Friday: The End of the World

I wake up in the morning and I wonder
Why ev’rything is the same as it was
I can’t understand, no, I can’t understand
How life goes on the way it does

— excerpt, The End of the World, written by Arthur Kent and Sylvia Dee

Jazz version of this song first released by Skeeter Davis in 1962 performed here by Postmodern Jukebox’s Scott Bradlee and band with Niia’s vocals.

A few people in my timeline have asked over the last several months, “Is this the end of the world, or does it just feel like like it?”

It’s the end of something, that’s for sure.

Z is for Zika

• New York City: First baby born with brain defect attributed to Zika (The Hill) — Infant delivered with microcephaly to a mother who contracted Zika outside NYC.
• Two cases of Zika in Florida may have been non-travel, non-sexual transmission (NBC News) — With one case identified in Miami-Dade and another in Broward county, Florida is checking for the possibility local mosquitoes may have been the vector of infection. They are also confirming sexual transmission is not a vector. So far there have been 15 recorded cases of infection by sexual transmission in the U.S. and one by lab accident.
• Brazilian researchers found signs of Zika in non-Aedes mosquitoes (ScientificAmerican) — Researchers at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation in Brazil first reported in 1Q2016 that the common Culex quinquefasciatus ‘house mosquito’ species may have been responsible for some Zika infections. In general, Culex genus are hardier and bite at night. Members of that same mosquito genus are also found widely across the U.S., unlike the Aedes species.
• ‘This is no way to fight an epidemic,’ says CDC’s Director (NatGeo) — What he said. The epidemic is coming, it’s just a matter of time. It’s going to happen like West Nile virus, only the results will be worse than the +47,000 cases and +1,800 deaths from WNV over 16 years.

I can’t make this clear enough to Congress: you’re playing with lives here, and it’s going to be ugly. It will affect your families if anyone is of childbearing age. I haven’t seen anything in the material I’ve read to date that says definitively studies are underway to verify transmission from Brazil’s Culex quinquefasciatus to humans. There’s a study on the most common U.S.’ Culex pipiens species which showed weak transmission capabilities, but once it’s proven quinquefasciatus can transmit, it’s just a matter of time before more effective pipiens pick up and transmit the virus, and they may already have done so based on the two cases in Florida. GET OFF YOUR BUTTS AND FUND ADEQUATE RESEARCH PRONTO — or risk paying for it in increased health care and other post-birth aid for decades.

Still Brexin’ it

• Johnson: “mistake-prone former journalist twice exposed for committing adultery” (IBTimes) — Wow, I missed this last week about the diplomatic cables Wikileaks leaked. Amazing how much these descriptions of Boris sound like Donald Trump. And yet PM Theresa May appointed him Foreign Secretary.
• SNP’s Angus Robertson: Scotland “on the brink of independence” (The Telegraph) — Robertson, Leader of the Scottish National Party in the House of Commons, is bucking for deputy slot to First Minister Nicola Sturgeon — consider the motive. Sturgeon has been laying groundwork for another independence referendum if there is no other way to keep Scotland in the EU.
• Mild recession forecast for UK post-Brexit (Bloomberg) — No surprise whatsoever. Especially since data showing retraction in manufacturing and services spurred another drop in the pound; a potential rate decrease by Bank of England now possible to prevent further slide in growth.

Clean-up duty

• Looking for MH370 in all the wrong places — for two years (IBTimes) — Bad suppositions? Or misled? Who knows, but the debris found so far now suggests the plane may have glided across the ocean in its final moments rather than plummeting nose first.
• Enbridge settles $177 million for 2010 oil pipeline rupture (ICTMN) — Seems light for the largest ever oil spill inside the continental U.S., and their subsequent half-assed attempts to clean up the mess. Check the photo in the story and imagine that happening under the Straits of Mackinac between Lakes Huron and Michigan. How did it take them so long not to know what had happened and where?
• Broadband companies now have a real competitive threat in Google Fiber (USAToday) — It’s beginning to make a dent in some large markets where Google Fiber’s 1Gb service has already been installed. But it is slow going, don’t expect it in your neighborhood soon. You’re stuck with your existing slowpoke carriers for a while longer.
• Cable lobby counters FCC pressure on set-top boxes (Ars Technica) — Sure, they’ll yield to the FCC on set-top boxes, but they won’t offer DVR service and each cable provider with 1 million subscribers or more will be responsible for their own apps. Cable lobby claims copyright issues are a concern with the DVR service; is that a faint whiff of MPAA I smell?

