News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back a... by netsharc on Tuesday July 04, 2017 @07:28PM (#14698966)
Great point about Twitter and FB not having the "I've seen this" flag (although they probably have this info for their "engagement metrics"), it keeps people addicted and returning. I remember being glued to Twitter during the Mumbai terror attack, but the way it was designed, it was an endless stream of the same info, repeated. And spam, since bots add trending hashtags to their junk messages. I guess it's like cable news' rolling coverage, but instead of the same info repeated every hour, we can now read the same thing every second...
Re:Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back a... by Pigo on Wednesday July 05, 2017 @09:55AM (#14702392)
I just don't get Facebook anymore, and I've never enjoyed Twitter. I understand they can still be useful tools for finding out some news quick, or sharing pictures of your kids with grandma. But is there anything online that is even close to what Myspace and early facebook were like? People seem to have forgotten what it was like when these were tools to augment your actual social life.
Re:Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back a... by therealdrag0 on Tuesday July 11, 2017 @02:19PM (#14746595)
Right. I have zero interest in FB being a source of news, which seems to be what they've become.
Re:Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back a... by foreigner on Wednesday July 05, 2017 @01:56AM (#14700214)
How about implementing an RSS interface on top of the likes of Twitter and Facebook by screen scraping? Would have to take authentication of course. Then we could consume it via RSS readers just like the good ol' days. Does that already exist? I would pay for that.
Re:Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back a... by Animats on Wednesday July 05, 2017 @02:41AM (#14700346)
Facebook used to support RSS feeds. So did Twitter. Now they're both gone, to force people to use their ad-laden interfaces. There are services to generate RSS feeds from both, but there's probably some catch to that.

[1] https://zapier.com/blog/facebook-twitter-rss-feed/

Re:Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back a... by zdkl on Wednesday July 05, 2017 @03:56AM (#14700617)
The social media are pushing the social thing, which is fair enough from a business standpoint.

What isn't fine is that users are (intentionnaly, could be argued) led to believe that the media part is equivalent to traditional "RSS-like" media like AFP/Reuters/Bloomberg who carried the responsibility of being trustable.

There's a place and implementation for everything and social media is not an appropriate platform for diffusion of factchecked information. How we make use of the different information dispersion platforms is on us!

Re:Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back a... by alanfranzoni on Wednesday July 05, 2017 @03:34AM (#14700514)
Most probably it would be illegal, against each website's TOS. If such tool catches up, it will be removed - and you still need to account for upstream changes that periodically kill the functionality.
Re:Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back a... by TeMPOraL on Wednesday July 05, 2017 @04:04AM (#14700652)
Thinking of such a tool as a service is a symptom of the same disease that got us where we are in the first place. If such tool would, instead, be open-source and self-hosted (or a component of trivially self-hosted) application, websites could do exactly shit about it. Traffic will be coming from everywhere, and the tool will get updated by people to overcome upstream interface changes.

Ultimately, it's SaaS webapps that's the problem. The model has legitimate benefits (lack of installation, cross-platform), but it also is the reason the Web centralizes so much.

Re:Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back a... by alanfranzoni on Wednesday July 05, 2017 @05:04AM (#14700893)
Most probably the github repo will be suspended, even though it's self hosted, I think. And you still need to account for upstream changes.
Re:Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back a... by TeMPOraL on Wednesday July 05, 2017 @05:25AM (#14700974)
Forget Github. It might be just a regular git repo on someone's server. IANAL, but could companies really go against a person hosting the source code of a software that scraps a website?

Even if, that's probably solvable (by turning it into cat-and-mouse game, TPB/SciHub-style). Have a non-turing-complete set of conversion rules that do scrapping -> standardized-data-format via a general-purpose scrapper. Distribute those through P2P. There might be problems with malicious actors, but generally this should be possible to implement in a way that's mostly transparent for end users.

> And you still need to account for upstream changes.

Upstream changes will never be too extreme to handle manually, if we're talking scrapping solutions - because any such extreme changes would also piss off the regular browser users.

