Ayúdenme a entender el zunzuneo

Cuba Encuentro
Eugenio Yáñez

Hace varios días el tema del zunzuneo está en el centro de la información en el sur de La Florida, desplazando noticias sobre Venezuela y el avión de Malasia, y con tantas interpretaciones alrededor del “twitter” cubano se genera bastante confusión.

No pretendo detenerme ni en el manejo típico de aficionados con que la USAID “dirigió” el proyecto, ni en la peregrina suposición de que ese plan funcionaría en Cuba sin que el régimen activara sus alarmas y detectara componentes y ubicaciones, ni en considerar si lograr cuarenta mil suscriptores haya sido un éxito, ni si había derecho o no a hacer lo que se hizo, ni en lo útil que resulta ahora esa información para Caracas y La Habana, cuando las redes sociales de Venezuela denuncian al mundo la brutal represión en ese país, mientras Nicolás Maduro prohíbe difundir noticias a los medios de comunicación y acusa al “imperialismo”, los “fascistas” y los exiliados de fomentar la subversión desde el exterior.

Tampoco en las suspicacias sobre la forma en que todo el escándalo sobre el programa salió a la luz pública precisamente desde una agencia de prensa norteamericana. Allá quienes quieran pensar que son casualidades.

Me interesa destacar dos informaciones de Associated Press (AP), que la semana pasada desató el escándalo del zunzuneo. Ambas informaciones, fechadas en Washington el martes 8 de abril, aparecieron con 10 minutos de diferencia, lo que no es extraño si una agencia de prensa pretende corregir alguna inexactitud en la primera información, pero este no fue el caso.

Los títulos en Diario Las Américas eran muy sugerentes: “Mensajes de Zunzuneo tenían tinte político y despreciaban al régimen” y “AP: ‘Tuits’ de Zunzuneo tenían tinte político y despreciaban a los Castro”. Con tales titulares, me dispuse a leer esperando conocer de esos mensajes que tenían tinte político y despreciaban al régimen y sus personeros. Y aquí fue donde surgió mi confusión. Porque en ambas notas el “lead” o primer párrafo, donde se supone que aparece lo sustancial del tema que se abordará, era el mismo: “Los mensajes creados para la red de internet que USAID armó clandestinamente en Cuba tenían un tinte político y expresaban desprecio hacia la familia Castro”. Y se trataba de informaciones elaboradas por la AP, no de titulares del Diario Las Américas.

Leí ambas notas detenidamente, y tuve que volver a leerlas, esperando encontrar alguna prueba o evidencia, algún mensaje o “twitter” donde pudiera comprobarse el “tinte político” de algún texto, o constatarse el “desprecio” hacia el régimen o la familia Castro a que hacían referencia los despachos de AP. Sin embargo, debo ser demasiado torpe leyendo en español, porque lo que proclamaban los “leads” de las informaciones no aparecía por ninguna parte en las 1.433 palabras que componían ambos textos.

De manera que solicito la colaboración de los lectores para encontrar algún texto o mensaje en zunzuneo con “tinte político” o que muestre “desprecio” al régimen o los Castro, como dice AP. De lo contrario habría que suponer que con este tema Associated Press cayó en el amarillismo más burdo o que ahora en vez de periodistas profesionales utiliza “trabajadores ideológicos”, al mejor estilo de Granma o Corea del Norte.

Naturalmente, evidencias de lo que menciona la AP en informaciones serias y creíbles, no en “denuncias” que surjan desde La Habana sin la más elemental prueba, como de costumbre, y que algunos por estos foros reproducirán sin recato ni vergüenza.

Algunas deberían existir cuando Associated Press es capaz de utilizar el mismo “lead” acusador en dos informaciones diferentes en diez minutos. Quizás alguien pueda ayudar en este aspecto.

