Author: Seth Anderson

Just another Gen-Xer still posting on a blog

The New York Times Is Not A Fan of Flickr

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Facebook Sucks
Facebook Sucks

In the middle of a mostly pointless article about how there is no worthy competitor to Facebook, so why bother leaving, Bryan X. Chen writes:

Remember Flickr? The Yahoo-owned site is the closest thing either [Instagram or Facebook] has to a competitor, and it’s like a graveyard of people’s digital memories before they abandoned it for Facebook and Instagram.

(click here to continue reading Want to #DeleteFacebook? You Can Try – The New York Times.)

Hmm. That is not my experience. Perhaps there are less selfies and photos of one’s meal on Flickr1 but I still spend more quality time on Flickr than either Facebook or Instagram. I haven’t uploaded many photos to Flickr recently (I’ve been updating my curated photo gallery instead – check it out) but for an example, my Flickr photos were viewed 1,760 times yesterday. Not exactly burning up the internet, but much more active than my Instagram account. My complaint about Instagram is that it is intentionally too limiting – you are encouraged to see what is newly uploaded in a constant stream, but keeping up with what people share is futile. With Flickr, one can create thematic albums, limited only by imagination. For instance, I have an album of photos that I’m considering printing for my next gallery show2; an album of bridges; and album called, “Our Crumbling Infrastructure”. Or my “Least Interesting Photos”. Not an Instagram option.

Instagram 8 logo
Instagram 8 logo

Instagram also looks horrible on an iPad, you’d think by now they would have made an iPad version. Flickr looks good on any device. Don’t get me wrong, I have complaints with Flickr, and worry that Verizon3 is going to cut Flickr loose, but compared to Facebook or Instagram, I much prefer Flickr.

Anyway, if you are looking to reduce the amount of personal information Facebook has of yours that they can sell or give away to Robert Mercer’s psych-ops organizations like Cambridge Analytica, here are two articles which do a better job explaining your Facebook options than the NYT does. There are other articles, so not only was the NYT instructions second rate, they also were about a week too late. 

Buzzfeed’s Nicole Nguyen wrote on Tuesday:

 

But Facebook and its network of apps, including Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp, are important communication lines for a lot of people, so deleting your account might not be a realistic option. You can, however, dial back your use and reduce the amount of information you give the site. Here’s how.

 

Break your habit and limit your use of the platform.

 

Just by signing up for the service, you’ve agreed to let Facebook track your activity and constantly collect data about you. By reducing the time you spend on the site, interaction with posts, and content you upload, you are also reducing the amount of data Facebook is gathering from you. And remember, this data collection applies to Facebook — and everywhere you’ve signed in with Facebook, including Facebook-owned Instagram and WhatsApp, as well as, to a lesser extent, third-party websites like Spotify.

 

Log out of Facebook before browsing the web.

 

Non-Facebook websites use what’s called the Facebook Pixel, a small piece of JavaScript code that tracks your browsing activity across the web and tells Facebook what you’re looking at when you’re not on Facebook’s site and apps.

 

Any page that has a Facebook Like button installed most likely uses a Facebook pixel. Even pages that don’t have a Like button can have a pixel. This means it’s possible that Facebook knows most of your web browsing history.

 

 

(click here to continue reading If You’re Not Ready To Delete Facebook, Here’s How To Limit The Data You Give It.)

And the EFF4 has good instructions for disabling the Facebook API:

 

You shouldn’t have to do this. You shouldn’t have to wade through complicated privacy settings in order to ensure that the companies with which you’ve entrusted your personal information are making reasonable, legal efforts to protect it. But Facebook has allowed third parties to violate user privacy on an unprecedented scale, and, while legislators and regulators scramble to understand the implications and put limits in place, users are left with the responsibility to make sure their profiles are properly configured.

…

Of course, you could choose to leave Facebook entirely, but for many that is not a viable solution. For now, if you’d like keep your data from going through Facebook’s API, you can take control of your privacy settings. Keep in mind that this disables ALL platform apps (like Farmville, Twitter, or Instagram) and you will not be able to log into sites using your Facebook login.

Log into Facebook and visit the App Settings page (or go there manually via the Settings Menu > Apps ).

…

From the same page, click “Edit” under “Apps Others Use.” Then uncheck the types of information that you don’t want others’ apps to be able to access. For most people reading this post, that will mean unchecking every category. 

 

(click here to continue reading How To Change Your Facebook Settings To Opt Out of Platform API Sharing | Electronic Frontier Foundation.)

Facebook Apps Others Use
Facebook Apps Others Use – click everything off would be my advice

Footnotes:
  1. though, there are plenty of those too [↩]
  2. or to be hung around my house [↩]
  3. its current owner [↩]
  4. Electronic Frontier Foundation [↩]

Hurricane Harvey’s Toxic Impact Deeper Than Public Told

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No Chemicals
No Chemicals…

Surprising nobody, the EPA and Texas governor are sweeping any discussion of toxicity under the concrete. 

A toxic onslaught from the nation’s petrochemical hub was largely overshadowed by the record-shattering deluge of Hurricane Harvey as residents and first responders struggled to save lives and property.

More than a half-year after floodwaters swamped America’s fourth-largest city, the extent of this environmental assault is beginning to surface, while questions about the long-term consequences for human health remain unanswered.

County, state and federal records pieced together by The Associated Press and The Houston Chronicle reveal a far more widespread toxic impact than authorities publicly reported after the storm slammed into the Texas coast in late August and then stalled over the Houston area.

Some 500 chemical plants, 10 refineries and more than 6,670 miles of intertwined oil, gas and chemical pipelines line the nation’s largest energy corridor.

Nearly half a billion gallons of industrial wastewater mixed with storm water surged out of just one chemical plant in Baytown, east of Houston on the upper shores of Galveston Bay.

Benzene, vinyl chloride, butadiene and other known human carcinogens were among the dozens of tons of industrial toxins released into surrounding neighborhoods and waterways following Harvey’s torrential rains.

In all, reporters catalogued more than 100 Harvey-related toxic releases — on land, in water and in the air. Most were never publicized, and in the case of two of the biggest ones, the extent or potential toxicity of the releases was initially understated.

Only a handful of the industrial spills have been investigated by federal regulators, reporters found.

