Author: Christopher Parsons

Policy wonk. Torontonian. Photographer. Not necessarily in that order.

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The Problem of Botting on Instagram

Calder Wilson at Petapixels:

Instagram’s Terms of Use make it clear that botting is a no-no. Over the past couple of years the platform has implemented anti-spam/anti-bot restriction, which does things like prevent accounts from liking too many photos in a short amount of time or commenting the same thing again and again. It’s obvious they oppose using bots ideologically, and it’s very easy to determine who’s using them or not, so why don’t they do something about it?

For one thing, Instagram is killing it right now. Every time Facebook reports their financial earnings, they need to show robust growth in their flagship products; almost just as importantly, they need to show healthy engagement. Growth and engagement are the life forces of Facebook’s stock, and any decrease in either can send shares south.

Now, consider that my @canonbw account was liking over 30,000 photos every month along with thousands and thousands of comments. That doesn’t even include the activity generated from people responding and liking my images/following me in return. If I took every Instagram user I know in my life who doesn’t use a bot, it’s more than likely that my single account generated more “activity” than everyone else over the last year combined.

If we take into account the massive number of people botting everyday all around the world, the number of likes and comments are astronomical. It’s very unlikely that this huge engagement engine will ever be shut down by Facebook Inc. The relationship between Instagram and botters is seemingly symbiotic, but I argue that in the long run, Instagram suffers.

The problems linked with false engagements fuels the life of Facebook as a public company, while turning the actual product space into one that is as demoralizing as Facebook itself. A growing number of academic articles are finding correlations between Facebook use and depression, in part linked to how much content is liked. While Instagram use remains relatively strongly correlated with happiness, will this persist with the growing rise of bots?

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Links

How to Debug Your Content Blocker for Privacy Protection

Via the EFF:

Millions of users are trying to protect their privacy from commercial tracking online, be it through their choice of browser, installation of ad and tracker blocking extensions, or use of a Virtual Private Network (VPN). This guide focuses on how to correctly configure the blocking extension in your browser to ensure that it’s giving you the privacy you expect. We believe that tools work best when you don’t have to go under the hood. While there is software which meets that criteria (and several are listed in the final section of the guide), the most popular ad blockers do not protect privacy by default and must be reconfigured. We’ll show you how.

Definitely a helpful guide to help you get the most out of your Ad/Tracker Blocker.

As a note: you don’t just want to block ads and trackers for privacy reasons (linked to being surveilled as you travel around the Internet) but also for security reasons: online ads are a vector for dropping malicious payloads and even the biggest networks are periodically affected.

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Links Roundup Writing

The Roundup for November 25-December 1, 2017 Edition

Photo made with iPhone 7 at the edge of Kensington Market in Toronto, Ontario. Edited in Apple Photos and Snapseed.

I’m a kind of obsessive consumer. Before I buy something I tend to get excited about it, and do a lot of research, and get super into whatever it is that has struck my fancy. When the iPhone X came out, even knowing that I wasn’t on a buying cycle this year, I still wanted it and so did dozens of hours of research. A few weeks prior I was looking at a particular Olympus lens. And before then it was a new Sony rx100 or Fuji x100.

But I’ve gotten to know myself well enough that I let myself wallow in the obsession…and then just let go. It’s a self-reflective defensive mechanism that kept my wallet pretty safe throughout the sales of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and one that more generally has helped to lift me out of consumer debt hell over the course of the past year. Consumerism is exciting, so long as you only enjoy the dreams and avoid crushing them by actually purchasing the item(s) in question.

During the Cold War humanity did terrible things to the natural ecosystems of the world by testing nuclear weapons. Bikini Atoll is one of the areas that most felt humanity’s ugly destructive impulses. So it was pretty exciting to learn that after abandoning that part of the world for about fifty years things seem to be recovering:

The research, López says, provides at least preliminary evidence that even if you destroy an ecosystem, it can heal with time — and with freedom from human interference. Ironically, Bikini reefs look better than those in many places she’s dived.

Despite the fact that the ecosystem is healing what’s there now remains dangerous to human life. The coconuts (and coconut trees more generally) hold huge doses of radiation, and the platter-sized crabs are presumably similarly radioactive because their primary food source is coconut meat. Despite the outward appearances of healing the atoll will likely remain hostile to human life: for the foreseeable future this paradise will only be accessible to animal life and off limits to human habitation.

In some exciting personal news, I got back a review from a journal to which I’d sent an article. While some revisions are required, work that I’ve been hacking on for the past few years is more than likely going to be public in one of Canada’s law journal’s next year! Unlike some other publishing experiences this time it was a fast turn around: submit in September, hear back by end of November, revisions by January, and publication in Spring 2018. W00T!

New Apps and Great App Updates from this Week

Great Photography Shots

Jenna Martin gave herself a challenge: go to an ugly location (Lowe’s) and get some pretty shots (success, in my opinion).

