Fergus Noodle

Nadir: “My blazer and trousers are from UFF. The shoulderbag is Supreme, the t- shirt Zara, the shoes Nike. Can’t never go wrong with a pair of Airforces. I'm also wearing one of my favourite bucket hat from Kangol. I get inspired by a lot of things such as my friends, my family or through social media. At the end of the day I just wear what I like and what I feel comfortable in wearing.

Salma: “My style is inspired by friends, Instagram and just streetstyle in general.Im wearing over size cargo pants from I Am Gia with a black vest and chunky sandals.”

12 July 2019, Iso Roobertinkatu

It's Friday night and time for a food adventure with my sometime vegetarian friend Laura and Kat. On the agenda: to eat the famous chicken and garlic sauce at El Jannah in Granville! The only challenge? The impending hailstorm!

Over the past few years, Chris Pratt has been more public about his faith in interviews, award speeches, and social media. A few days ago, Ellen Page raised questions about Pratt’s church advancing anti-LGBT views. Pratt has ties to both Zoe Church and Hillsong, evangelical churches that are well-known and influential in contemporary Christianity.

My work doesn’t usually dovetail with celebrity gossip, but this case caught my interest because it raises questions about whether we can or should ask people to justify the political work of their religious groups. Thanks to research in the sociology of religion, we know how political attitudes spread through faith groups, and this can help us make better sense of the conversation.

There is good reason to expect people to have their own beliefs that might differ from their church leadership. Research across the social sciences shows that people generally aren’t consistent in the way they express their religious beliefs in everyday life. Also, churches are not often clear about where they stand on these issues. According to reporting in The Huffington Post,

Zoe’s official stance on LGBTQ issues is unclear, according to Church Clarity, a crowd-sourced database that scores churches based on how clearly they communicate their policies on LGBTQ people and on women in leadership. George Mekhail, one of Church Clarity’s founders, told HuffPost he suspects that the ambiguity some conservative Christian churches have around their LGBTQ policies could be intentional.

That last part of the quote gets at the most important sociological point. In these church contexts, people don’t usually get their politics straight from the pulpit. Research on evangelical congregations shows how most of the political socialization in church life comes from lay leaders and fellow members who model their political views for new members. If church leaders want to advocate for a pro-life, anti-LGBT, or other policy agenda, they often don’t have to do it explicitly. The laity has already taught newcomers that this is how “people like us” vote.

We also have to consider Pratt’s status as a celebrity congregant. Regardless of his personal views, religious organizations have long taken an interest in cultural influence and worked to foster connections with important social networks in politics, business, and the entertainment industry to legitimize and advance their social agendas.

It might seem unfair to call out a single person for the agenda of an entire church organization. On the other hand, as a sociologist, I come to this debate less interested in what’s in any single person’s head or heart. I’m more interested in where they are in relation to everyone else and what those relationships do. The conversation from Page reminds us that It’s not necessarily about what a person believes, but about what they legitimate with their platform and presence.Evan Stewart is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Minnesota. You can follow him on Twitter.

(View original at https://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

We don’t yet know the root cause(s) that forced Marriott this week to disclose a four-year-long breach involving the personal and financial information of 500 million guests of its Starwood hotel properties. But anytime we see such a colossal intrusion go undetected for so long, the ultimate cause is usually a failure to adopt the most important principle in cybersecurity defense that applies to both corporations and consumers: Assume you are compromised.

TO COMPANIES

For companies, this principle means accepting the notion that it is no longer possible to keep the bad guys out of your networks entirely. This doesn’t mean abandoning all tenets of traditional defense, such as quickly applying software patches and using technologies to block or at least detect malware infections.

It means accepting that despite how many resources you expend trying to keep malware and miscreants out, all of this can be undone in a flash when users click on malicious links or fall for phishing attacks. Or a previously unknown security flaw gets exploited before it can be patched. Or any one of a myriad other ways attackers can win just by being right once, when defenders need to be right 100 percent of the time.

The companies run by leaders and corporate board members with advanced security maturity are investing in ways to attract and retain more cybersecurity talent, and arranging those defenders in a posture that assumes the bad guys will get in.

This involves not only focusing on breach prevention, but at least equally on intrusion detection and response. It starts with the assumption that failing to respond quickly when an adversary gains an initial foothold is like allowing a tiny cancer cell to metastasize into a much bigger illness that — left undetected for days, months or years — can cost the entire organism dearly.

