Tag: technology

My money would be on China getting there first.

The US military is desperately trying to recover the wreckage of a Japanese F-35A stealth fighter which crashed over the Pacific yesterday amid fears China and Russia could beat them to it. Parts of the tail of the world’s most sophisticated stealth jet have already been found after it disappeared off the radar 85 miles east of Misawa, Japan during a training mission.

Eight ships and seven aircraft,including a U.S. Navy P-8 Orion maritime patrol plane, are looking for traces of the jet that is believed to have sunk to 5,000ft. The pilot of the aircraft is still missing.

But experts today warned that Russia and China could also be trying to get their hands on the aircraft to discover its secrets.

Tom Moore, a former senior professional staff member at the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, tweeted: ‘There is no price too high in this world for China and Russia to pay to get Japan’s missing F-35, if they can. Big deal.’

‘Bottom line is that it would not be good,’ retired US Air Force Lt. Gen. David Deptula told Business Insider.

It is believed Russia and China could be using their advanced submarines to scour the ocean floor in search of the jet in order to steal vital technology on board. And experts have warned that parts of the jet could easily be replicated if they do recover the wreckage before US or Japanese search teams.

On the other hand, given the apparent shortcomings of the F-35, the bigger fear might be the Chinese or Russians learning that there is no reason to replicate any parts of the jet. It’s interesting how this storyline tends to track the plot of A Mind Programmed/The Programmed Man.

Facebook again proves – as if any more proof were necessary – that it cannot be trusted in any way, shape, or form:

Old Facebook posts by Mark Zuckerberg have disappeared — obscuring details about core moments in Facebook’s history.

On multiple occassions, years-old public posts made by the 34-year-old billionaire chief executive that were previously public and reported on by news outlets at the time have since vanished, Business Insider has found. That includes all of the posts he made during 2007 and 2008.

Reached for comment, a Facebook spokesperson said the posts were “mistakenly deleted” due to “technical errors.”

“A few years ago some of Mark’s posts were mistakenly deleted due to technical errors. The work required to restore them would have been extensive and not guaranteed to be successful so we didn’t do it,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

“We agree people should be able to find information about past announcements and major company news, which is why for years we’ve shared and archived this information publicly — first on our blog and in recent years on our Newsroom.”

These disappearances, along with other changes Facebook has made to how it saves its archive of announcements and blog posts, make it much harder to parse the social network’s historical record. This makes it far more difficult to hold the company, and Zuckerberg himself, accountable to past statements — particularly during a period of intense scrutiny of the company in the wake of a string of scandals.

The very nature of the issue means it is extremely challenging to make a full accounting of what exactly what has gone missing over the years.

It’s always Year Zero for these liars. Nothing they say is ever true, which is why they’re always focused on hiding what they said yesterday.

Neon Revolt appears to have uncovered some sort of conspiracy to hide something related to Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the Supreme Court:

I listened last night as was immediately discouraged because, frankly, I’m hoping RBG kicks the bucket soon. She has had some recent health scares, as I’m sure you’re all aware, but here, she sounded cogent, coherent, and quite vocal…. But something was bothering me about this clip, and I wasn’t sure what it was exactly, so I returned to it early this afternoon…

I had it playing in a tab on my browser when I clicked ahead, and suddenly heard what I thought was a repeat of audio I had just heard.

“Huh, that’s weird…” I thought to myself.

I clicked back and listened again.

There was that voice again.

Kagan’s voice!

I clicked forward…

Kagan AGAIN!

It may sound crazy, but let’s face it, in light of the Mueller Report, Q is now officially more reliable as a news source than the entire mainstream media

I’ve been saying this for years. Now the children are finally getting old enough to speak for themselves:

My parents had long ago made the rule that my siblings and I weren’t allowed to use social media until we turned 13, which was late, compared to many of my friends who started using  Instagram, Wattpad, and Tumblr when we were 10 years old.

While I was sometimes curious what my sister was laughing at and commenting on, and what my friends liked about it, I didn’t really have much of an interest in social media, and since I didn’t have a smartphone and wasn’t allowed to join any sites at all until I was 13, it wasn’t much of an issue for me.

