Tag: technology

The second iteration of SocialGalactic is in active Beta. All Annual, Premium, and Basic UATV subscribers have been invited. If you are a current subscriber and have not received an invite, please email me with SG2 INVITE in the subject from the email you used to subscribe to Unauthorized and the level of your current subscription.

Burn Unit members will be invited soon, after which we will invite the creator-specific subscribers. Following that, we will invite Castalia Deluxe subscribers. Those involved in other projects that do not involve those subscriptions, such as Rebel’s Run investors, Replatforming patrons, and the AHQ Rubble Bouncers, will receive special badges they can use if they wish.

Only after all of the various contributors have been invited will we prepare to offer actual SG2 subscriptions and open up the site to free users.

And if you’re already on SocialGalactic, feel free to comment upon how it’s working for you and what improvements you would like to see.

Shadow-banning is now officially a feature of the Twitter services, according to their revised Terms of Use:

The process of limiting how many people can see posts from a certain Twitter account is commonly referred to as “shadow banning,” and many (including the company itself) have claimed that it is simply a conspiracy theory by conservatives and that Twitter does not limit the reach of content on its platform. But now, a change to Twitter’s terms of service appears to give the social media platform the right to do exactly that.

ReclaimTheNet.org notes that a recent change to Twitter’s terms of service adds that the company “may also remove or refuse to distribute any Content on the Services, limit distribution or visibility of any Content on the service…”

Twitter does not clarify what content may be subject to “limited distribution or visibility” giving the company free rein to limit any content it sees fit.

Sadly, the Legal Legion can’t take any credit for this particular modification. In other social media-related news, SG2 has added video for a very select number of Paragon accounts. We’re just testing it now, so if you’re on SG2 already, don’t ask for it, please.

The problem with which we’ve been dealing for the last few years is just a microcosm of a much larger one that has disturbing long-term implications for the future direction of the intersection of technology and law:

The resounding message in the Pew report is this: There’s no way the problem in public discourse is going to solve itself. “Between troll attacks, chilling effects of government surveillance and censorship, etc., the internet is becoming narrower every day,” said Randy Bush, a research fellow at Internet Initiative Japan, in his response to Pew.

Many of those polled said that we’re now witnessing the emergence of “flame wars and strategic manipulation” that will only get worse. This goes beyond obnoxious comments, or Donald Trump’s tweets, or even targeted harassment. Instead, we’ve entered the realm of “weaponized narrative” as a 21st-century battle space, as the authors of a recent Defense One essay put it. And just like other battle spaces, humans will need to develop specialized technology for the fight ahead.

Researchers have already used technology to begin to understand what they’re up against. Earlier this month, a team of computer scientists from Stanford University and Cornell University wrote about how they used machine-learning algorithms to forecast whether a person was likely to start trolling. Using their algorithm to analyze a person’s mood and the context of the discussion they were in, the researchers got it right 80 percent of the time.   

They learned that being in a bad mood makes a person more likely to troll, and that trolling is most frequent late at night (and least frequent in the morning). They also tracked the propensity for trolling behavior to spread. When the first comment in a thread is written by a troll—a nebulous term, but let’s go with it—then it’s twice as likely that additional trolls will chime in compared with a conversation that’s not led by a troll to start, the researchers found. On top of that, the more troll comments there are in a discussion, the more likely it is that participants will start trolling in other, unrelated threads.

“A single troll comment in a discussion—perhaps written by a person who woke up on the wrong side of the bed—can lead to worse moods among other participants, and even more troll comments elsewhere,” the Stanford and Cornell researchers wrote. “As this negative behavior continues to propagate, trolling can end up becoming the norm in communities if left unchecked.”

Using technology to understand when and why people troll is essential, but many people agree that the scale of the problem requires technological solutions. Stopping trolls isn’t as simple as creating spaces that prevent anonymity, many of those surveyed told Pew, because doing so also enables “governments and dominant institutions to even more freely employ surveillance tools to monitor citizens, suppress free speech, and shape social debate,” Pew wrote.

