Wired State

So Wait, What Appelbaum is Leaking Aren't Authentic Snowden Docs? Per Greenwald

I asked yesterday if Appelbaum was back in the Snowden docs leaking business.

It seemed odd, since he had broken with Glenn Greenwald and the Guardian amid accusations that Greenwald was ostensiby sitting on the Tor (and other?) stories. The Tor story was then published soon after (under duress?) but Jake still ended up looking stupid.

The question resulting from all these maneuvers is really this: who controls the documents Snowden leaks? Did he really give them all away to "journalists"? Which ones? Do adversarial reporter helper/anarchist geeks like Appelbaum also retain some or all of them or access to them? Is Snowden still leaking them?

Now -- according to Cryptome, which tend to be anti-WikiLeaks (which no doubt they see WL as competitors in the anarchy business)  -- Greenwald is denying that the document published by Der Spiegel is one that he had and gave to Appelbaum.

Wow, the plot thickens.

So that means that either Appelbaum got his own stash, or Snowden keeps leaking them, or Assange/Sarah Harrison has them -- you know, it's like a game of three-card monte, and maybe deliberately so, to keep everybody running in circles.

Cryptome claims to have references a tweet from Greenwald saying this:

Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald 8:05 AM - 29 Dec 13:

"@Cryptomeorg @ioerror I had no involvement in that Spiegel article, ask them - and they don't say those are Snowden docs."

This must be a DM, or an erased tweet, as it is now not in Greenwald's feed. 

I found this tweet in Greenwald's feed eventually by clicking ALL to see his responses (he has me blocked, so I have to find him in search, then click ALL).

It's instructive to read the whole conversation there because Greenwald styles himself (and even Appelbaum) as "keeper of Edward's wishes" and his safety, whereas these others more radical than they (can it be?!) who want to dump the entire trove out are heedless of Snowden's security (and by implication, the safety of his helpers).

Yeah, they don't say they are Snowden docs. Maybe CCC stole them in some separate hack. That's because they've long had a jihad against the NSA, as I outline in this blog post.

Curiously, Greenwald also links to Appelbaum's CCC talk, which he describes as "genuinely important," i.e I take that to mean that a) they didn't really have a break or b) they had a break, but GG still has the presence of mind (within the context of his own cause) to acknowledge credit where credit is due to his former comrade.

He also adds, "At 7:40 here, @ioerror explains the legal and prudential constraints governing what can & can't be published https://soundcloud.com/moltke/to-protect-and-infect-part-2 …

I'll watch and return to this subject but obviously this leads to more questions.

 

 

Wait, Jacob Appelbaum is Back in the Snowden Leaking Business?

Who's on first?

And who is really controlling the Snowden documents -- or is anarchy ensuing?

There's a new story out realated to a Snowden leak involving Jacob Appelbaum, Snowden's hacker helper, even though he broke with Glenn Greenwald and the Guardian.

Forbes even breathlessly headlines it "Appelbaum's Latest NSA Revelations from the Edward Snowden Documents" as if this is the latest in a series, although that headline is something that has never been done before by Forbes. It's based on a report in Der Spiegel.

Says Forbes, about this NSA document cataloguing types of equipment:

This is not a list of backdoors into equipment that the manufacturers have allowed the NSA to insert. This is instead a listing of the hacks and hardware that the NSA has developed in order to get into kit that the manufacturers have no intention of allowing them into. It is not, absolutely not, evidence of collaboration in any form at all. It’s actually evidence of how good the hackers working for the NSA are.

Both Forbes and The Verge make it clear that computer manufactures themselves didn't knowingly build in or allow these backdoors -- the original Der Spiegel story doesn't front this aspect as much (although concedes it). Of course, Forbes is in the business of covering business, and Verge is in the business, as a tech publication, of selling gadgets to make a living. So both of these publications are motivated (some would say cravenly) to portray the story with more nuances.

At the bottom of the story, you learn that what Snowden got ahold of was an old, outdated copy of a catalogue from 2008. You wonder why the genius hacker couldn't get a more up-to-date version but there it is...

What's important about all this, however, isn't just the story of the backdoors, but the provenance of the documents, who got to leak them, and the timing.

How did Appelbaum keep getting documents, and does this mean that a) Snowden still leaks documents b) Appelbaum had access to all or some despite whatever break he might have with Greenwald c) Greenwald doesn't control the leaks.

This is something to watch closely.

In our last episode (so I thought, but I may have lost track) over the summer, I thought that Appelbaum quarrelled with Glenn Greenwald. He called him out publicly on Twitter and accused him and Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian, of sitting on Snowden stuff because they were chicken...or something.

He claimed that there was some sort of story about Tor they were sitting on.

Boy, did Jake look stupid when just a day or two after that, the Guardian published a story on Tor, and with Bruce Schneier as the techie expert, not Appelbaum. The story was odd, because on the one hand, we know the FBI took down Tor with two big cases this year, one involving a child pornography ring in Ireland, and another the Silk Road drug mart, and half the nodes, i.e. 2,000 were said to be shut down or "had purple dye" put on them to out them. Schneier didn't even mention the Silk Road bust. Earlier, Jake had been publically vilified by "the community" for not keeping watch over the exploits in Mozilla, and not warning users in time of vulnerabilities, when he bundled Tor and the Firefox browser together in order to attrack lots of newbie Tor users an make it less wonky and hard to use, so that only nerds used it. Oops.

Could that have been why they cut Jake, the Tor King, out of the loop on the story about Tor?

It then seemed that Appelbaum publicly broke with Greenwald and The Guardian, and seemed to advocate that the Snowden stash should just be "put out there" although they didn't themselves "put it out there" the way WikiLeaks has done with other things like State Department cables or Stratfor emails. That suggested they didn't have it. Right around this time Cryptome and other sites began to bitch about how Greenwald was making bank on these documents and personal gain was corrupting his vision and work for "the cause" -- and the documents should just all be posted, like WikiLeaks. They weren't.

Just so there's no confusion about this -- the cause isn't transparency. No. This is the cause of crypto-anarchy, of course, which, as we were reminded about with Assange's Wizard of Oz Big Screen appearance this week at the 30th annual convention of the aptly-named Chaos Computer Club, involves consolidating the anarchist left which openly calls for wrecking and sabotaging systems, and openly recruits systems administrators not only to wreck and sabotage, but to spill files into the, um, "knowledge commons" i.e. leaking classified government files so that enemies of liberal states can use them to defeat democracy. Truly, a lovely bunch.

So after that Tor Story, then, Greenwald announced that he was leaving the Guardian and taking an offer that no journalist could refuse, to work with millionaire Pierre Omidyar on a new media venture, which is being dubbed "NewCo" as if it is out of an economics textbook, but in fact, it has been revealed now (again by Cryptome) as already registered in August 2013 under the corporate name "First Look".

That caused a cascade of further accusations that Greenwald was monetarizing Snowden. Paul Carr, who sold out his NSFW muck-raking outfit (which never did investigative journalism for real, but just raked over the same tired muck) to Pando Daily, was leading the pack of Silicon Valley technocommunists (he constantly publishes Mark Ames of The Exiled who loathes capitalism) raging about technolibertarian Omidyar exploiting the Hero-Geek Snowden.  (I actually would submit that Omidyar is a technosocialist; different lol). Sibel Edmonds, a blogger who claims to represent the whistleblowing issues, has gotten on to this vein, and there's a whole camp now that critique the Greenwald/Snowden thing from the hard left (or the hard...something, one never knows these days as libertarians and commies converge). So that means we have the progs that critique Greenwald/Snowden from the left merely because it hurts Obama; we have the loony right and libertarians like Rand Paul embracing Greenwald/Snowden for their own cause and to fight Obama and the Democrats; and then we have some Democrats, including some congressmen who spoke out this past week against Snowden, who criticize this not so much for Obama's sake but more because they are now what constitutes, for better or worse, the "establishment" that is trying to protect a liberal democracy. I'm telling you, things are in a bad way...

