Tag: technology

Milo banned from Instagram

The Ralph Retort reports:

I know I said I was done with this story for today, but I also said that I’d be back if more news broke. Well, that just happened. Controversial Breitbart Tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos was just banned from Instagram for reasons that are, as of now, unknown. All I know is that his Instagram was pretty mild when I checked it the other day, so this isn’t making a lot of sense.

Excessive Fabulosity, one can only assume. It’s rather remarkable. At this point, Milo is banned from more places than I am.

Chinese buy Opera

This should shake things up in the browser world, to say the least:

After a $1.2 billion deal fell through, Opera has sold most of itself to a Chinese consortium for $600 million. The buyers, led by search and security firm Qihoo 360, are purchasing Opera’s browser business, its privacy and performance apps, its tech licensing and, most importantly, its name. The Norwegian company will keep its consumer division, including Opera Apps & Games and Opera TV. The consumer arm has 560 workers, but the company hasn’t said what will happen to its other 1,109 employees.

The original deal, announced in February, reportedly failed to gain regulatory approval. While expressing disappointment that it was scrapped, Opera CEO Lars Boilesen says “we believe that the new deal is very good for Opera employees and Opera shareholders.” The acquisition was approved by Opera’s board, and the company now has 18 months to find a new name, according to Techcrunch.

That’s great news for Brendan Eich and Brave, which is already the best browser out there. I still use Pale Moon for a few things, but 85 percent of my work is now done on Brave.

Anyhow, I would not advise using Opera or OperaMail anymore. It’s bad enough to share things with the US government through Google and Microsoft, but this is a whole new can of worms.

Trolls are federal criminals now

This Court of Appeals decision should making policing the blog considerably easier for the moderators:

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has handed down a very important decision on the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, Facebook v. Vachani, which I flagged just last week. For those of us worried about broad readings of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the decision is quite troubling. Its reasoning appears to be very broad. If I’m reading it correctly, it says that if you tell people not to visit your website, and they do it anyway knowing you disapprove, they’re committing a federal crime of accessing your computer without authorization….

As I read the court’s opinion, the main issue is state of mind. Did you know that the computer owner didn’t want you to visit the website? At first, Power didn’t know Facebook’s view. But after the cease-and-desist letter, Power knew Facebook’s position. As a result, it was a federal crime to use Facebook after having received Facebook’s letter telling it to stay away. If I’m reading the opinion correctly, it appears that every contact with the computer that its owner doesn’t want is “without authorization.” The main question becomes mens rea: The visit becomes a federal crime when the visitor knows that the computer owner doesn’t want it.

Got that, everyone? If I tell you to go away, and you continue to visit or comment here, you are committing a federal crime. I’m sure the FBI doesn’t have anything better to do than investigate violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, so I trust you will comply.

The Wikipedian war

High-ranking SJWs at Wikipedia – or in Gamaliel’s case, formerly at Wikipedia – are up to their usual tricks in attempting to disemploy journalists who fail to submit to the SJW Narrative:

Wikipedia bills itself as “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.” In reality, it’s a bureaucratic mess dominated by a small clique of established editors who exploit their position to bully, smear, and intimidate anyone who challenges their authority.

Their latest target is David Auerbach, a highly regarded technology columnist for Slate and a fellow at the New America Foundation. Auerbach has been in the editors’ crosshairs ever since he wrote a series of damning exposes of Wikipedia’s bureaucratic elite in 2014.

In one of these columns, Auerbach described how the Wikipedian aristocracy maintain their power.

As it turned out, I’d run into a couple of what one Wikipedia administrator terms “The Unblockables,” a class of abrasive editors who can get away with murder because they have enough of a fan club within Wikipedia, so any complaint made against them would be met with hostility and opprobrium.

Longtime editors, wrote Auerbach, “have developed a fortress mentality in which they see new editors as dangerous intruders who will wreck their beautiful encyclopedia.” According to Auerbach, the combination of hostility to new editors, and the precipitous drop in longstanding ones (MIT Tech Review counted only 31,000 active editors in 2013, compared to a peak of 51,000 in 2007) “increases pressure to retain other long-standing editors, even incredibly acerbic ones, reinforcing the fortress mentality.”

Previously, Auerbach’s opponents targeted him on Wikipedia, attempting to smear him in public articles, and  have his own page deleted — both favorite tactics of editors looking to damage someone’s public image. Although those efforts failed, Auerbach’s opponents — who hold senior positions in the Wikimedia Foundation’s DC outreach unit — are now targeting his job.

Robert Fernandez, a member of Wikimedia DC’s Board of Directors and Audit committee, who goes by the pseudonym “Gamaliel” on Wikipedia, was the primary culprit, accusing Auerbach of being “pro-Brexit, pro-GamerGate” and “anti-SJW,” as well as a “libel machine.”

One tweet in particular was amusing:

It’s good to know that I am the Dark Lord haunting SJW nightmares. Which, for some reason, happens to remind me of something. There will be a Brainstorm tomorrow, for Brainstormers and OGs only, at 7 PM Eastern. Keep an eye out for the email this evening and be sure to register, as we’ll be launching Round Two and providing a progress report tomorrow.

