Media – Page 124 – Public Intelligence Blog

2010/09/292011/01/03

VMyths: Truth About Computer Security Hysteria

Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Computer/online security, Cyberscams, malware, spam, Government, Hacking, Media, Misinformation & Propaganda, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests

http://vmyths.com/about

Vmyths traces its roots to a “Computer Virus Myths treatise” first published in 1988. It evolved into the critically acclaimed “Computer Virus Myths home page” in 1995, then it moved to Vmyths.com in 2000. Its name has changed over the years, but Vmyths remains true to its original goal: the eradication of computer security hysteria.

Vmyths sells the truth about computer security hysteria. We take no prisoners; we pull no punches; and we refuse computer security ads in order to maintain our independence.

Our editors:

Rob Rosenberger edits Vmyths and writes as a columnist. He is one of the “original” virus experts from the 1980s, and the first to focus on virus hysteria. Red Herring magazine describes him as “one of the most visible and cursed critics in computer security” today, and PC World magazine says he “is merciless with self-appointed virus experts and the credulous publications that quote them.” Rosenberger was one of only a dozen industry experts invited to the White House’s first-ever antivirus summit meeting in December 2000.

George C. Smith, Ph.D. serves as Vmyths‘ editor-at-large. He also writes as a columnist. His seminal book, The Virus Creation Labs, documents the insane early history of the antivirus world. He also published the critically acclaimed Crypt newsletter. The San Jose Mercury News recommends Smith’s work to “those who insist on at least a modicum of fact, accuracy and clear thinking in their tech news.”

Continue reading “VMyths: Truth About Computer Security Hysteria”

2010/09/272010/09/27

“The Century of the Self”: Must-See Documentary on Psychology, Advertising, Consumerism and Control

03 Economy, 04 Education, 07 Health, Academia, Civil Society, Commerce, Corporations, Corruption, Ethics, Government, Media, Misinformation & Propaganda, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, True Cost, Videos/Movies/Documentaries

FULL VIDEO HERE

Century of the Self (ADAM CURTIS)

DOCUMENTARY DESCRIPTION
Episode 1: Happiness Machine
Episode 2: The Engineering of Consent
Episode 3: There is a Policeman Inside All Our Heads: He Must Be Destroyed
Episode 4: Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering

CENTURY OF THE SELF asks the deep questions about the roots and methods of consumerism and representative democracy and the implications of the two. The foundation of this documentary is the idea that public relations and politicians have used the theories of Sigmund Freud to engineer a society of consent.

This series is about how those in power have used Freud s theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy. Adam Curtis

For more information about this series, visit its Wikipedia page.

Keywords from imdb.com: Propaganda, Public Relations, Consumerism, Capitalism, Media, Advertising

Related:
Documentary – “The Corporation” (full movie in 23 parts at YouTube)

2010/09/17

Journalists, Media Professionals Donating Frequently to Federal Political Candidates

Government, Media

Journalists, Media Professionals Donating Frequently to Federal Political Candidates this Election Cycle
By Megan R. Wilson on September 14, 2010

Last year, Christopher Hayes gave $250 to the congressional campaign of a good friend, Alabama Democrat Josh Segall. That’s hardly noteworthy, but for one factor: Hayes is the Washington, D.C., editor of The Nation, a left-leaning news magazine that covers U.S. politics. And his political donation is not an anomaly in journalism, where donating to or otherwise advocating for politicians is often taboo – if not prohibited outright by some news companies.

Hayes is one of 235 people who identified themselves on government documents as journalists, or as working for news organizations, who together have donated more than $469,900 to federal political candidates, committees and parties during the 2010 election cycle, a Center for Responsive Politics analysis indicates.

People identifying themselves as working for hard news outlets such as the Washington Post, the New York Times, the New York Post, News Corp., Vanity Fair and Reuters are among the listed donors. Also listed are employees from outlets offering lighter fare — ESPN, Vogue — or community news. Some have donated thousands of dollars.

The average contribution per person identified is eight times Hayes’ amount, and because of some big-spending media professionals, that number is slightly skewed upwards — with the median amount donated coming in at $500. Sixty-five percent of all identified donations went to Democrats, the Center’s research indicates.

