Google is planning to block.. ads that appear on a site with a countdown blocking you before the content loads.
Let's see if the people at Youtube are outraged enough at this change to take action against the makers of Chrome. These companies' struggle might be the next big war. Who will win?
I am shocked, shocked that a megacorp (not to mention that it just happens to be one that was already primarily known for being a piece-of-shit) offers a trojan horse VPN service.
Who could have predicted that Facebook would want to spy on people?! No, I wouldn't have guessed it to be untrustworthy, and you wouldn't have guessed either! Now if you'll excuse me, I'll go back to using something safe: my Google VPN (unless someone tells me that the FBI's VPN service is better).
If you want to change the status quo, you have to prove your position ( that being that fake news has significant influence ).
If persuasion and spin don't work, then the entire ad industry is a scam. And maybe it is, but I think that's a somewhat extraordinary claim (given that pretty much the entire economy votes-with-its-wallet on it being not a scam).
Of course, the more you research this the more you realize it's not necessarily "fake news" that has the media in an uproar, it's more along the lines of "not our brand of dog food" fake news.
Assuming you're right, it might be irrelevant. If there is an alliance forming against bullshit, that's an opportunity to take advantage of. Who knows, you might be able to weaken several brands of dog food all at once.
I can't agree more. It is so easy to discount crackpot shit, until you meet it in real life.
I had a friend and a girlfriend (now very ex-) who were 9/11 truthers. They were both convinced the WTC towers collapsed from demolition charges, the planes which hit them and the pentagon may or may not have even existed, and thought the "loose change" video was an accurate description of what happened.
Their "evidence" for the demolition charges was "that's what it looks like." I don't want to even get started on the whole thing here yet fucking again; fuck this.
The more I learned about her (the now-ex-gf) especially, the more religious stuff would come up. (e.g. she would burn "smudge" to get bad energy out of the house, and could measure chakra spin with pendulums, and last I heard from her, she was getting into the Landmark Forum cult.)
At one point she even admitted to being a Christian. If only "Forged in Fire" had been a TV show back then, maybe I could have converted her from a Christian 9/11 truther to a Hephaestus worshipper.;-) I am pretty sure there were absolutely no limits to what she would accept in defiance of day-to-day reality and empiricism.
You can make up the most ridiculous stuff that you know nobody could ever take seriously, and people will take it seriously. If you think people aren't shockingly gullable, then you don't know people. Everyone should ask themselves: are you filtering these nutcases out of your life? Because it's sort of common sense that you should filter nutcases out of your life, but.. there you go: insulation, and therefore: ignorance.
I haven't kept up with either of these people, but maybe if I had, I might have known in advance that Trump would get more than 5% of the vote. And really, I already should have known.
"Technology is not neutral," said Professor Sahami, who formerly worked at Google as a senior research scientist. "The choices that get made in building technology then have social ramifications."
But those choices are almost always based on the predicted social ramifications. Granted, that social ramification is often "doing it this way will cause people to spend more money on our product or service" but you know what you're doing when you make those choices.
Tech is neutral. Your goals that you use tech to advance, are what's not neutral.
One of the obvious problems with this whole thing, is that what https does is somewhat more technical than the kinds of things laymen know about, and Google wants to "dumb down" the distinction in the UI to something succinct. So they chose one single word, "secure" instead of "this conversation is believed (to a somewhat degree of confidence) to be though party X's webserver (or with them plus other parties that they consented to be included), and oh by the way, we also encrypted it too."
It's "wrong" but such is the cost of brevity. Some people will get the wrong idea what it means, but Google's betting that overall, on average, laymen users will be generally better informed by the change.
Right, and pretty much any truly-interesting political statement is going to be about what strategy is best. And what strategy is best, depends on what your goals and values are. They're totally subjective.
Imagine a political statement like "the federal reserve should raise [or lower, take your pick] the interest rate by 0.25%." You can't tell someone else whether or not that's true or false for them. At best you can tell them whether or not it's a good idea for achieving what you want.
