Back when I was doing road-shows to raise money for the start-up that didn’t happen, several of the venture capitalists we met with said things like, “right now, we’re investing in blockchain.” As far as I am concerned, they could just have easily said “quantum.”
I don’t really know where to go with some of this; I’m geniunely afraid I’m going to start sounding like a conspiracy theorist. The conspiracies have already staked out their territory, though, which makes this whole topic a bit of a mine-field.
When does a lifeboat look like a Scotch Terrier? It would appear that, if you’re an AI, the difference is a few pixel-shifts, and that’s got interesting implications.
There’s another fun story about cold war submarines, which appears to have now been (semi-?) confirmed. Lots of story hasn’t come out, yet, but it probably will, within the next fifty years.
Recent “be afraid of Russia” propaganda includes scary stories about Russian submarines prowling around submerged cables.
Hey, it’s Marcus – your tactical consultant – here with another necessary bit of tactical stuff to protect you against all the various threats of the modern world. This is something that, well, if you need this, you’ve got some serious problems about being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
By now, you ought to have heard about A/2017 U1 – a large rock that whipped through our solar system at an odd angle off the plane of the ecliptic, moving so fast that it almost certainly could not have come from within our solar system. [rt]
Congratulations to our own Shiv, whose reporting on the J20 case is in VICE. [vice]
Writing something that is timely and fact-filled, in this day of “fake news” is a huge amount of work and takes tremendous dedication. Usually I don’t have much to say about her pieces, because I’m reading them to educate myself about the oppression transpeople experience, and I’m just in absorb mode. For someone like me, who’s coming at that world from “cishet, ignorant” perspective, she’s an invaluable read.
The actions of the police state are a concern Shiv and I share, for different reasons. The stuff she’s writing about is what’s happening on the cutting end of the retro-scope and the intelligence state. All the stuff I post about surveillance is theoretical(-ish) and she’s talking about the fear that real people have to deal with, confronting the abuse of power by the state. It’s only going to get worse.
The retro-scope appears to now be part of the investigative procedure for any incident that has political implications. Because its time-horizon goes about -10 years (with some blurry images back to -20 years) the entire current crop of politicians grew up in a time before retro-scoping existed, so they do not fear the ‘scope, nor do they fully understand it. They will.
I did a google image search for “retroscope” and look at this beauty!
I just stumbled across this one; perhaps it’s what was going on with my browser the other day. I’ve been thinking about how to enumerate all the stuff that’s going on in a system – building a “petri dish” surrounded with sniffers, then watching and memory-scraping my browser to see what it was doing. It sounds like the answer would be “too much.”