Tag: technology

That’s the one thing you can reliably count on. The masses simply don’t care enough about anything to ever take action unless they are starving. Techcrunch explains why so few people quit Facebook and Google… and by extension, Amazon and Twitter.

Privacy advocates will tell you that the lack of a wide boycott against Google  and particularly Facebook is symptomatic of a lack of information: if people really understood what was happening with their data, they would galvanize immediately for other platforms. Indeed, this is the very foundation for the GDPR policy in Europe: users should have a choice about how their data is used, and be fully-informed on its uses in order to make the right decision for them.

I don’t believe more information would help, and I reject the mentality behind it. It’s reminiscent of the political policy expert who says that if only voters had more information — if they just understood the issue — they would change their mind about something where they are clearly in the “wrong.” It’s incredibly condescending, and obscures a far more fundamental fact about consumers: people know what they value, they understand it, and they are making an economic choice when they stick with Google or Facebook .

Alternatives exist for every feature and app offered by these companies, and they are not hard to find. You can use Signal for chatting, DuckDuckGo for search, FastMail for email, 500px or Flickr for photos, and on and on. Far from being shameless clones of their competitors, in many cases these products are even superior to their originals, with better designs and novel features.

And yet. When consumers start to think about the costs, they balk. There’s sometimes the costs of the products themselves (FastMail is $30/year minimum, but really $50 a year or more if you want reasonable storage), but more importantly are the switching costs that come with using a new product. I have 2,000 contacts on Facebook Messenger — am I just supposed to text them all to use Signal from now on? Am I supposed to completely relearn a new photos app, when I am habituated to the taps required from years of practice on Instagram?

Surveillance capitalism has been in the news the past few weeks thanks to Shoshana Zuboff’s 704-page tome of a book “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.” But surveillance capitalism isn’t a totalizing system: consumers do have choices here, at least when it comes to consumer apps (credit scores and the reporting bureaus are a whole other beast). There are companies that have even made privacy their distinguishing feature. And consumers respond pretty consistently: I will take free with surveillance over paid with privacy.

One of the lessons I have learned — perhaps the most important you can learn about consumer products — is just how much people are willing to give up for free things. They are willing to give up privacy for free email. They are willing to allow their stock broker to help others actively trade against them for a free stock brokerage account with free trading. People love free stuff, particularly when the harms are difficult to perceive.

As a general rule, if your plan involves “waking people up with the truth”, it’s going to fail. If you consider that even Jesus Christ himself could not change a petty regional power structure with the truth, you probably shouldn’t count on anything else changing on that basis either.

As described in SJWAL, SJWs successfully swarm Roku in order to deplatform Alex Jones again:

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has been removed from Roku after the streaming platform faced fierce criticism from users, the New York Times reports.

Last year, Jones’ InfoWars channel, as well as his other media projects, were scrubbed from most major social media platforms and streaming services for violating various rules and standards. However, this week, Jones’ free channel became available on Roku devices, which are used by about 27 million people.

“After the InfoWars channel became available, we heard from concerned parties and have determined that the channel should be removed from our platform,” Roku said in a statement.

“Deletion from the channel store and platform has begun and will be completed shortly.”

You can’t run because they won’t let you run. You can’t hide because they are actively seeking out every last violator of the Narrative.

So you might as well fight.

Even people who desperately want to be considered tolerant, equalitarian, progressive, inclusive, and diverse simply can’t take the constant barrage of pressure to converge more completely anymore.

What we have had to deal with on the back-end the past few years is more than just running a conference and sharing with friends. The conference scene in general changed drastically and small pocket groups focus on outrage and disruption where there is no right answer (regardless of how you respond, it’s wrong), instead of coming together, or making the industry better. There is a small, yet vocal group of people creating negativity, polarization, and disruption, with the primary intent of self-promotion to advance a career, for personal gain, or for more social media followers. Individuals that would have us be judge, jury, and executioner for people they have had issues with outside of the conference that has nothing to do with the conference itself.

