YouTube To Delete All Accounts That Aren't "Commercially Viable" Starting Dec. 10th — Ethan Huff

What this means is that YouTube content creators who’ve built their entire livelihoods around the platform are going to need a backup option in the event that they end up being terminated. One such option is Brighteon.com, which you can sign up for here. [free]

It also means that YouTube has created for itself yet another legal loophole to continue targeting channels that disseminate politically incorrect content, which YouTube has been trying to silence from its platform for at least the past several years....

ALL YOUTUBE HAS TO DO NOW TO SILENCE FREE SPEECH IS DEMONETIZE CHANNELS IT DOESN’T LIKE AND FORCE THEM INTO COMMERCIAL NON-VIABILITY

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what YouTube is planning to do once this policy change comes into full effect.

Zero Hedge
YouTube To Delete All Accounts That Aren't "Commercially Viable" Starting Dec. 10th
Ethan Huff via Natural News

Sputnik — Great Piece of Kit! Huawei to Launch Google Maps Rival by October

Map Kit will be available in forty languages, Huawei has announced, and despite being a ‘latecomer’ to the mapping industry, the Chinese tech giant owns telecom base stations across 160 countries and regions, which it can use to implement the new service globally, Xiang Ligang, Director-General for the Information Consumption Alliance said.

The Chinese tech giant has also partnered with Russian tech heavyweight Yandex and US travel company Booking Holdings to build the mapping service, a source familiar with the matter told China Daily....

Sputnik International

Great Piece of Kit! Huawei to Launch Google Maps Rival by October

Southfront — Huawei In Discussions To Install Rostelecom’s Aurora OS On Its Devices: Media

Chinese tech giant Huawei is allegedly in discussions with Russia to implement the Russian Aurora operation system (OS) on its devices, the Bell reported on June 10th.

Southfront

Huawei In Discussions To Install Rostelecom’s Aurora OS On Its Devices: Media

See also

Hopefully, all this will lead to more competition in the field of operating systems down the line. Once the Chinese, Russians and Indians gear up it is going to be a new game. And we are beginning to see that.

Huawei's OS, which remains Android-compatible, is reportedly based on a lightweight microkernel which "can react quickly to adjustments and batches," with engineers creating the system after closely studying both Android and Apple's iOS, its nearest competitor. Presently, the pair of operating systems account for nearly 100 percent of current smartphone operating systems.

Last week, a company source toldGlobal Times that the new OS, named 'HongMeng' OS in China and 'Oak OS' for the overseas clients, would likely launch by the third quarter of 2019, and definitely no later than next spring.

Sputnik International
Huawei Predicted Trump's Tech Crunch Years in Advance, Building Own OS in Secret - Report

See also

Russia has offered Huawei to consider an option of using a Russian software ecosystem at various devices of the Chinese corporation, a source familiar of details of the meeting between Russian Telecom Minister Konstantin Noskov and Deputy Chairman of Huawei Board Guo Ping told TASS on Tuesday.

Further to the domestic Aurora Operating System (OS), social media, search engine and antiviruses were also discussed, according to the source.

"Aurora was not the only item for discussion. An ecosystem of Russian software was offered to Huawei at large: social media, search engine, antiviruses, and so on," the source said.

TASS
Russia offers software ecosystem for smartphones to Huawei — source

RT — Huawei CEO says company’s own OS will run Android apps - reports

My, my. turns out that Huawei was not only making its own chips in anticipation of exclusion, but also preparing its own operating system. Obviously, native developers will create their own apps hosted in a Huawei store. This market is lost to US firms (think Google and Apple).

The decoupling of the US from China and end of Chimerica is leading to a new division of the global economy into blocs, on one hand, and on the other, to a push for national self-sufficiency and control the commanding heights of the economy and finance.

In other words, neoliberal globalization has reached its limit and is now beginning to unwind.

