industryterm:search engine

  • Tired of Google following you ? It is now easier to clear location data
    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jun/27/google-following-you-clear-location-data-history

    New functionality automatically deletes history of places users have visited It is now slightly easier to opt out of Google’s panopticon, with the introduction of new controls from the search engine to automatically clear your data after a set period of time. By default, Google saves a permanent history of everything a user has searched for, every website they have visited, activity from any other app, site or device that uses Google services, and a record of their physical movements (...)

    #Google #Maps #géolocalisation

    https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/ad5dbcd6d43321bcbe1fb4fc7eb1b8d3e9820098/0_103_5184_3110/master/5184.jpg

  • This Chinese Artist Criticized Google and Xi Jinping. Now He’s Facing Government Harassment.
    https://theintercept.com/2019/06/04/badiucao-china-google

    The messages arrived suddenly and then he went quiet. “My identity is leaked,” he said. “I am worried about my safety.” The Chinese dissident artist Badiucao had been busy preparing an exhibition in Hong Kong to celebrate Free Expression Week, a series of events organized by rights groups. His show was partly inspired by Google’s plan to build a censored search engine in China, and was set to include work that the artist had created skewering the U.S. tech giant for cooperating with the (...)

    #Google #Facebook #Twitter #GoogleSearch #Dragonfly #activisme #censure #surveillance #art (...)

    ##harcèlement

  • Google’s Censored Search Would Help China “Be More Open,” Said Ex-CEO Eric Schmidt
    https://theintercept.com/2019/05/14/google-search-china-eric-schmidt-comments

    Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has defended the company’s plan to build a censored version of its search engine in China. In an interview with the BBC on Monday, Schmidt said that he wasn’t involved in decisions to build the censored search platform, code-named Dragonfly. But he insisted that there were “many benefits” to working with China and said he was an advocate of operating in the country because he believed that it could “help change China to be more open.” As The Intercept first (...)

    #Google #GoogleSearch #algorithme #Dragonfly #censure #surveillance #web

  • 10 Reasons To Consider a #search Engine Alternative to #google
    https://hackernoon.com/10-reasons-to-consider-a-search-engine-alternative-to-google-a4d46f79154

    If you’re using Google as your only search engine, it’s time for you to search for a new search engine. You, like most people, have probably developed quite the Google habit over the years. It’s been the most commonly used search engine for nearly 20 years. While Google may seem to work extremely well for you, it’s likely coming at the cost of losing your privacy and losing an objective view of the information on the internet.Reason #1: Google Tracks Your SearchesWhen you use Google, your search term gets linked to your device and Google stores that information. It then uses that information to target you with ads.According to Google’s Privacy Policy, “When you’re not signed in to a Google Account, we store the information we collect with unique identifiers tied to the browser, application, or (...)

    #alternative-search-engine #search-engines #alternative-to-google

  • How To Boost Your Business With Residential Proxies : 5 Real-life Use Cases
    https://hackernoon.com/how-to-boost-your-business-with-residential-proxies-5-real-life-use-case

    Image credit: UnsplashMasking your IP address might be useful in a range of situations from accessing blocked content to bypassing anti-bot systems implemented by search engines and other online services. Here are several ways of organizing proxies:Residential #proxy — IP addresses that are assigned to homeowners by the ISP are called residential. These addresses are flagged in regional internet registries. Residential proxies provided by services like Infatica use such IP addresses because all requests that are sent via them are indistinguishable from those generated by regular users.Data center proxy — Such proxies are not connected to the ISP, while addresses are assigned by hosting providers who’ve purchased large pools of IP addresses.Shared proxy — In this case a proxy can be used by (...)

    #privacy #seo #private-proxies #residential-proxies

  • danah boyd : When Good Intentions Backfire – Data & Society : Points
    https://points.datasociety.net/when-good-intentions-backfire-786fb0dead03

    I find it frustrating to bear witness to good intentions getting manipulated, but it’s even harder to watch how those who are wedded to good intentions are often unwilling to acknowledge this, let alone start imagining how to develop the appropriate antibodies. Too many folks that I love dearly just want to double down on the approaches they’ve taken and the commitments they’ve made. On one hand, I get it — folks’ life-work and identities are caught up in these issues.