La única referencia concreta a mensajes con “tinte político” en zunzuneo que he visto aparece en el artículo “¿Zunzuneo, subversión o romper la censura?”, que desde Cuba publica el periodista independiente Odelín Alfonso Torna en Cubanet, donde señala claramente que “Ningún joven recibió en su móvil un texto subversivo”, aclarando que, por el contrario, se recibían “mensajes que exhortaban a liberar a los cinco espías”, y pone de ejemplo uno concreto: “Amar la justicia es defender a los cinco. ¡Fin a la injusticia! ¡Libertad ahora!” No creo que alguien considere que mensaje como ese haya sido enviado por “el imperio”.

Por eso parece elemental que se pueda mostrar alguna evidencia que silencie muchas bocas “anticubanas”, como dicen en La Habana. Un simple mensaje con “tinte político” o que muestre “desprecio” podría ser suficiente.

Declarar que lo subversivo vendría más adelante es lo mismo que acusar a una persona de “peligrosidad”, como se hace en Cuba: una inmoralidad.

Mientras no se muestren evidencias, hay derecho a pensar que Associated Press, igual hace La Habana, está mintiendo en ese aspecto.

Y entonces habría que preguntarse: ¿por qué?

How the feds snoop: What happens when you hit send on your email

usnews

www.zerohedge.com

By Stephanie Gosk and Jeff Black, NBC News

The Internet makes it easy to send information to far flung places in an instant – hit “send” and poof there it goes. But where does that information go, how does it get there and who gets access to the data?

Every second of every day billions of bits of data speed through an elaborate network, many created and controlled by companies such as Yahoo and Google.

Indeed, the latest leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, first reported by the Washington Post and confirmed by NBC News, say that NSA has tapped into Google and Yahoo's data cables and vacuumed up emails and phone records, although security official say Americans are filtered out.

Big tech companies — among them Facebook, Microsoft, AOL and Apple, in addition to Google and Yahoo — say the worry they’re losing an arms race to secure their users’ information and have called on new laws to stop U.S. intelligence agencies from breaking into data centers.

Those data centers, often misleadingly called the “cloud,” in reality have nothing ethereal about them. They’re thousands of miles of cables and high-tech switchers and computers. They’re warehouse-sized buildings that hum with servers to collect and store huge reams of data.

“For your email account you know you can have years worth of data stored in your account,” Kim Zetter of Wired magazine told NBC News.

Google alone has six such large datacenters in the United States, and another seven are overseas.

“A lot of people think if I'm in the U.S., my data is stored in the U.S., and that's really not the case,” Zetter said.

Jim Stickley, a cyber security expert, said it's those cables where the vulnerability lies.

“You have thousands and thousands of miles of cable out there of this fiber optic cable,” Stickley said. “And so presumably the NSA has founds somewhere to gain access to this cable and physically attach some sort of device to capture date on this network.”

On Thursday, Google issued a statement, which said, in part: "We are outraged at the lengths to which the government seems to have gone to intercept data from our private fiber networks" 

Google said it is now working to encrypt its high-speed fiber optic lines in order to counter NSA snooping.

But even if that company’s system is secure, it’s clear that these internet giants have become the gatekeepers of our digital lives.

“We have put all of our digital eggs into their baskets, they're not in ours anymore,” Lee Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation told NBC News. “and whether that's wise in terms of privacy and security is, I think, a very open question.”

Bruce Schneier, a Harvard Law School fellow who writes frequently on cybersecurity, said there's only one sure fire way to protect yourself from snooping, and it’s an idea most people won’t like: Give up your email.

“You cannot be on the systems. That’s what you can do,” he said in a telephone interview. “Whenever you go into a cloud, you have to trust the cloud provider. There’s nothing you can do. It’s not your data. It’s their data.”

One reason there is so much data collection, Schneier said, is that “Surveillance is very, very cheap, that’s the problem."

He added, "Adding encryption makes surveillance more expensive, Which means they can’t do it as much.”

So, for anyone feeling a little digitally vulnerable, there appears to be only one way around it:  Write a letter and get a stamp.

Andrea Mitchell and Erin McClam of NBC News contributed to this report.

