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Assange: Google Is Not What It Seems

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Re: Assange: Google Is Not What It Seems

#71

Post by Mandatum »

TheMagicHorsey wrote: post #19

I did not realize what a nut Assange has become. The more there is the danger that he might be forgotten, the more ridiculous his theories of the world. However, you have to think about his target audience. The audience doesn't consist of people who are familiar with things like DARPA grants, and think tanks. For people in the know, this writing will read like lunacy, because they will understand that Assange sees de…

Hence why I think Snowden is somewhat stand-offish around him. Assange seeks acceptance and validation in a lot of the duo-presentations I've seen (especially in the Mega sponsored New Zealand one, where Snowden outright disagreed with him on a few points), but Snowden knows that he appears as a crackpot. A crackpot with SOME good ideals and points, but are ultimately poisoned by his high-level of lunacy appearance.

EDIT: It seems some people don't agree with me.

EDIT2: And the responder below has also been downvoted. Not liking this attitude, if you disagree with something it doesn't mean you should downvote. :\

Re: Assange: Google Is Not What It Seems

#72

Post by mindslight »

smtddr wrote: post #21
chiaro wrote: post #9

He writes well, and it's an interesting look at how intertwined the government has become (was it ever not?) enmeshed with corporate empires. Unfortunately in the wider population, Google's image is nigh unassailable. The average user wouldn't know about their being saddled with military contracts through their Boston Dynamics acquisition, for example. For this, and other reasons, 99 times out of 100, "free market" c…

>>Unfortunately in the wider population, Google's image is nigh unassailable. Well, for me I _still_ [1] think of Google as the good guys because I place the blame for this mess squarely on USgov, which perhaps ultimately leads to the public's lack of empathy - but I see this as a chicken-and-egg problem. I don't know if USgov laws created a socioeconomic setup that made people too stressed about day-to-day life not…

> What are they [Google] suppose to do?

Not have a business model predicated on datamining users' information, and build their systems in such a way that they are unable to collect troves of unnecessary information.

But the only way we'll ever see any change is through users/developers: Detach yourself from such businesses. Don't build your dream on top of their corrupted platform. And if you must use some of their services for pragmatic reasons, consider them hostile governmental entities and thoroughly understand what you are giving away to be stored indefinitely.

Even if we demolished the NSA and put the traitors' heads on pikes, it would only be a matter of time until insurance companies robustly created similar chilling effects: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7928484

Re: Assange: Google Is Not What It Seems

#73

Post by contingencies »

cromwellian wrote: post #50

A lot of innuendo and guilt by association, political conspiracy ala Kevin Bacon. I suppose isolation tends to produce conspiracy theories. I'll get down voted for this of course. When Assange is raising concerns about a potential Google monopoly over the whole of the internet, he is of course, raising a legitimate concern. But the attempts by Assange, and people like Yasha Levine, to tie Google into the military ind…

the attempts by Assange, and people like Yasha Levine, to tie Google into the military industrial complex are weak sauce

The historical, current and future involvement of senior Google executives in US foreign policy, their self-description and in some cases their personal identification as middle-east focused was, I felt, well illustrated in the article. The DARPA point is tangential.

Re: Assange: Google Is Not What It Seems

#74

Post by trevelyan »

TheMagicHorsey wrote: post #37
incision wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The piece is 5800+ words, exactly one of which is DARPA. It's entirely possible that Assange is a nut, but nothing he says presents quite as nutty as extrapolating that single mention into a tale of innocent students being seeded with delusions of CIA double agents and elite shadow cabals by a scheming madman.

The DARPA point wasn't the only point of insanity. I just don't have the patience to sit and list out why his other points are equally silly for anyone versed in the space. The DARPA point was the easiest to explain and the most accessible for the Hacker News audience.

When your entire job is managing other people's information, the terms on which you let potentially hostile third parties access that data is a huge deal.

