Jorge Scientific — really, that’s the name. They’re a bunch of scientific guys, of that there can be no doubt.
Unsurprising, though. From a country that’s addicted to permanent wars, regarded by security corporations as money-making much like professional football, it would be unusual if there were none of this. In fact, one suspects there is plenty of private digital phone camera video of security men and soldiers who appear to smell strongly of drink.
Reference — Young, Fast & Scientific. I thought this was really boss when I was in high school. Still do.
DONALD BARLETT, Co-Author, “The Betrayal of the American Dream”: The “Advertising Age” has written off the middle class in this country. They say the age of mass affluence is over. And now you’re going to have to learn to cater to the super rich and the affluent in other countries, because the middle class in China, Brazil, India, that’s the source of the coming wealth, not the U.S. middle class …
DONALD BARLETT: On the surface it sounds great, open trading, other countries. What’s to be against? The problem is, when the theory was developed back in the early 1800s, it was envisioned as countries operating comparably.
The incomes of the United States and China are so disparate that it would never work. It’s always going to be cheaper to go over to China to build what you want to build.
PAUL SOLMAN: As manufacturing jobs migrated aboard, Barlett and Steele point out, the Middle American standard of living sank steadily.
JAMES STEELE: If you’re going to get the smart jobs in this country, the brain power, and it is not working out as everybody said it would, because now many of those jobs are starting to go offshore faster than the old manufacturing jobs did.
PAUL SOLMAN: The job drain, especially to China, has become a staple of both presidential campaigns.
NARRATOR: Under Obama, we have lost over half-a-million manufacturing jobs. And for the first time, China is beating us.
NARRATOR: Romney’s never stood up to China. All he’s done is send them our jobs.
DONALD BARLETT: The real bottom-line question is, what kind of a society do we want? Do we want a society built on the principle that the only thing that matters is the lowest possible price or a society built on the principle that everyone should have a living wage?
And those are going to be two very different societies. And this goes back again so what we’re talking about. The people up here, they don’t want everyone to have a living wage.
PAUL SOLMAN: So, you actually think we could have an economy in this country in which lots of Americans would simply be not part of the economy at all?
DONALD BARLETT: Irrelevant.
JAMES STEELE: You know, they will have jobs, but these are going to be jobs that don’t pay much.
JAMES STEELE: Maybe things will have to get a lot worse before people realize that there are some things, some positive things that government can do. These things didn’t use to be so partisan in this country. We used to be able to get together and do things for the benefit of everybody. And we hope one of these days we’re back to that. We’re definitely not there now.
Finally, most of the US citizenry gets this.
However, Mitt Romney built his expanded fortune on shipping jobs to China and destroying middle class livelihoods. This fact has allowed the Democrats, and the President in last night’s debate, to tag him as an “outsourcing pioneer.”
He is, in other words, the vulture mega-businessman who most Americans should be running away from as fast as they can.
Romney: “They hack into our computers.” Yes, definitely, that’s why all the jobs went there.
Barlett and Steele are essentially arguing that you can’t have an economy for most Americans where the only stuff made is artisan goods for the very wealthy and portions of emerging upper middle classes in other countries. It’s a point I’ve made numerous times under the Made in China tab.
Mechanical Turk, and others like it, allow corporate America to get around the minimum wage by making more and more work — which is all service and task oriented — free-lance labor where people are paid pennies.
In this smartphone applications are used make life worse by speeding up the leveraged destruction of the ability of average people in the street to make a living.
When Fernando Navales lost his job last June, things looked pretty grim.
His efforts to find gainful employment proved futile until he downloaded an app called Gigwalk, where companies offer small amounts of money for small tasks that take little time. (Users simply swipe to “accept” the task and complete it within a set time period.) Within days, he was earning more than he had in his previous position.
