investigation which still has not concluded, but the developer has made these loot boxes “include odds for the very first time, as well as giving players a breakdown of what they stand to gain from each loot box they purchase.” This seems to have made many people but does it really fix the problem? I feel its like telling someone at a gambling table that their odds of winning are 1 in 100. The investigation is sure to be an interesting one though and I will be waiting for the results.

Article 13

                                                                Article 13

                                                              By: Samuel Miranda

The hot news at the moment seems to be filled by the European Parliaments choice to accept copyright law changes that included the controversial articles 11, and 13. According to some musicians and creators the laws are necessary in order to fairly compensate artists, but what they mean by “fairly compensated” they never elaborate on. The laws aren’t entirely in place yet due to the leaders of the EU’s member states needing to sign off on it and after that the individual countries needing to put the laws in place. In the BBC’s article on the copyright changes they state that the laws would require all internet platforms to filter content put online by users which is being called an excessive restriction of freedom of speech. How strict this filter is going to be is very lightly talked about later in the article which states that Parodies would not violate the laws. A point that caught my confusion was where they stated that “Article 11 is also controversial because it forces online platforms to pay news organisations for the use of their content.” My confusion starts where they state online platforms would be forced to pay for news which makes no sense seeing as it is news and not something you can copyright. Imagine if CNN breaks a news story and asks for payment when any other news station reports on the story, it doesn’t make sense. Although the final version clarifies that platforms wouldn’t be forced to pay for hyperlinks which was what people thought would be the case but they still don’t say what they mean by paying for use of their content.  In the article that the BBC made there is a quote from EU commissioners Andrus Ansip and Mariya Gabriel in which they state that the change is “an essential step to achieving our common objective of modernising the copyright rules in the European Union.” This is an interesting statement due to it implying that the copyright rules are far out of date when they really aren’t the only issues you can see about copyright happen when large companies strike down content that is made by users on sites like YouTube and claiming all revenue for a piece of the companies’ content being used in a 30 second parody from a 20 minute long video. (Source: Jameskii)  This is where the law stating that parodies would be fine is a good part. The article then goes on to quote Phil Sherrell who is the head of media, entertainment and sports at a company called Bird & Bird with “Rights holders will be delighted as the directive provides them with additional rights and should strengthen their ability to negotiate royalty payments from online platforms for use of their work.” The big question I have here is why do they need additional rights when the copyright system already works for them to the point of being able to ignore fair use in a parody. The laws seem to be over doing it, a lot of parliament say that it would be doing the internet a great favour, but the entire thing is a disaster waiting to happen. 

Gannon Hall

                

You have a lot of people that you go to class with, but how many do you know? Do you talk to people outside of your small friend group? You may have heard bits and pieces about other people but never actually know them in full. Maybe you’ve talked to them a bit, but do you know all their interesting quirks and hobbies? Let me ask you if you know Gannon and all his hobbies?

           

            Weekends are the time you usually use to relax from the stress of the week, but Gannon sometimes enjoys golfing on these weekends. You don’t see many people who golf these days. All the golfers you hear about today are people who go pro with it and are in their early 30’s to mid 40’s, Gannon is however just in his high school years. He says that the reason he likes playing golf is because his family just loved playing it and played it around him a lot when he was younger. To this day he is an avid golfer and is on the golf team. Golf isn’t his only interesting hobby he has, Gannon also enjoys selling shoes. You would usually see people just getting a job to earn some money, but Gannon decided against that and he chose to start reselling shoes.

            

             Gannon seems to be a rather interesting person, filling his weekends with selling shoes and golf when the rest of us usually are relaxing or playing a more common sport.  You may not have known these things but now thanks to my brief interview with him and my choice to share the fact he enjoys golf and selling shoes. 

Samuel Miranda.