When searching for terms that challenged the official narrative of the Parkland shooting, the results on Google varied drastically, compared to other search engines.
The post Google Caught Red-Handed Censoring Search Results Asking Questions About Parkland Shooting appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
Oath, Yahoo’s new parent company, announced Tuesday that it is providing notice to 2 billion additional user accounts that had been affected by a data breach in 2013.
In December, the web portal disclosed that more than 1 billion Yahoo email accounts had been compromised, setting the record for the largest data breach in history by number of users.
In their recent announcement, the company said that the problem had already been solved in 2016, when they “took action to protect all accounts.” Yahoo notified the 1 billion impacted users “identified at the time,” required them to change their password, and invalidated unencrypted security questions so they could not be used to access an account.
Four months after Yahoo was acquired by Verizon Communications for a record $4.48 billion, the company said it had received “new intelligence” and conducted an investigation into the breach with the help of third-party forensic experts.
Verizon updated the number of users affected, but continued to deny that hackers had gained access to their “passwords in clear text, payment card data, or bank account information.”
Verizon’s chief information security officer, Chandra McMahon, said that their investment in Yahoo is allowing them to “continue to take significant steps to enhance their security, as well as benefit from Verizon’s experience and resources.”
“We proactively work to ensure the safety and security of our users and networks in an evolving landscape of online threats,” McMahon said in a statement.
Yahoo has advised users to change their passwords and security questions and answers for any accounts that had the same or similar information as their Yahoo accounts, review their accounts for suspicious behaviour, and avoid clicking on links or downloading attachments from suspicious emails.
In March, an internal investigation by Yahoo’s board found that senior executives “did not properly comprehend or investigate” information about the breach that their security team had known about.
“The information security team understood that the attacker had exfiltrated copies of user database backup files containing the personal data of Yahoo users but it is unclear whether…exfiltration was effectively communicated and understood outside the information security team,” a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission said.
“The Committee found that the relevant legal team had sufficient information to warrant substantial further inquiry in 2014, and they did not sufficiently pursue it,” the filing continued.
(INTELLIHUB) — In yet another shocking display of how far the mainstream media is willing to go to take out Donald Trump, various news outlets have essentially aligned themselves with the violent, left-wing anti-fascist group Antifa.
Yahoo News, CNN, and numerous other publications have all published uncritical pieces on the transparently violent group over the last 48 hours while at the same time attacking the president with “fake news” claims that he didn’t disavow white supremacists in his numerous statements to the nation after the horrific car attack in Virginia.
In perhaps the most shockingly blatant piece of propaganda on the group, Yahoo News published a piece by Caitlin Dickson that gushed over the “combative leftists”, even going as far as to include a photo of a “happy” group of warriors with their fists raised.
“Short for antifacist, the term “antifa” refers to a secretive movement of combative leftists, including many self-described anarchists, who are ready and willing to use violence in order to fight white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and others they deem to be fascists,” Dickson wrote.
In her quest to legitimize the group, Dickson specifically downplays their origins, leaving out key parts that would obviously turn off the causal reader.
“Like the authoritarian movements they seek to destroy, the antifa’s origins can be traced back to Europe in the 1920s and 30s. Since the end of World War II, antifa activity has ebbed and flowed along with that of neo-Nazis, skinheads and other hate movements that have sprung up around the United Kingdom, Germany and the United States,” she continued.
As Breitbart noted in an article about the piece, “In fact, as the avowedly Marxist-socialist periodical Jacobin magazine explains in a much more honest, if not less enthusiastic, appraisal, Antifa, originally known in its native Germany as Antifaschistische Aktion, was founded as the militant wing of the German Communist Party. In the 1930s, it was known to be every bit as violent as its Nazi opponents. After World War Two, Antifa groups re-formed in Germany to collaborate with Soviet communists on subduing the country and rooting out its past to create a new socialist utopia. They were active in Communist-controlled East Germany until that country’s Stalinist leadership got fed up, broke the groups up, and sent many of their leaders to gulags.”
To be fair, if you are writing a fawning piece you most likely wouldn’t want the general public to know the above noted stunning facts.
Dickson goes on to write that, “They prefer direct action: They pressure venues to deny white supremacists space to meet,” while completely failing to mention the actual violence that is the “direct action”.
“Neglecting to mention that “direct action” to Antifa means smashing people in the face with bike locks, spraying elderly men with bear mace, sending reporters to the hospital when they film them, and then bragging about it online, all because people with different opinions than theirs are allowed to speak, or simply be, in public,” the Breitbart piece continued.
