Monday, October 22, 2018

List of Every Animal Humans Currently Monitor Using Facial Recognition Technology

Whatever it takes the strange human political latitude that keeps giving  ... Saudi Arabia has now called the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi at its Istanbul consulate a "huge and grave mistake", but sought to shield its powerful crown prince from the widening crisis, saying Mohammed bin Salman had not been aware.
Jim Chalmers broke down in tears and begged Kevin Rudd to let him run for Parliament, despite helping orchestrate a carpet-bombing campaign against the former prime minister during Labor's leadership wars.
The revelation about the opposition frontbencher, who holds ambitions to become prime minister, is contained in Mr Rudd's new book, The PM Years.

 Can Trauma Be Inherited Between Generations? Atlantic 

Privatised Assets a Public Concern


Growing numbers of Australians are seriously concerned and even fiercely opposed to the continuing sale of government assets and the privatisation of so many services once provided by government. With the mass sell-offs of the family furniture across the board at all levels of government, many of us now hold serious concerns about losses of […]
Are there eight main channels of innovation?



 New York Magazine: “Facial recognition technology has some serious, persistent issues. These were clearly shown earlier this year when Amazon’s “Rekognition” mistakenly identified 28 members of Congress as criminals. The technology as a whole largely suffers both from inaccuracy and systemic bias. Regardless of who wields the technology or for what purpose, the algorithms use raw data pulled from a society hindered by racial and gender predispositions which ultimately yield similarly biased results. In essence, bad data in means biased results out. In places like China, where the national government is already primed with a proclivity for mass surveillance, facial recognition turns the the troubling into the dystopian

 VISITORS of the Skalnaté Pleso mountain lake in High Tatras can enjoy a less traditional routine than mere hiking – every Tuesday a professional trainer offers open-air Yoga lessons.


Alexa, Should We Trust You?


The voice revolution has only just begun. Today, Alexa is a humble servant. Very soon, she could be much more—a teacher, a therapist, a confidant, an   Be Using to Save Time Immediately
Anzac Day 2018: Military history: a quick guide to online resources

Anzac day 2018: A quick guide to military anniversaries in 2018

Gizmodo: “When you go into the privacy settings on your browser, there’s a little option there to turn on the “Do Not Track” function, which will send an invisible request on your behalf to all the websites you visit telling them not to track you. A reasonable person might think that enabling it will stop a porn site from keeping track of what she watches, or keep Facebook from collecting the addresses of all the places she visits on the internet, or prevent third-party trackers she’s never heard of from following her from site to site. According to a recent survey by Forrester Research, a quarter of American adults use “Do Not Track” to protect their privacy. (Our own stats at Gizmodo Media Group show that 9% of visitors have it turned on.) We’ve got bad news for those millions of privacy-minded people, though: “Do Not Track” is like spray-on sunscreen, a product that makes you feel safe while doing little to actually protect you.

WEAPON SYSTEMS CYBERSECURITY: DOD Just Beginning to Grapple with Scale of Vulnerabilities (PDF) GAO. I can well believe that DOD is an enormous IT clusterf*ck, but I’m also leery of studies like this, because of the obvious implication that another round of enormous spending on weapons built like Ferraris is what’s needed, an enormous windfall for IT, which (a) wrote the code for the vulnerable systems in the first place, and (b) hasn’t demonstrated an ability to secure anything else.

Why King Salman Must Replace M.B.S. NYT. Again, I don’t want to be Mr. Counter-Suggestible here, but the signature, as it were, of this operation, as it were, is very familiar: (1) Anonymous leaks from intelligence commmunity, (2) evidence nobody can examine, (3) prurient, viral-friendly detail (piss tapes; the saw), (4) inflammatory headlines qualified by text like “increasingly convinced” and “alleged” in the body, (5) moral panic and frantic virtue signaling in the political class, and (6) full spectrum dominance in mainstream press coverage. Of course, this time everything could be true; gaslights really do flicker, after all. And if that’s the case, then all previous gaslighting will seem true, or at least truthy, via the halo effect, a salutary result for all concerned. So we’re talking win-win, here.
Killing Jamal Khashoggi Was Easy. Explaining It Is Much Harder Philip Giraldi, Council for the National Interest. Kill a chicken to scare the monkeys. Khashoggi would be the chicken, but who are the monkeys? Internal Saudi factions would be my guess.
Killing Jamal Khashoggi Was A Saudi Warning Shot HuffPo. The conclusion: “In long term, though, businesses and policymakers will need to signal consistently ― in public and in private ― that, despite the potential damage that sanctions on Saudi Arabia might do to the global economy, there are values that the international community is not ready to sacrifice. The challenge for the international community is to decide what those values are.” Indeed.

Disinformation on Steroids Council on Foreign Relations. Deck: “The threat of deep fakes.”
Reality Breaks Up a Saudi Prince Charming’s Media Narrative New York Times. UserFriendly: “Holy crap NYT goes introspective on their love of MBS aka Mr. Bone Saw. This is a must read.”   
Jamal Khashoggi: Where The Road to Damascus & The Path to 9/11 Converge George Washington. Lots of detail. This tidbit comes close to the end:
One last fact to mention: the timing of Khashoggi’s disappearance when taken in connection with the 9/11 Families’ litigation. Last Friday, something very notable happened in the 9/11 litigation against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. For the first time ever, the Department of Justice stood on the side of the 9/11 Families and publicly committed to finally releasing three large tranches of formerly secret documents that we believe connect the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to the 9/11 attacks. This is the biggest development we have had in our over 16 years of litigation.
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