UK Prime Minister calls on internet big beasts to 'auto-takedown' terror pages within 2 HOURS The UK's Prime Minister has once again raised the tech stakes in the fight against online terror, with her latest, er, bright idea being for internet giants to stop extremist content before it's even online. At a meeting with companies including Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and Google today, Theresa May urged them to "develop …
Imagine, if the PTB actually tried to spend money on stuff that works, like more police, investigations and arrests, with a little border control thrown in. Instead, they prefer to chase after livid facebook posters with unpopular and politically incorrect opinions. This will not end well.
This task should be handed off to the copyright enforcement folks. I mean they do a splendid job in keeping down the pirate copies of "Poker Face" off EwwTube.
Or better still use machine learning to identify anything a bit "terroristy" using human feedback to fine tune the network. Make sure it is hooked into everything and has total control, including automatic swatting of anyone deemed even slightly dodgy. Extra bonus points if they happen to be working in their parent's basements because there was that one guy in 'Murrika who made a breeder reactor in his kitchen!
I mean what could go w(*!(*YU$R <NO CARRIER> <END OF LINE>
I would not the least bit surprised if we had to resort to imaginary numbers on the result of her IQ test. Basically we need to resort to polar coordinates, specifically angle, to explain any subjects divergence from reality. As an example, Donald Trump is actually fairly bright (two standard deviations from the mean) but his divergence from reality places him somewhere between, say, 160 or 175 degrees out. That's still a bit of a guesstimate. I'd have to suffer through more of his media events and tweets to make a final determination.
Some time ago, I was in love with a young lady, definitely for marriage, that was extremely bright. That's a requirement for my future sanity. However, her connection to reality was very tenuous, at best. *I* could follow her departures into fantasy disconnected from the universe. Sadly, she married another gent who was committed to an asylum two weeks after the weeding.
All of that is just to say, things aren't so simple as a simple number (magnitude) can describe. Oh, and from personal experience, I've had more than a few breaks from reality here, so I understand it a bit more than some.
I like that idea. It answers (and measures) the question "How can someone who seems quite intelligent hold views that are so bats**t crazy." There not stupid, they're smart in a very different direction (which makes them much more dangerous than stupid people holding these views).
"Oh, and from personal experience, I've had more than a few breaks from reality here, so I understand it a bit more than some."
I think most of suspected as much. However it's interesting that prior to the release of the Edward Snowden documents most people as cautious as Snowden has shown you have to be to preserve online privacy and security would be thought paranoid. Turns out most people aren't paranoid enough. :-( .
I keep hearing a line from "Enemy of the State" where Will Smith says of Gene Hackman "Oh, you're one of those "conspiracy" nuts," and Hackman replies "No, one of the conspirators."
Our politicians truly deserve a spot on Loose Woman, they clearly have no idea how the internet works. It's a utter waste of time even attempting to block such content... they had the same idea about torrent sites and before you know it... you have thousands of proxies popping up. Terrorist are not as stupid as the government lets us believe, if you block such a website they will just use a VPN or use the Dark Web. The government know this and they just want another INTERNET freedom grab... sadly, taking more and more away from us.
So that people make dud bombs that just burn instead of explode because they couldn't calculate the stoichiometric mixture (plus a bit extra oxidiser) that any 3rd former chemistry pupil could work out, or many people in Northern Ireland pubs.
All this from the woman who introduced Sharia law into UK law whilst home secretary even though most Muslims when polled didn't want it. Also the same woman who appointed a bunch of Imam's to investigate reports of discrimination against Muslim women by those Sharia courts - which fostered such distrust that the women then wouldn't dare get involved in the investigation .......
May is also selling weapons to beheading happy fundamentalists Saudi Arabia who are really not much different to the taliban with oil. Links between them and ISIS were investigated and found but May seems to have decided to keep secret the report.
So having given Islamic fundamentalists such a huge boost around the world by backing to the hilt Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia, she comes to our rescue with an entirely unworkable demand, which no doubt will be used to censor other content off the internet that May doesn't like.
Germany = 2 days
UK = 2 hours.
Trump is going to announce 2 minutes.
Of course China, with more than 1 million operatives monitoring everything its citizens say on line already has it down to an average of 2 seconds.
But what really saddens me is the quality of commentards these days; an obviously futile gesture, yet no references to Kanute or the tide.
"But what really saddens me is the quality of commentards these days; an obviously futile gesture, yet no references to Kanute or the tide."
As it happens to be one of those widely misquoted and misunderstood utterances, it is actually a good thing. Quality of commentards in a non-ironic sense.
If a page looks to a computer program like it might be a terrorist page, it could be automatically taken down, and then flagged for review by a human being. If it wasn't really a terrorist page, then it could be unblocked. What could be wrong with that?
Well, for one thing, this could be a trick for terrorists to use to get their pages whitelisted. Wait for the false positive, then after being unblocked, put the real terrorist page in.
For another, it might be that affected companies, like Google or Facebook or Blogspot, might have plenty of humans who read English, but hardly any who can read Arabic, so that a suspected Arabic-language page might languish for ages.
Still, given the amounts of damage terrorists do, it does make sense to ask Internet companies to make an effort to prevent terrorists from recruiting with inadvertent help from them. A legal mandate, though, will lead to compliance efforts, not necessarily productive efforts.
