Category: Internet

Right-Wingers Hate Their Cable Companies More Than They Hate Democrats

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This is why the Republican dominated legislature in Ohio has backtracked on its attempt to ban municipal broadband.

People really, really, really, really, really, really hate their cable companies:

After coming close to imposing a near-total ban on municipal broadband networks, Ohio’s Republican-controlled legislature has reportedly dropped the proposed law in final negotiations over the state budget.

The final budget agreement “axed a proposal to limit local governments from offering broadband services,” The Columbus Dispatch wrote. With a June 30 deadline looming, Ohio’s House and Senate approved the budget and sent it to Gov. Mike DeWine for final approval on Monday night, the Dispatch wrote.

As we wrote earlier this month, the Ohio Senate approved a version of the budget containing an amendment that would have forced existing municipal broadband services to shut down and prevented the formation of new public networks. The proposed law was reportedly “inserted without prior public discussion,” and no state senator publicly sponsored the amendment. It was approved in a party-line vote as Democrats opposed the restrictions in municipal broadband.

The House version did not contain the amendment, and it was dropped during negotiations between the House and Senate.

Lawmakers apparently relented to public pressure from supporters of municipal broadband and cities and towns that operate the networks. People and businesses from Fairlawn, where the city-run FairlawnGig network offers fiber Internet, played a significant role in the protests. FairlawnGig itself asked users to put pressure on lawmakers, and the subscribers did so in great numbers.

If Democrats want to win, they should claim that Republicans want the cable companies to have monopolies on broadband (true), and that they support robocalling by Indian and Pakistani telemarketers. (True enough)

We’d have 65 seats in the Senate, and 320 in the House.

 

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

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The Washington State legislature passed two different bills repealing the states ban on municipal broadband.  One is expansive (H.B. 1336), and the other is more limited in scope (S.B. 5383), authorizing municipal broadband only in areas that are underserved. 

There was a rush to pass a bill to break the incumbent provider’s monopoly, and when presented with two conflicting bills, Washington Governor Jay Inslee signed both bills simultaneously, which means that neither bill has precedence.

By simultaneously, I mean that the Governor claims that he signed a bill with each hand at the same time.

First, much criticisms to the State House and Senate for passing two conflicting bills.

Second, I can see no explanation for the Governor’s actions unless he wants to keep this all snarled in litigation for the next few years as a way to suck up to Comcast and it’s Evil Minions™, who will try to extract every penny from their monopoly rents int he interim:

Washington state went all in on expanding public broadband this year. So much so, that the Legislature passed two different bills aimed at extending high-speed internet to people in rural areas.

It’s possible, however, that two bills aren’t better than one. And they may partly cancel each other out.

Now that Gov. Jay Inslee has signed both measures into law, confusion is mounting about whether the two laws can co-exist.

And that debate may end up in court.

Both House Bill 1336 and Senate Bill 5383 give public utility districts and ports new authority to offer broadband internet. The idea behind both bills is to have those public entities offer broadband in remote areas where private companies don’t operate because it’s not cost effective.

But the authority granted under HB 1336 is broader, said state Sen, Lisa Wellman, D-Mercer Island. Rather than requiring PUDs and ports to focus on offering broadband to people who lack any internet service, the House bill allows the public entities to serve all customers, including people who can already access the internet through a private company, such as CenturyLink or Comcast.

………

Inslee’s office hasn’t done much to clarify matters. In an unusual move on Thursday, the governor signed both bills at the same time, one with his right hand and the other with his left. While most bill signings occur in public and are broadcast on video, Inslee signed these two bills off camera. His office didn’t explain why.

If the bills do conflict with one another, the order in which they were signed into law becomes of paramount importance. In theory, the last bill signed would take precedence over the other. If it was Hansen’s bill, Wellman said she believes her bill’s focus on expanding public broadband in remote, unserved areas would be stripped out.

“It’s such drama, I’m telling you,” said Wellman, the sponsor of SB 5383. “I’ve never been in this situation before and I don’t want to ever be again.”

………

“We are planning to seek clarification from Thurston County Superior Court on how to proceed, as this is unchartered territory,” [Secretary of State Spokesperson Kylee] Zabel wrote in an email Friday.

