Volume 18, Issue 44        Atari Online News, Etc.       November 18, 2016   
                                                                           
                                                                              
                  Published and Copyright (c) 1999 - 2016
                            All Rights Reserved

                          Atari Online News, Etc.
                           A-ONE Online Magazine
                Dana P. Jacobson, Publisher/Managing Editor
                      Joseph Mirando, Managing Editor
                       Rob Mahlert, Associate Editor


                       Atari Online News, Etc. Staff

                        Dana P. Jacobson  --  Editor
                   Joe Mirando  --  "People Are Talking"
                Michael Burkley  --  "Unabashed Atariophile"
                   Albert Dayes  --  "CC: Classic Chips"
                         Rob Mahlert  --  Web site
                Thomas J. Andrews  --  "Keeper of the Flame"


                           With Contributions by:

                                Fred Horvat



      To subscribe to A-ONE, change e-mail addresses, or unsubscribe,
                log on to our website at: www.atarinews.org
                       and click on "Subscriptions".
      OR subscribe to A-ONE by sending a message to: dpj@atarinews.org
          and your address will be added to the distribution list.
      To unsubscribe from A-ONE, send the following: Unsubscribe A-ONE
    Please make sure that you include the same address that you used to
                              subscribe from.

        To download A-ONE, set your browser bookmarks to one of the
                              following sites:

                http://people.delphiforums.com/dpj/a-one.htm
                               Now available:
                          http://www.atarinews.org


                 Visit the Atari Advantage Forum on Delphi!
                   http://forums.delphiforums.com/atari/



                                  =~=~=~=



A-ONE #1844                                                 11/18/16

   ~ Fool Me Once, Facebook ~ People Are Talking!    ~ New ARAnyM Minipack!
   ~ Comparing 030 Machines ~ Call of Cuty Refunds!  ~ Wi-Fi Shadows Issues!
   ~ Jaguar Rebooteroids!   ~                        ~ New EmuTOS 0.9.7! 

                  -* Twitter Politically Biased?  *-
               -* IBM Plans Mock Cyberattacks on Web! *-
           -*  Google Is Taking Aim at Fake News Sites!  *-



                                  =~=~=~=



->From the Editor's Keyboard              "Saying it like it is!"
  """"""""""""""""""""""""""



As part of the country is finally coming to grips over the fact
that Donald Trump will be our next president, Trump is busy trying
to put together his new Cabinet.  While we probably won't agree
with all of his choices (big surprise there!), it's a ritual
that occurs every four years after an election.

I'm still amazed at the level of protests still going on that
pertain to the election results.  Fervent Sanders supporters are
bitter over the results, why?  Your candidate wasn't on the
ballot, he lost the primary!  Get over it!  He backed Hillary,
and she lost!  Get over it!  You didn't vote because Sanders
wasn't on the ballot!  Your vote was your means of protest, so
get over it!  On the other side of the coin, you do have a right
to your opinion and the right to protest.  Do it peacefully.
In the end, it won't matter; there are potentially more effective
ways to make your opinions and issues heard.

Meanwhile, I'm going to continue to follow the progress of the
Trump transition to the White House.  It's guaranteed to be as
interesting as the trip getting there!

Until next time...



                                  =~=~=~=



                            ARAnyM MiniPack


Hi,

ARAnyM <http://aranym.org/> is the GNU/GPL ATARI Virtual Machine
from which a minimal configuration, the *miniPack* is distributed
<http://eureka.atari.org/miniPack.zip> miniPack is modified with
the new release of EmuTOS v.0.9.7. It supports :

`Run_win` allows launching on PC with Windows
`MacAranym` allows launching on PPC Macintosh with OS X
`MacAranym JIT` allows launching on IntelMac with OS X
`run_x86.sh` allows launching on PC with x86-Linux
`run_ppc.sh` allows launching on Mac _and_ PS3 with PPC-Linux

So Macintosh-PC-PlayStation3 are all supported with Windows,
OS X and GNU/Linux.

This simple ARAnyM configuration is running on any machine.
Here is a screenshot <http://eureka.atari.org/aranym.gif>

Enjoy, it's yours =)

-- 
Franois LE COAT
Author of Eureka 2.12 (2D Graph Describer, 3D Modeller)
<http://eureka.atari.org/>



                            EmuTOS 0.9.7


The EmuTOS developers are please to announce the release of
EmuTOS 0.9.7. In case you didn't know, EmuTOS is a
GEMDOS-compatible operating system for Atari computers and is a
free and open source replacement for common TOS images for Atari
emulators.

