Blue_Tires
Blue_Tires's JournalFacebook VP detained over company's standoff with police
A Facebook executive in Brazil has been detained after authorities said the company failed to comply with a court order.
The court order asked Facebook to provide data from WhatsApp, a messaging app it owns, in connection with a criminal investigation into drug trafficking.
Police in São Paulo took Diego Dzodan, Facebook's VP for Latin America, in for questioning on Tuesday morning. He is still in custody, Facebook said.
Dzodan joined the company last June, according to his LinkedIn profile. His Facebook and LinkedIn profiles also list him as the VP for Latin America at Instagram, which is also owned by Facebook (FB, Tech30).
Dzodan's detainment comes four months after authorities first obtained a court order, according to a spokeswoman for Brazilian Federal Police in the state of Sergipe.
Authorities in Sergipe said they needed Facebook's help in a case where the suspects used Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp to communicate and plan their crimes. Gmail was another platform, according to the spokeswoman.
According to the authorities, the judge issued the order three times and started fining Facebook 50,000 reals ($12,600) daily for noncompliance two months ago. Last month, the fine increased to 1 million reals ($253,000) per day. A warrant was issued for Dzodan on February 7.
http://money.cnn.com/2016/03/01/technology/facebook-brazil/index.html
What a shame -- And in Glenn Greenwald's backyard, too... I have no doubt our fearless Mr. Greenwald will get right on this outrage once he finishes writing his Hillary smear piece for today...
Jesse Ventura: I’ll Run for President If Bernie Loses
Minneapolis — Jesse Ventura told The Daily Beast he will run for president if Bernie Sanders does not win the Democratic nomination.
Ventura was elected the governor of Minnesota as an independent in 1998 after serving as a Navy SEAL and professional wrestler. Ventura said his campaign was so successful at showing an outsider could be elected that Trump and Sanders are “ripping him off.” He bets he can do it again if Sanders loses and the election is Hillary Clinton vs. Trump.
“They’re setting the groundwork for me because if Bernie loses, by the time we get to June, how sick are the people going to be of all these people,” he said while dressed in a Jimmy Hendrix shirt under a blazer and SEALs beanie.
“See I’m an independent and I despise the two parties,” Ventura, who speaks as if he is prepared to tackle you, continued. “I love what Trump’s doing to the Republicans. He’s got them in complete disarray. In fact, it looks like the WWE when you watch their debates.”
“I support the revolution of what’s happening here,” Ventura said after telling a local that he worked for most “level-headed” news outlet (RT America). “There’s three things where I stand with Bernie on more so than Trump. Number one is campaign is finance reform,” two is “the war,” and three is ending the War on Drugs.
Ventura’s main cause of concern with Trump is his hawkish nature, suggesting that the man who claims he will “bomb the shit out of ISIS” will get the U.S. stuck in more quagmires.
https://twitter.com/thedailybeast/status/704432727152566272
Yeah, might as well... This primary season can't get any crazier!
Bill O’Reilly Loses Custody of Children In New York Court Ruling
A New York appeals court held last week that Fox News host Bill O’Reilly’s school-age children don’t want to live with him anymore, and should live exclusively with their mother, O’Reilly’s ex-wife Maureen McPhilmy.
The lengthy decision affirms the holding of a Nassau County Supreme Court justice last year that the children, now aged 13 and 17, should live full-time with their mother (the former couple had been splitting residential custody). As we reported at the time, O’Reilly appealed that ruling, thereby delaying its enforcement (and, of course, extending his multi-front battle against McPhilmy and her new family).
The Appellate Division issued its 1,400-word opinion on February 24, a little over a month after attorneys for O’Reilly and McPhilmy—known in court documents as Anonymous 2011-1 and Anonymous 2011-2—presented oral arguments at the division’s courthouse in Brooklyn Heights. According to the opinion, the court’s four justices unanimously ruled in McPhilmy’s favor based upon “the clearly stated preferences of the children”:
The preference of McPhilmy and O’Reilly’s 17-year-old daughter is not particularly difficult to guess: As we noted last year, she told a court-appointed forensic examiner that she witnessed O’Reilly drag her mother down a staircase by the neck. (According to court transcripts obtained by Gawker, she also viewed O’Reilly as a temperamental, absentee parent who was uninterested in developing a relationship with her.) At a January 22 hearing, the children’s court-appointed lawyer, Barbara Kopman, told the appellate court that both the daughter and son strongly preferred living with their mother over their father. (Gawker was able to attend but not record the court session, which was open to the public.)
http://gawker.com/bill-o-reilly-loses-custody-of-children-in-new-york-cou-1761303124?utm_campaign=socialflow_gawker_twitter&utm_source=gawker_twitter&utm_medium=socialflow
And Fox still won't ever fire him!
"Stockholm Syndrome" talking points refuse to die(!)
