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At its inception, the internet was a beautifully idealistic and equal place. But the world sucks and we’ve continuously made it more and more centralized, taking power away from users and handing it over to big companies. And the worst thing is that we can’t fix it — we can only make it slightly less awful.

That was pretty much the core of Pirate Bay’s co-founder, Peter Sunde‘s talk at tech festival Brain Bar Budapest. TNW sat down with the pessimistic activist and controversial figure to discuss how screwed we actually are when it comes to decentralizing the internet.

Forget about the future, the problem is now

In Sunde’s opinion, people focus too much on what might happen, instead of what is happening. He often gets questions about how a digitally bleak future could look like, but the truth is that we’re living it.

Everything has gone wrong. That’s the thing, it’s not about what will happen in the future it’s about what’s going on right now. We’ve centralized all of our data to a guy called Mark Zuckerberg, who’s basically the biggest dictator in the world as he wasn’t elected by anyone.

Trump is basically in control over this data that Zuckerberg has, so I think we’re already there. Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong and I don’t think there’s a way for us to stop it.

One of the most important things to realize is that the problem isn’t a technological one. “The internet was made to be decentralized,” says Sunde, “but we keep centralizing everything on top of the internet.”

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

Data, Power, And War

December 12, 2017

Data, Power, And War

We’ve built a power structure that leaves the public good begging at the door. This must change.

Over the past few years I’ve been looking for a grand unifying theory that explains my growing discomfort with technology, an industry for which I’ve been a mostly unabashed cheerleader these past three decades.

I think it all comes down to how our society manages its most crucial new resource: Data.

That our largest technology companies have cornered the market on the data that powers our society’s most important functions is not in question. Who better than Amazon understands at-scale patterns in commerce (and with AWS, our demand for compute-related resources)? Who better than Google understands what products, services, and knowledge we want, and our path to finding them? Who better than Facebook understands our relationships to others and our interaction with (often bad) ideas? And who better than Apple (and Google) understand the applications, services, and entertainment we choose to engage with every day (not to mention our location, our ID, our most personal data, and on and on)?

These companies also dominate two crucial assets related to data: The compute power necessary to translate data into actionable insights, and the human talent required to leverage them both. Taken together, these three assets — massive amounts of data, massive compute platforms, and legions of highly trained engineers and data scientists — represent our society’s best path to understanding itself, and thereby improving all of our lives.

If anything should be defined as a public good — “a commodity or service provided without profit to all members of a society” — it should be the ability to study and understand society toward a goal of improving everyone’s lives.

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

Trump Administration Lobbying Hard for Sweeping Surveillance Law

September 29, 2017

Admiral Mike Rogers, Director of the National Security Agency (NSA), testifies about the Fiscal Year 2018 budget request for US Cyber Command during a House Armed Services Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, May 23, 2017. / AFP PHOTO / SAUL LOEB (Photo credit should read SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION LOBBYING HARD FOR SWEEPING SURVEILLANCE LAW

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION is pushing hard for the reauthorization of a key 2008 surveillance law — section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA — three months before it sunsets in December.

To persuade senators to reauthorize the law in full, the Trump administration is holding classified, members-only briefings for the entire House and Senate next Wednesday, with heavy hitters in attendance: Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, NSA Director Mike Rogers, and FBI Director Christopher Wray will give the briefings, according to an internal announcement of the meetings provided to The Intercept and confirmed by multiple sources on Capitol Hill.

Section 702 serves as the legal basis for two of the NSA’s largest mass surveillance programs, both revealed by Edward Snowden. One program, PRISM, allows the government to collect messaging data sent to and from foreign targets, from major internet companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft. The other, UPSTREAM, scans internet backbone sites in the U.S. and copies communications to and from foreign targets.

