How easy is it to exploit Airbnb? While searching for my grifter, I found out.
Source: I Accidentally Uncovered a Nationwide Scam on Airbnb – VICE
After reading this, I might not stay in an AirBnb again. You need to at least skim through this article if you ever stay via AirBnb. Worse, AirBnb rarely – if ever – refunds the costs to those customers who have been scammed.
AirBnb refuses to talk publicly about the scam unearthed in this report.
The FBI is now involved.
We thoroughly evaluate the claims made by Bloomberg in their Supermicro China tampering stories and found them likely impossible or implausible at best. We take stock of sources and discuss the next steps calling for formal SEC and shareholder investigations of Bloomberg.
Source: Investigating Implausible Bloomberg Supermicro Stories
Apple and Amazon, both named as allegedly using the allegedly hacked servers, have denied the Bloomberg accusations. Apple has called for Bloomberg to retract the article. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued a statement appearing to agree with Apple.
The Bloomberg article, as noted in the linked story, appears to have numerous technical inaccuracies.
More than a quarter million comments submitted to the Food and Drug Administration about flavored vapor products were fake, according to a watchdog group.
Source: FDA hit with bot-generated wave of fake comments on flavored vapor products
About one half million comments were filed of which 255,000 have already been evaluated as fake; and additional 200,000 are also thought to be fake.
Fake news, fake reviews, fake social media propaganda, fake public comments – this isn’t the great Internet world of the future we were promised đ
A proposed class-action lawsuit alleging Facebookâs ad placement tools facilitate discrimination against older job seekers has been expanded to identify additional companies, further widening the latest front in claims that candidates are being filtered out by gender, geography, race and age.
âWhen Facebookâs own algorithm disproportionately directs ads to younger workers at the exclusion of older workers, Facebook and the advertisers who are using Facebook as an agent to send their advertisements are engaging in disparate treatment,â
…
In its amended lawsuit, the union alleged that Facebook also uses age-filtering in ads intended to find its own new employees.
Source: Facebook Tools Are Used to Screen Out Older Job Seekers, Lawsuit Claims – Bloomberg
More on this on my other blog:
Major U.S. employers use social mediaâs ability to display job ads only to those in certain age groups, such as between age 25 to 36, or below age 38 or below age 50. They are using this feature to advertise job openings only to younger workers, thereby removing older workers from their candidate pool.
Examples:
Verizon targeted showed ads only to those age 25 to 36 years old
UPS targeted age 19 to 35
State Farm targeted age 19 to 35
The story is well past the “alleged discrimination” phase as many companies admitted they were targeting ads by age, including Verizon, Target, Facebook, Goldman-Sachs and so on. Facebook defends age discrimination in job advertising as “an accepted industry practice”.
Facebook is a global surveillance and propaganda platform that engages and supports age, gender and racial discrimination.
In China, high skilled tech workers become unemployable as early as 30 years old.
âMost people in their 30s are married and have to take care of their familyâtheyâre not able to focus on the high-intensity work.â
Source: Chinaâs Tech Industry Wants Youth, Not Experience – Bloomberg
Personal note – I graduated in 2012 with an M.S. in software engineering (GPA 4.0, thesis on Android and smart device power management). I already had an M.B.A. and a B.S. in computer science and had worked in Silicon Valley, at Microsoft and for other organizations. I had 3 degrees – in fact, the top 3 most in demand degrees in the United States at the time.
After completing the M.S., I applied for jobs. I did not receive a single response. Not one.
I was unemployable in tech because of age.
When the tech industry tells you they do not discriminate on the basis of age they are straight up lying. Former colleagues were dismissed because of age (one received a large settlement from his former employer).
The latest fads in tech are almost always short lived. Having 10 years experience is a negative – no one needs someone experienced in tech that is fading. What they want is a constant influx of young talent fresh out of college and trained in the latest fad. (I was fresh out of grad school but I was not young.) There is a presumption that older workers, bogged down with family life, cannot learn new technology (earning an MS in software engineering in my 50s proves that assertion wrong).