(click here to continue reading Hurricane Harvey’s Toxic Impact Deeper Than Public Told – The New York Times.)

Disturbing, and portent of massive human misery to come, especially if the GOP controls the environmental inspectors. Profits over people, always, is the Republican agenda.

White House Job Requirement: Signing Trump’s NDA

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Are We Really Free
Are We Really Free?? 

I guess most of us knew that people who willingly worked for Donald Trump are idiots.

As a real estate executive and reality TV star, Donald J. Trump tightly controlled his image by insisting that everyone around him sign nondisclosure agreements threatening steep monetary penalties if they revealed anything about him or his company.

So a few months into his presidency, Mr. Trump — infuriated by leaks about everything from staff rivalries to his bathrobe-wearing, TV-viewing habits — ordered Reince Priebus, then his chief of staff, to do the same thing in the West Wing.

Donald F. McGahn II, the White House counsel, had warned the president before that such a blanket policy could not be imposed on federal employees. But in order to placate an angry president who was convinced that the people around him had to be pressured into keeping his secrets, Mr. McGahn drew up a broad document barring White House officials from publicly disclosing what they heard and saw at work.

That nondisclosure agreement, presented by Mr. Priebus to the senior staff last April, did not specify any penalties — financial or otherwise — and was something that almost everyone around the president understood could not be enforced. But it was an early indication that Mr. Trump, who spent decades using pressure tactics and secrecy in his private life, wanted to do the same thing at the White House, breaking with tradition. He would push the obsession of many of his predecessors with damaging leaks to a new level.

…

But former White House lawyers and government ethics experts said the agreement raised serious legal questions and reflected Mr. Trump’s refusal to submit to the norms of public disclosure or respect the basic right of free speech.

“You can’t blanket wipe out speech, and you have to show there’s a compelling government purpose for doing so,” said Norm Eisen, the top ethics lawyer in former President Barack Obama’s White House Counsel’s Office.

(click here to continue reading White House Job Requirement: Signing a Nondisclosure Agreement – The New York Times.)

What I would love to happen is for someone who signed Resident Trump’s NDA to publicly leak info, and subsequently get sued by a raging Trump. Trump would be humiliated in court I’d assume, and this would send him in an even worse impotent rage. People who are angry tend to make mistakes.

Freedom Isn t Free
Freedom Isn’t Free

Ruth Marcus of The Washington Post reported that the initial NDA had a $10,000,000 penalty for violations. The White House has denied the number was as high, but take their denials with the normal 67 tons of salt.

 

Moreover, said the source, this confidentiality pledge would extend not only after an aide’s White House service but also beyond the Trump presidency. “It’s not meant to be constrained by the four years or eight years he’s president — or the four months or eight months somebody works there. It is meant to survive that.”

 

This is extraordinary. Every president inveighs against leakers and bemoans the kiss-and-tell books; no president, to my knowledge, has attempted to impose such a pledge. And while White House staffers have various confidentiality obligations — maintaining the secrecy of classified information or attorney-client privilege, for instance — the notion of imposing a side agreement, supposedly enforceable even after the president leaves office, is not only oppressive but constitutionally repugnant.

 

Unlike employees of private enterprises such as the Trump Organization or Trump campaign, White House aides have First Amendment rights when it comes to their employer, the federal government. If you have a leaker on your staff, the cure is firing, not suing.

 

“This is crazy,” said attorney Debra Katz, who has represented numerous government whistleblowers and negotiated nondisclosure agreements. “The idea of having some kind of economic penalty is an outrageous effort to limit and chill speech. Once again, this president believes employees owe him a personal duty of loyalty, when their duty of loyalty is to the institution.”

 

I haven’t been able to lay hands on the final agreement, but I do have a copy of a draft, and it is a doozy. It would expose violators to penalties of $10 million, payable to the federal government, for each and any unauthorized revelation of “confidential” information, defined as “all nonpublic information I learn of or gain access to in the course of my official duties in the service of the United States Government on White House staff,” including “communications . . . with members of the press” and “with employees of federal, state, and local governments.” The $10 million figure, I suspect, was watered down in the final version, because the people to whom I have spoken do not remember that jaw-dropping sum

 

 

(click here to continue reading Trump had senior staff sign nondisclosure agreements. They’re supposed to last beyond his presidency. – The Washington Post.)

Nicolas Sarkozy, ex-French president, detained over Gaddafi bribery allegations

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Monument to Honore de Balzac
Monument to Honore de Balzac…

You’d think this would be a bigger story, but I guess the Trumpnado overwhelms the news cycle most days.

Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy was taken into police custody Tuesday over allegations he illegally accepted 50 million euros ($68.5 million) from the government of the late Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi to finance his successful 2007 presidential campaign.

The detention of Sarkozy — France’s president between 2007 and 2012 — represented a major development in what is likely to become an explosive political scandal.

…

If the allegations are true, it would mean Sarkozy knowingly violated France’s campaign finance laws, which in 2007 capped campaign funding at 21 million euros ($28.8 million). In the presidential election that year, Sarkozy narrowly defeated Ségolène Royal, a Socialist, in the final round of the vote.

Investigators and journalists have long scrutinized potential connections between the former center-right president and Gaddafi.

(click here to continue reading Nicolas Sarkozy, ex-French president, detained over Gaddafi bribery allegations – The Washington Post.)

Cook County Voters Give Firm Yes on Legalizing Recreational Marijuana

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Non binding referendum still progress
Non binding referendum, still, progress

Legalize Marijuana Cook County
Legalize Marijuana: Cook County

Cook County’s 2018 primary ballot contained a non-binding referendum to legalize marijuana statewide. Of course, as you’d expect, it passed. By a greater than 2 to 1 margin.

Cook County voters on Tuesday voted in favor of legalizing recreational marijuana use in Illinois, according to unofficial results.

…

County commissioners voted unanimously last December to put the question on the primary ballot. The state Senate earlier this month passed a measure to put the question on ballots for statewide voters in November, according to the Chicago Tribune.

The full question on primary election ballots read as follows: “Shall the State of Illinois legalize the cultivation, manufacture, distribution, testing, and sale of marijuana and marijuana products for recreational use by adults 21 and older subject to state regulation, taxation and local ordinance?”

