Why would anyone think it is a good idea for kids to have cellphones in class?

I can’t even understand the concept.

RT:

A majority of teachers in the Netherlands’ General Education Union (AOb) support banning mobile phones from the classroom, a recent poll conducted by the organization has revealed.

While more than half of primary and trade school teachers – 54% and 57%, respectively – supported keeping phones out of classrooms, 73% of secondary school teachers voted in favor of a government-imposed ban, AOb found.

“It’s an obvious result,” Jelmer Evers, AOb’s official for secondary education, said in a press release last week. “Our members are saying the mobile phones are having a detrimental effect on pupils’ ability to concentrate. And that, in turn, affects the effectiveness of the teaching.”

Another 21% of the 8,400 teachers surveyed said they wanted schools to make their own decisions on phone use, while 6% volunteered to decide for themselves what students could bring into class.

Younger teachers – who were more likely to have grown up with cell phones themselves – were slightly more likely than their older counterparts to vote in favor of keeping the devices out of the classroom, with 69% of AOb members under the age of 31 approving of the ban compared to 62% of those older than 51.

While the vast majority of teachers agreed that smartphones could be severely distracting in a classroom setting, some stopped short of supporting a ban because phones can be used in schoolwork and are sometimes needed to access school networks.

This is really one of those “how is it even possible that we are having this conversation” situations.

But we have a lot of those situations now.

Most situations, in fact, fit into this category.

It really just makes you wish everyone was dead.

The US government runs Windows and Android on their devices. These are operating systems that private actors can buy exploits for from the Israelis. The exploits are hundreds of thousands and sometimes over a million dollars, but China for sure has that much money.

Hacking because you produced the cellphone tower is not how hacking works.

Also, I don’t think the nukes are running on wireless technology.

RT:

The US government has stalled in its efforts to remove Huawei telecom equipment that the FBI claims could have spied on and disrupted communications at US military bases, including those housing nuclear missiles, CNN reported on Saturday.

Amid a broad crackdown on Chinese technology under the Trump administration, Congress approved $1.9 billion in funding in 2019 to remove Huawei and ZTE telecom equipment across the US. However, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) told lawmakers last week that stripping American networks of this Chinese gear would cost between $4.7 and $4.98 billion.

Much of this equipment remains in place, and although the administration of President Joe Biden has largely continued the efforts of his predecessor, Donald Trump, to purge the US of Chinese communications technology, a Commerce Department probe into Huawei’s activities is progressing slowly, CNN reported.

Meanwhile, this technology may have posed an acute security risk to the US, Reuters reported on Thursday. FCC commissioner Brendan Carr told the news outlet that cell phone towers around Montana’s Malmstrom Air Force Base – which controls several missile sites in the US – used Huawei technology, as did two other sites in Nebraska and Wyoming.

You wonder if these people are giggling to themselves when they make statements like this, or if they’re just a bunch of dumb boomers.

I don’t even know what it means.

You’re going to remove the ZTE and Huawei telecommunications equipment because it is made in China in order to replace it with Korean telecommunications equipment made in China?

A fair amount of tech parts are still made in the United States. Intel has a lot of factories. But building an entire telecommunications systems without Chinese-made parts is almost certainly impossible. Maybe not. Maybe it is possible, it would just be really expensive, as the FCC says. $5 billion is a lot when we’ve got a Ukraine people democracy to save.

I’ve been hearing about this “China is going to hack us with cellphone towers” thing for a long time, and I’ve never seen an layman’s explainer in Popular Mechanics or Ars Technica or whatever. There are a lot of different parts in a cellphone tower.

I’m not an expert. Maybe ZTE is going to use trojan horse microwave antennas to take control of American nukes.

But I don’t think this is a real threat, and seems to more be related to:

• Creating hysteria
• Giving contracts to other companies lobbying the government

Everyone in America who doesn’t work in the US government agrees that American products should be made in America. This is something where you very clearly have both Democrat and Republican voters aligned against Democrat and Republican politicians. It’s one of the single issues you can say this about, because Democrat voters will support basically anything. But no one supports all of our national manufacturing being in China (or Mexico, Vietnam, Thailand, Brazil, or whatever).

However, that is not the reality situation. The reality situation is that all global manufacturing is dominated by China.