………

The Washington State Broadband Office is set to distribute hundreds of millions of dollars in state and federal money to expand broadband internet access across the state. Under either of the bills that passed the Legislature, public utility districts and ports would be in a better position to take advantage of that influx of new money.

………

However, the dispute over how the two bills interact could complicate public utility districts’ plans to jump into the retail broadband business, he [Russ Elliott, the director of the broadband office] said.

“I think there are a lot of people right now worried whether, if someone implements something in the vein of this legislation, are they subjecting themselves to some sort of a legal battle?” Elliott said Friday. “Unfortunately that may be the way this gets played out — someone challenges what happens under these bills. I would hate to see that.”

The legal battle is the goal.  The longer that Comcast, CenturyLink, and Frontier can string this along, the more money they can rake in.

So Much for the Unfettered Free Market

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 It turns out that former FCC Chair Ajit Pai’s promises of a brave new world of competition and performance increases and price drops when ISPs were released from burdensome regulation.

Instead, prices continued to rise unabated, and there was no meaningful improvement in performance.

Not a surprise.  The broadband industry is about extracting monopoly rents, and deregulation increases their ability to extract the aforementioned rents:

The average US home-Internet bill increased 19 percent during the first three years of the Trump administration, disproving former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai’s claim that deregulation lowered prices, according to a new report by advocacy group Free Press. For tens of millions of families that aren’t wealthy, “these increases are felt deeply, forcing difficult decisions about which services to forgo so they can maintain critical Internet access services,” Free Press wrote.

The 19 percent Trump-era increase is adjusted for inflation to match the value of 2020 dollars, with the monthly cost rising from $39.35 in 2016 to $47.01 in 2019. Without the inflation adjustment, the average household Internet price rose from $36.48 in 2016 to $46.38 in 2019, an increase of 27 percent.

The nominal increase in each of the three years was between 7.27 percent and 9.94 percent, while inflation each year ranged from 1.81 percent to 2.44 percent.

“That means the nominal increase in broadband bills was more than four times the rate of inflation during those three years,” Free Press said. The report is based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Consumer Expenditures Survey data, which does not yet include 2020.

………

“[B]roadband prices consistently increase faster than the rate of inflation while the providers’ own costs do not. This makes this increasingly critical infrastructure service both more expensive in real terms to users and more profitable for the ISPs,” the report said.

Capital investment by Internet providers has dropped, “with substantial declines at large companies like AT&T (where 2020 investment was 52 percent below the 2016 total for the company on an inflation-adjusted basis) and Comcast (where 2020 cable segment investment was 22 percent below 2016’s level on an inflation-adjusted basis),” the report said.

In a press release, Free Press said that ISPs “grew their profits to record levels before and during the COVID-19 pandemic by increasing their prices during an unprecedented economic downturn,” and that “low-priced entry-level options for high-speed Internet service are disappearing, raising the adoption barrier for low-income families.”

The entire narrative that has driven the overpriced and under-performing connectivity situation is a lie.

My, How Nick Clegg has Fallen

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Roll Tape!

In 2010, largely on the basis of being telegenic and glib, Nick Clegg and his Liberal Democrats, (Slightly Silly Party) managed to snag enough seats in Parliament, no mean feat in Britains first-past-the-post system, to be the junior member in coalition with David Cameron and the Tories until the next election, where

In the next election, they lost 48 of 57 seats, because the electorate realized that all Clegg cared about was proximity to power.

Speaking of Nick Clegg’s pathological need to be close to power, he is now Facebook’s vice president of global affairs, and so, much like his days in UK politics, defending the indefensible.

In this case, the former head of the Lib Dems is defending Facebook’s algorithms and its reckless and insecure handling of user data. 

Clegg’s descent into an irrelevant joke does not surprise me one bit:

Facebook wants to reintroduce users to its algorithms.

On Wednesday, within the span of a few hours, the company took several steps to encourage users to trust its ranking and recommendation systems. In a blog post, Facebook said it would make it easier for users to control what’s in their feeds, pointing to both new and existing tools. In an apparent attempt to buttress that announcement, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs Nick Clegg published a 5,000-word Medium post defending the company’s ranking algorithms and repudiating the argument that those algorithms create dangerous echo chambers. Clegg also defended Facebook’s algorithms in a wide-ranging interview with The Verge published on the same day.