So what exactly is your problem with the DARPA point? It is perfectly legitimate to complain that the same political institutions advocating the dismantlement of civic privacy are funding consumer-focused tech in California. Or that Schmidt might harbor political/social aspirations that are leading him at best into a sort of passive acquiescence in activities Assange sees as socially destructive.

All you seem to be saying is that you consider these sorts of connections "normal" and thus not subject to reasonable critique.

Re: Assange: Google Is Not What It Seems

#75

Post by contingencies »

Mandatum wrote: post #71
TheMagicHorsey wrote: post #19

I did not realize what a nut Assange has become. The more there is the danger that he might be forgotten, the more ridiculous his theories of the world. However, you have to think about his target audience. The audience doesn't consist of people who are familiar with things like DARPA grants, and think tanks. For people in the know, this writing will read like lunacy, because they will understand that Assange sees de…

Hence why I think Snowden is somewhat stand-offish around him. Assange seeks acceptance and validation in a lot of the duo-presentations I've seen (especially in the Mega sponsored New Zealand one, where Snowden outright disagreed with him on a few points), but Snowden knows that he appears as a crackpot. A crackpot with SOME good ideals and points, but are ultimately poisoned by his high-level of lunacy appearance.…

I have seen some very shallow attempts to paint this as truth on Youtube. Not sure who the sponsoring organization was for that one, but you can probably safely assume it's an western-based acronym. Anyway, if you watch the full event it's clear that the entire thing was out of context. The fact is, both characters were somewhat standoffish around Mr. Dotcom and with good reason. I am not sure how, when discussing such important matters as the political direction society is taking with regards to its economic, technological development and the preservation of fundamental human rights within that context, how anyone's appearance is remotely relevant.

Re: Assange: Google Is Not What It Seems

#76

Post by hawkice »

rdtsc wrote: post #57
mturmon wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's another one: "In 2012, Google arrived on the list of top-spending Washington, D.C., lobbyists—a list typically stalked exclusively by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, military contractors, and the petro-carbon leviathans. Google entered the rankings above military aerospace giant Lockheed Martin, with a total of $18.2 million spent in 2012 to Lockheed’s $15.3 million. Boeing, the military contractor that absorbed…

> Are we to assume that they are even more cryptomilitaryindistrial than Google? No. But those others haven't managed to convince too many that hey are "not Evil" or some like that bullshit. Once they made that proclamation they get a nice PR boost, but when they are perceived to not abide by it, they should accept the corresponding criticism.

> But those others haven't managed to convince too many that hey are "not Evil" or some like that bullshit.

The "American Hospital Association" probably has very few people who think it is evil.

Re: Assange: Google Is Not What It Seems

#77

Post by dragonwriter »

dalke wrote: post #67
pkrs wrote: post #61

A lot of what he writes has nothing to do with the facts but rather adds to the general "evil theme". Somehow he was able to paint having "analyticity" as a bad thing: "Schmidt’s dour appearance concealed a machinelike analyticity". And acquisitions are conveniently renamed into takeovers: "In 2004, after taking over Keyhole" And then this. I don't even: "The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden…

Those interested in geopolitics have their own cultural references. The last is a reference to Thomas Friedman's "A Manifesto for the Fast World" (NYT, 1999). The more complete context is: > It's true that no two countries that both have a McDonald's have ever fought a war since they each got their McDonald's. (I call this the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention.) But globalization does not end geopolitics --…

The Golden Arches Theory (even before it was disproven by the Russia-Georgia war of 2008) -- and similar theories like the "democracies don't fight wars against each other" theory -- have always been silly things that take rely on people not understanding math. You've got a feature that (at the time the theory is articulated) is historically fairly recent and that, when you take the number of pairs of countries that have been in wars that have occurred in any given time frame and the total number of pairs of country that have existed in the same time frame, and the total number of pairs of country that share the feature in question, where the expected value of number of wars between countries sharing the trait that is supposed to protect against war would be closer to zero than one if wars were randomly distributed and the feature had no effect, and then the theory uses the (utterly unsurprising) fact that the actual number of wars between countries sharing the trait is zero as the whole basis for an argument that sharing the trait prevents war.

