Centralized world power and Net censorship

Centralized world power and Freedom of Speech cannot coexist!

We live in a small world where the actual power structure is hidden and centralized. On the other hand, the Net is all about freedom of speech. Clearly, centralized power and the Net cannot coexist. It is obvious that centralized power is well entrenched so naturally it is the Net that has to back off. This backing off manifests itself in many ways such as malware, P2P clogging, complexity and cost of Internet access, sluggish roll-out, non standard components, obsolescence, information overload, lack of customization and so on.

But the most sinister factor is Google's dominance. The lack of competition allows Google to stick to its keyword centric syntactic strategy where it is able to censor websites much more easily. This SIGNAL vs NOISE kind of censorship is able to confuse even the most determined searchers. In any case, Google is more about Ads than about Search.

The only way to bypass such censorship seems to be to search on the basis of authors as opposed to keywords. This is the only way to keep the SIGNAL NOISE ratio from getting out of control. What is more worrying is not ideology, it is spin. This is the reason we should give up even on authors and follow only individual commenters. The logic is that authors are looking for numbers and only spins see propagation.

To follow individual commenters, we can click on their names, which is usually a link to their website or a page containing other comments made by them. We can also try and Google their name. Savvy commenters pick quirky (hopefully unique) screen names for this very purpose.

But never mind, here too, our rulers have found a way out: botnets. The common perception is that botnets are moronic spreaders of spam and some of the less moronic botnets even try and phish out our passwords. To a certain extent this is true because email is the purest form of addressability so our rulers need spam to dilute it. And also financial scams and economic hardship have forever been used to keep people under control. That such actions keep the insurance and security companies humming is welcome too.

In actual fact, botnets are highly sophisticated networks which are not only able to unceasingly dodge detection but also troll ALL forums and add to the NOISE everywhere. Even complex captchas are no deterrents to these sophisticated bots. It is amazing how many of the comments posted are actually from sophisticated trolls that never be exposed because these behave like human commenters and come from innocent IPs. Recent studies have confirmed that botnets use SEO techniques to capture search engine traffic on controversial keywords.

Moral of the story: Suspect anything and everything because PERCEPTION CONTROL is the biggest game in town.

Internet Censorship Alert

Internet Censorship Alert: Alex Jones exposes agenda to 'blacklist' dissenting sites (March 14, 2010) As I predicted, the Obama Administration is trying to shut down the Internet - at least the parts he doesn't like. Barack Obamas regulatory czar, Cass Sunstein has stated that he wants to ban conspiracy theories from the internet. Think about what this means - Every video, every website, every blog, every email, that exposes or just criticizes the government for any reason whatsoever could be labeled a "conspiracy" and taken down. Your home could be raided in the middle of the night, and you could be carted of to jail for criticizing the government. All they have to do is call it a "conspiracy theory". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqAWmBLFodE

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

The new carry trade

‘Stead LBO, SWF: The new carry trade
Financial Times
Aug 21, 2008

http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2008/08/21/15269/
stead-lbo-swf-the-new-carry-trade/

The oil-rich sovereign wealth funds have it good, if we didn’t already know that. Citigroup’s Robert Buckland reinforces the idea in his latest Global Equity Strategy note to clients, in which he claims a new carry trade - with SWFs poised to be prime beneficiaries:

Just as the equity market looked cheap to anybody who could source capital from the debt markets between 2003 and 2007, now it looks cheap to anybody who can source capital from the oil market. And just as markets missed the point about private equity - they could afford to pay higher prices for assets given their access to cheap debt capital - maybe they are now missing the point about oil-rich investors. Most financial assets looks cheap when your source of capital is oil at over $100 a barrel.

The re-rating of global equities against oil over the past year has been just as significant as the re-rating of debt against equity that kicked off the de-equitisation trade. A combination of rising oil and falling share prices means that a barrel of oil will now buy enough equities to deliver $8 of corporate earnings per year (we divide the oil price by the market PE to calculate this), way up from the $5 that it would have bought a year ago.
Posted by amolpatil2k at Wednesday, August 27, 2008
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