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Rex Tillerson has made it clear that he likes the media about as much or even less than President Donald Trump. While Trump has relied on the press to make him the center of attention, Tillerson relies less on it and as the head of the State Department, which is supposed to provide policy for the U.S, he has been very determined to keep his distance. As Blasting News has reported, Tillerson has gone out of his way to not engage with anyone at the Department and on a flight to Beijing over the last few months, he took with him just one reporter to be interviewed where he revealed just how little he tries to rely on the press. Blasting News even reported on mass firings of officials left over from the previous administration, weakening the opposition, and the Department's function.

During his trip last week to Russia, it was reported that Russian president Vladimir Putin was upset enough about the United States' attack against the Assad regime that he initially refused to meet with Trump's Secretary of State. What was scheduled and reported on was his meeting with his counterpart Sergei Lavrov. But the Washington Post reported that after his meeting with Lavrov, the Secretary ditched reporters before he met with Putin at the Kremlin. Originally, it was the Associated Press (AP) which first tweeted that a Kremlin spokesman was the original source, that they were the ones who said Tillerson was meeting with Putin. The Post's article is titled: "We are relying on China and Russia to tell us what Trump and Tillerson discussed with their leaders."

The Washington Post said that it was surprising that Putin's team and not Tillerson's was the source. The contrast here is with the fact that according to the Post he, allowed U.S. journalists to accompany him to the Osobnyak Guest House in Moscow for the meeting with Lavrov. What's more, their article said that Russian #State Media pushed out a steady stream of information and that the State Department couldn't match it, and that they too had to rely on that information. Prior to the Donald Trump's presidency, the U.S. has largely believed and even now accuse the Russian government of disinformation from its media channels.

The Post refers to the differences in the perception of reporting by Russian state media and the Associated Press via Twitter where the AP said at 1:45 pm Eastern that Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says Moscow and Washington have agreed on the need for the United Nations to investigate the use of chemical weapons in Syria. This was clearly during the meeting that was on Tillerson's itinerary. But then at 3:28, the AP reports differently on not only the topic of agreement, but from the view of who is disputing the agreement: The United States is disputing that it has agreed with Russia on the need for a United Nations investigation into a chemical weapons attack in Syria.

The article says that the stream of disinformation was allowed to go unchecked by the State Department for an hour and 45 minutes. Prior to becoming Secretary, Tillerson was the CEO of Exxon Mobile who considered his relationship with Putin to be good enough to award Rex Tillerson with a Friendship Award which is considered Russia's highest honor bestowed to foreign citizens. During his confirmation hearing, it was suspected that he would try to help lift sanctions on Russia since he was against them as Exxon CEO because it hurt their bottom line.

During his hearing, Tillerson was also cornered for not saying whether he believed that Putin had assassinated people who opposed him. In an exchange between he and Sen. Marco Rubio during his hearing, he refused to conclude that Putin was a war criminal and that under his review, he would only side with what was already in the public record after looking at it more thoroughly, which would indicate that negative coverage on the Russian president or the West's decades old conclusion that Putin was a war criminal was simply not enough to go by.

It's assumed that Tillerson might also be taking his cues from the #White House. In the mentioned Blasting News article (at the beginning of this one) it referred to the fact that Trump has aides monitoring members of his cabinet throughout the government to keep them in line. In a similar way of controlling the message, the Post also makes the comparison with Chinese state media where the White House had little to nothing to say about the discussion between Trump and Xi other than that it was good. The Chinese government provided a far more descriptive and detailed account and what America has to rely on for transparency. #propaganda

More:
Trump government allows foreign state media to control narrative - Blasting News

For all the hype behind fancy products like VR, AI and bots, one would think that something as seemingly low tech as getting a page to load quickly would be a concern of the past. But the reality is that latency remains a persistent painthat publishers have to constantly monitorif they want to avoid alienating users.

