Category: Links

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How to Publish A  Story That Explains How to Use Social Media to Juice Your Story’s Popularity

emptyage:

I paid to have my latest Wired story promoted on social networks, like Twitter and Facebook, to try to show that a lot of the metrics* we use to measure a story’s success are bullshit. It worked. When the story went live today, the page appeared with more than 15,500 links on Twitter, and 6,500 likes on Facebook. The story is a part of Wired’s Cheats package for the latest issue of the magazine. It needed to go live online at the same time readers encountered it in print, and it needed to have all those social shares set up in advance. 

…

The entire package was going live at once. I could publish my story a little bit early, but the timing needed to be very close. I wanted all the public-facing stats (like the 15 thousand links and Twitter and 6,000 Facebook shares) to be live by the time the text appeared. Certainly, if someone found it in print or on the tablet, it needed those metrics to already be there. To make that happen, we cheated. 

…

This morning (or last night) at a little after 1 am, I added the story text, set it to the current time, and hit update. Now it showed up in RSS readers and I could openly tweet it form my main account. (I had originally used a secondary Twitter account I have for testing 3rd party stuff to link to it and score retweets.)

So now, the story goes “live” and as if by magic it has tens of thousands of social shares listed on it the instant real people start to encounter it. It worked. 

*As is site traffic, to a very large extent. My original idea was to use a botnet to throw traffic at it, but Wired’s lawyers said “no, no. Don’t do that.“ 

And, of course, people tend to associate lots of shares with an article’s significance or influence. Consequently, by ‘cheating’ ahead of time a content owner can add a false gravitas to the content in question. I’m curious to know how search companies that, in part, use social signals to surface content deal with this kind of ‘hacking the social.’

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Links Writing

Cellular Security Called Into Question. Again.

Worries about spectrum scarcity have prompted telecommunications providers to provide their subscribers with femotocells, which are small and low-powered cellular base stations. Often, these stations are linked into subscribers’ existing 802.11 wireless or wired networks, and are used to relieve stress placed upon commercial cellular towers whilst simultaneously expanding cellular coverage. Questions have recently been raised about the security of those low-powered stations:

Ritter and his colleague, Doug DePerry, demonstrated for Reuters how they can eavesdrop on text messages, photos and phone calls made with an Android phone and an iPhone by using a Verizon femtocell that they had previously hacked.

…

They said that with a little more work, they could have weaponized it for stealth attacks by packaging all equipment needed for a surveillance operation into a backpack that could be dropped near a target they wanted to monitor.

While Verizon has issued a patch for its femtocells, there isn’t any reason why additional vulnerabilities won’t be found. By placing the stations in the hands of end-users, as opposed to retaining control over commercially deployed cellular towers, third-party security researchers and attackers can persistenty test the cells until flaws are found. The consequence of this deployment strategy is that attackers will continue to find vulnerabilities to (further) weaken the security associated with cellular communications. Unfortunately, countering attackers will significantly depend on security researchers finding the same exploit(s) and reporting it/them to the affected companies. The likelihood of security researchers and attackers finding and exploiting the same flaws diminishes as more and more vulnerabilities are found in these devices.

In countries such as Canada, for researchers to conduct their research they must often first receive permission from the companies selling the femtocells: if there are any ‘digital locks’ around the technology, then researchers cannot legally investigate the code without prior corporate approval. Such restrictions don’t mean that researchers won’t conduct research, but do mean that researchers’ discoveries will go unreported and thus unpatched. As a result, consumers will largely remain reliant on the companies responsible for the security deficits in the first place to identify and correct those deficits, but absent public pressure that results from researchers disclosing vulnerabilities.

In light of the high economic costs of such identification and patching processes, I’m less than confident that femtocell providers are going to be investing oodles of cash just to potentially as opposed to necessarily identify and fix vulnerabilities. The net effect is that, at least in Canada, telecommunications providers can be assured that the public will remain relatively unconcerned about the security of providers’ products: security perceptions will be managed by preventing consumers from learning about prospective harms associated with telecommunications equipment. I guess this is just another area of research where Canadians will have to point to the US and say, “The same thing is likely happening here. But we’ll never know for sure.”

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Links Writing

Drawing Comparative Inferences from Canadian and American Network Investment

Peter Nowak recently had a good post concerning the nature of mobile pricing in Canada. You really should go read it all. However, there was one key piece that he noted, towards the end, that deserves to be highlighted. Specifically:

It was only a few short years ago when Bell and Telus were getting pummeled by Rogers, thanks to that company’s chosen technology. Rogers, like most of the carriers in the world, went with GSM network technology while Bell and Telus opted for CDMA instead. Without getting technical, GSM won, and Apple put the exclamation point on the battle in 2007 in the form of the iPhone. Unable to offer the latest and greatest devices, including that quintessential and hotly desired device, Bell and Telus moved quickly to upgrade to the next greatest and latest 4G technology. Rogers followed suit. The same is happening in the United States, with Sprint and Verizon – both former CDMA users – both spending heavily on LTE.