The main new features of EmuTOS 0.9.7 are:
- BIOS: add support for extended MBR partitions
- BIOS: add support for MonSTer board
- BIOS: configure & size ST-RAM on TT
- BIOS: add support for Eiffel on CAN bus on ColdFire EVB
- BIOS: add _5MS cookie to support FreeMiNT on non-Atari hardware
- BIOS: add support for Apollo Core 68080
- BDOS: set archive flag when file is created/modified
- EmuDesk: allow disk delete via desktop File menu item
- EmuDesk: implement desktop 'Install devices'
- EmuDesk: implement desktop 'Install icon'
- EmuDesk: implement desktop 'Remove desktop icon'
- EmuDesk: rewrite 'Install application'
- EmuCON2: provide a standalone version of EmuCON2

You can download your preferred binary archive here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/emutos/files/emutos/0.9.7/



Amiga 3000, Atari TT030 and Macintosh IIci 030 68030 Computers Compared!


By M. Bergseth


The 80s was over. 1989-1990 was alive, and so was 68030 monster
machines era alive. Here we compare Amiga 3000, Atari TT030 and
Macintosh IIci 030 computers. The Mac is from 1989, but it got
same specs as the Amiga and Atari, however even if it was
released one year before the price of it was huge. The 68030 CPU
line from Motorola was used in several machines, but here we
compare these 3 as they are all SCSI based computers. They also
have quite similar specs, but at the same time others are not and
because of this differ a lot and a wonder how Commodore and Atari
could screw things up so badly!? Theyve could both have been
strong names today, if they did the right moves in 1990 for sure.
Here we look at these monsters, but important computers that
actually changed the computer industry a lot.

Atari TT030 and Amiga 3000 also tried to introduce UNIX to the
people. Atari promised UNIX to be released at launch, but it took
2 years before it was actually released. Commodore launched Amiga
3000UX with Amix (Commodore UNIX). These giants sure made impact
for sure and because of their price and functionality should have
been much more loved back in the days. The Mac also had UNIX
possibility since 1989, but because of the price you had to pay
for the machine it wasnt a affordable like A3000 or Atari TT030.

It is a bit unfair to compare these regarding the price, as 68030
CPUs became cheaper later. But the price of $8798 on Macintosh
IIci is just insane high. Amiga 3000 was launched at a price of
$3379 which was also was quite stiff, but much more affordable by
less riches bussines people. The Atari TT030 landed at $2995 which
made it the cheapest one.

How Apple could survive with serving the public such expensive
machine is beyond my understanding. The specs of the machine was
quite high for the time, but the Amiga 3000 was miles ahead of it
and especially the sound quality of Paula 8-bit custom chipset
was still miles ahead of the competitors. The Atari TT030 desktop
computer was on the other hand a bit cheaper when launched.
However the specs of it said that the machine had 16 MegaByte of
RAM as standard, which should have wiped out the competition if
only AtariTOS (and the promised UNIX OS) were updated fully. What
were Atari thinking??? There are some words about that Atari had
issues with Atari TT030 at first;

    The Atari TT030 was Ataris crown jewel of computer systems up
until the Atari Falcon030 became available 2 years later. However
its a toss up between the two systems as to which one is better.
Originally the Atari TT030 was to come with a MC68030 at 32Mhz and
the units initial run was done with those processors and that
speed. However problems plagued the initial run and 32mhz
processors were swapped out and 16mhz version were put in there
place. The later run of TT030s did have issues resolved and were
sold in the 32Mhz version.

The time in 1990 was a bloody race at the Motorola side of CPUs.
Both Commodore and Apple managed to launch cheaper 68030 and 68040
machines later on, but in 1990 all 3 companies actually competed
themself to a death sort of. Apple just survived because of their
brilliant iPod launch later. Commodore even managed to release a
68030 version of Amiga 4000 that was way cheaper than the 68040
version. Still Commodore went down. Atari finished the Atari TT
development totally in 1993 and so their desktop computer era was
over. Atari Falcon030 lasted a bit more, but its rather seen as a
Amiga 1200 competitor.