Why do so many black Americans support Hillary Clinton? Stockholm Syndrome. They are faithful battered wives. They are yoked to Hillary by co-dependency: “I’ve stuck by you and suffered to do so for so long that you owe me, and I have faith that you will reward me later if I help you reach your goal now.”
In their minds they have no such guarantee from Bernie Sanders (and of course from Hillary such a guarantee is an illusion). It is clear that Bernie Sanders has been successful without being dependent on them up to now. So (again, in their minds) he owes them nothing, and thus cannot be counted on to reward them after the election for their support during it.
What this sad diminished thinking shows is a lack of confident independence, an inability to reason that the best estimator of Bernie Sanders’ future trustworthiness is the consistency of his commitment to their fundamental cause for over half a century.
One has to acknowledge the detestable brilliance of the Wall Street and 1%-ist strategy of political purchase: own Hillary and Obama who in turn have enchained so many proletarian minds to their identity-politics personality cults: Pied Pipers leading their trusting conga lines into the Wall Street abattoir.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/29/the-cult-of-hillary-the-ultimate-junk-bond/
Wow...Just wow...
I'm officially done with CounterPunch if this is what passes for nuanced political commentary.
Go home CounterPunch, you're drunk
Why do so many black Americans support Hillary Clinton? Stockholm Syndrome. They are faithful battered wives. They are yoked to Hillary by co-dependency: “I’ve stuck by you and suffered to do so for so long that you owe me, and I have faith that you will reward me later if I help you reach your goal now.”
In their minds they have no such guarantee from Bernie Sanders (and of course from Hillary such a guarantee is an illusion). It is clear that Bernie Sanders has been successful without being dependent on them up to now. So (again, in their minds) he owes them nothing, and thus cannot be counted on to reward them after the election for their support during it.
What this sad diminished thinking shows is a lack of confident independence, an inability to reason that the best estimator of Bernie Sanders’ future trustworthiness is the consistency of his commitment to their fundamental cause for over half a century.
One has to acknowledge the detestable brilliance of the Wall Street and 1%-ist strategy of political purchase: own Hillary and Obama who in turn have enchained so many proletarian minds to their identity-politics personality cults: Pied Pipers leading their trusting conga lines into the Wall Street abattoir.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/29/the-cult-of-hillary-the-ultimate-junk-bond/
In New York, Thousands Protest Officer Liang’s Conviction
On the vast lawn of the plaza near the courthouse in Brooklyn where Peter Liang, a former New York City police officer, was convicted in the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man just over a week ago, a crowd of several thousand people gathered on Saturday.
They chanted, “No scapegoat! No scapegoat!” and carried signs bearing the same message. Some said they had never had a reason to protest before, while others said they had taken the day off from work or had come by train and bus from across the city — or as far as New Jersey and Connecticut — to take part in the demonstration at Cadman Plaza Park to show their support for Officer Liang.
Prosecutors had described Officer Liang’s behavior as reckless when he fired his gun inside a public housing complex, and argued that after the man, Akai Gurley, had been shot, the officer seemed more concerned about his career than in helping Mr. Gurley, who was 28.
Yet Officer Liang’s conviction has gripped many in the city’s Chinese-American community, who believe that he had been targeted for prosecution because of his race. They followed the case closely and have been denouncing the jury’s verdict, arguing that Officer Liang, 28, was a victim himself. Supporters of Officer Liang noted the strained relationship between the police and African-Americans across the country, after a string of incidents in which unarmed black men were killed by officers, many of whom were never charged.
Officer Liang, in their view, was the one who had to pay the price. One of the printed announcements for the rally read, “In the wake of so many unfortunate deaths of unarmed black men, some cops gotta hang.” The evidence against Officer Liang, his supporters contend, did not seem as clear-cut compared to the cases of other officers who have not been prosecuted. Some also believed that the gunfire had been an accidental discharge.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/21/nyregion/in-new-york-thousands-protest-officer-liangs-conviction.html?_r=1
Wait.... WHAT? 
And the other shoe drops regarding Apple:
Apple’s response to US and UK government demands for backdoors to user data has been direct, bordering on defiant. Yesterday (Feb. 16), Apple CEO Tim Cook published a letter explaining the company’s refusal to comply with a US federal court order to help the FBI access data on a phone recovered from one of the attackers in the San Bernardino, California shootings.
Apple appears to take a different tack in dealing with data security demands from China, a key growth market for the company.
In January 2015, the state-run newspaper People’s Daily claimed, in a tweet, that Apple had agreed to security checks by the Chinese government. This followed a piece in the Beijing News (link in Chinese) that claimed Apple acceded to audits after a meeting between Cook and China’s top internet official, Lu Wei. China’s State Internet Information Office would reportedly be allowed to perform “security checks” on all Apple products sold on the mainland. According to the report, this was despite Cook’s assurances that the devices didn’t contain backdoors accessible by any government, including the US.