Both programs ostensibly only “target” foreigners, but likely collect massive amounts of Americans’ communications as well. And despite persistent questioning from members of Congress, the Obama and Trump administrations have repeatedly refused to provide an estimate of how many domestic communications the programs collect. Civil liberties advocates have long warned liberal defenders of the program under President Obama that one day the surveillance apparatus may fall into the hands of a president with little regard for rule of law or constitutional protections.

Privacy activists have also raised concerns about how the data is shared with law enforcement, and routinely used for purposes unrelated to national security. The FBI frequently conducts “backdoor searches” on the data during ordinary criminal investigations, which allows them access to Americans’ communications without having to get a warrant.

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

Why Economic Data No Longer Matters

September 21, 2017

Why Economic Data No Longer Matters

Back in mid-2009, we said that with the Fed and central banks nationalizing capital markets, macro and even micro data and newsflow will matter increasingly less and less, and the only thing that does matter is the Fed’s weekly H.4.1 statement, showing the changes to the Fed’s balance sheet. It also means that so-called “data dependency” is a farce (it is, and has always been “Dow dependency”), and that the impact of incremental newsflow will shrink with every passing week until virtually nobody pays attention (we have largely reached this state now).

Since then it has been entertaining to watch how one after another stoic trader and commentator has thrown in the towel on conventional market orthodoxy to adopt precisely this kind of “tinfoil” thinking, the latest example being Bloomberg’s macro commentator Mark Cudmore, who in his overnight Macro View writes that “traders should should spend less time studying economic releases and listen to the clear guidance from officials instead.”

The relevance of data is declining. Policymakers around the world are trying to make crystal clear that they’ll ignore that which doesn’t fit their narrative. Many financial commentators have failed to make the transition and are incorrectly transfixed by each data release.

Or, in short, data no longer matters in a world of central planning.

Here is his latest Macro View in which Cudmore explains why “It’s Time for Traders To Listen Rather Than Watch“

Data-dependency is becoming passé for global policymakers. Traders should should spend less time studying economic releases and listen to the clear guidance from officials instead.

For years, policymakers have been emphasizing data dependency. Investors took a while to fully register the message and, as a result, often got whipsawed by throwaway comments from officials.

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

Worst US Consumer Data Hack Ever? Equifax Confesses

September 8, 2017

Worst US Consumer Data Hack Ever? Equifax Confesses

Your data was likely stolen. Here’s what you can do to protect yourself even after the hack, and Equifax doesn’t want you to do it.

Equifax, as a consumer credit bureau, collects financial, credit, and other data on every US consumer. It has names, birth dates, social security numbers, driver’s license numbers, bank account numbers, credit card numbers, mortgage data, and payment history data, including to utilities, wireless service providers, and the like. It collects data on bank balances, loan balances, credit card balances, credit card purchases, and myriad personal details. It has massive digital dossiers on every consumer in the US and in some other countries. And it sells this data to other companies, such as banks, credit card companies, car dealerships, retailers, and others, as a routine part of its business model. That’s how it makes money.

But when someone breaks in and steals this data without paying Equifax for it, well, that’s a huge deal. And it is.

Turns out, Equifax got hacked – um, no, not today. Today it disclosed that it had discovered on July 29 – six weeks ago – that it had been hacked sometime between “mid-May through July,” and that key data on 143 million US consumers was stolen. There was no need to notify consumers right away. They’re screwed anyway. But it gave executives enough time to sell 2 million shares between the discovery of the hack and today, when they crashed 13% in late trading.

Given the quantity and sensitivity of the stolen data, it may well be the biggest and worst breach in US history.

That stolen data “primarily includes”:

Names
Social Security numbers
Birth dates
Addresses
“In some instances,” driver’s license numbers.

In addition, the stolen data includes:

Credit card numbers of around 209,000 US consumers
“Certain dispute documents with personal identifying information” of around 182,000 US consumers.
“Limited personal information for certain UK and Canadian residents.”