Beach-bound longread
Check out this piece in WIRED: David Chang’s Unified Theory of Deliciousness. I’m hungry after reading just a portion of it.

Hasta luego, mi amigas. Catch you Monday if the creek don’t rise.

Tuesday Morning: Garbage in, Garbage out

Why’d I pick this music video, besides the fact I like the tune? Oh, no reason at all other than it’s trash day again.

Speaking of trash…

Facebook furor just frothy foam?
I didn’t add yesterday’s Gizmodo piece on Facebook’s news curation yesterday or the earlier May 3 piece because I thought the work was sketchy. Why?

• The entire curation system appears to be contractors — Where is a Facebook employee in this process?
  

  “…News curators aren’t Facebook employees—they’re contractors. One former team member said they received benefits including limited medical insurance, paid time off after 6 months and transit reimbursement, but were otherwise excluded from the culture and perks of working at Facebook. […] When the curators, hired by companies like BCForward and Pro Unlimited (which are then subcontracted through Accenture to provide workers for Facebook), arrive at work each day, they read through a list of trending topics ranked by Facebook’s algorithm from most popular (or most engaged) to least. The curators then determine the news story the terms are related to.

  The news curation team writes headlines for each of the topics, along with a three-sentence summary of the news story it’s pegged to, and choose an image or Facebook video to attach to the topic. The news curator also chooses the “most substantive post” to summarize the topic, usually from a news website. […] News curators also have the power to “deactivate” (or blacklist) a trending topic—a power that those we spoke to exercised on a daily basis. …” (emphasis mine)

  I see a Facebook-generated algorithm, but no direct employees in the process — only curator-contractors.

• Sources may have a beef with Facebook — This doesn’t sound like a happy work environment, does it?
  

  “…Over time, the work became increasingly demanding, and Facebook’s trending news team started to look more and more like the worst stereotypes of a digital media content farm.

  […]

  Burnout was rampant. ‘Most of the original team isn’t there anymore,’ said another former news curator. ‘It was a stop-gap for them. Most of the people were straight out of [journalism school]. At least one of them was fired. Most of them quit or were hired by other news outlets.’ …” (emphasis mine)

  It’s not as if unhappy contractors won’t have newsworthy tips, but what about unhappy Facebook employees? Where are they in either of Gizmodo’s pieces?

• Details in the reporting reveal bias in the complainant(s) — So far I see one reference to a conservative curator, not multiple conservative curators.
  

  “Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project.

  […]

  Other former curators interviewed by Gizmodo denied consciously suppressing conservative news, and we were unable to determine if left-wing news topics or sources were similarly suppressed. The conservative curator described the omissions as a function of his colleagues’ judgements; there is no evidence that Facebook management mandated or was even aware of any political bias at work. …”

  Note the use of “a” in front of “former journalist” and “the” in front of “conservative curator.” (Note also Gizmodo apparently needs a spell check app.)

• No named sources confirming the validity of the complaints or other facts in Gizmodo’s reporting — Again, where are Facebook employees? What about feedback from any of the companies supplying contractors; did they not hear complaints from contractors they placed? There aren’t any apparent attempts to contact them to find out, let alone anonymous confirmation from these contract companies. There are updates to the piece yesterday afternoon and this morning, including feedback from Vice President of Search at Facebook, Tom Stocky, which had been posted at Facebook. Something about the lack of direct or detailed feedback to Gizmodo seems off.
• Though named in the first of two articles, Facebook’s managing editor Benjamin Wagner does not appear to have been asked for comment. The May 3 piece quotes an unnamed Facebook spokesperson:
  

  When asked about the trending news team and its future, a Facebook spokesperson said, “We don’t comment on rumor or speculation. As with all contractors, the trending review team contractors are fairly compensated and receive appropriate benefits.”

I’m disappointed that other news outlets picked up Gizmodo’s work without doing much analysis or followup. Reuters, for example, even parrots the same phrasing Gizmodo used, referring to the news curators as “Facebook workers” and not contract employees or contractors. Because of this ridiculous unquestioning regurgitation by outlets generally better than this, I felt compelled to write about my concerns.

And then there’s Gizmodo itself, which made a point of tweeting its report was trending on Facebook. Does Gizmodo have a beef with Facebook, too? Has it been curated out of Facebook’s news feed? Are these two pieces really about Facebook’s laundering of Gizmodo?