For their part, noted anti-Trump “news” network CNN has gone into overdrive in their shilling for the violent leftist group, with at least three different examples of their employees either expressing support for or downplaying actions carried out by Antifa.
First the network wrote an “explainer” piece on the group that literally failed to mention any of the violence they have carried out, instead opting to causally mention “property damage” for the reasons they remain controversial.
“In the section, “Why are they controversial?” CNN states that “the group is known for causing damage to property during protests.” This, in fact, is only one key reason why Antifa is “controversial” — the other is violence,” The Daily Caller reported.
“Antifa’s violence ranges from stabbing a police horse in the neck to beating people with bike locks. Antifa physically assaulted a reporter with The Daily Caller News Foundation in January and a search on YouTube reveals hours of footage displaying Antifa violence from protests across the nation. Antifa thugs are additionally known for assaulting police officers and chasing down fleeing people in order to beat them.”
CNN Correspondent Sara Sidner then took to the airwaves in an obvious attempt at legitimizing violence as long as its against anyone the left deems to be racist.
“There’s a group of anti-fascist called the black bloc, which do tend to get violent,” Sidner admitted. “Their idea is, look, non-violence hasn’t worked, we are going to try to stop this.”
“But, they wouldn’t have been there, they wouldn’t have been anywhere near there had it not been for the fact that white supremacists and neo-Nazis were out there scaring the living daylights out of most of the people in that town,” she continued.
Lastly, the publicly anti-Trump CNN host Don Lemon had to join in, downplaying literally everything about the group in another unhinged rant about the president.
“Everyone was sitting there watching, saying here we go, his true colors are coming out. To equate a group that is a protest group, two protests group. Yes, they are both protest groups, calling antifa. They were there protesting fascism. Maybe their tactics weren’t exactly right. It is messy. There is a difference between the two groups,” Lemon claimed.
Keep in mind all the documented attacks carried out by Antifa. To people like Lemon, as long as they are against the president they are apparently allies.
In 2005, one of the most intriguing advertising stunts of the internet age was hatched.
As Visual Capitalist"s Nick Routley explains, Alex Tew launched the The Million Dollar Homepage, where anyone could “own a piece of internet history” by purchasing pixels-plots (minimum of 10×10) on a massive digital canvas. At the price of just one dollar per pixel, everyone from individual internet users to well-known companies like Yahoo! raced to claim a space on the giant digital canvas.
Today, The Million Dollar Homepage lives on as a perfect record of that wacky time in internet history – or so it seems. However, the reality is that many of the hyperlinks on the canvas are now redirects that send incoming users to other sites, while over 20% of them are simply dead.
Here are the links that still work on the Million Dollar Homepage today:
The revealing graphic above, via John Bowers, raises the question – how do hyperlinks disappear, and what implications does this “digital decay” have?
The internet is stitched together by an incalculable number of hyperlinks, but much like cells in an organism, the sources and destinations have a finite lifespan. Essentially, links can and do die.
Most “link rot” is the result of website restructuring, or entities going out of business and pulling their website offline.
A high-impact example of this is when Yahoo! pulled the plug on GeoCities, one of the first popular web hosting services. In one fell swoop, roughly 7 million websites (containing a plethora of animated gifs, auto-playing midi files, and traffic counters) went dark forever.
Links can also die because of more deliberate reasons, as well. In 2015, the editor-in-chief of Buzzfeed, Ben Smith, came under fire for deleting thousands of posts from the site (including content that was critical of Buzzfeed advertisers). Journalism has traditionally acted as a public record, so this type of “decay” has serious implications on the credibility of media brands.
This idea of a public record is at the heart of why digital decay is an issue worth addressing. Once millions of links simply burn out, what will people in the future know about society in the early-ish days of the internet? What record will remain of people’s thoughts and feelings in that era?
I worry that the twenty-first century will become an informational black hole.
– Vint Cerf, Internet pioneer
Perhaps more urgent are public records that live in the digital realm. Supreme Court decisions and academia lean heavily on citations to build their arguments. What happens when those citations simply vanish? A Harvard study found that 49% of the hyperlinks in Supreme Court decisions are now broken.
Even that ubiquitous resource, Wikipedia, has serious issues caused by digital decay. Over 130,000 entries link to dead pages – a troubling development, as linked citations are what lend entries their credibility.
A handful of people are taking steps to archive the internet.
The most well-known solution is Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which has archived hundreds of billions webpages over the past 20 years. Even the The Library of Congress – which is well known for archiving digital information such as tweets – contracts Internet Archive to do its web crawling.
