Right; this is what a lot of the bitcoin fanatics don't understand the fractional reserve component of banking is their real role in the economy. I am not saying banks don't generate revenues in various ways off transaction processing but that isn't the core business. I am sure they won't like that part of the pie taken from them and will find ways to leverage their existing market positions in the space to keep themselves there. \\
Which is another thing you bitcoin nerds to realize it IS GOING TO ZERO. Even if some blockchain based cryptocurrency does become as ubiquitous as the dollar its NOT going to be bitcoin. Don't let the fact the goldman and few others are playing in the space. They are there to make some money speculating off suckers perhaps if they can but its really about developing the methodologies and infrastructure to do blockchain trading in whatever the ultimate currency is. Bitcoin is a research EXPENSE in their view not a profit center.
So why is Btc doomed? Think for a second currency is only valuable in terms of what real property or services it will purchase. Banks hold at least the title to awful lot of real assets. Do you think think they are going to surrender those assets to purchase some new currency? Why would they do that; what possible motive would they have to make a bunch of internet speculators and handful of crypto experts super wealthy? None.. Not when they can simple hire some other smart people (plenty of those) for a fraction of the cost to build them their own currency; which they can back with their existing assets.
Yes but not everyone just puts lights in the ceiling you know. Some of us - me for example - live in 150 year old farm houses which were not originally electrified. We don't have wiring or light fixtures in ceilings or walls for that matter because they are in many cased not stud walls like in a modern home. So we have outlets usually located in floors; and use lamps.
Guess what resistance heat at waist level isn't as bad a away to heat a room. When its your reading lamp near your face its actually a pretty damn good way because it means YOU feel warm without heating the entire room. I actually have halogens, florescent, traditional incandescent and some led bulbs in various places around here. I uses each where it makes the most sense. LEDs are used in rough operation locations (door opener) and in places like the kitchen where lights are on for long hours for electrical efficiency. florescent are used where I need a lot of lumens cheap - shop lights. Incandescent are used for comforts lights - reading lamps, bedside tables, etc. The halogens (which I realize are also a type of incandescent) are legacy fixtures in the bathroom that I just haven't scrapped yet. I have a stock of bulbs I'll probably replace them once I use them up.
See I am not stupid and I understand how things work; how much power they draw and what service conditions they are suited for. I can choose a type of bulb that is both econ-concious and is fit for purpose without the help of the federal government!
How about we don't make the same mistakes as last time and make it not suck for large amount of the population, eh?
Was that a mistake though or was it the market doing allocation efficiency. Arguably it was focusing resources on those who were most productive. It just happens to suck if that isn't you.
Yes; and thankfully Amazon.com has brought that model back. I essentially go make them a list; someone or some robot fetches the items for me and other people deliver them. Its great for commodity items.
Oddly enough the low skill jobs are proving harder to automate. Finding humans to reliably weld auto or aircraft frames everytime - is difficult as it requires both talent and practice. On the other hand we have successfully created robots that can it; at least for scale production.
Now show me a robot that is good at entering houses and scrubing toilets and bath tubs..
Yes; we would not want to be subjected to a diversity of opinion. Slashdot is already myopic enough; if you want perfect echo chamber you can have that at facebook. Just mute everyone you disagree with.
You can't argue with these people. They will find fault with the results not matter what. Had Muller run down non-Russian crimes himself instead of referring other apparent criminal matters to the rest of the normal DOJ apparatus to deal with they'd be screeching about how Muller did not have enough resources to investigate the Russia angle fully because he was to busy dealing with everything else. Make no mistake the GPP was only going to be satisfied if the report stated Trump was a Russian agent; otherwise he'll use anything as an excuse as to why it does not count.
Just sentence fragments hand-picked by Trump's AG.
Hand picked with the advice and consent of the US Senate. If you want to argue our entire system of checks and balances does not work fine. If you do though that pretty much legitimizes the entire process right back to the Obama DOJ and looking into and inserting FBI plants into the presidential campaign and of a rival party.
