[Google claims it has the solution for saving the human race from its age old nemesis: lying.]

Google claims it has the solution for saving the human race from its age old nemesis: lying.


The digital giant has assembled a crack team tasked with devising a search engine and database model which measures the trustworthiness or ‘truth’ of an internet article or website.

Currently, Google uses an objective formula of rating web posts and sites by counting the number of incoming links along with a few other attributes – all of which determine its visibility in your web searches. But that’s all set to change…

Their new system will count the number of ‘incorrect facts’ and then rate the page according to a ‘Knowledge-based Trust Score’. Google’s brain trust explains, “A source that has few false facts is considered to be trustworthy.”

How the system is designed to work is through Google’s giant army of online ‘fact-checking bots’ which gather and compile Google’s ‘knowledge’ into a massive database called a ‘Knowledge Vault’. Their software works by tapping into the Knowledge Vault - the vast store of facts that Google has pulled off the internet. Facts the web unanimously agrees on are considered a reasonable ‘proxy’ or representation of the truth. Web pages that contain contradictory information are bumped down the rankings.

There are some obvious problems here, the most fundamental of which Google and others seem to have missed. The system claims it can check ‘incorrect facts’ but cannot always determine the context in which these were presented. Also, it will not count the number of correct ‘facts’.

Bots do not think, they just execute. Clearly, this system is only as good as what Google decides are its baseline markers or web sources for the truth. A level of bias would be built into the system by programers. It could become a tool which is programed to shoot down any pages which mention views or opinions which are not ‘official’ – a high-tech way of burying large sections of information online. More importantly, what Google geeks and aspiring technocrats are missing here, or perhaps do not yet understand (will they ever understand or do they want to?), is that no matter how much computing power or Artificial Intelligence (AI) you have at your disposal, you cannot  automate facts, or the truth. Both of these are subjective, and can only be agreed upon – and even then only temporarily – after many rounds of discussion, debates, adjustments, presentations and publications. For Google to even think that it can play god in this respect speaks more to Google’s radical pragmatic, or ‘Tyrell Corporation’ mindset, than it does to anything rational or democratic.

So if the Scientific Age of Enlightenment was man’s revolution, then Google’s new ‘Internet of Truth’ metric is the counter-revolution.

Establishment hacks and corporate scribes who write for mainstream publications are celebrating this as Google’s triumph over the unwashed masses online who are generating too much ‘bad information’.

Writer Hal Hudson from the New Scientist, “The internet is stuffed with garbage. Anti-vaccination websites make the front page of Google, and fact-free “news” stories spread like wildfire. Google has devised a fix – rank websites according to their truthfulness.”

Of course, even if this were the problem, the answer is not for Google to come up with a new program to ‘fix it’ in order to make any uncomfortable truths or even questions to disappear under a digital heap of consensus reality binary. Here is where Google transitions from being a mere facilitator (search engine) for truth, into becoming the arbitrator of truth.

Perhaps the simple answer here is for people to become better at two basic disciplines: comparative studies and critical thinking. Hold on. Wait a minute. Isn’t that one of the main purposes of a university education, and isn’t the goal of a modern society to make sure that each generation is receiving a better education than its predecessor?
Well, it was, but that was before Google’s new ‘gods of truth’ arrived on the scene.

To date, there is no software solution that can fix society’s biggest curse of the modern technocracy – laziness.



http://21stcenturywire.com/2015/05/06/behold-googles-new-gods-of-truth/

If a friend told you that we were all living in a giant hologram, you’d probably tell him to lay off the kush. But incredibly, physicists across the world are thinking the same thing: That what we perceive to be a three-dimensional universe might just be the image of a two-dimensional one, projected across a massive cosmic horizon.

Yes, it sounds more than a little insane. The 3D nature of our world is as fundamental to our sense of reality as the fact that time runs forward. And yet some researchers believe that contradictions between Einstein’s theory of relativity and quantum mechanics might be reconciled if every three-dimensional object we know and cherish is a projection of tiny, subatomic bytes of information stored in a two-dimensional Flatland.

“If this is true, it’s a really important insight,” Daniel Grumiller, a theoretical physicist at the Vienna University of Technology, told me over the phone. Grumiller, along with physicists Max Riegler, Arjun Bagchi and Rudranil Basu, recently published the very first study offering evidence that the so-called “holographic principle”—that certain 3D spaces can be mathematically reduced to 2D projections—might describe our universe.


“If you asked anyone twenty years ago how many dimensions our world has, most of us would answer 'three spatial dimensions plus time,'" he said. "The holographic principle would mean that this is actually a matter of perspective.”

The holographic principle was first postulated over 20 years ago as a possible solution to Stephen Hawking’s famous “information paradox.” (The paradox is essentially that black holes appear to swallow information, which, according to quantum theory, is impossible.) But while the principle was never mathematically formalized for black holes, theoretical physicist Juan Maldacena demonstrated several years later that holography did indeed hold for a theoretical type of space called anti-de Sitter space. Unlike the space in our universe, which is relatively flat on cosmic scales, anti-de Sitter space as described by mathematicians curves inward like a saddle.


“Anti-de Sitter space is not directly relevant to our universe, but it allows us to perform calculations that would otherwise be very difficult if not impossible,” Grumiller said.

Within this theoretical space, Maldacena showed that two sets of physical equations mapped perfectly onto each other: The equations of gravitational theory, and those of quantum field theory. This correspondence was totally unexpected, because while gravity is described in three spatial dimensions, quantum field theory requires only two. That the laws of physics produced identical results two or three dimensions pointed to anti-de Sitter-space’s holographic nature.
“This was the first instance where somebody explicitly showed how holography works,” Grumiller told me. “But given that our universe is not anti-de Sitter space—it’s approximately flat at large scales—it’s interesting to ask whether the holographic principle applies to flat space, as well.”



http://motherboard.vice.com/read/there-is-growing-evidence-that-our-universe-is-a-giant-hologram?utm_source=vicefbus

As a part of its ‘body integration’ campaign, the payment service is working on an ingestible pill that would preserve your password in the slimiest of vessels: your stomach.
PayPal wants to get to know you. Really well. Really really well.

They know how much you hate having to remember all your different passwords. So, to ease your burden, they have a new device. It’s simple really, simpler even than clicking a few times to have PayPal move money from your bank account to that guy selling the weird lamp you don’t need but accidentally bid on during an eBay excursion.

For those who have classic garden-variety paranoia: you’d be advised to stop here. But for those insensate to the stirrings of good old American paranoia, or who are prescribed large doses of mood flatteners, read on!

PayPal plans to put a teensy weensy little microchip into a pill; a pill you swallow every now and again; one where the microchip is sort of like an electronic key that you swipe. Rather than swiping here is what happens: Every time you are near a computer and get the itch to buy something, your pals at PayPal won’t ask you to remember your password. No more random combinations of dogs’ names or old girl friends’ names or mixes of the two.

Instead of using your noodle, PayPal will get the signal from that cute little pill you swallowed and log you on with no muss or fuss. From your ingested microchip, onto the Internet, and you don’t have to even remember your own name!

This is part of PayPal’s goal of “true integration with the human body”—a goal I hadn’t realized they valued much. I mean, we pay them when we need to—but do we really have to integrate them into our own bodies? Apparently so: like birth control, per PayPal’s Jonathan Leblanc, the “next wave of passwords will be edible, ingestible or injectable”
And the information being sent is not the dog-and-girlfriend variety at all—that is, guessable by someone with a creative mind and a lot of time. You can be (and probably have been) hacked. Not in this brave new world. Your “log-on” will be biometric—something that says you and just you! Like your heartbeat or your veins or maybe the may your blood sugar rises and falls during the day. Something unique that your ingested microchip can beam across to that laptop opened to the irresistible sport coat marked down to $79 while they last.

