raysondetre

[raysondetre]

Herr Freeland

The cabinet minister doing this to Canada 🇨🇦 is the granddaughter of a Ukrainian Nazi propagandist. Apple 🍏—>tree = not far at all. https://readpassage.com/chrystia-freeland-must-account-for-her-nazi-collaborator-grandfather/

https://cbc.ca/news/politics/emergencies-act-banks-ottawa-protests-1.6353968… Prime Minister Trudeau, thanks to this affinity/affiliation (he's shifted her through four different cabinet posts, including deputy PM) has met with NeoNazis in Ukraine himself. https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1494397968140619784 

She is implementing all the draconian Emergency Act Measures this WSJ article is talking about.  She announced sending (on Twitter etc.) sending Canadian armed forces/arms to neoNazis in her origin country in 2016 (within the Ukrainian Amred forces, which assimilated the Above Battalion), which has now subject 🇨🇦's Defense Forces to an internal review of whether they trained neoNazis/war criminals. (Hyperlinked article sourcing this is Ottawa Citizen in the Passage article.) The Liberal Party and Leadership (Trudeau of course included), plus the Liberal votership willfully ignored all this while she was foreign minister. Trudeau transferred her to Minister of Intragovernmental Affairs (liaison between Provincial and Federal governments) and then awarded her with Finance Minister, where she attempted to bankrupt the country using Covid relief to the tune of $250 billion as a non-transparent black box.https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/covid-spending-government-transparency-1.5826917 Post Trudeau's divisive election campaign where he referred to anti-vaccine mandate people as "misogynist" "right wing" White supremacists" who deplore science, this protest brewed. Voila, Herr Chrystia Freeland is now administering the financial aspects of the extrajudicial pain with extralegal powers to destroy lives and livelihoods. She's not only de facto running the country. Her first target third term is literally the destruction of democracy.

[raysondetre]

80% of all assets in the world are held in US dollars

“… even though the US is only you know 5 percent of the (global) population and you know [unintelligible] as a percentage of global GDP maybe 20 or 25 percent, 80 percent of all assets in the world are held in US dollars. Okay? And that is why we’ve got the world by the fucking balls… excuse my language.”

hmm, so the global economy is the US economy is the global economy. and this is all basically just a ponzi scheme with US at the top. the rich get richer and the poor already exploited get poorer.

[raysondetre]

(2013/12/10) NSA uses Google cookies to pinpoint targets for hacking

[washingtonpost.com][1]

  [1]: <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2013/12/10/nsa-uses-google-cookies-to-pinpoint-targets-for-hacking/>

# NSA uses Google cookies to pinpoint targets for hacking

By Ashkan Soltani, Andrea Peterson, and Barton Gellman

10-13 minutes

* * *

For years, privacy advocates have raised concerns about the use of commercial tracking tools to identify and target consumers with advertisements. The online ad industry has said its practices are innocuous and benefit consumers by serving them ads that are more likely to be of interest to them.

The revelation that the NSA is piggybacking on these commercial technologies could shift that debate, handing privacy advocates a new argument for reining in commercial surveillance.

According to [the documents][2], the NSA and its British counterpart, GCHQ, are using the small tracking files or “cookies” that advertising networks place on computers to identify people browsing the Internet. The intelligence agencies have found particular use for a part of a Google-specific tracking mechanism known as the “PREF” cookie. These cookies typically don’t contain personal information, such as someone’s name or e-mail address, but they do contain numeric codes that enable Web sites to uniquely identify a person’s browser.

  [2]: <http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/national/nsa-signal-surveillance-success-stories/647/?itid=lk_inline_manual_9>

In addition to tracking Web visits, this cookie allows NSA to single out an individual’s communications among the sea of Internet data in order to send out software that can hack that person’s computer. The slides say the cookies are used to “enable remote exploitation,” although the specific attacks used by the NSA against targets are not addressed in these [documents][3].

  [3]: <http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/national/nsa-signal-surveillance-success-stories/647/?itid=lk_inline_manual_10>

The NSA’s use of cookies isn’t a technique for sifting through vast amounts of information to find suspicious behavior; rather, it lets NSA home in on someone already under suspicion - akin to when soldiers shine laser pointers on a target to identify it for laser-guided bombs.

Separately, the NSA is also using commercially gathered information to help it locate mobile devices around the world, the [documents][4] show. Many smartphone apps running on iPhones and Android devices, and the Apple and Google operating systems themselves, track the location of each device, often without a clear warning to the phone’s owner. This information is more specific than the broader location data the government is collecting from cellular phone networks, as [reported by the Post last week][5].

