Credit where credit is due

 It's a start.

Here goes another one...

 

Google may not be your friend

 

Bending the knee: Over the Google barrel

Google Calendar users recently noticed that certain cultural observances, including Black History Month and Pride Month, are no longer displayed on the platform.

The company previously included these events in prior years, but for 2025, they have been removed without public announcement.

The change, which The Verge first reported, has sparked online discussion, with users questioning why these events were excluded.

A Google spokesperson confirmed the update, The Verge reported, stating that the company is now only showing public holidays and national observances instead of manually maintaining a broader list of cultural moments.

  Fox

But...

So much of our computer usage is tied into Google.  

Stupid

"Officially" is doing a lot of work here.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Out of this world

Clarifying information

So this is why the relief package recently passed by Congress came with a caveat money couldn't go to Trump's family, and specifically mentioned his "son-in-law".

On March 13, President Donald Trump promised Americans they would soon be able to access a new website that would ask them about their symptoms and direct them to nearby coronavirus testing sites. He said Google was helping.

That wasn’t true. But in the following days, Oscar Health—a health-insurance company closely connected to Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner—developed a government website with the features the president had described. A team of Oscar engineers, project managers, and executives spent about five days building a stand-alone website at the government’s request, an Oscar spokesperson told The Atlantic. The company even dispatched two employees from New York to meet in person with federal officials in Washington, D.C., the spokesperson said. Then the website was suddenly and mysteriously scrapped.

The site would not have helped many Americans even if it had launched. Today, more than two weeks after the president promised a national network of drive-through test sites, only a handful of such sites have opened, and fewer than 1 million Americans have been tested.

[...]

The partnership between the administration and the firm suggests that Kushner may have mingled his family’s business interests with his political interests and his role in the administration’s coronavirus response. Kushner’s younger brother Joshua is a co-founder and major investor in Oscar, and Jared Kushner partially owned or controlled Oscar before he joined the White House.

  Atlantic

These people never quit.

Impeach the motherfucker again.

For the past several weeks, Kushner has led a “shadow task force” on the coronavirus, separate from Vice President Mike Pence’s official committee, according to The Washington Post. Kushner’s team, composed of federal officials allied with Kushner and outside corporate executives, has met in the headquarters of the Department of Health and Human Services. A senior official at that agency called Oscar to ask for its help on March 13, the day of Trump’s press conference, the Oscar spokesperson said.

[...]

[The website] was designed to look like a government-developed product, provided freely by the Department of Health and Human Services to the American public.

[...]

Two weeks ago, the company told Business Insider that it had “shared code” with the Department of Health and Human Services, but it did not disclose that it had actually made a website. Last week, Kahn told me in an interview that the company had merely “shrink-wrapped” its code, a piece of jargon that meant it had disconnected the code from its in-house technical platforms so that it could work on other servers. Her statement today admitted that Oscar had gone much further.

[...]

Oscar donated its work freely and never expected to be paid for the project, Kahn said. The company is “not, nor has ever been,” a contractor or subcontractor for the government, she said, which would make it harder for the government to pay Oscar for its work. The work was “all at the direction of HHS,” [Jackie Kahn, the Oscar spokesperson] said. “The website never saw the light of day,” she added in an interview today.

That may not matter from an ethics perspective. The ad hoc nature of Kushner’s task force has already collided with federal laws. Oscar’s involvement deepens Kushner’s ethics and conflict-of-interest problems.

[...]

[Companies are generally not supposed to work for the federal government for free, though some exceptions can be made in a national emergency. “The concern, when you have some free services, is that it makes the government beholden to the company,” [ Jessica Tillipman, an assistant dean at the George Washington University School of Law and an expert on anti-corruption law] said.

More important, she said, any Kushner involvement may have violated the “impartiality rule,” which requires federal employees to refrain from making decisions when they even appear to involve a conflict of interest. The rule also prohibits federal employees from making a decision in which close relatives may have a financial stake.

[...]

In 2013, Jared and Joshua were the “ultimate controlling persons in Oscar’s holding company,” according to a New York State report that Mother Jones dug up earlier this month. When the elder Kushner joined the White House, he disclosed that he had been on the board of Oscar’s holding company from May 2010 to January 2017. He also said that he had sold his shares in the holding company for somewhere between $1.2 million and $7 million. Joshua still holds a stake in the company. When Jared joined the administration, he sold his shares to either Joshua or a trust controlled by their mother, according to his financial disclosures.

