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"I am not a number, I am a Free Man" - No. 6
Information Liberation Alex Jones’ Prison Planet Gary North Specific Answers Antiwar The Daily Bell Tenth Amendment Center Economics Policy Journal The American Thinker The New American Lew RockwellPosted by M. C. on June 7, 2022
Stop paying for Microsoft Office every year! Microsoft has an option that allows you to buy office if you really want it and there are a bunch of options out there that you should be looking at instead!
Libre works for me.
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Posted by M. C. on June 16, 2021
While more revelations about the Bill Gates–Jeffrey Epstein relationship have begun trickling out following the Gates’s divorce announcement, the strong evidence pointing to their relationship beginning decades prior to 2011 continues to be covered up by the media—not necessarily to protect Bill but to protect Microsoft.
In early May, the announcement that Bill and Melinda Gates would be divorcing after twenty-seven years of marriage shocked both those that praise and those that loathe the “philanthropic” power couple.
Less than a week after the initial announcement of the divorce, on May 7, the Daily Beast reported that Melinda Gates had allegedly been “deeply troubled” by Bill Gates’s relationship with child sex trafficker and intelligence asset Jeffrey Epstein. The report suggested that Melinda was a major reason for her husband’s decision to distance himself from Epstein around 2014 because of her discomfort with Epstein after they both met him in 2013. That previously unreported meeting had taken place at Epstein’s mansion on New York’s Upper East Side.
The Daily Beast also revealed that the details of the Gates’s divorce had been decided several weeks prior to the official announcement. Then, on May 9, the Wall Street Journal published a report suggesting that the plans for divorce went back even farther, with Melinda having consulted divorce lawyers in 2019. Allegedly, that consultation was made after details of Bill Gates’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein had gained considerable mainstream media attention, including from the New York Times.
While mainstream media outlets apparently agree that Jeffrey Epstein was a likely factor in the Gates’s recently announced split up, what these same outlets refuse to cover is the real extent of the Bill Gates–Jeffrey Epstein relationship. Indeed, the mainstream narrative holds that Gates’s ties to Epstein began in 2011, despite the evidence pointing to their relationship beginning decades earlier.
This blanket refusal to honestly report on the Gates-Epstein ties likely is due to Gates’s outsized role in current events, both in terms of global health policy as it relates to COVID-19 and in his being a major promoter and funder of controversial technocratic “solutions” to a slew of societal problems. What is more likely, however, is that the nature of the relationship between Gates and Epstein before 2011 is even more scandalous than what transpired later, and it may have major implications not just for Gates but for Microsoft as a company and for some of its former top executives.
This particular cover-up is part of an obvious tendency of mainstream media to ignore the clear influence that both Epstein and members of the Maxwell family wielded—and, arguably, continue to wield—in Silicon Valley. Indeed, the individuals who founded tech giants such as Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, Microsoft, Tesla, and Amazon all have connections with Jeffrey Epstein, some closer than others.
This investigation is adapted from my upcoming book One Nation Under Blackmail, which will be released early next year and will include a more complete investigation into Epstein’s ties to Silicon Valley, scientific academia, and intelligence agencies.
In 2001, perhaps the most important article ever written about Jeffrey Epstein was published. The article, which focused mainly on Ghislaine Maxwell’s and Epstein’s relationship with Prince Andrew, was published on January 22, 2001, in London’s Evening Standard. The article, written by Nigel Rosser, was never retracted and was published well before Epstein’s first arrest and the onset of his public notoriety. It has, nevertheless, since been removed from the Evening Standard’s website and can now only be found on professional newspaper databases. I made a PDF of that article and several other scrubbed Epstein-related articles publicly available in October 2019.The full article here can also be accessed here:Download
Key statements made in the article make it clear why it was removed from the internet, apparently in the wake of Epstein’s first arrest in Florida. Rosser introduces Epstein as “an immensely powerful New York property developer and financier,” a nod to Epstein’s past in the New York real estate market. Later in the article, he notes that Epstein “once claimed to have worked for the CIA although he now denies it,” one of several likely reasons why the article was removed from the internet well before Epstein’s second arrest in 2019.
See the rest here
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Bill Gates, Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein, Melinda Gates, Microsoft | Leave a Comment »
Posted by M. C. on May 12, 2021
These companies want “robust funding”—provided by taxpayers, of course—for the Act’s programs which, the Coalition says, “would help America build … additional capacity” for semiconductor production.
In other words, America’s tech oligarchs want to buy subsidized semiconductors, and they think regular people should pay for it all while also subsidizing research.
https://mises.org/wire/3-ways-tech-oligarchs-new-subsidy-ripping-you
Billionaire plutocrats at Apple, Google, Microsoft, Cisco, and other tech companies don’t spend all their time deciding whether or not to boycott your state or lecture you on the “correct” voting laws. No, sometimes they have time to plot ways to rip off the taxpayers to the tune of more than 50 billion dollars.
At least, that’s what a new coalition of tech companies wants in a new effort to lobby Congress for subsidies and other “incentives” for the production of semiconductors. According to Fox Business:
The Semiconductor in America Coalition, made up of chip buyers including Amazon Web Services, Apple, Google and Microsoft, and manufacturers like American Micro Devices, Intel, Nvidia and Texas Instruments, has asked Congress to provide funding for the CHIPS for America Act, which authorized domestic chip manufacturing incentives and research initiatives.
These companies want “robust funding”—provided by taxpayers, of course—for the Act’s programs which, the Coalition says, “would help America build … additional capacity” for semiconductor production.
