There have been many complaints lately about the way Google searches are far less informative than a decade ago. A number of new search engines have emerged to overcome this.
One of the best is Tusk which aims to stop censorship in search. It even has its own AI, Gippr, a throw back to Ronald Reagan.
I had a play with Gippr this morning , and had this amusing response to “What is the Uniting Church in Australia?
I have made Tusk my default search engine to see how it compares to Duck Duck Go
LifeSiteNews.com
NewsThe Christian head of the social media platform encourages conservatives to boycott leftist companies.
February 5, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) – Andrew Torba, CEO of alt-tech social media platform Gab, called for a “silent secession” of Christians in a blog post earlier this week, urging conservatives to boycott Big Tech and other leftist companies.
“Over the course of the past week Gab has been deplatformed by one of our banks, a business we were working with to source new server hardware, third-party infrastructure analysis software, and even our accountant,” Torba announced. He also noted that Gab has been deplatformed by more than 25 service providers, including Apple and Google.
However, “I rejoice and praise God because I know that He is working to separate the wheat from the chaff,” the Christian tech founder said.
Despite being blacklisted, Gab has gained millions of new users since Twitter permanently banned President Donald Trump last month and unleashed a wide-ranging purge of conservative voices, according to Torba. Trump himself may have joined Gab, with the first new post from a dedicated Gab account made for him appearing Friday.
“At this point we have no choice but to ‘build our own’ everything. That starts by supporting those who are already building and share our values. It’s not about simply building our own social networking platforms anymore, it’s about building our own Christian economy,” Torba said.
“I am in the process of transitioning every part of my financial expenses to support Christian businesses, Christian media companies, Christian content creators, and Christian people,” he added. “I am done giving my money to The Enemy and funding the destruction of our country and values,” he said, encouraging “everyone else to do the same.”
“Deeply examine the businesses, brands, and media companies you currently support both financially and with your time,” Torba continued. “If they are not serving God, they are serving Satan.”
Along with Twitter and other Big Tech companies, multiple banks, email services, and at least one payment processor have cut ties with President Trump and fellow Republicans in recent weeks. More than a dozen companies, some of which excused Black Lives Matters riots, have halted donations to Republicans who objected to the certification of the 2020 election. — Article continues below Petition —PETITION: Dump Twitter and Big Tech for threatening our democracy and freedom of speech
64,578 have signed the petition.Thank you for signing this petition!
PETITION UPDATE (1/26/20) –
Twitter has again locked LifeSiteNews out of two of our accounts on the platform for displaying a message noting that President Joe Biden’s newly named Assistant Secretary of Health “Rachel” Levine is a man.
Both accounts displayed a simple message which read: “Biden names transgender ‘woman’ as Assistant Secretary of Health. ‘Rachel’ Levine is a father of two who divorced his wife in 2013 after 30 years of marriage.” The tweets also included a link to LifeSite’s article Biden names transgender ‘woman’ as Assistant Secretary of Health, and contained part of the opening sentence of that article, “Joe Biden has announced his intention to appoint a gender-confused man” as Assistant Secretary of Health.
For stating biological or Biblical truths, Twitter and Big Tech are trying to shut down conservative voices.
Therefore, it is now more important than ever to consider dumping Twitter, Google (who own YouTube) and Facebook. To be clear: LifeSite is still using Twitter and Big Tech to encourage others to migrate away from these illiberal platforms.
This is not the first time that LifeSiteNews has been censored by Twitter. In December 2019, Twitter indefinitely suspended our account for a tweet that linked to an article on transgender activist Jonathan “Jessica” Yaniv.
At the time, Twitter gave LifeSite the option to delete the tweet and reactivate our account right away. LifeSite remained steadfast that the tweet did not violate any of the company’s “rules and policies,” and sought several appeals with Twitter, while looking into legal action against the company.
And, while LifeSite’s account was eventually restored, we must now consider what course of action we will pursue in this case, over and above appealing the ban.
Meanwhile, since taking office on Wednesday last week, Joe Biden has already signed an executive order which will force women’s athletic programs, restrooms, and locker rooms to be open to men. He has also turned back the Trump administration’s policy protecting women’s sports programs in schools.
Last week, LifeSite was banned for two weeks from our YouTube channel, after the site determined that one of our videos about vaccines violated YouTube’s “community guidelines.” We are also in the middle of appealing this ban.
Please considering SIGNING and SHARING this petition. Thank you!
__________________________________________________________________________
Twitter just deplatformed President Trump premanently! And, other conservatives, including General Flynn and Sidney Powell, were also summarily deplatformed.
