Part 1 -- Digital Tones and Pavlov’s Dog – A New Language ? - 'Beep-speak' ? by Anno Nymus

 

Digital Tones and Pavlov’s Dog – A New Language ?

An exploration of our times - with tongue mildly planted in cheek  

by Anno Nymus

"In 1927, Ivan Pavlov experimented with his dog on the subject of psychological training—specifically conditional stimuli and response. He found that when he rang a bell each time before he fed his dog, the dog no longer salivated in response to the food, but to the bell."

A conditional response is when you're trained to respond to something such as Pavlov's Bell as opposed to using simply your reflexes.” * – Urban Dictionary

*

'Hotel California', an album recorded by the Eagles, (greatest selling album of the 1970's), used a subliminal ringing phone
at the end of a long passage to refocus your attention to the next lyric !

*

This was my first personal experience with social engineering --  using audio tones. At the time I thought it was very clever. We have all been programmed since childhood to answer a phone quickly, so we get a vague sense of urgency to respond to a subliminal ringing phone. Folks then take a mental beat to give the issue some unconscious attention unaware they are seeking a source for the ringing phone. Thus we have a physical reaction that makes us 'look' !? Hmmm ?? This is what brought Pavlov and his famous dog to mind.

I think the social engineering folks have sussed this pretty well .. and the folks who brought you the cloud, might now be programming us - subliminally -- are we taking the bait? Now the stimulus is overt – outright notification tones and alerts emitted by our devices.

Have you ever raced or fumbled to answer an insistently ringing phone? Do you get a mild rush of anxiety when you just barely miss that call ? The area of emotional manipulation by alerts, is a growing phenomenon worth looking into.

Example: A notification triggers a sense of urgency (and probably some adrenaline .. further fueling the sense of urgency – metaphorical salivation?). Youth especially are committed to the social media phenomenon, and some research suggest there may be a chemical-endorphin 'reward' component to their compulsion to achieve notices and comments with constant alerts? Everyone has their own personalized tones, beeps, squawks, and alerts, or silent-vibration mode to catch every notification possible. Any group today will have a stew of phones and notification tones going off.

Since the advent of of the digital age it seems our lives are continuously driven by endless notifications and digital sounds throughout our personal 'audio-dome' - environment.

Noise Pollution - and our personal 'Audio-Dome' 

There is an area of research called Noise Pollution, which deals with social problems created by digital sounds.

In the ER, folks have to instantly assess, understand, and react to the meanings of the various equipment tones, alarms, and beeps ! But there is a serious “Catch 22”. Many of the machines use similar tones for opposite functions or conditions, or opposite tones for the same functions. Noise Pollution, can literally be dangerous !

Each of us has a palette of notification tones programmed into our sundry devices. Each notification or silent buzz , has meaning to us. It's our own code, and we know how to process each notification. We ingest a panoply of alerts, consciously, or subliminally in our daily personal activities. This constitutes our personal Digital Noise - Audio Pollution Dome.

"Beepspeak" ? - A new language ?

I think Digital Noise Pollution has become a new kind of unspoken 'digital language' in a curious way : an audio pollution-collusion, contusion, and intrusion that I like to call “Beepspeak” !

This 'Beepspeak' brings me to think again of Pavlov! Epiphany ! Have we been programming ourselves, whilst programming our devices ?!? Perhaps in doing so, have we made ourselves 'digital' Pavlovian dogs ??

You can't put the poop - back in the horse. We sure would be in a mess without these notifications. The world would grind to a halt in short order, but where is all this notification taking us ?

Is this digital cacophony some weird mystical new unspoken language or tower of babel ? Could this be presaging some digital “AI bot” take over by programming us to react to various notifications?

No voting required madam, the computer voted for you – with who it thought you liked – based on your notification history ? 

The sky is falling ! – the sky is falling !

 

Beeps, alerts and tones control us more than we would like to admit. We continue to program ourselves to jump at an alert – whose sound demands and insists, that we react !

Do we need to be concerned ? What does this unseen phenomena signify? Where is this digital whirlwind of alerts taking us? What are we becoming because of it ? What – if anything – should, or can be, done about it? Hmmm … Tag ! You're 'It' !

Mysteries yet abound doncha know ? Thanks Pavlov for leading us to this new “Beepspeak” !

What are your devices telling you ?

Riiiinnnnnngg ! ! !

... still scratching my head over the future, 

so with tongue firmly planted in cheek ..  

until next time .. 

Anno Nymus

* * * * *

Privacy NOT by KimB

[Editor's Post]

It is time again to tell you what by now you already know, even if you didn't want to know, about our Privacy Policy.

Our Privacy Policy hasn't changed:

• We do not monitor you.
• We do not monetize the blog.
• We do not track you.

but, as you all know this is rather incomplete because:

• You are being monitored
• You are being monetized
• You are being tracked

just not by us.

What do you remember about Privacy? If you are over 30 you may remember what that meant, if you are under 30 you never got a chance to know anything about it.

The extent of Corporations and LEOs (Law Enforcement Organizations) General Surveillance, each of them desperate to find any aspect, any period, any thought that isn't tracked, logged, archived, analyzed and acted upon, has reached their first tier of saturation.

What that means is there is hardly a moment when you are not being watched: Live and Memorexed ¹.

Previous forms of surveillance generally were one-way: they watched you.

It was external, outdoors, the stuff of B-Movies stake-outs. There existed times where the Watchers lost contact; B-Movies foot races though crowded alleys and markets with the required up-turned vegetable cart delaying the pursuit just long enough for the hero or villain to disappear into the crowd.

This year the surveillance has achieved a two-way breakthrough milestone.

It started a few years back with those sports trackers and fitness monitors. It seemed innocuous stuff at the time. These items promised to monitor your heart rate while working out, analyze your workout effectiveness and track your fitness+muscle-mass progress over time. They never promised to DO the workouts for you, so the sweat was all yours and as many of us really dislike sweating, these devices evolved to be more fashionable because if it was just for the gym, you were going to take it off. Now you don't because it Looks Good and maybe fools folks into thinking that muscle-mass around your waist is really your biceps.

Two-way surveillance allows a peek inside your personal sphere and fitness trackers got a foothold. Not only do they track if your heart is beating, they track your location on the surface or inside a building. Some have a logging feature for those inconvenient times when it losses satellite signal, but will catch up once a connection is re-established. The over-turned vegetable cart doesn't work anymore.

Of course, the ubiquitous smartphone does the heavy lifting for most of the two-way surveillance but there's a bit of a problem: people drop, loose, forget or stop using them or sometimes turn them off. Although, by now you should know OFF does not mean OFF.

So the next step is to get inside where you might take off the fitness tracker or might set down the phone. This is where RING and IoT (Internet of Things aka IdiOT) play their part.

RING (owned by Amazon) provides a video camera system for your door. Generally installed at the front door but any door will do. IdiOT devices can be installed into anything that puts an access APP on your smartphone like thermostats, lights, garage doors. These are surveillance devices and even if you do not install the app, the surveillance is still happening. YOU are the target, not the Bad-Dudettes listed in the "Why You Need This" pamphlets.

Repeat after me:

If it puts an APP on your phone or computer
it's a surveillance device.

Here is a recent synthesis of RING abilities that are not included in the "Why You Need This": ^{2 3 4 5}

• Live Real Time and Recorded Video
• Accessible by World and Dog, by Bad-Dudes and Bad-Dudettes everywhere. Fully accessible by The Neighborhood Committee for General Housekeeping in charge of Ring Around The Collar and Floor Wax in the Corner Removal Compliance
• Video feeds direct to LEOs (Law Enforcement Organizations)
• Interior and Exterior details down to the square inch
• Two Way Talk usable by Strangers to talk to anyone inside at any time including Alexa
• Two Way Talk is also 24 Hour Listening by anyone who cares to listen to you singing in the shower or admire your snoring
• LEOs on the sales stump because they get free kit from Amazon if you buy what they're selling

These are features, they are part of the way the system works and is designed , it's not a bug.

