industryterm:search queries

Obfuscation – A User`s Guide for Privacy and Protest
( Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum )

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/318dwUtOhCL._SX311_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

▻https://www.amazon.fr/Obfuscation-User%60s-Guide-Privacy-Protest/dp/0262029731

How we can evade, protest, and sabotage today’s pervasive digital surveillance by deploying more data, not less—and why we should.

With Obfuscation, Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum mean to start a revolution. They are calling us not to the barricades but to our computers, offering us ways to fight today’s pervasive digital surveillance—the collection of our data by governments, corporations, advertisers, and hackers. To the toolkit of privacy protecting techniques and projects, they propose adding obfuscation: the deliberate use of ambiguous, confusing, or misleading information to interfere with surveillance and data collection projects. Brunton and Nissenbaum provide tools and a rationale for evasion, noncompliance, refusal, even sabotage—especially for average users, those of us not in a position to opt out or exert control over data about ourselves. Obfuscation will teach users to push back, software developers to keep their user data safe, and policy makers to gather data without misusing it.

Brunton and Nissenbaum present a guide to the forms and formats that obfuscation has taken and explain how to craft its implementation to suit the goal and the adversary. They describe a series of historical and contemporary examples, including radar chaff deployed by World War II pilots, Twitter bots that hobbled the social media strategy of popular protest movements, and software that can camouflage users’ search queries and stymie online advertising. They go on to consider obfuscation in more general terms, discussing why obfuscation is necessary, whether it is justified, how it works, and how it can be integrated with other privacy practices and technologies.

about the book:
▻https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/yp3ex7/obfuscate-yourself-nissenbaum-brunton

When it comes to maintaining their digital privacy, many people probably think about software like encrypted messaging apps and Tor browsers. But as Brunton and Nissenbaum detail in Obfuscation, there are many other ways to hide one’s digital trail. Obfuscation, the first book-length look at the topic, contains a wealth of ideas for prankish disobedience, analysis-frustrating techniques, and other methods of collective protest. The aim, as Brunton tells Motherboard, was to create an approach that could be adopted by people without access or training to the best tools, or in situations where they can’t get away with using strong crypto, for instance.

▻http://mitp.nautil.us/feature/257/how-to-obfuscate

#TrackMeNot
#privacy
#book #livre

Anyone can Cook. Anyone can Code. The Way of the Programmer
▻https://hackernoon.com/anyone-can-cook-anyone-can-code-the-way-of-the-programmer-2ebefc99692?so

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/0*_v7WtwarZ9YZD8E_.jpg

How I Learn, How I Code- From a professional programmersource — ▻https://d23.com/anyone-can-cook-with-these-tips-from-ratatouille/I found that as a long time programmer I have developed a sort of symbiotic relationship with the Internet. I do my work with its help, firing tens or sometimes even hundreds of search queries in a day. You can call me a-Google based Programmer/a Stack Overflow programmer- but I don’t mean it the way to copy answers naively, post silly questions, get away with doing the bare minimum. No, I code with the help of the internet, and I try help it be a better helper- In small way’s, I add to the knowledge base via articles, answers, blogs, so that it becomes a little easier for someone else to follow. Nothing illustrates it better than sites like StackOverflow — the (...)

#software-engineering #software-development #programming

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 Knowledge Graph — The Best Guide For Beginners
▻https://hackernoon.com/google-knowledge-graph-the-best-guide-for-beginners-d513c1180abf?source=

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/700/1*-BUuwH947O9PUrPmMQ7_nA.jpeg

Google Knowledge Graph — The Best Guide For BeginnersDo you want to learn about the latest gadgets in the market? Perhaps you’d like to check out the best Chinese restaurants in your town? Or are you conducting research on the life of an entrepreneur?Regardless of the nature of your search query, Google tries its best to deliver the most relevant and meaningful answers to you.There is no doubt that Google has become an indispensable part of every internet user’s life. From acquiring knowledge to buying products, you run quick Google searches for almost every need, big or small. In fact, more than 71,000 search queries are conducted by Google every second.HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:8 Inbound Marketing Strategies Your Startup Needs to Start Using Today8 Website Navigation Mistakes You Might Be (...)