The companies with the most clueful leaders are paying threat hunters to look for signs of new intrusions. They’re reshuffling the organizational chart so that people in charge of security report to the board, the CEO, and/or chief risk officer — anyone but the Chief Technology Officer.

They’re constantly testing their own networks and employees for weaknesses, and regularly drilling their breach response preparedness (much like a fire drill). And, apropos of the Marriott breach, they are finding creative ways to cut down on the volume of sensitive data that they need to store and protect.

TO INDIVIDUALS

Likewise for individuals, it pays to accept two unfortunate and harsh realities:

Reality #1: Bad guys already have access to personal data points that you may believe should be secret but which nevertheless aren’t, including your credit card information, Social Security number, mother’s maiden name, date of birth, address, previous addresses, phone number, and yes — even your credit file.

Reality #2: Any data point you share with a company will in all likelihood eventually be hacked, lost, leaked, stolen or sold — usually through no fault of your own. And if you’re an American, it means (at least for the time being) your recourse to do anything about that when it does happen is limited or nil.

Marriott is offering affected consumers a year’s worth of service from a company owned by security firm Kroll that advertises the ability to scour cybercrime underground markets for your data. Should you take them up on this offer? It probably can’t hurt as long as you’re not expecting it to prevent some kind of bad outcome. But once you’ve accepted Realities #1 and #2 above it becomes clear there is nothing such services could tell you that you don’t already know.

Once you’ve owned both of these realities, you realize that expecting another company to safeguard your security is a fool’s errand, and that it makes far more sense to focus instead on doing everything you can to proactively prevent identity thieves, malicious hackers or other ne’er-do-wells from abusing access to said data.

This includes assuming that any passwords you use at one site will eventually get hacked and leaked or sold online (see Reality #2), and that as a result it is an extremely bad idea to re-use passwords across multiple Web sites. For example, if you used your Starwood password anywhere else, that other account you used it at is now at a much higher risk of getting compromised.

By the way, if you are the type of person who likes to re-use passwords, then you definitely need to be using a password manager, which helps you pick and remember strong passwords/passphrases and essentially lets you use the same strong master password/passphrase across all Web sites.

The “assume you’re compromised” philosophy involves freezing your credit files with the major credit bureaus, and regularly ordering free copies of your credit file from annualcreditreport.com to make sure nobody is monkeying with your credit (except you).

It means planting your flag at various online services before fraudsters do it for you, such as at the Social Security Administration, U.S. Postal Service, Internal Revenue Service, your mobile provider, and your Internet service provider (ISP).

Assuming compromise means placing very little trust or confidence in anything that comes to you via email. In the context of this Marriott/Starwood breach, for example, consider all the data points that attackers may now have to make a phishing or malware attack more likely to be successful: Your Starwood account number, your address, phone number, email address, passport number, dates and times of your reservations, and credit card information.

How hard would it be for someone to craft an email that warns of a problem with a recent reservation or with your Starwood account, urging you to click a booby trapped link or attachment to learn more? Now imagine that such targeted emails can come from any brand with whom you’ve done business (for a refresher, see Reality #2 above).

Assuming you’re compromised means beefing up your passwords by adopting more robust multi-factor authentication — and perhaps even transitioning away from SMS/text messages for multifactor toward more secure app- or key-based options.

TOUGH TRADE-OFFS

If the advice above sounds inconvenient, unfair and expensive for all involved, congratulations: You are well on your way to internalizing Realities #1 and #2. For better or worse, being a savvy consumer means constantly having to make difficult trade-offs between security, privacy, and convenience.

Oh, and you generally only get to pick two out of three of these qualities. Same goes for the trio of high-speed, high-quality, and low-cost. Or good, fast, and cheap. Again, pick two. You get the idea.

Unfortunately, these transactions become even more lopsided and difficult to weigh when one party to them always selects the same trade-off (e.g., fast, low-cost, and convenient). Right now, it sure seems like there aren’t a lot of consequences when huge companies that ought to know better screw up massively on security, leaving consumers and their paying customers to clean up the mess.

I don’t know how many more big-time privacy and security debacles we need to convince our nation’s leaders that perhaps we should enshrine in law some basic standards of care for how companies handle and secure consumer data, and what rights and expectations consumers should have when companies fail to meet those standards. Because it’s clear that unless and until this happens, some subset of businesses out there will continue to make the most expedient and short-sighted trade-offs available to them, regardless of the impact to their customers and the public at large.

