Tag: technology

Even the EU Parliament is skeptical of Zuckerberg’s Monster:

Zuckerberg responded after the questioning, addressing the issue of political bias.

“We are committed to being a platform for all ideas,” he declared. “It’s very important to me that we’re a service that allows a wide variety of political discourse.”

“We have never and will not make decisions about what content is allowed or how we do ranking on the basis of a political orientation,” Zuckerberg said.

“We’ve made a number of changes this year to make sure we’re showing people’s friends and family and community content,” he said, citing the “well-being” research the company has done to make sure that the technology is helping people. All the research, he said, shows that connecting with people you care about is “good for your well-being.” He explained that news “isn’t correlated with those same benefits.”

He reiterated that Facebook is “not targeting any specific political ideology.”

I’m dubious that such shameless lying is going to help his cause much.

Twitter has taken the Twitter Jail concept one step further:

Are you the sort of person who annoys, frustrates, and offends lots of people on Twitter—but manages to avoid technically violating any of its policies on abuse or hate speech? Then Twitter’s newest feature is for you. Or, rather, it’s for everyone else but you.

Twitter is announcing on Tuesday that it will begin hiding tweets from certain accounts in conversations and search results. To see them, you’ll have to scroll to the bottom of the conversation and click “Show more replies,” or go into your search settings and choose “See everything.” Think of them as Twitter’s equivalent of the Yelp reviews that are “not currently recommended” or the Reddit comments that have a “comment score below threshold.”

But there’s one difference: When Twitter’s software decides that a certain user is “detract[ing] from the conversation,” all of that user’s tweets will be hidden from search results and public conversations until their reputation improves. And they won’t know that they’re being muted in this way; Twitter says it’s still working on ways to notify people and help them get back into its good graces. In the meantime, their tweets will still be visible to their followers as usual and will still be able to be retweeted by others. They just won’t show up in conversational threads or search results by default.

I’d pretend that I care, but they suspended me for good back in November. Of course, it’s just a matter of time for most of the rest of you. In the meantime, give Idka a try; many of the Daily Meme Wars memes are posted there on a regular basis.

It will probably not surprise anyone who has read SJWAL or SJWADD to learn that Codes of Conduct chase off the evil male programmers who built the project.

Rafael Avila de Espindola is the fifth most active contributor to LLVM with more than 4,300 commits since 2006, but now he has decided to part ways with the project. Rafael posted a rather lengthy mailing list message to fellow LLVM developers today entitled I am leaving llvm.

He says the reason for abandoning LLVM development after 12 years is due to changes in the community. In particular, the “social injustice” brought on the organization’s new LLVM Code of Conduct and its decision to participate in this year’s Outreachy program to encourage women and other minority groups to get involved with free software development.

The reason for me leaving are the changes in the community. The current license change discussions unfortunately bring to memory the fsf politics when I was working on gcc. That would still not be sufficient reason to leave. As with the code, llvm will still have the best license and if the only community change was the handling of the license change I would probably keep going.

The community change I cannot take is how the social injustice movement has permeated it. When I joined llvm no one asked or cared about my religion or political view. We all seemed committed to just writing a good compiler framework.

Espindola was one of the most prolific LLVM contributors.

What a lot of people still don’t understand is that the Code of Conduct is working as designed when it chases off the productive members of the project.

If I was not married, Mark Zuckerberg is literally the last person on Earth I would want knowing about my dating habits:

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave the keynote address at the F8 developer conference in San Jose on Tuesday, introducing, among other innovations, the company’s new dating features.

“We are announcing a new set of features coming soon around dating,” Zuckerberg told conference attendees, lamenting that his company has been late to the dating game.

“This is going to be for building real, long-term relationships, not just hookups,” he declared.

Zuckerberg didn’t explain how he plans to prevent “hookups,” but he did say that the dating service will be “opt-in” and “if you want you can make a dating profile. We have designed this with privacy and safety in mind from the beginning,” he assured conference attendees. “We’re excited to start rolling this out soon.” He assured users that no one will see their information without express permission. Instead, he said, Facebook will suggest possible dating prospects.