Conservatives, Christians and freedom-loving Americans of all political persuasions must now take a decision to preserve their free speech AND their ability to peaceably assemble by dumping Twitter and Big Tech, and by finding other good alternatives to communicate with each other and share their opinions.
Please SIGN our petition-pledge to Dump Twitter and Big Tech, and take back your freedom of speech and privacy. [CLICK HERE for our “Goodbye Google” resources page to find good alternatives to Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, and Google!]
When you use Twitter or Facebook to communicate, and, or, Google and Amazon to search for something online, these companies can stifle your ability to share your thoughts and opinions and manipulate your search results, threatening your privacy, your freedom of speech, and even our democracy.
Evidence suggests that Twitter and Facebook’s ‘community guidelines’ are selectively enforced against conservatives and Christians, while Google rigs their search algorithms to direct traffic away from conservative and Christian websites, effectively choking traffic to those sites.
Simply put, Twitter, Facebook, Google (who owns YouTube) and Amazon appear to be actively suppressing access to pro-freedom, pro-family and pro-life news and opinion.
Don’t contribute to this assault on democracy: Stop using Twitter, Facebook, Google and Amazon as your default social media platforms and search engine! [CLICK HERE to find a good alternative to Google.]
To repeat: a few liberal and completely unaccountable computer programmers in Silicon Valley are dictating what we do and do not see in our Twitter and Facebook feeds, and in our Google searches.
We, here, at LifeSite, also recently had our Twitter account suspended by the company over “misgendering” a man who claims to be a woman.
LifeSite has also experienced a fall-off in Google search-related traffic since the company updated its search algorithms at the beginning of May.
And, since the November election, Twitter and Big Tech appear to have dramatically INCREASED their censorship of conservatives and Christians as the President Trump disputed the results of the election and when evidence of election fraud began to mount.
Now, it seems likely that they are trying to cut-off conservative leaders (like President Trump) from conservatives on the ground, and effectively exclude us from the national conversation.
But, this tactic will not work. Because Twitter, Facebook, Google and Amazon are not the only game in town! There are a good number of excellent alternatives which we list in our ‘Goodbye Google’ Resources page.
The great irony is that, while Twitter, Facebook, Google and Amazon executives talk a lot about maintaining freedom of speech and diversity, in fact, these hypocrites are ATTACKING free speech point-blank!
This kind of manipulation poses a lethal threat to our democracy, but as we see so clearly now, Twitter and Big Tech have shown no hesitation in excluding conservatives and Christians from the public square.
So, at this point, the only way to stop Twitter, Facebook, Google and Amazon is to quit using their platform.
I pressed the “Delete” button on Facebook yesterday.
The last straw for me was the suspension of President Trump’s account. I put up with the claims of political censorship, the manipulation of algorithms, the massive privacy breaches, the ever-increasing ads….
When an American platform deletes the current President of the United States, it seems to me that there is a line of political contempt and arrogance that has been crossed.
I am sad to be missing out on the opportunities for sharing with people and for the huge platform that Facebook offers. On the other hand, I did live most of my life without Facebook.
I am sure there will be another better, more free medium that emerges, and when it does I will be there. In the meantime I will be blogging more and I am also on mewe.com and xapit.com
JD Morecambe writes:
“Tyranny in democratic republics does not proceed in the same way,
however. It ignores the body and goes straight for the soul. The
master no longer says: You will think as I do or die. He says: You are
free not to think as I do. You may keep your life, your property, and
everything else. But from this day forth you shall be as a stranger
among us.”
– Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Imagine a future where a benevolent all-seeing and all-powerful censor
quietly manipulates everything you see, hear and watch; tracks and
limits everyone you communicate with and determines what information
is spread, and what is suppressed. No form of communication exists
which does not pass through the filters of the censors.
So powerful are these censors that they can suppress not only information, but people too. No one is immune from this gentle yet persistent form of
persecution, and even the most senior in government are routinely
‘non-personed’; though they still live, they are rendered voiceless.
This is not the theme of some 20th century dystopian novel, but the
world we inhabit in 2021.
The spotty tech-geeks of Silicon valley have accrued, along with their
billions and our indifference, an overwhelming monopoly over
communications during the past decade. They have now matured from
adolescent cyber-nerds tinkering with their early IT systems into
greying and sinister tyrants who mouth slogans like “Don’t Be Evil” as
they continue to consolidate their domination over the most advanced
tool of social control ever built; the centralised internet.