On this point, as with many others related to Internet security and privacy, I found it hard to argue with the opinion of my home state Senator Mark Warner (D-Va.), who observed:

“It seems like every other day we learn about a new mega-breach affecting the personal data of millions of Americans. Rather than accepting this trend as the new normal, this latest incident should strengthen Congress’ resolve. We must pass laws that require data minimization, ensuring companies do not keep sensitive data that they no longer need. And it is past time we enact data security laws that ensure companies account for security costs rather than making their consumers shoulder the burden and harms resulting from these lapses.”

The parent firm of bling retailers Jared and Kay Jewelers has fixed a bug in the Web sites of both companies that exposed the order information for all of their online customers.

In mid-November 2018, KrebsOnSecurity heard from a Jared customer who found something curious after receiving a receipt via email for a pair of earrings he’d just purchased as a surprise gift for his girlfriend.

Dallas-based Web developer Brandon Sheehy discovered that slightly modifying the link in the confirmation email he received and pasting that into a Web browser revealed another customer’s order, including their name, billing address, shipping address, phone number, email address, items and total amount purchased, delivery date, tracking link, and the last four digits of the customer’s credit card number.

Sheehy said after discovering the weakness, his mind quickly turned to the various ways that crooks might exploit it.

“My first thought was they could track a package of jewelry to someone’s door and swipe it off their doorstep,” he said. “My second thought was that someone could call Jared’s customers and pretend to be Jared, reading the last four digits of the customer’s card and saying there’d been a problem with the order, and if they could get a different card for the customer they could run it right away and get the order out quickly. That would be a pretty convincing scam. Or just targeted phishing attacks.”

Concerned that his own information was similarly exposed, Sheehy contacted Jared parent company Signet Jewelers and asked them to fix the data exposure. When several weeks passed and Sheehy could still view his information and that of other Jared customers, he reached out to KrebsOnSecurity.

Scott Lancaster, chief information security officer at Signet, said the company did fix the problem for all future orders shortly after receiving a customer’s complaint. But Lancaster said Signet neglected to remedy the data exposure for all past orders until contacted by KrebsOnSecurity.

“When a customer first brought this matter to our attention in early November, we fixed it for all new orders going forward,” Lancaster said. “But we didn’t notice at the time that this applied to all past orders as well as future orders.”

Lancaster said the problem affected only orders made online through jared.com and kay.com, and that the weakness was not present on the sites of the company’s other jewelry brands, such as Zales and Piercing Pagoda.

Data exposures like these are some of the most common yet preventable for online retailers. In July, identity theft protection service LifeLock corrected an information disclosure flaw that exposed the email address of millions of subscribers. And in April 2018, PaneraBread.com remedied a weakness exposing millions of customer names, email and physical addresses, birthdays and partial credit card numbers.

Sheehy said he’s glad Signet has fully fixed the bug, but said he was annoyed that it seems like many companies fail to address or even acknowledge such failures unless and until they’re confronted by the news media.

“Being a Web developer, the only thing I can chalk this up to is complete incompetence, and being very lazy and indifferent to your customers’ data,” he said. “This isn’t novel stuff, it’s basic Web site security.”

Dec. 11, 10:37 a.m.: Corrected Sheehy’s title.

Well the christmas tree is up




The garden is messy but very dry , we had a very dry winter and spring and now it's summer the bush fires are everywhere lots of rain soon would help.

It's fareing ok  most of my garden likes it a bit dry.
and some has just gone wild as we have had a bit of a downpour in the early summer days.

the 4oclock's are eating the garden chairs.




Angus is still here for another couple of months it will be lonely when he goes to NZ, Pidge will be the only one left and he is getting on a bit we had him for about 7 years and he was full grown and very injured so I'm surprised he lasted this long but it's a ideal life freedom of the air, food and a safe place to go and sleep when needed.
I't hard to take a picture of this dog always got his nose in something.
LOOK at these skies black as black.
Pidgee is home, not good to be caught out in a storm.
15 minutes of heavy rain and the sky is a bit lighter but more coming
The garden is having a good wash to bad i just swept it all up a few hours ago.

My pond  was empty yesterday .





We need the rain but it will mean a big clean out now.

