#AxisOfEasy 142: Get Ready For mandatory Coronavirus App Tracking And Social Credit

#AxisOfEasy 142: Get ready for mandatory Coronavirus app tracking and Social Credit from Mark Jeftovic on Vimeo.

 

CBC teaches kids how to neutralize their silly parents conspiracy theories

This little vignette from the CBC teaches you how to deal with your dopey parents who drop ridiculous misinformation into family group chats.  It cautions against telling your out of touch dad, for example, how idiotic he’s being (“he’ll just double down then”).

Instead, hit him with some empathy “you’re right dad, these are scary times”, finally send him some links from credible sources, like maybe the CBC, and established scientists.

I can’t find the original piece on The National website, the tweet is here:

 

One of the few companies actually experiencing a boom right now is Amazon.

Since it is tough all over,  with people scambling to #LearnToCode or somehow eke out a living online, Amazon is doing their bit…. By cutting affiliate revenue shares by up to 80% across certain categories:

Furniture and home improvement products will drop from 8% to 3% percent, while affiliate commissions on groceries and food products will be chopped from 5% to 1%.

We should just start calling them “the company store” from now on.

 

Business is booming for surveillance corp Palantir as revenues exceed $1 billion

Surveillance, also bullish.  We reported a few weeks ago that Peter Theil’s shadowy Palantir was diving into the coronavirus tracking and monitoring business.  We introduced Palantir back in #AxisOfEasy 46.

“Palantir markets its services to governments and corporations like JP Morgan to conduct pervasive surveillance.  From vacuuming up emails, GPS locations from corporate smartphones, and transcripts of phone calls, Palantir uses everything it can get its hands on”.

Things are looking up for the privately held company, who is on track to have revenues in excess of $1 billion this year, up 35% from last year.

 

Sale of .ORG TLD has been stalled pending inquiries by AG

The sale of the .ORG registry from Internet Society to a private equity firm called Thanos or something, no wait, Ethos, Ethos Capital, has been stalled.  The sale is contingent on ICANN approval, which was supposed to render their decision on April 17th.

Xavier Becerra, California’s Attorney General, sent a letter to ICANN asserting that all non-profit trusts in the state come under his jurisdiction and requested various documents about the proposed transaction (we reported on this back in #AxisOfEasy 131).  ICANN has pushed the decision out (so far) to May 4th.

 

Kirikos: The ICANN PDP for Rights Protection Mechanisms has been captured

Domain policy expert George Kirikos is trying to sound the alarm on a seemingly obscure policy initiative within ICANN that could have far-reaching implications.  The policy is called “The Rights Protection Mechanism” (RPM) and is currently in PDP (Policy Development Process).  We touched on this in earlier stages of the track to note that George Kirikos had been ejected from the Working Group (WG) for (ostensibly) egregious use of a bad word (that word was “wishlist”) or more realistically, because he was too meddlesome to the Intellectual Property interests dominating the discussion.

According to George we are now looking at an emerging policy that could include such draconian measures as revoking an entire domain portfolio, even domains that do not infringe any trademarks, after losing 2 URS disputes.

He’s writing a series breaking all this down and if you’re a domain investor or just somebody who has an interest in a fair shake for dispute mechanisms, check it out:

Read: https://freespeech.com/2020/04/16/icann-rpm-pdp-phase-1-comment-period-is-another-sham-part-2/

Read: https://freespeech.com/2020/04/17/icann-rpm-pdp-phase-1-comment-period-is-another-sham-part-3/

 

High severity unpatched WP widget plugin issue

Via WordFence, there is a high impact vulnerability with the WordPress plugin Widget Settings Importer/Exporter that enables an attacker with minimal permissions to compromise a site by importing widgets with embedded javascript.  The plugin does not properly sanitize input, and it appears to no longer be maintained.  The developers have not responded to the WordFence report, and have not issued a fix. WordPress has removed the plugin from the repository.

If you have this installed, disable and remove it now.  If you’re using our easyPress managed WordPress platform then we already took care of it.

 

Vice takes a bow for getting protestors deplatformed from Facebook

The American Revolution 2 Facebook page, which was organizing protests and online dissent against lockdowns has been removed by Facebook after an article in Vice made them look like completely unhinged nutcases (keep in mind, everybody is somebody’s unhinged nutcase).

This is part of a larger initiative within Facebook to contain “misinformation” by, in addition to deplatformings, steering people toward World Health Organization news sources for Coronavirus material (you know the WHO, the same people who refused to declare COVID-19 a pandemic until about 60 days after everybody else knew we had a big problem and who abetted China’s coverup of the issue.  Those guys.  They have the lock on “objective truth”, according to Facebook).

While I understand why there is an impetus toward stopping the spread of Coronavirus, I still think the place to deal with real world actions is in the real world.  People should be free to peaceably dissent online. This coordinated movement toward marginalizing non-conforming speech is setting a bad precedent.

Keep in mind:  the economy is shut down, effectively by decree. Countless millions of jobs have been lost, countless businesses have folded.  So now we’re going make it so that people cannot voice their grievances online?  Call them “Covidiots”?   If you want to foment a pressure cooker of social unrest, I’d say that’s a pretty good start.

I wrote this up at length in “What’s the Difference between Fake News and Hypernormalisation?”

Read: https://axisofeasy.com/axisofeasy/quick-whats-the-difference-between-fake-news-and-hypernormalisation/

 

Jesse Hirsh ponders Social Credit: Post-pandemic Scoring

Where all this is going, unfortunately, as Metaviews (And AxisOfEasy contributor) Jesse Hirsh describes it:  is to “follow China’s lead no matter where it takes us”.  That means that as part of the policy response to Coronavirus, we’re all gonna wind up with “social credit scores” that could factor in metrics ranging from your vaccination/immunity status to whether you belong to any Facebook groups that have been making trouble.

The most important point Jesse makes, is that this is not a health crisis as much as it is a political and economic crisis brought on by the failure and rot within the system itself.  The pandemic was just the catalyst.   It could have been anything.  That’s why everything has come unglued so rapidly (and why all efforts to keep the system on the rails appears to be hypernormalisation, as I mentioned above).

 

Unassailable is now free. Tell all your friends.

Given the direction all this is headed, I’ve decided to make the ebook version of my book, Unassailable: Protect Yourself from Deplatform Attacks, Cancel-culture and other Online Disasters, free for download.

Please help us get the word out and share widely.

If you haven’t checked out the new AxisOfEasy website, you should!  It’s not just me sitting in my basement shouting at clouds, we have Jesse Hirsh from Metaviews and Charles Hugh Smith from Of Two Minds looking “way beyond the frame” of our world today and providing analysis and commentary you won’t find anywhere else.  Stay tuned for our podcast!