14 Wednesday Oct 2020
Posted in News and Notes
≈ Comments Off on Technical Issues
We’ve had a few. But the Freedom Prepper podcast thingy is rolling (slowly) along. You’ll know it when you see or hear it. If I can finish and upload this ridiculous monster, and it gets edited or whatnot, then it will be a great prepper primer on civil war. Fun stuff!
-P
23 Sunday Aug 2020
Posted in News and Notes
≈ Comments Off on The “Key” to Technology
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I’m supposed to finally get a new dumb phone soon. This story makes me want to scrap the technology altogether.
Every time you unlock your front door, your key whispers a small, but audible, secret. Hackers finally learned how to listen.
Researchers at the National University of Singapore published a paper earlier this year detailing how, using only a smartphone microphone and a program they designed, a hacker can clone your key. What’s more, if a thief was able to install malware on your smartphone, smartwatch, or smart doorbell to record the audio from afar, they wouldn’t even need to be physically nearby to pull off the attack.
The key (ahem) to the attack, dubbed SpiKey, is the sound made by the lock pins as they move over a typical key’s ridges.
“When a victim inserts a key into the door lock, an attacker walking by records the sound with a smartphone microphone,” describes the paper written by Soundarya Ramesh, Harini Ramprasad, and Jun Han.
Smartphones can (and should) be shielded. Smartwatches are just ridiculous. And, the new doorbells are about as appealing as those cameras and 1984 microphones people are rushing to add to their homes. Again, I am really starting to suspect that electricity, not the AI thing, was the mistake. You might want to … lock that down.
26 Thursday Mar 2020
Posted in News and Notes
≈ Comments Off on It Was Already Slowing Down
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Much like the economy, the internet was already dragging along at 2000 levels of performance before the Chinese virus hoax surfaced. It has made things noticeable worse.
And last week, as a wave of stay-at-home orders rolled out across the United States, the average time it took to download videos, emails and documents increased as broadband speeds declined 4.9 percent from the previous week, according to Ookla, a broadband speed testing service. Median download speeds dropped 38 percent in San Jose, Calif., and 24 percent in New York, according to Broadband Now, a consumer broadband research site.
So, 5G will look even better when it’s rolled out. 2018 video streaming speeds will seem like great comfort to the home population while the primary uses facilitate the next phase. Got it.
29 Wednesday Jan 2020
Posted in News and Notes
≈ Comments Off on Why Would Any Sane Homeowner Install This Stuff?
People use to value privacy. Now they pay to get rid of it. Ring clandestinely sells out users to Farcebook.
Amazon’s Ring smart doorbell surveillance product has been caught sending user data to Facebook and other companies without making Ring users aware their data was being shared. That’s according to an investigation from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). What’s even more alarming is Ring users are having their data sent to Facebook even if they themselves don’t have Facebook accounts.
The EFF examined Ring’s latest Android app and found that it had four unlisted trackers sending Ring user data back to four websites including branch.io, mixpanel.com, appsflyer.com, and facebook.com. This is despite Ring’s privacy policy, which purports to list all the trackers being used in its software. That privacy policy was last updated over a year and a half ago and doesn’t list three of the four new trackers discovered.
And, why would anyone do business with the big tech companies that… Oh, yeah. Monopolies and all. Maybe low tech (or no tech) is the way of the sane future. Otherwise, is it One Ring to report them all?
28 Tuesday Jan 2020
Posted in News and Notes
≈ Comments Off on I Spy, With My Little Eye, Something That Looks Like BS
Mass Attendance, mass surveillance, what’s the difference? And, these days, what is the point of attending most Amerikan universities? The University of Missouri mandates spying on its student inmates.
New students at the University of Missouri will be required to participate in a tracking program designed to measure and enforce class attendance, according to a new report from The Kansas City Star.
Despite privacy concerns, officials defended the decision as one to the benefit of students, as the school’s athletics department has already been using the same app, SpotterEdu, to track certain student-athletes.
“From labs to auditoriums our technology can expand to cover any size of space accurately and precisely” Tweet This
“A student will have to participate in this recording of attendance,” Jim Spain, vice provost for undergraduate studies at MU, said in a statement to The Kansas City Star.
Individual professors have to opt-in to using the app, but once they do, students in those professors’ classes will not be able to opt-out.
SpotterEDU, developed by a former basketball coach, is designed to monitor a user’s attendance by “pinpoint[ing] students within a classroom until they leave, providing continuous, reliable and non-invasive attendance,” according to the app’s website. While the app ensures that students are in the classroom during class times, it claims it does not track students’ locations anywhere else.
