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.

February 18, 2019

UK Parliament Pouts About Facebook – Alternative History

Filed under: Facebook,Fair Use — Patrick Durusau @ 10:39 am

I followed Facebook labelled ‘digital gangsters’ by report on fake news by David Pegg to find Disinformation and ‘fake news’: Final Report published, which does have a link to Disinformation and ‘fake news’: Final Report, an eleventy-one page pout labeling Facebook “digital gangsters” (pages 43 and 91, if you are interested).

The report recommends Parliament respond to the invention of the movable type printing press:

MPs conclude: “[Printing presses] cannot hide behind the claim of being merely a ‘platform’ and maintain that they have no responsibility themselves in regulating the content [they produce].” (alternative history edits added)

Further, the printing press has enable broadsheets, without indentifying the sources of their content, to put democracy at risk:

“Democracy is at risk from the malicious and relentless targeting of citizens with disinformation and personalised ‘dark adverts’ from unidentifiable sources, delivered through the major [broad sheets and newspapers] we use everyday. Much of this is directed from agencies working in foreign countries, including Russia.

For obscure reasons, the report calls for changing the current practice of foreign players interfering in elections and governments of others, saying:

“The UK is clearly vulnerable to covert digital influence campaigns and the Government should be conducting analysis to understand the extent of the targeting of voters, by foreign players, during past elections.” The Government should consider whether current legislation to protect the electoral process from malign influence is sufficient. Legislation should be explicit on the illegal influencing of the democratic process by foreign players.

The UK, its allies and enemies have been interfering in each others’ elections, governments and internal affairs for centuries. The rush to insulate the UK and its long time partner in interference, the United States, from “illegal interference” is a radical departure from current international norms.

On the whole, the report struts and pouts as only a UK parliament committee, spurned by Mark Zuckerberg, not once, not twice, but three times, can.

There’s no new information in the report but more repetition that can be stacked up and then cited to make questionable claims less so. Oh, that’s one of the alleged tactics of disinformation isn’t it?

Can we say that “disinformation,” “interference,” and “influencing” are in the eye of the beholder?

PS: The only legislation I would support for social media platform is the prohibition of any terms of service that bar any content. Social media platforms should be truly content neutral. If you can digitize it, it should be posted. Filtering is the answer to offensive content. Users have no right to censor what other readers choose to consume.

September 11, 2018

Censorship Fail (no surprise) at Facebook

Filed under: Censorship,Facebook,Free Speech — Patrick Durusau @ 6:01 pm

Facebook’s idea of ‘fact-checking’: Censoring ThinkProgress because conservative site told them to by Ian Millhiser

From the post:

Last year, Facebook announced that it would partner with The Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine, to “fact check” news articles that are shared on Facebook. At the time, ThinkProgress expressed alarm at this decision.

The Weekly Standard has a history of placing right-wing ideology before accurate reporting. Among other things, it labeled the Iraq War “A War to Be Proud Of” in 2005, and it ran an article in 2017 labeling climate science “Dadaist Science,” and promoted that article with the phrase “look under the hood on climate change ‘science’ and what you see isn’t pretty.”

The Weekly Standard brought its third-party “fact-checking” power to bear against ThinkProgress on Monday, when the outlet determined a ThinkProgress story about Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was “false,” a category defined by Facebook to indicate “the primary claim(s) in this content are factually inaccurate.”

…

To save you the suspense, the ThinkProgress story was true by any literate reading of its report and the claims by The Weekly Standard are false.

Millhiser details the financial impact of a “false” rating from Facebook, which reverberates through the system and the lack of responsiveness of The Weekly Standard when questioned about its “false” rating.

The Weekly Standard has been empowered by Facebook to become a scourge on free expression. Hold Facebook and The Weekly Standard accountable for their support and acts of censorship.

May 21, 2018

Contrived Russian Facebook Ad Data

Filed under: Data Preservation,Data Quality,Data Science,Facebook,Politics — Patrick Durusau @ 2:16 pm

When I first read about: Facebook Ads: Exposing Russia’s Effort to Sow Discord Online: The Internet Research Agency and Advertisements, a release of alleged Facebook ads, by Democrats of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, I should have just ignored it.

But any number of people whose opinions I respect, seem deadly certain that Facebook ads, purchased by Russians, had a tipping impact on the 2016 presidential election. At least I should look at the purported evidence offered by House Democrats. The reporting I have seen on the release indicates at best skimming of the data, if it is read at all.

It wasn’t until I started noticing oddities in a sample of the data that I cleaned that the full import of:

Redactions Completed at the Direction of Ranking Member of the US House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence

That statement appears in every PDF file. Moreover, if you check the properties of any of the PDF files, you will find a creation date in May of 2018.

I had been wondering why Facebook would deliver ad data to Congress as PDF files. Just seemed odd, something nagging in the back of my mind. Terribly inefficient way to deliver ad data.

The “redaction” notice and creation dates make it clear that the so-called Facebook ad PDFs, are wholly creations of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and not Facebook.

I bring that break in the data chain because without knowing the content of the original data from Facebook, there is no basis for evaluating the accuracy of the data being delivered by Congressional Democrats. It may or may not bear any resemblance to the data from Facebook.

Rather than a blow against whoever the Democrats think is responsible, this is a teaching moment about the provenance of data. If there is a gap, such as the one here, the only criteria for judging the data is do you like the results? If so, it’s good data, if not, then it’s bad data.

Why so-called media watch-dogs on “fake news” and mis-information missed such an elementary point isn’t clear. Perhaps you should ask them.

While cleaning the data for October of 2016, my suspicions were re-enforced by the following:

Doesn’t it strike you as odd that both the exclusion targets and ad targets are the same? Granting it’s only seven instances in this one data sample of 135 ads, but that’s enough for me to worry about the process of producing the files in question.

If you decide to invest any time in this artifice of congressional Democrats, study the distribution of the so-called ads. I find it less than credible that August of 2017 had one ad placed by (drum roll), the Russians! FYI, July 2017 had only seven.

Being convinced the Facebook ad files from Congress are contrived representations with some unknown relationship to Facebook data, I abandoned the idea of producing a clean data set.

Resources:

PDFs produced by Congress, relationship to Facebook data unknown.

Cleaned July, 2015 data set by Patrick Durusau.

Text of all the Facebook ads (uncleaned), September 2015 – August 2017 (missing June – 2017) by Patrick Durusau. (1.2 MB vs. their 8 GB.)

Seriously pursuit of any theory of ads influencing the 2016 presidential election, has the following minimal data requirements:

  1. All the Facebook content posted for the relevant time period.
  2. Identification of paid ads and by what group, organization, government they were placed.

Assuming that data is available, similarity measures of paid versus user content and measures of exposure should be undertaken.

Notice that none of the foregoing “prove” influence on an election. Those are all preparatory steps towards testing theories of influence and on who, to what extent?

February 7, 2018

Were You Pwned by the “Human Cat” Story?

Filed under: Facebook,Fake News — Patrick Durusau @ 5:55 pm

Overseas Fake News Publishers Use Facebook’s Instant Articles To Bring In More Cash by Jane Lytvynenko

Fake stories first:

From the post:

While some mainstream publishers are abandoning Facebook’s Instant Articles, fake news sites based overseas are taking advantage of the format — and in some cases Facebook itself is earning revenue from their false stories.