Taken together, these moves appear to be a concerted campaign by Facebook to repair the negative reputation of its algorithms, which many say actively encourage and incentivize political polarization, misinformation, and extreme content. The efforts come as the company faces heavy criticism from lawmakers for its platform design, and just a week after CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified to Congress during a hearing on misinformation.

In its latest PR blitz, Facebook is pushing the idea that it’s not particularly responsible for the proliferation of polarization and extreme content on its platforms and is taking appropriate steps to combat both. That defies longtime critics, who have said Facebook’s algorithms are engineered to reward the most odious content, a specific narrative that Facebook and Clegg are actively denying.

………

“Nick Clegg’s Medium post is a cynical, breathtaking display of gaslighting on a scale hard to fathom even for Facebook,” a spokesperson for the Real Facebook Oversight Board, a group of scholars and activists critical of Facebook, told Recode. “Clegg asks, ‘Where does FB’s incentive lie?’ A better question might be: Where does Nick Clegg’s incentive lie? The answer to that is clear.”

“Facebook managed to both insult its users for being too dimwitted to understand how its algorithms work while also blaming them for taking advantage of them too effectively,” said Ashley Boyd, the vice president for advocacy at Mozilla, in a Wednesday statement. “The News Feed controls unveiled today amount to nothing more than an admission that its algorithms are the problem.”

Ashley Boyd’s quote is spot on, and I have nothing to add.

Remember When I Said that Contextual Ads Were More Effective?

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I pointed to the case of a Dutch broadcaster who got better results, and more revenue, when they stopped using ad tech that tracked and identified (stalked) people, and switched to ads based on the contents of the web page that they were viewing. 

Well, with Google shifting its own ad tech, some other companies are discovering that what they were sold by Google and Facebook was complete pants: 

Bacardi last October ran a test to tell whether its campaign promoting Bombay Sapphire in the U.K. could boost sales and brand favor—and in the process help answer a broader question about the long-term fate of its digital marketing as the way consumers are targeted for ads faces a shift.

The campaign took 10,000 anonymized identities of people who had visited the gin brand’s distillery or website, and sent them offers like promotional emails or Instagram ads promising drink recipes and early access to new products.

The result was a click-through rate, which indicates how often ad exposures lead to clicks, around 9% higher than previous campaigns that relied on common but now endangered targeting methods, such as using data from third-party sources. The new campaign also saw a 14% increase in cost efficiency as measured by a cost-per-click metric.

Bacardi says those and other encouraging signs give it confidence in its ability to build its brand and sell products even once it no longer has access to individual ad tracking and targeting technology that Google plans to move against next year.

My guess is that Bacardi’s marking department is calling Google and Facebook and the other “Stalker Advertisers”  pig felching* c%$# sucking con men who should be put up against the wall, because they realized that they have been scammed.

You want to sell booze?  Buy ads on booze web sites.

It’s that simple, and it’s cheaper, and far less opaque.

*If you do not know that that word means, Don’t Google It. Trust me.

Going Down the Wikipedia Rabbit Hole

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I am sure that most of you have experienced this, you look up something, and you go to the Wikipedia page, and there is an interesting link, and you go there, and before you know it, you have clicked on 20+ different links, and you are looking at something completely unrelated to where you started.

Well, I did this today, I was looking up the comedy team of John Clarke and Bryan Dawe, after posting their classic sketch, The Front Fell Off, and I ended up on the sport of ferret-legging.

Ferret legging is a sport in which men (and it is almost always men) stuff ferrets down their trousers, and the one who can do this for the longest time wins:

Ferret-legging was an endurance test or stunt in which ferrets were trapped in trousers worn by a participant. Also known as put ’em down and ferret-down-trousers, it seems to have been popular among coal miners in Yorkshire, England. Contestants put live ferrets inside their trousers; the winner is the one who is the last to release the animals.

Ferret-legging may have originated during the time when only the relatively wealthy in England were allowed to keep animals used for hunting, forcing poachers to hide their illicit ferrets in their trousers. Following a brief resurgence in popularity during the 1970s, it has been described as a “dying sport”, although a national ferret-legging event was held in Richmond, Virginia from 2003 to 2009.

