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CYBER SECURITY

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BITCOIN CURRICULM PROJECTS
#bitcoin #jobskills #egames #edtech #security #code

Imagine using drupal to build on this site Imagine #K12Education!

Students Build projects for their community and link to the video of their project from their school information page.

( Translate into Spanish)

BUILDERS / GAMERS

BUILD A MACHINE PROJECT
Build a Rube Goldberg machine that can feed the dogs chicken, using common items found around the house. @matthew_d_green #Science #STEAM #EdTech #jobskills #K12Education
[embed]https://youtu.be/0LvWVKWWOsI[/embed] Activities
From homemade bath bombs to toothbrush-and-rubber-band robots,  has over three dozen at-home experiments< for aspiring scientists. The experiments show that “you can demonstrate cool scientific principles and test out your ideas with everyday objects found all around you.
Each experiment is accompanied by a materials list and set of instructions, and most also feature additional content.

MAKERS / HACKERS / STUDENTS / EDUCATORS 
Adafruit provides the tools to make it easy to teach electronics.

STUDENTS Find everything you need making things.
Helping educators teach the wonderful world of electronics, and programming, to makers of all ages. Adafruit provides the tools to make it easy to teach electronics.  Adafruit sells a wide range of products for all skill levels. We carry all of the most popular boards including Circuit Playground, Feather, Arduino-compatible, Raspberry Pi, micro:bit, and more.

Free to Play https://www.ea.com/games/library/freetoplay

Free Games Girls Play https://www.girlsgogames.com/games/girls

EGAMES - BOARD GAMES - PLAYGROUND GAMES

 

Drupal Open Source Code -- CYBER DEFENSE  K12  PROJECT

CISA - Resilience Series Graphic Novels Graphic Novel: Real Fake

CISA encourages everyone to use care when consuming information they receive or come across. Practicing media literacy—including verifying sources, seeking alternative viewpoints, and finding trusted sources of information—is the most effective strategy in limiting the effect of disinformation. The Resilience Series highlights the importance of evaluating information sources to help individuals understand the risks from foreign influence operations on our society and democracy. If you have any questions or comments, please email CFITF@cisa.dhs.gov

Carnegie Cyber Kids Academy World’s Most Prestigious Cyber Defense Training Facility.

CyberPatriot for High School Students. https://www.uscyberpatriot.org 
CyberPatriot is the National Youth Cyber Education Program.
At the center of CyberPatriot is the National Youth Cyber Defense Competition.
The competition puts teams of high school and middle school students in the position of newly hired IT professionals tasked with managing the network of a small company. In the rounds of competition, teams are given a set of virtual images that represent operating systems and are tasked with finding cybersecurity vulnerabilities within the images and hardening the system while maintaining critical services in a six hour period. Teams compete for the top placement within their state and region, and the top teams in the nation earn all-expenses paid trips to Baltimore, MD for the National Finals Competition where they can earn national recognition and scholarship money.​

TechGirlz mission is to inspire middle school girls to explore the possibilities of technology to empower their future careers. TechGirlz is accomplishing its mission through the creation of free, fun, interactive “TechShopz” led by industry professionals, leaders and students. We share our free workshop curriculum with companies, organizations, schools and community groups so they can inspire girls around the world with technology. We develop fun and educational hands-on workshops,called TechShopz, and an annual Summer Camp. @TechGirlzorg

- CODEGIRL Intro to Computer Science

The team at CODEGIRL are so excited that you have decided to check out Codecademy! Good luck and may the code by with you!

- Freada Kapor Klein, the founder of the Level Playing Institute, talks about her experience and the future of diversity in the tech industry. @friedamca http://kaporcenter.org/

The Kapor family of organizations works to remove barriers to Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) education and tech careers for underrepresented people of color. We take a comprehensive approach to fixing the leaks at every stage of the tech pipeline, from K-12 education through the workplace with education programs, advocacy, and social impact investing.

Free Training from Cybrary

FREE Free Cyber Security Training and Career Development

 

 

 

(Summer Camp) Program for High School Girls

- ChickTech is an organization that provides free technology workshops for high school girls 1 weekend a month for 6 months. Find out if there is a chapter in your city.

Kode With Klossy But it has only a few cities it services. They're dedicated to making the program free, including assisting with transportation costs. This page  gives more information about the cities and how the scholarship works, and something new this year is that if you know a young woman who might be interested in the program, you can nominate them for the scholarship!

- Be a Mentor at MAGIC "More Active Girls In Computing" http://getmagic.org/ -email - contact [@] getmagic.org

Girls Who Code Summer immersion program

- Get 8th Graders interested in #STEM 

*Code.org® is a nonprofit dedicated to expanding access to computer science in schools and increasing participation by women and underrepresented minorities.
They have tutorials on programming, using user-friendly environment and concepts like minecraft, star wars or frozen, to appeal to children. It really makes it fun and engaging to create something using the programming logic and see it work; especially if you're working on your favorite pc game (eg. minecraft).  There's even categorization on grades: *https://studio.code.org/courses
Show them around the website, watch short inspirational videos and complete a simple game together.

*https://code.org/minecraft

MAGIC (More Active Girls In Computing) aims to be such a program.

We believe that we need to start with middle school girls, and foster in them a positive attitude towards computing, since the high school level might be too late. What is needed is a mentorship program throughout the country, available to everyone.

How to get the pre-teen and teen audience interested:
Try to make the subject matter interdisciplinary and relevant to their immediate interests or some part of their everyday life.  Many kids show their particular interest in science or tech when it explains make-up (the science behind color theory or creating homemade cosmetics), constructing clothing and accessories (proportions in the human body, dying fabric, fashion design drawing apps ), how to take better or more unusual digital pictures/video (the importance of natural light, shutter speed), the science behind cars and recording music (what is behind synthetic music or digital editing).  
Ask them to design a dress, shoe or chair. This kicked off a discussion on algorithms. Then math was discussed as their projects required taking or identifying measurements to use for construction. If the project construction continued over several days, then they were required to keep track of their costs and time.

 

Internships Internships/Research Opportunities for High school Students 

AI4ALL Education Programs For The Social Good of the Nation

AI4ALL is a nonprofit working to increase diversity and inclusion in artificial intelligence.

We believe that some of the best ideas come from the voices you don’t often hear. Our supportive and rigorous summer education programs are an entry point into artificial intelligence and computer science for underrepresented high school students. Applications are now open for programs across North America.
We create pipelines for underrepresented talent through education and mentorship programs around the U.S. and Canada that give high school students early exposure to AI for social good. Our vision is for AI to be developed by a broad group of thinkers and doers advancing AI for humanity’s benefit. Apply to 2018 Summer Programs

High School Club Builds Self-Driving Vehicle 

"For the most part, I’m self-taught. I took a series of C programming language classes a few years ago from Stanford’s program. I learned the Python programming language on my own.
In eighth grade, I took advanced-placement calculus and statistics courses, which enabled me to take multivariate calculus in ninth grade. We are fortunate at my school because we have a professor from Foothill College who teaches this course. This class turned out to be useful for understanding machine-learning algorithms.  I’ve finished Udacity’s online machine-learning engineer nanodegree. I also interned at Nvidia, in Santa Clara."

If anyone is interested, we open sourced all of the design files, with instructions on how to build a car of your own for around $900 (at the time, this was several years ago)

Here is a video of the results from the semester. One group was able to max out the speed on the car, which at scale is equivalent to 128 MPH. 

- Girl Scouts of America will offer a total of 18 K-12 cybersecurity badges

All the badges and pins cost money! from $1.75 - $5.50
Tax Return 2014 - 2015 - Overall Rating

Engineering | Robotics: Girls design their own robots after learning how they’re built and programmed. “Unplugged” activities allow girls to earn badges without buying kits.  

Engineering | Mechanical Engineering: Girls complete hands-on engineering activities, such as building and testing rollercoasters, race cars, and gliders.

Engineering: Think Like an Engineer. Girls discover how to think like an engineer by participating in hands-on design challenges and completing a Take Action project.

Computer Science: Think Like a Programmer. Girls learn how programmers solve problems as they (girls) participate in interactive computational-thinking activities and complete a Take Action project.

Outdoor STEM: Think Like a Citizen Scientist. Girls practice the scientific method by undertaking a citizen science project. They make observations, collect data, and work with scientists who provide feedback on research and findings. Girls also complete a Take Action project. 

According to the Girl Scout Research Institute 81% of 11 year old girls are interested in pursuing a STEM related career, but by the age of 15 they have already lost interest. There is a lack of role models and mentors, not enough hands-on experience in STEM subjects, and an intimidating lack of gender equality in the STEM career fields of their choice.

WOMEN AND THEIR ROLE IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE MODERN COMPUTER

Barbara Liskov, professor at @MIT, receives the @IEEEorg Computer Society’s 2018 Computer Pioneer Award “for pioneering data abstraction, polymorphism, and support for fault tolerance and distributed computing in the programming languages CLU and Argus." Women's History Month - Computer Wonder Women and the Digital Diva's:

 

Protect America from cyber attacks. #1 Protect America from cyber attacks and ensure our online world is a safe place to live, work and play.

 

USE CYBER HYGIENE: :-)

 

Compliance, Corporate Data, Passwords a set of practices performed to preserve health.
 

PROTECT YOUR PRIVACY: USE A VPN -  and SEARCH ENGINE https://www.qwant.com/ that provides Privacy, SSL, Proxy. Cookie Free Searching etc.

SECURITY INFORMATION

WHAT ARE YOUR PRIVACY RIGHTS ONLINE?