The academia-focused Perma is another example of a company looking to create permanent records of the web sources (particularly citations).
Many of the weird and wonderful forums and hand-coded homepages of early internet lore may be gone, but we’re finally taking steps to combat digital decay. As awareness grows, avoiding an “informational black hole” may be possible.
There are over 1.1 billion websites on the internet, but the vast majority of all traffic actually goes to a very select list of them. As Visual Capitalist"s Jeff Desjardins notes, Google.com, for example, has an astounding 28 billion visits per month. The next closest is also a Google-owned property, Youtube.com, which brings in 20.5 billion visits.
Today’s infographic comes to us from Vodien, and it lists the 100 highest ranking websites in the U.S. by traffic, according to website analytics company Alexa.
The information is grouped by company – for example, you can see that Google controls four sites in the Top 100 (Google, Youtube, Blogger, and Google User Content), while Verizon owns the Huffington Post and AOL.com (they will also control Yahoo and Tumblr when that deal closes in Q2). The data is also sorted by industry, so sites in a similar category are grouped in the same color.
A STEEP DROPOFF
The dropoff from #1 to #100 is significant. Google.com has 28 billion visits, but a website like Citi.com (ranked #98) only has 53 million visits a month. That’s a 500x difference!
Meanwhile, a website like Visualcapitalist.com gets one million visits per month, and is ranked #33,000 in the United States – a 50x difference from Citi. Further down the trail – there are literally millions of tiny websites that get thousands or just hundreds of visits per month, and some that don’t get any love at all.
The whole distribution is quite fascinating, and it is clear that the spoils go overwhelmingly to the very top of the food chain. However, that also means that there is an entire world of millions of websites out there that almost no one (except Google’s crawler) has ever seen.
Four-and-a-half years after taking over as CEO of Yahoo, the company announced today, via an 8-K that Marissa Mayer is resigning from the board. Additionally the comany"s name with be change to Altaba (well it"s better than "Bahoo").
It"s been a bumpy ride...
Statement via 8-K
In connection with the previously announced pending sale by Yahoo! Inc. (“Yahoo” or the “Company”) of its operating business (the “Sale Transaction”) to Verizon Communications Inc. (“Verizon”) pursuant to the terms of a Stock Purchase Agreement, dated as of July 23, 2016, between the Company and Verizon, the Board of Directors of the Company (the “Board”) has made certain determinations with respect to the size and composition of the Board following the closing of the Sale Transaction (the “Closing”).
In light of the fact that following the Closing the Company will operate as an investment company under the Investment Company Act of 1940, the Board has determined that, immediately following the Closing, the size of the Board will be reduced to five (5) directors. Tor Braham, Eric Brandt, Catherine Friedman, Thomas McInerney and Jeffrey Smith will continue to serve as directors of the Company following the Closing, and Mr. Brandt will serve as Chairman of the Board. Each of David Filo, Eddy Hartenstein, Richard Hill, Marissa Mayer, Jane Shaw and Maynard Webb has indicated that he or she intends to resign from the Board effective upon the Closing, and that his or her intention to resign is not due to any disagreement with the Company on any matter relating to the Company’s operations, policies or practices.
To facilitate the transition of the Company to an investment company following the Closing, the Board also determined that, effective January 9, 2017, Mr. Brandt will become Chairman of the Board and Mr. Webb will become Chairman Emeritus of the Board.
The Board also determined that, following the Closing, it intends to cause the Company’s name to be changed to Altaba Inc.
* * *
On the bright side, she will ge to do a lot more of this.
We warned it might anmd sure enough, following news of another one billion accounts hacked overnight, Bloomberg reports that Verizon is exploring a price cut or possible exit from its $4.83 billion pending acquisition of Yahoo, according to a person familiar with the matter.
While a Verizon group led by AOL Chief Executive Officer Tim Armstrong is still focused on integration planning to get Yahoo up and running, another team, walled off from the rest, is reviewing the breach disclosures and the company’s options, said the person, who asked not to be identified discussing private information.
A legal team led by Verizon General Counsel Craig Silliman is assessing the damage from the breaches and is working toward either killing the deal or renegotiating the Yahoo purchase at a lower price, the person said. One of the major objectives for Verizon is negotiating a separation from any future legal fallout from the breaches. Verizon is seeking to have Yahoo assume any lasting responsibility for the hack damage, the person said.
The result:
Sending Yahoo to 4 month lows...
