Tag: Bullshit

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Enough Already!

That’s it! Let’s take all social media platforms down! Yeah I said it!

All podcasts, Twitter, FaceBook, Gab, and all the rest!

I’m sick of seeing yet another self righteous pundit, news organization, or whoever the hell else, BITCHING about people espousing views that they don’t agree with. We’re supposed to be a free country, we’re supposed to have freedom of speech, we’re supposed to respect people whose views are different from our own. RIGHT?

Apparently NOT!

The latest two examples of violation of free speech is this article in Breitbart. Followed by this little gem from The Washington Post.

The Breitbart piece talks about the AP, yeah, you read that right… The Associated Press making the case that Podcasts should be de-platformed due to “incitement” on these podcasts.

The Washington Post article describes Apple being sued in federal court to force Apple to de-platform Telegram. Telegram, don’t ya know is where all the Parler users went after finding out that Parler was going to be screwed over by Amazon Web Services.

Here’s a idea. Shut it all down. Our phone batteries would last longer.

That would have the benefit of keeping all the village idiots in their own villages. If you stop them from talking to each other, you’ll prevent them from gathering steam. You might also have a side benefit that if they never meet, we don’t have to worry about an every increasing number of idiots that we’ll have to put up with and take care of.

Then we have this brilliant Senior News analyst from CNN (Communist News Network) who’s trying to float a balloon about censoring OAN & Newsmax.

Both of which appear to be conservative oriented news broadcasters. I’ve not watched either of them, because by the time I learned about them, I was too disgusted by the way the country was heading after the 2020 election to give a rancid fuck.

This is so similar to the way that the NAZI party came to power I can’t stand it. If they actually taught history in schools today and didn’t sanitize the brutality of various regimes people would know this.

First control the narrative, then control the media, then censor anyone with differing beliefs, cast everyone who doesn’t agree with you as anti-(insert the noun de jour) BLM, ANTIFA, Left, Progressive, Equality, Woman, blah, blah, blah. Then take over the country. Next build the camps, then try the re-education, and finally kill EVERYONE!

But… humanity appears doomed to repeat the horrors of the past.

A couple thousand years from now, in a barren wasteland some guy will find a TESLA buried in the sand. People will oooh and ahhh and decide it’s from Aliens. One curious person in the group will recognize that it was made by humans, be curious about how we fell so far, and the whole process of a civilization crawling out of the muck will start over.

Maybe they’ll get it right the next time.

The fall of America to communism or socialism won’t destroy all civilization. But the pervasive backwards thinking cult of leftism in the world just might.

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And the hits just keep on coming.

There was this lovely article yesterday on Breitbart. The original article is linked here. I’ve copied the article below.

I submit that this data breach is a direct result of Amazon Web Services negligence. This data wouldn’t have been exposed if they 1) Hadn’t de-platformed Parler. 2) Had provided reasonable notification and time to Parler to remove their data from AWS servers.

I won’t be surprised if the leaked user data ended up on one of The Lincoln Projects communistic hit lists.

Now, I as one of the class of individuals potentially affected by AWS and Twilio’s negligence DEMAND restitution.

I’d like to see a class action lawsuit against AWS and Twilio on the part of the verified members of Parler.

Parler said they verified members for security. Part of the Terms of Service, If I recall correctly, was that if you engaged in unlawful behavior as a verified user, that Parler could and would provide your information to appropriate law enforcement. I personally had no problem with that. It seemed reasonable and correct.

I do have a major problem with my data being scraped and distributed across the internet. It’s one thing to provide information as a law abiding citizen in exchange for access and posting privileges on a site. It’s quite another thing to have my data made public in an age of cancel culture and rabidly communistic behavior on the part of a specific party within our own government.

Parler Suffers Massive Data leak

Recent reports claim that 70 terabytes of user data from social media network Parler have been leaked online.

CyberNews reports that self-drscribed security researchers performed a massive data scrape of the social media network Parler before it was taken offline by Amazon Web Services. The data scrape captured user profile data, user information, and other private and administrative information.

A Twitter user going by @donk_enby announced the scrape, claiming that over a million video URLs had been collected. Twitter itself suffered a massive hack of prominent accounts in 2020.

I am now crawling URLs of all videos uploaded to Parler. Sequentially from latest to oldest. VIDXXX.txt files coming up, 50k chunks, there will be 1.1M URLs total: https://t.co/YUl8CtoeEA

This may include things from deleted/private posts.