BuzzFeed News found 29 Facebook pages, and associated websites, that are using Instant Articles to help their completely false stories load faster on Facebook. At least 24 of these pages are also signed up with Facebook Audience Network, meaning Facebook itself earns a share of revenue from the fake news being read on its platform.

Launched in 2015, Instant Articles offer a way for publishers to have their articles load quickly and natively within the Facebook mobile app. Publishers can insert their own ads or use Facebook’s ad network, Audience Network, to automatically place advertisements into their articles. Facebook takes a cut of the revenue when sites monetize with Audience Network.

“We’re against false news and want no part of it on our platform; including in Instant Articles,” said an email statement from a Facebook spokesperson. “We’ve launched a comprehensive effort across all products to take on these scammers, and we’re currently hosting third-party fact checkers from around the world to understand how we can more effectively solve the problem.”

The spokesperson did not respond to questions about the use of Instant Articles by spammers and fake news publishers, or about the fact that Facebook’s ad network was also being used for monetization. The articles sent to Facebook by BuzzFeed News were later removed from the platform. The company also removes publishers from Instant Articles if they’ve been flagged by third-party fact-checkers.
…

Really? You could be pwned by a “human cat” story?

Why I should be morally outraged and/or willing to devote attention to stopping that type of fake news?

Or ask anyone else to devote their resources to it?

Would you seek out Flat Earthers to dispel their delusions? If not, leave the “fake news” to people who seem to enjoy it. It’s their dime.

January 3, 2018

How-To Defeat Facebook “Next or Next Page” Links

Filed under: Bash,Facebook — Patrick Durusau @ 10:09 pm

Not you but friends of yours are lured in by “click-bait” images to Facebook pages with “Next or Next Page” links. Like this one:

60 Groovy Photos You Probably Haven’t Seen Before

You can, depending on the speed of your connection and browser, follow each link. That’s tiresome and leaves you awash in ads for every page.

Here’s a start on a simple method to defeat such links.

First, if you follow the first link (they vary from site to site), you find:

http://groovyhistory.com/60-groovy-photos-you-probably-havent-seen-before/2

So we know from that URL that we need to increment the 2, up to and including 60, to access all the relevant pages.

If we do view source (CTRL-U), we find:

<div class=’gallery-image’>
<img src=’http://cdn.groovyhistory.com/content/50466/90669810f510ad0de494a9b55c1f67d2.jpg’
class=’img-responsive’ alt=” /></div>

We need to extract the image where its parent div has class=’gallery-image,’ write that to a file suitable for display.

I hacked out this quick one liner to do the deed:

echo "<html><head></head><body>" > pics.html;for i in `seq -w 1 59`;do wget -U Mozilla -q "http://groovyhistory.com/60-groovy-photos-you-probably-havent-seen-before/$i" -O - | grep gallery >> pics.html;echo "</body></html>" >> pics.html;done

Breaking the one-liner into steps:

  1. echo "<html><head></head><body>" > pics.html.

    Creates the HTML file pics.html and inserts markup down to the open body element.

  2. for i in `seq -w 1 60`.

    Creates the loop and the variable i, which is used in the next step to create the following URLs.

  3. do wget -U Mozilla -q "http://groovyhistory.com/60-groovy-photos-you-probably-havent-seen-before/$i" -O - .

    Begins the do loop, invokes wget, identifies it as Mozilla (-U Mozilla), suppresses messages (-q), gives the URL with the $i variable, requests the output of each URL (-O), pipes the output to standard out ( – ).

  4. | grep gallery >> pics.html.

    The | pipe sends the output of each URL to grep, which searches for gallery, when found, the line containing gallery is appended (>>) to pics.html. That continues until 60 is reached and the loop exits.

  5. echo "</body></html>" >> pics.html.

    After the loop exits, the closing body and html elements are appended to the pics.html file.

  6. done

    The loop having exited and other commands exhausted, the script exits.

Each step, in the one-liner, is separated from the others with a semi-colon “;”.

I converted the entities back to markup and it ran, except that it didn’t pickup the first image, a page without an appended number.

To avoid hand editing the script:

  • Pass URL at command line
  • Pass number of images on command line
  • Text to grep changes with host, so create switch statement that keys on host
  • Output file name as command line option

The next time you encounter “50 Famous Photo-Bombs,” “30 Celebs Now,” or “45 Unseen Beatles Pics,” a minute or two of editing even the crude version of this script will save you the time and tedium of loading advertisements.

Enjoy!

November 16, 2017

Shape Searching Dictionaries?

Filed under: Cuneiform,Facebook,Subject Identifiers,Subject Identity,Subject Recognition,Unicode — Patrick Durusau @ 11:27 am

Facebook, despite its spying, censorship, and being a shill for the U.S. government, isn’t entirely without value.

For example, this post by Simon St. Laurent:

Drew this response from Peter Cooper:

Which if you follow the link: Shapecatcher: Unicode Character Recognition you find:

Draw something in the box!

And let shapecatcher help you to find the most similar unicode characters!

Currently, there are 11817 unicode character glyphs in the database. Japanese, Korean and Chinese characters are currently not supported.
(emphasis in original)

I take “Japanese, Korean and Chinese characters are currently not supported.” means Anatolian Hieroglyphs; Cuneiform, Cuneiform Numbers and Punctuation, Early Dynastic Cuneiform, Old Persian, Ugaritic; Egyptian Hieroglyphs; Meroitic Cursive, and Meroitic Hieroglphs are not supported as well.

But my first thought wasn’t discovery of glyphs in Unicode Code Charts, although useful, but shape searching dictionaries, such as Faulkner’s A Concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian.

A sample from Faulkner’s (1991 edition):

Or, The Student’s English-Sanskrit Dictionary by Vaman Shivram Apte (1893):

Imagine being able to search by shape for either dictionary! Not just as a gylph but as a set of glyphs, within any entry!

I suspect that’s doable based on Benjamin Milde‘s explanation of Shapecatcher:

…
Under the hood, Shapecatcher uses so called “shape contexts” to find similarities between two shapes. Shape contexts, a robust mathematical way of describing the concept of similarity between shapes, is a feature descriptor first proposed by Serge Belongie and Jitendra Malik.

You can find an indepth explanation of the shape context matching framework that I used in my Bachelor thesis (“On the Security of reCATPCHA”). In the end, it is quite a bit different from the matching framework that Belongie and Malik proposed in 2000, but still based on the idea of shape contexts.

The engine that runs this site is a rewrite of what I developed during my bachelor thesis. To make things faster, I used CUDA to accelereate some portions of the framework. This is a fairly new technology that enables me to use my NVIDIA graphics card for general purpose computing. Newer cards are quite powerful devices!
…

That was written in 2011 and no doubt shape matching has progressed since then.

No technique will be 100% but even less than 100% accuracy will unlock generations of scholarly dictionaries, in ways not imagined by their creators.

If you are interested, I’m sure Benjamin Milde would love to hear from you.

October 3, 2017

Facebook Hiring 1,000+ Censors

Filed under: Censorship,Facebook,Free Speech — Patrick Durusau @ 4:49 pm

Facebook‘s assault on free speech, translated into physical terms:

That is a scene of violence as Spanish police assault voters on Catalonia independence.