Jesus these grifters.

Oh, Jesus

Here we go again.

Google is not working with the US government in building a nationwide website to help people determine whether and how to get a novel coronavirus test, despite what President Donald Trump said in the course of issuing an emergency declaration for the coronavirus pandemic. Instead, a much smaller trial website made by another division of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is going up. It will only be able to direct people to testing facilities in the Bay Area.

  The Verge

And that damned woman stood up there with a fucking chart touting it.

What is WRONG with these people?

Carolyn Wang, communications lead for Verily, told The Verge that the “triage website” was initially only going to be made available to health care workers instead of the general public. Now that it has been announced the way it was, however, anybody will be able to visit it, she said. But the tool will only be able to direct people to “pilot sites” for testing in the Bay Area, though Wang says Verily hopes to expand it beyond California “over time.”

The triage site should be put live within a few days, and it will be hosted at Project Baseline, the Verily website where people can sign up to take part in clinical trials. That’s a seemingly odd place for the triage tool to live, but Wang says that Project Baseline already has certain necessary tools like an informed consent agreement, so it makes sense to put it there.

[...]

In all, the difference between the reality of what is being built and what was promised during the press conference is very large.

Debbie Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, showed a flowchart during the press conference that explained what the proposed functionality of the website would be. Nobody from Alphabet or Google spoke at the event, although may executives from other health and retail companies did.

As Birx described the website, citizens would be able to enter their symptoms and, depending on what the results are, be directed to a “drive thru” testing facility. That same website would apparently also be where people can go to find their results.

So are the drive-through testing sites they touted actually happening?

Jesus wept.

UPDATE 3/31: This explains a lot: Jared Kushner was in charge of this, and his brother is co-founder of the company that was to build the website.

These slimebuckets never quit.

Guess what? Trump tweeted a lie

Shocking, I know.

[Trump] was referring to a study by psychologist Robert Epstein, which was discussed on Fox Business earlier on Monday. But Trump did not describe the research correctly. And the research itself has been called into question.

Epstein himself says Trump was wrong about his findings. Epstein did find "bias" in Google search results, but he says there is no evidence Google "manipulated" the results to favor Clinton. Also, critics of the study note that there is no definitive link between search results and voting behavior in presidential elections.

[...]

Epstein, who testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in July, found what he alleges was a pro-Clinton bias in Google's search results.

In an interview with CNN on Monday, Epstein said the pro-Clinton bias was "sufficient to have shifted between 2.6 and 10.4 million votes" to Clinton.

There is no basis in Epstein's research for Trump's claim that the alleged bias might have affected "16 million" votes. Epstein did testify in July that big tech companies in general could potentially shift "upwards of 15 million votes" in the 2020 election, but he didn't claim that this happened in 2016.

In the Monday interview, Epstein rejected Trump's claim that Google "manipulated" votes in 2016. He said he does not have firm evidence even that Google intentionally manipulated its search algorithm or results, let alone votes themselves.

[...]

For this study, he had 95 people from 24 states, including 21 self-described undecided voters, conduct election-related searches using search engines Google, Yahoo and Bing. Then he had another group of Americans, hired through the crowdsourcing website Amazon Mechanical Turk, use a point scale to rate the supposed bias of the articles found on the first page of the search results.

An extremely pro-Trump article would get a minus-5, while an extremely pro-Clinton article would get a plus-5.

Using this method, he found that Google's results were reliably more pro-Clinton, in both red states and blue states, than Yahoo or Bing results. Then, using his previous research from elections in other countries about how search results can affect voter intentions, he came to a broad estimate of 2.6 million to 10.4 million votes potentially affected by search bias in the US in 2016.

[...]

Google said Epstein was incorrect in his claims of bias.

"This researcher's inaccurate claim has been debunked since it was made in 2016. As we stated then, we have never re-ranked or altered search results to manipulate political sentiment

[...]

Other academics have joined Google in criticizing Epstein's methodology and conclusions.

One issue is the quality of news sources.