Gamaliel unmasked

The Witchfinder General unmasks the anti-GamerGate Wikipedia administrator Gamaliel, who was, until recently, an Arbitration Committee member, Wikimedia DC board member, and the editor-in-chief of Wikipedia’s quasi-newspaper, The Signpost.

Unmasking Gamaliel

Your author has decided to name Gamaliel. Last year I concluded that there was no public interest in unmasking Gamaliel. He was a mere administrator and there is a convention that only in exceptional circumstances is a low ranking person in a large organisation named.

Recent events have caused me to review that decision and I have concluded that it is in the public interest now to name Gamaliel and reveal his occupation and employer—The former Wikipedia Arbitrator and Administrator known as Gamaliel is known as Robert Manuel Fernandez in real life.

1. Gamaliel is no longer junior. He held an international, policy-setting, elected position on the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee.
2. Gamaliel read my article ‘Paedophiles of Wikipedia’ and breached policy by not banning an admitted paedophile.
3. Gamaliel works in an educational institution as an assistant professor and a librarian and is in a position of trust.
4. Gamaliel has made potentially ruinous allegations against users of Wikipedia like The Devil’s Advocate and afforded them no opportunity to respond – indeed this blog treated Gamaliel and Jimmy Wales better and allowed them the opportunity to comment in advance.
5. When I put this article on hold out of pity for Gamaliel, his acolytes claimed contacting his employers was, ‘extortion’ … before doing far worse to David Auerbach.

Gamaliel is Robert Manuel Fernandez, Assistant Professor, Reference / Instructional Librarian at Saint Leo University, Florida.

I don’t know that it’s much of an “unmasking”, actually, but regardless, Fernandez is the poster boy for a considerable amount of what is wrong with Wikipedia. He is also a useful study in SJW entryism, even though Wikipedia itself is an SJW-controlled organization, in light of how he continually wormed his way towards positions of internal influence.

I suspect an inordinate number of Wikipedia administrators are low-level academics at lesser institutions. That’s why they have no shortage of time to spend thought-policing Wikipedia pages for any content that might call the SJW Narrative into question. It also explains why they almost invariably demonstrate terminal midwittery.

The decline of entrepreneurship in America

The media is beginning to notice that there are fewer and fewer startups in the USA every year:

If you look at what’s happened in big cities around the U.S. in recent years, it’s easy to think we’re living in Startup Nation. Thanks to the plummeting cost and increased availability of digital tools, as well as greater access to early-stage funding, we’ve seen what the Economist has called a “Cambrian moment,” with digital startups “bubbling up in an astonishing variety of services and products.” The number of companies in Silicon Valley that got seed funding from investors, for instance, more than doubled between 2007 and 2012. Venture capital funding in the U.S. over the last five years has totaled a remarkable $238 billion, and 200 companies today are so-called unicorns, privately valued at more than a billion dollars each.

Meanwhile, though, a host of economic researchers have been telling a much bleaker story: American entrepreneurship is actually on the decline, and has been for decades. As the economists Ian Hathaway and Robert Litan documented in a 2014 Brookings Institution paper, the percentage of U.S. firms that were less than a year old fell by almost half between 1978 and 2011, declining precipitously during the recession of 2007-’09 with only a slow recovery after. According to the Commerce Department, the number of new businesses started by Americans has fallen sharply since 2000, and so too has the percentage of American workers working for companies that are less than a year old. Indeed, in 2013 Americans started fewer businesses than they did in 1980, when the country’s population was much smaller. This decline isn’t just due to the aging of the U.S. population—Americans of all ages just seem less likely to open new businesses than they once were. And, as Hathaway and Litan put it, the decline “has been documented across a broad range of sectors in the U.S. economy, even in high-tech.”

Speaking as a successful entrepreneur who left the country, who is the son of a very successful entrepreneur who is presently in prison, it’s not exactly difficult to understand why Americans are considerably less inclined and less able to start businesses than they were 36 years ago.

  1. The rapacious and criminal tax agencies. You would probably not believe the shenanigans and outright lies these agents habitually engage in if you did not see it in black-and-white documents right in front of you. Even those who think my father merited an amount of jail time for his actions are aghast when they find out what actually happened, and how absurdly egregious the behavior of the various agencies was.
  2. The increasing regulatory and reporting burden. Why go to the effort of building up a company when doing so is the equivalent of painting a big red target on your chest? As one of my entrepreneurial friends said after shutting down his company and taking a job for a big tech firm, “it’s so nice not having to deal with all that shit anymore.” In the USA, self-employment often feels more like working for the government as a paper-pusher. Just trying to get your head around why part-time external contractors who are clearly not your employees must be treated as employees for various compliance purposes is enough to give anyone a headache.
  3. The criminalization of commerce. These days, it’s more work to file the paperwork required to get paid by a big corporation than it is to do the work itself.
  4. The dumbing-down of the populace. Thanks to post-1965 immigration, Americans are 4-6 IQ points less intelligent than they were back in 1980. Less intelligent people are less inclined to start jobs.
  5. Emigration. Many of the American expats I meet around the world are highly intelligent and entrepreneurial. Few of them have any desire or intention to return to the USA. This is a fairly small group of people, but they are a statistically significant percentage of the entrepreneurial class.
  6. International competition. The Internet and semi-free trade means that one no longer needs to live in the USA to have access to its markets. So, would-be American entrepreneurs are much more likely to be beaten to the punch by foreign entrepreneurs exploiting American markets than was the case in 1980.
  7. The politicization of culture. Why start, say, a bakery, if you know you’re going to be forced to choose between being sued into oblivion and violating your conscience as well as your right to free association?
That being said, the situation isn’t much better elsewhere. The worse the global economy gets, the more desperate the various governments are for tax revenue, and the more intensely they go tax-hunting among the successful entrepreneurial class. The first country to offer legal protection and operational assistance to the international entrepreneurs being preyed on in this manner is going to do very well indeed, and do so at the expense of the other countries.