This new demand for cash follows last year’s passage of the CHIPS for America act which included an initial payout of $10 billion for “a new federal grant program” and new tax credits, which, unless accompanied by reductions in spending, only amount to tax increases for everyone who doesn’t receive the credit.1 The coalition also expresses its dismay over the fact that Federal “investment”—i.e., government spending—on semiconductor research has “fallen flat” as a share of GDP.
In other words, America’s tech oligarchs want to buy subsidized semiconductors, and they think regular people should pay for it all while also subsidizing research.
And, of course, no attempt at ripping off the taxpayers would be complete without an appeal to patriotism and economic nationalism.
The coalition was careful to mention that the global share of semiconductors produced in the United States has fallen over the past thirty years. The implication is that sinister foreigners are catching up to the United States in terms of semiconductor production. In other words, the subsidies are “essential for …national security.”
This is just textbook special-interest politics: large, powerful business groups are lobbying the regime to subsidize their products or inputs. This lowers the cost to these businesses while raising the cost to taxpayers and competitors.
But it raises the cost to ordinary Americans in a variety of ways that aren’t just measured in dollars. Here are some of them:
Every time a government extracts resources from private owners via taxation, it is redistributing wealth. But this redistribution doesn’t occur according to the wishes of consumers—i.e., market allocation. Rather, these resources are now doled out according to the wishes of government planners and pressure groups.
This redirection of resources away from market allocation inflates prices in some areas, while depressing prices in others. It creates bubbles in “demand” for certain products and services as generated by the arbitrary purchasing decisions of government bureaucrats.
In the case of the semiconductor subsidy scheme, labor and capital are redistributed by government planners to the semiconductor industry, even if a functioning marketplace would have put those resources elsewhere. The “seen” effect is that more semiconductors are built. The “unseen” is the countless important and in-demand products and services that won’t be provided in the marketplace.
Politically, the entire scheme rests on the assumption that the consumers aren’t to be trusted with their own money, and their money must be spent in the “correct” places by government agents. That is, every subsidy, tariff, tax, or money-printing scheme requires that regular people hand over a portion of their own wealth to bureaucrats to put it in the “right” places.
In the case of the semi-conductor subsidy, the tech plutocrats worry that a “shortage” of semiconductors will cause the prices of various tech products and services to increase. As a result, it stands to reason that consumers may spend less money on those products and services. This could impact the tech sector’s revenue and profits.
Consumers ought to be free to change their spending habits, of course, and they ought to be able to re-arrange their spending so as to fit their own personal budgets and desires.
But the oligarchs and bureaucrats don’t like that sort of thing, and they don’t like the consumer having the freedom to simply spend less in the tech sector. They found a way to protect their revenue and profits: simply force consumers to spend in the tech sector whether they want to or not.
So, the regime forcibly redistributes’ the consumers resources. This represents a loss of consumer “welfare,” which we can define as the consumer engaging in voluntary market action to increase his own welfare according to his own individual valuations. The oligarchs want to reduce this welfare in order to increase the oligarchs’ welfare. It’s as simple as that.
The situation is more complex than just a transfer of cash from taxpayers to certain subsidized industries.
When the regime subsidizes a particular industry, business, or sector, this results in an increase in prices for competing businesses and industries. For example, if the regime decides to subsidize semiconductor makers, these firms will then have more resources to bid up the wages they pay, and the prices they pay for various resources necessary for production. This means that firms in other sectors now must compete more heavily for labor and raw materials or any other factor that the semiconductor industry is now buying up in larger amounts.
This is especially repugnant in the case of the semiconductor scheme because most of the large tech firms in question have already been indirectly subsidized for years through the Fed’s financialization efforts, and especially in the form of the Greenspan put. This has served to inflate stock prices in the tech sector and has benefited large publicly-traded firms over smaller firms that have not been able to count on the Fed to have their back.
In other words, the semiconductor subsidy is just the latest part of a scheme to stack the deck against small business owners, employees, and customers.
One can easily guess what the defenders of this latest subsidy will say. They’re likely to claim that it just amounts to a small amount per household: “What’s 50 billion dollars spread across so many households?” Of course, this is what advocates for tax increases, tariffs, and subsidies always say: “Just give us this one new, teeny-tiny tax/subsidy. It’s not a big deal!” But if we add up all the government schemes this claim has been used to justify, we get a pretty “big deal,” indeed. Moreover, as we’ve seen above, the real cost in terms of economic distortions, lost welfare, and harm to competitors, is quite real and beyond the dollar amounts we see in the subsidy itself.
Author:
Ryan McMaken (@ryanmcmaken) is a senior editor at the Mises Institute. Send him your article submissions for the Mises Wire and Power&Market, but read article guidelines first. Ryan has degrees in economics and political science from the University of Colorado and was a housing economist for the State of Colorado. He is the author of Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Apple, CHIPS, Cisco, Google, Microsoft, oligarchs, Semiconductor, Tech | Leave a Comment »
Posted by M. C. on January 23, 2021
FireEye’s account can be taken with a grain of salt, however, as the CIA is one of FireEye’s clients, and FireEye was launched with funding from the CIA’s venture capital arm In-Q-tel. It is also worth being skeptical of the “free tool” FireEye has made available in the hack’s aftermath for “spotting and keeping suspected Russians out of systems.”
