Monday, February 4, 2019
David Patrikarakos, War in 140 Characters
At Amazon, David Patrikarakos, War in 140 Characters: How Social Media Is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century.
Bar Refaeli Bikini
At Drunken Stepfather, "BAR REFAELI BIKINI OF THE DAY."
— Bar Refaeli (@BarRefaeli) January 24, 2019
Sunday, February 3, 2019
Dua Lipa Flash
At Drunken Stepfather, "DUA LIPA PANTY FLASH OF THE DAY."
BONUS: "STRATEGICALLY TIMED GISELE SMUT OF THE DAY."
Got the whole gang back together 🖤 bts by Pixie Levinson for Alita London premiere x pic.twitter.com/qKnq287T3S
— DUA LIPA (@DUALIPA) February 1, 2019
BONUS: "STRATEGICALLY TIMED GISELE SMUT OF THE DAY."
Life Without the 'Big 5' Tech Giants
Some time ago I posted the link to "Social Media Self-Defense."
I have not yet implemented the plan, but I do think about it often.
And it turns out, an operational defense plan for social media should be just a start. To be truly free in this day and age, you've got to unplug from all the biggies: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft.
Who does that? Probably no one, but Kash Hill is giving it a go. She's a warrior, dang!
See, "Life Without the Tech Giants," and "I Cut Google Out Of My Life. It Screwed Up Everything."
From the latter:
If you could create a social media defense anonymous identity, I suspect you could continue to use the Big Five relatively safely (anonymously), although you'd still be handing over all your data, which is valuable whether you're identified or not.
What a crazy world we live in!
I have not yet implemented the plan, but I do think about it often.
And it turns out, an operational defense plan for social media should be just a start. To be truly free in this day and age, you've got to unplug from all the biggies: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft.
Who does that? Probably no one, but Kash Hill is giving it a go. She's a warrior, dang!
See, "Life Without the Tech Giants," and "I Cut Google Out Of My Life. It Screwed Up Everything."
From the latter:
First-person adventure time: I’ve been cutting the tech giants out of my life one by one. https://t.co/CqSPbQRNAX— Kashmir Hill (@kashhill) January 22, 2019
It was easy technically to block Facebook because it doesn’t run the web like Amazon’s AWS, but FB's trackers are everywhere, including 'Pixel,' which tracks products you look at so companies can show you ads for those products on FB/Instagram. https://t.co/MCAjZfrm7A— Kashmir Hill (@kashhill) January 24, 2019
Long ago, Google made the mistake of adopting the motto, “Don’t be evil,” in a jab at competitors who exploited their users. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has since demoted the phrase in its corporate code of conduct presumably because of how hard it is to live up to it.Keep reading.
Google is no stranger to scandals, but 2018 was a banner year. It covered up the potential data exposure of a half million people who probably forgot they were still using Google+. It got caught trying to build a censored search engine for China. Its own employees resigned to protest Google helping the Pentagon build artificial intelligence. Thousands more employees walked out over the company paying exorbitant exit packages to executives accused of sexual misconduct. And privacy critics decried Google’s insatiable appetite for data, from capturing location information in unexpected ways—a practice Google changed when exposed—to capturing credit card transactions—a practice Google has not changed and actually seems proud of.
I’m saying goodbye to all that this week. As part of an experiment to live without the tech giants, I’m cutting Google from my life both by abandoning its products and by preventing myself, technologically, from interacting with the company in any way. Engineer Dhruv Mehrotra built a virtual private network, or VPN, for me that prevents my phone, computers, and smart devices from communicating with the 8,699,648 IP addresses controlled by Google. This will cause some huge headaches for me: The company has created countless genuinely useful products, some that we use intentionally and some invisibly. The trade-off? Google tracks us everywhere.
I’m apprehensive about entirely blocking Google from my life because of how dependent I am on its products; the company has basically taken up residence in my brain somewhere near the hippocampus.
Google Calendar tells me what I need to do any given day. Google Chrome is how I browse the internet on my computer. I use Gmail for both work and personal email. I turn to Google for every question and search. Google Docs is the home of my story drafts, my half-finished zombie novel, and a running tally of my finances. I use Google Maps to get just about everywhere.
So I am shocked when cutting Google out of my life takes just a few painful hours. Because I’m blocking Google with Dhruv’s VPN, I have to find replacements for all the useful services Google provides and without which my life would largely cease to function:
I migrate my browser bookmarks over to Firefox (made by Mozilla).
