All posts by nedhamson

Activist, writer, researcher, addicted to sharing information and facts.

Congress has tried more than 200 times to pass an anti-lynching law. This year, it could fail again

It was nearly a century ago that Rep. Leonidas C. Dyer, a Republican from Missouri, introduced a bill to make lynching a federal crime. With vigilante slayings of African Americans rampant, it promised to force the federal government to prosecute lynch mobs for murder.

The bill wasn’t the first…

Putin threatens arms race if US dumps nuclear treaty

All fall down…

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Russia would also build new medium-range missiles if the US were to do so, says president

Vladimir Putin has threatened that Russia will develop new missiles banned by the intermediate-range nuclear forces treaty if the US exits the pact and pursues an arms buildup of its own.

The Russian president’s remarks came one day after the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, said Moscow was in “material breach” of the cold war-era treaty and issued a 60-day ultimatum for Russia to correct the alleged violations. Otherwise, he said, the US would quit the 1987 accord, considered a milestone in reducing the threat of a nuclear war in Europe.

Continue reading…

Luxembourg to become first country to make all public transport free

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Government seeks to prioritise environment and end some of world’s worst traffic congestion

Luxembourg is set to become the first country in the world to make all its public transport free.

Fares on trains, trams and buses will be lifted next summer under the plans of the re-elected coalition government led by Xavier Bettel, who was sworn in for a second term as prime minister on Wednesday.

Continue reading…

Inoreader – EID Journal: Higher Viral Load of Emerging Norovirus GII.P16-GII.2

Globally, particularly in developing countries, Norovirus infections may claim 50,000 children’s lives each year (cite).  One of the keys to prevention is good hand hygiene, unfortunately, unlike with many other bacteria and viruses, alcohol gel doesn’t do a particularly good job of killing the virus (see CMAJ: Hand Sanitizers May Be `Suboptimal’ For Preventing Norovirus).

Source: Inoreader – EID Journal: Higher Viral Load of Emerging Norovirus GII.P16-GII.2

British Member of Parliament publishes 250 pages of damning internal Facebook documents that had been sealed by a US court

via Sophia, NOT Loren!

Damian Collins chairs the UK Parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee; it was he who ordered the Parliamentary Serjeant at Arms to drag a visiting US tech executive named Ted Kramer out of his hotel to surrender his laptop to Parliament so they could see the internal Facebook documents that a US federal judge had ordered sealed.

Kramer is CEO of Six4Three, a creepy US startup whose Facebook app helped you find pictures of your friends in bikinis; when the app was neutered by a change to Facebook’s API, Six4Three sued Facebook and in the course of pre-trial discovery, they were given extensive internal documents from Facebook, which the judge in the case had ordered sealed. Somehow, Collins got wind of the fact that Kramer, his laptop, and the documents were all in London, and — having been spurned by Mark Zuckerberg, who repeatedly refused demands to appear in Parliament — saw his chance.

Now, Collins has dumped a 250 page file, hosted on Parliament’s servers, which includes the documents from Kramer’s laptop and Collins’s summary.

The release comes despite a plea from Facebook to respect the US court order and not publish the documents.

The documents are incredibly damning. They show Facebookers at the highest level — up to CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg — conspiring to trick Android users about how much data was being gathered by an update to the Facebook app; to give certain companies “whitelisted” access to user data beyond the access the company had disclosed to its users; to explicitly productize “friends” data (that is, to allow the trick Cambridge Analytica pulled, when getting a user to grant permission to their own data also allowed a company to access their friends’ data); to use the Onavo battery-monitor app to covertly gather data on which other apps users had installed; and anti-competitive targeting of partners’ apps.

Collins tweeted: “I believe there is considerable public interest in releasing these documents. They raise important questions about how Facebook treats users data, their policies for working with app developers, and how they exercise their dominant position in the social media market.”

This isn’t just one smoking gun, it’s hundreds of them. This is Facebook’s worst nightmare.

Summary of key issues from the Six4Three files

1. White Lists

Facebook have clearly entered into whitelisting agreements with certain companies, which meant that after the platform changes in 2014/15 they maintained full access to friends data. It is not clear that there was any user consent for this, nor how Facebook decided which companies should be whitelisted or not.

