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It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we hadPhiladelphia asked Benjamin Franklin, "Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" With no hesitation whatsoever, Franklin responded, "A republic, if you can keep it." ~ BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 1787

Thursday, October 21, 2021

ORANGE-MAN ... GETS A SET OF LUNGS

ORANGE-MAN LUNGS <--- CLIK FOR LUNGS!

Pranksters have already defaced Trump’s new social network

The site, Truth Social, said it reserves the right to ban users and safeguard itself from lawsuits with Section 230 protections -- the same measures Trump has complained about during his long and bitter battle with Big Tech.

NO WE ARE NOT RELATED!

Former president Donald Trump and his team declared Wednesday night that they would soon launch a “media powerhouse” that would help them triumph in their long-running war against Big Tech. But within hours, pranksters found what appeared to be an unreleased test version and posted a picture of a defecating pig to the “donaldjtrump” account.

The site has since been pulled offline — evidence that Trump is likely to face a daunting challenge in building an Internet business that can stand on its own.

Banned by all major social networks after his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, Trump has for months agitated to regain the online megaphone that once blasted his voice around the world. In a presentation released Wednesday by his new media company, Trump Media & Technology Group, his team hailed the new social network as the first tentpole for a Trump-led media, news and Internet empire that would one day compete with Disney, CNN and Facebook.

But the site’s early hours revealed lax security, rehashed features and a flurry of bizarre design decisions. An open sign-up page allowed anyone to use the site shortly after it was revealed, sparking the creation of the “donaldjtrump” account and the pig posting. A Washington Post reporter was able to register and post under the account name “mikepence” without any stops in place. New sign-ups were blocked shortly after.

A Trump Media and Technology Group spokesperson did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

UP NEXT

The site looks almost entirely like a Twitter clone: A user can post Truths, which are like tweets, or Re-Truths, which are retweets. There’s also a news feed, called the Truth Feed, a notification system so users can know “who’s interacting with your TRUTH’s,” the social network’s App Store profile states.

The site’s code shows it runs a mostly unmodified version of Mastodon, the free, open-source software launched in 2016 that anyone can use to run a self-made social networking site.

Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko told The Post Thursday that Trump’s site may violate Mastodon’s licensing rules, which require developers to share any modifications and link to the original source code. Rochko said he has contacted the company’s legal counsel to make a determination.

Mastodon would not be able to take the site down in case of a violation, Rochko said, because users can host the software on their own servers. “Such independence is one of the selling points of the platform,” he said, but “it is not an independence from the law, so avenues to take action still exist through legal proceedings.”

Trump’s social media site aims to be the politically incorrect safe space he had promised

Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. promoted the social network on Fox News on Wednesday night, saying the “platform for everyone to express their feelings” would be in “beta testing” for the next few weeks and would stage a full launch in the first quarter of next year.

The social network’s rollout bears little resemblance to the caustic, attack-filled attitude that defined Trump’s years on social media. Truth Social’s listing on Apple’s App Store said the site will be a place for families with “varied opinions” to come “together to have an amazing time and share their viewpoints of the world.”

The company boasted that the site will showcase the basic features that have been expected of social networks for nearly a decade, including the ability to create a profile and post news stories, photos and videos.

The site’s terms of service, however, list some rules that would hamstring Trump himself. The site will ban, for instance, “excessive use of capital letters” — a hallmark of Trump’s online screeds.

Though the site portrays itself as a refuge for free speech uncensored by Big Tech, Trump’s site will ban any content that would “disparage, tarnish, or otherwise harm, in our opinion, us and/or the Site,” the terms state.

They also show that the site hopes to benefit from something on which Trump has long criticized Big Tech: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects companies from legal liability for the content their users post.

Trump last year threatened to veto a massive (and unrelated) bill for military spending unless Congress repealed the long-standing law, which Trump said should be “completely terminated.”

Section 230: The little law that defined how the Internet works

The company is “not responsible for … any Third-Party Content posted on, available through, or installed from the Site, including [its] content, accuracy, offensiveness, opinions [or] reliability,” the site’s terms of service state.

