Quixey Makes Sense Now

From the Slope of Hope blog: The main drag here in Palo Alto is University Avenue, which is lined with pricey restaurants and retail. One city to the south of us, Mountain View, has their own main drag, and it"s called Castro Street (not to be confused with the gay mecca in San Francisco, half an hour"s drive north).

I"ve walked Castro many times (again, let"s not confuse the two), and I would often pass a very nice building which was neither a restaurant nor a retail store; on the front was a large sign, QUIXEY, and inside the building were dozens of young engineers, all of whom I"m certain were earning great six-figure salaries, working away at their keyboards. Beneath the "Quixey" name was the tag line: "The Search Engine for Apps"

Now this didn"t make a great deal of sense to me. Why would anyone need a search engine for apps? I mean, if I needed to search for an app, I"d go off and do something crazy like this:

You know......like........do a search. Quixey bragged, "The technology allowed users to search across multiple platforms, eliminating the need for multiple searches using different mobile devices." Ummm, sorry, if I"m an iPhone user, I don"t give a crap about, say, Android apps.

But people with far more money and far more intelligence than me felt otherwise, and thus:

Yes, countless tens of millions poured into the Quixey coffers, valuing the company at way over half a billion dollars for what I"m convinced has to be one of the stupidest and most useless ideas in history. But how are you going to fund free lunches and ping pong for your overpaid twenty-somethings without all this cash, people??

Indeed, although I could only see bits and pieces of Quixey from outside the building, it was apparently a fairly spiffy place for a startup. Its office had themed conference rooms constructed by local set designers, such as Ski Lodge, Picnic, Movie Theater, and Wild West. Hell, they even had Up and Down escalators so the little darlings didn"t have to move their legs to change floors.

So color me surprised when this finally happened:

Strategic options. Got it. Like wondering where your $133 million went.

But this is all too common in the Silicon Valley. VCs, armed with far more billions to throw at ideas than they know what to do with, will just keep hurling the cash until the next Facebook or Google comes along. One home run makes up for a multitude of past sins. And, for those ideas that are too stupid or fraudulent to make it........they just disappear without a trace.

The Truth Will Not Be Googled

Authored by Claire Connelly via RenegadeInc.com,

Google has come under scrutiny by free-speech organisations for shutting down neo-Nazi website, Daily Stormer, seemingly too distracted to notice the tech giant has been waging a censorship campaign against news organisations that publish content which conflicts with the narrative of the Washington establishment, along with Facebook and Twitter on the grounds of ‘fake news’.

While web-hosting services have been criticised for cancelling the registration of neo-Nazi website, Daily Stormer, progressive left-leaning sites are losing Google ranking and traffic because of a deliberate move to censor “fake” news by the internet search giant.

New data released by World Socialist Websites (WSWS) revealed that sites such as Wikileaks, The Intercept, Electronic Frontiers Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Organisation, CounterPunch and many other organisations with the audacity to provide context about the activities of federal governments not reported in mainstream publications have experienced a significant drop in traffic after Google altered its algorithm.

(WSWS is an online news and information service founded by the International Committee of the Fourth International, the leadership of the world socialist movement).

Earlier this week, internet hosting provider, GoDaddy, announced it had cancelled US neo-Nazi website, Daily Stormer, for posting an attack on Heather Heyer, the protester who was murdered at the Klan rally in Charlottesville last week. Google and CloudFlare likewise cancelled its registration after the site tried to move its hosting over to their respective services.

But while these hosting services are being congratulated by some – and condemned by others on free-speech grounds – for ensuring that those looking to commit violence have to work slightly harder to get access to their like-minded Nazi communities, those who own the means of transmission – namely Google, Facebook and Twitter – are still preventing the rest of us from accessing information that allows people to make sense of the world around us.

Earlier this month, Google altered its algorithm – allegedly in an attempt to address the ‘fake news’ problem – and in doing so, a broad array of anti-establishment news organisations, whistleblower, civil-rights and anti-war websites were censored from its search listings. But most people were too distracted by the opinions of some low-level engineer on Google’s diversity hiring policies and its intolerance of conservative views in the workplace to take notice.

