You plan to move to the Philippines? Wollen Sie auf den Philippinen leben?

There are REALLY TONS of websites telling us how, why, maybe why not and when you'll be able to move to the Philippines. I only love to tell and explain some things "between the lines". Enjoy reading, be informed, have fun and be entertained too!

Ja, es gibt tonnenweise Webseiten, die Ihnen sagen wie, warum, vielleicht warum nicht und wann Sie am besten auf die Philippinen auswandern könnten. Ich möchte Ihnen in Zukunft "zwischen den Zeilen" einige zusätzlichen Dinge berichten und erzählen. Viel Spass beim Lesen und Gute Unterhaltung!


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Showing posts with label Twitter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Twitter. Show all posts

Friday, January 6, 2023

Maris Racal falls victim to virus ‘who viewed your profile’ link

 January 6, 2023 - 11:35 AM
Maris Racal in this photo from her Instagram on Nov. 22, 2022 (Instagram/mariesteller) 

Actress-singer Maris Racal alerted online users about clicking a link on Twitter that unleashes spam posts on unsuspecting users.

The artist apologized to her 3.8 million followers for “incoming spam tweets” that they might encounter on their Twitter feed since she clicked a link claiming to know users who visited their profile.

“I clicked on this who visits your account thingy and virus pala siya,” she tweeted on Wednesday with an upside-down emoji. 

“Changed my password already. Hope that fixed it,” Maris added in another tweet.

Some Twitter users who read her post warned their mutuals about the spam.


Others claimed of encountering the similar link and spam tweets.

“OMG! Kaya pala may iba pa akong tweets na posted kanina tapos pare-parehas lang. ‘Wag na talagang ma-curious next time. Haha!” a Twitter user said, quote tweeting Maris.

“Kaya pala ‘yung iba sa feed ko [ulit ulit] ‘yung tweets about that who viewed their profile, ganon. Waaaa,” another online user responded.

The link in question has the name “askforme.me” and has the following thumbnail, as recently shared by a Twitter user:

In 2018, a lead malware intelligence analyst warned the public about the spam which lures users into thinking they will get to know who has visited their Twitter profiles.

“At the time of testing, all this [spam link] seemed to do was promote the app across timelines and encourage more installs, so the main aggravation here is the knowledge that you installed something useless, and then started beaming said uselessness to all of your contacts,” Christopher Boyd said.

“No matter how you come across these sites, we’d advise you not to bother giving these apps permission. The ‘See who visited you’ routine has been around for years on Twitter and Tumblr, and going even further back to Myspace. In all cases, none of these things ever seem to work and only serve to annoy, spam ads, or offer surveys,” he added.

Boyd said that users can remove the app by heading over to the Apps and Sessions tab on Twitter via Settings and Support > Settings and Privacy > Security and Account Access.

They can “revoke” an app’s permission through the “Connected Apps” tab.

Wednesday, November 9, 2022

Mastodon: What is the social network hailed as a Twitter alternative?





Twitter and Mastodon logos are seen in this illustration taken November 7, 2022. (Reuters/Dado Ruvic/Illustration)

 With Twitter in disarray since the world’s richest person took control of it last week, Mastodon, a decentralized, open alternative from privacy-obsessed Germany, has seen a flood of new users.

“The bird is free,” tweeted Tesla TSLA.O mogul Elon Musk when he completed his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter. But many free-speech advocates reacted with dismay to the prospect of the world’s “town square” being controlled by one person and started looking for other options.


For the most part, Mastodon – named after an extinct breed of mammoth – looks like Twitter, with hashtags, political back-and-forth and tech banter jostling for space with cat pictures.

But while Twitter and Facebook FB.O are controlled by one authority – a company – Mastodon is installed on thousands of computer servers, largely run by volunteer administrators who join their systems together in a federation. 

People swap posts and links with others on their own server – or Mastodon “instance” – and also, almost as easily, with users on other servers across the growing network.

The fruit of six years’ work by Eugen Rochko, a young German programmer, Mastodon was born of his desire to create a public sphere that was beyond the control of a single entity. That work is starting to pay off.

“We’ve hit 1,028,362 monthly active users across the network today,” Rochko tooted – Mastodon’s version of tweeting – on Monday. “That’s pretty cool.”

That is still tiny compared with his established rivals. Twitter reported 238 million daily active users who had seen an advert as of the second quarter of 2022. Facebook said it had 1.98 billion daily active users as of the third quarter.

