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_{(in the loving memory of Runaway1956, who succumbed after a long battle to gatewaypundits. May his brain rest in peace, squeaky clean and smoothed over)}

because "Doing your own research" is far easier nowadays than building the habit of thinking critically.
Add COVID-anxiety, a chaotic narcissistic Orange clown and compound with the lack of survival problems to solve for the everyday life in a westernized society and (where appropriate) a good dose of American exceptionalism.

Google admits to censoring the World Socialist Web Site

While both Dorsey and Zuckerberg refused to give names—claiming they would provide a list at a later date—when Lee got to Pichai, the Google executive responded that “we have moderation policies which we apply equally... We have had compliance issues with the World Socialist Review [sic], which is a left-leaning publication.”

Although Pichai used the name “World Socialist Review,” a print newsletter that ceased publication in 2011, it is clear that he was referring to the World Socialist Web Site. In fact, a Google search for “World Socialist Review” actually yields the WSWS in its top two results.

Pichai did not explain what he meant by “compliance issues,” but his response to Senator Lee was absolutely clear. He was saying that Google does in fact take censorship action against left-wing and socialist publishers, and an example is the censorship of the World Socialist Web Site.

1.7% of the vote. The machine did an outstanding job. The standard narrative stands stronger than ever.

So, what's gonna happen to Twitter? This is a big loss for them.

Open your eyes and see

The sooner you stop bickering over election results, the sooner you can start doing something about it.

We have had a number of discussions on SN, regarding the influence the tech industry exercises in politics. This story offers a little insight into that influence. No matter your opinion in this 2020 election, you should give this story some real thought.

It's a moderately long read, but I encourage one and all to click on the link, and read it through.

And - disclaimer: I found this story because the Green site published it first.

This data expert helped Trump win. Now he’s built a machine to take him down
Former Facebook employee James Barnes is part of a team that’s tapping big data to nudge critical voters to the polls—amid intense efforts to keep them home.

Starting in August 2019, you may have seen an ad in your Facebook news feed asking you to take a news quiz. If you didn’t know who controlled the Senate, for instance—about 30% of people didn’t—you would be classified as most persuadable, and you would become part of one of the largest and most sophisticated experiments of its kind.

On the internet, we’re subject to hidden A/B tests all the time, but this one was also part of a political weapon: a multimillion-dollar tool kit built by a team of Facebook vets, data nerds, and computational social scientists determined to defeat Donald Trump. The goal is to use microtargeted ads, follow-up surveys, and an unparalleled data set to win over key electorates in a few critical states: the low-education voters who unexpectedly came out in droves or stayed home last time, the voters who could decide another monumental election.

By this spring, the project, code named Barometer, appeared to be paying off. During a two-month period, the data scientists found that showing certain Facebook ads to certain possible Trump voters lowered their approval of the president by 3.6%. For the frantic final laps, they’ve set their sights on motivating another key group of swing-state voters—young Democratic-leaning voters, mostly women and people of color—who could push Joe Biden to victory.

“We’ve been able to really understand how to communicate with folks who have lower levels of political knowledge, who tend to be ignored by the political process,” says James Barnes, a data and ads expert at the all-digital progressive nonprofit Acronym, who helped build Barometer. This is familiar territory: Barnes spent years on Facebook’s ads team, and in 2016 was the “embed” who helped the Trump campaign take Facebook by storm. Last year, he left Facebook and resolved to use his battle-tested tactics to take down his former client.

“We have found ways to find the right news to put in front of them, and we found ways to understand what works and doesn’t,” Barnes says. “And if you combine all those things together, you get a really effective approach, and that’s what we’re doing.”

I think it is important to note what has been revealed here, as well as noting what is not claimed.

The research identified low-information potential voters, then experimented with changing the opinions of those low-information voters. What is not claimed, is that factual data was presented to these low-information voters. The only claim being made here is, they can identify potential low-information voters, then manipulate their opinions.

A multitude of outside anti-Trump groups such as Acronym have spent millions more to fill in the gaps. Earlier this year, Priorities USA and Color of Change launched a $24 million digital advertising campaign aimed at exciting Black voters in swing states. American Bridge and Unite the Country, two of the other largest progressive PACs, have tapped Mike Bloomberg’s political ad tech startup, Hawkfish to wage their own data-rich digital onslaughts through Election Day. Acronym was first out of the gate, and is thought to be the Democrats’ most advanced digital advertising project. By the election it promises to have spent $75 million on Facebook, Google, Instagram, Snapchat, Hulu, Roku, Viacom, Pandora, and anywhere else valuable voters might be found.

For a year that money went toward targeting low-information voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, and North Carolina, but by the end of the summer, the Barometer team saw its persuasion powers diminishing; they guessed that they couldn’t budge the president’s approval rating any lower. So Acronym redirected that cash to motivate another critical audience of low-information voters: new or unlikely Democratic-leaning people thought to be unexcited about Biden and his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris. Barometer’s scientists have identified 1.8 million such voters in six states—mostly women of color younger than 35 across Acronym’s original five target states, plus Georgia.

With more than $1 million per week in Facebook ads during the homestretch, “we’re trying to boost their enthusiasm,” says Kyle Tharp, Acronym’s VP of communications.

