Wozniak: Cloud Computing Will Cause "Horrible Problems"

"Wozniak didn't offer much in the way of specifics . . . . [but said, 't]he more we transfer everything onto the web, onto the cloud, the less we're going to have control over it.'" Steve Wozniak was the inventor of the Apple I and Apple II computers.

More at Business Insider. You can find more re- the kinds of problems I worry about by clicking on the label, "Worldbeam," at the bottom of this post.

A Few Headlines: Facebook & Other Big Bros., & the Nasher v. Museum Tower

More at the links.

1. What Facebook Knows. "[O]n 219 million randomly chosen occasions, Facebook prevented someone from seeing a link shared by a friend. Hiding links this way created a control group . . . . the company is not above using its platform to tweak users' behavior. . . . By learning more about how small changes on Facebook can alter users' behavior outside the site, the company eventually 'could allow others to make use of Facebook in the same way' says Marlow."

(Rough translation of image at left: "I give the secrets of big companies to you, and I am a terrorist – Assange; I give your secrets to big companies, and I am Man of the Year – Zuckerberg.")

2. Three NSA Whistleblowers Back EFF's Lawsuit Re- Gov't's Massive Spying on US Civilians. "Three . . . former employees of the National Security Agency (NSA) . . . have come forward to . . . confirm that the NSA has, or is in the process of obtaining, the capability to seize and store most electronic communications passing through its U.S. intercept centers, such as the 'secret room' at the AT&T facility in San Francisco first disclosed by retired AT&T technician Mark Klein in early 2006." (Link added.)

3. US Nat'l Reconnaissance Office's Castoff 'Scopes Beat NASA's Hubbell. "The U.S. government’s secret space program has decided to give NASA two telescopes . . . . [d]esigned for surveillance [and] no longer needed for spy missions . . . . These telescopes will have 100 times the field of view of the Hubble . . . . NASA official Michael Moore gave some hint of what a Hubble-class space telescope might do if used for national security: 'With a Hubble here you could see a dime sitting on top of the Washington Monument.'"

4. A Modest Proposal. In case you missed it, Dallas's latest addition to housing for the 1%, Museum Tower, is frying everything within its line of sight on the Nasher Museum premises. "So [writes Christina Rees in Glasstire], one of Dallas’s more admirable enfant terribles, Erik Schuessler . . . came up with an early solution, and so far I haven’t seen one to beat it." (Link added; click on the images for larger versions.)

How to Assert Your Rights

Use them or lose them.

(Not to mention the waste of public funds.)

A Few Recent Headlines

Been out of town; so, in cased you missed these (more re- each item at the headline link) . . .

1. Don't Forget to Sign Up for the "Do Not Kill" List

A number of sources (including the Wall Street Journal) report that someone has used the White House's "We the People" website to start a petition asking it to create a "Do Not Kill" list similar to the "Do Not Call" list that has been reasonably successful against telemarketers. This follows the New York Times report that every week or so, a bunch of National Security People get together to flip through some PowerPoint slides and "recommend to the President who should be the next to die." The President, who you may recall won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, then personally approves names on the "kill list" for execution targeted killing by drone.

Sign the "Do Not Kill" Petition here. (For more on the "Kill List," see here and links therein.)

2. Occupy Buffalo Helps Convince City to Divest from JPMorgan Chase

City Comptroller Mark J.F. Schroeder has agreed to transfer $45 million . . . from a JPMorgan Chase account to local bank First Niagara Financial Group after Occupy Buffalo raised concerns about leaving the money at JPMorgan, the Buffalo News reports. The move comes with a number of benefits, including a higher interest rate and more local branches that make it easier for employees to cash paychecks . . . .

“It also sends a crystal-clear message to JPMorgan Chase that the City of Buffalo is not happy with their business practices," Schroeder told Buffalo News.

3. Collateral Damage in the War on Protesters: Neighbors of the NATO3 Cuffed, Held at Gunpoint

The . . . officer came up to me and told me he had a hard time believing I wasn’t associated with the people downstairs. His quote exactly was that I had ‘hateful revolutionary things’ in my house. He asked me why I had so many red-colored things (Olli got similar accusations because he was wearing his red work uniform). They were commenting about the red color – I have red curtains and my brother’s an artist, so all his paintings are hanging up, and they found that very suspicious and were trying to say it was part of some kind of conspiracy.

* * * * *
“They acted like asking for a warrant and a lawyer was unreasonable . . . ” Ben said, “but they didn’t seem to realize that they had kidnapped us in our own home. We were handcuffed on the ground in our own living room."

