USGOVT spying on citizens is now ubiquitous

The Government Is Spying On Us Through Our Computers, Phones, Cars, Buses, Streetlights, At Airports And On The Street, Via Mobile Scanners And Drones, Through Our Smart Meters, And In Many Other Ways

Even now – after all of the revelations by Edward Snowden and other whistleblowers – spying apologists say that the reports are “exaggerated” or “overblown”, and that the government only spies on potential bad guys.

In reality, the government is spying on everyone’s digital and old-fashioned communications. For example, the government is photographing the outside information on every piece of snail mail. The government is spying on you through your phone … and may even remotely turn on your camera and microphone when your phone is off.

As one example, the NSA has inserted its code into Android’s operating system … bugging three-quarters of the world’s smartphones. Google – or the NSA – can remotely turn on your phone’s camera and recorder at any time.

Moreover, Google knows just about every WiFi password in the world … and so the NSA does as well, since it spies so widely on Google.

But it’s not just the Android.  In reality, the NSA can spy on just about everyone’s smart phone.

Cell towers track where your phone is at any moment, and the major cell carriers, including Verizon and AT&T, responded to at least 1.3 million law enforcement requests for cell phone locations and other data in 2011. (And – given that your smartphone routinely sends your location information back to Apple or Google – it would be child’s play for the government to track your location that way.) Your iPhone, or other brand of smartphone is spying on virtually everything you do (ProPublica notes: “That’s No Phone. That’s My Tracker“). Remember, that might be happening even when your phone is turned off. Read more >>

Apple Sells 9M iPhones Over The Weekend, A New Record

Apple shares are up more than 6% in pre-market trading after its announcement about the weekend sales — the first that included its new iPhone 5C and 5S.Analysts expected as many as 8M units to be sold worldwide.

That would have handily beat the previous opening weekend record of 5M set last year with the release of the iPhone 5. With the new sales figures, Apples says in an SEC filing that it expects its fiscal Q4 revenues to come in “near the high end of the previously provided range of $34 billion to $37 billion” with gross margins “near the high end of the previously provided range of 36% to 37%.”

Demand for the iPhones was “incredible,” CEO Tim Cook says, “and while we’ve sold out of our initial supply of iPhone 5S, stores continue to receive new iPhone shipments regularly. We appreciate everyone’s patience and are working hard to build enough new iPhones for everyone.” Unlike last year, people served by T-Mobile and Japan’s DoCoMo were able to buy the new iPhones on the opening weekend. Read more >>

Homeless Being Paid To Stand in Line For iPhone 5C, 5S

Several homeless people were being paid to stand in line Friday in Pasadena for the release of the iPhone 5C and 5S. The phones went on sale at Apple and other retail stores at 8 a.m.

Pasadena police told KNX 1070′s Jon Baird that many people in line at the Colorado Boulevard store were recruited from downtown Los Angeles.

“I was asked yesterday if I would be willing to sit in line for someone so they could get a phone. I said ‘Sure, I’ve got nothing else to do.’ So I’m here,” Mickie, who was driven from the Midnight Mission area along with 10 others,said.

It was unclear how much Mickie was being compensated, however, others in line said they were being paid as little as $35 to wait in line for hours. “They dropped us, sit in line, get the vouchers and then we’ll be paid,” she added.

Vouchers were given out at 6 a.m. to those in line. “It’s just something you need to have,” fan Francisco Naranjo, who began camping Sunday night outside of the company’s Pasadena store, said.

The iPhone 5C will be available in five colors — green, blue, yellow, pink and white. Read more >>

iPhone 5S: Thieves chop off phone-owners' fingertips to access fingerprint-reading handsets

Apple's new model includes Touch ID, which allows users to unlock their handsets with their fingerprints

Thieves have mutilated victims to gain access to phones equipped with a fingerprint reader, an expert has warned. Yesterday, Apple launched its iPhone 5S, which includes the Touch ID feature, an integrated sensor on the device's home button that reads your fingerprint in order to unlock your phone.

