Internet 'is not working for women and girls', says Berners-Lee — Ian Sample

Inventor of world wide web calls for urgent action to make cyberspace safer for women and girls

The Guardian
Internet 'is not working for women and girls', says Berners-Lee

Ian Sample

Has the internet helped China contain the coronavirus? — Mu Li

Cutting through the BS surrounding Chinese government's response to the coronavirus.

But the origin of the virus is yet unestablished. This is a limitation on prevention.

East Asia Forum
Has the internet helped China contain the coronavirus?
Mu Li | Professor of International Public Health at the Sydney School of Public Health, The University of Sydney

Pew Research Center — Americans and Privacy: Concerned, Confused and Feeling Lack of Control Over Their Personal Information

Majorities think their personal data is less secure now, that data collection poses more risks than benefits, and believe it is not possible to go through daily life without being tracked.

Maybe the prevalent business model on the Internet is about to change? Into what though?

Pew Research Center
Americans and Privacy: Concerned, Confused and Feeling Lack of Control Over Their Personal Information

Washington’s Blog — October 31st Is Our Last Day

Regaining control of the narrative through economic censorship.

We’re grateful for the support we’ve received over the years …

Loyal readers have made insightful comments for many years.

Some loyal readers have donated $2/month, or $5/month or $10/month, (and a few have donated even more) which we appreciate.

Passionate writers have burned the midnight oil to report on stories which no one else is covering.

But we simply can’t afford to keep paying the thousands of dollars of hosting fees it takes to keep this site running each year.

We’re not going to whine about how we got smeared and blacklisted by agents of disinformation, which took away 99% of our ad revenue. Alot of other good sites did as well …

We simply can’t afford to keep Washington’s Blog going given financial realities....

This is not an isolated case. The Internet is narrowing.

Washington’s Blog: October 31st Is Our Last Day

See also

The Duran
Tulsi’s Youtube, suppressed

Life-Altering Copyright Lawsuits Could Come to Regular Internet Users Under a New Law Moving in the Senate — Ernesto Falcon

Intellectual "property."

Electronic Frontier Foundation
Life-Altering Copyright Lawsuits Could Come to Regular Internet Users Under a New Law Moving in the Senate

Ernesto Falcon | Legislative Counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation with a primary focus on intellectual property and open Internet issues.

Anti-Media Strikes Back Against Censorship with LBRY Blockchain Technology for Publishing

Important if you are concerned about Internet censorship and how to fight it.

Anti-Media
Anti-Media Strikes Back Against Censorship with LBRY Blockchain Technology for Publishing

Anti-Media Press Release

Tim Berners-Lee — One Small Step for the Web…

Tim Berners-Lee - modern hero. The guy who really invented the Internet and is now engaged in re-inventing it so that it becomes more like the tool he envisioned but got hijacked on the way.

Medium

One Small Step for the Web… *

Tim Berners-Lee | Founder and Director of W3C, the Web Foundation and the Open Data Institute, and now Solid and inrupt.

* Reference to Neil Armstrong, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind," as he took the first step by a human onto the surface of the moon.

See also

This week, Berners-Lee will launch Inrupt, a startup that he has been building, in stealth mode, for the past nine months. Backed by Glasswing Ventures, its mission is to turbocharge a broader movement afoot, among developers around the world, to decentralize the web and take back power from the forces that have profited from centralizing it. In other words, it’s game on for Facebook, Google, Amazon. For years now, Berners-Lee and other internet activists have been dreaming of a digital utopia where individuals control their own data and the internet remains free and open. But for Berners-Lee, the time for dreaming is over.

“We have to do it now,” he says, displaying an intensity and urgency that is uncharacteristic for this soft-spoken academic. “It’s a historical moment.” Ever since revelations emerged that Facebook had allowed people’s data to be misused by political operatives, Berners-Lee has felt an imperative to get this digital idyll into the real world. In a post published this weekend, Berners-Lee explains that he is taking a sabbatical from MIT to work full time on Inrupt. The company will be the first major commercial venture built off of Solid, a decentralized web platform he and others at MIT have spent years building....

FastCompany
Exclusive: Tim Berners-Lee tells us his radical new plan to upend the World Wide Web

Katrina Brooker

RT — Ex-Google CEO: Internet will split in two, with China controlling half

“I think the most likely scenario now is not a splintering, but rather a bifurcation into a Chinese-led internet and a non-Chinese internet led by America,” Schmidt told tech-heads at a private event in San Francisco on Wednesday, organized by investment firm Village Global VC....

