DOWNLOAD PDF POOLS, BOTS AND TROLLS

Transcription

1 Chapter 1 : Poll Bot Discord Bots "Pools, Bots And Trolls," World Scientific Book Chapters,in: FINANCE MASTERS A Brief History of International Financial Centers in the Last Millennium, chapter 5, pages World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd. A do-it-yourself in-ground pool is really possible There were some complaints about response time and things of that nature, but they were all basically the same. What I found out was they mostly all are nothing more than distributors of pools, just a replacement for brick-and-mortars. There are few pool manufacturers in the U. S, but the brand I ended up going with was Hydra. Pool Warehouse sells them, and I went with them mostly because their website was the most user-friendly for me. As a store or distributor, I think they did a fine job. I have no complaints. The hole has been dug! The approval process is an extra fee, of course. Electrical was way easier. I just went in and asked for an electrical permit for a pool, paid my money, and was sent on my way. That Is the Question I pondered this for a minute or two. I was going to dig my own hole, but common sense got the better of me. That is the key here: Needless to say, I recommend that you pay someone to dig the hole. It probably would have cost nearly that much if I had rented the equipment to do it myself. On top of that, I rented a Bobcat, and they are tricky. I think it would have taken me a week to dig the hole and it would have probably been all messed up. The steel walls are up. Installing the Pool Building the pool is fairly straightforward: You erect the walls first, whether they are steel or polymer. You then will want to make sure it is as level as you can get it. After that I recommend squaring the pool and staking the corners. We then put the braces on, staked them and the walls completely, then adjusted the walls again for plumb and level. After that, you can have your concrete bond beam poured. It needs to be somewhere between inches around the outside of the pool, up to the overdig wall. We put the mix in dry, but you might want slightly moist sand to give the mix a little body and workability. After you get it all in and smooth, you can mist it well to speed up the curing process. After the floor was done, we then put on the coping, the skimmers, the light housing, and the input port. Cement floor is in. Seriously, if you are not comfortable with electrical work, hire this out. I wired my pool myself, but had a electrician friend look it over before I let my kids swim in it. Electricity is not something that should be taken lightly. I have done a bit of electrical work in the past, and felt I had enough ability to do this project. Stairs and coping are done. Getting the padding and liner in basically signified to the kids that it was time to go swimming. The padding was actually more difficult than the liner. I am glad I added the padding. We used spray adhesive to stick it to the steel walls, and we used the same adhesive and duct tape to do the floors. You should not do the tapered parts of the floors because over time, it will bunch up and cause issues. I still have landscaping and all the area around the pool to finish, but it can be used now. It was a lot of work. I am only 41 years old, and this was about the biggest project I could handle at this age. But it was a very interesting experience, and I am happy that I was able to do it for my family. Water is in the pool! Page 1

