Tag: technology

There will almost certainly be a push to combine the “vaccine passport” abomination with this implantable chip that supposedly “detects Covid”:

Pentagon scientists working inside a secretive unit set up at the height of the Cold War have created a microchip to be inserted under the skin, which will detect COVID-19 infection, and a revolutionary filter that can remove the virus from the blood when attached to a dialysis machine.

The team at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have been working for years on preventing and ending pandemics.

They assess the issues and come up with ingenious solutions, which at times appear more from a science fiction novel than a working laboratory.

One of their recent inventions, they told 60 Minutes on Sunday night, was a microchip which detects COVID infection in an individual before it can become an outbreak.  

The microchip is sure to spark worries among some about a government agency implanting a microchip in a citizen.

Officials who spoke to the 60 Minutes team said the Pentagon isn’t looking to track your every move.

Of course they’re not looking to track your every move. They already do that. What they’re looking to do here is to deny your access to the Beast’s global financial system. 

UPDATE: a prediction from SG.

Ben Shapiro will make the conservative case for the Mark of the Beast. It’s the culmination of his life’s work

The outcome is still in doubt, but for once, the software developers are resisting the forces of convergence:

The progressive priesthood noticed the existence of another priesthood among software engineers, and vigorously attempted to converge it. Since convergence was having insufficient success, not in that the software priesthood espoused red pilled views, but that they failed to view knowledge of the latest shibboleths for sexual perversions as higher status than the latest shibboleths about software, the progressive priesthood proceeded to use more vigorous and aggressive measures, similar to those it has been using against “nazis” and “fascists”. The existence of high status shibboleths that it had not deemed high status enraged them.

To which attack, the software priesthood responded like a wet noodle. I was shocked and outraged by the feebleness and gutlessness of ESR’s limpwristed pushback when a bunch of sockpuppets in his comments section set to doing to some other man in the free software movement what had earlier been done to ESR.

The Software Priesthood is still saying “we are progressives too”, but this has not been working for them. The only thing that is going to work is identifying and purging the enemy. And since they made no attempt to identify and purge the enemy, I figured that they were a lost cause.

Well, the Software Priesthood are showing signs of life. And the enemy is becoming more visible and distinct as the enemy, shedding its “hail fellow engineer” disguise. The enemy just does not like Western Civilization, nor any of the things that Western Civilization in its greatness created, because what Western Civilization in its greatness created makes their mascots look like plains apes.

This may well turn out to be merely another Comicsgate, which was rapidly conquered by enemy entryists, but the people running the entryists against Comicsgate were smarter than the fans. They are nowhere near as smart as the people they have been purging from the Free Software movement. We shall see what happens.

One thing I’ve noticed is that most of the tough-talking libertarians fold like paper napkins soaked in batter acid in the face of SJW attack. But now that the big-talking weak sisters have been exposed as useless surrender monkeys, people are beginning to understand that they need to find the will to resist the infiltration and convergence on their own.  

Clay Travis is right… although the literal Communists in China actually permit more freedom of expression than the converged US tech corporations do:

Facebook? Or communist China? You tell us the difference. Because anymore, it’s hard to tell if there is one — especially after Facebook refused to allow Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law to post an interview with the former president.

That’s right. Lara Trump wanted to post something to Facebook. The social media giant said no. And its lone reason was entirely based on the fact the post involved Donald Trump.

“This is outlandish,” said OutKick founder Clay Travis. “And it’s crazy to me how many members of the blue-checkmark brigade are cheering blatant censorship. What’s happened in America — and I don’t think most people have recognized this, or it certainly hasn’t been talked about in a big way — is that China has the Great Wall of China for the Internet, right? They filter what people in China are able to see, the government does, in an effort to promote nationalism and respect for their country.”

In other words, China does not have a “free and open” Internet, Clay adds. And guess what? Neither does Big Tech in America.

The problem is that “free and open”, which is a form of “freedom of expression” was always a lie put forth by the 19th century Prometheans who wanted to blaspheme against Jesus Christ and the living God. One doesn’t need “freedom of thought”, one literally has complete freedom of thought.

Expression and speech, on the other hand, have always been restricted. That’s why we have concepts such as “blasphemy”, “slander”, and “lese majeste“. The only thing that has changed is a) who is doing the restricting and b) what they are restricting. And since the wicked are now making the rules, what they are restricting is the truth.

Lara and Eric Trump didn’t do a single damn thing about social media censorship when Milo and I were being kicked off Twitter back in 2015. They paid no attention when people and businesses were systematically deplatformed from Paypal, Patreon, Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Amazon, Google, Apple, and pretty much every other Big Tech platform for the entirety of President Trump’s first term from 2016 through 2020.

