Tag: technology

It looks as if Michael Yon’s story on Google is going to be a lot more explosive than Wired’s, if indeed the latter’s ever runs.

Achtung! Pay attention: tonight I talked for about an hour with a “Google Snowden” who will soon go public. A deep insider.

Fascinating stuff. I cannot say much now other than pay attention to what is coming out starting in a week or so from now.

Source said many interesting things about how Chinese are flooding into tech companies like Google, and some of the incredible techniques they can use to brainwash or at least mislead millions of people.

Take this as an example that I am making up based on our conversation. Again, I am making this up but it is based on our conversation:

A politician tweets saying we must protect our national interests.

Google, or whoever, immediately promotes all stories that translates, “must protect our national interests,” to “nationalism,” and then in almost real time rewrites the meaning of “nationalism” to include traits such as xenophobic, racist, and references Nazis as nationalists.

This happens so quickly and so comprehensively that most people never will notice that in the 30 seconds the curtain was closed, Google (or whoever) rewrote part of the dictionary, and history.

To state this more clearly: they can basically rewrite what you say, write, sing, wear, or hand gesture — name it — and they can rewrite that faster than we can make popcorn.

They can do this anonymously saying the algorithm is doing it when in reality they write the rules that make the rules.

Anyway, the insider told me much more. I do not know how much already is public but I do think that if the source is correct, President Trump and a lot of others in powerful positions will be extremely angry with some of the internet players who already have hired half of China.

The amusing thing is that those of us who are dev-savvy already knew this was how it worked. An algorithm is not an excuse, it’s just a series of rules. So, blaming bad behavior on “the algorithm did it” is simply pointing the finger at the programmers of the algorithm.

But an insider putting it in terms that non-developers will understand and demonstrating the intrinsically and intentionally manipulative of the process is essentially translating it from techno-dialectic to techno-rhetoric, which is necessary if people are to be stirred into action.

And the most revealing aspect will be the obvious aims of the manipulators being revealed by the nature of the manipulation.

There was never any such thing as “freedom of speech”. It was always an anti-Christian charade used as a foundation from which to attack the blasphemy laws. In Christendom, a man was not permitted blaspheme against Jesus Christ. In Satandom, a man is not permitted to blaspheme against, or even criticize, Google.

Hours after Google engineer Greg Coppola  appeared with James O’Keefe in a Project Veritas video, he was put on administrative leave by his company. In the video, Coppola said that he believed that Google News and Google’s search engine algorithms were biased. He also claimed that CEO Sundar Pichai’s testimony to Congress in December 2018 was not “true.”

Google has chastised those employees who have gone against its agenda. In 2017, Google fired engineer James Damore after he wrote a memo about the company’s “ideological echo chamber.” In 2019, Republican engineer Mike Wacker was fired after he complained about the hostile attitude in the corporate culture toward conservatives.

If Coppola is let go, he will be the third public victim of Google’s inherent bias toward conservative engineers. Coppola openly admitted in his interview with O’Keefe that he “liked Trump and liked his policies.” He stated that the search engine relies too much on biased news outlets to feed its users negative news on Trump.

According to Coppola’s GoFundMe, he expects that Google will “probably fire him.” He plans on publishing more on tech in the upcoming months.

This should put an interesting spin on the upcoming Wired article.

No wonder the recent wave of deplatformings has suddenly come to an abrupt halt:

The U.S. Department of Justice opened a sweeping antitrust investigation of major technology companies and whether their online platforms have hurt competition, suppressed innovation or otherwise harmed consumers.

It said the probe will take into account “widespread concerns” about social media, search engines and online retail services. Its antitrust division is seeking information from the public, including those in the tech industry.

“Without the discipline of meaningful market-based competition, digital platforms may act in ways that are not responsive to consumer demands,” Makan Delrahim, the department’s chief antitrust officer, said in a statement. “The Department’s antitrust review will explore these important issues.”

The terse but momentous announcement follows months of concern in Congress and elsewhere over the sway of firms like Google, Facebook and Amazon. Lawmakers and Democratic presidential candidates have called for stricter regulation or even breakups of the big tech companies , which have drawn intense scrutiny following a series of scandals that compromised users’ privacy.

But if they’re left alone, or merely let off with a strict finger-wagging warning, they’ll double down on the deplatformings. Because that’s what converged organizations do.

