Spreading confusion over the internet since 1994
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I took Wilted Kale Salad on January 31, 2013 at 12:38PM
and processed it in my digital darkroom on February 01, 2013 at 05:38AM
Defunct Tweets
Brief followup to the Goldman Faux-Elevator story, is this theory promulgated by Kevin Roose:
In the three years since that interview – while breaking the news of @GSElevator‘s book proposal, among other things – I’ve learned a bit more about who is behind @GSElevator. I’ve come to suspect that the account is a group effort, the product of at least two individuals working collaboratively, one or more of whom may work at Goldman or may have worked there in the past. Part of this is a simple smell test – the sharp, concise writing contained in @GSElevator‘s tweets has always read like the work of a different author than the loose, elementary prose in the book proposal and the writing contained in some of the account’s articles on sites like Business Insider. But I’ve also seen credible proof of multiple authorship. Several months ago, I was contacted by a person who works in finance and is not named John Lefevre, who showed me convincing evidence that he had access to at least one of the accounts affiliated with @GSElevator.
…
“Who cares?” you might be asking. And you’re right – this mystery matters to a handful of reporters in New York, and perhaps some tiny fraction of @GSElevator’s 625,000 Twitter followers. But as someone who has spent the better part of three years corresponding with @GSElevator, reading @GSElevator tweets, and reviewing a book proposal and several other pieces of @GSElevator output, I’m invested (albeit extremely reluctantly, since – reminder – this is a parody Twitter account!) in the outcome.
For now, I don’t have any other names to share, or a second-poster theory credible enough to print. But, if I were a betting man, I’d bet that we’re still not hearing the full story of who’s behind @GSElevator. Some of the tweets may have come from inside the building after all.
(click here to continue reading Is the @GSElevator Mystery Really Solved? — Daily Intelligencer.)
On The Internet Nobody Knows You Are A Dog – Peter Steiner, The New Yorker. Wiki
Three stories I read yesterday, exhibiting a common theme. These aren’t wrapped together as a neat thread, but if you think about it a bit, perhaps they are related after all.
First, and the most newsworthy by far was Glenn Greenwald’s latest amazing story about our National Security apparatus. There are Power Point documents created instructing how to ruin an enemy’s online reputation. You should read his article if you read nothing else today, and this adjunct tale of this process in action:
One of the many pressing stories that remains to be told from the Snowden archive is how western intelligence agencies are attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction. It’s time to tell a chunk of that story, complete with the relevant documents.
Over the last several weeks, I worked with NBC News to publish a series of articles about “dirty trick” tactics used by GCHQ’s previously secret unit, JTRIG (Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group). These were based on four classified GCHQ documents presented to the NSA and the other three partners in the English-speaking “Five Eyes” alliance. Today, we at the Intercept are publishing another new JTRIG document, in full, entitled “The Art of Deception: Training for Online Covert Operations.”
By publishing these stories one by one, our NBC reporting highlighted some of the key, discrete revelations: the monitoring of YouTube and Blogger, the targeting of Anonymous with the very same DDoS attacks they accuse “hacktivists” of using, the use of “honey traps” (luring people into compromising situations using sex) and destructive viruses. But, here, I want to focus and elaborate on the overarching point revealed by all of these documents: namely, that these agencies are attempting to control, infiltrate, manipulate, and warp online discourse, and in doing so, are compromising the integrity of the internet itself.
Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. To see how extremist these programs are, just consider the tactics they boast of using to achieve those ends: “false flag operations” (posting material to the internet and falsely attributing it to someone else), fake victim blog posts (pretending to be a victim of the individual whose reputation they want to destroy), and posting “negative information” on various forums.
(click here to continue reading How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations – The Intercept.)
God Is Ugly
Second, did you notice that the still-Governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, Tea Party and Koch Brother favorite, paid his staff to write comments on newspaper articles? If you were a resident of Milwaukee, or later, of anywhere in Wisconsin, your taxpayer money was spent thus1. Doesn’t that make you pleased? Have you ever waded through comments on a news article?Yeah, nasty stuff most usually. Makes you wonder who the author of that sycophantic comment really is, or more precisely, who his employer is.
Madison — In the heat of the 2010 governor’s race, Scott Walker urged both county employees and campaign aides to go to news websites and post comments promoting him and his record, newly unsealed documents show.
It was just such anonymous posts by a county worker on campaign issues that prompted prosecutors to expand a secret “John Doe” investigation — launched to probe into missing money in a veterans fund — to also examine whether taxpayer dollars were being used illegally to finance political operations.
