Here’s what robots destroy when they compete with humans

A new study has something to say about the toll of workplace automation

Source: MarketWatch

Robots are jerks.

That’s according to the demoralized humans who played against the machines for money in a recent Cornell University-led experiment shedding light on what can happen to worker’s drive in an increasingly automated workplace.

When humans unsuccessfully vied against a robot arm for cash prizes, participants ended up viewing themselves as less competent, didn’t try as hard, and tended to dislike the automated appendage that bested them, the researchers found.

“I felt very stressed competing with the robot,” one participant admitted. “In some rounds, I kept seeing the robot’s score increasing out of the corner of my eye, which was extremely nerve-racking [sic].”

Another said in “some rounds the robot would go slower and that’s when I started going faster.”

“It was obvious when the robot was ’going easy’ on me,” according to another person.

The task was counting how often the letter G showed in a list of characters, and then putting the corresponding number of blocks in a bin. Awards were given through a lottery system tied to the human and robot scores, so that the player with better scores had better odds at winning.

On the whole, Cornell University and Hebrew University of Jerusalem researchers determined the 61 people involved “liked a low-performing competitor robot more than a high-performing one, even though they considered the latter to be more competent.”

The study was the first to bring experts in both behavioral economics and robotics to see how a machine’s performance influences the reactions of the humans competing alongside the robot. The study noted it used an off-the-shelf WidowX Mark II as the mechanized competitor. They said the results supported behavioral economic theories of “loss aversion,” where people slacken their efforts in the face of defeat.

While participants might have been just counting letters and putting blocks in bins — a task researchers acknowledged was “tedious” — they said the findings have serious implications.

There are already many places where robots and humans work next to each other on jobs that are similar or the same, assistant professor Guy Hoffman of Cornell’s Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering noted. Cashiers scanning products next to automatic check-out devices is one example, and delivery robots scooting around with worker-operated forklifts is another, he said.

The study provides more insight on the big issue of automation in the workplace.

The Brookings Institution estimated earlier this year that 36 million American workers, including cooks, waiters, office clerks and short-haul truckers, faced a “high exposure” to automation, making a pink slip a real possibility. Robots powered by current technology could do at least 70% of their job duties, the report said.

There’s anxiety over the consequences of automation and artificial intelligence. It’s possible there’s a link between a person’s poor health and their worries that robots would render them jobless, according to October findings from Ball State University and Villanova University researchers.

President Donald J. Trump brought up his own concerns Tuesday, not about automation, but creeping computer overcomplexity in the context of the recent Ethiopian Airlines crash of a Boeing BA, -2.55%   737 MAX 8. Trump tweeted, “pilots are no longer needed, but rather computer scientists from MIT. I see it all the time in many products. Always seeking to go one unnecessary step further, when often old and simpler is far better.”

Another view is that workplace automation holds plenty of promise.

When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, spoke this past weekend at the SXSW Conference in Austin, Texas this weekend, she told an audience, “We should not be haunted by the specter of being automated out of work. …We should be excited by that.”

The reason for the lack of enthusiasm, according to Ocasio-Cortez, “is because we live in a society where if you don’t have a job, you are left to die. And that is, at its core, our problem.”

Hoffman, the Cornell professor who was a senior author of the study, said workers’ heart and souls need to be factored into the equation when it comes to calling a robot a co-worker.

“While it may be tempting to design such robots for optimal productivity, engineers and managers need to take into consideration how the robots’ performance may affect the human workers’ effort and attitudes toward the robot and even toward themselves,” he said.

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The Calm Before the Fed

The US Federal Reserve’s Open Market meeting begins tomorrow and honestly, there’s not much change in “the conventional wisdom” that they likely won’t raise rates this time. The reason is computer modeling that suggests, based on recent work by former Fed-boss Ben Bernanke (et al), that Lower For Longer” (L4L) is the best course for […]

The post The Calm Before the Fed appeared first on UrbanSurvival.

Prepping: Your Own “Back-Up Internet”

My buddy JB asked a dandy question in an email earlier this week: “What cables (and other stuff) are needed to hook up a ham radio system to a router or computer in case we get Venezuela’ d? As you know I have the hams and the generators but am not certain what buyable cables […]

The post Prepping: Your Own “Back-Up Internet” appeared first on UrbanSurvival.

Prepping: Your Own “Back-Up Internet”

My buddy JB asked a dandy question in an email earlier this week: “What cables (and other stuff) are needed to hook up a ham radio system to a router or computer in case we get Venezuela’ d? As you know I have the hams and the generators but am not certain what buyable cables […]

The post Prepping: Your Own “Back-Up Internet” appeared first on UrbanSurvival.

“Tech neck”: What is it and how can you prevent it?

(Natural News) If you use a computer or a mobile device for extended periods of time every day, you might end up developing a painful condition called “tech neck.” Fortunately, this returning pain in the neck can be fully avoided by making a habit to improve your posture as regularly as possible. Also called “text neck,” this problem is a…

Wall Street critic Warren vows to break up Amazon, Facebook, Google

March 8, 2019

By Diane Bartz

(Reuters) – Senator Elizabeth Warren vowed on Friday to break up Amazon.com Inc, Alphabet Inc’s Google and Facebook Inc if elected U.S. president to promote competition in the tech sector.

Warren, who is seeking to stand out in a crowded field of Democratic presidential candidates, said in a blog post that on their way to the top, the big tech companies purchased a long list of potential competitors, like Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram.

“They’ve bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field against everyone else. And in the process, they have hurt small businesses and stifled innovation,” Warren wrote in a post https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up-big-tech-9ad9e0da324c on Medium.

Warren said she would nominate regulators who would unwind acquisitions such as Facebook’s deals for WhatsApp and Instagram, Amazon’s deals for Whole Foods and Zappos, and Google’s purchases of Waze, Nest and DoubleClick.

Investors shrugged off her comments. Shares of Facebook closed up 0.3 percent on Friday, while Alphabet fell 0.08 percent and Amazon.com lost 0.3 percent.

It is rare for the government to seek to undo a consummated deal.

The most famous case in recent memory is the government’s effort to break up Microsoft. The Justice Department won a preliminary victory in 2000 but was reversed on appeal. The case settled with Microsoft intact.

Warren also proposed legislation that would require tech companies like Google and Amazon that offer an online marketplace or exchange to refrain from competing on their own platform. This would, for example, forbid Amazon itself from selling on its Amazon Marketplace platform.

Amazon and Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Facebook declined comment.

“AN ARCHAIC IDEA”

Tech companies have come under fire because of their role in displacing existing businesses. Amazon has replaced many brick-and-mortar stores and has been criticized for poorly paying its warehouse workers.

Facebook has angered lawmakers for losing track of users’ data and for not doing more to stop foreign meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Google has clashed with smaller companies, like Yelp, over search placements and has raised concerns it would comply with China’s internet censorship and surveillance policies if it re-enters the Asian nation’s search engine market.

Congress held a series of hearings last year looking at the dominance of major tech companies.

NetChoice, an e-commerce trade group whose members include Facebook and Google, said Warren’s plan would lead to higher prices.

“Senator Warren is wrong in her assertion that tech markets lack competition. Never before have consumers and workers had more access to goods, services and opportunities online,” said Carl Szabo, vice president and general counsel for NetChoice.

