Tag Archives: Forbes

July 13, 2021 · 21:20

The Lawyer wins, the law loses

Yes, it is a stage that we will be seeing soon enough. As the lawyer wins, the law loses and tht is just the beginning. As we see ‘Apple loses appeal in Fortnite court battle’ (source: Australian Financial Review) there is a secondary stage that comes up. It is not immediately clear, but someone gave the reader by Jeff Dotzler in GC Consulting in 2019 ‘Will You Get Sued if Your Business is Hacked?’ There we see “Even though the company was able to restore the records, one of the affected clients, Surfside Non-Surgical Orthopedics in Boynton Beach, sued Allscripts in federal court. Surfside accused Allscripts of not doing enough to prevent the attack or lessen its impact and sued on behalf of all affected clients for “significant business interruption and disruption and lost revenues.”” Now consider that ‘significant business interruption’ can be replaced with ‘game score disruption’, a stage I saw coming a mile away. Epic Games did not  consider the stupidity of their actions and now, should they win they will soon face several, if not well over a dozen class cases. They cannot make some ‘we are not responsible draft’, the moment ANYONE at Google or Apple squeals the setting of the hack and it comes with the accompanied ‘We could have prevented that’ Epic Games is lost, it will cost them billions in settlements and lawyer costs. If you doubt that, consider ‘SolarWinds says unknown hackers exploited newly discovered software flaw’ (at https://www.reuters.com/technology/solarwinds-says-unknown-hackers-exploited-newly-discovered-software-flaw-2021-07-12/), so they just got out of one mess only to land in a new one and these people have a decently simple system, Epic Games will have to spend on protection that is several levels higher and I feel decently certain that it is not enough. The moment any profile is transgressed on whilst there was a purchase, that is the game, loss Epic Games and loose they will, a lot. 

Even as we are told “SolarWinds said the flaw was “completely unrelated” to last year’s hack of government networks”, it will not matter, another flaw is found and there is every chance that more than one will still be found. In this Forbes gives us ‘Why SolarWinds Is The Wakeup Call No One Heard’, it comes with “everyone talks a good game, but the very structure of American (and other businesses around the globe) makes it nearly impossible to, for example, deliberately and significantly reduce EBITDA to prepare for cyber warfare” and when you consider that EBITDA is Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortisation. You see the problem, it is not all, it is earnings before interest and depreciation that bites, earnings before interest is all earnings with cost diminishing this and too many corporate players tend to cut cost. In some cases they have no choice in the cloud a lot does not matter but it is transgressed on (according to some numbers) for almost 90%. And when you add that Amortisation is merely anther view of  depreciation the path is clear. Steve Andriole also gives us “The number of severity of cyberattacks will explode in 2020.  Cyberwarfare has now levelled the playing field in industry, in government, and in national defence:  why spend ten or fifteen billion dollars on an aircraft carrier when you can disable it digitally?” You think that this is about defence? Do you have any idea what 50 million whining gamers can do? EVERY ransomware player will target Epic Games and with an open Android and iOS setting they will succeed. I saw this when this all started in 2020 within 5 minutes, the short sightedness will hit Epic Games and others in a few ways. Think I am BS’ing you?  Consider that several sources gave you a month ago “Hackers Stole 780GB Data Including FIFA 21 Source Code in EA Hack” and EA has been in this game a lot longer than Epic Games has been. That is not evidence, but it is a setting that we need to consider and when Epic Games loses that data the class actions start, and it is not something that they can keep quiet (apart from that being a crime), the people will talk and the parties involved, including government parties will find a nice letter making claim to financial losses. The law source (see above) also gives us a link to the Ohio Data Protection Act. There we see “Under the law, damages cannot be imposed if a state court finds your company had a reasonable cybersecurity plan when a breach occurred and followed it to the best of your ability. Or, as the legislation puts it, the law is “an incentive to encourage businesses to achieve a higher level of cybersecurity through voluntary action.”” In this I offer ‘reasonable cybersecurity plan’, was it followed through? Was there a backup if it fails, was there consideration for cross platform transgressions? In this last part I offer to the older programmers 

IF(clipper)
   …
ELSE
   …
ENDIF

Those who know will nod and consider what else Epic Games and others have forgotten, what happens when someone exploits a Sony flaw over the entire system, and at that point these companies have little to no protection. 

Which gets us to ‘when a breach occurred and followed it to the best of your ability’, but the suing side will argue that the breach could have been prevented on day zero, or even day -1, which will be their way of saying that they opened the system when they were not ready and that is another billion in class actions right there, and I agree with the stage that there will be enough cases that have no bering (just like the loot box cases in the media), yet Epic Games will have to hand to their lawyers to investigate them all, the hours alone will rake up millions and that is merely year one. The lawyer wins his bread and butter for a year (at the very least) and the law is up the creek without a clause. The law was never ready for this, so the going will be good towards the coffers of Epic Games, a looting box that requires time, not money. 

So when we go back to Forbes and consider “When I took the results to the CFO (to which technology weirdly reported), his only question was, “what’s all this going to cost me?,” which of course was the wrong question.” We see there setting, but I wonder who gave that same question to the Chief Legal Officer (CLO) with the question ‘What will this cost the firm?’, a question that he can decently predict when he considers 1-5 class actions and that result has to be scary and any consideration of future profit goes straight out of the window, not merely the legal costs, marketing will have to offer a whole range of products and services to stem the tide of people leaving for the next safer harbour, the most dangerous of all settings, and that is merely the beginning of year one as Android and iOS stores open. Forbes also gives a reference to Andy Greenberg (Wired Magazine, 2019) said about why governments have been unwilling to deal with cyberthreats: “More fundamentally, governments haven’t been willing to sign on to cyberwar limitation agreements because they don’t want to limit their own freedom to launch cyberattacks at their enemies.  America may be vulnerable to crippling cyberattacks carried out by its foes, but US leaders are still hesitant to hamstring America’s own NSA and Cyber Command, who are likely the most talented and well-resourced hackers in the world.” And this is not a government setting, Epic Games will be hit be greed driven and vengeance driven hackers as well as organised crime, a %5 billion company? With the state of cybercrime convictions? They are definitely on board. A stage Epic Games could have prevented from the start, but someone saw 30% of $5,000,000,000 and did the math, but whoever did the math was not ready for the tidal wave they would be inviting through that choice. In this, Forbes had one more gem, it comes from Nicole Penroth and ‘The hubris of American exceptionalism’, when we see “More hacking, more offence, not better defence, was our answer to an increasingly virtual world order, even as we made ourselves more vulnerable, hooking up water treatment facilities, railways, thermostats and insulin pumps to the web, at a rate of 127 new devices per second”, now consider that Fortnite is on Windows, MacOS, Switch, Sony, Microsoft, iOS and Android, they drew more than 125 million players in less than a year, do you think that there will be no flaws? And how many devices a second will that add to the equation? Do you have any clue what level of protection is required, even as Sony, Solarwinds, Nintendo and Microsoft have all been hacked even though they had nowhere near that level of complexity required. This was a dangerous situation from the start and gamers will soon have to seriously consider to remove any program that has an ‘open’ store, the cost will be too high for a lot of them. 

And that is not all, as Nicole spoke about ‘an increasingly virtual world’ the danger that open stores will mean that you either have a dedicated computer, or healthcare and safety products will not be considered to be insured in your house, when that happens we get a whole new level of nightmare, I can only imagine that setting, but I am clueless as to the impact, we cannot oversee that, not with an evolving IoT and 5G evolving before our very eyes.

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July 5, 2021 · 21:48

Your data or your life!

