#Google, c'est comme la cigarette : c'est votre choix mais il impacte les autres

https://www.ladn.eu/tech-a-suivre/donnees-personnelles-pourquoi-arreter-services-gafa/

« Dans une interview de Wired UK, le président de Softbank, une entreprise japonaise qui a récemment créé un fonds d’investissement de 100 milliards de dollars, a dit : nous sommes la nouvelle #noblesse. Il explique ouvertement qu’il souhaite connaître tout ce qui vous concerne : vos appels téléphoniques, l’hôpital où vous allez, le restaurant où vous mangez… Car selon lui, ceux qui connaissent tout cela contrôlent les #données et contrôlent le #monde. C’est une #autocratie, et les dirigeants de cette autocratie ne s’en cachent même plus. Ce n’est pas de la science-fiction. »

#Gafam #Logiciel #Surveillance #Riche #SurRiche #Oligarchie #Ploutocratie #Totalitarisme par le #Numérique - Solution : #LogicielLibre #OpenSource #Décentralisé

(Article cité dans cet interview de Angie de #Framasoft :
S’émanciper des services des GAFAM avec les logiciels libres
https://framatube.org/videos/watch/1990527b-1ec9-4bb3-be08-349880904591 )

Remember the names Arnoud Boot, Peter Hoffmann, Luc Laeven, Lev Ratnovski, as signatories to the death of all privacy and the opening of universal surveillance in all commercial and financial dealings.

Under the remarkably anodyne title "What is Really New in Fintech" and published by the International Monetary Fund blog, these four men proposed that credit ratings be improved by "tapping various nonfinancial data: the type of browser and hardware used to access the internet, the history of online searches and purchases".

https://blogs.imf.org/2020/12/17/what-is-really-new-in-fintech/

Everything you do online, transferred to, assessed, rated, and stored permanently, one would suspect, by that most highly egalitarian and trusted of all institutions, the global financial system.

Arnoud Boot is professor of Corporate Fiance and Financial Markets at the #UniversityOfAmsterdam, in the country whose census records were used during WWII to prosecute the Holocaust on the Netherland's Jewish population. Of 107,000 deported Jews, only 5,200 survived.

Peter Hoffman is an economist working at the Financial Research Division of the #EuropeanCentralBank ( #ECB ), researching microstructure of financial markets, but apparently neither ethics nor privacy and surveillance.

Luc Laeven is Director-General of the Directorate General Research of the #ECB, and previously worked with the #IMF, #WorldBank, and #ABNAmroBank.

Lev Ratnovski is Sr. Econoist at the #IMF's research department.

These men would sell your entire personal informational history to gain a few fractions of a percent of interest income.

The banality of evil indeed.

#ArnoudBoot #PeterHoffmann #LucLaeven #LevRatnovski #Surveillance #SurveillanceCapitalism #Privacy #BrowserHistory #SearchHistory #Profiling #Credit #Risk #Holocaust

Amazon Plans to Install Always-On Surveillance Cameras in Delivery Vans

Not content to only wield its creepy surveillance infrastructure against warehouse workers and employees considering unionization, Amazon is reportedly gearing up to install perpetually-on cameras inside its fleet of delivery vehicles as well.

This is the company that paid workers less than they promised and even used workers' tips to pay them. Now they not only want to surveil their ~~slaves~~ drivers, they want to distract their driving with verbal warnings!

#technology #tech #Amazon #OnlineShopping #commerce #security #privacy #surveillance

@Rainer "diaspora" Sokoll What it means for the general public is:

• You will not be able to buy a surveillance-free device at anything remotely resembling a reasonable cost.
• There may be a bespoke / custom device market, at extraordinary markup. Once again, privacy becomes a luxury good.
• The potential impacts of surveillance are hard to define and specify, in large part because these are future events of probabalistic impact based on presumptions of major changes in landscape and inherently latent and covert rather than manifest and overt. It's hard to say whether or not there are other factors which should have major consideration, such as with the general protections of law, civil government, due process, and the like. It's just really hard to speculate on this.
• There's a long history of cautions dating to the very beginning of the modern networked computer age and its founding members, as well as, of course, _pre-digital concerns with surveillance and recordkeeping: Kafka's "Trial", Bentham's "Panopticon", Orwell's *1984*, Huxley's *Brave New World*, and the like. I've compiled a list of early (pre-1980) tech-sector discussion here: https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/105074933053020193, with further discussion on that thread. My Mastodon #surveillance threads are linked here: https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/tagged/surveillance