Vital information about these 68030 monster machines from 1989-1990

 		Amiga 3000		Atari TT030	Macintosh IIci

PRICE		  $3379		   $2995			$8798
YEAR		  1990		   1990			1989
OS	   AmigaOS 2.04(32-bit)Atari TOS 3.0x (16-bit)MacOS 6.0.4 (16-bit)
CPU	    68030 25MHz	     68030 32MHz	   68030 25MHz
CPU MAX	68060 50MHz/PowerPC 604e 233MHz	68030 32MHz 68040 25MHz / PowerPC 601 100MHz
GFX	        ECS	          TT	          Dedicated
COLOURS	4096 (HAM mode)	     16	            256
MEM	       2MB	              16MB	            4MB
HD TYPE	  SCSI	         SCSI	            SCSI
HD SIZE  40MB, 50MB or 100MB   50MB	         40MB, 80MB
SOUND	PAULA   8-bit	     STe Soundchip	   Built-in Audio
EXPANSION	 Zorro III,ISA 	     TBA	          NuBus, ADB,
PCI EXPANSION  Possible	     No	              No
FLOPPY STORAGE  1.74MB	    720KB	           1.44MB
UNIX	          YES	           YES	             YES

The prices of these machines is taken from the year they were
launched. Todays currency isnt taken into those numbers. Here I
wanted to show the differences at the time of 1989-1990. The
point of this article is to try to get a glimps of these machines
that were huge competitors in 1990. With PC line on the side that
just took of, it is now a bit shock to see both Atari and
Commodore no longer with us. Both of these had specs at the same
level of Apples.

Mac was however very expensive at that time, but even today Mac
is still as expensive. However today they have design that makes
people buying their laptops and iMacs. At that time, it is
clearly that Amiga 3000 was and still is looking good even today.
The design that Commodore made was timeless and shows how far
Commodore was at their design. Only if they didnt collapse in
1994. What if we could change the history today?

Comparing all of these 68030 beasts, Amiga 3000 is the one that
is most expandable even today. Elbox is a company that have made
PCI Expansion Possibilities for the machine even. Zorro III was
for a long time a very nice expandable system made by Commodore.
You can actually install a cheap ATI Radeon 9200 card if you
want and get 3D support also etc. The Zorro III expansion
possibility also gave A3000 PC Emulators, Mac Emulators, Sound
cards and also Ethernet cards.

With this article I tried to view how it was in 1989-1990. Apple
released way more 68k Macs later that was way cheper, but still
they kept quite high price tag. You could say that Amiga 4000 030
and Macintosh LC III 030 would be rivals from 1992 etc. Atari
gave up the TT line in 1993 and Commodore final machine was the
Amiga 4000T.

Purpose of this article is to show the differences of these
machines at a time all of these had high expectations for their
future. However different decisions by different CEOs made Atari
and Amiga loose it. What if everything ended in a different way?
How would the world have been today?



                                  =~=~=~=



->In This Week's Gaming Section  - Microsoft Refunds Call of Duty Players!
  """""""""""""""""""""""""""""    Rebooteroids for the Atari Jaguar!
                                   
                                   


        
                                  =~=~=~=



->A-ONE's Game Console Industry News   -  The Latest Gaming News!
  """"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""



        Windows 10 Store Refunds Call of Duty Player
                  Because Nobody's Playing It


Every year, Activision releases another Call of Duty and gamers
across the world scramble to get their hands on the new shooter.
Fans love the single player campaign, but the games polished,
fun, and fast-paced multiplayer mode is the real draw.

Of course, it only works if you have other people to play with.
A few gamers who bought Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare through
the digital storefront built into Windows 10 have discovered they
can only play with other gamers who also bought the game from
Microsoft. Xbox One players can only play with other Xbox One
players, and PlayStation 4 players can only play with other
PlayStation 4 players. This has always been the case. The trouble
is that this time not all PC players can play with other PC
players. For unknown reasons, Windows 10 Store customers are
segregated from customers who bought the game from Steam, which
is by far the most popular platform on PC.

Thats like buying a game from Target and learning you cant play
with people who bought it from Best Buy. Call of Duty fans who
made the unfortunate of mistake of giving Microsoft their cash
are left sitting in lonely multiplayer lobbies waiting for games
thatll never start.

However, it appears that Microsoft is giving out refunds.

Activision released two Call of Duties this year. Infinite
Warfare is a new entry in the franchise and Modern Warfare
Remastered is a fancy remake of one of the series' most popular
games players could get as an extra for buying Infinite Warfares
special edition. One Reddit users little brother bought a copy
of special edition to play Warfare Remastered through the
Windows 10 Store. When he tried to play some deathmatch he
learned he was one of two people looking for a game.

Thats right, he couldnt find a game for one of the most popular
multiplayer shooters of all time. To put that in perspective,
more than 5,000 gamers are playing Modern Warfare Remastered on
Steam right now.

Redditor hayz00s' little brother never did find a match and
called up the Windows 10 Store to refund the product. It was very
easy, hayz00s told me in a private Reddit message. He said they
were very courteous and didn't give him any trouble trying to get
the refund.

The Redditors brother bought the game from the Windows 10 Store
for two simple reasons: It was cheaper and he wanted to play with
another sibling whod bought the game on Xbox One.