Facebook is using social and mainstream media to cloak its violence in high-minded terms:

  1. “…thwart deceptive ads crafted to knock elections off course.” Facebook knows the true “course” of elections?
  2. “…hot-button issues to turn people against one another ahead of last year’s US election.” You never saw the Willy Horton ad?
  3. “Many appear to amplify racial and social divisions.” Ditto on the Willy Horton ad
  4. “…exacerbating political clashes ahead of and following the 2016 US presidential election.” Such as: 10 Most-Shared 2012 Republican Campaign Ads on YouTube
  5. “…ads that touted fake or misleading news or drove traffic to pages with such messages…” And Facebook is going to judge this? The same Facebook that knows “how” elections are supposed to go?

Quotations from Facebook beefing up team to thwart election manipulation by Glenn Chapman.

Like the Spanish police, Facebook has chosen the side of oppression and censorship, however much it wants to hide that fact.

When you think of Facebook, think of police swinging their batons, beating, kicking protesters.

Choose your response to Facebook and anyone proven to be a Facebook censor accordingly.

September 26, 2017

GraphQL News

Filed under: Facebook,GraphQL,Graphs — Patrick Durusau @ 6:45 pm

Relicensing the GraphQL specification

From the post:

Today we’re relicensing the GraphQL specification under the Open Web Foundation Agreement (OWFa) v1.0. We think the OWFa is a great fit for GraphQL because it’s designed for collaborative open standards and supported by other well-known companies. The OWFa allows GraphQL to be implemented under a royalty-free basis, and allows other organizations to contribute to the project on reasonable terms.

Additionally, our reference implementation GraphQL.js and client-side framework Relay will be relicensed under the MIT license, following the React open source ecosystem’s recent change. The GraphQL specification and our open source software around GraphQL have different licenses because the open source projects’ license only covers the specific open source projects while the OWFa is meant to cover implementations of the GraphQL specification.

I want to thank everyone for their patience as we worked to arrive at this change. We hope that GraphQL adopting the Open Web Foundation Agreement, and GraphQL.js and Relay adopting the MIT license, will lead to more companies using and improving GraphQL, and pave the way for GraphQL to become a true standard across the web.

The flurry of relicensing at Facebook is an important lesson for anyone aiming for a web scale standard:

Restrictive licenses don’t scale. (full stop)

Got that?

The recent and sad experience with enabling DRM by the W3C, aka EME, doesn’t prove the contrary. An open API to DRM will come to an unhappy end when content providers realize DRM is a tax on all their income, not just a way to stop pirates.

Think of it this way, would you pay a DRM tax of 1% on your income to prevent theft of 0.01% of your income? If you would, you are going to enjoy EME! Those numbers are, of course, fictional, just like the ones on content piracy. Use them with caution.

September 22, 2017

MIT License Wins Converts (some anyway)

Filed under: Facebook,Licensing,Programming — Patrick Durusau @ 6:12 pm

Relicensing React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js by Adam Wolff.

From the post:

Next week, we are going to relicense our open source projects React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js under the MIT license. We’re relicensing these projects because React is the foundation of a broad ecosystem of open source software for the web, and we don’t want to hold back forward progress for nontechnical reasons.

This decision comes after several weeks of disappointment and uncertainty for our community. Although we still believe our BSD + Patents license provides some benefits to users of our projects, we acknowledge that we failed to decisively convince this community.

In the wake of uncertainty about our license, we know that many teams went through the process of selecting an alternative library to React. We’re sorry for the churn. We don’t expect to win these teams back by making this change, but we do want to leave the door open. Friendly cooperation and competition in this space pushes us all forward, and we want to participate fully.

This shift naturally raises questions about the rest of Facebook’s open source projects. Many of our popular projects will keep the BSD + Patents license for now. We’re evaluating those projects’ licenses too, but each project is different and alternative licensing options will depend on a variety of factors.

We’ll include the license updates with React 16’s release next week. We’ve been working on React 16 for over a year, and we’ve completely rewritten its internals in order to unlock powerful features that will benefit everyone building user interfaces at scale. We’ll share more soon about how we rewrote React, and we hope that our work will inspire developers everywhere, whether they use React or not. We’re looking forward to putting this license discussion behind us and getting back to what we care about most: shipping great products.

Since I bang on about Facebook‘s 24×7 censorship and shaping of your worldview, it’s only fair to mention when they make a good choice.

It in no way excuses or justifies their ongoing offenses against the public but it’s some evidence that decent people remain employed at Facebook.

With any luck, the decent insiders will wrest control of Facebook away from its government toadies and collaborators.

August 10, 2017

#FCensor – Facebook Bleeding Red Ink of Censorship

Filed under: Censorship,Facebook,Free Speech — Patrick Durusau @ 4:12 pm

Naked down under: Facebook censors erotic art

From the post:

Facebook has censored Fine Art Bourse’s (FAB) adverts for the online auction house’s relaunch sale of erotic art on the grounds of indecency. In 2015, FAB, then based in London, went into receivership shortly before its first sale after running out of funds due to a delay in building the technology required to run the cloud-based auctions. But the founder, Tim Goodman, formerly owner of Bonhams & Goodman and then Sotheby’s Australia under license, has now relaunched the firm in his native Australia, charging a 5% premium to both buyers and sellers and avoiding VAT, GST and sales tax on service charges by running auctions via a server in Hong Kong.

When Goodman attempted to run a series of adverts for his relaunch sale of Erotic, Fetish, & Queer Art & Objects on 12 September, Facebook barred the adverts citing its policy against “adverts that depict nudity” including “the use of nudity for artistic or educational purposes”.
…

Remember to use #FCensor for all Facebook censorship. (#GCensor for Google censoring, #TCensor for Twitter censoring.)

Every act of censorship by Facebook and every person employed as a censor, is a splash of red ink on the books at Facebook. Red ink that has no profit center offset.

Facebook can and should erase the red ink of censorship from its books.

Provide users with effective self-help filtering, being able to “follow” filters created by others and empowering advertisers to filter the content in proximity to their ads (for an extra $fee), moves censoring cost (read Facebook red ink) onto users and advertisers, improving Facebook’s bottom line.

What sane investor would argue with that outcome?

Better and “following” filters would enable users to create their own custom echo chambers. Oh, yeah, that’s part of the problem isn’t it? Zuckerberg and his band of would-be messiahs want the power to decide what the public sees.

I’ll pass. How about you?

Investors! Use your stock and dollars to save all of us from a Zuckerberg view of the world. Thanks!

July 11, 2017

Truth In Terrorism Labeling (TITL) – A Starter Set

Filed under: Censorship,Facebook,Free Speech,Government,Terrorism — Patrick Durusau @ 3:28 pm

Sam Biddle‘s recent post: Facebook’s Tough-On-Terror Talk Overlooks White Extremists, is a timely reminder that “terrorism” and “terrorist” are labels with no agreed upon meaning.

To illustrate, here are some common definitions with suggestions for specifying the definition in use:

Terrorist/terrorism(Biddle): ISIS, Al Qaeda, and US white extremists. But not Tibetans and Uyghurs.

Terrorist/terrorism(China): From: How China Sees ISIS Is Not How It Sees ‘Terrorism’:

… in Chinese discourse, terrorism is employed exclusively in reference to Tibetans and Uyghurs. Official government statements typically avoid identifying acts of violence with a specific ethnic group, preferring more generic descriptors like “Xinjiang terrorists,“ “East Turkestan terror forces and groups,” the “Tibetan Youth Congress,” or the “Dalai clique.” In online Chinese chat-rooms, however, epithets like “Uyghur terrorist” or “Tibetan splittest” are commonplace and sometimes combine with homophonic racial slurs like “dirty Tibetans” or “raghead Uyghurs.”

