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Facebook Admits Hiring PR Firm To Smear Google
hasanabbas1987 writes "The clash of the Internet Giants reached new heights after a spokesman for Facebook confirmed to Daily Beast that Facebook paid a high level Public Relation firm to publish and spread stories against Google throughout the media to study various methods to examine the allegations that Google has been violating user privacy."
Facebook didn't hire them to publish stories against Google. That would be libel. They merely hired them to help educate the public about Google's anti-privacy practices that may violate the Consumer Protection Act. That's all. It's just part of Facebook's ongoing efforts to help educate us all and make us better consumers.
And who better to educate us on privacy than Facebook, after all--a company well-known for its respect for user privacy?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
...hiring a native speaker to edit their English language edition. Anyone who has successfully completed third grade could help them.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I guess Buzz and Google's other efforts really did scare them.
Yes, and it should link to the original source of the story, not this crappy write-up on some unknown blog.
Original: [link]
"This should be fun, and by fun, I mean a wholly depressing insight into the cognitive ability of some grown adults."
This is why the dumbing-down of our educational system is so tragic.
The fact is that we have access to more information than any people in history, but if one is unable to think CRITICALLY about the data, it's almost worse than useless.
Why, do you suppose, Fox News is telling us about Obama's latest gaffe?
Why, do you suppose, a failed presidential candidate makes a movie telling us how the world is going to hell?
Certainly, the basic information could be true or false; more likely it's a careful presentation of the factual or a blend of fact and supposition in order to encourage a specific response in the reader.
Without a good education we're unable to participate as useful citizens, and are merely a remotely-controlled 'demographic' that marches according to what the media tells us to. Sadly, this programming has always been with us and always will. The educational system used to program us to be good, unquestioningly patriotic citizens, but at least squeezed in some knowledge in the meanwhile. Now it programs our kids into reflexive iconoclasts, that they are 'good' regardless of what they do, and that their self-esteem is far more important than any silly facts, particularly if those facts came from dead white men.
-Styopa
How dickish.
Indeed it is. And Facebook is not the worst offender by far. Ever notice that when a critical Microsoft story comes up, we are bombarded by comments from certain people? dave420, x**xy**yo(or whatever), bing tsher, westlake, d'aldredge, and many more names that escape me now. Of course, when a pro-Google story pops up, the usual suspects are right there to jeer them down. It is tiresome. Then the sock puppet accounts come to mod up the shills and mod down any dissenters.
Remember the Kin? Hordes of astroturfers came to tell us all that if we didn't see how a dumb-smartphone aimed at tweens with a plan of 80 dollars a month would succeed, we just didn't get it? Then the things sell less than 10000 units. Apparently nobody else got it either. Or the Zune HD? Took 10 seconds for the calculator app to start and then you were subjected to advertising to boot. But the shills kept screeching that it was just going to kill the iPod touch and they couldn't wait to sell "their" ipod to go get that piece of shit. And the shills keep telling us how good Vista was and how well 7 runs on netbooks even though it is slower than congealed shit. Of course, now the refrain is the iPad is just a "consumption" device and just wait for Windows 8. Yeah like $WINDOWS_CURRENT_VERSION's shortcomings will all be addressed when $WINDOWS_NEXT_VERSION comes out. Same refrain.
Just know shills, that shit may have worked on OS/2 vs NT when you all flooded usenet but, the competitors are much stronger now and people apparently think a little more critically.
If anyone really wants to see how the masters orchestrate this farce, start here
The summary is hard to read because the article itself is written in very poor English, making it hard to read. When there are two grammatical errors within in the first two words of the blog post, it's not a good sign.
The Daily Beast article is much better written. (It links back to the USA Today article: http://www.usatoday.com/money/media/2011-05-06-google_n.htm , which lays out the campaign, although doesn't name Facebook)
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The reporter "confirming" the story is Mr. Dan "Linux stole from SCO!" Lyons. A stopped clock twice a day and all that, but I wouldn't trust Lyons to report that water is wet and the sky is blue. I'd wait for confirmation from reputable sources before getting on opinion on this.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Google - Don't be evil.
