Slashdot Mirror
Automated News Crawling Evaporates $1.14B
cmd writes "The Wall Street Journal reports that Google News crawled an obscure reprint of an article from 2002 when United Airlines was on the brink of bankruptcy. United Airlines has since recovered but due to a missing dateline, Google News ran the story as today's news. The story was then picked up by other news aggregators and eventually headlined as a news flash on Bloomberg. This triggered automated trading programs to dump UAL, cratering the stock from $12 to $3 and evaporating 1.14 billion dollars (nearly United's total market cap today) in shareholder wealth. The stock recovered within the day to $10 and is now trading at $9.62, a market cap of $300M less than before Google ran the story." The article makes clear that Google's news bot only noticed the old story because it has been voted up in popularity on the site of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper. The original thought was that stock manipulation may have been behind the incident, but this suspicion seems to be fading.
... the power of the GOOG!!
There is a war going on for your mind.
When you're talking about numbers like that then there is definitely a responsibility somewhere to try to prevent it happening again.
...perhaps they'll be more careful about whose luggage they lose.
This was posted yesterday in Idle and cites the Chicago Tribune as running the old article.
Time to stop using you xBox to run your financial empire, kids. Get the grizzled old traders back and fire the children.
I laughed so hard my coworkers made me go outside.
I love Google.
ed duval the very last person
Slashdot Idle had this story 24 hours before the main page.....
"I planned within my means and got a fixed rate mortgage, so where's MY bailout?" -cafepress
So the NewsBots trick the TradeBots, and we humans are left on the sidelines, hoping that we don't get squished in the process.
Sounds like a sad Transformers sequel.
A post a day keeps productivity at bay.
"Google regrets the error." What, it always works for the New York Times!
It would be so awesome if the Google news bot was able to dig up some old dirt on Google that would make it's ~$450 per share stock crater... that would be an awesome site to behold.
I doubt it'll happen, since there haven't been any previously bad financial reports that could come back and masquerade as current news, but you never know.
It also serves to show how fragile our financial system is (just read the "what if" reports on what would have happened if Fannie Mac/Freddie Mae were allowed to go under... it would have been BAD). Sure, United gained back most of its value but it's still down a good bit of cash. It reminds me of when Abbie Hoffman threw a bunch of $1 bills onto the NYSE trading floor and TRADING STOPPED as the floor traders ran around picking up the bills.
Live by the sword, die by the sword.
It's because google is going to launch their own airline.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Schmidt. Your flight has been delayed by two hours."
"Son of a... do you people know who I am? Dammit, get Brin on the phone."
I've noticed a few time lately that the BBC News site's 'most read' list contains stories from years ago. It's very misleading because the links are on the main news page and the date, although present at the top of each story, is fairly subdued. I've been caught out a couple of times by this. Of course, once a story gets on the 'most read' list everyone clicks on it pushing it further up the list and prolonging its being there.
I'll have to point to this next time someone finds an error on my website.
Thats a LOT of money.
Never happen.
Every brokerage house in the country is increasing their presence in "Automated Trading". The majority of these companies income is now made on small percentage point fluctuations brokered very fast. With the automated systems pulling in that much more money than the traditional ones, and with more algorithms being designed (and held as proprietary info), what would YOU do?
Ridiculous? Yes. Not going away? Also Yes.
Might as well vote to bring back the horse drawn carriage since the price of gas has risen so much lately.
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
After reading TFA, it sounds like google is LEAST to blame out of the many many automated systems involved. First of all, the damn story should have been dated. That's the tribune's fault. Google doesn't seem to have claimed it as today's news, only ranked it high up. No one should have ever reprinted the story without actually CHECKING WITH UNITED AIR FIRST. That's neither google nor the tribune's fault. That's every service that reprinted the story as new without verifying its fault. Google and tribune seem least at fault because neither ever gave any indication it was a new story.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
Google better bot-up its legal team.
Google News crawled an obscure reprint...
The story was then picked up by other news aggregators...
This triggered automated trading programs...
Is there even a live person at the wheel anymore? Or is SkyNet just fucking with us now?
Never approach a vast undertaking with a half-vast plan.
That's more likely than you think. The equity lost by those dumping the stock automatically (for a loss) will be tragic for those involved. On the other hand, the sharp traders who noticed what happened and bought at the discounted price had turned a tidy profit by the end of the day. All in all, a day later the stock is right back to riding the whim of the indexes and no one other than those who traded in that window are affected.
Cautionary tale for the Web 2.0/semantic web or whatever they are calling it now.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
"It's my first day."
I'm glad I picked up 4000 shares of United at $3 a share. Cheers!
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
So the question becomes, how can we replicate this issue at the time of our choosing and tank a stock to buy it up? Personalyy I would love to try to get a seat on the microsoft board.
-Ours is the wisdom of Solomon, the magic of Merlyn, the fall of Icaris.
I am by no means a lawyer but it sounds like the automated trading software has the majority of the blame since it is the one that actually intiated the trade. So what if google descided to reprint old news...nothing wrong with that.