We’re already seeing how companies like Facebook and Google have weaponized the concept of “fake news”, and now entire countries are following suit. In what is a crushing refutation of libertarian theory, the Internet and the devolution of what were once civilized anonymous discussion spaces on bulletin boards and CompuServe have clearly demonstrated that Man cannot handle the freedom of a perceived lack of accountability.

There are deeper philosophical aspects to this, that lend additional clarity to traditional thinking about morality and ethics. Even the most devout atheist should be able to recognize at this point that Man was not made for, nor can he reliably handle, even the perceived absence of a Lawgiver to whom he knows he will be held responsible for his actions.

It’s bitterly amusing to see the USA and EU fussing over their discovery that the rest of the world is not going to play with their stacked deck:

A move by the United Nations to approve a Russian-sponsored and China-backed resolution that aims to create a new convention on cybercrime has alarmed rights groups and Western powers that fear a bid to restrict online freedom.

The resolution was approved on Friday by the general assembly by a vote of 79-60, with 33 abstentions.

It establishes an expert committee representing all regions of the world “to elaborate a comprehensive international convention on countering the use of information and communications technologies for criminal purposes”. The resolution said the committee will meet in August 2020 to agree on an outline of its activities.

The United States, European powers and rights groups fear that the language is code for legitimising crackdowns on expression, with numerous countries defining criticism of the government as “criminal”.

Meanwhile, the US, the European powers, and rights groups are busy cracking down on expression of which they do not approve. They simply don’t have a leg to stand on, and the rest of the world knows it. Do they really think that China, Russia, India, and everyone else don’t see that no one is allowed to criticize certain peoples, races, and orientations despite this supposed freedom of expression?

And furthermore, Huawei is discovering the advantage of being forced to build your own platforms:

Being cut off from the world’s most popular mobile OS and being left with its open-source version at best was a blow for Huawei – but the split between the two tech giants is a sword that is capable of cutting both ways. Just months after Google’s decision, Huawei unveiled its own Harmony mobile OS and rolled out a new flagship smartphone without any proprietary Google apps. It vowed to finalize the development of Huawei Mobile Services (HMS) – a replacement for popular Google apps – by the end of the year.

The Chinese giant did not stop at that, and entered into negotiations with India’s top 150 app developers to convince them to publish their products on HMS, which itself could offer up to 150 ‘own apps’ to customers all over the world.

“In the future, Chinese companies might push the American one from the entire Asian market. Huawei’s indigenously developed services might soon replace Google services like Gmail, YouTube, and Google Maps. Then, the US company will be in real trouble.”

I switched from Samsung to Huawei several years ago. Both their tablets and their phones are great; as for the OS, I barely noticed when the switch to Harmony took place. This is why I have no doubt that we will soon see a China-Russia-India technological alliance that, unlike the China-Russia-Iran military alliance, will be fundamentally offensive in nature.

On Tuesday, December 17 we were hit by multiple big DDoS attacks. Multiple prefixes were attacked. Needless to say, we dealt with it without any real trouble because we have been under constant cyberattack since Castalia House endorsed GamerGate in 2015.

The VFM have been instructed to track down the parties responsible while the LLoE is reviewing the applicable laws in the relevant legal jurisdictions. When we find them, we will file both civil and criminal charges.

In case you ever wondered why we don’t disclose information about our operations and how they work, this should suffice to explain why. We don’t talk much about these attacks, but we have been dealing with them every day for more than four years now.

This is what those worried about a YouTube purge should be worrying about rather than the new terms of service:

YouTube will no longer allow videos that “maliciously insult someone” based on “protected attributes” such as race, gender identity or sexuality. The video-sharing platform will also ban “implied threats of violence” as part of its new harassment policy.

A row erupted in June after a prominent video-maker said he had been the target of abuse by another YouTube star. At the time, YouTube said its rules had not been broken. But it has now deleted many of the videos in question.

“Even if a single video doesn’t cross the line, with our new harassment policy we can take a pattern of behaviour into account for enforcement,” Neal Mohan, chief product officer at YouTube, told the BBC.