"We should enact a law to use force to prevent abortions after n weeks because a human that many weeks old is a person who has rights." Riight, because we're all on the same page about what aspect of personhood is the benchmark (and where rights come from).. here in a world where a significant number of people are racist, an intelligent, even well-meaning person can make a rational decision to start a military action, etc.
Or even zoom in on that last part. "We should launch airstrikes again country X because.." yeah, right. There are so many pros and cons that all completely depend on what you want and what you think is important.
Life is way too complicated, and values too diverse, for an AI (or even a human or a god) to make generalities about the truth/falsehood of political statements.
Politics is all about how-to-deal with our lack of consensus! Whenever you have an objective truth, you're probably not speaking particularly politically.
I'm trying to understand how a user would be excited or interested in this. "You're about to step in it by posting something really stupid which will damage your personal reputation among everyone who knows you, covering you in a shroud of dishonor and making everyone whisper and giggle about you behind your back. Are you sure you want to make a fool of yourself?" Is it like that, but more charitably phrased?
I would think that most of the people who share the kind of bullshit that this would detect, know it's bullshit, and bullshitting is part of their enjoyment. You do it wittingly.
And in the unlikely event of sharing bullshit unwittingly, if they're told it's bullshit, they'd get mad at the software and tell it "no Goggle, yuor fake news!!!1"
Can anyone explain to me the point of view of a person who would actually want this? If it's actually someone conscientious who is really trying to avoid errors, I'd think they'd already make decisions themselves prior to figuratively putting their name on the bottom. By the time the plugin or whatever warns htem, they've already made up their minds.
Am I wrong? Raise your hand if you think, as a user, that this is a neat idea (and totally putting aside concerns about the system's accuracy, Google's intent, etc).
Black cab drivers have to learn the knowledge often committing up to 3 years driving around London to learn streets and locations.
Aren't you just restating what the summary said?
Not quite, because the summary didn't have this "black cab drivers" trick for those unfamiliar with London, causing a brief impression that something racist was going on. He added some brilliant confusion. It was master-quality misdirection and the least we could do is applaud.
I think he means that if the uploader doesn't tell pornhub that a video contains the grafted-on face of $SOMEONE or otherwise reference that person other than showing their face, then there is a very low chance that pornhub's robots or even humans, will have the slightest idea that the video was intended to represent $SOMEONE, much less that it does so falsely.
Upload a video of your teacher/neighbor/coworker/celebrity without any hints of the deception, publish a link to it on some other site that pornhub doesn't crawl (and use a noreferrer link) and you can show the world whatever video you want, without pornhub catching on (or not at least not quickly catching on).
If your problem was to prevent or oppose such a practice, what could you do? At best, it's hard.
First idea: keep a database of celebrities' faces (since those faces are both the easiest to acquire and also the people with the deepest pockets for lawyers and therefore pose the greatest threat to pornhub) and automatically scan videos for those faces. (I haven't worked at all on face recognition and know little about it, but apparently it's a thing and works fairly well nowdays.) Doesn't help with non-celebrities, though.
Second idea: keep a database of the face data of everyone in every video you have, and slowly try to build a dossier on every single performer in every video. Then you can also start to build whitelists.
This video has a previously-known performer so you're not worried it's a fake face, but that video has the face of someone new. Not a known performer but not a celebrity either. If it's a new porn performer then maybe you'll see them again later. But a human could check it out and see if it looks possibly fake and therefore might be someone's secretary or babysitter. This would be a bigger list of shit to sort through, though. More human moderators needed.
But it's an entirely other type of skill to program something that can't be broken by malicious actors.
Early teacher: "Garbage in, garbage out."
Real life need: "Whatever in, never-fucking-ever garbage out. Output must always be correctly formed, even if that means it's blank or otherwise useless."
I still haven't even figured out why some assholes think being "divisive" is a bad thing. People do have differing opinions/goals/values and that is an objective fact. People need to talk out their disagreements. Division is a good thing to see, because division is a real thing that exists.