Herbert Simon is a polymath with contributions to economics (Nobel laureate), psychology, artificial intelligence, and other fields. He commented on the risk/benefit of comprehensive computer data systems in a 1977 essay "What Computers Mean for Man and Society" (https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a9e7/33e25ee8f67d5e670b3b7dc4b8c3e00849ae.pdf). This includes the paragraph:

The privacy issue has been raised most insistently with respect to the creation and maintenance of longitudinal data files that assemble information about persons from a multitude of sources. Files of this kind would be highly valuable for many kinds of economic and social research, but they are bought at too high a price if they endanger human freedom or seriously enhance the opportunities of blackmailers. While such dangers should not be ignored, it should be noted that the lack of comprehensive data files has never been the limiting barrier to the suppression of human freedom. The Watergate criminals made extensive, if unskillful, use of electronics, but no computer played a role in their conspiracy. The Nazis operated with horrifying effectiveness and thoroughness without the benefits of any kind of mechanized data processing.

As we know now, Nazi German DID have extensive mechanised data processing, supplied, contracted, supported, and organised by IBM: https://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/

This detracts to the extreme from Simon's argument.

Originally noted here: https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/104735912104205063

LWN: Tackling the Monopoly Problem

There was a time when people who were exploring computational technology saw it as the path toward decentralization and freedom worldwide. What we have ended up with, instead, is a world that is increasingly centralized, subject to surveillance, and unfree. How did that come to be? In a keynote at the online 2021 linux.conf.au event, Cory Doctorow gave his view of this problem and named its source: monopoly.

https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/844102/a23d1543b5a55cae/

Note that this is a shared link created by an LWN subscriber. Please consider subscribing to LWN if you value its content and can afford to do so. The site has served the Linux and Free Software community excellently for decades.

#CoryDoctorow #Pluralistic #Monopoly #Decentralisation #Centralisation #Surveillance #SurveillanceCapitalism #SurveillanceState #LinuxConfAU #LWN

Ils cherchent "les trucs bizarres qu'il y a dans vos téléphones" : rencontre avec des traqueurs de trackers

https://www.franceinter.fr/emissions/le-code-a-change/ils-cherchent-les-trucs-bizarres-qu-il-y-a-dans-vos-telephones-rencontre-avec-des-traqueurs-de-trackers

#surveillance #exodusprivacy #android #google #apple #ios #app #tracker #consommation #consommateur #privacy #playstore #applestore #fdroid #aurorastore #permission #franceinter #lecodeachangé #xavierdelaporte #yaleprivacylab

#Attention #WhatsApp has updated its #privacy policy.

#internet #economy #facebook #surveillance #fail #warning #meme

| #whatsapp #europe #facebook #vieprivée #surveillance

| #whatsapp #facebook #privacy #tracking #surveillance #advertising

Data Facilitates Surveillance, Privacy Violation, and Manipulation Directly Through Increased Efficiences

Digitisation and distribution (to multiple agencies, organisations, and firms) has been ongoing mostly since the 1960s, though accelerating greatly as disk storage costs passed through the threshold of personal-budget levels in the late 1990s.

I'd been working with industry data in the early 1990s, when several analytic departments at a mid-sized firm might share a couple of gigabytes of mincomputer storage. At a conference during the 1990s, in an audience of several hundred data analysts, only a few hands went up for dealing with GB-scale datasets (the raised hand representing telecoms data as I recall). I realised circa 2000 that storage capable of storing a few hundred bytes data (plenty for a basic dossier) on every individual in a large country, or soon the world, would be within a modest household budget. Shortly afterward, the first news stories of data brokers started appearing, as well as Total Information Awareness, often contracting with those same data brokers.

Early social networking sites were beginning to apply collaborative-filtering moderation systems, which I quickly realised, having helped in the design of several myself, were themselves prodigious personal preferences data collection systems on the part of reviewers --- rating systems like many swords cut two ways; reviewers rate content, but ratings and content preferences also rate the reviewers. (An interesting twist on the Quis custodiet ipsos custodes question.)

