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Wild Ride to Nowhere Since Jan 2018: What the US Stock Market Looks Like Minus APPL, MSFT, AMZN, GOOG, FB

June 24, 2020

Wild Ride to Nowhere Since Jan 2018: What the US Stock Market Looks Like Minus APPL, MSFT, AMZN, GOOG, FB

Entire market of 3,451 stocks minus “Giant 5” is down 1% from Jan 2018. But wow, the volatility! You would have been better off with a despicable freaking savings account.

The market capitalization of the five largest stocks combined – the “Giant 5:” Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, and Facebook – rose to a new record today of $6.18 trillion. Since their combined low point on March 16, their market capitalization has soared by 51%. That’s an increase of $2.1 trillion in a little over three months. Since January 2017, my Giant 5 index has soared by 164% (market cap data via YCharts):

So how big did they get?

The overall stock market capitalization, as measured by the Wilshire 5000 Market Cap Index tracking 3,451 US-listed companies, ticked up to $31.8 trillion, up by 41.6% from its low on March 23.

Today, the “Giant 5” accounted for 19.4% of the total US stock market capitalization, as measured by the Wilshire 5000, a new record. On January 3, 2017, the Giant 5 had accounted for 10% of the Wilshire 5000. In the three months since the crash in March, the share of the Giant 5 has soared from abound 16% to 19.4% today (Wilshire 5000 data via YCharts):

But wait… Performance of Wilshire 5000 without “Giant 5.”

Let’s take the five largest stocks out of the largest stock market in the world, with 3,451 companies, and see what’s left over. What’s left over is now valued at $25.7 trillion. It’s up by 28.4% from the March 23 low, and while that’s till strong for a three-month rally, it’s a far cry from the 51% for the Giant 5.

And here is the thing: All these companies combined, minus the “Giant 5,” are way below their peak in February 2020, and below a whole bunch of other dates before then, and below where they’d first been in at the end of January 2018.

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

The Future is Up for Grabs

May 14, 2020

The Future is Up for Grabs

When it comes to cashing in on Covid-19, the race has just begun. Whether you’re talking about education or contact tracing or medicine or mind control, an anti-democratic, dystopian future is being charted while we the people are locked down, locked up and locked out.

Naomi Klein’s latest piece, “Screen New Deal” in the Intercept, describes in chilling detail the way that a no-touch, no accountability pandemic economy has been being divvied up among corporate kingpins since Covid Shock hit in March.

Google is grabbing our data, Microsoft is coming for our classrooms and Amazon wants to be our one-stop, only shop.

Pandemic panic is making possible fast what the hurdle of popular consent made slow. As Klein reminds us, until recently, public pushback against companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft was surging.

“Presidential candidates were openly discussing breaking up big tech. Amazon was forced to pull its plans for a New York headquarters because of fierce local opposition. Google’s Sidewalk Labs project was in perennial crisis, and Google’s own workers were refusing to build surveillance tech with military applications,” writes Klein.

Now, the very same companies that the public chased out the front door are walking in the back, repackaged no longer as a threat, but as the solution to our personal and national woes.

The future could certainly be bleak, but as Naomi acknowledges, we’re not there yet. It’s also important to remember that the present as we know it was not always thus.

In 1994, for example, India had a different set of patent laws, which positioned it to become the global supplier of affordable AIDS drugs. It was only the birth of the World Trade Organization and Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) that held them back. In the years that followed, an Indian drug maker and international activists used Indian law to force Big Pharma to cave. A cheap generic drug was able to save millions of lives.

…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…

Is Facial Recognition Destroying our Right to Privacy?

June 25, 2019

Is Facial Recognition Destroying our Right to Privacy?

The recent Financial Times investigation revealed that Microsoft had collected discreetly a facial recognition database of some 10 million images of some 100,000 people. They apparently used it for facial recognition software. When the FT began investigating, Microsoft discretely deleted the database. The public dataset, called ‘MS Celeb,’ included images of ‘celebrities’ pulled from the internet, but also contained photos of ‘arguably private individuals,’ often without their knowledge or consent, the FT found.

The classic film, the Minority Report, takes place where facial recognition is just using eye scans. To become invisible, he goes through a procedure where he gets eye transplants to hide his identity. This scene shows that when walking through a store, they scan his eyes and offer advertising tailored to preferences. There is no question that this technology can become much like the movie but using facial recognition eliminating the option of just getting our eyes replaced.

