NEWS

Big Tech’s accountability-avoidance problem is getting worse

Published

4 years ago

June 12, 2020

Do you know how you can tell when a giant social network is trying to hide something? When one of its executives claims its service is “just a platform.”

You know how you can tell when the company doesn’t believe its own excuse? When that executive isn’t even the CEO.

This much has been obvious to many people outside and inside Silicon Valley for years now. But too many leaders in Big Tech still appear to think that having an underling utter this incantation will dispel the latest crisis.

No company has better illustrated this lately than Facebook (FB) since the Guardian and the New York Times reported Saturday that a researcher hired by the Trump-linked marketing-research firm Cambridge Analytica had obtained the data of as many as 50 million Facebook users in 2013 by lying to 270,000 of their friends about the ultimate use of a personality-quiz app.

How not to talk to your users

Since then, the social network has conducted a master class in how not to deal with a crisis. It hasn’t explained why it didn’t do more when it learned in 2015 of the Cambridge Analytica data heist — it hasn’t even said if it notified the people who took the quiz or the friends whose data was swept up via a feature Facebook closed in 2015.

(The odds are it hasn’t, since it still has no policy requiring it to notify users if an app they installed broke its own rules. So first Facebook leaves it to you to decide to trust a third-party app on its platform, then it leaves it to you to discover if the app betrays your trust.)

Instead, Facebook’s initial response amounted to “we’re mad too, we didn’t realize that people could abuse our platform like this, but please don’t call this a data breach.”

Facebook’s top leadership seems to have switched its own visibility on this subject to “Friends Only.” CEO Mark Zuckerberg and chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, the two faces of the franchise, have yet to speak even as Facebook’s stock has reeled.

The most public and useful comments have come from two lower-ranking executives — and on Twitter, not Facebook. Chief security officer Alex Stamos and augmented-and-virtual-reality vice president Andrew Bosworth have provided straightforward, humane responses there.

Alas, Stamos—a clear-eyed security expert and, earlier, chief security officer at Yahoo Finance’s then-parent firm Yahoo — may not speak for Facebook much longer. A New York Times story Monday said he will leave the company in August.
We’ve seen this movie before

Facebook can at least point to plenty of precedent. Major social networks went through almost the exact same exercise over the last two years as it became increasingly obvious how badly they’d been abused by fake-news vendors and then Russian social-media operatives.

Then as now, the initial reflex was to back away from responsibility. The damage wasn’t that bad, representatives of Facebook, Twitter (TWTR), and Google (GOOG, GOOGL) said. We’re not in the news business anyway, we’re just platforms. We’ll punish the people who exploited our system.

And then as now, the CEOs involved largely directed their subordinates to do the talking. When the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism wanted to question all three firms about Russian online disinformation efforts in 2016, Facebook’s Zuckerberg, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Google’s Sundar Pichai all sent in their lawyers instead.

But now that we’re stumbling through yet another news cycle, this time led by Facebook, the calls are increasing for Zuckerberg to testify in person. Delivering yet another heartfelt monologue via Facebook Live like his Sept. 21 vow to do more against meddling by foreign political operatives — with the audiences that his appearances draw, that’s not a conversation but a lecture — will not cut it.

And thanks to Cambridge Analytica being a British firm, these calls are coming from both sides of the Atlantic. As Damian Collins, a Conservative member of Parliament, put it: “It’s time for Mark Zuckerberg to stop hiding behind his Facebook page.”
There are exceptions

Not all of Big Tech has entirely forgotten how to talk to the public.

Four months after letting his general counsel get grilled by that Senate subcommittee, Twitter’s Dorsey took to his own service — on which users regularly denounce him by his @jack handle for not kicking Nazis off the platform — on March 1 to confess that “we didn’t fully predict or understand the real-world negative consequences” of enabling a public conversation in Twitter’s format.

He added that in trying to kick off content that broke its rules, Twitter had failed to “encourage more healthy debate, conversations and critical thinking.” In fewer words: The problem isn’t just bad actors on the platform, but the design of the platform itself.

When we see Zuckerberg make an admission like that in public, we’ll know Facebook has at least realized the depths of its problems. But at this point, seeing Zuckerberg speak publicly at all about the Cambridge Analytica debacle might represent progress — unless he only does so after Congress compels his testimony.

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NEWS

German military to sell tons of toilet paper

Published

12 months ago

May 24, 2023

The San Francisco Telegraph

The Bundeswehr decided to jettison inventory that does not fit new dispensers

The German military is auctioning off nearly 10,000 rolls of toilet paper that do not fit new dispensers at Bundeswehr facilities, local media reported on Monday.

