The net has recently suffered from various ailments. Luckily, it's still operating. But the tech giants like Google have lost the plot. Their search engines are spluttering but rarely find what you're after. Bing, Ecosia and Duckduckdodo suffer from amnesia in this regard. Yahoo does not know I exist (not)... Meanwhile this site had to be improved for security. The new parameters mean that from a certain point onwards, the cartoons registered under a previous security code do not meet the new standards and the image will be a blank space. Some sites, like The New York Post, have become hostile to old computers, even operating Chrome. Safari? Steam engine coming from the 2003 dark ages on my little machine...

Now, for the people who only rely on Facebook to manage their life, it's time to go back to the days of kero-lamps and grow your own peas... You have back-up, haven't you? This is what I do with my own storage. But the problem is to streamline the images into a workable recall system. So bear with me, I will reinstate most of the images as possible when I find them to update a line of comments...

Good luck with Facebook.

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Facebook’s Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer tweeted around 6:45 pm ET that company’s services were “coming back online,” noting that it may take time to get them in a fully functioning mode.

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/usa/536584-facebook-whatsapp-online-outage/

After mass complaints about the various platforms in the Facebook family being down, and users getting error messages when trying to log on, the company said it was working to resolve the issue.

With all four now off-air for several hours, Zuckerberg has faced a pile-on on rival social media platforms, and habitual Facebook users have taken to other apps that aren’t experiencing issues, such as Twitter and Telegram, to express their dissatisfaction. Many have even temporarily celebrated the absence of Facebook. 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/usa/536574-mark-zuckerberg-billions-losses-facebook/

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By Lindsay Crouse (@lindsaycrouse) — a writer and producer in Opinion.

When I was a student at Harvard in the early aughts, Mark Zuckerberg and some other classmates dropped out to become the young kings of tech. They were smart, competitive and hard-working — like most people there. But I never could exactly relate. They had a confidence that was hard to describe, a peculiar kind of ambition that seemed to all but entitle them to success. As I got older, I realized the quality I was imagining as special wasn’t. They were just men.

Then I learned about Elizabeth Holmes, a rare female paragon of super-successful genius. With her health technology company, Theranos, she was crowned America’s youngest self-made female billionaire by 2014. She broke into the exclusive club of Silicon Valley’s boy wonders, not as an employee or even an executive, but as a founder.

She and I were each approaching 30, but were on vastly different paths. I was an overgrown assistant, hunched over my desk itemizing receipts from other people’s dinners, and starting to worry that these jobs weren’t steppingstones anymore, but my career. I saved for work shoes from Aldo, while she filled her closet with those black turtlenecks from a designer whose clothes I’d only seen in pictures. I couldn’t tell if I was putting limits on myself, or if this was just the way it was. She seemed to have cracked the code. How did she do it?

Although it feels somewhat shameful to admit now, I was a little jealous of what Ms. Holmes had achieved. She wasn’t struggling up a ladder; she’d leapt straight to the top. She came off as intellectual and nerdy, unlike the sleek Instagram-filtered “girl bosses” with their marketing shticks. I didn’t realize we could do that.

Of course, by now it’s well known how Elizabeth Holmes ascended. She lied. In addition to all the obvious wrongs she is accused of committing, that’s what feels so deflating about her narrative. It has become almost a cliché to talk about how ambitious women suffer from imposter syndrome, but it’s real. For a moment, my admiration of what Ms. Holmes had achieved served as fuel. What she symbolized contradicted a lot of what I thought about gender and work and success, making me believe I could also lay claim to bigger ambitions. Then she turned out to be the biggest imposter of all.

I’m not saying that Elizabeth Holmes, even in her mythologized persona, was a perfect role model. I know all the caveats — that she was already wealthy and well connected. White. Blond. Backed by a team of powerful male mentors, including Henry Kissinger and James Mattis. But other female entrepreneurs to look up to were rare — in fact, I can’t think of any other young woman who was as prominently celebrated and rewarded for her professional achievements.

That hasn’t really changed. Even with its supposedly progressive values, Silicon Valley is a mirror of most centers of power in this country. It suffers from the same problems they all do — including a dearth of women at the very top.

