As Daesh loses its final sliver of territory in Syria, US and Iraqi leaders are warning the militant group isn’t gone for good, and some think tanks are warning that the group could reemerge powerfully in Iraq. Those dangers, however, seem nearly as overblown as those the Pentagon is employing to keep US troops in Syria.

Outside the town of al-Baghuz Fawqani, the US-allied Syrian Democratic Forces, composed primarily of Syrian Kurdish militias, have captured hundreds of Daesh militants fleeing from the onslaught. Baghuz is only a couple of miles from the Syrian border with Iraq, across which the roughly 2,000 US forces in Syria will soon withdraw as the war draws to a close.

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/201903081073073112-US-Leaders-Once-Ag...

Glencore has attracted significant criticism for operating a multimillion-dollar shadow campaign to bolster demand for coal, run by political operatives at the C|T Group.

Project Caesar spread sophisticated pro-coal messaging on social media using “grassroots” online Facebook groups and associated websites. The aim was to shift public sentiment toward coal using arguments personally relevant to its audience. No disclosure of the links between the content and Glencore was made.

One source with knowledge of Project Caesar said a site linked to Project Caesar was “Energy in Australia”, a Facebook group and associated website which pushed pro-coal, anti-renewable messaging to an audience of more than 20,000 people.

Energy in Australia was also aided by politicians such as Christensen, who shared its material on his own Facebook page. In 2017, Christensen shared an Energy in Australia graphic suggesting a new high-efficiency, low-emissions (Hele) coal plant in north Queensland would bring “9,000 NEW JOBS”.

Read more:

This social media news outing is all crap... as mentioned by Robert Thomson, News Corp’s CEO, who says social media is anti-social... I could not agree more here when it's used by the devil coal.

The internet was meant to be open, free, and decentralized, but today it is controlled by a few companies with grave consequences for society and the economy. The internet has become the opposite of what it was intended to be.

In the early 1960s, Paul Baran was an engineer at the RAND Corporation when he began thinking about the need for a communications network that could withstand a nuclear strike. RAND was contracted by the Pentagon to create a system that could continue operating even if parts of it were destroyed by an atomic blast. It was supposed to be the ultimate decentralized system. 

Baran went on to publish a paper in 1964 titled “On Distributed Communications,” which was influential in establishing the concepts behind the architecture of the internet. 

Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn put these concepts into practice at the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency in the late 1960s, and created the communication methods that make the internet possible. The principles of freedom and openness were at the heart of the design—packet switching made the system robust in the face of nuclear attacks and Internet Protocol allowed for open interconnection.

Years later, Cerf said, “The beauty of the internet is that it’s not controlled by any one group.” In his view, “this model has not only made the internet very open—a testbed for innovation by anyone, anywhere—it’s also prevented vested interests from taking control.”

The principle of decentralization went directly against the business models of technology giants like AT&T and IBM. Until AT&T’s monopoly was broken up in the early 1980s, communications were extremely centralized and traveled through dedicated, point-to-point channels. The use of third-party devices on the network was prohibited. 

The internet would have remained an obscure channel for government and scientists to communicate had it not been for Tim Berners-Lee. In the late 1980s, he created a way for information to be shared easily using hypertext via the World Wide Web.

Berners-Lee could have become fabulously wealthy, but instead he released the source code for free, embodying the democratic spirit of the internet. Berners-Lee wanted “an open platform that would allow everyone, everywhere to share information, access opportunities, and collaborate across geographic and cultural boundaries.”

In recent years, the great hope of an open and free internet has given way to a dystopia where a few big companies control what we see, how we communicate, and what we can say online. 

Today, Berners-Lee thinks the internet is broken. In a 2018 interview with Vanity Fair, he recalled its early days. “The spirit there was very decentralized,” Berners-Lee said. “The individual was incredibly empowered. It was all based on there being no central authority that you had to go to to ask permission. That feeling of individual control, that empowerment, is something we’ve lost.”

Berners-Lee is taking a break from his work at Massachusetts Institute of Technology to launch Inrupt, a startup that he has been working on for the past nine months. His mission is to decentralize the internet, reclaim power from tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Amazon, and allow individuals to control their own data.

Although the architecture of the internet is still decentralized, the ecosystem of the World Wide Web is not. A few giant companies have near-monopolistic control of traffic, personal data, commerce, and the flow of information.