  [4]: <http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/national/nsa-signal-surveillance-success-stories/647/?itid=lk_inline_manual_14>   [5]: <http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-tracking-cellphone-locations-worldwide-snowden-documents-show/2013/12/04/5492873a-5cf2-11e3-bc56-c6ca94801fac_story.html?itid=lk_inline_manual_14>

“On a macro level, ‘we need to track everyone everywhere for advertising’ translates into ‘the government being able to track everyone everywhere,’” says Chris Hoofnagle, a lecturer in residence at UC Berkeley Law. “It’s hard to avoid.”

These specific slides do not indicate how the NSA obtains Google PREF cookies or whether the company cooperates in these programs, but other documents reviewed by the Post indicate that cookie information is among the data NSA can obtain with a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act order. If the NSA gets the data that way, the companies know and are legally compelled to assist.

The NSA declined to comment on the specific tactics outlined in this story, but an NSA spokesman sent the Post a statement: “As we’ve said before, NSA, within its lawful mission to collect foreign intelligence to protect the United States, uses intelligence tools to understand the intent of foreign adversaries and prevent them from bringing harm to innocent Americans.”

Google declined to comment for this article, but chief executive Larry Page joined the leaders of other technology companies earlier this week in calling for an end to bulk collection of user data and for new limits on court-approved surveillance requests. “The security of users’ data is critical, which is why we’ve invested so much in encryption and fight for transparency around government requests for information,” Page said in a [statement][6] on the coalition’s Web site. “This is undermined by   the apparent wholesale collection of data, in secret and without independent oversight, by many governments around the world.”

  [6]: <http://reformgovernmentsurveillance.com/>

**How consumers are tracked online**

Internet companies store small files called cookies on users’ computers to uniquely identify them for ad-targeting and other purposes across many different Web sites. This advertising-driven business model pays for many of the services, like e-mail accounts, that consumers have come to expect to have for free. Yet few are aware of the full extent to which advertisers, services and Web sites track their activities across the Web and mobile devices. These data collection mechanisms are invisible to all but the most sophisticated users – and the tools to opt-out or block them have limited effectiveness.

Privacy advocates have pushed to create a “Do Not Track” system allowing consumers to opt out of such tracking. But Jonathan Mayer of Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society, who has been active in that push, says “Do Not Track efforts are stalled out.” They ground to a halt when the Digital Advertising Alliance, a trade group representing online ad companies, [abandoned][7] the effort in September after clashes over the proposed policy. One of the primary [issues of contention][8] was whether consumers would be able to opt out of all tracking, or just not be served advertisements based on tracking.

  [7]: <http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/322701-do-not-track-group-should-give-up-departing-online-ad-reps-say>   [8]: <http://www.pcworld.com/article/2044472/w3c-rejects-ad-industry-attempt-to-hijack-donottrack-specs.html>

Some browsers, such as Apple’s Safari, automatically block a type of code known as “third-party cookies,” which are often placed by companies that advertise on the site being visited. Other browsers such as Mozilla’s Firefox are also experimenting with that idea. But such settings won’t prevent users from receiving cookies directly from the primary sites they visit or services they use.

**Google’s PREF Cookie**

Google assigns a unique PREF cookie anytime someone’s browser makes a connection to any of the company’s Web properties or services. This can occur when consumers directly use Google services such as Search or Maps, or when they visit Web sites that contain embedded “widgets” for the company’s social media platform Google Plus. That cookie contains a code that allows Google to uniquely track users to “[personalize ads][9]” and measure how they use other Google products.

  [9]: <http://www.google.com/policies/technologies/types/>

Given the widespread use of Google services and widgets, most Web users are likely to have a Google PREF cookie even if they’ve never visited a Google property directly.

That PREF cookie is specifically mentioned in an internal NSA slide, which reference the NSA using GooglePREFID, their shorthand for the unique numeric identifier contained within Google’s PREF cookie. Special Source Operations (SSO) is an NSA division that works with private companies to scoop up data as it flows over the Internet’s backbone and from technology companies’ own systems. The slide indicates that SSO was sharing information containing “logins, cookies, and GooglePREFID” with another NSA division called Tailored Access Operations, which engages in offensive hacking operations. SSO also shares the information with the British intelligence agency GCHQ.

“This shows a link between the sort of tracking that’s done by Web sites for analytics and advertising and NSA exploitation activities,” says Ed Felten, a computer scientist at Princeton University. “By allowing themselves to be tracked for analytic or advertising at least some users are making themselves more vulnerable to exploitation.”

