July 12, 2019 · 11:49

Desertion

Desertion is an ugly word, it is often contributed to cowardice and cowards, the truth is actually less straight forward. We can consider that the choice is left to someone who can no longer tolerate the actions of their government. Then there is another form, when it is not linked to a military decision, when in its purest form the application is the action of deserting a person, cause, organization or even a government, and even then people try to hide it behind words like forsaking, abandonment, shunning, stranding or jilting.

They consider desertion too harsh a word, but that is exactly what the US government is doing as the New York Times (at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/11/us/politics/house-democrats-saudi-arabia.html) gives us: ‘House Moves Again to Cut Off Support to Saudi War in Yemen‘, so when we see: “to prevent the Trump administration from using its emergency authority to transfer munitions to the kingdom, delivering twin rebukes as Democrats sought to leave their stamp on military policy“, when we see this, we should consider betrayal of an ally, abandoning a nation that the US claims to have good ties with. And it goes further than that, there is actually an issue that has been left unpublished for a much longer time (to the degree it should have been published).

Qatar has been accused of being a facilitator for state sponsored terrorism. This is not a light subject, it is quite heavy an accusation. Let’s be clear, I am not accusing them of this, they have been accused and it is an important accusation, because the US is in much deeper waters than you think. Even as Saudi Arabia is getting cut off from defence options to defend itself against Hezbollah and Iranian supported Houthi units, attacked by (mostly) Houthi forces using missiles, we learn that mere hours ago “a Houthi rocket was fired indiscriminately and targeted a non-military area“, the target was Dhalea in SW Yemen, so the fighting goes on and America is pulling out, or are they? With the news from ABC that less than 24 hours ago (at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-07-10/qatar-donald-trump-military-and-commercial-deals/11294500) we are given: ‘US and Qatar ink deals for ‘tremendous amounts’ of military weapons and Boeing planes‘, the quote: “Qatar has agreed to buy “tremendous amounts of military equipment” and Boeing planes from the United States following a visit by Gulf Nation’s Emir to the White House, according to President Donald Trump” implies that the United States wants to be part of the Middle East, more importantly it is seemingly on track to keep stability to a nominal minimum, which is only serving America at present. It was given (by ABC as well ) that Qatar has an issue, in 2017 we saw the accusation “According to James Piscatori, deputy director at ANU’s Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies, “It is probable that the regime, as well as some wealthy Qataris, have been supporting various groups, such as the Nusra Front.”” and unlike the implied murder of a journalist no one cares about, the accusation against Qatar is not one that requires ‘beyond all reasonable doubt‘, it requires ‘is it more likely than not‘ and that bar was seemingly passed. Over two years there has never been clear evidence produced that this was not the case and now we see that in the backwash of implied state sponsored terrorism we see the US making happy deals. The fact that these questions are not out in the open with the media is a lot more pressing than one might imagine. Media inaction allows for the accusation to fester and that is happening.

So when we get the additional quote: “The terrorist group, which has since changed its name to Jabhat Fatah al-Sham, began as an offshoot of Al Qaeda. It’s been fighting President Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian war and wants to establish an Islamic caliphate“, the fact that this was given to AC out in the open in a stage where we see the American non treasury see a shift from one player to another is more pressing, there is a larger concern and as the US is keeping stability in the region to a minimum, the dangers will mount to larger degrees soon enough. the problem remains a large one, not because of the lack of evidence pointing one way or another, it is the statement from Gen. Charles Wald, former commander of U.S. Central Command Air Forces, who gave us only a few days ago: “Qatar is helping Iran“, now this is a loaded issue, first of all, there might be a large issue with Iran, but that does not mean that some nations do not have an economic need to play mean to dump Iran as a business partner. Can we (or should we) prevent medications and food to be shipped to any nation? If we have a humanitarian side, it wold be that a population need not be hungry, famished or denied medical provisions. And we also acknowledge that less than 48 hours after the attack on the World Trade Centre, Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar opened business to America so that it could have a strategic advantage. Even as we acknowledge it all, we also see the view that this general has with: “Qatar must choose: It can keep its U.S. air base or its ties to Tehran“, I am willing to think that issues are this simple, but they are not. Yet the state funded terrorism accusation lingers.

Then the second tier comes into play, consider that the accusation is true, how high does it go? Consider that Qatar is a monarchy with Emir Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad Al Thani at the head of that table. No matter the accusations have never been linked, or were there any serious accusations (with some level of evidence) that a member of the monarchy was involved. Is Qatar therefor still guilty, or are there elements in Qatar (high ranking ones) part to the stage where state funded terrorism is a valid accusation? The fact that the media is not looking there, does not mean we must shun the question.

When we look at family, we see the father Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, under his rule as previous ruler, we see that two US military bases were hosted, large investments in western corporations for well over $100 billion, there was the support of Arab spring and founded Al Jazeera, these are all actions that imply futuristic thinking, not funding terrorism and we need to acknowledge that. Then there is the brother (of the current monarch) Jassim bin Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, educated at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst as well as at Sherbourne School (Dorset), none of this screams terrorist support, this does not mean that it is not happening, it merely implies that the ‘more likely than not‘ might be a wrong standard and there has been very little investigation towards the guilt or innocence of Qatar.

Still these sides do not imply that the US is wrongfully selling arms, it does still support the tactic of minimalizing stability in the region and that is wrong, the abandonment of Saudi Arabia seems clear too and as such the dangers in the Middle East are escalating, not lowering, which is a large failure.

What happened?

For this we can turn to yesterday’s Washington Post (at https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/the-saudi-qatari-breach-explained/2019/07/09/96ec69de-a260-11e9-a767-d7ab84aef3e9_story.html) Here we see: “The crisis was sparked in 2017 when hackers published a story on Qatar’s news agency quoting Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani as criticizing mounting anti-Iran sentiment after a trip to the region by U.S. President Donald Trump. Qatari officials quickly deleted the comments, and appealed for calm as Saudi and U.A.E. newspapers, clerics and celebrities accused Qatar of trying to undermine efforts to isolate Iran“. Here my issue becomes ‘when hackers published a story‘, and they have journalistic integrity how exactly? Hackers tend to lack credibility, not to mention in an age with over 10,000,000 hackers there is a group (well over 90%) that have only greed driven needs, so how is that reliable?

How money flows

Then the Washington Post gives a gem that is worth its weight in gold. With: “Some Qataris have provided support to al-Qaeda and its spinoffs, U.S. officials say. According to the State Department’s report on international terrorism, despite government controls, “terrorist financiers within the country are still able to exploit Qatar’s informal financial system.” The U.S. report uses similar language in its section on Saudi Arabia. The report details efforts by both the Qatari and Saudi governments to counter terrorism financing. It offers greater praise of the Saudi efforts“, it does something strong, the premise of ‘more likely than not‘ now fails to a much larger degree. when we see: ‘Some Qataris‘ we recognise that there is a small issue, but when we place ‘some Qataris‘ next to the thousands of terrorists that America has (the members of the Ku Klux Klan to name merely a first group), we see that the accusations against Qatar are suddenly less powerful. Now we accept that the issue existed in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, yet we see that Saudi Arabia has been more eager to fight this than Qatar it does not make Qatar more guilty, it merely means that optionally more is required from Qatar, yet in all this there remains the issue on why America abandoned Saudi Arabia. I believe that these steps have seemingly nothing to do with commerce, merely with reduced stability and in this day and age in the way that Iran is jumping around not a good thing, when the kettle boils a short decisive war would be essential and America just made that a non-option.

so when we get back to the New York times, we see how the US government is making themselves liable (as I personally see it) “But the most consequential amendments on Thursday continued Congress’s months long effort to intervene in the Yemen conflict and punish Saudi Arabia for the murder of the dissident Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi” you see, no evidence was ever presented, no evidence can be presented at present making a government privy to intentional murder, there is no body, there is no forensic evidence, there is merely circumstantial evidence at best and even then, some of that evidence in tainted. So the US taking the work of an essay writer (seemingly named Eggy Calamari) as gospel to the degree it is doing is not staging any level of progress, it was a document at best and presented in three stages, every time merely meant to attack Saudi Arabia, progressing destabilisation in the Middle East (better stating inhibiting stability).

It gets to be worse (for America) when we consider “Lawmakers voted 236 to 193 to prohibit the administration from using funds to support the Saudi-led military operations — either with munitions or with intelligence — against the Houthis in Yemen“, especially when we see mounting evidence that Houthis have directly been targeting civilians, have engaged on a larger scale firing Iranian missiles into Saudi Arabia and using drones to attack ships and airfields in the region, that is a group you want to protect? I think that there are optionally 236 voters guilty of supporting terrorism to a much larger degree, I wonder which excuse they will use for letting the battle rage on, stopping humanitarian aid to go forward towards the Yemeni civilians and now with the added accusation that Houthi forces have recruited 30,000 child soldiers up to this point (source: Middle East monitor). As I see it, when the dust settles, I will have fun! I will try to publish the photos of the cadavers from all over Yemen with (or is that ‘in’) all their exposed guts and glory. I will on the principle of the matter make sure that these 236 names are published with these images so that the American people know who they voted for and how humanitarian their actions were in the end, that’s only fair, right?

When you desert your ally, you should be proud of that fact and get named in full, should you not?

 

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July 10, 2019 · 12:24

Grayscale, never Black or White

Grayscaling has been around since the beginning of photography, 30 years ago it was a lot more important as colour screens were not great and monochrome exposure came at a much higher quality (higher resolution, Hercules graphic adapters), others followed for the longest time and until EGA evolved (with overpriced monitors) we were all happy to think in grayscales, it was also more precise and easier on the eye. Even home computers had its version. The Atari MEGA STe with 4MB memory was ahead by a lot when you consider that the PC could not manage more than 640Kb (1991), more important, it was an almost direct attack on Macintosh who was up to 600% more expensive in those days, so it was a nice DTP alternative.

Yet today grayscaling had been done for, at least that was what I thought. The Guardian (at https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jul/10/watchdog-finds-work-of-patisserie-valerie-auditor-unacceptable) shows us mere hours ago that I was wrong, especially when we are confronted with Grant Thornton and the fact that that the work from this auditor has been regarded as unacceptable (basically in Black & White). It gets to be worse when we see: “Across the industry, one in four audits failed to reach required standards, a finding that will intensify pressure on the firms“. That is a massive failing that is no longer merely the optional rotten apple in the basket; this sets the stage that the entire harvest is no longer trustworthy. In the days of the Atari MEGA STe the work of accounting auditors were close to beyond reproach, so the slipping of quality is one of much larger concern, it is a much larger issue of quality; optionally it is now the age of butchers being granted to perform operations on people because the shortage of surgeons is too overwhelming.

And when we see the quote: “Grant Thornton’s chief executive, David Dunckley, exasperated MPs in January when he said it was not his firm’s job to uncover fraud or judge that a company’s books were correct“, is that not the foundation of an audit? Is the audit not to make sure as they ‘judge that a company’s books were correct‘ is that not at the core to check before they are signed off on? Of course it comes with the step to slam my favourite Tesco auditor when we see: “The FRC also criticised PwC, one of the big four accountants, for an unsatisfactory drop in the results for its audits. Only 65% of the firm’s audits of FTSE 350 companies required no more than limited improvements, down from 84% a year earlier and well short of the FRC’s 90% target“, I think the stage is becoming clear that these two places should no longer be considered as valid auditors. Like the Atari MEGA STe, they have become obsolete and optionally overpriced and useless. If we consider that they were optionally the beez knees in 1991, it is the passage of time how that view is now reduced against my smartphone.

