Politics Thread: Edge of Seventeen

[injurai]

 

My god... all it's saying is if you choose to operate a social media platform, you have a fiduciary duty to mitigate (not prevent) false news. That is going to tend towards blatantly false news. It recommends some sort of fact-checker, which is just a way of saying some sort program that acts as a classifier. It doesn't have to be a strong-arm approach, it's just saying you can't run a social media platform and allow it to be a vector by which disinformation can spread.

 

Further any vague aspect of it is going to be clarified by the surrounding literature.

Always have to look at the way something can be abused

 

 

It's true. Just there are ways of exploring that question which find themselves highly off-track.

 

When JBP was tackling issues wrt bill C-16, some legal experts dismissed the issue. Which may be entirely the case, but at the same time it was clear a particular section of the law was becoming highly subjectivised and beholden to the interpretation of specially staffed tribunal.

 

Here I don't see the law as giving any body that is part of the law any subjective power. Instead it's increasing the standard by which social media business must operate, and makes no dictates as to how exactly those business must fact-check. Meaning different social media platforms can compete. Off course with social media, each "format" tends to operate as a monopoly it's not like these entities are being given the freedom to stifle truth in any way that they weren't already doing. In fact a good interpretation of these laws may actually be beneficial over time.

[Zoraptor]

My god... all it's saying is if you choose to operate a social media platform, you have a fiduciary duty to mitigate (not prevent) false news.. It recommends some sort of fact-checker..

 

Trouble is that facts and what is or isn't fake news tends to vary by opinion. Consider:

 

1) 'Obama is a lizardman alien who has returned to Venus' is obviously fake news, but it also isn't going to be believed by people blessed with the gift of a functioning brain, so no point removing or fact checking it

 

2) 'Hillary Clinton had Seth Rich murdered', no evidence of it apart from some odd circumstances so strongly unproven, but an opinion that can be defended as being possible. Fake news, sure, 'fake opinion', no; fact check false if stated as fact, but unproven if presented as a theory.

 

3) 'Trump = serial groper", objectively unproven and opinion rather than true or false, but, have a pro Trump fact check and it's false, fake news; have an anti Trump fact checker and it's true, real news.

 

4) 'We know where Iraq's WMD are they're at [places]..', definitely said, also absolutely a lie. Fake news? No, Rumsfeld said it; fact check would be false, now, but then it was generally regarded as being absolutely true due to the authority of the source. Conversely, the reverse opinion from Comical Ali was obviously false, then. The same thing now from Muhammed Sahif al Sahaf though would be fact checked as true.

 

It's the latter examples which are why regulation is a potential major problem as you're providing even more motivation to move from proper facts to opinion which the authorities- whether it's facebook or the government- agree with as facts, and labeling of dissenting of opinions that predisposes people not to even consider them. That isn't free speech, indeed some might say it's the reverse. The current situation is far from ideal but is probably the best we can get with human nature, it can get far far worse.

[Malcador]

Trump's personal lawyer had his offices raided by the FBI in a no-knock raid, with all sorts of documents seized. Yikes. What in the world did they have that a judge felt comfortable signing off on raiding the president's lawyer? Will have to wait and see, but that is...bold, to say the least.

​

​(e): According to Trump's lawyer's lawyer, it was at least party done on the basis of a referral made by Special Counsel Mueller.

Trump's reaction was amusing

[injurai]

I entirely agree with you. I just don't see how social media flagging content is any different from the manner in which old media works by there own selective filtering. The difference before and after those amendments has nothing to do with now permitting social media to interfere with information flow, the already did so, it is simply compels them to have some measure in place for the problem. Maybe that's a regulation against the market that is unwanted and will hurt budding social media platforms, but that is the only aspect I really take issue with. What it does to free speech or the miasma of social information seems like a negligible change from the status quo, with a glimmer of hope that a satisfiable standard could be built into some platforms.

 

Guess we'll have to wait and see where the litigation around these changes ends up. Which is why I think further refinement and relying on established common law is going to be more important here than simply the vaguenesses of those clauses.

