Megan McArdleâs excellent opâed in The Washington Post, âA farewell to free journalismâ, has been bookmarked on my phone for months. Itâs a very good summary of where things are for digital media, and how the advent of Google and Facebook along with the democratization of the internet have reduced online advertising income to a pittance. Thereâs native advertising, of course, which Lucire and Lucire Men indulged in for a few years in the 2010s, and I remain a fan of it in terms of what it paid, but McArdleâs piece is a stark reminder of the real world: there ainât enough of it to keep every newsroom funded.
Iâll also say that I have been very tempted over the last year or two to start locking away some of Lucireâs 21 years of content behind a paywall, but part of me has a romantic notion (and you can see it in McArdleâs own writing) that information deserves to be free.
Everyone should get a slice of the pie if they are putting up free content along with slots for Doubleclick ads, for instance, and those advertising networks operate on merit: get enough qualified visitors (and they do know who they are, since very few people opt out; in Facebookâs case opting out actually does nothing and they continue to track your preferences) and theyâll feed the ads through accordingly, whether you own a ârealâ publication or not.
It wasnât that long ago, however, when more premium ad networks worked with premium media, leaving Googleâs Adsense to operate among amateurs. It felt like a two-tier ad market. Those days are long gone, since plenty of people were quite happy to pay the cheap rates for the latter.
Itâs why my loyal Desktop readers who took in my typography column every month between 1996 and 2010 do not see me there any more: we columnists were let go when the business model changed.
All of this can exacerbate an already tricky situation, as the worse funded independent media get, the less likely we can afford to offer decent journalism, biasing the playing field in favour of corporate media that have deeper pockets. Google, as we have seen, no longer ranks media on merit, either: since they and Facebook control half of all online advertising revenue, and over 60 per cent in the US, itâs not in their interests to send readers to the most meritorious. Itâs in their interests to send readers to the media with the deeper pockets and scalable servers that can handle large amounts of traffic with a lot of Google ads, so they make more money.
Itâs yet another reason to look at alternatives to Google if you wish to seek out decent independent media and support non-corporate voices. However, even my favoured search engine, Duck Duck Go, doesnât have a specific news service, though itâs still a start.
In our case, if we didnât have a print edition as well as a web one, then online-only mightnât be worthwhile sans paywall.
Tonight I was interested to see The Guardian Weekly in magazine format, a switch that happened on October 10.
Itâs a move that I predicted over a decade ago, when I said that magazines should occupy a âsoft-cover coffee-table bookâ niche (which is what the local edition of Lucire aims to do) and traditional newspapers could take the area occupied by the likes of Time and Newsweek.
With the improvement in printing presses and the price of lightweight gloss paper it seemed a logical move. Add to changing reader habitsâthe same ones that drove the death of the broadsheet format in the UKâand the evolution of editorial and graphic design, I couldnât see it heading any other way. Consequently, I think The Guardian will do rather well.
Since (mostly) leaving Facebook, and cutting down on Twitter, Iâve come to realize the extent of how outdated traditional computing definitions have become. To help those who need to get up to speed, Iâve compiled a few technobabble words and translated them into normal English.
app: in many cases, an extremely limited web browser for your cellphone that only works with one site, as opposed to a proper web browser that works with many sites.
bots: fake, computer-driven profiles masquerading as real humans on, predominantly, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
clean install: something entirely unnecessary, but suggested by tech support people who want to cover up buggy operating systems (q.v. Windows 10).
cloud: hackable online repository of naughty photos of celebrities.
comments’ section: when you see this while surfing, it’s a reminder to leave the web page you are on and make up your own mind.
Facebook: a website where bots live, where post-sharing is intentionally broken to ensure you need to pay for attention. Once paid, your posts are shared with bots, so even fewer humans actually see them.
Facebook friend: (a) a friend; (b) a total stranger; (c) a bot.
Google: (a) a virtual hole into which you dump all your private information, to be sold on to corporations, but feel good doing it because you gave it up to a private company to use against you rather than have the state take it to use against you; (b) a cult that supports (a), whose members will think you have a degenerative brain disease if you dare question the perfection of their god.
malware scanner: malware (especially when offered by Facebook, q.v.).
messenger app: an inefficient messaging program where typing takes 10 times as long as on a desktop or laptop computer. Designed to dissuade you from actually calling the person.
phone: portable computing device, not used to make calls.
remote desktop: when your operating system fails, and the odds of you seeing your familiar screen are remote.
social media: media where people are antisocial.