— crash override (@donk_enby) January 10, 2021

The Twitter account claims that the posts are linked to accounts that posted them and some of the video and images contain location information. It’s also said to include data from Parler’s “Verified Citizens,” which are users of the network who have verified their identity by uploading photographs of government-issued IDs such as a driver’s license or passport.

The data scrape also appeared to include deleted posts which would mean that Parler kept user data after users attempted to delete it.

a sample of what’s in there pic.twitter.com/5o8CBRrmgc

— crash override (@donk_enby) January 9, 2021

Parler has previously claimed to have over 10 million users but was shut down after google and Apple removed the website’s smartphone apps from their app stores. A short time later, Amazon Web Services announced they would be removing the site’s hosting services, alleging that Parler failed to properly moderate its platform.

Some Reddit users allege that the user data scrape was made possible due to Twilio, an American cloud communications platform that provided Parelr with a phone number verification service and has since cut ties with the company.

In a press release announcing plans to cut ties with the platform, Twilio revealed which services Parler was using which allowed hackers to determine that it was possible to create users and verified accounts without actual verification.

Once the was discovered, they were allegedly able to get behind the login box API that is used for content delivery, allowing them to see which user shad moderator rights and in turn allowing them to reset passwords of existing users. As Twilio was no longer authenticating emails, hackers were able to access admin accounts easily.

Breitbart News has reached out to Parler for comment on this story.

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com

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Sometimes I ask Questions I’m not supposed to…

ADT security and I parted ways yesterday. Another divorce and another reduction in mothly expenses. They’ve been replaced by a Simplisafe system and thus far I’m far more impressed with the Simplisafe than I ever was with ADT.

The sensors are smaller, the control pad is smaller, the installation or removal of sensors is a snap, and doesn’t require arcane incantations like the ADT did. The price for monitoring is about 1/2 what ADT was charging.

There’s the rub.

When I called ADT to tell them, “You’re outta here,” suddenly they were interested in me. In the 10 years we’ve been ADT’s customer, we’ve had 4 service calls. 1 Installation, and 3 repair calls. The bill has been paid on time, and for many years they took the cash directly from the account and all was well.

Then I noticed the price going up. I didn’t think much of it. I figured inflation, and cost of doing business. Then the monthly price went up sharply and around the same time due to various human errors on our part we had a couple of false alarms. Both of which we canceled with the appropriate codes and countersigns. But the police still showed up 3 -4 hours later, after we’d been assured by ADT dispatch that they’d cancel the police call.

The police told us that ADT almost never contacted them to cancel a call and that they (the police) hated ADT for that and other reasons.

While speaking to the ADT Customer Service person I mentioned the rise in fees and falsehoods that ADT dispatch had engaged in. I also mentioned that the system was exactly as it was when it had been installed and that didn’t make sense to me.

You’d have thought that when the last technician was out here to replace the cellular communication module he’d have mentioned that there were newer improved systems that we could upgrade to. Those systems being more capable, efficient and lower cost to maintain and work with.

Suddenly, the Customer Service person said we could reduce your monthly fee to about 1/2 of what they’d been charging me. I told the person, “thank you.” but it’s too late. Then she got a bit miffed.

Whatever! Within an hour of that phone call I’d disabled the system, and removed all the sensors. Now, I’m patching the holes in the wall from the 10 x 8 control pad.

While I was scraping off all the leftover glue from the entry sensors, it occurred to me that if ADT could offer me 1/2 price reduction, that the price they were charging could always have been at the lower rate.

Then I remembered that Cox Cable had played the same game. They raised the rate per month gradually until I called them and told ’em I wanted to cancel service. Suddenly the price could be magically reduced by a substantial amount.

This indicates that these companies at least are charging much more for their services than they are actually worth.

Which leads me to the question:

Why not charge a fair price for your service in the first place?

I know that it’s a money making process to increase the rates yearly, regardless of actual need. I wonder if corporations would find it more profitable in the long run to just be honest.

If they’re going to raise rates, explain to their customers that costs have increased by X and that rates will be increased by Y to facilitate continued good service and provide for expansion to increase service levels. Most customers, myself included would understand that.

But customers like me tend to get very annoyed when we reach our breaking point, and during our cancellation call, suddenly find that, for who knows how many years, we’ve been ripped off.

The ADT Divorce is final. I save 1/2 on the monthly security bill with Simplisafe and have a smarter more adaptable system too.

I’m just working on simplifying my world and reducing the costs too. If you’ve had services in place for a long time. Maybe it’s time to call ’em up and see if they’re ripping you off.

I’ll grant you, you shouldn’t have to do it, but rattle their cages and see if discounts fall out.

Have a great day.