THE WEEKENDER-YOUR PROFILE

WHO ARE YOU?

WE KNOW.

    Frequent readers may recall my cautionary concerns about the surrender of information autonomy to convenience, communication and the aggregating power of algorithms.

    As an aside in this battle, I'd prefer to write the word, rather than have the spell check, auto write function fill in or begin to assume the word I wish to say. But this is the age of information warfare and collateral damage comes in many forms, so we all soldier on. Hopefully, wisely.

    Well, this is The Weekender and we try to keep the mood light and entertaining, so it is in that vein we bring you this video beware.  It's a pitch, but the message makes sense.

A PARTING BITE

A leftover of sorts-an image in this case-from a

Friday Lunch Flash Mob treat.

A Hearst Ranch all beef foot-long hotdog, Sebastian style.

Have a great weekend. See you down the trail.

DID TWITTER COMMIT SUICIDE? & BIG KIDS AT RECESS

NEWS FROM THE FRONT LINE

OF THE INFORMATION WARS

It's probably a result of my decades in journalism,

broadcasting and documentary production,

but I'm super sensitive when there are 

rumblings in the "force," that is

communications and information flow.
Veteran readers may recall a couple of 
posts that shook up a few people-
Posting (link here) about the convenience of algorithms and a kind of "thought control."  
Or about the danger of cyber crime
Read the post by linking here.
Now a new battle line has been drawn.
Here's the Forbes blog on what has set off many recriminations.


Twitter Commits Social Suicide
By Mark Gibbs, Forbes
27 January 12
Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country - while keeping it available in the rest of the world. We have also built in a way to communicate transparently to users when content is withheld, and why.
ith those words earlier today, in a blog posting titled "Tweets still must flow" the management ofTwitter's went over to the dark side and may well have dug their own grave
In what can only have been a fit of corporate insanity, Twitter announced that it has the ability to filter tweets to conform to the demands of various countries.
Thus, in France and Germany it is illegal to broadcast pro-Nazi sentiments and Twitter will presumably be able to block such content and inform the poster why it was blocke
Quite obviously, Twitter's management believes that there is some kind of value in being able to filter in this way but given that, over the course of 2011, the number of tweets per second (tps) ranged from a high of almost 9,000 tps down to just under 4,000 tps, any filtering has got to be computer-driven.
So, consider this tweet:
@FactsorDie Nazi Germany led the first public anti-smoking campaign.
Could that be considered to be pro-Nazi? How will a program accurately make that determination?
What concerns me is that if the algorithm Twitter uses registers a false positive (i.e. determines that the tweet is pro-Nazi when it isn't) and the tweet has any time sensitivity to it then that attribute will be completely nullified by the time the tweet makes it out of tweet-jail if it ever does.
On the other hand if the software makes a false negative (i.e. determines that the tweet is NOT pro-Nazi when it is) then the filtering is useless and Twitter will be held accountable by every political group with an axe to grind.
Now it might be argued that some percentage of false positives or false negatives will be acceptable but what is that percentage? 0.0000o01%? That equates, at a minimum of 4,000tps, to 3,456 misclassified tweets per day or 1,261,440 per year!
And will the filtering software be able to detect irony and sarcasm? I rather doubt it.
And what about the fact that Twitter will be implicitly editing all tweets? Doesn't that attract legal issues in that they are taking on an editorial responsibility and therefore become a lightning rod for lawsuits?
I see Twitter's management having made a huge epic, mistake. In trying to appease the demands of political pressure they've dug themselves a huge hole that they won't be able to climb out of. The mere fact that they have published a blog posting claiming that they can filter seals their fate.
I really like Twitter; it's a unique and amazingly rich social platform but Twitter's management may have just diminished if not wiped out their edge and their global relevance.
You can't service all of humanity if you allow the needs of politics to triumph over the needs of the people. And if you can't service all of humanity, what is your relevance?

What do you think?
It is certainly a different world from when most information flowed from major news gathering organizations dedicated to the proposition of the public's right to know and adamant about the First Amendment. That was of course a time before news organizations were expected to be profit centers and before mergers and group ownership of once competing media.  And certainly before the sophistication of data mining and social media.


DAY BOOK
ANOTHER FLASH MOB BIRTHDAY 
AND THE OLD SCHOOL HOUSE GETS A NEW CUPOLA.