Then again, it doesn’t really matter because there are no actual rules to which anyone, much less a banned creator, can hold YouTube accountable or any authority to which one can appeal. This means that YouTube will do whatever it wants right up until the moment that it finds suddenly itself paying out tens of millions of dollars in the inevitable class action lawsuit.

We’re not dealing with great legal minds here. Notice how everything is veiled in subjectives; they can’t simply ban insults because doing so would be relatively easy to objectively observe. Is it an insult, Y/N? So, in order to allow selective enforcement, they ban “malicious” insults depending upon whatever motivation their mindreaders determine applies. Or difficult-to-define things such as implications and patterns of behavior.

Ron Unz, quite rightly, has broached the idea of offering subscriptions to the Unz Review and tying it to the amount of comments a user is able to make.

The underlying principle is simple. If you spend a great deal of time doing something, then you have empirically demonstrated that it must be worth the hourly value of your time. And it hardly seems unreasonable to financially contribute a small additional fraction to help support the iconoclastic writers who are providing that service.

Restricting access to our webzine to casual or ordinary readers would defeat our entire purpose of widely disseminating important and controversial material. But I think that our heavier website users, perhaps those who spend more than 5 or 10 hours per month here, should be encouraged or even required to support it. A stepped-fee somewhere in the range of $1 per hour seems fairly reasonable, and such a figure would go a long way toward covering the payments to our existing writers, allowing for further expansion, and helping to make this website self-sustaining. I doubt that a charge of $1/hour would strain many budgets given that it’s much less than the cost of a cup of coffee or most daily newspapers.

A substantial fraction of our heavy readers are probably ideologically-committed individuals, who might welcome a chance to support writers and thinkers whose content they often admire and whose writing may rarely be found elsewhere.

Perhaps the handful of irritating “trolls” possibly employed by various hostile organizations will be annoyed at having to request an expense account payment to cover such costs, causing them to effectively subsidize the distribution of ideas they abhor and would eagerly censor. But I think they deserve such a fate, and if they choose instead to permanently depart, I doubt they will be much missed.

The exact details and payment methodology will need to be determined, perhaps involving Patreon or other similar systems as an option. But I thought I’d first open on a discussion on this general topic and see what thoughts or suggestions our readers had.

Needless to say, this perfectly reasonable evolution has not gone over well with the troll brigade or the free lunch crowd there. One example of a typical response:

You mean he’d really like to censor opinions he doesn’t like but he doesn’t want to be seen to be doing so? In other words he’s just like everyone else. He believes in freedom of speech but doesn’t really think it should apply to people he disagrees with?

If that’s his intention he is choosing absolutely the worst way to do it. He’ll end up with just as many crazies and trolls as he has now but he’ll have chased away the thoughtful commenters.

And to be brutally honest, in general the comments here are a hell of a lot better and more interesting than the articles. Most of the articles are puerile or they’re simply rants. Most of the “writers” here are here because they can’t get published elsewhere, not because they’re controversial but because they’re nuts. There are three or four really good writers here and that’s about it.

I think Mr Unz will discover that most people come here for the lively discussions in the comment sections, not for the articles. He seems to be aiming to destroy the one great asset that the site has.

I’ve heard this self-serving, narcissistic argument every time I turned comment moderation on over the past 16 years. The fact that there are around 100 non-commenting readers for every commenter never seems to register with them, nor does the fact that when comments were turned entirely off, the site traffic here actually increased by about five percent.

Now, I’m willing to permit comments here as a courtesy to regular readers who want them. I think they can be a net benefit to everyone here, although it is clear that open and anonymous commenting is unfortunately no longer viable. But commenters should not delude themselves. No one – literally no one – is primarily here to read the comments.

Bonus project: identify the key word that gives away the commenter’s SSH game.

ANSWER: “thoughtful”. It’s not the only indicator, and a number of people correctly pointed to the obvious “seems”, but I was interested to see if anyone would spot a tell that I have not previously pointed out. One thing I have noticed over time is that only Gammas ever describe themselves as thoughtful. One can always tell that a blog is going to be meandering, boring, pointless, and self-absorbed when it advertises itself as featuring “thoughtful commentary”, as just about every failed blog started by a journalist in the early 2000s did.