Trying to install linux on my microwave, but keep getting a kernel panic...
I wonder who gets sued for this. Obviously Google's Crawler was at fault, somewhat, but that one error shows a flaw in a lot of other news site handling of information (or misinformation as this was), especially Bloomberg - all for lack of actually double checking sources and dare I mention, actual facts, before running a story.
In a day and age where everyone is automating news feeds, I'd like to believe that someone out there should be responsible for approving posts - much like how I do syndicated posts on my wordpress blog...of course, asking for someone to take responsibility for anything in America is asking too much anyway...
Ave Molech Setting
... "INTENTIONAL" evil.
NO SIG
Maybe if the industry you were in wasn't on the brink of an economic disaster for the past 7 years an old story being dug up by Google News wouldn't have had such a drastic impact.
Money doesn't just evaporate, I'm sure it's still somewhere!
it's nobody's fault, but your dog is dead, lolz, but it's unlikely to happen again, at least to your dog
Wouldn't there have been a date from when the article was written? Sounds to me like someone else may have helped this happen.
___
Beleive nothing you hear, half of what you see, and everything you track with vehicle tracking!
I'm sure if someone had called UAL to do some fact checking before making a financial decision, they would have been told it was untrue.
It kinda highlights the deficiency in our media that this could make it past an editor. My guess there was no editor checking it before the South Florida Sun-Sentinel pushed the publish button.
With the automated systems pulling in that much more money than the traditional ones, and with more algorithms being designed (and held as proprietary info), what would YOU do?
Find their buttons... Then press them.
Deleted
Yeah this was old news YESTERDAY!
http://idle.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/09/1559216
If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur. --Red Adair
I wonder who gets sued for this. Obviously Google's Crawler was at fault, somewhat
How do you figure that? It's doing what it's supposed to. The problem wasn't the crawler, it's the people who thought the crawler was some kind of magic AI that could find relevant stories for them.
Wow.
Need an automatic screenshot taker? Try here.
Ouch.
That said, are automated trading systems going to be this decade's great Ponzi scheme? I can't believe so many people can be so lazy with their investments to send the stock tumbling that much.
It looks like the ones who'll ultimately get burned from this are are those who are careless with their money. But how soon before people take advantage of viral networking to manipulate Google's algorithms for determining popular news, bring up old doom and gloom articles to intentionally tank a stock so they can buy while it's cheap?
Charisma is the measure of someone's ability to lie with a straight face.
It's gambling, it isn't investing.
Deleted
How did it become a "Popular Stories" article all of a sudden? Maybe it was intentional, or maybe not. From TFA:
"It remains unclear how the old story rocketed onto the list of most popular stories. Tribune said online traffic began to tick up beginning earlier Saturday evening. Some UAL investors suspected there were efforts to manipulate Web traffic in order to sow fears about UAL's financial condition.
There may be a more innocuous explanation, however: Amid serious storms in Florida and on the East Coast, Web surfers checking for news about travel delays may have stumbled onto the old UAL story by mistake, and a small number of fresh hits may have been enough to drive it onto the list. "
...But the next day it magically created about 800 million as the stock climbed back up. Assuming it recovers back to the previous level, which it should, no money will have been lost. It will simply have moved from poor, knee-jerk investors to smarter investors.
You're kidding me, right? Stockholders entrusted their assets to managers who entrusted their assets to tradebots. The tradebots/managers made bad decisions. How can the tradebots/managers/stockholders now blame anyone else for their incompetence?
Anyone who sells something of value based on a rumor this thin deserves what they get. As for those who didn't sell and still lost value, anyone who has been in the stock market for very long knows that you sometimes get what others deserve.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
"It's because Google is going to launch their own airline."
Yeah, they'll call it "United Airlines BETA".
So a reader of an obscure newspaper voted up/submited an old archived story, it got popular from several others, got picked up by google news, then by market traders and, well, the perfect storm happened?
That is not the first time that automated scan of internet from google made big damages (remember the "hidden" passwords/files/ftplistings/etc that could still be found searching?), because people somewhat misbehaving creating sites, but at least is focused enough to be able to give some fast good hint on how much money was lost.
Now that google are scanning old newspapers, cant wait till someone pick a "new" story about the market crash of 1929.
My guess there was no editor checking it before the South Florida Sun-Sentinel pushed the publish button.
The FLorida Sun-Sentinel published it in 2002. The date on the page was 2002. It was in their archives. They had a link on their website pointing to popular stories in their archives. Such links change minute by minute.
It's Bloomberg who should have had an editor in the loop.
"Oops."
It went into the pockets of the people who aren't using automating trading bots, saw the price plummet, checked the facts, and decided to decrease their retirement age by a decade or two.
And yes, everyone is aghast that something like this could happen, but in the end it is a good thing. It is better for crazy broken shit to happen in a broken system than for the broken system to keep puttering along as usual -- increases the chances it might get fixed.