Trump has long blamed Section 230 as part of allegations that the tech companies are biased against conservatives, especially after his posts in which he sought to mislead the public about election fraud were flagged as misleading.

The company said it also reserves the right to “refuse, restrict access to, limit the availability of, or disable” a user’s access or contributions. Trump has vilified other tech companies for banning his accounts using that same right.

Truth Social’s listing on the App Store includes mostly inoffensive examples of posts that users might share, such as, “What’s your favorite place to go in the world? You won’t believe how beautiful Jamaica is.”

But it also includes logos for companies and, in one image, an entire fake post by the carmaker Chevrolet, which declared it was “going electric.” A spokeswoman for General Motors, which owns Chevrolet, told The Post on Thursday morning that the company has “no affiliation with this platform.”

Patent and trademark filings show the company in July trademarked “Truth Social” and “Trump Plus,” the latter of which was forecast to one day possibly cover TV shows, podcasts, movies and “online video games.” The company also applied to trademark terms such as “truthing,” “post a truth,” and “retruth,” filing records show.

Trump ends blog after 29 days, infuriated by measly readership

The company’s presentation shows Trump still relishes the fame and following he amassed over years on social media. Three of the roughly 20 slides repeat Trump’s peak Twitter following, of 89 million accounts, to support its argument that the former president could still help galvanize the “conservative media universe.”

Trump’s attempt this summer to win online audiences, however — a blog, “From the Desk of Donald Trump,” heralded as a “beacon of freedom” — was discontinued after only 29 days. Trump advisers said he was upset by reports from The Post and other outlets highlighting its scraggly traffic count.

Trump’s lawyers earlier this month pushed for a federal court to force Twitter to reinstate his account, saying the company held “power and control over political discourse in this country that is immeasurable, historically unprecedented, and profoundly dangerous to open democratic debate.”

In the Truth Social announcement, Trump’s team said the site would be owned by Trump Media & Technology Group, a vaguely defined company headquartered at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s club in Palm Beach.

Trump asks court to force Twitter to reinstate his account

The Trump company said it was merging with Digital World Acquisition Corp., one of many so-called “blank-check” companies used for financial maneuvering, and would be publicly listed for trading. The statement valued the company at $875 million, though it was unclear how that number was reached.

The company said it intended to launch a video streaming service that would include news, entertainment, documentaries and sports, saying, “The American public is seeking ‘non-woke’ entertainment, and TMTG+ will provide content for all to enjoy.”

The company said it would compete with Netflix, Hulu and Disney+ but gave no information as to how. The slide, however, did include an old photo of Trump giving a big trophy to a sumo wrestler.

The site is likely to undermine other conservative-friendly social media alternatives, such as Gettr, Gab and Parler, that have sought to win over pro-Trump audiences.

Gettr, led by Trump’s former senior adviser Jason Miller, in a statement Wednesday congratulated Trump “for re-entering the social media fray.” Miller’s company had been angling to officially partner with Trump but “just couldn’t come to terms on a deal” with the “great deal-maker,” the statement said.

The Gettr statement also revealed lofty ambitions for other media properties, including a “GVision” short-video network and a “GETTR Pay” payments system. Its bare-bones social media site, however, has faced its own issues, including a launch that was plagued with terrorist propaganda and cartoon pornography. “Let the downloads begin!” the statement said.

Wednesday, October 20, 2021

TAKE A RIDE ON THE READING RAILROAD ... IF YOU PASS GO!

I'VE BEEN RAILROADED ...

Don’t Steal This Book

The economy has arrived at a point where it produces enough in principle for everyone. . . . So this new period we are entering is not so much about production anymore—how much is produced; it is about distribution—how people get a share in what is produced.

—W. Brian Arthur, Santa Fe Institute, 20171

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You also might wish to read a number of other books that our algorithm has selected on the basis of the online choices of people like you. These works explain how software is eating the world, as the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has observed, and how Google’s search and other software constitute an artificial intelligence (AI) that is nothing less than the biggest event in human history. Google AI offers uncanny deep machine learning algorithms that startled even its then chairman, Eric Schmidt, by outperforming him and other human beings in identifying cats in videos. Such feats of deep mind recounted in these books emancipate computers from their dependence on human intelligence and soon will know you better than you know yourself.