But now that it is affecting them, it’s suddenly 1984 in 2021!

Facebook tonight removed an interview Lara Trump conducted with President Trump on The Right View. “We removed content from Lara Trump’s Facebook page that featured President Trump speaking,” the message from Facebook stated. “In line with the block we placed on Donald Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts, further content posted in the voice of Donald Trump will be removed and result in additional limitations on the accounts.”

Lara Trump posted the message on her Instagram page. It was also shared on Twitter by her husband, Eric.

A second message from the social media platform stressed that “content posted on Facebook and Instagram in the voice of President Trump is not currently allowed. The guidance applies to all campaign accounts and pages, including Team Trump, other campaign messaging vehicles on our platforms and former surrogates,” Facebook wrote.

The Trumps were stunned by the blatant censorship.

“We are one step closer to Orwell’s 1984,” Lara wrote on Instagram.

“What an absolute slap in the face to 75 million Americans,” Eric wrote on Twitter.

I think I speak for every American who has been deplatformed over the last six years when I say: “shut the fuck up, Lara and Eric. Now you’re stunned? If you notice or give a fraction of a damn about anyone else being censored, why the Hell do you think 75 million Americans care about yours?” 

This should be a warning for those of you who are “sympathetic” and “on our side” but refuse to get involved in the conflict for one reason or another. If you weren’t there for us, don’t expect us to be there for you when they come for you. And they will come for you, sooner or later.

Personally, I consider the failure of President Trump – who I will remind you is nevertheless the greatest US President of the last 184 years – to address the thought policing of Americans to be his greatest failure in office, because unlike many of the other challenges he faced, it was such an easy one to address and successfully resolve in a short period of time.

UPDATE: It’s a good thing Lara Trump complained about it on Instagram. That clearly accomplished… so much:

As big tech companies continue their bid to cancel the ex-commander-in-chief, audio from the podcast “The Right View With Lara Trump,” was yanked from Facebook Tuesday night and reportedly later removed by Instagram.

Actually, forget green screens. I’ve seen Skyrim mods with more realistic 3D animations than these recent Biden videos. This doesn’t looks like deepfaked video to me, it looks more like a 3D animated model with video genlock. At this point, if you still unironically believe Joe Biden is the President of the United States, you’re simply not paying attention.

It appears that the security breach reported last week by Wired was genuine, as Gab is currently down as a consequence of the hack:

The social media site Gab blamed “oligarch tyrants” who keep the US “under occupation” for being forced offline, after they refused to pay a ransom in Bitcoin to a hacker who had pilfered gigabytes of user data through an exploit.

“We took the site down to investigate a security breach,” Gab announced on Monday afternoon via their Twitter account. Users trying to log into Gab were greeted with an “internal error” message and told to try again. 

“Banks are banning us. Hackers are attacking us. Journalists are libeling us. Why?” Gab tweeted, calling the US “a totally subverted nation under the occupation of a handful of oligarch tyrants who use their power to destroy dissenters.”

Gab went offline after several verified accounts on the social media platform displayed a ransom note signed “cApTaIn JaXpArO,” claiming the credit for the hack and accusing CEO Andrew Torba of lying to his “despicable users” and not caring about their privacy.

The hacker, whose name is a reference to Captain Jack Sparrow of Disney’s ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ franchise, claimed that last week’s hack “fully compromised” Gab, including 35 million public and three million private posts, 50,000 emails, 7,000 passwords. 

More importantly, they claimed to have obtained 831 verification documents – “which the ransom was about” – but Gab refused to pay 8 Bitcoin for them.

Unfortunately, Torba is still trying to convince Republican politicians to help him rather than taking the necessary steps to relocate outside of a US system that has repeatedly demonstrated that it is actively opposed to his operation.

Gab is an American business run by law-abiding American citizens that can’t get a business checking account, can’t process credit and debit cards online, and can’t access basic online services run by tech monopolies. Where are our leaders? Where is the GOP?

What part of “bifactional ruling party” does he still not understand? 

This is why it’s necessary to break free of the cult of free, and to wisely utilize whatever resources can be mustered. In not-at-all-unrelated news, UATV is about to pass the 2,000-video mark and SG is averaging nearly 80k posts per month. If you’re not subscribing yet, this is the right time to do so.

One of these days, Gab is going to have to seriously consider testing whether these banks actually have the legal right to politically discriminate against them. Because running from one converged bank to the next doesn’t appear to be working very well.