 

Atari MEGA STe

 Smartphone Difference

Alternative
CPU 16 MHz 2.4 GHz 150 times better +15,000%
Memory 4 MB 4GB 1024 times more +102,400%
Storage 20 MB 128 GB 6400 times more +640,000%
Display 640*400 2340 * 180 16.45 times more +1,645%
Price $1995 $499 75% cheaper -75%

 

We can all accept that technology moves on and I am comparing one tech that is 5 generations and 27 years more advanced, but that is the setting with these auditors. They are failing in quality again and again and they are still tolerated to operate, the FRC (Financial Reporting Council) is as I personally seeing this ignoring its duties, perhaps politicians have yanked out their teeth, so that they can merely bark, but the amount of issues that we see, issues that predates that so called Tesco clambake of 2013. The issue is not merely the fact that impacts places like PwC and Grant Thornton, it is larger and the sliding of quality is now well beyond embarrassing and for the most actions have been largely null and void. If there is something to be learned from the Carillion disaster, it is the fact that KPMG (at £1,500,000) a year dropped more than just the ball, they are setting the stage that auditing needs to be a lot more on par towards criminal prosecution and investigative prosecution than ever before. Before it got to the auditors, the financial controllers, the bookies and the CFO’s worked those books and that facilitating side needs to stop. There was an interesting view that was given in February 2018. Accountancy Age (at https://www.accountancyage.com/2018/02/26/carillion-inquiry-missed-red-lights-aggressive-accounting-pension-deficit/), and as we read: “In a series of scathing joint committee sessions MPs took to task Carillion directors, pension regulators and KPMG and Deloitte auditors– grilling them on missed red flags, aggressive accounting and the pension deficit reaching nearly £1bn“, is it all that simple? Is it not the task of the auditor to make sure that the books are 100% ok? It seems now that the auditors are facilitating to their paying clients on what they can get away with, and to some degree that is fine (it is about looking at black letter law and to see where the border is), because it is about what the law allows, yet the flaws of PwC, Grant Thornton and KPMG shows is that the auditor needs to be more towards prosecuting their client on what will not pass the tax laws and reporting laws, there is a much larger difference between these stages and as such the FRC needs to grow a set of teeth (optionally balls too) and whilst we accept the stage as it is, it is no longer a stage that is acceptable and that needs to be clear. The impact to people as we saw in Tesco and Carillion has been much too large and those board members walked away with more than just a pretty penny, so did the auditors and that requires adjustment of a much larger kind.

Even as we are shallowly given: “Audits carried out by PwC that the FRC inspected included Kier Group, the construction and services company whose recent profit warning prompted comparisons with Carillion, and the struggling department store chain Debenhams. The FRC did not disclose which audits were substandard from the list of companies it reviewed“, we could set the stage that these players can no longer audit any firm with a revenue over £1 billion or more than 1,000 employees. I feel certain that such a limitation will chase these players to much higher standards. Let’s face it, when we get to read small printed facts that PwC made an accounting error of £40,000,000 can we assume (read: speculate) that their flaws are larger and go deeper? Should we allow these dangers to set the stage where 1,200 jobs are cut because there was no more room to wiggle?

As I personally see it, the stage is actually rather simple. Any firm that makes the statement: “Kier Group plc’s Group financial statements and Company financial statements (the “financial statements”) give a true and fair view of the state of the Group’s and of the Company’s affairs as at 30 June 2018 and of the Group’s profit and cash flows for the year then ended;” all whilst we see that there was a £40,000,000 ‘oopsie’ is not a firm that should be allowed to set the stage where that statement was given in the first place.

It does not matter which excuse is given (the contracts were way to complex), or how the stage seemingly turned through operational changes (this quarter has seen over double the number of weeks of refresh disruption compared to the same period last year). They are all excuses of an unacceptable level and no matter how we slice this, it seems that some accountancy firms can no longer keep up and they should be cut from clients that have grown beyond certain sizes. We have rules on the F1 races, we have rules on how soccer teams become premiere league, even the Olympics requires rules before athletes can compete and when they cannot keep up they no longer qualify, it is time for these accountancy firms to be held to qualifications to a much higher and larger degree, having a degree no longer takes the cake, we need to consider that issues like Tesco, Carillion, Debenhams, Kier group and several others are also case for limiting access. Each of these failings should be seen as the tipping point to the limit of companies with ‘a revenue over £1 billion or more than 1,000 employees‘ are required to find another auditor, or face an optional complete audit by an FRC appointed auditor (at the expense of the firm being audited). I feel certain that once this rule is in play that quality will suddenly go through the roof, it will also allow the smaller firms to become an optional future big four, even though it is more likely that the reduced pool will create a stage of a new big seven tier of accountancy firms; even though we think all accountants are evil, they are not and plenty are above board trying to be the best in their business, we all (including me) forget that at times and we too need some adjusting. It does however begin by clipping the wings of no less than two auditors at present.

There is also the idea that it is all in the presentation, and perhaps to some degree it is. Yet when something is marketed as a new 50 shades of grey for male readers, it is nice to know that it is marketing of a different kind, not a summary report that there are equal scales for two different groups, because that is not an oversight, that is an example of direct applied deceptive conduct and I think that we have seen too many victims of those twists. It needs to stop and perhaps the FRC will finally push for a stage that allows for larger changes, as this mess has been going on for well over 5 years now.

 

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July 8, 2019 · 11:35

The wider field

There is a wider field, the field is ignored by many because it overlaps in several ways and most people (read: media) tend to stare at one element. We can argue whether it is bad or good, but it does mean that the bulk of the information is not there. To get this view we need to look at several sources. First we get the International Business Times, they give us two headlines. The first is ‘Samsung Expecting Profits Slump For Q2‘ as well as ‘Huawei Ban Helps Company Earn More‘, in one way we get an increase of revenue due to the Huawei events in the US, yet there is still a Q2 slump. There are several plays that apply, but it is not about the play as such. The firs realisation is that 5G is currently being ‘advertised as here‘ by several players and at present there is an increased question on which phone is 4G and/or 5G and most people are holding off on phones this year until that field has a better view on what is available. Most people cannot afford to buy a new phone when some new models are $1800, most people cannot afford a step like that and being tied to any provider at present is an increasingly bad step to make. Even as Huawei is 20% cheaper, it remains a lot of money, and the Google (Android) issues are still there, so people are hesitant. I might have committed myself to Huawei, but that is in part because I renewed my phone in the beginning of the year, so it has to last me 2-3 more years (I have principles towards blatantly buying new phones) and I am happy with my phone.

then there is the new stage hat is now evolving when we see CNN Business give us (at https://edition.cnn.com/2019/07/04/tech/huawei-us-ban/index.html) ‘US government asks judge to dismiss Huawei lawsuit‘, they are rightfully scared because the claim: “Huawei had filed the lawsuit in March, arguing that a law preventing US federal agencies from buying its products violates the US constitution by singling out an individual or group for punishment without trial” is almost a given, the US government made sure that every media outlet on the planet took great painstaking effort in illuminating that and now it becomes the anchor attached to their legs as they have to swim across the Pacific river (or Atlantic river). If the case goes through and discrimination is proven, the impact will be monumental, especially as no evidence was ever brought forward and if we are a nation of laws, the impact will be large, moreover, at present Huawei is still growing its pool of 5G contracts and should the Case fall on the side of Huawei, the impact on Europe will be much larger, it could signal a much larger run on trying to get a quick deal with Huawei, not because they are nice people (they optionally are), but because Huawei 5G equipment is more advanced and all the telecom players know this. Ericsson and Nokia fear that side, they had a good run due to the escalations, but Huawei is still on par to have well over 50% of 5G by themselves and that is what the US fears, that large a disadvantage because its pool of CEO’s and CTO’s were increasingly stupid, flaccid and complacent in an age where pushing innovation was essential.

The issue is not out of the room yet because there is the larger issue that everyone has not been looking at. There is still the Google issue around Android. Consider that Huawei’s Oak OS is now 60 days away from release, it is the start where people who were initially ‘forced’ to dump Android, they now will be part of the Oak OS group, a data core that involves millions from adding data to the Oak servers and no more to the Google servers. The impact seems small, but it impacts the US to a much larger degree, this stance has given China a much larger boost than ever possible. For the users it will only be a temporary setback, as apps will be supported through Oak/OS, these players will continue, yet the overhaul as people push away from android is much larger than the interaction of IOS versus Android. Consider what you need. The bulk of all android apps we use will almost immediately be available, leaving us with optionally some issues regarding LinkedIn, Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram. Now there is a new stage where Chinese options could be considered and for the most when we can address who we need, we might not care on where we are. The idea that advertisements might initially fall away will be a massive reason to do that. I am certain that there will be a Facebook Oak and LinkedIn Oak, the rest remains open, the usage is huge but that too might be a reason to try something new, people love new things, especially if it comes with cool additions and new we see a different stage, it is not the US that matters, it is whether China has options that appeal to India and Europe, these three represent 3 billion people and there is the data crunch, they will not all go the Chinese solution, but even 10% would be massive, it would be a an intense gut punch to Google, more important over time as word of mouth make more people switch, the damage will increase for Google. Make no mistake, it will merely impact the total, it will not sink Google, it is too large, but in light of their predictions when they have 20% less data points to make predictions with, granularity becomes an issue for the professional side and there too there will be an impact, Chinese app owners will have their own digital advertisement agenda and business dictates that you cannot ignore that population, so budgets will be shortened to cover an audience as large as possible.

All that because of the Huawei ban, which was shown to be short-sighted from the very beginning. Consider that we were given in June: “Huawei can no longer pre-install Facebook apps on its smartphones after Facebook fell into line with a US ban on exporting software“, now consider that suddenly millions are offered a pre-installed WeChat and they are willing to try it, the impact on Facebook will be seen in less than 60 days, the fact that Facebook had been playing games with its mobile users for a much longer time will also entice users to give it a try. Not all will stay, but some will and the dimension of ‘some’ will imply a drop of Facebook of several million user. In addition we see “Chinese users spend an average of over 70 minutes a day within the app. All this makes it one of the most popular choices for businesses looking to get started with social media marketing in China“, yes it was overwhelmingly Chinese, yet in the shift it will now have optional access to a large Indian and European following. In addition the shift we optionally see when we realise: “WeChat allows for one-to-one personalized interaction between brands and users. This allows brands to communicate directly with their followers through the messaging functions on their account. This also allows brands to provide customer service directly through their WeChat account. It’s due to this reason that many companies in China don’t even operate traditional websites instead of focusing their efforts on constantly improving their WeChat official accounts” direct granularity towards the user, not mass marketing, but adjusted marketing for the individual, and then consider players like Tableau, Salesforce (now one and the same), SAP, Sony and Microsoft all wanting to address the person, not the masses, do you think that they will ignore this group of users? These people invest hundreds, if not thousands of dollars a day towards addressing their growing need of users, all revenue that is soon lost to Apple and Google. It goes beyond merely Facebook; Twitter and Snapchat, all have a Chinese version that now has the option to surpass (read: close the gap) towards their competitors. Surpass is perhaps the wrong word, the fact that people will consider the alternative in the immediate is a risk for these players, it sets the dangers of schools of users to switch to another pond, so those fishing for ads, visibility and awareness, they will all have to adjust the way they operate. There now are now only two parts where I have no idea how it will play out. Youku Tudou is the Chinese version of YouTube, but YouTube is so strongly placed that I have no idea how that will go, the same for LinkedIn. these are the two we cannot predict, no one can, but if they remain absent from Oak/OS something will have to budge, the question becomes how much do you need LinkedIn to be on your smartphone when you can just catch up daily at home, or in the office. I personally do not believe that its equivalent Maimai will be embraced as strongly as Maimai would hope, but that is my speculation on the matter.

