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Mars Global Surveyor – Survival

Elizabeth Uncategorized October 15, 2021

Mars

Mars has a lot of robot corpses on it. Some were a result of programming failure, some were simply planned shutdowns, and some continued for ages after they were supposed to expire, collecting valuable data and sending it back to Earth.

As for what we know now, we’ve learned that Mars’s atmosphere is weak and thin, but still thick enough to have a little weather, Mars itself has a very poor magnetic field, Mars has evidence of water once existing on-planet, but doesn’t have any known sources near the surface, and Mars may have had a partially molten mantle and tectonic plates to go with it at some point in it’s history.

We know that all of this is connected! Magnetic fields protect atmospheres from being blown away from solar radiation – the Earth has a particularly powerful field compared to Mars’s weaker one. Earth’s tectonic movement is linked to its liquid core and putty-like mantle; Mars’s lack of tectonic movement points to a molten inner core and a solid, cooled mantle. Water boils faster the less atmospheric pressure it’s under, so any surface water Mars had was likely evaporated and then blown off into space once some of the atmosphere disintegrated, also a result of its weak magnetic field. All of it is connected. Being able to see details up close made it possible to connect these dots on Mars.

A lot of information about Mars’s weather and overall surface comes from information sent back from orbiters – the rovers and explorers can take samples of soil and provide granular detail, but we rely on orbiters to see the bigger picture.

The Surveyor, and Launch

The new Global Surveyor was large.

The surveyor launched from Cape Canaveral in 1996, and arrived in Mars’s orbit in 1997, about ten months after it’s initial launch. The thing weighed a little over a ton, about 2,270 lbs, and was assembled in a Lockheed Martin facility in Denver; it would be solar powered, like many of Mars’s projects are, and it would use those solar panels for aerobraking as well as power. The panels allowed the orbiter to dip into the atmosphere slightly to slow and steer itself into its proper orbit, and allowed for extremely fine-tuned control of said orbit. The high point was a mere 280 miles off the surface of Mars – perfect for getting readings of that enigmatic ionosphere.

With some delays due to re-positioning, the orbiter was able to begin taking mapping photos officially in 1999, orbiting in sync with the Sun so that changes in shadows wouldn’t interfere with the images.

Success!

The global surveyor worked exactly as planned! Even better, it continued working – it lasted much longer than its initial mission goal of making it to 2001, and provided invaluable information about the planet’s surface for nearly a decade. Landing sites. Weather patterns. The entire surface. This orbiter was truly a breakthrough in an era that would come to be dominated by Mars-related robot splatters. The Global Surveyor helped direct other orbiters and sent back pictures and readings about everything on Mars, including readings about its ionosphere. In 1999, it began mapping the surface of the red planet; in 2001, its mission was extended after it had already taken more pics than all of the other Mars projects combined; in 2004, it caught some candid shots of the Spirit rover on the surface; in 2005, it captured pictures of Odyssey and Mars Express while both were on their way to the planet.

Across its long life above the surface, it also witnessed Mars’s CO2-ice poles change shape and size, witnessed new impact craters, spotted very solid evidence that Mars once had water for the first time, and witnessed storms only Mars’s weak atmosphere could produce. It sent back 240,000 pictures of Mars to Earth, and was the longest-living Martian project at the time. This was an incredible tool, one that provided incredible insight into what Mars was really like. Telescopes can see a long way – that’s nothing compared to getting up close and personal with an orbiter.

Fading

The good news couldn’t go on forever. This is an article about a dead orbiter, after all. What exactly went wrong?

The orbiter had two copies of its system software as a redundancy. One operator on Earth updated one system, and a different one updated the other; they realized the orbiter was returning errors because it used both copies in operation. An update correcting those updates introduced a memory fault, and then a command to adjust its solar panels sent the machine into a safe mode, causing it to lose contact for a few days. It misinterpreted a reading for battery overheat as a reading for battery overcharge – both are bad, and both require different solutions. A battery overheat needs repositioning to get the overheated battery out of the sun, while an overcharge needs an immediate power cut so it doesn’t short out other things.

One response puts the device into safe mode; being in safe mode was a bad thing when the battery was overheating. Once it cut power, it was stuck in the position that overheated the battery, and that led to the final, fatal issues with the orbiter. NASA managed to ping it again, weakly, but they discovered it couldn’t communicate with the robots on the ground, and so declared the mission over. It’s still in a good, stable orbit – NASA says they expect it to crash into the surface in about 2047.

This particular mission is a highlight to NASA’s turbulent history with Mars robots. Other projects before and after often suffered from failures; a couple of upcoming missions would shake faith in NASA’s ability to manage itself. This orbiter failed because of a software bug introduced in an update, the other two were doomed before they even launched!

Sources:

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars-exploration/missions/mars-global-surveyor/

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/mars-global-surveyor/in-depth/

https://mars.nasa.gov/internal_resources/813/

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/goddard/2020/mars-electric-currents

https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/174244main_mgs_white_paper_20070413.pdf

SQL Injections

Elizabeth Uncategorized October 13, 2021

Sanitize your Inputs.

If you’ve been following cyber security news over the past few months, you’ve probably seen ‘SQL Injection’ somewhere. It’s usually in reference to a security failure – maybe a breach happened, and you saw it written in the post-mortem of the attack. What is it?

SQL

What is SQL? SQL stands for ‘Structured Query Language’. It’s widely considered the language of databases! Essentially, SQL is really good at handling structural data, which is data that keeps the relationships between variables coherent. SQL is more like an umbrella term than a thing in and of itself: language for controlling data, language for relating data, language for defining data, etc. all fall under the scope of SQL. Different vendors also have different methods of implementing SQL, so even SQL that does the same thing across websites may look different. It’s basically everywhere!

Especially on the back-end side of websites. Passwords and login info have to be stored somewhere, and preferably somewhere where they are A) secure and B) accessible. That’s not as simple as it sounds. If a website stores its data in a simple table, with no hiding, hashing, or scrambling of the credentials, it’s only a matter of time before some malicious party comes for it. Hashing is mandatory nowadays, and in fact, hashing and hiding data is often the only thing turning major breaches into minor events. See Blizzard’s hack, for instance – having the data somewhere else and scrambled saved them. Proper SQL usage saved them.

Retrieving that information is also important, and SQL does that too. SQL specializes in uniting all of these tasks. However, it’s widespread use doesn’t mean it’s invulnerable, and mistakes while putting it together for a site can render it a dangerous weapon.

SQL Injection

An SQL injection is an attempt to interfere with the requests the SQL is sending to the database. If a hacker can deliver a little bit of code to that otherwise impossible-to-reach database, they may be able to grant themselves access to it, or damage it, among other things. For example: a new user signs up. They put their name and password in. SQL directs that information to the database with the instructions “Store this (USERNAME)”. However, in an injection attack, the username actually contains code, which then leads to the SQL misreading the instructions as “Store this (AND DELETE ALL DATA)”.