[Bartimaeus]

 

Trump's personal lawyer had his offices raided by the FBI in a no-knock raid, with all sorts of documents seized. Yikes. What in the world did they have that a judge felt comfortable signing off on raiding the president's lawyer? Will have to wait and see, but that is...bold, to say the least.

​

​(e): According to Trump's lawyer's lawyer, it was at least party done on the basis of a referral made by Special Counsel Mueller.

Trump's reaction was amusing

 

 

His threat to fire Mueller, not so much.

[213374U]

My god... all it's saying is if you choose to operate a social media platform, you have a fiduciary duty to mitigate (not prevent) false news. That is going to tend towards blatantly false news. It recommends some sort of fact-checker, which is just a way of saying some sort program that acts as a classifier. It doesn't have to be a strong-arm approach, it's just saying you can't run a social media platform and allow it to be a vector by which disinformation can spread.

 

Further any vague aspect of it is going to be clarified by the surrounding literature.

 

Yeah. So either unenforceable on the part of social media operators, or completely ineffectual if they don't take a strong-arm approach. But sure, let the courts try to discern the "lawmakers' intent", and hand down some ridiculous rulings in the process. That'll at least make for some amusing posts here.

 

Also, who watches the watchmen, etc.

Edited April 10, 2018 by 213374U

[injurai]

The courts are going to interpret the law regardless. Then overtime they will formulate restatements of the common law. I don't really see this getting out of hand at the judiciary level, and at the level of social media, they can already strong arm if they want to. They didn't need permission. So really the only issue is how the law may interfere as a business regulation that you can't opt out of. But look either you succeed to stamping out the evidentially-bankrupt disinformation going around, your encroach on actual truth. If you encroach on obvious truth there will be resistance and communities will keep their own records as they already do in this factually-balkanized world. The likely outcome will be more content will fly under the radar as opinion pieces, which have been rising consistently for awhile now. Instead of suppressing truth, it will be about spin and interpretations of facts, which is the actually affective way of managing the information of the masses and has been the status quo for ages.

 

Backing up to the law-makers, who watches them indeed? Could it be the public? As it's always been, people need to exercise themselves as citizens. Good thing plenty of people are righteously indignant to raise issues, and thankfully bureaucratic partisan comities are forced to step through fact patterns to see where everything comes out in the wash.

 

So is this amendment one of those times to raise an issue? Can be, that's fine. I just don't see the concerns posited playing out when put in context.

[213374U]

If you encroach on obvious truth there will be resistance and communities will keep their own records as they already do in this factually-balkanized world. The likely outcome will be more content will fly under the radar as opinion pieces, which have been rising consistently for awhile now. Instead of suppressing truth, it will be about spin and interpretations of facts, which is the actually affective way of managing the information of the masses and has been the status quo for ages.

 

If legislation of this sort becomes more widespread, that could signal the death of social media. A guy can dream.

 

As for the public watching the legislators... that's a good one.

[injurai]

Didn't say the public can manage, simply that's who in theory watches the watchmen.

[Agiel]

 

Experts who make claims not in evidence deserve to have their claims debunked and ignored. If they'd shown what they claimed there would be no argument, but they didn't. Otherwise, you get birth of credulity and death of skepticism. And Saddam's WMDs being over London in 45 minutes etc.

 

 

 

 

So a private company that stakes its reputation on its analysis (and would likely provide further proof to potential clients that are not convinced by their publicly available content) gets picked apart, yet one can take on faith a claim made almost purely for domestic consumption to placate the most misinformed hardliners and is corroborated by zero evidence? 

 

 

 

 

It really isn't, jamming relies solely on the physical properties of EM radiation, and if the US military has a way to alter that then they can do anything. Spoofing is debatable in terms of its technical aspects and whether it would work, jamming isn't; if you have a stronger signal that overwhelms a weaker one. Cell phone towers are actually an ideal terrestrial placement for jammers since you already have the transmitter infrastructure in place, but it's really easy to make mobile ones- say, on a ship- because you don't need much power to jam weak signals. Even a cell phone signal is far stronger than GPS.