Throughout this discussion, as before, the issue of who has the documents, and what Snowden gave to journalists, keeps coming up, because there are so many contradictory statements. It now seems multiple sets of journalists in different political camps have all or some of these files and are not coordinated in their leakage of them.

So do note what we have now today: an article from Appelbaum and his German media friends in Der Spiegel, not anywhere else.

(Actually, Der Spiegel was the first to get Snowden material even before Greenwald, as Poitras and Appelbaum interviewed Snowden in May and sent their interview to Der Spiegel, which then published it after Greenwald appeared in The Guardian, in probably a timed agreement which probably was fought over).

But wait. How did Appelbaum get new materials that Glenn hasn't released, if he is out of sorts with Glenn? Clearly, Appelbaum, Assange, and Sarah Harrison were all in perfect harmony as we saw from their presentation at 30c3.  They never had any falling out with each other, even if Glenn had a falling out with all or some of them.

Supposedly Snowden doesn't release new materials because supposedly he doesn't have them, but gave them all away to "journalists" in Hong Kong. That was supposedly only Poitras, Greenwald and Ewan McCaskill, whom we never heard from again, he got out of the Snowden business completely for some reason although he remains at the Guardian. My theory has always been that Appelbaum either was in Hong Kong, or met Snowden in Hawaii before Hong Kong, or simply had his own channel to him online and has maintaind it.

Of course there's Bart Gellman, who was recruited by Laura Poitras for Team Snowden -- they had met at the Center for National Security at NYU where they were both fellows.

But how does all this work? Laura and Glenn dole out sets to this one and that one? Or complete sets? Do they agree who does what? Do they fight?

Come to think of it, when was the last time you saw Greenwald come out with any leaks? It's all been Bart Gellman, ProPublica, and The New York Times lately. Greenwald must be on break, and implies he is preparing even more sensational stuff for the new publication. To be honest, I won't be surprised if this publication fails before it is born, or fails within a year of its birth.

What does all this mean? In June, Appelbaum claimed to be in direct contact with Snowden; he represented him in Germany at a prize ceremony. He hasn't publicly made this claim since then the way Greenwald has, who claims he speaks to him "daily," but there's nothing to say he isn't in contact. Given that he likely helped with the comms and set up the archives and transfer, even if there were some channel that GG would be in a position to cut him out of, he'd have retained his own back channels. Given how he gushed about Snowden's private message to him (which he made public), concerned about how Jakey was holding up under all the stress), chances are they remained in touch, despite his odd quip at 30c3 about "Chelsea Manning, formerly Bradley Manning, Daniel Ellsberg who is still Daniel Ellsberg, and Edward Snowden who is still Edward Snowden (hopefully)." You know, that isn't a surprising thing to say given that in the hands of the Russians, anything is possible.

The leak about the online laptops is a minor leak in the oeuvre of Snowden leaks -- it's a nerd's leak that most people won't follow, and seems to have been made just in time for 30c3 to establish Jake's street cred with other hackers and to keep fresh his fake "journalist" credential (that he needs two other co-writers is indicative).

The story claims that the NSA has put trap doors in online sales so that "all our computers" ordered on line are "being watched".

I have long since stopped taking any of these stories "as is" at face value, because so many of the early ones had holes and mistakes and outright tendentious misleading claims in them.

Of course, these "journalists" don't bother to explain that the NSA develops this capacity relating to online sales of laptops to follow suspects; that they are constrained by law and internal regulations and oversight from using this just against "anybody" or "everbody". That's typical of every presentation on this subject from this gang.

In covering this, the Verge at least concedes this:

While the report does not indicate the scope of the program, or who the NSA is targeting with such wiretaps, it's a unique look at the agency's collaborative efforts with the broader intelligence community to gain hard access to communications equipment. One of the products the NSA appears to use to compromise target electronics is codenamed COTTONMOUTH, and has been available since 2009; it's a USB "hardware implant" that secretly provides the NSA with remote access to the compromised machine.

I do feel as if we are in a Wag the Dog situation now, but I can't tell who is doing what to whom.

 

Related articles

Sysadmins of the World, Unite! - Julian Assange, Jacob Appelbaum, Sarah Harrison @ 30c3

Hey! I'm Really Tired of this "Chilling Effects" Bullshit Around Snowden's Leaks

Snowden ally Applebaum says his Berlin apartment was subjected to raids

"Snowden Exiles" Paying The Price For Speaking Truth To Power

Snowden ally Appelbaum claims his Berlin apartment was invaded

Pierre Omidyar plunges first $50m into media venture with Glenn Greenwald

Who is Controlling The Snowden Documents & To What Purpose?

All Systems Are Insecure Until Proven Otherwise: An Interview with Bruce Schneier

Morozov Overshadowed by Snowden

Have you noticed how desperately Evgeny Morozov has been trying to get attention for himself, ever since Edward Snowden's big hack completely eclipsed him?

He has gotten more and more zany with his aphorisms on Twitter, and now the gloves are off, and the mask is off, and he's come clean on his technocommunism -- nore more hiding it behind a "critique of technology" as if he were just a typical university liberal or lefty -- he's become more shrill and edged now:

The Snowden Saga Heralds a Radical Shift in Capitalism

See, anybody who tells you about "radical shifts in capitalism" (!) is a Marxist of some sort -- but only recently, with his Social Democratic sort of articles for the German press, has he been fretting about evil capitalism so openly.

Of course, it's always been lurking in his writings; I recall that awful misreading he made of Vaclav Havel's story about the state store.

God knows what kind of contrived thinking led to putting this together -- we're just shy of Time Cube here.

But this is what we get:

Technical infrastructure and geopolitical power; rampant consumerism and ubiquitous surveillance; the lofty rhetoric of “internet freedom” and the sober reality of the ever-increasing internet control – all these are interconnected in ways most of us would rather not acknowledge or think about. Instead, we have focused on just one element in this long chain – state spying – but have mostly ignored all others.

But the spying debate has quickly turned narrow and unbearably technical; issues such as the soundness of US foreign policy, the ambivalent future of digital capitalism, the relocation of power from Washington and Brussels to Silicon Valley have not received due attention. But it is not just the NSA that is broken: the way we do – and pay for – our communicating today is broken as well. And it is broken for political and economic reasons, not just legal and technological ones: too many governments, strapped for cash and low on infrastructural imagination, have surrendered their communications networks to technology companies a tad too soon.

Mr Snowden created an opening for a much-needed global debate that could have highlighted many of these issues. Alas, it has never arrived. The revelations of the US’s surveillance addiction were met with a rather lacklustre, one-dimensional response. Much of this overheated rhetoric – tinged with anti-Americanism and channelled into unproductive forms of reform – has been useless. Many foreign leaders still cling to the fantasy that, if only the US would promise them a no-spy agreement, or at least stop monitoring their gadgets, the perversions revealed by Mr Snowden would disappear.

When Morozov lets us know that he finds this lovely global debate just not producing enough, he shows his hand: nothing less than Marxist revolution would do.

And here he tries to square the odd circle he has created by trying to find connections to his Brezhnevism:

Here the politicians are making the same mistake as Mr Snowden himself, who, in his rare but thoughtful public remarks, attributes those misdeeds to the over-reach of the intelligence agencies. Ironically, even he might not be fully aware of what he has uncovered. These are not isolated instances of power abuse that can be corrected by updating laws, introducing tighter checks on spying, building more privacy tools, or making state demands to tech companies more transparent.

