A Vast Web of Vengeance
Outrageous lies destroyed Guy Babcock’s online reputation. When he went hunting for their source, what he discovered was worse than he could have imagined.
On Thursday morning Facebook began preventing Australian news sites from posting, while also stopping Australian users from sharing or viewing content from any news outlets, both Australian and international.
The social media giant said it made the decision in response to the news media bargaining code currently before the Senate, which would force Facebook and Google to negotiate with news companies for payment for content.
While the ban was only meant to target Australian news publishers, dozens of pages run by key government agencies, community pages, union pages, charity organisations and politicians were also blocked for several hours.
Australia’s main source of weather information, the Bureau of Meteorology, said on Thursday morning that it had been blocked, and was advising users to go to its direct website, app or Twitter page.
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Twitter said on Tuesday it had taken down 373 accounts which it said had ties to Russia, Armenia and Iran and had breached its platform manipulation policies.
The company said it had taken down 238 accounts operating from Iran for various violations of its policies.
Twitter said 100 accounts with Russian ties were removed for amplifying narratives that undermined faith in NATO and targeted the United States and the European Union.
Russia’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that Moscow planned to look into the grounds for Twitter blocking the accounts, TASS news agency reported.
Twitter also said 35 accounts with ties to Armenia were taken down, adding that they had been created to target Azerbaijan.
“The 373 associated accounts across the four networks were permanently suspended from Twitter for violations of our platform manipulation policies,” the company said in a blog post.
faith in NATO
Osnivač Twittera Jack Dorsey odlučio je prodati svoj prvi tweet. Tweet k'o tweet, sadrži kratku poruku pisanu samo kurentom bez interpunkcije „just setting up my twttr“. Već je ponuđeno 2,5 milijuna za vlasništvo nad njim
Ono što je nekima u okviru demonstracije bogatstva, sklonosti i prestiža nekad bilo imati na zidu spomenute Picassa i da Vincija, u novije vrijeme posjedovati Hendrixovu gitaru ili Jordanove tenisice, to je sutra nekome imati certifikat o vlasništvu važne digitalne poruke.
Netko sanja da posjeduje “Posljednju večeru”, a netko da ima “Prvi tweet”. Ima neke čudne, „futurističke“ logike u tome.
On the business model of Facebook: "It's like if you were in a bar and there was a guy in the corner that was constantly egging people onto getting into fights, and he got paid whenever somebody got into a fight? That's the business model here." https://t.co/DfAELZUpkr
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 27, 2021
The Internet Is Rotting
Too much has been lost already. The glue that holds humanity’s knowledge together is coming undone.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/06/the-internet-is-a-collective-hallucination/619320/
It’s not trivial to censor a network as organic and decentralized as the internet. But more recently, these features have been understood to facilitate vectors for individual harassment and societal destabilization, with no easy gating points through which to remove or label malicious work not under the umbrellas of the major social-media platforms, or to quickly identify their sources. While both assessments have power to them, they each gloss over a key feature of the distributed web and internet: Their designs naturally create gaps of responsibility for maintaining valuable content that others rely on. Links work seamlessly until they don’t. And as tangible counterparts to online work fade, these gaps represent actual holes in humanity’s knowledge.
The first study, with Kendra Albert and Larry Lessig, focused on documents meant to endure indefinitely: links within scholarly papers, as found in the Harvard Law Review, and judicial opinions of the Supreme Court. We found that 50 percent of the links embedded in Court opinions since 1996, when the first hyperlink was used, no longer worked. And 75 percent of the links in the Harvard Law Review no longer worked.
People tend to overlook the decay of the modern web, when in fact these numbers are extraordinary—they represent a comprehensive breakdown in the chain of custody for facts. Libraries exist, and they still have books in them, but they aren’t stewarding a huge percentage of the information that people are linking to, including within formal, legal documents. No one is. The flexibility of the web—the very feature that makes it work, that had it eclipse CompuServe and other centrally organized networks—diffuses responsibility for this core societal function.
So far, the rise of the web has led to routinely cited sources of information that aren’t part of more formal systems; blog entries or casually placed working papers at some particular web address have no counterparts in the pre-internet era. But surely anything truly worth keeping for the ages would still be published as a book or an article in a scholarly journal, making it accessible to today’s libraries, and preservable in the same way as before? Alas, no.
Because information is so readily placed online, the incentives for creating paper counterparts, and storing them in the traditional ways, declined slowly at first and have since plummeted. Paper copies were once considered originals, with any digital complement being seen as a bonus. But now, both publisher and consumer—and libraries that act in the long term on behalf of their consumer patrons—see digital as the primary vehicle for access, and paper copies are deprecated.
The project of preserving and building on our intellectual track, including all its meanderings and false starts, is thus falling victim to the catastrophic success of the digital revolution that should have bolstered it. Tools that could have made humanity’s knowledge production available to all instead have, for completely understandable reasons, militated toward an ever-changing “now,” where there’s no easy way to cite many sources for posterity, and those that are citable are all too mutable.
Society can’t understand itself if it can’t be honest with itself, and it can’t be honest with itself if it can only live in the present moment. It’s long overdue to affirm and enact the policies and technologies that will let us see where we’ve been, including and especially where we’ve erred, so we might have a coherent sense of where we are and where we want to go.
You may not know the term “generative adversarial network” yet, but you can see it in action on a website that uses artificial intelligence to generate spookily realistic images of people who don’t exist. The site is aptly named: https://t.co/wprND9rAdW. https://t.co/bnwW8GlMoF pic.twitter.com/nTZbG2J8XL
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) October 10, 2021
RT (with permission):
— fasterthanlime (@fasterthanlime) October 23, 2021
"Ok so, I just read through all 173 pages of the unredacted Google antitrust filing and I have to say that either Google is screwed or society is screwed, we'll find out which.
Unordered list of fun things I learned:"
"- Google had a plan called "Project NERA" to turn the web into a walled garden they called "Not Owned But Operated". A core component of this was the forced logins to the chrome browser you've probably experienced (surprise!)"
— fasterthanlime (@fasterthanlime) October 23, 2021
"- The exchanges are also rigged so that google wins on bids where they aren't the highest bidder.
— fasterthanlime (@fasterthanlime) October 23, 2021
- A large amount of people inside google are aware of all of this
- If Google ever tells you some change will increase your ad yield, run. In fact anything they tell you is a lie"
You can read the full unredacted document for yourself here: https://t.co/aismwE2rkI
— fasterthanlime (@fasterthanlime) October 23, 2021
More highlights re AMP performance claims: pic.twitter.com/c8544t8DcR
— fasterthanlime (@fasterthanlime) October 24, 2021
Google manipulating bids behind advertisers' backs: pic.twitter.com/lWe9bWMzZa
— fasterthanlime (@fasterthanlime) October 24, 2021
Another thread about the recent Google court documents https://t.co/narfIxISKH
— fasterthanlime (@fasterthanlime) October 24, 2021
I think it’s pretty important here to spell out that these are allegations made in a lawsuit (as opposed to eg a whistleblower complaint). That’s not to say some or all of it ends up being true, but a complaint is not something anyone should take for its full truth.
— HBIC, ESQ (@HBIC__esq) October 24, 2021