Back in the late 70s, the city of Chicago replaced all the mercury streetlamps with sodium vapor lights. It was sold as a way to improve visibility at night and make driving safer and everything safer.
They didn't expect it to completely alter the behavior of birds in the city, messing up their diurnal cycles and screwing with their reproduction. Also, it changed the city's character. Night time used to be this magical silvery place in Chicago. It was just beautiful and romantic. The streetlights were the color of a winter moon, and you could still see stars. After the sodium vapor lamps, it was like this phony daylight all the time and yellow and it's ugly as hell. Also, no more stars.
You can really fuck up artificial lighting. Maybe it's just because it was what I was used to, but if you see any old color photos of Chicago neighborhoods at night, you can really see the difference.
What I have been saying is that removing posts based on some guess as to source is not a valid way of dealing with the problem.
And I'm saying it's better than nothing, because fake information has a viral effect when weaponized, as it was in 2016. There are other ways of finding out how long the lines are at your polling place. Calling the board of elections, for one.
Except that the cost does not justify the benefit. That's one thing that makes voter ID a different issue altogether.
So, in the case of fake news, your deciding factor is that false positives are disqualifying. For Voter ID, false positives are part of the cost of doing business, even though there is virtually zero evidence of voter fraud by people trying to impersonate someone else or voting when they're not eligible. We're talking way less than one in a million. But we have tons of evidence of legitimate voters being disenfranchised by the suite of laws that includes Voter ID by the hundreds of thousands.
Some places, like Montana, not only don't require an ID, but actually don't require voter registration. And somehow, they've managed to exist without being overrun by rampaging mobs of illegal immigrants seeking to vote for local school boards.
I don't mind that your standards are inconsistent based on your political agenda. However, I object to your pretending that it is otherwise.
The rest can't stop thinking that his ilk are what got trump elected in the first place.
We already know what got Trump elected in the first place. There have been peer-reviewed studies published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
SuperKendall can be annoying, but he's mostly rational (emphasis on mostly). Sometimes he's spot-on, other times he's in low Earth orbit wondering where all the oxygen went.
However, "1110101" guy, or "Binary Bro" as we call him, is a flat out brain-fucked douchebag, and is as dogmatic as a meth-addled fundamentalist preacher from the backwoods of Alabama.
That's too harsh. Both of those guys are OK, and mean well. A little obtuse, maybe, but not bad people. Imagine the uncle who comes to Thanksgiving with all his opinions from Fox and creates one-man arguments. You still love him, and sometimes when you get him to lower his guard he'll act like a human being, but you have to treat him with a little respect because down deep, that's all he really wants. He wants to be heard and loved and he's been manipulated into thinking those things are impossible unless he's a hostile grievance-machine.
If we cannot guarantee that the people who have legal right to access their homes can do so, then the prevention methods are bad.
Now we're getting somewhere. So let's also say that any election security that might disenfranchise a single legitimate voter is also bad. Yet, we have these Voter ID movements, and these new efforts in red states to require exact matches between information on voter registrations and the voter database. So, if your name on your ID card is "John Q. Public" but you write "John Q Public" on your voter ID, sorry Mr Black or Hispanic or Student or Possibly Democrat, but no vote for you today. Or let's take capital punishment. If we run the risk of depriving one innocent person of their life, isn't it a bad system? We know for sure that innocent people have been put to death by the state in America, so shouldn't we end that practice immediately?
The fact is, that what a corporation that publishes stuff, like Facebook, chooses to do with fake accounts and bots is totally up to them. Go spread fake polling line length times and bogus stories somewhere else. Go stand on a public street corner with a bullhorn and spread bullshit. Facebook is not required to use their resources to help you.
Fake news is like meat that's infected with Mad Cow Disease. When there's an outbreak, it's best to just shut entire markets down until we can figure out what's going on. Even if you accidentally throw out a small amount of good meat, you're better off being safe. We don't want to spread an infection, after all. Don't you agree?
Sure. Some people might like to leave a device where people can contact them (i.e.: their phone) and just take a device that lets them browse content.
Just because I want the world to leave me alone for a little while doesn't mean I don't want to learn things from Wikipedia.
Do you know that you can choose "ignore" when a call comes in that you don't want to take, and still "browse content"? I don't know about iPhones, but I'm pretty sure every modern cellular phone has that feature. You can also turn the phone ringer off completely and still get audio for whatever "content" you happen to be browsing.
But when you want to disconnect some, while not being fully disconnected, you could grab Palm instead of your other phone.