Microsoft - Be incompetent.
Intel - Be oligopolistic.
Dell - Be beige.
Acer - Be shoddy.
HP - Be recurrent.
Cisco - Be expensive.
Sony - Be invasive.
Twitter - Terse.
Apple - Be exclusive.
Facebook - Be evil.
You know what? I think Buzz works very well and i like it, much because of the people using it. Instead of a crazed cacophony of updates i couldn't care less about i can read interesting stuff from people i know wont degenerate into pre-pubertal shouting.
HTTP/1.1 400
Oracle's pranks are always at their customer's expense.
ipv6 is my vpn
Google does a pretty good job of making an ass of themselves all on their own, that whole "do no evil" thing Google used to swear by, it is a load of crap,
That is a load of crap, because it's "don't be evil", troll.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I was talking to my 23 year old sister about this phone. Not only did she not care about the lack of app store, she saw it as a bonus. It looks like MSFT was definitely listening to a consumer segment when they designed the phone.
Given a choice between an EnV or a Kin, the Kin is an easy choice
The thing is, not everyone is, and phones like this are going to have appeal to people who are looking one tier below a smart phone.
And so on.
Here's a link to the original article if anyone wants to read about it without the inventive grammar and composition of the awful linked blog post:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-05-12/facebook-busted-in-clumsy-smear-attempt-on-google/
God is imaginary
...Facebook is its own negative-PR department.
Koans and fables for the software engineer
I'm clearly missing something here. Every single one of those posts merely suggests that the phones will appeal to someone. That looks nothing like what you were ranting on about.
Clearly, your anti-Microsoft sentiment is showing in spades. You feel the need to exaggerate your claims and the need to post AC drives the point home. You can't even stand behind your own message.
Whilst I don't disagree with you about the problem, you seem to naively believe that only Microsoft partake in this.
It was only a few weeks ago we had two stories about Samsung in as many days that turned out complete and utter bullshit, just at the same time Samsung's phones and tablet was stealing a fair bit of the limelight from Apple at last. We regularly get feel stories about how Apple gave a free iPad to a guy whose wife told him to take it back, or how an iPhone survived a fall out a plane, or saved little Timmy who fell down a well or whatever without there ever seeming to be any evidence these things really did actually happen in most cases, and where there is evidence it seems weak.
Make no mistake, this is likely almost industry standard practice to spread FUD about the competition and try and get feel good stories about your own products out there. Facebook, Microsoft, Apple are quite blatant offenders to name a few but I have no doubt it stretches far beyond just those three as even they become victim of such stories sometimes, sometimes simply because it's warranted, other times perhaps not so, and it's quite possible there's some funding behind those stories too.
I'd say something about just ignoring FUD and making your own mind up with various products out there, but that message is probably already in the minds of those capable of thinking for themselves anyway whilst it'll still be lost on the fanboys and likely your average Joe in the street who read in the Daily Mail about how Blackberrys kill your puppy or whatever.
What is the difference between a shill and a fanboi?
A shill is paid whether he likes the product or not, generally follows some sort of script and is usually an account manned by more than one person. It's really a coordinated attack on the truth. A fanboy genuinely likes the product and, though extreme, is actually representative of the true fan base. It's the difference between grass-roots and astroturf to use the terminology generally associated with the phenomenon.
Real fanboys don't bother me because it's all in good fun but shills are pure poison and the practical differences are significant as what happened on usenet during the OS/2 NT wars. Say a product comes out and there are 10,000 people roaming around on the internet that actually care about it and post to message boards with a 50/50 distribution of for/against. Then a "relationship management" firm gets in the game with multiple shill accounts on the most important sites, i.e., Engadget, Slashdot, Zdnet, etc. It's not that hard to turn the conversation on its head with a coordinated campaign on a few target sites with the right kind of money in a specific time frame. Those 5000 people out of our hypothetical 10,000 can easily be drowned out by a room full of Indians shilling full time for the company du jour. This happens all of the time and has been going on for a while.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Wow again!
