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Julie Rubicon

facebook.com

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Re: Julie Rubicon

#31

Post by cavisne »

Great piece of fiction, it feels like the author works at Facebook or knows someone who does though.

That said, what's described could possibly be done with existing technology . Could Facebook accurately move forward statements like "next Monday is going to be massive for Volkswagen" over time you could weight private messages from people who work for regulators higher. For more public events like an apple launch they could predict a spike easily just by all the media mentions of the date

Re: Julie Rubicon

#32

Post by carsonreinke »

stygiansonic wrote: post #15

Fiction or not, this is similar to an actual story of (ex)-fraud researchers at Capital One[1], who (ab)used their access to credit card transaction data in order to infer whether target companies' quarterly earnings would be below/above expectations, and then traded on that knowledge. However, in the actual story, there was no "black box" to query, the ex-employees wrote all the complicated queries themselves. EDIT:…

Can someone explain why this is illegal (besides any data/privacy breach within Capital One)?

Re: Julie Rubicon

#34

Post by basch »

stygiansonic wrote: post #15

Fiction or not, this is similar to an actual story of (ex)-fraud researchers at Capital One[1], who (ab)used their access to credit card transaction data in order to infer whether target companies' quarterly earnings would be below/above expectations, and then traded on that knowledge. However, in the actual story, there was no "black box" to query, the ex-employees wrote all the complicated queries themselves. EDIT:…

It sounds like a retelling of this story from a decade ago.

But then on September 6, 1997, something quite extraordinary happened: the graph shot upwards, recording a sudden and massive shift in the number sequence as his machines around the world started reporting huge deviations from the norm. The day was of historic importance for another reason, too.

For it was the same day that an estimated one billion people around the world watched the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales at Westminster Abbey.

http://www.rense.com/general62/bbox.htm http://noosphere.princeton.edu/ https://science.slashdot.org/story/05/02/12/2344224/random-n... http://msgboard.snopes.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=print_...

Re: Julie Rubicon

#37

Post by ojbyrne »

carsonreinke wrote: post #32
stygiansonic wrote: post #15

Fiction or not, this is similar to an actual story of (ex)-fraud researchers at Capital One[1], who (ab)used their access to credit card transaction data in order to infer whether target companies' quarterly earnings would be below/above expectations, and then traded on that knowledge. However, in the actual story, there was no "black box" to query, the ex-employees wrote all the complicated queries themselves. EDIT:…

Can someone explain why this is illegal (besides any data/privacy breach within Capital One)?

It's in the article:

'The "misappropriation theory" holds that a person commits fraud "in connection with" a securities transaction, and thereby violates § 10(b) and Rule 10b-5, when he misappropriates confidential information for securities trading purposes, in breach of a duty owed to the source of the information. ... Under this theory, a fiduciary's undisclosed, self-serving use of a principal's information to purchase or sell securities, in breach of a duty of loyalty and confidentiality, defrauds the principal of the exclusive use of that information. In lieu of premising liability on a fiduciary relationship between company insider and purchaser or seller of the company's stock, the misappropriation theory premises liability on a fiduciary-turned-trader's deception of those who entrusted him with access to confidential information.'

Re: Julie Rubicon

#39

Post by carsonreinke »

carsonreinke wrote: post #32
stygiansonic wrote: post #15

Fiction or not, this is similar to an actual story of (ex)-fraud researchers at Capital One[1], who (ab)used their access to credit card transaction data in order to infer whether target companies' quarterly earnings would be below/above expectations, and then traded on that knowledge. However, in the actual story, there was no "black box" to query, the ex-employees wrote all the complicated queries themselves. EDIT:…

Can someone explain why this is illegal (besides any data/privacy breach within Capital One)?

Oh, duh, it explains it in the article: "misappropriation" insider trading

Re: Julie Rubicon

#40

Post by drostie »

StavrosK wrote: post #22
chatmasta wrote: post #3

Usually I read comments on HN before the article, but there were no comments when I saw the link, so I went straight to reading it. What a bizarre piece. How long did it take everyone else to realize it was fiction? For me, I did not realize until the very end -- and even then I still wasn't sure. It could just as well have been written by some delusional non-technical employee at Facebook.

I realized it was fiction when querying after today's date produced a spike that completely matched reality. If anyone can do this, they sure as hell won't do it by omitting an end date in a query.

Right. I was initially credulous to the idea that there is data in the system after the present, thinking, "Holy crap! That means that some other department in Facebook consists of chatbots which have randomly woven themselves into peoples' lives and have advance-scheduled chatter!"

But once it was like, "hey, we're predicting the outcome of a sports game before it happened based on this" then it's like "ooh, this is a cool fake story which just took a turn towards the supernatural, I get it..."

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