Comment Sections Have Devolved into Garbage Whether you?re considering an online article, news story, or video, the comments section probably isn?t someplace you look for insight and civil discussion as it was intended to be. Instead, there?s an assortment of hate, lewdness, and spammy ?advertisements? filled with malware and/or empty promises. Naturally, the platforms and organizations that support and provide this content aren?t all too pleased with this situation, so they have taken various steps to try and eliminate these comments?some going so far as to eliminate their comment sections entirely. Others have taken a more progressive approach by leveraging advanced technologies?the aforementioned artificial intelligence playing a critical role in their strategies. AI and Automation, Now Involved in Comment Moderation Let?s start with Google, which has a dedicated AI conversation platform called Perspective API. Joining with OpenWeb to conduct a study, Google implemented Perspective API in some news platforms? comment sections to test the real-time feedback functionality. How Well Did AI Moderation Work? This study examined comments that violated community standards on these websites and provided the user with a request to edit their comment??Let?s keep the conversation civil. Please remove any inappropriate language from your comment? or ?Some members of the community may find your comment inappropriate. Try again?? As a control, some commenters saw no intervention message. According to the study, about a third of commenters went back and edited the comment. Of those, half took the advice to heart and made their message more acceptable by eliminating the problematic language. However, a quarter of these users doubled down, simply editing their comment to still make their message clear by evading the filter. For instance, rather than saying ?booger,? the user would edit it to read ?b o o g e r,? or would adopt a new word to stand in for an offensive one. The rest of the responses were those that revised the wrong part of their submitted comment, misunderstanding the issue, or those that instead directed their comment to the AI feature, rather than the media they were commenting on, complaining about censorship. These results were pretty much in line with those that came from a similar study that Google conducted with Coral, which showed toxic language being edited out in 36 percent of cases. Having said that, another experiment that The Southeast Missourian conducted showed a 96 percent reduction in ?very toxic? comments after this feedback was provided. Ultimately, the number of people who persisted in posting their comment unedited or simply chose not to post anything after all show that these gentle reminders are only effective to a degree, with people who legitimately don?t mean any offense. Fortunately, there is also some indication that the number of so-called Internet trolls is overestimated, and that most inflammatory comments come from people feeling some strong emotion. This interpretation was boosted by the findings of another study conducted with Wikipedia. Most offensive content was reactive and isolated. Besides, compared to the scale of the Internet, the 400,000 comments sampled by OpenWeb and Google are far from statistically significant. YouTube?one of Google?s most prominent possessions?has especially been active when it comes to comment moderation. Its comment sections are notorious for exactly the kind of problematic dialogue that these enhancements are looking to correct. This kind of approach […]
Quibi?s Quick Exit In 2020, streaming services are all the rage. That?s why Quibi thought that they could alter the business model somewhat and succeed. The streaming service offered some of the biggest names out there in short-form episodes. With so much talent connected it was easy for Quibi founders to get the financial backing they needed, some $1.75 billion in all, to press forward. They charged $5 a month for the service. At that price point, how could they fail? They did. With the pandemic sheltering a lot of people in place, people just didn?t have the need for mobile-exclusive short-form content. Quibi wasn?t available on any of the devices that people use to view content from home and therefore had middling demand, despite the celebrity attached. Quibi shut down service just seven months after it?s debut and most of the remaining investment was returned to the financiers. So, what can we learn from Quibi?s failure? The old adage ?timing is everything? stands true. Not to say that Quibi couldn?t have failed in a normal economy, but the COVID-19 pandemic made people a lot less reliant on mobile for their chosen content and it negatively affected the company?s chances to succeed. Zoom?s Security Missteps As people were asked to stay inside to ward against the spread of COVID-19, individuals and businesses began to lean heavily on conferencing solutions. Some platforms simply weren?t up to the challenge, but as the pandemic entered its second month, Zoom answered the call and was being used by hundreds of millions of people. Unfortunately, Zoom didn?t have the security in place early on, and it had negative effects for people. Hate groups would ?Zoombomb? a meeting and share their bigoted world view, and other people reported being inundated with lewd conduct from outside parties while in a Zoom meeting. Since then, Zoom has built onto their service and now has the security needed to be used by so many people to this day. Celebrity Twitter Hack It?s off putting when people?s social media accounts get hacked. 2020 saw some of the most high-profile people?s Twitter accounts get hacked as a part of a Bitcoin scam. Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Barack Obama, and Kanye West all had their Twitter accounts hacked in the scam. Twitter quickly locked down the accounts and put the kibosh on the scam and has since taken further steps to ensure that that kind of scam won?t happen again, but questions about account security and data privacy remain as a result of the hack. Coronavirus Myths and Misinformation In times of public crisis, hackers and scammers typically thrive. This was evident for most of 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic brought out the worst. With so many people conducting their business and social lives online, it was the perfect opportunity for cybercriminals. Here are a few examples of problems created for people online due to the coronavirus: Numerous conspiracy theories linking the development of 5G connectivity to COVID-19, resulting in acts of cell tower vandalism and assault against telecom employees. Bill Gates being accused of masterminding COVID-19 or using the pandemic to implant people with microchips?despite his long history of contributing to disease-fighting causes and efforts. Fumbled information sharing efforts on the part of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention?s […]
What is Voice over Internet Protocol? VoIP is a telephone signal that uses the Internet to transmit its data, rather than the traditional phone infrastructure. This methodology helps businesses in a few different ways?including significant cost savings and many included features that would otherwise come at an additional charge. Basically, utilizing VoIP makes the services provided by the telephone company essentially redundant. Why You Should Use VoIP VoIP offers a lot of real benefits to a business that implements it. First off, it is easily accessible on a wide variety of devices, from desktops to laptops and even mobile devices. This not only keeps your communications accessible to your team members, but it also helps to minimize the investment you need to make into your business? communications. After all, since your business should already be capable of supporting Internet connections, it is already equipped to support VoIP. If there are any additional costs associated with your VoIP implementation, they?ll generally be less expensive than the charges the phone company would likely require. VoIP also lends itself well to unified communications, simply due to the diverse integrations that it has with other enterprise solutions. As a result, VoIP can help tie together the rest of your collaborative tools. Furthermore, by helping to track your communications, VoIP helps to improve the efficiency of the conversations you have. White Mountain IT Services can help you make the most of VoIP, starting with your implementation of it. For our assistance with it or the rest of your IT, give us a call at (603) 889-0800.