I don’t know; I can’t tell you because I don’t use Facebook. Not going to start now because of Gizmodo’s sketchy reporting on Facebook, of all things.

Miscellany
Just some odd bits read because today is as themeless as yesterday — lots of garbage out there.

• SAS Confidential: Unpacking @AcademicsSay, Part 1 (SAS blog) — This is just good fun and yet it’s an incredibly educational collection of insights into the creation of a popular microblog. Worth a read.
• Five Solomon Islands have sunk below sea level (CNN) — This climate change stuff isn’t bullshit. It’s affecting entire cultures with permanent displacement beginning now.
• FCC and FTC want security patches from wireless providers yesterday (CNET) — If not sooner. Maybe these patches would have been done already if these firms hadn’t needed to redirect resources to responding to USDOJ’s encroachment on encryption…
• Amazon’s new Video Direct goes after Google’s YouTube’s user-created videos (Investor’s Business Daily) — Amazon’s throwing out some monetary chum, too, offering to split a monthly pot of $1M among the creators of most popular videos. This could rock indie film distribution.

Skepticism: I haz it
As I read coverage about news reporting and social media leading up to the general election, I also keep in the back of my mind this Bloomberg report, How to Hack an Election:

As for Sepúlveda, his insight was to understand that voters trusted what they thought were spontaneous expressions of real people on social media more than they did experts on television and in newspapers. […] On the question of whether the U.S. presidential campaign is being tampered with, he is unequivocal. “I’m 100 percent sure it is,” he says.

Be more skeptical. See you tomorrow morning!

Tuesday Morning: Monitor

Y me lamento por no estar alla
Y hoy te miento para estar solos tu y yo
Y la distancia le gano al amor
Solo te veo en el monitor

— excerpt, Monitor by Volovan

Sweet little tune, easy to enjoy even if you don’t speak Spanish.

Speaking of monitor…

Flint Water Crisis: Michigan State Police monitoring social media
Creeptastic. MSP is following social media communications related to Flint water crisis, which means they’re watching this blog and contributors’ tweets for any remarks made about Flint. Whatever did they do in the day before social media when the public was unhappy about government malfeasance?

MDEQ personnel told Flint city water employee to omit tests with high lead readings
The charges filed last week against two Michigan Department of Environmental Quality and a Flint city employee were related to the manipulation and falsification of lead level tests. From out here it looks like Mike Glasgow did what the MDEQ told him to do; with the city under the control of the state, it’s not clear how Glasgow could have done anything else but do what the state ordered him to do. Which governmental body had higher authority under emergency management — the city’s water department, or the MDEQ? And what happens when personnel at the MDEQ aren’t on the same page about testing methodology?

MDHHS too worried about Ebola to note Legionnaire’s deaths in 2014-2015?
Michigan’s Department of Health and Human Services director Nick Lyons maintains a “breakdown in internal communication” kept information about the Legionnaire’s disease outbreak from reaching him. He also said MDHHS was focused on Ebola because of its high mortality rate overseas. There were a total of 11 cases of Ebola in the U.S. between 2014 and 2015, none of which were diagnosed or treated in Michigan. Meanwhile, 10 people died of Legionnaire’s due to exposure to contaminated Flint water in that same time frame. Not certain how MDHHS will respond to an imported biological crisis when it can’t respond appropriately to a local one created by the state.

Other miscellaneous monitoring

• Charter Communications and Time Warner tie-up approved, with caveat (Reuters) — Charter can’t tell content providers like HBO they can’t sell their content over the internet – that’s one of a few exceptions FCC placed on the deal. I think this is just insane; the public isn’t seeing cheaper broadband or cable content in spite of allowing ISPs to optimize economies of scale. Between Charter/TWC and Comcast, they’ll have 70% of all broadband connections in the U.S.
• Mitsubishi Motors fudged its fuel economy numbers for last 25 years (AP) — This investigation is exactly what should happen across EU, because EU-based manufacturers have done this for just as long or longer. And the EU knows this, turns a blind eye to the tricks automakers use to inflate fuel economy ratings.
• Goldman Sachs has a brand new gig: internet-based banking (Fortune) — This is the fruit of GS’ acquisition of General Electric’s former financial arm. Hmm.
• BAE Systems has a nice graphic outlining the SWIFT hack via Bangladesh’s central bank (BAE) — Makes it easy to explain to Grampa how somebody carted off nearly a billion dollars.

