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Sumerian clay tablet with the text of the poem Inanna and Ebih by the priestess Enheduanna, Writing in cuneiform characters on clay tablets is a little laborious, but it ensures that your text is not vulnerable to accidental erasure: these tablets have survived for more than 5000 years. It is hard to think that the posts of our blogs will survive for so long. But, at least, we should try to protect them from accidental loss or direct attacks. Image from Wikipedia.

I don’t know if it ever happened to you, but a few days ago I lost two post drafts in a row, the same day. Then I discovered something that I should have known: that Google’s Blogger gives you zero chances to recover your text when you erase it by mistake. No way, impossible, I could have thrown those drafts into a black hole.

No tragedy, but a few hours of work wasted. And that set my mind in motion: why is it that Google, the world’s most powerful Internet company, can’t provide even a minimal file recovery facility in their blogging platform? Call me paranoid, but I think they had something in mind when they structured Blogger the way it is. That is, prone to data loss. Just think of a few characteristics of the shiny new version of Blogger: there is no way to make an automatic backup. There is no trash can from which you can recover erased data. There is no way to disable the automatic saving that operates every two seconds or so, and that virtually guarantees that any mistake you make can’t be reversed. I can’t believe that these are bugs: they have to be features.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Trump said Twitter Has Become a National Security Threat

November 28, 2020

Trump said Twitter Has Become a National Security Threat

Others have been writing in that they have now censored Pat Buchanan as well. It seems that anyone who they dislike is being censored. President Trump has come out against Twitter saying their censoring of Republican lawmakers is now creating a matter of national security. He has ample grounds to arrest Dorsey – NOW! Section 230 cannot overrule the Constitution. It is unconstitutional and he should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

This is absolute TREASON and it is entirely to further the take over of the United States by this foreign agenda headed by Klaus Schwab and his World Economic Forum which has openly stated that one of their predictions is that the United States will no longer be a superpower and it will be “shared” among nations being the United Nations.

This is an outright coup to try to take over the United States to create this one-world government of George Soros. These people have crossed the line. This is a deliberate attempt to overthrow the government and destroy all our lives and they have been using this virus and the pretense for this invasion. I did an interview in Canada and the death toll from COVID-19 outside of nursing homes was 165 in the entire nation. This is by no means justification to lockdown everyone which is really to destroy the economy for their “Build Back Better” agenda coming from the World Economic Forum.

Demanding Silicon Valley Suppress “Hyper-Partisan Sites” in Favor of “Mainstream News” (The NYT) is a Fraud

November 27, 2020

Demanding Silicon Valley Suppress “Hyper-Partisan Sites” in Favor of “Mainstream News” (The NYT) is a Fraud

The corporate news organizations masquerading as reliable and non-partisan are, in fact, as hyper-partisan as any sites on the internet, and spread as much misinformation.

The most prolific activism demanding more Silicon Valley censorship is found in the nation’s largest news outlets: the media reporters of CNN, the “disinformation” unit of NBC News, and especially the tech reporters of The New York Times. That is where the most aggressive and sustained pro-internet-censorship campaigns are waged.

Due in part to a self-interested desire to re-establish their monopoly on discourse by crushing any independent or dissenting voices, and in part by a censorious and arrogant mindset which convinces them that only those of their worldview and pedigree have a right to be heard, they largely devote themselves to complaining that Facebook, Google and Twitter are not suppressing enough speech. It is hall-monitor tattletale whining masquerading as journalism: petulantly complaining that tech platforms are permitting speech that, in their view, ought instead be silenced.

In Tuesday’s New York Times, three of those censorious tech reporters — Kevin Roose, Mike Isaac, and Sheera Frenkel — published an article on Facebook’s post-election deliberations over how to alter its algorithms to prevent the spread of what they deem “misinformation” regarding the election. The most consequential change they implemented, The New York Times explained, was one in which “hyperpartisan pages” are repressed in favor of promoting “a spike in visibility for big, mainstream publishers like CNN, The New York Times and NPR” — a change the Paper of Record heralded as having fostered “a calmer, less divisive Facebook.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

NSA Dodges Questions About Controversial “Backdoors” In Tech Products

October 29, 2020

NSA Dodges Questions About Controversial “Backdoors” In Tech Products

Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing campaign exposed the National Security Agency in 2013 for having “backdoors” into commercial technology products. The US spy agency worked with some Silicon Valley tech firms to develop covert methods of bypassing the standard authentication or encryption process of a network device so it could scan internet traffic without a warrant.

Snowden revealed the NSA’s special sauce in how it conducted domestic and foreign backdoor operations to collect vital intelligence, resulted in the agency reforming its spying process, and had to formulate new rules to limit future breaches and how it conducts spy operations, three former intelligence officials told Reuters.

