Beyond Real Time

A 1964 clip so relevant in 2018, could, in actuality, lay out, in indirect fashion, how WWIII starts, based on the insanity of Trump jumping the shark on whether Assad is willing to do stupid by gassing his people when the war, as ascertained by US military, has already been won with extensive Russian help. Words cannot describe just how dangerous Trump's unilateral action truly is. One hopes the joint chiefs will say no to this folly before it's too late.

President Trump: In an early morning tweet on Wednesday warned Moscow that "nice and new and 'smart'" missiles would be headed to Syria, saying "Get ready Russia."

"Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and 'smart!'" he said.

"You shouldn’t be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!" the president added.

WTF & Dr. Strangelove indeed.

The second luckiest man on the planet (Bill Gates is 1st - thanks to the ineptness of IBM) building an empire on non state of the art tech, just admitted a possible cool 2.2 billion of us rubes may have had our data hacked. WTF comes to mind here as Zuckerberg is one that yours truly, and many others, has disliked from day one as one who could not be trusted. Unfortunately, FB is a part of my life but at least I am not alone in getting hosed based on, what appears to be, a slovenly approach to maintaining security for us chickens.

Facebook has admitted that "most" of its 2.2 billion users "could have had their public profile scraped" by third parties without their knowledge, and that the personal information of up to 87 million people was improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica, the company disclosed on Wednesday.

“In total, we believe the Facebook information of up to 87 million people — mostly in the US — may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica,” said Mike Schroepfer, Facebook's Chief Technology Officer.

Initial reports set the number of users affected by the CA data purchase at 50 million. The London-based political data company bought the data from two psychologists (one of whom currently works for Facebook) who developed a data harvesting app disguised as a fitness app.

One of the methods used by "malicious actors" to "scrape" user data has been to enter another person's phone number or email address into a Facebook search, allowing information to be harvested or scraped. “We believe most people on Facebook could have had their public profile scraped in this way,” Schroepfer said.

It gets better.

The Menlo Park company admitted to Bloomberg on Wednesday that it's been scanning private messages between individuals communicating through Messenger to "make sure it follows the company's content rules."

The company told Bloomberg that while Messenger conversations are private, Facebook scans them and uses the same tools to prevent abuse there that it does on the social network more generally. All content must abide by the same "community standards." People can report posts or messages for violating those standards, which would prompt a review by the company’s “community operations” team. Automated tools can also do the work. -Bloomberg

“For example, on Messenger, when you send a photo, our automated systems scan it using photo matching technology to detect known child exploitation imagery or when you send a link, we scan it for malware or viruses,” a Facebook Messenger spokeswoman said in a statement. “Facebook designed these automated tools so we can rapidly stop abusive behavior on our platform.”