Tag: technology

If there is one thing upon which the Left and the Right can both agree, it is that Facebook should be broken up:

In a letter published when his company went public in 2012, Mark Zuckerberg championed Facebook’s mission of making the world “more open and connected.” Businesses would become more authentic, human relationships stronger, and government more accountable. “A more open world is a better world,” he wrote.

Facebook’s CEO now claims to have had a major change of heart.

In “A Privacy-Focused Vision for Social Networking,” a 3,200-word essay that Zuckerberg posted to Facebook on March 6, he says he wants to “build a simpler platform that’s focused on privacy first.” In apparent surprise, he writes: “People increasingly also want to connect privately in the digital equivalent of the living room.”

Zuckerberg’s essay is a power grab disguised as an act of contrition. Read it carefully, and it’s impossible to escape the conclusion that if privacy is to be protected in any meaningful way, Facebook must be broken up.

The reason both Left and Right can agree on this is because there are multiple reasons that Facebook should not be permitted to continue operating. It is a criminal enterprise. It is a monopoly. It is treasonous, and it is an ongoing attack on several unalienable American rights protected by the U.S. Constitution.

I find it more than a little bizarre that Republicans have not seized upon the breakup of Facebook and other social media giants as a signature policy in their 2020 campaign platform, because it is not merely a popular position, it is not only the right thing to do, but it is manifestly in their best interest.

A whole range of new plot lines suddenly occurs to me:

France intends to tax the revenue of about 30 Internet giants such as Amazon.com Inc. to help ensure “fiscal justice,” according to Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire. The levy of as much as 5 percent of French sales will start Jan. 1 and potentially raise about 500 million euros ($570 million) for the state, Le Maire told Le Parisien newspaper. Under the plan, which the cabinet will discuss on WednWednesday, the tax will apply to any company with global revenue of more than 750 million euros and French sales above 25 million euros, Le Maire said.

U.S., Chinese and European companies may meet the levy criteria, including a few French businesses, the report said, as governments grapple with how to tax global Internet giants that can generate huge domestic revenues from limited physical assets. Spain and the U.K. are also working on digital sales taxes, while Europe has so far balked at a continent-wide levy. France intends to tax revenues from local targeted ads, marketplaces and the re-selling of personal data.

The free ride for Big Internet appears to finally be over.

Project Veritas and a former Facebook insider explain some of the technical details behind how Facebook is “dethrottling” people like Steven Crowder and Mike Cernovich:

According to the insider, the documents revealed a routine suppression of the distribution of conservative Facebook pages. The technical action she repeatedly saw, and for which Project Veritas was provided documentation, was labeled ActionDeboostLiveDistribution. Said the insider, “I would see [this term] appear on several different conservative pages. I first noticed it with an account that I can’t remember, but I remember once I started looking at it, I also saw it on Mike Cernovich’s page, saw it on Steven Crowder’s page, as well as the Daily Caller’s page.”

Conservative commentator Steven Crowder’s page had been suppressed before in April 2016, and Crowder told Project Veritas they settled a dispute related to the issue with Facebook out of court. Asked for comment on this story, Steven Crowder’s attorney Bill Richmond said:

“Louder With Crowder is investigating the allegations of concealed stream throttling by Facebook. The accusations are deeply troubling given the previously settled dispute with Facebook uncovered by Gizmodo.com, which found the show was targeted by Facebook workers with secret audience restrictions on political grounds alongside other prominent conservative voices.”

A screenshot of an action log on Mike Cernovich’s Facebook page provided by the insider, shows the tag. The insider believes that the “deboost” code suppresses the distribution of livestream videos on Facebook. Project Veritas spoke to a current Facebook employee off the record who said that the code could limit a video’s visibility in news feeds, remove sharing features, and disable interactive notifications.