The secret to a great dumpling? Don’t ever underestimate the dumpling skin. Most diners prioritise the filling but if the wrapper is wrong, you’ll know about it. Too thin and your dumpling will break apart. Too thick and you’ll notice its rubbery doughiness immediately. We reckon that’s why Shanghai Dumpling in Ashfield – with its gossamer thin dumpling skins – has such a loyal following. It

The pictures, of course, went viral. Donald Trump serving fast food, still in the box, to the college champion Clemson University football team. The cardboard containers and paper wrappers were artfully stacked on silver platters alongside ornate candelabras and embossed napkins and served on a formal table beneath a gold-framed portrait of Abraham Lincoln.

Sure the juxtaposition was glaring, and the media, the twitterverse, and the late night talk shows had a field day poking fun at the President’s seeming lack of class. The Washington Post headline quoted Patrick Guaschino, who accused the president of turning the “white house into a White Castle.” Comedian W. Kamau Bell joked that a white house staffer, “choking through tears [would say] ‘I guess we could use the Lincoln gravy boats for the McNugget sauces.’” My personal favorite meme photoshopped Ronald McDonald in place of the president.

These reactions also teach us something important about social class and “good taste.” Pierre Bourdieu famously wrote that “taste classifies the classifier (1984, 6),” and this insight has become essential to understanding contemporary American food cultures. In Discriminating Taste (2017), S. Margo Finn argues that the increasing fascination with “good food,” including trends toward the local, organic and artisanal, and the condemnation of fast and processed foods, are way for people to perform elite status. In a similar take on Foodies, Joseé Johnston and Shylo Baumann write that many foodies enjoy everything from high brow cuisine to street food, but often only enjoy fast food ironically (2010, 2012). And Julie Guthman (2011) and Charlotte Biltekoff (2013) offer contemporary and historical accounts of the ways that more affluent Americans have looked down on the food cultures and (always constrained) food choices of working class and immigrant groups as a way to boost their own cultural status and displace their own cultural anxieties.

Trump isn’t the only person who highlights our assumptions about food and social class. In an article that was just published in American Studies, media scholar Emily J. H. Contois examines Guy Fieri’s take on American food culture, arguing that he uses “unpretentious” foods, as well as his own bleach-tipped, tattooed presentation of self, to create a populist image that “speaks directly to eaters who oppose culinary elites and who experience a sense of disenfranchisement regarding their own sociocultural status.” Examining Fieri’s work offers a “method for considering the most recent rise of populist sentiment in the United States” (2018, 156). Her analysis aligns nicely with comedian Seth Meyers’ Late Night joke, which, playing on the fact that Trump said Burger Kings (plural) that, “had he lost the election, The Burger Kings would have been the name of the food show he would have co-hosted with Guy Fieri.”

Despite his own elite background, Trump has something of a masterful ability to appeal to white working class tastes, and to mobilize that group in opposition to political progressives who might actually work to improve their lives and livelihoods. Working class foods like burgers are part of the habitus through which these sort of Trump voters define themselves. To those who love fast food, serving it to football players might read like an embrace of their ways of being over the so-called cultural elites who (they believe) look down on them. Mocking Trump for this lends credence to this belief.

There is no shortage of reasons to object to fast food— land use and environmental degradation, worker exploitation, low pay, and the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands—and, of course, there are no shortage of reasons to object to Trump’s behavior. But when we mock fast food culture out of context, we ignore the fact that many people have cultural attachments to these foods, and through them, tell themselves stories about who they are and what they believe in. As sociologists, I hope we can hear and empathize with those stories, rather than dismiss them.

Recommended Readings:

Baumann, Shyon and Joseé Johnston. 2012. “Democracy vs. Distinction in Omnivorous Food Culture. Sociologica. 2: 1-12.

Biltekoff, Charlotte. 2013. Eating Right in America. Chapel Hill, NC: Duke.

Bordieu, Pierre. 1987. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Contois, Emily J. H. 2018. “Welcome to Flavortown: Guy Fieri’s Populist American Food Culture.” American Studies. 57(3): 143-157.

Guthman, Julie. 2011. Weighing In. Berkeley: UC Press.

Johnston, Josee and Shyon Baumann. Foodies. NY: Routledge.

Alison Hope Alkon is associate professor of sociology and food studies at University of the Pacific. Check out her Ted talk, Food as Radical Empathy

(View original at https://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

Dining solo while female can get you banned from the bar.  I am not making this up.

