Tag: internet

NPR Declares Using Wrong Colour Emojis is Probably RACIST

In another example of the establishment left’s obsessive grift with race and social segregation, publicly funded NPR published a story claiming that if you use the wrong colour emoji in text messages in relation to your own skin colour, you are probably a racist.

In the article titled  “Which skin color emoji should you use? The answer can be more complex than you think”, writers Alejandra Marquez, Janse Patrick Jarenwattananon, and Asma Khalid (it took three of them to take on this weighty subject) argue that choosing to use a yellow emoji, rather than a white, brown or black one is “the neutral option” that will leave the respondent free to “focus on the message” rather than race.

Of course, any rational person wouldn’t immediately see an emoji in a text and start thinking about race. Not these taxpayer funded hacks though.

They even went around interviewing people for the piece.

One interviewee said “I present as very pale, very light skinned. And if I use the white emoji, I feel like I’m betraying the part of myself that’s Filipino.”

The interviewee continued, “But if I use a darker color emoji, which maybe more closely matches what I see when I look at my whole family, it’s not what the world sees, and people tend to judge that.”

OMG, what a terrible dilemma to be in.

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Senate Bill Creates Massive Surveillance Program to Scan All of Your Online Messages

 People don’t want outsiders reading their private messages —not their physical mail, not their texts, not their DMs, nothing. It’s a clear and obvious point, but one place it doesn’t seem to have reached is the U.S. Senate.

A group of lawmakers led by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) have re-introduced the EARN IT Act, an incredibly unpopular bill from 2020 that was dropped in the face of overwhelming opposition. Let’s be clear: the new EARN IT Act would pave the way for a massive new surveillance system, run by private companies, that would roll back some of the most important privacy and security features in technology used by people around the globe. It’s a framework for private actors to scan every message sent online and report violations to law enforcement. And it might not stop there. The EARN IT Act could ensure that anything hosted online—backups, websites, cloud photos, and more—is scanned.

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Concerned about Your Privacy? 6 Ways to Reduce the Amount of Internet Data that Has Been Collected on You

Most businesses want to generate as much profit as possible.  That’s always been true.  Data collection can be very profitable – sometimes even more so than selling products and services.  Data collection for the purpose of marketing more products and services to customers as well as selling customer data to third parties is sometimes referred to as “Surveillance Capitalism”.  Many businesses collect personal data on customers even when customers aren’t aware of it or have freely consented to it.  The examples are countless and include utility companies that install hazardous electric, gas, and water “Smart” Meters (see 1, 2, 3) on homes throughout communities worldwide.

It’s overwhelming to think about how much data has been collected on us – even children.  The good news is that there are ways to reduce some of this.

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Is a new kind of religion forming on the internet?

“It just doesn’t sit right with me,” begins a TikTok by a user named Evelyn Juarez. It’s a breakdown of the tragedy at Astroworld, the Travis Scott concert in early November where eight people died and more than 300 were injured. But the video isn’t about what actually happened there. It’s about the supposed satanic symbolism of the set: “They tryna tell us something, we just keep ignoring all the signs,” reads its caption, followed by the hashtags #wakeup, #witchcraft, and #illuminati.

Juarez, a 25-year-old in Dallas, is a typical TikToker, albeit a quite popular one, with 1.4 million followers. Many of her videos reveal an interest in true crime and conspiracy theories — the Gabby Petito case, for instance, or Lil Nas X’s “devil shoes,” or the theory that multiple world governments are hiding information about Antarctica. One of her videos from November suggests that a survey sent to Texas residents about the use of electricity for critical health care could signify that “something is coming and [the state government] knows it.”

Her beliefs are reminiscent of many others on the internet, people who speak of “bad vibes,” demonic spirits, or a cosmic calamity looming just over the horizon, one that the government may be trying to keep secret. Juarez tells me she was raised Christian, although at age 19 she began to have a more personal relationship with God outside of organized religion.

Today, she identifies more as spiritual, as an increasing number of young people do, many of them working out their ideas in real time online. They may talk about manifesting their dreams and faceless sex traffickers waiting to install tracking devices on women’s parked cars. Some might act almost as prophets or shamans, spreading the good word and guiding prospective believers, while others might just lurk in the comments. They might believe all or only some of these ideas — part of the draw of internet spirituality is that it’s perfectly pick-and-choosable — but more than anything, they believe in the importance of keeping an open mind to whatever else might be out there.

I asked Joseph Russo, a professor of anthropology at Wesleyan University, if this loosely related web of beliefs could ever come together to form into its own kind of religion. “I think it already has,” he says.

