GRUEN...

http://iview.abc.net.au/collection/gruen?WT.tsrc=Homepage_MREC&WT.ac=Hom...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Alexa

Can Alexa vote on your behalf in a democratic world where the machines have equal rights?

As Alexa, see above, is able to collect algorithms on your behaviour and product purchases, the NSA has been collecting your dick picks and other items you would not want Alexa to know about... What could stop the NSA to control your "Alexa" or even plant one in your home — Ah yes it's known as "bugging":

A new report indicating US President Donald Trump requested CIA Director Mike Pompeo meet with NSA expert Bill Binney to get "the facts" about so-called "Russian hacking" has led to a predictable, if lamentable, online smear campaign against the whistleblower.

Binney has argued, along with many in the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group of former US Intelligence Community professionals, that DNC emails published by WikiLeaks were leaked by someone inside the DNC. This blows up a major chapter in the "RussiaGate" narrative, which holds that Russians hacked the emails and supplied them to WikiLeaks — a claim which has never been indisputably proven.

@raymcgovern #CNN just demoted #NSA's ex-Global Intel Director, Bill Binney, to "DNC hack 'conspiracy theorist'"--How long can this lie hold?

​CNN referred to the Pennsylvania native as a "DNC hack conspiracy theorist," parroting a similar mischaracterization proffered by Mother Jones. Lawfare, The Hill and NBC more accurately described Binney as a former US intelligence professional turned whistleblower and critic.

​​

The slander and fake news raises an important question: Who Is Bill Binney?

William Edward Binney is a 30-year veteran of the National Security Agency who resigned from his position there on October 31, 2001, in frustration and disgust at malpractice that he believed cost American lives.

​​

The reason was straightforward: Binney had worked on a wiretapping and data analysis program that he said could have prevented the September 11, 2001, terror attacks against the US, but was halted by the agency just weeks before the attack. Binney and two colleagues, J. Kirk Wiebe and Edward Loomis, later filed a complaint with the Pentagon's Office of Inspector General over NSA's fateful decision to continue a program dubbed "Trailblazer" over the program Binney had worked on, "ThinThread."

ThinThread was less intrusive and more effective than Trailblazer, Binney contended, and, crucially, it was a working prototype at the time it was cancelled, while Trailblazer was only a concept on paper. The functioning ThinThread could have even stopped 9/11, Binney told Sputnik Radio's Loud & Clear last year.

​Binney and his colleagues attempted to resolve their differences with NSA leadership and draw attention to what they characterized as malpractice by notifying the Department of Defense, the standard procedure for bringing serious grievances to light. They were stifled. It was the example of Binney and his treatment that ultimately propelled NSA contractor Edward Snowden to resort to extra-legal channels when to blow the whistle of the US government's massive and illegal surveillance programs, because Snowden had seen that following regular channels within the government would lead nowhere.

Binney has become increasingly critical of surveillance against US citizens, which he told The Nation in 2013 has become "better than anything [the] Gestapo or SS ever had." And Binney should know: he "created many of the collection systems still in use" at the NSA and told VIPS "that NSA's ‘cast-iron' coverage… would have almost certainly yielded a record of transfer from Russia to Wikileaks."

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Indeed, the man who is being smeared today has been used as a credible source for information about NSA programs and government surveillance for more than a decade. Binney was likely a key source for a bombshell New York Times article published in December 2005 revealing that President George W. Bush authorized the NSA to eavesdrop on American citizens and others in the US without the court approval normally required for such spy operations. The government was "keeping all these crimes in secret," Binney told Sputnik Radio's Loud & Clear in 2016.

After being interviewed by the FBI on three occasions in spring 2007, Binney was cleared of wrongdoing for potential contributions to the NYT piece. In June 2007, a dozen FBI agents stormed his house with assault rifles, pointed a gun at his head while he was taking a shower and confiscated his computers, documents and other records. The story was told in the 2015 documentary "A Good American," which has become a regular feature on online streaming sites like Netflix, where it was available to watch as recently as last month.

PBS, a TV channel funded by the US federal government, broadcast a "Frontline" segment on Binney in 2013 titled: "United States of Secrets."

​While 9/11 is always used to justify egregious domestic espionage programs, the fact of that attack doesn't make the illegal legal. Those programs were illegal the day the intelligence community started them, and they are in violation of the constitution today. Not only is the Fourth Amendment breached — "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized" — NSA surveillance violates the first, fifth and sixth amendments, too, Binney told Sputnik News.

Binney noted the First Amendment says each person has the right to free association. "It doesn't say you have the right to free association as long as NSA or the rest of the government knows about it." 