Related:
NSA, British intelligence secretly tapped into Google, Yahoo cable links, officials say

Also: PRISM (surveillance program) - Wikipedia

FAA to allow tablets and e-readers during all phases of flights

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Read on nbcnews >>

10 Things You Didn't Know About Twitter

TIME

 

Tom Standage on ancient social media: Papyrus, pamphlets and tweets

The Economist

Diplomático de EEUU en encuentro de blogueros cubanos

martinoticias

Conrad Tribble, Jefe Adjunto de la SINA en La Habana

Una variopinta reunión se dio cita el pasado viernes en La Habana, durante la segunda edición del Twitthab que agrupó a las cuatro de la tarde a más de cincuenta twitteros y blogueros en el parque Villalón del Vedado con el objetivo de acercarse más y coordinar mejor sus acciones.

El diario digital On Cuba dijo que los trovadores Vicente Feliú, Fidel Díaz Castro y Eduardo Sosa, además de Kenia Serrano, presidenta del Instituto Cubano de Amistad con los Pueblos (ICAP), asistieron como invitados especiales.

“La abierta convocatoria de participación atrajo igualmente, en garantía sui géneris de heterogeneidad, al Jefe Adjunto de la representación diplomática de Estados Unidos en La Habana (SINA), Conrad Tribble, al ex-agente y periodista cubano Manuel David Orrio, y al corresponsal de la BBC en Cuba, Fernando Ravsberg, quien asistió en funciones de periodista”, dijo el artículo firmado por Alejandro Ulloa García.

Durante el par de horas que duró el Twitthab, las intervenciones de los presentes se enfocaron, sobre todo, en los mensajes cubanos que se emiten en la red y la necesidad de mejorarlos, a la vez que multiplicar este tipo de encuentros “fuera de la @”.

On Cuba cita declaraciones de Ravsberg, opinando que los blogs “o influyen o no hay cambio en la prensa (cubana)… La única presión que puede venir es la de los blogs (y) va a venir cuando crezca el acceso a internet y la gente lea tu blog porque te cuenta lo que dijo el Vicepresidente que medios oficiales no lo dicen”.



Un intercambio de opiniones sobre la presencia del funcionario estadounidense se ha desarrollado en el blog chiringadeCuba donde un bloguero cuestionó la intervención del estadounidense y este le respondió. 

“Tras este segundo encuentro de twitteros y blogueros cubanos, y con la propuesta de crear de un blog, una cuenta de Twitter y una página en facebook donde confluir y “conectarse” cuantos lo deseen, Cuba da los primeros pasos en una reconfiguración de sus formas de socialización”, subrayó el reportaje.
------------------
Fotos:  chiringadeCuba

Prisoners in Jail Posting Videos on Facebook

HowTheWorldWorks

"The Vaulter": Canada's most notorious bank robbers

GlobalToronto 

Police are turning to social media in the hopes of catching one of Canada's most notorious bank robbers. He's known as the "vaulter" and as Christina Stevens explains, he's still at large. 

Gay? Conservative? High IQ? Your Facebook ’likes’ can reveal traits

cosmiclog

David Stillwell / Cambridge

A graphic from the "You Are What You Like" Facebook app illustrates how the pages you click on can tell others about your personal traits, even if you don't mean to do so.

By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News

When you click a "like" button on Facebook, you could be telling the world whether you're gay or straight, liberal or conservative, intelligent or not so much — even if you don't intend to. That's what researchers found when they ran tens of thousands of Facebook profiles and questionnaires through a computer algorithm to find the obvious as well as not-so-obvious connections.

The results were published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and you can sample the method for yourself at a website called YouAreWhatYouLike.com.

"The main message of the paper is that whether they like it or not, people do communicate their individual traits in their online behavior," said lead author Michal Kosinski, operations director at the University of Cambridge's Psychometrics Center.