Twitter: (a) social media with no discernible rules on who gets kicked off and why; (b) where the US president gets angry.
white balance: when racists attack people of colour but pretend they are noble and against racism.
Weibo: a website monitored by the Chinese Communist Party, where users have more freedom than on Facebook and Twitter.
Windows 10: a buggy operating system that requires 10 goes at any updates or patches, hence the name.
As Twitter (and other social media) descend, whatâs been interesting is seeing how many of us Kiwis arenât being terribly original. No, I donât exactly mean Dr Don Brash thinking that he can import US-style division into New Zealand wholesale without understanding the underlying forces that helped Donald Trump secure their presidency (in which case such attempts here will fail), but I do mean how later Tweeters hunt for keywords and arguments to defend institutionalized racism, sexism, and other unsavoury -isms, then use imported techniques because they saw on television that they worked overseas.
I recall one not long ago who was evidently looking out for white male privilege, with some pretty standard Tweets prepared and an odd refusal to address fundamental questionsâthat sort of thing. Thereâs little point getting into a debate with nobodies who troll, and itâs all too obvious how they emerge on your radar.
Once upon a time social media didnât have these types, but then once upon a time, email didnât have spammers. Itâs the natural development of technology that humans tend to mess up pretty decent inventions. But, like spam, we find ways of dealing with it.
Race was one that came up over the weekend. Now, if youâre against racism, it would stand to reason that busting false stereotypes would be something that youâd savour. Ditto if youâre battling sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc.
Iâve mentioned some of these before, e.g. âAsian driversâ somehow being terrors on our roads, something that statistics donât bear out. (Or, for that matter, the total lack of truth about âwomen driversâ, who are statistically safer than men.) Among tourists, weâve established Australians and Germans are the two most dangerous groups. Food has been one thatâs been on our minds lately, since my other half managed to find herself ill from eating at two occidental restaurants, and given the amount of research sheâs done into the area, Iâll defer to her on the subject. Again itâs an area where I hear myths about Chinese food repeated ad nauseam.
The thing is that busting stereotypes gives racists less to go on, less of a feeling of superiority, so theyâll begin countering. Women know full well when sexists attack, and racists follow the same pattern.
A very funny chap sent two swear word-filled Tweets whichâand this is the only interesting thing about themâwere extracted fully right out of the racistsâ playbook. I was only surprised that this was still going on in 2018, hence this blog post, since I thought these signs were so clear by now that no one would be daft enough to try them on.
Their overriding message: dissing a western stereotype makes you a racist.
Akin to the âIâm not the Nazi, youâre the Naziâ Tweets and comments seen overseas, there was a suggestion that my lot was just as racist. Now, I donât deny that any majority race in any country can be racist. Itâs how I met one gentleman in Hong Kong who pointed out racism in a schoolbook that had a Filipina caricatureâI reached out offering to help. Or calling out the treatment of Malays and Indians by certain business people among my own lot in Malaysia. When youâve been the minority for most of your life, you can spot it, and you find it particularly tasteless when itâs perpetrated by your own race. (Thanks to #MeToo, it appears some men are getting better at calling out âlocker-room talkâ, too.)
But this is a diversion meant to cloud the issues. The intent is to criticize the person (by their race) in order to devalue the argument they make, and not deal with the argument itself. They miss the irony of this and it actually validates your original point. If you canât answer something civilly, then you havenât answered it at all.
In Tweet no. 2 (I wish I had taken a screen shot, as it has been deletedâI didnât expect the cowardice) was a variation on âMy best friend is Asian.â This one was about his partner and stepchildren being Asian, and his own son, who is half-Asian, and how he considers himself Asian. Um, no, youâre not, not from the exhibited conduct, but itâs a feeble attempt to scramble to give his own position a status above yours. Again itâs not about addressing the argument (a classic move in social media), but about debasing the opposition. Another one to look out for.
Now, if you really were to address this, wouldnât your best friend being Asian, or having a child with Asian heritage, mean you have a stake in busting myths that could harm that person? Thatâs not something they really care about, even if it harms those supposedly closest to them. (And those of us in New Zealand have a negative history with the term âAsianâ, so I doubt youâd actually use it in referencing your âbest friendâ. Youâd actually know their heritage, whether it was Iraqi, Asiatic Russian, Japanese, Kazakh, or whatever.)