In 1900, the only routinely digitised mass citizen data were US Census tabulations, updated decadally and not generally accessible. By 1960, telephone, banking, and airlines data (through SABRE) were digitised, largely as with Census data, on punch cards. Tape and further expansion to credit, insurance, and utility data developed by the 1970s, though punch cards remained in heavy use through the 1980s. The first widespread data privacy outcries came in the 1970s, see for example Newsweek's 1970 article, "The Assault on Privacy (1970)" (PDF), though early infotech pioneers such as packet-switched networking pioneer Paul Baran were writing on data, surveillance, privacy, and ethical concerns in the 1960s. (An aside; those publications are freely available online by RAND at my request.) Marketing and advertising were increasingly represented by the 1990s, as well as healthcare data, though records there remained (and still remain) highly fragmented.

By the 1990s, previously offline court and legal documents began getting digitised in bulk (a practice begun years earlier), sometimes by local courts, more frequently by aggreggation services such as LexisNexis, Westlaw, JustCite, HeinOnline, Bloomberg Law, VLex, LexEur, and others who took advantage of pubic access to compile and store their own aggreggations. Often literally by sending individuals to those rural courthouses mentioned above, and recording or duplicating records, one at a time, from clerks.

Access costs matter. And by costs I'm referring to all inputs, not just money: time, knowledge, rates of availability, periodic caps (e.g., 4 records/hr., but a daily cap of 8 records, 16/week, 32/month, effectively imposing an 8 hr/month access restriction), travel, parsing or interpretation, ability to compile independent archives (rather than relying on the source or origin archive), etc.

Aggregation itself is an invasion of privacy. Reduced search, parsing, and inference-drawing costs enable observation, surveillance, and manipulation.

Reduced costs don't simply facilitate existing uses, but facilitate new, lower-value, activities. This is a rephrasing of the Jevons paradox; increased efficiency increases consumption. Trying to reduce consumption through greater efficiency is like fucking for virginity. Another characteristic is that many of these new uses are of very limited, or negative, social benefit. Very often of fraud, or predatory practices.

Technnology is far less an equaliser than a power multiplier, amplifying inequalities. Information technology especially so.

Data corrupts. Absolute data corrupts absolutely.

#data #InfoTech #surveillance #SurveillanceState #SurveillanceCapitalism #privacy #manipulation #DataAggregation #JevonsParadox #ActonsLaw #PaulBaran

Hunting the Hunters: How We Identified Navalny’s FSB Stalkers

... Due to porous data protection measures in Russia, it only takes some creative Googling (or Yandexing) and a few hundred euros worth of cryptocurrency to be fed through an automated payment platform, not much different than Amazon or Lexis Nexis, to acquire telephone records with geolocation data, passenger manifests, and residential data. For the records contained within multi-gigabyte database files that are not already floating around the internet via torrent networks, there is a thriving black market to buy and sell data. The humans who manually fetch this data are often low-level employees at banks, telephone companies, and police departments. Often, these data merchants providing data to resellers or direct to customers are caught and face criminal charges. For other batches of records, there are automated services either within websites or through bots on the Telegram messaging service that entirely circumvent the necessity of a human conduit to provide sensitive personal data.

For example, to find a huge collection of personal information for Anatoliy Chepiga — one of the two GRU officers involved in the poisoning of Sergey Skripal and his daughter — we only need to use a Telegram bot and about 10 euros. Within 2-3 minutes of entering Chepiga’s full name and providing a credit card via Google Pay or a payment service like Yandex Money, a popular Telegram bot will provide us with Chepiga’s date of birth, passport number, court records, license plate number, VIN number, previous vehicle ownership history, traffic violations, and frequent parking locations in Moscow. A sample of the baseline information provided can be seen below, with key personal details censored. ...

https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/2020/12/14/navalny-fsb-methodology

h/t @Glyn Moody

Previous discussion.

#surveillance #DataAreLiability #SurveillanceCapitalism #SurveillanceState #bellingcat #privacy #russia

@Michael Fenichel Some answers (thanks to @Glyn Moody):

Hunting the Hunters: How We Identified Navalny's FSB Stalkers

... Due to porous data protection measures in Russia, it only takes some creative Googling (or Yandexing) and a few hundred euros worth of cryptocurrency to be fed through an automated payment platform, not much different than Amazon or Lexis Nexis, to acquire telephone records with geolocation data, passenger manifests, and residential data. For the records contained within multi-gigabyte database files that are not already floating around the internet via torrent networks, there is a thriving black market to buy and sell data. The humans who manually fetch this data are often low-level employees at banks, telephone companies, and police departments. Often, these data merchants providing data to resellers or direct to customers are caught and face criminal charges. For other batches of records, there are automated services either within websites or through bots on the Telegram messaging service that entirely circumvent the necessity of a human conduit to provide sensitive personal data.

