[VIDEO] MONTAGE: Zuckerberg Promises ‘More AI Tools’
Posted: April 12, 2018 Filed under: Entertainment, Law & Justice, Mediasphere, Politics, U.S. News | Tags: Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, video Leave a comment
Amber Athey reports: Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has a simple solution for most of the problems presented to him by Congress: “more AI tools.”
Zuckerberg repeatedly stressed Facebook’s growing focus on artificial intelligence during his testimony Read the rest of this entry »
[VIDEO] MONTAGE: Zuckerberg Doesn’t Know — His ‘Team’ Will ‘Follow Up’
Posted: April 11, 2018 Filed under: Entertainment, Humor, Law & Justice, Mediasphere, Politics, Science & Technology, U.S. News | Tags: Congress, Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, media, video Leave a comment
During Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance before two Congressional committees, it was unclear whether the Facebook CEO knew the answer to ANYTHING. Don’t worry though, his ‘team’ will be sure to follow-up.
Peggy Noonan Channels Jordan Peterson: ‘If Adults Won’t Grow Up, Nobody Will’
Posted: April 6, 2018 Filed under: Health and Social Issues, History, Mediasphere, Think Tank | Tags: Adulthood, Facebook, Harvey Weinstein, Jordan Peters, Laura Ingraham, Mark Zuckerberg, PEGGY NOONAN, WSJ Leave a comment
From Facebook to Harvey Weinstein, America’s scandals amount to a giant crisis of maturity.
“The signal fact of Mr. Zuckerberg is that he is supremely gifted in one area—monetizing technical expertise by marrying it to a canny sense of human weakness. Beyond that, what a shallow and banal figure.”
It has to do with not being able to fully reckon with your size, not because it is small but because it is big. I see more people trembling under the weight of who they are.
Clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson has been on this message for years. Are voices like his finally being being heard?
Laura Ingraham got in trouble for publicly mocking one of the student gun-control activists of Parkland, Fla. She’s been unjustly targeted for boycotts, but it’s fair to say she was wrong in what she said, and said it because she didn’t remember 
who she is. She is a successful and veteran media figure, host of a cable show that bears her name. As such she is a setter of the sound of our culture as it discusses politics. When you’re that person, you don’t smack around a 17-year-old, even if—maybe especially if—he is obnoxious in his presentation of his public self. He’s a kid. They’re not infrequently obnoxious, because they are not fully mature. He’s small, you’re big. There’s a power imbalance.
As of this week, it is six months since the reckoning that began with the New York Times exposé of Harvey Weinstein. One by one they fell, men in media, often journalism, and their stories bear at least in part a general theme.
They were mostly great successes, middle-aged, and so natural leaders of the young. But they treated the young as prey. They didn’t respect them, in part because they didn’t respect themselves. They didn’t see their true size, their role, or they ignored it. Read the rest of this entry »
What’s ‘Genius’ for Obama is Scandal When it Comes to Trump
Posted: March 21, 2018 Filed under: Censorship, Mediasphere, Politics, White House | Tags: Barack Obama, Cambridge Analytica, Democrats, Donald Trump, Facebook, Facebook’s algorithm, journalism, Mark Zuckerberg, media 1 Comment
The scandal involving Cambridge Analytica’s abuse of Facebook data underscores the point.
Ben Shapiro writes:
… In 2012, The Guardian reported that President Obama’s reelection team was “building a vast digital data operation that for the first time combines a unified database on millions of Americans with the power of Facebook to target individual voters to a degree never achieved before.”
… Facebook had no problem with such activity then. They do now. There’s a reason for that. The former Obama director of integration and media analytics stated that, during the 2012 campaign, Facebook allowed the Obama team to “suck out the whole social graph”; Facebook “was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing.” She added, “They came to [the] office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.”
Not so with Trump. As soon as Facebook realized that Cambridge Analytica had pursued a similar strategy, they suspended the firm.
This whole hullaballoo about Facebook isn’t complicated.
1. Trump wins.
2. Democrats/Left declare social media in “crisis,” threaten legislation.
3. Social media heads punish conservatives.— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) March 20, 2018
Again, this isn’t surprising. Since Trump’s election, Democrats — in search of a rationale for their favored candidate’s defeat — have blamed a bevy of social media outlets. Senate Democrats trotted out pathetic Russian-created memes on Facebook, viewed by a handful of human beings, as an excuse for Hillary’s loss; Democrats claimed — without evidence — that “fake news” had swamped Facebook and thus led to Trump’s victory. Democrats have also insisted that Facebook be regulated. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) raged, “You’ve created these platforms, and now they’re being misused, and you have to be the ones to do something about it. Or we will.” Facebook’s former privacy manager called for the government to step into an oversight role regarding Facebook.
