newsonaut
Turning inner space into outer space
Wednesday, August 6, 2014
Google's autocomplete has suddenly become serious business
If you haven’t had fun with Google autocomplete, you’re missing out on a popular Internet pastime. People have been posting their results for years.
One of the best-known recent examples is a map of Europe by Randy Olson showing autocompletes for the phrase: “Why is [country] so . . .?”
You can do the same for other places. For Canada, the top result is “bad at soccer.” It might have something to do with the second result: “boring.”
For B.C., it’s “expensive” and for Kamloops, it’s “smoky.” Wildfires are a big worry in River City.
But what if autocomplete didn’t come up with a harmless result. What if, instead, it was actually defamatory.
If you type in Albert Yeung, you get “triad” next to his name — and the Hong Kong entrepreneur maintains that this association with criminal gangs is bad for business.
So he went to court, and got a judge to agree that he can sue Google because it refuses to remove the autocomplete. CBC has the story from The Associated Press:
Judge Marlene Ng disagreed with Google’s lawyers, who argued Yeung was better off asking the websites where the defamatory information was published to remove it. She said Google had the ability to censor material.
Google finds itself in an awkward position. The company is so successful that it has become synonymous with search. That means its autocompletes are seen by millions of people every day — and a bad one could indeed affect a person’s reputation.
The U.S. firm is already trying to figure out the best way to deal with a European “right to forget” law requiring it to remove information about people if they make a request.
And The Associated Press notes this isn’t the first autocomplete case to go before a court.
Last year, a German court ruled in favour of a nutritional supplements company and its owner who sued Google to remove autocomplete terms suggesting links to Scientology and fraud.
Google makes the bulk of its money by gathering data about users and translating that into ad revenue. But that data is turning into a double-edged sword.
No longer can the company claim to be an disinterested bystander. They’re in this up to their necks.
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Saturday, August 2, 2014
Readers are wising up to clickbait tactics
For many websites, revenue from advertising depends on getting as many visitors as possible. The higher the numbers, the more they than can charge for their ads.
So it shouldn’t be surprising that we’ve been subjected to a phenomenon called clickbait. These are the linked headlines you see on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere that present tantalizingly unanswered questions — the idea being that many people won’t be able to resist the temptation to click so they can read the rest of the story.
Here are a couple of examples I just made up:
“You’ll never guess what crazy thing Kim Kardashian did last weekend”
“Seven secrets about kittens that will blow your mind”
Newspapers and magazines have long tried similar tactics to lure people into buying their product. There is no clicking involved, so these types of headlines are known as teasers.
But the Internet clickbait really does seem a lot more shameless, likely because there is so much more competition.
It’s reached a point where there is a backlash of sorts brewing from readers who are tired of being manipulated. One such effort is a Twitter account called @SavedYouAClick, run by Jake Beckman.
When he sees clickbait on Twitter, he reads the story to get the gist of it. He then retweets the clickbait with a couple of words that save you the trouble of clicking and reading it yourself.
So if he saw one of my examples above, he might have reworded it like this: “Went skinny dipping RT @newsonaut You’ll never guess what crazy thing Kim Kardashian did last weekend.” The one about kittens might prove tricky for him.
Other Twitter users have followed suit, and saving us a click has become quite popular.
You might think what Beckman is doing is a harmless pastime, all in good fun. But one of the worst clickbait offenders, BuzzFeed, has raised the alarm in a lengthy article called Please Stop Saving Me A Click.
Charlie Warzel presents a number of reasons for why we shouldn’t be worried about clickbait, but here is his biggest:
But perhaps the best reason — especially if you happen to work in media — not to police clickbait is simple: Everyone’s at least a little bit guilty of trying to get others to care about their work (and why not?!).
Well, yes, as I said, clickbait is nothing new when you think about the teasers that have been vying for our attention at newsstands for decades.
Still, I can’t help but root for efforts such as @SavedYouAClick. They help readers by raising awareness about how the media works. And in a sense they also help the media by forcing writers to become better at their craft, and not resorting to lazy formulas.