This isn’t the first time Google cookies have been highlighted in the NSA’s attempts to identify targets to hack. A presentation released in October by the Guardian called “[Tor Stinks][10]” indicates that the agency was using cookies for DoubleClick.net, Google’s third-party advertising service, in an attempt to identify users of the Internet anonymization tool Tor when they switched to regular browsing. “It’s similar in the sense that you see the use of an unique ID in the cookie to allow an eavesdropper to connect the activities of a user over time,” says Felten.

  [10]: <http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/oct/04/tor-stinks-nsa-presentation-document>

**Leaked location data**

Another slide indicates that the NSA is collecting location data transmitted by mobile apps to support ad-targeting efforts in bulk. The NSA program, code-named HAPPYFOOT, helps the NSA to map Internet addresses to physical locations more precisely than is possible with traditional Internet geolocation services.

Many mobile apps and operating systems use location-based services to help users find restaurants or establishments nearby. In fact, even when GPS is disabled, most smart phones silently determine their location in the background using signals from Wi-Fi networks or cellular towers.

And apps that do not need geo-location data may still collect it anyway to share with third-party advertisers. Just last week, the Federal Trade Commission announced a [settlement for a seemingly innocuous flashlight app][11] that allegedly leaked user location information to advertisers without consumers’ knowledge.

  [11]: <http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/flashlight-app-kept-users-in-the-dark-about-sharing-location-data-ftc/2013/12/05/1be26fa6-5dc7-11e3-be07-006c776266ed_story.html?itid=lk_inline_manual_43>

Apps transmit their locations to Google and other Internet companies because ads tied to a precise physical location can be more lucrative than generic ads. But in the process, they appear to tip off the NSA to a mobile device’s precise physical location. That makes it easier for the spy agency to engage in the sophisticated tracking techniques the Post described in a [story Dec. 4][12].

  [12]: <http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-tracking-cellphone-locations-worldwide-snowden-documents-show/2013/12/04/5492873a-5cf2-11e3-bc56-c6ca94801fac_story.html?itid=lk_inline_manual_46>

**Implications for privacy**

The disclosures about NSA practices reveal the dilemma facing online companies, which have faced a backlash against tracking for commercial purposes and their role in government surveillance.

“If data is used and it stops the next 9/11 our fellow citizens wouldn’t have any problem with it no matter what it is,” says Stuart P. Ingis, General Counsel at the Digital Advertising Association. But he says that it is a balancing act to pursue those bad actors “while at the same time preserving the civil liberties.”

Other defenders of online advertising companies have argued it is unfair to conflate private companies’ ad-tracking activities with the NSA activities revealed in the Snowden leaks. Marvin Ammori, a lawyer who advises technology companies including Google on surveillance issues, [wrote][13] in USA Today that “limiting bulk data collection by private companies - whether they advertise or not - would do little or nothing to limit the NSA.”

  [13]: <http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/11/22/nsa-spying-facebook-tech-companies-column/3677799/>

Felten disagrees, noting that the latest [documents][14] show that “the unique identifiers that are being placed on users’ computers are not only being used by analytic and advertising companies, but also being used by the NSA for targeting.” He also says that there are things those companies could do to protect their users from the type of attacks described in the slides, like “not sending tracking IDs, or at least not sending them in the clear” without a layer of encryption.

  [14]: <http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/national/nsa-signal-surveillance-success-stories/647/?itid=lk_inline_manual_51>

Similarly, he says, “browser makers can help by giving users better control over the use of third-party tracking cookies and by making sure that their browsers are not sending unique IDs as a side effect of their safe-browsing behavior.”

Stanford’s Mayer says the revelations suggest the need for limits on the data that companies collect about consumers. “There’s increasingly a sense that giving consumers control over the information they share with companies is all the more important,” he says, “because you’re also giving them control over the information they share with government.”

_Soltani is an independent security researcher and consultant._

[raysondetre]

Neoliberalism paves the way for neofascism so the fact that @JoeBiden and the Democrats are STILL peddling the same failed neoliberal politics that got us here means they have already set the ball in motion to bring us an even worse Trump in 2024 or 2028.

[raysondetre]

[raysondetre]

The NSA has long sought agreements with technology companies under which they would build special access for the spy agency into their products, according to disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and reporting by Reuters and others.

nothing has changed since snowden’s leaks. the NSA is still spying on you and the entire world, back doors or not. and oh the NSA just recently finished building their massive data center out in utah. over 1 to 2 million gallons or more of water is being pumped into the DC daily…  just to give you an idea of scale. why would they need such a massive space? lol.

[raysondetre]

“The virus has mutated in mink. The mutated virus has spread to humans,” Frederiksen said.

17 million? are these minks at least used for food? or they’re just for coats? i guess some of that is turned into oil?