Instead of working hard in research, being a positive force in the industry, or sharing their own unique experiences (which makes us better as a whole), they tear others down in order to promote themselves. This isn’t just about DerbyCon, it is present at other conferences as well and it’s getting worse each year. We’ve spoken with a number of conference organizers, and each year it becomes substantially more difficult to host a conference where people can come together in large group settings. It’s not just conferences either. This behavior is happening all over the place on social media, in our industry, targeting people trying to do good. As a community, we add fuel to fire, attack others, and give them a platform in one massive toxic environment. We do this all in fear of repercussions from upsetting others. Until this pattern changes, it will continue to get worse.

This shouldn’t detract from real issues, and believe us, there are _real_ issues that happen. Issues that need to be dealt with when people get in large group settings. As a whole, DerbyCon has far fewer incidents than other conferences that post their statistics, and where conference safety is paramount and the #1 priority. We do listen, we do respond, and we always look to improve and get better.

This year, we had to handle issues that honestly, as an adult, we would never expect to have to handle from other adults. Conferences in general have shifted focus to not upsetting individuals and having to police people’s beliefs, politics, and feelings. Instead of coming to a conference to learn and share, it’s about how loud of a message a person can make about a specific topic, regardless of who they tear down or attempt to destroy. To put it in perspective, we had to deal with an individual that was verbally and mentally abusive to a number of our volunteer staff and security to the point where they were in tears.

This is not what we signed up for.

Admittedly, we had no idea how to handle this person, and in fear of repercussion of removing this person, allowed them to stay at the conference in order to “not upset the masses”. The best we could do was just apologize, for other apologies, and apologize more for another’s actions. This is just one example of many we have had to deal with over the past few years, and each year it becomes increasingly harder for us to handle. We do everything as a conference to ensure the safety, security, and go above and beyond that of others. Maybe that puts us on a different level where something that would normally not be an issue explodes into a catastrophic situation on social media.

Who knows? What we do know is each year it gets harder and harder.

2019 will be our last year of DerbyCon. Please know that this decision was not done in haste, and it was one of the most difficult decisions we have ever had to make in our lives. We looked at hiring third-party crisis management companies to deal with people directly, we looked at having entire companies run the conference where we would become more of the direction and vision, but at the end of the day, that is not why we started DerbyCon. It’s taken a personal toll on our lives, our businesses, and our friends, and it has gotten to the point where we don’t want to manage it anymore.

This is how we win. We are the only ones willing to actually take action against the SJWs. Everyone else is going to simply submit or quit. All these people needed to do was announce a strong anti-SJW policy, throw out the Code of Conduct and the updated Code of Conduct, and carry on with their business. But, they didn’t want to take what they knew would be the inevitable heat.

And now there is a hole in the market for anyone in that particular market to exploit. It’s not my area in any sense of the word, so I’m not interested, but if it’s in your metaphorical neck of the woods, you might want to look into it.

Now that Neocon control over the Republican Party and the alternative media has slipped despite their powerful grip on the mainstream media and talk radio, the liberal imperialist world revolutionaries who used to call themselves “neocons” are imitating the SJWs in utilizing a techno-political approach to controlling the narrative by policing what you see and hear:

The product which NewsGuard markets to the general public is a browser plugin which advises online media consumers whether a news media outlet is trustworthy or untrustworthy based on a formula with a very pro-establishment bias which sees outlets like Fox News and the US propaganda outlet Voice of America getting trustworthy ratings while outlets like RT get very low ratings for trustworthiness. This plugin dominates the bulk of what comes up when you start researching NewsGuard, but circulating a plugin which individual internet users can voluntarily download to help their rulers control their minds is not one of the more nefarious agendas being pursued by this company. The full MintPress article gives a thorough breakdown of the yucky things NewsGuard has its fingers in, but here’s a summary of five of its more disturbing revelations:

1. The company has created a service called BrandGuard, billed as a “brand safety tool aimed at helping advertisers keep their brands off of unreliable news and information sites while giving them the assurance they need to support thousands of Green-rated [i.e., Newsguard-approved] news and information sites, big and small.” Popularizing the use of this service will attack the advertising revenue of unapproved alternative media outlets which run ads. NewsGuard is aggressively marketing this service to “ad tech firms, leading agencies, and major advertisers”.