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According to many prestigious voices, the industry is rapidly approaching a moment of singularity. Its supercomputers in the cloud are becoming so much more intelligent than you and command such a complete sensorium of multidimensional data streams from your brain and body that you will want these machines to take over most of the decisions in your life. Advanced artificial intelligence and breakthroughs in biological codes are persuading many researchers that organisms such as human beings are simply the product of an algorithm. Inscribed in DNA and neural network logic, this algorithm can be interpreted and controlled through machine learning.

The cloud computing and big data of companies such as Google, with its Deep Mind AI, can excel individual human brains in making key life decisions from marriage choices and medical care to the management of the private key for your bitcoin wallet and the use and storage of the passwords for your Macintosh drive. This self-learning software will also be capable of performing most of your jobs. The new digital world may not need you anymore.

Don’t take offense. In all likelihood, you can retire on an income that we regard as satisfactory for you. Leading Silicon Valley employers, such as Larry Page, Elon Musk, Sergey Brin, and Tim Cook, deem most human beings unemployable because they are intellectually inferior to AI algorithms. Did you know that Google AI defeated the world Go champion in five straight contests? You do not even know what Go is? Go is an Asian game of strategy that AI researchers have long regarded as an intellectual challenge far exceeding chess in subtlety, degrees of freedom, and complexity. You do not possess the mental capacity to compete with computers in such demanding applications.

Don’t worry, though. For every obsolescent homo sapiens, the leading Silicon Valley magnates recommend a federally guaranteed annual income. That’s right, free money every year! In addition, you, a sophisticated cyber-savvy reader, may well be among the exceptional elites who, according to such certifiable geniuses as Larry Page and Aubrey de Grey, might incrementally live unemployed forever.

You may even count yourselves among the big data demiurges who ascend to become near-divinities. How about that?

As Google "DEEP" Search becomes virtually omniscient, commanding powers that previous human tribes ascribed to the gods, you may become a homo deus. A favored speaker on the Google campus, Yuval Noah Harari, used that as the title for his latest book.2

In the past, this kind of talk of human gods, omniscience, and elite supremacy over hoi polloi may have been mostly confined to late-night bibulous blather or to mental institutions. As Silicon Valley passed through the late years of the 2010s with most of its profits devolving to Google, Apple, and Facebook, however, it appeared to be undergoing a nervous breakdown, manifested on one level by delusions of omnipotence and transcendence and on another by twitchy sieges of security instructions on consumers’ devices. In what seemed to be arbitrary patterns, programs asked for new passwords, user names, PINs, log-ins, crypto-keys, and registration requirements. With every webpage demanding your special attention, as if it were the Apple of your i, you increasingly found yourself in checkmate as the requirements of different programs and machines conflicted, and as scantily-identified boxes popped up on your screen asking for your password as if you had only one.

Meanwhile, it was obvious that security on the Internet had collapsed. Google dispatched swat teams of nerds to react to security breakdowns, which were taken for granted. And as Greylock Ventures’ security guru Asheem Chandna confided to Fortune, it is ultimately all your fault. Human beings readily fall for malware messages. So, says Fortune, the fight against hacking promises to be a never-ending battle.3

In the dystopian sci-fi series Battlestar Galactica, the key rule shielding civilization from cyborg invaders is never to link the computers. Back in our galaxy, how many more breaches and false promises of repair will it take before the very idea of the network will become suspect? Many industries, such as finance and insurance, have already essentially moved off-line. Healthcare is deep in this digital morass. Corporate assurances of safety behind firewalls and 256-bit security codes have given way to a single commandment: nothing critical goes on the Net.

Except for the video game virtuosi on industry swat teams and hacker squads, Silicon Valley has pretty much given up. Time to hire another vice president of diversity and calculate carbon footprints.

