Anything is Funny if it Didn’t Happen to You

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But though most people can recover from having their credit card data compromised (or perhaps weren’t personally affected by it), they might not recover so well from having their marriage destroyed, so perhaps the most poignant of  recent hacks was the one of the Ashley Madison extramarital affair website. Most recently Ashley Madison users filed class action lawsuits in Canada and the US, which will almost certainly destroy the company and at a minimum disgrace its parent company Avid Life Media  Ironically, the hackers had originally not tried to destroy the whole thing but to force more ethical behavior on it, and when the company stonewalled the hackers carried out their threat of disclosure. Another example of hubris … which has at a minimum forced  the CEO of Avid Life Media to resign.

Phishing for “Dead” People (or FORMER LinkedIn members)

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Like Mark Twain, reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated. At least on the geni.com genealogy website. Coggshall is not a common name. Dan Coggshall confirms that he has nothing to do with Geni.com. Apparently Geni.com is just hoping to trick me into using their site. When I click on “Contact profile manager” it just dumps me back at their Home screen where they try to sign me up. Apparently there is no way to actually communicate with them unless you are playing their game. HIGHLY UNETHICAL.

Speaking of unethical, LinkedIn had been triggering regular weekly messages (exactly the same day and time each week) from an acquaintance, using as bait a handful of people who were NOT known to him but LinkedIn claimed they were. Because of this and other nasty games they played I totally quit LinkedIn. I only got a few more messages, all of which I unsubscribed, and this acquaintance’s weekly missives ceased. But a couple of days ago LinkedIn re-started the same game. Apparently the CEO’s “compassion” philosophy does not extend to members or former members of LinkedIn.

BIG Data Is Not Necessarily GOOD Data

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Social networks collect enormous amounts of data about people’s intentions and actions, but they have come into being so quickly that there hasn’t been time for much wisdom to have been gleaned from this data. The large majority of both the staffs of the social network companies and their users have little or no experience with the practical challenges of collecting and interpreting data. A just-published study by Derek Ruths of McGill University and Jürgen Pfeffer of Carnegie Mellon University in Science Daily warns of some of the pitfalls. Foremost among them is not dealing with the biases due to the composition of the sample. Technology Bloopers’ Statistics and Surveys webpage states at the outset “Be sure your sample is representative.” Different social networks attract different sorts of people, in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, etc. Findings based on data from one almost certainly do not represent the U.S. population as a whole. One flagrant example, which occurred decades before most of the people designing or using today’s social networks were born, was the mistaken prediction that Dewey would beat Truman in the 1948 U.S. presidential race; this was caused by a failure to sample voters properly. There are certainly a number of similar errors that have already been made by failures to understand the underlying samples from social networks’ being used for decision-making.

Mandatory Fun of (Watching) Football … and Other (Even Electronic) Games

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The massive media coverage in recent years of poor health due to over-eating and under-exercising is no match for the even more massive advertising budget of professional sports. If you thought that the NFL were a sports league you would be wrong; it is actually a major TV channel. And the editorial side of the Wall Street Journal has been suckered in.

Hopefully games of touch football or flag football among youths are still getting them off the couch and away from their electronic devices. But it appears that they would rather play the Madden NFL electronic game on a gadget than the real thing on a green field. But this only exercises their fingers. And it’s not just the teen-aged boys who are exercising their fingers rather than their legs. Grown men are playing so much fantasy football on their laptops that it has been estimated there is an annual $13 billion productivity loss in America.

Social Media Doesn’t Care Who It Hurts

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The late Jacques Littlefield was reputedly the largest collector of military vehicles in the world. During a recent tour of the collection the docent started off with a safety warning, saying “A tank doesn’t care who it hurts.” Those words came back a bit later in the tour when he showed a video clip of an insurgent on a building top using a rocket-propelled grenade to blow up a tank on parade in the street below. Where did the video come from? YouTube! The insurgents had uploaded it to show what they could do, even during (more-or-less) peaceful moments.

The insurgents are becoming increasingly sophisticated in using social media for a variety of purposes. And they are adept at using all the hacker tricks, e.g., hijacking unrelated topics to spread their message.

NSA and Information Industry Giants: On Speaking Terms Again

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You have to admire the chutzpah of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg in complaining about the NSA’s invading Facebook’s or the populace’s privacy. It seems that Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and every other social networking site is doing that in spades, and has been doing it for years. So how did he get off venting to President Obama about the abuse by the NSA? And didn’t the NSA hack into Facebook so shouldn’t he be saving some of his anger for his own IT staff who let this happen? (The CIO and CEO of Target lost their jobs over such breaches.) Anyway, during July both sides have been getting friendlier, according to an article and a video by Bloomberg Businessweek.