[Read the full story here, at TheHill]
In February, Wired magazine ran a cover story specifically dealing with Facebook’s role in the election of 2016, and their subsequent attempts to “fix” the problem. After the election, Mark Zuckerberg even met with Barack Obama, apparently in an attempt to convince Obama that he was serious about stopping the “misuse” of the platform. And in February, Zuckerberg said he wanted to re-jigger the algorithms on his platform to benefit content that Facebook deems “trustworthy, informative, and local.” Wired celebrated: “You can’t make the world more open and connected if you’re breaking it apart.” Read the rest of this entry »
Zuckerberg’s Dilemma: When Facebook’s Success Is Bad for Society
Posted: January 8, 2018 Filed under: Censorship, Health and Social Issues, Mediasphere, Politics | Tags: Content Moderators, Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, media, Mental health, Snapchat, Social media, Twitter Leave a comment
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg met with entrepreneurs and innovators at a round-table discussion in St. Louis on Nov. 9. Photo: Jeff Roberson/Associated Press
Facebook’s chief has signaled he will do what it takes to curb the social network’s negative effects—but how far will he go?
Christopher Mims reports: When scientists started linking cigarettes to cancer, the tobacco industry silenced them—only acknowledging the extent of the truth decades later, under legal duress.
Imagine if, instead, they had given these researchers license to publish papers, or even taken the information to heart and crippled their own moneymaking machines for the good of their addicted users.
No one has accused Facebook FB 1.37% of causing cancer, but Mark Zuckerberg now stands at a similar crossroads.
In the face of pressure brought by a growing roster of Facebook investors and former executives, many of whom have publicly stated that Facebook is both psychologically addictive and harmful to democracy, the Facebook founder and chief executive has pledged to “fix” Facebook by doing several things, including “making sure that time spent on Facebook is time well spent.”
Mr. Zuckerberg has also recently told investors he wants his company “to encourage meaningful social interactions,” adding that “time spent is not a goal by itself.”
Facebook researchers have acknowledged that while direct sharing between individuals and small groups on Facebook can have positive effects, merely scrolling through others’ updates makes people unhappy. Photo: ISTOCK
So here’s the multibillion-dollar question: Is he willing to sacrifice revenue for the well-being of Facebook’s two-billion-plus users?
Mr. Zuckerberg has already said the company will hire so many content moderators to deal with fake news and Russian interference that it will hurt profit, but whether he will go further and change the basic fabric of Facebook’s algorithms in the name of users’ mental health, he has yet to say.
[Read the full story here, at WSJ]
Clearly, Facebook, a company Mr. Zuckerberg started when he was in college, has changed so much that even its creator is playing catch-up to the reality of its globe-spanning power.
In June, he changed the company’s mission from “connecting” the world to bringing the world closer together. He said he used to think giving people a voice would make the world better on its own, “but our society is still divided. Now I believe we have a responsibility to do even more.”
In December, Facebook researchers surveyed the scientific literature and their own work and publicly acknowledged that while direct communication and sharing between individuals and small groups on Facebook can have positive effects, merely lurking and scrolling through others’ status updates makes people unhappy. 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 »
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 »
Social Media Is Killing Discourse Because It’s Too Much Like TV
Posted: November 29, 2016 Filed under: Art & Culture, Censorship, Entertainment, Health and Social Issues, Mediasphere, Politics, Think Tank | Tags: 2016, Ali Khamenei, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, News satire, propaganda, Social media, The Wall Street Journal, Twitter, United States presidential election Leave a comment
We need more text and fewer videos and memes in the age of Trump.
Hossein Derakshan writes: If I say that social media aided Donald Trump’s election,
you might think of fake news on Facebook. But even if Facebook fixes the algorithms that elevate phony stories, there’s something else going on: social media represents the ultimate ascendance of television over other media.
I’ve been warning about this since November 2014, when I was freed from six years of incarceration in Tehran, a punishment I received for my online activism in Iran. Before I went to prison, I blogged frequently on what I now call the open Web: it was
decentralized, text-centered, and abundant with 
hyperlinks to source material and rich background. It nurtured varying opinions. It was related to the world of books.
[Order Neil Postman’s book “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business” from Amazon.com]
Then for six years I got disconnected; when I left prison and came back online, I was confronted by a brave new world. Facebook and Twitter had replaced blogging and had made the Internet like TV: centralized and image-centered, with content embedded in pictures, without links.