This is why I'm not really alarmed about the fact that we've reached some climate point of no return. It's probably about time that humanity is wiped from the face of the Earth anyway. Are there really people who will pay money to be "disconnected but not disconnected"? Maybe we can address climate change by just killing those people. I know it sounds harsh, but jesus wept already. Enough is enough.
Because we have solid evidence of foreign tampering in elections. Do you not believe in borders? Do you believe countries should not be allowed to have sovereignty?
Yes you can, you just end up casting a provisional ballot [azcentral.com] if you do not go to your assigned polling place. You can still vote at any polling place in your county...
Provisional ballots are generally not counted.
And the ballot you cast provisionally must be the ballot for the precinct you are from. They don't keep ballots for all precincts at all polling places. So unless you are in the rare state that will send you the ballot by mail ahead of election day, the only way you're going to get the correct ballot is by going to your assigned precinct's polling place. If they could get their assigned ballot from their assigned polling place, then they wouldn't need a provisional ballot, would they?
Yes, you could cast a provisional ballot, but it would not be counted unless it was the ballot from the precinct you were assigned. That's law. Also, there are several states that do not allow provisional ballots at all.
Well for one thing someone who wanted to pay for such a thing could easily be wanting to have staff writing and manning that in a much cheaper place than the U.S.. It could easily be a U.S. company but all of the technical work would come out of Russia or India or China.
Do you hear yourself? You're saying that an American company, seeking to report on lines at polling places in Southern Indiana, for an audience in Southern Indiana, would engage the services of someone in "Russia, India or China" to do so.
Any feed, coming from anywhere outside the United States for any reason, should not be allowed to report on live election data on Facebook for local consumption. Not on Facebook and not elsewhere.
In that section I am talking more about the pure technical challenge of limiting posts on attendance based merely on spatial location. You start making exceptions and suddenly the task of correctly filtering is a nightmare and you will make mistakes.
It's not as big a technical challenge as you're making out. If the Guardian website for international news knows well enough to display a weather report for my zip code, thousands of miles away, I'm guessing Facebook can figure it out too.
No. Just because we can't guarantee 100% that our houses won't be broken into doesn't mean we should not have home security systems.
Considering we have a president and Congress who were elected after getting fewer votes than their opponents, we have to first do what we can to prevent outside interference that contributed to this situation. Then, we can also address voter suppression and gerrymandering.
Just throwing up our hands and saying, "oh well, nothing we can do" is not an option. It's not working when it comes to climate change and it's not going to work with our elections.
In my hypothetical -- I have a fake GPS app on my phone that says I'm in Portland IF I allow location services to tell Facebook where I am at all, I am using satellite networking that says I'm in Mexico, and my account is based in Florida. Am I really standing in Portland or not? Facebook has no clue.
The best we can do is eliminate most of the fake polling place reports. Of course, a committed criminal could still probably get through, but the point is, most criminals are not nearly as committed as you.
Why is that impossible? I can get traffic conditions in Minsk from my home in the U.S., why is it impossible to fathom that accounts even in other countries could be providing real time monitoring of polling traffic?
The question is not "if", the question is "why". As in, why would someone in Minsk have this interest in reporting the length of time people are waiting to vote in Baton Rouge?
Would you say the same thing about an account in NYC giving polling line times anywhere in the country? That is just as plausible to work and no-one would bat an eye if the New York times were providing that information, yet it's not spatially close either.
That's because we know who the New York Times is, and we can choose to believe (or not) their reports based on a long history of our own experience. You can not say the same thing about "totallyamericanmaganews.ru".
Not just accessed globally, but it can lack any identification of where the poster actually is. I've moved at least twice since I got my Facebook account,
You're still not seeing the obvious. If you want to minimize fake reports of line length at polls, just don't allow any post that reports line length from any account that does not allow Facebook location tracking. I'm not talking about the "check-in" feature, which can easily be spoofed, I'm talking about actual location data that is a lot more difficult to spoof.
It's really not a difficult technical challenge to eliminate false "on-the-scene" reports.
So all the more important to get line length info so you can go when it's at a lull...
So, more important to get authentic line length info. Someone posting from Bulgaria about line length in Council Bluffs is probably trying to suppress the vote.
Phoenixâ(TM)s Maricopa County, the largest in the state, reduced the number of polling places by 70 percent from 2012 to 2016, from 200 to just 60.
In Maricopa County, as in all of Arizona, you are assigned a polling place. You can't just show up at whichever one you want on election day.
You would know this if you were a voter in the US.
Anything other than voting for Hillary Clinton, right?
