A beloved relative recently included me on an email forward that I simply could not ignore. I’m not the first person to write a rebuttal to this email. It has been making the rounds since at least 2009, as the screenshot below illustrates.

[caption id=“attachment_2525” align=“aligncenter” width=“700”]<img class=“size-large wp-image-2525” src=“https://joeross1.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/27aed-scr.png?w=1024&amp;h=768" alt=‘Earliest Google result for “An Eye Opener” email: archive.is/jO20n’ width=“700” height=“525”> Earliest Google result for “An Eye Opener” email: archive.is/jO20n[/caption]

My response took about an hour to research and draft but there is so much factual evidence available to refute the absurd claims made in the “An Eye Opener” email that you could do a thesis on it. In other words, the little bit of work I did here is just the tip of the iceberg.

Here’s the full text of the email, followed by my reply.

Introduction

This is the exact text of an email I received recently from a very intelligent relative:

AN EYE-OPENER

Charity Hospital run by the Sisters of Charity in New Orleans, along with the Upjohn company developed the plasma system in the1930’s that saved so many lives in WWII, Korea, Vietnam and in the Middle East now.

During the Civil War most of the nurses were nuns.

Even if you are not Catholic, this is eye opening:

When the Catholic Church was founded in the United States, there were no hospitals.

Today, one out of five persons in this country receive their medical care at a Catholic hospital.

When the Catholic Church was founded, there were no schools. Today, the Catholic Church teaches 3 million students a day, in its more than 250 Catholic Colleges and Universities, in its more than 1200 Catholic High Schools and its more than 5000 Catholic grade schools.

Every day, the Catholic Church feeds, clothes, shelter and educates more people than any other organization in the world.

The new Obama Health Mandate could end all this and the tax payers would have to make up the loss.

Also, all Catholic adoption services will come to an end… a human disaster.

There are more than 77 million Catholics in this country. It takes an estimated 50 million Catholic votes to elect a president.

I am asking all of you to go to the polls in 2016 and be united in replacing all Senators, Congress and the president with someone who will respect the Catholic Church, all Christians Churches of every denomination, the Jewish Synagogues and all other Religions and Temples with perhaps the exception of Islam.

Mr. President, you said in a speech, “The USA is not a Christian Nation”. You are wrong - we are a Christian Nation founded on Judeo-Christian values allowing all religions in America to worship and practice freely… something that Islam will never do.

Oh, by the way Mr. President, on your MUSLIM HERITAGE in America ….

Have you ever been to a Muslim hospital, heard a Muslim orchestra, seen a Muslim band march in a parade, know of a Muslim charity, ever seen Muslims shaking hands with a Muslim Girl Scout, or ever seen a Muslim Candy Striper volunteering in a hospital?

Have you ever seen a Muslim do much of anything that contributes positively to the American way of life?

One more note….. in every church or synagogue, I have ever been in, in the United States, I have always seen an American flag. No mosques in the United States carriers or flies an American flag.

Let’s circulate this to as many as possible.

Remember the elections are coming up in November 2016!

Response

Now, we will simply examine the facts:

There are no Muslim hospitals in the U.S. that I know of. However, any successful businessperson can appreciate the difficulty of running an operation which, in today’s political climate, may only have about 1% of the U.S. population as potential customers.

The American Blues has roots in Muslim music, probably because about 30% of American Slaves were Muslim. That is, until they were brutally enslaved and often forcibly converted to Christianity by Christian slaveholders.

Islamic influences on Medieval Europe are also well-documented, including with regard to music (there’s even a 13th century miniature depicting a Muslim and a Christian jamming on their lutes together).

It appears Muslims influenced a great many other areas of European history, which of course trickled down to U.S. history. Even Saint Thomas Aquinas “made a study of the Islamic writers and admitted his indebtedness to them."