Marc Rogers said the sensors can provide a convenient way to unlock gadgets while also boosting security. But they have led criminals to commit increasingly brutal robberies and even chop off phone-owners' fingertips, the chief researcher at mobile security firm Lookout claimed.

Fraudsters have also succeeded in lifting and duplicating prints with technology that “is only going to improve with time”, he added. Read more >>

Google Glass app being designed to read emotions

Last week, I stood in the cramped office of a Sand Hill Road venture capital firm, staring through Google Glass eyewear at an 18-year-old with a blank expression.

In the display above my right eye, the word "neutral" appeared. Then he cracked a wide smile and the word changed to "happy."

The young man with plenty of reasons to grin is Catalin Voss, an entrepreneur and Stanford student from Germany who has been working on iPhone apps since he was 12 - that is to say, pretty much since there has been an iPhone.

Now, with a small team of mostly fellow students, he's working on emotion-recognition tools that could improve education and training by monitoring engagement. But there are other interesting use cases as well: Voss, who has a cousin with autism, thinks the Glass app could help those with difficulty discerning emotions to interact in more natural ways, easing their path through the world.

The company, Sension, based in the Menlo Park offices of Highland Capital for the summer, is among a handful of businesses making strides in emotion-recognition technology. The tools can analyze facial expressions and vocal patterns for signs of specific emotions: Happiness, sadness, anger, frustration and more.

There's a broad array of potential applications, including potentially creepy commercial ones: If my TV knows I'm feeling depressed, might it load up an ad for fast food? Read more >>

Massive solar flare narrowly misses Earth, EMP disaster barely avoided

The earth barely missed taking a massive solar punch in the teeth two weeks ago, an "electromagnetic pulse" so big that it could have knocked out power, cars and iPhones throughout the United States.

Two EMP experts told Secrets that the EMP flashed through earth's typical orbit around the sun about two weeks before the planet got there.

"The world escaped an EMP catastrophe," said Henry Cooper, who led strategic arms negotiations with the Soviet Union under President Reagan, and who now heads High Frontier, a group pushing for missile defense.

"There had been a near miss about two weeks ago, a Carrington-class coronal mass ejection crossed the orbit of the Earth and basically just missed us," said Peter Vincent Pry, who served on the Congressional EMP Threat Commission from 2001-2008. He was referring to the 1859 EMP named after astronomer Richard Carrington that melted telegraph lines in Europe and North America. Read more >>

AT&T to Load iPhones With Emergency Alerts From Obama – That You Can’t Switch Off

AT&T has begun rolling out Wireless Emergency Alerts updates for iPhone 4S and 5, so you won't be the last folks to know if the entire northern hemisphere is about to be covered in ice à la Day After Tomorrow.

You'll receive a notification from the carrier when your update is ready, but only if you're using iOS 6.1 or higher. Once installed, AMBER and Emergency alerts are automatically sent to your phone unless you switch them off via Settings.

However, should you be tired of Obama, just know that there's no way to switch off Presidential alerts. WEA messages are always free of charge, so you don't have to worry about going over your texting limit when notified that you need to get the hell out of dodge. Read more >>

Why Apple will never bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S.

Foxconn -- China's largest private employer and the manufacturer of an estimated 40% half of the world's consumer electronic devices -- pays its assembly workers far less than American labor laws would allow. A typical salary is 2500 RMB (U.S. $400), or about $18 a day.

But pay isn't the biggest obstacle. Various economists have estimated how much an all-American labor force would add to the cost of an iPhone and come up with figures ranging from $65 to $100 per device.

The real stumbling block is speed. Unlike U.S. plants, Foxconn and other Chinese manufacturing operations house employees in dormitories and can send hundreds of thousands of workers to the assembly lines at a moment's notice. On the lines, workers are subjected to what most Americans would consider unbearably long hours and tough working conditions. Read more >>

An Arkansas company knows more about you than your friends and sells your data

Theweek.com
When you think of the surveillance state, you usually think of snoopy alphabet-soup government agencies like the FBI, IRS, DEA, NSA, or TSA, or cyber-snoops at Facebook or Google, says Natasha Singer in The New York Times. But there's a company you've probably never heard of that "peers deeper into American life," and probably knows more about you than any of those groups: Little Rock–based Acxiom Corp.

