Society's ChildS


Padlock

Apple quietly closes retail stores in California as coronavirus cases surge

Apple store
© Getty ImagesApple store in Santa Monica, CA
With less than a week until Christmas, Cupertino-based Apple quietly closed all of their retail stores in California as coronavirus cases and hospitalizations continue to surge in the state.

According to their website, customers with pre-scheduled appointments will still be able to stop in for things like in-store pickup, Genius Bar appointments, and personal shopping experiences through Dec. 22.

It's a bold move for the iPhone maker to close dozens of its stores, as the holiday season historically drives their highest sales of the year.

Customers looking to make a purchase at an Apple Store are still able to do so online, although if you're looking to avoid waiting for the shipment to arrive, you're likely better off shopping at an Apple-authorized retailer, such as Costco, Target, or Best Buy.

KTVU has reached out to Apple for comment but has not yet heard back.


Rocket

Rockets 'targeting US embassy' rain on Baghdad's Green Zone - VIDEOS show fiery intercepts

US embassy in Baghdad, Iraq
© Reuters / Thaier al-SudanUS embassy in Baghdad, Iraq.
Multiple rockets have targeted the Iraqi capital's heavily fortified Green Zone on Sunday evening. The US embassy's C-RAM air defense systems were engaged to intercept the missile attack, which it said resulted in no casualties.

Footage published on the social media show the night skies over Baghdad illuminated with flashes of light as rapid-fire guns of the US C-RAM systems were used to intercept the incoming projectiles. At least three rockets were targeting the American diplomatic missions, the Iraqi security officials told AP, saying they were launched by an "outlaw group."

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Eye 1

Israeli colonists attempt to disrupt prayers in the oldest Christian monastery in Palestine

israeli settlers dirupt christian prayers
Hundreds of illegal Israeli colonialist settlers gathered, Thursday, near Mar Saba (St. Saba) Christian Monastery, east of the Palestinian city of Bethlehem, south of occupied Jerusalem, and attempted to disrupt prayers.

Hundreds of colonists descended to the ancient holy site, the older Christian Monastery in occupied Palestine, during the celebration of the feast of St. Saba, eyewitnesses said.

They added that the Israeli assailants then attempted to intimidate the monks who gathered there to pray, in a deliberate attempt to stop the prayers.

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Attention

Your credit score should be based on your web history, IMF says

Google fingers
© Philippe Huguen (Getty Images)
With more services than ever collecting your data, it's easy to start asking why anyone should care about most of it. This is why. Because people start having ideas like this.

In a new blog post for the International Monetary Fund, four researchers presented their findings from a working paper that examines the current relationship between finance and tech as well as its potential future. Gazing into their crystal ball, the researchers see the possibility of using the data from your browsing, search, and purchase history to create a more accurate mechanism for determining the credit rating of an individual or business. They believe that this approach could result in greater lending to borrowers who would potentially be denied by traditional financial institutions.

At its heart, the paper is trying to wrestle with the dawning notion that the institutional banking system is facing a serious threat from tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple. The researchers identify two key areas in which this is true: Tech companies have greater access to soft-information, and messaging platforms can take the place of the physical locations that banks rely on for meeting with customers.

The concept of using your web history to inform credit ratings is framed around the notion that lenders rely on hard-data that might obscure the worthiness of a borrower or paint an unnecessarily dire picture during hard times. Citing soft-data points like "the type of browser and hardware used to access the internet, the history of online searches and purchases" that could be incorporated into evaluating a borrower, the researchers believe that when a lender has a more intimate relationship with the potential client's history, they might be more willing to cut them some slack.


Comment: Or the more likely scenario, to cut you off from services because you were perusing websites deemed to be 'controversial'.


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Cell Phone

Dozens of Al-Jazeera journalists allegedly hacked using Israeli firm's spyware

NSO group spyware
© AFPNSO Group spyware has been implicated in the gruesome killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Saudi Arabia and UAE thought to be behind attacks which took place weeks before UAE-Israeli normalisation deal.

Dozens of journalists at Qatari-funded Al-Jazeera were targeted by advanced spyware in an attack likely linked to the governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, weeks before the Trump administration announced the normalisation of ties between Israel and the UAE.

Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto said it traced malware that infected the personal phones of 36 journalists, producers, anchors and executives at Al-Jazeera back to the Israeli-based NSO Group, which has been widely condemned for selling spyware to repressive governments.