I’ve said from the beginning: we should have made a deal to return Taiwan to China in exchange for China returning at least the manufacturing that is critical to our infrastructure. Here’s the thing: they would have to return it, as in, we would have to have Chinese people come to America and show us how to build a lot of these factories. We do not, at this point in time, possess the technological know-how to build or run most of these factories. We would have to be trained by the Chinese. At this point, China is doing most of the R&D, which we would have to buy into.

Globalism was like, the dumbest idea ever. It didn’t even accomplish the stated purpose of ending war, and might actually create a much worse war.

This is a pretty quick and simple video that focuses on semiconductors. It was made about ago to explain the chip shortage.

Donald Trump was actually bullying companies into using Intel plants in the US, and Intel was announcing new plants due to new contracts – a project that seems to have stalled since the adults have entered the room, just like energy independence was canceled by the room adults.

Biden shakes John Cenas hand at a rally pic.twitter.com/3ZGcQIP1KZ

— Niko Exxtra (@nikoexxtra) July 15, 2022

The face when the adults enter the room and start communicating with force ghosts

It’s all just mind-boggling that the US somehow still feels in charge when the China are like, so obviously and openly in control of everything.

Chinese are non-confrontational, and want Taiwan back really badly. This is a huge national shame. Imagine if Florida was owned and operated by the Chinese government. It’s embarrassing for them. So it’s this huge trade that could be made in exchange for getting some of our economy back. But instead these people in Washington think they can have a war with China using weapons that are made in China.

The cellphone-brain tumor pipeline was something that was talked about a lot when cellphones first became popular. Then people sort of stopped talking about it because it just didn’t seem like it was happening.

However, it’s possible it just took a while to show up.

Fox 5 New York:

New UC Berkeley research draws a strong link between cell phone radiation and tumors, particularly in the brain.

Researchers took a comprehensive look at statistical findings from 46 different studies around the globe and found that the use of a cell phone for more than 1,000 hours, or about 17 minutes a day over a ten year period, increased the risk of tumors by 60 percent.

Researchers also pointed to findings that showed cell phone use for 10 or more years doubled the risk of brain tumors.

Joel Moskowitz, director of the Center for Family and Community Health with the UC Berkeley School of Public Health conducted the research in partnership with Korea’s National Cancer Center, and Seoul National University. Their analysis took a comprehensive look at statistical findings from case control studies from 16 countries including the U.S., Sweden, United Kingdom, Japan, Korea, and New Zealand.

“Cell phone use highlights a host of public health issues and it has received little attention in the scientific community, unfortunately,” said Moskowitz.

…

Many studies looking into the health risks of cell phone use have been funded or partially funded by the cellular phone industry, which critics argue can skew research results.

“Moskowitz emphasized that these studies have been controversial as it is a highly sensitive political topic with significant economic ramifications for a powerful industry,” Berkeley Public Health noted.

…

Experts also suggested when not in use, putting the phone in airplane mode, which turns off cellular, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth.

When on a call, experts advised avoid holding the phone up to your head and instead use the speaker feature or a headset.

Experts also said you should reduce or avoid use of your phone when there’s only one or two bars displayed showing the strength of connectivity. “Cell phones put out more RF energy to connect with cell towers when the signal is weak,” health officials noted.

That’s also true when using a mobile device in a fast-moving car, bus, or train because the phone emits more RF energy to maintain connections to avoid dropping calls as it switches connections from cell tower to cell tower.

Ultimately, when it comes to cell phones, “distance is your friend,” Moskowitz said. “Keeping your cellphone 10 inches away from your body, as compared to one-tenth of an inch, results in a 10,000-fold reduction in exposure. So, keep your phone away from your head and body,” he advised.

…

Moskowitz, who has been researching and writing about the dangers of radiation from cell phones and cell towers for more than a decade, said publication of his findings have consistently led to increased calls for continued research. “…as soon as those stories went public in the media,” he said, “I was contacted from survivors of cell phone radiation begging me to stay on this topic.”

Even if the phones aren’t really causing brain tumors (and it doesn’t seem like they really are on any scale, given the amount of time that this number of people have used them), all of this electromagnetic noise is clearly affecting our bodies in negative ways.

