2024-06-26
etc
-
What everyone gets wrong about the 2015 Ashley Madison scandal | New Scientist
Ashley Madison is now owned by Ruby Life and bills itself as a spicy dating site for married people. But back then, it marketed itself as a social networking site for men seeking affairs with women. In late 2015, a group calling itself Impact Team got angry at the site and hacked into its servers. The group grabbed a bunch of user data and code, then posted it on Reddit with the claim that 95 per cent of the people on the site were men. I was intrigued. How could all those men be having affairs, if there were virtually no women on the site? With the help of two hackers and a database expert, I decided to find out. What I discovered was a bizarre scam – though it was far more like Westworld than US reality show Cheaters. The company had systematically created an army of fake women, mostly very simple chatbots called engagers, who would flirt with men to lure them into paying for a subscription to the site. As I wrote in 2015, “it’s like a science fictional future where every woman on Earth is dead, and some Dilbert-like engineer has replaced them with badly-designed robots”. Back then, I repeatedly contacted Avid Life Media for comment, but it wouldn’t reply.
As we pored over the code, we found that, although there were a few human women on the site, more than 11 million interactions logged in the database were between human men and female bots. And the men had to pay for every single message they sent. For most of their millions of users, Ashley Madison affairs were entirely a fantasy built out of threadbare chatbot pick-up lines like “how r u?” or “whats up?” There were real women behind the curtain, though. We found company emails in the data dump and discovered that Avid Life Media was also paying a small number of workers to generate fake profiles for more than 70,000 engager bots.
-
The Chinese-funded and staffed marijuana farms springing up across the US
-
(Video) Bridge collapses amid flooding in US Midwest
A railroad bridge between South Dakota and Iowa has collapsed due to severe flooding, illustrating the extensive impact of the recent heavy rains across the Midwest.
-
New research shows why you don’t need to be perfect to get the job done.
-
What It's Like Trying to Work from Home After a Snake Pops Out of Your Drain
Horseshit
-
'It's been hell': injured Amazon workers turn to GoFundMe to pay bills
-
The Story Behind the American Wine Crisis | SevenFifty Daily
The crisis of diminishing wine consumption isn’t relegated solely to the U.S. market and its domestic wine industry. The OIV State of the World Vine and Wine Sector in 2023 reports that worldwide wine consumption declined 2.6 percent compared to 2022. In the U.S., it dipped three percent, while Europe saw a 1.8 percent decrease. This report attributes the global decline to several factors, including a decrease in China’s consumption, inflation, geopolitical tensions due to the conflict in Ukraine, and disruptions in the global supply chain that led to surges in production costs and price increases for consumers. “It’s not just us,” confirms Tacoma, Washington-based wine economist Mike Veseth. “Inflation has risen around the world in all of the major consumer countries, and wine isn’t an absolute necessity.”
-
Taxing super-rich debate should start with 2% levy, says economist behind plan
-
Online is where we most need the cues idiosyncratic language used to provide
-
Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews
Electric / Self Driving cars
celebrity gossip
-
Michael Palin Suggests That 'Few' People Remember Monty Python
While chatting about Palin’s travel career, which includes a recent two-part documentary about North Korea, host Susanna Reid told her guest, “You're best known for Monty Python, of course, but I wonder whether that's true now.” To which Palin countered: “Well, there are really very few people still around to remember Monty Python I think,” before adding, “John Cleese is still around actually.”
-
Why is Julian Assange flying to the remote Pacific island of Saipan?
-
Julian Assange has reached a plea deal with the U.S., allowing him to go free | Hacker News
-
Midnight Society cuts ties with Dr Disrespect following Twitch ban allegations
Deadrop developers Midnight Society have "terminated" their relationship with studio co-founder and celebrity streamer Herschel "Guy" Beahm, aka "Dr Disrespect", over fresh allegations about the reasons for his infamous Twitch ban in 2020. At the time of the ban, which came just a few months after Beahm and Twitch announced a two-year exclusivity contract, Twitch commented only that Beahm had been jettisoned for acting "in violation of our Community Guidelines". Beahm himself described the move as "a total shock" in a later conversation with the Washington Post. In August 2021, he took Twitch to court over the ban, but the dispute was eventually settled with neither party admitting any wrongdoing. Last week, however, former Twitch strategic partnerships account director Cody Conners alleged in a Xitter post that an unnamed person "got banned because [he] got caught sexting a minor in the then existing Twitch Whispers product. He was trying to meet up with her at TwitchCon. The powers that be could read in plain text. Case closed, gang." (Twitch Whispers is a now-retired private 1-to-1 messaging service.) According to two anonymous former Twitch employees cited by the Verge in a subsequent investigation - one of whom worked on Twitch's trust and safety team at the time of the ban - the unnamed person in question was Beahm.
