If Twitter can’t recognize a problem account when it is pointed out
to them, how can they identify any similar accounts?
Twitter
suspends accounts linked to mail bomb suspect
At least two
Twitter accounts linked to the man suspected of sending explosive
devices to more than a dozen prominent Democrats were suspended on
Friday afternoon.
… In one case, those threats had been
previously reported to Twitter. Democratic commentator Rochelle
Ritchie tweeted that she reported a tweet from @hardrock2016
following her appearance on Fox News. According to a screenshot,
Twitter received the report and on October 11 responded that it found
“no violation of the Twitter rules against abusive behavior.”
The tweet stated “We will see u 4 sure. Hug your
loved ones real close every time you leave home” accompanied by a
photo of Ritchie, a screenshot of a news story about a body found in
the Everglades and the tarot card representing death.
Update: Twitter issued an apology
for not dealing with Ritchie’s initial report.
(Related) Twitter-like social media for Wackos?
Who monitors these?
The
Pittsburgh Suspect’s Internet of Hate
Robert Bowers was an
avid user of Gab, a social network popular among white nationalists
and the alt-right.
… Bowers didn’t make his anti-semitic
statements on Twitter or Facebook or even Reddit, but rather on a
small social network called Gab. It was founded in 2016 as an
alternative to Twitter and other large social platforms, and indeed
looks and operates similarly to Twitter, allowing users to follow and
reply to each other, and to reshare short status updates.
But while Twitter, Facebook, and other mainstream
social networks abide by ever-evolving sets of community standards,
Gab allows
users to say pretty much anything they want. Andrew Torba, the
Silicon Valley Trump supporter who created it, said that he wanted to
offer an alternative to mainstream social networks which he and
others feel are biased against conservatives.
Before I forget, here are some GDPR resources
mentioned in Friday’s Privacy Foundation seminar.
GDPR Recitals
https://gdpr-info.eu/
Information
Commissioner’s Office https://ico.org.uk/
Perspective. The pendulum swings…
The Digital
Gap Between Rich and Poor Kids Is Not What We Expected
… For the last six months, at night in school
libraries across Overland Park, a suburb of Kansas City, Mo., about
150 parents have been meeting to talk about one thing: how to get
their kids off screens.
It wasn’t long
ago that the worry was that rich students would have access to
the internet earlier, gaining tech skills and creating a digital
divide. Schools ask students to do homework online, while only about
two-thirds of people in the U.S. have broadband internet service.
But now, as Silicon Valley’s parents increasingly panic over the
impact screens have on their children and move toward screen-free
lifestyles, worries over a new digital divide are rising. It
could happen that the children of poorer and middle-class parents
will be raised by screens, while the children of Silicon Valley’s
elite will be going back to wooden toys and the luxury of human
interaction.
(Related)
GATINEAU, QC, Oct. 26, 2018 /CNW/ – Privacy
commissioners from around the world are urging educational
authorities and developers of e-learning platforms to better protect
the privacy of students, who increasingly use e-learning platforms in
the classroom.
Privacy Commissioner of Canada Daniel Therrien and
his international counterparts have adopted a resolution
on e-learning platforms in Brussels, Belgium at the 40th
International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy
Commissioners.
“E-learning platforms are powerful tools that
help teachers teach and students learn, but they come with the
inherent risk that personal information could potentially be used
inappropriately,” Commissioner Therrien says.
… The federal Privacy Commissioner’s office
also co-sponsored two other
resolutions at the international conference — on ethics and
artificial intelligence as well as on digital citizens and consumer
protection.
Perspective.
Cloud
Giants Continue Pouring Billions Into Data Centers
Even though there are indications that overall
cloud data center spend may be slowing down, the biggest cloud
providers continue spending billions to expand their platforms’
physical scale.
Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet all reported their
earnings for the quarter ended September 30 this week, and all three
said they invested a ton of money in data centers during the quarter.
They don’t report the exact amounts they spend on data centers –
usually lumping that number with spending on other things – but
it’s safe to say that data centers represent the bulk of the bucket
they're in.
… Google’s parent Alphabet, for example,
spent close to $5.6 billion on “production equipment, data center
construction, and facilities” during the quarter, Alphabet CFO Ruth
Porat said on an earnings call Thursday.
… Amazon, the leader of the cloud pack,
reports its data center spend as part of a capital leases bucket,
whose size during the quarter was $2.33 billion.
(Related) Perhaps this is being run by the folks
who build Denvers’s $328 Million $1.73 Billion VA
Hospital.
Washington
Veterans Are Unconvinced A New $10 Billion Computer System Will
Actually Improve VA Service
… “So what we are doing here in Washington,
we are testing out the medical health records, which is the
largest program the VA has ever undertaken,” Wilkie said
at the Fairchild event organized by U.S. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers.
“That will be the template for the entire country.”
But the system designed by Kansas City,
Missouri-based Cerner Corp. has gone anything but smoothly under a
similar contract for the U.S. Department of Defense. The same
computer system, called Medical Healthcare System GENESIS, is being
installed under a separate contract at four military bases in
Washington state, including Fairchild.
According to an April
30 DOD report, military personnel trying to install the health
care system had a litany of problems that caused them to shut the
testing down.
“MHS Genesis is not operationally effective
because it does not demonstrate enough workable functionality to
manage and document patient care,” the report states. Users were
only able to perform “56 percent of the 197 tasks used as measures
of performance.”
God Bless Our Troops! (Call the Guinness book of
world records!)
US Troops
Deploy ‘Overwhelming Force’ Against Iceland’s Beer Supplies
U.S. troops landed
in Iceland last week ahead of the start the largest
NATO military exercise since the Cold War, and apparently, they
left their mark in the most appropriate way possible: by drinking
every last beer in the nation’s capital.
A significant number of bars in downtown Reykjavík
were forced to make emergency beer runs under the onslaught of
thirsty American sailors and Marines in town for the start of Trident
Juncture 18, Iceland Magazine reports.
Local media estimate that 6,000 and 7,000 U.S.
military personnel exhausted beer cellars across the Icelandic
capital in the span of a single weekend.
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