Microsoft, like some of Samanage’s main backers, is part of the World Economic Forum and is an enthusiastic supporter of and participant in the Great Reset agenda, so much so that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote the foreword to Klaus Schwab’s book “Shaping the Fourth Industrial Revolution.” With the WEF simulating a cyber “pandemic” and both the WEF and Israel’s head of Israel’s National Cyber Directorate warning of an imminent “cyber winter”, SolarWinds does indeed appear to be just the beginning, though perhaps a scripted one to create the foundation for something much more severe. A cyberattack on Microsoft products globally would certainly upend most of the global economy and likely have economic effects more severe than the COVID-19 crisis, just as the WEF has been warning. Yet, if such a hack does occur, it will inevitably serve the aims of the Great Reset to “reset” and then rebuild electronic infrastructure.
In mid-December of 2020, a massive hack compromised the networks of numerous US federal agencies, major corporations, the top five accounting firms in the country, and the military, among others. Despite most US media attention now focusing on election-related chaos, the fallout from the hack continues to make headlines day after day.
The hack, which affected Texas-based software provider SolarWinds, was blamed on Russia on January 5 by the US government’s Cyber Unified Coordination Group. Their statement asserted that the attackers were “likely Russian in origin,” but they failed to provide evidence to back up that claim.
Since then, numerous developments in the official investigation have been reported, but no actual evidence pointing to Russia has yet to be released. Rather, mainstream media outlets began reporting the intelligence community’s “likely” conclusion as fact right away, with the New York Times subsequently reporting that US investigators were examining a product used by SolarWinds that was sold by a Czech Republic–based company, as the possible entry point for the “Russian hackers.” Interest in that company, however, comes from the fact that the attackers most likely had access to the systems of a contractor or subsidiary of SolarWinds. This, combined with the evidence-free report from US intelligence on “likely” Russian involvement, is said to be the reason investigators are focusing on the Czech company, though any of SolarWinds’ contractors/subsidiaries could have been the entry point.
Such narratives clearly echo those that became prominent in the wake of the 2016 election, when now-debunked claims were made that Russian hackers were responsible for leaked emails published by WikiLeaks. Parallels are obvious when one considers that SolarWinds quickly brought on the discredited firm CrowdStrike to aid them in securing their networks and investigating the hack. CrowdStrike had also been brought on by the DNC after the 2016 WikiLeaks publication, and subsequently it was central in developing the false declarations regarding the involvement of “Russian hackers” in that event.
There are also other parallels. As Russiagate played out, it became apparent that there was collusion between the Trump campaign and a foreign power, but the nation was Israel, not Russia. Indeed, many of the reports that came out of Russiagate revealed collusion with Israel, yet those instances received little coverage and generated little media outrage. This has led some to suggest that Russiagate may have been a cover for what was in fact Israelgate.
Similarly, in the case of the SolarWinds hack, there is the odd case and timing of SolarWinds’ acquisition of a company called Samanage in 2019. As this report will explore, Samanage’s deep ties to Israeli intelligence, venture-capital firms connected to both intelligence and Isabel Maxwell, as well as Samange’s integration with the Orion software at the time of the back door’s insertion warrant investigation every bit as much as SolarWinds’ Czech-based contractor.
In the month since the hack, evidence has emerged detailing the extent of the damage, with the Justice Department quietly announcing, the same day as the Capitol riots (January 6), that their email system had been breached in the hack—a “major incident” according to the department. This terminology means that the attack “is likely to result in demonstrable harm to the national security interests, foreign relations, or the economy of the United States or to the public confidence, civil liberties, or public health and safety of the American people,” per NextGov.
The Justice Department was the fourth US government agency to publicly acknowledge a breach in connection to the hack, with the others being the Departments of Commerce and Energy and the Treasury. Yet, while only four agencies have publicly acknowledged fallout from the hack, SolarWinds software is also used by the Department of Defense, the State Department, NASA, the NSA, and the Executive Office. Given that the Cyber Unified Coordination Group stated that “fewer than ten” US government agencies had been affected, it’s likely that some of these agencies were compromised, and some press reports have asserted that the State Department and Pentagon were affected.
In addition to government agencies, SolarWinds Orion software was in use by the top ten US telecommunications corporations, the top five US accounting firms, the New York Power Authority, and numerous US government contractors such as Booz Allen Hamilton, General Dynamics, and the Federal Reserve. Other notable SolarWinds clients include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Microsoft, Credit Suisse, and several mainstream news outlets including the Economist and the New York Times.
Based on what is officially known so far, the hackers appeared to have been highly sophisticated, with FireEye, the cybersecurity company that first discovered the implanted code used to conduct the hack, stating that the hackers “routinely removed their tools, including the backdoors, once legitimate remote access was achieved—implying a high degree of technical sophistication and attention to operational security.” In addition, top security experts have noted that the hack was “very very carefully orchestrated,” leading to a consensus that the hack was state sponsored.
FireEye stated that they first identified the compromise of SolarWinds after the version of the Orion software they were using contained a back door that was used to gain access to its “red team” suite of hacking tools. Not long after the disclosure of the SolarWinds hack, on December 31, the hackers were able to partially access Microsoft’s source code, raising concerns that the act was preparation for future and equally devastating attacks.
FireEye’s account can be taken with a grain of salt, however, as the CIA is one of FireEye’s clients, and FireEye was launched with funding from the CIA’s venture capital arm In-Q-tel. It is also worth being skeptical of the “free tool” FireEye has made available in the hack’s aftermath for “spotting and keeping suspected Russians out of systems.”