On a recent trip to Manhattan, [business executive Clementine Crawford] said she visited Nello for an early dinner and took her usual place at the bar, but was quickly confronted by an “oddly hesitant” waiter who informed her that she was “no longer permitted to eat” at the bar and “must now sit down at a table.” Crawford was tired from her flight, so obliged without thinking. But she said the same thing happened when she returned to the restaurant a few days later.

More details here, here and here.

(By way of information, I am not related to the woman in the story.)

Everyone has been talking about last week’s Senate testimony from Christine Blasey Ford and Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Amid the social media chatter, I was struck by this infographic from an article at Vox:

Commentators have noted the emotional contrast between Ford and Kavanaugh’s testimony and observed that Kavanaugh’s anger is a strategic move in a culture that is used to discouraging emotional expression from men and judging it harshly from women. Alongside the anger, this chart also shows us a gendered pattern in who gets to change the topic of conversation—or disregard it altogether.

Sociologists use conversation analysis to study how social forces shape our small, everyday interactions. One example is “uptalk,” a gendered pattern of pitched-up speech that conveys different meanings when men and women use it. Are men more likely to change the subject or ignore the topic of conversation? Two experimental conversation studies from American Sociological Review shed light on what could be happening here and show a way forward.

In a 1994 study that put men and women into different leadership roles, Cathryn Johnson found that participants’ status had a stronger effect on their speech patterns, while gender was more closely associated with nonverbal interactions. In a second study from 2001, Dina G. Okamoto and Lynn Smith-Lovin looked directly at changing the topic of conversation and did not find strong differences across the gender of participants. However, they did find an effect where men following male speakers were less likely to change the topic, concluding “men, as high-status actors, can more legitimately evaluate the contributions of others and, in particular, can more readily dismiss the contributions of women” (Pp. 867).

The important takeaway here is not that gender “doesn’t matter” in everyday conversation. It is that gender can have indirect influences on who carries social status into a conversation, and we can balance that influence by paying attention to who has the authority to speak and when. By consciously changing status dynamics —possibly by changing who is in the room or by calling out rule-breaking behavior—we can work to fix imbalances in who has to have the tough conversations.

Evan Stewart is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Minnesota. You can follow him on Twitter.

(View original at https://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

“I'm into daddy look, senior style, comfort and handy grandpa clothes which are also fitting together with my world ugliest car Fiat Multipla! But in this foto, I'm wearing my custom made suit (made in Vietnam on our honeymoon) and my white ”Touch D’ Andre” shoes and a Tiger of Sweden shirt. I like to wear clothes that are just a bit out of fashion or what I think can be soon trendy.”

30 June 2018, Helsinki Pride

Ever tried Khachapuri before? This delicious Georgian cheese bread is a boat shaped fluffy bread filled with gorgeous melty cheese and a egg on top. It's served with pats of butter and you tear off some bread and dip it into the runny yolk and melted cheese and use the bread to scoop up the delicious filling! Dear Reader, this is a pushy recipe!

I have had a life long aversion to rhubarb, ever since childhood. We grew a lot of rhubarb and it was served, stringy and under-sweetened at almost every meal while in season. It has taken until this year, decades later, for me to try it again. And only because I was given some rhubarb from … Continue reading "Sweet Rhubarb with Cloves and Black Pepper, Poppy Seeds and Gin Soaked Cumquats"

A cosy neighbourhood restaurant on Marrickville Road, Sidecar is the new baby sister restaurant to Gasoline Pony (get it? The motorcycle and the sidecar?). There is a good range of vegetarian, vegan and gluten free offerings on the menu and for the moment it is BYO.

Salads are one of two types. First we have the very simple salad, simple flavours and few ingredients. Fresh and vibrant, they are made to accompany dishes that are complex in composition and flavours. The second sort, the more complex Ottolenghi-style salads, contain a whole range of ingredients and layer upon layer of flavours. They … Continue reading "Moroccan Salad with Radishes"

The arepa is everything to Venezuelans, a gluten-free cornmeal patty eaten plain or split open and stuffed with meat or beans. They’re about as ubiquitous as a burger or kebab in Venezuela, eaten any time of day but always a hit late at night. Sydneysiders might have seen La Reina’s bright orange stall at weekend markets or food festivals but their digs in Newtown finally offer a permanent

The Brisbane gardens a wonderful place very lush and green.........................



The son and daughter in law checking out the bamboo.
A lot of cool and restful pictures.











