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Social Media, Not Religion, The Opium Of The People

May 7, 2018

Social Media, Not Religion, The Opium Of The People

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. – Karl Marx,  A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right

Social media is becoming the new whipping boy and poster child for all that ills our culture and contributing to its decline.

We added our two cents in a recent post,  Why Google Is A Short,

…social media probably generates negative productivity.  We read some time ago the average American spends 40 minutes per day playing Farmville.   How does planting virtual corn add to the GDP?

Though we are more ambivalent about Google, Facebook is doing some severe psychological damage to an entire generation, including my 15-year daughter.   They spend much of their time competing with trophy photos loaded up on Instagram.  Never gonna win that game, which leads to increased anxiety and depression for an entire generation.

The Google Short

That brings us to the Google (we are old school and can’t bring ourselves to call it Alphabet) short.

Imagine when a politician has his/her epiphany that all those porn searches they have done over the years on Google are stored somewhere and could be hacked and released to the public?  That will ignite a prairie fire of potential legislation, which will spread faster than you can say SNAP.  – GMM, Apr 24th

Our Friend Weighs In

We received this email from a very close friend yesterday,

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

The Big Tech Backlash of 2018

April 6, 2018

The Big Tech Backlash of 2018

Herbert Ponting Scott’s Terra Nova Expedition, Antarctica 1911

Something must be terribly wrong with the world. A few days ago Elizabeth Warren agreed with Trump on China, now Bernie Sanders agrees with him about Amazon. What’s happening?

Bernie Sanders Agrees With Trump: Amazon Has Too Much Power

Independent Vermont senator and 2016 presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders echoed President Donald Trump in expressing concern about retail giant Amazon. Sanders said that he felt Amazon had gotten too big on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday, and added that Amazon’s place in society should be examined.

“And I think this is, look, this is an issue that has got to be looked at. What we are seeing all over this country is the decline in retail. We’re seeing this incredibly large company getting involved in almost every area of commerce. And I think it is important to take a look at the power and influence that Amazon has,” said Sanders.

A backlash against Facebook, a backlash against Amazon. Are these things connected? Actually, yes, they are connected. But not in a way that either Trump or Sanders has clued in to. Someone who has, a for now lone voice, is David Stockman. Here’s what he wrote last week.

The Donald’s Blind Squirrel Nails An Acorn

It is said that even a blind squirrel occasionally finds an acorn, and so it goes with the Donald. Banging on his Twitter keyboard in the morning darkness, he drilled Jeff Bezos a new one – or at least that’s what most people would call having their net worth lightened by about $2 billion:

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

Check Your Mute List On Twitter For Possible New Censorship Shenanigans

April 2, 2018

Check Your Mute List On Twitter For Possible New Censorship Shenanigans

I decided a while back that I’m just going to document all the weird censorship activities that I personally encounter from giant social media corporations in order to have information available to the public so the hive mind can connect the dots on all the myriad ways that anti-establishment voices are being silenced. A lot of the tactics that these corporations are using to stifle dissent depend on the fact that they’re occurring within individual social media accounts, and the only way to learn more about how those tactics are being used is for all of us to publicly share our own experiences with them.

It might look a little unusual, but in my opinion by making as much anti-establishment noise as I can and then documenting all the ways my voice is silenced and marginalized I’m performing a useful journalistic service to the new media landscape. In a corporatist system of government, wherein corporate power is not separate in any meaningful way from government power, corporate censorship is government censorship. It’s important to learn how these quasi-governmental surveillance-based Silicon Valley corporations are protecting the establishment on which their plutocratic dynasties are built.

Before I go on, let me remind my audience that last year Twitter openly admitted to censoring the #DNCLeaks hashtag in the lead up to the 2016 election to prevent it from trending, which Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey blatantly lied about doing at the time. Let me also remind you that Twitter, along with Facebook and Google, was asked on the Senate floor a few months ago to take measures to “silence” rebellious voices in order to “prevent the fomenting of discord” in America.

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

 

Know Your History: Google Has Been a Military-Intel Contractor from the Very Beginning

March 23, 2018

Know Your History: Google Has Been a Military-Intel Contractor from the Very Beginning

Levine’s investigative reporting on the connection between the Silicon Valley tech giants and the military-intelligence community has been praised by high-level NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, and many others. [See my interviews of Drake here:

“Google has partnered with the United States Department of Defense to help the agency develop artificial intelligence for analyzing drone footage, a move that set off a firestorm among employees of the technology giant when they learned of Google’s involvement.” — Gizmodo / March 6, 2018

Gizmodo’s report on Google’s work for the Pentagon has been making headlines all day. It’s also thrown the normally placid halls of Google’s Mountain View HQ into chaos. Seems that Googlers can’t believe that their awesome company would get involved in something as heinous as helping the Pentagon increase its drone targeting capability.

