My take has always been that, primarily, only morons click on Google AdSense links, and by extension, Facebook advertising. Those who do click may be doing so only out of curiosity, often to see just how awful whatever’s being shilled actually is.
And some knob named Alexander Heffner at the blog of the ex-newspaper formerly known as the Christian Science Monitor:
Mark Zuckerberg has the potential to rekindle confidence in the markets and to engage everyday Americans in the kind of economic growth that has been limited to only a handful of individuals in recent years.
Four out of five Facebook users say they have never bought a product or service as a result of advertising or comments on the social network site, underlining, to some observers, the challenges Facebook faces when it comes to drawing in revenue.
Furious Facebook.Com investors have filed a lawsuit against founder Mark Zuckerberg, alleging he knew the business had been overvalued ahead of its flotation last month (May12).
Zuckerberg floated his social networking site on the U.S. stock market for $100 billion (£63 billion) but shares soon dropped in price, prompting complaints from many investors.
Critics allege the CEO knew the stock was overpriced and protected his own finances by selling off the organisation, according to TMZ.com.
Mark Zuckerberg and his FB colleagues are great poster boys for the culture of lickspittle and how it works. The jig’s up for Facebook but they have their piles.
And you’re not famous and you have a couple hundred ‘friends,’ maybe more, on Facebook?
It’s all right to tell the doctor you don’t need any more renewals on that prescription for stupid pills. It’s OK to stop taking them. Really.
The third US drone strike in as many days in Pakistan has raised the three-day death toll in the aerial attacks to at least 27, according to Pakistani intelligence officials.
Monday’s strike in the Hesokhel village of North Waziristan’s tribal areas, was said to have targeted a hideout for fighters, officials said.
The latest strike, which officials said had killed 15 people, was the seventh in a span of less than two weeks.
The attack on Monday morning came just after a strike on Sunday that killed 10 suspected fighters …
“Many people here in Pakistan are frankly tired of the United States’ presence in the region, and are calling for Islamabad to sever ties with the US …”
That wouldn’t stop the drones. You have to make them stop, dudes, not just complain about it. Haven’t you gotten that yet?
The reason Pakistan isn’t stopping the drones is because it’s military has no capability and can’t afford to have its best gear quickly destroyed in any fight, small or large, with the US military.
Steve Smith, a longtime racist activist with a history of violence and top-level ties to numerous white nationalist hate groups, has been elected to a 4-year term on the Republican Party’s county committee for Luzerne County, Penn., One People’s Project reports.
Recruited into the neo-Nazi movement while he was stationed at Fort Bragg in the 1990s, Smith, of Pittston, Penn., has been active in an extraordinary array of white nationalist, skinhead, and neo-Nazi groups, including American Third Position, Keystone United (formerly Keystone State Skinheads), and the Council of Conservative Citizens. He is a former Aryan Nations member and former leader of the Philadelphia chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of White People …
Smith’s ties to the racist right stretch far beyond the political. In 2001, he co-founded a racist skinhead group now known as Keystone United (which was until 2009 known as the Keystone State Skinheads, or KSS), one of the largest and most active single-state racist skinhead crews in the country. In March 2003, he and two other KSS members were arrested in Scranton for beating up Antoni Williams, a black man, using stones and chunks of pavement. Smith pleaded guilty to terrorist threats and ethnic intimidation and received a 60-day sentence and probation.
To advance his goals, Smith has distanced himself somewhat from his violent past and focused on political activism. As state chairman for American Third Position (A3P), a white nationalist political party that aims to deport immigrants and return the United States to white rule, he has for several years been working the crowds at local Tea Party gatherings, which he once described as “fertile grounds for our activists.???
