The CIA is planting web beacons inside Microsoft Word documents to track whistleblowers, journalists and informants, according to WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks released details on what it said is a Central Intelligence Agency document tracking program called Scribbles, part of the agency’s effort to keep tabs on documents leaked to whistleblowers and journalists. Scribbles allegedly embeds a web beacon-style tag into watermarks located on Microsoft Word documents that can report document analytics back to the CIA. ...

Camaraderie, adventure, danger, the desire to prove oneself all play their part too, as with any army. And, perhaps more than most regular armies, love affairs gone wrong propel many into the arms of the Legion. – Robert Twigger in The Legend of the French Foreign Legion

The CIA didn’t break Signal or WhatsApp… despite what you’ve heard. The agency might be able to break into your phone, but files released today show no ability to intercept encrypted chats before they arrive there. There’s been one particularly misleading claim repeated throughout coverage of CIA documents released by WikiLeaks today: that the agency’s in-house hackers “bypassed” the encryption used by popular secure-chat software like Signal and WhatsApp. It doesn’t. Instead, it has the ability, in some cases, to take control of entire phones; accessing encrypted chats is simply one of many security implications of this. ...

Free software is software that respects users’ freedom and community. It’s not about price. It’s libre, not gratis. With any program, there are two possibilities: either the users control the program, or the program controls the users. When the users control the program, that’s free software—they control the things they do with it, and thus it respects their freedom and their community. If they don’t have full control over it, then it’s user-subjugating, non-free proprietary software—the program controls the users, and the program’s owners control the program, so it becomes an instrument of unjust power for the owner over the users. ...

Facebook does not connect people together; Facebook connects people to Facebook, Inc. Encouraging individual sovereignty and a healthy commons Abstract: Facebook’s business model is to be the man in the middle; to track every move you, your family, and your friends make, to store all that information indefinitely, and continuously analyse it to understand you better in order to exploit you by manipulating you for financial and political gain. Facebook isn’t a social network, it is a scanner that digitises human beings. It is, for all intents and purposes, the camera that captures your soul. Facebook’s business is to simulate you and to own and control your simulation, thereby owning and controlling you. ...

L’Éducation Nationale a résolu le problème : pour réduire les lacunes, on évite d’en apprendre trop. Imparable. Comme l’a très bien montré Ingrid Riocreux, certains journalistes n’ont pas hésité, tout en se muant en spécialistes auto-proclamés de l’enseignement du français, à reprocher à ceux qui s’indignaient de l’apparition du prédicat de s’attacher à un détail. On pourrait inversement se demander si d’autres ne se sont pas servis du prédicat pour faire oublier tout le reste. Tout comme on a accusé les pourfendeurs de la réforme d’être réfractaires à tout changement, dans le seul but d’éviter le débat. Pour ne jamais remettre en cause les réformes de l’école, on taxe désormais d’« antipédagogisme ». ...

By James Rickards - Daily Reckoning China’s problems are not entirely external and are not limited to the new Trump administration. China is now embroiled in an internal political struggle around the efforts of President Xi to make himself the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao Zedong. President Xi’s first five-year term expires in March 2018. He is certain to be elected to a second term, but he has so far deviated from the script by not designating any potential successors for a smooth transition in 2023. At a minimum, this will make Xi more powerful after 2018 because it will eliminate the lame duck factor. ...

Google as a fortune teller Governmental control is nothing compared to what Google is up to. The company is creating a wholly new genus of capitalism, a systemic coherent new logic of accumulation we should call surveillance capitalism. Is there nothing we can do? Google surpassed Apple as the world’s most highly valued company in January for the first time since 2010. (Back then each company was worth less than 200 billion. Now each is valued at well over 500 billion.) ...

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