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.
The ‘me’ in media
I’ve been interviewed several times in recent weeks:
- GoodDog & Radix
- Q GREATEST COMMUNICATION EVENT IN HISTORY?
- Blue Pill vs. Red Pill. Pedophilia and Occultism PUSH in I.T.
Subscribers to John B Well’s Caravan to Midnight can also listen to my interview there. The wheels of history are turning, and the world is waking up to some difficult truths. Things are about to get bumpy, so it’s a good time to self-educate.
Censorship corner
UK Woman Detained At Mental Health Facility For Claiming 5G & WiFi Radiation Is Harmful To Health! — YouTube
“Susanne alleges that she was sectioned after she spoke to her doctor about a new mobile phone mast that had been erected near her home. Susanne told her doctor that she began to feel unwell around about the time that the mast was erected. … Speaking to Richie from the hospital where she is being evaluated, Susanne says that she believes that her doctor recommended that she undergo a psychiatric evaluation. Susanne says she was then taken to the hospital against her will.” — See also French Politician Marine Le Pen Ordered Psychiatric Evaluation for Posting ISIS Images.
Internet regulator considered for UK — BBC News
“However, Buzzfeed News said the government’s proposals would go further. It said it had seen details of the White Paper, which included: forcing websites to remove illegal hate speech within a specific time period or face penalties. A similar law is in force in Germany; making social networks verify the age of their users; punishing social networks that failed to remove terror content or child abuse images; restricting advertisements online for food and soft drink products that were high in salt, fat or sugar.”
Twitter Approves Ads in Favor of Female Genital Mutilation After Blacklisting Pro-Lifers — Breitbart
“Twitter promoted a post advocating for female genital mutilation (FGM) this week, after building a history of blacklisting promoted ads from pro-lifers, before claiming it was an “error.” The tweet, which was made by Dawoodi Bohra Women for Religious Freedom (DBWRF), attempted to make FGM, named “khafz” by the group, look like a normal and safe practice.” — See also Google staffers wanted to manipulate search results to combat Trump’s travel ban, emails show.
Noteworthy news
White House Drafts Order to Look Into Google, Facebook — Bloomberg
“The document instructs U.S. antitrust authorities to “thoroughly investigate whether any online platform has acted in violation of the antitrust laws.” It instructs other government agencies to recommend within a month after it’s signed, actions that could potentially “protect competition among online platforms and address online platform bias.”” — The cosy relationship with the Obama administration must seem a world away. See also Louisiana Attorney General Encourages Jeff Sessions to Break Up Google, Facebook.
New Mexico Suing Google & Twitter for Knowingly and Illegally Exploiting Children Online — Activist Post
““For years, Google has abdicated its responsibility to kids and families by disingenuously claiming YouTube — a site rife with popular cartoons, nursery rhymes, and toy ads — is not for children under 13,” said Josh Golin, executive director of the CCFC, as reported by the Guardian at the time. “Google profits immensely by delivering ads to kids and must comply with Coppa. It’s time for the FTC to hold Google accountable for its illegal data collection and advertising practices.”” — See also Facebook ‘profits from child trafficking’, Theresa May says.
The New York Times Clearly Has The Carter Page FISA Warrant But Never Published It — Big League Politics
“That is a very persuasive case for why the New York Times is sitting on an important document and thus aiding and abetting the Deep State conspiracy against President Donald Trump.” — They’ve been knowingly lying to the public for two years. Expect people to go to jail over this for racketeering. They are not alone.
Google admits it lets hundreds of third party apps read your emails — RT
“Google itself has mined users’ emails since Gmail was launched in 2004, but announced last year that it would stop the practice, amid privacy concerns and a federal wiretapping lawsuit.” — See also Apple gives you a TRUST rating – and it’s based on your phone call and email habits.
Cool tech
Deutsche Telekom and Aricent Create Open Source Edge Software Framework — AP
“Deutsche Telekom and Aricent today announced the creation of an Open Source, Low Latency Edge Compute Platform available to operators, to enable them to develop and launch 5G mobile applications and services faster. The cost-effective Edge platform is built for software-defined data centers (SDDC) and is decentralized, to accelerate the deployment of ultra-low latency applications.”