Some of the correlations are obvious: For example, If you're a fan of the "I'm Proud to Be a Christian" Facebook page, it's a pretty safe bet that you're a Christian. But others are hard to explain: Why is it that liking the "Curly Fries" page is associated with having a high IQ? Why does the computer model put "Sometimes I Just Lay in Bed and Think About Life" in the category for homosexual females, while "Thinking of Something and Laughing Alone" is linked to heterosexual females?

"These little patterns are really not perceptible to humans," Kosinski said. Sometimes, it takes a computer.

Kosinski and his colleagues conducted their experiment over the course of several years, through their MyPersonality website and Facebook app. More than 8 million people took the MyPersonality survey, which asked participants about their personal details and also had them answer questions about personality traits. About half of the test-takers gave their OK for the researchers to match up their survey results with Facebook likes, on an anonymous basis. More than 58,000 of the volunteered profiles from U.S. respondents were selected for matching.

The results were analyzed to produce correlations in more than a dozen categories, including five widely accepted personality attributes (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and emotional stability). Those are the attributes analyzed on the "You Are What You Like" website. The other categories included IQ, religion, politics, sexual orientation, age, gender, race, relationship status, alcohol and drug use, tobacco use, life satisfaction, number of friends — and even whether a Facebook user's parents had separated by the time the user was 21.

This PDF file shows you which Facebook pages are the best fit for each of the categories.

YouAreWhatYouLike.com

Researchers set up a website that assesses your personality based on Facebook "likes."

The researchers' computer model did the best at predicting black-vs.-white and male-vs.-female (95 and 93 percent accuracy, respectively). It could distinguish correctly between Republicans and Democrats 85 percent of the time, and between Christians and Muslims 82 percent of the time.
The accuracy rates for predicting sexual orientation were 88 percent for males and 75 percent for females. But don't think reaching that result was as easy as seeing who clicked the "like" button for "Gay Marriage." Less than 5 percent of the gay users were fans of such obvious pages, Kosinski and his colleagues said. The predictions were based instead on inferences from likes for less obvious pages. For example, the computer model associated the fan pages for Kathy Griffin and "Wicked, The Musical" with homosexual males, while heterosexual males were associated with the pages for Bruce Lee and WWE wrestling.
OK, maybe the pages weren't all that much less obvious.
The model wasn't as accurate (60 percent) when it came to predicting whether a user's parents stayed together or separated before the user turned 21. But even that level of predictive power could be "worthwhile for advertisers," the researchers said. "For instance, digital systems and devices (such as online stores or cars) could be designed to adjust their behavior to best fit each user's preferred profile," they wrote.
"I know the paper might sound like we're criticizing Facebook, but not at all," Kosinski told NBC News. "I'm a fan of Facebook."
Kosinski pointed out that an analysis of your credit card purchases, online music preferences, video rentals and Web browsing habits could come up with personal profiles at least as detailed as the ones that he and his colleagues produced. It just so happens that the Facebook likes were accessible enough to yield a vivid illustration of how such analyses work.
"It's possible this will lead some people to say, 'Maybe I shouldn't be using Facebook, or I shouldn't be using Google.' And that could be bad," he said. That kind of technophobia could hamper technological and economic progress, he said. Instead, the research should lead people to think twice about what they share online.
"We hope this information will help users start a discussion with organizations like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, or even policymakers about the rules of the game online," Kosinski said.
Update for 3:55 p.m. ET March 11: Kosinski's two co-authors, David Stillwell of Cambridge and Thore Graepel of Microsoft Research, passed along their comments in a news release from Cambridge.
"Consumers rightly expect strong privacy protection to be built into the products and services they use, and this research may well serve as a reminder for consumers to take a careful approach to sharing information online, utilizing privacy controls and never sharing content with unfamiliar parties," Graepel said.
"I have used Facebook since 2005, and I will continue to do so," Stillwell said. "But I might be more careful to use the privacy settings that Facebook provides."

