Nemo_bis 's Techdirt Comments

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  • On the post: FTC Politely Asks Education Companies If They Would Maybe Stop Spying On Kids

    Nemo_bis ( profile ), 25 May, 2022 @ 07:13am

    True colors

    by we I mean industry lobbyists who want government to be a toothless subsidy machine
    Finally Karl has revealed his true identity as a corporate shill! ^_^

  • On the post: Despite What Fox News Tells You, A New Study Did Not ‘Prove’ That Gmail Is Targeting Conservatives

    Nemo_bis ( profile ), 17 Apr, 2022 @ 02:37pm

    SPF usage and other factors

    The authors completely neglected to check any of the factors usually associated with deliverability, because they assumed that these big senders would get it right:

    As these digital marketing organizations are among the largest in the world, it is highly unlikely that the SFAs would mark emails as spam just because they were sent using one of their SMTP servers. Thus, we do not perform PSM using the IP address of the sender’s SMTP server as a covariate.
    That's a strange assertion. Big newsletters try to have their own IP address to avoid having their reputation harmed by bad senders. It would have been useful to compare responsible senders on both sides. Curiously, less than half of the emails sent had an SPF record, and over two third of these were from the Democratic party. It would have been useful to compare emails with correct SPF records. $ cat *json | grep -c "Received-SPF" 98231 $ cat *json | grep "Received-SPF: pass" | grep -Eo "[a-z]+.[a-z]+ " | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -n 5 31901 bluestatedigital.com 26334 myngp.com 11118 amazonses.com 8997 bluehornet.com 3722 rnchq.com Maybe the GOP should use SPF?

  • On the post: Despite What Fox News Tells You, A New Study Did Not ‘Prove’ That Gmail Is Targeting Conservatives

    Nemo_bis ( profile ), 17 Apr, 2022 @ 02:23pm

    Re: DKIM

    Actually, if you look at the raw data for Gmail, you'll see that most of the messages passed DKIM verification: $ cat *json | grep -Eo "dkim=[^ ]+" | sort | uniq -c 68 dkim=fail 221388 dkim=pass 16626 dkim=temperror https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1DgL_K1Vmfj7v6Rvz3BtL6PG7sPIwZ9xL

  • On the post: Despite What Fox News Tells You, A New Study Did Not ‘Prove’ That Gmail Is Targeting Conservatives

    Nemo_bis ( profile ), 17 Apr, 2022 @ 01:40pm

    Alternative title: Google makes it easiest to subscribe to GOP newsletters

    The paper also contains this passage:

    When a user moves emails from spam to inbox, the spam percentage should decrease because the user is showing interest that such emails should appear in the inbox. The response of Gmail to the S→I interaction follows this intuition while that of Outlook and Yahoo does not. Fig. 7 shows that after the five S→I interactions, on average, Gmail marks just 5.34% of the right emails as spam
    The Fox News narrative is counterproductive, because the GOP is missing an opportunity to fundraise more: it should be telling people to use Google to subscribe to its emails!

  • On the post: Masnick's Impossibility Theorem: Content Moderation At Scale Is Impossible To Do Well

    Nemo_bis ( profile ), 03 Apr, 2022 @ 06:07am

    YouTube comment spam

    The problems of scale are getting popular: see Marques Brownlee, "YouTube Needs to Fix This", which also discusses the very interesting YT-Spammer-Purge (congratulations to the author of this GPL utility and to Google for providing an effective API to make it possible!). Brownlee thinks the community-made tools prove that YouTube could do better, but in reality they only prove how hard it would be to perform such antispam work at scale. The repository is full of reports about false positives (which is normal), and we know how even a 99.5 % accuracy can result in a filter being a major net negative (see " A Numerical Exploration Of How The EU's Article 13 Will Lead To Massive Censorship "). One depressing line in the video is that the comment section "is such a unique feature" of YouTube. Comment sections were ubiquitous 15-20 years ago, but for recent internet users they appear a rarity. (Reposting the comments without links to see whether it gets past the antispam filters here...)