We have been sacrificing our privacy and free expression in return for
centralised convenience online for some time, but 2021 is already
proving to be the year when the libertarian pretensions that typified
the early internet are finally falling away like dross, leaving behind
the glistening ore of raw power. While the rest of us spent 2020
largely muzzled, in 2021 their mask has slipped.
So complete is their monopoly that they can now silence even the most
powerful man in the world; the President of the United States.
Since protestors broke into the US Capitol Building, Facebook and
Instagram have blamed the President Trump with inciting an
‘insurrection’ and banned the President from communicating with the
public indefinitely. Twitter has permanently banned the President from
their platform. YouTube have introduced a removal policy for accounts
that question the US election results, and regularly bans dissenting
content.
Tiktok have cancelled Trump-related hashtags, claiming that
‘Hateful behavior and violence have no place’ on the Chinese-owned
platform. Reddit has removed Trump-related Subreddits. Shopify has
cancelled Trump’s online stores. Google and Apple have removed
alternative social media competitors from their app-stores, and
Amazon, claiming that they “pose a very real risk to public safety”
has ceased web-hosting such rival platforms as Parler, effectively
removing it from the internet until it can rebuild the site, as
Parler’s CEO John Matze said, “from scratch” with another host.
Why is this happening?
Read the full article here
The Australian Government is introducing a digital health record where all of your health information is stored in one location accessible to all health professionals. On the face of it, this is a great idea. Hospitals, GPs and specialists will be able to see the full story of your health.
My mother-in-law in her later years required a huge number of medications and was under the care of several specialists who did not talk to each other. Consequently she sometimes became ill from the interactions of the drugs with each other.
The My Health Record would have prevented suffering for her and for many other people with chronic health conditions.
But the Government could not leave it there as a service to individual citizens and to the health service. No, they had to use it as a backdoor to spy on our personal data. So numerous agencies have access to your health records regardless of their need to provide health services.
Agencies which can access personal health records include The Australian Tax Office, Centrelink, State and Territory Police Forces, the various crime commissions, the Agency that runs the NDIS and many more.
I am not a huge privacy nut. If you want to know about my haemorrhoid, my blood pressure (controlled nicely by medication), or the prostate infection I had 20 or so years ago, I will happily tell you. That’s my choice.
I will not have nosy public servants having access to my information without my consent, just because they have an interest or they think I might be defrauding them. If they think a crime may be committed, for example by people on sickness benefits, then they should gather evidence and apply for a warrant.
This is yet another “Big Brother” exercise by the Government under the guise of helping the people.
If they rescind the ability of agencies that are not health related, then I will be in it.
You can opt out at http://www.myhealthrecord.gov.au
UPDATE
The Federal Government announced on August 1st that it will legislate to ensure that health records can only be accessed by other agencies after obtaining a court warrant. A win for privacy! After the legislation is passed, I will be opting in.
This is amazing!
From the ABC
Wax worms biodegrade plastic bags at ‘uniquely high speeds’, study finds
Posted
Scientist and amateur beekeeper Federica Bertocchini picked parasitic wax worms from the honeycomb of her beehives and left them sitting in a plastic bag.
When she returned to the bag, it was riddled with holes and many of the worms had escaped.
It was that chance discovery that led her to collaborate with scientists at the University of Cambridge in England to unearth the possibility of using worms to munch through the world’s plastic problem.
The team discovered the wax worm, a caterpillar commercially bred for fishing bait, has the ability to biodegrade polyethylene — a type of plastic used to make shopping bags — at uniquely high speeds.
The degradation rate was extremely fast compared to other discoveries, like plastic-eating bacteria, the study published in Current Biology found.
When the team exposed about 100 wax worms to a plastic shopping bag, holes started to appear after 40 minutes, with a reduction of 92mg after 12 hours.
Analysis showed the wax worms transformed the polyethylene into ethylene glycol, a chemical used to make polyester and anti-freeze.
The team of three scientists said the discovery could lead to a biotechnological approach to plastic pollution.
People around the world use about 1 trillion plastic bags each year, the study said, and more than 45 million tonnes of polyethylene plastics are produced annually.
“The caterpillar produces something that breaks the chemical bond, perhaps in its salivary glands or a symbiotic bacteria in its gut,” said Cambridge University’s Paolo Bombelli said.
“If a single enzyme is responsible for this chemical process, its reproduction on a large scale using biotechnological methods should be achievable.”
Wax has similar chemical structure to plastic
Wax moths lay their eggs inside hives where the wax worms grow on beeswax.
The worms are known for living like parasites in bee colonies and damaging hives by eating their wax comb.
Researchers said breaking down plastic and beeswax required similar types of chemical bonds.