[Read the full story here, at technologyreview.com]
Like TV it now increasingly entertains us, and even more so than television it amplifies our existing beliefs and habits. It makes us feel more than think, and it comforts more than challenges. The result is a deeply fragmented society, driven by emotions, and radicalized by lack of contact and challenge from outside. This is why Oxford Dictionaries designated “post-truth” as the word of 2016: an adjective “relating to circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than emotional appeals.”
Neil Postman provided some clues about this in his illuminating 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. The media scholar at New York University saw then how television transformed public discourse into an exchange of volatile emotions that are usually mistaken by pollsters as opinion. One of the scariest outcomes of this transition, Postman wrote, is that television essentially turns all news into disinformation. “Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information—misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information—information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing … The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining.” (Emphasis added.) And, Postman argued, when news is constructed as a form of entertainment, it inevitably loses its function for a healthy democracy. “I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?” Read the rest of this entry »
Forget the FBI Cache; the Podesta Emails Show How America is Run
Posted: November 1, 2016 Filed under: Breaking News, Crime & Corruption, Mediasphere, Politics, Think Tank | Tags: Anthony Weiner, Classified information, Clinton Foundation, Democratic Party (United States), Donald Trump presidential campaign, Facebook, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, Huma Abedin, James Comey, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Sexting, Silicon Valley, WikiLeaks 2 Comments
WikiLeaks’ dump of messages to and from Clinton’s campaign chief offer an unprecedented view into the workings of the elite, and how it looks after itself.
Thomas Frank writes: The emails currently are part of some unknown digital collection amassed by the troublesome Anthony Weiner, but if your purpose is to understand the clique of people who dominate Washington today, the emails that really matter are the ones being from the hacked account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta. They are last week’s scandal in a year running over with scandals, but in truth their significance goes far beyond mere scandal: they are a window into the soul of the Democratic party and into the dreams and thoughts of the class to whom the party answers.
“When you search ‘Vineyard’ on the WikiLeaks dump that you realize these people truly inhabit a different world from the rest of us. By ‘vineyard’, of course, they mean Martha’s Vineyard, the ritzy vacation resort island off the coast of Massachusetts where presidents Clinton and Obama spent most of their summer vacations. The Vineyard is a place for the very, very rich to unwind, yes, but as we learn from these emails, it is also a place of high idealism; a land of enlightened liberal commitment far beyond anything ordinary citizens can ever achieve.”
The class to which I refer is not rising in angry protest; they are by and large pretty satisfied, pretty contented. Nobody takes road trips to exotic West Virginia to see what the members of this class looks like or how they live; on the contrary, they are the ones for whom such stories are written. This bunch doesn’t have to make do with a comb-over TV mountebank for a leader; for this class, the choices are always pretty good, and this year they happen to be excellent.
“Everything blurs into everything else in this world. The state department, the banks, Silicon Valley, the nonprofits, the “Global CEO Advisory Firm” that appears to have solicited donations for the Clinton Foundation. Executives here go from foundation to government to thinktank to startup. There are honors. Venture capital. Foundation grants. Endowed chairs. Advanced degrees. For them the door revolves. The friends all succeed. They break every boundary.”
They are the comfortable and well-educated mainstay of our modern Democratic party. They are also the grandees of our national media; the architects of our software; the designers of our streets; the high officials of our banking system; the authors of just about every plan to fix social security or fine-tune the Middle East with precision droning. They are, they think, not a class at all but rather the enlightened ones, the people who must be answered to but who need never explain themselves.
Let us turn the magnifying glass on them for a change, by sorting through the hacked personal emails of John Podesta, who has been a Washington power broker for decades. I admit that I feel uncomfortable digging through this hoard; stealing someone’s email is a crime, after all, and it is outrageous that people’s personal information has been exposed, since WikiLeaks doesn’t seem to have redacted the emails in any way.
[Read the full story here, at The Guardian]
There is also the issue of authenticity to contend with: we don’t know absolutely and for sure that these emails were not tampered with by whoever stole them from John Podesta. The supposed authors of the messages are refusing to confirm or deny their authenticity, and though they seem to be real, there is a small possibility they aren’t.
“The dramatis personae of the liberal class are all present in this amazing body of work: financial innovators. High-achieving colleagues attempting to get jobs for their high-achieving children. Foundation executives doing fine and noble things. Prizes, of course, and high academic achievement.”
With all that taken into consideration, I think the WikiLeaks releases furnish us with an opportunity to observe the upper reaches of the American status hierarchy in all its righteousness and majesty.
