Tag: technology

Confirming convergence

It doesn’t really matter if a company backs down on its convergence due to a backlash. The point is, the mask has slipped.

The National Trust has reversed a decision to bar volunteers from public-facing duties at a Norfolk stately home if they refuse to wear rainbow sexual equality symbols.

Staff at Felbrigg Hall in Norfolk were offered behind-the-scenes roles after saying they were “uncomfortable” wearing multicoloured badges and lanyards for a “Prejudice and Pride” event marking 50 years since the decriminalisation of homosexuality.

The decision came after a new film made by the National Trust revealed that Robert Wyndham Ketton-Cremer, the hall’s last owner who bequeathed it to the nation, was gay.

The land and home conservation charity said on Saturday that wearing the badges was now “optional and a personal decision” for volunteers and staff. A trust spokesman said: “We remain absolutely committed to our Pride programme, which will continue as intended, along with the exhibition at Felbrigg. “owever, we are aware that some volunteers had conflicting personal opinions about wearing the rainbow lanyards and badges. That was never our intention. We are therefore making it clear to volunteers that the wearing of the badge is optional and a personal decision.”

On a not-unrelated note:

Hey voxday,

Congrats! Review all the perks that come with verification or just watch this video. Also be sure to check out these handy pointers to help you make the most of Vidme.

If you ever have questions or just want to chat, feel free to shoot us an email anytime. We’re super excited to have you as a part of the Vidme community!

Share your new verified status with your fans:

♥ Team Vidme

Now, I’m not going to slam people that have taken a step in the right direction. On the other hand, I’m not inclined to trust them either. The fact is that converged or not, they’re simply not as bad as YouTube and there are no unconverged options.

So, I will resume posting select Periscope and other videos there. But I will be relying upon a more reliable service for Voxiversity.

YouTube restricts “extremist” content

And by extremist, they don’t mean what you might think they mean:

YouTube has been working on ways to manage offensive and extremist content that do and do not violate its policies, and some steps it has taken include AI-assisted video detection and removal as well as input from more experts. Today, in a blog post, the company provided more detail about its ongoing efforts.

First, its machine learning video detection has been hard at work and during the past month over 75 percent of videos taken down because of violent, extremist content were done so without the help of humans. This system has helped YouTube remove twice as many of these sorts of videos. The company has also started working with a number of non-governmental organizations including the Anti-Defamation League, the No Hate Speech Movement and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. “These organizations bring expert knowledge of complex issues like hate speech, radicalization, and terrorism that will help us better identify content that is being used to radicalize and recruit extremists,” said YouTube in the blog post.

For videos that contain “controversial religious or supremacist content” but don’t violate any of YouTube’s policies, they’ll now be placed in a “limited state.” YouTube said, “The videos will remain on YouTube behind an interstitial, won’t be recommended, won’t be monetized, and won’t have key features including comments, suggested videos, and likes.” It says that the limited state will start being applied to desktop versions in the coming weeks and will hit mobile versions shortly thereafter.

YouTube said that these changes are just the beginning and it will be sharing more about its work in the months ahead. “Altogether, we have taken significant steps over the last month in our fight against online terrorism. But this is not the end. We know there is always more work to be done,” it said.

They actually mean people like Dr. Jordan Peterson of the University of Toronto. And, one has to presume, the 36 individuals on the ADL’s hit list.

A professor in Canada who refuses to use gender-neutral pronouns and criticizes social justice issues was banned from using his Google and YouTube accounts Tuesday, regaining access hours later with no detailed explanation provided.

Professor Jordan B. Peterson of the University of Toronto disputed Google and YouTube’s decision to lock him out of his accounts, according to correspondence obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation.

“Please tell me what principle I have violated,” said Peterson in his email to Google upon discovering that he was locked out of his account. “I have not violated any terms that I am aware of and have not misused my account.”

The psychology professor has over 350,000 subscribers on his YouTube channel, which he uses as a platform to post his lectures, interviews, and Q&As.

“We understand you’ve recently been unable to access your Google account, and we appreciate you contacting us,” said Google in a response. “After review, your account is not eligible to be reinstated due to a violation of our Terms of Service.”

But Google did not provide any details regarding which rule the professor violated.

The changes are just beginning….

A failure of SJW

In an announcement that will surprise precisely no one in the Alt-Tech movement, Twitter has ceased to expand its user base:

Twitter shares tumble as it reveals it has added NO new users in the past three months. Twitter had 328 million average monthly active users (MAU) in the three months through June 30, unchanged from the previous quarter.  Analysts were expecting 328.8 million, according to financial data and analytics firm FactSet. Shares had run up some 40 percent since mid-April as Twitter investors bet on another quarter of growth after the microblogging service reported adding 9 million more monthly active users than expected in the first quarter.