It is not the dream, not this time. I was persecuted by a Construction AI with diminishing reality capacity, but in the humour side there were a few criminals trying to get away with a golden car (like Goldfinger) and they got in the middle, so there. No, today is about Ransomware. Reuters gives us ‘Ransomware breach at Florida IT firm hits 200 businesses’ (at https://www.reuters.com/technology/200-businesses-hit-by-ransomware-following-incident-us-it-firm-huntress-labs-2021-07-02/). Like the solarwinds issue we see “The attackers changed a Kaseya tool called VSA, used by companies that manage technology at smaller businesses. They then encrypted the files of those providers’ customers simultaneously” and no one, most visibly the media is asking the questions that needs asking. The Microsoft Exchange issue, the Solarwinds issue, now Kaseya. We understand that things go wrong, but as I see it the hackers (read: optionally organised crime) have a much better understanding of matters than the lawmakers and police do, we see this with “encrypted the files of those providers’ customers simultaneously” and that is before we consider that ‘an American software company that develops software for managing networks, systems, and information technology infrastructure’ has the kind of security that can be trespassed upon. And why do I think this? It is seen “The attackers changed a Kaseya tool called VSA, used by companies that manage technology at smaller businesses” and contemplate the issue that this had been happening for the last 5 months. A lack of larger systems as well, and all this continues as the law is close to clueless on how to proceed on this. We see statements like “In their advisory and further incident communications, Kaseya said that only a few out of their 36 000 customers were affected”, yet CNet gives us “REvil, the Russia-linked hacking group behind the attack on meat processor JBS, is linked to the Kaseya attack, The Wall Street Journal reported. Security firms Huntress Labs and Sophos Labs have likewise pointed to REvil”, which gives the law the problem that a member must be a proven member of REvil and that is largely not the case, moreover they have no clue how many members are involved. When one player gives us “We are in the process of formulating a staged return to service of our SaaS server farms with restricted functionality and a higher security posture (estimated in the next 24-48 hours but that is subject to change) on a geographic basis”, all whilst one of the victims is the largest grocery store in Sweden (COOP), the setting of “only a few out of their 36 000 customers” becomes debatable and it will affect the retail stage to a much larger degree, especially when you consider that they are cloud based. I stated in the past (based on data seen) that 90% of the cloud can be transgressed upon. And they are all servicing the larger stage of people dealing with IT requirements on a global scale. Now consider that cloud systems remain largely insecure and beyond the fact that ITWire was giving us “SolarWinds FTP credentials were leaking on GitHub in November 2019” and it was a direct results from someone who thought that ‘solarwinds123’ was a good idea. Oh, I remember a situation involving Sony and stated that there might be an issue that someone (I implied the Pentagon) had a router with password ‘cisco123’, I did that in ‘The Scott Pilgrim of Technology’ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2019/05/23/the-scott-pilgrim-of-technology/) in MAY 2019, and did anyone learn anything yet? It is now 2 years later and still we see these levels of transgressions? Some might say that IT firms are helping REvil get essential revenues, some might say that these IT firms got themselves in this mess. So when we look at some firms relying on ‘Five years of experience for an entry-level job’, or perhaps “Any of the following will be grounds for immediate dismissal during the probationary period: coming in late or leaving early without prior permission; being unavailable at night or on the weekends; failing to meet any goals; giving unsolicited advice about how to run things; taking personal phone calls during work hours; gossiping; misusing company property, including surfing the internet while at work; submission of poorly written materials; creating an atmosphere of complaint or argument; failing to respond to emails in a timely way; not showing an interest in other aspects of publishing beyond editorial; making repeated mistakes; violating company policies. DO NOT APPLY if you have a work history containing any of the above” (source: Forbes). All this in a stage of age discrimination and narrow minded thinking of HR departments. Yes that is the dynamic stage of people that have bad passwords and a stage of transgressions. So whilst we might think it is a stage of ‘Your data or your life’, there is a larger stage where the law has a bigger issue, it has the issue of IT firms cutting cost and having a blasé approach to the safety of their systems, and more important their customers. And whilst ABC New York gives us “The number of victims here is already over a thousand and will likely reach into the tens of thousands,” said cybersecurity expert Dmitri Alperovitch of the Silverado Policy Accelerator think tank. “No other ransomware campaign comes even close in terms of impact” (at https://abc7ny.com/amp/ransomware-attack-4th-of-july-cyberattack-kaseya/10859014/) we see a first stage where the statement ‘only a few out of their 36 000 customers were affected’ is as I personally see it marketing driven panic. And that is a much larger case. I get that the firm hit does not want too much out in the open, but between a few, 2% and optionally a stage that could go beyond 27% is a setting too many are unable and too uneasy to consider. And when we see that 27%, do I still sound too ‘doomsday’ when I state that there is a much larger problem? And when we see the media go with ‘MSPs on alert after Kaseya VSA supply chain ransomware attack’, all whilst I stated a few issues well over 2 years ago, they should have been on the ball already. I am not blaming the MSP’s, but I do have questions on how their systems are so automated that an attack of this kind (the stated 1000+ customers hit) all whilst some sources state 50 MSP’s, there is a stage where triggers would have been there and the alarms were set to silent because some people might have thought that there were too many false alarms. This is a different stage to the larger playing field, yet I believe it needs to be looked at, especially when the damage can be so large. I am not certain what work lies ahead of the hit customers like COOP that had to close down 800 supermarkets, but in all this something will have to give. 

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July 1, 2021 · 00:21

Big Oil in the family

We all have moments where we look at the sky and roll our eyes. Today was my moment when I was treated (by the Guardian) to ‘Big oil and gas kept a dirty secret for decades. Now they may pay the price’, in this I start with “Was it really a secret?” You see, we all want to blame someone else for the problems we helped create. And  when the (what I reverently call) the stupid people are bringing about “An unprecedented wave of lawsuits, filed by cities and states across the US, aim to hold the oil and gas industry to account for the environmental devastation caused by fossil fuels – and covering up what they knew along the way”. You see that is is merely one element of stupid. I gave light to ‘Uniform Nameless Entitlement Perforation’ on December 10th 2020 (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2020/12/10/uniform-nameless-entitlement-perforation/), I emphasised on a report by European Environmental Agency (EEA) where. We see that 147 industrial plants create 50% of the pollution, the media seemingly ignored the report I have not see the media go out and bash the nations for these 147 plants, we even had a joke (read: BBC article) by Tim McGrath on how the “Global ‘elite’ will need to slash high-carbon lifestyles”, so how stupid do people need to get?

In case you forgot

This reflects on the now when we see (at https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/30/climate-crimes-oil-and-gas-environment) “Coastal cities struggling to keep rising sea levels at bay, midwestern states watching “mega-rains” destroy crops and homes, and fishing communities losing catches to warming waters, are now demanding the oil conglomerates pay damages and take urgent action to reduce further harm from burning fossil fuels”, just when you think that Americans can no longer become any more stupid, we get the next iteration of ‘stupid is as stupid does’. Statista shows us that in 1975 the US requires 1.747 BILLION kilowatt hours a year, this went up again and again until that number was well over doubled in 2005 (3.8B KwH), then it roughly stays the same. There was one spike in 2018, yet one source gives us “From 2003 to 2012, weather-related outages doubled”, I personally believe it is not all weather related. I believe that energy delivery hit a saturation point around 2005. This is why the last decade has so many of these failings and outages. Consider that it was not merely oil and gas, it was energy, the underlying need that drives this. If you doubt this you need but to read the entire ENRON scandal papers to get a clue on how it has always about greed and not about big oil and gas. When I see ‘Big Oil and gas’ I personally think it tends to be a hidden jab towards the Middle East. There have been carbon neutral solutions for almost two decades. Yes, they were expensive in the beginning, but how much effort was made to push this? It is about profit margins, it is about cheap and it is about exploitation. Oil and gas check most marks, but are they to blame? We can ignore settings like “In the early 1990s, Kenneth Lay helped to initiate the selling of electricity at market prices and, soon after, Congress approved legislation deregulating the sale of natural gas” that was almost 30 years ago, so how was electricity created? How do we get energy? And why is Congress not in the same accusation dock? Until the late 80’s the idea of Electricity at market prices was a lull and instead of protecting that part, it was left to the needy and the greedy.

