An army of volunteer 'elves' fights disinfo in the Czech Republic - <AUTHOR> https://www.codastory.com/disinformation/volunteers-fight-disinfo-czech-republic/ <comment><USER2> I'm sure there are organizations that earnestly and in good faith fight disinformation online, but whenever I hear the term "online army to fight disinfo" it's almost certainly another group also trying to put their own spin on things rather than asserting some objective ground truth.

<comment><USER3> It's always just a matter of perspective. What are one sides freedom fighters, are the other sides terrorist. This will never change as long as people are fighting for "truth and justice".

<comment> seph-reed > It's always just a matter of perspective

Straight-up lying does exist. And to quote the article:

"We must persuade the general public that fake news and disinformation are simply not a question of different opinions, but a planned campaign organized by foreign actors," Kučík said. "This is a serious matter."

<comment><USER3> > Straight-up lying does exist.

And? All side lies. People lie to fight lies. Is a smaller evil good when it serve the greater goodness or still bad? Is false good still good when you don't see the lie? What if you the lie but not the greater good?

<comment><USER4> Lies are lies - and it's increasingly easy to see through them. From a purely pragmatic standpoint, the reason not to lie is that you will probably be caught, and after that you will not be trusted.

The information age will force the art of PR to reevaluate itself at a fundamental level.

<comment><USER3> > Lies are lies - and it's increasingly easy to see through them.

No, it's not. If everyone lies, how do you know what's real? The reveal could be a lie too. You need to have expertise in the specific area to know whether it's a lie or not. Or you trust nothing, or everything, or just convincing sources.

That's a reason why fake-news work so well, because people can't trust anything anymore, some people choose the sources which from their point of view are the least untrustable. In which case certain lies have no relevance for them anymore.

> the reason not to lie is that you will probably be caught, and after that > you will not be trusted.

Reality has disprooven this more than enough. Unless it's a big lie with legal consequences, getting caught is just a temporary sting which in best case goes under in the flood of daily noise and comes long after the lie was spread, in which case it has no relevance anyway.

<comment><USER4> > You need to have expertise in the specific area to know whether it's a lie > or not

That is exactly my point. The knowledge that the expertise is based on is available for everyone. If you actually read the conspiracy theories around the virus, and don't allow popular media to tell you they're all idiots, you'd find there is very well researched information out there. You don't need an academic position to know how to do research. And if you know enough, you can validate for yourself of what you're told is true - unless you advocate taking the official sources as unquestionable.

> Reality has disproven this more than enough.

I was thinking the current distrust of the WHO and China was enough evidence of my claim being true. Not to mention the declining trust in mass media (though whether that last one is deserved is a rather partisan question).

Getting caught in a lie is not "just a temporary sting": it's why people become "conspiracy theorists", which is another way of saying, someone who doesn't trust the official story.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Normally I am highly supportive of volunteer based efforts. However for political causes volunteers tend have political biases, which make the results less than authoritative. According to this [1] article from University of Manchester researchers, even EU supported volunteer anti-disinformation campaigns seems to produce more of it themselves. And yes, I did confirm that the "reframingrussia.com" domain does belong to a University of Manchester group[2].

[1] [https://reframingrussia.com/2020/04/06/covid-19-disinformati...](https://reframingrussia.com/2020/04/06/covid-19-disinformation- two-short-reports-on-the-russian-dimension/)

[2] [https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/projects/ref...](https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/projects/reframing- russia-for-the-global-mediasphere-from-cold-war-to-information- war\(12ff514a-6b46-4b0c-b190-76754ccb0033\).html)

<comment><USER6> That's super interesting. It's hard to imagine what a legitimately authoritative anti-disinformation campaign would look like. Back when Operation INFEKTION was big, in the 80's iirc, the U.S. Department of State was involved in trying to counter claims of AIDS being of U.S. origin by sending out letters to many news outlets. Mostly the details of these letters were worked out by a group known as the "Active Mea-sures Working Group".

As far as I know, they were basically underfunded and understaffed, but worked hard to try to tease out the truth and track down the origins of disinformation. These days I'm not sure if it would help or hurt to have the likes of the CIA, FBI, DoD, etc running these groups considering peoples lack of trust in them. It's a tough problem for sure.

<comment><USER4> That's why independent media is so important. The government will always be assumed to have a spin on things: can you imagine if Trump had the US department of state doing what you described? No democrat would ever believe it was unbiased.

It's unfortunate that the government is not the only powerful player in town. Doesn't help that even Amazon owns a news outlet these days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you want to hear the other side of this story, I can recommend Gilbert Doctorow's books or blog. Thoroughly fascinating readings.

He's a fiercely independent yet diligent fact-based writer, a (Harvard- graduate) international affairs specialist based in Belgium and Russia. His non-conformist books "Does Russia Have A Future?" and "A Belgian Perspective on International Affairs" are eye-opening as it gives a rarely seen Russian perspective on the information wars. He doesn't deny Russian malfeasance, but he claims that the Russians are often acting in reaction to a vicious, calculated anti-Russian information campaign in the West which often operates under the guise of human rights activism.

Far from being opinion pieces, he does some excellent investigative journalism with first-hand reports of people, events, press conferences, statements and sometimes blatant falsehoods attributed to Russia, providing evidence of Western "propaganda". Really helps to see the current media situation as an information war or New Cold War, rather than a simple case of "the Russians are evil and they lie all the time and hate us for no reason" which is the narrative that seems to run in the West. That Western narrative really makes no sense to the independent thinker.

<comment><USER8> This is interesting, but it's a sort of tangentially related story, not "the other side of this story".

Whether or not Russia is a victim itself or has been provoked or whatever is not relevant as to whether these volunteers are doing a good thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's interesting that they're targeting chain emails first. I would say comments on the Czech news sites are a bigger problem. Usually the Russian trolls are easy to spot (they use words and terms that people just don't normally use, like "demoblok" to denote the political parties which are critical to Russia), but sometimes it can be quite subtle. Then again maybe the news sites themselves should regulate this.

</comment><comment><USER10> He who controls the definition of "disinfo"

controls the world.

<comment><USER11> Yep - when I questioned my local health authorities guidance that if "healthy" I should take off my mask on crowded public transit and when working with the very elderly (adult day health) I was told to avoid "disinformation" (in writing) and to follow surgeon general and their guidance and take off my mask on public transit and while working with the elderly.

A month later they flip-flopped on that ironically. I wonder if they started to believe some of the "disinformation" that wearing masks is a low cost though imperfect way to reduce spread.

I've found actual scientists working with these diseases are pretty on it for logic, but folks like epidemiologists are sometimes totally horrendous. Is epidemiology less rigorous then other infectious disease educational tracks?

<comment><USER12> Epidemiology during a pandemic is about one part science to three parts PR. Sending a consistent message to the public and getting them to change their behaviour at all is more important than getting the details right.

In the case of masks, the WHO decided early on that masks for the public were of limited use in slowing coronavirus spread: they'd stop some infections but could be detrimental if misused and could threaten the supply to medical professionals. This was a reasonable conclusion at the time. To communicate that to the public, the party line was: masks no good. Many national organisations took their cue from the WHO.

Now the risk/reward tradeoff has shifted: better research shows that masks, even ersatz ones, are good and the supply lines for professionals have improved. So the message has to change: masks good.

The actual scientists know that it's not black and white, but pretending it is is a useful tool for health organisations.

At some point I expect we'll see a flip-flop on the party line that "there is no evidence that covid-19 infection confers immunity against future infection". It's nonsense - there are hundreds of years of circumstantial evidence - but it's just about defensible in that there haven't been any sufficiently powerful blinded trials to directly demonstrate it specifically for Covid-19. Once it's deemed to be in the public good, they'll accept some study showing exposure does indeed confer immunity.

<comment><USER4> > The actual scientists know that it's not black and white, but pretending it > is is a useful tool for health organisations.

Coming from a family of doctors (thought not one myself), I've assimilated the background knowledge to recognize the official BS surrounding face masks and the like. It's been eye-opening, and it certainly made me trust the official story far less. If they're 'stretching the truth' about face masks, what other information about the virus is less than honest?

The pretense is good PR - as long as people trust you, and don't know better. What epidemiologists and PR folks need to realize is that the Information Age has left most people in my position, with more information than they used to have. That means useful lies are seen as such, and the population stops beliveing the approved experts, because there's plenty more with great credentials online saying other things.

<comment><USER13> > What epidemiologists and PR folks need to realize is that the Information > Age

I don't think we have begun to understand what effect this will have on age- old institutions that relied on inside knowledge to maintain their ivory tower existence (and privileges). We already see some sword-rattling and expert communities becoming increasingly defensive. Doctors and other experts are obviously still in charge, no serious web service will give actual medical advice without referring to "your physician" \- but it's a matter of time before that will change if the current trends continue. Let's check back in 30 years or so.

<comment><USER4> As long as deviation can be successfully labelled as 'conspiracy theory', the institutions probably won't have too much trouble. It's when the majority of people begin to see the BS in at least one area, that things will likely change. But that also depends on critical thinkers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> seph-reed This seems awesome and it weirds me out how many anti posts there are... is it better this whole thing just be one sided? Maybe nobody read the article, it's not like they're filtering anything. They're just doing the opposite of spreading disinformation, to the best of their abilities.

</comment><comment><USER14> How about educate people to make that filtering by themselves?

