Category Archives: Law

July 4, 2020 · 15:27

Oh what a show

Yes, Oh what a circus, Oh what a show. It is that setting I am listening to, Evita the soundtrack with Antonio Banderas and Madonna starring. It was updated only 4 hours ago, yet the founding article was placed almost 13 hours AFTER I published my story. The article ‘In pursuit of Ghislaine Maxwell, authorities allege mysterious financial dealings with Jeffrey Epstein’ (at https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/03/us/ghislaine-maxwell-mysterious-financial-dealings-jeffrey-epstein/index.html) will give the people a lot to consider, especially when they give us “Maxwell was living on a 156-acre New Hampshire estate purchased for $1.07 million in cash in December 2019 “through a carefully anonymized LLC,” according to court papers and the realty company”, a 156 acre piece of real estate in New Hampshire? So, Jeff Bezos, wanna buy 5G technology concepts for $25 million post taxation? It is not the weirdest question to state, consider that before CNN rolled the die I gave you all “We see “Prosecutors allege that between 1994 and 1997 Ms Maxwell helped Epstein groom girls as young as 14. The charges say she would build a rapport with them – including by taking them shopping or to the movies – and would later coax them into giving Epstein massages during which they were sexually abused.”” I gave you more in the article ‘The FBI Snooze button’ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2020/07/03/the-fbi-snooze-button/), in this, I am not doubting CNN, I am also not doubting the words of Shan Wu, a CNN legal analyst who gives us “that arouse my suspicions are the large transfers in the millions between her accounts and Epstein’s accounts, which raises the question, is there some kind of laundering going on?” And the star is decently given, it sets the stage that it took time to get some of the details and consider that I made some of the speculated conclusions within an hour if getting access to the data, al that and it took the CNN machines months? We accept that Shan Wu would need time to set the proper legal stage, but in all this there is a time lap where those connects to Jeffrey Epstein would have been able to vanish into the wind and I did make a speculated sage of numbers (based on Catholic numbers thanks to the Boston Globe) that there are optionally 300,000 child hunters out there, a person facilitating to these people should have been regarded as beyond dangerous, as such we see a much larger stage and the stage was out in the open, so why was it taking this long? Consider that Epstein died in August 2019, so where was the witch-hunt that the US had no problems to paint China with? Why was it not aimed at optional facilitators that cater to the needs of people like Jeffrey Epstein? Is that not a valid question?

CNN gives us more, yup they were on the case. They give us “Prosecutors say that between 1994 and 1997, the period that covers her indictment, the two were in an “intimate” relationship and that he paid her to manage his various properties, which ranged from an Upper East Side mansion to a sprawling ranch in Santa Fe, New Mexico.” This gives us a rather large issue, the published Affidavit from Miami (see earlier mentioned blog), as well as the blog from January 2015 (art https://lawlordtobe.com/2015/01/07/as-we-judge-morality/) we see a much larger absence, there is every indication that they are missing from the unsealed documents as well (this is my speculation, I did not read those documents). As such, how much did the FBI miss? Were they asleep and did they miss the snooze button, or did they bring a Rohypnol Mickey? It is not the weirdest idea, it is like they walked up to a vagrant and the vagrant asks them ‘Does this rag smell like Chloroform?’ 

It is a stage where too many pieces are simmered to silence and either the media accepted this or were not willing to actually investigate. It took me an hour to find a lot of it and that was by merely investigating open sources. And all this gives us one other part that is not out in the open. The quote “federal prosecutors disclosed that for a five-year period beginning in 2007, Maxwell and Epstein exchanged more than $20 million dollars between their bank accounts, with the sums going first from Epstein to Maxwell, and then back to Epstein.” The question becomes ‘What does the IRS have?’ Let’s face it the US treasury coffers are empty at minus 25,000,000,000,000 dollar, so the question is relevant, more importantly what is the registered value of the New Hampshire estate and what are the tax briefs on that part? So are my questions out of bounds? I believe that this is not the case and that is before you take a look at Jeffrey S. Pagliuca, who is (as far as I can tell) seen at https://www.hmflaw.com/attorney-jeff-pagliuca.html. This man as an amazing career in law, this gives us that a man like this costs a lot more per hour than I make in a week implying that the retainer of this man can fuel a small state. So where does a socialite get access to this kind of money? We did see what money was involved, yet consider the last 5 years, how did she get her income (the IRS link again) and she has decently massive living expenses as well. This is not the kind of girl that is satisfied with $2.98 Hershey bites at Walmart, does it not fuel your questions? I think that people like Shan Wu have found a lot more, I wonder who is setting course of the CNN sails (perhaps for very valid reasons), yet when you consider what was out there for close to 15 years, I reckon that American citizens should not asking questions, they should shout at their congressional and senatorial representatives for endangering their children, yet that is merely my view on the matter. I wonder what Governor Chris Sununu and Senator Maggie Hassan both from New Hampshire will have to say on the matter during the week, don’t you? Og and when you are consider all the complex parts in what is part of all the estate and other matters, who dealt with those and as such what cogs were in play? To keep her name out of pampers takes time and involves a fair amount of people, were they ALL in the dark? I will let you decide. 

 

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July 3, 2020 · 07:25

The FBI Snooze button

Don’t you just love your snooze button? I do, there are these moments that I have to be up at 07:01, but not always, and the idea of the snooze button that I remain under the warm blankets just a little longer in a half awake and half not stage is pretty addictive, intoxicatingly addictive. I reckon that there are loads of people who feel that way, even the FBI, even though one could argue that their snooze button is set to an annual option.

To see this we need to take a look at the Law and Crime site (at https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/anonymous-individuals-fight-possible-unsealing-of-details-related-to-alleged-epstein-sex-ring/) where we see on March 20th 2019 the following “The Second Circuit Court of Appeals is deciding whether or not to unseal documents from a lawsuit against a woman accused of running a sex trafficking ring with billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Judges had given parties 15 days to argue why documents in a lawsuit brought against Epstein’s former partner Ghislaine Maxwell should not be unsealed.”, you know what, it might be longer than an annual snooze. The court records indicate that the FBI could have done a hell of a lot more to do something about the Maxwell factor in paedophelia. The BBC reported (at https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53268218) that she was arrested with ‘Jeffrey Epstein ex-girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell arrested by FBI’, yet the setting does not match up, I had initial questions when I saw the affidavit in January 2015 and that was 9 years later. OK, I will say now there was no link to Ghislaine Maxwell at that point, yet the stage seemed delimited. You see the affidavit shows on pages 16 and 17 6 censured names, we cannot see the names, but if you consider the affidavit, the stage was larger, and that size was already visible in 2006, almost 14 years ago, so why did it take the FBI that long to get any traction? And let’s face it, it did not happen until AFTER Epstein allegedly committed suicide. And the affidavit describes events from almost a year before that date, the issue was larger!

Now that Maxwell has been arrested, the question is not what will she get, the question becomes who else is part of all this and what remains hidden as such, because the events that are criminal and part of sealed court documents whilst others remain untouched is as I see it a new low in American jurisprudence. There is actually a lot more in the BBC article. We see “Prosecutors allege that between 1994 and 1997 Ms Maxwell helped Epstein groom girls as young as 14. The charges say she would build a rapport with them – including by taking them shopping or to the movies – and would later coax them into giving Epstein massages during which they were sexually abused.” Yet when we see the timeline we see that optionally these girls who were still in high school, some would have been exposed to Ghislaine Maxwell and there is no clear trail how. If we look at it from a distance, grooming requires identifying, prepping the stage where they will have a conversation with an unknown person like Ghislaine Maxwell, and that is after you realise that this had been going on since 1994, 26 years is a long time to create a clientele, so there is every chance that she was not merely setting the stage for Epstein. If we consider the stage of Ghislaine Maxwell, a socialite, we need to consider the stage. A socialite is (according to the dictionary “a person who is well known in fashionable society and is fond of social activities and entertainment”, it is a title that also limits her activities, one failure and she is exposed. As such we ca argue that she had a system, a system with co-conspirators. And let’s face it, how often do you see a socialite scouring high school? Especially when the socialite is well over 50 (OK, she was half her age in those days). The stage does not match the activities, she had serious help, I see no other way there.