The key thing is not letting them play it both ways on the publisher/not-publisher front. If they control content, then they must be liable for it. Only if they are completely content-neutral should they escape being held liable for it.

Looks like Wired is going to take yet another shot or two at me for the fourth time since the Sad Puppies first blew up the Hugos. Although it is possible that it is only doing so in the process of taking one at Google, since I am notoriously – and rather inexplicably – banned from setting foot on Google’s Mountain View headquarters.

I am fact-checking a story on Google for the coming issue of WIRED. Can you confirm the following details?

1. Your name is Theodore Beale.
2. You run the blog Vox Populi.
3. Would you consider yourself a member or proponent of the alt-right?

And no, of course I did not respond to the email. FFS, you’d think they would try simply, I don’t know, looking at the blog for the answers to those questions. Now, given the basic nature of the questions, it probably wouldn’t be any more harmful to answer them than not… but in the interest of setting a good example for those more tempted by seeing their name in print than me, I will not cooperate even to that extent.

If this human resources debacle isn’t a clear sign to short Intel’s stock, I don’t know what is:

Hoseong Ryu’s trouble at Intel started even before he began working there, he claimed in a lawsuit filed this week.

Ryu, 45, applied in 2014 for a software engineering job at Intel, and was interviewed by a three-man panel, according to his lawsuit filed in Northern California U.S. District Court. One interviewer at the Santa Clara semiconductor giant was originally from India, and he had a question for Ryu, the suit claimed.

“I see you are from Korea,” the man allegedly said. “I know a Korean man named Sung Won Bin. Do you happen to know him?”

After the meeting, the man told a fellow  interviewer that Intel shouldn’t hire Ryu because he was “Korean, married, and had a child,” and added, “It would be easier to hire a younger, unmarried Indian man,” the suit alleged.

Still, Intel hired Ryu onto its system integration team, where he found “the demographics of the worksite and its management have been heavily skewed toward employees from India or people of Indian or south-Asian descent,” the suit claimed.

One manager in his team, of Indian origin, “openly favored the hiring and promotion of only employees from India, stating that ‘Indians work hard’ and ‘Indians are harder workers,’” the suit alleged. That manager also encouraged a supervisor to hire only Indian employees, the suit filed Wednesday claimed.

Intel said it does not comment on pending litigation. But a company spokeswoman said a diverse workforce and inclusive culture are key to the company’s progress. “We believe diverse teams with different perspectives, experiences and ideas are more creative and innovative, resulting in a collaborative and supportive environment,” spokeswoman Patricia Oliverio-Lauderdale said.

I tend to doubt that Intel has realized yet that those different perspectives, experiences and ideas include the Indian notion that only employees from India, preferably younger unmarried men from their own extended family, should be hired.

Indiegogo has had some serious layoffs of late:

Indiegogo  has a new chief. Andy Yang will take over for outgoing CEO David Mandelbrot, who is stepping down. According to sources close to the company, several other Indiegogo employees are also leaving. Indiegogo has yet to confirm this claim or state the number or reason for their departure.

Mandelbrot announced the move on LinkedIn, citing “personal reasons” as why he’s leaving. He was at Indiegogo for six years, starting as SVP of Operations in August of 2013.

Andy Yang  comes to Indiegogo from Reddit,  where he was most recently leading its product team. He was previously the CEO of 500px.

Yang comes to Indiegogo at a critical time for the company. Consumers are increasingly becoming jaded by crowdfunding projects that leave backers without their promised product. Under Mandelbrot’s leadership, he helped Indiegogo net several key partners, including General Electric and Lego. The company also enlisted the help of several manufacturing and marketing professionals to help backers make projects into products.

TechCrunch requested an interview with Yang, but has yet to be granted that request.

I tend to suspect their numbers aren’t going to look a whole lot better anytime soon. Watch out for that falling rubble!

If you weren’t afraid to fly before, you will be now that you know how Boeing is producing its 737 flight software:

It remains the mystery at the heart of Boeing Co.’s 737 Max crisis: how a company renowned for meticulous design made seemingly basic software mistakes leading to a pair of deadly crashes. Longtime Boeing engineers say the effort was complicated by a push to outsource work to lower-paid contractors.

