The word Palantir must come from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.
They were stones with which one could communicate with anyone looking into another Palantir.
The largest could evesdrop on the others.
Besides the 120-question survey, Cambridge Analytica's app would download
information from a your profile, like education, where you lived and worked, your relationship status, and your “likes”.
It was also possible, at that time, to do the same for your friends.
This is what Christopher Wylie (The whistleblower in the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica scandal) has to say about it:
"So whenever you go, and you like something, you are giving me a clue as to who you are as a person. And so all of this can be captured very easily and run through an algorithm that learns who you are. When you go to work - right? - your co-workers only see one side of you. Your friends only see one side of you. But a computer sees all kinds of sides of you. And so we can get better than human level accuracy at predicting your behavior."
Suppose you are not a Facebook user because you would like to remain private.
And what if your friend installed the Facebook App on his or her mobile and uploads the entire address book with your information in it?
Facebook now has a shadow profile on you, based on information from potentially many friends, and there is no way to opt out.
And then there are the photos and Facebook's facial recognition software.
Whenever someone uploads a photo with your face Facebook can probably identify you,
if any of your friends previously identified you.
Note that photos from phones contains date and geographic information.
This is used on people who have agreed to let Facebook use their face data.
But there is a class-action lawsuit claiming that Facebook uses the facial recognition also on shadow profiles.
"First Party Isolation, also known as Cross-Origin Identifier Unlinkability is a concept from the Tor Browser. The idea is to key every source of browser identification with the domain in the URL bar (the first party). This makes all access to identifiers distinct between usage in the website itself and through third-party. Think of it as blocking Third-party cookies, but more exhaustively."...
Why don't you ask Facebook who have banned CA for violating it's data use policies?
Facebook were informed about what the Obama campaign did, and had no complaints.
But listen I'm not a fan of anyone using Facebook data for political marketing.
It's not what democracy should be about.
Nonetheless there is a big difference between these two examples.
And note that the attorney general of Massachusetts is opening an investigation into Facebook and CA
possible violation of privacy laws.
The Obama campaign
complied with Facebook’s terms of service,
collected data with its own app,
did not give data to third parties,
and got permission from users before using the data.
CA violated Facebook rules, and their fired CEO offered to entrap
political rivals with secret videotapes and sex workers
on the UK Channel 4 TV.
Not only all of that, they also download the photos with location data from your mobile, and run face recognition software on them.
There is something in the US called BIPA (Biometric Information Privacy Act) though,
and an ongoing lawsuit against Facebook claiming that Facebook's face recognition violates BIPA.
They don't this in EU probably due to the tougher
GDPR regulations.
Note that you can configure the app and shut off the face recognition if you want.
The president want's to do something about the trade deficit and loss of jobs, and thinks that tariffs will help.
First of all, a deficit is due to two possible things, consumer consumption and investment.
If the deficits are caused by investments that is good thing because it will mean stronger future growth.
When it comes to jobs, losses of jobs in the industry is due primarily to automation.
And while tariffs will might help the profits and output of these industries to some degree, it won't bring back lost jobs,
and they will have a negative effect on the overall economy.
And yes this could be the start of a trade war, and no one wins a trade war.
The personality test collected information of users Facebook friends, and participants agreed to have their data collected for academic use.
Also the Facebook android app will download information about all your contacts if you agree to letting it find your friends.
So you might have a shadow profile on Facebook even if you don't have an account, when your friend uses the Facebook app.
And there is no way to opt out.
If you use private browsing, FF59 removes "referrer values" when you click a link.
And you can also change the default referer behavior for the browser.
See: https://blog.mozilla.org/secur...
Ignoring established economics? When it comes to trade tariffs on steel and aluminum, absolutely.
He has protectionist attitudes toward trade that are laughable if the consequences weren't likely to be so serious.
Most economists say that such tariffs are not going to help domestic producer, just cause an extra burden on the rest of the economy.