For example, to find a huge collection of personal information for Anatoliy Chepiga — one of the two GRU officers involved in the poisoning of Sergey Skripal and his daughter — we only need to use a Telegram bot and about 10 euros. Within 2-3 minutes of entering Chepiga’s full name and providing a credit card via Google Pay or a payment service like Yandex Money, a popular Telegram bot will provide us with Chepiga’s date of birth, passport number, court records, license plate number, VIN number, previous vehicle ownership history, traffic violations, and frequent parking locations in Moscow. A sample of the baseline information provided can be seen below, with key personal details censored. ...

https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/2020/12/14/navalny-fsb-methodology

#surveillance #DataAreLiability #SurveillanceCapitalism #SurveillanceState #bellingcat #privacy #russia

My Tradecraft Things

Deaddrops near roses, whispers with Britons
Five Eyes exchanges and CIA missions
Brown paper packages of OTP'd strings
These are a few of my favourite things

Black Cubing smartphones from Apple and Google
Doorbells with cameras and shotgun mic'd poodles
Stingrays that fly through the sky on drone wings
These are a few of my favourite things

Girls in white dresses with zero-day stashes
Handshakes MITM'd by elite anti-fashes
Foiled white nationalist conspiracy rings
These are a few of my favorite things

When MOSSAD bites
When cagey bees sting
When I'm feeling MAD
I simply remember my tradecraft things
And them I don't feel so bad

#tradecraft #FavouriteThings #surveillance #espionage #filk

Exclusive: Israeli Surveillance Companies Are Siphoning Masses Of Location Data From Smartphone Apps | Forbes

This year has seen a rush amongst government snoops for a new and sometimes contentious data set: location data grabbed by smartphone popular apps. Customs and Border, the FBI, the U.S. military and other federal agencies have been keen buyers, though it’s caused a furor amongst privacy and human rights watchdogs. The outcry this week led Apple and Google to kick apps containing location-grabbing code from Reston, Virginia-based provider X-Mode out of their respective app stores.

But Israeli surveillance vendors are also getting in on the act, Forbes has learned.

#technology #tech #security #privacy #hacking #surveillance #DataProtection

# Phill from GCHQ - page 99 #

Drawing - 966 × 1350 px - 462 kb PNG - Page 99 of Phill from GCHQ.

I always liked making drawings with white ink on black paper. Problem is that the white has a hard time being completely opaque and that black paper is a dodgy, untrustworthy thing. The way to do it right is to make it as a woodcut or a screen print. That way you can still print black on white while the process Not so with digital drawings. When you make digital drawings black is black and white is white, and contrary to making graphical print you can just go ahead and draw and see the result right away. This page that is going on at night two days before the new year 2017, so I decided to use the white on black technique.

The NSA hacker team led by the twins, Nut and Geb, has been present in the comics since early on. They are among the most dangerous antagonists of Phill and his friends and after they have teamed up with ex-cia analyst Latisha Babin their full potential is unleashed. Nut is always doing the talking while Geb is introvert, but with a strange intuition for finding people. Already on their first appearance Geb had a hunch that his brother (rightfully) took very serious. I have always envisioned them as two rural boys from the Midwest, who early on delved into the binary magic and who was head-hunted by the NSA already in high school. Their names are Nathaniel and Gabriel Johnston, nicknamed Nut and Geb by their church going parents unaware that those two names also are the names of two heathen Gods (and twins) from the old Egypt.

Nut is heaven and Geb is the earth, as is hinted at in the text. Below you can see a representation of the Heavenly Nut and the earthly Geb.