Limiting “terrorism” to Tibetans and Uyghurs excludes ISIS, Al Qaeda, and US white extremists from that term.

Terrorist/terrorism(Facebook): ISIS, Al Qaeda, but no US white extremists (following US)

Terrorist/terrorism(Russia): Putin’s Flexible Definition of Terrorism

Who, exactly, counts as a terrorist? If you’re Russian President Vladimir Putin, the definition might just depend on how close or far the “terror” is from Moscow. A court in the Nizhniy Novgorod regional center last week gave a suspended two year sentence to Stanislav Dmitriyevsky, Chair of the local Russian-Chechen Friendship Society, and editor of Rights Defense bulletin. Dmitriyevsky was found guilty of fomenting ethnic hatred, simply because in March 2004, he published an appeal by Chechen rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov — later killed by Russian security services — and Maskhadov’s envoy in Europe, Akhmet Zakayev.

Maskhadov, you see, is officially a terrorist in the eyes of the Kremlin. Hamas, however, isn’t. Putin said so at his Kremlin press-conference on Thursday, where he extended an invitation — eagerly accepted — to Hamas’s leaders to Moscow for an official visit.

In fairness to Putin, as a practical matter, who is or is not a “terrorist” for the US depends on the state of US support. US supporting, not terrorists, US not supporting, likely to be terrorists.

Terrorist/terrorism(US): Generally ISIS, Al Qaeda, no US white extremists, for details see: Terrorist Organizations.

By appending parentheses and Biddle, China, Facebook, Russia, or US to terrorist or terrorism, the reading public has some chance to understand your usage of “terrorism/terrorist.”

Otherwise they are nodding along using their definitions of “terrorism/terrorist” and not yours.

Or was that vagueness intentional on your part?

May 26, 2017

Thank You, Scott – SNL

Filed under: Facebook,Social Media,Twitter — Patrick Durusau @ 8:49 pm

I posted this to Facebook, search for “Thanks Scott SNL” to find my post or that of others.

Included this note (with edits):

Appropriate social media warriors (myself included). From sexism and racism to fracking and pipelines, push back in the real world if you [want] change. Push back on social media for a warm but meaningless feeling of solidarity.

For me the “real world,” includes cyberspace, where pushing can have consequences.

You?

May 5, 2017

3,000 New Censorship Jobs At Facebook

Filed under: Censorship,Facebook,Free Speech — Patrick Durusau @ 8:46 pm

Quick qualification test for censorship jobs at Facebook:

  • Are you more moral than most people?
  • Are you more religious than most people?
  • Are you more sensitive than most people?
  • Do you want to suppress “harmful” content?
  • Do you enjoy protecting people who are easily mis-lead (unlike you)?
  • Do you support the United States, its agencies, offices and allies?
  • Do you recognize Goldman Sachs, Chase and all other NYSE listed companies as people with rights?

If you answered one or more of these questions with “yes,” congratulations! You have passed a pre-qualification test for one of the 3,000 new censorship positions for Facebook.

(Disclaimer: It is not known if Facebook will recognize this pre-qualification test and may have other tests or questions for actual applicants.)

For further details, see: Will Facebook actually hire 3,000 content moderators, or will they outsource? by Annalee Newitz.

Censorship is the question. The answer is no.

April 27, 2017

Facebook Used To Spread Propaganda (The other use of Facebook would be?)

Filed under: Facebook,Government,Journalism,News,Subject Identity,Topic Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 8:31 pm

Facebook admits: governments exploited us to spread propaganda by Olivia Solon.

From the post:

Facebook has publicly acknowledged that its platform has been exploited by governments seeking to manipulate public opinion in other countries – including during the presidential elections in the US and France – and pledged to clamp down on such “information operations”.

In a white paper authored by the company’s security team and published on Thursday, the company detailed well-funded and subtle techniques used by nations and other organizations to spread misleading information and falsehoods for geopolitical goals. These efforts go well beyond “fake news”, the company said, and include content seeding, targeted data collection and fake accounts that are used to amplify one particular view, sow distrust in political institutions and spread confusion.

“We have had to expand our security focus from traditional abusive behavior, such as account hacking, malware, spam and financial scams, to include more subtle and insidious forms of misuse, including attempts to manipulate civic discourse and deceive people,” said the company.
…

It’s a good white paper and you can intuit a lot from it, but leaks on the details of Facebook counter-measures have commercial value.

Careful media advisers will start farming Facebook users now for the US mid-term elections in 2018. One of the “tells” (a behavior that discloses, unintentionally, a player’s intent) of a “fake” account is recent establishment with many similar accounts.

Such accounts need to be managed so that their “identity” fits the statistical average for similar accounts. They should not all suddenly like a particular post or account, for example.

The doctrines of subject identity in topic maps, can be used to avoid subject recognition as well as to insure it. Just the other side of the same coin.

April 23, 2017

Dissing Facebook’s Reality Hole and Impliedly Censoring Yours

Filed under: Censorship,Facebook,Free Speech,Social Media — Patrick Durusau @ 4:42 pm

Climbing Out Of Facebook’s Reality Hole by Mat Honan.

From the post:

…

The proliferation of fake news and filter bubbles across the platforms meant to connect us have instead divided us into tribes, skilled in the arts of abuse and harassment. Tools meant for showing the world as it happens have been harnessed to broadcast murders, rapes, suicides, and even torture. Even physics have betrayed us! For the first time in a generation, there is talk that the United States could descend into a nuclear war. And in Silicon Valley, the zeitgeist is one of melancholy, frustration, and even regret — except for Mark Zuckerberg, who appears to be in an absolutely great mood.

The Facebook CEO took the stage at the company’s annual F8 developers conference a little more than an hour after news broke that the so-called Facebook Killer had killed himself. But if you were expecting a somber mood, it wasn’t happening. Instead, he kicked off his keynote with a series of jokes.

It was a stark disconnect with the reality outside, where the story of the hour concerned a man who had used Facebook to publicize a murder, and threaten many more. People used to talk about Steve Jobs and Apple’s reality distortion field. But Facebook, it sometimes feels, exists in a reality hole. The company doesn’t distort reality — but it often seems to lack the ability to recognize it.

…

I can’t say I’m fond of the Facebook reality hole but unlike Honan:

…
It can make it harder to use its platforms to harass others, or to spread disinformation, or to glorify acts of violence and destruction.
…

I have no desire to censor any of the content that anyone cares to make and/or view on it. Bar none.

The “default” reality settings desired by Honan and others are a thumb on the scale for some cause they prefer over others.

Entitled to their preference but I object to their setting the range of preferences enjoyed by others.

You?

February 26, 2017

Countering Inaccurate/Ineffectual Sierra Club Propaganda

Filed under: Facebook,Government,News,Protests — Patrick Durusau @ 2:18 pm

This Sierra Club ad is popular on Facebook:

First problem, it is inaccurate to the point of falsehood.

“…about to start their chainsaws…. …trying to clearcut America’s largest forest, the Tongass National Forest in Alaska…. (emphasis added)”

Makes you think clearcutting is about to start in the Tongass National Forest in Alaska. Yes?

Wrong!

If you go to Forest Management Reports and Accomplishments for the Tongass, you will find Forest Service reports for logging in the Tongass that start in 1908. Cut History 1908 to Present.

The first inaccuracy/lie of the Sierra ad is that logging isn’t already ongoing in the Tongass.