New York Public Radio affiliate WQXR has a great story on historically significant orchestral tours, including the following section:

A product of Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim and the late Palestine activist Edward Said, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra was founded in 1999 to bridge the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and bring young musicians of Jewish and Arab descent together to make music. The orchestra is based in Seville, Spain, a city chosen for having both Jewish and Muslim legacies. And its performances are better received outside the musicians' homelands. However, the group traveled to Ramallah in 2005 for a concert. The visit is considered one of the first non-militaristic encounters between Israelis and residents of the Occupied Territories.

See also: National Arab Orhestra and New York Arabic Orchestra

Muslims ‘Give Most To Charity’, Ahead Of Christians, Jews And Atheists, Poll Finds: I admit, this article is three years old and relates only to British citizens, but it is data nonetheless.

Directory of 1,271 Islamic charities: Yes, there are 4 times as many Jewish charities and 84 times as many Christian charities, but the data suggest that if we don’t know of any Muslim charities it isn’t because they don’t exist.

As for marching bands in parades, I could find none in the U.S. but I did notice that marching bands are most likely an import from Ottoman military history, as seen here.

Muslims do have parades, but a quick Google search and some careful reading will show many of the marchers are more focused on the geopolitical turmoil in their home countries rather than their religion, and many U.S. commentators, pro- as well as anti-Islam, are ignorant of that fact.

As for Girl Scouts, where do we begin? Here are few links:

• To Muslim girls in U.S., Girl Scouts offer a chance to fit in
• Islamic Committee on Girl Scouting: The Religious Recognition Awards offered by the ICGS is approved by both the G.S.U.S.A. and by W.A.G.G.S. (World Association of Girl Guides and Scouts).
• Muslim Scouts pursue an American tradition --- in an America wary of Muslims
• If you don't believe country, honor and Allah can co-exist, meet these Muslim Boy Scouts
• Muslim, Christian Scouts come together to foster friendship, understanding

As for volunteering:

• California Muslims with Muslim Spiritual Care Services volunteer in hospitals and provide services and training in chaplaincy to Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
• Muslim Volunteers For New York does similar work.
• Muslim volunteers hand out 700 'Mercy Bags' to seniors, homeless
• In good faith: American Muslim RNs reflect on challenges: This article suggests it's hard enough being a paid Muslim nurse in the U.S., let alone a volunteer

Muslims have done much of anything that contributes positively to the American way of life. Like football, and basketball, and boxing, and many other things. While the roughly 5,900 Muslim-American military members of the U.S. Armed Forces make up only a bit more than a quarter of one percent of the Armed Forces, their contribution to the American way of life surely cannot be denied.

Some Mosques do actually have American flags, like this one, and this one, and this one, and this one, and even ones who receive bomb threats.

Conclusion

If there is any doubt left as to the absurdity and ignorance of the claims made about Islam in the email this post destroys I will address them with a future article on the well-documented history of Christian bloodlust throughout the centuries. #justsayin

NJ law would require pet stores sell only rescue animals

John C. Ensslin reports for The Record:

New pet stores in New Jersey would be allowed to sell only cats and dogs obtained from shelters, pounds and animal rescue organization under a bill the state Senate passed Thursday.

The bill still has to go to the Assembly and will face industry opposition there, but it’s a great step forward. Find more information about the bill here. You can read an embedded PDF of the Senate version below this post.

A Slack bot to alert about missing children

[caption id=“attachment_2481” align=“aligncenter” width=“700”] Slack screenshot of MissingKidsBot[/caption]

From the product page of MissingKidsBot, built by David Markovich and Daniel Doubrovkine:

According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, roughly 800,000 children are reported missing each year in the United States -- that's roughly 2,000 per day.

This is a really great idea, and something everyone with a Slack group should consider adding. However small the chances are that you’ll ever see something that might help with one of these alerts, a child’s life will always be worth it.

Nerds can look at the code over on Github. And those of you who don’t use Slack should keep an eye out for MissingKidsBot on Facebook, Skype and WhatsApp.

Apple users targeted in first known Mac ransomware campaign

Jim Finkle reports for Reuters:

Hackers infected Macs through a tainted copy of a popular program known as Transmission, which is used to transfer data through the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing network, Palo Alto said on a blog posted on Sunday afternoon.

