*Pronounced in Japanese, “baka ni tsukeru kusuri wanai”, which means, “There is no medicine for stupidity.”
Unbelievably stoopid.
H/t HR at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.
Category: Internet
Latest Big Brother Bill Fails
Yes, Joe Lieberman’s attempt at a combined police state wet dream/vanity legacy project, the Cybersecurity Act of 2012, failed failed to break a filibuster, and so it’s dead for this session.
I’m happy, but Barack Obama is bumming, because, well, the worlds worst constitutional law professor wants to be able to spy on people without any independent review.
So, When is Mark Zuckerberg Going to Jail?
I’ve always thought that there was something odd about how Facebook does business.
Even by the litigious standards of the various dot-com bubbles, the number of law suits that have have been filed alleging that he took money from people to develop stuff,. and walked off with said work product.
It’s entirely reasonable to see the enormous amount of money involved as an inducement to file suits, after all, even a small settlement will still be a lot of money, but I’d make sure to dot my “i”s and cross my “t”s if I dealt with Facebook in a commercial capacity.
This is what online market provider Limited Run has discovered, when they realized that 80% of the ad click-throughs that they were paying through were bots:
Hey everyone, we’re going to be deleting our Facebook page in the next couple of weeks, but we wanted to explain why before we do. A couple months ago, when we were preparing to launch the new Limited Run, we started to experiment with Facebook ads. Unfortunately, while testing their ad system, we noticed some very strange things. Facebook was charging us for clicks, yet we could only verify about 20% of them actually showing up on our site. At first, we thought it was our analytics service. We tried signing up for a handful of other big name companies, and still, we couldn’t verify more than 15-20% of clicks. So we did what any good developers would do. We built our own analytic software. Here’s what we found: on about 80% of the clicks Facebook was charging us for, JavaScript wasn’t on. And if the person clicking the ad doesn’t have JavaScript, it’s very difficult for an analytics service to verify the click. What’s important here is that in all of our years of experience, only about 1-2% of people coming to us have JavaScript disabled, not 80% like these clicks coming from Facebook. So we did what any good developers would do. We built a page logger. Any time a page was loaded, we’d keep track of it. You know what we found? The 80% of clicks we were paying for were from bots. That’s correct. Bots were loading pages and driving up our advertising costs. So we tried contacting Facebook about this. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t reply. Do we know who the bots belong too? No. Are we accusing Facebook of using bots to drive up advertising revenue. No. Is it strange? Yes. But let’s move on, because who the bots belong to isn’t provable.
While we were testing Facebook ads, we were also trying to get Facebook to let us change our name, because we’re not Limited Pressing anymore. We contacted them on many occasions about this. Finally, we got a call from someone at Facebook. They said they would allow us to change our name. NICE! But only if we agreed to spend $2000 or more in advertising a month. That’s correct. Facebook was holding our name hostage. So we did what any good hardcore kids would do. We cursed that piece of sh%$ out! Damn we were so pissed. We still are. This is why we need to delete this page and move away from Facebook. They’re scumbags and we just don’t have the patience for scumbags.
(%$ mine)
I’m thinking that the people who will win if this story goes mainstream will be the newspapers.
Much of the allure of online advertising is its ability to closely track response to a specific ad. If that turns out not to be true, then print ads become much more attractive.
H/t Naked Capitalism.
Twitter Joke Conviction Overturned
Finally, some sanity in the courts, though it’s across the pond.
Perhaps we’ve finally found judges who have a clue about Twitter:
A bloke found guilty of tweeting a “menacing” joke about blowing up a UK airport has had his conviction quashed by the High Court today. A collective sigh of relief was heard moments later from comedians addicted to the micro-blogging website.Paul Chambers, 28, was waiting to fly from Doncaster’s Robin Hood airport to Belfast to see his girlfriend, whom he met on the social networking site, when snow closed the airfield and delayed his flight.
He vented his frustration in a series of tweets to his squeeze Sarah Tonner, now his fiancee, including a suggestion that he had considered “resorting to terrorism” to ensure he could visit her.
………
Mr Justice Owen and Mr Justice Griffith Williams said in the High Court today that the facts needed to be considered in context, pointing out that the tweets had clearly appeared to be a reference to the airport closing due to adverse weather conditions.
“There was no evidence before the Crown Court to suggest that any of the followers of the appellant’s ‘tweet’, or indeed anyone else who may have seen the ‘tweet’ posted on the appellant’s time line, found it to be of a menacing character or, at a time when the threat of terrorism is real, even minimally alarming,” the High Court heard.