Just accept there is no there there; Muller ran an aggressive investigation and 2 years of looking no smoking gun. After investing a completely off the hook amount of time and law enforcement resources a form FBI director, concedes he hast got enough evidence for a case. It really is time to let this go. Either Donald Trump did not illegally collude with Russia, our entire system is so broken it can't deliver justice. The harm to very idea of representative democracy the results form continuing down this path needs to be considers. "Elections have consequences" they are supposed to have consequences. Its dangerous and stupid to normalize allowing the opposition party to obstruct by running endless investigations on thin pretexts.
Trump has essentially been denied his right as President to staff the DOJ as he sees fit for more than half his term of office now; because had he removed anyone else everyone would have started crying "obstruction"
Except the ref did make the call. The AG that the Senate only just confirmed. Declined to prosecute. End of story.
Sure the House can still impeach if that is what they want to do. A lot of American take 'high crimes and misdemeanors' to be ones where you have proof of guilt the rises to the eviduciary standards we normally expect in a criminal trial. Being Impeached is like being indicted and Senate is like the jury trial aspect. The Senate with is present makeup will not convict Trump.
So sure my message to losers like Nadler and Schiff is go right a head Impeach Trump; The Senate can then EXONERATE him right be fore the 2020 election.
No this is not correct. If it was correct than Edwards would have gone to jail.. You telling me John Edwards did not think running around on his wife while she lay dying would not affect the optics of the campaign. What happens if I buy a new car while running for office. If I chose a Prius one could argue that I was trying to appeal to eco-concisous voters. Do I need to disclose that to the FEC as a campaign expenditure. Obviously not if its only for my person use fetching groceries.
Cohen took a plea. Cohen is a guy with his hands in many of cookie jar by all appearances and its likely he was threatened with being charged with much much worse. The same way a boarder line DUI offender might plea to equipment failure to account for their weaving. That sort of thing happens literally every day.
The John Edwards case casts a WHOLE HECK OF A LOT OF DOUBT on if payments to Clifford's would ultimately be determined by a court to constitute a campaign contribution or not. If Trump were to be charged you can bet his lawyers would argue; quite correctly that a man might have all kinds of reasons to want to a mistress to not talk about the affair he had with her while his wife was pregnant. Reasons not related to the campaign at all. A lot of people for example might ask if that is how he treats his wife; can he be a reliable partner in business? As an example. That isnt a question a real-estate tycoon would want potential investors asking.
Its only a campaign contribution if can convince a jury "but for his presidential campaign, the hush money would not have been paid." If anything Cohen's repeated self contributions do a lot to impeach the best argument that likely exists: Trump's fixer said that is why he did it.
So although yes Cohen was "convicted of campaign finance violations" there exists no finding of fact that said violation occurred. That is important legally speaking if you are Trump.
We can expect all future presidents to be indicted (for trail after they leave office, under current law) by one or more states.
Let me fix this for you. We can expect all future Republican Presidents to be indicted (for trail after they leave office, under current law) by one or more states run be vindictive leftists who don't care at all about the rule of law, or justice, and are only interested in how they can use the machinery of state to consolidate their own power.
Unless you were really using some good long high entropy password like something use made with uuidgen or similar the fact the hackers have your plain text does not mean much. Anything less than that and someone could have easily cracked the hash. Even if its not a dictionary word and not made of dictionary words the hardware is out there now such that pretty much anything that isnt hashed with bcrypt or scrypt, not a dictionary word or variation with simple replacements, and not at least 15 chars is probably crackable.
If I had to guess I would assume these are some of the oldest accounts and these people just never changed their passwords. Zuck while still in school probably wanted to read his friends e-mails and figured FB would be a good way to collect their passwords; or maybe he was just ignorant of best practices at the time and stored the passwords clear text because he did not know any better.
Then when people who knew better updated the software rather than just hashing the clear texts they had and updating the records put some logic in to first try a submitted password as clear text a test for match and if that failed hash it and test for match. That way old records would still work and passwords would just get hash as people changed them. Why nobody thought to go a just hash all the clear-texts they had at that point; I don't know just lazy probably.