    I’ve never met an educator who thinks that the process of educating is easy or formulaic. (Heck, this is why most educators roll their eyes when they hear talk of computerized systems that can educate better than teachers.) So why do we assume that well-intended classroom lessons — or even well-designed curricula — might not play out as we imagine? This isn’t simply about the efficacy of the lesson or the skill of the teacher, but the cultural context in which these conversations occur.

    In many communities in which I’ve done research, the authority of teachers is often questioned. Nowhere is this more painfully visible than when well-intended highly educated (often white) teachers come to teach in poorer communities of color. Yet, how often are pedagogical interventions designed by researchers really taking into account the doubt that students and their parents have of these teachers? And how do we as educators and scholars grapple with how we might have made mistakes?

    From the outside, companies like Facebook and Google seem pretty evil to many people. They’re situated in a capitalist logic that many advocates and progressives despise. They’re opaque and they don’t engage the public in their decision-making processes, even when those decisions have huge implications for what people read and think. They’re extremely powerful and they’ve made a lot of people rich in an environment where financial inequality and instability is front and center. Primarily located in one small part of the country, they also seem like a monolithic beast.

    As a result, it’s not surprising to me that many people assume that engineers and product designers have evil (or at least financially motivated) intentions. There’s an irony here because my experience is the opposite. Most product teams have painfully good intentions, shaped by utopic visions of how the ideal person would interact with the ideal system. Nothing is more painful than sitting through a product design session with design personae that have been plucked from a collection of clichés.

    Most products and features that get released start with good intentions, but they too get munged by the system, framed by marketing plans, and manipulated by users. And then there’s the dance of chaos as companies seek to clean up PR messes (which often involves non-technical actors telling insane fictions about the product), patch bugs to prevent abuse, and throw bandaids on parts of the code that didn’t play out as intended. There’s a reason that no one can tell you exactly how Google’s search engine or Facebook’s news feed works. Sure, the PR folks will tell you that it’s proprietary code. But the ugly truth is that the code has been patched to smithereens to address countless types of manipulation and gamification (e.g., SEO to bots). It’s quaint to read the original “page rank” paper that Brin and Page wrote when they envisioned how a search engine could ideally work. That’s so not how the system works today.

    Powerful actors have always tried to manipulate the news media, especially State actors. This is why the fourth estate is seen as so important in the American context. Yet, the game has changed, in part because of the distributed power of the masses. Social media marketers quickly figured out that manufacturing outrage and spectacle would give them a pathway to attention, attracting news media like bees to honey. Most folks rolled their eyes, watching as monied people played the same games as State actors. But what about the long tail? How do we grapple with the long tail? How should journalists respond to those who are hacking the attention economy?

    In short, I keep thinking that we need more well-intended folks to start thinking like hackers.

    Think just as much about how you build an ideal system as how it might be corrupted, destroyed, manipulated, or gamed. Think about unintended consequences, not simply to stop a bad idea but to build resilience into the model.

    As a developer, I always loved the notion of “extensibility” because it was an ideal of building a system that could take unimagined future development into consideration. Part of why I love the notion is that it’s bloody impossible to implement. Sure, I (poorly) comment my code and build object-oriented structures that would allow for some level of technical flexibility. But, at the end of the day, I’d always end up kicking myself for not imagining a particular use case in my original design and, as a result, doing a lot more band-aiding than I’d like to admit.

    #Hacker #Freaks #Résilience #danah_boyd

  • Women Once Ruled Computers. When Did the Valley Become Brotopia? - Bloomberg
    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-02-01/women-once-ruled-computers-when-did-the-valley-become-brotopia

    Lena Söderberg started out as just another Playboy centerfold. The 21-year-old Swedish model left her native Stockholm for Chicago because, as she would later say, she’d been swept up in “America fever.” In November 1972, Playboy returned her enthusiasm by featuring her under the name Lenna Sjööblom, in its signature spread. If Söderberg had followed the path of her predecessors, her image would have been briefly famous before gathering dust under the beds of teenage boys. But that particular photo of Lena would not fade into obscurity. Instead, her face would become as famous and recognizable as Mona Lisa’s—at least to everyone studying computer science.