2. NewsGuard’s advisory board reads like the fellowships list of a neocon think tank, and indeed one of its CEOs, Louis Gordon Crovitz, is a Council on Foreign Relations member who has worked with the American Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation. Members of the advisory board include George W Bush’s Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, deep intelligence community insider Michael Hayden, and the Obama administration’s Richard Stengel, who once publicly supported the need for domestic propaganda in the US. All of these men have appeared in influential think tanks geared toward putting a public smiley face on sociopathic warmongering agendas.

3. Despite one of its criteria for trustworthy sources being whether or not they are transparent about their funding, the specifics of NewsGuard’s financing is kept secret.

4. NewsGuard is also planning to get its news-ranking system integrated into social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter, pursuing a partnership which will make pro-establishment media consumption a part of your experience at those sites regardless of whether or not you download a NewsGuard app or plugin.

5. NewsGuard markets itself to state governments in order to get its plugin installed in all of that state’s public schools and libraries to keep internet users from consuming unauthorized narratives. It has already succeeded in accomplishing this in the state of Hawaii, with all of its library branches now running the NewsGuard plugin.

If they were more honest, they would have simply named the company NeoConGuard, because the entire purpose of NewsGuard is to police the internet on behalf of the Israel First lobby in the United States. That’s why it is focused on upholding the Never-Trump Russia, Russia, Russia narrative and will almost certainly be used to push the state and federal anti-BDS laws as well as war in the Middle East and Ukraine, free trade, and unlimited immigration.

NeoConGuard is just a techno-political expansion of what Bill Kristol and Jon Podhoretz were trying to do with the now-failed Weekly Standard, which by Podhoretz’s own admission was “to create a publication that would help guide and keep honest the hard-charging Republican party that had scored its stunning lopsided victory over Bill Clinton’s Democrats.”

We are rapidly approaching the end of the Carrier Age with regards to sea power:

They’re the pride of the US fleet: enormous 100,000 tonne, 333m long nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. But Beijing thinks they’re Washington’s achilles heel.

Rear Admiral Lou Yuan has told an audience in Shenzhen that the ongoing disputes over the ownership of the East and South China Seas could be resolved by sinking two US super carriers.

Taiwan’s Central News Agency (CNA) reports Admiral Lou gave a wide-ranging speech on the state of Sino-US relations. The high-profile, hawkish military commentator reportedly declared the current trade spat was “definitely not simply friction over economics and trade,” but was instead a “prime strategic issue”.

His speech, delivered on December 20 to the 2018 Military Industry List summit, declared that China’s new and highly capable anti-ship ballistic and cruise missiles were more than capable of hitting US carriers, despite them being at the centre of a ‘bubble’ of defensive escorts.

“What the United States fears the most is taking casualties,” Admiral Lou declared.

He said the loss of one super carrier would cost the US the lives of 5000 service men and women. Sinking two would double that toll.

“We’ll see how frightened America is.”

I don’t think it’s an accident that both Russia and China have developed carrier-killer missiles. It’s not so much that they want to get into a conventional war, it’s that for the first time since the end of World War II, they appear to possess the ability to keep the US military from exercising air superiority or even supremacy and controlling the oceans wherever it pleases.

One carrier sinking will forever change the balance of power. And even a shift in US strategy that clearly reflects an awareness of the new vulnerability of its carriers will probably be enough to alter it substantially.

Federal regulators should keep this news in mind when they’re considering the way in which the big tech platforms speech police and deplatform while they are funding criminal filth.

Google  has scrambled to remove third-party apps that led users to child porn sharing groups on WhatsApp in the wake of TechCrunch’s report about the problem last week. We contacted Google with the name of one of these apps and evidence that it and others offered links to WhatsApp groups for sharing child exploitation imagery. Following publication of our article, Google removed from the Google Play store that app and at least five like it. Several of these apps had more than 100,000 downloads, and they’re still functional on devices that already downloaded them.

WhatsApp failed to adequately police its platform, confirming to TechCrunch that it’s only moderated by its own 300 employees and not Facebook’s  20,000 dedicated security and moderation staffers. It’s clear that scalable and efficient artificial intelligence systems are not up to the task of protecting the 1.5 billion-user WhatsApp community, and companies like Facebook must invest more in unscalable human investigators.

