"...just a little sugar."

When poor countries become deeply indebted they fall into an abyss of economic degradation, this fact is directly linked with education and how these nations are being ruled by their selfish and incompetent leaders.  Your country... here.

 San Juan Chamula, Chiapas.

 

“The children succumb quickly to dysentery and they are totally dehydrated by it. I have been told that just a little sugar water from a pure source can keep a child alive, but the natives have been told to give the children formula mixed with local water and the water is so bad that is killing the children in the hundreds”.     

-DM
@orsoviaggiando 

One that Sees from Afar... by @feexitmx

Stylometry… stylometry is the way in which a person writes; and that style allows it to be quantified and identified. It is the way in which a person creates a paragraph, the length of sentences, the use of vocabulary… all this contributes to obtain a scientific perspective of the style of writing of any single person using an electronic device. In OPSEC terms (Operations Security), stylometrics are a subject that deserves full attention because it is very difficult to defend and protect ourselves from them.

 

One of the operational safety measures that Edward Snowden applied involved writing small paragraphs and short sentences, but never full and well-structured texts. The reason for this measure was that regardless of the types of anonymity systems being used, if any kind of spyware or governmental agency were able to extract a plaintext, this action could expose him and relate it to some other documents previously written. The NSA´s repertoire is massive, but Semantic Analysis is by far the scariest.

Any good story must have dreamers and geniuses, villains and visionaries… the first company that came out with this type of software was not the exception to this rule and obtained the whole and undivided attention from governmental agencies, mainly the CIA. 
 
 

Palantiri (One that Sees from Afar) is “a fictitious” artifact of the legendarium created by Daddy J.R.R. Tolkien and is a spherical stone that serves to see distant events or places or to communicate with the user of another stone. 
 

 
"Reality is stranger than fiction..."

                                    “They're in a scary business”. –Lee Tien, EFF.

 

Palantir, which is very real, was founded back in 2004 by Peter Thiel (PayPal), Alex Karp, Joe Lonsdale, Stephen Cohen and Nathan Gettings… with an initial investment of $2 million USD through one of the CIA´s main companies, In-q-Tel. 
 

 

But it does not stop there because its main clients are the NSA, the CIA, the FBI, NewsCorp and JPMorgan Chase. Their advisers are Condoleezza Rice, George Tenet & General David Petraeus.

"Any war against humanity is betrayal"

                           ¨I do not expect to see home again¨. –Edward Snowden

In five years Palantir became the company to which “The Dark One” goes when in need of “Massive Data Mining”, and unlike other agencies and companies Palantir realized that the single use of Artificial intelligence would work against an “adaptable adversary”, that´s when they started using teams of human analysts to explore data being originated from different sources, this process is called intelligence augmentation. 

In 2007 The University of Arizona sneaked into blogs, forums and any platform in the Deep Web that allowed them to gather information, the idea was to compile and analyze all that delicious data… obviously using stylometrics.

"How?”

There are two types of analysis: Supervised and Unsupervised. In Supervised Analysis, there is a text with a totally identifiable author and different "anonymous texts", they compare them and look for matching fingerprints (writing style).  For Unsupervised Analysis, the computer reviews complete blocks of anonymous texts and it piles them up according to different parameters in writing styles: A, B, C…

"Feexit, save us!” 

The document presented by Michael Brennan, Sadia Afroz & Rachel Greenstadt at 28C3 shows 2 ways to avoid “being labeled”:

1.    Obfuscation: To make a text resemble something that is definitely not your style… for example, translate the text to one language and back to the language of origin using google translate.

2.    Imitation: Make your style resemble someone else´s… Donald Trump, you are so screwed!

 

Anonymouth

Anonymouth is simply beautiful… once you have mastered it. Anonymouth is a Java-based tool, so always keep in mind that requires constant updating. The way it works is by comparing the desired text to other documents written by the same author; the outcome is a neat breakdown of used common words among all texts, sentence structure and proper suggestions for modifications.

 

 Stylometrics are this century's version of phrenology

“Bonus... yes, even in this economy”

 

PRISM is a government code name for a data-collection effort known officially by the SIGAD US-984XN, PRISM allows the NSA to connect itself directly to the central servers of “The Big 9”: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple… in the meanwhile, Palantir keeps growing.
 

Published on 10/10/14 by @feexitmx
Translated by DM

Sea Chair

The Sea Chair is made from the plastic collected from the ocean(s). The design is open source, meaning that anyone can make one... which also means that there is a big chance that we will be able to make a few of them since our nearest oceans are also polluted.  

 

The Open Source Design.








Sea Chair on http://vimeo.com/58461689 

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1715854418/sea-chair-into-the-gyre

-DM

Surrender your sons

Surrender your sons

The symptoms are fever, congestion, cough and sore throat… spreads through offices, schools and homes… it does not matter where we are, it will get to us. Colds and flu are caused by viruses; just like HIV, Ebola, Hepatitis and Herpes. Just as Napoleon, viruses are also small; 100 times smaller than the average bacteria and can only exercise influence on the cells since they do not have a cellular structure, nor have the ability to replicate on their own, viruses are just bundles of DNA or RNA, encapsulated in protein... looking for a cell that can dominate. 

