As we await the Case-Shiller Housing report in a few minutes (come back for that, right?) most of the news flow today is mild and boring. As it should be just ahead of a long holiday weekend. So much so that we will ultra-compress our thoughts because you’re probably busy stacking chips and beer ahead of time…
Dot Connecting
A word about two stories which the Mainstream Media is doing its usual terrible job of putting in context. So it falls on us, I suppose.
Story #1: The Fast Company story “Uh-oh: Silicon Valley is building a Chinese-style social credit system.”
Story #2: In the Wall Street Journal we see how “Google Warns Against Blocking ‘Cookies’ Entirely, Triggering Criticism.”
For simplicity, what’s going on is the whole world is now in a preliminary skirmish to “The Big One” and we’ve labeled this The Cookie War.
The agenda is simplicity itself: When you surf the web, greedy media companies (some of which, like search engines, and arguably social media platforms, too) want to make money on you. Sure, they ought to be non-partisan and anonymous.
What blows up privacy (and anonymity) are cookies. Which – in theory – is what drove the Brussels sprouts – the megalomaniacs of the European Union – to demand cookie notices before setting cookies in order to give people a chance to opt-out of having their browsing info sold at a profit to advertisers.
Ever wonder why if you search something like “new car” your browsing for the next few months will contain a disproportionate number of car ads? Cookies are the answer…and they are the problem.
People like you and me are the problem, too. We like browsers that can strip out most ads (Opera) and those which support Ghostery and other plug-ins that block ads, and pop-up. And their delayed-triggering cousins, the “pop-behinds.”
Everything’s a Business Model
How many times do we need to say it? In the midst of The Cookie War, we have to admire the Sun Tzu-like tactics of Global Corporatism. Because the real assaults on our freedom (and which feeds into the massive personal data file on each and every one of us) are cookies. Been to a rabble-rousing site? Sets a cookie. Been to a government site? No telling what they do with cookies.
The Sun Tzu twist is that the dimmer-witted of the herd, the AoC-laced backers of Digital Mob Rule, are spewing about the superficial while the really BIG moves are being made invisibly.
All for MONEY. Tax money, ad money, and even “news money” which is why on an ever-increasing number of news sites, you will only get a headline before the site tells you “ You’re in Privacy Mode. Please log in or sign in with Facebook or Google…” What not disclosed is the remainder of this Cookie War Reality (CWR): “ So we can track you, sell your personal data on tastes and websites and even feed it to the Bumble-hive up in Provo to go into your control file – seems there’s one on every American that Your Government has been building on You because they don’t trust you or Us anymore…”
Sad, But it all dates back to an NSA program called XKeyscore. If you know where to look (here) you will read:
“On January 26, 2014, the German broadcaster Norddeutscher Rundfunk asked Edward Snowden in its TV interview: “What could you do if you would use XKeyscore?” and he answered:[1]
You could read anyone’s email in the world, anybody you’ve got an email address for. Any website: You can watch traffic to and from it. Any computer that an individual sits at: You can watch it. Any laptop that you’re tracking: you can follow it as it moves from place to place throughout the world. It’s a one-stop-shop for access to the NSA’s information.
… You can tag individuals … Let’s say you work at a major German corporation and I want access to that network, I can track your username on a website on a form somewhere, I can track your real name, I can track associations with your friends and I can build what’s called a fingerprint, which is network activity unique to you, which means anywhere you go in the world, anywhere you try to sort of hide your online presence, your identity.”
But, understand, if you really have a “clean computer” and you’re not dropping cookies all over the place and it doesn’t link to you (the computer operator) that takes a lot of teeth out of the program.
A little later on in the Wikipedia article, the XKeyscore program is defended by the government:
“In terms of access, an NSA press statement reads that there is no “unchecked analyst access to NSA collection data. Access to XKeyscore, as well as all of NSA’s analytic tools, is limited to only those personnel who require access for their assigned tasks.” and that there are “…stringent oversight and compliance mechanisms built in at several levels. One feature is the system’s ability to limit what an analyst can do with a tool, based on the source of the collection and each analyst’s defined responsibilities.”
