Unauthorized is getting some big updates to its backend and content servers tonight so the site will be down for a while. A notice about the update has been posted on the homepage; even if the site remains accessible, as long as that notice is posted videos should not be expected to play normally. The interruption is not expected to last more than two hours, and it will not begin until Owen has finished his stream today.
Tag: technology
Leaving the West Behind
It’s clear that the primary reason for the current desperation of the Prometheans stems from the way they seriously underestimated the Chinese. But the Chinese have turned out to be significantly harder to fool than the Europeans of the West, and now they are demonstrating that they no longer require guidance in order to advance their technology beyond Western levels.
A report by Bloomberg Thursday found that Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC). China’s premier chip manufacturer has developed the ability to produce chips to the highest Western standards despite US sanctions that had been designed to prevent such an advance.
According to a report by industry blog Tech Insights, which Bloomberg has confirmed, SMIC has produced Bitcoin mining semiconductors with 7-nanometer technology since last July. The figure represents the size of the transistors involved, and the smaller the figure, the smaller the transistors, and the more transistors that can be fit on a single chip. The more transistors on a chip, the faster and more efficient it will be.
Previously SMIC had only produced chips to a standard of 14-nanometers, and the US government had hoped to prevent any advance beyond that level. In 2020, the US government had banned export of equipment capable of producing 10nm and below level chips to SMIC. Currently the US government is focusing on preventing Dutch supplier ASML from supplying similar machines to SMIC.
Although ASML is already forbidden from selling its most advanced equipment to SMIC, the Biden administration is trying to tighten the ban to include less advanced technologies as well.
Currently Taiwan’s TSMC and South Korea’s Samsung can make 7nm semiconductors, while US-based Intel is slated to release its own 7nm chip next year. Currently the most advanced US and European chips are only 12nm.
It is not clear how China has reached this level of technological sophistication. Some have suggested they may have modified their 14nm tooling.
Meanwhile, in Europe, the lights may literally be going out this winter thanks to the reprehensible stupidity of the European leaders who believed the lies of the neocons and agreed to act as the USA’s economic proxy army:
Switzerland has developed an emergency plan in the event of an energy crisis if natural gas and electricity supplies run short, the Basler Zeitung newspaper reported this week.
According to the paper, the Swiss government has been working in tandem with industrial companies for several months on the plan. It includes several steps, ranging from a public awareness campaign with calls for energy saving, such as turning off shop window lights and heaters, to rationing electricity for about 30,000 large energy consumers.
The government also warns of the possibility of power shutdowns in certain areas of the country from four to eight hours a day as a more stringent measure.
As I have repeatedly warned you, we’ll be fortunate if we emerge on the other end of this civilizational catastrophe with interior plumbing. Abandoning the traditions of your fathers, adopting foreign creeds and accepting foreign rulers seldom ends well for any nation.
The Potemkin “Tech” Industry
Russia and China have figured out what Westerners should have known for decades:
Russia has fined Google about US$373 million for allowing users to access, “prohibited” material about the war in Ukraine and other restricted content. The material was said to include materials attempting to discredit Russia’s military, as well as exhortations to protest the Russian government, according to Roskomnadzor, the country’s communications regulator. It added that the company has proven a “systemic” violator of national laws regarding content.
Google has not commented on the fines.
The company’s local subsidiary had declared bankruptcy last month after Russian authorities had seized its bank account to recover 7.2 billion rubles, or US$130 million which the company had been fined for similar violations last year.
The moves are part of a broader regulatory push by the Russian government to place pressure on tech firms, which they accuse of not moderating their content in accordance with Russian laws, and of trying to meddle in the nation’s internal affairs.
The key phrase: “trying to meddle in the nation’s internal affairs”. AC spells out the obvious conclusion.
It is clear at this point all of these tech companies are just subsidiaries of our intelligence apparatus. And given it is no coincidence that every top tech company is just taking orders from intel, that means intel has been throughout our economic system deciding who wins and who loses, and making sure it is their operations who win every time. We were never in a capitalist system, any more than we elected our leaders. All along, the idea you could have a killer app, form a business, and be just like Bill Gates was just a myth. Intel was always deployed domestically, even throughout the world of American business, working against any American who was not on their payroll and under their control.
We’re going to need a new economic theory simply to explain the way in which the “capitalist” system has been functioning since the 1980s at the absolute latest. Everything that we’re taught in microeconomics is observably untrue; the winners in far too many industries are evidently not determined by efficiency or competition or even luck, but rather by the hidden, but heavy hand of secret government funding.
It’s very much like the oft-criticized industrial policy of Japan, only on steroids. Instead of MITI selecting key industries in which to invest for maximizing economic growth, Big Brother is selecting favored corporations in every industry in which to invest for a) gathering information for the Panopticon and b) establishing official narratives.