When approached for comment, author and filmmaker Mike Cernovich said the troubling issue is that Facebook could just “make stuff up” about people through these systems. “Facebook, or an individual at Facebook, has the unilateral power to create false allegations against someone he or she doesn’t like. The person accused not only can’t do anything about the allegation, they don’t even have an idea the allegation was made,” said Cernovich.

The insider says that unlike many actions that Facebook content moderators can take against pages, the “deboost” action, which appears to occur algorithmically, does not notify the page’s owner. “[W]ith these ‘deboost live stream’ things, there was no warning sent to the user… These were actions that were being taken without the users knowing.”

Upon further review, the insider says she did not notice the tag on any left-wing pages. “I looked at the Young Turks’ page, I looked at Colin Kaepernick’s page, none of them had received the same deboost comment.”

The “deboost” tag appears after the word “Sigma,” which Project Veritas has learned is an artificial intelligence system used to block potential suicide and self-harm posts. Both Mike Cernovich and Steven Crowder cannot recall having ever produced any videos on Facebook that promote suicide or self-harm. Mike Cernovich told Project Veritas that in fact he has long spoken out against suicide and self-harm, and provided tweets of his and a blog post as evidence.

It’s time to start building class action lawsuits against Facebook and other social media companies engaged in these false, defamatory, and materially damaging practices. And let me assure you that their terms of service don’t permit these practices, nor are their legal teams anything to be feared. Remember, despite all their financial resources, these are organizations that are seriously committed to both diversity and identity politics, with all the obvious consequences that follow from those practices.

Conservatives are going to have to stop settling out of court in ways that prevent them from commenting publicly on their experiences or divulging what they’ve learned, especially because, as Crowder has recently learned, these companies will not live up to their settlement agreements.

Facebook is relentlessly spying on people in a myriad of ways:

Facebook enabled its Android app to track and collect data from unwitting customers in order to increase advertising revenue, according to a cache of confidential internal emails that were leaked online. Some 60 pages of documents – including emails between Facebook executives – were posted anonymously on Github on Friday. The files were taken from a lawsuit between Facebook and Six4Three, an app developer, with most of them never having been published in fully unredacted form until now.

One email exchange from 2012 details plans by Facebook to use its Android app to track the location of its customers and pass data on single Facebook users to dating sites. The company also discussed providing data to organizations that wanted to target users with political ads – a business strategy that has led to scandal in the wake of alleged disinformation campaigns operating on the platform.

“This is a big win for the dating vertical specifically, but also supports our efforts to examine ‘good’ revenue opportunities resulting from policy relaxation/changes,” Marne Lynn Levine, then vice president of global public policy, wrote in support of the company’s plans.

In another message, Levine gloats about a meeting between General Martin Dempsey, then chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, and Sheryl Sandberg, noting that Dempsey and his wife are “both active Facebook users.”

The leaked documents also include a memo about a meeting between Facebook and the head of California’s eCrime unit to discuss then-California attorney general Kamala Harris’s office of privacy protection. Harris, now serving in the US Senate, announced her candidacy for president in January.

The Facebook representatives were told that Harris views the company “as a good actor” and that the privacy office “will keep communications with us open (we will not unknowingly be the subject of an investigation).”

But it’s even worse than that. Facebook also collects the data from apps used by people who are not even Facebook users.

It’s time to shut Facebook down altogether. It clearly merits the corporate equivalent of life in prison. Which raises an obvious question. If corporations have rights based on their personhood, why don’t they bear the responsibilities and potential consequence of people? A corporation that is found guilty of committing a crime should be no more able to earn an income than any other criminal who is sentenced to prison.

As an ex-libertarian, I am instinctively hostile to government regulation. But, as we have learned over the last decade, there are much worse things than regulation by nationalist governments.

Facebook deliberately broke privacy and competition law and should urgently be subject to statutory regulation, according to a devastating parliamentary report denouncing the company and its executives as “digital gangsters”.

The final report of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee’s 18-month investigation into disinformation and fake news accused Facebook of purposefully obstructing its inquiry and failing to tackle attempts by Russia to manipulate elections.

