Do You Use Social Media? Too Bad, You Are Now Evil
September 2, 2016
An ignorant understanding of social media can yield many humorous results; that is, grandparents who do not understand how to use Facebook or Twitter. It can also, however, lead to consequences more dire than the average Facebook user imagined. The International Business Times reports that “Zimbabwean Government Brands Social Media Users As ‘Cyber Terrorists’ And Reiterates Threats” is taking things too far The media is prone to create sensationalism around events that tend to be more mild. In this case, social media activists who take to Facebook, Twitter, and other channels to voice their disproval of the Zimbabwean government are labeled terrorists.
In the United States, we take our right to freedom of speech, for granted and the Zimbabweans are protesting the current government. Zimbabwe cracks down on any civilian demonstrations, but the country is now in the most provocative civilian movement in recent years. The leader of the moment, Pastor Evan Mawarire, has fled for his life and sought asylum in other countries. The Zimbabwe government is calling all Mawarire’s supporters “cyber terrorists”:
“On Tuesday (16 August), information minister Christopher Mushohwe warned that online activities are being monitored and that the government would deal with activists working with ‘Diaspora cyber-terrorists.’ ‘They must be warned that the long arm of the law is encircling them,’ he told press in Harare. ‘There are people who are now in trouble because they thought Mawarire was their leader. Where is Mawarire now?’ the minister said, in reference to #This Flag’s figurehead’s US stay.”
The Zimbabwe government is also saying that the current civil unrest will result in a war similar to what is currently happening in Syria. Social media is simply the tool Zimbabwe activists are using to pressure their government into making changes and to communicate their message.
Anything that be used to spread the activists’ message would be deemed as “terroristic” or “evil” in the eyes of the government because it is undermining their power. Do I hear a comparison of China’s limitation on information as well as North Korea keeping its citizens ignorant? The Zimbabwe protestors are not terrorists and social media is not only a communication hub.
Whitney Grace, September 2,2016
Social Media Snooping Site Emerges for Landlord and Employers
September 2, 2016
The promise of unlocking the insights in big data is one that many search and analytics companies make. CNet shares the scoop on a new company: Disturbing new site scrapes your private Facebook and informs landlords, employers. Their website is Score Assured and it provides a service as an intermediary between your social media accounts and your landlord. Through scanning every word you have typed on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or even Tinder, this service will then filter all the words through a neuro-linguistic programming tool to provide a report on your reputation. We learned,
There’s no reason to believe that Score Assured’s “analysis” will offer in any way an accurate portrayal of who you are or your financial wherewithal. States across the country are already preparing or enacting legislation to ensure that potential employers have no right to ask for your password to Facebook or other social media. In Washington, for example, it’s illegal for an employer to ask for your password. Score Assured offers landlords and employers (the employer service isn’t live yet) the chance to ask for such passwords slightly more indirectly. Psychologically, the company is preying on a weakness humans have been displaying for some time now: the willingness to give up their privacy to get something they think they really want.
Scraping and finding tools are not new, but could this application be any more 2016? The author of this piece is onto the zeitgeist of “I’ve got nothing to hide.” Consequently, data — even social data — becomes a commodity. Users’ willingness to consent is the sociologically interesting piece here. It remains to be seen whether the data mining technology is anything special.
Megan Feil, September 2, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Facebook Ad Targeting Revealed
August 29, 2016
A scoop maybe. Navigate to “98 Personal Data Points That Facebook Uses to Target Ads to You.” The list-tickle becomes news because real newspapers report real news. For the full list, visit the estimable Washington Bezos. Sorry, Washington Post.
Here are some signals I found amusing:
- How much money user is likely to spend on next car. Doesn’t that depend on fashion, the deal, or what my spouse wants to drive?
- Users who have created a Facebook event. I don’t know what a Facebook “event” is.
- Users who investor (divided by investment type). For a real journalism outfit, I am puzzled by the phrase “who investor”.
- Types of clothing user’s household buys. Another grammatical gem.
- Users who are “heavy” buyers of beer, wine or spirits. I assume “heavy” means obese. Perhaps I am incorrect.
- Users who are interested in the Olympics, fall football, cricket or Ramadan. What about other sports like Ramadan?
All in all, a fine list. An ever more better finest scrumptious article from a real journalistic outfit, the Washington Bezos. Darn, there I go again. I mean the Washington Post.
Stephen E Arnold, August 29, 2016
No More Data Mining for Intelligence
August 23, 2016
The U.S. intelligence community will no longer receive information from Dataminr, which serves as a Twitter “fire hose” (Twitter owns five percent of Dataminr). An article, Twitter Turns Off Fire Hose For Intelligence Community from ThreatPost offers the story. A Twitter spokesperson stated they have had a longstanding policy against selling data for surveillance. However, the Journal reported their arrangement was terminated after a CIA test program concluded. The article continues,
Dataminr is the only company allowed to sell data culled from the Twitter fire hose. It mines Tweets and correlates that data with location data and other sources, and fires off alerts to subscribers of breaking news. Reportedly, Dataminr subscribers knew about the recent terror attacks in Brussels and Paris before mainstream media had reported the news. The Journal said its inside the intelligence community said the government isn’t pleased with the decision and hopes to convince Twitter to reconsider.