2 Chapter 2 : Trolls, Bots and Fake News: The Mysterious World of Social Media Manipulation The wonder of internet connectivity can turn into a horror show if the people who use online platforms decide that instead of connecting and communicating, they want to mock, insult, abuse, harass. But despite the much-publicized case in the U. Citizens are exposed to them the world over, often without ever realizing it. Drawing on two recent reports by the Oxford Internet Institute OII and independent research, Newsweek has outlined the covert ways in which states and other political actors use social media to manipulate public opinion around the world, focusing on six illustrative examples: You are creating truth. In Michigan, in the days before the election, fake news was shared as widely as professional journalism. We enable voters to have their concerns heard, and we help political candidates communicate their policy positions. On October 11, it was also revealed that the House Intelligence Committee has asked the company to provide information for its ongoing probe into Russian interference. But social media manipulation did not begin or end with the election. Accounts that have tweeted only once or twice for Trump, and which now sit silently, waiting for a triggerâ a key political momentâ to spread disinformation and drown out opposing views. The account is one example of a nationalist troll, repeatedly retweeting the President and other patriotic content. In February, he took the unprecedented step of making his wife vice-president. As troll training-centers multiplied across the countryâ one source says there were 52 in different towns and cities, funded with government moneyâ a few hundred young volunteer-bloggers became tens of thousands of trained trolls. At first, they were encouraged to become bloggers, painting a positive picture of the country, but focus slowly switched to -attacks on critics, managing Wikipedia pages and running promotional campaigns on social media. Our objective is to produce young people who can take an active part in the information war. Youth organizations are favoured as cybertroops around the world because they are cheap, more adept at social media and easily rewarded with government positions or scholarships. The language is more aggressive, violent and degrading, with an emphasis on scale rather than subtlety, with opposition journalists routinely harassed. Personal attacks are typically taken as the best line of defence. Whenever Azerbaijan is discussed at a conference and there is online activity, they hijack the hashtags and make sure they dominate the debate. There is also worrying evidence that the government is finding new roles for social media. Last month, 60 people were reportedly arrested in Azerbaijan in an unprecedented crackdown on LGBT rights, with fake profiles allegedly being set up to locate them. One classic tactic is to post emotional or far-fetched comments in order to re-direct citizen rage towards that user, diverting attention from the issue itself. It emerged that many of these hostile comments were being sent from mainland Chinaâ where Facebook, along with Twitter, is bannedâ suggesting it could only have been a government endorsed operation. It also possesses the most infamous internet censor: This year, with the approach of the 19th Party Congressâ which shuffles the top-ranks of the Chinese leadershipâ the Propaganda Ministry and Cyberspace Administration has apparently gone into overdrive, issuing more censorship guidelines than in the previous ten years combined. A high-tech fight for the moral high-ground An image of Israeli soldiers is seen on a computer screen through a face recognition programming script, during a cyber security training course at a high-tech park in Beersheba, southern Israel August 28, What we are doing is revolutionary. Troll factories Russia is the defining case of how a powerful authoritarian regime uses social media to control people. But most are known for their aggressive persistence. They target journalists and political dissidents with the hope of either taking them off the internet or cowing them into silence. Those on Twitter are supposed to have at least ten accounts and tweet 50 times a day. Individuals have specific, personalized targets for followers and the level of engagement. Brexit, bots and big-data The Brexit referendum was the moment that social media became not only a battleground but a tool in British politics. In the months before the vote, roughly one third of all traffic on Twitter was from automated bots, which were almost entirely pro-leave. It is notable that bots were not exclusive to the pro-brexit movement. In the aftermath of the vote, an online petition calling for a second referendum attracted more than 3. While this was initially interpreted as a sign of voters having changed their mind, it then emerged that the petition had 42, signatures from Vatican City population and Page 2

3 almost 25, from North Korea where Internet access is extremely limited. Independent of the referendum, the British state has taken to some of these tactics itself. Page 3

4 Chapter 3 : How to remove bots and trolls and clean up your Twitter feed in seconds ZDNet The power of bots and trolls lies in their ability to deceive humans. A recent report by RAND Corporation, an American nonprofit policy think tank, listed a number of recommendations for defending democracies in the advent of malicious bots and trolls on social media. The effort also sought to heighten the appearance of international tensions and promote fear of looming hostilities with nuclear-armed Russia. Two teams of independent researchers found that the Russians exploited American-made technology platforms to attack U. There is no way to know whether the Russian campaign proved decisive in electing Trump, but researchers portray it as part of a broadly effective strategy of sowing distrust in U. The tactics included penetrating the computers of election officials in several states and releasing troves of hacked s that embarrassed Clinton in the final months of her campaign. The problem is that this was hard to do before social media. The researchers used internet analytics tools to trace the origins of particular tweets and mapped the connections among social-media accounts that consistently delivered synchronized messages. Identifying website codes sometimes revealed common ownership. In other cases, exact phrases or sentences were echoed by sites and social-media accounts in rapid succession, signalling membership in connected networks controlled by a single entity. On Facebook, PropOrNot estimates that stories planted or promoted by the disinformation campaign were viewed more than million times. Some of these stories originated with RT and Sputnik, state-funded Russian information services that mimic the style and tone of independent news organizations yet sometimes include false and misleading stories in their reports, the researchers say. Some of the first and most alarming tweets after Clinton fell ill at a Sept. She was treated for pneumonia and returned to the campaign trail a few days later. The Daily Beast debunked a particularly widely read piece in an article that reached 1, Facebook accounts and was read online more than 30, times. But the PropOrNot researchers found that the version supported by Russian propaganda reached 90, Facebook accounts and was read more than 8 million times. This propaganda machinery also helped push the phony story that an anti-trump protester was paid thousands of dollars to participate in demonstrations, an allegation initially made by a self-described satirist and later repeated publicly by the Trump campaign. The way that this propaganda apparatus supported Trump was equivalent to some massive amount of a media buy The final weeks of the campaign featured a heavy dose of stories about supposed election irregularities, allegations of vote-rigging and the potential for Election Day violence should Clinton win, researchers said. They expressed hope that their research detailing the power of Russian propaganda would spur official action. The findings about the mechanics of Russian propaganda operations largely track previous research by the Rand Corp. The same tactics, researchers said, helped Russia shape international opinions about its annexation of Crimea and its military intervention in Syria, which started last year. Its English-language flagship YouTube channel, launched in, has 1. Page 4