And at the same it could set of at trade war undermining the global trading system.
But Trump thinks that "Trade wars are good, and easy to win".
"Well, it's clear that Mr. Putin has a plan, and that plan includes not just the use of his military but also cyberattacks, disinformation, support for fringe political groups, the weaponization (ph) of energy resources, organized crime and corruption, all of that to compromise democratic institutions. His primary target is Europe. He's trying to influence countries particularly where there is Russian-speaking populations but also Western Europe. And he's also been interested in the United States, as we saw in the 2016 election."
- Ben Cardin of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee
“So I have a very simple message for Russia. We know what you are doing. And you will not succeed,”
Russia was interfering in the US election for several reasons, and it is doing so in many European countries too.
Here are some reasons.
1. Fuel discontent
2. Putin doesn't like the Clintons. Bill supported Yeltsin. Putin blames Hillary for starting protests against him 2011 and 2012.
3. To get Trump elected
In 58 they put the graphics in a separate thread so rendering can potentially be done by a separate CPU.
Here are the details: https://mozillagfx.wordpress.c...
One thing that some might have missed is that with 57 one can enable tracking protection (not just for private browsing)
and that can have a significant impact on real world performance.
How do you know if the account was a Russian (largely automated) bot or not?
They were identified as Russian it the account had Russian as the profile language, but the Brexit tweets were in English.
And then there is the issue of retweets by humans.
Also Twitter has stated that Russian-backed accounts spent $1,031.99
to buy six Brexit-related ads on its platform during Brexit.
When the Times of London reported that researchers who were working on an another study
had identified 156,252 Twitter accounts with Russian as their language,
had posted messages in English to argue against the European Union
during the Brexit referendum, was that sampling bias?
This is international politics not statistics or science with complex cases of cause and effect.
Russian Twitter accounts posted more than 45,000 messages about Brexit in 48 hours during last year’s referendum in an apparently co-ordinated attempt to sow discord, The Times can reveal.
More than 150,000 accounts based in Russia, which had previously confined their posts to subjects such as the Ukrainian conflict, switched attention to Brexit in the days leading up to last year’s vote, according to research for an upcoming paper by data scientists at Swansea University and the University of California, Berkeley.
Anyway if anyone want to read that US Senate minority report quoted above it is freely available here,
with plenty of info on "PUTIN’S ASYMMETRIC ASSAULT ON DEMOCRACY IN RUSSIA AND EUROPE: IMPLICATIONS FOR U.S. NATIONAL SECURITY", i.e. it's title.
https://www.foreign.senate.gov...
Concern about Russian influence in British politics has intensified as it emerged that more than 400 fake Twitter accounts believed to be run from St Petersburg published posts about Brexit.
Researchers at the University of Edinburgh identified 419 accounts operating from the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) attempting to influence UK politics out of 2,752 accounts suspended by Twitter in the US.
Nonsense.
For information on the Russian interference in the French election see this Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Here is the relevant bit.
In March 2017, Macron's digital campaign manager, Mounir Mahjoubi, told Britain's Sky News that Russia is behind "high
level attacks" on Macron, and said that its state media are "the first source of false information". He said: "We are
accusing RT (formerly known as Russia Today) and Sputnik News (of being) the first source of false information shared
about our candidate...".[174]
Two days before the French Presidential Election on 7 May, it was reported that nine gigabytes of Macron's campaign
emails had been anonymously posted to Pastebin, a document-sharing site. These documents were then spread onto the
imageboard 4chan which led to the hashtag "#macronleaks" trending on Twitter.[175][176] In a statement on the same
evening, Macron's political movement, En Marche!, said: "The En Marche! Movement has been the victim of a massive and
coordinated hack this evening which has given rise to the diffusion on social media of various internal
information".[177] Macron's campaign had been presented a report before in March 2017 by the Japanese cyber security
firm Trend Micro detailing how En Marche ! had been the target of phishing attacks.[178] Trend Micro said that the group
conducting these attacks were Russian hacking group Fancy Bear who were also accused of hacking the Democratic National
Committee on July 22, 2016.[178] These same emails were verified and released in July 2017 by WikiLeaks.[179] This was
following Le Pen accusing Macron of tax avoidance.[180]
In January 2018, a US Senate minority report suggested possible ways Russia may have influenced the Brexit campaign.[10] It stated,[11]
"The Russian government has sought to influence democracy in the United Kingdom through disinformation, cyber hacking, and corruption. While a complete picture of the scope and nature of Kremlin interference in the UK’s June 2016 referendum is still emerging, Prime Minister Theresa May and the UK government have condemned the Kremlin’s active measures, and various UK government entities, including the Electoral Commission and parliamentarians, have launched investigations into different aspects of possible Russian government meddling."
