Steven Bellovin: Don’t Get Hacked!

Texas at a Crossroads

The Plutopia News Network team takes a wide-ranging look at the changing political landscape in Texas, using Jon Lebkowsky’s experience as a delegate to the Texas Democratic Convention as a springboard for a broader discussion of democracy, public policy, and the state’s future. The conversation explores Democratic efforts to compete statewide by expanding voting access, supporting public education, improving health care, protecting civil rights, and addressing climate and infrastructure challenges, while also examining water shortages, AI data centers, renewable energy, immigration, and Texas’s independent power grid. Along the way, the hosts compare American and British perspectives on issues such as universal health care and immigration, reflect on Texas’s political history, and critique the influence of Donald Trump and right-wing culture wars, ultimately arguing that the state’s future will depend on pragmatic solutions to environmental, economic, and democratic challenges rather than ideological battles. Jon: > The candidates for the Democratic Party were not — for one thing, there were many seats where Republicans were running unopposed in the past. This time every seat in the state has a Democratic candidate. They’re concerned about voting rights and democracy and the erosion of democracy. So they want to expand voting access, which has certainly not been happening in Texas. Maybe they’re even considering going for online voter registration. Scoop: > You’ll hear some of the Republican office holders Kind of kissing up to Trump about doing away with electric vehicles and the windmills, as he calls them. But the reality is that’s the only thing it’s going to save Texas. Wendy: > This is one of the things that when you live outside the states, most countries have some form of nationalized health care. You know, Britain was, of course, the pioneer in this. And that anybody sees it as socialist to have universal health care or somehow wrong just boggles people’s minds. The post Texas at a Crossroads [https://plutopia.io/texas-at-a-crossroads/] first appeared on Plutopia News Network [https://plutopia.io].

Peter Richardson: Brand New Beat

Peter Richardson joins Plutopia to discuss Brand New Beat, [https://bookshop.org/a/52607/9780520399396] his history of Rolling Stone’s [https://www.rollingstone.com/] first decade and its roots in San Francisco counterculture, Ramparts, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramparts_(magazine)] and the Bay Area music scene. The conversation covers Richardson’s access to Rolling Stone’s private archives, the magazine’s founding by Jann Wenner [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jann_Wenner] and Ralph J. Gleason, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_J._Gleason] its early tension between rock journalism and radical politics, its male-dominated “boys’ club” culture, and the roles of writers and editors such as Hunter S. Thompson, Ellen Willis, Ben Fong-Torres, Greil Marcus, Ed Ward, and Cameron Crowe. Richardson also explains how Rolling Stone evolved from a countercultural rock magazine into a broader entertainment and political publication, shaped by celebrity journalism, changing music economics, Annie Leibovitz’s photography, and the magazine’s eventual move away from its original revolutionary hopes. Peter Richardson: > Jann Wenner came through town to promote his memoir, and I met him, and at the same event, I met Ben Fong-Torres. And I asked him if I had his support for this book, and that I didn’t want to do it if I didn’t have that support. And he said, well, what do you mean by that? And I said, I want you to talk to me. I don’t want you to tell other people not to talk to me. And I also want to make sure that I get to those papers that his biographer had access to and were not publicly available. It’s not in an archive somewhere that everybody can access. Those papers, they’re all the Rolling Stone papers going back to the origin of the magazine. Those papers, by the time I got to them, were in deep storage, secure storage, in a New Jersey warehouse. So I asked for access to those papers, too. And he said, okay, and that was it. That was actually a difficult thing to arrange because they’re not used to people coming in and pulling things out of a working warehouse to look at them for weeks at a time. So that was a big break. > > > > The post Peter Richardson: Brand New Beat [https://plutopia.io/peter-richardson-brand-new-beat/] first appeared on Plutopia News Network [https://plutopia.io].

