Be Excellent To Each Other

STOP THE QUOTE WALLS DAMMIT

OK

I'M GLAD THAT'S AGREED.

Agree. Parties and political organisations have been using and collating data for targeting voters for years. Just a computer is faster than going up and down tower blocks knocking on doors and matching that against turnout rolls, census data, etc. It's the combination of that with the use of narrowly targeted campaigns and extensive testing of different messages to get reactions that's the scary part. I don't think people realise how much stuff is out there.

I get your point about the Trump campaign and how it might be feeding into the outcry. It feeds into the 'stupid people voting stupidly' narrative: we ought to remember that clever people can also be as easily fooled, just in different ways.



Spooky!

Surprised that only the US election and not Brexit is being mentioned in all of this.
This all came out 10 months ago - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... -democracy

Strongly disagree. The scale that ML can work at is transformative; a quantitative difference becomes a qualitative one. Consider facial identification and gait recognition hooked up to all of London's CCTV cameras, say. With only humans watching the cameras, you cannot build a panopticon. With computers watching them, you can, because computers scale almost infinitely.

Not sure we're actually disagreeing on this. Parties have always used data for mobilisation, organisation, and voting purposes. This is taking it to new heights, and saves getting cold in graveyards.

I agree with this.

Moving back to Trump, I don't think there was a kerfuffle with Obama campaign.
https://ischool.syr.edu/infospace/2013/ ... 2-victory/

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/5090 ... ly-voters/

It is an arms race, and there are questions of its efficacy. To not use it as a tool, though, would be an error.

I think it is easier to blame the a brexit referendum on this, than grasping the nettle that was complacency in some in the Remain campaign, but I am not inclined to labour that point.

The Obama campaign app was exactly that -- a campaign app. No-one was surprised it gathered your data to use on a political campaign. The CA data came from an app run by a Cambridge University professor that purported to be for psychological research. In addition, the Obama app didn't store any data from your friends' profiles, or use it for anything other than a "send a friend a message" feature. Whereas the CA data sucked up everything it could and exfiltrated it all. These are very different things.

Wikipedia borrows the definition of "data breach" from the US DHHS as "A data breach is a security incident in which sensitive, protected or confidential data is copied, transmitted, viewed, stolen or used by an individual unauthorized to do so." That makes the data that CA worked with a breach, whereas the Obama campaign app was not.

It really isn't. Online research companies have been buying or mining Facebook data for years and years. There are two people doing it full time where I used to work.

Pleae correct me of i am 7nderstandi g tbis wrong:

How the data was obtained is the issue. The survey takers agree to it through the T&Cs and their friends who had publicly accessible profiles had those scraped for information which someone with pen and paper could (labouriously) do.

That data then went elsewhere which is the issue.

If getting all the data and exporting it was fine, dandy and above boardthen there is no issue with what was done with it subsequently.

The issue is CA could use that data within Facebook, but the moment it was used outside of Facebook it broke the agreement with Facebook.

Away from the data angle, the reps in the C4 videos were also talking about a lot more nefarious schemes to manipulate electorates such as entrapment, and they generally came across as jerks. They deny this.

I view that through this prism:

No. Some or perhaps most of the scraped data in the friends' profiles would have been only viewable to friends and not publicly, so you couldn't gather it up like this without being friends with everyone on Facebook first.

I also continue to reject the idea that this is something "someone with pen and paper could do" and therefore not a new thing. Consider Google Photos. I can search my 30k+ photos for the word "trees" and get back my pictures of trees. In theory, without machine learning, I could have paid a room full of flunkies to do that, but there aren't enough flunkies in the world for everyone to do this. So when Google Photos launched, was this a new product the world had never seen before? I think it was. Similarly, the way CA analysed data at scale is fundamentally a different thing to how traditional human-powered campaign modelled had to operate.

Ah. Right. Got it. Yeah, I can see why there is annoyance at this. I consider that a step too far



Oh, i quite agree in the implementation issues. It is possible for me to, I dunno, go to the Moon and back, but not at all probable.

[/quote]

Yeah, it is a step change. I'm considering it, for this discussion, as a magic box, where the ends are targeted adverts, points to mention and whatever it chucks out as a Good Idea To Be More Popular. The idea behind it is the same, whether a machine does it, or party members . I'm faiy chill with this as it is a bit of an arms race and so on and more resources help in things.