The historic San Simeon school has been spiffed up.

While the Friday Lunch Flash Mob has grown to 4 tables.

 With the tradition of a candle in the chocolate chip cookie continues.

It's like big kids at recess!
See you down the trail.

INFORMATION WARS

BATTLE LINES IN THE BRAVE NEW WORLD

A chasm sized absence has been launched as a defensive weapon in a profound and historic battle today.

Wikipedia has gone dark.

Link here for the Wikipedia rationale.

In summary a battle of giants is raging-

entertainment powerhouses of television, music and film versus Internet, tech and new media icons.

The focus is SOPA and PIPA-legislation designed 

to stop piracy and protect intellectual property rights.

Production companies, film makers, musicians and television networks want to stop uncompensated use of 

their material, primarily by foreign (outside the US)

web sites.  Google, Wikipedia, Facebook and other

cyber powers argue the legislation is poorly drafted

and will infringe upon free communication,

search, and the unfettered brave new world

of the Internet. Our parents would consider

this the stuff of science fiction, but information

wars are our reality. 

When I was ceo of a media and content production 

company I watched as some of our product was

pirated. It is theft, pure and simple.

Yet as we know the cure can sometimes be worse than

the disease and that is point of today's world wide

protest.

Many in the tech industry fear the legislation will

give too much power to the networks and film studios.

This is, as one account called it, a coming of age for

the world of tech, new media and the Internet.

A kind of wild west where anything that works, goes

is now faced with old fashioned power politics.

It is an historic battle and today's disappearance of

Wikipedia and other messages is an escalation.

DAY BOOK

MY OWN TECH EXPERIMENT

Today's study of the Cayucos pier is

from my smart phone, via e-mail.

Carry on cyber warriors.

See you down the trail.

CYBER vs. REAL-BEWARE

WHEN DOES ONE CROSS A LINE

THE AGE OF INFO WARS

***A RECENT SLATE FRONT PAGE***

Second "Lesbian" Blogger Turns Out To Be a Man Editor of Lez Get Real outs himself as a retired military man from Ohio. READ FULL STORY

Cyber Vandals Breach Senate Website Same group that hacked PBS claiming Tupac is alive takes on the government. READ FULL STORY This front page from SLATE struck me as a reminder of the precarious nature of our communication and information systems. Even the CIA's web site has been hacked. Credibility and security are at risk.  They will continue to be so, it seems, for as long as we build our social structure around cyber communication. There are no safeguards.  As we do with blogs, I followed a link from the  SLATE piece to a well articulated set of thoughts from Brian Spears. THIS POST-A NOTE TO MY FELLOW WHITE MALES MAKES SOME OUTSTANDING POINTS. LINK HERE What Brian wrote prompted me to write a response.   "Fiction is just that.  Journalism is an approximation of truth  build on a foundation of facts. The blogsophere is  full of both and hybrids. Credibility remains the currency of journalism.  Notice or self expression may well be the fuel of bloggers.  These are mostly divergent cultures, but they aggregate n this cyber gumbo that we inhabit. Years ago I posed a question to a network executive for  whom I was developing a project:  at what point do the ethics of the cyber world begin to alter our sense of justice in the "real world?"  Random mayhem in gaming, serial  killing, explicit violence, explicit sexuality and false persona in the cyber world are permitted.  At what point does a social tolerance of such a recreational behavior begin to sew genuine social consequences?  It was an odd question to post to a network executive who went on to preside over what we call "reality" television. The post points the effect.  Anthony Wiener is living through another repercussion.  One may feel a cloak of protection or privacy while feeding the blogosphere with any manner of fantasy, lunacy or "creativity."  It is not illegal to do so, yet. Whether it is right or wrong is for someone else to reason.  It does however have consequence and indeed could be more serious or even lethal than a lone writer, wrapped in their own reality may have the intelligence or common sense to realize."  The old adage is true-Buyer beware, especially in this age of  information wars. We would add to that the modern admonition-   Read with care. "You should read only what is truly good or what is frankly bad." Gertrude Stein-quoted by Hemingway in A MOVEABLE FEAST There are efforts underway on the security front. LINK HERE TO READ OF A NOVEL APPROACH TO NET SECURITY BEING DEVELOPED BY A GROUP OF NEW YORK STUDENTS. DAY BOOK ARCHIVE SHOTS See you down the trail.