---

Made with the following open source software:

---

The comic can also be read in French, German and Danish

You can support the making of this comic on:



or by buying it as a comic book on:












like all other works on this profile this work is licensed under a

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Attribute - Katharsisdrill - Link to: https://www.datataffel.dk/u/katharsisdrill




#art #Krita #Inkscape #Gimp #Mageia #drawing #Illustration #comic #comics #bd #bande-dessinée #Phill #Phillfromgchq
#surveillance #drone #drones #intuition #nut #geb #night
#mywork #ownwork #cc #creativecommons #cc-by

44 bits

So, a redditor tracked down the location of a monolith placed in the Utah desert a few years ago, recently discovered by authorities, who did not disclose where it was.
[1]

I looked at rock type (Sandstone), color (red and white - no black streaks like found on higher cliffs in Utah), shape (more rounded indicating a more exposed area and erosion), the texture of the canyon floor (flat rock vs sloped indicating higher up in a watershed with infrequent water), and the larger cliff/mesa in the upper background of one of the photos. I took all that and lined it up with the flight time and flight path of the helicopter - earlier in the morning taking off from Monticello, UT and flying almost directly north before going off radar (usually indicating it dropped below radar scan altitude. From there, I know I am looking for a south/east facing canyon with rounded red/white rock, most likely close to the base of a larger cliff/mesa, most likely closer to the top of a watershed, and with a suitable flat area for an AS350 helicopter to land. Took about 30 minutes of random checks around the Green River/Colorado River junction before finding similar terrain. From there it took another 15 minutes to find the exact canyon. Yes... I'm a freak.

-- /u/Bear__Fucker @ reddit

It's relatively well known that 33 distinct bits is enough to uniquely identify any individual person now alive on Earth.

[2]Geospatially, assuming 10m resolution, 44 bits is enough to identify any unique location on Earth's land surface. 46 bits buys you the oceans as well.

Searching for a ~1m^2^ monolith visually within a 10m^2^ square is reasonable.

GNU units:

You have: ln((.3 * 4 * (earthradius^2) * pi)/10m^2)/ln(2) 
        Definition: 43.798784 
You have: ln((1 * 4 * (earthradius^2) * pi)/10m^2)/ln(2) 
        Definition: 45.535749

49 bits gives 1m accuracy, 63 bits 1cm, 69 bits 1mm. Anywhere on Earth, land or sea.

For comparison, cellphone positioning accuracy is typically 8--600m:

• 3G iPhone w/ A-GPS ~ 8 meters
• 3G iPhone w/ wifi ~ 74 meters
• 3G iPhone w/ Cellular positioning ~ 600 meters

https://communityhealthmaps.nlm.nih.gov/2014/07/07/how-accurate-is-the-gps-on-my-smart-phone-part-2/

https://www.gps.gov/systems/gps/performance/accuracy/

The power of disparate data traces to rapidly narrow down search spaces on a specific item, individual, or location, is what makes #BigData aggreggation so powerful, and terrifying.

---

Notes:

• https://old.reddit.com/r/geoguessr/comments/jzw628/help_me_find_this_obelisk_in_remote_utah/gdfbzee/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25199879
• https://web.archive.org/web/20160304012305/33bits.org/about/

#privacy4 #location #33bits #44bits #data #deanonimization #DataAreLiability #surveillance #SurveillanceState #SurveillanceCapitalism

Bruce Schneier, "IT for Oppression"

IEEE Security & Privacy. March/April 2013

* What is called censorship when practiced by a government is content filtering when practiced by an organization. Many companies want to keep their employees from viewing porn or updating their Facebook pages while at work. In the other direction, data loss prevention software keeps employees from sending proprietary corporate information outside the network and also serves as a censorship tool. Governments can use these products for their own ends.
* Propaganda is really just another name for marketing. All sorts of companies offer social media-based marketing services designed to fool consumers into believing there is “buzz” around a product or brand. The only thing different in a government propaganda campaign is the content of the messages.
* Surveillance is necessary for personalized marketing, the primary profit stream of the Internet. Companies have built massive Internet surveillance systems designed to track users’ behavior all over the Internet and closely monitor their habits. These systems track not only individuals but also relationships between individuals, to deduce their interests so as to advertise to them more effectively. It’s a totalitarian’s dream.
* Control is how companies protect their business models by limiting what people can do with their computers. These same technologies can easily be co-opted by governments that want to ensure that only certain computer programs are run inside their countries or that their citizens never see particular news programs.

