Tag Archives: snopes

Google’s “Hummingbird”: IP Theft & Mind-Control

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Google’s new search algorithm Hummingbird adds to the company’s sinister reputation among privacy advocates.

Google’s creepy Google Glass didn’t help it either.

Now comes Hummingbird, the biggest algorithm change in the search engine in twelve years.

“Hummingbird should better focus on the meaning behind the words,” Sullivan reports. “It may better understand the actual location of your home, if you’ve shared that with Google. It might understand that ‘place’ means you want a brick-and-mortar store. It might get that ‘iPhone 5s’ is a particular type of electronic device carried by certain stores. Knowing all these meanings may help Google go beyond just finding pages with matching words.”

(“Hummingbird is Google’s biggest algorithm change in 12 years,” WebProNews,  Sept. 28, 2013)

Simply put, Hummingbird is about Google trying to find the holistic meaning behind the individual words of a search-string (the query or series of words you input into the search function),  or, in the case of websites, the overall intent behind the key-words most used.

Bottom-line: Google is trying to figure out what’s going on in your mind when you type out certain words.

That is terribly similar to an area of research dear to the defense and spy agencies – predictive software and technology.

For instance,  DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is very interested in developing the cognitive footprints of users for identification purposes.

The goal is to bypass the need for passwords, which tend to be cumbersome for users and vulnerable to password-cracking, phishing, social-engineering, memory failures, and hardware theft.

“Software biometric modalities” are to be used to develop what it terms Active Authentication.

Anyone can see how useful the new Hummingbird algorithm would be to DARPA.

Indeed, given Google’s prior collaboration with the CIA in the monitoring of social media, it wouldn’t be surprising if Hummingbird has also come out of a joint project with the government.

The defense agencies come up with the technology to figure out what random “bad guys” are up to. Google monetizes it and returns the favor by data-sharing with the government.

The consumer might have his every need…indeed wish…met, but web-users are now going to find that Google’s “free lunch:” is not only not free, it’s not remotely cheap.

And web users are the ones footing the bill.

Here’s how.

“Google Hummingbird: Where no search has gone before,” Jeremy Hull, iProspect, Wired, October 15, 2013

“Google has updated its search algorithm many times over the past few years, but previous updates were focused on making Google better at gathering information — for example, indexing websites more often and identifying spammy content. Hummingbird is focused on the user. It’s about Google getting better at understanding what searchers really want and providing them with better answers.”

That’s Google’s stated objective, of course. But how about websites?

When you search Google for answers to questions, what website owners want is for you to go to their site to get the information.

This is not only because they might hope to sell you something and thereby earn a living.

It’s also because they hope that by giving you good information not available in the mainstream media,  they might attract you to their site and persuade you on other issues.

By offering free information, web writers hope you will find them reliable, credible, or interesting and become committed readers. That’s why millions of writers and websites, spend inordinate amounts of energy and time finding answers and giving them away to others for free.

Of course, ethics and decency demand that readers who benefit from that information cite the place they found it and give the author credit.

Not Hummingbird.

It harvests information from the net and puts it on Information cards that pop up in answer to searches.

Now, if the information is immediately given to the reader by Google, why will they visit the websites from which Google might have culled the answer?

They won’t.  That means that Google is not only stealing the private data of its users through Gmail, Google Earth, and a bunch of other programs, it’s also stealing from the websites it’s supposed to be helping.

But “Hummingbird” is not just unfriendly to websites offering information to the public, it acts to control what information is presented to you and how.

Hummingbird’s graphic is an easy way for Google to give you what Google (and very likely, the government) want you to know, rather than what you might learn if you delved into your search results yourself.

The new graphic could even give you downright misleading or inaccurate information. Just think about Snopes, the ostensibly myth-busting site that somehow manages to bust myths only in left-liberal ways.

So, Hummingbird is not only using your personal information for Google’s own commercial (and the government’s surveillance) purposes, it’s using information from blogs/websites, without their permission, for its own operations.

That’s two counts of IP theft.

Then, the whole business of trying to determine exactly what you’re thinking when you type certain things into the search function sounds awfully like mind-reading to me. In order to do that kind of mind-reading, all sorts of personal information from your web usage (even more than Google has been collecting so far) has to be collated and compared. Mapped, if you will.

That’s two counts of privacy invasion.

Finally, by manipulating access to the knowledge available on the Internet, under the guise of consumer satisfaction, by giving you pre-packaged answers before it gives you your search results, Google is actually  trying to control your thinking.

That’s one count of mind-control.

Is it any surprise that the new algorithm shares its name with DARPA’s nano flying robot/drone Hummingbird, which beats its wings like a bird?.

DARPA’s Hummingbird is a spy drone:

“The drone, built by AeroVironment with funding from DARPA, is able to fly forwards, backwards, and sideways, as well as rotate clockwise and counterclockwise. Not only does the ‘bot resemble its avian inspiration in size (it’s only slightly larger than a hummingbird, with a 6.5-inch wingspan and a weight of 19 grams), it also looks impressively like a hummingbird in flight.

But that’s not vanity — it’s key to the drone’s use as a spy device, as it can perch near its subject without alerting it.”