Granted, lots of lies are spoken (and that's not the same thing as a differing opinions/goals/values) and that sucks. But I'd rather fight bullshit -- no, I'd rather live in a world full of bullshit up to my fucking neck -- than let the government Do Something About "divisive" speech. Even having a piece-of-shit president is better than not letting Nazis explain what assholes they are. I want Nazis to say what they're thinking. It's worth suffering a weak president if it means we don't have to all pretend we're all on the same page about everything.
Some day the person-you-hate-in-government will be gone, and we'll still have to live in America. So, my fellow Americans, please don't fuck up America. Keep your hands off Youtube, senators. Government regulation of speech is way more threatening than the stinkiest, stupidest, most-possibly-dishonest propaganda.
A _US_ court does not have carte Blanche over the world. I realize that is a hard thing for Americans to understand.
I think you don't understand. If someone points a loaded gun at your head and you're convinced they're really going to pull the trigger unless you obey them, then it doesn't matter if you think the gun wielder should be able to do that. He's doing it.
US courts have absolute power over anyone and everyone that they're able to coerce. If cloudflare is vulnerable to US attack, then that's the problem they have. If they weren't vulnerable, then we'd be reading about how they told the court to go fuck itself.
If you have a website that you want to shield from court interference, then you should be looking into the next generation of tech. Maybe sci-hub needs an eepsite or.onion domain.
McCabe said they couldn't go to the FISA court without Steele's information (in the memo during his Congressional testimony)
I think this point, right here, is the big question. We don't actually know what McCabe said, nor do we know what all was in the FISA application.
The only people who know McCabe's testimony are Congresscritters. (And I'm not sure who all knows what was in the FISA application, but it seems to be even fewer people than Congress.) Near as I can tell, they're divided on partisan lines about what, exactly, McCabe said.
Correct?
It seems the McCabe transcript (Nunes said he's going to release it) should mostly clear this up. Seeing the actual FISA application would be even better and clearer, but we're probably never going to be allowed to see that, so McCabe's words are going to be the closest we get unless the FISA court talks.
Do I have this right?
(And if McCabe's testimony isn't published, then it's going to come down to which Congresscritters you most believe, which means this will be an eternal flame war without either side having evidence to back up their position.)
I also agree there should be some solution found. But I really don't think it's simple, because even the definition of 'abandoned' isn't clear cut, and we have a recent example where a technology shifts have rendered viable again things one previously considered abandoned
I wonder if the solution got discovered a couple hundred years ago. A shorter copyright (e.g. 14 years) with option to renew would fit perfectly. Think your old copyrighted work whose copyright is about to run out, might have a second wind? Renew it.
I'm curious how people would have explained the old system was broken. It seems like it was a better fit for our modern world, than the newer system that replaced it. We should have gone from 95 year copyrights without renewal option to 14 year copyright with renewal option. Maybe the best thing to do, is acknowledge the corruption of the 1970s (nobody in power today needs to lose face) and undo it.
It looks like there was some bullshit in the application. Nobody seems to be contradicting that, as far as I can tell. (Correct?) Is Nunes saying the bullshit was the ONLY thing in the application? Nobody is showing it, so we can't see. But the DoJ does seem to be disputing it and hinting they had probable cause but can't reveal it to public. And Nunes doesn't seem to be really disputing that, though I think he's trying to imply it. Maybe I need to read it again more carefully?
All that aside, it sounds like Nunes might support abolishing FISA. If letting a crook (Carter) get away is the price for this, it might be worth it. We can always get more crooks.;-)
This gives me an idea for a science fiction story. A tired old man is suffering in agony and despair, FORCED to watch TV shows which contain characters who use strategies different than what he uses. Then, one day, behind a waterfall he discovers an abandoned "remote control" which emits IR rays that allow him do something he's never heard of: changing the channel. So begins an unprecedented adventure into the unknown, with sights and sounds to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But word of this "remote control" spreads, and the priests are not amused...
