Tag: technology

I’m not surprised that the well-publicized social media bans aren’t harming Alex Jones. The truth is that social media doesn’t actually matter all that much for those who already have a strong base of supporters. It’s the content that matters much more than the medium.

Some of the nation’s largest technology and social media companies have tried to stop Alex Jones and his conspiracy theories. But in a digital world, their attempts seem to have barely slowed him down.

After YouTube, Facebook and others this week removed content by Jones and his website, the InfoWars leader, talk show host and Austin resident fired back, accusing the companies of censorship and urging his audience to fight back against what he called an “unprecedented attack.”

Meanwhile, Jones’ website and other online platforms have remained popular destinations.

InfoWars continues to see more than 1 million page visits per day and has trended upward this month, according to Amazon’s Alexa website traffic report, which also said InfoWars averages more than 25 million page views per month.

Being banned from Twitter last year and having links to my blog blocked by Twitter and Facebook haven’t had any serious effect on my blog either. Last year at this time, the monthly traffic average for VP alone was 2,500,791. Now it is 2,604,358, which represents 4.1 percent annual growth.

Given the massive Twitter audiences that Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec have developed – I had 33k when I was banned – it’s likely that the bans have somewhat slowed the growth of the blog and Voxiversity. But they obviously haven’t stopped it, which I suspect is one reason why the tech media giants have only engaged in fairly limited banning in response to the demands of their SJWs, who would prefer to ban everyone who is a Republican, who ever voted for a Republican, or is to the Right of Che Guevara.

These bans are a very delicate balancing game for the social media giants. They already know we have built a few alternative platforms and have the ability to build more. And they are very well aware that there is a tipping point somewhere at which too many bans will trigger a snowball effect that will more than decimate their user bases. After all, both Facebook and Twitter are already in decline.

CNBC describes the drop at Facebook as “severe” and goes on to round out its list this way: “The five websites receiving the most traffic in the US in the last several years have been Google, Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo and Amazon, in that order. However, Facebook has seen a severe decline in monthly page visits, from 8.5 billion to 4.7 billion in the last two years, according to the study. Although Facebook’s app traffic has grown, it is not enough to make up for that loss, the study said.”

Twitter isn’t content with losing money and hemorrhaging users, so they’re going to drive even more people away just to prove that no one, not Facebook, not Apple, not YouTube, not Spotify, can speech-police more enthusiastically than Twitter does:

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on Wednesday signaled a coming change to his company’s speech policies, following pressure from his own employees

• Some Twitter employees are unhappy that Twitter has yet to join Facebook, Spotify, Apple and YouTube in banning right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones
• Twitter is planning to accelerate a crackdown on “hate speech” and is looking to evaluate whether to punish users for “off-platform behavior,” according to a company-wide email sent on Wednesday
• Twitter is planning to accelerate changes to the company’s speech policies after a backlash from its own employees who want the company to ban right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, responding to a critical tweet from a Twitter engineer, said Wednesday he is “not happy” with Twitter’s current policies, which he said need to “evolve.”

Twitter vice president Del Harvey also sent a company-wide email Wednesday pledging to accelerate Twitter’s efforts to crack down on “dehumanizing hate speech,” in the wake of internal “conversations” about Jones.

Harvey noted that Twitter also plans to evaluate whether the company needs to better police “off-platform behavior.”

It’s clearly time to revive the blasphemy laws, many of which are still on the books. Now, here’s the interesting thing about Twitter’s rules and policies. According to their own policies, they should start banning their own employees for abusive behavior in their attempt to silence Alex Jones.

Forget the thought policing. Forget the Infowars ban. Facebook is going to get a LOT worse very soon.

The social-media giant has asked large U.S. banks to share detailed financial information about their customers, including card transactions and checking-account balances, as part of an effort to offer new services to users.

