10 minutes ago, smedly said:

who or what is Facebook and also the other media companies 

 

seems to me they are now some sort of political force 

 

is that where they are going or already have become "political"

 

That is way beyond their remit as a chat room IMO

 

They should not have got involved in politics - yes censor illegal activities that every sensible reasonable person recognises - like terrorism or sexual abuse but they have gone too far 

 

It is quite scary what these media companies have become - power they should not have and I hope governments across the world take notice and do something about it very quickly

2021 is going to be a defining year for the future of big tech & the power it holds. From China to Australia & just about everywhere else, battles between government & tech are brewing.

China: https://gizmodo.com/china-rolls-out-new-anti-monopoly-rules-aimed-at-reinin-1846217803

Australia & Europe: https://www.politico.eu/article/australia-copyright-google-facebook-reruns-europe-battle/

Love, lust, and romance appear to be the potions that blind us from reason, and online scammers are having a heyday with this easy to manipulate human weakness. Careful out there.

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Deceptive online behavior prompted plenty of emotions last year. Anger, fear, anxiety, frustration — take your pick. Just don’t forget heartbreak.

 

Exactly how much heartbreak? The Federal Trade Commission’s scam-tracking team doesn’t monitor emotions, but it does collect complaints from people who say they were victims of romance scams. In 2020, they were worth a record $304 million — an increase of about 50% over the previous year.

 

Some of the fraud was initiated through dating apps, the FTC said, as people flocked to them during months of stay-at-home orders during the coronavirus pandemic. But social media was an even greater source, the agency said.

 

“Scammers fabricate attractive online profiles to draw people in, often lifting pictures from the web and using made up names. Some go a step further and assume the identities of real people,” the FTC said. “Once they make online contact, they make up reasons not to meet in person. The pandemic has both made that easier and inspired new twists to their stories, with many people reporting that their so-called suitor claimed to be unable to travel because of the pandemic.”

Once a scammer establishes a connection, the story is a familiar one: Fake tales of woe or loneliness escalate to requests for money in one way or another. In one case last year, for instance, a con artist tried tricking a New York City teacher into believing she was flirting with Gen. Paul Nakasone, the director of the U.S. National Security Agency.

“Gift cards, along with wire transfers, are the most frequently reported payment methods for romance scams,” the FTC says.

The trend line for the numbers isn’t good: Reports of romance scams have tripled since 2016, the agency says, to more than 30,000 in 2020. Over that span, the total dollar value of those reports have quadrupled, from about $75 million in 2016 to the $304 million cited this year.

The median amount spent on any given scam was about $2,500 — “more than ten times the median loss across all other fraud types,” the agency sad.

The FTC’s advice for avoiding romance scams involves a lot of common sense, including, “never send money or gifts to someone you haven’t met in person.”

But the agency also recommends a basic tech tip that is part of the toolkit for journalists, cybersecurity researchers and other practitioners of open-source intelligence (OSINT). What’s good for identifying inauthentic social media campaigns is also good for nabbing dating-scene catfishers.

“Try a reverse-image search of the profile pictures,” the FTC says “If they’re associated with another name or with details that don’t match up, it’s a scam.”

https://www.cyberscoop.com/romance-scams-ftc-social-media-dating-apps/

It's a browser extension that you would need to add to each browser you use on your personal computers. Unfortunately wouldn't help you much on public computers.

Someone should do a report on the most popular destinations in the world by #s of visitors after COVID took over the headlines. I wonder if they'd all be in China.

21 hours ago, KhunHeineken said:

 

Thanks.  I'll check it out.  

Now that the holidays are past and life is returning to normal, it's the perfect time. ????

Ether, Bitcoin and the rest are making the financial sector fun again.

Feels like 2021 has already delivered more high profile attacks than the first 11 months of 2020. Going to be a rough year on so many fronts.

February is already off to a strong start: Female escort review site data breach affects 470,000 members.

????

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/female-escort-review-site-data-breach-affects-470-000-members/?&web_view=true

Ethnically Chinese, but educationally American. ????

I'm not upset about it, but I would be if I was a student, teacher or parent.

It's rough enough being a student and a teenager, but having that constant monitoring as well would feel way too constricting. That's just me.

The web version definitely wasn't around in 1970. ☺️ I imagine they are temporarily down for maintenance.

Have you tried to access it from another device or browser?

They've come up with a method to make sitting in a classroom more miserable than before: the Classroom Care System. It's an “emotion recognition” program that identifies each student’s face and analyzes their behavior.

More and more, China's recipe for success appears to be the technological control of its residents, "for their own good." But as I think about students sitting in their classroom, knowing that every frown, fart, and eye roll is recorded, analyzed, then sent to teacher and parents as a weekly report, I wonder how students will be left with any personality, creativity, or even hope.  https://restofworld.org/2021/chinas-emotion-recognition-tech/

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Every second, the surveillance cameras installed in each classroom at Niulanshan First Secondary School in Beijing snap a photo. The images are then fed into the Classroom Care System, an “emotion recognition” program developed by Hanwang Technology. It identifies each student’s face and analyzes their behavior: a student rifling through their desk might be labeled “distracted,” while another looking at the board would be labeled “focused.” Other behavioral categories include answering questions, interacting with other students, writing, and sleeping. Teachers and parents receive a weekly report through a mobile app, which can be unsparing: In one, a student who had answered just a single question in his English class was called out for low participation — despite the app recording him as “focused” 94% of the time.