Oh, and Beckman has an answer for BuzzFeed: “No. RT @BuzzFeed: Please Stop Saving Me A Click”
Image Credit: xkcd
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Wednesday, July 16, 2014
Email scams are obvious for a reason
Those Nigerian email scammers must think we’re really stupid, right? For years, they’ve been trying to trick us into handing over our bank accounts with amazing tales of untold riches to be unlocked.
The truth, it turns out, is that they know that less than one per cent of us are that stupid. But that’s all they need. They know few people will believe their story of a deposed prince who needs a way to get his money out of the country. But from their point of view, that’s a good thing.
The last thing scammers want to do is waste time trying to lure people who are too sensible to fall for their schemes. It’s much better to concentrate their efforts on the truly gullible.
This topic came up recently at Quora, a website devoted to giving intelligent answers to people’s questions.
One person asked why it is that email scams are typically written in broken English. Are they crafted by people with a poor command of the language or by idiots who simply can’t spell?
It turns out that these emails are often deliberately written this way. The 99 per cent of people who know better will put them straight into the trash. The remaining one per cent — the credulous and the easily deceived — will be reeled in.
Microsoft researchers have published a paper on this method called Why Do Nigerian Scammers Say They Are From Nigeria? Here’s an excerpt:
An email with tales of fabulous amounts of money and West African corruption will strike all but the most gullible as bizarre. It will be recognized and ignored by anyone who has been using the Internet long enough to have seen it several times. It will be figured out by anyone savvy enough to use a search engine and follow up on the auto-complete suggestions. It won’t be pursued by anyone who consults sensible family or friends, or who reads any of the advice banks and money transfer agencies make available. Those who remain are the scammers’ ideal targets.
Another reason for using broken English may be to get past spam filters. There seems to be a whole industry based on ways of presenting the word “Viagra” without using the actual letters used to spell it.
Also, part of the scheme may be to portray the scammer as the one who is gullible. Greedy victims might be lured in thinking they can get the best of the deal.
So now you know — they don’t think you’re stupid after all. It’s that other guy they’re aiming for.
Image credit: Why Do Nigerian Scammers Say They Are From Nigeria?
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Saturday, July 5, 2014
Trackers keep an eye on your every Internet movement
There really is no such thing as privacy on the Internet. Virtually every website has software that logs your visit and makes a note of it when it spots you at another site that it tracks.
Typically these trackers are trying to get to know you so they can show ads for products you’re likely to buy.
At Pando Daily, Paul Carr installed a browser extension called Ghostery that shows the names of trackers on the sites you visit. He found that it was not unusual for websites to have 20 or 30 trackers.
I’ve spent maybe an hour visiting every possible site I could think of, from personal homepages to the biggest sites on the web and wasn’t able to find a single site that wasn’t tracking me in some way.
He obviously didn’t go to the website for my daughter’s elementary school. It has not a single tracker. Still, once you move on to commercial sites, the numbers quickly climb into the dozens.
Here at newsonaut, by the way, the only tracker is Google Analytics. I haven’t looked at it in ages. Maybe I should.
Browser extensions like Ghostery can also block trackers, preserving privacy and speeding up page loads. An alternative that does much the same thing is called Disconnect.
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Thursday, July 3, 2014
Google walks the fine line between 'forgetting' and censorship
New “right to forget” legislation in the European Union is quickly turning into a muddle.
The law gives citizens the right to request that Google remove links to information about them considered “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant.”
On the face of it, that seems like a good idea.
But with Google controlling 90 per cent of the search market in Europe, the removal of a link to a story is akin to deleting it.
The Guardian, BBC and Mail Online are among news organizations that have had posts on their websites forgotten.
“It is the equivalent of going into libraries and burning books you don’t like,” Mail Online publisher Martin Clarke said in an AP story.
The Guardian called it a “challenge to press freedom.”
