Wow, this is amazing at first glance. Will definitely have to dive into to see that it hits all the requirements. But as someone who trodded down this rathole when a client asked if we supported SSO, it would be an amazing utility to have around.
How battle tested is this with real companies and different IDPs?
In any case, congrats on the launch and will definitely be taking a closer look.
Thanks so much! We're super confident in the 6 IDPs we've built first class support for. But we also know that there are sure to be edge cases we haven't totally caught, we're still a bit early. But at least we can catch those across our customer base, as opposed to you finding them ll in your one-off SAML integration.
We have to really manually test real IDPs, and we do whenever we release new software, but we also run e2e cypress tests against a Mock IDP we built, so SP -> Osso -> Mock IDP -> Osso -> SP, you can see these in our Buildkite CI - https://buildkite.com/enterpriseoss/osso
Can you elaborate what it means to remove the chunks of silence? Aren't there valid cases where there's no sound but you're actually showing/doing something on the video.
Yep there are! This is a harder problem to solve but I have plans to handle it down the road.
For now, I’m targeting it at folks who make videos in the “egghead style” [0] - short, tightly-edited code screencasts where there’s very little dead air.
i'd think it wouldn't be too hard to use something like opencv to detect frames that don't have any/much change between them and then correlate that with the audio detection to figure out what can be safely culled like in that fashion.
Ahh thanks for that, I hadn't seen this post. And the comment thread perfectly summarizes and addresses some of my shock and questions when I read the article.
Just insane the amount of numbers a site this Shared is throwing around.
I'm perfectly serious; i want to download a bunch of stupid memes that my account has liked and saved into various groups in my account over the years. They're public photos that shitpost accounts have posted.
If you find a way, please comment here again.I have saved thousands of posts and even sorted them. I desperately want to download them before nuking my account.
Your likes absolutely are your own interactions, and it's no violation of privacy to allow you access to data to which you already have access. You can't like it unless you can view it first. In fact (it's hidden but it's there) you can go back and view all of your past likes on Instagram.
This is not privacy, this is walled garden nonsense. Instagram thinks they own all your curation activity on the site, and they do not.
I wouldn't characterize these as fake news, they just appear to be massively automated sites generated from public press releases from local government. In several of the articles they list the byline as "By Press Release submission". So it appears they aren't trying to be too deceptive, and if you search the text from the articles is does link back to the actual press release from a real .gov site in that locality.
Also looking at the bylines from metric media news service itself ( just append /author/metric-media-news-service to the main domain ), I would have expected a more discernible pattern of articles biased towards a particular viewpoint, but again, I didn't see anything too nefarious.
So at first glance, it looks like a reasonable local site albeit very cookie cutter, and primarily regurgitations of press releases from local official govs. And at second glance, it doesn't appear to be much worse than that.
NOW having said all of that, I can easily see how this can be turned sideways very easily and quickly by the site maintainers. If you're actually able to build up a good readership with some of this 'basic' content, then come election time or some other critical moment where influence is important, you can easily seed more biased content into the articles. And these don't necessarily need to be blatantly 'fake', they can just be slanted a certain way. They could certainly go full bore and insert some really fake content in there once in awhile.
The sheer magnitude of it all is impressive, taken in isolation these sites would seem legitimate but seeing them all side by side and seeing the content laid out it becomes painfully obvious there's an ulterior motive to it all.
Thanks to the parent comment for making me ( and hopefully more of us ) aware of this type of activity.
> I wouldn't characterize these as fake news, they just appear to be massively automated sites generated from public press releases from local government.
That's just filler: low-quality automated content so that the site appears genuine at first glance. These sites are not intended to attract regular readership. They're a context into which propaganda pieces can be inserted and be linked to on social media. Readers are expected to hit the site only for specific articles, and to not be motivated to explore much further. If these sites were a genuine attempt to make money by peddling local news, they would have more ads and at least some mention of weather or traffic.