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Laptop

The Russian 'cyber Pearl Harbor' that wasn't

cyber attack hacked hacking
© Shutterstock/solarseven
The recent SolarWinds hack is no excuse for doomsday rhetoric, especially from those who have been leveling it for decades.

For almost three decades, we have awaited a mythical "cyber Pearl Harbor," the harbinger of digital doom that the U.S. cybersecurity community assumes to be inevitable. Strangely enough, some believe this cyber Pearl Harbor already happened twice within the last two months.

Though warnings of cyber Pearl Harbor emerged as early as 1991, former defense secretary Leon Panetta is perhaps best known for promoting the idea, warning in 2012 of an impending "cyber-Pearl Harbor that would cause physical destruction and the loss of life, an attack that would paralyze and shock the nation." Such a grand event would be tough to miss.

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Eye 1

Why they're denying you healthcare and financial support during a pandemic

pelosi
An old adage known as Betteridge's law of headlines asserts that "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

There's a Bloomberg story trending on Twitter right now about China having the ability to control the weather, with the headline reading "Has China Mastered Weather Modification? Should We Worry?"

According to Betteridge, no.


It just goes on and on and on. Every single day the western mass media are bashing us in the face with stories about horrifying scary things other countries are doing which we all need to be afraid of, and from which we must turn imploringly to our own kind and beneficent rulers for protection.

Clipboard

Lockdowns do not control the coronavirus: The evidence

lockdown advertisement notice
© Christopher Thomond/The GuardianAn Orwellian public information notice in Manchester on Thursday.
The use of universal lockdowns in the event of the appearance of a new pathogen has no precedent. It has been a science experiment in real time, with most of the human population used as lab rats. The costs are legion.

The question is whether lockdowns worked to control the virus in a way that is scientifically verifiable. Based on the following studies, the answer is no and for a variety of reasons: bad data, no correlations, no causal demonstration, anomalous exceptions, and so on. There is no relationship between lockdowns (or whatever else people want to call them to mask their true nature) and virus control.

Perhaps this is a shocking revelation, given that universal social and economic controls are becoming the new orthodoxy. In a saner world, the burden of proof really should belong to the lockdowners, since it is they who overthrew 100 years of public-health wisdom and replaced it with an untested, top-down imposition on freedom and human rights. They never accepted that burden. They took it as axiomatic that a virus could be intimidated and frightened by credentials, edicts, speeches, and masked gendarmes.

The pro-lockdown evidence is shockingly thin, and based largely on comparing real-world outcomes against dire computer-generated forecasts derived from empirically untested models, and then merely positing that stringencies and "nonpharmaceutical interventions" account for the difference between the fictionalized vs. the real outcome. The anti-lockdown studies, on the other hand, are evidence-based, robust, and thorough, grappling with the data we have (with all its flaws) and looking at the results in light of controls on the population.

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Gift 2

Anonymous donor gives 123 tons of food to needy families in Kentucky

Food donation in KY
© Kentucky State Police
Numerous Kentucky families will not have to worry about putting food on their tables for quite a while thanks to an anonymous person's generous gift.

"Santa Clause is known for delivering toys to children but in Daviess County he just dropped off 246,300 pounds (123 tons) of food for families struggling this holiday season," the Kentucky State Police wrote in a Facebook post Tuesday:

The anonymous benefactor reached out to Trooper Corey King, asking for help in finding somewhere to donate the non-perishable items.

"This is usually the time of year when our troopers are involved in a statewide food drive called 'Cram the Cruiser'," King explained. "Due to the pandemic, we were not able to host the program like we have in years past. So when our 'Secret Santa' reached out I was excited to help."


TV

Big Media: Selling the narrative and crushing dissent for fun and profit

censored
The profit-maximizing Big Tech / Big Media Totalitarian regime hasn't just strangled free speech and civil liberties; it's also strangled democracy.

The U.S. has entered an extremely dangerous time, and the danger has nothing to do with the Covid virus. Indeed, the danger long preceded the pandemic, which has served to highlight how far down the road to ruin we have come.

The danger we are ill-prepared to deal with is the consolidation of the private-sector media and its unification of content into one Approved Narrative which is for sale to the highest bidders. This is the perfection of for-profit Totalitarianism in which dissent is crushed, dissenters punished and billions of dollars are reaped in managing the data and content flow of the one Approved Narrative.

So don't post content containing the words (censored), (censored) or (censored), or you'll be banned, shadow-banned, demonetized, demonized and marginalized. Your voice will be erased from public access via the Big Media platforms and you will effectively be disappeared but without any visible mess or evidence--or recourse in the courts.

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