Supporters of legalization point to the increased tax revenue that has come with legalization, taxation and regulation in other states. Opponents often have concerns about social costs and the fact that marijuana use would remain illegal under federal law.

Recreational marijuana is currently legal in Colorado, Washington, Alaska, Nevada, Oregon, Massachusetts, Maine, Vermont and California. All but Vermont passed the laws in binding ballot questions between 2012 and 2016.

(click here to continue reading Cook County Voters Give Firm Answer on Legalizing Recreational Marijuana – NBC Chicago.)

Somehow CO, WA, AK, NV, OR, MA, ME, VT, and CA don’t seem like they are turning into chaotic, failed states. In fact, these states are all doing pretty well all things considered.

JB Pritzker Wants to legalize and tax marijuana
JB Pritzker Wants to legalize and tax marijuana

Oh, and the winner of the Democratic primary for Governor of Illinois, JB Pritzker, sent flyers announcing his position last week. Interesting. The current witless doofus occupying the governor’s mansion, Bruce Rauner, is very tepid, at best, in support for cannabis reform: he didn’t want medical marijuana either.

Tina Sfondeles wrote, back in December, 2017:

Gov. Bruce Rauner is taking a blunt stance, telling a Downstate TV station that it would be a “mistake” to legalize marijuana in Illinois.

The Republican governor has, in the past, said he wants more studies on the “ramifications” in states that have legalized the drug. On Wednesday, he took it further.

“I do not support legalizing marijuana. I think that’s a mistake. You know there’s a massive, human experiment going on in Colorado, and California, other places. We should see how that’s impacted lives and addiction and hurt young people before we make any decision about it here,” Rauner said in an interview on WSIL in Marion. “I do not support legalizing marijuana.”

In April, the governor called recreational marijuana “a very, very difficult subject.” He said he wouldn’t support legalizing marijuana unless there’s a study of the “ramifications” in states that have legalized the drug.

(click here to continue reading Gov. Rauner not high on legalizing marijuana: ‘That’s a mistake’ | Chicago Sun-Times.)

ex-Facebook insider says covert data harvesting was routine

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No Information Left Of Any Kind
No Information Left Of Any Kind

The Facebook exposé continues at The Guardian. Privacy enthusiasts have known or suspected this was Facebook’s business model all along, it is good to make Facebook’s practices more well known to the general public.

Hundreds of millions of Facebook users are likely to have had their private information harvested by companies that exploited the same terms as the firm that collected data and passed it on to Cambridge Analytica, according to a new whistleblower.

Sandy Parakilas, the platform operations manager at Facebook responsible for policing data breaches by third-party software developers between 2011 and 2012, told the Guardian he warned senior executives at the company that its lax approach to data protection risked a major breach.

 “My concerns were that all of the data that left Facebook servers to developers could not be monitored by Facebook, so we had no idea what developers were doing with the data,” he said.

Parakilas said Facebook had terms of service and settings that “people didn’t read or understand” and the company did not use its enforcement mechanisms, including audits of external developers, to ensure data was not being misused.

Asked what kind of control Facebook had over the data given to outside developers, he replied: “Zero. Absolutely none. Once the data left Facebook servers there was not any control, and there was no insight into what was going on.”

Parakilas said he “always assumed there was something of a black market” for Facebook data that had been passed to external developers. However, he said that when he told other executives the company should proactively “audit developers directly and see what’s going on with the data” he was discouraged from the approach.

He said one Facebook executive advised him against looking too deeply at how the data was being used, warning him: “Do you really want to see what you’ll find?” Parakilas said he interpreted the comment to mean that “Facebook was in a stronger legal position if it didn’t know about the abuse that was happening”.

He added: “They felt that it was better not to know. I found that utterly shocking and horrifying.”

(click here to continue reading ‘Utterly horrifying’: ex-Facebook insider says covert data harvesting was routine | News | The Guardian.)

As a side note, if you have a few dollars to throw at the feet of The Guardian, they’ve done heroic work on this story, and don’t have a paywall. Support heroic journalism!

6 Charged With Identity Theft Scheme Using Card Skimmers at Gas Stations

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Filling Up
Filling Up…

There has to be some better solution to the problem of gas station and ATM skimmers  other than paying cash inside the little gas station booth.

Six Florida residents are accused of using card skimmers at Chicago-area gas stations to commit identity theft to the tune of more than $200,000.

…

Charges of identity theft, financial institution fraud, theft by deception, conspiracy to commit a financial crime, computer fraud and mail fraud have been filed in Cook County

…

“This scheme is nearly impossible to detect by a customer, so it is critically important that people regularly monitor their bank and credit card accounts and report any unauthorized charges,” Attorney General Lisa Madigan said in the statement.

(click here to continue reading 6 Charged With Identity Theft Scheme Using Card Skimmers at Gas Stations – NBC Chicago.)

Impossible to detect! Well, what then? Apple Pay or other higher security transactions?

Facebook’s Role in Data Misuse Sets Off a Storm on Two Continents

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Helicopter with Camera
Helicopter with Camera

The big news over the weekend was how Facebook, Trump and Cambridge Analytica worked together to weaponize people’s personal information against them to help Trump win the 2016 election, perhaps with the assistance of Russia. The truth is this harvesting and manipulation of data is Facebook’s model, and anyone who uses Facebook is participating. Facebook is “free”, how exactly do you think they make their billions?

American and British lawmakers demanded on Sunday that Facebook explain how a political data firm with links to President Trump’s 2016 campaign was able to harvest private information from more than 50 million Facebook profiles without the social network’s alerting users. The backlash forced Facebook to once again defend the way it protects user data.

Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, a Democratic member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, went so far as to press for Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, to appear before the panel to explain what the social network knew about the misuse of its data “to target political advertising and manipulate voters.”

The calls for greater scrutiny followed reports on Saturday in The New York Times and The Observer of London that Cambridge Analytica, a political data firm founded by Stephen K. Bannon and Robert Mercer, the wealthy Republican donor, had used the Facebook data to develop methods that it claimed could identify the personalities of individual American voters and influence their behavior. The firm’s so-called psychographic modeling underpinned its work for the Trump campaign in 2016, though many have questioned the effectiveness of its techniques.

But Facebook did not inform users whose data had been harvested. The lack of disclosure could violate laws in Britain and in many American states.

