- Banned
- #1
I saw a sign on a church marquee- it read; putting out another's light does not make your's shine brighter-
Boy Howdy- that pretty well sums up our lives, does it not? Someone (usually an idiot or a pseudo intellectual pretending to be something he/she ain't) constantly trying to put out another's light so their's shines brighter- and the masses fall right in line with it-
Anyway, that saying is what came to mind when I read the following.
Huawei, Tik-Tok and WeChat
First, let’s dispel the combined notion that China spies on everyone and the US spies on no one. There is so much public evidence to destroy both these assertions that I won’t bother repeating them here. I will however remind readers that a few years ago China more or less banned Windows 8 from the country because it was discovered that the O/S had a built-in NSA back door.[1] It seems that Germany reported on this first, but the devastating proof was at an IT conference where a Microsoft executive was interrupted during a speech with precisely this accusation.[2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9] He did not deny it because the person making the accusation was the person who discovered it and had with him the proof, but refused to discuss it and changed the subject.
from the comments:
It seems to me that the quite large part of the current generation of CEOs and US politicians in the USA don’t have much experience with censorship – perhaps this was not their main focus in the previous decades.
I lived in the Soviet block as a kid, and censorship was everywhere. After several decades of media bulshit, the vast majority of the population did not beleive anything in the media. Everyone was getting information from other sources – being secretly listening to radio free europe, word to mouth stories from truck drivers, speaking to relatives in the party, speaking to foreign lecturers in universities etc.
I know from my grandfather, that that in the 60-es the propaganda worked better and people beleived most of what the government told them. By the mid-80-es, no sane person was bying this. The system swiftly collapsed with the fall of the Brelin wall – there was just no trust and support as many peoplewere perceiving the state as their main enemy, one of the main reasons was this information war.
I remember an article here about an ex-mossad guy called Victor Ostrovsky who published a book and all the agency efforts to silence him ended in making the book a bestseller. The second book was intentionally ignored, and received much less attention. This is the normal, civilised approach to make some information less attractive – otherwise there is a forbidden fruit everyone wants to taste.
In my opinion, there is no way this old-school censorship game to be played along for decades in the internet age – a large part of the most productive population will start seeing the US state as an enemy and the number of those people will only grow each year. The way to censor is not to censor – in this era of interconnectedness and short attention span, it is enough to wait several days for a story to disappear by itself.
Boy Howdy- that pretty well sums up our lives, does it not? Someone (usually an idiot or a pseudo intellectual pretending to be something he/she ain't) constantly trying to put out another's light so their's shines brighter- and the masses fall right in line with it-
Anyway, that saying is what came to mind when I read the following.
Huawei, Tik-Tok and WeChat
First, let’s dispel the combined notion that China spies on everyone and the US spies on no one. There is so much public evidence to destroy both these assertions that I won’t bother repeating them here. I will however remind readers that a few years ago China more or less banned Windows 8 from the country because it was discovered that the O/S had a built-in NSA back door.[1] It seems that Germany reported on this first, but the devastating proof was at an IT conference where a Microsoft executive was interrupted during a speech with precisely this accusation.[2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9] He did not deny it because the person making the accusation was the person who discovered it and had with him the proof, but refused to discuss it and changed the subject.
from the comments:
It seems to me that the quite large part of the current generation of CEOs and US politicians in the USA don’t have much experience with censorship – perhaps this was not their main focus in the previous decades.
I lived in the Soviet block as a kid, and censorship was everywhere. After several decades of media bulshit, the vast majority of the population did not beleive anything in the media. Everyone was getting information from other sources – being secretly listening to radio free europe, word to mouth stories from truck drivers, speaking to relatives in the party, speaking to foreign lecturers in universities etc.
I know from my grandfather, that that in the 60-es the propaganda worked better and people beleived most of what the government told them. By the mid-80-es, no sane person was bying this. The system swiftly collapsed with the fall of the Brelin wall – there was just no trust and support as many peoplewere perceiving the state as their main enemy, one of the main reasons was this information war.
I remember an article here about an ex-mossad guy called Victor Ostrovsky who published a book and all the agency efforts to silence him ended in making the book a bestseller. The second book was intentionally ignored, and received much less attention. This is the normal, civilised approach to make some information less attractive – otherwise there is a forbidden fruit everyone wants to taste.
In my opinion, there is no way this old-school censorship game to be played along for decades in the internet age – a large part of the most productive population will start seeing the US state as an enemy and the number of those people will only grow each year. The way to censor is not to censor – in this era of interconnectedness and short attention span, it is enough to wait several days for a story to disappear by itself.