Canciller cubano s/ redes sociales neokaxtriztas

Human Sapienome Project: The 100YSS

Human Sapienome Project, complement to the 100YSS (credit: Photo Wall)

By Martine Rothblatt

Dr. Martine Rothblatt suggests inviting the entire world’s population on-board the 100YSS by uploading, at no cost, their mindfiles — a 1 TB (or less) digital file of an individual’s mannerisms, personality, recollections, feelings, beliefs, attitudes and values — into a central database that will be carried onboard the starship. Presented at the 100 Year Starship (100YSS) 2012 Public Symposium Sept. 13–16, 2012 in Houston.

Daedalus starship (credit: David Hardy)

In 1985 We Are the World, the first-ever multi-platinum single, got tens of millions of people singing “There is a choice we’re making; we’re saving our own lives.” [1]. These words may never apply to a project more meaningfully than to the 100 Year Starship (100YSS), intended to “make the capability of human travel beyond our solar system to another star a reality over the next 100 years.”.

Digital size of a person

Research from several groups show that a digital file of a person’s mannerisms, personality, recollections, feelings, beliefs, attitudes and values can be represented by less than one terabyte (1TB) of structured information [2] [3] [4] [5]. This is because a limited number, n, of human universals, m, yield millions of unique human combinations via (n!)/(m!*(n-m)!).

Add to this a few gigabytes of unique memories and you can account for the billions of diverse human mindsets, notwithstanding a very modest toolkit of building block characteristics.

For example, a megabyte of information about one’s daily experiences amounts to under 20 GB of information in 50 years. That daily megabyte is adequate to handle all of one’s tweets, texts and emails plus some compressed photos, audio and video. Combined with structured answers to personality inventories [5] and socio-cultural contextual information, a TB is ample space to provide a comprehensive digital reflection of your consciousness, known as a “mindfile.” The vast majority of information we store is redundant.

Websites exist that collect video streaming of an individual’s daily interactions. While such video streams can rapidly exceed many terabytes in volume, they far exceed the amount of information needed to accurately reflect a person’s mannerisms, personality, recollections, feelings, beliefs, attitudes and values. Advanced versions of pattern recognition software will be able to abstract from such continuous digital records such information as uniquely contributes to a mindfile. These pattern recognition based-abstracts are unlikely to require more than a TB of storage, especially when intelligently structured.

Digital size of all human mindfiles — the “Human Sapienome”

Digital memory of approximately 10²² bytes, the size of all human mindfiles in aggregate, what should be called the human “sapienome,” will be available within 20 years at less than 1% of the likely weight and cost of the 100 YSS. Ten billion people, times one trillion bytes, yields 10²² bytes.

The Project Daedelus starship, either in its original British Interplanetary Society version or in subsequent self-replicating conceptualizations, had a payload mass of on the order of 500 tons [6]. Orion Starship designs of Freeman Dyson had estimated costs ranging from a tenth 10% to 100% of 1968 US GNP [7].

The past five decades of relatively steady, 18-month doubling rates in constant cost for digital memory is not expected to change over the coming decades, due to economic demand, competition and the availability of three-dimensional traditional and novel computing substrates [8].

Hence, by exponential growth, today’s terabyte of memory will become a giga-terabyte of memory in 45 years. Ten such memory modules would hold a ten billion person human sapienome at that time. Alternatively, a few thousand mega-terabyte modules could contain the human sapienome about 30 years from now.

A terabyte today costs around $100 and weighs about 0.5 kg. These numbers are not significantly different from lesser amounts of memory in years past, and are considered by Ray Kurzweil to remain constant or shrink with exponential growth [8]. Hence, 45 years from now, the mass and cost of the human sapienome on a 100YSS would be insignificant. Even 30 years from now, the mass would be a few thousand pounds and the cost about $1 million. This represents less than 1% of the mass and cost of the starship.

Universal access to information technology needed to create a mindfile is at hand. Already three-fourths of the world’s population has a mobile phone, about one-fourth of which are smartphones capable of full mindfile creation capabilities.

Specialized websites to create mindfiles, such as LifeNaut.com and CyBeRev.org, as well as more generic websites that can also be used to create mindfiles, such as Google+ and Facebook, are free to the public.