I change the default search engine on Firefox and my iPhone from Google—a privilege for which Google reportedly pays Apple up to $9 billion per year—to privacy-respecting DuckDuckGo, a search engine that also makes money off ads but doesn’t keep track of users’ searches.
I download Apple Maps and the Mapquest app to my phone. I hear Apple Maps is better than it used to be, and damn, Mapquest still lives! I don’t think I’ve used that since the 90s/a.k.a. the pre-smartphone age, back when I had to print directions for use in my car.
I switch to Apple’s calendar app.
I create new email addresses on Protonmail and Riseup.net (for work and personal email, respectively) and direct people to them via autoreplies in Gmail. Lifehack: The easiest way to get to inbox zero is to start a brand new inbox.
Going off Google doesn’t come naturally. In addition to mentally kicking myself every time I talk about “Googling” something, I have to make a “banned apps” folder on my iPhone, because otherwise, my fingers keep straying out of habit to Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Calendar—the three apps that, along with Instagram and Words With Friends, are in heaviest rotation in my life.
There’s no way I can delete my Gmail accounts completely as I did with Facebook. First off, it would be a huge security mistake; freeing up my email address for someone else to claim is just asking to be hacked. (Update: While other companies recycle email addresses, many Googlers have informed me since this piece came out that Google does not.) Secondly, I have too many documents, conversations, and contacts stored there. The infinite space offered by the tech giants has made us all digital hoarders.
And that hoarding can be a bonanza for tech giants, allowing Google, for example, to create a “Smart Reply” feature that crawls billions of emails on Gmail to predict how you’d like to respond to a friend’s missive. Yay?
This experiment is not just about boycotting Google products. I’m also preventing my devices from interacting with Google in invisible or background ways, and that makes for some big challenges.
One morning, I have a meeting downtown. I leave my apartment with enough time to get there via Uber, but when I open the app, it won’t work. Same thing with Lyft. It turns out they’re both dependent on Google Maps such that I can’t even enter my destination while blocking Google. I’m astounded. There are no taxis around, so I have to take the bus. I wind up late to the meeting.
Google is a behemoth when it comes to maps. According to various surveys, the vast majority of consumers—up to 77 percent—use Google Maps to navigate the world. And a vast majority of companies rely on Google Maps’ API to power the mapping on their websites and apps, according to data from iDataLabs, Stackshare, and BuiltWith.
Even Google’s mortal enemy, Yelp, uses it for mapping on its website (though it taps Apple maps for its iPhone app). Luther Lowe, head of policy and Google critic-in-chief at Yelp, says there aren’t great alternatives to Google when it comes to mapping, forcing the company to pay its foe for the service.
In its Maps API, Google has long offered a free or very cheap product, allowing it to achieve market dominance. Now it’s making a classic monopolistic move: Google announced last year that it’s raising its mapping prices significantly, leading developers across the web to freak out because Google Maps is “light years ahead of its competitors.”
I become intimately acquainted with Google Maps competitors’ drawbacks using Mapquest for navigation; it keeps steering me into terrible traffic during my commute (probably because it doesn’t have the real-time movements of millions of people being sent to it).
Google, like Amazon, is woven deeply into the infrastructure of online services and other companies’ offerings, which is frustrating to all the connected devices in my house.
“Your smart home pings Google at the same time every hour in order to determine whether or not it’s connected to the internet,” Dhruv tells me. “Which is funny to me because these devices’ engineers decided to determine connectivity to the entire internet based on the uptime of a single company. It’s a good metaphor for how far the internet has strayed from its original promise to decentralize control.”
In some cases, the Google block means apps won’t work at all, like Lyft and Uber, or Spotify, whose music is hosted in Google Cloud. The more frequent effect of the Google block though is that the internet itself slows down dramatically for me...
If you could create a social media defense anonymous identity, I suspect you could continue to use the Big Five relatively safely (anonymously), although you'd still be handing over all your data, which is valuable whether you're identified or not.
What a crazy world we live in!
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
*BUMPED.*
Releasedon Tuesday last week.
At Amazon, Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.
Released
At Amazon, Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.
Siva Vaidhyanathan, Antisocial Media
*BUMPED.*
At Amazon, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy.
At Amazon, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy.
Amber Lee's Super Bowl Forecast
Well, we had record rain yesterday. Hopefully today Rams fans can make it to their Super Bowl parties without getting caught in the floods.
