Oracle started as a CIA project (2014)
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
If these agencies were NOT investing in potential technical solutions that would be a cause for concern.
Read more about In-Q-Tel and their investments here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel
Oracle collects:
1. Who is staying in which hotels and in which rooms
2. Who is eating at which restaurants and going to which entertainment facilities
3. Who is getting what health services
4. Who is travelling where across travel industry
5. Who is working for which companies in what roles and how much are they paid
This is incredibly powerful intelligence the CIA could not NOT want. Replace "who" in any of the above with a politician in a country of interest, or other person of interest/intelligence target.
<strike> It's sort of like Facebook getting CIA funding. CIA definitely has interest to know intimate details of everyone's lives, who is sharing what information with who, and how social fabric in different countries are organized. They/we would be crazy not to. Taking the converse: The CIA wasn't funding Facebook because they really needed to socialize more with friends and family. </strike> Please see thread below. CIA investment in Facebook has not been established.
I will remove from parent content.
If not, what are you saying?
I mean.. I suppose you could air gap your database, but of what utility is it to you now?
https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/22/oracle-us-privacy-class-ac...
For the rest of the world however, and people who understand that power should have limits, and that a distrust in authority figures should be the default state the idea that companies like Oracle and Google are mere extensions of the CIA/NSA is terrifying.
https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo...
If there were no CIA agents inside Google that would be a cause for concern.
…
If the CIA did not control Google that would be a cause for concern.
…
> In-Q-Tel sold 5,636 shares of Google, worth over $2.2 million, on November 15, 2005.[10] The shares were a result of Google's acquisition of Keyhole, Inc, the CIA-funded satellite mapping software now known as Google Earth.[11]
Good luck with that, especially since they’re opaque and black box and all.
It's not much different from how military funding drove advancement of aircraft or integrated circuits.
By the way, how is China coping with the vast flood of immigrants trying to move there? Oh, that's right -- there aren't any.
On immigration to China: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_China.
How’s judiciary in US? Still imprisoning millions of random people for being poor and using them as slave labour?
As for "millions of random people for being poor" I think you'll find they were imprisoned for committing crimes, and imprisoned after a jury trial or a plea bargain.
As opposed to, I don't know, publishing a newspaper in Hong Kong. Or being Uyghur.
It does show a bias that at this point should be obvious even to you: you are conditioned to believe US prison victims - I’m guessing including those forced into slavery - deserve it, and to believe those imprisoned for all kinds of felonies in China don’t.
Just for due diligence, I looked at your "references":
1) the first two are from the same person, and are unattributed. So I kind of doubt they're even true.
But let's pretend they are: "irrelevant formality" -- going to your probation appointment is pretty important. It's not "nothing." Probation is what they gave you instead of prison. I thought you were in favor of keeping people out of prison.
"Dirty urine" probably means they were using drugs. They were let out of prison on the promise that they'd stay off drugs. You think people should use drugs after pledging not to?
2) your third one: One extremely biased side of a case which I assume has other sides, from an extremely biased source. Try to do better.
as for the "felonious" people in China: what did the Uyghurs do to deserve it?
If you talk to almost any defense attorney (as I've done), they'll freely admit that the vast majority of their clients are guilty.
>as for the "felonious" people in China: what did the Uyghurs do to deserve it?
Terrorism. The difference between Uighurs and the victims of American invasion on Middle East is that Chinese aren’t mass executing them from safe distance like Americans do.
I haven't seen any serious claims (except from the remains of the pro-Putin nutcases, and the amount of these went to like 1/10000 the state before the war) about US hostility for a very long time - most people here think that giving up Afghanistan was a huge mistake. Most of my friends who didn't like the US acting as world police have said they were mistaken.
China did take anti-Russian stance. Their strategic investments were redirected to other countries. They are complying with embargoes, differently from Germany (https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1563534129534500874 for a somewhat related story) and some other western countries. Of course you won’t find it mentioned in mainstream western media.