Important ideas
An Introduction to the Single Variable New Calculus [Google drive PDF] — John Gabriel
“Never in the history of academia, has anything been published on what it means for a concept to be well defined, never mind the requirements or a systematic method for determining well-formedness. This is evident when one looks at all the paradoxes and contradictions that arise in theory – especially such as first order logic, axioms, etc. One needs only to investigate the bogus concept of infinity which cannot be reified in any way, shape or form to see how it has infected all mathematics.”
Who’s doing what in the field of Responsible Technology? — doteveryone
“We started by attending and speaking at events across Europe and generally trying to understand what is going on out there. Through desk research, we also identified over 200 organisations across Europe who are active in the field of responsible and ethical tech.”
Just Capitalism: Can billionaires gamify social good? — Douglas Rushkoff
“The real way to use capital for social good is not simply to further inflate the valuations of Fortune 500 companies, but to find individual enterprises whose actual activities benefit humanity. That’s harder to do because most of these companies are not on the stock exchange. They are the companies reclaiming water, empowering small farmers, trying to educate people, or promoting economic and social resilience.”
Data of distinction
The Global 1% Is Destroying Democracy — Whitney Milam
“By 2030, members of the wealthiest one percent of the global population are projected to hold 64 percent — a full two-thirds — of the world’s wealth.”
Fix your “tech neck” with stretches and neck stabilization exercises — Natural News
“A study that appeared in the journal Spine listed the five occupation groups that have the highest risk of developing neck pain: These included the people from the military, television, research science, healthcare support, and repair.”
IBM announces cloud service to help businesses detect and mitigate AI bias — Venture Beat
“Research shows that popular smart speakers are 30 percent less likely to understand non-native U.S. accents, for example, and that facial recognition systems such as those from Cognitec perform demonstrably worse on African American faces. In fact, according to a recent study commissioned by IBM, two-thirds of businesses are wary of adopting AI because of potential liability concerns.”
Israeli spyware found on phones in 45 countries, U.S. included — The Palestinian Information Centre
“Sold by NSO Group of Herzliya, Israel, Pegasus is capable of exfiltrating private data from infected cellphones, including passwords, text messages and live voice calls, and has previously been deployed against targets including Mexican journalists and a prominent United Arab Emirates human rights activists, among others.” — Everyone’s at it, but the Talpiot graduates are clearly among the best.
Why ‘cloud’ will die out by 2025 — IT Pro Portal
“A quarter (26 per cent) of IT decision makers believe the term ‘cloud’ will be obsolete by 2025. More than half of those (56 per cent) think it will be the case because of the cloud’s omnipresence at that time. … The younger workforce is on the same page. A third (30 per cent) don’t know what the term even means, and another third (33 per cent) have never used it, outside ICT classes at school. Still, 83 per cent recognised cloud as a place where they store their photos and music, while 42 per cent confirmed they use it to share stuff.”
Amazon plants fake packages in delivery trucks as part of an undercover ploy to ‘trap’ drivers who are stealing — Business Insider
“Dummy packages are just one way that Amazon is trying to control theft, which is a giant problem for the company — and all retailers, for that matter. Shrinkage — the industry’s term for losses attributable to theft, error, or fraud — cost retailers nearly $47 billion last year, according to the National Retail Federation.” — Historically, “bricolage” made up a non-trivial part of the longshoreman’s remuneration. No longer.
Hackers Set Up ‘Parasitic’ Crypto Mining Operations Using Stolen NSA Tools — Zero Hedge
“As it turns out, the case of a mysterious group of hackers installing illicit software inside the servers of Transneft, Russia’s largest oil-pipeline company, wasn’t an isolated incident. According to Bloomberg, detected cases of illegal crypto mining have surged 459% in 2018 compared with last year.”
More Evidence It’s a Mistake to Make Employees Work in the Office — Inc
From 2014: “While Ctrip originally thought the money it would save in space and furniture–about $1,900 per employee for the length of the study–would offset a drop in productivity, at-home worker output wasn’t hampered a bit, Bloom reported in a story for Harvard Business Review. In fact, compared with office counterparts, those working from home made 13.5 percent more calls, quit 50 percent less, and said they were much happier on the job.”
