Sorry for the delayed posting. And for going Full Political yesterday. (You never go full political.) You know how us junkies are. I even watched a half hour of last night’s debate. Hadn’t done anything like that in years, but Kit Perez was LiveGabbing it so entertainingly over at Gab.ai that I had to see for myself. I thought I could just … have a taste, you know? Just one little taste. Afterward I needed to detox. —– I thought Trump did well in the bit I watched. But Hillary did a better job: outwitting him, out-talking him, and sneakily…
Category: Privacy and self ownership
Owning our own information and telling Big Brother to get lost
Yesterday, rumors roiled the Internet waters: Julian Assange is dead. The U.S. government finally moved in on him. The first rumor was not true. The second … appears to be. Assange’s Internet access has been cut off, supposedly by a “state party.” Which means the U.S. fedgov even if some other state acted as its proxy. At the same time, the UK bank accounts of the Russian state media, RT or Russia Today, were frozen without explanation. Assange is widely assumed to have gotten his damning Hillary Clinton emails from hackers associated with the Russian government. Whatever the reality of…
Another example of history rhyming. Until new polls come out, we can’t know (and actually we can’t know until the v*tes are counted, assuming — yeah, big assumption — that they’re counted honestly), but the very smart Nate Silver examines whether Trump is really torpedoed this time. Unlike all the other times the media predicted his electoral demise. OTOH, Clinton, Comey and company would be in far worse trouble in a just world. Five times evolution “ran backward.” This is only one small example of how self-driving cars will spy on their occupants. But in the good news department, a…
In today’s links post, I blogged about Yahoo’s compliance with a federal “security directive.” If true, their act would not only be despicable, but would be technologically unprecedented. They reportedly not only rolled over without a fight, but actually built new software at the behest of the fedgov to spy in realtime on their users’ incoming and outgoing mail. There are obviously still a lot of questions here including some extremely basic ones. Did Yahoo really do this? Was the request made by the NSA or the FBI? What were the specific terms the company was “directed” to scan for?…