The cynical part of me wonders whether this is a clever move by one or more media companies to discourage the use of BitTorrent clients.

I know, maybe I need to order a tin-foil hat. But when even Kanye is pirating stuff it’s really time to bust out some innovative new tactics.

The perils of marriage equality

Professor Kimberly Mutcherson of Rutgers Law School writes at Concurring Opinions about Professor Katherine Franke’s recent book ‘Wedlocked: the Perils of Marriage Equality’:

We do not want to reinforce familial hierarchies by forcing people into specific family arrangements in order to warrant recognition (2 parents only), nor do we want to fetishize outsider families such that those who do not fit that model are denigrated for their choices (i.e., the adoptive parents who choose a closed adoption or the birth mother who opts for such an adoption thus perhaps not being queer enough in their choices). In thinking about the ways in which reproductive justice calls for us to respect the right to have a child, not have a child, or parent that child in a safe and healthy environment, the upshot for me is that the reproductive justice paradigm does not demand that outsider families conform to some particular form in order to help dismantle hierarchy.

I have thought about this concern since undergrad, where postcolonial literature, feminism and even semiotics courses touched on the nature of othering as an active verb, something done to a group of people. I was lucky enough to take a course in law school called Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and the Law with Professor Leonore F. Carpenter which expanded my understanding and interest in the dynamics of queer identity, family and legal frameworks.

The specific concern with which I’ve been preoccupied since then is that there is a danger in radical acceptance or the success of various equality movements. The danger I see is in achieving a nominal or “seat at the table” equality that normalizes othered groups to the frameworks of the groups that have historically done the othering.

One infuriating example of how I think about this stuff is the so-called equality of separate-but-equal, which of course was not equality at all. In the case of race, equality is not allowing non-white people to do all the stuff white people are allowed to do, but allowing non-white people to do whatever it is non-white people want to do, which is really what has always been allowed to white Americans.

I see Professors Franke and Mutcherson making a similar point about the danger of seeing marriage equality as squeezing queer couples and families into 1) heteronormative cis-gendered and/or culturally/racially segregated family models or 2) altogether new models, sometimes developed by hand-wavingly obnoxious if well-intentioned hetero-cis folks. Maybe I’m mistaken, but the overall approach as I see it being explained by these two scholars is essentially to stop putting up new roads and signs for queer families and just get the hell out of the way.

Read Mutcherson’s entire post, it’s worth it. And I’ve added “Wedlocked' to my Kindle wishlist, which is growing faster than I can keep up.

Enough with the conspiracy theories about Justice Scalia’s death

I read this earlier today:

"As a former homicide commander, I am stunned that no autopsy was ordered for Justice Scalia," William O. Ritchie wrote in a Facebook post on Sunday, according to reports. After seeking to cast doubt on the conclusion of the deputy U.S. marshals who responded to a call from the ranch, he added, "My gut tells me there is something fishy going on in Texas."

My gut tells me there is some fishing for attention going on in the head of the former D.C. police officer who said that.

Why?

Let’s consider this:

1. Why?
2. Why??
3. Why???

Was it a Liberal conspiracy to get President Obama one more lasting decision about the future of United States legal policy?

Was it a “Conservative” conspiracy to give Congressional Republicans and presidential candidates something “meaningful” to “stand up” to Obama about?

Was it Ancient Aliens?

There was no autopsy, they say! There was a pillow above his head, they say! The President was told long before anyone else, they say (as if the President doesn’t get most of the news before everyone else…)!

Conspiracy theorists demand: “What is your proof Scalia wasn’t murdered?”

These stupid theories remind me of one of the frequent arguments levied against atheists: “What is your proof that there is no god??”

Who proved god exists in the first place?

Pillows

Many articles note the ranch owner who found Scalia said there was a pillow above his head, and many conspiracy theorists point to this as suspicious. I sleep with a pillow over my head every night, and another one underneath it, using the two to drown out the sounds of an increasingly conspiratorial world so I can maintain my slumber all night long.