The dramatis personae of the liberal class are all present in this amazing body of work: financial innovators. High-achieving colleagues attempting to get jobs for their high-achieving children. Foundation executives doing fine and noble things. Prizes, of course, and high academic achievement. Read the rest of this entry »
Mark Zuckerberg’s Long March to China
Posted: October 29, 2016 Filed under: Asia, China, Science & Technology, Think Tank | Tags: Beijing, BRICS, China, Communist Party of China, Deng Xiaoping, Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, President of the People's Republic of China, The Social Network, Xi Jinping Leave a comment
The Chinese government likes to control social media and what people do with it—but Facebook looks willing to launch in China anyway.
Emily Parker writes: For U.S. Internet businesses, China is the land of moral defeat. Many people hoped that Western technology companies would loosen China’s control over information. Instead, those companies have willingly participated in efforts to censor citizens’ speech. Yahoo gave Chinese authorities information about democracy activists, landing them in jail. Microsoft shut down the blog of prominent media-freedom activist Michael Anti. Google censored search results that were politically sensitive in China. In 2006, those three companies came before Congress and were accused by a subcommittee chairman of “sickening collaboration” with the Chinese government. Google shut down its mainland Chinese search engine in 2010, publicly complaining about censorship and cybersecurity.
“The number of Chinese Internet users has surged to some 700 million, and they represent a valuable untapped resource for American companies with saturated, highly competitive home markets. But the Communist Party’s attempts to control information have also grown more intense.”
Facebook has been blocked in China since 2009, and its Instagram photo-sharing service was blocked in 2014. I once thought that it would be disastrous or impossible for the social network to try a Chinese adventure of its own, and some China experts still believe that to be true. But a Facebook launch in China now looks probable.
Facebook’s founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has signaled to Beijing that he’s willing to do what it takes to get into the country. People who know the company well think it will happen. “It’s not an if, it’s a when,” says Tim Sparapani, who was Facebook’s first director of public policy and is now principal at SPQR Strategies, a consulting firm. Facebook declined to comment for this article, but Zuckerberg said last year: “You can’t have a mission to want to connect everyone in the world and leave out the biggest country.”
[Read the full story here, at MIT – technologyreview.com]
A decade after Google’s hopeful but ill-fated entry into China, U.S. Internet companies may see the Chinese market as even more tantalizing—yet impenetrable. The number of Chinese Internet users has surged to some 700 million, and they represent a valuable untapped resource for American companies with saturated, highly competitive home markets. But the Communist Party’s attempts to control information have also grown more intense. In addition to the “Great Firewall” that blocks access to foreign websites, legions of human censors, many employed at Internet companies, police domestic blogs and social networks. And a U.S. company would now have to compete with China’s own Internet giants. WeChat, a messaging app from the behemoth Tencent, has hundreds of millions of users.
Zuckerberg clearly thinks China is worth the trouble, even if that means leaving some “Western values” at the door. Earlier this year, he traveled to Beijing and had a high-profile meeting with China’s propaganda chief, Liu Yunshan. Chinese state media reported that Facebook’s founder praised China’s Internet progress and pledged to work with the government to create a better cyberspace. Liu highlighted the notion of Internet governance “with Chinese characteristics.” The translation was clear: a Chinese version of Facebook would definitely be censored. This year’s trip was something of a sequel. In 2014, he hosted Lu Wei, minister of the Cyberspace Administration of China, at Facebook’s offices. President Xi Jinping’s book The Governance of China just happened to be on Zuckerberg’s desk.
[Read the full text here, at MIT – technologyreview.com]
This courtship hasn’t been without some awkward moments. When Zuckerberg posted a photo of himself cheerfully jogging through the polluted haze of Tiananmen Squarethis year, he was mocked on Chinese social media. But overall he has made the right moves, says Cheng Li, director of the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution. “Chinese leaders pay a lot of attention to personal relationships,” he says. “They think Mark Zuckerberg is a friend of China. He’s successful. He’s very China-friendly. He has a Chinese wife. He speaks Chinese. So what else do you want?”
At your service
Facebook will still have to overcome Beijing’s suspicions that American Internet companies could destabilize the Communist Party’s rule. Media outlets that described the Arab Spring as the “Facebook Revolution” didn’t do the company any favors. And documents leaked by the former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden fueled Chinese suspicions that American technology companies had “back doors” for U.S. government surveillance. Read the rest of this entry »
[VIDEO] How the Federal Government Is Killing Free Speech on Campus
Posted: June 2, 2016 Filed under: Censorship, Education, History, Mediasphere, Politics, Think Tank | Tags: Campus, college, Facebook, Freedom of speech, Internet, Jim DeMint, Knowledge spillover, Mark Zuckerberg, Matt Welch, Reason (magazine), Robby Soave, The Washington Free Beacon, United States, University Leave a comment
“The vocal minority of students who actually want censorship—who want to be protected from ideas they don’t like—they’ve always existed,” says Reason associate editor Robby Soave. “But in the last five years they have gained institutional power on these campuses.”