To which I say—good luck, kids.

Have you ever looked inside someone’s stomach? It’s scary in there—enough acid to denature a raw egg, thick folds of stomach lining, gooey mucus, old food and new, a penny you swallowed in a nervous fit as well as the microscopic milieu of bacteria and glands and dying stomach cells killed by the very acid made by the next cell over. You want to put a microchip in THAT and try to get anything intelligible?

Much less the issues like what happens when you eat a really greasy meal and the signals are blunted in the butter sauce. Or what about getting a pacemaker or an MRI scan—or for that matter walking merrily through a TSA body scanner. Maybe your unique biometric identifier will be changed, maybe it won’t— but what can you do? It’s in your stomach somewhere.

I will leave aside the evacuation aspect of the problem—like if you “pass” your microchip, how will you know it? Perhaps toilets could be equipped with additional sensors that monitor the passage of equipment. This update could then be relayed to a nearby PayPal body integration specialist who would appear at your doorway with a new micro-chipped pill—and a comment about your blood pressure and over all state of mind.


http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/05/05/paypal-wants-to-make-your-body-a-password.html

Note: Hate speech, not hate crimes. YouGov asked people about hate crimes for its poll too and found bipartisan support for the federal law that provides steeper penalties for crimes motivated by hatred of the victim’s race, religion, gender, or national origin. Sixty-four percent of Dems gave thumbs-up to that versus 54 percent of Republicans. A plurality of Republicans also support expanding that law to target hate crimes committed against gays: 44 percent say yes versus 30 percent who say no.

Hate-crimes laws matter in the sentencing phase. If you’re guilty of the underlying offense, then you can be punished more severely depending upon what your motive was. A hate-speech law is different in that it treats hate as the offense itself. All you have to do is verbalize your thoughtcrime against a protected group and you’re facing prison. Our intellectual superiors in Europe cherish their hate-speech laws but the First Amendment makes them anathema in the U.S.


Independents and Republicans are heavily opposed (although, alarmingly, not quite to a majority degree among GOPers) but Democrats and liberals — proud guardians of the free-speech movement in the 1960s — are ready to censor. The best spin I can put on this for lefties is that YouGov’s question asked if they’d support a law that criminalizes comments that “advocate genocide or hatred” against a particular group. Could be that some people who said yes focused on the first part of that, genocide, rather than the second and figured that “advocating genocide” is close enough to making a credible violent threat against a person that it can and should be made illegal too. It can’t (unless you’re doing your advocating in front of a mob that’s whipped up and ready to attack someone), but a question asking exclusively about “hatred” would have been better. An interesting footnote to all this: Given America’s history of racism against blacks, you would think they might support hate-speech laws more than any other group. They do support those laws more than whites (44/34 in favor among blacks versus 32/43 opposition among whites) but not as much as Latinos do. Latinos favor them 49/20, a wider gap in support than you find even among self-identified liberals. On the other hand, the left-leaning 18-34 group doesn’t support hate-speech laws much more than any other age demographic does. They break 38/37. Seniors breaks 35/39.


Support across the board. This is another question that could have benefited from better wording, though: “Desecration” could mean anything from aggressive vandalism, like smashing a religious statue or graffiting a church’s walls, to mockery that doesn’t involve property crimes. (I.e. a difference similar to the difference between hate crimes and hate speech.) The question was inspired by the case in Pennsylvania where a 14-year-old went up to a statue of Jesus and — well, see for yourself. Jonathan Turley has the photo. When YouGov asked whether that kid should spend up to two years in jail for that specific act of desecration, respondents split 36/47 against. Among Republicans, it was 40/46. Among Democrats, it was … 44/38. That’s appalling but it makes sense given their response to the hate-speech question. If you want to criminalize offensive expression, as many liberals seem inclined to do, why not hit the 14-year-old with prison time for insulting Jesus? Coming soon, presumably: Blasphemy laws.



http://hotair.com/archives/2014/10/02/poll-51-of-democrats-support-criminalizing-hate-speech/

Most people realize that emails and other digital communications they once considered private can now become part of their permanent record.

But even as they increasingly use apps that understand what they say, most people don’t realize that the words they speak are not so private anymore, either.

Top-secret documents from the archive of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden show the National Security Agency can now automatically recognize the content within phone calls by creating rough transcripts and phonetic representations that can be easily searched and stored.

The documents show NSA analysts celebrating the development of what they called “Google for Voice” nearly a decade ago.

Though perfect transcription of natural conversation apparently remains the Intelligence Community’s “holy grail,” the Snowden documents describe extensive use of keyword searching as well as computer programs designed to analyze and “extract” the content of voice conversations, and even use sophisticated algorithms to flag conversations of interest.

The documents include vivid examples of the use of speech recognition in war zones like Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in Latin America. But they leave unclear exactly how widely the spy agency uses this ability, particularly in programs that pick up considerable amounts of conversations that include people who live in or are citizens of the United States.

Spying on international telephone calls has always been a staple of NSA surveillance, but the requirement that an actual person do the listening meant it was effectively limited to a tiny percentage of the total traffic. By leveraging advances in automated speech recognition, the NSA has entered the era of bulk listening.

And this has happened with no apparent public oversight, hearings or legislative action. Congress hasn’t shown signs of even knowing that it’s going on.

The USA Freedom Act — the surveillance reform bill that Congress is currently debating — doesn’t address the topic at all. The bill would end an NSA program that does not collect voice content: the government’s bulk collection of domestic calling data, showing who called who and for how long.

Even if becomes law, the bill would leave in place a multitude of mechanisms exposed by Snowden that scoop up vast amounts of innocent people’s text and voice communications in the U.S. and across the globe.

Civil liberty experts contacted by The Intercept said the NSA’s speech-to-text capabilities are a disturbing example of the privacy invasions that are becoming possible as our analog world transitions to a digital one.

“I think people don’t understand that the economics of surveillance have totally changed,” Jennifer Granick, civil liberties director at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, told The Intercept.

“Once you have this capability, then the question is: How will it be deployed? Can you temporarily cache all American phone calls, transcribe all the phone calls, and do text searching of the content of the calls?” she said. “It may not be what they are doing right now, but they’ll be able to do it.”

And, she asked: “How would we ever know if they change the policy?”

Indeed, NSA officials have been secretive about their ability to convert speech to text, and how widely they use it, leaving open any number of possibilities.

That secrecy is the key, Granick said. “We don’t have any idea how many innocent people are being affected, or how many of those innocent people are also Americans.”


https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/05/05/nsa-speech-recognition-snowden-searchable-text/

It has been apparent for some time that the subset of liberals consumed with the pursuit of “social justice,” particularly the feminist left, are so starved for victories that they will turn on anyone for a quick boost of self-esteem. The hard targets, those groups composed of individuals who are ideologically opposed to the modern social justice program, long ago stopped paying attention to the minor grievances that occupy the minds of campus feminists. As such, the only targets of opportunity left are of a softer variety.

It was this impulse that led the mob to attack an astrophysicist who had just managed a spectacular feat of engineering by landing a probe on a comet some 310 million miles from Earth for wearing a shirt they deemed inappropriate. It turns out that this offensive shirt, covered as it was with comic book images of women in provocative poses, was a handmade gift from a female friend. That was of no matter to the tribe. This accomplished individual was made to cry on camera as he apologized for offending only the most fragile sensibilities.

