A weekly reading list to stimulate thoughts about the (digitised) world you might (or might not) want to live in.
Here is this week’s collection of articles and ideas that caught my eye, with a focus on ‘digital life’ , broadband Internet and personal data. They offer data about the world we presently live in, and hints about the one we might wish to pass on to future generations.
Censorship corner
This subject continues to dominate the news, so I’ll start by giving it its own section once more. It’s an uncomfortable topic, as it means defending dishonourable hawkers of misinformation (like Alex Jones and Infowars).
Censorship Is What Happens When Powerful People Get Scared — Liberty Blitzkrieg
“Facebook isn’t even hiding the fact that it’s outsourcing much of its “fake news” analysis to the Atlantic Council, a think tank funded by NATO, Gulf States and defense contractors. … With that in mind go ahead and check out the Atlantic Council’s donor list and all the shady characters on its board. … Now that it’s been established that Facebook is in fact censoring based on advice provided by former spooks and other assorted establishment charlatans, let’s talk about what this means.”
Mozilla / Firefox goes all in for EVIL… pushes corporate news collusion to silence independent media — Natural News
“Many of us sought out Firefox from Mozilla, an organization with a strong history supporting free speech and open access to information. But now Mozilla has joined the dark side. They’re jumping in bed with pure evil, pushing an “Information Trust Initiative” that would block independent media sources at the browser level while favoring corporate media giants like CNN, a cesspool of deliberately fake news.”
Taibbi: Censorship Does Not End Well — Rolling Stone
“Now that we’ve opened the door for ordinary users, politicians, ex-security-state creeps, foreign governments and companies like Raytheon to influence the removal of content, the future is obvious: an endless merry-go-round of political tattling, in which each tribe will push for bans of political enemies. In about 10 minutes, someone will start arguing that Alex Jones is not so different from, say, millennial conservative Ben Shapiro, and demand his removal.” — Which is why you still need to defend Alex Jones, even if he’s controlled opposition paid to make the truth appear ridiculous.
See also:
- Facebook Bans Jewish-Australian Military Veteran Avi Yemini for ‘Hate Speech’
- Internet Censorship: Appeal to Reinstate “American Everyman”
- Palantir: The PayPal-offshoot Becomes a Weapon in the War Against Whistleblowers and WikiLeaks
- Google Employees Protest Secret Work on Censored Search Engine for China
- Source: House panel considers subpoena for Twitter CEO
- Shadow Ban: PragerU Reveals Immediate 99.9999% Drop in Facebook Reach
Noteworthy news
Google tracks users who turn off location history — BBC News
“The study found that users’ whereabouts are recorded even when location history has been disabled. For example: Google stores a snapshot of where you are when you open the Maps app; Automatic weather updates on Android phones pinpoint roughly where a user is; Searches that have nothing to do with location pinpoint precise longitude and latitude of users.”
Newspaper Calls For Coordinated Editorial Attack On Trump — Daily Wire
“The Associated Press reports that the Globe is calling for media outlets to publish editorials denouncing what it called a “dirty war against the free press.” Marjorie Pritchard, deputy managing editor of the Globe’s editorial page, told the AP: “We are not the enemy of the people,” as Trump has called the media.” — A free press, or a criminal and seditious one?
Cryptocurrency investor robbed via his cellphone account sues AT&T for $224 million over loss — CNBC
“After the first hack, Terpin alleged that an impostor was able to get his phone number from an “insider cooperating with the hacker” without an AT&T store employee requiring him to show valid identification or provide a required password. That phone number was later used to access Terpin’s cryptocurrency accounts, according to the complaint.” — Oops.
Anti-Facebook site launches despite legal threats — New York Post
“The site is pitching itself as a haven for small and midsize publishers who are looking to vent about Facebook algorithm changes that slashed their customer and ad bases earlier this year. … Facebook claims that its algorithm change, which favored friends and family over media sites, was a way to get back to its roots as a site that connected people.” — Payola gets a digital makeover.
See also:
- Facebook Accused Of Threatening Media ‘Work With Us Or End Up in a Hospice’
- Facebook accused of misleading advertisers by inflating its audience size
- U.S. government seeks Facebook help to wiretap Messenger – sources
Cool tech
Civil is the decentralized marketplace for sustainable journalism — civil.co
At the moment people don’t appreciate the true cost of “free” content, and don’t see it as a citizen’s responsibility to pay for high quality journalism. Until there’s a social change against unrewarded creativity — like drink-driving becoming unacceptable — I don’t see blockchain and token economics having much impact here.
Meet your new web-research assistant — worldbrian.io
“A free & privacy-focused browser extension to effortlessly organise, recover and share the most useful content you find online.” — Writers moving to decentralised toolchains for content creation and management seems a lot more plausible than getting users to change behaviour.
Lip-reading artificial intelligence could help the deaf—or spies — Science
“The researchers started with 140,000 hours of YouTube videos of people talking in diverse situations. Then, they designed a program that created clips a few seconds long with the mouth movement for each phoneme, or word sound, annotated. The program filtered out non-English speech, nonspeaking faces, low-quality video, and video that wasn’t shot straight ahead. Then, they cropped the videos around the mouth. That yielded nearly 4000 hours of footage, including more than 127,000 English words.”
