Tag Archives: Google

Google News on My Pixel 6 Tells Me to Put Toilet Paper in the Freezer. Failing American Economy. Venezuelans Don’t Like Chicago.

Google News on My Pixel 6 Tells Me to Put Toilet Paper in the Freezer. Failing American Economy. Venezuelans Don’t Like Chicago.

There’s been a steep decline in Google News on my phone, and now it recommends stories saying “Life hack, put your toilet paper in the freezer.”

This after Google laid off at least 50 people from their News division. So why wouldn’t it behave more like MSN floating garbage and nonsense to the top now?

I’ve noticed a sharp increase in sources like the tabloid sites as well.

In just a generation, we’ve gone from Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather, to Lester Holt and Bill O’Reilly, to THIS.

The billionaires bought the news figuring they could run it as a propaganda rag that people would pay money to read. Then when they erected paywalls, they noticed they lost their ad revenue with very few subscribers, thus losing more money than they gained in subscriptions, and then after that they decided to do mass layoffs or even put the companies into bankruptcy and walk away from it.

The news is dead.

I was on the phone with my mother, who is a nurse and so hasn’t had trouble finding work since the early 1980s recession.

It’s so long ago now, plus my dad confiscated all the money and paid the bills himself and kept it all in his checking account, so she had no idea what inflation was running in that era, but I did manage to finally get through to her what finding a job is like now.

The U6 unemployment rate, which counts workers working REALLY bad jobs that are way beneath their skill set, or a few hours a week because they can’t find anything else, and “discouraged” workers is over 7.5% in Illinois right now. (October 2023, latest data, BLS)

It’s over 10% in Los Angeles and New York City.

7.2% in the US overall.

The early 80s recession was considered horrific, but the worst that unemployment ever got was near 11% by this measure, which they don’t publish conspicuously anymore, and in 1981 when she became a nurse it was about like it is now.

I asked her “So how were you doing in the jobs market in 1980 and 1981 when you weren’t a nurse yet?”

She said, something like “Oh it was terrible out there. All I could find was a waitress job at Richards (a restaurant in Indiana, I don’t know if it’s still there, but it had decent food in the 90s), and it barely paid me $2 an hour after I counted my tips and I had to go in for 10 hours every day to be on the clock for 7 because they did split shifts where I had to sit 3 hours with nothing to do then clock in for the next rush.”

I said, “Did you try to find anything better than this?”

She said, “Oh yeah, I was out there pounding the pavement. I tried to get a job at GM and they wouldn’t hire me. I went out to RCA and they hired both of your dad’s sisters but didn’t call me back.”

My dad’s sisters both have severe mental illness, so I can’t imagine they even had that job 3 months later knowing them. But they wouldn’t hire mom.

She said, “Finally I spent $1,600 on nursing school.” ($6,000 in 2023)

The State was running some sort of program where 160 people applied for 24 spots where the State would help them with some of their expenses.

My dad tried to sabotage her by not allowing her to study during the evenings “Because you have other things to do.” and turning off her alarm so it wouldn’t ring. Knowing that if she missed one day that they’d kick her out.

At first, he said “If you can find $1,600 you can go to school.” and walked off laughing and puffing a cigarette. He never figured she would. My grandmother and great-grandmother pooled the money together and paid for everything, so he resorted to sabotage saying “You’ll leave me if you become a nurse.”

He was always paranoid that she’d leave, but he would never treat her well so she figured out a way to leave. Her next two husbands were much worse.

But she got around the alarm clock sabotage by setting a second alarm. He can’t be woken up by anything so she set that for 3 AM and got a couple hours sleep, woke up, studied, and slipped out the door, and he never figured out what was going on.

But, it was bad out there in the 80s, real bad.

The news SAID it was bad, which is something they won’t do today even though it’s as bad finding a good job as it was in 1981.

The Chicago Tribune reported yesterday that many Venezuelan migrants were shocked that they came here and there’s nothing for them and they’ve been sleeping on the floor at the airport or in a tent city in a public park for months.

It’s starting to get cold and it’ll only get worse.

Many of them now apply for funds from the State through Catholic Charities to self-deport back to Venezuela, or to give up and go back down to a State where they won’t freeze to death.

They all got snookered in thinking it would be better in America for them than it would be in Venezuela, and the news quoted one man who came to Chicago as saying, “The American Dream no longer exists. […] If I’m going to sleep on the ground in Chicago I’d rather do it in Venezuela.”

So, all they did was walk through a jungle in a caravan, sneak into the US, and realize that it’s a real estate scam with bad winters, bullets flying everywhere, no jobs, and a lot of people who REALLY don’t want them here (including Chicagoans after they passed a “Welcoming City Ordinance” and then got 20,000 Venezuelans), and now they want to go back to Venezuela, where they will be treated worse than if they had never left for “failing to support the revolution”, which has left them with money worth so little that they “throw it in the trash because it’s not worth the trip to the bank” and “we still owe De La Rue millions and millions of dollars for printing it” according to one of the SeaMonkey (web browser suite) developers I’ve spoken to, who is in Venezuela.

I asked “tomman” what he thought about the mass illegal migration to the US, and he said “The last thing we need is more defectors.”, he seemed to be distraught by the idea that they’ve given up fixing anything and left.

In my opinion, this whole thing probably started because a few people spread rumors that in America the streets are paved with gold, and instead they’ve come to ANOTHER third world country that’s only “rich” because there’s about 1,600 people in the entire country that have amassed nearly all of the wealth. They hide in the shadows, control everything, buy the government you see, and don’t pay their taxes, so everything has been falling apart HERE too since about 2003 (five years later than Venezuela).

I also asked “tomman” how they could be so poor when they have more oil than Saudi Arabia. He said, “No Latin American country has ever been smart enough to do anything with that.”

Bad Lenovo UEFI Firmware Causes Nine Models to Freeze on Resume from Suspend. Delays Linux 6.6.

Bad Lenovo UEFI Firmware Causes Nine Models to Freeze on Resume from Suspend. Delays Linux 6.6.

I don’t even want to write about Lenovo again in my life, since they are such a nasty company, but Roy asked me to say something.

Ever since 2016 when they admitted to me that there was a deal with Microsoft to lock Linux out of the Yoga 900 ISK2, but then proceeded to defame me after the media reported on a Reddit post I made on the subject that went viral, and then quietly fixed it after I took legal action against them, I’ve been telling people what a super shitty company they are.

Lenovo is a Chinese company, so it probably shouldn’t come as any shock that they banned everyone in the State that I live in from commenting on their forum until the scandal died down.

In China, when someone is talking, you typically figure out abhorrent ways to stop them from talking, which don’t work in a Free country. For Lenovo, really all they could do was try to silence people on their own support forum, but by then it was too late.

They also indiscriminately banned anyone who talked about “hacking” the board with an external flasher to unhide the “ACPI” option (to allow other operating systems to see the storage device), which was always present, but hidden as per their illegal contract with Microsoft, which they quickly got scrapped after the State of Illinois started investigating them.

The late 2020 Tiger Lake-based ThinkBook 15 I have is a little better.