That is a very naive way of looking at the Russian meddling.
Russia does not have the interest of any US citizen, either Democrat or Republican.
The US does not meddle in the elections of other normal democratic countries like Russia does.
Russia meddled in the 2016 US election.
It meddled the UK Brexit referendum.
Russa has launched a campaign to influence Mexico’s 2018 presidential election.
Marcon's team said that their servers were hacked by a group likely to be associated with Russians during the 2017 French election.
Russia supported the far right National Front extensively as well the populist Five Star Movement in Italy.
And is more.
What has the US done? Since 2005 it launched a campaign for regime change in Syria.
In 1981 CIA attempted to do something about Gaddafi.
And there is Iran, Iraq, Haiti and there is more. but in my opinion this is rather different from Russian behavior.
What Russia is doing is sometimes called information warfare, that attempts to achieve political goals without military force.
It is cheaper.
And it includes social media, psychological operations, and information operations that target specific groups.
Slashdot Mirror
The word Palantir must come from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. They were stones with which one could communicate with anyone looking into another Palantir. The largest could evesdrop on the others.
Besides the 120-question survey, Cambridge Analytica's app would download information from a your profile, like education, where you lived and worked, your relationship status, and your “likes”. It was also possible, at that time, to do the same for your friends.
This is what Christopher Wylie (The whistleblower in the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica scandal) has to say about it:
"So whenever you go, and you like something, you are giving me a clue as to who you are as a person. And so all of this can be captured very easily and run through an algorithm that learns who you are. When you go to work - right? - your co-workers only see one side of you. Your friends only see one side of you. But a computer sees all kinds of sides of you. And so we can get better than human level accuracy at predicting your behavior."
You are aware of the OpenJDK that is under the GPL License but supported by Oracle Engineers?
Se: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
There are many implementations including Oracles that are based on the OpenJDK.
Se https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
If your friends have a Facebook account then you might well have a Facebook shadow profile. The Facebook app downloads their contact data.
Suppose you are not a Facebook user because you would like to remain private. And what if your friend installed the Facebook App on his or her mobile and uploads the entire address book with your information in it? Facebook now has a shadow profile on you, based on information from potentially many friends, and there is no way to opt out.
And then there are the photos and Facebook's facial recognition software. Whenever someone uploads a photo with your face Facebook can probably identify you, if any of your friends previously identified you. Note that photos from phones contains date and geographic information. This is used on people who have agreed to let Facebook use their face data. But there is a class-action lawsuit claiming that Facebook uses the facial recognition also on shadow profiles.
There is the First Party Isolation plugin. Here is the description:
...
"First Party Isolation, also known as Cross-Origin Identifier Unlinkability is a concept from the Tor Browser. The idea is to key every source of browser identification with the domain in the URL bar (the first party). This makes all access to identifiers distinct between usage in the website itself and through third-party. Think of it as blocking Third-party cookies, but more exhaustively."
Instagram is owned by Facebook since 2012 (for one billion USD).
Why don't you ask Facebook who have banned CA for violating it's data use policies? Facebook were informed about what the Obama campaign did, and had no complaints. But listen I'm not a fan of anyone using Facebook data for political marketing. It's not what democracy should be about. Nonetheless there is a big difference between these two examples.
