SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the your-photos-are-still-your-photos dept.
A Paris court on Thursday ordered Twitter to change its smallprint, according to a consumer group which accused the tech giant of having "abusive" clauses in its terms and conditions.
UFC-Que Choisir claimed victory in its case against the US social media platform, saying "the conviction has a gigantic scope for the protection of users' personal data". The consumer association had called on the high court "to recognise the abusive or illegal nature" of 256 clauses contained in Twitter's terms and conditions that it said breached users' privacy.
In particular, UFC-Que Choisir said the court's decision guarantees Twitter users that their photos and tweets can no longer be "commercially exploited" if they have not given their consent. "By ticking a small box to accept the terms of service, the consumer has not expressly accepted their data can be exploited," the group said.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday August 12 2018, @05:02AM (2 children)
The account allows stories to be submitted using the API, which considerably reduces the workload of making a significant number of submissions. It is available for use by any editor. It is up to them to decide whether to use that method or another one. Arthur is also the name of the bot: if you go back and look at the period you are discussing, you will notice that quite a few stories have the phrase 'Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story....' That is because they have been processed using the bot. However, as you correctly pointed out there were no submissions by me - I was in hospital. Now you can see that I am not the only one using Arthur, Furthermore, is also part of the 'Exec' submission process used on IRC.
Secondly, if you look back over this weekend you will see that several stories have been processed and released by other editors even though they have the 'Arthur' phrase in them. The submissions are put into the queue just like any other. They do not have any special privileges regarding selection. The reason that we have to use Arthur is that we often have a lot of stories in the submission queue that are simply not going to be published. They are poorly written, or repeat themes that we have already covered, or are simply 'off topic' for this site. We have to keep publishing stories to keep the site active and when the community fails to submit them we have to go and find them ourselves.
You will also note that there are several other submitters who get most of their submissions printed - they produce good quality submissions which are interesting and well researched. That is how to get your submission published - not to submit more stories about American politics which will result in the same old finger pointing and accusations and provide nothing of value to the community whatsoever. There are other sites for that material.
Arthur would not be necessary if, rather than complaining about how we find stories, you sat down a made 1 good quality submission a day to help us out. Nah, not going to happen. bitching anonymously is much easier.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 19 2018, @10:49PM (1 child)
Thank you for replying to my comment. I did indeed try to engage you in the easiest possible way, and perhaps an e-mail or an “Ask SoylentNews” submission would have been more appropriate.
In the instance of the stories submitted via IRC, the submitter’s IRC nickname is credited for submitting the story. For example, one story [soylentnews.org] now on the front page is credited as “Submitted via IRC for Fnord666.” (Because I joined the IRC chat I understand that the default nicknames begin with “SoyCow,” something that a casual reader wouldn’t know. If the default nicknames began with “default” it would be more descriptive.)
When a story is submitted via the Arthur T Knackerbracket account, there’s no indication of who submitted it, not even the fact that it’s operated by an editor. The account has a blank profile [soylentnews.org], by which I mean the biographical section is blank. Why not fill it out with something like “bot account used by the editors”?
You remarked severely on the fact that I’m commenting anonymously. I do value anonymity and I’m grateful that your site allows it. Stories submitted via the Arthur T Knackerbracket account are, as far as the public can see, submitted anonymously. In your comments, you’ve disclosed that the account is available to the editors. However, the use of the account disguises the identity of the submitter. Is that intentional? I wrote about one occasion when you ran the storybot software from your janrinok account, hence not anonymously. If you and the other editors (if any) who use the storybot software would do that consistently, that would fully address my main concern: readers would be able to see which editor submitted each story. Because you did this before, I assume there is no technical obstacle to doing so. I also assume that doing so would involve little or no additional effort.