Google says one of its criteria for ranking news results is how authoritative a source is. Using Epstein's methodology, a search engine whose top results page did not feature an article from a far-right pro-Trump website, such as Breitbart, would be ranked as more biased in favor of Clinton than a search engine that did showcase Breitbart.

[...]

Epstein emphasized that he is not a Trump fan. But he argued that Google results should not be treating pro-Trump media as second-class "for whatever reason, whatever your excuse."

[...]

Another issue, other academics say, is that Epstein's study did not establish a link between alleged bias in search results and voter behavior in 2016.

[...]

In other words: Epstein did not test 2016 American voters to see if their Clinton-or-Trump choice had been changed by search results they got. He extrapolated from his previous studies.

In an American presidential election, people tend to know so much about the two leading candidates, and are getting news from so many different sources, that it is not at all clear that search results would affect their preferences the same way they might in other settings where they have less information, said Michael McDonald, a political science professor and elections expert at the University of Florida.

McDonald said it is certainly possible that political results from Google and other search engines have been affected by the unintentional biases of the people who wrote their algorithms. But McDonald said Epstein has failed to establish that any such biases have had anywhere near the magnitude of impact on American presidential voting that Epstein suggests.

  Daniel Dale @ CNN

Which, I think is an argument pro-Trump people (including Trump) make about the Russian social media interference in 2016: there's nothing proving it made any difference in how people actually voted.

(An aside: Judicial Watch, a conservative legal activist group that is active on elections issues, was not involved in Epstein's research. The group told CNN that it believed Trump tagged it in the tweet to encourage it to look into the allegations.)

Judicial Watch is Trump's go-to for unwavering pro-Trump "information".

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The most transparent government president ever

But did he beg?




Lou Dobbs!  Well, it has to be true, then.

Google, you've been warned!



UPDATE:


UPDATE:

Europe attempts to rein in Google

Google was hit with a $57 million fine [over how they address privacy practices], the largest yet leveled under a sweeping new European data law, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The fine is meager compared to Google’s bottom line, but the law allows regulators to ramp up penalties up to 4 percent of their annual global revenue. For Google’s parent company Alphabet, that could amount to a $4 billion hit. For Google and its Silicon Valley peers, the fine is being seen as a wake-up call that Europe is ready to challenge them on their data practices. And in the U.S., it’s raising pressure on American regulators to follow suit and toughen their oversight of tech giants.

[...]

In a statement, a spokesperson for Google said it was reviewing the decision to “determine our next steps.”

[...]

“It’s hard to say how much you have to fine Google to hurt them, but it’s stronger than anything we’ve seen here in the U.S.,” Fitzgerald told The Hill. “I think U.S. consumers should ask why the FTC [Federal Trade Commission] is failing to act against these tech companies.”

[...]

“Almost every democratic country in the world has an authority focused on data protection so the U.S. is kind of alone in that regard,” Fitzgerald said.

  The Hill

The days of Edward Snowden seem far behind us.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

No, Google

In fact, we don't have a Secretary of Defense.  Who knows when we might get one. Catch up.  A lot of people depend on you.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The Dems smell blood

That was so sly.  Just a random example to ask a technical question.  She's got a future on any Congressional committee she chooses.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

And they just re-elected him, didn't they?

Now, if Comey told me Steve King thought his emails were secure as long as his server was physically guarded, I might believe that.  (See previous post.)

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Sessions seems impotent

They probably figure he's not going to be around much longer.

Officials from 13 states and the District of Columbia gathered at the Department of Justice Tuesday morning. Entering without an official public agenda, it was unclear what the meeting would actually be about. Just this past weekend, reports of a leaked memo suggested that the Trump administration might be gearing up to instruct the Department of Justice and other federal agencies to investigate online platforms like Facebook and Twitter for anti-trust violations. Speculation leading up to the meeting strongly suggested that the Department of Justice would hone in on the potential of anti-trust actions against big tech on the basis of conservative bias, accusations that have been a repeated refrain from Republican lawmakers and the president in recent weeks.

But, according to one attorney general at the meeting, it seemed like Sessions was the only person who wanted to talk about political bias, with the majority of the attorneys general instead deeming the path “too dangerous.”