#google-knowledge-graph #seo #knowledge-graph #google-analytics #guides-and-tutorials

Reality Winner Has Been in Jail for a Year. Her Prosecution Is Unfair and Unprecedented.

▻https://theintercept.com/2018/06/03/reality-winner-nsa-paul-manafort

THIS IS A tale of two defendants and two systems of justice.

Christmas was coming, and Paul Manafort wanted to spend the holiday with his extended family in the Hamptons, where he owns a four-acre estate that has 10 bedrooms, a pool, a tennis court, a basketball court, a putting green, and a guest cottage. But Manafort was under house arrest in northern Virginia. Suspected of colluding with the Russian government, the former campaign manager for Donald Trump had been indicted on a dozen charges involving conspiracy, money laundering, bank fraud, and lying to federal investigators.

https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2018/06/hamptons-lincolnton-1527897800.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&q=90&w=1024&h=512

Paul Manafort’s Hamptons estate, left, and the jail in Lincolnton, right.

A lobbyist who became mysteriously wealthy over the years, Manafort avoided jail by posting $10 million in bond, though he was confined to his luxury condo in Alexandria, Virginia. That’s why, in mid-December, his lawyers asked the judge to make an exception. Manafort’s $2.7 million Virginia home could not provide “adequate accommodations” for his holiday guests, some of whom would have difficulty traveling because of health problems, the lawyers stated. A day later, the judge agreed to the request. Manafort could have his Christmas getaway in the Hamptons.

Hundreds of miles away, another defendant in an eerily related case was not so blessed. Reality Winner, an Air Force veteran and former contractor for the National Security Agency, was sitting in a small-town jail in Lincolnton, Georgia. Arrested a year ago today, on June 3, 2017, Winner was accused of leaking an NSA document that showed how Russians tried to hack American voting systems in 2016.

The bail system plays to the advantage of wealthy defendants like Paul Manafort and Harvey Weinstein (who paid his $1 million bond with a cashier’s check), because they can provide the government with fantastic sums; freedom is quite literally for sale, as in a story Anton Chekhov might have written about czarist Russia. The poor and the unlucky are stuck behind bars, punished before their guilt is determined. Defendants who are unable to pay bail have sometimes been held for years without a trial.

IMAGINE THAT YOU are facing trial but are forbidden from searching for evidence to prove you are innocent. It is a scenario from a totalitarian “Alice in Wonderland” – you may do anything you want to defend yourself except the one thing that might actually help.

That’s a rough approximation of the situation Winner’s lawyers have faced due to a strange twist in her case. She is accused of potentially causing “exceptionally grave damage” to national security by leaking a classified document that, the government claims, contains “national defense information.”

Winner’s lawyers have stated in public filings that they needed to search on the internet to determine whether information in the document was known to a large number of government officials or was in the public domain. This was crucial to their effort to prove that the document did not merit NDI status. But because the document is classified, and because researching its contents on the internet could disclose search queries to hackers who theoretically could compromise the lawyers’ computers or access their routers, they were prohibited from Googling key phrases, according to court filings. In essence, Winner’s lawyers were forbidden from finding out if the document was as sensitive as the government claimed.

An open letter to Google: Stop the censorship of the Internet! Stop the political blacklisting of the World Socialist Web Site! - World Socialist Web Site
▻http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/08/25/pers-a25.html

https://www.wsws.org/img/open-graph-icon.png

Gentlemen:

Google’s mission statement from the outset was “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Its official code of conduct was proclaimed in Google’s famous motto: “Don’t be evil.” In recent years, you have seriously lost your way. You are now engaged in hiding the world’s information, and, in the process, are doing a great deal of evil.

Google, and by implication, its parent company Alphabet, Inc., are now engaged in political censorship of the Internet. You are doing what you have previously publicly denounced.