Of course, all those things must be done: they are the low-hanging policy fruit that we know how to reach and harvest. At the very least, such measures can create the impression that something is being done. But what good are these steps to counter the much more disturbing trend whereby our personal information – rather than money – becomes the chief way in which we pay for services – and soon, perhaps, everyday objects – that we use?

Ah, so that's what this is about. It's realy about the Technolibertarian's technocommunism for us, where "we pretend to work" (we turn over our data and upload stuff) and "they pretend to pay us" (with a badly working and vexatious form of social media).

Morozov isn't content to discover the technocommunism right in front of us, however; he has to get more clever (the Zizek of the Internet set).

I'm all for paying for content online; Morozov isn't, and every time he needs a JSTOR article he can't access he just puts out a call for it on Twitter until somebody sends it to him who does.

From reading Morozov's past books and that really long TNR piece, I bet I know what he'd really like to see: a regime where we are given everything for free and don't pay for it with data, because....our wealth is redistributed as we make it by some central committee...

 

Join Me in Protesting to NYT Public Editor Re Nick Bilton's Removal of Anil Dash Under Pressure

Nick Bilton's Removal of Anil Dash from a Story on Bullying

[email protected]

Dear Ms. Sullivan,

Re:

Is the Internet a Mob Without Consequences
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/24/is-the-internet-a-mob-without-consequence/?_r=0
12/24/2013
Web

I am writing to urge you to investigate a situation whereby Nick Bilton, a writer for the Bits column, completely removed a subject of his story -- Anil Dash -- and his comments about Dash being "angry" -- merely because this influential Silicon Alley entrepreneur protested on Twitter about the way he was covered.

This publication -- and then removal under pressure -- was documented by Loren Feldman here:

http://www.lorenfeldman.com/how-nick-bilton-compromised-himself-and-the-ny-times-for-anil-dash/

As many of us know, Anil Dash is responsible for getting the CTO of Business Insider fired over a few off-colour and ill-advised misogynist tweets. Not only did he get him fired, he met with him in person and then threatened him with never getting funding for any start-up in Silicon Valley again -- over a few tweets! Fortunately, the man has now found a new job despite Dash's thuggish threats.

Dash is selective in his concern for such cases -- not every Silicon Valley personage will get this treatment for similar offenses or even real-life behaviour involving rape allegations.

It is hugely creepy when an influential person can force a New York Times journalist to erase something he wrote completely and put it down the memory hole. This is especially true when the NYT has a practice of putting elaborate correction statements below articles even for slightly mispelled names or incorrect locations. When a change of this magnitude is made to a story after publication, you owe it to the reader to print a correction and explanation. In this case, the text really should be restored, and if Dash doesn't like what is said about him, he can write a comment or a letter to the editor.

My blog post:

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2013/12/anil-dash-silences-nick-bilton-at-the-new-york-times-in-bullying-article.html

Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

New York, New York

[telephone number]

Yes, There is a Connection Between Violence and Autism

The documents and statements released recently in the Newtown Massacre case are chilling. Among them, there's these facts:

Lanza was diagnosed in 2006 with "profound autism spectrum disorder, with rigidity, isolation and a lack of comprehension of ordinary social interaction and communications," while also displaying symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder, according to Dr. Robert A. King, a professor at the Yale School of Medicine Child Study Center.

But he also told investigators that he observed nothing in Lanza's behavior that would have predicted he would become a mass killer. Contacted by The Associated Press, King referred questions to the Yale University press office.

Peter Lanza, who was estranged from his son, told police that his son had Asperger's syndrome — a type of autism. Autism is not associated with criminal violence. Among the images released Friday was a photo of a birthday card he'd given Adam, offering to take his son hiking or shooting, though it's not clear when it was sent.

Kathleen A. Koenig, a nurse at the Yale Child Studies Center, told investigators that Lanza frequently washed his hands and changed his socks 20 times a day, to the point where his mother did three loads of laundry a day.

The nurse, who met with Lanza in 2006 and 2007, said Lanza's mother declined to give him prescribed antidepressant and antianxiety medication after she reported that he had trouble raising his arm, something she attributed to the drug.

This document and statement should put to rest the constant speculation and denial that Adam Lanza was diagnosed with autism. We were constantly told by journalists and bloggers and commenters that we had no proof of such diagnosis, or that it was never made.

We were told it wasn't autism, but Asperger's, which his less severe. Now we see that a recognized, authoritative doctor is explaining that it is "profound autism," and that it is co-morbid with obsessive-compulsive disorder. The father continues to describe it as Asperger's, but he is either in denial or ill-informed.

We can also note that this doctor doesn't have even the most basic background materials -- like Lanza's school essays that were disturbingly violent, that might have changed his opinion regarding potential violence.

Of course, there will be many who will continue to say "but there are other factors here, not autism," that led to this tragedy. Or they'll say "my autistic child is a sweet, peaceful kid, and it is so unfair to stigmatize him."

Neither of these attitudes will help avoid the next situation, which isn't going to come from the helicopter parents who interact constantly with their autistic child and are a huge factor in his peaceful outcome, but will come from parents in denial or who have ceased to cope with their autistic child, who then becomes violent.

Obviously, having this deeply upsetting news about your child puts some people in denial, as such parents themselves have described.

And there is an enormous amount of denial among parents and the liberal press that there is any connection between autism and violence whatsoever.

But there is, and this case shows it.

There may be factors that make this case rare or unique -- co-morbidity with untreated deprssion and OCD; dysfunctional parents; accessibility of guns; violent video games.

But certainly you couldn't say this case had "nothing" to do with autism. When a child has autism, the parents obviously also can become sick and dysfunctional. Here's a completely overwhelmed mother who has ceased listening to reason about a much-needed medication, and is also soothing herself with fairy-tales about "experiments" needed to see if her son can "handle" being home alone -- when he has not come out of his room for three months.

What should have happened is that this mother could call an ambulance and put her son in a psychiataric hospital, without a lot of resistance and obstruction. A person sitting alone in their room playing violent video cames is not someone you leave to their own devices, although we can understand how it happens that a mother in this situation begins to accept this profoundly dysfunctional situation as "the new normal." Society doesn't help her with this, because it either treats such behaviour as a source for comedy videos on Youtube, or says that it's even fine, and that it's wrong to put people in psychiatric hospitals againts their will.

The resistance to finding any link between autism and violence is as profound as the profound autism. And that's understandable, because parents don't want their children hurt, stigmatized, incarcerated against their will, harmed in any way. All understood.

But as with all things in life, there is a balance. All those things are desirable, but not having dozens of school children massacred is also desirable. And the key to preventing this again lies precisely in looking at the mother's situation -- it is one of no help, temporary measures, stigmatizing of her if she attempts psychiatric confinement or even the impossibility of getting good psychiatric confinement, despite her wealth, because of the profession's resistance.

The psychiatric profession resists this not merely because facilities are overcrowded or not very good at handling patients and improving them; they resist because they don't want to lose their licenses in a malpractice lawsuit for wrongful internment. If you don't believe me, ask them. Look at any court records where people tried to get psychiatric confinement for relatives beyond 3 days or 30 days, and see what the result was -- denial even for the 3 days, or refusal to follow up after the 30 days. Then they are back to square one.

We need to destigmatize psychiaric confinement, involve families and society more with it, make the facilities work, and stop exposing the general public to harm. That's all there is to it. Newtown proves this to us. And yet we are still hearing howling -- and will for a long time -- about making ANY association between autism and violence.

The chief reason we don'to see more cases of autism and violence isn't because of the lack of connection, but because hero-parents are bearing the brunt of the management of such patients on themselves, at enormous cost to themselves and the other members of their family. That's all good, if they have the will and resources to accept such a burden and can handle it.

