Tag: technology

Facebook, free speech, and the FBI

Yes, American, you are now officially living in a police state possessed of an all-seeing eye the likes of which even the Soviets and East Germans never managed to achieve:

A
man says that within hours of making an impassioned post on Facebook,
he was being interrogated by police and the FBI. Blaine Cooper, 33,
contacted policestateusa.com with a concerning story about how his
sentiments posted on Facebook had drawn the attention of the federal
government.  He showed me the comment and told me that within 24-hours
of posting it, he was being contacted by the police and FBI.

His
colorful comment was in reference to what he believes is an “American
Police State,” in which the power of the federal government is growing
in a direction which may one day lead people to fight back.

Cooper,
who is training to be a wild land fire fighter, said that on August 23,
he was contacted by Officer Jason Kuafman of the Prescott Valley Police
Department and was told that he needed to come to the police station
for an interview with the FBI.

He complied with the
request for an interview, which lasted 45 minutes with federal agents
present.  He was released after apparently being determined to not be a
threat.

“They had every Facebook post I had ever made
in a huge file, along with all my wife’s information, and parent’s
information,” Cooper told policestateusa.com.

I
sometimes feel as if I should take requests from the federal agents
charged with monitoring this blog.  I mean, if I knew the usual guy was a
Jets fan or particularly into Asian women, I’d feel obliged to
occasionally surf through a few Jets sites or hit up Hot Asian Babes
every now and then. While I’m obviously opposed to the universal spying
system and I think it is the very definition of the sort of fragile
system that predictably ends in chaos and tears, the actual individuals
are basically the Internet equivalent of the late-night security guard.

What
is there to do?  Either go entirely dark or flood them with
information.  Those are your two options.  Nothing else is even remotely
viable.

Mailvox: The Bank of Internet

If Amazon can’t make money as a retailer, perhaps it can do so as the Central Bank of Internet:

Two of my overseas contributors have asked to be
paid not via PayPal in their local currencies *or* in U.S. dollars.
Instead, they prefer to receive payment in the form of Amazon gift card
credits.

And a new global medium of exchange emerges…

Given the problems that Amazon is having which Karl Denninger has chronicled, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see them introduce some sort of rival to PayPal before the end of the year.  Because they make no profit margin on most of their non-media sales, and because international media growth was actually negative last quarter, they’re going to have to do something different.

And as one banker I knew once told me, nothing makes money like money. Jeff Bezos is a smart guy, so if it so obvious that even we can see it, he’s probably already got it in the works.

How Steve Jobs sank Apple’s case

Beldar sums up the Apple price-fixing case and quotes the judge’s decision:

“On January 27, Jobs launched the iPad. As part of a beautifully
orchestrated presentation, he also introduced the iPad’s e-reader
capability and the iBookstore. He proudly displayed the names and logos
of each Publisher Defendant whose books would populate the iBookstore.
To show the ease with which an iTunes customer could buy a book,
standing in front of a giant screen displaying his own iPad’s screen,
Jobs browsed through his iBooks “bookshelf,” clicked on the “store”
button in the upper corner of his e-book shelf display, watched the
shelf seamlessly flip to the iBookstore, and purchased one of Hachette’s
NYT Bestsellers, Edward M. Kennedy’s memoir, True Compass, for $14.99. With one tap, the e-book was downloaded, and its cover appeared on Jobs’s bookshelf, ready to be opened and read.

“When asked by a reporter later that day why people would pay $14.99
in the iBookstore to purchase an e-book that was selling at Amazon for
$9.99, Jobs told a reporter, “Well, that won’t be the case.” When the
reporter sought to clarify, “You mean you won’t be 14.99 or they won’t
be 9.99?” Jobs paused, and with a knowing nod responded, “The price will
be the same,” and explained that “Publishers are actually withholding
their books from Amazon because they are not happy.” With that
statement, Jobs acknowledged his understanding that the Publisher
Defendants would now wrest control of pricing from Amazon and raise
e-book prices, and that Apple would not have to face any competition
from Amazon on price.