    In engineering circles, some refer to Lena as “the first lady of the internet.” Others see her as the industry’s original sin, the first step in Silicon Valley’s exclusion of women. Both views stem from an event that took place in 1973 at a University of Southern California computer lab, where a team of researchers was trying to turn physical photographs into digital bits. Their work would serve as a precursor to the JPEG, a widely used compression standard that allows large image files to be efficiently transferred between devices. The USC team needed to test their algorithms on suitable photos, and their search for the ideal test photo led them to Lena.
    0718P_FEATURE_BROTOPIA_01
    Lena

    According to William Pratt, the lab’s co-founder, the group chose Lena’s portrait from a copy of Playboy that a student had brought into the lab. Pratt, now 80, tells me he saw nothing out of the ordinary about having a soft porn magazine in a university computer lab in 1973. “I said, ‘There are some pretty nice-looking pictures in there,’ ” he says. “And the grad students picked the one that was in the centerfold.” Lena’s spread, which featured the model wearing boots, a boa, a feathered hat, and nothing else, was attractive from a technical perspective because the photo included, according to Pratt, “lots of high-frequency detail that is difficult to code.”

    Over the course of several years, Pratt’s team amassed a library of digital images; not all of them, of course, were from Playboy. The data set also included photos of a brightly colored mandrill, a rainbow of bell peppers, and several photos, all titled “Girl,” of fully clothed women. But the Lena photo was the one that researchers most frequently used. Over the next 45 years, her face and bare shoulder would serve as a benchmark for image-processing quality for the teams working on Apple Inc.’s iPhone camera, Google Images, and pretty much every other tech product having anything to do with photos. To this day, some engineers joke that if you want your image compression algorithm to make the grade, it had better perform well on Lena.

    “We didn’t even think about those things at all when we were doing this,” Pratt says. “It was not sexist.” After all, he continues, no one could have been offended because there were no women in the classroom at the time. And thus began a half-century’s worth of buck-passing in which powerful men in the tech industry defended or ignored the exclusion of women on the grounds that they were already excluded .

    Based on data they had gathered from the same sample of mostly male programmers, Cannon and Perry decided that happy software engineers shared one striking characteristic: They “don’t like people.” In their final report they concluded that programmers “dislike activities involving close personal interaction; they are generally more interested in things than in people.” There’s little evidence to suggest that antisocial people are more adept at math or computers. Unfortunately, there’s a wealth of evidence to suggest that if you set out to hire antisocial nerds, you’ll wind up hiring a lot more men than women.

    Cannon and Perry’s work, as well as other personality tests that seem, in retrospect, designed to favor men over women, were used in large companies for decades, helping to create the pop culture trope of the male nerd and ensuring that computers wound up in the boys’ side of the toy aisle. They influenced not just the way companies hired programmers but also who was allowed to become a programmer in the first place.

    In 1984, Apple released its iconic Super Bowl commercial showing a heroic young woman taking a sledgehammer to a depressing and dystopian world. It was a grand statement of resistance and freedom. Her image is accompanied by a voice-over intoning, “And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984.” The creation of this mythical female heroine also coincided with an exodus of women from technology. In a sense, Apple’s vision was right: The technology industry would never be like 1984 again. That year was the high point for women earning degrees in computer science, which peaked at 37 percent. As the number of overall computer science degrees picked back up during the dot-com boom, far more men than women filled those coveted seats. The percentage of women in the field would dramatically decline for the next two and a half decades.

    Despite having hired and empowered some of the most accomplished women in the industry, Google hasn’t turned out to be all that different from its peers when it comes to measures of equality—which is to say, it’s not very good at all. In July 2017 the search engine disclosed that women accounted for just 31 percent of employees, 25 percent of leadership roles, and 20 percent of technical roles. That makes Google depressingly average among tech companies.

    Even so, exactly zero of the 13 Alphabet company heads are women. To top it off, representatives from several coding education and pipeline feeder groups have told me that Google’s efforts to improve diversity appear to be more about seeking good publicity than enacting change. One noted that Facebook has been successfully poaching Google’s female engineers because of an “increasingly chauvinistic environment.”

    Last year, the personality tests that helped push women out of the technology industry in the first place were given a sort of reboot by a young Google engineer named James Damore. In a memo that was first distributed among Google employees and later leaked to the press, Damore claimed that Google’s tepid diversity efforts were in fact an overreach. He argued that “biological” reasons, rather than bias, had caused men to be more likely to be hired and promoted at Google than women.