In October 2010, he led a delegation of A3P activists in presenting the party’s position to a Scranton Tea Party group. “We explained that the A3P was formed to represent white Americans, who have been denied representation for decades …”
In our book, “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism,” my co-author Theda Skocpol and I examine this remarkable grass-roots engagement … In the end, we found that tea partyers combine laudable and effective political engagement with high levels of misinformation and troubling intolerance of their political opponents …
[Tea Party] members we interviewed held wildly inaccurate views of what is in, or not in, public policy. Tea partyers confidently told us that the Affordable Care Act of 2010 (“ObamaCare” in their parlance) includes both death panels and the abolition of Medicare – although both claims are flat-out untrue … At times, the level of misinformation in tea party circles reached conspiratorial proportions. At a tea party meeting in Massachusetts, people discussed the possibility that the “smart grid” (an electrical infrastructure improvement approximately as controversial as road repair) was in fact a plan that would give the government control over the thermostats in people’s homes. Where are these smart, educated Americans getting such terribly inaccurate information?
Some of these rumors live primarily on the Internet, but another major source is Fox News. Almost all interviewees I spoke with had a favorite Fox News show – and some retirees reported watching as many as eight hours of Fox News a day. Checking the transcripts, we found that former Fox News host Glenn Beck had indeed raised the weird possibility of federal thermostat control on his show …
At a meeting I attended in Virginia, a visiting lecturer informed local tea party members . . . The United Nations and American authorities at all levels of government, it was claimed, are engaged in a communist conspiracy. In the near term, this scheme would take the form of apparently innocuous measures like new bike paths. But in the long term … would lead to the confiscation of all private property and the herding of Americans citizens into urban ghettos and then concentration camps. “Sustainable development,” the lecturer concluded, was a euphemism for the coming one world government.
Last week I used the words “bug nuts” to describe The Iowa GOP’s proposed party platform, also chock full of conspiracy theories including an assertion that government had made it illegal to do home repairs.
I have been told a Zygote is a person. That’s Zygote, with a capital Z.
At this juncture I have no tolerance for right wingers, theocrats and stupid people. Wish it were otherwise but it can’t be helped. I’m flawed this way.
You do realize that the term Zygote, like the terms: fetus, infant, toddler adolescent, teen, adult, and senior are quantifiers and not qualifiers of biological human life. So biologically speaking a Zygote is like an adult, but just at different stages of life. Even at the oocyte stage there exists 46 unique chromosomes with the entire genetic blueprint of a new individual. Chromosomes contain tightly packed, tightly coiled molecules called DNA. DNA contains all the instructions needed for this single-cell embryo to develop into an adult …
[snip — more stuff about abortion]
Also, for a long time the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), i.e. “the Central Bank’s Central Bank??? backed a gold standard as being the basis of sound monetary policy. Having a gold standard would reign in debt spending because it would constrain Congress/ Fed from creating liabilities out of thin air. So, guess which standard the political actors will support.
There’s never a day when some annoying nerd has a story to tell about his revolutionary app, social and smart, for changing the world. Always, they’re trivial solutions to minor annoyances or non-problems, just ways for the geek to make money siphoning cash from one established process to a new one owned by the tech revolutionary, or creative destroyer, or whatever.
All you have to do is wave an iPhone, mention “app” and “social,” and your inane idea is considered gold by the gullible.
[Ryan Rzepeki’s] new company, Social Bicycles, also called SoBi, will launch a pilot program “at the end of the summer??? in Buffalo and two unnamed West Coast cities soon after, Rzepecki says. It’s not just the model that he has going for him, it’s also the data.
‘I looked at the model in Europe, where there are big docking stations and kiosks,??? said Rzepecki. “It’s very expensive. I thought, what if they have smart bikes rather than smart bike racks????
It is that idea of a smart bike – and a mobile app to connect all those bikes – that is at the heart of Social Bicycles. Once you subscribe to the service, the app will tell where the closest sharable bike is …
“We definitely see the software, electronics and tracking package, working for other parts of transportation,??? said Rzepecki. “We’re Interested in looking at other modes. You don’t need a five ton steel cage to go a few miles.???
