A Thanksgiving Carol: How Those Smart Engineers at Twitter Screwed Me

Thanksgiving Holiday is a time for family and cheer. Well, a time for family. It's the holiday where we ask our doctor relatives to look at that weird skin growth, and for our geek relatives to fix our computers. This tale is of such computer support, and how the "smart" engineers at Twitter have ruined this for life.

Don Jr.: I'll bite

So Don Jr. tweets the following, which is an excellent troll. So I thought I'd bite. The reason is I just got through debunk Democrat claims about NetNeutrality, so it seems like a good time to balance things out and debunk Trump nonsense.

NetNeutrality vs. limiting FaceTime

People keep retweeting this ACLU graphic in regards to NetNeutrality. In this post, I debunk the fourth item. In previous posts [1] [2] I debunk other items.

NetNeutrality vs. Verizon censoring Naral

People keep retweeting this ACLU graphic in support of net neutrality. It's wrong. In this post, I debunk the second item. I debunk other items in other posts [1] [4].

NetNeutrality vs. AT&T censoring Pearl Jam

People keep retweeting this ACLU graphic in response to the FCC's net neutrality decision. In this post, I debunk the first item on the list. In other posts [2] [4] I debunk other items.

The FCC has never defended Net Neutrality

This op-ed by a "net neutrality expert" claims the FCC has always defended "net neutrality". It's garbage.

This wrong on its face. It imagines decades ago that the FCC inshrined some plaque on the wall stating principles that subsequent FCC commissioners have diligently followed. The opposite is true. FCC commissioners are a chaotic bunch, with different interests, influenced (i.e. "lobbied" or "bribed") by different telecommunications/Internet companies. Rather than following a principle, their Internet regulatory actions have been ad hoc and arbitrary -- for decades.

Sure, you can cherry pick some of those regulatory actions as fitting a "net neutrality" narrative, but most actions don't fit that narrative, and there have been gross net neutrality violations that the FCC has ignored.

Your Holiday Cybersecurity Guide

Many of us are visiting parents/relatives this Thanksgiving/Christmas, and will have an opportunity to help our them with cybersecurity issues. I thought I'd write up a quick guide of the most important things.

Why Linus is right (as usual)

People are debating this email from Linus Torvalds (maintainer of the Linux kernel). It has strong language, like:

Some security people have scoffed at me when I say that security
problems are primarily "just bugs".
Those security people are f*cking morons.
Because honestly, the kind of security person who doesn't accept that
security problems are primarily just bugs, I don't want to work with.

I thought I'd explain why Linus is right.

How to read newspapers

News articles don't contain the information you think. Instead, they are written according to a formula, and that formula is as much about distorting/hiding information as it is about revealing it.

A good example is the following. I claimed hate-crimes aren't increasing. The tweet below tries to disprove me, by citing a news article that claims the opposite:

Ugh turns out you're wrong! I know you let quality data inform your opinions, and hope the FBI is a sufficiently credible source for you https://t.co/SVwaLilF9B

— Rune Sørensen (@runesoerensen) November 14, 2017

But the data behind this article tells a very different story than the words.

Every November, the FBI releases its hate-crime statistics for the previous year. They've been doing this every year for a long time. When they do so, various news organizations grab the data and write a quick story around it.

By "story" I mean a story. Raw numbers don't interest people, so the writer instead has to wrap it in a narrative that does interest people. That's what the writer has done in the above story, leading with the fact that hate crimes have increased.

But is this increase meaningful? What do the numbers actually say?

To answer this, I went to the FBI's website, the source of this data, and grabbed the numbers for the last 20 years, and graphed them in Excel, producing the following graph:

As you can see, there is no significant rise in hate-crimes. Indeed, the latest numbers are about 20% below the average for the last two decades, despite a tiny increase in the last couple years. Statistically/scientifically, there is no change, but you'll never read that in a news article, because it's boring and readers won't pay attention. You'll only get a "news story" that weaves a narrative that interests the reader.

So back to the original tweet exchange. The person used the news story to disprove my claim, but going to the underlying data, it only supports my claim that the hate-crimes are going down, not up -- the small increases of the past couple years are insignificant to the larger decreases of the last two decades.

So that's the point of this post: news stories are deceptive. You have to double-check the data they are based upon, and pay less attention to the narrative they weave, and even less attention to the title designed to grab your attention.

Anyway, as a side-note, I'd like to apologize for being human. The snark/sarcasm of the tweet above gives me extra pleasure in proving them wrong :).