    #Féminisme #Informatique #Histoire_numérique

  • Google Is Conducting a Secret “Performance Review” of Its Censored China Search Project
    https://theintercept.com/2019/03/27/google-dragonfly-china-review

    Google executives are carrying out a secret internal assessment of work on a censored search engine for China, The Intercept has learned. A small group of top managers at the internet giant are conducting a “performance review” of the controversial effort to build the search platform, known as Dragonfly, which was designed to blacklist information about human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful protest. Performance reviews at Google are undertaken annually to evaluate employees’ (...)

    #Google #GoogleSearch #Dragonfly #censure #web #surveillance #Amnesty

  • Google flipped seats, shifted millions of votes to Dems in 2018 midterms, researcher tells RT — RT USA News
    https://www.rt.com/usa/454653-epstein-interview-google-elections

    Google’s biased search algorithm actually flipped seats in the 2018 US midterm elections, according to a researcher who found the search engine’s “dramatically biased” results could have shifted over 78 million votes to Democrats.

    Upwards of 25 percent of the national elections in the world are being decided without people’s knowledge by Google’s search algorithm,” senior research psychologist Dr. Robert Epstein of the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology told RT, calling the search engine the “deciding factor” in close races.

    Epstein’s study of three 2018 California House races found Google played the deciding role in flipping those Republican-held seats to the Democrats, influencing millions of undecided voters by controlling what they saw when they searched 500 election-related terms. Google’s results showed a “significant liberal bias,” unlike Bing’s or Yahoo’s – and with 90 percent of the search engine’s market share in the US, that bias is enormously influential.

    Search results favoring one side of an issue can influence anywhere from 20 to 80 percent of undecided voters, depending on the issue and demographic group, Epstein said. He has spent six years investigating the role of what he calls the Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME) in swaying public opinion, more recently focusing on the political ramifications by looking at various countries’ elections.

    People trust algorithmic output. They trust Google. They think because it’s generated by a computer, they don’t see the human hand - they think it’s impartial and objective and, because of that, their opinions change,” Epstein said.

    While Google denies it manipulates search rankings to manipulate political sentiment or makes election-specific tweaks, Epstein says their response is disingenuous – he never claimed they re-ranked results, merely that the results they displayed were biased.

  • Whatever You’re Thinking, #google Already Knows
    https://hackernoon.com/whatever-youre-thinking-google-already-knows-751b3829fe78?source=rss----

    But here’s what you can do about it.Remember back in 2015, before Google nixed their corporate motto “Don’t be evil”? Yeah, those were good days. They just kept putting out better and better products. Google launched the best search engine algorithm, the best browser, streamlined Chromebooks, Google Drive, a Youtube partner program, stable and safe DNS servers, and on and on. It felt like everyone was winning, especially the consumer.The reality, however, is that Google was never quite as magnanimous as we all supposed. In pursuit of ad dollars, they had been on a downward trajectory for a long while, and they were dragging all their users with them. In 2019, I suspect all of us are painfully aware that Google and other tech giants no longer have the user’s best interests in mind. Let’s (...)

    #google-knows #google-already-knows #privacy #internet-security

  • 8 Common Link Building Myths That Are Holding Back Your Website
    https://hackernoon.com/8-common-link-building-myths-that-are-holding-back-your-website-173307ab

    Link Building MythsThe myth is, after all, the never ending story!!Similar holds true for gossips too!!There is no end to the gossips, doing the round, much beyond the school grounds. The mind-boggling questions whether Google changed something or was it merely an algorithm update leads to infinite brainstorming sessions happening around the globe.As long as the search engines veil their algorithms in secrecy, the global industry will persevere to be rife with gossip, myths, and spams.And guess what it results in….This encourages the businesses to follow wrong strategies or seriously ending up damaging their backlink profile or perhaps more severe ones like a spiteful Google penalty, shifting which is quite a sturdy task.The fact is that everything, included under #seo and backlink building (...)

