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posted by cmn32480 on Sunday September 17 2017, @07:36AM   Printer-friendly
from the drain-the-ocean-with-a-teaspoon dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1937

The FTC said Tuesday [September 5] that it cannot stop computer makers from selling computers that inject ads into webpages to US consumers. The statement covers Lenovo's practice of having sold computers pre-installed with the so-called VisualDiscovery adware developed by a company called Superfish. This adware, which was installed on computers without consumers' knowledge, hijacked encrypted Web sessions that made users vulnerable to HTTPS man-in-the-middle attacks and shared user browsing data with third parties.

In a Tuesday court settlement with Lenovo, the FTC said the Chinese hardware maker, or any computer company for that matter, was free to sell computers with the adware made from a company called Superfish—as long as consumers consented before it was downloaded on the machine.

"As part of the settlement with the FTC, Lenovo is prohibited from misrepresenting any features of software preloaded on laptops that will inject advertising into consumers' Internet browsing sessions or transmit sensitive consumer information to third parties. The company must also get consumers' affirmative consent before pre-installing this type of software," the FTC announced.

According to a Reuters article Lenovo paid a fine of $3.5million dollars as part of the settlement.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/09/ftc-slaps-lenovo-on-the-wrist-for-selling-computers-with-secret-adware/


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday September 18 2017, @12:21AM (8 children)

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Monday September 18 2017, @12:21AM (#569541) Homepage Journal

    Rather just offer him a SN hat. I think we're gonna get a few dozen made up here soon for the folks who contribute the most to the site. Significantly better quality and aesthetics than the ones in the store. And we can write them off on our taxes as advertising.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 18 2017, @01:52AM (7 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 18 2017, @01:52AM (#569580)

    (Uh, I thought I clicked reply this in page showing only the thread)

    What about using a Bayesian text classifier like dbacl? Train with a good chunk of past posts, spam and not spam, then new submissions get tested and the flagrant autorejected. Every now and then retrain with newer posts. Probably other tools can retrain on the go, but I remember playing with that tool and a handful files to test ideas.

    BTW, got hit by lameness filter in the X11 story. At the end the post went thru.

    (And now Submit just shows preview?)

    • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday September 18 2017, @03:04AM (6 children)

      by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Monday September 18 2017, @03:04AM (#569608) Homepage Journal

      Nah. I'd prefer us to affirmatively have to pay attention to everything we decide needs blocking as spam. If we're going to deny any speech based on content, some human needs to be accountable for it.

      Dunno about preview vs submit. I didn't monkey with those bits of the code at all. Just told the regexes to be extended regexes instead of flaccid ones. qr/$var/x vs qr/$var/. The temporary false positives were caused by existing regexes with unescaped #s in them and got fixed as quickly as I figured it out and could get them their very own personal backslashes.

      If you or anyone else does get hit by a false positive going forward though, do please drop me an email with the content of the attempted comment and the text of the lameness filter message.

      --
      My rights don't end where your fear begins.
      • (Score: 1) by anubi on Monday September 18 2017, @06:14AM (5 children)

        by anubi (2828) on Monday September 18 2017, @06:14AM (#569642) Journal

        Thanks for your concern about the accountability, TMB. I thoroughly agree the "spam" moderation is extremely serious and require accountability along with severe penalties for misuse.

        I would like to see the "spam" mod being the only mod being able to push a score below -1, say, all the way to -5, irreversible with positive moderation, which means five people are going to be on the hook for mismoderation, while cohorts to the spam can't keep upmodding it. I am thinking down the lines of making the "spam" mod cost nothing to use, while setting everyone whose involved karma = 0 should misused spam mods result in the undeserved obliteration of someone's post. Only people with karma >=30 eligible to give a "spam" mod just to see that throwaway newbie accounts aren't created just to kill someone else off.

        The direct intervention of one of the SN staff would be required to reset one's karma, and of course, you guys would demand a really good reason.

        The intent is to make it possible to set an obliteration level of -5. By the time five eligible moderators have seen the offending POS crap post, its done, pushed down so low that unless you have actively opted-in, its completely off the radar.

        Is it possible to make it so everyone who has karma >= 30 or so be able to give "free" spam mods whether they have modpoints or not, but they must be logged in, and totally responsible for issuing such a mod?

        The idea is to crowdsource the cleanup functions so those who pelt us with crap posts won't have the pleasure of seeing them stay up very long.

        And, of course, you guys review the posts we collectively chose to obliterate, and mete out the punishment for misuse accordingly.

        --
        "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
        • (Score: 3, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday September 18 2017, @11:28AM (4 children)

          by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Monday September 18 2017, @11:28AM (#569696) Homepage Journal

          I was actually speaking of the spam filters we set up if a specific type of spam persists and is brought to our attention (as it was specifically designed to be) by the Spam mod but yeah, moderation doesn't need to ever be automated either.