Even if we casually dismiss “claimed that Maxwell recruited her to be a “masseuse” for Epstein when she worked at Mar-a-Lago, the Florida club owned by President Donald Trump.” We see places (one that former president Clinton visited), a stage where security is a lot larger then normal, as such others wee in the know, camera’s that would have set the stage where people too young to be allowed were let in, the stage does not add up, when you start reading the affidavits, the documents and the connected briefs, there is a much larger stage to be seen. Do you think that a place like the Mar-a-Lago gets by with below par security? Several people avoided the boat with “In return, prosecutors declined to bring federal charges.” It was not about Epstein, in that phase a lot more would be brought to light, I have absolutely zero doubt about that. That part is partially visible when we consider “The agreement, which was offered by prosecutors working under then-federal prosecutor Alexander Acosta (President Trump’s current U.S. Labor Secretary), was made without informing any of the alleged victims in the case.” In addition, we see several people now in a stage where they are at the top of the legal profession, among them Kenneth Star and Alexander Acosta. So when we see “The appellate court ruled that the district court “failed to conduct the requisite particularized review when ordering the sealing of the materials at issue.” So what else did the district court fail to conduct?

And this has been out and about for close to a decade, so do we like the FBI snooze button at present? The fact that in all this federal players were left in the dark seems completely impossible to me, as such we need to include that there is every chance that Ghislaine Maxwell is part of something much larger, involving other players too, this is not the stage of a socialite, this is the optional stage of a facilitator. If this deviant behaviour is possible in 6% of the clergy, how many rich people would optionally be driven by similar illegal needs? If we accept that there are a little over 5 million multimillionaires in the USA, the 6% mark hands us that Ghislaine Maxwell might have had access to (or being sought by) up to 300,000 very wealthy people requiring her services. Now let’s be fair, they do not all know Ghislaine Maxwell, but see might and that makes this issue a lot larger than we previously considered. And it brings forth the issue of the FBI snooze button, perhaps I am wrong and they were very awake, and it took this long to get a group of people subpoenaed, but consider what I stated and the evidence as it was out and about, and in the media no less.

How many looked away whilst some of this was happening under their very noses?

 

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July 2, 2020 · 04:49

Here come the drums

We all see them, at times awe merely hear them, the rattles of sabres, the sound of the drums. Politicians in a stage of ‘Them be fighting words’, and for a moment it seems that they have balls, not sure where they keep them, but that could optionally be the topic of a very different conversation. As I see it, it all started with ABC giving us ‘The hundreds of billions being poured into Defence shows Morrison’s done with the old world order’ (at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-01/defence-spending-scott-morrison-miliatry-strategy-jennett/12410464), yet the quote “Morrison’s blunt language about the abrupt disappearance of the “benign security environment” is calculated to jolt the public into accepting the military escalation the PM’s ordering and it is paying for. At $270 billion over a decade, the money is considerable, but dollars alone do not explain what’s happened in defence, diplomatic and national security thinking since the last Defence White Paper was handed down by Malcolm Turnbull in 2016” implies something different and something more. We might think that it is about China, but the rhetoric does not quite work, so when I see “Who else could the White Paper be referring to when it inserts the words “coerce” or “coercion” a dozen times in a document only 12 pages in length. He is not freelancing, but accurately reflecting the wider shift in thinking and disposition that the boundary riders have adopted. In their view, there’s no point in a prime minister banging on about defending the international “rules-based order” anymore — China’s not playing by those rules and Trump is rewriting them on the fly, as he sees fit, on any given day.” I see a different horse, but I will update you soon, There is another article linked to this. The article I am referring to is the one given to us on June 19th by news.com.au, the article starts with ‘Australian Government and businesses hit by massive cyber attack from ‘sophisticated, state-based actor’’ (at https://www.news.com.au/technology/online/hacking/australian-government-and-private-sector-reportedly-hit-by-massive-cyber-attack/news-story/b570a8ab68574f42f553fc901fa7d1e9), I see it differently, but lets put that aside for now. The quote gives us “In an urgent press conference called this morning in Canberra, Mr Morrison said the ongoing, “large-scale” hack was being executed by a “sophisticated, state-based cyber actor”. “This activity is targeting Australian organisations across a range of sectors, including all levels of government, industry, political organisations, education, health, essential service providers and operators of other critical infrastructure,” Mr Morrison told reporters.” Now, I am not stating that it is wrong or inaccurate, but the game is actually a little different from my point of view. You see, for the last few weeks Australians have been under attack, being it from the Department of Housing, the Justice department as a few criminal cases are coming to light and these calls are coming from a so called ‘automated voice’, yet they seemingly come from numbers like 08-92166959, 08-92100644, 08-71603541 and when you call them, these numbers are disconnected, calls over a month from multiple numbers all scam based and it was going on for a month, so we can argue that as these scammers are not stopped, how does Scott Morrison have any foundation to stop so called state-based actors? It is simple math, when the cyber sleuths can stop scammers, we can argue they might be ready for the real deal, but the real deal has superior hardware, all whilst the hunt for scammers is not really in a stage of being successful at present, I actually wonder whether they can identify these so called ‘sophisticated, state based cyber actors’, is that a foundation we can get behind? Oh and by the way, there is no evidence that these scams are Chinese, at least I saw no evidence of any kind, so I cannot make such an assumption. We can argue all we like on the need for $1-$1.3 billion on that stuff, but there is (as I personally see it) a lack of how to deal with the problem, you know, the odd execution, the simple stage of evicting these criminals (if they are not Australians), or perhaps long term eviction to a dark prison in Darwin (presumably a black site), the law stops to a larger degree the persecution as evidence is key here and so far the collection of evidence is pretty much a bust. That is not the fault of the police or the AFP, it is the lack of hardware and the lack of expertise. That is where things tend to go wrong and if these players lack the resources to find scammers, the other group remains untouchable. That is how I see it. The second stage that I see is that the Australian PM is how shall I put it, the bitch of the US president? Yup, not elegant but pretty spot on, the US is setting the stage where we can only be friends with the US if China is our enemy, a way of thinking that is massively shortsighted and the Commonwealth will pay for that acceptance dearly in several ways down the road. Now, if China was an actual enemy and danger it would be one thing, but the US has yet to deliver any substantial evidence on that effect. Yup, there is every chance it can towards the Chinese government, but not in regards to Huawei and as the US sees both as one and the same, the evidence tends to be tainted and can we afford that approach? That is the situation and as I see it the Commonwealth is being pulled down a maelstrom of bad situations that can only get worse over time. That is seen when we look at the talking points a mere two days ago when we saw ‘It is understood Australian officials believe China is responsible for recent cyber hacking activity’ in this case I am not going to hammer on evidence, there is such a thing as ‘national security’ and one can validly argue that I need not be in the know. Yet the underlying situation remains, if the scammers can continue unopposed, what chance do we have stopping any optional state funded cyber actor and why bother, we could argue that the billions will not make too big a dent, not until the expertise is in the house and the Australian house is seemingly lacking expertise, it is not stupid, it has skills, but it needs a lot more and if that billion also provides training, then it is one thing, but I wonder how much training makes up for the shortages. My view is only one view, but some share that view and even as consultants from all over the place are happy to help, we see a larger stage where defence funds are swallowed by over priced consultants, the US fell into that trap in the last 10 years and the Commonwealth needs to avoid that very same trap. 

The problem is that there is no clear cut solution, there is no bandaid fixing the situation, but it needs fixing, no one denies this, I merely hope that we go about that stage in a clearcut manner, and I do hope that we are not merely targeting the enemy of the US without proper evidence. If there is evidence that China is marking us then that is one thing, yet we need to keep the Chinese government issues and the Huawei issues separate, the US does not think that this is possible, I am not convinced it is so, but if proper evidence is presented, I would change my mind, wouldn’t you? The issue there is that the US no longer has any credibility, so we need to rely on third parties to inform us and that is not the greatest place to be in. So we can hear the drums, but who is directing the drums is one thing, in what direction they are playing is another, a cyber stage with two unknown variables, also (as I personally see it) a stage that we are not familiar with, actually three when you consider the non-reliability of an ally. 