Already there are government agencies using facial recognition to look for people walking in public places. New York Police Department’s facial recognition system, includes image alteration and the use of non-suspect images. They are using facial recognition in Britain to look for criminals, but it is apparently wrong 96% of the time. There has even been lawsuits filed over this intrusive approach. San Francisco banned the police from using facial recognition. There are companies offering facial recognition for police.

There is no question that facial recognition poses a significant threat to our privacy and could hamper First Amendment-protected protests and other legal activities. Anyone who exercises their right to join some protest can find their faces suddenly recorded into a secret database that pops up on any encounter with governments.

It’s official: the collapse of the mainstream media’s credibility is now complete

April 19, 2019

It’s official: the collapse of the mainstream media’s credibility is now complete

(Natural News) Attorney General William Barr held a press conference this morning to address the contents of the Mueller report, just as he promised to do. Not long after, Barr delivered the full Mueller report to the public with necessary redactions, also as promised. And yet the mainstream media, which demanded all of these things and has now received them, still isn’t happy.

In fact, most fake news media pundits are now foaming at the mouth, questioning Barr’s loyalties and accusing him of colluding with President Donald Trump to convey the “spun” message that he’s innocent – which it would seem as though no amount of evidence will ever convince those with Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) is actually true.

In a nutshell, Special Counsel Robert Mueller, whom Leftist Democrats have been hailing for the past two years as their savior and hero who was going to take down Trump, didn’t end up procuring what these Trump haters were wishfully thinking he would. And in response, Trump haters everywhere are reeling with more anger than ever, demanding that Mueller be burned at the stake for failing to prove their deranged conspiracy theories.

CNN White House Correspondent Jim Acosta about had a coronary in response to Barr’s press conference, accusing Barr of “clearly laying out a sympathetic presentation” of what’s supposedly in the Mueller report. Twenty-twenty presidential hopeful and Leftist Democrat Cory Booker similarly accused Barr of “undermining the independence of this entire process” for his speaking publicly about the Mueller report prior to releasing it.

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

Social Media Titans Holding Private Meeting To Coordinate Strategy For 2018 Midterms

August 24, 2018

Social Media Titans Holding Private Meeting To Coordinate Strategy For 2018 Midterms

Representatives from around a dozen US tech titans are holding a private Friday meeting at Twitter headquarters to coordinate their efforts ahead of the 2018 US midterm elections, reports BuzzFeed News.

Last week, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, invited employees from a dozen companies, including Google, Microsoft, and Snapchat, to gather at Twitter’s headquarters in downtown San Francisco… –BuzzFeed News

“As I’ve mentioned to several of you over the last few weeks, we have been looking to schedule a follow-on discussion to our industry conversation about information operations, election protection, and the work we are all doing to tackle these challenges,” Gleicher wrote.

The meeting has a three-part agenda; each company will present their latest efforts to counter “information operations,” then there will be a discussion about problems each company faces; and finally, participants will discuss whether such coordination conclaves should become an annual affair.

Nine of the companies meeting Friday also met in May at Facebook to discuss similar issues along with two US government representatives; Department of Homeland Security Under Secretary Chris Krebs and Mike Burham from the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force created last November. The attendees say they were discouraged after the meeting after receiving little input from the G-men.

Red Dawn?

Social media giants – particularly Facebook and Twitter – faced harsh scrutiny from Democratic legislators following the 2016 US election for allowing “fake news” and Russia to rob Hillary Clinton of her turn to be president, or for somehow forcing her to ignore several key states while campaigning.

On the other hand, Facebook VP of advertising, Rob Goldman, admitted in February that “the majority of the Russian ad spend happened AFTER the election,” and “I have seen all of the Russian ads and I can say very definitively that swaying the election was *NOT* the main goal.”

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

Amazon’s Fusion With the State Shows Neoliberalism’s Drift to Neo-Fascism

July 4, 2018

Amazon’s Fusion With the State Shows Neoliberalism’s Drift to Neo-Fascism

In our next installments, we will continue exploring the rise of Surveillance Capitalism and the implications of Amazon-fueled spying technology, both in the workplace and in U.S. city streets.

“Capitalism is a system that seeks to transgress all boundaries in its production and sale of commodities, commodifying everything in existence, which today, in the age of monopoly-finance capital and surveillance capitalism, means intruding into every aspect of existence,” John Bellamy Foster told MPN.

SEATTLE – This year may go down in history as a turning-point when the world finally woke up to the dark side of the ubiquitous presence of popular Silicon Valley companies in our daily lives. One can only hope so, at least.