So a bit more info not found on the "Why You Need This":

• 696 LEOs have full access to everything INSIDE and OUTSIDE (December 6, 2019)
• Anyone can install the APP and use it. You don't need a RING device to use the software
• Lots of 3d Party RING Apps and with ready to run Access Scripts
• A sample of usage within a 9 square mile area of unique Ring cameras that had uploaded video during the 500-day window
• The precise locations of approximately 20,000 Ring cameras across 15 different US cities
• Washington, DC, 1,863 devices pinpointed
• Los Angeles, 5,016 Ring cameras located
• Denver, 1,788 devices found
• Hidden geographic coordinates latitude and longitude with up to six decimal points of precision, accurate to the square inch of ground
• Washington, DC, at least 13 active Ring cameras line the path between a grade school and playing field
• Washington, DC, APP users shared videos of children
  (No one cares if they share pictures of adults)
• Track individual's entry and exit from businesses like a health clinic and legal office
• 90 Cities/LEOs have partnered with Amazon to sell Ring cameras
• Police agree not to talk about the details of the contract.
  If you remember STINGRAY/DRT BOX it's the same non-disclosure ^{6a 6b 6c}
• Police perform marketing and sales by encouraging residents to use the APP or buy Ring products and provides free "seed cameras" to kick start the local surveillance system
• Police departments run any public statements about Ring past Amazon first. Amazon PR provides template social media posts and pre-written press releases. "Any and all contact from journalists should be immediately shared with Ring."

Perhaps you are thinking

So, OK ... They can see inside and outside.
I get it.
I won't buy one or remove it if I have one.

Well, that's a nice thought but you have neighbors that have already installed a RING or like device. Guess which way that exterior camera is pointed? It's pointing at your house, at your garage, at your back yard. The busy-body-nosy-parker-informant is watching you and uploading your comings and goings, your friends, your parties, your holiday family gatherings and family fights in real time.

It's a strategy well documented under the STASI and they didn't need half the cameras to employ it, just upwards of 600,000 helpful citizens.⁷

Using cameras and geo-location, LEOs are having a big laugh at our collective myopia or shortsightedness. They collect far more than needed for any investigation, trapping millions into LEO databases because we passed though an intersection with a traffic camera.

Over collection is the name of the game.
Collect the Haystack is the goal. ⁸

An investigation of several arson cases in Wisconsin (value $50,000). ATF requested and received reverse-location data on about 1,500 phones in an area the size of an average Milwaukee city block. ⁹

The idea goes like this:

While you can't track the phone of a suspect you don't have

• You can start with the time and place of the crime
• Look to see what phones were nearby
• Presume all phones belong to the suspect

A small detail: this assumes whoever committed the crimes has an active phone. They may not have a phone, may not have brought it with them, or may have brought it with them in airplane mode or powered off, or used someone else's phone. However, using airplane mode won't stop the data collection because there are other parts of the device still broadcasting. And, we already know OFF isn't OFF.

Camera capture systems are everywhere. There really isn't any legal prohibition to them. If you are imaged by one, you are in a public space or a private space where you waived your rights to having your image taken. Major bushiness install detailed surveillance, health care, hospitals, supermarkets all have them. Occasionally, grainy blurred images are trotted out for public consumption with sensational headlines as favored by the 24-Hours of 5-Minutes of Recycled No News Services.

In the USA, we have Running-A-Red-Light cameras with automated automatic ticketing. In Australia, cameras target mobile phone use while driving with a substantial fine if imaged using one. Results are as you expect because we all know people use the phone while driving, just as people run red lights at intersections.

Worthy causes to be sure on the surface, but these systems do not stop or alter the behavior. They do provide a renewable source of income for LEOs and underfunded Community Budgets. An automated variation on asset forfeiture laws.

Mobile phones imaged in use while driving (In Australia)¹⁰:

• 3,303 drivers in one week
• 500 drivers a day
• 6 month trial: 100,000 drivers out of 8.5 million checked
• If 3% of drivers caught were to challenge the penalty,
  it would lead to 72,000 cases per year
• Reversed onus of proof, requiring drivers to prove what they are holding is a flat packed banana

Oh well... hmmm... Why is OFF not OFF?

Because they told us...

Well, they eventually told us, they didn't do it willingly or completely and they continually omit the details and roll back or re-introduce un-fixes to fixes.

Every modern device has a lot of layers to the hardware and software. The two layers do not have to connect. The lights on-off are a feature not a requirement.

There are 2 ways the lights get turned on:

• The software sends a message to the hardware to turn on or off the green/red lights. If there isn't any message from the software the light is blank
• Another part of hardware sends a message to turn on or off the green/red lights. If another part of the system doesn't flip the switch the light is blank

It isn't the hardest job on the programming scale. Wax On / Wax Off. Lights On / Lights Off.

Apple's new iPhone 11 incorporates an incomplete version of Ultra Wideband technology (UWB). UWB is designed to allow your phone to find and connect to any other UWB phone or device. If you have geo-location turned OFF at the top level and OFF for every APP on the phone, one might think that it would be OFF all together but UWB won't work if geo-location is OFF. UWB needs your precise location. ^{11a 11b 12 13}

So the phone auto-turns-on geo-location tracking periodically (every couple of minutes) just in case it can find something to partner with. Whether you want to or not, the Apple iPhone is going to hunt for a partner.

Apple's reasoning:

“So users can do things like share a file with someone using AirDrop simply by pointing at another user’s iPhone.”

It's incomplete, not fully functional and you cannot turn it off or limit it, but they thought it was a great thing to give you anyway. A bonus boon to anyone wanting to drop illegal, illicit, unwanted images on your phone just by pointing at it and waiting a couple of minutes.

What's also clear is that there is more coming:

Apple:
“The icon appears for system services that do not have a switch in Settings”

Translated into normal language it means there is stuff on the phone with no OFF settings. Apple will either provide a future OFF option or simply hide the indicator light which may pacify their clientele.

We know that OFF isn't OFF but ON is generally ON.

Apple isn't the only one with skin in the game, Google's in there too. They got caught out collecting your location data even if you have Geo Location Data Tracking turned OFF. ⁹ Google's facing lawsuits over collecting and retaining location data and distributing it illegally. Even when Google can wave a warrant, Google was never supposed to have the data to start with, much less keep it.

Now that you've glazed over there are things you can do.

1. Stop believing the ads
2. Stop upgrading or buying stuff
3. Reduce device usage
4. Place devices in a drawer when not in use
5. Remove obsolete devices with multi-year year batteries
6. Use it when you need it
7. Don't feed the machine

Hot RING Topics:³

• Sit back and relax to over 45 minutes of entertainment
• Join us as we go hit on completely random targets
• Watch while we tell shelter owners we killed a kitten
• Hear unsolicited racist commentary
• Funny "wake up" calls
• Ransom Demands to recover control of your system
• Talk to the children
• Video Replay On Line
• Watch the shows live...

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorex
   A series of famous television commercials featuring Ella Fitzgerald. In the commercials she would sing a note that shattered a glass while being recorded to a Memorex audio cassette. The tape was played back and the recording also broke the glass, asking "Is it live, or is it Memorex?"
   
   
2. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/12/ring-used-parties-swag-to-build-700-police-partnerships-report-finds/
   Uploaded Ring footage reportedly provides location to the square inch
   Neighbors data proves extra-revealing as Amazon police partnerships accelerate.
   Kate Cox - Dec 10, 2019 8:50 pm UTC
   A review of Gizmodo RING use analysis
   
   
3. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/12/wave-of-ring-surveillance-camera-hacks-tied-to-podcast-report-finds/
   Wave of Ring surveillance camera hacks tied to podcast, report finds
   The bad actors harassing folks for fun got more attention than they meant to.
   Kate Cox - Dec 12, 2019 10:10 pm UTC
   In all the cases, some bad actor accessed indoor Ring cameras (not doorbells) and used them to harass, intimidate, or attempt to extort the residents.
   