2. Value of friends data

It is clear that increasing revenues from major app developers was one of the key drivers behind the Platform 3.0 changes at Facebook. The idea of linking access to friends data to the financial value of the developers relationship with Facebook is a recurring feature of the documents.

3. Reciprocity

Data reciprocity between Facebook and app developers was a central feature in the discussions about the launch of Platform 3.0.

4. Android

Facebook knew that the changes to its policies on the Android mobile phone system, which enabled the Facebook app to collect a record of calls and texts sent by the user would be controversial. To mitigate any bad PR, Facebook planned to make it as hard of possible for users to know that this was one of th e underlying features of the upgrade of their app.

5. Onavo

Facebook used Onavo to conduct global surveys of the usage of mobile apps by customers, and apparently without their knowledge. They used this data to assess not just how many people had download ed apps, but how often they used them. This knowledge helped them to decide which companies to acquire, and which to treat as a threat.

6. Targeting competitor Apps

The files show evidence of Facebook taking aggressive positions against apps, with the consequence that denying them access to data led to the failure of that business.

Summary of key issues from the Six4Three files [Damian Collins MP/DCMS Committee]

Nearly 250 Pages of Devastating Internal Facebook Documents Posted Online By UK Parliament [Jason Koebler and Joseph Cox/Motherboard]

Facebook lured charities to its platform, then abandoned them once they got hacked

via Sophia not Loren

Facebook’s walled garden/roach motel strategy made it progressively harder and harder for charities to reach supporters on the web, driving them within Facebook’s confines, where they devoted thousands of hours to making their Facebook presence attractive and pleasing to Facebook’s algorithm.

Facebook rewarded them with a “Donate” button that could be used to raise funds directly within Facebook — which increased donations and also provided one more way for Facebook to lock in its users and surveil their actions.

But as charities started to fall prey to hackers who used phishing and social engineering to repeatedly take over the charities’ accounts and steal the donations destined for them, Facebook was AWOL, refusing to answer increasingly desperate pleas from charities who sometimes found themselves blackmailed by hackers who threatened to delete the charities’ pages altogether unless they diverted their donations to the hackers by way of ransom.

Some charities got shut down by Facebook, when the hackers who took over the accounts did shady things that triggered Facebook’s fraud-detection. Again, nobody was home at Facebook to help these charities get their accounts back.

Wired traces the story of two charities that finally got their accounts secured and undid the damage that the hackers had done — but only by raising such a stink that a Facebook Vice President got the company’s PR department to sort them out.

Remember this the next time someone calls for Facebook to stop harassment or hate speech: this is a company that doesn’t pick up the phone when a hacker steals thousands of dollars from a charity. Once we ask it to start algorithms to decide what is and isn’t acceptable speech, they’ll make billions of mistakes, blocking everything from messages of condolences after a tragic death to urgent political messages on the eve of elections, and it will take months or years to get those decisions reviewed, and in many cases, you’ll never get justice.

After WIRED reached out to Facebook in early October, an employee from the social network’s communications department also contacted Alana to ensure that her account was secure, according to emails. But Alana’s problems weren’t over. Numerous fake Facebook accounts soon began appearing that impersonated people who worked for the shelter, or their friends and family. The harassment was exhausting, and it didn’t stop until Alana transferred $1,500 to the hacker via an anonymous PayPal account—the same amount the fake GoFundMe had raised before it was shut down and the money returned to donors. Since then, Alana says, she and the shelter’s Facebook page have been left alone.

But Alana is still bewildered by how difficult it was to reach a real person at the company. “Facebook needs to have some kind of customer service department,” she says. “PayPal has one, Amazon has one, eBay has one. There is zero reason for them to not have one.”

Facebook says it provides plenty of support.

Facebook Exposes Nonprofits to Donors—and Hackers [Louise Matsakis/Wired]

(Image: Howard Lake, Alessio Jacona, CC-BY-SA)

To Reduce Privacy Risks, the Census Plans to Report Less Accurate Data

Ah, err, umm… the Census is not taken for the benefit of scholars, it is taken to apportion voting, get an idea of where the government should be spending or not spending money… Grin. Guaranteeing people’s confidentiality has become more of a challenge, but some scholars worry that the new system will impede research.