Tag: technology

FBI assassination threats?

No wonder the FBI is so desperate to bury the text messages sent between their agents and executives:

A high-ranking FBI official confirms a number of the missing 50,000 FBI text messages — as well as other text and email messages among FBI brass — reportedly discussed initiating physical harm to President Donald Trump.

The FBI official urged the U.S. Department of Homeland Security — which oversees the U.S. Secret Service  — to launch an investigation of the Justice Department, the FBI and all text messages missing and otherwise that threatened the President.

“This is dangerous territory and all FBI text messages and personal phones should be examined,” the official said. “It would reveal some frightening conversations.”

Did FBI brass discuss the assassination of President Donald Trump? If not, what was the nature of the threats against the president from inside the alleged premiere law enforcement agency in the United States?

“(Director) Wray wants a lid on this,” the FBI official said. “Many know there was talk of harming Trump politically but there is a group here (in D.C. HQ) that understands it goes deeper. We need a special counsel or Homeland Security. Somebody has to clean this up outside of DOJ. It is unacceptable.

“This is much larger than just texts between two FBI agents.”

The FBI official called on President Trump to do what is necessary to weed out corruption in the FBI.

“Text messages just don’t disappear,” the FBI official said. “Not here. Someone outside DOJ has to look at all emails and texts. These (FBI bosses) are bad people. You’ve only scratched the surface.”

The high-ranking FBI official called on lawmakers and the Inspector General to focus on the text and email messages of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. The official referred to McCabe’s official and personal correspondences “an anti-Trump treasure trove.”

Q was right, apparently. These people are not only evil, they are stupid as well. I mean, they know better than anyone else that all electronic communications are monitored somewhere, by someone.

How to be in charge

Without actually being in charge. Google’s Sundar Pichai demonstrates what it means for a CEO to serve at the will and pleasure of the SJWs nominally under his authority:

Google CEO Sundar Pichai responded today to the firing of employee James Damore over his controversial memo on workplace diversity, stating that while he does not regret the decision, he regrets that people misunderstood it as a politically motivated event. Speaking in a live conversation with journalist and Recode co-founder Kara Swisher, MSNBC host Ari Melber, and YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki in San Francisco, Pichai said that the decision to fire Damore was about ensuring women at Google felt like the company was committed to creating a welcoming environment.

“I regret that people misunderstand that we may have made this for a political belief one way or another,” Pichai said. “It’s important for the women at Google, and all the people at Google, that we want to make an inclusive environment.” When pressed by Swisher on the issue of regret, Pichai stated more definitively, “I don’t regret it.” Wojcicki, who has spoken publicly about how Damore’s memo affected her personally, followed up with, “I think it was the right decision.”

It’s not political, it’s just about women’s feelings. Apparently this walking, talking corporate debacle has never heard of either a) feminism or b) the feminist mantra “the personal is the political”.

I had an interesting conversation with Nitasha Tiku, a senior writer at Wired, last night. She’s working on a story about how the poor, powerless executives and managers at Google feel frightened, intimidated, and harassed because James Damore, Charles Johnson, and others have exposed how they harass, intimidate, and blacklist their coworkers, how they hate everyone who voted for Donald Trump, and how they can get away with openly threatening their colleagues with violence and unemployment without suffering any consequences for their behavior.

Poor, poor Googlers. Why can’t they harass their victims with impunity in secret?

As I pointed out to Ms Tiku, I and a number of other outsiders have known about what has been taking place behind the scenes at Google for years. I even wrote about it after the election, nine months before the Damore memo was leaked to the public by SJWs.

Internal pressure is pushing for the expansion of hate speech to include everything and everyone that fails to submit to the SJW narrative, for more intense action against so-called “fake news”, and even broader definitions of “fake news”. So far, they are only cracking down on genuinely fake news, but there is some belief that this is the proverbial dipping the toe in the water, to see what they can do without provoking a backlash.

The victory of the God-Emperor Ascendant was a massive blow to the SJWs inside Google, and like most SJWs, they have completely lost the plot post-election. They were openly calling other Googlers racists, sexists, and homophobes just for voting for Trump. Those are firing offenses at Google. Google has insane civility requirements imposed on anyone talking to a member of a protected group, but apparently calling for all Republicans to be fired is perfectly acceptable.

Everyone ignored this. Then James Damore and I provided incontrovertible proof that Googlers were, in fact, behaving every bit as badly as I had said they were. So now, having been accused, exposed, and caught red-handed, they’re trying to spin documented proof of their own misbehavior as some sort of harassment, and they are attempting to enlist the media as their ad hoc defense attorneys in order to change the subject.

Amazon’s next market

I refuse to use any of these smart, voice-activated devices or to have one in my home. It astonishes me that anyone does:

Amazon wants to put a camera and microphone in your bedroom with the UK launch of its latest Echo home device. The camera on the £119.99 ($129) Echo Spot, which doubles up as a ‘smart alarm’, will probably be facing directly at the user’s bed.  The device, which is already available in the US has such sophisticated microphones it can hear people talking from across the room – even if music is playing.