 

Pretending as if FHSS and ECCM doesn't exist; a Hollywood actress figured it out in the 1940s for the purpose of defeating jamming efforts against radio-guided torpedoes after all. The placement of GPS jammers on cell-phone towers is also critically useful against cruise missiles that have some form of GPS guidance due to the elevation giving it maximum line of sight against a low-flying target. Thus if a missile were to pass through a "communications denied environment" the INS guidance kicks in until it passes through, the GPS guidance kicks back on, and it continues as normal.

Edited April 10, 2018 by Agiel

[Katphood]

Woah, this thing is real!

 

 

...so is this:

 

[Zoraptor]

 

Experts who make claims not in evidence deserve to have their claims debunked and ignored. If they'd shown what they claimed there would be no argument, but they didn't. Otherwise, you get birth of credulity and death of skepticism. And Saddam's WMDs being over London in 45 minutes etc.

 

So a private company that stakes its reputation on its analysis (and would likely provide further proof to potential clients that are not convinced by their publicly available content) gets picked apart, yet one can take on faith a claim made almost purely for domestic consumption to placate the most misinformed hardliners and is corroborated by zero evidence?

 

 

The evidence they provided was for a number of strikes consistent with the Russian version.

 

You're using classic appeal to authority fallacy. I've seen 'experts' claim that T72BM tanks are the only ones fitted with kontakt-5 ERA and kontakt-5 means the tank has to be Russian. Literally none of that is true; and being said by an expert, in a think tank with an authoritative name ('Institute for International Strategic Studies' in that case), doesn't make it true.

 

 

It really isn't, jamming relies solely on the physical properties of EM radiation, and if the US military has a way to alter that then they can do anything. Spoofing is debatable in terms of its technical aspects and whether it would work, jamming isn't; if you have a stronger signal that overwhelms a weaker one. Cell phone towers are actually an ideal terrestrial placement for jammers since you already have the transmitter infrastructure in place, but it's really easy to make mobile ones- say, on a ship- because you don't need much power to jam weak signals. Even a cell phone signal is far stronger than GPS.

 

Pretending as if FHSS and ECCM doesn't exist; a Hollywood actress figured it out in the 1940s for the purpose of defeating jamming efforts against radio-guided torpedoes after all. The placement of GPS jammers on cell-phone towers is also critically useful against cruise missiles that have some form of GPS guidance due to the elevation giving it maximum line of sight against a low-flying target. Thus if a missile were to pass through a "communications denied environment" the INS guidance kicks in until it passes through, the GPS guidance kicks back on, and it continues as normal.

 

GPS jammers won't do crap against cruise missiles over land, but not every military GPS utility uses terrain recognition.

 

And there's a massive scale difference between jamming torpedo guidance which is terrestrial and on a single figure km distance scale and GPS- which is 20,000km away, and with the energy limitations of a satellite. At 0.1 femtowatt signal strength you can drown out entire bands, which brute forces switching defences. To put it in perspective the signal output of a single cellphone, not even cellphone tower, is around 1 watt and thus a full 16 orders of magnitude larger than a GPS signal. That attenuates quickly as well, of course, but still, 16 orders of magnitude higher for something you literally carry in your pocket.

 

Edit: Is the US military itself a sufficient source?

Edited April 10, 2018 by Zoraptor

[Guard Dog]

The value of a news item is entirely in the eye of the reader/viewer. As I've said many time if you believe everything you read on the internet you are a fool. Case in point:

 

 

 

You all know I don't think too highly of Elizabeth Warren. But she never said that. That is a edited ripoff of something Josef Stalin supposedly said. And even that can't be proven. When it comes to news on the internet it's caveat emptor.  If someone is stupid enough to believe everything they read then you can pity them, insult them, try to educate them, whatever. But by God you do NOT make the choice for them of what they get to see. You do not substitute your judgement for theirs, even if you know they are wrong. They need to come to the realization of what is or isn't on their own. Because it won't take long before the truth becomes only what the biases of the "fact checkers" want it to be. After that, the things you see on the internet will still be BS, but you won't have any sources to debunk it.

