Tag: big tech

Apple and Meta Gave User Data to Hackers Who Used Forged Legal Requests

Apple and Meta provided basic subscriber details, such as a customer’s address, phone number and IP address, in mid-2021 in response to the forged “emergency data requests.” Normally, such requests are only provided with a search warrant or subpoena signed by a judge, according to the people. However, the emergency requests don’t require a court order.

Snap Inc. received a forged legal request from the same hackers, but it isn’t known whether the company provided data in response. It’s also not clear how many times the companies provided data prompted by forged legal requests.

Cybersecurity researchers suspect that some of the hackers sending the forged requests are minors located in the U.K. and the U.S. One of the minors is also believed to be the mastermind behind the cybercrime group Lapsus$, which hacked Microsoft Corp., Samsung Electronics Co. and Nvidia Corp., among others, the people said. City of London Police recently arrested seven people in connection with an investigation into the Lapsus$ hacking group; the probe is ongoing.

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Silicon Valley’s Transhuman Obsession Is Fundamentally Flawed

If, through biotechnology, we could drastically enhance ourselves—such that our ability to absorb and manipulate information was unlimited, we experienced no disquiet, and we did not age—would we? Should we? For advocates of radical enhancement, or “transhumanism,” answering “yes” is a no-brainer. Accordingly, they press for the development of technologies that, by manipulating genes and the brain, would create beings fundamentally superior to us.

Transhumanism is far from a household term, but, whether or not they use the word publicly, its adherents are in places of power, especially in Silicon Valley. Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, is devoted to boosting “cognition” and co-founded the company Neuralink toward that end. Having raised more than $200 million in new funding in 2021, in January, Neuralink proclaimed its readiness to start human trials of brain-implantable computer chips for therapeutic purposes, to help those with spinal-cord injuries walk again. But Musk’s ultimate target in exploring brain-computer connections is “superhuman,” or “radically enhanced,” cognition—a top transhumanist priority. Those with radically heightened cognitive ability would be so advanced that they wouldn’t even really be human anymore but, instead, “posthuman.”

In transhumanist fantasy, posthumans could, philosopher Nick Bostrom assures us, “read, with perfect recollection and understanding, every book in the Library of Congress.” Similarly, according to futurist and transhumanist Ray Kurzweil—who has worked at Google since 2012—they would rapidly absorb the entire contents of the World Wide Web. Pleasure would be pervasive and boundless: Posthumans will “sprinkle it in [their] tea.” On the flip side, suffering wouldn’t exist, as posthumans would have “Godlike” control of their moods and emotions. Of course, posthuman bliss would not be supreme absent immortality. This last facet, the quest to conquer aging, already garners substantial backing from Silicon Valley. In 2013, Larry Page, Google’s co-founder—and CEO of its parent company, Alphabet, until December 2019—announced the launch of Calico Labs, whose mission is to understand aging and subvert it. A growing list of startups and investors, dedicated to the “reprogramming” of human biology with the defeat of aging in view, has entered the mix. This list now includes Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who, in January, contributed to the $3 billion that launched Altos Labs.

Today, transhumanism’s name recognition has spread beyond Silicon Valley and academia. In 2019, an opinion piece in the Washington Post stated that “the transhumanism movement is making progress.” And a 2020 essay in the Wall Street Journal suggested that, by making “our biological fragility more obvious than ever,” COVID-19 may be “just the kind of crisis needed to turbocharge efforts” to achieve transhumanists’ goal of immortality.

You’re probably already familiar with certain enhancements—like athletes using steroids to gain a competitive advantage, or individuals using ADHD drugs like Ritalin and Adderall off label in search of a cognitive boost. But a chasm separates such enhancements from transhumanism, whose devotees would have us engineer a species-level upgrade of humanity into posthumanity. And key to all of transhumanism’s planned advancements, mental and physical, is a specific understanding of “information” and its causal dominance in relation to features that advocates prize. This focus on information is also transhumanism’s fatal flaw.