Description and rules

In the sport of ferret-legging, competitors tie their trousers at the ankles before placing two ferrets inside and securely fastening their belts to prevent the ferrets from escaping. Each competitor then stands in front of the judges for as long as he can. Competitors cannot be drunk or drugged, nor can the ferrets be sedated. In addition, competitors are not allowed to wear underwear beneath their trousers, which must allow the ferrets free access from one leg to the other, and the ferrets must have a full set of teeth that must not have been filed or otherwise blunted. The winner is the person who lasts the longest.

The sport is said to involve very little “native skill”, simply an ability to “have your tool bitten and not care”. The former world champion, Reg Mellor, is credited with instituting the practice of wearing white trousers in ferret-legging matches, to better display the blood from the wounds caused by the animals. Competitors can attempt, from outside their trousers, to dislodge the ferrets, but as the animals can maintain a strong hold for long periods, their removal can be difficult. The ferrets are occasionally put inside the contestants’ shirts in addition to their trousers. An attempt to introduce a female version of the sport—ferret busting, in which female contestants introduced ferrets down their blouses—proved unsuccessful.

This is profoundly weird, and having been exposed to the story Sredni Vashtar by Saki at a young age, it is certainly not a sport that I have any interest in participating in, though right now I am craving a piece of buttered toast. (It’s Passover, so I am REALLY craving a piece of buttered toast)

This Will Not End Well

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So, the new hot thing is a payments processor called Stripe, and it is planning for an IPO and has just announced a $95 billion valuation with its series H funding round.

I’m generally dubious of “Unicorns”, and when I did a quick Google on Stripe, it appeared to be a fairly anodyne supplier payments processing, with the only “Innovation” I could see being its incorporation in Ireland, which will allow it to avoid most taxes.  (There appears to be no “Secret Sauce.”)

It’s a dull, if profitable, business with relatively low barriers to entry, but suddenly everyone is talking about making bank when it goes IPO.

I’m not saying that it’s a fraudulent operation, its business model appears to be solid, if rather dull.  What I AM saying is that its funding seems to be less about the business than it is about creating a hubbub which which will allow those institutional funders to fill their pockets, walk away, and the retail investor takes the losses when gravity returns:

The payments company Stripe is worth $95 billion after a new round of funding, making it the most valuable start-up in the United States.

The San Francisco and Dublin-based company said on Sunday that it had raised $600 million in new funding from investors including Sequoia Capital, Fidelity Management and Ireland’s National Treasury Management Agency. The investment nearly triples Stripe’s last valuation of $35 billion.

The funding comes amid a surge in the adoption of digital tools and services in the pandemic as more people live, work and make purchases online. That has fueled a wave of investment into, and eye-popping valuations at, tech start-ups, as well as a frenzy of highly valued initial public offerings. Investors have valued Airbnb, the home rental start-up that recently went public, at $123 billion. Roblox, a kids gaming start-up, saw its valuation soar to $45 billion when it went public last week.

Founded in 2010, Stripe builds software that enables businesses to process payments online. As more people have turned to online shopping in the pandemic, Stripe’s offerings have been in demand. It is the largest among a class of fast-growing, highly valued financial technology companies.

Then again, I am always profoundly skeptical of the, “Next Big Thing.”

Why the Hell Haven’t I Been Banned from Twitter?

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And I am outraged that James Hodgkinson was not a better shot.

— Jack Dorsey Is Objectively Pro-Nazi (M.G. Saroff) (@40_Years) March 4, 2021

Seems bannable to me

In response to a Tweet from Steve Scalise (R-LA) wherein he expressed, “Outrage,” over the House of Representatives passing a bill to make it easier for people to vote, I replied, “And I am outraged that James Hodgkinson was not a better shot.”

James Hodgkinson, as you probably already know, was the left-wing gunman who opened fire on a baseball practice being conducted by Congressional Republicans, severely wounded Representative Scalize. (He nearly died, both from the immediate effects of the shooting, and later from a post operative infection.)

Not only am I still on Twitter, but I haven’t even been called an asshole.

At least this time, unlike the last time, I will actually have done something meriting a banning.   (Last time, it was (I think, I never got an answer) for using the term “Wymyn” as a part of a joke.)