Charging the Internet companies with policing 3rd party generated content is like ordering the road maintenance crews to, "while they are at it", control traffic and issue traffic fines.
It's not their fucking job!
If the govt. wants to police the forums, OK, but they must do it themselves.
Remember the laws to freeze bank accounts of terrorists ?
Remember how it got used against Icelandair?
Remember the laws allowing surveillance without a warrant - to stop terrorism?
Remember them being used for school catchment areas?
Remember the laws allowing websites to be shut down if they supported terorrism ?
Remember them being used to block -------------
Since Youtube, Facebook and Twitter can't keep the spammers, pirates and scammers of their platform, I fail to see how they are going to identify terrorist content within 2 hours. Unlike content ID systems which uses hashes to identify for copyrighted material these terrorism photos and videos are unique so even they flag one of them its trivial for ISIS to create new ones that will pass the filters.
If you check some more nefarious corners of the internet you can get information on how to alter a copyrighted video enough to upload it to YT and bypass the copyright checks.
Take a leaf out of imgur's approach to 'bad' content. If something is 'bad' people down vote it to the point one has to click to view and most probably don't bother. Moreover if it were heavily downvoted it could trip a metric trigger and alert the platform.
Ah crap there I go again trying to think of practical things to accommodate the whims of impractical politicians.
p.s. Prime Sinister is feckin genius.
If the big Internet companies that rely on other peoples content could identify and take down terrorist content in 2 hours, would that mean they could do the same for content owned by others?
If they didn't have all that content owned by others, would they get their page views and advertising revenue?
Let's supose for a second that the magic badness-detecting AI engine did exist. We all know it's impossible, but she's heard or read some people waffling on about AI so stupidly assumes it's a real thing that oould do this.
Now surely you would just run all content through the magic engine at the time it was uploaded in order to check it before making it available on your site, so what's this random "within 2 hours" figure for that she's just pulled out of her backside? She would make a fine middle manager at an average UK medium to large company with inane clueless "ideas" about IT systems of this quality.
Additionally
"Developing technological solutions which prevent [terrorist online content] being uploaded in the first place"
Given that, apart from China's Great Firewall, there is no single jurisdiction over Web content, who defines what's classed as terrorist content, and how the algorithm runs ? Given that one country's freedom fighter is another's terrorist, who has the casting vote, 5 eyes TLA orgs?
On the "within 2 hours", achieving this would necessitate the organisations massively ramp up their resourcing to have a review process otherwise, simply having an automated script to delete the offending content would easily be gamed by those that wish to censor stuff I don't like'.
...at the time it was uploaded...
That one statement told me, T.May hasn't a clue about the Internet.
I connect a webserver to an IP address and grant access, I haven't uploaded anything, yet all the content on that server is now on the Internet.
I suspect (tempted to do an experiment) that as most public hotspots have static IP addresses, that I can advertise the availability of my website as being 'open' between 10 and 11 am when I take an extended break in my local Library, McDonalds, Starbucks etc.
But then if lived outside of the UK - France post-March 2019? ...
"Social Media" companies such s FaceBook, YouTube, Titter etc. send all newly published content to Theresas secret squirrel top terrosist content detection department. Her super team siftware (delibearte typo) magically identifies *all* the terrorists content within less than 2 hours.
Said terrorist content is then assessed independently by objective people to see if it actually is terrorist as a single false positive would be a total fail.
If it subsequently turns out any terrorist material was missed by the TM super team software, then a fail again.
If it turns out that it was not all automated and a bit of human decision making was needed, again instant fail (after all, this AI lark is so easy peasy Teresy..)
If the TM super team software can, over the course of a year manage zero fails... then they could maybe think about asking tech companies to do the same (after all it would be easy, they could just give tech companies their super tech)
Until that occurs, TM is best keeping her fantasies to herself
The pesky terrorists have been using all sorts of ways to obfuscate so what languages are you defining terror content in?
I heard a story about the efficiency of wiretaps back in the 80s which was problematic because the pesky terrorists used things like Gaelic which put a lot of strain on the few that could actually understand it. They already worked out that the solution to terror isn't a lack of data or powers but instead it's manpower.
Anyone want to bet this system will quietly be expanded to block porn, copyrighted content and ultimately things that are bad for you. Anorexia glorification perhaps?
May is reducing the workforce and handing over management and costs for to people who can't bill them for what they want.
Maybe she thinks it's just like Star Trek where the computer goes "would you like me to take down any terrorist content the moment it's created, with no false positives, ever?"
"No, computer, let's not."
"OK, how about child porn or anything else remotely illegal."
"No, computer, let's not. Let's pretend this is actually quite difficult to do and would require human intervention, careful judgement, an ability to read multiple languages, specialised local knowledge and that an omnipotent, perfect all-knowing system doesn't exist."
"Lol, OK. Shall I make Siri and Cortana terrible then?"
"Yes please, and Bing."
"Hahaha... Bing's already terrible, captain".
Already Google is being castigated for removing pages of violence from the Syrian conflict that member of the human rights organizations were using to store video evidence of crimes against humanity. They are working to tweak their algorithms - but given the volume of video data being uploaded to their sites, they are short on eyeballs to review that much data. If it is something that "You'll know it when you see it", it probably will be a while before you can expect real-time.
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