Daily Archives: September 26, 2021

Bing Search Results Erases Images Of ‘Tank Man’ On Anniversary Of Tiananmen Square Crackdown (2021)

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On the 32nd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests, internet users noticed Microsoft’s Bing search engine was producing some interesting results. Or, rather, it wasn’t producing expected search results for some possibly interesting reasons.

Users searching for the most iconic image of the protests — that of the unidentified person known only as “Tank Man” — were coming up empty. It appeared that Microsoft’s search engine was blocking results for an image that often serves as shorthand for rebellion against the Chinese government.

As was reported by several web users, followed by several news outlets, the apparent blocking of search results could be observed in both the United States and the United Kingdom, leaving users with the impression the Chinese government had pressured Microsoft to moderate search results for “tank man” in hopes of reducing any remembrance of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, which resulted in the deaths of 2,500-3,500 protesters.

The apparent censorship was blamed on Microsoft’s close relationship with the Chinese government, which allowed its search engine to be accessed by Chinese residents in exchange for complying with government censorship requests.

This led to Microsoft being criticized by prominent politicians for apparently allowing the Chinese government to dictate what users around the world could access in relation to the Tiananmen Square protests.

[…]

Shortly after the apparent censorship of the iconic “Tank Man” image was reported, Microsoft claimed the very timely removal of relevant search results was the byproduct of “accidental human error.”

However, the company refused to offer any additional explanation. And, while searching the term “Tank Man” produced search results in Bing, it did not generate the expected results.

Image via The Verge

Several hours after the first “fix,” things returned to normal, with “Tank Man” searches bringing up the actual Tank Man, rather than just tanks or tanks with men near or on the tanks.

Image via Twitter user Steven F

More clarification and comment was sought, but Microsoft apparently had nothing more to say about this “human error” and its conspicuous timing. Nor did it offer any details on whether or not this “human error” originated with its Beijing team. It also didn’t explain why the first fix resulted in images very few people would associate with the term “Tank Man.”

Source: Content Moderation Case Study: Bing Search Results Erases Images Of ‘Tank Man’ On Anniversary Of Tiananmen Square Crackdown (2021) | Techdirt

Marvel Files Lawsuit to Keep Iron Man, Spider-Man Rights From Creators

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The families of iconic Marvel comic book writers and artists Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, Don Heck, Gene Colan, and Don Rico have filed termination of copyright notices on the superheroes they helped create. Marvel—which Disney has owned since 2009—unsurprisingly, disagrees and has filed lawsuits against all five to keep the characters in the Marvel stable and making the company billions.

The Hollywood Reporter broke the news. Without trying to get into too much legalese, creators can file termination of copyright notices to reclaim rights to their work after a set amount of time, with a minimum of 35 years. Marvel’s suits argue that the characters are ineligible for copyright termination because they were made as “work-for-hire”—as in Marvel paid people to create characters for the company, meaning the company owns them outright. According to the report, if the creators’ heirs notices were accepted, Marvel would lose rights to characters including Iron Man, Spider-Man, Hawkeye, Black Widow, Doctor Strange, Falcon, Ant-Man, and more. One caveat is this only matters in the United States. According to THR, even if Marvel loses, Disney can continue making money off the characters everywhere else. If the heirs win, Disney would still share ownership.

Since Marvel has pro-actively sued to keep the copyrights to these characters, I suppose the creators’ claims have some validity to them, but as a layman, the case looks hopeless to me. Not only does the Walt Disney Company have the infinite cash reserves to keep the rights tied up with them for years, but there have been previous cases where Marvel creators have claimed ownership and had to settle. Additionally, the lawyer representing the heirs is Marc Toberoff, who also represented the families of Superman creators Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel when they tried to terminate DC Comics’ rights to the Man of Steel. DC was successfully represented by Dan Petrocelli—and he’s the one who just filed the lawsuits for Marvel.

More likely, the case will ultimately be about paying people some kind of fair compensation for turning Marvel into a billion-dollar company, which Disney has no desire to do (remember, Disney’s reportedly been paying creators a mere $5,000 for work it’s made those billions on). This is unfair, immoral, and purely greedy; the company has more than enough money to make all of these creators rich without coming close to losing a profit. In the best-case scenario, Disney/Marvel will give these folks as little as possible to make these legal annoyances go away early. It won’t be nearly as much as the company could and should give them, but at least it’ll be something.

Source: Marvel Files Lawsuit to Keep Iron Man, Spider-Man Rights From Creators

Even the fact that there is copyright on these characters still after the original creators have died is downright ridiculous

Apple’s App Tracking Transparency Feature Doesn’t Stop Tracking

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In 2014, some very pervy creeps stole some very personal iCloud photos from some very high-profile celebs and put them on the open web, creating one very specific PR crisis for Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook. The company was about to roll out Apple Pay as part of its latest software update, a process that took more than a decade bringing high-profile payment processors and retailers on board. The only issue was that nobody seemed to want their credit card details in the hands of the same company whose service had been used to steal dozens of nude photos of Jennifer Lawrence just a week earlier.

