Tag: technology

The Yemeni attack on Saudi Arabia may mark a turning point in the 100-year history of air war:

Saudi Arabia spent billions to protect a kingdom built on oil but could not stop the suspected Iranian drone and missile attack, exposing gaps that even America’s most advanced weaponry failed to fill.

In addition to deciding whether that firepower should be turned on Iran in retaliation, the Saudis and their American allies must now figure out how to prevent a repeat of last weekend’s attack — or worse, such as an assault on the Saudis’ export facilities in the Persian Gulf or any of the desalination plants that supply drinking water.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was asked Wednesday on his way to Saudi Arabia how it was possible that the kingdom could have dropped its guard, failing to stop any of the low-flying cruise missiles or armed drones that struck the Abqaiq oil processing center — the largest of its kind in the world — and the Khurais oil field. Even the best air defenses sometimes fail, he replied….

Between 2014 and 2018, the Saudis ranked as the world’s No. 1 arms importer. In that period, they accounted for 22 percent of the United States’ global arms sales, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. In recent years they have acquired some of America’s top-shelf weapons, including F-15 fighter aircraft, Apache attack helicopters and the Patriot air defense systems.

None of that made a difference last weekend in the face of an attack that exposed Saudi weaknesses that might seem obvious in retrospect.

The undeniable fact of the matter is that the US is well behind Russia and China with regards to unmanned air war due to its historical supremacy in conventional manned air warfare. Because the US has focused on defending against threats of the sort that it poses to others, neither it nor its allies are prepared for “unconventional” attacks that avoid those defenses.

This is the usual pattern of military history, wherein a long-standing advantage is circumvented by technological and tactical innovations that eliminate the utility of the advantage. Think about the way in which the German U-boat circumvented the British Navy’s control of the oceans or how Wellington’s refusal to give battle at any time and place that was not of his choosing negated the massive numerical advantage of the French forces occupying Spain.

The early history of mind control in the USA:

In 1951, Dulles hired a chemist to design and oversee a systematic search for the key to mind control. The man he chose, Sidney Gottlieb, was not part of the silver-spoon aristocracy from which most officers of the early CIA were recruited, but a 33-year-old Jew from an immigrant family who limped and stuttered. He also meditated, lived in a remote cabin without running water and rose before dawn to milk his goats.

Gottlieb wanted to use Detrick’s assets to propel his mind control project to new heights. He asked Dulles to negotiate an accord that would formalize the connection between the military and the CIA in this pursuit. Under the arrangement’s provisions, according to a later report, “CIA acquired the knowledge, skill, and facilities of the Army to develop biological weapons suited for CIA use.”

Taking advantage of this arrangement, Gottlieb created a hidden CIA enclave inside Camp Detrick. His handful of CIA chemists worked so closely with their comrades in the Special Operations Division that they became a single unit.

Some scientists outside the tight-knit group suspected what was happening. “Do you know what a ‘self-contained, off-the-shelf operation’ means?” one of them asked years later. “The CIA was running one in my lab. They were testing psychochemicals and running experiments in my labs and weren’t telling me.”

Gottlieb searched relentlessly for a way to blast away human minds so new ones could be implanted in their place. He tested an astonishing variety of drug combinations, often in conjunction with other torments like electroshock or sensory deprivation. In the United States, his victims were unwitting subjects at jails and hospitals, including a federal prison in Atlanta and an addiction research center in Lexington, Kentucky.

In Europe and East Asia, Gottlieb’s victims were prisoners in secret detention centers. One of those centers, built in the basement of a former villa in the German town of Kronberg, might have been the first secret CIA prison. While CIA scientists and their former Nazi comrades sat before a stone fireplace discussing the techniques of mind control, prisoners in basement cells were being prepared as subjects in brutal and sometimes fatal experiments.

