Tag: technology

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.”

Facebook arrogates a nonexistent authority unto itself:

Facebook announced in a blog post on Thursday that it has removed Instagram and Facebook accounts used by Myanmar’s military to communicate with the public in the wake of a coup by the armed forces in the Asian nation.

The social media company said it was left with no choice but to ban the accounts following the “deadly violence” in the country after the coup, believing that it was too risky to allow the Myanmar military, known as the Tatmadaw, to remain on its platforms.

Facebook will also remove and prevent all Tatmadaw-linked commercial entities from advertising on its platforms.

The tech company had previously removed 20 military-linked individuals – including Commander-in-Chief Min Aung Hlaing – and organizations from the site in 2019 over “severe human rights violations,” and taken down six “Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior networks” run by the Tatmadaw in the last two years.

Given its recent conflict with Australia and Canada, I don’t think it will be too terribly long before some nation’s military demonstrates to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook the difference between power and influence. Of course, it’s understandable why Facebook would believe otherwise given how easy it has been for them to buy off politicians in order to avoid legal consequences:

Australian lawmakers have passed a law that forces tech giants like Facebook and Google fork out money for the media content. Critics argue the bill was watered down after Facebook imposed a week-long ban on Australian news. The much-anticipated bill, which is widely expected to serve as a precedent other nations such as Canada might soon follow, seemingly puts an end to the heated row between Facebook and the Australian government that forced last-minute changes to the bill. The changes provided the tech firms with extra time to thrash out the deals with publishers to avoid being subjected to the new rules. The tech companies can potentially skirt the new media bargaining code if they make “significant financial contributions to the sustainability of the Australian news industry.”

I have to admit, I imagined that living in William Gibson’s Sprawl future where global corporations act like nations would be an awful lot cooler than it is.

Will no longer be answered by the F35:

The U.S. Air Force’s top officer wants the service to develop an affordable, lightweight fighter to replace hundreds of Cold War-vintage F-16s and complement a small fleet of sophisticated—but costly and unreliable—stealth fighters.

The result would be a high-low mix of expensive “fifth-generation” F-22s and F-35s and inexpensive “fifth-generation-minus” jets, explained Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Brown Jr.

If that plan sounds familiar, it’s because the Air Force a generation ago launched development of an affordable, lightweight fighter to replace hundreds of Cold War-vintage F-16s and complement a small future fleet of sophisticated—but costly and unreliable—stealth fighters.

But over 20 years of R&D, that lightweight replacement fighter got heavier and more expensive as the Air Force and lead contractor Lockheed Martin packed it with more and more new technology.

Yes, we’re talking about the F-35. The 25-ton stealth warplane has become the very problem it was supposed to solve. And now America needs a new fighter to solve that F-35 problem, officials said.

Yes, Virginia, the USA is most certainly losing this unrestricted and undeclared war. To be honest, they’d be much better off simply switching to a drone-based air doctrine.

U.S. States are beginning to follow the lead of foreign governments like Australia in breaking the power of Big Tech:

Last month, a lobbyist approached Kyle Davison, a North Dakota state senator, with an unusual proposal: a law to stop Apple and Google from forcing companies in the state to hand over a share of their app sales.

Mr. Davison, a Republican, was focused on bills related to a $200,000 literacy program and birth records for the homeless. But he was intrigued by the lobbyist’s arguments that the tech giants were hurting small businesses, and he thought such a law could attract tech companies to North Dakota. So he introduced it.

“She said to me that this could be big. But to me, that means the local newspaper is going to come with a camera,” Mr. Davison, 60, said. “I would not be truthful if I said I expected the reaction.”

At the Capitol in Bismarck, a 21-story Art Deco tower that’s the state’s tallest building, a hearing on the bill last week drew Washington lawyers, North Dakota newspapers and Silicon Valley executives. Siding with Apple and Google was Americans for Prosperity, the conservative group funded by the Koch family. On the other side was the Fargo Chamber of Commerce. One person called in from Alaska.

Supporters of the bill said it would help smaller companies and only hurt Apple and Google’s revenues. Apple’s chief privacy engineer, Erik Neuenschwander, testified that the bill “threatens to destroy iPhone as you know it.”

Siding with Apple and Google was the conservative group funded by the Koch family. And you wonder why conservatives always lose? They literally side with their enemies. 

And destroying iPhone as we know it is a feature, not a bug.

Karl Denninger explains what happened and why it’s not going to get better any time soon:

The Bidens and AOCs of the world are literally going to kill you.