However, a recent inquiry into the new guidelines by Senator Ron Wyden, a top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, yielded absolutely nothing as the spy agency dodged questions.

“Secret encryption back doors are a threat to national security and the safety of our families – it’s only a matter of time before foreign hackers or criminals exploit them in ways that undermine American national security,” Wyden told Reuters.

“The government shouldn’t have any role in planting secret back doors in encryption technology used by Americans,” he continued:

The agency refused to comment on its updated policies on current backdoor processes. NSA officials did say they were in the rebuilding trust phase with the private sector.

“At NSA, it’s common practice to constantly assess processes to identify and determine best practices,” said Anne Neuberger, who heads NSA’s year-old Cybersecurity Directorate. “We don’t share specific processes and procedures.”

Three former senior intelligence agency officials told Reuters that before a backdoor operation is conducted, the agency must “weigh the potential fallout and arrange for some kind of warning if the back door gets discovered and manipulated by adversaries.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

There Is A Solution To Big Tech Censorship – But No Politician Will Touch It

October 25, 2020

There Is A Solution To Big Tech Censorship – But No Politician Will Touch It

The issue of censorship by major tech companies is a precarious one, and I’m becoming increasingly suspicious of the nature of the debate. There are some complexities, but it can all be boiled down to this:

Big tech social media conglomerates argue that their websites are like any other private business and that they are protected from overt government interference by the US constitution. In other words, they have a right to platform or deplatform anyone they choose. Of course, this is the exact OPPOSITE of what most leftist groups have argued in the past when it comes to private businesses refusing to cooperate with people they disagree with on basic principle, such as LGBT activists, but let’s set that hypocrisy aside for now.

Social media companies have decided that the people they want to deplatform most are conservatives, along anyone else who disagrees with hard left ideologies such as social justice or the handling of the pandemic situation. Statements or content that run contrary to leftist philosophies are simply labeled “hate speech” or “conspiracy theory” and are erased.

Conservatives argue that big tech is a monopoly with far too much power, that social media should be treated more like a public resource or “town square” and that these companies are violating the free speech rights of conservatives by specifically targeting them for censorship. Many conservatives are also demanding that Donald Trump and the government step in to regulate or punish such companies for these actions.

The truth is that both sides are right, and both sides are wrong. The real solution to the problem requires a radical change in how we view the institution of corporations and how they interact with government, and it’s a solution I doubt ANY political official will consider, and that includes Trump.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How Did People Have Conversations Back Before Tech Oligarchs Were There To Police Them?

October 11, 2020

How Did People Have Conversations Back Before Tech Oligarchs Were There To Police Them?

Twitter has announced the rollout of even more censorship policies in the lead-up to the November US presidential election.

“Starting next week, when people attempt to Retweet a Tweet with a misleading information label, they will see a prompt directing them to credible information about the topic before they can amplify it,” Twitter informs us, with “credible information” of course meaning information from the same mass media outlets who’ve lied to us about every American war throughout their entire existence.

“We’re taking more steps to encourage thoughtful amplification by preventing Tweets that have been ‘followed by’ and ‘liked by’ accounts you don’t follow from showing up in your timeline,” adds Twitter, as though the social media echo chamber that is turning us all into idiots wasn’t bad enough.

This is just the latest in the stack of additional censorship measures that Silicon Valley tech corporations have been rolling out in open coordination with the US government under the banner of protecting American democracy. We may be certain that none of these measures will be rolled back when the election is over.

As my regular readers are no doubt tired of hearing me repeat by now, when you have monopolistic tech corporations which attract the bulk of online communication coordinating with governments to censor speech, what you have is government censorship. As Matt Taibbi recently wrote after the irrational Facebook purge of QAnon cultists, this censorship regime is continually expanding and this expansion is likely to continue, especially in the direction of those who oppose these same establishment power structures that are promoting this censorship.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“Big Tech Has Become A Tool Of Totalitarian Fascism” – Google Has ‘Memory-Holed’ The Great Barrington Declaration

October 10, 2020

“Big Tech Has Become A Tool Of Totalitarian Fascism” – Google Has ‘Memory-Holed’ The Great Barrington Declaration

The bureaucrat/scientists who have been guiding the American response to the coronavirus – even Dr. Fauci acknowledges that the Trump Administration has accepted most of his recommendations (even if Trump hasn’t always followed them on a personal level).