Lenovo’s advice was to disable “Secure Boot”, as all it has ever done for Linux is cause problems due to extra complexity and bugs, as it is a Microsoft requirement to license Windows to OEMs, which is the default state of the laptop. “Secure Boot” actually does nothing to secure the computer from most any actual security threat that anyone really faces.

In at least one case, on my Yoga 900 ISK2, Ubuntu updated the “Secure Boot” dbx due to “Boothole”, and the revocation update (dbx) caused Fedora to fail to boot with a “Security policy violation.”

To unjam it I had to reset “Secure Boot” to the factory settings and that apparently wiped the dbx update. At that point I turned “Secure Boot” off and have never turned it on after removing Windows from a PC since then.

Lenovo’s other advice for this laptop, even though the “fake RAID” support was added to Linux after the 2016 incident by Intel (after they refused to document it for over a year!), is to turn that off and set the disk controller to “AHCI”.

Matthew Garrett claimed that this had something to do with power management, but he was either wrong or lying, because when I run powertop as a system service (to set all power management tunables to on), I always get better battery life than Windows does.

He’s very obtuse, and it’s probably because his job at various points in time involved implementing Microsoft nonsense like “Secure Boot” in Linux.

They need to get rid of the “Free Software Award” because they have such a bad habit of giving it to the wrong people.

(It’s like watching Donald Trump putting the Presidential Medal of Freedom on people at this point.)

Other than a bunch of “FIRMWARE BUG” crap on my 2020 Lenovo laptop that prints to the screen (which Windows and IBM Fedora hides, but Debian doesn’t), the laptop works fine with Linux.

But Lenovo released, apparently, more than nine models of AMD-based laptops with UEFI bugs that prevent the user from resuming from suspend due to fatal ACPI errors, which includes the AMD option for the laptop model I’m writing this on.

Although, mine’s an Intel, so in your face to all those “AMD is better” people. 🙂

The Linux kernel’s 6.6 release was delayed while workarounds that added 78 more lines of firmware bug workarounds was added.

Linus Torvalds was obviously furious, but criminals and idiots put him in therapy for yelling at them with incompetent code in the past, and he put Linux under the control of a now Microsoft-controlled “Linux Foundation” and so to keep his job, he can’t say much anymore.

According to Roy Schestowitz, the culprit was something that a Chinese man exhaling some sort of smoke (to look macho I guess?) on his Microsoft GitHub page did in the ACPI code in the Linux kernel.

Apparently, his name is Huacai Chen and he works at Loongson.

Linus Torvalds very obviously wanted to scream at him (backscroll and read down) for moving ACPI code around to fix something and then breaking other things, then hiding that they were broken until users started writing in saying they upgraded their kernel, some stuff happened, and kersplat.

I don’t even plan to stay on the PC after this laptop unless I decide to buy a model with open source firmware from System76 instead of this Lenovo garbage which is barely even code.

UEFI is garbage, Microsoft is garbage, Lenovo is fucking garbaaaage. The entire PC situation is cat shit wrapped in dog shit. And the people working on things like “Secure Boot in Linux” just make it so much worse from there.

This is the worst time to own a x86 PC, EVER.

Lenovo has never supported updating your UEFI firmware on most of their products using anything available to Linux users, even LVFS, which is a backdoor, and I wouldn’t trust them not to brick my computer or make it worse if they did.

I uninstalled LVFS because it started spitting an error message into Debian. It’s in charge of updating the dbx, but fuck dbx, fuck “Secure Boot” (which makes it harder to plug actual security holes), fuck Microsoft, and fuck the people Microsoft gets to make this my problem.

As a user, I just think these things are deplorable, but large corporations have turned Linux into some shitty colony where they can put DRM malware, universal backdoors, and absolutely broken shit with no repercussions. None. Not even that Linus Torvalds might yell at them.

So the last time the UEFI in my ThinkBook 15 was updated was August 2021, when I switched it over to Linux.

By that point, they had fixed most of the really nasty bugs they shipped the laptop with, which were even causing problems in Windows, but as firmware upgrades are dangerous and I have no warranty now, and they require Windows, I don’t plan to touch the firmware on this laptop ever again.

It’s just not worth it. One of the bigger problems with UEFI is that it’s just such a monster that you can keep fixing bugs forever, and that’s why “Secure Boot” will never work even if they wanted it to.

If you could get past the issues like “This is barely even code. It’s just a pile of garbage.”, the x86 PC might be worth plodding along with.

Now that they make the Raspberry Pi 5, and it’s several times faster than its predecessor, I wonder why we’re even talking about sticking around for more abuse.

When the UEFI firmware Lenovo ships is so fragile that a guy working for a hardware company making totally unrelated MIPS processors in China bumps something and an x86 Lenovo laptop that people bought THREE GODDAMN YEARS AGO starts malfunctioning if anyone installs that kernel, it’s time to look for greener fields.

UEFI is such a catastrophe, that it’s not even just a Freedom issue.

It’s such a massive fucking colossal failure on a code level that Google, which certainly doesn’t care about your Freedom, based the Chromebook firmware on a variation of Coreboot.

My next system will probably just be Linux running off some cheap flash memory on a ~$80 ARM computer. The fact that the Pi 5 finally has a SKU with 8 GB RAM really REALLY helps. With the help of ZStandard compressed ZRam, you can make KDE work with this.

No more of these $1,000 Lenovo PC laptops full of LULZ for firmware and Chinesium keyboards where buttons randomly break and need to be remapped to another key because they’re three years old, and playing “How do I brutally murder Windows 11 this time? Hmm…. DIE DIE DIE!!!!!”

Google Announces End of Support for Ogg Theora. Cites “Zero Day Security Issues” in Media Codecs; Forgets to Mention Their Own Codecs are the Problem.

Google Announces End of Support for Ogg Theora. Cites “Zero Day Security Issues” in Media Codecs; Forgets to Mention Their Own Codecs are the Problem.

Google has announced the “end of support” for Ogg Theora.

They claim it’s not widely used.

Wikipedia is one site that used it extensively, but Google moles are filling the site up with Googleisms so that nobody can access parts of Wikipedia without support for media codecs which have had some of the worst security disasters ever found in media codecs lately. libvpx and WebP, both Google formats.

There’s only 5 security vulnerabilities in the MITRE CVE database that even mention Theora, and the last one was in 2011.

Meanwhile, Google’s libvpx has 24 and its WebP image format has 34.

There isn’t really anything to prove Google’s claim that there is some imminent danger from Theora. It’s a much simpler and well-written codec. It’s also been around longer.

Google has, however, proven that it proliferates new formats, is incapable or unwilling to properly debug, them and then by the time they even start to get used on the Web, they’re off to something else.

There’s a lot of media codec attack surface in Chrome and that’s mainly because of Google adding new formats that are pointlessly different.

It’s also not clear at all that AV1 or WebM are free of legal dangers.

When the MPEG-LA threatened everyone using VP8 (a Google format), Google quietly paid them off so they would shut up. Who even knows what the REAL situation is with AV1 and WebM? Google won’t tell you.

The only thing we do know is that they’re way less than 20 years old and by the time patent trolls come out of the woodwork and start suing everyone over them, Google will have made sure that nobody can go back to using Theora even if they want to.

There is no longer a functioning W3C.

Years ago, Apple convinced them to drop Theora from the HTML 5 standard because the truth is that Theora is nearly as high quality as h264, but they were doubtful even in 2010 that they could sue over it.