The data released by WSWS shows that since Google altered its algorithm, Wikileaks experienced a 30% decline in traffic from Google searches. Democracy Now fell by 36%. Truthout dropped by 25%. Its own traffic dropped by 67% percent over the same period. Alternet saw a 63% decline in traffic. Media Matters saw a 36% drop in traffic. Counterpunch.org fell by 21%. The Intercept fell by 19%.

In May, WSWS was ranked 5th in Google searches for the keyword ‘socialism’. Today the WSWS is nowhere to be found in the top 200 searches for the same keyword. In addition, Google blocked every one of WSW’s top 45 search terms.

Aaron Kaufman, director of development at progressive news outlet, Common Dreams said that Google Search as a percentage of total traffic to the Common Dreams website has decreased nearly 50 percent since May.

When human bias mistakes truth for bullshit

In a blog post published on April 25th, Google’s chief search engineer, Ben Gomez framed the issue as a change to the tech giant’s technical procedures in response to “the phenomenon of fake news”.

“The most high profile of these issues is the phenomenon of ‘fake news,’ where content on the web has contributed to the spread of blatantly misleading, low quality, offensive or downright false information,” Gomez wrote.

 

“While this problem is different from issues in the past, our goal remains the same—to provide people with access to relevant information from the most reliable sources available. And while we may not always get it right, we’re making good progress in tackling the problem. But in order to have long-term and impactful changes, more structural changes in Search are needed.”

Gomez revealed that Google had recruited more than 10,000 “evaluators” hired to judge the quality of various websites, “real people who assess the quality of Google’s search results—give us feedback on our experiments,” though the chief search engineer did not identify the “evaluators” or explain the criteria against which websites are judged.

The ultimate irony: Google has seemingly allowed its evaluators to exercise their own biases when assessing the truth, accuracy and validity of these websites, and in doing so, are censoring essential information inconvenient to the narrative of the Washington establishment.

Illustration by Rachael Bolton

Corporate regulation and shadow-blocking

Google is not the only player in this censorship game. Earlier last year, anti-establishment information services – Renegade Inc included – experienced a 20% drop in traffic to its Facebook pages, after the social-network altered its algorithm, again, allegedly in an attempt to crack down on ‘fake news’.

And as some excellent reporting by Reveal News’ Aaron Sankin has demonstrated, Facebook’s moderator army is likewise using the social network’s reporting system to shut down dissenting voices, particularly activists, particularly activists of colour.

Likewise, Twitter is allegedly shadow-blocking those of the left and right who it perceives to be tweeting content that sits outside of the mainstream. Renegade Inc has not been immune from this sidelining.

While Twitter has formal mechanisms for trolls and those who post abusive content – in which case it will notify users they have been suspended and provide explanations as to why – shadow-blocking is a whole different ball game. ‘Shadow-blocking’ – or ‘shadow-banning’ – are terms used to describe a more informal mode of censorship whereby particular users will simply not show up when you search for their username. Certain tweets may disappear into the ether, and your content may only be visible to people who follow you but will not show up on any Twitter feed, even if after it is re-tweeted.

Russell Bentley, a former American soldier fighting fascism in the Ukraine under the Donetsk People’s Republic – a self-declared, Russian backed separatist state – had his Twitter account shut down two days ago after a sustained campaign of targeted harassment and death threats (prohibited by Twitter’s terms of service) by pro-nazi propagandists.

Most notably, Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic, recently fell victim to a shadow-ban by Twitter, allegedly for his views on Trump.

So too was Nicholas Sarwark, chair of the Libertarian National Committee who told Renegade Inc that for weeks his own Twitter username does not show up when he searched for it from other accounts. Likewise his tweets disappeared, and were not visible to those outside of his network.

Meanwhile, those on the right claim their web traffic is also being restricted. Alt-right website Breitbart claimed both Google and Facebook had attempted to defund its site and those like it by altering Google Adsense and Facebook Audience Network.

Corporate regulation means never having to explain yourself

It is difficult to know whether these instances of censorship are a deliberate, or unintended side-effect of a fake-news crackdown because, unlike governments who have some semblance of an obligation to explain themselves, companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter are under no obligation to be transparent about their reasoning or methods, claiming intellectual property rights over proprietary information, (their algorithms).

The result is a corporate regulation of the internet by companies with no obligation to explain how or why it changes its feeds or search listings.