I recently gave Paul Skallas some crap for dropping the ball in a New York Times interview and allowing them to post a picture of a bunch of sluts getting drunk at a club and call it “deep Lindy.” In my view, calling a modern nightclub Lindy completely removes any meaning whatsoever from the term.

However, it’s fair to say the interview was probably pretty long and the Times fished around to get their own narrative out of the story. For all we know, Skallas might have explained that a Lindy nightclub would look nothing like a modern nightclub, which is a miserable palace of feminist vagina worship (basically, a nightclub is a torture device that men volunteer to undergo in the hopes that they might be granted access to a vagina by one of their female overlords).

Even of Skallas has sold out, he deserves credit for getting people interested in Lindy, which was not a small feat, all things considered. So, I don’t want to make it seem like I was just dumping on him. Anyone who gets into Lindy is not going to have a hard time figuring out for themselves that the modern conception of a nightclub is about as far as you can get from Lindy.

Paul had an interesting thread last week that is not even directly about Lindy, but certainly speaks to the issue of the nature of culture in time.

What year is it? 2008 forever https://t.co/6b2l2TreW2

— LindyMan (@PaulSkallas) June 22, 2021

https://t.co/WXTsTrvDSZ

— LindyMan (@PaulSkallas) June 22, 2021

https://t.co/NJbwAOs6TH

— LindyMan (@PaulSkallas) June 22, 2021

https://t.co/nVEDXKwa6I

— LindyMan (@PaulSkallas) June 23, 2021

pic.twitter.com/IGEXuCl2VZ

— LindyMan (@PaulSkallas) June 26, 2021

Firstly, I want to note that Avril looks surprisingly good in that video. I would have expected her to go full Mandy Moore.

That said, the observation that we are still basically in 2008 is obviously true, and the implications of that are somewhat extensive.

Peter Van Valkenburgh commented that we don’t need any new culture because there is so much of it, which has only recently been perfectly cataloged and available at your fingertips (at least that was the case before the censorship campaign began).

An entertaining thread and, yes, cultural decadence is upon us… but we are also at a unique moment in human history. For the first time, we've perfectly preserved digital recreations of the last half century of culture and art. Do we need more flow when the stock is so high? https://t.co/UWa9Y9IcUv

— Peter Van Valkenburgh (@valkenburgh) June 23, 2021

For the most part, I don’t really see zoomers as having their own culture. Zoomer pop culture seems to be completely a rehash of a bunch of stuff from when I was in my teens and early 20s – I.e., right about 2008.

The most obvious explanation for that is that it is the last stop in the culture before things got really weird, and therefore it’s something people want to hang on to. This is the year Obama got elected.

From there, all of the gay stuff, and the race stuff, went into hyperdrive. Obama was elected by white people on the promise of ending racial tensions and putting the whole thing behind us, and instead he used his position as president to agitate for a bunch of racial grievances from the 1960s that most Americans (including the blacks) viewed as finished with.

People apparently long for that time, before everything went so weird.

The other angle that might be worth looking into is that 2008 is when the iPhone launched, and before long, basically everyone had become addicted to these devices. We don’t fully understand the effects of this, but I have speculated at some length (in various articles I can’t find right now) that the psychological disconnect created by cellphones – this new form of unreality, where people have lost connection to their physical environment completely – is what allowed for everything to go so weird over the last 13 years.

The cellphones certainly affected human relationships. It interfered significantly with normal human interactions – people won’t have a conversation without constantly messing with their phones. This caused a breakdown in relationships. The phones also gave women the ability to get unlimited amounts of attention from thousands or millions of men, as well as allowing them sexual access to extremely private one night stands with men who would never be interested in them in any other context. These dynamics made women more or less completely unwilling to engage in normal human mating behavior.

Lacking access to the normal process of family building would in theory make men much less motivated to create new things. Every man I know has more or less completely given up on women. We don’t really see “tfw no gf” memes anymore, because no one maintains romantic ideas anymore. A lot of guys still have girlfriends, but they’re usually not under the illusion they’re going to build a family.

Along with lacking the basic natural motivation and romantic drive towards creativity because of the phone, it’s just an obvious fact that constantly having a screen in front of your face is going to destroy both concentration and creativity.