4. The US Government Is Running a Massive Spy Campaign on Occupy Wall Street

The US Dept. of Homeland Security finally released some docs in response to repeated Freedom of Information Act requests by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund. Although the docs are partially blacked out,

[Per the PCJF's Director, "t]hese documents show not only intense government monitoring and coordination in response to the Occupy Movement, but reveal a glimpse into the interior of a vast, tentacled, national intelligence and domestic spying network that the U.S. government operates against its own people."

* * * * *
In particular, the role of the “Fusion Centers,” a series of 72 federally-funded information hubs run by the NOC, raises questions about the government’s expansive definition of “Homeland Security.”

Created in the wake of 9/11, the Fusion Centers were founded to expedite the sharing of information among state and local law enforcement and the federal government, to monitor localized terrorist threats, and to sidestep the regulations and legislation preventing the CIA and the military from carrying out domestic surveillance (namely, the CIA ban on domestic spying and the Posse Comitatus Act).

5. Speaking of JPMorgan Chase . . . the bank's risk committee lacks any members who've actually worked at a bank or as risk managers; one of them was on AIG’s governance committee in 2008.

6. Congressmen Seek to Lift Propaganda Ban

An amendment that would legalize the use of propaganda on American audiences is being inserted into the latest defense authorization bill, BuzzFeed has learned.

The amendment would “strike the current ban on domestic dissemination” of propaganda material produced by the State Department and the independent Broadcasting Board of Governors . . . . The tweak to the bill would essentially neutralize two previous acts—the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 and Foreign Relations Authorization Act in 1987—that had been passed to protect U.S. audiences from our own government’s misinformation campaigns.

The bi-partisan amendment is sponsored by Rep. Mac Thornberry from Texas and Rep. Adam Smith from Washington State.

7. US E-Voting System Cracked in Less than 48 Hours

Researchers at the University of Michigan have reported that . . . . "Within 48 hours of the system going live, we had gained near complete control of the election server", the researchers wrote in a paper that has now been released. "We successfully changed every vote and revealed almost every secret ballot." The hack was only discovered after about two business days – and most likely only because the intruders left a visible trail on purpose.

(Yes, electronic voting and/or tabulation is still a very, very bad idea.)

Google vs. Bloggers

A new user interface is being forced on us bloggers. My and others' experience indicates it's harder to use and offers much less control over the look of posts. Presumably it's also designed to facilitate greater incursions on our privacy. So far, we've been allowed the option to continue to use the old interface, but that's supposed to end soon.

Tenuously related UPDATE: Google's now getting heat from regulators for its collection of people's emails and other private data in the course of its street view photography – invading our privacy without our permission or knowledge – and then lying about it to regulators; more at Wired.

Rebecca Mackinnon: Consent of the Networked

If you don't read her book, at least watch this:

(Another irresistible re-blog from Boing Boing).

More Re- the Infowar

Don't miss Michael Hasting's excellent, recent interview of Julian Assange in Rolling Stone.

Assange mentions the speaker in the video below, Jacob Appelbaum, ("[t]he Tor Project, which protects people around the world from being spied on or censored, lost some $600,000 to the U.S. government, as a result of one of their people, Jacob Appelbaum, having filled in for me once at a conference in New York.") If you haven't seen much of Appelbaum before, his presentation's also not to be missed (you can skip the first 2 min.):



Assange's appeal of extradiction proceedings in the U.K. is due to be heard by the nation's supreme court tomorrow.

Ideas for Facebook Apps

(1) "Who Are My Sycophants?"; and

(2) "Of Whom Am I on the Brink of Becoming Categorized as a Sycophant?"

Wikileaks-esque Sites

As of today, LeakDirect lists 23 of them (with links).

Somebody had to be first.

Recent Assange on Facebook et Al., the Media, War, Etc.

Facebook in particular is the most appalling spying machine that has ever been invented. Here we have the world’s most comprehensive database about people, their relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations and their communications with each other, their relatives, all sitting within the United States, all accessible to US intelligence. Facebook, Google, Yahoo – all these major US organizations have built-in interfaces for US intelligence. It’s not a matter of serving a subpoena. They have an interface that they have developed for US intelligence to use.

Now, is it the case that Facebook is actually run by US intelligence? No, it’s not like that. It’s simply that US intelligence is able to bring to bear legal and political pressure on them. And it’s costly for them to hand out records one by one, so they have automated the process. Everyone should understand that when they add their friends to Facebook, they are doing free work for United States intelligence agencies in building this database for them.

