Author: HP McLovincraft

Seeker of rabbit holes. Pessimist. Libertine. Contrarian. Your huckleberry. Possibly true tales of sanity-blasting horror also known as abject reality. Prepare yourself. Veteran of a thousand psychic wars. I have seen the fnords. Deplatformed on Tumblr and Twitter.

Google Quietly Escalates Manual Search Censorship

Google has quietly escalated censorship of its market-dominating search engine, adding a range of new topics where human moderators are allowed to manually penalize websites, suppressing them in search results.

If a website is affected by one of these manual acts of censorship, “some or all of that site will not be shown in Google search results,” according to the tech giant.

The list, published in full on Google’s support website, includes the following:

  • Discover policy violation: Adult-themed content
  • News and Discover policy violation: Dangerous content
  • News and Discover policy violation: Harassing content
  • News and Discover policy violation: Hateful content
  • News and Discover policy violation: Manipulated media
  • News and Discover policy violation: Medical content
  • Discover policy violation: Misleading content
  • News and Discover policy violation: Sexually explicit content
  • News and Discover policy violation: Terrorist content
  • News policy violation: Transparency
  • News and Discover policy violation: Violence and gore content
  • News and Discover policy violation: Vulgar language and profanity

Publishers who have been hit with a manual action by Google will be able to appeal the decision by “fixing” whatever issue violated the policy and then submitting their website to Google for a review. Google states that it could take “several days or a week” for the tech giant to reach a final decision, leaving

Once upon a time, Google attempted to conceal its censorship of search. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai insisted, under oath before congress, that the company does not “manually intervene on any particular search result,” a statement that one of Google’s own former employees said was a lie.

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Sweden: Vaccine Passport Will ‘Probably Be Required’ For Shopping, Eating Out, Travel, Meeting Loved Ones

Swedish Health Minister Lena Hallengren announced at a recent press conference the government’s intention to provide a “digital vaccination certificate” to residents who receive a COVID-19 vaccine, allowing them to “travel abroad on holiday or to meet a loved one.”

The minister said she is convinced that a “vaccination certificate is probably as desirable as getting vaccinated,” raising speculation that the digital identifier could become necessary for accessing international travel, as well as going about everyday activities such as like shopping and eating out.

Swedes who have received the vaccine are already eligible for a vaccination certificate from the vaccine provider; the digital “passport” will allow those people to have a copy on their phones.

Anders Ygeman, Sweden’s minister for digital development, stated that the government’s “goal is for the work to go as quickly as possible, and that the digital infrastructure will be in place by the summer,” specifically June 1.

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South Bend’s Infrastructure Was So Bad When Buttigieg Was Mayor, Domino’s Had to Help Fill Potholes

A few weeks ago, President Joe Biden named former Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg as his secretary of transportation, despite his lack of experience in the field.

In fact, the one city Buttigieg was mayor of before suddenly rising to political fame had serious issues with infrastructure during his tenure.

According to the South Bend Tribune, the pothole situation in South Bend, Indiana, was so bad in 2019 that residents contacted pizza chain Domino’s to ask for help.

In 2018, Domino’s launched its “Paving for Pizza” campaign. The idea was to give grants to certain cities in order to ensure a smoother ride for customers carrying out their own pizzas.

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Schumer and AOC Team Up to Announce Taxpayers Now on the Hook for COVID Funerals, Including for Illegal Immigrants

If there’s one way to make sure COVID-19 deaths don’t go down, this is it.

New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer joined forces this week to publicize a federal program that will reimburse the families of coronavirus victims up to $7,000 for funeral expenses for deaths from the disease that occurred in 2020 — even if the death involved an illegal alien.

And, according to CNN, Schumer said the lawmakers want the program to last as long as the pandemic does — which means the numbers are likely to show the pandemic lasting a good long time.

According to the New York Post, the program Schumer and Ocasio-Cortez introduced at a joint news conference in New York on Monday is part of the COVID relief measure signed into law in December by then-President Donald Trump.

Under the bill, $2 billion will go to the Federal Emergency Management Agency for COVID-19 funeral expenses, according to the Post, with about $200,000 million going to New York, the hardest-hit area of the country.

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U.S. Government Contractor Embedded Software in more than 500 Apps to Track Phones of hundreds of millions of users!!!

A damning new WSJ report says a small U.S. government contractor embedded software in over 500 apps, tracking millions of people worldwide.

According to the report:

A small U.S. company with ties to the U.S. defense and intelligence communities has embedded its software in numerous mobile apps, allowing it to track the movements of hundreds of millions of mobile phones world-wide, according to interviews and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Anomaly Six LLC is the company in question, apparently boasting in marketing material that it was “able to draw location data from more than 500 mobile applications” from its own software development kit, embedded directly in some apps:

Anomaly Six says it embeds its own SDK in some apps, and in other cases gets location data from other partners.

The report says Anomaly Six is a federal contractor that provides global location data “to branches of the U.S. government and private-sector clients”. It told WSJ that it restricts the sale of U.S. mobile phone movement data only to the private sector, however.

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“Free Assange” Demands Grow as Biden DOJ Says It Will Continue to Seek Extradition

Just a day after a coalition of press freedom groups urged President Joe Biden to drop his predecessor’s effort to prosecute Julian Assange, a spokesperson for the Department of Justice said Tuesday that the new administration intends to challenge a British judge’s rejection last month of the U.S. attempt to extradite the WikiLeaks publisher.

“We continue to seek his extradition,” Marc Raimondi, a spokesperson for the DOJ’s National Security Division, told Reuters just days before the Friday deadline to appeal Judge Vanessa Baraitser’s ruling, which denied the U.S. extradition request on the grounds that America’s brutal prison system would pose a threat to Assange’s life.

Charged by the Trump Justice Department in 2019 with 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act for publishing classified documents that exposed U.S. war crimes overseas, Assange would likely face up to 175 years in a maximum-security prison if the extradition effort is successful.

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