According to a posting on the Vebeg online auction platform, which was picked up by the German TV network RTL, the Bundeswehr is offering a total of 12 pallets of toilet paper stored in 360 boxes that has a transport weight of over 3 tons.

While it is unclear when exactly the ad was posted, the auction is scheduled to last until May 31. The winning bidder will be able to pick up the toilet paper, which was produced by the Sweden-based company Tork, at the military barracks in the city of Wesel, not far from Munster in the northwestern part of the country.

Potential buyers will need to register with the military department where the inventory is being stored before coming to the premises to pick it up or view it, the ad reads.

Germany faces toilet paper shortage

The German military told RTL that the sale was due to having switched the toilet paper dispensers at Bundeswehr sanitary facilities to pieces made by a different company.

“However, the toilet paper from the first company cannot be used in a universal hygiene dispenser,” a Bundeswehr spokesman told the outlet.

According to RTL, the German military has also put printer toners, desks, and laptops up for sale.

The state of the Bundeswehr stocks of weaponry and other equipment and amenities has been an issue of concern in Germany. In March, Eva Hogl, who serves as the country’s parliamentary commissioner for the armed forces, claimed that the Bundeswehr “has too little of everything and it has had even less since February 24, 2022,” referring to when Russia started its military campaign in Ukraine. Since then, Berlin has provided massive military and economic support to Kiev.

She noted that the German army also lacked “functioning toilets, clean showers… indoor sports facilities, troop kitchens… and last but not least, wireless internet.”

Hogl also pointed out that the government had failed to spend any of the money from a €100 billion ($108 billion) special defense fund created last year in light of the Ukraine conflict.

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NEWS

First female Saudi astronaut heads to space

Published

12 months ago

May 24, 2023

The San Francisco Telegraph

The Falcon 9 has successfully blasted off on a private mission carrying Saudi and American astronauts to the ISS

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket successfully launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sunday, on a mission from the Houston-based company Axiom Space. It also carried the first Saudi woman to travel to the cosmos.

The mission, dubbed Ax-2, is Axiom’s second private mission bound for the International Space Station. The company utilized SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, named Freedom, to carry the crew and the Falcon 9 to deliver it from Earth’s atmosphere.

Shortly after liftoff, the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket successfully performed a boost-back burn to SpaceX’s Landing Zone-1 and touched down safely about seven minutes and 45 seconds after launch.

The Dragon then detached from the Falcon 9’s upper stage some 12 minutes after liftoff and headed to the ISS to perform a docking scheduled for Monday.

Aboard Freedom are the first two Saudi Arabian nationals to travel to the ISS, including stem cell researcher Rayyanah Barnawi – the first Saudi woman ever to enter space. Joining the Ax-2 as mission pilot is businessman John Shofner, who paid out of his own pocket for the trip.

First blockbuster filmed in space premieres in theaters

Leading the mission is commander Peggy Whitson – a former NASA astronaut who has spent 665 days in space throughout her career, more than any other American or any other woman, and was also the first woman to serve as commander aboard the ISS. She currently works as Axiom’s director of human spaceflight.

The four-person crew is expected to spend eight days aboard the ISS, living and working alongside the seven astronauts currently residing there. They will also conduct independent research, including into how people that have not undergone rigorous training will react when first introduced to microgravity.

Axiom has announced plans to further develop commercialized spaceflight and even launch its own free floating private space station by the end of the decade. The first module of this future station is expected to be sent up to the ISS next year, with another three pieces to follow by the end of 2027.

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NEWS

Kenya supports creation of pan-African court

Published

12 months ago

May 23, 2023

The San Francisco Telegraph

The move may prompt more African nations to ratify the Malabo Protocol, a political analyst told TSFT

Kenyan President William Ruto says his country will ratify the 2014 Malabo Protocol by September in a move towards making the Pan-African Parliament (PAP) an official legislative organ of the African Union (AU).

The Malabo Protocol seeks to convert the PAP into a full-fledged legislative body, which would hold jurisdiction over international and transnational organized crimes; in other words, creating an African international crimes court.

The protocol must be approved by at least 28 countries before it can enter into force. However, only 15 of the 22 signatories to the protocol in 2014 have ratified it, making Kenya the 16th.

Ken Bosire, a Kenyan political analyst, told RT that Nairobi’s decision to give the PAP legislative power is a “positive move” that could inspire other African leaders to follow suit. “The new president of Kenya seems to have some kind of persuasive sway among leaders of the region,” he added.

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