(click here to continue reading Facebook’s Role in Data Misuse Sets Off a Storm on Two Continents – The New York Times.)

Even the Faux Walls have eyes
Even the Faux Walls have eyes

If you have time, you should read the tale of the ex-Cambridge Analytica whisteblower, Christopher Wylie in The Guardian/Observer.

which includes this revelation:

Dr Kogan – who later changed his name to Dr Spectre, but has subsequently changed it back to Dr Kogan – is still a faculty member at Cambridge University, a senior research associate. But what his fellow academics didn’t know until Kogan revealed it in emails to the Observer (although Cambridge University says that Kogan told the head of the psychology department), is that he is also an associate professor at St Petersburg University. Further research revealed that he’s received grants from the Russian government to research “Stress, health and psychological wellbeing in social networks”. The opportunity came about on a trip to the city to visit friends and family, he said.

There are other dramatic documents in Wylie’s stash, including a pitch made by Cambridge Analytica to Lukoil, Russia’s second biggest oil producer. In an email dated 17 July 2014, about the US presidential primaries, Nix wrote to Wylie: “We have been asked to write a memo to Lukoil (the Russian oil and gas company) to explain to them how our services are going to apply to the petroleum business. Nix said that “they understand behavioural microtargeting in the context of elections” but that they were “failing to make the connection between voters and their consumers”. The work, he said, would be “shared with the CEO of the business”, a former Soviet oil minister and associate of Putin, Vagit Alekperov.

“It didn’t make any sense to me,” says Wylie. “I didn’t understand either the email or the pitch presentation we did. Why would a Russian oil company want to target information on American voters?”

…

Lukoil is a private company, but its CEO, Alekperov, answers to Putin, and it’s been used as a vehicle of Russian influence in Europe and elsewhere – including in the Czech Republic, where in 2016 it was revealed that an adviser to the strongly pro-Russian Czech president was being paid by the company.

When I asked Bill Browder – an Anglo-American businessman who is leading a global campaign for a Magnitsky Act to enforce sanctions against Russian individuals – what he made of it, he said: “Everyone in Russia is subordinate to Putin. One should be highly suspicious of any Russian company pitching anything outside its normal business activities.”

Odd.

(click here to continue reading ‘I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’: meet the data war whistleblower | News | The Guardian.)

The attention led to Facebook suspending Mr. Wylie’s Facebook and Instagram accounts…

Techcrunch reports

In the latest turn of the developing scandal around how Facebook’s user data wound up in the hands of Cambridge Analytica — for use in the in development in psychographic profiles that may or may not have played a part in the election victory of Donald Trump — the company has taken the unusual step of suspending the account of the whistleblower who helped expose the issues.

(click here to continue reading Facebook has suspended the account of the whistleblower who exposed Cambridge Analytica | TechCrunch.)

Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic writes:

Academic researchers began publishing warnings that third-party Facebook apps represented a major possible source of privacy leakage in the early 2010s. Some noted that the privacy risks inherent in sharing data with apps were not at all clear to users. One group termed our new reality “interdependent privacy,” because your Facebook friends, in part, determine your own level of privacy.

For as long as apps have existed, they have asked for a lot of data and people have been prone to give it to them. Back in 2010, Penn State researchers systematically recorded what data the top 1,800 apps on Facebook were asking for. They presented their results in 2011 with the paper “Third-Party Apps on Facebook: Privacy and the Illusion of Control.” The table below shows that 148 apps were asking for permission to access friends’ information.

…

But The Guardian’s reporting suggests that the company’s efforts to restuff Pandora’s box have been lax. Wylie, the whistleblower, received a letter from Facebook asking him to delete any Facebook data nearly two years after the existence of the data was first reported. “That to me was the most astonishing thing,” Wylie told The Guardian. “They waited two years and did absolutely nothing to check that the data was deleted. All they asked me to do was tick a box on a form and post it back.”

But even if Facebook were maximally aggressive about policing this kind of situation, what’s done is done. It’s not just that the data escaped, but that Cambridge Analytica almost certainly learned everything they could from it. As stated in The Guardian, the contract between GSR and Strategic Communications Laboratories states, specifically, “The ultimate product of the training set is creating a ‘gold standard’ of understanding personality from Facebook profile information.”

It’s important to dwell on this. It’s not that this research was supposed to identify every U.S. voter just from this data, but rather to develop a method for sorting people based on Facebook’s profiles. Wylie believes that the data was crucial in building Cambridge Analytica’s models. It certainly seems possible that once the “training set” had been used to learn how to psychologically profile people, this specific data itself was no longer necessary. But the truth is that no one knows if the Kogan data had much use out in the real world of political campaigning. Psychological profiling sounds nefarious, but the way that Kogan and Cambridge Analytica first attempted to do it may well have proven, as the company maintains, “fruitless.”

(click here to continue reading Cambridge Analytica and the Dangers of Facebook Data-Harvesting – The Atlantic.)

The way I personally deal with Facebook is by seeding it with incorrect information whenever I can, and by being diligent about deleting Facebook cookies from my browsers. Of course, I’m sure they know way too much about me, but at least some of their information is wrong.

Facebook Cookies
Facebook Cookies.PNG

Gina Haspel Should Be In Prison Not Head of CIA

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War Is Still a Racket
War Is Still a Racket

Torture is stain on our country. Not only does it rarely produce actionable intelligence, it is just morally and ethically wrong. The Senate should not confirm Gina Haspel to be Director of the CIA because she should be in prison instead.

John Kiriakou, a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, writes:

Described in the media as a “seasoned intelligence veteran,” Haspel has been at the CIA for 33 years, both at headquarters and in senior positions overseas. Now the deputy director, she has tried hard to stay out of the public eye. Mike Pompeo, the outgoing CIA director and secretary of state designee, has lauded her “uncanny ability to get things done and inspire those around her.”

I’m sure that’s true for some. But many of the rest of us who knew and worked with Haspel at the CIA called her “Bloody Gina.”

The CIA will not let me repeat her résumé or the widely reported specifics of how her work fit into the agency’s torture program, calling such details “currently and properly classified.” But I can say that Haspel was a protege of and chief of staff for Jose Rodriguez, the CIA’s notorious former deputy director for operations and former director of the Counterterrorism Center. And that Rodriguez eventually assigned Haspel to order the destruction of videotaped evidence of the torture of Abu Zubaida. The Justice Department investigated, but no one was ever charged in connection with the incident.