You have to love automated content moderation, where things like discussions of chess get flagged as hate speech.

Ha Ha!

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Right wing hate site Gab just got hacked, big time.

DDOSecrets, who previously had leaked racist and Islamophobic police training materials got almost everything, public posts, private posts, user info, passwords, etc.

These guys really do have spectacularly poor IT skills don’t they?

It’s the revenge of Bobby Droptables all over again

On the bright side, it save lots of aviation fuel.

Black helicopters are notorious fuel guzzlers: 

When Twitter banned Donald Trump and a slew of other far-right users in January, many of them became digital refugees, migrating to sites like Parler and Gab to find a home that wouldn’t moderate their hate speech and disinformation. Days later, Parler was hacked, and then it was dropped by Amazon web hosting, knocking the site offline. Now Gab, which inherited some of Parler’s displaced users, has been badly hacked too. An enormous trove of its contents has been stolen—including what appears to be passwords and private communications.

On Sunday night the WikiLeaks-style group Distributed Denial of Secrets is revealing what it calls GabLeaks, a collection of more than 70 gigabytes of Gab data representing more than 40 million posts. DDoSecrets says a hacktivist who self-identifies as “JaXpArO and My Little Anonymous Revival Project” siphoned that data out of Gab’s backend databases in an effort to expose the platform’s largely right-wing users. Those Gab patrons, whose numbers have swelled after Parler went offline, include large numbers of Qanon conspiracy theorists, white nationalists, and promoters of former president Donald Trump’s election-stealing conspiracies that resulted in the January 6 riot on Capitol Hill.

DDoSecrets cofounder Emma Best says that the hacked data includes not only all of Gab’s public posts and profiles—with the exception of any photos or videos uploaded to the site—but also private group and private individual account posts and messages, as well as user passwords and group passwords. “It contains pretty much everything on Gab, including user data and private posts, everything someone needs to run a nearly complete analysis on Gab users and content,” Best wrote in a text message interview with WIRED. “It’s another gold mine of research for people looking at militias, neo-Nazis, the far right, QAnon, and everything surrounding January 6.”

DDoSecrets says it’s not publicly releasing the data due to its sensitivity and the vast amounts of private information it contains. Instead the group says it will selectively share it with journalists, social scientists, and researchers. WIRED viewed a sample of the data, and it does appear to contain Gab users’ individual and group profiles—their descriptions and privacy settings—public and private posts, and passwords. Gab CEO Andrew Torba acknowledged the breach in a brief statement Sunday.

………

According to DDoSecrets’ Best, the hacker says that they pulled out Gab’s data via a SQL injection vulnerability in the site—a common web bug in which a text field on a site doesn’t differentiate between a user’s input and commands in the site’s code, allowing a hacker to reach in and meddle with its backend SQL database. Despite the hacker’s reference to an “Anonymous Revival Project,” they’re not associated with the loose hacker collective Anonymous, they told Best, but do “want to represent the nameless struggling masses against capitalists and fascists.”

It’s reassuring that all the Nazis so far seem to be Colonel Klink, but we cannot rely on that forever.

Facebook is a Ponzi Scheme

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I have noted for some time not that even by the rather loose standards of internet advertising, Facebook stands out because of the fraudulent nature of its ad metrics.

Now we have a whistle-blower:

A Facebook employee warned that the company reported revenues it “should have never made” by overstating how many users advertisers could reach, according to internal emails revealed in a newly unsealed court filing.

The world’s largest social media company has since 2018 been fighting a class-action lawsuit claiming that its executives knew its “potential reach metric”, used to inform advertisers of their potential audience size, was inflated but failed to correct it.

According to sections of a filing in the lawsuit that were unredacted on Wednesday, a Facebook product manager in charge of potential reach proposed changing the definition of the metric in mid-2018 to render it more accurate.

However, internal emails show that his suggestion was rebuffed by Facebook executives overseeing metrics on the grounds that the “revenue impact” for the company would be “significant”, the filing said.

The product manager responded by saying “it’s revenue we should have never made given the fact it’s based on wrong data”, the complaint said.

………

Facebook has argued that the metrics are only estimates. Indeed, advertisers do not pay the company based on potential reach, rather for actual impressions and clicks on ads.

