Questioneer
Sorry for not fully elaborating on the subject as it is convoluted and mostly easily searchable with the keywords I've already listed.
To further discussion, what did you find insightful in context to this parent thread's topic? I can only begin to imagine the possibilities to access what is moderated and what is not. What is your opinions?
edit: How is consonants doing? I am a bit down at seeing the same actors in the news again doing their same shifty acts. I have always assumed headlines like NSA/Snowden would have a damper on the will to start-up business or innovate a new industry but never considered the change in tone it would have on HN users in general.
Undermining governance, diplomacy, while promoting corruption.
But by all means take the public facing statements as they are crafted.
Then the "terrorists" wikileaks helped expose it all.
Bonus snippet from the leak:
On Jul 23, 2011, at 11:41 PM, Don Kuykendall <[email protected]> wrote:
"We blamed everything on the lawyers. The result will be a frustrating StratCap and Service agreement that you and Bruce will vomit over. So be it. George, Shea and I are on the same wave length and are willing to have loose ends in the contract to get the business deal done. The three of us have an understanding that goes beyond whatnots in the future that might happen. If we can't trust each other, then things are going to fail regardless what the contract reads. StratCap and STRATFOR are the same investment to Shea, George and me."
[1] http://wikileaks.org/gifiles/releasedate/2012-02-27-00-strat...
edit: I cannot for the life of me figure out why this would be down-voted. Was it the syntax, grammar? Was it highlighting one of Stratfor's own emails about StratCap and Stratfor being considered one and the same? The cultivation of insider info paid for, then 'laundered' offshore for for-profit use while those involved also get a cut of the profits?
Beuller?
edit edit: I would honestly appreciate input to whoever does the negative votes, sometimes sprees. In some instances in which I vote down myself I cannot fathom down-voting without adequately explaining why the to user.
The price for one oxygen condenser is covered after a victim(patient) pays for the device for around half a year.
Looking over some others I know, they are all going through this same company. Referred to them by each of their hospitals.
I cannot fully explain the scheme worked out from the hospitals, but I know it depends on having the often confused patient signing a bundle of documentation while he is being led out the door. I read over the documents and it seemed fair, I just had no time to research all that was needed. My father was in full legal control and he himself just simply followed through with what the hospital asked.
Fuck you, Airway Oxygen.
No 1940s vehicles didn't come with ABS, front and side panel air bags. But linkage in the suspension was at least metal, and wasn't known to fatigue every five years. If I were so inclined I could bring my hick mechanic in here and he would have volumes of corner cuts to cite that have resulted in unnecessary deaths over the years.
Some advancements have been great but overall legacy parts don't engulf vehicles in flames. Hodge-podge workarounds do[1].
"Endgame executives will bring up maps of airports, parliament buildings, and corporate offices. The executives then create a list of the computers running inside the facilities, including what software the computers run, and a menu of attacks that could work against those particular systems. Endgame weaponry comes customized by region—the Middle East, Russia, Latin America, and China—with manuals, testing software, and “demo instructions.” There are even target packs for democratic countries in Europe and other U.S. allies."
With news of payments rendered to companies complicit in handing over data under dubious laws, I believe much more attention should be put on the 'plumbers' themselves. [1] http://wiki.echelon2.org/wiki/Endgame_Systems
For science and all that, can you think of other examples?
edit: Oh I see it is different chapters, /1 /2 etc. Nevermind that.
But if it involves a topic like Syrians, even if the topic involves Bluecoat.com's hardware being used to track dissidents, something most users here fear the NSA/GCHQ may be doing, it is down-voted.
The accounts that post it have been hell banned if they dare point out the relevance of the issue if ethnic and national borders are ignored.
"If I keep going on like this," this is something I have to do, before I have examples of white dissidents to show as well.
I was not exactly concerned by it until it the same occurred to me. When the issue was raised, I received a wave of down-votes. To boot further submissions were hell-banned!
Flabbergasted, my tone and demeanor on this site has changed since. Cheers for the conversation instead of silent down-votes or condescending commentary, stephengillie.
I tried by best to steer the conversation into a realm that truly does relate to "Hacker News." The real life ramifications of producing spyware, ISP data mirroring hardware. Of course the topic was deaded and my commments down-voted.
Is HN a place for commentary on Snowden and Manning sexual habits or for the details and real ramifications for our work?
I've been hell-banned and down-voted for trying to steer discussion into more than social observations of the actors involved. It lowers faith in this community and those involved moderating it.