In one instance in May 2010, for example, a close ally posted online a portion of a Walker email almost verbatim on a Journal Sentinel story just minutes after receiving the directive. Walker had sent the note to an inner circle that included county administrators as well as campaign operatives.
Tapping out a message on his campaign Blackberry on the afternoon of May 4, 2010, Walker urged county aides, campaign staffers and other trusted volunteers to go to an online Journal Sentinel business story and respond to critics of his plan to privatize the airport in the comments section below the story.
“Someone should comment on the fact that the only way for the county to benefit from that success is to contract out operations,” Walker wrote in an email. “Having a well performing airport increases the value that the county could receive.”
A half-hour later, Brian Pierick — the boyfriend of Walker aide Timothy D. Russell — posted a comment on the story under the alias “WI_Calvin,” calling rising airport traffic “another example of Scott Walker’s outstanding leadership.”
“The only way the county can to (sic) benefit from that success is to contract out operations. Having a well performing airport increases the value that the county could receive,” Pierick wrote, adding only a single word to Walker’s phrasing. Pierick and Russell were both later convicted of other activities in the secret probe.
(click here to continue reading Scott Walker urged county staff, campaign aides to promote him online.)
Elevator to Gallows
Lastly, and probably least, there was an anonymous tweeter by the name of @GSElevator who got a book deal, based mostly on what he tweeted, things allegedly overheard in the elevator of Goldman Sachs. Except the author only briefly even came close to working for Goldman, years ago, and so made up most of what he quoted. He still got a lot of publicity though.
A three-year parlor game has been taking place on Wall Street to identify the Goldman Sachs employee behind a Twitter account that purports to reveal the uncensored comments overheard in the firm’s elevators.
The Twitter account, @GSElevator, reports overheard remarks like, “I never give money to homeless people. I can’t reward failure in good conscience,” and “Groupon…Food stamps for the middle class.”
The Twitter account, which has an audience of more than 600,000 followers, has been the subject of an internal inquiry at Goldman to find the rogue employee. The tweets, often laced with insider references to deals in the news, appeal to both Wall Street bankers and outsiders who mock the industry. Late last month, the writer sold a book about Wall Street culture based on the tweets for a six-figure sum.
There is a good reason Goldman Sachs has been unable to uncover its Twitter-happy employee: He doesn’t work at the firm. And he never did.
The author is a 34-year-old former bond executive who lives in Texas. His name is John Lefevre.
(click here to continue reading @GSElevator Tattletale Exposed (He Was Not in the Goldman Elevator) – NYTimes.com.)
Footnotes:
Ballin’
What nearly amuses me is that Beer Baron John Hickenlooper is so opposed, still, to citizens of his state taking positive steps towards ending the ridiculous drug war in the US. The vote wasn’t even very close, considering. No, if Gov Hickenlooper had his way, only beer should be legal…
Colorado Democrat John Hickenlooper has a firm answer to other U.S. governors asking him about marijuana as source of revenue: Just say no.
Hickenlooper said yesterday that about a half-dozen called or asked him at this weekend’s National Governors Association meeting in Washington about his state’s experience legalizing recreational pot. They want to know about the potential to collect money and avoid the costs of enforcement and incarceration, he said.
Colorado projected last week that sales would generate more than $100 million a year toward a general fund of about $9 billion. But Hickenlooper, who opposed legalizing marijuana, said he’s telling fellow governors that he’s not counting on it to lower other taxes or for spending — and that they shouldn’t, either.
(click here to continue reading Colorado’s Experience With Legal Pot Has U.S. Governors Curious – Bloomberg.)
and this is despite admitting in his own state budget that legal cannabis sales could reach $1,000,000,000 in their very first year! Just consider that for a second: a newly legal industry that already is this significant, despite foot dragging from the Beer Baron, and others of his ilk who hold anachronistic viewpoints about the demon weed.
Beer Money at the MCA
new budget numbers predicted that those marijuana taxes could add more than $100 million a year to state coffers, far more than earlier estimates.
The figures offered one of the first glimpses into how the bustling market for recreational marijuana was beginning to reshape government bottom lines — an important question as marijuana advocates push to expand legalization beyond Colorado and Washington State into states including Arizona, Alaska and Oregon.
In Colorado, where recreational sales began on Jan. 1 with hourlong waits, a budget proposal from Gov. John W. Hickenlooper estimated that the state’s marijuana industry could reach $1 billion in sales in the next fiscal year, with recreational sales making up about $610 million of that business.
“It’s well on its way to being a billion-dollar industry,” said Michael Elliott, executive director of the Marijuana Industry Group, a Colorado trade association. “We went from 110,000 medical marijuana patients to four billion people in the world who are 21 and up.”
