Microsoft Launches New Tools For Curbing Online Abuse

Microsoft Launches New Tools For Curbing Online Abuse

Microsoft says it’s joining the movement to curb online hate speech.

Today, the company announced two new additions to its online services: one tool for reporting hate speech so that the company can take it down, and another for requesting that the company reinstate content once it comes down. The move comes as criticism from Internet denizens about online abuse reached a new peak this month, notably after online trolls waged Twitter campaign against comedian Leslie Jones and then someone hacked into her personal website and exposed her private information.

For Microsoft, the move is as important as it is symbolic. Up to 40 percent of Internet users have experienced harassment at one point or another. People don’t typically think of Microsoft first when it comes to how abuse spreads on the Internet. Those conversations tend to revolve around social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit, zooming in on how these companies try to strike a balance between protecting free speech and cracking down on players who use their services as a way to promote violence or threats—with Twitter receiving more and more criticism in recent weeks. But Microsoft wants to get ahead of the game.

“We’ve never—nor will we ever—permit content that promotes hatred based on age, disability, gender, ethnic origin, race, religion, and sexual orientation,” Jacqueline Beauchere, Microsoft’s Chief Online Safety Officer, wrote in a company blog post today. As Microsoft notes, its principles and policies have always been this way. But the timing of this new announcement is key.

By introducing new processes for customers to report hate speech, Microsoft says, it hopes to make it easier for users to call the company’s attention to the stuff that truly matters. Right now, the company institutes a “notice-and-takedown” approach, and has an internal team that evaluates each complaint that comes through, considers context and other factors, and determines what action to take. This includes monitoring content on its various products—including Outlook, Skype, Xbox, OneDrive, and Office 365. But with these new tools—and with more input from its users—the company hopes reviews of abuse reports can happen even faster, and get even better.

 

2 Author: Davey Alba. Davey Alba Business

• Date of Publication: 08.23.16. 08.23.16
• Time of Publication: 10:19 am. 10:19 am

Zuckerberg Sold His Facebook Shares For Charity—But He’s No Hero Yet

Click to Open Overlay GalleryFacebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg arrives with his wife Priscilla Chan for the awards ceremony of the newly established Axel Springer Award in Berlin, Germany, on February 25, 2016.Kay Nietfeld/REUTERS

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg just sold a chunk of his personal shares in the social networking company. It’s worth about $95 million before taxes, and it’s all designated for charity.

This is the first round of funding for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the philanthropic venture Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, announced in December. At the time of the initiative’s launch, Zuckerberg and Chan pledged 99 percent of their Facebook fortune to philanthropic causes, which means donating around $45 billion over the span of their lifetimes.

But before you applaud too heartily, you should realize that Zuckerberg and Chan haven’t actually distributed these funds yet—or even said how they will do so. “Covering a public announcement of do-gooding, with no follow-up on how he actually allocates the millions of dollars, just burnishes his reputation,” says Rob Reich, co-director of the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. “Don’t call this do-gooding yet. Call for more transparency.”

Where Will It Go?

The pair have now begun to sell off this stock, starting with this first $95 million—an amount that, to be sure, is not insignificant to the average person. But it’s a mere fraction of the Zuckerbergs’ fortune. Plus, we still don’t know where all that money will end up. Publicly, the pair has stated they intend to focus on “personalized learning, curing disease, connecting people and building strong communities.” And the venture recently announced its first investment in Andela, a startup that trains engineers in Africa to get tech jobs. Beyond that, however, we know very little.

Meanwhile, Zuckerberg reaps many positive benefits from having the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative exist at all. “Foundations are one way to generate tax benefits from wealth, as well as social and political influence,” says Santa Clara University School of Law corporate finance professor Stephen Diamond. Reich adds that it’s “legally incorrect” to say the proceeds from the sale of this Facebook stock is going into philanthropy. That’s because the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is a limited liability corporation, or LLC, not a non-profit.

Zuckerberg has defended the move, saying that setting the organization up as an LLC gives them more flexibility when it comes to funding specific causes. Those may well be philanthropic causes, including giving out grants to deserving non-profits. But under the legal definition of an LLC, he points out, Zuckerberg can do “anything he wants with the money, including political advocacy work, electioneering, and investment.” While it seems only positive that Zuckerberg has set aside billions for the public good, it’s worth examining how the move redirects money into charitable investments Zuckerberg himself has chosen. Zuckerberg hasn’t been elected to public office, and as such, he’s under no obligation under the law to be held accountable by the public. But the public should still hold him accountable.

 

Brian Barrett Gear

• Date of Publication: 08.29.16. 08.29.16
• Time of Publication: 12:57 pm. 12:57 pm

The Hack

In its warning sent to state-level election boards, the FBI described an attack on at least one of those two election websites as using a technique called SQL injection. It’s a common trick, which works by entering code into an entry field on a website that’s only meant to receive data inputs, triggering commands on the site’s backend and sometimes giving the attacker unintended access to the site’s server. In this case, it seems to have allowed the hackers to steal 200,000 voter records from the Illinois board of elections, and to cause the Illinois board to close registration for ten days.