It's blatantly obvious that "...phones like this are going to have appeal to people who are looking one tier below a smart phone" is written by a marketing department lackey and not the type of person who would actually buy this phone.
"OMG!!! i hav to hav this to sent pony texts to my bff!!!"
That ^^^^ is the type of message an actual user of the Kin would send.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
So, why don't you trust Google to hold your data, out of curiosity. I'm biased for various reasons, but I think it's a fair question to ask. I trust my bank to hold my data, even though I'm pretty sure they abuse it (after calling to ask about a refinance of my mortgage, for example, I got 5 cold-calls about mortgages in 2 days). I trust my ISP with my private data even though I'm pretty sure they have a direct tap for warrantless wiretapping. I trust all sorts of entities with my data who I know to be lying bastards, but I've never known Google to be such.
Everyone I know who works for them honestly believes that they try to do the right thing as often as they can. My friends who work for Yahoo! don't say that. My friends who work for Amazon don't quite say that, though they think it's better than most. My friends who work for many large corporations laugh a little or just get real quiet if you ask them that...
So the evidence that I have at my disposal says that:
1) Google's S1 filing is fairly honest (go read it... it's fascinating)
2) Google is, at worst, an altruistic company that may well change over time.
3) Given the choices that you do make to share personal data (with banks, ISPs, etc.) Google looks pretty good.
To be fair, Windows 7 doesn't run too badly on a netbook with 1Gb RAM and a decent drive (i.e. not one of the slow SSDs that came with a lot of models a year or two ago), at least if you are using it mainly for web browsing and a little bit of other stuff. No worse than XP anyway (unlike Vista).
Though Ubuntu (and no doubt any other distro, but that is the one I have significant personal experience of on netbooks) does work better, both the latest release (which a friend of mine uses in dual-boot with W7 on her netbook) and the last LTS release (which I run, with a couple of updates (FF4 being the main one) from PPAs, in a similar manner though I very very rarely touch the W7 setup). It starts and logs in noticeably faster and feels nippier in general operation. Ubuntu+OO.o is certainly faster than either W7+OO.o or W7+MSOffice on these little machines in my subjective opinion (I've not done any scientific tests, so add salt to taste). And that is with Windows be on the faster end of the drive. But I'd not go nearly as far as describing Windows7 as slower than congealed shit.
Given /.'s affinity for Dup's... we can be assured that within 24 hours, this story'll be reposted, but with reference to the DailyBeast article. Ain't redundancy great? :D
One man's pink plane is another man's blue plane.
... although "fermented" does work here, come to think of it.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
What is the difference between a shill and a fanboi?
The same as that between a whore and a girlfriend.
And if you click through to the authors' profile page to look at their other comments, they're pretty typical slashdot posters. They comment on space exploration, file sharing, Lord of the Rings Online, and liberal vs conservative politics. If these are shills, they're doing a lot of random blabbing on company time, and not much actual shilling.
Stockholm Syndrome.
Many victims of Zynga suffer severely for it, and Facebook is all about it.
That would be me. Fuck Microsoft and its shitty OutFuckingLook. I've wasted 3 weeks of my life because of that piece of shit.
1) Can't *COPY* a piece of mail, have to move it. So I have to export the mailbox in order not to screw with the user's mailbox.
2) exporting a 2Gig file out of outlook can take 1 whole business day.
3) Hell, syncing a 2G mailbox from sexchange can take 1 whole business day.
4) why is there no tools to convert from OST to PST?!
5) And how do you export to PST? File -> Open -> Import -> Export to a file. WHAT THE FUCK?