It was this impulse that forced Time magazine to apologize to its readers after it conducted a survey and discovered that the word “feminism” is tarnished beyond repair. By a mile, Time found that its readership believed that this word more than any other had outlived its usefulness. That reality was so offensive to the easily-offended that they demanded Time retract its discovery. This magazine, too, eventually accepted its role in the dock of a familiar show trial.

And it was this impulse that prompted a group of delicate souls to chase the director Joss Whedon off Twitter after he failed to observe properly the tenets of religious feminism in the film Avengers: Age of Ultron.

“Whedon’s departure did create a wave of speculation on Twitter that he closed his account because of ‘death threats,’” Time magazine reported. “A search of tweets directed at him over the past week definitely turned up some deep ugliness, with some of the abusive users urging him to ‘die’ or ‘commit suicide’ over plot points they didn’t like in Age of Ultron.”


The most abusive bullying came from viewers who objected to Black Widow’s tentative relationship with The Hulk’s Bruce Banner and another scene in which she was briefly captured by Ultron. There was also anger about how he depicted Quicksilver and a number of other plot points that “fans” of this comic book title apparently felt justified harassment. Filtered out and pasted together, as some on Twitter have done, it looks like significant vitriol – but compared to the immense volume of conversation about this film on the social media platform, it’s really background static.



It is no coincidence that Whedon, Time, and a sensitive, bookish scientist were all creatures of the left. They are the only people still listening to the mob of disaffected and tortured feminists for whom the only measure of self-worth they have left is their collection of scalps.

But this latest “victory” may be one of feminism’s last. They seem to have broken the backs of their otherwise tolerant ideological compatriots.

“Whedon is just one of many celebrities to have quit the social media service, but will be missed more than most,” The Verge’s Rich McCormick wrote. “In addition to his comedic output, he has been a staunch and vocal supporter of people such as Anita Sarkeesian who have faced systematic campaigns of online harassment. It’s not clear whether similar harassment, his relationship with movie executives and their contracts, or simple fatigue drove Whedon from the service, but with his disappearance, we’ve lost one of Twitter’s most respectful and relatable public figures.”

Even the comedian Paton Oswalt has had it with the mob. No conservative, Oswalt channeled the worst insult he could muster when he learned that the social justice police had run Whedon out of town: “Tea Party.”

“Yep. There is a ‘Tea Party’ equivalent of progressivism/liberalism,” he wrote. “And they just chased Joss Whedon off Twitter.”

We are witnessing soft attacks on soft targets met with equally soft pushback. This dynamic, while in its infancy, is nevertheless worth watching. This might be the beginning of the end of another period of collective hysteria in American history. It couldn’t come soon enough.


http://hotair.com/archives/2015/05/05/the-left-eats-its-own-and-liberals-dont-like-it-much-at-all/

China is making big moves in Antarctica as it attempts to position itself for maximum influence on the world's last unclaimed piece of land, Jane Perlez reports for The New York Times.

Although Beijing did not establish its first Antarctic research base until 1985, Chinese efforts to expand its influence across the continent have intensified and are now outpacing other nations' plans.

"China’s operations on the continent — it opened its fourth research station last year, chose a site for a fifth, and is investing in a second icebreaker and new ice-capable planes and helicopters — are already the fastest-growing of the 52 signatories to the Antarctic Treaty," Perlez notes.

The US  has six research stations on the continent, while Australia has three. The Antarctic Treaty, which was signed in 1959, commits the signatories to ensuring that the continent will remain open for peaceful scientific research and that the region will not be militarized. A number of separate protocols aim to protect the Antarctic environment from overfishing and mining of what are considered to be large supplies of scarce resources in the region.

Although China has abided by the constraints of the pacts, observers of Antarctic affairs believe that Beijing is using the guise of research to gain a strategic upper hand in case region opens to commercial drilling in the future.

“This is part of a broader pattern of a mercantilist approach all around the world,” Peter Jennings, director of Australian Strategic Policy Institute, told the NYT. “A big driver of Chinese policy is to secure a long-term energy supply and food supply.”



http://www.businessinsider.com/china-is-making-moves-in-antarctica-2015-5

[...]

While conservatives in Indiana and Arkansas were explaining last month why their new religious objections laws weren’t invitations to discriminate against gays, the leaders of Wisconsin’s capital city were busy protecting the rights of another group: atheists.

In what is believed to be the first statute of its kind in the United States, Madison banned discrimination against the non-religious on April 1, giving them the same protections afforded to people based on their race, sexual orientation and religion, among other reasons.

It’s hardly surprising that such a statute would originate in Madison, an island of liberalism in a conservative-leaning state and the home of the Freedom from Religion Foundation. But the ordinance’s author, Anita Weier, said it didn’t arise from an actual complaint about alleged discrimination based on a lack of religious faith.

“It just seems to me that religion has spread into government more than I feel comfortable with,” said Weier, who left the council after the statute passed. “It just occurred to me that religion was protected, so non-religion should be, too.”


http://bigstory.ap.org/article/87acbdbc0f7843fb96d941f8d90e932c/madison-bans-discrimination-against-atheists-non-religious



*************

[...]

At what point does an ordinance become so broad that it effectively renders itself useless? Also, does this indicate that a lack of belief is considered to be a system of belief?

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/christinerousselle/2015/05/03/wisconsin-capital-bans-discrimination-against-atheists-n1993827

Kim Dotcom has succeeded in getting more of his seized funds released by the courts in New Zealand. In addition to millions for legal expenses, the entrepreneur will receive $128K per month including $60K to pay mansion rent, $25,600 to cover staff and security, plus $11,300 for grocery and other expenses.

How much does it cost to enjoy a reasonable standard of living in the modern world? A couple of thousand dollars a month? Three thousand? Four?

For Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom, none of these amounts scratch the surface, a problematic situation considering all of his assets were previously seized by the U.S. and New Zealand governments.

In February a “broke” and “destitute” Dotcom appeared before Justice Patricia Courtney, asking for living expenses and a massive cash injection to pay historical and current legal fees. Dotcom was previously granted around US$15,000 per month to live on but high costs had left him “penniless”.

Following the hearing Justice Courtney’s ruling is largely good news for Dotcom, with the Judge taking into consideration claims by authorities that the entrepreneur has funds in a trust that could help pay his expenses.

“The trust’s major asset is its shareholding in Mega Ltd, said to be worth more than $30m (US$22.6m). In evidence Mr Dotcom said that there were difficulties in selling Mega shares because they were blocked from being sold until the planned listing of Mega, which is now scheduled for late May 2015 (though it is possible that this date will be pushed back). There was no evidence to the contrary,” the Judge’s ruling reads.

“I have concluded that Mr Dotcom does not have the ability to meet his legal and reasonable living expenses from trust assets because, on the evidence, those assets are not sufficiently liquid.”

Noting that he still owes former lawyers around US$1.5m, the Judge said that Dotcom’s estimate for financing his legal battle against extradition is between US$1.5m and US$3m. This amount will be released from currently restrained government bonds.

Next up was the Dotcom family’s accommodation costs. Rent on the now-famous mansion amounts to US$754,000 per annum under a lease Dotcom signed in February 2013 and which expires in the same month 2016. The Judge decided that terminating that lease would result in additional costs.

“If [Dotcom] were to terminate the lease in order to find a more modest home, he would immediately be exposed to a significant contractual liability for the existing rental in addition to the costs of any new accommodation,” the Judge writes.