From microaggressions and trigger warnings, to the shouting down and assault of controversial speakers, the climate on American college campuses have shifted sharply away from the classical understanding of free speech and inquiry that were once the bedrock of higher education.
Soave, who reports on political correctness and on college campuses for Reason, sat down with Reason magazine Editor-in-Chief Matt Welch at Reason Weekend, the annual event hosted by the Reason Foundation, to talk about the state of free speech on American colleges and universities.
Edited by Alex Manning. Camera by Paul Detrick and Todd Kranin
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?
Robotic Sports: Ready for Prime Time
Posted: July 28, 2015 Filed under: Entertainment, Robotics | Tags: Anonymous (group), Apple TV, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Artificial Intelligence, Bitcoin, Central Intelligence Agency, Comedy Central, ESPN, Facebook, Fox Sports (United States), IOS, Mark Zuckerberg, Monday Night Football, National Football League, NFL Game Pass, United States Leave a comment
Robotic Sports Will One Day Rival the NFL
Cody Brown writes: When I was 13, I watched a season of Battle Bots on Comedy Central then attempted to build a killer robot in my parent’s basement. You might think, oh, you were probably a weird kid (and you’d be right) but I think eventually this is behavior that will become normal for people all around the world. It’s had some moments in the spotlight but a bunch of factors make it seem like robotic sports is destined for primetime ESPN in the next five years.
1.) A drone flying through the forest looks incredible at 80 mph.
A new class of bot (FPV Quadcopter) has emerged in the past few years and the footage they produce is nuts. Robots can do things we’re fascinated by but can’t generally achieve without risking our own lives. Drones the size of a dinner plate can zoom through a forest like a 3 pound insect. A bot that shoots flames can blow up a rival in a plexiglass cage.
You can make an argument that the *thrill* of these moments is lightened if a person isn’t risking their own life and limb and this is true to a certain extent. NASCAR crashes are inherently dramatic but you don’t need to burn drivers to make fans scream.
Just look at the rise of e-sports. This League of Legends team sits in an air conditioned bubble and sips Red Bull while a sold out arena screams their lungs out. They’re not in any physical danger but 31 million fans are watching online.
The thing that ultimately matters is that the sport looks incredible on video and fans have a connection to the players. And right now, the video, in raw form, is mesmerizing.
2.) Robot parts have gotten cheaper, better and easier to buy.
When I was a kid, I was limited to things available at the local Radio Shack or hardware store. Now I can go to Amazon, find parts with amazing reviews and have them delivered to my house in a day. The hobby community has had many years to develop its technology and increase quality. Brands like Fat Shark, Spektrum, and adafruit have lead the way.
3.) Top colleges fight over teenagers who win robotics competitions.
If you’re good at building a robot, chances are you have a knack for engineering, math, physics, and a litany of other skills top colleges drool over. This is exciting for anyone (at any age) but it’s especially relevant for students and parents deciding what is worth their investment.
There are already some schools that offer scholarships for e-sports. I wouldn’t be surprised if intercollegiate leagues were some of the first to pop up with traction.
4.) The military wants to get better at making robots for the battlefield.
This one is a little f***ed but it’s worth acknowledging. Drones (of all sizes) are the primary technology changing the battlefield today. DARPA has an overwhelming interest to stay current and they’re already sponsoring multimillion dollar (more academic) robotics competitions. It’s up to the community to figure out how (or how not) to involve them. Them, meaning the giant military apparatus of the United States but also military organizations around the world who want to develop and recruit the people who will power their 21st century defense (and offense). Read the rest of this entry »
Senator Sessions: Zuckerberg Spent $30 Million on Four Houses to Secure HIS Borders
Posted: September 13, 2014 Filed under: Mediasphere, Politics, U.S. News | Tags: Facebook, Jeff Sessions, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, Mexico City, Open border, United States, Zuckerberg Leave a comment
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) blasted pro-amnesty billionaires whose fondness for open borders ends at the doors of their “gated compounds and fenced-off communities,” noting how Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg bought other four houses surrounding his own just because he wanted “a little privacy.”