Re: Assange: Google Is Not What It Seems

#78

Post by Mandatum »

contingencies wrote: post #75
Mandatum wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hence why I think Snowden is somewhat stand-offish around him. Assange seeks acceptance and validation in a lot of the duo-presentations I've seen (especially in the Mega sponsored New Zealand one, where Snowden outright disagreed with him on a few points), but Snowden knows that he appears as a crackpot. A crackpot with SOME good ideals and points, but are ultimately poisoned by his high-level of lunacy appearance.…

I have seen some very shallow attempts to paint this as truth on Youtube. Not sure who the sponsoring organization was for that one, but you can probably safely assume it's an western-based acronym. Anyway, if you watch the full event it's clear that the entire thing was out of context. The fact is, both characters were somewhat standoffish around Mr. Dotcom and with good reason. I am not sure how, when discussing su…

Thankfully Dotcom has realised his poisonous "brand", and has stepped back from the limelight (that is, until extradition is pushed again).

Re: Assange: Google Is Not What It Seems

#79

Post by bduerst »

mturmon wrote: post #49
TheMagicHorsey wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The DARPA point wasn't the only point of insanity. I just don't have the patience to sit and list out why his other points are equally silly for anyone versed in the space. The DARPA point was the easiest to explain and the most accessible for the Hacker News audience.

Here's another one: "In 2012, Google arrived on the list of top-spending Washington, D.C., lobbyists—a list typically stalked exclusively by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, military contractors, and the petro-carbon leviathans. Google entered the rankings above military aerospace giant Lockheed Martin, with a total of $18.2 million spent in 2012 to Lockheed’s $15.3 million. Boeing, the military contractor that absorbed…

From a business perspective, you want to look at these as rates against revenue, not just bulk sums for reasons you pointed out.

Normalized for dollar spend per $1000 in revenue (2012), the % spend on lobbying is:

HP 232%

Facebook 75.6%

Northrop G 69.4%

Yahoo 55.1%

Google 36.3%

Lockheed Martin 32.4%

Boeing 19.1%

Oracle 18.1%

Microsoft 10.9%

IBM 4.6%

Ideally you would want to normalize by revenue from government contracts (like in HP's case), but there isn't really a story to follow here because different companies spend different percentages of their revenue on lobbying.

Re: Assange: Google Is Not What It Seems

#80

Post by dalke »

TheMagicHorsey wrote: post #19

I did not realize what a nut Assange has become. The more there is the danger that he might be forgotten, the more ridiculous his theories of the world. However, you have to think about his target audience. The audience doesn't consist of people who are familiar with things like DARPA grants, and think tanks. For people in the know, this writing will read like lunacy, because they will understand that Assange sees de…

> In fact the worst thing you can say about those DARPA grants is that they are haphazardly doled out for some real stupid projects.

There have been protests and boycotts against DARPA funding even back when it was ARPA. See http://web.eecs.umich.edu/~kuipers/opinions/no-military-fund... . This was especially an issue because "[t]he Mansfield Amendment of 1973 expressly limited appropriations for defense research through ARPA, which is largely independent of the Military Services, to projects with direct military application." You can see some of the effects at http://books.google.com/books?id=nUJdAAAAQBAJ&pg=PT264&lpg=P... , where project had to have a military justification.

Perhaps you can tell me this - why is there so much funding through DARPA and not NSF, NIH, and other non-military sources? Steve Blank's "The Secret History of Silicon Valley" discusses some of the long ties between Silicon Valley and the military. Do you call that a 'grand conspiracy'? Whatever it is, Assange's statement seem to be in line with at least part of DARPA documented history.

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