These were the most gruesome experiments the U.S. government ever conducted on human beings. In one of the them, seven prisoners in Lexington, Kentucky, were given multiple doses of LSD for 77 days straight. In another, captured North Koreans were given depressant drugs, then dosed with potent stimulants and exposed to intense heat and electroshock while they were in the weakened state of transition. These experiments destroyed many minds and caused an unknown number of deaths. Many of the potions, pills and aerosols administered to victims were created at Detrick.

One of the most well-known victims of the MK-ULTRA experiments was Frank Olson. Olson was a CIA officer who had spent his entire career at Detrick and knew its deepest secrets. When he began musing about quitting the CIA, his comrades saw a security threat. Gottlieb summoned the team to a retreat and arranged for Olson to be drugged with LSD. A week later, Olson died in a plunge from a hotel window in New York. The CIA called it suicide. Olson’s family believes he was thrown from the window to prevent him from revealing what was brewing inside Camp Detrick.

A decade of intense experiments taught Gottlieb that there are indeed ways to destroy a human mind. He never, however, found a way to implant a new mind in the resulting void. The grail he sought eluded him. MK-ULTRA ended in failure in the early 1960s. “The conclusion from all these activities,” he admitted afterward, “was that it was very difficult to manipulate human behavior in this way.”

Turns out all they needed was a Like button and they could rely upon fake social pressure to do the rest.

It was really rather stupid of the US government to imagine that public claims China was spying on consumers through their devices weren’t going to rebound hard on the US tech giants:

China has accused Apple of monitoring its users through spyware on its phones and computers.

The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said today that the world should be wary about the US tech company because it had assisted Washington to spy on ordinary users as well as country leaders ‘for as long as 10 years’.

Beijing’s spokesperson made the allegation after the United States claimed Chinese company Huawei could be collecting intelligence for Beijing and urged its allies to block the firm from their 5G networks. Hua Chunying, a spokesperson from the Ministry, also accused American IT provider Cisco of secretly collecting information from its users through the firm’s devices. Hua said: ‘As early as 2014, Apple acknowledged in a statement to have extracted personal data including short messages, contact lists, pictures from its users’ mobile phones through a “back door” in its system.’

She added: ‘According to leaked information by project PRISM, American people barely have any personal privacy in data including their phone calls, communications, documents and voice recordings in front of US intelligence. In additional, leaders from 35 countries – including some of America’s most intimate allies – have had their phone calls monitored. Some of them have been monitored for as long as 10 years.’

Just wait until they start going after Facebook and Google. I really fail to see how “you don’t want to let them spy on you, you should let US keep spying on you” is likely to be a successful sales pitch.

If you use Chrome or Brave, there is absolutely no need to utilize Wikipedia ever again. All you need to do is add the Transporter extension and you’ll automatically be transported to Infogalactic every time you click on a Wikipedia link.

This extension allows the user to move between Wiki and IG.

Auto-redirects from Wikipedia to Infogalactic’s version of that page (whether entering via a link or the address bar).

Clicking the extension button shuttles you back to the Wiki version and disables auto-redirect for that tab, and clicking again takes you back to Infogalactic. If you navigate away, on that tab, to some website outside either Wiki or IG, it’ll reset the behaviour back to auto-redirecting. 

Behaviour is also bound to the tab in which the clicking took place. If you click the button, thus disabling auto-redirect, and open a new tab, that new tab will obey the default redirect behaviour, i.e. taking you to Infogalactic if you visit Wikipedia.

There is also a Firefox version.

Mozilla has taken corporate SJW activism to new depths:

Firefox maker Mozilla is trying to shame YouTube into “fixing” its recommendation algorithm, soliciting horror stories from users sent down radicalizing “rabbit holes.” Trouble is, most users don’t want more censorship.

“Once, at 2 a.m., you searched YouTube for ‘Did aliens build Stonehenge?’ Ever since, your YouTube recommendations have been a mess: Roswell, wormholes, Illuminati,” Mozilla laments in its call for submissions, asking users for their “YouTube regret” so that they might “put pressure on YouTube to do better.”