Which, since the government is totally infested with lawyers isn’t quite the truth. Lawyers are specialists in half-truthing, understand.
The reality is that while what NSA claims is nominally true with regard to US Nationals (employed citizens) the reason that places like Alice Spring and Menwith Hill are NOT ON AMERICAN SOIL is so that Legal Prohibitions can’t be applied to the foreign nationals who do our government’s bidding.
On the other hand, when foreign nationals put sensitive material (about you or me) into the Bumble hive servers, it’s logical to argue that storing personal data in the cloud (which is really Provo) isn’t a violation, since once there (nominally for processing and analysis by machines, there’s no “analysts or personnel” involved. See how crafty and misleading all this gets? Big Lie Lookout: The “Cloud” is not a non-local place. Every node has a physical location and lat/lon. The lie is its “non-local.”
Back to point, though: The Mainstream Media doesn’t want to put The Cookie War on the front page of their papers. , Because, they too, want to get something (monetary) from your use of “their intellectual property” (the news).
My own view – and the reason we generate so much of our own coverage here via press releases and such, is that 80 percent of all news has a press release behind it somewhere. You can see how the news business has gotten “crookified” I hope?
Say the Employment Situation report comes out from a Labor Department press release. How can any of the jerks claim copyright of publicly available data? Answer: They Can’t. BUT what they can do is put up a “No reading unless you give us your personal data so we can continue as billionaires on your data..”
Which is how the digital realms work.
So if there’s one Big Tuesday Think, it’s how do you want to play in the cookie war? Block all cookies? Refuse to hand over “the digital money?” You won’t make the Lords of Digits very happy if you do. Why, where do you really think you get Social Credit Scores from, though? Cookies are your ante-up.
If everyone blocked all cookies,. hid their phone numbers, turned off their phone…why, social credit scores wouldn’t work. And my, wouldn’t that be a shame?
We now get back to real: It’s a lot less hidden and much shorter.
A Few Things That Matter
Yet another reason for an economic crisis in the EU come Halloween: Brexit: No deal ‘only acceptable’ way to leave EU, says Nigel Farage.
Sour grapes from the opioid trial: Johnson & Johnson calls judge’s ruling “flawed,” plans to appeal $572 million ruling in opioid trial.
Where’s the beef? Papa John’s names Arby’s president as CEO.
Just get in the line: Russian Aircraft Firm Files Lawsuit Against Boeing Over 737 Max Jet Order.
Hurricane Tracking:
No doubt it will drift around a bit…
Some Personal Woo-Woo
I debated mentioning any of this, but…
We are getting to one of othe two times of the year when my “second sight” and “dream adventures” tend to peak. Seems to happen around equinoxes (equini?) and that’s just over 3-weeks out now.
Dream #1: Had an odd dream about being in (yet another) “class” in a dream and the instructor was an all-but forgotten teacher from like 1st or 2nd grade. The point of the dream? The story line was that a super-secret government agency sent “teachers” into public schools and gave selected numbers of kids minute amounts of a psychedelic in the mid 1950’s to see what the long-term impact would be on their lives. Not MK Ultra, but a low-level dose designed to see what spiritual portals would eventually develop and so forth
Odd as hell while I knew this teacher’s name when I woke, when it came time to write it down it was blocked somehow. With great concentration I finally pulled out “Mr. Fraser” out again but in the dream it was Dr. Fraser and the “students” were lab rats for him as he tested IQ and various potentials.
Yet, I can describe the fellow: round features, light hair, wore a golf cap, and drove an older humpback Hudson. Mind you, this was in the 1950’s… Very strange, huh?
Was there such a program? Was that what the Kool-Aid and cookies were about? Hmmm. Trippendicular, to be sure…
Dream #2: Emergency landing of a jet in an area just before the rise of the Andes in the western Amazon. Plot was interesting: Off-airport landing, two-engine jet, two back-up pilots were with 10-20 others on the plane. Plan had been for the jet to return to somewhere else…so no one had passports with ’em.