What I am to learn from this? Do not submit things older members may later submit? Do not point out the flaws in such a system?
edit: Thanks swombat for ending with a question, a way to further discussion instead of making it a pointed statement. :)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6262162
Edit: Read before down-voting.
Nevermind how _hackers_ who have taken on the White House, Washington Post and others are defecting against Assad due to his chemical attacks[1]. The topic involves a whiff of politics so it must be moderated against! Any hacker, technical, code related aspects are ignored if one shred of the topic goes against the whims of HN mods.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6248144
edit: In-case users are down-voting before reading what was linked. The comments I provided showed how monitoring hardware was used to track people of 'interest' like religious followers. I have been attempting to focus on the ramifications for hardware like Bluecoat's ending up being used to monitor and persecute others.
This persecution is not just using to harass others but to know what leaders of Sunnis to 'cleanse' as to make populating Alawites easier[2].
[2] http://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/syrian-army-ren...
If HN wants to halt discussion they are finding a very effective way to do so.
edit: Why is this comment getting down-voted? Must I start collating a list of users complaining their submissions are being overrode by others? Or show how they get down-voted/dismissed when bringing it up?
Is this what HN has come to?
Petrol from a tanker? Shaped charge.
Cracking armored vehicle? Shaped charge.
Unlocking stuck door? Shaped charge.
It really does seem people try to downplay any potential reactor designs because global thermonuclear war may damage the reactor. Stop living in fear.
While I haven't heard Xbee's stance on such things, would they perhaps care to clarify their stance beyond "most persons are able to use our products, the use is up to the end consumer."
I would wholly appreciate it since hobbyist part manufactures depend on the community around them, and we really do like some of the makers out there as well as their efforts for disseminating open ended hardware for others to tinker with.
edit: Thank you diydrones community and others! Promoting responsible use while not seeking to limit the possible innovations of others.
I have NEVER seen anything from CDBaby's presence with actual CD sales, be it in retail shops or online, on the other hand their mode of operation since starting to use Youtube indicates this is their main line of income.
"Represent" artists by claiming copyright on any under-protected samples that they may have used.
Including voice samples of men who have had their throats slit.
Force users dispute it on Youtube, disputed videos get resolved but every other copy of the media that was uploaded does not. Leaving each of the other users who uploaded to fight it one by one on their own. Blanket claims on swaths of video are made by CDBaby forcing individual defense from users for each of their uploaded copies. Not all users notice the copyright claims, not all care, even less have the motivation to try to set things right.
CDBaby over time gets claim to a larger and larger portfolio of media that doesn't belong to them.
It's all fairly obvious, regardless of how the original company started and operated.
Some things I just cannot muster any bit of eloquence to describe. The best service I could think of was to help disseminate what others likely felt as they record.
Nothing was ever clarified.
I keep using "manager" in quotes because their lower support rep and the "manager" shared the same name..
My problem with the CDBaby/Youtube relationship is that CDBaby was essentially created to take advantage of blanket claims. Youtube's algos create a set of hashes or something of track audio. This is fine. The first to make a copyrighted claim, even if non-copyrighted uploads already exist, get precedence. This is not fine.
So the hundreds of copies of the man singing his heart out matter nothing once CDBaby uploads one copyrighted track that includes a part that matches. Copyrighted claims override the others for some horrific reason.
Leaving me to defend a dead man. Thanks to @ioerror, Telecomix and others for keeping it real respecting the dead's rights.
There was a time when a multitude of cities rose up in peaceful demonstration. Civilian organizations took root to make clear cases for ways and means of reforms, both on the local and national scale. These local coordination committees were most publicly visible by foreigners on the net, being prolific in uploading of media, mainly during Friday protests after prayer. These local orgs, mainly teens, found sites like bambuser.com and youtube.com highly effective for disseminating and spreading word of solidarity for towns spread miles apart, those miles just may as well be worlds apart much like how it is in the US and other nations.
Well I helped disseminate these events, my favorite were those broadcast live on bambuser as it gave viewers a much more personal feeling for those demonstrating on the other end. Much respect to Hans Eriksson[1] who used his position at bambuser in a positive way, embracing these broadcasts and himself helping disseminate the broadcasts to the world.
These weekly mass demonstrations took a bloody turn, and while many stopped looking the coordination committees kept witness, services like bambuser kept showing live feeds even though they were turning increasing violent as Assad's forces began publicly gunning down crowds.