Vice Media has fought this headache by ramping up its own tech stack so that it can control and isolate tags that are slowing things down, pressing back on slow vendors and reducing its dependency on open-exchange bidders.By doing these things, Vice claims it has reduced its average page-load time by about 50 percent and its average ad-load time by about 80 percent.

Speed improvements that matter are all nerdy stuff like this, and you have to get under the hood to really understand speed optimization, said Drake Martinet, vp of product.

Many publishers simply do not have a sophisticated-enough tech stack to identify and block the ad units that cause the most latency. But Vices growth as a company has led to more investment in creating a beefier tech stack. About two years ago, Vice had fewer than 10 engineers, but the company now has more than 50. A bigger engineering team has allowed Vice to develop its own proprietary CMS and video player.

Since the company developed much of its own stack, its engineers have better control over how the systems work on the back end, which means they have more available options to make speed tweaks. Vice utilizes this control by programming a series of microservices directly into its systems, which focus on very specific tasks.

For example, an engineer will set up one microservice to automatically resize ads if they come in at the wrong size, while another microservice will monitor how long that particular ad takes to load. By keeping the code for each of these processes lightweight and hosting the code on the companys servers, engineers can compartmentalize the plethora of variables that contribute to latency, which allows them to more easily isolate problem areas to make incremental adjustments.

A Vice spokesperson said theaverage load time for one of its verticals was a little over a second before thecompanys proprietary tech stack was made available to the vertical. After getting access to getting access to the tech stack, page loads quickly dropped to around half a second. Website speed tester Pingdom gave Vice URLs a B in performance, which is the same grade it gives to The New York Times. Google speed tests rate Vice URLs in the low 60s out of 100, which is lower than the ratings it gives to the Times. But these ratings should be taken with a grain of salt given that Google rated a CNN article that killed by browser an 87 out of 100 in desktop speed.

Another latency headache for many pubs is the proliferation of ad tech middlemen since each additional vendor places more tags on-page, which slows down loading times. To mitigate vendors impact on speed, Vice seeks vendors that have the least amount of third-party code, said Andrew Smith, vp of digital.

Vice also pushes back if it notices that a vendor is the cause of latency.

We will tell them, We really value your service, but we notice that it is slowing our page down, so we are going to pause on using [the vendor] until you get it back under control, Smith said.

An analysis of latency in 2017 wouldnt be complete without discussing how a publisher handles the selling of its programmatic inventory. Because a major criticism of header bidding the process by which publishers offer inventory to multiple ad exchanges simultaneously before making calls to their ad servers is that it can really slow down page loads.

Vice alleviates the pangs of programmatic in a few ways. It places bidders in a wrapper, which reduces latency by collecting and centrally hosting ad tech tags in an external cloud service. Vice has also increased its private marketplace deals, which reduces middlemen by connecting advertisers directly to publishers.

Regarding the fight against latency, Martinet emphasized that vigilance is as important as a publishers tech capabilities.

Half of it is the technology, he said. But the other half is the desire.

Photo via Vice

Link:
How Vice Media cut page-load time by 50 percent in six months - Digiday

It has long been suspected that the Chinese government, as part of its effort to control the Internet within its borders, surreptitiously floods social media with fake posts written by a vast army of hired promoters posing as ordinary people. The 50-cent party, its called, because each fake post supposedly earns its author 50 cents.

The phenomenon has been talked and written about widely by journalists, academics, activists, other social-media users, but evidence for these claims has been hard to finduntil recently. In a study (to be published this year in the American Political Science Review) that has already prompted a startled response from Beijing, Weatherhead University Professor Gary King, the director of Harvards Institute for Quantitative Social Science, confirmed the suspicion: the 50-cent party, he says, is real, although much of the rest of what everyone believed about it is wrong. For one thing, the fake posters likely arent paid 50 cents. Most arent independent contractors: theyre government employees writing online comments on their off time, and theres no evidence they earn extra money for it.

