Saturday 27th of April 2024

you have surrendered your life to your smart phone... no escape.

tweeting twit.

On Wednesday afternoon, nearly every smart phone in America blared and vibrated with an emergency alert – the first ever test of the national Presidential Alert system.

The Presidential Alert is similar to the state-level systems that let police and local authorities send out AMBER Alerts and weather warnings. The biggest difference is its scale. Wednesday’s nationwide system was designed to blast a message to all 225 million smart phones in the United States – and reach about 75% of the population.

News of the Presidential Alert test drew immediate criticism on some corners of social media – with some people vowing to turn off their phones, believing wrongly that they will be a captive audience of President Donald Trump. Some even mused – incorrectly – that the system would allow him to tweet to every American.

 

Read more:

http://time.com/5400574/presidential-alert-donald-trump-fema/

 

Meanwhile:

Russia on Thursday faced a coordinated barrage of accusations from the United States and its NATO allies, that claimed Moscow was behind a slew of recent malicious cyber attacks around the world.

The accusations were levelled almost simultaneously by the US, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Canada – and included charges about alleged attacks on the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and the World Anti-Doping Agency, among others.

US indictments

The US Justice Department indicted seven Russian military intelligence figures, claiming they had targeted the Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) – the watchdog agency that has been responsible for investigating the poisoning of ex-Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in March. They also claimed the seven men were involved in leaking Olympic athletes’ drug-test data and in an attack on a Pennsylvania nuclear energy company.

US prosecutors say that the alleged Russian cyber attackers were targeting officials who supported a ban on Russian athletes competing in international sporting events.

British accusations

The British Foreign Office attributed six attacks to Russia, including the World Anti-Doping Agency attacks of 2017, the theft of emails from a UK television station in 2015 and the alleged hack of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in 2016 during the US presidential election campaign.

They also blamed Russia for the 2017 'BadRabbit' attack which caused disruption at metro stations and an airport in Ukraine, as well as at Russian media outlets and the Russian central bank.

In a characteristically dramatic statement, British foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt said “the ability of people around the world to go about their daily lives free from interference, and even their ability to enjoy sport” was under threat due to Russian attacks.

Netherlands expels four ‘GRU agents’

The Netherlands got in on the action, too, announcing that it had expelled four Russian intelligence officers back in April, claiming they too had been targeting the Hague-based OPCW. The Dutch defense minister Ank Bijleveld said the agents worked for the Russian military intelligence GRU agency and that they had used diplomatic passports to enter the country, where they allegedly took pictures of the OPCW’s surroundings in The Hague and hacked into the organization’s WiFi network from a car parked outside the building.

Appearing at the Dutch media conference, the UK ambassador to the Netherlands Peter Wilson also alleged that Russia had targeted the UK Foreign Office and Porton Down Defense and Science Laboratory. The four men expelled by the Netherlands are included in the list of seven men the US announced indictments against

Canada under threat?

Not wanting to feel left out, Canada also joined the chorus of accusations on Thursday, saying that their intelligence agencies agreed with assessments from the other NATO countries and that Russia had been acting “outside the bounds of appropriate behavior”.

The statement from Global Affairs Canada said that some of the alleged Russian attacks “have a connection with Canada”and cited a 2016 attack on the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport which had its systems compromised by a malware attack.

Canada said it had assessed with “high confidence” that GRU was responsible for the attack.

READ MORE: Canada joins international chorus accusing Russia of ‘malicious cyber attacks’

Russia has dismissed the allegations as a coordinated media attack timed to coincide with a NATO meeting on cyber-warfare. The Russian ambassador to Britain, Alexander Yakovenko, said that the accusations, together with a lack of proof, are intended to tarnish Russia's reputation.

“We see a well-coordinated campaign to discredit Russia. Of course, from my point of view that’s unacceptable,” he said.

Reacting directly to Hunt’s accusations, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the "diabolical perfume cocktail" of new allegations must be the product of someone with a “rich imagination".

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/440356-russia-coordinated-hacking-accusations-nato/

 

What? Not a word from Orstraya? Ah yes... This is where we have Pine Gap, a secret (not so secret) place from where the USA launches their own (and ours) cyber attacks on the Chinese shackled world, with programs (now obsolete) such as Prism...

See also:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/32847

the technology revolution circa 1989...