This smells like a case of the Frankenstein complex to me. Although Google News may have linked the article in its recent results because of the fresh link on the Sun Sentinel home page, both the WSJ article and the Forbes investigation make it very clear that the problem was a human editor who misinterpreted the original article and posted it as new information (with a freshly written headline) in a by-subscription-only investor information service that is carried on Bloomberg trading terminals.
A human saw the story, failed to check the date (there was no date line at the top of the article), refreshed it with a new headline, and republished it on a trading service that was believed to be a source of credible journalism by its readers.
How and why would a 5-year old story about bankruptcy suddenly get "voted up" in at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel so that news aggregators (and google-bot) would pick it up? Sounds very suspicious to me.
So are you telling me that I could set up a "click-bot" to vote up old-news and make myself rich in the ensuing mayhem?
with Alzheimer's and planning to attack Alabama.
Spread the news.
First of all, this is fucking hilarious. Anyone with "computers that robotically [sic] troll the Web for news stories and execute stock trades automatically" deserves to reap the consequences of turning their destiny over to a computer.
Second, I doubt that any capitol was destroyed by this. Wealth didn't "evaporate," it merely moved from stupid people to smarter people.
I only wish I were one of the smarter people, who bought some stock worth $12 for $3. I should write a program to watch for that sort of thing happening, and then automatically buy-- oh wait.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
But I can't remember the name of it for the life of me. Basically the plot is that someone triggers a financial collapse by selling a bunch of a certain stock to get the automated systems to kick and and cause a cascade effect. Who knew it could really happen? If anyone knows what the book is called, I will give them a cookie.
Wow. Take a look at Monday's trading history for UAUA. Look at that drop. And notice that it happened on huge volume; several hundred million dollars changed hands within fifteen minutes. It wasn't just a few traders running the price down in light trading.
The stock hasn't come back all the way. It's still down 20% for the week.
Here's the newspaper page that started it all, as archived by Google.
No, what the article makes clear is the way the stockmatket is run now has nothing to do with "investing" in a company because you think they offer good products or services so they will grow and prosper in the future, and everything to do with it being it a big stupid gambling casino that has zilch to do with traditional investing. A congame run by charlatan conmen to take advantage and leech off the suckers. Goes hand in pickpocketing hand with those big financial "industry" thieves who are quick to grab megaprofits when they successfully con people into taking their toxic waste pieces of paper, and right there with those same hands out taking tax payer bailouts when they run up against serious losses because of their overwhelming greed being the most important aspect to their "busy-ness".
How and why would a 5-year old story about bankruptcy suddenly get "voted up" in at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Hurricanes Hanna and Ike making Florida newsworthy, attracting a bunch of people to newspapers like the Florida Sun-Sentinel who weren't familiar with the paper's layout and archives?
Another point that no one seems to be picking up on is the problem of a lot of news sites neglecting to include a dateline on their stories. I've run in to this a number of times, and it makes it difficult to determine the relevance of a given story. It's a very simple thing to include the date the story was published, but a lot of sites don't seem to bother.
I don't care why you're posting AC
Ah yes, another "money is bad, greed is bad" post from the Left. Let me guess, you would want to open it up to all the people and free unrestricted trade for all?
...and by paying attention to the markets, trends, and doing my homework, I've amassed a small fortune.
Bullshit hippie notions that would only lead to chaos and the destruction of the world economy.
Oh, who am I? I'm an "outsider". The Little Guy.
Lets hear it for the Little Guy who actually WORKS for his money instead of bitching about how unfair it is.
All these comments and no one mentions Sneakers? Google is Ben Kingsley!
"It's about who controls the information."
The market has become emotional, and often lacks reason.
The market has been emotional forever, and always lacks reason.
There, fixed that for you.
Seems like there is an opportunity to create a purely online stock exchange, where all subscribers trade on equal terms?
Seems like there's at least one purely online stock exchange. Though that may not mean internet, and I'm not sure about equal terms.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
So... if Google newsbot picked up the story about Google newsbot's near destruction of United Airlines... would that make it self-aware? :D [/joke]
Anyway, one interesting thing this story brings up is our over-reliance on automated systems... Googlebot picks up the old story, a financial firm's automated query systems sees the story as a recent one, the system spreads the story to its feeds, and it winds up as an alert in Bloomberg (the trading software, for those who've never worked with a trading firm) and other financial systems.
It's such a very fragile structure, wherein a single word can irrevocably alter the fate of a company, or even events around the world (butterfly effect, and a company like UA is a big butterfly). In the end, machines won't have to enslave mankind to take over the world. We've gladly handed them the keys and gone on vacation in the Bahamas...
If you look back a bit further, you can see that the stock price has been drifting down for several days and that it's a little above the trend for Sep 5-8. I doubt that this glitch has made any significant difference to the stock price.
Sounds like the modern equivalent of "Blue Horse Shoe Loves Anacot Steel"
- Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen), Wall Street
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
'Alright class, yesterday we learned how to automatically sell stocks protect our money. Today I'll show you why you shouldn't ever do that'
I think a few day traders missed class that day.
But clearly you have something better to say...