Ol’ Pikachu isn’t remotely capable of addressing the challenges that are heading Google’s way. He isn’t even tough enough to stand up to his own SJW employees:

Google’s employees are openly revolting over the company’s handling of sexual harassment and controversial executives hires like Miles Taylor, the former Department of Homeland Security chief of staff who defended the Trump administration’s Muslim travel ban. Last month, 200 employees in San Francisco protested Google’s various contentious decisions. Shortly after, four of the protesters were fired. Google has denied that the employees were fired for organizing. Now those former employees, dubbed the “Thanksgiving Four” plan to file charges against Google with the National Labor Relations Board.

Meanwhile, Google is investigating its own executives over inappropriate relationships they may have had with subordinates, CNBC first reported last month. That includes Chief Legal Officer David Drummond, who recently married an employee in Google’s legal department and faces a string of damaging allegations from another former employee with whom he had an extramarital affair.

Next, there’s YouTube, which has faced controversy after controversy in recent years, ranging from pedophiles lurking in video comments where underage children appear, to the spread of conspiracy theories about victims of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, last year. (We’d be here all day if I listed every recent YouTube crisis and failure.)

And then there are the dollars and cents. Growth in Google’s core digital advertising business is slowing, and the pressure is mounting for the company to find new areas of expansion. While its cloud and hardware businesses are showing some promise, they still make up a tiny fraction of Google’s overall revenue. At its core, Google is still an advertising company.

But that’s just the internal stuff. Outside the company, nearly every state attorney general in the country is looking into antitrust violations related to Google’s ad business. CNBC reported last month that the probes may expand into Google’s search business as well. The FTC and Department of Justice are also said to be looking at Google’s potential antitrust violations.

With so much scrutiny from regulators and attorneys general, there will almost certainly be some sort of action taken, and Pichai is now the one who has to steer the ship as various government agencies seek to punish his company. Page and Brin picked the perfect time to step down and protect themselves.

It’s informative to see how the founders of the last wave of Silicon Valley giants are all running for the exits as the markets hit a historic peak. The smart money is getting out while it can.

Patreon just deplatformed Mister Metokur in what can only be described as an epic fuckup of proportions that have seldom hitherto been seen. So much so that Mister Metokur may not even know it yet.

If anyone has his email address, send it to me. And if you are he, get in touch! Because you’re not going to believe this….

There is a stronger case for breaking up Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon than there was for breaking up Standard Oil:

Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft all easily have more than 10 times the net income as did Standard Oil when it was broken apart. Apple coming in at close to 50 times the net income! Cisco and Intel come in just under 10 times the net income as compared to Standard Oil, both at 9.9 times greater net income than Standard Oil when it was broken apart.

If 91 percent control of the oil refining industry and net income of $35 million per year was enough to break apart Standard Oil under the terms of the Sherman Antitrust Act, there are a few tech super giants that would face a similar fate if the trust-busting philosophies that held sway during the administration of President Theodore Roosevelt were en vogue today.

In January, The Wall Street Journal published an article titled The Antitrust Case Against Facebook, Google and Amazon. The article reports that these major tech firms each have greater control over certain high tech industry sectors than Standard Oil had over oil production during its heyday. For example, 95 percent of young adults using the Internet subscribe to a Facebook product, whether it’s the company’s flagship social network or other services like Instagram or WhatsApp. Google controls 89 percent of Internet searches.

Where monopolies don’t exist, duopolies certainly do; Google and Apple, for example, collectively hold 99 percent of the mobile operating software market.

If the percentage of market share for important tech sectors held by these titans wasn’t enough, the massive fortunes these companies continue to generate would seem likely to trigger at least some antitrust scrutiny. Remember, Standard Oil’s annual net earnings through 1906 earned what today would be $969 million each year in 2017 dollars, adjusted for inflation. To some of the tech super giants of today, $1 billion in profits is nothing more than pocket change.

What is holding Republicans back? This is an absolute no-brainer as well as a certain vote winner across the political spectrum?