CIA officers and psychologists under contract to the agency began torturing Abu Zubaida on Aug. 1, 2002. The techniques were supposed to be incremental, starting with an open-palmed slap to the belly or the face. But the operatives where he was held decided to start with the toughest method. They waterboarded Abu Zubaida 83 times. They later subjected him to sleep deprivation; they kept him locked in a large dog cage for weeks at a time; they locked him in a coffin-size box and, knowing that he had an irrational fear of insects, put bugs in it with him.

Rodriguez would later tell reporters that the torture worked and that Abu Zubaida provided actionable intelligence that disrupted attacks and saved American lives. We know, thanks to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on CIA torture and the personal testimony of FBI interrogator Ali Soufan, that this was false.

…

The meaning of Haspel’s nomination won’t be lost on our enemies, either. The torture program and similar abuses at military-run prisons in Iraq were among the greatest recruitment tools that al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and other bad actors ever had, according to legal experts, U.S. lawmakers and even the militantsthemselves. It energized them and gave them something to rally against. It sowed an even deeper hatred of the United States among militant groups. It swelled their ranks. It was no coincidence that the Islamic State paraded its prisoners in front of cameras wearing orange jumpsuits (like those worn by Guantanamo Bay detainees) before beheading them. Haspel and the others at the CIA who engineered and oversaw the torture program are at least partially responsible for that, because they showed the world how the United States sometimes treats captives. 

Do we Americans want to remain a nation that tortures people, like North Korea, China and Iran? Are we proud of the era when we snatched people from one country and sent them to another to be interrogated in secret prisons? Do we want to be the country that cynically preaches human rights and then violates those same rights when we think nobody is looking?

(click here to continue reading I went to prison for disclosing the CIA’s torture. Gina Haspel helped cover it up. – The Washington Post.)

Round Hole
Round Hole

I will be paying attention to who votes to confirm Bloody Gina, I’m looking at you specifically Senator Feinstein…

 

 

Asked by a reporter about her opposition to an earlier promotion that Haspel was up for in 2013, Feinstein replied, “Well, I have spent some time with her, we’ve had dinner together, we have talked … everything I know is, is that she has been a good deputy director of the CIA….I think hopefully the entire organization learned something from the so-called enhanced interrogation program. I think it’s something that can’t be forgotten. And I certainly can never forget it. And I won’t let any director forget it,” the senator added, revealing she shared a “long personal talk” with Haspel about the program.

 

Pressed to say whether she’s “a no” on Haspel’s nomination, Feinstein appeared to be undecided. “No, right now I’m late for my hearings,” she said.

 

Feinstein is facing a surprisingly robust primary challenge from Democratic state Sen. Kevin de Leόn, which already seems to have nudged her leftward as she competes for the nomination. It’s very unlikely Feinstein will actually lose, but frustration with her perceivably establishment politics is clearly mounting among California’s progressive voter base. Last month, not only did the longtime senator fail to secure the state party’s endorsement at its annual convention, but de Leόn beat her by a margin of 17 percent of delegates.

 

If Feinstein believes Haspel is the right woman for the job, a “yes” vote could really upset Golden State progressives already dissatisfied with her job performance. On Tuesday afternoon, de Leόn seized on Feinstein’s early reaction to Haspel. “It is very concerning Senator Feinstein is ‘open to supporting’ CIA nominee Haspel, who ran a ‘black site’ prison that waterboarded and beat prisoners,” he tweeted. “Believes she has been a ‘good’ deputy CIA Director.”

 

Regardless of her own interests, Feinstein may plausibly determine Haspel is unfit for the position. But the senator’s ambiguity on Tuesday signals some measure of respect for the nominee, indicating the decision won’t come easily no matter what.

 

 

(click here to continue reading Gina Haspel’s CIA nomination could torture Dianne Feinstein.)

Archive of Studs Terkel Radio Shows to Be Released to Public

Seth Anderson0 comment

Zenith Phono Radio
Zenith Phono & Radio.

Excited to hear more of these:

More than 5,600 of Studs Terkel’s radio interview programs on the Chicago station WFMT will be released to the public.

The Studs Terkel Radio Archive will launch May 16, the 106th birthday of the late author, activist and oral historian. Terkel died in 2008 at age 96. The archive will be available on studsterkel.org.

For 45 years — 1952 to 1997 — the legendary Terkel elevated oral history to a popular genre by interviewing both the celebrated and everyday people for books and on WFMT. Among the radio interviews to be released are those with Martin Luther King Jr., Simone de Beauvoir, Bob Dylan, Cesar Chavez and Toni Morrison.

(click here to continue reading Archive of Studs Terkel Radio Shows to Be Released to Public – The New York Times.)

How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions While Facebook Winked

Seth Anderson0 comment

Revolution of The Innocent
Revolution of The Innocent…

Cambridge Analytica, remember them?

All the more reason to cut back on the amount of time you spend at Facebook, and all the more reason to give Facebook and similar data-mining corporations fake information whenever possible:

As the upstart voter-profiling company Cambridge Analytica prepared to wade into the 2014 American midterm elections, it had a problem.

The firm had secured a $15 million investment from Robert Mercer, the wealthy Republican donor, and wooed his political adviser, Stephen K. Bannon, with the promise of tools that could identify the personalities of American voters and influence their behavior. But it did not have the data to make its new products work.

So the firm harvested private information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission, according to former Cambridge employees, associates and documents, making it one of the largest data leaks in the social network’s history. The breach allowed the company to exploit the private social media activity of a huge swath of the American electorate, developing techniques that underpinned its work on President Trump’s campaign in 2016.

…

But the full scale of the data leak involving Americans has not been previously disclosed — and Facebook, until now, has not acknowledged it. Interviews with a half-dozen former employees and contractors, and a review of the firm’s emails and documents, have revealed that Cambridge not only relied on the private Facebook data but still possesses most or all of the trove.

Cambridge paid to acquire the personal information through an outside researcher who, Facebook says, claimed to be collecting it for academic purposes.

During a week of inquiries from The Times, Facebook downplayed the scope of the leak and questioned whether any of the data still remained out of its control. But on Friday, the company posted a statement expressing alarm and promising to take action.