 

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June 28, 2020 · 14:42

Where are we at?

That is the question I am throwing out there and as I am sitting in a mall enjoying a large cappuccino, I see the phrase “your safety is our concern” pass by, yet is that so? I am not opposing it, yet in the same stage the phrase “Our safety is your concern” is equally valid. We might ignore it, we might oppose it and for the most, the pussies in the field are all about ignoring the safety of others, their ego’s are all about setting the stage of what THEY need, whilst disregarding the simplest safety. I get it, it is not. Normal flu, but the realisation needs to be on the foreground of EVERY person around, and it is not, it there is one certainty, then it was seen in the scenes I personally witnessed yesterday. Th world moves on and whilst we see another clambake article on the hardships of Yemen, we need to realise that the Coronavirus will hit there a lot harder, it is not merely the stage of “5 yeas of hunger, 5 years of war” that the BBC gives us (they make no false claims there), we see that Saudi Arabia is trying to raise $2.41 billion in aid. In all this we see that the European support is dwindling down, support after support project is shutting down, the money is gone and pleads from the UN is seemingly falling on deaf ears. And the noise the people like Andrew Smith are making does not help anyone, even less the Yemeni people. So whilst we are given partial parts on Scotland by the Campaign Against Arms Trade, we simply ignore the massive support that the Houthis are giving by Iran. Do you think that this was was going on if Iran was not involved? If anything we could give out the considerations that the Yemeni war is going on because of Andrew Smith and his band of rascals. We see the accusations on both sides and we can draw a parallel to our own Corona issues, the  entire matter is in a stage of imbalance and the Yemeni people are paying the price. And it is important to see that this was not due to the Saudi intervention, they were asked by the rightfully elected government, a small titbit that is set not mentioned often enough, and now that the Houthis after 3 years are getting better in shooting their missiles, the mess will escalate faster and larger. The problem is not whether the Saudi government gets the support they need, it becomes the question on why full support was not given 3 years ago, now that the Yemeni children are dying left, right and centre, we are all in a stage of “Awwww!”, yet this has been going on for years and for the longest time no one cared, there is merely the presented concerns on these ‘dastardly Saudi’s and their guns’, whilst our concern should have been on ending the blatant disregard fo lives that Iran was ensuing (and ensuring). As I see it, the Saudi coalition had the high ground and even as the media is now calling it the Saudi Arabian led intervention, the Saudi coalition does include Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Sudan, and it also used to include Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco. This thing was always a lot bigger then we thought it was whilst the sources are clear to ignore the Iranian involvement and setting the stage of opposition to a revolutionary committee, the Houthi forces and the pro Sales Houthi. Did you think that this stage would still exist without Iran? We ignore the larger stage and we help it coming of age, killing thousands of children, we have due to our inactions blood on our hands and we are in a stage of ignoring that part.

Just like the corona virus, we seemingly push the responsibility onto others, whilst our actions did matter all along, but feel free to ignore that part and when you see more people die in Yemen. On TV tonight, feel free to switch to Big Brother, hoping to see one of the girls taking a shower, your life almost seem perfect, so enjoy the nightmares you have from prolonging a war that could have ended in 90 days, and consider that someone is feeding the houthi forces ballistic missiles, especially in light that thee isn’t a building left standing to produce these bad boys in the first place. Materials that the Houthi forces could not own or afford, they have them by the dozen (cheaper that way), in a stage where they have no economy, they have spend more on weapons, missiles and drones than a nation like Sweden could afford, did no one realise that part of the equation? A setting of imbalance that players like the CAAT is fuelling and no one takes notice.

When the children of Yemen start chanting “Our safety is your concern”, which excuse will a person like Andrew Smith offer? He’ll probably know someone to blame, but the fault is in us all. Iran should have been dealt with well over 10 years ago, but we were all fooled by a mediocre puppet all whilst the battle hardened IRGC was ignored, in that regard our inaction should pave an interesting highway to hell.

 

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June 27, 2020 · 23:32

When it is about something else

We all have those moments, we see one thing, yet when we look at the news, it was seemingly about something else. This of course goes both ways, what we see is not always what we think it is and in this case I might well be wrong, yet I am willing to yet you decide.

It all started 10.3 minutes ago (roughly), I was munching down on a bag of ‘veggie straws’ I never had those before and they were on special (50% off) so I decided to take a walk on the Wilde side, so there I was munching on savoury goods whilst listening to Jordi Savall playing Matrimonio di Francesca Borgia, I remember the procession (I saw the Blu-ray on the Borgias), it was a lovely wedding and she copulated in public, the good old days where a wedding was only valid when they did it on the wedding day, all that before there was VHS and we got the best porn in the city. Ah well, as we see one thing we see another, so when the BBC showed me ‘Coca-cola suspends social media advertising despite Facebook changes’ I feel that we are shown something else. At present it sucks to be Coca Cola, let’s face it, when I was in the supermarket I got myself 2 bottles of Vanilla Coke, yet no advertisement would have spurned me, I know the stuff, it is 20% off and for a lot of people it is that way. Coca Cola has sent a truckload of cash in the right directions (Olympics, Sport events, public events, but Covid-19 is stopping it all from happening, so for players like Coca Cola there is no benefit, if there were pubic events, oh no, these are cancelled as well, apparently only a chosen few can have sex at 1.5 metres apart (names redacted for national security reasons). So, I understand the setting where all these firms are blaming Marky Mark of the Zuckerberg clan, yet that is so short sighted. We want to blame the for everything, yet this problem is a lot larger, it is drenched in fear and drenched in opposition to things we cannot control. We cannot control the flu, so when we get some slick politician making claims that big tech is to blame, whilst their own records cannot be properly vetted (the paying dead people issue) all whilst their internal systems are dodgy as hell, I wonder how large the issue is. It is not merely America, the failings in Europe are not small either and it is laced in technology. As these slick individuals took the cheap options, we now see how cheap is letting all kinds of people shout whatever they want, it brings fear to all.

So whilst we see brand after brand relabel their products as to avoid the backlashes, we see that there is a larger issue in play and the media is doing whatever it can to avoid them as to not anger their advertisers, they need all the advertisers they can as you can see.

It is even more dastardly than you think. The BBC also reported on shaadi.com, an Asian dating site that they were removing skin tone filters. Consider that this was done, do you think that they inserted the skin filter automatically, or was it done to appease their members? Do you think that a dating site, or any site will auto filter the look of a member without permission? How liable would they be? Consider the fact that the filter was created, do you think it was to make the programmer happy? He might not have cared, I reckon that if w get actual statistics on the site on who used it (numbers that optionally would suddenly be accidentally deleted), how many women (or men) used it? They would have started their optional relationship based on a lie. So when we see in the article “Priya (name has been changed) found her husband on the site after being rejected by others for her skin colour. “I am dark-skinned and saw the skin colour question on there (shaadi.com) and answered it the best I could,” she tells BBC Asian Network.

“I remember selecting ‘wheat-ish’ – whatever that means.””, so this person hid behind ‘whatever it means’, and I do not care, but we see two versions of deception and I get that she girl made a choice, hoping it would work out, but lets not deceive each other. There is a larger stage and it is founded on racism, you get better breaks (so they say) when you are caucasian and I will not fault anyone to get the better deal, yet the advertisement issue is a lot larger and is drenched in lost revenue due to ineffective advertisements (a Covid cancelled Olympics event for example) and it seems that it could go on for another 60 days and as such the people involved will stop advertising, especially if you already have visibility going up the kazoo (like Coca Cola, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Netflix, Google, and a few Unilever brands), I get the idea that these people are watching the dimes they spend, but lets not call it #StopHateForProfit when it is about margins of profit, it is actually that simple as I see it.