Altered Carbon is the obvious one, simply because it's so imminent (thus should be on everyone's radar right about now). It's been a while but I remember the book as "cool."
Slashdot Mirror
Let's see if the people at Youtube are outraged enough at this change to take action against the makers of Chrome. These companies' struggle might be the next big war. Who will win?
It has to be. It's a whole new level of stupid, never before seen.
I am shocked, shocked that a megacorp (not to mention that it just happens to be one that was already primarily known for being a piece-of-shit) offers a trojan horse VPN service.
Who could have predicted that Facebook would want to spy on people?! No, I wouldn't have guessed it to be untrustworthy, and you wouldn't have guessed either! Now if you'll excuse me, I'll go back to using something safe: my Google VPN (unless someone tells me that the FBI's VPN service is better).
If persuasion and spin don't work, then the entire ad industry is a scam. And maybe it is, but I think that's a somewhat extraordinary claim (given that pretty much the entire economy votes-with-its-wallet on it being not a scam).
Assuming you're right, it might be irrelevant. If there is an alliance forming against bullshit, that's an opportunity to take advantage of. Who knows, you might be able to weaken several brands of dog food all at once.
I can't agree more. It is so easy to discount crackpot shit, until you meet it in real life.
I had a friend and a girlfriend (now very ex-) who were 9/11 truthers. They were both convinced the WTC towers collapsed from demolition charges, the planes which hit them and the pentagon may or may not have even existed, and thought the "loose change" video was an accurate description of what happened.
Their "evidence" for the demolition charges was "that's what it looks like." I don't want to even get started on the whole thing here yet fucking again; fuck this.
The more I learned about her (the now-ex-gf) especially, the more religious stuff would come up. (e.g. she would burn "smudge" to get bad energy out of the house, and could measure chakra spin with pendulums, and last I heard from her, she was getting into the Landmark Forum cult.)
At one point she even admitted to being a Christian. If only "Forged in Fire" had been a TV show back then, maybe I could have converted her from a Christian 9/11 truther to a Hephaestus worshipper. ;-) I am pretty sure there were absolutely no limits to what she would accept in defiance of day-to-day reality and empiricism.
You can make up the most ridiculous stuff that you know nobody could ever take seriously, and people will take it seriously. If you think people aren't shockingly gullable, then you don't know people. Everyone should ask themselves: are you filtering these nutcases out of your life? Because it's sort of common sense that you should filter nutcases out of your life, but .. there you go: insulation, and therefore: ignorance.
I haven't kept up with either of these people, but maybe if I had, I might have known in advance that Trump would get more than 5% of the vote. And really, I already should have known.
But those choices are almost always based on the predicted social ramifications. Granted, that social ramification is often "doing it this way will cause people to spend more money on our product or service" but you know what you're doing when you make those choices.
Tech is neutral. Your goals that you use tech to advance, are what's not neutral.
One of the obvious problems with this whole thing, is that what https does is somewhat more technical than the kinds of things laymen know about, and Google wants to "dumb down" the distinction in the UI to something succinct. So they chose one single word, "secure" instead of "this conversation is believed (to a somewhat degree of confidence) to be though party X's webserver (or with them plus other parties that they consented to be included), and oh by the way, we also encrypted it too."
It's "wrong" but such is the cost of brevity. Some people will get the wrong idea what it means, but Google's betting that overall, on average, laymen users will be generally better informed by the change.
Perhaps the best way to explain this would be to say that Chrome is merely a World Wide Web browser, not a general web browser. ;-)
Right, and pretty much any truly-interesting political statement is going to be about what strategy is best. And what strategy is best, depends on what your goals and values are. They're totally subjective.
Imagine a political statement like "the federal reserve should raise [or lower, take your pick] the interest rate by 0.25%." You can't tell someone else whether or not that's true or false for them. At best you can tell them whether or not it's a good idea for achieving what you want.