“This was a scam — and a fraud,” Paul Grewal, a vice president and deputy general counsel at the social network, said in a statement to The Times earlier on Friday. He added that the company was suspending Cambridge Analytica, Mr. Wylie and the researcher, Aleksandr Kogan, a Russian-American academic, from Facebook. “We will take whatever steps are required to see that the data in question is deleted once and for all — and take action against all offending parties,” Mr. Grewal said.

(click here to continue reading How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions – The New York Times.)

Smile Through It All
Smile Through It All

Yeah, Facebook is going to “take action”. How? By admitting that they accumulate and sell way more personal information than their users know? By deleting this information? What exactly is the action that Facebook is going to do that will miraculously solve their bad PR?

The data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump’s election team and the winning Brexit campaign harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters, in the tech giant’s biggest ever data breach, and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box.

A whistleblower has revealed to the Observer how Cambridge Analytica – a company owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Trump’s key adviser Steve Bannon – used personal information taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with personalised political advertisements.

Christopher Wylie, who worked with an academic at Cambridge University to obtain the data, told the Observer: “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis that the entire company was built on.”

Documents seen by the Observer, and confirmed by a Facebook statement, show that by late 2015 the company had found out that information had been harvested on an unprecedented scale. However, at the time it failed to alert users and took only limited steps to to recover and secure the private information of more than 50 million individuals.

The New York Times is reporting that copies of the data harvested for Cambridge Analytica could still be found online; its reporting team had viewed some of the raw data.

(click here to continue reading Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach | News | The Guardian.)

Alarmist
Alarmist

From the Facebook statement:

In 2015, we learned that a psychology professor at the University of Cambridge named Dr. Aleksandr Kogan lied to us and violated our Platform Policies by passing data from an app that was using Facebook Login to SCL/Cambridge Analytica, a firm that does political, government and military work around the globe. He also passed that data to Christopher Wylie of Eunoia Technologies, Inc.

Like all app developers, Kogan requested and gained access to information from people after they chose to download his app. His app, “thisisyourdigitallife,” offered a personality prediction, and billed itself on Facebook as “a research app used by psychologists.” Approximately 270,000 people downloaded the app. In so doing, they gave their consent for Kogan to access information such as the city they set on their profile, or content they had liked, as well as more limited information about friends who had their privacy settings set to allow it.

Although Kogan gained access to this information in a legitimate way and through the proper channels that governed all developers on Facebook at that time, he did not subsequently abide by our rules. By passing information on to a third party, including SCL/Cambridge Analytica and Christopher Wylie of Eunoia Technologies, he violated our platform policies. When we learned of this violation in 2015, we removed his app from Facebook and demanded certifications from Kogan and all parties he had given data to that the information had been destroyed. Cambridge Analytica, Kogan and Wylie all certified to us that they destroyed the data.

(click here to continue reading Suspending Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group from Facebook | Facebook Newsroom.)

Since 2015, Robert Mercer’s team of anti-liberal hordes have been siphoning personal information from Facebook, and Facebook only suspended them yesterday. Who else is doing similar things? I bet the list is long, longer than I can even imagine. But Facebook is content to take the cash…and get Trump elected.

Embarrass
Embarrass

Bloomberg reported a while ago

Facebook Inc.’s platform was a crucial messaging tool for President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, according to the campaign’s digital director — who told CBS’s “60 Minutes” that he hand-picked pro-Trump “embeds” from the company to help him use the platform in targeted ways.

“Twitter is how [Trump] talked to the people, Facebook was going to be how he won,” Brad Parscale told “60 Minutes,” according to an excerpt of an interview that the program intends to air Sunday. The social-media platform was particularly valuable because it allows for targeted messaging, Parscale said, according to the excerpt.

Facebook’s employees showed up for work at his office multiple days a week to provide guidance on how to best use the company’s services, Parscale said in the interview excerpt. “I wanted people who supported Donald Trump,” he said — and he questioned the workers about their political views.

(click here to continue reading Facebook ‘Embeds’ Helped Trump Win, Digital Director Says – Bloomberg.)

Random Friday – Movement In The Atmosphere Edition

Seth Anderson0 comment

Put That Record Back On
Put That Record Back On…

We have not played the random shuffle game1 in a while, so here’s what came up on the shuffler this afternoon. Note: this is more than 10 songs, the smart playlist I used is made for creating CDs to play in a car2

My top-of-mind3 notes in green.