The Max software — plagued by issues that could keep the planes grounded months longer after U.S. regulators this week revealed a new flaw — was developed at a time Boeing was laying off experienced engineers and pressing suppliers to cut costs.

Increasingly, the iconic American planemaker and its subcontractors have relied on temporary workers making as little as $9 an hour to develop and test software, often from countries lacking a deep background in aerospace — notably India.

In offices across from Seattle’s Boeing Field, recent college graduates employed by the Indian software developer HCL Technologies Ltd. occupied several rows of desks, said Mark Rabin, a former Boeing software engineer who worked in a flight-test group that supported the Max.

The coders from HCL were typically designing to specifications set by Boeing. Still, “it was controversial because it was far less efficient than Boeing engineers just writing the code,” Rabin said. Frequently, he recalled, “it took many rounds going back and forth because the code was not done correctly.”

Boeing’s cultivation of Indian companies appeared to pay other dividends. In recent years, it has won several orders for Indian military and commercial aircraft, such as a $22 billion one in January 2017 to supply SpiceJet Ltd. That order included 100 737-Max 8 jets and represented Boeing’s largest order ever from an Indian airline, a coup in a country dominated by Airbus.

I have had just one experience working with Indian software developers, when I was designing a game-training tool for 3M. To say that they were completely incompetent would have been an exaggeration, as in the end, they did manage to get a very basic, ugly version of what I had designed working. But I would estimate that they were about one-tenth as competent as the worst Western programmer with whom I ever worked.

Think about how poorly Skype and the average application works today in comparison with five years ago. Now apply that level of technological degradation to literally everything that involves putting people in the air and transporting them from one place to another.

Then again, the first rockstar programmer I ever knew was a young Indian who was the best programmer at my father’s company despite being hired right out of college, and who is still a brilliant programmer and entrepreneur. But that was literally the opposite of outsourcing. So, it’s not that Indians simply can’t do it, it’s that the probabilities don’t favor outsiders attempting to determine who can and who cannot.

The growing number of development issues with the F-35 will not surprise anyone who understands that the US empire is in its decline-and-contraction stage:

According to a June 2018 report by the Government Accountability Office, the program had 111 category 1 deficiencies on the books in January 2018. By May 24, 2018, that number had decreased to 64 open category 1 problems out of a total 913 deficiencies, according to one document obtained by Defense News.

Another document obtained by Defense News noted that at least 13 issues would need to be held as category 1 deficiencies going into operational tests in fall 2018.

The 13 deficiencies include:

• The F-35’s logistics system currently has no way for foreign F-35 operators to keep their secret data from being sent to the United States.
• The spare parts inventory shown by the F-35’s logistics system does not always reflect reality, causing occasional mission cancellations.
• Cabin pressure spikes in the cockpit of the F-35 have been known to cause barotrauma, the word given to extreme ear and sinus pain.
• In very cold conditions — defined as at or near minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit — the F-35 will erroneously report that one of its batteries have failed, sometimes prompting missions to be aborted.
• Supersonic flight in excess of Mach 1.2 can cause structural damage and blistering to the stealth coating of the F-35B and F-35C.
• After doing certain maneuvers, F-35B and F-35C pilots are not always able to completely control the aircraft’s pitch, roll and yaw.
• If the F-35A and F-35B blows a tire upon landing, the impact could also take out both hydraulic lines and pose a loss-of-aircraft risk.
• A “green glow” sometimes appears on the helmet-mounted display, washing out the imagery in the helmet and making it difficult to land the F-35C on an aircraft carrier.
• On nights with little starlight, the night vision camera sometimes displays green striations that make it difficult for all variants to see the horizon or to land on ships.
• The sea search mode of the F-35’s radar only illuminates a small slice of the sea’s surface.
• When the F-35B vertically lands on very hot days, older engines may be unable to produce the required thrust to keep the jet airborne, resulting in a hard landing.

The Pentagon has identified four additional category 1 deficiencies since beginning operational tests in December 2018, mostly centered around weapons interfaces, Winter said.

For the price of the F-35, the USA could have built 79,787 F-16s, or 17.3x more than were ever built. If you don’t understand why the USA is going to lose its next major war, look up the kill rate between German Panthers and US Shermans or between Tigers and T-34s. One F-35 might be better than one F-16, but it’s not capable of taking on 200 at a time.