Google’s Hummingbird seems no less innocuous and no less insidious.

It’s more evil-doing from the Franken-SearchEngine that routinely spies for the NSA and CIA and systematically  commits Intellectual Property theft.

Read more at Entrepreneur .com

Obama Birth Certificate A Forgery, Says Sheriff Arpaio

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Update (July 20): The Daily Bell has an interesting theory that this whole controversy might be engineered to rescue Obama in public perception. Their reasoning is that Sheriff Arpaio is himself a polarising figure guilty of many controversial practices and making him the center piece of the storm over the certificate (which broke in 2008) might be an clever way to diffuse the scandal. Additional proof for this theory is that the forgery itself is so clumsy that people have been speculating it was intended as a trap.

Well, well, well. Lookee here (chuckle, and h/t EPJ)…

Turns out Barack Obama’s birth certificate is definitely forged.

“I have to respect the science of document examination and the evidence there points to the forgery pictured above.  There are also serious signs that the forger of the Obama birth certificate released by the White House did not understand codes and numbers associated with the document.  Analysis of the numbers and code revealed that the document is not genuine.  The evidence is more than compelling.

The biggest error came as a result of the age of the document forger.  He or she was obviously too young to be aware of correct terms used to classify what we today call African-Americans. The creator of the phony document listed Obama’s race as African.  That is a huge red flag because that term was not applied as a race title until well into the 1980’s.  That term and the moniker, Black would have been considered politically incorrect and racist back when Obama was born.  The proper term throughout history until the late 1970’s was Negro. The government did not change this until well into the 1980s.

“Additionally the United States government standardized the acceptable terms for all identification documents.  Eventually Negro became an apparent derogatory term that sensitive politically correct Americans abandoned in the 1980’s.

This so-called birth certificate document was the product of a criminal conspiracy.  It needs to be investigated by Congress and the State of Hawaii.   The problem here is politics prevents the orderly administration of justice.  Democratic politicians have total control and are breaking the law by obstructing justice. “

Comment:

President Obama’s release of a long form birth certificate in April 2011 didn’t assuage his critics. They insisted it was forged.

The persistence of such doubts, die-hard Obama defenders in the media replied, was yet another yahoo conspiracy by bitter clingers.

Here are some reminders of what the mainstream said (courtesy of wikipedia):

Michael Tomasky called it racial paranoia “Birthers and the persistence of racial paranoia” The Guardian (London) April 27, 2011

[A guy called Tomasky would never express racial paranoia, I suppose]

Dan Vergano said it was racial prejudice, “Study: racial prejudice plays role in Obama citizenship views”. USA Today, May 1, 2011

[USA Today would never, never cater to racial prejudice.}

The New York Times said it was an embarrassment, “A Certificate of Embarrassment”. The New York Times. April 27, 2011.

[The NY Times is never embarrassed by the baldfaced banditry in its own backyard]

Fareed Zakaria said it was coded racism, “Fareed Zakaria on Donald Trump and coded racism”. Global Public Square (CNN), April 22, 2011.

[Zakaria apparently doesn’t mind racism when it involves dropping bombs on strangers in the Middle East]

Real estate mogul Donald Trump’s taste in wives  is much better than his taste in wedding-cake mansions…..or in bankster bail-outs, but he scored a bulls-eye on this one.

The fudge with “African” instead of “Negro” was discussed a long while back.

So what’s the news in the recent claim?

Apparently, a 95 year old retired state worker was able to point out numerical codes that hadn’t been filled in, while the boxes for race and employment had.

I’m not sure what to make of it yet, but I already know what to make of how it’s being spun.

I googled Obama birth certificate, and right after a couple of sites with the hot news at the top, where you’d expect it to be,  were sites that dismissed the birth certificate controversy as “birther” conspiracy.

They were in  third or fourth place when I saw them, which would seem to be pretty high when the news that’s breaking is that big.

Usually new stuff buries the old stuff and sends it way back past the fourth or fifth page in an Internet search…at least for the first day after a big story.

But not here.

Then I hunted for images to put up on my blog so people could see what the Sheriff’s team means about the fudge about “African.”

Well, when I searched google and then looked on the left-hand side of the search results for what comes up under IMAGES, the very first image on the left was the certificate.  But instead of getting a bunch of different sites where the image was posted, google kept redirecting me instantly to Snopes.  The redirection was blatant.

So why would google heart snopes?

Snopes, according to its ABOUT page, was founded in 1995 by Barbara and David Mikkelson of Los Angeles, to explore urban legends and such. Naturally, it just became the web’s leading “touchstone” for rumor research. Naturally, they got a couple of “Webbies” and “Best of the Web” awards and have been invited onto all the major networks.

So naturally, no one in their right mind would take them at face value.

And so it is.

Read anti-Zionist activist Maidh O’Cathail’s piece at Dissident Voice, exposing its pro-Israeli bias in covering 9-11 research.

See also the conservative blog called Huffington Riposte which considers Snopes a left-liberal propaganda outlet.

On the other hand, here are some Kossacks (from Daily Kos) claiming it pushes right-wing views.

My diagnosis of something that sounds left to the right and right to the left and reeks of big bucks?

You guessed it. George Soros.