But the jump in Mastodon users in a matter of days has still been startling.

“I’ve gotten more new followers on Mastodon in the last week than I have in the previous five years,” Ethan Zuckerman, a social media expert at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, wrote last week.

Before Musk completed the Twitter acquisition on Oct. 27, Mastodon’s growth averaged 60-80 new users an hour, according to the widely-cited Mastodon Users account. It showed 3,568 new registrations in one hour on Monday morning.

Rochko started Mastodon in 2016, when rumours were spreading that PayPal founder and Musk ally Peter Thiel wanted to buy Twitter.

“A right-wing billionaire was going to buy a de facto public utility that isn’t public,” Rochko told Reuters earlier this year. “It’s really important to have this global communications platform where you can learn what’s happening in the world and chat to your friends. Why is that controlled by one company?”

‘Toots’ and ‘Instances’

There is no shortage of other social networks ready to welcome any Twitter exodus, from Bytedance’s Tiktok to Discord, a chat app now popular far beyond its original constituency of gamers.

Mastodon’s advocates say its decentralised approach makes it fundamentally different: rather than go to Twitter’s centrally-provided service, every user can choose their own provider, or even run their own Mastodon instance, much as users can e-mail from Gmail or an employer-provided account or run their own e-mail server.

No single company or person, can impose their will on the whole system or shut it all down, the platform’s advocates say. If an extremist voice emerged with their own server, they say, it would be easy enough for other servers to cut ties with it, leaving the account to talk to its own shrinking band of followers and users on the isolated server.

The federated approach has downsides: It is harder to find people to follow in Mastodon’s anarchic sprawl then on the neatly ordered town square that centrally administered Twitter or Facebook can offer.

But its growing group of supporters say those are outweighed by the advantages of its architecture.

Fast growth has led to overload and server glitches. Seeing economist Paul Krugman struggling to get his Mastodon account running, Musk on Monday mocked the upstart network.

“If you don’t like Twitter any more there is awesome site called Masterbatedone,” he wrote in a swiftly deleted tweet above a screenshot of Krugman’s misfired toots.

Rochko, whose Mastodon foundation runs on a shoestring crowdfunded budget topped up with a modest grant from the European Commission, has found a particularly receptive audience among privacy-conscious European regulators.

Germany’s data protection commissioner Ulrich Kelber is waging a campaign to get government bodies to close their Facebook pages, since, he says, there is no way of hosting a page there that conforms to European privacy laws.

Authorities should move to the federal government’s own Mastodon instance, he says. The European Commission also maintains a server for European Union bodies to toot from.

“No exclusive information should be sent over a legally questionable platform,” Kelber said earlier this year.

While Mastodon is busier than ever before, it still has few of the big names from politics and showbiz that have made Twitter an addictive online home for journalists in particular. Few know comic Jan Boehmermann – Germany’s answer to John Oliver – outside his country, but climate activist Greta Thunberg is globally known.

For Rochko, the project’s only full-time employee, programming at his home in a small town in eastern Germany for a modest 2,400 euro ($2,394.96) monthly salary, the work continues.

“Would you believe me if I told you I’m extremely tired?” he tooted on Sunday.

—Reporting by Thomas Escritt; Editing by Andrew Heavens and Aurora Ellis

Friday, October 28, 2022

Musk in control of Twitter, ousts top executives — AP sources


DONE DEAL A sign is pictured outside the Twitter headquarters in San Francisco, Wednesday, Oct. 26, 2022. A court has given Elon Musk until Friday to close his April agreement to acquire the company after he earlier tried to back out of the deal. PHOTO BY AP


By Associated Press October 28, 2022 


ELON Musk has taken control of Twitter and ousted the CEO, chief financial officer and the company's general counsel, two people familiar with the deal said Thursday night.


The people wouldn't say if all the paperwork for the deal, originally valued at $44 billion, had been signed or if the deal has closed. But they said Musk is in charge of the social media platform and has fired CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal and General Counsel Vijaya Gadde. Neither person wanted to be identified because of the sensitive nature of the personnel moves.


The departures come just hours before a deadline set by a Delaware judge to finalize the deal on Friday. She threatened to schedule a trial if no agreement was reached.


Elon Musk attempted to soothe leery Twitter advertisers Thursday, a day before a deadline to close out on his $44 billion acquisition of the social media platform, saying that he is buying the platform to help humanity and doesn't want it to become a "free-for-all hellscape."