In the budget proposal that Mr. Hickenlooper released Wednesday, his office said the state could collect about $134 million in taxes from recreational and medical marijuana for the fiscal year beginning in July.
(click here to continue reading Colorado Expects to Reap Tax Bonanza From Legal Marijuana Sales – NYTimes.com.)
Shiner Bock in Lower Yurtistan
and the truth is that Gov Hickenlooper is just a hypocrite, a politician, in other words:
But the state’s Democratic governor said he “hates” his state’s legal weed “experiment.”
Gov. John Hickenlooper revealed his feelings about marijuana legalization to the Durango Herald’s editorial board Friday.
“I hate Colorado having to be the experiment,” he told the newspaper.
The governor said he intends the regulation of legal weed to be even more strenuous than alcohol. “We are going to regulate the living daylights out of it,” he told the Herald.
Hickenlooper was a beer brewer before governor and made his fortune from selling alcoholic beverages — a fortune that wouldn’t have been possible had the U.S. not ended its prohibition on alcohol in 1933. The irony that he hates the the end of another drug’s prohibition in Colorado was not lost on Marijuana Policy Project’s communications director, Mason Tvert.
“I doubt Gov. Hickenlooper felt like he was participating in an experiment when he was making a living selling alcohol in a legal market,” Tvert told The Huffington Post. “Our state has been successfully regulating alcohol for quite some time, so regulating a less harmful substance like marijuana is hardly something new. Does the governor want to go back to a system in which cartels control marijuana instead of licensed businesses and thousands of responsible adults are punished each year simply for using it? We let that experiment go on for 80 years and it never worked.”
Tvert also called out the governor for suggesting that marijuana should be more heavily regulated than alcohol. “Every objective study on marijuana has concluded that it is less toxic than alcohol, less addictive, and less likely to contribute to violent and reckless behavior,” Tvert said. “If he is truly concerned about public health, he should be encouraging adults to consider making the safer choice to use marijuana instead of alcohol when they are socializing or relaxing after work.”
(click here to continue reading Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper Hates His State’s Legal Weed ‘Experiment’.)
Wouldn’t our society be better off if fatties were smoked at sports arenas instead of endless 20 oz mugs of beer? Not to say that pot smokers can’t be aggressive or violent, but let your own experience with drunks be a guide.
Goose Island in black and white
This sounds like a good thing for Chicago; in our society, Defense budget items are sacrosanct, as we1 would rather cut the ability of poor people to eat2, or the medical cost reimbursements of a veteran before we3 slice a dime from the military machine’s budget…
Chicago will be the site of a digital manufacturing institute backed by $70 million in government money and another $250 million of private finding…Chicago competed against several other locations in a bidding process run by the Defense Department. The city envisions the institute would focus on such projects as the faster and cheaper production of a next-generation aircraft engine; drastically reducing the amount of scrap material associated with small manufacturing runs; and speeding the design process among geographically dispersed suppliers.
“This is clearly, without a doubt, one of the most significant things to secure Chicago’s long-term economic future,” Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said in a Saturday interview. “It is the best insurance policy you can buy, which is major research capacity.”
The $70 million grant will come from the Department of Defense. But far more was at stake, as city officials and business leaders quietly raised private commitments in excess of $5 million each from General Electric, Rolls-Royce, Procter & Gamble, Siemens, Lockheed Martin and The Dow Chemical Co.
The new institute, which is proposed for a leased building on the northern end of Goose Island, would fall under the oversight of UI Labs, a nascent University of Illinois-affiliated effort focused on turning academic research into moneymaking, job-creating products. UI Labs stands for “Universities and Industries.”
(click here to continue reading Chicago wins bid for $320 million manufacturing hub – chicagotribune.com.)
Train on Cherry Avenue
Ambitions Are Low
Check out the old timey religion
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I took Uhh, because it’s national Margarita day? on February 22, 2014 at 04:14PM
and processed it in my digital darkroom on February 22, 2014 at 10:16PM
Sursum Vestri Culus – a rough sketch of the flag for Upper Yurtistan
The flag colors:
courtesy of the Minister of Color and Rhetoric
and the treaty establishing its boundaries:
Treaty of The Expansion of Upper Yurtistan
Honoria, Minister of Color and Rhetoric
Minister of Design and The Future, Blue
Yurtistan Yellow
Upper Yurtistan
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Update, added the whole SMS discussion of the proper phrase. You know, for posterity.
