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SpyVeillance: Corrupt Cops Take Bribes from Sleezy Corps to Pimp SpyVeillance on You
by grarpamp 21 Jun '21

21 Jun '21

https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2021-06-17/ring-influence… "In a bid to bolster its claims as a crime-fighting tool, Ring deployed a tactic popular in the business world: influencer marketing," reports the Los Angeles Times. "It selected a cadre of brand ambassadors, rewarded them with free gadgets and discount codes, and urged them to use their connections to promote the Santa Monica security camera startup via word of mouth. "In this case, the brand ambassadors were Los Angeles Police Department officers." "You are killing it, by the way. Your code has 14 uses, eleven more and I will be sending you every device that we sell," a Ring employee wrote to one officer in a 2016 email. "Do you have any community meetings or crime prevention fairs coming up?" Ring provided at least 100 LAPD officers with one or more free devices or discount codes and encouraged them to recommend the company's web-connected doorbells and security cameras, emails reviewed by The Times reveal. In more than 15 cases, emails show that officers who received free gadgets or discounts promoted Ring products to fellow police officers or members of the public... [P]articipating officers got tens of thousands of dollars' worth of free and discounted electronics and helped establish a network of personal surveillance cameras that the LAPD could tap into with much less red tape than the typical means of obtaining video. The practice, privacy and criminal justice experts warn, raises the question of whether LAPD officers were serving the public in their interactions with Ring, or if they were serving a private business and themselves... It's unclear whether LAPD officers disclosed their arrangements with Ring to the public or fellow officers.

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Interesting Engineering: Law Enforcement Secretly Ran Part of the Dark Web, Again
by jim bell 20 Jun '21

20 Jun '21

Interesting Engineering: Law Enforcement Secretly Ran Part of the Dark Web, Again. https://interestingengineering.com/law-secretly-ran-part-of-dark-web-again

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[ot][spam] being scared of police
by Karl 20 Jun '21

20 Jun '21

Person a walks up to person b. B: "Let's lock our doors! Take down the surveillance state!" A: [looks around furtively] "Omigod!" B: "What are you, some kind of narc? Come on, everyone is locking their doors!" A: "Are you a plant? Am I in danger? I don't want to get hurt. Is it safer to break the law or obey it here?" B: "Laws telling you not to lock your doors are the man breathing down your ass. Get up and stop milking your own sorry death!" A: "Omigod! Are there such laws as that? I never thought about whether I might get imprisoned for locking my door!" B: "Totally. There's worse stuff than that, too. Why, the national spy agencies are taking 80%[number made up for impact] of your taxes and mostly spend their time actively trying to make people helpless." A: "Omigod! I don't want to be made helpless fighting these people!" B: "The only solution is rip your chains off, throw it down, and fight!" A: "Are you going to hurt me? What I do to fight? Can you rescue me if I'm in trouble with these people? Can they rescue me if I'm in trouble with you?" B: "I've already told you how to be rescued. Stop being a sheep and bite the forces of oppression." A: "I'm ready! I'm scared! I'm bite the forces of oppression until you go away!" B: "Good." B: "Me and A are going to bite the forces of oppression. Who's with us?" C: "A is my friend, and I oppose the government, but not violently, because I have a federal agent friend who follows me everywhere ever since I attended a rally. What do you have to say to my federal agent friend?" B: "Your jerk friend better quit their job and take down the state! You're an agent yourself, I bet!" C: "A is my friend. Are they okay?" B: "I won't fall for your state-sponsored deception!" D: "So, how are things going? And what's your name?" C: "D is a friend who follows me everywhere." A: "Creepy! Do they ever hurt you?" B: "I don't need to give idiots like you my name. Did you know that state-sponsored spy agencies take 80% [number fabricated for impact] of your taxes?" C: "Well, no not directly and physically, but I've been pretty stressed out being followed everywhere." D: [turns to A] "And you? What's your name?" A: "My name is A and B is asking me to fight the state and I just don't want to get hurt!" C: "I mean honestly the state is not always that amazing. Many see voting as fighting the state." B: "Voting is a trick designed to keep you from ever accomplishing anything! Burn down the voting booths!" D: "And your name is B, is it?" B: "My name is C. That's B." [points to C] C: "He knows I'm C, he follows me everywhere D: "Oh, B and I are good friends, I was just putting on a show for you all." A: "Where is normality? Where is normality?"