I’m too old and too-long married to have any experience with online dating of any kind, but I do know that the more sensitive the data is, the less I am interested in making it available to Facebook. It wouldn’t surprise me if he was already selling the information on status updates to divorce lawyers and the IRS.

Meanwhile, Facebook is also implementing a system to better suppress the public’s access to the news it does not want them to see.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Tuesday that the company has already begun to implement a system that ranks news organizations based on trustworthiness, and promotes or suppresses its content based on that metric.

Zuckerberg said the company has gathered data on how consumers perceive news brands by asking them to identify whether they have heard of various publications and if they trust them.

“We put [that data] into the system, and it is acting as a boost or a suppression, and we’re going to dial up the intensity of that over time,” he said. “We feel like we have a responsibility to further [break] down polarization and find common ground.”

This is a really good interview with Jaron Lanier which hits on three important concepts:

This dovetails with something you’ve said in the past that’s with me, which is your phrase Digital Maoism. Do you think that the Digital Maoism that you described years ago — are those the people who run Silicon Valley today?

I was talking about a few different things at the time I wrote “Digital Maoism.” One of them was the way that we were centralizing culture, even though the rhetoric was that we were distributing it. Before Wikipedia, I think it would have been viewed as being this horrible thing to say that there could only be one encyclopedia, and that there would be one dominant entry for a given topic. Instead, there were different encyclopedias. There would be variations not so much in what facts were presented, but in the way they were presented. That voice was a real thing.

And then we moved to this idea that we have a single dominant encyclopedia that was supposed to be the truth for the global AI or something like that. But there’s something deeply pernicious about that. So we’re saying anybody can write for Wikipedia, so it’s, like, purely democratic and it’s this wonderful open thing, and yet the bizarreness is that that open democratic process is on the surface of something that struck me as being Maoist, which is that there’s this one point of view that’s then gonna be the official one.

And then I also noticed that that process of people being put into a global system in which they’re supposed to work together toward some sort of dominating megabrain that’s the one truth didn’t seem to bring out the best in people, that people turned aggressive and mean-spirited when they interacted in that context. I had worked on some content for Britannica years and years ago, and I never experienced the kind of just petty meanness that’s just commonplace in everything about the internet. Among many other places, on Wikipedia.

On the one hand, you have this very open collective process actually in the service of this very domineering global brain, destroyer of local interpretation, destroyer of individual voice process. And then you also have this thing that seems to bring out this meanness in people, where people get into this kind of mob mentality and they become unkind to each other. And those two things have happened all over the internet; they’re both very present in Facebook, everywhere. And it’s a bit of a subtle debate, and it takes a while to work through it with somebody who doesn’t see what I’m talking about. That was what I was talking about.

But then there’s this other thing about the centralization of economic power. What happened with Maoists and with communists in general, and neo-Marxists and all kinds of similar movements, is that on the surface, you say everybody shares, everybody’s equal, we’re not gonna have this capitalist concentration. But then there’s some other entity that might not look like traditional capitalism, but is effectively some kind of robber baron that actually owns everything, some kind of Communist Party actually controls everything, and you have just a very small number of individuals who become hyperempowered and everybody else loses power.

And exactly the same thing has happened with the supposed openness of the internet, where you say, “Isn’t it wonderful, with Facebook and Twitter anybody can express themselves. Everybody’s an equal, everybody’s empowered.” But in fact, we’re in a period of time of extreme concentration of wealth and power, and it’s precisely around those who run the biggest computers. So the truth and the effect is just the opposite of what the rhetoric is and the immediate experience.

A lot of people were furious with me over Digital Maoism and felt that I had betrayed our cause or something, and I lost some friends over it. And some of it was actually hard. But I fail to see how it was anything but accurate.

This guy is sharing some important insights into the intrinsic danger of centralization, even when it is unintentional and inadvertent. It also underlines the importance of the Infogalactic approach, which rejects the concept of the One True Page that defines objective reality for everyone on the basis of the opinions of the information gatekeepers.

