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fyrstenberg

162 karma · joined July 29, 2017

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fyrstenberg··on Ask HN: What are some of the best documentaries you've seen?
I found this one very interesting:

"How Big Oil Conquered The World"

"From farm to pharmaceutical, diesel truck to dinner plate, pipeline to plastic product, it is impossible to think of an area of our modern-day lives that is not affected by the oil industry. [...]"

https://www.corbettreport.com/episode-310-rise-of-the-oiliga...

fyrstenberg··on Anne Wojcicki on How to Build the Future
Is this a poor and cringe way of admitting Y is onboard the United Nation's Agenda 2030 program? [1]

Will the next interview be about partnering with World Government Summit? [2]

We had people in Europe trying this for a very long time - didn't end well (never does)..

[1]: https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/post2015/transformingo...

[2]: https://www.worldgovernmentsummit.org/partners

fyrstenberg··on Norway Used NSA Technology for Potentially Illegal Spying
Dragnets is a huge problem for analysts. Traditional analysis is based on a certain amount of "degrees", 1. degree would persons/network directly associated with a target, then usually would never exceed 2. or 3. degree.

Now that everything is collected it causes problems with the amount of data which causes quality data to drown in the amount. You basically don't get to pick up anything of worth before it's too late.

This again (the perceived lack of finding "terrorists") is used to argue for more budgets and "tools". Some say this is on purpose and I wouldn't disagree.

My 2 cents.

fyrstenberg··on Norway Used NSA Technology for Potentially Illegal Spying
> security services engaged in illegal surveillance mostly of the Norwegian left wing.

IMO how you put it is perhaps a bit misleading -

You should probably point out that it was the left wing surveilling each other. More specifically it was the Socialist Labour party (AP) which conducted surveillance of the communist AKP-ML (and NKP) for the reason of being in control of the left-wing agenda in Norway.

Considering that AKP-ML was part of the stay-behind groups, known as "Gladio" (something that ironically (?) sprung out of NATO [0]), armed and trained PLO and marxist revolutionaries in Israel, and had networking with other similar ideological extreme radical left groups such as Red Army Fraction (Germany, Japan, Italy), Black Panthers and Weather Underground in the US, as well as IRA in Ireland and close ties with Pol Pot[1] and other groups in Asia. And they were actually planning armed revolution in Norway - the surveillance was called for (ref. Willoch). However, the labour party's close ties with the IC and media in Norway was peculiar (at the time there were only a single national government owned TV/radio broadcaster, NRK, rooted in the labour party) and these three "fractions" held meetings frequently.

> No secret prisons

Partly correct - in Norway some people were thrown into mental hospitals instead. A famous case would the Kaare Torvholm [2] case which got arrested, together with the sheriff and a deputy (the equivalent of) and sent to mental institution which lead a local newspaper to raise the question if a "schizophrenic epidemic" had reached the shores (later picked up by VG, a national newspaper). This for reporting discrepancies with money (pension funds and more) in the fishing industry which was used as part of intelligence networks (at the time).

As the original thread topic:

Norwegian military has been conducting surveillance for a long time, illegally and including Norwegian citizens. The process right now is to push through laws which allows for this sort of surveillance (and let them keep the data they have, which is already shared with US and UK). These laws will just "harmonize" the Norwegian laws to those of the UK and partly US. These operations centers are located several places, not just in this region, but from the west of Norway (Haakonsvern) to Troms in the north (Setermoen) and involves what is called "svarte operasjoner" ("black ops" in English). One of these operations got public attention some years ago when it was revealed that they were spying on the King's email traffic [3].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio

[1]: https://cambodiatokampuchea.wordpress.com/2015/08/30/norwegi...

[2]: https://www.fiskersiden.no/forum/index.php?/topic/22444-fisk...

[2]: http://detsomstatennorgeskjuler.origo.no/-/bulletin/show/548...

[3]: https://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/forsvaret/forsvaret-bekl...

fyrstenberg··on Show HN: Swapping Position and Brightness in Grayscale Images
This type is actually known as a luma waveform histogram:

https://i.imgur.com/Gn4KQTW.png

Source: https://github.com/epistemex/scopes

fyrstenberg··on Join the Battle for Net Neutrality
In the mean time, and in related news (media all quiet) - the "USA Liberty Act of 2017" has passed meaning government is allowed to search our private data without a warrant:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/3989...