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Japan breaks world record for fastest internet speed

Engineers in Japan have set a new world record for fastest internet speed — and it’s so fast, you’d be able to download nearly 80,000 movies in just one second.

Need for speed: Internet speed is typically measured by how much data can be transmitted between two devices in one second.

The new record is 319 terabits per second (Tb/s). That’s double the previous world record for fastest internet speed and about 7.6 million times faster than the average home internet speed in the U.S. (42 megabits per second). 

Fiber-optic cables: Different types of internet connections transmit data over different types of hardware. The old dial-up connections, for example, relied on telephone wires, while the fastest kind of internet available today — fiber — uses fiber-optic cables.

These cables transmit data using pulses of light, which travel along thin optical fibers with glass or plastic cores.

To break the record for fastest internet speed, researchers at Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology developed an experimental optical fiber with four cores, instead of just one.

They then combined their fiber with a laser that fired pulses at different wavelengths and multiple signal amplification techniques. This enabled them to transmit data over a distance of more than 1,800 miles at 319 Tb/s. 

Perfect fit: The laser and amplifiers used to break the fastest internet speed record are not cheap, so don’t expect 300 Tb/s home internet any time soon. 

However, there is one part of the experiment that could have an impact on your life in the not-so-distant future: the optical fiber.

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The UK plans to make online “pile-ons” a crime, in chillingly broad attempt to suppress speech

The UK is preparing to criminalize what is perceived as internet trolling that causes “likely psychological harm,” thanks to the country’s upcoming Online Safety Bill that is introducing a new set of criminal offenses.

And while the punishment internet users in the UK could face under the new legislation is clear – up to two years in prison – the definitions of their “crimes” are a good deal murkier.

In addition to their posts “likely” causing psychological harm, users can also be accused of committing a crime if they post messages containing “threatening communication” – but not necessarily, as defined in the previous law dealing with online hate speech and abuse, because they are found to intend to follow through on the threat.

Instead, it would be enough to “prove” that the recipient of such posts and messages “feared” the threat was real.

Another offense has to do with spreading information that internet users “know” is false, again, in order to cause emotional or physical harm to their “likely audience.” The proposed bill is littered with equally vague and subjective definitions of future crimes that could be hard to prove in a court of law.

The Department for Culture, Media & Sport incorporated the “likely psychological harm” as a basis for the new legislation, as recommended by the Law Commission, and will include them in the bill once it is forwarded to the UK government, which should approve it before it hits parliament in November.

Another recommendation that has been accepted is to make online “pile-ons” a crime – i.e., several users sending trolling messages perceived by the recipient as harassing, while one example a government source gave to the media of what it means to “knowingly” spread false information would be if a vaccine skeptic or a vaccine hesitant person speaks about their conviction – that is apparently automatically considered untrue, while the author is held responsible for “knowing” it.

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Behind NATO’s ‘cognitive warfare’: ‘Battle for your brain’ waged by Western militaries

NATO is developing new forms of warfare to wage a “battle for the brain,” as the military alliance put it.

The US-led NATO military cartel has tested novel modes of hybrid warfare against its self-declared adversaries, including economic warfare, cyber warfare, information warfare, and psychological warfare.

Now, NATO is spinning out an entirely new kind of combat it has branded cognitive warfare. Described as the “weaponization of brain sciences,” the new method involves “hacking the individual” by exploiting “the vulnerabilities of the human brain” in order to implement more sophisticated “social engineering.”

Until recently, NATO had divided war into five different operational domains: air, land, sea, space, and cyber. But with its development of cognitive warfare strategies, the military alliance is discussing a new, sixth level: the “human domain.”

A 2020 NATO-sponsored study of this new form of warfare clearly explained, “While actions taken in the five domains are executed in order to have an effect on the human domain, cognitive warfare’s objective is to make everyone a weapon.”

“The brain will be the battlefield of the 21st century,” the report stressed. “Humans are the contested domain,” and “future conflicts will likely occur amongst the people digitally first and physically thereafter in proximity to hubs of political and economic power.”

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The VPN Empire Built By Intelligence Agents

For many people, a VPN is accepted as being their best bet for protecting their data and online privacy. While cyber security is certainly a concern for them, most VPN users aren’t exactly adept when it comes to information technology. Like any consumer, they typically err on the side of using a trusted name within the industry. In many ways, ExpressVPN is that standard-bearer. Since it began in 2009, ExpressVPN has signed up millions of users for its service under the promise that it does everything from encrypting data on their internet browser to masking their IP address in order to protect users against hackers and government surveillance.