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/analysis/201711081058932927-nsa-whistelblower-binney-conspiracy-theorist/

The well-deserved outcry regarding the New York Times’ insufficiently critical profile about a Nazi in the American heartland has exposed a commonly held myth about journalism: that our profession is objective. This is a lie.

When a reporter at the American “paper of record” can admit that his story didn’t hold up and their editor chose to assign significant resources towards it and published it anyway, journalism is clearly not based on meritocracy or neutrality.

Rather, with journalism jobs going to white people 87% of the time in the US and a staggering 94% in Britain, journalism is practically a white-people-only club that will reward mediocre white journalists before it will advance excellent journalists of color who can bring needed perspectives.

Our racially monolithic mainstream press is particularly ill equipped to cover an increasingly non-white world when it declares itself to be “objective”. Like other parts of the society, journalism operates within an ideology which bell hooks describes as “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy”.

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/28/media-diversity-ne...

One of my kids has asked for a Google Home Mini. But hold up, Santa.

It’s been three years since Amazon debuted Echo, a speaker that came with a talking digital assistant named Alexa, which you can ask to order a pizza or play a song or a great many other things. Since then, such smart speakers have proliferated, with 24 million expected to sell worldwide this year.

Amazon said last month it was bringing Alexa to the workplace, where it can help set up conference calls or track appointments. Google has priced its Home Mini under $30 for the holiday season. And Apple is coming out with its own competitor, the HomePod, next year.

But I’m not sure I’m ready. I just bought an Atari and a record player, so I’ve been reverting to the technology of my youth. But more important, there are some secrets I don’t want within earshot of an open microphone. I put on a Barbra Streisand album the other day. It’s not something that I’m proud of, but these are complicated times and it happened. How do I explain that to Alexa?

Of course, we’ve been trading off privacy for the wonder and convenience of technology for years. How comfortable we are with gradually ceding more data to the machines is probably inversely correlated with how many times we’ve watched “The Terminator.” And I’ve watched it. A lot.

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/08/business/echo-alexa-amazon.html

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By CRAIG S. SMITH 

Researchers can send hidden audio instructions undetectable to the human ear to Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant.

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A family in the United States has vowed to never use Amazon's virtual assistant Alexa again after the device recorded a private conversation in their home and sent it to a random contact.

Danielle (surname withheld) told KIRO-TV she received a call from an employee of her husband who urged them to unplug their Echo devices, which use the Alexa software.

She said the employee then revealed he had been sent an audio file of what was going on in their Portland home.

The employee lived in Seattle — 282 kilometres away.

"I felt invaded, like total privacy invasion," Danielle said.

"I'm never plugging that device in again — I can't trust it."

Danielle said when she contacted Amazon, an Alexa engineer confirmed the conversation had been recorded and sent it to a contact without their consent.

She said the engineer told her Alexa had "guessed" what they were saying.

"He apologised like 15 times in a matter of 30 minutes and said, 'We really appreciate you bringing this to our attention, this is something we need to fix'," she said.

Amazon has described the event as an "extremely rare occurrence".

Read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-05-25/amazon-alexa-recorded-private-conv...

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The pro-information freedom NGO is sounding the alarm over the impact that smart tech is having on the way we consume news. In a Thursday report, it says the development of voice assistants – like Amazon's Alexa, or Siri, or Google Assistant – "raises the question of guarantees for pluralism in news and information."

RSF is concerned that when you ask "What's the news?" and submit to the mercy of your virtual assistant, you could be allowing someone else to cherry pick your sources for you. "Voice assistants are liable to reinforce the opaque and often pay-based methods of media content distribution that exist already,"says RSF's Journalism and Technology head Elodie Vialle. And while the media is happy to report on the futuristic technology itself, it diverts attention from its potential implications.

The selective news-feeding is not the only thing worrying RSF about virtual assistants. There's also the constant surveillance of their environment and owner, and of course, the annoying bugs.

A combination of those last two factors caused one of Alexa's biggest fumbles of late: in March, one US couple's digital helper recorded their private conversation about hardwood floors and sent it to one of the husband's employees. Amazon explained it away by saying Alexa had misheard some of the words in the conversation as a weirdly specific series of commands. Still, the couple said they would never plug the device in again.

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/434982-voice-assistant-threat-news/

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The main thing about robots and voice-activation software in general is that, as per the creepy Joaquin Phoenix movie Her, they imperil us by generating actual emotions: in my case, fooling me into bonding with a 10in-high cylindrical speaker. It’s true that a few years ago, when I first bought a Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner, I was inclined to apologise to it when I got in its way. It’s also true that when Alexa’s perimeter flashes red to indicate poor signal health, I feel a surge of emotion.