How do you know that the motives of the site operators are what you think? For instance it could be that this is a network of ad-revenue generating sites and has nothing to do with civil protest movements...
The sites I've looked at simply don't have enough advertisements for that to be at all plausible. Ads on these sites are so sparse that it's eerie compared to legitimate news sites. Only a small fraction of the content on these sites is going to get any real traffic, and without a regular audience base the handful of ads spots they do offer are not going to bring in much money. I counted just three ads on the "Metro East Sun" homepage and only two on their current top non-bot story—one of those ads was from the Trump campaign.
And even if they do expect to turn a profit off these sites, the clear patterns in their non-bot content need to be explained. Why do all of these sites seem to be focused on mingling Republican propaganda with their filler content? Why not have some sites featuring clickbait for a different audience?
If they are not going for ad revenue as you indicate above (sparse ads, at best) are they instead going for a huge number of "references"? I.e., do they feel (or have they A/B tested) that their miss-information campaign can be more convincing if their initial "contact" can cite a bunch of "references" that all seem to support the "issue" being pushed in that initial contact?
I.e., presume their real aim is some kind of initial email contact, possibly soliciting donations/support for some 'cause'. If that contact email can reference ten of these fake websites, all of which support the point made in the initial email, does it increase the rate of donation/support return from that initial contact email?
A lot of the non-bot content seems to be fairly local stuff: hit pieces against local Democrats or praise for local Republicans. The underlying issues are similar, but the articles themselves don't seem to lend themselves to being aggregated in that manner. Plus, it doesn't seem like a good idea to try to present a false consensus when all the sites you're linking to look like the same site.
And I highly doubt that they're focusing on email as the means of reaching new users. This clickbait is meant to spread via Facebook posts.
> hit pieces against local Democrats or praise for local Republicans.
This suggests another possible reason. Those behind them have found that if the 'fake' site appears to be 'local' enough, it will be seen as more reliable and/or it is more likely to get "liked" (given your "spread via Facebook posts"). Possibly their A/B testing has shown that fake 'local' stuff gets more spreading on FB?
I don't think that's "another" possible reason so much as you're closing in on the original accusation. The reddit group linked upthread refers users to this article explaining these sites: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/31/upshot/fake-local-news.ht...
All you're missing out on at this point is the obvious partisan motivation.
Can we just take a moment to appreciate that a sites legitimacy is questioned because the site isn't crippled by ads to the point of being nearly unusable? That's a really unfortunate state of affairs. Especially since I don't think small sites trying to build an audience can afford to cripple themselves to the same degree with ads as bigger sites can.
One reason I can think of for increased Republican content is because of outrage economics. They tend to generate more clicks. It's also something that isn't catered to by the big news networks. Smaller sites I'm regularly visiting for over ten years have also shifted in this direction and those type of articles always generate more comments than other ones, so the tactic seemingly works.
> I wouldn't characterize these as fake news, they just appear to be massively automated sites generated from public press releases from local government.
Correct. Some are completely automated using state/county filters of public APIs, while others are word for word scrapings of Facebook posts from relevant local groups.
> NOW having said all of that, I can easily see how this can be turned sideways very easily and quickly by the site maintainers. If you're actually able to build up a good readership with some of this 'basic' content, then come election time or some other critical moment where influence is important, you can easily seed more biased content into the articles.
Already happening. Besides the automated posts there is also what appears to be original content written by professional content writers. Some of the websites listed in the spreadsheet will only have automated posts as you've found, but look further and you'll see closer to a 50/50 split on the sites for some of the larger cities. What's more concerning here is that some of these authors are submitting their work to sites in completely disparate areas, and own accounts on all of the websites even if they don't write there.
> The sheer magnitude of it all is impressive, taken in isolation these sites would seem legitimate but seeing them all side by side and seeing the content laid out it becomes painfully obvious there's an ulterior motive to it all.
My understanding of this original content from some of the MassMove discussions is that it's trying to build public opinion where there is none to eventually get laws pushed and signed - so effectively astroturfing.