RT
Ex-Google CEO: Internet will split in two, with China controlling half

Addison dePitt — Presstitutes raise the temperature on social media giants to join the campaign to stamp out free speech and all political dissent

Zuckerberg’s auto-da-fé before the Congressional inquisition is designed to send a message to his tech industry colleagues, as well as provide official cover for the future enforcement of draconian rules against deviants from the official script. “Misuse of social media!” cry the new Inquisitors. But who decides what constitutes “misuse”? Isn’t that what the First Amendment is all about?….

The suppression of free speech in the US and the rest of the “capitalist democracies” (a glorious oxymoron) is a systemic bipartisan plot that long precedes Trump, the result of the establishment’s realisation —brought to a boil with the upset election of Trump—that they are losing control of the main narrative—the truth is getting through, so to speak— and the holes must be plugged. The gargantuan echo chamber dedicated to lies 24/7 that is the mainstream media and supporting institutions must be kept safe from further erosion and eventual dismantlement by that pesky little thing some people still quaintly call, “just the facts.”...

The Greanville Post

Presstitutes raise the temperature on social media giants to join the campaign to stamp out free speech and all political dissent

Addison dePitt

Ashley Rodriguez — Google has made it official: The internet is now mobile-first

This may go down in history as the week the mobile web became the web.
On Monday, Google began indexing and ranking pages on its search engine based on the mobile versions of websites rather than the desktop ones, the company announced. The change may seem minor, but it underscores how Google views and presents the web to the world—as mobile first.

"The medium is the message" — Marshall McLuhan

Quartz

Google has made it official: The internet is now mobile-first
Ashley Rodriguez

The Saker — Emergency Warning From The Saker

The cyberattack on Internet sites and blogs is on.

The Vineyard of the Saker
Emergency Warning From The Saker

The Saker

See also

WSWS
Behind the Facebook data scandal: The drive to censor the Internet

Andre Damon

Awara — Russia launched its own “LinkedIn”

Today, the Federal Service for Labour and Employment of Russia (Rostrud) opened access to skillsnet.ru – a Russian professional networking platform powered by Rabota v Rossii (Work in Russia) employment web portal.

The main idea is to develop skillsnet.ru to become the Russian alternative of the blocked LinkedIn. The new platform will host user profiles (with work experience, skills and achievements), professional groups, job opportunities for young talent and employer reviews....

Awara
Russia launched its own “LinkedIn”

Olivia Solon — Tim Berners-Lee: we must regulate tech firms to prevent 'weaponised' web

The inventor of the world wide web warns over concentration of power among a few companies ‘controlling which ideas are shared’

The Guardian
Tim Berners-Lee: we must regulate tech firms to prevent 'weaponised' web

Olivia Solon

While the chattering class is obsessing over social media, the deep state is operating behind the scenes.

Advanced capitalism leads to corporate statism, the symbiotic relationship between the state and capital, which is the definition of fascism.

"It can't happen here."

Insurge Intelligence — Medium
How the CIA made Google — Inside the secret network behind mass surveillance, endless war, and Skynet—part 1

Why Google made the NSA — Inside the secret network behind mass surveillance, endless war, and Skynet—part 2

Nafeez Ahmed

also

World Economic Forum
This is the future of the internet

Paul Laudicina | Chairman, A.T. Kearney Global Business Policy Council

also

Moscow also building alternative Domain Name System

Asia Times
Russia could disconnect from global internet in event of war: Putin advisor

Also

Disobedient Media
On The Weaponization Of Artificial Intelligence And Its Ties To The ‘Paypal Mafia’
Elizabeth Vos

Yael Grauer — Staggering Variety of Clandestine Trackers Found In Popular Android Apps

You are the product.

The Intercept
Staggering Variety of Clandestine Trackers Found In Popular Android Apps
Yael Grauer

Vesti — Putin calls for greater Internet security, without freedom barriers for users

Security versus privacy and censorship.

It is necessary to improve the security of the Russian Internet (known colloquially as Runet). This was stated by President Vladimir Putin at a meeting of the Russian Security Council . For this he proposed to adopt additional normative acts. At the same time, the head of state stressed that it is not about limiting access to the internet and not about "total barriers and filters" for citizens.