Dr Monique Mann, researcher at Queensland University of Technology’s Crime and Justice Research Centre, and Director of Australian Privacy Foundation told Renegade Inc that these issues of censorship relate to broader issues around bias in computer systems.

“These decisions aren’t being made by formal enforcement bodies, or any kind of body with authorised legal powers,” she said.

 

“This process is occurring by transnational companies and platforms, these tech giants are acting like big regulators.”

Dr Mann says these instances of censorship by algorithm raises questions over trade secrets and proprietary rights.

“These trade secrets and algorithms are how they operate,” she said. “But they introduce additional challenges and barriers to transparency and accountability of algorithms, themselves protected under international property law.”

Hypothetically Google is applying a colour blind algorithm. Dr Mann says the question is over what happens when algorithms are built by “digital duopolies” to match societal expectations.

“Google is deciding what is an acceptable story, and what is unacceptable, whose views and voices are preferenced, and whose are silenced,” she said.

 

“There is no transparency and accountability. These companies are protected by very serious financial investments and fields of law.”

Dr Monique Mann told Renegade Inc that there has been a suggestion that some tweets made by President Trump violate Twitter’s terms of service, because they contain hate-speech that targets certain groups and minority populations: particularly Muslims and the LGBTQI community given his recent attempt to enact a Muslim ban and deny health care to LGBTQI servicemen, women and those who identify as neither, or have them thrown out of the service altogether.

“But are Twitter likely to block Trump for violating its terms of service?,” she asked. “These are all very loaded and difficult decisions around what constitutes hate speech vs political expression. These are very contested issues and I do not think there are any easy answers here.”

A battle for the heart and soul of the web

Dr Matthew Rimmer, Professor of IP and Innovation Law and Queensland University of Technology told Renegade Inc that how these companies manage information is becoming increasingly important.

“Their duties and responsibilities are becoming quite significant,” he said. “There is a battle for the heart and soul of the internet in many ways.”

Tim Berners Lee, (computer scientist and inventor of the World Wide Web), commented recently that the open system he helped create has come under threat from various corporate players who have enacted site blocking and surveillance. He said it is important to address the balance away from big IT companies and other corporations and national governments. He wants to recover the emancipatory potential of the internet and World Wide Web. There are some larger questions involved in terms of the future evolution of the regime.

Dr Mann said that automation through algorithm is ‘falling into a trap’ that is not going to find us any easy answers.

“These processes and the way they operate create a range of additional problems,” she said. “I don’t think technology in this situation is going to be the panacea for social issues.”

Don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone

It is worth mentioning here that nothing Renegade Inc publishes is anything close to ‘fake news’ and we take exception at being treated as such. Rather we, and other like-minded publications that sit outside of the mainstream, are committed to providing much needed context that you won’t find in the New York Times or Washington Post, for example, publications that are far too cozy with intelligence communities.

You won’t find the Post or the Times reporting on the fact that the US and its allies are funding terror groups like ISIS, al-qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. Nor will you find them reporting on the American interests at play in Venezuela, or Syria, Iraq, Iran or Libya. Or how freedom is a concept that has been co-opted by right-wing ideology.

Censoring access to sites like ours is what allows people to continue believing that America is fighting a war on terrorism, when in reality, it is funding, arming and training terrorist organisations to fight a proxy war on Middle East Socialism.

You won’t find corporate media reporting on how the economy really works, or the countries, governments, companies and individuals involved in the financialisation of the economy, or the role of central banking in the Global Financial Crisis.

Moreover, there would be no need for any of these services if establishment media could be trusted to provide readers with enough information, background and context to make rational decisions.

But when you accept the claims of the intelligence community as lore, when you accept that market freedom is the same as actual freedom and not a tool used to trick people into accepting permanent financial insecurity, the entire narrative for understanding the world and how we came to find ourselves on the sidelines of history, powerless to the whims of the new economic order, becomes a fiction. The system that took 35-years to build has worked perfectly, according to the rules upon which it has been set, and now it is being defended. So long as sites like these continue to be censored, we will never know the real terms of our enslavement, or how we let it happen.

James Damore: "This Is Why I Was Fired By Google"

Fired Google engineer Jame Damore has penned an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal explaining how his good-faith effort to discuss differences between men and women in tech couldn’t be tolerated in the company’s "ideological echo chamber," adding that self-segregation with similar-minded people has grown in recent decades as we spend more time in digital worlds "personalized to fit our views."

