Google + Wikipedia = Oops!

[sashi]

Remember this thread? You should.
http://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtop ... =21&t=2514

That discussion led me, in a roundabout way, to SJ interviewing Cryptokitties at the Berkman Center.

I may need to watch it: Governance and Regulation in the land of Crypto-Securities (as told by CryptoKitties) featuring founding members, Dieter Shirley and Alex Shih


done. very strange. Still can't help wonder if that isn't the Arb...

[CrowsNest]

The assumption that traditional industry is a paragon of virtue, or is at least being effectively reigned in by the law, seems flawed to me. Does the book even attempt a comparison to, say, the finance or manufacturing sectors, or even Walmart? Certainly in the UK, there are comparable contemporary examples of greed, corruption and illegality on breathtakingly grand scales, all in the traditional and non-technology emerging sectors, like fast fashion etc. More will be exposed as the realities of Brexit hit, with contracts being renegotiated and regulatory frameworks being upended.

[sashi]

Alex Shih mentions completely reimagining "privacy" as a concept and alludes to a discussion:

Privacy is not the thing that we're trying to protect with privacy: the thing... the things... we're trying to protect are freedom of thought and freedom from persecution and privacy is just the way that we have protected those 2 things. If we can find other ways to protect those things by other means, then privacy isn't that interesting [...] privacy is actually more trouble than it's worth. [...] privacy boils down to those two things.

source the privacy question starts at 31:10

Really?! Isn't individual privacy (& the property rights associated therewith) the very founding premise of capitalism?

Strange strange discussions of breeding virtual cats that own virtual hats and 3d printing automated weapons in your basement.

Not sure if these cats can be both dead and alive, or if they are just immortal from the get-go.

[Daniel Brandt]

Speaking of Google, a blockbuster of a research book was published this year. It's "Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet" by Yasha Levine. 371 pages. The seven chapters EACH average 100 footnotes. While "freedom of expression" may have been what they were talking about in Silicon Valley all these years, what was going on behind the scenes was all about support from the secret state: NSA, CIA, Pentagon, etc. This book includes stuff that even Snowden didn't know. Snowden wasn't a researcher, and his revelations -- as amazing and important as they are -- only covered things that passed his desk where he was employed.

[CrowsNest]

https://www.wired.com/story/google-sear ... op-nazism/

Believe it or not, Wired relied on some random Tweeter to inform them how long this vandalism lasted. I'm 99% sure they got it wrong, and have mistaken a piece of piped link vandalism (live for six days) for the later simple link vandalism (up for one minute), but I find myself now seriously asking, would Google really code their information panels to display the target of the piped link, rather than its display text? If so, then our inability to know this for sure without asking Google (a request sure to be refused even if coming from a journalist) or vandalizing Wikipedia to test it, is surely the big story here. If only there was publication out there dedicated to technology who wanted to use this incident to write about how people should really be more informed about the real cause of why things to wrong on the interwebs......

We're all doomed.

[ericbarbour]

Speaking of Google, a blockbuster of a research book was published this year. It's "Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet" by Yasha Levine. 371 pages. The seven chapters EACH average 100 footnotes

I will look into that. And frankly, if we can ever get an actual book about Wikipedia's history published, it will have far more than 100 footnotes per chapter. In fact it's a major headache to justify everything with weblinks--how much is "too much"? What insane garbage do you include as "significant" and what do you skip over? Like the 350+ articles I've got on Wikipedia insiders, can't decide which ones to include, other than important people who actually wrote or decided major parts of their absurd "official policies" and pulled dirty tricks in the early years. If we threw everything in, the result would be a multivolume set that no one would read....

[Daniel Brandt]

At last, a long, decent review of Yasha Levine's book:

Yet it would be easier to believe the “isn’t all hopeless” sentiment, had the book provided more analysis of successful instances of pushback. While it is respectable that Levine puts forward democratic (small d) action as the needed response, this comes as the solution at the end of a lengthy work that has discussed how the Internet has largely eroded democracy.

This is a good comment by the reviewer. For example, I've been been "pushing back" since I started NameBase in 1983 by writing code in BASIC to index the muckraking books, periodicals, and clippings that I had been collecting since 1973 -- the year that Kissinger, Nixon, and the CIA overthrew democracy in Chile.

There are no doubt more people like me, and Yasha Levine's book needs another chapter to motivate others, rather than coming off as nearly 100 percent hopeless.