.
I considered using the subtitle “Evil Is Overdetermined”. Here’s a roundup of the latest thumbnails ICYMA (In Case You Missed Any… )
NEW w/@AllMattNYT & @carolecadwalla: interviews & documents reveal how an employee at Peter Thiel's Silicon Valley intel contractor Palantir helped Cambridge Analytica exploit Facebook data. https://t.co/j5wJzTZ6JX
— Nick Confessore (@nickconfessore) March 28, 2018
NEW: A group of 37 state attorneys general are pressing Facebook to provide more answers regarding how Cambridge Analytica was able to obtain the data of 50 million unwitting Facebook users. pic.twitter.com/xLrjehQes1
— Caroline O. (@RVAwonk) March 26, 2018
Early Facebook investor @Moonalice: "Facebook wasn’t hacked…the Russians used tools that were created for advertisers and they used them exactly the way they were meant to be [used]. It’s just that there was nobody was guarding the henhouse.” https://t.co/ySXJ6pl7Ny
— ProMarket (@ProMarket_org) March 27, 2018
Facebook Inc. is on a hiring spree, bulking up on lobbyists in the midst of its privacy scandal.
It’s under federal investigation, @ChuckGrassley wants testimony before Congress — and it’s hiring at least 11 new lobbyists. @nsnix87 https://t.co/xo00tYrNdj
— Jennifer Jacobs (@JenniferJJacobs) March 27, 2018
LOL Facebook Decides To Delay Release of New 'FaceLexa' Digital Assistant that Lets Facebook Record and Video Everything You Do in Your Home >>> https://t.co/t46pMrM5dk via @TPM
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) March 28, 2018
Imagine if all legal contracts were little pop ups that interrupt you when you're just trying to play a game. https://t.co/NyqL9dN2YD
— Schooley (@Rschooley) March 27, 2018
I call this piece “The Cliff of Karma”.
The one-year chart of Facebook’s stock price. pic.twitter.com/MY4J3v8b0B
— The Hoarse Whisperer (@HoarseWisperer) March 27, 2018
For years, all Facebook "had to do was vaguely make a noise, and people would say nice things." https://t.co/Yceex3umHL
— The Hive (@VFHIVE) March 27, 2018
.
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone ???
Baud
@rikyrah: Good morning.
OzarkHillbilly
Ummm…. actually, no I didn’t.
Baud
This is what a culture of hating trial lawyers and regulators gets you.
Aleta
@rikyrah: Good Morning
Baud
OT. They are playing Donnie like a fiddle.
Reuters.
satby
@rikyrah: Good morning ?! Feeling better,I hope?
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: Exclusive: Arizona governor and Uber kept self-driving program secret, emails reveal In action.
Tony Jay
One thing that’s occurred to me but as a resolutely technophobic old-geezer I’m utterly ignorant about whether it’s possible or already been reported on.
Facebook basically sells – everything – about its users to whoever wants to pay for it, and that information can be sliced and diced with algorithms to allow advertisers/propagandists to target them with bespoke ‘opinion modifiers’. I get that. But does ‘everything’ include access to private data like passwords.
What I’m getting at is, would it be possible for professional hackers to take the raw data from Facebook and the other social media sites and interrogate it with other algorithms to identify people in sensitive jobs, then concentrate their efforts on exploiting what they find there to gain access to information from that person’s other, non-Facebook accounts and files. I guess I’m asking could your Facebook data be used to backdoor a way into other data streams, and basically expose a target’s entire digital history for exploitation?
Baud
@Tony Jay:
This isn’t quite accurate. Much of their info on you stays in-house.
No. If they did this, it would actually destroy the company.
NotMax
From last month, but a splash of even slightly vintage pleasant news is always welcome.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Tony Jay: It might give hackers some information to guess with.
HeleninEire
Well, at least this will squash Zuck’s planned run for President. Hopefully.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
Yet people went absolutely bananashit over Snowjob and complained bitterly about NSA data retention.
You know, that stuff that they were hanging on to that required court oversight for searches and regulatory/statutory oversight to prevent misuse.