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

The Age of No Privacy: The Surveillance State Shifts Into High Gear [SHORT]

June 27, 2017

The Age of No Privacy: The Surveillance State Shifts Into High Gear [SHORT]

“We are rapidly entering the age of no privacy, where everyone is open to surveillance at all times; where there are no secrets from government.” ― William O. Douglas, Supreme Court Justice (1966)

The government has become an expert in finding ways to sidestep what it considers “inconvenient laws” aimed at ensuring accountability and thereby bringing about government transparency and protecting citizen privacy.

Indeed, it has mastered the art of stealth maneuvers and end-runs around the Constitution.

It knows all too well how to hide its nefarious, covert, clandestine activities behind the classified language of national security and terrorism. And when that doesn’t suffice, it obfuscates, complicates, stymies or just plain bamboozles the public into remaining in the dark.

Case in point: the National Security Agency (NSA) has been diverting “internet traffic, normally safeguarded by constitutional protections, overseas in order to conduct unrestrained data collection on Americans.”

It’s extraordinary rendition all over again, only this time it’s surveillance instead of torture being outsourced.

In much the same way that the government moved its torture programs overseas in order to bypass legal prohibitions against doing so on American soil, it is doing the same thing for its surveillance programs.

By shifting its data storage, collection and surveillance activities outside of the country—a tactic referred to as “traffic shaping” —the government is able to bypass constitutional protections against unwarranted searches of Americans’ emails, documents, social networking data, and other cloud-stored data.

The government, however, doesn’t even need to move its programs overseas. It just has to push the data over the border in order to “[circumvent] constitutional and statutory safeguards seeking to protect the privacy of Americans.”

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

Venezuela Stops Publishing Money Supply Data For Obvious Reasons

March 21, 2017

Venezuela Stops Publishing Money Supply Data For Obvious Reasons

More than a year after hyperinflating banana republic Venezuela stopped reporting official inflation data, Venezuela has stopped publishing money supply data, depriving the general public of the last, and best, available tool to ascertain soaring inflation in what has become the world’s worst-performing economy. Then again, one hardly needs official data to confirm the blistering wave of hyperinflation sweeping through the nation which has seen the value of the bolivar disintegrate under the Maduro regime.

The money supply indicator suddenly stopped appearing on the central bank’s website on Feb. 24. The data in question, which will no longer be updated, looked as follows most recently.

Despite the halt of CPI data, consumer price rises are widely seen to be in triple digits, driven by an unraveling socialist system in which many people struggle to obtain meals and medicines. The M2 money supply was up by nearly 180% in mid-February from a year earlier, according to the central bank before it halted the release of the weekly data without explanation last month Reuters reports. In contrast, Reuters reports that neighboring Colombia’s M2 was up 7 percent in the same period and the United States’ was up 6 percent.

“If they are not publishing, you know it must be skyrocketing,” Aurelio Concheso, director of the Caracas-based business consultancy Aspen Consulting, stated the obvious. The central bank and ministry of communications did not respond to a request for comment, Reuters adds.

An increase in M2, the sum of cash together with checking, savings and other deposits, means more currency is circulating. That can accelerate inflation when coupled with a decline in the output of goods and services – such as in Venezuela, which is in the fourth year of a recession. When money supply is growing exponentially, as it has been in Venezuela, academics usually point to the infamous example of the Weimar Republic and leave it at that.

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

The World is Awash in Bullshit

January 23, 2017

The World is Awash in Bullshit

This is really the best paragraph I have read so far in 2017:

The world is awash in bullshit. Politicians are unconstrained by facts. Science is conducted by press release. So-called higher education often rewards bullshit over analytic thought. Startup culture has elevated bullshit to high art. Advertisers wink conspiratorially and invite us to join them in seeing through all the bullshit, then take advantage of our lowered guard to bombard us with second-order bullshit. The majority of administrative activity, whether in private business or the public sphere, often seems to be little more than a sophisticated exercise in the combinatorial reassembly of bullshit.

It’s from The Bull$hit Syllabus, which was created by University of Washington Professors Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West, who are trying to combat The Bull$hit. The syllabus includes questions and standards for data scientists to think about and use.