Not everyone is a hero, and Mrs. Lanza is a good example of that fact -- a fact that -- again -- we shouldn't stigmatize, by telling her to become more of a heroine or even blaming her --as the hideous Sarah Kendzior did about another woman who came forward with her story -- we as a society should provide every support, approval, and means. Otherwise the results are deadly.

Here's a typical debate I have with people who bombard me with hate mail -- in this case, in Second Life after I published this lengthy piece raising the issue about the "hero-parents" who may be masking the violence of their children by absorbing it on themselves. Yes, I get it that they have "research" showing there "isn't" violence by and large. Yes, I get it that most autism cases appear to be unconnected whatsoever with violence.

But...some are, and one of the factors is the absence of a hero-parent. I'm not for waiting to see if hero-parents will break or not to deal with this problem -- a situation I've seen in both real life and in Second Life. I'm for being open and honest about the connection that does occur at times, and making it more than fine for such families to seek psychiatric confinement as a solution.

(Saved Tue Oct 29 20:48:08 2013)you have some interesting ideas/generalizations about autism.... some of which are rather hurtful.
[18:57] Jullianna Juliesse: (Saved Tue Oct 29 20:49:59 2013)As someone who works with kids an young adults on the spectrum, just saying......
[19:00] Prokofy Neva: That's great that you work with autistic kids. The public has the right to question some of the defensive myths built up around this subject by vested interests. Journalists and bloggers have a right to question it. When we have mass murders occur again and again with various factors converging, whether psychiatric drugs, video games, or autism spectrum, we have to investigate. It's not about hurting someone. You can go about your business. But you cannot deprive the rest of us from demanding answers and demanding protections. Adam Lanza's mother should have been able to get him into long-term residential treatment without facing so many barriers, end of story.
[19:02] Jullianna Juliesse: I live in CT
[19:02] Jullianna Juliesse: I know the people involved in that
[19:02] Jullianna Juliesse: I find your generalizations hateful
[19:03] Jullianna Juliesse: and I won't keep my opinions to myself.
[19:03] Jullianna Juliesse: autism does not equal hate, or violence.
[19:03] Jullianna Juliesse: ramble on missy.
[19:04] Prokofy Neva: Great. Then you should endorse locking up people who are a danger to themselves and others. Well, it's too bad. They aren't hateful.  They are a call to have less burden on families who turn themselves into burned-out heroes, and a call for society to do more. There's no reason why residential treatment has to be inhumane. But it does, though. Some of the people on the autism spectrum are indeed found to be violent. You'll have to accept this. And clearly one of the key reasons why we aren't seeing that is that parents hide this by absorbing all the difficulty themselves. I have seen it.
[19:04] Prokofy Neva: Well ramble on yourself "missy".
[19:04] Jullianna Juliesse: cut and paste.  yay
[19:04] Prokofy Neva: You don't sound terribly thoughtful or intelligent, but no doubt you do good work.
[19:05] Jullianna Juliesse: You are not a parent, clearly
[19:05] Prokofy Neva: So why don't you concentrate on doing your good work and stop trying to do thought-control and speech-control on other people
[19:05] Prokofy Neva: Um, yes I am, in fact.
[19:05] Jullianna Juliesse: thought control?
[19:05] Prokofy Neva: And I don't accept bullshit -- I counter it.
[19:05] Jullianna Juliesse: goodness
[19:05] Prokofy Neva: And on this question, we're getting  a lot of double talk.
[19:05] Jullianna Juliesse: I work to counter it.
[19:05] Prokofy Neva: No, you work to propagandize your PC thinking which is oppressive
[19:06] Prokofy Neva: and that means people in trouble then feel they can't get help by having their loved ones go into mental institutions
[19:06] Prokofy Neva: that's the problem
[19:06] Prokofy Neva: you help stigmatize in fact
[19:06] Jullianna Juliesse: oh?
[19:06] Prokofy Neva: by making it seem that no one should ever be violent because they can't be violent -- a tautology.
[19:06] Jullianna Juliesse: they are not.
[19:06] Prokofy Neva: When there are cases of violence, and by autistic and by Aspbergers
[19:06] Jullianna Juliesse: check the spelling.
[19:07] Prokofy Neva: It doesn't mean all of them are, but for those percentage who are, in combination with other factors, more restraint is needed
[19:07] Prokofy Neva: Check your snotty attitude
[19:07] Jullianna Juliesse: we all see the world a different way
[19:07] Prokofy Neva: I guess you're on the autistic spectrum yourself. Well, great, that should help your work with kids
[19:07] Jullianna Juliesse: I will fight snottiness
[19:07] Jullianna Juliesse: no, I am not.
[19:07] Prokofy Neva: I'm not required to shackle my own perceptions over your neuralgia
[19:07] Prokofy Neva: well whatever, you're a selfappointed heroine, clearly, and it's a bore
[19:08] Jullianna Juliesse: oh you are special!
[19:08] Prokofy Neva: No, I'm not special, I'm a normal person who calls out the truth on this issue, that's all.
[19:08] Jullianna Juliesse: You have no knowledge
[19:08] Prokofy Neva: Parents like Nancy Lanza bear too much and it's because people like you stigmatize the idea of them admitting their child is violent
[19:08] Jullianna Juliesse: and your ignorance of it is apparent.
[19:08] Jullianna Juliesse: and when I see prejudice, I get Mad.
[19:08] Jullianna Juliesse: MAD
[19:08] Prokofy Neva: No, your unwillingness to see the truth about some percentage of cases is the real problem
[19:09] Prokofy Neva: well get mad, you don't sound terribly bright
[19:09] Jullianna Juliesse: there are people without autism who are messed up
[19:09] Jullianna Juliesse: maybe I am not terribly bright
[19:09] Prokofy Neva: But Adam Lanza was on the specturm, he became violent, and should have had earlier intervention
[19:09] Prokofy Neva: your refusal to concede that is troublesome
[19:09] Jullianna Juliesse: get over Adam Lanza.
[19:09] Prokofy Neva: because it certainly doesn't harm the majority of non-violent autistic cases to admit that some are violent
[19:10] Jullianna Juliesse: there are others who have donw far worse.
[19:10] Prokofy Neva: No, I won't, because he massacred dozens of children
[19:10] Jullianna Juliesse: yes, and my priest buried them
[19:10] Prokofy Neva: Um, I think that's the largest number of children killed in America in one incident, or at least one of the largest
[19:10] Jullianna Juliesse: do not blame autism
[19:10] Prokofy Neva: so now I know that you ARE sectarian on this question and are trying to silence truthful discussion
[19:10] Prokofy Neva: but he was on the spectrum, that was amply documented
[19:11] Prokofy Neva: it's great that your priest helped the families. That doesn't make you an expert or the only legitimate voice on this subject
[19:11] Jullianna Juliesse: you are singling out all people with autism
[19:11] Jullianna Juliesse: fot the act of one
[19:11] Jullianna Juliesse: *for
[19:11] Jullianna Juliesse: which I find offensive
[19:11] Prokofy Neva: No. I'm saying that this small minority of people who are violent need extra special treatment
[19:11] Jullianna Juliesse: that is all.
[19:12] Prokofy Neva: that doesn't mean all of them have to be arrested or forcibly treated. They aren't anyway. Getting treatment is a hugely difficult job.
[19:12] Jullianna Juliesse: you are crazy.
[19:12] Prokofy Neva: I'm for those cases where families can't cope with difficult and even violent children that they can get help and get residential treatment
[19:12] Jullianna Juliesse: Autism is a neurological condition
[19:12] Prokofy Neva: without the stigma that it "can't be" because "it can't be"
[19:12] Prokofy Neva: So?
[19:12] Prokofy Neva: so what?
[19:12] Prokofy Neva: that doesn't change that it can be a factor for violence
[19:12] Jullianna Juliesse: a sensory processing thing
[19:13] Jullianna Juliesse: no speaking with you.
[19:13] Jullianna Juliesse: Good night@
[19:13] Prokofy Neva: It doesn't matter the etiology.
[19:14] Jullianna Juliesse: %^&^%^%^%^%^%^
[19:14] Prokofy Neva: What matters is that parents get help without judgement.
[19:14] Prokofy Neva: You're one of the judgers.
[19:14] Jullianna Juliesse: You do not know me
[19:15] Jullianna Juliesse: Kindly do not pass judgment on those are different than you
[19:15] Prokofy Neva: But that's what you're doing, trying to round me up and suppress my speech and override me
[19:15] Jullianna Juliesse: Come spend a day with me and me kids
[19:15] Prokofy Neva: I won't be changing my mind or my blogging
[19:15] Jullianna Juliesse: fine
[19:16] Prokofy Neva: I don't need to do that. I have my own kids to take care of and my own life. I have my opinion, that is valuable, and I will stick to it.
[19:16] Prokofy Neva: I'm sure you do important work, don't try to be hegemonic about it
[19:16] Jullianna Juliesse: well done
[19:16] Prokofy Neva: It's not necessary for everyone in the world to believe your sectarian beliefs about your children in order to help them
[19:16] Jullianna Juliesse: big word, yay
[19:16] Prokofy Neva: No one is out to "get" your autistic children
[19:16] Jullianna Juliesse: back the fuck off my friends, ok?
[19:16] Prokofy Neva: But they sure as hell will not let any small percentage of violent autistic children with other factors like gun access kill the rest of our children. No thanks.
[19:17] Prokofy Neva: Back the fuck off me.
[19:17] Prokofy Neva: The end.
[19:17] Prokofy Neva: You are not interesting to talk to
[19:17] Jullianna Juliesse: people with autism are not violent
[19:17] Prokofy Neva: Hilarious for YOU to tell me to back the fuck off, when you crossed the street to come in here and tell me your beliefs forcibly
[19:17] Prokofy Neva: I didn't seek you out
[19:17] Jullianna Juliesse: your are ill-informed, dearest.
[19:17] Prokofy Neva: but some of them are
[19:17] Prokofy Neva: that has been established
[19:17] Prokofy Neva: and the questions have to be asked again and again
[19:17] Prokofy Neva: precisely becuase of this stubborn omerta you have built up around the subject
[19:18] Jullianna Juliesse: I write the grants, have the research.
[19:18] Jullianna Juliesse: what do you do?
[19:18] Jullianna Juliesse: oh wait, nothing!
[19:18] Jullianna Juliesse: mute!
[19:18] Prokofy Neva: So what? I have researched too, I've documented it on my blog, and I stand by it.
[19:18] Prokofy Neva: I will continue to raise the issue.
[19:18] Jullianna Juliesse: yay.