The message appears aimed at addressing concerns among advertisers — Twitter's chief source of revenue — that Musk's plans to promote free speech by cutting back on moderating content will open the floodgates to more online toxicity and drive away users.


"The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence," Musk wrote in an uncharacteristically long message for the Tesla CEO, who typically projects his thoughts in one-line tweets.


He continued: "There is currently great danger that social media will splinter into far right wing and far left wing echo chambers that generate more hate and divide our society."


Musk has previously expressed distaste for advertising and Twitter's dependence on it, suggesting more emphasis on other business models such as paid subscriptions that won't allow big corporations to dictate policy on how social media operates. But on Thursday, he assured advertisers he wants Twitter to be "the most respected advertising platform in the world."


The note is a shift from Musk's position that Twitter is unfairly infringing on free speech rights by blocking misinformation or graphic content, said Pinar Yildirim, associate professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.


But it's also a realization that having no content moderation is bad for business, putting Twitter at risk of losing advertisers and subscribers, she said.


Musk said Twitter should be "warm and welcoming to all" and enable users to choose the experience they want to have.


"I didn't do it to make money," he said of the pending acquisition. "I did it to try to help humanity, whom I love. And I do so with humility, recognizing that failure in pursuing this goal, despite our best efforts, is a very real possibility."


Friday's deadline to close the deal was ordered by the Delaware Chancery Court in early October. It is the latest step in a battle that began in April with Musk signing a deal to acquire Twitter, then tried to back out of it, leading Twitter to sue the Tesla CEO to force him to go through with the acquisition. If the two sides don't meet Friday's deadline, the next step could be a November trial that could lead to a judge forcing Musk to complete the deal.


Musk lugs sink into Twitter HQ as deadline looms

But Musk has been signaling that the deal is going through. He strolled into the company's San Francisco headquarters Wednesday carrying a porcelain sink, changed his Twitter profile to "Chief Twit," and tweeted "Entering Twitter HQ — let that sink in!"

Monday, September 27, 2021

Rest In Peace!

My column in Mindanao Daily News and BusinessWeek Mindanao

OPINION
By KLAUS DORING
 September 27, 2021

Years ago, I was still a freshman, when it came to the Internet and blogging. When I started my first blog as a German expatriate living in the Philippines, a very special social network came across my path: Facebook! I started chatting with some media friends from all over the Philippines.
 
Actually I started with "Friendster". Friends from the whole globe! Facebook was introduced to me as a new site for college kids.
 
Nowadays, we're experiencing different headlines, when it comes to social media networks. Despite scandals over fake news and data privacy, one thing is for sure: the social network Facebook is unlikely to disappear any time soon.
 
Actually, during the first year, I found Facebook’s evolution and societal function both equally fascinating and disturbing.
 
The biggest question of all that gnaws at the back of my mind is whether there is any stopping Facebook in the future?  It looks increasingly like the answer is no.
 
“Friendster failed for simple reasons: the time wasn’t right,” says Bernie Hogan, senior research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute. “Not only is it about the readiness of people to participate in a social networking site, but it’s also just about the nuts and bolts.” Friendster and MySpace helped blaze the trail for Facebook's global popularity, but they failed to achieve even close to the same success as their successor.
 
The kind of engineering that allows Facebook to function every day simply wasn’t available back in the early days of the new millennium. But by 2004, internet speeds had increased and the coding that underpins websites had become more sophisticated. The technical limitations of earlier social networking sites like Friendster and Friends Reunited cleared the runway for Facebook.
 
But despite technical barriers, those other sites paved the way for Facebook at a time when people were still a little wary of putting too much of themselves out on the internet. In the 1990s, internet users were warned against even sharing their first name online, but now words like “oversharing” and “selfie” are so common they are recognised by the Oxford English Dictionary.
 
Facebook - bone or ban? Fact is, Facebook is becoming that de facto, online identity provider. I am on Twitter and LinkedIn. But bear with me, most of the time, I spend being online on Facebook.
 
Once the mid-2000s rolled around, Facebook was also able to hire a lot of talented engineers from Silicon Valley, which helped it put together the kind of website infrastructure that could scale-up with an exponentially growing user base. Your Newsfeed doesn’t curate and customise itself – its launch needed engineers to cook up algorithms that picked the most valuable updates from your friends’ updates.
 
