Allow me to reiterate

I do not watch videos. I will NEVER watch videos. So for the love of all that is Good and Beautiful and True, stop suggesting that I watch "just this one amazing video."

VD - I know you don't like videos but this is awesome.

First, I don't give a single fragment of a quantum of a damn what anyone else thinks is awesome. I am not asking for video reviews. I am not requesting recommendations. I am not inspired by whatever it is that inspires you. I do not care about whatever it is that happens to enlighten you.

Second, I do understand that most people do not share my antipathy for videos and podcasts. That's fine. I have no quarrel with their opinions and I am not offended that their preferences happen to differ from my own. If anyone wants to recommend a video or a podcast or a wax cylinder recording to others here, that is perfectly fine with me so long as they leave me out of it. I am very grateful that so many people so greatly appreciate and so staunchly support the videos being produced and published every day on UATV. Video is, without question, the dominant form of media today.

But what part of I DO NOT WATCH VIDEOS OR LISTEN TO PODCASTS is so hard for some of you to understand?

I. DO. NOT. WATCH. VIDEOS.

And I will never, ever, watch ANY video that is recommended to me no matter how many of you insist that because you are a Very Special Boy or Girl, I should ignore my preferences refined over four decades of informational intake because your one special video is the specialist special must-see inspirational series of moving pictures ever.

If you don't understand why I absolutely hate all video and auditory informational exchange, let me put it into terms you might understand. I read at around 1,200 words per minute with full comprehension. That's not an estimate or an exaggeration, as it has been repeatedly and reliably tested over a period of 34 years. I scan-read more than twice as fast as that when I'm reading casually to see if I'm interested in the subject or not. In contrast, videos and podcasts transmit information at around 150 words per minute on average.

And if you factor in the probability that whatever the person is saying in the video is something I already know in considerably more detail than is being addressed, then perhaps you can grasp that I view videos and podcasts as being considerably more akin to sadistic psychological torture than entertainment or inspiration.

The Cloud Police

Not content with eradicating thought crime from the social media platforms, the media is now teaming up with the technology companies to eradicate it from personal accounts in the Cloud:

The Washington Post’s Silicon Valley Correspondent Elizabeth Dwoskin complained that after the coronavirus documentary Plandemic was censored on social media, some YouTube clips were telling users how to access “banned footage” from the documentary via Google Drive. She then notes that after The Washington Post contacted Google, Google Drive took down a file featuring the trailer for the Plandemic documentary.

This is why you need to get off the Cloud, get off the social media platforms, and support the independent alternatives. Even if you are certain that you are not a crimethinker today, you cannot be certain that you will not be deemed a crimethinker tomorrow.

Don't threaten, just do it

The President threatens to shut down Twitter:

Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices. We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen. We saw what they attempted to do, and failed, in 2016. We can’t let a more sophisticated version of that happen again. Just like we can’t let large scale Mail-In Ballots take root in our Country. It would be a free for all on cheating, forgery and the theft of Ballots. Whoever cheated the most would win. Likewise, Social Media. Clean up your act, NOW!!!!
- Donald J. Trump

The great weakness of the conservative Right is their inability to accept the necessity of action. Every single social media giant merits being shut down for their crimes and their ongoing war against the Constitution.

China brings Silicon Valley to heel

As I wrote in Corporate Cancer, China is going to dominate the consumer technology high ground - namely, the apps and interfaces, because they a) protect their home markets from competition and b) don't hate more than 50 percent of their users. The signs of this coming domination are already visible.

YouTube is automatically deleting comments that contain certain Chinese-language phrases related to criticism of the country’s ruling Communist Party (CCP). The company confirmed to The Verge this was happening in error and that it’s working to fix the issue.

“Upon review by our teams, we have confirmed this was an error in our enforcement systems and we are working to fix it as quickly as possible,” said a YouTube spokesperson. The company did not elaborate on how or why this error came to be, but said it was not the result of any change in its moderation policy.

But if the deletions are the result of a simple mistake, then it’s one that’s gone unnoticed for six months. The Verge found evidence that comments were being deleted as early as October 2019, when the issue was raised on YouTube’s official help pages and multiple users confirmed that they had experienced the same problem.

