Inside Google’s Effort to Develop a Censored Search Engine in China
Posted: August 10, 2018 Filed under: Censorship, China | Tags: Beijing Guxiang Information and Technology Co., Cai Wensheng, Google, Great Firewall, Search Engine, YouTube Leave a comment
The company sampled searches from a Beijing-based website to hone its blacklists.
Engineers working on the censorship sampled search queries from 265.com, a Chinese-language web directory service owned by Google.
Unlike Google.com and other Google services, such as YouTube, 265.com is not blocked in China by the country’s so-called Great Firewall, which restricts access to websites deemed undesirable by the ruling Communist Party regime.
265.com was founded in 2003 by Cai Wensheng, a Chinese entrepreneur known as the “the godfather of Chinese webmasters.” In 2008, Google acquired the website, which it now operates as a subsidiary. Records show that 265.com is hosted on Google servers, but its physical address is listed under the name of the “Beijing Guxiang Information and Technology Co.,” which is based out of an office building in northwest Beijing’s Haidian district.
265.com provides news updates, links to information about financial markets, and advertisements for cheap flights and hotels. It also has a function that allows people to search for websites, images, videos, and other content. However, search queries entered on 265.com are redirected to Baidu, the most popular search engine in China and Google’s main competitor in the country.
[Read the full story here, at theintercept.com]
It appears that Google has used 265.com as a de facto honeypot for market research, storing information about Chinese users’ searches before sending them along to Baidu. Google’s use of 265.com offers an insight into the mechanics behind its planned Chinese censored search platform, code-named Dragonfly, which the company has been preparing since spring 2017.
After gathering sample queries from 265.com, Google engineers used them to review lists of websites that people would see in response to their searches. The Dragonfly developers used a tool they called “BeaconTower” to check whether the websites were blocked by the Great Firewall. They compiled a list of thousands of websites that were banned, and then integrated this information into a censored version of Google’s search engine so that it would automatically manipulate Google results, purging links to websites prohibited in China from the first page shown to users. Read the rest of this entry »
The Dirty War Over Diversity Inside Google
Posted: January 29, 2018 Filed under: Business, Censorship, Health and Social Issues, Law & Justice | Tags: Activism, Authoritarianism, Cultural Marxism, Diversity, Doxing, Gender, Google, Harrassment, Human resources, James Damore, Progressivism, race, Silicon Valley, Workplace culture Leave a comment
Advocates of greater diversity at Google say they are being harassed and targeted on right-wing websites.
Nitasha Tiku reports: Fired Google engineer James Damore says he was vilified and harassed for questioning what he calls the company’s liberal political orthodoxy, particularly around the merits of diversity.
Now outspoken diversity advocates at Google say that they are being targeted by a small group of their coworkers in an effort to silence discussions about racial and gender diversity.
In interviews with WIRED, 15 current Google employees accuse coworkers of inciting outsiders to harass rank-and-file employees who are minority advocates, including queer and transgender employees. Since August, screenshots from Google’s internal discussion forums, including personal information, have been displayed on sites including Breitbart and Vox Popoli, a blog run by alt-right author Theodore Beale, who goes by the name Vox Day. Other screenshots were included in a 161-page lawsuit that Damore filed in January, alleging that Google discriminates against whites, males, and conservatives.
What followed, the employees say, was a wave of harassment. On forums like 4chan, members linked advocates’ names with their social-media accounts. At least three employees had their phone numbers, addresses, and deadnames (a transgender person’s name prior to transitioning) exposed. Google site reliability engineer Liz Fong-Jones, a trans woman, says she was the target of harassment, including violent threats and degrading slurs based on gender identity, race, and sexual orientation. More than a dozen pages of personal information about another employee were posted to Kiwi Farms, which New York has called “the web’s biggest community of stalkers.”
Meanwhile, inside Google, the diversity advocates say some employees have “weaponized human resources” by goading them into inflammatory statements, which are then captured and reported to HR for violating Google’s mores around civility or for offending white men.
Engineer Colin McMillen says the tactics have unnerved diversity advocates and chilled internal discussion. “Now it’s like basically anything you say about yourself may end up getting leaked to score political points in a lawsuit,” he says. “I have to be very careful about choosing my words because of the low-grade threat of doxing. But let’s face it, I’m not visibly queer or trans or non-white and a lot of these people are keying off their own white supremacy.”
Targeted employees say they have complained to Google executives about the harassment. They say Google’s security team is vigilant about physical threats and that Danielle Brown, Google’s chief diversity and inclusion officer, who has also been targeted by harassers, has been supportive and reassuring. But, they say they have not been told the outcome of complaints they filed against coworkers they believe are harassing them, and that top executives have not responded assertively to concerns about harassment and doxing. As a result, some employees now check hate sites for attempts at doxing Google employees, which they then report to Google security.
Google declined to respond to questions due to ongoing litigation, but a Google spokesperson said the company has met with every employee who expressed concern.
The complaints underscore how Google’s freewheeling workplace culture, where employees are encouraged to “bring your whole self to work” and exchange views on internal discussion boards, has turned as polarized and toxic as the national political debate. Read the rest of this entry »
‘There Are More Than Two Genders,’ Tortured Employee Forced To Say In Darkened Room At Google Headquarters
Posted: January 11, 2018 Filed under: Censorship, Crime & Corruption, Entertainment, Humor | Tags: comedy, Forced Speech, Freedom of speech, Gender, Google, Left Wing Propaganda, Parody, Political Correctness, satire, Sexuality, Social justice, Torture Leave a comment
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA—In a darkened room labeled “101” deep within Google’s Mountain View headquarters, an outed conservative employee was forced to say there are more than two genders after a long period of torture.
The man was tortured for hours, arguing the objective reality of two genders, being told he was “mentally deranged” and suffering from “a defective worldview” before finally giving in.
“Do you remember writing in an email that there are only two genders?” he was asked while strapped to a table. “What if Google says there are three?”
“How can I help it? How can I help but see what is in front of my eyes? Two genders are two genders!” the man cried through tears as his torturer, a Google project lead, held up a picture of a man and a woman, according to surveillance footage.
“Sometimes. Sometimes there are two. Sometimes there are three. Sometimes there are any number of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane,” the project lead replied coldly before administering another round of electric shocks into the man’s brains. Read the rest of this entry »
[VIDEO] Compilation of Liberal Media Freaking Out About Google Memo
Posted: August 8, 2017 Filed under: Entertainment, Humor, Mediasphere, Politics | Tags: ABC, broadcast news, CBS, CNN, Global Panic, Google, Google Memo, Groupthink, Liberal Media, media, MSNBC, news, Progressive, video Leave a comment
What’s Killing Journalism?
Posted: August 6, 2017 Filed under: Censorship, Education, Mediasphere, Think Tank | Tags: Ajit Varadaraj Pai, Facebook, Federal Communications Commission, Google, Internet, Internet access, Internet of Things, Internet service provider, journalism, media, YouTube Leave a comment
The state of the Fourth Estate—and who can save it.
Brittany Karford Rogers writes: If hashtags had been a thing, these would have been some #FakeNews whoppers.
The 32 BC Mark Antony takedown: it began with a fake-news campaign masterminded by Octavian, complete with Tweet-like proclamations on ancient coins.
The Simon of Trent humdinger: in 1475 a prince-bishop in Italy set off a story that local Jews murdered missing 2-year-old Simon—and used his blood for rituals. Fifteen Jews burned at the stake.
The Benjamin Franklin special edition: he concocted an entire 1782 newspaper, peddling a fake story about Native Americans scalping 700 men, women, children, and infants.
In short, fake news is old news.
For all the handwringing over fake news today, BYU journalism professor Joel J. Campbell’s (BA ’87) response is more “meh.” It’s another punch for a profession that’s been in the ring for the better part of a decade. Trust in news media is at an all-time low. Revenue models are upended. Reporters are exhausted. Readers are fragmented. And that’s just a short list of jabs.
Looming larger in Campbell’s eyes are analytics-driven newsrooms and disenfranchised readers, who, flooded with content, are living in information silos or, worse, opting out altogether.
So how does one make sense of the crowded, increasingly polarized news landscape? And what’s left of journalism as we knew it?
[Read the full text here, at BYU Magazine]
BYU faculty and alumni practitioners—their collective résumés spanning Fox News, C-SPAN, CNN, the Atlantic, and more—have some ideas.
Before you throw your hands up, consider the forces at play, take heart in journalists’ earnest self-searching, and look in the mirror—because the finger pointing goes all the way around.
It’s worth asking, “Is journalism still doing its job?” But as our panel of experts chimes, there’s an equally important question: “Do the citizens of this country have the will to save it?”
