1023: Warm Hand-Off

It's not easy for me to judge, since I only got one look at the perpetrator

holding the gun before I ran for it. However, they looked very serious. They

were dressed in black, and my coworker who I met up with later said he thought

it was a woman, with at least part of her face covered. The perpetrator was

holding the pistol (medium-sized) in both hands, the sort of way I believe

you're supposed to. When I heard the very loud popping, I looked up from my

food and saw that figure described. I was "fortunate" to be sitting

at the table closest to the lobby doors, whereas the shooter was more in the

center of the patio area and aiming straight in front of her, at a downwards

angle. She could not have been more than 10-15 feet from the victims that got

shot.

The door to our building require badges to enter, which slowed our escape by

probably 1 second which felt like an eternity. I escaped through the lobby, but

I think many people may have ran out though the side entrance; where you don't

need a badge to exit.

That's mostly it for my account. I'd like to know how the shooter got in. It

wouldn't be too hard for them to "tailgate" someone through the

outside entrance to the patio, but if they were familiar with the layout (or

lucky) they could have just gone through the garage complex. To get from the

garage complex into the patio there's a heavy door, but for some reason the

badge is only needed to get into the garage from the patio, but not vice versa.

My co-worker think they came through the garage, so I'm not sure how they knew

that. Maybe they've scoped it out.

From the news coverage, there was some initial thought that this could be a

domestic incident, which is what I would _like_ to believe, and at the surface

it would make sense due to the small number of victims. However, as you've

probably read, they've recently released the identity and it seemed like she

had a vendetta against YouTube in general, which is very scary for me and my

co-workers. My co-worker from China was even thinking about leaving and going

back to China permanently. I'm not sure about the exact timeline and I can't

remember the exact pattern of the shots, except that they were rapid fire.

Since it sounds like she bought the gun in California, she probably only had

<10 round magazines. So one possibility is she emptied the magazine into

those three people, reloaded, walked to the lobby doors, and found that they

were locked due to the badge reader. Then she may have shot herself after

realizing she couldn't get much farther before police would have gotten her.

San Bruno is a relatively small town and the police only took a couple minutes

to arrive. I remember hearing sirens as I was still running away from the

building.

Demonetization less important than 'celebrity' factor

Social Media Detox Centers

Link to Article

Archived Version

Wed, 04 Apr 2018 11:44

Click here if you are having trouble viewing the gallery and video on your mobile device The night before Nasim Aghdam opened fire in a courtyard at YouTube's headquarters Tuesday afternoon, Mountain View police found the San Diego woman sleeping in her car.

She had been reported missing by her family in Southern California, and her father Ismail Aghdam told police she might be going to YouTube because she ''hated'' the company. Police called the family at 2 a.m. Tuesday to say she'd been found and that everything was ''under control,'' her father said.

But hours later, his daughter was dead of a self-inflicted gunshot after shooting three people and causing an afternoon of terror at YouTube's headquarters.

In an interview Tuesday night with the Bay Area News Group, Ismail Aghdam said his 38-year-old daughter told her family a couple of weeks ago that YouTube had been censoring her videos and stopped paying her for her content. ''She was angry,'' he said in an interview from his Riverside County home.

It wasn't clear Tuesday night what Mountain View police knew about her history with YouTube.

A police spokeswoman confirmed that officers had found a woman of the same name asleep in a vehicle early Tuesday morning in a parking lot.

''Our officers made contact with the woman after the license plate of her vehicle matched that of a missing person out of Southern California,'' said Mountain View Police spokeswoman Katie Nelson.

''The woman confirmed her identity to us and answered subsequent questions. At the conclusion of our discussion, her family was notified that she had been located.''

Start your day with the news you need from the Bay Area and beyond. Sign up for our new Morning Report weekday newsletter.

Ismail Aghdam said his daughter was a vegan activist and animal lover. As a youngster, she would not even kill ants that invaded the family home, instead using paper to remove them to the back yard, he said. State records show she had once established a charity called Peace Thunder Inc., to ''educate people about animal cruelty, environmental pollution'' and other causes.

''For me, animal rights equal human rights,'' Aghdam told the San Diego Union-Tribune at a People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals protest in 2009 outside Camp Pendleton.

She told her family that YouTube had stopped paying her for the content she posted to the site, Ismail Aghdam said. YouTubers can receive payment for advertisements accompanying their videos, but the company ''de-monetizes'' some channels for various reasons, meaning ads don't run with them.

Aghdam was prolific on social media, posting videos and photos on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube. Her YouTube channel included strange workout video clips, graphic animal abuse videos and vegan cooking tutorials. But recent posts show evidence of her growing frustration.

Aghdam's YouTube, Facebook and Instagram pages were all taken down late Tuesday, but not before reporters from this news organization were able to view much of the material.

On a March 18 Instagram post, she railed at YouTube: ''All my youtube channels got filtered by youtube so my videos hardly get views and it is called ''merely relegation.'' This is also happening to many other channels on youtube. This is the peaceful tactic used on the internet to censor and suppress people who speak the truth and are not good for the financial, political '... gains of the system and big businesses. I recently got filtered on instagram too and maybe its related to youtube and youtube staff asked instagram to filter me here too!!?''

On Jan. 28, Aghdam recorded a video of herself lamenting her perceived ''discrimination'' by YouTube, particularly railing on how YouTube determined her ab workout video was too racy and, therefore, filtered it.

''I'm being discriminated and filtered on YouTube and I'm not the only one,'' the video begins, as Aghdam, wearing a black, white and orange long-sleeved shirt and short jet black hair stands in front of a background of green and white stars. ''They age restricted my ab workout video. A video that has nothing bad in it. Nothing sexual.''

On one of her many websites, she claims to have at least four YouTube channels, one in English, and then others in Farsi and Turkish.

A law enforcement source on Tuesday afternoon said investigators were looking into whether she may have been targeting a boyfriend, however San Bruno Police late Tuesday night confirmed she was the attacker but said investigators were trying to determine her motive.

''At this time there is no evidence that the shooter knew the victims of this shooting or that individuals were specifically targeted,'' the department said in a press release.

In the interview with this news organization, her father said the family knew nothing about Nasim owning a gun. ''Maybe she bought one'' recently, he said.

Nasim's brother, Shahran Aghdam, spoke to reporters from the foyer of the family's home in Menifee in Riverside County on Tuesday night. His mother could be heard crying in the home and his father asked one reporter about the condition of the victims.

The family came to California from Iran in 1996, Shahran said. He said Nasim had been living recently with her grandmother in San Diego. ''She was always complaining that YouTube ruined her life,'' he said.

He said she was missing since Saturday and not answering her cell phone. When he learned his sister was in Mountain View, he Googled the city and found out it was near YouTube headquarters.

He said he called the Mountain View police, who found her and reported back that she was fine, and they would keep an eye on her.

Wednesday would have been Nasim's 38th birthday. He said she never hurt anyone until today, and has no idea where she may have gotten a gun. ''She chose the day to die the day she came,'' he said.

Southern California News Group staff writers Stephanie Schulte and Richard De Atley contributed to this report.

Link to Article

Archived Version

Wed, 04 Apr 2018 11:19

YOUTUBE ENGLISH

YOUTUBE HAND ART

FACEBOOK

*****MY OFFICIAL CHANNELS*****

YOUTUBE TURKISH

YOUTUBE FARSI

. BE AWARE ! Dictatorship exists in all countries but with different tactics! They only care for personal short term profits & do anything to reach their goals even by fooling simple-minded people, hiding the truth, manipulating science & everything, putting public mental & physical health at risk, abusing non-human animals, polluting environment, destroying family values, promoting materialism & sexual degeneration in the name of freedom,..... & turning people into programmed robots! "Make the lie big, Make it simple, Keep saying it, And eventually they will believe it" Adolf Hitler... There is no free speech in real world & you will be suppressed for telling the truth that is not supported by the system. Videos of targeted users are filtered & merely relegated, so that people can hardly see their videos! . There is no equal growth opportunity on YOUTUBE or any other video sharing site, your channel will grow if they want to!!!!! . My Revenue For 300,000 Views Is $0.10????? . This video got age restricted after new close-minded youtube employees, got control of my farsi youtube channel last year 2016 & began filtering my videos to reduce views & suppress & discaurage me from making videos! Dokhtare Sinebadkonaki نØ"یم دختر Ø"ینه بادÚ(C)نÚ(C)ی

Warning Graphic Video! Consumers of animal products are supporters of these animal abusers! About %80 of worlds fur/skin come from china. Animals are tortured to death in such countries

. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere The very first Persian vegan TV commercial and vegan music video was created by Nasim and launched through international Persian satellite television "Andisheh TV" for the first time in April, 2010. I also had TV shows on different Iranian TVs

. World is a dangerous place to live, not because of evil people but because of people who do nothing about it! Einstein Stolen pet dog cooked alive! Chinese eat dogs & cats too & torture animals to death.Shame on those who can stop these cruelties, but do nothing because of financial gains!

Health Risks Of Anal Sex

ÙیدیÙی زیان Ø"Ú(C)Ø" مقعدی به فارØ"ی

چطÙر Ùگان گیاهخÙار خاÙص بشÙیم Ùیدی٠با نØ"یم Ø"بز

Nasil Vegan Oluruz - Video By Yesil Nasim

Vegan Nasim Strenght Test قدرت بدنی نØ"یم Ø"بز دختر ÙرزشÚ(C)ار Ùگان ایرانی

. My Instagram followers, views, likes are real. On instagram, you can buy pages, buy likes, buy followers,.... But mine are real, without advertising or using programs designed to promote instagram pages all my videos are created by myself and I have no help from others

همه Ú(C)ارهای هنری Ù ÙیدیÙهایم تÙØ"Ø· Ø®Ùدم Ø"اخته میشÙند ٠هیچ Ú(C)مÚ(C) فÚ(C)ری یا فنی یا ماÙی از احدی ندارم

اÙÙین مÙزیÚ(C) ÙیدیÙی Ùگان ٠تبÙیغ تÙÙیزیÙنی Ùگان تÙØ"Ø· نØ"یم در Ø"ا٠د٠هزار ٠ده تÙÙید ٠پهش شد از تÙÙیزیÙن جهانی ایرانی Ù Ø"ایر تÙÙیزیÙنهای ماهÙاره ای

در اینØ"تاگرام میتÙنی فاÙÙÙر فیÚ(C) بخری ٠مصنÙعی Ø®Ùدت٠بÚ(C)شی باÙا اما فاÙÙÙرهای من Ùاقعی اند بدÙن هیچ تبÙیفی . kanallarimi, Youtube filter etmis ta izleyenleri cokalmaya! - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - . Youtube filtered my channels to keep them from getting views!

در Ú(C)Ø´Ùرهایی مØ٠چین حیÙانات را Ø´Ú(C)نج میÚ(C)نند قب٠از Ø®Ùردن

یÙتÙب Ú(C)اناÙهای من ر٠فیÙتر Ú(C)رده تا بیننده نگیرند

Link to Article

Archived Version

Wed, 04 Apr 2018 11:08

The suspected shooter in today's YouTube incident has been identified. Please see press release for details - https://t.co/Xvr2l9bB9s pic.twitter.com/NEBoX3WWK5

'-- San Bruno Police (@SanBrunoPolice) April 4, 2018

In several videos posted over the last year or so, she angrily spoke about the company's policies, saying they were filtering her videos so they wouldn't get any more views, and she was upset over demonetization. It appears the channels have now been completely removed by YouTube, citing policy violations.

On her website, she wrote: "There is no equal growth opportunity on YOUTUBE or any other video sharing site, your channel will grow if they want to!!!!!"

BE AWARE! Dictatorship exists in all countries but with different tactics! They only care forpersonal short term profits & do anything to reach their goals even by fooling simple-minded people,hiding the truth, manipulating science & everything, putting public mental & physical health at risk,abusing non-human animals, polluting environment, destroying family values, promoting materialism &sexual degeneration in the name of freedom,..... & turning people into programmed robots!"Make the lie big, Make it simple, Keep saying it, And eventually they will believe it"Hitler... There is no free speech in real world & you will be suppressed for telling the truth that is notsupported by the system. Videos of targeted users are filtered & merely relegated, so that people canhardly see their videos!.There is no equal growth opportunity on YOUTUBE or any other video sharing site,your channel will grow if they want to!!!!!CBS2 News reporter Tina Patel spoke to Aghdam's father, who said he told police of her anger with YouTube after they called him and said that after being missing for a few days, she'd been found in her car in Mountain View. The network also said Aghdam asked for the male victim by name before the shooting started. Buzzfeed heard from Mountain View police in an email that officers found a woman by that name asleep in her vehicle in a parking lot there Tuesday morning.

Link to Article

Archived Version

Thu, 05 Apr 2018 10:40

April 4th, 2018

SAN BRUNO, CA - APRIL 03: San Bruno police chief Ed Barberini speaks to members of the media outside of the YouTube headquarters on April 3, 2018 in San Bruno, California. Police are investigating an active shooter incident at YouTube headquarters that has left at least one person dead and several wounded. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Nasim Aghdam's family members reportedly warned police they thought she was going to attack the YouTube headquarters early Tuesday morning, but the San Bruno Police Department could not prevent the shooting later that afternoon.

Aghdam wounded three people after opening fire on YouTube staffers Tuesday afternoon. She reportedly was motivated by a perception the company was censoring her videos on a variety of liberal issues.

Aghdam's father, Ismail, reported her missing Monday night. He told local police police she ''hated'' YouTube and could possibly act violently in some capacity. Officers eventually located Aghdam early Tuesday morning in Mountain View, California, more than 700 miles away from San Diego home.

Similarly, Aghdam's brother contacted the authorities after she did not respond to multiple text messages and calls Tuesday morning.

''I Googled 'Mountain View,' and it was close to YouTube headquarters,'' he told a local CNN affiliate. ''She had a problem with YouTube.''

SAN BRUNO, CA '' APRIL 03: San Bruno police chief Ed Barberini speaks to members of the media outside of the YouTube headquarters on April 3, 2018 in San Bruno, California. Police are investigating an active shooter incident at YouTube headquarters that has left at least one person dead and several wounded. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

San Bruno Police Chief Ed Barberini said on ABC Wednesday morning his department was aware Aghdam ''was reported missing by her family in San Diego on the 31st of March, and that she was located in a community about 30 miles south of us early Tuesday morning.''

Aghdam had a history of vocally opposing YouTube via social media and her own personal website. (RELATED: YouTube Shooter's Bizarre Anti-Meat Videos)

WATCH:

''This is what they are doing to vegan activists and many others who try to promote healthy, humane, and smart living,'' she said in one video. ''People like me are not good for big businesses'... that's why they are discriminating and censoring us.''

WATCH:

Follow Datoc on Twitter and Facebook

Christian Datoc Breaking News and Engagement Editor

Link to Article

Archived Version

Fri, 06 Apr 2018 23:19

The Department of Homeland Security wants to track the comings and going of journalists, bloggers and other ''media influencers'' through a database.

The DHS's ''Media Monitoring'' plan, which was first reported by FedBizOpps.gov, would give the contracting company ''24/7 access to a password protected, media influencer database, including journalists, editors, correspondents, social media influencers, bloggers etc.'' in order to ''identify any and all media coverage related to the Department of Homeland Security or a particular event.''

The database would be designed to monitor the public activities of media members and influencers by ''location, beat and influencers,'' the document says.

The chosen contractor should be able to ''present contact details and any other information that could be relevant including publications this influencer writes for, and an overview of the previous coverage published by the influencer.''

The request comes amid concerns regarding accuracy in media and the potential for U.S. elections and policy to be influenced via ''fake news.''

The plan calls for the ability to track 290,000 news sources including online, print, broadcast and social media. Also, it would have the ability to track media coverage in over 100 languages, along with the ''ability to create unlimited data tracking, statistical breakdown, and graphical analyses on ad-hoc basis.''

Link to Article

Archived Version

Fri, 06 Apr 2018 23:19

The Department of Homeland Security, National Protection and Programs Acquisition Division is requesting the following information listed below. The Capabilities Statement that you provide will only be reviewed to ascertain if your company is capable of performing the requirements of the attached Statement of Work (SOW). You will not receive a response regarding the information that you submit. Your Capabilities Statement shall be no longer than five (5) pages and is due by 1:00 pm on April 13, 2018. The due date will not be extended. Please send your response to the following email address: Patricia.Oliver@hq.dhs.gov ; Frederick.Thompson@hq.dhs.gov

1. Core competencies. Introduce your company's core competencies and relate those to the specific needs of the attached SOW.

2. Describe 3 projects your company has performed similar in size, scope and complexity to the work delineated in the attached SOW.

3. Differentiators. Discuss unique techniques or approaches that are part of your business.

4. Corporate data. List your business details:

· Facilities or Office Locations. List all significant and strategically placed office locations.

· Company data. Include your available resources, staffing capacity (Personnel shall possess Top Secret with SCI, Top Secret and Secret clearances) and the typical geographic area you serve.

· Contact information. Include physical address, contact person details, office telephone, office fax, email address, etc.

· Relevant codes. List DUNS, CAGE, NAICS, and/or other relevant codes.

Link to Article

Archived Version

Sat, 07 Apr 2018 13:04

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen speaks during the press briefing at the White House in Washington, DC, on April 4, 2018. (NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images)

In today's installment of "I'm Not Terrified, You Are," Bloomberg Law reports on a FedBizOpps.gov posting by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with the relatively benign-sounding subject, ''Media Monitoring Services.''

The details of the attached Request for Information, however, outline a plan to gather and monitor the public activities of media professionals and influencers and are enough to cause nightmares of constitutional proportions, particularly as the freedom of the press is under attack worldwide.

And "attack" is not hyperbolic.

Every day, journalists face serious consequences including physical violence, imprisonment and death. A few days ago, the Committee to Protect Journalists launched its annual Free The Press campaign to raise awareness about imprisoned journalists throughout the world. On May 3, UNESCO will once again mark World Press Freedom Day "to inform citizens of violations of press freedom '-- a reminder that in dozens of countries around the world, publications are censored, fined, suspended and closed down, while journalists, editors and publishers are harassed, attacked, detained and even murdered."

Meanwhile, the United States government, traditionally one of the bastions of press freedom, is about to compile a list of professional journalists and "top media influencers," which would seem to include bloggers and podcasters, and monitor what they're putting out to the public.

What could possibly go wrong? A lot.

DHS's "Media Monitoring" Plan

As part of its "media monitoring," the DHS seeks to track more than 290,000 global news sources as well as social media in over 100 languages, including Arabic, Chinese and Russian, for instant translation into English. The successful contracting company will have "24/7 access to a password protected, media influencer database, including journalists, editors, correspondents, social media influencers, bloggers etc." in order to "identify any and all media coverage related to the Department of Homeland Security or a particular event."

"Any and all media coverage," as you might imagine, is quite broad and includes "online, print, broadcast, cable, radio, trade and industry publications, local sources, national/international outlets, traditional news sources, and social media."

The database will be browseable by "location, beat and type of influencer," and for each influencer, the chosen contractor should "present contact details and any other information that could be relevant, including publications this influencer writes for, and an overview of the previous coverage published by the media influencer."

One aspect of the media coverage to be gathered is its "sentiment."

Anyone else just pull their blanket up over them a little more tightly? Just me?

Why "Media Monitoring" and Why Now?

DHS says the "NPPD/OUS [National Protection and Programs Directorate/Office of the Under Secretary] has a critical need to incorporate these functions into their programs in order to better reach Federal, state, local, tribal and private partners." Who knows what that means, but the document also states the NPPD's mission is ''to protect and enhance the resilience of the nation's physical and cyberinfrastructure."

That line makes it sound as if the creation of this database could be a direct response to the rampant allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election '-- though President Donald Trump, who has normalized the term "fake news," can't seem to decide whether that's even an issue or not.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg thinks it is. Earlier this week, he announced the social networking site would remove "more than 270 pages and accounts operated by a Russian organization called the Internet Research Agency" in an effort "to protect the integrity of elections around the world."

Within the context of increasing concerns over "fake news" and foreign interference in elections, an action such as the DHS's database might seem, at first glance, to be a sensible approach.

Not exactly.

Unfortunately, increasing government encroachment on the freedom of the press is the sinister backdrop to all of this. Freedom House, which has monitored the status of the press for nearly 40 years, recently concluded that global media freedom has reached its lowest level in the past 13 years. The independent watchdog organization blames " new threats to journalists and media outlets in major democracies" as well as "further crackdowns on independent media in authoritarian countries like Russia and China." And then it goes one step further.

"But it is the far-reaching attacks on the news media and their place in a democratic society by Donald Trump, first as a candidate and now as president of the United States, that fuel predictions of further setbacks in the years to come," the report said.

Could the DHS media database be such a setback?

Possibly, and it's not even the first time potential regulation of journalists has drifted across the American political scene.

Last October, an Indiana lawmaker proposed that journalists be licensed. Representative Jim Lucas's bill was mostly a publicity stunt, but could this DHS action be a way for the government to keep track of American and foreign journalists as well as ''citizen journalists," threatening not only the freedom of the press but also individual freedom of speech?

The real question, of course, is what the government plans to do with the information it compiles, and there's been no comment on that beyond what is in the posting, which, by the way, has interest from at least seven companies. Will those on the DHS media database be questioned more harshly coming in and out of the country? Will they have trouble getting visas to go to certain countries for their own reporting or personal vacations? Worse?

Speaking of visas '-- and showing that social media activity is squarely on the radar of this Administration '-- earlier this week, the State Department placed two notices in the Federal Register seeking comments on its proposal to require that all visa applicants to the U.S. turn over their social media information for the previous five years.

Regarding the DHS media database, we are entering potentially dangerous territory with the government keeping track of the "sentiment" of citizens and foreign nationals. If not legal challenges from organizations that defend press freedom and freedom of speech interests, the government should expect, at the very least, backlash from the public.

And that means you. If you think the idea of the U.S. government's compiling and monitoring a list of media professionals and "top media influencers" is a potential threat to democracy, now would be the perfect time to call your local and congressional representatives to let them know how much you value a free press and the freedom of speech, just in case they've forgotten.

Sleep tight, kids!

Link to Article

Archived Version

Fri, 06 Apr 2018 15:05

Wikileaks has published pager intercepts from New York on 9/11:

WikiLeaks released half a million US national text pager intercepts. The intercepts cover a 24 hour period surrounding the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington.

[...]

Text pagers are usualy carried by persons operating in an official capacity. Messages in the archive range from Pentagon, FBI, FEMA and New York Police Department exchanges, to computers reporting faults at investment banks inside the World Trade Center.

Near as I can tell, these messages are from the commercial pager networks of Arch Wireless, Metrocall, Skytel, and Weblink Wireless, and include all customers of that service: government, corporate, and personal.

There are lots of nuggets in the data about the government response to 9/11:

One string of messages hints at how federal agencies scrambled to evacuate to Mount Weather, the government's sort-of secret bunker buried under the Virginia mountains west of Washington, D.C. One message says, "Jim: DEPLOY TO MT. WEATHER NOW!," and another says "CALL OFICE (sic) AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. 4145 URGENT." That's the phone number for the Federal Emergency Management Agency's National Continuity Programs Directorate -- which is charged with "the preservation of our constitutional form of government at all times," even during a nuclear war. (A 2006 article in the U.K. Guardian newspaper mentioned a "a traffic jam of limos carrying Washington and government license plates" heading to Mount Weather that day.)

FEMA's response seemed less than organized. One message at 12:37 p.m., four hours after the attacks, says: "We have no mission statements yet." Bill Prusch, FEMA's project officer for the National Emergency Management Information System at the time, apparently announced at 2 p.m. that the Continuity of Operations plan was activated and that certain employees should report to Mt. Weather; a few minutes later he sent out another note saying the activation was cancelled.

Historians will certainly spend a lot of time poring over the messages, but I'm more interested in where they came from in the first place:

It's not clear how they were obtained in the first place. One possibility is that they were illegally compiled from the records of archived messages maintained by pager companies, and then eventually forwarded to WikiLeaks.

The second possibility is more likely: Over-the-air interception. Each digital pager is assigned a unique Channel Access Protocol code, or capcode, that tells it to pay attention to what immediately follows. In what amounts to a gentlemen's agreement, no encryption is used, and properly-designed pagers politely ignore what's not addressed to them.

But an electronic snoop lacking that same sense of etiquette might hook up a sufficiently sophisticated scanner to a Windows computer with lots of disk space -- and record, without much effort, gobs and gobs of over-the-air conversations.

Existing products do precisely this. Australia's WiPath Communications offers Interceptor 3.0 (there's even a free download). Maryland-based SWS Security Products sells something called a "Beeper Buster" that it says let police "watch up to 2500 targets at the same time." And if you're frugal, there's a video showing you how to take a $10 pager and modify it to capture everything on that network.

It's disturbing to realize that someone, possibly not even a government, was routinely intercepting most (all?) of the pager data in lower Manhattan as far back as 2001. Who was doing it? For that purpose? That, we don't know.