Then there are the emotive overreactions, the falsely placed righteous moral indignation that this group is particularly good at. Itâs to make you think (unconvincingly) that your statements have potentially offended not just the racist, but, shock, horror, all right-thinking people.
Think about how a normal person would have reacted, and you have to conclude that no one jumps to uncontrollable shaking anger, the keyboarding equivalent of firing a gun as a result of road rage.
Thereâll be aspects of one or more of these in social media, and those who are combatting prejudice would do well to spot the signs.
To me, these are signs of unstable characters, akin to an adult having a tantrum. Or they specifically fish for things to make them angry. Now, I donât know how they dealt with their powerlessness ten years ago, but now they surf among us, hoping in vain to drag you to their level.
So given they are still around, the local body elections next year are going to be interesting, because you donât need the Dirty Politics crowd to coordinate it now: itâs a lot easier to provoke this dying group with fake news and let them run riot. On the other hand, itâs also a lot easier to spot them and see the conceit behind them.
Weâre a small enough country for most of us to know this by now anyway. Or so I hope.
I like apples. So youâre anti pears then. No, I just prefer apples. So you hate pears. I never said that. Fucking pear hater. I donât hate pears! Yes you do. You make me sick. Scum.
Then, within days, it played out pretty much exactly like this when Frank Oz Tweeted that he did not conceive of Bert and Ernie as gay. Or how Wil Wheaton can never seem to escape false accusations that he is anti-trans or anti-LGBQ, to the point where he left Mastodon. In his words (the link is mine):
I see this in the online space all the time now: mobs of people, acting in bad faith, can make people they donât know and will likely never meet miserable, or even try to ruin their lives and careers (look at what they did to James Gunn). And those mobsâ bad behaviors are continually rewarded, because itâs honestly easier to just give them what they want. We are ceding the social space to bad people, because they have the most time, the least morals and ethics, and are skilled at relentlessly attacking and harassing their targets. It only takes few seconds for one person to type âfuck offâ and hit send. That person probably doesnât care and doesnât think about how their one grain of sand quickly becomes a dune, with another person buried beneath it.
Oh goodness, what fun twitter was in the early days, a secret bathing-pool in a magical glade in an enchanted forest ⌠But now the pool is stagnant âŚ
To leave that metaphor, let us grieve at what twitter has become. A stalking ground for the sanctimoniously self-righteous who love to second-guess, to leap to conclusions and be offended â worse, to be offended on behalf of others they do not even know ⌠It makes sensible people want to take an absolutely opposite point of view.
Not that long ago I was blocked by a claimed anti-Zionist Tweeter who exhibited these very traits, and I had to wonder whether he was a troll who was on Twitter precisely to stir hatred of Palestinians. With bots and fake accounts all over social media (I now report dozens of bots daily on Instagram, which usually responds with about five messages a day saying they had done something, leaving thousands going back years untouched), you have to wonder.
Years ago, too, a Facebook post I made about someone in Auckland adopting an American retail phrase (I forget what it was, as I don’t use it, but it was ‘Black’ with a weekday appended to it) had the daughter of two friends who own a well known fashion label immediately jump to ‘Why are you so against New Zealand retailers?’ I was “unfriended” (shock, horror) over this, but because I’m not Wil Wheaton, this didn’t get to the Retailers’ Association mobilizing all its members to have me kicked off Facebook. It’s a leap to say that a concern about the creeping use of US English means I hate retailers, and all but the most up-tight would have understood the context.
This indignant and often false offence that people take either shows that they have no desire to engage and learn something, and that they are in reality pretty nasty, or that they have one personality in real life and another on social media, the latter being the one where the dark side gets released. Reminds me of a churchgoer I know: nice for a period on Sundays to his fellow parishioners but hating humanity the rest of the decade.
Some decent people I know on Twitter say they are staying, because to depart would let the bastards win, and I admire that in them. For now, Mastodon is a friendly place for me to be, even if I’m now somewhat wary after the way Wheaton was treated, but the way social media, in general, are is hardly pleasing. Those of us who were on the web early had an ideal in mind, of a more united, knowledgeable planet. We saw email become crappier because of spammers, YouTube become crappier because of commenters (and Google ownership), and Wikipedia become crappier because it has been gamed at its highest levels, so it seems it’s inevitable, given the record of the human race, that social media would also descend with the same pattern. Like in General Election voting, too many are self-interested, and will act against their own interests, limiting any chance they might have for growth in a fairer society. To borrow Stephen’s analogy, we can only enjoy the swimming pool if we don’t all pee in it.