So when they have another go at ‘Big Oil’ (to be honest, I have no idea what they are talking about), consider that the drive to have your own car started in the 50’s. Forbes gave us in 2020 ‘Traffic Congestion Costs U.S. Cities Billions Of Dollars Every Year’, which is fine, but that too relies on fuel, so when they gave us “New York had the highest economic losses out of any major U.S. city with congesting costing it $11 billion last year. Los Angeles lost $8.2 billion while Chicago suffered the third-worst impact at $7.6 billion.” And how much fuel is wasted in that setting? Do you want to blame ‘big oil’ for that too? This is a case that will go nowhere, the only thing it enforces is something I will touch on a little later. You see, when we saw the messages on how companies had enough of California, they vacated and left, Texas is such a much better place (it actually might be), and Forbes again gave us in February ‘Texas Energy Crisis Is An Epic Resilience And Leadership Failure’, yet how much consideration are we seeing when we get sources feeding us “There are several reasons tech companies shave been moving to Texas – lower housing costs, lower tax rates, less regulations have made it easier for companies to operate in Texas. There is already an abundance of technical talent all over Texas. Any company moving here can tap into a well-experienced talent pool. There is also a well-educated stream of new talent graduating from top schools like Texas, Rice, University of Houston, and Texas A&M.” I am not debating the act, I am fine with the action taken, but when you consider that the following companies moved to Texas, how much of a drain on energy in other places will that give you and when you see the sudden spike in some places requiring a lot more energy, all whilst the other places are not diminishing their offer, because people will always need power, how is ‘Big Oil’ to blame? So lets take a loot at that list and most names moved less then 2 year ago (or are about to move)
Guideline, Contango, Done, Carbon Neutral Energy, Tailift Material Handling, Estrada Hinojosa,  GBS Enterprises, Wedgewood, Verdant Chemical, Ranchland Food, Drive Shack, Invzbl,Markaaz, XR Masters, Elevate Brands, Harmonate, Einride, Green Dot, NRG Energy, Caterpillar,Flex Logix, Leaf Telecommunications, Katapult, Wayfair, Ribbon Communications, BSU Inc, Avetta, First Foundation, 5G LLC, TaskUs, BlockCap, Element Critical, City Shoppe, CrowdStreet, Lalamove, NinjaRMM, Gilad & Gilad, MDC Vacuum, FERA Diagnostics, Roboze, Leadr, SupplyHouse.com, Eleiko, Firehawk Aerospace, International Trademark Association, ZP Better Together, Precision Global Consulting, Loop Insurance, QSAM Biosciences, AHV, Dominion Aesthetics, Sage Integration, Quali, Samsung, Truelytics, Alpha Paw, Sentry Kiosk, ProtectAll, Optimal Elite Management, Ametrine, Digital Realty, Amazing Magnets, Lion Real Estate Group, NeuraLink, Maddox Defense, DZS Inc, The Boring Company, Oracle, Hewlett Packard Enterprise,Tesla, Optym, Longevity Partners, Iron Ox, Palantir, 8VC, Bonchon, Titans of CNC, Saleen Performance Parts, CBRE, Slync.io, Baronte Securities, Omnigo Software, Incora, Vio Security, JDR Cable Systems, FileTrail, Sonim Technologies, Murphy Oil Corp, Buff City Soap, Origin Clear, QuestionPro, SignEasy, Sense, Astura, Charles Schwab, Splunk,  Bill.com, Chip 1 Exchange, McKesson, and Lonza. This is not a complete list and I am not considering (at present) which ones are doing it for all kinds of tax hypes. Now consider how many people will move as well. I get it, California is expensive, but how will this change that represents the population of more than one large city impact the power needs in Texas that is already has it fair share of brownouts, and that is just for starters, how many gas and oil energy producing plants will Texas get? Is ‘Big oil’ to blame, or do they merely offer a commodity that EVERYONE needs? Consider that a powerful computer required a 200 Watt power unit in 1997, today it is 600Watt or even higher. There were roughly 51 million units sold last year alone. I cannot state how the division on laptop and desktop is, but the need for energy is unrelentingly large, how large? Consider all the staff moving to Texas and consider how many more energy issues Texas has in the next two years, that is your marker and ‘Big Oil’ had nothing to do with this. 

So when we reconsider “wave of lawsuits, filed by cities and states across the US”, how many of these claimants voted against wind farms, against solar power and against nuclear power? They did it for all kinds of reasons and we get it, some are expensive and you do not want your children to go to school glowing in the dark (yet in winter that is a case for less accidents), but in all this blaming ‘Big Oil’ is just too ludicrous to mention. So as for a promise earlier in this article. When the US goes on with silly and stupid court cases, how long until the owners of IP and Patents will consider the US to be too dangerous to remain in? Consider that the US has an IP value of $21,000,000,000,000 (trillion), it represents almost 90% of the S&P 500 value, so what do you think happens when a massive slice of that moves to Asia or the Middle East, optionally to Europe? I reckon that over 70% of Wall Street executives are on a floor above the 30th and there is every chance that well over 40% of them will do a (at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEpKcBkkVMY); now consider the stage of blaming the wrong  party. I am not stating that any of the energy delivering components are innocent, yet we are all guilty, in almost every nation. We remained silent when energy prices remained the same (somehow), we have known about alternatives and most people never pushed their politicians, we have known about the dangers of erosion for decades and we see pollution report after report, yet nothing is done. We are all to blame and putting ‘Big Oil and Gas’ in the dock will never ever go anywhere, I reckon that Kenneth Lay set the charter for that. When we realise that we allowed a utility to become profit driven which we clearly get from ‘the selling of electricity at market prices’, we changed a whole range of processes and now that we see the impact we should not cry, we should look into the mirror for blame.

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March 26, 2021 · 12:32

The joy of discovery

We all get it, there are moments, those ‘aha’ moments when we see something that does not add up. You see, Agnes Callamard (aka eggy calamari) has been going out and accusing the Saudi government and specifically the Crown Prince of all kinds of misdeeds and she got the CIA to help her out. I debunked that report in several articles a few times, the fact that I am a mere recent graduate add to just how stupid the UN has been in the last 2 years, then she was all up in arms because a man claimed that the Crown prince hacked his mobile, a report that was debunked and questioned by a whole range of cyber experts, yes it was the man who is really rich and saves money on shampoo (hint: it rhymes with Beff Jezos), two instances when the UN got involved, the second one is debatable whether the UN should have gotten involved in the first place.

Now we get ‘Saudi accused of threat to Khashoggi UN investigator is human rights chief’ (source: the Guardian), to be honest I was about to let it go, tempers run high and an official is slightly over protective of its Crown Prince. This happens, it is a fact of life, I am no different, I am Australian now, but if someone threatens the life of my previous King of the Netherlands and/or his family, I will kill that person myself, on the spot and if I sit a life sentence in jail I will be whistling dixie. I took an oath in 1981 and I believe that an oath is set for life. So the quote “The Saudi official who is alleged to have twice issued threats against the independent UN investigator Agnès Callamard is the head of the kingdom’s human rights commission” is something that comes by and I think, ‘Shit happens!’ As such no big deal, then I saw “We confirm that the details in the Guardian story about the threat aimed at Agnès Callamard are accurate. After the threat was made, OHCHR informed Ms Callamard herself about it, as well as UN security and the president of the Human Rights Council, who in turn informed the relevant authorities” at this point a thought crossed my mind “This Rupert Colville, a spokesperson for the UN high commissioner for human rights is dotting his ‘i’ and crossing his ‘t’”, it happens, but the stage is reported in a fashion that the media often does not go through to this degree and that is when the revelation hit, not the revelation of Saudi Arabia bashing. It is seen when you see the following image (see below)

The name Stephanie Kirchgaessner keeps on popping up, way too often and if she is as the Guardian quotes “the Guardian’s US investigations correspondent”, the focal points do not make sense, this was an article that an intern could have written and as such more and more question marks on ‘Saudi bashing’ surface and the ring of those doing this is is becoming more and more debatable. Yet in all this, no one is asking questions, no one seems to notice. I did initially in a previous video article with Stephanie Kirchgaessner, but it could have been an editing issue, now I am no longer sure. I am not questioning the stage we see here, yet such a space for a threat all whilst dying children in Yemen get less space, whilst Al Jazeera gives us ‘People in Yemen are not just dying, they are being left to die’ (2 days ago), I start to wonder what the focal point of a US investigative reporter has become, aren’t you?