“Little would be saved by requiring Mr Dotcom to move into more modest
accommodation pending the expiry of the lease; it is more likely that the total amount required to house Mr Dotcom and his children and meet his lease commitment would actually prove greater than simply remaining where he is.

“I therefore accept that, in the particular circumstances of this case, a figure of $80,000 (US$60,300) per month is reasonable for accommodation.”

The Judge also considered Dotcom’s claims for items like security, staff wages and other general expenses.

Dotcom currently has eight staff but the Judge felt that five would be sufficient to assist with cleaning, cooking, shopping, managing the grounds and caring for Dotcom’s children.

“I allow $25,000 ($18,850) per month for staff,” the Judge said.

Turning to Dotcom’s request for $20,000 (US$15,000) for groceries, fuel and maintenance etc, the Judge said this was a little high considering Dotcom’s estranged wife Mona could be expected to chip in.

“On the basis that the children’s mother can be expected to contribute to
some of these costs I consider that the figure of $20,000 (US$15,000) is a little high and would reduce that to $15,000 (US$11,300) per month,” the Judge added.

In addition to the legal fees mentioned earlier, in total Dotcom was awarded $170,000 (US$128,000) per month to cover living expenses.

“Mr Dotcom may have access to that figure each month pending the expiry of the lease on the property,” the Judge said. “At that point I would expect that the position will be reviewed.”


https://torrentfreak.com/kim-dotcom-awarded-millions-plus-128k-per-month-expenses-150502s/

[Should GoFundMe and Christian Bakers Be Treated the Same? We Ask]

In January 2013, Rachel Cryer and her mother walked into Sweet Cakes By Melissa, a bakery in Gresham, Oregon, and tried to order a wedding cake. Aaron Klein, the co-owner (and Melissa’s husband), was informed Cryer would be marrying another woman. He apologized and told them that providing a cake for a same-sex wedding violated his Christian convictions. Cryer walked out of the store.

In a suburb adjacent to Portland, one of the most progressive cities in America, Sweet Cakes By Melissa was living on borrowed time once the incident became public. (The city is so famously tolerant that Sam Adams, the first openly gay mayor of a major city, survived two recall attempts after it was revealed that he had lied about having a relationship with an underage teenage boy. His supporters initially smeared those making the accusations as homophobic.) Protests started outside the bakery soon after, and by September 2013 Sweet Cakes had closed its doors.

You might think that once Sweet Cakes By Melissa had been driven out of business, the good citizens offended by the Kleins’ beliefs would have called it a day. But the totalitarianism of America’s liberal culture warriors is a thing to behold.

On April 24, 2015, more than a year and a half after the bakery was shuttered, Alan McCullough, an administrative law judge for Oregon’s Bureau of Labor and Industries, ordered the Kleins to pay $135,000 in fines for violating the state’s public accommodation laws. It is impossible to see this award as anything but excessively punitive. A few years back, a New Mexico wedding photographer was penalized by that state for refusing to work at a same-sex commitment ceremony. The fine in that case was $6,637.

McCullough arrived at his determination by citing a laundry list of damages asserted by Cryer and her partner. Since this was an administrative decision, there was no requirement the women prove their claims. And so they piled them on: “felt mentally raped, dirty and shameful” and “pale and sick at home after work,” suffered “shock,” “surprise,” and “uncertainty.” Some are contradictory: both “loss of appetite” and “weight gain.” The judge was apparently moved.

The Kleins have five children to take care of, and their income has dropped precipitously since their business closed. Aaron now works as a garbage collector. They say the fine could bankrupt them. So shortly after the decision was handed down, supporters started taking up a collection on the popular GoFundMe website. In just a few hours, donors had contributed $109,000 to the Kleins. Then GoFundMe, under pressure from critics of the Kleins, shut down the fundraiser. The rationale? The website has a policy of refusing fundraisers “in defense of formal charges of heinous crimes, including violent, hateful, or sexual acts.”

Behind the organized campaign to pressure GoFundMe was Lisa Watson, the owner of Cupcake Jones in downtown Portland. (Cupcake Jones also provides wedding cakes and was presumably a competitor of Sweet Cakes By Melissa.) “This business has been found GUILTY OF DISCRIMINATION and is being allowed to fundraise to pay their penalty. .  .  . The amount of money they have raised in a matter of a few hours by thousands of anonymous cowards is disgusting,” Watson wrote on her Facebook page.

The First Amendment issues surrounding compelled participation in a same-sex marriage celebration are far from settled, and it’s absurd to think the Kleins are guilty of a “heinous crime.” Even Andrew Sullivan, the writer perhaps most responsible for making gay marriage a legal reality, has spoken out against such inquisitions: “If you find someone who’s genuinely conflicted about doing something for your wedding, let them be. Find someone else.”

But ironically, pleas for tolerance are not carrying the day, either in Portland or in the gay community. On April 25, Cupcake Jones was given an award for LGBT activism by Basic Rights Oregon. Prominent gay activist and radio host Michelangelo Signorile has a new book out in which he declares, “It’s time for us to be intolerant—intolerant of all forms of .  .  . bigotry against LBGT people.”

C. S. Lewis once warned that a tyranny of “omnipotent moral busybodies” would be the worst tyranny of all, for “those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end .  .  . with the approval of their own conscience.” The Klein family’s Jacobin persecutors are intent on stamping out a Christian morality they believe to be rigid and punitive. By inflicting inordinate material harm and insisting on a total capitulation of conscience, they only reveal their own pernicious and pitiless ambitions.


http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/bake-me-cake-or-else_935066.html

Should GoFundMe and Christian Bakers Be Treated the Same? We Ask

According to a disturbingly pleasant graphic from Information is Beautiful entitled simply 20th Century Death, communism was the leading ideological cause of death between 1900 and 2000. The 94 million that perished in China, the Soviet Union, North Korea, Afghanistan, and Eastern Europe easily (and tragically) trump the 28 million that died under fascist regimes during the same period.

During the century measured, more people died as a result of communism than from homicide (58 million) and genocide (30 million) put together. The combined death tolls of WWI (37 million) and WWII (66 million) exceed communism’s total by only 9 million.

It gets worse when you look at the lower right of the chart—The Natural World—which includes animals (7 million), natural disasters (24 million), and famine (101 million). Curiously, all of the world’s worst famines during the 20th century were in communist countries: China (twice!), the Soviet Union, and North Korea.

Communism is a killer. And yet some still say they support the idea: According to a 2011 Rasmussen poll, 11% of Americans think that communism would better serve this country’s needs than our current system.


http://reason.com/blog/2013/03/13/communism-killed-94m-in-20th-century

[What is EmDrive?EmDrive is based on the theory of special relativity that it is possible to convert electrical energy into thrust without the need to expel any form of repellent.Shawyer's critics say according to the law of conservation of momentum, his theory cannot work as in order for a thruster to be propelled forwards, something must be pushed out of the back of it in the opposite direction.However, EmDrive does preserve the conservation of momentum and energy – to put it simply, electricity converts into microwaves within the cavity that push against the inside of the device, causing the thruster to accelerate in the opposite direction.Shawyer proved that if you had a 100kg spacecraft, the thrust would be in a clockwise direction and the spacecraft would then accelerate in an anti-clockwise direction.Nasa says it works when tested in a vacuum]

Nasa has been testing a highly controversial electromagnetic space propulsion technology called EmDrive and has found evidence that it may indeed work, and along the way, might even have made a sci-fi concept possible.