âThere’s an old Polish proverb ⌒ I believe it’s ‘Reality television can’t stop the motorways in Warsaw from getting icy.’
I’ve always known what sort of telly I liked, and often that was at odds with what broadcasters put on. In the 1970s, my tastes weren’t too dissimilar from the general public’s, but as the years went on, they diverged from what New Zealand programmers believed we should watch.
Shows I liked would prematurely disappear (Dempsey & Makepeace), only to return very late at night a decade later. Some only ever appeared late at night (Hustle), then vanish (in New Zealand, seasons 5 to 8 have never appeared on a terrestrial channel, and they have also never been released on DVD).
We had a British expat visitor on Wednesday. He arrived here in 2008, and had no idea that TV1 had once been the home of British programming, and TV2 was where the Hollywood stuff went.
By the late 2000s and early 2010s, I was watching either DVDs or finding a way to get to BBC Iplayer et al, because less and less of what was on offer had any appeal. We had boxed sets of Mission: Impossible, The Persuaders, and others.
When the country switched to Freeview, I couldn’t be bothered getting a decoder. We were fine with online. Eventually, I did buy a TV set with Freeview, but only because the previous one conked out.
On Thursday night, it became very apparent just how bad television had become here.
Every English-language and Te Reo Māori terrestrial channel had unscripted drama, i.e. “reality” shows, or the occasional panel show or real-life event, other than Prime, showing the MacGyver remake.
Who in the 1980s would have predicted that MacGyver would be the only scripted series on air during prime-time here between 7.30 and 8.30 p.m.?
I realize the economics of television have changed, and there’s no such thing as a TVNZ drama department any more.
Shows which might have had the whole country watching would be lucky to pull in a quarter of the audience today.
But it is a sad reflection that the televised equivalent of the weekly gossip rag is what rates. The effort needed to produce quality drama is expensive, and not enough of us support it.
I also imagine scripted Hollywood shows are cheaper than British ones, hence what we see on our screens is Americanâand why some kids these days now speak with American accents. Yet to some New Zealanders, Chinese-language signs on Auckland high streets are a bigger threat to the local culture. Really?
In this household, we vote with our attention spansâand over the last month that has meant DVDs of Banacek and, in true 50 shades of Grade fashion, The Protectors. Sometimes, you feel it’s 1972 in this houseâbut at least the telly was better then.
I really enjoy Yakov Smirnoff’s old jokes about the Soviet Union, and the Russian reversal that is often associated with him. In the 21st century, I’ve used the odd one, such as, ‘In Russia, Olympics game you!’ and ‘In America, internet watch you!’. I’m sure I’ve done wittier ones, but I’ve yet to post, ‘In America, president Tweet you!’
Today on Twitter, Anton Troynikov, while not doing exactly the above, had a bunch of Tweets about how similar the USSR was to Silicon Valley today. Although he’s not pointing out opposites, it’s humour in the same spirit. In Tweeting, he outdid the few modernized Russian reversals I’ve used over the years.
Things that happen in Silicon Valley and also the Soviet Union:
– waiting years to receive a car you ordered, to find that it's of poor workmanship and quality
– promises of colonizing the solar system while you toil in drudgery day in, day out
Welcome to another of my âI told you they were dodgyâ posts. This time, itâs not about Facebook or Google (which, finally, are receiving the coverage that should have been metered out years ago), but Wikipedia.
The latest is on a Wikipedia editor called âPhilip Crossâ, a story which Craig Murray has been following on his blog.
Start with this one, where Murray notes that Cross has not had a single day off from editing Wikipedia between August 29, 2013 and May 14, 2018, including Christmas Days.
And this one.
Both note that Cross edits Wikipedia entries on antiwar and antiestablishment figures, making them more negative and stripping away the positive, and concerns raised by other Wikipedia editors amount to naught. Cross is known to be against the UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, and has devoted a lot of time to George Galloway’s page. However, he likes right-wing Times columnists Oliver Kamm and Melanie Phillips.