  1. Fleetwood Mac– Rhiannon
    Fleetwood Mac – I’ve never been a huge Fleetwood Mac fan, but this isn’t a bad pop song, sung in best Stevie Nicks sultry style. You’ve probably heard it on the radio once or twice, or a million times. Do love the closing bass/drum line too.
  2. Bloque– Nena
    Bloque – A Columbian band that I don’t know much about. The opening sounds a lot like early Led Zeppelin. A catchy, danceable song, with Latin percussion layered onto alternative-rock changes; too bad I speak very little Spanish. 
  3. Doug Peters– Pact
    John Barleycorn Reborn: Dark Britannica –  Part of a box set of folkish music from the British Isles that’s worth tracking down. This song, like many on this collection, full of minor key obfuscations and hypnotic acoustic guitar riffs. 
  4. Beastie Boys– The New Style
    Licensed To Ill – Ahh, takes me way back (this came out in 1986). The Beastie Boys did evolve, and later albums are better musically and lyrically, but Licensed to Ill will always have a place in my brain.
  5. Merle Haggard, Buck Owens, and Dwight Yokam– Beer Can Hill
    1996 – Bakersfield twang, multi-generational edition. Not worthy of playing every day, but not bad. You could dance to it even.
  6. X– White Girl (Single Mix)
    Wild Gift – Speaking of a misspent youth, X was played often too. “Living with a White Girl” might have been chanted a few times at various roommates in college. I refuse to say more.  
  7. Belle & Sebastian– I’m Not Living In The Real World
    Write About Love – A poppy lesson in Scottish ebullience. Allmusic compares this album to mid ‘60s Swinging London, I can hear that.
  8. Joy Division– Atmosphere
    Heart And Soul – A tremendously moving song, one of my favorite Joy Division tracks. Peter Hook (bassist) agrees with me. Here’s the official band video (after Ian Curtis’s death). “Don’t walk away in silence.” B-Side to Love Will Tear Us Apart.
  9. 13th Floor Elevators– Slide Machine (mono)
    Easter Everywhere – My high school’s most famous grad, other than me, was Roky Erickson. Psychedelic garage rock, with the electric jug, and LSD, what’s not to like? Upon listening more, this particular song is more psychedelic than straight-ahead garage rock. Quite interesting. I have no idea what the lyrics mean, probably neither does anyone else, though some speculate it refers to heroin injection.
  10. Vashti Bunyan– Winter Is Blue 
    Just Another Diamond Day – True. Every spring I sigh a sigh of escape, didn’t off myself this winter… This song irritates me though at the moment. A little too hippy-dippy. Some days I know I enjoy Vashti Bunyan, not today. 
  11. The Lemonheads– I Just Can’t Take It Anymore
    Varshons – A Gram Parsons cover on an album of interesting covers, produced by Gibby Haynes.4 I thought I knew the music of Gram Parsons well, but I don’t know this particular song, so I can’t judge if the cover is as good or better than the original, just that I like it. Parsons is usually more plaintive, but that isn’t Evan Dando. 
  12. Cash, Johnny– Cocaine Blues
    At Folsom Prison – I took a shot of cocaine and I shot that bitch down is prototypical gangsta rap, right? Still genius after so many listens…One of the best “live” albums ever.
  13. The Besnard Lakes– Rides The Rails
    The Besnard Lakes Are The Dark Horse – Canadian Indie Rock from 2007, part smooth harmony, part crunchy guitars. 
  14. Nelson, Willie– How Long Is Forever
    Countryman – Willie does a reggae LP. There are better songs on this album, but this one is ok too. A little generic.
  15. CAKE– Frank Sinatra
    Fashion Nugget – Frank Sinatra as a metaphor. CAKE never became alt-rock gods in the ‘90s, but they could have, even on the basis of this song. 
  16. Reda Darwish– Raqset El Banat
    Bellydance: A Rough Guide to – I should probably add this fun, danceable song to my list of Honoria’s Instrumentals. Back story of that: she asked if I could suggest some non-word music to play in the background while she teaches her drawing classes (using iTunes streaming I think). I suggested a few dozen off the top of my head, and since then, have been keeping track of wordless music, aka instrumentals. I have a new list to send her of over 1,000 songs, but I keep delaying sending her an update because I’m finding new tunes like this one. 1,000 instrumentals is kind of excessive, but  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 
  17. Pavement– Our Singer
    Slanted & Enchanted – Again a slice of ‘90s nostalgia. Part of the soundtrack to my early adulthood. Shambolic indie-rock with obscure lyrics FTW.
  18. Ho’opi’i, Sol– Feelin’ No Pain
    Master Of The Hawaiian Guitar, Volume One – Sol Ho’opi’i is an amazing guitar player (this song is also on Honoria’s Instrumentals). Recently I tuned my acoustic guitar to open G tuning, and have been exploring the slide guitar universe. Nothing as adept as this, but a “fun” variation to my normal guitar playing. Anyway, Sol Ho’opi’i is a Jimi Hendrix of the lap-steel slide guitar. Amazing. I actually cheated and played this song twice.
  19. Fishbone– Movement In The Light
    In Your Face – Alt-Rock Funk/rock, uhh, does that suffice as a description? Another album on this list I originally owned on vinyl, in the pre-CD/pre-streaming days. Strange how so many of the tunes on this playlist are songs I knew on vinyl. Not typical to be honest.
  20. Sonics, The– This Broken Heart
    Chess Rhythm & Roll – Not those Sonics, a doo-wop band instead. I’m partial more to the garage rockers, but this song is still sweet. Funkadelic did an awesomely funky cover on their Cosmic Slop LP, seek that out. The original is ok, but the Funkadelic twist is better.
  21. Brand Nubian– Brand Nubian
    Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas – Radio Los Santos/Playback FM – early ‘90s hip-hop, with a Funkadelic sample5. Ok. 

Well, there you have it. If this was a road trip, and you were a passenger listening to the mix tape, would you take over control of the radio? I’d be ok with this eclectic mix, but on the other hand, there wasn’t quite enough loud music which is often a requirement for a road trip – one needs those driving rhythms to be able to merge in traffic with confidence. This particular randomization leans heavily on folk, folk rock, and country tunes. Not exclusively, but enough to maybe hit the fast-forward button mid-stream. Since I was only listening to the playlist in my office, it was pretty good. If I was burning this to CD, I’d change both the opening and closing track to something more memorable/interesting. I like to open with an instrumental, close with one too.

Smart Playlist CDizer
Smart Playlist – CDizer.PNG

Footnotes:
  1. the rules are simple, shuffle your music by song, play the first x=number songs, list ’em [↩]
  2. 79 minutes worth [↩]
  3. shallow [↩]
  4. of the Butthole Surfers [↩]
  5. Flashlight [↩]

Music Is a Sanctuary From Chaos on Yo La Tengo’s ‘There’s a Riot Going On’

Seth Anderson0 comment

Silk Screen Via Virgil Thrasher
Silk Screen Via Virgil Thrasher…

Hmmm, minus the Beach Boys, that sounds a lot like what the core of my music library consists of1 Probably why I have most of Yo La Tengo’s albums already.

The band’s general canon, defined through its own songs and countless cover versions, is clear and broad: the 1960s of the Velvet Underground, the Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, the British Invasion and psychedelia; the 1970s of Los Angeles folk-pop, krautrock and punk; the 1980s of new wave, post-punk and indie rock, not to mention select Top 10 pop from every era.

(click here to continue reading Music Is a Sanctuary From Chaos on Yo La Tengo’s ‘There’s a Riot Going On’ – The New York Times.)

Not to mention that Sly & The Family Stone’s “There’s A Riot Goin’ On” is of my favorite Sly LPs…

Sam Adams adds

The title of There’s a Riot Going On, the 15th album by Yo La Tengo, seems to promise a confrontation of the sort laid down by their fellow indie rockers Superchunk, whose What a Time to Be Alive is full of galvanizing anti-Trump broadsides. But instead of a blast of supercharged guitars, the first thing you hear on Riot is a wave of undulating organ that goes on for the better part of a minute before being joined by a three-note bass loop and the sound of sleigh bells. Ira Kaplan’s guitar enters the swirl, tracing a path through the hypnotic, head-nodding pulse of James McNew’s bass and Georgia Hubley’s drums. The song, an instrumental, is called “You Are Here,” but the feeling is more like being swept along than rooted in place. You are everywhere.