A Happy Accident
Journalism has a lofty goal—one epitomized by the career of R. John Hughes.
The emeritus BYU professor won the Pulitzer Prize in 1967 for his coverage of an attempted communist coup and its bloody aftermath in Indonesia. Over his career as a writer for and then editor of the Christian Science Monitor, he covered revolutions and interviewed world leaders.
“Journalism was almost like a religion to me, to get the story, and get it right, to help evince change,” Hughes says. “It’s a kind of love affair for most journalists, shining light in dark corners.”
Journalists call themselves the watchdogs, the truth seekers. The press is dubbed the Fourth Estate after all, the final check on all three branches of government. Democracy requires informed citizens; the press make up the informants. “Democracy Dies in Darkness” goes the new Washington Post tagline.
That’s the why of modern journalism.
The how—being objective, non-partisan—“is rather a new phenomenon in the history of news,” says Campbell.
It has always depended on who’s paying.
Wealthy traders and merchants underwrote the first news in the Americas, and it was all route intel. In the colonial period political parties footed the bill for most papers—party organs that were far more partisan and acrimonious than what we cry foul at today. It wasn’t until the penny-press era—the 1830s on—that a new funding model developed: scale up the circulation, then sell readers’ attention to advertisers. That advertising revenue could bring the cost of the paper down to something many could afford.
Writing to a mass audience, publishers began to recognize there was a market for real, honest news that could cross political divides and speak with a relatively neutral voice. This paved the way for professional journalism standards. And for most of the 20th century, it made newsrooms the information power brokers.
Then the internet smashed the model.
“For the last decade, we have seen a steady erosion of the advertising economy for newspapers,” says Campbell. That’s the nice way of saying it. Revenue streams have been gutted.
Department stores and auto malls, the go-to advertisers, cut back on ads, facing their own disruptions: e-commerce competition and recession. Craigslist happened to the classifieds. And reader eyeballs, once concentrated among a few media outlets, are now diverted to Facebook, YouTube, and that thing you just Googled—and the bulk of advertising has followed them.
[Read the full story here, at BYU Magazine]
As they say in the industry, the digital transition traded print dollars for digital dimes and, in turn, digital dimes for mobile pennies.
One thing is certain: it’s a fascinating time to study the news. Alum Seth C. Lewis (BA ’02) holds the Shirley Papé Chair in Emerging Media at the University of Oregon and is a leading scholar on the digital transformation of journalism.
“We’ve gone from media monopoly to media disruption and ubiquity,” says Lewis. And in ubiquity, no one gets a sizable piece of the economic pie.
Lewis suggests that maybe the last century of advertising-based news subsidy—which fostered these objective, non-partisan notions—“was just a happy accident. Maybe instead we’re returning to other forms of funding and thinking about the news.”
Illustration by Dan Page
Casualties of the Internet
The internet is not the first technology to shake up the news industry. It happened after radio. It happened after TV.
This shakeup, however, may have taken more casualties.
News staffs have been decimated. The journalists who still have jobs are stretched thin—while the internet demands more of them than ever. Read the rest of this entry »
Czech Republic Plans To Combat Terrorism By Arming Its Citizens
Posted: July 3, 2017 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Global, Guns and Gadgets, Law & Justice, Mediasphere, Politics, Self Defense | Tags: Alphabet Inc., Anti-competitive practices, Comparison shopping website, Competition law, Czech Republic, European Commission, European Parliament, European Union, Google, Margrethe Vestager Leave a comment
Czech Republic Votes To Put Gun Rights In Constitution.
‘In reaction to the recent increase of security threats’
Jacob Bojesson The lower house of the Czech parliament voted to put gun owners’ rights in the constitution Wednesday, arguing it protects citizens from Islamist terrorists.
The European Commission passed stricter gun laws in December in response to a growing terror threat. The Czech Republic was one of three countries to oppose the changes, and it is now about to make it legal for citizens to use firearms to protect the security of the country.
“This constitutional bill is in reaction to the recent increase of security threats, especially the danger of violent acts such as isolated terrorist attacks … active attackers or other violent hybrid threats,” a draft of the bill reads.
Critics argue the changes will never take effect as European Union directives overrule the proposed legislation.
“Putting it in the constitution is therefore nonsense,” Jan Farský, the deputy mayor of Chovanec, told Hospodarske Noviny. Read the rest of this entry »
Secret Service Has No Audio or Transcripts of Any Tapes Made in Trump White House
Posted: June 12, 2017 Filed under: Law & Justice, Mediasphere, Politics, White House | Tags: Apollo program, Auction, Donald Trump, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Google, John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, The Wall Street Journal, White House Leave a comment
Photo: jonathan ernst/Reuters
WASHINGTON — Louise Radnofsky reports: The U.S. Secret Service has no audio copies or transcripts of any tapes recorded within President Donald Trump’s White House, the agency said on Monday.
The agency’s response to a freedom of information request submitted by The Wall Street Journal doesn’t exclude the possibility that recordings could have been created by another entity.
The Secret Service handled recording systems within the White House for past presidents, including Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy.
The question of a White House recording system has lingered for more than a month since Mr. Trump first raised the possibility in a provocative tweet about former FBI Director James Comey.
In recent days, the two men have offered differing accounts of whether Mr. Trump asked Mr. Comey in private conversations within the White House complex to ease off the FBI’s probe of former national security adviser Mike Flynn.
On Friday, Mr. Trump kept the tapes mystery alive, telling reporters in the White House Rose Garden, “I’ll tell you about that maybe sometime in the very near future.” He added, “Oh, you’re going to be very disappointed when you hear the answer, don’t worry.” Read the rest of this entry »
X-Men Artist Apologizes for Reportedly Anti-Christian, Anti-Semitic Imagery
Posted: April 10, 2017 Filed under: Comics, Mediasphere, Politics, U.S. News | Tags: Antisemitism, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, Bogor, Donald Trump, Facebook, Google, Halim Perdanakusuma Airport, Indonesia, Jakarta, Jews, Marvel 1 Comment
Oliver Gettell reports: Comic book artist Ardian Syaf has issued an apology for including hidden messages in an issue of X-Men: Gold that have been interpreted by many readers as being anti-Semitic and anti-Christian.
“My career is over now. It’s the consequence what I did, and I take it.”
The panels in question appear to allude to religious and political tensions in Syaf’s native Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country.
“My career is over now,” Syaf said in a statement posted to Facebook on Monday. “It’s the consequence what I did, and I take it. Please no more mockery, [debate], no more hate. I hope all in peace.”
Syaf went on to address his inclusion of the number 212 and the phrase “QS 5:51” in the comic, writing that they were meant to represent “justice” and “love.” He also apologized “for all the noise.”
As reported by Bleeding Cool on Saturday, Syaf’s artwork in the first issue of X-Men Gold appeared to reference hardline opposition to Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, the Christian governor of Jakarta, as well as anti-Semitic sentiments. Read the rest of this entry »
Daily Mail Front Page for Friday March 24, 2017
Posted: March 24, 2017 Filed under: Global, Mediasphere, Terrorism | Tags: Daily Mail, England, Google, London Leave a comment
How the CIA Allegedly Turns Everyday Devices into High-Tech Spy Weapons
Posted: March 8, 2017 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Mediasphere, Science & Technology, White House | Tags: Android (operating system), Apple Inc, Big Brother, Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, Edward Snowden, Google, IOS, iPad, iPhone, Smart TV, Spying, WikiLeaks 1 Comment
‘This essentially gives our enemies a playbook on how we go about our clandestine cyber-operations.’
Some of the computer programs target the iOS software that runs Apple iPhones as well as Google’s Android operating system, which does the same for phones built by Samsung, HTC and Sony, WikiLeaks said.
The “weaponized” software also reportedly provides techniques to defeat the encryption abilities of popular apps including WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram and Wiebo, which claim to supply users with secure and private communications.
One program, known as “Weeping Angel,” can even be used to infect Samsung “smart” TVs and covertly activate their built-in microphones to record conversations and then transmit them over the internet, WikiLeaks said.
[Read the full story here, at New York Post]
The documents also reveal that the CIA as of 2014 was “looking at infecting the vehicle control systems used by modern cars and trucks,” WikiLeaks said.
“The purpose of such control is not specified, but it would permit the CIA to engage in nearly 
undetectable assassinations,” WikiLeaks suggested.
Although it posted online nearly 9,000 documents and files related to the Orwellian tools — a cache it called “Year Zero — WikiLeaks said it had decided to hold off on releasing the actual software.