Let me paint you a picture (not the girl with the pearl earring mind you): “As I was sitting in the CIA office in the US Consulate in Sydney, I was talking to a man, let’s call him Hugo. Another man walks in and scans the room with an advanced version of the TM-196 3-Axis RFFSM. I ask him to give it to me and turn around, he does both, I scan his ass and tell him “Please inform NASA that the CIA can say with high probability that there are no bugs on Ur Anus”, so what will be the news after that?” The absolute truth is one thing, the way it gets ‘altered’ by those through what some would call ‘intentional misinformation’, it is one of the tools that too many have been using and the matter is getting worse, it has been  dwindling into politics and the media for decades, but we see more and more stages where technology and business are relying on misinformation and it hurts the bottom line. Forbes stated it as ‘To Gain Money, Lose Money’ (at https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrisreining/2020/03/11/to-gain-money-lose-money) there we see “volatility is the nature of the market. Whether you’re investing in indexes or stocks like Netflix you’re going to spend time losing money. Most days it’s immaterial. Some days it’s not. But it’s how you react to losing money that ultimately determines your gains”, I am not debating that part, it is well explained in more words then I am giving here, but some are transferring this to the real stage of actual life and that is where it goes ‘tits up’ as some say, a long term stage cannot be set to economic stages of equilibrium. This is why I hate the hypocrisy that is shown too often and for too long regarding the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. When we hold these people to account some will hide behind ‘an unnamed source’, others will use the miscommunication line, but they all hide behind the same wall of hypocrisy. It is time to wreck-ball that wall, because it is costing us way too much and when the others realise just what the costs were, the people invoking the actions will claim to be non-accountable and it all started with a missing journalist 99.9% of the global population never cared about, that too I brought to light, and as we saw 41 minutes ago that “European Union leaders are ready to boost cooperation with Turkey if a “current de-escalation is sustained”, they said in a video summit on Thursday following a spike in tensions”, all whilst Turkey moved away from the Istanbul Convention, so when are these so called politicians holding Turkey to account? I reckon never, but that is how the cookie crumbles as some say. Stages of denial, all whilst those are all happy to bash Saudi Arabia a little longer and there we see the article on threats whilst we also get “The Guardian independently corroborated Callamard’s account of the January 2020 episode”, I personally wonder how much of that corroboration was done by Stephanie Kirchgaessner in the first or second degree. Aren’t you curious of that part too? 

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March 14, 2021 · 07:38

First the sting

Yes, it happens, we get stung every so now and then. It is one thing when it actually happens, it is another when it is done for secondary reasons, which were the main reasons. Forbes gets us there with “Yesterday, there was a roundtable with Xbox and Bethesda folks talking about the recently finalised purchase of Zenimax, with the biggest news being the reveal that more or less every recent Bethesda game you’ve ever heard of was now being added to Xbox Game Pass as soon as today”, we get it it is a reason but a secondary one. There is also the exclusivity reason which is equally secondary and it is given as well with “a bunch of future Bethesda games, likely including the big ones like Elder Scrolls 6 and Starfield, are going to be Xbox exclusive”, but it also gave us “on any device that can access Game Pass”, which will be their secondary Xcloud push. The article ‘Microsoft Stuns With Reveal It Bought Bethesda For Xbox Game Pass’ (at https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2021/03/12/microsoft-stuns-with-reveal-it-bought-bethesda-for-xbox-game-pass/?sh=27455bf8fa48) is more than that. The PS5 has broken all records and at present we get that over 4 million were sold in 2020 and it will rise to an expected 17 million in 2021. There is some conjecture because Microsoft is scared of the numbers, but it seemingly amounts to 2:1 on average sales two PS5’s for every Xbox series X sold, and it will likely rise to 3:1 when Sony stocks are globally replenished, these numbers scare Microsoft, which is why Twitter is drowning in XCloud advertisements. I also believe that it scared Microsoft enough to pay $8,500,000,000 for Bethesda. Bethesda has a loyal following and they hope that enough Playstation fans will drop the playstation to go wherever Bethesda is, the bandaid with the timed exclusive of Deathloop on the PS5 is merely a bandaid to deceive the minds, any gamer knows that the power of gaming is Elder Scrolls and Fallout. That is what Microsoft needs and that is why I had placed the setting of a new RPG as freebee for any Sony exclusive designer. I am about to add to that. And it might upset enough board members at Microsoft when others get for free for what they had to pay 8 billion plus, I am all about the sarcasm, unless it backfires, then it becomes irony.

You see, the largest challenge was that I am trying to avoid some Elder Scrolls replica, which is why I took the path I did and I added the generation stage, there is only so much exploring a person can do in one lifetime and I had the improvements for Assassins Creed to consider. So I created an altered stage for the player. 

The stage is set in phases, but I had to consider how to set the stage

Path APath BPath C
Path AXX
Path B1X
Path C2XX
Path D1

The story has a number of paths, we map the ones we take, but in this I am also allowing and setting the stage for the paths not taken, as long as the path has been discovered. To illustrate this, perhaps we can think back to Fallout 4, the first place you emerge from had a cold weapon at the end, but you have no skills to get there. So how many have forgotten that weapon? I certainly did the first two times I played that game. Yet it is about more than just a chest or a location, I wanted books, scrolls and tomes to be much more profound, I also wanted to make sure that you cannot carry like a mule and that the chest in your house does not hold a container full of stuff. Most RPG players are hoarders, as such I will need to change that premise too. As You see in the table, the first person (path A) will take paths B and C,  this is where the shoe gets a new style, there are two outcomes, the person dies before betting back home, in which the next generation has no idea where to seek, other then follow the same map to find his parents remains, this is a limited chart as there are only three options, but the stage is seen when the parent goes home after path A,2. Now as he is home the next generation gets their diary and tomes filled, more important, some of the skills are automatically gained. As such the next generation will not start from ground zero, and whilst that person has every option to take skills into new directions, it will be up to the player to do so. The second part is the map, I made mention of it in an earlier story, but what if we take what Assassins Creed does to a whole new level? There are dozens of RPG’s and they all map similarly, what if we change that? Each generation is at least a decade apart, we get to evolve mapmaking and transcribing maps during the game, so consider the AC2 map of Venice, going to the top of a tower fills it in, yet there was no learning curve. 

I want that time is an equaliser and evolving stage here, as such generation one will give entrances to a place with roads but not much more, all whilst generation 3 will map out roads, hazards, and also give rise to dangers AFTER you visit it, not before, unless the diary had given out the dangers in a place. These are just a few additions, or alterations to current RPG games. Like the blowpipe, I needed to get away with the bow and arrow, optionally crossbow. I wanted the blowpipe and later allow for something like a catapult (slingshot) to be introduced to keep range weapons alive and to give something new to the game. As one goes away a new portal opens and that was the intent all along. As evolution becomes a much larger stage in this game, we are confronted that death is pretty permanent and it allows for a new dimension if you play it in permadeath. In the end the stage is around these parts, but the story is still the most important aspect. So take the previous stories as a template and see what happens when generation one goes into one area, but as generation two you can travel in opposite directions, to set the land to that contrast requires a larger map, more options and different kind of hurdles. And there we see the initial part, with well over half a dozen stages that Bethesda never considered (or optionally rejected), and now it is in the public domain and we can show Microsoft what it feels like to spend eight point five billion on something that looks and tastes like a lemon, but that is merely because they thought it would solve all their problems and I am happy to add to their misery (I have to do something). So let’s make games and set the bar of Sony versus Microsoft to 5:1 or better, gives those Micro$oft people something to cry about, most of us will like that part anyway.

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December 16, 2020 · 21:06

Dangerous conclusions

We all come to them, conclusions that are shaped in the mind, usually they are based on facts making them speculations, some are based on speculations making them pure delusions, some are in-between and that is the dangerous part, are they visionary, are they speculative delusions? The point is that the writer will see them as visionary, but the writer (even me) is not the best judge in this.