No conspiracy. Just a light sleeper.

Politics aside

I disagreed with much of Justice Scalia’s Supreme Court jurisprudence but his presence on the Court was invaluable to the development of United States law and the debates from which it springs.

He articulated his positions in such a way that I (almost always) respected them, even when I found it hard to believe someone so intelligent was seriously asserting them. He was rarely conclusory, giving reasons for his views, and whether you agreed with those reasons or not, that’s more than most politicians (and lawyers) usually do.

His death is a loss, but there are few more certain paths to some sort of immortality than thirty years on the Supreme Court of the United States.

Photo: Then-nominee Antonin Scalia, right, with President Ronald Reagan in 1986, via Wikipedia

Google begins rolling out free internet to public housing in Fiber cities

This is a big deal. I worked at the Philadelphia Housing Authority for years and talked to a lot of kids and adults about their desire to get online. Philly isn’t yet on Google’s Fiber expansion roadmap, but this is a great development.

Retiring founder wants $1M for his SCOTUS audio archive

Oyez is a robust archive of audio recordings and other information spanning much of the history of the Supreme Court of the United States. Its founder Chicago-Kent College of Law Professor Jerry Goldman is looking for a buyer as he nears retirement. Jess Bravin reports at the Wall Street Journal:

The sticking point, however, isn’t the annual budget; Harvard Law School, for one, has offered to pick up the operating cost. But Mr. Goldman also wants to be paid for the sweat he’s put into his baby–or at least the intellectual property it represents—something he estimates is worth well over $1 million.

Here comes an entitled opinion right here: A decision to somehow “close down” Oyez if no one is willing to put up six or seven figures for it would be morally bankrupt and stain Professor Goldman’s otherwise admirable legacy.

LucasFilm to toy vendors: No Rey

Michael Boehm at Sweatpants and Coffee:

The insider, who was at those meetings, described how initial versions of many of the products presented to Lucasfilm featured Rey prominently. At first, discussions were positive, but as the meetings wore on, one or more individuals raised concerns about the presence of female characters in the Star Wars products. Eventually, the product vendors were specifically directed to exclude the Rey character from all Star Wars-related merchandise, said the insider.

I want to be infuriated and surprised by this revelation, but I’m just infuriated.

U.S. DOT paving way for self-driving cars

Chris Ziegler reports at The Verge:

DOT and NHTSA will develop the new tools necessary for this new era of vehicle safety and mobility, and will seek new authorities when they are necessary to ensure that fully autonomous vehicles, including those designed without a human driver in mind, are deployable in large numbers when demonstrated to provide an equivalent or higher level of safety than is now available.

This is far more progressive than I expected the federal government to be on the autonomous transportation vehicle front, primarily for safety reasons. It’s good news.

Aside: DOT or Klingons?

The featured image above is a photo of the U.S. DOT headquarters building in Washington, D.C. I first looked at the DOT logo as a potential image for this post, but it looked too much like the Klingon symbol:

[gallery type=“square” size=“medium” link=“none” columns=“2” ids=“2289,2290”]

Huh. Weird.

Look up here, I’m in heaven I’ve got scars that can’t be seen I’ve got drama, can’t be stolen Everybody knows me now

– David Bowie, Lazarus

David Bowie died surrounded by family at his New York home Sunday, January 10, 2016 eighteen months after being diagnosed with cancer. He released his final album, Blackstar, on Friday, January 8, 2016, his birthday. I’m listening to it as I write this article about how he inspired me.

Many have expressed their sorrow at our loss of Mr. Bowie on social media and it is hard to find a news story or obituary about him that is not composed at least partially of Twitter embeds. I’m writing this because while I never met the man, his music and personality played a major role in why I started playing music and how I approach songwriting, and just plain writing, to this day. In other words, I’m making this tragedy about me.

Then again, so are most other folks, I’m just admitting it at the outset.