“WikiLeaks has carefully reviewed the ‘Year Zero’ disclosure and published substantive CIA documentation while avoiding the distribution of ‘armed’ cyberweapons until a consensus emerges on the technical and political nature of the CIA’s program and how such ‘weapons’ should be analyzed, disarmed and published,” the hack clearinghouse said in a press release.
There is nothing in the WikiLeaks documents to suggest that the CIA — which is charged with obtaining foreign intelligence for national security purposes — uses any of these devices to spy on American citizens.
The CIA refused to confirm or deny the authenticity of the WikiLeaks information, and White House press secretary Sean Spicer wouldn’t comment, saying it “has not been fully evaluated.”
A retired CIA operative told The Post that the WikiLeaks disclosure could cripple the agency’s high-tech surveillance capabilities.
“This essentially gives our enemies a playbook on how we go about our clandestine cyber-operations,” the former agent said.
“This will be bad for the agency. They will have to re-examine its procedures for doing this type of work.”
Cybersecurity experts said the material appeared genuine.
Jake Williams of Rendition InfoSec, who has experience dealing with government hackers, noted the files’ repeated references to operation security.
“I can’t fathom anyone fabricated that amount of operational security concern,” he said. “It rings true to me.” Read the rest of this entry »
Feminists Complain: If You Sexually Harass Siri on Your iPhone, She Doesn’t Fight Back!
Posted: February 27, 2017 Filed under: Health and Social Issues, Science & Technology | Tags: Alexa Internet, Amazon.com, American Institute for Economic Research, Apple Inc, Apple TV, Artificial Intelligence, Feminism, Google, Google Assistant, iMac, iPad, iPhone, Microsoft, Microsoft Windows, sexual harassment, SJW, Wi-Fi Leave a comment
Siri wasn’t programmed to be a Social Justice Warrior. Feminists want to change that.
Hank Berrien reports: A woman writing for Quartz.com laments that bots such as Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Google’s Google Home exhibit signs of submissiveness that not only reflect the feelings of dominance among men but also reinforce the concept that women are made to be submissive.
“People often comment on the sexism inherent in these subservient bots’ female voices, but few have considered the real-life implications of the devices’ lackluster responses to sexual harassment. By letting users verbally abuse these assistants without ramifications, their parent companies are allowing certain behavioral stereotypes to be perpetuated.”
I spent weeks sexually harassing bots like Siri and Alexa—their responses are, frankly, horrific. It’s time tech giants do something. https://t.co/z5FGBruxWU
— Leah Fessler (@LeahFessler) February 22, 2017
[Also see – Yeah, Siri Was Asking for It by Jonah Goldberg ,at The Corner]
Leah Fessler writes, “People often comment on the sexism inherent in these subservient bots’ female voices, but few have considered the real-life implications of the devices’ lackluster responses to sexual harassment. By letting users verbally abuse these assistants without ramifications, their parent companies are allowing certain behavioral stereotypes to be perpetuated.”
[Read the full story here, at Daily Wire]
Uh-oh.
“By letting users verbally abuse these assistants without ramifications, their parent companies are allowing certain behavioral stereotypes to be perpetuated.”
And this: “Justifications abound for using women’s voices for bots: high-pitched voices are generally easier to hear, especially against background noise; fem-bots reflect historic traditions, such as women-operated telephone operator lines; small speakers don’t reproduce low-pitched voices well. These are all myths. The real reason? Siri, Alexa, Cortana, and Google Home have women’s voices because women’s voices make more money.”
“People tend to perceive female voices as helping us solve our problems by ourselves, while they view male voices as authority figures who tell us the answers to our problems.”
And the usual false statistics: “Even if we’re joking, the instinct to harass our bots reflects deeper social issues. In the US, one in five women have been raped in their lifetime, and a similar percentage are sexually assaulted while in college alone; over 90% of victims on college campuses do not report their assault.” Read the rest of this entry »
Having it Both Ways: Google Cozies to Trump but Calls for His Impeachment
Posted: February 3, 2017 Filed under: Global, Mediasphere, Politics, U.S. News, White House | Tags: American Civil Liberties Union, Barack Obama on social media, California, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Google, Melania Trump, Mountain View, President of the United States, Sergey Brin, Sundar Pichai, United States Leave a comment
After investing millions ingraining itself within the Obama White House, Google is suddenly on the outside looking in with the Trump administration — and it clearly has Google rattled — protesting Mr. Trump in private, and then publicly trying to cozy up with him the next.
impeached.“Some of us may need to adopt Pence 2017 bumper stickers,” Google’s cofounder Sergey Brin joked at a company sponsored anti-Trump protest — the biggest demonstration from a Silicon Valley corporation this week — in response to Mr. Trump’s controversial immigration executive order.
More than 2,000 Google employees attended the protest on Monday, with it becoming a trending topic on Twitter with the hashtag #GooglersUnite. The rally came 24 hours after Google donated $2 million to the ACLU and Immigrant Legal Resource Center, to help fight Mr. Trump’s executive order, which was matched by $2 million in donations from Google employees.
The week prior, Google lawyers flooded the California office of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, demanding she oppose Sen. Jeff Sessions’ confirmation as attorney general.
After investing millions ingraining itself within the Obama White House, Google is suddenly on the outside looking in with the Trump administration — and it clearly has Google rattled — protesting Mr. Trump in private, and then publicly trying to cozy up with him the next. Read the rest of this entry »
Facebook Is Trying Everything to Re-Enter China—and It’s Not Working
Posted: January 30, 2017 Filed under: Asia, Censorship, China, Global | Tags: Android (operating system), Beijing, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Facebook, Google, Honolulu Star-Advertiser, Hugo Barra, Majority rule, Mark Zuckerberg, Priscilla Chan (philanthropist), Xiaomi 3 Comments
Since regulators blocked the service in 2009, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has hired well-connected executives, developed censorship tools and taken a ‘smog jog’ in Beijing—but the company has made no visible headway.
Such permits typically give Western firms an initial China beachhead. This one, which Facebook won in late 2015, could have been a sign Beijing was ready to give the company another chance to connect with China’s roughly 700 million internet users, reopening the market as the social-media giant’s U.S.-growth prospects dimmed.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s 2016 ‘smog jog’ in Tiananmen Square. Photo: Facebook
There was a catch. Facebook’s license was for three months, unusually short. Facebook executives found the limitation unexpected and frustrating, people familiar with the episode said.
Facebook never opened the office. The official posting disappeared and now exists as a ghost in cached versions of the government website. “We did, at one point in time, plan to have an office,” said Facebook spokeswoman Charlene Chian, “but we don’t today.”
[Read the full story here, at WSJ]
The episode is part of Facebook’s running tale of woe in China, where it has been trying to set the stage for a return. Blocked on China’s internet since 2009, Facebook has courted Chinese officials, made Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg more visible in China, hired a well-connected China-policy chief and begun developing technology that could cull content the Communist Party deems unacceptable.
It has made no visible headway. And as time passes, Facebook is watching from the outside as Chinese social-media giants mop up the market that might have been its own. Weibo, along with Tencent Holdings Ltd.’s WeChat and QQ, are now dominant in China, and it may be too late for Facebook, said industry executives including Kai-Fu Lee, Google’s former China head and now CEO of Innovation Works, a Chinese incubator.
“At this stage and time with WeChat, Weibo and other products, it’s hopeless,” Mr. Lee said.
Facebook also faces a wary central government, which blamed social media for stirring ethnic unrest in 2009 and remains uneasy with Facebook’s ability to be a dissidents’ megaphone, said industry executives and others who deal with Beijing regulators. And government censorship would be a prerequisite, under Chinese law, for Facebook to re-enter China.
“It’s important for Facebook to respect the laws and regulations of China,” said Guo Weimin, vice minister of the State Council Information Office. “The Chinese government has always had an open approach to social-media networks. Cooperation with new media is welcome on our side.”
Mr. Zuckerberg, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has said he considers China crucial to Facebook’s future. “Obviously you can’t have a mission of wanting to connect everyone in the world and leave out the biggest country,” he told analysts in 2015. “Over the long term, that is a situation we will need to figure out a way forward on.”
His drive has had fits and starts. He scored a high-profile board seat at one of China’s top universities to build inroads with Chinese officials but didn’t attend the body’s meeting last year. Read the rest of this entry »
Counterfeit Electronic Products Worth HK$1.3 Million Seized in Hong Kong
Posted: January 4, 2017 Filed under: Asia, China, Crime & Corruption, Global | Tags: Amos Yee, Babatunde Fashola, Beijing, China, Google, Hong Kong, Human Rights Watch, O'Hare International Airport, South China Morning Post, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, United States Leave a comment
Clifford Lo reports: About 200 parcels mailed from the mainland to the United States carrying counterfeit electronic products were intercepted in a three-day joint operation mounted by Hong Kong Customs and United States authorities.
