IO Impotency – Page 167 – Public Intelligence Blog

The attached BBC report/video by John Simpson describing Afghan attitudes toward the US/UK exit struck me as bizarre. The weight of Simpson's gist is that most Afghans do not want us to leave. But the report based most of its information on interviews in Kabul and only a short part (the wobbly part) on the countryside where the vast majority of Afghans live — i.e., Helmand. Simpson did not mention of Taliban strongholds in Kandahar and the border areas with Pakistan,nor did he mention the western areas like Herat, or the Northern areas. So I asked an Afghan friend who follows events in Afghanistan closely for his take on this report. Attached below the video link is my friend's reaction and a NYT piece with yellow highlights.

Afghanistan: Will the Taliban take over again? (with video)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-25864611

(BBC) The BBC's world affairs editor John Simpson visited Kabul, a city he knows well, to discover what shape Afghan government forces are in and whether the Taliban could take over after UK and American troops leave.

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Email from Mr. X

(a highly educated Afghan — ethnic Pashtun — an expat living in Europe)

2014/01/272014/01/27

Mini-Me: Is Google Stupid? Here’s The Plan — and the Phi Beta Iota Alternative

Commerce, Corruption, Idiocy, IO Impotency

Huh?

Google’s Grand Plan to Make Your Brain Irrelevant

By Marcus Wohlsen
WIRED
01.27.14

Google is on a shopping spree, buying startup after startup to push its business into the future. But these companies don’t run web services or sell ads or build smartphone software or dabble in other things that Google is best known for. The web’s most powerful company is filling its shopping cart with artificial intelligence algorithms, robots, and smart gadgets for the home. It’s on a mission to build an enormous digital brain that operates as much like the human mind as possible — and, in many ways, even better.

Continue reading “Mini-Me: Is Google Stupid? Here's The Plan — and the Phi Beta Iota Alternative”

2014/01/272014/01/27

Yoda: The NSA’s Losing Argument

Corruption, Government, Ineptitude, IO Impotency, Military

The NSA’s Losing Argument

The Editors, Bloomberg, 26 January 2014

Of the many questions that still surround the National Security Agency’s vast global spying operations, one seems especially pertinent: Do they actually work? That is, have they helped to prevent terrorist attacks against Americans?

In the case of the NSA’s phone-data program — in which the agency vacuums up information about essentially every call made by Americans — it’s getting harder and harder for the government to answer yes. The latest evidence comes from a report last week by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an independent federal agency established on the recommendation of the Sept. 11 Commission to balance the right to liberty against the need to prevent terrorism.

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2014/01/27

Stephen E. Arnold: Business Intelligence – A Functional Barrier

Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Ineptitude, IO Impotency

Business Intelligence: A Functional Barrier

Walls.

I see him there,
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees. (Robert Frost, Mending Wall)

A reader sent me a link to an item that appeared in Phi Beta Iota. You can find the graphic at http://bit.ly/1d3H3Q4. The original document appeared on 2010 at http://bit.ly/1fnOB2Y. I thought again of walls.

In late 2014, O1Business published a short item that provides more back up for the apparent slow down in some business intelligence markets. You can find that original article at http://bit.ly/1aAgA27. My take on the 01Business story by Marie Jung appeared in December 2013 at http://bit.ly/19VUqH9.

Continue reading “Stephen E. Arnold: Business Intelligence – A Functional Barrier”

2014/01/27

SchwartzReport: NSA Is Making Us All Less Safe

Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War, IO Impotency, Military

People who are truly knowledgeable about IT are appalled about what the NSA is doing and, as this report shows, they are speaking out.

Open Letter From Top U.S. Computer Security Experts Slams NSA Spying As Destroying Security
WashingtonsBlog

The NSA Is Making Us All Less Safe

An open letter today from a large group of professors – top US computer security and cryptography researchers – slams the damage to ecurity caused by NSA spying:

Inserting backdoors, sabotaging standards, and tapping commercial data-center links provide bad actors, foreign and domestic, opportunities to exploit the resulting vulnerabilities.

The value of society-wide surveillance in preventing terrorism is unclear, but the threat that such surveillance poses to privacy, democracy, and the US technology sector is readily apparent.

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2014/01/262014/01/26

Stephen E. Arnold: Future of Business Intelligence?

IO Impotency

The Future of Business Intelligence

January 26, 2014

In the article titled Business Intelligence Usage Evolving Subtly on Smart Data Collective it is made apparent that new developments in business intelligence and analytics are still growing. The article assumes that the 2013 trend in cloud computing popularity will continue into 2014.

Looking further ahead, the article states:

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2014/01/23

Owl: Ralph Nader on Internet Wrongful Secrecy, Snares and Delusions

Commerce, Corruption, Government, IO Impotency

Expect to Get “Mice Print” or Little or Nothing When Looking for Public Information

Ralph Nader debunks a major myth about the Internet: the assumption that government and important public information is accessible or easily so. As he shows, in many cases, not so at all:

“Information technology (IT), now the supplier of millions of jobs, does not have its own value-based imperative. The power structure is very selective about what this technology can access so as to keep the power in its concentrating corporate and governmental hands. For an example, you need only look to how franticly government agencies react when whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden tear aside the curtains and reveal widespread mischief or criminal activity.

Consider a sample of what a selective information age keeps away from our fingertips, away from the Cloud, and away from your smartphones:

Continue reading “Owl: Ralph Nader on Internet Wrongful Secrecy, Snares and Delusions”

Category: IO Impotency

Chuck Spinney: Should US Leave Afghanistan? Is BBC Out of Its Mind? Robert Steele Comments