Tag: technology

“Online testing is a joke”: How Chinese students cheat on U.S. college entry exams

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For just $5,000, students can buy their way to acing English exams.

Watching through a camera, a proctor monitors a Chinese student taking an English exam. Sitting in a Beijing living room, the student appears to be taking the test seriously. They frown during the listening session, as if trying hard to think about the answer. And for the written portion, their arms move about, with the tapping of a keyboard being heard.

But the student wasn’t typing anything. They weren’t even looking at the screen. Sitting next to the student, just outside of the camera’s field of view, was 34-year-old Tony Wang. As he’d done for dozens of students before, Wang was answering the questions by typing on a wireless keyboard, sometimes while eating barbecued skewers. For the speaking portion, he’d type the answers on an iPad or a smartphone for students to read out. And students who couldn’t speak English at all would silently move their lips while Wang invisibly spoke aloud the answer on their behalf.

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Good article, provides a clear picture of what is happening. Cheating is very common in East Asia. ABN

nostr – Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays

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The simplest open protocol that is able to create a censorship-resistant global “social” network once and for all.

It doesn’t rely on any trusted central server, hence it is resilient; it is based on cryptographic keys and signatures, so it is tamperproof; it does not rely on P2P techniques, therefore it works.

This is a work-in-progress. Join the Telegram group!

Very short summary of how it works, if you don’t plan to read anything else:

Everybody runs a client. It can be a native client, a web client, etc. To publish something, you write a post, sign it with your key and send it to multiple relays (servers hosted by someone else, or yourself). To get updates from other people, you ask multiple relays if they know anything about these other people. Anyone can run a relay. A relay is very simple and dumb. It does nothing besides accepting posts from some people and forwarding to others. Relays don’t have to be trusted. Signatures are verified on the client side.

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This was recommended by Jack Dorsey this morning. Something like this has to be done. We all have to support it. A communication system that cannot be controlled by governments or corporations or secret societies, once established, will be a major turning point in world history. There is no other path forward for free speech, individual rights, human rights, a flourishing world civilization than this one. This kind of system is also in perfect alignment with the American First Amendment and core Buddhist ethical teachings. ABN

a native internet protocol for social media ~ Jack Dorsey

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[All of the below is Dorsey’s blog on how he thinks Twitter and social media should be operated. I have bolded some sections in addition to the few places he bolded. I completely agree with what Dorsey is saying and hope all readers of ABN and in the world read what he has written. I have taken the liberty of posting his entire blog post here to ensure we have a copy of it. ABN]

There’s a lot of conversation around the #TwitterFiles. Here’s my take, and thoughts on how to fix the issues identified. 

I’ll start with the principles I’ve come to believe…based on everything I’ve learned and experienced through my past actions as a Twitter co-founder and lead:

1) Social media must be resilient to corporate and government control.
2) Only the original author may remove content they produce.
3) Moderation is best implemented by algorithmic choice.

The Twitter when I led it and the Twitter of today do not meet any of these principles. This is my fault alone, as I completely gave up pushing for them when an activist entered our stock in 2020. I no longer had hope of achieving any of it as a public company with no defense mechanisms (lack of dual-class shares being a key one). I planned my exit at that moment knowing I was no longer right for the company.

The biggest mistake I made was continuing to invest in building tools for us to manage the public conversation, versus building tools for the people using Twitter to easily manage it for themselves. This burdened the company with too much power, and opened us to significant outside pressure (such as advertising budgets). I generally think companies have become far too powerful, and that became completely clear to me with our suspension of Trump’s account. As I’ve said before, we did the right thing for the public company business at the time, but the wrong thing for the internet and society. Much more about this here:
jack@jackI do not celebrate or feel pride in our having to ban @realDonaldTrump from Twitter, or how we got here. After a clear warning we’d take this action, we made a decision with the best information we had based on threats to physical safety both on and off Twitter. Was this correct?12:16 AM – 14 Jan 2021

Continue reading “a native internet protocol for social media ~ Jack Dorsey” →

The World Economic Forum wants you to prove, via government ID, that you own what is already yours: your data, your identity and yourself

~ ABN ~ 1 Comment

United States common law provides for self-ownership in practice, in publication and in moral exercise. There are miles of US precedent that would support this. However, it has been a very tiny sieve of technocratic gatekeepers who are actively coordinating digital sanctions and censorship from the public-private sector: BRICS grey data exchanges for money, the World-Economic Forum, and Democratic Socialist technocratic oligarchs from the United States. It was only vigilant activists who have made null past attempts to produce a US based mandate for globalized identity articles as NSTIC and Real ID.

It is these globalized interests who now claim the way to recover from bad times is to cull government identity through a social credit system run and controlled by them. The very same interests have used their influence in the past to control and subvert US identity ownership claims. They now want to pose “sovereign- ID” as a promissory note, granted by their underworld monarch/oligarch/fascists, on your total access to digital exchanges. This is to eliminate cash altogether for being “filthy”, “infection laden” and “antiquated” as follow up act to COVID-19 mass hysteria. Apparently, monarchic communist serfdom is now “modern”, while anything analog they cannot administrate, categorize and manipulate to arbitrary sanction is “antequated” [SOURCE].

