Mapping How Emotions Manifest in the Body – The Atlantic – click
‘Self-reported’, but even so. I always try to keep an open mind about these things.
Here’s the article: Mapping How Emotions Manifest in the Body Across cultures, people feel increased activity in different parts of the body as their mental state changes. — Olga Khazandec The Atlantic
– P
It appears the FBI’s assessment (‘assume that [your communication] will be intercepted and retained’) was based on reality … including the remote control of your phone’s microphone & camera.
click through for article at The Daily Dot and to watch video
According to leaked documents, the NSA claims a 100 percent success rate when it comes to implanting iOS devices with spyware. The documents suggest that the NSA needs physical access to a device to install the spyware — something the agency has achieved by rerouting shipments of devices purchased online — but a remote version of the exploit is also in the works.
From the NSA document in question: (quoted by Forbes, see: The NSA Reportedly Has Total Access To The Apple iPhone)
“DROPOUT JEEP is a software implant for the Apple iPhone that utilizes modular mission applications to provide specific SIGINT functionality. This functionality includes the ability to remotely push/pull files from the device. SMS retrieval, contact list retrieval, voicemail, geolocation, hot mic, camera capture, cell tower location, etc. Command, control and data exfiltration can occur over SMS messaging or a GPRS data connection. All communications with the implant will be covert and encrypted.”
Gawd. Alienating.
– P
Of course, I tooootally trust Android and Microsoft Windows phones … 🙂 (cough)
The NSA Has Inserted Its Code Into Android OS, Or Three Quarters Of All Smartphones and NSA Has Full “Back Door” Access To iPhone, BlackBerry And Android Smartphones, Documents Reveal Sheesh.
Update: Make of this what you will: Apple Denies Working with NSA on iPhone Backdoor
Apple has never worked with the NSA to create a backdoor in any of our products, including iPhone. Additionally, we have been unaware of this alleged NSA program targeting our products. We care deeply about our customers’ privacy and security. Our team is continuously working to make our products even more secure, and we make it easy for customers to keep their software up to date with the latest advancements. Whenever we hear about attempts to undermine Apple’s industry-leading security, we thoroughly investigate and take appropriate steps to protect our customers. We will continue to use our resources to stay ahead of malicious hackers and defend our customers from security attacks, regardless of who’s behind them.
Nice bit of FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) or is it Shock and Awe?
Very droll. (click to view on Twitter)
Dedicated to Martyn Bradbury.
– P
The Atlantic has a must-read article on an internet marketing cowboy and [alleged] hustler and con-artist called Jesse Willms. It’s a longish read but a very good one.
Nice use of ‘alleged’. Click to read Taylor Clark’s informative and sobering article about Jesse Willms at THE ATLANTIC
Reading about Willms, I saw some similarities in the story of motormouth Shaun Stenning, a figure in various failed internet marketing enterprises Geekversity, Twalk, Snipr, YouTube Traffic Thieves, NZ Property Guru’s (sic) etc. who we discussed here. (The post ‘Is this how Shaun Stenning handles a request for a refund?‘ is still the most-commented article on The Paepae.)
Among the similarities was starting young, extensive use of hyperbole and deceit, and choosing what ‘lesson’ one takes out of a major business failure due to ethical lapses:
After Microsoft crushed his company, Willms sifted a valuable lesson from the remains. The lesson was not in what he’d done wrong, but in what he’d done right: a person, he now knew, could make a hell of a lot of money selling products without ever coming within 1,000 miles of them.
This paragraph sounds a touch too… admiring, but it makes a point about how characters like this build their ‘skills’:
When we use the term con artist, we typically place the emphasis on the first word while forgetting the implications of the second: that there is, after all, a real art to fleecing people. And no matter whether you believe Willms deserves a marble bust in the scamming pantheon, there is little question that he was something of a virtuoso—a Web wunderkind. By the time he’d built and lost his first fortune, Willms was still just a teenager, but the experience taught him something important: what it would take to really make a killing on the Internet.