If the purpose of the account is anonymity, it would be a service to the readers if the stories were to clearly indicate that they were submitted by an anonymous editor, much as my comments here say prominently “by Anonymous Coward.” You’ve stated publicly in your comments that the account is available to the editors. On each story that’s posted from the shared account, I’d like to see something like “An anonymous editor found the following story:” where you now say “Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:”. You could achieve that simply by creating and using an account with the pseudonym “An anonymous editor.” The current account name is cute but uninformative. A less prominent, and therefore less desirable, place would be in the header generated by the bot. The way it’s being done now is opaque to readers, at least to those who haven’t read this thread or the previous one. A visitor who sees “Arthur T Knackerbracket” is likely to assume it’s one person’s pseudonym, or even someone’s real name. If you’ll forgive me for telling you how to do your job, it’s my opinion that a major goal of an editor-in-chief ought to be to minimize readers’ confusion.
I’ve made suggestions; I intend them to be helpful. I didn’t suggest that you stop using the storybot software. The “Arthur” account does appear to be unnecessary and one of my suggestions was that you discontinue using it, instead posting from your main account. If you choose to adopt any of my suggestions, readers will readily see that numerous stories are being submitted by the editors. Whether that would encourage some other readers to submit stories, or the opposite, I don’t know. I feel that opacity is not a good look. I don’t begrudge you or the other editors the option of submitting stories anonymously. I’m asking that you inform your audience when you do so.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Monday August 20 2018, @01:17AM
Not necessarily. The software is in use on IRC - where some of the submissions receive the 'story collected by Arthur....', it is used by some editors, and it is available for use by quite a few of our regular submitters. I've made sure that the header identifies that the story is collected by and not 'submitted by'. All the bot does is strip out the story from the rest of the HTML in which it is embedded. And it can, but doesn't have to, automatically submit the story via the Arthur T Knackerbracket account. This is necessary because AC accounts have an enforced time limit on the submission of stories to protect the site from flooding attacks. For the software to function it is preferable to have an account because a) it does not suffer from the imposed time limits - it is a 'named' account, and b) it is immediately obvious to editors that it has to be processed in a certain way because the content cannot be identified as being a good or a bad story. The bot cannot differentiate between the two as it has no understanding of the story content. The bot returns all the story material, it requires extensive manual editing to make it suitable for release. The material might have been viewed by someone prior to submission but it might have been operated in fully automatic mode wherein the collection and submission are entirely automatic.
Normally, Arthur can find and process between 200 and 500 stories per day. It is fed directly from the RSS feeds that we maintain on IRC, and which are available to anyone if they want to submit a story. I believe that no-one actually operates the software in fully automatic mode with no human intervention because that would flood the submission queue with each of those stories i.e. all submissions are viewed by someone to remove material that is obviously unsuitable for our site.
Not all of the methods by which stories can be submitted from IRC identify the submitter. You have correctly identified one that does, but there are others that do not. As Arthur is also used by some other bots, some of which are still under development, and can be invoked in software by new bots that are being written now or in the future, it is impossible to say how they might operate.
Arthur uses an API that has been written by TMB, has been published on the site and is fully documented in the Wiki. Anyone can use the API to write software which interfaces directly with the submission process and software can also query data from the database so that users can submit and display data entirely by their own software if they chose to do so. Changing that API would have a major impact on the way a lot of software operates. The Wiki also contains a list of all the bots in use, their function and, in most cases, their maintainer. It is there for anyone who is interested to see. The site is being as open as it can be regarding such things, but I cannot force anyone to read the contents of the Wiki. However, having a named account is essential if you wish to avoid the anti-flooding timing restrictions. There are, or at least were (I haven't checked recently), other accounts that exist that are not single users, you just happen to have noticed one of them.
The Arthur account is NOT intended to be a 'single user' account. Changing it could have an knock-on affect on how other people's software works. For example, if they receive an unexpected field from the account it might prevent their software from functioning at all. This is entirely speculative on my part, I have no idea on how Arthur is being used by others.
I welcome your comments and observations, and I am treating them in the spirit in which I believe they have been made. I will look again at how I identify material that is collected by Arthur, but that will not change software that has already been written by others or which is not updated to reflect any changes that I might make in future versions. To be honest, yours is the only discussion/comment raised by anyone on the site regarding how we collect stories when the submission queue does not contain enough quality material to keep the site operating. That does not imply that your views are unimportant; I will look at how we can improve things as I have promised above.