Everyone got out OK after the landing and eventually, the plane was towed 3-4 miles through heavy brush/jungle lite to the airport. Where the plane and people had to wait almost a month while parts were flown in. Local officials were incensed at the lack of “papers.”
The landing took place as the plane passed over a large white round building, too. Looked like an upside-down dinner plate.
Oh, and as I got out the front of the plane I was confronted by a wild-man looking fellow dresses in animal furs and speaking what I took to be the local Indian dialect. After “playing me” for a bit, he handed me a business card. Smiled. He was a network engineer who had retired to the bush and made his money ion a nearby town bringing first world IP skills to the thrid world backwaters of the upper reaches of jungle.
Whew! Odd set of dreams, huh? Well, off to wait for the ticker on the Housing numbers, so like the old saying goes “Dew Drop Inn – again!:”
george@ure.net
Doddering Old Dude – if the shoe fits..
Creepy , Slow Joe – “I want to be clear, I’m not going nuts”
Creepy’s Wife – “have to Swallow a little bit” – no offense to Ure SF readers with mentioning the cities official bird. Yes sireee Ure Demoncratic front runner..
Bohica Time: Derivative Pyramid is collapsing, time is running out.
Gold & Silver price being retarded , but BTC’s allowed to increase 3 fold in past 6 months..
Why do ALL of the media corps show picture of Bitcoins as a Gold Coin?!?! R U being conditioned?
The question then is will FedNow be on-line in time? Hmmm lets see – Today we can use Bitcoin Core, LiteCoin Core, Etherium Mist – with NO financial intermediaries – or Wait for FedNow – which will have a nifty “skimming” feature for Tax Collection purposes..
Not to worry Newbs, Ure elites r going 2 be “pumping” financial derivatives into the Cryptosphere. Once they Tokenize derivitives, they will be foisted on the public..lucky U.
* The Woolly Bear Caterpillars r saying Colder, More Precipt. this winter, Farmers Almac says the same. Will take a gander at Bear Grease in pickle jars stored in basement rafters this weekend for final confirmation of Farm Almanac and WB Caterpillars predictions.
More wetterer! Yuck. More mud:(
Time to prepare some paths and a roadway here so that I don’t have to deal with mud.
Time to cut wood and stack it. Set up more solar for electric heat? Maybe. I was hoping to have time to just relax and play.
Housing numbers are not going to be so good. Looks to be another beat down on wall street.
Ive been busy, pole vaulting mouse turds.
Strange dreams forsure, but not for you. Lol spiritual cookies.
Well, i best git. Who knows what the day has on the menu. Spiritual cookies….. hmmm never thought about it like that.
Hi Kat. :)
RE: Dream #1 – I learned of the CIA’s MKUltra drug testing program (not the reported UFO aspect of it) as a psych student back in the 70s. According to this Smithsonian summary . . .
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/what-we-know-about-cias-midcentury-mind-control-project-180962836/
“Under MKUltra, the CIA gave itself the authority to research how drugs could: . . . render the induction of hypnosis easier;” “enhance the ability of individuals to withstand privation, torture and coercion;” produce amnesia, shock and confusion; and much more. Many of these questions were investigated using unwitting test subjects . . .”
Today the media and cyber industries are much more covert and more highly effective than the crude use psychedelic drugs. Plus, the former is borderline legal, the latter decidedly illegal.
With all the conservatives and other “conspiracy theorists” out there saying they’re being blocked on YouTube it really mazes me that Derren Brown’s episode “The Assassin with Stephen Fry” is still there – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owootTAuxic. He very pointedly uses the Sirhan-Sirhan case as an example of the fact you can turn certain individuals into effective assassins and demonstrates it in the episode. No drugs involved but a particular type of individual is required.