Now we get to deal with Google’s “Intent to Ship” notices instead of Web standards that anyone can implement.

Also, as reported by Google, Mozilla is discussing, privately, whether to drop Theora.

Whether they do or not is irrelevant because basically nobody uses Gecko anymore, and even if they do, it’s irrelevant because it is developed behind closed doors, by a company that is as independent of Google as Belarus is of Russia.

Gecko is also not “true open source”. You can compile a version yourself, but all the development decisions happen behind closed doors. It’s more like “source available”, but the fork control is that you’ll never make significant improvements to the code and keep up with them. Like, Pale Moon even admits, again, that it will have to rebase and lose Unified XUL Platform.

No discussion is tolerated on Mozilla Bugzilla.

They use Google Groups marked Private (no mailing lists), they don’t even have IRC anymore.

Mozilla is hopelessly fucked and anyone saying it is not is delusional, and with all three people that still use their pile of spyware and adware, they have no power to enforce any decisions they even try to make to go another way with the Web platform.

Firefox and Gecko effectively ceased to exist a long time ago, in the sense that anything Mozilla does even matters.

For the last ten years, they were an investment Google made in case of an Anti-Trust trial, which is going on now. The search royalties made less and less sense as all of the Firefox users left, but they make perfect sense in a “We’ll prop you up as long as you don’t do anything to really get in our way and smile for the judge.” way.

They’re comparable to a nearly bankrupt and ruined Apple being reanimated by Microsoft in the 90s to say they had some really terrible competition for Windows, but it was something you could use.

Even I gave up and moved to Brave, which rips out and modifies a lot of the pollution that Google’s ad business throws into Chrome.

Theora is not a bad codec.

It runs faster on the decode side than h264, the code is decent, and it does almost as well (post-Thusnelda improvements) as h264 in coding efficacy.

Google is projecting all of the design mistakes, patent mess, and security holes in its own projects on something that has never had any huge problems.

I would have been happy if Theora and Ogg Vorbis became widely used, but the problem with technologies like these is it’s whatever the porn and pirate scene do that gets the codecs out there and widely used. MP3 would have failed without pirates, and the pirates are basically pushing HEVC and AAC now.

To be sure, Google does deserve some credit. Things could be much worse if HEVC ever made it onto the Web, and I’m not talking about some server that sends it to Safari, because honestly, who cares?

Google could have just paid the extortion within the context of Chrome and let it get out there and become a huge mess for everyone.

The compression efficacy of HEVC is actually not that much better than h264, but the patent mess is designed to basically go on forever when h264 patents are dying by the hundreds and closer to the end.

The CPU requirements if you have no hardware decode on HEVC are also very very bad, and the encode times are also very bad even with reasonable hardware.

My favorite thing about Theora was mainly just how fast it had CPU decode even in 2004.

Nobody designs these modern codecs to be simple, they design them to do stupid pointless things to get patents, and then you have to live with that. They’ve always done this to some extent, like MP3, but it’s gotten out of control so that they can get 50,000 patents.

Who wants to use software that was designed to waste their processing resources to make it more patentable? I don’t.

Illinois State Government: Don’t Use Microsoft Edge Due to Bugs Which Aren’t Even in Chrome.

Illinois State Government: Don’t Use Microsoft Edge Due to Bugs Which Aren’t Even in Chrome.

After telling everyone to use Microsoft Edge to access government Web sites and fill out PDFs, the Illinois State Government now admits that Microsoft Edge is buggier than even Google Chrome and advises users to switch to something else.

Awkward.

Users shouldn’t use Chrome either, but Microsoft Edge is some next level shit. Basically everything wrong with Chrome, plus a third coat of spyware and a sewer of ads.

I mostly use Brave.

There is currently a bug affecting users running a newer version of Microsoft’s Edge Browser. This bug forces users to log into Illinois workNet when they click on a link to view any Office document file (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.). Until this issue has been resolved by Microsoft, affected users can download the file via an alternate browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc.) or do the following to download via Edge.

  1. Right click on the file.
  2. Click “Save link as”
  3. Download the file to your computer.

This will allow you to view the file without logging into Illinois workNet.

– Illinois WorkNet, a division of the Illinois Department of Employment Security

Valve Threatens Users on Windows 7 and 8: “Upgrade or Lose What You Already Have”

Valve Threatens Users on Windows 7 and 8: “Upgrade or Lose What You Already Have

In another example of “forced upgrades by way of arson”, like Mozilla does to users hanging out on old versions of Windows that even sort of worked, Valve will be discontinuing support for Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 because it relies on an integrated Google Chrome (barf) browser.

Users have until January to get away from these operating systems before what they’re already doing stops working, taking out all their games.

They should move to Linux, which is free, or a Steam Deck which also runs Linux (and KDE) and bring their Steam library over that way.

Eventually, Firefox 115 ESR will be out of support and then the browser will degrade and pile up unpatched security holes.

There’s no telling how long an existing computer from the Windows 7/8 era will run Linux, but it beats these Windows “upgrades by arson”, which often need a brand new PC just to run Windows, and which are probably only somewhat better (and less frequent) than Apple not being able to decide which processors they’ll use or APIs that will be supported. 🙂

Windows 7 and Windows 8 Support

As of January 1 2024, Steam will officially stop supporting the Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 operating systems. After that date, the Steam Client will no longer run on those versions of Windows. In order to continue running Steam and any games or other products purchased through Steam, users will need to update to a more recent version of Windows.

This change is required as core features in Steam rely on an embedded version of Google Chrome, which no longer functions on older versions of Windows. In addition, future versions of Steam will require Windows feature and security updates only present in Windows 10 and above.

Although support won’t end until 2024, we strongly encourage all Windows 7/8/8.1 users to update sooner rather than later. Microsoft ended security updates and technical support for Windows 7 in January 2020 and for Windows 8.1 in January 2023. Computers running these operating systems, when connected to the internet, are susceptible to new malware and other exploits which will not be patched. That malware can cause your PC, Steam and games to perform poorly or crash. That malware can also be used to steal the credentials for your Steam account or other services.

-Valve

Google Search is Garbage Designed to Show Ads Instead of What You Searched For.

Google Search is Garbage Designed to Show Ads Instead of What You Searched For.

Wired published and then immediately retracted an op-ed (Archive Today, Wayback Machine) about how Google quietly manipulated what you searched for by turning it into something designed to bring back a lot of ads instead, using machinery that is invisible to the user.

These “imperceptible” manipulations are actually one reason (alongside manually censoring billions of Web resources so that they can’t show up no matter what you search for, at the behest of the American government and Copyright trolls) why Google Search has descended into “garbage” quality over about the last five years or so.

The article was deleted and replaced with a message saying “it did not meet editorial standards” and was removed, but we can only really guess the real reason why.

Google, with 93% of the search engine market, has the ability to punish Web sites that are pissing it off.

Ending up being ranked lower as a way to harass sites into not saying anything bad about them is one possibility that comes to my mind, although I cannot say that’s what happened. All you have to do to destroy a site financially is cut off its ad impressions, which would be ironic if that is what’s going on, since that’s exactly the sort of thing that leads to an Anti-Trust trial in the first place.

