Posts tagged Fighting
Group Says Twitter Trails Other Social Networks In Fighting Pedophilia
Jan 11th
A watchdog group says Twitter lags behind Facebook, Bebo and other social networks when it comes to protecting children from abuse.
The London-based Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre said it believes some pedophiles still use the site to discuss crimes against children and link to pornographic images, despite efforts by Twitter to act immediately when it receives complaints about such activity.
WIn a statement Del Harvey, Twitter’s Director of Trust and Safety, said “we receive a report and identify it as valid, we take action immediately.”
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“Accounts being reported may be the subject of law enforcement investigations. In those instances, while the profiles are certainly disturbing, removing them immediately can actually harm the cases that law enforcement may be attempting to build,” Harvey said. “Additionally, a user submitting a report may not receive a response if it is a duplicate to one that has already been reported, even if action has been taken.”
CEOP said Facebook and Bebo have both worked with the agency to develop “panic buttons” on their sites which allows users to immediately report concerns with a single mouse click. Twitter, on the other hand, is still a “little bit behind some other sites that have been around a little bit longer,” CEOP Chief Executive Peter Davies said in a statement.
CEOP provided no specific examples of instances where children have been endangered, but the group cited anecdotal evidence from Mark Williams-Thomas, a former detective who now works as a child protection expert. Williams-Thomas said he believes pedophiles are still active on the site and may be using Twitter to contact victims.
Williams-Thomas also told the BBC that privacy protections on Twitter and other social networks may be helping pedophiles hide their crimes. In Twitter, for example, users can keep conversations private from everyone but their followers, which makes them harder to detect and report.
“Clearly you can communicate whatever you want within a protected profile,” Williams-Thomas said.
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Google’s Latest Deal With IBM Is All About Fighting Oracle (GOOG, ORCL, IBM) – San Francisco Chronicle
Jan 4th
 BBC News |
Google's Latest Deal With IBM Is All About Fighting Oracle (GOOG, ORCL, IBM)
San Francisco Chronicle At the end of 2011, the US Patent Office recorded that Google bought more than 200 patents from IBM, as first noticed by blog SEO By The Sea. It's the third deal between the two companies in the last year, accounting for more than 2000 patents. … Google Gets 200+ IBM Patents, Including One for a 'Semantic Social Network' Google Acquires More IBM Patents Google bolsters patent stockpile with IBM buy |
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Clay Shirky Says Good Collaboration is Structured Fighting
Aug 19th
Companies and projects focusing on large-scale collaboration might want to start thinking about collaboration in a new way. Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody closed out the second day of LinuxCon North America 2011 with a contrarian look at collaboration. While many treat collaboration as a “love fest” or harmonious interaction, Shirky put forward the idea that productive methods of fighting are the most successful, particularly in open source.
Shirky, who also teaches at New York University, started talking about his “favorite bug report ever.” The bug report, for Firefox (#330884), was a corner case where Firefox would show any user what sites that should never save passwords even if selected by another user.
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In other words, if one user chose not to save passwords for a dating site, their fiancé could also see what sites Firefox should not save passwords for. The bug was filed by a woman who discovered (through the Firefox bug) that her significant other had been perusing dating sites and consequently ended a five-year-old relationship. The bug report not only contains the technical issue, but also the social impact of the bug, and Shirky describes the rest of the comments on the bug report as a mix of technical discussion and relationship advice, and in some cases relationship advice given as one might give techincal advice.
The bug report, says Shirky, demonstrates that you can never disentangle the technical from the “soft human squishy stuff.”
Then Shirky tied in the birth of GNU and Linux to the idea that “the whole world is your talent pool,” (a quote from Eric Raymond’s “Cathedral and Bazaar”) and his main ideas about collaboration and cognative surplus.