Tags: 9/11, FEMA, leaks, privacy, surveillance

Posted on November 26, 2009 at 7:11 AM ' 88 Comments

Photo of Bruce Schneier by Per Ervland.

Schneier on Security is a personal website. Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of IBM Resilient.

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Archived Version

Sat, 07 Apr 2018 08:49

December 2, 1997 By MARTY KATZ two-way pager made by Motorola, long the cause of paging industry rumors, was finally released for retail sale on Monday. The paging industry is in the process of being remade by two-way paging products that send, as well as receive e-mail or acknowledge receipt of a page for guaranteed messaging.

The cost of building two-way networks, with remote radio receivers scattered around cities, is turning out to be much more costly than expected. Defaults and consolidations among the top paging companies have been occurring for the past year. Last week, AT&T's paging unit went up for sale.

The new Motorola pager, which will operate on Skytel's two-way paging system, looks like a tiny, three-and-a-half-inch wide laptop, and generates interest just on the basis of this appearance. Motorola had been showing prototypes privately of the sophisticated pager for about a year. Dubbed "PageWriter" and having a miniature "qwerty" keyboard, working versions had been distributed to press and industry observers for much of this year, prompting intense interest and speculation. Motorola made the first two-way pager, the Tango, that could respond to an e-mail page with 16 canned answers, but users could not originate text, and it was not well received. Over the winter, Skytel began marketing the Skywriter, built by Wireless Access, a Silicon Valley startup with some Motorola engineering alumni on staff. Its ease of use in originating text without a keyboard, and early appearance on the market may have derailed Motorola's plan to bring PageWriter to market earlier. Originally, Motorola was predicting September 1996 delivery, but the unit is just now getting to market.

PageWriter 2000 The PageWriter 2000 is only slightly larger than the current SkyWriter, has a large (2-1/2") graphics-capable screen on a lid (that must be opened to operate or look at messages), has a 3-1/4" real but cramped qwerty keyboard (needing two hands to operate), and requires serious attention to the instruction manual. The unit uses a proprietary battery requiring a specialized charger, which doubles as a docking station and infrared communicator. The charger is constructed so that the battery and charger do not both fit in at the same time, and the battery, specially constructed for this purpose, is not readily available. Other two-way pagers, such as the existing Skywriter, use common AA batteries, can be operated with one hand, while walking, for instance, and do not require a cover to be opened to read or compose messages.

The service for the unit from Skytel, called Skywriter, is the same as their existing two-way product for the Wireless Access Inc. unit that is currently sold as the Skywriter.

Two pricing packages are offered: $330 for the pager alone, or a deluxe package for $360 that includes PC software and the docking station, which allows PC connectivity and firmware upgrades.

Skywriter service begins at $24.95 a month for 6,000 characters; $48 buys 20,000 characters. Skytel's two-way coverage allows the sending and receiving of e-mail in all large cities and many areas in between, with options like operator processing of messages and robot reading of messages to a user who calls in when out of a coverage area.

Pagewriter and Skywriter users may compose and send messages directly to the Skytel one- or two-way pagers directly from the unit without using a telephone or the Internet.

Since the units are actually miniature e-mail terminals, Internet access from the hand is possible. Applications such as phone number lookup, limited Web browsing, faxing through fax gateways, news, stock, sports, and weather information retrieval are possible.

According to Motorola, corporate intranet applications may be the marketing focus.

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2-Way Features

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Final paper for the class Systems and Self, MAS 714J and STS 528J, Fall 1998 Professors: Mitchel Resnick and Sherry Turkle, Teaching assistant: Marina Umaschi Bers by

Stefan Marti

The Media Laboratory Massachusetts Institute of Technology 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA USA 02139stefanm@media.mit.edu New: PDF file of this paper

Table of contents 1. Abstract2. Introduction3. Theoretical part 3.1. A Tool To Connect

3.2. Two-way paging in classrooms? 3.3. Two-way paging in professional environments4. Fieldwork 4.1. Methodology

4.2. Survey results 4.2.1. Email forwarding 4.2.2. Notification, sixth sense, and rudeness2. Introduction When I came to the Media Lab a year ago, several people were carrying small, strange looking devices that caught my interest immediately. Part of it was because I still had the opinion that all people wearing small devices like radios or cellphones must be somehow important, so the high coolness factor of these devices whatsoever made the people using them special2. On the other hand, the devices with their trapezoid shape reminded me strongly of a small version of a very old fashioned Commodore PET computer of 1977 (e.g., [8]) But, of course, these devices were not old. People told me that these were alphanumeric two-way pagers, and that they were the newest toys they got. I didn't know what this meant, so they explained to me the difference between ordinary paging and this new way of paging3.

Picture 1: PageWriter 2000 by Motorola First of all, alphanumeric paging. The pagers I knew up to then were numeric, and therefore, they were only good for sending a telephone number that one was supposed to call back. I always felt very uncomfortable with the idea of someone else remotely giving me the order to call back. Like that, anybody would be able to make me run away from what I was just doing, looking for a phone, perhaps spending money on the phone call—and all that without knowing if it was worth the hassle to me! Of course I could just ignore a page, but I was curious enough not to be able to do so. Perhaps it was really important this time! Most often, it wasn't. Later on, I heard of another use for numeric paging: secret codes. There was something mystic about it, and it reminded me of secret languages we invented when we were teenagers. But these new codes were mere numbers. I saw a list of them, ranging from 'Happy B-Day!-- (code 58) to 'Get some milk in the grocery store-- (code 834572 or something similar) (e.g., [4]). But who would remember them, since they were pretty much random? Eventually, I found a booklet that contained a long list. But how do I know that the other person has the same booklet, or at least understands my codes? This was very unsatisfying. But now, the new pagers are alphanumeric. What a relief! No more misunderstandings because of short, cryptic pages. Plain English is possible. Together with the fact that six lines, each thirty characters long, can be displayed, it became obvious that 'normal-- sentences can be transmitted: full-length messages, and therefore, standard email. Although there was originally no relation between 'pages-- and 'email messages,-- they became the same with alphanumeric pagers. It was also very obvious that an email based communication culture, like the one at MIT and in the Media Lab, would be extremely grateful for a device that enables one to read email even in the bathroom or sitting on a couch watching TV. What an increase of living quality! 'Port able email--4 is probably the most important change the two-way pager made to my life as a student.

The second novelty was the sending of messages. Part of the frustration with simple paging was due to the fact that one can listen, but not speak. What an unnatural way to communicate. It somehow resembles a nightmare of lying on a surgeons bed, being not enough anesthetized so that all the pain is suppressed, but being enough anesthetized so that one is paralyzed and not able to cry! Of course there are one way media, like radio and TV, but these are one-to-many media, not one-to-one. One-way paging degrades a human to follow another person who gives orders. One-way pagers are like very sophisticated remote controls for human beings. The underlying forces are very subtle, but nevertheless very powerful. Like me, most humans are curious enough to follow an order to call back without knowing what it is actually all about. In most of the cases, even after a long period of learning that makes clear that probably none of the orders to call back is as urgent as we assume, we still feel bad if we don't return a call immediately. I always thought that this was very humiliating. And now, this has come to an end! It is not only possible to reply to an email message immediately, but also to originate email messages from the pager. A big concern for the designers of the system5 was to make the pager technology opaque to people outside. This means, on one hand that every message sent from the pager, be it a newly written email message or a reply, should look like any other email message sent by this specific user. On the other hand, no one should have to worry about multiple email addresses. A user has only one email address, and the system decides autonomously if a message for this user will be forwarded to the pager.

Another novelty was the idea of using a two-way pager not only as a remote email terminal, but also as a means of accessing our desktop computers. The idea is somehow orthogonal to the notion of decentralized computing and information storage. It is based on the assumption that our desktop computers already have a multitude of files and connection possibilities, and that we just have to access the desktop with portable devices. For example, there is a calendar file on UNIX desktop systems, an address book, and a to-do list. If we would have similar files on our portable devices, we would have the problem of how to update and synchronize them with the parent files on the UNIX system. To avoid this, one just caches all information on the portable device. There is no additional calendar or address book in the two-way pager; we just access the relevant files on the UNIX system. The same with other files and information chunks that are accessible locally on the LAN or further away on the Internet, e.g., a thesaurus, weather forecasts, traffic reports, or stock quotes. These things are already accessible on our desktop, so why don't we just use the pager to get access to this desktop? During the last year a system was developed for exactly this purpose [11,22].

And finally, a pager can obviously also have 'normal-- PDA functionality. One can use it, e.g., as a notebook. Due to the small but complete keyboard and the graphical LCD display, the built in email editor can be used as a simple word processor. However, like with the calendar and the address book, one tends to 'store-- the text by sending it as an email message to the desktop.

To summarize it, there are three main functions of an alphanumeric two-way pager: Email handling: receive and send messages. Information requests: locally, on the LAN, and on the Internet, e.g., calendar events, translations, weather reports. Other PDA functions, e.g., word processor. So much for how it should work. We will look at what actual users say about the system a bit later in section 4.2.

3. Theoretical part 3.1. A Tool To Connect As we have seen, a two-way pager is a hybrid of a computer and a communication device, with characteristics inherited from uncle cellphone and aunt Nintendo video game. It is more similar to a cellphone than to a PC because of its form factor. Furthermore, almost all cellphones in Europe already have two-way paging capabilities, so the device that is used at the Media Lab is actually a stepbrother of a GSM cellphone. The size also makes it somehow similar to a Nintendo video game, together with its big graphical display and the big and prominent cursor key. As far as I know, there are also games available to play on the device.

But although it is technically a computer, it is more important as an interface device. Rather than a Tool To Think With, I would look at it as a Tool To Connect, a gateway to cyberspace. It is 'only-- an interface, but a very powerful one. It is a magnifying glass, a knothole, allowing a (limited) view to other computational devices. As PalmPilot [1] users sometimes call their brains a cache for their PDA, a two-way pagers adds another layer, since it is a cache for a desktop computer. Therefore, one could call the brain of a two-way pager user a second level cache for cyberspace: the brain as a cache for the pager, and the pager as a cache for cyberspace.

But this is only theory. In my survey, none of the participants mentioned such a one-way directed relationship. Since we do not only access the web passively, but also influence the cyberspace landscape actively by sending out messages, it is indeed an interaction device. As Fuhrer et al. [9] mentions, the internal and the external mind (culture) mutually cultivate or co-develop each other anyway.

I personally think of the pager as an extension of my mind, since certain things are easily accessible through the pager, like my calendar. But my laptop in my bedroom with its permanent Internet connection is a much more powerful extension of my mind6. It is my never-ending source of knowledge. The pager could theoretically have the same function, but practical limitations prevent that. First of all, it is not real time. With the Canard pagers, it takes 70 seconds to get an answer from the desktop. Although other devices are faster, e.g., GSM phones with their SMS service have a response time of less than 20 seconds, it's still far away from the immediacy of a LAN connection or even a cable modem connection. Another problem is that the pager system we use right now can't display graphics or play audio files. Although it is technically possible to transmit such files, it is just too slow to actually surf the Web. I have learned that this is not a limitation, since there indeed are advantages of text-based channels over multimedia channels. There are situations where it is much more effective to have characters and digits than a graphical representation of the same fact. For example, if I want to know the telephone number of a friend, a text message is the most appropriate means7.

3.2. Two-way paging in classrooms? Imagine if all students of an elementary school class would have two-way pagers, what would happen to the classroom? One of the characteristics of such a device is permanent and easy access to the web. I think that Internet access in classrooms is very useful as an information resource. But students sitting in front of a computer screen during class all the time is not an option, since the main interaction should happen between them and their teacher. But two-way pagers have a user interface that is much less obtrusive than a normal PC. One can sit in a class and participate normally and, in parallel, look up information on the web. This is possible due to the small size of the device and the still usable keyboard and screen.

Would they be allowed in schools? When I was in elementary school, the first pocket calculators were commercially available. I remember the discussions I had with my classmates about how funny it would be to hide one of these magic machines under the table during classes of mental arithmetic. The teacher could ask very difficult questions, and we would be able to answer them in almost no time. It was like having a James Bond gadget and sitting in a TV talk show as a genius. What a feeling of power! At this time, the concept of the pocket calculator modified my ideas about what was important in learning mathematics. I realized that calculating by hand or mental arithmetic can't be the main thing I have to learn. I realized that understanding the concepts of mathematics is much more useful than dumb number crunching. My teachers and my parents didn't quite agree. They said that calculating arithmetic expressions without 'mechanical-- help is important, since it shapes the understanding of the concept of numbers. Today, of course, I would agree. Twenty years ago, there was a discussion going on about when a student should be allowed to use a calculator in class or for homework. The same problem will appear with extensive two-way paging in classrooms. Suddenly, the action of accessing information on the Web and on the personal computer of the student is almost not detectable anymore by a teacher, since the use of a two-way pager is unobtrusive. As Fred, one of the persons I interviewed, said: 'Sometimes I find myself discretely using it under the table—in many cases people don't find out or just ignore my geeky8 behavior.-- The device itself is definitively small enough to be hidden behind an open book, or even just behind the table. Although the interface is very unobtrusive, a student using a pager secretly just doesn't pay the same attention to class as others. This leads to the discussion of undivided attention in general, an important issue of two-way paging.

If two-way pagers are allowed in classes, the question will come up very quickly as to whether they are considered as cheating or not. Obviously, students who have these devices available have an advantage over others who haven't. So let's assume that every student has such a device. The nature of tests and finals has to change, since with the external help of the Internet, a test has to focus on the connections between knowledge rather than on the mere knowledge, on the understanding of the material rather than on single formulas and dates. With the help of a two-way pager and the Internet, it becomes very important if one is able to handle this information overflow. But this is not a new problem9, and elementary school students will eventually learn how to deal with it.

I expect that unlike the controversy about if the use of computers significantly improves teaching and learning [16], two-way pagers will be used by students anyway. Unlike personal computers, pagers will be 'real-- personal devices, and since they are comparably cheap, students (or their parents) will get them themselves. This technology doesn't have to be introduced to classrooms, like it was the case with PCs and the Internet. It will be much more like cellphones or video games: the technology will find its way from the bottom up, not from the top down.

3.3. Two-way paging in professional environments In a professional environment, one could argue that laptops have already the same functionality as a two-way pager. This is not correct, since laptops 'are awkward and slow to set up, the batteries may not last long enough, and there is a social stigma against typing during meetings.-- [14] All these things are not true for two-way pagers. Even if the device runs continuously all day and night, the batteries will last for half a week. Once the pager runs, there is no starting up or shutting down procedure. Just open it, and one can start using it immediately. On the other hand, laptops with wireless LAN connections can browse the Web with an acceptable speed, and they are able to display pictures and play sound, which is currently not possible with pagers. However, one of the main uses of alphanumeric two-way pagers, email handling, is almost as comfortable as on laptops. Missing on the current pagers are the possibilities to quote certain lines of an email message, the lack of displaying multimedia attachments, as well as the retrieval of older messages10.

Other very similar devices are PDAs like the PalmPilot by 3Com [1]. However, unless they are connected to a LAN via a wireless network (e.g., Minstrel by Novatel [13]), they are not comparable in their functionality. Being connected makes the big difference. Nevertheless it is obvious that very soon, PDAs will come with a built in wireless connection (e.g., Palm VII [17]).

Picture 2: REX by Franklin Most probably these devices—PDA's, laptops, palmtops, multi functional cellphones (e.g., Nokia 9110 [15]), and two-way pagers—, will eventually converge into a device which combines all their features. However, there are doubts that one device, holding all these functions, is the thing users actually want. Eventually, everything will come down to the form factor. I personally agree with Marco who says, 'I would pay big money to have a have a deal like that about the size of a credit card and no more than twice as thick.-- (REX by Franklin [18] is pretty much what he describes.) If someone invented such a device that contained my cellphone, my two-way pager, my PDA, a Web browser, and a nice, readable color display together with some sort of input device, I guess it would be a killer product.

4. Fieldwork 4.1. Methodology To learn more about how users think of the alphanumeric two-way pager, I decided to make a small survey. It consisted of eight questions, sent out by email to a set of users who I know were actively using the device. Since I knew all of them personally, I mentioned only briefly or not at all that I would ask them to fill out the survey.

The instructions for the survey were included in the email message and were as follows: I am currently writing a short paper about 2way pagers for the class Systems and Self (Mitchel Resnik and Sherry Turkle). In this context, I would like to know more about how people use 2way pagers and what they think of them. So, if you have time, could you please write a few lines to each of these questions? (You can write a s much as you want.) It would be extremely helpful to me! Thanks a lot. Of course all your answers are confidential, and if there are interesting things to quote, I will make sure your anonymity is guaranteed.

And these were the eight questions I asked: Since when do you use a two-way pager? What configuration do you use? (Software, hardware) With your settings, which messages are getting forwarded to your pager? What is the advantage of having a two-way pager, for you specifically? Describe how you use it: How often, when, and what you do with it. Did you ever miss it? If yes, when and why? When is it appropriate to use the pager? Do you know situations where you think people misuse it? Give a short 'etiquette-- for pager users! Did other people ever tell you that your behavior concerning the pager is inappropriate? Did someone ever get upset because of your pager? If yes, why? (See note below *) Has your opinion towards the pager changed? If yes, how, and what caused the change? In short: What do you like about your pager, what do you hate about it? *Note to question (6): Does it make a difference what you do with your pager, e.g., receive email, send email, use it as a PDA (look up calendar or address book, use it as a translator), request timely information like traffic reports, etc? Five subjects returned the survey filled out completely, which is 41% of the people I asked. Additionally, several people gave me further feedback on my questions, some of them answering specific questions, some of them giving me unstructured feedback on this issue, both orally and textually.

The five main subjects are 20 to 50 years old; one of them is female11. They used two-way pagers for at least two months and up to thirty months, with an average time of approximately eight months.

4.2. Survey results 4.2.1. Email forwarding The first two questions were about which configuration the subjects use. All of them use the Canard system [6] with a PageWriter 2000 [21]. One subject uses Skytel service [20] as well. All except one use the additional Knothole service [11,22]. However, although the hard- and software settings seem to be similar, there are differences about which messages are being forwarded to the pager. Most of the subjects forward all the email messages they get to their portable device. This can mean that they don't get so many messages that selective filtering is necessary, or it can mean that they filter the messages otherwise, e.g., by just switching off the devices when they don't wish to receive messages12. In any case, the fact that the messages are free seems to be an important issue. The SkyTel user restricts the amount of messages sent through this commercial service much more than with the Canard system. The same effect with the people using commercial SMS service: since the amount of free messages per month is very low, almost no messages are routed directly to these two-way messaging capable cellphones. One user, Karen, has installed dynamic filtering, which means that only important messages are sent to the pager. The decision about if a message is important is made by a quite sophisticated system that looks at the users calendar, address book, and prior communication history [12]. It is interesting to see that no one uses the simple static filtering provided by Procmail [10]: with this UNIX program, one can define simple rules about which messages get forwarded. All in all, it looks like to set up the somewhat complicated dynamic and static filtering mechanisms seems not to be worth the hassle! A simple and easy to use routing mechanism might be a useful thing to develop13.

Bill uses an interesting kind of static filtering. Although all email messages are getting forwarded, he makes the system add specific labels to important messages. Once received by the pager, messages with these labels are automatically put into specific input folders. These specific input folders are configured to make different sounds if a message arrives. Like that, filtering happens on the perceptual side of the system. Specific sounds indicate specific importance levels and origins for a message. However, he also complains about the fact that he has to change these settings constantly: 'I hate that I have to change the notification settings all the time. I.e. put it in silent or vibe mode when I go into a class. The same with my cell phone. I have to change to silent/normal/outdoors always depending on the situation I'm in. And it can have very embarrassing consequences if I forget to put it in silent mode during a movie or something similar.-- I personally never use any sound notification on my portable devices, and it still happens that I get in embarrassing situations. If the vibration mode is on, the device still can make a pretty loud sound depending on the resonance characteristics of the things it touches! If it lies on the table, the whole table starts to vibrate, and even if the pager is in my pocket touching my key ring, the sound can be too loud for quiet seminars or talks.

This leads directly to the issue of unobtrusiveness and annoyance. One of the main questions I wanted to ask the subjects is if a two-way pager is annoying to people interacting with users carrying such devices.

4.2.2. Notification, sixth sense, and 'rudeness-- A two-way pager user, like any other one-way pager or cellphone user, is a normal person until she gets a message or a call. Almost everybody agrees that the more directed the notification is, the less obtrusive for the environment. This means, the lower the volume of an audio notification, the better. No audio notification is the best14. As Lucy says, 'I think it is rude to have the pager vibrate or beep during a lecture, or movie, etc.-- And Fred says: '... I find it distracting during a meeting or class, so I turn off all notification.-- Unfortunately, the 'expressive possibilities-- of today's portable devices are limited to sound15 and vibration, and as we have seen, even vibration can be annoying!

Several devices come with built in vibration notification (including the PageWriter 2000). However, the disadvantage is that the user has to be in close contact with the device all the time. A possible solution to this problem is to separate the actual vibration unit from the bigger communication device. Such small, so-called 'vibracall-- devices were very popular two years ago in Europe. These are tiny (2 1/2 x 1 x 1/2 inch.) stand alone vibration alarm boxes which 'listen-- to specific radio wave patterns and detect any incoming phone call within a short distance (up to 10 feet). Therefore, a cellphone can be in silent mode, and the user still 'feels-- a call in his pocket, even if the cellphone itself sits on the table or is hidden in the backpacker. Unfortunately, since these devices don't distinguish between the owners' cellphone and any other cellphone in close range, they vibrate on any incoming phone call in their surroundings. As the density of cellphones in commercial environments is growing in Europe, the practical use of these devices is declining. However, I don't know why these very useful devices are not known in the States. Perhaps it is because the cellphone density in the States is not as high as in Europe.

However, my vibracall device is far from being perfect. It registers not only incoming cellphone calls, but gives also a short signal if a message is sent successfully from my pager! Although the manufacturer did definitively not intend it, these two features give me a very interesting sixth sense, which I don't want to miss anymore. It enables me to have a 'radio wave awareness-- of my close environment. The device is small enough to sit in my pocket all the time, the batteries last for months, I don't have to take it out of my pocket to use it, and it talks to me on an almost subconscious level. With the growing amount of wireless communication devices (cellphones, cordless phones, wireless LAN, and pagers), and since a radio transmission means that the device is communicating, it is like having a touchable interface to cyberspace16. I am already capable of detecting different patterns of vibration and assigning them to specific devices. Together with the fact that, e.g., email arrives at my pager a few seconds before it gets to my UNIX inbox, and that the audio notification of cellphones is a few seconds after I feel an incoming call, I actually can predict events happening in the near future. The feeling that I get from my vibracall device is somehow related to the power and fascination of infrared or night-vision goggles. I can perceive things that others can't!

Public annoyance stemming from the notification is only the first of several ones. Asked about when it is appropriate to use the pager, Karen says: 'The question should be, when is it appropriate to read the pager screen.-- This makes clear that there are at least three different sources of 'rudeness-- with the use of two-way pagers. The first one is, as we have seen, obtrusive notification. The second one is pulling the device out, opening it, and reading the screen, and the third one is typing replies or information requests on the keyboard.

When is it appropriate to pull out the device and read email? Although this action takes only a very short time—I guess my average time to look at a new incoming message is about 3 to 5 seconds—, it still can be inappropriate. Clifford says: 'If the class is a seminar type class, besides it being more important to me than any mail, I would also consider it very rude to pull out my pager during the class discussion. On the other hand, if I have a very boring class, which I have to go to, having the pager to receive email is a way to pass the time. (In this case it is a classroom setup, as opposed to all sitting around a table, and I sit at the back.)-- Karen has an even more detailed opinion about when it is appropriate to read pages: '[It] depends. During a quick conversation, not appropriate. During a longer conversation where I may have important interruptions, it's OK. In a meeting, it's generally OK. When I am doing the speaking, it's generally not OK.-- So, the shorter and the more personal the conversation is, the less appropriate it is to read email. Fred has a somehow different opinion. If the relationship is casual, checking email is not such a big issue. 'Sometimes I've used it while having dinner with friends—it can be a bit impolite—but if they are really casual friends and you are waiting to hear from someone, it's OK.--

When is it appropriate to actually type a message? Clifford: 'I find it rude, when talking to a person, for them to pull out their pager, most especially if they start answering the message.-- Without any doubt, this is the activity that takes the most attention of the user. Interestingly, not many of the subjects type a lot on the keyboard. Clifford says: 'In general, I mostly use it as a one-way pager. I receive my mail on it and occasionally send a short answer or request a weather report.-- And Fred: 'I mostly use it to receive messages—I have rarely utilized the two-way feature.-- The subjects who don't have a permanent Internet connection at home use the device as an email reading mechanism, and then dial up to the mail machine if they want to reply. Lucy: 'It is great for checking email fast without having to set up a dialup Internet connection from home.-- Fred: 'It's mostly helpful when I don't want to maintain a long-term connection.-- However, most subjects like the possibility to send a message. Karen: 'I use the two-way aspects to answer important messages, to coordinate activity and meeting times/places…-- Nevertheless, writing messages from the pager seems to be awkward, and is therefore reserved for important, urgent, or timely events. Clifford: 'I must admit that it was very cool once getting a ‘good luck' message from my advisor just before a short talk I had to give!-- But such things do not happen very often. Clifford again: 'The advantage is of course ‘being connected.' When I am at work, I am already very connected. The longest period of time in which I don't have access to email is 1.5 hrs if I am in a class. I don't usually take the pager when I go to class and if I do, I don't pay any attention to it. It is a matter of priority! I don't receive any mail about anything which can't wait an hour—so class is more important.-- And Fred: 'Also it is not easy to send messages or use its services. I often forget the commands. I need a simpler interface to send and use remote services , and some more custom replies that may allow me to use the two-way feature more often. It just takes too long to compose messages or request queries.-- However, it seems like typing messages is seldom enough so that it is not an issue of annoyance.