5 Chapter 4 : Pools, Bots And Trolls The CEO of digital consulting firm Botón Rojo, Sergio Zaragoza, said that bots and trolls are "one more weapon in the electoral battle, and any campaign that fails to use them will lose out.". Messenger The wonder of internet connectivity can turn into a horror show if the people who use online platforms decide that instead of connecting and communicating, they want to mock, insult, abuse, harass and even threaten each other. It happens on many different websites and social media systems. Users have been fighting back for a while, and now the owners and managers of those online services are joining in. The most recent addition to this effort comes from Twitch, one of a few increasingly popular platforms that allow gamers to play video games, stream their gameplay live online and type back and forth with people who want to watch them play. Players do this to show off their prowess and in some cases make money. Game fans do this for entertainment or to learn new tips and tricks that can improve their own play. When spectators get involved, they can help a player out. For example, in one video game I helped build, people watching a stream could make comments that would actually give the player help, like slowing down or attacking enemies. This can be a mere nuisance, but can also become a serious problem, with racism, sexism and other prejudices coming to the fore in toxic and abusive comment threads. In an effort to help its users fight trolling, Twitch has developed bots â software programs that can run automatically on its platform â to monitor discussions in its chats. The streamer can then decide what action to take, such as blocking the user from the channel. Trolls can share pornographic images in a chat channel, instead of having conversations about the game. For instance, a bot could approach people using racist language, question them about being racist and suggest other forms of interaction to change how people interact with others. Using bots to affect humans In I was part of a team that created a system that uses Twitter bots to do the activist work of recruiting humans to do social good for their community. We called it Botivist. We used Botivist in an experiment to find out whether bots could recruit and make people contribute ideas about tackling corruption instead of just complaining about corruption. Of those who engaged, Botivist asked follow-up questions and asked them to volunteer to help fight the problem they were complaining about. We found that Botivist was able to encourage people to go beyond simply complaining about corruption, pushing them to offer ideas and engage with others sharing their concerns. However, we also found that some individuals began debating whether â and how â bots should be involved in activism. But it nevertheless suggests that people who were comfortable engaging with bots online could be mobilized to work toward a solution, rather than just complaining about it. In research at New York University in, doctoral student Kevin Munger used Twitter bots to engage with people expressing racist views online. If the bot had relatively few followers or was a black man, its interventions were not measurably successful. A key question is: What types of behaviors should bots encourage or discourage? Twitch lets streamers decide for themselves whether they want to use the bots, as well as what if anything to do if the bot alerts them to a problem. In conversations I have seen among Twitch streamers, some have described disabling them for causing interference with browser add-ons they already use to manage their audience chat space. Other streamers have disabled the bots because they feel bots hinder audience participation. Should bots monitor language use on all online platforms? How should the bots â which is to say, how should the people who design the bots â handle those Twitch streamers who appear to enjoy engaging with trolls? One Twitch streamer posted a positive view of trolls on Reddit: What if their audiences respond positively to those remarks? And what language should the bots watch for â racism, perhaps, but what about ideas that are merely unpopular, rather than socially damaging? In the offline world, people are free to say racist things to willing audiences, but suffer social consequences if they do so around people who object. Chapter 5 : Sorry, this content is not available in your region. Trolls, Bots and Fake News: The Mysterious World of Social Media Manipulation By Sam Earle On 10/14/17 at AM Page 5

6 Once heralded as tools for democratization, social media sites are increasingly. Chapter 6 : Fighting online trolls with bots Social media bots and Russian trolls promoted discord and spread false information about vaccines on Twitter, according to new research led by the George Washington University. Chapter 7 : DIY In-Ground Pool: Here's How I Did It Dengarden Twitter is overrun with bots and trolls, and there is little prospect that Twitter's management will do anything about it. However, you can remove most of them from your Twitter timeline in less. Chapter 8 : Russian bots still interfering in U.S. politics after election, says expert witness - CBS News trolls and bots. This is especially needed at times of heightened public awareness or when a new threat emerges. Often, during bor pool is substantially larger. Page 6