From Amazon to Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft and PayPal – among others – revelations poured out confirming the ongoing abuse of user data by monopolistic corporations, as well as their growing role as vendors of surveillance technology to the U.S. police state, military, and migrant detention agencies.

In March, the lid was blown off of the violation of user data on Facebook, with Cambridge Analytica mining user information for the purpose of providing millions of detailed “psychological profiles” to the Trump campaign, among others. Scarcely two weeks later, the Google campus was in an uproar over the development of its “Project Maven,” which was building an AI-fueled platform to vastly upgrade the automatic targeting abilities of the U.S. military’s global drone fleet. Faced with public outrage and internal dissent, the companypulled out of bidding to renew its Pentagon contract, which ends next year.

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

In Latest Privacy Scandal, Facebook Gave Apple, Amazon And Others Unprecedented Access To User Data

June 4, 2018

In Latest Privacy Scandal, Facebook Gave Apple, Amazon And Others Unprecedented Access To User Data

Facebook has been giving user data to at least 60 major device manufacturers over the last decade – including Apple, Amazon, BlackBerry, Microsoft and Samsung – as part of a data-sharing partnership program which allowed the companies to integrate various features such as messaging and “like” buttons into their products.

The data-sharing agreement, reported Sunday evening by the New York Times, allowed manufacturers to access information on relationship status, calendar events, political affiliations and religion, among other things. An Apple spokesman, for example, said that the company relied on private access to Facebook data to allow users to post on the social network without opening the Facebook app, among other things.

What’s more, the manufacturers were able to access the data of users’ friends without their explicit consent, despite Facebook declaring they would not let outside companies access user data. The catch? The NYT explains.

Facebook’s view that the device makers are not outsiders lets the partners go even further, The Times found: They can obtain data about a user’s Facebook friends, even those who have denied Facebook permission to share information with any third parties.

In interviews, several former Facebook software engineers and security experts said they were surprised at the ability to override sharing restrictions. –NYT

“It’s like having door locks installed, only to find out that the locksmith also gave keys to all of his friends so they can come in and rifle through your stuff without having to ask you for permission,” said Ashkan Soltani, a research and privacy consultant and former chief technologist for the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

…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…

Recently Bought a Windows Computer? Microsoft Probably Has Your Encryption Key

December 29, 2015

RECENTLY BOUGHT A WINDOWS COMPUTER? MICROSOFT PROBABLY HAS YOUR ENCRYPTION KEY

One of the excellent features of new Windows devices is that disk encryption is built-in and turned on by default, protecting your data in case your device is lost or stolen. But what is less well-known is that, if you are like most users and login to Windows 10 using your Microsoft account, your computer automatically uploaded a copy of your recovery key – which can be used to unlock your encrypted disk – to Microsoft’s servers, probably without your knowledge and without an option to opt-out.

During the “crypto wars” of the nineties, the National Security Agency developed an encryption backdoor technology – endorsed and promoted by the Clinton administration – called the Clipper chip, which they hoped telecom companies would use to sell backdoored crypto phones. Essentially, every phone with a Clipper chip would come with an encryption key, but the government would also get a copy of that key – this is known as key escrow – with the promise to only use it in response to a valid warrant. But due to public outcry and the availability of encryption tools like PGP, which the government didn’t control, the Clipper chip program ceased to be relevant by 1996. (Today, most phone calls still aren’t encrypted. You can use the free, open source, backdoorless Signal app to make encrypted calls.)

The fact that new Windows devices require users to backup their recovery key on Microsoft’s servers is remarkably similar to a key escrow system, but with an important difference. Users can choose to delete recovery keys from their Microsoft accounts (you can skip to the bottom of this article to learn how) – something that people never had the option to do with the Clipper chip system. But they can only delete it after they’ve already uploaded it to the cloud.

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

Why Big Tech May Be Getting Too Big

September 28, 2015

Why Big Tech May Be Getting Too Big

Conservatives and liberals interminably debate the merits of “the free market” versus “the government.” Which one you trust more delineates the main ideological divide in America.

In reality, they aren’t two separate things and there can’t be a market without government. Legislators, agency heads and judges decide the rules of the game. And, over time, they change the rules.

The important question, too rarely discussed, is who has the most influence over these decisions and in that way wins the game.

Two centuries ago slaves were among the nation’s most valuable assets, and a century ago, perhaps the most valuable asset was land. Then came another shift as factories, machines, railroads and oil transformed America. By the 1920s most Americans were employees, and the most contested property issue was their freedom to organize into unions.