 

The Beijing program, first described by journalist Yujie Xue in 2019, has attracted fresh scrutiny in a sweeping new report on emotion recognition technology in China published Monday by Article 19. The British human rights organization found that the dubious tech, while not yet widespread, is being promoted by dozens of Chinese corporations and academic researchers for a wide range of applications, including border screening and prison surveillance as well as assessing student behavior and performance.

 

Emotion recognition technology is based upon a fundamentally flawed idea: that an algorithm can analyze a person’s facial expressions and accurately infer their inner state or mood. In reality, when a person experiences emotions like joy, worry, or disgust, studies have found that they don’t necessarily respond by reacting in consistent, universal ways. While many people may frown if they feel sad, that reaction is also dependent on factors such as culture and the situation and moment.

Apparently tech and good intentions don't always mix well. Hope that other organizations developing vaccine data systems learn from this, and hope a big refund is in store.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/01/30/1017086/cdc-44-million-vaccine-data-vams-problems/

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What went wrong with America’s $44 million vaccine data system?

The CDC ordered software that was meant to manage the vaccine rollout. Instead, it has been plagued by problems and abandoned by most states.

The first time Mary Ann Price logged into her employer’s system to schedule a vaccine, she found an appointment three days later at a nearby Walgreens pharmacy. She woke up the next day to an email saying it had been canceled.

 

So she logged in again and found an opening that afternoon at the local surgical hospital.

 

“When I showed up, they said they wouldn’t honor it—they were only doing their own staff,” Price says. But when she tried a third time to make an appointment, she was blocked from doing so: according to the system, she was already in the middle of getting a vaccine.

 

Her frustration is echoed by millions of Americans who have struggled to get vaccines through various chaotic systems. But unlike others in some states, she wasn’t encountering these problems with a third-party consumer service like Eventbrite, or even through an antiquated government system. She was on the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s brand-new, $44 million website called VAMS—the Vaccine Administration Management System, built by the consulting firm Deloitte.

For efficiency, just need to figure out how to do the anal swab via drive through.  ????

Wonder if asking China to ease up on the weather modification programs would help any?

Quote

But the proposed increase in scale may affect weather patterns in the region. Part of the weather modification efforts focus on the Tibetan Plateau, the largest freshwater reserve in Asia, sometimes referred to as the Third Pole given its ice fields. The Tianhe Project (“sky river”) would divert water vapour above the Yangtze River basin northward to the Yellow River basin, where it would fall as precipitation. Although the project could alleviate water shortages in China’s dry north, it could also cause problems in India and south-east Asia if the water flow of the Mekong, Salween or Brahmaputra rivers – with headwaters in the Tibetan Plateau – is affected.

https://smartwatermagazine.com/news/smart-water-magazine/china-will-expand-weather-modification-practices

The biggest topic in US news today--- a group of basement living nerds nearly take down some Wall Street hedge funds that bet against dying retailer GameStop. The world really is changing, and refreshingly, US headlines are again covering topics other than Trump and Covid.

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There are three things to remember as you watch the chaos unfolding with GameStop’s stock price. First, Wall Street is just what happens when you mix money with feelings. Second, the internet is real life. And third, the Street always wins, especially if you’re trading with Robinhood.

 

If you haven’t been paying attention, GameStop’s stock has been soaring in a remarkably volatile fashion; on January 22nd, GameStop zoomed upward 69 percent (nice) before it triggered a circuit breaker halt. The following Monday, January 25th, GameStop trading was halted nine times.

"The idea was to punish short-sellers, and for the little guys to pummel Wall Street"

 

On the surface, this doesn’t make sense. GameStop, founded a year before Blockbuster, is part of a dwindling cohort of IRL businesses that are being starved by online marketplaces. These days, you can just buy video games over the internet instead of going to a soul-killing strip mall in Iowa City to buy a physical copy of the game. GameStop’s business has been suffering as a result.

 

Currently, many people are at home and bored, and consequently, interest in day trading has shot through the roof. There is a Reddit forum for this, r/WallStreetBets, which describes itself as being “like 4chan found a Bloomberg Terminal.” A year ago, a user called delaneydi argued that GameStop was underpriced by the market. For a while, the idea that r/WallStreetBets would take over GameStop was a joke — but then it turned serious, Bloomberg reported. The idea was to punish short-sellers, and for the little guys to pummel Wall Street.

https://www.theverge.com/22251427/reddit-gamestop-stock-short-wallstreetbets-robinhood-wall-street

In the 1930's and 1940's Japan was expansionist minded and wanted to show the world the might of Asia. Sometimes I wonder if today's China is Japan 2.0, and Xi believes he's the reincarnated Emperor of the Sun. Massive tragedy in the making, no matter who eventually comes out on top.

Parents need to remind their children to choose any career but mining. Even the military seems safer, at least during times of peace.

This LifeWire post has pretty detailed instructions for searching your history for particular messages. Step by step guide with lots of pictures. https://www.lifewire.com/find-your-facebook-chat-history-1949310

Click the link, or search the article on your favorite web browser: How to Find Your Facebook Messenger History: Search for information in a conversation or download message history, by Brandon De Hoyos.

Hope this helps.

11 hours ago, topt said:

Any reason why Telegram and not Signal - especially after looking at the info in the graphic?

Likely choosing Telegram since that's what most of his friends and acquaintances use. If you download one that your people don't use, it won't do you much good. Just my guess.

Glad it made it to you safely. Enjoy your new companion.