"If what you are getting online is for free, you are not the customer, you are the product." ~Jonathan Zittrain

PROTECT PRIVACY THERE ARE NO  CHIEF PRIVACY OFFICERS IN K-12 EDUCATION 
A multibillion dollar market -  N.J. data broker tried to sell personal info on a million kids but didn’t tell state officials.

 

ETHICS 
There isn't a single school district with a K-12 CPO.

In fact, it is still extremely rare for districts to hire even one full-time employee dedicated to privacy. Student Privacy Bill Protection : No Parental Consent Needed for Data Mining. Schools Are Deploying Massive Digital Surveillance Systems. The Results Are Alarming
School gives kid Chromebook  - Kid uses it to charge personal phone  - Device automatically downloads all kid's photos - @Gaggle_K12 automatically scans everything & generates alerts

National Director, K12 Security Information Exchange (K12 SIX) | Founder, K-12 Cybersecurity Resource Center. Also: @K12CyberMap  @K12SIX  @GRF
 

 

K12 PlayGround.com warns ADMINS - EDTECH - LIBRARIANS - TEACHERS 
There are real physical dangers using phone apps like Whisper, Kik, and Chat Avenue. They exploit sexually assault vulnerable underage boys and girls. You have apps and games that also have chat functions that predators now use to target children playing these games! [more]

"There are only two types of companies: those that have been hacked, and those that will be." ~ Robert Mueller FBI Director, 2012

 

Drupal Open Source Code BACK IN THE DAY: SECURITY INFORMATION

CONGRESS : THE COLD WAR  : MOVIES

1998 Hackers Testified to the U.S. Senate that their computers were not safe, not the software, not the hardware, not the networks that linked them together.

2017 The Cold War Is Over, The Cyber War Has Begun ~ Ray Watson @rayjwatson and BlackHat17 talk about history of hacking, phreaking, and social engineering.
Shouts out to @2600 @jfagone @jdcrunchman @phrack @kpoulsen @kevinmitnick @VinceintheBay @da5ch0 @RachelTobac @HydeNS33k @tprophet 

Movies rarely influence public policy, but Washington’s policies on cyberattacks, computer surveillance and the possibility of cyberwarfare were directly influenced by the 1983 box-office hit “WarGames.” 
Three months earlier, Reagan had delivered his “Star Wars” speech, imploring scientists to build laser weapons that could shoot down Soviet missiles in outer space. The idea was widely dismissed as nutty. What was the old man up to now?  
After finishing his synopsis, Reagan turned to Gen. John W. Vessey Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and asked: “Could something like this really happen?” Could someone break into our most sensitive computers? General Vessey said he would look into it.  One week later, the general returned to the White House with his answer. “WarGames,” it turned out, wasn’t far-fetched. “Mr. president,” he said, “the problem is much worse than you think.”

NATION STATE ACTORS:
Stuxnet the first weapon to made entirely out of open source code. When Historians write about WW3 the great CyberWar which began in 2011 when the U.S. and Israel lost an extremely advanced revolutionary airgapped weapon (a virus) used against Iran called Stuxnet. Then the OPM Office of Personel Management lost the person information for over 22 million people including their friends and family  who went under US government background checks.

Hacker Ethos The Professionals
BlackHat 2017: 5 Generations of Hacking entire talk
 

K12 HOMELAND SECURITY

| HAM RADIO OPERATORS

Drupal Open Source Code WE NEED HAM RADIO OPERATORS

#EdTech ALERT #STEAM INTERDISCIPLINARY CURRICULUM TOTAL #FAIL

EXPLAIN WHY K12 HIGH SCHOOLS DO NOT  HAVE #HAMRADIOS AND OPERATORS IN TO HELP WITH #SECURITY AND HURRICANE #FLORENCE FOR THEIR COMMUNITY RIGHT NOW!!

#STEM: Science, Technology, Engineering, Math
#STEAM: Science, Technology, English, Arts, Math

 

THIS IS THE PERFECTLY INTEGRATED #STEAM SCHOOL PROJECT!
#Civics #edtech #edchat #edtechchat #HamRadio #science #math #code

OfficeofEdTech #EmergencyCommunication #SECURITY
The Office of Educational Technology (OET) provides leadership for maximizing technology's contribution to improving education at all levels.

State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA)

EVERY K12 DISTRICT TECHNOLOGY COORDINATOR SHOULD BE REQUIRED TO BE A LICENSED HAM RADIO OPERATOR TO BE ELIGIBLE FOR EMPLOYMENT IN THE SCHOOL DISTRICT.

K12 District Educational Technologists Are Our Civil Defense front line of our Community

GO LOW TECH IT ALWAYS WORKS IN A DISASTER ! ! !

EVERYONE SHOULD LEARN MORSE CODE

NEED TO  TEACH STUDENTS MORSE CODE AND HOW TO OPERATE A HAM RADIO IN EVERY HIGH SCHOOL IN THE US, PUERTO RICO, AND AMERICAN VIRGIN ISLANDS AS THE FIRST LINE OF CIVIL DEFENSE FOR AMERICA.

Every State should mandate that each K12 Educational Technologist they employ be required to Know Morse Code and prove they have their Ham Radio License.

HAM RADIO FORUMS

Why doesn't every K12 School District and High School have a ham radio and operator?

WIFI Wireless Wide Area Networks for School Districts FAQ

What Is Ham Radio?

Garden School ham radio club connects loved ones in storm-battered Puerto Rico
Ham radios do not require use of a power grid and can run off a small generator. Garden’s Amateur Radio Club has teamed up with Amateur Radio Emergency Services to help relay messages to and from locations on the stricken islands that have lost power and cell phone service.

American Red Cross Asks ARRL’s Assistance with Puerto Rico Relief Effort

Find an Amateur Radio License Exam in Your Area

PUERTO RICO REPEATERS: Oscar Resto works with another volunteer to pass along information at the Red Cross headquarters in San Juan, Puerto Rico. "I have the responsibility to establish the required emergency communications that the American Red Cross needed for understanding the needs of the citizens impacted by the hurricane," said Resto, a section manager for the American Radio Relay League, which boasts 160,000 members. Two ham volunteers, Raul Gonzalez and Jose Santiago, set up a radio control hub run by generator power in Monacillo, near San Juan, and other centers quickly followed suit. There, ham operators work shoulder to shoulder with public safety and utility officials to transmit information to other ham operators working with teams in the field.

Amateur Radio Callsign Lookups Database

Port of SAN JUAN (PR SJU) details - Departures, Expected Arrivals and Port Calls | AIS Marine Traffic

Drupal - Puerto Rico Recovery is increasingly urgent - can you help in mobilizing the virtual/real communities?

94% of School Districts Have High-Speed Broadband
Verizon to pay $17.7 million to resolve school broadband probe

Drupal Open Source Code The 4 C's needed for success in college, career and life.

Communication, Collaboration, Critical thinking, and Creativity

Google finds STEM skills aren’t the most important skills By Lou Glazer Michigan Future Inc. January 5, 2018
This, of course, is consistent with the findings of the employer-led Partnership for 21st Century Learning who describe the foundation skills for worker success as the 4Cs: collaboration, communication, critical thinking and creativity. And the book Becoming Brilliant which adds to those four content and confidence for the 6Cs. And consistent with the work on the value of a liberal arts degree of journalist George Anders laid out in his book You Can Do Anything and in a Forbes article entitled That Useless Liberal Arts Degree Has Become Tech’s Hottest Ticket.

EVERYONE SHOULD LEARN MORSE CODE

Learn Morse Code

NATIONAL SECURITY

| GUN LAWS

Drupal Open Source Code GUN LAWS:

@JRehling #TXSenateDebate
Ted Cruz said that school shootings take place because we removed "God from the public square." Texas is 93% Christian and has a fatal school shooting every year. Japan is 2% Christian and has never had a school shooting. Worst theory ever.

David Hogg We got the highest youth voter turnout of any midterm in American history in 2018 Then we got the highest youth voter turnout ever in American history in 2020 Now we turnout again, combat youth voter suppression, hold politicians accountable and start running for office in 22.

WHAT IS YOUR K12 SCHOOL ACTIVE SHOOTER PLAN?

OASC Guidelines: Active Shooter and Kidnapping Response Tips PRINT

U.S. private-sector organizations that operate in a variety of environments and face active shooter and/or kidnapping threats may find these tips useful.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) PDF

Provides products, tools, and resources to help you respond to an active shooter incident. To contact the active shooter preparedness team for Active Shooter Preparedness Workshops email ASworkshop@hq.dhs.gov

The Secret Service and U.S. Department of Education studied every American school shooting from 1974 to 2000 and found 37 separate attacks  63 page report in 2009

2018 Gun deaths in US rise to highest level in 20 years, data shows': Forty thousand people were killed in shootings last year amid a growing number of suicides involving firearms, CDC reveals. The CDC’s Wonder database shows that in 2017, 39,773 people in the US lost their lives at the point of a gun, marking the onward march of firearm fatalities in a country renowned for its lax approach to gun controls. When adjusted for age fluctuations, that represents a total of 12 deaths per 100,000 people – up from 10.1 in 2010 and the highest rate since 1996. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/dec/13/us-gun-deaths-levels-cdc-2017

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics. Underlying Cause of Death 1999-2017 on CDC WONDER Online Database, released December, 2018. Data are from the Multiple Cause of Death Files, 1999-2017, as compiled from data provided by the 57 vital statistics jurisdictions through the Vital Statistics Cooperative Program. Accessed at http://wonder.cdc.gov/ucd-icd10.html on Dec 19, 2018 9:33:29 AM

"Understanding school violence is the first step to finding effective prevention strategies." ~ Dr. Nadine Connell, associate professor of criminology in the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences, at The University of Texas at Dallas said the National Institute of Justice project aims to fill a need for reliable data on gun violence on school campuses.Connell is creating a database that tracks shootings at K-12 schools in the United States going back to 1990.