Google is basically running the trial anyway, and this is something that leaked out that was put on a projector for a few seconds and then was whisked away.

Things that make you go “hmm”.

I don’t have a hard time believing that, with how everything in this world is designed to make it, basically illegal to exist anywhere without spending money, and also to subject you to advertising every waking moment, that Google has gotten very good with “shaking the couch cushions”.

They’re very desperate now, with the economy in the US failing and millions of people losing their jobs (Google itself recently fired over 12,000), and with express elevator inflation, and consumers pulling back, ad revenue hasn’t looked this bad since the DotCom Bubble collapse.

So Google is, getting very aggressive lately. Maybe you’ve already seen the manipulations and anti-adblock shit over at YouTube?

I doubt DuckDuckGo (which is a skin for Bing) is even this bad. First of all, Microsoft would have to invest a lot of money into being this rapacious, and they’ve been on a layoffs spree at Bing and Edge anyway, and even if they were, they’re only a few percent. A rounding error.

Google is definitely in more of a position to cause harm. Uniquely positioned to cause harm.

Again, when I saw that Wired retracted this, there was only one real plausible (to me) answer that popped into my head.

In “Being the Ricardo’s”, a dramatized documentary of sorts about Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Desi argues with the studio about something and has to go to an executive that was higher up. The higher-up sends a letter to the lower official that simply reads, “Don’t fuck with the Cuban!”

And I think that’s what’s going on here.

I think that people are too afraid to make Google angry.

Now, maybe Google tapped someone on the shoulder, and maybe it didn’t have to.

Either way, I think we just witnessed part of the implosion of what remained of journalistic integrity.

Google Attacks User-Installed Apps and Promotes Their Own Spyware in Bizarre Misuse of the Word “Security”.

Google Attacks User-Installed Apps and Promotes Their Own Spyware in Bizarre Misuse of the Word “Security”.

Google has announced that it plans to start interfering with the user’s ability to install APK packages locally. To get other application repositories, such as F-Droid, means installing one of these APK packages.

F-Droid contains no spyware. It’s a Free and Open Source Software repository.

There wouldn’t be any reason to put spyware in software like this because everyone can see it, someone would take it out and make a version that doesn’t do that, and then if the F-Droid repository hosted it, people would quit using that and replace it too.

The Google Play Store, on the other hand, contains very little other than spyware.

See, Google is an ad company, and as an ad company, it peddles spyware libraries that are bundles with the majority of the “apps”, which are actually adware, and monitor what the user does with their entire phone, because almost all adware is also spyware.

The user, by installing things from Google Play, agrees to this, often for some functionality that is minor compared to the dozens and dozens of unnecessary (for the stated purpose of the “app”) permissions, which are intended to let it do things like monitor your use of the phone, figure out where you’re at on Earth to within 3 feet (1 meter), even when the “app” seems to be closed, monitor your phone calls and texts, and uploading your contacts list.

There are actually many more permissions in the Android permission model, and these are just some of the creepier ones.

“Apps” like these can be anything, from McDonald’s, a car insurance company, or even just a program that says it has wallpaper images.

If you try to sign into a particular “app” called Grindr, which is an app for gay people to find sex partners, you may not see everything it does in most countries, but if you have an IP address in the European Union, you will get a “consent” screen about several hundred other “partner companies” they may share your data with.

And if you have a Facebook account, you can go to your “off Facebook Activity” screen, which is hidden rather well, and see that Grindr has been talking to them.

In America, they don’t even ask before they do this.

They’re telling Facebook and Google your HIV status and when the last time you were tested were, and they (allegedly) keep logs of who you are having sex with, and all of your nude photos, even after you delete your account. Seriously!

This was according to a high ranking executive named Ron DeJesus, who was let go recently.

Ron DeJesus claims that he was responsible for trying to keep Grindr compliant with multi-jurisdictional privacy laws, and Grindr basically flouted them all and fired him so that it could continue. He is suing them.

Almost everything in Google Play is some form of malware.

It’s so much worse than what we used to call “spyware” back in the Windows 98/XP era, when it was just something like Bonzi Buddy or Conducent, or New dot Net.

Almost everyone walking around with a cell phone in their pocket has “apps” like this, because they use the Apple App Store or Google Play.

But now Google is saying that the malware problem exists “outside” of their malware store. Which is quite clever.

Soon, according to the plans already revealed by Google, there will be no way to “sideload” (install something yourself) without letting Google “Play Protect”, which is rapidly turning into malicious software pretending to be an antivirus program, like Windows Defender is.

The choices listed are “allow scan” or “don’t install”. That’s it.

And I say “malware pretending to be antivirus” because when you click “allow scan”, it sends Google bits and pieces of the program, to a remote server.

So they know everything that’s on your phone, and they can block modified APKs that you get where someone has removed the spyware libraries from things that are in Google Play.

They can block anything they want and say “malware”, and who are you to stop them? Peasant!

Make no mistake about this, the timing is impeccable.

Right after Google apparently came down hard on people for using ad blockers (I haven’t seen the demand to turn off my ad blocker because I use Brave and they just bump it to deal with f***ing Google for me.), we get this announcement about “sideloading”.

“You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. […] It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club. And by the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head in their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table is tilted folks. The game is rigged, and nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care.”

-George Carlin

There’s no telling what all is in store for Android.

Like I said in my article about Samsung falling apart, Android was designed to gain marketshare. To do this, part of the deal was that it was somewhat less bogus than iOS about not letting you use it as a real computer.

They let all the other OEMs fight each other over crumbs building up the marketshare, and then Google came in and cleaned everything up and makes the “best” Android phones now.

Well, “sideloading” is the same. They needed it, to gain marketshare, and now they’ll be wanting that back.

I suspect that within five years, the practical benefits of owning an Android phone instead of an iPhone, such as local music playing and the option to use F-Droid, will be gone.

And, basically, Apple gimps the iPhone so bad, that if you have one you might as well just get the cheapest because it doesn’t really do much of anything anyway. It can’t even play music without the network. Without the network, it’s an expensive brick.

The iPhone calls people and has an “app” that makes fart sounds for $1,800.

Google probably won’t take such action until they defeat this fake Anti-Trust Trial in the federal court (the judge is a corrupt stooge who is working with them to hide almost everything from the public) but they will do it.

The media is so bad that instead of criticizing this and calling it what it is, they repeat Google’s press statement. However, there is much more going on than we are being shown.

American Search Engines; Disinformation Peddling, Propaganda, Censorship, and Lies. What Kind of a Country is This? And a Commentary on Gay Rights.

American Search Engines; Disinformation Peddling, Propaganda, Censorship, and Lies. What Kind of a Country is This? And a Commentary on Gay Rights.

The situation with American search engines is rapidly deteriorating.

The situation was already unacceptably bad when just two companies got to control the entire search market. Those companies being Google and Microsoft.

But throughout the 2010s, you could still view most of the things you asked them for.

As time went on, especially in the wake of COVID, they’ve become Gaslighting Engines, full of disinformation, propaganda, censorship, and lies.

What I KNOW they are hiding is disturbing, but obviously only people working at Google and Microsoft have the entire blacklists available.