The CEO himself admitted to using this data to hack users' email.
Really to bad the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act only has a 2 year statue of limitation for that soft of thing. Would have been hilarious to send Zuck to the pokey.
Yes major ones. I don't know where you have been. Here is the not-to-technical-explaination: this is what all this trusted platform; EFI bios "secure mode" stuff is about. Its so primarily you don't have a way tell the Windows kernel that its alright to load an unsigned video driver. The signed drivers are all certified to not let you read those buffers when protected content is playing. This why you can't 4k commercial content on anything but Windows for the most part btw. (with some exceptions).
Now there are things you might be able to do. You could try to convince the content playing software that platform integrity modes were enforce when they are not; or you could try to use some kind of kernel exploit to gain access to modify the video driver stack with integrity mode enforce; load a fake video driver etc.. You could also possibly re-verse engineer the content players and patch them to not check for platform integrity, but they heavily obfuscated and usually use some kind of nasty VM layer.
The NSA was nice enough to release GHIDRA recently so if you are of for any of this sort of thing start there; you don't have to buy a copy of IDA pro anymore:-). Its not going to be easy though. A lot of really smart people have put a lot of effort into making it really really hard, they will fix whatever bug you find and probably find a way to force patches on most folks.. None of this is impossible but its hard enough that few people have the skills to approach it.
The objectives of our political system are not to optimize for any one thing. They are to arrive at a consensus or solution or at least a set of compromises we can all live with regarding many mutually exclusive things.
I have little doubt an AI could be built to drive GDP growth to optimal levels. Maybe what is what some people want but it won't be what everyone wants. What if some AI decided that we need our birth rate to be > 1 per person and concluded that policies not favoring heterosexual marriage were sub optimal? GASP!
See one person might want maximal individual liberty while others might want economic security. Politics is about finding a plan that allows people with competing agendas to coexist without causing societal collapse. Its not about making good policy decisions its about making good enough policy decisions. We are never going to agree on what 'good' actually is. Some people think a higher population of endangered cats would be the ultimate good; others like cattle ranches and eating beef..
They also broke it by not switching to the secure desktop to take inputs. Granted for malware to take advantage and be able to actually send events to the UAC window; it pretty much has to have elevated already but still... The Vista solution was more secure if more annoying. Microsoft gets into trouble because they make some many exceptions to their own rules.
As you point out with the auto-elevate of their own stuff (also all their own stuff is allowed by default applocker configs) they move the security boundary out from the kernel to basically include any user space executable with a MS signature on it. That is a A LOT of attack surface. Sure it makes the system way more usable but its sloppy approach and we have seen its had significant negative security implications now in the real world.
Had they stuck to their guns on the design and made a very limited white list of specific executable verified by secure hash or maybe re-signed with a special cert for only core components or something and rigorously audited any items that got that special accommodation for any potential user controllable command execution things would probably be fine.
Instead we have a situation where attackers can use msbuild to run about any code they want; oh and it turns out you can use certutil much like the old debug.exe to make an executable if your clever...
I don't know maybe it was all a conspiracy to keep the A/V vendors in business.
Even if you don't have backup how does one generally lose stuff in migrations. I am always amazed when i read that. Because if you are not upgrading in place (which I would term a software migration not a server migration) usually the process isn't destructive. Why can't they just stand the old server back up?
Only think I can think of is move the data volume from the old server to the new server via the san and corrupt the file system in the process or something. Still seems really odd.
More like something did not go smoothly and we are not going to invest the effort into recovering the data because nobody really cares.
^^^THIS^^^ Journalism over the past two decades has proven it self to be of so little value it wont be missed and it isn't worth subsidizing. What little analysis they provide is hardly objective. I can't name a single Paper or television institution besides *maybe* PBS and NPR that don't have a clearly partisan world views. Even on PBS/NPR various personalities clearly editorialize in what is presented as new content at least at times, although I will say these outfits continue to do better at separating and distinguishing editorial and "soft content" than others.