Only YouTube as it is and remains the behemoth of Google, is too strong an app to ignore, it is too strongly desired, especially on smartphones, some might give Youku Tudou a try, but the library of YouTube increases with 300 hours of material every minute, there is no real competing with that, no matter how you slice that. There is no denial that their Chinese competitor will grow, but there the impact is less than a mosquito bite for YouTube, it is perhaps the one part of Google that no one seemingly can be without.

Is there another side?

Well there is always the option that everything in Google will be accessible on Huawei phones and that is for Google the best solution, but at present that part is just not a given, and when many Huawei smartphones are between 20%-40% cheaper, they will have an advantage and only because of US stupidity that impact is now optionally becoming much larger. And now the shift is changing faster, the Observer gave us on Saturday ‘UK mobile operators ignore security fears over Huawei 5G‘, when we consider the quote “The Observer understands that Huawei is already involved in building 5G networks in six of the seven cities in the UK where Vodafone has gone live. It is also helping build hundreds of 5G sites for EE, and has won 5G contracts to build networks for Three and O2 when they go live“, we see how things are escalating away from the US. the massive part in all this is “a firm line against the company amid claims, strongly denied, that it is controlled by the Chinese government and that its equipment could be used to spy on other countries and companies” all from the point of view that clear evidence was never provided and the commercial corporations need to remain on top or drown and that was the larger flaw the US never seemingly understood (or blatantly ignored). Yet the other side also matter, as the numbers are given: “The consultancy Assembly suggests a partial to full restriction on Huawei could result in an 18-to-24-month delay to the widespread availability of 5G in the UK. The UK would then fail to become a world leader in 5G – a key government target – costing the economy between £4.5bn and £6.8bn” (source: the Guardian). People tend to get nervous at a loss of millions, so the loss of £4,000,000,000 plus is something that can start cardiac arrests all over the telecom boardrooms. More important as Huawei is still ’embraced’ in Germany, the German players will get the upper hand over other European players giving a larger technological shift. The final straw was the consideration of “They have taken note of what happened last December when the O2 4G network went down for 24 hours due to problems with technology provided by the Swedish telecoms firm Ericsson“, a danger as this was 4G technology that should have been clear and non-problematic, now consider that this happened to established technology, so what optional risks are Ericsson users exposed to when in involves 5G, a technology that Nokia and Ericsson is still trying to figure out?

In all this, Huawei has not stopped adding pressure. Now that we see that less than 24 hours ago we were notified that Huawei has completed the contracts with Msheireb Properties. It seems small and insignificant, but it is not. With a smart experience centre in Qatar, it is my expectations that they are ready to approach and upgrade Al Jazeera to 5G, it is speculative but it will be the first time that Al Jazeera surpasses CNN technology (as well a Fox News), It might not matter to most of us, but to people like Nasser Al-Khelaifi (beIN Media Group) it matters a lot, so when we are informed that Al Jazeera getting ready to offer 5G streaming during the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics and Huawei as a Chinese company is mentioned everywhere in Tokyo, you better believe that these two are on top of making this work as fast and as quickly as possible, so when I created my base station IP, I never considered this, but it fits and that is another notch that some miss out on. Half the planet goes nuts for sports on a regular day, how nuts do you think the planet goes when ‘their nation‘ is fighting its fight (against up to 205 other nations) to be the best at the Olympics? When you get to watch that live, streaming it all at 5G, do you really think that people will care who brings it as long as it is true 5G? In several nations the brand jump was huge when 4G became real and some were not up to scrap, I believe that this time around the jump will be close to 300% larger than before, and the Tokyo Olympics will be a clear driver on that part. When 206 nations fight for the laurels (gold medals) every nationally driven sports fan tends to get a little (read: abundantly) nuts, and at present that group of people is well over 3 billion people, all factors some players did not consider when they were playing the short game, Huawei never played the short game, it gives them an advantage in several ways.

That is merely my view on the situation at present.

 

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July 7, 2019 · 14:03

Be the bitch

We are confronted with all kinds of changes, some are trivial, some are important, but when do we get to decide what is what? Consider that Iran is now stating ‘Iran says it is ready to enrich uranium beyond nuclear deal levels‘, the news (at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/06/iran-says-it-is-ready-to-enrich-uranium-beyond-nuclear-deal-levels), it is all under the guise of the reality. When the main players (the US and Europe) are showing to be the bitches of politics, what are we supposed to do? Trump talks a lot, he yells loudly (adapting poor grammar) but in the end, the US is not acting, neither is Europe, they are trying to remain delusional into the air of ‘saving’ something that had been lost some time ago. In the meantime, as no one acts Iran continues not merely by enriching Uranium, it is the other part, the ‘Saudi Arabia intercepts drones launched by Houthi militia from Sanaa‘ (at http://www.arabnews.com/node/1521686/saudi-arabia) that shows a much larger danger. Even as we heard: “the drones actually destroyed in the air by systems belonging to the Arab coalition“, the fact that is being ignored by the media to the largest degree is that these drones come from Iran, there is also still the issue that there is no real evidence that Houthi forces are up to controlling them, yet that part cannot be proven at present, a proxy war that is getting more and more out of control and in this when we add the Uranium pressure, there is every chance that both Saudi Arabia and Israel will have no option but to take this to the next level and whilst the bitches of politics (USA and the EU) are sitting on the sidelines complaining, reeling and dealing for delusionary deals, Iran plays its game and even as we see that the game is badly played, we need to acknowledge that they are getting shit done because they properly anticipated that neither the US, nor Europe would actually act, indecision and incapability to act are at the centre of these non-moves.

For the US it becomes even worse as we see that there is every chance that the denial is likely to grow when we see the CBS news quote: “Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard believes that war with Iran would be “far more devastating” to the U.S. than the war in Iraq was, saying in an interview with CBS News that President Trump was “pushing us closer and closer to war with Iran”“, she is on the European side of inaction, when we see: “that nuclear agreement prevented war“, it never stopped it, it merely delayed it so that Iran could get ready and that part has been shown in several ways over the last three years alone, now that the pressure is growing we need to consider that no one wants a war, but Iran made it impossible to avoid and as they make tally of all who are willing to become the bitch by not acting, that is how we might lose this upcoming war, not merely by inaction of them, but the mere fact that these politicians are willing to grab their ankles and let happen what would happen next. They will call it: “We have reached an immediate cease fire so that a diplomatic agreement can be drawn” that will be the second sign that the war was won by Iran, if that is what you want to happen, then go ahead, but also realise that you lose whatever rights you have. I for one will align with Israel and Saudi Arabia and go to war, because that is how evil is defeated. No matter how decorated Tulsi Gabbard got to be by the Hawaiian National Guard. The world is adhering to terrorist factions too quick and too much, in all this delusional acts by humanitarian laws are becoming a joke and that needs to stop.

When the news becomes about lashing out to a rapper named Nicki Minaj, have we not lost the plot? Oh and before I forget, the fact that we saw only 18 hours ago that ‘Houthis Commit 18000 Human Rights Violations in 6 Months‘ and the fact (as far as I could tell) that only the Asharq Al-Awsat Newspaper is giving the world that part, is that not a first indication on how the world has lost the plot on Human rights? And it links because Iran and Hezbollah are directly involved in funding, training and assisting Houthi forces to do that part, but these Human rights bozo’s are really not up to the part to report on that, yet their adversary (Saudi Arabia) is getting the front seat for getting a rapper perform in Saudi Arabia. It is in the realisation of these issues that we see that America and Europe have both become the bitches of others to a much larger degree than most can even fathom.

So when we see (at https://aawsat.com/english/home/article/1800416/yemen-houthis-commit-18000-human-rights-violations-6-months) the stage of “the number of kidnappings and imprisonment of women and children escalated this year, accusing Houthis of systematically and physically torturing women, defaming many of them, and accusing them of unethical charges contrary to Yemeni custom and traditions” we see a much larger stage that requires intervention, but where are the Americans? Where is Europe? They cannot act because they have their own clever plan involving Iran and it is backfiring fast and much harder than they realised (failure usually does that).

How long until they comprehend that you cannot reason with a rabid dog, you put it out of its misery plain and simple. And most people are part of the problem, they elected the politicians in Europe not doing anything and in America they are optionally selecting a Democratic president who wants to talk a little more, I wonder what happens when the others are no willing to talk, when these politicians are placed on the sidelines not allowed to speak at all, how fast will the media suddenly acts as some delusional conscience? we know that they are merely the bitch of big business, but for now they are all in denial of that reality and I wonder how many people will accept that delusional stage, because when Iran gets in a first strike the caused war will be much larger and there will be no negotiating with the ones they stuck against, as well as the neighboring countries, that is the impact of a dirty bomb, it freaks out everyone, especially those living next to the place that got hit. so it will not only affect Israel and Saudi Arabia, it will then suddenly impact Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and the UAE, and that by all definitions implies the start of World War 3 when one of these nations get involved.

In the end it started not by started a war, but by refusing to act when action was essential, I wonder how the politicians will validate their own existence at that point. Yet there is a bright spot at that point, when it happen, the human rights organisations will not have any reason to be around, because the impact that we get to live through will be a clear indication that talking solves nothing and Human Rights organisations will end up being in the same stage that they were in the 17th century when the VOC was a global power, the HRA organisations will become non-existent.

Could I be wrong?

Well, that is up to you people, check your local news, your local newspapers and what they give you, who else had the Yemen story on Houthi Human Rights violations? As far as I was able to tell, not one of them had it, but several of them all had something on Nicki Minaj, some merely gave view to that UN speaker Eggy Calamari and her accusations (that so called essay) regarding Jamal Khashoggi, the media has become that polarised on the political needs for Turkey and Iran to be cut as much slack as possible and most of us are enabling this to continue.

So when that enabling attitudes starts open hostilities against Iran by Israel and Saudi Arabia, how will the news be reported, or will it at all? Will we merely see some top line report trying to make Israel and Saudi Arabia look as bad as possible as long as Iran signs some fake nuclear deal?

The pressure is rising and there is not much time before things go out of control, all because of inactions, and you better realise that really really fast.