In Washington, the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Tom Donohue, said breaking up the big tech companies would “take us back to the Stone Age.”

“This is not a vision for the future, but an archaic idea that should be dumped in your computer trash can,” he said.

Public Knowledge, a tech policy group, called Warren’s plan a step toward protecting the next generation of businesses, but stopped short of a full-throated support for breaking up the tech giants.

“We need legislation specifically targeted to enhance competition on digital platforms so that there is a real opportunity for new, innovative competitors to succeed,” said Charlotte Slaiman, the group’s policy counsel.

Tim Wu, a professor of law, science and technology at Columbia Law School who coined the term “net neutrality” and has warned against an economy dominated by a few giant firms, said in a tweet that it was “heartening” to see the idea of breaking up the tech giants gaining some traction.

Tech companies are some of the biggest political donors. Google spent $21 million to lobby in 2018 while Amazon spent $14.2 million and Facebook spent $12.62 million, according to their filings to U.S. Congress.

Angering a deep-pocketed industry could hurt Democrats, but that is not likely to be a big worry for Warren, who made her political mark and plenty of enemies by going after big banks after the 2007-09 financial crisis. In the Senate, Warren continues to be an outspoken critic of Wall Street and is a leader of her party’s progressive wing.

Other Democratic candidates have also criticized the tech firms.

Senator Amy Klobuchar used her campaign launch speech to vow action on digital issues like privacy, saying “big tech companies” misuse personal data.

Senator Bernie Sanders, another presidential candidate, in 2018 even named a bill after Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the Stop BEZOS Act, which would tax big companies if their employees receive public benefits.

(Reporting by Diane Bartz; editing by Meredith Mazzilli, Nick Zieminskiand Leslie Adler)

Power in the Greater Depression (Ch. 8)

Advanced Chargers,  Inverters, and Grid-Tie In today’s chapter, we’ll turn you into a prepper who “knows their stuff” about power inverters (that make AC from DC sources) as well as be inducted into the nearly occult world of computer controlled solar chargers using something called MPPT. By the time we’re done, you’ll be ready to […]

The AI Road To Serfdom?

Authored by Robert Skidelsky via Project Syndicate,

 Should we trust the conventional economic narrative according to which machines inevitably raise workers’ living standards?

Surveys from round the world show that people want secure jobs. At the same time, they have always dreamed of a life free from toil. The “rise of the robots” has made the tension between these impulses palpable.

Estimates of job losses in the near future due to automation range from 9% to 47%, and jobs themselves are becoming ever more precarious. Yet automation also promises relief from most forms of enforced work, bringing closer to reality Aristotle’s extraordinary prediction that all needed work would one day be carried out by “mechanical slaves,” leaving humans free to live the “good life.” So the age-old question arises again: are machines a threat to humans or a means of emancipating them?

In principle, there need be no contradiction. Automating part of human labor should enable people to work less for more pay, as has been happening since the Industrial Revolution. Hours of work have fallen and real incomes have risen, even as the world’s population increased sevenfold, thanks to the increased productivity of machine-enhanced labor. In rich countries, productivity – output per hour worked – is 25 times higher than it was in 1831. The world has become steadily wealthier with fewer man-hours of work needed to produce that wealth.

Why should this benign process not continue? Where is the serpent in the garden? Most economists would say it is imaginary. People, like novice chess players, see only the first move, not the consequences of it. The first move is that workers in a particular sector are replaced by machines, like the Luddite weavers who lost their jobs to power looms in the nineteenth century. In David Ricardo’s chilling phrase, they become “redundant.”

But what happens next? The price of clothes falls, because more can be produced at the same cost. So people can buy more clothes, and a greater variety of clothes, as well as other items they could not have afforded before. Jobs are created to meet the shift in demand, replacing the original jobs lost, and if productivity growth continues, hours of work can fall as well.

Notice that, in this rosy scenario, no trade unions, minimum wages, job protections, or schemes of redistribution are needed to raise workers’ real (inflation-adjusted) income. Rising wages are an automatic effect of the fall in the cost of goods. Provided there is no downward pressure on money wages from increased competition for work, the automatic effect of technological innovation is to raise the standard of living.

This is the famous argument of Friedrich Hayek against any attempt by governments or central banks to stabilize the price level. In any technologically progressive economy, prices should fall except in a few niche markets. Businessmen don’t need low inflation to expand production. They need only the prospect of more sales. “Dearness” of goods is a sign of technological stagnation.

But our chess novice raises two important questions:

“If automation is not confined to a single industry, but spreads to others, won’t more and more jobs become redundant?

And won’t the increased competition for the remaining jobs force down pay, offsetting and even reversing the gains from cheapness?”

Human beings, the economist replies, will not be replaced, but complemented. Automated systems, whether or not in robot form, will enhance, not destroy, the value of human work, just as a human plus a good computer can still beat the best computer at chess. Of course, humans will have to be “up-skilled.” This will take time, and it will need to be continuous. But once up-skilling is in train, there is no reason to expect any net loss of jobs. And because the value of the jobs will have been enhanced, real incomes will continue to rise. Rather than fearing the machines, humans should relax and enjoy the ride to a glorious future.

Besides, the economist will add, machines cannot replace many jobs requiring person-to-person contact, physical dexterity, or non-routine decision-making, at least not any time soon. So there will always be a place for humans in any future pattern of work.

Ignore for a moment, the horrendous costs involved in this wholesale re-direction of human work. The question is which jobs are most at risk in which sectors. According to MIT economist David Autor, automation will substitutefor more routinized occupations and complement high-skill, non-routine jobs. Whereas the effects on low-skill jobs will remain relatively unaffected, medium-skill jobs will gradually disappear, while demand for high-skill jobs will rise. “Lovely jobs” at the top and “lousy jobs” at the bottom, as LSE economists Maarten Goos and Alan Manning described it. The frontier of technology stops at what is irreducibly human.

But a future patterned along the lines suggested by Autor has a disturbingly dystopian implication. It is easy to see why lovely human jobs will remain and become even more prized. Exceptional talent will always command a premium. But is it true that lousy jobs will be confined to those with minimal skills? How long will it take those headed for redundancy to up-skill sufficiently to complement the ever-improving machines? And, pending their up-skilling, won’t they swell the competition for lousy jobs? How many generations will have to be sacrificed to fulfil the promise of automation? Science fiction has raced ahead of economic analysis to imagine a future in which a tiny minority of rich rentiers enjoy the almost unlimited services of a minimally-paid majority.

The optimist says: leave it to the market to forge a new, superior equilibrium, as it always has.

The pessimist says: without collective action to control the pace and type of innovation, a new serfdom beckons.

But while the need for policy intervention to channel automation to human advantage is beyond question, the real serpent in the garden is philosophical and ethical blindness. “A society can be said to be decadent,” wrote the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka, “if it so functions as to encourage a decadent life, a life addicted to what is inhuman by its very nature.”

It is not human jobs that are at risk from the rise of the robots. It is humanity itself.

Delingpole: The Five Best Arguments Against Climate Alarmism via Tony Heller

  1. Climate alarmism is just a modern version of man’s primal superstitions about cataclysmic natural events.
  2. Climate alarmism is a form of Groupthink — or, as Heller puts it, the Emperor’s New Clothes. 
  3. If the case for the “global warming” were as strong as these experts say, the debate would be over by now.
  4. Climate alarmism is entirely dependent on graphs and computer models which rely on cherry-picked or corrupt data. 
  5. The proposed solutions to “climate change” are “unworkable, dangerous and useless.”