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I took Click Here To Confirm on November 26, 2012 at 10:51AM
and processed it in my digital darkroom on November 28, 2012 at 02:11PM
My photo was used to illustrate this post
Google’s new home, the Fulton Market Cold Storage Building before renovation. Photo by Seth Anderson] The West Loop and Near West Side are gaining more momentum as Chicago’s newest tech hotspots every week. As Chicago’s economy turns towards young startups and tech incubators to help usher in the new century, neighborhood demographics and flagship business tenants are changing constantly. With dozens of new coworking spaces, names like Groupon, Lightbank and soon-to-be Motorola, River North has been the city’s tech powerhouse for at least the last five years. However some are saying that the near north neighborhood known for its luxury high rises and fine dining has become saturated and too expensive for newer, younger and less endowed companies.
click here to keep reading :
Chicago’s Near West Side Is The Next Big Thing For Tech – Ch-ch-ch-changes – Curbed Chicago
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Not only a quick, shallow review, but also will probably be disjointed since I watched this film on my iPad while on my treadmill, over a period of 3 days. Anyway, how did this film get such good press? Full of gangster clichés, Chicago tropes, and populated by Kevin Costner’s usual Bloomingdale’s store mannequin style of acting. There are an insane amount of continuity, factual and editing problems, enough to start me laughing eventually. Even the famous scene, so beloved by News America’s thuggish CEO, Paul Carlucci, doesn’t get explained – if you didn’t know before hand what was going on, you were not informed. Why does De Niro’s Al Capone suddenly start beating his own guy with a baseball bat? Doesn’t seem to be very emblematic of teamwork to me. Were there a couple pages of script that got cut out?
Somewhere in Chicago under the El
I watched the entire movie, so it wasn’t horrible, but it boggles my mind that The Untouchables allegedly propelled Kevin Costner to film star status.
Only Don’t Tell Me You’re Innocent
As an aside, has Kevin Costner ever been in a good film, a movie where his acting was the essential ingredient? I can’t say I’ve seen one, but then I haven’t ever sat through either of his big films: The Bodygaurd, nor Waterworld. I did watch about 15 minutes of The Bodyguard once on television, but decided I needed to trim my toenails instead of wasting more time with that dreck. Waterworld might be more fun to watch, albeit not in the way Costner intended. Waterworld was famous for a minute for being an expensive flop, full of closeups of Costner’s face, but empty of plot.
Speaking of Waterworld, some fun gossip collected by IMDb…
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I took Ballin’ on January 11, 2014 at 06:33PM
and processed it in my digital darkroom on February 13, 2014 at 03:10PM
Amazon – The Original Store
George Packer discovers a truth about corporate America, including the faux Libertarian strain in the tech industry: namely, they are extremely reluctant to talk to outsiders about anything, consequential, or not.
To some degree, secrecy prevails in all American corporations, and in large institutions generally. No one at these places wants to get caught saying the wrong thing. A gaffe (famously defined by Michael Kinsley as inadvertently telling the truth) is more likely to get you fired than dishonesty, deception, or any number of other ethical breaches. And this situation keeps getting worse, as any reporter who has had to negotiate ground rules with phrases like “on background with quote approval” knows all too well. It was a great relief to read Will Blythe’s Times Op-Ed about refusing to sign a termination agreement after being fired from the digital publisher Byliner because it would have prohibited him from saying anything disparaging about the company. The inexorable inflation of ground rules, non-disclosure agreements, and other impediments to speaking and writing can only be stopped when people refuse to go along with them.
I was naïve about tech companies until I started reporting on them. They turn out to be at least as closed as companies in other industries. This seems backwards—aren’t they filled with hardcore libertarians who want an end to privacy as we’ve known it, a more open and connected world? Apparently for everyone except themselves. And perhaps a sector that monetizes information is more likely to become obsessed with protecting it than if the product were oil or cars. But even in this atmosphere, Amazon is reflexively, absurdly secretive—only giving the absolute minimum information required by law or P.R. In response to a host of fact-checking questions, many of the company’s answers were along the lines of “We don’t break out that number externally,” “We do not share Kindle sales figures,” and “As a general practice, we don’t discuss our business practices with publishers or other suppliers.”
…
But I would argue that a culture of secrecy is bound to end up harming the institution itself, especially when it’s firmly under the control of one leader, as Amazon is under Jeff Bezos. Without some permeability to the outside world, groupthink takes over, bad habits become entrenched, and a company, like a government, is slow to recognize problems that are apparent to everyone else. I saw this happening with American officials in Iraq, holed up in the Embassy in the middle of the Green Zone and beguiled by their own data points while the country outside spiraled down in flames.
(click here to continue reading Amazon and the Perils of Non-Disclosure : The New Yorker.)