“We only care if students are in class during class; no GPS tracking means we can’t locate them anywhere else,” the app’s website states.
However, the app is not incapable of tracking students’ locations outside the classroom.
They even use Newspeak! We can’t track them elsewhere, only in class. Well, it’s not incapable of outside tracking. BTW, SEC school graduates, that means it is capable of tracking them outside. And, it will. This isn’t ripe for abuse. It is abuse. By the same Mizzou (Columbia) that rates a solid “D” on ACTA’s 2019 What Will They Learn index. (St. Louis also = “D,” Kansas City = “F”). So, what will they learn? Not much, outside of the joys of being herded like cattle, lied too and fleeced. “F” that.
20 Monday Jan 2020
Posted in Legal/Political Columns, News and Notes
≈ Comments Off on Watching the “Subversives”
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The statists of MLK’s day would have loved using secret spy tech to identify any and everyone associated with the man and his movement.
Until now, technology that readily identifies everyone based on his or her face has been taboo because of its radical erosion of privacy. Tech companies capable of releasing such a tool have refrained from doing so; in 2011, Google’s chairman at the time said it was the one technology the company had held back because it could be used “in a very bad way.” Some large cities, including San Francisco, have barred police from using facial recognition technology.
But without public scrutiny, more than 600 law enforcement agencies have started using Clearview in the past year, according to the company, which declined to provide a list. The computer code underlying its app, analyzed by The New York Times, includes programming language to pair it with augmented-reality glasses; users would potentially be able to identify every person they saw. The tool could identify activists at a protest or an attractive stranger on the subway, revealing not just their names but where they lived, what they did and whom they knew.
And it’s not just law enforcement: Clearview has also licensed the app to at least a handful of companies for security purposes.
“The weaponization possibilities of this are endless,” said Eric Goldman, co-director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University. “Imagine a rogue law enforcement officer who wants to stalk potential romantic partners, or a foreign government using this to dig up secrets about people to blackmail them or throw them in jail.”
Now, imagine that the rogue officer is the entire state. Dr. King could not have dreamed this in a nightmare.
17 Friday Jan 2020
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Some you don’t. READ THE LIST.
The tech industry doesn’t intoxicate us like it did just a few years ago. Keeping up with its problems—and its fixes, and its fixes that cause new problems—is dizzying. Separating out the meaningful threats from the noise is hard. Is Facebook really the danger to democracy it looks like? Is Uber really worse than the system it replaced? Isn’t Amazon’s same-day delivery worth it? Which harms are real and which are hypothetical? Has the techlash gotten it right? And which of these companies is really the worst? Which ones might be, well, evil?
We don’t mean evil in the mustache-twirling, burn-the-world-from-a-secret-lair sense—well, we mostly don’t mean that—but rather in the way Googlers once swore to avoid mission drift, respect their users, and spurn short-term profiteering, even though the company now regularly faces scandals in which it has violated its users’ or workers’ trust. We mean ills that outweigh conveniences. We mean temptations and poison pills and unanticipated outcomes.
Facebook only ranked number 2?!
Might the future not require those cool shades we were sold on in the 80s?
12 Sunday Jan 2020
Posted in News and Notes
≈ Comments Off on The Evil of AI: Submit for Brain Scan
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If you could read my mind, love,
What a tale my thoughts could tell…
-Gordon Lightfoot, If You Could Read My Mind
It’s coming.
A tiny fraction of the people is slowly waking up to the massive evil that is Faceberg, the socials, AI, and probably most modern technology.
Changing norms: Another big risk is that this neurotechnology might normalize a culture of mind-reading, causing us to give up — so slowly and subtly we almost don’t notice it’s happening — our expectations of mental privacy.
One day, our interiority could become a thing of the past, with the technology decoding not just the thoughts we’d like it to transcribe for our own convenience but also the thoughts we want to keep private. That could include everything we keep hidden in our inner sanctum, from sexual fantasies to political dissent.
“A lot of my concerns about Facebook accumulating this data are surveillance and civil liberties concerns. You’d worry about the way that Facebook would be helping build a surveillance state,” Nadler said, adding that being able to peer into the brain would be game-changing for law enforcement.
If you find it hard to imagine that a project incubated by Facebook could dramatically change norms around surveillance and law enforcement, just think for a minute about facial recognition technology. Facebook rolled out that tech years ago in an innocent context: tagging your friends in photos you posted on the social-media network. But now the tech is used for policing and surveillance, disproportionately harming people of color. And other giants like Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft are all mired in controversy over it.