His comedian supporters were stoked:
Verizon Sucks
And I am speaking now as a Verizon customer (FIOS).
You see, they are claiming that they have a first amendment right to censor your internet access:
Last week, Verizon filed a brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit laying out their various and sundry complaints against the Federal Communications Commission’s Open Internet Order, which put net neutrality regulations in place for Internet service providers. The telecom giant is suing to have the FCC’s order thrown out, and one of their legal arguments is raising more than a few eyebrows. Verizon, per the court document, considers itself your Internet editor. Or your Internet editor-in-waiting.
It goes like this: the Open Internet Order says that Verizon, as a provider of broadband Internet, can’t block or slow access to (legal) online content because they disagree with its message or are being paid by an outside party to do so. This is essentially how the internet has operated since its inception, and the Open Internet Order is intended to prevent ISPs like Verizon from becoming gatekeepers. Verizon, however, argues that it has the constitutionally protected right to decide which content you, as a Verizon customer, can access — that it is no different from a newspaper editor:
Of course, when they are sued, they claim to be mere dumb pipes, and scream “safe harbor.”
C%$# sucking pig felching rat bastards.
Another Wanker of the Day
One week after Apple announced it was booting Google Maps from iOS and photographing the world with its own aerial fleet, a top US Senator has written to both companies expressing concern over their “military-grade spy planes.”
“Barbequing or sunbathing in your backyard shouldn’t be a public event,” said Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) in a statement on Monday. “People should be free from the worry of some high-tech peeping Tom technology violating one’s privacy when in your own home.”
Schumer noted that although Google Maps and Google Earth have used satellite imagery in the past, “reports have suggested” that both Google and Apple have upgraded their capabilities to aircraft-based photography that can see through windows and capture detailed images with four-inch resolution.
Although Schumer specifically mentioned sunbathing – and we never even knew he was a Reg reader – his remarks suggest that his main concern isn’t high-flying voyeurism, but rather intelligence that could aid terroists and other miscreants.
“Detailed photographs could also provide criminals and terrorists with detailed views of sensitive utilities,” he wrote to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google CEO Larry Page, noting that although there are online sources which currently show such potential targets as power lines, substations, and reservoirs, those images are in low resolution.
“However,” Schumer surmised, “if highly detailed images become available, criminals could create more complete schematic maps of the power and water grids in the United States. With the vast amount of infrastructure across the country, it would be impossible to secure every location.”
So, we have yet another participant in the war against maps.
Let’s keep everyone ignorant, because someone might do something bad with information someday.
Dumbass.
Consumer Protection Theater
The DoJ is investigating to see if cable companies blocking videos from competitors is illegal anti-competitive behavior.
Of course it is. Their goal is to keep raping their customers:
The Justice Department is conducting a wide-ranging antitrust investigation into whether cable companies are acting improperly to quash nascent competition from online video, according to people familiar with the matter.
Justice Department officials have spoken to several online video providers, including Netflix Inc. and Hulu LLC, those people said. Investigators have also questioned Comcast Corp., Time Warner Cable Inc. and other cable companies about issues such as setting data caps, limits to the amount of data a subscriber can download each month, these people said.
Representatives of all those companies and the Justice Department declined to comment on the investigation.
Cable companies provide both television channels and high-speed Internet access for many consumers in the U.S. With broadband Internet, consumers can watch individual programs or channels through online video services like Netflix, Hulu or Amazon, bypassing the cable company’s traditional bundles of channels.
Having invested billions of dollars building their networks, some pay-TV companies have shown little inclination to get out of the business of packaging television channels and become mere conduits for other companies’ data. Some major entertainment companies also have an interest in preserving the current model of television viewing because they want cable companies to take bundles of their channels, rather than just cherry-picking the most popular ones.
It’s an election year, and so nothing is going to come of this.
It’s just political posturing from an administration that sees corrupt incumbents as partners in the process.
This Reminds Me of My Days on Usenet
A well executed troll is a thing of beauty.
Observed on Twitter
I guess the fact that this is the pithy quote season goes along with the fact that it is the silly season.
I Fear That My Son Might Be Ineluctably Evil
I was getting my son to bed, and in a fit of bad parenting, I told him to, “Put his head on the f%$#ing pillow.”
He asked me if his pillow actually did this, and I told him that Rule 34 said yes.
He asked what Rule 34 was, and I said that it was, “If it exists, there’s pr0n for it.”
