Google + Wikipedia = Oops!

[Daniel Brandt]

Zerohedge reports that Google, which has long used Wikipedia to enhance its search results with a special box at the top of a Google search, got nailed by this practice. The California Republican Party was described as having an ideology that includes, among other things, "Nazism".

Google explained that "people vandalize public information sources, like Wikipedia, which can impact the information that appears in search."

So whose fault is that, Google?

[Graaf Statler]

Google should better be deeply, deeply ashamed for the way of top ranked every wikipedia artikel without any control. Weather there are mouses, rats or snakes in a artikel, or it is written by a child. They don't even speak Dutch, how can they judge a Dutch article? And they don't have the expertise, and now they are complaining? After they have changed Wikipedia with the easy money earning of WMF in a digital madhouse? Because of Google they make that immense amount of money, that is the treu.

I am waiting to see Google in the European parlement, because its manly there mistake, I have claimed that a long time before on Wikipediocrazy. Google made WMF rich by there top ranking, because they wanted the results for free. Without using there brains, and that is now the unsolvable problem.

[AndrewForson]

When WMF showed signs of wanting to compete with Google in the infamous Knowledge Engine saga, Lila had to be sacked with a quarter-million payoff and Heilman had to be thrown off the Board with Jimbo lying about him. It will be a long time before WMF makes another mistake by upsetting its Google overlords.

[Flip Flopped]

Google wants the money and the credit without any blame or responsibility. Thanks for the post, Brandt.

[CrowsNest]

Obvious set up is obvious (it was up for less than a minute on Wikipedia). The negative media coverage is completely negated by the fact such incidents are actually quite easy for Wikipedia/ns and Google to swat aside as inconsequential, which removes any need for them to answer any difficult questions. Which sadly hides from the public the terrifying truth, namely that great harm can be wrought via this exact vulnerability, given the right inputs. Which will inevitably occur, either by accident or as a result of malicious intent.

As an aside, it did provide another entertaining example of the WMF failing to read an article history properly, and thus identifying and seeking to excuse the wrong episode of vandalism. That is of little benefit, except merriment, because the prepared excuses apply to that just as well as the episode this story was referring to.

[Graaf Statler]

Google wants the money and the credit without any blame or responsibility. Thanks for the post, Brandt.

The CC licence doesn't gave any protection in Europe and it's cash on the nail. We don't have something like a Notice and takedown procedure like America has, one screenshot is enough. I said it many times before, a lawyer can send you a screenshot and a bill and you have to pay. And don't go to court, because at the end it cost you fortune, it's a no warning system. But I really don't know what happens if you are distributing copyvio as a American firm, but in the near future they have to check content in advance. It's new European regulation what will come in the near further. And that will be the end of the wikifun for Google, because then they are for sure responsible.

[Flip Flopped]

Google wants the money and the credit without any blame or responsibility. Thanks for the post, Brandt.

The CC licence doesn't gave any protection in Europe and it's cash on the nail. We don't have something like a Notice and takedown procedure like America has, one screenshot is enough. I said it many times before, a lawyer can send you a screenshot and a bill and you have to pay. And don't go to court, because at the end it cost you fortune, it's a no warning system. But I really don't know what happens if you are distributing copyvio as a American firm, but in the near future they have to check content in advance. It's new European regulation what will come in the near further. And that will be the end of the wikifun for Google, because then they are for sure responsible.

I'm looking forward to seeing how Europe handles these issues as Silicon Valley firms lose influence. Unfortunately, the future of parts of Europe looks politically tumultuous so I don't know if laws will stabilize.

[Daniel Brandt]

Both Wikipedia and Google are sufficiently powerful and embedded in today's culture, such that neither is liable for what they publish. For example, why should Wikipedia even dedicate an article to Encyclopedia Dramatica, and why should Google play along by showing "about 42,400 results" for site:encyclopediadramatica.rs?

When ED started, most of its readers could recognize it as sick, wanton humor. But today a typical teenager spends most of their waking hours with their smartphone; reality to them is a series of snippets from this or that on a small screen, courtesy of Wikipedia and/or Google. The combination of those two bohemoths plus a small screen contributes to the "dumbing down" of society.

[Graaf Statler]

I'm looking forward to seeing how Europe handles these issues as Silicon Valley firms lose influence. Unfortunately, the future of parts of Europe looks politically tumultuous so I don't know if laws will stabilize.

The EU is a partnership, not a country and the instability is because of the huge debts of South Europe. And that is something what has to be solved, but what the northern country's don't want. They simple don't want to share there surpluses what is necessary to finish the last part of the Eurocrisis, it's a economic problem. But about other matters like for instance copyright and the influence of the big internet firms they are united, so there will be no delay in implanting this rules. It's a complete other discipline what is handeling this kind of matters, Europe is governed by bureaucrats. But not always the same bureaucrats, there are many separated commissions. So, in one "branch" it can be halleluja, and in the other "branch" it can be a complete war.

I am sure they work some compromise out, Italy can't itself afford to leave the Eurozone and the EU and the EU can't go on without Italy. It is just as it is in a bad marriage, the partners are fighting about everything, but they agree to what university the kids have to go. The European construction is kind of Wikipedia, you have to understand very well how it is operating to understand the EU.

[ericbarbour]

Since no one cares what I think (because I'm just a nobody posting on a forum), I'm going to recommend this book again.

http://liveworkworkworkdie.com/

If you don't believe me, I've gotten a part of the book OCR converted. This is the kind of material that drives Internet fanboys crazy. Evgeny Morozov has been writing similar things for years, and been pilloried for it. And I hope Steve McGeady SOILS HIS PANTS, because it is in direct contravention to the nonsense HE seems to believe about the Internet. The same goes for all the Wikipediocracy people, and Wikipedia lovers everywhere.