They believe that with the advent of “Big Data” and tools to deal with it, the amount of BS in the world has really risen too much. It has become too easy for BS to be taken out of context, and to be spread and made to go “viral.” Big Data has given us ginormous datasets to study and manipulate. While we might not be quick to draw conclusions from a smaller data set, we have become very comfortable putting credence to implications and patterns in big data sets. Bergstrom explains:

Before big data became a primary research tool, testing a nonsensical hypothesis with a small dataset wouldn’t necessarily lead you anywhere. But with an enormous dataset, he says, there will always be some kind of pattern. “It’s much easier for people to accidentally or deliberately dredge pattern out of all the data,” he says. “I think that’s a bit of a new risk.”

He is also skeptical of machine learning algorithms. They often give very strong results, but the data they analyze and draw from is not questioned often enough:

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

How Globalists Predict Your Behavior

January 11, 2017

How Globalists Predict Your Behavior

The globalists seem to have an overarching obsession with data collection. As we have seen with revelations from multiple government whistle-blowers, the establishment spends most of its time, energy and manpower collecting information not just on known threats to their supremacy, but information on EVERYONE through FISA-based surveillance protocols. This is because the establishment sees every individual as a potential threat.

Thus, the system, without warrant, is programmed to collate data from everywhere, not necessarily to be analyzed on the spot, but to be analyzed later in the event that a specific person rises to a level that poses legitimate harm to the globalist power structure.

There was a time not long ago when this notion was considered “conspiracy theory” by the mainstream, but with multiple exposures from Wikileaks to Edward Snowden it is now common knowledge that the government (and the globalists) spy on us en masse. However, I do not think that many people understand the greater implications or uses for this full spectrum surveillance. This is why you sometimes hear the argument that “if you aren’t doing anything wrong, then you have nothing to worry about…”

The truth is, mass surveillance is not done merely for the sake of surveillance, and it is certainly not undertaken for the sake of public safety. There is a greater purpose, and it is something the elites crave dearly — the purpose of total and PREDICTIVE information awareness.

The establishment is not just hoping to observe our present behavior in detail. No, they hope to use today’s data to predict our behavior tomorrow, and at this very moment, they are extremely close to achieving their goal.

Lets examine some of the methods they use in the pursuit of this goal…

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

The Source of Failure: We Optimize What We Measure

May 29, 2016

The Source of Failure: We Optimize What We Measure

Rather than measure consumption and metrics that incentivize debt, what if we measure well-being and opportunities offered in our communities?

The problems we face cannot be fixed with policy tweaks and minor reforms.Yet policy tweaks and minor reforms are all we can manage when the pie is shrinking and every vested interest is fighting to maintain their share of the pie.

Our failure stems from a much deeper problem: we optimize what we measure. If we measure the wrong things, and focus on measuring process rather than outcome, we end up with precisely what we have now: a set of perverse incentives that encourage self-destructive behaviors and policies.

The process of selecting which data is measured and recorded carries implicit assumptions with far-reaching consequences. If we measure “growth” in terms of GDP but not well-being, we lock in perverse incentives to boost ‘growth” even at the cost of what really matters, i.e. well-being.

If we reward management with stock options, management has a perverse incentive to borrow money for stock buy-backs that push the share price higher, even if doing so is detrimental to the long-term health of the company.

Humans naturally optimize what is being measured and identified as important.

If students’ grades are based on attendance, attendance will be high. If doctors are told cholesterol levels are critical and the threshold of increased risk is 200, they will strive to lower their patients’ cholesterol level below 200.

If we accept that growth as measured by gross domestic product (GDP) is the measure of prosperity, politicians will pursue the goal of GDP expansion.

If rising consumption is the key component of GDP, we will be encouraged to go buy a new truck when the economy weakens, whether we need a new truck or not.

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

Are Asian Central Bankers Even Crazier Than Our Own?

February 22, 2016

Are Asian Central Bankers Even Crazier Than Our Own?