Go out and spend. Prices are scheduled to rise Monday.
if George was an agent in the NSA he would know I clicked on a YouTube channel call Matt Fraser . lol.
https://youtu.be/Y8D93bv786o
Who will have a nationwide TV show at the first of the year
#2
https://youtu.be/sRYxa_W7FrM
Hidden invasive Fleet the masses
msg andy for a comp day in rehab, old buddy
Yeah but someone’s got to come up with an answer to what all those indentations are in the rainforest there scattered everywhere.
I’ll see if I can get some remote viewers to scan that thing and see what they come up with
I may be wrong but I believe those are markers for underground Caverns where things are that you don’t want to encounter
stockcharts has spent the last several years hiding parts of their site behind google junk and javascript. The latest today is no access to public charts with out something called “getclicky”. Now I need a substitute for stockcharts.
cookies: I set them “to originating site only” and to clear all when quitting browser. Also preferences are set for the tool “clear private data” to delete all cookies. Websites that try to cheat my blocking have their java cut off by “No Script” software or if polite behavior is not possible they get blocked by “Little Snitch” firewall.
Stopping all those trackers makes my browser really fast and never crash. Some sites don’t work so I don’t go there. If access is important I send a note outlining why their site doesn’t work and then usually ends with “get rid of that stupid, incompetent jerk that does your website”
get a brokerage account…
George, have your dreams ever had a “guide?”
My most interesting dream this week, I had a guide. Female, wearing all white and with white hair. Never saw her face, only from the backside.
She was leading me to a room/storefront in a building, sort of like a white mall with dark storefronts. I can’t remember what after that.
See steinbrechers inner guide meditation on amazon wfor working with ure guides – vy good.
Prepper….
I have dreams that are so real you would swear they were. I’ve had them for most of my life..
What’s funny is I’ll dream she comes in touches my arm and takes me out to show me stuff .. she ages to.. small pixie woman with beautiful features real light blonde or whitish hair wearing white.
I see her face though..when we leave the landscape changes..buildings .. etc. What’s funny is long after a dream about a building I actually went in one and knew where everything was in the place
Hey George the Dew Drop In is actually just outside of Grass Valley Ca
“You can watch traffic to and from it. Any computer that an individual sits at: You can watch it. Any laptop that you’re tracking: you can follow it as it moves from place to place throughout the world. It’s a one-stop-shop for access to the NSA’s information.”
My friend decided I needed a tablet he had a nice iPad freshly scrubbed.. and sent it to me. I of course didnt want it but would let the 4 year old grandson watch you tube cartoons. Then one day he brings it up papa change the channel..
I take a look he had somehow reactivated the iPad to the cloud.
All of the data that was scrubbed off and deleted was back. On the screen was his wife coming out of the shower..his banking credit card accounts tracking of his cell phones the works
He thought I was being a smartass.. I wasn’t and he got irritable..anyway the more I tried to explain what was on it the more stubborn he would get.. I would say how would I know you were at store a or your wife was at the hairdeessers. So since he was being stubborn I decided to prove to him.. I was dropping beavis and butthead videos in his video folder etc..
On the cloud was a folder photos.. so I would drop a cropped photo of the luckiest guy…
https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&ei=P3dlXdecGobU-gTNsp-YAQ&q=luckiest+guy+wins+lottery+and+finds+true+love&oq=luckiest+guy+wins+lottery+and+finds+&gs_l=mobile-gws-wiz-hp.1.0.33i299.5442.28654..29598…1.0..0.229.6825.0j27j9……0….1…….8..35i39j0i67j0j46j0i131j46i131j46i67j46i275j0i10j46i10j0i22i30j33i160j33i22i29i30.eGR2E83cPxc#imgrc=9C0Z0GL5K_Kl9M:
He would erase it so I’d drop it in again and again..
Then I had a talk with his kid who talked some since I to him.. he called.. I said didnt you have a clue when i.put that guys picture in.. he said what guy.. so I sent him the photo…hey that’s the pervert.. I said no stupid that’s a.picture I kept dropping in the folder.. the photo folder was his doorbell camera folder and every time I dropped the picture in his doorbell would ring.. he had the.police looking for that guy lol lol…
So it’s already here.