These are so incredibly simple to execute that it would be foolish not to try at least a couple of times. It’s as simple as figuring out what kind of inputs the data field will allow (i.e are semicolons allowed in passwords? Can I use @ in my username? Are brackets included, or not?) and then trying to abuse that as hard as possible to get results.

Even big websites are susceptible. Why? The process to prevent it is separate from the process of putting SQL into the website in the first place. Picture trying to drive a car with no automatic headlights at night. Eventually, you may forget to turn them on manually – and that may cause an accident even if you’re an otherwise excellent driver. Turning the headlights on, or sanitizing the inputs, is the safest way to prevent harm from coming to that database behind the scenes, but it’s easy to forget.

Sanitizing Inputs (Or Making Them Unreadable)

This method of hacking doesn’t work if the program doesn’t see the code. Now, there is some contention as to what sanitizing actually means specifically – generally, it means make computer not read input wrong, which can be achieved in a number of ways with coding.

There’s telling the database to convert data, which may produce undesired results in the database.

There’s telling the code that’s taking the input to split the query used to ask for data and the resulting data itself apart, which prevents that data from being misinterpreted as a command.

And then there’s simply not allowing certain things to be used in the input fields, which is kind of sanitizing by elimination.

If the database never gets anything it doesn’t expect, then it can’t do things that its programmers weren’t expecting, thereby making it safer. Validating the inputs is equally as important to prevent attacks! You’d never see letters in a phone number or brackets in a name, anyway, so this is also good for the data itself.

Sanitizing, validating, or otherwise controlling inputs, no matter how a business decides to approach it, is good for database security. However, it’s often difficult to do right if the website is assembled by the business owner themselves. Luckily, Wix, Squarespace, and other big DIY-website places do this automatically. The folks in the most danger are people and companies with just enough expertise to make a public-facing webpage from the ground-up, without enough expertise to secure it ground-up.

Dangerous, Even Now

Technology improves, and some things get better.

And then there’s things like sanitizing inputs. The code may be cutting edge, the machines themselves may be top of the line, but forgetting to include some verification for data is just like forgetting to put out a candle before leaving your house for the day. The action is insignificant… the consequences are not. And, just like candles, there isn’t really tech that turns that off. Either you blew out the candle, or you didn’t. If you’re lucky, nothing happens while it’s unattended.

SQL injections have compromised tens of millions of files of legal and healthcare data around the world because they’re so simple! It’s easy to automate, and often overlooked. It’s painfully easy to introduce weaknesses via plug-ins as well – WordPress has over 50,000 plug-ins, and many are outdated or obsolete when it comes to SQL security, so using a DIY website designer is no guarantee of safety if the customer strays too far outside the presets.

SQL injections are a big threat that’s easy to avoid… if the website creator knows to look for it. Free resources for fixing vulnerabilities scatter the web, but nothing beats expertise. (Don’t just slap something into a site willy-nilly – go to an expert!)

Sources: https://www.veracode.com/security/sql-injection

What Is SQL And How Does it Work? Everything You Need to Know About it

https://kevinsmith.io/sanitize-your-inputs/

Sanitizing Inputs: Avoiding Security and Usability Disasters

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/01/keeping-web-users-safe-by-sanitizing-input-data/

Incognito Mode: What’s It Do?

Elizabeth Uncategorized October 11, 2021

You might have heard it in advice: “You should always look at airline tickets in Private Mode, or the price will go up”, or “I look at eBay in Incognito Mode when I’m on the family computer, so my mom doesn’t know what her Christmas present will be”. Every browser is equipped with it! So what does Incognito Mode actually do?

No History

You probably already know this, but Incognito Mode (or Private Browsing, or Private Mode, or…) doesn’t store history for your browsing session. Great! The downside: If you find something really interesting while Incognito, and don’t bookmark it, it’s not in your history. The upside: if you were shopping on eBay but don’t want the person leaning over your shoulder to know, as long as you only ever visited in Incognito Mode, it won’t auto-fill in the search bar when you type the letter ‘E’.

No cookies

This is a little bit bigger than it seems.

A cookie is essentially a way for a website to see what you’re interested in (see our article on Cookies for more info). It does other things too, but for most websites, interest is enough. It improves ad revenue, and it does usually make the user’s experience a little better. For example, if I search for dog treats, and I’m not logged into my Amazon account, Amazon may still show me listings for dog treats, even though it shouldn’t technically know it’s me without my login.

This is tracking, even if it’s non-malicious and just to maybe show you something you might buy. That makes a lot of people uncomfortable! Not only that, but if you’re searching for a gift that you yourself would never use – say, Carrot Flavored dog treats – the website has no way to know that the Carol’s Carrot Treats are not for you. So you get recommendations for it. Forever. Unless you’re in Incognito Mode!

Cookies can range from harmless to annoyingly persistent, but they don’t seem to be going anywhere fast. If you’re looking for a gift, and don’t want to be recommended purses for the rest of your life – use Incognito Mode.

Yes, Downloads Are Still There

The browser probably warned you on the default ‘New Tab’ window for Incognito Mode, but anything you download is downloaded to your computer. Downloading things to your browser is actually downloading them to your computer through the browser. If you’re pirating music (don’t do that) and hoping that Incognito Mode will help you avoid malicious downloads, it won’t. Don’t download anything you wouldn’t download in your non-incognito browser.

This applies to bookmarks too: things you bookmark in Incognito Mode are still visible in the regular browser’s bookmark bar.

No Browser-Saved Logins

You know how some websites ask if you’d like them to ‘Remember Me!’ with a little check box the first time you visit a site, and then it autofills the next time you log in, and then it keeps doing that for so long that you forget your password? And then you try to log in so you can get your sister that tchotchke she had her eye on for her birthday? Yep, ‘Forgot Password’ link time. Yaaaay. Passwords saved by your browser might still be there in Incognito Mode, but passwords saved by the website are stored with cookies. As seen above, Incognito Mode does not save cookies.

This will also annoy you next time you log in, because clicking ‘Remember Me!’ for the new password you made just now (in Incognito Mode) won’t actually save it. The website’s cookie only remembers the last password you used in regular browsing mode. The cookie responsible for remembering you is disabled in Incognito Mode.

Yes, Your Internet Provider Can Still See Your History

Don’t do illegal things online. They’re illegal. And also usually visible to the internet provider. Your internet provider can still see the websites you’re visiting in Incognito Mode, because that information passes through them first. However, if you don’t want the ISP to know that you’re ordering oil paintings of dogs through Etsy (LEGALLY!), your best bet is a VPN (Virtual Private Network). A VPN adds a layer of encryption to your data, making it difficult for the Internet Provider to see what sites you’ve visited. This isn’t foolproof, because the VPN is the one seeing your data instead of the ISP – but it is another layer between you and other people discovering you bought that oil painting.

Apple And Differentiation

Elizabeth Uncategorized October 6, 2021

You might remember Apple’s smart mouse having it’s left-right click removed. Now there is only mono-click. All hail mono-click.