Read more crazy stuff:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/20/alexa-devices-amaz...

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see also:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/34374

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/33918

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/30130

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/33755

Amazon announced on Friday that it would allow users of its smartphone assistance app Alexa to deny the company access to their private conversations. “We take customer privacy seriously and continuously review our practices and procedures,” the Amazon spokesperson told Bloomberg.

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/465704-apple-amazon-alexa-spying/

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One day in 2017, Alexa went rogue. When Martin Josephson, who lives in London, came home from work, he heard his Amazon Echo Dot voice assistant spitting out fragmentary commands, seemingly based on his previous interactions with the device. It appeared to be regurgitating requests to book train tickets for journeys he had already taken and to record TV shows that he had already watched. Josephson had not said the wake word – “Alexa” – to activate it and nothing he said would stop it. It was, he says, “Kafkaesque”.

This was especially interesting because Josephson (not his real name) was a former Amazon employee. Three years earlier, he had volunteered to sit in a room reciting a string of apparently meaningless phrases into a microphone for an undisclosed purpose. Only when Amazon released the Echo in the US in 2014 did he realise what he had been working on. He bought a Dot, the Echo’s cheaper, smaller model, after it launched in 2016, and found it useful enough until the day it went haywire. When the Dot’s outburst subsided, he unplugged it and deposited it in the bin. “I felt a bit foolish,” he says. “Having worked at Amazon, and having seen how they used people’s data, I knew I couldn’t trust them.”

The Dot wasn’t supposed to behave like a dadaist drill sergeant. Then again, voice assistants often do things that they are not supposed to do. Last year, an Amazon customer in Germany was mistakenly sent about 1,700 audio files from someone else’s Echo, providing enough information to name and locate the unfortunate user and his girlfriend. (Amazon attributed this “unfortunate mishap” to human error.)

In San Francisco, Shawn Kinnear claimed that his Echo activated itself and said cheerfully: “Every time I close my eyes, all I see is people dying.” In Portland, Oregon, a woman discovered that her Echo had taken it upon itself to send recordings of private conversations to one of her husband’s employees. In a statement, Amazon said that the Echo must have misheard the wake word, misheard a request to send a message, misheard a name in its contacts list and then misheard a confirmation to send the message, all during a conversation about hardwood floors. Not great, Alexa.

Technology frequently inspires ambivalence: we know that Facebook and Google know too much about us, yet we continue to use their services because they’re so damn convenient. Voice assistants, however, are unusually polarising. People who consider them sinister and invasive (myself included) regard enthusiasts as complacent, while those who find them useful and benign see the sceptics as paranoid technophobes. There is one question freighted with bigger issues about our relationship with the tech industry: should you let Alexa into your home?

In January, Amazon’s senior vice-president of devices, David Limp, revealed that the company had sold more than 100m Alexa-enabled devices. Last year in the US, where one in five adults own a home voice assistant, Alexa had a 70% US market share, compared with the Google Assistant’s 24%. It is therefore best-placed to become what Shoshana Zuboff, in her bestseller, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, calls the “One Voice”: the dominant ecosystem that would give its operator “the ability to anticipate and monetise all the moments of all the people during all the days”. Zuboff calls the birth of Alexa “a threshold event”.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/09/alexa-are-you-invadin...

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In a discussion of the highly competitive streaming market, Todd Sampson called for the ABC to reverse its current strategy - make iview the primary product and television the supplementary.

iview has been very successful for the ABC, which still promotes it as a way to catch up on TV shows.

Todd Sampson said that has to change.

"I think iview is the business and TV is supplementary. Structurally the industry is changing. The networks are all struggling with that. But the more important thing is behaviourally it’s changing. It’s never going back to pre-streaming time. It’s not going to happen."

He urged the ABC to get ahead of the changes, scrap ABC2, make less content and put it all on iview.

His Gruen colleague Russel Howcroft urged the ABC to advertise its programs in order to attract a younger audience.

Read more:

https://www.abcalumni.net/news-and-views/gruen-scrap-abc-tv-put-it-all-o...

Gus Leonisky says bullshit to the advertising gurus-imbecile-ishes Gruen... They live in a vacuum-cleaner of ideas despite being full of ideas. Dogs are full of ideas as well — and you need a poop-bag to collect them... The ABC has a much better job to do than play the game of attrition which the government and the other publishers of crap, like News Limited, want... We need REAL information and as such, the ABC is the best source of it, though some of its honchos are getting distracted by the white noise of the idiots...

See also: significantly damaged = write off... in does an old woman with a lisp think she owns your ABC?...

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