It’s the other way around: the surveillance state helped build Farcebook and these other hellish companies. And, this won’t stop with implants, chips, and goofy helmets for playing Pong – those likely being a very short interim measure. The end goal is to REMOTELY read minds, either via some sort of intercept scanning beam or, more likely, through a continuous capture field, like that generated by, I don’t know … 5G.
They will not like my thoughts about them.
21 Saturday Dec 2019
Posted in News and Notes
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Tyranny – there’s an app for that.
This was the decade we gave our privacy away.
We took silly personality quizzes on Facebook Inc. that made Cambridge Analytica possible. We bought phones that tracked our locations everywhere we went. We plugged in smart speakers that sent recordings of our most intimate moments to humans overseas for transcription. We downloaded apps and plug-ins with reckless abandon. We installed security cameras everywhere. We clicked through terms of services without reading. We agreed to do whatever it took to make those pesky red badges on our phones go away. We are complicit in the corporate surveillance state we inhabit.
That doesn’t mean we weren’t duped. Companies tempted us with their free services. They downplayed the risks. They broke promises to safeguard our data. They presented themselves as silly apps, only to become world-changing communications platforms. They hired psychologists to manipulate us. They used the money they made from our data to buy lobbyists to fight off privacy regulations.
The New York Times explained on Thursday just what it means to hand over the kind of location data collected by our smartphones. The newspaper painted a terrifying portrait of the self-imposed surveillance state: “Within America’s own representative democracy, citizens would surely rise up in outrage if the government attempted to mandate that every person above the age of 12 carry a tracking device that revealed their location 24 hours a day. Yet, in the decade since Apple’s App Store was created, Americans have, app by app, consented to just such a system run by private companies.”
If you’re paying attention, this is not surprising. The Times wrote an article with many of the same revelations almost exactly a year ago. Other publications have been doing similar work for years.
The 2010s should be remembered as the decade tech turned dystopian.
Maybe it’s all best forgotten? Has anyone noticed that them internets are about as slow now as they were nearly twenty years ago? Half of the bogging down is the overkill graphics, ads, and disclaimers. The other half is surveillance. 5G is supposed to cure this. It won’t. Expect, in exchange for your health, perhaps a doubling of speeds – back to where we were in about 2010. The majority of the new capacity will be devoted to more spying. 5G isn’t a tool for transferring information. It’s one for gathering information. And they will love it. It’s not even amazing any more just how incredibly stupid most humans really are. Back to your cat videos.
14 Thursday Nov 2019
Posted in News and Notes
≈ Comments Off on Self-Driving Cars and Cat Videos
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May be all that’s left after the full effects of 5G are felt.
There’s No Safe Way to Implement 5G
Similarly, in an article8 on the Environmental Health Trust’s website, Ronald Powell, Ph.D., a retired Harvard scientist of applied physics, notes “there is NO SAFE WAY to implement 5G in our communities; rather, there are only ‘bad ways’ and ‘worse ways,’” and rather than argue about who should have control over its deployment, we should focus on preventing its employment altogether.
Indeed, mounting research9,10 suggest the proliferation of 5G for the sake of faster wireless internet could be a public health disaster, so if 5G does end up “replacing cable internet for good,” humanity may be in for a devastating shock in coming decades, if not sooner.
While it may take years to fully ascertain the full effects of 5G, there are early warning signs. People have reported mass die-offs of bees around 5G towers in California,11 for example, and residents in Gateshead in the U.K. started reported insomnia, chronic nosebleeds and stillbirths after the installation of streetlamps that emit 5G radiation in 2016.12
‘No Reason to Believe 5G Is Safe,’ Scientific American Says
In an October 17, 2019, article,13 Scientific American warns “We have no reason to believe 5G is safe,” and that “contrary to what some people say, there could be health risks.” The article, written by Joel M. Moskowitz, Ph.D., director for the Center for Family and Community Health in the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley, notes:14
“The telecommunications industry and their experts have accused many scientists who have researched the effects of cell phone radiation of ‘fear mongering’ over the advent of wireless technology’s 5G.
Since much of our research is publicly-funded, we believe it is our ethical responsibility to inform the public about what the peer-reviewed scientific literature tells us about the health risks from wireless radiation.”
B-b-but, faster streaming mooovies!
In unrelated news, another extremely low-effort gun control false flag school shooting perpetrated by another white nationalist terrorist Asian teenager with mental issues. Could this have been carried out to save face for the Congress Truffle Lesbo?? Or, just to give Bernie something else to get worked up about? Sad.