   
4. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/dec/13/ring-hackers-reportedly-watching-talking-strangers-in-home-cameras
   Ring hackers are reportedly watching and talking to strangers via in-home cameras
   Hackers are using two-way talk function to wake people up in the middle of the night and watch unsuspecting children
   Poppy Noor Fri 13 Dec 2019 13.45 EST
   A review of a Motherboard investigation into RING.
   
   
5. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/23/be-careful-you-are-not-giving-away-your-privacy-with-christmas-gifts-this-year
   Be careful you are not giving away your privacy with Christmas gifts this year
   Tim Singleton Norton
   Sun 22 Dec 2019 21.00 EST
   In the US, this has led to a rapid take-up of the [RING] tiny cameras on front porches and doorsteps. In turn, this has been too tempting an opportunity for US law enforcement, which earlier this year went into partnership with Amazon to gain unprecedented and unfettered access to video footage.
   
   
6. 6a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_phone_tracker
   The StingRay is an IMSI-catcher, a controversial cellular phone surveillance device, manufactured by Harris Corporation.
   
   6b https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirtbox_(cell_phone)
   A dirtbox (or DRT box) is a cell site simulator, a phone device mimicking a cell phone tower, that creates a signal strong enough to cause nearby dormant mobile phones to switch to it. Mounted on aircraft, it is used by the United States Marshals Service to locate and collect information from cell phones believed to be connected with criminal activity. It can also be used to jam phones. The device's name comes from the company that developed it, Digital Receiver Technology, Inc. (DRT), owned by the Boeing company.
   
   6c https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_use_in_United_States_law_enforcement
   Initially, the use of Stingray phone trackers was a secret, due to a number of non-disclosure agreements between individual police departments and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, the FBI entered into agreements with at least 48 police departments in the United States. In these agreements, the FBI allowed police departments to use the stingrays, while requiring police departments provide no information to either the public or the courts regarding the devices' operation or existence.
   
   
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informal_collaborator
   An unofficial collaborator or IM (both from German inoffizieller Mitarbeiter) or, euphemistically, informal collaborator (informeller Mitarbeiter) was an informant in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) who delivered private information to the Ministry for State Security (MfS / Stasi). At the end of the East German government, there was a network of around 189,000 informants, working at every level of society.
   
   During its lifetime the Stasi employed around 624,000 Informal collaborators
   
   In the residential areas the Stasi relied on "Information people" ("Auskunftspersonen " / AKPs), for information on neighbours. These were informants who in most circumstances would not themselves have been listed as IMs, and whose information gathering would mostly have been controlled by senior Stasi officers. They would have sought to conceal the true basis for their "curiosity", as representing, for instance, the local council, the military or the tax office in order to get their target-interlocutors talking.
   
   
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_B._Alexander
   "Rather than look for a single needle in the haystack, his approach was, 'Let's collect the whole haystack. Collect it all, tag it, store it ... And whatever it is you want, you go searching for it."
   
   
9. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/12/feds-reap-data-from-1500-phones-in-largest-reported-reverse-location-warrant/
   Feds reap data from 1,500 phones in largest reported reverse-location warrant
   The search warrants demanded nine hours' worth of location history from Google.
   Kate Cox - Dec 13, 2019 9:19 pm UTC
   Federal investigators trying to solve arson cases in Wisconsin have scooped up location history data for about 1,500 phones that happened to be in the area.
   Users who disable Google's location history features should, in theory, not have data in Google's SensorVault for the company to pass along to investigators. That said, Google is facing multiple lawsuits, including a potential class-action in the US and a suit by consumer protection regulators in Australia, alleging the company misled users and retained location data even if the setting was turned off.
   
   
10. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/17/mobile-phone-detection-cameras-more-than-3000-nsw-drivers-week
    Mobile phone detection cameras pick up more than 3,000 NSW drivers in a week
    Drivers caught by the cameras before March will receive a warning letter, but then fines of [AU$] $344 will be levied
    Josh Taylor
    Mon 16 Dec 2019 23.31 EST
    [AU$344 is about US$237 as of 12/19/2019]
    
    
11. 11a https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/12/the-iphone-11-pros-location-data-puzzler/
    
    11b https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/12/apple-explains-mysterious-iphone-11-location-requests/
    Detailed analysis of the OFF-ON location tracking in iPhone 11.
    
    
12. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/12/the-iphone-11s-u1-chip-necessitates-constant-geolocation-pings-apple-says/
    Analysis of iPhone 11 Ultra Wideband technology (UWB) implementation.
    
    
13. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/12/06/apple_ultra_wideband/ Analysis of iPhone 11 Ultra Wideband technology (UWB) implementation.
    
    

A Story for a Hot Day by KimB

I went shopping mid-morning as the heat was running towards 100+; so nice and cool in the store. I did the rounds of the discount bins and found a few items and I hit a good sale on Fruit Popsicles too.

We recently tried them and they are very good: 100% fruit and no junk. They come in different flavors and sizes. There is a standard popsicle size (4 per box) or a tube size (10 per box). We decided the 10 box smaller one is better as it is just enough when u want a cool pick-me-up and you can have a second one guilt free.

I pay for my small haul and a nice person helps me out to put the bags in the car. The heat hits like a hot skillet as we leave the store for the real outside.

I go to open the doors of my High Tech DNA car and

they do not open

It is 100+F outside and my super fancy car won't open the darn door!!! I tug, pull, and push all the ways I know of to trigger the door to open and ... NADA. I stab all the In Case buttons on the key fob and ... NADA.

I know there is a bypass for an emergency key that I have to find, but

my popsicles are melting!!! YIKES!!!

zho ... the kind person takes my groceries back inside and stashes them in their cold box until I can get things sorted.

I have to uncover the key bypass, which after a bit I manage to do. Now I have the door open and ...

hmmm...

 DNA cars do not use a key to start them

hmmmm ....

What to do Percy?

I make a call to the dealership service folks and explain the dilemma: I am in the car but how do you start it with no key???

They explain there is a voodoo ritual to get the car to start and after a few tries I get the car running. WOOTS!!!

I collect my popsicles from cold storage and make it home PDQ to get them in the freezer. YIPPEEE!!

Now I have to deal with the DNA car and we complete the Jedi Mind Trick again and cruise down to the dealership where they quickly replace a battery in the key fob for me.

A BATTERY??

A BATTERY IN THE KEY FOB???

The whole DNA car depends on a BATTERY???

The story ends well. The popsicles are fine. The groceries put away. I got an adventure and it cost $5.00. WOW!!

If the internet doesn't collapse under its own bloat first, all we have to do is wait for the key fobs linking the internet, cars, and commerce system together to have a $5 battery failure. All those self-driving cars will congeal on the tarmac as their parking-valet systems collapse into a pile of discharged ions.

For the want of a battery the system was lost

The End

Learned Helplessness by KimB

Learned Helplessness ¹ is a behavior (or lack there of ) where people/animals cannot avoid painful or adverse conditions. They just give up in the face of unrelenting pain or confusion. We've all had our moments where things are just so horrible, we just "stop". Generally we get going again in some fashion but the dread of repeating the experience stays with us.

It's a well used concept in torture programs ² and features prominently in military manuals ³ with detailed descriptions of how to induce the state where the "fear of pain or deprivation" is more useful than the actual beatings, electric shocks and other pain inducing methods. Although, the sadistic folks who undertake these jobs much prefer the latter to the former.

Learned Helplessness is also very useful in other contexts, not ones normally associated with torture chambers. Some High Tech companies specialize in embedding similar concepts into their software programs in order to "direct" the users into a specific set of behaviors: compulsive use of the programs and dread of not being able to use them.