Viruses can infect any living organism, that is why they are so dangerous. The means of infection can be by air (to cough and to sneeze), with carriers such as mosquitoes; and corporal fluids (saliva, blood or semen). Once the virus infects the cell, its mission is to totally seize the host through replicas; the cell host produces more viral material rather than genetic; once finished, the cell will die and the virus will jump to other near cells to repeat the process.

The human body has acquired some mechanisms to defend itself against viruses; these mechanisms are stored and activated through genetic memory; unfortunately the viruses also have their own memory and in many cases they evolve faster. Viruses such as HIV deceives the immunological system, and we already know how it ends for most people.

Official history dictates that the evolutionary development of our ancestors mainly occurred by the search of better climates and diet; but it is also worth mentioning the influence that viruses have had on human evolution, it is necessary to review the historical context of the different interactions between pathogens and society, viruses affected the genetic diversity in the immune system and dictated the degree of genetic mixture between populations, contributed to our expansion outside Africa and the infections of past have been shared through our lineage and will live like adopted elements that regulate our biological functions.

The “boom” in population occurred when technology was used to serve mankind; the advances in medicine contributed to reduce the mortality rate and to increase the life expectancy of the cities/countries that benefited from those technological changes; it is true that all the regions in the planet have not been developed evenly, but there has been a real reduction for all the regions in the planet.

 

“Humans live longer, earn more money, want it all and know nothing”, that is how many companies think.
 

Straight razors made in the 1900s were so good, that one just needed a strop and they were good to go, from grandfathers to fathers, to the grandsons and great-grandchildren... 

but it was necessary to sharpen it and that was "a waste of time"… it was necessary to buy shave-soap… 

one needed to be careful, because the edge could be lethal; so, fear came in… and that is when Gillete showed up with its safe blade that eliminated all those inconveniences and fears. Then we got bombarded with disposable pens and tissues, instant coffee , fast food , digital music.

According to “The Kondratieff Theory of the Long Cycles”, (no, it is not a bipolar/lithium thing), we are living in the fifth cycle of economic activity; the era of Knowledge Economy, the age of the computers. Everything has become intangible and has to be available 24/7, everything passes by so fast because of the people's capacity to process and retain information, in most users it is minimal. The technology that we had 7 years ago is an old memory, far distant and long gone!, so is the iOS 6, nothing but a very vague memory for iPhone users. 

In the same way that viruses have shaped human evolution, electronic devices have its own AIDS; and I'm not talking about the one you can get by watching all that porn' I am talking abou the most dangerous of all, Planned Obsolescence. 

 

Each device comes out of factory with an expiration date, the date as such is dictated based on the technological breakthroughs, markets, fashion and trends… or simple digital euthanasia through an operating system with greater demand of resources, as we mentioned in “When we were happy XP”. The rationale behind the strategy is to generate long-term sales volume by reducing the time between repeat purchases (referred to as shortening the replacement cycle).

Here are some examples related to computers:

Ink Cartridges for Printers (if you have one): most of those cartridges come with a clever chip that disables the cartridge when one of the colors reaches “a low point" determined by the manufacturer, even when there is enough ink to finish the task. In addition, the clever chip forbids to refill the cartridges… and let's not forget about the "timer" inside every printer. 

 

Software: some times it is “incompatible” with certain files or programs, and forces the consumer to update. Although the update also happens when the manufacturer decides to stop supporting "old versions". This software update triggers hardware sales; let's not forget about iPhone 6 -iOS8.

Video Games… Xbox to Xbox 360 and Xbox One? Nintendo Entertainment System, Super Nintendo Entertainment System and Nintendo64… let's not forget about the infamous Virtual Boy.

Moving away from technology, but following the same path.Automobiles… parts discontinued to avoid repairs, "new models" just because of the aesthetic changes.
 

Light Bulbs: up to 2010 there were some functioning light bulbs made by Thomas Edison… our modern energy efficient bulbs last for about 8 thousand hours... even though the technology to make them last longer exists, it is just not a very lucrative idea. 

 

Text books: it is very difficult to have significant changes from one edition to another, specially when this changes happen on a yearly basis. But Publishers have updates all the time, moving information from one page to another, changing the colors in diagrams, perhaps adding a CD-ROM? The problem is that not buying this new edition will make it difficult to follow in class… since some teachers "follow the book"… even the ones with horrendous mistakes.

Blitzkrieg Fashion… Ja!. One day in the 90's, every body was flashing their pacifier necklaces, the following day was troll dolls, then the Livestrong bracelets… should I continue?

 

There must be a balance between the technology as a tool and technology as life itself; the technology that we have in this very moment is died when it touched your hands, according to Moore's Law, we will have something twice as powerful in next 18 to 24 months; but intellectual capacity in humans won't duplicate… nevertheless, the addiction will. The day the iPhone 6 came out was living proof that there is an addiction that affects a great number of people, material addiction, even for the things that we do not understand.
 

Planned Obsolescence jumped to humans and acts in the person in the same way a mental disease does; but collectively speaking, it is a virus that affects all mankind, whatever the product, we buy for compulsive or impulsive reasons; we buy just to fill the void, to forget emptiness… emptiness? 

That is a personal quest that each individual most take before the virus fulfills its mission and turns mankind into an Obsolete Species.

@feexitmx
www.feexit.mx

id@feexit.mx
rp@feexit.mx