Ever see the GPS trail of someone fleeing with a crowd of his neighbors during a live broadcast, while they were being shot at? I have. Here is a profile of a martyr who fought with his camera to show the world his life[2].
What does this have to do with copyright? Well those early days of mass demonstrations are valuable evidence of the true origins of the Syrian civil war, peaceful defiance met with violence.
During my monitoring and dissemination of other people's hard fought media, I began processing some into panorama as the narrow field of view provided by handheld cams reduced much of the true impact of what the recorder meant to show to others. I made stitched images from video showing tanks awaiting a push into so-called 'infected' cities[3]. I made images of the days during the fraudulent elections, of BMPs chasing unarmed civilians through the streets[4]. Later, I've stitched together images of war crimes that I can never remove from my thoughts. After doing this for many images I had video of which I also processed and began uploading those of potential interest, video of Assad's troops hurling IEDs onto residential neighborhoods from helicopters for instance[5].
But the video that involves this discussion of copyright, is one held dear to many of the early activists. Held dear to many of those now deceased. It was a song sung by someone who himself, was killed in those early days of mass demonstrations.
Ibrahim Qashoush, a fireman and a poet from Hama Syria[6].
Ibrahim coined a song that became popular during these mass demonstrations in Hama, singing them in a multitude of breathtaking shows filled the entire town square (remember when towns had those?) with the families that lived there. Time passed, and after becoming depressed at the daily slaughter I decided to go back and make a stitched image[7] of that night in Hama, when Ibrahim sung before his throat was slit[8] for daring to sing.
After uploading the video to Youtube, marking the video as not copyrighted, then the image to imgur as usual I received a copyright complaint from CDBaby[9]. Apparently they thought that due to an artist of theirs including a sample of the protest audio, they retroactively owned the original protest song themselves.
I lodged a rebuttal saying that the video was clearly not theirs, and Youtube agreed. Attempts to contact CDBaby were futile. Having the copyright claim removed I was somewhat happy with the vindication that this dead man's song was indeed not CDBaby's, but infuriated that this company made ABSOLUTELY NO DUE DILIGENCE AS TO THEIR CLAIMS. Most of the time people, if they notice, can contact them saying a company like CDBaby was in the wrong. But in this case the man they wronged had his throat slit for the media CDBaby was now claiming as their own. Cue the rage.
Youtube removed the claim from my copy of the video[10] but when linking the original copy that I processed I noticed that CDBaby's claim was still on their video. Looking further I found _ALL_ copies of this dead man's voice claimed by CDBaby.
This is around the time I started making a stink on Twitter making sure to include CDBaby's handle while pummeling them for stealing a murdered man's voice.
Of course after this I finally had CDBaby contact me.
The response from their support 'manager' said simply that my upload has had the claim removed, she was completely unaware or ignorant of what I was referencing since I never said my video was the problem. The fact they were blanket claiming without due diligence or occasional follow-ups to check the accuracy of their claims was the problem.
Only after displaying their absolute pathetic avoiding of the topic of legal ramifications for false claims online did I receive a simple follow-up from CDBaby support 'management':
"All claims have been removed," and indeed they were, for now.
My position on copyright shifted in those months of shouting into the copyright void that is the Youtube/CDBaby scheme.
I will break every copyright possible without care.
Not just for those who died bravely singing songs for others to be motivated by, but because for-profit entities display far less due diligence in their corporate position than a marijuana smoker does in his hobby.
Now I sometimes listen to Ibrahims song, thinking of how many of those people in Hama in the crowd no longer are alive. I think of CDBaby profiting off it and who knows how many others, think of Google's complicity in the mess, think of the lawyers who profit off it keeping the situation rolling. I think of the militant US government who is coming closer and closer to making copyrights worse than violent crime, and I get really depressed.
That is one of my fights with copyrights.
[1] https://twitter.com/HansEriksson
[2] http://bambuser.com/channel/syriapioneer
[3] http://i.imgur.com/pyegah.jpg
[4] http://i.imgur.com/prkBmh.jpg
[5] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZNy7V4Dz60
[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibrahim_Qashoush
[7] http://imgur.com/gallery/R0hnb
[8] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/22/world/middleeast/22poet.ht...
After Assad deployed his military forces SEA started to become a more public facing entity, taking on media firms due to perceived slights in reporting and others to cull more user information to further track targets. A short time-line from Wikipedia:
April 2013: The SEA hijacked the Associated Press Twitter account and falsely claimed the White House had been bombed and President Barack Obama injured.