The security system has broken down just as the computer elite have begun indulging the most fevered fantasies about the capabilities of their machines and issuing arrogant inanities about the comparative limits of their human customers. Meanwhile, these delusions of omnipotence have not prevented the eclipse of its initial public offering market, the antitrust tribulations of its champion companies led by Google, and the profitless prosperity of its hungry herds of unicorns, as they call private companies worth more than one billion dollars. Capping these setbacks is Silicon Valley’s loss of entrepreneurial edge in IPOs and increasingly in venture capital to nominal communists in China.

In defense, Silicon Valley seems to have adopted what can best be described as a neo-Marxist political ideology and technological vision. You may wonder how I can depict as neo-Marxists those who on the surface seem to be the most avid and successful capitalists on the planet.

Marxism is much discussed as a vessel of revolutionary grievances, workers’ uprisings, divestiture of chains, critiques of capital, catalogs of classes, and usurpation of the means of production. At its heart, however, the first Marxism espoused a belief that the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century solved for all time the fundamental problem of production.

The first industrial revolution, comprising steam engines, railways, electric grids, and turbines—all those dark satanic mills—was, according to Marx, the climactic industrial breakthrough of all time. Marx’s essential tenet was that in the future, the key problem of economics would become not production amid scarcity but redistribution of abundance.

In The German Ideology (1845), Marx fantasized that communism would open to all the dilettante life of a country squire: Society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.4

Marx was typical of intellectuals in imagining that his own epoch was the final stage of human history. William F. Buckley used to call it an immanentized eschaton, a belief the last things were taking place in one’s own time.5 The neo-Marxism of today’s Silicon Valley titans repeats the error of the old Marxists in its belief that today’s technology—not steam and electricity, but silicon microchips, artificial intelligence, machine learning, cloud computing, algorithmic biology, and robotics—is the definitive human achievement. The algorithmic eschaton renders obsolete not only human labor but the human mind as well.

All this is temporal provincialism and myopia, exaggerating the significance of the attainments of their own era, of their own companies, of their own special philosophies and chimeras—of themselves, really. Assuming that in some way their Go machine and climate theories are the consummation of history, they imagine that it’s winner-take-all for all time. Strangely enough, this delusion is shared by Silicon Valley’s critics. The dystopian join the utopians in imagining a supremely competent and visionary Silicon Valley, led by Google with its monopoly of information and intelligence.

AI is believed to be redefining what it means to be human, much as Darwin’s On the Origin of Species did in its time. While Darwin made man just another animal, a precariously risen ape, Google-Marxism sees men as inferior intellectually to the company’s own algorithmic machines.

Life after Google makes the opposing case that what the hyperventilating haruspices Yuval Harari, Nick Bostrom, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Tim Urban, and Elon Musk see as a world-changing AI juggernaut is, in fact, an industrial regime at the end of its rope. The crisis of the current order in security, privacy, intellectual property, business strategy, and technology is fundamental and cannot be solved within the current computer and network architecture.

Security is not a benefit or upgrade that can be supplied by adding new layers of passwords, pony-tailed swat teams, intrusion detection schemes, anti-virus patches, malware prophylactics, and software retro-fixes. Security is the foundation of all other services and crucial to all financial transactions. It is the most basic and indispensable component of any information technology.

In business, the ability to conduct transactions is not optional. It is the way all economic learning and growth occur. If your product is free, it is not a product, and you are not in business, even if you can extort money from so-called advertisers to fund it.

If you do not charge for your software services—if they are open source—you can avoid liability for buggy betas. You can happily evade the overreach of the Patent Office’s ridiculous seventeen-year protection for minor software advances or business processes, like one-click shopping. But don’t pretend that you have customers.

Security is the most crucial part of any system. It enables the machine to possess an initial state or ground position and gain economic traction. If security is not integral to an information technology architecture, that architecture must be replaced.

The original distributed Internet architecture sufficed when everything was free, as the Internet was not a vehicle for transactions. When all it was doing was displaying Web pages, transmitting emails, running discussion forums and news groups, and hyperlinking academic sites, the Net did not absolutely need a foundation of security. But when the Internet became a forum for monetary transactions, new security regimes became indispensable. EBay led the way by purchasing PayPal, which was not actually an Internet service but an outside party that increased the efficiency of online transactions. Outside parties require customer information to be transmitted across the Web to consummate transactions. Credit card numbers, security codes, expiration dates, and passwords began to flood the Net.