Woulda been nice to have retained all
those programs and abilities post Snowjob – it would have helped to combat what Russia did, or at least expedited getting to the root of this quickly. Funny that Snowjob fled to Russia and advocated elimination of a lot of our cybercrime combat abilities from Russia, aided as he was by Assange and Greenwald.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@NotMax:
It’ll probably taste like ass, not in a good way – the corks alone likely fouled it decades ago.
ascap_scab
Faceborked – good one. I would have gone with “All your Face are belong to us”.
Yes, I’m that old.
Baud
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Yeah, turns out that it wasn’t the NSA spying on Americans that was the motivating force, it was the NSA spying on Russia.
trnc
Just finished deactivating my FB account.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Baud:
If we had a “like” and “share” button on here, I’d give your comment an upvote and share that could be aggregated into my corporately valuable online data profile for later psychological manipulation.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@trnc:
I have scraped all my photos and video, in case something happens to the site. I have kind of a commercial presence though, and am loathe to give that up.
I have stopped buying post boosts (they are overpriced for what they accomplish) – my SEO provider pushes some content, and I’m satisfied to let that be.
Jeffro
Facebook shenanigans: exciting news!
Meanwhile, robbing from the poor to pay the rich continues in broad daylight: The Debt Crisis Is On Our Doorstep (or, “time to pay for that tax cut, working Americans and seniors!”)
It’s enough to make me wanna reach for the nearest bat and start swinging…
Boy, you’re not fucking kidding there, Distinguished Fellows!
Wait…you’re not really taking him seriously, are you?
And why are they so much higher than they were just a year ago, one wonders? Anyone? Bueller?
OMFGwhereismymotherfuckingbat?
That is some weapons-grade bullshit right there.
Um yeah, it’s definitely BAT TIME NOW. How about we repeal that big-ass cut that the GOP just gave to corporations and the rich, and see where we stand, eh? And then let’s have the 1%…heck, the 20%…pay their fair share for once. How about that, GOP???
Baud
Stormy Daniels wants to depose Trump. Haha.
Baud
@Jeffro: Which shill is that?
Chyron HR
@Baud:
I think they gave that game away when Gr**nw*ld was trying to gin up outrage that the US spies on foreign countries’ governments.
Baud
@Chyron HR: Just no respect for Russia’s Fourth Amendment rights.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
Oh, and I’m light of the NRA confirmation of what we all knew the facts to be, when Obama predicted this very effect of Citizens United Not Timid, Scam Alito mouthed “not true”.
I hope I outlive Scam, just so I can take a trip to shit on his grave.
Jeffro
@Baud: A combination of them – George Schultz and four others I don’t recognize offhand – from the Hoover Institute. Yes, really.
debbie
@Tony Jay:
New day, same thing. This is really just the tech version of amassing mailing lists and selling them to direct marketers.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Jeffro: You’re being un-civil and a tad bit shrill.
Baud
@Jeffro: I’m not that familiar with Hoover. Are they traditionally right wing or “bipartisan”?
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: We’d all like to have Trump deposed.
Baud
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
FTW!
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: Center right.
ETA: Remember Hoover was a Republican.
Baud
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Thanks.
ETA:. I assumed it was related to the vacuum.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Jeffro:
I’m intrigued with your notion of beating each of them to death with a baseball bat. Would there be video, and could we have it on pay per view for the purpose of deficit reduction?
And who would be wielding the bat? A “swing for the fences” guy or someone who bats a great infield game, and takes it slow?
satby
OT, an upbeat story from my home town about neighbors helping neighbors.
Baud
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Or we could just tax them. That would hurt them more.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: It is related to a vacuum in the sense that they want the rich to suck up all the wealth they can.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: Even though they’re not cray-cray, they still suck.
debbie
Paraphrasing Peter Navarro on NPR: “If we don’t have a steel and aluminum industry, we don’t have a country.” This guy’s a bigger bullshit artist than Larry Summers. Lowering tariffs and adding quotas? This is what passes for free trade now?
Baud
Even the Today show knows that China and NK own Trump now. I don’t mind. Anything that deters Trump from using nukes is welcome.