David Hogg @davidhogg111  Student Activist
Inside the Teen Movement That’s Changing the Conversation About Guns

Folklife Projects - K12 Student Walkouts Protesting Gun Control Law
Hashtags #calloutlawmakers #neveragain @davidhoagg111 #BanBumpStocks

- David Hogg recounts the horrifying shooting that killed 17 of his classmates and teachers.
Florida School Shooting survivor. Hogg and many of his classmates have been outspoken about the need for stricter gun laws since they witnessed the massacre that killed 17 students and staff members at their Florida high school. Hogg's experience is similar to what happened after the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, that left 26 dead -- most of them young children. http://www.randomhousebooks.com/books/599770/

@SenBlumenthal  9/7/18 asked Aalayah Eastmond, a Parkland survivor, what she would say to Judge Kavanaugh in response to his opinion that assault weapons can’t be banned under the 2nd Amendment. This was her answer.  Thank you Aalayah.

How about we let kids get a good night's sleep?

#RECESS We’ve already known for years that the loosely defined parameters of playtime allow children to explore teamwork, competition, rule formulation, and conflict resolution, all developmental building blocks that help them to grow into healthy and functional members of society.

HOW  DARK MONEY FROM CITIZENS UNITED PROTECTS THE NRA

Since Citizens United, over $800 million in “dark money” has poured into federal elections.
Donald Trump was with Chris Cox (L), Executive Director of the NRA Institute for Legislative Action and Wayne LaPierre (R), Executive Vice President of the National Rifle Association, were at the National Rifle Association's NRA-ILA Leadership Forum during the NRA Convention at the Kentucky Exposition Center on May 20, 2016 in Louisville, Kentucky.

The source of these funds is largely untraceable for the public because it has been funneled through secretive nonprofits, such as the NRA and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The FBI is investigating the National Rifle Association to determine whether Russians illegally funneled money through the organization to help the Trump campaign. Foreigners are not allowed to spend in American elections — not in presidential races, not for state or city officials, not for dog catcher. But a nonprofit playing this dark money shell game could easily hide an illegal foreign source of money as just another anonymous donor and that would be akin to money laundering.

THE NRA

The NRA is among the largest "dark money" organizations, reporting the greatest amount of campaign spending without revealing the source of the funds — over $35 million in the 2016 election cycle alone. Still, this amount was just a fraction of the over $175 million in reported campaign-related spending that came from unknown sources. NRA spent $30 million on Trump, now did every one of their 5000 members pony up $6000.00?

The National Rifle Association continues to wield immense influence over American legislators, primarily through enormous campaign contributions. When it comes to funding, the NRA may have finally gone too far: the FBI recently launched an investigation to determine whether a Russian central banker, and Putin ally, illegally funneled money through the organization to help the Trump campaign. These allegations have prompted a complaint to the Federal Election Commission and an effort by Sen. Ron Wyden to obtain documents from the Treasury Department and the NRA. 

Sen. Ron Wyden is requesting further information from the @NRA after the organization admitted to accepting foreign contributions. 

HOW GOOGLE HELPS DARK MONEY AND THE NRA WITH THEIR SEARCH ADS

THE NATIONAL NARRATIVE VS. FACTS FOUND ON GOOGLE

Advertising Money gets spent on propaganda disguised as "balancing information", it isn't accurate information, but is used to keep that REAL INFORMATION out of view.

We know from lawsuits that people will pay much more to put an advertisement on a page where the user has just searched for their competitor, it is fairly intuitive that this would be the case, the upstart just wants a shot at convincing you they have a better product, the incumbent wants to be sure you never learn that there is an alternative choice.

We also know that rounded to the nearest billion, none of Alphabet's businesses make money except search advertising. It isn't a stretch to guess that the tension to take the money might be overwhelming other forces inside of Google.

[1] The average price per click (CPC) of advertisements on Google sites has gone down for every year, and nearly every quarter, since 2009. At the same time Microsoft's Bing search engine CPCs have gone up. As the advantage of Google's search index is eroded by time and investment, primarily by Microsoft, advertisers have been shifting budget to be more of a blend between the two companies. The trend suggests that at some point in the not to distant future advertising margins for both engines will be equivalent.

SEARCH RESULTS AS PROPAGANDA

The Devil Baby 1910 

The Devil Baby

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fake News on TV 1982

Fake News TV 1982

 

 

ART AS PROPAGANDA

WHAT IS ART?
Jacques Ellul observes When dialogue begins, propaganda ends. His theme, that propaganda is not this or that ideology but rather the action and coexistence of all media at once, explains why propaganda is environmental and invisible. The total life of any culture tends to be "propaganda", for this reason. It blankets perception and suppresses awareness, making the counter environments created by the artist indispensable to survival and freedom. -Marshall McLuhan

1995 Modern #art was #CIA #'weapon' unwitting artists such as Pollock and de Kooning got used in cultural Cold War 

Political Control - Video "Oh Dear" by Adam Curtis Import ideas from conceptual #art into the heart of politics Power Strategy -- just keep them all confused .... 

Book Review America's Secret Weapon
Saunders' The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of #Arts and Letters Video

WARNING Salon.com will crash your computer. You’re watching Pentagon propaganda: “American Idol,” “Ice Road Truckers” and the truth about your favorite shows.

Jazz is the Secret Weapon was not Fake
NewsUS has sonic secret weapon - jazz (NYTimes, November 6, 1955) "America's secret weapon is a blue note in a minor key" or better "European approach to jazz as seen by Americans". In 1955 NY Times US has sonic secret #weapon - #jazz  a blue note in a minor key" or better "European approach to jazz as seen by Americans".

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Jazz the Secret Weapon

TEACH DEMOCRACY

| TEACH DEMOCRACY

Drupal Open Source Code PROTECT DEMOCRACY

Democracy is direct self-government over all the people, for all the people, by all the people.”

#SocialJustice

Protect Yourself: Search online anonymously use a search engine that doesn't track you! DuckDuckgo.com

Find Your Unknown Culture Maker / Community Scholar

The Two Codes Your Kids Need to Know. The College Board came up with a surprising conclusion about keys to success for college and life which are learn to code, and learn the constitution.

LINK TO YOUR VIDEO PROJECTS

In 2019 We mark the 243nd year of our great Nation’s birth, let us remember the words of our 1st President, George Washington:  "The bosom of America is open to receive not only the opulent and respectable Stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations and Religions." Hear voices say the Declaration of Independence while you read along.

Of Politics and Survival:

America is not a person. A President is not a King or Queen. A President is not the State. A President is not God or Ordained by God. A President can and will be subjugated to the will of others. "I believe you are serving as President today because of God’s providence. I believe that same providence brought me into your service." --Scott Pruitt, in resignation letter to Trump. This sounds like he's addressing Henry VIII, a king who is also head of the church. America will consume itself in political squabbles. You can tell a story about  out of control greed, power, and money.

TRACK THE GOVERNMENT BILLS THAT EFFECT YOUR LIFE 

KNOW WHAT IS GOING ON: Just a bunch of kids, right? What do they know?

Age in 1776

  • Marquis de Lafayette, 18
  • James Monroe, 18
  • Henry Lee III, 20
  • Aaron Burr, 20
  • Nathan Hale, 21
  • Alexander Hamilton, 21

1/25/17 The U.S. Was Just Downgraded from a 'Full' to 'Flawed Democracy

'While U.S. citizens could once claim to be part of the 9% of people in the world governed by a “full democracy,” they’re now part of the nearly 45% who live in a “flawed democracy.” That downgrade is based on an analysis by the Economist Intelligence Unit. 

NORTH CAROLINA IS NO LONGER CLASSIFIED AS A DEMOCRACY
12.31.17 By ANDREW REYNOLDS

In 2005, in the midst of a career of traveling around the world to help set up elections in some of the most challenging places on earth – Afghanistan, Burma, Egypt, Lebanon, South Africa, Sudan and Yemen, among others – my Danish colleague, Jorgen Elklit, and I designed the first comprehensive method for evaluating the quality of elections around the world. Our system measured 50 moving parts of an election process and covered everything from the legal framework to the polling day and counting of ballots.

In 2012 Elklit and I worked with Pippa Norris of Harvard University, who used the system as the cornerstone of the Electoral Integrity Project. Since then the EIP has measured 213 elections in 153 countries and is widely agreed to be the most accurate method for evaluating how free and fair and democratic elections are across time and place.

When we evolved the project I could never imagine that as we enter 2017, my state, North Carolina, would perform so badly on this, and other, measures that we are no longer considered to be a fully functioning democracy.

In the just released EIP report, North Carolina’s overall electoral integrity score of 58/100 for the 2016 election places us alongside authoritarian states and pseudo-democracies like Cuba, Indonesia and Sierra Leone. If it were a nation state, North Carolina would rank right in the middle of the global league table – a deeply flawed, partly free democracy that is only slightly ahead of the failed democracies that constitute much of the developing world.

Indeed, North Carolina does so poorly on the measures of legal framework and voter registration, that on those indicators we rank alongside Iran and Venezuela. When it comes to the integrity of the voting district boundaries no country has ever received as low a score as the 7/100 North Carolina received. North Carolina is not only the worst state in the USA for unfair districting but the worst entity in the world ever analyzed by the Electoral Integrity Project.

That North Carolina can no longer call its elections democratic is shocking enough, but our democratic decline goes beyond what happens at election time. The most respected measures of democracy — Freedom House, POLITY and the Varieties of Democracy project — all assess the degree to which the exercise of power depends on the will of the people: That is, governance is not arbitrary, it follows established rules and is based on popular legitimacy.