So instead of being a symbol of progress, as I first saw her, Ms. Holmes has turned out to be a symbol of how far we haven’t come.

Even now, almost 90 percent of the world’s billionaires are men. A few more women made it into the billionaire’s club this year, including the singer and entrepreneur Rihanna and the chief executive of the dating app company Bumble, Whitney Wolfe Herd, but more than half of the female billionaires are heiresses.

I’m not arguing that the solution to gender inequality lies in creating more female billionaires. But until we create a fairer society and actually tax the rich at reasonable rates — instead of just bickering over a congresswoman’s formal wear — the notion that money doesn’t matter is a lie. That lie favors men. As Jessica Knoll wrote in 2018, “Rich is still a man’s word.” That remains true.

If there isn’t a way for women to thrive at the top, it doesn’t get easier downstream. In 2020, women earned 82 cents to each dollar men earned. And despite all the recent hand-wringing around how our performances are leaving men behind academically, a recent study found that women a decade out of business school working full-time at for-profit companies were making just 74 cents to each dollar made by men.

It still seems that to be powerful, women need to outplay men — which sometimes means behaving as recklessly as them. I hate that ultimately that’s where Ms. Holmes seems to have overachieved.

There were those who exalted in her downfall. I still remember the glee that a male acquaintance my age exuded when he showed me the allegations about Ms. Holmes’s fraud on his phone the evening they emerged in 2015. He had nothing at stake. But he looked so triumphant.

Of course, we can’t attribute Ms. Holmes’s downfall to a discriminatory system. In the end, she was a spectacular liar whose product did not do what she said it did. But there is a discriminatory system, the one that rewards women for pitching their projects in a voice lowered to a baritone to sound more “dominant.”

Instead of shattering that system, Ms. Holmes made it worse. The fallout of her fraudulence served to calcify the barriers, especially when it comes to the smart women trying to execute on their own visions in her wake: Several recently recounted in a New York Times article that they have encountered more skepticism from potential investors after the fall of Theranos.

Now we are all grown up. Elizabeth Holmes is standing trial. My female friends and I are still working our way up the ladder in our chosen fields. When I see them get promotions — or get passed over — I know exactly how they got where they are. The hard way.

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By Kit Klarenberg, an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions. Follow him on Twitter @KitKlarenberg

On October 3, the Washington, DC-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) announced the leak of almost three terabytes of incriminating data on the use of offshore financial arrangements by celebrities, fraudsters, drug dealers, royal family members, and religious leaders the world over.

The ICIJ led what it called “the world’s largest-ever journalistic collaboration,” involving over 600 journalists from 150 media outlets in 117 countries, to comb through the trove of 12 million documents, dubbed the ‘Pandora Papers’.

Among other things, the data reveals the use of tax and financial secrecy havens “to purchase real estate, yachts, jets and life insurance; their use to make investments and to move money between bank accounts; estate planning and other inheritance issues; and the avoidance of taxes through complex financial schemes.” Some documents are also said to be tied to “financial crimes, including money laundering.”

While the publication of articles related to the documents’ bombshell contents is only in its early stages, the Consortium promises that the records contain “an unprecedented amount of information on so-called beneficial owners of entities registered in the British Virgin Islands, Seychelles, Hong Kong, Belize, Panama, South Dakota and other secrecy jurisdictions,” with over 330 politicians and 130 Forbes billionaires named.

Despite the voluminous haul, many critics have pointed outthat ICIJ maps of where these “elites and crooks” hail from and/or reside are heavily weighted towards Russia and Latin America – for example, not a single corrupt politician named is based in the US. The organization itself notes that the most significantly represented nations in the files are Argentina, Brazil, China, Russia and the UK – which seems odd, when one considers the Consortium identified over $1 billion held in US-based trusts, key instruments for tax avoidance, evasion, and money laundering.

Then again, past blockbuster releases by the ICIJ, and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), its chief collaborator, have contained similarly incongruous omissions. For instance, in March 2019, the latter exposed the ‘Troika Laundromat’, through which Russian politicians, oligarchs, and criminals allegedly funnelled billions of dollars.