Nobody owns the truth. It's the last thing I want is an horde of elves making that filtering for me.

<comment><USER8> That's what they're doing. They don't have any power to filter anything. I recommend reading the article, it's pretty short.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Perhaps it is better usage now to call them Czechia rather than the Czech Republic. We usually speak of France, not the French Republic.

<comment><USER16> Not clear why you're being downvoted, I remember the Czech government explicitly requesting this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Any similar organizations in the US?</comment>


Uncss – Find unused CSS - <AUTHOR> http://davidwalsh.name/uncss <comment><USER2> Try Helium. [https://github.com/geuis/helium- css](https://github.com/geuis/helium-css)

I wrote and maintain this project for the last 4 years.

There are issues with David Walsh's approach that are explained in the Helium README. Automatic stylesheet generation is a terrible idea, for one.

<comment><USER3> Cool, and this runs in the browser without needing nodejs too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If this worked across a whole site rather than a single page, that would be great.

<comment><USER5> Exactly. Sitepoint made a browser extension to do this years ago but it's not really actively maintained anymore: [http://www.brothercake.com/dustmeselectors/](http://www.brothercake.com/dustmeselectors/)

<comment><USER6> There is an add-on for Firebug too ([https://addons.mozilla.org/en- us/firefox/addon/css-usage/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- us/firefox/addon/css-usage/)) -- I use it a big corp. Basically if there is some wild huge monolithic css file I'll cut a new one for a site & use this to pick a decent-looking base subset from the existing dung heap. Then I'll use it again later to analyze widgets etc. if someone complains "how come ______ doesn't look like it does on the old site?".

I'd love for this all to be automated but it seems there are some fundamental flaws in that. Sometimes unused css still fits into a logical unit and _should_ be included. Sometimes in-use css is just a piece of garbage innocuously clinging to some jagged edge of the DOM.

I try to comment blocks of CSS with both starting and ending comments, "______ START" to "_______ END" to avoid this. That way I can extract those pieces later without really worrying that I'm mangling a code module, manually, without much fear.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You can also get a list of un-used CSS Rules using Chrome. In the Developer Tools, under Audits, the list will appear under "Web Page Performance."

</comment><comment><USER8> Most of us are using CSS precompilers (Less, Sass, Stylus) and then stitching tons of files together into a single .css file. I wonder if there is an easy way to produce Sass/Less/Stylus files with the un-used classes removed.

<comment><USER9> It would be sweet to have a grunt plugin that scans your CSS and templates and removes unused rules. It would probably have to read JS files to be thorough though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> First thought was that this should be a grunt plugin, then I read the comments. Here it is: [https://github.com/addyosmani/grunt- uncss](https://github.com/addyosmani/grunt-uncss)

<comment><USER11> I thought there should be a Gulp plugin, and then I found this: [https://www.npmjs.org/package/gulp- uncss/](https://www.npmjs.org/package/gulp-uncss/)

<comment><USER12> I thought there should be a Broccoli plugin, and then I found this: [https://github.com/sindresorhus/broccoli- uncss](https://github.com/sindresorhus/broccoli-uncss)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This seems to beg for testing integration - run it for every page visited in feature tests, aggregate the results, spit out a "following selectors were defined but not used" report at the end.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is a great first step. It seems the next step toward usefulness is making it follow some script throughout the site as a build/optimize step to tease out the full set of rule usage (think Selenium on PhantomJS). Automatically finding all rule usage in a data-driven application would be an NP complete problem, but with proper direction from the developers this could be a viable tool. Even more so if it could map back to LESS/SASS rules, which I think would also need some brute forcing or at least hand holding. Nice work!

</comment><comment><USER15> Neat. There's also a Firebug extension that does this: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/css- usage/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/css-usage/) A little rough around the edges, but it works.

The challenge, of course, is that's it's hard to say for sure that something is unused. Maybe it's only called on one page, or only after some interaction with javascript on the page.

<comment><USER16> >only after some interaction with javascript on the page

That's why I will use a prefix js-[something] for elements that will interact with javascript and then user other classes for style so nothing gets removed by accident by others.

<comment><USER15> Smart. I end up grepping the whole codebase by hand for each class I want to remove, but even that isn't perfect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Maybe I missed the info, but does it work for a whole website or only 1 subsite?

</comment><comment><USER18> As soon as I hit the page I understood what it was and how awesome that was going to be for me. This is genius! I'm sure something like that has been done before but I've never come across it until now.

</comment><comment><USER19> If you're an ArchLinux AUR user, here's the package: [https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/nodejs- uncss](https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/nodejs-uncss)

</comment><comment><USER20> I prefer [https://github.com/peterbe/mincss](https://github.com/peterbe/mincss) It's based on python :)

</comment><comment><USER21> I don't see how this could work on a single page application where only a small fraction of the content is loaded on page-load.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm using css less and less these days, and letting the browser decide how to render html5 on its own...

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm trying this out in AngularJS. So there's an issue with classes locked away inside templates (or building with @ng-class, anyone?), and authentication scenarios.

I'm thinking about building URL workflows (stored in arrays) and passing authentication tokens via URL.</comment>


Skype releases a hotfix for Skype 5.0 for Mac OSX - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.skype.com/garage/2011/02/skype_50_for_mac_hotfix.html

<comment><USER2> I want a Skype 5 for Mac hotfix that fixes the crappy new UI.

Horrendous. Bug ugly candy buttons. Fonts too big. Way too much white space.

Give us back a compact view, at least as an option! I mean, you are absolutely forced into a one-window-to-rule-them-all mode. No way out. Cannot even collapse the window panes. A chat program should not take up half the screen. Seriously, it's not like there were no good Mac chat clients out there to learn from.

Custom chat styles by the user community have helped, but that's just the chat window pane. The rest still looks like crap.</comment>


Ask HN: If you only do programming at work, how do you manage your career? - <AUTHOR> People who say they don't do programming outside of work hours, I'm kind of surprised at them. I was thinking that I needed to in order to stay on top with marketable skills. But if you don't make software on the side outside of work hours, how do you manage your career in programming so you don't fall off the rails?<p>Were you just lucky enough to get into the right jobs that keep you doing work that is highly in demand for the moment? Looking back, I kinda wish I started my career with a slow-moving Java or .NET enterprise work because, although not being very sexy, it is comparatively stable to front end web development. <comment><USER2> You kind of hit the nail on the head. If you don't want to constantly be on the treadmill, don't focus on the front end. The further down the stack you go, the slower technology moves and the easier it is to stay relevant.

Besides, just from looking around, front end pays less and it's easy for most companies to find cheap "good enough" front end developers.

As far as being "lucky", it's not luck. If I see my employer's stack falling behind the market, it's time to jump ship. Why would I work at a company all day and then come home at night trying to keep myself marketable instead of just changing jobs?

There is usually a job out there where the "must haves" are $old_tech and the "nice to haves" are $new_tech, rinse and repeat.

You could always take the r/cscareerquestions tact and "learn leetCode and work for a FAANG" (note sarcasm).

<comment><USER3> As a counterargument (or perhaps as a corollary), backend programming is also a treadmill these days. It may not have the churn of the world of front-end Web programming, but the world of backend programming in 2020 is quite different from that of 2010. As someone who does mostly backend work, within the past decade I've seen the rise of cloud services, non-relational databases, the Hadoop ecosystem, distributed storage systems, containers, the increased use of languages outside of C/C++/Java for systems programming (e.g., Python, Go, Rust, Clojure, Scala), machine learning, and CUDA, among many other technologies that were either nonexistent or were in their infancy in 2010. A person who stayed stuck in the world of 2010 might be overwhelmed by how much has changed in the past decade. Heck, even C++ has changed dramatically over the past decade; someone coding in C++98 would need to get up to speed with C++11's fundamental changes as well as changes added in later versions.

Now, there are some levels that haven't changed as much in the past decade. The kernels of today's most widely used operating systems are still written in C, and x86-64 still remains the dominant instruction set despite an increased challenge by ARM64 and the possibility of RISC-V. Someone writing kernel-level code in 2010 would feel at home today in 2020, notwithstanding the natural kernel code changes that have always happened. However, the job markets for kernel developers, compiler developers, and those writing low-level system software are much smaller than the job market for backend programmers overall, and it's possible that a laid-off low-level systems software engineer would have to get up to speed in all of the advances that happened in higher levels of the stack in order to more easily find another job.

<comment><USER4> > As someone who does mostly backend work, within the past decade I've seen > the rise of cloud services, non-relational databases, the Hadoop ecosystem, > distributed storage systems, containers, the increased use of languages > outside of C/C++/Java for systems programming (e.g., Python, Go, Rust, > Clojure, Scala), machine learning, and CUDA, among many other technologies > that were either nonexistent or were in their infancy in 2010.

You've missed what is maybe the worst offender - kubernetes and microservices.

<comment><USER2> Kubernetes is not as big as the hype makes it out to be.

Microservices have been around for over a decade. They were called service oriented architecture and instead of REST with JSON they sending XML.

<comment><USER5> I've got a feeling that in the SOA days the services were just "services", not microservices. I.e. people were not pushing for 200 lines of code microservices, like they do now. For example, I have a team of three devs at work who wrote a backend of around 10 microservices... Total cargo cult.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> a-saleh You don't manage your career by programming.

You manage your career by being able to deliver projects or at least participate in meaningful manner and then building meaningful work- relationships.