The extent to which North Carolina now breaches these principles means our state government can no longer be classified as a full democracy.

First, legislative power does not depend on the votes of the people. One party wins just half the votes but 100 percent of the power. The GOP has a huge legislative majority giving it absolute veto-proof control with that tiny advantage in the popular vote. The other party wins just a handful of votes less and 0 percent of the legislative power. This is above and beyond the way in which state legislators are detached from democratic accountability as a result of the rigged district boundaries. They are beholden to their party bosses, not the voters. Seventy-six of the 170 (45 percent) incumbent state legislators were not even opposed by the other party in the general election.

Second, democracies do not limit their citizens’ rights on the basis of their born identities. However, this is exactly what the North Carolina legislature did through House Bill 2 (there are an estimated 38,000 transgender Tar Heels), targeted attempts to reduce African-American and Latino access to the vote and pernicious laws to constrain the ability of women to act as autonomous citizens. [snip]

Americans are Vulnerable to Despotism. 

2018 Betsy Devos met with the Michigan State University president days before her department rolled back Title IX regulations and her family have donated to MSU in the past. We’re requesting documents clarifying her relationship to the school.

Dewey tells us unequivocally in School and Society, that the reliance on listening “tells the story of the traditional education”. He repeats this indictment in Democracy and Education:

“Almost everything” about the traditional education, he states there, “testifies to the great premium put upon listening (and) reading . . . It is hardly possible to overstate the contrast between such conditions and the situations of active contact with things and persons in the home, on the playground . . .” ; the fundamental distinction between traditional and progressive education lies may be said to lie in the latter's attempt to recreate the communicative conditions of homes, playgrounds and workplaces.

As one-way, straight-line communications leaves no room for response, listeners habituated to them remain passive and lax, irresponsible, thoughtless, fickle, emotionally susceptible, shortsighted, amusement-seeking, and shiftless, imbued neither with courage or energy to speak nor intellectual power to say anything worth listening to. 

2016 $100 billion for K–12 education. 
The new money was to be spent over a two-year period, with some of it devoted to compensatory education or special education, the rest to district priorities. Federal aid to K–12 and preschool education jumped from $39 billion in 2008 to a high of $73 billion in fiscal year 2010 (0.49 percent of GDP). The following year, $66 billion in federal funding continued to flow. Much of the aid targeted urban districts with heavy concentrations of low-income and special-education populations. For two years, local school districts enjoyed a generous flow of federal cash.

The Role that Folklore Plays Against Fascism

American Mythologies: Creating, Recreating, and Resisting National Narratives.

Myths and narratives are constructed, reconstructed, and resisted not only through written texts but in every form of media and within every kind of community. America has been and still is consistently defined and constituted through national myths and narratives.

Mountaineers

Mountaineers

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Folklore Against Fascisim

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Drupal Open Source Code PROPAGANDA / MIND CONTROL

'Classic Propaganda': Sinclair Broadcasting
Pushes Aside Fox News to Become 'Trump TV' “It’s unheard of to have one company pushing one specific agenda reaching so many people and doing it in a way designed to evade local input”  by Common Dreams staff. 
David D. Smith built Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc. into the largest owner of television stations in the U.S. after taking over his father's television company (with his brothers) in the late 1980's. With David as president and CEO, the Sinclair Broadcast Group blossomed to 59 stations in less than a decade. By 2014, that number had nearly tripled to 162.

Sinclair - Youtube video This Is What Mind Control Looks Like

The erosion of gravitas matters for the erosion of the office of president around the world.

Kushner: We struck deal with Sinclair 
With a combined total audience of over 2.1 million prime time viewers, Fox News has had an incredible impact on the country’s political discourse. They’ve presented misinformation and glorified propaganda to households across the country, which in turn has affected how people behave when they vote. Fox News has gaslit the American people for over two decades, with disastrous results.

Fox News’ European outlet was coordinating with Putin’s propaganda machine to push pro-Russia content. They just ended their agreement after this news broke. Fox News’ ties to the Kremlin keep getting deeper.

APRIL 20 2018 Fox News Finally Realizes It's Not Cool to Follow Russian Propaganda Guidelines  
The international edition of Fox News airing in Latvia was translated according to Russian censorship guidelines,​​ Latvia's public broadcaster ​reported Wednesday. Fox issued a ​statement ​on Friday that it will discontinue the practice.​ 
As it turned out, Fox News content was indeed "softened" in accordance with Russian government censorship. Commentary critical of the Russia's administration or military, as well as any overt conversation about homosexuality, had to be expurgated. The cleaned-up version also went soft on prurient topics like drugs, sex, death, and political extremism.

Fox News Actual research shows their viewers to be the most misinformed and least knowledgeable group of television viewers. 

Parenting

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nazi's in Charlotte VA 2017 Learn to Spot the Secret Signals of Far-Right Fashion

Nazi's in Charlotte VA 2017


Skinhead style has fragmented into a set of subtle subcultures."I think it’s a way of blending in, of evading notice, of not being as obvious.”

A new sociology book explores how the style of right-wing youth subcultures has evolved in Europe and what's come to replace the racist skinhead.

Goldwater

 

Racism

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Experts in authoritarianism advise to keep a list of things subtly changing around you, so you'll remember. By Amy Siskind Jan 13 2018

Drupal Open Source Code Innumerable shocking and important developments, including:

         • 9/19/17 Facebook Won’t Reveal if Russia Targeted You During the Election 
         • 10/23/17 A Suspected Network Of 13,000 Twitter Bots Pumped Out Pro-Brexit Messages In The Run-Up To The EU Vote
         • 10/23/17 Twitter investigation initiated by Former Louisiana Attorney General: Kahn Swick & Foti, LLC Investigates the Officers and Directors of Twitter, Inc. 11/29/17 
         • 11/29/17 @mattblaze will be testifying before House Government Reform https://oversight.house.gov/hearing/cybersecurity-voting-machines/ on "Cybersecurity of Voting Machines"
         • 12/21/2017 Unauthorized Review of Private, Privileged Materials by the Special Counsel’s Office 
         • 1/7/2018 Roughly 10 Percent of Amazon's Ohio Workforce on Food Stamps
         • A new tax law passed that will enrich the 1% and put the US in more debt. Paul Ryan Collected $500,000 In Koch Contributions Days After House Passed Tax Law which is peanuts compared with what the Koch brothers will save. Americans have faced “aggressive rent hikes, fee gouging & high rates of eviction” as Wall St has been buying up rental housing.
         • 1/20/18 Congress shut down the federal government! 
         •  Palm Beach Post - Donald Trump’s multi-decade tax scam to intentionally hide material information about the Mar-a-Lago Club from the IRS in an illegal multi-million dollar tax shelter scheme.
         • The US Department of Justice recommends that every company create a vulnerability disclosure policy
         • Trump’s longtime personal attorney, Michael Cohen, negotiated a secret $130,000 payment to payoff an adult-film star Stormy Daniel whose real name is Stephanie Clifford. for her silence days before the 2016 presidential election.
         • Senator Dianne Feinstein released 300 pages of Fusion GPS testimony on the Steele dossier, days after her Republican colleagues had unilaterally issued the committee’s first criminal referral to the FBI, implicating Steele. 
         • Proposed changes to Medicaid, exempting Florida from offshore drilling, and waiving fines for five megabanks, including Deutsche Bank — all of which, in a week of sheer bedlam, got little or no attention. Deutsche Bank flagged “suspicious transactions” concerning Jared Kushner’s family accounts. The bank said it’s willing to turn information over to Mueller.
         • Trump’s “sXXXhole” countries statement prompted worldwide condemnation and questions of whether he is eroding US moral authority — while concerns about his fitness for office continued to swirl.
        • WAPO reported that Trump has made more than 2,000 false or misleading claims in his first 355 days in office — on average, 5.6 claims per day.
        • The Twitter account for the House Committee on Natural Resources attacked outdoor apparel company Patagonia in a tweet with a graphic referring to the company as “lying” and “hiding.”
        • Contradicting Trump regime talking points, Sebastian Gorka said he was told to cooperate with Fire and Fury author Michael Wolff, but said after meeting him in Reince Priebus’s office he got a bad feeling and did not. Steve Bannon was set to meet with Wolff after him. 
       • Bannon apologized for his role in Wolff’s book in a statement given to Axios — expressing “regret” to Trump, praising Donald Jr., and adding, “There was no collusion and the investigation is a witch hunt.”
        • Axios reported according to a copy of his real schedule, Trump’s time in the Oval Office has shrunk to 11am to 6pm, then he’s back to the residence. During the day he also has blocks of “Executive Time.”
        • Axios reported Executive Time means TV and Twitter time alone in the residence. Trump schedule also lists 8 am to 11 am as Executive Time in the Oval Office, but most is spent at the residence.
        • CNN reported in early 2016, before Bannon and Trump became allies, a watchdog group led by Bannon tried to shop anti-Trump research alleging ties between Trump companies and organized crime.

What you need to know about influencer fraud

SECURE THE VOTE

| ELECTIONS: SECURITY

Drupal Open Source Code American elections are too easy to hack. We must take action now

Expert Matt Blaze ~ "State and local election authorities, which are responsible for these systems, are no match for the national intelligence agencies of our adversaries. They need help, whether they realize it or not."

The computers we use in the voting process are vulnerable at every level.

THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT PEOPLE WHO FIND AND EXPLOIT VULNERABILITIES DO!