Humans are very malleable and getting us to do X Y Z is much easier than teaching a dog to sit, stay, don't jump on people, don't run away. etc. etc. etc. Any one with dogs knows that one or more of these commands may not work, especially if you are not a professional dog trainer. Just open the front door and see how well your sit, stay commands work.

Humans though sit, stay, stare at the monitor and punch at the keyboard for hours and hours. We spend hours just "looking" or "checking" our phones. In the last week I've spent 5 hours just "looking" at my so-call smartphone, in case the "smart" part wore off and it failed to notify me of some ultra-important-trivial-item was collected and went un-noticed.

I play on-line video games MMORPGs ⁴ and I don't think anyone who plays regularly hasn't experienced the dread of "New Release Downtime". Just the thought of an announced 24 hour update period that morphs (ahem) into a 5 day outage is enough to make our control trigger fingers twitch even when off line. However, playing a game is not Real Life and a twitching fire button finger isn't the worst, unless you happen to pull an entire mob of NPCs including the Boss prematurely. The old 50 DPK Minus⁵ WoW raid video is still floating about showing what happens when things go pear shaped.

In our modern on-line world, High Tech companies work very hard to make sure we are permanently in a state of Learned Helplessness. It's all done subtly and packaged as convenience using social and cultural conditioning and our own mental processes to achieve the same outcome: to render us Unable to Function unless we are "allowed" by the High Tech software. It's more than just being reliant or dependent, it's the complete inability to do anything at all without it.

Recently a journalist tried to Not Google for a week ⁶. It was one to the saddest indictments of Learned Helplessness I've read. One can be horrified and revolted by the doings in CIA Torture Chambers and those of our Allies and even those of our Enemies but this surpassed the blood and gore by a long way. The man was completely unable to do even a few tasks without the High Tech sadist in his pocket telling him how, when and where to do to them.

The loss of knowledge about how to do anything without Google was condensed to:

You have to hope someone else knows what to do. ^6a

The man was completely unable to think for himself, solve any problem, learn something on his own, experience adventure, discover new concepts or compete even trivial tasks.

It was sad reading.

All through his article, he describes how helpless he felt, adrift in a world where he had no fundamental ideas about anything that had not been imprinted by High Tech and worse yet, the inability to remember anything even when it was imprinted. He couldn't even find his way home.^6b

It's a new form of dementia⁷: Googlezheimer's⁸

What's most sad is that common skills cannot be completed without a request to the Google Mind Monitoring System⁸.

Where to go, what to do, how to do it, what should I do, where am I, cannot be done without permission: Learned Helplessness.

Without Google, the issue was how to get the answer.
With Google, the issue is the answer.^6c

And that's the problem. We don't know the answers anymore. We have lost the ability to think on our own. To solve our own problems.

The most subtle part of Googlezheimer's is that we don't even recognize when Google gives us the WRONG ANSWER.

Oh yeah...
Big Issue...

There are plenty of wrong answers to be presented. We have no real compass to gauge reality anymore. We cannot tell the fake from the real, the imaginary from reality or the repurposed designed to enhance our dependence. We are adrift and we don't even recognize it ... because Google didn't tell us.

There is so much that is good about technology and so much that is really not good. It's in the underlying structure of how we use High Tech. We are fed less and less of what's new and more and more of about what we already know until we are so crippled mentally we cannot even find our own homes.

You can turn a horse loose and he will find his stable.
You can turn a dog loose and he will find his way home.
Cats are notorious for Coming Back ⁹ too.

But not so with Googlezheimer's

As I read the continuing saga of this man's descent into the enormity of what's been lost to him, his main concern was getting back to his comfort zone, to a Googlezheimer's Dormant State⁸. He's not even that alarmed about his incapacity to do things because he's focused on getting back to using Google. There's no epiphany¹⁰ moment for him, no insight¹¹ or Eureka!¹² only a frightened human overwhelmed by what he doesn't know and has no way of finding out ... without Google.

For whatever knowledge he has acquired in his life, it matters only to the extent of his hidden ignorance. Once the ignorance is exposed, the results are devastating mentally.

Google is like an insect: highly specialized; narrow purposed. Humans have greater capacities, except Google won't tell you this ... it's not good for their business.

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.

Specialization is for insects."

— Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love 1973 ¹³

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness
   Learned helplessness is behavior that occurs when the subject endures repeatedly painful or otherwise aversive stimuli which it is unable to escape from or avoid. After such experiences, the organism often fails to learn or accept "escape" or "avoidance" in new situations where such behavior is likely to be effective. In other words, the organism learned that it is helpless.
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness
   In CIA interrogation manuals learned helplessness is characterized as "apathy" which may result from prolonged use of coercive techniques which result in a "debility-dependency-dread" state in the subject, "If the debility-dependency-dread state is unduly prolonged, however, the arrestee may sink into a defensive apathy from which it is hard to arouse him.
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Army_and_CIA_interrogation_manuals
   Details of what's in the public released documents about how the Army and CIA torture people.
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massively_multiplayer_online_role-playing_game
   Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) are a combination of role-playing video games and massively multiplayer online games in which a very large number of players interact with one another within a virtual world.
5. ht tps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtvIYRrgZ04
   Published on Dec 8, 2007
   Onyxia Wipe Animation
   NOTE: Video and Animation contain Strong and Vulgar Language and Images.URL fractured to prevent autorun.
6. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/apr/17/would-life-be-happier-without-google-i-spent-a-week-finding-out
   Would life be happier without Google? I spent a week finding out
   Tim Dowling The Guardian Wed 17 Apr 2019 01.00 EDT
   a) “You just had to hope someone else knew”
   b) "When I moved house two years ago, I started to rely on Google for navigation. Now, I am utterly dependent. I don’t just want to know the way – I want to know the best way, as of this minute. I can’t remember the last time I gave a thought to where anything was."
   c) “Without Google, the issue was how to get the answer ... With Google, the issue is the answer.”
   
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dementia
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alzheimer%27s_disease
   Information about Dementia and Alzheimer's conditions.
8. My own definitions:
   Googlezheimer's: Tech induced loss of knowledge.
   Googlezheimer's Dormant State (GDS): A mindless gazing at screens, thumbing or scrolling though apps or screens of information without reading or comprehension or remembering anything about what's displayed. Seen everywhere at anytime except when sleeping or napping; the thumbing motion may still occur from long term habit.
   Google Mind Monitoring System (GMMS): Any system that compels a continuous re-checking behavior. Such systems are based on compulsive behavior creation and are designed to maximize looking or checking of devices. Each access episode provides additional data points and market target details. A successful display will increase checking or viewing times and duration. Successful triggers are noted and used to tailor targeted stimulations.
9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cat_Came_Back
   "The Cat Came Back" is a comic song written by Harry S. Miller in 1893.
   

   But the cat came back, he couldn't stay no long-er,
   Yes the cat came back de very next day,
   the cat came back—thought she were a goner,
   But the cat came back for it wouldn't stay away.
   

10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiphany_(feeling)
    An experience of a sudden and striking realization
    
11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insight
    Insight is the understanding of a specific cause and effect within a specific context
    
12. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_effect
    The eureka effect by Albert Einstein (also known as the Aha! moment or eureka moment) refers to the common human experience of suddenly understanding a previously incomprehensible problem or concept.
    
13. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Time_Enough_for_Love
    Quotation from Time Enough for Love 1973 by Robert Heinlein
    

    "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

TANSTAAFL1 by KimB

To Paper or Not to Paper? - that is the modern question. To go paperless or remain in the sea of overflowing paper that represents your life?

Paperless has it's problems because once the disk drive crashes or the data is corrupted or incorrect, you have no method of recovering the information. Paper can preserve things longer but modern paper is poorly made and doesn't hold up very long in a historical sense.

It is a conundrum but a dangerous one to ignore.