More surprising, the purpose of these fabricated posts is not to argue with other social-media users, but to distract them. To perform the study, King and his two coauthorsJennifer Pan, Ph.D. 15, and Margaret Roberts, Ph.D. 14analyzed a trove of leaked emails sent between local government offices and the propaganda department in one county in southeastern China. A big giant mess of a dataset, King recalls, from which the researchers harvested nearly 44,000 fabricated social-media posts from 2013 and 2014. Across all of China, they calculated, that suggests about 450 million posts per year. In those King and his team read, 50-cent party members are not arguing with anybody at all, he says. They dont jump into fights when other users complain about the regimes repressions or corruption among local officials.

Instead, they change the subject. Theyll say, I woke up this morning and thought about how important our martyrs were to the history of China, King says. Or, What a beautiful day it is today. Lots and lots of theseand not just randomly. Theyll post them in big bursts when they need them. Kings team found large batches of fake posts turning up around the same time as crises, holidays, and other events that might stir up public action: the Shanshan riots in June 2013, the Urumqi Railway explosion in April 2014, Martyrs Day, Tomb Sweeping Day, Communist Party meetings to discuss national policies. Its almost like when youre having an all-out fight about something with your spouse or your kids, King points out, and you want to end the argument, and so you say, Hey, why dont we go get ice cream?

This findingthat 50-cent party members are less interested in controversy than in cheerleadingfits with Kings previous research on Chinas social-media control (see harvardmag.com/china-censors-13), in which he found that the government would ignore comments disparaging the regime or local leaders, while posts about organizing protests, or even pro-government rallies, were invariably censored. They dont care what you say or what you think, King says. They only care what you can do. They dont want people in the streets.

Last spring came an unexpected twist, when a Western reporter got hold of an unfinished draft of the 50-cent party research paper and called King with some questions for an article. King answered them and then, realizing that his research would be going public ahead of schedule, posted the paper on his website. The reporter published his article, and about an hour and a half later, another publication picked up the story; 72 hours after that, some 5,000 articles had appeared worldwide.

Thats when the Chinese government responded. In an editorial in the pro-government Global Times, the regime for the first time admitted the existence of the 50-cent party, King says, and attempted to explain to its citizens the reason for this public opinion guidance, which is their term of art for information control. Basically, the government argued that without such control, the country would fall into strife and chaos. And, King adds, they said that the Chinese people are in agreement about the necessity of this public opinion guidance.

As it happens, that was an assertion King could check. After the international blizzard of attention, there was enormous discussion on Chinese social media about the paper and the governments answer to it. So we downloaded all the posts commenting on it, King says. The finding? He smiles. Well, it turns out that the Chinese governments claim in their editorial is incorrect. Eighty percent of the people, at least on social media, think its not a good idea to be censoring and fabricating posts.

Read the original post:
China's Social-Media Smoke Screen - Harvard Magazine

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) Googles new fact-checking program is a bid tocontrol the news bythe old and increasingly discredited corporate-owned media establishment.

"I see this asan effort tocontrol news inthe new digital age," Executive Intelligence Review senior editor Jeff Steinberg told Sputnik.

The international fact-checking community currently consists of115 organizations, according toGoogle.

AP Photo/ Virginia Mayo, File

"The ability ofmainstream media toabsolutely control how people think and what facts they take asvalid is much more challenging thanwhen there were three TV networks and a few major daily newspapers [in the United States," he pointed out.

Steinberg expressed skepticism that the so-called "international fact-checking community" Google relied uponwas truly independent and unbiased.

"I am leery aboutthe international fact-check community withoutgetting a better idea ofwhich groups they are. I know the case ofWikipedia and their fact checkers are neocon ideologues who scrub content foranything that deeply critiques their ideology and boosts their enemies list," he said.

Steinberg cited an example a recent website that claimed toidentify "fake news" outlets.

"They noted that the only trustworthy sources of facts are the BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation], the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and NPR [National Public Radio]," Steinberg added.