Comments left under videos or in live streams that contain the words “共匪” (“communist bandit”) or “五毛” (“50-cent party”) are automatically deleted in around 15 seconds, though their English language translations and Romanized Pinyin equivalents are not.

The fact that we're already seeing companies like Apple, Google, and Facebook beginning to kneel before Beijing means that it won't be long before other converged companies like Paypal and Patreon are completely compliant, assuming, of course, that they even survive the initial shock of competition from the East.

It's even possible that rogue independent platforms like SG, BitChute, and UATV may have a brighter future than the Silicon Valley giants.

Google counts, Facebook doesn't

Ron Unz learns the hard way which of the two Internet giants actually matters with regards to site traffic:

I don’t use Facebook or other social networks myself, and noticed little reduction in our daily traffic following that purge, which seemed to underscore our lack of reliance upon social media. But a week later, this abruptly changed, and our regular daily readership dropped by a significant 15-20%, hardly a crippling blow but quite distressing, setting us back many months of previous growth.

This puzzled me. Why would the Facebook ban have had such limited initial impact but then suddenly become so much more serious? Eventually I discovered that a second even more powerful Internet giant had also banned us, which explained the sharp drop. Our entire website and all its many millions of pages of serious content had been silently deranked by Google, thus eliminating nearly all our incoming traffic from search results....

Google still does contains all these pages, and if the additional specifier “unz” is added to the search, the results come up, but for anyone not knowing where to look, our entire website and all its content has completely disappeared. This explained our sudden 15-20% reduction in regular traffic.

I use DuckDuckGo myself, but one of the problems with it and the other alternative search engines is that they still seem to be tied into the Google system in various ways, so they don't take proper advantage of Google's self-hamstringing of their own technology.

Targeting Big Tech

Turnabout is fair play. And Big Tech is long overdue for taming:

'The Radical Left is in total command & control of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Google,' Trump said in his tweet. 'The Administration is working to remedy this illegal situation. Stay tuned, and send names & events.'

Trump's tweet came after it emerged that federal and state regulators in the U.S. are preparing to file antitrust lawsuits alleging Google has abused its dominance of online search and advertising to stifle competition and and boost its profits.

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Google should all be shut down for their complete lawlessness. Facebook and Google, in particular, need to be broken up as a result of their illegal duopoly in the online advertising market.

Revising Internet history

For SJWs and their historical antecedents, it is always Year Zero and we have always been at war with Eastasia:

Last month, MIT Technology Review went after the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine – a service that preserves historical versions of webpages and allows users to access archives of these pages when they’re deleted.

MIT Technology Review complained that these archives were allowing coronavirus “misinformation” to evade moderators and fact-checkers and that these archived coronavirus articles had “better performance than most mainstream media news stories.”

Now, just a few weeks later, the Wayback Machine has started to add warning labels to some of its archives, while also forcing users to log in to view some of the archived content on the site.

The warning labels are bright yellow, appear at the top of some archived pages, and tell users when a post was removed for violating a site’s content policy.

Every institution and organization that is not dedicated to rooting out and keeping out the parasites will eventually be converged by them. No rational appeals to functionality, competence, merit, or profit will ever suffice to stop them.

Different directions

As Arkhaven has embraced Webtoons - and if the backers want it, we are even considering our own custom site and app, which would be considerably simpler than SG2, UATV2, or Infogalactic - Marvel is retreating from web-based comics.

Thank you for being a loyal Marvel fan. As a fan of Marvel digital comics, we wanted to let you know that the Marvel Digital Comics Shop at comicstore.marvel.com will be closing on June 2, 2020.

After June 2nd, you will still be able to purchase Marvel digital comics and read your existing Marvel digital comics library via the Marvel Comics app and the comiXology store.

To purchase Marvel digital comics after June 2nd:

Download the Marvel Comics app on the App Store or Google Play Store, and/or Visit comixology.com.

To read your existing Marvel digital comics library after June 2nd:

View your past purchases in "My Books" when you log into your account on the Marvel Comics app, and/or

Sync your current Marvel Digital Comics Shop account with a comiXology account to continue to read your books on a web browser

I can only read digital comics on a web browser, how can I continue to do that?

Marvel won't support a web reading experience after June 2, 2020.