A Citizen Suing the Department of Justice Needs More than Just a Winning Legal Argument – Sharyl Attkisson

by Sharyl Attkisson, American Thinker: As I fight on with my computer intrusion lawsuit against the U.S. government, it seems to intersect more clearly with current events every day. And it points to an even larger story. How widespread is improper government surveillance of journalists, politicians and other U.S. citizens in the name of the […]

The post A Citizen Suing the Department of Justice Needs More than Just a Winning Legal Argument – Sharyl Attkisson appeared first on SGT Report.

Global Research PDF Collection: 6 PDF Books for 1 Price

Purchase six e-books from Global Research Publisher’s PDF collection at a discounted price. Download your order as a zipped folder straight to your computer and avoid shipping and handling costs.

Special Offer: Global Research PDF Collection – 6 PDF Books

The post Global Research PDF Collection: 6 PDF Books for 1 Price appeared first on Global Research.

Morocco looks to French as language of economic success

February 18, 2019

By Ahmed Eljechtimi

RABAT (Reuters) – Morocco’s economy is getting lost in translation.

With so many students dropping out of university because they don’t speak French, the government has proposed reintroducing it as the language for teaching science, maths and technical subjects such as computer science in high schools.

It also wants children to start learning French when they start school.

The country’s official languages are Arabic and Amazigh, or Berber. Most people speak Moroccan Arabic – a mixture of Arabic and Amazigh infused with French and Spanish influences.

In school, children are taught through Arabic although they don’t use it outside the classroom. When they get to university, lessons switch to French, the language of the urban elite and the country’s former colonial masters. Confused? Many are.

Two out of three people fail to complete their studies at public universities in Morocco, mainly because they don’t speak French.

The linguistic morass has stymied economic growth and exacerbated inequalities in the North African country, where one in four young people are unemployed and the average annual income runs at approximately $3,440 per person, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – less than a third of the world average.

The plans to broaden the teaching of French go to the heart of Morocco’s national identity.

They would overturn decades of Arabisation after independence from France in 1956 and have triggered a furor in parliament, where members of the Islamist PJD party, the senior partner in the coalition government, and the conservative Istiqlal party view them as a betrayal.

The disagreement has delayed a vote on the changes.

“Openness to the world should not be used as an excuse to impose the primacy of French,” said Hassan Adili, a PJD lawmaker.

Proponents say the changes reflect the reality that French reigns supreme in business, government and higher education, giving those who can afford to be privately schooled through French a huge advantage over the majority of the country’s students.

“In the Moroccan job market, mastery of French is indispensable. Those who do not have command of French are considered illiterate,” said Hamid El Otmani, head of talent and training at the Confederation of Moroccan Employers.

Even before parliament votes on the changes, Education Minister Said Amzazi has okayed the roll-out of French in some schools, declaring its use in teaching scientific subjects as an “irreversible choice”.

Like many Moroccan politicians, his children received a private education.

“When decision-makers start sending their children to public schools, only then can we say that we have a successful education system,” said Jamal Karimi Benchekroun of the co-ruling socialist PPS party.

Amzazi did not respond to a Reuters request for comment.

Frustration over jobs and poverty has fueled periodic protests in Morocco, but the country has avoided the sort of instability suffered by other North African states, where pent-up anger has triggered uprisings and provided fertile ground for Islamist extremism.

King Mohammed VI, the ultimate power in Morocco, has proven adept at introducing limited reforms in response to popular protest. He has spoken publicly about the need to teach foreign languages to students to reduce unemployment and has made the economy a top priority.

Last year, he sacked the minister for finance after calling on the government to do more to boost investment.

C’EST LA VIE

Problems with language are not unique to Morocco. In neighboring Algeria, another former French colony, students are also schooled in Arabic only to be greeted “en francais” in university and the workplace.

French’s pre-eminence reflects Paris’ continuing influence in the region. France is the biggest foreign direct investor in Morocco and large companies such as carmakers Renault and Peugeot employ tens of thousands of people.

Privately-run universities such as the International University of Rabat (UIR) have courses geared toward high-growth industries such as aerospace and renewable energy and offer tuition in French and English.

But a year at UIR can cost up to $10,000 in fees, way beyond the budget of most Moroccans. They go instead to non-fee paying public universities, where the abrupt transition to studying in French is frequently a burden for students and their lecturers.

“Sometimes we find ourselves giving French language courses during economy classes,” said Amine Dafir, economy professor at Hassan II University, a public institution in Mohamedia, near Casablanca.

Hamid Farricha, 37, dropped out of his applied physics and computer science degree at Hassan II University during the first year. He dreamed of becoming an engineer but the language barrier meant he struggled to keep up.

Trying to find Arabic translations for French scientific words was a drain on his time.

He switched instead to studying mechanics at a vocational school. He still had to master French to get hired.

“The biggest challenge after earning my diploma was writing a CV and sitting for job interviews in French,” Farricha told Reuters.

He got a job as a technician at a plant repairing car frames, paid below Morocco’s minimum monthly salary of 2570 dirhams, or $270.

Farricha was one of the lucky ones. Morocco’s economy cannot absorb all the young people looking for work. Around 280,000 graduates entered the labor force last year but only 112,000 jobs were created.

The unemployment rate for graduates is 17 percent, above the national rate of 9.8 percent, according to data from Morocco’s planning agency.

Morocco’s reliance on small and medium-sized companies which do not typically employ graduates, and austerity drives which have cut public sector jobs are part of the reason for the high rate of graduate unemployment.

The education system is also failing to prepare students for work.

In addition to high dropout rates, Moroccan students score badly compared to peers on international tests, and at university level, students oversubscribe to social science fields at the expense of technical subjects, according to an IMF report in late 2017. That means many don’t have the skills employers are looking for when they graduate.

Even for roles not requiring a degree, French is a must. On the French website of Morocco’s job promotion agency, almost all employers were looking for French speakers, including for jobs as guards, waiters, cooks and drivers.

Determined to get ahead, Farricha worked on his French while employed at the plant. He read newspapers and books in his spare time and gave himself a daily list of new expressions and vocabulary to learn.

He went back to university in 2014 for a degree in French law and is studying for a masters in diplomacy and international arbitration.

To meet his living costs, he teaches French to other students.

(Editing by Ulf Laessing and Carmel Crimmins)

Bernanke et al on L4L

Odds of future Fed Hikes may be diminishing thanks to computer models.  For those who don’t track such things, there is an incredibly interesting paper our from the Federal Reserve in its Finance and Economics Discussion Series (FEDS). In  addition, a long discussion on Mexico which we’ve been writing about for a couple of decades […]

FBI Strived to Protect Clinton Prior to 2016 Election, Emails Show

The FBI scrambled to protect Hillary Clinton leading up to the 2016 election, emails show

Senior FBI officials scrambled to protect Hillary Clinton “at all costs” in the days running up to the 2016 presidential election, new emails show.

The FBI email threads show the Bureau’s highest-ranking officials doing everything in their power to appease Hillary Clinton’s team.