I have a hunch that if we knew the half of it, it would be downright scandalous. Far from being limited to “a few sites where someone was getting decapitated” in the 2000s, now Microsoft blocks almost all (legal) porn, and this trickles down to everything that asks it for results, including DuckDuckGo, which is a flat-out copy of the same results as Microsoft Bing.

They also block information they don’t want people to have about how dangerous the alleged “COVID vaccines” are or their true efficacy*, as well as any “debate” about climate change.

*(COVID shots are quite dangerous, and not very useful, as I and others only learned at some great cost, with the Pfizer shot damaging the heart of someone I know and his doctor having to write a medical slip saying he could never take one again….fortunately I didn’t get it THAT bad. This year I’m just skipping it. I told my doctor and she moved right along. If she had persisted in repeating the government lies and propaganda, I would have kept going through the list until I found a doctor that wasn’t compromised to the point of arguing about it, knowing they were wrong.)

The people running the search engines have made the decisions on every issue that is up for debate. It’s the one that they want you to arrive at.

And if logic and reason tell you that you’re right, and they’re lying to you, they will simply bullshit you until you doubt what you’ve repeatedly witnessed. The tactic of the disinformation peddler is to tell you to ignore what you’ve experienced and bully you into admitting things you know aren’t true.

You’re not even allowed to read anything else anymore.

When did information become illegal in a country with the alleged “Freedom of Speech”? When did information become “banned” in a Free country?

You can’t ban information in a Free country, so the only logical conclusion is that America is not a Free country. Not anymore.

On top of this, they also block a lot of Web forums, international news sites, and to a large extent, Microsoft and the search engines that ask it for things are dramatically limiting the reach of porn.

Flat out refusing to return any for more and more types of “porn” queries.

What they decide to return to you is what they decide.

We’ve spent so many years reaching the point where there’s basically only one search engine that’s even usable at all (Google), that it’s reached the point where Google might as well be the government. They go above and beyond what the government wants them to censor and lie about.

We know that the Biden Administration contacts tech companies and tells them to ban, shadow ban, and delist users and their posts, and even Democrats in Congress do it.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Biden Administration and Congressional Democrats violated the First Amendment of the Constitution, and ordered them to knock it off, as of October 3rd, 2023.

But we have the most Anti-Constitutional Administration and Party in control of the US federal government, maybe in American history. It just rules “with a pen and a phone” and sees what sticks, and eventually the courts bring an end to the worst of it (like “COVID Vaccine” threats), so whatever limits the court has placed, the Biden Administration and Democrats are likely already looking for ways around.

There’s nothing that pisses off a leftist troll mob like a person who can think for themselves.

There is a group and it is hated wherever it goes. This group has been the subject of mass murder by the Nazi Party, and it has faced the death sentence, imprisonment, abuse of psychiatry, and other horrors. No, not the Jews.

I’m gay and I have a mob following me around the Internet, launching virulently homophobic garbage my way and trying to get me banned from everything. They’re so mentally unstable and evil that they even say racist things about my spouse, who they don’t know, just to hurt me. At the same time, they demand respect from me, for being “trans”. This just isn’t how that works.

You ask when will the persecution of gay men ever stop? Probably never. It’s welcomed on Mastodon.social as we speak. A “Social Networking” site, subject to the laws of Germany. How ironic.

It greatly offends them to see someone who was so badly oppressed by the American government for over 30 years that he not only had no Freedom to marry, but could have been arrested in half the states for the first 19 years simply for existing, who says openly that he doesn’t like what America, and more broadly, the Western world, has turned into.

Even long after the 1970s, well into the 2000s, mainstream Psychiatry in America was very openly homophobic. If you spoke to a psychiatrist, you had to tread lightly on the entire issue.

When I was a teenager in the early 2000s, a psychiatrist asked me “Are you attracted to men?” and I said “Absolutely not.”

Later on, I read his clinical notes, and he wrote down that “he agrees that he is a NORMAL [all caps] heterosexual male”.

The way in which he asked it led me to believe I would face trouble if I said yes. So I lied. There’s no shame in lying to a person like this.

What was I supposed to say to a person who had the legal authority to detain me without trial and fill me with primitive pharmaceuticals if he didn’t like me? They don’t call it “punishment for society being homophobic, and nobody will stop me”.

“Why yes, yes, I am everything you hate! You know those Muslim people that just blew up New York City? Well, I’m GAY. Not only gay, but I don’t believe in God! You hate me MORE!”

They just commit these terrible and criminal abuses of Psychiatry, and nobody will stop them.

Law & Order: SVU had a banned episode called “Unstoppable” about a rapist nobody would do anything about. They should have made an episode called that about Psychiatry.

No matter what they say these days, nobody has convinced me that Psychiatry has changed at all. They keep re-issuing the DSM, and if you read it closely they take “gay” out and put it back in somewhere as things they can say instead, to the same effect, but it’s about muddying the waters.

It’s not that there are just a lot of old psychiatrists hanging around from when being an open bigot was more acceptable in the profession, it’s that Psychiatry is hardly even medicine and it draws in the very worst doctors.

Even as a teenager, I was smart enough to pick up on where it was going with this guy. I knew I wouldn’t be a martyr. I would have only picked the wrong hill to die on.

Today, people would just go screaming all over the place until they get what they want. Back then, it would have been “Sir, this is a Wendy’s.”

It will be demonstrated that I knew, for a fact, that I would not even be helped by my own parents, if this brain butcher decided to go to work on me.

The Nazis did the same things to gay people that they did to the Jews.

We have records of gay people being oppressed all over the world going back hundreds of years, we have records of gay people in various societies going back into antiquity with varying levels of acceptance.

In some ways the modern world has been worse to gay people than the ancient world was.

One of the crazies that follows me around and tries to get me banned everywhere was talking about “gay rights in the world”, as-if I was the one that needed any lectures about living in an oppressive shithole.

They act like rights come from the government. That’s something that only a fool could believe.

Perhaps President Ronald Reagan put it best when he said that the government doesn’t solve problems, the government is the problem, and that the nine scariest words in the English language are, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

The government doesn’t give anyone a right. You have to take them.

Sometimes it means openly ignoring that law.

For half my life, being gay was a crime in half of America.

Ignoring the law that made it a crime was not wrong.

I think that most people would agree with me on that now, but that doesn’t change the fact that to be gay then, you also had to be a criminal in the eyes of the law.

Eventually, you hope it relents, and that it may finally give you some of the things that other people were entitled to for tens or hundreds of years, or for as long as this government has existed and denied some people their rights.

Obviously, I can only speak to what I’ve seen over the past 40 years or so, but this is my take. It could be wrong, but here’s my take.

I knew dozens of other gay people (counting bisexual people) in Indiana in the late 90s and early 2000s. Some were open or semi-open about it. Usually at least their immediate family knew.

One of my friends from school was bisexual. It obviously wasn’t something that was largely invented just over the past few years or so. Up until about a few years ago, you hardly saw any trans people at all.

I only knew one until a few years ago, and when I knew him, he was a man, and he was a very bad man. He got married to my (now deceased) Aunt and had children, and then ran out on them. I don’t respect that. You want to go become a woman? Whatever. Don’t start a family and run out on them.

But back in the 90s, it was impossible to even suggest that anyone was “going into the schools and teaching kids to be gay”.