Translation: Apps or Amazon. Comixology is Amazon's platform and it is a suboptimal page-based approach. Vertical panels are the future since they display much better on smartphones. All of our comics are now being created and constructed with that in mind, even if they're not designed specifically as panels for vertical digital display.

Global rule by devil nerd

Bill Gates is rapidly giving George Soros and Disney Inc. a run for their devil money. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. expounds upon the Microsoft billionaire's weird obsession with injecting children with chemicals:

Gates’ obsession with vaccines seems to be fueled by a conviction to save the world with technology.

Promising his share of $450 million of $1.2 billion to eradicate Polio, Gates took control of India’s National Technical Advisory Group on Immunization (NTAGI) which mandated up to 50 doses (Table 1) of polio vaccines through overlapping immunization programs to children before the age of five. Indian doctors blame the Gates campaign for a devastating non-polio acute flaccid paralysis (NPAFP) epidemic that paralyzed 490,000 children beyond expected rates between 2000 and 2017. In 2017, the Indian government dialed back Gates’ vaccine regimen and asked Gates and his vaccine policies to leave India. NPAFP rates dropped precipitously.

The most frightening [polio] epidemics in Congo, Afghanistan, and the Philippines, are all linked to vaccines.

In 2017, the World Health Organization (WHO) reluctantly admitted that the global explosion in polio is predominantly vaccine strain. The most frightening epidemics in Congo, Afghanistan, and the Philippines, are all linked to vaccines. In fact, by 2018, 70% of global polio cases were vaccine strain.

My suspicion is that this can all be traced back to Isaac Asimov and Bill Gates reading Foundation at an impressionable age. That book appears to have convinced a certain type of Boomer nerd that they are destined to micromanage the world. Paul Krugman freely admits it was his inspiration.

According to CDAN, Tom Hanks and four professional athletes, presumably NBA stars, will be at the forefront of trying to push Gates's lethal vaccines on the world:

I wrote about the A+ list actor and what he is doing so the general public will get on board when the time comes. Apparently this pro sports organization is not even being shy about why they are going to put four players, front and center. They flat out said it was to get acceptance from the general public when the time comes. They are only identifying one player publicly. The other three will be revealed later by the organization one by one as they keep boosting awareness.

Proto-marks of the Beast pushed by the Gates of Hell.

Labour Party spied upon its members

And, allegedly, did so by violating the EU's General Data Privacy Regulations in connivance with Twitter and Facebook:

A leaked internal Labour Party report has hit the headlines because of lurid statements allegedly made by staff. What has been missed however, receiving barely any coverage, is an apparent admission that, using a secret deal with Facebook and Twitter, the Labour Party has been running automated surveillance on its own members. If true, this is manifestly unlawful – each member affected would almost certainly have a valid claim in damages under Data Protection legislation.

In the furore about the leaked Labour report, many commentators have focused on the supposedly racist, sexist, and / or ableist remarks. There is also the apparent dishonest treacherous plotting. It is important to remember of course that this report was produced by a bitterly infighting party and its contents are disputed. Former staff who were criticised claim that accusations about their conduct were never put to them.

Labour had automated software that reconciled its privileged access to Twitter and Facebook data with their membership database to identify and monitor member accounts.

It is worth turning to the Data Protection Principles set out in the Data Protection Act 1998, which was in force at the time (replaced by the EU General Data Protection Regulation and Data Protection Act 2018 in May 2018). The principles were set out in section 4 (archive) and Schedule 1 (archive).

Of especial relevance, these principles included processing data, “fairly”, holding data that was “not excessive”. Fairness usually means notifying members of the way their data will be used. A quick glance at Labour’s current terms on its, ‘Join’ page does say that email addresses will be used to contact members. It says nothing about consenting to Orwellian real time monitoring for wrongthink.

Furthermore, on the topic of fairness, it is alleged that the Governance and Legal Unit deliberately hid aspects of the project from the Labour Party’s supreme body, the NEC. It is alleged that Sam Matthews, a Compliance Officer, stated – “we don’t want the NEC to have much of an idea how many there are to review (we’re worried they’ll get scared)”.