          Appreciate the ideas. Always happy to back and forth something until we can see what's gonna work best for us. Don't take the following as dumping all over you; criticizing every idea until it is provably good is just how I like to approach things.

          We thought about making the Spam mod not have a cost but the exploitability potential was just too high. One honked off user could Spam mod every comment less than two weeks old programmatically in a matter of seconds. It might not be a common occurrence but it would be a hell of a lot of work to undo when it did happen.

          As for pushing things below -1 (which is as low as a user can set their minimum for viewing), I'm inclined to be prejudiced against this idea. Rehash has an outright delete comment functionality but we decided way back that this was too much power even to be put in the hands of site admins and disabled it for ourselves. Ideas approaching that functionality at any security level make me extremely skeptical. I very much default to preferring that every comment that makes it through the spam filters be allowed to remain visible if a user chooses to see low-moderated comments.

          --
          My rights don't end where your fear begins.
          • (Score: 1) by anubi on Tuesday September 19 2017, @06:06AM (3 children)

            by anubi (2828) on Tuesday September 19 2017, @06:06AM (#570086) Journal

            TMB: Thanks for the reply!

            criticizing every idea until it is provably good is just how I like to approach things.

            Very prudent. I am the same way.

            We thought about making the Spam mod not have a cost but the exploitability potential was just too high. One honked off user could Spam mod every comment less than two weeks old programmatically in a matter of seconds.

            Mea Culpa on me! You are so right. Entire corporations can be severely damaged in milliseconds by a carefully crafted script.

            As for pushing things below -1 (which is as low as a user can set their minimum for viewing), I'm inclined to be prejudiced against this idea. Rehash has an outright delete comment functionality but we decided way back that this was too much power even to be put in the hands of site admins and disabled it for ourselves.

            Forcing five people to put their karma on the line was my reasoning here. Someone could read at -5 if they opted in. The post would not go away, but like a dogshit pushed under a bush, its out of sight where people won't step in it. You are so right about someone using unlimited mods - so maybe allow the moderator to put ten of his karma points on the table for each spam mod, even though they cost him nothing to use?

            Even if completely out of modpoints, he would still have capacity to help knock a spam under as long as he had sufficient uncommitted karma credits to cover him.

            For the sake of numbers, say one must have a karma >=30 to make spam mods. This should eliminate newbies. Someone having a karma of 50 could theoretically issue five spam mods, after which the system tells him he no longer has the karma to cover his moderation. The hold lasts for say 24 hours, giving you guys time to review the moderations and if we have a wolf in the fold, nail him so it will take him quite some time to regain enough karma to do it again. My guess is that 99% of the people here with karma>30 are pretty conscientious about keeping these forums cleaned up, and putting one's entire karma ( or at least fifteen points of it ) on the line for each spam mod should ensure they aren't passed out frivolously.

            I thoroughly expect you know from your logs exactly who modded who how and when.

            I am with you 100% that none of us individually should have the kind of authority to make even a terrible post completely disappear, but if enough of us think it stinks, let us push it under a bush so the rest of us don't have to see it unless we are reading at -5. With the only mod that can decrement below -1 being the spam mod.

            Well, that's my take on it. Submitted for what its worth.

            What you are doing with your regexes looks like the best way to keep the shit out of here in the first place. I have seen no more of that breed of spam since you implemented it. But I know things change and another variant will show up. Like a capcha, we will see it, parse it, and nail it, and you tweak the regexes to impede further postings of like nature.

            My guess is because the spam mod has teeth in it for the moderator, it will rarely be abused, and in the rare cases it does get used, the info log you guys get to look at should be short and nasty.

            This is a really nice place. I am very happy most here want to keep it that way.

            --
            "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
            • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday September 19 2017, @02:29PM (2 children)

              by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Tuesday September 19 2017, @02:29PM (#570189) Homepage Journal

              I thoroughly expect you know from your logs exactly who modded who how and when.

              HA! Nah, keeping up with that would be a full time job even if we did have a convenient way to keep track. We can check an individual user's moderations from their user page. We can check all Spam mods from the Spam mods page. And a few of us can get in the db and write up an SQL query. None of those would work be terribly convenient for watching what everyone is doing moderation-wise though. Which is fine. It's really not our business unless we have a specific reason to check something.

              I have seen no more of that breed of spam since you implemented it.

              Yeah, I'm actually kind of disappointed in that. I can think of six different ways off the top of my head to evade the regexes we currently have in place for DN spam. I was hoping for a bit more of a challenge.

              Hmm... I think what I'd rather do is simply make a distinction between a comment's untweaked score and its score as adjusted by your preferences and allow the tweaked score fall below -1. That way seems to accomplish the same goal on many fronts instead of just the one. Want Foes, Spam, and Funny comments completely invisible but still prefer to browse at -1? No problem.

              --
              My rights don't end where your fear begins.