[raysondetre]

46,972,329,188 animals have been killed for food this year in the United States

Chickens: 7,958,900,000 Turkeys: 226,580,000 Cattle: 35,810,000 Pigs: 123,686,000 Ducks: 28,620,000 Sheep: 6,880,000 Fish: 3,797,000,000 Shellfish: 43,109,000,000

Taken together, more than 55 billion land and sea animals die annually to support the U.S. food supply. 

more: https://animalclock.org/

[raysondetre]

Diverse animals across the globe are slipping away and dying as Earth enters its sixth mass extinction, a new study finds.

Over the last century, species of vertebrates are dying out up to 114 times faster than they would have without human activity, said the researchers, who used the most conservative estimates to assess extinction rates. That means the number of species that went extinct in the past 100 years would have taken 11,400 years to go extinct under natural extinction rates, the researchers said.

Much of the extinction is due to human activities that lead to pollution, habitat loss, the introduction of invasive species and increased carbon emissions that drive climate change and ocean acidification, the researchers said.

“Our activities are causing a massive loss of species that has no precedent in the history of humanity and few precedents in the history of life on Earth,” said lead researcher Gerardo Ceballos, a professor of conservation ecology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and a visiting professor at Stanford University.

read more: https://www.livescience.com/51281-sixth-mass-extinction-is-here.html

[raysondetre]

bombshell? is anyone surprised? how about investigate all the crimes and sexual abuses that don’t get “documented.” there’s another bombshell.

even another bombshell… investigate all the crimes and mass epidemic of sexual abuse by teachers and educators in this country. yes, bombshell…

[raysondetre]

The new coronavirus was circulating in Italy since September 2019, a study by the National Cancer Institute (INT) of the Italian city of Milan shows, signaling that COVID-19 might have spread beyond China earlier than previously thought.

The World Health Organization has said the new coronavirus and COVID-19, the respiratory disease it causes, were unknown before the outbreak was first reported in Wuhan, in central China, in December.

Italy’s first COVID-19 patient was detected on Feb. 21 in a little town near Milan, in the northern region of Lombardy.

But the Italian researchers’ findings, published by the INT’s scientific magazine Tumori Journal, show that 11,6% of 959 healthy volunteers enrolled in a lung cancer screening trial between September 2019 and March 2020, had developed coronavirus antibodies well before February.

A further specific SARS-CoV-2 antibodies test was carried out by the University of Siena for the same research titled “Unexpected detection of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in the pre-pandemic period in Italy”.

It showed that four cases dated back to the first week of October were also positive for antibodies neutralizing the virus, meaning they had got infected in September, Giovanni Apolone, a co-author of the study, told Reuters.

Read more: https://de.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-italy-timing-idUSKBN27V0KF

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The U.S. military is buying the granular movement data of people around the world, harvested from innocuous-seeming apps, Motherboard has learned. The most popular app among a group Motherboard analyzed connected to this sort of data sale is a Muslim prayer and Quran app that has more than 98 million downloads worldwide. Others include a Muslim dating app, a popular Craigslist app, an app for following storms, and a “level” app that can be used to help, for example, install shelves in a bedroom.

[raysondetre]

curious, what licensed software do american publican schools need that open source isn’t able to provide?

the education system is so fucking corrupt.

[raysondetre]

This is capitalism's vast irrationality and inhumanity in action. Markets and The Economy™ matter more to capitalism than the concrete distribution of resources according to tangible human need.

Resources exist in abundance -- give them to people. Housing sits empty -- give it to people. The rules of the feast table should apply to our economic system -- no one gets seconds until everyone has gotten a plate.

We stand at a crossroads in these chaotic times: socialism or barbarism! The ruling class repeatedly chooses the latter. We need to organize and choose the former!

[raysondetre]

twitter keeps bothering me

[raysondetre]

Portrait of an American Mass Shooting

As he was waiting to be taken to jail, a local reporter asked Willie Cory Godbolt why he did it. Why did he kill all those people?

“Because I love my wife and I love my children,” he replied matter-of-factly.

Of course, it wasn’t about love at all. Cory had just been arrested for committing a massacre. He was accused of slaughtering eight people: his wife’s mother, her older sister and her aunt, her cousin and her cousin’s husband, her pastor’s grandson and another young boy, as well as the officer who responded to the 911 call.

Why did Cory say it was love that led him to kill so many? Only one person understood.

“He didn’t want nobody else around us,” Cory’s wife, Sheena Godbolt, said sitting on her sister’s couch one scorching hot afternoon in July, almost two months after the shooting.

“He wanted me there with him, with no friends or family members, nothing,” she said. She shifted in her seat, drew a deep breath, shook her head. “That’s not love.” https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/mass-shooting-domestic-violence-willie-cory-godbolt_us_5989f222e4b0449ed505d656