Guess what is in this water, not so restful now.
Look closely.
Can you see it.
It's a croc, can you see the eyes., in a city park not expected at all.
After the real thing I'm glad these are carved in a rock.
Lots and lots of bonzi they look like they are having a bad time to me but I too find the shapes fascinating.









Waterfalls are working here
They do cool it down a lot



A tree full of figs and wasps.
Just down the road from my sons place is a field with donkeys a lot of people stop and feed them we gave them carrots.

I even got a pat in
They are very friendly.

“My whole outfit is thrifted. Since it’s almost impossible nowadays to come up with something new, I rely on customizing used clothes and creating new combinations. I enjoy a dialog between clothes. The combination might be new but each peace still has a certain conception, which differs in the eyes of the beholder.”

25 May 2018, Näytös18

Well winter is here the loungeroom looks very gloomy.
So I started a jigsaw puzzle, I told the beer fairy 3 weeks to finish it, this is after 4 days it is slow going but with a hot cup of coffee and the fire or heater on it quite pleasant sitting here looking for bits that fit.
A day out in Parramatta paying bills and checking out the shops here I am sitting on the bus stop watching the cranes moving stuff around lets hope they don't drop anything it has been known to happen.
Almost two weeks now moving along.


Now sitting on Granville train station watching the cranes again about 8 months ago these buildings were not here but Sydney is a hive of activity,  developers have gone crazy,  big money is to be made here now. I have lived in Granville for a long time nothing much happened for about 20 years but in the last few years so many new buildings have gone up mainly all units selling off the plan in a lot of cases ok if the developer doesn't go broke it has been known to happen.
Talking of selling my daughters house was sold last Saturday, the house looked lovely,  freshly painted all minor repairs done and staged with lovely furniture but it was a bit alien to me I more familuar with the laughter of the twins and sometimes crying, toys all over the floor and the distinct smell of my furry friend who is staying with me until they buy a house in NZ. 

It is the sweetest little house, pictures are a bit odd because I took photos from the advertising as there were lots of people at the auction.
Well look at that I 'm finished it only took 2and a bit weeks.
 I filled my pond up well half of it

 All my trees that are not evergreen are stripped of their leaves



 and leaves everywhere these fell last night I  cleaned the leaves yesterday morning.
 My maple is just sticks.




Thats it for now I was going to show you a picture of Angus but he is fast asleep under my bed so next time.

”Everything I’m wearing is from UFF, I just repainted the shoes and ripped the sleeves of the blazer. At the moment I like vintage Comme des Garçons, oversized blazers, and gender-free dressing.”

23 May 2018, Koe18

They are going to a farm today with animals, they will love that
I hope everyone has a lovely mothers day.

“I live in the countryside in Portugal running a B&B so I spend lot of time cleaning, renovating or in the veggie garden so most of the time I'm wearing something comfy and pratical. Clothes don't really play a big part in my life anymore despite having studied fashion design. It's very freeing to be apart from the consumerism though first it was quite hard to let go of that part of my identity to dress up every day. When I visit cities I do like to wear something more special like for example today this Vuokko dress but I hardly buy new clothes anymore, there is no need since my style has been same for years and I have enough clothes in my wardrobe already.”

5 August 2017, Kalliolanrinne

“I'm wearing lots of vintage that I've gathered from different people: the dress is from my friend, the belt I stole from my grandma, bag is made out of car tires and I think it belongs to my friend's mother. I adore clip on earrings and these are a fantastic find from the Hietalahti flea market. My style is combination of new and old, streetstyle and drag. I don't like wearing clothes that other people around me can find. Lately I've been gaining more body confidence so I love dressing in more revealing clothes. My inspirations are all over the place but Namilia is a one brand I'd wear every day for the rest of my life if I could. Right now I'm dreaming of (vegan) leather cargo pants.”

23 May 2018, Koe18

One thing can always be relied upon when you travel: that is that you'll forget one thing. Or is that just me? Without fail, I always forget one thing and it's usually a toiletry item. But if you're staying at an MGallery by Sofitel hotel around the world, then this has become less of a problem! On International Women's Day they launched a new initiative called "Inspiredbyher". Come and take a look at it at the historic Harbour Rocks Hotel!