Forging or Fakes ² have been around for as long as there has been anything of value to steal with a false document, painting or sculpture. Many of today's museums are filled with forgeries and it seems that every other month a new multi-million dollar ancient master painting is discovered; a production rate which, as anyone who knows or can guess what it takes to make such a masterpiece, is not possible, probable or even remotely theoretical to achieve in a any one lifetime.

The curious thing about masterpiece forgeries is this:

Until the painting is revealed to have less-than-authentic signature, the painting has pride of place on the gallery wall. Articles are written to describe the beauty of the painting, texture, colors and applications etc. etc. etc.

Once the painting has a signature change, it disappears into the dark vaults of embarrassment. Or on rare occasions, moved to the Modern Art section of the museum.

It's the SAME PAINTING...

Modern technology is now able to forge just about anything you can imagine and stuff you haven't even considered that can be forged or manipulated. There isn't much left that cannot be faked.

In old times (and current times), the best method Prosecutors in the USA have to guarantee a conviction is to withhold evidence and documents from the Defense. In the USA that is not what is supposed to happen, but if the Defense doesn't get a document how would anyone know? The lack of a document without knowledge of the existence of it, means a free ride for the Prosecutor, who's livelihood, and political ambitions rely on the number of convictions they get. They figure it's SOK to fudge and not turn over the items that show the Accused is Not The One because it would ding their stats.

90% Conviction Rate - Reelect Me - Make Me President

Sometimes though, this method backfires and someone with a bit of Moral Fiber squeaks and the truth drips out. Generally, not without a whole lot of anguish on the part of the Prosecutor's Victim, and the Prosecutor declaiming They Did It For The Betterment of Society and of course the true winner is the person(s) who actually Got Away With The Crime.

Any Conviction is a Good Conviction
    Innocence isn't Important to getting Reelected

With electronic documents however, there's a wrinkle. They might erase a document but erasing an electronic document does leave holes - tiny future embarrassments when they are found on the Way Back Machine³ or sitting on the drives in Bluffdale Utah⁴.

What is much easier is to alter the documents, video, voice, images or any other electronically stored data. There are now techniques that can create or alter any item without leaving an audit trail or footprint or indication that anything has been tampered with.

Make It So - Make It How You Want It - No One Can Tell

Part of the reason this is a Big Deal is that now a great deal of our society runs on electronic data and as anyone who has run afoul of a "computer error" can attest, fixing a "computer error" is nigh on impossible.

Computers Do NOT Make Mistakes.
    They do EXACTLY what they are programmed to do.

Programmers MAKE Mistakes.
    YOU Pay the Piper.

So, considering how easy it is to create a "deep fake"⁵, this is going to be a big problemo. And one that not too many are thinking about as they calculate that next statistical bump up.

This is something besides the normal trash-level computing that is passed off as Artificial Intelligence (AI) that purports to know you based on some dataset held in Facebook, Google, Amazon, Netflix private data stores, this in beyond plain old manipulation and greed, it's the complete Falsification of ALL Electronic Data.

If any one piece of electronic data is faked,
    where will you find unaltered data?

Millions of electronic letters or documents become useless once fakes penetrate the database.

Got a Birth Certificate?
    Prove it!
        Fake!

We have already seen the opening salvo of the "fake document" problem but in the world of fakes the problem will go deeper. There either won't be any document at all or the document will have been altered beyond forensic ability to uncover. People with less access to specialists claiming new found ancient masterpieces are authentic, are going to be severely impacted.

Most courts now require electronic submissions of documents, depositions, videos, audio, interviews. When these are faked and the courts stamp these as authentic, how can anyone "Prove It"?

We TRUST Computers
    We do not see the HUMAN in the background

In My Fair Town, there was a community sponsored event to help shred old documents. Gosh knows, I have boxes and boxes of old paper, crumbling and fading in storage boxes stacked one atop another in the garage. Some years back, I was able to take them to an office-supply-store and shred them for a nominal fee, then the fee became not-nominal and so I stopped shredding there. When I stopped shredding the stack got higher and higher.

So, when the community sponsored event came around I packed up some of the oldest of the old boxes and headed to the event. It was extremely well organized. Surprisingly so. Cars neatly tracked into 2 lanes, snaking their way to the location of the big shredders. More folks waiting at the unloading area, taking the boxes, dumping them into security containers and wheeling them to the biggest shredders you can imagine. 10 seconds and my old paper was gone.

And in theory, the now dead and shredded letters and documents make me safer from Bad Dudettes, primarily since paper with names, addresses, IDs, Bank Statements, Utility Statements and every other sort of document is beyond their reach.... It's also beyond mine.

I no longer have proof of - anything

I can no longer prove 5 years or 40 years of continuous existence with rent, utility, pay stubs or any other ephemera of modern life.

Do you think that's not a problem?

It is.

Some countries now require their citizens....
    to prove they are citizens.

How can you do that if the data is wrong, gone, altered or misfiled? How can you do that after 5 - 10 - 15 - 30 - 40 years of no paper? Where can you find pay stubs for companies that have gone out of business? Schools that have been closed? Records destroyed? Landlords long gone across the river? Towns that have been abandoned due to climate, water, fire and flood?

As I was snaking my way towards the Big Shred I thought about what a Great Event it was for the community. Old documents of perhaps not much value, safely destroyed, recovering room in my garage, and watching the cars in front of me unloading 5-10-15 boxes of life-long documents being tossed into the maw of a big machine. I wasn't really thinking too hard about the downside of not having a paper trail, like the others in line, I was just happy to get rid of this stuff that the IRS said I had to collect and now had hit its expiration date. I pondered how the community had collected the funds to pay for the mass paper grinding. I figured it was partly from local taxes and a donation by the paper grinder companies and a lot of nice civic minded folks helping one another.

It was a good feeling.
    It didn't last
        I looked behind me



Clovis CA Police Surveillance Van

The reasons for 2 nicely formed lines, slowly filing thru a small lane with no driveways, became apparent.

• The camera was hidden
• The truck was hidden
• The intent was hidden
• The reason was hidden
• The effect can be calculated.

There was no good reason to hide but they did. They hid because they were ashamed (in a way) of what they were doing. They did it anyway, no doubt claiming it was FOR THE GREATER GOOD. They paid for the shredding and in return got more of what they wanted.

They didn't ask. They just took.

In one of my ancient episodes of employment, I worked for company that collected trash cans. It's a big business, people produce lots of garbage and in some places it gets picked up regularly and taken ElseWhere. It's really a fascinating business.

No doubt most folks have seen a movie plot where the bad guy puts something in the trash and the good guys grab the trash can and get it. This happens. Normally the trash truck collects the targeted can and places the contents into a separate compartment and then takes it directly to a special area to hand it over. There's a set of legal reasons that allow it. Once you put the trash can on the street, the contents no longer belong to you.

Once you hand over the box of stuff to be shredded, it no longer belongs to you.

One can guess that the video and license plate reader with face recognition AI marked out some cars and the nice helpful persons unloading the boxes set them aside. There is no way to know if the items handed over really got shredded.

And then there was this...



Clovis CA Tactical Military Vehicle

We don't look so we don't see.

TANSTAAFL - "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch" ¹

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TANSTAAFL
   "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch" The phrase was in use by the 1930s, but its first appearance is unknown. The "free lunch" in the saying refers to the nineteenth-century practice in American bars of offering a "free lunch" in order to entice drinking customers.
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgery
   Forgery is a white-collar crime that generally refers to the false making or material alteration of a legal instrument with the specific intent to defraud
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayback_Machine
   The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web and other information on the Internet. It was launched in 2001 by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, California, United States.
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
   The Utah Data Center (UDC), also known as the Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center, is a data storage facility for the United States Intelligence Community that is designed to store data estimated to be on the order of exabytes or larger. Its purpose is to support the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI), though its precise mission is classified. The National Security Agency (NSA) leads operations at the facility as the executive agent for the Director of National Intelligence. It is located at Camp Williams near Bluffdale, Utah, between Utah Lake and Great Salt Lake and was completed in May 2014 at a cost of $1.5 billion.
   