Many who have been closely following coverage of the 2nd wave of the virus hammering Europe have heard Europe’s leaders explain to indignant reporters how their lockdown-free approach differs from an outright ‘herd immunity’ strategy question, as well as the growing acceptance of lockdown-free approaches to tackling the coronavirus (even as Sweden imposes new restrictions as Europe’s second wave looms). Just yesterday in the UK, London Mayor Sadiq Khan said a return to ‘lockdown’ status within London was “inevitable”, even as London’s infection rate lags the hot spots in northern England (in and around Manchester, as well as a few other areas) by a sizable margin.

Leaders in Europe have all warned that returning to a national lockdown would be an absolute last resort, as their economies struggle to recover from the springtime mass closures that wrought unprecedented havoc on the real economy (even if it hasn’t always translated over to the market).

But an even bigger threat to the status quo engineered by Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx and their colleagues around the world is the sudden emergence in academia of a credible, and vocal, chorus of dissent, as researchers who are luminaries in their field speak out against lockdowns.

Since the spring, libertarians have criticized governors and even President Trump for following in the footsteps of communist China, which clearly allowed the virus to spread unchecked for weeks, or even months, before stepping in. Fewer than 100k cases have been confirmed in China – a figure that many observers suspect is far short of the real number.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

We’re All Serfs of Big Tech

August 25, 2020

We’re All Serfs of Big Tech

What do you call an economy of monopolies without competition or any regulatory restraints?

An economy of monopolies that controls both the buying and selling in the markets they control?

Monopolies with the power to commit legalized fraud and the profits to buy political influence?

Monopolies whose black box algorithms are all-powerful but completely opaque to public scrutiny?

Call it whatever you want, but it certainly isn’t Capitalism, which requires competition and market transparency to price capital, labor, risk, credit, goods, services, etc.

Black Box Monopoly is the death of Capitalism as it eliminates competition and market transparency.

Legalized Fraud

The American economy is now dominated by Big Tech Black Box Monopolies, and thus what we have isn’t a “free market” system (a.k.a. capitalism), it’s the pretense of capitalism, a slick PR cover for the most rapacious form of exploitation.

The SillyCon Valley model is simple: achieve monopoly power by scaling the network effect and buying up hundreds of potential competitors with stock “printed” out of thin air.

Once monopoly is achieved, buyers and sellers are both captive to the Big Tech monopoly: both buyers and sellers of apps, for example, must submit to the profiteering and control of the Big Tech monopoly.

Once the profits flowing from monopoly pile up, buy back the shares you “printed” to eliminate competition, boosting the wealth of insiders to the moon. Since share buybacks were once illegal, this is nothing but legalized fraud.

Despite the immense destruction these Big Tech monopolies wreak on society, the political power they purchase protects them from any limits. of “free markets.”That their platforms now control the flow of data, including political content and adverts, is brushed aside with the usual paradoxical claims

Ironic, isn’t it?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How We Could Wind Up Banned From Discussing An October Surprise On Social Media This Election

August 16, 2020

How We Could Wind Up Banned From Discussing An October Surprise On Social Media This Election

In what it calls an effort to make itself “a more reliable source for election-related news and information,” YouTube has announced that it will be removing “content that contains hacked information, the disclosure of which may interfere with democratic processes, such as elections and censuses.”

“For example, videos that contain hacked information about a political candidate shared with the intent to interfere in an election,” adds the Google-owned video sharing platform.

This by itself is an alarming assault on human communication and press freedom. If there is authentic information out there about either of the candidates who are up for the most powerful elected position on the planet, the world is entitled to know about it, regardless of how that information was acquired. Monopolistic tech oligarchs have no business barring us from learning about and discussing that information.

Immensely powerful people should not be permitted to have secrets from the public anyway. The amount of power one has should be directly inverse to the amount of secrecy they are permitted to have. If you’re anywhere near the presidency of the United States of America, the secrecy you are entitled to should be zero.

If a hacker is able to get ahold of accurate information about Donald Trump or Joe Biden, that information is ours. We’re entitled to it. Anyone who tries to obstruct our access to that information is stealing from us. It’s absolutely ridiculous that we have a society where people are permitted to both rule over us and keep secrets from us as it is without government-aligned tech plutocrats silencing our attempts to learn what those secrets might be.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Pollak: Big Tech, Establishment Media Crush Free Speech Through a Form of Prior Restraint

August 2, 2020

Pollak: Big Tech, Establishment Media Crush Free Speech Through a Form of Prior Restraint

Jack Dorsey New York Times (Michael Cohen / Getty) — Michael Cohen / Getty

Big tech and mainstream media have joined forces to crush free speech and press freedom. Not only are they censoring alternative medical views on coronavirus, but they are also censoring news outlets that happen to cover those views.