“The import of Jobs’s statement was obvious. On January 29, the
General Counsel of [Simon & Schuster] wrote to [the CEO of S&S,
Carolyn] Reidy that she “cannot believe that Jobs made the statement”
and considered it “[i]ncredibly stupid.””

Beldar sums up the decision: “This is just a methodical thrashing. In every appeal, the first thing
the appellate judges (and their law clerks) read is the district judge’s
opinion. After reading this one, I think almost any appellate judge is
going to be favorably impressed with its comprehensiveness and clarity.
It’s the kind of opinion after which you exhale and say, “Whew! That’s
going to be hard to fault in any significant way.””

And so the expected post-Jobs descent of Apple begins.

Datagate goes international

I was catching up on the Italian news this morning and saw that Datagate is what the Italian press is calling the explosive new revelations that the NSA has secret agreements with European countries to spy on European citizens as well. The news is not quite so readily available in English, although Prachi Gupta’s article at Salon is still accessible:

The
NSA has been working with at least seven European other countries to
collect personal communications data, according to Wayne Madsen, a
former NSA contractor who has come forward because he does not think the
public should not be “kept in the dark.” According to Madsen, Denmark,
the Netherlands, France, Germany, Spain and Italy all have formed secret
agreements with the US to submit sensitive data.

The Guardian reports:

Under
international intelligence agreements, confirmed by declassified
documents, nations are categorised by the US according to their trust
level. The US is first party while the UK, Canada, Australia and New
Zealand enjoy second party relationships. Germany and France have third
party relationships.

In an interview published last night on the PrivacySurgeon.org blog,
Madsen, who has been attacked for holding controversial views on
espionage issues, said he had decided to speak out after becoming
concerned about the “half story” told by EU politicians regarding the
extent of the NSA’s activities in Europe.

He said that under the
agreements, which were drawn up after the second world war, the “NSA
gets the lion’s share” of the sigint “take”. In return, the third
parties to the NSA agreements received “highly sanitised intelligence”.

The
news could be potentially damaging to countries, particularly Germany,
whose chancellor Angela Merkel has vocally condemned the NSA program
that recently came to light by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

This sounds like Echelon on steroids, dwarfing anything Orwell imagined in Big Brother. Moreover, as La Repubblica reports, the Observer article has already been removed from the web “pending an investigation: 

“Datagate, anche l’Italia collabora” 
Poi il Guardian rimuove la pagina web
Il Telegraph: quella fonte è inaffidabile
Foto Ma l’articolo è comunque finito in edicola

“Datagate, Italy also collaborates”
Afterwards the Guardian removes the web page
The Telegraph[sic]: that source is not found
Photo But the article is nevertheless still on the newspaper stand

Note that La Repubblica mistakenly refers to The Telegraph when the link actually refers to The Guardian.  These revelations should give a massive boost to the growing anti-Merkel forces in Germany, as it reveals her to be a shameless and bald-faced liar.

Snowdon and the secret cyber army

Although, given its functions and capabilities, secret cyber Praetorian Guard would appear to be a more historically relevant description:

With his revelations exposing the extent of potential, and actual, pervasive NSA surveillance over the American population, Edward Snowden has done a great service for the public by finally forcing it to answer the question: is having Big Brother peek at every private communication and electronic information, a fair exchange for the alleged benefit of the state’s security. Alas, without further action form a population that appears largely numb and apathetic to disclosures that until recently would have sparked mass protests and toppled presidents, the best we can hope for within a political regime that has hijacked the democratic process, is some intense introspection as to what the concept of “America” truly means.

However, and more importantly, what Snowden’s revelations have confirmed, is that behind the scenes, America is now actively engaged in a new kind of war: an unprecedented cyber war, where collecting, deciphering, intercepting, and abusing information is the only thing that matters and leads to unprecedented power, and where enemies both foreign and domestic may be targeted without due process based on a lowly analyst’s “whim.”