………

Facebook itself acknowledged that the metric was “arguably the single most important number in our ads creation interfaces” in an internal document cited in the unsealed filing.

The filing also claimed that in early 2018, internal Facebook research found that removing duplicate accounts from potential reach would result in a 10 per cent drop in the figure.

………

In March 2019, Facebook made some changes to its potential reach, making it based on how many people matching an advertiser’s criteria had been shown an ad in the past 30 days, rather than the number of active users over the same time period. However, the lawsuit alleges that as of 2020, the company “still has not removed the fake and duplicate accounts from its potential reach calculation”.

………

The lawsuit over potential reach is the second major suit brought by advertisers regarding misleading metrics at Facebook. Several years ago the company settled a complaint filed after it disclosed it overstated video-viewing metrics in 2015 and 2016.

(emphasis mine)

I really want to see Mark Zuckerberg marched out of Facebook headquarters in handcuffs one day. 

Of course, that would require a Department of Justice that wasn’t generally opposed to prosecuting white collar crime.

Worse Response to a Bad Idea

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The Australian government is in the process of passing a law that requires payment for linking to news sites, which to my mind is a horrible idea, and Mark Zuckerberg’s response to all of this is to have Facebook ban all Australian news content from their platform. 

Granted, Australia is not a huge market, at 25 million people, it’s only about 5 million more people than the New York City metropolitan area, but this ham-fisted response is going to do a lot of damage to Facebook while mildly inconveniencing the people of Australia.

I don’t expect Zuckerberg to cave, and in that case, I see Australia generally moving to some other source of rumors, genocidal racists, fascism, and cat pix.

The Australians are a hardy and inventive people:

Facebook has followed through on its threat to ban Australians from seeing or posting news content on its site in response to the federal government’s news media code.

The tech giant’s Australian and New Zealand managing director, Will Easton, said this would block links to Australian publishers from being posted, while no Australian users would be able to share or see content from any news outlets, both Australian and international.

“The proposed law fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between our platform and publishers who use it to share news content,” he said in a blog post published on Thursday morning. “It has left us facing a stark choice: attempt to comply with a law that ignores the realities of this relationship, or stop allowing news content on our services in Australia.

“With a heavy heart, we are choosing the latter.”

………

Users on Thursday reported seeing a pop-up error window when they attempted to post links to news, stating these cannot be posted in response to the news media code.

………

Facebook’s move is in contrast to the approach from the other major platform subject to the code, Google.

Although Google had threatened to withdraw its search engine from Australia if the code went ahead, in the past week, Google has signed agreements with some of Australia’s biggest publishers, including News Corp, Nine Entertainment and Seven West Media, for payment for its News Showcase product. The Nine deal is reportedly worth $30m a year.

As several people have pointed out to me, Facebook blocked itself. pic.twitter.com/LVhyJMAHfp

— Josh Taylor (@joshgnosis) February 17, 2021

Yes, Facebook banned Facebook, I think that the Aussies would call this an “Own Goal”

It gets even worse, because Facebook f%$#ed up the rollout of the ban, shutting down non-profits and government agencies as well:

The Bureau of Meteorology, state health departments, the Western Australian opposition leader, charities and Facebook itself are among those to have been hit by Facebook’s ban on news in Australia.

On Thursday morning Facebook began preventing Australian news sites from posting, while also stopping Australian users from sharing or viewing content from any news outlets, both Australian and international.

The social media giant said it made the decision in response to the news media bargaining code currently before the Senate, which would force Facebook and Google to negotiate with news companies for payment for content.

………

As Australia prepares to begin the rollout of Covid-19 vaccines, state health departments, including SA Health and Queensland Health, were unable to post.

St Vincent’s Health in Melbourne said it was “extremely concerning”its Facebook page had been blocked “during a pandemic and on the eve of crucial Covid vaccine distribution”.

Facebook is claiming that this was a “Mistake.”

If you believe that, I have a bridge in Melbourne made completely of Koala poop to sell you.

I Don’t Vote for Internet Trolls

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Nor do I vote for those who knowingly and deliberately employ internet trolls :

When the Internet’s legions of Hillary hecklers steal away to chat rooms and Facebook pages to vent grievances about Clinton, express revulsion toward Clinton and launch attacks on Clinton, they now may find themselves in a surprising place – confronted by a multimillion dollar super PAC working with Clinton.