Before your life became an open book on your smart phone, you already were prisoner of the IT revolution, as shown by this old cartoon (1989-90) of Mark David:

IT

the monster was already here...

There will never, ever be another Adolf Hitler.

History doesn’t repeat itself. Human behavior patterns repeat themselves, because humans are deeply conditioned animals, but history doesn’t repeat itself. Anyone who says it does is confused about how time works.

Consumers of mainstream culture have been trained to watch out for the next Hitler the way evangelical Christians are trained to watch for the second coming of Jesus. References to Hitler are ubiquitous in movies, television, literature, and of course in political discourse, and understandably so; he is the clearest, purest example of evil in living memory. A genocidal dictator leading humanity into world war with the explicit agenda of totalitarian global domination is indeed as stark an example of an evil human being as you could possibly imagine, and serves as a philosophically unassailable “NOT THIS WAY” sign for our species. The saturation of our culture with that sign is why Godwin’s law (“As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Hitler approaches 1”) is a thing; any time you want to tell a stranger that their ideas could lead in an undesirable direction, it becomes increasingly tempting to throw up the “NOT THIS WAY” symbol that Adolf Hitler has come to represent.

But history doesn’t repeat itself. No one will ever show up acting like the thing we’ve all been taught all our lives to never, ever act like and saying the things we’ve all been taught to never, ever say and be elevated by the masses the way Hitler was. It will not happen. The next enemy of humanity would have the good sense to present as completely different from the way Adolf Hitler presented in order to seize power, and, since we’ve all been trained to bristle at anything resembling him, would actually do well to present as his diametric opposite.

If you are watching out for the next powerful enemy of humanity who presents the way Adolf Hitler presented, you will be waiting the rest of your life. And you will have missed the fact that we already let the next enemy of humanity in through the front door.

Despite all the warnings that we were given in the lead-up to the 2016 election about the Nazi dystopian future America would quickly find itself in should Queen Hillary fail to be properly coronated, what we have actually seen since Trump’s election is a foreign policy that is in practice almost indistinguishable from that of his globalist predecessors, and a domestic policy which sees George W Bush campaigning for Trump’s virulently pro-establishment Supreme Court nominee. When you strip away the blind, fawning hero worship of his supporters and the shrieking, garment-rending hysteria of his opponents, instead examining the actual behavior of this administration, the sitting president looks an awful lot like a fairly conventional Republican scumbag with about as many differences from Obama as Obama had from Bush.

And, to be clear, that is a bad thing. Both Trump supporters and Trump haters get upset whenever I say that this president is not significantly different from his predecessors in any meaningful way outside of rhetoric and narrative, Trump supporters because they believe he is a populist hero and Democrats because I’m disputing the narrative that he’s Literally Hitler. But I don’t say this because I like upsetting everyone, I say it because it’s extremely important to be absolutely clear about what is happening here if we ever want to turn things around for the fate of our species. Trump’s election did not represent the arrival of a new Hitler-like monster, the monster was already here. The call is coming from inside the house.

 

Read more:

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2018/09/29/the-enemy-of-humanity-will-never...

wooooooeeeeehe... busted...

Kimmel’s network, ABC, was one of four media organizations fined by the Federal Communications Commission this week for improper use of the emergency signal that is sent over television, radio and mobile phones to warn people of danger like floods and fires. The $395,000 fine to ABC was by far the stiffest.

FCC rules prohibit the use of the signal for any purpose other than an actual emergency. The idea is to prevent confusion, the agency said Friday.

Kimmel used the signal three times as part of a skit on his show on Oct. 3, 2018. ABC has signed a consent decree agreeing to pay the fine and promising not to improperly use the emergency tones again, the FCC announced Thursday.

AMC network agreed to pay a $104,000 fine for improper use of the signal in an episode of its most popular show, “The Walking Dead,” in February, the FCC said.

Discovery’s Animal Planet was fined $68,000 when an actual emergency signal sent to a mobile phone was picked up by cameras during a filming session for its show, “Lone Star Law.” The show was filming Texas game wardens making rescues in the wake of Hurricane Harvey.

Los Angeles radio stations KDAY and KDEY were fined $67,000 for using the signal in show promotions.

 

Read more:

https://cbs4indy.com/2019/08/16/fcc-fines-kimmel-walking-dead-for-improp...

 

 

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