Navales threw himself into the work, taking between 30 and 40 “gigs” per day (often photographing restaurants for Microsoft’s (MSFT) Bing search engine). Over the past year, he has completed about 750 gigs – and this new kind of employment has changed his perceptions of the working world.
“It’s a large part of my life,” he said. “I actually turned my brother onto it. He’s in Ohio, but we flew out to New York together and we basically took a working trip to NY taking pictures of restaurants.”
Not included: The part where the journalist asks the man and his brother how much they actually netted after deducting living expenses and two round trip air tickets from Ohio to NYC.
While there have been businesses catering to this audience for some time, it was the advent of the smart phone that allowed them to take off.
“But as these services now get pushed to your phone … it’s more convenient for the task consumers to receive the jobs when they’re out already,” said Henry Mason, head of research and analysis at TrendWatching.com.
Beyond Gigwalk, there are a few leaders in the business-to-consumer tasksumer space, including TaskRabbit and Mechanical Turk, a division of Amazon (AMZN) …
“What you’re starting to see is a higher degree of comfort with the concept,” said Ariel Seidman, CEO and co-founder of Gigwalk. “Where [it] really shines is when you get to places that are hard get to, like Kalamazoo, MI or Kodiak, AK. Those types of places, you can all of a sudden reach into them with the same efficiency and speed in which you can reach into a Chicago or LA …”
Other firms bring people together in a different way. PleaseBringMe acts as a handshake service between travelers who can volunteer to bring things like hard to find items to someone at their destination.
“My wife is pregnant and craving In-n-Out,” wrote one user. “We used to live in CA but are now in the NYC area. If anybody would be willing to buy 4 Animal Style cheeseburgers and bring them on a plane to me in NYC, that would be awesome.”
Another user, from Brazil, is on the hunt for a drink that’s only sold in Greece. “I want Mythos beer!!!!,” he pleads.
It’s difficult to get past the brainlessly towering odiousness of a request for fast food cheeseburgers to be flighted, in passenger, from soCal to NYC, which — of course — has no cheeseburgers, cheeseburgers, cheeseburgers.
One begins to wonder if it’s even real or just another among millions of Internet trolls and pranksters posting something vile to see how many people are crushed and stupid enough to jump at it.
Most people with sense instantly recognize things like Mechanical
Turk as mechanisms for an economy mediated by vultures and predators, using trivial mass computing applications and bad economic conditions to slice more flesh off a shrinking active labor force with few ways to protect itself.
One comment, chosen from many — all of them pretty supercilious — on the GigWalking brothers:
If their total income from this is under $400, they wont [sic] need to report it as self-employment income.
Undecided “Walmart moms” in Milwaukee, Wis., gave the presidential debate win to President Obama by a narrow margin – but they’re not sold yet.
In a bipartisan focus group conducted by Public Opinion Strategies and Momentum Analysis and sponsored by Walmart, a group of undecided female voters were asked to vote for who they thought won the second presidential debate. Five women in the group said Obama, three said Mitt Romney, and two said they thought it was tie.
Overall, though, most of these women said they remain undecided. They said they feel as though it’s time to do some more research …
The women agreed on a series of points.
First, the debate made them want to do more research on the candidates. “I need to research some of these facts,” one skeptical sounding woman said. “Anybody can spout out numbers,” said another woman.
“Research,” my ass. Who talks that way in real life? No one you can stand. I guaran-damn-tee that if you’re chatting with someone and they mumble about needing to do “more research” your opinion of them drops and you’ve started thinking about where to go to get a couple slices of pizza.
Americans don’t know shit about “research.” And the idea that more of it would need to be done now exposes only a small pack of fools jerking around a pollster/interviewer because they can.
Scientists and doctors do research. Random Americans are often time-wasters who spout ill-considered rot on the spur of the moment. There’s a big difference.