However, there remain privacy concerns over using such a device in the home. Amazon devices have previously activated when they’re not wanted meaning this small device could turn into a potential spy.

Five years from now, I’m sure we’ll all be shocked when Amazon unveils that it is adding adult channels to all of its streaming services, with a library bigger than all of its rivals combined.

The most hostile work environment on the planet

James Damore’s lawsuit is making it clear to everyone just how toxic the work environment is at Google. It is so extreme that even Rod Dreher has taken notice of the lethal convergence.

7. ‘Discourage them all throughout the industry’
“If we really care about diversity in tech, we don’t just need to chase serial offenders out of Google, we need to discourage them all throughout the industry,” a lengthy internal post on Damore read. “We should be willing to give a wink and a nod to other Silicon Valley employers over terminable offenses, not send the worst parts of tech packing with a smile …”

8. ‘I will hurt you’
Damore’s memo prompted another employee to post this quote: “I’m a queer-ass nonbinary trans person that is fucking sick and tired of being told to open a dialogue with people who want me dead. We are at a point where the dialogue we need to be having with these people is ‘if you keep talking about this shit, i will hurt you.”

9. ‘Relies on crowdsourced harassment’
Google encourages employees to enforce unwritten norms by harassing and ostracizing those who break them, according to the suit, and by allowing employees to create “blocklists” on their communications systems. “[Google] relies on crowdsourced harassment and ‘pecking’ to enforce social norms (including politics) that it feels it cannot write directly into its policies,” the suit states.

11. ‘You’re being blacklisted…at companies outside Google’
Google manager Adam Fletcher wrote in 2015 he would never hire conservatives he deemed hold hostile views. “I will never, ever hire/transfer you onto my team,” he wrote. “Ever. I don’t care if you are perfect fit or technically excellent or whatever. I will actively not work with you, even to the point where your team or product is impacted by this decision. I’ll communicate why to your manager if it comes up. You’re being blacklisted by people at companies outside of Google,” he added. “You might not have been aware of this, but people know, people talk. There are always social consequences.”

It’s really rather remarkable how completely out of control the big technology companies are. And it’s going to be even more remarkable to see how fast they collapse once the artificial circumstances keeping them afloat change. They are like hollow, cancer-ridden giants and I expect that several of them will vanish as soon as the debt-equity bubble pops.

Convergence tends to metastasize after a company hits its peak. We’re seeing this in industry after industry, and particularly in corporations whose executives start to believe their position is unassailable.

Photo-preening is wrong and illegal

You can’t say that I haven’t repeatedly warned you about the negative consequences of photo-preening online at your children’s expense:

An Italian woman has been banned from posting images of her teenage son on social media, and threatened with a 10,000 euro fine if she defies it.

The 16-year-old had made a court complaint about his mother’s social media habits, which included posting pictures of him on Facebook without his consent.

A Rome family court dealing with the mother’s divorce from the teen’s father, ruled in the 16-year-old’s favour. The court ruled that as per Italian copyright law, the subject of the photographs owns the copyright and the mother was therefore in breach.

It’s natural to be proud of your children. But they do not exist to serve your ego, and as a parent, you should be far more concerned about protecting their privacy and their futures than in trying to demonstrate to everyone what a wonderful father or mother you are, or how fabulous your genetic legacy happens to be, or showing the distant relatives they barely know what they look like. That’s what Christmas cards are for.

Posting your children’s pictures online without their consent is obnoxious, self-serving, and potentially dangerous. It is also illegal in an increasing number of jurisdictions. Just don’t do it.

Even being a woman in tech won’t help

An actual female programmer discovers that actually being a woman who genuinely works in tech doesn’t protect you from Tech SJWs once you violate the Narrative:

To be clear, right from the start: I never actually did anything wrong. I didn’t egregiously violate any codes of conduct. (Quite frankly, even if I had, I have no idea how, why, or when it might have happened, since my “accusers” refuse to tell me.) My only “crime” is being an outspoken, albeit moderate, conservative who doesn’t prescribe to the radical feminist narrative of many women in STEM groups. I’ve questioned some of their talking points and, at times, I’ve vehemently disagreed with some of their views, but I nonetheless support their mission of supporting and advocating for women in technology.

By telling the story of how I got mercilessly smeared and ostracized by the leadership and members of two prominent women in tech groups, Women Who Code and Google’s Women Techmakers, my hope is to encourage other people to speak up and to fight back if they’re the victims of bullying. It’s important to recognize that women can, and do, bully each other, and in the tech industry, it is unfortunately a problem that is all too often ignored and even denied, because other factors like racial bias, sexism, and even sexual harassment are typically blamed for an unfavorable attrition rate of women in tech.