"We should enact a law to use force to prevent abortions after n weeks because a human that many weeks old is a person who has rights." Riight, because we're all on the same page about what aspect of personhood is the benchmark (and where rights come from).. here in a world where a significant number of people are racist, an intelligent, even well-meaning person can make a rational decision to start a military action, etc.
Or even zoom in on that last part. "We should launch airstrikes again country X because .." yeah, right. There are so many pros and cons that all completely depend on what you want and what you think is important.
Life is way too complicated, and values too diverse, for an AI (or even a human or a god) to make generalities about the truth/falsehood of political statements.
Politics is all about how-to-deal with our lack of consensus! Whenever you have an objective truth, you're probably not speaking particularly politically.
Let's ass/u/me the tech works. (Ok, hypothesize.)
I'm trying to understand how a user would be excited or interested in this. "You're about to step in it by posting something really stupid which will damage your personal reputation among everyone who knows you, covering you in a shroud of dishonor and making everyone whisper and giggle about you behind your back. Are you sure you want to make a fool of yourself?" Is it like that, but more charitably phrased?
I would think that most of the people who share the kind of bullshit that this would detect, know it's bullshit, and bullshitting is part of their enjoyment. You do it wittingly.
And in the unlikely event of sharing bullshit unwittingly, if they're told it's bullshit, they'd get mad at the software and tell it "no Goggle, yuor fake news!!!1"
Can anyone explain to me the point of view of a person who would actually want this? If it's actually someone conscientious who is really trying to avoid errors, I'd think they'd already make decisions themselves prior to figuratively putting their name on the bottom. By the time the plugin or whatever warns htem, they've already made up their minds.
Am I wrong? Raise your hand if you think, as a user, that this is a neat idea (and totally putting aside concerns about the system's accuracy, Google's intent, etc).
Is that really odd? I'd think that would be the best, correct and also most mainstream approach.
Not quite, because the summary didn't have this "black cab drivers" trick for those unfamiliar with London, causing a brief impression that something racist was going on. He added some brilliant confusion. It was master-quality misdirection and the least we could do is applaud.
Err.. not that I meant to imply that I would call people-who-put-other-peoples'-faces-without-consent-into-porn-videos "innocent."
Guess which country most of Slashdot's readers are in. ToS can be used offensively, to trick and harm the innocent and unwary.
I think he means that if the uploader doesn't tell pornhub that a video contains the grafted-on face of $SOMEONE or otherwise reference that person other than showing their face, then there is a very low chance that pornhub's robots or even humans, will have the slightest idea that the video was intended to represent $SOMEONE, much less that it does so falsely.
Upload a video of your teacher/neighbor/coworker/celebrity without any hints of the deception, publish a link to it on some other site that pornhub doesn't crawl (and use a noreferrer link) and you can show the world whatever video you want, without pornhub catching on (or not at least not quickly catching on).
If your problem was to prevent or oppose such a practice, what could you do? At best, it's hard.
First idea: keep a database of celebrities' faces (since those faces are both the easiest to acquire and also the people with the deepest pockets for lawyers and therefore pose the greatest threat to pornhub) and automatically scan videos for those faces. (I haven't worked at all on face recognition and know little about it, but apparently it's a thing and works fairly well nowdays.) Doesn't help with non-celebrities, though.
Second idea: keep a database of the face data of everyone in every video you have, and slowly try to build a dossier on every single performer in every video. Then you can also start to build whitelists. This video has a previously-known performer so you're not worried it's a fake face, but that video has the face of someone new. Not a known performer but not a celebrity either. If it's a new porn performer then maybe you'll see them again later. But a human could check it out and see if it looks possibly fake and therefore might be someone's secretary or babysitter. This would be a bigger list of shit to sort through, though. More human moderators needed.
Early teacher: "Garbage in, garbage out."
Real life need: "Whatever in, never-fucking-ever garbage out. Output must always be correctly formed, even if that means it's blank or otherwise useless."
