If you only fire up Tor when you want to do something secret, you're leaking information about yourself that could get you caught. A Harvard student who emailed a bomb threat got tracked down this way. Obviously I don't support one's right to email bomb threats, but the principle is the same, the investigation narrowed down to him because of the exact time his Internet connection connected to a Tor relay.
So I second your call for us to run our own relays, full-time.
It is always weird reading anything Schmidt writes because it feels like he's using his own definitions of things that he never clarifies. He says he's against censorship, but then says that we need to act quick to remove certain videos. How does he define censorship?
He holds up the mortgage industry in the early 2000's as an example of how "nudging" in private industry can backfire worse than in government. It completely overlooks how the government was using the mortgage industry to do its own nudging. If anything it confirms the opposite of what he intended.
Video games specifically. They are next-gen propaganda tools because you can subtly or not so subtly railroad a player into your frame by making them roleplay it for reward. It can adapt to less or more pliant players, it can collect analytics which help create faster iterations of improvement.
As an intentional cultural weapon (in the manner OP describes) I don't think it's actually ascendant yet, but it will be.
I only was able to stop supporting IE7 this year :-P The only thing that has forced some of our customers to upgrade has been a year of successive SSL exploits that have rendered old browsers/OS insecure.
XML to the rescue! The alternate future of the web! XML + XSLT (stylesheet)-> XSL:FO (intermediate XML language for formatting) -> FOP (program to convert formatting objects to output) -> rendered format. XML all the way down! (One mistake, zero output.)
I was almost always left alone. I knew a guy who was bugged all the time. The difference between us was that I was quiet on the subway, dressed in a subdued fashion. Basically I was a square. He was not. Japanese cops profile people. I _think_ what it boiled down to was, I didn't look like the sort of person who might be carrying marijuana on their person, another difference between my friend and I :-) This could be extremely outdated information though, that was over two decades ago (thinking about moving back, if a no-longer-young person can somehow find work.)
Who here remembers John Wamsley? Is he still on a crusade to reduce the feral cat population in Australia? I remember this guy from way back, he made a lot of people mad.
The minister in talks with Facebook called the content "ideological trash" and "right wing nonsense" so it's pretty clear it's not just limited to incitement of violence.
You're acting like the networks we use are just neutral conduits through which we engage conversationally exactly how we do in person, and that's just not true. They change how we interact. For one thing, these networks make it so that you can reach out and help mob somebody from the safety of your home, which is completely asymmetric compared to how such interactions would work in person.
You're twisting "Paranoid Style" to deny the existence of real things. "Paranoid Style" doesn't apply to real things. It applies to "Communists infiltrated our schools to brainwash our kids" and not "communists infiltrated government." It applies to "the crack epidemic was created by the CIA" and not "we have a serious problem with drugs and organized crime in America." It applies to "All Muslims are all practicing taqiya and are working together to invade and undermine the USA" and not "Muslim communities contain extremists that are lying in wait to attack Americans."
The John Stewart/John Boehner example is particularly apt, because it's not even uncommon for progressives to perpetuate this, even when they're trying to fight it. To wit, it used to be that there were negative gay stereotypes. In an ideal world we would stop stereotyping particular people as gay or having "gay" behavior. But instead we've just taken some of the negative gay stereotypes and recast them as positive. I have progressive friends that never, _ever_ fail to characterize male intimacy or physical closeness as "gay" for the purposes of showing how OK they are with it. Example, Olympics "gay bobsled": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iAwO7FN15E People loved this stupid video.
The UN's been pressuring Japan for years to ban child porn comics and cartoons, which it's a leading world producer of. Japan also finally outlawed possession of actual child abuse porn last year, do you consider that fascism?
Euphemism treadmill, ridiculous proliferation of personal pronouns, victim veto, persistent assault on works like The Mikado or Dante's Inferno. Anchor babies are a thing, Chinese pay 80K for exactly what the term implies, feds shut down places being used for birth tourism, but being true's not a defense when the goal's not offending. Careful language, what could be wrong with that? Well what's the opportunity cost, what's the upper limit on the cognitive burden on that? Relatively easy for people with college degrees and lots of time, great way to signal social superiority by being able to waste fucktons of time on intricate, piddling shit, just like aristocrats used to do with clothing and politeness rules. No cost to being polite, except for all those plays I guess you can't show anymore. Let's throw a fit about a kid wearing a fucking kimono, what's that, Japanese people don't even care? That's not important to me, this is the USA and I've got to show how not racist I am by calling other people racist. Oh shit, the little girl wearing the kimono is biracial and has a Japanese mom, well she looked white so when I started that shitstorm of hate against the family on Facebook and Twitter, at least I was raising awareness about cultural appropriation. She was white-looking anyway so she has white privilege. Cool story, political correctness isn't real.
The extremists are successfully spreading their ideology worldwide, backed by a trillionaire oil state. The moderates are not. The Saudis are eager to inject their ideology into wherever the migrants go, they see this as a great opportunity. Migrants aren't evil, but they are vulnerable, it would be insane to not recognize this fact.
Well, on second reading, you're right. He does slip in there next to Microsoft Windows that you somehow have to use Google Search because everyone else does, and doesn't explain how that supports the rest of his article. I don't think that's the main thrust of it, though.
From the article, Reich is saying that Google used its dominant market position to unfairly promote its own products. Antitrust isn't only about lack of alternatives.
After the OK City bombing my school banned wearing camouflage. They were afraid of school shootings at some point so they banned coats that were "tool long" or "too bulky". A friend of mine got in trouble for wearing a leather jacket.
Maybe this kid WAS singled out because he had brown skin, but school administrators were overreacting to stupid shit decades ago, in ways that obviously weren't connected to "racism."
There's not time to educate the entire population of the United States, nor would only educating the people in the sphere of our democracy be sufficient. The environmental crisis is now.
I was shown a pine cone once that snapped open when burned, enabling its seeds to pop out. It was explained to me that fire was a necessary part of the tree's lifecycle, and that this is why logging isn't a suitable substitute for fires.
His gay marriage example is instructive of the weakness of this type of argument. Marriage is purely a social institution, so what does science have to say on the subject, anyway? Well, he appeals to equality. If we have these laws, they should be applied equally. Ok then, what's the scientific argument for equality? He takes these things as axiomatic, which, presumably, means that these are the types of things he should most militantly be examining.
What if self-described militant atheists like Krauss took their atheism seriously and considered fundamental values, whether they come from a sincere belief in a deity or not, to be essentially the same, since they basically are if there's in fact no God? They would have to look closer at values and see if there was perhaps a social or personal utility to having certain types of values. Study them, and figure out what makes certain values work well and which ones implode. Create some kind of explanatory model of values. If you will, come up with a "scientific" way of analyzing values. One might even put some effort into examining value systems for consistency, figure out if they have side-effects or study what types of outcomes they optimize for, and make a good one for the outcome you desire. Just don't tell Krauss that this is what philosophy does, because he thinks philosophy is dumb and a waste of time.