Microsoft has spent the past six months pushing cross platform
play between PC and Xbox One. High profile titles such as Gears
of War 4 and Forza Horizon 3 already support the feature, but
Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare does not.

The price difference is pretty big. Steam users who want to play
the remastered Modern Warfare have to drop $79.99 for Call of
Dutys Legacy Edition. The Windows 10 Store has the same product
for $63.99.

hayz00s said hed stick to Steam, but his brother would use the
Windows 10 Store again, If its cheaper than Steams version
and wont have separated online multiplayer.

Call of Duty does have a single player campaign, but most fans
buy the games to kill other people in multiplayer. Without that,
its just not Call of Duty and its not worth the cash. The
Redditor claimed he reached out to Microsoft and scored his
little brother a refund, a heroic feat in these days of
draconian digital return policies.

This probably isn't Microsoft's fault. Microsoft has been
pushing cross platform play between the Xbox One and Windows 10
for the past year, even promising people who buy a game on one
platform will get it on the other for free.

"We support cross-play between devices and platforms for
partners who want to enable it, a Microsoft spokesperson told
Windows Central when it asked them about the recent Call of Duty
problems. The statement implies Activision made the call to keep
PC players who bought the game from different storefronts
separate. Which, if true, is ridiculous.

Gamers are used to the separation of console and PC multiplayer
communities. But PC players arent used to companies gating them
off based on where they purchased their game. Its a ludicrous
policy that doesnt serve anyones interest and its another
black eye for a digital storefront that PC gamers already avoid
like the plague.



                                  =~=~=~=



->A-ONE Gaming Online       -       Online Users Growl & Purr!
  """""""""""""""""""
 


               Rebooteroids for the Atari Jaguar
	

Rebooteroids is a new take on an arcade classic for the Atari
Jaguar. In development for over six years, Rebooteroids is now
available for purchase! Rebooteroids features 100 unique levels,
plus 10 'kombateroids' levels for multiplayer head to head. You
can choose from five gameplay modes, including a 'skirmish mode'
whereby randomly generated levels of increasing difficulty
challenge the player. Enjoy the original soundtrack by 505 and
MSG/reservoir gods while you fight your way through each wave.

You pilot the EWS, a small, highly maneuverable test ship
equipped with a basic rapid-fire cannon. Your test ship is also
fitted with a state of the art Hyperspace Engine which, if it was
working, would be capable of jumping the craft vast distances.
However, due to damage, it currently only has the ability to jump
short range, and without a navigation lock you have no way of
knowing where you will pop back into normal space.

Use your controller to rotate the EWS left and right, thrust to
avoid colliding with objects, and most importantly, fire to blast
everything in sight! Collect bonus power-ups to increase your
odds of survival. Every five waves (in Arcade mode) you'll enter
a bonus round, where you have the opportunity to earn an extra
life. Your high scores are saved to the cart, and you can also
share them online.

Rebooteroids is packed into a 4MB cartridge and includes a
high-quality box and 20-page manual.

Please visit the AtariAge Store to purchase a copy today!



                                  =~=~=~=



                           A-ONE's Headline News
                   The Latest in Computer Technology News
                       Compiled by: Dana P. Jacobson



     IBM Built A Copy of the Internet for Mock Cyberattacks


A simulated version of the entire Internet is now live inside an
IBM data center in Massachusetts, where the company plans to hold
mock cyberattacks against large corporations.

The "cyber range," located just a few blocks from MIT in
Cambridge, is manned by former security experts from federal law
enforcement and intelligence agencies. They can use live malware,
ransomware, and other hacking tools to stage realistic
cyberattacks.

IBM said in a statement that it is the first privately operated
facility of its kind. It's built around the intranet of a
fictitious corporation, with more than one petabyte of information
and more than 3,000 users. IBM hopes it will better prepare its
clients to recover from the type of large-scale attack that
disabled much of the US Internet infrastructure for several hours
last month.

"Response is such a big part of security, but it's often a
forgotten part of security," IBM Security General Manager Marc
van Zadelhoff said at the facility's unveiling Wednesday,
according to BostInno. Seventy-five percent of IT and security
professionals that IBM surveyed said their organizations don't
have a modern incident response plan in place.

In addition to getting critical systems back online, the response
to a cyberattack typically involves notifying a company's
customers in addition to alerting government authorities. The
Obama administration recently issued new rules for handling
cyberattacks, complete with a color-coded "cyber incident
severity schema" reminiscent of the Bush-era Homeland Security
Advisory System.