The analysis we do get is usually highly cursory. Its rare any author will do enough research and give the reader enough background to understand anything more than headline deep. If the typical AP story has to get continued onto another page its ONLY because the publisher consumed 35% with ad space and some giant photo of politician shaking some guy or gals hand, that could have been 20% of its size and still been of as much value to the reader.
Frankly must of the best information out there now is citizen journalism, photos and short descriptions of observed events and letting us draw our own conclusions. The press gets it wrong as often as right at this point when they try to characterize anything. As far as "pressers" come on regardless of your political leanings you have to admin things like White House briefings are a big joke. The administration uses it as an opportunity to deliver talking points -not- to seriously respond to questions. And the entirety of the press corps (some worse than others) use it grand stand and proselytize asking questions we all already know the answers to..
So as far AP,NYT,CNN,FOX,NBC,ABC,CBS,Times,Tribune,etc go - good riddance to bad rubbish.
Donald trump is the worst person to be president. This election really showed how stupid the U.S. is
gets flagged as pretty toxic. I don't consider it a terribly productive comment but it certainly could be a valid statement in part of a larger post about voter apathy, voting rights, access etc.
Its a valid string in this conversation! I see this kind of AI us unhelpful as far as the free exchange of ideas go. There is enormous potential to block valid conversation and exchange if you crack it up. If you dial it down to where almost anything is allowed it appears to be no better than a basic profanity filter.
So the big fear is that these 'online communities' become echo chambers, that re-enforce ideas. The response of the high minded folks at Google apparently is to make sure you can take your echo chamber with you everywhere you go.
What is a toxic comment anyway. My guess is its any idea Google execs don't agree with.
Slashdot Mirror
Right; this is what a lot of the bitcoin fanatics don't understand the fractional reserve component of banking is their real role in the economy. I am not saying banks don't generate revenues in various ways off transaction processing but that isn't the core business. I am sure they won't like that part of the pie taken from them and will find ways to leverage their existing market positions in the space to keep themselves there. \\
Which is another thing you bitcoin nerds to realize it IS GOING TO ZERO. Even if some blockchain based cryptocurrency does become as ubiquitous as the dollar its NOT going to be bitcoin. Don't let the fact the goldman and few others are playing in the space. They are there to make some money speculating off suckers perhaps if they can but its really about developing the methodologies and infrastructure to do blockchain trading in whatever the ultimate currency is. Bitcoin is a research EXPENSE in their view not a profit center.
So why is Btc doomed? Think for a second currency is only valuable in terms of what real property or services it will purchase. Banks hold at least the title to awful lot of real assets. Do you think think they are going to surrender those assets to purchase some new currency? Why would they do that; what possible motive would they have to make a bunch of internet speculators and handful of crypto experts super wealthy? None.. Not when they can simple hire some other smart people (plenty of those) for a fraction of the cost to build them their own currency; which they can back with their existing assets.
Yes but not everyone just puts lights in the ceiling you know. Some of us - me for example - live in 150 year old farm houses which were not originally electrified. We don't have wiring or light fixtures in ceilings or walls for that matter because they are in many cased not stud walls like in a modern home. So we have outlets usually located in floors; and use lamps.
Guess what resistance heat at waist level isn't as bad a away to heat a room. When its your reading lamp near your face its actually a pretty damn good way because it means YOU feel warm without heating the entire room. I actually have halogens, florescent, traditional incandescent and some led bulbs in various places around here. I uses each where it makes the most sense. LEDs are used in rough operation locations (door opener) and in places like the kitchen where lights are on for long hours for electrical efficiency. florescent are used where I need a lot of lumens cheap - shop lights. Incandescent are used for comforts lights - reading lamps, bedside tables, etc. The halogens (which I realize are also a type of incandescent) are legacy fixtures in the bathroom that I just haven't scrapped yet. I have a stock of bulbs I'll probably replace them once I use them up.