User data shared on social media has such a myriad of potential applications for business, law enforcement, education, journalism and countless other sectors. This story highlights how applications for journalism may be better received than applications for government intelligence. This is something worth noticing.
Megan Feil, August 23, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
There is a Louisville, Kentucky Hidden /Dark Web meet up on August 23, 2016.
Information is at this link: https://www.meetup.com/Louisville-Hidden-Dark-Web-Meetup/events/233019199/
USAGov Wants More Followers on Snapchat
August 12, 2016
The article on GCN titled Tracking the Ephemeral: USAGov’s Plan for Snapchat portrays the somewhat desperate attempts of the government to reach out to millennials. Perhaps shocking to non-users of the self-immolating picture app, Snapchat claims over a hundred million active users each day, mostly comprised of 13 to 34 year olds. The General Service Administration of USAGov plans to use Snapchat to study the success of their outreach like how many followers they receive and how many views their content gets. The article mentions,
“And while the videos and multimedia that make up “Snapchat stories” disappear after just 24 hours, the USAGov team believes the engagement metrics will provide lasting value. Snapchat lets account owners see how many people are watching each story, if they watch the whole story and when and where they stop before it’s over — allowing USAGov to analyze what kind of content works best.”
If you are wondering how this plan is affected by the Federal Records Acts which stipulates documentation of content, GSA is way ahead of you with a strategy of downloading each story and saving it as a record. All in all the government is coming across as a somewhat clingy boyfriend trying to find out what is up with his ex by using her favorite social media outlet. Not a great look for the US government. But at least they aren’t using ChatRoulette.
Chelsea Kerwin, August 12, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
There is a Louisville, Kentucky Hidden /Dark Web meet up on August 23, 2016.
Information is at this link: https://www.meetup.com/Louisville-Hidden-Dark-Web-Meetup/events/233019199/
These Emojis Are Logical
August 9, 2016
Emojis are a secondary language for many people, especially the younger sect, and whole messages can be conveyed within a few images. Someone needs to write an algorithm to translate emoji only messages, but machine learning has not yet reached the point where it can understand all the intricacies associated with emojis. Or has it? TechCrunch shares that “Dango Mind-Melds With Emoji Using Deeping Learning And Suggests Them While They Type.”
Dango is an emoji suggestion chatbot. Unlike the Microsoft chatbot that became anti-Semitic and misogynist in a matter of hour, Dango just wants to give you emoji suggestions to pep up your messages:
“Okay, so Dango is one of those virtual assistants that lives in your chat apps, and this one is based on a neural network that has been trained with millions of examples to understand what emoji mean. So not only can it suggest an appropriate one, but it can translate entire sentences. Its icon is a weird piece of cute cake, which sits above your keyboard watching you type. It’s free for Android right now, with an iOS version coming out eventually.”
Aww, it’s a little cake icon that sits above your keyboard. Is it not tempting already to download it make Dango your friend? The cute factor comes after the deep machine learning took place.
The Dango programmers used a recurrent neural network to teach Dango how to decipher the meaning of emoji. It would guess, then check against real world examples, then adjust its parameters when it was wrong. The guesses were assembled in a “semantic space” that relates the emojis to concepts (check the article for the visualization).
Dango is constantly updating itself to be on top of the latest slang and memes, including the negative aspects of the language. Dango is still learning, especially when it comes to translating entire sentences to pictures. Before you say that the written language cannot be replicated in little images, it was done eons ago by Egyptians, Sumerians, Phoenicians, and still by the Chinese, Japanese, and other Asian cultures.
Whitney Grace, August 9, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
There is a Louisville, Kentucky Hidden /Dark Web meet up on August 23, 2016.
Information is at this link: https://www.meetup.com/Louisville-Hidden-Dark-Web-Meetup/events/233019199/
Jurors for Google v. Oracle Case Exposed to Major Privacy Violation Potential
August 1, 2016
The article titled Judge Doesn’t Want Google to Google the Favorite Books and Songs of Potential Jurors on Billboard provides some context into the difficulties of putting Google on trial. Oracle is currently suing Google for copyright violations involving a Java API code. The federal judge presiding over the case, William Alsup, is trying to figure out how to protect the privacy of the jurors from both parties—but mostly Google. The article quotes from Alsup,
“For example, if a search found that a juror’s favorite book is To Kill A Mockingbird, it wouldn’t be hard for counsel to construct a copyright jury argument (or a line of expert questions) based on an analogy to that work and to play upon the recent death of Harper Lee, all in an effort to ingratiate himself or herself into the heartstrings of that juror,” he writes. ” The same could be done… with any number of other juror attitudes…”
Alsup considered a straightforward ban on researching jurors, but this would put both sides’ attorneys at a disadvantage. Instead, Google and Oracle have until the end of the month to either consent to a voluntary ban, or agree to clearly inform the jurors of their intentions regarding social media research.
