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DRAGONFLY: Google Employees Publicly Rebel Against Building a Dystopian New Search Engine
DRAGONFLY: Google Employees Publicly Rebel Against Building a Dystopian New Search Engine
More than 1,400 Google staff, many journalists, and human rights organizations are calling on Google to halt its controversial project called Dragonfly.
What is Project Dragonfly?
Dragonfly is a search engine specially built for China. It would unleash more censorship on a mass scale by selectively blocking certain search terms, apparently at the behest of China’s government. Human rights groups are blasting the company for aiding and abetting China’s mass surveillance and rights violations which could result in potential imprisonment.
It turns out Google’s employees had been unwittingly working on this project for a while until 2017 without knowing its intended purpose. News of this highly secret program finally leaked and no one is letting it get swept under the rug.
Thankfully, since the news leaked out, no amount of time has caused advocates and free speech lovers to forget this scandal. Those in the know are using the hashtag #DropDragonfly.
How would the Dragonfly search engine in China Work?
The search engine would censure terms like “human rights” and “religion.” Hundreds of Google employees have called this out as obvious freedom of speech violations.
BBC reported in August:
The search app would “blacklist sensitive queries”, The Intercept says, identifying and filtering websites currently blocked by China’s so-called Great Firewall.
According to documents it had seen, a search via the app would result in a list with banned websites removed and a disclaimer saying that “some results may have been removed due to statutory requirements”.
It said the BBC News website and Wikipedia would be among those blocked.
Employees of Google are horrified.
“We are Google employees and we join Amnesty International in calling on Google to cancel project Dragonfly…”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
15 Million People Were Just Blacklisted from Travel by China’s Social Credit Program and It’s Coming to America Soon
China’s social credit system is in full swing and has already blacklisted more than 15 million Chinese residents from travel. Is it coming soon to the U.S.?
Recently, The Organic Prepper reported some shocking news of China’s newest rollout: a social credit system.
It’s a system of surveillance and governance using a social scoring system based on the state’s perceived trustworthiness of the individual. Not only are social media and financial accounts tied into a person’s “score” – much like a credit score number – but also friends and associates are compelled to distance themselves from an offending person, otherwise, their score can be dropped too.
The program is called the Sesame Score. Symbolically this represents “open sesame”or doorways that are eithe r opened or blocked to the individual who tries to move freely.
A totalitarian dream
This is every totalitarian government’s ultimate dream: a society that polices itself, its thoughts, its beliefs and each other.
It’s the ultimate power imbalance and crushes individual will. If such a scoring system should be used it should be in cases of state or institution accountability such as checking politicians’ funding sources or Glassdoor.com where employees and interviewees can evaluate companies to let others know about the real company culture. But social scoring cannot work the other way around in a free society.
The ramifications of this are perfectly encapsulated by the episode of Netflix’s futurist show Black Mirrorcalled “Nosedive” in season 3 episode 1, where a woman trying to boost her social credit status quickly takes a turn for the worse. Out of all the shows in the series, that episode makes my heart pound right out of my chest because it seems the most real of all the surreal dystopian themes.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
25 Basic Life Skills That Should Be Taught in School (But Aren’t)
25 Basic Life Skills That Should Be Taught in School (But Aren’t)
Think of the vast amount of time that students spend in school. But what do they come away knowing? They are taught very few life skills, so are they really prepared for the real world?
Here’s one of the glaring problems with public school: it’s designed to waste time.
Like a Weeping Angel from Doctor Who, school can zap your life away. It wouldn’t be half bad if you were being taught something useful. Sure, reading and math are important, but the bulk of those things can be taught in much shorter periods of time than are being utilized right now. Plus, reading skills are deteriorating and math was swallowed by Common Core.
Ideally, there would be myriad forms of trustworthy education that could suit any personality. And ideally many of these skills would be taught by family and imparted by experienced people – but that’s getting harder to do.
So in the list below, think of what it would be like if schools were ideal and actually preparing people to live meaningful lives.
Without further ado, here are…
25 Life Skills That Should Be Taught In School (But Aren’t):
#1 Individual Thought
Instead of regurgitating what the teacher says and mirroring their peers, people need to think for themselves only. That means no groupthink. Most people think they are unique but are only parroting. That’s why you can figure out who they are from just two of their beliefs. A lot of people struggle with who they really are but can’t even have a thought of their own. Life shouldn’t be so monochromatic and Borg-like. Calling all real individuals.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
