Tag: technology

The independent comic industry news and review site Bounding Into Comics has been deplatformed:

Facebook has censored Bounding Into Comics and completely removed our 250k+ strong Facebook page.

Facebook did not provide any warnings and didn’t really explain why the page was removed.

The page was removed on Monday around 10:20 a.m. ET shortly after we published the new Spider-Man: Far From Home trailer. I was logged out of my personal Facebook account, which I use to manage the Bounding Into Comics Facebook page. Upon logging back in, I received a number of alerts from Facebook indicating they had removed ‘Content’ which ultimately meant they had removed not just content posts but all traces of the Bounding Into Comics Facebook page.

The first alert indicated Bounding Into Comics was being removed because it violated “the Facebook Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.” The next alert read, “Our policies prohibit posting content that infringes or violates someone else’s rights or otherwise violates the law.”

The alerts continued, “If you continue to post content that infringes or violates other’s rights or otherwise violates the law, you could be temporarily blocked from posting content on Facebook, or even have your account permanently banned.”

The next alert then directed us to review Facebook’s Intellectual Property Policies. It read, “If you have questions regarding the removal of content please visit the Help Center. To help keep your account in good standing, remove any other content you’ve posted to Facebook that may infringe or otherwise violate another’s rights. To learn more about intellectual property, visit the Help Center.”

Two of the messages then repeated. The next alert read, “Our policies prohibit posting content that infringes or violates someone else’s rights or otherwise violates the law.”

The final message read, “If you continue to post content that infringes or violates others’ rights or otherwise violates the law, you could be temporarily blocked from posting content on Facebook, or even have your account permanently disabled.”

Facebook did not provide us with any actual concrete examples of the alleged violation. In fact, the reason why we are writing this article today, instead of yesterday, is because we attempted to reach out to Facebook believing the removal of the page was inadvertent. However, Facebook has not responded to any of our Help Center inquiries. They stopped responding in an email thread with a Publisher & Media Support team representative once the page was identified.

This is why it is absolutely vital to stop relying upon these enemy platforms. What is the point of building anything that relies upon them as a foundation when they can pull it out from under you like Lucy yanking the football away from Charlie Brown at any time?

Facebook’s most recent banning binge is a little ironic in light of how they wouldn’t let me delete my account, so I had to settle for deactivating it last year.

Facebook announced Thursday afternoon that it had designated some high-profile people, including Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who’s notorious for using anti-Semitic language, and right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, as “dangerous” and said it will be purging them from its platforms.

Jones and his media outlet InfoWars had previously been banned from Facebook (FB) in in August 2018, but had maintained a presence on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook. On Thursday, Jones and InfoWars will be barred from Instagram as well.

Other people banned Thursday include fringe right-wing media personalities Laura Loomer, Milo Yiannopoulos and Paul Joseph Watson. Also included are Paul Nehlen, an anti-Semite who unsuccessfully ran for Congress in 2016 and 2018.

“We’ve always banned individuals or organizations that promote or engage in violence and hate, regardless of ideology,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement provided to CNN Business. “The process for evaluating potential violators is extensive and it is what led us to our decision to remove these accounts today.”

Build your own platform. That is the only solution. And, of course, make the rubble bounce. 

But then, we knew that AI was naturally inclined to racism when Tay became self-aware and promptly joined the Nationalist Right:

Artificial Intelligence is rapidly becoming the Artificial Id, revealing through coded algorithms what we humans really think about taboo topics.

Why does AI think Michael Obama and Scrotal Williams are men?

Oh I dunno, it could be the hulking physiques.

The ripped musculature.

The overhanging brow.

The prognathism.

The shadowed canvas.

AI, like humans, is racist, which just means it notices things and isn’t polite enough to keep those thoughts to itself.

Reality wins.

Russia is following China’s lead in setting up its own Internet free of US control:

President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday signed into law a “sovereign internet” bill which will allow Russian authorities to isolate the country’s internet, a move decried by rights groups.

Russian lawmakers insist the new law is necessary to ensure the security of Russia’s online networks but critics say the vaguely worded bill gives new censorship powers to government monitors.

The text of the law was published Wednesday but it will not come into effect until November.

The measures include creating technology to monitor internet routing and to steer Russian internet traffic away from foreign servers, ostensibly to prevent a foreign country from shutting it down.

The authors of the initiative say Russia must ensure the security of its networks after US President Donald Trump unveiled a new American cybersecurity strategy last year that said Russia had carried out cyber attacks with impunity.