 Hillary Clinton’s well-heeled backers have opened a new frontier in digital campaigning, one that seems to have been inspired by some of the Internet’s worst instincts. Correct the Record, a super PAC coordinating with Clinton’s campaign, is spending some $1 million to find and confront  social media users who post unflattering messages about the Democratic front-runner.

 In effect, the effort aims to spend a large sum of money to increase the amount of trolling that already exists online.

………

 “It is meant to appear to be coming organically from people and their social media networks in a groundswell of activism, when in fact it is highly paid and highly tactical,” said Brian Donahue, chief executive of the consulting firm Craft Media/Digital.

 “That is what the Clinton campaign has always been about,” he said. “It runs the risk of being exactly what their opponents accuse them of being: a campaign that appears to be populist but is a smokescreen that is paid and brought to you by lifetime political operatives and high-level consultants.”

 ………

 The mere mention of Correct the Record makes some critics seethe. Super PACs are typically prohibited from working in tandem with candidates, but Correct the Record is doing just that by exploiting a loophole in campaign finance law that it says permits such coordination with digital campaigns.

(emphasis mine)

I’ve spent way too much of my time online dealing with these ratf%$#s, and Hillary Clinton is paying to make more of them.

I am so glad that I do not live in a swing state.

The Reality of Private Internet Service Providers

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The DC Court of appeals just overturned the FCC ruling invalidating state bans on municipally owned internet service providers:

Federal regulators just suffered a major setback in their efforts to help cities build Internet services that compete with large providers such as Comcast and Time Warner Cable.

 In a federal-court decision Wednesday, the Federal Communications Commission was told that it doesn’t have the power to block state laws that critics say hinder the spread of cheap, publicly run broadband service.

Rather ironically, the feel good story of the day is how a cooperative of rural communities in Minnesota jsut put together their own high speed internet services.

These services are both better and cheaper than the commercial alternatives:

Seven years ago, Winthrop, Minnesota, population 1,400, decided it needed an internet upgrade.

Most local residents were served by companies like Mediacom, which Consumer Reports consistently ranked among the country’s worst internet providers. Slow connection speeds made work difficult in local schools and businesses, but farmers outside of town, who increasingly rely on connectivity to do business, experienced the worst of it.

Fourteen miles from Winthrop, in Moltke Township, population 330, one soybean- and wheat-farming family reported its sluggish DSL connection often made it impossible to upload reports to business partners.

Organizers in Winthrop knew they were too small to fund a major internet infrastructure-building project on their own, so they reached out to other neighbors, the town of Gaylord, population 2,305.

And the towns attracted 25 more municipal allies.

Today, in this sparsely populated swath of Minnesota, a grassroots, member-owned cooperative spanning more than 700 square miles and four counties is poised to expand high-speed broadband access — without relying on federal funding. After seven years of development led by local leaders and volunteers, RS Fiber, now in its first phase of construction, is expected to deliver high-speed broadband internet to more than 6,000 rural households by 2021. And unlike companies like Mediacom, the co-op is owned by local customers who have a say in rates and how it’s operated.

………

Once complete, the RS Fiber network is expected to match the 1 gigabit top speeds of cities like Cedar Falls, a milestone that would make southern Minnesota the envy of rural America. According to recent data, only 55 percent of rural residents have access to broadband internet faster than even 25 Mbps (compared to 94 percent of urbanites). Moreover, the investment already holds promise for boosting the local economy. In May 2015, the Minnesota College of Osteopathic Medicine announced plans to set up services in an old school building in Gaylord — a decision officials said was because of RS Fiber’s infrastructure investment.

US internet performance has been lagging since the 1990s because the mantra of unleashing the market has led to monopoly providers and monopoly rents, which in turn leads to higher prices and lack of investment in infrastructure.

From a business perspective, it makes sense for the ISPs to suck wet farts from dead pigeons.

From a societal perspective it is a disaster.

The Internet of Things Got Hacked Again, Things that go Buzz in the Night Edition

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In news of the coming tech utopia, a network enabled sexual aid has been hacked, and even in the unhacked condition, it sends personal data back to the manufacturer.