Foxnews.com reports: The trove of documents turned over by the FBI, in response to a lawsuit by the transparency group Judicial Watch, also included discussions by former FBI lawyer Lisa Page concerning a potential quid pro quo between the State Department and the FBI — in which the FBI would agree to effectively hide the fact that a Clinton email was classified in exchange for more legal attache positions that would benefit the FBI abroad.

The quid pro quo would have involved the FBI providing some other public reason for withholding the Clinton email from disclosure amid a Freedom of Information Act request, besides its classification level. There are no indications the proposed arrangement ever took place.

And, in the face of mounting criticism aimed at the FBI, the documents revealed that Comey quoted the 19th century poet Ralph Waldo Emerson by assuring his subordinates, “To be great is to be misunderstood.”

The FBI did not respond to Fox News’ request for comment on the released emails.

On Oct. 28, 2016, Comey upended the presidential campaign by informing Congress that the FBI would quickly review the Weiner laptop. The Justice Department’s internal watchdog later faulted the FBI for failing to review the Weiner laptop through much of the fall of 2016, and suggested it was possible that now-fired FBI Agent Peter Strzok may have slow-walked the laptop analysis until other federal prosecutors pressured the FBI to review its contents.

On the afternoon of Oct. 28, Clinton lawyer David Kendall demanded answers from the FBI — and the agency jumped into action, the emails showed.

Many of the emails found on the computer were between Clinton and her senior adviser Huma Abedin, Weiner’s now-estranged wife. Despite claims by top FBI officials, including Strzok, several of those emails were determined to contain classified information.

“I received the email below from David Kendall and I called him back,” then-FBI General Counsel James Baker wrote to the agency’s top brass, including Comey, Page and Strzok, in an email. “Before doing so I alerted DOJ via email that I would do that.”

Page and Strzok eventually were revealed to be having an extramarital affair, and Strzok was terminated after a slew of text messages surfaced in which he and Page derided Trump and his supporters using their government-issued phones. Republicans, citing some of those text messages, have accused Strzok and Page of orchestrating a coordinated leak strategy aimed at harming the president.

Although a portion of Kendall’s email was redacted, Baker continued: “He said that our letter was ‘tantalizingly ambiguous’ and made statements that were ‘inchoate and highly ominous’ such that what we had done was worse than transparency because it allows people to make whatever they want out of the letter to the prejudice of Secretary Clinton. … I told him that I could not respond to his requests at this time but that I would discuss it with others and get back to him.

“I suggest that we have some kind of follow up meeting or phone call with this group either this evening or over the weekend to address this and probably other issues/questions that come up in the next 24 hours,” Baker concluded. “Sound reasonable?”

In a partially redacted response, Strzok agreed to spearhead a conference call among the FBI’s top officials the next day.

On Nov. 6 — just two days before Election Day — Comey sent another letter to Congress stating that agents had concluded their review of “all of the communications” to or from Clinton while she was secretary of state that appeared on the laptop, and that the review did not change his assessment that Clinton should not be prosecuted.

In an email also sent Nov. 6 and unearthed by Judicial Watch, Strzok wrote to the FBI’s leadership: “[Redacted], Jon and I completed our review of all of the potential HRC work emails on the [Anthony Weiner] laptop. We found no previously unknown, potentially classified emails on the media.”

Strzok added that a team was coming in to “triple-check” his methodology and conclusions.

However, at least 18 classified emails sent from Abedin’s account were found by the FBI on the Weiner laptop. And, despite Strzok’s apparent claim, FBI officials later conceded they had not manually screened all of the nearly 700,000 emails on the laptop, but instead used computer technology to prioritize which emails to screen as Election Day rapidly approached.

“It is big news that, just days before the presidential election, Hillary Clinton’s personal lawyer pressured the top lawyer for the FBI on the infamous Weiner laptop emails,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a statement. “These documents further underscore that the fix was in for Hillary Clinton. When will the Justice Department and FBI finally do an honest investigation of the Clinton email scandal?”

Separately, another email from Page, apparently sent in response to a Judicial Watch lawsuit, discussed an apparent attempt by the State Department to pressure the FBI to downgrade the classification level of a Clinton email.

“Jason Herring will be providing you with three 302s [witness reports] of current and former FBI employees who were interviewed during the course of the Clinton investigation,” Page wrote. “These 302s are scheduled to be released to Congress in an unredacted form at the end of the week, and produced (with redactions) pursuant to FOIA at the beginning of next week.

Page continued: “As you will see, they describe a discussion about potential quid pro quo arrangement between then-DAD in IOD [deputy assistant director in International Operations Division] and an Undersecretary at the State Department whereby IOD would get more LEGAT [legal attaché] positions if the FBI could change the basis of the FOIA withhold re a Clinton email from classified to something else.”

Fox News has previously reported, citing FBI documents, that a senior State Department official proposed a quid pro quo to convince the FBI to strip the classification on an email from Clinton’s server – and repeatedly tried to “influence” the bureau’s decision when his offer was denied, even taking his plea up the chain of command.

Through it all, the trove of documents suggested that top to bottom, FBI brass were convinced they were acting appropriately.

In response to a press release from Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley that criticized the FBI for failing to provide unclassified information on its Clinton probe in a timely and thorough manner to Congress, Comey quoted Emerson’s 1841 essay “Self Reliance.”

“Outstanding. … I should have added that I’m proud of the way we have handled this release [of unclassified information],” Comey wrote to his subordinates, including Strzok, on Sept. 2, 2016. “Thanks for the work on it. Just another reminder that Emerson was right when he said, ‘To be great is to be misunderstood.’ Have a great and quiet weekend.”

Page forwarded the email along to her colleagues, including Strzok, and added a smiley face.

Trump fired Comey in 2017, leading to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation after Comey leaked a series of memos he recorded while speaking with Trump privately.

Comey acknowledged in closed-door testimony in December that as of July 2016, investigators “didn’t know whether we had anything” implicating Trump in improper Russia collusion, and that “in fact, when I was fired as director [in May 2017], I still didn’t know whether there was anything to it.”

Swiss Computer Model: “The One Bank” Superentity Controls 40% of the Global Economy — And the Rothschilds Control It

from Humans Are Free: A few years ago, readers were introduced to a paradigm of crime, corruption, and control which they now know as “the One Bank”. First they were presented with a definition and description of this crime syndicate. That definition came via a massive computer modelconstructed by a trio of Swiss academics, and cited […]

The post Swiss Computer Model: “The One Bank” Superentity Controls 40% of the Global Economy — And the Rothschilds Control It appeared first on SGT Report.

New digital-camera-based system can ‘see’ around corners

Source: Kat J. Mcalpine,

What if your car possessed technology that warned you not only about objects in clear view of your vehicle—the way that cameras, radar, and laser can do now in many standard and autonomous vehicles—but also warned you about objects hidden by obstructions. Maybe it’s something blocked by a parked car, or just out of sight behind a building on a street corner.

This ability to see things outside your line of sight sounds like , but researchers have made strides in the last decade to bring what’s called “non-line-of-sight imaging” to reality.

Until now, they’ve had to rely on expensive and stationary equipment. But Vivek Goyal and a team of researchers from Boston University have developed a system that, employing a and a simple digital camera, can give us a more affordable and agile look at what’s around the corner.