The EmDrive is a technology that could make it much cheaper to launch satellites into space and could be key to solving the energy crisis, if solar power could be harnessed off the satellites and sent back to Earth.

It was thought up and developed by a British scientist called Roger Shawyer, who spent years having his technology ridiculed by the international space community even though Boeing licensed it and the UK government was satisfied it worked.

Nasa has been testing the technology for a while and it confirmed on 29 April that researchers at the Johnson Space Center have successfully tested an electromagnetic propulsion drive in a vacuum, and although it did not seem possible, the technology actually works.

"Thrust measurements of the EmDrive defy classical physics' expectations that such a closed [microwave] cavity should be unusable for space propulsion because of the law of conservation of momentum," Nasa's José Rodal, Jeremiah Mullikin and Noel Munson wrote in a Nasa Spaceflight blog.

What is EmDrive?

EmDrive is based on the theory of special relativity that it is possible to convert electrical energy into thrust without the need to expel any form of repellent.

Shawyer's critics say according to the law of conservation of momentum, his theory cannot work as in order for a thruster to be propelled forwards, something must be pushed out of the back of it in the opposite direction.

However, EmDrive does preserve the conservation of momentum and energy – to put it simply, electricity converts into microwaves within the cavity that push against the inside of the device, causing the thruster to accelerate in the opposite direction.

Shawyer proved that if you had a 100kg spacecraft, the thrust would be in a clockwise direction and the spacecraft would then accelerate in an anti-clockwise direction.

Nasa says it works when tested in a vacuum


The researchers explain that the reason why Shawyer's EmDrive models and EmDrive experiments carried out by Chinese researchers had been criticised in the past was because none of the tests had been carried out in a vacuum.

Physics says particles in the quantum vacuum cannot be ionised, so therefore you cannot push against it, but Nasa says Shawyer's theory does indeed work.

"Nasa has successfully tested their EmDrive in a hard vacuum – the first time any organisation has reported such a successful test. To this end, Nasa Eagleworks has now nullified the prevailing hypothesis that thrust measurements were due to thermal convection," the researchers wrote.

Nasa says its researchers joined forces with a large community of enthusiasts, engineers, and scientists on several continents to discuss EmDrive theories on the NasaSpaceflight.com EmDrive forum, and "despite considerable effort within the NasaSpaceflight.com forum to dismiss the reported thrust as an artefact, the EmDrive results have yet to be falsified".

At least now Shawyer's work is being validated and he continues to work on a souped-up second generation version of the EmDrive that uses super conductors and an asymmetrical cavity to increase the thrust by up to five orders of magnitude.

In an interview with IBTimes UK in August 2014, Shawyer said: "There was an element of not wanting to disrupt the industry, but also a total ignorance in the laws of physics. They did make life difficult for me for a while.

""The space industry doesn't want to know about it as it's very disruptive. If the customer will spend hundreds of millions of dollars on launching a satellite, why would you want to make something that could do it cheaper?

"This technology is a quantum leap – it would enable vertical take-off and landing for airplanes, it's quiet and it uses liquid hydrogen as a fuel, so it's green too."

Star Trek warp drive might also now be possible

Apart from the excitement over EmDrive possibly being a real thing, internet users also noticed Nasa could possibly have accidentally invented the warp drive – a faster-than-light propulsion system that enables spacecraft to travel at speeds that are greatly faster than light in sci-fi movies such as Star Trek.

Nasa researchers posted on the Nasa Spaceflight forum that when lasers were fired into the EmDrive's resonance chamber, some of the laser beams had travelled faster than the speed of light, which would mean the EmDrive could have produced a warp bubble.

A post by another user analysing the EmDrive experiment said "the math behind the warp bubble apparently matches the interference pattern found in the EmDrive".




http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/nasa-says-emdrive-does-work-it-may-have-also-created-star-trek-warp-drive-1499098

Presstitute:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrHE_eXDeJg

Baltimore Protestors around the same time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=st4IHokD4Jc


"Most Trusted News..."

[The first hijacking of a medical telerobot raises important questions over the security of remote surgery, say computer security experts.]

The first hijacking of a medical telerobot raises important questions over the security of remote surgery, say computer security experts.



A crucial bottleneck that prevents life-saving surgery being performed in many parts of the world is the lack of trained surgeons. One way to get around this is to make better use of the ones that are available.

Sending them over great distances to perform operations is clearly inefficient because of the time that has to be spent travelling. So an increasingly important alternative is the possibility of telesurgery with an expert in one place controlling a robot in another that physically performs the necessary cutting and dicing. Indeed, the sale of medical robots is increasing at a rate of 20 percent per year.

But while the advantages are clear, the disadvantages have been less well explored. Telesurgery relies on cutting edge technologies in fields as diverse as computing, robotics, communications, ergonomics, and so on. And anybody familiar with these areas will tell you that they are far from failsafe.

Today, Tamara Bonaci and pals at the University of Washington in Seattle examine the special pitfalls associated with the communications technology involved in telesurgery. In particular, they show how a malicious attacker can disrupt the behavior of a telerobot during surgery and even take over such a robot, the first time a medical robot has been hacked in this way.

The first telesurgery took place in 2001 with a surgeon in New York successfully removing the gall bladder of a patient in Strasbourg in France, more than 6,000 kilometers away. The communications ran over a dedicated fiber provided by a telecommunications company specifically for the operation.

That’s an expensive option since dedicated fibers can cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Since then, surgeons have carried out numerous remote operations and begun to experiment with ordinary communications links over the Internet, which are significantly cheaper.

Although there are no recorded incidents in which the communications infrastructure has caused problems during a telesurgery operation, there are still questions over security and privacy which have never been full answered.

So Bonaci and co set out to explore some of these questions using a telesurgery robot called Raven II, which was developed at the University of Washington. Raven II is designed with the goal of dramatically reducing the size of these robots while improving their durability so that they can be used in extreme environments.

The robot consists of two surgical arms that are manipulated by a surgeon using a state-of-the-art control console which includes video and haptic feedback.

The robot itself runs on a single PC running software based on open standards, such as Linux and the Robot Operating System. It communicates with the control console using a standard communications protocol for remote surgery known as the Interoperable Telesurgery Protocol.

This communication takes place over public networks that are potentially accessible to anyone. And because the robot is designed to work in extreme conditions, this communications link can be a low-quality connection to the internet, perhaps even over wireless.

And therein lies the risk. “Due to the open and uncontrollable nature of communication networks, it becomes easy for malicious entities to jam, disrupt, or take over the communication between a robot and a surgeon,” say Bonaci and co.

So that’s exactly what they tried to do. Bonaci and co have attempted various types of cyberattack on the robot to see how easy it is to disrupt.

Their experiment is relatively straightforward. Instead of a real operation, the operator has the task of moving rubber blocks from one part of a peg board to another. The team then measures how quickly the operator can complete this task during an attack and how difficult various operators rate the task.

The control console connects to the robot over a standard network, which the attacking computer is also linked to. This set up allows the attacking computer to intercept and manipulate the signals sent in both directions between the control console and the robot.

The team tries out three type of attacks. The first changes the commands sent by the operator to the robot by deleting, delaying or re-ordering them. This causes the robot’s movement to become jerky and difficult to control.

The second type of attack modifies the intention of signals from the operator to the robot by changing, say, the distance an arm should move or the degree it should rotate and so on. “Most of these attacks had a noticeable impact on the Raven immediately upon launch,” say Bonaci and co.

The final category of attack is a hijacking that completely takes over the robot. This turns out to be relatively easy since the Interoperable Telesurgery Protocol is publicly available. “We effectively took control over the teleoperated procedure,” they say.