In Hong Kong, about 1,300 fakes including mobile phones, tablet computers and chargers were confiscated in 54 parcels totalling an estimated street value of HK$1.3 million, the Customs and Excise Department said.
It is understood some of the parcels intercepted in the United States were confiscated based on intelligence from Hong Kong customs officials.
Initial investigation showed the fake products were mailed from the mainland and destined for the US via Hong Kong, a source said. Read the rest of this entry »
Sacré Bleu! Move to Name Paris Street After Steve Jobs has French Leftists Freaking Out
Posted: December 2, 2016 Filed under: Art & Culture, France | Tags: Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing, Apple Inc, Capitalism, Communists, European Commission, European Union, Google, iPhone, Paris, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs Leave a comment
The local district mayor wants to call one of several new streets around the vast Halle Freyssinet high-tech startup hub the ‘Rue Steve Jobs’ in honor of America’s best-known Capitalist.
PARIS (Reuters) – Geert De Clercq reports: A proposal to name a street after the late Apple Inc chief executive and co-founder Steve Jobs has divided the leftist city council of a Paris district.
“Steve Jobs was chosen because of his impact on the development of personal computing and because he was a real entrepreneur.”
— Spokeswoman for mayor Jerome Coumet
The local district mayor wants to call one of several new streets around the vast Halle Freyssinet high-tech startup hub the “Rue Steve Jobs” in honor of the U.S. inventor of the iPhone who died in 2011.
“The choice of Steve Jobs is misplaced in light of the heritage he has left behind.”
— Communist local councillors
But Green and Communist local councillors in Paris’s 13th district don’t like the idea because of Apple’s social and fiscal practices.
“Steve Jobs was chosen because of his impact on the development of personal computing and because he was a real entrepreneur,” said a spokeswoman for mayor Jerome Coumet, defending the proposal.
She said other streets would be named after British computer scientist and code-breaker Alan Turing, UK mathematician and computer pioneer Ada Lovelace, US naval officer and computer programming pioneer Grace Murray Hopper and French civil engineer Eugene Freyssinet, who invented pre-stressed concrete.
Leftist councillors are not impressed however by Jobs’ reputation and heritage. Read the rest of this entry »
BREAKING: Facebook Helps Users Block The New York Times, CBS, NBC, ABC, with ‘B.S. Detector’, Fake News Warning Plugin
Posted: December 2, 2016 Filed under: Breaking News, Censorship, Crime & Corruption, Entertainment, Humor, Mediasphere, Politics | Tags: ABC News, Audience (TV network), Buzzfeed, CBS, Donald Trump, Facebook, Google, Google Chrome extension, Hillary Clinton, Mark Zuckerberg, NBC, New York Times, News satire, Product Hunt, The New Yorker Leave a comment
Not only is Facebook not providing little red warnings along with links to potentially specious news—it’s now blocking links to the plugin that did.
Over the past week, some Facebook users reported seeing content warnings next to links from established fake news domains, apparently without realizing a third party was responsible. We reported this phenomenon, later clarifying that B.S. Detector is in fact a third party plugin that both we and a number of Facebook users mistook as a testing feature. Irony!
Now, if you attempt to share a link to B.S. Detector on Facebook, you’ll be met with this message. Apparently, blocking fake news (detectors) is quite simple!
“I believe they are doing this because of TechCrunch article that came out yesterday, falsely identifying a screenshot of my plugin as a Facebook feature under development,” Daniel Sieradski, design technologist and creator of B.S. Detector, told TechCrunch. “It would seem I’ve caused them some embarrassment by showing them to be full of bull when it comes to their supposed inability to address fake news and they are punishing me for it.”
For now, the B.S. Detector plugin itself remains functional, as do links to the plugin on Product Hunt and the Chrome app store. Read the rest of this entry »
Facebook User Verifies Truth Of Article By Carefully Checking It Against Own Preconceived Opinions
Posted: December 1, 2016 Filed under: Censorship, Education, Entertainment, Humor, Mediasphere | Tags: Facebook, Google, journalism, LinkedIn, Marketing, media, news, News satire, Parody, satire, Snapchat, Social media, Social network, Twitter Leave a comment
“You can’t just accept everything you see online, which is why I always take a closer look at the claims that are made in every article and make sure that each one of them is backed up by my existing assumptions and personal feelings about the world.”
CLARKSVILLE, TN—Explaining that people need to be critical of the news stories that circulate on social media these days, area Facebook user James Wheatley, 44, reportedly took the time to verify the truth of an article he came across Thursday by carefully checking it against the opinions he already holds.
“There are all kinds of bogus news stories out there, so it’s important to take a step back and hold each article up against my personal convictions to find out for myself whether what I’m reading is true or not. It’s pretty sad, but once I got in the habit of looking at articles this way, I could see just how many awful sites there are on the internet that don’t even adhere to the most basic tenets of my individual worldview, so now I just disregard them completely.”
“You can’t just accept everything you see online, which is why I always take a closer look at the claims that are made in every article and make sure that each one of them is backed up by my existing assumptions and personal feelings about the world,” said Wheatley, who told reporters he had to correct several friends on Facebook earlier this week after an investigation of his beliefs and individual political perspectives proved the articles they had posted to be entirely false. Read the rest of this entry »
China’s Internet Boom
Posted: November 19, 2016 Filed under: Asia, China, Science & Technology, Think Tank | Tags: 17th century, AdSense, Alibaba Group, Ant Financial Services Group, Apple Inc, Artificial Intelligence, Autonomous car, Baidu, China, Department of National Defence (Canada), George Qulaut, Google, Government of China, Internet of Things, Kim dynasty (North Korea), Kim Jong-un, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China, MIT Technology Review, Virtual reality Leave a comment
Online experimentation doesn’t have to be limited to tech companies.
Edward Jung It’s tempting to portray the rapid growth of the Chinese Internet as just one more example of China’s efforts to catch up with the West: Alibaba is the eBay of China, Baidu is the Google of China, Didi is the Uber of China, and so on. But China is actually conducting some fascinating experiments with the Internet (see “The Best and Worst Internet Experience in the World“). You just need to look outside the tech sector to notice them.
The most significant innovation is happening not among Chinese Internet companies but in the country’s so-called “real” economy. Corporations in old-school sectors like construction, agriculture, transportation, and banking are pursuing new business models based on big data, social media, and the Internet of things.
These are some of the largest firms of their kind in the world, yet many are young enough to be helmed by their original owner/founders. They’re like Rockefeller, Ford, or Carnegie with access to smartphones.
So it’s China’s largest residential-property developer—not a tech company—that is pioneering the integration of Internet-based technology and services into fully wired communities. Vanke wants to create urban hubs that supply residents with gardens, safe food, travel, entertainment, and medical and educational services, all enabled by the Internet. Read the rest of this entry »
Google’s Eric Schmidt Wore ‘Staff’ Badge at Hillary ‘Victory’ Party
Posted: November 17, 2016 Filed under: Censorship, Mediasphere, Politics, U.S. News | Tags: Alphabet, Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, Democratic Party (United States), Donald Trump, Eric Schmidt, Google, Hillary Clinton, Inc., Michael Slaby, propaganda, Republican Party (United States), The Groundwork, United States 1 Comment
Hacked memo revealed Schmidt was working directly with the Clinton campaign
Google came under fire earlier this year for allegedly altering search results to paint Hillary Clinton in a more favorable light than Donald Trump. Schmidt stated at the time that Google did not pick sides in the presidential race.
“We have not taken a position on the American election and nor do I expect us to,” Schmidt said at the time.
Despite this assurance, Schmidt provided funding to a tech startup called The Groundwork, one of the Clinton campaign’s biggest vendors.
[Read the full story here, at freebeacon.com]
Michael Slaby, the Obama campaign’s chief integration and innovation officer, developed The Groundwork through a company he co-founded called Timshel. The Clinton campaign paid the group $600,000 throughout the election cycle. Read the rest of this entry »
OH YES THEY DID: YouTube Blacklists PragerU Educational Videos
Posted: October 12, 2016 Filed under: Censorship, History, Mediasphere, Politics, Religion | Tags: Amazoncom, Audience, corruption, Democratic Party, Facebook, Google, Media bias, Prager University, PragerU, Twitter, Video hosting service, YouTube 1 Comment
Nearly two dozen videos put into ‘restricted mode.’
Jennifer Kabbany reports: YouTube has placed 21 PragerU videos on “restricted mode,” a category meant for inappropriate and objectionable adult and sexual content.