Volunteers were used to review the data produced by the automated scan, including 10 Labour Students. Two were from pro-remain group, “Britain Stronger in Europe”. The program would scan for juxtapositions of wrong or abusive terms and the Twitter handles of Labour MPs. That is, for tweets likely to be rude tweets directed at Labour MPs. However, it only included a subset of Labour MPs. Some MPs were not included for protection. Whilst the report alleges that this was factional, the reason does not really matter. Personal data linked to members and MPs was apparently processed in a manifestly unfair way, with oversight and disclosure intentionally thwarted....

This is probably the most sinister thing I have ever seen ever out of Big Tech. A major political Party, conspiring with the world’s two largest social media companies, to scan its members feeds and expel or suspend them for “incorrect” views. I would say it should be against the law but of course it is.

It's long past time for European countries to follow the wise lead of China and Russia by banning systematically lawless technology companies like Twitter and Facebook. And the allegation that Twitter is guilty of violating the GDPR is strongly supported by the fact that it responded almost immediately to the author's email, in contrast to the smug silence with which it greets most emails from its users.

“Twitter disputes the factual characterizations and legal conclusions in your email and your draft blog post. We reserve all rights and defenses.”

Ooh, they reserved their rights and defenses? So intimidating! As if Twitter wants to get within one thousand miles of a European court investigating their GDPR violations and data security practices. And Twitter is very far from the only US-based tech company to be suspected of serially and systematically violating GDPR as well as other data privacy laws.

But they'll have their chance to defend their practices, as they have already been reported to the Information Commissioner by the author.

IDKA bows out

Unfortunately, our Swedish friends at IDKA were unable to make a go of their social-media-with-privacy service. They sent out this email this morning. It's a reminder that starting a new business is always very difficult, and every genuine success is hard-won.

Dear enthusiast and Idka user

As you know, Idka was started by a small group of inspired, driven and sincere privacy enthusiasts and activists, a group which has since been joined by other similarly driven people, staff, consultants, investors and other supporters. We are all very proud of the idea and the ‘designed bottom up for privacy’ cooperation and social media platform that Idka has become. We sincerely thank all the present and past staff and consultants who have contributed to this fantastic achievement.

We thank you, the enthusiast user, for your support as well. We also thank the contributors to our blog and videocast channel, who have kept the very important dialogue around privacy alive, motivating people to act – to Idka.

However, we have not managed to grow the user bases as fast as we would have hoped for, in spite of the tsunami we are experiencing in terms of interest around privacy. This has led to a need for more growth capital. The board of Idka have for some time been in close contact with funds, either existing or under establishment, which specialize in funding purpose driven companies and business ideas with a particularly focus on privacy. This is a new trend within VC funding that Idka has contributed to and which time now have come.

The board of Idka has planned for, and had gotten positive indications from prospective investors (new and existing), to raise further bridge financing, in order to the company through the Corona-pandemic and then raise growth capital from one or more of these very exciting new funds. However, due in large part to the Corona-pandemic, some of the support for the share issue was withdrawn.

As a result of this, and in spite of our hard work and your support, Idka may not be able to attract necessary short-term funding. We are still working hard at it, but due to the grave financial situation Idka is in and the implications of the pandemic lock-down, the board have taken the decision to inform you that the Idka service may discontinue at any time; and that you as a matter of priority should download any material you have uploaded to the cloud storage.

We are indeed very sorry to have to write this message, and still hope that we would manage to secure future funding. However, no-one should rely on this, so please save your digital assets as soon as possible (see below).

Stay safe, take care of yourself, your family and your friends in these difficult times.

All the best from the Idka team.

No need for school

Conventional classroom education is expensive, unhealthy, and unethical:

The recent coronavirus pandemic has forced students to take to virtual online classrooms to complete their coursework. Even though it may take time for students to adjust to this new format, their education might not suffer, especially if they are in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields.

A new study led by Cornell University researchers shows that STEM students learn just as much in online classrooms as they do in traditional in-person classes. Online courses might be less satisfying than in-person classes, but many more students can access them and they are much cheaper to facilitate.

STEM students in Russia participated in this study in the 2017-18 academic year. Researchers divided 325 students into one of three classroom styles for two of their courses: a fully online class through a program called OpenEdu; an in-person course as their local university or a blended course with online course lectures; and in-person discussion sessions.

Results of the study show that students in all three groups scored pretty similarly on their final exams. Students in the online course scored 7.2% higher on their regular coursework, but this is probably because they were allowed to make up to three attempts on their weekly assignments, allowing them to boost their scores.