At CBS News 2 Los Angeles, the lovely Ms. Amber:
At CBS News 2 Los Angeles, the lovely Ms. Amber:
CBS Rejects ‘Just Stand’ Super Bowl Advertisement (VIDEO)
At the Washington Examiner, via Memeorandum, "CBS rejects pro-flag, anti-Kaepernick ‘Just Stand’ Super Bowl ad":
A veteran-owned apparel company’s pro-flag Super Bowl TV ad that punches back at Nike's promotion of Colin Kaepernick and his national anthem protests has been rejected by CBS.
According to the firm, Nine Line Apparel, CBS was apparently not satisfied the firm could pay for the 45-second ad, despite having annual revenues of $25 million. A spokesman for Nine Line charged that CBS didn’t like the ad’s content.
The ad features soldiers, first responders, and images of military graves decorated with American flags and gives credit to them for protecting the rights of those like Kaepernick to protest.
It appears to open up where the ad Kaepernick narrated and starred in ended.
Nike’s minutelong ad, which debuted at the beginning of the 2018 NFL season to great fanfare and controversy, shows Kaepernick at the end saying, “So don’t ask if your dreams are crazy. Ask if they are crazy enough.”
The ad celebrated sports achievers but was controversial because it featured the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback, who started a wave of political protests by kneeling during the National Anthem to protest the treatment of minorities.
Nine Line Apparel’s ad opens with, “Don’t ask if your loyalty is crazy. Ask if it’s crazy enough.”
It is narrated by Benghazi survivor U.S. Marine Mark Geist. “Some people think you’re crazy for being loyal, defending the Constitution, standing for the flag. Then I guess I’m crazy,” he said in it.
“For those who kneel, they fail to understand that they can kneel, that they can protest, that they can despise what I stand for, even hate the truth that I speak, but they can only do that because I am crazy enough,” he adds.
Nine Line Apparel CEO Tyler Merritt ripped the rejection of his ad.
"CBS’s purported reason for rejecting a Super Bowl commercial that extols patriotism is totally out of bounds," he said. "Let’s call this what it is: a blatant attempt to censor a message that their politically correct executives find offensive. We urge Americans who believe it’s important to show respect for our flag and national anthem to join us in calling out this offensive bias. It’s time to give a penalty flag to CBS."
The firm is overtly patriotic. Nine Line Apparel’s “About Us” page on its website reads: "Nine Line Apparel represents the grit and commitment of all Patriotic Americans. Founded on the principles similar to other value based organizations, Nine Line aims to promote the issues faced by all those who have served their country, on both foreign and domestic soil. Nine Line encourages a conversation between those who serve and those who support them."
Super Bowl Today
I'm obviously rooting for the Rams. I can't stand New England, and have loathed the Patriots since the snowy "tuck rule" game of 2001.
In any case, great coverage at the Los Angeles Times.
In any case, great coverage at the Los Angeles Times.
It's Super Bowl Sunday pic.twitter.com/kkURBifNrI
— L.A. Times Sports (@latimessports) February 3, 2019
Super Bowl LIII: Rams ready to butt heads with Patriots and their G.O.A.T. https://t.co/2P3W29ZUxe pic.twitter.com/3MUxdRTxDh
— L.A. Times Sports (@latimessports) February 3, 2019
Super Bowl LIII by the numbershttps://t.co/lxpSz7aOCx pic.twitter.com/xNlFdvf7UD
— L.A. Times Sports (@latimessports) February 3, 2019
The official @latimessports staff #SuperBowl picks in the @latimes this morning. I got the #LARams 31-28. pic.twitter.com/nP4Gbe8dG4
— Arash Markazi (@ArashMarkazi) February 3, 2019
Friday, February 1, 2019
Voters Want Political Moderation?
Do they?
Seems like most folks on Twitter, especially leftists, are attacking moderation. Look at the leftist jihad against former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz. The attacks have been so bad he's rethinking whether or not he should run. Even his hometown constituency launched huge protests against him. See NYT, "Howard Schultz Draws Protesters in His Hometown, Seattle."
This is an interesting discussion, in any case, at Fox News:
Seems like most folks on Twitter, especially leftists, are attacking moderation. Look at the leftist jihad against former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz. The attacks have been so bad he's rethinking whether or not he should run. Even his hometown constituency launched huge protests against him. See NYT, "Howard Schultz Draws Protesters in His Hometown, Seattle."
This is an interesting discussion, in any case, at Fox News:
Corey Booker Throws His Hat in the Ring
Isn't this the biggest group of clowns ever to run for the Democratic nomination?