Russia now has the ability to drown the US coasts:

Russia’s new nuclear drone submarine could be capable of causing 300ft-high tsunamis, able to wipe out coastal cities, experts say. The existence of the drone, believed to be the Status-6 system – also known as ‘Putin’s doomsday machine’ – was confirmed by the Russian President himself in his annual state-of-the-nation speech in Moscow last month.

Experts say a 50 megaton underwater nuclear bomb would be able to create tsunami waves reaching more than 320ft – the ‘Status-6’ is allegedly able to carry a 100 megaton warhead.

Perhaps the neocons should stop trying to throw the US weight around and interfering in the affairs of sovereign nations. On the plus side, the prospect of having both coasts submerged underwater is considerably better than thermonuclear war. Indeed, one could quite credibly argue that the American nation would be better off without either of them.

I have to admit, I find it more than a little amusing when another right-wing figure gets banned by Twitter and acts genuinely surprised about it.

Conservative street artist Sabo has been permanently suspended from Twitter. Sabo, who ran the @UnsavoryAgents account, was banned from the platform on Friday.

“Was not told why or for how long. I just saw I no longer have my 32,000 followers and I’m no longer following anybody,” claimed Sabo in an email to Breitbart Tech. “They want nothing less than to completely destroy us on the Right.”

Really. You don’t say…. It’s always fascinating how so few on the Right believe there is a problem or is willing to actually lift a finger to do anything about it until they are personally affected.

I figured it was only a matter of time before Spacebunny got kicked off of Twitter too. She’s currently in Twitter Jail for a week.

Your account has been locked for violating the Twitter Rules. Specifically for:

Violating our rules against hateful conduct. You may not promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.

Spacebunny Day @Spacebunnyday
Not only are they muslims, dear, but they are better muslims than you clearly are. They take your holy book seriously. […]

Violating our rules against hateful conduct. You may not promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.

Spacebunny Day@Spacebunnyday
Making people feel bad is worse than beheading them, blowing them up and throwing acid in their faces…. […]

Violating our rules against hateful conduct. You may not promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.

Spacebunny Day@Spacebunnyday
Not a factual rebuttal, dear. But it’s refreshing you don’t deny that Muslims behead, throw acid, blow people up and run them down on a regular basis! […]

Violating our rules against hateful conduct. You may not promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.

Spacebunny Day@Spacebunnyday
It’s not false, dear. Jihadi muslims are following the Koran. They are literally doing what they’re told to do by their god. Christians sinning are going against God. […]

Violating our rules against hateful conduct. You may not promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.

Spacebunny Day@Spacebunnyday
#LoveAMuslim even as they behead you, throw acid in your face, bomb you and run you down with a truck…..

Violating our rules against hateful conduct. You may not promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.

Spacebunny Day@Spacebunnyday
In Muslim countries it’s Punish A Christian day, every day. More Christians die at the hands of Muslims simply for being Christian than the reverse.

I am proud of my wife for refusing to respect Jack and the social mores enforced by his little Safety Council. What is better than a hot blonde hater? Hate is human, and hatred is a human right. God hates deceit, God hates the wicked, and so should we.

They might as well go ahead and shut Facebook down now, given the latest revelations and those that are still to come. The number of laws that Zuckerberg’s company has broken must be in the triple digits by now:

Facebook’s problems just keep accumulating, drip by drip—or more like splash by splash. It’s now been discovered that Facebook not only collects and uses the personal data of its members but also collects the data of those who never signed up for Facebook.

So if you’re one of those who blames Facebook users for allowing their personal data to be compromised, don’t be so smug. Facebook may be sharing your personal data as well.

Daniel Kahn Gillmor, senior staff technologist at the ACLU, discovered that, although he never joined Facebook or any other social network, Facebook has a detailed profile on him.

Facebook obtains information from those not on Facebook in two different ways: from other Facebook users and by tracking people who visit other other sites on the web.

I can’t believe Trump hasn’t taken this opportunity to booster his popularity by coming out hard against Big Social yet. He must be occupied with something even more important….