Therefore, everyone in society is stuck in a loop. The creatives themselves are stuck in a loop in that they aren’t coming up with new ideas, but more importantly, the masses of consumers are stuck in a loop. The entire concept of art involves the artist asking the viewer of the art to join them in a creative journey, and this then requires imagination on the part of the consumer of the entertainment. Therefore, even if an artist is capable of putting aside the women disaster, putting down the phone, keeping off the various anti-creativity drugs, and staying fit enough to have a working brain, his art is not worth anything to a society that is stuck in a loop and therefore only has interest in the safe and familiar.

However we must note that even if we’ve reached a kind of stasis in terms of artistic expression, society continues to change rapidly, as we continue down this death spiral of homosexuality, racial revolution and feminism. The fact that people choose to comfort themselves with this looped 2008 culture simply shows that people of all ages are simply dumbstruck, incapable of offering a response to what is happening.

Both supporters and opponents of this global agenda are entirely passive. The supporters do not think about any of it, they just go along with whatever new thing is promoted by CNN, the Democrat Party, and Hollywood. Opponents continually fall back on stupid clichés and worn out nonsense.

Look for example at the Donald Trump movement right now. These people are saying that the solution to a literal coup is to repeat 2016 and vote really hard. None of these people have worked through any of that logically, because if they thought about it for even a second, they would notice that it doesn’t make any sense that after having an election stolen the party that took over the government in a stolen election would give the guy they stole it from a fair shot.

I’ve often noted that peasants are not intended by God to be critical thinkers. I’ve noted the observable facts with regards to mass psychology and out them alongside the New Testament’s running metaphor of the masses of people as a flock of sheep, and stressed that expecting the masses to all be independent thinkers is ridiculous. However, they’re also not supposed to be a bunch of complete morons. Even a peasant with very low critical thinking skills should be able to recognize that Trump’s reelection campaign does not name any sense.

Just so, liberal peasants should be able to recognize that abolishing the police is going to lead to an increase in crime.

People in 2021 are in a state of future shock that is truly extreme, by any measure. In this context, the static culture is what you would expect.

You should have asked why they needed your name and ID to register a cellphone.

People kept saying “I don’t care if I’m being spied on, because I’m not doing anything wrong.”

Well, let’s see how that works out.

RT:

Punjab’s provincial government is turning to coercive measures to increase participation in its Covid-19 vaccination program, after unveiling plans to disable the SIM cards of people who decline to get jabbed.

The extreme decision was made during a meeting of high-ranking civil and military officials chaired by Punjab Health Minister Yasmin Rashid.

Rashid said that the policy would disable SIM cards belonging to those who fail to get vaccinated “beyond a certain time.”

“We are doing all we can to compel people to get vaccinated… The government cannot allow individuals, who do not want to get vaccinated, to risk lives of those who are already vaccinated,” the health minister told Pakistan’s Express Tribune. She said that the provincial government would devise a timeline for the policy’s implementation once it received formal approval from the National Command and Operation Center, which coordinates Pakistan’s national response to Covid-19.

Punjab’s Primary and Secondary Health Department announced the measure on Thursday in a tweet detailing the outcome of the meeting.

“Mobile SIMS of people not getting vaccinated may be blocked,” the department wrote.

In theory, Moslems should at least be against the vaxx for the same reasons Christians are: it contains aborted fetal tissue.

Of course, the Anal Pope came out and told Christians that the cannibalistic act of being injected with human fetal tissue was morally good and righteous.

Apparently, modern Moslems are no more serious than modern fake Christians.

It’s shocking the way religious institutions across the board have bowed to this vaxx program.

As far as shutting off phones: you can say “oh this is just Pakistan” – but Pakistan is part of the Western human rights democracy regime. You can guarantee this idea was endorsed by Western powers.

Of course they’re going to start this sort of thing in a shithole.

But this is in-line with the logic of censorship we’ve seen in the West: cellphone companies are private companies. Private companies are allowed to take away your First Amendment rights. We’ve seen now that private companies are allowed to force you to get vaxxed. Even in Florida, companies have been forcing their employees to get vaxxed under threat of being fired.

Private companies can do whatever they want to anyone – that is our values.

Right now, there is nothing in America stopping Verizon and T-Mobile from demanding that you show your vaxx card and if you refuse, shutting off your service. They could announce that program later today, and you would have absolutely zero recourse.