Re:Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back a... by jacquesm on Wednesday July 05, 2017 @04:29AM (#14700756)
Against the TOS does not make something illegal.
Re:Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back a... by dredmorbius on Wednesday July 05, 2017 @09:25AM (#14702183)
Unfortunately, that's precisely what the CFAA does, in the United States. EFF's interpretation:

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”), 18 U.S.C. § 1030, is an amendment made in 1986 to the Counterfeit Access Device and Abuse Act that was passed in 1984 and essentially states that, whoever intentionally accesses a computer without authorization or exceeds authorized access, and thereby obtains information from any protected computer if the conduct involved an interstate or foreign communication shall be punished under the Act. In 1996 the CFAA was, again, broadened by an amendment that replaced the term “federal interest computer” with the term “protected computer.”18 U.S.C. § 1030. While the CFAA is primarily a criminal law intended to reduce the instances of malicious interferences with computer systems and to address federal computer offenses, an amendment in 1994 allows civil actions to brought under the statute, as well.

https://ilt.eff.org/index.php/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act_%...

Re:Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back a... by eeZah7Ux on Wednesday July 05, 2017 @06:40AM (#14701311)
Not yet - but people seem to confuse legislators and corporations more and more frequently...
Re:Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back a... by jacquesm on Wednesday July 05, 2017 @06:41AM (#14701316)
Clink or Hoosegow?
Re:Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back a... by Semaphor on Wednesday July 05, 2017 @02:42AM (#14700349)
There is a tool that converts Twitter to RSS. I used to use it to get updates from a fantasy author who had neither a website nor a mailing list. It was self hosted but can't remember the name.
Re:Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back a... by Silvus on Wednesday July 05, 2017 @03:40AM (#14700543)
Re:Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back a... by Semaphor on Thursday July 06, 2017 @06:32AM (#14709332)
Not the one I used (it started with Tw), but useful nonetheless :)
Re:Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back a... by ksrm on Wednesday July 05, 2017 @01:07PM (#14704175)
That looks excellent. Thanks for posting it!
Re:Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back a... by partycoder on Tuesday July 04, 2017 @10:14PM (#14699584)
Someone should greasemonkey this ftw
Re:Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back a... by vosper on Tuesday July 04, 2017 @09:20PM (#14699414)
With Facebook I scroll down until I see something I've seen before, then I stop. Doesn't seem very hard, and I imagine its what most people do. If I want to revisit older things then I keep scrolling, but that's almost never the case.
Re:Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back a... by incompatible on Tuesday July 04, 2017 @10:42PM (#14699664)
That's what I do, but I also have to change the ordering from "Top Stories" to "Most Recent" fairly frequently. That usually puts out different stuff (Facebook seems incapable of remembering the setting. I assume it's deliberate design at this point, since such a blatant bug would have been fixed by now).

I suspect it's only a workable strategy if you either have few friends, or stop following all the ones with a low signal to noise ratio, or if you use Facebook somewhat frequently. Otherwise, there'd just be too many updates to finish scrolling through them in a reasonable amount of time.

Re:Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back a... by jkmcf on Tuesday July 04, 2017 @11:13PM (#14699763)
"Most Recent" is most recently updated by comments, which is mostly useless for me. I just stopped using FB as much, checking in just to see how people are doing every few days.
Re:Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back a... by Terribledactyl on Tuesday July 04, 2017 @10:28PM (#14699624)
I was under the impression that each scroll through Facebook could show different content in arbitrary orderings.
Re:Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back a... by WalterGR on Tuesday July 04, 2017 @10:34PM (#14699639)
For vosper's technique to work, you have to select the Most Recent ordering for your news feed.
Re:Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back a... by M2Ys4U on Tuesday July 04, 2017 @09:53PM (#14699516)
I used to do this with Twitter, but that's impossible these days.
Re:Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back a... by SyneRyder on Wednesday July 05, 2017 @04:46AM (#14700811)
Still possible with Twitter if you use a 3rd party app, like Tweetbot on Mac / iOS and Fenix on Android. I don't think it's possible on the website or official app (and if I was forced to use Twitter as currently designed, I think I'd give up on it).
Re:Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back a... by pjc50 on Wednesday July 05, 2017 @06:26AM (#14701237)
Still works for me - you occasionally have to decline "things you may have missed", but they come as a lump and the chronological order is preserved.