</comment><comment> non-entity Many people I know like this found a stable job in government or a large corporation and for the most part states put there. The may have had a few other jobs, but like you mention it's all enterprise stuff which moves slow enough.

They also have tend to have different motivations, whether that be a family or unrelated hobbies.

Tbh sometimes I envy people like this and sometimes I dont.

<comment><USER6> I'm kind of like this... been at current employer around 8 years.

Motivation: very strictly 9-5 which is great for my toddler kids and personal side interests and being able to keep current even if employer is boring tech. Healthy compensation means I will be mortgage free in 2 years.

Profitable large company that will easily weather the coming storms (have always been tight with budgets), and not worried about layoffs since in growing + future investment part of company.

If it all goes to shit, once I own my house outright I don't care, since wife owns a recession proof revenue producing business on which we can survive if I need to retool (can't survive on only that while we have a mortgage payment on solely that income tho).

Many reasons for something like this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't want to spend all my time honing one skill (programming). So I chose a job that is constantly challenging to keep me stimulated intellectually, and moved from frontend to backend/infra (took 18 months). Learning how to get up to speed with whatever technology being thrown at you is the skill one should develop, and not focus on specific framework or programming language per se, because they come.

Also, programming is not the only skill that will help you in your career as an engineer.

</comment><comment><USER8> > " _I was thinking that I needed to in order to stay on top with marketable > skills._ "

These people are fine not being on top and are consciously or unconsciously accepting the risk of falling off the rails. The risks have been fairly low for the past decade or so since software's role has just kept growing and growing in society and, at least for the foreseeable future, that growth doesn't seem likely to slow significantly.

Not a strategy I'd pursue but it doesn't seem like an unreasonable bet.

</comment><comment><USER9> You can take risks on the job and learn as you go. If you have a good manager they will take your career goals into mind when deciding what you are doing on a per-sprint basis.

A great manager will allocate sprint points to you exploring a new area of technology as long as you can somehow realize value for the business as a result of that exploration.

<comment><USER10> A fantastic manager doesn't make you assign points to your work to fit inside an arbitrary time box.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I work on side projects if it's something that interests me. Otherwise, I try not to make programming my life. I have other interests in politics, film, etc. that I would also prefer to pursue.

</comment><comment><USER12> At least for me "programming" is never 100% of my day to day work.

There always research tasks and proof of concepts that allows you to learn and try out new things.

</comment><comment><USER13> Well, the tools I learned to use are not just evaporating. They are still in use at many places and will be for the near term future. New things I tend to learn on the job. (Some examples: react hooks, webpack & build tooling, graphql)

I guess we are now entering into a new world, so we will see. But beside that, there is so much demand and opportunity, I don't see why I should fear for my career. What are "the rails" and what does falling off them look like?

The other thing is, new stuff tends to just be repackaging of old stuff. Once you've seen a couple cycles of this you stop worrying about it.</comment>


The Success of Kayak.com - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/node/958590/print <comment><USER2> Interesting article; I actually thought Kayak received pay per click, leads AND commissions in various forms depending on the airline.

This is a good one too: [http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/23/mobissimo- has-1223-the-...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/23/mobissimo-has-1223-the- capital-of-kayak-and-out-executes-them/)

Some of Mobissimo's main problems are that their name is forgettable and their home page isn't near as slick as Kayak's.

</comment><comment><USER3> Its success seemed foreordained to me from the beginning: a travel site that knows about international flights and whose UI isn't a complete disaster.

</comment><comment><USER4> "Kayak.com secures $196 million funding"

A startup?

"Kayak.com's founders include Steve Hafner, co-founder and chief executive officer of Kayak.com and a co-founder of Orbitz Inc. in 1999"</comment>


There's no 'organic' on the App Store - <AUTHOR> http://yardley.ca/2011/03/11/theres-no-organic-in-the-app-store/

<comment><USER2> It depends how many apps you're competing against. There's hardly any apps for development/coding, so if you publish something half-decent, your target audience _will_ know about it. Of course that target audience will be much smaller than that for 'social games' or whatever. To publish a social game app, unless it falls into a readily identifiable niché, then it could languish in obscurity regardless of quality.

</comment><comment><USER3> What I want to know is the cost to be in the top 100 if you purchase installs.

<comment><USER4> I remember seeing some posts on the iphonedevsdk(?) forums promising to get any free app to the top 100 for something on the order of $3000-$5000. I suspect most of those use a few thousand iTunes accounts and automated downloads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's hard to find 'organic' in a lot of things. As soon as there is money to be made, someone will figure out how to exploit that 'organic'. Ask Google with their search results. It's the basis of advertising--he with the most money gets his product in front of the most eyeballs.

That said, I would love some organic in the App Store as well, but every scenario I can imagine to accomplish it, I can also imagine how to exploit.

</comment><comment><USER6> Something I've been wondering about is why Angry Birds has under 100 reviews while Smurfs Village has over 1200, many of which are nonsense like one which was a 5-star review that said only "ok". I know some apps do a better job at encouraging reviews, but the sheer volume and garbage quality of many of the reviews makes me wonder if they're offering in-game rewards as payment.

<comment><USER7> Rovio just released another update, app store defaults to show reviews only for the most current version.

<comment><USER6> Yes, this is correct. I just checked and Angry Birds has 267,000 reviews across all versions. It's just surprising the number of reviews for Smurfs Village: 71,000 in total for a game that is 4 months old as of today. Maybe this just highlights my inability to understand the appeal of click-wait- repeat style of games.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Its 20-30k for paid apps. But often, if the app sucks - it won't stay on top very long.

</comment><comment><USER9> Can anyone provide some background? How do you "purchase application installs"?

<comment><USER10> I should probably write a blog post on this too.

Essentially you buy inventory from a specialized ad network, and they charge you by the install, using UDIDs to match the users who click on the ads with the users who installed the app. That way you get charged only for the users they actually sent you.

Most application ads convert poorly, so the companies doing the most volume in this space run 'incentivized' ads, where the user gets some virtual currency for installing the app.

For example, if they're playing 'Tap Widget', which normally charges for widgets, the user can get a widget for free by installing an application.

The user wants the widget, so they install the advertiser's application. The ad network sees the install and tells Tap Widget to give the user his widget. The advertiser gets a new user, so the ad network gets paid. The ad network takes their cut and passes the rest of the money on to Tap Widget. This works out pretty well for all parties.

I own a chunk of Flurry, one of the companies that specializes in this. There are others.

<comment><USER11> Interesting! That's a pretty clever way to goose your CPA performance.

<comment><USER10> Thanks! I can't take credit for it, though - incentivizing CPA offers was probably first done by Gratis Network a decade ago. That was for actual physical goods - complete five offers, refer three friends who do the same, get a PlayStation or an iPod.

Later, the model was adapted for Facebook games, with the offers remaining the same (insurance quotes, etc.) but virtual currency used as the bait. On iOS, the focus is on application installs, but it's still pretty similar to the Facebook model.

I can only recommend the model under very particular circumstances, since what you gain in conversion rate you lose in traffic quality. If users are shown a list of ten different offers, they'll pick the offer that sounds most appealing, but at the end of the day they _really_ just want the incentive. Companies like Gratis were constantly churning through their advertisers, as each advertiser figured out that most of the traffic they bought couldn't care less about their products.

On iOS, the advertiser churn doesn't happen, because the installs are just a proxy for front-page App Store placement - and at the moment, anyway, App Store placement doesn't have anything to do with application usage. Because of this, the advertisers get what they want, consider any application usage they get a bonus, and the incentivized model keeps working. If Apple were to change the 'top free' list to take into account time spent in app, the model would have to be changed.

<comment><USER11> Apple probably doesn't care much about how much you use the apps, as long as you come back to the store. Even for the free apps, they're probably thinking primarily about _store_ engagement rather than _app_ engagement.

As an apple shareholder, I like revenue optimization, but I can imagine it's pretty frustrating if you have a horse in the app race. Or out of a general sense of fairness :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> We have been contacted by these people who sell access to the 'Top' list.

Zero 'organic' is overstating it, but there definitely is a reason that there are terrible apps in the top paid lists.</comment>


Macron condemns 'massive' hacking attack - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-39827244 <comment><USER3> Considering the amount of money that large political parties pay for high-six- figure salary media consultants, stylists, image consultants and PR fluffers....

You would think they would want to hire a few professional, highly qualified NetSec sysadmins and give them authority to enforce network, server and endpoint security policies over an organization as a whole. But nope.

DNC is a fine example of failing to prioritize network security.

edit: I mean it's not exactly rocket science in terms of recruiting. Find a person who would be qualified by their years of experience and proven track record to be the chief security officer at an organization the size of cloudflare, limelight or netflix (or similar) and offer them a job at an equally high salary. Pay relocation and COLA expenses.

<comment><USER4> Get real.

Political campaigns, outside of the States, are very much bootstrapped. And IT folks very much not minded to volunteer their time.

Citation: I'm a member of a European Parliament on his third term in politics. Of my 200+ volunteers, not one is in infosec. Within my party, maybe 60 staff total are paid for a campaign.

<comment><USER3> I am really skeptical that considering the ongoing total operational budget on a yearly basis for all of the facilities and support structure in Strasbourg there are no infosec/netsec professionals. If that's really true, then to put it crudely, you're utterly fucked. Because Russia certainly does have money for blackhat infosec/netsec types.