Network investment in both Canada and the United States does not reflect the competitiveness of either market, but rather phone makers’ decisions on technologies. Carriers are simply being pulled along for the ride.

One thing I may indeed have been wrong about in the past is how high prices were mainly the result of the lack of foreign competition in Canada, which wasn’t legally allowed until last year. The poor technological choices made by a number of carriers can’t be discounted as a factor. The industry is now waving the billions they’re having to spend to correct those mistakes in the faces of consumers and government, with prices – be they as they are – the necessary rationalization.

A key aspect of Nowak’s argument towards the end is that network investment was driven not so much by carrier-driven decisions but by the decision of a device manufacturer: Apple. I’d not really considered how Apple’s decision to ‘cut out’ a group of telecom companies from offering the iPhone could have been/was significantly responsible for massive re-engineering and investment in compatible networking technologies (i.e. GSM). Obviously such changes to the network infrastructure came at a significant fiscal cost.

It would be interesting to take Nowak’s point and then build on it to better understand how Canadian three year contracts might have alleviated the ‘hurt’ experienced by Canadian mobile providers. Specifically, we could ask the following:

  • what was the churn that Bell and TELUS experienced as a result of not being able to provide the iPhone?
  • was churn in Canada comparable to the CDMA providers in the United States?

Based around these questions we could establish a working hypothesis that churn was lower in Canada than the US. If this hypothesis bore out when tested we could try to ascertain why it bore out:

  • were Canadians happier with Bell and TELUS than their American counterparts?
  • were Canadians unable to choose their preferred economic options at a rate comparable to American customers because of the longer contracts associated with the Canadian carriers?
  • Other?

In effect the bad bets of American and Canadian carriers on CDMA offers an interesting comparative case from which we can draw inferences about the effects of the much-loathed three year cellular phone contracts in Canada. It would be awesome to see the numbers crunched to evaluate the effects of those contracts, especially before and after Bell/TELUS look launched their HSPA+ network(s). From there, I’m sure some interesting thoughts on the CRTC’s wireless code of conduct (which includes effectively mandating two year contracts) could follow: if a device as disruptive as the iPhone appears on the market, what would it do to the Canadian telecommunications market?

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Links

On the Zimmerman verdict …

politicalprof:

So let me see if I have this straight:

In Florida, I can follow an otherwise law-abiding person around on a dark and rainy night, and if they decide I am a threat and respond, I get to shoot and kill them if I start losing the fight.

I am sure the people of Florida are sleeping much more secure in their beds knowing that this could never happen to their child or in their neighborhood.

Quality work all around.

Legalizing lethal stalking: a really great decision…

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Links Writing

How to Dispel the Confusion Around iMessage Security | Technology, Thoughts & Trinkets

There’s a lot of confusion about the actual versus rhetorical security integrated with Apple’s iMessage product. I’ve tried to suggest, in the linked article, how Canadians can use our federal privacy laws to figure out whether Apple is, or the company’s critics are, right about the company’s security posture.

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Links

Protecting Their Own: Fundamental Rights Implications for EU Data Sovereignty in the Cloud by Judith Rauhofer, Caspar Bowden :: SSRN

Go read Protecting Their Own: Fundamental Rights Implications for EU Data Sovereignty in the Cloud by Judith Rauhofer, Caspar Bowden

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Links Quotations

Freelancers are second-class journalists—even if there are only freelancers here, in Syria, because this is a dirty war, a war of the last century; it’s trench warfare between rebels and loyalists who are so close that they scream at each other while they shoot each other. The first time on the frontline, you can’t believe it, with these bayonets you have seen only in history books. Today’s wars are drone wars, but here they fight meter by meter, street by street, and it’s fucking scary. Yet the editors back in Italy treat you like a kid; you get a front-page photo, and they say you were just lucky, in the right place at the right time. You get an exclusive story, like the one I wrote last September on Aleppo’s old city, a UNESCO World Heritage site, burning as the rebels and Syrian army battled for control. I was the first foreign reporter to enter, and the editors say: “How can I justify that my staff writer wasn’t able to enter and you were?” I got this email from an editor about that story: “I’ll buy it, but I will publish it under my staff writer’s name.”

