The British army is creating a special force of Facebook warriors, skilled in psychological operations and use of social media to engage in unconventional warfare in the information age.
The unit, which is quite substantial — 1500-strong — will formally come into being in April. The Guardian story provides some interesting background to the announcement:
The move is partly a result of experience in counter-insurgency operations in Afghanistan. It can also be seen as a response to events of the last year that include Russia’s actions in Ukraine, in particular Crimea, and Islamic State’s (Isis) takeover of large swaths of Syria and Iraq.
Nato has so far been unable to find a counter to what the US and UK claim is Russia creating unrest by sending in regular troops disguised as local militia, allowing president Vladimir Putin to deny responsibility. Isis has proved adept at exploiting social media to attract fighters from around the world.
Category: Ignorant or unreasonable
Texas School Overreaction
Seems that a Texas school has suspended a 9-year-old for threatening another student with a replica One Ring. (Yes, that One Ring.)
Pirate Site’s Deal With Police Backfires Massively
In the wake of The Pirate Bay raid in December, Swedish police intensified their focus on one of the country’s top streaming portals, Dreamfilm.se. The site had been growing in popularity for some time but it appears that in recent weeks police had been homing in.
Early January everything seemed fairly normal when the site ran a promotion offering 100 movie tickets to fans who shared the picture below on Facebook. Plenty of people participated.
On January 14 the site published the Facebook links of 100 winners and requested that they send in their names and addresses to claim their prizes. But just a few weeks later and it’s now all over for Dreamfilm.“After an administrator was detained and interrogated, it has been mutually agreed that dreamfilm.se will be shut down for good,” the site reveals in a statement.
“The police gave us an ultimatum, to shut down the site and be free, or to keep it online and be detained again.”
It seems that after an extended period trying to close the site, the authorities finally had the upper hand.
“Following controversial interrogation methods it was decided that the site and everything to do with it will be shut down for good. With this, all other administrators decided to resign altogether from the site’s operations with immediate effect,” the site’s operators add.
Thanking users for their dedication over the years, the admins bid farewell to the site and its members. Well, sort of…..
It appears that while some of the site’s admins agreed to close down the site, others did not give the police the same undertakings. They have now broken ranks and created a brand new venture. Today, DreamFilm.se is dead but DreamFilmHD.com lives on in its predecessor’s form.
Anti-Net Neutrality Propaganda Reaches Insane Levels With Bad Actors And Porn Parody
There’s been plenty of propaganda concerning the net neutrality fight, but with FCC boss Tom Wheeler finally making it official that the FCC is going to move to reclassify broadband, it’s kicked into high gear of ridiculousness. An astroturfing front group that’s anti-net neutrality is trying to make a “viral” anti-net neutrality video, and it did so in the most bizarre way, by making an attempted parody porno video, based on the classic “cable guy” porno trope. The video is sorta SFW, since the “joke” is that “the government” stops the homeowner from getting naked with the cable guy, but people at work might still question what the hell you’re watching
The video makes no sense at all. You get the sense that some not particularly internet savvy (or, really, clever at all) telco wonks got together and said “how do we make a viral video — I know, let’s pretend it’s a porn film!” And then tried to shoehorn in some sort of message. But the “message” appears to be that whoever put together the video doesn’t know anything about what net neutrality is.
55th Largest Private Company In America Sent Millions To China Because An Email Told Them To
You’ve all heard of this kind of scam before. Some nefarious person or group gets a hold of someone’s email or computer screen, pretends to be someone in some official capacity, and demands a whatever sum of money they can get away with. Some of the time these scammers pretend to be the IRS, or a utility company, or even law enforcement. What these scams tend to mostly have in common is that they go after private citizens en masse, in the hope to entice whatever percentage of the more gullible amongst us to pay up. What you don’t expect to hear about is one of the largest corporations in the United States essentially falling for the same thing.
Australian Prime Minister: Social Media Is Like Electronic Graffiti
I’ll leave social media to its own devices. Social media is kind of like electronic graffiti and I think that in the media, you make a big mistake to pay too much attention to social media,” Mr Abbott said on Australia Day. “You wouldn’t report what’s sprayed up on the walls of buildings.
– Tony Abbott, Prime minister of Australia
Unpacking France’s Chilling Proposal to Hold Companies Accountable for Speech
France’s misguided efforts to grapple with hate speech—which is already prohibited by French law—have been making headlines for years. In 2012, after an horrific attack on a Jewish school, then-president Nicolas Sarkozy proposed criminal penalties for anyone visiting websites that contain hate speech. An anti-terror law passed in December imposes greater penalties on those that “glorify terrorism” online (as opposed to offline), and allows websites engaging in the promotion of terrorism to be blocked with little oversight. And following the attack on Charlie Hebdo last month, Prime Minister Manuel Valls stated that “it will be necessary to take further measures” to address the threat of terrorism.