Among other things, this absconomic theory will explain why modern corporations, from technology to entertainment, are increasingly unable to address the basic needs and preferences of their nominal customers.
Mailvox: Enjoy the Silence
Big Tech is so corrupted and converged that even the less-converged companies are in on the deplatforming game.
Today I noticed that Brave Search severely down-ranks infogalactic.com. Using the search term “infogalactic”, infogalactic.com appears as the fifteenth result, on the second page of results.
I checked other major search engines using the same search term. Google seems to have completely removed infogalactic.com from its search. Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Yandex all return infogalactic.com as the first result, as they should.
According to this post by a Brave employee, 92% of Brave Search results are from their own crawler.
Brave Search isn’t even out of beta and it’s corrupted.
What’s more, the current version of Brave Browser (V1.39.122 released June 10th, 2022) doesn’t allow setting default search to anything other than a short, approved list (that excludes Yandex) despite documentation describing otherwise.
It’s not a big surprise. Brandon Eich is a good man, but he’s a techno-idealist who has never understood the necessity to secure his flanks and police his ranks. A pure meritocracy may sound nice, but since they are effectively defenseless against infiltration and convergence, the concept is intrinsically counterproductive. Once just one capable SJW gets inside, it’s only a matter of time before “merit” is redefined and the meritocracy ceases to exist.
Infogalactic support actually used to be built into Brave. Typing “:i” would automatically search Infogalactic. But once that was removed, it was pretty clear that Brave was eventually going to get converged. It probably won’t be more than two years before there is a serious attempt to eject him from the company he founded, presumably for committing one of the new satanic sins such as transphobia or pedophobia.
The March of Technology
It goes ever on, as the brand names of the past fall by the wayside. Internet Explorer, which I assiduously avoided using even back in the days of the Netscape Wars, has been retired. I always liked its logo, though.
Truth Social: A Review
NeonRevolt tries out the new social media platform and shares his opinion:
Truth Social is like being trapped in the world’s gayest Boomer containment unit, where Dan Bongino and Charlie Kirk fanbois celebrate their successful “throuple-ing” alongside the gender reveal of their gay test-tube babies, while posting weak memes from 2014 like they’re somehow still digital owns.
Oh, you can post Chippendale’s Make America Gay Again to your heart’s content, but call anyone a faggot or a retard, and cyber-Nunes will emerge from the clouds to Stalin your post from the timeline, so you won’t hurt Richard Grenell’s feelings.
Anything other than slavish devotion to Durham and the promise of “2 more weeks” is met with all the typical whining.
Sounds like yet another Republican gatekeeper platform. Hard pass.
The Decreasing Utility of Email
Google’s dirty political tricks are only a small fraction of the problem. What used to be a supremely useful tool has been rendered increasingly useless, and totally unreliable, but the very services that purport to provide it.
A new study found that Google’s Gmail favors liberal candidates, allowing the vast majority of emails from left-wing politicians to land in the user’s inbox while more than two-thirds of messages from conservative candidates are marked as spam.
North Carolina State University’s Department of Computer Science published, “A Peek into the Political Biases in Email Spam Filtering Algorithms During US Election 2020,” last week in order to determine if spam filtering algorithms (SFAs) are biased toward a particular political party or ideology. The extensive study took place over a course of five months, from July 1, 2020 to November 30, 2020 on Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo. They created 102 email accounts and subscribed to two Presidential, 78 Senate, and 156 House candidates.
To accurately estimate the political biases and mitigate any potential effects of demographics (ethnicity, age, and gender), we created multiple email accounts with different combinations of demographic factors and designed two experiments. The first experiment studies the general trends of biases in SFAs across the email services for the Presidential, Senate and House candidates. The second experiment studies the impact of different email interactions such as reading the emails, marking them as spam, or vice versa on the biases in SFAs. We designed an automated process to perform all the subscriptions, and took periodic backups to keep all the email accounts active as well as to keep track of the correct number of spam emails received over the course of data collection for each of the three services,” they wrote.
“We made several important observations in our study. For example, as an aggregate trend, Gmail leaned towards the left while Outlook and Yahoo leaned towards the right. Yahoo retained about half of all the political emails in inbox (up to 55.2% marked as spam) while outlook filtered out the vast majority of emails (over 71.8%) from all political candidates and marked them as spam,” the proposed methodology section continued. “Gmail, however, retained the majority of left-wing candidate emails in inbox (< 10.12% marked as spam) while sent the majority of right-wing candidate emails to the spam folder (up to 77.2% marked as spam).”
The study “further observed that the percentage of emails marked by Gmail as spam from the right-wing candidates grew steadily as the election date approached while the percentage of emails marked as spam from the left-wing candidates remained about the same” in the days leading up to Election Day.
