He dissects it a bit and then some in the comments who understand encryption do even more. It seems that Glenn, in his frenzy, mixed up characters and bits -- speaking up 4,000 characters when he met 4096 bits.
Greenwald really does seem to be on automatic, like a robot, like a brainwashed cult member. He just keeps spouting and insulting as if this passes for great insight.
He think the idea that China and Russia copied anything Snowden was carrying, or pried anything out of him through interrogation, is ridiculous and unproven.
But the reality is that it has been more than three months since we've heard from Snowden -- he has not appeared and spoken in public all this time, and only communicate a few wooden statements that could have been written by anybody, for various shows like a ceremony of a whistleblower's award in Germany. It is highly creepy.
Anyone who has studied and/or lived in Russia or China understand that OF COURSE they have his computers or have compromised him in some way, which is why we have not heard from him.
Greenwald tweeted obnoxiously that journalists were fools if they kept repeating that of course China and Russia had his files -- and fortunately someone called him out by saying exactly the opposite -- that if HE keeps repeating it enough he thinks WE will believe it.
Here's what I wonder about this. Glenn just got done reporting the other day that supposedly, the NSA have spoiled the entire encryption industry because they have back doors in everything, they have deliberately weakened standards, and they can get in anywhere. So we're told (but I don't buy this and have more to say in the next post on that).
And if the NSA has undermined everything and yet has been hacked so easily by a contractor (which mean a Russian mole programmer could have done the same thing) then...that means the Russians have it too.
But wait, now Glenn is telling us that it is IMPOSSIBLE to hack the encrypted files on thumb drives that his husband had, and that the UK intelligence said they only got 75 documents out of the batch.
He completely denies that a password on a paper was found among the materials his husband had.
Of course, the British could be throwing up smoke in our eyes to disguise what they have or don't have, but somehow, I don't buy what Greenwald is saying here. And we don't know they kept to only 75, more may have been cracked.
And again -- wait a minute, I thought the NSA could crack everything. So which is it?
Samsung isn't going for that silly "interactive" story-telling stuff. In their own way, they respect the content-making companies that produce the content that essentially sell with their gadget. You're not going to buy all the content you peruse on their tablet, although they might encourage more sales of books and movies in particular just because you'll find them and pay for them more easily on a tablet.
Crowdsourcing? Watch the ad man in this meta-commercial about making an ad snore and fall asleep for a moment.
Then the famous actor (I didn't recognize him because I don't have a TV) says:
"Put on the Internet that you want people to send you ideas, then you don't have to think of any!"
Bingo!
This ad cost $15.2 million to put on the air, says Yahoo, which was happy to have this ad today because it helped people like me click on their news story, and then I might click on the ad for Ashford University.
Wait, how can I not recognize these actors? I truly don't know who they are. Who are they? I don't have a TV and I hardly ever go to movies. So let me in on the secret.
And that's just it, how are advertisers going to reach people like me if we don't have TVs any more but just have the Internet? I may be an extreme case, but who really watches TV, let alone ads when they don't have to?
The bargain used to be that we bought TV sets, then we got all the programming we could receive on it for free. Free content! Really, TV was the first de-commodifier of content, except, you didn't have any way to copy it at first. But it did put that content out for free, conditioning a generation!
The social contract was, you would watch the shows, in between they would have 10 minutes or however long of ads for detergent or cigarettes or cereal, and you would then go out and buy those things!
So Palmolive, the detergent, you would buy because Madge, the beautician, would do your nails and tell you, "You're s0aking in it!" when she gave you the news that was was softening your hands was in fact a detergent. You wouldn't get those dry, wrinkly hands after using Palmolive!
Today, I wonder where the detergent ads are. They aren't on the Internet. If I go on my Yahoo email, there are only ads for moms going back to school because of Obama paying for something, one weird trick that will get rid of belly fat, and car insurance featuring dogs lapping their tongues out the window or strange old ladies bobbing up and down. Where are the beautiful things that we used to see on TV?
If I go to read the New York Times or Gawker or TechCrunch, I never see those household products. On the New York Times, there might be a Tiffany ad, an ad for Adelphi University, or maybe a disruptive car or jewelry ad. What happened to the cereals?
Maybe that's why when I go to the store now with K.D. Lang's "The Consequences of Falling" droning on the tape every time I go, the products seem like strangers. Even scary strangers, as their boxes grow smaller and their prices go higher. I sometimes come in and find something completely strange. Oreos? With double stuffing? Or mint? What are they thinking?!
These products must only be advertised on TV. Why aren't they advertised on the Internet? If there were a detergent ad on TechCrunch instead of Seagate servers, wouldn't I click more? A funny "Mikey Likes It" ad on the New York Times for cereal, wouldn't I click? I'm not going to click for Tiffany.
A friend of mine who knows the ad business says that the full-page ads on the New York Times, the ones that cost $40,000-$80,000 or more per day still sell more than the Internet ads where the cost is less, and still make up a lot of revenue, although obviously dwindling. But of course, the Times went to the pay well and still have more and more disruptive and moving and frantic Internet ad interface because they have to sell those Internet ads, too, even if they make less money. I have to chuckle that often when I go to the Times now, of all things, I see an add for Linden Lab's new product, Patterns, which is sort of an Etch-a-Sketch for our time. Maybe after one hundred displays of that, I will click and buy.