I don't want to be the one to break it to him. Will someone please let this AC know that Hillary Clinton isn't running in this election? I don't have the heart to take away his will to live.
How is Facebook supposed to know which reports are illegitimate and which are simply reports that they can't verify?
Simple: location data.
How are people who read a tech site like Slashdot not able to figure this out? If an account based in Minsk reports a long line in a community 25 miles outside of Topeka, there would be a high probability that the information is bogus.
Kind of seems like we have the opposite question here - what kind of ghost town do you live in that you have only a single polling center you can use?
States like Texas, Georgia, etc have been closing polling places in minority neighborhoods. This is why, every single election, the longest lines you see are in minority communities.
I mean, come on, SuperKendall. You must know better than this. It's not like Republicans have been hiding their voter suppression efforts. How do you not know this stuff?
So how exactly is Facebook going to determine if reports of long lines are false?
I think it's safe to assume that someone located in Chechnya reporting on the length of lines outside a polling station in suburban Roanoke, Virginia is probably a fake.
Slashdot Mirror
Back in the late 70s, the city of Chicago replaced all the mercury streetlamps with sodium vapor lights. It was sold as a way to improve visibility at night and make driving safer and everything safer.
They didn't expect it to completely alter the behavior of birds in the city, messing up their diurnal cycles and screwing with their reproduction. Also, it changed the city's character. Night time used to be this magical silvery place in Chicago. It was just beautiful and romantic. The streetlights were the color of a winter moon, and you could still see stars. After the sodium vapor lamps, it was like this phony daylight all the time and yellow and it's ugly as hell. Also, no more stars.
You can really fuck up artificial lighting. Maybe it's just because it was what I was used to, but if you see any old color photos of Chicago neighborhoods at night, you can really see the difference.
And I'm saying it's better than nothing, because fake information has a viral effect when weaponized, as it was in 2016. There are other ways of finding out how long the lines are at your polling place. Calling the board of elections, for one.
So, in the case of fake news, your deciding factor is that false positives are disqualifying. For Voter ID, false positives are part of the cost of doing business, even though there is virtually zero evidence of voter fraud by people trying to impersonate someone else or voting when they're not eligible. We're talking way less than one in a million. But we have tons of evidence of legitimate voters being disenfranchised by the suite of laws that includes Voter ID by the hundreds of thousands.
Some places, like Montana, not only don't require an ID, but actually don't require voter registration. And somehow, they've managed to exist without being overrun by rampaging mobs of illegal immigrants seeking to vote for local school boards.
I don't mind that your standards are inconsistent based on your political agenda. However, I object to your pretending that it is otherwise.
We already know what got Trump elected in the first place. There have been peer-reviewed studies published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
https://jamanetwork.com/journa...
Let's hope they never to a study of this kind on Slashdot users.
I've heard the same thing about your mother.
That's too harsh. Both of those guys are OK, and mean well. A little obtuse, maybe, but not bad people. Imagine the uncle who comes to Thanksgiving with all his opinions from Fox and creates one-man arguments. You still love him, and sometimes when you get him to lower his guard he'll act like a human being, but you have to treat him with a little respect because down deep, that's all he really wants. He wants to be heard and loved and he's been manipulated into thinking those things are impossible unless he's a hostile grievance-machine.
Now we're getting somewhere. So let's also say that any election security that might disenfranchise a single legitimate voter is also bad. Yet, we have these Voter ID movements, and these new efforts in red states to require exact matches between information on voter registrations and the voter database. So, if your name on your ID card is "John Q. Public" but you write "John Q Public" on your voter ID, sorry Mr Black or Hispanic or Student or Possibly Democrat, but no vote for you today. Or let's take capital punishment. If we run the risk of depriving one innocent person of their life, isn't it a bad system? We know for sure that innocent people have been put to death by the state in America, so shouldn't we end that practice immediately?
The fact is, that what a corporation that publishes stuff, like Facebook, chooses to do with fake accounts and bots is totally up to them. Go spread fake polling line length times and bogus stories somewhere else. Go stand on a public street corner with a bullhorn and spread bullshit. Facebook is not required to use their resources to help you.
Fake news is like meat that's infected with Mad Cow Disease. When there's an outbreak, it's best to just shut entire markets down until we can figure out what's going on. Even if you accidentally throw out a small amount of good meat, you're better off being safe. We don't want to spread an infection, after all. Don't you agree?