Apparently the SJW-run Trust & Safety Council is engendering neither. And I note that 800,000 is pretty close to the number of people who are now on Gab. Apparently Alt-Tech can have an impact on the social media giants even before they launch serious bids to replace them.

The DNC-Pakistan connection

While NeverTrump and the media is still muttering RUSSIA-RUSSIA-RUSSIA like a crazed homeless man, the FBI is actively investigating the DNC-Pakistan connection:

FBI agents seized smashed computer hard drives from the home of Florida Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s information technology (IT) administrator, according to two sources with knowledge of the investigation.

Pakistani-born Imran Awan, long-time right-hand IT aide to the former Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairwoman, has since desperately tried to get the hard drives back, an individual whom FBI investigators interviewed in the case told The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group.

An additional source in Congress with direct knowledge of the case, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the probe, confirmed that the FBI has joined what Politico previously described as a Capitol Police criminal probe into “serious, potentially illegal, violations on the House IT network” by Imran and three of his relatives, who had access to the emails and files of the more than two dozen House Democrats who employed them on a part-time basis.

Capitol Police have also seized computer equipment tied to the Florida lawmaker….

Soon after Imran began working for Wasserman Schultz in 2005, his two brothers and two of their wives — plus Abbas and another friend — began appearing as IT staffers on the payrolls of other House Democrats. Collectively, the Awan group has been paid $4 million since 2009.

Fellow IT staffers TheDCNF interviewed said the Awans were often absent from weekly meetings and email exchanges. One of the fellow staffers said some of the computers the Awans managed were being used to transfer data to an off-site server.

One of the many, many reasons you don’t want to hire Indian or Pakistani IT guys. They can’t even manage to correctly wipe their hard drives when desperately needed to do so.

The fabrication of an anti-Trump attack

Remember, /pol/ is always right. Not only has Weaponized Autism demonstrated that the Russian Server story is bogus, they have identified the locus for the attack named “Tea Leaves”:

On October 31, 2016, Slate published an article titled “Was a Trump Server Communicating With Russia?” This article described the work of Professor L. Jean Camp and her colleagues, all of whom had developed an interest in the activity of mail1.trump-email.com, an email-marketing server associated with the Trump Organization:

The computer scientists posited a logical hypothesis, which they set out to rigorously test: If the Russians were worming their way into the DNC, they might very well be attacking other entities central to the presidential campaign, including Donald Trump’s many servers. “We wanted to help defend both campaigns, because we wanted to preserve the integrity of the election,” says one of the academics, who works at a university that asked him not to speak with reporters because of the sensitive nature of his work.

This professed altruism as a rationale for digital snooping may be hard to swallow given that Camp and her associates spend a great deal of time on Twitter launching unhinged attacks against President Trump, but pushing ahead, enter Tea Leaves:

In late July, one of these scientists—who asked to be referred to as Tea Leaves, a pseudonym that would protect his relationship with the networks and banks that employ him to sift their data—found what looked like malware emanating from Russia. The destination domain had Trump in its name, which of course attracted Tea Leaves’ attention. But his discovery of the data was pure happenstance—a surprising needle in a large haystack of DNS lookups on his screen. “I have an outlier here that connects to Russia in a strange way,” he wrote in his notes. He couldn’t quite figure it out at first. But what he saw was a bank in Moscow that kept irregularly pinging a server registered to the Trump Organization on Fifth Avenue.

Tea Leaves is another piece of work in the “concerned and impartial researcher” department. Check out Tea Leaves on medium.com (@tea.leaves) play-acting as the innocently curious Lea Vestea (roughly a cyclic permutation on “Tea Leaves,” in case you missed it):


If you are a billionaire, do you have lesser people “take the fall” for you? We already saw a loyal Trump employee — who is a woman — used as a scapegoat in the scandal about Melania Trump plagiarizing a Michele Obama speech. After reading details of an under-reported story that seems to be just emerging — I predict that The Donald will do it again and yet again find a woman amongst his large organization to blame his own extremely risky actions upon.

We were assured that known DNS experts vouched for the authenticity of the DNS logs. We were assured that nine computer scientists considered it nearly impossible for such logs to be forged or manipulated. And thus a virulent narrative was reinforced.

Now, I neither know anything nor care about DNS lookups or servers so long as my Internet is working. And I always assumed that this “Russian server scandal” was just another anti-Trump put-up job, just like the current non-scandal involving Donald Trump Jr. is. But there is one thing about this that is very interesting to me as a writer. There is a tremendous tell in that quote from Tea Leaves, who was commonly supposed to be a man all along. See if you can spot it. I mean, does that read like anything a man would ever write?

No, it most certainly does not….

This is why you don’t hire SJWs

Is anyone – anyone – even remotely surprised that things went badly awry for the company that hired the tranny SJW who was pushing Codes of Conduct on Open Source projects last year?