 

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July 5, 2019 · 10:49

The next economic identity

Today is about an opinion piece by Shoshana Zuboff, Zuboff graces us (at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/02/facebook-google-data-change-our-behaviour-democracy) with: ‘It’s not that we’ve failed to rein in Facebook and Google. We’ve not even tried‘. It’s a good piece, I do not completely agree, but it is a good piece and you should read it. The start is actually full on when we see: “tech giants use our data not only to predict our behaviour but to change it“, it is not actually an attack on democracy, but the applied pressure on our way of thinking, consumer adjusting if you will. Then we get to the part that has an issue, with “In 2011, the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt warned that government overreach would foolishly constrain innovation“, it is not that, it is actually a lot worse than that. It is the stage where big business goes its own way, regardless of what any government dictates and governments are all about facilitating. when we see all governments drop down on so called individuals committing fraud (which is fair enough) staging thousands of man hours finding these dozen or so people, all whilst places like Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook pay a mere 1% of 3 billion plus, do you think that there might be a pattern? A solution offered by me 20 years ago, ignored, shunned and ridiculed could have made things a lot better, but these people ignore it. They did not fail calculus, did they? When you realise these two simple parts, you see that government officials and big business fat cats go like hand in glove, but which of the two is the glove?

Now we get to the good part. We now see: “Facebook giving private information to developers, and more. Each of these was an expression of a larger breakthrough: the invention of what I call surveillance capitalism“, the writer is not wrong, but as I personally see it the writer is incomplete. It is only in part surveillance capitalism, you see capitalism is merely the consumer item; the actual currency in this capitalism is data. Data is everything and Google figured that out from the very very beginning. It took a decade to get where they are now, but that long play changed everything for Larry Page and Sergey Brin, they had been right from the very beginning and it is one of the reasons why I contain my IP for them or Ren Zhengfei, as I personally see it they are the only ones who can take my billion dollar IP (a mere slight exaggeration) and turn it into some serious cash, but I digress.

You see, the realisation that they saw it correctly from the beginning is essential, data is like the application of greed, it value is contained by always getting more. A billionaire becomes stagnant as he/she lives of the interest, stagnancy kills in the end and in data it becomes certain death, so data must always grow, which is exactly why the entire Huawei mess is not a good thing, not for Apple Iovesa and not for Google Androidian.

So far I merely create a side-track and it is all still on the Zuboff train to eternity. It is when we see: “A leaked Facebook document in 2018 describes its machine-learning system that “ingests trillions of data points every day” and produces “more than 6m predictions per second”. Finally, these prediction products are sold to business customers in markets that trade in human futures” this is where we see the first part that should wake us up. It is connected to “our societies successfully confronted destructive forms of capitalism in the past, asserting new laws that tethered capitalism to the real needs of people. Democracy ended the Gilded Age. We have every reason to believe that we can be successful again“, it is a nice premise but it is where the plan falls apart and it all fails. You see the biggest flaw is not them; it is us, the people. We expect all digital media be for free. We want it all and we do not want to pay for it, in addition that this economy implies that we cannot buy too many items before the budget hits our food needs, at that point we see that we are limiting ourselves. There is no free ride, there never was! As people refuse to learn this lesson they are confronted with the notion that they surrender their data as it is currency, it is not taxed and the people are happy, the merely had to hand over their soul if you will be, their personal data to well over a million people with a Faustian agreement and many were happy to do so because they do not comprehend what they signed up for. They are in denial through: “it is supposed to be free, yes?” Nothing is free and nothing is for free. These developers have to pay rent, they want either a gorgeous girlfriend, or they need enough for hookers. It seems plain and bland, but there you have it. Sex sells and sex is never free, not even when they marry the option. It is the simplest of evolutionary points. Be in denial as much as you care to be, but that notion should make it clear that nothing is free. You see, if you bought a program, you get to have rights. They get to be liable and when they consider that 95% of their user base would not be their customer base their income would be exceedingly limited, so as we realise that data is all, data is cash we see the path that is a problem. True democracy is not free either, as such the problem merely becomes bigger. Consider the people using Microsoft Word and those paying for Microsoft Word; we see a difference is a much larger part of several nations. If one does not pay in one way, one pays in another form and data is often that form. So as we get all these Google apps (or Apple apps) to aid us, we are all happy but that reliance on Google/Apple gives them the data they need to make predictive analytics and evolve it at some point into Artificial Intelligence.

At that point the writer becomes absolutely brilliant and gives us: “Data ownership is an individual solution when collective solutions are required. We will never own those 6m predictions produced each second. Surveillance capitalists know this. Clegg knows this. That is why they can tolerate discussions of “data ownership” and publicly invite privacy regulation“, Shoshana Zuboff has figured it out. It is the predictions that move forward and give these firms the additional capital they need, in addition it is almost like answers versus responses. they are two different things, a person can answer you whilst never responding to the question, they can also respond to the question and never give you an answer and whilst you ponder this consider that people are 97% sheep, so the 6 million predictions go a long way. Now consider that 6 million predictions needs a lot of data and when the US trade war comes to blow, Huawei will get a share of users, a large share of users that will then become unavailable to Google when the isolation increases, optionally unavailable to Apple too and so on, a new data currency will be created and when that data is 5G based Huawei data will grow faster and faster whilst Google data will end up coming to a standstill, 6 million predictions become 2 million, become 666,666 (I had to go there), in two hardware revolutions (less than two years) the system has to deal with collapse. OK, it is only partial exaggerated, but that is what happens when everything goes positive for Huawei, when they deliver 5G, when the others falter to a larger degree, when their infrastructure is not ready for latency and congestion this is what we will face, the Trump administration was actually that stupid.

And then we get to the final part where the ball is struck out, not out of the field, but merely the ball is out. When we see: “Surveillance capitalists are rich and powerful, but they are not invulnerable. They fear law. They fear lawmakers. They fear citizens who insist on a different path“, I can tell you right now that they do not. The largest issue with tax laws is that they catered to big business for two decades, and that will not stop, if you think that there is no one willing to compromise to the largest extend, I will introduce you to a politician and they will compromise to the largest extent, it is merely towards big business and we have decades of examples in a whole league on nations, so do you really think we have nothing to fear? We do and until proper taxation is in place and until the large corporations are given a proper tax invoice we will see more and more. So when you get another headline like: ‘Australia targets cryptocurrencies in international tax crackdown‘, you better believe that it is a joke, it will be high visibility with claims like “J5 was formed a year ago because of growing concern that tax avoidance, cybercrime and crypto currency abuse were escalating as criminals exploited differences between national tax laws“, you better believe that you are sold some bag of goods. ‘growing concern‘ and ‘exploited differences between national tax laws‘ and consider that the first is not proven and the second is stated in such a way that it is optionally not even a crime, the laws are not properly in place, so consider these empty efforts and the facts below

Apple

  • Apple’s statutory 30 percent tax bill of $76.6 million was compounded by a number of additional tax expenses, adding up to a total income tax expense of $183 million for 2017
  • Apple has paid its largest Australian tax bill in years as it reached $8 billion in local revenue for the first time.

Google

  • Australians paid Google $4.3 billion for consumer items/software.
  • Google had a corporate tax bill of only $26.5 million.

Facebook

  • Facebook scored more than $500,000,000 for services in 2018.
  • Facebook paid a mere $11.8 million in corporate tax.

These are merely three of the larger players and we haven’t even considered Amazon and Netflix yet. Is it really about crypto currency whilst there is an optional one billion ($1,000,000,000) up for the taking once we get politicians that actually fix taxation laws. You really thing that these people fear laws when they can make a deal (read: national economic agreement) with whichever politician is elected? Go cry me a river please.

Oh and let’s not forget that this is merely Australian number for merely three firms, so let’s get real about data currency and the value it has, because as I see it the law will still not be up to scrap and ready in another 10 years, we will at that point be optionally in (or towards) a 6G stage and most cannot even comprehend the impact of that much data per minute on a national economy at present, there is really no way to tell.

In the end there is part that is an attack on democracy, yet not in the way that we see it. You see, we see that numbers, statistics and dashboards help us make our place more efficient, you see it in shops and in offered services, but when the streamlining begins and the shop becomes more efficient we see the impact, it is not that we cannot have a democratic voice, we see
(yet not realise) that the choices are no longer there. It is the most dangerous of democratic impacts as it tends to be subtly. A clever question was asked of me once, a consideration: ‘What if we only please 80% of our customer base, not 93%?‘ It is the immediate and direct impact of the cost of doing business. The question makes perfect sense, but what happens when one of the lost 13% has a direct link to a large player like Johnson & Johnson, McKesson or Marathon Petroleum? What happens when we cannot get their business because we limited ourselves through the cost of doing business? You cannot answer that can you? That is fine, it was not a test, it is to show that there is always a price to limiting choice and or those chosen it works out fine, but real innovation comes from inclusion, not limitation and that is where we are, we are so streamlines, all the same people living in San Francisco (I wrote about this in an earlier blog), it is all the same, we all become the same, we all become a limited version of ourselves and the people in charge cannot learn that lesson because they do not care, their pocket were filled, which was their priority. It was the only goal they had and that is why my IP is not available (merely to a chosen few), that is why I wait, in the end it is either lost or I win, perhaps someone else will have the same idea in 5-10 years, but at that stage I will no longer care, I will already have moved on to different and better challenges as well as new puzzles.

My creative mind allows me to redesign almost anything and create based on what I see, the creative mind only stops at death and that is not even proven at present, I remain hopeful that the people figure it all out before it is too late for them.

 

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July 4, 2019 · 11:44

Demanding Dismissal

The actions of Eggy Calamari (aka Agnes Callamard) require me to now loudly demand her dismissal from the United Nations. She might be regarded as a person who is not entirely ignorant of matters; she still shows the largest concern of acting in dubious legal ways through popularity. Al this started in the middle of the night (actually 13 hours ago) when I received the news (at https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/07/expert-urges-world-powers-reconsider-g20-riyadh-summit-190703064336474.html). Again this so called essay writer is set in a stage where we see: “UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, in a report last month found “credible evidence” that linked Saudi Arabia’s powerful Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) to the killing of Khashoggi“, in this stage ‘credible evidence‘, is nothing, it holds no water and therefore it should have no legal value. Involvement, being a co-conspirator requires the person to be found guilty beyond all reasonable doubt; there is no exemption to that.

Yo Eggy, you did learn that in the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Grenoble, did you not? That and your presence in Başkent University as well as the PhD on Political Science from the New School for Social Research in New York did give you that part of law, did it not? Even as we go for French Civil law that uses “the preponderance of the evidence” (basically was it more likely than not that something occurred in a certain way), your verdict does not hold water. Even when we rack up all the circumstantial evidence, it lacks and you know it Agnes!

Then we need to consider the issues surrounding Mr. Mohammed Alotaibi, the Saudi Consul General in Turkey. His name is all over the report and I would like to raise the issue at [79]. Here we get: “It is not clear that all of this conversation was captured on the tape made available to the Special Rapporteur“, as well as (at 142) “On 17 October, press reports began circulating that Consul General Alotaibi had been fired“, was Jamal Khashoggi part of the reason for him being fired (I do not know), but that gives a person at the scene motive for murder, was that investigated?