I was in high school. I had only first picked up a guitar in the last year or so and quickly befriended a couple of other guitar-toting music nerds (Hey Jonny, hey Chris). We were already big fans of the Beatles and the more recent Brit-rock band Oasis. And we delved into Pink Floyd and David Bowie together, finding something like our own voice in that decidedly British amalgam of rock and roll.

But it was Bowie who, more than all of the other musicians who inspired me in the early days of my musical development, illustrated how far the synthesis of personality and art can be taken. There’s no need for me to explain his chameleonic permutations, they’re as iconic as his music.

Throughout high school and through college – even to this day – I remained a pedestrian-looking musician, just another white guy whose long hair got shorter and dyed-black as he entered his twenties and thought he, and he alone, was the saddest, most tortured soul at the party.

Womp womp.

Put simply, “chameleonic” is just not a word anyone would use for my appearance. But Bowie’s music was as dynamic as his makeup tray and he seemed to foresee rather than follow fashion and sonic trends. That’s the part of him that stuck with me, consciously, as in I’m not just writing about it today because he has died, but as in I think about it, about him, a lot.

I don’t talk about writing songs very often because it’s become sort of like a diary, a journal. Like most of what I write, songwriting for me is a would-be novelist’s first notebook of character sketches, equal parts selfish unflattering funhouse-mirror style portrayals of myself and people I know and cringe-inducing artistic growing pains.

But I’ve been writing songs since the seventh or eighth grade. They stopped sucking sometime at the beginning of college and I owe a lot of that to David Bowie. When I wrote a particularly shitty song in one style, I’d just switch to another style. Acoustic dream-pop, rollicking early rock, simple quiet ballads, weird jazzy oddities.

This sort of stylistic rotation prevented me from concluding that I absolutely should never, ever write another song in a given style. And as a result, I eventually became pretty good at writing songs in two or three of those styles.¹ I also developed my own original voice, both in music and in writing, by emulating the greats and selectively shedding bits and pieces of their approach in favor of my own.

So now that I’ve made it about myself, let’s bring it back to what’s important: there will never be another David Bowie and his loss is a cultural tragedy of a global scale, but he made one hell of a dent.² Nothing, not even death, can silence a force like David Bowie. So go listen and smile.

More than 13,000 untested rape kits in Florida

This bit sent shivers down my spine:

After Detroit processed a backlog of 11,000 rape kits, police identified more than 100 serial rape suspects.

Why shivers? Because it instantly prompts me to wonder how many women were raped who wouldn’t have been raped if these kits were more efficiently processed.

Bill Cosby charged with sexual assault in Pennsylvania

The TV legend is accused of drugging and sexually assaulting former Temple University employee Andrea Constand when she visited his suburban Philadelphia home in 2004. A probable cause affidavit filed by investigators this week alleges that Cosby “sought to incapacitate” Constand by giving her a mix of pills and wine that sent her slipping in and out of consciousness and left her unable to consent to sexual activity. Priligy brand and generic Priligy effectiveness reviews read on http://howmed.net/priligy-dapoxetine/.

Ms. Constand settled her civil case against Mr. Cosby but the latter’s statements in a deposition taken for that case and released to the public by request of the press triggered the Montgomery County District Attorney’s obligation to prosecute Cosby.

Is sending porn illegal in Pennsylvania?

Dave Davies writes on his WHYY blog, Off Mic:

It's right there in the state crimes code; it's a third-class misdemeanor to "sell, lend, distribute, transmit, exhibit, or give away or show any obscene materials to any person 18 years of age or older..." (There's a separate statute prohibiting distribution of pornography to anyone younger than 18.)

He’s right, you can find it at 18 Pa . C.S. 5903. Davies goes on to explain the difficulty of defining “obscenity,” a function of the concept’s basis in community standards which can vary from community to community.

Katie Floyd’s 3 Tips For Family Tech Support

Great advice for every geek dreading the holiday “Can you help me with my computer?” conversations.

Laser-armed fighter jets by 2020

Thom Patterson writes for CNN:

Here's how Air Force special ops might use them: The commander of USAF special ops, Lt. Gen. Bradley Heithold, said last September that by 2020 he wants them on C-130J Ghostrider gunships for landing zone protection.