Some more details here: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/10/usa-liberty-act-wont-f...

fyrstenberg··on Scientists have signed the largest-ever warning about Earth’s destruction
A) Digest of Education Statistics, https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d08/tables_3.asp#Ch3aSub... (although, the specific table has since been removed, reason unknown).

B) I just like to point out the hypocrisy (ref. OISM where 32,000 scientists where considering a "not a very compelling figure, but a tiny minority" (https://www.skepticalscience.com/OISM-Petition-Project.htm, together will all the left-leaning media's "breakdown" of this petition).

UN representative Christina Figueres has already stated in Brussel a couple of years ago that "global warming" has nothing to do with climate, but economy (i.e. "anti-capitalism"): https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/climate-change...

And as a reminder: consensus !== science.

fyrstenberg··on Scientists have signed the largest-ever warning about Earth’s destruction
So, a mere 0.14% (!) of the approximate 11 million scientists has signed. Lets be honest here: not a whole lot really...

(ps: down-voting this post doesn't change this fact...)

fyrstenberg··on Ask HN: What are your favorite browser extensions/add-ons for Firefox or chrome?
Most of my (Firefox) add-ons are privacy oriented. Besides from NoScript, Decentraleyes and Privacy Badger I also use AgentX to change the user-agent per site; simple, no bloat, and just works.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/agentx/

fyrstenberg··on Firefox 57.0 Released
Do anyone have NoScript working in 57r? The latest dev version from noscript.net doesn't want to install.
fyrstenberg··on Documenting the Web together
It seems neat on the surface but it also seem to involve two redirects, first one to google.com (which is not obvious and personally not something I would like), and then to MDN. It would be cool if it linked directly to the page on MDN or showed the content directly within the page.

And the second time I clicked I was met with this message, not mdn.io's fault but nonetheless (i.e. "google police" - not sure what they mean with "unusual activity", there is hardly any at the moment - maybe not enough? :) or maybe I just got a busy vpn exit point): https://imgur.com/itn48dZ

fyrstenberg··on Show HN: Metaballs
Most is done on the GPU nowadays - only getImageData() and putImageData() has to go via the CPU.

You can BTW also "cheat" your way to meta-balls: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17177748/increasing-real...

fyrstenberg··on Documenting the Web together
Don't forget you can use https://devdocs.io/ too which also searches MDN and store offline. The two are a great pair.
fyrstenberg··on Mozilla Awards Over Half a Million to Open Source Projects
Agreed. Mozilla as a tech company should stay out of politics IMO. "Picking" a political side will alienate at least 50% of the users (if not more as the left typically is < 50%). As a loyal user for years and contributor to Firefox I will start looking for tech somewhere else.

The tendencies in the US of tech companies coming out of their political closets is disturbing, at best. It worries me that this is being normalized and that it starts to lean toward corporatism as well in some cases.

fyrstenberg··on Mozilla Awards Over Half a Million to Open Source Projects
> In a lot of the rest of the developed world US liberals/Democrats are centrists.

Err, no, growing up in an European socialist country I can say this is not true. The left in the US has caught up pretty well ..

fyrstenberg··on “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”
I discovered this as well. Not only, they're faking it with the new YouTube design as well. I had to set my user agent to Chrome to get the new dark theme (it may have changed later).

I did try different user-agents using AgentX[1] and with Edge UA they said the new look wouldn't work (or in effect something along those lines), so there is not much actual feature check going on. Only setting Chrome would give me all features.

Google is doing what Microsoft did 10 years ago - it didn't go so well for Microsoft when people eventually caught on.

1: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/agentx/

fyrstenberg··on Why We Terminated Daily Stormer
As much as apps paying people to stay in front of resturants:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2017/08/1...

fyrstenberg··on Why We Terminated Daily Stormer
I'm not sure - the ad is supposedly from last week. I just thought I ask if anyone new something about this. The PR company seem legit (in the sense it actually exist).

It raises a few questions if related to what happened though.

fyrstenberg··on Snopes.com prevails in tentative court ruling over finances, ownership
Wait... am I missing something, cause those two signatures (https://imgur.com/Zk3oRmf) are written by the same person. Just look at the first D and the writing in general, or was that suppose to be like that (TL;DR).
fyrstenberg··on Ask HN: Do you charge your webdesign clients for ongoing hosting and support?
Absolutely. Most clients (in my experience anyways) is actually happy that you can provide hosting so they don't have to spend time in an area they're usually unfamiliar with.