I was fired by Google this past Monday for a document that I wrote and circulated internally raising questions about cultural taboos and how they cloud our thinking about gender diversity at the company and in the wider tech sector. I suggested that at least some of the male-female disparity in tech could be attributed to biological differences (and, yes, I said that bias against women was a factor too). Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai declared that portions of my statement violated the company’s code of conduct and “cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.”

My 10-page document set out what I considered a reasoned, well-researched, good-faith argument, but as I wrote, the viewpoint I was putting forward is generally suppressed at Google because of the company’s “ideological echo chamber.” My firing neatly confirms that point.

How did Google, the company that hires the smartest people in the world, become so ideologically driven and intolerant of scientific debate and reasoned argument?

We all have moral preferences and beliefs about how the world is and should be. Having these views challenged can be painful, so we tend to avoid people with differing values and to associate with those who share our values. This self-segregation has become much more potent in recent decades. We are more mobile and can sort ourselves into different communities; we wait longer to find and choose just the right mate; and we spend much of our time in a digital world personalized to fit our views.

Google is a particularly intense echo chamber because it is in the middle of Silicon Valley and is so life-encompassing as a place to work. With free food, internal meme boards and weekly companywide meetings, Google becomes a huge part of its employees’ lives. Some even live on campus. For many, including myself, working at Google is a major part of their identity, almost like a cult with its own leaders and saints, all believed to righteously uphold the sacred motto of “Don’t be evil.”

Echo chambers maintain themselves by creating a shared spirit and keeping discussion confined within certain limits. As Noam Chomsky once observed, “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.”

But echo chambers also have to guard against dissent and opposition. Whether it’s in our homes, online or in our workplaces, a consensus is maintained by shaming people into conformity or excommunicating them if they persist in violating taboos. Public shaming serves not only to display the virtue of those doing the shaming but also warns others that the same punishment awaits them if they don’t conform.

In my document, I committed heresy against the Google creed by stating that not all disparities between men and women that we see in the world are the result of discriminatory treatment.

When I first circulated the document about a month ago to our diversity groups and individuals at Google, there was no outcry or charge of misogyny. I engaged in reasoned discussion with some of my peers on these issues, but mostly I was ignored.

Everything changed when the document went viral within the company and the wider tech world. Those most zealously committed to the diversity creed—that all differences in outcome are due to differential treatment and all people are inherently the same—could not let this public offense go unpunished. They sent angry emails to Google’s human-resources department and everyone up my management chain, demanding censorship, retaliation and atonement.

Upper management tried to placate this surge of outrage by shaming me and misrepresenting my document, but they couldn’t really do otherwise: The mob would have set upon anyone who openly agreed with me or even tolerated my views. When the whole episode finally became a giant media controversy, thanks to external leaks, Google had to solve the problem caused by my supposedly sexist, anti-diversity manifesto, and the whole company came under heated and sometimes threatening scrutiny.

It saddens me to leave Google and to see the company silence open and honest discussion. If Google continues to ignore the very real issues raised by its diversity policies and corporate culture, it will be walking blind into the future—unable to meet the needs of its remarkable employees and sure to disappoint its billions of users.

Fired Coder Speaks Out On Google's "Potentially Illegal Practices", "Recorded Meetings" And "Science Denial"

For those who have managed to avoid this storyline, James Damore, now a former Google employee, caused outrage when he circulated a manifesto on Friday, complaining about Google’s “ideological echo chamber,” alleging women have lower tolerance for stress and that conservatives are more conscientious. By Monday, the chess master, who studied at Harvard, Princeton and MIT and worked at Google"s Mountain View HQ, was fired after the search giant’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, said portions of Damore’s 10-page memo “violate our code of conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes” despite saying in the same memo that Google employees shouldn"t be afraid of speaking their minds.

Now, for the first time, the former Googler sat down for a YouTube interview with University of Toronto professor of psychology, Jordan Peterson, to discuss the circumstances leading up to the release of his controversial memo and the fallout that has resulted since. 

In this first exchange, Damore explains that he decided to write his now-infamous memo after attending a "secretive" Google "diversity summit" in which he says presenters talked about "potentially illegal practices" intended to "try to increase diversity...basically treating people differently based on what their race or gender are."

