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Apple to Governments: Choose Markets over Repression

Apple accused NSO Group, the Israeli surveillance company, of “flagrant” violations of its software, as well as federal and state laws.

Source: Apple Sues Israeli Spyware Maker, Seeking to Block Its Access to iPhones

This is a fascinating case. Will courts allow Apple to stop a surveillance tool that governments clearly love? Will the US government come out in favor of Apple or NSO group?

Without a doubt, NSO group needs to be wiped out of existence because it clearly empowers monsters and dictators against civil rights activists, journalists and citizens outside of their countries’ jurisdictions. The NSO group is indisputably allowing repressive regimes to consolidate their power and even to manipulate international trade. As such, the company must be wiped out of existence, and the Israeli government must be held to account for supporting and protecting the NSO group.

It is a forgone conclusion that Apple will sue the Israeli government, too, once the Israeli government’s role is made clear during discovery. Of course, Apple will have a huge bargaining chip. Apple’s main chip design center is in Hertzliya, Israel. So, the Israeli government must weigh the small revenues and huge influence that NSO Group brings in against the blockbuster investment that Apple is making in the Israeli tech sector and Israel’s economy.

It’s a no brainer. The clear choice is to kill NSO and allow companies and marketplaces to function without illegal influence, but governments tend to act stupidly in such situations. Let’s hope that the US and Israeli governments don’t act like morons.

NSO group HQ in Israel

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No Better Time than Now to Revisit the No Asshole Rule

It has been about 15 years since Robert Sutton, currently at Stanford, published his seminal work on workplace behavior, The No Asshole Rule, detailing how assholes cost companies huge sums of money and make detrimental contributions to the bottom line. He has since followed it up with The Asshole Survival Guide and Good Boss, Bad Boss because, apparently, assholes are exceptionally tenacious at keeping their positions.

This Reddit survey, by way of Gizmodo, reminds us that the no asshole rule must be extended to all personal relationships because being a rude asshole has gained substantial cachet and purchase globally and in American society, in particular, since 2015 for reasons that are obvious to you if you’re not a member of the offending crew.

Please, distribute this widely so that–perhaps, just perhaps–rude people may find the awareness, mindfulness and motivation to exercise tact.

We can dream, no?

Whatever your age, gender, or background, you’ve probably talked like a jerk at least once in your life.

Source: 13 Things Only Assholes Say, According to Reddit

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A Critical Reminder of How Far Humans Can Go

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen provides a great summary of the means by which Jews and minorities were executed by Nazi squads in his tour de force book Hitler’s Willing Executioners. Although concentration camps receive the lion’s share of shrift and attention in popular accounts of the Holocaust, Goldhagen reminds the reader repeatedly that the method of choice during the holocaust was the bullet. Execution at gunpoint was the fastest, cheapest and, consequently, the most prevalent means by which victims were executed by Nazi murder squads. The practice was so prevalent and enormous that archeological discoveries serve as reminders and documentation of the practice. Mass graves were, of course, a deliberate strategy employed to prevent discovery and the erection of any memorial. The responsibility has thus fallen on the shoulders of physical anthropologists (i.e., archeologists) to uncover the details of history’s greatest crime. At a time when hate groups are organized, armed and dedicated to this outcome, it is important to remember the price of silence.

The Polish team who discovered the Nazi era mass grave in Poland.

Bullets, wedding rings pinpoint World War II execution grounds

Source: Archaeologists unearth Nazi-era massacre in Poland’s ‘Death Valley’

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Cryptocurrencies Must Be Regulated

The greatest vehicle for wreaking havoc is money without provenance. Therefore, terrorists rob banks, drug cartels go to exceptional ends to launder their moniesand billionaires use offshore accounts and onshore vehicles to hide the money trail in order to avoid taxes. Cryptocurrencies are clearly the new vehicle of choice for criminals to obscure their financial. The Associated Press story linked below reveals the horrifying means by which white supremacists are using cryptocurrencies to raise funds and to evade the law. Clearly, the criminal web site the Silk Road, which used cryptocurrencies to mask the identities of the criminals it supported, was not an anomaly but a harbinger of the criminality that is supported by cryptocurrencies.

Cryptocurrencies are legal tender only to criminals. They are exotic commodities to the rest of us. By investing in them, we are supporting an exorbitantly energetically wasteful commodity that supports the vilest criminals. This is almost as bad as investing in Facebook.

BRUSSELS (AP) — The Daily Stormer website advocates for the purity of the white race, posts hate-filled, conspiratorial screeds against Blacks, Jews and women and has helped inspire at least three racially motivated murders.

Source: Far-right cryptocurrency follows ideology across borders

 

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On Data Harvesting: Be Extremely Afraid

Source: Google Bans Location Data Firm Funded by Former Saudi Intelligence Head

A prime example of how easily compromising information may be obtained from SafeGraph is this preprint from Northwestern University and Boston University in which the authors used data from SafeGraph to follow people who attended the Sturgis, South Dakota, motorcycle rally from the rally to their respective home towns and measured whether these rally attendees ended up increasing covid-19 incidence in their home towns. In other words, they attempted to measure the degree to which Sturgis was a national super spreader event, not just a local one. The authors acknowledge SafeGraph for providing the data gratis, and cleverly sidestep the shocking revelation that such data is available for purchase to anyone. Though the data provided to the investigators was anonymous, it is highly likely that SafeGraph can identify every single person in the data set. What SafeGraph knows about the general populace is disturbing.

