Between Ricin Mom and the Snowden affair, an embarrassment of riches. Too amusing to pass up.
After serving as conduits for the US government’s push tarring Chinese cyber-spying as a serious threat to the nation, as well as being unsporting, our free press is hip to let us all know what “state run” Chinese media has to say.
From the Los Angeles Times, where the reporters don’t know shit from shinola on the topics of cybersecurity, cyberwar and cyber-espionage (no backlink, tar-baby scripting and infinite load):
After days of silence, state media have let loose with a barrage of criticism concerning Snowden’s allegations of a massive electronic surveillance program by the United States. The English-language China Daily ran a large cartoon of a shadowed Statue of Liberty, holding a tape recorder and microphone instead of a tablet and torch …
In Hong Kong, the pro-Communist Party Takungpao newspaper added: “If the U.S. is the true defender of democracy, human rights and freedom like it always described itself … President Obama should sincerely apologize to the people from other countries whose privacy was violated.’’
Of course, the criticism is irresistible, the opportunity too rich to pass up. For months now, the U.S. government has demanded that the Chinese government rein in an extensive military-sponsored hacking operation. During last weekend’s summit between Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping, cybersecurity was the main item on the U.S. agenda.
Snowden, the 29-year-old former U.S. government contractor who says he leaked National Security Agency secrets and is now in hiding in Hong Kong, alleged in an interview published early Thursday in the South China Morning Post that there had been more than 61,000 NSA hacking operations internationally, hundreds of them directed against China and Hong Kong.
“Chinese dissidents say they fear that the scandal will weaken the United States’ ability to take the high ground in pushing for more freedoms from Beijing,” adds the reporter.
“It is unfair to compare what the U.S. does to China … The U.S. program is trying to prevent certain terrorist activities, while China is listening in to monitor what dissidents are saying and writing. People get thrown into jail here just for an email,’’ one dissident told the reporter.
And people get thrown in jail for lots of things in the US. That ain’t much of a counter-argument anymore.
But we have freedom to shop and say whatever we like on Facebook and Twitter.
Bet on it, this will be just a faint memory by August. Especially after we’re told about all the terrorists we were saved from, Monday.
Coming from the White House blog, an excellent essay on how inequality in rock music has mirrored inequality in the country. Actually, it is worse. The growth of the winner-take-all society has made popular music even more unequal than American society, generally.
The music industry is a microcosm of what is happening in the U.S. economy at large. We are increasingly becoming a “winner-take-all economy,??? a phenomenon that the music industry has long experienced. Over recent decades, technological change, globalization and an erosion of the institutions and practices that support shared prosperity in the U.S. have put the middle class under increasing stress. The lucky and the talented – and it is often hard to tell the difference – have been doing better and better, while the vast majority has struggled to keep up.
These same forces are affecting the music industry. Indeed, the music industry is an extreme example of a “super star economy,??? in which a small number of artists take home the lion’s share of income …
[Krueger explains that digitization and the Internet have greatly decreased income from music sales. This in turn made artists go to performance as the only way to preserve income. As a consequence, ticket prices have exploded. But only for the benefit of the topmost.]
The top 5 percent [of pop music artists] take home almost 90 percent of all concert revenues.
This is an extreme version of what has happened to the U.S. income distribution as a whole. The top 1% of families doubled their share of income from 1979 to 2011.
Krueger also discusses how luck has an increasingly outsized effect on a society distorted by inequality.
Specifically, he shows a study on popularity, one which tested what numerical counts of downloads meant to success.
Here at DD blog I’ve discussed it before when testing effects of Google AdWords campaigns and how view counts are gamed on YouTube. Ranking, as I’ve long maintained, means a lot.
If you aren’t returned in the top page of findings at Google, if YouTube search doesn’t return your video or display it in “recommends” because it has low numbers, you do not exist.
You need luck, you need someone important to promote it on a site with lots of eyeballs. If such things are not available, and luck again has a lot to do with such fortune, then numbers languish. Their are few magical resurrections, few spontaneous rises to the very top.
And, indeed, YouTube music popularity mirrors the yawning inequality Krueger writes about at the White House blog.
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 [counts] 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.
[Note: Mega Grilled Ham and Cheese’s YouTube account was purely engaged in testing how to artificially boost counts on YouTube. Eventually YouTube pinched him off but the point and techniques had been made.]
But back to Krueger’s piece.
In it he shows a chart in which two songs in a research test are shown, rated by download count.