Tranny Watch warned when the censorship began that this new ultra-libertarian principle the socialist Jews were introducing and the government was accepting would be applied to things other than simply silencing speech.

The Biden Administration is still in the process of developing a vaccine passport, and they’ve already said that it will be up to companies if they want to use it. Obviously, all the big corporations will use it, and the government will punish any company that refuses. Because the government is allowed to incentivize private companies to violate people’s rights and that doesn’t count as the government violating your rights.

We’ve seen this with AOC calling for private companies to censor people.

She publicly demanded Apple and Google shut down Parler.

What are @Apple and @GooglePlay doing about this? https://t.co/Upb2BxZOQZ

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 8, 2021

She’s also sent out emails plotting to use her influence as an elected government official to censor Twitter and Facebook.

Wow. She just won't stop. AOC is determined to sow division in already-divided country and she's going back to manufacturing our consent for big tech censorship.

She's controlled, folks. pic.twitter.com/jk4sKup8aF

— R!CKYRANTS (@slikrik2003) February 4, 2021

It hasn’t gone to federal court yet, but it eventually will go to federal court, and it will be decided that the government can compel private companies to violate people’s rights, and incentivize them for doing so, and that doesn’t violate the libertarian principles that say a private company can do anything to anyone.

This is the new order: the tyrannical government works directly with mega-corporations to deprive people of their rights, and it is allowed on the basis of this libertarian claim that private companies’ rights trump those of individuals. It is totally incoherent in terms of these people’s ideology, but all ideologies are simply a smokescreen.

All of these ideologies are selectively enforced, and people like AOC, who are ostensibly socialists, will borrow from anarcho-capitalist ideology when it suits them.

No one can ever win with these ideologies. If it really was anarcho-capitalism, then the government wouldn’t be able to cooperate with these companies.

I don’t know when the US government will really start cracking down on anti-vaxxers, but they can do it at any time. There is no law stopping the government from working with “private companies” (that they both subsidize and manipulate using threats of government action against them) from taking away your phone or banning you from buying groceries.

Meanwhile, federal employees CANNOT be forced to take the vaxx, and Anthony Fauci admitted that between 40-50% of the staff at the NIH are refusing the vaxx.

Oh wait, no sorry – fact check alert – he didn’t say they refused it, he just said that they declined to take it.

USA Today: 

Reuters: 

Politifact: 

Here’s the video.

Senator Burr asked Fauci, Peter Marks from the FDA, and @CDCDirector what percentage of their own employees are vaccinated.

Fauci probably a bit more than half, around 60%.

Marks said about the same.

Walensky dodged the question. pic.twitter.com/zoeZXZeCWM

— Phil Kerpen (@kerpen) May 14, 2021

You can clearly say that he doesn’t use the word “refuse.”

They just didn’t take the vaccine.

They couldn’t refuse because they weren’t told they had to take the vaccine because only a private company can tell you you have to take a vaccine.

There are several things that you’re really just not allowed to talk about under any circumstances.

The most obvious historically has been the historicity of homicidal gas chambers in Nazi prison camps. The newest off-limits topics are the obvious fraud which took place in the 2020 election and the clear health danger of the coronavirus vaccine.

Another one of those topics is the health danger of birth control pills. Another is the health danger of so-called “anal sex.”

You cannot do studies on any of these things, and you cannot even collect information on them informally.

Fake shower room gas chambers, the 2020 election, the corona vaxx, the pill and anal are all black boxes.

The health dangers of cellphones – the worst of which are psychological – are not quite as off-limits as the pill or anal-ramming, but they’re close.

Occasionally, a study gets through.

It never looks good.

The Guardian:

Smartphone users have become “human snails carrying our homes in our pockets”, with a tendency to ignore friends and family in favour of their device, according to a landmark study.

A team of anthropologists from UCL spent more than a year documenting smartphone use in nine countries around the world, from Ireland to Cameroon, and found that far from being trivial toys, people felt the same way about their devices as they did about their homes.

“The smartphone is no longer just a device that we use, it’s become the place where we live,” said Prof Daniel Miller, who led the study. “The flip side of that for human relationships is that at any point, whether over a meal, a meeting or other shared activity, a person we’re with can just disappear, having ‘gone home’ to their smartphone.”