Randy’s Bookshelves Number 1
If you are interested in Amazon and the book publishing industry, you should also read Mr. Packer’s fascinating article, Cheap Words, with its byline, Amazon is good for customers, but is it good for books? which begins;
Amazon is a global superstore, like Walmart. It’s also a hardware manufacturer, like Apple, and a utility, like Con Edison, and a video distributor, like Netflix, and a book publisher, like Random House, and a production studio, like Paramount, and a literary magazine, like The Paris Review, and a grocery deliverer, like FreshDirect, and someday it might be a package service, like U.P.S. Its founder and chief executive, Jeff Bezos, also owns a major newspaper, the Washington Post. All these streams and tributaries make Amazon something radically new in the history of American business. Sam Walton wanted merely to be the world’s biggest retailer. After Apple launched the iPod, Steve Jobs didn’t sign up pop stars for recording contracts. A.T. & T. doesn’t build transmission towers and rent them to smaller phone companies, the way Amazon Web Services provides server infrastructure for startups (not to mention the C.I.A.). Amazon’s identity and goals are never clear and always fluid, which makes the company destabilizing and intimidating.
Bezos originally thought of calling his company Relentless.com—that U.R.L. still takes you to Amazon’s site—before adopting the name of the world’s largest river by volume. (If Bezos were a reader of classic American fiction, he might have hit upon Octopus.com.) Amazon’s shape-shifting, engulfing quality, its tentacles extending in all directions, makes it unusual even in the tech industry, where rapid growth, not profitability, is the measure of success. Amazon is not just the “Everything Store,” to quote the title of Brad Stone’s rich chronicle of Bezos and his company; it’s more like the Everything. What remains constant is ambition, and the search for new things to be ambitious about.
(click here to continue reading George Packer: Is Amazon Bad for Books? : The New Yorker.)
—
Blogger’s Note: I was working on this blog post, and had a few more sentences written than appear here. However, I typed relentless.com into my browser1, and my computer instantly crashed with a System Kernel Panic. So only Jeff Bezos knows what else I had written, I don’t time to recreate my blah-blah…
Footnotes:
Revolution of The Innocent
Well, that’s one way to reign in the NSA, albeit a tactic not likely to succeed. Good for Marc Roberts though…
The NSA data centre1 in Bluffdale, Utah, will require 1.7m gallons of water daily, activists estimate. The National Security Agency, already under siege in Washington, faces a fresh attempt to curtail its activities from a Utah legislator who wants to cut off the surveillance agency’s water supply.
Marc Roberts, a first-term Republican lawmaker in the Beehive State, plans this week to begin a quixotic quest to check government surveillance starting at a local level. He will introduce a bill that would prevent anyone from supplying water to the $1bn-plus data center the NSA is constructing in his state at Bluffdale.
The bill is about telling the federal government “if you want to spy on the whole world and American citizens, great, but we’re not going to help you,” Roberts told the Guardian.
Supporters of the bill freely admit they’re at a disadvantage. Roberts is still talking with colleagues to find co-sponsors. His activist allies expect a steep, uphill struggle against the NSA’s supporters in conservative Utah, as well as business groups whom Roberts expects will argue that the data center will create jobs and bolster the local economy.
(click here to continue reading Utah lawmaker floats bill to cut off NSA data centre’s water supply | World news | theguardian.com.)
Footnotes:
Old Town Triangle District
I received this email last week:
Hi- your photo of the Old Town Triangle/ Historic District sign is fantastic. I’d love to use it for a mailing…I’m a Realtor. How do you feel about that and how would you want to be credited for the image?
Thanks-Jennifer Kindel
I politely responded that I’d let her use the photo for a reduced rate of $300, asked where I should send her a purchase order, and then even asked as a post script if she had any interesting loft style properties she could show us, preferably live/work buildings.
I never heard from Ms. Kindel again. She only wanted an image to use for free in her mailer, I’m sure she frequently agrees to waive her real estate commission when she sells a place, right? I wonder if she pays anything to the USPS when she sends out her mailer? Probably not, they don’t expect compensation for their work either.
If I wanted to send a follow-up, it wouldn’t be too difficult, here’s Jennifer Kindel’s LinkedIn page, her Twitter account, her Prudential-Rubloff home page, and so on. But I guess no response is enough of a response, actually better than an indignant reply, as long as she doesn’t go ahead and use the photo without compensating me.
This has been another edition of NYCHMPFF 1
Old Town Ale House
Good Humor Man
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I took Make It Not Like All The Rest on October 19, 2013 at 04:22PM
and processed it in my digital darkroom on February 06, 2014 at 03:51PM