Those tested were invited to download all songs available in the test for free and the songs ranked by popularity. Halfway through the test, and unknown to those tested, the counts presented to half those tested were flipped, that is — the most popular tune by downloads was given the count of the lowest, and vice versa.
Here is the chart…
Says Krueger:
In the alternative world that began with the true rankings reversed, the least popular song did surprisingly well, and, in fact, held onto its artificially bestowed top ranking. The most popular song rose in the rankings, so fundamental quality did have some effect. But, overall – across all 48 songs – the final ranking from the experiment that began with the reversed popularity ordering bore absolutely no relationship to the final ranking from the experiment that began with the true ordering. This demonstrates that the belief that a song is popular has a profound effect on its popularity, even if it wasn’t truly popular to start with.
A more general lesson is that, in addition to talent, arbitrary factors can lead to success or failure, like whether another band happens to release a more popular song than your band at the same time.
Quality does have an effect, he adds, but the perception of popularity in a winner-take-all society like ours is a big influence.
“The same forces of technology, scale, luck and the erosion of social pressures for fairness that are making rock ‘n roll more of a superstar industry also are causing the U.S. economy to become more of a winner-take-all affair,” continues the economic adviser.
The United States, he explains, has the highest inequality among advanced nations. And the divide is getting bigger. The US now also has the highest level of social immobility than all other advanced countries.
The American Dream is now a myth. It was fast fading into it when I was in grad school.
Eventually he gets around to saying, in a very gentlemanly way, that a lot of the inequality has to do with corporate America screwing over the middle class for the last three decades.
Krueger warns, gently, that there will be increasing consequences.
In returning the country to Great Gatsby/Roaring Twenties levels of disparity, the corporate market economy is creating increasing inefficiencies. These inefficiencies spring from research that seems to conclusively show that workers who perceive unfair treatment by corporations exact a toll in efficiency.
Again:
It is not hard to find reasons why the institutions and practices that long enforced norms of fairness in the labor market have been eroded. At a time when market forces were pushing an increasing share of before-tax income toward the wealthiest Americans, the previous administration cut taxes disproportionately for the well off.
Even earlier, in the 1980s when inequality was starting to take off, the nominal value of the minimum wage was left unchanged from 1981 to 1989, causing it to decline in the value by 27 percent after accounting for inflation. The minimum wage serves as an important anchor for other wages, and the whole wage scale was brought down by the decline in the minimum wage.
A lower minimum wage and regressive tax changes sent a clear signal that maintaining fairness was not a priority.
Just coincidentally (ahem), “Taxavoidination” was a rock and roll video on one of the causes of growing economic inequality, corporate tax avoidance, or “profit shifting” to countries which have built finance-sheltering systems for the purposes of tax evasion.
“Rock and Roll, Economics, and Rebuilding the Middle Class,” at the White House blog, is here.
The post title, a not-subtle dig at “Reaganomics” and “trickle down.”
Edward Snowden said he was releasing the information to demonstrate “the hypocrisy of the US government when it claims that it does not target civilian infrastructure, unlike its adversaries”.
Jen Psaki, a spokeswoman for the State Department in Washington, said it was not aware of the hacking claims and could not comment directly, but she rejected the idea that such an incident would represent double standards given recent US criticism of Chinese cyber attacks.
You would hate to be the officials having to respond to queries on US double-standards re the rules of proper cyberwar and cyber-spying. But it comes with the job now and they are all well compensated.
The US acts as if it is the exceptional nation in cyberspace. It reserves the right to criticize and lecture others on what constitutes proper conduct but reserves the right to do what it pleases because of its allegedly exceptional nature.
The US, you see, only wages cyberwar, or cyber-espionage, campaigns in defense of freedom and to keep Americans safe. No other nations do similar things. They only cyber-spy on us and probe the net infrastructure to cause damage and steal our wealth.
The country has been in a terrible position to talk terms in cyberspace ever since it started up a hot clandestine war on the Iranian nuclear program and subsequent related malware spilled over into other nations.
White trash, stupidity, castor beans and the recipe for ricin as soap opera, granting first shot at book deal, movie or tv tie-ins and fifteen minutes of fame to nobodies only in the news for dumb perversity.
From the wire (taken with no backlink, network news infinite load page):
The husband of a pregnant actress, accused of sending poison-laced letters to President Obama and then trying to frame him for the crime, says it’s “heartbreaking” to think that his spouse implicated him, but he harbors no anger and hopes to move on with his life.