At first I had my doubts. I was well aware of GitHub’s very problematic past, from its promotion of meritocracy in place of a management system to the horrible treatment and abuse of its female employees and other people from diverse backgrounds. I myself had experienced harassment on GitHub. As an example, a couple of years ago someone created a dozen repositories with racist names and added me to the repos, so my GitHub profile had racial slurs on it until their support team got around to shutting them down a few days after I reported the incident. I didn’t get the sense that the company really cared about harassment.

My contact at GitHub insisted that the company was transforming itself. She pointed to a Business Insider article that described the culture changes that they were going through, and touted the hiring of Nicole Sanchez to an executive position leading a new Social Impact team. I was encouraged to talk to some other prominent activists that had recently been hired. Slowly, I opened my mind to the possibility. Given my work in trying to make open source more inclusive and welcoming, what could give me more influence in creating better communities than working at the very center of the open source universe?

With these thoughts in mind, I agreed to interview with the team. The code challenge was comparable to other places where I’d interviewed, as was the pairing exercise. I was impressed by the social justice tone of some of the questions that I was asked in the non-technical interviews, and by the fact that the majority of people that I met with were women. A week later, I had a very generous offer in hand, which I happily accepted. My team was 5 women and one man: two of us trans, three women of color. We had our own backlog separate from the rest of the engineering group, our own product manager, and strong UX and QC resources. I felt that my new job was off to a promising start.

However, it soon became apparent that this promising start would not last for long. For my first few pull requests, I was getting feedback from literally dozens of engineers (all of whom were male) on other teams, nitpicking the code I had written. One PR actually had over 200 comments from 24 different individuals. It got to the point where the VP of engineering had to intervene to get people to back off. I thought that maybe because I was a well-known Rubyist, other engineers were particularly interested in seeing the kind of code I was writing. So I asked Aaron Patterson, another famous Rubyist who had started at GitHub at the same time as I did, if he was experiencing a lot of scrutiny too. He said he was not.

Shortly after this happened to me, the code review feature was prioritized. This functionality was rolled out internally pretty quickly. From that point on I didn’t get dogpiled anymore, since I could request reviews from specific engineers familiar with the area of the codebase that I was working in and avoid the kind of drive-by code reviews that plagued my initial PRs.

A couple of months later, I finished up a feature that I was very excited about: repository invitations. With repository invitations, no one could add someone else to a repository without their consent. Being invited to contribute to a repository resulted in an email notification, from which the recipient could accept or decline to join and even report and block the inviter.

Feature releases such as these are frequently promoted on the GitHub blog, and the product manager on my team encouraged me to write a post announcing what I had shipped. Since it was so important to me personally, I wrote an impassioned piece talking about how this feature closed a security gap that had directly affected and provided an abuse vector against me. The post also served as an announcement to the world of the new team and the kinds of problems that we were charged with solving.

The post was submitted for editorial review. It was decided that the tone of what I had written was too personal and didn’t reflect the voice of the company. The reviewer insisted that any mention of the abuse vector that this feature was closing be removed….

In speaking up like this, I felt like I was simply doing my job. I was trying to make a positive impact by speaking up for the minority of users who are regularly targeted for abuse. I wasn’t just trying to represent the values of the Community & Safety team, I was trying the represent the values of marginalized communities. I tried my best to make a positive impact. I kept the needs and best interests of the most vulnerable people on our platform at the front of my mind at all times, and prioritized my work according to what would make the biggest difference to this population of users.

SJWs always – always – put themselves and their social justice before the interests of the project, the company, and the community. Like insects, they are always looking for a chance to further infest their surroundings.

Finally in January I got the chance to work on the one feature that I wanted GitHub to have most of all: a tool to make adding a code of conduct to a project easy… The code of conduct adoption feature was launched in May 2017, and was widely praised. It would be my last feature for GitHub.

I’ll bet it was not widely praised within the company, but rather, by SJWs outside both the company and the tech industry. It is never, ever, a good idea to hire SJWs. Even the lesser ones are a serious problem; that’s how Coraline was hired in the first place. Notice that as I warned in SJWAL, the lesser SJW had installed itself in HR and created a locus for infestation called the Social Impact team.

But don’t worry, it has a happy ending. Of sorts.

My overall review was a “Does Not Meet Expectations.” I was shocked and upset. A bad review out of the blue was not something that I had experienced before. I thought I had good rapport with my manager, and that if there was a problem that we would have been addressing it at our weekly meetings. In my mind this was a serious management failure, but there was apparently nothing I could do about it.