I imagine these sites need to look/be legitimate in order to be approved to buy advertising on FB. Automating them from press releases is a cheap way to do that. FB does some rigorous checks on ad-sets - I’ve had to honeypot their process to debug why on earth they kept rejecting a site (was an automated scraper flagging it? Or was a manual reviewer rejecting it after clicking around? Was the content, user experience, or something else in violation of FB ad policies?): https://facebook.com/policies/ads
Anyways, if these sites want to buy advertising on FB they need to pass this scrutiny. Would be curious to see which urls/content on these sites MassMove sees as nefarious. What landed these sites on the list?
Edit: Oh I see, there’s a short list of site operators.
Using automated tools to bring easily-scraped news to people is a good way to enure deniability and keep an audience around. Aggregators are wonderful homepages. Then, occasionally, you can (either by accidental scrape or design), push highly biased content that is provably false, and it will be a subtle signal in innocent-seeming noise.
Not saying that's what's happening here, just saying that an abundance of innocuous content does not make a site unbiased and trustworthy, just as it does not make it immediately suspicious.
> I wouldn't characterize these as fake news, they just appear to be massively automated sites generated from public press releases from local government.
In googling a few lines here and there in the articles, I couldn't find a way back to other content. I'm not saying they aren't using other documents as the seed for an article, but the writing appears to be unique upon a quick gut-check. Additionally, the photos appear to be unique as well. Again, super quick checks on my part.
To me, that means these things fit the bill of 'fake news' perfectly [0]. Maybe it was a very good bot that wrote the articles with a very good GAN image creator, maybe it was a mechanical turk that wrote them for ~$0.10. I don't really care. To me, it's fake news.
[0] Per Webster's: "False stories that appear to be news, spread on the internet or using other media, usually created to influence political views or as a joke"
Main points being that brain activity and cognitive tests have shown that kids with excessive screen time use exhibited negative results. Granted these tests likely refer to unattended, non-interactive screen time which is slightly different than this particular app's situation. But the general idea and question of screen time is relevant.
Also anecdotally, I have a young nephew and niece who's parents recently instituted a screen time purge for weeks at a time -- ( parent is an MD and recently attended a conference where research showed similar negative impacts in children's brain development after screen time use ). They've seen less hyperactivity, less meltdowns and improved listening and behavior. Again, one example, so take it for what it's worth.
Raising kids is a time consuming, challenging endeavor for most people, and everyone's experience is going to be unique. So, to each their own. And I'm someone who grew up with NES and after school cartoons. But even given that, I intend on leaning towards caution in this respect and limit screen time as much as possible certainly towards the younger age spectrum.
VMRacks (now hipaavault.com). I'm not affiliated, just a completely satisfied customer. As to setting up the business, I would also recommend a HIPAA auditing/hand-holding company. I use Compliancy Group (https://compliancy-group.com).
Just finished my undergrad in cis, and have been grasping at the many services in the industry. How did you find yourself in freelance within clients needing HIPAA compliant?
I am surrounded by people in the primarily private-pay Mental Health space because my (romantic) partner is a consultant in a tiny cottage industry. In my case, it's 100% "people you know". Dealing in PII suuuuuuucks because I constantly have an elevated anxiety about it. However, if it wasn't PII plus the people I know and met......then I probably wouldn't have the opportunity I have.
That said.....had I not done "this", then I probably would have done something more lucrative and "easy". I see non-PII opportunities everywhere, and (mostly) only hang around because what I do now pays the bills.
Very interesting read on the intersection between Tech/Politics/Money.
Personally I think it's bad idea to inject this type of (essentially) spam email marketing into politics to drive fundraising, but the alternative of Super PAC isn't very attractive either.
"Good things happened to bad people, and bad things happened to good people. Executives who contributed to the crisis retain enormous wealth, while many of those who trusted them have suffered life-altering losses."
The breakdown of trust in our institutions slowly chipped away.