But Hwang points to another serendipitous factor in Facebook’s global rise: mobile phones. In a lot of developing countries, people only have cheap mobiles to access the internet. In fact, a lot of these users think Facebook is the internet.
 
“We can’t discount the power of mobile,” says Hwang. It’s made “social networks much, much more pervasive. You have social media at all times in your pocket, which makes it this powerful platform for news and conversation that operated in a slower way in the desktop-only era.”
 
For starters, it has become so ingrained and intertwined in the digital ecosystem of the 21st Century that it is hard to now untangle it. Oxford’s Hogan points to a concept he calls “interoperability.” This is where a Facebook login is often required to use and operate other online services.
 
“Just today I went out to buy concert tickets,” Hogan says. “I had to log into Facebook. I don’t use Facebook, but I had to dust off my login. Facebook is becoming that de facto, online identity provider.” I am sure you experienced the same, my dear readers.
 
Facebook also taps into basic human needs, according to psychologists. Even with social media movements like #DeleteFacebook, mass privacy concerns or even just calls to leave the site on the back of pedestrian design tweaks, people just can’t stay away.
 
“Almost everybody comes back,” says Catalina Toma, associate professor of communication science at the University of Wisconsin. “Social networking sites tap into what makes us human: we like to connect with others.” Yes, we don't go out and meet friends somewhere for a chat or a beer or coffee. We are connected with them via Facebook. Especially since the pandemic didn't allow us to go out and meet people personally.
 
But there are tangible benefits beyond those that keep people hooked.
 
“Lots of studies show the more people use Facebook, the more social capital they derive – resources that we get from just being connected to other people,” says Toma. “There’s emotional support, asking for advice, asking for recommendations.”
 
For many Facebook users, the pros outweigh the cons: tracking down long-lost friends, getting leads to a job, expanding their business. They can deal with the glamorized glimpses. All this keeps people coming back for more, despite the onslaught of what Toma calls “glamorized glimpses”. These are the carefully curated peeks into the lives of everyone else, who all seem to be doing better than you. “They feel worse, but they cannot stop,” Toma says. I strongly have to agree!
 
Facebook is bound to have a grip on our lives. “Social media companies seek to exploit one’s attention for profit,” Hogan says. “It’s not even ambiguous. It’s exactly what Zuckerberg said in Congress: ‘Where do you get your money?’ ‘We get it from ads.’”
 
Right place, right time: the rise of internet-connected mobile devices in turn fueled the rise of Facebook.
 
“Facebook’s business is still going to accelerate,” says Scott Galloway, a professor of marketing at New York University who wrote The Big Four, a book about how powerful a tiny handful of technology companies are becoming. “Consumers talk a big game but where is the first place they go to express their rage? Facebook and Instagram. And with 2.2 billion monthly active users, advertisers have no choice but to be on Facebook.” That could change, though, as advertising dollars follow young users who abandon the platform.
 
Still, there’s plenty of stability with older people – even among senior citizens. The site’s true future could boil down to what world governments decide to do, if anything, about Facebook’s growing influence.
 
“I don’t think the question is [what is] ‘killing Facebook’,” says Sherry Turkle, professor of the social studies of science and technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “I think the question is what would get people to an appropriate use of Facebook. To the extent that we ‘knew’ about it before, we found ways to put it out of mind. Now, we can no longer do this.” We’re now all too familiar with the dangers of data leaks and fake news.
 
Let's face it: there’s also the simple fact that Facebook has a monopoly. “Facebook’s sheer size and cash on hand means that they can either acquire or effectively shut down any competition,” says Galloway, pointing to examples like WhatsApp and Instagram, which were eventually absorbed into the Facebook behemoth.
 
For now, Facebook is still so entrenched in our daily lives, there’s not going to be an immediate escape.“What’s more likely to happen is that people start to realize the markets and economy might be better off – by stimulating innovation, creating new jobs – if we were to break it up and have multiple firms instead of just one,” Galloway says. That’s the more likely outcome than Facebook just crashing, burning and disappearing altogether, according to the experts.
 
Rest in peace, Facebook? Surely a big NO!

Monday, May 10, 2021

Scammers now target intelligent users

 


by Art Samaniego, Manila Bulletin

The number of social media users recently scammed, hacked, and even harassed online is alarming. While cyber crime victims before were the clueless titos and titas, now, journalists, doctors, teachers, and even those in the religious communities have fallen to the more sophisticated forms of scams. We could see now the impact of cyber crime across all ages and spectrum of society.