“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 social media platforms we use every day,” warned the committee’s chairman, Damian Collins.

The report:

• Accuses Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-founder and chief executive, of contempt for parliament in refusing three separate demands for him to give evidence, instead sending junior employees unable to answer the committee’s questions.
• Warns British electoral law is unfit for purpose and vulnerable to interference by hostile foreign actors, including agents of the Russian government attempting to discredit democracy.
• Calls on the British government to establish an independent investigation into “foreign influence, disinformation, funding, voter manipulation and the sharing of data” in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, the 2016 EU referendum and the 2017 general election.
• Labour moved quickly to endorse the committee’s findings, with the party’s deputy leader, Tom Watson, announcing: “Labour agrees with the committee’s ultimate conclusion – the era of self-regulation for tech companies must end immediately.

Highly regulated corporations are not known for their performance or their innovation. But let’s face it, Ma Bell and the various utilities have served the interests of the American people considerably better than Facebook and the other social media giants have. It’s time for the national governments around the world to crack the whip and take the international digital gangsters firmly in hand by turning them into utilities.

This is one issue upon which the Left and the Right should be able to find plenty of common ground.

This is hardly the first time one of our projects has taken an unanticipated curve, but even so, I’m sorry to have to inform everyone that SocialGalactic 1.0 has gone down for the count. By which I mean that we are permanently pulling the plug on this particular form of it. I’ll explain more in my Devstream tomorrow, but the long and the short of it is that the Infogalactic team has unanimously decided that our best course of action was to shut it down and return to our original Plan A of developing our own social media technology on our own servers.

While we appreciated the short cut that the possibility of working with Fediway offered us, after further discussions with them, we have mutually concluded that it is best for both organizations to go their separate ways.

Developing the necessary social media technology will, of course, take time, though probably not as much as you might imagine, so we will gladly refund everyone who supported the Burn Unit with the expectation of having Bronze, Silver, or Gold access to SocialGalactic. Please just email me with the relevant email address and I’ll take care of it. Speaking for the team, I sincerely apologize to all 2,500 of our users for the inconvenience involved, and we all very much appreciate the strong interest that the Infogalactic community has indicated in its own social media site.

That being said, we will NOT be doing any crowdfunding for SocialGalactic 2.0 for reasons that will be very obvious in 4-6 weeks.

Apparently Jordan Peterson was keeping Patreon afloat:

Back when Patreon tried to change the way they charged fees for transactions, moving the cost to the supporters of the creators and then doubled down by charging them multiples of the credit card one off processing fee of 30 cents based on the number of creators they supported it set off alarm bells for me.

I called it a cash grab that they hoped would be borne by the patron’s so that they would not lose creators. Trouble is both creators and their supporters were pissed about it. They gave up on that idea.

Then yesterday Patreon’s cashing out system for creators to transfer funds to their bank accounts went down. I cried alarm. Why? The best way to hide a major cashflow crisis is to make it impossible for creators to remove funds but you can only do that for so long before it becomes a crisis of trust in itself.

I advised others that if you are creator you should be making sure that Patreon is not the sole source of income because it may just collapse and take your money with it.

Right now they have about 100,000 creators but their fee structure with that number of creators just cannot sustain the cost of the business.

It will be interesting to learn if Indiegogo is caught up in the same dilemma. Reports that Indiegogo has successfully raised $1.6 billion in funds for creators over 10 years would tend to suggest otherwise, as it would indicate that their annual income is on the order of $12.8 million, but neither their employment pattern nor their behavior is very consistent with a technology company in good order.

UPDATE: A Patreon creator confirms:

Hey creators,

As you might have noticed, payments are processing at a slower rate than normal, which means your patron’s pledges might take longer to process than they usually would. Our team is working around the clock to solve this issue.

This is frustrating, and we want to apologize for the delay in getting you your money. You will receive your anticipated total payout as soon as possible, and please know that we’re working as hard as we can to get our payments processing back to up regular speed.