The reason why people might think that checking email from the pager is rude is actually very simple. One can compare it to other situations, like answering a phone during a conversation. Clifford: 'It seems to me that if the phone went off, the person would usually say ‘excuse me' or ‘just a second' and then attend to it, or maybe just decide to ignore the phone. Basically, they do not attend to both threads of communication at the same time. Pager users often try to simultaneously share their attention between the person they are speaking to and the other person (via the device). This perhaps makes them more efficient although it is questionable if they can actually maintain attention or whether they are jumping back between the two sources.-- Lucy: 'My boyfriend hates the pager though, and I am pretty much forbidden to check it when I'm talking to him ... he hates to think other things demand my attention more than him!-- Bill brings it to the point: 'I don't think it's appropriate to divide your attention between another person and the pager. Perhaps it's OK when you're in a large lecture situation, but if you are having any sort of conversation with someone, eye-contact, etc., then I don't think it's appropriate. […] And more importantly, people still expect to have your undivided attention. Perhaps sometime in the future, people will expect this less, but we're not to that point yet.-- I have encountered this issue of undivided attention several times. In a face-to-face conversation, people expect to get 100% attention from each other. Is this really necessary? Why isn't it enough to get 90% of the partner's attention? I would guess that 10% of my attention would be enough to check email on my pager. But this seems to be a very sensitive issue. I personally think that this will be a less problematic issue for our children. With the advent of wearable computing, especially heads up displays and free hand audio only interfaces17, they will get used to the fact t hat anybody might be multitasking during direct conversations. On the question if less than 100% attention is rude, Jesse answers that it would depend on the importance of the topic. If a conversation were about, e.g., a personal relation problem, then she would consider it to be rude. If it were just chatting about weather and random things, it would not. Only Michael mentions that the rudeness of pager use might depend partly on what kind of task is done with it. Reading email would be considered as rude, using it as a thesaurus perhaps not, and taking notes would be OK, but could be rather strange, depending on the subject of the conversation. If a two-way pager would be used by handicapped people, e.g., reminding autistic people of daily events, or even as a translator for non-native listeners, then it would be OK.

Although I personally think that a two-way pager is a very useful thing18, two of my subjects explained that they were not excited at all about the idea of getting one. Fred says: 'Initially, I was not inclined to use it. I had put off getting it for a while. But it became a part of my daily life I've come to accept.-- Clifford was very negative about getting a two-way pager. Most probably because he felt that the use of two-way pagers can change the social behavior of human beings drastically. In a positive or a negative way? No one can tell right now.

5. References The following URLs were all visited last on Decemeber 9th, 1998, and were all functional by this time. 3Com Palm Computing [WWW Document]. URL http://www.palm.com/home.html. Advanced Messaging with the Inter@ctive Pager 950 [WWW Document]. URL http://www.rim.net/products/IP950/about.html. Ayad, K., Day, M., Foley, S., Gruen, D., Rohall, S., and Zondervan, Q. (1998). Pagers, Pilots and Prairie Dog: Recent Work with Mobile Devices at Lotus Research. Proceedings of the Workshop at CSCW'98 on Handheld CSCW, Seattle, 14 November 1998. Online at URL http://www.teco.edu/hcscw/sub/111.Day/hcscw.html. Beeper Codes [WWW Document]. URL http://cheapbeep.com/Codes.htm. BellSouth Interactive Pager Service [WWW Document]. URL http://www.bellsouthwd.com/ips/inf/index.html. Chesnais, Pascal R. (1997). Canard: A Framework for Community Messaging. Submitted to the International Symposium on Wearable Computing. URL http://canard.media.mit.edu/ CNET.com - Mr. Gadget's 7 simple rules of beeper etiquette [WWW Document]. URL http://cnet.com/Content/Gadgets/Guides/Beepers/. Commodore PET 2001-32B [WWW Document]. URL http://swift.eng.ox.ac.uk/rjm/museum/CommodorePET2001.html. Fuhrer, U., Josephs, I.E. (1998). The Cultivated Mind: From Mental Mediation to Cultivation. Developmental Review 18, pp. 279-312. Infinite Ink's Processing Mail with Procmail [WWW Document]. URL http://www.best.com/~ii/internet/robots/procmail/. Knotohole: Intelligent Paging [WWW Document]. URL http://www.media.mit.edu/~stefanm/pager/. Marx, M. and Schmandt, C. (1996). CLUES: Dynamic Personalized Message Filtering. Proceedings of CSCW '96, pp. 113-121. Minstrel Wireless IP modem [WWW Document]. URL http://www.novatelwireless.com/html/minstrel.htm. Myers, Brad A. (1998). Collaboration Using Multiple PDAs Connected to a PC. Short Paper as a Proposal to attend the Workshop on Handheld CSCW at CSCW '98. Online at URL http://www.teco.edu/hcscw/sub/103.Myers/pebblescscwworkshop.html. Nokia 9110 Communicator [WWW Document]. URL http://www.communicator.org/9110.htm. Oppenheimer, T. (1997). The Computer Delusion. The Atlantic Monthly, July 1997, pp. 45-62. URL http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/97jul/computer.htm. Palm Computing: connected organizers [WWW Document]. URL http://www.palm.com/pr/palmvii.html. REXworld [WWW Document]. URL http://www.franklin.com/rex/. Sawhney, N. (1998). Contextual Awareness, Messaging and Communication in Nomadic Audio Environments. M.S. Thesis, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, MIT Media Lab. Online at URL http://www.media.mit.edu/~nitin/msthesis/. SkyTel [WWW Document]. URL http://www.skytel.com/. SmartPagers by Motorola [WWW Document]. URL http://www.mot.com/MIMS/MSPG/SmartPagers/. Speech Interface Group projects [WWW Document]. URL http://www.media.mit.edu/speech/sig_projects.html. WolfeTech Corporation: Providing Internet access for wireless devices [WWW Document]. URL http://www.wolfetech.com/noframes/products.html.

6. Footnotes The distinction between being connected and being chained is originally introduced by [3]. Bill, one of the people I interviewed, told me that 'I'm getting more comfortable using it in public situations. A lot of times I still feel uncomfortable using it, because I think it will attract attention to myself, because these devices are still generally a novelty to most people. They don't understand them, can't afford them, whatever the reason...-- I just arrived from Switzerland, having written a 300-page thesis about how people use modern telecommunication technologies, having interviewed many people about their habits, and no one ever mentioned to me 'alphanumeric two-way paging.-- Therefore, I concluded, it must be really cool… Nevertheless, people think that the device itself is still too big to carry, which is reason enough just not to use it. As Marco said, 'If I can't fit it into my wallet without bloating it, then I pretty much don't use it.-- Here I am talking about the Canard system [6], as well as the modifications I made to the communication protocol in the context of my Knothole project [11,22]. There are commercial systems who are somehow related to these Media Lab projects, like PocketGenie by WolfeTech [23] and Inter@active by Bellsouth [5] and Research In Motion [2]. Actually, I use both of them, pager and laptop, in parallel in my bedroom, and I am not the only one. Fred, another person I interviewed, says: 'I frequently wake up and check the a few messages to see if any urgent meetings are scheduled that day.-- On the other hand, I am looking forward to having graphical representations for stock quotes, temperature curves, or radar maps. If elementary school students would call this behavior 'geeky-- as well is a very interesting issue that I unfortunately can't look at in this context, since I didn't talk to elementary school students. A very interesting collection of subjects for this question would be the young people having attended Junior Summit 1998. They were handed out a two-way pager for the use during their one-week summit at the Media Lab. I thought of interviewing them about their experiences, but although I was a 'buddy-- of one person, I had to realize that these young people were already very busy in their own activities. During my finals for my minor in Computer Science in Berne, all written and printed documentation was allowed. I went to these tests with two very big bags of books and all my notes I have ever taken during the classes. But the most important thing was how to organize these 30 kg of paper. During my one-year preparation for the finals, I made a card index with thousands of cards, each of them containing sophisticated entries about what knowledge was to find where in my books and notes. Of course today, it would be obvious to organize these things in a database on a laptop computer. Another option would be to leave the database on a desktop PC and look up the information from the two-way pager! Since all email messages sent to the pager are copies of the messages sent to the desktop, the designers of the pager systems did not intend to make the pager a full email client. Again, the idea behind it is caching the desktop email system. In this paper, name as well as sex of the subjects was changed randomly. This method works since the Canard system does not buffer the pages. If the pager is not ready to receive a message at the time it is sent, e.g., because the portable device is turned off or out of range, the message is lost. However, Knothole has a feature to compensate for that. This might be part of my forthcoming Master's thesis. The fourth rule of CNET.com's Mr. Gadget's 7 simple rules of beeper etiquette says: 'Use the Vibrate setting. If a jacket muffles the sound, it's somewhat better, but not much. You'll be less conspicuous and much less annoying if your pager quietly gives you, and only you, a gentle thrill. However, you must learn to control your unsightly beepilepsy when receiving a message. A Tourette's syndrome-like shriek or unsettling physical quiver announces to the world that you are an unstable person, not a mover and shaker with your finger on the pulse of the business world.-- [7] It is perhaps not appropriate to say 'limited to sound,-- since the audio notifications, e.g., on my Nokia 6190 cellphone are extremely sophisticated. There are not only more than 35 different possibilities, but also complete classical pieces, ranging from Pour Elise to Ode to Joy to Mozart. Even more custom-made notifications are available on the Web, to be transferred via SMS! The Media Lab's Tangible Media group is doing research on a closely related issue. E.g., Nitin Sawhney's Nomadic Radio [19] Lucy got a pager when she had surgery and couldn't access her email on a normal terminal.

Send me some comments! Last updated Dec 13 1998.

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Sat, 07 Apr 2018 08:59

Learn about pager choices and how to find the best prices on hospital pagers, restaurant pagers, and paging service.Here we give you the facts as well as our opinion to help you make informed choices.

Wide-area Paging (Paging Service) Wide area paging is provided by paging service carriers, and the signals are transmitted by a system of towers. Each tower can cover up to about a 25 mile radius, but the range is often affected by terrain and building structures. Remember that no matter what covergae the service provider offers, the actual coverage is dictated by the location of the towers and the local terrain. Before ordering paging service it is wise to check the coverage area map to determine if you will get service in the areas you generally travel in.There are two US nationwide paging carriers: USA Mobility and American Messaging. Each of these carriers transmits on different 900 MHz frequencies using a digital coding format called Flex, which was originally developed by Motorola. They also support 2way paging using a coding format called Reflex. Many, if not most, paging service customers that utilize one of these nationwide paging systems actually purchase their service from resellers. Very often the retail pricing offered by resellers is less than that offered by the carrier. We have also found that resellers will usually provide a better customer service experience for end users.

One-way Paging When you sign up for one way (alpha or numeric) paging service, you can opt for local (can be anything from city-wide to state-wide, to a small region that covers multiple states), state-wide, regional (northeast or southeast for example), or nation-wide coverage. You can also opt for a local or toll-freee number. Another option is voicemail, and this comes in many varieties based n length of messages, number of messages held, and length of message retention. Usually anything more than local service with a local pager number will cost more money per month.

One-way Pagerless Paging Yes, you are reading that correctly. There is a new service offered by MySecretaryUSA that provides nationwide numeric paging service with voicemail for only $6.95/mo. Alphanumeric service adds $3 per month. Numeric and alpha pages are sent directly to your cellphone as a text message and/or any email address. When a voicemail message is left in the mailbox, you receive notification in the same way. So there is no pager to carry around, no coverage issues to worry about, plus all the benefits of having a private pager number with voicemail. The paging service is also accessible via standard SMS texting (text to the pager number) and email. So wherever you have cell phone coverage, you have paging service coverage as well. Any missed pages will automatically be delivered to your cell phone once you regain coverage. The paging service is unlimited, but keep in mind that each page adds to your cellphone text count.

Two-way Paging Two-way (or 2way) paging on either of the two mentioned nationwide carriers allows for receiving and sending text messages and, as far as we know, is always provided with nationwide coverage. When SMS is added to two-way service, you may send text directly to text-enabled cell phones and other texting devices. Without SMS, you can still send to a cell phone but you would need to know the cell phone's email address. Here is a handy list for finding the email address of most cell phones provided you know the carrier. You may find some one way service plans that include unlimited paging, but most 2way plans are usage-sensitive, meaning that the more you use it in terms of quantity of messages, the more you pay.

Best Pagers For Use with Paging Service When you choose which paging provider to go with, they will offer a few different pager models based on the type of paging service you want. You can buy pagers from other sources such as eBay, but beware that due to the variuos frequencies and coding formats, you may end up with a pager you can't use. We highly recommend that you choose a pager that is offered by the provider based on their recommendation or features you would like. Many providers will offer used or refurbished pagers as well as new pagers. Do not be afraid to order a used or refurbished pager as these will generally work as well as a new pager, but may be a lot less expensive. Remember that Motorola stopped manufacturing pagers several years ago, so if you find a provider offering new Motorola pagers, it is highly unlikely that the pager would actually be new, and this would tell you something about the character of this provider. If you would prefer a new one-way pager, we recommend Apollo, Unication, Daviscomms, and Sun Telecom (in that order). There are still some new Axess Stories and Daviscomms BR501s offered. These are discontinued models but are excellent pagers. If you are looking for a two-way pager, refurbished Motorola T900s ($25 - $39 thru MySecretaryUSA) are the most popular, but the Unication M90 (retail $149, refurb $49 thru MySecretaryUSA) is a new-improved rechargeable version of that pager with more power, better display, and extended range & features. There is also a new Sun Telecom ST902 ($580 thru DirectPage which includes a year of service) 2way pager which again is similar to Motorola T900 but with a 6-line display vs. 4 lines on the T900, but still uses an AA alkaline battery and is not rechargeable.

Where to buy - Best Paging Service Providers Finding the best paging service rate is tricky because many providers will offer free pagers, but add activation fees, cancellation fees, exorbitant shipping fees, or require that you sign up and pay for a year of service in advance. Others will have good base rates but charge excessively for upgrades. We have done the math for you and have located what we feel are the lowest prices with the most flexibility.

One-way PagingPager World offers numeric service at $9.95/mo. which includes one free upgrade (voicemail, numeric retrieval, or statewide coverage). Alphanumeric service is just $1.00 more per month. Reseller of USA Mobility. Order on-line and pay via PayPal subscription.Pros: First month of airtime is free, No activation fee, No cancellation fee, Pay month-by-month, Free shipping.Cons: Only one pager model is offered (Axess Story) for both alpha and numeric service, but it is an excellent pager. MySecretaryUSA offers a nice selection of refurbished and new pagers.They also have lower over-all pricing of all the on-line paging service providers we could find.They are one if not the only on-line provider that offers pagers in various colors. They offer numeric, alphanumeric, and 2way paging service as well as Pagerless paging service (pages are received on your cell phone). All paging service plans include free voicemail. Reseller of USA Mobility and American Messaging. Numeric: $10.95/mo., alpha: $11.95/mo., alpha pagerless: $9.95/mo., 2way: $14.95/mo. - $29.95/mo. Order on-line and pay via PayPal subscription or credit card. Pros: Good pager choices, Free shipping, No activation fee, No cancellation fee, Pay month-by-month. Excellent and fast customer service - Phone 800-387-0654 (voicemail).Cons: None to report. One-way Pagerless PagingMySecretaryUSA stands out as the leading provider of pagerless paging (see above for details). They call it Paging-to-Cellphone and offer a 7-day free trial. Starting at $6.95/mo. after the 7-day trial. Order on-line and pay with credit card.Pros: Least expensive paging service, alpha and numeric service, no pager cost, includes voicemail, nationwide coverage, assured delivery of all pages. Excellent customer service.Cons: Text rates on your cell phone apply. We recommend an unlimited text plan. Two-way PagingSuperPager sells only one model pager, the Motorola T900 2way pager in a choice of 3 colors. Although the T900 is the most popular 2way pager, it is inherently a bit weak in transmit power due to the use of an internal NiCd battery pack that powers the transmitter and is recharged by the replaceable AA battery. The NiCd battery simply cannot supply the high current need of the transmitter. The SuperPager people have developed a super capacitor replacement for the NiCd battery that charges in a fraction of the NiCd charging time, and delivers nearly twice the current and about triple the power of the NiCd battery.This give their T900 pager about the same power as the more expensive Unication M90. $49.95 includes the first month of airtime, then $16.99/mo. Reseller of USA Mobility. Monthly auto-pay via credit card.Pros: The most popular 2way pager with more power. The best-priced unlimited 2way paging plans. Includes free voicemail. Helpful customer service.Cons: Only one pager model to choose from. MySecretaryUSA is currently carrying the Motorola T900 and the Unication M90 2way pagers. They sell the T900 at a discounted price ($24.95) in black only with cosmetic blemishes. You can get one in a choice of color with no blemishes for $39.95. The top-ranked M90 is $49.95. 2way paging plans start at $14.95/mo. (125 messages) to $29.95/mo. (unlimited messaging). Some plans include free executive voicemail (highest level of voicemail). Reseller of USA Mobility. Monthly auto-pay via PayPal.Pros: Best choice of 2way pager models. The best-priced unlimited 2way paging plans (comparable to SuperPager). Excellent and fast customer service - Phone 800-387-0654 (voicemail).Cons: None to report. PagersDirect offers a new nationwide 2-way paging device called the Zipit(R) Now(TM). With the Zipit(R) Now(TM) not only can you send and receive email messages, text messages and receive numeric pages, but the Zipit(R) Now(TM) service also features a web portal that allows the administrator to send messages to an individual or as a group plus it offers robust reporting that will show all messages, the time they were sent, the time they were received and also the time they were read by the holder of the Zipit(R) Now(TM) device. The Zipit(R) Now(TM) utilizes the nation's largest 3g data network as well as Wi-Fi networks and will automatically switch between the two depending on reception. More information as well as online ordering is available at PagersDirect regarding the Zipit(R) Now(TM)Pros: You can purchase a Zipit(R) Now(TM) 2-way device or use a smartphone app. Cons: If you use the smartphone app, data rates on your cell phone apply. We recommend an unlimited data plan.Other Paging Carriers In addition to the two nationwide carriers, there are also some local carriers that will provide service witihn a state or region of the country. These smaller carriers may offer service on any of the standard frequencies in VHF, UHF or 900 MHz. We have found that most of these smaller carriers use the pocsag coding format rather than Flex, and we have not found any that offer 2way paging. Here is a link to another website that has compiled a list of paging carriers throughout the US. Please note that many of the companies listed no longer exist or have been bought by one of the major carriers. We do not know when this list was last updated. We suggest you use this list only if the recommended reseller or carrier cannot provide coverage where you need it.

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Sun, 08 Apr 2018 04:33

Since the ancient times it is considered that the IP Address and the HTTP Cookies is the only reliable digital fingerprints which affects the online privacy and web browser identity. After a while, the privacy invaders began to looking for the ways to increase the user-tracking reliability to identify users from the general flow, they started to collect more and more additional user sensitive information.

Today the situation is more disappointing. Modern web browsers has not been architected to assure personal web privacy. Developers of major anonymity networks like TOR have no choice to edit the source code of a web browsers to somehow smooth over the situation, but this is sometimes not enough.

BrowserLeaks.com '-- It's all about Web Browser Fingerprinting. Here you will find the gallery of web browser security testing tools, that tell you what exactly personal identity data may be leaked without any permissions when you surf the Internet.

IP AddressMain tool that illustrates server-side abilities to expose the user identity. It contains a basic features, such as Showing Your IP Address and HTTP Request Headers. As well as Proxy Detection in all possible XFF headers. GeoIP Data Acquisition about the general IP Address and all of a Proxy IP's (Country, State, City, ISP/ASN, Local Time, Latitude/Longitude), and put all IP places to the Google Maps. In addition, here is a special features '-- Passive TCP/IP stack OS Fingerprinting, DNS and WebRTC Leak Tests.

JavaScriptA lot of user data can be obtained using common JavaScript functionality. DOM Window Object disclose much of sensitive information about the web browser: User-Agent, Architecture, OS Language, System Time, Screen Resolution. There is a listing of the NPAPI Plug-ins and Windows Explorer Components. Also there is already implemented: detection and obtaining data through a brand new HTML5 API's, such as the Battery Status API and Navigation Timing API.

Flash PlayerDescribes the Flash Player Runtime properties that can be provided through the use of AS3 System Capabilities: Flash Version, Plugin Type, Operating System, Manufacturer, System Language, Web Browser Architecture, Screen Resolution, and many other properties that describe the hardware and multimedia capabilities of the system.

SilverlightGetting system information using Silverlight Plug-In, installed in your web browser. Shows your system environment details such as: OS Version, Processor Count, System Uptime, Time Zone, Installed Fonts, System and User Culture, Region and Language OS settings, as well as part of evercookie to test Silverlight Isolated Storag Cookies.

WebGLWebGL Browser Report checks WebGL support in your browser, produce WebGL Fingerprinting, shows other WebGL and GPU capabilities more or less related web browser identity. Also this page contains the How-To enable or disable WebGL in a modern web browsers.

Java AppletWhat kind of permissions usual unsigned Java Applet has? It can be the extended Java Machine description, OS Detection: Name, Version, Arch, User Locale, and some file system related information. CPU Cores count, amount of Dedicated Memory, JVM instance Uptime, Network Interfaces Enumeration.

Canvas FingerprintingBrowser Fingerprinting without any of user agent identifiers, only through HTML5 Canvas element. The method is based on the fact that the same canvas-code can produce different pixels on a different web browsers, depending on the system on which it was executed.

Content FiltersThe set of demos that try to determine Content Filters usage, is the type of applications that operate between the browser and the web page, and are designed to manipulate the connection and content of a visited web pages. Among them are TOR Browser, Privixy, Adblock Detectors.

Geolocation APIThe live demo example about what the HTML5 Geolocation API is. Also it provide the Google Maps Reverse Geocoding with fancy Markers and on-the-map Accuracy Indicator. It should work both with W3C Geolocation API, and with third-party solutions like Google Gears too.

Features DetectionWeb Browser's Features Detection via Modernizr '-- library that detects HTML5 features. It once again shows how powerfully modern JavaScript affects to web browser's identity. This tool is also used by web developers as "Modernizr Helper", quick testing web browsers compatibility with HTML5 features.

Here is a list of new experemental, as well as controversial/possibly broken/deprecated tools:

No information is collected, only usual httpd access log. All cookies is browser-based, and there is no sessions. But some third-party embedded stuff: Disqus, Analytics, Maps. You can disable all of this via Privacy Settings.

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Sun, 08 Apr 2018 04:16

Description Edit Canvas fingerprinting works by exploiting the HTML5 canvas element. As described by Acar et. al. in [5]:

When a user visits a page, the fingerprinting script first draws text with the font and size of its choice and adds background colors (1). Next, the script calls Canvas API's ToDataURL method to get the canvas pixel data in dataURL format (2), which is basically a Base64 encoded representation of the binary pixel data. Finally, the script takes the hash of the text-encoded pixel data (3), which serves as the fingerprint ...