ES&S Admits It Installed pcAnywhere Remote-Access Software on Systems Sold to States

Remote-access software and modems on election equipment 'is the worst decision for security short of leaving ballot boxes on a Moscow street corner.' In a letter sent to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) in April 2018 and obtained recently by Motherboard, Election Systems and Software acknowledged that it had "provided pcAnywhere remote connection software … to a small number of customers between 2000 and 2006," which was installed on the election-management system ES&S sold them.
As late as 2011 pcAnywhere was still being used on at least one ES&S customer's election-management system in Venango County, Pennsylvania. “ES&S needs to stop stonewalling and provide a full, honest accounting of equipment that could be vulnerable to remote attacks,” he told Motherboard. “When a corporation that makes half of America’s voting machines refuses to answer the most basic cyber security questions, you have to ask what it is hiding.”
Hacks, Security Gaps And Oligarchs: The Business Of Voting Comes Under Scrutiny
For months, ES&S refused to tell Ron Wyden how many of its customers had remote-access software pcAnywhere installed on their election-management systems. ES&S would only say "a small number". NPR reports ES&S has finally revealed 300 jurisdictions had it installed. ES&S told NPR that the software was never installed on machines that tabulate votes. But that's exactly what election-manage systems do -- they tabulate the aggregated votes collected from voting machines.

We need a system resilient to threats – and in many cases, that means paper By Bruce Schneier Apr 18 2018
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/18/american-elections-hack-bruce-scheier

Elections serve two purposes. The first, and obvious, purpose is to accurately choose the winner. But the second is equally important: to convince the loser. To the extent that an election system is not transparently and auditably accurate, it fails in that second purpose. Our election systems are failing, and we need to fix them.  
Today, we conduct our elections on computers. Our registration lists are in computer databases. We vote on computerized voting machines. And our tabulation and reporting is done on computers. We do this for a lot of good reasons, but a side effect is that elections now have all the insecurities inherent in computers. The only way to reliably protect elections from both malice and accident is to use something that is not hackable or unreliable at scale; the best way to do that is to back up as much of the system as possible with paper.
Recently, there have been two graphic demonstrations of how bad our computerized voting system is. In 2007, the states of California and Ohio conducted audits of their electronic voting machines. Expert review teams found exploitable vulnerabilities in almost every component they examined. The researchers were able to undetectably alter vote tallies, erase audit logs, and load malware on to the systems. Some of their attacks could be implemented by a single individual with no greater access than a normal poll worker; others could be done remotely.  
Last year, the Defcon hackers’ conference sponsored a Voting Village. Organizers collected 25 pieces of voting equipment, including voting machines and electronic poll books. By the end of the weekend, conference attendees had found ways to compromise every piece of test equipment: to load malicious software, compromise vote tallies and audit logs, or cause equipment to fail. <</snip>

Elections Commission Chief Uses the “Nuclear Option” to Rescue the Agency From Gridlock
The agency’s chair says she won’t allow its lawyers to defend it when it’s sued. The gridlock at the FEC is partially to blame for the more than $900 million in “dark money” that has flowed into US elections from undisclosed sources since the 2010 Supreme Court Citizens United ruling, which gave corporations, nonprofits, and unions the ability to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections. A 2018 Pew Research poll found that 77 percent of Americans want limits on the amount individuals and organizations can spend on political campaigns.

VOTE - Election Fraud Issues and Resources

VOTER FRAUD - THE LONG HISTORY OF TAMPERING WITH THE VOTE  

RIGGING AN ELECTION IN AMERICA YOU ONLY NEED TO HACK ONE SWING STATE TO PULL IT OFF

INTERNET OF THINGS

| IOT & PITA

IOT Internet of Things

Who is responsible for ethics around code?

Click Here to Kill Everybody: Peril and Promise on a Hyperconnected Planet, which I generally refer to as CH2KE  by Bruce Schneier

Ethics Checklist
The default checklist consists of sections on Data Collection, Data Storage, Analysis, Modeling, and Deployment  allows you to easily add an ethics checklist to your data science projects. is pushing the conversation about ethics in data science, machine learning, and Artificial intelligence by providing actionable reminders to data scientists.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal and ethics in data science.

Facebook may face multibillion-dollar US fine over privacy lapses – report
Company said to be negotiating settlement with FTC after revelations it inappropriately shared 87m users’ information

WHO IS USING YOUR PERSONAL DATA
A guide to Who Buys, Sells, and Barters My Personal Data

Amassing and selling your data like this is perfectly legal. The trade-off between the data you give and the services you get may or may not be worth it, but another breed of business amasses, analyzes, and sells your information without giving you anything at all: data brokers. These firms compile info from publicly available sources like property records, marriage licenses, and court cases. They may also gather your medical records, browsing history, social media connections, and online purchases. Depending on where you live, data brokers might even purchase your information from the Department of Motor Vehicles. Don’t have a driver’s license? Retail stores sell info to data brokers, too.

The information data brokers collect may be inaccurate or out of date. Still, it can be incredibly valuable to corporations, marketers, investors, and individuals. In fact, American companies alone are estimated to have spent over $19 billion in 2018 acquiring and analyzing consumer data, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

Data brokers are also valuable resources for abusers and stalkers. Doxing, the practice of publicly releasing someone’s personal information without their consent, is often made possible because of data brokers. While you can delete your Facebook account relatively easily, getting these firms to remove your information is time-consuming, complicated, and sometimes impossible. In fact, the process is so burdensome that you can pay a service to do it on your behalf.

Who Controls our Data?
Our phones are not only tools that help us organize our day but also sophisticated monitoring devices that we voluntarily feed with interactions we think are private. The questions we ask Google, for instance, can be more honest than the ones we ask our loved ones — a ‘digital truth serum,’ as ex-Googler and author Seth Stephens-Davidowitz writes in Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are. Hoover up these data points and combine them with all of our other devices — smart TVs, fitness trackers, cookies that stalk us across the web — and there exists an ambient, ongoing accumulation of our habits to the tune of about 2.5 quintillion (that’s a million trillion) bytes of data per day.

Most Online ‘Terms of Service’ Are Incomprehensible to Adults, Study Finds. “Two law professors analyzed the sign-in terms and conditions of 500 popular US websites, including Google and Facebook, and found that more than 99 percent of them were ‘unreadable,’ far exceeding the level most American adults read at, but are still enforced.”

PITA

The Future of Computing  by David Gerrold.

In 1999 Esther Schindler

asked David Gerrold to write a

"future of computing" prediction

for the magazine where she was

THE Technology Editor.

Here's what he wrote.

PITA:

Personal Information Telecommunications Agent

or

Pain In The Ass

because all that connectivity

is going to destroy what's left

of everyone's privacy.

#DeleteFacebook Now!

 

THE IOT

Be Afraid Be Very Afraid for the IoT

2/2018 - More than 4000 government websites are infected with cryptocurrency mining software like Coinhive, including the US court system website without their knowledge or consent.

Threat Encyclopedia

IOT Threat Security

Hiding Through a Maze of IoT Devices
How to create the perfect anonymizing botnet by abusing UPnP features — and without any infection 
In March 2018, Symantec reported about the Inception Framework abusing vulnerable UPnP services to hide themselves. The Inception APT, a cyber espionage group from an unknown origin used this since 2014 to launch stealthy attacks. In this particular case, Symantec also reported that no custom malware needed to be injected on the routers… let’s take a deeper look.
What is UPnP?
UPnP stands for Universal Plug and Play and is basically just a set of networking protocols to allow devices to discover each other in the LAN and use some network features (such as data sharing or entertainment) without any configuration (hence “plug and play”). It’s a pretty old architecture that was designed in the late 90’s and finished in the early 2000’s. The most implemented revision of the protocol is probably the 1.1 that was published in 2008 and the most recent one (UPnP Device Architecture 2.0) in 2015.

Tech's ethical Dark Side Harvard, Stanford and others try to address this in 2018 ! ! !

Meanwhile in 1998 Sidney Karin Ph.D., P.E. was already teaching a course in Ethics and Social Impacts of Computing at UCSD. 

Sidney Karin Ph.D., P.E.        
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Director Emeritus,
San Diego Supercomputer Center
University of California, San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive La Jolla,  CA  92093-0505

A Horse Is a Horse, of Course: Farewell to the Horse: A Cultural History
In 1937, a car carrying Rebecca West got stuck in a snowdrift on a Croatian hilltop. “Peasants ran out of a cottage near by,” she wrote, “shouting with laughter because machinery had made a fool of itself, and dug out the automobile with incredible rapidity.

IOT

Internet of Crap

MEDIA LITERACY

| #PRIVACY #DeleteFacebook
Media Literacy

Image removed.MEDIA LITERACY:

Tristan Harris, a 33-year-old former Google employee turned vocal critic of the tech industry. “All of us are jacked into this system,” he says. “All of our minds can be hijacked. Our choices are not as free as we think they are.” 

Harris, who has been branded “the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience”, insists that billions of people have little choice over whether they use these now ubiquitous technologies, and are largely unaware of the invisible ways in which a small number of people in Silicon Valley are shaping their lives.

Ted Talk "I was a design ethicist at Google, where I studied how do you ethically steer people's thoughts? Because what we don't talk about is how the handful of people working at a handful of technology companies through their choices will steer what a billion people are thinking today."

The Creepy Line An eye-opening documentary, The Creepy Line reveals the stunning degree to which society is manipulated by Google and Facebook and blows the lid off the remarkably subtle – hence powerful – manner in which they do it.

Facebook labelled 'digital gangsters' by report on fake news
Company broke privacy and competition law and should be regulated urgently, say MPs

The final report of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee’s 18-month investigation into disinformation and fake news accused Facebook of purposefully obstructing its inquiry and failing to tackle attempts by Russia to manipulate elections.

“Democracy is at risk from the malicious and relentless targeting of citizens with disinformation and personalised ‘dark adverts’ from unidentifiable sources, delivered through the major social media platforms we use every day,” warned the committee’s chairman, Damian Collins.