With the ascendancy of Amazon, Apple, and other online emporia early in the twenty-first century, much of the Internet was occupied with transactions, and the industry retreated to the cloud. Abandoning the distributed Internet architecture, the leading Silicon Valley entrepreneurs replaced it with centralized and segmented subscription systems, such as Paypal, Amazon, Apple’s iTunes, Facebook, and Google cloud. Uber, Airbnb, and other sequestered unicorns followed.

These so-called walled gardens might have sufficed if they could have actually been walled off from the rest of the Internet. At Apple, Steve Jobs originally attempted to accomplish such a separation by barring third-party software applications (or apps). Amazon has largely succeeded in isolating its own domains and linking to outside third parties such as credit card companies. But these centralized fortresses violated the Coase Theorem of corporate reach. In a famous paper, the Nobel-laureate economist Ronald Coase calculated that a business should internalize transactions only to the point that the costs of finding and contracting with outside parties exceed the inefficiencies incurred by the absence of real prices, internal markets, and economies of scale.6 The concentration of data in walled gardens increases the cost of security. The industry sought safety in centralization. But centralization is not safe.

The company store was not a great advance of capitalism during the era of so-called robber barons, and it is no better today when it is dispersed through the cloud, funded through advertising, and combined with a spurious sharing of free goods. Marxism was historically hyperbolic the first time around, and the new Marxism is delusional today. It is time for a new information architecture for a globally distributed economy.

Fortunately, it is on its way.

DEFINITION, COVID-19, SARS, MERS ... WHAT THE MAINSTEAM MEDIA FAILED TO DO

Definition, COVID-19, SARS, MERS

Some coronaviruses cause the common cold, while others cause more severe respiratory illnesses

Coronaviruses cause a range of illnesses, including COVID-19. They typically affect the respiratory tract, but their effects can extend well beyond the respiratory system.

At the end of 2019, scientists identified a coronavirus outbreak in China. Experts named the newly identified virus severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and the illness that it causes coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19).

There are many types of coronavirus. Some cause mild illnesses, such as the common cold. Others can cause severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) or Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), which can be life threatening.

Many coronaviruses are present in animals but do not affect humans. Sometimes, however, a virus mutates in a way that allows it to infect humans. Scientists call these human coronaviruses, or “HCoVs.”

This article looks at a few coronaviruses that can infect humans, the illnesses they cause, and how they transmit. Specifically, we focus on three dangerous diseases caused by coronaviruses: COVID-19, SARS, and MERS.

Researchers first identified a coronavirus in 1937. They isolated one that was responsible for a type of bronchitis in birds and had the potential to devastate poultry stocks.

Scientists found evidence of human coronaviruses in the 1960s, in the noses of people with the common cold. Several human coronaviruses cause mild illnesses, including colds.

The name “coronavirus” refers to the crown-like projections on the pathogen’s surface. “Corona” in Latin means “halo” or “crown.”

In humans, coronavirus infections most often occur in the winter and early spring, but they can happen at any time.

Learn more about how coronaviruses affect the body.

Late in 2019, scientists started monitoring the outbreak of a new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19. They first identified the virus in Wuhan, China.

The virus spread rapidly around the world, and the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a pandemic in March 2020.

The new coronavirus has been responsible for millions of infections globally, and it has caused more than 2 million deaths. The mortality rate varies from country to country. In the United States, it is around 1.7%.

Many researchers believe SARS-CoV-2 first infected bats before spreading to other animals, including humans. Some of the first people with COVID-19 had links to a live animal and seafood market. Overall, however, there is little conclusive information about the origins of the virus. Scientists are still investigating its source and initial pattern of spreading.

Many people with COVID-19 experience a relatively mild form of the disease that does not require specialist treatment. Others develop severe breathing problems and need to spend time in the hospital. In some cases, it is fatal.