And note that the attorney general of Massachusetts is opening an investigation into Facebook and CA possible violation of privacy laws.
The Obama campaign complied with Facebook’s terms of service, collected data with its own app, did not give data to third parties, and got permission from users before using the data.
CA violated Facebook rules, and their fired CEO offered to entrap political rivals with secret videotapes and sex workers on the UK Channel 4 TV.
Not only all of that, they also download the photos with location data from your mobile, and run face recognition software on them. There is something in the US called BIPA (Biometric Information Privacy Act) though, and an ongoing lawsuit against Facebook claiming that Facebook's face recognition violates BIPA. They don't this in EU probably due to the tougher GDPR regulations.
Note that you can configure the app and shut off the face recognition if you want.
The president want's to do something about the trade deficit and loss of jobs, and thinks that tariffs will help.
First of all, a deficit is due to two possible things, consumer consumption and investment. If the deficits are caused by investments that is good thing because it will mean stronger future growth.
When it comes to jobs, losses of jobs in the industry is due primarily to automation. And while tariffs will might help the profits and output of these industries to some degree, it won't bring back lost jobs, and they will have a negative effect on the overall economy.
And yes this could be the start of a trade war, and no one wins a trade war.
The personality test collected information of users Facebook friends, and participants agreed to have their data collected for academic use.
Also the Facebook android app will download information about all your contacts if you agree to letting it find your friends. So you might have a shadow profile on Facebook even if you don't have an account, when your friend uses the Facebook app. And there is no way to opt out.
If you use private browsing, FF59 removes "referrer values" when you click a link. And you can also change the default referer behavior for the browser. See: https://blog.mozilla.org/secur...
Ignoring established economics? When it comes to trade tariffs on steel and aluminum, absolutely. He has protectionist attitudes toward trade that are laughable if the consequences weren't likely to be so serious. Most economists say that such tariffs are not going to help domestic producer, just cause an extra burden on the rest of the economy. And at the same it could set of at trade war undermining the global trading system. But Trump thinks that "Trade wars are good, and easy to win".
"Well, it's clear that Mr. Putin has a plan, and that plan includes not just the use of his military but also cyberattacks, disinformation, support for fringe political groups, the weaponization (ph) of energy resources, organized crime and corruption, all of that to compromise democratic institutions. His primary target is Europe. He's trying to influence countries particularly where there is Russian-speaking populations but also Western Europe. And he's also been interested in the United States, as we saw in the 2016 election."
- Ben Cardin of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee
“So I have a very simple message for Russia. We know what you are doing. And you will not succeed,”
- Theresa May
Russia was interfering in the US election for several reasons, and it is doing so in many European countries too. Here are some reasons.
1. Fuel discontent
2. Putin doesn't like the Clintons. Bill supported Yeltsin. Putin blames Hillary for starting protests against him 2011 and 2012.
3. To get Trump elected
Apparently Sam Raimi is in negotiations for directing a film, but just for the first book.
In 58 they put the graphics in a separate thread so rendering can potentially be done by a separate CPU. Here are the details: https://mozillagfx.wordpress.c...
One thing that some might have missed is that with 57 one can enable tracking protection (not just for private browsing) and that can have a significant impact on real world performance.
How do you know if the account was a Russian (largely automated) bot or not? They were identified as Russian it the account had Russian as the profile language, but the Brexit tweets were in English. And then there is the issue of retweets by humans.
Also Twitter has stated that Russian-backed accounts spent $1,031.99 to buy six Brexit-related ads on its platform during Brexit.
When the Times of London reported that researchers who were working on an another study had identified 156,252 Twitter accounts with Russian as their language, had posted messages in English to argue against the European Union during the Brexit referendum, was that sampling bias? This is international politics not statistics or science with complex cases of cause and effect.
See: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/art...
