Showing posts with label amazon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label amazon. Show all posts

Thursday, March 29, 2018

Economy

Facebook, Amazon, Nvidia, and Tesla stocks fall and drop market. Netflix, Google, and Twitter fall too. Is this the trigger?

Bounce back some today.
"Five titans of tech -- Apple (AAPL), Amazon (AMZN), Google (GOOGL) owner Alphabet, Microsoft (MSFT) and Facebook (FB) -- made up nearly a quarter of the market value of the entire S&P 500 as of the end of February.
Facebook, Google and Amazon have fallen sharply because of the possibility of more government regulations on the tech sector. That's dragged down the whole market.
The S&P 500 has fallen 5% in the past two weeks and the Nasdaq has tumbled 6%. Even the Dow, which has Apple, Microsoft, IBM (IBM), Cisco (CSCO) and Intel (INTC) as members, is down more than 3%.
But the market rebounded Thursday, led by solid gains in Facebook, Google and Apple."
And they represent all the gains.

Even CNBC predicts more pain to come.

Amazon yanks erotic romance novels from searches, hurting those authors. On the other hand, some writers were intentionally misrepresenting their books into the wrong categories.

Tesla's collapse would squander billions in taxpayer subsidies, but it would finally end them.

Tuesday, January 30, 2018

Health Care

Link between sugar and cognitive decline.

Amazon, Berkshire, and JPMorgan will launch health care enterprise. More competition is better, but this is still cronyism.

Thursday, January 18, 2018

Police State

Amazon misleads about sending echo data to the government.

A top congressman admits the CIA, NSA, and FBI cannot be trusted with the intelligence they collect on Americans.
"Yet Nunes voted to enhance federal bulk surveillance powers.
Bulk surveillance – which is prohibited by the Constitution – is the acquisition of digital versions of telephone, email and text communications based not on suspicion or probable cause but rather on geography or customer status. As I have written before, one publicly available bulk surveillance warrant was for all Verizon customers in the United States; that’s 115 million people, many of whom have more than one phone and at least one computer. And it is surveillance of Americans, not foreigners as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act contemplates.
How did this happen?
It happened in the dark. The NSA has persuaded the FISC, which meets in secret and only hears the government’s arguments, to permit it to spy on any American it wishes on the theory that all Americans know someone who knows someone else who knows someone who could have spoken to a foreign person working for a foreign government that could wish us ill." 
Trump changed his mind because spies rule over all. This vote happened while the press promoted Trump’s supposed “sh**hole” comment claimed by Sen. Durbin.

Warrantless spying reauthorization passes House. Senate passes.

Tuesday, January 09, 2018

Economy

Amazon stock drives Jeff Bezos's wealth above $105 billion.

Sunday, October 01, 2017

Economy

Alexa is Microsoft's nightmare. It's why Microsoft bought so many voice recognition patents and buried them years ago. Now that they've expired, Alexa will make Windows obsolete.

Sunday, July 23, 2017

Saturday, July 15, 2017

Socialism

In order to keep Amazon's business, the Post Office delivers Amazon packages below cost, hurting Amazon's competitors. It's good to be a crony.

Thursday, July 13, 2017

Regulation

Government thinks Amazon is getting too big. This spells trouble.

Friday, June 16, 2017

Economy

Even the DDN recognizes the craft beer business is a boom.

May second best month on record for new businesses.

West Chester ax-throwing business.

Amazon buys Whole Foods for $13.7 billion. Shares were suspended.

While a supposedly lone leftist nut was shooting three rulers in Washington, rulers were crushing all of us via Fed and political policies.
"The American people are being brought to ruin by three institutions that are mortal threats to liberty and prosperity. To wit, the Federal Reserve, the military/industrial/surveillance complex and a sinecured Congress that is burying unborn generations in debt – even as it sanctimoniously presumes that it is doing god’s work by servicing the beltway racketeers who keep it perpetually in office." 
Great quote.
"On the latter score, it is worth reminding once again. An incumbent House member standing for reelection has a smaller chance of losing his seat than did a Politburo member during the heyday of the postwar Soviet Union."
Great observation. This article touches everything.
"As we will document further tomorrow, the first part of Yellen’s proclamation is a risible lie. There has been zero net gain in industrial production since September 2007; no net gain in breadwinners jobs since January 2001; and zero gains in real median family incomes since 1989."
Oh, boy.

We should name bubble and bust business cycles for the Fed Chairmen who create them.

Saturday, June 10, 2017

Economy

America's big five tech stocks lost $97.5 billion in valuation Friday.

Sunday, May 28, 2017

Thursday, March 30, 2017

Sunday, March 12, 2017

Police State

How the FBI corrupted Geek Squad to spy on people.

How wiretaps theoretically work. In reality the NSA collects everything.

Bin Laden has won.

Wikileaks's Vault 7 press release. More.