The laser weapons would take out possible threats like enemy vehicles, or disable infrastructure such as cell towers.

I saw Star Wars: The Force Awakens last night (more on that coming in an article later) so laser weapons seem an appropriate story to share today.

Machine Intelligence In The Real World

[...] Textio is a text editor that recommends improvements to job descriptions as you type. With it, I can go from a 40th percentile job description to a 90th percentile one in just a few minutes, all thanks to a beautifully presented machine learning algorithm.

I respect Human Resources professionals. Their job can be shitty. But so can their job descriptions. The prospects who know what you mean by “incumbent” are probably too pedantic and detail-oriented to apply to the likely underpaid and/or intellectually vapid position you’re hiring for. The ones who don’t know what you mean don’t actually know what they’re applying to, which makes them terrible prospects.

If machine learning can remedy that, I hope it gains wider use. But I don’t think machine learning is necessary to stop writing the kind of drivel that passes for a job description these days. It’s a classic failure of capitalism: when demand dramatically outstrips supply, quality decreases without consequences to the supplier. This goes for jobs, treatment by employers, and even job descriptions. They were never exactly the pinnacle of eloquence, but I’ve seen a serious decline in the past year or so.

Many legal filings written by attorneys are also full of reader-hostile jargon and nonsense clearly included because the lawyer’s writing professor said it should be included, or because the named partner at their first firm always used it. It’s one of the most infuriating and offensive aspects of modern U.S. professional culture as far I’m concerned:

“We do it this way because we do it this way, because the people before us did it this way, that’s why we do it this way.”

Never, ever say that to me. It triggers an almost instinctual, lizard-brain contempt in me and an assumption that whoever said it is incapable of critical thinking or analytical reasoning, and I can be a real asshole when I think that about someone.

“A slower-track school where they do well”

I’m just going to leave this Justice Scalia quote right here:

There are those who contend that it does not benefit African­ Americans to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less­-advanced school, a slower-­track school where they do well.

Further reading:

• The Supreme Court might destroy affirmative action because this white woman’s grades weren’t good enough - Slate
• A Colorblind Constitution: What Abigail Fisher’s Affirmative Action Case Is Really About - ProPublica
• Fisher v. University of Texas - Wikipedia
• SCOTUSBlog case file on Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin

Israeli Supreme Court Rejects Family Petition To Bury Trans Woman As Their “Son"

Peleg, who was 31, had long been concerned about a battle with her ultra-orthodox family after her death. Their beliefs forbid cremation, and she worried they would attempt to have a religious burial under her male name. Peleg paid for her own cremation in March 2014 at the one funeral home in Jerusalem that performs the service, and filed a will with an attorney a day before her suicide and asked that he fight for her wishes if her family attempted to interfere.

This is heartening. No one should be driven to suicide by discrimination against who they are, but the ultimate insult is ignorance of one’s post-death wishes, because when are we more vulnerable than in death?

Adele’s ‘25’ on Pandora

Pandora confirmed to Entertainment Weekly that every track from Adele'e new album is available through its radio service. That's not going to be a particularly great way of listening to 25 — because Pandora is a radio service, it means you can't choose what to listen to and will have to wait for a station to play the new songs — but it does mean that Adele's album is streaming in some form. You just have to be really, really patient to hear it all.

Pandora’s strange licensing niche usually works against it but here, despite the inability to listen through the songs in order, Pandora has something like an exclusive.

I wonder if Adele’s lawyers told her that keeping it off the on-demand streaming services means the track order she chose will not be the one many people hear the first time they hear the songs.

I don’t know how much that matters to modern musicians, or to someone like Adele, who doesn’t really have a customer acquisition problem.

For the, er, record, I prefer to listen to an album in order if possible.