We were widely despised in America. Only 10% of Republicans said being gay was “morally acceptable”, and today half of Republicans say it is, and 70% of Americans polled by Gallup. But in the 90s, we were about as popular as cancer, but everyone still knew someone that was gay. It was, awkward, I guess.

Many people, like my parents, would just blurt out homophobic shit right in front of you, in public, and nobody cared.

Nobody who was gay talked much about being gay.

If someone who wasn’t gay did, they almost never said anything good about it. All you ever heard was shit like my mother and father said in the car about it being synonymous with pedophilia and that these people would murder kids.

Thanks to this childhood abuse, I didn’t even have a word for what I was. I knew I didn’t want to be gay because the only thing I’d ever heard about that word was what I just told you, so I was very terribly confused. Not about being attracted to other people, my own age, of my gender. I was very certain of that. But I didn’t have a word that wasn’t contaminated.

While straight children in school learned about sex in Health class, all they ever told us in Indiana public schools in 1996 was about gay and Black people getting AIDS. That isn’t really a dig at Indiana, because most of the country was on the same page.

It was the government doing this. The same government people want in total control of the Internet today, so that the government can decide what “disinformation” is.

They followed that by pulling out the TV/VCR cart and driving home their point.

We had to watch a movie where a Black woman got AIDS and gave it to the baby she was pregnant with, and then the Black woman died of AIDS.

I think that if an all White State and county government with an all White school district faculty, showed that to a school with about 249 White students and 1 Black one today, that school district would probably be condemned on every major news site.

Things like this were amazingly, not the least bit scandalous, but nobody heard about it, and nobody cared if they did. At least nobody that the government would have listened to.

Nobody under about 30-35 in America today understands the grotesqueness of what people my age had to go through and I hope that they never will.

I wouldn’t actually say there’s a lot of courage that I’ve seen in the “trans” movement.

They waited until gay people such as myself had to face the worst of it (actual malice and discrimination) and defeated the bastards in court, and had to suffer hundreds of years of abuse at the hands of bigots, oftentimes suffering government action more severe than Communists and Black people got, especially during an era (the mid-20th century, before I was born, but with effect that lingered) where it was impossible to tell where the Indiana government stopped and the Indiana Klan began (a litany of abuses which declined very slowly), then the trans people started coming out of the woodwork after the nuclear winter was over, so to speak, and the gay people had put in the hard work to rebuild a more tolerant society.

There was never a time when Black people were treated so badly in Hollywood, as when they made entire movies for the government telling people to watch out for gay men who were incurable predators out to harm their children.

The distrust of government and their “laws” that the actions of said government caused for gay people my age or older are probably permanent and irreversible. You cannot create a system like this that makes people illegal and then blame them for getting used to being criminal simply for existing, and for no longer necessarily respecting the rest of your “laws”.

YouTube took the film down. I think they should have left it, honestly.

It shows how the American government “educated” Americans about gay people. Americans in my parents’ age group. Which probably explains why my mother told me, aged 5-6 or so, in a Taco Bell, while we were eating dinner, never to get in the car with a stranger because it might be “a gay man who would rape [me] and cut off [my] head, like they did to Adam Walsh.

And if that sounds bad, while she was implying that gay men were all like Ottis Toole, she was mild compared to my father.

Many a day would I be riding along in the car with Dad, with him shouting about “f****s ruining our country”, with Rush Limbaugh on the radio ranting about Bill Clinton, with the occasional “Spatula City” riff or plug for “Snapple”, which was big in the 90s.

Yes, for many years, Snapple was one of the big advertisers that made Rush Limbaugh popular. If you knew Rush like I had to, you could tell that something like Trump would eventually happen, even 30 years ago.

Roy Schestowitz says that my family sounds horrific. It always has been. Imagine having to live with that for years.

But these trans people that follow me around the Internet are even more homophobic than my parents were (let that sink in), and they’re even less good at denying it after they literally just said the thing.

One particularly sick individual managed to make a statement that was homophobic, racist against Asian people, and xenophobic against Filipinos all in the same sentence.

This would be the one that was bragging about how good their totally unimportant joke of a country is for trans people, like her.

Their only defense to the homophobia is claiming that they are trans, which makes them immune from whatever they do, on platforms like Libera Chat and Mastodon.

She may be trans. I don’t know, does it matter? She’s still a homophobe. She still hates Asian people.

I stood up to my own parents, I stood up to my own government. I don’t have to take this crap from a homophobic and racist Internet person.

The only time I let myself get backed into a corner by one of these homophobic assholes was that stupid psychiatrist in 2001, and I’m not proud of it.

I was more afraid of him than I was of people who have stabbed me, held a gun to my head, or beat the shit out of me (for being gay).

I’m less afraid of actual death than I am of psychiatrists. Once they go to work on people, they don’t stop. Cracked ribs and concussions heal. They get you on “medicine”, or take away your civil rights, that does not heal.

Being anti-government, as in opposed to it in general, is not extreme.

This American government has hurt me and kept me down and taken everything I’ve owned repeatedly. This government has protected people who have attacked me in the street, and it has attacked me.

Why wouldn’t I be against it, in principle? I have a long memory, and I don’t tend to forget who the enemies are.

I’ll never forget the propaganda, the abuse. The fact that I learned more from Internet pornography and experiences with people I promised would never be spoken about again, about myself, is an experience that I blame squarely on this government and my parents. Nobody ever accused them of being stupid. This was deliberate.

There are parts of our government keeping, like the Bill of Rights. Most of it needs to be repealed.

If it’s gotten so big that it can sit around all day E-Mailing Google and Microsoft things it doesn’t want me to know, it’s gotten too big.

I experienced a government that was my only source of information in the pre-Internet (at least in people’s houses) era, and given the propaganda and disinformation it promoted using this total authority, I’m not looking forward to them gaining total control of the Internet so we can go back to that.

As to the part about my parents, if I ask them about something like the “Taco Bell Incident” and why they would ever say such horrible things and lie to me like this, my mother will reply, “I don’t recall ever saying that. You must be imagining things.”

Oh really? I remember which Taco Bell it was at, which table in the restaurant we were sitting at, what I ordered, and that I was halfway into my bean burrito (with no onions) in 1990 when she said that awful shit, but I’m imagining the awful shit. Okay, gaslighting. How does that work?

If they could actually admit that they did this and apologize, I might hate them less.

In some countries, they apparently respect their elders. All I could think about while all this shit was going on was “at least the people doing this will start dying someday and my life might not be such Hell then”.

And even then it’s awkward, because I heard my dad has been having heart trouble and he’s still my dad.

But back to search engines…

Every year these search engines and the government get together, and they decide that there’s some new thing they won’t let you see, or don’t want to allow you to think about, and they start blocking it or framing it only one way.

That’s their answer for everything. Just block it or only return “the Party line”.

Their goal is that the Web should be shopping, banking, streaming (from Apple, Netflix, etc.), and reams of government-whitelisted propaganda, and there should be no more real people on it.

People on Twitter and Mastodon are not real people.

They’ve had their brains scooped out by the mass media and turned into mashed potatoes, and put back in. They’ve never had to endure anything like I have, I guarantee you. I only wish the worst thing that had ever happened to me was pronoun-related. Trust me.