We can push all we can, but it is the fellow man and woman next to us that needs to change, to stop giving in to hate and fear, we get it, it is overwhelming, and when you are African American in the good old KKK of SA, there are larger concerns and it is a lot more serious there, even as the Business Insider gave (two weeks ago) a list with 25 charts that show that racism is serious in the US, lets think about that, so in 2020 we see clear numbers on racism, so why is the US not acting? Do you still think it is that simple? (at https://www.businessinsider.com.au/us-systemic-racism-in-charts-graphs-data-2020-6?r=US&IR=T), so when we are in a stage of #BlackLivesMatter and #AllLivesMatter, consider that corporate America has not acted for well over a decade, the numbers give that much, even as the situation is seemingly going better, there is too much that needs to be done and government does seemingly not care, only 10% is non-caucasian there, look at the Business Insider for that part, so it is about something else and we need to consider that part, we need to consider that a lot faster then we think, because if this explodes, we see a much larger issue, especially when you consider that the pay gap is supposedly between 59% and 62%, and take in consideration the Fair Employment Act 1941, Civil Rights At 1991, Equal Pay Act 1963, and 4 amendments to the Constitution of the United States, so where was corporate America all these years? Let’s call the issue by its name, and let’s take a look at the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act 2009, which directly impacts the case Ledbetter v Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company (2007). So when you are done with all that, consider that Coca Cola issue again and consider how many companies are in a shady place at present. None of it has anything to do with Marky Mark of the Facebook tribe, and a lot more with the bottom dollar as Wall Street needs it to be for at least another 30 years (at present).

 

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June 23, 2020 · 22:59

Speak through deafening silence

We all tend to be in a motion to listen to the right person, sometimes we know that person and sometimes we do not. In this age and as we see tidal movements towards black lives matter (I personally believe that nearly all life matters), we look at the cacophony of chaos and we are trying to make sense of what is real, what is sincere and what is different. So, whilst I modernised the idea towards the idea of renewed IP in video gaming, I started to look in different directions, I do that at times. I do it because it tends to remove tunnel vision from creativity. As such I get a new lease on balance, it is part of my own process. And in light that the new IP would be best suited for Ubisoft as they already have parts in their archives, my mind ended up not being very happy. The idea that their process is the better choice does not bode too well. So as I was looking at the change, I overlooked something different as well. 

As such was my mind when the BBC gives us ‘‘Speak and be heard’: Why black media matters’ (at https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-53142308/speak-and-be-heard-why-black-media-matters), added to that is “Sara Lomax-Reese owns WURD, one of a handful of black-owned and operated radio stations in the US. Her father, Dr Walter P Lomax Jr, was a respected physician, entrepreneur and philanthropist. He originally acquired the station in 2003 in an effort to amplify and empower the voices of Philadelphia’s black community.” with a less than 3 minute video. That is all!

So one might deduce that black lives do not really matter that much at all. And now I give that proof.

The Evidence?

The video is really good, it gave me a lot more than I bargained for. It starts with a link to the 1996 Telecommunications Act where according to the video individual voices were eliminated. The Wiki page (at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WURD) gives some information, but I am baffled by the amount of information that we do not see. We get the gist, poison and speculations (facts too) of nearly every reality TV station on the planet. Most of them in great detail, in case of WURD it ends with “The new owners reinstituted the WURD call sign. After a period of apparent indecision during which the station aired various types of music and CNN Headline News, management settled on the current talk format.”

So even if I wanted to slap the BBC around, I would be partially unable to do so, there is not much, as such I wonder how trained are the ‘all black lives matter’ in the stage of digital media. Even now as I listen to WURD Radio (streaming) I wonder what more they can do in light of the stage that they are on. 

I hear a lot of references towards Facebook, they give all kinds of Coronavirus information and a lot of Philadelphia news. There is nothing bad about WURD, I am just amazed at how little information on WURD is out there. If we see the digital media, I feared a tidal wave of information drowning me, that is not the case. So as I listen to Solomon Jones, I wonder just  how much more could be done, let’s face it, if black lives truly matter, then they need a voice box that is a lot larger than we are now seeing. Not the people screaming ‘black lives matter’, but voices that inform all others that they matter and that part is not out there. WURD is merely one station in a stage where there would be at least one station per state. And there are a lot more, via Google using “black radio stations US” I find 31 stations, so there is a lot more and whilst I get the news on a young man who gets a whole clip (14 bullets) in his body, I get it that they are talking about it. From my personal experience I know that 1 bullet stops a person, the second shot kills that person. In keeping a community safe we need to see that a lot of questions need to be asked, but at present the mood is too hot and too emotional to see any progress, but questions need to be asked. I personally believe that a clear voice needs to be available. In all this the voice of Solomon Jones comes across clearly. So why does the BBC article have merely 34 words with a less than 3 minute video? This is what I see as evidence. 

In all this it did not need to be merely about WURD, although I must admit that they bring it nicely. And it is here that I notice the first improvement. When you seek a station and you find it, Google gives the low down on the right side, yet if EVERY station found would have a stream button right there, it would optionally become a first step in improving and increasing the visibility of every station. In this stage of globalisation, being able to listen to a local station is actually more important than you could ever imagine. And it is at this point that the video shows the gem it has at the near end: “Media Institutions are in some way cultural institutions”, when we realise that and we wonder how big business has gotten a grasp of strangling budgets to kill of cultural aspects we see a much larger failure, if the Gates Foundation is so close to bringing good, then the idea of them bringing a million dollars a year for every State in advertisement money to these stations, is not a big request, let’s face it paying for advertisements makes sense, and before it is dwindled down to the presentation that digital media is cheaper, wonder how much print advertisement is used, is it such a leap to give these rural and local media stations some of these dollars? Oh, and it is not merely Microsoft or the Gates Foundation, I reckon that it is in the interest of the entire FAANG group to dwindle some dollars in that direction. 

We might believe that it is all cultural and we get it, but culture needs fuel, if it is not fed, it dies, the formula is that simple and as we see the results in the US, we see what anger does when it lacks culture to give wisdom to those in anger, a person who has nothing to live for is the most dangerous man in the game, perhaps that is why a young boy got 14 bullets, it makes us wonder how desperate and how uncertain the person was that was shooting the young black man.

Even as the BBC gave light to WURD, I see that a lot more should have been done.If it was up to me, the video (the entirety) would be part of a 10-20 minute video on local news and how it could optionally temper and improve lives, not merely black lives, but all lives. We all want to see the a better world where all people have a place and optionally a place where they can voice concerns, it is (my personal believe) that larger business enterprises see that as a hindrance to their bottom line and that is the biggest evil, that is why the FAANG group needs to be involved, if the biggest firms become a shield the others will stop their game and we see will over time see a better answer to the one that the 1996 Telecommunications Act seemingly brought.

 

 

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May 26, 2020 · 01:03

Open Targets

We all have that point in time when we see a person we know, and when we see that person, we wished we had a paintball rifle, that person is the target. That person optionale did nothing wrong, it is a variant to “Slap your annoying coworker day”. I feel certain that more than one person had me in mind and that is probably why my title as ‘certified psychopath’ gets me out of hot water. Iget it, I tend to be goal driven and I have zero regard for diplomacy (most of the time), yet it also works in opposition. I get annoyed when some boss gives me the run around instead of giving me the direct message. There is nothing as hateful as a manager keeping you on a leash instead of giving the bad news up front, which he has had for 3-4 hours. So wasting time on long rides whilst the short message would have changed the dynamics towards the goal. 