I still haven't even figured out why some assholes think being "divisive" is a bad thing. People do have differing opinions/goals/values and that is an objective fact. People need to talk out their disagreements. Division is a good thing to see, because division is a real thing that exists.
Granted, lots of lies are spoken (and that's not the same thing as a differing opinions/goals/values) and that sucks. But I'd rather fight bullshit -- no, I'd rather live in a world full of bullshit up to my fucking neck -- than let the government Do Something About "divisive" speech. Even having a piece-of-shit president is better than not letting Nazis explain what assholes they are. I want Nazis to say what they're thinking. It's worth suffering a weak president if it means we don't have to all pretend we're all on the same page about everything.
Some day the person-you-hate-in-government will be gone, and we'll still have to live in America. So, my fellow Americans, please don't fuck up America. Keep your hands off Youtube, senators. Government regulation of speech is way more threatening than the stinkiest, stupidest, most-possibly-dishonest propaganda.
I think you don't understand. If someone points a loaded gun at your head and you're convinced they're really going to pull the trigger unless you obey them, then it doesn't matter if you think the gun wielder should be able to do that. He's doing it.
US courts have absolute power over anyone and everyone that they're able to coerce. If cloudflare is vulnerable to US attack, then that's the problem they have. If they weren't vulnerable, then we'd be reading about how they told the court to go fuck itself.
If you have a website that you want to shield from court interference, then you should be looking into the next generation of tech. Maybe sci-hub needs an eepsite or .onion domain.
I think this point, right here, is the big question. We don't actually know what McCabe said, nor do we know what all was in the FISA application.
The only people who know McCabe's testimony are Congresscritters. (And I'm not sure who all knows what was in the FISA application, but it seems to be even fewer people than Congress.) Near as I can tell, they're divided on partisan lines about what, exactly, McCabe said.
Correct?
It seems the McCabe transcript (Nunes said he's going to release it) should mostly clear this up. Seeing the actual FISA application would be even better and clearer, but we're probably never going to be allowed to see that, so McCabe's words are going to be the closest we get unless the FISA court talks.
Do I have this right?
(And if McCabe's testimony isn't published, then it's going to come down to which Congresscritters you most believe, which means this will be an eternal flame war without either side having evidence to back up their position.)
I wonder if the solution got discovered a couple hundred years ago. A shorter copyright (e.g. 14 years) with option to renew would fit perfectly. Think your old copyrighted work whose copyright is about to run out, might have a second wind? Renew it.
I'm curious how people would have explained the old system was broken. It seems like it was a better fit for our modern world, than the newer system that replaced it. We should have gone from 95 year copyrights without renewal option to 14 year copyright with renewal option. Maybe the best thing to do, is acknowledge the corruption of the 1970s (nobody in power today needs to lose face) and undo it.
I misspelled his name recently simply because if Android's autocorrect. Had to train it.
It looks like there was some bullshit in the application. Nobody seems to be contradicting that, as far as I can tell. (Correct?) Is Nunes saying the bullshit was the ONLY thing in the application? Nobody is showing it, so we can't see. But the DoJ does seem to be disputing it and hinting they had probable cause but can't reveal it to public. And Nunes doesn't seem to be really disputing that, though I think he's trying to imply it. Maybe I need to read it again more carefully?
All that aside, it sounds like Nunes might support abolishing FISA. If letting a crook (Carter) get away is the price for this, it might be worth it. We can always get more crooks. ;-)
Maybe we should think of it as a sorting problem.
This gives me an idea for a science fiction story. A tired old man is suffering in agony and despair, FORCED to watch TV shows which contain characters who use strategies different than what he uses. Then, one day, behind a waterfall he discovers an abandoned "remote control" which emits IR rays that allow him do something he's never heard of: changing the channel. So begins an unprecedented adventure into the unknown, with sights and sounds to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But word of this "remote control" spreads, and the priests are not amused...
Altered Carbon is the obvious one, simply because it's so imminent (thus should be on everyone's radar right about now). It's been a while but I remember the book as "cool."