Despite such a history, the latest proposal to emerge from the country is shocking. At the World Economic Forum last week, President Francois Hollande called on corporations to “fight terror,” stating:
The big operators, and we know who they are, can no longer close their eyes if they are considered accomplices of what they host. We must act at the European and international level to define a legal framework so that Internet platforms which manage social media be considered responsible, and that sanctions can be taken.
In effect, Hollande’s proposal seeks to hold social media companies accountable for the speech that they host. This is antithetical to US law, where online service providers are explicitly exempted from being treated as publishers, with few exceptions, thanks to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
‘Privacy is DAMAGING to PROGRESS’ says Irish big data whitepaper
More than 350 Irish boffins have signed a white paper calling for nothing less than a “Magna Carta for Data”.
The Insight Centre for Data Analytics says it wants to “put Europe on the road to fair and relevant legislation”, but most of the language sounds like what it really wants is to water down privacy rights in favour of Big Data businesses.
“We have progressed so rapidly that the term ownership is obsolete. Does a person own all of the data they generate, for example? Or just the identifying parts of it?” the group innocently asks.
Dara Murphy, Ireland’s Data Protection Minister, spoke at the presentation of the paper in Brussels on Wednesday, saying: “In seeking to harness the power of Big Data, we must place the protection of individual privacy at the heart of everything we do.”
With thousands of jobs in Ireland dependant on Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and other data slurpers, however, he is unlikely to let the flow of data to big business dry up.
Although it makes some conciliatory noises about “trust”, according to the paper “the almost exclusive focus on the privacy of the individual, while politically popular, is potentially damaging to progress.” It further dismisses public fears that “data owners may evolve into monopolies” and “lock in” or “control” citizens, saying this would undermine the benefits of data analytics.
The paper further suggests that self-censoring behaviour “by those who think they are being monitored” is a problem in the face of potentially unrealistic fears. But it does concede: “Direct harm to autonomy might occur when an autocratic (or democratic) government uses Big Data technologies to effectively root out any resistance.”
The paper asks eight questions about data ethics but is short on answers. The usual defences of health diagnoses and smart cities are trotted out alongside a surprisingly long treatise on the benefits of Monsanto’s prescriptive farming programme in California. The paper then glibly adds that “companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon and Netflix are [also] collecting consumer data.”
Well, that’s OK then.
Yes, Major Record Labels Are Keeping Nearly All The Money They Get From Spotify, Rather Than Giving It To Artists
A small group of very vocal musicians has decided that the new target of their anger, after attacking cyberlockers, search engines and torrent sites, should be legal, authorized streaming services. They’ve decided that the payouts from these services are simply too low, even though almost none of these services are anywhere close to profitable, and most are handing out the vast majority of their revenue to copyright holders. The complaints are often nonsensical. Way back in 2012, we noted that the target of these musicians’ anger appeared to be misplaced, as the CEO of Merlin (which represents a ton of indie labels) admitted that the real problem was that Spotify paid lots of money to labels and it was the labels not giving that money to the artists. Yet, rather than blaming their own labels (or their own contracts), these artists lashed out at Spotify and other streaming services. Just a few months ago, we covered this issue again, with even Bono admitting that the real problem was the lack of transparency from the labels.
And, it appears, there’s a decent reason why those labels haven’t been eager to be transparent: because they’re keeping most of the money. The Music Business Worldwide site has the details on a new report put together by Ernst & Young with the French record label trade group SNEP, concerning where the money from streaming services Deezer and Spotify ends up. Spoiler alert: it’s not with the artists.
Negotiators Burn Their Last Opportunity to Salvage the TPP by Caving on Copyright Term Extension
New reports indicate that Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiators have agreed to language that would bind its 12 signatory nations to extend copyright terms to match the United States’ already excessive length of copyright. This provision expands the reach of the controversial US Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (or the “Mickey Mouse Act” as it was called due to Disney’s heavy lobbying) to countries of the Pacific region. Nations including Japan, New Zealand, Malaysia, and Canada would all be required to extend their terms and grant Big Content companies lengthy exclusive rights to works for no empirical reason. This means that all of the TPP’s extreme enforcement provisions would apply to creative works for upwards of 100 years.
Negotiators have been made well aware that there is no economic rationale that can justify this extension. The fact that they have chosen to ignore what is a clear consensus among economists points to the fact that this agreement has not been driven by reason, but by the utter corruption of the process by lobbyists for multinational entertainment conglomerates, who have twisted what is notionally a trade negotiation into a special interest money-grab. After all of the trouble that public interest advocates have gone to educate negotiators about the folly of term extension, the fact that they have gone ahead anyway is the last straw for us. We’ll now be pulling out all the stops to kill this agreement dead.