Virtually every human being will be able to freely create a mindfile, as smartphone ownership becomes all-but universal over the next decade (with shared access to one for individuals in deep poverty). Hence, there are neither economic nor technological barriers to the creation of a human sapienome.

Activation of mindfiles with consciousness operating system software, or “mindware”

It may well be feasible to activate the individual mindfiles within the sapienome with consciousness operating system software, known as “mindware.” This would enable all participating members of the human race to be digitally present, via software agent extensions of themselves, and interfaced with sensors upon arrival at the 100 YSS destination.

However, even if such mindware activation is not possible, the entire human race can still be conceptually — and in a sense spiritually and philosophically — “present” at the interstellar destination by virtue of their mindfiles being present onboard the starship.

As noted above, dozens (n) of mannerism, personality and feeling types (m) yield many thousands of unique human combinations via (n!)/(m!*(n-m)!).

Once you add to these thousands of personality and worldview templates differential recollections, beliefs, attitudes and values (within the terabyte of mindfile information), there are many billions of unique possible combinations of human psyches, one of which will be a best-match for digitally stored mindfiles of each 100YSS participating biological person.

Mindware best fits one of the “m” compound mannerisms, personality and feeling types to that analyzed from stored mindfiles, and then populates it with the recollections, beliefs, attitudes and values evident from that stored mindfile. These combinations and correlations can be accomplished with software that needs be nowhere near the complexity of synaptic connectivity of the human brain, and yet still appears as true to the original person as to persuade others, and their digital self, that the same personal identity is present, albeit via a digital extension.

In the last century people became accustomed to the notion that electro-acoustic waves via telephony represented a biological original person. In the coming century, an analogous association is likely with digital simulacra of unique conscious minds.

Keep reading on kurzweilai >>

New Facebook tool lets you search everything related to friends

Nbcnews

Rosa Golijan / NBC News

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveils a new "Graph Search" feature during a press event on Tuesday.

Facebook announced a new "Graph Search" feature on Tuesday that will answer all the questions that the social network's Newsfeed and Timeline do not.

"Today we're going to take a little trip to our roots," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, in making the announcement.

He described Facebook as a huge database before pointing out that "just like a database, you should be able to query it." The Newsfeed answers the question "What's going on?" and Timeline answers "Who is this person?" But what about everything else? We'll be able to answer other questions using something called "Graph Search."

In addition to launching Graph Search, Facebook is also incorporating Microsoft's Bing search results in Facebook searches. (Microsoft owns a 1.6 percent share of Facebook.)  Doing search on Facebook has often been an exercise in frustration, and Graph Search may help to change that. Will Graph Search challenge Google? No, but it could be a start to making Facebook's nemesis even more nervous, although Zuckerberg emphasized the new tool is "not Web search."

Graph Search is a privacy-aware search, Zuckerberg said. That means that it only searches content which has been shared with you and that your search results will differ from the search results someone else will see ... even if you enter the same exact queries.

Rosa Golijan / NBC News

Facebook's new Graph Search allows you to search through photos, places, friends, and interests.

You can initially use Graph Search search through people, photos, places, and interests. 

For example, let's say you want to play matchmaker for a friend who recently moved to New York City from Germany. You could search for all friends-of-friends who happen to reside in New York City, lived in Germany at some point, and are single. Ta da! You'll have a list of the ideal matches for your pal. Or perhaps you need to find a dentist. You can easily search for dentists who are liked by your friends.

There was a lot of emphasis on privacy and Zuckerberg explained that a message will appear on users' Newsfeeds to remind them that they should review their privacy settings. Even though Graph Search is privacy-conscious, some slightly embarrassing content could always come up and haunt you.

Zuckerberg emphasized that Graph Search is currently a beta product, meaning that it isn't quite perfect just yet. 

"Even as an early product, Graph Search is a completely new way for people to get information on Facebook," he says. If you want to start using the new feature, you can sign up for the beta by heading here.