May 2013: The ITV news London Twitter account was hacked on the 24th May 2013 by the SEA. The Android applications of British Broadcaster Sky News were also hacked on 26 May 2013 on Google Play Store.
July 2013, Truecaller servers were allegedly hacked into by the Syrian Electronic Army.
August 2013: Advertising service Outbrain was hacked by the SEA via a spearphishing attack. This allowed them to place redirects into the websites of The Washington Post, Time, and CNN.
Their history has been starkly pro-Assad, even going as far to defend indiscriminate bombing runs on the more rural cities in Syria of which the hackers are not likely to live in. While villages far away from the loyalist strongholds of Mezzeh 86 or al-Assad housing are more easily cast off of 'nests of terrorists' to be 'cleansed' it has to be harder to rationalize the same when the bombing runs are striking neighborhoods within visible range of these loyalist strongholds.
A SEA affiliated twitter account became highly critical after a chemical weapons attack on the outside suburbs of Damascus, the user posted a video of the event along with the message:
"We are calling for all members of SEA to focus their attentions on the political elite that is the scourge of our country."
There has been persistent shelling from Assad loyalist neighborhoods down onto Zamalka below it. One video of such volleys of indiscriminate fire captured the essence of the situation, so I took frames of the video and stitched them into a panorama with a wider field of view than what the video provided[1].
The neighborhood with what most likely is howitzers is al-Assad,[2] and I say howitzers due to the neighborhood being military housing for the military artillery base north of it. This is very striking to what was documented to happen on the other side of Damascus to the west, where another set of military housing was scene wanton violence.
In Jdaidat Artouz civilians were taken by Assad's military officers and lynched to death in a heap at the military family housing block either in or near the town (Jdaidat Artouz or Moadamiyet al-Shams). Video taken by some of the offenders shows the victims unloaded from a military truck being struck while shouted at by military and civilian persons. Later video shows the the pile of victims mostly motionless. Even later video shows them being further crushed with a tractor, throats slit.
Both cases have the military feeding off victim populations as if they were supermarket meat, there for picking and abuse. With offenders deployed from military housing. The latter case documented by the offenders themselves.
[1] http://i.imgur.com/XM85Q1q.jpg
[2] http://wikimapia.org/#lang=en&lat=33.551696&lon=36.378479&z=...
From January 27 2012 in Zamalka Syria: http://youtu.be/M6GyEm3_uqA
As Assad called in regular military forces, even before "National Defense" militias, the crowds in the streets were gunned at, chased down, killed.
Here is an image I stitched from video showing a BMP chasing people in the streets during Assad's "referendum" when the pretense of elections were used to kill more[1].
This brings me to Zamalka[2], this neighborhood is in Rif Dimashq which is the Governorate just outside of where Damascus is located. During the time just before the military was unleashed upon civilian centers, there was massive swells of demonstrations, mainly in more rural areas of Syria like Talbisah. For a short while Assad was able to shrug off the start of military action in these rural areas as his core supporters are from neighborhoods like those ringing Damascus. The enemy was simply banging on the gates, never mind the enemy being civilians. Now Assad's forces been bolstering Homs in sectarian slaughter while even letting ardent neighborhoods come under fire.
Alawite citizens are being shipped in to areas purged of Sunnis in Homs. Repeat, population cleansing, dispersant, resettling[3].
So it seems that Assad is burning areas even closer to Damascus than Jobar, while setting up an Alawite shield for the wealthiest supporters towards Latakia in the west. Not good.
Some more on Talbisah, here is a very good account that uploaded videos from the early phases of demonstrations to bitter battles against the military base that neighbored the residential neighborhood. Watching the videos from oldest uploaded to newest is a painful descent into madness[4].
[1] http://i.imgur.com/prkBmh.jpg
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zamalka
[3] http://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/syrian-army-ren...
[4] http://www.youtube.com/user/talbisah/videos?flow=grid&view=0...
Due to my inclusion of the name "Dell" I was accused of thinking that "the entire info-tech infrastructure, companies and "wage-slaves" alike are complicit in all this.[1]" Even though I never mentioned "wage slaves."
Well, the user wasn't aware of Snowden obtaining NSA documents while there, he just needed to be alerted of the information. But before that time the response I received was "Dell? A computer hardware device assembler? What on earth are you on about.[1]"
I imagine now the question that user is asking is "Dell? A computer hardware device assembler? What on earth is the NSA's involvement with them and why does Dell's employees have access to volumes of sensitive data?"
It is important enough simply because it is.