But the fact that Google helps the military build more efficient systems of surveillance and death shouldn’t be surprising, especially not to Google employees. The truth is that Google has spent the last 15 years selling souped-up versions of its information technology to military and intelligence agencies, local police departments, and military contractors of all size and specialization — including outfits that sell predictive policing tech deployed in cities across America today.

As I outline in my book Surveillance Valley, it started in 2003 with customized Google search solutions for data hosted by the CIA and NSA. The company’s military contracting work then began to expand in a major way after 2004, when Google cofounder Sergey Brin pushed for buying Keyhole, a mapping startup backed by the CIA and the NGA, a sister agency to the NSA that handles spy satellite intelligence.

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

 

Breaching the Public Trust – Facebook is the Beginning

March 23, 2018

Last night I was chatting with a friend while waiting for my daughter. She told me her phone now informs her when her bills are due.  Now, that may not seem like a big deal, but it is when you realize that she never told her phone to do that.

Her phone is scanning her emails and letting her know her when her electric bill is due.

I told her Google likely pushed down an update which she agreed to without realizing it (or getting the opportunity to opt-out of) which authorized them to not only scan her inbox but set up alerts for her.

She was angry about it, and rightfully so.

This is why I don’t use any of the Google apps on my Android phone.  Outlook for email, Opera for my browser.  Office for my productivity apps.  It was a conscious choice.  I moved to Android under protest because Microsoft willfully destroyed Windows Phone.

I know it’s not much better, but at least Microsoft appreciates my business, now, for the first time in their miserable existence.

And I wasn’t willing to shell out $600+ for a comparable iPhone.  Pennywise and pound-foolish, I know, but no one’s perfect.

As a hardware-savvy guy I know when software is over-burdening hardware and why.

And I can tell you the data harvesting on my phone was so out of control by Facebook and Google that it became nigh unusable on wake-up.  Upwards of a minute or two would go by before the phone was usable because so much data was being harvested off it before it would deign to allow me to use it.

I will switch to the iPhone when I can justify the money.

Once I deleted Facebook and all its crap from my phone, it miraculously became almost functional again.  I could answer calls as they came in.  I could reply to texts and approve blog comments/pingbacks.

I will never reinstall Facebook on any device I own.

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

 

Facebook: Six Degrees of Giant Squid

March 22, 2018

Facebook: Six Degrees of Giant Squid


Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) German artist, philosopher, composer, mystic Cosmic Tree
All of a sudden, politicians in the EU, UK, and USA all want to talk to Mark Zuckerberg. That’s a bad enough sign all by itself. It means they all either have been asleep, complicit, or they’re not very bright. The media tries to convince us the Facebook ‘scandal’ is about Trump, Russia (yawn..) and elections. It’s not. Not even close.

If Zuckerberg ever shows up for any of these meetings with ‘worried’ politicians, he’ll come with a cabal of lawyers in tow, and they’ll put the blame on anyone but Facebook and say the company was tricked by devious parties who didn’t live up to their legal agreements.

After that, the argument won’t be whether Facebook broke any laws for allowing data breaches, but whether their data use policy itself is, and always was, illegal. Now, Facebook has been around for a few years, with their policies, and nobody ever raised their voices. Not really, that is.

And then it’ll all fizzle out, amid some additional grandstanding from all involved, face-saving galore, and more blame for Trump and Russia.

The new European Parliament chief Antonio Tajani said yesterday: “We’ve invited Mark Zuckerberg to the European Parliament. Facebook needs to clarify before the representatives of 500 million Europeans that personal data is not being used to manipulate democracy.”

That’s all you need to know, really. Personal data can be used to manipulate anything as long as it’s not democracy. Or at least democracy as the Brussels elite choose to define it.

First: this is not about Cambridge Analytica, it’s about Facebook. Or rather, it’s about the entire social media and search industry, as well as its connections to the intelligence community. Don’t ever again see Google or Facebook as not being part of that.

What Facebook enabled Cambridge Analytica to do, it will do ten times bigger itself. And it sells licences to do it to probably thousands of other ‘developers’. The CIA and NSA may have unlimited powers, but prior to Alphabet and Facebook, they never had the databases. They do now, and they’re using them. ‘Manipulate democracy’? What democracy?