Big Tech is about to experience its Cersei moment, when it learns the difference between influence and power:

This is the moment the U.S. technology superpowers surely knew was coming: The U.S. government is preparing to crawl all over Google to figure out whether it is an abusive monopolist. Google parent company Alphabet Inc. and the other tech giants should be quaking in their fleece vests.

Bloomberg News and other news organizations reported late Friday that the U.S. Department of Justice is preparing to open an investigation into Google’s compliance with antitrust laws. If it goes forward, an investigation will no doubt be broad, lengthy, messy, and impossible for Google and its investors to predict.

That should terrify Google and every other big technology company — because there’s no guarantee that the antitrust Klieg light will turn on one company alone.

This isn’t Google’s first antitrust rodeo. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission in 2013 closed without further action its own antitrust investigation into whether Google wielded its dominant web search engine like a cudgel to disadvantage rivals, drive up prices for advertisers and ultimately harm consumers. (Google did agree to some voluntary changes.)

And in recent years, the European Union antitrust watchdog imposed billions of dollars in fines after finding antitrust violations, including over how Google conducted business with its Android smartphone software and its internet shopping service. In the U.S. and elsewhere, politicians from all party stripes have sought to attack Google or other tech giants for various perceived sins, including being too big for the good of industry and consumers. Being Google has meant dealing with perennial regulatory and political nightmares.

This latest chapter of “As Google Turns” may have started in January on Capitol Hill. “I don’t think big is necessarily bad, but I think a lot of people wonder how such huge behemoths that now exist in Silicon Valley have taken shape under the nose of the antitrust enforcers,” Bill Barr, now the U.S. attorney general, said to U.S. senators during a confirmation hearing. The DOJ’s chief antitrust enforcer, who represented Google during a merger more than a decade ago, has expressed similar views.

Antitrust investigations are difficult to predict, of course. Once the U.S. government pores over every internal email and business development contract, there’s no telling what it will turn up. If the DOJ moves ahead, it will also be an open invitation for every company or individual with a gripe against Google to pile on, and an investigation will embolden critics of Facebook, Amazon and other tech giants as well.

I’ve certainly got a complaint or two to register against Twitter, just to name one of the Big Tech companies that will be investigated, as do dozens of other individuals of my acquaintance. I think it might even be a good time to sign up for a few of these converged companies specifically in order to get deplatformed. Several of them are clearly dumb enough to continue the very activities that have put them in the DOJ’s sights.

By the way, it will be interesting to see if this serious problem with Google Cloud may have been the cause of everyone’s recent streaming issues. It’s not necessarily SJW action:

Google experienced several major technical problems Sunday that left YouTube down for many users in the US, South America and Europe. The Alphabet-owned search engine company said its tech troubles began at 12.25pm on Sunday. YouTube’s was first reported down at 2.50pm, according to downdetector.com. YouTube, Google Cloud and G Suite services including Gmail were affected, but Google said it believes it has identified the cause of the issue in its cloud network. Some users also said they were having issues with third-party sites and applications including Snapchat, Pokemon Go, Uber, Uber Eats, Vimeo and Discord.  

This is potentially great news. It appears the God-Emperor is finally preparing to strike back against the converged companies that have been persecuting his supporters:

The Trump administration is asking victims of social media censorship to share their stories, promising to “fight for free speech online” and exciting conservatives who feel their plight has been ignored.

No matter your views, if you suspect political bias has caused you to be censored or silenced online, we want to hear about it! http://wh.gov/techbias 

Of the named platforms, only Twitter had anything to say about the administration’s call for stories, responding that it enforces its terms of service “impartially” without regard to “background or political affiliation.” President Donald Trump met with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey last month at the White House just hours after complaining (via Twitter) that the platform didn’t “treat [him] well as a Republican,” and Dorsey has admitted in the past that they’ve been “too aggressive” in banning right-wing users, but many complain that nothing has changed.

I suggest every AH:Q backer submit the story of how the AH:Q campaign was deplatformed by Indiegogo to the administration site.

SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS should advance FREEDOM OF SPEECH. Yet too many Americans have seen their accounts suspended, banned, or fraudulently reported for unclear “violations” of user policies. No matter your views, if you suspect political bias caused such an action to be taken against you, share your story with President Trump.