Then why don’t you shut down your company’s efforts to build a better surveillance state?

IF BEZOS WERE the political victim of surveillance state abuses, it would be scandalous and dangerous. It would also be deeply ironic.

That’s because Amazon, the company that has made Bezos the planet’s richest human being, is a critical partner for the U.S. Government in building an ever-more invasive, militarized and sprawling surveillance state. Indeed, one of the largest components of Amazon’s business, and thus one of the most important sources of Bezos’ vast wealth and power, is working with the Pentagon and the NSA to empower the U.S. Government with more potent and more sophisticated weapons, including surveillance weapons.

In December, 2017, Amazon boasted that it had perfected new face-recognition software for crowds, which it called Rekognition. It explained that the product is intended, in large part, for use by governments and police forces around the world. The ACLU quickly warned that the product is “dangerous” and that Amazon “is actively helping governments deploy it.”

“Powered by artificial intelligence,” wrote the ACLU, “Rekognition can identify, track, and analyze people in real time and recognize up to 100 people in a single image. It can quickly scan information it collects against databases featuring tens of millions of faces.” The group warned: “Amazon’s Rekognition raises profound civil liberties and civil rights concerns.” In a separate advisory, the ACLU said of this face-recognition software that Amazon’s “marketing materials read like a user manual for the type of authoritarian surveillance you can currently see in China.”

It’s more than a little ridiculous to cry about your privacy being violated when you are literally building the system for permanently eliminating everyone’s privacy.

Twitter is SJW-controlled territory. Gab is a hellhole of defamation and Nazi trolls. So, after many of Infogalactic’s supporters asked us to provide something on the social media front, the InfoGalactic team joined forces with OneWay and created a new social media alternative: SocialGalactic.

We’re presently in Beta. Free accounts have 140-character posts and 1MB storage, which is just enough for an avatar and a header. We’ll soon be making Pro accounts available at three levels, which will provide posts of 200, 480, and 999 characters, and image storage up to 500MB. Sign up and check it out!

For the Burn Unit members who are already on the site, please note that it has been updated to version 1.1.0. Log in and log out to make sure that you’re running the latest version, which includes:

1)  Badges for member levels
2)  Character limits based on member levels
3)  Mobile improvements
4)  Moderator controls
5)  Notifications counters
6)  Position of post you are relying to in modal.
7)  X closes DM modal.
8)  Bio in dark mode
9)  Post counters on home page.
10)  Online user counter on home page.

Please keep in mind that SocialGalactic is NOT a free speech zone. Don’t be vulgar, don’t post nudes or obscene material, and behave in a civil manner. If you want spicy memes and bantz, you’ve already got Gab. Don’t bother asking for more image storage for free accounts, as we’ve identified that as a primary attack vector by trolls and monkey-wrenchers and we’re more likely to reduce the image storage than increase it.

If you are experimenting with (the thing that shall not be named but will be announced Friday), the 1MB limit on image storage is most certainly NOT a bug. Free accounts get 1MB, which is just enough for an avatar and a header, and not very much more.

More importantly, this approach allows us to defang a major attack vector utilized by anonymous trolls, serial harassers, and monkey-wrenchers on social media sites.

One more thing. If you are an Infogalactic supporter – and thank you very much, all of you – you need to email me BOTH your @name and your support level. I may write 900-page epic fantasy novels without an outline, but nevertheless, I am entirely incapable of remembering every single supporter’s precise support level on the basis if their email account. Telling me “my name is X” is great, but it does not tell me whether you are a Bronze, Silver, or Gold supporter.

The support badges and additional text limits are expected to arrive before we announce publicly on Friday.

UPDATE: our payment processor is suddenly taking belated issue with our subscription model because it is technically on a different site, so we have taken down the products from the store while we resolve the matter. If you are already a Burn Unit member, please continue to provide me with your username and support level in order to have your status upgraded.