This phenomenon was leading to the “death of proximity” when it comes to face-to-face interaction, he said.

“This behaviour, and the frustration, disappointment or even offence it can cause, is what we’re calling the ‘death of proximity’. We are learning to live with the jeopardy that even when we are physically together, we can be socially, emotionally or professionally alone.”

This site was launched just right about the time that this phone phenomenon began in earnest, and Andrew Anglin has continually pressed the issue, and told people: you don’t have to participate.

Yes, you probably have to have a cellphone. And yes, it probably has to be a smartphone. That is, for most people, not avoidable.

However, you can and should establish clear boundaries with this device.

For example: when you meet with a friend or family member, you can simply turn it off. Sometimes, you may be able to just not bring it to a meeting.

It is a good idea to own a computer. You can make the computer your primary device for reading and electronic communication. Most of the major messaging apps have desktop versions that you can install. This will cause you to associate your electronic behaviors with a device that is not always in your pocket.

Something that we have yet to see a study on, but which is anecdotally true, is that if you do not bring out your phone while meeting with someone, that other person is much less likely to bring out their phone. If they do bring out their phone, and you do not immediately respond by also bringing out your phone, the person will likely say “I’m sorry, I just have to do something really quick” and then put the phone down.

What has been observed is that people expect that if they pull out their phone, whoever they are with will do the same, and people seem to be aware when they pull out the phone and the people their are with do not do the same. If you simply sit there, the other person will recognize what is happening.

It might not seem like it matters at this point, but limiting cellphone involvement is good for everyone’s mental health. The likelihood is that you are personally addicted to the device yourself, and you will have some trouble getting off of it. But like with alcohol, drugs, or sugar, the less you use it, the less it calls to you.

It’s almost like these phones can overpower the human will.

RT:

The family of a Robinhood investor who took his own life last year has sued the platform, alleging it misled the 20-year-old into thinking he was nearly $1 million in debt and that “reckless tactics” directly led to his death.

Filed in California’s Santa Clara County Superior Court on Monday, the 30-page complaint from the family of Alex Kearns accuses the online trading app of luring a young, inexperienced investor into transactions he “did not understand” and misleading him to believe he had incurred hundreds of thousands of dollars in obligations through the platform.

“‘How was a 20-year-old with no income able to get assigned almost $1 million worth of leverage?’ These were the last known written words of 20-year-old Alex Kearns before he rode his bicycle to a railroad crossing and ran in front of an oncoming train,” the Kearns family wrote in the court filing, adding “The only ones with the answer to Alex’s question are defendants Robinhood Markets Inc., Robinhood Financial LLC and Robinhood Securities LLC.”

“[Robinhood’s] reckless conduct directly and proximately caused the death of one of its victims. The distress, and the suicide, of this victim was foreseeable. Indeed, it was almost inevitable that an event like this would occur as a result of such reckless behavior.”

Do you wonder about the flicker rate of the lighting on the phones?

Do you ever wonder if it could be used to hypnotize someone?

What about the electromagnetic waves the phones are giving off constantly?

Could that affect our brain waves?

This is a headline from Scientific American in 2008:

This is the first paragraph:

Hospitals and airplanes ban the use of cell phones, because their electromagnetic transmissions can interfere with sensitive electrical devices. Could the brain also fall into that category? Of course, all our thoughts, sensations and actions arise from bioelectricity generated by neurons and transmitted through complex neural circuits inside our skull. Electrical signals between neurons generate electric fields that radiate out of brain tissue as electrical waves that can be picked up by electrodes touching a person’s scalp. Measurements of such brainwaves in EEGs provide powerful insight into brain function and a valuable diagnostic tool for doctors. Indeed, so fundamental are brainwaves to the internal workings of the mind, they have become the ultimate, legal definition drawing the line between life and death.

Maybe we will investigate this further in the future.

The fact is that the way everyone has just gone totally insane all at once and there are only a few of us who are aware of it is just simply incomprehensible.

The FBI is using cellphone data to track everyone who was at the Capitol on January 6, and is just randomly showing up at their houses to question them.

It’s probably going to take a while for them to get to everyone, and there might be some they can’t figure out, but they are using a system where if your cellphone pinged a tower or wifi near the Capitol on that day, they consider you a suspect in an “insurrection.”