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Anil Dash Silences Nick Bilton at the New York Times in Bullying Article

Wow, this is terrible, the famous Nick Bilton of the New York Times who writes about gadgets had an article up about online bullying -- it was mainly about poor Justine Sacco -- and he mentiond Anil Dash in it and Dash got the mention removed.

Awful, awful.

Shame on the Times for that.

But it's likely to go down the rat hole and no one will ever do anything about it.

Fortunately, this has been documented by the imperturbable Loren Feldman, who is not scared by these people's threats and has always maintained his independence.

Anil has tweets up which Loren Feldman reproduces, expressing outrage that  Bilton wrote about his "anger" without first clearing it with him (!), and he ended up getting himself removed from the column.

Loren wrote a comment about this on the Bilton alticle but it didn't show up. I did, too, linking to Loren's blog, and I doubt it will clear the NYT censors, either, because they hate comments that talk about flaws in reporting itself or start something with the journalist himself.

So that's when you write to the Ombudsman, and I will be doing that, even though I know in advance she will not do a thing about it.

There are some people in Silicon Valley or Alley -- Anil Dash is in the Alley -- who are influential and powerful enough that they just get rid of the criticism about them. Paul Carr is one, as we saw. He could cover for Mark Ames of the old The Exile, who bragged about having sex with a 15-year-old girl in Russia -- bragging in his book that was never described as "fiction" -- and claim that Mark Ames is just telling tall tales. Except Mark Ames himself doesn't claim this, because if he did, then everyone would find his supposed gonzo journalism a lot less gonzo. Even as fiction, it's awful, and the sort of thing that if it were somebody else, Paul Carr and Anil Dash would be going crazy, as would Jillian York. But since it's not, and it's one of their own, they are silent. Disgusting.

One thing that always happens in these cases is that if you keep criticizing, they end up accusing you of being sexist or racist. I've had this slur slung at me from both Carr and Dash. First Dash let me know that he "intervened" to make sure my blog wasn't removed when he was at this blogging platform Typepad (!) -- to let me know I was "on sufferance". Ugh.

Then, I was given a "test" -- Dash sent me a link to a forum taking him down in the most racist and outrageous fashion. I'm supposed to spend my days condemning that, but I can never speak about "black crime" in our neighbourhood --- we live a few blocks from each other -- he in a lot nicer place than I do -- because, see, I would never speak of "white crime" (so he thinks) and therefore I can't speak about something that even Obama himself, in his speech, discusses, and in critical terms.

Indeed, I'm going to follow up on this soon in a blog post about anti-Indian sentiment that I think is growing in this country as Indians assume more public and powerful positions. And I'm also going to talk about how some of them have really bad ideologies and really bad behaviour and we have to be able to call that out without being charged with "racism".

So Paul Carr picked up the Wikipedia vandalism and the nonsense about my remarks concerning Romney's digital people not having their heart in the job because they were Democrats voting for Obama (um, no, I didn't claim black people put bugs in his software to make him lose, derp) -- and Carr, too, reached for this discreditor of claiming I am "racist".

This is how these people are, and the only thing you can do is keep calling them out, keep documenting, keep trying to name and shame.

There's a good comment on Loren's site, too, showing the sub-tweets that Dash does (his favourite thing to do is put a DM in my Twitter, then unfollow me so I can't answer him).

 

Why I Don't Play #FF Follow Friday, And Never Have and Won't Until the Follow Ceiling is Raised

I was an early adapter on Twitter, and joined on my @Prokofy account in February 2007. So I have been around for a long time, watching as Twitter evolved and changed. And one of the things that it put in early on -- the follow ceiling of 2,000 -- is something I've protested from day one and continue to protest because it has never changed.

The chief way I protest is by informing everyone on Follow Friday why I won't play the Follow Friday game with them, even if they are great people.

I suspect that the algorithms that determine the rate at which I can follow people -- in my case, only one per 3-4 days or less! -- is affected by people following and unfollowing me -- which is a factor cause by a) spammers trying to collect followers by that method and b) hecklers trying to silence speech who follow but then get banned.

I don't think it's fair that the algorithm of whom I can follow is affected by such factors, so I refuse to play.

Let me explain further.

Take a look at this week's list of 23 people who unfollowed me, below.

Wow, 23 people, that's a lot, right?

Well, take a closer look.

Out of these 23 people, 7 of them were banned or discontinued Twitter. Let's assume they were banned, because most people who start Twitter don't leave it within a week or so or don't bother to figure out how to delete their accounts. I don't know who they are, but likely they're the latest day-old alts of certain stalkers and harassers of me personally, or people who are constantly looking for people whose politics they hate to heckle and try to drive them into silence -- or even accounts run by agents of authoritarian governments like Russia who try to harass people online. So they're gone -- but not all of them.

So again, take a look at the rest of these people who "unfollowd me". Who are they? Why are they following me? I don't know a single one of them, and I was only able to follow one of them back because of the "follow ceiling" of 2,000 (stay with me, and I will explain more on that).