RT
Huawei CEO says company’s own OS will run Android apps - reports

At the front line in the Sino-American trade war — Links

Zero Hedge
Beijing Backs Iran, "Firmly Opposes" Unilateral US Sanctions
Tyler Durden

Sputnik International
Google Suspends Huawei Access to Android Updates After Trump’s Ban – Reports

Reuters
Schumer asks government to probe rail tech from China

Sputnik International
Chinese Users Call for Boycott of Apple Phones Due to US Trade War

ProMarket — Editors’ Briefing: This Week in Political Economy (November 11-18)

"Is monopolization threatening capitalism?" Facebook, Google, Amazon.

ProMarket
Editors’ Briefing: This Week in Political Economy (November 11-18)

Editors

Michael Krieger — Thoughts on the Leaked Google Video and Why Populism Is Just Getting Started

The Iraq war? An honest mistake. The bailouts of criminal bankers in 2008? Unfair, but necessary. This is how they see things and it makes people apoplectic. In the face of a booming stock market and a grotesquely lopsided economic “recovery” during which the most wealthy members of society gained share from the bailouts, people remain angry and they have every right to be. The U.S. is not a free market economy, but a kakistocracy in which the “elites” have placed themselves above the law and above failure. We bail criminals out so they can shove it all back in our faces ten years later.…

The leaked Google video confirmed what many of us already knew, which is that these “don’t be evil” tech executives are a bunch of superficial phonies, cut from the same cloth as rapacious bankers or crooked politicians. The extremely powerful aren’t going to reform or fundamentally change the system that’s been so beneficial to them. It’s up to us to do that. This is why we’re in a populist period, and why populism won’t be going away anytime soon.

The only question is in what form will the next iteration of populism manifest....

Significantly, there are multiple other ways populism can manifest outside of traditional politics, with the most promising being in the realm of open source, decentralized technologies that don’t ask permission and can change the world via their very existence. Bitcoin’s the preeminent example of this sort of thing in the post-financial crisis period, but I expect more to follow.…

As Buckminster Fuller put it:

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

More than anything else, this is what we need to do.

Amen to that. But American populists, left and right, are deeply divided on what that model should look like.

I omitted Krieger's remarks on Google, but they are important and I fully agree with what he says.

Liberty Blitzkrieg
Thoughts on the Leaked Google Video and Why Populism Is Just Getting StartedMichael Krieger

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

Dylan Curran — Are you ready? This is all the data Facebook and Google have on you

The harvesting of our personal details goes far beyond what many of us could imagine.

The Guardian
Are you ready? This is all the data Facebook and Google have on you

Dylan Curran

Moon of Alabama — Google Does Evil

Why you should be using DuckDuckGo.

Moon of Alabama

Google Does Evil
b

Corporate Statism grows in the US?

Executive Chairman of Google’s parent company Alphabet, Eric Schmidt, says Google will “engineer” specific algorithms for RT and Sputnik to make their articles less prominent on the search engine’s news delivery services.

Google will “de-rank” RT and Sputnik News articles to make them harder to find.

Alex Christoforou

Amazon launches a cloud service for US intelligence agencies

• The introduction of the AWS Secret Region for the U.S. intelligence community comes six years after Amazon announced a cloud data center region for public-sector customers.
• U.S. government agencies with sufficient secret-level access and contracts will also be able to use the new region.

CNBC

U.S. government agencies with sufficient secret-level access and contracts will also be able to use the new region.
Jordan Novet

SouthFront —YouTube Bans SYRIANGIRL’s Video About Her Facebook Ban – for ‘Hate Speech’

Censorship strikes again. Google, FaceBook, say it isn't so. Sure looks like it. (Google owns YouTube).

Is the window closing and the blinds being drawn?

SouthFront
YouTube Bans SYRIANGIRL’s Video About Her Facebook Ban – for ‘Hate Speech’
lkb22

ikb22 — YouTube Is Adamant About Censoring Southfront

YouTube Rejects Appeal, Holds ‘Original Decision’ To Censor Southfront’s Channel

Gives "googling" a new meaning in addition to searching and providing intel to the US government. Now it inclues censorship. (Google owns YouTube.)

What are the alternatives to YouTube to avoid the censor?