Then, several months ago, when I turned 13, my mom gave me the green light and I joined Twitter and Facebook. The first place I went, of course, was my mom’s profiles. That’s when I realized that while this might have been the first time I was allowed on social media, it was far from the first time my photos and stories had appeared online. When I saw the pictures that she had been posting on Facebook for years, I felt utterly embarrassed, and deeply betrayed.

There, for anyone to see on her public Facebook account, were all of the embarrassing moments from my childhood: The letter I wrote to the tooth fairy when I was five years old, pictures of me crying when I was a toddler, and even vacation pictures of me when I was 12 and 13 that I had no knowledge of. It seemed that my entire life was documented on her Facebook account, and for 13 years, I had no idea.

I realize this will be a very unpopular opinion in some circles, but I firmly believe that posting pictures of your children in public is fundamentally bad parenting. I wonder how many parent-child relationships will be permanently damaged because Mommy or Daddy was using their children to attention-whore.

Google’s European fines are now up to $9.5 billion in the last three years.

European Union regulators have hit Google with a $1.68 billion (1.49 billion euro/£1.28billion) fine for or blocking rival online search advertisers. It is the third multi-billion dollar EU antitrust penalty for Google’s parenting company Alphabet in just two years. The European Commission, which said the fine accounted for 1.29 percent of Google’s turnover in 2018, said in a statement that the anti-competitive practices had lasted a decade.

The EU’s competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, announced the results of the long-running probe at a news conference in Brussels on Wednesday.

‘Today’s decision is about how Google abused its dominance to stop websites using brokers other than the AdSense platform,’ Vestager said.

The commission found that Google and its parent company, Alphabet, breached EU antitrust rules by imposing restrictive clauses in contracts with websites that used AdSense, preventing Google rivals from placing their ads on these sites.

Today’s EU case concerned AdSense for Search, which placed a Google search bar on the website in question, then used any searches made through it to tailor the content of adverts that users were shown.

For example, if a user searched for ‘shoes’, they would be shown articles about shoes as well as adverts for shoes. But Google also made publishers sign contracts which initially forbid them from using a rival search engine on the same site, and later forced them to make Google’s search the most prominent used on the site. Google also required publishers to reserve the most profitable advertising spaces for adverts they supplied, and forced them to seek written approval any time they wanted to change the way rival adverts were displayed

The EU found these restrictions stifled innovation and denied rivals the chance to compete.

Google ‘prevented its rivals from having a chance to innovate and to compete in the market on their merits,’ Vestager said.  ‘Advertisers and website owners, they had less choice and likely faced higher prices that would be passed on to consumers.’

Last year Vestager hit the company with a record $5bn (£3.8bn / €4.3bn) fine following an investigation into its Android operating system. In 2017, she slapped Google with a $2.84bn (£2.1bn / €2.42bn) fine in a case involving its online shopping search results.

I strongly suspect this is why YouTube appears to be much less inclined to interfere with European-based AdSense accounts than US-based ones. Given that the EU has been willing to fine Alphabet a cumulative $10 billion for interfering with rival corporations, imagine how high the fines for consumer actions could be.

The tech giants are under the mistaken impression that the contracts they impose on everyone that declare they can do anything they want at any time to anyone are going to hold up in court. As Indiegogo is already learning, that is absolutely not true; to the contrary, the mere fact that they blithely impose these “agreements” on everyone without any input from the other parties is actually one of the more powerful legal weapons against them.

What their lawyers don’t seem to have grasped is that the legacy terminology that was perfectly sufficient when a free service was provided does not supersede centuries of contract law precedent once money starts changing hands.

If there is one thing upon which the Left and the Right can both agree, it is that Facebook should be broken up:

In a letter published when his company went public in 2012, Mark Zuckerberg championed Facebook’s mission of making the world “more open and connected.” Businesses would become more authentic, human relationships stronger, and government more accountable. “A more open world is a better world,” he wrote.

Facebook’s CEO now claims to have had a major change of heart.

In “A Privacy-Focused Vision for Social Networking,” a 3,200-word essay that Zuckerberg posted to Facebook on March 6, he says he wants to “build a simpler platform that’s focused on privacy first.” In apparent surprise, he writes: “People increasingly also want to connect privately in the digital equivalent of the living room.”