Now all they do is share links to the most dishonest media outlets, ever, and agree with each other all the time. That’s all these things are. You disagree with anyone, they shoot you and that’s the last thing anyone hears from you on that platform.

The government, at least the American one, is not worried about Mastodon. It’s all under control. The instances that are not under control will be taken care of “by other means”, including de-indexing, attacks on hosting, and other forms of harassment, as is what increasingly happens to Web sites in general.

Even Wikipedia is pretty bogus. Any article that PR agencies and the government care about, they just pretend to be “editors”. They use sockpuppets. They write their own articles, they watch them. If anything that’s not good for them ends up there, they revert it and use tricks to ban people. They control what you read.

In some ways, things are not as bad on the American Web, yet, as they are in North Korea or China, but there is more similarity than they want you to think about.

I’m waiting for the part where Comcast, RCN, AT&T, and the few other ISPs in the United States get orders to block access to the sites.

It won’t even be crude DNS blocks like they do in already non-Free countries which were years ahead of us in all the wrong ways, like Canada and the United Kingdom.

Working with Enemies of Free Software, like Let’s Encrypt, they’ll also take their TLS certificates away.

Modern Web browsers scream about connecting to sites without TLS, and TLS only works with Cartel Certificates, and it won’t be long until TLS is mandated by these same browsers…they want to use Certificates for the Web the same way “Secure Boot” is meant to control what software your computer can run.

Then they’ll make sure there aren’t any American hosting providers your site can work with. There won’t even need to be a law or a reason why. If you haven’t done anything, they’ll just say there is “imminent danger to the public”. They’ve done this before to take down a lot of sites that aren’t violating any American laws.

If you use cell phones, you won’t be able to “get the app”. For years now, the US government has leaned on Google and Apple to throw everything out of the App Store and Play Store that it doesn’t like.

(For now you can just load an APK if you use Android though.)

They’ll drive you to the point where you give up or have to use “unorthodox” methods to run your site, or abandon the Web and hack something together on Gopher or Gemini, and then they’ll say “Well why would you do that if you’re not a <whatever>?”

It’s so completely obvious that the US Internet is turning into something more like the North Korean “Intranet”. They are literally doing it all right in front of us.

Their goal is that even if VPNs and Tor aren’t illegal, that you still won’t be able to easily access information. Once they cut you off from mainstream stuff, you are open to all sorts of crude DDoS attacks and such and they can finish you off that way.

The American government is oppressive and terrible, and it’s getting more oppressive and terrible now that it’s coming apart and taking on a trillion dollars in debt every three months or so.

But it’s not as “crude” as North Korea. Far from needing something like Naenara Browser or Red Star OS, they can go after you everywhere all at once.

The enemies, software-wise, are Windows and Mac OS, and to a lesser extent Chrome OS. They’re the “major Web browsers” like Firefox and Chrome.

You’re probably using unfriendly software to read this at this very moment.

Not content with just entirely controlling most of the software that Americans rely on, they pay unemployable nutcases to sit around all day and scream about Brave. They have “hate group watchers” like the SPLC which have said nothing about the recent Black Lives Matter endorsement of Hamas, telling parents to watch out for “Linux, Tor, Matrix, and Brave”.

The Anti-Defamation League, which primarily concerns itself with anti-Jewish hatred, moved a mention of BLM’s endorsement of Hamas down the list and under a heading that wouldn’t draw attention! This is just incredible.

But they have plenty of time to screech about software they don’t like.

I saw look at the list and use the software. Tell them thank you for the helpful recommendations!

I wish I could say what to do about Web Search.

Back in the day, search engines just basically did whatever you told them to, today they lie and promote disinformation (mostly from the government), lopsided results (which are always biased towards the left), and blacklist sites and wide swaths of content due to moral crusaders out collecting scalps (the porn) and copyright trolls (the bittorrent sites).

SearXNG can only solve a part of the “Google and Bing are bullshitting you.” problem.

The main thing SearXNG is designed to do is to protect your privacy.

While asking multiple engines the query can exploit gaps in their censorship and disinformation, they are never truly in 100% lock-step with one another, it’s still pretty bad. There’s still a whole Web out there you’re not seeing.

Some of the problem can be worked around by (and I use a VPN and Tor together for this) asking a Russian search engine like Yandex.

Is Russia bad in its own ways? Yeah, but amazingly their search index isn’t as censored as the ones in America, at least on the English site.

And if they don’t learn anything about me, what harm am I doing?

I would never resort to asking the Russians something if Google worked as well for me as it did in 2005 or 2010. Even Yahoo! in 2000 was better than this crap.

My position on what should be done about search is there should be a law against “blacklists” if it’s not material that is illegal under a Constitutionally-valid statute.

The leftist organizations have been urging the US Supreme Court to reverse its opinions from the 90s and allow the American government to shut down anything on the Internet it doesn’t like.

The American government has had a bit of a problem in the last few years where little things like Constitutions and laws don’t matter, so it’s probably just a matter of time before it starts openly defying court orders too.

There is no law in my State that says the governor can demand that everyone stay in their home over a virus. There simply isn’t.

So imagine my surprise when the governor purportedly “ordered” me to do that.

Bullshit! I will do whatever the Hell I want unless there’s an actual law that is in actual effect. Once Darren Bailey obtained relief from the governor’s phony executive order, the jig was up, but like all true authoritarian dictatorships, the governor said the executive order was still enforced.

I didn’t hear them enforce it on anyone. Nobody ever got ticketed for ignoring it.

Perhaps they were too busy sending the city police, the Sheriff’s department, a hostage rescue team, and the State Troopers downtown over the BLM (loves Hamas) riots and looting.

That was scary. And now, the BLM people who openly supported Hamas Terrorists the other day, with no consequences, have managed to erase the fact that that ever happened from existence.

It’s funny how BLM was “one movement” until it endorsed the people behind “Israel’s 9/11”, and now suddenly it wasn’t “really BLM” because it was “just some chapters of it really”.

Yes, because Chicago and Los Angeles are podunk little towns that nobody has ever heard of, far, far off the beaten path. /s

Politicians (all Democrats) who were climbing over each other to get the endorsements from BLM (loves Hamas) just a year or two ago are now stampeding to get away from it, disavowing themselves, removing BLM references and logos off their campaign Web sites.

Maybe they can “Get in touch.” with Google and have them chisel all this off the index.

Down, down the memory hole! Further, I say!

I have yet to see any “chapters” of people who honestly believe that all lives matter, promoting Hamas. Please inform me of how people who value all lives are bad.

The anti-Techrights trolls, including the homophobe/racist, support Hamas and terrorists pretty openly on Mastodon now. Some of them frame it in a way where they can deny it later, but in many cases it was a very “tepid disapproval” where they gave support to Hamas, but in a way where they could “still condemn the violence”.

You have to wonder who on the “Left” can work up the nerve to actually condemn Hamas, full stop, after the horrific events that have been unfolding as of late.

I condemn Hamas, full stop. There is no excuse for terror, and I hope they find every last one of the sons of bitches and hang them for this dastardly cowardly attack that murdered civilians, including many helpless children.