Yet the larger issue is not the manager, it is me. I am aware that I have flaws and faults (we all do), yet I present the flaw as a strength, and that is where things get dicey at times. I feel that I am on the right path, but I also understand that those drowning in diplomacy have a case. In this setting we look at Ubisoft, it is hit hard by the Rainbow Six clone (I would call it a rip off), and Apple and Google are actually in hot waters over the entire setting. This is nothing less than copyright infringement. This is a lot more than a clone, this is more than some copy lookalike. Several people, or better stated, several gamers could not tell the difference ad that is a bad thing. Ubisoft has many flaws, but in the titles they believe, they have pumped cash into them and Rainbow Six is an important IP revenue for them. As such the game Area F2 is a much larger concern and the impact on Alibaba will also be significant. It is my issue here that I fail to see how Area F2 even made it onto the App sites in the first place. And that is before we take a look at the Nintendo app store. There is a larger flaw and even as I enjoy slapping Ubisoft, I am also protective of games and Ubisoft does deserve every bit of protection here. There is a larger stage, not merely of what is missed, but of the things we see that require a larger consideration, apart from Alibaba getting every bit of software scrutinised, before it is allowed online. The larger stage is how can we prevent this larger stage exploding. In today’s stage we see that videogames get the initial 30-60 day joust for revenue and that leads to a 60-120 day revenue boost. Basically Area F2 screwed that up for Rainbow Six and they should pay for it, optionally using the Alibaba credit cards. In today’s stage it will be a massive invoice, and as I personally see it, Ubisoft is entitled to those funds. The stage for Alibaba changes even further when we consider the historic stage that Call of Duty and Medal of Honour had, they looked alike but were different in several ways and it kept both alive. In this stage where people cannot tell the difference between Area F2 and Rainbow Six siege there is a much larger and a different stage. Copyright infringement is not new, not even in gaming, but the fact that people cannot tell the difference is pretty new and very unique, and I wonder what play will be set in motion to stop this from happening again, in all this, I do believe that Alibaba will take a large hit to their value, I personally believe that Ubisoft has all the rights it can to divert damage to its IP and let it all be paid by someone name Ali Baba

It reminds me of an old publishing joke, you see the book ‘Ali Baba and the 40 thieves’ was politically incorrect, it was republished as ‘Ali Baba and the 40 fighters for the Palistinian cause’. I wonder how it sounds when the third edition is staged as ‘Alibaba and the 40 game programmers’, yet in all this it is still early days, I will keep my eyes on the court case, because the impact will be a lot larger than most of us can imagine. The only thing I wonder about is how they got it looking alike so fast, there seems to be a factor of intent in all this, so there is every chance that Alibaba will go to court against the people who made Area F2. 

 

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April 8, 2020 · 23:35

Secretary of the Nanny

Something happened last week, it was seen in the BBC news when we were given ‘Captain pleads for help over outbreak’, in this case it is Captain Crozier of the USS Theodore Rooseveld. I initially wondered how they dealt with other flu scenarios, taking into consideration that except from him and his CO, the people on that ship are pretty much all of them in the lower than 1% mortality rate group. Most people in Las Vegas would give their wife, oldest daughter and mistress for those odds, so why is there an overreaction? 

I was uneasy with the entire ‘No one has to die’ approach. This is a warship and here my Merchant Navy knowledge, training and education is a little help. I understand and accept the hierarchy that is important on EVERY boat, Article 2 is about the responsibility of the ship’s captain (ZAR, when I was in School) and I remember that part (reference to the Ships Collision Regulation). Yet it is larger and harder on a war vessel. I do not envy the situation that Captain Crozier found himself in, but the entire stage is an altered one, and the alteration matters. 

It requires me to repeat the part that I gave three days ago, the age based mortality curve. 

80+ years old 14.8%

70-79 years old 8.0%

60-69 years old 3.6%

50-59 years old 1.3%

40-49 years old 0.4%

30-39 years old 0.2%

20-29 years old 0.2%

10-19 years old 0.2%

Consider that the bulk of a naval vessel will have people between 20 and 39 years of age. This Captain is setting the odds against a stage where he runs the risk of optionally losing 8 people, and that is in a stage where complications set in. Lets not forget that military staff tends to be in much better condition then the average person in that same age, so optionally the risk for these groups is 20%-30% lower than the numbers we see, and I admit that this is slightly speculative, yet I feel that this is correct. As such I stand behind the Secretary of the Navy, or as we could consider the nanny of Captain Crozier,who set himself up in all kinds of ways. Letters ‘leaked’ to the press, the view of the navy and a few other matters makes me a supporter of Thomas Modly and the actions he took in this (name calling disregarded).

Yes, we want all crews to be 100% safe, but it is and remains a war vessel, there are priorities that need to be met and on a crew of 4000, losing 8 people is not nice, but not unrealistic either. In all this, the entire ‘plead for help’ was massively stupid, and he knew this, mainly because he would have send any considerations on the pandemic to the Admiralty (its American equivalent) and that does not seem to have been the case.

Perhaps there is a side where I am wrong and I should not call his actions ‘massively stupid’ yet there are other actions he could have taken and if it is not written down it does not exist, it is that simple in political actions and this was in part a political move, lets make no illusions on that. In this, it is my opinion that the call by Joe Biden (stating that the firing of Captain Crozier was close to criminal) is wrong, or at least this is how I perceive it to be. The Captain called doubt on the functioning of an American Warship and that is never OK. I cannot tell you what is the right action, but the visibility was wrong, there are rules, regulations and visibility of those in charge and most civilians do not understand it. That is not their fault, but there is a given where the function of a warship even in peacetime is extensive and we forget or shut our eyes to this and in civilian life that is fine, in the eyes of defence it is not. 

Showing your optional enemies that there is weakness and handing this out in a letter is folly, my mind remains focussed on who ‘leaked’ the letter, because that is the larger enemy in all this, not Captain Crozier (unless he leaked the letter).

 

 

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February 28, 2020 · 17:32

Tech needs

I was amazed by a story in the guardian (at https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/feb/27/phones-that-may-hold-child-abuse-images-returned-to-suspects). Now, we all have that at times, a moment where we just do not get the idea that something is happening (or not), the issue here is that it is a much larger setting and we see this with “Police are giving back to suspected paedophiles phones and computers that possibly hold child abuse images because they do not have the time or technology to search the devices“, so the police ran out of time (or options) hand the evidence that could be used against these people and let them go?

Then there is “the technology that helps officers quickly scan devices to determine the likelihood of indecent images being present is not consistently available across forces” in this that it is important that we take notice of ‘quickly‘, how determining is that factor? As I see it with the range of mobiles that are coming in the next two years, the hardship of the police will increase by factor 16 at the very least (on average factor 32 applies). There is a larger setting where the police have a duty, but so do the tech firms. I am not the person to blame all the tech firms, yet there is a larger setting where certain tools need to become available with the next stage of transportable drives and hardware. And we need to look beyond the normal FAT (or NTSC) stage of scans where allocated space is scanned alone, making the hardship for the police increase to factor 64 at the least. 

Then we see “limited capacity of forces to conduct many costly and time-consuming digital forensic examinations is also hampering investigations into suspects who have downloaded indecent images of children” and that is when we see the impact of people saving images on their own drives, it is the group that has dark web links in a sort of 4chan (not blaming 4chan here) that allows these people to look at such images at their own ‘leisure’ in any free wifi situation as the images are encrypted until at the endstation with the decrypting part in the app itself, and as the hardship of the police is merely to scan for images, the solution to find these people is unlikely to become a larger solution ever.

So when we see “restore 20,000 police to the streets of England and Wales will not be enough to match the increasing demand placed on officers to protect children” we need to consider very different solutions and the adaptation of law to protect children becomes a much larger need. It is seen in “In one case inspectors found that 100 days had passed since police were notified that a 10-year-old girl had been receiving indecent images from three older men via social media. During that time there was no effort to identify and trace the perpetrators“, which is interesting because they were apparently able to identify that these were ‘three older men‘. Is it just me or is there a larger failing in the making? The second failure is seen in “Safeguarding planning for children linked to a suspected perpetrator is routinely deferred until a criminal investigation has begun“. As such there are actually three failings. We overlooked ‘social media‘, they too play a role. There should be a clear path for a younger person to press the alarm button alerting social media on any indecent picture sent via social media if the account holder is under 18, this could have been avoided years ago. This is not a stage of freedom of expression, this is not free speech, it is optionally criminal speech and evidence must be gathered at this point. 

There is no defence in ‘someone had my password!‘, the owner of the social media account had responsibilities too. As such as we see “The delay is worsened by the lack of technology available to officers to search devices for child abuse images“, the statement is cutting on both sides, as the images might not have been on the device. other means of tracking usage must be found and we need to do more to keep the children safe.

In all this there is a much larger failing, yes there are criminal prosecution needs, yet it is almost indecent to push the blame onto the police. I believe that whatever enlargements places like GCHQ is getting, they need to get off the horse of blaming players like Huawei on events that come from alleged unproven sources like the US state department and place these sources on finding true solutions to aid the police. Consider the need for solutions and less so towards unfounded allegations, that is close to 15% of GCHQ resources freed overnight. I call that a decent solution, do you not?