SouthFront
YouTube Is Adamant About Censoring Southfront

ikb22

Samer Hussein — Google Losing its Market to Yandex in Russia

Fort Russ
Google Losing its Market to Yandex in Russia

Samer Hussein

Andre Damon — Defense Secretary “Mad Dog” Mattis visits Google and Amazon

The censorship algorithms rolled out by Google no doubt figured prominently in Mattis’ discussions with tech executives. The nominal purpose of his visit, however, was to integrate Silicon Valley firms even more closely into the booming and lucrative business of waging war.

On Thursday, Mattis met with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos at the tech giant’s headquarters in Seattle.

On Friday, he spoke at the headquarters of Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DUIX), a Defense Department unit located two miles from the Google campus in Mountain View, California. Among the unit’s advisors is Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet.

Mattis said the Pentagon’s partnership with Silicon Valley via DUIX would make the US military “more lethal and more effective” than ever before. DUIX awards military technology contracts to US hi-tech firms.

The operation has already awarded more than $100 million in contracts for 45 pilot projects in areas such as artificial intelligence, autonomous machines and outer space. Its web page encourages technology firms to “tap into a $100+ billion market.”

The entrepreneurial state at work.

Here's on project:

Even more important to the Pentagon than the utility of the tech giants in waging war abroad is the use of their communication infrastructure to shape public opinion and block the expression of antiwar and oppositional sentiment. A major player in this sphere is a think tank called Jigsaw, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company, Alphabet. Jigsaw is headed by Jared Cohen, a former State Department advisor to both Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton.

Jigsaw’s most prominent project is a web commenting censorship system called “Perspective API,” which it calls “a new tool for web publishers to identify toxic comments that can undermine a civil exchange of ideas.”

Developed in cooperation with major US newspapers, Jigsaw has already been implemented to flag comments for deletion in the New York Timescomments section. This week, WikiLeaks noted that a comment containing the language “The CIA armed Islamists in Syria, killing thousands” would be flagged as 66 percent “toxic” by Perspective API. A comment declaring that “the US government is wonderful” is labeled zero percent “toxic,” while “the US government is corrupt” is flagged as 71 percent “toxic.”…

The goal: Control of the population through control of the narrative.

In a study titled “Social media, the vital ground: Can we hold it?” published in April, the Army War College noted, “The impact of social media on the media environment has been widely recognized, as has the ability of extremist and adversarial organizations to exploit the media to publicize their cause, spread their propaganda, and recruit vulnerable individuals.”

It went on to conclude that “Social media will increasingly have a direct impact on virtually all aspects of military operations in the 21st century,” and that the military had to expand its control over social media, “in particular, its use in deception and Psychological Operations (PSYOPS).”

Control over online communication will become increasingly significant amid what one Defense Department report published last month warned was an “increasing chasm between governments and their governed over the basic right to rule.”

That report concluded, “Today, all states are experiencing a precipitous decline in their authority, influence, reach and common attraction,” as populations are presented with “myriad alternative sources of political alignment or allegiance.”

Yet another report, published last year, warned that growing international antagonisms were leading to an intensifying crisis of “social order.”

It concluded that states “now all wrestle with one another over competing interests while standing on quicksand—threatened” not only by national rivals, but by “the fragile and restive social order they themselves rest on.”

As the danger of a major new war mounts, free and unfettered access to information becomes increasingly vital to the mobilization of the working class in opposition to the war plans of the capitalist ruling elite. We call on all our readers to share WSWS articles on social media and sign up to join the fight against Google’s censorship of the Internet.

WSWS
Defense Secretary “Mad Dog” Mattis visits Google and Amazon

Andre Damon

See also

Insurge Intelligence
How the CIA made Google

Why Google made the NSA

Nafeez Ahmed

Jan 22, 2015

Business Insider

14 cutting edge firms funded by the CIA

Paul Szoldra
Sep. 21, 2016

Bruce Dixon — It's Getting Real – Google Censors the Left. And Us.

More evidence that censorship is here.

It didn’t take long to see the “social media” players in First Draft to begin the actual suppression of public access to news, information, analysis and commentary from the left. Last week the World Socialist Web Site released the results of an investigation into Google keyword search results pointing to 13 of the left wing sites identified by PropOrNot. Their data in the table below showed that Google searches pointing to their sites declined in aggregate volume by 45%.