The Internet of Things That Can Be Hacked grows daily. Lightbulbs, trucks, and fridges all have computers inside them now, and all have been hacked by someone. But at least you don’t put those inside your body.

Two years ago, someone had the good idea to put a bluetooth connection inside a vibrator, and the We-Vibe 4 Plus was born. The vibrator can connect with a smartphone app that its makers say “allows couples to keep their flame ignited – together or apart”: that is, it can be controlled remotely, while, say, making a video call.

The consequences of a wrong number are left to reader’s imagination.

But at the Def Con hacking conference in Las Vegas, two independent hackers from New Zealand, who go by the handles goldfisk and follower, revealed that the way the vibrator speaks with its controlling app isn’t really secure at all – making it possible to remotely seize control of the vibrator and activate it at will.

In their talk, Hacking the Internet of Vibrating Things, Follower argued that despite titters at the back of the room, the security of a sex toy should be taken seriously. “The company that makes this vibrator, Standard Innovation: They have over 2 million people using their devices, so what’s at stake is 2 million people.”

“A lot of people in the past have said it’s not really a serious issue,” he added, “but if you come back to the fact that we’re talking about people, unwanted activation of a vibrator is potentially sexual assault.”

Potentially worse still, the pair discovered that the app itself was phoning home, letting the manufacturer discover some very intimate information about users.

(emphasis mine)

I want no part of this brave new world.

Wikileaks Releases 300K Emails from Turkish AKP

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There have not been any bombshells discovered (yet), but the release of a year’s worth of emails from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s AKP party should prove to be rather interesting:

Over the weekend, the Internet may have saved the regime of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, as protestors organized online to fight a military coup, and Erdogan himself addressed the nation via Apple’s Facetime video-calling app. Today, however, Erdogan may remember that he doesn’t particularly like the Internet, after all—as hundreds of thousands of his ruling party’s alleged private correspondences spills onto the web.

On Tuesday, WikiLeaks published what it’s calling the Erdoğan Emails, a searchable collection of 294,548 emails it says are leaked from the AKP, Turkey’s ruling political party, and the organization president Erdoğan led before he was elected president. Turkish citizens and the world community are still struggling to understand the context of Turkey’s coup and the crackdown that’s followed, all of which could make this alleged Erdoğan leak more significant than the secret-spilling group’s average data dump. However, at the time of writing, it’s not at all clear yet what exactly the Turkish-language megaleak contains, or if the emails are what Wikileaks claims they are.

“The material was obtained a week before the attempted coup. However, WikiLeaks has moved forward its publication schedule in response to the government’s post-coup purges,” reads a note posted with the release on WikiLeaks’ site. “We have verified the material and the source, who is not connected, in any way, to the elements behind the attempted coup, or to a rival political party or state.”

I did a quick search of the data (for Bilal, Erdoğan’s remarkably corrupt son), so the search works, but given my complete lack of understanding of the Turkish language, it proved of little use to me.

Hopefully someone in the expat community (Turkey is blocking access to the site) will do a deep dive.

Where There’s a Wool, There’s a Way*

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It appears that the people fo the Faroe Islands want to have Google cameras taking pictures of them when they are unaware so that the island is covered by Google Street View™.

I find this odd, but who am I to judge them?

What is odd is that they have a shortage of motor vehicles, so they mounted the Street View™ equipment on sheep:

Living across 18 tiny sub-polar islands in the north Atlantic, Faroe islanders are used to working in difficult conditions. So tired of waiting for Google Street View to come and map the roads, causeways and bridges of the archipelago, a team has set up its own mapping project – Sheep View 360.

With the help of a local shepherd and a specially built harness built by a fellow islander, Durita Dahl Andreassen of Visit Faroe Islands has fitted five of the island’s sheep with a 360-degree camera.

As the sheep walk and graze around the island, the pictures are sent back to Andreassen with GPS co-ordinates, which she then uploads to Google Street View.

“Here in the Faroe Islands we have to do things our way,” says Andreassen. “Knowing that we are so small and Google is so big, we felt this was the thing to do.”

My mind is officially blown.

Clearly

*H/t Emptywheel for the joke, which she described as a, “Baaad joke.”  Ouch.