The analyses show that there is one drawback to the online classroom style: students in the online group were less-satisfied with their class experience than students in the in-person or blended learning groups.

There really isn't any reason to maintain the conventional school system anymore, except for the global elite's interest in imposing its centralized propaganda.

Mailvox: testing results

A lab technician emails and reminds of the important efforts that are taking place behind the scenes.

I work in a medical testing lab and have been involved in reporting out COVID lab results. From my experience, the negative result to positive result ratio is roughly between 5:1 to 10:1. Only the positives are being reported to public health agencies, and that's what eventually makes its way to the Hopkins page and other pages.

As an aside, there is probably a 2-to-3-day delay in what happens in the lab, and what shows up on the internet. The latest numbers of new cases reported in the US for today are about 8,000. So this probably represents 40,000 to 80,000 new test results reported in a day. If you understand the work involved to produce a single test result, that is an astounding amount of test results for a test that no clinical labs had just one month ago.

The point is that the private sector industry has done an amazing job responding to this demand in a short amount of time. They are doing much better than any government effort could muster.

The tech crackdown

France fines Apple more than $1 billion:

France’s national competition regulator announced on Monday it has fined American tech giant Apple a record €1.1 billion ($1.23bn) for anti-competitive practices after nearly a decade of investigations. The decision comes over Apple’s alleged anti-competitive behavior in its distribution and sales networks.

The authority said that two of Apple’s wholesalers, Tech Data and Ingram Micro, were fined €63 million and €76 million respectively for unlawfully agreeing on prices.

According to the French regulator, “Apple and its two wholesalers have agreed not to compete with each other and to prevent distributors from competing with each other, thereby sterilising the wholesale market for Apple products.”

Expect other European countries to follow suit soon. Pretty much everyone around the world is utterly sick of the unethical and anti-competitive behavior of the US-based tech giants. Their rising competitors are going to clean their clocks over the next decade.

A reckoning is here

I don't think the tech startup observers fully understand just how deflating the next stage is going to be:

Now the layoffs have started coming in droves. Last month, robot pizza startup Zume and car-sharing company Getaround slashed more than 500 jobs. Then DNA testing company 23andMe, logistics startup Flexport, Firefox maker Mozilla and question-and-answer website Quora did their own cuts.

“It feels like a reckoning is here,” said Josh Wolfe, a venture capitalist at Lux Capital in New York.

It’s a humbling shift for an industry that long saw itself as an engine of job creation and innovation, producing ride-hailing giant Uber, hospitality company Airbnb and other now well-known brands that often disrupted entrenched industries.

Their rise was propelled by a wave of investor money — about $763 billion washed into startups in the United States over the past decade — that also fueled the growth of young companies in delivery, cannabis, real estate and direct-to-consumer goods. Unlike low-cost software startups, these private companies frequently took on old-line competitors by spending heavily on physical assets and workers while losing money.

Now a pullback is unfolding in precisely the areas that drew the most hype.

Around the world, more than 30 startups have slashed more than 8,000 jobs over the past four months, according to a tally by The New York Times. Investments in young companies have fallen, with 2,215 startups raising money in the United States in the last three months of 2019, the fewest since late 2016, according to the National Venture Capital Association and PitchBook, which track startups.

And those are not the only signs of change. Casper Sleep, which billed itself as the “Nike of sleep” by selling mattresses online, flopped when it went public this month. Once-hot companies like Lime, the electric scooter provider, have pulled out of some cities. Others, like e-commerce startup Brandless, game app HQ Trivia and electronics maker Essential Products, are on the verge of shutting down.

There are now “frantic mini-moments of panic, as one thing after another happens,” said Roy Bahat, an investor at Bloomberg’s venture arm in San Francisco. “At some point, one rock after another will fall away from the cliff and we’ll realize we’re not standing on anything in many, many companies.”

Let's just say at least one of  "the next billion dollar startups" won't be....

Amazon can't fix fake reviews

It's astonishing to me that Amazon STILL can't figure out how to fix fake reviews, so instead of doing the obvious and preventing people who have not bought a product from reviewing it on their site, they are trying to weight the star rating instead:

Fake reviews still exist on Amazon, but the dominant online shopping platform recently made a big change that might help drown them out instead.