Technology magnifies power, and there’s no technical difference between a government and a corporation wielding it. This is how commercial security equipment from companies like BlueCoat and Sophos end up being used by the Syrian and other oppressive governments to surveil — in order to arrest — and censor their citizens. This is how the same face-recognition technology that Disney uses in its theme parks ends up identifying protesters in China and Occupy Wall Street protesters in New York.

https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2013/03/it_for_oppression.html

See previously: Propaganda, Censorship, and Surveillance are attributes of the same underlying aspect: Monopoly and Centralised Control.

#propaganda #censorship #surveillance #monopoly #SurveillanceState #SurveillanceCapitalism #control #power #decentralisation #decentralization #pluralism

Your Computer Isn't Yours

It turns out that in the current version of the macOS, the OS sends to Apple a hash (unique identifier) of each and every program you run, when you run it. Lots of people didn’t realize this, because it’s silent and invisible and it fails instantly and gracefully when you’re offline, but today the server got really slow and it didn’t hit the fail-fast code path, and everyone’s apps failed to open if they were connected to the internet.

https://sneak.berlin/20201112/your-computer-isnt-yours/

#JeffreyPaul #Apple #macOS #computers #internet #surveillance spying #privacy #security #digitalrights

Loi sécurité globale : surveillance généralisée des manifestations – La Quadrature du Net

#politique #surveillance #1984

youtube-dl Is Not Gone

This headline had me really worried.

https://torrentfreak.com/riaa-takes-down-popular-open-source-youtube-dl-software-201024/

However, youtube-dl is not gone. It's only gone from GitHub, which all right-thinking projects have already left, anyway. (Check out https://codeberg.org/).

We can install youtube-dl now the way we always have.

sudo curl -L [url=https://yt-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl]https://yt-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl[/url] -o /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl 
sudo chmod a+rx /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl

As someone pointed out to me a while back, you can also install it in distros where ~/bin is in PATH like this.

curl -L [url=https://yt-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl]https://yt-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl[/url] -o ~/bin/youtube-dl 
chmod 755 ~/bin/youtube-dl

This allows you to update youtube-dl without using sudo. We update youtube-dl with youtube-dl -U. It's necessary to update youtube-dl often.

See https://yt-dl.org/ for more info about youtube-dl.

#privacy #surveillance #freedom #youtube #youtube-dl #download #downloads #video #videos #invidious

GitHub has removed the ability to access youtube-dl's source code due to a DMCA request by the RIAA

... The clear purpose of this source code is to (i) circumvent the technological protection measures used by authorized streaming services such as YouTube, and (ii) reproduce and distribute music videos and sound recordings owned by our member companies without authorization for such use. We note that the source code is described on GitHub as “a command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com and a few more sites.” ...

https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/10/2020-10-23-RIAA.md

Various coverage, discussion, and related topics

Micah F. Lee (EFF/The Intercept @[email protected] https://nitter.net/micahflee/status/1319746131723628544?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet

"RIAA blitz takes down 18 GitHub projects used for downloading YouTube videos"
https://www.zdnet.com/article/riaa-blitz-takes-down-18-github-projects-used-for-downloading-youtube-videos/

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24872911

Reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/jgub36/youtubedl_just_received_a_dmca_takedown_from_riaa/
https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/jgtzum/youtubedl_repo_had_been_dmcad/
https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/jgubfx/youtubedl_github_repo_taken_down_due_to_dmca/
https://old.reddit.com/r/youtubedl/comments/jgttnc/youtubedl_github_repository_disabled_due_to_a/

Reddit search: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search/?q=youtube-dl+dmca&sort=relevance&t=all

Nitter/Birbsite: https://nitter.net/search?f=tweets&q=youtube-dl+riaa+dmca&since=&until=&near=

Censorship, propaganda, surveillance, and targeted manipulation are inherent characteristics of monopoly: https://joindiaspora.com/posts/7bfcf170eefc013863fa002590d8e506

RMS, "The Right to Read" (1997): https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

Remember that the RIAA is a strong-arm and bad-publicity-deflection cartel of its major members. These are:
#Sony
#SonyMusic
#UniversalMusic
#AtlanticRecords
#Disney
#ExcelerationMusic
#InterscopeGeffen
#NonesuchRecords
#PartisanRecords
#ProvidentMusic
#SireRecords
#TommyBoy
#WarnerMusic

#DMCA #youtubedl #RIAA #MPAA #github #Censorship #Surveillance #Propaganda #Manipulation #Monoply #CensorshipPropagandaSurveillanceMonopoly #TheRightToRead #EFF

On authors who were publishing information technology panopticon concerns in the 1980s, or earlier

A quickie dump.