“We’ve worked quietly behind the scenes for months to resolve this, but YouTube’s censorship continues, leaving us with no option but to go public.”
PragerU stands for Prager University. Its four- to five-minute videos promote Judeo-Christian values and principles and are ideal for young people as they distill complex issues into concise bullet points with stimulating graphics.
“There is no excuse for Google and YouTube censoring and restricting any PragerU videos, which are produced with the sole intent of educating people of all ages about America’s founding values.”
[Read the full story here, at The College Fix]
“We’ve worked quietly behind the scenes for months to resolve this, but YouTube’s censorship continues, leaving us with no option but to go public,” PragerU announced Tuesday on its Facebook page.
[PragerU has also launched a petition on the matter]
YouTube is owned by Google, and PragerU states on its website that “in response to an official complaint we filed, Google specialists defended their restriction of our videos, and said, ‘We don’t censor anyone,’ although they do ‘take into consideration what the intent of the video is….(read more)
Here’s a list of the 21 videos PragerU has requested YouTube remove immediately from restricted mode, some of which are directly related to higher education topics:
Are The Police Racist?
Why Don’t Feminists Fight for Muslim Women?
Why Did America Fight the Korean War?
Who’s More Pro-Choice: Europe or America?
What ISIS Wants
Why Are There Still Palestinian Refugees?
Are 1 in 5 Women Raped at College?
Islamic Terror: What Muslim Americans Can Do
Did Bush Lie About Iraq? Read the rest of this entry »
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Calls Company ‘People’s News Network’
Posted: October 11, 2016 Filed under: Entertainment, Mediasphere, Politics | Tags: Apple Inc, Character (computing), Facebook, GIF, Google, Jack Dorsey, Microsoft, San Francisco, The Verge, Twitter Leave a comment
Liana B. Baker reports: Twitter Inc Chief Executive Jack Dorsey defined one of the company’s missions as being the “people’s news network,” according to an internal memo seen on Monday.
The 10-year-old social networking service has long struggled to define its core purpose and is under the spotlight as it explores selling itself in a process that has attracted potential buyers such as Salesforce.com.
Twitter has made a recent push into news and sports on mobile devices and this foray could pique the interest of a media company as an acquirer, analysts have said.
“Twitter is what’s happening, and what everyone is talking about… News and talk. We’re the people’s news network.”
The memo does not address the sales process. Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Bloomberg, which first published the memo Monday, reported that it was sent to employees last week. Read the rest of this entry »
Google Employees Have Enjoyed Revolving Door During Obama Administration
Posted: August 9, 2016 Filed under: Censorship, Crime & Corruption, Politics, Science & Technology, White House | Tags: Barack Obama, Business, Encryption, Executive Office of the President of the United States, Gmail, Google, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Maps, YouTube 2 Comments
The Google Transparency Project, the work of Campaign for Accountability, poured over reams of data to find 258 instances of ‘revolving door activity’ between Google or its associated companies and the federal government, national political campaigns and Congress since 2009.
Johnny Kampis reports: More than 250 people have moved from Google and related firms to the federal government or vice versa since President Barack Obama took office.
The Google Transparency Project, the work of Campaign for Accountability, poured over reams of data to find 258 instances of “revolving door activity” between Google or its associated companies and the federal government, national political campaigns and Congress since 2009.
Much of that revolving door activity took place at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, where 22 former White House officials went to work for Google and 31 executives from Google and related firms went to work at the White House or were appointed to federal advisory boards by Obama. Those boards include the President’s Council on Science and Technology and the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.
Regulation watchdogs may be just as keen about the moves between Google and the Federal Communications Commission and Federal Trade Commission. Those government bodies regulate many of the programs that are at the heart of Google’s business, and there have been at least 15 moves between Google and its lobbying firms and those commissions.
The research also shows that 25 officials in national security, intelligence or the Department of Defense joined Google, and three Google executives went to work for the DOD.
Eighteen former State Department officials became Google employees, and five Google staffers became employed at the State Department.
[The complete list can be downloaded via Excel file here]
Friends in high places
Former Google employees occupy several key slots in the federal government. These include:
- Megan Smith, vice president new business development at Google 2003-12, vice president of Google 2012-14, chief technology officer at the Office of Science and Technology Policy 2014-present.
- Alexander Macgillivray, deputy general counsel at Google 2003-09, general counsel at Twitter 2009-13, deputy chief technology officer at OSTP 2014-present.
- Nicole Wong, vice president and deputy general counsel at Google from 2004-11 and deputy chief technology officer at OSTP 2013-14.
- Jannine Versi, product marketing manager in Middle East and North Africa for Google 2010-2012, White House National Economic Council 2013-14, chief of staff International Trade Administration at U.S. Department of Commerce 2014-present.
- Michelle Lee, deputy general counsel at Google 2003-12, under secretary of commerce for intellectual property and director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office 2012-present.
- Mikey Dickerson, site reliability manager at Google 2006-13, administrator U.S. Digital Service 2014-present. Dickerson also assisted with election day monitoring and modeling with Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign and helped repair the broken HealthCare.gov website.
At least 18 former Google employees work or have worked for the U.S. Digital Serviceand its General Services Administration sidekick, 18F. USDS operates under the Executive Office of the President, consulting on big federal information technology projects.
The door revolves
Scott Amey, general counsel for the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan group that exposes abuses of power in government, said it’s hard to know for sure how more than 250 people moving between Google and the federal government since 2009 compares to other corporations, but “it sounds like it’s a very significant number.”
“It’s very hard to get information about the quantity of people who go in and out of government service,” Amey told Watchdog.org.
Google didn’t return an email seeking comment for this story.
Analysts at Google Transparency Project compiled the revolving-door data by using public information that includes lobby 
disclosure records, news stories, LinkedIn profiles and reports from Open Secrets. Campaign for Accountability notes the analysis is “an evolving representation of the scale of the revolving-door relationship between Google and government” rather than a comprehensive tally.
In other words, the total could be higher.
SCHMIDT: The Google chief executive
SCHMIDT: The Google executive chairman’s company Civis Analytics was a key ally of Obama during his re-election campaign.
The project’s analysis included affiliates of Google, such as YouTube, as well as key law firms and lobbyists.
It also includes Civis Analytics, whose sole investor is Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google parent company Alphabet Inc.
At least 27 people who worked on Obama’s 2012 presidential re-election campaign went to work for Civis Analytics after the election. Google Transparency Project said “those employees are then deployed by the White House to work on President Obama’s top policy priorities.”
Those policies include federal technology acquisition reform, national security matters and health care reform – Civis Analytics employees worked with Google engineers to fix the broken HealthCare.gov website in 2013, Campaign for Accountability reports. Read the rest of this entry »
DID THEY OR DIDN’T THEY? Google Caught Whitewashing Autocomplete, Manipulating Search Results to Favor Hillary Clinton
Posted: June 10, 2016 Filed under: Censorship, Crime & Corruption, Mediasphere, Politics | Tags: Advanced Encryption Standard, Bing, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Google, Hillary Clinton, Microsoft, Web search engine 1 Comment
Brent Scher and Elizabeth Harrington report: “Crime” and “indictment” are not the only terms Google is keeping hidden from searches of Hillary Clinton, a Washington Free Beacon analysis finds.
Common search terms associated with Clinton appear to have been scrubbed from Google as the tech giant has been accused of manipulating its autocomplete results to favor the Democratic presidential candidate.
Matt Lieberman of SourceFed released a video showing examples of Google skewing its autocomplete results for Clinton, while other search engines simply display the most searched terms.
“While researching for a wrap-up on the June 7 Presidential Primaries, we discovered evidence that Google may be manipulating autocomplete recommendations in favor of Hillary Clinton,” SourceFed wrote. “If true, this would mean that Google Searches aren’t objectively reflecting what the majority of Internet searches are actually looking for, possibly violating Google’s algorithm.”
For example, when searching Hillary Clinton “cri,” Google finishes the phrase as “crime reform.” On Yahoo, the result is “criminal charges.” On Google’s own trend website, there were not enough searches for Hillary Clinton and “crime reform” to build a graph of the results.
[Read the full text here, at freebeacon.com]
Typing Hillary Clinton and “ind” gives Google users results on Hillary Clinton and Indiana. On Microsoft’s Bing search engine, a user gets Hillary Clinton and “indictment,” yielding results for the FBI investigation into Clinton’s private email server.
Just putting the name “Hillary Clinton” into Google, you are directed towards searches for her “twitter,” “email,” “age,” and “speech.”
Notably missing is the second top result on Bing, which is of her potential “indictment.”