To download an itemized spreadsheet of self-identified journalists and other people working for news organizations, click here: Media Donations 091410.xls

2010/09/13

Inside the iPhone Maker, the Man Who Makes Your iPhone & the Human Costs

01 Poverty, 07 Other Atrocities, Civil Society, Commerce, Corporations, Media, Mobile, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Technologies, True Cost

The Man Who Makes Your iPhone

September 9, 2010
By Frederik Balfour and Tim Culpan

Foxconn founder Terry Gou might be regarded as Henry Ford reincarnated if only a dozen of his workers hadn't killed themselves this year. An exclusive look inside a postmodern industrial empire. On a crushingly hot mid-August day at Foxconn's Longhua factory campus in Shenzhen—where a dutiful army of 300,000 employees eats, sleeps, and churns out iPhones, Sony PlayStations, and Dell computers—workers indulged in a rare moment of celebration. First, there was a parade, an Alice in Wonderland spectacle of floats, blaring vuvuzelas, and workers dressed up as Victorian ladies, geishas, cheerleaders, and Spider-Men. This was followed by a two-hour rally inside a vast sports stadium featuring acrobats, musical performances, fireworks, and life-affirming testimonials punctuated by chants of “treasure your life” and “care for each other to build a wonderful future.”

Inside the iPhone Maker

By Frederik Balfour

Foxconn Gives Bloomberg Businessweek Unprecedented Access

Foxconn, the secretive Taiwanese company that produces Apple's iPhone and iPad, the Sony PlayStation, Nintendo Wii, and Dell computers, was forced into the limelight in May 2010 after a dozen employees committed suicide, most by jumping from company dormitories. As part of a much needed public relations effort, Foxconn granted Bloomberg Businessweek unprecedented access to the company's factory floors, worker dorms, suicide helpline operators, and the company's charismatic chairman and founder, 59-year-old Terry Gou. Here are some images of its sprawling facility in Longhua, a suburb of Shenzhen, China, where more than 300,000 migrant laborers work.

2010/09/122010/09/13

Y Combinator Hacker News Community’s Model for Info-Sharing & Potential for Collective Intelligence

03 Economy, 04 Education, 11 Society, Academia, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Commerce, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Hacking, Law Enforcement, Media, Military, Mobile, Non-Governmental, Peace Intelligence, Technologies

“Hacker News” has a welcome page and guidelines page offering an overview of what the organizers expect from those planning on posting comments and why it's good overall for the community. I (Jason Liszkiewicz) was impressed with this. Hacker News has a solid number of participants and provides a simple and mature format for exploring and contributing thoughtful feedback, insight and resources.

It has a jobs link (mainly for engineers and programmers) and the “Ask Hacker News” link which enables the community to share information and reply to what is shared. Such a model (deemed an “experiment”) that provides mature and thoughtful information-sharing is something we need more of. Communities inter-linking with communities (or at least over-lapping) to spill over each others insights can be invaluable and potentially priceless.

Example: Ask HN: What do you perceive as worth spending money on?

This simple and useful model is something I hoped would emerge + converge from the SMS/text messaging developers at ChaCha.com (humans online responding to text messaged questions) or somewhere else. Converging multi-community info-sharing online, offline, and through the mobile world on a global scale is an exciting possibility.

The next level to all of this exists in the form of ideas or fragmented applications but it seems not beyond that, yet.

Email earthintelnet|at|gmail.com or post something at this new forum to discuss these ideas. Or, provide some mature and thoughtful feedback at the Hacker News community.

2010/09/122010/09/12

Sick Systems on a Micro to Macro Level; Not All Vampires Suck Blood; Psychopaths Among Us

04 Education, 07 Health, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, Academia, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Law Enforcement, Media

The following pieces are from June 2010 and 2001. They were found separately within the same day and provide inter-connected insights. Link to the full version..below is an extremely shortened version:

PSYCHOPATHS AMONG US

Dr. Robert Hare claims there are 300,000 psychopaths in Canada, but that only a tiny fraction are violent offenders like Paul Bernardo and Clifford Olsen. Who are the rest? Take a look around.
By Robert Hercz (2001)

(three highlights from the article)

+ Hare has said that if he couldn't study psychopaths in prisons, the Vancouver Stock Exchange would have been his second choice (Forbes magazine called the Vancouver Stock Exchange the scam capital of the world). This brings a whole other meaning to “psycho-geography.”