And you guys whine about mods missing SLASHDOT dupes. Wow.
Another thing that many smaller news sites don't include is the city and state that the news is from, especially if it is local news and there is nothing to tell you where it is from.
AP news articles usually have the location at the start of the article, which makes a lot of sense.
Aren't news articles supposed to answer:
Who?
What?
Where?
When?
Why?
How?
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
But you see, Google is duping a story from SIX YEARS AGO! They have now out-slashdotted slashdot.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
...die by the sword.
If you're trading based on news, minutes or seconds of advantage, and arbitrage, then you'll occasionally get nailed by something unforseen. Like a two-or three year old news story that 'looks' new all of a sudden.
So is someone watching over this, ready to pull the plug if something doesn't smell right? Nope. When the timing is so short, you're at the mercy of the system.
Besides, most of these programs are pure arbitrage. Which is sort of the 'greater fool' theory in play. You make money at someone else's expense. Like they didn't know about something, and you sell out a minute before they find out.
In this case, justice, if there is any, is won by those who saw the activity, realized the mistake, bought low and sold back high. Too bad, big institutional investor. You lost this round.
I can't shed a tear.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Well, apparently the mods are doing what they're told today so let's see if this works. You are completely right.
Sorry for this temporary interference of this particular stock. We were just trying out a new business model. This is no reason to worry about. In parallel to the CERN First Beam Launch today we were just experimenting with a so called "black hole share" (we thought that no one will not notice that negligible stock change). In case you experience financial loss, please contact bh@google.com. We highly appreciate your cooperation.
Ooh, United vs Google...
New York, 12 January 2013. (own reporter)
In the conclusion and final appeal of the dragged out lawsuit between United and Google, the 3 judge panel awarded United $1.2Bn in punitive damages. Google stock plunged on the news from its record high only two months ago, falling to $13 a share.
Especially Americans. Witness the politial campaigns.
Not only is it unnecessary, but such a law would be completely unenforceable. Look at how much trouble online gaming servers have in preventing people from running bots which play their characters for them.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
for the anti-capitalist perl hackers!
The stock hasn't come back all the way. It's still down 20% for the week.
Yeah, but it's still down less than 10% for the day, which was supposedly caused by this Google problem. If anything this may attract some attention to the stock, and once the CFO's pacemaker kicks in they'll be OK.
The people who sold down on automatic trading pissed away an enormous amount of wealth, and smarter people profited. This is fantastic - they got punished by the market for their stupidity and their wealth was transferred where it can do more good.
I feel sorry for the people who trusted them to manage their wealth, I do, but hopefully this was a small percentage of everybody's holdings and everybody is the wiser about automated trading.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The news and financial systems are so intertwined that any strange news will make financial systems go crazy. We need to desensitizing the system so any news needs to be verified before it is take to be true. Unfortunately our society has gone from a "think before go" to a "go before think" so now we are suffering the consequences for this now.
Anyways I saw that news item on my phone news message though that was bunch of male bovine feces but I double checked then I knew it was real nonsense. Pity we don't allow time to check all of our sources so we don't back pedal for a retraction later.
Might as well vote to bring back the horse drawn carriage since the price of gas has risen so much lately.
For people who can't afford the gas, that's already happening. In Cuba they're going back to oxen since they don't have the parts for tractors or a steady fuel supply.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Anecdotal AND we've heard that logic millions of times before, and it adds _nothing_ to the conversation. Just because you're successful doesn't mean that the system isn't at least partially imbalanced. Part of being in a democracy is criticizing the system when you think it doesn't work properly. (And, yeah, I know my response is just as over-used, but it's the right response.)
Once again, Slashdot gives Google a free pass - blaming everyone and his brother but Google...
Yet it never occurs to them to realize that this shows a major bug in the bot, one with potentially far reaching implications... The bot failed to error out when it did not find a date on the story, instead defaulting to today's date. Sure, there are guys up the line who share some of the fault, but bottom line - Google screwed up. Badly.
When a blip at a local Florida newspaper can combine with a trivial bug to destroy a major American airline in a morning, the economy and the "reporting" that the economy depends on is revealed to be a giant joke.
This episode was remarkable because it was huge, fast, and concentrated in a single high profile corporation. But how much of this broken system's smaller problems go "unnoticed"? Unnoticed as problems, at least, but showing up in all kinds of market valuations and economic decisions based on them that are all built on a landscape of errors, omissions and misunderestimations?
How can you trust an economy that makes mistakes like that? Anyone smart would find any alternative that's less crazy and put their money into it.
--
make install -not war
Gee let's see. Alarmist reports causes stock prices to rise/fall dramatically due to bad information. People make/lose a pile of money based on irrationality, armed with billions of dollars of other people's money. Welcome to every single day on the stock market.
120 characters isn't enough to explain it.
Burn 1500 $100 notes and the value will still be around somewhere, because less cash circulating will cause a drop in prices, so everybody else's cash will be worth a little bit more. But drive your new Porsche into a wall and you'll see $150 thousand evaporate.