Yet, I am not blaming GCHQ, the issue is that we need to adjust the laws on digital prosecution and where we are presently allowed to go, that is not a given in the stage we see. We need to adjust the track we can walk and who can walk it for us, it is the only solution that remains at present and too many people think in call centre cubicle terms and refuse to see the larger pasture that we need to canvas.

In all this tech firms and governments need to find common ground and we are in the space where we can blatantly blame tech firms, yet it is not that simple. The tech firms offered a solution and someone found another use for it. We cannot blame Sony for people using their PS3 as a powerful Ubuntu Linux station and that is basically what is happening. This is not some tech firm problem, it is the station where a generic piece of hardware can run another app and use it as it sees fit, use and adjust for other solutions and implement that and the police has little to no hope at all solving the issue they face and tech firms need to come out and play with governments and stay nice. 

Yet the issue is much larger than anyone thinks. We saw part of this last year in the Crime report with ‘Tech Firms’ Neglect Lets Pedophiles Run Rampant Online‘, the fact that ‘freedom of expression’ is used in a way none are willing to agree to also means acknowledging that sometimes an aerosol is used, not to hand out what it was intend on doing, but to assassinate a politician. See here the object (at https://www.amazon.com.au/Aluminum-Pneumatic-Refillable-Pressure-Compressed/dp/B00JKED4MS/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=aerosol&qid=1582859473&sr=8-3), as I add it with the right Arsenic mix and switch the bottle, the user kills himself. Is the bottle maker to blame (or I am even more devious and add the mix to their own bottle, was the victim in the end to blame for their suicide)?

So the entire ‘rampant’ part is (as I personally see it) intentional miscommunication, there is a larger stage and both sides need an actual point of reference. there is a system in place and we see “YouTube removed this video, and many others, after WIRED alerted it to the problem” (source: Wired) yet we forget that this is a massive engine and google is not in a place to stop the engine being used by criminals to make a few quick bucks. We need to accept and understand that. Even as several people hide behind “on a test account created to investigate the network of paedophiles on YouTube, the platform’s algorithm continues to suggest similar videos of children that have been commented on by sexual predators“, the engine did exactly what it was supposed to do, yet in this case we see that it is servicing the criminals and the short sighted people shout and blame the tech company, just as they blame the police and neither is at fault, the criminals are. We can look at the T91 assault rifle and claim it is used to kill, which is true, yet we forget that the person using it can kill criminals and police officers alike, blaming the makers for that is just short sighted and stupid.

We need a much better solution and we need to rely on tech makers to hand the tools to us, all whilst we know that those making the request (see hidden images) have no clue what to look for and how to look for them, it is maddening on several levels and the people on the side lines have no clue that the referee is looking for an orange jersey all whilst the All Blacks are playing Australia, so he sees Green, Yellow, Black and White (the fern). It is a stage where we look at the players, whilst the field has several other members that are validly there and we overlook them, just like the ‘hidden pictures’ are sought in a game where the pictures are optionally not even on the mobile device, merely the link to them is.

That part is overlooked and as we go from one item to the other, we forget that links can be added in several ways and the police will run out of time long before it runs out of options to check. In all this the law failed the children long before the tech firms did. So whilst we see Wired giving us “To date, Disney, Nestlé, Epic Games, Dr. Oetker and a number of other companies have halted advertising on YouTube after it emerged that the platform was monetising videos being uploaded and viewed by paedophiles“, I merely see one sanctimonious firm and 3 short sighted ones, it could be two for two, but I leave you to decide on that. An automated systems was designed and put into place, the criminals were hiding in the woodworks and there are close to a dozen ways to hide all this from an AI for years, all whilst we clearly see that We need to realise that YouTube became so much more than it ever was intended to be and when we take notice of ‘300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute!‘ and consider that 18,000 hours of video is uploaded every hour, we get a first input of just how difficult the entire setting is, because these 18,000 hours of video will include 3,000 hours of videos that is set to items no more than 5 minutes per video, making the issue 20 times larger, in all this we forget that this is a global thing and cross border criminal activities are even harder to set any mind to then anything else and in all this, there is no actual number on the actual number of uploads. Consider that ten minutes out of 18,000 hours is illegal and that 30 seconds out of those 10 minutes is on paedophiles. At that point do you get a first inkling of how large the problem is. and that is merely YouTube, there are channels that have no monitoring at all, there are channels that have encrypted images and video solutions and there are solutions out there that have an adapted DB2 virus header and the police has no clue on how to go about it (not their fault either), in all this places like the DGSE and GCHQ are much better solution providers and it is time the tech firms talked to them, yet whenever that discussion starts we get some stupid politician who conveniantly adds a few items to the agenda, because to that person it made sense and as such no solution is designed and it has been the situation of non action and non solutions for a few years now and I see the same discussion come up and go about it all whilst I already know the outcome (it is as simple as using an abacus).

We have larger tech needs and we have better law needs, And whilst we see people like Andy Burrows, NSPCC associate head of child safety online go on about “extremely disturbing“, all whilst a person like that should realise that the system designed is generic and severely less than 0.03% of the population abuses it is beyond me, I would go on that a person like Andy Burrows should not be in the position he is when he has little to no regard of the designed system, more precisely, he should remove the ‘online‘ part from his title altogether.

And whilst Wired ends with “During our investigation into his claims, we found comments from users declaring their “love” for the children and exchanging phone numbers with one another to share more videos via WhatsApp“, I merely wonder how the police is investigating these phone numbers and whatsApp references, in all this the absence of WhatsApp (Facebook) is also a little weird, it seems that these social media predators are all over the place and the open abuse of one system is singled out whilst we get no real feel of just how the abuse statistics are against the total statistics. Consider that Windows has a 2.3% error to abuse by non users, in all this for Google to get a system that is close to 99.4% decent is an amount that is almost unheard of. most people seem to forget that Google gets pushed into a corner by media and madiamediators on transgressions on IP protected events (publishing a movie online), there is the abuse of video, there are personal videos that are disallowed and terrorism via YouTube, in all this harsh or not, the paedophile issue is a blip on the radar, Youtube gets $4 billion out of a system that costs $6 bilion to maintain and it pays off in other ways, yet the reality on the total is ignored by a lot of players and some of them are intentionally averting their eyes from the total image and no one asks why that is happening.

So whilst we look at the Wired byline ‘Legislation to force major tech platforms to better tackle child sexual abuse on their networks is also “forthcoming”, a Home Office spokesperson has confirmed‘ we need to seriously ask whether these legislation people have any idea of what they are doing. The moment these people vacate to another nation the entire setting changes and they have to start from scratch again, all whilst there is no solution and none will be coming any day soon. You might think that vacating nations solves anything, but it does not, because the facilitators of these images can pick up their server and move from place to place whilst they get millions, all whilst the payers are still out of reach from criminal prosecution. and whilst we go in the magic roundabout, we get from point to point never having a clue on the stage we are on, we are merely going in circles and that is the problem we face. Until the short sighted blaming stops and governments truly sit down with tech firms trying to find a solution, we are left in the middle without any solution, merely with the continued realisation that we failed our children.

We have dire tech needs and we need to make a cold list of what we need, and the first we need to do is blaming them for a situation that they are not to blame. Consider that we are blaming Johannes Gutenberg for the creation of the printing press, he created it in 1439, basically to make the bible available to all (before that only rich people could afford a bible), yet he is the one being accused of aiding the spread of Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler. that is what we face, we blame YouTube and Google for something they never did and optionally never considered facing. In 1814 Joseph Nicéphore Niépce made the first photograph (like we know camera’s today), yet in that same year Julien Vallou de Villeneuve used it to photograph naked women, should Joseph Nicéphore Niépce be held accountable? We all seem to say yes and blame Google, but it had little to no control at all, a system like the one Google made was not meant for the 0.00000000925% abusing the system, yet that is what is happening right now and we need to take a step back and consider what we are doing. I am not claiming that Google is a saint, yet we refuse to hold Microsoft to account for their 97.5% operating system, yet we are going to all lengths to prosecute Google for 0.00000000925% of materials produced (actually it is up to 1/24th of that if not smaller) by others through abusing the YouTube system, all whilst the problem is a lot larger and is beyond almost any tech firm, so why are we doing that?