The Sierra ad and its links also fail to mention (in millions of board feet) harvesting from the Tongass:

Calendar Year Board Feet
2016 44,076,800
2010 35,804,970
2000 119,480,750
1990 473,983,320
1980 453,687,320
1970 560,975,120

A drop from 560,975,120 board feet to 44,076,800 board feet looks like the Forestry Service is moving in the right direction.

But you don’t have to take my word for it. Unlike the Sierra Club that wants to excite alarm without giving you the data to decide for yourself, I have included links with the data I cite and data I don’t. Explore the data on your own.

I say the Sierra Club propaganda is “ineffectual” because it leaves you with no clue as to who is logging in Tongass?

Once again the Forestry Service rides to the rescue with Timber Volume Under Contract (sorry, no separate hyperlink from Forest Management Reports and Accomplishments), but look for it on that page and I picked Current Calendar Year Through: (select Jan).

That returns a spreadsheet that lists (among other things), ranger district, unit ID, contract form, purchaser, etc.

A word about MBF. The acronym MBF stands for thousand, as in Roman numberals, M = 1,000. So to read line 4, which starts with Ranger District “Thorne Bay,” read across to “Current Qty Est (MBF)”, the entry “6.00” represents 6,000 board feet. Thus, line 23, starts with “Juneau,” and “Current Qty Est (MBF)”, reads “3,601.00” represents 3,601,000 board feet. And so on. (I would have never guess that meaning without assistance from the forestry service.)

The Sierra Club leaves you with no clue as to who is harvesting the timber?, who is purchasing the timber from the harvesters?, who is using the timber for what products?, etc. The second and third steps removed the Forestry Service can’t provide but the harvesters gives you a starting point for further research.

A starting point for further research enables actions like boycotts of products made from Tongass timber, choosing products NOT made from Tongass timber and a whole host of other actions.

Oh, but none of those require you to be a member of the Sierra Club. My bad, it’s your dues and not the fate of the Tongass that is at issue.

If the Sierra Club wants to empower consumers, it should provide links to evidence about the Tongass that consumers can use to develop more evidence and effective means of reducing the demand for Tongass timber.

BTW, I’m not an anti-environmentalist. All new factory construction should be underground in negative-pressure enclaves where management is required to breath the same air as all workers. No discharges of any kind that don’t match the outside environment prior to its construction.

That would spur far better pollution control than any EPA regulation.

February 9, 2017

Republican Regime Creates New Cyber Market – Burner Twitter/Facebook Accounts

Filed under: Facebook,Government,Security,Twitter — Patrick Durusau @ 4:17 pm

The current Republican regime has embarked upon creating a new cyber market, less than a month after taking office.

Samatha Dean (Tech Times) reports:

Planning a visit to the U.S.? Your passport is not the only thing you may have to turn in at the immigration counter, be prepared to relinquish your social media account passwords as well to the border security agents.

That’s right! According to a new protocol from the Homeland Security that is under consideration, visitors to the U.S. may have to give their Twitter and Facebook passwords to the border security agents.

The news comes close on the heels of the Trump administration issuing the immigration ban, which resulted in a massive state of confusion at airports, where several people were debarred from entering the country.

John F. Kelly, the Homeland Security Secretary, shared with the Congress on Feb. 7 that the Trump administration was considering this option. The measure was being weighed as a means to sieve visa applications and sift through refugees from the Muslim majority countries that are under the 90-day immigration ban.
…

I say burner Twitter/Facebook accounts, if you plan on making a second trip to the US, you will need to have the burner accounts maintained over the years.

The need for burner Twitter/Facebook accounts, ones you can freely disclose to border security agents, presents a wide range of data science issues.

In no particular order:

  • Defeating Twitter/Facebook security on a large scale. Not trivial but not the hard part either
  • Creating accounts with the most common names
  • Automated posting to accounts in their native language
  • Posts must be indistinguishable from human user postings, i.e., no auto-retweets of Sean Spicer
  • Profile of tweets/posts shows consistent usage

I haven’t thought about burner bank account details before but that certainly should be doable. Especially if you have a set of banks on the Net that don’t have much overhead but exist to keep records one to the other.

Burner bank accounts could be useful to more than just travelers to the United States.

Kudos to the new Republican regime and their market creation efforts!

January 6, 2017

Three More Reasons To Learn R

Filed under: Facebook,Programming,R,Statistics,Twitter — Patrick Durusau @ 3:31 pm

Three reasons to learn R today by David Smith.

From the post:

If you're just getting started with data science, the Sharp Sight Labs blog argues that R is the best data science language to learn today.

The blog post gives several detailed reasons, but the main arguments are:

  1. R is an extremely popular (arguably the most popular) data progamming language, and ranks highly in several popularity surveys.
  2. Learning R is a great way of learning data science, with many R-based books and resources for probability, frequentist and Bayesian statistics, data visualization, machine learning and more.
  3. Python is another excellent language for data science, but with R it's easier to learn the foundations.

Once you've learned the basics, Sharp Sight also argues that R is also a great data science to master, even though it's an old langauge compared to some of the newer alternatives. Every tool has a shelf life, but R isn't going anywhere and learning R gives you a foundation beyond the language itself.

If you want to get started with R, Sharp Sight labs offers a data science crash course. You might also want to check out the Introduction to R for Data Science course on EdX.

Sharp Sight Labs: Why R is the best data science language to learn today, and Why you should master R (even if it might eventually become obsolete)

If you need more reasons to learn R:

  • Unlike Facebook, R isn’t a sinkhole of non-testable propositions.
  • Unlike Instagram, R is rarely NSFW.
  • Unlike Twitter, R is a marketable skill.

Glad to hear you are learning R!

January 1, 2017

Defeating “Fake News” Without Mark Zuckerberg

Filed under: Censorship,Facebook,Free Speech,Politics — Patrick Durusau @ 1:53 pm

Despite a lack of proof that “fake news” is a problem, Mark Zuckerberg and others, have taken up the banner of public censors on behalf of us all. Whether any of us are interested in their assistance or not.

In countering calls for and toleration of censorship, you may find it helpful to point out that “fake news” isn’t new.

There are any number of spot instances of fake news. Michael J. Socolow reports in: Reporting and punditry that escaped infamy:

…
As the day wore on, real reporting receded, giving way to more speculation. Right-wing commentator Fulton Lewis Jr. told an audience five hours after the attack that he shared the doubts of many American authorities that the Japanese were truly responsible. He “reported” that US military officials weren’t convinced Japanese pilots had the skills to carry out such an impressive raid. The War Department, he said, is “concerned to find out who the pilots of these planes are—whether they are Japanese pilots. There is some doubt as to that, some skepticism whether they may be pilots of some other nationality, perhaps Germans, perhaps Italians,” he explained. The rumor that Germans bombed Pearl Harbor lingered on the airwaves, with NBC reporting, on December 8, that eyewitnesses claimed to have seen Nazi swastikas painted on some of the bombers.
…

You may object that it was much confusion, the pundits weren’t trying to deceive, any number of other excuses. And you can repeat those for other individual instances of “fake news.” They simply don’t compare to the flood of intentionally “fake” publications available today.

I disagree but point taken. Let’s look back to an event that, like the internet, enabled a comparative flood of information to be available to readers, the invention of the printing press.