It has also put spotlight on the man, who until recently deep in the shadows, has been responsible for building America’s secret, absolutely massive cyber army, and which according to a just released Wired profile is “capable of launching devastating cyberattacks. Now it’s ready to unleash hell.”

Meet General Keith Alexander, “a man few even in Washington would likely recognize”, which is troubling because Alexander is now quite possibly the most powerful person in the world, that nobody talks about. 

I have little doubt that General Alexander is, within the constraints imposed upon him by the nature of his job and career path, a decent man who operates within the limits that have been set for him by his superiors, though obviously not the legal ones imposed by the U.S. Constitution.  However, it doesn’t take a superintelligence or a Roman historian to figure out where this arrangement is likely to end up as soon as a sufficiently ambitious or ideologically driven individual manages to take control of the cyberwar apparatus.

Meanwhile, Edward Snowden has safely landed in Moscow and a ship bound for Syria, rumored to be carrying American weapons for the Syrian rebels, has mysteriously cracked in two on the high seas and has been abandoned.

Curiouser and curiouser….

UPDATE: It appears Mr. Snowden is heading for Ecuador:

“The government of Ecuador has received an asylum request from Edward J.
Snowden,” Patino said. WikiLeaks said in a statement that Mr Snowden is “bound for the Republic
of Ecuador via a safe route for the purposes of asylum, and is being
escorted by diplomats and legal advisors from WikiLeaks.”

Setting the record straight

Two days ago, I referenced one of our previous game innovations in discussing the latest one, which naturally inspired the sort of individual who firmly believes their ideological opponents cannot possibly have ever accomplished anything of note to leap in with his ignorant version of events:

Vox: It will probably surprise no one to discover that the primary response of the forward-thinking futurists was to declare their opinion that First Sword was unlikely to sell enough ebooks to matter one way or the other, as if the universal adoption of 3D hardware texture-mapped acceleration that Big Chilly and I introduced in Rebel Moon, and the 16-bit color we introduced in Rebel Moon Rising, had anything at all to do with how many copies of those games were sold. 

Obvious: It’s really too bad that the game POD had full MMX support and was released a full six months before Rebel Moon Rising.

First of all, if one was to go by the publicly available information from IGN and GameSpy – which is wrong, by the way – one would learn that RMR was released by GT Interactive on December 22, 1996, which is obviously before POD was released by UbiSoft on February 28, 1997. But the fact is that both games were actually released together for the first time on the same CD by Intel on January 8, 1997. However, the following YouTube video should make it clear that not only were both of us incorrect, the entire MMX-related discussion is irrelevant as I’d forgotten that Big Chilly and I actually introduced both 16-bit color and dynamic lighting in Rebel Moon, which was released as part of the original VL bus 3D Blaster package back in November 1995.

I don’t know what possesses these people with the desperate need to denigrate everything I do, but history tends to render their efforts pointless. I have little doubt that if in-game digital sales are successful and become standard in the industry, the anklebiters of tomorrow will do their best to deny that I had anything to do with it, let alone came up with the concept. Anyhow, this sort of thing suffices to indicate how the Left’s revisionist instincts penetrate even to the pettiest micro level.

I was wondering how I’d managed to forget that we had the advanced lighting model in our first game, and I realized that I tend to think of the dynamic lighting in terms of the laser effects.  The colored lighting is so much more effective when the lasers light up the corridors as they fly back and forth, that since the first one was lacking that particular application of it, I assumed that we’d been still using the same 8-bit palette that everyone else had been until then. 

One bit of trivia that might be interesting; we were also the very first to discover the reason for the huge gap between expectations for MMX and the disappointing results.  And by very first, I mean that I was the one who had to call Intel and give the guy managing the project the bad news.  We couldn’t figure out why the game was running at about one-quarter the Intel-estimated frame rates when Big Chilly decided to simplify things as much as possible and simply blit a black rectangle.