Toodledy-doo, Tuesday. See you tomorrow morning!

Friday Morning: Some Place Warm

Warm, like the Philippines, the home of the Manila sound. It’s Friday once again and today’s jazz genre is the precursor to Pinoy rock (like Freddie Aguilar’s Anak) and Pinoy hip hop (like Andrew E’s Binibirocha).

The Manila sound emerged under Ferdinand Marcos’ regime; wish I knew more about this body of work to identify songs which pushed the envelope politically. You can still hear the ghost-like impact more than 300 years of Spanish colonialism in some riffs, shaped by other Asian and American influences.

Think I’ll try a mix mix cocktail later today with a little more contemporary Filipino jazz.

Coincidentally, “mix mix” is an apt description for this morning’s post. A lot of smallish, unrelated items in my inbox today…

The canary that didn’t chirp
Reddit may have received a National Security Letter, based on the disappearance of a notice in transparency reporting which up to now indicated no NSLs had been received. Was an NSL sent to Reddit in response to an online discussion last year with Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras, and Glenn Greenwald? Or did some other content trigger a possible NSL?

Department of Homeland Security’s Cyber Security Division wants to fix open source software
“Hello, we’re from the government. We’re here to help you.” Uh-huh. Color me skeptical about this initiative intended to reduce vulnerabilities in open source software. when the government finds a way to insert itself into technology, it’s an opportunity for co-option and compromise. Can you say ‘backdoor’?

Fixing a problem with business iPhones may create a new one
A key reason the USDOJ went after Apple to crack the passcode on the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone: poor or missing mobile device management software. Had the iPhone’s owner and issuer San Bernardino County installed an MDM app that could override the assigned user’s passcode, the FBI would have had immediate access to the iPhone’s contents. Employers are likely moving toward more and better MDM to prevent a future costly #AppleVsFBI situation. However, the new SideStepper malware is spreading and taking advantage of MDM’s ability to push software to enterprise-owned iPhones without the users’ approval.

FCC’s very busy Thursday

• FCC approved a $9.25 monthly subsidy for Lifeline-eligible low-income folks to use on high-speed internet service. Now if only high-speed internet was less than $10/month, or available across the U.S. to all low-income citizens…there are still wide swaths of the U.S. where high-speed internet is simply a pipe dream, let alone adequate competition to keep prices within reach of the subsidy.
• The subsidy’s approval came amid a lot of political scrambling and maneuvering due to conservatives’ resistance on spending (what a surprise, right?), though the investment should increase the number of users able to access state and federal programs online, reducing costs to operate them over the long run.
• The FCC also voted to proceed with rulemaking on the handling of users’ personal information over ISPs. Privacy is currently regulated on telecommunications by the FCC, but not on ISPs. Implementing rules on ISPs substantially similar to telecoms may protect consumers’ privacy, which is otherwise wide open. It would also force more equitable competition between ISPs and telecoms on consumer communications services. Perhaps this makes it easier to understand why NBC and MSNBC — both owned by cable ISP company Comcast — have been completely in the tank for Donald Trump? (Might even explain why Trump was such an ass to Univision’s Jorge Ramos, as Comcast owns competitor Telemundo.)

Today in literacy

• Participating in a book club could land you in prison in Angola (QZ) — There’s either more to this story, or Angola is incredibly repressive and ripe for trouble.
• Fairy tales, now with more firearms (NPR) — The idiots at NRA think there’s not enough violence in fairy tales, so they’ve rewritten them with weapons added. Distorting the Constitution isn’t enough; why not distort children’s fiction, too?
• Lawful Hacking: using Existing Vulnerabilities for Wiretapping on the Internet (Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property) — Not a book, but a worthwhile read for infosec literacy.

Public Service Announcement: Backup/Alternate Site
You may have noticed the site’s connectivity going up and down; there’s some tinkering going on under the hood. If the site should go down for long, you can find our more recent content at this alternate site (bookmark for emergency use). If the site needs to stay down for longer periods of time for repairs or redesign, we’ll redirect traffic there. Comments left at the other site will not be ported back to this page, however, and the alternate location is not intended to replace this one though you may find you like the alternate site’s mobile version better.

That’s a wrap, I’m off to find some calamondins, or an approximation for a mix mix cocktail. Have a good weekend!