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
-
In 2020, the Stanford Internet Observatory, where I was until recently the research director, helped lead a project that studied election rumors and disinformation. As part of that work, we frequently encountered conspiratorial thinking from Americans who had been told the 2020 presidential election was going to be stolen. The way theories of “the steal” went viral was eerily routine. First, an image or video, such as a photo of a suitcase near a polling place, was posted as evidence of wrongdoing. The poster would tweet the purported evidence, tagging partisan influencers or media accounts with large followings. Those accounts would promote the rumor, often claiming, “Big if true!” Others would join and the algorithms would push it out to potentially millions more. Partisan media would follow. If the rumor was found to be false — and it usually was — corrections were rarely made and even then, little noticed. The belief that “the steal” was real led directly to the events of Jan. 6, 2021. Within a couple of years, the same online rumor mill turned its attention to us — the very researchers who documented it. This spells trouble for the 2024 election.
Trump / War against the Right / Jan6
-
Evidence of political bias in English-language Wikipedia articles
-
Manhattan Institute raised –$200M to wage its war on "wokeness" (Archive)
Over the past decade, business figures led by hedge-fund billionaire Paul Singer have poured nearly $200 million into a New York think tank that’s now projecting its own vision for Trump’s America. Powered by wealthy donors, the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research has become an intellectual staging ground for the American right. One head-spinning result: a growing number of Republican statehouses are effectively outsourcing the job of drafting laws about race and gender to policy wonks centered in Manhattan, where Democrats outnumber Republicans 10:1.
-
Trump's company is valued 'absurdly out of the realm of normal' billionaire says
-
Former NPR Editor Passes the Audition, Joins Bari Weiss’ Free Press
Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
-
Clarification On "Fake Tradition Is Traditional"
I was critiquing Sam Kriss’ claim that the best traditions come from “just doing stuff”, without trying to tie things back to anything in the past. The counterexample I was thinking of was all the 2010s New Atheist attempts to reinvent “church, but secular”. These were well-intentioned. Christians get lots of benefits from going to church, like a good community. These benefits don’t seem obviously dependent on the religious nature. So instead of tying your weekly meeting back to what Jesus and St. Peter and so on said two thousand years ago, why not “just do stuff” and have a secular weekly meeting? Most of these attempts fell apart. One of them, the Sunday Assembly, clings to existence but doesn’t seem too successful. People with ancient traditions 1, people who just do stuff 0.
But after thinking about it more, maybe this isn’t what Sam means. Arches and columns are iconic architectural features. But they were originally invented by people just trying to figure out how to efficiently support buildings (columns might have started as tree trunks, and only later been translated into stone). Likewise, gargoyles are whimsical and exciting, but they started life as utilitarian rainspouts that gradually became more ornamented and fanciful.
-
A Huguenot philosopher realised that atheists could be virtuous
-
Most of the programs that are most beneficial to racial equality are universal
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
-
Scientific American calls for federal regulation of homeschool families - Must Read Alaska
“This number, calculated from a nationwide survey, is surely an undercount because the homeschooling population is notoriously hard to survey, and more children have been homeschooled since the COVID pandemic began. Eleven states do not require parents to inform anyone that they are homeschooling a child, and in most of the country, once a child has exited the traditional schoolroom environment, no one checks to ensure they are receiving an education at all,” Scientific American says.
-
Unschooling Is the Parenting Trend That's Pissing Everyone Off
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
TechSuck / Geek Bait
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
Economicon / Business / Finance
-
Yellen announces $100 million affordable housing fund as shelter costs weigh on Biden.
-
Intel investor sues over Foundry flop, seeks to reforge corporate governance
-
There Are 63 'Problem Banks' and $517B in Unrealized Losses: FDIC
-
'Months to correct, if not years': Car dealerships impacted as CDK outage drags
-
What’s happening? America’s non-farm payroll numbers, via the Establishment Survey, suggest relentless job creation — it reported 272k new jobs in May. The Household Survey data implies employment is slowly trending down, last month it registered a 408k drop. Both surveys have different samples and scopes so differences are to be expected, the problem is that their current trajectories tell different stories.