In a think-piece with the title Who’s Afraid of the Female Nude?, over at The Cut, author Michael Slenske asks, “Is it still an artistically justifiable pursuit for a man to paint a naked woman?” He proceeds:

To answer this question, I reached out to a number of prominent male artists known for doing just that (as well as for painting nude men). But most of them — including Currin, Carroll Dunham, Jeff Koons, and the young Mexican-American painter Alex Becerra (some of whose nudes are drawn from escort ads) — declined to talk about their work’s relationship to the current social climate. Presumably, they worried about unintentionally saying the wrong thing that would then echo endlessly across social media, damaging their reputations. For emerging artists, there is the fear of a possibly career-derailing gestalt fail.

As expected, essay is full of quotes from male artists blaming hyper-sensitive women for making it impossible for them to express themselves in all their artistic glory.

Read the full piece here, along with a contrasting/companion piece by author Molly Langmuir. Langmuir’s article focuses on seven female artists’ take on the way they represent the female form in their art.

Facebook has built some of the most advanced algorithms for tracking users, but when it comes to acting on user abuse reports about Facebook groups and content that clearly violate the company’s “community standards,” the social media giant’s technology appears to be woefully inadequate.

Last week, Facebook deleted almost 120 groups totaling more than 300,000 members. The groups were mostly closed — requiring approval from group administrators before outsiders could view the day-to-day postings of group members.

However, the titles, images and postings available on each group’s front page left little doubt about their true purpose: Selling everything from stolen credit cards, identities and hacked accounts to services that help automate things like spamming, phishing and denial-of-service attacks for hire.

To its credit, Facebook deleted the groups within just a few hours of KrebsOnSecurity sharing via email a spreadsheet detailing each group, which concluded that the average length of time the groups had been active on Facebook was two years. But I suspect that the company took this extraordinary step mainly because I informed them that I intended to write about the proliferation of cybercrime-based groups on Facebook.

That story, Deleted Facebook Cybercrime Groups had 300,000 Members, ended with a statement from Facebook promising to crack down on such activity and instructing users on how to report groups that violate it its community standards.

In short order, some of the groups I reported that were removed re-established themselves within hours of Facebook’s action. I decided instead of contacting Facebook’s public relations arm directly that I would report those resurrected groups and others using Facebook’s stated process. Roughly two days later I received a series replies saying that Facebook had reviewed my reports but that none of the groups were found to have violated its standards. Here’s a snippet from those replies:

Perhaps I should give Facebook the benefit of the doubt: Maybe my multiple reports one after the other triggered some kind of anti-abuse feature that is designed to throttle those who would seek to abuse it to get otherwise legitimate groups taken offline — much in the way that pools of automated bot accounts have been known to abuse Twitter’s reporting system to successfully sideline accounts of specific targets.

Or it could be that I simply didn’t click the proper sequence of buttons when reporting these groups. The closest match I could find in Facebook’s abuse reporting system were, “Doesn’t belong on Facebook,” and “Purchase or sale of drugs, guns or regulated products.” There was/is no option for “selling hacked accounts, credit cards and identities,” or anything of that sort.

In any case, one thing seems clear: Naming and shaming these shady Facebook groups via Twitter seems to work better right now for getting them removed from Facebook than using Facebook’s own formal abuse reporting process. So that’s what I did on Thursday. Here’s an example:

Within minutes of my tweeting about this, the group was gone. I also tweeted about “Best of the Best,” which was selling accounts from many different e-commerce vendors, including Amazon and eBay:

That group, too, was nixed shortly after my tweet. And so it went for other groups I mentioned in my tweetstorm today. But in response to that flurry of tweets about abusive groups on Facebook, I heard from dozens of other Twitter users who said they’d received the same “does not violate our community standards” reply from Facebook after reporting other groups that clearly flouted the company’s standards.

Pete Voss, Facebook’s communications manager, apologized for the oversight.

“We’re sorry about this mistake,” Voss said. “Not removing this material was an error and we removed it as soon as we investigated. Our team processes millions of reports each week, and sometimes we get things wrong. We are reviewing this case specifically, including the user’s reporting options, and we are taking steps to improve the experience, which could include broadening the scope of categories to choose from.”

Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress last week in response to allegations that the company wasn’t doing enough to halt the abuse of its platform for things like fake news, hate speech and terrorist content. It emerged that Facebook already employs 15,000 human moderators to screen and remove offensive content, and that it plans to hire another 5,000 by the end of this year.

“But right now, those moderators can only react to posts Facebook users have flagged,” writes Will Knight, for Technologyreview.com.