So out of this big list of 23 -- a lot for somebody like me in the under-2000 range of followers -- at least 5 or 6 or more are merely commercial accounts trying to get more followers by just randomly following people on the basis of key word searches and hoping they get follow backs. They may even use illegal scripts to do this. Since I tweeted something about bitcoins, I got these people with financial information, or investment advice, or insurance, or whatever it is they hawk for a living.

Then look at some of the others -- 3 or 4 of them are outright hecklers, people who began to heckle me for my views, harass me, and followed me in order to do so -- these are various geeks with odd slogans on their profile. I don't block people as a rule unless they get really vicious and incite violence or fill up my connect feed so I can't see anybody else.

The rest are random people, some in my field, some not, some with 100 followers, who didn't like my feed after finding it on search, and unfollowed me.  A student,  a professor, a non-profit researcher -- whatever.

Out of all these people, none of them are a loss. None of them are people I followed, or even know, or heard of, or respect, or find interesting. Well, maybe one or two, but if they don't like my feed, that's their call. Unfortunately, I can't follow all of them, as I'm limited to at most one or two a week in my quota of new followees.

And yet this number -- 23 -- enters a mysterious algorithm in the Twitter devs' lair, and becomes a number that prevents me from breaking the 2,000 ceiling.

The 2,000 ceiling, in case you never hit it, is the number of people you can follow automatically, at will, before you hit a message that you can't add any more. Then, until more people follow you, you can't follow others. THAT number varies from person to person, and is affected by...something. We don't know. Some coded algorithm. THAT number for me has hovered around the 1700 mark for ages, constantly churning.

Each week, I'll have 20-30-40 of such people who follow me -- many of them commercial or SEO gurus or hecklers or outright griefers who get banned (and I'm usually not even the one to report them, others do).  So let's say half or two thirds of my new followers are junk, and a third are actually real people of interest in my field. I might follow some people back -- but I can't, stuck at the ceiling. They often unfollow me when I don't follow them back, increasing the vicious circle of churn.

So because of this "churn" and this "non-following," I'm punished. I can't get out of the 2000 ghetto. And likely neither can you. I don't know HOW or WHAT this algorithm is exactly, but THAT something like the elements I'm speculating about exist is just common sense.

SOMETHING determines the rate at which you can break out of this artificial constraint. I have two accounts (the other is Prokofy) and they have different algorithms and one can follow more people faster -- and who knows why.  Maybe because the account isn't as active. Maybe because the accounts follow me tend to be in the SL subject matter and stay put. Or maybe because I follow back at some faster pace. WHO KNOWS. IT'S A SECRET.

Like all social media companies, Twitter keeps this secret sauce a secret. If they didn't, more people would game it.

Yet it's ridiculous. It means that when real people I'm interested in follow me -- let's say 10 percent out of the 20 or 30 each week -- *I can't follow them back*. Because my "rate" is set at something like one more addition every 3 or 4 days (it's not so regular as to be able to pin it down). I constantly get the message I can't follow more people. I might fix this by unfollowing people. But the number I unfollow does NOT equal the number I can now follow anew (one of the most unfair aspects of this algorithm). In fact, who knows if my rapid unfollowing is also dinging my algorithm in some fashion. Whatever it is, sacrificing, say, 10 dearly-beloved followed people doesn't get me 10 new free slots or even 5. Who the hell knows, it changes.

And that's why I don't play #FF. I can't. But I also won't. I won't, as long as this ridiculously unfair situation prevails where there are no rules, and only mysterious algorithms governing my social life online.

Perhaps that magic algorithm is somehow connected to how many people retweet me or "favourite" my tweets? well, another service tells me I got 90 retweets this week, let's say. Maybe it was 45 retweets the week before and 180 next week. But that doesn't seem to up my ability to follow new people.

Twitter claims that it "has" to artificially constrain the number of people you follow because otherwise it would have server overload. Nonsense. If Twitter doesn't have heavy-duty high-capacity high-speed servers that can handle the billions of transactions it needs to handle, it should get out of the social media business. Yes, we've all seen the Fail Whale on Twitter. But come on, most people don't tweet -- the usage rate of account in fact follows the usual power curves of all social media of 10% of the accounts providing the content of the rest of the 90%. Facebook limits your friends, too, but the number is 5,000, and think of what a heavier load the apps and pictures and games are on those accounts.  Given that most people like me at most tweet 10-20 tweets per day, there is no reason in hell to prevent us from following back normal, real people who follow us. We will not break the damn servers.

And please, let's not hear talk about how you can't possibly meaningfully follow more than 2000 people, given various other "laws" that say that only about 10 or 30 percent of those accounts wil be active and tweeting anyway, giving you the "Moore's Law" of 150 people, beyond which you can't remember or absorb things. Baloney. Given time differences, rates of tweets, events, etc. you can easily handle more. And obviously people do. No one complains if they have 5000 followers or 10,000 followers and then are free to go follow thousands more themselves, and do.

To be sure, most people have WAY more followers than people they follow. That's because either they are vain celebrities or scared of strangers or just people who fear they will "miss something". Twitter is only interesting when you follow lots of people AND have conversations. Otherwise it's damn dull.

Of course they won't miss anything, because it doesn't matter. Have you ever looked at how much news repeats on Twitter?  Major news events get repeated and retweeted thousands of times; niche events get repeated dozens or hundreds of times. You will not miss anything. Key word search if you think you did; use the term "breaking".

In fact, what's the point of someone retweeting something when their hundreds of followers read the exact same news services? Isn't that stupid? Well, it's a behaviour that developed on Twitter precisely beause of its stream nature, to ensure that nothing does get drowned out but also so that culled or "curated" streams become the way people can acquire crediblity. If someone's overall stream regularly produces for you, you follow them, not just because of who they are, but because their stream is a good news stream.

Back in the early days, you had what was called "the fire hose" -- everyone's tweets from around the world. This was at first really fun to watch, as they came really fast and you got this world picture that was really cool. But then they came too fast for the human eye to see them (there's a rule there, too, is it 360 frames a minute or something?). And Twitter realized "the fire hose" was something they could sell to companies to mine -- and they do. Now you can no longer see it. You can keyword search, or see your own feed.

So why does the follow ceiling fixed at 2,000, even though Twitter stopped the fire hose and allows millions more to join constantly, straining their servers? No reason. It just is. It could be 3,000 or 5,000 and most people wouldn't take advantage of it. Except those SEO gurus and commercial accounts would, and that would mean an automatic strain, sure. That could be dealt with -- Twitter chooses not to.

Google+ tried to fight the commercialization of social media by at first banning business accounts. All those SEO gurus and consultants in geek land howled and raged and made fake individual accounts that were really businesses, and made such a fuss that finally Google relented. It might be that you have to tag your account as business or something, and maybe that helps them manage the algorithms. Of course they could charge, but that would be gamed. Social media is always gamed and the devs never stay ahead of it.

For awhile, whenever I got one of these SEO or consultant or business types just trying to get a follow back, I would block them or report them for spam, thinking that might help my algorithm. Lately, I don't bother. It doesn't seem to make a difference. If I get an outright spammer or malware linker or porn linker, of course I'll report them. But somebody selling insurance or "help with your start-up" is too pathetic to block.

Some of the people you see with gadzillion followers got them dishonestly, with scripts. That is, at first, scripts were allowed, and gurus like Scoble added followers constantly in real time as they were followed, something most people can't do organically unless they sit all day 24/7 on Twitter. Twitter then banned scripts, although some people still use them. There are servers that will "get you" followers and of course they get them illegitimately. Some people say that you should follow back all the SEO nerds and porn stars and then you will break the ceiling. But why? Why fill up your list with junk?

Lists should be culled and be quality. I want my list to be one that other people can copy if they want a good list, just the way I'll copy or "mine" their list for interesting people, too.