IBM's Cambridge center is the latest addition to its security
division, which already has 1,400 experts in multiple data centers
around the world who use the Watson artificial intelligence
platform to detect attacks.



   Twitter Accused of Political Bias in Right-wing Crackdown


Ariana Rowlands, a 20-year-old college student from Southern
California, is half Mexican and half Welsh, a child of immigrants
raised on telenovelas and burritos. She's also a fervent
conservative who regularly airs her political views on Twitter.

"So proud of my Hispanic Heritage and so proud to support
@realDonaldTrump for President!!" she tweeted in September under
a hashtag celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month. Soon after, she
began receiving personal attacks and death threats, she says.

Rowlands reported the abuse but she says Twitter did nothing.
And, she says, it wasn't the first time Twitter ignored concerns
for her safety that she and her Twitter followers expressed and
even reported to police.

"I want to stress that it's not like we're crying victim or
anything like that," Rowlands said in an interview. "It's just
that we're pointing out the double standard."

Rampant abuse on Twitter is in the spotlight coming off a
bitterly divisive election season that turned the social media
service into a political battleground. When it comes to policing
behavior from warring sides that crosses the line, conservatives
say Twitter is guilty of left-wing favoritism. The rash of recent
suspensions of high-profile alt-right accounts is more evidence
of that favoritism, they say.

"The commonality of these groups that are being targeted is
their politics, and you don't see it on the other side as much,"
D.C. McAllister, a columnist for conservative news service PJ
Media and The Federalist, said in an interview.

"There are Twitter accounts on the left that are suspended, but
it's not en masse like it is here."

Whether Twitter has taken a more aggressive stance with some users
over its harassment policies is hard to prove: Twitter gives few
details, if any, when it suspends accounts, and some observers say
the fault lies more in its failure to rein in abuse regardless of
the political tilt.

But the perception that it has a double standard runs strong.
Twitter's suspension of alt-right leader Richard Spencer
contributed to the suspicion that Twitter is arbitrarily stifling
conservative speech. Spencer, who coined the term alt right in
2010, says he was tossed from Twitter for his political views  he
wants to segregate the United States by racial groups  not for
harassing Twitter users. He was suspended alongside the accounts
of other white nationalists.

Conservatives say their ouster fits a pattern of liberal bias.

In July when Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones was subjected to
racist and sexist taunts led by Breitbart technology editor Milo
Yiannopoulos, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey intervened and yanked
Yiannopoulos from the service.

Yet, conservatives say, nothing happened to rapper Talib Kweli
and his followers when they attacked black Breitbart reporter
Jerome Hudson with racial slurs. When Breitbart contributor
Kassy Dillon complained about a Twitter user who sent her
harassing tweets and messages, Twitter made the perpetrator
delete one tweet that suggested someone shoot Dillon in the
head.

Twitter refused to comment directly on the allegation that it
ignores abuse hurled at conservatives. "The Twitter rules prohibit
violent threats, harassment, hateful conduct and multiple account
abuse, and we will take action on accounts violating those
policies," the company said in an emailed statement.

Long before the contentious election, Twitter was under growing
pressure to cut off the gushing fire hose of hate and harassment
that targeted people.

Users don't have to reveal their real names on Twitter and that
anonymity emboldens them to attack women, people of color,
Muslims, gays and other groups, even threaten rape and death. The
alt right, a loose-knit group that embraces white nationalism
among other things, gained prominence during the presidential
campaign for using social media to spread its ideology through
viral memes and anonymous attacks on users from pro-Donald Trump
accounts.

The Anti-Defamation League documented a dramatic rise in
anti-Semitic tweets targeting journalists who covered the
Republican presidential candidate. After the election, the
neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer published a list of more than
50 Twitter users who had expressed fear about the outcome of the
election, urging its readers to "punish" them with a barrage of
tweets that would drive them to suicide.

"While we have taken steps over the years to try to combat abuse
and harassment, we haven't moved as quickly as we would have liked
or we haven't always done as much as we would have liked because
we have tried to make sure we are not making decisions that have
unintended, negative consequences and ramifications," Del Harvey,
Twitter's head of safety, recently told USA TODAY.

As a private platform, Twitter is not required to treat all users
equally. Harvey says Twitter is drawing a hard line between free
speech and "behavior that is intended to silence others."

But conservatives say they see public shows of support for
liberals and their causes, such as gay rights and racial justice,
yet Twitter turns a deaf ear when left-wing activists target them.

"When liberals complain, Jack Dorsey is on their side. He sees
their point of view. He cares about their feelings," said
Rowlands, who is president of the UC Irvine College Republicans,
a group that had a run-in with campus administrators when it
hosted an event with Yiannopoulos and then invited him back for
another.