Previously I’ve written about gaming Google and YouTube. Google and its properties, along with social networking sites, have made an environment in which most value is accrued only by numbers of likes, views, inbound links and increasing numbers which allegedly measure legitimate followers and friends. With web search, this has instated a winner-take-all digital ecology in which there is always strong incentive to cheat, to purchase rigging.
So I discovered that about two weeks after I’d written the linked piece an anonymous account had ripped “GE and Jeff (Taxavoidination)” and uploaded it under their account.
Subsequently, the user — going under the name Mega Grilled Ham & Cheese, rigged its views.
Here are snapshots of the results.
The number of views were zero until, one day, they rocketed to a number far in excess of what the original copy was able to achieve through discovery, linkage and me pushing it.
Tapping the public web stats, it’s easy to see what was done.
All the views alias to Facebook. It’s quite clear this was an automated process, either using a network of dummy FB accounts or a maneuver in which YouTube sees thousands of scripted views, delivering with spoofing that makes them appear to originate from FB. Notice the small bulge for numbers from a “mobile device” directly above the Facebook statistic. While it may be coincidental, it sticks out just enough to give you the idea the dummy Facebook views were manipulated through misuse of a smartphone app (or a rogue app distributed for the purpose) and that YouTube’s data collection saw them as distinct, when they’re just part of the same process.
In recent weeks I’ve noticed one of the tactics for net comment spamming and numbers rigging is through automated processes which either utilize networks of dummy Facebook accounts or forgery which makes them appear as originating from real FB users who actually did not initiate the activity.
The latter — the hacked by Mitt Romney phenom — is attributed to conspiracy thinking among liberals with Facebook assigning it to mistakes made with mobile phone apps during web browsing.
Mother Jones discusses it here. Facebook, it informs has claimed the phenomenon is mass random user errors on smartphones. Whether or not this is actually true is uncertain.
The magazine concedes “The Obama camp is reportedly experiencing Facebook funny business too … On Tuesday, Buzzfeed noted the president’s page saw an odd spike in likes.”
In any case, it is baldly obvious the Facebook network can be used in web rigging schemes.
Other giveaways to Mega Grilled Ham & Cheese’s minor YouTube gaming include the observation that the large numbers of views come with zero or no likes and no comments — except one spam linking to some manner of other squirrelly web promotions site. You can, of course, also buy likes and comments, but they are extra work. In this case, it’s quite obviously a falsified operation, which is perhaps the point.
Other videos uploaded by Mega Grilled Ham & Cheese show similar patterns –someone interested in testing to what degree views and likes can be manipulated.
Whether YouTube’s anti-click fraud algorithms ever catch up with such abuse remains to be seen. Odds are the nature of the system created, and the way it makes a profit, rule against it.
U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has revealed some details of U.S. plans to deal with a massive cyber attack. Those plans include launching a possible cyber-offensive in what some analysts say is a message to Iran.
With thousands of enemy cyber-actors probing the Pentagon’s systems millions of times a day, the secretary of defense has spoken about the threat of a massive cyber attack before. But his warnings late Thursday in New York have been the strongest yet.
“This is a pre-9/11 moment. The attackers are plotting,??? said Panetta …
Gary Schmitt, a security analyst at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, sees Panetta’s strong remarks as a message for Iran.
“This is Secretary Panetta essentially saying ‘this is enough.’ It somewhat reminds you that cyber warfare is the kind of warfare that impinges on being terrorism,??? said Schmitt. “So, Iran, the tens of thousands of computers that it shut down in the Gulf, it would be the same thing as if an Iranian agent were to throw a bomb into a room with a variety of servers.???
Critics of that message include George Smith, a cyber specialist at Globalsecurity.org, whose job for several years has been to analyze the U.S. government’s assessments of cyberthreats. He said Iran’s capabilities are not as developed as those of the United States, and he believes issuing warnings about cyber attacks may actually encourage Tehran to launch them.
“They came to the game late. In cyberspace, it’s basically an arms race, so people are going to be spurred by what they perceive other people to be doing.???