In more recent years, information and ideas have become the most valuable forms of property. This property can’t be concretely weighed or measured, and most of the cost of producing it goes into discovering it or making the first copy. After that, the additional production cost is often zero.

Such “intellectual property” is the key building block of the new economy. Without government decisions over what it is, and who can own it and on what terms, the new economy could not exist.

But as has happened before with other forms of property, the most politically influential owners of the new property are doing their utmost to increase their profits by creating monopolies that must eventually be broken up.

The most valuable intellectual property are platforms so widely used that everyone else has to use them, too. Think of standard operating systems like Microsoft’s Windows or Google’s Android; Google’s search engine; Amazon’s shopping system; and Facebooks’ communication network.

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

The Surveillance State Goes Mainstream: Windows 10 Is Watching (& Logging) Everything

August 2, 2015

The Surveillance State Goes Mainstream: Windows 10 Is Watching (& Logging) Everything

If Edward Snowden’s patriotic exposure of all things ‘super secret surveillance state’ in America were not enough, Newsweek reports that, as 10s of millions of hungry PC users download the free upgrade, Windows 10 is watching – and logging and sharing – everything users do… and we mean everything.

Thomas Fuchs @thomasfuchs

Windows 10 should be renamed to Spyware OS https://jonathan.porta.codes/2015/07/30/windows-10-seems-to-have-some-scary-privacy-defaults/ …

6:22 AM – 31 Jul 2015

From the moment an account is created, Microsoft begins watching. The company saves customers’ basic information – name, contact details, passwords, demographic data and credit card specifics – but it also digs a bit deeper… and finding answers is not easy, as one privacy expert exclaimed, “there is no world in which 45 pages of policy documents and opt-out settings split across 13 different Settings screens and an external website constitutes ‘real transparency’.”

As NewsWeek reports,

More than 14 million devices are already running Microsoft’s Windows 10 after its global launch on Wednesday, but it’s unclear how many of their users read the company’s Privacy Policy and Service Agreement before downloading. Tucked away in the 45 pages’ worth of terms and conditions (effective August 1) is a substantial power grab: The company is collecting data on much of what you do while using its new software.

From the moment an account is created, Microsoft begins watching. The company saves customers’ basic information – name, contact details, passwords, demographic data and credit card specifics – but it also digs a bit deeper.

Other information Microsoft saves includes Bing search queries and conversations with the new digital personal assistant Cortana; contents of private communications such as email; websites and apps visited (including features accessed and length of time used); and contents of private folders. Furthermore, “your typed and handwritten words are collected,” the Privacy Statement says, which many online observers liken to a keylogger.

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

Microsoft Gives Details About Its Controversial Disk Encryption

June 5, 2015

Microsoft Gives Details About Its Controversial Disk Encryption

Featured photo - Microsoft Gives Details About Its Controversial Disk Encryption

Recently, I wrote a guide explaining how to encrypt your laptop’s hard drive and why you should do so. For the benefit of Windows users, I gave instructions for turning on BitLocker, Microsoft’s disk encryption technology.

This advice generated an immediate backlash in the comments section underneath the post, where readers correctly pointed out that BitLocker has been criticized by security experts for a number of real and potential shortcomings. For example, BitLocker’s source code is not available for inspection, which makes it particularly vulnerable to “backdoors,” security holes intentionally placed to provide access to the government or others. In addition, BitLocker’s host operating system, Microsoft Windows, provides an algorithm for generating random numbers, including encryption keys, that is known to have been backdoored by government spies, and which the company’s own engineers flagged as potentially compromised nearly eight years ago. BitLocker also lost a key component for hardening its encryption, known as the “Elephant diffuser,” in the latest major version of Windows. And Microsoft has reportedly worked hand-in-glove with the government to provide early access to bugs in Windows and to customer data in its Skype and Outlook.com products.

Even having known about these issues, I still believed BitLocker was the best of several bad options for Windows users; I’ll explain my reasoning on this later.

But in the meantime, something interesting has happened: Microsoft, after considerable prodding, provided me with answers to some longstanding questions about BitLocker’s security. The company told me which random number generator BitLocker uses to generate encryption keys, alleviating concerns about a government backdoor in that subsystem; it explained why it removed the Elephant diffuser, citing worries over performance and compatibility that will appease some, but certainly not all, concerned parties; and it said that the government-compromised algorithm it bundles with Windows to generate encryption keys is, by default, not used at all.

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

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