A $1 billion drop in market value means that there's $1 billion somewhere that left the stock market to be spent on other things. This causes inflation, everybody's cash will have a somewhat smaller value.
"Buy and Hold" is generally good, but if the stock's going bankrupt, holding it any longer isn't going to do you much good. You've got to know when to fold them.
(I once used a similar technique back during the Boom&Crash years, called "Wasn't paying attention that month", which cost me most of the value of a stock I held too much of - it went from ~60 to ~3, and never recovered past about ~5.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I call bullshit.
If you knew a single thing about the market, you'd realise that abuse of the markets by regulators is NOT a partisan issue. The right is raping the market and the left is raping the market.
If we actually had a congress who followed the constitution, if we actually had sound money, if we actually had a stable federal budget, maybe we wouldn't be seeing the same boom/bust cycle that's chipping away at our wealth.
It's been a long time.
The stock didn't drop because Google News reported the story. It dropped because people read the story, not very carefully, and started selling in a panic. After that, of course, program trading tends to take over, and five minutes later people had noticed that it was a mistake and started buying again, real cheap, from people who were still panic-selling.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Who wants to bet that google has a control panel somewhere, inside of some html document, on an intranet computer deep inside of their evil lair that has buttons saying "Destroy United Airlines" "Destroy yahoo" "Destroy Microsoft". I know I sure as hell would if I had that sort of power/influence. :D
I wonder if hookers and cocaine evaporate?
This shows you how disconnected Wall Street is from reality.
A news story is printed, and certainly anyone with real expertise in investing in UAL would say "hmmm, this doesn't add up, this is old news from 2002" and ignore it.
Instead, the market is SO skittish that idiots dumped their stock at a huge loss, and not enough smart people took advantage of it. In the end, the stupid people that dumped took a huge hit, and the people who were smart and purchased walked away with a tidy profit.
In the end, this is a natural failing of the market, not the mistaken reprint of an old article. Those who don't know the market are destined to lose money. Period.
Notice how oil prices were radically up due to "demand?" And now they're falling off considerably, and may go back to 2006 levels? Even with hurricanes and "lack of refinery capabilities" and other fake news? Same players, same game, same idiots.
The smart ones are the ones who realized what had happened, and when the stock was at it's lowest bought a bunch of it as they knew it would rebound once the truth was known.
You may yet eat your words on this one :-)
This wasn't Google's, it was the Tribune that posted the story as new. Google just picked it up and republished it, as they do with all news, without any guarantee that it's accurate.
And the people who caused United to lose the money were automated trading programs. Maybe they should be made a bit more robust? Just a thought.
Why do I always see Flori-DUH being part of a major fuck-up? The 2000 elections are still fresh in my mind :(
cheers, http://88.80.13.160/wiki/Wikileaks
If ANYthing, this sounds like insider trading of a sort. They get legally sanctioned/approved early opportunity to alert cronies ahead of the rest of the common stock holders/traders.
However, the NPR report i heard, and submitted on
http://tech.slashdot.org/~davidsyes/firehose/
said the plunge and its return were both *fast* and paper-trades. Sounds to me that if anyone gained or lost would be those who tried to take advantage of the short (duration) time period in which to alert buddies to get ready to dump stocks early or to prepare to buy up low-priced shares related to the plunge predicted to happen.
So, of this can be likened to a form of insider trading, then those not involved might feel lucky.
Also, if anyone *did* gain much or if anyone dumped early, i would expect that they would expect to hear from the SEC about insider tips. Then again, what do i know?
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
You generally don't want to buy and hold volatile stocks...
GPL Deconstructed
I hope now some news sites stop the practice of putting today's date on the top of a page with an article. I have been fooled (momentarily) a bunch of times where I thought "oh, here's a more recent article" when it is the same old news I already read before.
The problem with blaming any one single person is the incalculable permutations of many points of minor failure. The original article should have been posted with a date, a glitch/operator error/intentional act caused the article to be in the most viewed category, google's bot didn't check other websites, the list goes on. The question is whether this will happen again, and if any litigation will arise causing arrests/fines.
... it will be now
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
For some reason ElectricEuphonium's article is scored 0, but there's no moderation log.
Particularly with someone at Bloomberg making the comment that they wouldn't check an article if it came from the Sun-Sentinel. I would expect that they would at least read the article, for goodness sake.
This sounds like the next thing the Russian mafia will use their legions of zombie PCs for. Blackmail some company that you will destroy their stock price by creating a lot of traffic to an old negative news story if they don't pay up.
Google's bot did what it was supposed to do, it posted someone else's news with all the information provided to it by it's source (in this case, the source lacked a date).
The financial sites that picked this up and ran it as their own information have a responsibility to CHECK THEIR FACTS and ESTABLISH THE CREDIBILITY OF THEIR SOURCES. This is a result of an overzealous pursuit of a scoop.
Steal my band's record! Seriously,
Based on the recent drop in demand for oil, I think people are actually going back to walking.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
How about outlawing speculation altogether? Then a news gaff like that wouldn't matter!