It becomes clear when we add last year’s CNN article in the process. They gave us “Frustrated that those regulators are moving too slowly, Congress, with support from Democrats and Republicans, will use its investigative power for a top-to-bottom review of the tech industry, and focus on the biggest companies. Congress cannot break up companies under existing laws, but it could cook up new ones — and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who’s established herself as Democrats’ big ideas leader in 2020, already has a plan to break up the largest tech monopolies.” (at https://edition.cnn.com/2019/06/04/politics/washington-turn-against-tech-companies/index.html), I believe that this is not about the materials, it is about a handle of the company and flaming conversations brings emotional response and the quickest way to push voters into an area where they are the most useful. Google is still too big for politicians, so they push and push until something gives and they are hoping that the people will be malleable to a much larger extent then the tech companies ever were.

Lets face it, how many companies are actually interested in fixing a problem that covers 0.00000000925% of their materials? That is the actual question! The police can’t go after it, these politicians are unwilling to adjust laws where paedophiles are actually processed, as such the entire situation does not make sense and tech firms are suiting up for their defense, that is all the politicians have enabled, now the politicians through media hope for enough outrage and we see the fallout, those politicians are willing to endanger the lives of the children by not seeking an actual solution, but a solution that fit their needs and these two do not align. and in this both sides of the isle on a global scale are guilty, both the elected and unelected (this term) parties are all equally guilty of setting a stage that suits them, not one that solves the problem.

We seemingly forget about that part of the equation, I wonder why that is.

 

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February 13, 2020 · 14:06

Middle of the seesaw

To be honest, I am not sure where to stand, even now, as we see ‘Google starts appeal against £2bn shopping fine‘ (at https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51462397), I am personally still in the mindset that there is something wrong here. 

We can give the critique that my view is too much towards Google, and that is fine, I would accept that. Yet the part where we see 

  • In 2017, €2.4bn over shopping results.
  • In 2018, €4.3bn fine over claims it used Android software to unfairly promote its own apps.
  • In 2019, €1.5bn fine for blocking adverts from rival search engines.

Feels like it is part of a much bigger problem. I believe that some people are trying to stage the setting that some things are forced upon companies and I do not mean in the view of sharing. I personally do not believe that it is as simple as Anti-Trust. It feels like a more ‘social mindset’ that some things must be shared, but why?

The BBC also gives us: “Margrethe Vestager, who has taken a tough stance on the Silicon Valley tech firms and what she sees as their monopolistic grip on the digital landscape” this might feel like the truth, yet I personally feel that this was in the making for a long time, Adobe was on that page from the start. I believe that as the digital landscape was slowly pushed into a behemoth by Macromedia, who also acquired Coldfusion a change came to exist, for reference, at that time Microsoft remained a bungling starter holding onto Frontpage, an optional solution for amateurs, but there was already a strong view that this was a professional field. that stage was clearly shown by Adobe as it grew its company by 400% in revenue over a decade, its share value rose by almost 1,000% and its workforce tripled. There was a clear digital landscape, and one where Google was able to axe a niche into, the others were flaccid and remained of the existing state of mind that others must provide. Yet in all this Social media was ignored for far too long and the value of social media was often ignored until it was a decade too late. 

For example, I offered the idea that it would be great to be in the middle of serviced websites where we had the marketing in hands, my bosses basically called me crazy, that it had no functioning foundation, that it was not part of the mission statement and that I had to get back to work, I still have the email somewhere. This was 4 years before Facebook!

I admit that my idea was nothing as grandiose as Facebook, it was considered on other foundations an I saw the missing parts, but no one bit and now that I know better on the level of bullet point managers I am confronted with and their lack of marketing I now know better and my 5G solutions are closed to all but Huawei and Google, innovation is what drives my value and only those two deliver.

But I digress, the Digital Landscape was coming to be, and as we realise that this includes “websites, email, social networks, mobile devices (tablets, iphones, smartphones), videos (YouTube), etc. These tools help businesses sell their products or services” we can clearly see that Microsoft, Amazon and others stayed asleep at the wheel.
some might have thought that it was a joke when Larry Page and Sergey Brin offered the email service on April 1st 2004, yet i believe that they were ahead of many (including me) on how far the digital landscape would go, I reckon that not even Apple saw the massive growth, perhaps that Jobs fellow did, but he was only around until 2011 when it really kicked off. IBM, Microsoft and others stayed asleep thinking that they could barge in at a later stage, as I see it, IBM chose AI and quantum computing thinking that they can have the other niche no one was ready for. 

When we consider that we saw ‘Google faces antitrust investigation by 50 US states and territories‘ 6 months ago and not 5 years ago we see part of the bigger picture, of course they could have left it all to China, was that the idea? When we get “Regulators are growing more concerned about company’s impact on smaller companies striving to compete in Google’s markets” we will see the ignoring stage, when it mattered smaller places would not act, as Google acted it became much larger than anyone thought, even merely two years ago we were al confronted with ‘companies’ letting Google technology do all the work and they get all the credit and coin, why should Google comply? Striving to compete with Google is no longer a real option and anyone thinking that is nuts beyond belief. The only places that can hold a candle are the ones with innovative ideas and in an US economy founded on the principle of iteration no one keeps alive, but they are all of the mind that franchising and iteration is the path to wealth, it is not, only the innovative survive and that is being seen in larger ways by both Google and Huawei. Those who come into the field without innovation is out of options, it is basically the vagrant going to the cook demanding part of the pie the cook made as they are hungry, yet the vagrant has no rights to demand anything. 

And as we are given (read: fed) the excuse of “Alphabet, has a market value of more than $820bn and controls so many facets of the internet that it’s fairly impossible to surf the web for long without running into at least one of its services. Google’s dominance in online search and advertising enables it to target millions of consumers for their personal data” we can give others the state where Microsoft did its acts to take out Netscape, how did that end? It ended in United States v. Microsoft Corp.. In all,  we see that in the end (no matter how they got there) that the DOJ announced on September 6, 2001 that it was no longer seeking to break up Microsoft and would instead seek a lesser antitrust penalty.

As such, in the end Microsoft did not have to break up hardware and software, they merely had to adopt non-Microsoft solutions, yet how did that end? How many data failures and zero day breaches did its consumer base face? According to R. Cringely (a group of journalists and writers with a column in InfoWorld) we get “the settlement gave Microsoft “a special antitrust immunity to license Windows and other ‘platform software’ under contractual terms that destroy freedom of competition.”” (source: Webcitation.org). 

Yet all this is merely a stage setting, it seems that as governments realised the importance of data and the eagerness of people giving it away to corporations started to sting, you see corporations can be anywhere, even in US hostile lands and China too. That is the larger stage and Google as it deals in data is free of all attachments, as governments cannot oversee this they buckle and the larger stage is set. 

From my point of view, Google stepped in places where no one was willing to go, it was for some too much effort and as that landscape shaped only google remains, so why should they hand over what they have built? 

It is Reuters that give is the first part of it all (at ) here we see: “EU regulators said this penalty was for Google’s favoring its own price comparison shopping service to the disadvantage of smaller European rivals“, yet what it does not give us is that its ‘smaller rivals’ are all using Google services in the first place, and Google has the patent for 30 years, so why share? This is a party for innovators, non-innovators are not welcome!

Then we get “Google’s search service acts as a de-facto kingmaker. If you are not found, the rest cannot follow“, which is optionally strange, because anyone can join Google, anyone can set up camp and anyone can advertise themselves. I am not stupid, I know whatthey mean, but whe it mattered they could not be bothered, no they lack the data, exaytes of data and they cannot compete, they limited their own actions and they all want to be head honcho right now, no actual investment required.