  • On the post: Masnick's Impossibility Theorem: Content Moderation At Scale Is Impossible To Do Well

    Nemo_bis ( profile ), 03 Apr, 2022 @ 06:03am

    YouTube comment spam

    The problems of scale are getting popular: Marques Brownlee, "YouTube Needs to Fix This" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Cw-vODp-8Y Which also discusses the very interest https://github.com/ThioJoe/YT-Spammer-Purge (congratulations to the author of this GPL utility and to Google for providing an effective API to make it possible!). Brownlee thinks the community-made tools prove that YouTube could do better, but in reality they only prove how hard it would be to perform such antispam work at scale. The repository is full of reports about false positives (which is normal), and we know how even a 99.5 % accuracy can result in a filter being a major net negative: https://www.techdirt.com/2018/12/18/youtubes-100-million-upload-filter-failures-demonstrate-what-disaster-article-13-will-be-internet/ One depressing line in the video is that the comment section "is such a unique feature" of YouTube. Comment sections were ubiquitous 15-20 years ago, but for recent internet users they appear a rarity.

  • On the post: Why The Snippet Tax In The EU Copyright Directive Is Pointless And Doomed To Fail

    Nemo_bis ( profile ), 01 Apr, 2022 @ 02:13am

    Bundling and unbundling the newspaper

    That alternatives to classified ads are a big part of the decline of newspapers' revenues will be surprising for... exactly nobody who paid attention to the countless articles on the "unbundling of the newspaper" written since at least 2002. 2002:

    Unbundling The Newspaper https://www.poynter.org/archive/2002/unbundling-the-newspaper/
    2008:
    Unbundling The Newspaper Could Be A Good Thing
    https://www.techdirt.com/2008/05/16/unbundling-the-newspaper-could-be-a-good-thing/
    This business model unbundling occurred over the course of approximately five years in a series of waves that didn’t actually reveal their true impact until after the year 2000.
    https://www.alchemyofchange.net/great-unbundling/ 2010:
    “Bundling” was the idea that all parts of the paper came literally in one wrapper—news, sports, comics, grocery-store coupons—and that people who bought the paper for one part implicitly subsidized all the rest. [...] “Newspapers never made money on ‘news,’” Hal Varian said. “Serious reporting, say from Afghanistan, has simply never paid its way. What paid for newspapers were the automotive sections, real-estate, home-and-garden, travel, or technology, where advertisers could target their ads.” The Internet has been one giant system for stripping away such cross-subsidies.
    https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/06/how-to-save-the-news/308095/

  • On the post: Meta Messes Up Again: Admits That It Suspended RT & Sputnik Due To Gov’t Pressure

    Nemo_bis ( profile ), 09 Mar, 2022 @ 09:38am

    "Reliable information"

    This is the same Nick Clegg who the next day claimed people need Facebook to access "reliable information". https://nitter.eu/nickclegg/status/1499819557870989316 Clearly, he's completely divorced from reality at this point.

  • On the post: DirecTV, Roku Give RT The Boot

    Nemo_bis ( profile ), 09 Mar, 2022 @ 09:35am

    Re: War propaganda

    soon no-one will be able to act as the propaganda mouthpiece for a violent government engaged in invading another country
    I don't know, I wouldn't bet on the imminent shutdown of the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC. https://www.medialens.org/2007/invasion-a-comparison-of-soviet-and-western-media-performance/ https://www.mintpressnews.com/ukraine-russia-war-media-bias-study/279847/

  • On the post: What Happens When A Russian Invasion Takes Place In The Social Smartphone Era

    Nemo_bis ( profile ), 09 Mar, 2022 @ 09:21am

    Social media only helps some people; guess who

    All of the current online activities — taking advantage of the Social Smartphone Era — leave us with the hope the good can prevail over the bad and the ugly
    No, sorry. What's going on has absolutely nothing to do with social media. Social media didn't spur a wave of empathy for the suffering of people in Yemen, Syria, South Sudan or any other place where millions are displaced by war and thousands have been killed. https://www.unhcr.org/emergencies.html https://www.mintpressnews.com/ukraine-russia-war-media-bias-study/279847/

  • On the post: Gift Of Sight Stolen As Medical Implant Company Implodes

    Nemo_bis ( profile ), 20 Feb, 2022 @ 11:19pm

    NIH Policy for Data Management and Sharing

    Given most medical industries receive public money from the NIH, one first step could be the new data sharing mandate at NIH.
    https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00402-1
    https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-21-013.html Clinical trials already have wide-ranging deposit mandates.

  • On the post: Penguin Random House Demands Removal Of Maus From Digital Library Because The Book Is Popular Again

    Nemo_bis ( profile ), 12 Feb, 2022 @ 04:09pm

    Re: Abusing copyright or simply using copyright?