That the world’s central bankers get a lot of things wrong, deliberately or not, and have done so for years now, is nothing new. But that they do things that result in the exact opposite of what they ostensibly aim for, and predictably so, perhaps is. And it’s something that seems to be catching on, especially in Asia.

Now, let’s be clear on one thing first: central bankers have taken on roles and hubris and ‘importance’, that they should never have been allowed to get their fat little greedy fingers on. Central bankers in their 2016 disguise have no place in a functioning economy, let alone society, playing around with trillions of dollars in taxpayer money which they throw around to allegedly save an economy.

They engage solely, since 2008 at the latest, in practices for which there are no historical precedents and for which no empirical research has been done. They literally make it up as they go along. And one might be forgiven for thinking that our societies deserve something better than what amounts to no more than basic crap-shooting by a bunch of economy bookworms. Couldn’t we at least have gotten professional gamblers?

Central bankers who moreover, as I have repeatedly quoted my friend Steve Keen as saying, even have little to no understanding at all of the field they’ve been studying all their adult lives.

They don’t understand their field, plus they have no idea what consequences their next little inventions will have, but they get to execute them anyway and put gargantuan amounts of someone else’s money at risk, money which should really be used to keep economies at least as stable as possible.

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

Ecological Panic: The New Rationale For Globalist Cultism

December 16, 2015

Ecological Panic: The New Rationale For Globalist Cultism

Faith in an ideology based on a desire for power over others and the need to feel personally superior without any legitimate accomplishment is perhaps the most dangerous state of being an individual or society can adopt. I would refer to such a mindset as “zealotry,” an integral element of cultism and an extreme result of the elitist side of faith.

Zealotry and cultism are not limited to the realm of the religious. Zealotry is a clever devil hiding in the woodwork of any political or academic construct, and this includes the scientific community when it strays away from empirical logic and honest data into a world of pseudoscience and social engineering. I cannot think of a better example of zealotry feeding scientific cultism than the highly propagandized climate change/global warming movement.

Anthropogenic (man-made) global warming is quickly becoming the overarching rationale for almost every policy toward global centralization, as well as a scapegoat for nearly every major crisis from mass shootings and the rise of ISIS to geopolitical shifts in economic structures. Global warming has been projected as a magical force deviously underlying everything. It is presented by climate scientists and activists as an all-encompassing behemoth of cause and effect, yet nearly all of this frantic pontificating is supported by faith, rather than hard data.

The issue is one of transparency. Without transparency of experimental data, climate scientists and think tank operatives become immune to examination. That is to say, if climate scientists and organizations, many of which are funded by public tax dollars, are not required to reveal the raw data behind their claims on global warming, then their claims are no longer a matter of “fact” or scientific process.

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

Peak Oil: Right Again [Pt 2]

December 3, 2015

Peak Oil: Right Again [Pt 2]

IMGP1044

We continue with an examination of the statements offered in a recent example of cherry-picked nonsense, an article entitled: “Earth Is An Oil-Producing Machine — We’re Not Running Out.” The fine art of misleading the uninformed….

Delighted with the discovery that “Earth is actually an oil-producing machine” [a secret all these eons!], our cheerleading scribe then confidently bases that bold proclamation on “[r]esearch from the last decade.”

As noted in my most recent post, “the ‘research’ relied upon by the author were two related and generously interpreted articles from 2008—neither of which appear to have been elaborated upon since then.” Those articles were based on research conducted in 2002 and again in 2005, as explained below.

On a roll now, the writer then adds: “In other words, as Science magazine has reported, the ‘data imply that hydrocarbons are produced chemically’ from carbon found in Earth’s mantle.’” Excellent foundation and a rock-solid piece of substantiation—but for the fact it’s more than a bit misinterpreted [if that matters].