6) Indexing sucks more ass. I have a quad core 16Gig system. 1% cpu utilization. But NOOOOO, MICROFUCK MAKES IT SO THAT I HAVE TO WAIT ONE WHOLE FUCKING DAY FOR THE INDEXING TO RUN IN THE BACKGROUND WITH NO WAY TO INCREASE PRIORITY.
7) OK, now all done. WHERE THE FUCK IS THE SEARCH MENU? OH, IT'S PLAYING FUCKING HIDE AND SEEK. You have to click on the search box, then the fucking search menu pops up (so that I can find out what is the current indexing status)
8) Really, Microsoft, is it SO FUCKING HARD TO MAKE IT AN OPTION TO MAKE SEARCH ALL SUBFOLDERS THE DEFAULT? I'M IN THERE *SEARCHING* FOR SHIT. Why WOULD I NOT WANT TO SEARCH ALL THE FUCKING SUB FOLDERS?! WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU MORONS!
So, how many business days did I just waste, just so that I can search a mailbox for some terms and create a new mailbox with those emails?
On unix, with maildir, I can run swish-e, and be done in a couple of hours. The HATE AND LOATHING I have for OutFuckingLook just cannot be understated.
Erm. It's /. - we'll need a car analogy.
All that claptrap about "the free press" and "guardians of democracy" is a pile of cow dung, as anyone who lived through the last 10 years can easily tell. Read your history books and you will see that it has always been thus.
This is true only if U.S. history begins at World War II. In the late 1800s and early 1900s there were labor papers which were mainly subscription supported, with local news, educational articles, and union events. There were many of these, some small, some with a broader reach. For example as late as the 1930s the Institute for Propaganda Analysis, which taught people how to read and think critically, had significant influence.
The media consists almost entirely of hired shills, whose job it is to influence your opinion in exchange for money.
While this is generally true of US corporate news, here are four exceptions: Amnesty International, Christian Science Monitor, DemocracyNow, and Z Magazine.
It's the ad-supported news that increasingly becomes business-supporting news; particularly when the news media organization is owned by big business.
That would be me. Fuck Microsoft and its shitty OutFuckingLook. I've wasted 3 weeks of my life because of that piece of shit.
Outlook may be crap, but the alternatives are worse (eww, Thunderbird! And holy crap is Apple Mail awful).
1) Can't *COPY* a piece of mail, have to move it. So I have to export the mailbox in order not to screw with the user's mailbox.
Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V. Not exactly rocket science.
2) exporting a 2Gig file out of outlook can take 1 whole business day.
About 30 minutes here. Can I work at your company with 30 minute days?
3) Hell, syncing a 2G mailbox from sexchange can take 1 whole business day.
Same as above
4) why is there no tools to convert from OST to PST?!
It's called "Export". Or copy/paste.
5) And how do you export to PST? File -> Open -> Import -> Export to a file. WHAT THE FUCK?
File > Import and Export.
6) Indexing sucks more ass. I have a quad core 16Gig system. 1% cpu utilization. But NOOOOO, MICROFUCK MAKES IT SO THAT I HAVE TO WAIT ONE WHOLE FUCKING DAY FOR THE INDEXING TO RUN IN THE BACKGROUND WITH NO WAY TO INCREASE PRIORITY.
Agreed. Indexing sucks. My Outlook data STILL isn't indexed, and it's been installed for over a year.
7) OK, now all done. WHERE THE FUCK IS THE SEARCH MENU? OH, IT'S PLAYING FUCKING HIDE AND SEEK. You have to click on the search box, then the fucking search menu pops up (so that I can find out what is the current indexing status)
Search sucks. You'll get no disagreement from me.
8) Really, Microsoft, is it SO FUCKING HARD TO MAKE IT AN OPTION TO MAKE SEARCH ALL SUBFOLDERS THE DEFAULT? I'M IN THERE *SEARCHING* FOR SHIT. Why WOULD I NOT WANT TO SEARCH ALL THE FUCKING SUB FOLDERS?! WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU MORONS!
Couldn't agree more, bar all the expletives.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".