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Month: March 2018

Social media operates to manipulate your perceptions, impact your decisions, and change your behavior

Social media operates to manipulate your perceptions, impact your decisions, and change your behavior

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Molly McKew writes: Social media is free because the commodity it is selling isn’t the platform, it’s you. The business of social media is to harvest and sell information about you, through various means. All social media companies — not just Facebook, but Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Google, Reddit, and a range of other apps and services — work this way. They profit by profiling you, targeting posts to you that will keep you engaged on the platform, and collecting more…

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China’s new frontiers in dystopian tech

China’s new frontiers in dystopian tech

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Rene Chun writes: Dystopia starts with 23.6 inches of toilet paper. That’s how much the dispensers at the entrance of the public restrooms at Beijing’s Temple of Heaven dole out in a program involving facial-recognition scanners—part of the president’s “Toilet Revolution,” which seeks to modernize public toilets. Want more? Forget it. If you go back to the scanner before nine minutes are up, it will recognize you and issue this terse refusal: “Please try again later.” China is rife with…

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Sudan, the last male northern white rhinoceros, dies in Kenya

Sudan, the last male northern white rhinoceros, dies in Kenya

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The New York Times reports: The last male northern white rhinoceros died on Monday at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya following a series of infections and other health problems. At 45, Sudan was an elderly rhino, and his death was not unexpected. Hunted to near-extinction, just two northern white rhinos now remain: Najin, Sudan’s daughter, and Fatu, his granddaughter, both at the conservancy. The prospect of losing the charismatic animals has prompted an unusual scientific effort to develop new…

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DNA from more than 900 ancient people trace the prehistoric migrations of our species

DNA from more than 900 ancient people trace the prehistoric migrations of our species

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Carl Zimmer writes: David Reich wore a hooded, white suit, cream-colored clogs, and a blue surgical mask. Only his eyes were visible as he inspected the bone fragments on the counter. Dr. Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School, pointed out a strawberry-sized chunk: “This is from a 4,000-year-old site in Central Asia — from Uzbekistan, I think.” He moved down the row. “This is a 2,500-year-old sample from a site in Britain. This is Bronze Age Russian, and these…

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Cambridge Analytica uncovered: Secret filming reveals election tricks

Cambridge Analytica uncovered: Secret filming reveals election tricks

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  The Guardian reports: The company at the centre of the Facebook data breach boasted of using honey traps, fake news campaigns and operations with ex-spies to swing election campaigns around the world, a new investigation reveals. Executives from Cambridge Analytica spoke to undercover reporters from Channel 4 News about the dark arts used by the company to help clients, which included entrapping rival candidates in fake bribery stings and hiring prostitutes to seduce them. In one exchange, the company…

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Facebook’s rules for accessing user data lured more than just Cambridge Analytica

Facebook’s rules for accessing user data lured more than just Cambridge Analytica

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The Washington Post reports: Facebook last week suspended the Trump campaign’s data consultant, Cambridge Analytica, for scraping the data of potentially millions of users without their consent. But thousands of other developers, including the makers of games such as FarmVille and the dating app Tinder, as well as political consultants from President Barack Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign, also siphoned huge amounts of data about users and their friends, developing deep understandings of people’s relationships and preferences. Cambridge Analytica — unlike…

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How Facebook’s stock structure gives Mark Zuckerberg the freedom to ignore his critics

How Facebook’s stock structure gives Mark Zuckerberg the freedom to ignore his critics

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Troy Wolverton writes: If Mark Zuckerberg were a normal CEO, he might — emphasis on might— be fearing for his job right now. At a typical company, a scandal the likes of the one involving Cambridge Analytica’s illegitimate harvesting and possession of data on 50 million Facebook users might have directors asking some uncomfortable questions of the executive team. Those questions might be particularly pointed if that same company and executive team had already been at the center of a…

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Facebook’s chief information security officer planning to leave company amid disinformation backlash

Facebook’s chief information security officer planning to leave company amid disinformation backlash

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The New York Times reports: As Facebook grapples with a backlash over its role in spreading disinformation, an internal dispute over how to handle the threat and the public outcry is resulting in the departure of a senior executive. The impending exit of that executive — Alex Stamos, Facebook’s chief information security officer — reflects heightened leadership tension at the top of the social network. Much of the internal disagreement is rooted in how much Facebook should publicly share about…