Matt Kennard Tweeted on May 12:
My wikipedia page is full of irrelevant and erroneous info but it is interesting that on the day I tweeted this https://t.co/fKTP7UYgft
'Phillip Cross' decided it was time to spend an hour editing my page https://t.co/OAUGGMfVfD
In other words, suggesting that someone play by the rules on Wikipedia will get you threatened with a ban from Wikipedia.
Now you get the idea, you can check out Murrayâs subsequent blog posts on the subject:
Whether you believe Philip Cross is one person or not, it highlights what Iâve said on this blog and formerly on Vox in the 2000s: that certain editors can scam their way to the top and not be questioned. I know first-hand that publicly criticizing Wikipedia could get me hate mail, as had happened last decade when I was subjected to days of email abuse from one senior editor based in Canada. That time I merely linked to a piece which talked about the dangers of Wikipedia and how some editors had scammed itâall that editor unwittingly did with her emails was confirm that position (no one says that all scammers are smart) and since then, observing Wikipedia has cemented it. Interestingly, both the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikipediaâs remaining co-founder Jimmy Wales are quick to defend Cross, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that âheâ is biased. Facebookâs idea of using Wikipedia to combat âfake newsâ is about as moronic a decision one can make.
Now that there are voices adding to my own, and on far more serious matters than non-existent cars, I can only hope people will, at the least, treat Wikipedia with caution. If you choose to stop donating to them, I wouldnât blame you.
Now that I’ve gone four days without a BSOD, it does appear Microsoft realized it had rolled out another lemon, and, nearly two months later, patched things. Goodness knows how many hours it has cost people worldwideâthe forums have a lot of people reporting BSODs (maybe it’s confirmation bias, but I really don’t remember this many, ever). I posted this in a discussion entitled âWindows 10 is a nightmare!’, and the comments there make for sobering reading. A small number have had to purchase new computers; others report that the OS has made their computers unusable or that countless hours were spent trying to fix things. I can believe it. My addition:
I have to concur with the original poster: Windows 10 has been, hands-down, the most shockingly unreliable OS ever made, by anyone, anywhere.
I have spent more time here for this OS than at any other time with Microsoft productsâand Windows 10 has been terrible from day one.
Most recently, I have had multiple BSODs per day since the fall Creators update was installed, and until Microsoft rolled out a patch at the end of January that finally fixed problems of its own making. If your computer is BSODing multiple times a day, with 800-plus events in the reliability monitor per week, then you can imagine how little work gets done. Things finally calmed down on February 2, when I received the cumulative update. You can see the thread for yourself here: I actually feel sorry for the MS tech who stepped in, because heâs solving problems a crap product with faults not of his own making. They wonât be bugs that are in his handbook. Looking at this part of the forum alone, BSOD comes up a lot in the subject lines, more than I ever remember. So it isnât us, Microsoft, itâs you.
Going right back to day one, I canât believe how many threads Iâm involved in. Windows 10 started up differently each day, as it would forget its own settings each day. Some days Cortana worked, other days it didnât. Sometimes I had the UK keyboard (which I had never once installed), other days the US. In November 2015 I had to post a queryto ask how many hours it would take for a Windows 10 machine to shut down. Thatâs right, hours. At least thatâs better than some of you who commented earlier who canât get yours to start up.
Initially, Cortana required fiddling with each day to get it to work. Notifications once went back in timeâon a Saturday I began getting notifications from the previous Thursday. None from Friday though, they all vanished. Windows began forgetting my default browser and default PDF application, and no, you couldnât fix either from the standard settings. The Anniversary update took 11 attempts to install on this PCâand one of them screwed things up so badly my PC was bricked and wound up at the shop, where I had to spend money to get it fixed urgently. (I joked at the time it was called Windows 10 because you needed more than 10 attempts to do anything.) It never installed on my laptop at all: by the time Creators spring came round, the one update that was compatible with my laptop, it had been through 40 unsuccessful update cycles.
Thereâs still more that I can share, and you can probably find it via my profile. I would add more but on the original reply I actually hit a limit on these boxes. I guess Microsoft has a limit to how much bad news it can take from one user.