“Well, the ‘masters of the universe’ are very fond of open borders as long as these open borders don’t extend to their gated compounds and fenced-off estates.”
Sessions began by rebuking Zuckerberg – one of the billionaire elites he has dubbed “Masters of the Universe” – for going to Mexico City and giving a speech claiming that America’s immigration policy is “strange” and “unfit for today’s world.”
“Well, the ‘masters of the universe’ are very fond of open borders as long as these open borders don’t extend to their gated compounds and fenced-off estates,” Sessions said.
As an example of the hypocrisy of these “Masters,” Sessions then recalled how Zuckerberg bought four houses surrounding his own to keep people from crossing his borders and secure “a little privacy”: Read the rest of this entry »
Behind Closed Doors: White House Meets with Big Business Lobbyists Crafting Executive Actions to Increase Guest-Worker Visas
Posted: August 19, 2014 Filed under: Breaking News, Economics, Health and Social Issues, U.S. News, White House | Tags: Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Compete America, Jeff Session, Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft, Obama, Politico, White House 1 Comment
“Beto Cardenas, who represents big-business interests… ‘was encouraged to hear that nothing was off the table’.”
For Breitbart, Tony Lee reporting: After White House officials reportedly met with big-business groups, President Barack Obama is considering executive actions that will give them more guest-worker visas in the high-tech and low-skilled sectors.
“America does not have a shortage of high-tech workers. Even mainstream media outlets like CBS News concluded that the notion of such a shortage ‘is largely a myth’.”
This may come on top of Obama’s potential grants of amnesty and work permits to millions of illegal immigrants in the country. While outside groups are urging Obama to “go big,” Senate Democrats have expressed some concerns of late, as poll numbers have shown that executive amnesty may cost them control of the Senate. The White House is reportedly reaching out to big-business groups on guest-worker visas so they can give Obama air cover on his potential executive amnesty.
“Cisco recently slashed another 6,000 jobs after pushing for amnesty legislation.”
According to a Politico report, senior White House aides earlier this month met with “more than a dozen business groups and company officials to discuss potential immigration policy changes they could make.” According to the outlet, “Oracle, Cisco, Fwd.US, Microsoft, Accenture, Compete America, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce” were represented at the meeting. Read the rest of this entry »
Report: Zuckerberg’s Connections, Millions Couldn’t Defeat Tea Party on Amnesty
Posted: July 8, 2014 Filed under: Mediasphere, Politics, U.S. News | Tags: Barack Obama, Eric Cantor, Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, National Republican Senatorial Committee, Renee Ellmers, United States 3 Comments
For Breitbart.com, Tony Lee reports: Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg‘s connections and millions could not defeat the Tea Party to pass comprehensive amnesty legislation this year.
Politico concluded that “Zuckerberg’s immigration reform push had all the capital, connections and star power to merit success,” but “not even Silicon Valley could make this investment — and the Facebook founder’s first foray into national politics — pay off.”
Zuckerberg’s FWD.us reportedly “surpassed its $50 million fundraising goal Zuckerberg set and has almost $25 million still squirreled away.” According to Politico, “much of the money went to media buys,” including a deceptive $150,000 ad buy in North Carolina that declared pro-amnesty Rep. Renee Ellmers (R-NC) was against amnesty to ensure that she would win her primary. But despite some small wins, the group, Politico notes, learned some “sobering lessons” of Washington.
One big lesson is that the record number of Americans who hate Congress also despise the bipartisan “Boomtown” elites Zuckerberg courted to pass amnesty legislation. Read the rest of this entry »
The Slow Death of American Entrepreneurship
Posted: May 15, 2014 Filed under: Economics, Think Tank, U.S. News | Tags: Brookings Institution, Business, Census Bureau, Economy of the United States, FiveThirtyEight, Mark Zuckerberg, Startup company, United States Census Bureau Leave a comment
For FiveThirtyEight, Ben Casselman writes: Mark Zuckerberg was a billionaire before age 30 and investors are fretting over the prospect of an another tech bubble, but according to the data, U.S. entrepreneurship is on the decline.
“Business dynamism is inherently disruptive, but it is also critical to long-run economic growth.”
Americans started 27 percent fewer businesses in 2011 than they did five years earlier, according to data from the Census Bureau. As a share of all companies, startups have been declining for more than 30 years.
It isn’t clear what’s causing that decline, which accelerated during the recession but long predates it. The aging of the baby boom generation may be part of the explanation, since people are more likely to start businesses when they are younger. The U.S. economy is also increasingly dominated by large corporations, suggesting deeper structural changes working against small companies. People have pointed to other explanations, from increasing licensure requirements in many industries to high corporate tax rates to a broader decline in innovation and productivity growth.