The report:

  • Accuses Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-founder and chief executive, of contempt for parliament in refusing three separate demands for him to give evidence, instead sending junior employees unable to answer the committee’s questions. </snip>

Facebook’s Advertising Platform: New Attack Vectors and the Need for Interventions

Facebook has built a Frankenstein monster. When will they admit that?
Two groups of independent researchers analyzed data provided to Congress by Facebook, Google and Twitter and came to parallel conclusions. The report by New Knowledge with support from the intrepid researcher Jonathan Albright, who singlehandedly caught Facebook downplaying the scope and scale of the operation, offers clear evidence that the tech companies provided the absolute bare minimum of datasets necessary to study the attack.

How America's largest local TV owner turned its news anchors into soldiers in Trump's war on the media:

"There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what is NOT true; the other is to refuse to accept what IS true." ~ Soren Kierkegarrd

"Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed." ~ Joseph Stalin

Just Replace the word "Education" with "Fox News or Facebook"

 

THIS IS WHAT MIND CONTROL LOOKS LIKE:

Google reserves the right to "stop providing Services to you … at any time." And because Google, one of the largest and richest companies in the world, has no customer service department, getting reinstated can be difficult. ~ 2016

How did Google become the internet’s censor and master manipulator, blocking access to millions of websites?  Which Words Does Google Instant Blacklist? The autocomplete blacklist can also be used to protect or discredit political candidates.

Russia spent years building up Twitter accounts that posed as sources for Americans' hometown headlines. The accounts posted real local news, building trust and readership for some future, unforeseen effort.

This is why laws exist to prevent consolidation of news media ownership. Old media would abolish social media – if people can't upload a video like that on Youtube or Twitter, citizens wouldn't be able to realize how TV is used to spread propaganda. Social media is competition that old media doesn't want.

Zuckerberg gave Mail.ru a Russian Internet Company temporary special access to its user data.

  • Facebook acknowledged that it gave Mail.Ru special access to user data after 2015, when it officially ended the system that allowed third-party apps to access user data. 
  • Mail.Ru was among dozens of companies that were granted special temporary access to Facebook user data.
  • Mail.Ru has ties to the Kremlin, according to news reports.

3/17/18  50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica
in major data breach Whistleblower describes how firm linked to former Trump adviser Steve Bannon compiled user data to target American voters.
The data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump’s election team and the winning Brexit campaign harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters, in the tech giant’s biggest ever data breach, and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box. A whistleblower has revealed to the Observer how Cambridge Analytica – a company owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Trump’s key adviser Steve Bannon – used personal information taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with personalised political advertisements. Christopher Wylie, who worked with an academic at Cambridge University to obtain the data, told the Observer: “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis that the entire company was built on.” Documents seen by the Observer, and confirmed by a Facebook statement, show that by late 2015 the company had found out that information had been harvested on an unprecedented scale. However, at the time it failed to alert users and took only limited steps to recover and secure the private information of more than 50 million individuals. The New York Times is reporting that copies of the data harvested for Cambridge Analytica could still be found online; its reporting team had viewed some of the raw data.

Russian company had access to Facebook user data through apps
What a coincidence that Yuri Milner met personally with Zuckerberg in 2010, invested $200M in Facebook, and then his Russian company was allowed to secretly harvest user’s data. A Russian internet company with links to the Kremlin was among the firms to which Facebook gave an extension which allowed them to collect data on unknowing users of the social network after a policy change supposedly stopped such collection.

RUSSIA THE ENEMY OF THE UNITED STATES

Russia will continue to meddle in U.S. elections in 2018. "There should be no doubt that (Putin) views the past effort as successful," said the Director of National Intelligence. "The Russia story is a total hoax," said the president.

4/20/18 Inside the Competitive, Corrupt World of Russian Intelligence

Bottom Line: The Kremlin employs various often overlapping and competitive security and intelligence services to create multiple sources of intelligence, encourage risk-taking and keep a wary eye on each other. 
Background: The Soviet Union primarily relied on two intelligence services. The Committee for State Security (KGB) was tasked with foreign political and economic espionage, covert action – known as active measures – and domestic security, while the Main Intelligence Director (GRU) under the General Staff was responsible for military intelligence. 

2/13/18 Sen. Jack Reed just got FBI Director Wray and other intel chiefs to admit that the president has never asked them to focus on or disrupt Russian election meddling. 

We should all remember the story of how an internet friendship between an American Reality TV star and a Russian dictator led to America's democracy coming under attack. Friendship is a great thing as long as Kompromat isn't involved!

FBI Dir. Christopher Wray tells the Senate Intel Cmte that the FBI “followed established protocols” in their background check of Rob Porter, & they provided information to the WH on several occasions, meaning the WH knew what the FBI knew, yet still covered for Porter. 
NYT: People familiar w/ the security clearance process in Trump’s WH said it was widely acknowledged among sr. aides that raising questions about unresolved vetting issues in a staff member’s background would implicitly reflect on Kushner’s status, as well
Jared Kushner has a broad foreign policy portfolio that requires access to some of the intelligence community’s most closely guarded secrets, but he still does not have a permanent security clearance.

Donald Trump's Budget summarized: - Cuts Medicaid by $300 billion - Cuts Disability programs by $70+ billion - Cuts SNAP by $213 billion - Cuts spending to the EPA - Inflates the National Debt - Still no Russian Sanctions!!

SINCLAIR & Broadcast Group Under Fire for Pushing Lies currently control 173 stations.

FCC Enables Faster Media Consolidation as Pro-Trump Sinclair Group Seizes Even More Local Stations - this should be illegal!

Fox News Actual research shows their viewers to be the most misinformed and least knowledgeable group of television viewers.

List of stations owned or operated by Sinclair Broadcast Group

'Classic Propaganda': Sinclair Broadcasting Pushes Aside Fox News to Become 'Trump TV' “It’s unheard of to have one company pushing one specific agenda reaching so many people and doing it in a way designed to evade local input”

How Trump's FCC aided Sinclair's expansion Use of a regulatory loophole will allow Sinclair to reach 72 percent of U.S. households after buying Tribune’s stations.

RUSSIA COMPROMISED 7 STATES PRIOR TO 2016 ELECTION 2/27/18

Three senior intelligence officials told NBC News that the intelligence community believed the states as of January 2017 were Alaska, Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Texas and Wisconsin. The officials say systems in the seven states were compromised in a variety of ways, with some breaches more serious than others, from entry into state websites to penetration of actual voter registration databases.

Want to hack a voting machine? Hack the voting machine vendor first
How password reuse and third-party breaches leave voting machine vendors vulnerable to attack.
Thousands of voting machine vendor employees' work emails and plaintext passwords appear in freely available third-party data breach dumps reviewed by CSO, raising questions about the security of voting machines and the integrity of past election results.

FOREIGN AGENTS

Days after the Supreme Court issued its Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission decision allowing unlimited outside spending in elections, President Obama, in his first State of the Union address, warned that the decision “will open a floodgate for special interests  including foreign corporations to spend without limit in our elections.”  

U.S.-based Russian news outlet RIA Global LLC has registered as a foreign agent with the U.S. Justice Department, the fourth Russian-linked media company to do so since November under pressure from the U.S. government. According to the Washington Post, Justice Samuel Alito, who was sitting in the chamber alongside his fellow Supreme Court jurists as Obama spoke, “winced at the accusation and muttered ‘not true.’ ”  

The new report raises the specter that Obama’s fears have been realized.  

U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded  an intensive effort by Russia to interfere with the Nov. 8 election. U.S. intelligence officials acquired the documents, which were prepared by the Moscow-based Russian Institute for Strategic Studies [en.riss.ru/], after the election.  The institute is run by retired senior Russian foreign intelligence officials appointed by Putin’s office. The first Russian institute document was a strategy paper written last June that circulated at the highest levels of the Russian government but was not addressed to any specific individuals.  It recommended the Kremlin launch a propaganda campaign on social media and Russian state-backed global news outlets to encourage U.S. voters to elect a president who would take a softer line toward Russia than the administration of then-President Barack Obama, the seven officials said. - Reuters

2/22/18 Mueller's  32-count indictment on Manafort and Gates.

We know Trump won because of the Electoral College but his "victory" would not have happened without help from the Russians. Special Counsel Robert Mueller's indictment of 13 Russian agents for criminal conspiracy helped the citizens of the US know that this is a fact. We know that the Russians helped. 
Republicans, Democrats and Independents have an opportunity to remind everyone everywhere of what we do know: that the Russians attacked us, and that the president has done nothing in response.
Mueller’s indictment of the Russian troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency, show that they adopted Silicon Valley's best practices and turned them against U.S. democracy. The indictment says the Russian outfit also used data analytics to track which of their posts were proving most successful, sent private social media messages to stir up genuinely American grass-roots activists and registered accounts on PayPal to pay for ads. The organization even double-checked the content generated by its posting “specialists” to make sure it had the kind of authenticity to make it believable to Americans. 

Leaked: Secret Documents From Russia’s Election Trolls An online auction gone awry reveals substantial new details on Kremlin-backed troll farm efforts to stir up real protests and target specific Americans to push their propaganda.

Image removed.ONLINE PRIVACY

"Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed." ~ Joseph Stalin

@torproject @motherboard This would break the internet.   Imagine YouTube Content ID, but for everything: blog comments, tweets, Github commits, Instagram photos, replies to newspaper articles, rental listings, dating profiles.   This is being proposed in the EU. #Article13

MEDIA LITERACY INCLUDES "SOCIAL MEDIA" 
K12 EDTECH - MEDIA LITERACY and the Trust Deficit

You Won't Find Me On FacebookJust Replace the word "Education" with "Fox News or Facebook"

FACEBOOK IS A SURVEILLANCE COMPANY NOT "SOCIAL MEDIA"! 
 

YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THEY SELL YOUR DATA 

5/25/18 Proof Zuckerberg set up fraudulent scheme to "weaponise" data. This case is based on a massive trove of internal Facebook docs. Developers claim Facebook's whole response to Cambridge Analytica scandal is a "fraudulent narrative". by Carole Cadwalladr and Emma Graham-Harrison
Twitter Thread

HOW TO GET YOUR PERSONAL DATA DELETED
People get their data from @CamAnalytica. and learn how it relates to #edtech.

Surveillance and Facebook
The FEC requires political ads on Facebook to say who paid for and approved them. But 87% of ads DID NOT meet these requirements. Facebook is strip-mining human society. Watching everyone share everything in their social lives and instrumenting the web to survey everything they read outside the system is inherently unethical.

A lack of trust for business and government is "contagious" and spreading to other sectors. The erosion of gravitas matters for the erosion of the office of president around the world.

FACEBOOK TOTAL FAIL #deletefacebook HOW TO GET OFF FACEBOOK NOW

4/26/18 Facebook's chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer admits he never read the terms and conditions for the Cambridge Analytica app!!!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/04/26/facebook-didnt-read-the-terms-and-conditions-for-the-app-behind-cambridge-analytica

9/1/16 In firing human editors, Facebook has lost the fight against fake news

Image removed.ZUCKERBERG AND CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA

Scraping data from Facebook isn't a breach or a bug it is a feature that is their business model.

4/18 Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will testify before a congressional committee regarding the allegations that consulting firm Cambridge Analytica misused the personal data of millions of Facebook users.

Mercer owns Cambridge Analytica.
Trump’s campaign wasn’t the only organization paying Cambridge Analytica. According to election complaints filed in 2016 by the Campaign Legal Center, a SuperPac, Make America Number 1, with ties to both Steve Bannon and billionaire hedge fund manager, Robert Mercer, paid $4.6 million to Cambridge Analytica.

Cambridge Analytica and the Trump campaign broke a law prohibiting foreign nationals from involvement in US elections. And it appears people involved knew they were breaking the law.

Cambridge Analytica mined 50 million Facebook users private information on more than which it then used to target voters for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Trump’s campaign hired Cambridge Analytica in the spring of 2016 and “paid it more than $6.2 million,” according to a Reuters report.

Cambridge Analytica says they won the election for Donald Trump and describe how. VIDEO
Trump’s election consultants were filmed saying they use bribes and sex workers to entrap politicians. Bosses were filmed talking about using bribes, ex-spies, fake IDs and sex workers. The company’s chief executive Alexander Nix said the British firm secretly campaigns in elections across the world. This includes operating through a web of shadowy front companies, or by using sub-contractors.
Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix Met with Assange in order to help propagate Hillary emails. Roger Stone contacted Assange about Hillary emails. Roger Stone and Cambridge Analytica both worked for Trump campaign.

FACEBOOK took the money from Cambridge Analytica and kept the money
Facebook has a business model of “you are learning about me and taking me and my relationships apart to monetize that.” It’s a trojan horse for something sinister. Facebook has said we want your emotional and social attachments in one place and we will control it for you. They are openly asking you to give that power to them and it seems like a dangerous combination. Social media is destroying human relationships by turning our fundamental emotional connections into commodities.

Sir Tim Berners Lee says in regard to Cambridge Analytica that we need to rethink out Attitude towards the web

Government officials, have failed to pass the sort of campaign finance disclosure or data privacy laws or rules that could make it more difficult to target Americans online thanks to SiliCON Valley lobbyists and lobbyist Paul Manafort’s pursuit of foreign cash. Shady deals laid the groundwork for the corruption of Washington.

Samidh Chakrabarti, Product Manager, Civic Engagement
Around the US 2016 election, Russian entities set up and promoted fake Pages on Facebook to influence public sentiment — essentially using social media as an information weapon. Russians created 80,000 posts that reached around 126 million people in the US over a two-year period. A nation-state used our platform to wage a cyberwar intended to divide society.

1) HOW MUCH MONEY DID FACEBOOK MAKE FROM RUSSIAN ADS?
2) HOW MUCH MONEY DID TWITTER MAKE FROM RUSSIAN ADS?
3) HOW MUCH MONEY DOES GOOGLE CONTINUE TO MAKE FROM RUSSIAN ADS?
Below are snapshots of the network generated from these 9000 “crisis actor” YouTube videos. I’m not finished with this part of the analysis yet, so these are very rough drafts. But they are interesting to look through to get a sense of the quality and breadth of content that’s being hosted, monetized, and promoted on Youtube.

FACEBOOK AND DATA PRIVACY LAWS

  • Both Google and Facebook are roughly a decade old, and together they make up roughly 25 percent of all global advertising expenditure [source]

 

#deletefacebook HOW TO GET OFF FACEBOOK NOW

4/16/18 Facebook must face class action over facial recognition:
U.S. District Judge James Donato ruled in San Francisco federal court that a class action was the most efficient way to resolve the dispute over facial templates. Facebook Inc must face a class action lawsuit alleging that the social network unlawfully used a facial recognition process on photos without user permission. Facebook users sued in 2015, alleging violations of an Illinois state law about the privacy of biometric information. The class will consist of Facebook users in Illinois for whom Facebook created and stored facial recognition algorithms after June 7, 2011, Donato ruled. That is the date when Facebook launched “Tag Suggestions,” a feature that suggests people to tag after a Facebook user uploads a photo. <https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-privacy-classaction/facebook-must-face-class-action-over-facial-recognition-u-s-judge-idUSKBN1HN35G>

Login With Facebook data hijacked by JavaScript trackers
Facebook confirms to TechCrunch that it's investigating a security research report that shows Facebook user data can be grabbed by third-party JavaScript trackers embedded on websites using Login With Facebook. The exploit lets these trackers gather a user's data including name, email address, age range, gender, locale, and profile photo depending on what users originally provided to the website. It's unclear what these trackers do with the data, but many of their parent companies including Tealium, AudienceStream, Lytics, and ProPs sell publisher monetization services based on collected user data.<https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/18/login-with-facebook-data-hijacked-by-javascript-trackers/>

Delete FacebookDELETE FACEBOOK the social network holds far more data about them than they expected, including complete logs of incoming and outgoing calls and SMS messages.Facebook makes it hard for users to delete their accounts, instead pushing them towards “deactivation”, which leaves all personal data on the company’s servers. When users ask to permanently delete their accounts, the company suggests: “You may want to download a copy of your info from Facebook.” It is this data dump that reveals the extent of Facebook’s data harvesting.
Your logs contain the metadata of every cellular call you’ve ever made, including time and duration and the metadata about every text message you've received or sent - including everyone in your address books, their calendars, and their friends’ birthdays.Permanently deleting a Facebook account will also result in contacts no longer being uploaded and all previously uploaded contacts being deleted.
Facebook advertisers shrug off its privacy scandal Facebook's revenue, which largely derives from ads, soared 49 percent to $12 billion in the first three months of the year, the company announced on Wednesday. Profit jumped 63 percent to $5 billion.

Ex-Yahoo Paying $35M to Settle SEC Charges Over 2014 Hack

4/25/18 YAHOO deceived investors by failing to disclose one of the biggest data breaches in internet history. The SEC alleged that, although Yahoo senior managers and attorneys were told about the breach, the company failed to fully investigate. The breach wasn't disclosed to the investing public until more than two years later, when Yahoo was working on closing Verizon's acquisition of its operating business in 2016.

#Google+ Google Surveillance

4/18 Thousands of Google employees recently demanded an end to deals that let the military use the company’s artificial intelligence technology.More than 3,000 employees wrote to CEO Sundar Pichai objecting to the contract. They argued that Google "should not be in the business of war” and asked for a policy stating the the company will not “ever build warfare technology.”
Eric Schmidt, Google’s former chief executive officer and a director of parent Alphabet Inc. gave a strong endorsement of the Pentagon’s proposal for a new AI center and its collaboration with technology companies. Schmidt, who also chairs the Defense Department’s Innovation Board. Google’s cloud unit is still pursuing Defense contracts.
<https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-17/ex-google-ceo-schmidt-ai-useful-in-military-defense-offense>

Stop Google from Collecting Your Information | Google Privacy Settings by Dylan Curran @iamdylancurran youtube video

This is what #Google knows about you thread by Dylan Curran @iamdylancurran.

Becoming Anonymous
This is a 5 day free guide for the average Jane and Joe to minimize the invasion of your privacy when using the internet. It was inspired by this Twitter thread. This guide is the minimum every person should do to claim back some of their privacy while not compromising their use of the internet. This won't make you 100% anonymous, but it's a start.

Unlike on Facebook, #Google+ does not have a "real names" policy still is in force, Google dropped Google+ real name requirements and associated account actions long ago. And Google never sells your personal information to third parties. Nor do they permit third parties to buy their way into priority positions or into your feeds.

REAL INFORMATION COMES FROM RESEARCH

ATTENTION HACKING: Learn How fringe groups get questionable memes in front of millions

2018 On the Origins of Memes by Means of Fringe Web Communities PDF

This is where internet memes come from Two Reddit and 4chan communities are especially good at spreading and “weaponizing” them.

Researchers Studied 160 Million Memes and Found Most of Them Come From Two Websites The most toxic, yet most effectively spread, memes are first shared on two places, the subreddit r/the_donald and 4chan’s “politically incorrect” forum, called /pol/.
 

4,000,000 17 Year Old& People Turn 18 Before the November Election!!