17 instances of criminality documented in the CIA Vault 7 leak.

The CIA is not targeting terrorists.
"Among the list of possible targets of the collection are ‘Asset’, ‘Liason Asset’, ‘System Administrator’, ‘Foreign Information Operations’, ‘Foreign Intelligence Agencies’ and ‘Foreign Government Entities’. Notably absent is any reference to extremists or transnational criminals."
Not surprising. Terrorists promote government power.
"As Wikileaks noted, the CIA did not seem especially interested in ISIS, or drug cartels.
But the French Election did interest the CIA. We know they monitored the candidates to intercept communications. The CIA was especially interested in the prospects of French economic growth, specifically which candidates would follow “the German model of export-led growth.”"
Again, not surprising.
"The CIA mission seems to be controlling the world economy and choosing who will win elections of foreign governments. Where is the focus on Isis, China, and Iran coming from? The leaked documents specifically mention 10,000 targets from North America, Europe, and South America."
Not surprising.
"In reality, it is the CIA creating and disseminating these weapons in a disorganized insecure way that makes us all more vulnerable to whoever’s hands the cyber weapons have fallen into. We have been less safe since the CIA built the hacking arsenal."
Exactly.
"Which also brings up more questions about sketchy incidents like the death of investigative reporter Michael Hastings.
Vault 7 confirmed the CIA’s interest in taking over and controlling vehicles. Michael Hastings died in a strange and mysterious car accident.
He was preparing a report on then-CIA Director Brennan’s involvement in sanitizing Obama’s passport records. Hastings died when his car hit a tree and exploded, just three months after Brennan became head of the CIA."
Which is why suddenly everybody is developing a self-driving car.

Self-driving cars should be called hacker-available cars.

The CIA hacks make it easier for Russian, Chinese, Iranians, North Koreans, and terrorists to hack us. That sounds like aiding and abetting the enemy to me.
"When do the unlimited powers of the Intelligence/Security agencies threaten America’s domestic and global national interests? The CIA and its political enablers claim the agency’s essentially unlimited powers, partially revealed by Wikileak’s Vault 7, pose no threat to America’s interests, since they are intended to “defend” American interests.
This is the rationale presented by neocon CIA allies in both political parties: the CIA can’t possibly threaten America’s interests because the CIA defines America’s interests."
That reminds me of Nixon claiming anything done by the president is, but definition, not criminal. It also contradicts what we learned above.

Ransomware didn't lock people out of their hotel rooms, but it can lock people with smart locks out of their houses.

Tech companies in bed with CIA against Wikileaks.

CIA funded Google and Facebook.

The DoD's venture capital network.
"Total participants in the DoD’s Highlands Forum number over a thousand, although sessions largely consist of small closed workshop style gatherings of maximum 25–30 people, bringing together experts and officials depending on the subject. Delegates have included senior personnel from SAIC and Booz Allen Hamilton, RAND Corp., Cisco, Human Genome Sciences, eBay, PayPal, IBM, Google, Microsoft, AT&T, the BBC, Disney, General Electric, Enron, among innumerable others; Democrat and Republican members of Congress and the Senate; senior executives from the US energy industry such as Daniel Yergin of IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates; and key people involved in both sides of presidential campaigns."
"In 1994 — the same year the Highlands Forum was founded under the stewardship of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the ONA, and DARPA — two young PhD students at Stanford University, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, made their breakthrough on the first automated web crawling and page ranking application. That application remains the core component of what eventually became Google’s search service. Brin and Page had performed their work with funding from the Digital Library Initiative (DLI), a multi-agency programme of the National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA and DARPA.
But that’s just one side of the story.
Throughout the development of the search engine, Sergey Brin reported regularly and directly to two people who were not Stanford faculty at all: Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham and Dr. Rick Steinheiser. Both were representatives of a sensitive US intelligence community research programme on information security and data-mining.
Thuraisingham is currently the Louis A. Beecherl distinguished professor and executive director of the Cyber Security Research Institute at the University of Texas, Dallas, and a sought-after expert on data-mining, data management and information security issues. But in the 1990s, she worked for the MITRE Corp., a leading US defense contractor, where she managed the Massive Digital Data Systems initiative, a project sponsored by the NSA, CIA, and the Director of Central Intelligence, to foster innovative research in information technology.
“We funded Stanford University through the computer scientist Jeffrey Ullman, who had several promising graduate students working on many exciting areas,” Prof. Thuraisingham told me. “One of them was Sergey Brin, the founder of Google. The intelligence community’s MDDS program essentially provided Brin seed-funding, which was supplemented by many other sources, including the private sector.”
This sort of funding is certainly not unusual, and Sergey Brin’s being able to receive it by being a graduate student at Stanford appears to have been incidental. The Pentagon was all over computer science research at this time. But it illustrates how deeply entrenched the culture of Silicon Valley is in the values of the US intelligence community."
Government rules tech.