They even worked out how to generate movements that triggered an automatic stop mechanism built in to the robot. This occurs when a movement takes the arms beyond some predefined distance or makes them move too quickly.

By constantly sending commands that triggered this mechanism, the team were able to carry out a kind of denial of service attack. “We are able to easily stop the robot from ever being properly reset, thus effectively making a surgical procedure impossible,” they say.

And if this kind of cyberattack weren’t bad enough, the video connection was also publicly available allowing almost anybody to watch the operation in real time.

It’s not hard to imagine how cyberattacks of this kind could have lethal consequences. Even the denial of service attack at a crucial point during a surgical procedure could be fatal.

Having seen how effective these kinds of cyberattacks can be, Bonaci and co also suggest ways to prevent them. The most obvious is to encrypt the communications between the control console and the robot.

They even tested this idea and said the robot performed as expected. “The use of encryption and authentication has low cost and high benefits to telerobotic surgery, mitigating many analyzed attacks,” they conclude.

However, encryption cannot foil every kind of attack. In particular, it still allows man-in-the-middle attacks where an eavesdropper intercepts signals in both directions while fooling both parties that they are still talking to each other.

And video encryption probably isn’t practical over the kind of network links envisaged for remote surgery in extreme locations. That may not be a security concern but it does raise important issues of privacy. 

That’s interesting work that has profound implications not only for the way telesurgery will be performed but on the way the public perceive the safety and privacy of these systems.

Telesurgery operators will have to take a view on how secure their equipment will need to be. And policy makers and the public will have to reach their own conclusions of what kind of security and privacy is acceptable. Either way, the cat and mouse game of cybersecurity will continue.


http://www.technologyreview.com/view/537001/security-experts-hack-teleoperated-surgical-robot/

[Sometimes these dangers are labeled denialism (in which someone's identity isn't recognized) or triggering speech (speech that sets off traumatic responses in unwitting listeners)]

One of the more contentious ideas to recently emerge from the culture war is that of "safe spaces." We are said to be at risk of social dangers. Sometimes these dangers are labeled denialism (in which someone's identity isn't recognized) or triggering speech (speech that sets off traumatic responses in unwitting listeners). The way some students at elite colleges combat these social dangers is to create, or demand the creation of, safe spaces. And just as often, students demand that their entire campus become a safe space.

Hence the wrong kind of speech is re-labeled as violence. The space only becomes safe when certain ideas (and the people expositing them) are banished. We're trying to build a supportive community, don't you know?

Why worry about the exotic (and sometimes silly) life of a college campus? Well, it matters because future elites — who will set the norms and tone of our institutions of power — are coming of age in this intellectual stew. At top colleges we already see the nepotistic acceptance of incurious mediocrity, the shirking of citizenship's duties, and a liberation from old constraints, all of which tell us about the future of our nation's social and political life.

Here's my prediction: Safe spaces will continue to spread across campuses. And from there, the colonization project will really begin in earnest. Public institutions, schools, and even the home. And colonization is the right word, because the logic of a "safe space" is entirely alien to traditional notions of liberty.

How can you even object? Are you pro-trauma? Pro-denialism? You think kids should have their identities denied and be traumatized in the home?

The fear of terrorism — a statistically infinitesimal risk in everyday American life — has caused us to expand the American surveillance state, launch misbegotten wars, consent to the search of everything from library records to our bodily cavities, and generally surrender our liberty. So, too, will a pervasive fear of social danger raise the demand for social control.

It's hard not to see the mechanism of privilege at work. These students are taking on decades worth of debt, or spending 15 times the median income on their college education — why shouldn't they demand that adjunct professors and guest speakers not offend them? And as they graduate into the upper echelons of American life, paying the lion's share of taxes, they'll demand the same of fellow citizens, too. I pay for these cops, why shouldn't they tell you what to think? I'm creating a supportive community.

I'm not unsympathetic to the most limited aims of safe-spacers. Some of their moral impulses are perfectly laudable. People who have experienced real trauma — violent crimes, rape, the loss of loved ones in violence — do need special consideration. That a victim of rape would want to avoid a heated discussion on rape statistics is perfectly understandable. Someone who lost a loved one in a war overseas may find themselves distressed by a frank talk about whether that war was justified.

Long-term healing may mean strengthening oneself to face these subjects in the future. We intuitively understand the effects of physical, emotional, or even spiritual trauma.

But it takes the intellectual gymnastics of a collegian to see that thoughts and ideas amount to violence and trauma.

Perhaps the safe-space movement cannot be sustained for long. The political left used to praise fearlessness, non-conformism, and dangerous ideas. It used to embrace the figures of history who were once branded heretics. Maybe that romantic rhetoric is too deeply embedded in our political tradition and culture to let this hysterical, stultifying conformism colonize our institutions and social life.

Then again, if safety-obsessed neighbors now believe — against all evidence — that children who are not actively surveilled are suffering from neglect, then heaven knows how dangerous the home can be, with all those proles thinking their thoughts in the presence of children. Surely the practice of "reparative therapy," which could soon be illegal, will be expanded to include any non-medical therapeutic practices that have "denialism" embedded within them.

The safe-space movement offers hysterics real power over their institutions and neighbors. And this is a power that denies itself as power, that grasps by wailing. If America is rapidly becoming more economically and politically unequal, it seems natural enough that the graduates of our elite credentialing institutions should feel the need to control the thought and speech of their inferiors.

Nothing so endangers privilege as the freedom of the masses. I learned that from the left.



http://theweek.com/articles/551122/why-safe-space-movement-liberal-assault-freedom

[...]
The 101 version of his big idea is this: Under the right conditions, a random group of atoms will self-organize, unbidden, to more effectively use energy. Over time and with just the right amount of, say, sunlight, a cluster of atoms could come remarkably close to what we call life. In fact, here’s a thought: Some things we consider inanimate actually may already be “alive.” It all depends on how we define life, something England’s work might prompt us to reconsider. “People think of the origin of life as being a rare process,” says Vijay Pande, a Stanford chemistry professor. “Jeremy’s proposal makes life a consequence of physical laws, not something random.”

England’s idea may sound strange, even incredible, but it’s drawn the attention of an impressive posse of high-level academics. After all, while Darwinism may explain evolution and the complex world we live in today, it doesn’t account for the onset of intelligent beings. England’s insistence on probing for the step that preceded all of our current assumptions about life is what makes him stand out, says Carl Franck, a Cornell physics professor, who’s been following England’s work closely. “Every 30 years or so we experience these gigantic steps forward,” Franck says. “We’re due for one. And this might be it.”

[...]
England didn’t begin with number-crunching, though. During his postdoc research on embryonic development, he kept coming back to the question: What qualifies something as alive or not? He later superimposed an analytical rigor to that question, publishing an equation in 2013 about how much energy is required for self-replication to take place. For England, that investigation was only the beginning. “I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” he says, his normally deep voice rising until eventually cracking. “It was so frustrating.” Over the next year, he worked on a second paper, which is under peer review now. This one took his past findings and used them to explain theoretically how, under certain physical circumstances, life could emerge from nonlife.

In the most basic terms, Darwinism and the idea of natural selection tell us that well-adapted organisms evolve in order to survive and better reproduce in their environment. England doesn’t dispute this reasoning, but he argues that it’s too vague. For instance, he says, blue whales and phytoplankton thrive in the same environmental conditions — the ocean — but they do so by vastly different means. That’s because that while they’re both made of the same basic building blocks, strings of DNA are arranged differently in each organism.