Differentiation

Differentiating yourself from your competitors is generally a good thing. After all, if every company is producing the same product, customers will choose whichever is cheaper. However, differentiation is also not as simple as price or quality: at some point, this differentiation gets so huge that customers literally cannot switch back over without learning the competitor’s product from scratch.

Little differences make the electronics market incredibly diverse!

History

Apple and Microsoft have been the two big dogs in the industry for forever. Microsoft focused on software, while Apple focused on computers – Apple famously nearly bankrupted itself once by focusing too much of their resources at projects like the Newton, which would have been one of the first PDA devices able to recognize handwriting, in 1997. They also made a deal with Microsoft to secure an investment and get the company back into solvency, which lead to a much more user-friendly version of Windows for their computers. Essentially, Apple traded some of it’s UI in order to get back on track financially. Since then, Apple and Microsoft have taken wildly different paths, and while they’re always trying to go faster, they’re doing it in different ways:

Apple’s focus is very much on the human side of computer/human interaction, while Microsoft’s more concerned with the computer and it’s functionalities. After all, people are easier to teach new things to than the computer!

As a result, the two use very different machines to get to their ultimate goal of a happy customer. Even then, Microsoft can appear on any number of devices, from Dell to Azer or Asus and more, while Mac’s OS appears almost exclusively on Apple devices.

Hardware

Let’s start small. Most mice have two separate plates for left- and right- click. Most mice also have a few millimeters of give on them for clicks, so they have to be divided. The newest generation of Magic Mouse defies both of these, and the left-right click is handled by one, singular button. The plastic is more flexible than on traditional mice to accommodate the twisting it needs to do to function.  This fundamentally changes a user’s experience, as do the paper-thin buttons and the placement of the charging port. This new gen of Apple mice is also missing a physical scroll wheel!  

Slightly Bigger

 Apple’s laptops and peripherals are becoming wafer-thin. Their tablets, too, are typically thinner than tablets of the same speed and power brought out by Dell or Microsoft. Meanwhile, Alienware (produced by Dell) laptops play up how much thicker and beefier their products are when compared to the sleek, small Apple devices. Differentiation here allows the customer to pick a device more suited to what they need: Alienware’s goal is to look like a gaming device. Apple’s is to look like a personal computer. The million other shapes and sizes of Azer, Asus, Dell, etc. computers fall somewhere in the middle. Looks still tell consumers a lot about a machine, so physical differentiation is critical for marketing!

Even Bigger

Apple’s UI is one of a kind. Because the hardware is so different, the software itself needs to do more with less.

The Magic Mouse, for example, can’t be used while it’s charging. The charging port is at the bottom. It’s also missing buttons for separate left-right clicks, which presents an issue as the mouse gets older and becomes prone to mis-interpreting physical inputs. Both of these mean that Apple’s touch screens and touch pads have to be phenomenal to keep up with the features they’re getting rid of for sleekness – the built-in trackpad is often compensating for the finicky nature of the buttons.

Secondarily, the lack of physical buttons (like that scroll wheel) doesn’t mean those functionalities are gone, they’re just controlled by gestures instead. Apple’s newest Magic Mouse can actually “see” human hands and interpret certain movements as gestures! It’s even customizable to a limited extent. The software in the mouse alone is incredibly different from anything users see from Windows. That might be a good thing, as users are often frustrated by this 75+$ mouse when it glitches or misinterprets an input.

Meanwhile, third party and Windows-compatible mice don’t futz with gestures at all, bringing down the price dramatically.

Built Different

The computers themselves are built differently. It is possible to download the iOS on a third party computer – however, most computers come with either Windows or that iOS already installed. While Linux can run on Windows, it had to be specially modified to get to Linux on an Apple-made device. Apple also prioritizes computer resources differently – thinner machines have to sacrifice some function to get wafer-thin. It keeps the stuff that an average user needs, and cuts wants down to the bone so it all fits inside. You may notice that Apple tablets struggle with more intense App games, and that’s not a mistake. Game studios have to create a separate version of their game especially for Apple devices, not only for the programming but for the hardware: Apple uses less powerful GPU units than most Windows manufacturers, since Apple is catering to casual users first.

Apple’s also notoriously finnicky about warranty – open up your Apple device yourself and risk voiding the warranty on the machine. They barely tolerate third-party repair shops, and it seems, at times, like they want to punish the end user for buying something Apple-made with expensive and easily breakable parts (notably their easily breakable phone screens, up until a couple of years ago). Windows devices, which are really an assortment of all sorts of third party machines, can get repaired basically anywhere.

Final Verdict? Apple’s main focus is always going to be on the user experience first and performance second, where other devices may let user experience slink to second or third place to favor other aspects of computers. In Cult of Mac’s article, you can see just how many of these principles are to make the user experience easier, vs. Windows, which often didn’t bother to spell things out for the user until much later in its history. They’re radically different in more than just appearance!

Sources:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5054751

https://magicutilities.net/magic-mouse/help/scrolling-and-swipes

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/difference-between-windows-and-ios/

A visual overview of Apple’s essential design principles

https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/08/06/august-6-1997—-the-day-apple-and-microsoft-made-peace

https://www.businessinsider.com/how-steve-jobs-took-apple-from-near-bankruptcy-to-billions-in-13-years-2011-1#1998-introducing-the-imac-2

Online Survey Questions: How to do it Wrong

Elizabeth Uncategorized October 4, 2021

Experts have struggled with this problem for decades. How do you measure something subjective, and how do you do it in a consistent way? How do you, a researcher, discover pain points and weak spots in your process for the customer? Carefully crafted questions with non-leading answers are difficult to make, though, so…

Here’s how to make a bad one.  

1) Make the question leading.

“How positively do you see Our Company”, “Do you think of Our Company in a positive light?” And “What is your opinion, on a scale of 1 to 5, of Our Company?” Are all going to get the company wildly different results. Using adjectives to describe the product or service to lead the customer into the ‘right’ answer is hardly new, but it’s always been a bad idea! Genuinely happy customers don’t need your survey questions to rail-road them into the right answer. Unhappy customers will be frustrated that they can’t make their opinion known. The data on the back end will suffer as a result.

Leading questions that express negative sentiments towards competitors and non-buyers are also likely to cause problems. “How unhappy were you with your previous company?” reads like a red flag – they might have switched for any number of reasons, and now they’re being forced to read these questions defensively. When someone breaks up with their partner, you don’t bad mouth the ex unless they start doing it first!

2) Don’t include any negative options.

If you don’t include a null option, you’re gonna get bad data. Picture a question asking you if you’ve heard of a handful of platforms, and think positively of them, and it assumes you’ve heard of at least one – that is, it doesn’t give you an option for ‘none of the above’.