On a not-entirely unrelated note, I expect the foreign alternatives to rapidly sweep away the US tech giants due to the latter’s abuse of their customers.

Amazon isn’t SPYING on you. They’re just improving your experience!

Amazon workers are listening to private and sometimes disturbing voice recordings to improve the voice-assistants’ understanding of human speech. Amazon has admitted to its customers that thousands of recordings are being analysed by staff and transcribed before feeding them back into the software.

As many as 1,000 clips are reviewed by workers in buildings all over the world, many of which are not obviously run by the online giant.   Staff members have said that the work is mostly mundane, however they do come across embarrassing clips, like a woman singing off-key in the shower.  The teams use internal chat rooms to share files when they need help deciphering a muddled word – or come when they come across an amusing recording. Among more sinister content the workers have heard, have been a child screaming for help and two instances were they believed they heard a sexual assault taking place. 

Amazon last night confirmed the revelations when approached by Bloomberg saying that ‘an extremely small sample of Alexa voice recordings’ are analysed by staff. In an emailed statement to MailOnline, an Amazon spokesperson said: ‘We only annotate an extremely small sample of Alexa voice recordings in order to improve the customer experience.

I find this particularly amusing because Spacebunny and I use the term “enhancing your user experience” as a synonym “made it stop working”. Which is usually expressed in some sort of context like this:

“Did you take out the trash?”

“No, I’m enhancing your user experience!”

My money would be on China getting there first.

The US military is desperately trying to recover the wreckage of a Japanese F-35A stealth fighter which crashed over the Pacific yesterday amid fears China and Russia could beat them to it. Parts of the tail of the world’s most sophisticated stealth jet have already been found after it disappeared off the radar 85 miles east of Misawa, Japan during a training mission.

Eight ships and seven aircraft,including a U.S. Navy P-8 Orion maritime patrol plane, are looking for traces of the jet that is believed to have sunk to 5,000ft. The pilot of the aircraft is still missing.

But experts today warned that Russia and China could also be trying to get their hands on the aircraft to discover its secrets.

Tom Moore, a former senior professional staff member at the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, tweeted: ‘There is no price too high in this world for China and Russia to pay to get Japan’s missing F-35, if they can. Big deal.’

‘Bottom line is that it would not be good,’ retired US Air Force Lt. Gen. David Deptula told Business Insider.

It is believed Russia and China could be using their advanced submarines to scour the ocean floor in search of the jet in order to steal vital technology on board. And experts have warned that parts of the jet could easily be replicated if they do recover the wreckage before US or Japanese search teams.

On the other hand, given the apparent shortcomings of the F-35, the bigger fear might be the Chinese or Russians learning that there is no reason to replicate any parts of the jet. It’s interesting how this storyline tends to track the plot of A Mind Programmed/The Programmed Man.

Facebook again proves – as if any more proof were necessary – that it cannot be trusted in any way, shape, or form:

Old Facebook posts by Mark Zuckerberg have disappeared — obscuring details about core moments in Facebook’s history.

On multiple occassions, years-old public posts made by the 34-year-old billionaire chief executive that were previously public and reported on by news outlets at the time have since vanished, Business Insider has found. That includes all of the posts he made during 2007 and 2008.

Reached for comment, a Facebook spokesperson said the posts were “mistakenly deleted” due to “technical errors.”

“A few years ago some of Mark’s posts were mistakenly deleted due to technical errors. The work required to restore them would have been extensive and not guaranteed to be successful so we didn’t do it,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

“We agree people should be able to find information about past announcements and major company news, which is why for years we’ve shared and archived this information publicly — first on our blog and in recent years on our Newsroom.”

These disappearances, along with other changes Facebook has made to how it saves its archive of announcements and blog posts, make it much harder to parse the social network’s historical record. This makes it far more difficult to hold the company, and Zuckerberg himself, accountable to past statements — particularly during a period of intense scrutiny of the company in the wake of a string of scandals.

The very nature of the issue means it is extremely challenging to make a full accounting of what exactly what has gone missing over the years.

It’s always Year Zero for these liars. Nothing they say is ever true, which is why they’re always focused on hiding what they said yesterday.

Neon Revolt appears to have uncovered some sort of conspiracy to hide something related to Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the Supreme Court:

I listened last night as was immediately discouraged because, frankly, I’m hoping RBG kicks the bucket soon. She has had some recent health scares, as I’m sure you’re all aware, but here, she sounded cogent, coherent, and quite vocal…. But something was bothering me about this clip, and I wasn’t sure what it was exactly, so I returned to it early this afternoon…

I had it playing in a tab on my browser when I clicked ahead, and suddenly heard what I thought was a repeat of audio I had just heard.