If you had to choose a date for when the internet died, it would be in the year 2014. Before then, traffic to websites came from many sources, and the web was a lively ecosystem. But beginning in 2014, more than half of all traffic began coming from just two sources: Facebook and Google. Today, over 70 percent of traffic is dominated by those two platforms.

The internet was meant to be open, anarchic, decentralized, and above all free. In the 1990s, America Online helped people connect and discover content, but it failed to meet the internet’s founding ideals because it was ultimately a “walled garden.” AOL determined and curated the user experience, which was contrary to the spirit of the web. Once users started going online with their local cable companies, and Google began helping them find the information they needed on the web, people began to leave AOL.

Facebook has since become AOL 2.0, a centrally designed internet for its users. You discover only what the company wants you to. It is about as uncool as AOL, but it won’t die the same death because personal Facebook accounts contain so much of a user’s life history, photos, and friend and family connections. Many articles and videos only appear behind Facebook’s walled garden, and many apps and sites will not even let a user join without a Facebook account.

Vint Cerf, the father of the internet, decries Facebook’s walled garden. Cerf, however, now works at Google and is the firm’s chief internet evangelist. He fails to see how Google also is swallowing up the internet.

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-death-of-the-internet/

Read from top.

And so it was on Friday. Abbott was asked during a candidates’ forum broadcast by Sky News whether he still wanted to get out of Paris.

Given the independent Zali Steggall is attempting to blast Abbott out of his seat of Warringah using climate change as the sharp end of her offensive, presumably it has become more difficult for Abbott politically to keep arguing Australia needs to get out of the treaty he signed the country up to.

So Tony has shifted again. We don’t need to get out of Paris any more, the former prime minister said on Friday, because circumstances have changed.

Well, yes, they have changed.

Last July, Abbott was coming after Turnbull, because Turnbull had come after him, and he was coming after any policy that could have led to emissions reduction, because he’d made that deeply strange and corrosive crusade an article of faith with so-called fellow conservatives. The media bobble heads amplified their nonsense because conflict, however manufactured and bone-headed, is the new media currency.

Now Steggall is coming after him. That is a change of circumstances.

These weren’t, however the changed circumstances referenced by Abbott in Friday’s debate. The changed circumstances were the Coalition had now shaken off its “emissions obsession”.

“We had an emissions obsession that needed to be broken,” Abbott reported like the duty doctor. “And it has now changed.”

It’s not clear to me whether “emissions obsession” EO™ is a recognised medical condition or psychological disorder, perhaps someone could Google that if they get a minute, but in any case, Abbott noted that the terrible fever had broken.

...

What is unclear though, is how Angus being a good man with EO™ immunity makes the Paris target any less than it was when Abbott signed up to it, recanted, then clambered back on board it again – but this way lies madness.

Instead of getting frustrated with a performance that could be fairly categorised perhaps as the last stand of the political opportunist, perhaps we should just look on the bright side and celebrate the backflip on the backflip.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/mar/08/dear-tony-your-ch...

Time to throw Abbott-the-Liar-fudger-bullshitter in little bits to a shark at Manly Beach as a charitable stunt for the coffers of the lifeguards on a sunny Autumn day. And then retire him on a pension — the shark that is.... Will the voters of Warringah have the balls to do this for the sake of political sanity? Please do it.... 

Zali Steggall, the independent facing off against Tony Abbott in Warringah at the federal election, has vowed to push for reform of political advertising laws after a rightwing group falsely linked her to Labor’s franking credits policy.

Advance Australia, the group billed as a rightwing version of GetUp, has been pushing professionally produced, paid video ads into the feeds of Facebook users aiming to undermine Steggall’s campaign to take Warringah from the Liberals.

The ad claims Steggall supports Labor’s proposed franking credit policy, and warns she is “too risky for Warringah”.

“You worked hard and saved for your retirement but now, Bill Shorten and Zali Steggall want to pass a new seniors tax, taking your money and making your life harder,” the ad claims.

The claim is false. Steggall is opposed to Labor’s policy and has never made any claim otherwise. In fact, during Friday’s debate with Abbott, she described Labor’s policy as “absolutely appalling”.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/mar/11/zali-steggall-pla...