"But because I am a conservative, it seems like Twitter doesn't
actually care," she said. "They selectively choose when they want
to follow their own rules."

Twitter isn't alone in facing allegations of political bias from
the right. Earlier this year, Facebook was accused of
intentionally suppressing conservative news from appearing on
Trending Topics, its listing of the most popular news stories on
Facebook. Facebook denied the charge.

James Grimmelmann, a Cornell law professor who studies social
networks, says he does not believe Twitter's lapses are
politically motivated. Complaints are just as common on the left
as they are on the right, he said.

"Twitter is terrible at listening to anybody about harassment,"
he said. "The rare exceptions are those who organize media
campaigns and get enough attention to catch Jack's ear. That is
a very small number of people compared with the amount of
harassment that gets reported to Twitter."

In the tense aftermath of the election, Twitter may be even less
effective at cracking down on abusive behavior anywhere on the
political spectrum, said Syracuse University communications
professor Jennifer Grygiel, who studies social media.

"Everyone is blowing up their phones," Grygiel said. "The Twitter
moderation queue must be off the hook."

McAllister sees it differently. She believes Twitter moderators
are demonstrating their political bias when deciding which
complaints to take seriously. She also says conservatives are less
likely than what she labels "social justice warriors" on the left
to complain about abuse. If Twitter was simply "incompetent," she
said, suspensions and other penalties would be "a lot more
random."

"They are a private company and they can do what they want," she
said. But, "people have their biases and it comes through in their
work."

"We are always telling people to check their privilege. They need
to check their biases," McAllister  said. "What we are asking
from Twitter is fairness."



                Google Takes Aim at Fake-News Sites


Alphabet Inc.s Google plans to ban fake-news websites from using
its ad-selling software, a sign that technology companies are
moving to address a growing controversy about misinformation on
the internet.

Google said Monday it plans to prevent Google ads from being
placed on pages that misrepresent, misstate, or conceal
information about the publisher, the publishers content, or the
primary purpose of the website. The policy would cover sites that
distribute false news, a Google spokeswoman said.

False news stories, particularly those that spread widely on
Facebook Inc.s social network, became an issue during the recent
presidential election. Google experienced its own mishap on Sunday
when a story on a right-wing blog erroneously stating Donald Trump
won the popular vote appeared atop some Google search results.

Some media commentators have urged tech companies to try to prevent
the spread of such misinformation. 

Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg on Saturday tried to play
down the prevalence of fake news on the social network. In a
lengthy post, he said fake news accounts for less than 1% of global
content on Facebook and didn't affect the outcome of the election;
he said there are false stories with both conservative and liberal
leanings.

At the same time, Mr. Zuckerberg said Facebook is developing tools
to help reduce fake news on the site, including one that would
allow users to flag news that they believe is fake. However, Mr.
Zuckerberg warned that the tool could be misused if people flag
content that reflect opinions they disagree with.

Google largely had avoided such controversy, in part because it
lacks a popular social-media site where stories are shared among
users. Moreover, Googles search algorithm favors webpages that
are well-designed and are linked to by other established sites,
which tends to disfavor fake news.

But Googles AdSense program, which helps website operators place
ads on their sites, is the most popular tool for monetizing
websites and helps fund many fake-news sites. Google has long
blocked ads that misrepresent what they market, and blocks AdSense
from sites that promote hate speech or include pornography or
violent content.

Googles move will crimp revenue at many fake-news sites, but it
likely wont obliterate the small industry of misinformation in
some corners of the internet. Others offer similar ad-selling
services, though they may not be as lucrative for publishers as
AdSense.

On Sunday, Google was pulled into the debate concerning fake news
on the web when a blog post on 70news.wordpress.com highlighting
incorrect election results appeared atop some Google search
results. In fact, Hillary Clinton leads Mr. Trump by nearly
700,000 votes, according to Googles own election data, though
Mr. Trump was elected president by amassing a majority in the
Electoral College.

The goal of Search is to provide the most relevant and useful
results for our users, a Google spokeswoman said via email. In
this case we clearly didnt get it right, but we are continually
working to improve our algorithms.

The 70news.wordpress site said its source for the popular-vote
count was a tweet by another person. Efforts to reach the
websites operator were unsuccessful.

The little-known blogs prominent position in some search results
appeared to be a rare occurrence. An analysis by data journalists
at the University of Maryland showed that the vast majority of
news stories included in the In the news box in Google search
results come from established news organizations.