It’s worth defining the American Enterprise Institute as a standard right-wing think tank that would virtually automatically advocate for a war with Iran.
Voice of America had a nice chat with me and I remarked at one point that it took a lot of gall to warn about Iranian cyberattack after we’d been poking that nation with directed malware, the equivalent of digital pointed sticks, for awhile. We were throwing our bombs into their digitized control rooms, so to speak, first. And many computer security specialists, inside and outside the government, surely understand it.
And you should pass it around in social media, in spite of being afraid the name will soil you among peers, if you’re as sick of the deadening Cult of Cyberwar’s central hypocrisies as I am. It’s been well over ten years of this stuff, since before I became a Senior Fellow at GlobalSec, after 9/11.
And, believe me, it’s been all downhill since then. The topic of cyberwar has been virtually changed into another third rail issue, one in which the debate is not a debate or an attempt to inform at all, but only a regular stream of dire announcements and proclamations on what must inevitably occur: The country will be made a dysfunctional ruin in an afternoon of Internet mischief if agendas aren’t attended to immediately.
The last public ride of Arlen Specter, who died today, was facing the wrath of the nascent Tea Party deep inna heart of Pennsy Dutch country, where I grew up. He was among the first of the moderates to be run out of town.
“Specter startled fellow senators in April 2009 when he announced he was switching to the Democratic side, saying he found himself ‘increasingly at odds with the Republican philosophy,'” reads Specter’s obituary at the LA Times.
Looking back from 2012, “increasingly at odds with the Republican philosophy” doesn’t quite capture the Zeitgeist.
In 2009 Craig Miller of Lebanon, PA, confronted Specter, then a “new” Democrat, at a town hall meeting. It made great television and went nationwide, a GOP rally point for virulent opposition to the Obama administration’s plan to rework the health care system.
Miller was incoherent, then and in later television appearances. He couldn’t express, even in a basic way, the specific nature of his gripes other than to rage over alleged violation of the Constitution. However, his anger was very real. Three years on, it’s still visceral. It wilted and ultimately destroyed a gravely ill Arlen Specter who was unprepared for it. Craig Miller, and everyone else, deserved much better.
The outburst, infamous in the genesis of the Tea Party, was emblematic of the lack of Democratic leadership and its choices of wan uninspiring ruling class pols so used to being surrounded by sycophants and legal bribe-masters they can’t engage with people outside Washington in any way. After having been given the keys to power at a time so fraught in American history, they decided being empty unresponsive suits was most prudent.
With Hey Craig Man! I realized it was impossible to write any lyrical narrative that fit the tableau. The only things that worked were non sequiturs and balderdash about heevahavas, nudists, poozle, on your floor, outside your door, plus Pennsylvania Dutch-isms. There was nothing you could take away from the event except failure.
Paul Broun: God’s word is true. I’ve come to understand that. All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell. And it’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior. You see, there are a lot of scientific data that I’ve found out as a scientist that actually show that this is really a young Earth. I don’t believe that the Earth’s but about 9,000 years old. I believe it was created in six days as we know them. That’s what the Bible says.
As previously said, if you count the number of Republicans who are profoundly anti-science, they now stack up like cord wood. And the Republican Party, in an affront to everything rational, puts such men on the House Committee responsible for oversight of science.
It’s no longer mildly amusing in a “look at the heevahava” way. It constitutes a menace, a conscious effort to overturn rational leadership.
When I was at Lehigh a man named Michael Behe was hired by the chemistry department. My thesis advisor was part of the search committee.
After Behe got tenure, he was able to get a book published on creationism. He called it intelligent design and the GOP right seized on Behe as a standard bearer for debunking evolution.
Here was a tenured academic in the science faculty at a respectable school who had allegedly disproved Darwin. Lehigh’s science professors had paid Behe no mind although quite a few people on the ground knew what he was pushing.