Whatever the reason, the decline has economists worried. New businesses are akey driver of job growth, responsible for more than 15 percent of new job creation despite accounting for just 2 percent of total employment. And they play a vital role in promoting innovation and productivity gains across the economy. In a recent report from the Brookings Institution, Ian Hathaway and Robert Litan wrote that the decline in entrepreneurship “points to a U.S. economy that has steadily become less dynamic over time.” Read the rest of this entry »
Zuckerberg Says He Called Obama To Express Frustration Over NSA Surveillance
Posted: March 13, 2014 Filed under: Mediasphere, Politics, White House | Tags: Barack Obama, Facebook, Federal government of the United States, Mark Zuckerberg, National Security Agency, United States, US government, Zuckerberg 1 Comment
Happier times: Zuckerberg sitting to Obama’s right at a White House dinner in 2011.
Andy Greenberg writes: Mark Zuckerberg isn’t the first name that comes to mind as a champion of privacy. But the seemingly endless revelations of NSA surveillance programs has inspired Facebook’s founder to call up no less than President Obama himself to defend his users from government intrusion.
“They need to be much more transparent about what they’re doing, or otherwise people will believe the worst…”
— Zuckerberg’s statement
On Thursday Zuckerberg posted a statement on Facebook calling on the U.S. government to take more measures to respect users’ privacy and security. “The US government should be the champion for the internet, not a threat,” reads his statement. “I’ve called President Obama to express my frustration over the damage the government is creating for all of our future. Unfortunately, it seems like it will take a very long time for true full reform.”
“We work together to create this secure environment and make our shared space even better for the world,” Zuckerberg’s statement reads. “This is why I’ve been so confused and frustrated by the repeated reports of the behavior of the US government…”
Though Zuckerberg never explicitly names the NSA in his statement, his comments follow news of NSA programs that have potentially allowed spying on Facebook users for years–particularly the majority of those users outside the United States. The initial stories on the NSA’s PRISM program last July cited NSA slides that made Facebook appear to have given direct backdoor access to its servers, a notion Zuckerberg and others have vehemently denied.
[Check out Andy Greenberg’s book “This Machine Kills Secrets: Julian Assange, the Cypherpunks, and Their Fight to Empower Whistleblowers” at Amazon]
Former Democrat Operative Helped Prepare Mark Zuckerberg’s Amnesty Pitch to GOP
Posted: February 5, 2014 Filed under: Politics, U.S. News | Tags: Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Facebook, FWD.us, Jennifer Martin, Mark Zuckerberg 1 Comment
Brietbart.com’s Matthew Boyle reports: FWD.us, the pro-amnesty brainchild of Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, made a big splash at the House GOP retreat last week in Cambridge, Maryland, with a packet distributed to every lawmaker touting the benefits of a big, comprehensive reform bill.
However, the Republicans who received the document might be interested to learn that one of its co-authors is a hardened Democratic party operative.
According to the file properties of a near-final version of the Microsoft Word version of the document obtained by Breitbart News, FWD.us staffer Jennifer Martin was at one point the last person to modify it.
Martin is a “field coordinator” at Zuckerberg’s lobbying group, according to her LinkedIn page.
Reality Check: Amnesty is Not a Civil Right
Posted: January 6, 2014 Filed under: Economics, Global, Law & Justice, Mediasphere | Tags: illegalimmigration, Immigration, Jeff Sessions, Mark Zuckerberg, Obama, Obama administration, Peter Kirsanow, United States, White House 3 CommentsCrowding Out U.S. Workers
The GOP needs to oppose the White House’s immigration plan and expose its flaws
Jeff Sessions writes: Several prominent amnesty advocates, including Mark Zuckerberg and top Obama administration officials, have argued that amnesty is a civil right. The claim is, of course, preposterous on its face. Under this reasoning, every immigrant currently living in the U.S. on a temporary visa has the right to refuse to leave when that visa expires. And every household in a foreign country has the right to enter the U.S. illegally tomorrow and demand the Obama administration’s amnesty for “DREAMers” and their relatives.
To say that amnesty is a civil right is to effectively declare to the world the right to enter the United States without permission, to bring one’s family, and to receive all of the financial benefits our nation provides. To say that one has a right to freely violate our immigration laws is to deny the very idea that a nation can establish enforceable borders.