On Monday night, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube (owned by Google) took down video from a Facebook live stream of a press conference on coronavirus in Washington, DC, by a group of doctors that was covered by Breitbart News that day.

The press conference was held by a group called America’s Frontline Doctors, which was organized and sponsored by the Tea Party Patriots. The press conference featured doctors talking about their own views about the treatment of coronavirus or COVID-19, sometimes presenting perspectives that are not featured by the “experts” making policy for the country. Some talked about hydroxychloroquine; others touted the scientific case for reopening schools.

One doctor, Stella Immanuel, a Nigerian immigrant, argued passionately for hydroxychloroquine (plus zinc and azithromycin), saying she had personally treated hundreds of patients with it. She called hydroxychloroquine a “cure.” The video went viral.

New York Times columnist Kevin Roose drew attention to the video, noting: “Breitbart could claim it was just covering a newsworthy press conference.”

CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy tweeted a report that Roose’s tweets were “driving people at Facebook absolutely crazy.”

Subsequently, Facebook and Twitter took the video down, with Facebook responding directly to Roose, saying the video was taken down for “sharing false information about cures and treatments for COVID-19.”

When President Donald Trump retweeted someone else’s version of the video, Twitter removed it. It was the latest example of Twitter interfering in a message posted — in this case, indirectly — by the President of the United States.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Weekly Commentary: Precarious World

August 1, 2020

Weekly Commentary: Precarious World

Another fascinating – if not comforting – week. A Friday Wall Street Journal headline: “Big Tech’s Embarrassment of Riches – Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google all show resilience during pandemic while undergoing congressional scrutiny.” Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google all reported booming earnings the day following Wednesday appearances by respective CEOs before the House Antitrust Subcommittee hearing. Down the road from Capitol Hill, the FOMC released their post-meeting policy statement. Chairman Powell conducted a virtual press conference where he addressed key issues: “inflation running well below our symmetric 2% objective,” and “inequality as an issue has been a growing issue in our country and in our economy for four decades.”

While it is true that inequality has been building for decades, this trend has worsened markedly since the 2008 crisis. Much more so of late.

Powell: “So [inequality is] a serious economic problem for the United States, but it’s got underlying causes that are not related to monetary policy or to our response to the pandemic. Again, four decades of evidence suggests it’s about globalization, it’s about the flattening out of educational attainment in the United States compared to our other competitor countries. It’s about technology advancing too.”

If we could chart “inequality,” it would at this point be rising parabolically – following the trajectory of the Fed’s balance sheet. I had been assuming Fed holdings would at some point be getting a lot larger. It seemed clear inequality would only get worse. COVID dramatically accelerated both trends.

Bubble analysis is these days as fruitful as ever. We’re in the waning days of a multi-decade super-cycle. Bubble markets have become extraordinarily distorted and increasingly disorderly. Protracted deep structural maladjustment has fostered pervasive Bubble Economy Dynamics. Aggressive monetary inflation and central bank market interventions – primary contributors to financial and economic Bubbles – are being deployed to hold Bubble collapse at bay. And we’re now witnessing the initial consequences of desperately throwing massive stimulus at speculative market Bubbles and a Bubble Economy.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Big Tech Is Turning Hospitals Into Real-Time Surveillance Centers

May 18, 2020

Big Tech Is Turning Hospitals Into Real-Time Surveillance Centers

Recent events have come to light about hospital surveillance that should concern everyone.

Big Tech is using the pandemic as an excuse to turn hospitals into mirror images of law enforcement’s real-time crime centers.

When Google announced that they were donating 10,000 Nest cameras to hospitals, my jaw dropped.

“With these Nest Cams, nurses and doctors will be able to check in on patients, supplementing in-person checks. This means there will be a reduction of physical contact, and therefore less of a need for personal protection equipment (PPE), which has fast become a scare resource.”

What makes Google’s donation so jaw dropping is how Big Tech companies are using the pandemic to make them appear magnanimous.

“With both contact tracing and the Nest Cam solution, however, Google needs to rebuild a reputation as a privacy concerned company due to the sensitive nature of both projects. It’s not going to be an easy task, but one that should remain at the forefront of all such efforts.”

Because nothing says reputation builder, like putting real-time surveillance cameras in patients rooms. Not only will hospitals record patients but they will record, nurses, doctors, hospital staff and anyone else who enters a patients’ room. That also includes minors, so no one will be safe from Big Brother’s prying eyes.

As The Guardian discovered, it also sends that information to Google servers.