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

 

Tell Me More About How Google Isn’t Part Of The Government And Can Therefore Censor Whoever It Wants?

March 9, 2018

Tell Me More About How Google Isn’t Part Of The Government And Can Therefore Censor Whoever It Wants?

When you tell an establishment Democrat that Google’s hiding and removal of content is a dangerous form of censorship, they often magically transform into Ayn Rand right before your eyes.

“It’s a private company and they can do what they like with their property,” they will tell you. “It’s insane to say that a private company regulating its own affairs is the same as government censorship!”

This is absurd on its surface, because Google is not separate from the government in any meaningful way. It has been financially intertwined with US intelligence agencies since its very inception when it received research grants from the CIA and NSA for mass surveillance, pours massive amounts of money into federal lobbying and DC think tanks, has a cozy relationship with the NSA and multiple defense contracts.

“Some of Google’s partnerships with the intelligence community are so close and cooperative, and have been going on for so long, that it’s not easy to discern where Google Inc ends and government spook operations begin,” wrote journalist Yasha Levine in a 2014 Pando Daily article titled “Oakland emails give another glimpse into the Google-Military-Surveillance Complex”.

“The purchase of Keyhole was a major milestone for Google, marking the moment the company stopped being a purely consumer-facing Internet company and began integrating with the US government,” Levine wrote in a recent blog post about his book Surveillance Valley. “While Google’s public relations team did its best to keep the company wrapped in a false aura of geeky altruism, company executives pursued an aggressive strategy to become the Lockheed Martin of the Internet Age.”

And now we learn from Gizmodo that Google has also been helping with AI for the Pentagon’s drone program.

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

Should Facebook, Google and Twitter Be Public Utilities?

March 5, 2018

Should Facebook, Google and Twitter Be Public Utilities?

This opaque corporate censorship amounts to a private-sector Stasi, pursuing an Orwellian world of profits reaped from the censorship and suppression of dissent

My longtime friend GFB recently suggested I revisit my position on RussiaGate, the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 US election.

I have been dismissive of the investigation because the idea that a pinprick of Facebook advertising ($100,000) could influence the sprawling ocean of public opinion struck me as preposterous.

But GFB suggested I look a bit deeper and consider the consequences of the Russian interference, however modest it might have been; and I have taken his sage advice and reconsidered.

I’ve reached the conclusion that Facebook, Google and Twitter should be operated as public utilities, not as for-profit corporations beholden solely to their shareholders and managers.

Here is my thinking:

1. As GFB so insightfully observed, Facebook says it sells advertising, as this is uncontroversial. But what Facebook is actually selling is data on its users. This enables enterprises to deliver adverts to highly specific audiences (surfers between the ages of 18 and 34 with an interest in traveling overseas, etc.), campaigns that are known only to the advertiser and Facebook, not to the targeted users. But it also enabled the Russian crew to target audiences most likely to be receptive to divisive, inflammatory content.

2. If we follow this dynamic to its conclusion, we realize that these for-profit corporations are threats to democracy, or incompatible with democracy, if you prefer that wording, as they directly enable the relatively affordable and easy sowing of intentionally divisive content.

A recent wired.com article, Inside the Two Years that Shook Facebook–and the World, describes Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s realization that the technology he’d assumed was both incredibly profitable and helpful could be used as a force for exploitation and propaganda.

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

Ye shall know them by their fruits (Matthew 7:16)

February 20, 2018

Ye shall know them by their fruits (Matthew 7:16)

Google eyes

Google eyes

Recently it was my birthday (I’m not going to say what date that was, for reasons which will become clear later) and when I did a Google search, I was surprised to find a “Happy Birthday” greeting from Google, complete with an image of candles.  I didn’t know how Google knew that, but I was busy at the time, I couldn’t be bothered looking into it and I just wrote it off as one of those “weird web” things.

The issue surfaced again more recently in a more sinister form when I tried to delete an online “profile photo” of myself stored in my Google account.  There was nothing particularly sinister about the photo, just a standard head and shoulders shot, but it was out of date and not particularly flattering and I thought “let’s get rid of it then”.  I couldn’t.  I spent an hour trying to delete that photo when it was the Christmas holidays and I had better things to do.  I consider myself a fairly proficient Internet user, but I tried everything I could think of to delete that photo without success.  First I tried following all the obvious links to things like “my account”, “my profile”, “update details”, “images” and so on.  I right clicked and left clicked on the picture and hit the “delete” button many, many times.  I tried to replace it by uploading a neutral landscape photo.  It was very easy to upload a new photo, but impossible to delete the one which was already there: I just found that both photos were then stored in my Google account.  I tried Googling for “how to delete your Google profile photo” and found some instructions, but when I tried to follow them, they didn’t work.