Great quote:
"“Rights aren’t rights if someone can take them away. They’re privileges. That’s all we’ve ever had in this country, is a bill of temporary privileges. And if you read the news even badly, you know that every year the list gets shorter and shorter. Sooner or later, the people in this country are gonna realize the government … doesn’t care about you, or your children, or your rights, or your welfare or your safety… It’s interested in its own power. That’s the only thing. Keeping it and expanding it wherever possible.”— George Carlin" 
Carlin got it.

Blaming FISA for out of control spying.
"The president can order the National Security Agency to spy on anyone at any time for any reason, without a warrant. This is profoundly unconstitutional but absolutely lawful because it is expressly authorized by the FISA statute."
This critique is misguided. Spies are never limited by law, only technology. New laws merely legalize what's already being done.

Yes, the Wikileaks CIA Vault 7 leak proves we live in a police state.
"The massive infection of commonly used software and electronic devices leads to a major problem: proliferation. As these viruses and other invasive programs are unleashed on an unsuspecting public, they fall into the hands of a variety of bad actors: foreign governments, criminals, and teenagers on a lark (not necessarily in descending order of malevolence). This plague is being spread over the Internet by a veritable army of CIA hackers: “By the end of 2016,” WikiLeaks tells us, “the CIA’s hacking division, which formally falls under the agency’s Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI), had over 5000 registered users and had produced more than a thousand hacking systems, trojans, viruses, and other ‘weaponized’ malware.” The inevitable end result: a world infected with so much malware that computers become almost useless – and this parlous condition is paid for by you, the American taxpayer."
Like I said, aiding and abetting the enemy.
"And one more thing: I found it extremely odd that, when the hacking of the DNC and John Podesta’s email was discovered, party officials refused to let the FBI and other law enforcement agencies examine either their server or Podesta’s devices. Instead, they gave it over to CrowdStrike, a private firm that regularly does business with the DNC. CrowdStrike then came out with the now-accepted analysis that it was a Russian job. "
That information is new to me.

Woman asks Amazon's Alexa if it is connected to the CIA. It is.

I'm sure Apple and others have fixed many of the Vault 7 vulnerabilities, but there's always new ones to exploit.

Criminal probe of Wikileaks's leak, not CIA hacking.

Sunday, March 05, 2017

Police State

Trump supports renewal of invasive spy law without modification.

We can only hope for an exodus of talent from the NSA. I'm skeptical.

NSA and GCHQ have intercepted in-flight mobile communications for years.

History of CIA incompetence.

Street lamps to be wired with cameras and microphones in San Diego. I won't visit there.

Spies have so much data on everybody they can selectively reveal whatever they want to benefit or destroy whomever they want. That's why I say NSA is the ultimate power in the country.

UK passes most invasive spy law in western world.

Hacked NSA tools for sale on market.

Prosecutors subpoena Alexa records in criminal case. Amazon claims Alexa is protected by the first amendment. That's a crazy argument. Regardless, Alexa and all other voice command assistants are spying all the time. The government gets that info whether it has a warrant or subpoena or not.

Amazon refuses to turn over Echo recording to Arkansas police.

Microsoft can call for a digital Geneva Convention, but all governments will break it. They always spy to the limits of technology. They limit themselves to legal spying.

Government allows Microsoft to sue it over email surveillance.

Twitter blocks government from accessing user data.

US-born NASA scientist detained at border and coerced into unlocking his phone.

State-sponsored hackers hack journalists.

DHS considers forcing US visitors to surrender social media passwords.

Man arrested for arson based on pacemaker data. Even medical devices are spying on you.

FBI reverts to using fax machines and snail mail to slow down responding to FOIA requests.

Secret rules make it easy for FBI to spy on journalists.

FBI hacked 8,000 computers in 120 countries based on one warrant. FBI uses malware like a grenade.

Fusion centers are a billion dollar boondoggle to promote paranoia.

Groupthink in the 17 member intelligence community which is focused on only expansion.

Obama signed new law against whistleblowers in December.

Why we need whistleblowers.

DHS and FEMA expose 10,000 trainees to ricin.

Anti-surveillance clothing hides people from surveillance cameras.

Local police building their own DNA databases.

Thursday, January 12, 2017

Economy

Amazon plans to add 100,000 US jobs in the next 18 months. That would be excellent, but I'm skeptical.

Friday, January 06, 2017

Police State

Prisoner receives taxpayer-funded sex change operation.

Following the military's lead, now we have transgender cops.

Spying Alexa orders dollhouses based on news report it heard.

Thursday, January 05, 2017

Friday, December 30, 2016

Police State

Demand for recordings made by Amazon Echo regarding murder investigation wake a few people up to the fact that devices that listen to you actually listen to you.

Thursday, October 27, 2016

Thursday, September 08, 2016

Regulation

Tech giants form AI consortium so they can control the patents and market.