“However, Nest admits that when connected to Google’s “Works with Nest integration” system, which allows other devices such as ceiling fans, washing machines and car sensors to integrate with Nest’s products, it does share personal information with Google.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Tech Giants Rely on Big Lies — and We Fall for Them

January 29, 2020

Tech Giants Rely on Big Lies — and We Fall for Them

From ‘the cloud’ to ‘free’ services, we’ve been conned by tech babble.

Just stop it with ‘the cloud.’ Illustration by Christopher Cheung.

Remember when we spent our days “surfing” the “information superhighway?”

The 1990s dotcom bubble, when some tech companies spent as much as 90 per cent of their budgets on advertising, brought a flood of hype-driven technobabble designed to lure venture capitalists.

Twenty years later, some tech giants have revenues greater than the GDPs of small countries and have the power to influence election outcomes in major ones.

The need to cut through the hype churned out by the tech giants’ marketing departments has become even more acute.

Here are three techno-utopic terms we should ban in the 2020s.

1. There is no ‘cloud’

“The cloud,” we should have learned by now, simply means “someone else’s computer” (and not necessarily someone trustworthy).

The term is brilliant branding. Selling people on “cloud storage” is a lot easier than convincing them to hand over all their data to a corporation.

And the idea makes sense. With the advent of wide access to high-speed connectivity, it’s efficient — and cheaper — to shift storage and processing from individual devices to central sites.

But there is no safe, secure cloud. Security breaches have exposed millions of users’ accounts — on Dropbox, Amazon, Google and others. Companies have handed files over to authorities, sometimes without a fuss or a word. And Edward Snowden has revealed practically limitless government spying on data moving through the internet.

Where data ends up, how it gets there, and the laws and security processes that govern both are pretty darned important.

The clouds, where the gods live, have always been humanity’s favourite storage place for all that is out of reach of questioning and understanding.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

YouTube is planning to delete all accounts that aren’t “commercially viable” starting December 10

November 15, 2019

YouTube is planning to delete all accounts that aren’t “commercially viable” starting December 10

(Natural News) Content creators everywhere are starting to panic about an upcoming policy change over at YouTube that threatens to eliminate all accounts and channels on the Google-owned video platform that are deemed to no longer be “commercially viable.”

In the “Account Suspension & Termination” section of YouTube’s “Terminations by YouTube for Service Changes,” guidelines, the company explains that, as of December 10, 2019, “YouTube may terminate your access, or your Google account’s access to all or part of the Service, if YouTube believes, in its sole discretion, that provision of the Service to you is no longer commercially viable.”

In other words, if you have a YouTube channel that YouTube employees decide isn’t profitable enough for Google, then the company has now granted itself the option to completely shut down your account without warning or consequence.

What this means is that YouTube content creators who’ve built their entire livelihoods around the platform are going to need a backup option in the event that they end up being terminated. One such option is Brighteon.com, which you can sign up for here.

It also means that YouTube has created for itself yet another legal loophole to continue targeting channels that disseminate politically incorrect content, which YouTube has been trying to silence from its platform for at least the past several years.

In essence, YouTube now has a blanket excuse to pull down all channels that it wants to see eliminated by simply claiming that these channels are no longer profitable. And there will likely be no way for targeted YouTube users to prove otherwise.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Big Tech & Big Brother Are Going to Join Forces to “Secure Elections”

September 10, 2019

BIG TECH & BIG BROTHER ARE GOING TO JOIN FORCES TO “SECURE ELECTIONS”

Security teams for Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Microsoft met with the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the Director of National Intelligence’s office to coordinate a strategy to “secure” the 2020 elections. And by “secure” they mean to manipulate the results of the election in any way possible to get the outcome they desire.

According to a report by RT, the big tech platforms met with government officials at Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters on Wednesday, the company has confirmed, boasting that Big Tech and Big Brother have developed a “comprehensive strategy” to get control of previous election-related “vulnerabilities” while “analyzing and getting ahead of new threats.” Those vulnerabilities and threats are the free thinkers who don’t buy the official narrative and dissent against the ruling class.

This is quickly escalating. Expect the censorship, social credit scores, and gun control talk to ramp up as the political class realizes people may not be as easily enslaved as they have imagined. Facebook has scrambled to get in front of the 2020 election after being blamed for Trump’s 2016 electoral victory over merely allowing the “Russian trolls” to buy a bunch of ads. Most of those ads appeared after the vote and had nothing to do with the election. Google, on the other hand, actively attempted to manipulate and rig the election in favor of Hillary Clinton, and the evidence of that indiscretion is rapidly becoming overwhelming.

Google’s potential to sway elections has been the subject of Senate hearings, and yet the company has remained silent on addressing the problem. Subsidiary YouTube, meanwhile, conducted another round of mass censorship last month even while declaring it was an open platform for controversial ideas.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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