Baud
@debbie: Trump wants things he can call “wins.”
Nicole
Ugh. Peter Thiel. Talk about a truly vile human being. Helps trash the US and then runs away to New Zealand.
debbie
@satby:
Nice!
OzarkHillbilly
Heineken removes ad after Chance the Rapper calls it ‘terribly racist’
And nobody noticed until Chance complained? Bull shit.
MomSense
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
Exactly.
MomSense
@Jeffro:
This is what we will run on in the midterms. The Republicans want to pay for their massive tax cuts for the wealthy with your hard earned Social Security and Medicare.
Baud
@MomSense: The Republicans will deny it. We should just run on protecting Social Security and Medicare, and not assert what the GOP will do.
Lapassionara
@Baud: Do you think Trump knows that China and NK own him?
Baud
@Lapassionara: No. But I’d imagine some of his hard core neocon supporters do.
Matt McIrvin
@Tony Jay: It doesn’t include passwords, but it might well provide clues to the “security questions” that many sites use for password recovery. Some online quizzes and “fun” Facebook memes about your action hero name or whatever blatantly phish for that stuff.
mai naem mobile
@OzarkHillbilly: Doug Ducey is a total Koch whore. Anything that destroys his presidential chances I am for. I read somewhere that Uber had two people in the cars and cut back to one person to save $$$ ofcourse. Fuckers. Travis Kalanick is a POS. I know the area where the woman was killed and I have no fucking idea why you would have a testing vehicle in that area. Full of ASU students jaywalking. BTW we’ve had Waymo testing longer than Uber. At one point Waymo kept on coming on the street I live on. I figured if Waymo takes pics they’ll definitely have one of me!
MJS
@Baud: How would Democrats run on protecting Social Security and Medicare without indicating what/who they’re protecting it from?
John S.
@Lapassionara:
Puppet? No puppet. You’re a puppet!
O. Felix Culpa
@rikyrah: Good morning! Hope you’re feeling better today.
Baud
@MJS: “I will strengthen and protect Social Security and Medicare, and oppose any effort to cut or privatize them.”
rikyrah
@satby:
On the mend. In the ‘coughing attack’ phase of the cold. ?
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Baud:
The baseball bat is a message to their families and remaining members of their class of opinion drivers, as well as those who provide their funding…
rikyrah
@Jeffro:
Uh uh
Nope.
You don’t pass that tax scam and then think you can begin whining about deficits.
Uh uh
???
Baud
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
Tax hikes would send a stronger message. They really hate tax hikes.
MJS
@Baud: And the downside to correctly pointing out that it’s the GOP that wants to cut and privatize them is what? Yes, they’ll deny it, but make them deny it, and then in either an ad or in a debate, bring up Ryan’s own words about “entitlements”, and hang those around the GOP candidate’s neck, noting everything else that the opponent and Ryan agree on. I’m pretty sure Conor Lamb did something along those lines, and it seemed to work pretty well for him.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Matt McIrvin:
The only time I log in to a merchant account that I spot on Facebook with Facebook is when I’m buying something that I figure I’ll buy again, and want to see their products in my feed. If there is a quiz or puzzle I think looks fun, I’ll click it and will back out whenever they beg my Facebook stuff – my take is that they should survive on their resident ads as opposed to transacting my data.
Baud
@MJS: They will deny it and call Dem liars. In red areas, people are inclined to believe Dems are liars, and this will be offered as proof. But if Lamb did it successfully, then by all means do it. Real world experience is the best evidence.
Amir Khalid
@OzarkHillbilly:
It’s been a rough week for them. Uber texted me and, I presume, a bazillion other southeast Asians on Sunday to let us know they’d just sold up to their main regional competitor (and market leader), Grab. This is the third regional market they’ve pulled out of in recent months, after Russia and China.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Baud:
What if you pick one for the baseball bat, make the others watch (along with their families) and then let the families choose to divest of all wealth or see the “opinion driver” receive the same treatment in the run up to the tax hikes?
You could video the family debates and show that as a reality show…
Baud
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
I’m impressed by your willingness to compromise.