Invading Afghanistan was a mistake, but most of all it was a crime against humanity. And the worldview that got US into that - same as worldview of Putin, essentially the belief that their country has god-given right to invade others - is still there. There are more similarities, like protecting their war criminals from justice. Or ideologically-motivated oppression: https://twitter.com/erininthemorn/status/1563223736681381888.
My local mainstream media is reporting about Germany correctly and in full, btw. But yeah, we like to shit on Germans, other nations might not be alike in that.
> but we can’t forget Middle East, same way we can’t forget Trump and resulting deterioration of human rights.
Agreed.
> same as worldview of Putin, essentially the belief that their country has god-given right to invade others
Crimes against humanity are happening in Afghanistan now in much greater number than when the US Army was there.
I think that coming to resolve problems such as were/are in Afghanistan is the correct thing to do (not saying the practice worked out perfectly and that there weren't problems). That's absolutely incomparable to Putin who's there to take children, gas/oil fields and access to Black Sea, not to help.
Because, well, that’s exactly what Rashists say about invading Ukraine. Once again: same mentality.
"invading Afghanistan and killing two hundred thousand random people"
there's that word "random" again. You disqualify yourself from any serious discussions when you keep using that. You're throwing around crazy numbers like someone on The View.
So you are saying all those droned kids were combatants, not random victims?
>You're throwing around crazy numbers like someone on The View.
Those are official statistics, you’ll find them quoted on Wikipedia. Let me guess: they look weird to you, because your media only reports loses on the invading side.
Also - you really believe those two hundred thousand people killed, as “US aid to Afghanistan”, were Taliban?
I'm starting to realize how difficult it is to compete in the tech sector without government assistance. I thought it was a free market, but it's looking increasingly like a giant clusterfuck of government intervention. It looks nothing like a free market, it looks more like a battlefield and everyone is competing for who can get the most free weapons and ammo from their respective governments (in the form of grants, contracts and beneficial regulations). That would explain why smaller companies cannot compete against the big ones in many sectors; the big players are flush with free government money; how can any small startup compete against that.
A good primer on the topic for the interested
https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo...
It's difficult to dispute the value of people's attention and trust, but their data... Common. Data seems more like a bonus; a way to monetize people's attention more efficiently (e.g. targeted ads). The main thing of value here (from a free market perspective) seems to be capturing people's attention in the first place.
https://www.nps.gov/pagr/learn/historyculture/the-birthplace...
That's called industrial policy, and the US does less of it than other countries. A model example for industrial policy is South Korea.
Larry Ellison's Oracle Started as a CIA Project (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28386824 - Sept 2021 (4 comments)
Larry Ellison's Oracle Started as a CIA Project - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8342091 - Sept 2014 (1 comment)
The only real fix is data privacy laws, which would force the private and public outfits to discard most of their stored data (and enforceable criminal and civil penalites for not doing so).
Slightly more interesting than this is the "Project Oracle" project description from the CIA, thanks to a FOIA request:
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80-01794R0001002...
mfw you imply that some Gizmodo posts aren't snarky
This has not been true for some time.
https://www.theregister.com/2019/10/16/amazon_ditches_oracle...
Black Friday, and Oracle's inability to scale up to meet it without explosive licensing costs, is a major factor in Amazon's decision to remove Oracle from their sales systems.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_...
But it's not the only, for instance https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci... and https://privacytogo.co/meet-jigsaw-googles-intelligence-agen...
I have thought that this fact is a common knowledge.
The reason is missing: There's a high likelihood that it was a sponsored article, at least inofficially. Some journalists love to write nice stories about companies - pre-dictated by those companies.
I don't have any specific insight here, but Vox aiming to be a "modern" media company seems to be an especially good candidate for such marketing.
And just to give a random data point: I saw the equivalent of Google Earth/Maps demonstrated at a government contractor (to which my company was a supplier of high performance hardware), in 1989.
Then all of the rest are at the mercy of all these other agencies to even operate independently.
Capitalism indeed.
Is this some sort of obscure reference to a trojan installed in Intel processors ?