Microsoft has actually changed its QC procedures for the worseâthat is a matter of recordâand youâd think after three years of abject failure they would switch back. We see the same hackneyed official responses here day in, day out. They need to spend more time getting things right before they ship their OSs, and spare their community people a lot of wasted hours with solutions that generally do not work. In my latest thread, I fixed itâyes, the tech helped a bit, but ultimately I had to listen to my gut and believe that MS had messed up. I was right, but wow, at a massive cost to my real job with days lost to being Microsoftâs unpaid technician.
It is good, however, to come out the other side (knock on wood)âand despite the countless hours spent, I was once again right, and conventional wisdom was wrong. I’m not sure if that’s something to be that proud of. A healthy mistrust of big firms stands one in good stead nevertheless, and remember, every industry has thick people making stuff.
Weâve had years of Google and Facebook acting like arses, but itâs disappointing to see Twitter give us more and more causes for concern.
In 2017, we saw them change their terms and conditions so speaking power to truth is no longer a requirement. You canât help but think that the decision to accommodate the US president is part of that: there is a policy within Twitter that President Trump is immune to their terms and conditions, and can Tweet with impunity what you and I would get kicked off for doing. We also saw Twitter, which is scrambling to show the US government that it is doing something about alleged Russian interference, kick off a privately developed bot that helped identify fake accounts. Youâd think that if Twitter were sincere about identifying fake accounts, it would embrace such technology.
One of my regular blog readers, Karen Tolfree, very kindly linked me a report from Hannity (which another friend later informed me was first revealed on Breitbart) which showed Twitter staff caught on video admitting to shadow-banning either because they disagreed with the userâs politics (with an admission that Twitter is 90 per cent US Democrat-leaning) or because of US government pressure (when discussing Julian Assangeâs account).
What was the old saying? I might not always agree with your politics but I will always defend to the hilt your right to express your views.
Therefore, I mightnât be President Trumpâs biggest fan but those who support him, and do so within the same rules that Iâm governed by on Twitter (e.g. not resorting to hate speech or attacking any individual or group), must have the same right to free speech as I should.
I do not wish them to be silenced because many of them have good reasons for their beliefs, and if I donât see them in my feed then how will I understand them? I donât wish to live in a bubble (meanwhile, Facebook and Google want you to; Facebookâs âcrowdsourcingâ its ranking of media sources is going to make things far worseâhave a look at Duck Duck Go founder Gabriel Weinberg’s series of Tweets at the end of this post).
Because you never know if Twitterâs shadow-banning is going to go after you, since, like Facebookâs false malware accusations, they could be indiscriminate.
In fact, two New Zealanders were shadow-banned over the last week: one with stated left-leaning views (Paul Le Comte), another (Cate Owen) who hasnât put her political leanings into her bio, and who was shadow-banned for reasons unknown. Itâs not just conservatives these guys go after, and neither was told just which Tweet netted them this âpunishmentâ.
I think itâs generally agreed that we have passed peak Twitter just as we have passed peak Facebook, but as itâs one of the original, mid-2000s social media services I still use, Iâm disappointed that I canât feel as happy being on there as I once did. After all, our presence is effectively our endorsement, and do we really endorse this sort of censorship against people because of either their politics, governmental pressure or reasons unknown? Twitter paints itself as a place where we can speak freely, provided we do so within certain rules, and the dick moves over the last 12 months make me wonder if itâs heading in the same direction as Google (tax-avoiding, hacking, lying about advertising tracking, allegedly pressuring think-tanks to fire someone over their viewpoints, biasing results in its own favour) and Facebook (forced downloads using the excuse of malware detection, kicking off drag queens and kings, tracking people after they have opted out, potential database issues that kick people off for days, endless bots and general ineffectiveness in removing them, lying about user numbers). Twitter always had bots and trolls, but weâre seeing what goes on inside nowadays, and it ainât pretty.
In 2018, we know Twitter is not a place for free speech, where rules apply differently depending on who you are, and where the identification of bots is not a priority.
And even though weâve had some happy news already this year (e.g. the prospect of Baby Clarcinda in five monthsâ time), these influential websites, whose actions and policies do affect us all, are âdoing it all wrongâ.
To be (more) clear, promoting trustworthy news sources is a reasonable idea.
Relying solely on crowdsourcing to determine trust, though, or making trust scores individualized, are both poor implementations that will create more negative unintended consequences.