This is why some sort of reliable community-wide direct comms systems need to be developed. Not for digital security – which is a charade no matter what technomagic is promised and probably would not be permitted – but simply for the reliability of delivery.
The user experience of email has been enhanced to the point of near-uselessness. And it probably won’t be too long before even that line is crossed.
You Can’t Fight the Market
Even mighty Amazon has finally been forced to submit to the inexorable forces of the market:
Amazon quietly updated its help documentation to state that Kindle devices will start supporting EPUB files.
There’s a catch, though. “Beginning in late 2022, Send to Kindle applications will support EPUB (.EPUB) format,” says the document. This means you’ll be able to send EPUB files to your Kindle via Amazon’s handy Send to Kindle system, which essentially lets you upload documents to your Kindle by emailing them to your Kindle email address. It’s unclear, however, whether Kindles will natively support EPUB files, allowing you to purchase ebooks from Amazon’s library in the EPUB format directly.
This is a big deal for everyone who owns a Kindle and isn’t completely reliant on Amazon’s library. Until now, you had to manually convert EPUB files into MOBI (or another format) to load them onto your Kindle, and this often brought additional issues as the conversion wasn’t always perfect.
Also, the news is notable for the sheer fact that Amazon avoided supporting the otherwise widely supported EPUB format for nearly 15 years (EPUB is an open standard that originally launched in September 2007).
Additionally, Amazon’s document says that – also in late 2022 – its Send to Kindle system will stop supporting MOBI files (ironically, MOBI was Amazon’s long-preferred standard, and the company has its own version of MOBI called AZW).
It certainly took them long enough to accept the inevitable. But it’s a very powerful lesson in learning not to fight the market. It is said that the heart wants what it wants, regardless of what logic dictates, and the same is true of the market. The sooner any entrepreneur or business accepts this reality, the less likely it is to make unnecessary and unforced errors.
Mailvox: An Insider’s Take
A friend who correctly called fake news on Jack Maxey of the false Hunter Biden laptop leak also offered me his take on Elon Musk and his recent actions, including the acquisition of Twitter.
Musk is a premier mechanism by which a certain faction of USG routes around the scleroticism of fedgov.
Most obviously with SpaceX contra United Launch Alliance, but also Tesla to counter Chinese electrotech dominance, Boring Company for post-drone swarm underground warfare, Neuralink for 1) controlling said drone swarms 2) AGI via human brain activity cloning.
His entire portfolio of companies is dual use for military purposes. Twitter is the public infowar arena for the Deep State.
Now Musk and by extension this faction own it.
Difficult to tell if this faction is friendly, neutral or hostile. They appear to me to be at the least not obviously friendly. This will be a public, reasonably sensitive test as to whether they are useful, depending on how they handle banned anti-prog accounts and ongoing anti-prog (note the distinction from rightist) speech.
Considering that Ivan Throne has already managed to get himself banned from the New and Improved Twitter (Musk edition), I am confident that all of Musk’s blatherings about FREE SPEECH are nothing more than empty rhetoric and advertising to bring all the basic conservatives and their gatekeepers back into the conservative sheepfold.
As far as I’m concerned, literally nothing has changed.
Furthermore, I note that the Enlightenment value of consequence-free freedoms of speech and expression is neither a Christian moral value nor a societal virtue. Societal virtue is determined by qualititative measures, not quantitative ones.
A society or an institution that permits everything is better described as licentious, not free, while a society or an institution that bans blasphemy, obscenity, and vulgarity is fundamentally different than one that bans the existence of opinions about historical events, sexual behaviors, and certain nations.
Musk’s faction is almost certainly more libertarian and licentious than the social justice faction, but it’s entirely possible that, given his predilection for dabbling with women enamored of spiritual darkness, that it is even more deeply wicked.
Out With the Old Gatekeeper
And in with the new:
Elon Musk has seized control of Twitter for $44 billion as weeks of rollercoaster negotiations finally came to a close Monday afternoon.
The billionaire agreed to pay shareholders $54.20 in cash for each share of common stock before the bombshell deal was struck.
The move shifts control of the social media platform populated by millions of users and global leaders to the world’s richest person.
Musk vowed to protect free speech on Twitter, ‘defeat the spam bots’ and ‘authenticate all humans’ as he welcomed the acquisition.
He also revealed he planned to ‘enhance the product with new features’ and ‘make the algorithms open source to increase trust’.
Elon Musk is not “the world’s richest person” because he’s a good guy or because he is dedicated to the Good, the Beautiful, and the True. Whatever god he serves is not God the Father of Jesus Christ. This is just the exchange of one set of gatekeepers for another.