My job as the Tech Editor and Information and Communications Technology head of Manila Bulletin has made me the unofficial 24/7 tech support guy for my friends. Just last week, I got urgent messages from five of my friends asking about different cyber security issues.

I always tell my friends to be careful when clicking links from emails. Scammers could convincingly copy websites to look the same as the real ones. Check the URL before clicking, hover the cursor on top of the link, check the lower-left corner of your browser. If you don’t recognize the URL, don’t proceed.

Never trust Facebook-sponsored posts immediately. Facebook allows scammers to target you using its platform. If a sponsored post asks you to log in to your account, it’s a scam. Don’t proceed. If you see these scam ads, it means the scammers target you. Using the Facebook algorithm, the scammers know that you are more likely to click their sponsored post.

These are the messages I got from my friends. With the help of some members of the Phillippine Hacking University (PHU) group, we recovered three Facebook and one Instagram accounts. Read on and learn how not to be a victim of cyber scams.

Scammers are out there waiting for your to make that mistake of clicking and engaging with them.

Question: I got a private message asking me to post an article through an instant Facebook article. He will pay 60 dollars per published article and 120 dollars for videos. Is this legit?

Answer: That’s a scam. It happened before. A struggling Facebook page immediately grabbed what seems to be an opportunity. Instead of getting that 60-dollars for the article and 120-dollars for the video, the scammers took over the page. If you agree, the scammers will then ask you to give them access to your Business Manager Account, don’t!. Giving permission will provide them with authority to kick you out as owner/admin of your page.

Question: I got a message that says my Facebook account would be verified and have that blue check after my name. I need to follow the instruction and install an app from someone who claims to be from Facebook.

Answer: That’s a scam. Facebook will never ask you to install an app to verify your account. Be careful. Third-party apps you would install could not only compromise your social media account but also take over your computer.

Question: I got a message from a friend that says I won a government agency raffle. I need first to send PhP 28,500.50 for a tax clearance fee to get the one million-peso prize.

Answer: That’s a scam. Never believe a message like this or its variants. Sometimes, scammers would use your friend’s account to ask for money from you. Never send anything. Verify first if it is really from your friend or that agency who said that you won something.

Question: I think hackers compromised my Facebook account. Someone is accessing it without asking permission. What would I do?

Answer: If you’re worried about the security of your FB account, go to

 https://www.facebook.com/hacked. Facebook will walk you through how to change your password if you think your account is compromised. After following all the instructions, immediately activate the 2FA feature to add an extra layer of protection to your account.

Question: I got a message saying that he has access to my email. As proof, he gave me the old password that I used for my account. He told me that he would forward my incriminating messages and photos to my friends and family if I won’t pay US$100 using bitcoin.

Answer: This is a scam. These criminals usually get email addresses from compromised databases. A breach like this is not your fault. To secure your email, you need to change your password regularly. It would be best to use a password that you could easily remember but difficult for hackers to guess. Don’t worry. A message like this is a scam, and the sender has no access to your email.

Remember, always think before you click.

Friday, April 9, 2021

Facebook, Google, TikTok, Twitter express support for DOH’s campaign vs COVID-19 misinformation

by Analou de Vera, Manila Bulletin


Technology companies Facebook, Google, TikTok, and Twitter expressed their support to the campaign against misinformation on coronavirus disease (COVID-19) and vaccines, the Department of Health (DOH) said on Wednesday, April 7. 


The DOH on Wednesday launched “Check the FAQs”  campaign that emphasizes the “importance of accurate information in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic and encourage the public to fact-check information that they come across.”


“Playing an important role in championing media literacy on vaccines, Facebook, Google, TikTok, and Twitter have committed to support the campaign which includes helping build awareness for the initiative,” the DOH said in a statement. 


“As COVID-19 vaccination becomes top priority across the globe, we must also race to fight disinformation and misinformation surrounding COVID-19 vaccines and the pandemic. Spreading the right information can save lives,” said Beverly Lorraine Ho, director of the DOH’s Disease Prevention and Control Bureau and the Health Promotion Bureau. 


The DOH said that a “Check the FAQs” page on its website was put up in order  for “Filipinos to have a source of trustworthy information about COVID-19 and its vaccines.”