FJP: A fast-paced, fiercely heartfelt essay on the downsides to freelance work abroad and the madness of war.

(via futurejournalismproject)

This speaks volumes about contemporary war reporting: not only are ‘dirty wars’ outsourced to freelancers, but the credibility linked to successfully covering them is either denigrated or obviated to the public.

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Links Writing

Online Voting Continues to Rear Its Ugly Head

From an editorial in the Cape Breton Post:

Elections Nova Scotia also touts “a dozen ways to vote.” But that’s a little misleading. Nine of those “ways” involve a write-in ballot.

Conspicuously, none include electronic voting. The significance of Doiron’s claim that Elections Nova Scotia’s changes will make it easier for people to vote fizzles when we consider the fact that electronic voting allows people to vote from virtually anywhere.

The Cape Breton Regional Municipality successfully implemented e-voting during the last round of municipal elections in 2012, with 26,949 — or 32.8 per cent — of CBRM electors voting electronically.

And as Postmedia News recently reported, Elections Canada has been touting Internet voting since 2008, although budget cuts put the kibosh on plans to introduce online voting in byelections held this year. But at least Elections Canada acknowledges the potential value of e-voting.

So, what are the chances of an elector voting electronically in a provincial election anytime soon?

“The registration and voting and the security — maintaining the integrity of the election — is still a very tricky game,” Doiron told the Globe and Mail. “And that’s one of the reasons that no provincial or federal authority has online voting yet because it’s just not secure enough for the kind of integrity we have to deliver.”

The CBRM had e-voting success. And at the federal level, barriers to implementing electronic voting seem to be more fiscal in nature than about security.

I’m curious as to how the author of this opinion piece concludes that fiscal issues are more significant than security issues. I presume that they are referring to Elections Canada’s decision to scrap an e-vote test, but despite not running the test the federal agency recognized that security was an issue with online voting.

These security challenges have been highlighted repeatedly: a recent election in Nova Scotia used online voting, and officials cannot guarantee that votes were recorded properly based on significant technical deficits. Similarly, voting events during the NDP Leadership election in 2012 suffered from third-party interference, which ultimately caused people to not vote. Moreover, even if the servers that recorded votes in both situations were secured all of the intermediary systems were not; consequently it is functionally impossible to assert that the malware-ridden computers that people vote on or intermediary network points didn’t alter voting outcomes.[1] This isn’t to say that malware or intermediary interference did affect the outcomes, but that the authoritative conclusions of online votes are much, much weaker than those reliant on paper ballots.

Voting matters. A lot. And folks that insist that we can ignore the security and privacy issues either don’t care enough to learn the detailed problems of online voting, or don’t seem to care that most verifiable online voting mechanisms enable the tracking of how people vote. That kind of tracking is something that a large number of people fought hard to excise from our democratic electoral systems. We invite it back in at our peril.

For more on this point, see “Online Voting and Hostile Deployment Environments”  ↩

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Links Writing

2013.7.10

jakke said: Actually I don’t agree at all. That’s directly analogous to leveraging (some is a positive externality to credit, too much is a negative externality to risk, the threshold differs depending on whom you’re talking about) and we can regulate that.

The literature that has looked at the economic of privacy over the past decade or two has been absolutely dismal, insofar as efforts to operationalize the ‘value’ of privacy are pervaded with assumptions of rationality, comprehension, ability to enact privacy choices, and so forth. The literature on privacy more generally is still struggling – after 40+ years – to really move beyond squabbling about what ‘privacy’ even means. The consequence is that ascertaining the externalities linked to privacy infringements/violations/concerns/(term of the month) necessarily requires adopting one definition or another.

Unlike more ‘defined’ harms (e.g. X percentage of Y particulate in the water is linked to Z) those linked with privacy have a tendency to be more normative, and harder to measure as a result. Ascertaining what the chilling effect of corporate surveillance, or the consequences of non-transparency in how communications infrastructures subtly modulate discourse and association, is an exercise in theory as much as anything else. Consumers, for lots of good reasons, are poor rational actors in lots of areas, and privacy is argued to be one of those areas.

So the quotation was emergent from a (longer) argument concerning the efficacy of economic analyses of privacy and place such analyses have within the broader dimensions of the contested individual, communal, and intersubjective natures of privacy. It’s on these bases that economic analyses fall short: while they *might* improve the situation, marginally, what is improved will be regarded as perpetuating the harm by some, and being the wrong measure of alleviating harms by other.

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Links

A handy guide to the hidden meaning behind all those NSA and government statements

A very helpful resource for deciphering ‘government-speak’ surrounding national security surveillance practices.