   The data center is alleged to be able to process "all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Internet searches, as well as all types of personal data trails — parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital 'pocket litter'." In response to claims that the data center would be used to illegally monitor email of U.S. citizens, in April 2013 an NSA spokesperson said, "Many unfounded allegations have been made about the planned activities of the Utah Data Center, ... one of the biggest misconceptions about NSA is that we are unlawfully listening in on, or reading emails of, U.S. citizens. This is simply not the case." This statement was made two months prior to the document leak that revealed the existence of the PRISM program ....
   
   In April 2009, officials at the United States Department of Justice acknowledged that the NSA had engaged in large-scale overcollection of domestic communications in excess of the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court's authority, but claimed that the acts were unintentional and had since been rectified.
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepfake
   Deepfake, a portmanteau of "deep learning" and "fake", is an artificial intelligence-based human image synthesis technique. It is used to combine and superimpose existing images and videos onto source images or videos using a machine learning technique called a "generative adversarial network" (GAN). The combination of the existing and source videos results in a fake video that shows a person or persons performing an action at an event that never occurred in reality.
   
   Such fake videos can be created to, for example, show a person performing sex acts they never took part in, or can be used to alter the words or gestures a politician uses to make it look like that person said something they never did. Because of these capabilities, deepfakes may be used to create fake celebrity pornographic videos or revenge porn. Deepfakes can also be used to create fake news and malicious hoaxes.

Bare Blog Names by KimB

[Editor's Post]

Back in the early days of the blog, we opted to buy extra DNS/URL names for the blog. Back-in-the-Day these were just about given away and having a few extra pathways to the blog seemed like a great way for guests to stop by for a nice cuppa while sharing our family stories.

Like many other internet related things, the price of the Name+Extention went from

-> cheap neat!
-> wow!
-> ouch!
-> no longer in the budget

There really isn't any reason for the DNS names to be expensive but the name-granters have figured that those with deeper pockets will pay "whatever the market will bear", which for our blog, has hit: No Mo'Bare.

Our current DNS names are:

• mrsbizzyb.com
• mrsbizzyb.net
• mrsbizzybsayshello.com

And for our other blog:

• elgato2k.com
• elgato2k.net
• elgato2000.com

The cost of the 6 names has now exceeded $300.00 USD. We do not monetize our blogs, and we have no plans to do so, so we have opted to reduce the number of names that we have to pay for out of pocket.

Starting in December 2018, the additional DNS/URL names for the blog will be:

• mrsbizzybsayshello.com
• elgato2000.com

The blog has been active for so many years now; filled with wonderful stories and contributions from family and friends and we plan that it will be around for a whole lot longer, sharing the stories that have yet to be written, after all, families never run out of stories. Our visitors may have to type a few more letters or replace a bookmark to find them.

Cookies are Bad for You by KimB

[Editor's Post]

Everyone knows Cookies are Bad for You but we still consume lots of them.

Years ago, watching the Oprah Winfrey Show, she hosted a guest nutritionist telling everyone around the OprahSphere how to lose weight. The Skinny Dude was telling those of us with Many Shades of Tubbiness how to be Just Like Him: Skinny.

His advice:

If you want a cookie... Eat a Cookie.

Oprah's response:

A Cookie? A Cookie?
It's not A COOKIE, it's a BAG OF COOKIES!!!!

Which goes to show that Oprah knows of what she speaks.

In my few encounters with nutritionists I've noticed that they have always been "skinny folks". The only credible people I've met are people who have Been There Done That ... about a thousand times.

Skinny folks, don't get it.
Fat folks get more than they should.

Which brings me to the topic of the day:

COOKIES are BAD for YOU

Because like Bags of Chocolate Chip Cookies, Computer Cookies are just as nasty. Worse even. A Bag of Chocolate Chip Cookies at least tastes good. Computer Cookies don't have any taste at all yet still manage to clog the arteries of your computer faster than the fake-chocolate, high fructose corn syrup, 200 years worth of preservative Chocolate Chip Cookies can clog yours.

Sort of a race to oblivion.

What are Computer Cookies?

You might very well ask...

Cookies are technically small files that are created and destroyed when you use a Browser (Chrome, Safari, Edge/IE, Firefox and others).¹ The appear harmless in concept but in practice they can be nasty or put to nasty use. They come in many types with different uses and their current use is one reason why the internet is the mess it is today.

Here are just some of the types of cookies you will find when you visit any website:

• Session cookie
• Persistent cookie
• Secure cookie
• Http-only cookie
• Same-site cookie
• Third-party cookie
• Supercookie
• Supercookie (more than)
• Zombie cookie / Evercookie

The average web page contains 20 or more cookies. Only 1% of cookies are strictly necessary. A scan of 330,000 websites found 4,940,969 Garbage Cookies and that's a lot of Computer Cookie Calories clogging up the internet.²

Computer Cookie Calories 2
Average cookies per website	20
Strictly necessary cookies	1%
Persistent Cookies	74%
Websites Scanned	329,151
Cookies Found	6,656,090
3rd party cookies	4,940,969

Cookies are the number one method companies and government's use to track people. The entire Internet Data Mining System is built on Computer Cookies and corporations use them to make Billions and Billions of Dollars from you, your family, your friends, your neighbors, and people you didn't even know you know.

Governments, of course, have many more methods they can use because they are not constrained by Rule of Law - they get to do whatever they want, whenever they want.

Years ago, working in a Start Up in the early Daze of Silicon Valley, discussing some internet protocols with other engineers in our High Tech Environment, the subject of cookies came up. One of the engineers stated flatly that No Cookie was ever going to grace the environment of his computer system and flatly refused to support cookie use. He was one of the few that no other engineer could bamboozle with Internet Hocus Pocus. He knew his stuff. And we all knew he knew too.

I have often thought about that conversation and thought More Fool Me for not recognizing what was really happening. Engineers get rather short sighted while slogging through deadlines and project status meetings and milestones and releases and QA cycles; more often than not, we miss the whole point.

• Engineers are good at doing what they are told to do.
• Engineers are great at building a Never Seen Before Widget
• Engineers are terrible at recognizing what it is that they are really building
• Engineers are horribly gullible and the smell of money and stock options makes them loopy

So what is the fuss about?

• A cookie is a small piece of data sent from a website and stored on the user's computer by the user's web browser while the user is browsing
• A cookie is designed to be a reliable mechanism for websites to remember stateful information (such as items added in the shopping cart in an online store) or to record the user's browsing activity
• A cookie can be used to remember arbitrary pieces of information that the user previously entered into form fields such as names, addresses, passwords, and credit card numbers

These are what allow websites to "remember you" and perform "auto logins". They help you avoid the unpleasant necessity of remembering and typing in awkward number sequences and the website takes advantage of this to put all kinds of trash on your system for their own benefit.

Computer Cookies were invented (ahem loose phrasing here) in 1994. Browser Makers created the code and started pushing cookies onto systems everywhere and sort of forgot to mention this to the public until they were outed in a Financial Times article about them on February 12, 1996

So for 2 years, Silicon Valley didn't say nuffin'.

At about the time of the article, the folks in charge of Defining the Internet had already identified third-party cookies as a considerable privacy threat.

Silicon Valley didn't change a single thing. 1996 - 2018 ... 22 years and counting.

Kind of makes you shudder a bit. Silicon Valley is just as forthcoming now as they were then.

Cookies and the Are You You? Problem

In the old days when folks were trying to recognize Friend From Foe there were a whole lot of ways you could tell or get the other guy to tell which side of the battlefield they were fighting for:

Loud Movie Voice:

H A L T !!! Who goes there? Friend or Foe???

Do you really think anyone was stupid enough to answer FOE?

In the internet, our battlefield lies between your computer and the destination computer you want to access. The size of the battlefield is enormous and spans the entire globe, with every government and bad dudette on the planet looking to find a way past each other into your very attractive computer or mobile device.