I separately continue to condemn Netanyahu, the person. What Hamas did will cement his control over Israel and make it impossible for anyone to stop him for years, like what happened with Geroge W. Bush’s approval after 9/11 where if anyone said something bad about the President, they disappeared.

(Starting with the journalists who had been used to operating with Press Freedom and didn’t appreciate the new country they had woken up in.)

Why is it so hard for the Left to condemn murderers? They’ve been brainwashed into thinking that the barbarians who voted for Hamas to rule the fictional “Palestine” have been cruelly oppressed by Israel. Israel is the only ally of the LGBT people in the entire Middle East. The rest are murderous savages.

Again, it will be a sad day when the American government gains total control over the Internet.

It will start out by claiming it is “eliminating Nazis and misinformation”, but that is not what’s going on.

It wants to make sure that you read nothing but misinformation, which will be whatever it wants to put there.

Samsung, Going Broke Due to Horrible Economy and Microsoft Deals, Allowed Exceptions to American China Sanctions.

Samsung, Going Broke Due to Horrible Economy and Microsoft Deals, Allowed Exceptions to American China Sanctions.

According to CNN, Samsung is going broke.

Their most recent statement shows profits down 78% vs. a year that was already pretty bad.

Like most “partners” that start smearing Microsoft crap everywhere, they lose customers to “clean” Android devices which don’t have the Microsoft junk and spyware on them, and then they complain that “chip sales” are down, because the phones which were contaminated with Microsoft and Facebook spyware are not selling.

Samsung complained that the economy is bad. Well it is, and that is certainly part of the problem.

It’s amazing that all these companies are blaming a bad economy where everyone loses their job, and pay stagnates, and nobody wants to risk buying anything, for their crummy sales.

They do this while the same “news” sites tout a “Biden Economic Miracle” that isn’t happening.

They claim that “people are reluctant to upgrade their devices”, but the real problem for Samsung is that when they eventually do, after they ride the Samsung phone into the ground, they switch to a Google Pixel, like I did, to get rid of the bloatware and incompetent Samsung code.

(Google has even called Samsung code incompetent, especially broken security features that Samsung attempted to hack in which actually added more security vulnerabilities than if they had just left Android alone.)

What Samsung has done to their phones kills value, and it’s certainly not helping that they keep demanding prices as-if they had a cult like Apple’s in tow, when they don’t.

Samsung’s junk, garbage, and bloatware, will also set you back the cost of two Pixel phones.

They’ve already done immense damage to their business and they need to stop it now.

The Biden Administration blew a hole in the US sanctions against China to try to let Samsung salvage part of their business, but it does not address the problem that people are leaving Samsung due to the Microsoft and Facebook junk and the high prices.

Samsung doesn’t get to price itself like Apple while promoting a disjointed, confusing, and slow phone.

One that is buried under the weight of all this crap Microsoft and Facebook told them to put in.

In the case of Microsoft, they got to ruin their second smartphone victim since Nokia, but it didn’t cost Microsoft anything this time.

They went to Samsung and threatened patent lawsuits unless they threw in the bloatware, so they did, and the customers went away.

Google will be less easy to shove around like this. For their part, they let other companies go broke and make all the mistakes to get Android out there and widely used, and then when Android became the de facto standard OS for smartphones, Google came back and cleaned up the mess and offered its own.

Google’s plan is to essentially say “Thank you, we don’t need you anymore, and we’ll take it from here!”, to the other vendors, and bleed all of the other manufacturers of their users, and to be the source of Android phones in a matter of several years, if that.

As to the Samsung mess you might say, “Hey, Google has bad stuff in there too!”.

Yes, and it’s all in the Samsung phones plus the Microsoft and Facebook spyware on top.

They’re still Google Play Certified, so now the privacy issues with a Samsung phone are three times as bad as buying a Pixel and at only twice the cost.

I doubt that Samsung will be a problem much longer.

To try to get themselves out of the MSRP mess they’ve made, they spam with these ridiculous fake discounts you get if you sign a 2-3 year contract with your carrier.

If these ridiculous tactics worked, they would help Samsung because they would get to lock you in for another ride and then make the phone more terrible with updates that you can’t refuse, or install in pieces.

But far from any smart or sane long term strategy, Samsung has managed to piss off their customers and put “Get rid of Samsung!” on the to-do list.

I can’t see this working out for them. None of Samsung’s financial data hints that it is.

Microsoft essentially convinced Samsung to self-destruct.

It would have been better to go to court and fight Microsoft than to eventually lose their entire smartphone business, and hanging in on marketshare for now due to customers whose phone hasn’t died yet and cost-cutting to the point of selling units at a loss.

(Let’s face it. Nobody is paying “list price”. When is the last time you walked into a carrier store and didn’t see the fake discounts of $500-600 on the Samsung phones? This limited time offer has turned into a rolling joke that has gone on for years.)

Bing has decided to delete all the porn and this has made it to DuckDuckGo and Qwant.

It looks like Bing has decided to delete all the **** and this has made it to DDG and Qwant. Truly a sad day for the 4% of the Web.

Here we see the very “independent” totally “has an index” and a “DuckDuck Bot” DuckDuckGo proving how “independent” it is by…….returning whatever Bing does, yet again. Very “independent”. Very independent. Much Wow. (And “DuckDuckBot”.)

Another thing I noticed after this was brought to my attention is that Microsoft Bing is now using Dark Patterns to get you to accidentally use the Bullshit Bot that returns malware.

They’ve put a “Chat” button right in front of where you click to get the next page of search results, then they made the next button smaller and moved it off to the left.

Are they getting desperate?

One can only speculate about why they decided to start nuking all the porn, while Google still returns reams and reams of the stuff.

There was chatter about trying to offload the Bing Lemon onto Apple.

And as we all know, Apple goes around, like a group of mobsters, site to site, app to app, threatening everyone to delete the porn or there will be….trouble.

A few years after ruining Tumblr, Apple went and roughed up Reddit. Now Reddit is complying (at least on New Reddit) by shoving a QR code in your face and telling you the porn is only available in their App, which spies on your entire phone (as most Apps that are on the Play Store do…I barely even open the stupid thing….use F-Droid) and displays advertising, so you can “anonymously” view the porn.

If Microsoft is looking to offload their Lada onto Apple, this would be a good place to start.

Google isn’t looking to get acquired by anyone.

Unlike Microsoft, with their pathetic 3% of the search market, laying off most of the “Bing developers” and relying on a Bullshit Bot full of propaganda and malvertising that is deflating as we speak, Google has a business that makes money.

In the post I wrote, previously, and linked to earlier, about the Social Credit Scores taking effect in America, and the censored search engines, it looks like the next thing you won’t be allowed to know about is legal pornography.

It was probably inevitable given the trajectory of the manually blacklisted results. If they could do this with with people’s Web forums and Bittorrent sites, who didn’t think they’d get around to this one next?

As much as it horrifies me to point this out, Americans may have to start asking Yandex (a Russian search engine) about things. Granted, it’s not ideal to rely on something Russian that’s got a lot of CAPTCHAs, but at least they don’t do requests from the American censors.

I would think that the American censors would be smart enough to at least realize that porn is one of the few escapes a lot of people have from our country rotting and falling down around us. Maybe they don’t care about distractions anymore and feel it’s safe to mess with the formula and rely completely on threatening to hurt people.