The same day that I had this review, I got some devastating personal news. I have bipolar depression and was already in a bad place mentally, so I found myself feeling crushed and hopeless. In an attempt to deal with things I ended up taking a dangerously high dose of my anti-anxiety medication. When I reached out to my therapist for help, she recommended that I go to the emergency room. This was the start of an eight day ordeal involving involuntary commitment to a mental health facility.

He’s not wrong

Vladimir Putin blames the USA for the mass cyberattack utilizing NSA software:

Vladimir Putin has blamed the US for the global cyber attack that has crippled computer systems around the world since Friday. The cyber attack, which wreaked havoc at dozens of NHS trusts on Friday, has continued to spread, hitting thousands of computers in China and Japan.

Putin said Russia had “nothing to do” with the attack and blamed the US for creating the hacking software that affects Microsoft computers.

“Malware created by intelligence agencies can backfire on its creators,” said Putin, speaking to media in Beijing. He added that global leaders needed to discuss cyber security at a “serious political level” and said the US has backed away from signing a cyber security agreement with Russia.

It is the USA’s fault. There simply isn’t any way around it. Heads at the NSA should be rolling right now and the God-Emperor should demand the resignations of everyone who had anything to do with the relevant program. This is evidence of a costly and extreme dereliction of duty at the agency, all so they could better commit unconstitutional and illegal acts at the expense of the American people.

Thanks, NSA

Who would have ever thought that a government bureaucracy would fail to adequately take safeguards against its tech-weaponry proliferating?

More than 100 countries across the world have been affected by the ‘unprecedented’ cyber attack using a computer virus ‘superweapon’ dubbed the ‘atom bomb of malware’. It is believed more than 130,000 IT systems are affected around the world, including hospitals in the UK, telecoms and gas firms in Spain, schools in China, railways in Germany and the FedEx delivery company.

The European Union’s police agency, Europol, says it is working with countries hit by the ransomware scam to rein in the threat, help victims and track down the criminals. In a statement, Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre, known as EC3, said the attack ‘is at an unprecedented level and will require a complex international investigation to identify the culprits.’

Security experts say the malicious software behind the onslaught appeared to exploit a vulnerability in Microsoft Windows that was identified by the US National Security Agency for its own intelligence-gathering purposes.

The NSA documents were stolen and then released to the world last month by a mysterious group known as the Shadow Brokers. The hackers, who have not come forward to claim responsibility, likely made it a ‘worm’, or self spread malware, by exploiting a piece of NSA code known as Eternal Blue, according to several security experts.

The idea that a government can adequately safeguard anything should have been exploded when the USA was unable to preserve its monopoly on nuclear weapons. If they can’t keep something as uniquely advantageous and powerful as that to themselves, what can they protect? Area 51?

WWII production trivia

MR sent this fascinating explanation of one reason the Allied bombing campaign was a bust with regards to inhibiting German aircraft manufacturing:

When I was in grad school I heard of the origins of CO2/Sodium Silicate core making in Germany during WWII. The fellow said we were bombing factories and foundries.  My dad and later myself were metallurgists, both doing time in the foundry industry before branching out.

Coremaking….. cores make the hollow spaces inside castings, is heat intensive as it was done with oil bonded sands that had to be baked like cookies.  Gas, coal, coke…..and big core ovens. A cupola to melt iron can be made from oil drums and bricks and the molding sands can be mixed with a shovel and rake, but you need ovens for cores.  We couldn’t figure out how the Germans were making castings so soon after we bombed their foundries into the stone age.

After the war we found out that they had invented a core making process that did not need ovens or oil.  Simple sodium silicate and clean sand.  What the foundry men would do was take the coreboxes, the molds for the core..out in the cities and countryside.  They taught the people to mix the silicate and sand and ram up the cores, then set them out in the air.  In a few hours to a day the core would be hard as a rock…literally.  The two halves, or more pieces, would be glued together and be ready to go. They had regular drop off and pick up routes and kept the German foundry industry humming.

Necessity, as is so often the case, proved the mother of invention. Given the dearth of invention in Silicon Valley of late, perhaps we should encourage the North Koreans to bomb the Bay Area.

Uber’s driverless car crashes

That’s not confidence-inspiring:

A self-driving car operated by Uber Technologies Inc. was involved in a crash in Tempe, Arizona, the latest setback for a company reeling from multiple crises.

In a photo posted on Twitter, one of Uber’s Volvo self-driving SUVs is pictured on its side next to another car with dents and smashed windows. An Uber spokeswoman confirmed the incident, and the veracity of the photo, in an email to Bloomberg News.

The spokeswoman could not immediately confirm if there were any injuries, or whether the car was carrying passengers. Uber’s self-driving cars began picking up customers in Arizona last month.

I have to admit, I do not understand the fascination of technology-companies with self-driving cars. I suppose one has to be a bit of a fascist, or at least a monopolist, to be enamored of the concept, which would explain why Apple and Google have gotten involved.