Joe Rogan with Tim Pool
It’s a long one, so grab a coffee.
Learn To Code
"Learn to code" was tweeted at me by a sketchy account. I reported it as abusive behavior as part of targeted harassment. Twitter suspended the account within 20 minutes.
Journalists if they tweet "learn to code" at you don't stay silent, take a moment to report it. https://t.co/RXgqqV2ptw
— Ben Popken (@bpopken) February 1, 2019
His email address is ben.popken@nbcuni.com. Subject line: Learn To Code
Social Disease
“Cue the death threats and doxxing”
A Facebook video surfaced this week of three members of the Fort McMurray Junior Oil Barons dancing around their dressing room to popular indigenous music. One player was pounding on the lid of a garbage can like a drum.
Covington, Canuck style.
Break Them Up
‘The goal is to automate us’: The combination of state surveillance and its capitalist counterpart means that digital technology is separating the citizens in all societies into two groups: the watchers (invisible, unknown and unaccountable) and the watched.
Break Them Up
Oh, there’s a reason.
WAR ON MEMES: Everyone's Favorite Pro-Trump Meme Maker Has Been Demonitized By YouTube For Absolutely No Reason https://t.co/89osuiGD69 via @gatewaypundit
— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) January 18, 2019
Social Disease
Old tweets reveal hidden secrets
Researchers from the Foundation for Research and Technology in Greece and the University of Illinois found all this out after writing a tool called LPAuditor. The software mines publicly available tweet data that anyone can download from Twitter via its application programming interface (API).
Using the tool, they analyzed the metadata – hidden information about a tweet embedded in the post – to identify users’ homes, workplaces and sensitive places that they visited. In dozens of cases, they were also able to identify the users behind anonymous Twitter accounts.
Break Them Up
Into a hundred thousand million pieces.
We needed to make an example of Damore. Looking for some excuse to fire him, we spied on his phone and computer. We didn’t find anything, although our spying probably made his devices unusably slow, preventing him from organizing support within the company. When we did fire him, our reputation and integrity took a hit, but at least other employees were now afraid to speak up.
(h/t BC)
Social Disease
Dave Rubin and Jordan Peterson leave Patreon over free speech concerns.
Break Them Up
Into a hundred thousand million pieces.
We found that at least 61 percent of apps we tested automatically transfer data to Facebook the moment a user opens the app. This happens whether people have a Facebook account or not, or whether they are logged into Facebook or not.
Break Them Up
This is pretty incredible. @Google image search vs @DuckDuckGo for Scott Adams.
Why on earth does Google show FAKE photoshop Nazi uniform images for @ScottAdamsSays ? pic.twitter.com/OG5wZfY8bQ
— 🇮🇱Dr Brian of London (@brianoflondon) December 30, 2018
Because they can and you can’t stop them.
Social Disease
[A] new study from Norway, which examines IQ scores from 730,000 men (standardized tests are part of military service there) disproves all these ideas, because it shows IQ dropping within the same families. Men born in 1991 score, on average, five points lower than men born in 1975. There must, in other words, be an environmental explanation, and the chronology throws up a clear suspect: the rise in screen-time.
Kids brought up with Facebook and Instagram are more politically bigoted, not because they don’t hear alternative opinions, but because they don’t learn the concentration necessary to listen to opponents — a difficult and unnatural skill.
Not blogs though. Blogs are good for you.
Frankly, My Dear
Nor should they: So far, none of the people involved have responded to the new furore.
Break Them Up
Into a hundred thousand million pieces.
Back in 2015, a woman named Imy Santiago wrote an Amazon review of a novel that she had read and liked. Amazon immediately took the review down and told Santiago she had “violated its policies.” Santiago re-read her review, didn’t see anything objectionable about it, so she tried to post it again. “You’re not eligible to review this product,” an Amazon prompt informed her.
When she wrote to Amazon about it, the company told her that her “account activity indicates you know the author personally.” Santiago did not know the author, so she wrote an angry email to Amazon and blogged about Amazon’s “big brother” surveillance.
I reached out to both Santiago and Amazon at the time to try to figure out what the hell happened here. Santiago, who is an indie book writer herself, told me that she’d been in the same ballroom with the author in New York a few months before at a book signing event, but had not talked to her, and that she had followed the author on Twitter and Facebook after reading her books. Santiago had never connected her Facebook account to Amazon, she said.
Update.
Facebook admits that it allowed Netflix and Spotify to access your private messages
Break Them Up
Into a hundred thousand million pieces: Google employees sought to block Breitbart from Google AdSense less than one month after President Donald Trump took office, leaked emails from the company reveal.
Social Disease
Because they’re pigs: For some reason, many media outlets decided this little nontroversy demanded a write-up.
Break Them Up
Into a hundred thousand million pieces.
But thanks likely to this evasion of Android permission requests, Facebook users did not realize for years that the company was collecting information about who they called and texted, which would have helped explain to them why their “People You May Know” recommendations were so eerily accurate. It only came to light earlier this year, three years after it started, when a few Facebook users noticed their call and text history in their Facebook files when they downloaded them.
Related: Google policy “is to get right up to the creepy line but not cross it.”
The Children Are Our Future
I already knew this and you already knew this: Screen Time Changes Structure of Kids’ Brains
In brain scans of 4,500 children, daily screen usage of more than seven hours showed premature thinning of the brain cortex, the outermost layer that processes information from the physical world. Though the difference was significant from participants who spent less screen time, NIH study director Gaya Dowling cautioned against drawing a conclusion.
“We don’t know if it’s being caused by the screen time. We don’t know if it’s a bad thing,”
They know it’s a bad thing. Now they just want to figure out how best to exploit it.
Break Them Up
Into a hundred thousand million pieces.
The disturbing scale of the personal data harvested and traded by multinationals can be revealed today.
Health details, children’s voice recordings and copies of passports can be at risk when customers tick an online consent box.
Analysis by the Mail found that Marriott International, Facebook, Asda, Paypal, BT and Tesco engaged in hidden data harvesting and sharing.
Giant firms can use personal data to build a profile of customers for targeted adverts or to pass to other organisations.
Related: A day that will go down in infamy…