For the exercise I need to grasp back to a story I did recently. ‘Trillion dollar Musk’ was written on December 3rd (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2020/12/03/trillion-dollar-musk/), I there ‘accused’ Elon Musk that his value would skyrocket to $1.2 trillion collars. I also gave the readers “The UK (via the Guardian) inform us of “Britain’s electricity will be in short supply over the next few days after a string of unplanned power plant outages and unusually low wind speeds this week”, the UK has an increasing need for Scandinavian power and soon it cannot be met. I reckon that in the next 2-3 years that shortage will be close to systemic all over the EU”, the stage was set and I still believe that we are 2-3 years away, but are we? Bloomberg (at https://www.bloomberg.com/sponsors/jll/seven-ways-to-retrofit/index.html) gives us ‘7 Ways to Retrofit Buildings for Energy Efficiency’, it is a setting and it is sponsored by JLL, a real-estate and investment firm who gives us “We’re here to create rewarding opportunities and amazing spaces around the globe where people can achieve their ambitions. In doing so, we are building a better tomorrow for our clients, our people and our communities”, I believe that we are about to hit an energy snag, a little sooner than I anticipated. 

So as the JLL gives us 

  1. Upgrade you lighting
  2. Upgrade the HVAC
  3. Optimise Performance
  4. Implement a Waste Strategy
  5. Use Continuous Commissioning
  6. Organize “Treasure Hunts”
  7. Elevator Controls
  8. Added by me: Upgrade kitchens.

Now the Elon Musk battery shows the issues, even as we are now hearing more and more on the need for carbon neutral in commercial buildings, the private places are merely one step away.

Forbes reported in August “At first, the state’s electrical grid operator last night asked customers to voluntarily reduce electricity use. But after power reserves fell to dangerous levels it declared a “Stage 3 emergency” cutting off power to people across the state at 6:30 pm” and this is only the beginning. Elon is about to get a massive increase of value and his wealth might go up well beyond $1.2 trillion. 

It is not limited to California, although they are the most visible one, New York, the United Kingdom, and parts of Europe and Australia will see a drastic need for power sooner rather than later. At that point the rich we can ignore, they will get what they need, the middle income section, that is where the massive gains are made, a lot will add a growing carbon neutral stage with the adapted Tesla battery, the power grid adaptions for lights, Air conditioning, water heaters (boilers), fridges and freezers. There will be a massive option for growth there, the adaptation of AC equipment to DC equipment, a stage where some will buy new stuff and some will need adaption with new power units for both. I came up with a new sort of roof tile, made from recyclable plastics, and each tile will have solar cells, instead of putting panels on top (some will still do that), to tiles where people can grow their power creation stage, two tiles, the highest levels which connects to the second grid and the battery and other tiles that will connect to other tiles and a highest layer tile. The benefit of that is that people do not need to splurge on massive panels, with the battery they get tiles, but it is a basic level, as some need more power more quickly, more sets of tiles can be bought, giving the people months to grow their setting and reduce their carbon footprint. In addition, some will add wind-vanes. It is a stage that is as essential and as clear as traffic jams, we have been increasing power needs with an average of 5% per year. How long did you think that the energy companies could deliver? Consider your fridge, what you had 10 years ago and what you have now. Larger families needing more boiler water and the summers require more and more air conditioning units, all set to a lower temperature burning power away and California can no longer cope with the need. They are the first, but they are not alone. How many devices require a charger? In 1990 that was 1 perhaps 2, now it is 5-8 PER HOUSE, routers, Wifi modules, and the PC went from the ‘high end’ of 300 Watts to the average PC now needing 600-1100 Watts. In 1990 there were less than 700,000,000 globally that were into gaming, now that number is 2,000,000,000 higher (globally), two billion additional devices, the consoles do not use that much, but still 150 watts, times a billion is still a lot, they also need a TV running, now, the TV is actually a massively low energy user if it is a LED flatscreen. But the numbers are not looking good and that is before you realise that PC’s were something a company had in 1990, now, for the most, nearly every employee at every firm has one, there tend to be low energy versions, but they are still there and often they are on day and night. When you see this list and do the numbers, you need to see that energy firms needed to double their options in 2000, that never happened and now they need and alternative and Elon Musk has it, and owns the IP no less.

So is my version so much more visionary because Bloomberg had a sponsored JLL article? I don’t think so, but I believe that awareness is being created at higher levels and we need to catch on sooner rather than later, because the prices of electricity will go up again and again in the next 2 years. Consider your budget and consider your energy costs will go up by 10% in 2021, how much more budget will you not have?

That is the stage I foresaw some time ago, I will let you decide how right or how wrong I am.

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December 10, 2020 · 02:19

Hatred of wealth

We have seen it, we at times observed it, but for the BBC to actively support it is taking this to a new sight. This is the feeling I had when I saw the article ‘Climate change: Global ‘elite’ will need to slash high-carbon lifestyles’ an hour ago (at https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-55229725). We have seen the options, we have seen the banter, but this article by Matt McGrath is taking it into a new direction. You see, some have a lifestyle that is slightly higher in carbon, mine might be a lot lower, I have no jet or helicopter. Yet what gives Matt the setting he has? 

Let’s look at some numbers given to us by Statista. The graph shows us that in the last 15 years plane travel went up by well over 15,000,0000 planes, this implies almost a million lanes per year more. So Matt, how many jets and helicopters are there? Now, we might see their use of a jet as a spillage, and perhaps it is, consider however, that for them there are fuel requirements, staff requirements and here Forbes was very useful (at https://www.forbes.com/sites/douggollan/2019/08/22/private-jet-travel-is-greener-than-you-think). The quote “Two private jets would bring $170,000 in spending, 55% more than the full 737, with just over 25 tonnes of CO2 emitted, one-sixth of the commercial airliner”, and when we see the numbers of 38 million airliners, knowing that there are nowhere near as much jets in the world, I wonder just what the game of Matt is, perhaps it is merely kicking rich people. 

Now, we are all interested in doing something for the environment, so how about stopping 10% of ALL Air traffic? I do not think that Matt McGrath is doing that, he would upset powerful people and the BBC does not do war with powerful people. Or perhaps he might take notice of “It is estimated that approximately 706 million gallons of waste oil enter the ocean every year, with over half coming from land drainage and waste disposal; for example, from the improper disposal of used motor oil”, I did not vet that information, yet it seems that neither did he, and the setting of doing something about the stage of ‘706 million gallons of waste oil’ is as I see it more impactful than slamming some person with a fat wallet and a jet (or helicopter), oh and these helicopters tend to be taxi services, you want to take the car from a taxi driver? Seems a little vague to me. 

So for those in doubt, let me add an image of a jet, something you might silently dream of and never get (just like me). And whilst I am on a roll (yes I am), consider all these flights, now identify the salespeople who are going to some pricey seminar, lets take those as well as sales people on some binge in Vegas to ‘be inspired’, as such how much environment did they waste? 

And when we get to “The global top 10% of income earners use around 45% of all the energy consumed for land transport and around 75% of all the energy for aviation, compared with just 10% and 5% respectively for the poorest 50% of households, the report says” which is a new level of BS. The poorest 50% cannot afford any vacation, due to sliding hourly wages, I will admit that rich people are at the head of that, but not all wealthy people, and the stage of pre-covid 2020, we see 40 million flights, all whilst the number of private jets are set to 4,600, and this includes jets that are corporate jets. So I want to see that report so I can cut Matt McGrath more to size. With the additional ““The UNEP report shows that the over-consumption of a wealthy minority is fuelling the climate crisis, yet it is poor communities and young people who are paying the price,” said Tim Gore, head of climate policy at Oxfam”, I see another person I need to cut down to size. The fact that I saw holes in this article in less than 10 minutes and the fact that the BBC is enabling this is jut too weird. Well at least I have another windmill to fight and bring to attention of the readers. Oh and before you think I am biased, consider that the 4,600 will include the jets owned by royal families and dignitaries and governments, consider this, when you saw the first number, do you really want them to charter a Boeing? To be honest, I cannot tell how many planes are in that group, I did not find any numbers on that, but the larger stage is that instead of them looking into matter that matter, we see a stage of ‘over-consumption of a wealthy minority’, so what EXACTLY is over-consumption? And per jet, how many flights were made? So let’s say a person like Bobby Axelrod (a fictional character), how often was he in a jet in 4 seasons? I am using this example to avoid using real people, because the question stays the same and we can argue that some like the Waltons from Kmart might fly less often than some whatchamightcallit from Wall Street, as such, the article has a few issues all over the place, I am making it my mission to look at that UNEP report, lets see what we can find there and how time was wasted on that report.