Variations in which GPU is installed or the graphics driver cause the variations in the fingerprint. The fingerprint can be stored and shared with advertising partners to identify users when they visit affiliated websites. A profile can be created from the user's browsing activity allowing advertisers to target advertising to the user's inferred demographics and preferences.[3][6]

Uniqueness Edit The fingerprint is primarily based on browser, operating system, and installed graphics hardware, so does not uniquely identify users. In a small-scale study with 294 participants from Amazon's Mechanical Turk, an experimental entropy of 5.7 bits was observed, but the authors of the study suggest more entropy could likely be observed in the wild and with more patterns used in the fingerprint. While not sufficient to uniquely identify users by itself, this fingerprint could be combined with other sources of entropy to provide a unique identifier. It is claimed that because the technique is effectively fingerprinting the GPU, that the entropy is "orthogonal" to the entropy of previous browser fingerprint techniques such as screen resolution and browser JavaScript capabilities.[7]

Mitigation Edit Tor Browser notifies the user of canvas read attempts and provides the option to return blank image data to prevent fingerprinting.[5] Browser add-ons like Privacy Badger,[8]DoNotTrackMe[9] or Adblock Plus[10] manually enhanced with EasyPrivacy list are able to block third-party ad network trackers and will block canvas fingerprinting provided that the tracker is served by a third party server (as opposed to being implemented by the visited website itself).[citation needed ]

History Edit In May 2012, Keaton Mowery and Hovav Shacham, researchers at University of California, San Diego, wrote a paper Pixel Perfect: Fingerprinting Canvas in HTML5 describing how the HTML5 canvas could be used to create digital fingerprints of web users.[3][7]

Social bookmarking technology company AddThis began experimenting with canvas fingerprinting early in 2014 as a potential replacement for cookies. 5% of the top 100,000 websites used canvas fingerprinting while it was deployed.[8] According to AddThis CEO Richard Harris, the company has only used data collected from these tests to conduct internal research. Users will be able to install an opt-out cookie on any computer to prevent being tracked by AddThis with canvas fingerprinting.[3]

A software developer writing in Forbes stated that device fingerprinting has been utilized for the purpose of preventing unauthorized access to systems long before it was used for tracking users without their consent.[2]

As of 2014 the technique is widespread in all sorts of websites with at least a dozen of high-profile web ads and user tracking suppliers using it.[11]

See also Edit Evercookie '' a type of browser cookie that is intentionally difficult to delete Local shared object '' a persistent browser cookie also known as a Flash cookie Web storage '' web application software methods and protocols used for storing data in a web browser References Edit ^ Knibbs, Kate (July 21, 2014). "What You Need to Know About the Sneakiest New Online Tracking Tool". Gizmodo . Retrieved July 21, 2014 . ^ a b Joseph Steinberg (July 23, 2014). "You Are Being Tracked Online By A Sneaky New Technology -- Here's What You Need To Know". Forbes . Retrieved November 15, 2014 . ^ a b c d Angwin, Julia (July 21, 2014). "Meet the Online Tracking Device That is Virtually Impossible to Block". ProPublica . Retrieved July 21, 2014 . ^ Kirk, Jeremy (July 21, 2014). "Stealthy Web tracking tools pose increasing privacy risks to users". PC World . Retrieved July 21, 2014 . ^ a b c Acar, Gunes; Eubank, Christian; Englehardt, Steven; Juarez, Marc; Narayanan, Arvind; Diaz, Claudia (July 24, 2014). "The Web never forgets: Persistent tracking mechanisms in the wild" . Retrieved July 24, 2014 . ^ Nikiforakis, Nick; Acar, G¼nes (2014-07-25). "Browser Fingerprinting and the Online-Tracking Arms Race". ieee.org. IEEE . Retrieved October 31, 2014 . ^ a b Mowery, Keaton; Shacham, Hovav. "Pixel Perfect: Fingerprinting Canvas in HTML5" (PDF) . Retrieved March 22, 2018 . ^ a b Davis, Wendy (July 21, 2014). "EFF Says Its Anti-Tracking Tool Blocks New Form Of Digital Fingerprinting". MediaPost . Retrieved July 21, 2014 . ^ Kirk, Jeremy (July 25, 2014). " ' Canvas fingerprinting' online tracking is sneaky but easy to halt". PC World . Retrieved August 9, 2014 . ^ Smith, Chris. "Adblock Plus: We can stop canvas fingerprinting, the 'unstoppable' new browser tracking technique". BGR. PMC. Archived from the original on July 28, 2014. ^ "Websites using HTML5 canvas fingerprinting". WebCookies.org. Archived from the original on 2014-12-28 . Retrieved 2014-12-28 . External links Edit

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Sun, 08 Apr 2018 04:14

A device fingerprint or machine fingerprint or browser fingerprint is information collected about a remote computing device for the purpose of identification. Fingerprints can be used to fully or partially identify individual users or devices even when cookies are turned off.

Basic web browser configuration information has long been collected by web analytics services in an effort to accurately measure real human web traffic and discount various forms of click fraud. With the assistance of client-side scripting languages, collection of much more esoteric parameters is possible.[1][2] Assimilation of such information into a single string comprises a device fingerprint. In 2010, EFF measured at least 18.1 bits of entropy possible from browser fingerprinting,[3] but that was before the advancements of canvas fingerprinting, which claims to add another 5.7 bits.

Recently such fingerprints have proven useful in the detection and prevention of online identity theft and credit card fraud.[4] In fact, device fingerprints can be used to predict the likelihood users will commit fraud based on their signal profile, before they have even committed fraud.[5]

Prior to early 2017, device fingerprinting was limited to single browsers. If a user switched browsers regularly, fingerprinting could not be used to link the user to these browsers.[citation needed ] A cross browser fingerprinting method has been published[6] which allows tracking of a user across multiple browsers on the same device.

Contents

Essentials Edit Motivation for the device fingerprint concept stems from the forensic value of human fingerprints. In the "ideal" case, all web client machines would have a different fingerprint value (diversity), and that value would never change (stability). Under those assumptions, it would be possible to uniquely distinguish between all machines on a network, without the explicit consent of the users themselves.

In practice neither diversity nor stability is fully attainable, and improving one has a tendency to adversely impact the other.

Diversity requires that no two machines have the same fingerprint. However, large numbers of machines are likely to have exactly the same configuration data and thus the same fingerprint. This is particularly true in the case of factory installed operating systems. One remedy is to use a scripting language to harvest a large numbers of parameters from the client machine; however, this is likely to reduce stability, as there are more parameters that may change over time. Stability requires that fingerprints remain the same over time. However, by definition browser configuration preferences are not tamper proof. For example, if one measured attribute is whether the browser has cookies on or off, then a simple change of that setting is sufficient to change the fingerprint. One remedy is to reduce the number of parameters collected to only those that are very unlikely to change; however, this is likely to reduce diversity, as fewer parameters are being measured. Active vs passive collection Edit Fingerprinting methods range from passive to active.

Passive fingerprinting refers to techniques which do not involve the obvious querying of the client machine. These methods rely upon precise classification of such factors as the client's TCP/IP configuration, OS fingerprint, IEEE 802.11 (wireless) settings,[7] and hardware clock skew.[8]

Active fingerprinting assumes the client will tolerate some degree of invasive querying. The most active method is installation of executable code directly on the client machine. Such code may have access to attributes not typically available by other means, such as the MAC address, or other unique serial numbers assigned to the machine hardware. Such data is useful for fingerprinting by programs that employ digital rights management.

OSI model fingerprints Edit Passive collection of device attributes below the web-browser layer may occur at several OSI model layers. In normal operation, various network protocols transmit or broadcast packets or headers from which one may infer client configuration parameters. Sorted by layer, some examples of such protocols are:

OSI Layer 7: SMB, FTP, HTTP, Telnet, TLS/SSL, DHCP[9] OSI Layer 5: SNMP, NetBIOS OSI Layer 4: TCP (see TCP/IP stack fingerprinting) OSI Layer 3: IPv4, IPv6, ICMP, IEEE 802.11[7] OSI Layer 2: CDP[10] Limitations Edit Collection of device fingerprints from web clients (browser software) relies on the availability of JavaScript or similar client-side scripting language for the harvesting of a suitably large number of parameters. Two classes of users with limited client-side scripting are those with mobile devices and those running privacy software or browser extensions which block ads and trackers.[11]

A separate issue is that a single device may have multiple web clients installed, or even multiple virtual operating systems. As each distinct client and OS has distinct internal parameters, one may change the device fingerprint by simply running a different browser on the same machine, unless a new[12] cross browser fingerprinting technique is used.

Criticisms Edit Consumers and their advocacy groups may consider covert tracking of users to be a violation of user privacy.[13]Computer security experts may consider the ease of bulk parameter extraction to be a browser security hole.[14]

See also Edit References Edit External links Edit

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Archived Version

Sat, 07 Apr 2018 16:11

Online ad networks and search engines love it when you surf around. Everything you do'--every page you load, every query you type'--helps them build a profile of you, the better to sell ads targeting your interests. Spy agencies are probably also happy to track your online moves.

But today they're all having trouble figuring me out, thanks to some sneaky browser plug-ins. One, AdNauseam, clicks every ad on every page I visit, baffling ad networks. When I do a search, TrackMeNot sends a stream of fake queries in the background'--like ''conan o'brien'' and ''watch tokyo samsung'''--so Google and Bing can't easily profile me either.

This is ''obfuscation,'' and it's a fascinating development in our relationship to online surveillance.

''We want everyone to benefit from this amazing online technology, but we want to impose constraints on it,'' says Helen Nissenbaum, director of the Information Law Institute at New York University and a leading thinker in the field of obfuscation. ''Right now the technology is stacked against you.'' Working with programmers overseas, Nissenbaum has spent the past decade crafting apps like AdNauseam and TrackMeNot, and this fall she published a book on why obfuscation is a strategy for modern life.

Reason one: It's increasingly hard to ''opt out'' of online tracking. ''Unless you want to go live in a cave away from society,'' Nissenbaum notes, you need to be online'--often for work or to access government services. Online services claim they're voluntary, but the cost of being a refusenik grows every day.

In this context, obfuscation is a clever judo move. It's a way for people in a relatively weak position'--which is to say all of us, compared with Google or Facebook'--to fight back. You exploit your adversaries' inherent weakness: their insatiable appetite for data.

Obfuscation has a long pedigree. Airplanes in World War II dropped chaff to confuse enemy radar. WikiLeaks has been known to generate fake traffic as cover for leakers who are uploading documents to the site. In all cases, the key to obfuscation, says Vincent Toubiana, a developer of TrackMeNot, ''is to create noise.''

As you might imagine, the folks in power are unthrilled by this monkey-wrenching. (One executive of an ad-supported site harshly criticized Nissenbaum at a talk she gave.) Obfuscation, they say, is a form of unfair ''free riding.'' Search engines use tracking to improve the overall quality of results'--so TrackMeNot users get those benefits without contributing their own personal data. Nissenbaum and her coauthor, Finn Brunton, think obfuscators are in the clear as long as their tools are open to everyone and they don't make other users worse off.

A bigger problem with obfuscation is that it doesn't curtail online tracking. Only legislation could do that, and it's pretty unlikely to come about. Nor is obfuscation, as Nissenbaum and her collaborators hasten to point out, true security. To really hide from, say, a repressive government, you need unbreakable encryption.

But as a form of everyday protest, I love the concept. Indeed, I can imagine plenty more ways to conceal my tracks. How about a hack that generates fake GPS readings in mobile apps? If I'm going to be followed online all day, I might as well leave some digital chaff.

Email clive@clivethompson.net.

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Sat, 07 Apr 2018 16:06

Embed Code Chances are you know you're being tracked online. Most of us are at the point where we're not surprised when an ad for something we searched for on one site appears on the next site we visit. We know that many pages (yes, this one you're reading, too) drop cookies and other scripts into our browser to keep tabs on our activity and sell us stuff.

A new survey from a group of Princeton researchers of one million websites sheds some light on the cutting-edge tricks being used to follow your digital trail. Rather than placing a tracker on your browser, many sites are now ''fingerprinting'' '-- using information about your computer such as battery status or browser window size to identify your presence.

On this week's What's The Point, Arvind Narayanan, one of the authors of the Princeton study, discusses his research, the latest in online tracking and what you (and our lawmakers) can do to counter the trackers.

Read a partial transcript below. Here are a few of the tools and studies we mentioned in the show:

Arvind Narayanan and Steven Englehardt's full paper (PDF) Ghostery, an online tool that alerts you to the trackers on the website you're visiting Panopticlick from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which analyzes how well your browser is protected from tracking How fingerprinting works Arvind Narayanan: In the ad tech industry, cookies are gradually being shunted in favor of fingerprinting. The reason that fingerprinting is so effective is that even if you have a device that you think is identical to the device of the person sitting next to you, there are going to be a number of differences in the behavior of your browser. The set of fonts installed on your browser could be different. The precise version number of the browser could be different. Your battery status could be different from that of the person next to you, or anybody else in the world. And it turns out that if you put all of these pieces of information together, a unique or nearly unique picture of the behavior of your device emerges that's going to be relatively stable over time. And that enables your companies to recognize you when you come back.

Jody Avirgan: But how does it enable that? My actual finger's fingerprint doesn't change from today to tomorrow. But my computer's battery status can change. So how do they know it's still you?

Narayanan: The battery status is actually the only exception to that general principle. And that's the reason why we're still figuring out how that works. [Editor's note: Earlier in the interview, Narayanan had mentioned that the rate at which your battery depletes might be an identifier.] But let's say you've got 41 fonts installed on your browser today. You come back in a week, maybe you have 43 fonts installed. But 41 of those are going to be the same as what they saw a week ago. And it changes slowly enough that statistically you can have a high degree of confidence. In the industry they call these things statistical IDs. It's not as certain as putting a cookie on your browser, but you can derive a very high degree of confidence.

Tracking's chilling effect Narayanan: The reason that this is really important, and perhaps the primary thing that motivates me to do this research, is this world of pervasive surveillance that we're entering into '-- and I'm going to use that word surveillance very deliberately, because it is surveillance. Everything that we look at online and click on is getting stored in a database somewhere. And it's being data-mined and various [decisions] are being based on that. Targeted advertising is a relatively innocuous example, but there are a variety of other things that can and do happen.

There is research that shows that when people know they are being tracked and surveilled, they change their behavior. We lose our intellectual freedom. A variety of things we consider important for our civil liberties '-- say, marriage equality '-- are things that would have been stigmatized just a few decades ago. And the reason we got to the point where it was possible to talk about it and try to change our norms and rules is because people had the freedom to talk to each other privately. To find out that there are like-minded people. As we move to a digital world, are we losing those abilities or freedoms? That is the thing to me that is the question. That's the most worrisome thing about online tracking. It's not so much the advertising.

If you're a fan of What's The Point, subscribe on Apple Podcasts, and please leave a rating/review '-- that helps spread the word to other listeners. And be sure to check out our sports show Hot Takedown as well. Have something to say about this episode, or have an idea for a future show? Get in touch by email, on Twitter, or in the comments.

What's The Point's music was composed by Hrishikesh Hirway, host of the ''Song Exploder'' podcast. Download our theme music.

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Archived Version

Sun, 08 Apr 2018 12:19

Technical Specifications*: Gemini PDA (Wifi Only) Gemini PDA (Wifi + 4G) Network: WIFI 802.11a/b/g/n/ac 802.11a/b/g/n/ac GSM '' 850/900/1800/1900MHz CDMA '' 850/1900MHz BC0 BC1+ EVDO WCDMA '' 900/2100MHz LTE '' 1/2/3/4/5/7/12/17/20/41 VoLTE '' Compatible Body: Form Factor Wide clamshell Wide clamshell Dimensions 17.14(W) x 7.93cm(D) x 1.51(H)cm 17.14(W) x 7.93cm(D) x 1.51(H)cm Weight Approx 320g Approx 320g Micro-SIM '' Micro-SIM slot + eSIM (ready) Display: Type FHD+ (18:9) FHD+ (18:9) Size 5.99inch 5.99inch Resolution 2160—1080, 403ppi 2160—1080, 403 ppi Multi Touch Yes Yes Protection Scratch resistant glass Scratch resistant glass Platform: OS Android OS, Linux OS (dual-boot) Android OS, Linux OS (dual-boot) Chipset Deca Core Deca Core CPU 2x Cortex A72 @2.6GHz 4x Cortex A53 @2.0GHz 4x Cortex A53 @1.6GHz 2x Cortex A72 @2.6GHz 4x Cortex A53 @2.0GHz 4x Cortex A53 @1.6GHz GPU ARM Mali 875MHz ARM Mali 875MHz Memory: RAM 4 GB 4 GB Card Slot microSD microSD Internal 64 GB 64 GB Camera: Front Camera 5Mp 5Mp Sound: Speakers Stereo Speakers Stereo Speakers Microphone Integrated ambient Microphone Integrated ambient Microphone 3.5mm Jack Yes Yes Comms: WLAN Wifi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac Wifi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac Bluetooth v4.1 v4.1 GPS Yes, with AGPS Yes, with AGPS NFC '' '' USB 2x USB Type C, OTG support 2x USB Type C, OTG support Features: Keyboard Mechanical full keyboard Mechanical full keyboard Voice Assistance Dedicated button for voice commands Dedicated button for voice commands Sensors Accelerometer, light sensor, gyro, magnetic sensor Accelerometer, light sensor, gyro, magnetic sensor Fingerprint '' '' Battery: Removable Li-Ion 4220mAh battery Removable Li-Ion 4220mAh battery Misc: Colour Metal, Gold-plated (limited edition) Metal, Gold-plated (limited edition) *We are working hard to achieve the above technical specifications for Gemini.

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Archived Version

Sun, 08 Apr 2018 12:32

Design

Stand outThe return of the icon. Much like the original, the new Nokia 8110 4G has a curved protective cover you can slide open to pick up calls and slide back to end them. The unique shape also means you can spin the phone in ways you never imagined.

Get your life in syncEffortlessly import contacts and sync your calendar through Gmail and Outlook.

Store powered by KaiOS to keep you entertainedTech

Reloaded with 4G capabilitiesYou can surf, chat and stream faster with 4G LTE. Plus, the wireless Hotspot feature lets you create your own Wi-Fi connection wherever you are.

Surf faster with 4G LTE

Powerful battery lifeThe Qualcomm® 205 mobile platform is optimised to bring performance without compromising on battery life, bringing up to 25 days of standby time from a single charge1.

Powerful multi-day battery life, just like the original

The detailsNokia 8110 4GColors:Smart Feature OS powered by KaiOS

Qualcomm® 205 mobile platform (MSM8905)

512 MB RAM

4 GB storage²

Polycarbonate shell

2 MP camera with LED flash

2.4'' curved display

OutsidePolycarbonate shell

2 MP camera with LED flash

2.4'' curved display

InsideSmart Feature OS powered by KaiOS

Qualcomm® 205 mobile platform (MSM8905)

512 MB RAM

4 GB storage²

Full specifications

DesignColors Black, Yellow

Size 133.45 x 49.3 x 14.9 mm

Weight 117 g

Network and connectivityNetwork speed LTE Cat. 4, SKU 1(Europe) 2G: 900, 1800 3G: WB-CDMA 1, 5, 8 4G: FDD-LTE 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 20, SKU2 (APAC, MEA,SSA) 2G: 900, 1800 3G: WB-CDMA 1, 5, 8, 39 4G: FDD-LTE 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 20 TDD-LTE 39, 40, 41(38)

Connectivity WLAN IEEE 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth® 4.1, GPS/AGPS

PerformanceOperating system Smart Feature OS powered by KaiOS

CPU MSM8905 Dual Core 1.1 GHz

RAM 512 MB

StorageInternal memory 4 GB2

Talk and standby timesTalk time (3G) Up to 7 hrs, VoLTE up to 9.3 hrs, GSM 7.2 hrs

Standby time (4G) Up to 25 days1 for SS, up to 17.7 days for DS

Music playback time Up to 48 hrs

Video playback time Up to 6.1 hrs (720p)

AudioConnector 3.5 mm headphone jack

Playable audio file formats AAC, AMR, MP3, MIDI, Vorbis

Radio FM Radio

DisplaySize and type 2.45'' QVGA display, curved screen

Material Polycarbonate

CameraCamera 2 MP rear camera with LED flash

Connectors and sensorsCable type MicroUSB (USB 2.0)

SIM SIM 1 Micro, SIM 2 Nano

BatteryType Removable 1500 mAh battery3

OtherDrip protection (IP52)

Close specsWhat's in the box

Your Nokia 8110 4G HeadsetChargerQuick guide360°

Google, Android and Android One are trademarks of Google LLC; Oreo is a trademark of Mondelez International, Inc. group. Qualcomm Snapdragon is a product of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and/or its subsidiaries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Variations on offering may apply. Check local availability. Images are for illustrative purposes only.

Qualcomm mobile platform is a product of Qualcomm Technologies Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Variations on offering may apply. Check local availability. Images are for illustrative purposes only.

1Testing done in lab conditions with no background apps running. 2Pre-installed system software and apps use a significant part of memory space. 3Battery has limited recharge cycles and battery capacity reduces over time. Eventually the battery may need to be replaced.

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Sun, 08 Apr 2018 14:24

Designed to be used as little as possible, the Light Phone is your phone away from phone. Whether it be an afternoon stroll, coffee break, night on the town, or a dinner date with someone you love, going light affords us the space we need to spend quality time free of distractions or notifications.

The Light Phone is your second phone, a casual 2G mobile device for specific situations. It works independent of your current phone plan, regardless of the carrier, with its own SIM provided by Light. There is a monthly charge to use the SIM provided of $5/month. This SIM is limited to the United States.

The packaging of the Light Phone.

The Light Phone only makes and receives phone calls. It uses your existing phone number and it is your second phone, a supplement to your smartphone for those times where you do not need the internet in your pocket. The Light Phone can store 9 speed dials accessed by a long press of the corresponding number on the keypad. It is intentionally limited to this feature set and is the only phone designed to be used as a second phone.

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Archived Version

Sun, 08 Apr 2018 14:23

Explore

What We Do Funding Marketplace Investing Generosity About

About Us Blog Trust & Safety Help & Support Press Careers Contact Entrepreneurs

How It Works Indiegogo vs. Kickstarter Education Center Experts Directory Fees Enterprise Language

Find it first on Indiegogo

Discover new and clever products in the Indiegogo newsletter

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Sun, 08 Apr 2018 12:15

News Starting today, John Giannandrea heads the team improving the Siri voice assistant. Photo: Google John Giannandrea used to run Google's artificial intelligence division, but now he works for Apple. He's leading the drive to make the company's Siri voice assistant smarter, a goal many would agree is overdue.

This is the most high-profile move yet in Apple's ongoing drive to hire more talent for the Siri team. Giannandrea came to Google in 2010. He helped make AI and machine learning part of all the company's products, from search to Gmail. And now he's doing that for Apple.

''John shares our commitment to privacy and our thoughtful approach as we make computers even smarter and more personal,'' Apple CEO Time Cook wrote in an email to employees obtained by The New York Times.

Siri and Apple's differential privacy Apple's voice assistant debuted in the iPhone 4S, and today is integrated into almost all the company's computers. It's one of the major ways of controlling the new HomePod smart speaker, even though it's not really up to the job. Siri is widely criticized for falling behind rivals, including Google Assistant, which Giannandrea helped develop.

Part of the reason for Siri's shortcomings is Apple's privacy stance. The company places a premium on privacy. It employs something called differential privacy (.pdf), steadfastly refusing to gather data about individuals the way Google, Facebook and other tech giants do. Apple says its methods let it ''gain insight into what many Apple users are doing, while helping to preserve the privacy of individual users. It is a technique that enables Apple to learn about the user community without learning about individuals in the community. Differential privacy transforms the information shared with Apple before it ever leaves the user's device such that Apple can never reproduce the true data.''

Quest to make Siri smarter According to information that recently leaked from Apple, there's been an internal debate for years on whether to make Siri able to handle much more complex tasks, or to leave the voice assistant as the simple tool it has been up until now.

The winner of that debate seems to be clear. In addition to bringing on one of the top names in AI, Apple recently posted more than a hundred job openings for the Siri team.

If all this bears fruit, then Apple will have a voice assistant that the company can be proud of. And, more importantly, one that can stand up to tough competition from Google Assistant and Amazon's Alexa.

Hey Adam,

I'm the slave that works to

improve the natural language programming algorithms for Apple, Amazon, Google,

etc. Part of how I do this is going over the data provided to my company from

Apple, Amazon, Google, etc. Well, one of our partners is the NYT so I am able

to go over all of the customer chats that are submitted on their website. I know

this sounds like it violates the privacy of the users chatting with customer

service agents but hey, I'm just a slave doing my job.

Anyways, the big news is this. After pouring over THOUSANDS

of NYT customer chats from their website literally 99% of chats are customers

asking to unsubscribe. Some of their chats are hilarious. They say such things

as "staying informed is too stressful" and other reasons as their

reason to cancel. One of my favorite cancelers even said "keep up the good

fight" but still cancelled lol. Anyways I hate the NYT and I thought you

would find this info hilarious.

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Archived Version

Sun, 08 Apr 2018 12:41

Seven years ago, I changed careers from theoretical physics to engineering, and discovered a deep love for understanding the things which make real-world systems work. This blog comes from that interest; while it discusses everything from AI to Middle East politics, the shared thread is seeing how things work in the real world, what makes them work well or poorly, and how they can be changed for the better.The interests reflected here are my own eclectic set. Some of them come from my professional or academic background '-- engineering, physics, history. Others come from long-running passions of mine; I've been a news junkie since I was seven, played the piano since before that, and have read avidly and widely for as long as I can remember.