“There’s a bit of a research community around non-line-of-sight imaging,” says Goyal, a Boston University associate professor of electrical and computer engineering. “In a dense urban area, if you could get greater visibility around the corner, that could be significant for safety. For example, you might be able to see that there’s a child on the other side of that parked car. You can also imagine plenty of scenarios where seeing around obstructions would prove extremely useful, such as taking surveillance from the battlefield, and in search and rescue situations where you might not be able to enter an area because it’s dangerous to do so.”

In a paper published in Nature on January 23, 2019, Goyal and a team of researchers say they are able to compute and reconstruct a from around a corner by capturing information from a digital photograph of a penumbra, which is the partially shaded outer region of a shadow cast by an opaque object.

“Basically, our technique allows you to see what’s around the corner by looking at a penumbra on a matte wall,” Goyal says.

When shadows turn ordinary walls into mirrors

Against a matte wall, Goyal explains, light scatters equally rather than being concentrated or reflected back in one direction like a mirror. Normally, that wouldn’t give enough organized information for a computer program to translate what’s happening in a visible scene around the corner. But Goyal’s team discovered that when there is a known solid object around the corner, the partially obstructed scene creates a blurry penumbra. The object can really be anything as long as it’s not see-through. In this case, the researchers opted to use an ordinary chair. To the , the resulting penumbra may not look like much. For a computer program, it’s highly informative.

By inputting the dimensions and placement of the object, the team found that their computer program can organize the light scatter and determine what the original scene looks like—all from a digital photograph of a seemingly blurry shadow on a wall.

“Based on light ray optics, we can compute and understand which subsets of the scene’s appearance influence the camera pixels,” Goyal says, and “it becomes possible to compute an image of the hidden scene.”

For their research purposes, they created different scenes by displaying different images on an LCD monitor. But Goyal explains there’s nothing fundamental about using an LCD screen or not.

Could the image of a human being standing around the corner, for example, be reconstructed using their approach? Goyal says there’s no conceptual barrier preventing it, but that they haven’t tried it yet. They did, however, make additional scenes by cutting out colored pieces of construction paper and pasting them on foam board to see if their system could detect the shapes and colors. Goyal says their “kindergarten art project” scenes were indeed able to be interpreted.

Seeing potential all around

The most fundamental limitation is the contrast between the penumbra and the surrounding environment, Goyal explains. “The results we present are for a relatively darkened room,” he says. When the team increased the levels of ambient light in the lab, they observed that the penumbra became harder to see and the system’s ability to precisely reconstruct the around-the-corner scene gradually became worse.

Goyal says that while real-world applications for using non-line-of-sight imaging are still a ways off, the breakthrough is in the proof of concept.

“In the future, I imagine there might be some sort of hybrid method, in which the system is able to locate foreground opaque objects and factor that into the computational reconstruction of the scene,” he says.

The most exciting aspect of their findings is the discovery that so much information can be extracted from penumbras, Goyal says, which are literally found everywhere.

“When you realize how much light can be extracted from them, you just can’t look at shadows the same way again,” he says.

Connection Found With Senate Democrats, Fusion, Soros And Facebook ‘False Flag’ Operation

In the biggest story no one is talking about, senate democrats have been linked to the Facebook false flag operation conducted against Roy Moore, along with fusion GPS, George Soros and a $50 milion payday. .

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In what appears to be the biggest story in the nation that no major media networks are even talking about, the non-profit group that used fake Russian bots to run a disinformation campaign against Roy Moore in Alabama’s special election has been linked to Fusion GPS, partially funded by George Soros, and connected to democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

“The groups, the Democracy Integrity Project (TDIP) and New Knowledge, partnered before the 2018 midterms to track alleged Russian disinformation networks… and both organizations have links to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), which is investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 election, as well as possible Trump campaign collusion.”

Naming a group an ‘integrity project’ when the group is out to trick voters and influence an election illegally seems classic democrat.

The Senate committee “provided New Knowledge with data from various social media companies as part of an investigation into Russian disinformation networks, according to a report New Knowledge released Dec. 17.”

“Two days later, news broke that New Knowledge’s chief executive was involved in a self-described ‘false flag’ operation in the special election for a Senate seat in Alabama, as was another staffer who was the lead author on the Senate report.”

The democracy ‘integrity’ project is also linked to the Senate Intelligence panel because Its founder, Daniel J. Jones, was a staffer for Democrats on SSCI and in contact with Mark Warner in early 2017.

Warner is the democratic chair of the committee, and previously made headlines when he drunkenly threatened 100 people at a Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee event that they should “buckle up” for more revelations in the Russia investigation.

“If you get me one more glass of wine, I’ll tell you stuff only Bob Mueller and I know,” Warner quipped to the crowd, according to Politico, adding, “If you think you’ve seen wild stuff so far, buckle up. It’s going to be a wild couple of months,” Warner added.

“As part of TDIP’s own Trump-Russia investigation, the group hired Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele, the author of the anti-Trump dossier, however, the extent of Warner’s contact with Jones isn’t fully known.

“The collaboration between TDIP and New Knowledge, which has not been previously reported, involved a dashboard set up at the site, Disinfo2018.com, which tracked ‘social media disinformation networks — to include suspected foreign state-actors — conducting information warfare against the American public prior to the 2018 U.S. midterm elections.’”

Now, we know that the groups were behind a false flag operation against Roy Moore, using the same strategy and technique.

“The New York Times published a damning exposé Dec. 19, 2018, showing New Knowledge operatives targeted conservative Alabamans with fake Facebook pages intended to sow doubt about Roy Moore, the Republican candidate.

“The operatives also created thousands of fake Russian Twitter accounts set to follow Moore. The effect was that numerous news outlets reported Moore was being supported by a Russian disinformation network.”

Moore claimed democrats were behind the plot, but was mocked relentlessly.

“Morgan, a former State Department adviser, said the Alabama project was merely an experiment that had no impact on the special election, which was won by Democrat Doug Jones.” He also claimed that he was unaware of the activities.

Give us a break!

“New Knowledge’s Senate report on Russian disinformation networks makes clear its investigation was undertaken at the request of SSCI. But an SSCI official told TheDCNF the committee did not pay New Knowledge and TDIP has never been hired for any work. The official also noted SSCI does not necessarily endorse New Knowledge’s findings.”

“TDIP has maintained a lower profile than New Knowledge…. information that Jones, the TDIP founder, provided to the FBI was also released in an April 27, 2018, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence report.

“Jones, who registered TDIP on Jan. 31, 2017, told the FBI in late March 2017 his organization had hired Fusion GPS and Steele, a former MI6 officer, to continue investigations into Russian meddling in the U.S. elections that began with funding from the DNC and Clinton campaign. Jones also told the FBI the project had received $50 million in funding from between seven and 10 wealthy liberal donors.

“IRS records suggest TDIP did not receive all of that funding at once. Information from the nonprofit’s tax filings show the group received $9 million in 2017.

“Around the same time as his meeting with the FBI, Jones reached out to Waldman, an attorney with a myriad of links to players in the Russia saga. Waldman represented Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska and has apparent links to Steele.

“Waldman told TheDCNF Jones told him that Fusion GPS was involved with TDIP. He also said Jones claimed Soros had provided funding for TDIP’s anti-Trump operation.