<comment><USER5> I think OP works for a member of parliament, if I understand them correctly. Their offices are actually not that sensitive. All the secrets are held by the executive, and the EU doesn't even have the sort of military and intelligence institutions that are usually most secretive.

<comment><USER6> >EU doesn't even have the sort of military and intelligence institutions that are usually most secretive.

Might just be because the EU is a trade block, it doesn't have secretive military and intelligence institutions because it doesn't have any military and intelligence institutions at all.

<comment><USER7> > it doesn't have any military and intelligence institutions at all.

Better let INTCEN, SIAC, SitCen, EUFOR and EUNAVFOR know that.

The EU is absolutely far, far more than a trade block.

<comment><USER3> and ISAF (now RS/Resolute Support)

<comment><USER8> ISAF and RS are functions of NATO, not the EU.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have read [1] that France has a 24-hour period before voting where political reporting and campaigning are forbidden.

Were these documents released during the blackout period? If so, that's kind of clever, since it will presumably be all over social media, but more respected information sources who could debunk wild claims may be forced to remain silent.

[1] [http://www.electoral- vote.com/evp2017/Pres/Maps/May05.html/#...](http://www.electoral- vote.com/evp2017/Pres/Maps/May05.html/#item-8)

<comment><USER10> They were released right before the blackout, yes. [https://twitter.com/RachelDonadio/status/860624629899157506](https://twitter.com/RachelDonadio/status/860624629899157506)

<comment><USER11> Wow, fancy that!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Similar to "follow the money", on a world view, who benefits from isolationism and breaking up western alliances?

trump: isolation + lessen ties with europe.

le pen: isolation + lessen ties with europe.

brexit: isolation + lessen ties with europe.

now, who benefits?

who benefits from a weakened europe.

<comment><USER13> Clearly Putin. If you make democracy look untenable it becomes less threatening to an autocrat.

<comment><USER14> Or me, since I want isolation and fewer ties to Europe.

<comment><USER15> Why ?

<comment><USER14> I don't support free trade when the comparative advantage is the cost of labor.

I don't support Europe's socialist ideals.

Edit: awww, downvote. One less fake internet point :(

<comment><USER16> What do you mean by Europe's socialist ideals?

<comment><USER17> He means having a social safety net and ensuring that those who are less fortunate in life actually have healthcare (among other things).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is a topic I am very very worried about. Especially in Europe.

Myself and some friends where thinking about writing a basic guide for small, democratic (in the global meaning of the term) parties, without big infrastructure resources, to be able to use if they want to have basic information security. I'm kind of swamped with my human rights work but if there is any one on here interested in contributing, shoot me a mail (you can find me in the profile) and we can see what we can do.

</comment><comment><USER19> Obviously right wing candidates either don't use email or have nothing interesting to say.

<comment><USER20> What's so left-wing about Macron in your opinion?

<comment><USER21> He was a member of the Socialist Party (PS) until he pivoted more centrist in 2009.

<comment><USER20> Now he's going to liberate 150.000 government workers of their jobs to bring down mass unemployment. Doesn't sound really logical if I put it down like that but that's what it comes down to. Reminds me of Macri in Argentina. Probably just as ineffective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think it's funny the campaign can't decide whether to announce that the leaked materials are actually legitimate or not. From the Wall Street Journal:

The cache includes both authentic and falsified documents "with the goal of sowing doubt and disinformation," the campaign said."

Basically, "If there's anything bad, it's fake news"

<comment><USER23> It's funny that they are being honest about the likely contents of the cache?

"both authentic and falsified documents" was speculated in the DNC/Russia hacks, and also claimed to be the Russia Today strategy abotu news, and whether it was true or not then, it's clearly a clever idea for any future crackers.

<comment><USER24> > "both authentic and falsified documents" was speculated in the DNC/Russia > hacks,

Yes, that claim was made many times, including by people directly implicated by the leaks, and yet and later it was found that they were all true, with not one source pointing out an actual fake email or document.

<comment><USER25> There was _plenty_ of selected editing by Wikileaks - which is what most reports about that referred to.

The actual sources, no. But given the sources we're rarely presented as the first point of information by the main distributor... it's a fair criticism

<comment><USER24> I'm not sure what you mean by selective editing.

The original emails are all there, including verified DKIM signatures for many of them.

Are you suggesting they only included the bad ones, selectively leaving out any good ones?

<comment><USER25> I'm talking about their presentation an initial editing.

To their credit, they did make the original emails available - which mostly showed that what the claimed was in them was... well, mostly lies. At best half-truths.

That's what I mean by selective.

<comment><USER24> Can you please provide links to one specific instance of this?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "The Macron email dump came minutes before France's campaign blackout started at midnight. Candidates can't respond before polls open Sunday"

\- [https://twitter.com/RachelDonadio/status/860624629899157506](https://twitter.com/RachelDonadio/status/860624629899157506)

<comment><USER26> Famed nonpartisan custodian of information Wikileaks' Twitter feed is trying to argue that timing it for the day before the election when the candidate is barred from properly addressing the rumours in the media proves that it _isn 't_ an attempt to influence the election (and it's totally unfair that it will be used to boost hostility to Russia)

Assange truly has no shame.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> What is supposed to be in these links? (That actually have any significance.)

[http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-05-05/macron-says-he- vict...](http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-05-05/macron-says-he-victim- massive-coordinated-hack-after-9-gigabytes-private-documents-r)

Points to this:

[http://archive.is/eQtrm](http://archive.is/eQtrm)

Which points to something saying "item not available".

But apparently 9 GB of data.

Seems like a nothingburger to me.

<comment><USER28> These links work. Don't ask how I got them.

[https://archive.org/download/Pierrpersongmail.com_drive.part...](https://archive.org/download/Pierrpersongmail.com_drive.part1/Pierrpersongmail.com_drive.part1_archive.torrent)

[https://archive.org/download/Pierrpersongmail.com_drive.part...](https://archive.org/download/Pierrpersongmail.com_drive.part2/Pierrpersongmail.com_drive.part2_archive.torrent)

[https://archive.org/download/xls_cedric/xls_cedric_archive.t...](https://archive.org/download/xls_cedric/xls_cedric_archive.torrent)

[https://archive.org/download/Macron_201705/Macron_201705_arc...](https://archive.org/download/Macron_201705/Macron_201705_archive.torrent)

But seriously, using archive.org as a dump? Get your shit together, Ruskies, and use IPFS next time.

EDIT: Here are the magnet links in case the archive.org links go down.

        magnet:?xt=urn:btih:6a9f03af2d552b42a23e69abbbe38737b8906454&dn=Macron%5F201705&tr=http%3A%2F%2Fbt1.archive.org%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=http%3A%2F%2Fbt2.archive.org%3A6969%2Fannounce&ws=https%3A%2F%2Farchive.org%2Fdownload%2F&ws=http%3A%2F%2Fia601505.us.archive.org%2F27%2Fitems%2F&ws=http%3A%2F%2Fia801505.us.archive.org%2F27%2Fitems%2F

        magnet:?xt=urn:btih:fc36c7e406187d83ec6602ff59183c3c56f3ea9b&dn=xls%5Fcedric&tr=http%3A%2F%2Fbt1.archive.org%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=http%3A%2F%2Fbt2.archive.org%3A6969%2Fannounce&ws=https%3A%2F%2Farchive.org%2Fdownload%2F&ws=http%3A%2F%2Fia601507.us.archive.org%2F11%2Fitems%2F&ws=http%3A%2F%2Fia801507.us.archive.org%2F11%2Fitems%2F

        magnet:?xt=urn:btih:b8f18fcb16819e34d01ea94d393f256cc540f99e&dn=Pierrpersongmail.com%5Fdrive.part1&tr=http%3A%2F%2Fbt1.archive.org%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=http%3A%2F%2Fbt2.archive.org%3A6969%2Fannounce&ws=https%3A%2F%2Farchive.org%2Fdownload%2F&ws=http%3A%2F%2Fia601502.us.archive.org%2F34%2Fitems%2F&ws=http%3A%2F%2Fia801502.us.archive.org%2F34%2Fitems%2F

        magnet:?xt=urn:btih:80baae16065f6fbc276e718bda2c5db4a6435f8d&dn=Pierrpersongmail.com%5Fdrive.part2&tr=http%3A%2F%2Fbt1.archive.org%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=http%3A%2F%2Fbt2.archive.org%3A6969%2Fannounce&ws=https%3A%2F%2Farchive.org%2Fdownload%2F&ws=http%3A%2F%2Fia601503.us.archive.org%2F22%2Fitems%2F&ws=http%3A%2F%2Fia801503.us.archive.org%2F22%2Fitems%2F

<comment><USER27> Why do people insist that it is the Russians?

If Russia is so capable in this area then why is every published attack simple low-tech hacks like guessing a password or sending a spoof link?

<comment><USER29> Security researchers say it's the Russians, based on evidence they have seen. It's not that people are throwing a dart at a map and picking Russia.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/05/world/europe/france- macro...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/05/world/europe/france-macron- hacking.html)

<comment><USER30> That article, and its cited sources, say that Trend Micro came to that conclusion, but does not even attempt to present any facts from the report, only the bare conclusions.

The 'Fancy Bear' report was also called into question by people looking over the details. They somehow missed that one of the tools used was an outdated copy of P.A.S., for example. More details can be found in past HN coverage.