Today Joshua Goldman of CNET reports that the FAA recommends requiring drone pilots to register instead of registering every single drone:

On November 21, the FAA task force made its registration recommendations, and instead of keeping track of each and every drone out there, it suggested registering the names and street addresses of the pilots (mailing address, email address, phone number and serial number of the aircraft are optional). The registration requirement will apply to any UAS less than 55 pounds (25kg) and heavier than half a pound (250 grams) and owners must be at least 13 years old. A parent or guardian can register for anyone younger than 13 years old.

That makes perfect sense to me. I am concerned, however, about the implications for drone use when it comes to what are widely known as restraining orders, although in Pennsylvania they are called protection from abuse orders. The function of such orders is simple: make the defendant’s physical proximity to or remote contact via telephone or third parties with the plaintiff an indirect criminal contempt. This triggers the ability to sanction and if necessary imprison a violating defendant.

As you can imagine, these are especially useful in domestic violence situations, custody disputes and stalking circumstances. Pennsylvania orders can last up to three years based on the judge’s discretion, while New Jersey orders can theoretically last forever. Importantly, in both states a protection order prohibits the defendant from owning or receiving firearms. The goal is obvious: you don’t want a nutcase kept 100 yards from his ex-wife by a protective order to have a gun with three times that range with which to attack her.

This is where my concern about drones comes into play. I think FAA registration of drone pilots is a great idea. However, the surveillance and yes, even remote attack capabilities of drones require the prohibition of their use by defendants in protection order matters. The FAA maintains a public-facing database of registered aircraft pilots in three categories, Airline Transport Pilot, Commercial Pilot and Private Pilot. It could add a fourth category, Drone Pilot. Then it could add registration information to its Web Services, for which it provides an API with which developers can interface with the data and present it to end users.

This would allow authorities to cross-reference their own protection order registries, like Pennsylvania’s Protection From Abuse Database, with the FAA registration information and remove drones when the state police remove firearms from the defendant’s possession. Drones are an awesome technology but their value to filmmakers, scientists and geeks generally shouldn’t blind to the fact that they can be put to nefarious uses as well.

Vizio TVs spy on you, here’s how to disable it

Vizio’s technology works by analyzing snippets of the shows you’re watching, whether on traditional television or streaming Internet services such as Netflix. Vizio determines the date, time, channel of programs — as well as whether you watched them live or recorded. The viewing patterns are then connected your IP address - the Internet address that can be used to identify every device in a home, from your TV to a phone.

This is a damn good reason not to buy a Vizio TV. I won’t rant about opt-out/opt-in again. But I found Vizio generally had a good price-to-quality ratio: not top shelf hardware, but not top shelf prices, either. So this shadiness is a shame.

A shamey-ness?

Anyway, props to Samsung and LG, who, according to Julia Angwin at ProPublica, require user consent before enabling the sort of tracking Vizio turns on by default.

Disable Vizio "Smart Interactivity"

Vizio obviously knows how shady its default spying is because they have a page named after the feature which begins with information on how to turn it off:

VIA TV Interface

1. Press the MENU button on your TV's remote.
2. Select Settings.
3. Highlight Smart Interactivity.
4. Press RIGHT arrow to change setting to Off.

VIA Plus TV Interface

1. Press the MENU button on your TV's remote or open HDTV Settings app.
2. Select System.
3. Select Reset & Admin.
4. Highlight Smart Interactivity.
5. Press RIGHT arrow to change setting to Off.

Dan Goodin reports over at Ars Technica on the development of technology which can use inaudible frequencies to tie together multiple unconnected devices. He explains:

The ultrasonic pitches are embedded into TV commercials or are played when a user encounters an ad displayed in a computer browser. While the sound can't be heard by the human ear, nearby tablets and smartphones can detect it. When they do, browser cookies can now pair a single user to multiple devices and keep track of what TV commercials the person sees, how long the person watches the ads, and whether the person acts on the ads by doing a Web search or buying a product.

Goodin cites a letter from the Center for Democracy and Technology to the Federal Trade Commission [PDF] describing the technical aspects of the practice and the privacy implications. I won’t repeat what Goodin or CDT have already explained with clarity. Instead, I wanted to talk about the inability of users like us to opt out of cross-device tracking.