“The way I look at it, being angry is a waste of energy,” Nathaniel Richardson told ABC News. “She has done this to herself. She has destroyed my reputation and my life but there’s a way up from this and if I sit here and focus on anger, I can’t focus on getting on with my life.”
“I’m sitting there thinking I don’t even know what ricin is,” Nathaniel Richardson said. “I wasn’t even saying it right at first. I was calling it licin. Really, everything I’ve learned about it I’ve learned from [the FBI].”
Meanwhile, Nathaniel Richardson says there’s nothing left in his marriage to love.
“The person she was wasn’t real,” he said. “Just couldn’t believe it. Heartbreaking.”
Shannon Richardson’s attorney said overnight in a statement to ABC News, “I have seen no evidence to even suggest that my client desired to hurt the president or any of the other individuals involved. She is incarcerated for the first time in her life. Her primary concern remains her children and the trauma they are experiencing.”
One good thing about the Edward Snowden affair: It has quieted NSA director Keith Alexander on cyber-espionage against the US being the greatest transfer of wealth in history. At least for a moment.
In fact, it’s blown the Cult of Cyberwar and its army of shoeshine completely off the pages of the dailies.
In turnabout, we have Congressmen who just a couple weeks ago were warning about the perfidy of the Chinese, now trying to make themselves look good in grilling Keith Alexander.
Edward Snowden, make no mistake, was part of the big corporate shoeshine army of cybersecurity, the well-paid servants of the upper class, with the privilege of work in the national security megaplex.
That he left the fold is rather remarkable, considering the sheer size of the shoeshine army. Paid employment in the US does buy loyalty for most.
[NSA director Keith Alexander] said that “dozens” of terrorist attacks had been thwarted in part because of the domestic surveillance dragnet. But he did not give specific details …
Alexander said he struggled with how much detail to provide in public about the surveillance. “I would rather take a public beating, and let people think I’m hiding something, than jeopardize the security of this country,” Alexander testified. He said he would aim to declassify specific cases in which the two surveillance programs described by the Guardian had contributed to government efforts at thwarting terrorist attacks.
It’s reasonable to be a cynic, even healthy. Two months from now it will be business as usual. You wait and see.
The national security powers know it as does everyone else paying attention. One just has to be patient and the bad notices eventually blow away like dry dog excrement before the wind.
Too late now in the national security state. Always too late.
Life in the US is increasingly impoverished and desperate for tens, even hundreds, of millions of people. The economy is shifting rapidly to one that caters to plutocracy. Plus the low level mass business where people still need food and life necessary sundries that can be bought by government subsidy. And, of course, economical pay-as-you-go smartphone plans.
You retain the freedom to high-end shop. This is guaranteed. And so one would expect premier goods to become increasingly bizarre and alienating.
And so it is with today’s “innovation,” behold the 27k smart rifle with vanity social networking included (no link, an “endless load” site):
AUSTIN, Texas — A new company in Texas is selling a precision rifle with a unique technology that allows even an inexperienced shooter to hit a target 10 football fields away. The price tag is a staggering $27,500 …
The TrackingPoint rifles, which are Wi-Fi enabled and have a color display so users can post videos of their shots on Facebook or YouTube, started shipping in May. Schauble said his company is on track to sell as many as 500 of them this year, to clients that he describes as “high net worth hunters” who want to kill big game at long range.
It is said to have set the world record for taking down a “wildebeast” ten football fields away.
For that special wealthy total dickhead in WhiteManistan.
As you’ve found DD blog was royally bricked for the past two days.
And it renewed my jaundiced view of WordPress and troubleshooting of errors by crowd-sourcing.
Adding a plugin on WordPress is always fraught with problems. They can crash the blog in an instant, making everything unreadable, the control panel impossible to reach. WordPress users have grown used to it, sort of like the citizenry of the US getting used to a life that guarantees nothing in a surveillance state.
When a plugin or add-on crashes the system you have to manually edit WordPress’s sql database and delete the hooks active plugins have put into the system.
That was done and the blog came back. But in the next hour or so it became impossible to get past the front page. Readers were presented with an error called “too many redirects.”
A quick Google search reveals how common it is and how people in the WordPress forums have very little idea about the cause, precisely, or how to get around it except by trial and error.
And the WordPress programmers have never seen fit to comment upon it. Crowd-sourcing technical help consigns people who need it to endless sifting of Google results, direction to pages and pages and pages of contributions by people who can neither write nor read well. And who are also often not even particularly capable of accurately describing the fault and what subsequent steps were taken.