From my point of view the UN has become the largest waster of funds and options in the last 10 years, so I am ready to roar at that mouse, you betcha!

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November 14, 2020 · 04:56

Outdated?

When you stop being a teenager you think that you are on top of the world, that is for about a decade, some have kids, some do not, but the you hit category three (old fart), you tend to feel outdated. This gets me to a comedian who had the setting (40 years ago) that there were three categories. Teener, Twenny, Old fart. Perhaps he was right. 

So here I am looking towards the options of data vaults, and personally I find them lacking. They are all seemingly founded on a population that hides the porn from partners and spouses. 

The problem is that there are specific needs to hide files (JPG, PPT, XLS, MOV, MP4, DOC, PDF, RTF, TXT), yes some want to keep the natural pictures of partners and spouses when she was 21-24, and even a decade or two ahead, she still has the ability to make you horny. Yet there is another person. They get horny on the dollar amount that patents represent, and in this age where 70% of clouds are invaded, this stage where data in transit is no longer safe, the need to set a secure location, with an optional link to a tablet is becoming essential. You see, those who have the IP trust no one, none at all. Having a secure application on one station, and that being the ONLY place where they can link is a setting that will grow pretty much exponentially soon enough.

So whilst I was trying to find a secondary place to keep the files, I see that the apple store caries failure after failure, and that is when you auto-delete anything that has an annual fee. A dozen data vaults, al copying the same idea, all seeing the stage to files being safe in open space. Yeah right!

But it dawned on me that there is a lack in services available. And this station is not one that I can do, merely because I am not a programmer, what is making me wonder is why programmers could not come up with this by themselves. To be honest, the app F-Vault is close to perfect, if they add the iPad app and link the two and also have players (PPT, PDF, DOC, RTF) in there it would become a pretty picture.

Yet the idea that everything has to go via your iTunes, your Apple TV and so on is weird. There is every chance that data will be copied to other places and that tends to be the end of IP.

Yet in the second, the change that Apple pushed for (in their defence) makes sense on the broad view. Yet it also gives rise to the perceived lack of privacy and safety when it comes to IP. At best you end up with 4 versions, at worst it is soon on the internet making IP public domain and that ends the value of the IP. With all these programmers, no one thought of that? F-vault has the option of fees, but for $10 (AU$15) you become a lifetime member and it all unlocks for you the VIP member. $10 is fair and if the added setting comes, it will be a steal at $20, as no-one else has the essential needs.

In NCIS it is seen as Gibbs rule #4 “Best way to keep a secret. Keep it to yourself. Second-best, tell one other person—if you must. There is no third best”, it is not merely about secrets, the rule applies to intellectual property as well, in bigger firms they have lawyers, yet hat if the inventor is you? What if the invention is one THEY want? Upload it? You have got to be kidding me. In all these settings, it seems no one thought of expanding the need, reaching the larger station, because it is about a lot more, consider the writers of their stories, the makers of a new concept. You think that studios are waiting fr the great idea? They seek out anyone who can give it to them, almost no questions asked. In 2008 today gave us ‘Million-dollar ideas often stolen in Hollywood’ with the added “37-year-old Cleveland resident Jeff Grosso, who paid his way through film school by playing Texas Hold ’Em, wrote a screenplay about it, then sued Miramax over its poker movie “Rounders.””, we get the added “attorney John Marder, who specialises in representing aggrieved writers. Many are victims of a system that favours studios and networks and offers little protection for writers and ideas”, to be honest, I do not know who is right, but I do know that at present there is only one system where my IP is safe, until some parts are upgraded, there is no way I am storing this on my laptop or tablet. So whilst we ponder our own safety regarding “Ideas are not subject to federal copyright protection and, until recently, that was the only legal avenue for relief. Federal law says only the expression of ideas — actual screenplays or treatments — are copyrightable. Therefore a writer would have to prove that a finished film or television show was almost identical to his original screenplay. A studio can get around that by simply tweaking a few details”. So when the greed driven are that driven to remove the original creator and the law falls short, is anyone even surprised that I would offer my IP to Huawei? The US claims that China blatantly steals IP, yet they cannot keep a muzzle on the greedy needs of players like Hollywood, it seems that the holy dollar is the golden cow they all worship at the expense of any soul. The article (at https://www.today.com/popculture/million-dollar-ideas-often-stolen-hollywood-wbna15641336) gives a lot more, but it mainly instills the fear that any idea needs to be safely behind lock and key and you have to have faith in yourself. So when writers consider the approach of “anyone who would take it” to be an invitation not to get paid for your work, at the point we will see other studios waking up and smelling the lack of creativity whilst having coffee. Yes, there is an alternative, getting an agent or a lawyer and make their pitches with that person present I an option, but an expensive one and writers tend to lack funds. 

Yet the stage is here, and I must ask myself, have I become outdated? Has the world moved on to cater to absolute greed? I wonder, yet I also wonder what happens when a player like Huawei takes my IP and gives us an additional 5G dimension others did not see coming. At that point, I wonder what those in Washington DC will d when they missed out again and again as they catered to the wrong people. There is only so many times that you can do this until there is nothing left. It is a stage often looked away from, but President elect Biden has this matter facing him from day one. $8,500,000,000 is in danger as they angered Saudi Arabia (and I greedily hope for my 3.75%), a nation who actually has the fastest 5G now, so as app developers over there see a larger option to become app powerhouses, and they are hungry to become them. The US doesn’t merely misses out on revenue, the data usage connected to all the is monitored outside of the US, and the US has more gaps in what was a near complete picture in the past. Not merely the US, Google is now also in a setting where they are soon to be showing gaps in their data wall. We might ignore ‘Huawei’s New ‘Fight’ With Google To Beat Android Is Suddenly More Threatening’, and it seems like a joke, but Forbes also gives us “the combination of HarmonyOS, its Android OS alternative and HMS, its Google Mobile Services replacement. Until the latest sanction speculation, the HarmonyOS threat to Android was tempered by the chipset sanctions. But if Huawei’s smartphone sales can recover, that materially changes. Furthermore, Huawei has now confirmed that HarmonyOS will be available as an open-source OS, pushed at other Chinese OEMs, to build bridges, Huawei says, between China and the West”, bridges the elude Google, so the dangers I predicted in 2019 are now coming to pass and they are about to land on the US economy as well, when app revenue dives, when app data is going elsewhere, the value of Google will take a step back, so will the value of Apple. It is a simple stage, what was iOS/Android, is now iOS, HarmonyOS and Android. HarmonyOS is not just a slice from the Android cake, as Apple fails to set options in China, their Chinese slice goes directly to HarmonyOS and that is a extending well beyond China, consider that both Google and Apple lose not just the Chinese part, but no less than 30% of the Indian part on top of that. Now we see a different powerhouse, all whilst Google, Apple and others are seeking margins the are no longer where they were and IP is setting a much larger tone, so this was about a lot more than a simple data vault, was it not? And as Forbes gives us “Huawei’s ecosystem pushed further into Google territory. We now have multiple mapping options, for example, to replace Google Maps. And now, critically, we also have a search alternative as well. This is beginning to feel more like the real thing. Yes, Huawei is short on apps and a global developer network, but it’s ploughing in money to its community and it knows consumers worldwide want its recipe of premium smartphones for less—a recipe now being replicated by those other Chinese OEMs” (at https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2020/11/01/huawei-wants-to-beat-google-android-apple-iphone-and-samsung-galaxy-after-trump-ban-update/?sh=12fce8b1e39e) almost two weeks ago, the stage shifts and the players better realise that it was the lack of creativity in the US that started all this (a pretty stupid government administration did the rest). In the end do you think that some of the players will sit still? They are about to lose billions and this is just the beginning, the lack of real 5G in several nations is the foundation for more losses, all in a stage where we still have not seen any real evidence that Huawei was a security risk, other than Huawei being a Chinese company. 