In addition, Microsoft, another key source in the SolarWinds story, is a military contractor with close ties to Israel’s intelligence apparatus, especially Unit 8200, and their reports of events also deserve scrutiny. Notably, it was Unit 8200 alumnus and executive at Israeli cybersecurity firm Cycode, Ronen Slavin, who told Reuters in a widely quoted article that he “was worried by the possibility that the SolarWinds hackers were poring over Microsoft’s source code as prelude to a much more ambitious offensive.” “To me the biggest question is, ‘Was this recon for the next big operation?’” Slavin stated.
Also odd about the actors involved in the response to the hack is the decision to bring on not only the discredited firm CrowdStrike but also the new consultancy firm of Chris Krebs and Alex Stamos, former chief information security officer of Facebook and Yahoo, to investigate the hack. Chris Krebs is the former head of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and was previously a top Microsoft executive. Krebs was fired by Donald Trump after repeatedly and publicly challenging Trump on the issue of election fraud in the 2020 election.
As head of CISA, Krebs gave access to networks of critical infrastructure throughout the US, with a focus on the health-care industry, to the CTI League, a suspicious outfit of anonymous volunteers working “for free” and led by a former Unit 8200 officer. “We have brought in the expertise of Chris Krebs and Alex Stamos to assist in this review and provide best-in-class guidance on our journey to evolve into an industry leading secure software development company,” a SolarWinds spokesperson said in an email cited by Reuters.
It is also worth noting that the SolarWinds hack did benefit a few actors aside from the attackers themselves. For instance, Israeli cybersecurity firms CheckPoint and CyberArk, which have close ties to Israeli intelligence Unit 8200, have seen their stocks soar in the weeks since the SolarWinds compromise was announced. Notably, in 2017, CyberArk was the company that “discovered” one of the main tactics used in an attack, a form of SAML token manipulation called GoldenSAML. CyberArk does not specify how they discovered this method of attack and, at the time they announced the tactic’s existence, released a free tool to identify systems vulnerable to GoldenSAML manipulation.
In addition, the other main mode of attack, a back door program nicknamed Sunburst, was found by Kaspersky researchers to be similar to a piece of malware called Kazuar that was also first discovered by another Unit 8200-linked company, Palo Alto Networks, also in 2017. The similarities only suggest that those who developed the Sunburst backdoor may have been inspired by Kazuar and “they may have common members between them or a shared software developer building their malware.” Kaspersky stressed that Sunburst and Kazuar are not likely to be one and the same. It is worth noting, as an aside, that Unit 8200 is known to have previously hacked Kaspersky and attempted to insert a back door into their products, per Kaspersky employees.
Crowdstrike claimed that this finding confirmed “the attribution at least to Russian intelligence,” only because an allegedly Russian hacking group is believed to have used Kazuar before. No technical evidence linking Russia to the SolarWinds hacking has yet been presented.
The implanted code used to execute the hack was directly injected into the source code of SolarWinds Orion. Then, the modified and bugged version of the software was “compiled, signed and delivered through the existing software patch release management system,” per reports. This has led US investigators and observers to conclude that the perpetrators had direct access to SolarWinds code as they had “a high degree of familiarity with the software.” While the way the attackers gained access to Orion’s code base has yet to be determined, one possibility being pursued by investigators is that the attackers were working with employee(s) of a SolarWinds contractor or subsidiary.
US investigators have been focusing on offices of SolarWinds that are based abroad, suggesting that—in addition to the above—the attackers were likely working for SolarWinds or were given access by someone working for the company. That investigation has focused on offices in eastern Europe, allegedly because “Russian intelligence operatives are deeply rooted” in those countries.
It is worth pointing out, however, that Israeli intelligence is similarly “deeply rooted” in eastern European states both before and after the fall of the Soviet Union, ties well illustrated by Israeli superspy and media tycoon Robert Maxwell’s frequent and close associations with Eastern European and Russian intelligence agencies as well as the leaders of many of those countries. Israeli intelligence operatives like Maxwell also had cozy ties with Russian organized crime. For instance, Maxwell enabled the access of the Russian organized crime network headed by Semion Mogilevich into the US financial system and was also Mogilevich’s business partner. In addition, the cross-pollination between Israeli and Russian organized crime networks (networks which also share ties to their respective intelligence agencies) and such links should be considered if the cybercriminals due prove to be Russian in origin, as US intelligence has claimed.
Though some contractors and subsidiaries of SolarWinds are now being investigated, one that has yet to be investigated, but should be, is Samanage. Samanage, acquired by SolarWinds in 2019, not only gained automatic access to Orion just as the malicious code was first inserted, but it has deep ties to Israeli intelligence and a web of venture-capital firms associated with numerous Israeli espionage scandals that have targeted the US government. Israel is deemed by the NSA to be one of the top spy threats facing US government agencies and Israel’s list of espionage scandals in the US is arguably the longest, and includes the Jonathan Pollard and PROMIS software scandals of the 1980s to the Larry Franklin/AIPAC espionage scandal in 2009.
Though much reporting has since been done on the recent compromise of SolarWinds Orion software, little attention has been paid to Samanage. Samanage offers what it describes as “an IT Service Desk solution.” It was acquired by SolarWinds so Samanage’s products could be added to SolarWinds’ IT Operations Management portfolio. Though US reporting and SolarWinds press releases state that Samanage is based in Cary, North Carolina, implying that it is an American company, Samanage is actually an Israeli firm. It was founded in 2007 by Doron Gordon, who previously worked for several years at MAMRAM, the Israeli military’s central computing unit.
Samanage was SolarWinds’ first acquisition of an Israeli company, and, at the time, Israeli media reported that SolarWinds was expected to set up its first development center in Israel. It appears, however, that SolarWinds, rather than setting up a new center, merely began using Samanage’s research and development center located in Netanya, Israel.