Tech volunteers wanted

We are looking for some assistance on the Big Fork team. Here is what we’re looking for:

  1.  Producer/Project Manager. Someone to keep track of what everyone is doing and free up Rifleman to focus on the coding.
  2. Mediawiki — has worked with the Mediawiki codebase and has deployed Mediawiki sites for at least 2 years, has worked on or is at least familiar with Mediawiki templates and extensions.
  3. PHP — understands the internal and external architecture of PHP, is aware of latest developments in PHP 7, HHVM and other optimizers, has experience with problems and solutions in large-scale PHP projects.
  4. Web application optimization — familiar with various methods of caching and parallelizing web applications, including load-balancing, proxy servers, Memcached, ElasticSearch, Varnish, knows Apache, NGinX.
  5. HTML/CSS/JS/AJAX — able to bridge the gap between web design and client-side development. Experience with modern Javascript UI frameworks like jQuery, Angular, Bootstrap, understands reactive design concepts.
  6. Javascript expert — understands the architecture of Javascript, including object-oriented and functional Javascript coding, performance optimization, cross-browser compatibility, future developments in Javascript,
  7. PostgreSQL Administrator — good understanding of configuration settings, performance tweaks, security, user account management, database/filesystem interaction, replication, failover, backup/restore automation.

If one of those roles fits you and you want to help out, email with BIG FORK in the subject. We’re making a lot of progress, but there is still plenty left to do.

The Post-Americans

Do tell us again how more American than American these immigrants are:

And yet, they somehow always seem to find the time to “honor” obscure third-world trivialities of whom few have ever heard and about whom even less care. Strange, how that works.

Surviving the cultural war

Everyday Joe interviews Pax Dickinson, whose job was one of the early casualties of a confirmed SJW attack in technology.

EJ: Was it hard for you to re-enter business after what happened?

Dickinson: I eventually managed to find work at below-market rates through friends and former co-workers, after promising to conceal my identity. I knew I wanted to launch another startup though, and the resultant notoriety from the blacklisting ended up putting me in contact with Chuck Johnson and he had this great idea for a journalism crowdfunding site, I couldn’t possibly turn down that kind of adventure.

Ultimately being blacklisted and fired is the best thing that ever happened to me, due to the high-profile nature I was able to use it somewhat to my advantage. I’ve met so many amazing people because of what happened to me and while it did close a lot of doors for me, it opened some others and the ones it opened are far more interesting anyway.

I think it’s important for me to keep my profile high and make sure everyone sees a guy who has been put through that social justice shaming ordeal come out the other side of it unbowed and refusing to slink away in disgrace. They’ve taken their shot at me and I’m still standing, and now they’re out of ammo and all it accomplished was pissing me off.

EJ: Any advice for surviving an attack like you suffered?

Dickinson: Vox Day’s book SJWs Always Lie is essential and he gets it right. Never apologize. I eventually let myself get talked into giving an apology of sorts, it was a mistake. I shouldn’t have bothered.

I think now that it’s been publicized, there are people who want to help. I’ve talked to a few people who have been fired for their opinions and given them advice. I think those of us who have lost our jobs due to this kind of censorship need to stand together and support each other whenever possible.

The only thing you can ultimately do is try to engineer a career for yourself that is as anti-fragile as possible. People like Mike Cernovich and Vox Day are leading the way and WeSearchr is an attempt to follow in that vein. When we get attacked by social justice warriors it only makes us stronger.

EJ: What’s your opinion of Donald Trump’s presidential run? Do you think he’ll make a difference in fighting Political Correctness in America?

Dickinson: I think Trump is great, and it has nothing to do with his policies. He represents the regular guy standing up and telling the PC gang that we’re not gonna take it anymore.

Win or lose, he’s setting an example to the men of America how to respond to bullshit shaming tactics. The guy is an inspiration, frankly. I hope to see some other billionaires following the example that Trump and Thiel are setting. I get the sense that a lot of the Silicon Valley top CEOs are quietly sympathetic and I hope they find their balls and start pushing back as well before it’s too late. Trump is doing even more important work as a national life coach right now than he would probably be able to do as President.

WeSearchr is very interesting and might have some serious potential in light of the way the culture war is developing. I’m still trying to get my head around the most effective way to make use of it.