Elizabeth Eisenstein in The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe characterizes the output of the first fifty years of printing presses saying:

…it seems necessary to qualify the assertion that the first half-century of printing gave “a great impetus to wide dissemination of accurate knowledge of the sources of Western thought, both classical and Christian.” The duplication of the hermetic writings, the sibylline prophecies, the hieroglyphics of “Horapollo” and many other seemingly authoritative, actually fraudulent esoteric writings worked in the opposite direction, spreading inaccurate knowledge even while paving the way for purification of Christian sources later on.
…(emphasis added) (page 48)

I take Eisenstein to mean that knowingly fraudulent materials were being published, which seems to be the essence of the charge against the authors of “fake news” today.

As far as the quantity of the printing press equivalent to “fake news,” she remarks:

…
Compared to the large output of unscholarly venacular materials, the number of trilingual dictionaries and Greek or even Latin editions seems so small that one wonders whether the term “wide dissemination” ought to be applied to the latter case at all.
… (page 48)

To be fair, “unscholarly venacular materials” includes both intended to be accurate as well as “fake” texts.

The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe is the abridged version of Eisentein’s The printing press as an agent of change : communications and cultural transformations in early modern Europe, which has the footnotes and references to enable more precision on early production figures.

Suffice it to say, however, that no 15th equivalent to Mark Zuckerberg arrived upon the scene to save everyone from “…actually fraudulent esoteric writings … spreading inaccurate knowledge….”

The world didn’t need Mark Zuckerberg’s censoring equivalent in the 15th century and it doesn’t need him now.

December 21, 2016

Facebook’s Censoring Rules (Partial)

Filed under: Censorship,Facebook,Free Speech — Patrick Durusau @ 2:09 pm

Facebook’s secret rules of deletion by Till Krause and Hannes Grassegger.

From the post:

Facebook refuses to disclose the criteria that deletions are based on. SZ-Magazin has gained access to some of these rules. We show you some excerpts here – and explain them.

Introductory words

These are excerpts of internal documents that explain to content moderators what they need to do. To protect our sources, we have made visual edits to maintain confidentiality. While the rules are constantly changing, these documents provide the first-ever insights into the current guidelines that Facebook applies to delete contents.
…

Insight into a part of the byzantine world of Facebook deletion/censorship rules.

Pointers to more complete leaks of Facebook rules please!

December 20, 2016

Achtung! Germany Hot On The Censorship Trail

Filed under: Censorship,Facebook,Free Speech — Patrick Durusau @ 7:05 pm

Germany threatens to fine Facebook €500,000 for each fake news post by Mike Murphy.

Mike reports that fears are spreading that fake news could impact German parliamentary elections set for 2017.

One source of those fears is the continued sulking of Clinton campaign staff who fantasize that “fake news” cost Sec. Clinton the election.

Anything is possible as they say but to date, other than accusations of fake news impacting the election, between sobs and sighs, there has been no proof offered that “fake news” or otherwise had any impact on the election at all.

Do you seriously think the “fake news” that the Pope had endorsed Trump impacted the election? Really?

If “fake news” something other than an excuse for censorship (United States, UK, Germany, etc.), collect the “fake news” stories that you claim impacted the election.

Measure the impact of that “fake news” on volunteers following standard social science protocols.

Or do “fake news” criers fear the factual results of such a study?

PS: If you realize that “fake news,” isn’t something new but quite tradition, you will enjoy ‘Fake News’ in America: Homegrown, and Far From New by Chris Hedges.

December 7, 2016

Facebook Patents Tool To Think For You

Filed under: Censorship,Facebook,Free Speech,News — Patrick Durusau @ 4:40 pm

My apologies but Facebook thinks you are too stupid to detect “fake news.” Facebook will compensate for your stupidity with a process submitted for a US patent. For free!

Facebook is patenting a tool that could help automate removal of fake news by Casey Newton.

From the post:

As Facebook works on new tools to stop the spread of misinformation on its network, it’s seeking to patent technology that could be used for that purpose. This month the US Trademark and Patent Office published Facebook’s application for Patent 0350675: “systems and methods to identify objectionable content.” The application, which was filed in June 2015, describes a sophisticated system for identifying inappropriate text and images and removing them from the network.

As described in the application, the primary purpose of the tool is to improve the detection of pornography, hate speech, and bullying. But last month, Zuckerberg highlighted the need for “better technical systems to detect what people will flag as false before they do it themselves.” The patent published Thursday, which is still pending approval, offers some ideas for how such a system could work.

A Facebook spokeswoman said the company often seeks patents for technology that it never implements, and said this patent should not be taken as an indication of the company’s future plans. The spokeswoman declined to comment on whether it was now in use.

The system described in the application is largely consistent with Facebook’s own descriptions of how it currently handles objectionable content. But it also adds a layer of machine learning to make reporting bad posts more efficient, and to help the system learn common markers of objectionable content over time — tools that sound similar to the anticipatory flagging that Zuckerberg says is needed to combat fake news.
…

If you substitute “user” for “administrator” where it appears in the text, Facebook would be enabling users to police the content they view.

Why Facebook finds users making decisions about the content they view objectionable isn’t clear. Suggestions on that question?

The process doesn’t appear to be either accountable and/or transparent.

If I can’t see the content that is removed by Facebook, how do I make judgments about why it was removed and/or how that compares to content about to be uploaded to Facebook?

Urge Facebook users to demand empowering them to make decisions about the content they view.

Urge Facebook shareholders to pressure management to abandon this quixotic quest to be an internet censor.

November 24, 2016

China Gets A Facebook Filter, But Not You

Filed under: Censorship,Facebook,Government,News — Patrick Durusau @ 6:11 pm

Facebook ‘quietly developing censorship tool’ for China by Bill Camarda.

From the post:

…
That’s one take on the events that might have led to today’s New York Times expose: it seems Facebook has tasked its development teams with “quietly develop[ing] software to suppress posts from appearing in people’s news feeds in specific geographic areas”.

As “current and former Facebook employees” told the Times, Facebook wouldn’t do the suppression themselves, nor need to. Rather:

It would offer the software to enable a third party – in this case, most likely a partner Chinese company – to monitor popular stories and topics that bubble up as users share them across the social network… Facebook’s partner would then have full control to decide whether those posts should show up in users’ feeds.

This is a step beyond the censorship Facebook has already agreed to perform on behalf of governments such as Turkey, Russia and Pakistan. In those cases, Facebook agreed to remove posts that had already “gone live”. If this software were in use, offending posts could be halted before they ever appeared in a local user’s news feed.
…

You can’t filter your own Facebook timeline or share your filter with other Facebook users, but the Chinese government can filter the timelines of 721,000,000+ internet users?

My proposal for Facebook filters would generate income for Facebook, filter writers and enable the 3,600,000,000+ internet users around the world to filter their own content.

All of Zuckerberg’s ideas:

Stronger detection. The most important thing we can do is improve our ability to classify misinformation. This means better technical systems to detect what people will flag as false before they do it themselves.

Easy reporting. Making it much easier for people to report stories as fake will help us catch more misinformation faster.

Third party verification. There are many respected fact checking organizations and, while we have reached out to some, we plan to learn from many more.

Warnings. We are exploring labeling stories that have been flagged as false by third parties or our community, and showing warnings when people read or share them.

Related articles quality. We are raising the bar for stories that appear in related articles under links in News Feed.

Disrupting fake news economics. A lot of misinformation is driven by financially motivated spam. We’re looking into disrupting the economics with ads policies like the one we announced earlier this week, and better ad farm detection.