Chelsea Kerwin, August 1, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Facebook Acknowledges Major Dependence on Artificial Intelligence
July 28, 2016
The article on Mashable titled Facebook’s AI Chief: ‘Facebook Today Could Not Exist Without AI’ relates the current conversations involving Facebook and AI. Joaquin Candela, the director of applied machine learning at Facebook, states that “Facebook could not exist without AI.” He uses the examples of the News Feed, ads, and offensive content, all of which involve AI stimulating a vastly more engaging and personalized experience. He explains,
“If you were just a random number and we changed that random number every five seconds and that’s all we know about you then none of the experiences that you have online today — and I’m not only talking about Facebook — would be really useful to you. You’d hate it. I would hate it. So there is value of course in being able to personalize experiences and make the access of information more efficient to you.”
And we thought all Facebook required is humans and ad revenue. Candela makes it very clear that Facebook is driven by machine learning and personalization. He paints a very bleak picture of what Facebook would look like without AI- completely random ads, unranked New Feeds, and offensive content splashing around like beached whale. Only in the last few years, computer vision has changed Facebook’s process of removing such content. What used to take reports and human raters now is automated.
Chelsea Kerwin, July 28, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Publishers and Facebook: Any Bets on Which Will Win?
July 9, 2016
I read another of those digitally informed grousing write ups from the London Guardian newspaper. This essay, which is not what I would call news from my vantage point in Harrod’s Creek, is titled “Few News Providers Will Now Be Liking Facebook.” I thought the title I thought up was more accurate; to wit: Few print centric news providers will be liking Facebook. But, hey, I live in rural Kentucky where print means the replacement for cursive. I noted this passage:
In her recent Humanitas lecture at Cambridge, for example, Columbia University’s Emily Bell pointed out that, for the first time in history, major news organizations had lost control of how their content was distributed. And George Brock, of City University, spotted that in becoming a major distributor of journalistic content, Facebook was implicitly acquiring editorial responsibilities, responsibilities that it neither acknowledged nor welcomed. But to desperate editors, faced with declining circulations and ad revenues, these seemed like theoretical considerations: however much they might dislike or fear Facebook, they had to deal with it because it was where their audiences were increasingly to be found.
Okay, Facebook with its billion plus users is more powerful than real “journalism” outfits. I would wager that Facebook is not likely to toss out its publishing system and embrace MarkLogic type technology either. How is that slicing and dicing working out?
I highlight in red ink red these sentences as well:
Social media are powerful engines for creating digital echo chambers, which is one reason why our politics is becoming so partisan. Brexiters speak only unto Brexiters. And Remainers ditto… We all inhabit echo chambers now and all Facebook has done is to increase the level of insulation on those inhabited by its users.
I think the Guardian missed the TED talk about “filter bubbles” and discovered the notion of an echo chamber itself.
My thought is that the flow of online data has washed away the foundations of the traditional approach to print on paper publishing. The white shoes are wet and muddy. The arbiters of taste and thought now have to recognize Facebook as the big dog.
Since the digital revolution is decades old now, I am delighted that real journalists are realizing that the clay tablets of ore are losing favor among some folks. You know. The young folks who do the mobile phone thing for affection, acceptance, and news.
Stephen E Arnold, July 9, 2016
Google Plus Now Five Years Old
July 4, 2016
I must admit I forget about Google Plus or Google+. Try searching for Google Plus with the “+” on your keyboard. How did that work out for you? Once the “+” allowed me to bind two words together like “white+house.” Well, forget that, gentle reader. You can depend on the Alphabet Google thing to handle bound phrases automatically with super smart software. Yep, works almost every time, doesn’t it?
I read a memory jogger titled “Google+ Social Network Turns 5 Years Old, Wants a Pony and a Plastic Rocket for Its Birthday.” According to the write up, the Alphabet Google thing no longer wants money. The corporate confection needs a Equus ferus caballus and a device which could be confiscated when going through airport security. Quite a surprise for me because I thought the Alphabet Google wanted money.
I learned:
Where Google+ goes from here isn’t entirely clear. Google seems content to keep it running for the time being, using it as a vector to gain new users on Google Photos and other related tools. While it’s nowhere near the juggernaut of Facebook and Reddit seems to be quickly swallowing up the niche community space, there are still a plenty of good conversations to be had in a Google+ feed.
The write up mentions the remarkable Google Wave service. There is not a hint of Google’s other social efforts. No Buzz. No Orkut. No Friend Connect.
Let’s see. Facebook is a big winner in the social space. LinkedIn is now a Microsoft Clippy for corporate social interactions. And Google+ or Google Plus? Yep, good conversations. I find conversations an overused word. Is Google+ or Google Plus overused? What happened to having bonuses for Gogglers linked to social media? Why aren’t Google’s services united with a single Google+ or Google Plus mandate? Oh, right. I forgot about user behavior.
I will try to remember Google+ or is it Google Plus. I thought Sillycon Valley outfits wanted unicorns and real Musk- and Bezos-type rockets. Oh, well.
Stephen E Arnold, July 4, 2016
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