For all they had in common with the dodgy gambling moguls of Las Vegas lore, the Silicon Valley tycoons had achieved a more convincing patina of legitimacy—which was strange, considering how- far they try to push the limits of established law. Indeed, flagrancy is at the very heart of their success—the secret ingredient.

A scan of the biggest winners confirms this view. In the first phase of the tech boom. Google started out by “borrowing" Stanford's computing resources—at times, consuming half of the network capacity of the university, where the founders were grad students—in order to “crawl” and “cache" (read: copy and paste) webpages without permission and irrespective of copyright. Google used this questionably sourced data hoard as the basis for a business selling ads to dodgy businesses such as get-rich-quick schemers and mail-order prescription drug dealers, among others. Before its IPO in 2004, Google issued stock options worth $80 million to employees in violation of SEC registration and disclosure requirements because it failed to disclose the arrangement to potential new investors. But the company emerged “unscathed" after promising in a settlement to behave in the future. Google also rigged the results of its chief product, the search engine, while insisting the results were somehow algorithmically pure and beyond reproach, as a multiyear investigation by the European Commission concluded in 2017. Eventually, the wheezing Federal Trade Commission launched an investigation and produced a report detailing Google’s practices. As reported by the Register, ETC investigators "recommended the watchdog take action. However, the FTC’s political appointees cut a deal with Google instead.” (The terms called for Google to provide websites more opportunities to “opt out* of granting Google rights to certain copyrighted material while permitting it to carry on with the most controversial and profitable practice of promoting its own services above competitors’.) As Google grew, it also shrank—small enough to fit inside a mailbox in Bermuda, where it funneled $14 billion in annual profits via an intricate series of transatlantic shell companies that allowed it to avoid an estimated $6 billion in taxes every year. “It's called capitalism," chairman Erie Schmidt said when questioned about it.

Google set a high bar for rule-breaking that its $275 billion Web 2.0 cousin, Facebook, tried mightily to surpass. Mark Zuckerberg may have committed multiple violations of felony-hacking laws in the early days of the company. According to the Harvard Crimson, he stole student photos from Harvard networks, broke into email accounts, and vandalized a competing startup. As Facebook amassed data on millions and then billions of people, it "monetized" the information in unsavory ways. For instance, in 2015, the company began selling its customer data trove to hanks and insurance companies, who might use it, among other ways, as a basis to deny services to poor people, minorities, and the disabled. Then there was the time Facebook ignored federal laws requiring “informed consent” in its secret behavioral experiments. The only reason anyone noticed was that the findings got published in a research journal. You can bet Facebook won’t make that mistake again!

Amazon, the $259 billion “everything store," may have benefited from the sale of unknown quantities of “gray market" and “e-fenced” goods that were allegedly counterfeit or stolen, according to press reports and the book Black Market Billions by Hitha Prabhakar. Furthermore, Amazon faced allegations of abuse of employment laws. Amazon’s salaried cubicle jockeys got it almost as bad as the warehouse temps, who were so overworked and toiled in such miserable conditions, that the company notoriously hired private paramedics to park their ambulances outside one of its facilities waiting to treat the next batch of employees who collapsed as a result of heat exhaustion. In Germany, Amazon hired menacing black-clad security guards employed by an outfit with neo-Nazi ties as modern-day Pinkertons to police its warehouse workers. And until the spring of 2017. founder Jeff Bezos refused to collect hundreds of millions of dollars in sales taxes in many jurisdictions, thus starving state and local governments while furnishing extra cash to crush the competition.

The pattern continued with eBay, the grifters' paradise; Craigslist, which profiled from the promotion of prostitution and discriminatory housing arrangements (although a judge found Craigslist not liable); and PayPal, which partnered with offshore gambling operations, fought attempts to regulate it as a bank, and settled various money laundering charges. Netflix, like most major corporations these days, faced an antitrust complaint, which it beat, as well as alleged Americans with Disabilities Act violations. (An appeals court ruled the ADA did not apply to Netflix.) Linkedln—which set a historic sales price record following Microsoft’s $26 billion buyout in 2016—conducted a galling spam campaign that was critical to its growth and settled a class-action lawsuit over it for $13 million. TripAdvisor was officially sanctioned in the UN for misleading advertising, and settled a claim that it classified its employees as independent contractors. Groupon settled various consumer protection lawsuits.

This outlaw tradition carried forward to the second wave of postmillennial unicorns, which picked up unstoppable momentum in 2001 or 2005. Uber, the unlicensed taxi service launched in 2010, proved once and for all that a few people really can change the world using nothing more than powerful connections, billions of dollars in capital, and a willingness to trample long-standing norms such as the nigh-universal requirement for taxi companies to obtain operating permits and insurance and to certify their drivers for the sake of public safely.

And that's only a small sample. Chapter 7 points out the connections of extreme people like "Mencius Moldbug", Justine Tunney, and Michael Anissimov to Peter Thiel, Ray Kurzweil and Google's top management. Not to mention Stanford University's past connections to the eugenics movement. Hypocrisy and dishonesty abound in this little net-world. Even the shitheads on RationalWiki like to deny these things.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Neoreactionary_movement

Remember this thread? You should. And who showed up to attack me for wearing a "tinfoil hat"? Steve McGeady!
http://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtop ... =21&t=2514