“Waldman also provided text messages from March 17, 2017, in which Jones said TDIP helped plant anti-Trump news stories.”

Planting fake news stories against Trump doesn’t seem to fit the democrat narrative.

“Our team helped with this,” Jones wrote to Waldman, linking to a Reuters article about Russian investment in properties owned by President Donald Trump.

Waldman also exchanged text messages with Warner suggesting that the democrat was in close contact. In an April 25, 2017, text message to Warner, Waldman said Steele had told him “Dan Jones is coming to see you.”

“The interactions between Warner, Waldman, Steele and Jones remain one of the enduring puzzles of SSCI’s Russia probe. The committee has refused to discuss the matter.”

But Warner was not Jones’s only democrat contact in the Senate.

“According to a New Yorker article published Oct. 15, 2018, an unidentified Democratic senator other than Warner contacted Jones in early 2017 to review data related to Alfa Bank, a Russian bank whose computer servers allegedly had back-channel contacts with Trump Organization computers.

“The Alfa Bank connection to Trump was first reported by Slate on Oct. 31, 2016. Alfa Bank’s founders are also accused of having cozy relations with the Kremlin in Steele’s dossier. The claims of illicit contact between Alfa Bank and the Trump Organization have remained unverified, with some computer experts doubting the theory.”

The fact that this isn’t splashed over every media network in the country tells its own tale.

Neither TDIP nor New Knowledge have commented in the new revelations.

Seattle TV Station Caught Doctoring Trump’s Face During National Address

A Seattle Q13 Fox employee has been placed on leave after a disturbing “deepfake” video of President Trump aired during his national address on border security this week, according to mynorthwest.com

In addition to dialing up the orange to oompa-loompa proportions, somehow the TV station was able to manipulate Trump on the fly to show him creepily sticking his tongue out at viewers. 

That comparison reveals the Q13 video creating a loop of the President licking his lips — making it seem bizarre and unbalanced — it also seems that someone distorted the President’s face and my have added an orange tone to his skin –mynorthwest.com

In a statement to MyNorthWest, Q13’s news director said “We are investigating this to determine what happened,” adding “This does not meet our editorial standards and we regret if it is seen as portraying the President in a negative light. The editor responsible for editing the footage is being placed on leave while we investigate further.

The most disturbing part of the prank is that Trump’s speech was manipulated in real time – a technological feat known as “Deep Fakes” – a convincing computer generated manipulation which can produce an almost believable impersonation of an individual.

Most recently Nvidia showcased an AI algorithm that can create realistic looking photos of people who don’t exist. 

And in China, state-run Xinhua news agency has rolled out an AI anchor which is disturbingly lifelike. 

“AI anchors have officially become members of the Xinhua News Agency reporting team,” said the agency, adding “They will work with other anchors to bring you authoritative, timely and accurate news information in both Chinese and English.”

The new AI anchors, launched by Xinhua and Beijing-based search engine operator Sogou during the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, can deliver the news with “the same effect” as human anchors because the machine learning programme is able to synthesise realistic-looking speech, lip movements and facial expressions, according to a Xinhua news report on Wednesday. –SCMP

We wonder if the MSM will give their Seattle comrades a pass for doctoring the Trump video, unlike the treatment received by Infowars editor Paul Joseph Watson, who was falsely accused of doctoring footage of CNN‘s Jim Acosta pushing a White House intern.

h/t InfoWars

Huawei Punishes Workers For Embarassing Tweet From An iPhone

China’s Huawei Technologies has reprimanded two employees for an embarrassing, New Year’s Eve tweet on the smartphone maker’s official Twitter account using an iPhone, social media sleuths noticed on Dec. 31. Huawei, whose smartphones compete with Apple’s iPhone and which has become the focal point of an ongoing feud between the US and China over “technology transfer”, on New Year’s Eve posted a message to followers saying “Happy #2019″ in a tweet marked sent “via Twitter for iPhone.”

MKBHD first detected Huawei’s New Year’s Eve mistake.

The tweet was immediately removed but screenshots of the mistake circulated across social media platforms.

Typically, this would be comical, but yet – not newsworthy. Though here, the recent arrest of a Huawei executive has been a dangerous escalation of President Trump’s economic war with China

“Late last year, Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou was arrested and detained in a Canadian jail for breaching US sanctions on Iran. This sparked even greater heat between the two tech giants, with companies in China going so far to boycott Apple. Firms have even threatened employees with termination for iPhone use, with most offering subnational discounts on Huawei phones to encourage employees to pick up Huawei devices,” said 9to5Mac.

In an internal Huawei memo dated Jan. 03 seen by Reuters, corporate senior vice-president and director of the board Chen Lifang said, “the incident caused damage to the Huawei brand.”

The memo said the mistake occurred when outsourced social media marketing firm Sapient experienced “VPN problems” with a computer so used an iPhone with a roaming SIM card to send the tweet. Twitter, like many social media platforms, is blocked in China, where the internet is heavily censored. For Sapient to gain access, the social media managers had to use a virtual private network (VPN) connection.

Huawei, which surpassed Apple as the world’s second-largest smartphone manufacturer, declined to comment on the situation when Reuters reached out.

The memo also said the error exposed procedural non-compliance and management oversight issues. It said two employees have been punished and demoted by one rank and their monthly salaries reduced by 5,000 yuan ($728.27). The pay grade of one of its employees, Huawei’s digital marketing director, will stay frozen for at least one year.

Reuters said this is not the first time an Apple smartphone has given cause for embarrassment.

Hu Xijin, editor-in-chief of China’s state-run Global Times, was criticized on social media last year after he used his iPhone when showing support for Huawei and ZTE Corp.

British Army targets ‘snowflakes, binge gamers and me, me, me millennials’ in new recruitment drive

A new Army recruitment campaign seeks to target gamers and millennials stuck in ‘boring jobs’. In the new series of adverts the Army hopes to show how current 16 to 25-year-olds may already have many of the attributes needed in the modern military, but either dismiss them as irrelevant or see them as embarrassing.

The new recruitment advertising campaign, titled ‘Your Army Needs You’, launches on January 3 with a series of adverts on TV and the internet as well as billboard posters.

The three adverts tell the stories of individuals whose perceived weaknesses are seen as strengths by the Army.

Potential recruits are shown at home or work, with others calling out their stereotypes, before the scene changes to depict them in the Army performing roles where their potential is recognised.

The Army hopes to show it can see potential beyond the stereotypes of millennials and Generation Z – those born from the 1980s to the mid-2000s.

How the new Army recruitmement posters may look
The new ‘Kitchener style’ Army recruitment posters are targeting a new generation of soldiers

The Ministry of Defence says that 72 per cent of young people describe themselves as ambitious yet feel undervalued and want a job with real purpose.

The campaign also features Kitchener-style illustrations of soldiers with stereotype labels which will be featured on billboards and outdoor advertising around the UK.

In one of the posters a ‘class clown’ is praised for his spirit. Another highlights the compassion shown by so-called ‘snowflakes’. Gaming and selfie addicts are said to have admirable levels of drive and confidence and a woman described as a ‘me me me millennial’ is celebrated for her self-belief.

According to new figures from The Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA), the video games sector now accounts for more than half of the entertainment market. The ERA said the gaming market’s value, at £3.864 billion, is more than double what it was worth in 2007.