Open questions

Some of the questions I'm presently most interested in are:

Passive sensing: What can we learn about extremely complex systems '' like economies and countries '' by watching the unavoidable but ''minor-seeming'' side effects of everyday actions? Information leaks from every one of our actions; can this information be studied to give us useful insights into the world? And how will these insights be used, and who will have the power to use them? Society and its future: Where is our world heading over the next year? Decade? Century? Can we understand present trends (political, demographic, resource usage, physical) well enough to guess the ways in which these changes might unfold? Law: Gen. Wesley Clark once said that, a hundred years from now, the only things we'll leave behind which matter are the environment and constitutional legitimacy. America is running a great experiment in democracy; preserving this needs every available eye on the system and every hand on the wheel. Look for discussion of laws and court rulings, especially ones which affect the foundations of our political structure. Design: What makes for good design? How is this different in different arts? What can we learn from this? Who am I?

Professionally, I'm a principal engineer at Google and Chief Architect for Social. My primary responsibility is the overarching technical design of Google's social products, especially the Google+ Project. I've been at Google since 2003, during which time I've worked on artificial intelligence (in the search quality / ranking team), search infrastructure (as head of the ultra-high capacity search group), and planet-scale distributed storage.

Before that, I was at Stanford's Institute for Theoretical Physics, where I worked on using unconventional geometries and topologies (noncommutative, twistor, etc) to study the low-level structure of spacetime. My physics papers are available via the arXiv.

During my undergraduate and graduate careers, I became very interested in history '-- first in Late Antiquity and then in the early Middle Ages. My core interest was initially in social history and the study of daily life in these periods, and gradually mixed with my existing interest in religion to an especial interest in the religious history of these periods. This led to extensive coursework and research, and almost led to my doing a graduate minor. Lately I've been moving my eye backwards a bit and starting to study the emergence of monotheism in the Late Bronze Age Middle East.

I come from a large Jewish, Israeli family. On the religious side, it varies from the ultra-Orthodox (In the rabbi business for over 2,500 years) to ultra-secular (Karl Marx is my Nth cousin), and watching this discourse play out left me deeply interested in all the related matters, from individual faith (and how it differs for people) to the social meaning of religion. On the political side, you can't grow up with wars breaking out at the drop of a hat and not become a news junkie. You just can't. So I read it compulsively. And analyze it compulsively, looking for signals of what's really going on and what's about to happen.

The Really Important Disclaimer

This is my personal blog, not an official Google blog. All statements and opinions on this blog are my own (or those of the respective commenters), and do not necessarily represent those of my employer or of anyone else.

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Archived Version

Sun, 08 Apr 2018 13:40

In the past, Turkey has done similar, censoring tweets and condemning social media as "the worst menace to society." Late last year, Congo ordered cuts to the internet and SMS to slow down protesters. And less than a day after that instance, Iranian officials blocked mobile access to Instagram and Telegram. Unfortunately, these reports of free speech being squashed by the local government continue to surface on a regular basis.

We've reached out to the affected companies for more information and will update this post should it arrive.

Update: A Facebook spokesperson responded with the following comment, which applies to Instagram as well:

"The safety of our community is absolutely critical to us. We have clear rules against hate speech and incitement to violence and work hard to keep it off our platform. We are responding to the situation in Sri Lanka and are in contact with the government and non-governmental organizations to support efforts to identify and remove such content."

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Archived Version

Sun, 08 Apr 2018 13:45

[Update: Facebook confirmed to TechCrunch that it plans to bring the an ‘unsend’ message feature to all users in the coming months.]

At a time when Facebook is under fire for failing to protect user data, it is ironically facing a $33M fine for refusing to allow police access to WhatsApp messages between suspected fraudsters …

Reuters reports that the fine has been levied in Brazil.

A Brazilian judge has ordered that Facebook pay 111.7 million reais ($33.4 million) for failing to cooperate with a corruption investigation, federal prosecutors said on Thursday, prompting Facebook to say it was exploring “all legal options.”

The judge fined Facebook for failing to give access in 2016 to WhatsApp messages exchanged by individuals under investigation for defrauding the healthcare system of Brazil’s Amazonas state, the prosecutors said in a statement.

Facebook said that it handed over the data required by law. The report doesn’t include specifics, but as WhatsApp messages are end-to-end encrypted, the company wouldn’t be in a position to hand over the content of any exchanges. In most such cases, what the authorities want is metadata showing who was in contact with whom, though all too many governments don’t seem to understand what end-to-end encryption means …

Zuckerberg PMs deletedOn the subject of private messages, Facebook has deleted a number of PMs sent by CEO Mark Zuckerberg from the inboxes of their recipients. This is something that ordinary Facebook users can’t do – once a message is sent, it remains available to the recipient even if you delete the conversation at your end.

TechCrunch was able to confirm multiple reports of this happening. The company said that this was for corporate security reasons.

After Sony Pictures’ emails were hacked in 2014 we made a number of changes to protect our executives’ communications. These included limiting the retention period for Mark’s messages in Messenger. We did so in full compliance with our legal obligations to preserve messages.

The site says that this may have been done to prevent the leak of sensitive corporate info, but might also have been an attempt to ‘thwart the publication of potentially embarrassing personal messages sent by Zuckerberg or other executives.’

Some unable to delete accountsWhile Zuckerberg said recently that the #DeleteFacebook campaign hadn’t had ‘any meaningful impact,’ some users who did attempt to delete their accounts are reporting that they have been unable to do so. The WSJ reports multiple people hitting the same brick wall.

At the confirmation screen that appears after clicking “Delete My Account,” the system tells them their passwords are incorrect.

Users have reported entering the verified correct password over and over again without success. Often, it is the password they used only moments before, to log into their accounts. Users have experienced the issue across different browsers, operating systems and devices. (Many didn’t even use password managers or their browsers’ auto-fill-form feature, which could potentially trip up this system.) Some of those affected found that changing their password then trying again fixed it.

Facebook stops asking hospitals to share patient dataFinally, and unsurprisingly, Facebook has reportedly paused an initiative in which a number of hospitals were asked to share patient data with the social network.

Although the data would have been anonymized, and the project appears to have been designed to help patients and hospitals alike, it’s obviously not a great time for the company to be requesting access to sensitive data. CNBC reports that the project has now been put on hold.

Facebook has asked several major U.S. hospitals to share anonymized data about their patients, such as illnesses and prescription info, for a proposed research project. Facebook was intending to match it up with user data it had collected, and help the hospitals figure out which patients might need special care or treatment.

Facebook said that its current focus was on ‘doing a better job of protecting people’s data.’

Photo: Thomas White/Reuters

Check out 9to5Mac on YouTube for more Apple news:

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Archived Version

Sun, 08 Apr 2018 14:09

Powered by

Unstoppable microblogging No corporation or government controls Peepeth, making it the perfect place to share what matters.

Peepeth is invite-only right now. This page will help get you set up, but you'll also need an invite to register. Just want to browse? Click here.

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Non-US citizens: buy ether through a cryptocurrency exchange and then send some ether to your MetaMask account.

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Archived Version

Sun, 08 Apr 2018 12:56

The attackers displayed a US flag, but it's not clear who's responsible.

The past few days haven't been great for the internet's broader security. Iran's Communication and Information Technology Ministry has reported that it was a victim in a global cyberattack that compromised about 200,000 Cisco switches that hadn't yet received patches for exploits in the company's legacy Smart Install protocol. The attackers displayed a US flag on at least some screens, complete with a "don't mess with our elections" warning, but the attack wasn't focused on Iran -- only 3,500 switches fell to the exploit in the country. About 55,000 of the victim devices were in the US, IT Minister Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi said, while 14,000 were in China. Other victims were located in Europe and India.

Iran's report came shortly after Cisco's Talos research group warned that there had been "several incidents" around the world where "specific advanced actors" had targeted its switches using Smart Install. There had been a spike in scanning as of November 2017, and it only increased in intensity in March and April.

The damage, at least in Iran, might be minimal -- Iran said it tackled the flaw within hours, and that it hadn't lost data. However, the reach of the attack and its messaging are more than a little baffling. If this was a warning over election meddling, why not focus on Russia instead of countries that could frequently be victims of those attacks? This could be an indiscriminate protest, or even a deliberate attempt to throw investigators off the trail by foisting the blame on one country.

Whoever's responsible, the cyberattacks highlight a recurring problem: many of the breaches in recent months have been the result of lax security practices. These switches could have been fixed in time to prevent the attack, but a slow response left them wide open. It may take a long time before a lear majority of network operators treat patches and operating system upgrades as high priorities.

Update: In a response to Motherboard, the attackers claimed this was a protest against Russia and other countries meddling in American elections. Also, some of the targets were Russian. It's still odd that the US and other countries got caught in the crossfire (especially as the attackers claimed they fixed the flaws on US and UK devices), but the campaign makes more sense as a result.

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Archived Version

Sun, 08 Apr 2018 13:25

If you work with data, or if data is important to your brand, you've no doubt heard about GDPR. We hope so, anyway. The General Data Protection Regulation (full text here) is a piece of legislation which will come into force across the European Union on May 25, 2018. But you shouldn't turn your head the other way even if you're an American company. GDPR will affect your brand if your marketing and eCommerce operations reach a European audience.

For companies who operate in European markets or who have actual or potential customers within those countries '-- even if your physical operations take place in the United States '-- strict compliance with GDPR is mandatory, and the penalty for failing to comply is a fine. A major fine. We're talking about a 4% of your global annual revenue (or up to $20 million) kind of fine.

In short, if you process data about individuals in the context of selling goods or services to European citizens in any EU country, then you will need to comply with GDPR.

But what exactly does GDPR require, and how must you comply?

At the bare minimum, the GDPR was drafted with the intended purposes of protecting all non-anonymized personal data (or personally identifiable information: PII). And any company (or organization) that stores or processes personal information about ''natural persons'' (individual human beings) who are ''data subjects'' under the Regulation '-- defined as European citizens who reside in an EU state '-- must comply.

The basics of GDPR

In its long and detailed text, the GDPR defines what types of personal data are at stake here:

Name, address, and phone number IP address and cookies Racial identity Religious and religious affiliation Health and genetic data Biometric data Sexual orientation and gender preference Digital marketers: Notice the first two entries on that list, and then consider the following.

Storing or processing of personal data can be undertaken only if: The data subject has given consent to the processing of his or her personal data for one or more specific purposes Processing is necessary for the performance of a contract to which the data subject is party, or in order to take steps at the request of the data subject prior to entering into a contract Processing is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation to which the controller is subject Processing is necessary in order to protect the vital interests of the data subject or of another natural person Processing is necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest or in the exercise of official authority vested in the controller Processing is necessary for the purposes of the legitimate interests pursued by the controller or by a third party, except where such interests are overridden by the interests or fundamental rights and freedoms of the data subject which require protection of personal data, in particular where the data subject is a child. That's a lot of legalese, I know. So to put it in layman's terms: You can't just go ahead and profit from personal data any more, if the data relates to European data subjects. Maybe we should just quote paragraph 70 of the preamble to underline that point '-- emphasis added:

''Where personal data are processed for the purposes of direct marketing, the data subject should have the right to object to such processing, including profiling to the extent that it is related to such direct marketing, whether with regard to initial or further processing, at any time and free of charge. That right should be explicitly brought to the attention of the data subject and presented clearly and separately from any other information.''

And to make matters even more difficult for multinational companies, there is also a ''right to be forgotten." More about that below.

Of course, on the one hand, this imperative to protect personally identifiable information about European subjects threatens business strategies, practices, and processes worldwide, especially cloud, SaaS, and mobile-driven enterprises. In order to cope with the GDPR, brands with international operations have been developing alternative and compliant data-storage centers within the EU. According to a report released by PwC, 64% of executives at U.S. corporations reported that ''their top strategy for reducing GDPR exposure is centralization of data centers in Europe. Just over half (54%) said they plan to de-identify [i.e. anonymize] European personal data to reduce exposure.''

''The threats of high fines and impactful injunctions, however, clearly have many others reconsidering the importance of the European market,'' the study says. In fact, 32% of respondents plan to reduce their presence in Europe, while 26% intend to exit the EU market altogether.

That's a high percentage of lost business, but if you're a company who wants to navigate the terrain and remain in the EU, here are a few things you need to think about.

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Archived Version

Sun, 08 Apr 2018 13:46

I'm going to lay out a bit about genders and sex, give some insight into why there's more than one answer to that question.

First of all, why do we even have more than one gender? Why do people have sex?

Roughly 1.2 billion years ago, simple eukaryotic cells evolved with an ability that allowed one cell to recombine itself with another cell to create a new cell that contained DNA from both cells. Before this, it did happen that a cell would swallow another cell, but it would technically devour the other cell, erasing its DNA. The new, sexual, eukaryotic cells could instead absorb some DNA from each other and create a new, stronger whole.

Sexual reproduction is used among 99.9% of all species alive.

It has a number of advantages, it generally makes us more resistant to parasites and diseases, and it can repair damage to our DNA.

As sexual reproduction evolved, so did sexual selection. When DNA is recombined between two animals, it is always preferable to scrutinize your prospective partner. Are they healthy? Are they thriving? Especially being the partner that has the greatest investment in the resulting offspring, typically being the female, it is necessary to find a strong mate.

As animals with two genders evolved, so did the behavior associated with the separate genders. It wasn't that gendered behavior evolved the exact same in all animals. Not at all in fact. In some animals, the behavioral difference between male and female is negligible. In others, it is extremely pronounced. In some, the female is bigger and more dominant than the male.

In primates and in our hominid ancestors, reproductive selection took two forms. Male on male competition, and female mate choice. We have some of that behavior still ingrained in us. There are those who argue that culture alone created our two main gender stereotypes. That, despite all our primate and hominid relatives display gender-specific behavior and traits, we are somehow above that.

Testosterone is the reason that males becomes males. The Y chromosome triggers special cells in the gonads that cause them to produce testosterone. The default fetus is female, but with testosterone, that fetus starts to form male characteristics. A penis forms, bones grow denser, and during the fourth to sixth month of the pregnancy, the masculinization of the brain occurs.

This has noticeable, physical impact on the brain, sufficient that you can tell the gender of a person based on a MRI. Once the child is born and starts growing up, there is a whole host of differences in the behavior and mental abilities of male and females. For example, males are, on average, better with their spatial intelligence, being better at rotating objects mentally. Females, on average, are better at remembering long lists of words. Even very early, our differences can be seen. Very young boys prefer toys that can be manipulated, toys with wheels or hinges. Very young girls prefer toys that offer sensory experiences (like soft, plushy toys), or toys with human-like facial features that they can focus on. This trend actually continues, women, on average, are better at reading facial expressions than men.

But in addition to these biological differences, we can add two other factors to the mix.

CultureIndividual variation1: Our culture, and the cultural stereotypes we have for gender, are not entirely separate from biological genders. Looking at the stereotypes we have, it is clear that they were created as embellishments on top of the gender roles naturally occurring in humans. They weren't entirely separate from biological genders, but a lot of ''artistic creativity'' was given in their interpretation. Obviously males have no preference for blue, just like females have no preference for red. In fact, go back a couple of hundred years, and red was considered the masculine color. Men don't have a natural preference for pants, and women for dresses. So it is obvious that we added a lot on top of what could be considered ''natural''. Not all of it made sense in terms of our natural preferences either.

2: In addition to what we added culturally, there is also the case to be made for individual variation. Remember how i mentioned men having better spatial sense, and women having better memory for words? Well, both of those are based on Averages. And that's the problem with averages, that there is so much individual variation between each person that it can totally erase that average difference, and sometimes make a male better than the average female, at the all of the things women are usually better at, and vice-versa.

So we have two ways in which we are deviating from our natural tendencies, especially if you think of them as averages.

Additionally, we have a very small portion of the population that suffer from one of the several conditions that can affect your perception of gender. Remember how I mentioned that the male brain becomes masculinized in the 4th to 6th month of a pregnancy? Well, it doesn't for all males. In some males, that masculinization doesn't take place. They still form as males in all regards, except their brain. Take an MRI, and it will resemble a female brain.

This is also why males suffer slightly more from gender distortion than females. Female is the base gender, and the fetus becomes male through the addition of testosterone. If any part of the masculinization process is disrupted, it can create a superficially male person with some feminine traits. It is harder to disrupt that process in a female fetus.

Additionally, there are also various chromosomal disorders that can create variations other than the two main XX (female) and XY (male) options.

Conclusion

- In reproductive terms, there are two genders, one that creates ovum (egg cells) and another that creates sperm cells. An extremely few people have been found capable of both (creating both ovum and sperm), and naturally some are incapable of creating either. But forming a fetus, naturally, requires one person creating ovum and another creating sperm.

- In terms of behavioral tendencies and mental abilities that are natural, we will already start to encounter a bit more grey areas. Yes there are behavioral tendencies and mental abilities that differ between men and women. But they aren't profound enough that normal, human variation can't negate them. Additionally, some people are born with brains more similar to that of the opposite sex.

- In terms of cultural tendencies and gender stereotypes, it is even more muddled. Our culture is constantly expanding and evolving. In some ways, I can understand the counter-culture to our old gender norms. Remember how I talked about ''average'' men and ''average'' women? Well, we used to have a culture that only allowed for those averages. It doesn't necessarily mean that those ''averages'' weren't based on natural tendencies, they were. The problem was that our culture didn't allow for deviation from that average. First religion was the main culprit in enforcing that norm, and after that came ''naturalists'' who claimed those differences were natural.

The problem with creating a culture that is focused on forcing everyone to adhere to an ''average'' is that it restrains and limits everyone who deviate from that average. And that is exactly what our culture of old did. We noticed early on that women have a preference for taking care of others more than men. We noticed men are more aggressive. But then we first made the erroneous assumption that all women and men follow that pattern. And then we made the second error in enforcing that erroneous assumption through cultural stereotypes and religion, enforcing it on everyone.

The problem now is that in some places, there are those who want to dissolve those old stereotypes by erasing all gender norms. That isn't the solution either though. Yes those gender stereotypes were restrictive and oppressive. But they weren't pure inventions, purely cultural fabrications. That's why there are tons of people, the majority in fact, who feel comfortable with a gender stereotype.

We actually enjoy having some guidelines to operate under. Social rules aren't always a bad thing. Often they give us a framework that allows us to function as a society, to help us find our place without having to figure out everything from scratch. Less confusion. More time to focus on leading a good life.

Admit to yourself that there are some gender types, that they are there for a reason, and that the majority of people live very good lives under them.

But also admit to yourself that there are people who deviate from those norms, sometimes through no fault of their own, and allow them to deviate, and respect them.

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Archived Version

Sun, 08 Apr 2018 14:02

Police have said her bitterness over the company's policies appeared to have motivated Tuesday's shooting that left three YouTube employees wounded. She then killed herself. Ms. Aghdam in January had posted a video accusing YouTube of limiting viewer traffic to some of her videos and suggested on her personal website that the site paid her a lower amount of ad revenue than she deserved.

Many fellow creators, while condemning Ms. Aghdam's actions, say that there are underlying problems with how YouTube treats the people who make its videos. Thousands of independent video makers rely on the site and the ad revenue it generates for their income. Their concerns, broadcast regularly through videos, Instagram posts and tweets, highlight the challenge YouTube faces as it expands its business and finds the demands of its advertisers in conflict with the wishes of its video creators.

Nasim Najafi Aghdam, accused of shooting three people inside YouTube's headquarters in San Bruno, Calif., posted this video to her personal website in January, complaining of unfair treatment by the company.

. A number of YouTube creators posted videos denouncing Ms. Aghdam after the shooting. Casey Neistat, one of the site's most popular creators who had previously criticized YouTube policies in a video Ms. Aghdam posted on her website, shared a new video Wednesday calling her a ''monster.''

A YouTube spokeswoman declined to comment on Ms. Aghdam's complaints and how they were handled.

The company has previously said its policies are designed to curtail bad actors on the video site and ensure a stable source of revenue for everyone else.

YouTube, a unit of Alphabet Inc.'s Google, relies on hundreds of thousands of people to upload short films and build audiences of regular viewers. In return, the company pays them 55% of the ad revenue generated by many of the videos on the site. That revenue share has been unchanged for years.

As the number of creators has grown and uploaded a wider range of videos, advertisers have grown more skittish about putting their messages next to what they deem objectionable content. Top brands including

Procter & Gamble Co. pulled spending from the site last year after discovering YouTube running their ads before extremist, racist and hateful videos.

In response, YouTube last year began requiring video producers to have more than 10,000 views from their combined videos before they can start making any money from ads. The company also hired more human reviewers to vet videos, removing clips or entire accounts they see as violating their terms of service.

YouTube prohibits nudity, violence, and other categories of content it deems potentially harmful or dangerous. Its terms also restrict copyrighted content and personal information uploaded without consent.

Earlier this year, YouTube raised the bar even more for its video creators that want to carry ads. Rather than 10,000 views, YouTube channels must now have accumulated at least 4,000 hours of watch time in the past 12 months and 1,000 subscribers. YouTube said a ''significant'' number of channels would be affected but declined to provide more details. The company said nearly all affected channels make less than $100 a year in ad revenue.

The changes had little impact on YouTube's most popular stars, some who make more than $100,000 on a single video, including sponsorships, according to Evan Asano, chief executive of Mediakix, a marketing agency for YouTube creators. But the new policies cut tens of thousands of smaller video makers off from getting paid, Mr. Asano said.

Some of them, like Chris Thompson, said the company has gone too far in removing content without being clear about what rules it violates. Mr. Thompson, a 36-year-old Los Angeles resident who shares videos about his life and social issues under the name SupDaily, stopped uploading videos regularly to YouTube after he said too many of his videos were being unfairly flagged as inappropriate.

Police taped off a portion of YouTube's offices in San Bruno, Calif., after a Tuesday shooting. Photo: Jeff Chiu/Associated Press

. ''Any video that is deemed controversial whatsoever'--which is very subjective'--gets demonetized,'' said Mr. Thompson, who moved to

Amazon.com Inc.'s video site Twitch last year, where he said he makes three times as much a month. Twitch and

Facebook Inc. have tried to court video creators from YouTube by making it easy to upload videos and generate revenue.

Ms. Aghdam had written on her website that ''close-minded'' employees at the company had set age restrictions on one of her videos depicting an ab workout routine. She said she had contacted the company's support team about the issue, and that she was told her video contained inappropriate content, without clarifying what was inappropriate about it.

YouTube has an appeals process for reviewing videos that may have been erroneously blocked. It is unclear whether Ms. Aghdam submitted a formal appeal.

Ms. Aghdam, who shared videos about veganism, graphic depictions of animal cruelty and videotapes of herself dancing and impersonating celebrities like Justin Bieber, had amassed an audience of more than 60,000 followers across two Instagram accounts. At least two YouTube accounts belonging to Ms. Aghdam have been ''terminated due to multiple or severe violations of YouTube's policy against spam, deceptive practices, and misleading content or other Terms of Service violations,'' the website says.

She posted a screenshot showing her analytics dashboard on YouTube in which she alleged she made just 10 cents for some 300,000 video views.

'--Zusha Elinson contributed to this article.

Link to Article

Archived Version

Sun, 08 Apr 2018 14:02

Police have said her bitterness over the company's policies appeared to have motivated Tuesday's shooting that left three YouTube employees wounded. She then killed herself. Ms. Aghdam in January had posted a video accusing YouTube of limiting viewer traffic to some of her videos and suggested on her personal website that the site paid her a lower amount of ad revenue than she deserved.

Many fellow creators, while condemning Ms. Aghdam's actions, say that there are underlying problems with how YouTube treats the people who make its videos. Thousands of independent video makers rely on the site and the ad revenue it generates for their income. Their concerns, broadcast regularly through videos, Instagram posts and tweets, highlight the challenge YouTube faces as it expands its business and finds the demands of its advertisers in conflict with the wishes of its video creators.

Nasim Najafi Aghdam, accused of shooting three people inside YouTube's headquarters in San Bruno, Calif., posted this video to her personal website in January, complaining of unfair treatment by the company.

. A number of YouTube creators posted videos denouncing Ms. Aghdam after the shooting. Casey Neistat, one of the site's most popular creators who had previously criticized YouTube policies in a video Ms. Aghdam posted on her website, shared a new video Wednesday calling her a ''monster.''

A YouTube spokeswoman declined to comment on Ms. Aghdam's complaints and how they were handled.

The company has previously said its policies are designed to curtail bad actors on the video site and ensure a stable source of revenue for everyone else.

YouTube, a unit of Alphabet Inc.'s Google, relies on hundreds of thousands of people to upload short films and build audiences of regular viewers. In return, the company pays them 55% of the ad revenue generated by many of the videos on the site. That revenue share has been unchanged for years.

As the number of creators has grown and uploaded a wider range of videos, advertisers have grown more skittish about putting their messages next to what they deem objectionable content. Top brands including

Procter & Gamble Co. pulled spending from the site last year after discovering YouTube running their ads before extremist, racist and hateful videos.

In response, YouTube last year began requiring video producers to have more than 10,000 views from their combined videos before they can start making any money from ads. The company also hired more human reviewers to vet videos, removing clips or entire accounts they see as violating their terms of service.

YouTube prohibits nudity, violence, and other categories of content it deems potentially harmful or dangerous. Its terms also restrict copyrighted content and personal information uploaded without consent.