Want more tech news or interesting links? You'll get plenty of both if you keep up with Rosa Golijan, the writer of this post, by following her on Twitter, subscribing to her Facebook posts, or circling her on Google+.

 

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Twitter atrapa #Cuba intentando manipular la red social

joanantoniguerrero
El régimen pretende hacer pasar por "censura" las consecuencias a sus malos usos de la red de microblogging

Cuba quiso celebrar el inicio del año en las redes sociales simulando una iniciativa espontánea en Twitter para conmemorar el 54 aniversario de la Caravana de la Libertad, es decir, haciendo spam. Los cabecillas de la Revolución pensaron en coger la red de microblogging más popular para sus cosas y salieron escaldados, pues su plan chocó con los criterios de buena conducta marcados por la plataforma, normas claras que están al alcance de todos. Todo el mundo debe saber que si alguno de sus usos está en la lista de lo sospechoso, Twitter suspende cuentas (para este tema, leer este artículo puede contribuir a aclarar conceptos).

Yo no soy partidario de los robots en Twitter, ni tan siquiera cuando difunden mensajes con los que puedo estar más a favor. Aborrezco estas técnicas de difusión de información que lo único que hacen es estorbar e inundar la red con mensajes que no siempre nos traen los mejores links. Prefiero seguir las cuentas que me aportan una selección específica de datos e información, y no bombardeos de piñón fijo, ya sea a favor o en contra de la dictadura castrista.

Ahora Cuba dice que Twitter ha bloqueado casi un millar de cuentas de jóvenes cubanos por razones ideológicas. Es más, su cinismo es tal que incluso los portavoces del régimen han acusado a la compañía de violar el derecho a la libertad de expresión de todos estos jóvenes. Por lo visto, no hay vergüenza.

Ciertamente Cuba tiene capacidad para movilizar a un millar de cubanos, convocarlos en sitios oficiales, y hacerlos actuar como auténticos autómatas en un Joven Club (salas en las que tienen acceso a material de computación, aunque más allá de la propaganda, muchos cubanos saben que la maquinaria de estas aulas no funciona y también es muy dudosa la conectividad a Internet que pueden ofrecer; pero bueno, al régimen le basta decir que existe esto en la Isla, lo viste con los datos estadísticos necesarios, y cualquiera que no esté al caso se lo cree; con Cuba todo es así), este millar de personas, si fueron a un Joven Club no lo hicieron por amor a la Revolución, ni por deseos irrefrenables de celebrar el 54 aniversario de un hecho histórico bajo el hash tag #Caravana54, lo hicieron para acatar un mandato, cumplir una orden, ejecutar una tarea, esclavizados para la ocasión, empleados para propósitos propagandísticos de un régimen decadente. 

Continuar leyendo en joanantoniguerrero >>

Facebook Monitors Your Chats for Criminal Activity [REPORT]

Mashable/ By Alex Fitzpatrick 

Facebook and other social platforms are watching users’ chats for criminal activity and notifying police if any suspicious behavior is detected, according to a report.

The screening process begins with scanning software that monitors chats for words or phrases that signal something might be amiss, such as an exchange of personal information or vulgar language.

The software pays more attention to chats between users who don’t already have a well-established connection on the site and whose profile data indicate something may be wrong, such as a wide age gap. The scanning program is also “smart” — it’s taught to keep an eye out for certain phrases found in the previously obtained chat records from criminals including sexual predators.

If the scanning software flags a suspicious chat exchange, it notifies Facebook security employees, who can then determine if police should be notified.

Keeping most of the scanned chats out of the eyes of Facebook employees may help Facebook deflect criticism from privacy advocates, but whether the scanned chats are deleted or stored permanently is yet unknown.

The new details about Facebook’s monitoring system came from an interview which the company’s Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan gave to Reuters. At least one alleged child predator has been brought to trial directly as a result of Facebook’s chat scanning, according to Reuters’ report.

When asked for a comment, Facebook only repeated the remarks given by Sullivan to Reuters: “We’ve never wanted to set up an environment where we have employees looking at private communications, so it’s really important that we use technology that has a very low false-positive rate.”