“Wax is a polymer, a sort of natural plastic, and has a chemical structure not dissimilar to polyethylene,” Ms Bertocchini, from the Spanish National Research Council, said.
When the team mashed up the worms and smeared them into plastic they had similar degradation results to when the caterpillar “ate through” the plastic.
“The caterpillars are not just eating the plastic without modifying its chemical make-up. We showed that the polymer chains in polyethylene plastic are actually broken by the wax worms,” Mr Bombelli said.
“The next steps for us will be to try and identify the molecular processes in this reaction and see if we can isolate the enzyme responsible.”
From The Babylon Bee
GERMANTOWN, TN—Walking calmly into his scheduled Genius Bar appointment at exactly 10:00 a.m. Wednesday morning, local Presbyterian believer John Garner stoically greeted the Apple employee assigned to assist him before asking how he could remove the “Praise Hands Emojis” from his new iPhone, sources confirmed.
“There’s a problem with my phone,” Garner began. “See, there are these hands raised up in the air when I pull up the emojis on my keyboard, and I’d like to get them taken off—or if we could at least replace them with hands being placed in pockets where they belong, that’d work too.”
The confused Apple employee, unsure exactly what Garner was asking, launched into a demonstration of how to use the emojis, according to witnesses, but was interrupted by Garner.
“Whoa! Did I just see clapping hands on there? Those are going to need to be removed right away,” Garner said. “Please and thank you.”
“I’m not sure what it is you want, sir. These are installed by default on every iPhone we sell. It’s not a glitch, it’s a feature,” the bewildered Genius Bar worker reportedly replied.
“It’s pretty simple—I want you to remove all these emoji fellows showing various emotions. You can keep the expressionless guy, but the rest have to go,” Garner noted as the worker continued flipping through the pages of emojis on his iPhone.
At publishing time, Garner had run from the store in terror after seeing the wide array of diverse emojis from various cultures.
I’m not a technophobe by any means but I am worried when I see primary school children with phones. Even teenagers are too connected to the world “out there.”
From Lifesitenews.com
The horror stories are real. Don’t give your children a smartphone.
Oct. 4, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – After spending four days at the Coalition to End Sexual Exploitation Summit in Houston, Texas, my brain is very tired. We heard lectures on neuroscience, human trafficking, sexual abuse, child exploitation, and so much more. And we heard many, many lectures on the poison that is seeping in everywhere, fueling sexual abuse, destroying relationships, breaking down the ability of men to function, and obliterating childhood: pornography.
I’ll be writing a lot more about what I’ve learned (read my reports from the conference here, here, and here) but for now I’d like to make one simple plea to parents, something nearly every speaker and every lecturer advised: don’t give your children smartphones.
This advice has made me very unpopular in some circles—one teenager greeted me at a high school presentation by saying balefully, “So you’re the one who told my parents I shouldn’t have a cellphone.” But it is essential. Children, and most teenagers, do not need a phone with Internet access.
It’s crazy to think that a decade ago, smartphones were uncommon. Many people didn’t even own a cell phone. Now, as we heard from Vanity Fair journalist and author ofAmerican Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers Nancy Jo Sales, nearly every social interaction – and sexual interaction – of teenagers is shaped by the tiny, always-throbbing devices they carry with them wherever they go. This has given rise to cyber-bullying and a spate of suicides, sexting and sexual exploitation of teens by teens, and the nearly non-stop viewing and amateur production of pornography. Teenagers – and children – are pulled into the social webs woven from Facebook to Instagram, from Snapchat to a half-dozen other underground cyber-settings, the interactions and content curated only by the children who populate them, free of parental or adult supervision.
Teenagers know that it’s making their lives miserable. The girls Sales talked to told her so. They also said that they had no way of getting out. Much of life is now lived online, and to opt out is to engage in voluntary isolation. The currency is often nude or sexually explicit pictures or “selfies”—and increasingly, that’s often non-optional, too.
Parents cannot control the new world of teenagers. In many cases, they cannot even penetrate it. That is why one man was so bewildered when his daughter hung herself after a teenager cruelly posted a video of her in the shower on Snapchat—that was the first time the girl’s bereaved father had ever even heard of Snapchat. For parents who wish to rescue their children from the cyber-jungle or spare them the pain that is engulfing millions, there are a number of answers. Open communication and open conversations. Attempted oversight of social media use. Accountability software and filters on all technological devices.
But for today, I just want to push one: Don’t give your children smartphones.