BBC Economics Editor Robert Peston said Wednesday the removal of his 2007 blog post, which was critical of Merrill Lynch’s then-CEO Stan O’Neal, means “to all intents and purposes the article has been removed from the public record, given that Google is the route to information and stories for most people.”
To its credit, Google is being cautious as it feels its way through this minefield.
“This is a new and evolving process for us,” Google spokesman Al Verney said Thursday. “We’ll continue to listen to feedback and will also work with data protection authorities and others as we comply with the ruling.”
When the law was first proposed, I thought it would be a good way of moving past unflattering photos or references to youthful hijinks. There’s no need to have things like that haunt you for the rest of your life.
But, as usual, when government intrudes on our freedoms, the result is unintended consequences — and a mess that will have to be cleaned up.
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Thursday, June 12, 2014
This top-level domain program .sucks big time
You see them all the time while navigating the web — generic top-level domains. These are the .coms, .orgs and .nets commonly tagged onto the end of website addresses. For specific countries, you’ll variations such as .ca for Canada.
But how would you feel about a website with an address ending in .sucks?
An organization called ICANN is busy cranking out hundreds of new top-level domains with just about every word you can imagine. Among the latest are .global, .engineer, .nhk, .hamburg and .rehab. There’s also .republican, .lawyer, .mortgage, .hiv and .website. Yes, .website just in case you didn’t that what you were visiting was a website.
And there’s plenty more to come. ICANN makes its decisions in a byzantine process that starts with applications from companies that hope to make use of the new top-level domains. In the case of .sucks, there are three in the running: Top Level Spectrum Inc., Dog Bloom LLC and Vox Populi Registry Inc.
What possible motivation could they have for pursuing something as bad as .sucks? Well, if you look at the application status, in each case it is said to have passed “initial evaluation” and to be “in auction.” That means they’re going to have to scrap it out with each other for .sucks.
Beyond that we can only speculate. My thought is that pretty much every company or organization with a reputation to protect would have to buy this top-level domain to ensure that some malicious person doesn’t do it first. Imagine how much money some low-life could make by registering apple.sucks, posting critical content on it, then selling it for big bucks to Apple just so they can shut it down.
What other reason would you want .sucks in your web address? Because you’re selling vacuum cleaners?
On its website, ICANN says: “The new generic top-level domain program was developed to increase competition and choice in the domain name space.”
I’ve long suspected that in reality it is a scam to sell website owners something they don’t really need. And if .sucks actually starts showing up in URLs, I’ll be convinced of it.
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Tuesday, November 12, 2013
YouTube's comment section couldn't possibly get any worse
Lauren Hockenson at Giga Om wonders if YouTube is “damaged forever” by its new requirement that people use their real names via Google+ if they want to leave a comment.
The comments system, especially for Youtube, is a tenuous but necessary tool — perhaps this low-key change has in fact irrevocably damaged the ecosystem Youtube has worked so hard to create.
It’s hard to imagine anyone missing the cesspool of comments that passes for an “ecosystem” at YouTube.
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Friday, February 18, 2011
Those amazing robot subs
When I first heard about a mini robotic sub being used in the search for a missing woman, my inner geek was instantly on alert. Miniaturization. Robots. Submersibles. Does it get any better?
Unfortunately, the device being used by the police isn’t quite the Capt. Nemo-style Nautilus I had imagined. For one thing, when they say mini, they really mean it. You can fit one of these babies in the trunk of your car. The submersible itself weighs only 8.4 pounds. It can go to a depth of 500 feet and travel at a speed of 2.6 knots. That’s about five km/h for the nautically challenged.
There is, of course, a remote control device you use to pilot the sub, but you also have the option of using a computer to do this. An external video monitoring contraption is used to record missions.
VideoRay, the company that makes the subs, has a whole list of missions that these remotely-operated vehicles can be used for. For example, did you know that aquaculture operators can deploy them to go underwater and check their nets?
High-tech gadgets are wonderful when they work. This one will be all the more wonderful if it works to find the missing woman’s body, and brings comfort to her family.
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