    #search-engine-optimizatio #link-building #link-building-myths #marketing

  • Body politics: The old and new public health risks of networked health misinformation
    https://points.datasociety.net/body-politics-the-old-and-new-public-health-risks-of-networked-h

    There are clear parallels between the tactics used to spread health disinformation and political content. For instance, in 2018, researchers found that large networks of bots and trolls were spreading anti-vaccination rhetoric to sow confusion online and amplify the appearance of an anti-vaccination community. The anti-vaccination tweets often referenced conspiracy theories, and some accounts almost singularly focused on the U.S. government. As a result, real-life users and orchestrated networks of bots are engaged in a feedback loop. Recently, political public figures have used their platform to amplify vaccination misinformation, such as tweeting that measles can help fight cancer. There is a long history of people using influence to sway public opinion about vaccines—particularly among celebrities.

    These are symptoms of a larger societal crisis: disinformation campaigns aimed to undermine social institutions.

    The search and recommendation algorithms that underpin our information retrieval systems are other modern tools mediating access to health information. When a user enters an inquiry into a search engine, they receive curated results. As so many people rely on search engines for health information, they are another important mechanism that is susceptible to manipulation. For instance, the websites of some crisis pregnancy centers—which are designed to look and sound like those of clinics that provide abortion care, but instead give misleading information about the negative effects of abortion to visitors—are optimized results for Google searches often made by women seeking abortion information.

    Similarly, recommendation systems on popular social media platforms, particularly Facebook and YouTube, create easy entry points for problematic content. For example, a mother joining a generic parenting group on Facebook may subsequently receive recommendations for anti-vaxx groups. Bots, search engine optimization, and gaming of recommendation systems are foundational tools used by various actors to influence public health discourse and skew public debates — often blurring the line between medical mistrust and larger political ideologies and agendas.

    #Information_médicale #Santé_publique #Vaccination #Complotisme #Médias_sociaux #Algorithmes

  • Snowden Joins Calls For Google To End Censored Chinese Search Project
    https://www.dailydot.com/debug/snowden-google-censored-china

    Mikael Thalen— Dec 11 2018 - Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden has joined numerous human rights groups in condemning Google over its plan to launch a censored search engine in China.

    In an open letter published Monday, Snowden and more than 60 organizations including Amnesty International, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Human Rights Watch, called on the tech giant to cease its work on the secretive “Dragonfly” project.

    “Facilitating Chinese authorities’ access to personal data, as described in media reports, would be particularly reckless,” the letter states. “If such features were launched, there is a real risk that Google would directly assist the Chinese government in arresting or imprisoning people simply for expressing their views online, making the company complicit in human rights violations.”

    First revealed last August by the Intercept, the search app, made in an attempt by Google to re-enter the Chinese market, would not only surveil users but blacklist results for search queries such as “student protest” and “Nobel Prize” at the behest of Beijing.

    “New details leaked to the media strongly suggest that if Google launches such a product it would facilitate repressive state censorship, surveillance, and other violations affecting nearly a billion people in China,” the letter adds.

    Describing the project as “reckless,” the letter also warns that deploying Dragonfly would likely “set a terrible precedent for human rights and press freedoms worldwide.”

    Monday’s statement comes just weeks after more than 600 Google employees signed a similar letter demanding the company cancel Dragonfly’s development.

    Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who was confronted about Dragonfly during testimony in front of the House Judiciary Committee Monday, has repeatedly alleged that there are no plans “right now” to launch the project.

    A leaked meeting transcript from July, however, revealed Google’s search chief Ben Gomes had said the company intended to launch Dragonfly somewhere between January and April of 2019.

    #Chine #surveillance #Google

  • Google Employees Uncover Ongoing Work on Censored China Search
    https://theintercept.com/2019/03/04/google-ongoing-project-dragonfly

    Google employees have carried out their own investigation into the company’s plan to launch a censored search engine for China and say they are concerned that development of the project remains ongoing, The Intercept can reveal. Late last year, bosses moved engineers away from working on the controversial project, known as Dragonfly, and said that there were no current plans to launch it. However, a group of employees at the company was unsatisfied with the lack of information from (...)