Mr. Zuckerberg’s motivation is not elusive. He heads a lobbying group representing many of his industry’s wealthiest CEOs, and their companies wish to extract generous guest-worker programs from Congress. Similar efforts are underway from other CEOs seeking new workers for everything from manufacturing to construction to restaurant jobs. Presumably, Mr. Zuckerberg believes it is more advantageous to frame the group’s lobbying as a civil-rights crusade than as a corporate crusade for lower-cost foreign labor.
The Real Privacy Problem
Posted: October 24, 2013 Filed under: History, Science & Technology, Think Tank | Tags: Cass Sunstein, Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, Paul Baran, Privacy, Public Interest Leave a comment
Our Privacy Problem is a Democracy Problem in Disguise Illustration by Steve Powers
For MIT Technology Review, Evgeny Morozov writes: In 1967, The Public Interest, then a leading venue for highbrow policy debate, published a provocative essay by Paul Baran, one of the fathers of the data transmission method known as packet switching. Titled “The Future Computer Utility,” the essay speculated that someday a few big, centralized computers would provide “information processing … the same way one now buys electricity.”
Our home computer console will be used to send and receive messages—like telegrams. We could check to see whether the local department store has the advertised sports shirt in stock in the desired color and size. We could ask when delivery would be guaranteed, if we ordered. The information would be up-to-the-minute and accurate. We could pay our bills and compute our taxes via the console. We would ask questions and receive answers from “information banks”—automated versions of today’s libraries. We would obtain up-to-the-minute listing of all television and radio programs … The computer could, itself, send a message to remind us of an impending anniversary and save us from the disastrous consequences of forgetfulness.
It took decades for cloud computing to fulfill Baran’s vision. But he was prescient enough to worry that utility computing would need its own regulatory model. Here was an employee of the RAND Corporation—hardly a redoubt of Marxist thought—fretting about the concentration of market power in the hands of large computer utilities and demanding state intervention. Baran also wanted policies that could “offer maximum protection to the preservation of the rights of privacy of information”:
Highly sensitive personal and important business information will be stored in many of the contemplated systems … At present, nothing more than trust—or, at best, a lack of technical sophistication—stands in the way of a would-be eavesdropper … Today we lack the mechanisms to insure adequate safeguards. Because of the difficulty in rebuilding complex systems to incorporate safeguards at a later date, it appears desirable to anticipate these problems.
Sharp, bullshit-free analysis: techno-futurism has been in decline ever since.
Happy 64th, George Orwells 1984!
Posted: June 10, 2013 Filed under: Mediasphere | Tags: Barack Obama, Facebook, George Orwell, Google, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, Obama, United States Leave a commentShepard Faires Obama-Poster to fit PRISM.
What’s this stuff in German say? Beats me. But what a great poster. — The Butcher
Ich habe heute jede Menge Sachen zum Überwachungsmonster PRISM gelesen, heute, am 64. Geburtstag von George Orwells 1984 (!), das am 8. Juni 1949 zum ersten mal veröffentlicht wurde. Und weil ich ja heute sehr viel Zeit hatte, da dank eines größeren Ausfalls bei Host Europe die Seite down war, habe ich Shepard Fairys Obama-Poster für das Jahr 2013 aktualisiert. Ich hab’ sogar ein Allsehendes Auge an Stelle von Obey Giants Signet in die linke untere Ecke gepackt, damit das auch wirklich stimmig ist. Hier das Original zum Vergleich, hier das Baby in HighRes. Der Post hier ist ein bisschen länger und hat am Ende jede Menge Links zum Thema, da sind auch jede Menge obskure Sachen dabei, wie PRISM-Designkritik und sowas.
Mark Zuckerberg und Larry Page streiten selbstverständlich alles ab, der eine auf Facebook,der andere auf Google Bloggingplattform, und beide benutzen auffällig gleiche Formulierungen. Von Anwälten glattgerührte, oberflächliche Ausflüchte oder anders formuliert: Bullshit. Von Techcrunch:
The New York Times says you knowingly participated in the NSA’s data monitoring program. In some cases, you were asked to create ”a locked mailbox and give the government the key”, to allow it to peer into private communications and web activity. Even if the exact words of your denials were accurate, they seemed to obscure the scope of your involvement with PRISM. Outlining as clearly as possible exactly what kind of data the government could attain would have gone a long way.
But you were probably cornered by Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act restrictions about what you could say about PRISM. And in fact, you might have beeen subtly trying to fight back by asking the government for more transparency. When you decode Mark’s statement “We strongly encourage all governments to be much more transparent about all programs aimed at keeping the public safe”, I hear “Our hands are cuffed. Only the government can reveal that we participated. We wish they would.”
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