07.23.13

Tech Tips of the Day

Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 3:48 pm by George Smith

Let’s repeat, again and again until it is crystal clear, Facebook is not your friend. The corporate American web is not your friend. Both practice malicious design in programming for the automation of grasping.

Today’s procedure:

Use Facebook Graph Search to unlike stuff you never should have ‘liked’ in the first place. Type “Photos [your name] likes.” Unlike the embarrassing stuff and pics on ‘friends’ pages who have always ignored you. Collegiality is mostly dead in cyberspace. Your likes of others, unless you actually have a chatting relationship with them, serve only to increase the perception of their popularity. It comes at your expense, too, because Facebook ranks material on this basis. So if you’ve ever wondered why nobody sees your stuff but you see all theirs, this is one contributing reason.

Type “Companies [your name] likes.” Untick most or all of them. Liking companies on Facebook will never do you any good. In fact, it’s bad. Facebook just uses it to insert things you don’t want to see into your “news feed” while it’s hiding your stuff from other people. You do know that, don’t you?

Now type “Movies [your name] likes.” Untick everything if you have more than a few but leave all the boring middle of the road crap that in no way describes you to marketers. Trust me. (There’s another way to go about this although it’s a little more work. Let’s call it signal jamming. You emit a signal for Facebook algorithms, one to be harvested for business. What if your signal makes no sense? Make a list of favorite movies choosing titles from, say, the Al Jolson catalog, or films of the vintage of “Gold Diggers of Broadway.”)

Tip 2: How to find proof Facebook hates you.

Look up at the ‘people you may know’ bar that Facebook uses to push potential ‘friends’ at you. Today or tomorrow you’ll see someone in there, or more than a few, who you either detest outright or who are laughably wrong. Go ahead, check their profiles. See? Facebook algorithms, those you get to “use,” are just to make you stupidly click shit that will never be of benefit.

In line with today’s Tech Tip, readers can tell from the next story that US military police and counter-terror units globally use Facebook’s Graph Search to spy on you, looking for keywords having to do with their units, bases, or other things. And they have no reading comprehension.

“As a joke, a German man recently invited some friends for a walk around a top secret NSA facility [on his Facebook page],” writes The Spiegel. An American military/counter-terror unit assigned to provide security for the NSA facility scans Facebook, netted the timeline post and sent the German federal police to the fellow’s door.

While he got a droll story out of it, if he’d been in the states they might have disappeared him for a bit until it was all sorted out.

The tale is here at The Spiegel.

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Corporate American web design mainstreams malicious behavior.

One of the best examples are films, or overlays, which show between you and the sight soon after you browse to them. They serve no other purpose than to get in your face with demands for money, information or to deliver even more advertising on top of the revolving ad content the site already delivers.

A few years ago nuisance overlays were mostly the tool of web bottom-feeders. Now they are everywhere. They are on YouTube videos, forcing you to repeatedly dismiss them. They are dropped into news videos only minutes old. Want to see something about a local fire alert? First you’ll have to watch an advertisement for women’s shoes or a smartphone.

They come with the corporate American web business belief that the company has a right to demand something of you — money or attention to an advertiser, forcefully using what amounts to a denial-of-service attack (if one that can be dismissed, eventually), for the privilege of being there. These are the ethics of a sociopath. (And if you’re reading this and use them, you’re the enemy, too. Enough with the ‘buts’ and excuses. The moment of trust has passed.)

DailyKos, for example and despite the reality that some people of conscience work for it, nails you with an overlay dun passed off as a sincere blandishment every single time you access the page.

There is not much that can be done to eliminate them. You can abandon use of a site or refuse to ever buy something from it or contribute to it because of its use of overlays, making overlay films, on an individual level, counter-productive. You can also just take their stuff and not credit, which is a tactic I feel is justified by any type of push that is effectively denial-of-service or the phenomenon of the infinite download — another type of malicious web design in which a site never stops serving content and unresponsive scripting to the client.

The continuous use of such overlays to harass people constitutes systemic bad behavior rationalized by a corporate philosophy that holds Net users in contempt. When you see them it is a signal you are thought of as someone who ought to be bullied into parting with something, usually money, daily.

This should be enough to tell you that we’re well past the point that some future revision of the web will make the digital automation of mass grasping go away. Instead, it’s time for people to start thinking about ways in which they can show counter-hostility to such American business activity.

American business, from content generation to entertainment and corporate services, has destroyed most of the reality and philosophy of the open web. It should eventually find there is a cost attached to that level of greed, cynicism and bad faith.

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