Booker's a farcical grandstanding hack. (*Eye roll.*)
Booker's a farcical grandstanding hack. (*Eye roll.*)
Spotted in the wild pic.twitter.com/73IkSygCXJ
— Rebecca Buck (@RebeccaBuck) February 1, 2019
I want to take a couple minutes and share a few thoughts about why I’m running for president:
— Cory Booker (@CoryBooker) February 1, 2019
Sen. @CoryBooker: "The cancer, in many ways, in our country right now is a caustic type of politics that wants to pit us against each other and create the delusion of separateness." https://t.co/f8u2wc159S pic.twitter.com/bEcTLVSWrO
— The View (@TheView) February 1, 2019
New Arrests in Southern California Birth Tourism Industry
At LAT, "Travel agents charged with bringing pregnant Chinese women to give birth on U.S. soil":
Travel agents charged with bringing pregnant Chinese women to give birth on U.S. soil https://t.co/DT9YTY2dra pic.twitter.com/kiOttlnLub
— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) February 1, 2019
When pregnant Chinese women called You Win USA Vacation Services, they didn’t receive information on visiting Disneyland or the Grand Canyon.More.
Instead, they sought coveted advice on how to make a very different type of trip — one aimed at giving birth on U.S. soil so their children would be American citizens. You Win USA employees allegedly coached the women on the lies they should write on bogus applications for tourist visas and made sure the women traveled before their bellies swelled too much to conceal.
Fly first to Hawaii to blend in with the hordes of tourists, and list the Trump International Hotel in Honolulu as your destination, the women were told. Then, hop a flight to Los Angeles.
It was a scheme that federal authorities say went on for years. But Thursday, the operator of You Win USA and the owners of another allegedly illicit “birth tourism” company in Southern California were arrested and charged with an array of crimes including immigration fraud, money laundering and identity theft, according to indictments filed in U.S. District Court.
The arrests marked the culmination of a long-running investigation by agents from the Department of Homeland Security and the Internal Revenue Service into three outfits operating for years in Los Angeles, the Inland Empire and Orange County. They charged as much as $100,000 for their clandestine services — a price tag that authorities say Chinese parents-to-be readily paid to make sure their children would be citizens of what You Win USA’s promotional material called the “most attractive nationality.”
“These cases allege a wide array of criminal schemes that sought to defeat our immigration laws — laws that welcome foreign visitors so long as they are truthful about their intentions when entering the country,” U.S. Atty. Nicola Hanna said in a statement. “Statements by the operators of these birthing houses show contempt for the United States, while they were luring clients with the power and prestige of U.S. citizenship for their children.”
Arrested Thursday morning were Dongyuan Li, 41, of Irvine, who was identified in court records as an executive at You Win USA Vacation Services in Irvine; as well as Michael Wei Yueh Liu, 53, of Rancho Cucamonga; and Jing Dong, 42, of Fontana, who authorities said owned and operated a company called USA Happy Baby in San Bernardino.
All three pleaded not guilty in court appearances Thursday afternoon, according to a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office. Li was ordered to be held in custody pending a detention hearing next week. Liu and Dong can be released after they post $250,000 bonds.
Also indicted Thursday was Wen Rui Deng, 65, an American citizen officials accuse of running a Los Angeles agency named Star Baby Care, which authorities believe to have been the largest birth tourism operation in the U.S. She is believed to be living in China, authorities said...
The Fight Over Identity Politics
At Foreign Affairs, a symposium responding to Francis Fukuyama's recent article, "(“Against Identity Politics,” September/October 2018), "E Pluribus Unum? The Fight Over Identity Politics."
E Pluribus Unum? - The Fight Over Identity Politics; https://t.co/r0ZJ1NMZPy via @ForeignAffairs
— Steven J. Gulitti ⚔️🏴☠️⚔️ (@SJGulitti) February 1, 2019
Lindsey Pelas Busting Out Like Bananas? Or Melons?
Heh.
At Popoholic:
At Popoholic:
Lindsey Pelas Busting Out Her Ginormous Super Cleavage Like Bananas! https://t.co/kH8BemDvyb pic.twitter.com/5WsNa02Vhq
— Popoholic (@Popoholic) February 1, 2019
Kimberley Garner Working Out on the Beach (PHOTOS)
She's looking good!
At Taxi Driver, "Kimberley Garner Bikini Bottom Workout on the Beach."
And at Daily Mail, "Kimberley Garner flaunts her sizzling physique in a skimpy blue thong-style bikini as she soaks up the sun in Miami."
At Taxi Driver, "Kimberley Garner Bikini Bottom Workout on the Beach."
And at Daily Mail, "Kimberley Garner flaunts her sizzling physique in a skimpy blue thong-style bikini as she soaks up the sun in Miami."
Thursday, January 31, 2019
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