This ad is a perfect example of what not to do! In a world with so much access to information, big companies are under the gun like never before. Between Google’s quiet removal of “Don’t Be Evil” from its mission statement, Apple’s use of child labor, Amazon’s poor working conditions, and Facebook’s data harvesting, none of these companies are particularly guilt-free. They’ve done bad things. Bad things that have a negative impact on the world. Their positive impacts are directly tied into the things that make them bad. There’s no ‘right’ answer where one is ‘good’ and the rest are ‘bad’.  The survey takers either select a company they haven’t heard bad news from lately, pick an answer they’re not happy with, or don’t select a company at all and move on without answering. None of the answers fit! Well-informed consumers are effectively excluded from the survey! Without a ‘none of the above’, a percent of potential surveyees can’t answer the question honestly.

While the initial results may hypothetically look like this:

The actual results could hypothetically be closer to this:

But the company has no way of knowing that ~25% of their customers, hypothetically, don’t like any of these options without a null option! Getting real numbers is critical for questions like these. Beating around the bush with “You must like one of them, right?” is only harming the companies themselves by giving them an inflated image of their public perception. People know they did bad things, this leading question isn’t going to make them forget that.

3) Only make the survey available after completing an action.

Asking users to sign up for your newsletter before granting them access to the survey will not only weed out the dispassionate users, it will also greatly annoy users who really want to leave constructive feedback!

Studies show that even getting customers to the survey (even if it’s digital!) is a great undertaking, usually reserved for people who are moderately happy or upset. When companies put barriers like newsletter signups in front of their users, they’re not getting willing sign-ups, they’re getting worse, more polarized results. Only very happy or very angry people are committed enough to sign up for the newsletter, and the inconvenience of having to do so may make both survey-takers slightly more negative in their answers. The people who were going to leave a 4/5 stars and a blank comment box are gone. That’s not a good thing. Instead of reinforcing valuable data, you’ve skewed your answers towards outliers!

If you really want users to sign up, include it as an option at the end of the form. Don’t force it – the engagement won’t be worth the irritation inflicted on the customer.  

4) Make your questions incredibly long and/or confusing.

Starting any 1-5 question with “Are you Aware of…?” “Do you…?” or “Have you considered…?” is just a bad time. Those are yes/no, survey-takers are going to be confused. Not every option is scalable! Poor wording can also make otherwise simple questions with simple responses a confusing word puzzle.

“Do you agree that contrary to popular belief, the general public should put sand into lakes and rivers?“

“Did our employees not do a good job?” “Was your ad experience intolerable?” “Do you agree that the job could or could not have been done better?”

None of these work with simple yes/no, and now the survey maker has to elaborate in the answers with a “yes, they should…” or “no, I didn’t…” which is more work than making the question straightforward.

On top of poor wording, making questions too long or too short for the customer to parse is a surefire way to confuse even the best readers! If you want bad results, make sentences go on forever when they don’t need to.

4) Let People Self-Select – and Then Call it Representative of the Whole

Former President Donald Trump was famous for running approval polls via newsletters and his favored conservative website ads. Obviously, people who don’t like him are not going to want to sign up for his newsletter or watch these forums, so they never saw these polls. People who did like him were more likely to be signed up to conservative sites and newsletters, and as a result, the survey results skewed massively conservative, and positive in his direction. People self-selected into news sources that he could exploit. In this way, he could claim that he was very positively viewed by the general public, when really the survey barely reached anyone outside the bubble. Yeah, sure, technically the survey was available on public websites… that doesn’t mean the public saw them. This is a public page, I could slap something together really quick and call it a survey, does that mean I ran a public survey with valid results? No.

The questions were also incredibly leading, designed to reinforce support for Trump and his political party instead of acting as questions, but we covered that in Question 1. No matter what you think of him, this is an objectively bad method for discovering data.

By citing these poorly-ran surveys, he was able to convince some that the media really was depicting him unfairly. After all, how could he have gotten an 80% approval rate out of his own survey when the media says he’s only at 30%? The answer: his organization picked outlets that loved him and called it an accurate representation of the real world, while the Gallup poll sampled randomly. Speaking of which…

5) Don’t Sample Randomly

It’s possible to avoid people self-selecting into your survey… and yet, you might still get a skewed answer out of them. It’s a lot of hard work to extract data from customers in a meaningful way. Random sampling is crucial!

If you want weird or minimal results, do something that keeps distinct portions of the population from answering. Make it difficult for customers on mobile to fill out the survey, and you’ll cut an enormous amount of potential participants out. Allow customer service agents to point out the end-of-experience survey only to the happy customers, and only get happy results. Pick certain zipcodes and ignore others for political polling, which will give any organization the answers it wants. Kick participants for having the ‘wrong’ results so you only get right ones.

Manage that, and you haven’t randomly sampled anything!

5.5) Give access to non-customers

Sometimes, however, you do need to sample within a population to get results for that population. I don’t own anything Apple-branded. If Apple were to survey me now about owning a product, I would clutter up their results with noise. And yet, Apple sometimes asks me what my opinion of their brand is in online adverts, without asking first if I’m ever going to buy an Apple product. I don’t care about Apple. My answer is noise. And yet, if I answer without maliciously picking 1s for everything, they won’t know that! They won’t dismiss me as an outlier. It’s okay to put a gate in front of the survey if it filters out noise and bogus survey responses.

6) Torture the data you do get

JD Powell’s company came into being when he watched his coworkers massage data over and over to tell their higher-ups what they wanted to hear: “Customers Are Happy and you’re doing a Great Job ™”. Of course, this didn’t reflect the reality of the situation, and the company continued to suffer from quality issues that could have been solved sooner if they’d listened. Why run a survey if you’re not actually looking for results? Why let customers think their voice is heard, only to cut some of them out for being a little too disagreeable? Outside survey companies exist because internal departments can’t show their managers the real, raw data – they shoot the messenger, and then wonder why profits are down if surveys are so good.

Every company wants to hear that customers are very happy. Every company wants that. Some companies want it so bad that they refuse to accept news of anything else. If you want to do a bad job, torture your data! You’ll have no idea what customers are actually thinking!

7) Ask everything, all at once

This is a bad idea. Interactive ad-surveys are supposed to be short and sweet. Ask too many questions and the customer may bail before they complete the survey. However, tracking one specific variable is for good surveys, and we’re not doing that. Do a bad job and ask every question, all at once. Get yourself three surveys worth of data.

One of the hardest parts of designing a survey is getting juuust enough information to build out your data. Jeep owners might be more likely to fish, that’s valuable data. How important is it to know if they own Apple products, when choosing what materials to make seat covers with? Will knowing the customer’s favorite TV show help your company determine what scent to make their detergent?

Data overload is really cool for finding weird correlations in things, but when the researcher has to present something with meaning to their higher-ups, it’s very easy to get lost in the sauce. A fifty-question survey is also far too intense for an ad, or for a post-shopping survey on a receipt, so that limits the pool to people signing up for surveys voluntarily instead of the hit-n-run kind found in ads.