Here are 10 more examples of questionable Google autocompletes for Clinton:
1. “Hillary Clinton anti…”
Bing gets you antichrist, antisemitic, and anti gay marriage.
Google gets you “anti obama ad.”
2. “Hillary Clinton vin…”
Bing gets you vindictive and a variety of searches focusing on the death of Vince Foster.
[VIDEO] Atlas the Humanoid Robot in Action
Posted: February 29, 2016 Filed under: Robotics, Science & Technology | Tags: Android (robot), Boston, Boston Dynamics, Center of mass, Chumbawamba, Google, Humanoid robot, LIDAR, Robot, video Leave a comment
Atlas the humanoid robot can trudge through snow and overcome physical challenges from its developers at Boston Dynamics, a unit of Alphabet Inc.
Google Expands Self-Driving Car Testing to Washington State
Posted: February 3, 2016 Filed under: Science & Technology, U.S. News | Tags: Austin, Austin American-Statesman, Autonomous car, Bloomberg L.P., California, Google, Google driverless car, Mountain View, Texas, Vehicular automation Leave a comment
WASHINGTON (Reuters) David Shepardson reports: Alphabet Inc said Wednesday its self-driving car project will expand testing to Kirkland, Washington later this month, the third city where it is testing autonomous vehicles.
“We’re looking forward to seeing the cars on the road and understanding more about how self-driving cars might someday improve safety and provide traffic relief.”
— Washington Governor Jay Inslee
The company’s Google unit has conducted autonomous vehicle testing for six years in Mountain View, California, where it is based, and it expanded testing to Austin, Texas last summer.
Google said in a statement that one reason for the new site in the northwest United States is to gain experience in “different driving environments, traffic patterns, and road conditions.”
Kirkland has significant seasonal rain that allows for wet weather testing, along with hills that will allow testing of sensors at different angles and elevations.
Google began a few weeks ago driving a single Lexus RX450h SUV around a few square miles in North Kirkland to create a detailed map of the streets. Read the rest of this entry »
[VIDEO] The Geography of Genius: Why Some Places are Better at Fostering Creativity
Posted: January 27, 2016 Filed under: Art & Culture, Education, History, Think Tank | Tags: Bonn, Christian Gottlob Neefe, Downton Abbey, Edinburgh, Google, Hollywood Foreign Press Association, Holy Roman Empire, Johann Georg Albrechtsberger, Ludwig van Beethoven, Vienna Leave a comment
Renaissance Florence, Enlightenment Edinburgh, Mozart‘s Vienna: why have certain places at certain times created such monumental leaps in thought and innovation? This is the question at the heart of travel writer Eric Weiner‘s latest book, The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World’s Most Creative Places, From Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley.
“This is a book about process, about how creative genius happens and what are the circumstances,” Weiner explains. “I believe in the power of place and the power of culture to shape our lives in unexpected ways.”
Traveling the globe, Weiner looked at the locations and cultures that fostered history’s greatest minds. Through his research he pieced together a list of ingredients he believes played a vital role in creating these “genius clusters,” including money, diversity, competition, and disorder.
“A little bit of chaos is good,” says Weiner. “The pot has to be stirred. If you are fully invested in the status quo—either as a person or a place—you are unlikely to create genius because you are too comfortable.”
So can a government build a city that will generate the geniuses of tomorrow? Weiner thinks not. “I wish I could sit here and tell you that there was a formula and if you applied that formula you could create the next Silicon Valley,” he says. “There is no formula.”
About 8:30 minutes.
Camera by Austin Bragg and Joshua Swain. Hosted and edited by Meredith Bragg.
China is Putting Tighter Controls on Online Mapping Services
Posted: December 18, 2015 Filed under: Asia, Censorship, China, Global | Tags: Apple Inc, Autonomous car, Baidu, Beijing, BMW 3 Series, China, DocumentCloud, Google, Google Maps, Jing Wang, Philippines, Xinhua News Agency Leave a comment
New regulations could make it harder than ever for Google to re-enter the world’s largest market.
David Z. Morris reports: In rules released this week, China’s State Council announced that all digital maps provided in China be stored on servers within its borders. The rules, which also lay out certification standards for digital mapping providers, will go into effect Jan. 1.
“Keeping map servers within China would, in theory, give its government even more control over what its citizens see. But the move is arguably redundant—China has long held mapping services to strict content standards, and blocks those that don’t comply.”
According to China’s state-run Xinhua news agency, the purpose of the new regulations is to “boost development of the geographic information industry” and safeguard “national sovereignty and geographic information security.”
“Google has since made moderate concessions in its representation of Chinese borders on maps accessed from outside of the country, changing the names of disputed regions and depiction of Chinese borders with India and the Philippines”
The rules seem much heavier on tightening control than on boosting development. In addition to the server location requirements, map providers are prohibited both from displaying or even storing any data deemed to be prohibited by the government. Government officials will be able to regularly inspect data for “errors and leaks of information that threaten national sovereignty,” according to Xinhua. Read the rest of this entry »
Google Exploring Shanghai’s Free-Trade Zone
Posted: December 8, 2015 Filed under: Asia, China, Politics, Science & Technology | Tags: Apple Inc, Asia, California, California Institute of Technology, China, Department of Motor Vehicles, Diyarbakır, Free trade zone, Google, India, Information technology, iPad, iPhone, Shanghai, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal Leave a comment
Companies such as Amazon and Apple use Shanghai’s free-trade zone to run some of their value-added services in China, due to the area’s looser rules on foreign capital.
Yang Jie reports: The jury is still out on the business benefits of Shanghai’s free-trade zone— but one notable U.S. tech giant is among the firms that has dipped a toe into the pilot area’s waters.
“The free-trade zone’s rules make it easier for foreign companies to run e-commerce operations, for example. But they have little benefit when it comes to activities such as Internet search and e-mail, which are dependent on the location of the server and the storage of data”
Google, of Mountain View, Calif., set up a company in Shanghai’s pioneer free-trade zone last year, according to online filings reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Companies such as Amazon and Apple use Shanghai’s free-trade zone to run some of their value-added services in China, due to the area’s looser rules on foreign capital and greater freedom in terms of industries that foreign businesses can participate in.
The free-trade zone’s rules make it easier for foreign companies to run e-commerce operations, for example. But they have little benefit when it comes to activities such as Internet search and e-mail, which are dependent on the location of the server and the storage of data, according to people familiar with the matter.
A Google spokesman declined to comment on the issue. The company’s establishment was first reported on Monday by The Paper, a Shanghai-based media outlet.
Read the rest of this entry »
Hong Kong’s Memory Hole
Posted: November 21, 2015 Filed under: Asia, Censorship, China, Economics, Global | Tags: 2016 Summer Olympics, Academy Award, Advocate General, Amazon.com, Asia, EUROPE, European Commission, European Union, Facebook, FIBA Asia, Germany, Google, Hong Kong, Hong Kong dollar, Mainland China, Palestine Leave a comment
The right to privacy is usurping the public right to know in Asia’s financial hub.
Financial hubs depend on the free flow of information, and nowhere more so than in Hong Kong, gateway to the opaque China market. So a recent case in which an appeals board upheld the censorship of a court judgment to protect the supposed privacy rights of the litigants sets a bad precedent. The territory is following Europe’s lead toward extreme privacy protection at the expense of access to information.
“The right to be forgotten affects more than media freedom. It prevents investors and entrepreneurs from conducting due diligence and managing business risks, and helps people hide from public scrutiny. That may be good for the reputations of the rich and powerful, but it will hurt Hong Kong’s reputation for transparency.”
Luciana Wong Wai-lan, who now serves on several government advisory panels, participated in a matrimonial case in the early 2000s. In 2010 Ms. Wong requested that the court remove the judgments from its online reference system. The court made them anonymous, but hyperlinks to the judgments placed on the website of local shareholder activist David Webb still revealed her name.
[Read the full story here, at WSJ]
Ms. Wong wrote to Hong Kong’s privacy commissioner for personal data in 2013, and the commissioner ordered Mr. Webb to remove the links pursuant to Data Protection Principle 3 (DPP3) of the Personal Data Privacy Ordinance. Read the rest of this entry »
Two Suspects Die During Police Raid in Paris
Posted: November 18, 2015 Filed under: Breaking News, Crime & Corruption, France, Global, Terrorism, War Room | Tags: AK-47, Belgium, CNIL, Domain name, EUROPE, France, Google, Islamic extremism, Islamism, Jihadism, Law, Paris, Paris Attacks, Suicide Vest 1 Comment
The woman killed herself after shooting with an AK-47-type automatic gun. Another man was killed in the raid, a police official said. Three police officers were injured.