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Bi-partisan bill would push Big Tech and Big Media to make content distribution deals

Sen. Graham, Lindsey [R-SC], Sen. Kennedy, John [R-LA], Sen. Booker, Cory A. [D-NJ], Sen. Whitehouse, Sheldon [D-RI], Sen. Lummis, Cynthia M. [R-WY], Sen. Feinstein, Dianne [D-CA], Sen. Collins, Susan M. [R-ME], and Sen. Paul, Rand [R-KY] are all backing a bill that empowers mainstream media at the expense of smaller outlets and independent content creators.

The senators are co-sponsoring the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act which has been accused of actually hindering competition.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

Instead of promoting competition in the world of media, the bill would allow mainstream media companies, like CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and MSNBC to form an alliance and collectively bargain with Big Tech platforms.

These mainstream outlets would be able to form new deals with online platforms that would force tech platforms to uprank their own content at the expense of independent content creators and independent voices.

The bill has a provision allowing legacy media to exclude companies that are not “similarly situated,” meaning independent journalists and small media companies will not get the benefits of the bargains with Big Tech.

Tennessee’s Senator Marsha Blackburn has warned the bill would result in more censorship by Big Tech. Florida’s Sen. Marco Rubio aired similar concerns, saying the bill would strengthen the “collusion between Big Media and Big Tech.”

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Meta paid GOP operatives to push negative stories about TikTok

Meta has hired a top GOP consulting firm to gin up rage against TikTok and deflect political scrutiny away from Facebook and Instagram, according to a report on Wednesday. 

The consulting firm, Targeted Victory, pushed to “get the message out that while Meta is the current punching bag, TikTok is the real threat especially as a foreign owned app that is #1 in sharing data that young teens are using,” according to an internal email from February reported by the Washington Post.  

Targeted Victory reportedly advanced Meta’s agenda by pushing news stories blaming dangerous online trends such as the “slap a teacher challenge” on TikTok — even though the trend actually originated on Facebook. 

The group also helped place op-eds and letters to the editor in local papers like the Denver Post and Des Moines Register, raising concerns about China “deliberately collecting behavioral data on our kids,” according to the report. 

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has blamed TikTok for Facebook’s slowing user growth, which has contributed to its stock tanking 32.5% so far this year. 

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The Kids Online Safety Act Is a Heavy-Handed Plan to Force Platforms to Spy on Young People

Putting children under surveillance and limiting their access to information doesn’t make them safer—in fact, research suggests just the opposite. Unfortunately those tactics are the ones endorsed by the Kids Online Safety Act of 2022 (KOSA), introduced by Sens. Blumenthal and Blackburn. The bill deserves credit for attempting to improve online data privacy for young people, and for attempting to update 1998’s Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA). But its plan to require surveillance and censorship of anyone under sixteen would greatly endanger the rights, and safety, of young people online.

KOSA would require the following:

  • A new legal duty for platforms to prevent certain harms: KOSA outlines a wide collection of content that platforms can be sued for if young people encounter it, including “promotion of self-harm, suicide, eating disorders, substance abuse, and other matters that pose a risk to physical and mental health of a minor.”
  • Compel platforms to provide data to researchers
  • An elaborate age-verification system, likely run by a third-party provider
  • Parental controls, turned on and set to their highest settings, to block or filter a wide array of content

There are numerous concerns with this plan. The parental controls would in effect require a vast number of online platforms to create systems for parents to spy on—and control—the conversations young people are able to have online, and require those systems be turned on by default. It would also likely result in further tracking of all users.

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Tulsi Gabbard Explains Big Tech Censorship After Twitter Shadow Ban

Former Congresswoman and frequent target of far-left censors, Tulsi Gabbard, used her own Twitter account to illustrate big tech censorship to her followers firsthand. Gabbard demonstrated the effects of Twitter’s infamous “shadow ban” in a video she shared online.