University ofLouvain Professor Jean Bricmont, an eminent philosopher and author agreed that Google was likely touse the New York Times and other major establishment outlets todiscredit facts and interpretations presented byother sources and thereby severely limit freedom ofexpression.

REUTERS/ Goran Tomasevic/Files

The Western media establishment tried toclaim it was incorruptible and unbiased, Bricmont noted.

"This is all based onthe prejudice that mainstream media do not lie, do not make mistakes, do not select information, only alternative media do. This makes this fact checking a tool ofpropaganda ofcourse," he said.

However, Bricmont predicted that the fact-checking plan would fail withthe public.

"I doubt that this sort ofsoft censorship will induce them toregain faith inthe MSM [mainstream media] People do not ingeneral liketo be told what toread and people who trust alternative sites do so because they have lost trust inthe MSM," he said.

Bricmont expressed skepticism that the new Google policy would succeed instrengthening the hegemony ofthe mainstream media.

The rest is here:
Google's Fact-Checker Deemed to Give Corporate Media Power to Control News - Sputnik International

Prudhoe Bay. (Photo courtesy of BP)

UPDATE Saturday, April 15, 5:30 p.m.:

BP is still struggling to contain anout-of-control productionwell on the North Slope, after a failed attempt to shut it downFriday night.Thewell continuedto vent natural gas Saturday evening, more than a day and a half afterBP first reporteda gas release and spray of crude oil.

Thearea near the well remained too unsafe forworkers to approach Saturday.But BP said flights over the areasuggestedthat oil from the well waslikely contained to the drill pad, and may not havereachedthe surrounding tundra. The companyconfirmed there havebeen no injuries, and no reports of impacts to wildlife.

The focus today is on developing plans to fully and safely secure the well, BP said in a statement.

Representatives from the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation (ADEC), U.S. EPA and the North Slope Borough had traveled to Prudhoe Bay to forma unified command with BP to manage the response.

In a situationreportreleased Saturday afternoon, ADEC said it wastoo soon to pinpoint why BP lost control of the well.Butthe reportidentified two separate leaks in the well, and noted that the well itself had jacked up, or risen several feet out of the ground.

This is a continuing story. Check back for updates.

ORIGINAL STORY Friday, April 14, 5 p.m.:

BP is working to contain an out-of-control production well at the Prudhoe Bay oil field on the North Slope. The well is currently venting natural gas and has released at least some crude oil into the environment.

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State regulators say they dont yet know how serious the incident is, or what amountof oil or gas has been released.

In an emailed statement, BP said nobody was near the well at the time of the release, and there have been no injuries.

Regulators were still waiting for details Friday afternoon.

Its been spewing gas and some amount of crude, and some of its getting onto the surrounding tundra, Dan Seamount said. Hes a commissioner with the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission.We dont have any volumes yet.

Seamount said its been years since an incident like this took place on the North Slope. The drill site, DS2, is about five miles from the industryhub of Deadhorse.

On Friday afternoon, BP wasworking to depressurize the drill site to reduce the amount of gas venting from the well. Regulators said no workers werebeing allowed near the welluntil that happened, because of the fire hazard.

When a well has lost control, it becomes unpredictable, and we want to make sure that the people that respond to the site do so in a safe way, Ashley Adamczak, with the state Department of Environmental Conservation (ADEC) in Fairbanks, said.

Adamczak said once workers are able to approach the well, the company and regulators will be able to get a better sense of what caused the incident and how much oil and gas was released.

BPfirst noticed the release at about 7:30a.m. Friday, according to a situation report from ADEC. The report said representatives of ADEC, EPA and the North Slope Borough wouldestablish a unified command with BP to develop cleanup plans.

But asof 4 p.m. Friday, there was no word on when BP expected to have the well under control. Seamount said it could be hours, or days.The company hadnt yet submitted a plan for shutting in the well to the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission for approval.

It sounds like the problem is going to be taken care of,Seamount said, adding after a pause: Not sure when.

Visit link:
BP working to contain well on North Slope - Alaska Public Radio Network