Paul Baran / RAND

• "On the Engineer's Responsibility in Protecting Privacy"
• "On the Future Computer Era: Modification of the American Character and the Role of the Engineer, or, A Little Caution in the Haste to Number"
• "The Coming Computer Utility -- Laissez-Faire, Licensing, or Regulation?"
• "Remarks on the Question of Privacy Raised by the Automation of Mental Health Records"
• "Some Caveats on the Contribution of Technology to Law Enforcement"

Largely written/published 1967--1969.

https://www.rand.org/pubs/authors/b/baran_paul.html

Willis Ware / RAND

Too numerous to list fully, 1960s --1990s. Highlights:

• "Security and Privacy in Computer Systems" (1967)
• "Computers in Society's Future" (1971)
• "Records, Computers and the Rights of Citizens" (1973
• "Privacy and Security Issues in Information Systems" (1976)
• "Information Systems, Security, and Privacy" (1983)
• "The new faces of privacy" (1993)

https://www.rand.org/pubs/authors/w/ware_willis_h.html

Misc

Shoshana Zuboff, In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power (1988) Notably reviewed in the Whole Earth Catalog's Signal: Communication Tools for the Information Age (1988).

https://www.worldcat.org/title/in-the-age-of-the-smart-machine-the-future-of-work-and-power/oclc/60966402 https://archive.org/details/inageofsmartmach00zubo/page/n7/mode/2up

"Danger to Civil Rights?", 80 Microcomputing (1982)

https://archive.org/stream/80_Microcomputing_Issue_26_1982-02_1001001_US#page/n295/mode/2up (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14329877)

"Computer-Based National Information Systems: Technology and Public Policy", NTIS (September 1981)

http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/ota/Ota_5/DATA/1981/8109.PDF

"23 to Study Computer ‘Threat’" (1970)

https://www.nytimes.com/1970/03/12/archives/23-to-study-computer-threat.html

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

"Privacy and Information Technology" bibliography is largely 1990--present, but contains some earlier references.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/it-privacy/#Bib

Similarly "Privacy"

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/privacy/

Credit Reporting / Legislation

US Privacy Act of 1974

https://www.justice.gov/opcl/privacy-act-1974

Invasion of Privacy Act 1971 - Queensland Government, Australia

https://www.legislation.qld.gov.au/view/pdf/inforce/current/act-1971-050

Arthur R. Miller, The assault on privacy: computers, data banks, and dossiers

https://archive.org/details/assaultonprivacy00mill/page/n7/mode/2up

"The Computer, the Consumer and Privacy" (1984)

https://www.nytimes.com/1984/03/04/weekinreview/the-computer-the-consumer-and-privacy.html

Richard Boeth / Newsweek

The specific item I'd had in mind:

Richard Boeth, "Is Privacy Dead", Newsweek, July 27, 1970

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/11/is-privacy-dead.html%EF%BB%BF

Direct PDF: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/712228/1970-newsweek-coverstory-privacy.pdf

Based on an HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24851736

#privacy #surveillance #panopticon #PaulBaran #WillisWare #RAND #ShoshanaZuboff #RichardBoeth #CreditReporting

Propaganda, Censorship, and Surveillance are attributes of the same underlying aspect: Monopoly and Centralised Control.

All three problems have the same effective solution: Break up the monopolies.

Propaganda is a function of amplification, attention, audience capture, selective promotion, discovery, distraction, stealing the air supply or acquiring of any competion, and coöption of the platform. Propaganda is an inherent property of monopoly control.

Censorship and Gatekeeping are functions of excludability, audience gating, selective exclusion, obfuscation, distraction, stealing the air supply or acquiring of any competion, and, again, coöption of the platform. Censorship is an inherent property of monopoly control.

Surveillance whether of the state, capitalist, or non-state actor varieties, is a function of population and provider capture, coercion or gatekeeping of vendors and pipelines, and, again, coöption of the platform. Surveillance is an inherent property of monopoly control.