See I am not stupid and I understand how things work; how much power they draw and what service conditions they are suited for. I can choose a type of bulb that is both econ-concious and is fit for purpose without the help of the federal government!
How about we don't make the same mistakes as last time and make it not suck for large amount of the population, eh?
Was that a mistake though or was it the market doing allocation efficiency. Arguably it was focusing resources on those who were most productive. It just happens to suck if that isn't you.
Yes; and thankfully Amazon.com has brought that model back. I essentially go make them a list; someone or some robot fetches the items for me and other people deliver them. Its great for commodity items.
Oddly enough the low skill jobs are proving harder to automate. Finding humans to reliably weld auto or aircraft frames everytime - is difficult as it requires both talent and practice. On the other hand we have successfully created robots that can it; at least for scale production.
Now show me a robot that is good at entering houses and scrubing toilets and bath tubs..
Yes; we would not want to be subjected to a diversity of opinion. Slashdot is already myopic enough; if you want perfect echo chamber you can have that at facebook. Just mute everyone you disagree with.
You can't argue with these people. They will find fault with the results not matter what. Had Muller run down non-Russian crimes himself instead of referring other apparent criminal matters to the rest of the normal DOJ apparatus to deal with they'd be screeching about how Muller did not have enough resources to investigate the Russia angle fully because he was to busy dealing with everything else. Make no mistake the GPP was only going to be satisfied if the report stated Trump was a Russian agent; otherwise he'll use anything as an excuse as to why it does not count.
Just sentence fragments hand-picked by Trump's AG.
Hand picked with the advice and consent of the US Senate. If you want to argue our entire system of checks and balances does not work fine. If you do though that pretty much legitimizes the entire process right back to the Obama DOJ and looking into and inserting FBI plants into the presidential campaign and of a rival party.
Just accept there is no there there; Muller ran an aggressive investigation and 2 years of looking no smoking gun. After investing a completely off the hook amount of time and law enforcement resources a form FBI director, concedes he hast got enough evidence for a case. It really is time to let this go. Either Donald Trump did not illegally collude with Russia, our entire system is so broken it can't deliver justice. The harm to very idea of representative democracy the results form continuing down this path needs to be considers. "Elections have consequences" they are supposed to have consequences. Its dangerous and stupid to normalize allowing the opposition party to obstruct by running endless investigations on thin pretexts.
Trump has essentially been denied his right as President to staff the DOJ as he sees fit for more than half his term of office now; because had he removed anyone else everyone would have started crying "obstruction"
We can't run our country this way. Its not right.
Except the ref did make the call. The AG that the Senate only just confirmed. Declined to prosecute. End of story.
Sure the House can still impeach if that is what they want to do. A lot of American take 'high crimes and misdemeanors' to be ones where you have proof of guilt the rises to the eviduciary standards we normally expect in a criminal trial. Being Impeached is like being indicted and Senate is like the jury trial aspect. The Senate with is present makeup will not convict Trump.
So sure my message to losers like Nadler and Schiff is go right a head Impeach Trump; The Senate can then EXONERATE him right be fore the 2020 election.
No this is not correct. If it was correct than Edwards would have gone to jail.. You telling me John Edwards did not think running around on his wife while she lay dying would not affect the optics of the campaign. What happens if I buy a new car while running for office. If I chose a Prius one could argue that I was trying to appeal to eco-concisous voters. Do I need to disclose that to the FEC as a campaign expenditure. Obviously not if its only for my person use fetching groceries.
RIght,
Cohen took a plea. Cohen is a guy with his hands in many of cookie jar by all appearances and its likely he was threatened with being charged with much much worse. The same way a boarder line DUI offender might plea to equipment failure to account for their weaving. That sort of thing happens literally every day.