It is possible that the household survey has been unable to fully account for the large inflow of foreign workers into the US in recent years (which may have been easier to capture in employer surveys for the NFP). Higher estimates of immigration bridge a considerable amount of the remaining difference between the two series, according to Quaedvlieg.
-
Nvidia sees around £339B wiped off market value in three-day sell-off
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
-
The Vindication of Dobbs After Two Years - WSJ
Democrats are loudly bemoaning the second anniversary of the Supreme Court’s ruling overturning Roe v. Wade this week, and that’s because they think abortion rights will help them politically. Yet that political frenzy is actually a vindication of the Court’s 6-3 Dobbs decision and Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion. The Dobbs decision, which returned abortion policy to the states and the voters, was correct as a matter of constitutional law. It overturned what even liberal jurists in 1973 and since recognized was one of the High Court’s worst decisions. Justice Alito wrote that he had no idea how the voters would sort out the issue, but two years later it’s clear that Dobbs is letting democracy work. Despite the left’s predictions, the fall of Roe hasn’t ushered in a “Handmaid’s Tale” dystopia. Some conservative states have restricted many or most abortions, while some liberal states have moved to become sanctuaries.
-
As millions struggle with home prices, housing becomes a top issue for voters
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
-
The Mystery of AI Gunshot-Detection Accuracy Is Finally Unraveling | WIRED
For two decades, cities around the country have used automated gunshot detection systems to quickly dispatch police to the scenes of suspected shootings. But reliable data about the accuracy of the systems and how frequently they raise false alarms has been difficult, if not impossible, for the public to find. San Jose, which has taken a leading role in defining responsible government use of AI systems, appears to be the only city that requires its police department to disclose accuracy data for its gunshot detection system. The report it released on May 31 marks the first time it has published that information.
The false-positive rate is of particular concern to communities of color, some of whom fear that gunshot detection systems are unnecessarily sending police into neighborhoods expecting gunfire. Nonwhite Americans are more often subjected to surveillance by the systems and are disproportionately killed in interactions with police. “For us, any interaction with police is a potentially dangerous one,” says Gonzalez, an organizer with Silicon Valley De-Bug, a community advocacy group based in San Jose.
-
US prosecutors recommend Justice Dept. criminally charge Boeing
-
Detroit is banning gas stations from locking customers inside
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
World
China
Health / Medicine
-
It's Getting Harder to Die by Lydia S. Dugdale
work in one of the most technologically sophisticated hospitals in the world; I am not anti-tech or anti-hospital. But when it comes to dying, my preference is for low-tech and at home. This assumes, of course, that either I’m very old, or I have a medical condition or set of problems that suggest death is relatively imminent. But this raises two related questions: First, how do we know how old is old enough to forgo life-sustaining therapies? And second, how do we know when death is imminent?
-
Mail-Order Drugs Were Supposed to Keep Costs Down. It's Doing the Opposite
-
Popular Obesity Drugs Show the Divide Between 'The Haves and the Have-Nots'
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
-
Widely Used and Deemed Safe, These Food Additives Are More Harmful Than Thought
-
Tipping point in ice-sheet grounding-zone melting due to ocean water intrusion
-
Rising sea levels will disrupt Americans' lives by 2050, study finds
-
The scariest thing about climate change? Global cooling. - The Washington Post
fewer people know that burning fossil fuels doesn’t just cause global warming — it also causes global cooling. It is one of the great ironies of climate change that air pollution, which has killed tens of millions, has also curbed some of the worst effects of a warming planet. Tiny particles from the combustion of coal, oil and gas can reflect sunlight and spur the formation of clouds, shading the planet from the sun’s rays. Since the 1980s, those particles have offset between 40 and 80 percent of the warming caused by greenhouse gases. And now, as society cleans up pollution, that cooling effect is waning. New regulations have cut the amount of sulfur aerosols from global shipping traffic across the oceans; China, fighting its own air pollution problem, has slashed sulfur pollution dramatically in the last decade. The result is even warmer temperatures — but exactly how much warmer is still under debate. The answer will have lasting impacts on humanity’s ability to meet its climate goals.
-
Why are gray whales swimming into San Francisco Bay in increasing numbers?
-
86F UK weather: Hottest day of the year as temperatures hit 30C