The Cookie was an attempt to create a system where the Web Page knew You were You and didn't go blabbing your personal life to anyone else. This is sort of moot at the moment as web pages no longer need to blab much as entire corporations are spewing their data repositories containing every item they've collected about World+Dog to any FOE who wants to see it for FREE. If you are FRIEND you have to pay big bucks for the same data.

It was not the only way to do it this and like the stupidity of Friend or Foe, it didn't take long for the Foes to pretend to be Friends.

It was known 20 years ago. It is known now. It's not new news.

It's just the folks making a lot of bucks off of you DO NOT want YOU do know what to do about it.

Challenge of the Cookie

The internet battlefield is strewn with the corpses of good ideas and punctured balloons. It's like trench warfare: the lines move by inches back and forth. We gain some and we lose some. There isn't any "final victory". Foes are clever and they figure out new ways to pass through to their desired destinations.

There is NO DIFFERENCE between FOES:

Governments   Corporations   Bad Guys

They work the same methods and use the same techniques. There are no Knights in Shining Armour there.

What there are, are folks pushing back against the FOE Lines to minimize some of the damage they do. The damage is greater than advertised. Google recently shut down their Google+³ system due to:

Pick the Google answer you think best fits the topic:

1. Low usage.
or
2. Major Software Bug allowing Private Data to be exposed.

Was it due to cookies?   Yes.

Because cookies ARE methods by which private data is collected and then exposed not to mention a lot of other bad news coding. It was sooo bad they folded up the entire shop because there are some new laws (mostly in the EU), that make it very expensive when these eruptions happen. Facebook's MarkZ got a nice grilling in Congress⁴ and actually had to put on a suit and tie for similar reasons. I'm sure MarkZ was more upset that he couldn't wear his tee-shirt to the BBQ.

Recently, there was a new Internet Directive for browser makers involving removing cookies on demand or when a setting is checked that tells the browser to clear all cookies. Google sort of forgot to clear their own tracking cookies.⁵ When it was noticed (and it was noticed pretty fast) the official response:

Google:
Oh..   Ahhh...   Ummmm....
We thought you meant the OTHER GUY'S cookies.
Surely you want to keep OURS...

Corporations don't want to make things better for you. Only for themselves. In the Friend or Foe battle, corporations jump lines all the time. Even when you get a message saying "Cookies are cleared" that doesn't mean anything. All it means is you got a message with that text. It's a FOE claiming to be FRIEND.

So here are some things you can do to Challenge the Cookie and they are not painful or hard.

1. Check for Cookies
   Look at each web page you visit and check what kind of cookies are being pushed. This ability varies by browser. Some make it easy to see what's being dumped to your system. It is most often in the Privacy Settings Page of the browser.
2. Turn OFF the settings to automatically accept all cookies.
   This varies by browser. It's hidden in some and right up front in others. It is most often in the Privacy Settings Page of the browser.
3. Set up Your OWN List of FRIEND sites
   Set up Your OWN privacy list of webpages where cookies are OK Most people visit a small handful of webpages where they really want to have their data harvested. Most people visit a lot of webpages just to Surf. Use the Privacy Options to create your own list of who gets FRIEND status. Everyone else will be FOE by default. Change the list as needed.
4. Reconsider which sites you go to
   There are so many sites with similar information select the ones that aren't FOE makers. Put them on your FRIEND site list.
5. Turn off JavaScript
   This is the BEST thing you can do. It's the most armour you can get. Without JavaScript setting cookies is much harder. Never underestimate FOEs but it will push them back a long way. This setting is often hidden in the browser configuration file.
6. Accept there will be less flashy page layouts
   If you DO NOT allow ALL cookies and/or JavaScript some sites are gonna barf. Yeppers, sites that cannot get their cookie fix might choke. Many times it doesn't matter that much you can still use the site OKish. Some fancy stuff might not work but do you really need the fancy stuff?
7. Clear your History, your Cookies and your Browser Cache
   This varies by browser. It's hidden in some and right up front in others. It is most often in the Privacy Settings Page of the browser. There is often a direct button for this on the Browser Menu too. Clear your Trash Can too.
8. Clean out Temporary Files.
   Temporary files never make it to the trash can. They are normally managed by the operating system. Cookies and Junk can accumulate in the Temporary File Storage Area. This an advanced housekeeping action. DO NOT attempt to do this without completely understanding which files you can remove. Clearing out the wrong files can disable your computer. You can find information on the internet on how to do this for your system.

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie
2. From a research website that extracts and analyzes cookie usage.
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%2B
   https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/oct/08/google-plus-security-breach-wall-street-journal
4. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/11/zuckerberg-hearing-facebook-tracking-questions-house-back-foot
5. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/09/25/chrome_69_google_cookies/

Wanna Cookie?

Entertaining the Computer by KimB

[Editor's Post]

It's that time when the nearly useless requirement rolls around for us to tell you how your are tracked.

You are not tracked by us.
But you are tracked: relentlessly and ruthlessly.

There! Done!

It is no longer possible to evade the tracking. You can put some dampers on it but we now permanently live under surveillance: 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, from -9 months (more or less), to day 0, until the day you die and even that won't stop the tracking. You might be worth more dead than you think.

So on the good news side of things: LOTS and LOTS of folks are doing as much dampening as possible.

On the bad news side of things: There are MORE trackers than you could possibly imagine. Even the 5EYES haven't figured out all the trackers that are tracking them - which makes them very cranky indeed.

One of the interesting changes in human-computer relationships is how our roles have been reversed so quietly that hardly anyone notices.

Computers were promised to be tools for Human use.
Humans are now tools that Computers use.

It's rather interesting to see the ways in which we have become indentured ¹ to computers.

An indentured person has signed a contract for a particular fixed time in return for a fixed benefit. The contract can be sold to someone else and the indentured is obligated to work out the contract.

Gee, if that doesn't sound like a Smartphone Cellular Contract: where you agree to pay for an expensive device and agree to charges that are not ALL the charges as they pile in a few they forgot to mention or glossed over, and you are obligated to use their system with all of the add-on charges that they glossed over and you cannot exit before your time has expired.

So we willingly indenture ourselves not to a company but to a system of computers. We carry it because "we must". We pay for it because "we have to". We live years of our lives supporting a system of computers because "we have no choice".

In the days of Old Empires people lived their lives in support of Pharaohs and Emperors. Now we live our lives in support of massive computer systems.

Gee ain't that grand!

In every store, everything has a bar code ² and all sorts of nice graphic 2D matrix codes and often RFID chips in their products. They can be in boxes and clothes and shoes, in cars and even in people. Some companies offer "free RFID chip inplant days". While not "mandatory" and often "illegal" in some locales, employees queue up ready to be branded so the computer can follow them easier. Stock clerks feed the computer information similar to feeding an infant. They scan tags and ids and even use images to show the computer what it cannot see for itself: that the items are not only placed according to their tracking location but that the products are "front facing" or "positioned" exactly how the computer indicated on the layout diagrams.

There will be no deviation!

In days gone by, in market squares people would exchange coins for goods. You can see this antique setup still working at swap meets and yard sales where passersby will pick up a discarded item and pay the seller for it. Other than robbery and the weight of the coins, one of the biggest drawbacks was that people had to know how to:

• count
• add
• subtract
• figure multiples

It's all really complex how we got to:

• 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
• 1 + 1 = 2
• 5 - 1 = 4
• 2 * 4 = 8

but we managed and we were able to buy 1 chicken, 2 apples, 4 tomatoes and 8 potatoes for a very long time. ³

The tradesperson would figure out what each of the items was worth including the required taxes and levies and tell us what we owed. In many cases a handy dandy side of entertainment was included by "bargaining" ⁴ for a better exchange. If both parties agreed then the exchange took place.