Peterson:  "Why did you do this?"

Damore:  "About a month and a half ago, I went to one of our diversity summits, all of it unrecorded and super-secret and they told me a lot of things that I thought just were not right."

Peterson:  "Ok, what do you mean "unrecorded and super-secret?""

Damore:  "Most meetings at Google are recorded.  Anyone at Google can watch it.  We"re trying to be really open about everything...except for this.  They don"t want any paper trail for any of these things." 

"They were telling us about a lot of these potentially illegal practices that they"ve been doing to try to increase diversity.  Basically treating people differently based on what their race or gender are." 

Peterson:  "Ok, why?"

Damore:  "Because I think it"s illegal.  As some of the internal polls showed, there were a large percentage of people who agreed with me on the document.  So, if everyone got to see this stuff, then they would really bring up some criticism." 

Damore also talks about how he originally published his memo over a month ago but upper-management largely ignored it until it started to garner media attention.  Then, once it went viral, upper management organized a coordinated attack and misrepresented facts in order to silence him.

Damore: "I actually published this document about a month ago; it"s only after it had gone viral and leaked to the news, that Google started caring." 

"There was a lot of upper management that started to call it out and started saying how harmful it is.  This sort of viewpoint is not allowed at Google."

Peterson:  "Yeah, what sort of viewpoint exactly?  The idea that there are differences between men and women that might actually play a role in the corporate world?  That"s an opinion that"s not acceptable?"

Damore:  "Yeah, it seems so.  And there"s a lot of misrepresentation by upper-management just to silence me, I think." 

On why he was fired:

Peterson:  "What was there rationale for firing you exactly?  What was the excuse that was given?"

Damore:  "So, the official excuse was that I was perpetuating gender stereotypes." 

And finally, an interesting tidbit in which Damore once again points out that Google"s progressives are all too eager to put on their science hats when discussing climate change but are less eager to entertain scientific facts when they"re deemed "inconvenient."

Damore:  "I"m not sure how they can expect to silence so many engineers and intelligent people and just deny science like this"

How "Nothing To Hide" Leads To "Nowhere To Hide" – Why Privacy Matters In An Age Of Tech Totalitarianism

And just think, they were documenting Miss Witt’s activities and conversations by hand, back in the 1970s and ‘80s. Now, nearly every single aspect of our lives is being recorded in real time. Every email, every text, every phone conversation. Every time you allow your phone to know where you are, your whereabouts are noted. Soon, that Internet of Things — IoT — which already connects 50 billion “things” through an internet of its own, will be coming to your refrigerator, your dishwasher, your coffeemaker. Happy Alexa and GE “smart fridge” commercials are airing as we speak.

And not only are we letting all of this happen, we’re welcoming it. Twenty years ago, it was Miss Witt’s friends who recorded her personal conversations, and strangers who spied on her. But as she has noted, these days, we give a lot of our privacy away of our own free will. If someone were parked outside your house, surveilling you day and night, it would be unnerving, no? But we’re fine keeping our phones on us 24/7, and telling Facebook personal details about ourselves.

We do this because of the convenience, which will be increasing in scope as quickly as do the various surveillance mechanisms. Will it be convenient when your fridge tells your phone that you’re running low on orange juice (as the bottle will have a sensor, too)? Perhaps.

But will it be convenient when that same fridge tells your health insurance company that you’ve got ice cream in the freezer? And when your rates go up because of it?

Worse – will it be convenient when that fridge listens to your kitchen conversations and tells the government that you’ll be organizing a political discussion group on Tuesday? Or when it tells that bizarre man you went on one date with, who hacked your system, that your daughter has a recital this Friday night?

This is not a conspiracy theory. This is an extrapolation of what happens when people who crave power gain access to vast amounts of personal information.

The more you tell Facebook, or Siri, or Google, or FourSquare, or your phone, or your washing machine, then the more of your own personal power and privacy you’re giving up. (And the more photos you post of your young children, the more of their power you’re relinquishing. So, parents — stop. Now.) 

Bottom line: Once the state (or a company) knows your weaknesses, they can exploit them. They can go after you in myriad ways. And I don’t just mean to “punish” you… I mean to manipulate you.

