Happy viewing and cuídate.
Tara, Wessex, old wars, new homeworlds, etc.
August 11th, 2010Ample Splatter
August 9th, 2010Here’s some stuff I’ve read over the days.
I thought the Silber-on-a-roll particularly tasty, but by all means try whatever looks interesting.
- “Fuck Your Goddamned ‘Optics’“, “We Are Not Special, and There Is No Happy Ending” and the ongoing series “On Wikileaks” by Art Silber
- “Pitch for Mounds” by Shawn Kolcek, CP, “Ancient Indian burial mound in the Rocks?” by Anya Sostek, P-G, and “Critics cite delays in G-20 inquiry” by Paula Reed Ward and Joe Smydo, P-G
- “One reason why humans are special and unique: We masturbate. A lot.” and “Laughing rats and ticklish gorillas: Joy and mirth in humans and other animals” by Jesse Bering, Scientific American
- “A Condensed Critique of Transhumanism” by Dale Carrico
- “On the so-called ‘World War II’” by this dude Scott on livejournal
- a bunch of stuff on Booktryst
- Before the Muses: An Anthology of Akkadian Literature by Benjamin R. Foster review (pdf) by Alan Lenzi and a bunch of stuff on bookreviews.org
Happy reading and cuídate.
You maniacs! You blew it up!
August 6th, 2010Goddamn you!
Goddamn you all to hell!
While nuclear testing is always monstrous, policy makers of the most test-happy nation, the first and only one to have nuked civilians wholesale in cities, and the one with the most advanced, most extensive nuclear arsenal in the world being all like, “If (typically Islamic) Nation X even thinks about developing such WMDs – like these babies here – or even just enriches its own uranium – like this stuff, i’n'it pretty? – well, we might be forced to destroy the lives of the folks who live there – conventionally, most likely, though not necessarily – in preemptive self-defense,” is like pouring salt (kosher salt, in the case of Israel) in the gaping, radioactive wound.
Nuke as I say, not as I nuke, or else, mafucker – and cuídate.
Foundation and Google Earth
August 3rd, 2010
The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.
The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”
The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.
“The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases,” says company CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish Army Ranger with a PhD in computer science.
Which naturally makes the 16-person Cambridge, Massachusetts, firm attractive to Google Ventures, the search giant’s investment division, and to In-Q-Tel, which handles similar duties for the CIA and the wider intelligence community.
“Exclusive: Google, CIA Invest in ‘Future’ of Web Monitoring” by Noah Schachtman, Wired 7-28-10
So, the banally evil bedfellows at Google and the CIA are into playing Hari Seldon now, which would be hilarious were it not so obscenely obnoxious. Meanwhile, Julian Assange has dropped a 1.4 gig file of what may or may not be highly volatile dirt to WikiLeaks’ Afghanistan page, to be decrypted in the event of his capture, and some scumfuck congressfiend has called (may it not be returned) for Bradley Manning‘s head on a plate.
Mad props to Assange and Manning, unripe raspberries to yinz psychohistorians and cuídate.
Upadate, 8-7-2010
“If I look at enough of your messaging and your location, and use Artificial Intelligence,” Schmidt said, “we can predict where you are going to go.”
“Show us 14 photos of yourself and we can identify who you are. You think you don’t have 14 photos of yourself on the internet? You’ve got Facebook photos! People will find it’s very useful to have devices that remember what you want to do, because you forgot…But society isn’t ready for questions that will be raised as result of user-generated content.”
In addition to predicting personal behavior, diseases and other crises will become predictable as well, Schmidt said.
On the misuse of information for criminal or anti-social purposes:
“The only way to manage this is true transparency and no anonymity. In a world of asynchronous threats, it is too dangerous for there not to be some way to identify you. We need a [verified] name service for people. Governments will demand it.”
“Google CEO Schmidt: ‘People Aren’t Ready for the Technology Revolution’” by Marshall Kirkpatrick, ReadWriteWeb 8-4-10
That wretched demiurge the Gangster Computer God has again redefined obnoxiousness: Facebook and Google are going to war getting all Republican and Democrat, with Google dropping some kind of social networking shit called Google Me.
Unfuck you.
Mr. Fusion
August 2nd, 2010powers the time circuits and the flux capacitor.
Doc Brown, Back to the Future III
- Fusion Center of the Year–The Colorado Information and Analysis Center (CIAC) was recognized for exemplifying every aspect of a robust and mature fusion center. CIAC leadership has been a strong advocate of fusion centers, organizing and supporting the national build-out of the network. They were specifically recognized for their recent support to the Najibullah Zazi terrorism investigation as well as their leadership during the 2008 National Democratic Convention.
- Fusion Center Federal Representative of the Year–FBI agent Leslie Gardner, assigned to the Los Angeles Joint Regional Intelligence Center (JRIC), was nominated for her leadership in developing the JRIC into a nationally recognized model of cooperation and collaboration between agencies of all sizes and missions. She has been responsible for initiating policies, processes, and programs which exceeded expectations and drove standards across the national network of fusion centers.
- State/Local Fusion Center Representative of the Year–Mike Sena, Deputy Director, Northern California Regional Intelligence Center (NCRIC), was recognized for his leadership and management of the NCRIC’s growth and maturation. Under his leadership, the fusion center has expanded its all-crimes/all-hazards mission by providing superior customer service and expanding its partnerships across all levels of government.
Bart Johnson, DHS Principal Deputy Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis, said of the award winners: “It is an honor and a privilege to recognize the outstanding contributions of partners at all levels of government in support of the national network of fusion centers as they continue to evolve to enhance our national security.”
Ed Wall, Administrator of Wisconsin Emergency Management, received the National Fusion Center Leadership Award on behalf of the National Fusion Center Association. He was recognized for his ongoing support to the national network of fusion centers.
“U.S. Honors Award Winners At National Fusion Center Conference” by DHS, 2-26-10
What is a fusion center?
The answer depends on your perspective. If you work for the Department of Homeland Security, it is a federal, state, local, or regional data-coordination units, designed to improve the sharing of anti-terrorism and anti-crime data in order to make America safer. If you are privacy or civil-rights advocate, it is part of a powerful new domestic surveillance infrastructure that combines data from both the public and private sectors to track innocent people and so makes Americans less safe from their own government. In that respect, the fusion center is reminiscent of the East German stasi, which used tens of thousands of state police and hundreds of thousands of informers to monitor an estimated one-third of the population.
The history of fusion centers provides insight into which answer is correct.
“An American Stasi?” by Wendy McElroy, The Freeman 7-28-10
See something, say something and cuídate.