“Whenever you see or hear new information, we encourage everyone to #ChecktheFAQs. With the campaign and by promoting this single message on social media platforms, we hope to urge every Filipino to always verify any information regarding the vaccines they may come across,”  said Ho. 


Facebook  will “make it easy for people to find authoritative COVID-19 and vaccine information” among its users, said Facebook Philippines’ Public Policy Head Clare Amador. 


“Since the beginning of the pandemic, we’ve connected over 2 billion people to resources from health authorities through our COVID-19 information center and pop-ups on Facebook and Instagram. We are also taking action against accounts that break our COVID-19 and vaccine rules—including reducing their distribution or removing them from our platform. While misinformation is complex and always evolving, we continue using research, teams, and technologies to tackle it in the most comprehensive and effective way possible,” she said. 


Google, meanwhile, committed to protect its platforms from “misinformation and connecting more people to information they can trust,” said Google Philippines Director Bernadette Nacario.


“That includes taking down harmful and misleading content across our products, raising authoritative information on Search and YouTube, providing ad grants, and supporting quality news reporting on vaccines,” said Nacario.


“Globally, more than 700,000 videos related to dangerous or false COVID-19 information have been removed and our information panels on YouTube have been viewed 400 billion times, making them a valuable source of credible information,” she added. 


Misinformation and disinformation that continue to spread about immunization can cost lives, said  Kristoffer Rada, TikTok Philippines Head for Public Policy.


“At TikTok, we are committed to minimizing the spread of potentially misleading COVID-19 vaccine content. We take the responsibility of helping counter inauthentic, misleading or false information. To combat these, we’ve collaborated with fact-checking partners to determine whether the content shared on the platform is false,” said Rada. 


Twitter, meanwhile, has committed to protect the public’s conversation with regards to COVID-19, said Twitter Southeast Asia Head of Public Policy, Government and Philanthropy Monrawee Ampolpittayanant.


“We also recently implemented new policies to apply labels to the Tweets that may contain misleading information surrounding COVID-19, in addition to our continued efforts to remove it,” said Ampolpittayanant.



 

Tuesday, January 26, 2021

Twitter pilot to let users flag 'false' content


 


By James Clayton

North America technology reporter

Twitter is asking its users for help in combating fake news.

It has announced a pilot that allows people to submit notes on tweets that may be false or misleading.

The initiative, named 'Birdwatch', is being trialled among a small group in the US initially. The firm acknowledged the new system would have to be "resistant to manipulation attempts".

Companies like Twitter are looking at how they can better moderate their platforms.

Twitter said on Monday: "We know this might be messy and have problems at times, but we believe this is a model worth trying."

Twitter, along with other large social media companies, has struggled to deal with disinformation on its platform.

The pilot will allow users to flag tweets they believe to be "misleading or false", provide evidence to the contrary and discuss them with other - on a separate 'Birdwatch' site.

Additional notes and flags would then be placed on to content.

Twitter says this new approach could help it respond more quickly when misleading information spreads.

"Eventually we aim to make notes visible directly on Tweets for the global Twitter audience, when there is consensus from a broad and diverse set of contributors," Twitter said.

Twitter already adds labels to some misleading news. For example, many of Donald Trump's false claims of voter fraud were labelled by the company.

Twitter also reserves the right to remove tweets - and in extreme circumstances ban users - which it did with the US president after the riots in Washington earlier this month.

Twitter, though, wants to go further: "We don't want to limit efforts to circumstances where something breaks our rules or receives widespread public attention," said Twitter's Vice-President Keith Coleman.

Participants will have to provide a verified phone number and email to take part, in a bid to keep bots and bad actors away, as well as having no recent rule violations against their Twitter account.

President Biden said in his inauguration speech that: "We must reject a culture where facts are manipulated, or even manufactured."

Tuesday, March 3, 2020

8000 Google-Mitarbeiter müssen zuhause bleiben


Die beiden US-Technologie-Konzerne Google und Twitter weisen Teile ihrer Belegschaft an, von zu Hause aus zu arbeiten. Bei dem Suchmaschinenbetreiber sind alle 8000 Mitarbeiter in Dublin betroffen, nachdem ein Kollege grippeähnliche Symptome meldet.

Der Kurznachrichtendienst Twitter schreibt Heimarbeit für alle Mitarbeiter in Hongkong, Japan und Südkorea vor. Zudem werde das Home-Office für alle Beschäftigten weltweit empfohlen, wenn dies irgendwie möglich sei.