If a politician has access to your personal proclivities, then he can easily craft, via Artificial Intelligence, a targeted campaign that caters to exactly what the data tell him you want to hear. In the future, he could even warp news stories, video and even audio in real time to appeal to you for gain.

How “Nothing to Hide” Leads to “Nowhere to Hide” – Why Privacy Matters in an Age of Tech Totalitarianism

And just think, they were documenting Miss Witt’s activities and conversations by hand, back in the 1970s and ‘80s. Now, nearly every single aspect of our lives is being recorded in real time. Every email, every text, every phone conversation. Every time you allow your phone to know where you are, your whereabouts are noted. Soon, that Internet of Things — IoT — which already connects 50 billion “things” through an internet of its own, will be coming to your refrigerator, your dishwasher, your coffeemaker. Happy Alexa and GE “smart fridge” commercials are airing as we speak.

And not only are we letting all of this happen, we’re welcoming it. Twenty years ago, it was Miss Witt’s friends who recorded her personal conversations, and strangers who spied on her. But as she has noted, these days, we give a lot of our privacy away of our own free will. If someone were parked outside your house, surveilling you day and night, it would be unnerving, no? But we’re fine keeping our phones on us 24/7, and telling Facebook personal details about ourselves.

We do this because of the convenience, which will be increasing in scope as quickly as do the various surveillance mechanisms. Will it be convenient when your fridge tells your phone that you’re running low on orange juice (as the bottle will have a sensor, too)? Perhaps.

But will it be convenient when that same fridge tells your health insurance company that you’ve got ice cream in the freezer? And when your rates go up because of it?

Worse – will it be convenient when that fridge listens to your kitchen conversations and tells the government that you’ll be organizing a political discussion group on Tuesday? Or when it tells that bizarre man you went on one date with, who hacked your system, that your daughter has a recital this Friday night?

This is not a conspiracy theory. This is an extrapolation of what happens when people who crave power gain access to vast amounts of personal information.

The more you tell Facebook, or Siri, or Google, or FourSquare, or your phone, or your washing machine, then the more of your own personal power and privacy you’re giving up. (And the more photos you post of your young children, the more of their power you’re relinquishing. So, parents — stop. Now.) 

Bottom line: Once the state (or a company) knows your weaknesses, they can exploit them. They can go after you in myriad ways. And I don’t just mean to “punish” you… I mean to manipulate you.

If a politician has access to your personal proclivities, then he can easily craft, via Artificial Intelligence, a targeted campaign that caters to exactly what the data tell him you want to hear. In the future, he could even warp news stories, video and even audio in real time to appeal to you for gain.

Even Google Employees Can No Longer Afford Housing In San Francisco

Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

You load sixteen tons, what do you get
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go
I owe my soul to the new Google modular home

Every now and then a story appears in the national media that causes a lightbulb to start flashing incessantly in my head. For me, such a story came to my attention today and relates to how Google is manufacturing housing for some of its employees due to the ridiculous cost of housing in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Here’s a summary from The Verge:

Google’s employees can’t find affordable housing in Silicon Valley, so the company is investing in modular homes that’ll serve as short-term housing for them. The Wall Street Journal reports that Google has ordered 300 units from a startup called Factory OS, which specializes in modular homes. The deal reportedly costs between $25 and $30 million.

Modular homes are completely built in a factory and assembled like puzzle pieces onsite. This method of construction can reduce the cost of construction by 20 to 50 percent, the Journal reports. These apartments can also be put up more quickly to address dire housing needs. In one case the Journal cites, tenants saved $700 a month because of reduced construction costs.

Earlier this year, CNBC published a piece that detailed the difficulty tech companies have in trying to convince possible employees to move to San Francisco, especially when they live abroad. In response, some startups are establishing offices in other cities, like Chicago and Seattle. The other option is to out-tech the housing crisis, as Google appears to be doing with its modular home investment.

First, let’s get a couple of things out of the way. Yes, I understand that San Francisco is one of the most expensive places to live in the world, and yes, I get that nobody is forcing anyone to work for Google or live there. Yes, I understand that this is probably intended for entry level employees. Yes, I understand that revolutionary new ways of building homes using technology is the future, and the ability for such techniques to reduce costs is a positive thing. Yes, I understand all of that, yet I still think this development is a  sign we are getting closer to some sort of breaking point.