How could Twitter fix this? Well, perhaps they could accept that 20 or 30 people following you should be considered as "stable" and enable you to follow back exactly that many. You should be able to follow back anyone who follows you -- period. Perhaps Twitter can put a limit on this, but one every three days shouldn't be that limit; 100 a day would be more reasonable. Obviously, you won't follow back the spammers, the porn stars, the SEO gurus. They will fall away and unfollow you. Twitter can detect the behaviour of such accounts constantly going around following people who never follow back, and can deter *them* -- not the normal people who follow out of organic and genuine interest.

Oh, there's no way to tell that, you say? Oh, of course there is. If my average is 20-40 followers a week, and I follow 10-15 of them back because they are authentic and not spammers, then that should be my number -- again, not one every three or four days, which ensures that you simply forget to follow anyone back, and forget that you even have spaces to use now -- and then can't remember who to follow back who followed you -- then they might unfollow you.

Here's my list for the week. Get the Qwitter app where you sign in with Twitter and it will then deliver this news to your email box every week.

You have 23 fewer followers

16

7

Mark as

Dr.Larisa Varenikova @DrVarenikova Unfollow
Principal Executive Search Consultant http://t.co/dQ6lKKo9Ln
16,269 Followers, see Twitter Counter for more info and stats

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Mark as

Tom Arden @TomArdenMusic
Dj/Producer - Contact: [email protected]
13,867 Followers, see Twitter Counter for more info and stats

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Mark as

Grumpy Cat @grumpycatsmind
Hate you, hate Twitter. I had fun once. It was horrible. This isn't the Tard and you're not worth it. [Parody Account]
12,965 Followers, see Twitter Counter for more info and stats

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Mark as

Banker's Umbrella @BankersUmbrella
The world's most popular private banking and wealth management blog. No-nonsense (maybe a little) and not so boring.
11,148 Followers, see Twitter Counter for more info and stats

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Mark as

ᙇᓐ M. Edward Borasky @znmeb
Buck Borasky, Frontier Programmer - Hacking the Code of the West. Thought Follower, Real-Time Computational Journalist and Curmudgeon-in-Residence
10,768 Followers, see Twitter Counter for more info and stats

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Mark as

Ramon Williamson @ramonwilliamson
daily focus ❧ share what you know and love online to create income from anywhere ❧ new media marketing entrepreneur, mentor, author, speaker ❧ #health #travel
9,079 Followers, see Twitter Counter for more info and stats

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Mark as

Mal Harris @BigMeanInternet
@newinquiry | ain't a real writer | RT'd by Justin 4/1/2013
4,817 Followers, see Twitter Counter for more info and stats

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Mark as

Yes, We Scan ⊕ @BoldFreshJew
Individualist. ☩ Pundi†. ☩ Privacy Advocate. ☩ Metal Head. ☩ Old Soul. ☩ Eminem. ☩ Security. ☩ Usenet. ☩ Whistleblowers. ☩ Truth. pɹɐoqʎǝʞ ʇɐ dǝǝlsɐ™
4,557 Followers, see Twitter Counter for more info and stats

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Mark as

Lead From Behind @occbaystreet
Born, Sept. 18, 2011. Died, somewhere along the way. But before we died ...
3,705 Followers, see Twitter Counter for more info and stats

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Mark as

Ryan Shapiro @_rshapiro
PhD candidate in MIT's Dept. of Science, Technology, & Society: animals, civil liberties, national security, & freedom of information.
1,274 Followers, see Twitter Counter for more info and stats

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Mark as

Rahul Varshney @rahulvarshney
Public Insurance Adjuster @TX1810786 #Progressive #Libertarian #Union #MineCraft #EZDoesIt #OpenSourceMoney Make ur own! http://t.co/2PVKBpPOpM #CtrlC #CtrlV
826 Followers, see Twitter Counter for more info and stats

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Mark as

CISTran Finance @CISTRANFinance
Original news content on the growing business and banking world within the Commonwealth of Independent States that is often overlooked by the Western media
233 Followers, see Twitter Counter for more info and stats

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Mark as

liberalfish @liberalfish
Free thinker, particular focus on Lebanization of the MENA region, world transition, effects of ideology on Western political, social and economic policy
146 Followers, see Twitter Counter for more info and stats

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Mark as

Allan Caetano @afc1969
A mind is a wonderful thing to lose. Liberty-oriented politics, freedom-oriented computing. Random silliness too.
118 Followers, see Twitter Counter for more info and stats

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Mark as

Alexander Leeding @AlexLeeding
A regular 21st century Gogol.
61 Followers, see Twitter Counter for more info and stats

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Mark as

hambonesparklewell @sparklewell
Moth to flame, eyes open, taking notes.
21 Followers, see Twitter Counter for more info and stats

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7 users stopped with Twitter or were suspended by Twitter and are not shown on this list.

Who Can Be Trusted on NSA and Encryption?

Bruce Schneier, now separated from BT, asks "who can we trust"? regarding the NSA stuff.

And the answer is: not him.

Because he is not trustworthy in terms of the kind of free society you would want to live in.

The other day I was arguing with someone on Twitter with a name like @drunkeconomist about the problem of binary thinking, literalism, the geek culture, the code-as-law problem which I have outlined here in an essay on CP Snow's Two Cultures.

I really urge you to read it because I spent a long time writing and rewriting it and trying unsuccessfully to place it last year during the anti-SOPA mania.

Basically, there are three things wrong with how geeks approach governance:

o they don't understand how a bill becomes a law and don't believe in the process

o they don't understand how cases get prosecuted and how evidence has to be presented and the differet parts of the judicial system operate in checks and balances;

o they don't get how judicial review works to determine constitutionality.

And all of those things are predicated on the basic geek stinkin' thinking' that revolves around these core problems:

o if there is even one percent of a factor in negating a premise of 99 percent, then the factor is invalid; 60% won't do and even 94% won't do.

o law executes like a guillotine, never with any adjustments

o civil law -- spelling out law in detail to explain what is allowed -- versus common law -- adjudicating based on principles and identifying only what is not allowed (to give a very, very rough-and-ready definition) is the choice for geeks as closer to code-as-law. Therefore unless every single edge-case, hypothetical, problem is identified, spelled out, and remedied, nothing can stand.

There's lots more, but that sums up a lot of it.

Accordingly, you get these really, really brittle egomaniacs and perfectionist nerds like Snowden. They go into a rage-fit if they can't get their way on some bug find, and the devs won't fix it for them. They can't work through due process, or the "bill-becomes-a-law" method of principles, debates, adaptation, compromise, etc.

So I think that's why they do these enormous hacks -- to temper-tantrum and get their way. They don't understand or see how they could use the regular levers of organic society to advance a premise through negotiation, so they overwhelm with hacks to coerce their way.

That's why I think they are awful, dangerous, destructive, and must be stopped.

I noted to that @drunkeneconomist that someday, the National Guard will be sent in to pry the geeks away from their keyboards because they won't listen to common sense. But that isn't my idea, it's Ed Castronova's idea, and he isn't viewed as anyone on the loony fringes, he's a mainstream economist by day and a game economist by night. His premise was merely that if enough people escaped to virtual worlds, and wouldn't partake of normal society anymore and fulfill their obligations and duties, that the government might intervene. This was by way of a very far-out hypothetical, because usually before "the state" intervenes with the National Guard, more mundane if tragic things happen -- couples allow their babies to die while they play games; people die of heart attacks even at the age of 15 from playing games for days on end; people murder a spouse because they took away their games; etc. etc.

Most people don't immerse in virtual worlds all day -- and that could be Facebook or Twitter as much as Second Life -- because they have to "go to the bathroom" or "go to work" or "go meet their boyfriend" or "make dinner". You know how it is!