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Inventing your own communication system

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If you know a system well and change parts of it to make it more efficient, that system will work better.

Evolution works this way “mindlessly” in the sense that we assume today that there is no plan behind evolutionary change. If something works better it tends to replace that which it works better than.

Another “mindless” example is AI systems that invent their own languages:

An artificial intelligence system being developed at Facebook has created its own language. It developed a system of code words to make communication more efficient. The researchers shut the system down as it prompted concerns we could lose control of AI. (Researchers shut down AI that invented its own language)

The linked article mentions other AI system that have similarly invented their own communication systems. These systems work but humans are not able to understand them.

All of this shows that communication systems have their own logic and that they can be made more efficient by pursuing that logic.

This is what FIML does through the use of a few new rules for speaking and listening.

FIML emphasizes and provides techniques for:

  • analysis of real-time communication
  • much greater accuracy in real-time communication
  • much greater mutual understanding, efficiency, and satisfaction

By improving your communication system(s) and removing error from it, FIML greatly enhances psychological well-being.

FIML works with the communication system(s) you already have. FIML does not tell you what to think.

first posted JULY 27, 2017

COVID passport – the killer App helps Chinese government to build the world first digital gulag

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JUST IN – By simply click a button on a computer, Chinese government remotely switched all these people’s COVID passport to code yellow or red to stop them from leaving Guangzhou city.

These people from other provinces just wanted to go home. Now they are stuck at train station

[The future no one wants is already here in China. ABN]

Continue reading “COVID passport – the killer App helps Chinese government to build the world first digital gulag” →

Gmail creator predicts ‘total disruption’ for Google as new chatbot ChatGPT challenges tech giant’s monopoly on internet searches: ‘AI will eliminate the search engine result page’

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  • The latest iteration of artificial intelligence chatbot led to speculation it could replace popular tools like Google’s search engine within two years 
  • ChatGPT, created by the leading AI research lab OpenAI is capable of understanding and generating human-like responses to a wide range of queries 
  • ChatGPT uses a combination of advanced algorithms and artificial intelligence to understand the intent behind a user’s query
  • The AI can write essays, compose lyrics, make up stories, dream up stories, draft marketing pitches, write scripts, generate complaint letters and write poetry
  • It means users can search for information using natural language, rather than having to use specific keywords or phrases
  • It makes the search potentially more intuitive as a tool for finding information
  • Traditional search engines rely on keyword matching to provide results
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The Earth-Lunar Lagrange 1 Orbital Rapid Response Array (ELORA)

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Elora is a name meaning ‘The laurel of victory’. Within this paper, The Ethical Skeptic has proposed for consideration a concept for an elegant, flexible, high delivery-mass, rapid response, high kinetic-energy and low rubble-fragmentation system called ELORA. A Lagrange-exploiting orbital array anchored at LP1 between the Earth and the Moon, which can be rapidly deployed to interdict an approaching Earth-impactor threat, through massive, adaptable, and repeated kinetic impact. It is the contention of this white paper that this concept system offers features superior in every facet of challenge, to the existing asteroid/comet deflection technologies under consideration.

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This is about how to protect earth from an asteroid or other potentially catastrophic impact. Great read, wonderfully inventive device. ABN

The correct algorithm to use on Twitter is Twitter users being allowed to say and view what they want

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“New Twitter policy is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach.” -Elon Musk 11-18-22

Musk is wrong about this. An easy way to see this is consider a same or similar message sent by thousands of people. If this message is made “unreachable,” no one will see it. Making a message unreachable is censorship.

A very serious example of this kind of censorship is the “unreachable science” of covid. Hundreds of doctors and scientists and tens of thousands of others have been doing everything they can to make the voice of real science be heard. The have met with some success but not nearly enough.

Until Musk took over, in addition to outright bans, Twitter shadow banned, demoted, delisted, and otherwise hid the “reach” of real science as millions died. What’s worse, not only Twitter did this but also virtually all social media, all MSM, all academia, and all government agencies did it too. For three years all of the top official speakers in the West have concertedly and deliberately gaslit the world with the help of demonic algorithms and misguided intentions.

If real science had not been censored by government, social media, Twitter, and MSM, we would probably not even remember covid today.

Real uncurated science—which was difficult for most to reach—found effective early treatments for covid within months, thus precluding any need for a vaccine. Real uncurated science also identified the danger of Remdesivir, ventilators, and the experimental vaccines.

I congratulate Musk on removing all bans on covid-related speech from Twitter. By doing this, he is proving the point: The correct algorithm to use on Twitter is Twitter users being allowed to say and view what they want.

Consider again the banned and “unreachable” real science of covid. During these years, bad theories and evidence have appeared and been quickly exposed as such, just as they should be. As a “free speech absolutist,” which he claims to be, Musk should realize that all subjects will follow a similar evolution. Basing speech proscriptions on feelings, vague ideas, or lousy moral philosophies only opens the door to censorship by other names.