If Apple had indeed agreed to a Beijing security audit, it could have shared vital information with the Chinese government, such as its operating system’s source code, that could indirectly help government agents discover vulnerabilities on their own. It would have been a serious departure from Apple’s public, privacy-centric stance.
Cook has said on earnings calls that he believes the Greater China region, which includes Taiwan and Hong Kong along with the mainland, will eventually become Apple’s biggest market. Some could get the impression that Apple capitulated to Beijing’s security demands because it wanted access to a huge and growing market.
http://qz.com/618371/apple-is-openly-defying-us-security-orders-but-in-china-it-takes-a-very-different-approach/
How this company tracked 16,000 Iowa caucus-goers via their phones
On Thursday morning, I listened to an interview with the CEO of “a big data intelligence company” called Dstillery; it “demystifies consumers’ online footprints” to target them with ads. The CEO told public radio program Marketplace something astounding: his company had sucked up the mobile device ID’s from the phones of Iowa caucus-goers to match them with their online profiles.
Via Marketplace:
“We watched each of the caucus locations for each party and we collected mobile device ID’s,” Dstillery CEO Tom Phillips said. “It’s a combination of data from the phone and data from other digital devices.”
Dstillery found some interesting things about voters. For one, people who loved to grill or work on their lawns overwhelmingly voted for Trump in Iowa, according to Phillips.
When I heard this, I wondered how the company was doing this. Did they have employees at all the caucus locations holding phone-sniffing devices? The idea that phone-toting people could walk up to vote and immediately have their real world identities matched with a profile based on their digital trail would indeed be, as Marketplace headlined its piece, a “new frontier in voter tracking.”
http://fusion.net/story/268108/dstillery-clever-tracking-trick/
Beware of the angry white male public intellectual
Richard Dawkins is a bestselling author and atheist pundit who’s been credited with “redefining the role of the public intellectual in Western culture.” As recent events have shown, he’s also part of a largely unacknowledged problem with online harassers.
Late last month, Dawkins approvingly posted a video of a feminist activist known as Chanty Binx, blasting it to his more than one million followers. The video, created by men’s rights activists, features a cartoon caricature of Binx singing a duet with an “Islamist” about how similar they are. It concludes with the cartoon Binx inviting the man to rape her, because “it’s not rape when a Muslim does it.”
When feminist writer Lindy West noted on Twitter that Dawkins was actually pointing his followers at a real woman who’d received death threats for her views in the past, Dawkins deleted the post. Then he apologized for deleting it and went right back to name-calling, declaring that Binx was probably lying about her (documented) harassment. “I was momentarily persuaded, probably wrongly, that a human life (however vile) might be threatened,” he wrote. (Dawkins has since had a minor stroke and has yet to respond to requests for comment. He said in a message recorded Feb. 13 that stress related to his involvement in recent controversies–and his subsequent disinvitation from an upcoming conference–may have contributed to his stroke.)
Men with real power are giving online harassment campaigns the stamp of intellectual seriousness. When we talk about online trolls, we tend to cling to the stereotype that they are anonymous types who wield little power offline. These are the kinds of trolls we associate with GamerGate or the men’s rights movement. But we need to start acknowledging that men with real power and authority are fostering online harassment. Such public intellectuals are perhaps even more dangerous—both because they give online harassment a larger and more mainstream audience, and because they give those campaigns the stamp of moral or intellectual seriousness.
http://qz.com/613574/beware-of-the-angry-white-male-public-intellectual/
bloody brilliant...
Lost in translation - Wal-Mart stumbles hard in Brazil
When Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT.N) first expanded into Brazil's midwestern farm-belt city of Campo Grande seven years ago, the economy was booming and executives were eager to open stores even in sub-prime locations on one-way streets heading out of town.
It didn’t last. At the end of December, the U.S. retailer closed both of its Maxxi brand cash-and-carry stores in Campo Grande as part of a restructuring that shuttered 60 locations across Brazil, including some Supercenters. Shoppers said the stores could not compete on assortment, price or location.
"It was never clear who Maxxi was for. It wasn't cheap enough for the poor. But there was no appeal for the middle class," said Ordecy Gossler, 40, a public accountant filling his cart with cleaning supplies and toilet paper at Atacadão, a rival chain run by France's Carrefour (CARR.PA).
Today, Wal-Mart has just one Supercenter left in this city of 850,000 people, whose demographic of thrifty shoppers had once seemed suited to the world's largest retailer. It shuttered the city’s other one at the end of the year, as traffic dwindled in the shopping mall it was meant to anchor.
The retreat from Campo Grande is emblematic of Wal-Mart’s broader issues in Brazil, a once-red-hot destination for foreign retailers and other companies that has turned stone cold. And the lackluster performance in Latin America's largest economy shows how tactics that helped Wal-Mart build success in the U.S. sometimes get badly lost in translation overseas.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-walmart-brazil-idUSKCN0VQ0EQ?=rrpromo
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