REAL RESEARCH SKILLS COME FROM LIBRARY SCIENCE

TELL US A STORY ABOUT YOUR SCHOOL LIBRARIAN - MAKE IT A STORYMAP PROJECT!!!

LIBRARIANS ARE PATRIOTS: THEY ARE OUR FIRST LINE DEFENDERS TO LEARN WHAT YOU WANT TO KNOW. THEY WILL DEFEND YOUR RIGHT TO GET ACCESS TO ALL THE BEST INFO ACROSS THE NATION!!

JOURNALISTS WITH A LIBRARY SCIENCE BACKGROUND EMBED THEMSELVES INTO THE LIBRARY.

THAT IS HOW THEY GET THE BEST RESEARCH TO BREAK THE STORIES YOU READ THAT WINS THE JOURNALIST A PULITZER PRIZE!!!

Teachers why not submit a request to DonorsChoose.org for a subscription to the newspaper.
Donorschoose.org wish list for K12 Teachers
Active K-12 teachers and U.S. college students, faculty, and staff are eligible to save 50% with our Academic Rate.

K12 and Citizens can use the same tool the Journalists use for free:

DocumentCloud to research PRIMARY SOURCE documents related to your story and explore links to the original reporting.
If you're reporting on or publishing primary source documents, they can help.
Everything you upload to DocumentCloud stays private until you're ready to make it public, but once you decide to publish, your documents join more than one million other primary source documents in our public catalog.
Use our document viewer to embed documents on your own website and introduce your audience to the larger paper trail behind your story.

SCHOOL GARDEN -- CLIMATE CHANGE

| SCHOOL GARDEN -- CLIMATE CHANGE

Image removed.DOES YOUR SCHOOL HAVE A GARDEN?

"GUARDIANS NOT GARDENERS" 
YOU ARE THE GUARDIANS OF THE PLANET

Find a little bit of land AT YOUR SCHOOL or use the roof to grow food for your community.  

In the US 20.5% of children are living in poverty (OECD).

Ask your librarian for help to get these materials.

#SCHOOLGARDEN find some plants for your school garden
https://www.wildflower.org/plants-main

Mary Reynolds undertakes the design of gardens that marry the needs and wishes of the land's guardian with the needs and wishes of the land itself. Mary seeks to create spaces that are healing, truthful and magical.

Watch her TedX Lecture - What Can I Do? Design a School Garden

Watch her movie Dare To Be Wild This focuses on the magical story of Mary’s journey to build a gold medal winning garden at the Chelsea flower show. 

STORYMAP PROJECT: Tell us about your school garden and LINK to your project from your school page project info.

Image removed.TEACH ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE 

#Hurricane Florence is a Science Denying Warning for North Carolina and every other state that won’t vote for climate change law.

@Greta Thunberg

16-year-old Swedish climate activist#ClimateStrike #FridaysForFuture - Ted Talk

THE BATTLE FOR CONTROL OVER WATER 

July 22, 2017 Nestlé’s water privatization push
Across the globe, Nestlé is pushing to privatize and control public water resources. Nestlé’s Chairman of the Board, Peter Brabeck, has explained his philosophy with “The one opinion, which I think is extreme, is represented by the NGOs, who bang on about declaring water a public right. That means as a human being you should have a right to water. That’s an extreme solution.” Around the world, Nestlé is bullying communities into giving up control of their water. It’s time we took a stand for public water sources.

 

How Climate Change Deniers Rise to the Top in Google Searches By HIROKO TABUCHI Dec 29 2017

Groups that reject established climate science can use the search engine’s advertising business to their advantage, gaming the system to find a mass platform for false or misleading claims.

Type the words “climate change” into Google and you could get an unexpected result: advertisements that call global warming a hoax.

“Scientists blast climate alarm,” said one that appeared at the top of the search results page during a recent search, pointing to a website, DefyCCC, that asserted: “Nothing has been studied better and found more harmless than anthropogenic CO2release.”

Another ad proclaimed: “The Global Warming Hoax — Why the Science Isn’t Settled,” linking to a video containing unsupported assertions, including that there is no correlation between rising levels of greenhouse gases and higher global temperatures.

(In reality, the harmful effects of carbon dioxide emissions linked to human activity, like rising temperatures and melting sea ice, have been acknowledged by every major scientific organization in the world.)

America’s technology giants have come under fire for their role in the spread of fake news during the 2016 presidential campaign, prompting promises from Google and others to crack down on sites that spread disinformation.

Less scrutinized has been the way tech companies continue to provide a mass platform for the most extreme sites among those that use false or misleading science to reject the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change. Google’s search page has become an especially contentious battleground between those who seek to educate the public on the established climate science and those who reject it.

Not everyone who uses Google will see climate denial ads in their search results. Google’s algorithms use search history and other data to tailor ads to the individual, something that is helping to create a highly partisan internet.

A recent search for “climate change” or “global warming” from a Google account linked to a New York Times climate reporter did not return any denial ads. The top results were ads from environmental groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Defense Fund.

But when the same reporter searched for those terms using private browsing mode, which helps mask identity information from Google’s algorithms, the ad for DefyCCC popped up.

“These are the info wars,” said Robert J. Brulle, a Drexel University professor of sociology and environmental science who has studied climate advocacy and misinformation. “It’s becoming harder and harder for the individual to find unbiased information that they can trust, because there’s so much other material trying to crowd that space.”

After being contacted by The New York Times in mid-December, Google said it had removed an ad from its climate search results, though it declined to identify which one. An ad from DefyCCC was still turning up at the top of searches days later. As of Wednesday, no ads at all were turning up for Times reporters and editors running these searches.

The climate denialist ads are an example of how contrarian groups can use the internet’s largest automated advertising systems to their advantage, gaming the system to find a mass platform for false or misleading claims.

Google allows companies to bid on search terms, and displays paid content at the top of its search results in the same blue font used for unpaid content. (For example, a candy maker might bid on the term “Christmas candy” so that its ads pop up when someone searches for those words.) Google identifies ads in its search results with an icon below the link. [snip]
 

THE ARTICLE ABOVE

and all of the DuckDuckGo 'Don't Bubble Me' collateral discuss the challenges of tailored information.
~Chuck McManis January 2, 2018

This sort of effect is why publications, as recently as the the early 21st century, had a very strict wall between editorial and advertising. It compromises the integrity of journalism if the editorial staff can be driven by the advertisers. And Google exploited that tension and turned it into a business model.

If you have an AdSense account (they are free and used to be the go to way for people to monetize their web site) you will periodically receive mailers from Google suggesting you use AdWords (another Google product of course) to 'get your message out there.' When people started using Google as an 'answer this question' machine, and then Google created a mechanism to show your answer first, the stage was set for what has become a gross perversion of 'reference' information.

To put this in context, consider the challenge of Google's eroding search advertising margins[1].  

Google traditionally reported something called 'CPC' or (Cost Per Click) in their financial reports. This was the price that an advertiser paid Google when that advertiser's ad was 'clicked' on by a user. In a goods economy, it might equivalent to the 'average selling price' or ASP for the widget. But unlike a goods economy, Google could (and to date has) made up for this price erosion by increased ad volume. If you look at Google sites (web sites that are hosted on the google.com domains) there are more paid placements on those pages than there has ever been. On the search page, Google's bread and butter so to speak, for a 'highly contested' search (that is what search engine marketeers call a search query that can generate lucrative ad clicks) such as 'best credit card' or 'lowest home mortgage', there are many web browser window configurations that show few, if any organic search engine results at all!

Google has scrambled to find an adjacent market, one that could not only generate enough revenue to pay for the infrastructure but also to generate a net income . Youtube, its biggest success outside of search, and the closest thing they have, has yet to do that after literally a decade of investment and effort. As a result Google has turned to the only tools it has that work,  it has reduced payments to its 'affiliate' sites (AdSense for content payments), then boosted the number of ad 'slots' on Google sites, and finally paying third parties to send search traffic preferentially to Google (this too hurts Google's overall search margin)

The result is that you have a company which is painfully addicted to the high margins of search advertising, and is the defacto source of answers for a large chunk of the population, you put it into the position of choosing survival (sell the top search result slots to anyone who will pay) or integrity (return the best answer possible).  

Nothing like having your fiduciary duty to the shareholders conflict with your moral obligations.

In many ways it reminds me of the lawsuits against the cigarette makers. The cigarette makers certainly could not serve there shareholders by endorsing the view that their product was killing the customer, even if it was the morally correct thing to do.

Google isn't "killing" people by giving out results that have been shaped by third parties but their rationalizations (both internally when I worked there, and externally) seem to echo the same themes that Phillip Morris espoused when they argued it was a person's choice if they wanted to smoke or not. Google will argue that their job is just to show you where things are on the Internet, and match up people who want to share with people searching for a particular topic. They (Google) cannot take responsibility for people who don't bother to check their sources (which they could even do on Google!).  

I have run a world wide, nationally accessible, English language index search engine, Blekko, <NOW PART OF IBM> and I know what they "could" do, but don't do with regard to misrepresented information and false narratives.

 

Image removed.2/21/18 Fake news may be hard to spot, but fake arguments don’t have to be

 

How to Inoculate Yourself Against Climate Denial Misinformation Climate Change  with Six steps to evaluate contrarian climate claims.

2018 Foxconn just got permission to start draining Lake Michigan to make LCD screens The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources approved a request to divert 7 million gallons of water a day to the area where Foxconn is building its new plant. Flint Michagan still does not have clean water.

​​​​​Environmental Research Letters on a critical thinking approach to climate change denial  by Peter Ellerton and The Conversation

We applied this simple method to 42 common climate-contrarian arguments, and found that all of them contained errors in reasoning that are independent of the science itself.  In the video abstract for the paper, we outline an example of our approach, which can be described in six simple steps.