Conversely, tech web-hosting solutions at my provider are entirely dependent on who you get on the telephone. If you get someone who knows WordPress, as I did on my first call after the blog crashed, they can fix it quickly. Indeed, two years ago when a serious problem crashed the entire thing two people at the company restored it from the provider’s server back-up, something they must have, but which the mega-firm likes to keep hidden from its users.
On a second call, a different person mumbled at me for about an hour, showed no knowledge of a WordPress install — which the ISP offers as a business enticement — and then recited a script that WP troubleshooting “was outside the boundary of our support.”
When told it had not been outside the boundary of support 24 hours earlier, the script was modified slightly to inform “that person was operating outside the boundary of our support.”
There’s really nothing to be said. I’ve covered tech support issues with Blogger, and also with WordPress, most famously here:
As for aid in WordPress support forums, one is dependent upon the pure milk of human kindness dispensed by others. If one is inexperienced, the help forums can be combed for clues which, on balance, tend not to accurately describe the fault and its implications. In two questions I posted, the general solution offered was to update [9] to the newest version of WordPress, which is not a fix at all, but a catch-all recommendation many people receive from the volunteer squad as a pro forma band-aid. Some people, naturally, resent it.
As with Blogger help, one not so infrequently sees the passive-aggressive treatment handed out. If there has been a fault, it’s because the user was not diligent. The software can do no wrong.
“Code is poetry,” is the WP motto. Here’s some poetry, ala Ogden Nash:
I once had a blog that was fit
But one day a server got hit
My site went upside down
And I floundered around
WordPress had dumped upon me a s—
The song isn’t quite the same but the rhymes were.
In any case, the fault lies somewhere in the implementation of the WP “permalinks” structure. I had what are called “pretty links,” set to conform roughly to post titles.
The pretty links option had to be reset to default and a spontaneous category change made in a post to force changes in what was in the database. With material rewritten to default links, which are given an ID number, things seem to be working again.
However, one cannot revert to the old style without causing the ‘too many redirects’ error to recur.
There were a lot of options I could have followed, none of them particularly palatable. At one point I seriously contemplating tossing the entire thing.
I’m certain the database error — it’s not really one, as the db passes checks — could be edited out. And while I’m not afraid to work on the sql database directly, I don’t have intimate knowledge of everything in the control section.
Another possibility is that the hosting provider changed something at the server level. I have found that inquiring about such things is never particularly fruitful.
That’s the story so far. So reset whatever you have to reset. I’m sorry, it couldn’t be helped.
Additional note: Links to old pieces with the long format produce the redirect error. That means most of the internal old links are busticated. I’ll change some of them, as time allows.
However, since tens of thousands do not use this blog, most will stay ruptured unless I can restore “pretty links” at some future point.
Yes, it’s an ache.
Comments also will stay moderated for the time being. Akismet plugin failure started the cycle that led to collapse. When I reactivated it in one last attempt to get it going, it worked once again. Shortly after which the real problems began.
Posted in Bioterrorism at 12:52 pm by George Smith
An installation of a substitute for Akismet crashed the blog for about an hour in a php incompatibility. Turning off all plugins through the database restored access.
And, upon reactivating Akismet for one last try, I found it working again. Coincidence, maybe, maybe not.
Whatever.
Thanks for the help and suggestions, anyway, folks.
Despite the fact that a Texas woman admitted to sending ricin laced letters to President Barack Obama and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg last week, the woman is now apparently trying to pin the crime on her husband.
[An] FBI affidavit says Richardson failed a polygraph test and investigators found inconsistencies in her story. No charges have been filed against her husband. His attorney says the couple is divorcing and the letters were a setup.
And this isn’t the thing to say, either:
Richardson’s court-appointed attorney, Tonda Curry, said there was no intention to harm anyone and noted that it’s common knowledge that mail is checked before it reaches the person to whom these letters were addressed.
“From what I can say, based on what evidence I’ve seen, whoever did this crime never intended for ricin to reach the people to which the letters were addressed,” Curry said.
What? Someone thinks there’s mitigation because everyone knows the President doesn’t read his mail? Pathetic.
What about the poor sods who do actually have to deal with the greasy powder falling out of the letters?
This is going in a video.
Procedural note: I don’t know about you but I’ve come to hate news websites that pull the endless load routine. It’s an increasingly grasping tactic employed by corporate America to tie up eyeballs.
When I run into them the scripting overhead becomes a burden on the machine. And, henceforth, upon encountering such sites, material will be taken without attribution other than “from the wire” and will not contain backlinks.
What are your thoughts on websites that practice the never-ending load?