The middle class in America has been getting squeezed for a long time, and the societal, political and ethical ramifications of this development cannot be overstated. In fact, I’ve been so concerned about the U.S. transformation into a neo-feualism serf economy, I’ve dedicated much of the last decade to writing and warning about it. What’s going on will Google employees unable to afford housing is a sign that this corrupt, fraud economy is now starting to affect even the fortunate amongst us.

Google is one of the most successful companies the world has ever seen, and if its employees are struggling to find a place to live (I don’t care what city it is), something’s really not working. To me, this is a clear glitch in the matrix. A sign that some sort of reckoning is near. How that reckoning manifests I have no idea, but most companies don’t have the luxury of just buying homes to put their employees in. If this is happening to Google, consider it some sort of canary in the coal-mine.

The entire economic system is a rent-seeking, corrupt scam in which financial oligarchs and assorted other parasites suck more and more life out of the economy until it breaks completely. The fact that Google employees are now feeling the repercussions of this, tells you all you need to know. Even a terribly corrupt system can continue until it consumes itself. It is now consuming itself.

Mapping America's Most Misspelled Words

Amid Murica"s spelling-bee week, Google mapped the nation"s most mis-spelled words...

"Sauerkraut" in Pennsylvania, "Chaos" in Tennessee, Diarrhea" in New Hampshire, and "Chihuahua" in South Carolina"?

Source: Google

And here are the most-used words in each state...

Source: xkcd.com

Austria Found a Way to Tax Google Searches and Social Media Posts

(ANTIMEDIA) Austria — Highlighting the difficulty both public and private establishments can have when it comes to adapting methods in the digital age, it was reported Monday that one government is now trying to tax search giant Google and social media companies.

From a report by Bloomberg:

“Austria is seeking ways to make digital services like Alphabet Inc.’s Google or Facebook Inc. pay taxes for transactions with the nation’s internet users, trying to plug gaps in a tax system still designed for brick-and-mortar business.”

Continuing, Bloomberg explains something most people don’t stop to consider: how social media actually functions, and at no monetary cost to users:

“The most ambitious part of the plan targets the business models of Twitter Inc., Google or Facebook: The tacit pact under which searching, liking, posting and tweeting remains free as long as users let the companies feed usage data into algorithms that help tailor advertising that can be aimed at the most likely buyers.”

Since this arrangement is a form of bartering, the Austrian government argues, a value-added tax can be applied, just as in other sectors of the economy.

“The business transaction that’s going on here is that users are paying with their personal data,” the parliamentary head of the governing coalition, Andreas Schieder, told journalists in Vienna. “The business model of those internet companies is based on massive revenues that are generated with the help of those data.”

The government’s plan would include extending the general advertising tax to cover digital services, and it would also place a tax on purely digital services Austrians purchase from businesses with no physical location.

“We need a new approach to make sure that taxes are paid where revenue and profit is made,” Schieder said, adding that the government’s plan is comprised of “practical suggestions (on) how to define digital establishments for tax purposes.”

The proposals, according to Bloomberg, now need the approval of a single man, Finance Minister Hans Joerg Schelling.

Creative Commons / Anti-Media / Report a typo

Judge Orders Google to Hand over Data on Anyone Who Searched for a Certain Name

(ANTIMEDIA) Hennepin County, MN — A Minnesota judge recently signed a search warrant ordering Google, Inc. to hand over personal information on anyone who searched a specific name, a decision that could set an alarming precedent that would render the fourth amendment virtually ineffective with regard to online privacy.

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According to the application for the warrant, filed by Detective David Lindland of the Edina Police Department, authorities are trying to locate an individual who used a fake passport to trick a credit union into transferring $28,000 out of an Edina man’s account. Police say the passport image showed up in a Google search but was not available on Yahoo or Bing. The warrant does not mention whether or not they searched Ask.com, DuckDuckGo, Ixquick, or any other of the many search engines available to the public.

The warrant, signed by Hennepin County Senior Judge Gary Larson, demands Google disclose any and all information on any person who searched the victim’s name from December 1st, 2016, to January 7th, 2017. According to the warrant:

“The user/subscriber information [is] to include, but not limited to: name(s), address(es), telephone number(s), date(s) of birth, social security numbers, email addresses, payment information, account information, IP addresses, and MAC addresses of the person(s) who requested/completed the search.”