Linux not only produced an important technical work, but promoted the idea of mass collaboration taken up by things like Wikipedia. “Tiny changes of behavior by small fractions of the population” can make a huge difference, says Shirky. Why? Because we have a “cognative surplus” — when the whole world is your potential talent pool, you can see incredible successes. And silliness, of course, such as LOLCats. Shirky noted that the Internet is efficient at creating LOLCats and other silliness, and it takes dedication and interest to produce useful results. This is nothing new, says Shirky. The printing press produced erotica more than 100 years before the first scientific journal.
The printing press, and other modes of communication, are not only not immediately and mostly used for work – they also don’t lead to world peace. Says Shirky, “here’s a hint about what happens with media revolutions. Not world peace. When you vastly increase people’s ability to communicate with one another… means more fighting.”
The question, says Shirky, is how to structure that fighting to lead to productive results. We’re not good at subjecting our own beliefs to scrutiny, says Shirky, but we’re very good at scrutinizing others’ beliefs and work. He used the examples of chemistry versus alchemy. Alchemists hid their work, chemists published and discussed their work – a form of structured fighting. We know which field has led to better results.
Managing Collaboration
Here Shirky started talking about the importance of managing collaboration effectively. Large collaborative projects aren’t, in fact, large collaborative projects according to Shirky. They’re small collaborative projects with tight groups, that integrate very large amounts of small participatory effort. To put it another way, projects like Wikipedia and the Linux kernel may have thousands of contributors — but it’s a small core of contributors who do the bulk of the work and integrate the work from others who only contribute a small amount.
It’s also important, says Shirky, that people cannot join the project too easily. Even given the presumption that all the participants have goodwill towards the project, he says that it shouldn’t be too easy to change every aspect of a project. Some parts of the system should be easy to change, some parts should be hard.
As an example of putting barriers to contribution, Shirky pointed to StackOverflow. In order to test whether a new site would work well, they don’t just let people try anything to see what sticks. People have to propose a site, demonstrate the type of questions, and then recruit users. Sites that don’t make the criteria don’t launch, but the ones that do launch tend to be more successful.
New users can’t participate easily either. Shirky talked about the karma system for StackOverflow, which requires users to show up and listen at the beginning – and evolve to an admin-level status that can manage the site.
Another pattern, Shirky says, is getting the community to care. When you can do that, good code is a side effect. Here he returned to the Linux kernel. Kernel management shifted to tarballs sent by email to code tracked in BitKeeper, and then back to tarballs by email when BitKeeper turned out to be unsuitable. Eventually, Torvalds got tired of working that way, but rejected other code repository systems because of the influence they impose on the politics of the kernel. (Remember the problem of separating technical problems from human ones?) Torvalds wanted a system that “lived up to the promise of the GPL,” where it was easy to fork code, but made merging code a community decision.
Git was another revolution. Shirky pointed out that source control systems had been around for decades, but Git exploded in popularity and found uses outside of simply tracking code. Git spawned GitHub and a number of clones, and attempts to use Git to track things that were not code. For instance, Shirky pointed to Open-Knesset an attempt to scrape Israel’s parliament for proposed laws, start a branch, show how it should be re-written and debate the changes.
Will it work? Shirky says probably not. “It’s audacious enough it probably won’t work… but audacity beats predictablity over the long haul.” Even if Open-Knesset doesn’t work, Shirky says he thinks we’re going to see more of these attempts. “If the Internet means more fighting… we’re going to have to get good at it to get the value out of the system. What we’re seeing now with projects like StackExchange and non-code uses of Git… apply fighting in open source to the rest of the world.”
Shirky’s talk was one of many at LinuxCon to suggest that the impact of Linux is far beyond that of the kernel or operating system. The key impact is not simply what Linux is, but what it enables and has inspired – innovation and new forms of collaboration for IT and beyond.
(I’d like to thank the Linux Foundation for paying for my travel to LinuxCon North America 2011.)
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Fighting Scrapers when Google Won’t: A Simple Guide
Aug 12th
Battling those who mirror your site.