Despite upbeat polls and record early turnout numbers, Acronym’s battle was never going to be easy. These voters are thought to be some of the least-excited, and while Acronym has identified them as the easiest to persuade, they are also highly susceptible to the sort of BS that can keep voters home. Research has shown that low-information voters are not only less likely to vote but more likely to believe falsehoods; sometimes they’re called “misinformation voters.” And deterring voters with falsehoods and fear may be easier than motivating them with facts and hope. A false claim about voting, for instance, is much easier to spread on Twitter—or by anonymous text message—than it is to correct.

Again, we see specific demographics targeted, and swayed, with targeted advertising, meant to sway that specific demographic. And, we see that it works.

OK - a whole bunch of people voted for Biden, and the lower information people are going to cheer for this campaign.

The question is - how will you feel if/when you find yourself on the wrong side of a similar campaign?

Forget about the 2020 election for a few moments. I have a long track record of being opposed to the very concept of targeted advertising. I positively HATE the idea that any corporation can track you, or me, with fine detail. It sucks that your data or mine is available, and for sale to the highest bidder. And, here, we have a corporation openly admitting that they can, they have, manipulated voters into casting their vote for the corporation's chosen candidate.

Whether you be an R, a D, Independent, third party, or whatever - you should get involved with the investigations into the tech industries. Contact your senator and congress person, and demand that social media and hi-tech corporations be brought to heel.

The US needs something comparable to the EU GDPR, and we need it soon. We need to seriously restrict the harvesting of data, and we need to seriously restrict how that data is used.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90570689/acronym-james-barnes-facebook-2020-campaign-advertising

Please, read the full article. It should be a sobering read, if it doesn't outright scare you.

We're having a clear-out for moving house in a few weeks time. I was going through all my old computer stuff.

In one of my boxes I have a heap of old cards. I thought they were all PCI, but I have discovered an ISA SoundBlaster, a 10Mbit Ethernet card (coax and TP) and an EISA Adapted SCSI card.

There are quite a few PCI SCSI cards and some graphics cards including a 4MB S3 Virge and an nVidia GeForce 2 MX.

I think it's time they went.

I also found some backups on CD-R from 2004. I put one in my Blu-ray drive and it worked! I might run ddrescue on it to see if the whole disk in still readable.

Why do you think that is? And look at the margins! The kind dems could have over republicans everywhere, if they wanted... But we know they don't because they would have no "excuse" for their impotence.

Of course the party won't see it that way

UPDATE:

WooHoo! Lots of red meat for the democrat moderators today! Can they be any more obvious?

That the Democrats lose House seats, do not win the Senate and barely manage to drag their demented presidential candidate towards a stalemate tells a lot about their lack of sane policies. A donor party completely disinterested in what the people really want - medicare for all, no fracking etc. - will have little chance to survive a future onslaught of conservatives with a more competent figure head than Donald Trump. ...should Trump lose this election, Trumpism will only grow and make the U.S. ungovernable.

I finally got around to buying The C++ Programming Language, 4th Edition.

Depressingly, it's even thicker than the 3rd Edition. I haven't tried to read it yet.

I've managed to avoid any serious C++ coding for a couple of years or more, and the last dialect I used was C++98 (corporate waterfall projects and all that). To add insult to injury, it was very badly written, effectively FORTRAN written in C written in C++ with all the disadvantages of FORTRAN and all the complexities of C++.

I mean, who wouldn't want brittle code with hundreds of compiler warnings and very long compile times? And running a debugger is 90% of the fun of programming. Well, it's 90% of what you spend your time doing since none of it works. 9% of your time is spent compiling. 1% is actually writing code and fixing other people's bugs. The other 90% of your time is in the meetings. Lots and lots of long meetings. Then people can work long hours, acting the hero, and complain about being over-worked.

So I bought the book because I'm working on a new project. At the moment I'm writing C and will be writing a kernel module. The C will form a test harness for the kernel module and I will be able to cannibalise parts of it for the kernel module.

In a few months, I expect to have to write some higher-level stuff in C++. Fortunately the company has figured out that C++98 won't do any more because most of the Open Source libraries have moved on.

My question is, other than the Stroustrup book, what's the best way for me to get up to speed on the modern enhancements to C++? What should I read?

For reasons, I ended up watching CBSN on election night. For much of the night, I was impressed with CBSN. Their liberal bias was there, easily seen, but they contained themselves pretty well.

All the chatter seemed factual, and on target. The numbers seemed reasonable, even accurate.

Then - Trump made an appearance on television. FFS, it was, quite bluntly, childish whining. "We've won this election, and the evil Dems are withholding my coronation!"

At that point, the pundits fell back to repeating dem talking points, yada yada yada.

I've said it many times - if Trump could just STFU sometimes, the world would be a better place.

As for the numbers? Georgia is getting close, but Fulton county has problems and is unable to finish counting tonight. North Carolina is really close to an R victory, but they still have a lot of mail-in ballots that aren't counted. Penna boils down to Philly, and those aren't going to be counted tonight.

Michigan and Wisconsin aren't even close to being safely called yet. There are roughly 5 million uncounted votes remaining among those five states. That is more than enough to swing an election!

Arizona could possibly go R yet, but it seems highly unlikely.

Boys and girls, I do believe Trump is going to win. Once again, it's going to be a close thing, and Biden may or may not actually win the popular vote. But, I think Trump will get the Electoral College again.

I'll have more later, I just wanted to get my initial impression of Trumps whining out there before I forget how pissed off I am.