Go and read Taylor Clark’s article at The Atlantic and know that these characters rival cockroaches for survival skills. Of note was the deployment of loud charitable giving as image-enhancing ‘…Willms began donating money “to not look like the bad guy all the time”… ‘ That reminds me of another spruiker I encountered who tried to cover up his reptilian ways with well-publicised ‘support’ for ‘worthy causes’. {retch}
Shaun Stenning has, apparently, used the ancient tactic of taking his spouse’s name to conceal/compensate for his own impaired track record and ‘rebranded’ himself as John Panchalad and JP Digital Tech, selling (you guessed it) internet marketing ‘services’ among other things … with a good dose of ‘personal testimonials’ from ‘satisfied clients’ (right).
But taking a leaf from Shaun Stenning’s own book,* it appears some of Stenning/Panchalad’s dissatisfied customers have set up an attack/exposé website — http://johnphanchalad.net.
One of the (anonymous) organisers of the site wrote to me:
We’re actually a group of people who had been scammed by Stenning, the purpose behind our website is to inform people that Stenning is still at large. Our goal is to prevent more victims to Stenning’s scam program. We’re not looking to gain any financial benefit by establishing johnphanchalad.net, for anyone who wants to know more about Stenning’s latest activity, please visit our site, and feel free to spread the world.
‘Reputation management’ is a growth industry, isn’t it? ‘There’s gold in them thar hills!’
– P
* Possibly. See: Internet ninja cowboys … or schoolboys? and Internet ninja cowboys … spoofing revisited
A recent screen grab from The Guardian‘s website — nice use of the periodic table
I know this is contentious, the claim that Yasser Arafat was murdered using Polonium (as the Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko was, his killers leaving a radioactive trail through London). I reproduce this Al Jazeera banner (above) here, prompted in part by the clever use of the Po 84 periodic table reference to spell ‘POISONED’.
Whatever your own opinion of Arafat and the whole ‘Palestinian question’ which has so fixated world leaders and the United Nations, this 1990 ABC TV ‘town meeting’ appearance by Nelson Mandela is absolutely essential viewing on the subject of the PLO and its struggle for ‘self-determination’. (I know use of that word is contentious too, but let’s run with it for now. It’s a quote, as you’ll see.)
Some people resist the equating of apartheid to anything else at all, but when I see photos like this:
A Palestinian boy walks past a section of the controversial Israeli barrier, in Shuafat refugee camp in the West Bank near Jerusalem November 23, 2013. Marooned behind the wall, Israel’s controversial barrier, the Shuafat refugee camp reveals the state’s uneven treatment of Arab and Jewish neighbourhoods, creating a de facto partition of Jerusalem, which is the epicentre of the Middle East conflict. Picture taken November 23, 2013. (REUTERS/Ammar Awad) – via Baltimore Sun click for link
… I just can’t help but think of South Africa’s townships and the forced segregation and brutality of apartheid. My conclusion: Nelson Mandela’s opinion, his ‘identification’ with the PLO is worth hearing …
Continue reading →
Haha. I’m researching a project and came across this section in an FBI pamphlet for US students travelling abroad:
‘most countries’? — from FBI’s leaflet Safety and Security for U.S. Students Traveling Abroad – click
I love that the FBI warns US students travelling overseas that they should have ‘no expectation of privacy’ and that in the case of ‘all information … sen[t] electronically’ that ‘might be valuable to another government, company or group’ they ‘should assume that it will be intercepted and retained.’
Just like at home, eh?
– P
PS Pretty spooky about the mobile phone microphones being able to be switched on remotely, huh?
I promise I will spare you any New Year’s resolution navel-gazing.
But this wry commentary on Google’s acquisition of Boston Dynamics which I screen clipped at the time, and came across again tonight, raised (in me, anyway) a question:
Where am I rationalising such extreme, comical-if-it-weren’t-so-serious compromise in my own life?
Click to view on Twitter
The whole Jungian ‘shadow‘ thing, and the model that every positive ‘benefit’ we attempt to create has a negative, often repressed ‘cost’… that we can struggle to achieve our ‘good’ because we create an equal-but-opposite ‘evil’ … well, these ideas have power.
Denial will not de-fang the dragon.
“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” — Aldous Huxley
Worth considering.
– P
The UN human rights chief, Navi Pillay, has compared the uproar in the international community caused by revelations of mass surveillance with the collective response that helped bring down the apartheid regime in South Africa.
Pillay, the first non-white woman to serve as a high-court judge in South Africa, made the comments in an interview with Sir Tim Berners-Lee on a special edition of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, which the inventor of the world wide web was guest editing.