Apple desperately needed a rebrand, and that’s exactly what we got. Within days, the company rolled out a polished promotional campaign—complete with a brand new website and an open letter from Cook himself—explaining the company’s beefed-up privacy prowess, and the safeguards adopted in the wake of that leak. Apple wasn’t only a company you could trust, Cook said, it was arguably the company—unlike the other guys (*cough* Facebook *cough*) who built their Silicon Valley empires off of pawning your data to marketing companies, Apple’s business model is built off of “selling great products,” no data-mining needed.

That ad campaign’s been playing out for the last seven years, and by all accounts, it’s worked. It’s worked well enough that in 2021, we trust Apple with our credit card info, our personal health information, and most of what’s inside our homes. And when Tim Cook decried things like the “data-industrial complex” in interviews earlier this year and then rolled out a slew of iOS updates meant to give users the power they deserved, we updated our iPhones and felt a tiny bit safer.

The App Tracking Transparency (ATT) settings that came bundled in an iOS 14 update gave iPhone users everywhere the power to tell their favorite apps (and Facebook) to knock off the whole tracking thing. Saying no, Apple promised, would stop these apps from tracking you as you browse the web, and through other apps on your phone. Well, it turns out that wasn’t quite the case. The Washington Post was first to report on a research study that put Apple’s ATT feature to the test, and found the setting… pretty much useless. As the researchers put it:

In our tests of ten top-ranked apps, we found no meaningful difference in third-party tracking activity when choosing App Tracking Transparency’s “Ask App Not To Track.” The number of active third-party trackers was identical regardless of a user’s ATT choice, and the number of tracking attempts was only slightly (~13%) lower when the user chose “Ask App Not To Track”.

So, what the hell happened? In short, ATT addresses one specific (and powerful) piece of digital data that advertisers use to identify your specific device—and your specific identity—across multiple sites and services: the so-called ID for Advertisers, or IDFA. Telling an app not to track severs their access to this identifier, which is why companies like Facebook lost their minds over these changes. Without the IDFA, Facebook had no way to know whether, say, an Instagram ad translated into a sale on some third-party platform, or whether you downloaded an app because of an ad you saw in your news feed.

Luckily for said companies (but unluckily for us), tracking doesn’t start and end with the IDFA. Fingerprinting—or cobbling together a bunch of disparate bits of mobile data to uniquely identify your device—has come up as a pretty popular alternative to some major digital ad companies, which eventually led Apple to tell them to knock that shit off. But because “fingerprinting” encompasses so many different kinds of data in so many different contexts (and can go by many different names), nobody knocked anything off. And outside of one or two banned apps, Apple really didn’t seem to care.

[…]

Some Apple critics in the marketing world have been raising red flags for months about potential antitrust issues with Apple’s ATT rollout, and it’s not hard to see why. It gave Apple exclusive access to a particularly powerful piece of intel on all of its customers, the IDFA, while leaving competing tech firms scrambling for whatever scraps of data they can find. If all of those scraps become Apple’s sole property, too, that’s practically begging for even more antitrust scrutiny to be thrown its way. What Apple seems to be doing here is what any of us would likely do in its situation: picking its battles.

Source: Apple’s App Tracking Transparency Feature Doesn’t Stop Tracking

110,000 Affected by Epik Breach – Including Those Who Trusted Epik to Hide Their Identity as hate mongerers

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Epik’s massive data breach is already affecting lives. Today the Washington Post describes a real estate agent in Pompano Beach who urged buyers on Facebook to move to “the most beautiful State.” His name and personal details “were found on invoices suggesting he had once paid for websites with names such as racisminc.com, whitesencyclopedia.com, christiansagainstisrael.com and theholocaustisfake.com”. The real estate brokerage where he worked then dropped him as an agent. The brokerage’s owner told the Post they didn’t “want to be involved with anyone with thoughts or motives like that.”

“Some users appear to have relied on Epik to lead a double life,” the Post reports, “with several revelations so far involving people with innocuous day jobs who were purportedly purveyors of hate online.” (Alternate URL here.) Epik, based outside Seattle, said in a data-breach notice filed with Maine’s attorney general this week that 110,000 people had been affected nationwide by having their financial account and credit card numbers, passwords and security codes exposed…. Heidi Beirich, a veteran researcher of hate and extremism, said she is used to spending weeks or months doing “the detective work” trying to decipher who is behind a single extremist domain. The Epik data set, she said, “is like somebody has just handed you all the detective work — the names, the people behind the accounts…”

Many website owners who trusted Epik to keep their identities hidden were exposed, but some who took additional precautions, such as paying in bitcoin and using fake names, remain anonymous….

Aubrey “Kirtaner” Cottle, a security researcher and co-founder of Anonymous, declined to share information about the hack’s origins but said it was fueled by hackers’ frustrations over Epik serving as a refuge for far-right extremists. “Everyone is tired of hate,” Cottle said. “There hasn’t been enough pushback, and these far-right players, they play dirty. Nothing is out of bounds for them. And now … the tide is turning, and there’s a swell moving back in their direction.”
Earlier in the week, the Post reported: Since the hack, Epik’s security protocols have been the target of ridicule among researchers, who’ve marveled at the site’s apparent failure to take basic security precautions, such as routine encryption that could have protected data about its customers from becoming public… The hack even exposed the personal records from Anonymize, a privacy service Epik offered to customers wanting to conceal their identity.

Source: 110,000 Affected by Epik Breach – Including Those Who Trusted Epik to Hide Their Identity – Slashdot