And that keeps the National Guard at bay! But seriously, there is a class of extremists -- and Greenwald, Snowden and the rest are part of it -- who have decided that no normal way works, and their way or the highway works. Because it does. Then they can claim that their destructive coerciveness "started a national conversation" or "brought about much-needed reforms".

Schneier writes that the IETF is blocking the NSA co-chair. See, it started with kicking the NSA out of Defcon, and here we all are - all on the basis of a claim (no yet proven in my view) that the NSA undermines encryption standards to enable back doors for surveillance.

So, we went from having DARPA and such and the US government controlling the Internet; then people bitching about this and the creation of non-governmental bodies like IETF and ICANN which at least cooperated with the government; and now those entities going rogue and locking out NSA/government completely. So I urge you to consider what it would be like having these folks as your overlords.

Schneier's claim that trust is shattered is overblown. The cloud business, the whole Big IT business, the whole spy business, they've all pretty much continued on their way. Yes, there was that one story that claimed that Cisco took a beating in the Chinese market over the NSA and these estimates of the losses in cloud-computing in the EU due to the NSA mania. But this isn't proven in really hard reporting, it's speculation.

That bullshit of Schneier's -- and all of that gang -- that "voters need to know what is done in their name" truly grates. We know already. We're not stupid. What's worse is that people like Snowden believe they can arrogate the name of the people by their hostile and destructive actions based on their own sectarian notions.

 

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Why Isn't the 'Go Away Cameron' Chrome Extension a Violation of Google Third-Party Policy?

The UK created some kind of pornography filter on the Internet.

Already the coypleftist gang at TechDirt are bragging that someone has already gotten around this with a Chrome Extension.

I noted to the open-source cultist and anti-copyright crusader Glyn Moody on Twitter that naturally Google would be for getting around some porn filter because they need more ad clicks. Those XXX sites are filled with pop-ups and clickables.

Glyn countered that it isn't Google who made this, but just some geek, anyone can write code for the open-source Chrome and he implies Google has no say over ths.

Nonsense. Like Linden Lab (who copied the idea from them eventually), Google has a third-party policy, and rules for engineers who write code for their browser. Of course they don't just let any old thing into their branded corporate browser.

And among the rules are this:

Content Policies

Our content policies apply to your Product's content, including any ads it shows to users and any user-generated content it hosts or links to. Further, they apply to any content from your developer account that is publicly displayed in Chrome Web Store, including your developer name and the landing page of your listed developer website. Products that include content that may not be suitable for all ages should be marked "Mature" on the Developer Dashboard.

Sexually Explicit Material:
    We don't allow content that contains nudity, graphic sex acts, or sexually explicit material. We also don't allow content that drives traffic to commercial pornography sites. Google has a zero-tolerance policy against child pornography. If we become aware of content with child pornography, we will report it to the appropriate authorities and delete the Google Accounts of those involved with the distribution.

That sure sounds to me like an extension that gets around a governent filter to get at porn, and helps drive traffic to porn, would be contrary to that policy.

And it's not without its new set of problems, as someone named Oh Please helpfully explains:

This story is truly funny. Yes, using a proxy outside of the UK will circumvent things, but it also opens you up for all sorts of other issues, such as data harvesting at the proxy, man in the middle attacks, and so on.

The cure is worse than the cause, which is the point.

For those using Tor, just remember, at some point, that "technology" will be looked at and defeated as well. The traffic patterns of someone allowing a Tor portal is different from normal web traffic, and those portals could end up getting cut off or have inbound connections limited so as to make them useless. It flies under the radar right now because it's not as big a deal as torrent traffic, but increased usage via things like the "pirate browser" will likely expose it and make it a huge target for authorities and ISPs.

My guess is that, in the next 24 months, you will see many countries adopt laws that create direct liability for users and companies who provide proxies or allow their computers to be used as Tor style outlets.

Now wouldn't that be fascinating!

A commenter said that only some "very twisted" interpretation of Google's third-party extension rules would yield a judgement that this extension violates them. I think it's only a "very twisted" interpretation of the rules that enables a judgement that it does *not* violate them, but I take the point, that geeks will edgecase this to death.

I don't think trying to block porn on the Internet is a "fool's errand," any more than blocking pirates. You don't need perfection. Even 60% will do. It's okay to try to block some of the worst so that people don't have it shoved in their faces. It doesn't have a chilling effect on political or other speech. Indeed, what actually has a chilling effect on speech is the endless capacity of radicals to obstruct the legitimate pursuit of criminality.

The standards for what is illegal porn in the UK may be higher than in the US, I don't know.  But no geek in any of the articles below or anywhere else has been able to explain to me why Google, in its wisdom, can have language barring content like this: "We don't allow content that contains nudity, graphic sex acts, or sexually explicit material. We also don't allow content that drives traffic to commercial pornography sites" and yet if Cameron adopts the same language for the state, that's wrong.

Yeah, I get the difference between a browser accessing all kinds of content, and what you might have in terms of content showing on that browser interface, and the content itself, which is a separate thing. But so what? Let me say it again: Google think it has to ban explicit sexual material from its content. So why can't the people of England?

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Bruce Schneier Will Have to Go Somewhere Else to Fight the Man

(L-R) Bruce Schneier, Mark Cuban, Cory Doctorow, the copyleftists and crypto kids. Photo by eschipul, 2007.

Bruce Schneier has been let go of BT (British Telecom) and I can only say: good!

My saying this is "good" isn't about someone losing his livelihood -- because with all his lectures, books, consulting and past lucrative appoinments he isn't hurting for cash, and Pierre Omidyar will probably snatch him up for his new game-world Newco. That's because nowadays, for the media ervolution, geeks and cryptologists are actually more important than old-fashioned journalists for publication managers and owners whose main content consists of stolen classified documents.

No, my saying "good" is because this helps isolate Schneier further on the radical left rather than continuing the fiction that he is somehow some mainstream corporate guru on security, part of some weird but accepted establishment.

He's not. He's never been about corporate security, really. So many of his blogs in fact are just the opposite, about casual tolerance of hackers. In fact, like a lot of things in our day (Snowden), he's about encryption, i.e. the struggle for power.

Schneier just hasn't been able to stop himself from going even more rogue since Snowden, and joined Electronic Frontier Foundation to openly wage warfare on copyright and national security in the name of absolute encryption privileges for his anarchist collective to do whatever they like.

Schneier is described as a "futurologist" at BT, a word that most of Silicon Valley, briefly enamored with this term earlier in this century, seem to have dropped. Mainly, I see him very much a figure of the past -- the technocommunism, the collectivism, the undermining of the liberal state in a civil society, the utopianism, and so on. These are all throwbacks, not cutting edge. But the battle is for real -- lately, the technocommunists and technolibertarans are battling each other even more than us.

As I explained, when I directly challenged Schneier in person at his public lecture afterwards about the implications of absolute encryption, he dismissed the concern about absolute encryption and said "there will always be bad guys" and couldn't seem to explain how law enforcement would chase them if there were absolute encryption -- which he advocated.

Naturally the geek squad is discussing this dismissal assuming with paranoid bravado that it's about his radical blogs on the NSA and GQHC as if "fighting the Man" is the preferred activity. BT denies this, but of course that *is* what it's about -- his embrace of the radical, even loony edge of the open source  anarchist coder movement. He himself has a sneaky veneer of pretense that it isn't about this. 

Yet given that BT is accused of putting in the back doors (see the story below), it's no surprise they've parted ways. BTW, I don't believe he or Greenwald supplied adequate proof of this alleged undermining of encryption or of insertion of back doors.

His fanboyz gush and claim that The Man was always out to get him, and that's why you gotta Fight the Man.

Mkay. Get him!

 

 

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