David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch
Golden calf
David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch
the “coincidences” keep piling up.
MattF
I have minimal Facebook interaction– mainly to stay connected to some old friends and long-lost relatives. It does seem that FB has recently gotten worse, what with lots of ‘independent’ FB members trying to monetize the information that appears on FB by default. You would only need a few bad actors to make the FB experience unpleasant.
Steeplejack
@Jeffro:
I was glad to see the authors getting reamed in the comments. I’d like to see the criticism come a little further upstream, though, like the editors not putting that bullshit in their paper in the first place.
OzarkHillbilly
@David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch: Fake news.
rikyrah
@David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch:
Not.enough.coincidences.in.the.Western.World.
rikyrah
@David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch:
Well, of course ?
Steeplejack
@Baud:
It’s a quintet of dickweeds who are “senior fellows and economists at the Hoover Institution.”
MattF
@David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch: Not the KGB? Then I guess it wasn’t Putin himself.
JPL
btw The president still hasn’t tweeted about Stormy, and in fact the recent tweets don’t appear to be his. The WH is on lockdown today with no public events. hmmm
edit.. He does have an event this morning.
@David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch: No collusion!
mainmata
Peter Thiel is your classic evil oligarch.
rikyrah
Thiel is a vile person ?
OzarkHillbilly
@mainmata: Otherwise known as a “shithead”.
Aleta
Mercer and his hobby gun businesses. (One company makes assault rifles.) He’s also a volunteer reserve officer for the police in Lake Arthur, NM, in a program that gives rights to concealed carry anywhere to reserve officers.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Baud:
“Sure, we can keep the three ski lodges in Aspen, but on the downside, dad gets beaten to death with a wood baseball bat.” (Ed Note – always wood – never aluminum. The metallic “thunk” is pathetic, and never as satisfying as a good “crack”.
Frankensteinbeck
@JPL:
I’ve heard Stormy’s lawyer is trying to goad Trump into calling her a liar, so he can file a defamation suit and force Trump to give a deposition under oath.
ken
I haven’t read the Facebook user agreement, but if it is drafted wildly in favor of FB, and if CA did use user data in violation of that agreement, then why doesn’t FB sue CA (and its agents) for the billions of dollars of market value FB has lost since the CA scandal broke?
Yarrow
I’ve been waiting for Peter Thiel’s name to come up. Traitors of a feather flock together.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@ken:
They probably won’t because of Mutually Assured Destruction in the techbro world that will devour many 10s of billions of VC money. It’ll bounce like a tightly racked set of pool balls when hit with a monster cue ball slam.
afanasia
@Baud: “Hoover” would have been a great name for Facebook.
JPL
@Frankensteinbeck: That might be why they are keeping him close by. You know he wants to.
Jeffro
@Baud:
Yes.
Jeffro
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
I’m good with just kneecaps + every bit of fine art, china, and statues of themselves that these MOTUs were able to buy instead of paying their fair share of taxes.
rikyrah
I love this family. ??
Gotta find joy where you can.
https://youtu.be/zRcpyckar3Q
Quinerly
@JPL: 5th day of no public events. A lot of executive time, though.
Jeffro
@MomSense:
Yup, they do…and we definitely should make it the first and last things every Dem audience hears, every time.
@Baud:
Yeah, they’ll deny it…the problem for them is, they didn’t wait long enough (like past the midterms) to start with this “deficitOogaBOOGA!” nonsense. They’re trying to do it right. now., just moments (politically speaking) after giving the super-rich and corporations a $1.5T tax cut. Fuuuuuuuuck that. (Dang, there I go again being uncivil and shrill ;)
Jeffro
@David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch:
“Golden Calf Republicans” has a nice, bumper-sticker quality to it, eh?
“Golden Calf Trumpublicans” is even better…
David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch
Speaking of bats, only 27 hours and 18 minutes until opening day. But who’s counting.