Some people who do not have severe symptoms initially go on to develop health issues that continue for weeks or months, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

People with a higher risk of severe COVID-19 symptoms include older adults and those with underlying medical conditions, including high blood pressure, heart and lung problems, diabetes, and cancer.

According to the CDC, most children with COVID-19 have mild or no symptoms. Fewer children have developed COVID-19 than adults. That said, infants and children with certain medical conditions may have an increased risk of severe illness and death.

There may also be a higher risk of severe COVID-19 during pregnancy, as well as an increased risk of issues such as preterm birth. However, the role of the virus in these circumstances remains unclear.

Which treatments can help with COVID-19?

Symptoms of COVID-19

People may start to experience COVID-19 symptoms 2–14 days after exposure to SARS-CoV-2.

Symptoms of COVID-19 include:

a fever
chills
a cough
shortness of breath or difficulty breathing
a sore throat
congestion or a runny nose
fatigue
a headache
muscle pain
a new loss of taste or smell
nausea, vomiting, or both
diarrhea

Tests can detect the infection, even if there are no symptoms.

As the virus progresses, severe complications can arise. COVID-19 can affect a wide range of body systems and lead to multiple organ failure.

Systemic inequalities in healthcare have increased the risk of illness and death for people in marginalized racial and ethnic groups. Read more here.

SARS is a disease caused by an infection with a different coronavirus — SARS-CoV. It can lead to a life threatening form of pneumonia.

SARS first appeared in Asia in February 2003. The virus then spread to more than two dozen countries, resulting in 8,098 infections and 774 deaths. The last reported cases in humans occurred in a laboratory-related outbreak in China in 2004.

Symptoms of SARS

Early symptoms are flu-like and include:

a high fever
a headache
body aches
a feeling of discomfort
mild respiratory symptoms, in some cases

The infection affects both the upper and lower respiratory tracts. After 7–10 days, the person may develop a dry cough. Also, pneumonia, a severe lung infection, often develops.

As SARS progresses, it can lead to failure of the lungs, liver, or heart.

During the outbreak, complications were more common among older adults. According to one source, more than half of those who died from the disease were over the age of 65.

MERS is a severe respiratory illness caused by the MERS-CoV coronavirus. Scientists first recognized it in 2012 after reports in Saudi Arabia. After that, it spread to other countries, including the U.S.

MERS has not become widespread in the same way as COVID-19. According to reported figures, about 30–40% of people with MERS die from the disease.

Symptoms of MERS

These symptoms include:

a fever
breathlessness
coughing
nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting, in some cases

Complications include pneumonia and kidney failure.

The illness spreads through close contact with people who have the infection.

People aged 1–99 years have had MERS, and severe symptoms were more common among older people and those with underlying health conditions or weakened immune systems.

Coronavirus infections are contagious, and some of these viruses, including the one that causes COVID-19, spread easily between people. Researchers believe that the viruses transmit via fluids from the respiratory system.

Transmission may happen when a person:

coughs or sneezes without covering their mouth, dispersing droplets containing the virus into the air
has physical contact with someone who has the infection
touches a surface that contains the virus, then touches their nose, eyes, or mouth

Ways of preventing transmission include:

wearing a face covering in public
avoiding touching the face, especially the mouth and nose
always coughing or sneezing into a tissue, then disposing of it and washing the hands right away
regularly and thoroughly washing the hands

During the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, people should also do the following, even if they are well:

Stay home whenever possible.
Avoid contact with others.
Wear a face covering in public.
Stay at least 6 feet away from others in public.

Anyone with symptoms of COVID-19 should isolate at home and rest until the symptoms have passed. Contact a doctor for more information, and let them know if the symptoms seem to be worsening.

Vaccines can help prevent infection with SARS-CoV-2. Learn more here.

Coronaviruses are present in humans and other animals, and some types can cause severe illness.

The common cold is one illness that can result from a coronavirus. Others include SARS, MERS, and COVID-19.

Scientists continue to investigate coronaviruses and monitor for new types and outbreaks.

Keep up to date about the current COVID-19 outbreak. The CDC also have a resource describing ways to reduce the risk of infection.