Zuckerberg’s essay is a power grab disguised as an act of contrition. Read it carefully, and it’s impossible to escape the conclusion that if privacy is to be protected in any meaningful way, Facebook must be broken up.

The reason both Left and Right can agree on this is because there are multiple reasons that Facebook should not be permitted to continue operating. It is a criminal enterprise. It is a monopoly. It is treasonous, and it is an ongoing attack on several unalienable American rights protected by the U.S. Constitution.

I find it more than a little bizarre that Republicans have not seized upon the breakup of Facebook and other social media giants as a signature policy in their 2020 campaign platform, because it is not merely a popular position, it is not only the right thing to do, but it is manifestly in their best interest.

A whole range of new plot lines suddenly occurs to me:

France intends to tax the revenue of about 30 Internet giants such as Amazon.com Inc. to help ensure “fiscal justice,” according to Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire. The levy of as much as 5 percent of French sales will start Jan. 1 and potentially raise about 500 million euros ($570 million) for the state, Le Maire told Le Parisien newspaper. Under the plan, which the cabinet will discuss on WednWednesday, the tax will apply to any company with global revenue of more than 750 million euros and French sales above 25 million euros, Le Maire said.

U.S., Chinese and European companies may meet the levy criteria, including a few French businesses, the report said, as governments grapple with how to tax global Internet giants that can generate huge domestic revenues from limited physical assets. Spain and the U.K. are also working on digital sales taxes, while Europe has so far balked at a continent-wide levy. France intends to tax revenues from local targeted ads, marketplaces and the re-selling of personal data.

The free ride for Big Internet appears to finally be over.

Project Veritas and a former Facebook insider explain some of the technical details behind how Facebook is “dethrottling” people like Steven Crowder and Mike Cernovich:

According to the insider, the documents revealed a routine suppression of the distribution of conservative Facebook pages. The technical action she repeatedly saw, and for which Project Veritas was provided documentation, was labeled ActionDeboostLiveDistribution. Said the insider, “I would see [this term] appear on several different conservative pages. I first noticed it with an account that I can’t remember, but I remember once I started looking at it, I also saw it on Mike Cernovich’s page, saw it on Steven Crowder’s page, as well as the Daily Caller’s page.”

Conservative commentator Steven Crowder’s page had been suppressed before in April 2016, and Crowder told Project Veritas they settled a dispute related to the issue with Facebook out of court. Asked for comment on this story, Steven Crowder’s attorney Bill Richmond said:

“Louder With Crowder is investigating the allegations of concealed stream throttling by Facebook. The accusations are deeply troubling given the previously settled dispute with Facebook uncovered by Gizmodo.com, which found the show was targeted by Facebook workers with secret audience restrictions on political grounds alongside other prominent conservative voices.”

A screenshot of an action log on Mike Cernovich’s Facebook page provided by the insider, shows the tag. The insider believes that the “deboost” code suppresses the distribution of livestream videos on Facebook. Project Veritas spoke to a current Facebook employee off the record who said that the code could limit a video’s visibility in news feeds, remove sharing features, and disable interactive notifications.

When approached for comment, author and filmmaker Mike Cernovich said the troubling issue is that Facebook could just “make stuff up” about people through these systems. “Facebook, or an individual at Facebook, has the unilateral power to create false allegations against someone he or she doesn’t like. The person accused not only can’t do anything about the allegation, they don’t even have an idea the allegation was made,” said Cernovich.

The insider says that unlike many actions that Facebook content moderators can take against pages, the “deboost” action, which appears to occur algorithmically, does not notify the page’s owner. “[W]ith these ‘deboost live stream’ things, there was no warning sent to the user… These were actions that were being taken without the users knowing.”

Upon further review, the insider says she did not notice the tag on any left-wing pages. “I looked at the Young Turks’ page, I looked at Colin Kaepernick’s page, none of them had received the same deboost comment.”

The “deboost” tag appears after the word “Sigma,” which Project Veritas has learned is an artificial intelligence system used to block potential suicide and self-harm posts. Both Mike Cernovich and Steven Crowder cannot recall having ever produced any videos on Facebook that promote suicide or self-harm. Mike Cernovich told Project Veritas that in fact he has long spoken out against suicide and self-harm, and provided tweets of his and a blog post as evidence.