CNN and the New York Times together accounted for about 44% of
the links in those boxes for searches of Hillary Clinton and
Donald Trump between May 31 and July 9, according to the
analysis, which examined 5,604 links. In just four cases, the
analysis found stories from fringe-news sites Breitbart News and
InfoWars.

On Monday, after several news organizations wrote about the
70news link in Google search results, such queries began showing
a so-called info box from Google on election data atop the
results. The link to 70news also was displaced by established
news sites reporting on the earlier link.



 Wi-Fi Shadows Cast by Your Fingers Could Leak Your Password


Researchers in a team from Shanghai, Boston and Tampa recently
published an temptingly titled paper about password stealing.

Dubbed When CSI Meets Public Wi-Fi: Inferring Your Mobile Phone
Password via Wi-Fi Signals, the paper makes you think of Crime
Scene Investigation, but thats just a handy collision of
acronyms.

This CSI is short for channel state information, a collection of
readings that describes whats happening at the lowest level of the
data link between a Wi-Fi sender, such as your laptop, and a
receiver, such as as an access point.

If you remember the cassette tapes on which early home computer
programs were stored, youll know that there wasnt much CSI going
on: there were typically two sound frequencies, 1200Hz and 2400Hz,
and the pitch of the recording warbled between them every few
milliseconds to denote zeros and ones.

In modern Wi-Fi standards, however, connections are much more
complex, with each radio channel divided into many sub-channels
that transmit in parallel, and multiple antennas that measure
different signal paths, thus turning echoes and reflections into
an advantage, not a liability.

Chopping your radio spectrum into lots of sub-channels is a bit
like sending 20 bicycle couriers across town at the same time,
each carrying a modest amount of correspondence, instead of
stuffing the whole lot in a van and delivering it in one go.

When you have numerous independent delivery channnels, your
throughput copes much better with localised interference, because
you havent got all your communication eggs in one basket.

Now imagine that you have a stream of real-time information about
how what route each courier is taking, and how much progress each
of them has made so far.

You can build up a picture of what the traffic looks like in
various parts of the city, and you can guess at whats causing
the various holdups.

After all, protesters converging on parliament cause a different
pattern of disruption than a pile-up on the airport access road.

Thats the kind of approach that the researchers tried in this
paper.

They used specially modified firmware dowloaded into a Wi-Fi
network card to create an access point that could keep track of
minute variations in the underlying communication signal and
correlate those changes with your typing.

They dubbed their attack WindTalker.

Their idea was that if they could get their rogue access point
close enough to your phone, then the interference caused even by
your fingers moving in front of the on-screen keyboard might
produce detectable differences in the CSI data that they
measured.

And if they could guess when you were about to start entering a
PIN using just 10 widely spaced positions on the screen, rather
than when you were busy with the more complicated business of
navigating through a web form or typing words from the entire
keyboard

then they could focus their attention on the moments when they
had the best chance of success.
Limitations of the attack

The paper is mathematically rather technical: it helps if you are
already familiar with techniques such as discrete wavelet
transforms, dynamic time warping and machine learning.

But the bottom line, in brief, is that the researchers claim
modest success in guessing PINs tapped in on mobile phones, based
on Wi-Fi interference caused by the fingers doing the tapping.

Fortunately, the current version of the attack seems to have many
limitations:

    The attack only works with one model of Wi-Fi network card,
which limits the range of Wi-Fi devices that can be modified for
malicious purposes.
    The attack relies on modified firmware code that is prone to
 crashing, which limits its usefulness.
    The attack only works on unencrypted networks, because the
authors havent yet managed to squeeze both the CSI-grabbing code
and Wi-Fi decryption code into the limited firmware space
available.
    The tests were done in what looks like a rather sterile radio
environment, without the levels of interference you might expect
in real life.
    The attack relies on a consistent stream of network replies
from your phone (800 ping replies per second) to form the basis
of the CSI measurements, a rate that we found hard to maintain
when we tried in an office environment.
    The attack doesnt yet seem to scale from PIN entry to
full-on passwords, so it isnt applicable to all login pages you
may use.
    The attack is thwarted by two-factor authentication (2FA),
because it relies on guessing a password that can be re-used
indefinitely. 

What to do?

You can probably guess our advice in this case.

Use 2FA whenever you can, and you will be taking a big step
towards a digital lifetstyle in which you greatly reduce the risk
of sniffed and stolen passwords.

If the crooks cant figure out what tomorrows login code is
going to be, theres no longer much point in stealing todays.



                        Fool Me Once, Facebook


This past September Facebook realized it had been making an error
in the way it calculated one of the video metrics on its
dashboard  the average duration of video viewed.

It apologized.

Now it is reporting that it has uncovered other bugs that are
skewing its ad metrics.