You’re seeing it right here and now across the nation, including in Texas.

Texas, like so many other areas, has put up windmills and solar “farms” for the last 20 years, shutting down older coal-fired plants and not modernizing and improving their “fossil fuel” energy production infrastructure.  At the same time on a national basis the natural gas pipeline operators, in service to the woke green mob, have replaced fuel-fired pumps (that run on the gas in the pipe, therefore are failsafe so long as the pipe has something in it and is intact) with electrically powered booster pumps because, of course, you can get the power for them from “green” sources instead of all that eeee-vile carbon.

I remind you that natural gas does not freeze at other than cryogenic temperatures and as such the problem is not the gas freezing and as for machinery you have plenty of heat source in the pipe.  By putting up with and responding to the “woke mob” instead of immediately frying and eating their entire blood line these companies took an ultra-reliable and essential energy delivery system that other than by physical destruction would nearly-always continue to operate and turned it into a fragile system dependent on multiple outside elements where if any of those elements failed so does the natural gas delivery.

Winter in the south is when nuclear plants are typically taken down for maintenance as well — since it’s the middle of summer when the A/C is blasting away.  But those NatGas peaking plants and coal-fired base load infrastructure, well…. it’s not green enough, so let’s turn that stuff off and rely on the windmills and solar panels — and hope it doesn’t get destabilized.

Of course the “Globull Warming” screamfest folks always and forever have prognosticated that it will forever get warmer, that wind levels will rise forever and thus both solar panels and wind will forevermore continue to yield more and more useful energy.

All of that got blown up this week.

Texas is seeing wind chills in negative (Fahrenheit) numbers along with single digit or below temperatures.  That plus moisture = ice, and windmill blades are wings and not only suffer the same problem an airplane wing does when it gets loaded in addition they go out of balance and thus the windmill has to be shut down lest it destroy itself.  At the same time ice and snow cover solar panels and reduce their output to an effective zero.

The problem with the power grid is that in the event you demand more of it than can be delivered it becomes unstable due to a number of factors including, in the case of A/C transmission, phase sag.  If expected resources are not available — such as when your wind turbines ice up — then you have no alternative but to shed load (turn off people’s power intentionally) because if you don’t you will get an uncontrolled collapse and possible severe equipment damage.  Further most nuclear plants cannot quickly load-follow — if you need more power quickly you better have something else, and if a bunch of load drops off rapidly you better have some other generation source you can shut down.  Go outside the operating parameters and a nuke plant will “trip” and if they do most of them cannot immediately restart due to a phenomena called “xenon poisoning”; if the fuel has some age on it you must wait until that bleeds off because the core does not have enough reactivity to go critical until it does, which can take a couple of days or even more.

That’s exactly what happened.

I know it’s serious. I know a lot of people are enduring things that are very difficult. But, I have to admit, as a survivor of some of Minnesota’s coldest-ever winters, it’s hard not to be just a little bemused by people prophesying doom on the basis of “temperatures expected to drop to as low as 11F in Houston and 9F in San Antonio.”

I mean, in 1983, I once waited 30 minutes for a bus in -40F windchill temperature. They didn’t even cancel school! So, if you want some advice from a genuine Zero Hero:

• Layers. Always layers. It’s nearly impossible to be cold with five layers. T-shirt, turtleneck, sweater, windbreaker, parka, especially if you move at all.
• Mittens are better than gloves. Fur-lined mittens are better than regular mittens.
• Wet feet freeze. Three layers of socks are best. First the thin silver socks, then regular socks, then thick socks. Moon Boots rock.
• Hat and facemask works best. A scarf is good because you can cover your face with it if you don’t have a mask. That being said, I never wore a scarf.
• Back to the wind. Always keep your back to the wind as much as possible.
• Snow is warm. Use it to build windblocks.

Mike Lindell’s new video on the details of the 2020 election fraud. I haven’t watched it yet so I can’t testify to its accuracy.

UPDATE: If you want to save to your hard drive for whatever reason, you can do so here.

The GameStop investors will be able to go all Sheriff of Nottingham and easily bury Robinhood in arbitration if they wish, as it has the same insanely stupid ban on class arbitration incorporated into its terms of use that many tech firms do. Note that JAMS used to wisely mandate a class arbitration clause in its rules, but removed it in 2005 because the idiot tech corporations didn’t want to risk losing in arbitration to all their users if they did something shady. Instead, the technocracy forced a system on everyone that can quite literally bankrupt them in order to save a little on potential litigation fees. The stupidity is epic-class.