*ducks*
I think many problems could actually be solved by eliminating the market features that make it possible to make money on a tanking stock. Without short selling the market would probably have a much stronger tendency to self correct. A greater tendency to self correct would yield less volatility overall and less volatility could yield less reactionary bidding as the consequences of not reacting immediately wouldn't be as severe.
Honestly, I'm impressed.
Exactly. People who watch the news all day going BUY SELL BUY SELL are just asking to lose money on mistakes like this.
Trading was halted when the stock hit $0.01. There are several stories out there with more of the details.
Anybody investing in the Airline industry is either a fool or a madman. Invest in teleportation technology instead.
Google files for Chapter 7 (Say, via The Onion,) said pseudo story gets aggregated by Google's news reader, other news agencies grab on to said pseudo story, all I have to do is wait for Google's stock to drop to $3 (Fine, maybe $50...) Then I can ride the upswing?
Step 1: Write pseudo story for The Onion
Step 2: Wait for story to be repeated by reputable news channels
Step 3: Profit!
This practice has failed catastrophically in the past, and been likened to "picking up pennies in front of a steamroller". The problem is twofold. First, to make any money at this, you have to throw a lot of money behind it. A 0.1% gain over an extremely short period of time is only worthwhile if it's an 0.1% gain on millions, or billions of dollars. The problem is, sometimes something unexpected happens (the asian economy has a crisis, sub-prime lending collapses, you get a bad tip that United is going belly up), and instead of the 0.1% gain, you end up with a big loss.
So, yes, I understand that the idea of a "free money machine" is very appealing, but people are ignoring the risk. That needs to stop. It's a risk to the stability of the economy.
I'm curious about the trading bots.
So... AWESOM-O, are you a pleasure model?
I'm flashing back to the scene in Close Encounters where the computer takes over communication with the aliens.
when some cold-war era headline gets transcribed and posted without a date. "September 12th, 2008: Russian Nukes Installed in Cuba!"
That big red end-'o'-the-world button seems bigger every day
This is kinda like an updated market version of the Orson Wells' "War of the Worlds" event.
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
With bots making these mistakes I have high hopes that the machine vs man war will never take place, or is this their evil plan to slowly destroy us one stock broker at a time.
Can I bum a sig?
I believe this should read GOOGLE NEWS BETA.
Welcome our news site crawling, automatic trading robotic overlords!
you had me at #!
We're selective.
you had me at #!
Never happen.
Ah, careful there bub. It's dangerous to throw around the words "never" and "happen". Methinks [insert nefarious enemy here] just figured out a whole new way to disrupt or even topple our financial markets without flying planes into buildings.
Usually, when business is hacked AND it's painful enough, change does happen. You can keep living in never-never land and see what happens when you can't stop the bleeding.
Dutifully reporting the lies of a dishonest government and campaigning politicians?
you had me at #!
/. has HUMAN EDITORS??
you had me at #!
Might as well vote to bring back the horse drawn carriage since the price of gas has risen so much lately.
Rest assured, the horse and cart is surely coming back (unlike cheap oil). There's a good forward looking investment idea (so was stockpiling oil).
you had me at #!
if the real Skynet had said it.
you had me at #!
Seriously, someone in the know could make an absolute killing by picking up a few measly thousand shares while everyone else was busy dumping stock at rock-bottom prices.
Actually, I wonder if any google employees have suddenly developed a penchant for expensive cars and small tropical islands located conveniently in tax havens?
To prove it's just as powerful as real data!
you had me at #!
It did.
you had me at #!
From the folks who brought you 2000 and 2004, the third in a series of tilted elections is nearly ready.
you had me at #!
... bought UAL stock at just $3? Oh wait.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
If only the stupid people who went with the old article had lost money that would have been splendid. But unfortunately the stock price hasn't fully recovered yet and there are lots of people who own this stock who didn't dump it. Innocent victims. This incident would serve as an interesting case study on how the stock market operates in situations like this, what can go wrong, and how to prevent that. But that means the study has to be done and that conclusions have to be acted upon. This isn't the first time a companies stock loses value upon mere rumour, in fact companies have gone belly up because of such inanities. A fix is needed.
Look at the trend for UAL, and you'll see that it was going down anyways. I don't think the blip caused by the error made nearly as much difference as the WSJ article would lead you to believe.
All investing is speculation. Every investment by its very nature has the potential for loss.
For a long time I've wondered how stable and accurate a stock exchange would be if you could only sell your stock after 1 month + 1month*rnd() after you bought it. If everyone knew that they were holding on for an average for 1.5 months, I'm guessing most of the short-term speculation and sniping would go away.
Left would be those people who were fine with long-term investments, based on sound research.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
For realzies.
If Slashdot is basing karma on single posts that's just broken.
... hijack some newspaper web site (easy enough to do) and "publish" his own story about some company going into bankruptcy. Then he or his partner buys up the stock at a discount and waits for the story to be retracted before selling it at the normal price. Someone has to buy stock for the price to be driven back up.