From The Guardian
BBC Channel Channel 4 Alternative Christmas message Praxis films.
Audio here: https://m.soundcloud.com/producermatthew/edward-snowden-releases
All the best to you and your loved ones for the Christmas break. As usual things will be a little quiet here while I’m at the beach etc.
I post this Ronald Reagan/Chesterfield image as a reminder that perceptions, power balances and other things change, sometimes despite the active resistance of the self-interested forces of conservatism — whatever guise they may take.
That’s the way of the world. Thank goodness.
– P
One of my daughter’s girlfriends gave her pals T-shirts with appropriate slogans at a Christmas get-together last night. This one (and the delightful girl to whom it was given) just made me chortle. A lot. Soooo appropriate.
One of the pleasures of having a teenage daughter — like mine anyway, and I mean it wholesomely — is the delight of her circle of friends. She is pals with some really neat kids, including the model in this pic. In these days of Dad-as-taxi-and-Mr-Moneybags-Can-you-top-me-up?, sometimes they just make me laugh. (Remember The Hobbit premiere?)
It’s great having a kid who loves fun … and hangs out with others who do. Here’s a shot from earlier this week, displaying her superpowers:
– P
Check this out …
My boy’s team had their last hockey game of the year today (and won, yay). The card is an example of the great encouragement they’ve had from coach Camille. Good on her.
– P
In the context of Lily Allen’s sardonic and catchy message about how hard it is living with other people’s physical … ‘expectations’ … 5′ 2″ Cher Lloyd lets us in on her self-talk. Fabulous.
I like this singer, and have for a while, as readers may recall.
– P
That ‘I wish I was tall’ thing — I know from experience that’s a real source of angst for some teenage girls. 🙁
True: This is the old T-shirt I was wearing this morning as two Jehovah’s Witnesses dropped by with their latest ‘CAN YOU TRUST THE NEWS MEDIA?’ Awake! magazine.
Pic of New Zealand’s top spies Warren Tucker (SIS) and Ian Fletcher (GCSB): Barry Soper. Others by Peter Aranyi
Hahaha.
– P
At the risk of creating a terrible circularity that could collapse the interwebs, let me suggest you read Bryce Edwards’ Political Roundup today (available here at The NZ Herald.)
Bryce introduces his political topic du jour thus:
New Zealand politics is ‘a dirty, disgusting, despicable game. And it involves dirty, disgusting despicable people at all levels’. That’s the view of National Party-aligned blogger Cameron Slater. Is he right? Some areas are obviously cleaner and more principled than others. The blogosphere – although a particularly valuable part of the ‘public sphere’ – is often also one of the dirtiest and more deceptive. This reputation will be further cemented by revelations yesterday that one of John Key’s spin-doctors, Jason Ede, has supplied content to Cameron Slater’s Whaleoil blog. For the best coverage of this, see Michael Fox’s Senior Key staffer’s rubbish pic duty.
This story may seem frivolous or ‘beltway’, but it actually raises important questions about how political parties and politicians operate in New Zealand. For example, there are often allegations swirling around the blogosphere about who really funds the various partisan blogs, and whether they’re essentially written from within the taxpayer-funded parliamentary offices of the political parties.
Yes, I think he’s absolutely right about the importance of asking these questions … and so we reach that risk of circularity I mentioned, because he links to this blog, The Paepae, saying:
Questions about deception and integrity in the PR and blogging world have arisen in other recent items. Last week’s Listener editorial complains that both corporate and government public relations is now all about deceiving and obscuring information and not helping improve accountability and transparency – see: The truth is out. Blogger and journalist Peter Aranyi asks questions about the role of the institutions he is part of – see: Part of the news media? or a “PR blog” dedicated to “destroying” reputations?. And media academic Merja Myllylahti says the New Zealand’s blogosphere is thriving, but will the party last?.
Anyway, go and read it. See what you think.
It seems pretty clear there’s a whole lot of pretence and deception going on out there in the wild west of the web. The business model of ’running certain lines for PR companies‘ seems increasingly to be something real, denials notwithstanding.
And as for Cameron Slater labelling anyone or a group, such as, in this case, Press Gallery reporters ‘sanctimonious hypocrites’ … Well! There’s another example of his comically anaemic level of self-awareness.
– P
