[FRIAM] @fakedonaldtrump

[Steven A Smith]

Glen -
> This is interesting if you type in "trump":
> https://www.csc2.ncsu.edu/faculty/healey/tweet_viz/tweet_app/
15 minutes with this make me painfully aware of how much I'm not in tune 
with twitter culture... the tool seems pretty well made, but I found 
myself having  a hard time drawing meaningful conclusions (aside from 
looking for confirmation bias artifacts to glom onto)... the drilldown I 
did do made me realize that the pleasant/unpleasant axis wasn't what I 
thought it would be.   The system doesn't seem to take into account 
(double?) negatives?   Someone railing positively about taking Trump 
down appears to contribute to the quad-chart plot in roughly the same 
way as one praising him.  The tag clouds were in some way more 
interesting to me, but I'm not sure why.
>
> Here are some other tools:
> https://blog.bufferapp.com/free-twitter-tools
I tried to dig in a little but as I felt frustrated by the implied bias 
in the nature of the tools I realized the list was labeled as "for 
Marketing" which (with my own bias) seems to be what most social media 
tools exist for, to make us all in to better (more malleable?) consumers.
> It irritates me to no end when we call password guessing or phishing "hacking".  The concept of hacking is rich and calling those banal techniques "hacking" does the concept an injustice.  That password guessing stuff isn't even worthy of the word "cracking".  Now, if someone pulled a man-in-the-middle and reconstructed the packets to find a password, *that* would be worthy.
I agree in principle, with your examples being at best, fairly lame 
"social hacks".   I'm guessing that the amorphous mass of "Anonymous 
Hacktivists" are mostly very lame technically... but perhaps useful when 
recruited for DOS attacks by someone with a target and a voice.  There 
must be a FEW heavy hitters self-identified with that crowd?  It seems 
like the best thing anyone could do IF they guessed or phished passwords 
from the likes of DJT and his motley crue would be to publish them (not 
to abuse them, just to expose what kind of dumbass passwords they choose!?)
>    Get off my iLawn!
<grin>