This advice has made me very unpopular in some circles—one teenager greeted me at a high school presentation by saying balefully, “So you’re the one who told my parents I shouldn’t have a cellphone.” But it is essential. Children, and most teenagers, do not need a phone with Internet access. They do not need nonstop access to social media sites that put them under the influence of their peers rather than adults. They do not need the social pressure that inevitably – inevitably – comes with entering a cyber-world of teenagers with new standards and new currency. And above all, they should not have access to all the pornography the web can offer, vile material that is setting new sexual standards teenagers across North America and beyond are beginning to conform to, through pressure, through force, or by choice.
I heard dozens of stories this weekend of parents finding children on smartphones, watching hardcore pornography. Children younger than the former average age of first exposure to porn, which used to be age eleven. It’s now age nine. These children, in a few gawking, horrified moments, are robbed of their childhood. Their worlds change in that moment. They cannot unsee what they have seen. And they should never have had access to it in the first place.
Don’t give your children smartphones.
I understand that teenagers are more likely to actually need a cell phone. My parents signed for a cell phone for me when I got my driver’s license—not so I could interact with my friends or go online, but so they could contact me and I had a way of communicating with people when I was out and about. My first cell phones had no Internet capability, and I didn’t miss it. I sometimes wish my current phone didn’t have Internet either, because I’m as guilty as the rest of this generation of wasting time on my phone when I could be doing something – or anything, really – more productive. But when teenagers need a phone, they still don’t need a phone with Internet access. A phone that allows them to make phone calls and text is good enough. They don’t need nonstop social media connection, they don’t need SnapChat (a “sexting” app that destroys photos in seconds), and they absolutely should not have access to the twisted pornography that they will almost inevitably find.
Do not give the pornographers the access to your children that they seek. They know that children and teens are most likely to find porn on phones, and that’s why they’ve made a gargantuan effort in recent years to create porn that can be viewed and streamed on mobile devices. They know how to access your children—through a smartphone.
Don’t give them one.
Wow! So it’s just a starting point and you can only use it at temperatures of about -200 C, but this is just incredible
From the SMH:
When Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press he changed the world.
Now a team of scientists in the Netherlands has taken this to the ultimate extreme. Through the manipulation of single atoms they have made the world’s smallest hard drive. It is so dense the technology could store all the world’s books on device the size of a postage stamp.
“It is as if we have invented the atomic-scale printing press,” lead researcher Sander Otte at Delft University told Gizmodo.
Using a scanning tunnelling microscope to push single atoms around, Associate Professor Otte’s team created a stable grid of 8000 chlorine atoms where each can represent the one (1) or zero (0) that make up binary digital data.
This means a storage density of 78 terabits per square centimetre, many hundreds of times greater than the best hard disks available.
IBM estimates that humanity is creating about 2.5 billion gigabytes of data a day – and that was in 2012. So the ability to store data efficiently is as a global challenge.
The researchers at Delft hope their research, published this week inNature Technology, will be a step towards dealing with this data management conundrum.
“In theory, this storage density would allow all books ever created by humans to be written on a single post stamp,” Professor Otte said.
Read the rest here
Exciting new transport technology. I wonder if it will actually work in real life.
From the ABC.
Hyperloop One’s magnet-powered sled hits 160kph in breakthrough test of future train system
Updated
A car-sized sled powered by electromagnets has rocketed to more than 160 kilometres per hour through the Nevada desert in what the Los Angeles company developing the technology said was the first successful test of a futurist transit system called hyperloop.
Key points:
- Developers say system will transport passengers by 2021
- Sceptics say construction costs are underestimated
- Hyperloop One already has raised $80 million from backers
Hyperloop One is among several companies competing to bring to life a technical vision by Elon Musk, the founder of rocket maker SpaceX and electric car company Tesla Motors, who suggested sending pods holding passengers and cargo inside giant vacuum tubes between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
It is a matter of debate how soon — or whether — passengers and cargo will ride the system at velocities approaching 1,200 kilometres per hour, but Hyperloop One has already raised $80 million from backers including clean technology venture capitalist Khosla Ventures, high-speed railway SNCF, the French National Rail Company and GE Ventures.
Brogan BamBrogan, a former SpaceX engineer who co-founded Hyperloop One, called the test a major milestone.
“Technology development testing can be a tricky beast,” he said to a crowd of 300.
“You never know on a given day if things are going to work exactly like you want.”
The sled began on a train track and then was rocketed to 168 kilometres per hour by electromagnets as electricity was shot into copper coils. After a short ride, the sled ran into a sand trap, sending out silicon sprays. If all goes according to plan, sleds will levitate and carry pods in a test later this year.
Gigantic tubes are already scattered around the Las Vegas area test site.
Read the full story here
New Life Narrabri 