“YouTube’s recommendation engine can lead users down bizarre rabbit holes — and they’re not always harmless,” the company warns.

What business is it of Mozilla’s, one might wonder. Perhaps if Mozilla’s executives worried more about their browser’s long-vanished market share, which is now on the verge of being surpassed by the Samsung Internet app, and less about YouTube’s recommendations, they might still be relevant. I’ve used Firefox since it was called Firebird, but I’ve now uinstalled it entirely in favor of Brave.

And you can absolutely quote me on that, in whatever voice you like. He’s such a ridiculous whiner as well as being a profoundly non-philosophical fraud.

This week, however, a company called notjordanpeterson.com put an AI engine online that allows anyone to type anything and have it reproduced in my voice. It’s hard to get access to or use the site, at the moment, presumably because it is currently attracting more traffic than its servers can handle. [NOTE: As of August 23, this website posted the following announcement: In light of Dr. Peterson’s response to the technology demonstrated by this site, which you can read here, and out of respect for Dr. Peterson, the functionality of the site will be disabled for the time being.]

A variety of sites that pass themselves off as news portals—and sometimes are—have either reported this story straight (Sputnik News) or had a field day (Gizmodo) having me read, for example, the SCUM manifesto (hypothetically an acronym for Society for Cutting Up Men), a radical feminist rant by Valerie Solanos published in 1967. Solanos, by the way, later shot the artist Andy Warhol, an act, driven by her developing paranoia. He was seriously wounded, requiring a surgical corset to hold his organs in place for the rest of his life. TNW takes a middle path, reporting the facts of the situation with little bias but using the system to have me voice very vulgar phrases.

Some of you might know—and those of you who don’t should—that similar technology has also been developed for video. This was reported, for example, by BBC, as far back in July of 2017, who broadcast a speech delivered by an AI Obama, that was essentially indistinguishable from the real thing. Similar technology has been used, equally notoriously, to superimpose the faces of famous actresses on porn stars, while they perform their various sexual exploits (you can find this story covered, for example, on The Verge, Jan 24, 2018). Movies have also been reshot so that the main actor is transformed from someone unknown to someone with real box office draw. This has happened, for example, to Nicolas Cage, primarily on a YouTube site known as Derpfakes, a play on the phrase “Deep Fakes,” which is what the video recordings created fraudulently by AI have come to be known. More recently Ctrl Shift Face, a YouTube channel, posted a video showing Bill Hader transforming very subtly into Tom Cruise as he performs an impression of the latter on Dave Letterman’s show. It’s picked up four million views in a week. It’s important to note, by the way, that this ability is available to amateurs. I don’t mean people with no tech knowledge whatsoever, obviously—more that the electronic machinery that makes such things possible will soon be within the reach of everyone.

It’s hard to imagine a technology with more power to disrupt. I’m already in the position (as many of you soon will be as well) where anyone can produce a believable audio and perhaps video of me saying absolutely anything they want me to say. How can that possible be fought? More to the point: how are we going to trust anything electronically-mediated in the very near future (say, during the next Presidential election)? We’re already concerned, rightly or wrongly, with “fake news”—and that’s only news that has been slanted, arguably, by the bias of the reporter or editor or news organization. What do we do when “fake news” is just as real as “real news”? What do we do when anyone can imitate anyone else, for any reason that suits them?

And what of the legality of this process? It seems to me that active and aware lawmakers would take immediate steps to make the unauthorized production of AI Deep Fakes a felony offense, at least in the case where the fake is being used to defame, damage or deceive. And it seems to be that we should perhaps throw caution to the wind, and make this an exceptionally wide-ranging law. We need to seriously consider the idea that someone’s voice is an integral part of their identity, of their reality, of their person—and that stealing that voice is a genuinely criminal act, regardless (perhaps) of intent. What’s the alternative? Are we entering a future where the only credible source of information will be direct personal contact? What’s that going to do to mass media, of all types? Why should we not assume that the noise to signal ratio will creep so high that all political and economic information disseminated broadly will be rendered completely untrustworthy?