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[ot][spam] small mourning
by Karl 20 Jun '21

20 Jun '21

I read the fbi hacking scads of criminals via centralised compromises, mostly to hunt drugs. When I went to the place where my issue catalyzed, the activists' systems were all compromised, mostly disabled. It's really rough to live a normal life with your systems getting disabled. It's not hard to resolve such things with some technological skills, but I got targeted and couldn't do so. Now my systems get disabled and things. I wonder if there is some way to ask for help resolving things. I think once I found a cybercrime portal but it basically just seems like an anonymous drop box without any relation back. These people couldn't use their computers; for years I have struggled to use mine. The fact that they keep breaking gives direct trackable evidence for whyever they are breaking. How do we pursue these things? What is really going on? Are there people with systems that are actually secure?

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Censorship: Project Veritas - News Media Fires Reporters, Censors BTC HCQ Poor Empowerment
by grarpamp 20 Jun '21

20 Jun '21

Fox Affiliate Fires Reporter After Release Of "Censorship" Clips Via Project Veritas by Isabel van Brugen via The Epoch Times, https://www.theepochtimes.com/project-veritas-releases-fox-26-reporters-cen… https://www.instagram.com/real.ivory/ https://www.instagram.com/p/CQKXscKpy9-/ https://twitter.com/EricSpracklen/status/1404921756561854476 https://www.theepochtimes.com/giving-the-right-name-to-the-virus-causing-a-… https://www.projectveritas.com/ Fox News doing this, imagine what rest of Fake News Media is doing... A Fox affiliate station has fired a reporter after she went off-script during a weather segment on Monday saying she is being allegedly muzzled by Fox News, and later shared with Project Veritas recordings she says show the network’s censorship and corruption. Ivory Hecker, 32, who formerly worked for Fox 26 in Houston, has been let go by the station, a representative confirmed in a statement to several news outlets Tuesday. Hecker during the live segment claimed that Fox Corporation has been “muzzling” her to “keep certain information from you, the viewer.” “And from what I am gathering I am not the only reporter being subjected to this. I am going to be releasing some recordings about what goes on behind the scenes at Fox because it applies to you, the viewers. I found a nonprofit journalism group called Project Veritas that’s going to help put that out tomorrow so tune into them,” she said, before proceeding with the weather report. The 32-year-old, according to Fox 26’s website, was a general assignment reporter and fill-in anchor. She previously worked for KARE-11, an NBC affiliate station in Minneapolis. Hecker’s Instagram says she is a music recording artist who has released several songs. Hecker took her clips to investigative journalism nonprofit Project Veritas. In an Instagram story on her personal account, she said that she had made it clear to her bosses that she was recording them. She told Project Veritas that the Fox affiliate station “came at my throat for standing up against censorship.” “What’s happening within Fox Corp is an operation of prioritizing corporate interests above the viewer’s interest and, therefore, operating in a deceptive way,” Hecker told Project Veritas’ James O’Keefe. “It is unspoken, but if you accidentally step outside the narrative, if you don’t sense what that narrative is, and go with it, there will be great consequences for you,” she continued. “My newsroom kind of groups everyone into racial groups.” In one of the clips Hecker shared with Project Veritas, Lee Meier, an assistant news director with the station can be heard saying: “It’s not just about the viewers; it’s about what our CEO reads; it’s about what our GM [general manager] reads.” BREAKING: Fox 26 Reporter Releases tape of ‘Corruption,’ ‘Censorship.’ Fox Corp Boss told Hecker “cease & desist” posting on Hydroxychloroquine & ‘Poor African-Americans’ don’t care about Bitcoin. “Viewers being Deceived”#Fox26Whistleblower pic.twitter.com/vwVcy3MBvS — veritastips(a)protonmail.xn--com-v392bja (@EricSpracklen) June 15, 2021 Meier implies in the clip that the station wouldn’t run a story on the cryptocurrency based on specific demographics. “I have passed on Bitcoin stories…Bitcoin for poor African American audience at 5, it’s probably not going to play. That’s a choice I’m making. An editorial choice,” Meier says in the recording. Hecker also revealed how she was instructed to “cease and desist” on content that would present hydroxychloroquine as a feasible treatment for COVID-19, the disease caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus. She told O’Keefe that she was sent to a hospital to report on COVID-19 treatment, and ended up interviewing Dr. Joseph Varon, chief of critical care at United Memorial Medical Center on his use of hydroxychloroquine. “We have used it. I mean, we know it’s a drug that has been politicized up to the wazoo. We’ve used it. We use it with good success,” Varon told Hecker. In response, Susan Schiller, Fox 26 vice president and news director, told Hecker she had “failed as a reporter.” “You need to cease and desist posting about hydroxychloroquine,” Schiller says in one clip, citing a New England Journal of Medicine study on the drug. “What’s happening within Fox Corp is an operation of prioritizing corporate interests above the viewer’s interest and, therefore, operating in a deceptive way,” said Hecker. “The viewers are being deceived by a carefully crafted narrative in some stories.” Fox 26 Houston has responded to several news outlets through a company spokesperson: “FOX 26 adheres to the highest editorial standards of accuracy and impartiality. This incident involves nothing more than a disgruntled former employee seeking publicity by promoting a false narrative produced through selective editing and misrepresentation.” Hecker announced on her personal Instagram page late Tuesday that she will soon be releasing additional recordings that show “the depths to which the company will stoop.” “This story has not fully been told,” she told her followers. The Epoch Times has contacted Fox 26 and Fox Corporation for comment.