Several months after the acquisition was announced, in November 2019, Samanage, renamed SolarWinds Service Desk, became listed as a standard feature of SolarWinds Orion software, whereas the integration of Samanage and Orion had previously been optional since the acquisition’s announcement in April of that year. This means that complete integration was likely made standard in either October or November. It has since been reported that the perpetrators of the recent hack gained access to the networks of US federal agencies and major corporations at around the same time. Samanage’s automatic integration into Orion was a major modification made to the now-compromised software during that period.
Samanage appears to have had access to Orion following the announcement of the acquisition in April 2019. Integration first began with Orion version 2019.4, the earliest version believed to contain the malicious code that enabled the hack. In addition, the integrated Samanage component of Orion was responsible for “ensuring the appropriate teams are quickly notified when critical events or performance issues [with Orion] are detected,” which was meant to allow “service agents to react faster and resolve issues before . . . employees are impacted.”
In other words, the Samanage component that was integrated into Orion at the same time the compromise took place was also responsible for Orion’s alert system for critical events or performance issues. The code that was inserted into Orion by hackers in late 2019 nevertheless went undetected by this Samanage-made component for over a year, giving the “hackers” access to millions of devices critical to both US government and corporate networks. Furthermore, it is this Samanage-produced component of the affected Orion software that advises end users to exempt the software from antivirus scans and group policy object (GPO) restrictions by providing a warning that Orion may not work properly unless those exemptions are granted.
Around the time of Samange’s acquisition by SolarWinds, it was reported that one of Samanage’s top backers was the company Salesforce, with Salesforce being both a major investor in Samanage as well as a partner of the company.
Salesforce is run by Marc Benioff, a billionaire who got his start at the tech giant Oracle. Oracle was originally created as a CIA spin-off and has deep ties to Israel’s government and the outgoing Trump administration. Salesforce also has a large presence in Israel, with much of its global research and development based there. Salesforce also recently partnered with the Unit 8200-linked Israeli firm Diagnostic Robotics to “predictively” diagnose COVID-19 cases using Artificial Intelligence.
Aside from leading Salesforce, Benioff is a member of the Vatican’s Council for Inclusive Capitalism alongside Lynn Forester de Rothschild, a close associate of Jeffrey Epstein and the Clintons, and members of the Lauder family, who have deep ties to the Mega Group and Israeli politics.
Benioff is also a prominent member of the board of trustees of the World Economic Forum and the inaugural chair of the WEF’s Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (C4IR), making him one of the most critical players in the unfolding of the WEF-backed Great Reset. Other WEF leaders, including the organization’s founder Klaus Schwab, have openly discussed how massive cyberattacks such as befell SolarWinds will soon result in “even more significant economic and social implications than COVID-19.”
Last year, the WEF’s Centre for Cybersecurity, of which Salesforce is part, simulated a “digital pandemic” cyberattack in an exercise entitled Cyber Polygon. Cyber Polygon’s speakers in 2020 included former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, the Prime Minister of Russia Mikhail Mishustin, WEF founder Klaus Schwab, and IBM executive Wendi Whitmore, who previously held top posts at both Crowdstrike and a FireEye subsidiary. Notably, just months before the COVID-19 crisis, the WEF had held Event 201, which simulated a global coronavirus pandemic that crippled the world’s economy.
In addition to Samanage’s ties to WEF big shots such as Marc Benioff, the other main investors behind Samanage’s rise have ties to major Israeli espionage scandals, including the Jonathan Pollard affair and the PROMIS software scandal. There are also ties to one of the WEF’s founding “technology pioneers,” Isabel Maxwell (the daughter of Robert Maxwell and sister of Ghislaine), who has long-standing ties to Israel’s intelligence apparatus and the country’s hi-tech sector.
See the rest here
Whitney Webb Whitney Webb is a staff writer for The Last American Vagabond. She has previously written for Mintpress News, Ben Swann’s Truth In Media. Her work has appeared on Global Research, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She currently lives with her family in southern Chile.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: CIA, FireEye, Great Reset, Klaus Schwab, Microsoft, sabotage, Samanage, SolarWinds, Spy Scandal, WEF | Leave a Comment »
Posted by M. C. on August 10, 2020
Government always has your best interests at heart.
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/497410-microsoft-tiktok-information-colonialism-monopoly/
is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Twitter @velocirapture23
The US government has made clear the fact it won’t rest until the user-facing portion of the internet is under its control. It is no longer enough for Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube/Google to merely eject hundreds of anti-establishment accounts on command, accompanied by stated rationales that would be laughable if they didn’t trample on the fundamental freedoms of the account owners.
TikTok – hardly a bastion of subversive political thought – must nevertheless be wrested from its Chinese owners ByteDance and handed to Microsoft, a convicted antitrust violator, lest Beijing be permitted to challenge Washington for control over the hearts and minds of online youth.
It’s ironic that, with western culture in the grip of a reckoning with its colonial past, the US is so intent on subjugating the world’s peoples with a lighter-touch, tech-enabled version of colonialism that doesn’t require the deployment of ships to foreign shores (though those 800+ military bases around the world don’t hurt). A direct line to the eyes and ears of targeted peoples is sufficient to maintain Hegemony 2.0.
But the quality of US propaganda has deteriorated noticeably over the years, to the point where four out of five Americans believe their media is biased. Rather than step up their propaganda game, Washington’s response has always been to stifle competition, either using censorship enacted through its private-sector partners, or by buying competitors’ silence. Interlopers like TikTok are crushed – or bought out by the likes of Microsoft, massive companies intertwined with state intelligence agencies.