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

Soros and the EU Commission are now against the free Internet

February 14, 2018

Soros and the EU Commission are now against the free Internet

Source: commons.wikimedia.org

With his investments, Soros has become a billionaire. Unfortunately, for many years he has been interfering in the political and demographic developments in Europe and has been financially promoting ethnic replacement. Now he is turning against CSU, Facebook and Twitter because they are endangering his leftist revolution.

Like every year, Soros gave his speech on the state of the world at the World Economic Forum in Davos (see movie).1)The neo-liberal quasi self-made sage spoke to his heart’s content, while the open, freedom-loving society he invited soaked in each of his words like a sponge. Now hardly anyone noticed that Soros was trying to take away their freedoms.

In the beginning Soros spoke about Russia, which he describes as a mafia state, which adopted nationalist ideology and then he said that the US under Trump’s presidency will become similar in this respect. He now also included Hungary in the axis of evil. It is nothing new because he has always been hostile towards governments that are trying to protect their citizens from the consequences of open borders policies and the idea of an open society. What was new was that he scourged social networks. Soros maintains that since they have grown into powerful monopolies, they influence our behaviour and consciousness (especially during election time) too much.

They deceive their users by manipulating their attention and directing it towards their own economic interests and (…) making them dependent on their services (…) The platforms resemble casinos (…) and force people (…) to renounce what John Stuart Mill called the freedom of thought. Is that why Facebook and Twitter are banned in countries like China, Afghanistan and North Korea? Are people really allowed to think freely without access to the internet and the opportunity to post their opinions?

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

The Net’s Good Old Boys: Dr. (Don’t Be) Evil Meets Dr. Strangelove

January 26, 2018

The Net’s Good Old Boys: Dr. (Don’t Be) Evil Meets Dr. Strangelove

Dr. Eric Schmidt has called for intelligence agencies to stop illegally prying into personal information and has been doing his best to convince the government to pay Google to do it legally instead. That said, in 2009 he was widely rebuked for telling CNBC:

If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place, but if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines including Google do retain this information for some time, and it’s important, for example that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities. ~ Dr. Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, 2009

Schmidt didn’t add that Google is obliged to turn over email content under court order and not tell users it did so. He didn’t have to. We all know about FISA and PATRIOT. Same goes for Hotmail, AOL, or any US email provider, only Google has much more to give.

When Schmidt described Google searches as being up for grabs, he left out Gmail, Google Maps, Google Store or Google Play. Neither did he mention that you can enhance your privacy by encrypting your email and search Google anonymously via VPN servers and proxy search engines like StartPage and DuckDuckGo. He doesn’t want you to do that. It’s bad for your personality profile, and you’re likely up to no good if you do. But you are free to open “incognito” (private) windows on your browser that don’t record your search history. Google’s Your Data page says:

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

AI Censorship and the Power of Steem to Preserve Truth

January 24, 2018

AI Censorship and the Power of Steem to Preserve Truth

Just read a great article by Caitlin Johnstone over at Medium where she discusses the automation of censorship tools by companies like Twitter and Google.

Putting paid Julian Assange’s warning last year on this, Ms. Johnstone details just some of the abuses that Twitter and Google engaged in to subtly and not-so-subtly shift public perception of major issues that run counter to the narrative the power structure wants us to believe.

And it is for this reason that projects like Steemit are so very important.

I talked about how important Steem is after James O’Keefe’s latest expose of Twitter (read it here).  Watching people like Mrs. Johnstone wake up to the problem is great, but she also needs to take the next step.

You can’t hack something whose underlying content is stored in a distributed blockchain. Because the blockchain’s ledger is immutable, what you wrote is preserved in all of its glory (ignominious or otherwise) forever.

As she points out, type of censorship is far worse than simply throwing books into piles and burning them. With DRM and all digital assets, inconvenient truths can be memory-holed off your Kindle never to be seen again.

Abridged versions of books can be substituted for the original text and worse.

So, the blockchain as it pertains to how we communicate is a fundamental need to disrupt this communications super-state they are building.

I can’t stress enough how important this is today.

Now, more than ever, the information war is heating up. And the ability to control not just the validity of what people produce but what everyone consumes is the single most important issue of the age.

If we are to finally break the backs of the people working so hard to maintain their gravy train, we have to build systems that are beyond their control.