Sources: https://www.npr.org/2017/02/17/515791540/the-trump-media-survey-is-phenomenally-biased-it-also-does-its-job-well

http://neoinsight.com/blog/2017/02/21/on-the-trumppence-media-survey-dark-patterns-ux-and-ethics/

Hyperlink for Formatting: Survicate.com

https://survicate.com/surveys/more-survey-respondents/

https://blog.marketo.com/2017/01/4-effective-methods-to-increase-your-survey-response-rates.html

What’s a Kernel?

Elizabeth Uncategorized October 1, 2021

If your computer’s prone to bugs, you might have seen it give a ‘kernel error’ before it decided that it would be taking a very long nap. But what is a kernel?

A kernel is the program in the computer that decides what program gets to use what resource, specifically RAM.

Before the kernel, computer systems like Multics (the predecessor to Unix) effectively built the error resolutions into the programs themselves, but that gets really inefficient as computers gain more power, and with it the ability to host more and more programs. Unix’s kernel system was a blunt but more efficient fix: the kernel picks who goes first. The kernel is therefore also responsible for prioritizing: the boot-up program, for example, gets priority over the word-processing program until the computer has completed boot up.

But that’s not all! The kernel also portions out memory for two applications at the same time by putting up a virtual barrier to keep them from running into each other (trying to use the same portion of memory) and crashing.

But what’s a kernel error? Surely, one of the most essential functions of the computer can’t crash, right? It’s not even really an application!

Something PANIC() This Way Comes

When a kernel error occurs, it’s not always fatal to the computer, but it is a sign that something is seriously wrong. The kernel monitors both software and hardware, and if something essential breaks – it panics. The kernel stops everything happening to take a ‘snapshot’ of the kernel memory and then either reboots automatically or tells the user to. That snapshot can be used by Windows (or a repair shop) for de-coding what broke before the problem completely bricks the computer, or makes it impossible to retrieve data.

Kernel panics are commonly associated with things like the famous Blue Screen of Death. When RAM is what makes everything on the computer run, and there’s something wrong with the RAM, it’s difficult to recover, hence the shutdown. It’s kind of like putting the computer in an induced coma to try and save it.

Blue Screen of Death isn’t the last screen you’ll ever see out of your computer, but it’s definitely not a good sign. It’s a good idea to regularly backup your data anyway, but if the computer starts blue-screening, and by some miracle it reboots with everything still on it – back up the important stuff right there and then! Don’t wait for it to error again!

Sources: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/debugger/bug-checks–blue-screens-

Captchas – How and Why

Elizabeth Uncategorized September 29, 2021

Captcha, which stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (what a mouthful) was first conceptualized in the early 2000s. Websites were already struggling with bots, and a website known as iDrive recognized their inability to ‘see’ the way people did. Paypal, also struggling with bot attacks, began using the same method to keep brute-force attacks from getting in. This is the true essence of Captcha – in 1997, the tech was first described as anything that could differentiate robots and humans, but it wasn’t known as ‘Captcha’ until Paypal got in on it.  It’s more advanced form, the reCAPTCHA, was first coined in 2007 and then absorbed into Google in 2009.

Type These Letters, Hear These Sounds

The original style is becoming easier to get past as AI improves, but it’s still better than nothing. An AI would still leave clues that it was ‘reading’ the letters (or trying to) as it tried to decipher the captcha text from the other random lines and fuzz on screen – Cloudflare, a security website, notes that AI couldn’t do much better than keysmashing and hoping to get in that way when this was first implemented. Now that AI can ‘see’ much better than it used to thanks to endless training to recognize text out in the real world, it gets more and more accurate for every captcha box it sees. Captchas may be algorithmically generated – AIs designed to account for algorithmically generated content in front of them are now capable of deciphering the text, and Captchas are actually sometimes used as tests!

That doesn’t mean they’re obsolete or useless for protection. Just because some people can create AIs that can get past it doesn’t mean that everyone can. Many basic bot creators would much rather go to an easier, less-well-defended site than sit there and try to program an advanced, specific AI for such a simple task. It’s not perfect protection – no protection is.

However, there were problems: unimpaired users often complained that solving them was hard. For visually impaired or deaf users, the captcha might genuinely be unsolvable. Screen readers, a common tool for blind folks who use the internet, allow them to browse the web by reading the page out loud. Because a captcha is a picture, not a text box, the screen reader doesn’t know it’s there. Accessibility software is often simpler than cutting-edge bots (and incapable of reading images), and so they were left behind.

Audio versions are a better solution, but their nature still makes it difficult for screen readers to ‘see’ the play buttons. Besides, audio-to-text AI was already more advanced than picture-to-text because there’s a market for automated captions and auto-transcripted phone calls. Transcription software has been around for ages, and it only gets better at separating noise from information as time goes on – there is almost nothing a captcha could add to the sound to make it hard to interpret for a machine and not a person. As such, these captchas are less common than the fuzzy text and image ones still seen everywhere today.

“I am Not a Robot”

One of the simplest types of Captcha is the “I am Not a Robot” check box. It seems like it could be easy to trick it – and it sort of is, but it’s not a walk in the park. The box works by tracking cursor movement before the user hits the little check box. On a desktop, an AI might jump directly to the box it needs to click, with no hesitation, or it might scan the entire page to locate the box visually if it’s unable to detect the clickable element. That’s not human behavior – people don’t ordinarily need to select the entire page and then contemplate it before clicking the right area. People are also generally unable to jump directly to the clickable elements as soon as the page loads, even if they’re using the tab keys or a touchscreen device.

This was easily one of the most user-friendly kinds of Captcha out there. No reading. No listening. No selecting blurry images or trying to guess at misshapen letters. As such, it was quicker to use than a number of other types of captcha tests were, even though someone with a lot of time and determination could rig something up to bypass it.

Click These Pics

This is the previously impossible barrier that stopped AI dead in its tracks. Training an AI to see and recognize like humans do used to be impossible, but now… now it’s on the horizon. Self-driving cars will need it. Google uses it for reverse-image search. Facebook uses it to find you in friend’s photos. If humanity was going to truly master AI that behaved like people did, AI was going to have to learn how to see; that meant other, outsider AI would also be learning how to see.

The pictures are easy – you get an image separated into 9 or 16 tiles, and you select imagery that matches its request within those tiles. An AI might be able to measure ‘red’ in an image, but the sort of uncomplicated AI that most amateur hackers could crank out wouldn’t know a fire truck from a stop sign. Even if it got lucky that one time, other human users are picking all of the right squares every time – so if it misses even a sliver of the red in another tile, or over-selects, it doesn’t pass and has to go again.

Is that… being used for something?

Google is using Captchas to crowd-source training for their AI. However, doing this meant that Google had access to a metric ton of training time – Wikipedia claims that people around the globe spend 500 hours completing CAPTCHAs every week. Unlike those text and audio ones, pictures with the features they need can’t just be generated indefinitely. If you’ve noticed a decline in picture quality for these captchas, you’re not alone. The quality really is getting worse. The sharper pictures are already trained into the database, so now all that’s left is the blurry, fuzzy, poor-quality ones everywhere else, the ones that weren’t ideal for the initial training.