Now we get to [176] where we see: “The Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, where Mr. Khashoggi was killed, was overseen by Consul General Mohammed Alotaibi“, that is optionally correct and we do not oppose that, yet now under Executive Order 13818 it now partially becomes US law and under Common Law it is all beyond all reasonable doubt and you do not have that, not in any way, you do not even have a cadaver to work with. So when we see: “The Saudi officials we are sanctioning were involved in the abhorrent killing of Jamal Khashoggi. These individuals who targeted and brutally killed a journalist who resided and worked in the United States must face consequences for their actions” all your evidence is circumstantial and as such you have a whole lot of nothing. And when we get to 192 we see: “On 8 April, the United States Department of State issued a list of sixteen Saudis designated in the murder of Mr. Kashoggi, one less than the seventeen named in the Department of Treasury sanctions from 15 November. The State Department sanctions did not include Consul General Mohammed Alotaibi” and when we get to the list of former Consul General Mohamed Alotaibi, we see no Turkish arrest warrant, no arrest warrant for the KSA, no sanctions from the state department and merely sanctions from the US treasury. We accept that all people are innocent until proven guilty, yet the situation is that former Consul General Mohamed Alotaibi is much more likely the murderer than the Crown prince of Saudi Arabia ever was and you cannot even prove that, so it makes your actions merely rash and vindictive, and speaking out against the G-20 being in Riyadh an action by a young girl who failed her duty (implied duty) to prove in the documentation that the Royal Family of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is directly responsible for the optional wrongful death of Jamal Khashoggi and the evidence when properly vetted will not bring that out. It is what you can prove in court that matters and your essay does not give us this.

So when I get confronted with two parts, the first is Al Jazeera with ‘UN expert urges world powers to reconsider G20 Riyadh summit‘, you do not get to make that call for more limelight, you failed to the larger extent of your essay and as we all agree something happened, no part of it can hold up in court. Through the media Turkish ‘officials’ made all kinds of references tainting the evidence they claim to have. and even in your report you phrased (or rephrased) it as “a review of the rules of evidence and jurisprudence conducted by the Special Rapporteur shows that the admissibility of the tapes and potentially other intercepts relating to Mr. Khashoggi’s death will depend on the form in which they are ultimately produced, their reliability, the fairness to the defendants of using such evidence“, when we see ‘the form in which they are ultimately produced‘ implies editing and as such no reliability remains. As I personally see it, you want to give over increased validity to your essay and as such give a statement that was not yours to make in the first place.

In the second place, your actions on the G20 where we see: “U.N. rapporteur on extrajudicial executions Agnes Callamard told newspaper Algemeen Dagblad it was “more than disappointing” that the Dutch queen had apparently not raised the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi with the Saudi prince“, you do not now, not ever dictate the stage of conversation that was made regarding HRH Queen Maxima of the Netherlands. When you grow up and leave your teenage years behind you, you will see and learn that royalty and more precise Monarchy speakers all over the world (there is also Sweden, the UK, Denmark, Jordan, Japan, the UAE and others to consider) who have been able to start a conversation when some politically driven and opportunistically speaking politicians blew options out of the water, President Trump, President Trudeau and President Macron representing well over 100 events in this matter alone. As such, not merely because of etiquette, you should refrain from commenting on that. This is not me impeding you as a person with the rights to ‘press’ opinion, it is mere common sense that the act was utterly stupid, even if you had optionally a case, the G20 meeting was not about your essay and is never should be.

It is these two events alone that requires the United Nations to consider your dismissal, it gets to be even worse when you called “Donald Trump’s administration has to share its findings into the murder with the international community“, please explain to me how the United States has any actual evidence regarding the events in a foreign nation on a consulate that is another nations grounds? How was this evidence collected? Creating a mountain of non-substantial evidence is not really evidence, even as circumstantial evidence that is founded on probability will not hold water, even if the statement “officials have said they have high confidence“, they lost the credibility they had with a silver briefcase holding evidence on WMD in Iraq, you do remember that part, don’t you? (It was roughly 16 years ago)

You pushed for more and more whilst the foundation of where issues optionally happened was tainted from the very beginning, the fire you add at [369] where we see: “if the United States (or any other party to the ICCPR) knew, or should have known, of a foreseeable threat to Khashoggi’s life and failed to warn him, while he was in Turkey (or elsewhere), and under circumstances with respect to which it could be argued that he was under their functional jurisdiction, then the United States or any other State would have violated their obligations to protect Mr. Khashoggi’s life“, if that was unknown, why is there optional evidence collected in Turkey by the CIA? even if we could not shotgun the part ‘to which it could be argued that he was under their functional jurisdiction, then the United States or any other State would have violated their obligations to protect Mr. Khashoggi’s life‘ how was this the case? The consulate is Saudi territory, Turkish territory (the grounds around the Consulate) was implied to be monitored and there too a lot of errors were made, judgment calls that were basically colossal blunders. The realisation of any journalist getting so much attention with the dozens and dozens of incarcerated journalist in Turkish prisons calls for another venue and all these so called venues give rise that there are plenty of others with an optional issue with Jamal Khashoggi and you calling out HRH Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammad Bin Salman Al Saud should be regarded as stupid, the lack of evidence and the amount of circumstantial evidence alone calls you out.

In an optional fictive case: ‘there is a person who has every need to ascent his position, then there is an person of exulted position who was never near the claimant and the claimant was wrong, is it more likely than not that the person with the need to promote himself is more likely than not the person doing the act compared to the exulted position person?‘ In this case alone, the circumstantial evidence gives a much larger rise to the actions of Mr. Mohammed Alotaibi? I am not stating that Mr. Mohammed Alotaibi is guilty of any wrongdoing; I do so because there is no evidence to that effect. Yet you pastry the road with cherry pies brushing aside one for the other whilst the essay does not give actual conclusive evidence, I state again conclusive evidence that either was responsible for the act. the lack of a body emphasizes this and the fact that there is no evidence of any kind, only speculating on what optionally happened to Jamal Khashoggi merely confirms a lack of evidence for any trial and you set the stage so that you could remain in denial, that and the two events you had no business blasting on merely enforces the need for your removal.

Without the two events (G20 Riyadh and HRH Queen Maxima) you would have remained being a ‘young’ lady who wrote a pretty and optionally suspenseful essay, you yourself changed that premise.

So consider Le Salon NYC (at 310 E 44th St, New York) and Haircutters of Paris (at 320 E 49th St, New York) that are close to your current location, optionally see if you can run your own uber from your UN office, it might be a goldmine, just two of your options to consider in the near future.

Have a great Thursday Agnes!

UN Khashoggi Report June 2019

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July 3, 2019 · 11:57

The Yellowback politician

There is a phrase I initially heard on an episode of Star Trek (decades ago), the phrase goes “Do I detect a streak of yellow across the good fellows back?“, it was Dwight Schultz (aka Howling Mad Murdoch) as Reginald Barclay in an episode where he pretends to be Cyrano de Bergerac in the episode Hollow Pursuits, and weirdly enough, it all seems to fit, I know that it is just crazy coincidence, but that is just what it is, coincidence (and crazy to boot).

So when we see (in the Guardian at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/01/eu-powers-resist-calls-for-iran-sanctions-after-breach-of-nuclear-deal) the quote: ““Today I call on all of the European countries: stick to your commitment,” he said. “You committed to act as soon as Iran violates the nuclear deal; you committed to activate the mechanism of automatic sanctions that were determined by the Security Council. So I’m telling you: do it. Just do it.”” yet it seems that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is talking to a room full of deaf people, it is exactly as the headline states: ‘EU powers resist calls for Iran sanctions after breach of nuclear deal‘, you see, no matter how it falls, the initial target is not Europe, it will be Israel or Saudi Arabia, I reckon that it is 4 to 1, 80% chance Israel cops it first and only a 20% chance that Saudi Arabia does. In those odds, Europe does not have any risk and playing the waiting game and merely act out to some degree if one of the two is hit will be fine by them, it is the usual response from those graced with the constitution of a weasel. Even as we see the hollow ‘Focus is on averting further breaches and UK says it remains committed to 2015 deal‘, they merely prefer there not be any additional breaches. They ignore the fact that Iran could have temporarily halting production, they ignore that the reporting moment does not coincide with the moment Iran officially transgressed that line, they ignore that there is credible intelligence (OK, more wild rumours) that there is more than one additional unmarked enrichment site, that is all ignored, merely they prefer not to see additional breaches. When there is no skin in the game, when the economy has no real suffrage, the inaction game can be played, no matter who gets hurt.

What they fail to see is that no matter who gets hit, both Israel and Saudi Arabia have no options but to strike Iran, perhaps that is why all the arms deals were stopped? One could argue that the quote: “European leaders had urged Iran not to breach the deal, but the focus may now be on dissuading Iran from taking further, more serious steps away from the terms“, it could optionally be seen as a soft approach towards containing the fallout, quite literally so, and yet there is a first. It will be the first time when Saudi Arabia and the State of Israel as well as the true allies both have the stage where they all unite in a single need, the destruction of Iran, part of me hopes that this happens, it will be the first signal towards the EU to clean their house, it will be the first time that this union will bring fear to the heart of Turkey, they bet the wrong horse and now they become a target right next to Lebanon and Hezbollah.

Whatever proxy path was optionally in play will now fall away because no nation has ever faced the wrath of both Israel and Saudi Arabia at the same time. Those who played games in that fashion have no place to run to, they have no borders to hide behind, whatever small options these players have, Qatar, Oman, Yemen, Egypt and whatever sympathisers are out there in these nations, facing the wrath of both sides of borders is not a game they signed up for, as such the escalation will be swift and very violent. At that point it will be the first move of Iran to ‘suddenly’ give way to emergency meetings and sit down for some agreement, at that point the EU better sit on the side and not interfere, at that point the race will overtake manners and devour Iran. It is at that point that people like Ali Khamenei and Qasem Soleimani will make some hopeful statement on errors made within the rank and press for a diplomatic deal and some peace conference, but it will be too late, we should not hear of it and those so called European leaders who resisted calls better get out of the way at that point, they missed the option, they scathed their duty and the should remain silent, run and become a barber or an uber driver, it is basically all they have left.

I would prefer to avoid all these complications, but the inactions of those relying on gravy trains and non-commitment have burned their own boats and their own bridges, Iran will not learn one way, so they will have to learn another way. It took me a few hours to design an optional solution to cripple their navy, I feel certain that I could take a look at their air force and airfields and give some additional fun (solving puzzles is actually a lot of fun).