Earlier this year, YouTube raised the bar even more for its video creators that want to carry ads. Rather than 10,000 views, YouTube channels must now have accumulated at least 4,000 hours of watch time in the past 12 months and 1,000 subscribers. YouTube said a ''significant'' number of channels would be affected but declined to provide more details. The company said nearly all affected channels make less than $100 a year in ad revenue.

The changes had little impact on YouTube's most popular stars, some who make more than $100,000 on a single video, including sponsorships, according to Evan Asano, chief executive of Mediakix, a marketing agency for YouTube creators. But the new policies cut tens of thousands of smaller video makers off from getting paid, Mr. Asano said.

Some of them, like Chris Thompson, said the company has gone too far in removing content without being clear about what rules it violates. Mr. Thompson, a 36-year-old Los Angeles resident who shares videos about his life and social issues under the name SupDaily, stopped uploading videos regularly to YouTube after he said too many of his videos were being unfairly flagged as inappropriate.

Police taped off a portion of YouTube's offices in San Bruno, Calif., after a Tuesday shooting. Photo: Jeff Chiu/Associated Press

. ''Any video that is deemed controversial whatsoever'--which is very subjective'--gets demonetized,'' said Mr. Thompson, who moved to

Amazon.com Inc.'s video site Twitch last year, where he said he makes three times as much a month. Twitch and

Facebook Inc. have tried to court video creators from YouTube by making it easy to upload videos and generate revenue.

Ms. Aghdam had written on her website that ''close-minded'' employees at the company had set age restrictions on one of her videos depicting an ab workout routine. She said she had contacted the company's support team about the issue, and that she was told her video contained inappropriate content, without clarifying what was inappropriate about it.

YouTube has an appeals process for reviewing videos that may have been erroneously blocked. It is unclear whether Ms. Aghdam submitted a formal appeal.

Ms. Aghdam, who shared videos about veganism, graphic depictions of animal cruelty and videotapes of herself dancing and impersonating celebrities like Justin Bieber, had amassed an audience of more than 60,000 followers across two Instagram accounts. At least two YouTube accounts belonging to Ms. Aghdam have been ''terminated due to multiple or severe violations of YouTube's policy against spam, deceptive practices, and misleading content or other Terms of Service violations,'' the website says.

She posted a screenshot showing her analytics dashboard on YouTube in which she alleged she made just 10 cents for some 300,000 video views.

'--Zusha Elinson contributed to this article.

John and Adam,

Almost exactly one year ago, I

nearly died. What was believed at the time to be pneumonia was actually acute

heart failure, which in turn led to respiratory failure. I was only 46 years

old.

A few days after waking from emergency

open-heart surgery, I was moved from ICU to Cardiology. I consistently refused

full doses of my pain medication until I was repeatedly badgered by the

nursing staff into taking them as prescribed, which included eight

hydrocodone pills daily.

My full stay was nearly a week

longer than likely necessary, because they could not get me off

oxygen. Every time the cannula was removed, my blood oxygen would plummet. I

was getting daily x-rays to assess what was still assumed to be lingering pneumonia,

but which was not apparent on the x-rays. Without a complete answer, the

surgeon finally sent me home to finish my recovery, still on oxygen.

Within a week, I convinced my

cardiologist to transition me off the hydrocodone. The day after I stopped

taking the painkillers, I never needed the oxygen again. Not even for one

second.

While I am not a medical

professional and would never counsel anyone regarding their own medical

conditions and treatments, I found opioids to be a horrible option for me. I am

convinced they extended my hospital stay and delayed my recovery.

Sincerely,

J.

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Archived Version

Fri, 06 Apr 2018 13:10

The FBI's Miami Field Office is trying to locate an airline mechanic who may be linked to a 1996 airline crash that killed 110 people.

It is offering a $10,000 reward in a "Wanted" poster calling for information about a man identified as Mauro Ociel Valenzuela-Reyes.

The mechanic was criminally charged in the crash of ValuJet Flight 592 after he allegedly mishandled and packaged oxygen generators placed in the plane's cargo space, the Miami Herald reported.

The generators didn't have safety caps and ignited in the cargo area, according to the FBI.

At the time, Valenzuela-Reyes worked for the now defunct SabreTech, the airline's maintenance contractor.

But he never faced charges and fled, FBI Miami Special Agent Jacqueline Fruge said in a news release obtained by the Herald.

''We've tried over the years to find him,'' Fruge said. ''It bothers me. I've lived and breathed it for many, many years.''

''We've tried over the years to find him. It bothers me. I've lived and breathed it for many, many years.''

- FBI Miami Special Agent Jacqueline Fruge

On May 11, 1996, Flight 592 took off from Miami International Airport. Shortly after, the pilot reported a fire in the cargo area, and the aircraft plunged into the Everglades, west of Miami.

A 1996 Miami Herald archive story said the plane ''slammed nose-first into the muck and disappeared under the earth.''

An FBI ''Wanted'' poster released this week includes a photo of Valenzuela-Reyes in 1996 and progessive aging images of how he may look today.

The reward is for information on his whereabouts, in hopes of leading to ''a tip to bring him to justice,'' Fox Miami reported.

He faces additional federal charges for fleeing and failure to appear at his trial.

According to the FBI, Valenzuela-Reyes has connections to Atlanta, where his ex-wife and kids have lived, and Santiago, Chile, where he has relatives, the report said.

Authorities believe he may be living under a false identity, Fox Miami reported.

Fruge has been the primary agent on the case since it began and has worked with the families of the victims over the years. She said they ''want closure,'' the Herald reported.

Two other SabreTech employees were also reportedly charged in the criminal case, but were acquitted.

The ValuJet name is no longer in the skies, as the company merged with another airline a year after the disaster, the 1996 archival Herald report said.

Link to Article

Archived Version

Fri, 06 Apr 2018 23:12

Here's a question for which Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, special counsel Robert Mueller and former FBI Director James Comey may well know the answer but aren't likely to want to talk about it in public, under oath:

Why did the Clinton Foundation send a $37 million grant for the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund in 2010 to a Baltimore post office box when the CBHF told federal tax authorities that year its only office was in Washington, D.C.?

For the rest of us, the answers to that and many other questions posed by those who wonder why investigations into obvious and rampant frauds involving Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton and their purported foundation never go anywhere are complex '-- but worth following if you care about combating charitable fraud.

But be prepared, because the answers also make clear that too many powerful people were and are covering up an odious set of scandals that implicate establishment Republicans and Democrats alike.

So let's get started, shall we?

Origins of the Clinton Foundation frauds. From Oct. 23, 1997, until Jan. 20, 2001, President Bill Clinton had the power to ensure that no prosecutions might move forward in the Department of Justice (DOJ) against the William J. Clinton Presidential Foundation, an entity that still has never bothered to file a mandatory federal income tax return for Oct. 23, 1997 through Dec. 31, 1997.

Though there is abundant evidence in the public domain of defective filings made under oath, across state lines, using the mails, Clinton likely felt secure that government officials, even in states controlled by Republicans, would never bring solicitation fraud prosecutions against his nascent ''charity.''

Related: Family's Illegal Control of Clinton Charity Violates Multiple State Laws, Regs

Then, as it became clear that former Republican Texas Gov. George W. Bush would be inaugurated as his successor in the Oval Office, Clinton and others took steps to ensure that allies would occupy key roles inside the IRS, DOJ and elsewhere in the federal establishment.

Enter Rosenstein, Mueller and Comey. According to his official biography, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein ''from 2001 to 2005 '... served as Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Tax Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. He supervised the division's criminal sections and coordinated the tax enforcement activities of the Tax Division, the U.S. Attorney's Offices and the Internal Revenue Service.''

Records available through the FBI vault confirm that the FBI and DOJ attorneys conducted investigations, empaneled grand juries and issued subpoenas, yet they were unable to bring indictments or gain convictions against the many individuals and entities linked to the Clinton charity that clearly engaged in a raft of frauds, across state lines, and in numerous nations.

These FBI records, many of which are heavily redacted even now, clearly show that former FBI Director James Comey played ''leadership'' roles in these epic failures and that Comey's predecessor as FBI chief, Robert Mueller, was personally aware of the course of these ineffective efforts after he assumed his duties in September 2001.

To see how badly Rosenstein, Mueller and Comey flubbed the Clinton Foundation ''investigation,'' visit the organization's website and try to find audits for 1998 through 2004. You will not find them there, but you will find non-compliant accounting work product for 2000 through 2004 here, here, here, and here.

You will never notice charity fraud when you refuse to look at key evidence including fake audits that ineffectively mask the brazen theft of at least $64 million.

Recent years that matter: 2009 and forward. The Clinton Foundation filed an amended federal tax return for 2010 on Nov. 16, 2015. The largest single expense declared for 2010 is a grant of more than $37 million grant to the CBHF at a post office box address in Baltimore, MD.

This recent '-- within the statute of limitations '-- declaration on page 36 of the amended return is boldly incorrect. Sworn declarations made using the U.S. mails across state lines to New York and Minnesota declared the only office and mailing address that CBHF had during the year in question was in Washington, D.C.

So why was the $37 million sent to a Baltimore post office address? Who retrieved the check from the P.O. box? What happened to the $37 million thereafter?

Moreover, it is mathematically impossible to reconcile declarations made in these key states to regulators that are public records with federal tax filings for CBHF. Here's why: In total, CBHF declared nearly $49 million in grants and contributions for the entire year 2010.

In a CBHF state filing received in New York June 29, 2010, Anita Bhatt, the fund's chief financial officer, declared: ''Because the [CBHF] did not receive its 501(c)(3) status until April 2010, the Clinton Foundation and the Communities Foundation of Texas solicited funds on behalf of CBHF at the request of former President George W. Bush.''

In a filing received July 21, 2010, Bhatt declared that contributions and grants through May 31, 2010 totaled $34.1 million, reiterated that she was in charge of CBHF funds and repeated that CBHF only had one office in Washington, D.C.

This means that if the Clinton Foundation actually sent more than $37 million to a Baltimore address, it must have done so after May 31, 2010, which would mean that CBHF collected more than $71 million during a year when they ultimately declared just under $49 million in total revenues.

Claims by the Clinton Foundation concerning its supposed grant to CBHF do not and cannot be squared with CBHF filings. Someone here is lying and many people are doing their best to cover up what looks like a crystal clear instance of charity fraud and other serious crimes.

How much money did the Clinton Foundation actually receive during 2010, while soliciting to help poor Haitians after their devastating earthquake? More important, where did the money raised for Haiti by Clinton, Bush and their associates actually go? And remember, 2010 was a key election year, with much at stake for Democrats.

The same accounting firm '-- B.K.D., LLP '-- that rendered opinions to the Clinton Foundation during its early years continued as its auditor during and after 2010.

We certainly will never know the answer to that question if we must rely on Rosenstein, Mueller, and Comey, who, it must be remembered, were during those early years failing to catch obvious frauds.

And one more thing: The same accounting firm '-- B.K.D., LLP '-- that rendered opinions to the Clinton Foundation during its early years continued as its auditor during and after 2010.

President Donald Trump has been too patient with too many powerful swamp creatures. Americans deserve a real, empowered investigation into Clinton charity and allied frauds, and it should be convened as soon as possible.

Charles Ortel, a retired investment banker, concentrates on exposing complex frauds in his new career as an investigator, writer and commentator. Since August 2017, he has been hosting the " Sunday with Charles" podcast and covering the Clinton Foundation case in depth, using publicly available source materials.'‹ To view his previous LifeZette contributions, go here.'‹

(photo credit, homepage and article images: Clinton Bush Haiti Fund)

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Sun, 08 Apr 2018 13:15

American Airlines has cancelled a major deal with Airbus for 22 A350s, announcing it has instead purchased 47 787 Dreamliners from rivals Boeing in a deal valued at $12 billion.

The airline said it had also reached an agreement with Airbus to 'terminate its order' in an effort to 'simplify its fleet'.

But the announcement marks the end of a hard-fought contest between the two firms over who was to take on the significant order.

The sudden shift is a blow to France-based Airbus - who previously supplied American Airlines with nearly three dozen A350s.

Heated contest: American Airlines ordered 47 Boeing 787 Dreamliners and cancelled an order of 22 Airbus A350s. Pictured: An American Airlines Boeing 777

'This was a difficult decision between the Boeing 787 and the Airbus A350 and A330neo and we thank both manufacturers for their aggressive efforts to earn more of American's business,' said American Airlines president Robert Isom.

'In the end, our goal to simplify our fleet made the 787 a more compelling choice.'

The order comprises 22 787-8s scheduled to begin arriving in 2020 and 25 787-9s scheduled to begin arriving in 2023.

They will gradually replace Boeing 767s and 777s along with European Airbus A330s, American said Friday.

The sale brings American Airlines' total number of 787s to 89 aircraft. Though the total value is $12billion at list price, the final price paid by airlines is generally lower.

American Airlines said: 'As part of the strategy to simplify its fleet, American agreed with Airbus today to terminate its order for 22 A350s, which was originally placed by US Airways,' which it bought in 2013.

American Airlines has cancelled a major deal with Airbus for 22 A350s. Pictured: And Airbus SE A350 XWB jet

President Robert Isom (pictured left) said it had been a 'difficult decision' while Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Derek Kerr (pictured right) added there were benefits to having 'common fleet types'

Chief financial officer Derek Kerr added advantages of carrying common fleet types included 'creating less friction in our operation when aircraft swaps are necessary, reducing inventory needs, and creating a more consistent service for customers and team members.'

American Airlines also said it had deferred delivery of 40 Boeing 737 MAX aircraft previously scheduled to arrive between 2020 and 2022. The carrier said the revised schedule 'will better align with planned retirements of other narrowbody aircraft.'

The order for US manufacturer Boeing comes in the wake of protectionist trade measures by President Donald Trump, who champions buying from US manufacturers.

'We are extremely honored that American Airlines is deepening its commitment to the 787 Dreamliner,' said Boeing Commercial Airplanes president Kevin McAllister in a statement. Boeing says it has more than 1,350 orders registered for the 787.

Meanwhile, Airbus announced earlier Friday it recorded 45 net orders during the first three months of 2018, and delivered 121 aircraft. The company said its overall backlog of jetliners to be delivered stood at 7,189 as of March 31.

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Sat, 07 Apr 2018 13:37

The nation's convulsion of conscience after each modern mass shooting has become eerily predictable. Thoughts and prayers. Flowers on the sidewalk. Teary memorial services.

And cries '' sometimes very loud, large ones, as followed the recent Florida school shooting '' to do something about firearms. All this to ignite a national conversation.

Because Americans do not listen to each other anymore, it becomes instead a pointless national argument, stoked by those benefiting from public strife, including media.

And as much as proponents on all sides may genuinely believe their case, history reveals very little of substance ever results from such convulsions, even in election years, as passions and pains subside. Where are all those changes Sandy Hook would provoke?

But something serious can be done '' must be done -- to prevent or reduce these deadly outbursts. We don't need new laws. We need a serious social, legal and education confrontation with the issue of mental health.

That's uncomfortable for sure, the ugly elephant in society's living room. No one talks about a shooter's dangerous mental health until it's too late. Using the cover of political correctness, we recoil from terms like crazy and bananas and avoid the topic entirely. Because having a gun is dangerous. But having a mental illness engenders sympathy that cloaks the danger.

Whatever the words, mentally ill is what they are. In Florida, for example, several someones saw Nikolas Cruz' condition. And if anyone had the courage to say so, those 17 kids might not be dead. As well as many other victims before and those yet to come because vocal Americans with opinions on anything suddenly turn afraid to talk mental health.

We need to treat them humanely, of course, but differently. Because too many innocent people have paid the ultimate price for our reluctance to face the mental health stigma. That's crazy.

The Secret Service, which has a keen professional interest in shooters, has studied mass shootings. A major theme: Mental illness. Do ya think? No sane person walks into a school or church intent on killing as many as possible.

What's surprising is that as a society we haven't seriously picked up on that after all these lethal incidents and established a real system to spot and deal with them before.

Think of the intricate security and profiling system in place to screen and search hundreds of thousands of air passengers daily, almost all of them as innocent as the underwear that gets scanned.

The most recent Secret Service update of 28 shootings with 150 victims found that three-quarters of the shooters had displayed unusual behavior or writings that raised suspicions among others, who said or did nothing before it was too late.

Many shooters, especially younger ones, can't help whispering plans to someone. If that's an unconscious plea to be stopped, all the more reason to detect them.

Two-thirds of shooters had previous signs of mental illness such as paranoia and delusions. And fully a quarter of them had actually been hospitalized or treated with psychiatric drugs.

That's no crime. But if those patients are also targeting neighborhood pets for practice. Posting dreams of homicide. Beating up a girlfriend. That's suspicious.

Devin Kelley had been in trouble for sexual assault, stalking ex-girlfriends, abusing an ex-wife and escaping from a mental ward where he'd been placed for fracturing his infant son's skull.

Yet none of that disqualifying information made it into the database to prevent him from legally acquiring the firearms he used to kill 26 people in a Texas church last November. That doesn't require a law. That requires training.

Parkland school administrators knew of Cruz's behavioral issues so well they expelled him. Local police knew about him from frequent calls. Social workers knew of his troubled life. Mental health counselors too. School friends joked he was a shooter.

Yet he could still pull it off. And police responded by waiting outside the school.

Yes, mental health remains a touchy subject. Better to face it up front don't you think as possible prevention rather than later as a useless explanation for mass murder.

We can argue for empty years over adjusting age limits and other legislation to close gun purchase loopholes or whatever. Fine, go ahead.

But right now we can establish a standardized system for schools, doctors, law enforcement and counselors to safely file confidential reports'--and someone to comb the combined data for common patterns that should trip alarms. Remember, this is how the 9/11 hijackers evaded detection--no one saw that all the little pieces actually formed a suspicious pattern.

Potential shooters still have rights, of course. However, so too do school kids, concertgoers, mall shoppers and others going about their lives with a right not to be a target.

These days when we're dumping a successful shooter into a body bag, it's way too late to discover signs of mental illness. And way too late too for all innocent victims in the other body bags.

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Sun, 08 Apr 2018 13:26

The price of corn could soar to $8 a bushel, a level not seen since 2012, and more than double last Thursday's closing price of $3.895.

An unusual confluence of factors could propel prices higher over the next couple of years. These include declining output, an ethanol-led demand surge in China, and likely brutal weather.

''Eight dollars is very possible,'' says Shawn Hackett, author of the Hackett Money Flow Report newsletter, who adds that declining supplies will run headlong into increased Chinese demand.

Traders wanting to profit from the rally should consider buying futures for July 2019 delivery. Note: The trading volume of such long-dated futures is significantly lower than for front-month contracts, which makes trading more expensive. Alternatively, consider the Teucrium Corn exchange-traded fund (ticker: CORN), which tracks corn futures.

Stocks linked to the farm sector include machinery supplier Deere (DE) and grain company Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), says Vincent Catalano, global macro strategist at Blue Marble Research.

Demand for corn is likely to rise, in part because China has decided that gasoline in China should include 10% ethanol by 2020, just two years away. This is the so-called E-10 policy. Ethanol is made directly from corn.

How much corn will be needed? A lot. The U.S. has fewer registered vehicles than China (268 million versus 300 million), and the U.S. uses about 111 million tons of corn a year for fuel ethanol, according to a Barron's analysis. But China doesn't use nearly as much gasoline per car. The net figure is likely to be an additional 36 million tons of corn for ethanol, according to the National Bureau of Statistics, cited by press reports. Other analyses put the figure 50% higher.

However, corn production is falling in China and other key producing countries. The second-largest corn producer, China has seen output slump since the government eliminated its price-support system three years ago. When the support stopped, output fell. For the 2017-18 season, China corn production totaled 216 million metric tons, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That's down from 225 million tons for the 2015-16 growing season.

Whatever China's ethanol demand is, some of the Chinese crop will be required to make the fuel additive, but much of the crop is already used for other things, such as feeding livestock. Extra supplies will need to be imported.

Meanwhile, U.S. output fell over the past year (to 371 million tons in 2017-18 from 385 million tons the prior year, according to USDA figures). Furthermore, output was also down over the past two years in Brazil, the European Union, and Argentina, the third- through fifth-largest growing countries.

Won't supply bounce back in anticipation of more Chinese demand for ethanol? Not likely. U.S. farmers are switching from corn to soybeans this year, according to a survey from the USDA. On top of that, Hackett sees a major drought hitting China in 2019, which would reduce yields.

Will the recent Chinese tariffs on U.S. corn change the calculus? They could have a negligible impact, says Hackett. When China needs to import large quantities (this year, it will likely import just four million tons in all), it could buy some from other exporters such as Brazil or Ukraine. But Hackett says the Chinese could have little choice but to buy at least some corn from the U.S., the largest exporter.

To cap it off, unfavorable growing weather is forecast because the sun has entered the trough in its usual 11-year cycle. The number of spots on the solar surface varies over that period. When few or no spots are present, the Earth's temperature tends to be lower than when there are more spots. Sometimes the cycle morphs into a Grand Solar Minimum, such as happened from 1645 to 1715, when Europe experienced a mini Ice Age. The concern now is that we may have a repeat situation, with years of tough growing conditions.

''The next solar cycle is likely to be quite weak,'' says Arnab Rai Choudhuri, professor of solar physics at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and a sunspots expert. Will it be a grand minimum? ''It is difficult to make a definitive prediction, but it is a possibility,'' he says. ''And certainly, a grand minimum will have a cooling effect.'' Choudhuri concedes he's a ''cautious scientist.''

SIMON CONSTABLE is the author of The WSJ Guide to the 50 Economic Indicators That Really Matter.

Email: editors@barrons.com

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Sun, 08 Apr 2018 14:45

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Sun, 08 Apr 2018 14:40

There is a red light flashing in professor Albert Ponce's cubby-sized office. The light comes from an old-fashioned answering machine.

Lately, he doesn't like to listen to the messages by himself. When he presses play, it's obvious why. Here are a couple of messages:

"Albert Ponce, you are a piece of s*** f****** gutter slug that needs his neck snapped, OK? Call me if you need me. I'll do it for ya.

"F****** race-baiting f****** piece of trash."

Ponce teaches political science at Diablo Valley College, a community college in California's East Bay. It all started in October when he was invited to give a public lecture on campus on an area he specializes in: race and politics.

In the speech, which was filmed, he called the United States "a white supremacist, patriarchal, heteronormative, capitalist system." He also mentioned Karl Marx in passing, praised civil disobedience and referred to a white supremacist in the White House. The result: attacks on Facebook and threatening voice messages and emails.

Colleges are meant to be a home for free inquiry. But these days, not all professors feel that freedom. Across the country, in the past year and a half, at least 250 university professors, including Ponce, have been targeted via online campaigns because of their research, their teaching or their social media posts. Conservative professors have been attacked from the right and the left, both with equally dire language.

Some have lost their jobs, and others say they fear for their families' safety.

Professor Albert Ponce received death threats after giving a talk on white supremacy in the United States. Anya Kamenetz/NPR hide caption

toggle caption Anya Kamenetz/NPR Professor Albert Ponce received death threats after giving a talk on white supremacy in the United States.

Anya Kamenetz/NPR

Ponce says his ideas, in context, are "not controversial at all" in his circles of academia. For example, when he talks about white supremacy, he says, he is talking about a system of power, not about individual white people.

But in today's highly polarized political climate, almost any statement about race or diversity can prove extremely controversial. Here are a few examples:

Josh Cuevas, an associate professor in the school of education at the University of North Georgia, came under inquiry from his congressional representative after getting into an argument on Facebook about President Trump and voter turnout. Eve Browning, the chair of the department of philosophy and classics at the University of Texas, San Antonio, was targeted, as was her entire department, when a student surreptitiously recorded a disciplinary conversation that touched on his negative comments about Islam. Laurie Rubel, a professor of education at Brooklyn College, published a National Science Foundation-funded research paper about race and mathematics education. Rubel tells NPR that she was looking at how to support high school math teachers who teach in hypersegregated urban schools, in part by being critical of the concept of meritocracy. The on-air take of Fox News commentator Greg Gutfeld was: "A math professor ... claimed that merit-based education is ... a tool of evil whiteness." George Ciccariello-Maher, an associate professor of politics and global studies, was placed on leave and ultimately resigned from Drexel University in Philadelphia last fall after tweeting, "all I want for Christmas is white genocide." "White genocide" is a white nationalist conspiracy theory; Ciccariello-Maher says he meant to be satirical. Loading...

People on the right don't have a monopoly on threats to free speech or academic freedom. Campuses like the University of California, Berkeley, the home of the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s, have become national flashpoints with sometimes violent responses to conservative speakers.

And professors have sometimes been subject to attacks and harassment from the left. Bruce Gilley at Portland State University in Oregon, for example, was attacked online and over the phone when he published an academic paper titled "The Case for Colonialism." His paper on colonialism, he tells NPR, argues that "there is a wealth of evidence ... that shows quite overwhelmingly positive benefits in terms of democracy, public health, human rights."