“A woman blew herself up at the start of a dawn raid Wednesday on an apartment in the northern Paris suburb of Saint-Denis targeting suspects linked to Friday’s massacre in Paris,”
As the raid was unfolding, the Paris prosecutor said three men holed up in the apartment were detained, as well as a man and a woman nearby. Investigators didn’t immediately identify the detainees.
[Read the full story here, at WSJ]
French authorities suspect Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian-born Islamic State operative and presumed mastermind of the deadly Paris terror attacks may be in Saint-Denis, where elite police were conducting the raid in the early hours of Wednesday morning, a spokeswoman for the Paris prosecutor said.
Hooded police officers walked on a street in Saint-Denis Wednesday. A woman wearing an explosive suicide vest blew herself up as heavily armed police tried to storm a suburban Paris apartment where the suspected mastermind of last week’s attacks was believed to be holed up, police said. PETER DEJONG/ASSOCIATED PRESS
If confirmed, Mr. Abaaoud’s presence in Saint-Denis—near the a sports arena where three suicide bombers detonated their explosive vest on Friday—would deepen concerns about Europe’s security. It would raise questions over how an Islamic State operative, who featured prominently on Western military’s target lists, slipped back through borders to sow terror in the heart of the continent.
[VIDEO] Panic in Manhattan: New Yorkers Terrified by Pizza Rat Prank
Posted: November 9, 2015 Filed under: Art & Culture, Entertainment, Food & Drink, Humor, Mediasphere | Tags: BBC, Big Apple, Do it yourself, Epic Rap Battles of History, Google, GoPro, Grace Helbig, Hollywood Palladium, New York, NYC, Pizza, Rats, YouTube Leave a comment
Pizza Rat’s on a roll! Pranksters paid homage to the iconic Big Apple rodent — by building a robot version of it.
Operators of the YouTube channel PrankvsPrank created the….(read more)
Source: New York Post
‘Future Teardown’ of an Apple Car Shows Us Who Could be Making the Various Elements
Posted: October 27, 2015 Filed under: Mediasphere, Science & Technology | Tags: Apple Inc, Automobile, Automotive industry, California, Electric car, Elon Musk, Google, iPhone, Tesla Motors, The Wall Street Journal Leave a comment
Ben Lovejoy reports: While we can’t say for sure that an Apple Car will ever go on sale, it’s a certainty by this point that the company is devoting substantial development resources to the project. Tim Cook said recently that there would be “massive change” in the car industry, and that “autonomous driving becomes much more important.”
But as a recent opinion piece on sister site Electrek argued, and Elon Musk warned, actually manufacturing a car is massively more complex than making consumer electronics devices. Apple will therefore be looking for partners to pull together different elements of the car. Re/code has put together an interesting look at the most likely candidates …
None of the companies would comment on any conversations they have with the Cupertino giant about their own cars. None of them flat-out denied those conversations, either. Google, Tesla and Apple all declined to comment.
The list below is not exhaustive. Yet after conversations with nearly a dozen manufacturers, industry experts and tech companies involved in the world of self-driving cars, Re/code assembled a portrait of the leading, innovative companies and critical dynamics in the autonomous industry.
The exterior of the car could, it suggests, be made by five companies: Roush, Delphi, Edison2, Atieva and Renovo Motors. The first of those, Roush, is a Michigan-based “boutique automotive supplier” which already has one key claim to credibility in the field: it assembled the exterior for Google’s prototype self-driving cars.
[Read the full story here, at 9to5Mac]
Renovo recently teamed-up with engineers from Stanford University to create a self-driving electric DeLorean capable of donuts and drifting. While it was of course a PR stunt, you need some impressive tech to pull it off. Read the rest of this entry »
China’s Creepy New Form of Oppression
Posted: October 14, 2015 Filed under: Asia, Censorship, Global, Mediasphere | Tags: Apple, Authoritarianism, Big Brother, Chinese Communism, Data, Democracy Movement, Google, Human rights, Human Rights Abuses, Mark Hemingway, National ID Card, Oppression, Social Networks, The Weekly Standard, United States, White House Leave a comment
‘Authoritarianism, Gamified’
China’s Communist government is rolling out a plan to assign everyone in the country “citizenship scores.” According to the ACLU, “China appears to be leveraging all the tools of the information age—electronic purchasing data, social networks, algorithmic sorting—to construct the ultimate tool of social control. It is, as one commentator put it, ‘authoritarianism, gamified.’ ”
“Expressing the wrong opinion—or merely having friends who express the wrong opinion—will hurt your score. The higher your score, the more privileges the government will grant you.”
In the system, everyone is measured by a score ranging from 350 to 950, and that score is linked to a national ID card. In addition to measuring your financial credit, it will also measure political compliance. Expressing the wrong opinion—or merely having friends who express the wrong opinion—will hurt your score. The higher your score, the more privileges the government will grant you.
“When it comes to weaponizing oppression, even the Communist Chinese now see the value of private enterprise. That’s something to keep in mind when American politicians inevitably start agitating to enlist Apple or Google in launching some grand political initiative.”
This horrifying plan is to be administered by Alibaba and Tencent, companies that run much of China’s approved social networks and already have tremendous stores of data about what Chinese citizens are saying. When it comes to weaponizing oppression, even the Communist Chinese now see the value of private enterprise. That’s something to keep in mind when American politicians inevitably start agitating to enlist Apple or Google in launching some grand political initiative. Read the rest of this entry »
Daniel Payne: Six Unanswered Questions About Ahmed Mohamed’s Clock
Posted: September 24, 2015 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Education, Think Tank | Tags: Barack Obama, Chief of police, Facebook, Google, Irving, MacArthur High School (Irving, Mark Zuckerberg, Texas, The Dallas Morning News, Twitter, White House Leave a comment
Tick Tock, Tick Tock…
Daniel Payne writes: In just over a week, the Ahmed Mohamed clock controversy has become a global phenomenon: the young man brought a homemade clock to school and was subsequently arrested because school officials thought it looked like a bomb, leading to a worldwide outcry and hundreds of thousands of tweets, articles, and words of praise for the boy from Irving, Texas.
Ahmed has received commendation from the likes of Google, Facebook, Twitter, and even the president of the United States. Just recently, his family announced they will meet dignitaries at the United Nations; later, after a jaunt to Mecca in Saudi Arabia, they hope to meet with President Obama.
Mohamed has become an international superstar. But there are nonetheless several puzzling and troubling questions regarding his rise to fame. A great many people who have been mildly skeptical of this story have been denounced as “Ahmed truthers” and as people who are out to conduct a “smear campaign” against an innocent boy. But it’s actually reasonable and even necessary to be a bit skeptical of extraordinary stories such as this. You don’t have to have a vendetta against Ahmed to want the full story on the table, and asking honest questions about such a remarkable news event doesn’t mean you’re out to “smear” this young man.
With that in mind, here are six questions the media should be asking the Mohamed family to clarify some points that badly need it.
1. Why did Ahmed claim to build the clock if he didn’t actually build it?
From the beginning we’ve been told that Ahmed—a supposedly creative, clever, inventive young man—threw the clock together from parts in his bedroom in order to “impress” his teachers at school. Ahmed told Chris Hayes he put it together himself. He told the Dallas Morning News that he “made a clock,” elsewhere claimed “I’m the person who built a clock and got in trouble with it,” and claimed that the clock was “[his] invention.”
[Read the full text here, at thefederalist.com]
As it turns out, it’s almost certain he did no such thing. All the evidence points toward the conclusion that Ahmed didn’t build his clock at all, and instead just took apart an old digital clock and put the guts inside a pencil case. If this is true—and it almost certainly is—why did he claim he “built” such a device?
Photographs and videos of his workshop have shown a bench scattered with circuit boards, wires, and other electronic devices. If Ahmed is used to working in such conditions and with the guts and pieces of such technology, he should know the difference between “building” a clock and not building one. So what led him to claim he built something that, for all appearances, he didn’t?
Apple Wins Ruling in Patent Case Against Samsung
Posted: September 17, 2015 Filed under: Law & Justice, Mediasphere | Tags: Apple Inc, EUROPE, German language, Google, Injunction, iPhone, Motocross, Motorola, Patent, Samsung Leave a comment
WASHINGTON – Brent Kendall reports: A federal appeals court on Thursday ruled Apple Inc. was entitled to an injunction barring rival Samsung Electronics Co. from incorporating features into its devices that infringe the iPhone maker’s patents.
A trial judge who previously denied Apple’s request “abused its discretion when it did not enjoin Samsung’s infringement,” the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said.