And it goes beyond that, even as we see: ‘Israel preparing for possible military clash between US and Iran‘, it is more likely than not that US will halt its stance before the military clash happens, it will run to the border with all might, but not commit to an armed exchange, it will however not stand in the way of Israel and Saudi Arabia when they do strike, this differs them from the EU, the EU will do whatever they can to force any negotiation, even after a first strike by Iran, optionally via Hezbollah or Houthi forces and that makes this game a lot more dangerous this time around. As no one was able to stop Iran arming the other two, we are in the dark on how much was delivered and how these two will strike. Houthi forces will strike Saudi Arabia, Hezbollah will strike both Israel and Saudi Arabia, yet Hezbollah will more likely than not hide behind Houthi outfits, the rest is still open. As CNN reported hours ago, “Yemen’s Iranian-backed Houthi rebels claimed responsibility for a drone attack Tuesday on Abha International Airport, according to the Houthi-run Al-Masirah news agency. The Saudi-led coalition fighting the rebels confirmed the drone attack and said it believed Tehran was involved in the operation“, the problem is not merely the attack on the airports, it seems that Houthi (or its Hezbollah/Iranian operators) are getting more adapt at their actions implying that the targets might change soon enough, the fact that Iran is out of options also implies that they need Houthi forces to hit Saudi Arabia harder and that is more likely than not going to happen. Until the shipments stop Saudi Arabia is facing a battle on 2-3 fronts, a third front will happen if Hezbollah openly commits towards Iran and the Al Qurayyat region. There is no intelligence to prove that, but tactically Hezbollah could use that stage to also increase pressures on Jordan and Saudi Arabia at the same time; I cannot help but wonder on how far this could escalate and I cannot stop but wonder how the ignorant inactive politicians in Europe let it come to this. They all knew what was at stake; they all left it to some proclaimed expectation of ‘US actions’ who in their current state could not even afford to go to war with the 17th century VOC (and a 17th century technology navy), their state is pretty bad. Even if they score immediate hits on Iran, it will escalate and until they get direct fire support from both Saudi Arabia and Israel, this could escalate out of proportions giving rise to serious damage to Jordan, Bahrain, and the UAE to boot. Iran will avoid pushing Qatar, but there is no guarantee that they avoid damage. It is a mess that could soon become uncontrollable; the inactions of Europe push for that scenario more and more.

I personally believe that it will come to blows within the next few weeks. I would be extremely happy if it could be avoided, yet as the present stage is, I am uncertain as to how it can be avoided, the best chance would be a first strike on Iran and see if Iran realises that they pissed off too many sides at the same time, but that is not a given. They might not have any chance to win, but they can still do loads of damage to several players and there is no denying that the IRGC is ready for battle, making a quick victory over Iran extremely unlikely, or perhaps it might be more correct to state that a quick victory is only possible through a severe impact on all fighting sides, a cornered party will do weird jumps and that has been a truth in life and nature like forever, so the entire situation is not out of reach and let’s not forget, Iran had the option to create a stage by temporary halt enrichment and they decided not to do that. As such the escalation has clearly be on their side and no matter how the stage with America was, by surpassing enrichment amounts they have clearly given the indication that they care not for the accords and they are calling the bluff of the EU and America to escalate issues further whilst ignoring the danger that either Israel or Saudi Arabia is, as such they only have themselves to blame when the damage in Iran takes on a much larger proportion than they anticipated, the question then becomes will the attacking nations stop, or will they to prevent Iranian attacks continue until Ali Khamenei and Qasem Soleimani and their inner circles are completely removed from power. We might think that this is the best outcome, but it is not. The devil you know beats the devil you do not and in Iran there will always be another Mahmoud Ahmadinejad waiting to take the highest seat of Iranian office.

One would have hoped that the yellowback politician was an extinct breed, but that is not the case and I fear that their damage will be visible for decades to come, no matter where that damage is.

 

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July 2, 2019 · 11:51

From Location to Innovation (loss)

It is a real estate dream, to talk about the location and therefor get a better price; we are all about getting a nice home, yet we look at places where we know it will sell for the 100%-200% of the price we paid for it, preferably within 5 years. Most of us looking for something oversized have at some point seen 924 Bel Air Road, Los Angeles, California. It is so over the top, so expensive that most billionaires might not even consider it. No matter how much of a technological, arts and lifestyle monument it is, complete with helipad. A house like that makes you a target of some sorts. There will always be envy, there will always be the next challenge and there will always be the next addition. To live in a house that has it all is for most you desire is unsettling. Weirdly enough it is within us, when we see this and we think ‘this is as good as it will ever get’, when we have that thought before we are 40 it becomes the limitation on us, it boggles our need of creativity. Now, for the most we need not worry, 99.99% of the population will never get near to 50% of that marker, but it is there, our minds creates this. So when a few articles passed my way, they started to add up and weirdly enough it is an opinion piece by John Naughton on June 16th that started it all. With ‘How Silicon Valley’s whiz-kids finally ran out of friends‘ (at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jun/16/how-silicon-valley-whiz-kids-finally-ran-out-of-friends) it begins.

With: “Once upon a time, Silicon Valley was the jewel in the American crown, a magnet for high IQ – and predominately male – talent from all over the world. Palo Alto was the centre of what its more delusional inhabitants regarded as the Florence of Renaissance 2.0“, I was never there, but I was linked to some degree and I say early on how greed took over, how opportunity seekers would resort to Machiavelli and other means to get what they desire and they never cared how they got there, it was their ‘political game’. Then we see a truth as the quote “the commentator Alexis Madrigal identifies no fewer than 15 different groups preparing ambushes. They include angry conservatives and progressive politicians, disillusioned tech luminaries, competition lawyers, privacy advocates, European regulators, mainstream media, scholarly critics, other corporations (telecoms firms, for example, plus Oracle and other business-software companies, for example), consumer-protection organisations and, last but not least, Chinese internet companies. With enemies like these, the US tech companies are suddenly discovering that they really need some friends.” the reason is actually simple. these US tech companies were heading in a direction of maximisation through iteration, as the need for true innovation was lost (not that innovation that places like Apple claim to have), others caught on and the drive that Silicon valley once had was no longer there, it was stepwise progression whilst the marathon runners like Taiwan, Korea, Japan and China caught up. Microsoft wasted its console world through mere stupidity and a spreadsheet (and being dumb and short sighted). That is why none of them are allowed near my IP (with the optional exception of Google). As innovation becomes iteration the margins went down and it brought regulators, tax haven needs and other players like competition and IP attorneys into all of it (as fore mentioned) and suddenly the grape season was out, the harvest had diminished and what in whiskey terms is called ‘the angel’s share’ grew leaving little to the others. I believe that the writer nails it with: “And we are beginning to realise that the immense power that the valley’s uber-geeks have acquired is what Stanley Baldwin memorably nailed as “power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages”” but there a mistake is made, there are two kinds in that valley, the dreamers and the combined needs of the operators and facilitators, that second group is more important to watch mainly because it stopped the first group. the second group thought that by putting their stallion in a paddock, fenced in and limited to a smaller part it would be more effective, and having 5 fields will lead to 500% of the goal, but that was stupidity speaking. Wild horses, real stallions need to race, the strongest takes the lead and together as they burn the ground under their hooves they become more agile, stronger players and their race goes towards the dream that they had no envisioned yet. that is how the iPad came, that is how Smartphone came that is how Nano technology comes and through iteration the next tier is not merely slower, the dreamers forgot to dream, they needed to produce in larger amounts with less resources, less space and that is how they got overtaken by said Korea, Japan and China. The results are in front of us and now that India is catching up in more than one way the dream of more fortune becomes the nightmare of losing it all. So when the final wisdom comes: “And once they went public they did what corporations do: maximise shareholder value, come what may, avoid regulation and pay as little tax as possible. Just like tobacco companies and arms manufacturers“, there we have it, the larger system was ignore thought compartmentalisation and no one realised just how stupid they were. that is one of two more reasons why I do not trust my IP with 98% of the tech firms, they will not learn because the inner parts are all about profit and maximisation, and through that weakness billions in revenue are lost, because of the fake dream that iteration brings the same in twice the time but at only a part of the resources, the biggest flaw is setting a profit stage to a spreadsheet, innovation can never be gained through predictive analytics, because predictive analytics gives the continuation of a product, not the consequence of a new technology beheld by a dreamer, there will never be data to do that and that is how it was all lost.

Round two

And that is how we got to round two last Saturday as Ruha Benjamin (associate professor at Princeton University) and even as she starts with ‘We definitely can’t wait for Silicon Valley to become more diverse‘ (at https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jun/29/ruha-benjamin-we-cant-wait-silicon-valley-become-more-diverse-prejudice-algorithms-data-new-jim-code), she gives a truth that I partially oppose (not the diversity), as it was always about the dreamers. Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Mark Zuckerberg they were all dreamers to some degree. That world needs dreamers and facilitators that push dreams into the reality of innovation. The more diverse that world is, the more diverse the dream becomes and the greater the achievement could be. It is true innovation in its purest forms and whilst the CEO’s took the words of CFO’s and marketeers that reality was forgotten. Marketeers hope and drive hypes, they cannot dream on something that they cannot fathom, it is the most destructive vicious circle imaginable. So when I see: “She founded the Just Data Lab, which aims to bring together activists, technologists and artists to reassess how data can be used for justice. Her latest book, Race After Technology, looks at how the design of technology can be discriminatory” I see both hope and failure. the hope is that as diversity of ‘activists, technologists and artists‘ unites, we see new paths, the artist sees a path and draws it, the technologist can devise it the activist can oppose the path and scream for a meadow to walk on, that is how innovation came, quote literally, the Dutch a nation the size of New Jersey gave us: ‘Dutch Solar Bike Path SolaRoad Successful & Expanding‘ (which gave me another idea with a more metropolitan and rural opportunity approach), innovated roads by catching sunshine to power the evening lights, it is true innovation in action and an optional path to reduce the carbon footprint, whilst getting the surroundings powered. When we see first results: “with 3000 kWh generated, the solar panels were outperforming the 70 kWh annual per square meter expected threshold set in the lab. In its first year, the SolaRoad produced 9,800 kWh, roughly equivalent to the annual average consumption of three Dutch households“, we see a path towards innovation. There is no doubt that data can be used for justice, but in which direction? Yet I too adhere to idea’s, I am a different dreamer and even with a law and a technology degree (including a master) I have not dreamt in that direction, perhaps this is for another dreamer, the need to recognise it is essential, to find the right dreamer.

And this is not an attack on Ruha in any way, she gives a clear premise with “Many of these automated systems are trying to identify and predict risk. So we have to look at how risk was assessed historically – whether a bank would extend a loan to someone, or if a judge would give someone a certain sentence. The decisions of the past are the input for how we teach software to make those decisions in the future. If we live in a society where police profile black and Latino people that affects the police data on who is likely to be a criminal. So you’ll have these communities overrepresented in the data sets, which are then used to train algorithms to look for future crimes, or predict who’s seen to be higher risk and lower risk“, you see this is observation towards risk, a path we have seen clearly in the last two decades, yet the opposite is also there, but how to set its dimensionality? It becomes big data in observation towards opportunity, a path never walked because opportunity is one identified once it is walked, a system cannot predict the dream if it cannot comprehend the dream, or the dreamer. It is designing a computer that will design computers. It is the ability to design Skynet (I just had to go there), with the optional danger of our own end (see the collected works of Linda Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger). It is always most likely to fail because Ruha forgot to include a philosopher to her team. The computer fails because we forgot about philosophia, the love of wisdom, and as we forgot about that we merely ended with really clever calculators and calculators are never about predicting the future, it is about limiting cost and maximising profit in any endeavour (more money, more reserves, more energy, more resources) and these margins never lead to wisdom or innovation because the dreamer was missing and dreamers do not constitute a positive influx in that engine, sales and marketing did away with that, they always will.

