Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - August 12th, ’23

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002































Early Edition



August 12th, 2023















I Would Rather See My Books Get Pirated Than This (Or: Why Goodreads and Amazon Are Becoming Dumpster Fires)
Jane Friedman

Update: Hours after this post was published, my Goodreads profile was cleaned of the offending titles. However, the garbage books remain available for sale at Amazon with my name attached.

I did file a report with Amazon, complaining that these books were using my name and reputation without my consent. Amazon’s response: “Please provide us with any trademark registration numbers that relate to your claim.” When I replied that I did not have a trademark for my name, they closed the case and said the books would not be removed from sale.

There’s not much that makes me angry these days about writing and publishing. I’ve seen it all. I know what to expect from Amazon and Goodreads. Meaning: I don’t expect much, and I assume I will be continually disappointed. Nor do I have the power to change how they operate. My energy-saving strategy: move on and focus on what you can control.

That’s going to become much harder to do if Amazon and Goodreads don’t start defending against the absolute garbage now being spread across their sites.

I know my work gets pirated and frankly I don’t care. (I’m not saying other authors shouldn’t care, but that’s not a battle worth my time today.)

But here’s what does rankle me: garbage books getting uploaded to Amazon where my name is credited as the author. (Here’s but one example.) Whoever’s doing this is obviously preying on writers who trust my name and think I’ve actually written these books. I have not. Most likely they’ve been generated by AI.

It might be possible to ignore this nonsense on some level since these books aren’t receiving customer reviews (so far), and mostly they sink to the bottom of search results (although not always). At the very least, if you look at my author profile on Amazon, these junk books don’t appear. A reader who applies some critical thinking might think twice before accepting these books as mine.

Still, it’s not great. And it falls on me, the author—the one with a reputation at stake—to get these misleading books removed from Amazon. I’m not even sure it’s possible. I don’t own the copyright to these junk books. I don’t exactly “own” my name either—lots of other people who are also legit authors share my name, after all. So on what grounds can I successfully demand this stop, at least in Amazon’s eyes? I’m not sure.

To add insult to injury, these sham books are getting added to my official Goodreads profile. A reasonable person might think I control what books are shown on my Goodreads profile, or that I approve them, or at the very least I could have them easily removed. Not so.

If you need to have your Goodreads profile corrected—as far as the books credited to you—you have to reach out to volunteer “librarians” on Goodreads, which requires joining a group, then posting in a comment thread that you want illegitimate books removed from your profile.

When I complained about this on Twitter/X, an author responded that she had to report 29 illegitimate books in just the last week alone. 29!

With the flood of AI content now published at Amazon, sometimes attributed to authors in a misleading or fraudulent manner, how can anyone reasonably expect working authors to spend every week for the rest of their lives policing this? And if authors don’t police it, they will certainly hear about it, from readers concerned about these garbage books, and from readers who credulously bought this crap and have complaints. Or authors might not hear any thing at all, and lose a potential reader forever.

We desperately need guardrails on this landslide of misattribution and misinformation. Amazon and Goodreads, I beg you to create a way to verify authorship, or for authors to easily block fraudulent books credited to them. Do it now, do it quickly.

Unfortunately, even if and when you get these insane books removed from your official profiles, they will still be floating around out there, with your name, on two major sites that gets millions of visitors, just waiting to be “discovered.” And there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it.
https://janefriedman.com/i-would-rat...books-pirated/





CNET Deletes Thousands of Old Articles to Game Google Search

Google says deleting old pages to bamboozle Search is "not a thing!" as CNET erases its history.
Thomas Germain

Tech news website CNET has deleted thousands of old articles over the past few months in a bid to improve its performance in Google Search results, Gizmodo has learned.

Archived copies of CNET’s author pages show the company deleted small batches of articles prior to the second half of July, but then the pace increased. Thousands of articles disappeared in recent weeks. A CNET representative confirmed that the company was culling stories but declined to share exactly how many it has taken down. The move adds to recent controversies over CNET’s editorial strategy, which has included layoffs and experiments with error-riddled articles written by AI chatbots.

“Removing content from our site is not a decision we take lightly. Our teams analyze many data points to determine whether there are pages on CNET that are not currently serving a meaningful audience. This is an industry-wide best practice for large sites like ours that are primarily driven by SEO traffic,” said Taylor Canada, CNET’s senior director of marketing and communications. “In an ideal world, we would leave all of our content on our site in perpetuity. Unfortunately, we are penalized by the modern internet for leaving all previously published content live on our site.” A representative for the CNET Media Workers Union declined to comment. (Disclosure: Gizmodo’s Editor in Chief Dan Ackerman is a former CNET employee.)

CNET shared an internal memo about the practice. Removing, redirecting, or refreshing irrelevant or unhelpful URLs “sends a signal to Google that says CNET is fresh, relevant and worthy of being placed higher than our competitors in search results,” the document reads.

According to the memo about the “content pruning,” the company considers a number of factors before it “deprecates” an article, including SEO, the age and length of the story, traffic to the article, and how frequently Google crawls the page. The company says it weighs historical significance and other editorial factors before an article is taken down. When an article is slated for deletion, CNET says it maintains its own copy, and sends the story to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. The company also says current staffers whose articles are deprecated will be alerted at least 10 days ahead of time.

SEO, or search engine optimization, is the practice of calibrating the content and design of web pages to improve performance on Google and other search engines, that is, appearing closer to the search bar in the list of results. Many companies live or die by their performance on Google Search, but Google is tight-lipped about the workings of its algorithms. SEO is now one of the primary drivers of editorial strategy in the journalism and media business. News sites and media companies often base their entire editorial strategies on SEO best practices, some of which amount to trial and error and guessing games.

Google does not recommend deleting articles just because they’re considered “older,” said Danny Sullivan, the company’s Public Liaison for Google Search. In fact, the practice is something Google has advised against for years. After Gizmodo’s request for comment, Sullivan posted a series of tweets on the subject.

“Are you deleting content from your site because you somehow believe Google doesn’t like ‘old’ content? That’s not a thing! Our guidance doesn’t encourage this,” Sullivan tweeted.

If a website has an individual page with outdated content, that page “isn’t likely to rank well. Removing it might mean, if you have a massive site, that we’re better able to crawl other content on the site. But it doesn’t mean we go, ‘Oh, now the whole site is so much better’ because of what happens with an individual page.” Sullivan wrote. “Just don’t assume that deleting something only because it’s old will improve your site’s SEO magically.”

However, SEO experts told Gizmodo content pruning can be a useful strategy in some cases, but it’s an “advanced” practice that requires high levels of expertise, according to Chris Rodgers, founder and CEO of CSP, an SEO agency.

“If you’ve got content that’s fallen off in traffic and ratings and search engines have deemed is not valuable for users, that’s content you need to look at,” Rodgers said. Ideally outdated pages should be updated or redirected to a more relevant URL, and deleting content without a redirect should be a last resort. With fewer irrelevant pages on your site, the idea is that Google’s algorithms will be able to index and better focus on the articles or pages a publisher does want to promote.

Google may have an incentive to withhold details about its Search algorithm, both because it would rather be able to make its own decisions about how to rank websites, and because content pruning is a delicate process that can cause problems for publishers—and for Google—if it’s mishandled.

“Just because Google says that deleting content in isolation doesn’t provide any SEO benefit, this isn’t always true,” said Lily Ray, Senior Director of SEO and Head of Organic Research at Amsive Digital.

A media conglomerate called Red Ventures bought CNET in 2020, and the site’s changing strategies sparked a number of controversies since then. Earlier this year, CNET was caught publishing articles written by AI without telling readers about the use of technology, many of which were full of serious inaccuracies. CNET laid off 10 percent of its staff weeks later, though the company said the move was unrelated to AI. (Gizmodo, along with several other sites owned by G/O Media, had its own controversy with publishing factually incorrect AI-written articles in July.)

Whether or not deleting articles is an effective business strategy, it causes other problems that have nothing to do with search engines. For a publisher like CNET — one of the oldest tech news sites on the internet — removing articles means losing parts of the public record that could have unforeseen historical significance in the future. It also means the hundreds of journalists who’ve published articles on CNET could lose access to their body of work.

“CNET’s owner’s decisions to lay off a significant portion of its news staff, lean in on AI for articles and focus on profits from referral links already tarnished CNET’s reputation, and now they are literally erasing its legacy,” said a former CNET writer who asked to remain anonymous. “Beyond the damage to historical records, this hurts every long-term employee that Red Ventures laid off, who may be relying on their clips in job applications.”
https://gizmodo.com/cnet-deletes-tho...seo-1850721475





Journalists Seek Regulations to Govern Fast-Moving Artificial Intelligence Technology
AP

Several news organizations, writers and photographers groups are pushing to be involved in creating standards for the use of artificial intelligence, particularly as it concerns intellectual property rights and the potential spread of misinformation.

In an open letter sent on Wednesday, they outlined priorities for setting rules on the technology, which is developing faster than regulators can keep up with.

“We ... support the responsible advancement and deployment of generative AI technology, while believing that a legal framework must be developed to protect the content that powers AI applications as well as maintain public trust in the media,” the organizations said.

The letter was signed by The Associated Press; Gannett; the News Media Alliance, which represents hundreds of publishers; Getty Images; the National Press Photographers Association; Agence France-Presse and others.

The organizations want to make sure intellectual property owners maintain their rights when AI operators use material for training. The AP last month made a deal with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI to license the news agency’s archive of news stories.

The letter also calls for artificial intelligence companies to take specific steps to eliminate bias and misinformation in the material it produces. In particular, photographers are concerned about the ability of artificial intelligence to create false images.

Seven U.S. companies that are leading AI developers agreed in July to voluntary safeguards set by President Joe Biden’s administration for building their technology, but the commitments aren’t enforceable and don’t touch on intellectual property concerns.
https://apnews.com/article/media-art...83db77b5ef5f6e





Agence France-Presse Pursues Copyright Case Against X, Formerly Known as Twitter
AP

France’s international news agency, Agence France-Presse, says it is pursuing a copyright case against X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, in an effort to secure potential payment for its news content.

The news agency said it applied Wednesday to a Paris court to compel Elon Musk’s rebranded company to provide data it says is needed “for assessing the remuneration owed to AFP.”

The news agency announced the legal action in a statement. It said it is seeking payment under European Union intellectual property rules that cover “neighboring rights,” which allow news outlets and publishers to seek payment from digital platforms for the sharing of their work.

France was the first EU country to adopt the rules into national legislation, in 2019.

“As a leading advocate for the adoption of neighboring rights for the press, AFP remains unwavering in its commitment to the cause,” the news agency said.

It described the legal action against Twitter as “in line with this ongoing commitment.”

AFP said it “will continue to employ the appropriate legal means with each relevant platform to ensure the fair distribution of the value generated by the sharing of news content.”

The agency’s statement claimed that it has faced a “clear refusal” from X to discuss the copyright protections that allow news agencies to seek compensation from digital platforms.

In a tweet, Musk called the case “bizarre.”

“They want us to pay (asterisk)them(asterisk) for traffic to their site where they make advertising revenue and we don’t!?” he asked.

News companies pushed for the EU copyright reform amid worries that quality journalism is declining as ad revenue gets siphoned off by the digital giants.
https://apnews.com/article/twitter-m...efcbb8bc54840b





Almost 70% of Russian Gamers are Pirating in the Wake of Sanctions

Russia's piracy problem has worsened
Rob Thubron

In brief: Game piracy has long been popular in Russia, but the exodus of Western companies from the country following its invasion of Ukraine saw the practice skyrocket. In 2022, 69% of gamers said they'd played at least one pirated game, while 51% admitted to pirating more games than they did in 2021.

A survey carried out by Russian online game development platform School XYZ (spotted by TorrentFreak) highlights the explosion in piracy after numerous game devs and publishers pulled out of the market.

Almost seven out of ten gamers played a pirated game last year, with just over half confirming they were pirating more in 2022 than they were a year earlier. Around 20% said they had pirated more than ten games, while 27% confessed to pirating more than three.

The Russian gaming market in 2021 looked very different (courtesy: Game World Observer)

Not all participants were pirates: 31% said they had pirated nothing, all of whom were against pirating. Moreover, just 7% said they had purchased nothing through official channels, suggesting the other 93%, even the pirates, had bought at least one game legitimately last year.

Game piracy isn't a new issue in Russia, which had considered legalizing piracy to avoid sanctions. A 2019 survey of 2,000 Russian by ISET Softvea LLC (via Ars Technica) found that 91% preferred pirated content across mediums, with cracked games proving to be the most popular type of pirated content. Only 9% of respondents said they bought content exclusively from official sources.

Russians have few options when it comes to buying games legally. Microsoft, Ubisoft, Take-Two, EA, Activision, Epic, Sony, and Nintendo as just some of the big names to have stopped the sale of their products in Russia following the invasion, but the bigger problem has been companies like Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal suspending their services, making the purchase of games from online platforms much more difficult.

As with many modern technologies, video games are playing a big part in the Russia/Ukraine conflict. We've seen Counter-Strike: Go being used to skirt Putin's media restrictions and inform Russians about the war. There was also Microsoft's warning of Russian agents trying to infiltrate gaming communities. On the hardware side, it was reported in April that the Ukraine army was using the Steam Deck to control machine gun turrets.
https://www.techspot.com/news/99509-...companies.html





Russia Starts Blocking VPN Protocols
Dejan Cvetnarevic

About a week ago, Telegram chats were flooded with news of Russia planning to shut down services that bypass website blocking.

Now, it looks like the country has started doing it.

VPN protocols not working in Russia

More and more mobile users in Russia are reporting that their VPNs aren’t working.

The subscribers of mobile operators such as MTS (МТС), Beeline (Билайн), MegaFon (МегаФон), Tele2, Yota, and Tinkoff Mobile (Тинькофф Мобайл) have bumped into this problem.

As Russian media reports, subscribers of landline providers currently don’t experience any VPN issues.

Those who were not being able to connect tried replacing their VPN with another one. Unfortunately, this didn’t seem to resolve the issue.

The media in Russia reports that the reason behind this is that the country isn’t banning specific VPNs. Instead, it’s putting restrictions on the protocols these services use.

According to appleinsider.ru, the two protocols that are subject to the restrictions are:

As some news outlets report, Russia started blocking OpenVPN first.

Many Russian companies have now encountered problems in their daily operations as both OpenVPN and WireGuard are quite popular in corporate environments.

At the moment, there’s no information about other protocols, but the website notes that Russia may have blocked them as well.

The site also reported that the restriction currently doesn’t apply to Shadowsocks. It advises Russian citizens who want to bypass geo-restrictions to use it as an alternative to a VPN.

Widely used in China, Shadowsocks disguises your traffic as HTTPS, letting it move freely. It encrypts every byte of information, hiding your browsing sessions from prying eyes.

A Russian VPN provider, Terona VPN, confirmed the recent restrictions and said its users are reporting difficulties using the service. It’s now preparing to switch to new protocols that are more resistant to blocking.
https://vpncentral.com/russia-starts...vpn-protocols/





MIT Pirate Certificate

The MIT Pirate Certificate became available in the Fall of 2011. Students who have completed Archery, Fencing, Pistol (Air Pistol or Rifle) and Sailing should send an email to ahoymitpe@mit.edu with name and MIT ID number once grades are posted for all four courses. Check PE&W history after each quarter.

The MIT Pirate Certificate is designed to recognize the completion of the undergraduate Physical Education & Wellness General Institute Requirement.

The MIT Pirate Certificate is only made available to MIT students and is an incentive for undergraduate students to complete their Physical Education & Wellness General Institute Requirement of 4 physical education & wellness courses. It is not a stand-alone certificate. Non-MIT courses and life experience are not counted towards completing the certificate. The MIT Pirate Certificate is for entertainment purposes only and does not give the recipient license to engage in piracy or any pirate activities.
https://physicaleducationandwellness...e-certificate/
















Until next week,

- js.



















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