I was wrong. I just found out it only cost $31,252 a month to be at the Betty. Been here 62, going to do 30 more days. The last 30 have spectacular. never a dull moment. I have met some of the most amazing people in the world. Got a super good tan, in super good shape and i feel just wonderful.
Thats $93,756 to hangout with rich and famous people, paid by my insurance company. Which my compay pays my benifits for me.
Plus my $500 deductible. All to find out Drugs are bad for you. Ohhh okay. :)
I mean if you have benifits, be smart and think outside the box for a minute and use them to your advantage.
Have a great week. Buy low and sell high. Yup! I think i got the hang of this stock broker schtuff.
‘AoC-laced digital Mob Rule’….
Trump can’t follow Bush’s strategy to expand his ‘base-core’ of support, Trump wants to rely on his base alone:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/07/trump-appeals-his-base-aoc-census-and-ice/594013/
https://thehill.com/hilltv/what-americas-thinking/397695-pollster-gop-base-is-shrinking
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2019/07/21/the-racist-distraction-didnt-help-trump-it-hurt-him/
Dear Chief Circle,
Incoming message from dept. ZOBUZOBU said the Shadok to the Flatlander as today I returned an overdue book on procrastination to the library? In it’s place, a new title jumped out at me: “The Doomsday Calculation-how an equation that predicts the future is transforming everything we know about life and the universe” by William Poundstone, 2019.
Now if only the aliens can avoid precipitating a universe-ending low vacuum bubble event or Pandora’s take on “My Favorite Orkan”?
Oh, Happy Days!
“The Anonymizer” was created and set-up by the CIA (under a shell company, of course), to permit Iranian ex-pats and refugees a secure channel by which to communicate with their friends & relatives who were still landlocked in Persia. It took the CIA less than 6-months to realize some of those secure communications might contain intel — and then they “unlocked” the portal’s back door. It took the FBI less than an additional 6-months to postulate that “human traffickers and pedos might be using the portal” — thus gaining access to the CIA’s backdoor.
“The Anonymizer” was an object lesson to “We, who paid attention to such things…”
When I was building, I was a huge Opera fan — bought distro licenses for Opera 2, 3, and 5 (as well as purchasing a personal license for my own use), and installed it as “default” browser on every computer I sold. ‘Things about Opera were it was “light and fast” (came on a single floppy), strictly adhered to the W3C HTML standards (other than W3.org’s house browser/editor, Opera was the only one which did), and it came with a fully editable and modifiable plaintext config file. Opera’s config file allowed a power user to make it do many, many tricks that other browsers couldn’t, or weren’t allowed to do.
The last infinitely-configurable version of Opera was v10. The last Norweigan-created Opera was v12. Opera is now Google Chrome with a Norwegian GUI glued over the top of it.
Although Moz is my default, I still use Opera 10. The one-click “kill all scripts,” “toggle images,” and “spoof MSIE” controls are just too powerful for me to leave behind. It has limited use now, but one of the things it DOES still do is pass transparently through most paywalls…
If I really needed to do any absolutely secure browsing, I would use Tor, launch from Startpage, and use either Startpage or Duck as a search engine. Despite what Katherine Albrecht says (she owns a piece of ixquick/Startpage), this is not absolutely secure (‘cuz nothing is), but it is secure enough that any information one supplies to the Web gremlins would be quite stale, by the time they deciphered it.
George,
You used to recommend a program to track and drop cookies.
My browser tells me YOU install cookies.
I am offended by anyone doing so. It seems to me you are being hypocritical not disclosing what you are doing.
Actually, it is clearly disclosed on our Privacy page (we use Google adwords which drops the cookie, not me). Go ahead and be bothered, but for virtually all websites, cookies are how advertising revenue is tracked back to source.
Be offended all you want. There are zero cookies on our subscriber site.