To illustrate this let me give you a personal side. In 1997 I send a mail to a sales executive. I had recently by accident found the Warner Brothers Angelfire partnership site. They had united and every person could freely sign up to get a Buffy Address, a Babylon 5 address, a Charmed address and so on. It was static, you got access to fan art, you got 20Mb web space and an email address. In those days (pre Gmail) it was actually really cool, but there was no way to reach out, So I suggested that we have something similar and allow the people to reach each other and we would be in the middle being able to market to all of them. The sales executive laughed in my face, stating that it would never have any business premise, it was a useless use of resources, it was not in ‘the mission statement‘. I dropped it knowing it was a lost opportunity. Now we have Facebook. My idea was nowhere near it, it was not advanced it was merely messaging and marketing, the direct impact of no vision, 4 years before Facebook shown in two colours, Black and White, I still have the email somewhere, 4 years before the launch of Social media, I tried to introduce a path towards it. I have no doubt that Facebook would have overtaken me, I did not dream that advanced, but at least I had the dream and it is also for that reason that my IP will never go into hands like the limited ones I had to work with.

A limiting amount of opposition (from to her) is seen in “Part of that has been spurred on by Facebook and Cambridge Analytica and the US election. More and more people are realising that this idea of big tech coming to save us, it’s really been dismantled. Part of it is shifting from a kind of paranoia around technology to what my activist colleagues like to say: from paranoia to power“, I believe that data is data, it is not wisdom and I also believe that data can aid in finding solutions, yet to do that you must drive a solution, you must devise a way where data is the inspirer towards innovation and software cannot directly lead towards it, you can dashboard it to see where the needs are, you can report on it where the shortages are and you can make a slice and dice app to let people get a scope of information to feed the dream, but you cannot directly feed the dreamer as you cannot predict in what direction his dream goes. You can merely hope to bring the spark that makes the dreamer dream in his or her direction and hope it leads to innovation and at that part the CEO, COO, CFO and CTO will have come crying half a dozen times to stop the squandering of resources. She does address my view correctly when she gives us: “More diversity in Silicon Valley is important, but won’t automatically address algorithmic bias. Unless all those diverse people are empowered to challenge discriminatory design processes, diversity is a ruse” and she is correct and perhaps she also answers her own question.

In all this we forgot one group, we forgot about the children, we need to be able to look at data like a child and learn to randomly look at answers to questions that we aren’t even asking, it is the initial option of a spark (not a given) that leads to the insight we get with: ‘What If?‘, the need to embrace the obvious, not ignoring it, all this in data is required to get insights leading to wisdom, the question becomes how can this be addressed and form my personal point of view is to teach people about data as early as possible, not in a light of statistics, but in a light to something I got in the early 70’s, looking at the question ‘What is the chance something happens?‘, a simple ‘kans tol‘ (Chance spinner) which would give the younger watcher an indication on chance and statistics. When we add that to the equation what happens when creativity takes over and they start looking at what they can find, or even better, what they cannot find. The younger mind is more eager to find, and equally find missing. It is that part that we are missing out of and it matters, because it is the first step in learning the question that we are not phrasing, optionally overlooking the obvious.

Part Three (Final)

Finally we get to part three with ‘Why San Francisco techies hate the city they transformed‘ (at https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jul/01/san-francisco-big-tech-workers-industry). And we see part of the drive with “Even Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce and a San Francisco native who has long urged comity between the techies and the city, has taken to calling his hometown a “train wreck”“, we can only conclude that now that he bought Tableau it will get worse for him. Even as it is not about him, but the failing infrastructure with “one-bedroom apartment reached an all-time high of $3,700 a month“, which is more than twice the price for a real decent two bedroom apartment in Chicago, we see the impact, but not what is around all of them, yet it is not new, London has similar issues. As the people who can afford to live somewhere, we see that greed takes over turning the city into a carcass because it lacks a sustainable infrastructure. As people cannot afford to live near where they work, infrastructure becomes an increasing problem and as cities cater to large investors, they forgot that affordable living is essential; they merely pushed that issue forward and forward again and again. We see he escalation even further when we consider the quote: “San Francisco has become more of a satellite campus, with South Bay stalwarts including Apple, Facebook, Google and LinkedIn competing for office space in the city proper. They’ve joined the San Francisco-native companies Twitter, Uber, and Airbnb in the cramped confines of a city of just 49 square miles, surrounded by water on three sides” instead of diversifying and clustering over a much larger area, they all moved together, and as such thousands of employees need to live where they work and now prices are through the roof, it also impacts the bottom line, so as others decided to keep their stomping grounds in Columbus Ohio and as we see those in Madison Wisconsin, we see that the bottom line changes, yet they too push for space in San Francisco, so what was once the United States of America is not the Marketing needs of California. the sad part is that these people are all separated and isolated form one another through intellectual property, and as I am happy to make fun of Zendesk and their need to “file oppositions at the United States Patent and Trademark Office to 49 trademarks including the word “zen”“, all whilst we know that “Zen is a school of Mahayana Buddhism” that is reported and registered as something that is 1200 years old, so to see that there are at present well over 724 active trademarks which include the word “Zen” we see the replacement from inner peace to turf wars and it links to all of it, these people all think and associate alike, and as we have seen, it leads to iteration not innovation. And there we see the hoax in the serious setting. As we are introduced to: ““I feel like San Francisco is between Seattle and New York, but rather than the best of both, it’s the worst of both,” said Beth, a 24-year-old product manager who asked not to be identified by her real name. Beth moved to the city directly after graduating from Stanford to work at a major tech company, but recently transferred to Seattle. “Everyone I met was only interested in their jobs, and their jobs weren’t very interesting,” she said of her time in San Francisco. “I get it, you’re a developer for Uber, I’ve met a million of you.”” When you cluster together you create new bias and new limitations that merely stop you from dreaming. When you are in San Francisco, North of SF International Airport, you are now mostly all the same, think the same, work the same and you are all separated on three sides by water, and a failed infrastructure, you have no way to go. There we see the benefit that the two other locations have, space created opportunity and the chance to dream, a path to innovation, and I fear that things will turn from bad to worse for San Francisco. As greed pushed out the infrastructure, it removed diversity, it is not merely the diversity that pushes us to lows, the fact that some ideas came from watching someone do something else, the ability to see their interaction with the environment that allowed for new thoughts and that cubicles took that away, even if it is not called open space, it merely made the entire open space a cubicle. So whilst these people ‘enjoy’ their 55Km bus ride to Mountain view, we see that the same distance gets us to Santa Cruz and Monterey Bay, all with opportunity and other considerations and it is the ‘other considerations’ that are the treasure trove in this, because it changes the mindset of people, considerations lead to opportunity, opportunity is the foundation of innovation, it always has been, whether the innovation is accepted or rejected does not matter, it is the one that does go through that becomes the innovation that fills a corporate coffer, iteration merely lets it go on a little longer. Diversity shows that as others embrace an idea it can truly be improved on and create a new innovation, not a new iteration, but that only happens when the accepting diversity is large enough, and that is when we get the one quote that shows the disaster. With: ““It was really hard to stomach the indifference that I witnessed from folks who’d been living in San Francisco for a while, simply stepping over the slumped bodies of people who lived outside or just cold ignoring people asking for money,” said Jessica Jin, who moved to San Francisco from Austin, Texas, to work for a tech startup, of her first impressions of the city. “I wondered how long it would take me to also become numb to it all.”” we need to see that this is the largest danger. It is not that Jessica Jin moved to SF, it is ‘how long it would take me to also become numb to it all‘, that will be the moment that her dreaming to innovation ends, when we become numb, we merely create a shell to ignore what is around us and that is the first thing to thump innovation into silence, as I see it that has always been the first hurdle to lose innovation and soon thereafter they lose the ability towards iteration as well.

It is the larger issue to a much larger problem that we never properly defined, how did we lose the ability to properly dream a path to innovation, it is what drowns the creative mind and soon thereafter we get exactly what the CEO’s and CFO’s wanted, result driven worker bees, but that is what killed their company, the dream is lost and so is creation of innovation attached to it.

It is about location, location, location, but not in the way you thought it was. It was about the space to truly dream, too bad these hundreds of board members all forgot that one simple lesson, all whilst it was in front of them all along, most of them got into the board of directors using that path in the first place, how quaint!

 

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July 1, 2019 · 11:56

Drones to the wild

There was another attack in Saudi Arabia less than 24 hours ago, it went wrong (for the drones) and the Saudi military was able to intercept the drones. And when we look at the quote: “Saudi Arabia has intercepted two drones launched by Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels, a Saudi-led coalition spokesman has said“, most people look in the wrong way. The western media to the largest degree ignores: ‘Iran-backed‘, the issue is seen in two parts. In the first part the stated Qasef-2K is not merely that it is more advanced than the Qasaf-1, it is that Houthi forces do not have the ability to make the Qasef-1, this was not determined by me, Drone experts looked at it and were able to conclude without any doubt that it is beyond their ability. There is a lot more wrong with the Houthi forces, but this is a first part. the second is that the denial to register this implies that the western media is willing to falsely accuse Iran, but is unable to recognise the hand of Iran and is unwilling to hold them to account, their fear of losing whatever nuclear agreement joke there is, they want to cling to the impossible and most delusional setting of an agreement that will not work.

The fact that Qasef-2K is made and still shipped to Yemen gives rise that there is a much larger logistical support to keep the Houthi fighters active and the Yemeni people will suffer, that is the simple equation and the western media to the largest degree will ignore it and merely point fingers at Saudi Arabia, but with this much overwhelming evidence, and it is not conjecture, it is actual evidence. the part towards the Yemeni Qasef-1 is: “this claim has been disputed and there is widespread suspicion that it is Iranian-built“, the report [Iranian-Technology-Transfers-to-Yemen] by Conflict Armament Research gives us too much to consider and Yemen does not have the ability, I personally would go as far as stating that the assembly and manufacturing of these drones is nowhere near possible by Houthi/Yemeni parties and this counts heavy towards the required ‘spanking’ of Iran, and that was just the previous model, so the ante is up, because Houthi forces would not be able to research and evolve any drone technology in this current condition, pushing more pressure towards Iran, but the Western Media refuses to do this, merely the unfounded accusations of the optional killing of a journalist that no one cares about through a published UN essay.

So whilst we ponder the findings: “the Qasef-1 appears to be a type within the Ababil-II family of UAVs, produced by Iran’s Aircraft Manufacturing Industrial Company (HESA)” and “The Qasef-1 not only shares near-identical design and construction characteristics with the Iranian UAV, but also features identical serial number prefixes“, and the fact that the western media steers largely clear, we find ourselves in a corner, how can any conflict be resolved when the principal player is not recognised to be involved to the degree it is?

And this is not news, these results have been known since 2017, the issue has been that pressing for that long. The 8 drones that were taken a hold of in the Ma’rib Governorate show the evidence clearly, but for the most, the media shuns it. And it is only now that we get initial reports stating: ‘Iran is Using Western Drone Technology against America‘, I wonder if the American drone had not been shot down would there have been any coverage of Iranian drones? Even Al Jazeera joins the confusion when we see: “In May, two oil pumping stations in Saudi Arabia were targeted by drones causing minor supply disruptions highlighting an apparent significant leap in the drone capabilities of the Houthis“, the article (at https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/06/saudi-arabia-intercepts-houthi-drones-launched-kingdom-190630060904968.html) gives us another part, with: “US officials told the Wall Street Journal that those attacks originated in Iraq, not Yemen, the paper reported on Friday” there is another part that comes into the frame. the article that was given by the Wall Street Journal (at https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-saudi-pipeline-attacks-originated-from-iraq-11561741133) give us: “U.S. officials have concluded that drone attacks on Saudi Arabia’s oil industry in May were launched from Iraq“, it does so with the very clear premise of: “Iran’s allies in the region“, a stage that could be accepted, yet is it still Iran directly, or is it Iran indirectly via Kata’ib Hezbollah? either could be the case, yet until there is a lot more clarity we will not know for sure, the reeling and dealing of Iran so far have shown that this proxy war is done indirectly so that Iran can keep its delusional stance that it has clean hands in all this, the idea that anyone will believe this to be any serious level of truth is beyond me in all this.