• wsws.org fell by 67 percent
• alternet.org fell by 63 percent
• globalresearch.ca fell by 62 percent
• consortiumnews.com fell by 47 percent
• socialistworker.org fell by 47 percent
• mediamatters.org fell by 42 percent
• commondreams.org fell by 37 percent
• internationalviewpoint.org fell by 36 percent
• democracynow.org fell by 36 percent
• wikileaks.org fell by 30 percent
• truth-out.org fell by 25 percent
• counterpunch.org fell by 21 percent
• theintercept.com fell by 19 percent

Black Agenda Report
It's Getting Real – Google Censors the Left. And Us.

Bruce Dixon | Managing Editor

ht Naked Capitalism

Robert Hackett — Alphabet’s Eric Schmidt: ‘I Was Proven Completely Wrong’ About Artificial Intelligence

While leading Google through the aughts, Eric Schmidt made a miscalculation.
"I was proven completely wrong" about artificial intelligence, Alphabet's executive chairman said at the RSA security conference in San Francisco on Wednesday.

Schmidt has initially skeptical about the technology, and he's since acknowledged how vital it is to both the company's mission and to the global economy.

Fortune
Alphabet’s Eric Schmidt: ‘I Was Proven Completely Wrong’ About Artificial Intelligence
Robert Hackett

Zhang Rui — Mysterious Go 'Master' turns out to be new AlphaGo

Go is a strategy game similar to chess but with many more moving parts.

The mysterious "master" that has been beating elite Go players online has revealed its true identity as an updated version of AlphaGo, Google's London-based AI firm DeepMind announced.

The player registered with an ID of "Master" on Chinese online board game platforms eweiqi.com and foxwq.com and has won 60 fast-paced online matches since Dec. 29 against a group of elite Go players, including Lee Sedol's compatriot Park Jung-hwan, Japan's Iyama Yuta and China's top players Ke Jie, Nie Weiping and Gu Li, triggering interest in its identity within the professional Go circle.

"Master" identified itself as AlphaGo after beating Gu Li on Wednesday. "I'm AlphaGo's Doctor Huang," the user "Master" wrote on foxwq.com, according to screenshots from media reports. Taiwanese developer Aja Huang is a member of Google's DeepMind team, via whom AlphaGo played the game with.

DeepMind chief executive Demis Hassabis later revealed on Twitter on Wednesday that "Master" was a new prototype version of AlphaGo....

China.org.cn
Mysterious Go 'Master' turns out to be new AlphaGo

Zhang Rui

David Dayan — Google Gets a Seat on the Trump Transition Team

Google is among the many major corporations whose surrogates are getting key roles on Donald Trump’s transition team.

Joshua Wright has been put in charge of transition efforts at the influential Federal Trade Commission after pulling off the rare revolving-door quadruple-play, moving from Google-supported academic work to government – as an FTC commissioner – back to the Google gravy train and now back to the government.

The Intercept
Google Gets a Seat on the Trump Transition Team

David Dayan

I'm bullish on stocks, but...

I've been bullish on stocks for a while. I look at top line government spending, NOT the deficit. If you've been looking at the deficit and been all bearish on the economy because the deficit has been shrinking over the past four years you got KILLED if you shorted stocks on that premise.

I look at topline governemnt spending and I have been fooling around now with year-over-year percent change comparisons. (But don't tell anyone.)

Anyway, this is completely aside...NASDAQ added $60 BILLION IN VALUE today...in ONE DAY!!

$60 billion in value in one day. And not only that...the Google boys, Sergei and Larry, both added $4 BILLION to their net worth in ONE DAY.

A coupla things...

$4 billion is a huge number. If you had a total net worth of $4 billion you'd be set for life and your progeny, set, for generations to come.

But to just ADD another $4 billion--like that, poof!--that's starting to get to crazy land. I mean, what changed between yesterday and today that Larry and Sergei are suddenly such new geniuses?

Yep, things look like they are starting to get into crazy land. Manhattan and San Fran real estate, wealth of these tech guys. Google's a freakin' adverstising platform for goodness sakes. How big is the whole advertising industry, anyway?

Crazy land.