“He repeatedly mentioned that concept of political bias without calling it that,” Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh, one of the few Democrats in attendance, tells Mother Jones about Sessions opening remarks. “’There are forces that are surreptitiously using forces to influence public opinion,’ [Sessions] said, and I highly doubt he was referring to the Russians.”

[...]

According to Frosh, when Nebraska Attorney General Doug Peterson suggested the conversation focus on issues with more agreement, including consumer privacy, Sessions retorted, “What are we supposed to do about it, just ignore it?”

  Mother Jones

I think they're ignoring you, Jeff.

As for the question of anti-trust issues, attorneys general in attendance didn’t rule out the possibility as one of many avenues of creating better legal accountability for an increasingly powerful tech industry.

[...]

The meeting comes at a crucial time when federal lawmakers are playing catch up to efforts being made at the state level to enshrine consumer privacy. In June, California passed data privacy legislation which gives consumers basic rights, including the ability to opt-out from companies selling their data to third parties and the right to know what data about them is being collected. Conversations on the federal level, on the other hand, have moved more slowly since the wake of hearings brought on by Cambridge Analytica.

[...]

“I think it was pretty clear that there was a willingness among the state [attorneys general] to work together,” Frosh says, “and perhaps to work together with the Justice Department about abuses of economic market powers—but I couldn’t determine if that was of interest to the Justice Department.”

Let me guess.

“I think the key takeaway is the Justice Department, at least, is still thinking about changing what is written or spoken on social media platforms and make it more to their liking,” says Frosh. “That’s very dangerous to free speech.”

Details, details

“In January of this year, we began looking into using Cell ID codes as an additional signal to further improve the speed and performance of message delivery,” a Google spokesperson told Quartz.

Every time a device with a cellular data or WiFi connection came within range of a new cell tower, it would broadcast the addresses of nearby cellular towers and send the data to Google. However, the company said the data is “distinctly separate” from Location Services, which sends a device’s location to the applications.

  RT

Distinctly separate, perhaps, but not distinctly different.

Quartz found that the location-sharing was occurring on all modern Android devices. The report states that Android devices were sharing their location even when there was no SIM card installed and the user disabled location services.

[...]

The Cell ID was never incorporated into Google’s network sync system and all the data was “immediately discarded,” the company said. The tech giant promised to roll out an update that removes the cell ID collecting feature by the end of this month.

Only because they got caught.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Meanwhile in internet news

Eric Schmidt, the Executive Chairman of Google’s parent company Alphabet, says the company will “engineer” specific algorithms for RT and Sputnik to make their articles less prominent on the search engine’s news delivery services.

“We are working on detecting and de-ranking those kinds of site."

  RT

What are "those kinds of sites"? Something that propagandizes news? Something like Fox News?

"[I]t’s basically RT and Sputnik,” Schmidt said.

Oh, I see. Russian-affiliated sites.

“We are well of aware of it, and we are trying to engineer the systems to prevent that [the content being delivered to wide audiences]. But we don’t want to ban the sites – that’s not how we operate.”

We just virtually ban sites.

Another reason net neutrality is so important, yet on its way out.

“Good to have Google on record as defying all logic and reason: facts aren’t allowed if they come from RT, ‘because Russia’ – even if we have Google on Congressional record saying they've found no manipulation of their platform or policy violations by RT,” Sputnik and RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan said in a statement.

Indeed.

During the discussion, Schmidt claimed that he was “very strongly not in favor of censorship,” but said that he has faith in “ranking” without acknowledging if the system might serve the same function. Schmidt, who joined Google in 2001, said that the company’s algorithm was capable of detecting “repetitive, exploitative, false, and weaponized” info, but did not elaborate on how these qualities were determined.

Let me guess: Russia.

The Alphabet chief, who has been referred to by Hillary Clinton as a “longtime friend,” added that the experience of “the last year” showed that audiences could not be trusted to distinguish fake and real news for themselves.

[...]

RT America registered under FARA [as a foreign agent] earlier this month, after being threatened by the US Department of Justice with arrests and confiscations of property if it failed to comply. The broadcaster is fighting the order in court.

Big Brother is alive and well.

Amazon announced it has launched a “Secret Region” on its cloud computing service for use by US intelligence and other government agencies. The provider is now able to store government information classified as “Top Secret.”