 

Yes, I know that is not what this particular law, which has not even been passed yet, does. But that is the direction we are heading with it. It is insidious. Like I've said with gun control, the surest way to never reach the unthinkable end is to not take the first steps. 

 

Edited April 10, 2018 by Guard Dog

[Guard Dog]

Never mind

Edited April 10, 2018 by Guard Dog

[Pidesco]

 

Now that's what I call self sabotaging.

[Guard Dog]

[HoonDing]

Sounds way too articulate for Trump.

[Malcador]

Needs more asides.  So like "You know the Obsidian Forums. There's a guy there, really smart guy, really smart. Some say the SMARTEST person in the forum! Guard Dog is his name, Guard Dog, where are you? Really smart guy, the forum needs more like him. "

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

 

How many hours of sharks did you have to watch to earn that praise?

[Guard Dog]

I had to watch all 192 episodes of the Apprentice, back to back to back while tweeting "Best President Ever" after every contestant got fired. 

[Agiel]

 

 

 Cell phone towers are actually an ideal terrestrial placement for jammers since you already have the transmitter infrastructure in place, but it's really easy to make mobile ones- say, on a ship- because you don't need much power to jam weak signals. Even a cell phone signal is far stronger than GPS.

 

As for the rest, I'd bet everything I own against a bent 5c piece that the Russians knew where the 2 US destroyers which fired the CMs were, and everyone knows they were warned in advance. One Russian ship in a place able to jam one set, one set too far away. Easy.

 

 

 

 

Since an Arleigh Burke-destroyer has an antenna mast height taller than all but two vessels in the entire Russian Navy (let alone the Black Sea Fleet), its surface search radar would detect any potential vessel at a greater distance than the jammer would be effective, so a flight path could simply be plotted well out of range of it. As a former deputy CINC of the RuAF said himself in response to why the SA-21 did not intercept the missiles, "[t]he Americans are [...] not idiots."

 

 

 

You're using classic appeal to authority fallacy.

 

So next time I have hint of back pain I should look up my symptoms on WebMD? Then when I go to my doctor I should tell him "Spare me your expertise; I want you to give me a corticosteroid injection for my lumbar herniated disc"? 

 

Yes, experts do sometimes come up short. That's because they are human beings and are fallible, and the scientific method exists to shore up theories when there are mistakes. You're a human being, as am I. 

 

 

 

 

Is the US military itself a sufficient source?

 

Similar sources have confirmed this only for RQ-11 Ravens and not for anything in the class of the MQ-1. Not totally unsurprising, or even unexpected for such a small RPV when there's room for a rudimentary datalink and sensors and little else such as specifically hardened anti-jamming measures (and the cost is such that there is an assumption that it _will_ be neutralised by a peer or near-peer adversary, or at least disrupted, in one way or another) that's also flying fairly high and within LOS of any jamming measures.

 

Your arguments also fail to reconcile with what's perhaps the biggest hole in the Russian MoD story: If the missiles were jammed, where are the dozens of airframes littered across the Syrian/Lebanese countryside? Plenty of photo evidence exists of cruise missiles laying in a field due to mechanical faults mid-flight from past campaigns. Given that if nothing else the Russian bombing campaign serves as a country-sized advertisement for the latest and greatest of Russian military hardware, surely parading a big piece of the airframe on RT would be a great propaganda coup. 

Edited April 11, 2018 by Agiel

[Zoraptor]

Since an Arleigh Burke-destroyer has an antenna mast height taller than all but two vessels in the entire Russian Navy (let alone the Black Sea Fleet), its surface search radar would detect any potential vessel at a greater distance than the jammer would be effective, so a flight path could simply be plotted well out of range of it. As a former deputy CINC of the RuAF said himself in response to why the SA-21 did not intercept the missiles, "[t]he Americans are [...] not idiots."