A C4 article on the matter quotes nix as saying they were sending magical emails that deleted themselves off people's computers after 2 weeks. I'm not sure they know enough about technology to be journalisting this.

D) Strongly Agree

So was the guy a nazi or someone just taking the piss out of nazis and making a daft joke? If it's the latter then I'm with Gervais and Davies on this particular issue.

As far as I can tell he’s both, and using the ‘but I was just making a joke’ defence to jusify shouting ‘gas the jews’ a lot.

I'd give the guy the benefit of the doubt there - not least as he explained in the video what he was doing and that he didn't fancy Nazis. And let's be fair, a dog doing a Hitler salute is a little bit funny. It would be funnier and more on point if it were a cat, of course, as they are actual living Nazis.

Yeah, I'm always saying "Heil Hitler" and "Gas the Jews" in a context that's entirely removed from being a fucking Nazi.

In other reassuring news, everyone's favourite tangerine has made bomb-happy John Bolton the USA's National Security Adviser. Sleep well, folks.

Good slapdown of Boris by the Speaker today, as Boris was being a dick and referring to Emily Thornberry in terms of who her husband is.

No I can’t be arsed to find a link.

I just watched that too. Rather pleasing

I suppose if you want to be a Labour candidate these days you have to get with his friends. Faking it is easy.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/201 ... isbury-spy

Bastard!

We're a nation of animal lovers. They've crossed a line on this.

Speaking of which, the WW2 in real time twitter reached Katyn and I'm.still trying to get my head around the sheer coldness of the operation.

I love that account

Gardiner is pretty much why I dislike Labour so much.



https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2018/ ... ssion=true

Actually quite stunned by these remarks.

One of Labour's finest achievements in office (even after we've considered the role of John Major for his work beforehand), and he wants to throw it under a bus because of a need for Brexit at all costs? Gah.

I think it's showing, once more, the amateurism of the shadow front bench (MaliA - passim). I don't think they realise at times that they aren't little known back benches anymore and should really think rather than play to their mob of worshippers.

Labour announces plan for under 25s to have free bus travel (Guardian)

Putting aside the funding question (the old people's card is a substantial cost to local authorities, so this isn't going to help) but the main issue is lack of services in rural areas.
I've never understood why outside of the largest cities regional transport boards aren't a thing. Set them up, let them award franchises to public or private contractors covering routes in an area, and sweeten them with some profitable lines alongside services that are needed but won't ever make money. If Labour plan something like this, that'd be a really good change for the good.

"The youth hate us because of our stance on Brexit, and the running over a cat reporting thing wasn't the hit we hoped for."
"Quick! Bus passes for all!"

I read the plan is to pay for it through road tax.

I think.your views in transport are spot on.

Knew those years playing 'Transport Tycoon' wouldn't go to waste.

This was my first thought, too.

Over the weekend even the Sun and the Daily Mail ran articles attacking the government and supporting the Windrush immigrants. What a shitshow. I’m not saying May is an unfeeling racist but I am saying her policies are indistinguishable from someone who is.

The more I'm hearing about the Windrush affair the angrier I'm getting. Utterly disgusting; probably even a really serious case of maladministration.

Just read that the Home Office destroyed the landing cards. Let alone the evidence they offer, why destroy such a useful historical document for future generations?

Do the Home Office even think they can 'register' people from other EU countries living here? Would they even trust the Government with this?

Theresa may did so many racist things as home secretary. This is what people who voted for her wanted.

Jesus Christ Corbyn

https://twitter.com/faisalislam/status/ ... 3817372672

“The decision to destroy the landing cards was taken in 2009 under a Labour Government” says the PM to Corbyn’s question on the matter of why they were destroyed.

— Faisal Islam (@faisalislam) April 18, 2018

Oh she was holding onto that bombshell with glee, wasn't she?

And it seems he walked right into it. Because of course he did.

Amazing.

I was listening. It’s fair to say he lost his way after that, made up a terrible question/accusation on the hoof that had just been answered in the previous question, rendering it redundant but effectively implying tories are racist. May responded by saying that she wouldn’t take that accusation from an anti Semitic party to take an even stronger advantage.

*some paraphrasing.

But not the good kind of amazing.