The online retailer quietly introduced one-tap ratings for product reviews late last year, making it possible for shoppers to provide a star rating without needing to write a review to accompany it.

The change has already led to an increase in overall customer feedback, a competitive advantage that Amazon has over many of its biggest brick-and-mortar competitors. And new products are generating feedback on Amazon sooner, the company says, which could be a boon for new brands and sellers. But some industry observers believe another indirect impact of the change will be a significant increase in authentic ratings that will make it harder for fake reviews to break through the noise.

“As the number of ratings increase, customers can see a larger set and thus a more accurate rating,” said Patrick Miller, co-founder of Flywheel Digital, an agency that helps large consumer brands sell on Amazon. “For brands, this means the black-hat review clubs and sellers will have less impact, as fake reviews as a percentage of legit reviews should decrease.”

The new rating feature arrives at a time in which fake product reviews have been attracting more attention from the media, regulators, and Amazon itself as more consumers conduct more of their shopping online. Last year, the Federal Trade Commission brought its first case involving paid fake reviews, settling a complaint against an Amazon seller who purchased fake five-star reviews for a weight-loss supplement. Amazon has also filed at least five lawsuits related to fake-review schemes over the last five years. On one end, fake positive reviews can simply lead to the purchase of poor-quality merchandise and distrust among shoppers. But in certain categories, a flattering review of a bad or faulty product can be flat-out dangerous.

The new one-tap feature asks customers to select from one to five stars for a product. It’s only available to customers who have actually purchased the item from Amazon — “verified” buyers. That barrier alone creates one hurdle that will make the new rating system harder to game, since Amazon does allow written reviews from non-verified buyers. And as the new rating feature attracts more and more feedback from verified buyers, it’ll get more expensive for schemers to buy enough phony reviews to try to break through the noise.

“The more customers who purchased the product [who] provide feedback, the more accurately the star rating reflects the experience of all purchasers,” is how Amazon spokesperson Angie Newman put it, without directly referencing fake reviews.

Amazon does not provide many specifics about how a product’s overall star rating is calculated, other than stating that it is not a simple average but instead uses “machine-learned models” that take into account factors such as how recent the rating or review is and whether it was a verified purchase or not. It’s not clear whether one-tap ratings will carry as much weight in these models as written reviews.

It's better than nothing, but it's downright embarrassing that a company as heavily invested in AI and machine learning, and as dependent upon an algorithm, as Amazon is can't figure out how to write an algorithm that can easily distinguish an obvious fake review from a legitimate one.

Soros is not buying the best and brightest

The Soros-funded app that ruined the Iowa caucuses was written by amateurs:

Motherboard asked six cybersecurity and app development experts we trust to analyze the app. The app was built on top of React Native, an open-source app development package released by Facebook that can be used for both Android and iOS apps, according to Kasra Rahjerdi, who has been an Android developer since the original Android project was launched, and Robert Baptiste, a white-hat hacker who has exposed security flaws in many popular apps and reviewed the code. Rahjerdi said that the app contains default React Native metadata and that it comes off as a "very very off the shelf skeleton project plus add your own code kind of thing."

"Honestly, the biggest thing is—I don’t want to throw it under the bus—but the app was clearly done by someone following a tutorial. It’s similar to projects I do with my mentees who are learning how to code," Rahjerdi said. "They started with a starter package and they just added things on top of it. I get deja vu from my classes because the code looks like someone Googled things like 'how to add authentication to React Native App' and followed the instructions," Rahjerdi said.

"The mobile app looks hastily thrown together," Dan Guido, CEO of cybersecurity consulting firm Trail of Bits, told Motherboard.

Hey, look at the bright side of the debacle. At least journalists are finally learning to code!

We need more women in technology

If the Iowa caucuses don't demonstrate the importance of women in technology, I don't know what will:

Hours after a debacle that marred Monday’s Iowa Democratic presidential caucuses, investors in a company hired to tabulate votes through a new mobile app worked to distance themselves from the company at the center of the chaos, scrubbing digital trails publicly connecting them to the firm.

The chaos in Iowa on Monday evening put a microscope on one of Democratic Party’s youngest and fastest-rising digital stars, Tara McGowan, prompting serious questions—and some conspiracy theories—about the constellation of advocacy, technology, and quasi-news organizations she's built.