Zuckerberg told lawmakers that Facebook hopes expected advances in artificial intelligence or “AI” technology will soon help the social network do a better job self-policing against abusive content. But for the time being, as long as Facebook mainly acts on abuse reports only when it is publicly pressured to do so by lawmakers or people with hundreds of thousands of followers, the company will continue to be dogged by a perception that doing otherwise is simply bad for its business model.

Update, 1:32 p.m. ET: Several readers pointed my attention to a Huffington Post story just three days ago, “Facebook Didn’t Seem To Care I Was Being Sexually Harassed Until I Decided To Write About It,” about a journalist whose reports of extreme personal harassment on Facebook were met with a similar response about not violating the company’s Community Standards. That is, until she told Facebook that she planned to write about it.

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Hours after being alerted by KrebsOnSecurity, Facebook last week deleted almost 120 private discussion groups totaling more than 300,000 members who flagrantly promoted a host of illicit activities on the social media network’s platform. The scam groups facilitated a broad spectrum of shady activities, including spamming, wire fraud, account takeovers, phony tax refunds, 419 scams, denial-of-service attack-for-hire services and botnet creation tools. The average age of these groups on Facebook’s platform was two years.

On Thursday, April 12, KrebsOnSecurity spent roughly two hours combing Facebook for groups whose sole purpose appeared to be flouting the company’s terms of service agreement about what types of content it will or will not tolerate on its platform.

My research centered on groups whose singular focus was promoting all manner of cyber fraud, but most especially those engaged in identity theft, spamming, account takeovers and credit card fraud. Virtually all of these groups advertised their intent by stating well-known terms of fraud in their group names, such as “botnet helpdesk,” “spamming,” “carding” (referring to credit card fraud), “DDoS” (distributed denial-of-service attacks), “tax refund fraud,” and account takeovers.

Each of these closed groups solicited new members to engage in a variety of shady activities. Some had existed on Facebook for up to nine years; approximately ten percent of them had plied their trade on the social network for more than four years.

Here is a spreadsheet (PDF) listing all of the offending groups reported, including: Their stated group names; the length of time they were present on Facebook; the number of members; whether the group was promoting a third-party site on the dark or clear Web; and a link to the offending group. A copy of the same spreadsheet in .csv format is available here.

The biggest collection of groups banned last week were those promoting the sale and use of stolen credit and debit card accounts. The next largest collection of groups included those facilitating account takeovers — methods for mass-hacking emails and passwords for countless online accounts such Amazon, Google, Netflix, PayPal, as well as a host of online banking services.

In a statement to KrebsOnSecurity, Facebook pledged to be more proactive about policing its network for these types of groups.

“We thank Mr. Krebs for bringing these groups to our attention, we removed them as soon as we investigated,” said Pete Voss, Facebook’s communications director. “We investigated these groups as soon as we were aware of the report, and once we confirmed that they violated our Community Standards, we disabled them and removed the group admins. We encourage our community to report anything they see that they don’t think should be in Facebook, so we can take swift action.”

KrebsOnSecurity’s research was far from exhaustive: For the most part, I only looked at groups that promoted fraudulent activities in the English language. Also, I ignored groups that had fewer than 25 members. As such, there may well be hundreds or thousands of other groups who openly promote fraud as their purpose of membership but which achieve greater stealth by masking their intent with variations on or mispellings of different cyber fraud slang terms.

Facebook said its community standards policy does not allow the promotion or sale of illegal goods or services including credit card numbers or CVV numbers (stolen card details marketed for use in online fraud), and that once a violation is reported, its teams review a report and remove the offending post or group if it violates those policies.

The company added that Facebook users can report suspected violations by loading a group’s page, clicking “…” in the top right and selecting “Report Group”. Users who wish to learn more about reporting abusive groups can visit facebook.com/report.

“As technology improves, we will continue to look carefully at other ways to use automation,” Facebook’s statement concludes, responding to questions from KrebsOnSecurity about what steps it might take to more proactively scour its networks for abusive groups. “Of course, a lot of the work we do is very contextual, such as determining whether a particular comment is hateful or bullying. That’s why we have real people looking at those reports and making the decisions.”

Facebook’s stated newfound interest in cleaning up its platform comes as the social networking giant finds itself reeling from a scandal in which Cambridge Analytica, a political data firm, was found to have acquired access to private data on more than 50 million Facebook profiles — most of them scraped without user permission.

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