This became a disaster for Lehigh when Behe subsequently moved to the biology department. Today, Lehigh’s biology division publishes a disclaimer bluntly stating his creationism ideas have no basis in science.
But the damage had been done.
While Behe was hardly the only person to attack evolution, his legacy has played a substantial role in the GOP’s war on science, epitomized by its success in getting many Americans to question basic biology in the mistaken belief that their faith is under attack by science.
During the lengthy years of my education I never ran across a shortage of scientists who held belief in God. And I could write an essay about the way they occasionally expressed it.
Science is not capable of testing for whether there is God or not despite what people who don’t know anything about science may think. Science neither can prove nor disprove the existence of a deity yet much of the GOP antagonism toward science comes from fanning the idea in its base that science is an attack on religion.
I’m going to take a moment to relate a moment that has stayed with me all my life, taken as a freshman in a chemistry class during my undergraduate years.
One of my chemistry professors, now long gone, was discussing the characteristics of water. And I will convey the nut of it without going into the fine details of molecular structure.
Water, he said to the class, was a substance that was different from most, in that when it turns to solid, it expands.
Ice takes up more room than liquid water, is less dense — and so it floats; liquid water is not compressible as is ice, which turns back to liquid when you squeeze it. It’s why, among many things, we have the pleasure of ice-skating.
And since water is the solvent in which life’s chemical reactions occur, my chem prof said, this feature was one of the unique things that is important to life. It is why lakes and rivers do not freeze from the bottom up and become one entire block of ice during winter, and that’s essential.
So he added that this was something that affirmed his faith in a God because it is such a special thing. And he left it at that, not questioning anything else or trying to weave some complex explanation for an intelligent designer that other people should be persuaded to accept (although not being there and lacking a true science union card, others may miss such a distinction).
It was an expression of his faith.
God’s role, if it exists in water, cannot be tested for. It cannot be proven. And it cannot be rejected.
So my experience was that many scientists do have faith and it is not incongruent with their rationality.
On the other hand, this is why the modern GOP has become so contemptible. It takes ignorance of the way things are and wields it as a weapon to attack that which is scientific fact.
So if many in our country think that putting a modern Republican in power is a way to move the place forward, to help it deal with the very complex global problems with which it is currently faced, they’re one with entropy, which is the falling apart of everything, from order to disorder, until there is nothing left. That’s a tragedy and we should not delude ourselves that such actions, behaviors or opinions defend anything worthwhile.
I don’t see it as even a matter of science because I don’t know that you can prove one or the other. That’s one of those things. We can talk about theology and all of those other things but I’m basically concerned about, you’ve got a choice between Claire McCaskill and myself. My job is to make the thing there. If we want to do theoretical stuff, we can do that, but I think I better stay on topic.
If you count the number of Republicans who are profoundly anti-science, they stack up like cord wood. Every time you turn around — the last was this weekend — there will be some videotape of a Republican Party heevahava going on about the perfidy of scientists, the satanic deception of evolution, weird and offensive explanations of women’s reproductive biology, how one can pray the gay away, and the gigantic hoax of global warming
Indeed, the GOP lines the House Science committee with them showing only how the party is composed of extremists and nitwits, people who are toxic to progress and enlightenment.
This morning I was on the phone for an interview with Voice of America on Leon Panetta’s digital 9/11 warning at a “National Security Dinner” for business executives in NYC.
The mainstream news blotter on my PC had followed the usual script, dutifully repeating all the warnings about an infrastructure vulnerable to — potential Iranian cyberattack!
Ten years ago it was mostly always China that was named. And China is still a very favorite country to mention in Cult of Cyberwar news.
But as I’ve pointed out before, it takes a lot of gall to paint Iran as plotting to launch cyberattacks — the Shamoon virus being the star of this show, since it infected Saudi Arabian Aramco installations — when you’re the party who started the cyberwar.