 

There’s a Riot borrows its title from Sly and the Family Stone’s 1971 masterpiece There’s a Riot Goin’ On, trading the modified American flag on its cover for a hazy phosphene. It’s a puzzling choice that comes off somewhere between sincere homage and record-collector in-joke. (The band once fused the titles of an R&B instrumental, a one-off album by a Los Angeles punk band, and the surname of a fantasy novelist to come up with a song called “Pass the Hatchet, I Think I’m Goodkind,” which has nothing to do with either of the three.) But the original album’s title was also a misdirection, with a nonexistent “title track” running zero minutes and zero seconds. Faced with a turbulent world, Sly Stone turned inward, and so does Yo La Tengo on an album that, if hardly riotous, is one of their best.

 

 

(click here to continue reading Yo La Tengo’s new album There’s a Riot Going On, reviewed..)

I’ll let you know if it is any good in about a month2

Footnotes:
  1. well, with some additions of course, Miles Davis, Fela Kuti, etc. [↩]
  2. after I hear the album at least 4 times [↩]

The Mighty Shamrocks “Paddy”

Seth Anderson0 comment

Sláinte–Garfield Conservatory
Sláinte – Garfield Conservatory

Today is a good day to listen to Irish music, so I queued up the mythical Irish roots album, Paddy by The Mighty Shamrocks.

Final release for mythical and influential Irish Alt-Country bootleg. This has been a long time coming. After several years slogging around the Irish dancehall circuit The Mighty Shamrocks came to the attention of Terri Hooley of Undertones fame and the owner of Good Vibrations Records in 1979. He immediately offered them the opportunity to record their debut album but; by the time they’d completed it in 1983 the label had gone bankrupt and the Masters have been gathering dust ever since, with bootleg copies falling into the hands of several Irish, Northern Irish and American-Irish musicians who have all gone into print citing its’ influence on their music.

Why all the fuss, you ask? Well; when this was recorded The Mighty Shamrocks sounded like nothing Ireland had heard before as they carefully/accidentally fused Country with some Blues and a healthy dose of nascent Punk and the end result could easily be a template for Alt-Country.

(click here to continue reading CD Review – The Mighty Shamrocks “Paddy” | No Depression.)

Mighty shamrocks paddy
mighty shamrocks – paddy.PNG

and some backstory from Eric Klinger:

 

Northern Ireland. The late 1970s. The violence and turbulence of the Troubles are everywhere, along with IRA hunger strikes and crippling unemployment. Meanwhile, the straight ahead three-chord punk model was already revealing itself to be generally unsustainable, and shrewder bands were looking to other forms as a way forward. And in Northern Ireland, a way forward could mean a way out of the turmoil. Against that backdrop emerged the Mighty Shamrocks: singer/guitarist Mickey Stephens, guitarist Dougie Gough, bassist Roe Butcher, and drummer Paddy MacNicholl.

 

Taking cues from a wide range of music — the New Wave that was ubiquitous at the time, country elements from the pub rock scene, and a hint of reggae (their moniker is a play on roots reggae group the Mighty Diamonds) — the Mighty Shamrocks made their regional name on the strength of songs that brought the political turmoil of the times to a personal level. In 1983, the group recorded an album for the Good Vibrations label, and it looked like the group might well be on their way. But as it so often happens on the road to rock glory, fate made other plans. The Good Vibrations label went bankrupt just as the album was due for release, and the band collapsed under the pressure.

 

Over the years, the Mighty Shamrocks became something of a local legend, and the songs — mostly penned by Stephens, who had settled into an academic career in the United States — made the rounds on bootleg cassettes. It wasn’t until 2012 that the master tapes found their way into the right hands, enabling Paddy to receive the official release that for nearly 30 years had been out of reach.

 

This would be a nice enough story even if the music were only OK, but Paddy (named in honor of drummer MacNicholl, who unfortunately didn’t live to see this release) lives up to its legend. Stephens has a reedy, punchy quality to his voice, which complements the lyrics well. “Everyone had PTSD during the Troubles”, Stephens writes in the disc’s liner notes, and with that understanding lines like “I can’t sleep because I’m afraid of nightmares / I can’t stay up ’cause I’m afraid of ghosts” from “Dance the Night Away” take on a new urgency. Even “Coronation Street”, Stephens’ ode to the long-running British soap opera, becomes a meditation on simpler times that recalls the more pastoral side of Ray Davies.

 

 

(click here to continue reading Unearthing the Mighty Shamrocks – PopMatters.)

You can find a copy wherever it is you get slightly obscure music. 

The New York Times has shut down its customizable keyword email alerts feature

Seth Anderson0 comment

Daily News
Daily News.

This bummed me out enough that I wrote a complaint (unanswered) to the NYT. I’ve had about 30 of these email alerts, configured over the years for specific topics-of-interest, and I found them extremely useful. There is so much information published every hour, one cannot keep up with constant stream of topics without technological assistance. Even if I only read the New York Times, and I don’t, I doubt I could keep up. Having a customizable keyword search was very useful. Oh well, consumers of news are less and less important to corporate media entities. Google News alerts are ok, but they aren’t as targeted, nor useful.

The New York Times has sunset those custom email alerts to Times stories, that users could tailor based on keywords of their interests. The feature, which met its unceremonious end Tuesday, March 13, was being used by less than half a percent of users, according to a Times spokesperson. From the outside, it didn’t seem like MyAlerts was a huge technical lift to maintain, but “much of the technology powering MyAlerts was built in the early 2000s.”

Ending the feature frees up “resources to invest in new engagement and messaging features that will debut in 2018. We also encourage our readers to sign up for one of over 50 email newsletters.”

(click here to continue reading The New York Times has shut down its customizable keyword email alerts feature ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ » Nieman Journalism Lab.)

The webservice company IFTTT has an applet that purports to emulate this functionality, but as far as I can tell, you can only have one keyword alert at a time which is pretty lame.