The thing is, it’s all nonsense. Very few women actually want to work in tech, and even fewer will want to do so surrounded by foreign H1B Gammas and Omegas imported by the tech giants. But it is a salutary lesson in learning that no one who violates the Narrative is off limits, no matter what victim cards you can play.

If anything, SJWs crack down even harder on women and other victim classes who refuse to accept their victimhood, because no one is more threatening to the SJWs’ right to speak on their behalf.

The sex criminals of Seattle

High-level employees at Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are busted for prostitution- and sex trafficking-related crimes:

Several Seattle employees of both Google and Amazon were busted after using their corporate accounts to send emails to local brothels and pimps looking to purchase services from sex workers trafficked from Asia, according to emails obtained by Newsweek.

“[E]mails obtained by Newsweek reveal another sordid corner of the tech sector’s treatment of women: a horny nest of prostitution “hobbyists” at tech giants Microsoft, Amazon and other firms in Seattle’s high tech alley.”

Many of the emails were swept up in a 2015 sting operation which targeted online chat rooms and message boards in which customers rate sex workers – resulting in the arrest of 18 of these “prostitution hobbyists,” including several high level Amazon and Microsoft directors – two of which are currently scheduled for trial in March.

Seattle brothels had been catering to Microsoft employees through several “backpage.com” ads located nearby the company’s Redmond, WA headquarters, in what is becoming a booming business.

No names were mentioned. What do you want to bet that most of them are reflective of New/Not American heritage?

Of course, you have to wonder what the poor employees of these SJW-converged companies are supposed to do. They certainly don’t dare express any interest in their female colleagues or they’ll be denounced and disemployed.

Auto-deleted or banned?

Regardless of the reason, the Twitter account of Julian Assange has disappeared:

The official Twitter account of controversial Wikileaks founder Julian Assange — @JulianAssange — isn’t showing up.

Instead, anyone trying to reach it gets this message: Sorry that page doesn’t exist.

It wasn’t clear whether the account was suspended or deleted by Twitter or Assange himself — or why or for how long. Twitter wasn’t commenting.

The official Wikileaks Twitter account was still live but wasn’t mentioning the Assange account.

An account purporting to be an alternative Assange account was claiming Twitter had deleted his official one ahead of a blockbuster story he’s preparing to break. There was no confirmation that Assange was authoring that alternative account — and that account has now been suspended by Twitter.

But did it do so of the account owner’s volition or not? That is the question. The one thing that is clear is that Assange’s account wasn’t perma-suspended like mine. But as to whether it was Twitter or Assange who deleted the account, we can’t know until one of them accepts or rejects responsibility. My assumption is that Assange deleted it himself, because Twitter seems to prefer the softer approach of permanent suspensions to outright bans.

Throttling their own tech

Despite being a very early fan – I had both an Apple //e and an original Macintosh as well as a Macintosh SE – I despise what Apple has become. And with good cause; they are an SJW-converged and fundamentally dishonest corporation:

Apple has long inspired an almost religious devotion among customers and tech aficionados — but it just seriously undermined its fans’ faith and loyalty.

The company on Wednesday acknowledged what some people have long suspected: that it has been secretly stifling the performance of older iPhones.

Critics have accused the company in the past, based on anecdotal evidence, of purposely slowing phones to compel users to upgrade to the latest model. While Apple admitted to the practice on Wednesday, it sought to underscore that it had done so for a purely altruistic reason: to prevent older phones from shutting down unexpectedly.

The justification hasn’t mollified Apple’s outraged fans. If anything, the company’s statement has stoked the conspiracy theories, and for good reason.

Now they’re lying about the reason for their despicable behavior. Can you honestly say you are even a little bit surprised?

Spammees double down

Some of you have been complaining that Blogger has tightened its spam filters and you’ve been getting caught up in it. First of all, this is true and it is why we have been seeing less spam and fewer trolls of late. Second, I am completely unsympathetic because this is exactly what I told you would happen if you touched the poop. You were warned, you couldn’t control yourself, you did it, and now you’re suffering the consequences.

Third, if you’re dumb enough to try to defeat the spam filters by – and I cannot believe I actually have to point this out to anyone – reposting exactly the same comment that was previously spammed, all you’re doing is confirming to the spam filters that you are a spammer. You’re actually making the situation worse for yourself, because while the moderators can remove a single spammed comment from the filters, reposted comments get deleted, which strengthens the filters’ confidence that your comments are, indeed, spam that merits removal.

In the event that your comment fails to appear or mysteriously vanishes, the correct thing to do is nothing. Do not alert me or the moderators. Do not attempt to immediately comment again and absolutely do not repost your cut-and-pasted comment. If a single comment from a known commenter is seen in the spam, it will eventually be seen and restored by the moderators and the spam filters will gradually learn over time that your comments are not spam. In the meantime, rest assured that the other readers will do their best to survive despite being temporarily bereft of your valuable insights.