"How does it know?" you wonder, that it should pitch a virtual world company's game to me. I don't think it's because it knows I was interviewed a few times by the Times about Second Life in its hey-day. I think it's because somewhere on some news site or Facebook or somewhere, all my marketing data got drilled and scooped and saved somewhere with cookies. This doesn't bother me, really. And so now "it knows" that it should pitch me that particular deck of ads. Just like Yahoo keeps desperately trying to pitch me ads for moms to go back to school (I'm a mom) or pictures of old ladies buying insurance (I'm old, but they don't realize I don't have a car) or belly fat (I'm fat, but they may not know that either, they're just hoping the demographic is a likely prospect).
Honestly wonder, however, where the cereals, the detergents, the soaps that will keep my hands magically soft have gotten to. Will they ever come back? Maybe someone can explain this to me.
Well, then the social contract got broken. TV first morphed into cable for $37 a month, then TIVO came enabling you to remove the ads. I think there are other devices that do that too. Then people fled TV to go to the Internet.
Although there was an interrim where the gadget makers made VCRs and tape recorders with movies and tapes that had DRM on them, something I totally support, they were cracked (although not so much to cease selling them).
And people didn't hold up their end of the bargain as they kept demanding -- and liberating if they didn't get it -- their free content.
What they brought with them from tV is their sense of "God-given right" to "free content" which used to pour for free into their TV set if they only coughed up the few hundred bucks to buy the TV in the first place. But now, on the Internet, they don't then go out and buy the ads, which is what they were supposed to do to earn that free content, the way they did in the TV era. A click isn't a sale, even if clicks still earn ad-sellers at least some revenue.
Most of the click ads they don't click on -- so ads are not a good source of revenue. If they've seen an ad for a Lincoln car, a Coke drink, or a Samsung tablet, they might buy the second thing in that list, but they would do that anyway because its ubiquitous.
Why, indeed, do ad sellers and Internet sites not move to consumer goods in their ads? They might get more clicks and get more conversion to sales.
I doubt children play with Etch-a-Sketches any more because now they have i-pads which are much more sophisticated. I can't recall if we still have ours around here somewhere in a closet, I imagine they got thrown away long ago in favour of first Nintendo, then the Internet on the computer screens.
The Etch-a-Sketch was actually my first screen, even before a TV. I can literally remember before the TV set, because we got the TV set later. I believe I first held the Etch-a-Sketch in my hands in 1960 when I was three and a half, as it was a Christmas present. It seemed like a better present than dolls.
It was especially handy for those really long car rides that seem to fill everyone's childhood when you visited grandma or your cousins.
I'll have to confess that I didn't particularly like the Etch-a-Sketch. It was those square edges and the difficulty of trying to turn the dials so that you could get the picture drawn. My brother was better at it than me, and sometimes our Dad would take it and draw something quite well and we'd try to save it for awhile.
I much preferred taking the Colorforms as they had on Captain Kangaroo, or cutting out magazine pictures, and putting them in a box to simulate a TV set, as if I were making my own show. That was definitely my most favourite toy in 1960, I recall, my own hand-made television box with pasted figures and objects made out of Playdoh. I also like putting the Silly Putty on the comic strips and stretching them out.
The Etch-A-Sketch just wasn't that fun -- interactive, but difficult. And then, there was my first griefing of a virtual world, when my brother or the neighbour kids would grab and shake it and erase my drawing.
What is funny about the Etch-A-Sketch is just how many hours it *did* absorb, even though it wasn't all that, the results of your tortured drawing weren't that good, and you had to erase them to keep playing.
The mystery of the Etch-a-Sketch was beaten when my brother, spending hours, would draw and draw -- etch and etch -- until you could peer through the screen at the aluminum stylus underneath, which looked like a Hershey's chocolate kiss.
Well, there were many more screens to come after that in the next 50 years...
I saw this ad on my Facebook stream because I think I "liked" Coke's page once.
It is "interactive" in the sense that you can go and chose one of the teams to win, and then chose obstacles that they can place in each other's path, as in one of those old video games with the different outcomes like "Dust: Tales of the Wired West" by Cyberflix.
Muslim groups have complained that it stereotypes Arabs.
The Arabs are indeed shown tugging on camels in the desert. They are not even in the race for some reason; maybe it's because with their camels, and the ability to milk camels, they don't need to run after Coca Cola in the desert.
Women's groups could just as well ask why women are stereotyped as showgirls; why Mexicans are stereotyped as bandits; why white men are stereotyped as riding giant noisy vehicles. They're all stereotypes. It's a story in an ad.
Business Insider says this "scandal" is "fizzling" now. Maybe it's for the reasons I just said: all the people are stereotyped terribly, but only one group is complaining, maybe because they're new at the business of worldwide media stereotypes.
Or maybe Coke really did have a larger role in mind for the Arab in the skit, which they've revealed to mollify the Muslim protesters:
Coca-Cola spokeswoman Lauren Thompson says the Arab character
portrays a movie star filming his latest blockbuster as the race for
Coke begins. The company didn't want to tip viewers off about his
expanded role in the ads until game time.
"They explained themselves pretty well, and I would say we feel
better now that we have a better understanding of the campaign and the
intent," says Abed Ayoub, legal director for the committee. "The
Arab-American community has been experiencing demonization in television
and the media. The fact that this is occurring in one of the largest TV
events of the year aroused concerns."
The fact remains that this commercial does not "demonize" Arabs. It stereotypes them.
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