Nokia Cuts 10,000 Jobs

Nokia says it will slash 10,000 jobs and close plants as the ailing company fights fierce competition, and gave a grim outlook for most of the year, causing its shares to plummet 18 percent to close at €1.83 ($2.30).
The Finnish cellphone maker also on Thursday announced personnel changes and said it has agreed to sell its luxury phone brand, Vertu.

The measures, aimed at additional cost savings of €1.6 billion ($2 billion) by the end of next year, will shut down research and development facilities in Ulm, Germany, and Burnaby, British Columbia. Nokia said it will also close its main Finnish manufacturing plant in Salo, with 850 layoffs, but will keep its research and development center there.

The loss-making company has been struggling against fierce competition from Apple Inc.'s iPhone and other makers using Google Inc.'s popular Android software, including Samsung Electronics Co. and HTC of Taiwan. It is also being squeezed in the low-end by Asian manufacturers making cheaper phones, such as China's ZTE. Read more >>

Battle Brewing Over Labeling of Genetically Modified Food

AMY HARMON and ANDREW POLLACK
The New York Times
For more than a decade, almost all processed foods in the United States — cereals, snack foods, salad dressings — have contained ingredients from plants whose DNA was manipulated in a laboratory. Regulators and many scientists say these pose no danger. But as Americans ask more pointed questions about what they are eating, popular suspicions about the health and environmental effects of biotechnology are fueling a movement to require that food from genetically modified crops be labeled, if not eliminated.

How Apple Sidesteps Billions in Taxes

Apple, the world’s most profitable technology company, doesn’t design iPhones here. It doesn’t run AppleCare customer service from this city. And it doesn’t manufacture MacBooks or iPads anywhere nearby.

Yet, with a handful of employees in a small office here in Reno, Apple has done something central to its corporate strategy: it has avoided millions of dollars in taxes in California and 20 other states.

Apple’s headquarters are in Cupertino, Calif. By putting an office in Reno, just 200 miles away, to collect and invest the company’s profits, Apple sidesteps state income taxes on some of those gains. More...

The American middle class no longer matters on the global stage

Image via WikipediaThe ideal setup for Global Corporate America is domestic stability. The erosion of the American middle class is of little concern for one simple reason: it no longer matters much on the global stage. All that Global Corporate America needs from America is a stable foundation that won't offer up any surprises or spots of bother.

As the discretionary purchasing power of the American middle class erodes, four times as many new potential customers appear elsewhere, hungry to taste the Oreos, become consumed by the iPhone, etc., and ten times as many are potential buyers of toothpaste and other basics. U.S. corporations are pulling $500 billion in profits from non-U.S. sales, and they hold $1 trillion in stashed overseas profits in various tax havens. All the growth in their revenues and profits are coming from non-U.S. sources. Read more...

America's 50 Most Powerful People in Food

Any catalogue of powerful people — and certainly any ranking of them in order of clout — is bound to be highly subjective, of course. That doesn't mean that it has to be arbitrary. The Daily Meal editors collaborated to assemble our initial list, then added and subtracted, fine-tuned and developed. We did extensive research and had endless discussions and occasionally strenuous debates. One thing that was clear from the beginning was that the most influential figures in the field weren't always the best-known, and that CEOs could wield more might than celebrities. Read more...

CNBC Ratings Get Smashed

Damien Hoffman

I think Nielson ratings are complete bullshit, but for what it’s worth I’m going to make a bullshit to bullshit comparison:

Once again, CNBC has continued to lose viewers after failing to help anyone save money during the Great Crash of 2008. The newest Nielson Media Research numbers show Business Day (5am-7pm) down 24% P2+ (total households) and down 37% in the A25-54 demographic. Primetime, CNBC is down 34% P2+ and down 25% in the A25-54 demo (Monday through Friday).

That’s a significant drop. Is it those pesky video games? Maybe it’s iPhone apps. Nah. It’s definitely correlated to the value CNBC offers to our investment accounts.