In addition when it comes to Browsers, Wired gives us “I spent the summer and beyond using Bing instead of Google for search. It’s a whole new world, but not always for the better“, I personally cannot stand Bing, I found it to have issues (not going into that at present), so as we are ‘not found’ we consider the Page rank that Stanford created for Google (or google bought it), when we consider when that happened, when was it reengineered and by whom? And when we got to the second part “Google began selling advertisements associated with search keywords“, that was TWO DECADES AGO! As such, who was innovative enough to try and improve it with their own system? As I see it no one, so as no one was interested, why does there need to be an antitrust case? As such we see the Google strategy of buying companies and acquiring knowledge, places like Microsoft and IBM no longer mattered, they went their own way, even (optionally) better, Microsoft decided to Surf-Ace to the finish, I merely think, let them be them.

We are so eager to finalise the needs for competition law and antitrust law, but has anyone considered the stupidity of the iteration impact? If not, consider why 5G is in hands of Huawei, they became the innovators and whilst we are given the stage of court case after court case on the acts of Huawei, consider why they are so advanced in 5G, is it because they were smarter, or because the others became flaccid and lazy? I believe that both are at play here and in this, all the anti-Google sentiment is merely stopping innovators whilst iterators merely want to be rich whilst not doing their part, why should we accommodate for that?

so when we see (source: Vox) “United States antitrust officials have ordered the country’s top tech companies to hand over a decade’s worth of information on their acquisitions of competitor firms, in a move aimed at determining how giants like Amazon and Facebook have used acquisitions to become so dominant” who does it actually serve? is it really about ‘how giants like Amazon and Facebook have used acquisitions to become so dominant‘, or is it about the denial of innovation? Is it about adding to the surface of a larger entity that governments do not even comprehend, let alone understand? They have figured out that IP and data are the currency of the future, they merely need to be included, the old nightmare where corporations are in charge and politicians are not is optionally coming to fruition and they are actually becoming scared of that, the nerd the minimised at school as they were nerds is setting the tone of the future, the Dominant Arrogant player beng it sales person or politician is being outwitted by the nerd and service minded person, times are changing and these people claim that they want to comprehend, but in earnest, I believe that they are merely considering that the gig is up, iteration always leads there, their seeming ignorance is evidence of that.

Yet in all that, this is basically still emotional and not evidence driven, so let’s get on with that. The foundation of all Common Law Competition Law is set to “The Competition and Consumer Act prohibits two persons, acting in concert, from hindering or preventing a third person trading with a fourth person, where the purpose or likely effect of the conduct is to cause a substantial lessening of competition in any market in which the fourth person is involved“, yet in this, I personally am stating that it hinders innovation, the situation never took into proper account of the state of innovators versus iterators, the iterator needs the innovator to slow down and the foundation of Competition Law allows for this, when we see ‘preventing a third person trading with a fourth person‘, in this the iterator merely brings his or her arrogance and (optional) lack of comprehension to the table and claims that they are being stopped from competing, whilst their evidence of equality is seemingly lacking (as I personally see it). 

In this the Columbia Law School is (at least partially) on my side as I found “Scholars and policymakers have long thought that concentrated market power and monopolies produce more innovation than competition. Consider that patent law—which is the primary body of law aimed at creating incentives for innovation—was traditionally thought to conflict with antitrust law. Known as the “the patent-antitrust paradox,” it was often said that antitrust is designed to prevent monopolies and other exclusionary practices while the patent system does the opposite, granting exclusionary rights and market power in the form of patents. Given this framework, it makes sense that scholars, courts, and government agencies have only recently considered antitrust and patent laws to be complementary policies for encouraging innovation.” it gives the foundation and when you consider that iterators are the foundation of hindrance to innovators, you see how competition law aids them. In the old days (my earlier example) Microsoft and Netscape that was a stage where both parties were on the same technology and comprehension level. Microsoft merely had the edge of bundling its browser with the OS and got the advantage there, Netscape did not have that edge, but was an equal in every other way. 

Another name is Gregory Day, who gives us: “a greater number of antitrust lawsuits filed by private parties—which are the most common type of antitrust action—impedes innovation. Second, the different types of antitrust actions initiated by the government tend to affect innovation in profoundly different ways. Merger challenges (under the Clayton Act) promote innovation while restraint of trade and monopolization claims (under sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act) suppress innovative markets. Even more interesting, these effects become stronger after the antitrust agencies explicitly made promoting innovation a part of their joint policies” yet I believe that iterators have a lot more to gain by driving that part and I see that there is actually a lack of people looking into that matter, who are the people behind the antitrust cases? Most people in government tend to remain unaware until much later in the process, so someone ‘alerts’ them to what I personally see as a  ‘a fictive danger’. In this I wonder who the needed partner in prosecution was and what their needs were. I believe that iterators are a larger problem than anyone ever considered.

In the case of Google, Amazon and Facebook, we see innovators driving technology and the others have absolutely nothing to offer, they are bound to try and slow these three down as they are trying to catch up. 

Ian Murray wrote in 2018 (CEI.ORG), “Yet there is no such thing as a dominant market position unless it is guaranteed by government. AOL, Borders, Blockbuster, Sears, Kodak, and many other firms once considered dominant in their markets have fallen as the result of competition, without any antitrust action” and that is a truth, yet it does not give that the iterators merely want innovators to slow down, so that they can catch up and the law allows for this, more importantly, as the lack of innovations were not driven over the last decade, South Korea became a PC behemoth, and China now rules in 5G Telecom land. All are clear stages of iterators being the problem and not a solution, even worse they are hindring actual innovation to take shape, real innovation, not what is marketed as such.

As such, governments are trying to get some social setting in place by balancing the seesaw whilst standing at the axial point, it is a first signal that this is a place where innovators are lost and in that are you even surprised that a lot of engineers will only take calls from Google or Huawei (Elon Musk being an optional third in the carbon neutral drive)? 

It gets to be even worse (soon enough), now that Google is taking the cookie out of the equation, we get to see ‘Move marks a watershed moment for the digital ad industry to reinvent itself‘, this is basically the other side of the privacy coin, even as google complied, others will complain and as Google innovates the internet to find another way to seek cookie technology, we will suddenly see every advertisement goof with no knowledge of systems cry ‘foul!’ and as we are given “Criteo, which built a retargeting empire around cookies, saw its stock tumble following Google’s announcement. Others such as LiveRamp and Oracle-owned businesses BlueKai and Datalogix, as well as nearly all data management platforms, now face the challenge of rethinking their business” (source: AdAge) we will see more players hurdling themselves over Competition Law and optionallytowards antitrust cases because these players used someones technology to get a few coins (which is not a bad thing, but to all good things come an end).

And I am not against these changes, the issue is not how it will be reinvented, it is how some will seek the option to slow the actual innovators down because they had no original idea (as I personally see it). Yet we must also establish that Google did not make it any easier and they have their own case ORACLE AMERICA, INC. v. GOOGLE INC. to thank for.

That verdict was set to “With respect to Google’s cross-appeal, we affirm the district court’s decisions: (1) granting Oracle’s motion for JMOL as to the eight decompiled Java files that Google copied into Android; and (2) denying Google’s motion for JMOL with respect to the rangeCheck function. Accordingly, we affirm-in-part, reverse-in-part, and remand for further proceedings.” in this situation, for me “The jury found that Google infringed Oracle’s  copyrights in the 37 Java packages and a specific computer routine called “rangeCheck,” but returned a noninfringement verdict as to eight decompiled security files. The jury  deadlocked on Google’s fair use defense.“, as I see it in that situation Oracle had been the innovator and for its use Google was merely an iterator (if it ain’t baroque, don’t fix it).

Basically one man’s innovator is another man’s iterator, which tends to hold up in almost any technology field. Yet this time around, the price is a hell of a lot higher, close to half a dozen iterators ended up giving an almost complete technology surge to China (5G), which is as I personally see it. They were asleep at the wheel and now the US administration is trying to find a way around it, like they will just like ORACLE AMERICA, INC. v. GOOGLE INC.  more likely than not come up short.

And one of these days, governments will figure out that the middle of the seesaw is not the safe place to be, it might be the least safe place to be. As the population on each end changes, the slow reaction in the middle merely ends up having the opposite and accelerating effect, a few governments will learn that lesson the hard way. I believe that picking two players on one (or either side) side is the safest course of action, the question for me remains will they bite?

 

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