Listening. We will continue to work with journalists and others in the news industry to get their input, in particular, to better understand their fact checking systems and learn from them.

Enthrone Zuckerman as Censor of the Internet.

His blinding lust to be Censor of the Internet*, is responsible for Zuckerman passing up $millions if not $billions in filtering revenue.

Facebook shareholders should question this loss of revenue at every opportunity.

* Zuckerberg’s “lust” to be “Censor of the Internet” is an inference based on the Facebook centered nature of his “ideas” for dealing with “fake news.” Unpaid censorship instead of profiting from user-centered filtering is a sign of poor judgment and/or madness.

November 21, 2016

Preserving Ad Revenue With Filtering (Hate As Renewal Resource)

Filed under: Advertising,Facebook,Marketing,Twitter — Patrick Durusau @ 4:02 pm

Facebook and Twitter haven’t implemented robust and shareable filters for their respective content streams for fear of disturbing their ad revenue streams.* The power to filter feared as the power to exclude ads.

Other possible explanations include: Drone employment, old/new friends hired to discuss censoring content; Hubris, wanting to decide what is “best” for others to see and read; NIH (not invented here), which explains silence concerning my proposals for shareable content filters; others?

* Lest I be accused of spreading “fake news,” my explanation for the lack of robust and shareable filters on content on Facebook and Twitter is based solely on my analysis of their behavior and not any inside leaks, etc.

I have a solution for fearing filters as interfering with ad revenue.

All Facebook posts and Twitter tweets, will be delivered with an additional Boolean field, ad, which defaults to true (empty field), meaning the content can be filtered. (following Clojure) When the field is false, that content cannot be filtered.

Filters being registered and shared via Facebook and Twitter, testing those filters for proper operation (and not applying them if they filter ad content) is purely an algorithmic process.

Users pay to post ad content, a step where the false flag can be entered, resulting in no more ad freeloaders being free from filters.

What’s my interest? I’m interested in the creation of commercial filters for aggregation, exclusion and creating a value-add product based on information streams. Moreover, ending futile and bigoted attempts at censorship seems like a worthwhile goal to me.

The revenue potential for filters is nearly unlimited.

The number of people who hate rivals the number who want to filter the content seen by others. An unrestrained Facebook/Twitter will attract more hate and “fake news,” which in turn will drive a great need for filters.

Not a virtuous cycle but certainly a profitable one. Think of hate and the desire to censor as renewable resources powering that cycle.

PS: I’m not an advocate for hate and censorship but they are both quite common. Marketing is based on consumers as you find them, not as you wish they were.

November 18, 2016

Successful Hate Speech/Fake News Filters – 20 Facts About Facebook

Filed under: Facebook,Journalism,News,Reporting — Patrick Durusau @ 11:04 am

After penning Monetizing Hate Speech and False News yesterday, I remembered non-self-starters will be asking:

“Where are examples of successful monetized filters for hate speech and false news?”

Of The Top 20 Valuable Facebook Statistics – Updated November 2016, I need only two to make the case for monetized filters.

1. Worldwide, there are over 1.79 billion monthly active Facebook users (Facebook MAUs) which is a 16 percent increase year over year. (Source: Facebook as of 11/02/16)

…

15. Every 60 seconds on Facebook: 510 comments are posted, 293,000 statuses are updated, and 136,000 photos are uploaded. (Source: The Social Skinny)
…
(emphasis in the original)

By comparison, Newsonomics: 10 numbers on The New York Times’ 1 million digital-subscriber milestone [2015], the New York Times has 1 million digital subscribers.

If you think about it, the New York Times is a hate speech/fake news filter, although it has a much smaller audience than Facebook.

Moreover, the New York Times is spending money to generate content whereas on Facebook, content is there for the taking or filtering.

If the New York Times can make money as a filter for hate speech/fake news carrying its overhead, imagine the potential for profit from simply filtering content generated and posted by others. Across a market of 1.79 billion viewers. Where “hate,” and “fake” varies from audience to audience.

Content filters at Facebook and the ability to “follow” those filters for on timelines is all that is missing. (And Facebook monetizing the use of those filters.)

Petition Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook for content filters today!

November 17, 2016

Monetizing Hate Speech and False News

Filed under: Facebook,Journalism,News,Reporting — Patrick Durusau @ 5:48 pm

Eli Pariser has started If you were Facebook, how would you reduce the influence of fake news? on GoogleDocs.

Out of the now seventeen pages of suggestions, I haven’t noticed any that promise a revenue stream to Facebook.

I view ideas to filter “false news” and/or “hate speech” that don’t generate revenue for Facebook as non-starters. I suspect Facebook does as well.

Here is a broad sketch of how Facebook can monetize “false news” and “hate speech,” all while shaping Facebook timelines to diverse expectations.

Monetizing “false news” and “hate speech”

Facebook creates user defined filters for their timelines. Filters can block other Facebook accounts (and any material from them), content by origin, word and I would suggest, regex.

User defined filters apply only to that account and can be shared with twenty other Facebooks users.

To share a filter with more than twenty other Facebook users, Facebook charges an annual fee, scaled on the number of shares.

Unlike the many posts on “false news” and “hate speech,” being a filter isn’t free beyond twenty other users.

Selling Subscriptions to Facebook Filters

Organizations can sell subscriptions to their filters, Facebook, which controls the authorization of the filters, contracts for a percentage of the subscription fee.

Pro tip: I would not invoke Facebook filters from the Washington Post and New York Times at the same time. It is likely they exclude each other as news sources.

Advantages of Monetizing Hate Speech and False News

First and foremost for Facebook, it gets out of the satisfying every point of view game. Completely. Users are free to define as narrow or as broad a point of view as they desire.

If you see something you don’t like, disagree with, etc., don’t complain to Facebook, complain to your Facebook filter provider.

That alone will expose the hidden agenda behind most, perhaps not all, of the “false news” filtering advocates. They aren’t concerned with what they are seeing on Facebook but they are very concerned with deciding what you see on Facebook.

For wannabe filters of what other people see, beyond twenty other Facebook users, that privilege is not free. Unlike the many proposals with as many definitions of “false news” as appear in Eli’s document.

It is difficult to imagine a privilege people would be more ready to pay for than the right to attempt to filter what other people see. Churches, social organizations, local governments, corporations, you name them and they will be lining up to create filter lists.

The financial beneficiary of the “drive to filter for others” is of course Facebook but one could argue the filter owners profit by spreading their worldview and the unfortunates that follow them, well, they get what they get.

Commercialization of Facebook filters, that is selling subscriptions to Facebook filters creates a new genre of economic activity and yet another revenue stream for Facebook. (That two up to this point if you are keeping score.)

It isn’t hard to imagine the Economist, Forbes, professional clipping services, etc., creating a natural extension of their filtering activities onto Facebook.

Conclusion: Commercialization or Unfunded Work Assignments

Preventing/blocking “hate speech” and “false news,” for free has been, is and always will be a failure.

Changing Facebook infrastructure isn’t free and by creating revenue streams off of preventing/blocking “hate speech” and “false news,” creates incentives for Facebook to make the necessary changes and for people to build filters off of which they can profit.

Not to mention that filtering enables everyone, including the alt-right, alt-left and the sane people in between, to create the Facebook of their dreams, and not being subject to the Facebook desired by others.

Finally, it gets Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg out of the fantasy island approach where they are assigned unpaid work by others. New York Times, Mark Zuckerberg Is in Denial. (It’s another “hit” piece by Zeynep Tufekci.)