WUSA9:

If you were anywhere near the Capitol on Jan. 6, you may be getting a knock on your door from the FBI.

A D.C. woman said an agent visited her neighbor and called her, telling them investigators were tracking people whose cell phones connected to wi-fi or pinged cell phone towers near the Capitol during the riots.

“They don’t call first, they just come to your house,” Bree Stevens, a legal investigator who lives near Capitol Hill, said.

Stevens said an FBI agent told her they were reaching out to every single person whose cell phone put them near the Capitol during the riots.

She was out for a walk with a friend and his two young daughters on the afternoon of Jan. 6, but they were diverted by bomb scares until they ended up right next to the insurrection. Adults and kids were cordoned off and unable to get back to their apartments for four hours.

“You don’t want to be anywhere where they’re going to go!” she said on a video she shot while police officers in riot gear quick-stepped toward the Capitol.

This is obviously a new, insane sort of police state abuse, but hey – gotta protect those podiums.

It’s just like that old cellphone spy meme.

These cellphones were always obviously a major security risk, but it’s now at the point where it’s just not even viable to own one at all if you don’t want the FBI tracking your every move and using it against you.

They were always tracking your every move, but they weren’t generally able to use it against people on a mass scale like this.

So you should probably consider getting rid of your phone.

This is sort of thing is going to be used to enforce the coronavirus lunacy as well, very soon.

We are living in a pathocracy.

This is obviously hilarious, but it should be a reminder to be careful with your apps.

RT:

A popular Muslim prayer app has been secretly collecting its users’ location data, according to Vice. A network of data brokers links the app to US government law enforcement agencies such as ICE and the FBI.

The app called Salaat First (Prayer Times) was created to help Muslims perform their daily prayers, reminding when the time for the ritual has come, identifying the direction they need to take to face Mecca, and showing the location of nearby mosques. The features require identifying location data.

According to data leaked to Vice’s Motherboard website, the app went further than simply identifying where the user was, however. Until recently, it also shared that data with a broker, which sold the information on to other interested parties. The broker, a French firm called Predicio, is part of a what Vice claims is a shady data supply chain that had earlier been identified by the outlet. Among the chain’s clients are US law enforcement agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Vice had previously exposed Muslim Pro, another app aimed at Muslim users, which tracked user locations and sold the data to the US military, including the US Special Operations Command. Admittedly, Salaat First has a smaller user base – the Android version of Salaat First, which had been collecting the data, has been downloaded more than 10 million times, whereas MuslimPro had racked up over 100 million downloads by the time it was outed.

The dataset examined by Vice recorded the precise geographic location of the device running Salaat First and updated it every two minutes, plus the device model and operating system, the IP address, and a timestamp. It also contained a unique advertising ID, which allowed the tracking of individual users over time. The app’s developer told Vice the tracking feature was supposed to initialize only if the app was downloaded in the UK, Germany, France or Italy. The report says Vice tested the app and decided that users had not been sufficiently informed about the feature to be able to give their informed consent to being tracked and their data being sold on.

And the data harvesting was not limited to Salaat First. Several other apps have likely used the same software development kit (SDK) to handle data collection. SDK is third-party code that usually helps create new software faster but can also add functionality beneficial to the third party in exchange for some incentive to the developer. Among other apps possibly running Predicio’s tracker were popular weather apps Fu*** Weather and Weawow, the report said, based on reverse-engineering of the code. Neither of the three apps is using the SDK now, they told Vice.

It was not clear if any of the location data collected by Predicio through Salaat First ended up in the hands of US law enforcement. The firm itself changed its website after Vice’s previous coverage of its business, to say it “does not support any governmental, commercial, or private use cases that aim to use business intelligence data to identify ethnic, religious, or political groups for human tracking or people identification of any sort.”

Vice points out that the way the data harvesting was carried out through Salaat First violated Google Play’s terms of service. X-Mode, the location tracker behind Muslim Pro, was banned by both Google and Apple from their app stores after the previous exposé. However, Predicio was allowed to run its operation for years, bringing into question Google’s willingness to enforce its own rules.