So how long until the people catch on that the world map is changing and when we realise that the US is no longer a superpower (apart from super debt), what will they end up doing? I will let you see the light be yourself, when you consider who is outdated, consider that what we thought was a station of IP, a station too many players ignored from the start, perhaps the values we assign because Hollywood and Wall Street gave them to us, perhaps they too have become outdated. Just a thought to consider.

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October 29, 2020 · 19:09

Is it me? Perhaps it is!

Yup, we need to look into matters and I am willing to concede that I am the stupid one, yet the BBC is setting a stage that is not set to the proper players and it shows (well, to me it does), so as I look at ‘Facebook, Twitter and Google face questions from US senators’ (at https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54721023), we see ““[It] allows digital businesses to let users post things but then not be responsible for the consequences, even when they’re amplifying or dampening that speech,” Prof Fiona Scott Morton, of Yale University, told the BBC’s Tech Tent podcast. “That’s very much a publishing kind of function – and newspapers have very different responsibilities. “So we have a bit of a loophole that I think is not working well for our society.”” You see, the stage is larger, even as we see a reference towards section 230 with the added quote “some industry watchers agree the legislation needs to be revisited”, so can we have these names? 

Section 230
Section 230 generally provides immunity for website publishers from third-party content.
Section 230(c)(1) provides immunity from liability for providers and users of an “interactive computer service” who publish information provided by third-party users: No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
The statute in Section 230(c)(2) further provides “Good Samaritan” protection from civil liability for operators of interactive computer services in the removal or moderation of third-party material they deem obscene or offensive, even of constitutionally protected speech, as long as it is done in good faith.

Yet the stage is a lot larger, most common law nations (civil law nations too) have similar protections in place, and ever as we see the repose by Professor Fiona Scott Morton giving us “we have a bit of a loophole that I think is not working well for our society”, most parties refuse to hold the posters of the online information accountable. It is too hard, there are too many issues, but in the end, I call it a load of bollocks, the avoidance of accountability has been on my mind for close to a decade, the lawmakers have done nothing (or close to it). These lawmakers do not comprehend, the politicians are mostly clueless and the technologists cannot abide to the lack of insight that the other two are showing they lack.

So as we see “both sides agree they want to see the social networks held accountable”, yet neither is willing to hold the poster of the transgressor accountable and that is the larger issue. So even as we see the so called political ploys and no matter what the reason is, when we see “Both President Trump and his election rival Joe Biden have called for the removal of Section 230, though for different reasons”, yet both ignore the obvious, the posters want a medium and outside of the US they have all the options to continue. Basically the only thing that the US will accomplish is isolation, all whilst the dreaded posts from those who seek to harm society will never be stopped, they merely change location, and now that the US is ranking 8th on the 5G speed lit at a mere 13.29% of the speed of number one, things will go from bad to worse, limiting big tech is the larger error in their thinking pattern. 

Any form of censorship strangles freedom of expression and freedom of speech. Holding the speakers accountable is not censorship, it merely sets the frame that these social media speakers will be held to account, optional in a court for WHAT they say. It was never that complex, so why push the side that resolves nothing? So whilst we see all these media articles on AI and how AI is NOW the solution that one can purchase, the factual reality is “experts have predicted the development of artificial intelligence to be achieved as early as by 2030. A survey of AI experts recently predicted the expected emergence of AGI or the singularity by the year 2060”, a stage we seemingly forget whenever some short sighted politician makes a twist towards AI and the solution in social media, the reality is that there is no AI, not yet. Forbes (at https://www.forbes.com/sites/cognitiveworld/2019/06/10/how-far-are-we-from-achieving-artificial-general-intelligence/#389ade286dc4) introduces us to “Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) can be defined as the ability of a machine to perform any task that a human can”, you see, commerce couldn’t wait for AI to come, so they pushed it into AGI, and the AI they all advertise is merely a sprinkle of AI, scripted solutions to singular tasks and even that part is debatable, because the application of AI needs more, I wrote bout it almost two months ago. I wrote “until true AI and true Quantum computing are a fact, the shallow circuits cannot cut through the mess”, I did this in ‘About lights and tunnels’ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2020/09/08/about-lights-and-tunnels/), you see, IBM IS THE ONLY PLAYER that is close to getting the true Quantum computing up and running, Shallow circuits are still evolving and that matters, because they only launched their first quantum computing solution a year ago. When they complete that part we see the first stage when a true AI can become a reality, only then is there an actual solution available to seek out the perpetrators. So as we look at all the elements involved, we can see to a clear degree that 

  1. There is no real solution to the problem (at present).
  2. Section 230 is doing what it was doing, even as there are issues (no one denies that).
  3. As such we need to hold the posters accountable for what they post.

As I see it these three parts are only the top layer, and in no way is adapting or editing section 230 the solution, it might if all nations adopt it, but what is the chance of that? The only thing that the US and its senators achieve is scaring business somewhere else, when that happens the US and its data gathering stage will take a spiralling downward turn, one their economy is certainly seen as a near death experience. I think that these senators need to stop selling shit as peanut butter. To realise that part we merely need to turn the clock back to April 2018 and consider Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) asking Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg how he is able to sustain a business model in which users do not pay. The answer was simple “Senator, we run ads” (at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2H8wx1aBiQ). A stage where someone was allegedly this unaware of the stage of digital media, when they rely on questions that are a basic 101 of digital media, how can we take the efforts, or the presented efforts of both the democratic and republican houses serious? 

It is a stage where you will need to take a deeper look at what you see, it is not easy and I am not asking you to believe me, I for one might be the one who sees it wrong, I believe that my view is the correct one, but when all these high titled and educated people give sides, I am willing to go own faith that I need to take another look at what I believe to be correct. And wth that, I get to my very first article. The article ‘The accountability act – 2015’ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2012/06/19/the-accountability-act-2015/) was me seeing the change in 2012, seeing the need for an accountability act, an essential need in 2015, it never came to be and people more intelligent than me thought it not essential. So whilst I wrote (in 2012) “I believe it is time for things to truly change. I believe that the greed of some is utterly destroying the future of all others. Who would have thought in my days of primary school, that an individual would be able to have the amount of power to bleed entire cities into poverty? It was never in my thought, but then, GREED was always a weird thing. It is the one utter counterproductive sin. You see, greed does not drive forward. Competitiveness does. Innovation does. Greed does not. Greed is the foundation of slavery and submission. It drives one person to get everything at the expense of (all) others”, as such, I saw a setting that we see now more and more clearly, I was ahead of my time (well, my ego definitely is). 

We need a different setting and we can blame the big tech companies, but is that the factual setting? When we use the quote from the AFP giving us “Capitol Hill clashed with Silicon Valley Wednesday over legal protections and censorship on social media during a fiery hearing a week before Election Day in which Twitter’s Jack Dorsey acknowledged that platforms need to do more to “earn trust.””, yet the big tech companies do not write laws do they? Yes they all need to earn trust, but trust is also lost through the newspapers using digital media to set the stage of ‘click bitches’ reacting to THEIR stories, as such, how guilty is big tech? So when we are confronted with the ludicrous headline “Kim Kardashian is accused of having SIX TOES in snaps from THAT controversial birthday getaway: ‘Why is this not trending’”, something that comes up apparently every now and then, yet this is a NEWSPAPER, as such as they also use digital media to push forward their economic needs, the stage of section 230 is a little larger, and the fact that what I personally would see as fake news, we see fake news coming from news agencies, so when we consider that some talk about “earn trust”, I think that we demand this from newspapers and see how long they accept that stage before greed takes over, or should I say the needs for clicks on digital media? A stage we saw in the Leveson Inquiry and as greed took over, I wonder whether these senators have any clue on the stage that is before them and the size of that stage. A stage that has additional sides and I am willing to wager that they haven’t got a clue how many sides they are unaware off. The US (and some others) need big tech to be as it is, if I can innovate 5G beyond their scope, that matter will merely increase when they break up, making the US more and more of a target against innovators they have no defence against, because the innovators are no longer in the US, and those they thought they had are moving away to greener pastures.
It might not hurt the big tech companies with offices outside of the US, but I reckon those senators thought of that, didn’t they?