The tech sector is a mess from a career standpoint and is why I discourage young people from pursuing “high tech” (which has become a synonym for software). I encourage youth to consider other fields of engineering and science where they can put software skills to use.
Tech’s problem with age discrimination has been around forever. Growing up in Silicon Valley, my neighbor’s house was inhabited by 3 engineers, in sequence. Every one of them was laid off by age 30 and all left the field. Nothing has changed.
The H-1B and OPT visas staff about 3 million positions in the U.S. (almost all in high tech and most in software). These worker visas are temporary – after up to 6 years of work, they too are expendable. We have institutionalized the consumption of young tech talent. Neither of these visas is an immigrant visa – if we require more tech talent from abroad, we should be granting permanent residency visas but we are not. Its because we need a constant stream of young talent to be treated as a consumable commodity.
That companies can intentionally discard half or more of the potential work force tells you that the field has a surplus of workers, not a shortage. The only “shortage” is of young tech workers but this is a manufactured shortage.
From an employment and career standpoint, this is a mess but it seems to work great for shareholders so this status quo will remain.
They collect cell phone location data collected by all major cellular phone carriers, and then sell that location data to law enforcement agencies (no warrant needed). The data is used to conduct surveillance on potentially everyone in the U.S. who has a cellular phone.
When the FCC mandated “wireless 911” technology so that phones would be required to report their position to 911 operators, I predicted this would be used for surveillance purposes and was, in fact, the primary goal.
I’ve written a detailed of explanation of the enormous quantity of data that Facebook is accumulating on each of us, and some of the shocking methods they use to spy on us. That explanation is available at my Learn2C (programming) web site.
At its core, Facebook is a global surveillance and propaganda platform and nothing more.
They are using every possible method to track our online activities, our mobile device activities (location, phone and text message data, web access), our offline activities (yes, they know when you bought something at a retail store having nothing to do with Facebook) and how they harvest our Group memberships, Page Likes and Post Likes to develop elaborate models for each of us – to describe our behavior, our interest and activities, our physical and mental health, our “hot issues” and more. It is truly frightening what Facebook is doing.
For those reasons I no longer believe it is save for anyone to use Facebook. If you do not understand what the problem is with Facebook , you need to read my essay.
A follow up post will discuss ways to minimize Facebook’s surveillance if you are not able to delete your account at this time.
VCs discrimate against anyone over age 30 and especially over age 40
Meanwhile, Facebook spies on everyone and uses that data to propagandize us with messaging designed to control our minds.
The tech industry is looking pretty damned awful right now.
And just like that, possessing the bitcoin blockchain just became a Federal crime: Blockchain for bitcoin is infected with child porn | New York Post
The story of how that Sudafed ad got to me begins at Walgreens. As I bought tissues and Afrin, I keyed in my phone number so I could get loyalty points.
Source: Facebook Really Is Spying on You, Just Not Through Your Phoneâs Mic – WSJ
Stores use your loyalty card to identify you and all of your purchases. Your purchase transactions are then sold to other marketing companies. This data, in turn, can and is matched to your Facebook account and other online data using the phone number that you gave to the store and to Facebook or Google.
Think about how Facebook, Twitter and other online services are constantly pestering you to give them your phone number. Once they have your phone number, anything else you do that is linked to your phone number – such as using a loyalty card when buying stuff at Safeway or Walgreen’s is then accessible.
Update: CONFIRMED. Facebook purchases your online retail store purchase data from companies like Axciom, Datalogix, Epsilon and others. FB even says so buried in their anti-privacy policy. Your email address, phone number and possible credit number are used to link your Facebook surveillance logs with your offline purchases.
Everyone is also using the tracking data that Google collects on your Android phone to monitor where you are. Remember, that too is tied to your phone number. As I described on my other blog, the Facebook dossier even tracks what apps you have on your phone and data mines that to identify potential marketing opportunities.
Google and Facebook are doing highly invasive surveillance and almost no one understands what is being done or what this means.