The number of people accessing Facebook via the “dark web” now stands at 1 million per month, the tech giant announced today (April 22). Facebook has maintained an “Onion” site that resides on the Tor network, which forms part of the so-called dark web, for about a year and a half. This is the first time the company has revealed details about its presence in this shadowy corner of the internet.
Tor preserves users’ privacy by disguising their identity and location by bouncing web traffic randomly through a far-flung network of servers. (Tor is short for The Onion Router, since it adds layers of anonymity to traffic that are tricky to peel away.) The Tor code is open-source and its servers are operated by volunteers.
The number of people connecting to Facebook over Tor is growing at a steady clip. Facebook said that in June last year some 525,000 people accessed its dark-web site. Traffic has grown in a “roughly linear” pattern sine then, according to Facebook, meaning about 50,000 new users are have been accessing the social network via Tor each month.
“People who choose to communicate over Tor do so for a variety of reasons related to privacy, security and safety,” wrote Alec Muffett, a Facebook engineer in London who leads the company’s work on its dark-web presence. “It’s important to us to provide methods for people to use our services securely—particularly if they lack reliable methods to do so.”
Indeed, Facebook has added more ways to access the site on the dark web over time. In January, itmade its Onion site accessible to smartphones running the Android operating system.
Traffic to the Tor network often spikes in places when governments try to restrict access to social networks. This was the case in Bangladesh at the end of 2015, when the government cut off access to Facebook for around three weeks, citing security concerns following controversial death sentences handed down by the courts. Traffic to the Tor network originating in Bangladesh surged during that period, although Facebook hasn’t clarified whether it saw a similar uptick in traffic to its own dark-web site.
“To be clear, temporary increases have more to do with current events than access restrictions,” said Melanie Ensign, a Facebook spokesperson.
Lexicon packages the news in a way that its robo-clients can understand. It scans every Dow Jones story in real time, looking for textual clues that might indicate how investors should feel about a stock. It then sends that information in machine-readable form to its algorithmic subscribers, which can parse it further, using the resulting data to inform their own investing decisions. Lexicon has helped automate the process of reading the news, drawing insight from it, and using that information to buy or sell a stock. The machines aren’t there just to crunch numbers anymore; they’re now making the decisions.
Henri Waelbroeck seems to fit the popular image of the scientist transplanted into the world of high finance and hedge fund trading, the sort of stereotype found in books like "The Fear Index" by Robert Harris.
Waelbroeck, director of research at machine learning-enhanced trade execution system Portware, was previously a professor at the Institute of Nuclear Sciences at the National University of Mexico (UNAM). His areas of expertise include: complex systems science, quantum gravity theories, genetic algorithms, artificial neural networks, chaos theory.
The impression Waelbroeck conveys is one of precision. He explains that algorithms have grown in complexity since being introduced to the world of trading around 2000. This has made it increasingly difficult for traders to understand each vendor's full algorithm platform and how to optimally select an algorithm for each particular trade that comes in from a portfolio manager. Portware leverages artificial intelligence to help traders use execution algorithms and in some cases provides automated execution solutions that select the optimal control parameters on algorithms.
"Our work really has focused on two objectives: the first is to find an optimal execution schedule for each trade, and the second is to interact with the order flow more efficiently to avoid the harmful effects of high frequency trading (HFT)," Waelbroeck told IBTimes.
A practical implementation approach involves modeling, building, and testing commodities trading strategies using data gathered from datafeeds and databases. An effective workflow enables you to:
For more information, see MATLAB® and toolboxes for finance, statistics, optimization, and trading.
There are vast parts of our country that are poor and without security or education. The state needs to reach these people. Brazil’s history has shown that the free market simply won’t do it,” said Luiz Torelly, a bureaucrat at the state-run Institute for National and Artistic Patrimony in Brasília who defends the size of Brazil’s state.
At the same time, there are few voices in Brazilian public life to challenge the ideas of people like Mr. Torelly. There is no major political party advocating limited government. Politicians who do are likely to be derided by nationalists as sellouts to the free-market U.S.
Unlike other nations in the New World, Brazil never had a revolution that set it in opposition to an intrusive state. The Portuguese monarchy brought an entire ship filled with royal files and documents when it relocated to Rio. Successive governments have added new layers of regulation to a state that began as a royal court. In 1979, military rulers tried to pare back the bureaucracy by creating a cabinet post, the Minister of De-bureaucratization.
The result today is a bureaucracy that spends 41% of the country’s gross domestic product—about double the rate of the U.S. The return for all that tax money is questionable: poorly built roads, ports and bridges, and second-rate education and health services. As one travelers’ cliché goes, Brazil taxes like Scandinavia but has Africa-level infrastructure. In 2013, huge and sometimes violent protests erupted across the country, with protesters upset that the country was spending billions on World Cup stadiums while patients died waiting on the floors of hospital hallways.
Indeed, most of today’s largest media outlets – that appear respectable to outsiders – supported the 1964 military coup that ushered in two decades of rightwing dictatorship and further enriched the nation’s oligarchs. This key historical event still casts a shadow over the country’s identity and politics. Those corporations – led by the multiple media arms of the Globo organisation –heralded that coup as a noble blow against a corrupt, democratically elected liberal government. Sound familiar?
For more than a year, those same media outlets have peddled a self-serving narrative: an angry citizenry, driven by fury over government corruption, rising against and demanding the overthrow of Brazil’s first female president, Dilma Rousseff, and her Workers’ party (PT). The world saw endless images of huge crowds of protesters in the streets, always an inspiring sight.
But what most outside Brazil did not see was that the country’s plutocratic media had spent months inciting those protests (while pretending merely to “cover” them). The protesters were not remotely representative of Brazil’s population. They were, instead, disproportionately white and wealthy: the very same people who have opposed the PT and its anti-poverty programmes for two decades.
Slowly, the outside world has begun to see past the pleasing, two-dimensional caricature manufactured by its domestic press, and to recognise who will be empowered once Rousseff is removed. It has now become clear that corruption is not the cause of the effort to oust Brazil’s twice-elected president; rather, corruption is merely the pretext.
Are we in a recession right now (April 2016)?
Are you in Brazil, Argentina, Russia or Greece? If so, then yes, you are in a recession. If you live in pretty much any other country, you are not. The US is growing at about 2 ½ %, Europe at about 1 ½ %. These are not stellar rates, but they are very far from a recession.
The fact that many of you are asking though, confirms one of my biggest worries: there is an incurable pessimism out there, and many of my colleagues in the economics profession have their share of responsibility. Consider this: over the last five years we have heard over and over that we are still in a recession, or on the brink of a new crisis. And yet, over this period, global growth has averaged 3.8% per year. The average over 1980-2006 was…3.5%. That’s right. We have been doing better than the historical average, all the while telling ourselves we were in stagnation, or a “new mediocre” as the IMF likes to call it.
I see a few explanations for this. Advanced economies are a bit weaker than they used to be, and most of the economic punditry reflects their point of view. And we still think of the 2003-07 record-growth period as “normal” – instead of admitting that it was a bubble.
We are not in a recession. Not in the world, not in the US. In the US, there are now about 4.5 million more people employed than at the peak before the crisis.
All this pessimism troubles me for two reasons. The first is that it holds back consumption and investment – so it holds back growth. The second is that by thinking that the bubble years were normal, we are not focusing on the right things. All the debate is on quantitative easing and negative interest rates as ways to create growth. But you can’t quantitatively ease your way to sustainable growth. You have to invest in infrastructure and education, create a strong business environment, innovate. It’s hard work. But it’s the only way. That is what we should be debating.