Facebook increasingly wants to be a platform where people buy and sell goods and services, besides connecting with friends. The company over the past year asked JPMorgan Chase JPM 0.03{00e165f4fa25eece8620911fb25595762b8a82f0e9f17ab7d11d67b2fdd0d1a9} & Co., Wells Fargo WFC 0.10{00e165f4fa25eece8620911fb25595762b8a82f0e9f17ab7d11d67b2fdd0d1a9} & Co., Citigroup Inc. C 0.01{00e165f4fa25eece8620911fb25595762b8a82f0e9f17ab7d11d67b2fdd0d1a9} and U.S. Bancorp USB 0.04{00e165f4fa25eece8620911fb25595762b8a82f0e9f17ab7d11d67b2fdd0d1a9} to discuss potential offerings it could host for bank customers on Facebook Messenger, said people familiar with the matter.

At this point, if you’re still on Facebook, you’re not merely putting your children’s privacy at risk and aiding and abetting your would-be destroyer, you’re downright stupid. I’ve never been banned from Facebook, I used it sparingly at best, and I got rid of my account anyhow. The ability to indirectly exchange pictures with your extended family or cyberstalk your high school boyfriend just isn’t worth it.

If you need to have group communications, get on Idka. If you want more conventional social media, try Oneway. Or go radio dark if that suits you. But regardless, at the very least, deactivate your Facebook account and encourage your friends and family to do the same. It’s not going to get better.

I’ll bet they’re celebrating landing this contract:

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) (BSE: 532540, NSE: TCS), a leading global IT services, consulting and business solutions organization, and the Wyoming Department of Workforce Services (DWS) are celebrating the launch of a new Unemployment Insurance system this week – WYUI – for the State of Wyoming. The WYUI solution is a fully modernized Unemployment Insurance system that will improve the way claimants interact with the state with a more user-friendly interface and expanded self-service capabilities.

TCS’ WYUI solution is a robust, scalable and repeatable platform with the ability to integrate and control multiple functional requirements, including online claims processing, payments, adjudication, and appeals. The WYUI implementation is also one of the first in the United States to be developed, tested and implemented in Microsoft Azure in such a short time frame, and within budget. Hosting the new system on Azure makes it more scalable than the previous system, and as the data housed in the system continues to grow, the system itself can be expanded.

TCS has already enabled several U.S. states to modernize their systems to support Unemployment Insurance programs, including Mississippi and Maine, as part of the ReEmployUSA Consortium. By partnering with Wyoming’s DWS, TCS has replaced a 34-year-old benefits and appeal legacy system with a modernized system, within a span of less than 20 months.

About Tata Consultancy Services Ltd (TCS)
Tata Consultancy Services is an IT services, consulting and business solutions organization that has been partnering with many of the world’s largest businesses in their transformation journeys for the last fifty years. TCS offers a consulting-led, cognitive powered, integrated portfolio of IT, Business & Technology Services, and engineering. This is delivered through its unique Location Independent Agile delivery model, recognized as a benchmark of excellence in software development. A part of the Tata group, India’s largest multinational business group, TCS has more than 400,000 of the world’s best-trained consultants in 46 countries.

What a truly virtuous cycle! Put American workers out of work, then get paid to process the transfer payments between the state government and the unemployed workers. Imagine how much money can be transferred to Indiasaved by replacing the entire Social Security Administration with Tata Consultancy Services!

Something BIG is about to drop.
Q

Facebook plunges more than 24 percent on revenue miss and projected slowdown

The tech-heavy Nasdaq was set for a big down day Thursday after disappointing quarterly results from Facebook sent the social media giant hurtling toward its biggest share price decline ever and on track to lose more than $125 billion in market value.

The Invesco QQQ Trust, which tracks the Nasdaq 100 index and can give traders a good idea of how the Nasdaq stocks will trade, was down more than 2 percent at one point in after-hours trading Wednesday. At last count, the ETF was off by about 1.5 percent. Nasdaq futures opened lower Wednesday evening, off by about 0.8 percent. Facebook lost more than a fifth of its value after hours.