More >>

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By AspenInstitute

Twitter CEO: Don't Worry About Our Business

ForaTv

‘Big data’ from social media, elsewhere online redefines trend-watching

WP/ By Ariana Eunjung Cha

From a trading desk in London, Paul Hawtin monitors the fire hose of more than 340 million Twitter posts flying around the world each day to try to assess the collective mood of the populace.

The computer program he uses generates a global sentiment score from 1 to 50 based on how pessimistic or optimistic people seem to be from their online conversations. Hawtin, chief executive of Derwent Capital Markets, buys and trades millions of dollars of stocks for private investors based on that number: When everyone appears happy, he generally buys. When anxiety runs high, he sells short. 

Hawtin has seen a gain of more than 7 percent in the first quarter of this year, and his method shows the advantage individuals, companies and governments are gaining as they take hold of the unprecedented amount of data online. Traders such as Hawtin say analyzing mathematical trends on the Web delivers insights and news faster than traditional investment approaches.

The explosion in the use of Google, Facebook, Twitter and other services has resulted in the generation of some 2.5 quintillion bytes each day, according to IBM.

“Big data,” as it has been dubbed by researchers, has become so valuable that the World Economic Forum, in a report published last year, deemed it a new class of economic asset, like oil.

“Business boundaries are being redrawn,” the report said. Companies with the ability to mine the data are becoming the most powerful, it added.

While the human brain cannot comprehend that much information at once, advances in computer power and analytics have made it possible for machines to tease out patterns in topics of conversation, calling habits, purchasing trends, use of language, popularity of sports, spread of disease and other expressions of daily life.

“This is changing the world in a big way. It enables us to watch changes in society in real time and make decisions in a way we haven’t been able to ever before,” said Gary King, a social science professor at Harvard University and a co-founder of Crimson Hexagon, a data analysis firm based in Boston.

The Obama campaign employs rows of people manning computers that monitor Twitter sentiment about the candidates in key states. Google scientists are working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to track the spread of flu around the world by analyzing what people are typing in to search. And the United Nations is measuring inflation through computers that analyze the price of bread advertised in online supermarkets across Latin America.

Many questions about big data remain unanswered. Concerns are being raised about personal privacy and how consumers can ensure that their information is being used fairly. Some worry that savvy technologists could use Twitter or Google to create false trends and manipulate markets.

Even so, sociologists, software engineers, economists, policy analysts and others in nearly every field are jumping into the fray. And nowhere has big data been as transformative as it has been in finance. More >>

Family robbed after idiot teen posts photo of 'large sum of cash' on Facebook

By Rosa Golijan

On Thursday, a teenage girl posted a photo of a "large sum of cash" on Facebook. About seven hours later, two robbers arrived at her family's home. Unsurprisingly, this incident prompted local authorities to issue a warning about the dangers of posting photographs online.

According to BBC News, the 17-year-old girl was helping her 72-year-old grandmother count her cash savings when she decided to snap a photo of the money and post it on Facebook. A press release by the local police force explains that this social media activity occured in Sydney, Australia at about 4 p.m. on Thursday. At 11:30 p.m. on the same day, a house about 75 miles south-west was invaded by two armed men. The girl's mother, a 58-year-old man and a 14-year-old boy were home at the time.

Brandishing a knife and a wooden club, the two men "allegedly entered the home demanding to speak with the girl about the cash" seen in the Facebook photo. After the girl's mother explained that she no longer lives at that address, the men proceeded to search the house and "took a small amount of cash and other personal property before leaving."

It is unclear how the robbers connected the girl's social media activity to her mother's home address, but authorities are nonetheless urging "users of social media to take extreme caution when posting photographs and personal information." I suspect that's a polite way of saying "Use some common sense, folks!"

Gerd Leonhard: A Facebook Data Spill? Data and Privacy

By ForaTv

Cómo grabar una revolución

By TvControversia