You can’t patch this psychological vulnerability. Cybersecurity expert Thomas Rid

The use of that common SQL injection vulnerability hardly signals the involvement of sophisticated state-sponsored hackers, much less specifically Russian ones. But the security firm ThreatConnect, which has been investigating IP addresses that the FBI said were associated with the attacks, has found a few still-murky clues that point in Russia’s direction. ThreatConnect found that one of the IP addresses named by the FBI mapped in 2015 to Rubro.biz, a Russian-language website it describes as a cybercriminal black market. (However, WIRED found that the IP address now points to a website appearing to be associated with the Turkish AKP political party. This, too, could be a red-herring, as neither WIRED nor ThreatConnect has yet confirmed the legitimacy of that apparently Turkish website.) And the VPN used by the attackers appears to have been King Servers, the firm says, a service with a Russian language website.

“There are elements to suggest there are Russian fingerprints on this,” says Rich Barger, ThreatConnect’s director of threat intelligence. But he cautions that the firm’s research is “very nascent. We’re still working on it.”

Who’s Affected?

Neither the Illinois nor Arizona board of elections immediately responded to WIRED’s request for comment. But if foreign hackers are indeed involved in the attack—still a major “if”—the 200,000 voter records reportedly breached in the attacks may represent the least of the American electoral system’s worries. After all, US voter registration records have been practically public for years, often sold to data brokers who resell it to political campaigns and marketers. More serious is the notion, first raised by the public revelation of the Democratic National Committee hack in July, that a foreign power like Russia might be trying to influence or disrupt American politics.

How Serious is This?

We knew this could happen. Security researchers have warned for years that American voting systems are disturbingly vulnerable to digital attacks. The breaches of state board of election sites represent yet another reminder that elements of U.S. elections aren’t ready to face determined hackers. But attacking voter registration systems, or even paralyzing registration for weeks as in Illinois’ case, may not represent a practical threat to American elections so much as a psychological one, says King’s College’s Thomas Rid. After all, even deleted voter records can be accounted for with provisional ballots, as in recent primary messes in California and New York. But a foreign government using digital attacks to inject doubt in the election’s results could help destabilize American politics well after November.

“The thing that I’m worried about is not the technical disruption of the election itself. That’s still extremely unlikely,” says Rid. “The pattern we see is to call things into question, to sow doubt, to create uncertainty. This could be another way to create uncertainty in the minds of a lot of people…You can’t patch this psychological vulnerability.”

And in an election year when the Republican candidate has repeatedly called the race rigged, that kind of psychological damage is more serious than any one hack.

 

Final Thoughts

It can feel almost overwhelming when you finally realize that your financial state is completely out of control. You’re often simultaneously facing significant debt, a lack of any sort of sense as to where your money is going, and a great deal of worry about your future, and that can add up to a dark place in life.

The goal of all of these strategies is singular: it’s all about taking control again. It’s about getting back in touch with where your money is actually going, separating your needs from your wants, and figuring out which uses for your money actually make sense. It’s also about finding support for that change from your family, your friends, and your greater social network, as well as through your personal use of time and energy.

If you work on those things in concert, you’ll find that you’re back in control of your money surprisingly quickly and you’re ready to start heading down a path of debt freedom and financial independence.

Good luck!

Ten Useful Strategies for Learning Financial Self-Control | The Simple Dollar

Trent Hamm is a personal finance writer at TheSimpleDollar.com.

Microsoft Launches New Tools For Curbing Online Abuse

Microsoft says it’s joining the movement to curb online hate speech.

Today, the company announced two new additions to its online services: one tool for reporting hate speech so that the company can take it down, and another for requesting that the company reinstate content once it comes down. The move comes as criticism from Internet denizens about online abuse reached a new peak this month, notably after online trolls waged Twitter campaign against comedian Leslie Jones and then someone hacked into her personal website and exposed her private information.

For Microsoft, the move is as important as it is symbolic. Up to 40 percent of Internet users have experienced harassment at one point or another. People don’t typically think of Microsoft first when it comes to how abuse spreads on the Internet. Those conversations tend to revolve around social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit, zooming in on how these companies try to strike a balance between protecting free speech and cracking down on players who use their services as a way to promote violence or threats—with Twitter receiving more and more criticism in recent weeks. But Microsoft wants to get ahead of the game.

“We’ve never—nor will we ever—permit content that promotes hatred based on age, disability, gender, ethnic origin, race, religion, and sexual orientation,” Jacqueline Beauchere, Microsoft’s Chief Online Safety Officer, wrote in a company blog post today. As Microsoft notes, its principles and policies have always been this way. But the timing of this new announcement is key.

By introducing new processes for customers to report hate speech, Microsoft says, it hopes to make it easier for users to call the company’s attention to the stuff that truly matters. Right now, the company institutes a “notice-and-takedown” approach, and has an internal team that evaluates each complaint that comes through, considers context and other factors, and determines what action to take. This includes monitoring content on its various products—including Outlook, Skype, Xbox, OneDrive, and Office 365. But with these new tools—and with more input from its users—the company hopes reviews of abuse reports can happen even faster, and get even better.

 

2 Author: Davey Alba. Davey Alba Business