Never been to southern California, let alone Pasadena. Bicycling in large numbers is a total non-starter. Lotsa reasons: heat, traffic, culture, sweat, and the vague antipathy almost everyone holds for the few weaving fitness freak guys and gals in spandex and helmets on Saturday morning between Sierra Madre and eastern Pasadena near the high school.
Perhaps surprising to others, soCal has quite a few people who DO NOT have cars. Largely, they still do not gravitate to bikes. They use shoe leather and work in service near their homes. Or they use public transportation, albeit mediocre to poor.
Collect data from a potential fleet of such bikes? Who cares? Collecting data on vehicular traffic flow — that’s where action is.
And I’ll avoid the glaring distinctions between European city life and American, particularly in the hinterlands, even in college towns.
So go to Europe already. What’s with the pilot program in two “unnamed” West Coast cities stuff?
Is there anyone who doesn’t see electromagnetic pulsing on television, in comic books or movie screens a couple times a week?
From the wire — no link:
New Regency has picked up The New West, an adaptation of a comic book written by Jimmy Palmiotti, with Len Wiseman now on board to produce …
Palmiotti, co-writer of DC Comics’ All-Star Western comic (art by Phil Noto), wrote the two-issue New West set in a near-future Los Angeles where an electromagnetic pulse bomb causes all technology to stop working. In this hostile environment, a disgraced former LAPD detective must rescue a kidnapped mayor with only a horse and a sword.
Unintentionally hilarious because no one would actually want to rescue the mayor of Los Angeles for much of any reason in southern California.
Phoned in rubbish by those in Hollywood who regard audiences as so many factory-caged chickens.
Tim Cook and Apple appear to occasionally worry the reputation of the company has taken a hit. For all the sweat shop labor in China, legal global tax cheating and general arrogance.
So now DD sees company officials occasionally muttering about how they want to make it all up. They’ll look into labor abuse. We legally tax cheat because everyone else does it. And so on.
Today, it’s Tim Cook telling a gullible audience he’d like to make some iJunk completely in the US. Someday. But not today.
“The truth is the tool and die-maker skill in the U.S. began to go down in the late ’60s and early ’70s,??? Cook said. “How many tool-and-die makers do you know in the U.S. now? I could call a meeting and invite every tool-and-die maker in the United States and we wouldn’t fill this room.???
Not so in China, though. Said Cook, “In China you could fill a city with tool-and-die makers.???
Tim Cook was 10 in 1970.
So precocious, he knew the score then. Unskilled Americans, already going to shite.
It was all in China, just waiting to be tapped. We had nothin’ to do with sending it there. Nothin,’ I tell ya!
Told it was unclear how much the Iranians knew about the code, and offered evidence that it was still causing havoc, Mr. Obama decided that the [Stuxnet] cyberattacks should proceed. In the following weeks, the Natanz plant was hit by a newer version of the computer worm, and then another after that.
I’ve emphasized this is a good thing. Vigorous anti-virus company competition in the global industry makes finding and neutralizing state-designed viruses a business asset. So the social good on the Internet is served by messing up, terminating or exposing various aspects of cyberwar operations.
So making the paranoid mullahs more paranoid is good, eh?
In the Nineties I set out in my book Virus Creation Labs to tell some of the story of the anti-virus industry. As part of the job its programmers were keen to discover the identity of various virus-writers and they became good at it. Now they have hard news the US government, one of their clients, has been writing computer viruses they have to treat.
Finding some of the virus writers was easy work. The original hackers who wrote them often revealed themselves, anyway. They liked to brag about it. There was no thrill in the activity if people who knew about viruses didn’t know they were yours. Since there was no money in it back then it’s easy to grasp the motivation.
Sometimes it took more analysis of code on the part of the industry to narrow it down to one individual, perhaps unnamed but recognized as the writer.