The documents indicate Google was first served with an administrative subpoena requesting the information, which it promptly rejected. A spokesperson for Google responded to questions about the case in an email to The Register, saying, “We aren’t able to comment on specific cases, but we will always push back when we receive excessively broad requests for data about our users.”

A criminal defense staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Stephanie Lacambra, commented on the unprecedented scope of the warrant:

“As a former public defender for over a decade, I can say that this kind of warrant appears both unusual, in that it was approved in the first place without first establishing as a threshold matter that the suspect perpetrator used Google to obtain the photo used in the fraudulent passport in the first place, and overbroad, in that it calls for a dragnet production of the private information of all querents who searched a particular name within a five week time frame without any further limiting factors.”

While Google has pushed back against government overreach in the past, the company’s most recent transparency report shows they comply with more than 70% of  government requests for user information.

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The Mainstream Is Circling The Wagons: "They're Coming For All Of Us...It's An Orchestrated Attack Against Truth"

Via Mac Slavo of SHTFPlan.com,

Within hours of the election of Donald Trump the mainstream media, their politico counterparts and social media operatives began spreading the narrative that the President was only elected as a result of the dissemination of fake news. The term itself became a rallying cry for everyone from major search engines to massive social media websites who said they would create fact checking teams within their organizations to ensure only legitimate news and information would be listed on their respective platforms. Soon, the leftist media began spreading lists, none of which were backed with any actual evidence, of supposed “fake news” purveyors and Russian propaganda websites. The lists included some of the most highly trafficked non-mainstream websites and aggregators around the world. As these Silicon Valley behemoths and popular news organizations mobilized, so too did mainstream advertising agencies, one of which quickly pulled advertising from the purported king of fake news, conservative leaning news organization Breitbart.com.

The battle was clearly on. And to this day, it continues in earnest. Legitimate news is being buried in feeds and search engine pages, while the effort to directly attack the revenue of alternative media websites continues to expand.

Several weeks ago Mike Adams of NaturalNews.com penned an alert in which he reported that a shadow organization had contacted him with an offer to either help them take down Infowars founder Alex Jones, or be destroyed. Adams, being a long-time proponent of free speech and liberty, took to the internet to expose them instead. Naturally, the skeptics laughed it all off as another conspiracy theory.

Except just days after Natural News posted the warning, Infowars was suddenly dropped by one of the world’s largest online advertising agencies, reportedly costing the network some $3 million in revenue. And within a week of that attack, the largest search engine in the world delisted some 140,000 NaturalNews.com pages from their search results.

While this may seem like no big deal for the average reader today, what these recent actions demonstrate is that a conglomerate of traditional news media, big business and political operatives are actively working to suppress the reporting of information that runs counter to the mainstream agenda.

First they come for the purveyors of truth and information that has remained hidden from the masses for decades. Next they will come for those who publicly discuss their views and and ideas on social media and other forums. And while you may not fall into any of these two categories, make no mistake, as SGT Report warns in the following must-watch report, one day they will come for you, too. 

They’ll be coming for all of us… Because this is an orchestrated attack against truth… I cannot imagine living in a time in the United States of America where this is allowed to stand…

As of this morning Google has reinstated NaturalNews.com, though the original reasons provided by Google, which claimed this was a technical issue involving a small number of outdated pages on the website, were unable to be duplicated by numerous well known SEO websites and cyber sleuths. Curiously, as Health Ranger Mike Adams notes in his statement on the censroship, the very same technical issues actively exist on mainstream websites like CNN and Huffington Post, though their pages have yet to be delisted in the same manner as Natural News.

Based on the evidence, we are hard pressed to find any legitimate reason for why Mike Adams’ 140,000 pages would have been delisted, save for the fact that this was a direct attack against his alternative viewpoints on health, politics and a number of other issues. And though Google as an organization may not have been fully aware of the reasons behind the delisting, someone had to push the button. That the button push came just days after the aforementioned warning Mike received to either play ball or be destroyed is highly suspicious.

There is a concerted effort to shut down views and ideas that run counter to the status quo. Today it has come in the form of silencing the most vocal critics. Tomorrow, they may try to silence you.

Mike Adams discusses the delisting and reinstatement of his website on The Common Sense Show: