Governments Spying on Apple, Google Users Through Push Notifications
December 6th, 2023
What can I say? If you’re even mildly surprised by this, you haven’t been paying attention for the past couple of decades.
Via: Reuters:
Unidentified governments are surveilling smartphone users via their apps’ push notifications, a U.S. senator warned on Wednesday.
In a letter to the Department of Justice, Senator Ron Wyden said foreign officials were demanding the data from Alphabet’s (GOOGL.O) Google and Apple (AAPL.O). Although details were sparse, the letter lays out yet another path by which governments can track smartphones.
Apps of all kinds rely on push notifications to alert smartphone users to incoming messages, breaking news, and other updates. These are the audible “dings” or visual indicators users get when they receive an email or their sports team wins a game. What users often do not realize is that almost all such notifications travel over Google and Apple’s servers.
That gives the two companies unique insight into the traffic flowing from those apps to their users, and in turn puts them “in a unique position to facilitate government surveillance of how users are using particular apps,” Wyden said. He asked the Department of Justice to “repeal or modify any policies” that hindered public discussions of push notification spying.
In a statement, Apple said that Wyden’s letter gave them the opening they needed to share more details with the public about how governments monitored push notifications.
Billionaire Palmer Luckey Unveils Jet-Powered VTOL Kamikaze Drone
December 6th, 2023Via: ZeroHedge:
Introducing:
Roadrunner, a compact VTOL drone powered by twin thrust-vectored turbojet engines with extraordinary speed, range, and payload capacity.
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Roadrunner-M, a radical new low-cost weapon that allows for unprecedented tactics against powerful threats. pic.twitter.com/2C7Ga0h1Hf
— Palmer Luckey (@PalmerLuckey) December 1, 2023
Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus, is positioning Anduril Industries, his Southern California startup defense firm, to challenge military-industrial complex giants such as Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, and General Dynamics.
Luckey revealed on X that Anduril Industries has developed an affordable vertical takeoff and landing drone that can be reused on surveillance or kamikaze missions.
Ex-DEA Informant Pleads Guilty to Role in Killing Haitian President
December 5th, 2023Via: Reuters:
Joseph Vincent, a former informant for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), on Tuesday became the fourth person to plead guilty in a U.S. court for his role in the 2021 assassination of Haiti’s president that left a destabilizing power vacuum.
A Haitian-American national, Vincent is among 11 defendants, including include Colombian ex-soldiers and businessmen accused of helping supply funds and weapons and carrying out the nighttime attack at President Jovenel Moise’s Port-au-Prince home.
Vincent was arrested days after the attack alongside another Haitian-American, James Solages. Both men initially said they were hired by the conspirators as interpreters.
At the time of the attack, the gunmen reportedly masqueraded as DEA agents, though the DEA later said neither Vincent nor Solages were acting on behalf of the agency.
San Francisco Now at 35% Office Vacancy Rate, Highest Ever Recorded
December 5th, 2023Via: ABC7:
The skyline of San Francisco’s Financial District is about as picturesque as it gets. An area that was bustling with people several years ago, but one that according to the numbers, is now more vacant than ever.
“Right now in downtown San Francisco, we have a vacancy rate of a little over 35% which is the highest that we’ve ever recorded in the history of San Francisco,” says Colin Yasukochi who is an executive director of the tech insights center at CBRE, which focuses on the tech industry and how it affects commercial real estate. Yasukochi says that office vacancy numbers in San Francisco were 3 to 4% pre-pandemic, meaning we’ve seen more than a 30% increase and that trend may continue.
The American Dream Has Been Downsized into a Tiny Box
December 5th, 2023Via: Truthstream Media:
Flashback: L.A. Coliving: PodShare
Israeli AI ‘Assassination Factory’ Plays Central Role in the Gaza War
December 4th, 2023
Via: Antiwar:
Tel Aviv has been relying on an AI Program dubbed the Gospel to select targets in Gaza at a rapid pace. In past operations in Gaza, the IDF ran out of targets to strike in the besieged enclave.
A statement on the IDF website says the Israeli military is using the Gospel to “produce targets at a fast pace.” It continues, “Through the rapid and automatic extraction of intelligence,” the Gospel produced targeting recommendations for its researchers “with the goal of a complete match between the recommendation of the machine and the identification carried out by a person.”
Aviv Kochavi, former head of the IDF, said the system was first used in the May 2021 bombing campaign in Gaza. “To put that into perspective, in the past we would produce 50 targets in Gaza per year,” he said. “Now, this machine produces 100 targets a single day, with 50% of them being attacked.”
The IDF does not disclose what it inputs into the Gospel for the program to produce a list of targets.
Research Credit: RP
Microsoft Inked Deals With Chinese Communist Party Propaganda Outlets
December 4th, 2023Via: Washington Free Beacon:
Microsoft helped Chinese state-run media outlets disseminate propaganda as part of previously unreported partnership agreements, documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show.
The nation’s second largest corporation signed collaboration deals with state-run Chinese media outlets including China Daily and People’s Daily, the latter of which is the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Chinese government. Summaries of the deal state Microsoft would provide China Daily with technology that lets the paper target potential readers and gave the People’s Daily access to an artificial intelligence bot specially designed to be controlled and censored by the Chinese Communist Party.
The deals have not been widely reported outside of China, nor have the financial terms been disclosed. A spokeswoman for Microsoft said both agreements “expired years ago and were not renewed.” But experts say the fact that Microsoft inked the deals at all is a major win for the Chinese Communist Party.
“These are major propaganda outlets that publish outright falsehoods attacking the ideas of democracy, attacking the very concepts that undergird our society, and yet an American company is working to spread this,” said Geoffrey Cain, policy director at the Tech Integrity Project, which fights Chinese Communist Party influence in American tech companies. “The purpose of all this is to show the Chinese Communist Party that it’s firmly on the side of China and the Chinese system,” Cain added.
California: Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-CA) Delivers Brutal Fact Check Following The Newsom And DeSantis Debate
December 4th, 2023Via: Forbes:
Temperatures in Siberia Dip to Minus 50 Celsius as Record Snow Blankets Moscow
December 4th, 2023Via: Reuters:
Temperatures in parts of Siberia plummeted to minus 50 degrees Celsius (minus 58 degrees Fahrenheit) while blizzards blanketed Moscow in record snowfall and disrupted flights as winter weather swept across Russia.
In the Sakha Republic, located in the northeastern part of Siberia and home to Yakutsk, one of the world’s coldest cities, temperatures fell below minus 50 C, according to the region’s weather stations.
An abnormally early cold snap in Sakha pushed temperatures to even lower than minus 50 C in several areas of Sakha, a vast region just a little smaller than India.
Gold: New Record High
December 4th, 2023Via: Bloomberg:
Gold shot past a previous all-time high set in the midst of the pandemic on growing expectations for US rate cuts early next year, despite attempts by the Federal Reserve to temper the optimism.
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Gold rose 0.8% to $2,087.95 an ounce as of 1:32 p.m. in Singapore, following a 1.8% increase on Friday.