Artists impression of how the Kitchener-style posters will look in public spaces.
Artists impression of how the Kitchener-style posters will look in public spaces. Credit: KevinLakePhotography 

The video game Fortnite is considered the most popular computer game ever made and is currently thought to have over 200 million users. The Army is hoping to tap into this market of gamers.

Major General Paul Nanson, the head of Army Recruiting said: “The Army sees people differently and we are proud to look beyond the stereotypes and spot the potential in young people, from compassion to self-belief.

“We understand the drive they have to succeed and recognise their need for a bigger sense of purpose in a job where they can do something meaningful.”

In one advert a young person is seen avidly playing computer games, to the derision of his family, before his interest in technology is shown to be a skill sought after by the military.

In another, a supermarket trolley stacker is seen being ridiculed by her colleagues for being slow, before she is then shown in a combat situation where patience and attention to detail are critical.

The Army is struggling to meet its manning requirement. According to the most recent government statistics the Army numbered 79,640 soldiers, out of a requirement for 83,500. Army strength had declined by 3.1 per cent in the year to October 1, 2018.

There were 12,130 soldiers recruited in the same period, a decline of 130 from the previous year, and 14,760 people left the army.

Gavin Williamson, the Defence Secretary, said: “People are fundamental to the Army.  The ‘Your Army Needs You’ campaign is a powerful call to action that appeals to those seeking to make a difference as part of an innovative and inclusive team.

“It shows that time spent in the Army equips people with skills for life and provides comradeship, adventure and opportunity like no other job does.”

“Now all jobs in the Army are open to men and women.  The best just got better.”

The campaign has kept the slogan ‘Be The Best’. There had been speculation early in 2018, when the last series of recruiting adverts were launched, that the line was to be removed from future army recruitment campaigns. Reportedly the Defence Secretary had stepped in to demand the slogan be retained.

AI Program Taught Itself How To ‘Cheat’ Its Human Creators

When most people think about the potential risks of artificial intelligence and machine learning, their minds immediately jump to “the Terminator” – a future where robots, according to a dystopian vision once articulated by Elon Musk, would march down suburban streets, gunning down every human in their path.

But in reality, while AI does have the potential to sow chaos and discord, the manner in which this might happen is much more pedestrian, and far less exciting than a real-life “Skynet”. If anything, risks could arise from AI networks that can create fake images and videos – known in the industry as “deepfakes” – that are indistinguishable from the real think.

AI

Who could forget this video of President Obama? This never happened – it was produced by AI software – but it’s almost indistinguishable from a genuine video.

Well, in the latest vision of AI’s capabilities in the not-so-distant future, a columnist at TechCrunch highlighted a study that was presented at a prominent industry conference back in 2017. In the study, researchers explained how a Generative Adversarial Network – one of the two common varieties of machine learning agents – defied the intentions of its programmers and started spitting out synthetically engineered maps after being instructed to match aerial photographs with their corresponding street maps.

GAN

The intention of the study was to create a tool that could more quickly adapt satellite images into Google’s street maps. But instead of learning how to transform aerial images into maps, the machine-learning agent learned how to encode the features of the map onto the visual data of the street map.

The intention was for the agent to be able to interpret the features of either type of map and match them to the correct features of the other. But what the agent was actually being graded on (among other things) was how close an aerial map was to the original, and the clarity of the street map.

So it didn’t learn how to make one from the other. It learned how to subtly encode the features of one into the noise patterns of the other. The details of the aerial map are secretly written into the actual visual data of the street map: thousands of tiny changes in color that the human eye wouldn’t notice, but that the computer can easily detect.

In fact, the computer is so good at slipping these details into the street maps that it had learned to encode any aerial map into any street map! It doesn’t even have to pay attention to the “real” street map — all the data needed for reconstructing the aerial photo can be superimposed harmlessly on a completely different street map, as the researchers confirmed:

The agent’s actions represented an inadvertent breakthrough in the capacity for machines to create and fake images.

This practice of encoding data into images isn’t new; it’s an established science called steganography, and it’s used all the time to, say, watermark images or add metadata like camera settings. But a computer creating its own steganographic method to evade having to actually learn to perform the task at hand is rather new. (Well, the research came out last year, so it isn’t new new, but it’s pretty novel.)

Instead of finding a way to complete a task that was beyond its abilities, the machine learning agent developed its own way to cheat.

One could easily take this as a step in the “the machines are getting smarter” narrative, but the truth is it’s almost the opposite. The machine, not smart enough to do the actual difficult job of converting these sophisticated image types to each other, found a way to cheat that humans are bad at detecting. This could be avoided with more stringent evaluation of the agent’s results, and no doubt the researchers went on to do that.

And if even these sophisticated researchers nearly failed to detect this, what does that say about our ability to differentiate genuine images from those that were fabricated by a computer simulation?

Computer virus hits Tribune Publishing, Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A computer virus hit newspaper printing plants in Los Angeles and at Tribune Publishing newspapers across the country.

Tribune Publishing said a computer virus disrupted production of the Chicago Tribune and its other newspapers, the Chicago Tribune reported.

The print edition of the Chicago Tribune was published Saturday without paid death notices and classified ads, while in other markets a similarly slimmed-down version of the Saturday newspaper will be delivered on Sunday, the company said.

“This issue has affected the timeliness and in some cases the completeness of our printed newspapers. Our websites and mobile applications however, have not been impacted,” Tribune Publishing spokeswoman Marisa Kollias said in a statement.

Tribune Publishing also reported the attack to the FBI on Friday, the Chicago Tribune said.

The virus that hit Los Angeles prevented it from printing and delivering Saturday editions of the Los Angeles Times, the San Diego Union-Tribune and other papers to some subscribers.

The Los Angeles Times, which runs the facility, said the computer virus infected systems that are associated with the printing process.

Spokeswoman Hillary Manning said the paper has been working to fix the issues but added that Sunday deliveries may be affected as well.

Biotech billionaire Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong bought both the Los Angeles Times and the San Diego Union-Tribune earlier this year for $500 million.

“I See No Way Out”: Countless Americans Still Living Paycheck To Paycheck

from ZeroHedge: A recent Philly.com article noted that, despite the supposed economic “boom”, professionals like real estate agents, farmers, business executives and even computer programmers are all still living paycheck to paycheck. Responding to a Washington Post inquiry on Twitter, millennials, Generation Xers and baby boomers that work in a range of geographic areas claim that they have simply been […]

The post “I See No Way Out”: Countless Americans Still Living Paycheck To Paycheck appeared first on SGT Report.

Foreign Hackers “Cripple” US Newspapers, Cause Widespread Delivery Disruptions

Foreign hackers infiltrated computer systems shared by several major US newspapers, “crippling” newspaper production and delivery systems across the country on Saturday, according to the Los Angeles Times, citing a source with knowledge of the situation. 

LA Times Olympic printing plant (Photo: doobybrain.com)

The attacks, which began alte Thursday night, appear “to have originated from outside the United States,” according to the Times, and resulted in distribution delays in the Saturday edition of The Times, the San Diego Union-Tribune, the Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun and several other major newspapers which share the same production platform. 

West coast editions of the Wall Street Journal and New York Times were also affected, as they are all printed at the LA Times’ Olympic printing plant in downtown Los Angeles. 