There aren't a lot of facts to go on here, just a forest of articles citing the same conclusions without bothering to cover any of the details about the underlying technical facts they're supposed to be based on.

This is incredibly superficial reporting, anyone who bothers to look for details will be continually disappointed.

<comment><USER29> > There aren't a lot of facts to go on

In fact there is a long history of evidence. The Russia defenders love to try to create uncertainty, using these same talking points every time, regardless of the evidence.

<comment><USER30> No, there are a lot of articles. There are hardly any facts in any of them, I keep checking for that and getting disappointed. If you can find something with more facts, distill them and point me at them please.

The best we ever got on a technical level was that original report from the DNC consultants where most of the IP addresses in the "signature" were Tor exit nodes and they didn't recognize an old, freeware copy of P.A.S. despite it being publicly available.

We've had a lot of utterly laughable things, like the one where someone was intercepting the DNS traffic for a 3rd party marketing site weakly linked to Trump that was making queries to a Russian bank... because of some Russian spam. I can't help but note that the same people keep falling for nonsense of this level.

However, feel free to link to the actual technicals of the reports if you have any. Despite the prior reports being stuff and nonsense (but mostly the latter), I remain open to changing my mind should anyone offer actual proof of some sort. Please note that I'm looking for logs, IP addresses, code and other things that could qualify as actual evidence, not so-and-so's say-so.

The closest this article got to facts were various bits of speculation about people's motives, claiming that Trend Micro thinks it matches this APT (for reasons they didn't bother to cover) and links to past coverage... that also fails to answer any of the obvious questions about what we know and how we know it, for which the usual answer in the past has been variations on interviews with unnamed people, appeals to classified data not in evidence, or random "experts" giving an opinion without disclosing any of the facts used to form that opinion.

In short, it's a lot of hearsay. I follow more or less this process:

[https://www.popehat.com/2017/01/19/how-to-read-news-like- a-s...](https://www.popehat.com/2017/01/19/how-to-read-news-like-a-search- warrant-application/)

Most news currently fails this test. I completely ignore all articles that fail the test as unreliable, even when I happen to agree with the conclusions. This applies to other articles as well, not just controversial things.

<comment><USER30> Just as a follow-up, I eventually found the Trend Micro report linked from an Ars Technica article. It's justification for labeling this as Fancy Bear was that they saw an email address from a free provider that they believe is linked and some cyrillic text. That's not really very much, given that the original label for this APT is already quite tenuous, given how the 'signature' from the original report consists of things like using Tor exit nodes that are quite common.

Maybe there's more to it, but if so they should really put it in their reports.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Given that the election is tomorrow., I don't believe this hack will impact the result (at least, certainly not as much a if it would have appeared 1 week ago).

<comment><USER10> Right before the election is _far_ more dangerous. Fake or out-of-context portions will cause immediate outrage and take days/weeks to research and explain (and the French campaign blackout means the campaign _can 't_ explain until after the election).

As an example, 538 makes a compelling argument that the Comey letter - <USER2> found to be essentially a false alarm, but after the damage was done - influenced the US election. [https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-comey- letter-probab...](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-comey-letter- probably-cost-clinton-the-election/)

<comment><USER5> You may be right, although there can be a "too close to the election" if it means there isn't enough time to go through the documents to find anything incriminating, and/or for the information to spread.

In this case, it's highly unlikely that it will change the election's outcome, given that Macron has a solid 20%+ advantage in all recent polls.

It also bears repeating that debate about the Comey letter is somewhat silly in that it usually treats "Comey swung the election" and "Hillary made mistakes" as mutually exclusive options. In reality, it's almost certainly true that they both, as well as other reasons, were necessary conditions for a Trip win.

<comment><USER31> Then, it could be that this leak is intended to destabilize the next president and that this time-window is the perfect time to release it without opposition. (If he win - most likely -, then he won't focus directly on this. Any bad informations will strengthen the opposition - he is challenged by both left and right.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Everything about this is related to the immigration problem in Europe. I'll try to formulate this as neutral as possible.

The immigration problem is seen as huge in Europe, and also in the US. Therefore people choose candidates that are against more immigrations, or at least recognize this as a problem.

People are worried for economic reasons, integration-problems, violence, attack on women, terrorists. There are many reports, and people do not know who to trust, especially with the terrorists.

What would any of you think when 500 people from a far away country were placed near your house? You would experience it as a some kind of problem.

If we look back in history, we can see that a part of these (mostly male) immigrants are coming from Syria (some say only 25%). Syria is currently in a war with ISIS and Al Qaida. And at the same time Syria is under attack from "moderate rebels" that are supported by the US (continuing a policy against Syria). Also Kurds are fighting, and Turkey, sometimes against each other. And many more states.

It is a big mess. Most people do not see US meddling as a solution. Peace is usually achieved by NOT attacking people living in another country.

Tried to make it so simple that politicians can understand it ;-)

<comment><USER33> >What would any of you think when 500 people from a far away country were placed near your house? You would experience it as a some kind of problem.

What a pathetic attempt at a dog-whistle. If you want to start writing anti- immigrant comments just do it, don't doll it up in this bullshit pseudo pragmatism. Not like other people are letting it stop them.

<comment><USER34> It didn't read as a dog-whistle to me. It's a scenario that's happening across Europe.

The mass import of different cultures is a real problem because it erodes trust and cohesion within communities affected.

To put it bluntly, multiculturalism isn't all its cracked up to be. A trickle of immigrants from, for example, east Asia is clearly enriching. The same cannot be said for a mass influx from a culture that holds opposing values. Continuing to deny this will only result in more Brexit-like events.

<comment><USER29> Do you have any basis for these otherwise baseless allegations? Major cities are filled with immigrants and cultures from all over the world, and are the engines of advanced economies. New York is one very successful example; London is another.

In my experience, it's the people with the least experience with immigrants who have the most objection to immigration.

> A trickle of immigrants from, for example, east Asia is clearly enriching

I don't know what country you are in, but if you are in the West than East Asian nations certainly do not share your 'values'. Visit one of those countries some time.

But this comment is outright hateful ethnic stereotyping. One essential Western value is to judge people by their actions individuals, not by the color of their skin, their nationality, their sexual preference, etc. Another is liberty, which doesn't mean liberty to do what someone else happens to like.

Every generation of immigrants has the same things said about them: They don't integrate, they speak their own language, they don't share our values, etc. etc. But their kids grow up natives. How sad that you have so little confidence in those values that you don't think they will win over these immigrants just like they've won over every generation of immigrants before them.

<comment><USER35> > In my experience, it's the people with the least experience with immigrants > who have the most objection to immigration.

Same in Germany. The most persistent protests against immigration are in Saxony, where only 3.0% of the population are foreigners (compared to 9.4% national average).

Source: [https://www.destatis.de/DE/ZahlenFakten/GesellschaftStaat/Be...](https://www.destatis.de/DE/ZahlenFakten/GesellschaftStaat/Bevoelkerung/MigrationIntegration/Migrationshintergrund/Tabellen/MigrationshintergrundLaender.html) (I'm looking at the columns specifically titled "Foreigner". "German with migration background" includes additional immigrants that gained German citizenship, but also a whole slew of people who were displaced after WW2 when the German borders were redrawn.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> This should not come as a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to recent elections... well, anywhere.

Relevant: [https://medium.com/@thegrugq/dont-info-op-until-you-see- the-...](https://medium.com/@thegrugq/dont-info-op-until-you-see-the-whites- of-their-eyes-55624258f120)

</comment><comment><USER37> > If they opt for liberal Emmanuel Macron

How is he labelled as "liberal"? He's been a member of the French socialist party. He only left it last year for his campaign.

<comment><USER3> in comparison to Le Pen, nearly everyone is a flaming liberal/socialist. What exists _to the right of_ Le Pen? Actual swastika wearing nazis?

<comment><USER37> It's kind of sad that we classify Politics so linearly. After all originally it was only based on where representatives were seated at the assembly. What characterizes Le Pen is the nationalist stand inherited from her father : basically the idea that most problems come from immigration so that we should close borders and kick foreigners away.

The schism between "socialism" and "liberalism" has imho, nothing to do with that. It's more an economical philosophy about the ownership of capital, as discussed by Marx.

In addition to that there are differences regarding some moral values, where "conservatives" are usually seen as people who stand their grounds on old principles (like heterosexual marriage, death penalty, gun ownership), though it seems to me that this is very much an American.

Anyhow, this makes it all very confusing, especially when translating, and I suppose that's why an article written in English did not say Macron is "socialist" but rather "liberal", even if in France "liberal" kind of means "right-wing".

<comment><USER38> Macron is NOT socialist (he told it himself) (Well, to be fair, he also told that he was (cf youtube link for both)). He's pure and simple right-wing. He believe that we should let the market treat workers as they please. That's what we call "Being liberal" in Europe. Its the opposite of being socialists: the government should protect the workers from the institutions who wants to exploit them.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EBeAoFfXpg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EBeAoFfXpg)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> This will not stop until we get secure communication and collaboration tools into the hands of election campaign operatives.

<comment><USER40> You can not really stop social engineering with more tools. If anything, the attack surface will increase.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> OK, so what's the content of the documents. Best I can tell is that he has a bank account in the Cayman's?

Ummm, why is that surprising for a former investment banker?

This just seems like a desperate attempt to help Le Pen.

<comment><USER42> Even that was debunked, as a french journalist on Twitter spotted that the pdf leaked (earlier today) was poorly doctored with an vector-based image editor, and was able to move the actual text layer around.

Source (in French but pictures are enough): [http://www.numerama.com/politique/254983-compte-offshore- dem...](http://www.numerama.com/politique/254983-compte-offshore-demmanuel- macron-une-intox-venue-de-4chan.html)

<comment><USER43> [https://archive.fo/VCz3I/22b9ae6e1cfad9328490576e8ddb4549f87...](https://archive.fo/VCz3I/22b9ae6e1cfad9328490576e8ddb4549f8766b63.jpg)

Now, I have no idea which one is the original, but AFAIU once you take a jpg and scan it into pdf, it's easy to move the text around (?).

EDIT: I hope my implication is clear. I think that the jpg file is more likely to be the original photo. It was later scanned as a pdf. Then OCR'd version was edited a bit by merging parts of the text (or only parts of it were OCR'd). Then a journalist opened it up in an editor and saw those layers.

Going in the opposite direction would require someone to produce an authentic looking jpg from an obviously OCR'd pdf. That seems like less likely to me.

<comment><USER44> When software OCRs a PDF, it does it by adding an invisible text layer aligned with the original text, while leaving the original text visible. This makes the PDF searchable, without having to worry about changing the font, introducing OCR errors where people can see them, or disturbing the background. What we see here is very unambiguously the result of a PDF-editing program, not a scan+OCR.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Post from AtlanticCouncil's Digital Forensic Research Lab:

[https://medium.com/@DFRLab/hashtag-campaign- macronleaks-4a3f...](https://medium.com/@DFRLab/hashtag-campaign- macronleaks-4a3fb870c4e8)

>The #MacronLeaks files include several tags in Russian

[https://twitter.com/michaelh992/status/860788188981452801](https://twitter.com/michaelh992/status/860788188981452801)

</comment><comment><USER46> This year will witness major changes in how politicians perceive the internet and network security

</comment><comment><USER47> While I agree with the comments that political parties should hire infosec people to get their shit secured, you will be surprised how many fortune 500 companies actually do that and how many of them have more than 3 infosec specialist on staff.

</comment><comment><USER48> Now expect Russians to be blamed, worked well in US, rinse and repeat.

<comment><USER49> Yes, of course, it's all totally a coincidence that every time these conveniently-timed-for-election hacks and document dumps happen, it's always to the benefit of whatever candidate is running on a "let's be friends with Russia and ignore what they're doing in Ukraine and Syria" platform.

<comment><USER50> You mean all twice, both times leaks from or against politicians that are deeply unpopular?

Of the candidates running in the French first round, _all_ of them were anti- EU except Macron. Given the "anything anti-EU == Russian" idiocy, perhaps you can explain why this is seen as some kind of rare thing that needs frantic dot-joining?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> There are some details about one of the manipulated PDF's here; the article is in French:

[http://www.numerama.com/politique/254983-compte-offshore- dem...](http://www.numerama.com/politique/254983-compte-offshore-demmanuel- macron-une-intox-venue-de-4chan.html)

<comment><USER52> That article is about the fake "4chan" offshore bank account document that was circulating earlier this week. It is not about the email dump.

<comment><USER51> My fault for being distracted while trying to add content. It's too late for me to be the one to remove the comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> According to the journalist Marie Turcan, 4chan is behind those intox: [https://twitter.com/TurcanMarie/status/860497827356704768](https://twitter.com/TurcanMarie/status/860497827356704768)

<comment><USER54> That's just a link on 4chan, which any anon can make.

It's nice place to drop wild allegations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Hacking the democratic process seems, to me, tantamount to treason, honestly. It defeats the entire principle of democracy.

That said, there are _a lot_ of things which are detrimental to democracy.

</comment><comment><USER56> Earlier today a few tweets from extreme right leaders involved very very bad edited documents (composited pdf, fake iphone tweet screenshots).

</comment><comment><USER57> [http://archive.is/eQtrm](http://archive.is/eQtrm)

</comment><comment><USER58> Are people today so devoid of personal responsibility that they are unwilling to admit that their claims of "sophisticated hacking attempts" are nothing more than an excuse for one of their staffers clicking a phishing email?

I get that it is hard to admit responsibility, but this is ridiculous...

<comment><USER59> > their claims of "sophisticated hacking attempts" are nothing more than an > excuse for one of their staffers clicking a phishing email

and you know that how?

<comment><USER58> They themselves said it was phishing...

<comment><USER59> Admittance or excuse? Decide.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Rotschild vs Nazi's. I would stay in bed if I was French. You don't want to be responsible for any of them.

<comment><USER60> And that's exactly how you end up with Nazis... "after Hitler, our turn". The time for voting further left was the previous round of the election, unfortunately.</comment></comment>


Amazon's Fake Review Economy - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeed.com/nicolenguyen/amazon-fake-review-problem <comment><USER2> I suspect a big part of this problem is private brands. When 100 people can order the same cheap flashlight from a no-name factory in China and list it on Amazon as their own product there is a lot of incentive to fake reviews to get an advantage over the other sellers. And the huge number of product listings just makes it that much harder to separate the wheat from the chaff.

I would like to see Amazon raise the barrier to entry to prevent fly-by-night sellers from listing the same crappy products. I give up sometimes when looking for something after seeing dozens or hundreds of pages of the same thing listed under different brands from different sellers.

Is there really so much benefit to having everyone and their uncle selling on Amazon? I can go to Ebay for that. As Amazon becomes no more trustworthy than Ebay I lost my incentive to shop there.

<comment><USER3> On the other hand, what you describe is exactly what I love about Amazon.

Say I have an idea for a robot, and I need a few dozen battery clips, some NiMH batteries, a dozen servo motors, a bunch of disc magnets, a box of M3 screws/nuts, some PLA filament, a microcontroller board, and a small display panel to show status/errors/etc.

I can buy all of that and have it delivered in a day or two, for less than $5 more per item than I would pay if I ordered it from a Taobao listing and waited on international shipping. And I tend to have less problems with the Amazon listings, presumably because the sellers know I can return them quickly and painlessly if there are quality issues.

There is a _huge_ benefit to being "the everything store".

<comment><USER4> Yep and unless you spend hours researching the sellers, 100% of those NiMH batteries and servo motors will be absolute crap. The batteries will have fake UL logos, fake Samsung or whomever logos, etc. etc.

At this point, I would rather order my socks from Target and my electronics from Mouser. At least i know they have long standing relationships with distributors and I wont be getting fake products.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for mentioning Mouser... not familiar with it, but it feels like Newegg (my prior goto) is chasing Amazon down the quality black hole.

<comment> as-j You may also want to checkout Digikey. It's more focused on discreet components, but they have a huge catalog of electronics that's worth searching through, and pretty reasonable shipping.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, I've used Digikey for a few odds and ends too. I wish Amazon would just deal with their seller issues. Per-seller labels to at least track which seller's goods are counterfeit and/or problematic would be a good start. A big fat warning when refunds/returns aren't handled by Amazon would be another.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have seen a huge increase in product listings being changed from one item to something completely different.

For example, a listing had reviews from prior to 1/18 that mentioned how the product was a __metallic ruler __however the product page had been completely changed and it was now selling __USB wall chargers __, using the positive reviews previously posted for credibility. I haven 't seen this scam mentioned much. I'd imagine it is people selling their old, unused Amazon product pages to someone else.

<comment><USER7> Ya, ever since products began being listed together in a single listing I've lost a lot of trust in the reviews. For example, when looking at dog beds I found listings where the reviews talked about different shapes, sizes, materials, colors, and manufacturers. Back when I first started using prime it was great because I could find good products quickly, while trusting the reviews and prices. In recent years I've drastically cut my purchasing from Amazon, because it takes much more time and effort to find high quality, authentic items with reasonable prices. I've been considering cancelling prime

<comment><USER8> When you are viewing the reviews, there is an option to filter displayed reviews to only the currently displayed "style" or subitem. Go down to the reviews and select "See all reviews" and a list of filter selectors will become visible at the top of the displayed results. Where it says "All formats" you can drop down and change this to "Show only reviews for <variation-type>: <variant> [| ...]" where the variant info is based on whatever product you were actually looking for.

<comment><USER9> Too bad this isn't the default. Or better yet, something like "All versions of this product (...) / Just this variant (...)". Similar to the way Apple segments mobile app reviews by release version.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law)

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

I don't know a way around this with Amazon but it is getting increasingly annoying using a site where everything is 4-5 stars with hundreds or thousands of reviews and you need incredible intuition to tell the fake reviews from the real ones.

<comment><USER11> [https://www.fakespot.com/](https://www.fakespot.com/)

It's not perfect, but it's something.

<comment><USER12> You'd think that Amazon would have some technology similar to FakeSpot's by now, but I'm not convinced that they do. I bought a product that had the special "Amazon's Choice" label on it that turned out to be a dud. I looked up the product on FakeSpot just now, and FakeSpot (correctly, I believe) identifies the reviews on that product to be unreliable (grade level "C"). Just a single anecdote, but it's clear to me that there's a ton of room for improvement on Amazon's part.

Another strange thing about the "Amazon's Choice" label is this: I've seen a product get that label in part due to a low number of returns ... but the seller doesn't accept returns! That should be a con, not a pro.

As you can probably tell, I have not been happy with the results of following Amazon's product choice advice.

<comment><USER13> Plenty of the "Amazon's Choice" flags are...a little deceptive. Maybe not deceptive in a conventional sense, but say you see a product in the search results on Amazon and one has that flag. You click on it, because hey.

Then you notice the keywords attached to "Amazon's Choice". Oftentimes, they're strange and esoteric. Oftentimes, that flag is put on what appears to be a random off-brand item sitting right next to a much, much better product more deserving of that "Choice" insignia.

<comment><USER14> From what I've seen I'm guessing the amazon's choice tag is arbitrary and generated by some algorithm that simply matches up common search terms to the most-bought item. When it's something simple and common like "wireless mouse" it's probably alright. When it's a bit more esoteric like "male displayport socket soldered connector" or some other hopeless attempt to optimize search results and filter out noise, you get strange things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Forget fake reviews... I'm encountering alarming level of _fake products_ on Amazon. If you are buying batteries, water filters, razor blades, power cords, sun glasses etc then you are likely buying fake products pushed from China with same branding as the real thing. These items are usually even marked as "Prime" and "shipped by Amazon" and many qualifying for same day free shipping for prime members. So naive customers would go on to trust this and have no clue they are getting fake products made in China but warehoused and shipped by Amazon's awesome logistic system. For lot of high margin recurring items, fake producers are minting mountain of money these days.

<comment><USER16> And if its batteries you want, find a trusted brand and buy directly. I trust anker, I buy their batteries from their site. Funny enough they end up having the item fulfilled by amazon. Ends up being cheaper since I don't have prime and anker still gave me free two day shipping.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Just as bad is the Q&A section, for the life of me, I can't figure out why anyone would respond to a Q&A question if they do not know the answer, have not used the product, or just generally have no useful input to add. It's maddening to see the question you'd like to ask, only to find out some buffoon has provided non-answers-often to the point of burring correct (or at least, marginally valid) responses. This should be easier to correct...

<comment><USER18> I think Amazon sends emails saying "someone has asked a question about this product," which can make it seem like someone asked YOU, even though they send the email to a lot of people.

<comment><USER19> This is correct. It's more of a UX problem by Amazon to non-tech users. Amazon phrases it like "martincmartin asked you, bluetidepro, blah blah blah." and a lot of times the non-tech user will literally reply back with "I'm not sure" or "I don't know" and then Amazon still records that response as an answer to the question. I wish their system was smart enough to recognize these replies like this that I often see and just ignore them.

<comment><USER20> It's not restricted to emails, I've seen mobile push notifications from the app (which were enabled b/c of shipping notifications) asking me to respond. Tapping the notification brought me directly to the question. I'm sure this is the main reason for the garbage answers, since it's as much work to answer as responding to a text.

<comment><USER14> Wow, gross. I hate push abuse. This is another reason why I have a strict policy that if an app works in a web browser, it should stay in a web browser. It only wants out of that web browser so it can get its greasy little fingers all over your stuff.

I especially hate services that intentionally break their mobile site and disallow forcing the desktop site to make you to install their greasy, slimy mobile app. Like Facebook and Reddit. So scummy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> _"...An Amazon spokesperson told BuzzFeed News the percentage of inauthentic reviews on the platform is "tiny,"..."_

This is clearly total and utter crap, as anybody who has spent any time on Amazon knows.

What was not mentioned in the article, but is critically important, is that many times you can get more mileage out paying for negative reviews of competitors than you can your own positive reviews. Many times I've been looking at product X only to read in the reviews something like "X was okay...and enjoyed it. But it wasn't near as good as Y"

And over to Y I'm headed. It's an in-site referral.

I've read many negative reviews where it's obvious that the competitors are paying. "Great look, but why can't they have A?" (A is not important, but another vendor offers it and wants to use it as a market differentiator)

I don't see any easy answers to Amazon's problems. As they continue to monopolize all commerce, it'll just get worse.

<comment><USER22> > This is clearly total and utter crap, as anybody who has spent any time on > Amazon knows.

"Today's Deals" is absolutely infested with brand new products with tons of suspicious reviews, and has been for the last year. Even just checking the date from the first to the last review (e.g. one week) reveals problems for a product with 100+ reviews.

> I don't see any easy answers to Amazon's problems.

There's no "easy" answers, but user reputation is a good start. Right now every review is worth the same as every other review, but looking at the data available we can rate reviews:

\- Did the verified buyer actually receive the item before review?

\- Is the reviewer's account brand new?

\- What does account activity look like outside of reviewing (e.g. Do they browse products? Shop? Check order history? How many non-buy/non-review interactions do we have for every review posted?)

\- How did they get back to the product to review it (e.g. direct link? third party site? order history?)

\- Did they use a coupon for a discount on the product? Is that coupon posted on Amazon? What % was the coupon? If it is 90% are they even a verified buyer?

\- Was the shipment tracked? If not how do we know they even received anything?

<comment><USER23> I've heard of folks gaming at least some of these points by offering refunds (through a different channel, e.g. paypal) to buyers to leave a positive review. I don't know if it's true, but it definitely seems plausible and an easy way to buy reviews from 'legit' buyers.

Amazon could counter this by offering a big bounty on turning in sellers that do this, and/or financially penalizing them (the sellers) if sufficient evidence is produced.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> [https://douglas-fraser.com/FakeReviews/index.html](https://douglas- fraser.com/FakeReviews/index.html)

If anyone is interested... it is my dissertation on developing ML ensembles to classify reviews as fake or not, strictly using features derived from textual analysis (deception theory, stylometry, etc). Behavioral type features, like IP address and relationships between spamming accounts are more useful, but the text still has some value. At some point, I will expand this to using actual Amazon reviews, but I had to drop that idea just to get the dissertation done on time.

Several years ago, the percentage of fake reviews was estimated at 2 to 6%, so I'm sure it has increased to (gut feeling) probably like 10% these days. Is that "tiny"? A really good stat to calculate would be the percentage of products that have more than just a few fake reviews - such that the consumer is given a bad impression. That stat probably is not "tiny" and thus creates the perception Amazon reviews are useless.

<comment><USER25> Are you using NLP of any sort to assist with feature extraction? Curious.

<comment><USER24> Yes - I primarily used spaCy [0] to handle all the NLP related tasks (tokenization, etc) as well as empath [1]. The Stanford Parser was only used for constituency parsing as spaCy doesn't handle that. The different feature sets were then derived from all that data.

[0]: [https://spacy.io](https://spacy.io) [1]: [https://github.com/Ejhfast/empath-client](https://github.com/Ejhfast/empath- client)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Upton Sinclair on why Amazon has trouble getting rid of fake reviews and scammy sellers:

      > "It is difficult to get a man to understand something,
      > when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

<comment><USER27> I'm not even sure that Amazon really benefits from this.

I have become super wary to buy things from Amazon even with good reviews, because I am suspicious the reviews are fake.

<comment><USER28> I agree. I am using amazon less now than before because I can't trust amazon the way I used to. Part of that is fake reviews. It may not hurt amazon now, as they're still acquiring a lot of new prime users (baby boomers) but they too will sour and then it will be too late for amazon to earn trust back.

It's an easy problem to solve too... only allow reviews from people who have purchased the product on amazon. Nearly every other major e-commerce site does that. The fact that amazon hasn't required this is a good sign that they don't think that is the most beneficial thing to them. Their system already has this feature, but most sellers don't enable it.

<comment><USER5> Many reviewers are ordering through amazon, and are paid outside of amazon... Amazon needs to invest in heuristics for reviewers.

If someone literally reviews over 90% of what they order on Amazon, they're probably paid for it. If someone only buys things via external links, they're probably paid for it.

There's lots that Amazon can do. Hell, putting seller stickers on co-inventory to track the counterfeiters would be a nice start.

<comment><USER28> > putting seller stickers on co-inventory to track the counterfeiters would be > a nice start

Great idea! They'd still have the benefits of mixing inventory but then you can track who is putting fakes in the bin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I bought a book on "music theory". It was a relatively recent release and had about ten 5 star reviews. It was relatively cheap, so I bought it.

There was no music theory ... just an exhaustive list of scales. The "more than 100 exercises on CD" was simply 30 seconds of the author playing each scale.

So I went back and read the reviews. They were "Just perfect!" and "Exactly what I was looking for!".

Comically, a couple reviews of a different music theory book were obviously writing their review in a foreign language then translating it to English because instead of using the phrase "music theory" they used "music hypothesis".

</comment><comment><USER30> The Planet Money podcast had an episode on this recently that was really fascinating: [https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/04/27/606528176/epis...](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/04/27/606528176/episode-838-a-series- of-mysterious-packages)

It wasn't about Amazon specifically, but the sophistication of these scams are really intriguing.

</comment><comment><USER31> Does anyone else think it's weird that this article is talking about scammy practices on Amazon by linking to scammy examples with the reporter's unique Amazon affiliate id?

<comment><USER32> In fairness, it BuzzFeed might automatically replace Amazon URLs with either their affiliate version of the link when an article is published or the reporter's affiliate version of the link. I think slickdeals does this when someone links to Amazon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Wait! It gets worse! There are sellers who get paid reviewers to write bad reviews on competitor's products.

Even the honest ones are forced to get fake reviews, because their competitor is winning with fake reviews. This is the cost of replacing humans with algorithms, before it is on par in accuracy.

<comment><USER34> How does a human detect a fake bad review?

The problem here is not replacing humans with algorithms, it's with replacing trusted humans with arbitrary humans (and not even checking whether one human is pretending to be many humans). This is the same problem with online forums and comment sections. We need a way to build a web of trust, so I can tap my network for reviews, but have a way to blacklist the shills who pop up.

<comment><USER5> Maybe require that you purchased the product on Amazon before they count a < 3 star review?

There's no reason the "average" from the reviews presented need to count them all... the search ratings could easily exclude reviews by those that didn't have a confirmed purchase.

<comment><USER35> As stated in the article: The reviewer did purchase the product in Amazon and he's getting refund through PayPal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I had a great laugh along with another reviewer for this bike that seemingly hired a bunch of exaggerated writers to post unverified purchase reviews for it. [https://www.amazon.com/VTSP-Upgrade-Bicycle-Mechanical- Wareh...](https://www.amazon.com/VTSP-Upgrade-Bicycle-Mechanical- Warehouse/product-reviews/B07B7GTCJ2)

Something about the language trying too hard that the reviews just came off fake. It's a real bummer having to add this to the mental wading through online junk.

On another front I definitely like the idea of Amazon's Choice, that's based on quantitative things like return rate and what not. I'd like to see more of that data trend in that direction.

<comment><USER37> Most of those reviews are satirical, as are the Q&As. The product is a grotesque parody of a bicycle, so some scallywags have reviewed it appropriately.

It has clearly been designed by someone who has seen a few photos of fast road bikes, but doesn't know or care about any aspect of what makes a bike fast. It's the bicycle equivalent of a cheap Honda that some teenager has absolutely ruined with tacky "upgrades". It might not be obviously apparent to a novice, but the product images genuinely made me laugh out loud.

The reviews are an embarrassment to Amazon, but so is the fact that this product is even for sale. It's an atrocious bicycle that should have never been built in the first place, designed with the sole intention of deceiving naive customers. A quick browse of the bicycles category on Amazon suggests that this is an endemic problem - the customer reviews suggest that many are dangerously defective.

<comment><USER38> Woah, you're not exaggerating. It weighs 41 lbs!!!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Amazon, Walmart, Target do a lot with their store brands. It becomes more and more tempting to buy just from those because I (presumably) don't have to worry about counterfeits (where Amazon co-mingles everything that's supposed to be an "Apple") or review rigging like this.

What ends up happening a lot for me is fraud fatigue: I go to buy something and after 20 minutes of studying I don't buy.

<comment><USER5> Quality doesn't even stand there either... I bought some amazon branded speakers (cheapy ones) that I used at work, didn't really need much... liked them... bought a couple more, all dead within a few months of use.

There's no quality control on anything anymore it feels like sometimes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> The absolute worst department on Amazon for this, IMHO, is kids electronic toys. I've been scammed multiple times on this, to the point that I won't buy R/C product there anymore.

Once you give a gift to a kid, you can't send it back without a fuss and I think that the sellers know this. The return rate for kids stuff must be a fraction of that for other consumer electronics.

<comment><USER41> Pretty much any simple (i.e. easily cloned) item under $10 suffers. Sellers know it's not worth the hassle of packing and returning something. Only about 5% of customers post reviews and since the items are cheap sellers can afford to give enough away to review farmers that they can overwhelm reviews from legit customers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> So is everything on the Internet fake or about 60 percent fake?

Can we even take the Internet seriously re: anything that deals with commerce, politics and etc?

<comment><USER43> "Don't believe everything you see on TV." Somehow got lost on the internet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I always had this inkling, so since early on, despite the hype and 'attractive' prices, I have bought nothing but books. In fact, I can't see myself buying anything but books online, from any vendor and not just Amazon.

Even with books, especially technical books, I have fallen to the trap of unwittingly buying Indian version of the book (I am an Indian living in India) where chapters are culled, contents are 'adapted', preface and other such items are missing etc. But this could be my fault as I failed to read the fine print, which does exist.

(It enrages me that Indians are forced to use substandard versions of internationally acclaimed books for their reference. I am fine with using gray scale instead of 32M color images, or using thinner paper, smaller fonts etc but altering content, skipping content etc is bad. I am sure there is an economic constraint behind this - Indian versions are usually 1/5th to 1/8th the international price - and often think why don't they use substandard presentation instead of substandard content, but what do I know.

Many times, I buy older version of a book which will be far cheaper, and in 'Indian price range', than the freshly minted, latest and up to date version, especially when it deals with 'static' topics like maths, physics, linguistics etc because I have come to realize that the book companies whip out newer versions with negligible changes just to keep their business running, especially when its supposed to be a text book.)

</comment><comment> at-fates-hands I was duped after buying a set of wireless headphones. I did a bunch of shopping online and landed at Amazon. The headphones they had listed had nearly 4,000 4+ star rating, I figured they were all legit so I purchased them. In the box when they arrived was a small postcard which read, "Give us a positive 4 or 5 star rating on Amazon, and you can order any of our products for 50% off!"

This was less than six months ago and clearly after Amazon had outlawed the practice in 2016.

</comment><comment><USER45> Can someone explain this to me:

"Shutting down disingenuous reviews is tricky for Amazon. By doing so, the company risks alienating sellers, a core part of its business."

In the next paragraph:

"Amazon is the place to be for e-commerce sellers and is increasingly seen as a utility. In 2017, Amazon accounted for nearly half of all e-commerce sales in the US (44%) with $196.8 billion in sales."

If Amazon is the place to be, alienating the bad actor sellers isn't going to be an issue.

</comment><comment><USER46> I'm an Amazon Vine reviewer ... Ask me anything.

I've been one for years. It's an odd insider culture, which is pretty hard to talk about with anyone else. There's a lot of competition among the "Viners" as we call ourselves. And there's also a lot of decision-making. E.g., is the tax-value income and time required actually worth it to me? Many, many times, it's not.

<comment><USER16> I used to skip past every single vine review + flag some as being bad. It's painfully obvious they're giving good reviews for the free product.

<comment><USER46> I really doubt that's actually happening. For a long time there was a Vine forum, and the culture was definitely about reviewing as honestly as possible. I'd posted many positive but also many negative reviews before being selected for Vine.

It also seems like there are many more products needing reviews than reviewers. I've never worried about being negative.

And finally, the item is definitely not free:

* Amazon displays the tax value of each item we're offered for review, and reports it to the IRS if we choose it. So literally, the product is taxable income.

* Some items, like books, take a lot more time and effort, compared to their monetary value. But all items require time.

* Some items have collateral costs. Just a couple of examples: I once reviewed an AC/DC converter for the car which blew a fuse when I tried it out. That cost me a trip to the repair shop. Another time I reviewed a floor lamp which arrived destroyed in the box and left my living room speckled in glass shards and styrofoam pieces.

tldr; To me, it's a contractual relationship that I'll continue doing as long as it makes sense to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I consider the price of a Fakespot subscription part of the cost of doing business on Amazon. It's sad, but it works. Crazy that Amazon doesn't simply purchase it or similar service. The browser extension marks up listings nicely:

[https://imgur.com/a/dQKdM0j](https://imgur.com/a/dQKdM0j)

</comment><comment><USER48> I think I agree that incentivized reviews aren't necessarily bad (assuming the incentive isn't tied to a certain star level).

Amazon has a real opportunity to legitimize and enable sellers to offer incentivized reviews on their platform. I'm not sure how Amazon Vine ever worked, but I envision an interface almost similar to AdWords, where sellers can try and narrow down their target audience and offer a select sample an incentive to review, inline with search listings.

Since amazon would know about serial reviewers as well as how critical they are based on prior reviews, they could finely tune who is offered the incentive. I can easily imagine a world where these Amazon ordained incentivized reviews become far more trustworthy than ordinary ones. After all, if a product is good why wouldn't the seller get a few incentivized reviews through Amazon?

</comment><comment><USER49> If you want to see a bunch of fake reviews, search for Instant Pot cookbooks and read the reviews for those.

</comment><comment><USER50> Amazon may not be able to _stop_ it, but they could surely mitigate it significantly. They choose not to, because in the end, having lots of reviews for lots of products is better for them than having a few reviews for a few products, even if a significant number of the reviews are fake.

</comment><comment><USER51> Amazon can fix this, but they have no incentive to. It doesn't matter who make the sales, they get 15%. If the seller uses FBA, Amazon get a cut there too.

An example of a fix could be take into account of reviews to sales ratio and flag those products with high reviews to sales ratio.

<comment><USER14> How do you propose they determine which reviews are fake and which are real?

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> What if Amazon got rid of reviews?

</comment><comment><USER53> I have tried to deal with this by mainly reading the bad reviews and looking at what people were complaining about specifically.

But I read that vendors will also fake _bad_ reviews of competitors, so that might not be a good solution, either.

</comment><comment><USER54> Happens to 95% of Packt books.

</comment><comment><USER55> Awesome piece of content.</comment>


Through a Table, Sparsely - <AUTHOR> http://blog.memsql.com/through-a-table-sparsely/

<comment><USER2> Can you put an index on an optional column (or a function of an optional column)? Also, nice title.

<comment><USER3> You can, by hoisting it up as a calculated column and indexing on that. We have support for sparse indexes as well.</comment></comment>