Mark Zuckerberg tries to use China as an excuse to avoid antitrust law:

Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has hit back at the idea Facebook has become too big and should be broken up into smaller companies. The 34-year-old spent two days testifying about his company and answering questions – something he suggested an overseas company the size of Facebook would be less inclined to do.

‘I think you can bet that, if the government here is worried about…  whether it’s election interference or terrorism… I don’t think Chinese companies are going to want to cooperate as much and aid the national interest there,’ he said.

Zuckerberg also spoke out against the US constraining its own companies, noting it would only give way to overseas – specifically Chinese – competitors.

‘If we adopt a stance which is that, we’re going to, as a country, decide to clip the wings of these companies and make it so it’s harder for them to operate in different places or they have to be smaller, then there are plenty of other companies out there willing and able to take the place of the work that we’re doing,’ he said.

‘And they do not share the values that we have.’

Neither do white Christian Americans, Mark. So break Facebook up already. I’d vastly prefer civilized Chinese rule, which has a long track record of societal success, to rule by the techno-parasites of the neoliberal world order, who have already demonstrated their complete lack of ability to even grasp the basic concept of societal sustainability.

A notorious SJW explains why he won’t be attending a technology conference.

I’m not going to get into the specific policies carried out by the prevailing administration in the United States, including their targeting of transgender people, queer people, people of color, and health and reproductive rights. You can google that.

But the inclusion of this language, making political affiliation a protected class, leads me to believe that alt-right technologists would be as welcome at the conference as I would be. Including alt-right technologists who display on their clothing, for example, neo-Nazi insignia. Or t-shirts printed with anti-trans or anti-Black slogans. These could easily be interpreted as protected political speech.

To be clear, the code of conduct as it was written in 2016 already prohibited harassment of all kinds, including harassment of a political nature. But the 2017 language makes political affiliation a protected class, which means by my reading (and the Wikipedia definition) that people of specific political affiliations qualify for special protection by the authorities in charge of the event. This is a subtle but important distinction. This is an elevation of political affiliation– an actively chosen belief system– to the same level as race or gender or sexual orientation, which are not chosen traits.

You can’t make marginalized people– who are enumerated as a protected class– feel safe, and simultaneously make members of political groups who stand violently opposed to us feel welcome. And it doesn’t matter if these people act nicely in public. The very act of placing these two groups on equal footing puts marginalized people directly in harm’s way. And how would conflicts between these protected groups be handled?

See, his rights have to be protected, because if you have rights, that would harm him. And if he can’t get special treatment, he’s staying home. Which is not a bad thing, considering that he was Patient Zero for the Code of Conduct infestation in open source.

Take note, conference organizers. This is how you get rid of them without a fuss. All you have to do is make political affiliation a protected class.

Or rather, “suspends her account”. Of course, “suspension” is Twitter-speak for banning.

Hello Spacebunny Day,

Your account, Spacebunnyday has been suspended for violating the Twitter Rules.

Specifically, for:

Violating our rules against abusive behavior.
You may not engage in the targeted harassment of someone, or incite other people to do so. We consider abusive behavior an attempt to harass, intimidate, or silence someone else’s voice.

Note that if you attempt to evade a permanent suspension by creating new accounts, we will suspend your new accounts.

Her thoughtcrime was to tell a very stupid woman who had been harassing her that she was stupid. Strange, I don’t remember anyone ever being permanently suspended for telling me that.

From the transcript of the Darkstream.

There’s a lot of folks, especially on the Right, who would have a tendency to say, “well you know, what’s the problem with that? I mean everybody has a right to sell to whoever they want to etc etc etc.” Right, and that’s true if you’re looking at it from a theoretical point of view, but the reality is we don’t live in a free economy, we don’t live in a society where you are simply allowed to go and set up a bank with 200 dollars and begin payment processing and issuing credit and all that sort of thing anymore.

I don’t think it was even a hundred years ago – somebody mentioned this on the blog – barely a hundred years ago it was possible to set up a bank for 200 bucks, start making loans, and that was how Regions Bank was founded originally. But you can’t do that now because the banks – just like the hairdressers and just like every other self-interested group of people – have arranged to set up tremendous regulatory barriers, huge barriers to entry. For example, in, I believe it was Georgia, you needed to have 1,500 hours of training in order to be allowed to braid hair professionally!

Now this is ridiculous, as anyone who has been around junior high school girls for more than about 20 minutes will know. They sit around braiding each other’s hair all the time, they don’t need to spend fifteen hundred hours to be able to do it, and so what we are seeing is a private version of what was described as Operation Chokepoint by the Obama administration. Operation Chokepoint was a plan to deny banking and financial services to companies that were selling guns. If you’re in the gun industry in any way, they were planning to target those companies, and in fact they are actually still doing so, but again on a private level because Hillary Clinton is not President, and so that’s why you’re seeing companies like Intuit, which owns Quicken, Intuit targeted I believe it was a gun retailer and possibly some gun manufacturers as well, and they’re simply not working with them now.

You know, this is absolutely ridiculous considering that we have been indoctrinated for the past however many years, it’s been 58 years or so, that you have no right to deny service to anyone for any reason. Suddenly now that the Left has completed its long march through the institutions, suddenly they are going to deny all that, they’re going to attempt to deny the financial oxygen to all the  companies and all the people they don’t like now. I’m not shocked by this. I’m not alarmed by this, you know, I’m a Christian and  we’ve been we’ve been told about the Mark of the Beast and and being
denied the ability to buy things, that that sort of persecution would happen since I was a kid at Sunday school. Now I have to admit I didn’t expect to see it taking this kind of form, but it is.

So much for Stripe as a Paypal alternative.

I thought I might share a few thoughts with you on what I regard as the biggest issue of our time: tech apartheid.

Silicon Valley wants you to believe that it is a force for good but the evidence of its bias and fraudulent dealings couldn’t be more obvious even to a fair, impartial observer.

Most recently this duplicity concerns payment processing, namely the fraudulent company Stripe which canceled FreeStartr’s account despite record low chargebacks. FreeStartr wasn’t alone. All of those companies who had their accounts suspended — Bitchute (a YouTube competitor), MakerSupport (a Patreon competitor), and FreeStartr.com (a Patreon, Kickstarter competitor)– were created by Trump supporters.

This canceling of our business was done for political reasons by Edwin Wee, a Democratic political operative turned Stripe employee, and it exposes the libertarian lie that one can simply just go and create a competitor if one dislikes Silicon Valley ventures. You can’t. We need to get over that canard.

I’ll delve into the parochial issues concerning FreeStartr’s banning from Stripe later, but I am thoroughly convinced that if action isn’t taken in the very near future, our politics will be permanently titled to the far left for the foreseeable future. Ask your congressmen, your friends, to speak out on this issue and take necessary corrections.

We’ve had other discussions about the censorship and Google, Facebook, and Twitter, and yes, those trends are extremely worrisome. But what I’m talking about here as concerns Stripe and PayPal is far more dangerous both for politics and for our society writ large.

Every regime has scapegoats, and ours is no different. Whether you’ve participated in a Twitter mob and/or been its target, you know its power. Ours is a herd based species, and it is quite disturbing the speed with which mores can shift. What was once commonplace — big game hunting, smoking, corporal punishment, etc., — become frowned upon, then the province of cranks, and ultimately unthinkable. There is increasingly good social science evidence for how this process unfolds — where a small minority changes the standards of behavior in a population. Sometimes these changes are so abrupt as to be jarring and yes, even violent. Twitter mobs force you off of their platforms and begin the practice of targeting your employment, your spouse’s employment, etc. until you are ruined. There is no due process here.

One has to wonder what the people at Stripe are thinking. If they’re just going to be another arm of SJW enforcement, there is simply no need for their services. One might as well not use Paypal as not use Stripe, after all….

Voxiversity supporters, I think the smart move is to wait and see how Freestartr handles this before we come up with any alternative plans in order to keep the video offensive going.