Russian Twitter accounts posted more than 45,000 messages about Brexit in 48 hours during last year’s referendum in an apparently co-ordinated attempt to sow discord, The Times can reveal.
More than 150,000 accounts based in Russia, which had previously confined their posts to subjects such as the Ukrainian conflict, switched attention to Brexit in the days leading up to last year’s vote, according to research for an upcoming paper by data scientists at Swansea University and the University of California, Berkeley.
Anyway if anyone want to read that US Senate minority report quoted above it is freely available here, with plenty of info on "PUTIN’S ASYMMETRIC ASSAULT ON DEMOCRACY IN RUSSIA AND EUROPE: IMPLICATIONS FOR U.S. NATIONAL SECURITY", i.e. it's title. https://www.foreign.senate.gov...
https://www.theguardian.com/wo...
Concern about Russian influence in British politics has intensified as it emerged that more than 400 fake Twitter accounts believed to be run from St Petersburg published posts about Brexit.
Researchers at the University of Edinburgh identified 419 accounts operating from the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) attempting to influence UK politics out of 2,752 accounts suspended by Twitter in the US.
For information on the Russian interference in the French election see this Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Here is the relevant bit.
In March 2017, Macron's digital campaign manager, Mounir Mahjoubi, told Britain's Sky News that Russia is behind "high level attacks" on Macron, and said that its state media are "the first source of false information". He said: "We are accusing RT (formerly known as Russia Today) and Sputnik News (of being) the first source of false information shared about our candidate...".[174]
Two days before the French Presidential Election on 7 May, it was reported that nine gigabytes of Macron's campaign emails had been anonymously posted to Pastebin, a document-sharing site. These documents were then spread onto the imageboard 4chan which led to the hashtag "#macronleaks" trending on Twitter.[175][176] In a statement on the same evening, Macron's political movement, En Marche!, said: "The En Marche! Movement has been the victim of a massive and coordinated hack this evening which has given rise to the diffusion on social media of various internal information".[177] Macron's campaign had been presented a report before in March 2017 by the Japanese cyber security firm Trend Micro detailing how En Marche ! had been the target of phishing attacks.[178] Trend Micro said that the group conducting these attacks were Russian hacking group Fancy Bear who were also accused of hacking the Democratic National Committee on July 22, 2016.[178] These same emails were verified and released in July 2017 by WikiLeaks.[179] This was following Le Pen accusing Macron of tax avoidance.[180]
Regarding Russia and Brexit there is a complete article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Here is one bit.
In January 2018, a US Senate minority report suggested possible ways Russia may have influenced the Brexit campaign.[10] It stated,[11]
"The Russian government has sought to influence democracy in the United Kingdom through disinformation, cyber hacking, and corruption. While a complete picture of the scope and nature of Kremlin interference in the UK’s June 2016 referendum is still emerging, Prime Minister Theresa May and the UK government have condemned the Kremlin’s active measures, and various UK government entities, including the Electoral Commission and parliamentarians, have launched investigations into different aspects of possible Russian government meddling."
That is a very naive way of looking at the Russian meddling. Russia does not have the interest of any US citizen, either Democrat or Republican. The US does not meddle in the elections of other normal democratic countries like Russia does.
Russia meddled in the 2016 US election. It meddled the UK Brexit referendum. Russa has launched a campaign to influence Mexico’s 2018 presidential election. Marcon's team said that their servers were hacked by a group likely to be associated with Russians during the 2017 French election. Russia supported the far right National Front extensively as well the populist Five Star Movement in Italy. And is more.
What has the US done? Since 2005 it launched a campaign for regime change in Syria. In 1981 CIA attempted to do something about Gaddafi. And there is Iran, Iraq, Haiti and there is more. but in my opinion this is rather different from Russian behavior.
What Russia is doing is sometimes called information warfare, that attempts to achieve political goals without military force. It is cheaper. And it includes social media, psychological operations, and information operations that target specific groups.