"We must fight against those and those who use the information space to propagate radical ideas, justify terrorism, extremism, resolutely stop attempts to post materials that threaten the security of our state, society and individual citizens," Putin said at the meeting.

Fort Russ
Putin calls for greater Internet security, without freedom barriers for users
Vesti - translated by Inessa Sinchougova

According to RBC, members of the Association of European Businesses (AEB) are concerned by the impact of the new law that may complicate or even ban the use of Virtual Private Networks (VPN) by international companies operating in Russia. As we have reported, according to this law any VPN services or anonymizers will have to restrict users’ access to the websites officially prohibited in Russia (which are currently accessible via these VPNs). As for VPNs and proxies that do not comply with the rules, Russian authorities plan to block their domains and remove their apps from App Store and Google Play....

Awara
Foreign Businesses Express Concern over the Upcoming VPN Ban in Russia

Emerging Technology — First Evidence That Online Dating Is Changing the Nature of Society

Not just e-commerce that's changing the world. 

Social networks are proliferating and expanding, and it is affecting how people meet. An obvious way to test this is through investigating online dating, for which there is ample data. Online dating sites are obviously targeted at people meeting. This has implications for many other social media venues as well.

More evidence that the Internet is changing everything. Distance is shrinking, not only in terms of separation in space but also in terms of separation of networks. And interfaces are proliferating.

This article examines some of the effects observed.

MIT Technological Review

First Evidence That Online Dating Is Changing the Nature of Society
Emerging Technology from the arXiv

Nick Routley — The Dark Side of the Internet

What it is and how it works.

Visual Capitalist
The Dark Side of the Internet
Nick Routley

Scott Adams — Russia Hacked our Election! (So what?)

Pretty well summarizes my thinking on the matter.

Adams makes an important observation about democracy and the Internet, too.

But something much larger than government-on-government influence is happening, and I’d like to call that out in this post. We keep talking about physical border security, but what about influence security? Any country with widespread Internet access is susceptible to the same kind of fake news and other social media influence that we suspect Russia of doing. And every citizen can play this game. For example, if I were highly motivated to influence an election in Great Britain, I’m sure I could move a few thousand votes in any direction I chose. Could it be said in that case that America is trying to manipulate a foreign election? Yes, unambiguously so. And I believe it is totally legal, even if I use fake news as my persuasion.

From 2017 onward, the democratic process in any country is open to “voting” by the entire world. The foreign “votes” will come in the form of social media influence on the local voters. There is no practical way to stop any of that from happening. And that means political power will migrate from the traditional triumvirate of politicians, rich people, and the media, to individual persuaders who are good at it. In 2017 and beyond, the best persuaders in the world will be influencing democratic elections in every country. And those persuaders will be from anywhere on the globe. Borders can’t stop persuasion.

While you were watching the news coverage about physical borders between countries, and physical immigration, the democratic process in each country became global. We can (and do) influence politics across borders now, bigly. And fake news is part of the soup, unfortunately.

What Adams leaves unsaid is that TPTB will attempt to control this to their advantage, using censorship if deemed needed. However, they will likely prefer use the Internet for their own propaganda, disinformation, psyops, and other fake news, rather intervene directly with censorship or shutting down venues, which would be perceived as illiberal.

So we are likely looking forward to a more gaslit world.

Scott Adams' Blog
Russia Hacked our Election! (So what?)

Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert™

Zero Hedge — This Is The Chinese Firm Whose Cameras Took Down The Internet On Friday

Now, while the origin of the attack is still unknown (even though we're sure that Hillary's "17 intelligence agencies" have their suspicions), we're getting a better idea of how the attack was executed. According to Bloomberg, Internet-connected CCTV cameras made by a Chinese firm, Hangzhou Xiongmai Technology Co., were infected with malware that allowed hackers to takeover "tens of millions" of devices to launch the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

Hijacking. Unknown who the hijacker is.

Zero Hedge
This Is The Chinese Firm Whose Cameras Took Down The Internet On Friday

Tyler Durden

Xinhua — China's 4G users exceeds 500 min

There are now more than 500 million 4G users in China thanks to government measures, a minister told a conference Tuesday.

China owns the world's largest 4G network with more than 2 million 4G base stations, Industry and Information Technology Minister Miao Wei told the First Global 5G Event in Beijing.…

China has formed a 5G R&D team to research and test the technology with a view to commercialize it by 2020.

500 million is way more people than the entire population of the US.

China.org.cn
China's 4G users exceeds 500 min

Xinhua