What is the first thing that you would find when you do a Google search? Now, most of us would notice the little yellow box in the bottom left corner of the first few searches, and avoid them, but what if you're tired? You're tired, it's 1 am, and you're locked out of your house and you're desperately praying for your phone to not die. You click on the first result that shows up.
I'd recently watched a TEDx video which had a somewhat misleading title (link provided below). It was called "Wiretapping the Secret Service can be Easy and Fun". Intuitively, when we see such a title, we'd imagine the author to be a bored person living in their mother's basement, unemployed, despite their skills with a computer, looking for their 15 minutes of fame; anything to end the sheer monotony of their lives. This video, though, was something quite different.
Watch the video
In 2014, Bryan Seely hacked the Secret Service and the FBI, and then turned himself in to alert authorities to the problem. What was the problem? He says that most of the results of companies provided by google are fake. Preposterous, right? We trust google. I mean, I can type "google" with a lowercase "g" and not get that annoying jagged red line underneath it. That's how much google is trusted and respected. So how can this be? But as it turns out, it's true. They're fake.
I used to think these fake companies were just simply annoying. I mean, they're harmless, right? All they're doing is taking up space so that other, real companies can't... right... the real companies can't show up, so they lose business that they deserve.
So what can we do? How can we distinguish between the real and the fake? Something about what he said struck me, though. I mean, if we know which one is fake.. These people, they have to pay google to display their ads, right? On a per-click basis? Well, what if we all just kept clicking on them? The fake ones, that is. I don't know. This may seem really childish and ignorant, but I'm just so angry right now. Why do people have to be just so horrible?
I'd recently watched a TEDx video which had a somewhat misleading title (link provided below). It was called "Wiretapping the Secret Service can be Easy and Fun". Intuitively, when we see such a title, we'd imagine the author to be a bored person living in their mother's basement, unemployed, despite their skills with a computer, looking for their 15 minutes of fame; anything to end the sheer monotony of their lives. This video, though, was something quite different.
Watch the video
In 2014, Bryan Seely hacked the Secret Service and the FBI, and then turned himself in to alert authorities to the problem. What was the problem? He says that most of the results of companies provided by google are fake. Preposterous, right? We trust google. I mean, I can type "google" with a lowercase "g" and not get that annoying jagged red line underneath it. That's how much google is trusted and respected. So how can this be? But as it turns out, it's true. They're fake.
I used to think these fake companies were just simply annoying. I mean, they're harmless, right? All they're doing is taking up space so that other, real companies can't... right... the real companies can't show up, so they lose business that they deserve.
So what can we do? How can we distinguish between the real and the fake? Something about what he said struck me, though. I mean, if we know which one is fake.. These people, they have to pay google to display their ads, right? On a per-click basis? Well, what if we all just kept clicking on them? The fake ones, that is. I don't know. This may seem really childish and ignorant, but I'm just so angry right now. Why do people have to be just so horrible?
