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Martian Headsets - When the Problems with Standards Becomes the Standard Itself | Joel ... - 0 views

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    Joel takes on the difficult issues of standards and vendor specific implementations. This is a classic!
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The WHATWG Blog » Blog Archive » The Road to HTML 5: character encoding - 0 views

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    To sum up: character encoding is complicated, and it has not been made any easier by several decades of poorly written software used by copy-and-paste-educated authors. You should always specify a character encoding on every HTML document, or bad things will happen. You can do it the hard way (HTTP Content-Type header), the easy way ( declaration), or the new way ( attribute), but please do it. The web thanks you. Good post, lots of links to other "MUST READ" commentaries and explanations of character encoding. Including Joel Spolsky and Tim Bray.
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The Tyranny of the Market | Joel Waldfogel | Harvard University Press - 0 views

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    Economists have long counseled reliance on markets rather than on government to decide a wide range of questions, in part because allocation through voting can give rise to a... [# probably, 'government regulation' is much better than leaving broadband's 'shape' subject to the 'Tyranny of The Market'...]
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    Economists have long counseled reliance on markets rather than on government to decide a wide range of questions, in part because allocation through voting can give rise to a
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Review: Graylog delivers open source log management for the dedicated do-it-yourselfer ... - 0 views

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    "By Joel Snyder Network World | Nov 9, 2015 3:06 AM PT RELATED TOPICS Open Source Subnet Network Management System Management Comments In most big security breaches, there's a familiar thread: something funny was going on, but no one noticed. The information was in the logs, but no one was looking for it. Logs from the hundreds or thousands of network devices are the secret sauce to problem solving, security alerting, and performance and capacity management. Gathering logs together, analyzing them, "
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The Failure Of Social Media | Six Pixels of Separation - Marketing and Communications B... - 0 views

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    "Social Media doesn't work for the vast majority of small businesses. That was the main message in the USA Today article titled, Study: Social media a bust for small businesses, published on April 17th, 2013. From the news item: "About 61% of small businesses don't see any return on investment on their social-media activities, according to a survey released Tuesday from Manta, a social network for small businesses. Yet, almost 50% say they've increased their time spent on social media, and only 7% have decreased their time. What businesses are trying to get out of social media: 36% said their goal was to acquire and engage new customers, 19% said to gain leads and referrals, and 17% said to boost awareness. Facebook was most cited as the hardest to maintain social-media platform, according to the survey." There is a big lesson in this data..."
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Information Warfare: Automated Propaganda and Social Media Bots | Global Research - 0 views

  • NATO has announced that it is launching an “information war” against Russia. The UK publicly announced a battalion of keyboard warriors to spread disinformation. It’s well-documented that the West has long used false propaganda to sway public opinion. Western military and intelligence services manipulate social media to counter criticism of Western policies. Such manipulation includes flooding social media with comments supporting the government and large corporations, using armies of sock puppets, i.e. fake social media identities. See this, this, this, this and this. In 2013, the American Congress repealed the formal ban against the deployment of propaganda against U.S. citizens living on American soil. So there’s even less to constrain propaganda than before.
  • Information warfare for propaganda purposes also includes: The Pentagon, Federal Reserve and other government entities using software to track discussion of political issues … to try to nip dissent in the bud before it goes viral “Controlling, infiltrating, manipulating and warping” online discourse Use of artificial intelligence programs to try to predict how people will react to propaganda
  • Some of the propaganda is spread by software programs. We pointed out 6 years ago that people were writing scripts to censor hard-hitting information from social media. One of America’s top cyber-propagandists – former high-level military information officer Joel Harding – wrote in December: I was in a discussion today about information being used in social media as a possible weapon.  The people I was talking with have a tool which scrapes social media sites, gauges their sentiment and gives the user the opportunity to automatically generate a persuasive response. Their tool is called a “Social Networking Influence Engine”. *** The implications seem to be profound for the information environment. *** The people who own this tool are in the civilian world and don’t even remotely touch the defense sector, so getting approval from the US Department of State might not even occur to them.
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  • How Can This Real? Gizmodo reported in 2010: Software developer Nigel Leck got tired rehashing the same 140-character arguments against climate change deniers, so he programmed a bot that does the work for him. With citations! Leck’s bot, @AI_AGW, doesn’t just respond to arguments directed at Leck himself, it goes out and picks fights. Every five minutes it trawls Twitter for terms and phrases that commonly crop up in Tweets that refute human-caused climate change. It then searches its database of hundreds to find a counter-argument best suited for that tweet—usually a quick statement and a link to a scientific source. As can be the case with these sorts of things, many of the deniers don’t know they’ve been targeted by a robot and engage AI_AGW in debate. The bot will continue to fire back canned responses that best fit the interlocutor’s line of debate—Leck says this goes on for days, in some cases—and the bot’s been outfitted with a number of responses on the topic of religion, where the arguments unsurprisingly often end up. Technology has come a long way in the past 5 years. So if a lone programmer could do this 5 years ago, imagine what he could do now. And the big players have a lot more resources at their disposal than a lone climate activist/software developer does.  For example, a government expert told the Washington Post that the government “quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type” (and see this).  So if the lone programmer is doing it, it’s not unreasonable to assume that the big boys are widely doing it.
  • How Effective Are Automated Comments? Unfortunately, this is more effective than you might assume … Specifically, scientists have shown that name-calling and swearing breaks down people’s ability to think rationally … and intentionally sowing discord and posting junk comments to push down insightful comments  are common propaganda techniques. Indeed, an automated program need not even be that sophisticated … it can copy a couple of words from the main post or a comment, and then spew back one or more radioactive labels such as “terrorist”, “commie”, “Russia-lover”, “wimp”, “fascist”, “loser”, “traitor”, “conspiratard”, etc. Given that Harding and his compadres consider anyone who questions any U.S. policies as an enemy of the state  – as does the Obama administration (and see this) – many honest, patriotic writers and commenters may be targeted for automated propaganda comments.
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