Like Amazon, whose servers host the secrets of the US security state. Or Facebook, which skyrocketed past the billion-user mark with the alleged backing of CIA venture capital fund In-Q-Tel. Microsoft, meanwhile, is for all intents and purposes a private-sector extension of the US empire. It was the first to sign on to the NSA’s wildly unconstitutional PRISM surveillance program back in 2007. It left exploitable backdoors in its operating systems open for two decades until another government-collaborating tech company complained. Even in the privacy-averse 21st century, its intrusive practices – from keystroke logging to chiding users for politically incorrect language – have raised red flags for years. It’s also the only tech monopoly ever to be prosecuted for its monopolistic behavior.
The Big Tech apparatus serves as an ideal conduit for the US government to circumvent the Bill of Rights. Private corporations are not legally prohibited from imposing restrictions on users’ free speech or (digital) assembly, no matter how arbitrary. Section 230 protections have fallen by the wayside as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter became increasingly emboldened to knock troublesome dissenters off their platforms. Slurping up user information is child’s play too, with the kind of backdoors Microsoft and Apple have lovingly constructed for their government partners – never mind the protections against unreasonable search and seizure that would hamstring government agencies attempting to do the same thing. Big Tech and Big Brother are two arms on the same octopus.
TikTok, however, spoils US narrative dominance and doesn’t share its data with the bosses. Sure, right now it’s only insipid dance videos and teenagers lip-synching, but what about when those teens grow up? American propaganda is so sloppy that the State Department feels threatened by a handful of “Russian proxy” websites getting a few thousand hits per month, and it appears to have spammed thousands of Russians and Iranians with offers of $10 million for tall tales about election hacking.
Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are constantly being urged to censor an ever-larger range of opinions as the mainstream media struggles not to trip over its own falsehoods and hemorrhages cash to the victims of its lies.
At the heart of the TikTok seizure – which expanded on Friday to an assault on Chinese platform WeChat – is a hatred of competition. As Facebook, Twitter, Google, and YouTube become little more than mainstream media mouthpieces, users will naturally flock to other platforms, especially those with massive user bases like their Chinese competitors. Washington’s pet platforms can hardly roll back their censorship regimes – not with an election just a few months away. So, in the grand tradition of organized crime, they’ve made ByteDance an offer they can’t refuse. Climb in bed with Microsoft – the most corrupt of the bunch – or get banned.
Freedom isn’t free, as the saying goes. Neither are America’s celebrated “free markets.”
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Bill of Rights, ByteDance, Facebook, In-Q-Tel, Microsoft, TikTok | Leave a Comment »
Posted by M. C. on January 12, 2020
Bottom line is watch what you say because you can’t tell how a mchine will interpret it.
I can see why MIT is reporting on this. It is the kind of thing they like to do for the government.
The news: Microsoft has created an automated system to detect sexual predators trying to groom children online. The tool, code-named Project Artemis, is designed to spot patterns of communication in conversations.
Rating: On the basis of words and patterns of speech, the system assigns a rating for the likelihood that one of the participants is trying to groom the other. Companies implementing the technique can set a score (for example, 8 out of 10) above which any flagged conversations are sent to a human moderator to review. The moderators could potentially identify imminent threats and report them to law enforcement. It would also provide child protection experts with more information on how pedophiles operate online. Microsoft has been using these techniques for several years for its own products, including the Xbox platform and Skype, the company’s chief digital safety officer, Courtney Gregoire, said in a blog post.
How does it work? Microsoft hasn’t explained the precise words or patterns the tool hunts for—doing so could potentially cause predators to adjust their behavior to try to mask their activities. The tool is available free for companies that provide online chat functions, through a nonprofit called Thorn, which builds technology products to defend children from sexual abuse.
The risks: The system is likely to throw up a lot of false positives, since automated systems still struggle to understand the meaning and context of language. That means social-media companies will need to invest in more moderators if they are truly committed to tackling online grooming (and victims argue it is not clear that they are). The system also assumes that messages are not encrypted and that users consent to their private communications being read, which is not necessarily a given.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: false positives, Microsoft, pedophiles, Project Artemis | Leave a Comment »
Posted by M. C. on November 15, 2019
Mr. Bill no doubt felt smug and oh-so-holier-than-capitalists for winking at a holdup—of himself, no less. But I speak as one suffering the effects of Gates’ purloined billions. And I take his insouciance towards financing such evil personally.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/11/becky-akers/mr-bill-and-the-marxists/
By Becky Akers
Marxism has claimed its myriads of victims, but none of them are sorrier or more craven than American billionaires. These guys don’t just turn the other cheek to communists: they kneel and kiss their butts. Then they carefully wipe any spittle from their enemies’ posteriors, chirping about democracy and equality. As if abject submission has ever protected anyone anywhere.
I don’t understand the relationship between staggering affluence and cojones, but for sure it’s an inverse one. You’d think it would be the other way round: I mean, how many folks will tell a billionaire to take a hike? Even fewer will risk punching him out.
Surely Mr. Billionaire understands this; surely the hordes he employs, whether professionally or personally, have shown him that when boots are licked, it’s the Guccis on his own feet, not the hoi polloi’s $30 Frogg Toggs, that wind up glistening.