I get that companies don't want to editorialize, but there are other paths than inscrutable algorithms, such as creating or working with independent non-partisan bodies to make the hard editorial decisions based on transparent and obviously measurable criteria.
Many years ago, I was locked out of Facebook for 69 hours. It was completely a Facebook database problem, but in those days, they just locked you out without any explanation. It happened on a Friday. I believed I would not get back in till Facebook staff got back to work on Mondayâand I was right. This is a company that seems to close down for the weekend, and the important techs don’t get back till afterwards. It also doesn’t understand the concept of time zones, as six years ago, Facebook walls stopped working on the 1st of each month in every time zone ahead of Pacific Standard Time.
As it’s the weekend before the Gregorian New Year, Facebook’s probably closed again, so if their databases mess up, you could be stuck till Monday. Maybe later.
Except these days, I believe they run another con altogether, as I explained in 2016.
The theory: they now shift the blame to their users, by saying their computers are infected with malware, and forcing a malware scanner download on us. No one knows what this scanner actually does, but I know first-hand that it wrecks your real anti-virus program. I know first-hand that when Facebook and its scanner providers (which once included Kaspersky) are questioned on it, they clam up or they delete comments. I also know for a fact that others can log in to their Facebook accounts on the same “infected” PCs. All this is in earlier posts.
Some affected users over the last few years have said that they could wait this out, and three days seem to be the standard period (though some were out for a month). That sounds awfully close to 69 hours, which I was out for in 2014.
If word got out that their databases were this fragile, their share price would tumble.
In a year when Apple has had to apologize for short battery life on their Iphones, and sexual predators in Hollywood got outed, maybe we could finish off 2017 with Facebook having to apologize for lying to its users about just what this scanner does. Because we also know that people who have legitimate malware scannersâincluding ones supplied by Facebook’s “partners”âhave usually reported their PCs were clean.
Today is the day of the perfect storm: if there is a big database outage at Facebook, it’s the weekend, and no one is around to fix it. For whatever reason, thousands of people have been receiving Facebook’s malware-scan message, telling them their computers are infected: today has seen the biggest spike ever in users getting this, beginning 14 hours ago.
In my two years following this bug, I haven’t noticed any real common thread between affected users.
With Facebook’s old bug, where walls stopped working on the 1st of each month, there was a particularly noticeable rise in reports on Getsatisfaction when 2011 ticked over to 2012âprobably because no one was at work at Facebook to switch 2011 over to 2012. (I wonder if it had to be done manually. It honestly wouldn’t surprise me.)
While some of this is admittedly guesswork, because none of the companies involved are saying a thing, there are just too many coincidences.
Let’s sum up again.
⢠When certain Facebook accounts died three to four years ago, you were locked out, and this took roughly three days to fix (in my case, I got hit at a weekend, so nothing happened till Monday after a Friday bug). These bugs were account-specific.
⢠On January 1, 2012, Facebook walls around the world stopped working and would not show any entries from the new dayâtill it became January 1, 2012 in California, 21 hours behind the first group of people affected. It seems there is some manual tinkering that needs to go on with Facebook.
⢠Today, Facebook accuses people of having malware on their systems and demands they download a scanner. Yet we also know that others can log in to their Facebook accounts on the same “infected” machines. Conclusion: those computers are probably not infected as the lock-outs are account-specific. If it’s account-specific, then that leads me to believe it’s a database relating to that person.
⢠When people refuse to download Facebook’s scanner, many of their accounts come back online afterâyou guessed itâthree days. Ergo, they were probably never infected: Facebook lied to them.
⢠Those that do download the scanner cannot find it in their installed programs’ lists. Neither Facebook nor their scanner partners have ever come clean about what this program actually does or why it needs to reside in a hidden directory on Windows.
⢠It is December 30, 2017, and it’s a weekend, and there’s a spike in users getting this warning. It began, noticeably, 14 hours ago. It’s very hard to believe so many got infected at the same time by the same bug: even a regular virus, or the real malware that gets spread through Facebook, doesn’t have this pattern. It all points back to something happening on Facebook. My reckoning is that this won’t be fixed till January 1, 2018 or afterwards.
⢠Facebook is the home of fake accountsâit’s very easy to find bots and spammers. Logically, if resources are used to host the bots, then that means fewer resources for the rest of us, and potential database problems.
If you are stuck, I recommend you read the postscripts and relevant comments to my earlier posts: here and here.