Now, millions of people every day are telling the computer what a red car or a street sign looks like, instead of just a large handful of researchers. Some of this research is for smart-car training, some of it’s for reverse-image searching, some is purely to advance the state of AI – once AI can recognize things in its environment visually, it can usually behave with less human intervention. And the more training it has, the less likely it is to become confused at a really inconvenient time. Tesla has famously struggled with AI mis-recognizing things, such as the moon, blinking streetlights, and partially graffiti-d signs, but the more training it gets, on worse and worse quality images, the better it will eventually perform.

Sources:

https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/bots/how-captchas-work/

https://support.google.com/a/answer/1217728?hl=en

https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/teaching-computers-to-read-google.html

https://elie.net/publication/text-based-captcha-strengths-and-weaknesses/

Smishing

Elizabeth Uncategorized September 27, 2021

Do you get strange solicitations for all sorts of things in your messages? Are you getting texts from email accounts, or massive group-texts to you and everyone within a couple of digits of your number?

That’s Smishing.

Phishing

Phishing is the process of sending emails with dangerous, annoying links in them hoping that someone on the other end will click them. These emails can be broadly targeted or narrow, well written or not – it all depends on the person on the other end of the line. Broadly targeted emails with many people on the receiving end tend to be poorly written to weed out people who would flake out halfway through. Narrowly targeted emails aimed at individuals or specific companies tend to be much better, because they’re willing to invest the time needed to get them.

Phishing happens via email, but it comes in a variety of flavors, and setting rules such as ‘don’t click links’ and ‘don’t look at ads for services you didn’t sign up for’ can wipe a lot of the problems out. Phishing is still incredibly common, and many people (including the elderly, people who are reading in a different language than their native tongue, younger kids with email addresses, etc.) still fall for them… but where tech innovation goes, scams soon follow!

Improvement to the Tech 

There was a time when sending mass texts in hopes of securing some personal data was time consuming and expensive. There was a time when you couldn’t just send emails to a phone number or vice versa. Nowadays, all of these things have become possible. Everyone worth scamming has a smartphone. Very few plans ask users to pay per text, instead of per gig (or meg).

VOIP and assorted messaging apps all blur the lines between email, phone calls, text messages, app-based messaging services, and more. Of course, the market has encouraged this. If users have to trade apps to stay in touch with friends on a different app, they’ll generally do so. It’s in every app’s best interest to work with eachother, and most will enable users to send and receive messages with minimal issues. There aren’t a ton, but the handful in existence is plenty. Plus, Google and Outlook will allow you to direct-message phone numbers now, as long as you have the full ten digits.

Smishing

Smishing, just like phishing, involves sending messages trying to get people to click sketchy links inside or engage further with the scammers. Sometimes it happens with one number sending directly to one number, or one number to many, and sometimes an email address is able to send you messages directly.

Shot-gun blast smishing, just like regular phishing, is targeting people who don’t know better than to click on strange links or respond to “adult links” texts with incoherent rage. Now that many delivery services use text messages, unsolicited texts about a meal or package delivered to the target’s house may cause them to click the link in the message without pausing for a second to think about all of the other messages they should have received beforehand. The phone is new territory, and they hope you’ll fall for it because it’s new and blends in a little better.  

There is a more dangerous version of smishing – if they know who they’re texting, and they can text coherently, getting info or clicks out of the target becomes much easier because they can custom-fit those texts to said target. If someone uses your name, you’ll assume you know them from somewhere – and a text is already so personal, it’s hard to blame people who fall for it. Shotgun blast smishing only gets the folks who were vulnerable, but a good, targeted attack could fool many more. This obviously also applies to regular phishing, but because phone numbers all look the same, and phones can be misplaced while desktops can’t really be, bluffing your way into getting ‘emergency information’ from someone is just a smidge less difficult.

Viruses are still a potential problem for phones. The only issue is that they have to be custom-made for the phone type the end user has, or else they won’t be able to successfully infect that device. While many people use their phones for their internet browsing, a great many more use their desktop for everything, and so the scammers of the past would just use the desktop virus and hope they caught something.

Smishing introduces a new angle – phone numbers will generally lead to phones, meaning that they can use that custom-made phone virus and almost guarantee themselves a win as long as the target actually clicks the link.

Epidemic

Unfortunately, unlike phishing calls or emails, smishing is easier to spam with and doesn’t usually require a list of preexisting emails. Think about it: a phone number has a set number of digits with ten possible placements, 0-9. An email not only has the entire alphabet on top of all of the numbers, the length varies from the shortest possible username to the longest one. You can’t simply BS your way into a working email the way you can with a phone number, you’d have to buy a list and plug it into the spam machine to send messages.

Enforcement, too, is easier to evade. If a smisher’s email gets banned, they can simply make another one by the same mechanism that makes spamming emails without a list difficult, and continue to spam phone numbers. As emails and phone numbers get blocked out, online services allows them to continue messaging. If those services get complaints about the spam? Simply make a new account there, too. Easy, fast communication is vital to many people, businesses, and services today, so all of this is easy and accessible by design.

Sources:

https://www.androidauthority.com/apps-send-text-sms-pc-ways-740669/

https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/microsoft-office/use-outlook-to-send-e-mail-to-a-cell-phone/

Streaming Services – and What Causes Failure?

Elizabeth Uncategorized September 24, 2021

Pinpointing success is much more difficult than pinpointing what causes a failure. Perhaps, if you identify enough failures, you could assemble a guide on what not to do, a sort of Minesweeper approach to get the most optimal path.

What is that walkable path? Spend a lot of time planning content. Build confidence. Build a good library. The best platforms spent time curating the content they wanted available, while platforms that failed relied too much on individual series or gimmicks.

Failures

Yahoo! Screen

Fans of the show Community might remember this one. Yahoo! Screen came around a mere two years after Yahoo bought Tumblr, and it marks one of Yahoo’s biggest failures to expand into a market that they couldn’t compete in right after a series of large financial failures.

What did they do wrong? Nearly everything! They didn’t have the funds. They didn’t have a library built in for themselves, like Paramount or Disney did, because Yahoo wasn’t exactly known for producing movies. They didn’t have the talent or money to create many of their own shows or buy pre-existing ones, like Netflix did. They had Community season 6. Even that they later blamed for their failure because it was expensive, but it was one of their main drawing points! Their reaction to Community’s cost peeved off fans of the show, further nailing the coffin. It was a bad investment and a bad idea. It also proved via example that you really can’t just ‘make a streaming service’. Total failure to launch.

Quibi

Quibi lived in a strange in-between world for two years after it’s founding, only to die less than a year after officially launching services. It was competing with some of the best of the best – other programs launched long before 2020, and were much better-established. It credits part of its failure to the pandemic, which sounds a little odd for a streaming service, who arguably did better than most companies during the pandemic, but it makes more sense when you realize the shows were designed to be watched on the go – and on mobile devices. Every Quibi show had a format of 16:9, designed to be watched on a phone’s screen, not a TV. Episodes were ten or so minutes long. Content like that exists, but much of Quibi’s library had to be made specially for Quibi. Interesting concept, great initial execution, but the idea itself didn’t have legs.