“It is a pattern of fake it till you make it,” one top Democrative operative said of McGowan and her firm, ACRONYM. “You talk a big game and then sort of hope it becomes true.”

On Monday, all eyes turned to one company in McGowan’s portfolio, Shadow Inc., as Iowa precinct chairs reported serious flaws with the app it had developed tabulate the vote. As complaints about the app trickled in on Monday, McGowan, who is the chief executive of Shadow investor ACRONYM, took to Twitter to describe her group as just that, an investor.

Miss McGowan probably should have stuck to talking about the need for more women in technology on the conference circuit. I sincerely commend the Democratic Party's commitment to women and diversities in technology, and recommend they boost that commitment to the 100 percent level. Remember, diversity is your strength and straight white male technology is witchcraft!

Anyhow, it's not a big mystery as to why ACRONYM bombed so badly despite being founded by "the Democrats most dangerous digital strategist."

Acronym has taken hardly any time in breaking the strategy-firm ecosystem in the nation’s capital. By the end of 2018, it had raised and managed more than $18 million, registered 60,000 voters, run 105 targeted ad campaigns in 15 states, helped elect 63 progressive candidates and won 61 percent of the races it invested in. Its staff has grown from five to 38 and it has quickly become one of the go-to digital organizing forces for everyone from Planned Parenthood and Emily’s List to Everytown for Gun Safety and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. 

McGowan is just another Elizabeth Holmes. And never trust a "strategist" who couldn't beat a 9-year-old boy in checkers.

Hey, at least it FLIES!

Given all the other problems with the F-35, I wouldn't have been surprised if it turned out that the overdesigned grand compromise didn't even stay in the sky:

The latest news about the F-35 isn't just bad - it's CATASTROPHIC. It turns out that this utter turkey of a plane is so badly built and designed that its gun can't even shoot straight:

Add a gun that can’t shoot straight to the problems that dog Lockheed Martin Corp.’s $428 billion F-35 program, including more than 800 software flaws.

The 25mm gun on Air Force models of the Joint Strike Fighter has “unacceptable” accuracy in hitting ground targets and is mounted in housing that’s cracking, the Pentagon’s test office said in its latest assessment of the costliest U.S. weapons system.

The annual assessment by Robert Behler, the Defense Department’s director of operational test and evaluation, doesn’t disclose any major new failings in the plane’s flying capabilities. But it flags a long list of issues that his office said should be resolved -- including 13 described as Category 1 “must-fix” items that affect safety or combat capability -- before the F-35’s upcoming $22 billion Block 4 phase.

The number of software deficiencies totaled 873 as of November, according to the report obtained by Bloomberg News in advance of its release as soon as Friday. That’s down from 917 in September 2018, when the jet entered the intense combat testing required before full production, including 15 Category 1 items. What was to be a year of testing has now been extended another year until at least October.

“Although the program office is working to fix deficiencies, new discoveries are still being made, resulting in only a minor decrease in the overall number” and leaving “many significant‘’ ones to address, the assessment said.

Settle in with a stiff drink, chaps, because carving up this turkey is going to take a while.

Here's to hoping the empire goes out with a whimper and not a bang.

Amazon feeding data to Facebook

The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports that Amazon's Ring automatically sends private user data to Facebook:

Amazon’s Ring smart doorbell surveillance product has been caught sending user data to Facebook and other companies without making Ring users aware their data was being shared. That’s according to an investigation from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). What’s even more alarming is Ring users are having their data sent to Facebook even if they themselves don’t have Facebook accounts.

The EFF examined Ring’s latest Android app and found that it had four unlisted trackers sending Ring user data back to four websites including branch.io, mixpanel.com, appsflyer.com, and facebook.com. This is despite Ring’s privacy policy, which purports to list all the trackers being used in its software. That privacy policy was last updated over a year and a half ago and doesn’t list three of the four new trackers discovered.

So what data is Ring sending to Facebook and other companies? The EFF says the information includes “the names, private IP addresses, mobile network carriers, persistent identifiers, and sensor data on the devices of paying customers.”

This really isn't that hard. Don't use smart home technology. It's all spy-on-you-in-your-home technology.