Now take England’s simulation of an opera singer who holds a crystal glass and sings at a certain pitch. Instead of shattering, England predicts that over time, the atoms will rearrange themselves to better absorb the energy the singer’s voice projects, essentially protecting the glass’s livelihood. So how’s a glass distinct from, say, a plankton-type organism that rearranges it self over several generations? Does that make glass a living organism?

These are pretty things to ponder. Unfortunately, England’s work hasn’t yet provided any answers, leaving the professor in a kind of speculative state as he doggedly tries to put numbers to it all. “He hasn’t put enough cards on the table yet,” Franck says. “He’ll need to make more testable predictions.” So it remains to be seen where England will land in the end. Other scientists have made similar claims about energy dissipation in the context of non-equilibrium thermodynamics, but none has found a definitive means for applying this science to the origin of life.



http://www.ozy.com/rising-stars-and-provocateurs/the-man-who-may-one-up-darwin/39217?utm_source=HF1&utm_medium=pp&utm_campaign=pp

Warren Weinstein, 72, was accidentally killed by a U.S. airstrike on an Al Qaeda compound in Pakistan.
Editor’s Note: The U.S. announced on April 23, 2015 that Weinstein was killed in a drone strike on Al Qaeda in Pakistan.

It was before dawn the morning of Aug. 13, 2011, when a group of men armed with assault rifles knocked on Warren Weinstein's front gate in the Lahore suburb of Model Town, an upscale neighborhood where Benazir Bhutto is said to have had a house. Weinstein was working as country director for J.E. Austin Associates, a consulting firm based in Arlington, Va., that contracts with the Pakistani government. The 70-year-old was helping to create small businesses in tumultuous regions in conjunction with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

It was the beginning of more than two years in captivity for Weinstein, who was accidently killed by a U.S. drone strike in January, the Obama administration announced Thursday.

Shortly after he was taken captive, Weinstein appeared in a video and directly addressed President Obama.

“My life is in your hands," he told Obama. "If you accept the demands, I live; if you don’t accept the demands, I die,” Weinstein said, referring to a list of demands made by al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri last year that included an end to American strikes in Pakistan and the release of al Qaeda and Taliban militants detained at Guantánamo Bay.



http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/05/07/warren-weinstein-how-the-usaid-worker-was-kidnapped-video.html



http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/04/23/obama-apologizes-for-botched-military-operation-takes-no-questions/

Interesting...

IT’S OFFICIAL: JOHN Deere and General Motors want to eviscerate the notion of ownership. Sure, we pay for their vehicles. But we don’t own them. Not according to their corporate lawyers, anyway.

In a particularly spectacular display of corporate delusion, John Deere—the world’s largest agricultural machinery maker —told the Copyright Office that farmers don’t own their tractors. Because computer code snakes through the DNA of modern tractors, farmers receive “an implied license for the life of the vehicle to operate the vehicle.”

It’s John Deere’s tractor, folks. You’re just driving it.

Several manufacturers recently submitted similar comments to the Copyright Office under an inquiry into the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. DMCA is a vast 1998 copyright law that (among other things) governs the blurry line between software and hardware. The Copyright Office, after reading the comments and holding a hearing, will decide in July which high-tech devices we can modify, hack, and repair—and decide whether John Deere’s twisted vision of ownership will become a reality.

Over the last two decades, manufacturers have used the DMCA to argue that consumers do not own the software underpinning the products they buy—things like smartphones, computers, coffeemakers, cars, and, yes, even tractors. So, Old MacDonald has a tractor, but he owns a massive barn ornament, because the manufacturer holds the rights to the programming that makes it run.

(This is an important issue for farmers: a neighbor, Kerry Adams, hasn’t been able to fix an expensive transplanter because he doesn’t have access to the diagnostic software he needs. He’s not alone: many farmers are opting for older, computer-free equipment.)

In recent years, some companies have even leveraged the DMCA to stop owners from modifying the programming on those products. This means you can’t strip DRM off smart kitty litter boxes, install custom software on your iPad, or alter the calibration on a tractor’s engine. Not without potentially running afoul of the DMCA.

What does any of that have to do with copyright? Owners, tinkerers, and homebrew “hackers” must copy programming so they can modify it. Product makers don’t like people messing with their stuff, so some manufacturers place digital locks over software. Breaking the lock, making the copy, and changing something could be construed as a violation of copyright law.

And that’s how manufacturers turn tinkerers into “pirates”—even if said “pirates” aren’t circulating illegal copies of anything. Makes sense, right? Yeah, not to me either.

It makes sense to John Deere: The company argues that allowing people to alter the software—even for the purpose of repair—would “make it possible for pirates, third-party developers, and less innovative competitors to free-ride off the creativity, unique expression and ingenuity of vehicle software.” The pièce de résistance in John Deere’s argument: permitting owners to root around in a tractor’s programming might lead to pirating music through a vehicle’s entertainment system. Because copyright-marauding farmers are very busy and need to multitask by simultaneously copying Taylor Swift’s 1989 and harvesting corn? (I’m guessing, because John Deere’s lawyers never explained why anyone would pirate music on a tractor, only that it could happen.)

John Deere may be out of touch, but it’s not alone. Other corporations, including trade groups representing nearly every major automaker, made the same case to the Copyright Office again and again. It’s worth noting Tesla Motors didn’t join automakers in this argument, even though its cars rely heavily on proprietary software.

General Motors told the Copyright Office that proponents of copyright reform mistakenly “conflate ownership of a vehicle with ownership of the underlying computer software in a vehicle.” But I’d bet most Americans make the same conflation—and Joe Sixpack might be surprised to learn GM owns a giant chunk of the Chevy sitting in his driveway.

Other automakers pointed out that owners who make unsanctioned modifications could alter their vehicles in bad ways. They could tweak them to go faster. Or change engine parameters to run afoul of emissions regulations.

They’re right. That could happen. But those activities are (1) already illegal, and (2) have nothing to do with copyright. If you’re going too fast, a cop should stop you—copyright law shouldn’t. If you’re dodging emissions regulations, you should pay EPA fines—not DMCA fines. And the specter of someone doing something illegal shouldn’t justify shutting down all the reasonable and legal modifications people can make to the things they paid for.

GM went so far as to argue locking people out helps innovation. That’s like saying locking up books will inspire kids to be innovative writers, because they won’t be tempted to copy passages from a Hemingway novel. Meanwhile, outside of Bizarroland, actual technology experts—including the Electronic Frontier Foundation—have consistently labeled the DMCA an innovation killer. They insist that, rather than stopping content pirates, language in the DMCA has been used to stifle competition and expand corporate control over the life (and afterlife) of products.

“The bad part is, my sense is, these companies are just locking up this technology, and increasing the sort of monopoly pricing structure that just doesn’t work for us,” Brian Talley, a farmer on California’s central coast, says of restrictions placed on his equipment. I toured his farm with a fellow from the Intellectual Property & Technology Law Clinic so we could tell the Copyright Office how manufacturers are hampering farmers. “We are used to operating independently, and that’s one of the great things about being a farmer. And in this particular space, they are really taking that away from us.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Intellectual Property & Technology Law Clinic, and the Digital Right to Repair Coalition (Disclaimer: I’m a founding member of the Coalition.) are fighting to preserve the notion of ownership. We’re trying to open the floodgates of information. To let owners investigate the code in their devices. To modify them for better functionality. To repair them, even without the blessing of manufacturer.

Thankfully, we aren’t alone. There’s a backlash against the slow creep of corporate product control.