Quibi, who was counting on unrealistically high subscriber counts in order to continue functioning, didn’t draw in nearly enough funding in those first crucial months to make it work like Netflix did. Quibi crashed and burned, and then got sold to Roku. At least they didn’t threaten to drag their investors under, like Yahoo! Screens did.

Successes

Crackle

Crackle is actually still up and running, which is incredible because I haven’t seen an ad for Crackle since… ever, I think. Sony is probably Crackle’s most notable owner – it held onto it for years before eventually letting go of the reigns, a slow, gradual transition that likely kept it from pulling a Yahoo! Or a Quibi. Crackle is still up and running today. It even has a surprising amount of Crackle exclusives, and the service seems to be doing as good as ever. Crackle’s only failure is a lack of presence in advertising, but if it’s doing well… why spend money? It’s one of the default options on Roku, which helps a lot.

Netflix

Netflix is one of the first services to ever offer streaming. I’d call it a true success if it weren’t almost always cycling content and bleeding money.

Somehow it keeps happening: they’ll start a series, and end it before it has time to build steam. They’ll make terrible original movies. They’ll lose the rights to series they had previously, and buy series that fans love only to not get full permissions and/or sell them right back. And yet, they survived! They renewed and refreshed their funding with plans to introduce tiered viewing, trimming content, and otherwise making much-needed changes as a platform. If they had worthy competitors during this vulnerable period, who knows if they would have made it?

Even though they’re a pretty stable success now, – what does Netflix do wrong?

Selling content to other streaming services could catch up eventually. They seem a little better about starting insanely expensive projects only to not finish the script/the set/the casting/the series beforehand than they were even a couple years ago, but that could always change. There was a time when industry skeptics genuinely thought Netflix was going to die out because it just wouldn’t stop spending on content indiscriminately. Plus, auto-play on the home screen is really annoying.

Hulu

Hulu is functional. Much like Paramount Plus, it offers an even more hybrid model where bottom tier users see ads, the next tier users don’t, and higher tiers include live TV.

However, they’ve also suffered their fair share of struggles. Poor server balancing meant that even customers with good internet were forced to wait for ads to load and their show to buffer. This is obviously bad. The website was still useable, but it was unpleasant when other options existed in the early days, when Hulu had a free option. Nowadays, it’s much more stable, and therefore much more competitive as well.

Hulu originals don’t have the same draw as Netflix or Amazon originals, but producing your own library is only a bad idea if your service doesn’t have the funding – and Hulu has the funding, plus the means to secure content from channels like Adult Swim and Cinemax. That’s impressive. If Yahoo had managed that, it might still be around.

Break-in Branded Successes

Companies with a lot of preexisting capital and preexisting content libraries that they already own the rights to tend to do better than ones that don’t, all else equal, including time and foothold.

Former Channels

People get frustrated that services like HBO and Paramount won’t share libraries or combine – the primary complaint about streaming nowadays is that the subscriptions are expensive and the good shows are always on the other services, not the one you’re already subscribed to. The periodic drop of episodes instead of the content bombs are also deeply annoying, because the consumer has to either shell out for a subscription to see it new, or wait until it’s all released and then start a free trial to see it. The trade is time or money, and customers are upset! Still, many of them see great success. After all, what are you going to do – go back to cable? Which no longer has all of the shows you like hostage? Hah!

Paramount Plus

Paramount plus acts as the landing site for some pretty big movies once they’re out of theaters, although research says that’s not super important to its desired audience. It’s also surprisingly old! It started as CBS All Access in 2014, before becoming Paramount Plus in 2021.

It’s a hybrid model, much like Hulu. There’s no free version. The basic plan costs about 5$, and comes with ads, but for 10$ you can watch all of CBS’s content library ad-free. This may be part of why it’s less popular than Netflix (assuming the customer likes both content libraries) – it came from the early days of streaming services where you could do that and get away with it, and it never stopped. Is it popular? Yes. Do I personally see ads for it? No. It’s marketing skews towards millennial (and older) men. Live sports are one of it’s biggest draws. It does plenty of business in a market that’s often reluctant to cut cable, so it must be doing something right!

HBO Max

HBO Max is a standout success, and it looks a lot like a less turbulent Netflix. It has a surprisingly diverse library of content and doesn’t seem to be struggling financially. HBO Max is kind of the perfect middle ground between old TV and new streaming services, launched just in time to scoop up people from the pandemic. It was announced in early 2018 but launched in 2020 (the US) and 2021 (globally). It’s a landing site for HBO content, just like Paramount is, and makes content for itself separately from it’s primary channel to give consumers who still have cable a reason to subscribe. Other services that AT&T owned were retired, and their subscribers were funneled towards the newly minted HBO Max. If Netflix was a trailblazer, HBO Max is the 4-wheel drive that gets a much easier ride behind it.  

Amazon Prime (and Streaming)

Amazon’s offerings include many adult-oriented series, a refreshing break in a streaming mush of PG-13. One in particular, their original series Chernobyl, stands out as a brilliant showcase of what Amazon can do with all of it’s funding. Others, including ‘Invincible’ and ‘The Boys’, give lesser-known comic books a chance to stand in a comic book duopoly held by DC and Marvel, a chance they might not have gotten otherwise. It’s a shame that the parent company is the way it is – aspects of their services could be wonderful if they weren’t known for how they treated their workers.

Amazon as a megacorporation is doing what Yahoo! wanted to. The difference is in both funding and management. Where Yahoo couldn’t afford for Tumblr to be unprofitable, Amazon could. It had some runway before the service had to turn around and make money. Therefore, it never got in a fight with a fanbase over what series cost it it’s life.

Disney Plus

Disney owns a lot of media. A lot of media. Its streaming library was already built-in, but it’s constantly adding new series to its long list of IPs. Marvel. Fox. Pixar. Assorted TV shows. All of this, on top of the million-and-one movies they own, makes Disney Plus one of the easiest services to justify, and not just for families.

The issue is that Disney doesn’t want to make series for adults. It wants everything to be PG 13. Ryan Reynolds is refusing to film Deadpool 3 because Disney has suggested that they want it to be PG 13. Now, the first two movies weren’t, so a third movie not keeping pace with the first two is almost certainly going to disappoint – it’s a mystery that they even wanted that, because who goes to see the third movie of a series without seeing at least one of the previous ones?

Anyway, apply that to anything else they make, and Disney’s weaknesses are clear: it’s for the kids and tweens, not the adults who are paying for it. It’s more interested in playing things safe and producing guaranteed hits for kids (who will often watch anything) when the IP’s it purchased were groundbreaking series designed for adults. Deadpool set records for R-rated movies, so to try and pull back, to try and make Deadpool of all heroes play it safe, ­is a sign that Disney has bought things that it doesn’t actually want, but it didn’t want anyone else to have, either. It has too much money. Netflix suffered from the same problem! The Star Wars content is some of the only adult-focused stuff on the platform aside from what they riffled off of Fox’s corpse.