But no. Mr. Bill fawns and cringes when Marxists rudely—but I repeat myself—pry into his finances. He cowers as they rain their blows, plasters a sick, “please-don’t-hit-me-too-hard” smile on his face, and refuses to turn the tables on his interrogators, however easy it may be and no matter how richly they deserve it.
Indeed, an actual Mr. Bill—as in Gates—provides the latest example. Microsoft’s co-founder is a less-than-sympathetic character: not only does he grovel to his persecutors, “I’m all for super progressive tax systems,” but when Elizabeth “Fauxcahontas” Warren schemes to steal his fortune, he defends neither it nor himself.
So we will. Because theft is theft, whether it’s a buck or a billion, whether the mugger in the alleyway despoils us or the IRS does.
For starters, Fauxcahontas lives in a glass mansion: her estimated worth in 2019 is “$8.75 million…, a figure that is based on various financial statements, most notably the release of her federal tax returns…” Yep, small potatoes next to Mr. Bill’s stash—but lavish when compared to a serf’s, as is true of all Our Rulers. Why doesn’t this hypocrite donate her $8.75 million before coveting other people’s money?
Second, little more than a year ago, a genetics test that Fauxcahontas herself initiated proved she’s a liar who parlayed one measly ancestor from an indigenous tribe into a professorship. (N.B: most Americans whose families arrived here in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries can boast of such a forbear.) How is it that this cheat dares show her face, let alone cloaks thievery in jargon and sanctimony? Why aren’t Americans shunning and mocking her? Why aren’t they boycotting a media that covers rather than condemns her? I’m no fan of The Donald, but at least he ridicules this mendacious Marxist.
Gates should take a lesson. And yet he’s running scared. Responding last week to Fauxcahontas’ threats of grand theft, he snivelled, “‘I’ve paid more than anyone in taxes. If I had to pay $20 billion, it’s fine”…
Mr. Bill no doubt felt smug and oh-so-holier-than-capitalists for winking at a holdup—of himself, no less. But I speak as one suffering the effects of Gates’ purloined billions. And I take his insouciance towards financing such evil personally.
Mr. Bill, your taxes buy the US government more bureaucrats and more programs to destroy my freedom. They supply the NSA with more spooks to eavesdrop on my communications. They hire more Thieves and Sexual Assailants to molest passengers at airports, depriving me of overseas travel and of quick, easy hops around the ol’ Homeland. They purchase propaganda from the Department of Brainwashing–ah, Education and the FCC to whitewash these crimes while fooling many of my friends and family. Thanks in part to you, Mr. Bill, revolt against such revolting tyranny appears unlikely.
And this is only domestically: let’s survey the mischief your opulence funds abroad. It recruits cannon fodder for the US Empire. It then arms those kids to slaughter innocents before they themselves bleed out in some desert waste 6000 miles from home. Believe me, Mr. Bill, if you ever watch parents grieve over a body-bag, you’ll fight to keep every last dollar in your wallet, where it belongs.
Meanwhile, the fodder that survives comes home to join the cops, the TSA, or other occupying forces. And again, the wealth your state and local governments loot from you not only pays those cops to boss or even arrest and cage me, it enlists new ones.
Gates does have his limits, however: he balks “when you say I should pay $100 billion[.] OK, then I’m starting to do a little math about what I have left over…” But he apparently feared he’d gone too far for our latter-day Stalins and added, “I’m just kidding.”
Go ahead and puke while I admonish Mr. Bill. Yo, Jellyfish: you’ve already conceded that the kleptomaniacal State should pick your pockets. Ergo, the predators, not you, decide how much they’ll lift. That’s why a reporter helpfully informs us, “Bill Gates’ net worth currently stands at $106 billion.” Capisce, Mr. Bill? We are to infer that robbing you is perfectly OK. That’s the way the State in general and Marxism in particular works.
Of course, no advocacy of communism is complete unless Bernie Sanders contributes his senseless two cents. “Say Bill Gates was actually taxed $100 billion,” the old coot “tweeted on Thursday. ‘We could end homelessness and provide safe drinking water to everyone in this country.’”
Um, Coot? The federal government will extort over $3.4 trillion from us this year (scroll to page 117 at the link). That means “we” already have $100 billion—in fact, many multiples of $100 billion. Perhaps handing Leviathan even more bucks is a waste, ya think?
Regrettably, instead of cutting his losses, Mr. Bill also “respond[ed] to a question about whether he would speak with [Fauxcahontas] about his concerns”: “You know, I’m not sure how open-minded she is or that she’d be willing to sit down with someone who has large amounts of money…”
Oh, honestly, Mr. Bill: how did anyone as naive as you become CEO of Microsoft? Fauxcahontas is a politician. And even the most negligible amount of money, to say nothing of assets as sizable as yours, snares politicians more fatally than heroin does addicts: “Warren was eager [oh, I’ll bet] to have a sit-down with the Microsoft billionaire, as she said in a tweet Wednesday. ‘I’m always happy to meet with people, even if we have different views. @BillGates, if we get the chance, I’d love to explain exactly how much you’d pay under my wealth tax. (I promise it’s not $100 billion.)’…”
Yeah, more like $106 billion.
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The Mark of the Beast
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Bill Gates, Fauxcahontas, Marxists, Microsoft | Leave a Comment »
Posted by M. C. on October 12, 2019
Patrick Buchanan’s sister. This is the first I have seen of her writings.
By
While the New York Times‘ Robin Pogrebin’s and Kate Kelly’s The Education of Brett Kavanaugh turned out to be a giant dud, it did expose Silicon Valley’s complicity in the false smears against the Supreme Court justice.