Amir Khalid
@Quinerly:
The phrase “executive time” is going to enter the dictionaries as a euphemism for CEO-level goofing off. It will be Donald Trump’s only positive contribution to the world.
zhena gogolia
@rikyrah:
That is funny!
zhena gogolia
@Baud:
God, don’t give me a heart attack. When I read that, I was reading the word “depose” in its more traditional sense. I thought she was going to ride in on a white horse like Marlene Dietrich in The Scarlet Empress.
Frankensteinbeck
@JPL:
It’s the only explanation I can think of for a lockdown so total they wrestled his phone away from him.
MattF
@Frankensteinbeck: Well, y’know, a lot of TrumpGolf:
“Where is that golf ball??”
“Is it behind that rock? Let me go look.”
“Oh, lookee lookee– the ball was right behind the rock, lying in that nice little open area.”
germy
Major Major Major Major
@Tony Jay: @Baud: Technically Facebook doesn’t even know your password.
?BillinGlendaleCA
Another experiment: Can you photograph the Milky Way over Los Angeles? Yes you can.
Central Planning
@David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch: Send video!
SFBayAreaGal
@rikyrah: I love this. Thank you Rikyrah.
different-church-lady
@Tony Jay: I don’t have the answer to your question, but I do know that one of the (many, many, did I say many?) evil things about FB is the way they encourage you to use your FB password in as many other internet arenas as they can. If you don’t have a sense of paranoia and just go along with it a person with your password could wreak havoc in so many non-Facebook places.
Jager
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: David Ortiz as the batter would be perfect, you could always count on Big Pape to get his bat on a bullshit “pitch”
sherparick1
If you want to be amused by an asshole who has no idea that he is proving himself to be an asshole, check out Sam Harris, the newest recruit to white supremacy, who thinks he is embarrassing Ezra Klein by publishing their email correspondence about Charles Murray. https://samharris.org/ezra-klein-editor-chief/ Harris somehow believes this will embarrass Klein who comes across as as patient, rather forebearing dude. Sam, on the otherhand, comes across as a complete, racist, ass defending the “cross burner” Charles Murray (Murray, as a teenager burnt a cross on a hill in Newton, Iowa, and was astounded that people thought him “racist.” He continues be astounded as he propounds, and Sam Harris believes he is correct, that average black person is an inferior human being to the average white person. https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/07/why-is-charles-murray-odious
JPL
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-lawyer/exclusive-spurned-by-top-lawyers-trumps-defense-elevates-washington-outsider-idUSKBN1H409J
MomSense
@Jeffro:
I think the blatant and extreme corruption from 5 figure dining sets for Carson’s office to the millions of dollars spent on personal travel, private flights, and military flights people are primed to believe the worst about the Republicans. My only caution to Dems is to start early. Establish the narrative and force the republicans to be on defense from the outset.
different-church-lady
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: We are caught between idiots with no discretion at all and idiots who are paranoid about the wrong things.
Miss Bianca
@rikyrah: that was cute!!
different-church-lady
@David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch: BASEBALL HAS NO CLOCK!
Major Major Major Major
@different-church-lady: you’re not using your FB password in other places; you’re using your identity as a signed-in FB user as the other places’ method of authentication. It’s a symptom of how Facebook has become synonymous with an authoritative ‘identity’. The industry term is Single Sign-On, and many sites let you do it with FB or Twitter or Google or create an account directly. Before FB and all that, people tried to make this available with a system called OpenID for years but only people like me used it.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with a single centralized login. If properly managed it’s probably safer than a hundred decentralized ones.
different-church-lady
Anyone who went to a public school in the 70s could see all this coming. We knew that anything and everything you revealed about yourself would be used against you by bullies, assholes, mean girls… hell, even teachers or administrators at times.
Zuckerberg did a deliberate attack on the very idea of discretion. Fuck him.
JR
@JPL: he’s up to date on all the feudal law statutes!
different-church-lady
@Major Major Major Major:
Is this not a distinction without a difference?
Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeevil….
Lotta lifting that phrase is doing.