The Apple store is the only place where users of its devices can find and install apps without breaking terms of service. Android OS allows installation from third-party sources, but Google Play remains the main venue for bringing apps to end users. Big Tech power over software developers was recently highlighted by the ousting of Parler, a microblogging app catering to conservative audiences, amid the wider crackdown on supporters of Donald Trump.

You’ll hear a lot of people come out and say “OH BRO IT DOESN’T EVEN MATTER BRO EVERYTHING IS SPIED ON BRO.”

While that is possibly true, it is also nihilistic and retarded. Apple and Google were not turning over this information to the feds – an app was.

We actually have a lot of precedent for Apple in particular refusing to turn over information to the feds, or to anyone else. That doesn’t mean they aren’t doing it secretly, and I suspect they probably are, but secret information is not legally actionable.

At least not yet.

The point is: security is important, more than likely if you have a security leak, it is your fault for something stupid you did like install some random Android app and not because “BRO THEY RECORD EVERYTHING BRO.”

That having been said, there’s a good chance that under Kamala Harris, they’re going to make it so they can just legally use all of this secret NSA spying stuff to prosecute you in court, or just use it to round you up and put you in a FEMA camp.

But that means you should be more secure with your data – not less.

This is one of the reasons we removed Bitcoin as a donation option from the site.

By the way – please use monero and donate.

Apple had an event unveiling the iPhone 12 on Tuesday. We were all left remembering that there was no iPhone 9, and thinking about how gross and gimmicky it was to call the iPhone 9 the iPhone X and say the X is for the ten year anniversary, then say that the X meant 10, as in the iPhone 10, and then follow it with an iPhone 11.

Furthermore, the iPhone X should have actually been the iPhone 8, since the iPhone 8 should have been the iPhone 7s, given that it was the same phone as the 7 with very minor interior improvements. But okay, they skipped the “s” – but skipping an entire number and never explaining it was just gross and weird. Very disrespectful.

The event itself was very gross. I don’t think it had a single heterosexual white male involved. Watching it, you wouldn’t know that white men existed.

These were the presenters:

These were actors, the alleged userbase:

They don’t appear to want white men using the phone – so I won’t.

I will say that physically, the phone looks better than the 6-11, because they’ve brought back the flat sides of the earlier phones.

Honestly, they never should have dropped those to begin with, as they are more comfortable, slip less and just look better.

This is the current line pricing structure:

The mini is I guess interesting, as it is a retro model. But they already had a retro model.

Alas, I’ve stopped using the products of this horrible company a long time ago, and phones in general now bore me.

The reality is this: the iPhone 12 does not have improved functionality, in any critical area, over the iPhone 6. The 6 was peak phone. This yearly release celebration thing is now absurd. It used to make sense to be excited about yearly phone releases, because there were improvements. I used to be interested in this. No more.

Listen: imagine if Rolex did a yearly watch release event, and had 12 different women and colored people explaining to you that whereas last year’s model was accurate to 1/100,000,000,000th of a second, this year’s model is accurate to 1/100,000,000,001th of a second, and acted like you should rush out and buy one.

What these phones are now is a conversation starter and a status symbol for peasants.

In reality, as I’ve explained many times, it’s not a real status symbol, because anyone can conceivably get together $1200. Having a $1200 phone is not like having a $120,000 car. The car proves you’ve got money to throw around. The only thing that you’re proving with the phone is that you wasted $1200, which makes you look like a status-seeking dupe. I refuse to believe that anyone ever got laid because they had an expensive phone.

The cellphone industry is dead. Someone is going to start making phones that are like Rolexes, in that they have an extremely long lifespan. I think some Asian company is going to come out with a $1000 phone with a five year full warranty, and then there will be a lifetime warranty.

The one improvement Apple did apparently add to the 12 is that the glass is allegedly 4 times stronger.

But of course, they could have done that at any time. There are all kinds of ultra-hard glasses that you can drop on a tile floor and not break. Apple didn’t use them because they wanted the phones to break so you would have to buy a knew one. The fact that they added it now (if it’s even true) is just a concession that people are sick of buying these phones every two years and want something that will last longer.

Because I like the square sides, and the hardened glass thing sounds good, I would consider buying one of these phones. Except I won’t, because Apple is a hateful, anti-white company. I’ll stick with the gooks, thanks.