I can tell you from personal experience, for what that’s worth, that it is far from comforting to discover an entire website devoted to allowing whoever is inspired to do so produce audio clips imitating my voice delivering whatever content the user chooses—for serious, comic or malevolent purposes. I can’t imagine what the world will be like when we will truly be unable to distinguish the real from the unreal, or exercise any control whatsoever on what videos reveal about behaviors we never engaged in, or audio avatars broadcasting any opinion at all about anything at all. I see no defense, and a tremendously expanded opportunity for unscrupulous troublemakers to warp our personal and collective reality in any manner they see fit.

Wake up. The sanctity of your voice, and your image, is at serious risk. It’s hard to imagine a more serious challenge to the sense of shared, reliable reality that keeps us linked together in relative peace. The Deep Fake artists need to be stopped, using whatever legal means are necessary, as soon as possible.

This guy doesn’t even believe in the Divine, so to what “sanctity of your voice and your image” is he referring? He doesn’t even believe in group identity or taking pride in one’s direct ancestors, he’s the most famous advocate of individual uber alles since Ayn Rand, so what is this “sense of shared, reliable reality that keeps us linked together” to which he’s suddenly appealing.

If you didn’t grasp that Jordan Peterson is an intellectual fraud before, his call to outlaw synthetic speech and make it a felony offense should more than suffice.

Personally, I love synthetic speech. I’ve been wanting to design games around it since 1996.

A Reprehensible emails his observation that Twitter is muting the voices of anyone who criticizes the entertainment blackwashing:

After seeing the cast of Wheel of Time I couldn’t get my mind off of it so I made a twitter account using a throw away email account. I took a minute to grab some images from the web and put some propaganda/memes together, nothing special, and posted to the showrunners twitter. At first twitter gave me an error when trying to upload an image with the file name “not our Perrin”. Once I changed the name of the file to random numbers it let me post the image with my comment. The comment itself did not bring up race. I was IMMEDIATELY locked out of my account.

I followed the instructions to unlock my account through my email. I then navigated to the casting directors twitter and posted a similar image with a short message. I was once again locked out of my account. This time twitter was asking for my cell phone number to regain access to my account. I have a burner that I can use to get back into the account so I might continue but I’m amazed that they would be watching this so closely.

Also, as an aspiring illustrator/animator I keep seeing all of this twisting and perversion of stories that I would have loved to help get to the screen. Now I can’t stomach the idea of working on them. They even “woked” the ‘Cowboy Bebop’ cast. Do you have any advice on how to keep from getting discouraged by all of this?

It’s fascinating that they are clamping down on it so tightly. They must harbor some understanding the level of massive social fury they are inspiring with these blackwashing and gender-bending provocations.

As for getting discouraged, I don’t understand that at all. This is a massive strategic blunder by both Hollywood and the Social Thought Police. They are showing their hand to everyone, thereby giving us the opportunity to replace them entirely. Don’t be discouraged, be motivated and inspired!

It’s actually a feature designed to permit their ideological allies to exploit their infrastructure:

Tulsi Gabbard’s email account went down right after the Democratic Debate and I believe I can provide assistance on where to focus your discovery efforts because I saw how other accounts, such as Jordan B. Peterson, was taken down. I’m going to recount how this happened to him so as to assist you in your legal discovery process.

