Fix The News is an independent, subscriber-supported publication, read by 60,000 people from 195 countries. Each week, we find 30-40 stories of progress from around the world, and summarise and share them in our email newsletter. We have a podcast too, called Hope Is A Verb, where we interview people doing extraordinary things to make the world a better place.
'If it bleeds it leads' isn't just a mantra for tabloid editors anymore. It's a fundamental commercial reality for the media industry. A recent study of 23 million headlines from 47 popular news outlets showed that in the last two decades the share of headlines denoting anger increased by 104% and the share evoking fear surged by 150%.
What this shows is that it's not just your imagination. The news really has become more negative. It's making us all feel grim about the present, and hopeless about the future. Pessimism is so deeply ingrained in our media culture that it’s become the default frame imposed on all our realities. It’s not breaking news anymore. It’s broken news.
This newsletter, originally known as Future Crunch, was founded on the simple idea that another form of journalism is possible. For the past nine years, we’ve made the case that the news can delight and inspire, and our 60,000 readers are evidence that there’s a genuine market for this kind of content.
Introduced at The Last HOPE, this online project is a recreation of yesteryear using open source software. Phiber Optik used a modified build of Asterisk to build a virtual telephone network that you can hack around with using a blue box (or a software emulation thereof). It's completely isolated and completely legal, and was built for those of us who got into phreaking after electromechanical switching disappeared. If you want, you can set your own instance up by downloading the patches for the software.
A collective that's building F/OSS medical equipment and synthesizing important pharmaceuticals. Presented at HOPE about torrenting drugs and medication.
Hiddenservice: http://ga5wrpojaen4lhedpp2ccbps2gzdt5kxtyvqwr364jji53oqjbsbdvyd.onion/