The John Edwards case casts a WHOLE HECK OF A LOT OF DOUBT on if payments to Clifford's would ultimately be determined by a court to constitute a campaign contribution or not. If Trump were to be charged you can bet his lawyers would argue; quite correctly that a man might have all kinds of reasons to want to a mistress to not talk about the affair he had with her while his wife was pregnant. Reasons not related to the campaign at all. A lot of people for example might ask if that is how he treats his wife; can he be a reliable partner in business? As an example. That isnt a question a real-estate tycoon would want potential investors asking.
Its only a campaign contribution if can convince a jury "but for his presidential campaign, the hush money would not have been paid." If anything Cohen's repeated self contributions do a lot to impeach the best argument that likely exists: Trump's fixer said that is why he did it.
So although yes Cohen was "convicted of campaign finance violations" there exists no finding of fact that said violation occurred. That is important legally speaking if you are Trump.
To me the evidence suggests that both are true. Schiff performed some serious amounts of witness tampering AND Cohen is a pathological liar
I just want to say thank for this post. This is probably the most concise, fair minded, description of the entire affair; I have read anyway.
We can expect all future presidents to be indicted (for trail after they leave office, under current law) by one or more states.
Let me fix this for you. We can expect all future Republican Presidents to be indicted (for trail after they leave office, under current law) by one or more states run be vindictive leftists who don't care at all about the rule of law, or justice, and are only interested in how they can use the machinery of state to consolidate their own power.
Unless you were really using some good long high entropy password like something use made with uuidgen or similar the fact the hackers have your plain text does not mean much. Anything less than that and someone could have easily cracked the hash. Even if its not a dictionary word and not made of dictionary words the hardware is out there now such that pretty much anything that isnt hashed with bcrypt or scrypt, not a dictionary word or variation with simple replacements, and not at least 15 chars is probably crackable.
If I had to guess I would assume these are some of the oldest accounts and these people just never changed their passwords. Zuck while still in school probably wanted to read his friends e-mails and figured FB would be a good way to collect their passwords; or maybe he was just ignorant of best practices at the time and stored the passwords clear text because he did not know any better.
Then when people who knew better updated the software rather than just hashing the clear texts they had and updating the records put some logic in to first try a submitted password as clear text a test for match and if that failed hash it and test for match. That way old records would still work and passwords would just get hash as people changed them. Why nobody thought to go a just hash all the clear-texts they had at that point; I don't know just lazy probably.
The CEO himself admitted to using this data to hack users' email.
Really to bad the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act only has a 2 year statue of limitation for that soft of thing. Would have been hilarious to send Zuck to the pokey.
I'm sure there are challenges
Yes major ones. I don't know where you have been. Here is the not-to-technical-explaination: this is what all this trusted platform; EFI bios "secure mode" stuff is about. Its so primarily you don't have a way tell the Windows kernel that its alright to load an unsigned video driver. The signed drivers are all certified to not let you read those buffers when protected content is playing. This why you can't 4k commercial content on anything but Windows for the most part btw. (with some exceptions).
Now there are things you might be able to do. You could try to convince the content playing software that platform integrity modes were enforce when they are not; or you could try to use some kind of kernel exploit to gain access to modify the video driver stack with integrity mode enforce; load a fake video driver etc.. You could also possibly re-verse engineer the content players and patch them to not check for platform integrity, but they heavily obfuscated and usually use some kind of nasty VM layer.
The NSA was nice enough to release GHIDRA recently so if you are of for any of this sort of thing start there; you don't have to buy a copy of IDA pro anymore :-). Its not going to be easy though. A lot of really smart people have put a lot of effort into making it really really hard, they will fix whatever bug you find and probably find a way to force patches on most folks.. None of this is impossible but its hard enough that few people have the skills to approach it.
The objectives of our political system are not to optimize for any one thing. They are to arrive at a consensus or solution or at least a set of compromises we can all live with regarding many mutually exclusive things.
I have little doubt an AI could be built to drive GDP growth to optimal levels. Maybe what is what some people want but it won't be what everyone wants. What if some AI decided that we need our birth rate to be > 1 per person and concluded that policies not favoring heterosexual marriage were sub optimal? GASP!