I still remember his eyes narrowing in suspicion as he stared at the results, pointed to them, and said, “now why does that number look familiar?”  It was because it was precisely the same as the speed limit of the PCI bus.  It quickly became clear that Intel had produced a very fast CPU capable of processing graphics at four times the rate that the communications bus on the graphics card could accomodate them.  This had a huge effect on everything, because it meant that we couldn’t use the higher resolutions for which we’d been creating the art, but had to back it all down to the same resolution we’d used previously with the Creative Labs card.

The game still looked pretty enough and got a decent review from CGW, but it wasn’t anywhere nearly as graphically beautiful as it should have been, even considering that it was a 2.5D game.

And that wasn’t our only contribution to the MMX project.  I was also responsible for killing what was intended as Intel’s original marketing slogan for it: “On the
‘Net/Off the ‘Net”.  But that is a story for another time.  And on a tangentially related note that no one but Big Chilly will grasp the connection, SWEET BILLY GATES but the insanity of certain console makers truly knows no bounds.

“The new Oddworld game New ‘n’ Tasty is coming to every platform in the current generation and even the next generation but not the Xbox One.
It’s not that developer Oddworld Inhabitants isn’t porting the game.
It’s not that they hate Microsoft or the Xbox One. No, it’s that
Microsoft has taken an anti-indie dev stance with the Xbox One. While
the game industry is moving to Kickstarter and self-funded shops,
Microsoft has decided all developers must have a publisher to grace
their console.”

This Xbox One launch is reminding me more and more of the Sega Dreamcast. 

Those dratted hackers

I exchanged a pair of friendly emails with the intrepid book reviewer “Icefog” this morning after my good friends at the NSA provided me with his contact information last night.  “Icefog” explained that his Amazon account had been hacked and he was quite happy to remove the fake reviews that had been posted on Amazon using it.  I’m entirely content to take his explanation at face value, and I would appreciate it if Mr. Kulkis would please remove his four reviews that were posted in response to the now-deleted fake ones.

Edward Snowdon’s liveblog Q&A

If there is any doubt that Snowdon is a hero, the fact that he is openly taking questions from the public and addressing them should settle that one.

1) Why did you choose Hong Kong to go to and then tell them about US hacking on their research facilities and universities?
2)
How many sets of the documents you disclosed did you make, and how many
different people have them? If anything happens to you, do they still
exist?


1) First, the US Government, just as they did with other
whistleblowers, immediately and predictably destroyed any possibility of
a fair trial at home, openly declaring me guilty of treason and that
the disclosure of secret, criminal, and even unconstitutional acts is an
unforgivable crime. That’s not justice, and it would be foolish to
volunteer yourself to it if you can do more good outside of prison than
in it.

Second, let’s be clear: I did not reveal any US operations against
legitimate military targets. I pointed out where the NSA has hacked
civilian infrastructure such as universities, hospitals, and private
businesses because it is dangerous. These nakedly, aggressively criminal
acts are wrong no matter the target. Not only that, when NSA makes a
technical mistake during an exploitation operation, critical systems
crash. Congress hasn’t declared war on the countries – the majority of
them are our allies – but without asking for public permission, NSA is
running network operations against them that affect millions of innocent
people.

And for what? So we can have secret access to a computer in a
country we’re not even fighting? So we can potentially reveal a
potential terrorist with the potential to kill fewer Americans than our
own Police? No, the public needs to know the kinds of things a
government does in its name, or the “consent of the governed” is
meaningless.

2) All I can say right now is the US Government is not going to be
able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me. Truth is coming, and
it cannot be stopped.

Two great quotes:

“The consent of the governed is not consent if it is not informed.” 

“Citizens with a conscience are not going to ignore wrong-doing simply
because they’ll be destroyed for it: the conscience forbids it.”

Those are the words of a free man and a hero of human liberty.