“Huh, that’s weird…” I thought to myself.

I clicked back and listened again.

There was that voice again.

Kagan’s voice!

I clicked forward…

Kagan AGAIN!

It may sound crazy, but let’s face it, in light of the Mueller Report, Q is now officially more reliable as a news source than the entire mainstream media

I’ve been saying this for years. Now the children are finally getting old enough to speak for themselves:

My parents had long ago made the rule that my siblings and I weren’t allowed to use social media until we turned 13, which was late, compared to many of my friends who started using  Instagram, Wattpad, and Tumblr when we were 10 years old.

While I was sometimes curious what my sister was laughing at and commenting on, and what my friends liked about it, I didn’t really have much of an interest in social media, and since I didn’t have a smartphone and wasn’t allowed to join any sites at all until I was 13, it wasn’t much of an issue for me.

Then, several months ago, when I turned 13, my mom gave me the green light and I joined Twitter and Facebook. The first place I went, of course, was my mom’s profiles. That’s when I realized that while this might have been the first time I was allowed on social media, it was far from the first time my photos and stories had appeared online. When I saw the pictures that she had been posting on Facebook for years, I felt utterly embarrassed, and deeply betrayed.

There, for anyone to see on her public Facebook account, were all of the embarrassing moments from my childhood: The letter I wrote to the tooth fairy when I was five years old, pictures of me crying when I was a toddler, and even vacation pictures of me when I was 12 and 13 that I had no knowledge of. It seemed that my entire life was documented on her Facebook account, and for 13 years, I had no idea.

I realize this will be a very unpopular opinion in some circles, but I firmly believe that posting pictures of your children in public is fundamentally bad parenting. I wonder how many parent-child relationships will be permanently damaged because Mommy or Daddy was using their children to attention-whore.

Google’s European fines are now up to $9.5 billion in the last three years.

European Union regulators have hit Google with a $1.68 billion (1.49 billion euro/£1.28billion) fine for or blocking rival online search advertisers. It is the third multi-billion dollar EU antitrust penalty for Google’s parenting company Alphabet in just two years. The European Commission, which said the fine accounted for 1.29 percent of Google’s turnover in 2018, said in a statement that the anti-competitive practices had lasted a decade.

The EU’s competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, announced the results of the long-running probe at a news conference in Brussels on Wednesday.

‘Today’s decision is about how Google abused its dominance to stop websites using brokers other than the AdSense platform,’ Vestager said.

The commission found that Google and its parent company, Alphabet, breached EU antitrust rules by imposing restrictive clauses in contracts with websites that used AdSense, preventing Google rivals from placing their ads on these sites.

Today’s EU case concerned AdSense for Search, which placed a Google search bar on the website in question, then used any searches made through it to tailor the content of adverts that users were shown.

For example, if a user searched for ‘shoes’, they would be shown articles about shoes as well as adverts for shoes. But Google also made publishers sign contracts which initially forbid them from using a rival search engine on the same site, and later forced them to make Google’s search the most prominent used on the site. Google also required publishers to reserve the most profitable advertising spaces for adverts they supplied, and forced them to seek written approval any time they wanted to change the way rival adverts were displayed

The EU found these restrictions stifled innovation and denied rivals the chance to compete.

Google ‘prevented its rivals from having a chance to innovate and to compete in the market on their merits,’ Vestager said.  ‘Advertisers and website owners, they had less choice and likely faced higher prices that would be passed on to consumers.’

Last year Vestager hit the company with a record $5bn (£3.8bn / €4.3bn) fine following an investigation into its Android operating system. In 2017, she slapped Google with a $2.84bn (£2.1bn / €2.42bn) fine in a case involving its online shopping search results.

I strongly suspect this is why YouTube appears to be much less inclined to interfere with European-based AdSense accounts than US-based ones. Given that the EU has been willing to fine Alphabet a cumulative $10 billion for interfering with rival corporations, imagine how high the fines for consumer actions could be.

The tech giants are under the mistaken impression that the contracts they impose on everyone that declare they can do anything they want at any time to anyone are going to hold up in court. As Indiegogo is already learning, that is absolutely not true; to the contrary, the mere fact that they blithely impose these “agreements” on everyone without any input from the other parties is actually one of the more powerful legal weapons against them.

What their lawyers don’t seem to have grasped is that the legacy terminology that was perfectly sufficient when a free service was provided does not supersede centuries of contract law precedent once money starts changing hands.