Posts

Facebook rudely translating Chinese President’s name?!

/in /by

Facebook has apologised for translating the Chinese President’s (She Jinping’s) name as “Mr Shithole”. During his visit to Mi-yan-mar this week. The company said the incident was due to a “technical issue” that caused incorrect translations from Burmese to English on Facebook.

Facebook and their Awkward Situation

The technical error produced a rather embarrassing and awkward situation for all the parties involved. As part of his visit to the  Mi-yan-mar, President “SHE”  met with a State Counsellor Ang san suu chi to sign various infrastructure agreements backed by China. A post about the visit was published to suu chi’s official Facebook page, which meant that it was loaded with references to “Mr Shithole” when translated to English.

Additionally, according to Reuters, a headline from the local news site The Irrawaddy was translated as, “Dinner honors president shithole.”

Facebook said it had fixed the technical issue. Reuters reported that Google’s translation system did not produce the same error.

“This should not have happened and we are taking steps to ensure it doesn’t happen again,” Facebook said in a statement to Reuters. “We sincerely apologise for the offence this has caused.”

Facebook explained that the error occurred because its system did not have President SHE’s name in its Burmese database. So it guessed the translation. After running translation tests, the company found that its system also translated similar words. Which start with “SHE” and “shi” in Burmese to “shithole” in English.

Kenneth Wong, a Burmese language instructor at the University of California, Berkeley, told The New York Times that he could understand why a machine would have made that translation error. Wong said that President SHE’s name sounds similar to “chi kyin phyin,”. Which roughly translates to “faeces hole buttocks” in Burmese.

 

So, keep up to date with everything How To Kill An Hour by signing up to our newsletter by clicking here!

Let us know what you think of the show by clicking here!

Click here to subscribe to our YouTube Channel to see more amazing ways to kill time!

Follow us on Twitch by clicking here!

cambridge analytica

Cambridge Analytica: How to tell if your data was shared

/in /by

You may have heard about the Facebook data breach by Cambridge Analytica the past couple of weeks. Now Facebook are about tell us Brits if your data has been compromised in the data breach.

This week, more than 1 million British people will receive a detailed message on their news feeds. Within this post it will tell users if they are one of the huge 87 million users that have had their data breached. Therefore, used improperly, Facebook will then go one step further to help their users.

So, what is this help? All of Facebook’s 2.2 Billion users, that’s billion with a B! Will receive a notice from them that’s called ‘Protecting your information’. Within this notice will be a link that sends them to a page which tells users which apps have access to their data. Furthermore this page will tell them what information they have shared with said apps. From here users are able to go through the apps and deny access to their data if they wish. You can even go one step further and block any third parties from accessing this data.

Mark Zuckerberg had admitted that he made a huge mistake in realising how much of an affect Facebook had on the outer world. Not fully acknowledging Facebooks wider responsibilities to it’s audience. Facebook’s responsibility is so huge, that, he’s set to testify in front of Congress next week.

Cambridge Analytica: How?

The number of those affected was originally reported as 50Million, however, that number has said to have risen to 87million people. So, how did they get so much data? A personality quiz app called ‘This Is Your Digital Life’ created by Aleksander Kogan is said to be the culprit behind the breach. Kogan allegedly paid 270,000 people to take the quiz. As a result, all of the data of those that took part was breached. But this isn’t the worse part. Due to Facebook’s loose restrictions, data from the friends of the 270,000 people was too breached. Including data which was set to ‘only me’

As a result of this lapse of judgement, Facebook cracked down and limited the data that apps can access. Yet it seems that the damage has already been done.

To download Facebook please click here Apple / Android

Listen to the guys chatting about this by clicking here! 

To keep up with all things How To Kill An Hour, sign up to our newsletter by clicking here!