The OCCRP published numerous reports on the connivance, and detailed information on the many millions laundered via major Western financial institutions in the process, including Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan Chase. However, not once was HSBC ever mentioned – despite the Troika having openly advertised the bank as its “agent partner,” and then-OCCRP data team head Friedrich Lindenberg publicly conceding that HSBC was “incredibly prominent” in “all” of the Troika’s corrupt schemes.

The reason for this extraordinary oversight has never been adequately explained, although one possible answer could be that the OCCRP’s reporting partners on the story were the BBC and The Guardian. The former was headed by Rona Fairhead from 2014 to 2017, who also served as non-executive director of HSBC between 2004 and 2016. Meanwhile, the latter has long enjoyed a lucrative commercial relationship with the bank, which is surely vital to keeping the struggling publication’s lights on.

The April 2016 Panama Papers investigation, jointly led by the ICIJ and OCCRP, revealed how the services of Panamanian offshore law firm Mossack Fonseca had been exploited by wealthy individuals and public officials for fraud, tax evasion, and to circumvent international sanctions. The pair’s reporting, and resultant media coverage, focused heavily on high-profile individuals such as then-UK prime minister David Cameron, who profitedfrom a Panama-based trust established by his father.

A key promoter of the Papers’ most lurid contents was billionaire Bill Browder. What the convicted fraudster, and indeed a vast number of news outlets that featured his comments about the leak, have consistently failed to acknowledge was that he himself is named in Mossack Fonseca’s papers, linked to a large number of shell companies in Cyprus used to insulate his clients from tax on vast profits he amassed for them while investing in Russia during the tumultuous 1990s, and disguise ownership of lavish properties he owns abroad.

As Browder has testified, he enjoys an intimate relationship with the OCCRP, having engaged them in his global crusade against Russia since his unceremonious ban from entering the country in 2005. Furthermore, many other mainstream outlets, including Bloomberg and the Financial Times, which he has likewise used as pawns in his Russophobic propaganda blitz, have reportedly declined to publish stories about his dubious financial dealings.

Such evident reluctance to bite the hand that feeds could well explain why the Pandora Papers appear largely silent on the offshore dealings of wealthy US nationals and US-based individuals.

Take for instance the fortunes of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and investor George Soros, which reportedly total at least $11.6 billion and $7.5 billion respectively – no information implicating them in any questionable scheme has yet been unearthed. It may not be a coincidence that both provide funding to the ICIJ and OCCRP via their highly controversial Luminate and Open Society ‘philanthropic’ enterprises.

The OCCRP’s roll call of financiers offers other reasons for concern – nestled among them are the National Endowment for Democracy and United States Agency for International Development, both of which avowedly serve to further US national security interests, and have been embroiled in numerous military and intelligence operations to destabilize and displace foreign “enemy” governments since their very inception. Moreover, though, there are disturbing indications that the OCCRP itself was created by Washington for this very purpose.

In June, a White House press conference was convened on the subject of “the fight against corruption.” Over the course of proceedings, a nameless “senior administration official” announced that the US government would place “the anti-corruption plight at the center of its foreign policy,” and wished to “prioritize this work across the board.”

They went on to state the precise dimensions of this anti-corruption push “[remained] to be seen,” but it was expected that “components of the intelligence community,” including the director of National Intelligence and the Central Intelligence Agency, would be key players therein.

Their activities would supplement existing, ongoing US efforts to “identify corruption where it’s happening and take appropriate policy responses,” by “[bolstering] other actors” such as “investigative journalists and investigative NGOs” already receiving support from Washington. 

“We’ll be looking at what more we can do on that front… There are lines of assistance that have jump-started [investigative] journalism organizations,” they stated. “What comes to my mind most immediately is OCCRP, as well as foreign assistance that goes to NGOs.”

These illuminating words, completely ignored at the time by Western news outlets, have gained an even eerier resonance in light of recent developments. Indeed, they seem to establish a blueprint for precisely what has transpired, courtesy of the OCCRP, the very organization it “jump-started” and financially supports to this day.

For its part, the media merely state that the ICIJ “obtained” the documents, their ultimate source unspecified. As such, it’s only reasonable to ask – is the CIA behind the release of the Pandora Papers?

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/536539-cia-leak-pandora-papers/

Read from top.

See: https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/41975

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