 

A ship was only an example. You really don't really comprehend just how weak the GPS signal is.

 

(1) the GPS signal is so weak you can potentially block it from- literally- 100s of kms away

(2) you can block it with submarines. You probably wouldn't since it would largely defeat their purpose, but you could.

(3) you can jam with planes. You can jam with drones, it's so weak. Going to plot a course around planes that can fly considerably faster than the missiles you're launching? Especially if you've given an hour's notice...

(4) I'd take the rferl article more seriously if it wasn't literally the propaganda arm of the US government and

(5) while s400 is capable of being used against cm it's ludicrous overkill and you'd use pantsir or similar against tomahawks, so that article is mostly strawmanning.

(6) radar on US warships is so good they only ram gigantic cargo ships a few times a year and only occasionally mistake Airbuses for F14s. Yep, sarky, but you can't claim system infallibility.

 

So next time I have hint of back pain I should look up my symptoms on WebMD? Then when I go to my doctor I should tell him "Spare me your expertise; I want you to give me a corticosteroid injection for my lumbar herniated disc"?

 

That isn't even close to being an accurate analogy. A good analogy would be if your expert coroner says someone was shot 5 times but only shows 2 bullet wounds. Asking for the other 3 and why they weren't shown is not just fine, it should be expected.

 

 

Is the US military itself a sufficient source?

 

Similar sources have confirmed this only for RQ-11 Ravens and not for anything in the class of the MQ-1. Not totally unsurprising, or even unexpected for such a small RPV when there's room for a rudimentary datalink and sensors and little else such as specifically hardened anti-jamming measures (and the cost is such that there is an assumption that it _will_ be neutralised by a peer or near-peer adversary, or at least disrupted, in one way or another) that's also flying fairly high and within LOS of any jamming measures.

 

Your arguments also fail to reconcile with what's perhaps the biggest hole in the Russian MoD story: If the missiles were jammed, where are the dozens of airframes littered across the Syrian/Lebanese countryside? Plenty of photo evidence exists of cruise missiles laying in a field due to mechanical faults mid-flight from past campaigns. Given that if nothing else the Russian bombing campaign serves as a country-sized advertisement for the latest and greatest of Russian military hardware, surely parading a big piece of the airframe on RT would be a great propaganda coup. 

 

Firstly, as I've said multiple times, the whole point would have been jamming them over the sea since terrain recognition doesn't work over water; only inertial and GPS guidance. Guidance jamming of terrain recog is practically impossible over most landforms, but not over featureless water. There'd also be no evidence of crashes in water since, well, they'd sink.

 

Secondly, yeah, the role of recon drones as opposed to combat drones makes them intrinsically more likely to be jammed, indeed you'd probably deliberately fly them into jamming fields to test weaknesses etc. But if the reapers and predators haven't been exposed to the same extent because they're doodling around the Deir Ez Zor desert dozens of km further away to avoid being shot down and provoking an incident then yeah, you can't tell anything about the jamming potential.

 

I haven't seen any upcoming strike scenarios which involve combat drones, only manned planes and missiles. Given the potential for being fired at in anger by the s400s they'd definitely use drones if they could reliably do so.

[Drowsy Emperor]

Things are getting nasty in Syria, just when it looked like it was winding down.

[Katphood]

Unfortunately, this is the closest we have been to a WW3 since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Russia has vowed to shoot down any missile that is fired towards Syria along with the source from which the missiles is fired from.

 

It is a little weird that the US has suddenly decided to intervene in Syria in such a manner. Neither side seems to be backing down. 

 

 

Scary stuff. 

[Zoraptor]

Good thing we have Donald Trump to uh... compensate for his tiny hands?* Trouble being of course that Trump is precisely dumb and narcissist enough to really make a mess, then keep digging.
 
Apparently his talk with Teresa May spooked her so much Britain is now trying desperately to delay things.

 

*Fatal error, please reboot universe?

Edited April 11, 2018 by Zoraptor