He calls the response "a mass global mob." The article was withdrawn after threats of violence were made against both him personally and the editor of the journal that published it, Third World Quarterly.

Experts who study the spread of hate speech online say there is a difference in patterns of online harassment between the right and the left. Attacks from the left tend to originate from within campus communities. Thousands of self-identified academics, for example, signed online petitions calling for Gilley's article to be retracted.

On the right, though, a network of outside groups and sites has mobilized against academics. Their views range from libertarian to conservative to white nationalist.

Sites such as The College Fix and Campus Reform pay student reporters to contribute stories titled: "Meritocracy is a 'tool of whiteness,' claims math professor" (Campus Reform) or "History professor calls for repeal of Second Amendment" (The College Fix).

Jennifer Kabbany, editor of The College Fix, told NPR that the site's purpose is to train future journalists, not to foment hate. "The College Fix has publicly denounced any vile emails that a professor might get," she said. "I'm sorry if professors received that kind of backlash." In reference to Ponce, of Diablo Valley College, she added, "It appeared the lecture was not balanced and didn't do academic inquiry and debate justice."

The College Fix is run by the Student Free Press Association. The association has had Education Secretary Betsy DeVos' son listed on its board of directors and is funded by an anonymous conservative donor fund.

Campus Reform is a project the Leadership Institute, a conservative think tank. Professor Watchlist, which lists more than 250 professors who advance what it calls a "radical" left-wing agenda, is maintained by Turning Point USA, an on-campus group that has been labeled "alt-right."

Campus Reform and Professor Watchlist did not respond to requests for comment.

The Red Elephants is a pro-Trump "alt-right media collective" founded in November 2016. Founder Vincent James Foxx has reportedly denied the Holocaust and been accused of urging violence at rallies. The site posted an edited video of Ponce's talk on YouTube with commentary calling it "Marxist, Communist, disgusting rhetoric that they spew in these classrooms to indoctrinate these children." It used the video to kick off an initiative called "Film Your Marxist Professor."

The administrator of the "Film Your Marxist Professor" Facebook page, who gave his name as Aaron Burr, told NPR via Facebook message: "We receive around 10 submissions per day. Our goal is to stop the anti-white and anti-American rhetoric that is being spewed on college campuses all across the country."

From these specialized sites, content travels to alt-right media sources like Breitbart and Infowars and neo-Nazi sites like Stormfront, and then, sometimes, to Fox News and the New York Post, CNN and other outlets.

Meanwhile, harassment is coordinated out in the open on anonymous, uncensored forums like 4chan, 8chan and Reddit, where self-identified "trolls" uncover and post people's personal information, known as doxing, and try out strategies of attack. Cuevas at the University of North Georgia obtained screenshots of the 4chan forum on which people were fabricating social media posts in an attempt to paint him as anti-Semitic and racist or, alternatively, as pushing anti-Trump views onto his students.

"Their stated goal was to get me fired," he says, but he fears that is not the worst of it: "Georgia had just passed the campus carry law [for firearms], and what worried me was a lone nut case."

Flyers for Ponce's talk about white supremacy in the United States sit next to a flyer for Identity Evropa, a white supremacist group. Anya Kamenetz/NPR hide caption

toggle caption Anya Kamenetz/NPR Flyers for Ponce's talk about white supremacy in the United States sit next to a flyer for Identity Evropa, a white supremacist group.

Anya Kamenetz/NPR

Ponce says he sees a fresh wave of abusive calls and letters every time a new media story hits. He has gotten letters in the mail, emails and Facebook messages, and his colleagues and administrators have gotten calls and emails. He has found his personal information on a Hungarian right-wing website and gotten calls from South America. He, like other professors, has called the police, but the messages keep coming.

Most troubling, he says, are "the real threats against my family" and "pictures on the Web of my 9-year-old daughter."

He and his wife are trying not to park their cars in the same places every day, peek out into the street at night and warn their daughter not to touch the mail.

Hans-Joerg Tiede of the American Association of University Professors says no matter what side you're on politically, it's clear that academic freedom is under assault, as it has been many times in the past.

"There have always been instances of faculty being targeted in particular for what they say, for what they teach," says Tiede, a former computer science professor at Illinois Wesleyan University.

Anti-communist academic blacklists go back to the 1930s, and professors were targeted for taking desegregationist stances in the 1960s, he adds. The difference is that momentum builds very fast, and it doesn't take time to reach far-flung destinations. The AAUP has been tracking this latest wave of targeted harassment and issuing recommendations for policymakers.

Jessie Daniels, a professor of sociology at Hunter College, is among scholars who say the rise of the Web and social media have given right-wing groups new means for targeted harassment and for spreading their ideology.

"With the rise of the popular Internet, everybody's an expert," she says. "White supremacists really saw that as an opportunity."

In contrast to the sometimes-violent confrontations on campus around speakers like Milo Yiannopoulos, NPR was not able to find a case of an online harassment campaign, targeting a professor for his or her work, that resulted either in violent threats being carried out or in any legal action against the perpetrators.

What concerns experts like Tiede is the potential chilling effect on researchers, especially untenured graduate students and adjuncts, who might fear broaching any topic that could touch off a firestorm.

But as this pattern of behavior becomes better known, professors like Rubel and Ponce are no longer keeping quiet. They are fighting back. Rubel responded by posting many of the foul voicemails and emails and messages she received on Twitter and Facebook and by collecting statements of support from colleagues. "I think they messed with the wrong person," she tells NPR.

For his part, Ponce, who does not have tenure, and his colleagues are urging the board of governors of his community college's district to adopt a resolution in support of academic freedom, making clear that the colleges will stand behind its scholars no matter how provocative their work, as long as they are grounded in research and evidence.

"In a democracy, these places of higher learning should be the spaces where we engage in a rigorous scholarship, not necessarily an ideological one," Ponce says. College, he says, is the place for a quest for truth, not merely opinion.

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Sun, 08 Apr 2018 14:17

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Sun, 08 Apr 2018 14:05

Sarah Barrett didn't need a grand study to tell her a bunch of students on Kansas State University's campus had been going without food.

As an assistant dean of students, she had heard enough of them talk about choosing books or housing costs over food to know that the university needed to do something to help its hungry students.

K-State students are not alone. The problem of college students' inability to afford food is common on campuses across the country.

According to a first-of-its-kind survey of two- and four-year private and public schools, 36 percent of students on college campuses in the U.S. do not get enough to eat.

On Wednesday afternoon just after the noon lunch hour, the UMKC Kangaroo Pantry opened its doors to a short line of students needing food. Katie Garey, who manages the pantry, and a student volunteer were busy stuffing plastic bags with nonperishable food items requested by the handful of students who filled out order forms that day.

"We are pretty busy," Garey said. "At the end of the semester, we start recognizing that students no longer have food on their meal plans or maybe their financial aid has run out or they have given up a job so they can study, so they no longer have that income."

And that lost income could also impact housing. Nearly as many of those who are food insecure don't have secure housing. The U.S. Department of Education describes the homeless as "lacking fixed, regular, adequate housing," which includes those living in shelters, hotels, cars, tents or "couch surfing" at friends' houses.

While it found that 36 percent of university students and nearly half of community college students surveyed fit the category of "housing insecure" in the past year, it also found that 9 percent of university students were fully homeless, as were 12 percent of community college students.

The study led by Temple University Professor Sara Goldrick-Rab and her team at the Wisconsin HOPE Lab speaks to a national trend impacting students in Missouri and Kansas, but only the University of Central Missouri was among the 65 colleges and universities that participated in the survey.

Those examining the national situation don't place the blame on rising college costs alone. Other factors may include inadequate financial aid packages and the fact that today more low-income students have access to college through the help of tuition grants, federal loans and scholarships that don't always pay for food or housing.

There are also a number of international students who don't qualify for federal aid and older students who are trying to go to school while working part-time jobs to care for a family.

Some colleges are unwilling to admit they have students enrolled at their school who don't have permanent housing or who go hungry, the study says.

The study refers to the condition these students find themselves in as being "food insecure." The USDA defines it as not having consistent access to adequate food and being limited by financial challenges.

"A lot of folks tend to associate attending college with a certain amount of privilege, but that is not necessarily true," said Jonathan Pryor, the assistant director of LGBT services at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Pryor also coordinates the campus food pantry, opened in 2015 after university leaders heard repeated complaints from students struggling to afford groceries.

"Mac and cheese every night may not be what's considered adequate nutritious food," Barrett said.

The Washington Post reports that the survey report, out Tuesday, says that one in 10 community college students report having gone an entire day without food. About 6 percent of four-year university students have made the same report.

Experts have long known that kids in elementary, middle and high school who come to class hungry are less likely to perform well academically. The study found the same to be true for college students.

Students who take on the rigors of college study while experiencing basic needs insecurities are clearly committed to school and are trying to work to make ends meet. "But their academics still suffer," the report says. "Among students who reported receiving D's and F's in college, more than half were food insecure, with more than 40 percent at the very lowest level of food security."

Education experts say that in many cases, those students end up dropping out.

In 2014, Barrett and some of her colleagues launched a survey of their own at K-State to assess the need for help with food on the Manhattan, Kan., campus. It revealed that 39.4 percent of "students who were experiencing financial hardship also experienced difficulty finding food," Barrett said.

Studies at other universities had similar findings. The University of California found that 40 percent of its students were missing meals, and four universities in Illinois found the number to be 35 percent on their campuses.

The national survey report said: "While university students are more likely than community college students to have access to on-campus housing and meal plans, even these supports do not shield students from these challenges."

Evelyn "Evie" Craig, president and chief executive officer of ReStart, a nonprofit agency that provides services for homeless young people in the Kansas City area, recalled being contacted by colleges to house homeless students who had no home to go to during holidays and campus breaks, when dormitories are shut down.

"We have some 'Leave It to Beaver' notion that because a kid is in college, every kid has a home with a white-picket fence to go to," Craig said.

"In the five-county Kansas City metro area, 6,000 students identify as homeless. That's K-12, but you have to assume that if a student is homeless as a senior in high school, that is not suddenly going to change as they enter college. There is so little support directed at these young adults age 18 to 24."

To help combat the food insecurity problem, universities here began opening food pantries, like the ones at K-State and at UMKC.

"We realized that this supports what has become a growing trend across the country," Pryor said, adding that the UMKC pantry "gets pretty consistent use" during the months school is in session.

Much of the UMKC pantry is stocked with food bought at discount prices from Harvesters. And like at other college food pantries, some of the food comes from donations and food drives held by faculty and student groups.

Even though a fairly sizable number of students share in the predicament, many of them still worry about the stigma attached to needing to get food from a food pantry. So, universities tend to tuck their pantries away in an inconspicuous location to protect their students' privacy. UMKC's Kangaroo Pantry is located in the converted office space in a university building just north of campus.

K-State opened its pantry in 2014, when it hauled shelving in to a computer lab and stocked it with food and toiletries after assessing the school had a real need.

When K-State had asked students whether they ever considered leaving school because of financial needs, more than 50 percent said yes, Barrett said. More recently, more than 90 percent of students who experience some financial struggle said in a subsequent survey that having the food pantry '-- called the Cat's Cupboard '-- has helped alleviate some of that financial stress.

University officials at Northwest Missouri State University in Maryville notice a growing number of their students were going hungry and opened a pantry in 2016. Every year more students are using it. In March 2016, 19 students sought help at the pantry. In March 2017, 47 students used the pantry.

"I think there is more need," said Sue Nickerson, who is executive secretary of Student Affairs and coordinator for the Northwest Missouri State pantry. She said a recent assessment at her school showed about 35 percent of students there need help with food or are having to decide between eating and paying bills.

"That should not be a decision our students have to make," Nickerson said.

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Sun, 08 Apr 2018 14:00

Surgeon General Jerome Adams is recommending that more Americans be prepared to save people from opioid overdoses. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images hide caption

toggle caption Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Surgeon General Jerome Adams is recommending that more Americans be prepared to save people from opioid overdoses.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

As opioid-related deaths have continued to climb, naloxone, a drug that can reverse overdoses, has become an important part of the public health response.

When people overdosing struggle to breathe, naloxone can restore normal breathing and save their lives. But the drug has to be given quickly.

On Thursday, U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams issued an advisory that encouraged more people to routinely carry naloxone.

"The call to action is to recognize if you're at risk," he tells Morning Edition's Rachel Martin. "And if you or a loved one are at risk, keep within reach, know how to use naloxone."

Police officers and EMTs often have naloxone at the ready. Access to the drug for the general public has been eased in the past few years, too.

The medicine is now available at retail pharmacies in most states without a prescription. Between 2013 and 2015, researchers found a tenfold increase in naloxone sold by retail pharmacies in the U.S.

But prices have increased along with demand. Naloxone-filled syringes that used to cost $6 apiece now cost $30 and up. A two-pack of naloxone nasal spray can cost $135 or more. And a two-pack of automatic naloxone injectors runs more than $3,700.

And while it's true that naloxone can prevent many opioid-related deaths, it doesn't solve the root cause of the problem.

So where does this fit into an overall strategy for tackling the opioid crisis?

NPR's Martin asked Surgeon General Adams about the advisory, and the administration's broader plan for addressing the opioid epidemic.

Here are interview highlights that have been edited for length and clarity.

Interview Highlights On keeping naloxone at home, and using it effectively

We should think of naloxone like an EpiPen or CPR. Unfortunately, over half of the overdoses that are occurring are occurring in homes, so we want everyone to be armed to respond.

We're working with pharmacies, providers and medical associations to increase training on how to administer naloxone in homes. But overall '-- and I'm an anesthesiologist who's administered naloxone many times myself '-- it's very safe, easy to use, and 49 of 50 states have standing orders for people to be able to access and to use [naloxone] in the home setting.

On making sure someone treated with naloxone doesn't overdose again in short order

When a person is having multiple overdoses, I see that as a system failure. We know addiction is a chronic disease, much like diabetes or hypertension, and we need to treat it the same way. We can't have someone overdose and send them back out onto the streets at 2 a.m., because they're going to run right back into the hands of the local drug dealer.

If you come in at 3 a.m., having been resuscitated from an overdose, we need to have either an immediate access to treatment available for you, or, what's working well in many places is a peer recovery coach '-- someone who's been through this before and who can speak to you in a language that will resonate, and basically can be with you until you're in recovery. Those are the kind of systemic changes we need to make sure naloxone is a touch point that leads to recovery.

On pricing and availability of naloxone

President Trump has asked for, and Congress has approved, $6 billion in funding to respond to the opioid epidemic. There are different grants available for states to purchase naloxone, which they can give out for free.

We're also working with insurers. Ninety-five percent of people with insurance coverage, including Medicare, Medicaid, Tricare and Veterans Affairs, are actually able to get naloxone with little or no copay, and we're working with them to make that copay as small as possible.

We're also working with Adapt Pharma and Kaleo [two makers of naloxone available in the U.S.] to try to keep costs low. From an economic point of view, unfortunately, there are so many people who need naloxone that drug companies are going to make their money one way or the other.

On the role of law enforcement in combating the opioid crisis

We are not going to solve this crisis without the involvement of law enforcement. I can also tell you, from visiting many communities, that folks are concerned about public safety aspects. One neighbor is concerned their son is overdosing while another other neighbor is worried their house is getting broken into.

I'm focused on meeting with the attorneys general and meeting with local law officials and making sure that if you're dealing drugs, you're going to go to jail. But if you have a substance use disorder, we're going to give you an option to get treatment, and hopefully become a productive member of society again.

On where federal funding can help

This starts with naloxone '-- saving lives is one of the president's key pillars '-- and then using it as a bridge for treatment. Fifty-million dollars in funding has been allocated specifically for naloxone, and states are eligible for $2 billion in block grants that they can use however they like.

If we can spend money on prevention and more treatment options, making sure we're providing wrap-around services, I think we'll find ourselves in a good place. I continue to impress upon folks the importance of partnering, making sure that law enforcement is sitting down with health and education so they all put their money together on a local level. At the end of the day, unfortunately, there will never be enough money in the federal government to do everything that we want to do.

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The diplomatic confrontation between the U.K. and Russia over the use of nerve gas in Britain last month is shifting to the U.N. Meanwhile one of the victims, Yulia Skripal, has released a statement saying she's recovering quickly and thanking those who came to her aid.

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

The poisoning case that has sparked an international diplomatic crisis between Russia and the West is boiling over again. The United Nations Security Council met today on the issue at Russia's request. Moscow is challenging Britain's insistence that the Kremlin was behind the March 4 nerve agent attack on a former Russian double agent and his daughter in southern England. NPR's Joanna Kakissis brings us this update from London.

JOANNA KAKISSIS, BYLINE: A month ago, Sergei and Yulia Skripal were found slumped on a park bench in the city of Salisbury where Sergei lives. Britain says the Skripals had been exposed to Novichok, a Soviet-era nerve agent. Both were in critical condition until last week when Yulia awoke. She said in a statement released today that she's recovering after, quote, "a disorienting experience." Russian TV has released audio of a phone call purported to be between Yulia and her relative Viktoria Skripal.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

YULIA SKRIPAL: (Speaking Russian).

KAKISSIS: In the call, the woman identified as Viktoria asks about Sergei Skripal. The voice identified as Yulia responds that Sergei is resting, has no irreversible damage and will be discharged soon. But chemical weapons expert Hamish de Bretton-Gordon is skeptical.

HAMISH DE BRETTON-GORDON: In knowing how deadly these nerve agents are, you know, that the assertion in that telephone conversation he's fine really goes against everything else we know.

KAKISSIS: He's also not convinced that the voice Russian media identify is Yulia Skripal is really her. But Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says it's Britain that's twisting the facts.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

SERGEY LAVROV: (Through interpreter) This case has been used as an orchestrated pretext for the mass expulsion of Russian diplomats not only from the US and Britain but also from other countries who had their arms twisted.

KAKISSIS: The Kremlin had its opening to pounce when British foreign secretary Boris Johnson told a German broadcaster that the U.K.'s defense laboratory, Porton Down, had confirmed that the Novichok came from Russia.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

BORIS JOHNSON: They were absolutely categorical. I mean, I asked the guy myself. I said, are you sure? And he said there's no doubt.

KAKISSIS: But Porton Down's chief executive said it's not the lab's job to confirm where the nerve agent came from. Russia's ambassador to the U.K., Alexander Yakovenko, then suggested that it's Britain that should be scrutinized.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

ALEXANDER YAKOVENKO: We have a lot of suspicions about Britain, you know? So many Russian citizens died here in the U.K. under very strange circumstances.

KAKISSIS: He's referring to the suspicious deaths of at least 14 critics of the Kremlin. Meanwhile in New York, Britain's new ambassador to the U.N., Karen Pierce, said Russia's statements appear to be aimed at undermining an investigation by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

KAREN PIERCE: And all I'd say on that is we as U.K. have nothing to hide. We look forward to the report. We ask, what have the Russians got to fear?

KAKISSIS: The chemical weapons watchdog is expected to release its report next week. Joanna Kakissis, NPR News, London.

Copyright (C) 2018 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio record.

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Facebook will require an authorization process for people who want to buy political issue-based ads, and for managers of pages with large followings.

"These steps by themselves won't stop all people trying to game the system," CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post Friday. "But they will make it a lot harder for anyone to do what the Russians did during the 2016 election and use fake accounts and pages to run ads. Election interference is a problem that's bigger than any one platform, and that's why we support the Honest Ads Act. This will help raise the bar for all political advertising online."

In October, Facebook said it would require an authorization process for election-related ads. The news today expands that to all issue ads.

Facebook political ads will now come with labels and say who bought the ad.

The process will require advertisers to confirm their identity and location. The political ads will be clearly labeled and have "paid for by" information posted next to them. Later in June, Facebook will release a public political ads database which will show the image, text, spend and target demographic audience for the ad. The program, which is being tested in Canada right now, will launch globally this summer. It is also working on a searchable archive for past political ads.

The company will also require users who manage pages with tens of thousands of followers to be authenticated, although it did not state what the process will be.

To complete both initiatives, Facebook will hire more people before the 2018 elections, but it did not say how many people it would hire.

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Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg heads to Congress next week. NPR's Scott Detrow talks to Rep. Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, who represents Silicon Valley.

SCOTT DETROW, HOST:

This coming week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will sit before House and Senate committees. He'll be answering questions about how a conservative political firm improperly obtained data about up to 87 million Facebook users. The Cambridge Analytica scandal looks like it may be a tipping point when it comes to how the public and how politicians view social media.

Congressman Ro Khanna is a Democrat, and he represents Silicon Valley in Congress, and he joins us now. Congressman, thanks for coming on the show.

RO KHANNA: Absolutely.

DETROW: So what do you want to hear from Mark Zuckerberg this week? What questions do you think he needs to answer?

KHANNA: Well, I'm glad he's testifying. I'm glad he's doing media interviews, and I hope he will come out for well-crafted regulations. I personally have advocated that we need an Internet Bill of Rights. It's time that tech leaders like Zuckerberg embrace that, including a right to know what your data is, a right to be able to transfer your data, a right to be able to delete your data. There are a number of commonsense provisions that we need enshrined into law.

DETROW: Do you think there's room, especially in an election year, to get something passed that deals with this?

KHANNA: I absolutely think there is. The reason is that even Republicans and Libertarians will support, I believe, an individual's right to privacy to their own data. This is a case where technology has moved lightning-fast, and the laws haven't caught up. There should be some commonsense principles that will assure the American public that their rights are going to be protected online.

DETROW: You know, both political parties have long embraced Silicon Valley, and you yourself got a lot of key endorsements from tech figures, including Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. But from the beginning, the whole point of social media was to monetize people's personal data. And in recent years, campaigns have done a lot of bragging about how efficiently they can microtarget voters. So what's changed here?

KHANNA: Well, I'm still very proud of representing Silicon Valley, proud of having Sheryl's support, and I think she can play a very constructive role now in articulating the right type of regulation that we need. I guess what I'd say is I still believe in the power of social media. The Parkland kids are using Facebook Live to get their message out and mobilize - and Twitter to help mobilize a new generation. It would be wrong to say, let's not have social media, when the next generation is being inspired politically by it.

DETROW: Yeah.

KHANNA: But what 2016 showed us is that these technologies can be very dangerous if they are abused.

DETROW: Sandberg and Zuckerberg have both said in recent days that they misjudged this. They focused too much on the positive and not enough on the potential downsides of social media. Do you think Congress misjudged this as well?

KHANNA: I do. I put more blame on Congress. I mean, we shouldn't rely on 30-year-old entrepreneurs to come up with legal frameworks for protecting our national security or protecting American citizens. This is an area where Congress, I think, has been derelict, and where we need to step up and do our jobs.

DETROW: You know, to the joy and relief of congressional reporters like me, Congress has been in recess over the past two weeks, so you've been able to spend a lot of time in your district. And I'm wondering what the mood is there. Is there a circling of the wagons in the tech community?

KHANNA: There's a sense that tech needs to get out ahead of this - that we need to take the lead on being a positive force when it comes to job creation and when it comes to protecting American citizens. So I think there's been a social, political awakening of the valley - a recognition that they really need to engage in thinking about the common good and the proper types of regulation to make sure that they safeguard their reputation.

DETROW: That's Congressman Ro Khanna. He represents California's 17th Congressional District, which includes a lot of Silicon Valley. Thanks for coming on the show.

KHANNA: Thanks for having me.

Copyright (C) 2018 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio record.

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NPR's Scott Detrow talks with former Google engineer Yonatan Zunger. He argues the tech industry should operate with a "higher standard for care."

SCOTT DETROW, HOST:

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will be facing tough questions when he appears before Congress in the coming days. At the top of the list, the scandal involving Cambridge Analytica. That's the company that's been accused of improperly obtaining data from millions of Facebook users, then using that information for its work on political campaigns, reportedly including the Trump campaign.

Let's hear now from someone with a long history in Silicon Valley. Yonatan Zunger, the former Google engineer, recently wrote in The Boston Globe that this scandal is just more evidence that the entire tech industry faces an ethical crisis.

YONATAN ZUNGER: The method by which Cambridge Analytica got the data from Facebook was a system Facebook built almost specifically for the purpose of making it easy for companies to harvest information about networks of individuals.

DETROW: Right. And you write that over and over again throughout history, and also in recent years, in the tech field, companies work on something with a specific intention, and then the product is used with - only a slightly degree off from that intention in a way that nobody thought about and causes a lot of harm.

ZUNGER: Absolutely. Something I always tell people is that any idiot can build a system. Any amateur can make it perform. Professionals think about how a system will fail. It's very common for people to think about how a system will work if it's used the way they imagine it, but they don't think about how that system might work if it were used by a bad actor, or it could be used by just a perfectly ordinary person who's just a little different from what the person designing it is like.

DETROW: How do companies have those conversations like you mentioned about the downsides of the services they're coming up with?

ZUNGER: This is the single most important thing that most companies can be doing right now. First and foremost, companies need to pay attention. And, in fact, individuals working at these companies need to be thinking about how each product could actually be used in the real world.