    In copyright law, corporate interest trumps public interest
    Although that's the fact of copyright law, it's worth remembering that the theory under which said laws are passed is that they serve the public interest. Congress would not have power to pass said laws if it didn't pretend so:
    To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times...
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_Clause

  • On the post: With Stephen Breyer's Retirement, The Supreme Court Has Lost A Justice Who Was Wary Of Overly Burdensome Copyright

    Nemo_bis ( profile ), 02 Feb, 2022 @ 10:05am

    No Law

    To grant a monopoly in speech to one person is to abridge that speech as to all others. That is precisely what Congress may not (and cannot) do. That power the First Amendment withdraws on the fact of the text. Read absolutely, the text does not admit of any defense or justifications in the case of abridgement. No law simply means no law.

    https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/David_L._Lange

    Thank you for mentioning David L. Lange's book, I love it.

  • On the post: Alabama Town Has 1,253 People, Nine Cops, And Generates $600,000 A Year From Traffic Stops

    Nemo_bis ( profile ), 28 Jan, 2022 @ 04:44am

    Expensive amateurs

    This cash milking operation seems to be highly inefficient. In Italy, a municipality with 1000 inhabitants makes over 1 million euro a year with a single traffic enforcement camera placed on a busy road. No need to hire more police officers or check that they're behaving fairly.

    Source on Serravalle di Chienti: https://www.fanpage.it/attualita/il-record-del-paesino-marchigiano-mille-abitanti-e-un-milione-di-incasso-dalle-multe/ . (Another source states that two thirds of the municipalities do not report these revenues, so there might be some municipality which is even more efficient at milking car owners.)

  • On the post: How China Uses Western Influencers As Pawns In Its Propaganda War

    Nemo_bis ( profile ), 16 Dec, 2021 @ 12:19am

    Small potatoes

    That's a start but China has a long way to go before it can compete with similar programs run by state-supported USA media like Disney, let alone FOMO machines like Instagram.

  • On the post: Israeli Malware Merchants NSO Group, Candiru Added To Commerce Department Export Blacklist

    Nemo_bis ( profile ), 08 Nov, 2021 @ 03:24pm

    Raising the price

    I wonder what price the three-letter agencies will demand from NSO for not fully strangling it. Or has it really outlived its usefulness for them?

  • On the post: Internet Archive Would Like To Know What The Association Of American Publishers Is Hiding

    Nemo_bis ( profile ), 05 Nov, 2021 @ 12:19am

    By the magistrate judge on 2021-12-02

    The lawyers will meet in person with the judge in less than one month from now.
    https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.537900/gov.uscourts.nysd.537900.57.0.pdf

  • On the post: Trump Given 30 Days To Have His Social Media Site Comply With Open Source License

    Nemo_bis ( profile ), 25 Oct, 2021 @ 11:07am

    What happens next

    The answer is: more grifting.

    Shares of Digital World Acquisition Corp have risen 842% since the blank-check acquisition company announced on Wednesday it would merge with Trump Media & Technology Group, which aims to launch a social media network called TRUTH Social.

    https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-trump-socialmedia-investors-idUSKBN2HF0QI

  • On the post: Trump Announces His Own Social Network, 'Truth Social,' Which Says It Can Kick Off Users For Any Reason (And Already Is)

    Nemo_bis ( profile ), 21 Oct, 2021 @ 01:31pm

    Only needs to last until the merger

    Gab has been running two years on Mastodon, despite multiple... issues. This may end up being similar.

    As Matt Levine wrote (https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-10-21/matt-levine-s-money-stuff-donald-trump-does-a-spac ), the sole purpose of the website is to serve as an excuse to sell stock to gullible followers:

    Yesterday, before this announcement, DWAC’s stock closed at $9.96, a bit below the approximately $10.20 per share that it has in its trust, sort of a standard price for a SPAC with no deal yet. At 11 a.m. today it was trading at about $19.38, implying a valuation for Trump Thing of something like $1.7 billion. If you think Trump Thing is worth $19.38 per share, you are not going to take your $10 back; you’re going to keep the stock and let Trump have your $10. He will definitely get all $293 million.

    The website only needs to last until the cash goes into Trump's bank account, then it can vanish. Maybe it doesn't even need to last that long; a mere promise to put it up later might be enough for people to hold the stock.

  • On the post: British Telecom Wants Netflix To Pay A Tax Simply Because Squid Game Is Popular

    Nemo_bis ( profile ), 20 Oct, 2021 @ 11:50am

    Careful what you wish for

    Of course, if Google et al end up using only their own cables so that AT&T can keep its precious bandwidth for itself, people will accuse them of wanting to "own the internet" and will complain anyway.
    https://www.wired.co.uk/article/facebook-google-subsea-cables

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