The Other Chuck
@different-church-lady: Facebook is using OAuth for all those “sign on with facebook” sites, which is NOT the same as reusing a password. OAuth is quite a bit more secure than the decades-long disaster that passwords have been (don’t bother telling me about YOUR password policy, that isn’t the point), but there is definitely a need for a SSO (Single Sign-On) provider that does nothing but SSO, without hoovering up all your personal data. Dozens of such providers, ideally.
different-church-lady
@The Other Chuck: I don’t understand: if you have someone’s FB password, you have control of their account. Once you have that, what stops you from being them for all digital purposes?
danielx
@Baud:
There is a school of thought that says that making them deny it is a good thing, in addition to what you mentioned.
Brooklyn Dodger
@rikyrah: Awesome. Instant sunshine, thank you!!
Major Major Major Major
@different-church-lady:
Well, you were replying to a comment about passwords, so I assumed your comment was also about passwords.
Not at all. People trust LastPass and iCloud and Google (via chrome storage or SSO) for this already, and for good reason. A routinely audited single-purpose service like LastPass, staffed with experts in such things, is going to be better than whatever you or I come up with ourselves.
different-church-lady
@Major Major Major Major: You didn’t go to public school in the 70s, did you.
different-church-lady
@Major Major Major Major:
Right, so I should have said “Facebook identity” rather than password. Since I have always refused to do it on principle, I was unfamiliar with the mechanics of it.
It’s only a feeling in my gut, but I still think you’re being far too trusting of the unsinkability of the Titanic. The mice NEVER stop trying to defeat the mousetraps.
No Drought No More
It’s fantastic. To think, Ben Franklin outraged his adversaries once when he was busted for releasing private correspondence for political ends. And even as late as the early 1930’s, Hoover’s secretary of state Henry Stimson believed that espionage was, essentially, beneath the dignity of the United States (Henry had wised up by the time Pear Harbor was hit).
But Americans didn’t pick this fight. For one thing, it requires us to comprehend a Russian declaration of [technological] war upon our democracy, if we are to insure its survival (I assume we all agree that we have better things to do with our time- both as individuals, and a nation). And yet- AND GODDAMN THEM ALL- Americans are being thwarted in that understanding by the traitors themselves, and those congressional republicans that actively conspire with them (which is literally ALL of them).
But Americans will come to understand, and that very soon. By my lights, in fact, most Americans already do. But unlike the “Official investigation” that whitewashed the war crimes of the Bush-Chemney administration, the investigators of Mueller Inc. cannot be so corrupted. Nor will the rank and file of the democratic party permit its congressional representatives to repeat their tragic blunder, by turning a blind eye to this most recent treason.
Which is why, when all is said and done, the conspirators need to hang higher than Haman for their treachery, if only so future generations of Americans will say of us here today: “Well, at least the birdbrains got that one right”.
Mnemosyne
@different-church-lady:
Using your signed-in Facebook account to identify yourself to another website does not provide your password to that other website.
The Other Chuck
@different-church-lady: Yes, and since you have the password for an SSO provider, you have a “master key”. I’m screwed if someone grabs my Google password for example, since they can use it to reset all my other ones (as well as log in to the few sites I have using Google’s SSO). It’s a single point of failure that doesn’t belong in a single provider’s hands, that’s all correct. Nothing you’ve said about them is actually wrong, but the technology is neither Facebook’s fault, nor the actual problem.
The problem is addressed with privacy laws and security requirements similar to what payment processors have to conform to. Going back to individual passwords does not solve the underlying problem of authentication, and for the majority, in fact makes it worse.
Aleta
@JPL: He sure opens strong–lying about the reactions of scientists, then blaming nonscientists for the ignorant controversy. “At the time M wrote The Bell C, these claims were not scientifically controversial—(but) they proved devastating to his reputation among nonscientists.” And he quickly explains his own motivation is innocent. “I felt a moral imperative to provide him some cover.”
Slimy. I wonder if his target audience is those young “nazi historians.”
Aleta
@rikyrah: His jacket!
Thanks for this.
Aleta
@Aleta:
(Supposed to be @sherparick1: )
different-church-lady
@Mnemosyne:
OK, but that’s not what I’m getting at: if I have your FB password, I can log in as you on FB. If I can do that, I can get in everywhere else that uses FB for identity. It doesn’t matter if that other site gets the FB password or not.
catclub
@NotMax:
I think this is a nice way of saying it will no longer be drinkable, surprise!
