Security

Facebook Facial Recognition Was Criminal. Deleting It Is A Coverup Story.

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Facebook announced very publicly it was deleting its trove of facial recognition data. Somehow this has been falsely reported as Facebook won’t use facial recognition.

Let me be very clear here: Facebook said it will continue using facial recognition.

The reports bury this fact so far down it’s highly suspicious. Why would all the headlines say Facebook has stopped using facial recognition while in fact carrying a buried lede like this one:

…the company signaled facial recognition technology may be used in its products in the future.

Future? That’s today. Facebook is literally saying they will continue to use facial recognition. Please everyone stop reporting this as an end to their use!

NO NO NO and NO

Even worse, Facebook tried to use specious safety reasons to argue that facial recognition has a notable upside.

Meta’s vice-president of artificial intelligence, Jerome Pesenti, said the technology had helped visually impaired and blind users.

Capturing faces was to help visually impaired and blind Facebook users? Come on. This is like someone saying at least fascism kept the trains running on time (it didn’t). What a way to throw its blind users under the bus. You think facial recognition is bad? Well now Facebook is telling you you’re a bad person because you must hate blind people.

Let me very clear here: Facebook is covering something up that is very bad.

Deleting all those Yann LeCunn developed templates and databases from sub-second facial scans has to be related to the fact that regulators are coming, and that internal documents are leaking.

Privacy watchdogs in Britain and Australia have opened a joint investigation into facial recognition company Clearview AI…

This is the actual headline we should be seeing for Facebook, not a bunch of puffery about it being the good guy for deleting data.

…following an investigation, Australia privacy regulator, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC), has found that the company breached citizens’ privacy. “The covert collection of this kind of sensitive information is unreasonably intrusive and unfair,” said OAIC privacy commissioner Angelene Falk in a press statement. “It carries significant risk of harm to individuals, including vulnerable groups such as children and victims of crime…”

Facebook likely knows of a serious breach and ongoing misuse of its facial recognition data such that it’s covering up here (not unlike the massive coverup operation by Yahoo when it was breached).

Is there a smoke plume coming out of headquarters for all the internal memos on facial recognition they’re burning right now?

Black smoke rises from the roof of the Consulate-General of Russia Friday, Sept. 1, 2017, in San Francisco. The U.S. on Thursday ordered Russia to shut its San Francisco consulate and close offices in Washington and New York within 48 hours in response to Russia’s decision last month to cut U.S. diplomatic staff in Russia. Fireman were called to the consul, but were turned away after being told there was no problem. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)

Why else would their PR department be so odiously twisting news into “we’re shutting down facial recognition” while in the same breath saying “we’re still using facial recognition”.

Shame on journalists for reporting without doing a common sense check of the content.

Something very bad must have happened (after all, we’re talking about Facebook), and management seems to be pushing a very hot global coverup operation by manipulating the news cycles to get ahead of it.

Security

Toyota Bans Resale of Land Cruisers

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Here’s a fascinating development in supply-chain security. Toyota is trying to prevent their vehicles from ending up being used by extremists (a very old problem) by creating an explicit agreement with their buyers.

With over 22,000 pre-orders for the new 300 Series, Japanese publication Creative311 reports that Toyota Japan now requires that an agreement be signed, confirming that any new Land Cruiser purchased will not be resold.

The other argument made is not about militants; allegedly Toyota also is trying to prevent artificial scarcity from hedge buyers soaking up supplies to spike prices.

Although, to be fair, financial extremism is still a form of extremism. Both forms of extremism could be seen as criminal or even terror.

History, Security

Charity Spend Doesn’t Compensate for Billionaire Misconduct

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Margaret Olivia Sage was a school teacher who married into wealth. After being widowed she rapidly dedicated her inheritance to the betterment of others.

If you think charity spend by billionaires today is controversial, just look back at the early 1900s during industrialization. Let’s start in 1907 when Margaret Olivia Sage invented a new level of charity, by setting up the first private family foundation (causal analysis to alleviate poverty) with a unprecedented and whopping $10 million.

In the 37 years of their marriage, Russell and Olivia Sage were to make only three major donations: to the Troy Female Seminary, the Women’s Hospital, and the American Seamen’s Friend Society, totaling approximately $220,000. In the years after Russell’s passing, however, Olivia made up for lost time. […] When Russell Sage died in 1906, he left a fortune of $75 million to his wife. She proceeded to give away approximately $45 million in the next dozen years before her own death in 1918.

John D. Rockefeller saw Margaret’s genuine acts and smelled a loophole. He soon after applied for his own charter for a completely open-ended grant making foundation (the genesis of American “think tanks” for political sway).

Theodore Roosevelt replied:

No amount of charity in spending such fortunes can compensate in any way for the misconduct in acquiring them.

In a 1910 speech (penned by Gifford Pinchot) from the hallowed ground of John Brown in Kansas, to an audience estimated at 30,000, he went even further in his advice:

Ruin for our democracy, he warned, will be “inevitable if our national life brings us nothing better than swollen fortunes for the few.” […] A fortune “gained without doing damage to the community” he added, deserves no praise. Americans needed to set a higher standard. We should permit fortunes “to be gained only so long as the gaining represents benefit to the community.”

More to the point, William Jewett Tucker pointed out Carnegie unjustly cut wages of his workers to enrich himself, using charity acts to obscure it. Tucker wrote:

There is no greater mistake… than that of trying to make charity do the work of justice.

For example, Bill Gates systematically destroyed trust in the personal computer through a series of lies and negligence for profit.

80% of people surveyed did not trust Gates in 2004 when he announced that spam would be gone by 2006.

Guess where Silicon Valley today gets its ideas about big false promises from.

Gates’ absolute stance on ignoring safety and security in a dangerous rush to market, combined with infamously predatory tactics, birthed the crisis of malware and ransomware millions of people suffer from even today. Spam still isn’t gone.

He recanted somewhat in 2001, arguably admitting his wealth accumulation had been immoral for two decades, yet… damage was done and he’s not spending his billions on fixing the global catastrophe he created, nor surrendering it to people who need it most (e.g. working on accountability and reparations let alone justice).

Poetry, Security

Psychology of Poe’s Raven: Creating the Void Just to Fill It?

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A book recently published has multiple essays that explore the Psychology in Edgar Allen Poe

Sean J. Kelly intelligently examines, through a Lacanian psychoanalytic framework, the aesthetic effects of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven” (1845), specifically those effects produced by the poem’s sublime architectonics of present-absence. While critics have examined the role of the sublime and uncanny in the poem, most of these studies have focused on providing an historical context for Poe’s aesthetics or establishing cultural sources for the poem’s symbolic imagery. By contrast, Kelly aims to demonstrate that both the form and content of “The Raven” anticipate the psychoanalytic, specifically Freudian-Lacanian, concept of das Ding—the mythical “Thing”—which Jacques Lacan, in Seminar VII, argues is the lost object “attached to whatever is open, lacking, or gaping at the center of our desire.” Because, according to Lacan’s theory, this concept names the void around which human subjectivity forms and all subsequent desire turns, art functions, in essence, to “creat[e] the void and thereby introduce[e] the possibility of filling it.”