zerebubuth

This looks really interesting. What do you think the license of the articles should be?

I don't think we can assume it's within 1 hour of being reported. The press release also says:

> In addition to referrals, internet companies should implement proactive measures, including automated detection, to effectively and swiftly remove or disable terrorist content and stop it from reappearing once it has been removed.

To me, that sounds a lot like they're willing to mandate AI detection in order to "solve" the "team is asleep" problem. They suggest this might be yet another rent-seeking opportunity for big internet platforms:

> To assist smaller platforms, companies should share and optimise appropriate technological tools and put in place working arrangements for better cooperation with the relevant authorities, including Europol.

No doubt, some "helpful" authorities will provide an "appropriate technological tool" to help. No need for the government to break Perfect Forward Secrecy if every site is giving it clear-text access to all uploaded content.

I think there's a big difference between "everyone else is awful", "there's statistically enough awful individuals" and "every driver is trying to kill me". Only the last one of those is going to lead me to incorrectly blame a whole group.

I agree that a statistically significant subset of drivers cause problems (and a statistically significant subset of cyclists, too), but the vast majority of individual drivers (and cyclists) are safe and do not deserve to be grouped in with the the problem-causers.

I wonder if part of the problem might be a natural tendency to generalise bad behaviour of a small number onto the whole group?

For example, I might see several instances of individual cyclists running red lights and generalise that to "all cyclists run red lights". Or see several instances of individual motorists "dooring" cyclists and generalise that to "all motorists are dangerously inconsiderate".

It's probably easy to go from that generalisation to an overt dislike of the other group. Therefore, I try to force myself to attribute bad behaviour to the individual rather than any groups they might be a member of.

I think you're absolutely correct!

In each round, I reckon the optimal strategy for the "cut" will likely be the same as partisan cuts are now; densely pack the opposition's supporters into a small number of districts, while slicing the rest up to have a small but stable majority for one's own party.

This gives the opposition the chance to choose/freeze either a district they know they'll win, or a district they're pretty sure they won't win. I would choose the one I know my party would win, and redraw to pack all my opposition's voters into as few districts as possible.

If this is repeated a few times, the map ends up with many safe districts for each party and a small number of "left-overs" which will be contested. This means parties will have an incentive to concentrate on the small number of voters in the few contestable districts, at the expense of probably the majority of voters. It doesn't seem like a recipe for every vote counting and voters' voices being listened to.

If we break up monopoly businesses when the lack of choice increases the cost to consumers, should we also break up monopoly parties when the lack of choice increases the "cost" in time and effort that voters must "spend" to get their issues dealt with?

Do you think it might work to tell Facebook that in a year's time they'll be broken up into (for example) 5 separate companies, and their users will be assigned at random to one of those parts but must also be allowed to move between them at will?

That gives Facebook engineers a year to design and implement a federated API that would work seamlessly. If reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing was required on the API standards, then possibly others could interoperate with it too. Hopefully the mini-Facebooks could start to differentiate themselves through features, price, privacy, etc...

One method for making a copy or crawl very difficult to tamper with is to publish a hash somewhere difficult to forge (e.g: in a national newspaper or opentimestamps). That won't prove the copy wasn't manipulated before it was archived, though. For that, we would need multiple, independent archives.

This is effectively what libraries have been doing for many years with their archives of newspapers.

> for me the solution was to find social circles beyond work. For me I have my church community and also meetup groups with other developers in a similar field.

I think you are exactly right. Additionally, I think having a variety of social circles beyond work can help broaden one's support network, which can reduce the disruption of changing jobs or being let go. And it's fun to have a wider variety of friends with common interests.

This is why I subscribe to an independent review and consumer advice service / magazine. Money, even in small amounts, seems to distort reviews. Before I trust a review I want to know where the money that paid for it came from.

> Like many new technologies, it can be used for both good and bad. Harnessing nuclear reactions can be used to generate massive amounts of electricity, or to level cities. What's important is that it's regulated, not that it's banned.

I worry that, as we already see with NSA, GHCQ and friends, governments won't be quick to regulate a huge source of information that they can tap, and a source of technology that they can use for themselves. Recent history would seem to indicate that governments see the potential for state use of these techniques, but overlook the much wider scope for criminal uses of them. (E.g: Reliable facial recognition and pervasive tracking seems like it would make undercover police work much harder.)

Having a stockpile of nuclear weapons feels like an innately dangerous thing, whereas having a computer system tracking everyone for auguries of pre-crime is light-hearted enough that it's the central plot premise of a major TV show. Many politicians are who are rightly wary of the destructive power of nuclear technology may not see the same dangers in computer vision or pervasive surveillance.

> If you asked users to mark stories they considered fake, some would mark info wars and some would mark huff post.

It's possible that's the right answer, and that there should be more scepticism of stories from both of those sources.

Fake news didn't start online, though. There have been many paper publications which lie outside of mainstream scientific and ideological orthodoxy, e.g: Fortean Times, Daily Worker, Sunday Sport, which today we might call "fake news". Some of these had quite wide circulations and were available in many shops, and yet didn't precipitate any kind of crisis.

It would seem that fake news is perhaps a symptom of something deeper. It's possible that the mainstream press has lost the authority to suppress the fringes as public figures have learned to control their image in the media more (i.e: spin), presenting at least the appearance of collusion.

EDIT: It would appear that Joseph Pulitzer, creator of the prestigious journalism prize, was deeply involved in the rise of "yellow journalism", the "fake news" of the 1890s. Perhaps in a century from now, journalists will covet the Bannon Prize?