38. Arbitration.

A. This Agreement contains a pre-dispute arbitration clause. By signing an arbitration agreement, the parties agree as follows: (1) All parties to this Agreement are giving up the right to sue each other in court, including the right to a trial by jury, except as provided by the rules of the arbitration forum in which a claim is filed. (2) Arbitration awards are generally final and binding; a party’s ability to have a court reverse or modify an arbitration award is very limited. (3) The ability of the parties to obtain documents, witness statements and other discovery is generally more limited in arbitration than in court proceedings. (4) The arbitrators do not have to explain the reason(s) for their award unless, in an eligible case, a joint request for an explained decision has been submitted by all parties to the panel at least 20 days prior to the first scheduled hearing date. (5) The panel of arbitrators will typically include a minority of arbitrators who were or are affiliated with the securities industry. (6) The rules of some arbitration forums may impose time limits for bringing a claim in arbitration. In some cases, a claim that is ineligible for arbitration may be brought in court. (7) The rules of the arbitration forum in which the claim is filed, and any amendments thereto, shall be incorporated into this Agreement. B. Any controversy or claim arising out of or relating to this Agreement, any other agreement between Me and Robinhood, any Account(s) established hereunder, any transaction therein, shall be settled by arbitration in accordance with the rules of FINRA Dispute Resolution, Inc. (“FINRA DR”). I agree to arbitrate any controversy or claim before FINRA DR in the State of California. C. This agreement to arbitrate constitutes a waiver of the right to seek a judicial forum unless such a waiver would be void under the federal securities laws. If I am a foreign national, non-resident alien, or if I do not reside in the United States, I agree to waive My right to file an action against Robinhood in any foreign venue. D. No person shall bring a putative or certified class action to arbitration, nor seek to enforce any pre-dispute arbitration agreement against any person who has initiated in court a putative class action; or who is a member of a putative class who has not opted out of the class with respect to any claims encompassed by the putative class action until: (1) the class certification is denied; or (2) the class is decertified; or (3) the customer is excluded from the class by the court. Such forbearance to enforce an agreement to arbitrate shall not constitute a waiver of any rights under this Agreement except to the extent stated herein.

Two observations:

• Unlike AAA, FINRA has no rule allowing an arbitrator to declare an arbitration to be “frivolous”, and furthermore, the right to file even frivolous arbitrations is protected by the Federal Arbitration Act and the Supreme Court rulings Steelworkers and Schein.
• Robinhood’s terms of use specify California law. CCP Section 1284.3 prevents any consumer from being charged anything for an arbitration proceeding beyond the initial filing fee. “No neutral arbitrator or private arbitration company shall administer a consumer arbitration under any agreement or rule requiring that a consumer who is a party to the arbitration pay the fees and costs incurred by an opposing party if the consumer does not prevail in the arbitration, including, but not limited to, the fees and costs of the arbitrator, provider organization, attorney, or witnesses.”

The Ride Never Ends.

D-Live has doubled-down and banned Big Bear. How fortunate that the Patreon lawsuit has already been successfully concluded…. In answer to the obvious question, yes, UATV will have streaming in the future. We will not answer any questions as to when. When it is ready, we will let everyone know.

If you’re not yet on Unauthorized, well, you know what to do. The cult of free is over. Keep in mind that under the present regime, Big Tech is going to be banning everyone to the right of Hillary Clinton. In related news, Parler is learning why cloud technology is not an option.

When Amazon Web Services informed Parler that it was terminating its hosting deal, the social platform initially maintained that it would be back online in a week. It appears to have secured DNS hosting from Epik (the Sammamish, WA-company that hosts sites like 8chan, the Daily Stormer, Gab and Stormfront who have been dropped from other providers and recently lost its relationship with PayPal because of that).

But a later statement indicated that other providers are not willing to host the platform and as a result, the service may not return: “most people with enough servers to host us have shut their doors to us,” a statement to the Parler user base read and the company’s legal team suggested in court might not return without access to AWS.

Even if the social network finds a hosting provider, setting up all the different services it needs could be prohibitively slow, or even impossible. For all the talk of hybrid and edge computing, hyperscale cloud still has some hard to beat advantages for organizations with small infrastructure teams and not much capital expenditure budget who need to build large services quickly.

Needless to say, we’re not relying on the cloud for anything, not even brand new projects that are not even remotely political. In not-entirely-unrelated-news, MeWe is not a viable Facebook-alternative.