[...]

“The U.S. Intelligence Community can now execute their missions with a common set of tools, a constant flow of the latest technology and the flexibility to rapidly scale with the mission. The AWS Top Secret Region was launched three years ago as the first air-gapped commercial cloud and customers across the U.S. Intelligence Community have made it a resounding success. Ultimately, this capability allows more agency collaboration, helps get critical information to decision makers faster, and enables an increase in our Nation’s Security.”

  RT

So, is Amazon a government agency now? This strikes me as quite the coup.

It is separate from the existing $600 million contract signed with the Central Intelligence Agency in 2013 that provided cloud services to all 17 intelligence agencies. The new Secret Region agreement makes the technology available to all government agencies with sufficient clearance.

And a one-stop shopping center for anyone with a key.

This comes after it was revealed that the US Defense Department left a massive data collection on an Amazon cloud server, which could have been accessed by anyone with a free account. The data included billions of social media posts from Facebook, Twitter and news sites.

Nice.

But not to be outdone, Microsoft has its own version.

The computing giant Microsoft made a similar announcement in October when it said its government cloud program, called “Azure Government Secret” would support US government agencies working with data classified as “secret.”

RT

How will they compete? What will each offer to the government to get its contract?

While it is unknown what new security measures the AWS Secret Region will include, hackers have previously utilized what is known as “east-west” traffic to move around the servers in the cloud network while avoiding detection for long periods of time.

[...]

This means one breach could potentially put all of the data and applications being stored on the AWS Secret Region at risk of being stolen, manipulated, or held for ransom.

Nice.

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Google Censorship

An intensive review of Internet data has established that Google has severed links between the World Socialist Web Site and the 45 most popular search terms that previously directed readers to the WSWS. The physical censorship implemented by Google is so extensive that of the top 150 search terms that, as late as April 2017, connected the WSWS with readers, 145 no longer do so.

These findings make clear that the decline in Google search traffic to the WSWS is not the result of some technical issue, but a deliberate policy of censorship. The fall took place in the three months since Google announced on April 25 plans to promote “authoritative web sites” above those containing “offensive” content and “conspiracy theories.”

Because of these measures, the WSWS’s search traffic from Google has fallen by two-thirds since April.

  WSWS

In Spite of the Trump Syndrome

This fall, with backing from tech titan Google, [Jason] Okonofua, 31, a junior psychology professor at UC Berkeley, will launch an online intervention for more than 100 U.S. school teachers to motivate them to check their biases against African American students before meting out punishment. His approach is the first of its kind.

  Berkeley News

Continue reading.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

More Trump Administrators

Joshua Wright, the former GOP commissioner at the FTC, [has] been advising the [Trump transition] team on related matters, according to a source familiar with effort. Wright  [...]  comes to the transition as executive director of the Global Antitrust Institute at George Mason University, which he rejoined in 2015 after serving at the FTC during the Obama administration.

  Politico Morning Tech

Joshua Wright has been put in charge of transition efforts at the influential Federal Trade Commission after pulling off the rare revolving-door quadruple-play, moving from Google-supported academic work to government – as an FTC commissioner – back to the Google gravy train and now back to the government.

[...]

Wright’s leadership position in the Trump FTC transition flips him back into government work. The FTC has two open seats on its five-member panel, and Chair Edith Ramirez’s term ends in April 2017. So Trump will be able to remake the agency, which has responsibilities over consumer protection and policing anti-competitive business practices, like the employing of monopoly power. Outside of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, no government agency is more responsible for competition policy than the FTC.

[...]

Google is currently facing antitrust allegations in Europe. In May, Politico reported that the FTC planned to take a second look at Google’s search bias, three years after they closed an investigation, despite reported recommendations to prosecute from agency staff. Having someone on the Google payroll twice doing hiring for the new Administration may halt any new investigation at the FTC.

  The Intercept

In other words–it sure looks like Joshua Wright is exactly the kind of swamp dweller that one would have expected Mr. Trump to avoid.

Don’t tell me there’s a silver lining because Google will not have as much access to the White House as they’re used to under Obama. It may not be quite so cozy as it was, but it’s starting to look like Google really is part of the deep state.

  MTP

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.