• A MAJOR SOURCE FOR AGGRESSIVE E-MAIL PITCHES AND EXPOSURE TO PHISHING ATTACKS IS LINKED-IN. Beyond privacy risks, Visibility Settings also allow others to know when others view their profiles. Complete animosity can be achieved with ‘Private Mode,’ but even a few steps are helpful: (1) Simple deletion of Birthday information, Permission to copy Contacts, Sharing Key Profile updates, Permission to use personal info for ads; and (2) Scaling back Visibility by limiting public access to specific pieces of information. Linked-In is owned by Microsoft, which utilizes the initial Agreement to authorize dozens of data, privacy and ad settings which most users don’t even read, much less think about limiting.   [WASHINGTON POST – 7/26/22]
  • THE INTERNET EVOLVED OVER DECADES, FROM COLLABORATION by government/ university/ & research labs, primarily so that “one colorless static file (such as email or spreadsheet) could be copied & transmitted from one device to another… Today some 40 thousand networks span the planet, with millions of apps and nearly a billion websites accessible to tens of billions of devices, and nearly 20% of the world economy now considered ‘digital,’ with much of the remaining 80% running on it… The next evolution, the METAVERSE, will effectively be 3D internet, involving communication as a persistent and ‘living ‘ virtual world, where humans will also ‘exist,’ with an ever-growing share of our lives/ labor/ leisure/ time/ wealth/ happiness/ & relationships spent inside virtual worlds rather than just aided through digital devices – a parallel plane that sits atop our digital & physical economies, and unites both … but this time being pioneered, built, controlled and dominated by private corporate businesses, rendering more acute many of the hard problems of digital existence today (such as data rights, security, misinformation, radicalization, platform power and user happiness) which will help determine whether the future is better or worse.”  [TIME – 8/8/22]
  • OF THE VERY FEW THINGS ON WHICH LIBERALS AND CONSERVATIVES AGREE, an in-depth survey by RealClear Public Opinion Research found up to 70% consensus against “billionaires’ bottomless political spending, which exerts outsized influence and ability to corrupt the U.S. political system and institutions – especially by foreign money overtly (like Soros), obscurely (through institutional funding from Chinese & Saudis), or from direct influence (like TikTok)… When it comes to ownership of social media companies, 43% believe these belong in a public Trust; for news media companies, it’s 50%… Congress enacted just such a prohibition twenty years ago in the bipartisan McCain-Feingold campaign law. But in the ensuing two decades, those reforms were eroded by a series of unpopular Supreme Court decisions, and by the willingness of leaders in both major political parties to accept vast sums of ‘dark money’ even while decrying its impact.”   [REAL CLEAR POLITICS – 7/29/22]
  • WOKENESS EXPRESS: (1) The U.S. Dep’t of Justice is defending another liberal Ideology dictate, this one from Dep’t of Agriculture, which has ordered that, in order for schools to continue receiving food & nutrition assistance to some 30 million low-income kids, the schools must “specify in their policies the banning of discrimination based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identify – that is, the ‘correct’ Gender-optional education ideology. (2) The U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) website now has a Help page listing government & community organizations providing online advice, with content promoting: transgenderism, anal/oral sex, and occult superstition including ‘Queering Tarot.’ One reference specifies that “some children have gender identity that is different from that assigned at birth… that parents must accept the identity that children announce… and when someone shares identity, it’s inappropriate to assume or try to deduce their sex assigned at birth.”
  • THOUGHTS FOR THE WEEK:

       Latest study on Masks worn during the pandemic (gauze/ polyurethane/ non-woven up to 3 layers) found that “bacterial and fungal colony numbers of pathetic microbes remained, on both sides of the masks, without significant differences irrespective of washing.”  [SCIENTIFIC REPORTS]