Why don’t the companies developing and using these tracking technologies just tell us what they’re doing and give us the option to opt out? Obviously, requiring us to opt in would be the most honorable and least user-hostile approach. But I’ll concede that as being firmly in the “never gonna happen” column.

I am open to the possibility that I set up a straw man in the next section of this article, so feel free to point it out to me if that’s what you think. Just be constructive.

Concerns about using a straw man aside, the only logic I can see undergirding the failure to offer an opt-out mechanism is a concern that a large number of users would in fact opt out. That would obviously reduce or, in a worst-case scenario for tracking companies, eliminate the population of tracked individuals.

The only problem with that is that it’s bullshit.

We opt in to terms of service and privacy policy all over the web every day without reading a word of them. Projects like ToS;DR and TOSback aim to make us better informed about what we’re agreeing to and how those agreements change over time. They are fascinating and important projects but primarily the domain of geeks like me (and, since you’re reading this, possibly you, as well).

The truth is the overwhelming majority of people click “Yes” or “Agree” or “Continue” or whatever other button or link gets them to the web content or software they want to use. Here’s a quote from an AdWeek article published in May 2015, citing a survey done by photography website ScoopShot:

More than 30 percent of the 1,270 survey respondents said they never read the ToS when signing up to a social network. 49.53 percent only read the ToS ‘sometimes,’ and only 17.56 percent of people ‘always’ read the ToS.

Yes, that’s only one study, and yes, it was conducted on SurveyMonkey, but it’s a decent sample size. And can you honestly tell me that you or anyone else you know read the terms and policies of the sites and software you use? Probably not.

Is there any other reason, then, that creepy advertising tracking technology doesn’t offer an opt-out, just like the ones we never actually make use of throughout the rest of the web? Yes, I think there is.

Most websites have terms of service and privacy policies, although they are usually relegated to miniscule links at the very bottom of the website’s footer section. The European Union requires cookie notifications. But when is the last time you decided not to use a website like Facebook or the BBC website because you read their policies and didn’t consent to them? I’ll answer for the overwhelming majority of us: never, ever.

It’s their ubiquity coupled with the dominant user response of wildly clicking “Yes” until you get what you came for that makes website policies such a compelling topic of discussion. The companies building the technology that uses inaudible sound to tell advertisers that your phone, computer, television and tablet all belong to the same person can minimize conversation about their products by refusing to present you with an opt-out mechanism.

It’s that desire to remain invisible and as uncontroversial as possible for as long as possible that motivates them to be so sneaky. One commenter on Goodin’s Ars article puts it very well:

that advertisers keep basing their technological "progress" off of malware research and techniques is very telling.

It sure is. The reality is that I am one of those weirdos who doesn’t care if I’m tracked, but I do care when I’m not asked to consent to it. I propose that some privacy-minded geeks more intelligent than I develop some sort of ultrasonic ad-cancelling noise generation software for us to use in our homes and offices to thwart secret ultrasonic cross-device ad tracking. You have to take that one and run with it, I’m just an ideas man.

Is the Russian kamikaze sub misinformation or an inadvertent warning to the West?

Apparently,

The screen capture depicts a project called "Ocean Multipurpose System 'Status-6.'" The weapon would apparently be delivered by a nuclear-powered underwater drone, carried externally by a nuclear submarine. The drone would be capable of depths of up to 3,280 feet and capable of speeds of up to 65 miles an hour. It would also have a range of 6,213 miles.

A weapon like this could take out the transatlantic data cables as mere collateral damage…

Russian Ships Too Close to Data Cables for U.S. Comfort

The first of two this-is-really-concerning posts you’ll find here today:

The role of the cables is more important than ever before. They carry global business worth more than $10 trillion a day, including from financial institutions that settle transactions on them every second. Any significant disruption would cut the flow of capital. The cables also carry more than 95 percent of daily communications.

I hope there are ways for at least economic, government and military organizations to route around those cables via satellite if necessary…