What most of the 3 million users who currently use ExpressVPN probably weren’t aware of when they signed up is that the service proves the point that hackers and government surveillance aren’t mutually exclusive. On September 13th, ExpressVPN was sold to the Israeli-based company Kape Technologies in a $936 million cash and stock purchase. This acquisition added ExpressVPN to a catalog including several other VPN providers acquired by Kape Technologies since 2017. The acquiring company touted its purchase as being integral to defining the next generation in its fight for online privacy. However, the centralization the VPN services Kape Technologies owns and an examination of its history reveals the company’s efforts to undermine that very cause as a distributor of malware with ties to US and Israeli intelligence operations.

Kape Technologies was founded in 2011 by partners Koby Menachemi and Shmueli Ahdut under the name CrossRider. Early in its origins, CrossRider did not bill itself as a cyber security company. Instead, the focus of the company was on web browsing and advertising technologies. Just 20 months after its founding, the tech start-up with $2 million in working capital was purchased by Israeli tech billionaire Teddy Sagi for $37 million. Menachemi and Ahdut would stay on at the company as its CEO and CTO following the purchase. With the injection of capital that Sagi’s purchase put into the company, CrossRider pivoted its operations to change the scope of its outlook toward cyber security. In 2017, CrossRider cemented that change of direction when it purchased CyberGhost VPN for $10.4 million. Upon its acquisition of the Romanian-based VPN, CrossRider rebranded itself as Kape Technologies.

While CrossRider’s rebrand appeared to be a common tactic by a company marking a shift in its outlook as it made its first foray into cyber security, the basis of the change was rooted in a much different motive. By the time CrossRider had acquired CyberGhost VPN, the adware programs the company designed had been exposed as hacking tools. By attaching its adware to third party downloads, CrossRider was able to install potentially unwanted programs which attached to web browsers as spyware. Microsoft, Symantec MalwareBytes, and other cyber security websites categorized CrossRider’s malware program Crossid as a browser hijacker which collected user information such as browser information to IP addresses in order to monetize data for its value in targeted ad campaigns. With the CrossRider name being attached to this malicious spyware, the company was putting its newest VPN asset in jeopardy. In order to avoid losing users of CyberGhostVPN, rebranding to Kape Technologies was a measure designed to obfuscate the companies history as an entity producing malware programs which were antithetical to the interest of data security. The rebrand proved to effectuate the new image the company sought as it would go on to acquire additional VPN services years before its 2021 purchase of ExpressVPN. In 2018, Kape Technologies acquired Zenmate for $5.5 million and then Private Internet Access for $95 million in 2019.

With its growing portfolio, Kape Technologies had become increasingly more visible. Its umbrella of ownership centralizing multiple VPNs was a red flag for many who placed value in cyber security. Under growing scrutiny, the concerning origins of the company’s founders came to light. It was revealed that Koby Menachemi, Kape Technologies co-founder and former CEO, began his career in information technologies while serving in the Israeli Defense Forces. Menachemi worked as a developer in the Israeli Intelligence Corps under Unit 8200. That division of the IDF was responsible for collecting signal intelligence and data decryption. Its alumni are estimated to have founded over 1,000 tech startups. Companies founded by former operatives of Unit 8200 include Waze, Elbit Systems, and slews of other startups who have since been acquired by the likes of Kodak, PayPal, Facebook, and Microsoft.

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FB “whistleblower” saga has propelled push for social media “permits”

Apparently emboldened by a recent “Facebook whistleblower’s” congressional testimony and media tour, an op-end has surfaced on project-sindicate.org exploring how information could be further and more efficiently contained and obscured from users, beyond “old-fashioned” ways like censorship and downranking.

And Steven Hill, formerly of the Center for Humane Technology (CHT) – an outfit dedicated to “radically reimagining our digital infrastructure” – has an appropriately radical idea: introduce digital operating permits and “protect people” by not allowing more than 1,000 to see a particular post.

To make the idea somewhat palatable, it was introduced under the guise of a novel way of dealing with what everybody seems to agree needs to be dealt with: tech monopolies. But the tech monopoly horse has left the barn a long time ago, and it seems that a degree of regulation will now be needed to rein it in and then allow natural ways of dealing with monopolies – fair competition and innovation to take care of the problem.

But Hill thinks the way to make them less dominant is by making major social media sites’ audiences artificially smaller. And since an average person hardly communicates with 1,000 people “in real life” (notwithstanding that people’s digital lives have very much become a part of their “real” one), Hill doesn’t think that users would be “deprived” by this limitation.

But right away, the true nature of this extraordinarily dystopian idea reveals itself to be not to truly limit the power of tech monopolies, but to make sure that the message that does get out to a lot of people (so, more than 1,000 at a time) is very controlled.

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