His response, “So there’s Rubik’s Cube Pr0n?”
I’m afraid to Google it.
I’m Not the Only One Who Thinks Google’s Upgrades Suck
John Aravosis of Americablog has seen the new blogger update, and it has him planning to move the whole blog to WordPress:
Welcome to my own personal hell. Welcome to the new Blogger content management system, created by Google, that is incompatible with iPhones or iPads, and whose iphone app is a complete and utter disaster.
They’ve gotten similar responses about their changes to Gmail (here’s a hint, go with the high contrast theme to make it bearable)
I’m beginning to wonder if they are intentionally screwing the pooch.
I’m Cynical as to the Motives Here
So, after expressing concerns about the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), the White House has now threatened a veto:
The White House has said that the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), currently before the US House of Representatives, lacks enough privacy protections in its current form and will probably be vetoed if passed.
A statement from the White House Office of Management and Budget said that, while the importance of protecting the national infrastructure from online attacks is paramount, it “strongly opposes” the bill because it lacks proper oversight, could seriously damage individuals’ privacy and hands over responsibility for domestic cybersecurity to the NSA, rather than to a civilian body.
“Legislation should address core critical infrastructure vulnerabilities without sacrificing the fundamental values of privacy and civil liberties for our citizens, especially at a time our Nation is facing challenges to our economic well-being and national security,” the statement reads.
“The Administration looks forward to continuing to engage with the Congress in a bipartisan, bicameral fashion to enact cybersecurity legislation to address these critical issues. However, for the reasons stated herein, if H.R. 3523 were presented to the President, his senior advisors would recommend that he veto the bill.”
Yea! The White House is standing up for privacy.
Or maybe not:
“The Administration strongly opposes H.R. 3523, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, in its current form,” the White House said in a statement released Wednesday afternoon. “H.R. 3523 fails to provide authorities to ensure that the nation’s core critical infrastructure is protected while repealing important provisions of electronic surveillance law without instituting corresponding privacy, confidentiality, and civil liberties safeguards.”
CISPA’s sponsors, House Intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., and ranking member Dutch Ruppersberger, D-Md., dismissed the White House statement.
“The basis for the administration’s view is mostly based on the lack of critical infrastructure regulation, something outside of our jurisdiction,” the pair said in a statement released during the House Rules hearing. In addition, the sponsors pointed out that the White House objects to the bill’s current form, which doesn’t contain the latest changes hammered out with civil liberties groups.
(emphasis mine)
Maybe I’m a bit of a cynic, but I’m thinking that their objection is that it does not grant enough power.
If we look at the Obama administration’s prior behavior, their concerns for civil liberties or transparency have always taken a back seat to expanding executive power. (Basically Dick Cheney with abortion support)
Also, as PC Magazine notes, the Obasa administration made exactly the same sort of statements about the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which allows for indefinite detention of American citizens, but decided to sign it anyway.
In any case, the House just called what is likely his bluff, and they passed CISPA and sent it to the Senate.
I’m not optimistic.
White House Statement after break:
CISPAvetostatement
This is Prize
Unfortunately, the following is totally fictional, but I’d love to see some of the Facebook snooping employers get shafted like this:
One of the new terms is that every prospective new hire allow their manager to “shoulder surf” as they browse their Facebook or better still, to voluntarily log their manager into their Facebook account. If I recall correctly, she claims that we have the obligation to do a “background check” on prospective hires. I’m extremely vague on the correlation between faux-promiscuous sex or drinking and employee performance, but as she is a seasoned veteran, I have to trust her when she says that things like this overrule my judgment as to who is and who isn’t fit to be a programmer in our employ.
I was willing to go along with things and see how they panned out. But today something went seriously wrong. I have been interviewing senior hires for the crucial tech lead position on the Fizz Buzz team, and while several walked out in a huff when I asked them to let me look at their Facebook, one young lady smiled and said I could help myself. She logged into her Facebook as I requested, and as I followed the COO’s instructions to scan her timeline and friends list looking for evidence of moral turpitude, I became aware she was writing something on her iPad.
“Taking notes?” I asked politely.
“No,” she smiled, “Emailing a human rights lawyer I know.” To say that the tension in the room could be cut with a knife would be understatement of the highest order. “Oh?” I asked. I waited, and as I am an expert in out-waiting people, she eventually cracked and explained herself.
“If you are surfing my Facebook, you could reasonably be expected to discover that I am a Lesbian. Since discrimination against me on this basis is illegal in Ontario, I am just preparing myself for the possibility that you might refuse to hire me and instead hire someone who is a heterosexual but less qualified in any way. Likewise, if you do hire me, I might need to have your employment contracts disclosed to ensure you aren’t paying me less than any male and/or heterosexual colleagues with equivalent responsibilities and experience.”
I got her out of the room as quickly as possible. The next few interviews were a blur, I was shaken. And then it happened again. This time, I found myself talking to a young man fresh out of University about a development position. After allowing me to surf his Facebook, he asked me how I felt about parenting. As a parent, it was easy to say I liked the idea. Then he dropped the bombshell.
His partner was expecting, and shortly after being hired he would be taking six months of parental leave as required by Ontario law. I told him that he should not have discussed this matter with me. “Oh normally I wouldn’t, but since you’re looking through my Facebook, you know that already. Now of course, you would never refuse to hire someone because they plan to exercise their legal right to parental leave, would you?”
What could I say? I guess we have another hire whether he’s qualified or not. Here’s the bottom line: My ability to select the best candidates for our positions has been irreparably compromised by looking into their private lives. I’ve been “tainted” by knowledge of their sexual orientation, illnesses, religion, political affiliations, and other factors that expose us to anti-discrimination legislation. We can’t even claim that the employee improperly disclosed these matters to us, as we are the ones initiating the investigation of their private doings
Worse, I cannot manage these people once they’re hired. I would be diffident about censuring them or passing them over for advancement for fear of incurring a lawsuit that would be a distraction to our business and damaging to our reputation as fair employers.
You know I think that this may very well be true.
If you look at someone’s Facebook page, you might very well determine that they are a member of a protected group (no discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, national origin, sexual preference [in some states], etc.)
So in addition to having Mark Zuckerberg suing you for hacking Facebook, which is what coercing a password against their TOS is, you might very well have a discrimination suit on your hands.
Oopsie.
And We Are Supposed to Trust the Cable Companies Because?
Yes, they are moving to the gated garden, where favored vendors receive priority bandwidth:
It looks as if Comcast is preparing to move from a limited beta test to a wide release for its long-promised Xbox Live streaming video app, with some details appearing on the company’s support pages. Probably the biggest revelation about the service is that streaming Comcast’s On Demand videos through the Xbox 360 will not count towards customers’ 250GB monthly data limit.
Comcast says the Xbox app gets special treatment because the video is “being delivered over our private IP network and not the public Internet.” This gives the service a potentially large advantage over not just other video streaming apps like Netflix and Hulu Plus, but also over Comcast On Demand content streamed through the company’s website and mobile apps, both of which count against the data limits.
Enjoy your 3rd party streaming while you can, because it is not going to work reliably much longer.
I expect them to start f%$#ing with 3rd party IP telephony in the next few years as well, so buh-bye Skype.
H/t Harold Feld.
Here’s Some Insanely Great Tech
It looks like someone has come up with a method of simultaneously transmitting different signals in the same frequency:
A team of Italian radio boffins – and one Swede – have one-upped their pioneering countryman Guglielmo Marconi by demonstrating a method of simultaneously transmitting multiple signals on the same frequency.
“This novel radio technique allows the implementation of, in principle, an infinite number of channels in a given, fixed bandwidth, even without using polarization, multiport or dense coding techniques,” the team explains in a paper in the March issue of the New Journal of Physics.
If refined and commercialized, the technique developed by Fabrizio Tamburini and his team could radically increase the carrying capacity of today’s cramped bandwith of radio, television, Wi-Fi, and wireless telecommunications.
Essentially, it appears to be some sort of phase/geometry trick:
The breakthough achieved by Tamburini and his crew is based on adding orbital angular momentum to the signal-carrying mix, essentially twisting the directed signal in a way that offsets multiple signals in the same frequency.
The signal-spinning Venetian antennaThe team “spun” the signal in their successful demo by simply slicing one radius of a conventional parabolic antenna and raising one end of the slice above the other. Doing so gave the part of the transmitted signal from the elevated section of the antenna a small “head start” on the part from the lower segment.
The sent beam was then encoded with two separate signals timed to occupy opposite angles of the spin, and antennas were set up to receive each of them. Theoretically, much more discrete signal-slicing could fit more signals into the same transmitted frequency.
One beam, two signals received by antennas on either side of the signal’s centerpoint
Team member Bo Thide of Swedish Institute of Space Physics first conceived the orbital angular momentum idea in a 2007 paper focussed on radio astronomy, but in which he wrote that the concept “paves the way for novel wireless communication concepts.”