Earlier this year, consumers sent 40,000 comments to the Copyright Office—all of them urging the restoration of ownership rights. The year before, consumers and activists forced a law through Congress that made it legal to unlock a cellphone and move it to a different carrier.

This week, Senator Ron Wyden and Representative Jared Polis will introduce the “Breaking Down Barriers to Innovation Act of 2015, which would substantially improve the DMCA process. Lawmakers in Minnesota and New York have introduced “Fair Repair” legislation that assert an owner’s right to repair electronic equipment they’ve purchased. They want equal access to repair information, replacement parts, and security updates.

Of course, taking back the stuff that we own won’t be easy. Corporations have better lobbyists than the rest of us. And, somehow, the notion of actually owning the things you buy has become revolutionary.

It doesn’t have to be. Tell the Copyright Office to side with consumers when it decides which gadgets are legal to modify and repair. Urge lawmakers to support legislation like the Unlocking Technology Act and the Your Own Devices Act, because we deserve the keys to our own products. And support Fair Repair legislation.

If you bought it, you should own it—simple as that. It’s time corporate lawyers left the bullshit to the farmers, who actually need it.


http://www.wired.com/2015/04/dmca-ownership-john-deere/

Today we have Google (GOOGL). Don’t let the geeky façade, whimsical multicolored logo and “don’t be evil” mantra fool you. Google may very well be the most sinister threat and wicked incarnation of them all.

In an interview with the Atlantic almost five years ago, the search empire’s dark lord himself, Eric Schmidt, said, “Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.” He said, “I would argue that implanting things in your brain is beyond the creepy line … at least for the moment until the technology gets better.”

Then things got even creepier when Schmidt said, “We don’t need you to type at all because we know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less guess what you’re thinking about.” Then he paused and asked, “Is that over the line?”

Clearly, this creepy virtual line of Google’s is not just a moving target but a highly subjective one. How do they know when they’ve crossed it? Perhaps the more appropriate question to ask is how many lines does Google have to cross before its executives realize – before we realize – that they’re doing evil?

It’s easy to forget that Google once had a deep partnership with Apple. Then, while Steve Jobs mentored co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Schmidt sat on Apple’s (AAPL) board of directors, Android magically transformed from a BlackBerry-like (BBRY) phone with a physical keyboard into an iPhone clone.

And all the while – right up until the Federal Trade Commission forced Schmidt off Apple’s board on anticompetitive concerns – he maintained that Android did not compete with iPhone. A year later, Apple’s iPad was immediately followed by Android tablets which I’m sure were not competitors either.

Does that cross the line? Is that evil? Jobs certainly thought so. He was furious over the betrayal, calling Android “a stolen product” and vowing to “go thermonuclear war” on Google in Walter Isaacson’s biography of Apple’s iconic CEO.   

Between Google Search, Gmail, Maps, Android, YouTube, Glass, Now, Books, Wallet, Chromecast, Wear, Nest and its alliance with car companies, Google now knows more about you than you do. It knows what you want, where you are, whom you’re with, what you read, what you buy, even what pictures and videos you create and look at.

As Infoworld’s Robert X. Cringely so aptly put it, “Santa works for Google now.” 

While much of that is ostensibly “with your permission” and to “improve your search results,” as Schmidt says repeatedly, that’s just part of the story. Permissions are notoriously difficult to find and manage. And when you’re logged into your Google account, rest assured that the omnipresent eyes of Google are upon you.

Remember that nearly all of Google’s massive profits and revenues come from search advertising. That’s what funds the company’s ever-expanding presence in our lives. So when Schmidt or Page talk about improving search results, they really mean improving their ability to target you with contextual ads.

Not to sound paranoid or conspiratorial, but before long, those ads won’t just be limited to computer screens. They’ll be anywhere and everywhere Google can reach you.

And that’s just for starters. The Google Empire is expanding into everything from self-driving cars and virtual reality to broadband fiber and neural networks. It’s even collecting genetic and molecular information from thousands of people to map humans in a way that’s eerily reminiscent of how it maps the world’s streets.

Page says he wants Google to be much, much larger than it is today. In a Wired interview where he talked about the dozens of disparate projects the company has going on – what they call moon shots – he said, “Imagine what we could do if we had a hundred times as many employees. Anything is scalable.”

That would give the company millions of employees and make Google far and away the biggest and most powerful company in history. You would think the U.S. Justice Department or the FTC might have something to say about that. But then, you’d be wrong.

Last month the Wall Street Journal obtained a 160-page report from the trade agency’s bureau of competition that recommended the commission bring an antitrust suit against the search giant. It claimed Google’s actions have done and will continue to do “real harm to consumers and to innovation in the online search and advertising markets.”

And yet, the agency’s commissioners ultimately decided against and closed the investigation. Why? Could it be that Google was the second-largest donor to President Obama’s reelection campaign or that the company’s executives spend so much time at the White House that the administration is thinking of redoing the Green Room in Google’s multicolor scheme?

Don’t be silly. There’s no cronyism in Washington.

Finally, European regulators last week filed an antitrust action claiming Google skews search results in favor of its own shopping network, a practice that Yelp and others have long complained about. The European Commission also added a new investigation to its ongoing efforts, this one over Google’s Android operating system.

Don’t tell me we’re going to need Europe to save us from the evil empire. How ironic can you get?



http://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/2015/04/20/why-google-is-new-evil-empire/


------------------------------------------------------------------------
I see this as a motivation to have the brains among us develop the next open, unstoppable peer to peer/decentralized search engine. Ethereum based?

[The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.]

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.


[...]
She got the dogs safely out of the house, just as multiple armed agents rushed inside. Some even barged into the bathroom, where her partner was in the shower. The officer or agent in charge demanded that Cindy sit on the couch, but she wanted to get up and get a cup of coffee.

“I told him this was my house and I could do what I wanted.” Wrong thing to say. “This made the agent in charge furious. He towered over me with his finger in my face and yelled like a drill sergeant that I either do it his way or he would handcuff me.”

They wouldn’t let her speak to a lawyer. She looked outside and saw a person who appeared to be a reporter. Someone had tipped him off.


[...]
The John Doe investigations are a form of domestic lawfare, and our constitutional system is ill equipped to handle it. Federal courts rarely intervene in state judicial proceedings, state officials rarely lose their array of official immunities for the consequences of their misconduct, and violations of First Amendment freedoms rarely result in meaningful monetary damages for the victims. …

Yes, Wisconsin, the cradle of the progressive movement and home of the “Wisconsin idea” — the marriage of state governments and state universities to govern through technocratic reform — was giving birth to a new progressive idea, the use of law enforcement as a political instrument, as a weapon to attempt to undo election results, shame opponents, and ruin lives.

Most Americans have never heard of these raids, or of the lengthy criminal investigations of Wisconsin conservatives. For good reason. Bound by comprehensive secrecy orders, conservatives were left to suffer in silence as leaks ruined their reputations, as neighbors, looking through windows and dismayed at the massive police presence, the lights shining down on targets’ homes, wondered, no doubt, What on earth did that family do?

This was the on-the-ground reality of the so-called John Doe investigations, expansive and secret criminal proceedings that directly targeted Wisconsin residents because of their relationship to Scott Walker, their support for Act 10, and their advocacy of conservative reform.


http://www.nationalreview.com/article/417155/wisconsins-shame-i-thought-it-was-home-invasion-david-french


-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Progressives hate cops... Until they can use them as the thought police against their (peaceful!) conservative opponents...

Sad, but not surprising...