With the US government now exposed as involved in virus-writing there are different pullers at work in exposing the perpetrators of the operation.
A company may depend a great deal on government contracts. So what to do, what to do, when malware inevitably crawls into non-target computers in non-designated-enemy nations and your analysts and coders have a good idea of who’s behind it?
You develop an antidote and distribute it to everyone. But do you spill the beans? You have a conflict of interest, moral and ethical hazard.
Doing the right thing might cost business.
Or if you’re a security company not in the US does it matter at all? You know who’s behind the attacks and you have a nice story to tell based on your pulling apart viruses. Lots of people might want to hear it.
Be the whistleblower.
Virus-writers, professional or amateur, criminal or state-operated, don’t operate in a vacuum. No matter how classified or expert they think they are, they make mistakes. The code is never perfect. As the complexity of an operation rises so does the potential for error.
Do the state’s virus writers go to anti-virus conventions? Do they chat it up with the industry as virus-writers from many many years ago did?
The anti-virus industry knows. Perhaps some have held their tongues even though they don’t wish to.
Is American virus-writing outsourced, in part or in toto, to arms developers or other small businesses doubling as cybersecurity vendors?
Questions, questions.
When I wrote Virus Creation Labs there was always a small but hard-headed segment of people in information technology (and the computer savvy public) who believed anti-virus companies wrote viruses to help their businesses.
There was never any evidence of it. In fact, it was a ludicrous idea as their was never a shortage in virus writing and distribution.
In the late Eighties a small operation of the US Army made an offer looking for virus-writers. It was met with opprobrium in the a-v industry as well as general computer security circles. Nothing appeared to come of it although the publisher of my book claimed he had worked for a US military operation in NATO on the production of viruses. (He wrote many viruses for all his books on the subject, too.)
There is much more money in virus-writing now. And there is no reason to believe the national security companies, particularly those with government contracts in defending against cyberwar, don’t also want to be in the offensive side of the business.
They do.
They would love to write malware for Uncle Sam for taxpayer moolah.
Some would view it as fun, too, just like the old timey amateur virus-writers.
And the opportunity for early sales pitching is there. The cyberwar hype machine has been operating for so long the pump is primed in national leaders who don’t delve very deeply into these things. Many believe all the wild claims about cyberwar. If someone offers them malware options in attacking an enemy they will take it. And now it is known they have done so.
So when your secret war using malware is no longer secret, what is to be done? Is malware just like lobbing tear gas rounds or random cluster bombs with made in some comoany in the USA clearly embossed on some of the parts, only much less violent and directly hazardous to civilians?
If political leaders openly speak about how cyberwar threats can put lives at risk in the US what’s the difference when we’re caught doing it to someone else? Shouldn’t the president appear to be more thoughtful in such affairs rather than someone giving the OK to fuck up trust on the Internet even more for the sake of going after a pariah country? Do you think it might have been better if someone not in government or the military or intelligence had explained to him how computer viruses work?
Will the worldwide computer security industry work to expose and defeat, say, US cyberwar operations even more vigorously just as it pursues botnets and the work of cybercriminals? Will they now begin to spill the beans when the trail leads right back to a western government office?
Will they let us know when they have suspicions that some employees who’ve either worked for them or become ‘friends’ appear to have advanced the next step of their career in state-sponsored virus-writing?
Will diminishing returns now be a part of state-sponsored virus-writing? That is, is the US government’s virus-writing operation impeded now that the cat’s out of the bag and everyone knows it’s doing it?
Or do people not care? Just another day of bad business as usual on the Internet. And so what if it was against Iran? They had it coming and it’s better than bombing.
And we always trust our guys, anyway. Not a chance of a reliability problem or a crazy Bruce Ivins among ’em.
Just don’t be in the wrong country or line of work. And if it splattered onto you in … Hungary? Well, ha-ha, oops! Sorry ’bout that. Couldn’t be helped. Contact the American consulate.