While the US government has not acknowledged it, it’s no longer a secret that it has been quietly hard at work attacking Iranian infrastructure, and the networks of other Middle Eastern nations deemed unfriendly, with malware.
And it would come as no surprise if it had touched off a cyber-arms race and a retaliating clandestine war.
So since we’ve been poking Iran with pointed sticks in cyberspace for awhile, we’re really not in any position to summon outrage over malware on Saudi Arabian oil terminal networks.
We had to go and shit the bed so now we must live with it.
Look — it’s simple. Have good back-ups. Root, hog or die.
It’s worth adding, that the implication that Americans will wake up one morning and find the country, or portions of it, a smoking dysfunctional ruin due to Iranian cyberattack is about as disingenuous as can be imagined.
However, this type of rhetorical/political maneuvering is not new and Panetta’s speech is one in a historical continuum of warnings about digital Pearl Harbor that go back well over fifteen years. In fact, many American cyberwarriors, and computer security workers, were in rubber pants when they were first cranked up. We furnish the enemy of convenience, according to the time and conditions. The rest of the stuff about what they can do, embellished with the seasoning of computer malware incidents chosen from current news, follows automatically.
Here in the U.S., attacks on large financial institutions during the last two months have delayed or disrupted services on customer Web sites. Secretary Panetta said the scale and speed of those attacks was “unprecedented??? …
While recent attacks concern defense officials, the worry is that there could be even more destructive scenarios. “We know that foreign cyber actors are probing America’s critical infrastructure networks,??? said Secretary Panetta. Those hackers are trying to access computer control systems that operate chemical, electricity and water plants as well as those that guide transportation systems, he said. “We know of specific instances where intruders have successfully gained access to these control systems,??? he said.
Secretary Panetta said the Department of Defense is finalizing the most comprehensive change to the rules of engagement in cyberspace in seven years. “The new rules will make clear that the Department has a responsibility not only to defend DoD’s networks, but also to be prepared to defend the nation and our national interests against an attack in or through cyberspace,??? he said.
What’s not explained here is that networked computers have been everywhere for a good long time. And that trouble-makers and malware invariably always get into them, sooner or later. Well over a decade ago, malware was found on a space shuttle computer, for instance.
And to catalog it all might fill the Library of Congress.
As for the attack-the-water meme, no a requirement of every story on the issue, DD blog has dealt with it decisively, many times. Most recently, here.
And, the “unprecedented” attacks on US giant banks, which made their web pages run slow or inconvenienced some doing on-line banking, a digital Pearl Harbor that somehow failed to bring the nation low, here.
Due to the continued abuse of public news on the issue by US national security men, the now constant use of fearful scenarios and predictions, the public is primed to react badly to even the most trivial incidents. People believe the country could be ruined through cyberspace because they have been told so many times by the Leon Panettas.
One understands fully why the Leon Panettas of our nation do this. They must. Since 9/11, everything must be described in terms of how it could be a potential American civilization-destroying catastrophe, or you are not doing proper due diligence. Many others would say there’s quite a bit of rote CYA-ism to it.
Trouble via the Internet daily will always be with us. It’s a risk that must be managed and, to a large extent, is — with great labor and struggle. But it has not been served by unleashing a state-sponsored malware attack on foes and then hypocritically complaining when someone has aimed a clumsy attack in kind back at you or an “ally.”
“All told, the Shamoon virus was probably the most destructive attack that the private sector has seen to date,??? said Leon Panetta, as conveyed by the Wall Street Journal.
But Iranian computers, or those in other countries caught in the splatter campaign by the Stuxnet program and its brethren somehow have gone missing in this calculation. Because they’re the bad guys and deserve it, right?
In the world of global network security, what you see depends on where you’re standing.
“The Shamoon virus attacked 30,000 Saudi ARAMCO workstations and replaced crucial system files with an image of a burning U.S. flag … That virus added false information that overwrote all of the real data on those machines,” reads the Journal.