    #surveillance #web #Dragonfly #Google #GoogleSearch #censure

  • How #ai Can Be Improved By #blockchain
    https://hackernoon.com/how-ai-can-be-improved-by-blockchain-591a2fb7095e?source=rss----3a8144ea

    Quite some time age artificial intelligence (AI) has moved away from a fantastic fictional element and a limited gaming feature. Today AI can be found all across the board, from scientific experiments to everyday things like search engines and our favorite social media.But how can this new #technology that operates invisibly in almost every home change our lives — and more specifically, how can it make our lives better?AI market todayEngineers create AIs to allow computers to solve problems themselves. Essentially, they modify program code in response to the new difficulties they face. Computers beating world champions in chess and other games are no news, but for some time it seemed that AI development stagnated there.Until unmanned vehicles, created by corporations like Google and Uber, (...)

    #future #artificial-intelligence

  • #duckduckgo Vs. #google : What You Need to Know
    https://hackernoon.com/duckduckgo-vs-google-what-you-need-to-know-869368b08c4f?source=rss----3a

    DuckDuckGo vs. Google: What You Need to KnowAdweek: DuckDuckGo vs. GoogleThere’s no denying that we are years away from seeing any other search engine take over Google. Yes, it has grown thaaaaat big and has left us so dependent on itself that it just can’t happen so quick.Google tracks almost all our activities through our smart devices — especially so in the case of Android devices. The places you visit, the steps you walk, the time you spend on each website, the searches you make, the products you click on and so on.If you are using Google devices and/or its products, Google is behind you.Everywhere. All the time.https://medium.com/media/81f09925aa4750abf367b5b7505a4718/href(If you’re wondering, yes, Google does know exactly what you watched the last night and the night before it and (...)

    #search-engines #duckduckgo-vs-google #google-vs-duckduckgo

  • Private Mossad for Hire
    Inside an effort to influence American elections, starting with one small-town race.
    February 18 & 25, 2019
    By Adam Entous and Ronan Farrow

    https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/02/18/private-mossad-for-hire

    (...) Psy-Group had more success pitching an operation, code-named Project Butterfly, to wealthy Jewish-American donors. The operation targeted what Psy-Group described as “anti-Israel” activists on American college campuses who supported the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, known as B.D.S. Supporters of B.D.S. see the movement as a way to use nonviolent protest to pressure Israel about its treatment of the Palestinians; detractors say that B.D.S. wrongly singles out Israel as a human-rights offender. B.D.S. is anathema to many ardent supporters of the Israeli government.

    In early meetings with donors, in New York, Burstien said that the key to mounting an effective anti-B.D.S. campaign was to make it look as though Israel, and the Jewish-American community, had nothing to do with the effort. The goal of Butterfly, according to a 2017 company document, was to “destabilize and disrupt anti-Israel movements from within.” Psy-Group operatives scoured the Internet, social-media accounts, and the “deep” Web—areas of the Internet not indexed by search engines like Google—for derogatory information about B.D.S. activists. If a student claimed to be a pious Muslim, for example, Psy-Group operatives would look for photographs of him engaging in behavior unacceptable to many pious Muslims, such as drinking alcohol or having an affair. Psy-Group would then release the information online using avatars and Web sites that couldn’t be traced back to the company or its donors.

    Project Butterfly launched in February, 2016, and Psy-Group asked donors for $2.5 million for operations in 2017. Supporters were told that they were “investing in Israel’s future.” In some cases, a former company employee said, donors asked Psy-Group to target B.D.S. activists at universities where their sons and daughters studied.
    The project would focus on as many as ten college campuses. According to an update sent to donors in May, 2017, Psy-Group conducted two “tours of the main theatre of action,” and met with the campaign’s outside “partners,” which it did not name. Psy-Group employees had recently travelled to Washington to visit officials at a think tank called the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which had shared some of its research on the B.D.S. movement. In a follow-up meeting, which was attended by Burstien, Psy-Group provided F.D.D. with a confidential memo describing how it had compiled dossiers on nine activists, including a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. In the memo, Psy-Group asked the foundation for guidance on identifying future targets. According to an F.D.D. official, the foundation “did not end up contracting with them, and their research did little to advance our own.”

    Burstien recruited Ram Ben-Barak, a former deputy director of Mossad, to help with the project. As the director general of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, from 2014 to 2016, Ben-Barak had drawn up a plan for the state to combat the B.D.S. movement, but it was never implemented. Ben-Barak was enthusiastic about Butterfly. He said that the fight against B.D.S. was like “a war.” In the case of B.D.S. activists, he said, “you don’t kill them but you do have to deal with them in other ways.” (...)

