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How to Stop Being Tracked Online

  By Hanging Chen, ProPublica   Many sites (including ProPublica and F&O) track user behaviour using a variety of invisible third-party software. This means any time you visit a web page, you’re likely sharing data about your online habits, from clicks to views or social shares, whether you realize it or not. But there are a few ways to combat online tracking — although none can block some of the more sophisticated tracking techniques, such as ‘fingerprinting‘ and ‘onboarding.’ Here are three tools that block the most common trackers. Ghostery Featuring an ever-growing database of over 1,900 tracking entities, Ghostery’s

From Shattered Iraq, Ancient “Land of Kurds” Will Rise

The fracturing of Iraq will mean the birth of Kurdistan, and another revision of borders around  the ancient land of the Kurds, writes International Affairs analyst Jonathan Manthorpe. An excerpt of his new column: The question is not whether there will be an independent Kurdistan. It’s been lurking in the underbrush since 1991. The question is how big the country will get. The 40 million Kurds are the world’s most numerous distinct people without a country of their own. Their homeland is partitioned among Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria, and while most are Sunni Muslims, there are significant religious minorities of Zaroastrians,

Bandaging Symptoms Won’t Cure Thailand’s Trauma: Manthorpe

Thailand’s ousted prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra “is a symptom of Thailand’s problems, not the source of them,” writes International Affairs analyst Jonathan Manthorpe. “Erasing him and his cohorts from the political agenda will not alter the reality that Thaksin represents an upwardly mobile and provincial middle class in Thailand that wants a voice in a system dominated by royalist courtiers, old money and the military.”  An excerpt of today’s column: Thailand’s military regime appears intent on purging the country of all traces of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and his family, and preventing a come-back by the man who has dominated national politics for

Bombast

An American court lobbed a bombshell into the culture wars today, by ruling that some United States corporations have religious rights. My first notice of the decision was an email alert from the New York Times: “The Supreme Court has ruled on whether for-profit corporations may advance claims based on religious freedom. Our reporters are reading the decision and will update this article as soon as they feel confident about its basic meaning.“ (Emphasis is mine.) The restraint in that simple message was, oddly, a relief. Civility and sanity drown a bit more every day in maelstroms formed by instant explosive rage

The DICEy Flaws in Carbon Models: Chris Wood

Economists Simon Dietz and Nicholas Stern have published some startling findings about the current DICEy models used to estimate the social price of carbon. Chris Wood explains in today’s Natural Security column, excerpt here: A common line of attack for the propagandists, and the misled who imagine we are not altering Earth’s climate, is that climate projections rely on models. Models! Not the real thing. Why, they could be as made-up as a model of the space ship Enterprise! Pure fiction.  Of course, the richly researched ‘models’ that forecast where our climate is headed with increasing precision, are nothing of the

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