Speakers and Audiences --- a public --- divided across independent networks, with access to different editorial selection, from different distribution networks, with access to different input message streams, are far less subject to propaganda, censorship, or surveillance. Epistemic diversity resists control

It's importance to realise that the key is not nominal control but actual control, which may be nonobvious or unapparent to many participants. A system with appearances of decentralisation may well be centralised under the surface. Retail brand labels vs. brand ownership, or Luxottica's stranglehold over the eyeglasses market, for example, give a false sense of "consumer choice" in a case of actual tight corporate control.

Why is this?

What's the fundamental connection between monopoly and control? Control is about maximising desired outcome to applied effort. In monopoly, there is a central focus of influence: the monopolist. Even a very partial controlling share can still be effective. In a first-past-the-post majority scenario such as elections or corporate share ownership, the bloc which swings the majority has control, even if it itself is numerically a minority. In markets, networks, organisations, etc., a single place to permit or deny input or output increases control by decreasing effort and increasing effect. Price and costs often afford control, a faact monopoly apologists attempt to turn into a strength. By offering lower-price goods or services, or facing lower internal provisiioning and operating costs, monopolists can undercut competitors, even without taking active anticompetitive measures such as price-dumping, rebating, blackballing, blacklisting, exclusive dealing, tying, bundling, non-competes, and the like.

All monopolies are network structures with dominant nodes. These may be entry, exit, or transit nodes.

Increasing the number of entry, exit, and distribution points decreases the efficacy of propaganda (input control), censorship (output control), or surveillance (network control), as well as of targeted manipulation such as adtech and computational propaganda (data retention and algorithm control).

Careful readers may note the close correspondence with the ancient trivium of the classic liberal education: grammar (input), rhetoric (output), and logic (processing based on inputs and stored memory). The ancients had limited network control, widespread surveillance to them was exceedingly expensive, though small-town gossips and palace spies offer analogues.

Shout-outs to

* Cory Doctorow (Blogging at https://pluralistic.net -- On Mastodon at https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic --- a great profile to follow)
* Matt Stoller (https://mattstoller.substack.com/?no_cover=true)
* Lina Khan (https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox)
* Zephyr Teachout (https://bookshop.org/books/break-em-up-recovering-our-freedom-from-big-ag-big-tech-and-big-money/9781250200891)

... and others breaking through some seriously Borked chickenshit thinking on this topic.

---

Expanded from an earlier HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24735860

#propagand #censorship #surveillance #monopoly #SurveillanceState #SurveillanceCapitalism #control #power #decentralisation #decentralization #pluralism

#Apple Helps #FBI Track Down #GeorgeFloyd Protester Accused Of Firebombing Cop Cars

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2020/09/16/apple-helps-fbi-track-down-george-floyd-protester-accused-of-firebombing-cop-cars/

The case shows how Apple is willing to help even where the context of the crime is controversial, namely the Black Lives Matter protests. That’s despite President #Trump and Attorney General William Barr lambasting the company for failing to help track down serious criminals while caving in to the demands of the Chinese #government.

#police #usa #surveillance #crime #blacklivesmatter #technology #tracking #smartphone

Ad Tech Could Be the Next Internet Bubble | WIRED

#surveillance #1984 #plutocracy

The worst of generalized surveillance is that it doesn't even work.

Quote of note:

"Not content to put a flying surveillance drone inside customers' homes, the surveillance behemoth on Tuesday announced a plan to scan and store the "unique palm signature" of an untold number of Americans. Dubbed Amazon One, the company hopes the network of scanners will one day serve as an all-purpose form of identification."

"You should absolutely not participate."

via Amazon wants a copy of your 'palm signature.' You should pass.

#privacy #surveillance #dystopia

Amazon PR demanding we correct an article because we referred to an Echo as a "microphone"

-- Jason Koebler / Vice

https://nitter.net/jason_koebler/status/1303383712160190469#m

#privacy #surveillance #amazon #AlexaIsAMicrophone #Alexa

The article:

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qj45kx/amazon-wants-alexa-to-move-into-your-apartment-before-you-do

Context:

While it’s natural to be chiefly concerned about privacy when your apartment comes with an Amazon microphone pre-installed...

● NEWS ● #TechDirt #nsa #snowden #surveillance ☞ Ninth Circuit Says NSA's Bulk Phone Records Collection Was Illegal, Most Likely Unconstitutional