I’ve heard of some other techniques that will provide similar capabilities, and I would hope that if we do see a massive expansion in the carry capacity of wireless capacity, that much of this delta would be directed away from the incumbent carriers.
If there is any lesson to be learned about the history of data transmission, wired, and wireless, it is that incumbent monopolies, and near monopolies, are the enemies of innovation, not its source, because their profit margins are driven by preserving their monopolies.
Google Doodles you’ll never see – The Christian Science Monitor – CSMonitor.com
Google’s tribute to cluttered webpage design.
Hoodcoodanode that The Christian Science Monitor could be so funny?
Whoever came up with “Google doodles you’ll never see,” is a f%$#ing genius.
Ummm….Giada????
Score One for the Good Guys
It looks like the Obama administration has shut down an NSA proposal to continuously monitor huge portions of the internet:
The National Security Agency has pushed repeatedly over the past year to expand its role in protecting private-sector computer networks from cyberattacks but has been rebuffed by the White House, largely because of privacy concerns, according to administration officials and internal documents.
The most contentious issue was a legislative proposal last year that would have required hundreds of companies that provide such critical services as electricity generation to allow their Internet traffic to be continuously scanned using computer threat data provided by the spy agency. The companies would have been expected to turn over evidence of potential cyberattacks to the government.
The National Security Agency has pushed repeatedly over the past year to expand its role in protecting private-sector computer networks from cyberattacks but has been rebuffed by the White House, largely because of privacy concerns, according to administration officials and internal documents.
The most contentious issue was a legislative proposal last year that would have required hundreds of companies that provide such critical services as electricity generation to allow their Internet traffic to be continuously scanned using computer threat data provided by the spy agency. The companies would have been expected to turn over evidence of potential cyberattacks to the government.
While the NSA does good work, their world view, and hence their policy prescriptions, are driven by the fact that they are eavesdroppers.
Basically, they want to make their jobs easier, without any sort of cumbersome review of civil rights protections. It’s the inevitable consequence of who they are and what they do.
Their organizational imperative leads them to support policies that can be described as either totalitarian or sociopathic, which is why care should be taken to ensure that they are the servant, and not the master, of security policy in the United States.
H/t Kevin Drum.
Cyberwar Is the New Profit Center
Seriously, we are seeing yet another hyped up bit of pants-wetting terror in order to create another way for defense contractors to rip the taxpayers off:
In last month’s State of the Union address, President Obama called on Congress to pass “legislation that will secure our country from the growing dangers of cyber threats.” The Hill was way ahead of him, with over 50 cybersecurity bills introduced this Congress. This week, both the House and Senate are moving on their versions of consolidated, comprehensive legislation.
The reason cybersecurity legislation is so pressing, proponents say, is that we face an immediate risk of national disaster.
wired guest column“Today’s cyber criminals have the ability to interrupt life-sustaining services, cause catastrophic economic damage, or severely degrade the networks our defense and intelligence agencies rely on,” Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) said at a hearing last week. “Congress needs to act on comprehensive cybersecurity legislation immediately.”
Yet evidence to sustain such dire warnings is conspicuously absent. In many respects, rhetoric about cyber catastrophe resembles threat inflation we saw in the run-up to the Iraq War. And while Congress’ passing of comprehensive cybersecurity legislation wouldn’t lead to war, it could saddle us with an expensive and overreaching cyber-industrial complex.
Every so called case of a major attack on meat-space infrastructure has turned out to be false, but we’re gonna spend billions on it.
Twitter Goes Evil
So now Twitter has decided to do the dirty-work of every despotic regime on the face of the planet earth:
Twitter, a tool of choice for dissidents and activists around the world, found itself the target of global outrage Friday after unveiling plans to allow country-specific censorship of tweets that might break local laws.
It was a stunning role reversal for a youthful company that prides itself in promoting unfettered expression, 140 characters at a time. Twitter insisted its commitment to free speech remains firm, and sought to explain the nuances of its policy, while critics — in a barrage of tweets — proposed a Twitter boycott and demanded that the censorship initiative be scrapped.
“This is very bad news,” tweeted Egyptian activist Mahmoud Salem. Later, he wrote, “Is it safe to say that #Twitter is selling us out?”
Yes.
This has been another episode of simple answers to simple questions.
They are claiming that this has nothing to do with China, but is has everything to do with China.