Saturday, December 22, 2018

PNP warns public on social media posts


By: Romina Cabrera (The Philippine Star)
MANILA, Philippines — The Philippine National Police (PNP) yesterday urged the public to be careful with social media posts that may be used by criminals this holiday season.
PNP deputy spokesperson Supt. Kim Molitas said social media users should exercise restraint when posting their whereabouts or their itineraries for the holiday season on the site as this may be used by criminals. 

“Netizens should take precautions and be aware of the consequences of anything that they post on social media in real time,” she said.
The PNP did not want to cause alarm, but urged the public to limit the information that they post online and make sure their posts are restricted to family and friends.
The PNP said there has been no increase in petty crimes even with the coming holidays. 
“Our efforts did not go to waste because we sustained the campaign against crimes even before the holidays,” Molitas said.
She said it is the first time that there has been no reported increase in the number of petty crimes before the holidays.
Molitas said the PNP hopes to continue this trend even after the holiday. 

Saturday, May 26, 2018

Rest In Peace!

Rest In Peace!

Ten years ago, I was still a freshman, when it comes to Internet and blogging. When I started my first own blog as German expatriate living in the Philippines, a very special social network came across my path. The Facebook! I started chatting with some media friends from allover the Philippines.

Actually I started with "Friendster". Friends from the whole globe! Facebook was introduced to me as new site for college kids.

Nowadays, May 2018, we're experiencing different headlines, when we it comes to social media networks. Despite scandals over fake news and data privacy, one thing is for sure: the social network Facebook is unlikely to disappear any time soon.

Fast forward to April 2018: founder and CEO of “The Facebook,” Mark Zuckerberg, sat before US Congress trying to convince lawmakers his social network, initially set up as a way for students to stay in touch with each other, does not pose a threat to the stability of Western democracy and does not treat its users’ personal information with disdain.

The hearing saw him admit that his company had not done enough to prevent the service it provides being used for fake news, foreign interference in elections and data leaks. In March, it emerged that a political consultancy called Cambridge Analytica used data harvested from millions of Facebook users without their consent. The scandal rocked Facebook to its core and has forced its founder to reconsider how it does business.

In the latest round of his grand apology tour Zuckerberg faced the European Parliament this week (it's Friday, May 25, 2018 while writing this piece!) and faced even tougher questioning, just as Europe is poised to introduce new laws that will give it some of the strictest data privacy rules in the world: General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Actually, during the first year, I found Facebook’s evolution and societal function both equally fascinating and disturbing.

The biggest question of all that gnaws at the back of my mind is whether there is any stopping Facebook in the future?  It looks increasingly like the answer is no.

“Friendster failed for simple reasons: the time wasn’t right,” says Bernie Hogan, senior research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute. “Not only is it about the readiness of people to participate in a social networking site, but it’s also just about the nuts and bolts.”

Friendster and MySpace helped blaze the trail for Facebook's global popularity, but they failed to achieve even close to the same success as their successor.

The kind of engineering that allows Facebook to function every day simply wasn’t available back in the early days of the new millennium. But by 2004, internet speeds had increased and the coding that underpins websites had become more sophisticated. The technical limitations of earlier social networking sites like Friendster and Friends Reunited cleared the runway for Facebook.

But despite technical barriers, those other sites paved the way for Facebook at a time when people were still a little wary of putting too much of themselves out on the internet. In the 1990s, internet users were warned against even sharing their first name online, but now words like “oversharing” and “selfie” are so common they are recognised by the Oxford English Dictionary.

Facebook - bone or ban? Fact is, Facebook is becoming that de facto, online identity provider. I am with Twitter and LinkedIn. But bear with me, most time, I spend being online in Facebook.

Once the mid-2000s rolled around, Facebook was also able to hire a lot of talented engineers from Silicon Valley, which helped it put together the kind of website infrastructure that could scale-up with an exponentially growing user base. Your Newsfeed doesn’t curate and customise itself – its launch needed engineers to cook up algorithms that picked the most valuable updates from your friends’ updates.

But Hwang points to another serendipitous factor in Facebook’s global rise: mobile phones. In a lot of developing countries, people only have cheap mobiles to access the internet. In fact, a lot of these users think Facebook is the internet.

“We can’t discount the power of mobile,” says Hwang. It’s made “social networks much, much more pervasive. You have social media at all times in your pocket, which makes it this powerful platform for news and conversation that operated in a slower way in the desktop-only era.”