    #BDS

  • The “Backendification” of Frontend Development
    https://hackernoon.com/the-backendification-of-frontend-development-62f218a773d4?source=rss----

    Executive Summary (TLDR)Asynchronous #javascript in the form of Single Page Applications (SPA) offer an incredible opportunity for improving the user experience of your web applications. CSS frameworks like Bootstrap enable developers to quickly contribute styling as they’re working on the structure and behaviour of things.Unfortunately, SPA and CSS frameworks tend to result in relatively complex solutions where traditionally separated concerns - HTML-structure, CSS-style, and JS-behaviour - are blended together as a matter of course — Counter to the lessons learned by previous generations.CC BY-SA 401(K) 2012This blending of concerns can prevent entry level developers and valued specialists (Eg. visual design, accessibility, search engine optimization, and internationalization) from making (...)

    #backendification #startup #product-management #hackernoon-top-story

  • Querying the #blockchain: Why The Graph Might Become One of the Important Protocols of the Web3…
    https://hackernoon.com/querying-the-blockchain-why-the-graph-might-become-one-of-the-important-

    Querying the Blockchain: Why The Graph Might Become One of the Important Protocols of the Web3 StackData access has played a prominent role in any technology trend in the history of software. Data access technologies such as databases, search engines or query APIs are so ubiquitous that we barely think about them when architecting software solutions. As Web 3.0, decentralized applications powered by blockchain technologies evolve, infrastructure blocks such as data access will become more relevant. However, solving data access in the blockchain have proven to be a very challenging endeavor that forces developers to spend significant amounts of time writing infrastructure code. Among, the Web3 data access solutions in the market, The Graph Protocol is that one that I particularly like (...)

    #invector-labs #ethereum #cryptocurrency #blockchain-technology

  • #Google erases #Kurdistan from maps in compliance with Turkish gov.
    http://www.kurdistan24.net/en/news/e6a0b65e-84fa-447b-9ed4-5df8390961d3

    ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – Google incorporation removed a map outlining the geographical extent of the Greater Kurdistan after the Turkish state asked it to do so, a simple inquiry on the Internet giant’s search engine from Wednesday on can show.

    “Unavailable. This map is no longer available due to a violation of our Terms of Service and/or policies,” a note on the page that the map was previously on read. Google did not provide further details on how the Kurdistan map violated its rules.

    The map in question, available for years, used to be on Google’s My Maps service, a feature of Google Maps that enables users to create custom maps for personal use or sharing through search.

    Because the map was created and shared publicly by a user through their personal account, it remains unknown if their rights have been violated or if they will appeal.

    A Turkish lawmaker from the ultra-nationalist, opposition IYI (Good) Party revealed last week that he put a written question to the Minister of Transport and Infrastructure, Cahit Turan, as to whether the Turkish government acted to make Google remove the Kurdistan map.

    Turan answered in affirmative, saying authorities were in touch with Google.

    The MP, Yavuz Agiralioglu, charged the map with “being at the service of terrorist organizations” in his question to the minister, referring to Kurdish armed groups fighting for different degrees of autonomy and recognition of cultural rights in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, modern nation-states Kurdistan was divided between a century ago.

    He also claimed the map violated the Turkish borders, although it showed modern borders superimposed by a non-standard red line that defined Kurdistan as “a geo-cultural region wherein the Kurdish people have historically formed a prominent majority population.”

    “The most dangerous Turk is the one looking at the map. We laid the Earth flat under our feet and only walked. We took our civilization, our justice, and our mercy to the countries we went. Let those who fancy dividing our country with fake maps look at our historical record,” the nationalist MP tweeted, in a veiled reference to the fate of the Armenian people which faced a genocide before the Ottoman Empire collapsed.

    Currently, the search “Kurdistan” on Google brings up results for the Kurdistan Region and its constitutionally-defined borders within Iraq and the Kurdistan Province in Western Iran.

    The use of the word “Kurdistan” is criminalized in Turkey, even at the parliament’s floors where lawmakers can be fined to pay up to several thousand Liras and be dismissed from at least two legislative sessions.

    Maps drawn by ancient Greeks, Islamic historians, Ottomans, and Westerners showing Kurdistan with alternative names such as “Corduene” or “Karduchi” have existed since antiquity.