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[ot] slavery
by Karl 20 Jun '21

20 Jun '21

If you know the answer to slavery, we need to _succeed_ at whatever the best solution part is, because it will _only get harder and harder_.

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Tom's Hardware: Crucial Caves: Says Chia Cryptomining Voids SSD Warranty, Then Retracts Post
by jim bell 20 Jun '21

20 Jun '21

Tom's Hardware: Crucial Caves: Says Chia Cryptomining Voids SSD Warranty, Then Retracts Post. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/crucial-says-chia-cryptomining-voids-ssd-… Jim Bell's comment: I wonder if DRAM-based SSD's would be practical for Chia mining. There shouldn't be a need for non-volatility. SD- cards get a lot of their density by constructing them in many layers, up to 144 I recently read. I haven't been keeping up with DRAM construction techniques, but I wonder if DRAMs can be multi-layered in a similar way. I also wonder what is the wearout mechanism for SD non-volatile memories. Flash Memory Reliability, Life & Wear » Electronics Notes | | | | | | | | | | | Flash Memory Reliability, Life & Wear » Electronics Notes Flash memory reliability and lifetime are key issues - find out all about Flash memory life, wear levelling and failure mechanisms. | | | |

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Cryptocurrency: Homomorphic Encryption Rising
by grarpamp 20 Jun '21

20 Jun '21

As in other threads, Homomorphic, ZK, etc Cryptoprivacy research are advancing. More papers, libraries, demo applications, etc being published. Google, Microsoft, and others recently dropped code in the game. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption https://homomorphicencryption.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography https://github.com/google/fully-homomorphic-encryption https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/homomorphic-encryption/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/microsoft-seal https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/password-monitor-safeguarding… https://github.com/microsoft/electionguard https://github.com/Microsoft/SEAL https://palisade-crypto.org/ https://github.com/cpeikert/Lol https://github.com/vernamlab/cuHE https://github.com/lca1/lattigo https://github.com/homenc/HElib https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/resources/press-kits-labs-… https://www.ibm.com/security/services/homomorphic-encryption https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2020/06/ibm-releases-fully-homomorphic-e… https://developer.ibm.com/solutions/security/blogs/new-open-source-security… https://github.com/IBM/fhe-toolkit-linux

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[ot] [madness] healing psychosis with ai
by Karl 20 Jun '21

20 Jun '21

Text follows this introductory line. I believe I have this fully sorted out. Many problems can crop up on the path, and I believe I have a solution to any possible problems. The thought parts are hard to sustain, bring together, and retain, so there's only a bit here and there. Basically, the patient works with an AI as if they were part of a GAN. The AI learns to predict the behavior of the patient, and the patient learns to understand their own behavior. As the AI forms a model of the patient's psychosis, it maps things that trigger it or worsen it. The patient can then make informed decisions on how to act. They could pursue one or more of: - alteration of their brain to prevent the experiences - investigation into how the experiences developed and why they continue, in order to resolve them therapeutically - avoidance of the events that stimulate their experiences They could engage - personal cognitive training to learn to handle things - augmentation to warn them of or prevent the experiences This sounds both exotic and easy, but we have the research to do this today, and I am not aware of it being done. Research can take years to reach the doctor's office as things move through clinical trials. I've seen visualisations of AI models for image-recognition. I've also seen that AI models of human behavior are widespread among politics and sales. I'm sure visualising models of human behavior has already been done. I will probably be trying to work on this. But I expect public research to outpace me due to my issues. My eta would be a couple decades.