If you know Mark Zuckerberg, please pass this along to him.

June 17, 2016

Hacking Any Facebook Account – SS7 Weakness

Filed under: Cybersecurity,Facebook,Security — Patrick Durusau @ 9:12 am

How to Hack Someones Facebook Account Just by Knowing their Phone Numbers by Swati Khandelwal.

From the post:

Hacking Facebook account is one of the major queries on the Internet today. It’s hard to find — how to hack Facebook account, but researchers have just proven by taking control of a Facebook account with only the target’s phone number and some hacking skills.

Yes, your Facebook account can be hacked, no matter how strong your password is or how much extra security measures you have taken. No joke!

Hackers with skills to exploit the SS7 network can hack your Facebook account. All they need is your phone number.

The weaknesses in the part of global telecom network SS7 not only let hackers and spy agencies listen to personal phone calls and intercept SMSes on a potentially massive scale but also let them hijack social media accounts to which you have provided your phone number.
…

Swati’s post has the details and a video of the hack in action.

Of greater interest than hacking Facebook accounts, however, is the weakness in the SS7 network. Hacking Facebook accounts is good for intelligence gathering, annoying the defenseless, etc., but fundamental weaknesses in telecom network is something different.

Swaiti quotes a Facebook clone as saying:

“Because this technique [SSL exploitation] requires significant technical and financial investment, it is a very low risk for most people,”

Here’s the video from Swati’s post (2:42 in length):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wc72mmsR6bM

Having watched it, can you point out the “…significant technical and financial investment…” involved in that hack?

What investment would you make for a hack that opens up Gmail, Twitter, WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook, any service that uses SMS, to attack?

Definitely a hack for your intelligence gathering toolkit.

February 27, 2016

Is Conduct/Truth A Defense to Censorship?

Filed under: Censorship,Facebook,Twitter — Patrick Durusau @ 4:50 pm

While Twitter sets up its Platonic panel of censors (Plato’s Republic, Books 2/3)*, I am wondering if conduct/truth will be a defense to censorship for accounts that make positive posts about the Islamic State?

I ask because of a message suggesting accounts (Facebook?) might be suspended for posts following these rules:

  • Do no use foul language and try to not get in a fight with people
  • Do not write too much for people to read
  • Make your point easy as not everyone has the same knowledge as you about the Islamic state and/or Islam
  • Use a VPN…
  • Use an account that you don’t really need because this is like a martydom operation, your account will probably be banned
  • Post images supporting the Islamic state
  • Give positive facts about the Islamic state
  • Share Islamic state video’s that show the mercy and kindness of the Islamic state towards Muslims, and/or showing Muslim’s support towards the Islamic state. Or any videos that will attract people to the Islamic state
  • Prove rumors about the Islamic state false
  • Give convincing Islamic information about topics discussed like the legitimacy of the khilafa, killing civilians of the kuffar, the takfeer made on Arab rules, etc.
  • Or simply just post a short quick comment showing your support like “dawlat al Islam baqiaa” or anything else (make sure ppl can understand it
  • Remember to like all the comments you see that are supporting the Islamic state with all your accounts!

Posted (but not endorsed) by J. Faraday on 27 February 2016.

If we were to re-cast those as rule of conduct, non-Islamic State specific, where N is the issue under discussion:

  • Do no use foul language and try to not get in a fight with people
  • Do not write too much for people to read
  • Make your point easy [to understand] as not everyone has the same knowledge as you about N
  • Post images supporting N
  • Give positive facts about N
  • Share N videos that show the mercy and kindness of N, and/or showing A support towards N. Or any videos that will attract people to N
  • Prove rumors about N false
  • Give convincing N information about topics discussed
  • Or simply just post a short quick comment showing your support or anything else (make sure ppl can understand it
  • Remember to like all the comments you see that are supporting N with all your accounts!

Is there something objectionable about those rules when N = Islamic State?

As far as being truthful, say for example claims by the Islamic State that Arab governments are corrupt, we can’t use a corruption index that lists Qatar at #22 (Denmark is #1 as the least corrupt) and Saudi Arabia at #48, when Bloomberg lists Qatar and Saudi Arabia as scoring zero (0) on budget transparency.

There are more corrupt governments than Qatar and Saudi Arabia, the failed state of Somalia for example, and perhaps the Sudan. Still, I wouldn’t ban anyone for saying both Qatar and Saudi Arabia are cesspools of corruption. They don’t match the structural corruption in Washington, D.C. but it isn’t for lack of trying.

Here the question for Twitter’s Platonic guardians (Trust and Safety Council):

Can an account that follows the rules of behavior outlined above be banned for truthful posts?

I think we all know the answer but I’m interested in seeing if Twitter will admit to censoring factually truthful information.

* Someone very dear to me objected to my reference to Twitterists (sp?) as Stalinists. It was literary hyperbole and so not literally true. Perhaps “Platonic guardians” will be more palatable. Same outcome, just a different moniker.

January 22, 2016

Kindermädchen (Nanny) Court Protects Facebook Users – Hunting Down Original Sources

Filed under: Facebook,Government,WWW — Patrick Durusau @ 1:17 pm

Facebook’s Friend Finder found unlawful by Germany’s highest court by Lisa Vaas.

From the post:

…

Reuters reports that a panel of the Federal Court of Justice has ruled that Facebook’s Friend Finder feature, used to encourage users to market the social media network to their contacts, constituted advertising harassment in a case that was filed in 2010 by the Federation of German Consumer Organisations (VZBV).

Friends Finder asks users for permission to snort the e-mail addresses of their friends or contacts from their address books, thereby allowing the company to send invitations to non-Facebook users to join up.
…

There was a time when German civil law and the reasoning of its courts were held in high regard. I regret to say it appear that may not longer be the case.

This decision on Facebook asking users to spread the use of Facebook being a good example.

From the Reuters account, it appears that sending of unsolicited email is the key to the court’s decision.

It’s difficult to say much more about the court’s decision because finding something other than re-tellings of the Reuters report is difficult.

You can start with the VZBV press release on the decision: Wegweisendes BGH-Urteil: Facebooks Einladungs-E-Mails waren unlautere Werbung, but it too is just a summary.

Unlike the Reuters report, it at least has: Auf anderen Webseiten Pressemitteilung des BGH, which takes you to: Bundesgerichtshof zur Facebook-Funktion “Freunde finden,” a press release by the court about its decision. 😉

The court’s press release offers: Siehe auch: Urteil des I. Zivilsenats vom 14.1.2016 – I ZR 65/14 –, which links to a registration facility to subscribe for a notice of the opinion of the court when it is published.

No promises on when the decision will appear. I subscribed today, January 22nd and the decision was made on January 14, 2016.

I did check Aktuelle Entscheidungen des Bundesgerichtshofes (recent decisions), but it refers you back to the register for the opinion to appear in the future.

Without the actual decision, it’s hard to tell if the court is unaware of the “delete” key on German keyboards or if there is some other reason to inject itself into a common practice on social media sites.

I will post a link to the decision when it becomes available. (The German court makes its decisions available for free to the public and charges a document fee for profit making services, or so I understand the terms of the site.)

PS: For journalists, researchers, bloggers, etc. I consider it a best practice to always include pointers to original sources.

PPS: The German keyboard does include a delete key (Entf) if you had any doubts:

880px-German-T2-Keyboard-Prototype-May-2012

(Select the image to display a larger version.)

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