If you build a product that works great for men and is going to lead to harassment of women, you have a problem. If you build a product that makes everyone's address books 5 percent more efficient and then gets three people killed because it happened to leak their personal information to their stalker, that's a problem.

What you need is a very diverse working group that can recognize a wide range of problems, that knows which questions to ask and has the support both inside the company and in the broader community to surface these issues and make sure that they're taken seriously and considered as genuine safety issues before a product is released to the public, as well as after.

This is different from a traditional compliance function, where they come in at the very end and say, no, I'm sorry. You can't launch this, at which point a business leader is just going to say, well, we need to launch it and it's too late to change it. Because they were in there from the room from day one, it makes a huge difference.

DETROW: A lot of people would say, especially here in Washington, where we are, that the answer could be federal regulation. Do you think that's the right way?

ZUNGER: I think regulation has a place, but it's important to handle it very carefully. In particular, everyone agrees that building codes are a great idea, and I think most people also agree that our elected representatives are not the right people to decide what kind of insulation is appropriate for use in the garage.

What you want is regulation and other mandatory mechanisms, like ethics standards or review boards or whatever processes you have, that specifies goals and objectives, which we can discuss as a society. And then the actual translation of that into implementation is something that should be done by people who deeply understand the field.

DETROW: Well, Yonatan Zunger, formerly of Google. Now he works for the tech company Humu. Thank you so much for joining us.

ZUNGER: Thank you very much.

Copyright (C) 2018 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio record.

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Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg apologized Thursday for the social media giant's data breach and admitted the company failed to do enough to protect the data of tens of millions of its users.

Yet she said the company does not know whether political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, which used Facebook data to target voters in the run-up to the 2016 elections, still possesses user data from the company, and if so, what the data is.

''We were given assurances by them years ago that they deleted the data. We should've followed up. That's on us. We are trying to do a forensic audit to find out what they have,'' Sandberg said.

Cambridge Analytica's misuse of Facebook data, which may have affected up to 87 million users, according to a blog post from the company this week, has sparked widespread anger at the company and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, who will testify before Congress about how his company protects user data next week.

In an interview with the PBS NewsHour's Judy Woodruff, Sandberg acknowledged the company ''under-invested'' in the safety and security of user data. Sandberg said Facebook is now working to rectify that.

''We were very focused for the last 10 years on building on social experiences [but] we were not focused enough on the possible misuses of data,'' Sandberg said. ''What we are doing now is looking much more holistically at all the ways Facebook data is used and making a lot of proactive changes.''

Other highlights from the interview:

On reports that Russian agents used Facebook to spread false information during the 2016 elections: ''Certainly we've done a lot of soul-searching on the role we played with the foreign interference that we did not see or catch early enough on our election,'' Sandberg said. ''I think people are going to be trying to answer that question for a long time.'' Facebook is open to the idea of additional government regulation, Sandberg said. But she stopped short of saying how far the company would go in supporting new regulations. ''We've given a lot of thought to that. We do operate under a lot of regulation around the world,'' Sandberg said. Sandberg defended her company's business model, pushing back on criticism that Facebook puts advertisers ahead of user privacy. ''We believe very deeply in our advertising model,'' she said. ''Can we run an ads business where we serve targeted ads in the way that protects people privacy? And the answer to that is yes.'' John Yang:

Just a little while ago, Judy sat down with top Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg.

Judy Woodruff:

Sheryl Sandberg, thank you very much for talking with us.

Sheryl Sandberg:

Thank you for coming to Facebook.

Judy Woodruff:

So, Facebook acknowledged yesterday that most of your two billion users could have had their profile, their personal profile information harvested, stolen.

That is a stunningly damaging piece of information, isn't it?

Sheryl Sandberg:

Well, let's be clear what happened here.

In the case, we had a feature that enabled to you find your friends. You could find your friends by their name, or their e-mail or their phone number. That was a good use and really people important to a lot of people.

People who shouldn't have scraped that data and made a directory of it. But what matters here is that all the information they received was already public. They didn't scrape any private data.

So it was information people had already listed on Facebook publicly. Now, that doesn't make it OK. We shut down this use case. We are glad we found it. But it wasn't private data for all of those people.

Judy Woodruff:

So was damage done by this or not?

Sheryl Sandberg:

Well, this plays into the overall situation we're in, which is people not trusting how data is used on Facebook. And we know that we didn't do a good enough job protecting people's data.

I am really sorry for that, and Mark is really sorry. And we're taking strong action. In fact, that announcement is part of the strong action we're taking. We announced two weeks ago that we were going to take a very broad look at how Facebook data was used.

We were going to find problems, shut them down and tell people about it. And that is why that announcement happened. But that's not all we are doing. We have shut down many other use cases in groups, in events, in pages and search. And starting Monday, we will begin rolling out to everyone in the world on Facebook at the top of their news feed a very clear and easy way to see what apps they have shared their data with and an easy way to delete those.

And as part of that, we are going to let people know if their data might have been accessed by Cambridge Analytica.

Judy Woodruff:

And I want to ask you about that, but why weren't these steps taken sooner? And is there any chance that right now data is being lifted, taken, harvested, that people don't want?

Sheryl Sandberg:

It's a really important question.

And I think the answer on why this was '-- didn't happen sooner really goes back to what Facebook was trying to do. We were very focused for the last 10 years on building social experiences.

And those are important. Those are why your friends know it's your birthday, why you can share playlists. But we were not focused enough on the possible misuses of data. When we saw specific problems, we shut those specific problems down.

So in the Cambridge Analytica case, the friends of friends' sharing that enabled that, we shut that down in 2015. But what we didn't do until now '-- and, to be clear, we are late '-- but what we're doing now is looking much more holistically at all the ways Facebook data is uses and making a lot of very proactive changes.

Judy Woodruff:

But on Cambridge Analytica, how certain are you that that data is '-- is destroyed, that it's not available to anyone anywhere for use anymore?

Sheryl Sandberg:

With Cambridge Analytica, we don't know what data or if they have any data at all right now. We were given assurances by them years ago that they deleted the data. We should have followed up. That's on us.

We are trying to do a forensic audit to find out what they have. We started that. The U.K. government is now doing their own investigation. They get precedence. So, we are waiting. We don't know at all what data they have.

The 87 million people we notified are people whose data might have been accessed by Cambridge Analytica. So we're giving the most conservative possible estimate and notifying those people. But once we do our audit, if we can hone it and be more specific, we certainly will be.

Judy Woodruff:

Cambridge Analytica, of course, working with the Trump campaign for president. To what extent did Facebook play a role in electing Donald Trump?

Sheryl Sandberg:

The questions on this election, they are big and they are deep. And, certainly, we have done a lot of soul-searching on the role we played with the foreign interference that we didn't see or catch early enough on our election.

I think people are going to be trying to answer that question for a long time. And it is an important question. We are very focused on learning the lessons and applying them. So you might have seen this week we took down another 270 pictures from the Russian IRA.

Those pages are in Russian.

Judy Woodruff:

This is the Internet Research Agency.

Sheryl Sandberg:

Their Internet Research Agency.

Sheryl Sandberg:

Now, that is the same organization that tried to interfere in our election and did put content on our Web site and interfered.

We were too slow then, but we found these pages now proactively and we took them down. And some people say, well, these were Russia '-- in Russian targeted to Russia. And our point is clear. This is a troll farm. This is completely deceptive information and there is no place on it '-- place for it on Facebook in the United States, in Russia, anywhere in the world.

We found this. And we are proactively going find things like this in other parts of the world.

Judy Woodruff:

Do you believe Facebook played a role in the Trump election?

Sheryl Sandberg:

Well, certainly'...

Judy Woodruff:

In electing Donald Trump?

Sheryl Sandberg:

Look, certainly, every candidate at every level used Facebook. We also registered two million people to vote. So, of course we played some role in the election.

But what that role was and how that was influenced is something that people will study for a long time, and those are very important questions.

Judy Woodruff:

But, in a way, isn't the horse out of the barn? You have now lost the confidence of many of your users who were saying they don't know they can trust Facebook, they have to be careful about what they post.

How do you win back the trust that you had from so many people?

Sheryl Sandberg:

Trust is a really important thing. You are asking a really important question.

And, you know, for me personally, the fact that people would not trust us, I take responsibility for that. And that hits hard.

And here's what we are doing. We are shifting the way we think about running our company. We are finding the problems ourselves. The problem we found ourselves you started with, everything we announced this week, we found, because we're taking a proactive approach.

I am not going to sit here, Judy, and tell you there won't be future problems. There will. We are at the beginning of what is a comprehensive review. We are trying to work quickly, but we are trying to work thoroughly.

So we are going to announce more things. People are going to continue to find more things. But here is our commitment. Our commitment is that this isn't a one-time change or a one-time exercise. This is , because security and safety is an arms race. You build something, someone tries to abuse it. Then we're going to build the next thing, and someone is going to try to abuse it.

And we are going to take a much more proactive stance. We are investing to the point that it changes our company's profitability, so that we can get ahead of that.

Judy Woodruff:

You are saying you didn't focus on some of these problems soon enough.

Some people, though, look at this and say, this raises questions about the whole Facebook business model, the concept of Facebook in the first place, because you are basically saying to people, build this great community up, communicate with all your friends and family, and we are going to make that information, some of it, available to our advertisers.

There is a disconnect there. People are looking at that and saying, can the two things stay '-- coexist? Can you have something that is a community and a commercial venture at the same time, where people are profiting off that information?

Sheryl Sandberg:

It's a critical question, and I'm glad you asked.

We believe very deeply in our advertising model, because, just like TV, it's what enables us to make this product available to people all around the world for free. Two billion people use the product. If it weren't advertising-based, most of those people would not be able to.

But then the deeper question you are asking is, can we run an ads business where we serve targeted ads in a way that protects people's privacy? And the answer to that is a very clear yes. We have always built privacy into our ads models.

We do not sell data or give your personal data to advertisers, period. What happens on Facebook is, someone wants to advertise. We are able to show targeted ads that you will hopefully be interested in without passing any personal data.

Our commitment to that remains very strong. And we believe that being able to offer a free service is very important for the community we build.

Judy Woodruff:

Well, we know clearly some good has come out of what Facebook does. At the same time, you have got critics out there saying you, Mark Zuckerberg, your CEO, and others in the leadership of Facebook let your success go to your head, in effect, that you were doing so well, you were growing so fast, making so much money, that you forgot about one of the essential promises you made to your users.

And that is their privacy. How do you explain what went wrong inside the leadership, the thinking of Facebook?

Sheryl Sandberg:

Well, we made big mistakes, and we know that.

And I think it really is that we were very focused on social experiences, and pretty idealistic, that we believed in a world where people could share and experience things together. And we just weren't thinking enough about the bad use cases. And that's on us.

We are learning those lessons. So, for example, if you think about fake news on Facebook, happened quickly, we weren't doing enough. Now we are. We are now working very closely with third-party fact-checkers, so that we can identify things as false.

Judy Woodruff:

But, last fall '-- and I will just interrupt quickly '-- Mark Zuckerberg said sometime last year that it was crazy to think the Russians were using Facebook.

It turned out to be the case. I mean, there is a '-- the appearance is that Facebook didn't want to see some of the problems until it absolutely had to see them.

Sheryl Sandberg:

Well, Mark apologized for that comment. He knows it was way too flip.

And we are taking strong action. So going back to fake news, what we are doing now is that if someone is about to post something that is false, we warn them, hey, our third-party fact-checkers have said this is false. If you have posted something, we go back to you and warn you.

We dramatically reduce the distribution. And we have a partnership set up with AP in all 50 states, ahead of the, you know, the U.S. midterm election to mark false news.

Judy Woodruff:

To people watching all this, though, Sheryl Sandberg, what do you say to folks who say, well, it happened before at Facebook, several big mistakes; how do we know there won't be another one?

What are you changing inside the way you make decisions inside this company?

Sheryl Sandberg:

Well, I'm never going sit here and say there won't be more mistakes, and I'm never going to sit here and say there won't be content we don't want on Facebook.

There are two billion people who post every day. We have a no-hate policy, but someone is going to post a bit of hate, and we are going to work hard to get it down.

But here is what I will say, that we are fundamentally shifting the way we think about this. We are no longer just trying to build social experiences. We are also '-- I mean, we always were concerned about privacy, but not enough. We are also taking more proactive steps to get ahead of the possible misuse.

And you are already seeing us do that.

Judy Woodruff:

And what about the bigger question out there, one of the bigger questions out there, which is, should one private company have control over this many interactions, two billion people, growing? How much of a role is there for government?

I mean, you and Mark Zuckerberg have said you are open to some government regulation. How much are you open to and how could '-- how far are you willing to go to let an outsider or even a competitor come in and change the fact that you are dealing with a massive number of humans on this planet?

Sheryl Sandberg:

We have given a lot of thought to that.

And we are '-- we do operate under lots of regulation all over the world. We are in a lot of dialogue now and always, but particularly now, because there are big questions out there about what role should tech company has '-- should tech companies have, particularly in our size and scope?

We're not just open to regulation. We're moving ahead of it. So, the most likely regulation in the United States is the Honest Ads Act. It may or may not pass. We have already built the tool. It's live in Canada. It will be live in the U.S. before the election.

And what it means is that anyone can look at any page on Facebook and see all the ads they are running. And for election ads, you will be able to see how much was spent, who paid for it and the demographics.

And we are going to build a four-year look. Going forward, we have to start showing the data, so, four years from now, four years of data. That is completely industry-leading transparency. And that, we are doing before '-- we are open to the regulation as well, but we can't wait.

We have to do more now.

Judy Woodruff:

But for the critics who say Facebook needs competitors, it needs to be taken over by somebody else, it needs much more regulation, what do you say?

Sheryl Sandberg:

I say all of those open questions. We will see what happens. We have competitors, obviously, we compete with.

But the most important thing I say to them is that we understand that we were behind. We are getting much more proactive. You are already seeing us this week. It's never going to be perfect. This is an arms race.'

We are going to build something. Someone is going to try. We are going to try to get all the hate content off. And we are doing better and better. But what you are going to see from us is a real commitment and a real belief in what we do every day.

Judy Woodruff:

How hard has this been?

Sheryl Sandberg:

You know, it should be hard, because we have a really big responsibility here. We know that.

Judy Woodruff:

Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, thank you very much.

Sheryl Sandberg:

Thank you for coming here to be with me.

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Archived Version

Fri, 06 Apr 2018 12:16

Facebook has asked several major U.S. hospitals to share anonymized data about their patients, such as illnesses and prescription info, for a proposed research project. Facebook was intending to match it up with user data it had collected, and help the hospitals figure out which patients might need special care or treatment.

The proposal never went past the planning phases and has been put on pause after the Cambridge Analytica data leak scandal raised public concerns over how Facebook and others collect and use detailed information about Facebook users.

"This work has not progressed past the planning phase, and we have not received, shared, or analyzed anyone's data," a Facebook spokesperson told CNBC.

But as recently as last month, the company was talking to several health organizations, including Stanford Medical School and American College of Cardiology, about signing the data-sharing agreement.

While the data shared would obscure personally identifiable information, such as the patient's name, Facebook proposed using a common computer science technique called "hashing" to match individuals who existed in both sets. Facebook says the data would have been used only for research conducted by the medical community.

The project could have raised new concerns about the massive amount of data Facebook collects about its users, and how this data can be used in ways users never expected.

That issue has been in the spotlight after reports that Cambridge Analytica, a political research organization that did work for Donald Trump, improperly got ahold of detailed information about Facebook users without their permission. It then tried to use this data to target political ads to them.

Facebook said on Wednesday that as many as 87 million people's data might have been shared this way. The company has recently announced new privacy policies and controls meant to restrict the type of data it collects and shares, and how that data can be used.

Led out of Building 8 The exploratory effort to share medical-related data was led by an interventional cardiologist called Freddy Abnousi, who describes his role on LinkedIn as "leading top-secret projects." It was under the purview of Regina Dugan, the head of Facebook's "Building 8" experiment projects group, before she left in October 2017.

Facebook's pitch, according to two people who heard it and one who is familiar with the project, was to combine what a health system knows about its patients (such as: person has heart disease, is age 50, takes 2 medications and made 3 trips to the hospital this year) with what Facebook knows (such as: user is age 50, married with 3 kids, English isn't a primary language, actively engages with the community by sending a lot of messages).

The project would then figure out if this combined information could improve patient care, initially with a focus on cardiovascular health. For instance, if Facebook could determine that an elderly patient doesn't have many nearby close friends or much community support, the health system might decide to send over a nurse to check in after a major surgery.

The people declined to be named as they were asked to sign confidentiality agreements.

Facebook provided a quote from Cathleen Gates, the interim CEO of the American College of Cardiology, explaining the possible benefits of the plan:

"For the first time in history, people are sharing information about themselves online in ways that may help determine how to improve their health. As part of its mission to transform cardiovascular care and improve heart health, the American College of Cardiology has been engaged in discussions with Facebook around the use of anonymized Facebook data, coupled with anonymized ACC data, to further scientific research on the ways social media can aid in the prevention and treatment of heart disease'--the #1 cause of death in the world. This partnership is in the very early phases as we work on both sides to ensure privacy, transparency and scientific rigor. No data has been shared between any parties."

Health systems are notoriously careful about sharing patient health information, in part because of state and federal patient privacy laws that are designed to ensure that people's sensitive medical information doesn't end up in the wrong hands.

To address these privacy laws and concerns, Facebook proposed to obscure personally identifiable information, such as names, in the data being shared by both sides.

However, the company proposed using a common cryptographic technique called hashing to match individuals who were in both data sets. That way, both parties would be able to tell when a specific set of Facebook data matched up with a specific set of patient data.

The issue of patient consent did not come up in the early discussions, one of the people said. Critics have attacked Facebook in the past for doing research on users without their permission. Notably, in 2014, Facebook manipulated hundreds of thousands of people's news feeds to study whether certain types of content made people happier or sadder. Facebook later apologized for the study.

Health policy experts say that this health initiative would be problematic if Facebook did not think through the privacy implications.

"Consumers wouldn't have assumed their data would be used in this way," said Aneesh Chopra, president of a health software company specializing in patient data called CareJourney and the former White House chief technology officer.

"If Facebook moves ahead (with its plans), I would be wary of efforts that repurpose user data without explicit consent."

When asked about the plans, Facebook provided the following statement:

"The medical industry has long understood that there are general health benefits to having a close-knit circle of family and friends. But deeper research into this link is needed to help medical professionals develop specific treatment and intervention plans that take social connection into account."

"With this in mind, last year Facebook began discussions with leading medical institutions, including the American College of Cardiology and the Stanford University School of Medicine, to explore whether scientific research using anonymized Facebook data could help the medical community advance our understanding in this area. This work has not progressed past the planning phase, and we have not received, shared, or analyzed anyone's data."

"Last month we decided that we should pause these discussions so we can focus on other important work, including doing a better job of protecting people's data and being clearer with them about how that data is used in our products and services."

Facebook has taken only tentative steps into the health sector thus far, such as its campaign to promote organ donation through the social network. It also has a growing "Facebook health" team based in New York that is pitching pharmaceutical companies to invest its ample ad budget into Facebook by targeting users who "liked" a health advocacy page, or fits a certain demographic profile.

Link to Article

Archived Version

Fri, 06 Apr 2018 12:12

Log in Sign up Josh Caplan @ joshdcaplan Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) laughs hysterically after joking about killing President Trump during an appearance on The Ellen Show.

pic.twitter.com/Tx74ImWXTO 11:13 AM - 5 Apr 2018 Twitter by: Josh Caplan @joshdcaplan jane bardoe @ justjanedoee

18h Replying to

@joshdcaplan Willy Brown's concubine is a bit unhinged.

View conversation · CelticThunder @ Laner67

18h Replying to

@joshdcaplan @TheEllenShow @KamalaHarris That's actually not funny

@TheEllenShow and

@KamalaHarris it's despicable to talk about a sitting US president and a father like that ... If someone said that about #44 you would be marching in the street calling it

#racist #hypocrites View conversation · Roger Carpenter @ RogerCa45372320

18h Replying to

@joshdcaplan This is getting out of hand. These people have to be stopped. Both of those bit'‚¬¥^s need mental help.

#BoycottEllen #DrainTheSwamp View conversation · Roger Carpenter @ RogerCa45372320

18h Replying to

@joshdcaplan I see no humor in this whatsoever

View conversation · Debra Cole @ DebrainAustin

18h Replying to

@joshdcaplan @DocWashburn Ellen isn't as nice as she tells everybody else to be.

View conversation · Waiting for IG Report 🎠@ TheRealDuramax

18h Replying to

@joshdcaplan I'm calling for a boycott of Ellen and her sponsors. This kind of hateful rhetoric is unacceptable.

View conversation · Janet Oney @ JanetOney5

18h Replying to

@joshdcaplan @AmericanHotLips Kamala should visited by the Secret Service, resign her position, and Ellen should think about how it would feel, being boycotted.

View conversation · Kathleen @ kathleenjsm74

17h Replying to

@TheRealDuramax @joshdcaplan I used to watch Ellen all of the time. Turned her off months ago. I know many others who have done the same

View conversation · Lori Mauldin @ 1_bammom

17h Replying to

@joshdcaplan @thebradfordfile and

5 others @TheJusticeDept @FBI @WhiteHouse how can u not be looking at this threat to our

@POTUS? NOT funny at all

@TheEllenShow.

View conversation · Deskprotestor @ Deskprotestor

17h Replying to

@joshdcaplan @thebradfordfile Here is another crazy politician who should not have access to guns. When Trump said he would consider gun control laws that restrict access to mentally ill I thought how would you know if they are mentally ill. Apparently they go on TV and make it clear!

View conversation · #secondamendment 🇺🇸 @ jmlara02

17h Replying to

@RogerCa45372320 @joshdcaplan Me neither.... She's another loser....

View conversation · #BuildtheGallows @ MjpArchAngel777

17h Replying to

@joshdcaplan Ohhh, the web the wicked weave.

View conversation · Romona @ rromona

17h Replying to

@joshdcaplan She's the one they want to run in 2020. Ask about Willie Brown.

View conversation · #BuildtheGallows @ MjpArchAngel777

17h Replying to

@Deskprotestor @joshdcaplan @thebradfordfile Man, that was well said and makes one think about these liberal politicians, mental evaluations should be performed asap and determine if they are a danger to our society.

View conversation · Wiretapped Patriot @ T64Pamela

17h Replying to

@joshdcaplan @ahernandez85b She cackles like a witch.

View conversation · jeff plunkett @ cmoose57

17h Replying to

@joshdcaplan ARREST HER IMMEDIATELY THREAT AGAINST POTUS SHAMEFUL ELLEN AS WELL

View conversation · #BuildtheGallows @ MjpArchAngel777

17h Replying to

@joshdcaplan People should March on her office and demand her be removed.

View conversation · Jackie Warren 🌸🌺🌹 @ warrenkylady

17h Replying to

@joshdcaplan @JackPosobiec That's not funny 🤨

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Archived Version

Fri, 06 Apr 2018 12:04

Facebook users could have to pay to completely opt out of their data being used to target them with advertising, the company's Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg told NBC News on Thursday.

NBC asked if Facebook could come up with a tool to let people have a button that allows them to restrict the social network from using their profile data to stop targeted ads. Sandberg said that the company has "different forms of opt out" but not one button for everything.

"We don't have an opt-out at the highest level. That would be a paid product," Sandberg told NBC.

The comments come in the wake of the scandal in which 87 million Facebook profiles were scraped with the data being sent to political consultancy Cambridge Analytica.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has apologized for the company's role in the data scandal and is now set to testify in front of Congress on April 11. Zuckerberg has also been summoned to appear in front of lawmakers in the U.K. and European Union.

The data issue arose from a quiz app that collected data of Facebook users and their friends. This data was then passed on to Cambridge Analytica. Facebook banned the app in 2015, and said it got "assurances" from Cambridge Analytica and the app maker that the data was deleted. However, reports suggested this wasn't the case.

Facebook has been criticized for not checking the data had been erased, a mistake that Sandberg acknowledged.

"We had legal assurances from them that they deleted. What we didn't do was the next step of an audit and we are trying to do that now," Sandberg told NBC.

Read the full NBC News story here.

Link to Article

Archived Version

Fri, 06 Apr 2018 11:51

Sandberg, along with Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, have been addressing security concerns since admitting that 87 million Facebook users may have had their data harvested by Cambridge Analytica, the data firm that worked with the Trump campaign during the 2016 election.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg will testify before Congress next week about the social network's data breach. EPA Zuckerberg will go before Congress next week as part of the company's damage control efforts.

Sandberg told TODAY that Facebook takes the responsibility of protecting user information seriously. ''We cared about privacy all along but I think we got the balance wrong,'' she said. The social experience Facebook provides, like connecting virtually with friends and seeing their music playlists, are all examples of data sharing, she pointed out.

''There's the good cases for sharing and I think we were very idealistic and not rigorous enough and then there's the possible misuse,'' she said. ''What we are focused on is making sure those possible use cases get shut down. I'm not going to sit here and say that we're not going to find more because we are.''