    The use of the name “Kurdistan” was banned by the administration of Turkey’s founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in the immediate aftermath of the crushed Sheikh Said uprising for Kurdish statehood in 1925.

    Editing by Karzan Sulaivany

    #Turquie

  • Microsoft Bing not only shows child pornography, it suggests it
    https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/10/unsafe-search

    Microsoft Bing Child Exploitation Search Results redacted

    Illegal child exploitation imagery is easy to find on Microsoft’s Bing search engine. But even more alarming is that Bing will suggest related keywords and images that provide pedophiles with more child pornography. Following an anonymous tip, TechCrunch commissioned a report from online safety startup AntiToxin to investigate. The results were (...)

    #Microsoft #Bing #pédophilie #pornographie

  • The Best Ways To Recover From #google Penalties
    https://hackernoon.com/the-best-ways-to-recover-from-google-penalties-fe48d50d2416?source=rss--

    All webmasters share one common fear — a Google’s penalty. A penalty can seriously impact all of your search engine traffic. And it can hamper your website’s rankings in the search engine results pages(SERPs).However, due to cut-throat competition in the field, many webmasters push their #seo to the limit. For this reason, Google may end up penalizing your website for violating their guidelines. In fact, Google takes over 400,000 manual actions every month according to Matt Cutts.HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:Top SEO Challenges for Startups and How to Overcome ThemTop 16 Most Effective Search Engine Optimization TipsAdditionally, due to algorithm updates, many websites are getting penalized. Out of these websites, only about 20,000 of them apply for penalty recovery. That’s a measly 5% of the (...)

    #digital-marketing #analysis #backlink

  • #searchpedia : A List of 250+ Search Engines
    https://hackernoon.com/searchpedia-a-list-of-250-search-engines-40198146adfc?source=rss----3a81

    An Exhaustive List of All Search Engines from the Dawn of the InternetSince the dawn of the Internet Era, we have been flooded with an ocean of information. But without a good search engine, this ocean is useless.Search Engines have gone through a great journey, we saw a lot of them, some came and went, and some stay to this date.Here is an incomplete, but a big list of search engines. If you find something wrong or missing, then shoot your suggestions in the comments.We have categorized the search engines according to their use-cases. Enjoy!All-Purpose Search EnginesGoogle: Well, probably you used this for coming to this article. The world’s most popular search engine.Visit: http://www.google.comBing Search: Microsoft’s entry into the burgeoning search engine market. Better late than (...)

    #alternative-search-engine #list-of-search-engines #search-engines #all-search-engines

  • #Facebook: The global censor - World Socialist Web Site
    https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/12/29/pers-d29.html

    Facebook: The global censor
    29 December 2018

    The year 2018 has seen a vast intensification of internet censorship by Google, Facebook and Twitter, transforming them from tools for exchanging information and communicating around the world into massive censorship dragnets for policing what their users say, do and think.

    In August 2017, the World Socialist Web Site published an open letter to Google charging that the company, in collusion with the US government, was working to shape political discourse by manipulating search results. The open letter warned that Google’s actions set a dangerous precedent for subverting constitutional protections of freedom of speech and demanded that the company cease what the WSWS called “political blacklisting” of left-wing sites.

    Sixteen months later, the central argument of the open letter—that Google and its peers are carrying out political censorship—is undeniable. The regime that Google pioneered through its search engine has been expanded to all major US social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

    #censure #réseaux_sociaux

  • How Investments will Change in the Near #future
    https://hackernoon.com/how-investments-will-change-in-the-near-future-671161d4176e?source=rss--

    How Investments Can Change in the Near FutureToday, it is very important that we realize that we are on the verge of the fourth technological revolution, which means we are standing at the very beginning of tremendous changes which will affect all aspects of the life of human society as a whole.SourceIn our daily lives, we have become accustomed to things and phenomena that were difficult to imagine even 10–15 years ago: we don’t use cameras to take photos, and we don’t worry about how many more photos we can take; we don’t use paper encyclopedias; we don’t hail taxis on the street; we don’t search pharmacies for medication; we don’t go to the bank; we don’t buy airline tickets at a travel agency; we don’t use expensive international roaming; we’re not surprised when a search engine knows our (...)

    #investing #predictions #alternative-investments #technology