Scraping: When a site copies all of the information from a popular publisher and tries to pass it off as their own, sometimes even outranking the original author. Google has made great strides in preventing scraping, but it can still be an issue for those caught in its web. Here are some easy ways to discourage and prevent scraping:
1: Make Regular Updates
Google will assume that the first version of identical content that’s indexed belongs to the original author. For that reason, being indexed frequently is a great way to prevent scraping. While there are no magic bullets to being indexed more frequently, posting content on a regular basis is the most reliable way to get the attention of Google’s robo.
2: Link Back to Your Site
Scrapers need to post your content immediately if they’re going to be seen as the original author. That means copying your website, code and all. One way to ensure that you have evidence that you’re being scraped is to include links back to your own site. Have images, author tags, and other content link back to other portions of your main website.
3: Add “Read More” URL Inclusions
One way that scrapers get their content is just copying and pasting it. If this is the case, you can ensure that your site is attributed as the original source of the content by using a “read more” inclusion. This inclusion makes it so an additional line is added at the end of a copy/paste. Normally, this reads as “Read more: [your URL].” While there are multiple providers of this technology, Tynt is the most respected in the industry.
4: Truncate Your RSS
Another way scrapers get content is automatically importing your RSS feed. If you’re providing full posts in your RSS, it’s a good idea to truncate the total amount provided and add a “read more at” link at the bottom. This keeps your feed friendly for users while preventing the scrape.
Have other tactics that have helped you get past scrapers? Share them in the comments section below.
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
Fighting Scrapers when Google Won’t: A Simple Guide
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Fighting Search Spam with Blekko Co-Founder Mike Markson – Deadbolt
Mar 24th
 Deadbolt |
Fighting Search Spam with Blekko Co-Founder Mike Markson
Deadbolt Earlier this week, new search kid on the block, Blekko, founded by Rich Skrenta and Mike Markson, entered into a new partnership with SEO platform leader BrightEdge to take web search into a new era by delivering accessible tools to the … |
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Google Fighting Freedom of Press in Spain, Getting Fined in France
Mar 9th
A French court fined Google 430,000 Euros for four breaches of copyright, while the Spanish courts are considering referring a ‘right to be forgotten’ case involving 80 instances to the European Court of Justice.
“We’re pleased that the [Spanish] court is considering asking guidance from Europe’s top court on whether Spain’s [data-protection agency] has overridden European law. It shows that key issues are at stake,” Peter Barron, Google’s head of European external relations, said in a statement,” the Wall Street Journal reported.
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Stop Fighting SEO, It Is A Necessary Evil – The Business Insider
Sep 25th
 The Business Insider |
Stop Fighting SEO, It Is A Necessary Evil
The Business Insider Whether you're an SEO, a journalist, or someone who fancies themselves both, I'd encourage you to read Nikki Usher's recent post about the impact SEO is … |
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AP Stops Fighting Bloggers, Plans To Credit Them As News Source
Sep 3rd
Only two years ago, the Associated Press tried to stop bloggers from using their content. Threatening to charge sites that used their content and demaned that The Drudge Reports pull headlines and story briefs from their site. But now AP is singing a different song – saying this week that they will credit bloggers for any stories they break.
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Google Places Team Fighting Bugs In Dashboard Reporting
Jul 23rd
Google is working to fix at least a pair of bugs in the Google Places dashboard, both of which affect the analytics reporting related to a local business listing.
One bug is a delay in the analytics reporting inside Google Places. Earlier this week, users noticed that stats were only available through July 12th — more [...]
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Fighting The Oil Spill On Google: BP Versus The Lawyers
Jun 4th
As oil-poisoned pelicans are found on Gulf shorelines, lawyers and British Petroleum are looking to Google for help gaining public awareness. Attorneys are primed and ready to line up plaintiffs who were harmed by the oil spill that killed 11 people and threatens the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem. BP is reaching out, as well.
Ambulance [...]
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