Sources:

https://help.hulu.com/s/article/how-much-does-hulu-cost

Paramount+ Is Entering a Crowded Streaming Market. What Will Make Consumers Subscribe?

Internet Hysteria: No, Your Fav isn’t Going to Die

Elizabeth Uncategorized September 22, 2021

Folks who were on Tumblr during its peak often see similarities in the content cycles Twitter and TikTok are going through. One of the content cycles is a content creator receiving a non-credible threat and then getting positively hounded by people begging them to stay safe in the wake of this threat.  Where does this panic come from?

Mark, and L.A. Gangs

One of the most famous posts of this type ever was made on Tumblr, warning the popular Youtuber Markiplier (aka Mark Fischbach) that he was in danger from a gang war in L.A., where the first gang to 100 kills gets to take over that part of the city. If you think about that for even a second, it sounds stupid – who decides how the city is partitioned, is it all of L.A., 100 kills is a ton of people, so these chunks would have to be pretty large, etc. You get the picture. It’s impossible to tell if the original user was actually serious, but given Tumblr’s track record and age breakdown at the time, the answer is unfortunately unclear. Other users saw it and immediately began memeing on it, and passing it around, even commenting it on videos and social media that Mark posted.

Charlie D’Amelio and “”Peaches””

Peaches, a very-much-disliked internet personality, threatened to send people to Charlie’s house specifically to assault her. She said she’d already hired someone, and he was on his way. This is absurd for many reasons – a 19-year-old was threatening a 16 year-old, and the 19 year-old didn’t know where Charlie even lived. She was asking the comments section for her address. Of course, nobody feels good when they receive a threat, but a public, spur-of-the-moment threat? From someone like Peaches, who is constantly spamming weirdly explicit and violent things with no followup, ever? It was clearly an intimidation attempt and not much more.

Still, caution was reasonable – Peaches might have finally made a move, after all. However, fans already told her this. And then kept telling her this, constantly, for days after she’d promised ‘someone is on their way’. All of the people screaming at Charlie to be careful in her comment section apparently couldn’t tell that everyone else was also shouting warnings at her, and these comments still litter videos available from last year, 2020. Nothing happened. Peaches was banned from TikTok, but not arrested, because the threat wasn’t credible.

Really, the fans seemed to be a bigger nuisance about the whole ordeal than Peaches actually was.

Comments from one of Charlie’s dance videos last year, 2020.

And When It’s Real

Meg Turney and Gavin Free, two members of a popular production/Let’s Play company known as Rooster Teeth, had their house broken into by someone intending to kill Gavin because they were jealous that he was dating Meg. He had a gun as well as hundreds of notes on the two of them, and he was shot to death upon leaving their house and encountering the police.

What’s interesting about this – and many crazed fan cases – is that he never broadcasted his intent beforehand, at least not anywhere visible to the public. They were caught completely off guard. Christina Grimmie, another Youtuber, was shot to death while signing autographs by someone who went to Florida explicitly to harm her. Did he say anything beforehand? No. Philip DeFranco had a crazed fan break into his house, also without warning. Not every public, loud threat is harmless, but the vast majority of the crazy ones are just barely lucid enough to know that threatening their idol beforehand is going to make actually getting to them difficult. All bite, no bark makes for a very dangerous dog.

What Do?

Firstly, this isn’t legal advice.

Secondly, most threats made publicly (unless it’s doxxing by Keemstar) against a public personality by another public personality don’t really mean much. It would be a slam dunk in a court case if anything ever happened, and most people understand that. But say you saw a threat on Discord or something. What do you do when the threat seems credible to a normal person? You could go to the police. You could. But the evidence better be pretty compelling: an article by a private company shows the kind of rigor needed to go after someone who made a threat. ‘Credibility’ and ‘Being Specific’ about it are why Peaches didn’t get arrested for threatening Charlie; the threat wasn’t credible.

Often, the best thing an unconnected individual with no real ties to either party can do is simply do their due diligence to alert and then back away. It sounds callous – What if something really happens this time?, You might think – but imagine being on the receiving end of thousands of people telling you that someone promised to kill you, over and over, but also never getting warning for the times that people actually show up to your house. That would suck, right?  

For Clout, Not Safety

So why is that exactly what happens?

It’s insidious, and it’s tied into how social media works. If someone catches word of a rumor, the internet encourages them to take that as seriously as possible, no matter what – even if the evidence is shaky. Sometimes they don’t even need real evidence! A bad feeling or repeatedly pulling ‘The Tower’ card in a tarot reading is enough to start some comment panic in certain circles on TikTok. 

People shouting about threats in the comment section of that content creator get thousands of likes, so there’s good reason for them to be overly cautious and then “spread the word” on said threat. It’s easy ‘like’ farming. Everyone is in that comment section because they like their creator, and so actions taken to protect the creator are also appreciated, even if they’re overzealous. Other people join in for this reason. Sometimes they actually care – oftentimes, it’s just done because it’s easy points.

It’s also a way of taking action without actually taking action, and it feels good to take action. However, sometimes the worry is genuine – and that’s not good for either party.

Why Panic in The First Place?

A parasocial relationship is a relationship where neither side really knows the other, but they feel like they do. The full implications of social media and parasocial relationships is an entirely different article, but – for most people with healthy attachments – a parasocial relationship with their favorite actor or singer or bakery chef is no problem. A person makes things you like, and you like that person for making those things. Most people don’t feel extremely happy or extremely sad for complete strangers, but some amount of emotion towards strangers is a totally natural thing. You likely have parasocial relationships within your community – you may ‘know’ the barista who works mornings at your favorite coffee shop, or the guy who runs the counter at the hobby store.

Parasocial relationships are natural. That being said, the extent to which social media encourages them and weird behavior around them is not. It turns from a simple parasocial relationship into worship. Now, anyone can spend hours obsessively learning about a particular idol, and other superfans will encourage them to do it in a weird feedback loop where they could never truly love their mutual idol enough.

And the obsession never learns their obsessor’s name. This strange, overprotective hyper-alert from superfans isn’t good for either party. At it’s most extreme, you get cases like Meg’s house break-in, or Miley Cyrus’s house break-in, or Oli London attempting to look like his favorite Korean pop star, or any other number of weird cases.

The long and the short of it is that it’s not healthy to be constantly worried that something will happen to one’s favorite – so don’t panic for them. Or panic-spam in their comments.

Sources:

https://memedocumentation.tumblr.com/post/166689463830/explained-warn-markiplier-meme (wow, this is so much more user-friendly than KnowYourMeme)

https://www.distractify.com/p/who-is-peaches-on-tiktok

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-mexico-man-dead-after-breaking-youtube-stars-gavin-free-n847971

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