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Big data meets Big Brother as China moves to rate its citizens

Big data meets Big Brother as China moves to rate its citizens

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Wired reports: On June 14, 2014, the State Council of China published an ominous-sounding document called “Planning Outline for the Construction of a Social Credit System”. In the way of Chinese policy documents, it was a lengthy and rather dry affair, but it contained a radical idea. What if there was a national trust score that rated the kind of citizen you were? Imagine a world where many of your daily activities were constantly monitored and evaluated: what you buy…

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China wants to shape the global future of artificial intelligence

China wants to shape the global future of artificial intelligence

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MIT Technology Review reports: China isn’t just investing heavily in AI—its experts aim to set the global standards for the technology as well. Academics, industry researchers, and government experts gathered in Beijing last November to discuss AI policy issues. The resulting document, published in Chinese recently, shows that the country’s experts are thinking in detail about the technology’s potential impact. Together with the Chinese government’s strategic plan for AI, it also suggests that China plans to play a role in…

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Putin treats Britain with disdain because the Russian government thinks it has bought the British elite

Putin treats Britain with disdain because the Russian government thinks it has bought the British elite

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Anne Applebaum writes: “Londongrad” is the nickname, not entirely affectionate, that wealthy Russians have bestowed upon Britain’s capital. The term doesn’t just designate a physical place, though many Russians do indeed live here. Londongrad is more properly a state of mind — encompassing not only the nonresident owners of large houses in Kensington, but also the British institutions, banks, law firms, accountants, private schools, art galleries, and even the Conservative Party fundraisers that have gone out of their way to…

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Russia’s grasp on English football

Russia’s grasp on English football

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Rory Smith writes: Both Britain’s prime minister, Theresa May, and her foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, have raised the possibility of striking back at Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, by targeting the assets of oligarchs living in London. Alexei Navalny, the most prominent opposition figure in Moscow, has suggested such a move would win public approval in Russia. Send a message by punishing those close to Putin, those who benefit from his power, goes the logic. But any move against the…

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Robert Mercer, the misanthropic billionaire who made Trump president

Robert Mercer, the misanthropic billionaire who made Trump president

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Jane Mayer writes: [Robert] Mercer is the co-C.E.O. of Renaissance Technologies, which is among the most profitable hedge funds in the country. A brilliant computer scientist, he helped transform the financial industry through the innovative use of trading algorithms. But he has never given an interview explaining his political views. Although Mercer has recently become an object of media speculation, Trevor Potter, the president of the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan watchdog group, who formerly served as the chairman of…

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Facebook is a company built around a misanthropic premise

Facebook is a company built around a misanthropic premise

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Last August, John Lanchester wrote: [Mark Zuckerberg] is very well aware of how people’s minds work and in particular of the social dynamics of popularity and status. The initial launch of Facebook was limited to people with a Harvard email address; the intention was to make access to the site seem exclusive and aspirational. (And also to control site traffic so that the servers never went down. Psychology and computer science, hand in hand.) Then it was extended to other…

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The secret police enforcing Silicon Valley’s code of secrecy

The secret police enforcing Silicon Valley’s code of secrecy

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Olivia Solon reports: One day last year, John Evans (not his real name) received a message from his manager at Facebook telling him he was in line for a promotion. When they met the following day, she led him down a hallway praising his performance. However, when she opened the door to a meeting room, he came face to face with members of Facebook’s secretive “rat-catching” team, led by the company’s head of investigations, Sonya Ahuja. The interrogation was a…

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Cambridge Analytica: Whistleblower, Christopher Wylie, reveals data grab of 50 million Facebook profiles

Cambridge Analytica: Whistleblower, Christopher Wylie, reveals data grab of 50 million Facebook profiles

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  The New York Times reports: As the upstart voter-profiling company Cambridge Analytica prepared to wade into the 2014 American midterm elections, it had a problem. The firm had secured a $15 million investment from Robert Mercer, the wealthy Republican donor, and wooed his political adviser, Stephen K. Bannon, with the promise of tools that could identify the personalities of American voters and influence their behavior. But it did not have the data to make its new products work. So…

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