Interesting views
Ten Years After Lehman’s Collapse — Yanis Varoufakis
“It was the financial equivalent of watching the sun spinning out of control soon after it rose above the horizon. Humanity watched on in collective disbelief. The ancient Greeks had a term for moments like that one: aporia – a state of intense bafflement urgently demanding a new model of the world we live in. The Crash of 2008 was such a moment.”
Could Biometric Fingerprint Identification Replace Traditional Smart (Bank) Cards and Password Soon? — Datafloq
“In many Asian countries, one of the essential attractions of a biometric card is the pride that comes with having the latest technology. The protection it offers against fraud in other areas makes it more desirable. By solving a key concern in most markets, biometric cards are a trusted method that doesn’t require a network connection.”
6 Key Considerations When Deploying Conversational AI — Forbes
“AI Is A Brand’s New Face: Like switchboards and websites before them, bots can be an important new face for a company. … Conversational AI’s “persona” must embody a firm’s values and reflect its competence by communicating accurately and efficiently with uncounted, hard-to-predict human beings. A synthetic voice created with a personality that is too at odds with your brand can be just as disastrous as a tone-deaf advertising campaign.”
Leave no dark corner — Matthew Carney
“Social credit is like a personal scorecard for each of China’s 1.4 billion citizens. In one pilot program already in place, each citizen has been assigned a score out of 800. In other programs it’s 900. Those, like Dandan, with top “citizen scores” get VIP treatment at hotels and airports, cheap loans and a fast track to the best universities and jobs. Those at the bottom can be locked out of society and banned from travel, or barred from getting credit or government jobs.” — See also Former Google CEO predicts the internet will split in two — and one part will be led by China and Exposing China’s Digital Dystopian Dictatorship.
Why animal extinction is crippling computer science — Wired
“By studying the olfactory circuit responsible for processing odors in the fruit fly brain, we found that the fly uses a variant of a common computer science algorithm for performing similarity searches. The fly, however, demonstrated three new computational tricks that we were able to translate to improve the overall effectiveness of similarity searches.”
This small iOS 12 feature is the birth of a whole industry — Computer World
“Just as imaging formats such as TIFF, JPEG, GIF, and even PDF unleashed a big revolution in desktop publishing, AR imaging formats such as USDZ will enable a whole new class of industries and industrial applications of AR.”
The future of humanity depends on design ethics, says Tim Wu — Fast Company
“Some companies have realized that their users aren’t happy with the shameless ploys to grab and hold their attention, and have started to introduce tools that aim to nudge users toward closing the loop. YouTube recently announced a tool to let you know how long you’ve been watching, but it’s buried deep in its settings where no one ever goes. Apple’s recently released iOS 12 similarly lets you track how much time you’re spending in certain apps, but doesn’t have the functionality to proactively ask if you want to turn off notifications you never respond to.”
Provocative perspectives
5 Types of People: The Truth Seekers, Brainwashed, Misguided, Power Hungry, and The Ones Who Sold Their Souls — Humans Are Free
“There are people in positions of power who truly believe in what they are doing but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Somehow they have been manipulated without even realising it. These people have been brainwashed by the system, they have no evil intent, they truly believe in what they are doing. They also need our help.”
Media of merit
From Twitter:
- Israeli government launch video of Twitter/Facebook “Command Centre”
- A recent search warrant for an iPhone 6S resulted in this.
- How Google extorts publishers.
- The coming “voice first” world.
Buyable books
La clef de l’Histoire moderne — Pierre-Yves Lenoble
“Today, we do not conquer the land to own a man; one conquers souls, we conquer the psyche. Once we have the psyche, we have the man. … Once, to keep power one needed to control the Church, so as to control souls; in the nineteenth century… the brains. Today it is broadcasting and academia that prevail.”
Rule by secrecy — Jim Marrs
From reviews: “Seriously…if you read only ONE book on secret societies, this should be it. As he details the CFR, Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberg Group, he outlines the power structures in a highly interesting reverse chronology. Starting with modern times, he then goes backward and down the rabbit hole throughout all history–linking all the information together, and passing on some very sound judgement.”
Leopard Warrior: A Journey into the African Teachings of Ancestry, Instinct, and Dreams — John Lockley
“In Leopard Warrior, John shares a gripping account of his experiences and the wisdom he learned over years of training. Here he invites you to discover: … Ubuntu—a core concept for recognizing and embracing our deep interconnection with all living things…”
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