But now, new research provided exclusively to TechCrunch by anti-harassment algorithm startup AntiToxin shows that these removed apps that hosted links to child porn sharing rings on WhatsApp were supported with ads run by Google and Facebook’s ad networks. AntiToxin found six of these apps ran Google AdMob, one ran Google Firebase, two ran Facebook Audience Network and one ran StartApp. These ad networks earned a cut of brands’ marketing spend while allowing the apps to monetize and sustain their operations by hosting ads for Amazon, Microsoft, Motorola, Sprint, Sprite, Western Union, Dyson, DJI, Gett, Yandex Music, Q Link Wireless, Tik Tok and more.

The situation reveals that tech giants aren’t just failing to spot offensive content in their own apps, but also in third-party apps that host their ads and that earn them money. While these apps like “Group Links For Whats” by Lisa Studio let people discover benign links to WhatsApp groups for sharing legal content and discussing topics like business or sports, TechCrunch found they also hosted links with titles such as “child porn only no adv” and “child porn xvideos” that led to WhatsApp groups with names like “Children ???” or “videos cp” — a known abbreviation for “child pornography.”

They “scrambled” to remove them. But only after they were caught. How is that not a crime? After all, are we not reliably informed that the big tech platforms carefully monitor and patrol their content?

They are just the latest. More will be coming soon.

Crowdfunding site Patreon this week banned the accounts of several controversial public figures, part of a wider push by tech companies to de-platform users linked to the alt-right and far right.

The accounts of British conspiracy theorist YouTuber Carl Benjamin, better known as Sargon of Akkad, and U.S. far-right political commentator James Allsup, were removed Thursday.

The fresh bans came a day after far-right activist Milo Yiannopoulos saw his account killed — just 24 hours after he set it up to fund a “magnificent 2019 comeback” tour. The former Breitbart editor was cut off because of his association with the far-right group Proud Boys, Patreon said.

On the plus side, Jordanetics has Jordan Peterson so worried about his collapsing right flank that he’s decided to summon the powerful occult forces of the Ineffectual Dork Web and hold a marketing focus group meeting to determine what would be the best received response to these latest deplatformings.

Jordan B Peterson@jordanbpeterson
I’m doing everything I can to contact people in my circle and formulate a plan and response.

I don’t know. That sounds a little too pathological to me. I understand that the best thing one can do when deplatformed is not to resist, complain, or attempt to act in concert with anyone else, but to simply focus on living a stalwart, meaningful, and high-quality individual life.

I repeat: build your own platforms. That’s what we’re doing already. More are on the way in the new year. Also, stop using and supporting converged platforms such as Patreon, Kickstarter, and IndieGoGo, where they actually make money off your business.

It’s mildly amusing to observe how freaked out Google’s executives and managers are about the fact that everything they do is leaked out to various bloggers and reporters, considering how involved they are in tracking everything that everyone else does. I have to give Google a modicum of credit for self-discipline, though, as I’ve been expecting “rogue employees” to start trying to publicly embarrass critics by releasing emails and search histories for years.

A senior former Google employee who quit over its controversial plans to launch a search engine in China painted a picture of a company whose upper echelons are obsessed with stopping leaks, to the exclusion of almost anything else.

Jack Poulson, a former researcher at the company, said that senior managers consider the prevention of leaks to be their “number one priority.”

In comments reported on Saturday by The Times of London, Poulson cited as an example of the anti-leak culture an an unnamed senior engineer taking the microphone at an all-hands meeting to yell “F— you leakers” at his colleagues.

He said that the campaign against leaking had become a way for Google to avoid tackling the reasons staff were leaking in the first place, including concerns over the Chinese search project, code-named Dragonfly, or work for the US military.

Poulson left Google in September over Dragonfly, and said he believed four other employees had done the same. Google declined to comment on his departure at the time.

He said, according to The Times: “The narrative is that leaking is bad and that the number one priority is to prevent any leaks.”

Allow me to give you a little advice, Googlers. You will NEVER stop the leakers because a not-insignificant percentage of your colleagues are the very kind of people you have targeted for your ongoing anti-right hate campaign. They knew to keep their mouths shut, or in some cases, to present a convincing SJW front, so you think they are in accordance with your insane social justice program.