It’s time to start building class action lawsuits against Facebook and other social media companies engaged in these false, defamatory, and materially damaging practices. And let me assure you that their terms of service don’t permit these practices, nor are their legal teams anything to be feared. Remember, despite all their financial resources, these are organizations that are seriously committed to both diversity and identity politics, with all the obvious consequences that follow from those practices.

Conservatives are going to have to stop settling out of court in ways that prevent them from commenting publicly on their experiences or divulging what they’ve learned, especially because, as Crowder has recently learned, these companies will not live up to their settlement agreements.

Facebook is relentlessly spying on people in a myriad of ways:

Facebook enabled its Android app to track and collect data from unwitting customers in order to increase advertising revenue, according to a cache of confidential internal emails that were leaked online. Some 60 pages of documents – including emails between Facebook executives – were posted anonymously on Github on Friday. The files were taken from a lawsuit between Facebook and Six4Three, an app developer, with most of them never having been published in fully unredacted form until now.

One email exchange from 2012 details plans by Facebook to use its Android app to track the location of its customers and pass data on single Facebook users to dating sites. The company also discussed providing data to organizations that wanted to target users with political ads – a business strategy that has led to scandal in the wake of alleged disinformation campaigns operating on the platform.

“This is a big win for the dating vertical specifically, but also supports our efforts to examine ‘good’ revenue opportunities resulting from policy relaxation/changes,” Marne Lynn Levine, then vice president of global public policy, wrote in support of the company’s plans.

In another message, Levine gloats about a meeting between General Martin Dempsey, then chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, and Sheryl Sandberg, noting that Dempsey and his wife are “both active Facebook users.”

The leaked documents also include a memo about a meeting between Facebook and the head of California’s eCrime unit to discuss then-California attorney general Kamala Harris’s office of privacy protection. Harris, now serving in the US Senate, announced her candidacy for president in January.

The Facebook representatives were told that Harris views the company “as a good actor” and that the privacy office “will keep communications with us open (we will not unknowingly be the subject of an investigation).”

But it’s even worse than that. Facebook also collects the data from apps used by people who are not even Facebook users.

It’s time to shut Facebook down altogether. It clearly merits the corporate equivalent of life in prison. Which raises an obvious question. If corporations have rights based on their personhood, why don’t they bear the responsibilities and potential consequence of people? A corporation that is found guilty of committing a crime should be no more able to earn an income than any other criminal who is sentenced to prison.

As an ex-libertarian, I am instinctively hostile to government regulation. But, as we have learned over the last decade, there are much worse things than regulation by nationalist governments.

Facebook deliberately broke privacy and competition law and should urgently be subject to statutory regulation, according to a devastating parliamentary report denouncing the company and its executives as “digital gangsters”.

The final report of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee’s 18-month investigation into disinformation and fake news accused Facebook of purposefully obstructing its inquiry and failing to tackle attempts by Russia to manipulate elections.

“Democracy is at risk from the malicious and relentless targeting of citizens with disinformation and personalised ‘dark adverts’ from unidentifiable sources, delivered through the major social media platforms we use every day,” warned the committee’s chairman, Damian Collins.

The report:

• Accuses Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-founder and chief executive, of contempt for parliament in refusing three separate demands for him to give evidence, instead sending junior employees unable to answer the committee’s questions.
• Warns British electoral law is unfit for purpose and vulnerable to interference by hostile foreign actors, including agents of the Russian government attempting to discredit democracy.
• Calls on the British government to establish an independent investigation into “foreign influence, disinformation, funding, voter manipulation and the sharing of data” in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, the 2016 EU referendum and the 2017 general election.
• Labour moved quickly to endorse the committee’s findings, with the party’s deputy leader, Tom Watson, announcing: “Labour agrees with the committee’s ultimate conclusion – the era of self-regulation for tech companies must end immediately.

Highly regulated corporations are not known for their performance or their innovation. But let’s face it, Ma Bell and the various utilities have served the interests of the American people considerably better than Facebook and the other social media giants have. It’s time for the national governments around the world to crack the whip and take the international digital gangsters firmly in hand by turning them into utilities.

This is one issue upon which the Left and the Right should be able to find plenty of common ground.