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October 21, 2020 · 19:58

Intentionally creating imbalance

This happens, it happens more often than you think, but that is a separate issue. Yet too often have you seen that the media all over the world have thrown evidence to the side of the road, just to aid in imbalance? Consider that stage for a second. We all have our own windmills to fight, it is not simplifying to Don Quixote, even though it is tempting. I would be drawn to “The truth may be stretched thin, but it never breaks, and it always surfaces above lies, as oil floats on water”, even as some might rely on “Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness”, a stage we all all face, all sides of it. In this Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra might have been a larger philosopher than anyone realises, even if it made little sense in those days, it does in these days, in the age of digital awareness, sides of insanity and madness finally make sense.

In this I start with ‘Jamal Khashoggi: Journalist’s fiancee sues Saudi crown prince’. It is not the first page but it is another page that in isolation makes the most sense to use. Yes, there are all kinds of people telling me how insane I am, the madness that I show in this when soo many sources telling me otherwise.  A stage that I would accept if the soup wasn’t getting cooked on a high flame. In the BBC article I start with the fiancee is the one party I would give a pass on. I believe that she was hurt and she is filing, but there is the real matter, is it not? 

Even as we are given “Hatice Cengiz and the rights group Khashoggi formed before his death are pursuing Mohammed bin Salman and more than 20 others for unspecified damages”, so a group formed before his death? It is the ‘unspecified damages’ that takes the cake, the biscuits and the pot of tea. In the matter we need to look and address ‘a lawsuit against Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, accusing him of ordering the killing’. This part we need to see with a clinical view. What evidence exists? The term ‘ordering the killing’ requires proof beyond all reasonable doubt. The infamous UN essay by Agnes Callamard showed that there is no evidence, there is no body and the work of fiction called ‘Blood and Ice’, shows even more lack of truths. As I personal see it ‘Blood and Oil’ is a fictional work by Bradley Hope and Justin Scheck, a fictional work with a collection of facts based on people who actually exist. It reads easy and is seemingly created for a longer term, a stage I have not seen in Journalistic work, but this is not that, is it? It is an important take to realise, as the case created by the ‘Hatice Cengiz and the rights group Khashoggi’ calls for it. Consider the stage of a court, the costs involved. I will concede that there are leagues of people willing to set the stage through pro-bono work because of the limelight the case will get, but in the end, there was no evidence, the bast we can hope for is that Jamal Khashoggi is missing. This is not about personal feelings or personal knowledge, it is what can be proven in court and even if any evidence EVER comes to the surface, the setting that it can be linked to the Crown prince is close to impossible to prove. A stage where a person no one cared about (except his mum and the person he shares a bed with) has received close to 80 million hits online and that is merely a conservative guess. At some point I saw the counter go well over 60 million and that was a year ago. So has something bad happened to him? Personally I believe tht to be the case, but I cannot prove it. I was not there and NO ONE presented any evidence to the fact that this has happened. It happened in  nation that is the puppet of Iran and tht nation has the most incarcerated journalists in the world and that nation has been the discussion of a whole range of murdered journalists, murders that cannot be proven, but they state that they have the evidence on this, yet they never properly presented it. As I personally see it, the acts of a puppet nation without evidence. 

As such, when we see “After listening to purported audio recordings of conversations inside the consulate made by Turkish intelligence, UN special rapporteur Agnes Callamard concluded that Khashoggi was “brutally slain” that day”, the UN report does not show any evidence to positively confirm that the person allegedly being interrogated was Jamal Khashoggi, in the UN report at [398] we see “In an international forum at least, 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, and the interest of the international community in providing justice to Mr. Khashoggi and his family”, here we see no mention that the tapes PROVE that the tapes are beyond the shadow of a doubt the recordings of Jamal Khashoggi. Yet at [41] of that report we are given “Recordings of only seven different conversations over a two-day period were made available to the inquiry. Combined these amounted to 45 minutes of tape, when, according to Turkish Intelligence, they had access to at least seven hours of recordings. The remaining six hours and 15 minutes may or may not be relevant to the inquiry, but without doubt there remains much more recorded information than that made available to the Special Rapporteur”, consider that allegedly only 10.7% of the available recordings were made available, so in what universe does that not constitute reasonable doubt or even an alleged form of tempered evidence? This is merely a setting of 2 elements in a much larger report. None of it proves murder, to a much larger extent it is a document that due to manipulation could set many optionally involved people free. 

My setting is seen in the report at [244] where we see “Much attention has been focused on whether the Crown Prince himself ordered the murder. However, this focus on “ordering” the crime and on finding the “smoking gun” creates expectations which legal systems, both domestic and international, may not be able to meet.  The search for justice and accountability for human rights violations should also and as importantly require identifying those that have abused their influence and power or failed to act with the diligence required of their positions” and the stage of ‘which  legal systems, both domestic and international, may not be able to meet’. It was the stage I had from the very beginning, whatever happened, it cannot be proven and now we get to the good stuff. A report that is well over a year old gives us this, so why continue, this is not about ‘justice’ this is about creating middle east imbalance, optionally this is about people catering towards Turkey and Iran for a third reason and they have no issues burning Saudi needs. The larger stage is however a much more dangerous side. As some seemingly clever people are setting their needs of ‘we need no Saudi Arabia’, we see a stage where Russia and China are willing to set a much larger stage, as such it could cost the EU and the US well over $15 billion in trade deals and goods over the foreseeable future. I will be happy (not knowing whether if I am able) to take over that business. Yet walking way for crumbs from a $15,000,000,000 piece of pastry is even larger madness; of all the windmills I face, an income well below $135,000 a year (pre taxation) is perhaps the easiest to overcome if the opportunity is offered. The moment the two larger players are set in a stage where they lose out, we will see all kinds of demands and contemplated compromises, I merely wonder if it will be too late for them at that point.

And consider the larger issue, how much effort had been made towards all the murdered journalists in Turkey, or even those currently in a Turkish prison? How much articles have you seen on that part of the equation? Some sources give 47 (one less than China) some sources say a lot more, theft that in 2016 well over 100 were in prison gives us question on some data that Forbes presents (at https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2019/12/12/the-countries-imprisoning-the-most-journalists-in-2019-infographic), even as we see one source giving us ‘85 journalists and media workers in jail in Turkey’ (complete with a name list) we see a stage of catering and hiding behind ‘media workers’, yet the stage of 47 and 85 is a little too big, so I am willing to go on a madness quest and state that the media themselves are catering to the wrong parties and they need to consider this a lot quicker then they currently are.

Could I be wrong?
Yes, absolutely! Yet consider the evidence and sources. I reflect on the produced US report (which I will happily label a mere essay), and when we see the other stage (like Jeff Bezos and FTI Consulting) and accusation after accusation, all whilst evidence open to the media is ignored, you tell me, Am I wrong?

When a book refers to “dismembering Khashoggi’s body like butchers”, all whilst the body is never found, all whilst evidence of dismembering cannot be produced and whilst there is no digital evidence of any kind, we see “a gripping work of investigative journalism” and in all this, no one is asking questions. I for one do not stand for the hypocritical stage that is exploited by the media on several fronts. Fell free to disagree, yet I feel that there is enough evidence on my side, whilst the lack of evidence on the other side is massively questionable.

I will let you decide on this, like I pretty much always do.

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