Last month, Gab CEO Andrew Torba revealed that the New Tech site had been banned from three different banks in the space of three weeks. On Friday in a statement posted online, Torba confirmed that yet another bank had banned the site from its services. “It’s getting to the point where we are seriously considering buying our own bank,” Torba said. “Funny how this started happening right when Biden got into office,” he added.  Two of the four banks were identified as NBT Bank, which mostly operates in the northeast of the country, and City National Bank of Florida.

Another option is foreign banks and foreign payment processing systems, both of which are usually more than happy to establish footholds in the US market. For example, the new Chinese peer-to-peer direct pay system not only avoids the converged banks, but the US dollar as well. If they’re going to kick you out of the system, then you shouldn’t hesitate to utilize the existing alternatives to that system, even those that threaten the system.

Anyhow, all this is going to accomplish is to speed up the development timeline of the peer-to-peer payment alternatives. If it’s happening to Gab today, it will happen to everyone who votes, speaks, or thinks against the imperial establishment tomorrow.

It’s time for people to start holding the corpocracy responsible for its incessant attempts to strip all privacy from everyone:

Microsoft has teamed up with a number of tech and media companies to create a system of tracing content around the internet that could destroy online privacy and anonymity, radically transforming the nature of the web.

Against stiff competition, the alliance of tech and media giants has devised a plan that may constitute Big Tech’s most brazen power-grab yet.

According to Microsoft’s press release, it has partnered with several other organizations to form the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA).

Put simply, the purpose of this organization is to devise a system whereby all content on the internet can be traced back to its author.

The press release states that it will develop these specifications for “common asset types and formats,” meaning videos, documents, audio, and images.

Whether it’s a meme, an audio remix, or a written article, the goal is to ensure that when content reaches the internet, it will come attached with a set of signals allowing its provenance — meaning authorship — can be detected.

Consider the companies that have signed on to this initiative. Leading the pack is Microsoft, which operates Word, Paint, Notepad, Edge, and the Office Suite. If you create a .doc or a .jpg, a Microsoft service is probably involved in some capacity. Then there’s Adobe, the company behind Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, and Premiere Pro, as well as several other market-leading applications for publishing photos, videos, and documents. There’s also Truepic, a company that has developed technology to track the provenance of photos from the very moment they are captured on a smartphone.

Finally, there’s Intel, which dominates the market in laptop and desktop central processing units (CPUs). The CPU is responsible for processing virtually all information on computers. Whether you’re typing a sentence or taking a screenshot, it’s the CPU that is processing that data. Accessing the CPU is the ultimate form of digital surveillance. Even if you’re disconnected from the internet, the CPU still sees what your computer is doing.

The combination of these forces creates the potential to track and de-anonymize information from the moment it is created on a computer. Signals could be attached to information to ensure it is censored and suppressed wherever it travels online. Even if someone else is sharing the information, it could be suppressed simply because of its point of origin. And, of course, the signals could be used to identify the creators of dissident content.

It would also be useful to pass laws requiring artificial persons to be subject to the same responsibilities and penalties as natural persons, considering that they have many of the same rights. If a person who commits a crime that requires jail time cannot earn an income, why are corporations permitted to continue earning revenue if they are guilty of similar felonies and misdemeanors? 

This is just one of the many reasons SocialGalactic has a Clean Speech policy. Because if it’s on the Internet, you have to assume it will be made public sooner or later:

The Gab accounts of Donald Trump and Gab’s own CEO are among those “compromised” by a hack of the microblogging service popular among US conservatives and right-wingers. The data is being offered to researchers and journalists.

A 70-gigabyte trove of data dubbed “Gableaks” includes public posts on the platform, but also “private posts, user profiles, hashed passwords for users, DMs, and plaintext passwords for groups,”according to an entity called DDoSecrets. The information was allegedly stolen by a third party and leaked to the group, which operates similarly to WikiLeaks. The leak was described in detail by Wired, which was given access to a sample of the dataset.

Gab is a competitor of Twitter that caters to users who feel their freedom of speech is being unduly restricted by Big Tech. Critics call it a hotbed of far-right extremism that is flourishing thanks to the company policies encouraging user anonymity and a lack of content moderation.

Like it’s better-known counterpart Parler, Gab saw an influx of new users after Silicon Valley launched a crackdown on undesirable voices in the wake of the January 6 riot at the Capitol. When Parler was effectively deplatformed shortly afterwards, some of its users went to Gab.

The Gableaks trove “contains pretty much everything on Gab, including user data and private posts, everything someone needs to run a nearly complete analysis on Gab users and content,” DDoSecrets cofounder Emma Best told the tech news website. “It’s another gold mine of research for people looking at militias, neo-Nazis, the far right, QAnon and everything surrounding January 6.”