Do you know that you can choose "ignore" when a call comes in that you don't want to take, and still "browse content"? I don't know about iPhones, but I'm pretty sure every modern cellular phone has that feature. You can also turn the phone ringer off completely and still get audio for whatever "content" you happen to be browsing.
This is why I'm not really alarmed about the fact that we've reached some climate point of no return. It's probably about time that humanity is wiped from the face of the Earth anyway. Are there really people who will pay money to be "disconnected but not disconnected"? Maybe we can address climate change by just killing those people. I know it sounds harsh, but jesus wept already. Enough is enough.
Why do you libs have to constantly bring Trump into the discussion?
Every cop is bad cop-adjacent. They're either bad themselves or their looking the other way while the bad cops do their thing.
No citizen or corporation should help the police until they clean up their act. First, let them prove they can be trusted.
So votes should only be counted if they "matter"?
You wonder why I question whether you live in the US. Well, there it is.
Because we have solid evidence of foreign tampering in elections. Do you not believe in borders? Do you believe countries should not be allowed to have sovereignty?
I didn't take you for a globalist, SuperKendall.
Provisional ballots are generally not counted.
And the ballot you cast provisionally must be the ballot for the precinct you are from. They don't keep ballots for all precincts at all polling places. So unless you are in the rare state that will send you the ballot by mail ahead of election day, the only way you're going to get the correct ballot is by going to your assigned precinct's polling place. If they could get their assigned ballot from their assigned polling place, then they wouldn't need a provisional ballot, would they?
Yes, you could cast a provisional ballot, but it would not be counted unless it was the ballot from the precinct you were assigned. That's law. Also, there are several states that do not allow provisional ballots at all.
Do you hear yourself? You're saying that an American company, seeking to report on lines at polling places in Southern Indiana, for an audience in Southern Indiana, would engage the services of someone in "Russia, India or China" to do so.
Any feed, coming from anywhere outside the United States for any reason, should not be allowed to report on live election data on Facebook for local consumption. Not on Facebook and not elsewhere.
It's not as big a technical challenge as you're making out. If the Guardian website for international news knows well enough to display a weather report for my zip code, thousands of miles away, I'm guessing Facebook can figure it out too.
No. Just because we can't guarantee 100% that our houses won't be broken into doesn't mean we should not have home security systems.
Considering we have a president and Congress who were elected after getting fewer votes than their opponents, we have to first do what we can to prevent outside interference that contributed to this situation. Then, we can also address voter suppression and gerrymandering.
Just throwing up our hands and saying, "oh well, nothing we can do" is not an option. It's not working when it comes to climate change and it's not going to work with our elections.
The best we can do is eliminate most of the fake polling place reports. Of course, a committed criminal could still probably get through, but the point is, most criminals are not nearly as committed as you.
The question is not "if", the question is "why". As in, why would someone in Minsk have this interest in reporting the length of time people are waiting to vote in Baton Rouge?
That's because we know who the New York Times is, and we can choose to believe (or not) their reports based on a long history of our own experience. You can not say the same thing about "totallyamericanmaganews.ru".
You're still not seeing the obvious. If you want to minimize fake reports of line length at polls, just don't allow any post that reports line length from any account that does not allow Facebook location tracking. I'm not talking about the "check-in" feature, which can easily be spoofed, I'm talking about actual location data that is a lot more difficult to spoof.
It's really not a difficult technical challenge to eliminate false "on-the-scene" reports.
So, more important to get authentic line length info. Someone posting from Bulgaria about line length in Council Bluffs is probably trying to suppress the vote.
In Maricopa County, as in all of Arizona, you are assigned a polling place. You can't just show up at whichever one you want on election day.
You would know this if you were a voter in the US.
I don't want to be the one to break it to him. Will someone please let this AC know that Hillary Clinton isn't running in this election? I don't have the heart to take away his will to live.
Simple: location data.
How are people who read a tech site like Slashdot not able to figure this out? If an account based in Minsk reports a long line in a community 25 miles outside of Topeka, there would be a high probability that the information is bogus.
States like Texas, Georgia, etc have been closing polling places in minority neighborhoods. This is why, every single election, the longest lines you see are in minority communities.
I mean, come on, SuperKendall. You must know better than this. It's not like Republicans have been hiding their voter suppression efforts. How do you not know this stuff?
https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/r...
I think it's safe to assume that someone located in Chechnya reporting on the length of lines outside a polling station in suburban Roanoke, Virginia is probably a fake.
That has nothing at all to do with capitalism, though. Wealth is created through productivity in every economic system.
The problem with late-stage capitalism is the people who get the wealth are not the ones who are being productive.