Google is manipulating its Internet searches to restrict public awareness of and access to socialist, anti-war and left-wing websites. The World Socialist Web Site (www.wsws.org) has been massively targeted and is the most affected by your censorship protocols. Referrals to the WSWS from Google have fallen by nearly 70 percent since April of this year.

Censorship on this scale is political blacklisting. The obvious intent of Google’s censorship algorithm is to block news that your company does not want reported and to suppress opinions with which you do not agree.

Ben Gomes, Google’s vice president for search engineering, attempted to justify the imposition of political censorship with a blog post on April 25, claiming that the changes to the algorithm were a response to “the phenomenon of ‘fake news,’ where content on the web has contributed to the spread of blatantly misleading, low quality, offensive or downright false information.”

Google, according to Gomes, has recruited some 10,000 “evaluators” to judge the “quality” of websites. These evaluators are trained to “flag” websites that are deemed to “include misleading information” and “unsupported conspiracy theories.” Gomes explained that the blacklists created by these evaluators will be used, in combination with the latest developments in technology, to develop an algorithm that will impose censorship automatically, in real time, across future search results.

Whatever the technical changes Google has made to the search algorithm, the anti-left bias of the results is undeniable. The most striking outcome of Google’s censorship procedures is that users whose search queries indicate an interest in socialism, Marxism or Trotskyism are no longer directed to the World Socialist Web Site. Google is “disappearing” the WSWS from the results of search requests. For example, Google searches for “Leon Trotsky” yielded 5,893 impressions (appearances of the WSWS in search results) in May of this year. In July, the same search yielded exactly zero impressions for the WSWS, which is the Internet publication of the international movement founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938.

As stated above, since April, other left-wing publications that present themselves as progressive, socialist or anti-war also have suffered significant reductions in their Google search results:

alternet.org fell by 63 percent
globalresearch.ca fell by 62 percent
consortiumnews.com fell by 47 percent
mediamatters.org fell by 42 percent
commondreams.org fell by 37 percent
internationalviewpoint.org fell by 36 percent
democracynow.org fell by 36 percent
wikileaks.org fell by 30 percent
truth-out.org fell by 25 percent
counterpunch.org fell by 21 percent
* theintercept.com fell by 19 percent

Google justifies the imposition of political censorship by using a loaded term like “fake news.” This term, properly used, signifies the manufacturing of news based on an artificially constructed event that either never occurred or has been grossly exaggerated. The present-day furor over “fake news” is itself an example of an invented event and artificially constructed narrative. It is a “fake” term that is used to discredit factual information and well-grounded analyses that challenge and discredit government policies and corporate interests. Any invocation of the phrase “fake news,” as it pertains to the WSWS, is devoid of any substance or credibility. In fact, our efforts to combat historical falsification have been recognized, including by the scholarly journal American Historical Review.

#Google #Censure #Fake_news #Appétit_géants

Is Google Scared Of DuckDuckGo ?

In those eight curious days between the news of the Snowden leak and Google’s move to encrypt 100% of search queries, some startling search traffic occurred with one of Google’s tiniest competitors, DuckDuckGo.
“It took 1445 days to get 1 million (daily) searches, 483 days to get 2 million searches, and then just 8 days to pass 3 million searches.”

Can you guess when DuckDuckGo proudly sent out the above-tweet? If you clicked on it, you’ll see June 18th as the date. Or, roughly 8 days after Edward Snowden leaked the NSA news.

...

The question remains, did Google encrypt 100% of search because of NSA concerns? Or were they nervous about the tremendous growth displayed by a tiny competitor?

▻http://seekingalpha.com/article/1947371-is-google-scared-of-duckduckgo

#duckduckgo
#search

DocumentCloud’s VisualSearch.js
►http://documentcloud.github.com/visualsearch

VisualSearch.js enhances ordinary #search boxes with the ability to #autocomplete faceted search queries. Specify the facets for completion, along with the completable values for any facet. You can retrieve the search query as a structured object, so you don’t have to parse the query string yourself.

#recherche #champ #javascript