Despite formerly being elected to Congress as a Democrat and even seeking the DNC’s 2020 nomination for President, Tulsi Gabbard has been a frequent target of the political establishment and of big tech censors. Gabbard’s pro-freedom and anti-war stances (she has been to war herself) have often put her at odds with the geopolitical elite, and she has even been accused of being a Russian asset by the likes of Hillary Clinton and other’s often associated with the deep state, a claim then echoed by corporate media and, by extension, big tech. 

Like many others at odds with the uni-party elite have reported, Tulsi Gabbard says she has been shadow banned by Twitter. By web definition, shadow banning entails “blocking or  partially blocking a user or their content from some areas of an online community,” a practice which the censors at Twitter appear to have perfected.

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Google Doesn’t Want You to Research Mass Formation

At the end of 2021, the term “mass formation” had a value of 0 on Google Trends, meaning there’s not enough data for the term to even make it on the charts. Then, on December 31, Dr. Robert Malone, the inventor of the mRNA and DNA vaccine core platform technology,(1) mentioned it on an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience viewed by more than 50 million people.(2)

The term, which provides a coherent explanation of why so many people have fallen victim to the unbelievable lies and propaganda of the mainstream COVID-19 narrative, went viral. On January 2, 2022, mass formation reached a value of 100 on Google Trends,(3) which means it had reached peak popularity.

Google Manipulates Reality Around ‘Mass Formation Psychosis’

The technocrats quickly took action, adding a rarely seen warning that popped up for those searching the suddenly popular phrase in the early days of 2022. It read, “It looks like these results are changing quickly. If this topic is new, it can sometimes take time for results to be added by reliable sources.”(4)

In reality, the topic is not new. Mattias Desmet, professor of clinical psychology at the University of Ghent in Belgium, who has 126 publications to his name,(5) has been studying it for many years, and the phenomenon actually dates back over a hundred years. One of the earliest works on the subject, according to Malone, is an 1841 book titled, “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds,” which details “the irrational behaviors of crowds.”(6)

You won’t find any of this — at least not easily — if you search on Google for “mass formation” today, however, as it’s all been effectively buried by Big Tech. What you will find is the results of an orchestrated and carefully vetted links to sites that help control the mainstream narrative around the topic. This not only serves to twist the meaning of the term but also to discredit Malone, a classic Orwellian Doublespeak move.

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Cowards at Twitter HQ Cite Foreign ‘Hate Speech’ Law to Punish American Company

Twitter shut down the account of the U.S.-based Christian Post for accurately describing President Joe Biden’s transgender assistant health secretary, Rachel Levine, as a man — and the social media giant cited a foreign law to justify its actions.

The evangelical Christian outlet told its readers on Monday that its Twitter account had been “temporarily limited” because of a tweet about Levine, a man who identifies as female.

The Christian Post said it was told by Twitter it no longer would be able to post anything new and could not like or follow other users or retweet posts.

The outlet was further informed that it would be suspended from Twitter for 12 hours.

The “offensive” tweet was the Christian Post’s March 15 message that read, “USA Today names Rachel Levine, a man, among its ‘Women of the Year.’”

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How Dem officials, the media and Big Tech worked in concert to bury the Hunter Biden story

Everlasting, undying, soul-rending shame be upon you, Facebook and Twitter and Politico and all the others who covered up, denied and suppressed this newspaper’s true and accurate reporting about Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020. You should be hurling yourselves at the feet of the American people, begging forgiveness. You should be renting billboards saying, “WE LIED.”

But most importantly, you should be hauled before Congress to answer humiliating questions.

These and other information purveyors owe us — not just this paper, but this country — restitution for what now looks like the most egregious and willful fake-news scam of our time. This paper’s scoops on Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020 were labeled “Russian misinformation” (Politico), a “hoax” (Steven Brill of “fact-check” site NewsGuard), discredited by “many, many red flags” (NPR) and a “hack and leak” operation that had to be throttled (Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg).

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