Whether one place or another was used in this stage is not part of the issue, the fact that Iran is not asked to explain itself by every nation is the issue, there is too much pointing to Iran, yet the best we can see is a shallow statement that ‘Iran says it will soon exceed enriched uranium limit under nuclear deal‘ even though here are several considerations in place that Iran did that well over a week ego, so when that reality hits the people, how much longer before the nations at large will act against Iran in all this?

Most nations seem to be talking in a low pitch, trying not to create waves, that too is droning, but then again, it might the intent of some European players to create confusion on what a drone actually was. Clear communication is usually not expected to come from the European Union, or Strasbourg. that part is given voice and strength only 11 hours ago when Forbes reported (at https://www.forbes.com/sites/francescoppola/2019/06/30/europe-circumvents-u-s-sanctions-on-iran/#7d5089da2c8d) ‘Europe Circumvents U.S. Sanctions On Iran‘, It is not merely on how they perceive themselves to be clever, the quote: “Europe has found a way of circumventing U.S. sanctions on Iran. The governments of France, Germany and the United Kingdom have developed a special purpose vehicle (SPV) to enable European businesses to maintain non-dollar trade with Iran without breaking U.S. sanctions“, one could argue that Europe has decided to cater to the warmongering needs of Iran, do maintain some state of delusion on a nuclear accord that is clearly not worth the value of paper required to print the accord on. This created delay, whilst not holding Iran to account in its proxy war actions is exactly why Saudi Arabia should be looking for actual allies, and actual options for growing its defence, it is also another indication that the European Union has stopped being a force of good, no matter how they slice it.

The drones might be wild and game for ignoring, but only because global media was as facilitating as it could possibly be to ignore the clear indicators of those behind the screens pushing for these attacks in the first place. The fact that we also saw just a few days ago: ‘US can’t attack Iran without European support’, is not about setting the stage of ‘keeping the peace’, in this Franco Frattini, former Foreign Minister of Italy (twice over) is setting the stage of enabling Iran in all settings and cases against whatever is coming their way. It is this short-sighted approach to dealing with Iran where we see a much more dangerous setting soon enough, and I will be around to give the quote ‘I told you so’ soon enough, a weary push by deflating its options and abilities whilst inflating Iranian pride to do whatever they want. There has been no case in history where this worked out the way others have planned it, and the excuses will come soon enough.

Iranian-Technology-Transfers-to-Yemen

 

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June 29, 2019 · 13:18

Wrong way intersection?

We all look at times, we look in the direction that we are going we look at where we want to be, in this we are all alike and for the most, we stop to look where we were, what we passed and where we came from. These are natural moments. So what is natural on focussing on Huawei, especially the accusations by Finite State, a Matt Wyckhouse undertaking. I have a few issues here. You see, when a person hides behind statements like: “‘The Finite State report was highly critical of Huawei, claiming that the Chinese company’s “devices quantitatively pose a high risk to their users. In virtually all categories we examined, Huawei devices were found to be less secure than those from other vendors making similar devices.” According to Finite State, this included potential backdoors. “Out of all the firmware images analyzed, 55% had at least one potential backdoor,” Finite State reported. “These backdoor access vulnerabilities allow an attacker with knowledge of the firmware and/or with a corresponding cryptographic key to log into the device.”“, when the bla bla is surrounding “Out of all the firmware images analyzed, 55% had at least one potential backdoor“, a percentage with ‘potential backdoor‘, you should optionally be regarded as a hack giving a hatchet job, plain and simple. A real cyber security firm will give us: “These are the clear backdoors found“, there is no percentage, and it will be presented as evidence plain and simple. That is how this works; let’s face it, Columbus Ohio is not really Silicon Valley, is it? (there is a plot twist, read on please)

And when TechRadar gives us: ‘Huawei’s telecom equipment is more likely to have flaws than rivals’ claims report‘, my question becomes based on what evidence? When it is linked to: “when compared to similar equipment manufactured by its rivals Juniper and Arista“, why are they dependable? Or perhaps only the NSA has those backdoors? There is a disgusting amount of bias coming out of the mouths from those who should stay absolutely neutral, and it gets to be worse.

Twenty four

It is like a real time drama with Kiefer Sutherland, less than 24 hours ago, Cisco gave us: “Cisco issued three “critical” security warnings for its DNA Center users – two having a Common Vulnerability Scoring System rating of 9.8 out of 10“, which is really really bad and the rest of the media ignores it completely. So when we get: “In one advisory Cisco said a vulnerability in the web-based management interface of DCNM could let an attacker obtain a valid session cookie without knowing the administrative user password by sending a specially crafted HTTP request to a specific web servlet that is available on affected devices. The vulnerability is due to improper session management on affected DCNM software” there is a much larger story, especially as Cisco is working to remove a few severe failings in its own system, which are unlikely to be removed for a few more months, all leading to larger issues, but the media is seemingly more interested in spouting anti-Huawei materials and not interested in warning optional victims, how does that go over to you?

TechRadar also gives us: “Finite State makes big claims in its report but until it is publicly released, we won’t know for sure if its findings are accurate. However, now that the news is out, further investigation into its legitimacy will likely be carried out by the media, world governments and of course by Huawei itself“, a relatively unknown company in the middle of nowhere; that is how it reads to me and I will happily have my serve of humble pie when they are proven to be correct, yet that public release is likely to find delays to maximise on fear, all whilst Cisco is evading the limelight by media friends. This is not entirely correct from my side, Cisco has been warning all kinds of parties since they were found and that is a noble thing, yet the media does not hand out that reality to the larger media does it? (They had not responsibility to do so)

I have a second issue, this is supposed to be a ‘for profit‘ venture and that is fine, they have been around for 2 years, yet we now see: “the security report was done pro-bono as the company believed making this information public was the best way to inform policy makers of the security issues in Huawei’s equipment“, so this report requiring a massive amount of hours and testing if we go by: ‘all the firmware images analysed‘, the (initial) absence of numbers is also debatable here, so in all this time and resources required, this report was done pro-bono? Is (like it goes in deceptive conduct) merely a pro-bono report, or are they servicing Juniper and/or Arista? Is that not a valid question?

I find the setting debatable from the mere TechRadar point of view. From my point of view, well known cyber experts have looked at Huawei and none of them have given any clear indication that there was a clear and present danger with anything that Huawei has, they had shown previous issues and they had been dealt with, so unless Finite State gives the golden bullet with clear evidence, than the future of Finite State might not be that bright. Can we expect anything form a cyber-firm that facilitates for others? Well, yes but those are not known as Cyber Experts, they are merely digital marketing firms and the method used implies that they are not very good at what they do.

So I can jump in there and show them how to do it, as long as it comes with 300 W Spring St #1904 as a stating bonus (we all have our price), it is 2 blocks from the Ohio FBI office, as well as a nice view of the Scioto River (good for enjoying coffee in the morning). Would I compromise? Optionally, but do you want to have faith in someone who compromises, or someone telling you how it is at a price? I get it, at times there is a tactical reason to do things pro-bono, sometimes it brings in the larger fish, yet in this case, when the floor falls from under them, in the way it was presented, do you have faith in them looking towards keeping you safe? Is that really the security you want to bank on?

Cisco has issue, yet they came forward (almost) immediately telling us how it is, the fact that the media is treating them darling and keeping them out of the media to the largest degree is not a crime, it places merely question marks on the integrity of the media, and how much credibility do they really have?

There is a larger concern and it is a serious one, the media has set the stage that less and less information is trusted, especially in fields where trust is essential. It changes the game, but how is not to be told, we cannot tell, yet there is every concern that Europe, Asia and India are less and less likely willing to trust US equipment. There has been clear indicators that 5G evolution did not give rise to trust, the fact that so called pro-bono work is working out is also not a given, until there are clear trustworthy sources showing all that Finite State had indeed the silver bullet, things can only go worse for many over the long term and that has been proven in several ways offer the last decade. It is not that I want.

Let’s not start kidding around here, the report is damning, there is no doubt. When we look past the TechRadar hype created and take a serious look at the paper (at the end), we get 55 pages of tech heaven, all jetlagged turbo text, with all the hypes that any techie get off on.

When a firm gives us: “Across the firmware tested, there were 8,826 observations of vulnerabilities with a CVSS score of 10.0, the maximum severity level, indicating serious flaws in the systems“, it better come with backing, and the source of the data, as well as the firmware better be verifiable, from my point of view, any discrepancy shown and Finite State becomes liable. Even when we see: “Our automated system analyzed more than 1.5 million files embedded within 9,936 firmware images supporting 558 different products within Huawei’s enterprise networking product lines“, the sources are not given to us (as far as I saw). The appendix does give us the hardware list and it is a huge list, so now that the die is cast we will have to see what happens next, not merely to Huawei and Finite State, large names have stated on the record that no issues had been found, they will be in equal measure get judged if the scrutiny on the Final State paper holds up, no matter how this goes, there is a shit storm coming and it will impact at least one party, yet how large it will be cannot be stated at present, the claims are too loud and if the scrutiny breaks the paper it might be the end of Finite State and its board of directors before they got decently started, should they make it, the opposition is a lot larger and it gets to be a lot uglier for many players involved.

The paper also gives clear premises, for one there is: “It is common for embedded devices to ship with a default password enabled for the primary account, “root” in this case, as long as the password can be changed and is documented as part of the standard operating procedure of the device.” OK, that is fair enough, but there is a second part, how many consumer get told on how to change that? And how does that compare to issues found with Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon as documented parts that show users how to do that. Is that not equally important? In the end I can debate all the parts until I look like a failed auto asphyxiation attempt, yet the scrutiny from me has little to no value, it is the response of Huawei and the other players that now becomes the part, because these expert making 1000% or more of what I make will not be allowed the ‘Oops!’ or ‘That was not part of our investigation’ excuse, in that way whatever comes next will get ugly fast and in light of my initial exposure of anti-Huawei goons, I have an equal responsibility to take this to the next level, no matter how it goes, because that too is part of accountability. No matter how we slice it, Finite State has given us something serious to look at (one of the very first to do so), so now we look at the boffins at MiT and Stanford on what they make of it, and if the technical dudes at DARPA decide to wake up for this one, that would be nice too.

I look forward to round two, because it will be a beauty to watch on hundreds of channels all over the planet, this would make for great TV (and optionally ten times better than anything the Kardashians can show) so I’ll get the popcorn for this one.

https://finitestate.io/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Finite-State-SCA1-Final.pdf

Finite-State-SCA1-Final

 

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