21 Saturday Aug 2021
Posted in News and Notes
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Fighting with the upload system for the Prepper Post News. I think I have prevailed. There will be no substantive post beyond this today: I HATE TECHNOLOGY.
08 Sunday Aug 2021
Posted in Other Columns
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I give it a 2 – roughly equal to an old 14.4k having a rough time. Vox Day is building a book printing/binding factory. That may be the way to move forward, by going back to what worked for ages. I may try to etch this week’s column on a slate.
25 Sunday Jul 2021
Posted in News and Notes
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If I really cared, I might devise a 0-10 tracking scale for daily internet/technology failure. “0” would be the stone age; “10,” Star Trek. Today would be about a “2,” vaguely there but essentially unusable. If you’re successfully reading this, then we may have moved up to a “3.”
In related news, in the coming weeks or years, I will convert this blog into a subscription pigeon service whereby the birds deliver daily scribblings on small scrolls. Go ahead and line your window sill with newspaper.
08 Thursday Jul 2021
Posted in News and Notes
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Just how “smart” are those phones again?
Researchers took a comprehensive look at statistical findings from 46 different studies around the globe and found that the use of a cell phone for more than 1,000 hours, or about 17 minutes a day over a ten year period, increased the risk of tumors by 60 percent.
Averaging about one-tenth of the study average use time, I’m in no way worried. Soon, in a couple of years, I plan to cut phone time to zero minutes per day, year, and life. Is this price worth paying, for any of you, for babbling to some idiot about nothing? The whole post-modern world is beginning to resemble a death cult. Dial it back.
14 Wednesday Oct 2020
Posted in News and Notes
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