Of course if you couldn't count or add, subtract or multiply fast enough things might not turn out as you expected. Depending on which way the scale tipped you either got a Great Deal or A Rip Off.⁵

After the Civil War the Cash Register was invented ⁶ and this allowed both the seller and buyer to watch the counting without having to worry that someone forgot to Carry the 1. The total appeared in the window and That Said John Was That.

Still there was a problem: You might know that you were owed $4.90 but if the buyer gave you $5.00 ... well What To Do Percy?

It seems that being able To Count³ is not the same skill as Making Change⁵ .

So cash registers became computer Point of Sale Systems ⁷ linking RFID codes to pricing, adding up the totals with all the taxes and levies and displaying the value of the goods. Once the buyer handed over their money the machine would tell the cashier how much to return to the customer.

Years ago I was dining at a small breakfast establishment that had a newly acquired POS (it's officially called Point of Sale but the software is often a Piece of S#@% and that name works too.). The customer ahead of us paid their bill and while the cashier struggled to deduct $11.25 from a $20.00 bill, the computer showed the exact amount owed to be returned to the customer: $8.75. I watched as the owner scolded the cashier for taking $8.75 from the till and forced her to re-count the entire cash transaction by verbally counting out the change from $11.25 to $20.00

The bill for your party is $11.25.

.75 cents makes $12.
$1 dollar makes $13.
$1 dollar makes $14.
$1 dollar makes $15.
$5 dollars makes $20.

Thank you.

The exchange took longer than it took to eat the pancakes (which were quite good by the way).

When I asked the owner why the cashier wasn't allowed to give the change indicated by the computer register, I expected it was because they didn't trust the computer (not a bad thing in truth), but I was surprised when the reason was: The cashier cannot count change properly.

Evidently the cashier didn't know what 3 quarters, 3 dollars, and a fiver looked like.

So now we have POS systems everywhere counting quarters and fivers and the number of steps the serving staff took to go from the kitchen to your table and how long you had to sit there hoping the food was going to arrive hot. The POS system tells the chiefs how many flapjacks you want and some clever systems can even weigh the garbage and calculate how much was wasted because while the flapjacks came hot, there wasn't any syrup on the table and it took 30 minutes to open the TimeLock on the storeroom door to find a new bottle of Not-Maple Syrup, all because the computer didn't tell them to replace the empty one.

Education no longer matters!

While marketing at the local super, I've watched the cashiers move away from even handling monies. Of course paper money is fiat money (it's just a piece of paper) and the coins used to be real metal but are now some amalgam recast from old dental fillings ^{8 9}, but there was actually something physically in your hands and pockets. Now we all have plastic cards that we stuff into the maw of the massive Financial Computer System whenever we hope to make a purchase.

We HOPE we can make a purchase because we never really know what the Payment Computer System is going to agree to. There are numerous screens of numbers or requests that you have to pass through and while the systems crosscheck the POS, DEBIT, CREDIT, ATM, and ACH Financial Systems to verify your ability to exchange invisible fiat paper worth $4.90 for a loaf of bread. ^{7 10}

While standing by helplessly but hopeful that the card won't burp up You Shall Not Pass, there is nothing anyone can do. The cashier cannot do anything because unless the computer agrees, you won't get your loaf of bread. The store manager cannot do anything because the computer didn't indicate it was OK.

We await upon the pleasure of the System.

Not that long ago, while waiting for the computer to process the people ahead of me in the line, I noticed an elderly woman. She had no groceries but she had a card in her hand. When she got to the point where the computer/cashier could process something, there was a quiet exchange between the woman and the cashier. Being too far away to hear the exchange I saw the cashier shaking her head no, the woman looking a bit frazzled and the cashier pointing a an ATM across the corridor. One of those ATMs that charge you double the amount you take out. The woman made her way to the ATM.

The impatient people waiting behind her, heaved big sighs of relief and quickly queued up their goods and shuffled their mortal coils through the Dance of The Debits; continuing along their Happy Track Day jabbering away on their smartphones, because of course, THAT was what one DOES when you are IMPORTANT!

Being more than a few people behind in the queue with my loaf of bread, I watched the woman attempt to use the ATM. She wasn't having any success. Soon a clerk come to help her. Together they shook their heads. The woman looked distraught. The kindly clerk took her to his checkout counter and pointed to the Payment System and I watch while the Dance continued. It wasn't going well at all.

At last being within earshot of the first cashier I inquired:

What is the woman trying to do? What's the problem?

She wants Cash Back from her account.

Is there an issue?

We cannot give Cash Back unless you buy something for more than $1.00.

Ohhh Ahhhh Hmmmmm

The Horns of a Dilemma

There was only ONE thing to do.

I reached into my Mad Money pocket and pulled out a REAL FIAT $20.00 bill. I told the cashier to give the $20.00 to the old lady so she can buy something, which will then qualify her to put her card into the Payment Computer System so she can get her Cash Back. The kindly clerk looked at the $20.00 and at me in complete puzzlement. I said,

Sell her a packet of gum for a buck so she can get her cash back.

Light Bulbs are now LEDs but there was Illumination.

Computers are not Humans. They don't care.

Most humans don't care either but Computers don't care about them anymore than they do the rest of us.

I play several computer MMORPG video games ¹¹ with varying degree of success. Early games were tests of human - machine interface and used simple menus to accomplish "game stuff". Advanced games provide images that look like real world ones and some activities that mimic real world actions. There are lots of variations from basic, to neat, to wonderful all the way to creepy, weird, and totally yucky.

One of the most common secondary activities in these games is to use a scripting language to automate the game play.

So... lest this small sentence get lost in the flow:

They automate game play so Their Computer can play The Big Server In The Sky without human interaction.

It's a bit like the 1983 movie WarGames ¹² where you get your computer to run a simulaton against another computer because the Big System In The Sky cannot tell the difference between a simulation and reality. It cannot tell a human from another computer.

Ok there's a bit of a fudge here because every game system eventually has to work out HOW to tell if a human is actually playing or are they just pretending to play. But for the most part automated scripts work extremely well and play the game much better than any human. It's the nature of the computer: it never blinks, breaths, takes a bio, or misses a scripted action. You just rollout the script and sit back and watch Netflix while your computer plays the game for you.

In one of my games we had a fishing derby. Fishing is a popular item in many games. The goal was to catch A LOT of fish. It ran for 48 hours (that's to allow world time zones to participate). Of course there are no real fish in the game. It's a fishing simulation. Sometimes you get a fish, sometimes you don't. The simulation is designed with just enough fish rewards to encourage you to sit and click the fishing icon - in this case for 48 hours.

At a mid-way check-in by the Event Team they hoped that everyone was Having Fun and Enjoying the Event. I said,

I don't know about any people having fun ...
but I'm sure the fishing scripts are having a blast.

There is a difference, albeit small, between

Assisting a human to play
and
Eliminating the human from play.

These types of MMORPG Games are not cheap to play. They have micro-transaction stores and subscriptions and many other means to separate you from your fiat money. It's not uncommon to pay $200-$600 or more to play just one MMORPG style game. The companies that produce the games make Billions and Billions through various purchase mechanisms.¹³

Scripting has become very sophisticated and nearly every move in any game can be scripted. Your computer no longer needs YOU to play the game. Scripting allows you to pay a lot of money just so your computer can have fun playing with other computers.

Leave the power on.

HAL will contact you when your funds run out.

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indentured_servitude
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcode
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcode#Matrix_(2D)_barcodes
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcode#Example_images
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio-frequency_identification
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counting
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_numerals
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bargaining
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Change-making_problem
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coin_problem
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_register
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_of_sale
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_money
9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coinage_metals
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarter_(United_States_coin)
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cupronickel
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amalgam_(dentistry)
10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debit_card
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATM_card
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACH_Network
11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massively_multiplayer_online_role-playing_game
12. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarGames
13. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highest-grossing_video_game_franchises_of_all_time

Click to Fish