More disturbing is the revelation that SafeGraph is partly owned and controlled by Saudi interests because it places a digital surveillance apparatus with global reach under the control of a regime that has used such surveillance to intimidate or to kill political dissidents. Though it’s comforting that Google has decided to halt the stream of data it provides to SafeGraph, it is, nevertheless, this outcome must be perceived as a clarion call for action, not an occasion to breathe a sigh of relief. The revelation that even Google–an entity that exists to exploit its users’ data–finds SafeGraph’s business disquieting serves as ample warning that data collection and dissemination need to be regulated. Google’s action against SafeGraph is definitive proof that the dystopian society of total government surveillance is within reach through the overt and willing collusion between government and industry. In Western democracies, the government side of this collusion can be influenced, but willingness among the populace is waning because the cacophony of disinformation blasted by “social media” has drowned out reason. Failure in bringing democratic governments to restrain reprobate companies like NSO Group will empower governments to surveil everyone and to eliminate those who oppose autocratic regimes. This failure invites total chaos. This is, unfortunately, a precipice we may have already crossed.

SafeGraph sells smartphone location data to essentially anyone. Google banned the company in June.

Vice Motherboard

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The FAANG Wars Escalate

The war between Apple and Microsoft on one side, and Amazon, Facebook and Google on the other officially started in September of last year, and they just escalated with Apple’s release of iOS 14.5. Apple’s declaration that it will end app tracking–the practice of allowing the developer of one mobile phone application to be able to use your mobile device to track your activity in other applications you use on the mobile phone and to correlate your activity with your browsing habits on your computer and phone–is a major pillar of the business model of companies like Facebook and Google who collect this information in order to target ads at you specifically.

The practice goes much further, however. Both companies build “psychographical” profiles of users with such tracking information and use these models to control what each user sees. App tracking is thus one of the many elements of control through which Google and Facebook control the total user experience: they tailor the content they place before you in order to elicit the emotional response that will trigger you to click the ads they have included in the content they place before you. This is why, for example, Google is estimated to collect 20 times as much data as Apple does. It sounds sinister, and it is. (In the case of Amazon, this information is used to display search results that will maximize Amazon’s profit on the sale, not the value for the customer.)

Continue reading “The FAANG Wars Escalate”
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Cherry Blossoms and Global Warming

It is astonishing that records of when cherry trees bloom in Japan goes as far back as the ninth century. It is more astonishing that they agree with every other measure of global warming, down to the onset about 200 years ago with the start of the industrial revolution. With this much confidence in the measurement, why is there so much hesitation to act?

Records of the peak of the Japanese cherry tree blooms data back 1200 years, surprisingly, and demonstrate yet again that plant has changed since the start of the industrial revolution.

The early peak is thought to be linked to climate change as spring temperatures rise.

Source: Japan’s cherry blossom ‘earliest peak since 812’

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Pink seesaws at US-Mexico

The elegance with which a symbol of division and incipient racism is shattered by a favorite children’s playground toy is truly staggering. The design award is well earned.

The installation allowed children to play together from both sides of the US-Mexico border.

Source: Pink seesaws at US-Mexico wall win design award – BBC News

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Will American Politics Ever Be Civil Again?

The juxtaposition could not be starker. The Dutch government quit over a scandal comprised of the government accused poor people of theft over welfare funds they had legitimately received. It is hard to imagine any politician in the United States facing any consequences for stiffing poor people for welfare. It is even harder to imagine any member of Congress riding his or her bicycle (see picture below) in public in order to deliver an urgent message to the White House (since we don’t have a king).

Mark Rutte’s cabinet resigns after families were wrongly accused and many faced financial problems.

After the insurrection of January 6, 2020, it is impossible to imagine that any American politician will ever hold a public forum long enough to be shamed for not doing her or his job. This juxtaposition of Dutch civil life with American civil life begs so many depressing questions. Is American civil life doomed to become extinct? How do we regain civility and equanimity in the general American populace? Does any will exist to effect this change? This is one of the toughest times ever to be optimistic.

Source: Dutch Rutte government resigns over child welfare fraud scandal

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Another Historical Survey of Earth’s Atmosphere Rings Alarm Bells

The total lack of attention and imagination with which climate “skeptics”–contrarians, in truth–greet monumental scientific studies that repeatedly demonstrate that grave danger lies ahead must be remedied. The AIP (American Institute of Physics) provides a fairly comprehensive historical review of the discovery of the greenhouse effect, linked in the sidebar to the right. The findings of over a century and a half of scientific research continue to be corroborated by new advanced methods and by re-evaluation of the fossil record, such as the one reported in the article linked below.

Once again, the historical record unambiguously points to a catastrophe on the horizon. In this instance, the reevaluation of the Smithsonian’s fossil record shows that we are hurtling toward another geologic period without polar ice caps. A true skeptic would advocate contingency planning for a catastrophe that has a high probability of occurring, regardless of cause. Unfortunately, our world is impeded by contrarians whose lack of scientific literacy is coupled not with goodwill toward mankind but with short term political ambition. This outcome runs contrary to the political exigency of making long-term solutions for evolving problems. Whether the private sector can sufficiently insure itself against the predictions of global warming is an open question.

Historically, the only reason government exists is that the private sector lacks the resources and the discipline to insure itself against such large-scale catastrophes. Do we want to risk our existence to test the hypothesis that government is no longer needed?

  • Survey of the Smithsonian’s fossil record sheds light on the earth’s temperature fluctuations as far back as 500 million years.

Smithsonian’s revamped fossil hall prompts a look into Earth’s hot past

Source: A 500-million-year survey of Earth’s climate reveals dire warning for humanity | Science | AAAS