Important ideas
Sapiens DS’ Brad Perkins on a new healthcare industry emerging from computing — Hyper Wellbeing
“I believe the life insurance industry could actually own this industry that you describe so eloquently around prediction, prevention, and optimization. … They even have a large part of the right workforce in place. They certainly have the plugin to the financial services industry. And the value proposition of life insurance that extends life, seems really compelling, particularly to Millennials potentially, where life insurance is not a growing business sector.”
Loneliness On The Path — Bernhard Guenther
“The more we uncover and work through our own shadow aspects, our own mechanical programs, our wounds and traumas, the more we see it in others. As the masks fall away, we start to “see the unseen” and a whole new world – the REAL world – opens up. At first this view is not pleasant at all and we may question our sanity. Feelings of despair, depression, shame, guilt, anger, sadness, loneliness, etc. come up.”
Data of distinction
Here’s What Just a Few Days Without Electronic Devices Did for Children Reading Human Emotion — Wake Up World
“Use of interactive screen time below three years of age could also impair a child’s development of the skills needed for maths and science, they found, although they also said some studies suggested benefits to toddlers’ use of mobile devices including in early literacy skills, or better academic engagement in students with autism. … As a whole, more research will be directed to explore the intricately changing boundary between humans and electronic devices and the role emotions play in the dynamics.”
China’s AI “Goddess” and the East/West AI competition — Benjamin Fulford
“Remember, if you have a mobile phone, somebody knows 24 hours a day where you are, who you talk to, and what you are doing. This writer has met many real-life spies in the course of his work, and one thing they have in common is that they do not carry mobile phones or use credit cards. Since computers all have back doors built into them, spy agencies around the world are reverting to typewriters and handwriting.” See also From laboratory in far west, China’s surveillance state spreads quietly and Life Inside China’s Social Credit Laboratory.
Interesting views
Conscious Media: A New Form Of News & Media That Will Revolutionize Our World — Collective Evolution
“Conscious media is about looking at ourselves, our world and what happens within it to understand what it truly means for us and what we can do to change it. It turns the lens within and asks why we are creating conditions in our world through our consciousness, beliefs, actions and so forth. It challenges us to think more deeply about what is actually possible and work towards creating a world where humanity can truly thrive.”
‘Aadhaar chimeras threat to national security’ — New Indian Express
India’s biometric identity scheme has many of the predicted failures… “The Chimeras were introduced into the system due to faulty inputs by the enrolment agencies. When they began operations they were given targets, leading them to compromise on data quality over the number of enrolments. As a result, biometrics of a person were assigned to somebody else or there were other mismatches while entering key demographic indicators provided to avail Aadhaar numbers.”
Banks and Retailers Are Tracking How You Type, Swipe and Tap — New York Times
“A few months ago, the software picked up unusual signals coming from one wealthy customer’s account. After logging in, the visitor used the mouse’s scroll wheel — something the customer had never done before. Then the visitor typed on the numerical strip at the top of a keyboard, not the side number pad the customer typically used. Alarm bells went off. The R.B.S. system blocked any cash from leaving the customer’s account. An investigation later found that the account had been hacked, Mr. Hanley said.”
The Unlikely Activists Who Took On Silicon Valley — and Won — New York Times Magazine
“Political power is a malleable thing, Mactaggart had learned, an elaborate calculation of artifice and argument, votes and money. People and institutions — in politics, in Silicon Valley — can seem all-powerful right up to the moment they are not. And sometimes, Mactaggart discovered, a thing that can’t possibly happen suddenly becomes a thing that cannot be stopped.”
Why Open Source Failed — John Mark
“It’s time to understand something about open source software development: it is not going to save us. Using or developing more open source software is not going to improve anyone’s lives. Developing open source software is not a public good. It’s not going to result in a fairer or more equitable society. In fact, as currently structured, open source development is part of the problem.”
Provocative perspectives
Globalists at the top of the “pyramid” use satanic cults to recruit new psychopaths into their ranks — Natural News
““It’s people who are connected in just about every institutionalized area of modern life, including politics, law, business, finance, education, medicine, you name it. And it’s extensive, the networks they have in place.” Passio says these networks are much larger and more prolific than he ever could have imagined, meaning that satanism is everywhere.” — This is going to become headline news in the next few months, as we’ve all got some unpleasant realities to deal with. The tech and media industries are filled with people of the worst possible ethos and activities.
Buyable books
The State in the Third Millennium — Prince Hans-Adam of Liechtenstein
From reviews: “Getting the view from a European monarch is rare in this day and age, and Prince Hans-Adam makes his views known in this book. It’s packed with the history of the State from tribal days to monarchies, democracy, and the nation-state.”
Media of merit
From Twitter:
- For 14 years, photographer Sergio Tapiro took over 300,000 photos of Mount Colima. Then…
Chart on the evolution of Premier League shirt sponsors since 1992
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