But they’re not. And they’re very, very motivated to make sure that the outside world knows exactly what you are up to. Because they think you are insane.

What we’re seeing here with Google and with Facebook is the beginning of the great Big Tech crackup that has been inevitable since they decided to publicly cast in their lots with the Left and try to thought police the Internet. That doomed them, because it sent a very clear signal to the rest of the world that they not only could not be trusted, they could not even be tolerated.

It’s hardly a surprise, but Apple has declared itself to be a Christianity-free zone:

Apple CEO Tim Cook on Monday said he believes it is “right” and “moral” for technology companies to block hate speech and violent conspiracy theories from their platforms.

“At Apple, we believe that technology needs to have a clear point of view on this challenge,” Cook said at an Anti-Defamation League (ADL) conference on Monday afternoon. At the conference, Cook accepted the ADL’s first “Courage Against Hate” award, geared towards private sector leaders “dedicated” to fighting bigotry. He was also the conference’s keynote speaker.

“That’s why we only have one message for those who seek to push hate, division and violence: You have no place on our platforms,” Cook said during his keynote address. “You have no home here.”

It’s long past time to start enforcing the West’s long-dormant blasphemy laws, and doing so with a vengeance. As I have repeatedly pointed out  to everyone, the whole “free speech” movement was never anything but an anti-Christian Fabian campaign. Now that the forces of evil feel they have sufficient power, they have rejected the intellectual tools they utilized to dislodge Christian morals and ethics from their dominant societal position in the West.

This is not just a cultural war, it is a war for the soul of the West. And it is not being fought between Right and Left, it is not even truly between Nationalist and Globalist. At its core, it is between Good and Evil, between the Truth and the Lie.

The West needs to send a very clear message for those who seek to corrupt and control it. You have no place in our civilization. I was once a big fan of the Apple II, but I will never buy another Apple product of any kind, for any reason.

Google gets caught debating the manipulation of search results on ideological grounds:

Google employees debated whether to bury conservative media outlets in the company’s search function as a response to President Donald Trump’s election in 2016, internal Google communications obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation reveal.

The Daily Caller and Breitbart were specifically singled out as outlets to potentially bury, the communications reveal.

Trump’s election in 2016 shocked many Google employees, who had been counting on Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton to win.

Communications obtained by TheDCNF show that internal Google discussions went beyond expressing remorse over Clinton’s loss to actually discussing ways Google could prevent Trump from winning again.

“This was an election of false equivalencies, and Google, sadly, had a hand in it,” Google engineer Scott Byer wrote in a Nov. 9, 2016, post reviewed by TheDCNF.

Byer falsely labeled The Daily Caller and Breitbart as “opinion blogs” and urged his coworkers to reduce their visibility in search results.

“How many times did you see the Election now card with items from opinion blogs (Breitbart, Daily Caller) elevated next to legitimate news organizations? That’s something that can and should be fixed,” Byer wrote.“I think we have a responsibility to expose the quality and truthfulness of sources – because not doing so hides real information under loud noises,” he continued….

The discussion about whether to bury conservative media outlets isn’t the first evidence that some Google employees have sought to manipulate search results for political ends. After Trump announced his initial travel ban in January 2017, Google employees discussed ways to manipulate search results in order to push back against the president’s order.

A group of employees brainstormed ways to counter “islamophobic, algorithmically biased results from search terms ‘Islam’, ‘Muslim’, ‘Iran’, etc,” as well as “prejudiced, algorithmically biased search results from search terms ‘Mexico’, ‘Hispanic’, ‘Latino’, etc.”

Well, at least they’re not threatening to physically attack any crypto-Trump supporters discovered in their midst again. Merely undermining the core purpose of the company’s existence is pretty mild in comparison. The astonishing thing is that Google continues to employ these lunatics despite knowing perfectly well that they are actively conspiring against the company’s best interests.

But that’s good news, because it means that Google is converged to the point that it is increasingly unable to perform its primary functions and will eventually be replaced. I already find Duck Duck Go entirely suitable for all my search needs and Protonmail is getting pretty close to being able to replace Gmail.