Music I’m Digging

Neat Podcast Episodes

Good Reads for the Week

Cool Products

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Quotations

The Possible Implication of Letting Lying Liars Keep on Lying (Often About Their Lies)

From Salon:

But here’s the thing. Mnuchin’s shameless posturing about the administration’s tax plans—at one point he even promised there would be “no absolute tax cut for the upper class,” which was a laugher given every proposal Trump had ever backed—points to a deeper problem. The man regularly says things that just aren’t true. He’s been claiming that there was an analysis underway. There wasn’t. And while a lot of people may roll their eyes about that in the context of a wonky tax debate, his complete lack of credibility is going to be a problem if we ever run into a serious economic or financial crisis. Just ask yourself: If the markets were crashing and Steve Mnuchin held a press conference assuring everybody that the administration had an action plan in the works, would you believe him? His complete detachment from reality has mostly been an infuriating sideshow during this tax push. If stuff ever really hits the fan, though, his reputation for fibbing is going to make things even worse. Just like someone else we know.

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Expenses at University

It’s absurd that I have to carry expenses for multiple months before universities will reimburse me for expenses incurred speaking at their events. It shouldn’t take 160+ days to reimburse speakers who put aside multiple hours to prepare presentations, travel to location, present, etc.

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Supreme Court of Canada to Decide on Protection of Journalistic Material

From CBC News:

The materials at issue relate to three stories Makuch wrote in 2014 on a Calgary man, Farah Shirdon, 22, charged in absentia with various terrorism-related offences. The articles were largely based on conversations Makuch had with Shirdon, who was said to be in Iraq, via the online instant messaging app Kik Messenger.

With court permission, RCMP sought access to Makuch’s screen captures and logs of those chats. Makuch refused to hand them over.

RCMP and the Crown argued successfully at two levels of court that access to the chat logs were essential to the ongoing investigation into Shirdon, who may or may not be dead. They maintained that journalists have no special rights to withhold crucial information.

Backed by alarmed media and free-expression groups, Makuch and Vice Media argued unsuccessfully that the RCMP demand would put a damper on the willingness of sources to speak to journalists.

The conflicting views will now be tested before the Supreme Court.

This case matters for numerous reasons.

First, there has been a real drying up of certain sources, which has prevented journalists in Canada from bringing material to public light. Such material doesn’t just pertain to terrorism and foreign combatants but, also, white collar crime, political scandals, cybercrime issues, and more. The Canadian public is being badly served by the Crown’s continued pursuit of this case.

Second, this case threatens to further diminish relations between the state and non-state actors who may, as a result, be (further) biased against state authorities. It’s important to be critical of the government and especially aspects of the government which can dramatically reshape citizens’ life opportunities. But should the press gallery adopt an unwarranted and more critical and combative tone towards the government there could be a deleterious impact on the trust Canadians have in their government . By extension, this could lead to a further decline in the willingness to see the government as something that tries to represent the citizenry writ large. That kind of democratic malaise is dangerous to ongoing governance and a threat to the legitimization of all kinds of state activities.

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Quotations

2017.11.29

Most fundamentally, is it in Canada’s interest to further normalize the growing use of CNA (Computer Network Attack) activities by states? Should CNA be classified as just another tool of statecraft? Should such capabilities be restricted to a deterrent role? Is cyber deterrence, whether through CNA capabilities or more conventional responses, even a practical goal, given difficulties of attribution and the inevitable overlap between CNE (Computer Network Exploitation) and CNA? Would improved defence and resilience be a preferable, or at least sufficient, response or are all three required?

Bill Robinson, “CSE to get foreign cyber operations mandate”
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Quotations

2017.11.28

As effective encryption spreads, it may well be that the future of SIGINT lies increasingly in “end point” operations and other activities designed to cripple or bypass that encryption, and some of those activities could certainly benefit from HUMINT assistance. But there are also pitfalls to that approach. Using on-the-scene people in foreign jurisdictions can mean putting individuals at extreme risk, and such operations also have increased potential to go wrong in ways that could expose Canada to extreme embarrassment and even retaliation. If the government is contemplating going down that road, it should probably be open with parliament and the public about its intentions.

Informed consent. Because it’s 2017.

Bill Robinson, “CSE and Bill C-59 overview”
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Christmas in Coffeeshops

I’m certain that it’ll eventually drive me mad, but at the moment I’m enjoying the holiday music that’s playing in the coffee shops I work out of. Bring on Christmas and the holidays!

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I’m Not Linking to the Clickbait

The title of an article The Verge put up today — “My $2,000 iPhone X” — is the worst kind of clickbait. The article’s title is misleading (the phone was about $1500) and doesn’t actually inform the reader of the topic (the author bought extra stuff). It’s stuff like this that best exemplifies the bait and switch problems with online writing.

And no: I’m not linking to the clickbait.