The decision is a notable win for Apple, which has argued that Samsung should have to do more than pay monetary damages for infringing upon Apple’s patented technology. Read the rest of this entry »
[VIDEO] Can Bitcoin Survive a Hard Fork? Xapo’s Wences Casares on Block Size and Bitcoin’s Future
Posted: September 15, 2015 Filed under: Economics, Mediasphere, Science & Technology, Think Tank | Tags: 401(k), Apple Inc, Automated teller machine, Brokerage firm, Google, Internet, Internet television, Investor, iPhone, San Francisco Leave a comment
“I think bitcoin is more robust because we cannot depend on Satoshi [Nakamoto, creator of bitcoin] to say, ‘Hey, Satoshi, what do we do with the block size?'” says Wences Casares, founder of the bitcoin wallet Xapo. “I think that would be a weaker bitcoin.”
Casares is an entrepreneur who brought the first internet service provider to his home country of Argentina and then launched the mega successful online brokerage firm Patagon. So people listen when he says that bitcoin “may change the world more than the Internet did.”
Reason TV‘s Zach Weissmueller sat down with Casares in Xapo’s San Francisco headquarters and discussed the state of bitcoin, why he believes that bitcoin’s core technology needs modification to increase block size, and why such a modification doesn’t threaten the future of the crypotcurrency as some critics fear. Read the rest of this entry »
Robots Could Steal the Election
Posted: August 7, 2015 Filed under: Mediasphere, Politics, Science & Technology, Think Tank | Tags: Abhisit Vejjajiva, Bharatiya Janata Party, CNIL, Google, Google Search, Internet, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Swing vote, Web search engine Leave a comment
Adam Rogers writes: Imagine an election—A close one. You’re undecided. So you type the name of one of the candidates into your search engine of choice. (Actually, let’s not be coy here. In most of the world, one search engine dominates; in Europe and North America, it’s Google.) And Google coughs up, in fractions of a second, articles and facts about that candidate. Great! Now you are an informed voter, right? But a study published this week says that the order of those results, the ranking of positive or negative stories on the screen, can have an enormous influence on the way you vote. And if the election is close enough, the effect could be profound enough to change the outcome.
In other words: Google’s ranking algorithm for search results could accidentally steal the presidency. “We estimate, based on win margins in national elections around the world,” says Robert Epstein, a psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology and one of the study’s authors, “that Google could determine the outcome of upwards of 25 percent of all national elections.”
Epstein’s paper combines a few years’ worth of experiments in which Epstein and his colleague Ronald Robertson gave people access to information about the race for prime minister in Australia in 2010, two years prior, and then let the mock-voters learn about the candidates via a simulated search engine that displayed real articles.
One group saw positive articles about one candidate first; the other saw positive articles about the other candidate. (A control group saw a random assortment.) The result: Whichever side people saw the positive results for, they were more likely to vote for—by more than 48 percent. The team calls that number the “vote manipulation power,” or VMP. The effect held—strengthened, even—when the researchers swapped in a single negative story into the number-four and number-three spots. Apparently it made the results seem even more neutral and therefore more trustworthy.
[Read the full text here, at WIRED]
But of course that was all artificial—in the lab. So the researchers packed up and went to India in advance of the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, a national campaign with 800 million eligible voters. (Eventually 430 million people voted over the weeks of the actual election.) “I thought this time we’d be lucky if we got 2 or 3 percent, and my gut said we’re gonna get nothing,” Epstein says, “because this is an intense, intense election environment.” Voters get exposed, heavily, to lots of other information besides a mock search engine result. Read the rest of this entry »
OUT: Apple Watch. IN: Implantables
Posted: July 31, 2015 Filed under: Science & Technology, U.S. News | Tags: Apple Watch, FitBit, Forbes, Google, Implant, Implantible, Silicon Valley, Startup, Thync Leave a comment
‘ It might sound like something you’d see in a science fiction movie, but my prediction is that in the next three to five years, implantable devices will become about as normal as wearing the latest watch.’
Bijan Khosravi writes: That is right, the implantable. In the past decade of tech innovation, connectivity has been the name of the game. Call your friend in the middle of the night in Antarctica. Facetime with your sister on vacation in India. Talk about the movie you saw with friends in London. Anything is possible with the push of a button and now with the Apple Watch, you can do it all with the twist of a dial. But this is just the beginning of what Silicon Valley has in store for us in the name of connectivity. We’re about to enter the next level of high tech innovation – connecting with yourself.
And the most efficient and accurate way to do that is with the next wave of sensor based smart devices – those you can implant into your body. It might sound like something you’d see in a science fiction movie, but my prediction is that in the next three to five years, implantable devices will become about as normal as wearing the latest watch.
The movement into an era of implantables is already in full swing with wearables and attachables like FitBit. These are just the first generation of gadgets that go beyond monitoring and measuring your body movements. Startups like Thync are pushing the envelope with their neurosignaling patch that uses low voltage electrical currents to alter a person’s mood and energy. Read the rest of this entry »
Donald Trump: World’s Greatest Troll
Posted: July 21, 2015 Filed under: Mediasphere, Politics | Tags: Ben Carson, Bernie Sanders, Bloomberg Television, Bobby Jindal, Carly Fiorina, Culture War, Donald Trump, Facial recognition system, Google, Jeb Bush, John Kasich, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Mike Huckabee, Republican Party (United States), Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, Ted Cruz Leave a comment
Trolls operate on the principle that negative attention is better than none. In fact, the troll may feed off the negative attention, claiming it makes him a victim and proves that everyone is out to get him.
Nate Silver writes:
…There’s a notion that Donald Trump’s recent rise in Republican polls is a media-driven creation. That explanation isn’t entirely wrong, but it’s incomplete. It skims over the complex interactions between the media, the public and the candidates, which can produce booms and busts of attention. And it ignores how skilled trolls like Trump can exploit the process to their benefit.
Let’s look at some data. In the chart below, I’ve tracked how media coverage has been divided among the Republican candidates over roughly the past month (the data covers June 14 through July 12), according to article counts on Google News. In turn, I’ve shown the share of Google searches for each candidate over the same period. The data was provided to FiveThirtyEight by Google but should closely match what you’ll get by searching on Google Trends or Google News yourself.
“Trump has taken trolling to the next level by being willing to offend members of his own party. Ordinarily, this would be a counterproductive strategy. In a 16-candidate field, however, you can be in first place with 15 or 20 percent of the vote — even if the other 80 or 85 percent of voters hate your guts.”
Even before his imbecilic comments about Sen. John McCain this weekend, which came too recently to be included in this data, Trump was receiving far more media attention than any other Republican. Based on Google News, 46 percent of the media coverage of the GOP campaign over the past month was directed toward Trump, more than for Jeb Bush (13 percent), Chris Christie (9 percent), Scott Walker (8 percent), Bobby Jindal (6 percent), Ted Cruz (4 percent) and Marco Rubio (4 percent) combined.
“Trolls are skilled at taking advantage of this landscape and making the news cycle feed on its own tail, accelerating the feedback loop and producing particularly large bounces and busts in the polls.”
And yet, the public is perhaps even more obsessed with Trump. Among the GOP candidates, he represented 62 percent of the Google search traffic over the past month, having been searched for more than six times as often as second-place Bush.
So if the press were going purely by public demand, there might be even more Trump coverage. Instead, the amount of press coverage that each candidate has received has been modulated by the media’s perception of how likely each is to win the nomination….(read more)
“The public is perhaps even more obsessed with Trump. Among the GOP candidates, he represented 62 percent of the Google search traffic over the past month, having been searched for more than six times as often as second-place Bush.”
But a regression analysis — you can read the gory details in the footnotes3— suggests that press attention both leads and lags public attention to the candidates. This makes a lot of sense. The public can take cues from the media about which candidates to pay attention to. But the media also gets a lot of feedback from the public. Or to put it more cynically: If Trump-related stories are piling up lots of pageviews and Trump-related TV segments get good ratings, then guess what? You’re probably going to see more of them.4
This creates the possibility of a feedback loop….(read more)
…So if these spikes are media-driven, they seem to be driven by some particularly modern features of the media landscape. Social media allows candidates to make news without the filter of the press. It may also encourage groupthink among and between reporters and readers, however. And access to real-time traffic statistics can mean that everyone is writing the same “takes” and chasing the same eyeballs at once. Is the tyranny of the Twitter mob better or worse than the “Boys on the Bus” model of a group of (mostly white, male, upper-middle-class, left-of-center) reporters deigning to determine what’s news and what isn’t? I don’t know, but it’s certainly different. And it seems to be producing a higher velocity of movement in the polls and in the tenor of media coverage. Read the rest of this entry »
pundit from another planet 