+ Soon after he delivered a keynote speech at a conference for homicide detectives and prosecuting attorneys in Seattle three years ago, Hare got a letter thanking him for helping solve a series of homicides. The police had a suspect nailed for a couple of murders, but believed he was responsible for others. They were using the usual strategy to get a confession, telling him, ‘Think how much better you'll feel, think of the families left behind,' and so on. After they'd heard Hare speak they realized they were dealing with a psychopath, someone who could feel neither guilt nor sorrow. They changed their interrogation tactic to, “So you murdered a couple of prostitutes. That's minor-league compared to Bundy or Gacy.” The appeal to the psychopath's grandiosity worked. He didn't just confess to his other crimes, he bragged about them.

+ Know your own weaknesses, they advise, because the psychopath will find and use them. Learn to recognize the psychopath, they tell us, before adding that even experts are regularly taken in.

How to keep someone with you forever (common enslavement tactics)

Jun. 9th, 2010

Rule 1: Keep them too busy to think. Thinking is dangerous. If people can stop and think about their situation logically, they might realize how crazy things are.

Rule 2: Keep them tired. Exhaustion is the perfect defense against any good thinking that might slip through. Fixing the system requires change, and change requires effort, and effort requires energy that just isn't there. No energy, and your lover's dangerous epiphany is converted into nothing but a couple of boring fights.

Continue reading “Sick Systems on a Micro to Macro Level; Not All Vampires Suck Blood; Psychopaths Among Us”

2010/09/122010/09/12

Journal: Who, Exactly, is Behind Burning Koran?

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Secrets, Media

TIME? or CIA?

Viewpoint

Christianophobia: The Lesson of Terry Jones

by Tim Padgett, Friday, September 10, 2011

Pastor Terry Jones, right, of the Dove World Outreach Center speaks to the media in Gainesville, Fla., as Imam Muhammad Musri of the Islamic Society of Central Florida looks on. Phil Sandlin / AP

Even ogres can serve a purpose. The “Reverend” Terry Jones has at least shown us the ugly consequences of the Islamophobia that was this summer's political fad — by turning the tables. How does it feel to be caricatured as a nation of Koran-burning radicals? Americans were appalled to find that a solitary religious bigot and his tiny congregation of 50 pseudo Christians had hijacked our global image. We squirmed as a warped little corner of America's Judeo-Christian culture colored the entire country in the eyes of the world — the way Americans let a warped little corner of Islamic culture color all Muslims, even Muslim Americans.

Tip of the Hat to Rob Sentse at LinkedIn.

Phi Beta Iota: There are no coincidences within totalitarian corporate-controlled governments. The combination of the Christian dupe calling for the burning of the Qu'an and the manufactured theater of the Muslim mosque with CIA funding at Ground Zero are all too reminiscent of the FBI-sponsored car bombing of the World Trade Center in the 1990's, and totally consistent with what Buckminster Fuller called “White House Theater” and Noam Chomsky calls “manufacturing consent.” In light of this shallow and manipulative TIME story, the five “filters” that Chomsky and his co-author identified bear reiteration:

From Wikipedia “Propaganda Model:”

First presented in their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, the “Propaganda model” views the private media as businesses interested in the sale of a product — readers and audiences — to other businesses (advertisers) rather than that of quality news to the public. Describing the media's “societal purpose”, Chomsky writes, “… the study of institutions and how they function must be scrupulously ignored, apart from fringe elements or a relatively obscure scholarly literature”.^[1] The theory postulates five general classes of “filters” that determine the type of news that is presented in news media. These five classes are:

Ownership of the medium
Medium's funding sources
Sourcing
Flak
Anti-communist ideology

Today anti-communism (which was nurtured in part by the CIA's importation of 100+ senior Nazis each year after the end of WWII) has been replaced by the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) and its occasional theatrics such as the “Underpants Bomber.” The tragedy is that 80% of the US public has been so dumbed down and anesthitized as to take this garbage seriously, while the 20% that “get it” are marginalized, which is of course the point of it all.

Review: Grand Illusion–The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny

2008 ELECTION 2008: Lipstick on the Pig

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Disinformation, Other Information Pathologies, & Repression

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Empire as Cancer Including Betrayal & Deceit

Worth a Look: Impeachable Offenses, Modern & Historic

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Institutionalized Ineptitude