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

Google Has An Actual Secret Speech Police 

January 21, 2018

 

Google Has An Actual Secret Speech Police 

More than 100 nongovernment organizations (NGOs) and government agencies around the world help police YouTube for extremist content, ranging from so-called hate speech to terrorist recruiting videos.

All of them have confidentiality agreements barring Google, YouTube’s parent company, from revealing their participation to the public, a Google representative told The Daily Caller on Thursday.

A handful of groups, including the Anti-Defamation League and No Hate Speech, a European organization focused on combatting intolerance, have chosen to go public with their participation in the program, but the vast majority have stayed hidden behind the confidentiality agreements. Most groups in the program don’t want to be publicly associated with it, according to the Google spokesperson, who spoke only on background.

YouTube’s “Trusted Flaggers” program goes back to 2012, but the program has exploded in size in recent years amid a Google push to increase regulation of the content on its platforms, which followed pressure from advertisers. Fifty of the 113 program members joined in 2017 as YouTube stepped up its content policing, YouTube public policy director Juniper Downs told a Senate committee on Wednesday.

The third-party groups work closely with YouTube’s employees to crack down on extremist content in two ways, Downs said and a Google spokesperson confirmed. First, they are equipped with digital tools allowing them to mass flag content for review by YouTube personnel. Second, the partner groups act as guides to YouTube’s content monitors and engineers who design the algorithms policing YouTube but may lack the expertise needed to tackle a given subject.

It’s not just terrorist videos that Google is censoring. Jordan B. Peterson, a professor known for opposing political correctness, had one of his videos blocked in 28 countries earlier this month. A note sent to Peterson’s account said YouTube had “received a legal complaint” about the video and decided to block it.

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

Big Brother = You

January 11, 2018

Big Brother = You 


Giorgione The Tempest 1508
Happy belated new year. Belatedly. Thought I’d sit out a few days, since there wasn’t much news to be expected. And it did pan out that way, other than Trump bogarting the limelight; but then, that isn’t really news either. Anything he says or does triggers the expansive anti-Donald echo chamber into a daily frenzy. And frankly, guys, it’s not just boring, but you’re also continuously providing him with free publicity. At least make him work for some of it.

Then, however, the big microprocessor (chip) security ‘flaw’ was exposed. And that’s sort of interesting, because it concerns the basic architecture of basically every microchip produced in the past 20 years, even well before smartphones. Now, the first thing you have to realize is that we’re not actually talking about a flaw here, but about a feature. We use that line a lot in a half-jokingly version, but in this case it’s very much true. As Bloomberg succinctly put it:

All modern microprocessors, including those that run smartphones, are built to essentially guess what functions they’re likely to be asked to run next. By queuing up possible executions in advance, they’re able to crunch data and run software much faster. The problem in this case is that this predictive loading of instructions allows access to data that’s normally cordoned off securely..

And:

Spectre fools the processor into running speculative operations – ones it wouldn’t normally perform – and then uses information about how long the hardware takes to retrieve the data to infer the details of that information. Meltdown exposes data directly by undermining the way information in different applications is kept separate by what’s known as a kernel, the key software at the core of every computer.

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

Beware the Green Corporate Scam: the 100% Renewable Façade

December 8, 2017

Beware the Green Corporate Scam: the 100% Renewable Façade

A few months ago, Google announced that they will achieve their goal of being 100% powered by renewable energy in 2017 [1]. They are not the only corporation with such lofty goals. Google is joined by GM, Apple, Coca Cola, and more than one hundred companies who have also pledged to go “100% renewable” [2].

It would be easy to believe that this means a great victory for the planet, that the demise of fossil fuels is incoming, that environmentalism has won and that climate change will soon be a thing of the past. Yet the foul smell emerging from tax-dodging transnationals jumping all together into a bandwagon cannot be ignored.

Despite their claims, none of the companies in the RE100 list is actually going to receive all of its energy from renewable sources. The “100% renewable” label is a façade, a marketing gimmick used by corporations to pretend they are the good guys while their unfettered thirst for profits continues unopposed. This corporate lie is enabled by the abuse of Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) which allow companies to buy their way into “green” without having to change any of their practices. Here is Google’s actual claim:

“Google will buy, on an annual basis, the same amount of MWh of renewable energy as the MWh of electricity that we consume for our operations around the world” [3].

Behold the magic of the RECs. When a renewable energy facility creates one MWh of energy, it not only creates electricity, it also gets a certificate, a REC, which states that one MWh of clean energy was created. The REC can then be sold, either together with the electricity or separate from it.

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

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