* * * * *

Our No. 1 enemy is ignorance. And I believe that is the No. 1 enemy for everyone – it’s not understanding what actually is going on in the world. It's only when you start to understand that you can make effective decisions and effective plans. Now, the question is, who is promoting ignorance? Well, those organizations that try to keep things secret, and those organizations which distort true information to make it false or misrepresentative. In this latter category, it is bad media.

It really is my opinion that media in general are so bad that we have to question whether the world wouldn't be better off without them altogether. They are so distortive to how the world actually is that the result is . . . we see wars, and we see corrupt governments continue on.

One of the hopeful things that I’ve discovered is that nearly every war that has started in the past 50 years has been a result of media lies. The media could've stopped it if they had searched deep enough; if they hadn't reprinted government propaganda they could've stopped it. But what does that mean? Well, that means that basically populations don't like wars, and populations have to be fooled into wars. Populations don't willingly, with open eyes, go into a war. So if we have a good media environment, then we also have a peaceful environment.

(Emphasis supplied.) More at RT.

Autoprivacy

(Thanks, Ben!)

Student Thwarts Facial Recognition Software

"CV Dazzle" is based on the original camouflage from WWI and targets automated face detection and recognition systems by altering the contrast and spatial relationship of key facial features.



By Adam Harvey; more info at cvdazzle.com. (Thanks, Ben! Note: looks like you have to cut your bangs funny, too.)

About Anonymous

I'm still seeing a lot of confusion about what Anonymous is.

During the last several months, Anon constituencies have been most active in organizing peaceful online protests against services like MasterCard, Visa, and Bank of America (which are attempting to strangle Wikileaks financially) and in supporting the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere in the Middle East. For example, when Mubarek shut down most Egyptians' access to the internet, Anons provided critical help to the Egyptian people by creating and publicizing alternative means of access and other communications.

Part of the problem is that there have been both overt and covert disinformation campaigns going on about the Anons (as well as about Julian Assange and Wikileaks). E.g., during the Anons' DDoS "sit-in" against MasterCard, a rumor was spread that they'd actually hacked the site and had published a bunch of individuals' MasterCard account information. This was a fabrication; in fact, someone had published a list of account numbers that bore no relation to any actual accounts, in a deliberate effort to smear the Anons.

More recently, per The Guardian: "US spy operation that manipulates social media: Military's 'sock puppet' software creates fake online identities to spread pro-American propaganda." And there's no reason to believe that the disinfo efforts uncovered so far are the only ones.

The Anons are at least as diverse as any other large group of people and certainly include pranksters. But the majority seem almost poignantly altruistic; and I believe the results of their major operations have been helpful. Before you accept as true anything about or purporting to be from Anonymous, please check it against a trusted Anonymous news source. For info about the known, "legit" operations, see AnonNews or AnonOps Communications. Other sites have existed but have been taken down; new ones continually arise; again, please use caution re- the source.

Here are a couple of legit Anonymous videos. In the first, they describe themselves and their general purposes. In the second, they describe one of their more recently-launched operations.

"Ten Things You Need to Know About the Infowar"

Or, Are We in Post-Reality Yet?

The full essay with links to sources and more is here. (To comment on it, please return to this post and click here or on "comments," below.)

Here's the précis:

1. A balance of power requires a balance of information. In the US and elsewhere, we've developed a serious imbalance, in that governments and big businesses know everything about us, and we know less and less about them.

2. What's new about Wikileaks is that it may be the first instance of an institutional system that confers the power that comes from the revelation of secrets on the people rather than their rulers. The potential to help restore the balance of knowledge and thus the balance of power between the oligarchs and the rest of us constitutes what I've called as the most important effect of Wikileaks' revelations.

3. The infowar strategy of exposing the secrets of corrupt regimes (which I call, the "Exposure Strategy"), as described by Julian Assange, is three-pronged:
(a) It gives us the opportunity to redress previously hidden injustices;
(b) It tends to deter injustices in the first place by heightening the likelihood and
thus the fear of exposure;
(c) It tends to weaken corrupt organizations by prompting them to tighten security, thus lowering their
own computational I.Q.

4. The counter to the Exposure Strategy is "public relations," which uses our most primitive emotions and drives in order to induce us to disregard truth and to act against our own best interests, at least up to an as-yet-not-fully-understood point. When p.r. is deployed successfully, the truth simply no longer matters; it's as if we've been immunized against it. And note that, to the extent "public relations" is effective, it neutralizes all three prongs of the Exposure Strategy; i.e.,
(a) Injustices exposed need not be investigated, prosecuted, or corrected;
(b) Future injustices are therefore not particularly deterred;
(c) Corrupt organizations need not tighten their security, and thus can avoid having to lower their own
computational I.Q.