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Covid Crazies
by coderman 20 Jun '21

20 Jun '21

when thinking of usability of security features, i always wonder about diminished mental states - how do you handle authentication when the mind is unstable? (biometrics work, but they cannot be the whole piece. e.g. scanning a dead finger...) --- https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/28/health/covid-psychosis-mental.html Small Number of Covid Patients Develop Severe Psychotic Symptoms Most had no history of mental illness and became psychotic weeks after contracting the virus. Cases are expected to remain rare but are being reported worldwide. Almost immediately, Dr. Hisam Goueli could tell that the patient who came to his psychiatric hospital on Long Island this summer was unusual. The patient, a 42-year-old physical therapist and mother of four young children, had never had psychiatric symptoms or any family history of mental illness. Yet there she was, sitting at a table in a beige-walled room at South Oaks Hospital in Amityville, N.Y., sobbing and saying that she kept seeing her children, ages 2 to 10, being gruesomely murdered and that she herself had crafted plans to kill them. “It was like she was experiencing a movie, like ‘Kill Bill,’” Dr. Goueli, a psychiatrist, said. The patient described one of her children being run over by a truck and another decapitated. “It’s a horrifying thing that here’s this well-accomplished woman and she’s like ‘I love my kids, and I don’t know why I feel this way that I want to decapitate them,’” he said. The only notable thing about her medical history was that the woman, who declined to be interviewed but allowed Dr. Goueli to describe her case, had become infected with the coronavirus in the spring. She had experienced only mild physical symptoms from the virus, but, months later, she heard a voice that first told her to kill herself and then told her to kill her children. At South Oaks, which has an inpatient psychiatric treatment program for Covid-19 patients, Dr. Goueli was unsure whether the coronavirus was connected to the woman’s psychological symptoms. “Maybe this is Covid-related, maybe it’s not,” he recalled thinking. - Thanks for reading The Times. [Subscribe to The Times](https://www.nytimes.com/subscription?campaignId=9L9L9) “But then,” he said, “we saw a second case, a third case and a fourth case, and we’re like, ‘There’s something happening.’” Indeed, doctors are reporting similar cases across the country and around the world. A small number of Covid patients who had never experienced mental health problems are developing severe psychotic symptoms weeks after contracting the coronavirus. In interviews and scientific articles, doctors described: A 36-year-old nursing home employee in North Carolina who became so paranoid that she believed her three children would be kidnapped and, to save them, tried to pass them through a fast-food restaurant’s drive-through window. A 30-year-old construction worker in New York City who became so delusional that he imagined his cousin was going to murder him, and, to protect himself, he tried to strangle his cousin in bed. Advertisement [Continue reading the main story](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/28/health/covid-psychosis-mental.htm… A 55-year-old woman in Britain had hallucinations of monkeys and a lion and became convinced a family member had been replaced by an impostor. Beyond individual reports, a British [study of neurological or psychiatric complications](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7316461/) in 153 patients hospitalized with Covid-19 found that 10 people had “new-onset psychosis.” Another study identified [10 such patients in one hospital in Spain](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165178120315092?…. And in Covid-related social media groups, medical professionals discuss seeing patients with similar symptoms in the Midwest, Great Plains and elsewhere. “My guess is any place that is seeing Covid is probably seeing this,” said Dr. Colin Smith at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, who helped treat the North Carolina woman. He and other doctors said their patients were too fragile to be asked whether they wanted to be interviewed for this article, but some, including the [North Carolina woman](https://casereports.bmj.com/content/13/8/e236940), agreed to have their cases described in scientific papers. Medical experts say they expect that such extreme psychiatric dysfunction will affect only a small proportion of patients. But the cases are considered examples of another way the Covid-19 disease process can affect mental health and brain function. In Her Words: Where women rule the headlines. Although the coronavirus was initially thought primarily to cause respiratory distress, there is now ample evidence of many other symptoms, including [neurological](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/05/health/Covid-patients-ment…, cognitive and psychological effects, that could emerge even in patients who didn’t develop serious lung, heart or circulatory problems. Such symptoms can be just as debilitating to a person’s ability to function and work, and it’s often unclear [how long they will last or how to treat them](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/health/covid-long-term-symptoms.ht…. Experts increasingly believe brain-related effects may be linked to the body’s immune system response to the coronavirus and possibly to vascular problems or surges of inflammation caused by the disease process. “Some of the neurotoxins that are reactions to immune activation can go to the brain, through the blood-brain barrier, and can induce this damage,” said Dr. Vilma Gabbay, a co-director of the Psychiatry Research Institute at Montefiore Einstein in the Bronx. Brain