Reid Hoffman, co-founder of Microsoft’s LinkedIn, and Zynga founder Mark Pincus lent a private jet to Christine Blasey Ford to testify at Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing last year. “We believed then, as we do now, that it’s important to take seriously accusations of violence against women,” Hoffman said.
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg helped find a lawyer for Ford and advised her on how to sell her story to the public. Any tech exec who appeared to differ from the accepted opinion was reprimanded. Facebook apologized for one of its execs, Joel Kaplan, after he attended the Kavanaugh hearing because it appeared that he was supporting the judicial nominee. The company hosted an internal town hall to quell employee anger over Kaplan’s attendance.
Big Tech exhibits serious hypocrisy on sexual misconduct, and there’s no better exemplar of this than Hoffman himself. He claims not to tolerate violence against women, yet he helped rehabilitate Jeffrey Epstein’s image.
Hoffman invited Epstein to fundraise for MIT Media Lab in 2015. That kind of elite support allowed Epstein to return to polite society and continue with his heinous crimes. The Microsoft exec also defended then-MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito, who took several donations from Epstein. Hoffman attacked reporters for investigating Ito and his ties to the pedophile.
Hoffman apologized for his Epstein association earlier this month, but his apology is too little too late. The damage is already done.
The Microsoft associate’s relationship with Epstein contrasts sharply with the image he has tried to cultivate.
Hoffman promoted the “Decency Pledge” in 2017, which said that investors should “refuse to do business” with accused sexual harassers. He was particularly incensed by the “outrageous and immoral behavior” of execs who’d abused the power relationship between boss and employee. Yet he did not seem incensed by accusations that Epstein had abused his power to exploit the most vulnerable.
Moreover, taking this pledge seriously would blacklist most Big Tech monopolies. Consider the allegations against top Google lawyer David Drummond. Drummond was accused by a former employee in August of abusing his power and having multiple affairs with women he supervised. Drummond still works as Google’s senior legal chief in spite of the allegations. Microsoft, meanwhile, is facing a lawsuit for failing to act on 238 internal complaints of rape, sexual harassment, and sex discrimination.
Big Tech is desperate to attract women to its ranks, but Hoffman’s actions likely hurt that cause. Microsoft CEO Brad Smith writes in his new book that more women need to work in Big Tech and argues that tech companies are partially responsible for the dearth of women in the industry since they haven’t done enough to recruit them.
He writes: “[T]he world of technology remained stubbornly slow in recognizing and creating opportunities for women more broadly. At most tech companies, women still represent 30 percent of the workforce, and an even lower percentage of technical roles.”
What do those women think of a Microsoft associate helping out Jeffrey Epstein? Do they think that’s a culture they want to join?
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The Mark of the Beast
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Big Tech, Brett Kavanaugh, Facebook, Jeffrey Epstein, Linkedin, Mark Pincus, Microsoft, Reid Hoffman, Sheryl Sandberg | Leave a Comment »
Posted by M. C. on August 15, 2019
Motherboard now reports that Microsoft has updated its privacy policy to make users aware of the company’s recording of sensitive user information. “We realized, based on questions raised recently, that we could do a better job specifying that humans sometimes review this content,” a Microsoft spokesperson told Motherboard in a statement.
It’s the Benjamins, baby. Plus CIA, FBI, NSA and probably Mossad.
https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2019/08/15/microsoft-admits-that-human-workers-listen-to-skype-calls/
by Lucas Nolan
Recently leaked insider information revealed that Microsoft contractors have been listening in on some Skype and Cortana recordings. From the Breitbart News article last week:
Leaked documents and screenshots obtained by Motherboard reveal that Microsoft contract workers are listening in on personal conversations of Skype users that are using the app’s translation service. According to Skype’s website, the company reserves the right to analyze audio and phone calls through the app’s translation feature in order to improve the translation service. However, it doesn’t note that human workers will be doing some of this analysis by listening in on calls.
According to audio obtained by Motherboard, the recorded calls include conversations between loved ones, some talking about personal issues and others discussing relationship problems. A Microsoft contractor who provided a number of files to Motherboard stated: “The fact that I can even share some of this with you shows how lax things are in terms of protecting user data.”…
Previously, neither Microsoft’s privacy policy or the Skype Translator FAQ made it known that human contractors may listen in on customer’s audio, these have since been updated. The company’s privacy policy now reads: “Our processing of personal data for these purposes includes both automated and manual (human) methods of processing.”…
The firm also now allows users to delete audio recordings made of themselves using an online tool. Some tech firms have suspended the use of human transcribers, Microsoft has not. A spokesperson stated: “We’ve updated our privacy statement and product FAQs to add greater clarity and will continue to examine further steps we might be able to take.”
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: CIA, Cortana, FBI, Microsoft, Mossad, NSA, personal data, Skype Calls | Leave a Comment »
Posted by M. C. on June 4, 2019
My netbook was close to it’s second hard drive replacement so I sprung for a Dell.
A decent model (i3 processor), worked OK but the Windows 10 is cumbersome, overly complicated and slow. I said so in my Dell website review.
The review didn’t make it past the Dell review censor moderator due to the Windows comments.
I resubmitted my review just saying the machine was slow. Dell accepted that. Self-flagulation for Gates and MS sake.
Microsoft runs the show and gets preferential review treatment.
I have some CDs with Ubuntu and Linux Mint OS. I may give them a try. My experience tells me they can’t be any slower.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Dell, Linux Mint, Masters of the universe, Microsoft, Ubuntu, Windows 10 | 1 Comment »
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