The hackers were able to disable several crucial software systems which store news stories, photographs and administrative information – which complicated efforts to make the physical plates used to print the papers at The Times’ downtown plant. 

“We believe the intention of the attack was to disable infrastructure, more specifically servers, as opposed to looking to steal information,” according to the source who wishes to remain anonymous. 

All papers within The Times’ former parent company, Tribune Publishing, experienced glitches with the production of papers. Tribune Publishing sold The Times and the San Diego Union-Tribune to Los Angeles businessman Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong in June, but the companies continue to share various systems, including software.

Every market across the company was impacted,” said Marisa Kollias, spokeswoman for Tribune Publishing. She declined to provide specifics on the disruptions, but the company properties include the Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, Annapolis Capital-Gazette, Hartford Courant, New York Daily News, Orlando Sentinel and Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel.

Tribune Publishing said in a statement Saturday that “the personal data of our subscribers, online users, and advertising clients has not been compromised. We apologize for any inconvenience and thank our readers and advertising partners for their patience as we investigate the situation. News and all of our regular features are available online.” –LA Times

“We are trying to do work-arounds so we can get pages out. It’s all in production. We need the plates to start the presses. That’s the bottleneck,” said Director of Distribution, Joe Robidoux. 

The problem was first detected Friday, however technology teams were unable to completely fix all systems before press time. It is unknown whether the company has contacted law enforcement regarding the incident.

South Florida readers of the Sun-Sentinel were told that it had been “crippled this weekend by a computer virus that shut down production and hampered phone lines,” according to its website. The New York Times and Palm Beach Post readers in South Florida also failed to receive their Saturday papers since they use the Sun-Sentinel’s printing facility. 

“Usually when someone tries to disrupt a significant digital resource like a newspaper, you’re looking at an experienced and sophisticated hacker,” said Pam Dixon, executive director of nonprofit public interest research group the World Privacy Forum. 

Dixon added that malware has become more sophisticated and coordinated over time, involving more planning by hacking networks who work together to infiltrate a system over time. 

“Modern malware is all about the long game,” she said. “It’s serious attacks, not small stuff anymore. When people think of malware, the impression may be, ‘It’s a little program that runs on my computer,’” added Dixon. 

With modern hacking, “malware can root into the deepest systems and disrupt very significant aspects of those systems.” 

Media Falsely Link Migrant Boy’s Death to Trump, Shutdown

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A federal judge’s ruling to limit the transfer of files allowing citizens to print their own guns using 3-D technology has resulted in exactly the opposite: The number of downloads of those files has exploded since his ruling in August.

It was Western Washington’s District Court Judge Robert Lasnik who ordered the settlement between the Justice Department and Cody Wilson’s company Defense Distributed to be suspended. He should have known better. He and other gun-grabbers such as New Jersey Governor Chris Murphy and Massachusetts Democrat Edward Markey are trying to play catch-up and instead are falling farther and farther behind.

It isn’t that gun grabbers haven’t tried. Within days of Cody Wilson displaying in May 2013 the single-shot pistol that he built using software and a 3-D printer (which he appropriately called “The Liberator”) the Obama administration’s Department of Justice demanded he take down those files.

It was too late. By the time Wilson got the letter and took down those offending files, they had been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. Replication and echo websites around the world continued the multiplication process. The genie of firearms freedom was out of the bottle.

Wilson went on to other ventures. But in 2015 his company teamed up with the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) to sue the Department of Justice, complaining that the department had violated Wilson’s First Amendment-guaranteed right to free speech.

Fast forward to late July this year. Without fanfare the Department of Justice not only settled the lawsuit with Wilson and his company, it agreed to pay a large part of his legal fees as well.

Wilson was naturally delighted and put his people back to work on developing more files for more firearms to be made available for free for anyone who wanted them through his company. Said Wilson: “I have developers for anything and everything, some of the best talent in the world.… It’s all ready to go. I have interested stakeholders [and] a large network [of supporters who] care about what I do.… I am the internet.”

At The New American, we called the settlement a “rare and remarkable retreat”:

Surprisingly the U.S. Justice Department offered to settle the case, surrendering its pursuit of Cody and his code…

The long and short of the Justice Department’s rare and remarkable retreat is that publishing code that can be used to print a weapon capable of firing ammunition is now a constitutionally protected expression of free speech!…

It’s three years on and we have found out. We’ve found that in our day, firearms may be manufactured in diverse ways, and, as of July 10, 2018, using computer code to command a printer to produce a three-dimensional gun is [now] constitutionally protected free speech.

That is indeed a victory for liberty.

Alan Gottlieb of the SAF said the decision by the DOJ wasn’t political as much as it was practical. In court, the DOJ was likely to lose, and the department didn’t want to set a precedent. Said Gottlieb:

We asked for the Moon [figuring that] the government would reject it, but they didn’t want to go to trial. The government fought us all the way and then all of a sudden folded their tent.

These were all career people [in the DOJ] that we were dealing with. I don’t think there was anything political about it.

Wilson’s attorney Josh Blackman agreed: “They were going to lose this case. If the government litigated this case and they lost, this decision could be used to challenge other kinds of gun control laws [in the future].”

Enter Judge Lasnik. His ruling suspended the settlement but it didn’t faze Wilson. He read Lasnik’s ruling: “Regulation under the (Arms Export Control Act of 1976) means that the files cannot be uploaded to the internet but they can be emailed, mailed, securely transmitted, or otherwise published within the United States.” So now Wilson is selling his software instead of giving it away. He lets them set their own price and then emails or ships the code to them.

Wilson isn’t the only beneficiary of gun-grabbers’ attempts to shut down the flow of weapon-printing code. Within a single day of Lasnik’s ruling the website CodeIsFreeSpeech.com, which posted eight sets of files, reported more than 100,000 hits and nearly 1.5 terabytes of data were downloaded. Brandon Combs, president of the Firearms Policy Coalition, which posted those files, said “Just in the past 48 hours I would be shocked if hundreds of thousands of people don’t [now] possess these files.” Combs gave credit to Wilson for opening the door: “Cody was the pioneer, and all credit goes to him and Defense Distributed. I just wanted to give the government another target, if that’s what they want to do.”

Anti-gunners are up in arms about all of this. New Jersey Governor Chris Murphy expressed his horror: “Ghost guns can be created by anyone with a computer and access to a 3D printer, giving the public at large the ability to build their own unregistered, unsafe and untraceable firearm.” Massachusetts Democrat Senator Edward Markey was equally horrified at the turn of events: “That is absolute insanity to allow people to be able to download guns [sic: software] and then use them.” When Markey was asked just how he would enforce laws prohibiting them since there were already so many files downloaded, he said the penalties “were still to be determined.”

Wilson is delighted with Lasnik’s ruling: “All that’s happened here because of this judge’s ruling is perhaps the doubling or tripling of the valuation of my own company,” adding that “really what’s at stake … is simply the government’s power to tell you what you can or can’t have, or can or can’t download online.”

Thanks to the power of the Internet and the guarantees the Founders built into the Bill of Rights, gun-grabbers have been set back enormously in their efforts to disarm American citizens. That horse escaped from their barn years ago.

Image: Murat Göçmen via iStock / Getty Images Plus

An Ivy League graduate and former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American magazine and blogs frequently at LightFromTheRight.com, primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at [email protected].

 

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