On one of its Page Insights dashboards, one summary number showing
seven-day or 28-day organic page reach was miscalculated as a
simple sum of daily reach instead of de-duplicating repeat
visitors over those periods. Going forward, the de-duplicated
seven-day summary in the overview dashboard will be 33% lower on
average and 28-day will be 55% lower.

And..In the Facebook Analytics for Apps dashboard, one metric
called Referrals is miscalculated. This metric evaluates all
posts produced by people via an app or website. Facebook wrote in
its blog post that:
Recommended by Forbes

    We meant to count clicks that went directly to an app or
website; however, weve also counted other clicks on those posts
via the app or website, including clicks to view photos or video.
We are working to fix this.

There is more:

    Out of the referrals we currently report, on average about
30% are actually clicks to consume content on Facebook. For power
users of this metric (top apps that look at this data in the
dashboard most frequently), we found that referrals have been
overstated by approximately 6% on average. Other measurements of
referrals, such as those appearing in Facebooks ads reporting
tools, are unaffected.

Also Facebook has made an improvement to Page organic reach  a
stricter definition  that will translate into the reported reach
being 20% lower on average.

As for that previous error, Facebook is updating how it reads the
video length to address this issue.

Facebook has apologized, again.

To boot, this time it has announced a number of internal controls
to prevent future miscalculations including giving third-party
auditors like ComScore, Nielsen and Moat more access to its data.

Now that Facebook has admitted that it has miscalculated several
ad metrics, the question is, how will its legions of advertisers
react?

I asked Michelle LeBlanc, a social media strategist with ad agency
Industrium, if she thought companies might back away from Facebook
after the first misstep with video counts was announced. Her
answer: not if they understand what Facebook represents.
Specifically she told me:

    I honestly think that most people who truly understand the
value and impact of social media werent really relying on this
metric in the first place. Sure, video view metrics from within
Facebook can be useful to get a quick glimpse of how a campaign is
being received, but when my team creates a paid social strategy
for a client we always want to tie it back to overall business
goals  are we getting people back to their website in some way,
or driving job applications, walk in traffic or sales? If you
cant measure those bigger business goals in some way and tie
them back to your advertising budget, then you need to take a
better look at your strategy, both in the content youre producing
and the actions you are looking for your audience to complete.

What it comes down to, she said, is how a company views the real
value of any business expense, not just an ad buy on Facebook.
Consider the investment in new signage or a coat of fresh pain.

    Businesses frequently take on those expenses without being
able to measure it down to the penny. If your video content is
really connecting with your audience you will be able to see the
return, just as you can see the value of that fresh coat of
paint, and you wont have to rely on a spreadsheet to show it to
you.

Or heres another way to look at it: Facebook has become so
ubiquitous that its reach is probably wider than initially
realized. For example, those crazy political rants your cousin
posts that you finally are forced to block do indeed have some
influence, somewhere with someone.

A recent Pew Research survey found that social media can indeed
cause some users, 20% in fact, to rethink their views on an issue
and 17% say social media has helped to change their views about a
specific political candidate.

Of course some of that content came from fake news sites, an
issue that can come to the forefront following the U.S.
presidential election. Pew noted that:

Respondents who indicated they had changed their minds about
Clinton were more than three times as likely to say that their
opinion changed in a negative direction rather than a positive one
(24% vs. 7%), and respondents who mentioned Trump were nearly five
times as likely to say that their opinion became more negative as
opposed to more positive (19% vs. 4%).

But lets leave aside the fake news site, as awful as their
existence is.

Social media has broken through that final frontier  it has the
ability to change peoples minds about politics and similarly hot
topics like gun control and gun rights, gay rights and
immigration.

Think about it: a post on social media can influence someone on
gun control, one of the most contentious issues of the day. A
miscalculated referrals metric is hardly worth a second glance.



                                =~=~=~=




Atari Online News, Etc. is a weekly publication covering the entire
Atari community. Reprint permission is granted, unless otherwise noted
at the beginning of any article, to Atari user groups and not for
profit publications only under the following terms: articles must
remain unedited and include the issue number and author at the top of
each article reprinted. Other reprints granted upon approval of
request. Send requests to: dpj@atarinews.org

No issue of Atari Online News, Etc. may be included on any commercial
media, nor uploaded or transmitted to any commercial online service or
internet site, in whole or in part, by any agent or means, without
the expressed consent or permission from the Publisher or Editor of
Atari Online News, Etc.

Opinions presented herein are those of the individual authors and do
not necessarily reflect those of the staff, or of the publishers. All
material herein is believed to be accurate at the time of publishing.
