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Internet Water Army On the March
New submitter kermidge sends in an article at the Physics arXiv blog about what's called the "Internet Water Army," large groups of people in China who are paid to "flood" internet sites with comments and reviews about various products. Researchers at the University of Victoria went undercover to figure out exactly how these informational (or disinformational) floods operate, and what they learned (PDF) could lead to better spam-detection software. Quoting:
"They discovered that paid posters tend to post more new comments than replies to other comments. They also post more often with 50 per cent of them posting every 2.5 minutes on average. They also move on from a discussion more quickly than legitimate users, discarding their IDs and never using them again. What's more, the content they post is measurably different. These workers are paid by the volume and so often take shortcuts, cutting and pasting the same content many times. This would normally invalidate their posts but only if it is spotted by the quality control team. So Cheng and co built some software to look for repetitions and similarities in messages as well as the other behaviors they'd identified. They then tested it on the dataset they'd downloaded from Sina and Sohu and found it to be remarkably good, with an accuracy of 88 per cent in spotting paid posters."
Your first thought was cyber-payback for "EU says water isn't wet."
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
And, the moment this detection software is for sale, it will be inserted into the paid posters submission workflow.
It's just another SPAM arms race, the fact that nobody is challenging the reviewers yet is why it's so easy.
Well, at least we'll be safe in the English speaking world. Legitimate user reviews are always so intelligent and well-written I could easily distinguish freelancer's bullshit from the thoughts of intelligent users. Just look at the comments on Amazon and Youtube!
This "army" has been a staple of the CCP for years. They're usually pretty easy to spot on Chinese language sites and (increasingly) on English language sites. The name comes from the reputed 5 mao (or 1/2 of a Chinese yuan) they're paid for each message. That's about 7 US cents. For the Chinese psyche, it's much more satisfying to see a large number of shill posts that "agree" with the party line than to "waste" effort on even a thin veneer of truth.
I like Slashdot. Very good website.Soulskill best editor ever.
Great, now the internet is being Aquaturfed, not just astroturfed....
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
Yeah but try using that skill on 10,000 posts. You'll see why you want automated software after your brain melts around post 1000 or so.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
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"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
Just because someone never had issues with something that you dislike doesn't mean that they're a shill. This is something that bothers me a lot about modern discourse on the internet. You can't say anything without being accused of being a shill, troll, or fanboy. On the other hand, people credulously read outrageously biased review sites that give every single product they review 4/5 or 5/5. The absolute worst are tech and gaming sites. I forget which site it was (I think it was AnandTech), but a few years ago, one of the writers did a bit of investigative journalism and put out feelers to see how open hardware review sites were to the idea of paying for positive reviews. A small number of them (they refused to divulge who, unfortunately) openly agreed to it.
The internet is full of trolls, fanboys, and shills, to be sure, but they're not hiding under every rock. Sometimes, it's just a normal person who's trying to express a legitimate opinion. Simply saying that you didn't have any problems with a product is not enough for any accusations, or else you risk labeling every single satisfied customer a shill (and, believe it or not, there a whole lot of easily satisfied people out there, and they simply won't be annoyed by the things that drive you fucking crazy).
It's not "Our little corner of academia." It's every major academy of science in the entire world. And they aren't focused on "messaging" because they are scientists, not PR flacks.
It's true that in recent years the coordinated propaganda of the fossil fuel industry has managed to sway masses of uneducated people against the scientific community. But that's not because the fault of the scientific community. Some people out there are just going to believe whoever has the loudest microphone or the endorsement of their local pastor, no matter what the science says.
No, you'd definitely have to drain the water. Water attenuates RF like the dickens. It's usually slightly conductive, and the Van der Walls bonds give it a large permittivity at low frequency, and a large imaginary (lossy) permittivity at high frequency. To communicate with submarines, they have to use extremely low frequency signals in the hundreds of Hertz. At one point, Britain had a plan to turn an entire island into an antenna.
Another way to observe the effect is to put a cup of water in a microwave oven.