An at best marginally relevant, minuscule sampling of “data” which arguably implies something to dispute established evidence—albeit in a vague sort of way—is so much more weighty than decades of substantive yet contradictory research on point, isn’t it? We have all the utterances we need … especially if we ignore the principal scientist’s disclaimer [as quoted in Mother Jones]:

Giora Proskurowski, a researcher at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, recently discovered small amounts of hydrocarbons forming through an abiotic process deep in the Atlantic. The abiotic oil believers have seized on his findings, but Proskurowski says sorry—talk of bottomless, Saudi-free oil is ‘a pipe dream’

This begs at least one question: Is a “pipe dream” for new sources of oil reasonably close to could possibly being sort of “plentiful” nonetheless, if facts weren’t a consideration … perhaps?

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

The Unhackable iPhone Has Been Compromised: ‘Intelligence Agencies Can Intercept Calls, Messages, and Access Data’

November 4, 2015

The Unhackable iPhone Has Been Compromised: ‘Intelligence Agencies Can Intercept Calls, Messages, and Access Data’

unhackable-iphone

Iphone maker Apple, Inc. claimed last month that their latest iteration of the wildly popular handheld device was unhackable. According to HackRead, the company is so convinced of its security successes that they issued a statement saying that data stored on a phone secured with a front screen passcode was impossible to access – even by highly talented intelligence agencies:

The CIA and the FBI are always looking for backdoors in Apple devices, in fact, the agency spent years trying to hack iPhone and iPads according to documents released by NSA’s Edward Snowden.

Now, with the new upgraded operating systems, Apple has termed it “impossible” to access any data from Apple devices. Though, the company can still access data from older phones.

…

According to the Apple’s response to the court, 90 percent of the devices has ios 8 installed and with the type of encryption already there in the phone, it’s nearly impossible to access the data without the passcode, which is only known to the original owner. Even Apple itself cannot find the code.

But as we already know from recent hacks of Department of Defense computers, essential domestic grid infrastructure computers, and even NASA’s in-orbit spacecraft, in the digital age nothing is ever really secure.

Within hours of Apple releasing their latest iOS 9 update a cyber security firm known as Zerodium issued a challenge to the hacker community and offered up a $1 million bounty for any team that could bypass Apple’s latest security features. For weeks it appeared that Apple was right. Scores of hackers around the world burned the midnight oil trying to hack the iphone before Zerodium’s bounty expired.

But just few hours before the challenge came to end, one team submitted their exploits and vulnerabilities and Zerodium has confirmed that the Apple’s iOS 9 has been compromised.

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

Garbage In Garbage Out Economics

November 3, 2015

Garbage In Garbage Out Economics

“On two occasions I have been asked, “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine the wrong figures, will the right answers come out? …I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.” – Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher.”

Charles_Babbage_1860 The late Mr. Charles Babbage (1791-1871), an English polymath credited with inventing the first mechanical computer
Image via The Illustrated London News

Crunching Data to Fix Prices

The fundamental problem facing today’s economy is the flagrant contempt by governments the world over for the free exchange of goods and services and private stewardship of property. Perhaps it is power and control governments are after. Maybe they believe they are improving the economy and making the world a better place for all.

No one really knows for sure. But what is lucidly clear is the muddled disorder modern day economic policies have wrought upon us. You can hardly enter into a transaction without a cluster of intervention mucking with the price of payment.

Taxes, tariffs, wage laws, and subsidies. These all impact prices. But the main culprit affecting prices and trade are central bank interventions into money and credit markets. Relentless actions to control the economy by manipulating money and credit stand the price of everything else on end.

Certainly, government intervention into the U.S. economy is much looser than a Soviet style command and control system. But it does share a common refrain. Price fixing is central to its operation.

The Soviets, armed with their Five-Year Plans and the Theory of Productive Forces, deliberately directed how much wheat should be planted and how much a potato should cost. Conversely, the U.S. approach is mostly hidden from the short sighted view of the average lay person. The Federal Reserve allows the government to bypass the nuisance of tinkering with individual prices…though they still do it through subsidies and appropriations.

5 year plan

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

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