Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

October 4, 2019

Avoided Ethics Guidelines

Filed under: Ethics,Facebook,Google+,Government — Patrick Durusau @ 10:46 am

Ethical guidelines issued by engineers’ organization fail to gain traction by Nicolas Kayser-Bril.

The world’s largest professional association of engineers released its ethical guidelines for automated systems last March. A review by AlgorithmWatch shows that Facebook and Google have yet to acknowledge them.

In early 2016, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a professional association known as IEEE, launched a “global initiative to advance ethics in technology.” After almost three years of work and multiple rounds of exchange with experts on the topic, it released last April the first edition of Ethically Aligned Design, a 300-page treatise on the ethics of automated systems.

If you want to intentionally ignore these guidelines as well, they are at: Ethics in Action.

Understanding “ethics” are defined within and are supportive of a system, given the racist, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, capitalist exploitation economy of today, I find discussions of “ethics” quixotic.

Governments and corporations have no “ethics” even within the present system and following ethics based on what should be the system, only disarms you in the presence of impacable enemies. The non-responses by Google and Facebook are fair warning that you are “ethical” in your relationships with them, only with due regard for the police lurking nearby.

May I suggest you find a sharper stick than “you’re unethical” when taking on governments, corporations and systems. They shrug that sort of comment off like water off a duck’s back. Look around, new and sharper sticks are being invented everyday.

October 8, 2018

Slacking Hackers? Google API Bug – 13 Internet Years

Filed under: Cybersecurity,Google+,Hacking — Patrick Durusau @ 3:29 pm

Google chose not to go public about bug that exposed Google Plus users’ data by Graham Cluley.

From the post:


No-one, not even Google, knows for sure how many Google Plus users had their personal data exposed to third-party app developers due to a bug in its API which had was present from 2015 until March this year.

But in a blog post seemingly published in an attempt to take some of the sting out of the Wall Street Journal report, Google revealed that – despite approximately 500,000 Google Plus profiles were potentially affected in just the two weeks prior to patching the bug, and 438 separate third-party applications having access to the unauthorized Google Plus data – it has not seen any evidence that any profile data was misused.

Estimates of an Internet year vs. a calendar year range from 1 calendar year = 2 Internet years; 1 calendar year = 4.7 Internet years; and, a high of 1 calendar year = 7 Internet years.

To be fair, let’s arbitrarily pick 1 year = 4 Internet years, which means the Google API bug has been around for 13 Internet years.

I’m not a hacker so I certainly wasn’t helping but geez. Not that anyone should have pointed the flaw out to Google by any means. Google’s moves to hide the existence of the bug, speaks volumes about some of us being in ocean going yachts and others in leaking life rafts.

There is no commonality of interests in computer security between the average user and Google. Google offers security as a commodity (think DoD in the cloud) and whether you are secure, well, have you paid Google for your security?

I’m certain that Google will protest, should they bother to notice but can you guess who has a financial interest in your free or nearly so reports of security bugs? (Hint: It’s not me.)

I’ve tried to avoid Google+ since its inception so its death won’t impact me.

I do need to set about learning how to check APIs for security flaws. 😉

November 5, 2014

Google and Mission Statements

Filed under: Google+,Indexing,Searching — Patrick Durusau @ 4:55 pm

Google has ‘outgrown’ its 14-year old mission statement, says Larry Page by Samuel Gibbs.

From the post:

Google’s chief executive Larry Page has admitted that the company has outgrown its mission statement to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” from the launch of the company in 1998, but has said he doesn’t yet know how to redefine it.

Page insists that the company is still focused on the altruistic principles that it was founded on in 1998 with the original mission statement, when he and co-founder Sergey Brin were aiming big with “societal goals” to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”.

Questioned as to whether Google needs to alter its mission statement, which was twinned with the company mantra “don’t be evil, for the next stage of company growth in an interview with the Financial Times, Page responded: “We’re in a bit of uncharted territory. We’re trying to figure it out. How do we use all these resources … and have a much more positive impact on the world?”

This post came as a surprise to me because I was unaware that Google had solved the problem of “organis[ing] the world’s information and mak[ing] it universally accessible and useful.”

Perhaps so but it hasn’t made it to the server farm that sends results to me.

A quick search using Google on “cia” today produces a front page with resources on the Central Intelligence Agency, the Culinary Institute of American, Certified Internal Auditor (CIA) Certification and allegedly, 224,000,000 more results.

If I search using “Central Intelligence Agency,” I get a “purer” stream of content on the Central Intelligence Agency, that runs from its official website, https://www.cia.gov, to the Wikipedia article, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Intelligence_Agency, and ArtsBeat | Can’t Afford a Giacometti Sculpture? There’s Always the CIA’s bin Laden Action Figure .

Even with a detailed query Google search results remind me of a line from Saigon Warrior that goes:

But the organization is a god damned disgrace

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-U9Ns9oG6E

If Larry Page thinks Google has “organise[d] the world’s information and ma[de] it universally accessible and useful,” he needs a reality check.

True, Google has gone further than any other enterprise towards indexing some of the world’s information, but hardly all of it nor is it usefully organized.

Why expand Google’s corporate mission when the easy part of the earlier mission has been accomplished and the hard part is about to start?

Perhaps some enterprising journalist will ask Page why Google is dodging the hard part of organizing information? Yes?

November 3, 2011

Google+ Ripples: Revealing How Posts are Shared over Time

Filed under: Google+,Ripples — Patrick Durusau @ 7:22 pm

Google+ Ripples: Revealing How Posts are Shared over Time

From the post:

Google+ Ripples [plus.google.com] is the first data visualization project from the elusive Big Picture Group, organized around (previous IBM Visual Communication Lab pioneers) Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg. It is a working demonstration how aesthetics and functionality can still be effectively be merged.

The ‘Ripple Diagram’ shows how a post spreads as people (publicly) share it using the Google+ service, with arrows indicating the direction of the sharing. A timeline at the bottom of the diagram allow the ripple to animate, revealing how this post was shared over time. People who have reshared the post are displayed with their own circle. Inside the circle are people who have reshared the post from that person (and so on). All circles are roughly sized based on the relative influence of that person.

Awesome graphics! You need to visit if for no other reason than the graphics!

As far as the content/idea, with just a little bit of tweaking and better tracking, the title could read: Revealing How Information is Shared over Time. Think about it, there were a limited number of people party to the mission against bin Laden and according to the Sec. of Defense, there was a deal to no reveal some information about the mission. But by the following Monday (that was on Sunday), the deal fell appart as everyone leaked to the news media.

Now, just imagine that you have all the phone records for all the persons who were party to any or all of that information. Plus records of most of the people they could have spoken to overnight. Does that sound like over time you will be able to find the leakers?

Particularly with a topic map to flesh out contacts of contacts, merging phone numbers, etc.

Nothing new as Jack Park would say, you could do the same thing with pencil and paper but with a topic map you can combine numerous occasions of leaking to establish patterns, etc. Something to think about.

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