This is just a variation of the old stock scams previously done by email on small penny stocks. But with newspaper web site hijacking, Google news expanding it, and automated trading on Wall Street, this can be done on larger stocks where hundreds of people would be buying in at the bottom, obscuring the scammer in the crowd.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Our current economic system is largely evolved. You express outrage as if the economic system were badly designed, but that fundamentally misunderstands the nature of that system, because, for the most part, it was never designed in the first place.
So yes, a major airline lost a lot of its available capital, in the course of a morning, due to a trivial bug, but a) it wouldn't have been so dramatic if the company hadn't been in a precarious position in the first place (e.g. imagine if some old news story about Walmart was regurgitated, would it have any appreciable impact on their market capitalization, assuming anyone actually believed it was current news?), and b) because of the financial stakes involved, there will be intense pressure to fix or refine the mechanisms that were to blame.
So, again, we see the workings of evolution: that the weak are more subject to Natural Selection than the strong, and that organisms and systems adapt to their surroundings. You can express outrage all you want, but the economic system just continues evolving. This is just a minor speedbump, not a reason to chuck the whole thing and look for "alternatives" (whatever you mean by that).
This now shows what runaway effect all these automated systems can now have. In light of this:
Now that Google knows what sort of effect they can start in the market place, they should be at least sidelining data their robots pickup from news sites that cant be date verified by the robot, and a human should verify it. No other way around it or they risk starting another, possibly bigger, nastier chain reaction.
Of course, people downstream of all this information should make their own changes to their own systems.
But since Google's systems started it, they should accept part of the blame.
...for not dating stuff on their site. I'm constantly running across information that is certainly authoritative, but since there is no indication of when the page content was updated there's no way to know whether or not it's accurate. With today's product life cycles in the tech industry a date is crucial for accuracy of information.
- Disclaimer: Information in this post deemed reliable but not guaranteed.
If you submitted the journal as is, then its little wonder you didn't get it posted. The editors aren't going to make your links clickable just because you're too lazy to do it yourself. When was the last time you saw a story on the front page with a link you had to copy and paste into the browser? Don't bitch about preferences when you can't be bothered to make it postable on the front page.
It sounds like the blame can be on all the individuals that put their economical stability into a system that is purely based on speculation. You don't get any sympathy from me. People wonder why a lot more individuals simply don't want to work and just want money. Could it be that the stock market is just one way for people to do exactly that. One thing to remember is that the more you pay your CEO, execs, and shareholders you have to have that one individual to do even more work just to save you more.
When I click on TFA all I get is a blank page. When I view source, all I see is:
[html comment code start --] fastdynapage - sbkj2kwebp01 - Thu 09/11/08 - 00:13:47 EDT
[--!/html comment code end]
But most disturbing is when I visit the site that is linked, the Wall street Journal online, there's NO mention of anything to do with United & google, and a search even draws a blank:
http://online.wsj.com/public/search/page/3_0466.html?KEYWORDS=untied%20airlines%20google%20news&mod=DNH_S
Where's my tinfoil hat?! Oh wait, I'm still on Slashdot. Once NPR covers this tho'...
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
actually he's got a point. There are people who have excellent karma and because they pissed off a editor don't get mod points.
Also the automated systems don't require million pound/dollar bonuses every year, or spend a night or two at a strip joint doing "client entertainment" on the company expenses.
Or do they.....?
GooGoggles: the quasi-religious view nerds have of Google that prevents them from seeing any faults in the company
Google relies solely on an automatic bot for populating their news feed. There is something horribly wrong with this bot if it fails to notice that an article was last updated 5 years ago and ends up presenting it as "News". Yes, the cascade effect that resulted in the aftermath wasn't Google's doing. However, you can't possibly deny that they are the ultimate cause of United's massive loss. If they want us to trust their news site, then they should own up to the mistake and acknowledge that they need to fix the underlying problem: their not-so-sophisticated-after-all software.
I smell Pliant Obsequious Supplicant wretches... That said, risk my so-called and worthless 'Excellent karma' in saying in protestation that i will have NO faith in the firehose nor any expectation of surmounting the cronies, and i accept defeat and simper in the penalty box. Disgustingly saddening and demoralizing. i expect the on-alert, -1 smackdown/cloaking code to further suppress my comments...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I thought it was a secret plot by Google to launch their new Google Air at a fraction of the price they were looking at yesterday.
Just goes to show the fun that can happen when automated programs respond to automated programs. One wrong switch and Pandora is unleashed.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
. . . don't believe everything you read on the Internet.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
How much do you get from Microsoft for this kind of service these days?
It wasn't Google that screwed the pooch, it was Bloomberg... they passed the message on without even reading it, apparently, let alone verifying it with UAL or the paper.
I just bought a horse and carriage and got rid of my car. It's an amazing experience.
Heh, it happens a lot, my article about the whole "uwe boll not making the wow-movie" was also kept waiting for 3 days before some slashdot editor posted his version of the story.
Funniest was, my story had confirmation links, his didn't......