During my tenor, Jordan B. Peterson had his gmail account deactivated and I had the opportunity to inspect the bug report as a full-time employee. What I found was that Google had a technical vulnerability that, when exploited, would take any gmail account down. Certain unknown 3rd party actors are aware of this secret vulnerability and exploit it. This is how it worked:

Take a target email address, change exactly one letter in that email address, and then create a new account with that changed email address. Malicious actors repeated this process over and over again until a network of spoof accounts for Jordan B. Peterson existed. Then these spoof accounts started generating spam emails. These email-spam blasts caught the attention of an AI system which fixed the problem by deactivating the spam accounts… and then ALSO the original account belonging to Jordan B. Peterson!

To my knowledge, this bug has never been fixed. When Google says an account was deactivated because of “suspicious” activity, this is how they often do it.

Proof of this exploit can be found by doing the following:

1. Go inside the Google corporate network.
2. Then go to the following url: http://b (yes the url is that short).
3. Search terms: jordan b peterson

Cheers and good luck in your lawsuit!

Lawfare is the way to defeat the social media giants. But you must be willing to fight them! Contrary to what most people believe, they are not set up for it, they do not anticipate it, they are not legally sophisticated, and they aren’t even inclined to handle their own legal defenses with their expensive in-house lawyers. Their focus on diversity and inclusivity means that their lower-level executives and in-house counsel are almost astonishingly incompetent; look at the number of simple grammatical errors in the average Silicon Valley company’s terms of use as evidence of that.

It’s not the first. It won’t be the last. But it is substantive.

A Google staffer today released documents exposing a massive censorship campaign where the ubiquitous Google search engine purposefully censored pro-life and conservative web sites, including LifeNews.com.

Google Insider Zachary Vorhies has given an interview to watchdog group Project Veritas where he discusses how he documented Google censorship of leading pro-life and conservative web sites for over a year. He made the decision to go public in an on-the-record video interview after Google went after him following the release of the information to Project Veritas.

He decided to go public after receiving a letter from Google, and after he says Google allegedly called the police to perform a “wellness check” on him.

Along with the interview, Vorhies asked Project Veritas to publish more of the internal Google documents he had previously leaked.

“I gave the documents to Project Veritas, I had been collecting the documents for over a year. And the reason why I collected these documents was because I saw something dark and nefarious going on with the company and I realized that there were going to not only tamper with the elections, but use that tampering with the elections to essentially overthrow the United States,” he said.

I don’t quite understand the concept of making the documents available to download only if you install some strange application, though. I’ll pass, thanks.

I tend to doubt Sundar Pichai will still be CEO of Google by the end of the year now that he’s being busted for lying by his former employees. Again.

A former Google insider claiming the company created algorithms to hide its political bias within artificial intelligence platforms – in effect targeting particular words, phrases and contexts to promote, alter, reference or manipulate perceptions of Internet content – delivered roughly 950 pages of documents to the Department of Justice’s Antitrust division Friday.

The former Google insider, who has already spoken in to the nonprofit organization Project Veritas, met with SaraACarter.com on several occasions last week. He was interviewed in silhouette, to conceal his identity, in group’s latest film, which they say exposes bias inside the social media platform.

Several weeks prior, the insider mailed a laptop to the DOJ containing the same information delivered on Friday, they said. The former insider is choosing to remain anonymous until Project Verita’s James O’Keefe reveals his identity tomorrow.

He told this reporter on his recent trip to Washington D.C. that the documents he turned over to the Justice Department will provide proof that Google has been manipulating the algorithms and the evidence of how it was done, the insider said.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai told the House Judiciary Committee in December, 2018, that the search engine was not biased against conservatives. Pichai explained what algorithm’s are said Google’s algorithm was not offensive to conservatives because its artificial intelligence does not operate in that manner. He told lawmakers, “things like relevance, freshness, popularity, how other people are using it” are what drives the search results. Pichai said even if his programmers were anti-Republican, the process is so intricate that the artificial intelligence could not be manipulated and it was to complicated to train the algorithm to fit their bias.

The problem isn’t just that he lied to the House Judiciary Committee, it’s that he told such stupid and obvious and easily disproven lies. More on this soon….