Hugh Forrest: Growing Experiences

Former SXSW co-president and chief programming officer Hugh Forrest joins Plutopia to reflect on nearly four decades helping shape South by Southwest, [https://sxsw.com] its growth alongside Austin, and the challenges of scaling creative communities without losing authenticity. Forrest discusses how SXSW succeeded by bringing diverse creative people together, but also how rapid growth created problems of cost, accessibility, logistics, and community displacement. Now leading Gather and Grow Experiences, [https://www.gatherandgrowexperiences.com/] he advises organizations to build meaningful, locally grounded, face-to-face experiences that prioritize quality over quantity, reflect their host communities, and foster human connection in an increasingly digital, automated, and politically fragmented world. Hugh Forrest: > The most successful events and experiences — again, I like the word experiences more than events, as much as I use the word events — are very much a reflection of the local community that they’re in. And certainly, I think what we found with South by Southwest when we tried to do these events in other markets, was that you couldn’t treat this as a franchisable cookie cutter approach if it was going to be successful. If we’re going to do an event in Blank-blank city that’s going to be successful, it really has to reflect the the values, the the strengths, the interests of that particular city. So I don’t know that there’s a playbook on that. If anything, the playbook is reflect where you are. YOUTUBE VIDEO The post Hugh Forrest: Growing Experiences [https://plutopia.io/hugh-forrest-growing-experiences/] first appeared on Plutopia News Network [https://plutopia.io].

Steven Bellovin: Don’t Get Hacked!

In this Plutopia podcast episode, security researcher and educator Steve Bellovin [https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/] discusses the increasingly centralized and balkanized internet, the practical and social problems with age verification, the limited role of consumer VPNs in an era of widespread encryption, and the history and evolution of cryptography. He also shares advice from his new book Don’t Get Hacked, Protect Yourself at Home [https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/homesec/]: keep software updated, use two-factor authentication—especially on email and financial accounts—and rely on a password manager to avoid password reuse. Steve Bellovin: > I think the most important things you can do are keeping your software up to date and using two-factor authentication. Especially on the most important accounts, and that especially includes your email account. Which other than maybe your bank account is your most important password, most important account, because it’s used to reset all of your other passwords. So two-factor authentication, keeping your software up to date, and, given reality, probably you should use a password manager because you cannot keep track of a hundred or more strong (I’m not fond of that word) different passwords. Password reuse is a much greater sin than a quote weak unquote password. LINKS * Don’t Get Hacked, Protect Yourself at Home [https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/homesec/] * “Netnews: The Original Story” [https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/papers/netnews-hist.pdf] * On the Early Days of Usenet: The Roots of the Cooperative Online Culture [https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/613/534] VIDEO ON YOUTUBE The post Steven Bellovin: Don’t Get Hacked! [https://plutopia.io/steven-bellovin-dont-get-hacked/] first appeared on Plutopia News Network [https://plutopia.io].

Deborah Cohen: Bad Influence

Award-winning medical journalist Deborah Cohen joins the Plutopia News Network to discuss her book Bad Influence: How the Internet Hijacked Our Health. [https://bookshop.org/a/52607/9780861549887] Deborah examines how social media algorithms, influencers, podcasts, wellness brands, and AI tools have transformed the way people find and evaluate health information. She argues that online platforms reward certainty, emotion, and personal storytelling over scientific nuance, while commercial incentives increasingly shape what health advice reaches the public. The conversation explores the erosion of trust in traditional institutions, the rise of health influencers and wellness marketing, the promises and pitfalls of patient empowerment, the quantified-self movement, GLP-1 drugs, and the growing role of AI in medicine. Throughout, Cohen emphasizes the challenge of navigating a digital health ecosystem where expertise competes with attention, commercial interests, and algorithmic amplification, leaving patients to determine whom—and what—to trust. Deborah Cohen: > Obviously, you want to sell newspapers — if you’re a mainstream media, you want to get eyeballs on the screens. But this is all monetized on social media. So if you have a video that goes viral, you potentially stand to gain financially. Also, a lot of influencers work with companies for product placement, to advertise products. And there’s a massive market in healthcare. So there was one study that suggested — and this is a couple of years old, it’s a US study — that there’s over 3 million health providers on TikTok alone. So, We’re getting our information from people very much with a commercial incentive to sell. VIDEO ON YOUTUBE: The post Deborah Cohen: Bad Influence [https://plutopia.io/deborah-cohen-bad-influence/] first appeared on Plutopia News Network [https://plutopia.io].