According to Wired, the data in DDoSecrets’ possession was obtained through a technique called “SQL injection,” which tricks a website into executing malicious code sent as user input. In a Friday statement, Gab said it was “aware of a vulnerability in this area and patched it last week.” DDoSecrets says the hacking was done by “JaXpArO (they/them) & My Little Anonymous Revival Project.”

There isn’t any point in complaining about the media utilizing black hat hackers. They are, by their own admission, the enemy, and as such they are going to engage in enemy action. And all the so-called privacy policies will be denied and deemed to be irrelevant by the companies no matter what they say; if there is one thing we have learned from the Bears’ battle with Patreon, it is that the tech companies will assert, at every single point, that their behavior is not restricted in any way by their own contracts no matter what those contracts clearly say.

The only thing that actually restricts them is the intersection of those contracts with the law, to the extent that judges and arbitrators are actually willing to apply the latter. And that is very, very far from a sure thing.

The answer is very simple. Never post or comment anything that you would be hesitant to state in a courtroom before a judge under oath. And if the post or comment could cost you your job if it comes to light, then keep it to yourself. You simply cannot reasonably expect privacy in the Global Panopticon.

It looks as if Google is attempting to expand its domination of the browser market:

At this moment, Google Chrome is responsible for over 60{3549d4179a0cbfd35266a886b325f66920645bb4445f165578a9e086cbc22d08} of browser usage. (The exact number differs based on what graph you look at.) If you look at the numbers, Chromium-based browsers like Edge, Brave, Opera, and Vivaldi are starting to eat into Chrome’s number. Take Microsoft Edge for example. The first preview builds were released in April of 2020. By October of that year, it had reached 10{3549d4179a0cbfd35266a886b325f66920645bb4445f165578a9e086cbc22d08} market share and pushed Firefox to number 3. (Part of that market share, undoubtedly was caused by Microsoft pushing an update to replace Internet Explorer 11 and Edge Legacy with the new Chromium-based version.) If we learned one thing through the years, it’s that Google likes to dominate.

While it’s true that most of Google’s browser competitors use their own servers to store user bookmarks and passwords, they still use the same extensions as Chrome. For many people, it’s important to have access to certain extensions for work or fun. To borrow a familiar metaphor, the browser is the platform and the extensions are the applications that the user needs or wants to use.

What would happen to these Chromium-based browsers if Google blocked their access to the Google Chrome Store? Without access to their familiar tools, would they stay with Brave or Edge? I think many would switch back to Chrome because people tend to choose the path of least resistance.

The inherent problem with creating a new browser/platform is getting people to create addons/extensions for it. Case in point: before Microsoft switched to Chromium, it only had a few add-ons available. The majority of browser extensions are created by people as a hobby and maintaining two or more codebases seems more like a job than a hobby. The bottom line is that people would be less likely to create extensions, thus reducing the usability of the browser and leading to a loss of market share.

If you don’t think Google could do this, think again. Google has an iron grip on the Chromium project. As Steven Vaughan-Nichols points out “whatever Google wants to do with Chromium, Google can do it and it doesn’t matter what anyone else wants. This is not how open source is supposed to work. I think it’s time for all those Chromium developers out there to have a serious talk with Google. The vast majority of open-source projects don’t have a single company calling all the shots. Why should Chromium?”

Google Only Supports Open Source when It Benefits Them

Keep in mind that Google has a history of using open source to gain market share and then abandoning it. Android is the biggest example. From the beginning of its time with Google, Android was touted as THE open-source phone operating system. The Android Open Source Project was used by several projects to create their own version of Android. This helped make Android popular.

Then at a certain point, Google introduced an app called Google Play Services. This app is not open source and contains all of the stuff you need to access Google’s services. I’m sure that there is a workaround, but most people don’t want the added responsibility of tinkering with their phone to get it to work. (There is a minority who enjoys doing that and you know who you are.)

Another example is the Metastream saga. Back in 2019, a guy named Samuel Maddock created a side project named Metastream. It was going to be an Electron-based browser that would allow users across the web to watch videos at the same time. The videos would be synced up so that the users would enjoy the experience together. The only problem was that Samuel needed access to a DRM provider so that his users could watch videos on services like Netflix or Hulu.

For Electron/Chromium-based browsers, there is only one option Google Widevine. So, Samuel attempted to get a license for Widevine. Four months later, he got a response stating that “I’m sorry but we’re not supporting an open source solution like this”. In a follow up post, Samual listed other projects that ran into issues with Widevine and were left in the cold by Google. He also quoted Brian Bondy, Co-founder and CTO of Brave, who said, “This is a prime example for why free as in beer is not enough. Small share browsers are at the mercy of Google, and Google is stalling us for no communicated-to-us reason.”