The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
“Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.”
Narrative Managers Claim White Helmets Founder Was Driven To Suicide By Syria Skeptics
Phi Beta Iota: Her site is down intermittently. There is a new wave of attacks agaiinst truth-tellers (including PBI, defeating over 8,000 attacks, some sophisticated, each day). Some of the assholes have technical skills.
Death by screen — thank you, stupid Navy, thank you stupid Northrup Grumman. Thank you worthless Inspectors General and worthless Congress.
When the USS John S. McCain crashed in the Pacific, the Navy blamed the destroyer’s crew for the loss of 10 sailors. The truth is the Navy’s flawed technology set the McCain up for disaster.
An Artificial Intelligence Doubter: Remarkable
The often cynical and always irreverent Piekniewski’s blog has posted another perspective of the AI field in, “AI Update, Late 2019 – Wizards of Oz.” AI and deep learning scholar Filip Piekniewski has made a habit of issuing take-downs of AI propaganda, and this time he takes aim at self-driving cars, OpenAI, Microsoft’s DeepMind, and more. He writes: read more.
Belated Recognition: Barn Burned, Intelligence Costco Operating
Amnesty International has described the “Architecture of Surveillance.” Quick out of the gate? Concerns about privacy and the ways in which large tech companies use and profit off user data have been more and more in the news lately. A recent report by Amnesty International goes so far as to say Facebook and Google, in particular, maintain a “surveillance-based business model.” Common Dreams discusses the report in its article, “Unprecedented ‘Architecture of Surveillance’ Created by Facebook and Google Poses Grave Human Rights Threat: Report.” Writer Andrea Germanos summarizes: read more.
Hats off to The New York Times for a superb article on Amazon. It barely scratches the surface but it is a very good start. I am the one who inspired Amazon in 2007 with my briefing, “Amazon as the Hub of the World Brain,” but they went down the rabbit hole which was not my intention, I had hoped they would become a source of power for the public rather than an extension of the police state. Amazon is gobbling up — some would say very unethically — both normal online businesses (e.g. Netflix) and open source offerings (e.g. Elastic) while doing mass and a la carte surveillance (e.g delivery drones with cameras on call for law enforcement missions) beyond the pale.
Prime Leverage: How Amazon Wields Power in the Technology World
Oh, Google, I did love you so…
Azure Is Better at Hybrid Computing Because AWS Is an Orchid
There’s an interesting explanation of the DoD’s JEDI award in “Opinion: Microsoft Fairly and Squarely Beat Amazon in $10 Billion Pentagon Cloud Contract.” The reason is:
Amazon: What Does the S Team Do without a Policeware Leader?
You can get the list of S Team members in “Amazon Expands Bezos’ Elite ‘S-Team,’ Adding 6 Execs from Emerging Branches of the Company.” DarkCyber believes that there is a commitment at Amazon for policeware and developing services to assist authorities in determining if tax returns are on the up and up. The apparent exclusion of a designated policeware “owner” suggests that the company wants to continue its low profile approach to this high potential revenue sector.
Continue reading “Stephen E. Arnold: Is Amazon Concealing Its Core “Policeware” Aspect?”