We?ve all had our full helping of lessons to learn in 2020. Many of us had to make hard decisions and take on uncomfortable roles in order to get through the year. Some were able to make the best of a difficult situation and adapted quickly, while others had a much harder time. I think one of the bigger lessons to take away from this past year, and attempting to commit to business as usual, is that a lot of us are blessed to be surrounded by great, caring, forward thinking people. I feel this way about my team at White Mountain IT Services. They worked hard to help our clients earlier in the year get set up remotely. They worked hard to keep the internal communication happening and adjust our internal processes and deal with obstacles despite what was going on in the world. I?m proud to be a part of this group of people. I feel thankful about having great clients too. Clients who trust me and my team with their technology. The clients who have been with us for a long time, through ebbs and flows, who continue to put their faith in White Mountain IT Services to keep the gears running in their organizations?we thank you. To the new relationships we?ve made over the last year or two, we are so grateful that you chose to work with us and we can?t wait to see where we can go together over the next several years. Our hearts go out to those who have been struggling and have had to downsize, or close their doors altogether. It?s not been an easy year. We hope we see you all again, building new opportunities for New Hampshire. I?m specifically addressing the business owners and C-levels here?I hope you are proud of your people. I hope you are thankful for them. I hope they were able to adjust to remote work if they had to, and I hope that, despite the obstacles, your business comes out on top. As much as we want it to, when the clock strikes midnight on December 31st, the world isn?t going to suddenly change. It?s up to all of us to take the lessons that we?ve learned and apply them to our lives, whether that?s our personal lives or our professional lives. Many of us make promises to ourselves for the new year in the form of resolutions?from one business owner to another, I would like to suggest one to you. Nurture Your People How you do this will depend on your business, on you, and your employees. A good place to start is to realize just how important they are, and how much of an impact they have on your business. For some of us, simply conveying honest, thoughtful gratitude can be huge. If you?ve felt disconnected from your remote workforce, you aren?t alone. It?s harder to sweep the office and check in on people. Doing check-ins and dishing out kudos doesn?t seem as organic when it?s done remotely, but it?s still important. Commit to educating your staff. Cybersecurity threats have evolved to take advantage of home users more than ever before, and with many organizations already being stressed, the last thing they need is to get caught with ransomware or a phishing attack. Your employees (in general) want to […]
Many of the tools and strategies needed to keep your company’s data infrastructure secure may be new to you and your business, but in most cases, they are measures that any organization that wants to protect its IT should take. Let’s take a look at some of the strategies used to secure remote endpoints. Virtual Private Networking A Virtual Private Network (VPN) is a tool you may have heard of, that establishes an encrypted connection between your business? network and a remote endpoint. This allows people to send and receive information securely by passing it on via an intermediary network. The configuration of the VPN is where people start to get confused. IT administrators must therefore decide which security priorities to set for their network and which to disable. With more data coming in?and encrypted, for that matter?more bandwidth will be required, and the amount required for the entire team is going to be costly. On the other hand, there are clear security concerns without the VPN in place, making this a delicate balance. Phish Fighting Phishing is one of the largest cybersecurity issues for either in-house or remote employees, but arguably is a bigger risk for an employee working from home. After all, they likely aren?t under the same protections that should be set up in the office. Today?s Endpoint Protection and Response (EDR) tools can help to mitigate some of this risk, but the onus will still be on the user with their fingers on the keyboard. Therefore, training your employees to recognize an attempted phishing attack is the most effective way to really deter them. Establishing and repeatedly reinforcing the best practices and warning signs, and what to do if they do encounter one, is the best strategy to protect your business from phishing. Threat Intelligence Of course, you shouldn?t rely exclusively on your end users to protect your business. Your IT department should also have installed a comprehensive threat intelligence system, which helps to keep you protected from new threats as they develop. At the very least, your IT resource will be kept up to speed on the threats posing risks to your technology. Incident Response Finally, you have to account for the fact that one of your users will likely slip up and get ?hooked,? so to speak, by a phishing attack. Accidents happen, nobody?s perfect. In these cases, the EDR can help you determine how badly you?ve been breached, quarantining the impacted areas and resolving the threat. There are even options to help automate your anti-hacker efforts. Putting it plainly, any business that uses technology?really, any business currently in operation?needs to worry about its cybersecurity. To learn more about the protections and precautions you should take, give our IT experts a call at (603) 889-0800.