Make a man a fire and he will be warm for a day, set a man on fire and he will be warm for the rest of his life
Information is not illegal. It's how you act on it that creates a liability.
Information may not be illegal, but shouldn't MISinformation be? It is in some cases already.
The investors' programs sold low because of a typo in a source they trusted without verification. That's bad decision-making, automated, not Google's fault and not the Florida Sentinel Sun's fault. (typo intended)
Shout FIRE in a crowded theater when there isn't one, for example.
If you want to argue by analogy, make it fit. Consider a computer-controlled fire alarm. One that dials 9-11 based merely on speech-recognition of the word "fire" spoken by somebody in the room would be a good analogy to the programs in use for stop-loss on Wall Street. That was a stupid design. A sensible computer-controlled fire alarm at least checks for source(s) of heat, particulates and/or carbon monoxide. Instead of automatically dialing 9-11, it should also notify the property owner, who would then have to manually dial 9-11, if he decides the fire is real.
Instead of such a sensible algorithm, investors are automating sales based on one variable: stock price decrease. The same investors could make their stop-loss programs less risky to themselves by adding a method to send a TXT message to their BlackBerry (TM), with the ticker symbol, price decrease and time interval of the decrease. It could have a simple Y/N dialog, and depending on the number of shares they hold, they could then decide to check Bloomberg first, or just sell if they're reckless.
Redundancy and manual checks before important transactions are not novel concepts. Failure to require verification, and implementation of a design having a single point of catastrophic failure, were reckless choices. Google didn't write that faulty software. Those who did deserve to bear the full burden of the losses it caused. They have already enjoyed the full benefits of the same software, when it worked as intended without verification. Losses totaling $1.14B probably won't substantially improve programming in general, but it's a good start.
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p
But, i *do* get meta-moderator points. Maybe one or 2 times a week at times, it seems.
I prefer to comment (zany, semi-seriously, and seriously, too) so, I prefer to not moderate others, particularly not in a downward scoring. If i take strong umbrage to or disagreement with something someone wrote, i will weigh in with my own monologue/diatribe. But, I generally prefer to avoid conflict, especially avoiding capricious down-modding. This is why i feel the /. moderator system needs to be trashed/abolished and replaced with something that forces a lazy, vengeful, or friend-rubbing moderator to JUSTIFY their scoring or whatnot. They are NOT god, and the faster the owners of /. remember this, the better off /. will be. A scoring system is worthless if the scorers are not held accountable. Of course, source links are helpful. But links for and against the submitters' position would show balance.
As for the person calling me lazy, i ***DID*** hit publish my story (as opposed to share) for that story. The fact that there was not any rejection message of MY submission only shows someone was trying to not catch my attention that another's version got priority over mine. I included several sources, and even semi-editorialized. I guess it was hoped that i'd not be checking. That was a major insult. It's not as if i'm asking to be let in to the exclusive daily-doubles club.
I wish slashdot's owners would bust up the inside-boys-as-submitters and recognize that those of us who DO submit to the firehose are no less important. How would slashdot like it if enough harshly critical commentary spilled outside to more legitimate tech sites and caused real-named readers to be further tarred with a demeaning brush, even if they are good performers at work? Slash ASKS us for our participation. We participate. Yet, the cronies-club gets the lion share of submission displays. I would think there'd even be a metrics system to evaluate (positively?) those who pass on their meta-moderator points opportunities, opting instead to comment. I wonder if it metrics-monitors those who tend to down-mod people. After all, when i'm down-modded, i'm knocked to zero or -1, as if to suppress my posts.
So, unless/until /. starts playing revisionist history, more people need to read at below 0 to re-elevate capriciously down-modded articles/postings/comments. The firehose needs to be more visible, as in a running banner/vertical column/gutter stream so that READERS (not moderators) are the gatekeepers of what gets discussed and what gets replied to.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
This is one bad symptom of the incomprehensible good that is the evolution of human collective intelligence. Yes, a bad node can infect thousands of other nodes in an instant. And it can cost billions of dollars occasionally. But these costs pale in comparison to the benefits of the network effect and collective intelligence. Any corrective treatment for this "problem" will have a devastating cost to the global economy unless it is extremely precisely and accurately targetted.
A billion dollars is nothing compared to the wealth generated by the network effect and collective intelligence every day. It is a natural consequence, and it will happen again, many times. But it is a very small price to pay.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Maybe this event will prompt publishers of online media to display the date (and even time) in a more prominent position on the page... too many articles have a near-impossible-to-find-on-the-page publication dates.
"Wouldn't you prefer a nice game of chess?"
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
Yeah, like major US investment banks or multinational energy companies?
How about a $100 billion telecom company.
Maybe the Insurance industry has some stocks that don't have volatility? :-)
Just a friendly reminder that your statement is a tad absurd.
No, it just means my statement was underqualified.
You don't want to own poorly run, poorly situated, excessively risk-exposed or volatile stock.
Those companies do exist, but they exist almost outside the stock exchange since their core competency isn't making their stocks grow, it's making their company prosper.
GPL Deconstructed