scans, spinal fluid analyses and other tests didn’t find any brain infection, said Dr. Gabbay, whose hospital has treated [two patients](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7414775/?fbclid=IwAR… with post-Covid psychosis: a 49-year-old man who heard voices and believed he was the devil and a 34-year-old woman who began carrying a knife, disrobing in front of strangers and putting hand sanitizer in her food. Physically, most of these patients didn’t get very sick from Covid-19, reports indicate. The patients that Dr. Goueli treated experienced no respiratory problems, but they did have subtle neurological symptoms like hand tingling, vertigo, headaches or diminished smell. Then, two weeks to several months later, he said, they “develop this profound psychosis, which is really dangerous and scary to all of the people around them.” Also striking is that most patients have been in their 30s, 40s and 50s. “It’s very rare for you to develop this type of psychosis in this age range,” Dr. Goueli said, since such symptoms more typically accompany schizophrenia in young people or dementia in older patients. And some patients — like the physical therapist who took herself to the hospital — understood something was wrong, while usually “people with psychosis don’t have an insight that they’ve lost touch with reality.” Some post-Covid patients who developed psychosis needed weeks of hospitalization in which doctors tried different medications before finding one that helped. Dr. Robert Yolken, a neurovirology expert at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, said that although people might recover physically from Covid-19, in some cases their immune systems, might be unable to shut down or might remain engaged because of “delayed clearance of a small amount of virus.” Persistent immune activation is also a leading explanation for [brain fog](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/11/health/covid-survivors.html)and memory problems bedeviling many Covid survivors, and Emily Severance, a schizophrenia expert at Johns Hopkins, said post-Covid cognitive and psychiatric effects might result from “something similar happening in the brain.” It may hinge on which brain region the immune response affects, Dr. Yolken said, adding, “some people have neurological symptoms, some people psychiatric and many people have a combination.” Experts don’t know whether genetic makeup or perhaps an undetected predisposition for psychiatric illness put some people at greater risk. Dr. Brian Kincaid, medical director of psychiatric emergency department services at Duke, said the North Carolina woman once had a skin reaction to another virus, which might suggest her immune system responds zealously to viral infections. Sporadic cases of post-infectious psychosis and mania have occurred with other viruses, including the 1918 flu and the coronaviruses SARS and MERS. “We think that it’s not unique to Covid,” said Dr. Jonathan Alpert, chairman of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, who co-wrote the report on the Montefiore patients. He said studying these cases might help to increase doctors’ understanding of psychosis. The symptoms have ranged widely, some surprisingly severe for a first psychotic episode, experts said. Dr. Goueli said a 46-year-old pharmacy technician, whose family brought her in after she became fearful that evil spirits had invaded her home, “cried literally for four days” in the hospital. He said the 30-year-old construction worker, brought to the hospital by the police, became “extremely violent,” dismantling a hospital radiator and using its parts and his shoes to try to break out of a window. He also swung a chair at hospital staff. How long the psychosis lasted and patients’ response to treatment has varied. The woman in Britain — whose symptoms included paranoia about the color red and terror that nurses were devils who would harm her and a family member — took about 40 days to recover, according to [a case report](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7477483/#:~:text=To%20…. The 49-year-old man treated at Montefiore was discharged after several weeks’ hospitalization, but “he was still struggling two months out” and required readmission, Dr. Gabbay said. The North Carolina woman, who was convinced that cellphones were tracking her and that her partner would steal her pandemic stimulus money, didn’t improve with the first medication, said Dr. Jonathan Komisar at Duke, who said doctors initially thought her symptoms reflected bipolar disorder. “When we began to realize that maybe this isn’t going to resolve immediately,” he said, she was given an antipsychotic, risperidone and discharged in a week. The physical therapist who planned to murder her children had more difficulty. “Every day, she was getting worse,” Dr. Goueli said. “We tried probably eight different medicines,” including antidepressants, antipsychotics and lithium. “She was so ill that we were considering electroconvulsive therapy for her because nothing was working.” About two weeks into her hospitalization, she couldn’t remember what her 2-year-old looked like. Calls with family were heartbreaking because “‘You could hear one in the background saying ‘When is Mom coming home?’” Dr. Goueli said. “That brought her a lot of shame because she was like, ‘I can’t be around my kids and here they are loving me.’” Ultimately, risperidone proved effective and after four weeks, she returned home to her family, “95 percent perfect,” he said. “We don’t know what the natural course of this is,” Dr. Goueli said. “Does this eventually go away? Do people get better? How long does that normally take? And are you then more prone to have other psychiatric issues as a result? There are just so many unanswered questions.”

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