People are describing Facebook and its nine lives.

As Facebook’s popularity has spread, so too have predictions of an imminent “tipping point”. One 2014 study from Princeton University forecast that Facebook could lose “80% of its peak user base between 2015 and 2017.” This prediction was made long before the Cambridge Analytica scandal did so much harm to the company’s reputation. So, how has Facebook managed to accumulate the business equivalent of a cat’s nine lives?

For starters, it has become so engrained and intertwined in the digital ecosystem of the 21st Century that it is hard to now untangle it. Oxford’s Hogan points to a concept he calls “interoperability.” This is where a Facebook login is often required to use and operate other online services.

“Just today I went out to buy concert tickets,” Hogan says. “I had to log into Facebook. I don’t use Facebook, but I had to dust off my login. Facebook is becoming that de facto, online identity provider.” I am sure, you experienced the same my dear readers.

Facebook also taps into basic human needs, according to psychologists. Even with social media movements like #DeleteFacebook, mass privacy concerns or even just calls to leave the site on the back of pedestrian design tweaks, people just can’t stay away.

“Almost everybody comes back,” says Catalina Toma, associate professor of communication science at the University of Wisconsin. “Social networking sites tap into what makes us human: we like to connect with others.” Yes, we don't go out and meet friends somewhere for a chat or a beer or coffee. We are connected with them via Facebook.

But there are tangible benefits beyond those that keep people hooked.

“Lots of studies show the more people use Facebook, the more social capital they derive – resources that we get from just being connected to other people,” says Toma. “There’s emotional support, asking for advice, asking for recommendations.”

For many Facebook users, the pros outweigh the cons: tracking down long-lost friends, getting leads to a job, expanding their business. They can deal with the glamorized glimpses. All this keeps people coming back for more, despite the onslaught of what Toma calls “glamorized glimpses”. These are the carefully curated peeks into the lives of everyone else, who all seem to be doing better than you. “They feel worse, but they cannot stop,” Toma says. I strongly have to agree!

Facebook is bound to have a grip on our lives. “Social media companies seek to exploit one’s attention for profit,” Hogan says. “It’s not even ambiguous. It’s exactly what Zuckerberg said in Congress: ‘Where do you get your money?’ ‘We get it from ads.’”

Right place, right time: the rise of internet-connected mobile devices in turn fueled the rise of Facebook.

But even after the Cambridge Analytica disaster – Zuckerberg eventually published an apology to the 87 million Facebook users whose data was inappropriately shared  – there’s still no stopping the social media steamroller.

“Facebook’s business is still going to accelerate,” says Scott Galloway, a professor of marketing at New York University who wrote The Big Four, a book about how powerful a tiny handful of technology companies are becoming. “Consumers talk a big game but where is the first place they go to express their rage? Facebook and Instagram. And with 2.2 billion monthly active users, advertisers have no choice but to be on Facebook.” That could change, though, as advertising dollars follow young users who abandon the platform.

Still, there’s plenty of stability with older people – even among senior citizens. The site’s true future could boil down to what world governments decide to do, if anything, about Facebook’s growing influence.

“I don’t think the question is [what is] ‘killing Facebook’,” says Sherry Turkle, professor of the social studies of science and technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “I think the question is what would get people to an appropriate use of Facebook. To the extent that we ‘knew’ about it before, we found ways to put it out of mind. Now, we can no longer do this.” We’re now all too familiar with the dangers of data leaks and fake news.

Let's face it: there’s also the simple fact that Facebook has a monopoly. “Facebook’s sheer size and cash on hand means that they can either acquire or effectively shut down any competition,” says Galloway, pointing to examples like WhatsApp and Instagram, which were eventually absorbed into the Facebook behemoth.

For now, Facebook is still so entrenched in our daily lives, there’s not going to be an immediate escape.“What’s more likely to happen is that people start to realize the markets and economy might be better off – by stimulating innovation, creating new jobs – if we were to break it up and have multiple firms instead of just one,” Galloway says. That’s the more likely outcome than Facebook just crashing, burning and disappearing altogether, according to the experts.

For this to happen, governments will crack down on regulation to make Facebook less powerful. And while Facebook’s success has satisfied our human needs for connections, its sheer size, massive user base, and staying power has brought with it unprecedented scrutiny – like the kind we’ve seen this week in Europe.

Rest in peace, Facebook? Surely a big NO!