Major Major Major Major
@different-church-lady: huh?
different-church-lady
My comment about biological issues at #114 mushed up with our discussion about technical issues, in a tongue-in-cheek fashion.
Major Major Major Major
@different-church-lady: ahha. We were taught the same thing!
I saw a funny the other day. 1998: don’t get in a stranger’s car, and don’t meet people on the internet. 2018: summon a stranger’s car via the internet.
feckless
Only crazy “activists”, who were ignored by the MSM, said that this was the inevitable result of AT&T v Concepcion; where the pro-corporate SCOTUS ruled that Yes YOU are Responsible for the 20 paragraphs of legalese printed in 6 point font.
Or as Tom Waits explains “The large print giveth, the small print taketh away”.
This sucks but it is a good response to “dems or repugs are all the same” apathy. No they are not, and yes it will affect YOUR quality of life, even if you are white and well off.
Tony Jay
@Baud:
But who do they invite into that house? Eh? Or, more seriously, while that ‘everything’ was a bit of hyperbole, it’s looking more and more like any guarantees Facebook give on data security need to be checked and confirmed by a third party to be worth anything.
It would, yes, my fault that my phrasing was off. What I meant was more or less, would what they sell have the kind of information in it that would make it easy (or easier) for hackers to break your password security on other platforms? With a bit of hair of fire “OMG can they get into my phone and check my Pornhub history/list of Chinese agents I’ve strangled to keep them quiet through Facebook?!?”
Purely hypothetically.
boatboy_srq
@Tony Jay: Not exactly.
User credentials (username/password) are fairly tightly guarded in any system. FB on the inside is no exception.
Where miscreants get in is via password prediction and security question material.
Users are their own worst enemies when it comes to strong passwords. “Password,” “P4ssw0rd” and other variants are all too commonly used; so are pets’ names, kids’ names etc. A truly complex password is generally as difficult to remember as it is to break, because it’s long and becauee it includes characters not commonly thought of as characters (punctuation, symbols etc), so they get fudged or avoided. Via FB data you can find out a person’s pet and offspring and other critical information, and suddenly “Fluffy123” is knowable and easily guessable by millions.
Security questions are less obvious but equally exposed. If you’re a target for cyberintrusion, using predictable security answers like you mother’s maiden name, your father’s middle name, your first car or school, or any of a hundred others may seem secure – unless all of that is somewhere in your social media, in which case the search will take a little longer but the answers are all there to be mined. An attacker will not need your password if they can obtain your username and enough security question answers to force a password reset, at which point they can take ownership of your accounts and lock you out.
bluefoot
@Tony Jay: This is almost trivially easy once you have access to data, plus some computing power. Combining what Facebook collects with public data (census, voter rolls, property info, public social media profiles, etc), plus personal data that one can purchase (say, marketing data from credit card companies), even if the data Facebook releases is “de-identified”, tracking back to individuals and reconstructing their lives is not that difficult.
Combining indivdual anonymized data with with public data can lead to de-identification, and revelation of otherwise private, secure, or classified information. Like the whole Strava thing that was in the news a couple of months ago.
Uncle Cosmo
@Jeffro: Re the authors of that “opinion” piece – every one of their bodies deserves to be found in a dumpster, horribly mutilated, yesterday – if not last week or last month or last millennium. Motherfucking bastards.
TenguPhule
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
Depends on if they were in an oxygen deficient burial or not. If the collapse didn’t leave any air pockets, it might actually be unexpectedly good.
TenguPhule
@Jeffro: I can top that, one conservative ass made the claim “All spending by the federal government except military spending is wasteful.”
His scalp, I want to hang it high. And I am not being metaphorical.
Raoul
All the Alexa type things make me think of “Jessica” in the very silly film Why Him. I mean, do we really want computers listening to us poop, have sex, etc, and have it potentially stored on servers for ever?
Me, no. Definitely. No.
WhatsMyNym
@Raoul:Re: Alexa
I just don’t want talk to my computer and have to listen to it’s response.