5. How far p.r. prevails over the Exposure Strategy will provide an important indication of the extent to which we now live in Post-Reality.

6. Computers are the new guns; but an infowar is not just a war using information as ammunition; it is a struggle between old and new power structures over who will control access to information.

7. The infowar is in essence a class war over knowledge as a form of wealth. As a corollary, information is a commodity for which there are markets that are (absent effective regulation) manipulable.

8. Greater transparency maximizes efficiency and profits for a group as a whole, but individuals within the group profit most when they're not transparent while others in the group are.

9. So long as a system as a whole remains mostly transparent, it's a more-than-zero-sum game; but where transparency has sufficiently deteriorated, the competition among "players" devolves into a race to see who can loot the most the fastest, even if valuable resources are wasted in the process.

10. By virtue of the internet, humanity is (again) on the verge of a potential transition from a system in which powerful elites exploit the governed in a less-than-zero sum game, to a more transparent, collaborative, more-than-zero-sum game system. If the system as a whole remains mostly transparent, the growth in mankind's collective intelligence and well-being may be about to explode. But this beneficial effect could be retarded, perhaps even partially prevented, if we fail to protect the internet and facilities like Wikileaks from those who seek to control them.

More here.

The Great Dictator

Charlie Chapman was Anonymous:



The Great Dictator (1940) is a comedy film written, directed, produced by, and starring Charlie Chaplin. It was his first true talking picture as well as his most commercially successful film.

Ten Things You Need to Know About the Infowar

I'm working on an essay to put flesh on these bones, but wanted to get this out there without further delay. The essay will have lots of links to sources, plus images.

UPDATE: The guts of this post has been moved here.

WikiLeaks: Why It Matters. Why It Doesn't?

This video has been around for a few months and is long, but it's very good – I'm not aware of a better summation of many of the issues involved (I just went back to it as a source for an essay I'm working on). If you can't make it through the whole thing, my faves were the moderator, Paul Jay; Neville Roy Singham; and every bit of Daniel Ellsberg (including his comments near the end).



UPDATE 2011-03-07: Greg Mitchell celebrates his 100th day of blogging the WL story today with an article on his top Cablegate revelation picks; see also Kevin Gosztola's top 100 leaks in 100 tweets.

Free Phone via Google Vs. --?

As reported rather breathlessly by The NYT, you can now make and receive phone calls to/from regular phones from/at your computer for free, without using iChat or Skype, although you have to set up Gmail and Google Voice accounts to do it. This is "a big deal" because:

The ultimate, of course, would be free calls from a phone, to a phone. But until now, all we’ve been able to do is dance around that concept.

For example, chat programs let you make free calls, computer-to-computer. Skype lets you make free calls from your cellphone, but not to regular phone numbers. Skype and Line2 let you make calls from your cellphone (when you’re in a 3G area or on Wi-Fi), to actual phone numbers — but not free.

What Voice Calls from Gmail does is open up another variation, one that [enables free] calls “from a computer, to a phone.” . . . What if Google released an app like that for Android phones, or the iPhone? . . . At that point, you could, for the first time in history, make unlimited free phone-to-phone calls.

. . . That development would cause conniptions at the cellphone companies, that’s for sure."

Of course, some of us might actually still be willing to purchase our phone services from AT&T et al. in exchange for greater privacy. But then, they'd have to provide privacy.

Big Brothers Are Ganging Up on Us

The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.

The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”

“The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases,” says company CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish Army Ranger with a PhD in computer science.

* * * * *

“We’re right there as it happens,” Ahlberg told [Wired,] as he clicked through a demonstration. “We can assemble actual real-time dossiers on people.”

This is particularly disturbing if you've kept up with this.

PS: Why is Nineteen Eighty-Four not available through Netflix?

Nothing to Fear if You've Nothing to Hide?

"American Civil Liberties Union has issued a report chronicling government spying and the detention of groups and individuals 'for doing little more than peacefully exercising their First Amendment rights.'"

"'Our review of these practices has found that Americans have been put under surveillance or harassed by the police just for deciding to organize, march, protest, espouse unusual viewpoints and engage in normal, innocuous behaviors such as writing notes or taking photographs in public,' Michael German, an ACLU attorney and former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent, said . . . ." More at Wired.

And people haven't just been surveilled and harassed; they've been pre-emptively prevented from exercising their rights in such a way as to make their views heard.

Here's a tip for the authorities: I hear there might be some felonies going down in some board rooms. And the Gulf.