See one person might want maximal individual liberty while others might want economic security. Politics is about finding a plan that allows people with competing agendas to coexist without causing societal collapse. Its not about making good policy decisions its about making good enough policy decisions. We are never going to agree on what 'good' actually is. Some people think a higher population of endangered cats would be the ultimate good; others like cattle ranches and eating beef..
They also broke it by not switching to the secure desktop to take inputs. Granted for malware to take advantage and be able to actually send events to the UAC window; it pretty much has to have elevated already but still... The Vista solution was more secure if more annoying. Microsoft gets into trouble because they make some many exceptions to their own rules.
As you point out with the auto-elevate of their own stuff (also all their own stuff is allowed by default applocker configs) they move the security boundary out from the kernel to basically include any user space executable with a MS signature on it. That is a A LOT of attack surface. Sure it makes the system way more usable but its sloppy approach and we have seen its had significant negative security implications now in the real world.
Had they stuck to their guns on the design and made a very limited white list of specific executable verified by secure hash or maybe re-signed with a special cert for only core components or something and rigorously audited any items that got that special accommodation for any potential user controllable command execution things would probably be fine.
Instead we have a situation where attackers can use msbuild to run about any code they want; oh and it turns out you can use certutil much like the old debug.exe to make an executable if your clever...
I don't know maybe it was all a conspiracy to keep the A/V vendors in business.
Even if you don't have backup how does one generally lose stuff in migrations. I am always amazed when i read that. Because if you are not upgrading in place (which I would term a software migration not a server migration) usually the process isn't destructive. Why can't they just stand the old server back up?
Only think I can think of is move the data volume from the old server to the new server via the san and corrupt the file system in the process or something. Still seems really odd.
More like something did not go smoothly and we are not going to invest the effort into recovering the data because nobody really cares.
^^^THIS^^^ Journalism over the past two decades has proven it self to be of so little value it wont be missed and it isn't worth subsidizing. What little analysis they provide is hardly objective. I can't name a single Paper or television institution besides *maybe* PBS and NPR that don't have a clearly partisan world views. Even on PBS/NPR various personalities clearly editorialize in what is presented as new content at least at times, although I will say these outfits continue to do better at separating and distinguishing editorial and "soft content" than others.
The analysis we do get is usually highly cursory. Its rare any author will do enough research and give the reader enough background to understand anything more than headline deep. If the typical AP story has to get continued onto another page its ONLY because the publisher consumed 35% with ad space and some giant photo of politician shaking some guy or gals hand, that could have been 20% of its size and still been of as much value to the reader.
Frankly must of the best information out there now is citizen journalism, photos and short descriptions of observed events and letting us draw our own conclusions. The press gets it wrong as often as right at this point when they try to characterize anything. As far as "pressers" come on regardless of your political leanings you have to admin things like White House briefings are a big joke. The administration uses it as an opportunity to deliver talking points -not- to seriously respond to questions. And the entirety of the press corps (some worse than others) use it grand stand and proselytize asking questions we all already know the answers to..
So as far AP,NYT,CNN,FOX,NBC,ABC,CBS,Times,Tribune,etc go - good riddance to bad rubbish.
I would have expected it to have cost them more than 1/5 of the traffic
Okay but
Donald trump is the worst person to be president. This election really showed how stupid the U.S. is
gets flagged as pretty toxic. I don't consider it a terribly productive comment but it certainly could be a valid statement in part of a larger post about voter apathy, voting rights, access etc.
Its a valid string in this conversation! I see this kind of AI us unhelpful as far as the free exchange of ideas go. There is enormous potential to block valid conversation and exchange if you crack it up. If you dial it down to where almost anything is allowed it appears to be no better than a basic profanity filter.
So the big fear is that these 'online communities' become echo chambers, that re-enforce ideas. The response of the high minded folks at Google apparently is to make sure you can take your echo chamber with you everywhere you go.
What is a toxic comment anyway. My guess is its any idea Google execs don't agree with.