Tag Archives: data collection

Rally Ho

Yeah, it’s a little take off on “Tally Ho”, the old fox hunting call stating the quarry has been sighted. I was recently lucky enough to attend a Second Amendment rally. It’s been quite a while since I’ve been to one. I used to go every year to the big rally held in my state’s lovely Capitol building. But then, well, life, etc. and so I haven’t gone for a few years. And that’s bad. We had a decent size crowd, nowhere near what it was back when concealed carry was originally the big push. Then the rotunda was packed. My state’s concealed carry was pushed back by the helpful NRA’s interference, which is another story. But finally it passed, and was promptly vetoed by a Demoncratic governor. The veto was overridden, and that whole saga is another story as well, but those days the capitol was packed with us “gun nuts”. There have been some years where the crowd was very meager. But we all listened to fantastic speakers, and were so very fortunate as to have two famous book authors among them. Bills that needed our support were discussed. The big ticket item everyone wanted this year was elimination of legally mandated target rich environment zones, also known as “Gun Free Zones”. By that I mean if a store wants to post a “gun free, come on in criminal” sign they are more than welcome to do so. Nothing is stopping them. But while this column is a couple years old, before the most recent gun free zone killings, the details all remain. And nicely discount some progressive publications saying that no criminal has every picked a target because it was “gun-free”. They have. This one is interesting as well. Here’s How Many Lives Were Taken in Just 8 Armed Attacks in Gun Free Zones.

But other states have suffered as a result of putting total faith in the NRA rating system. Recently no less. How Vermont’s NRA A-rated governor was ‘shocked’ into backing new gun laws

Surrounded by gun-control opponents heckling him outside the Vermont State House on Wednesday, Gov. Phil Scott (R) signed into law the most restrictive gun-control measures in the state’s history.

While some had come to thank him, Scott knew that many there who voted for him based in part on his A-grade rating from the NRA were “disappointed and angry” with him, he said.

Some yelled “Traitor!” and “BS!” as he tried to assure them that the laws he was about to sign were not intended to “take away your guns — period.” Others told him he had lost their votes and brandished signs that said “One Term Gov” and “Not My Governor.”

But it was clear from his remarks that Scott had already considered all of that.

Well, alrighty then. The NRA Got Harry Reid Re-Elected.

School attacks concern everyone. But we certainly have different ideas on how to stop them. Conservatives think making the prey less easy to attack works well in many real life situations. That’s why folks call the police and hope they don’t have Coward County Sheriff Scott for law-enforcement. But it takes time for them to get there, even if they do come in. So why not let teachers fight back rather than die trying to hold a door shut?

Well, for one. Insurance companies don’t want to cover it. They claim they aren’t anti-gun, just afraid they’ll lose money.

Oh, some are in favor of arming the teachers, so they can fight back. With a bucket of rocks, or A district armed its teachers with tiny baseball bats, urging them to fight back in a shooting

It’s like their brains say, “hmm, well, leaving them defenseless isn’t working.” So some of them double down on stupid, and say they don’t want armed guards, no guns near schools. And some say, well, we need to give them a chance to do something besides beg for mercy when there is none. So we’ll give them tiny little souvenir baseball bats. Nothing that could be construed as a weapon of course, because we are a weapon free safe zone, well, safe for armed criminals of course. School kids? Meh, not so much.

I think the answer is gun free zones liability act. Your school chooses to be gun free and your child is harmed? Mental anguish, you sue the heck out of the school district. Let the insurance companies pay, because most assuredly the parents and students will be paying the rest of their lives. However long they may be.

But enough about the NRA, and the bill to decrease easy targets.

I could go to rally, yes, it was a bit of a drive but not that bad. I realize there might be people not all that happy to see me, but thought it would be good to see old friends and show support. Not every gal gets that chance. Marion Hammer, the NRA’s top lobbyist in Florida, didn’t attend a public hearing on a gun ordinance because of death threats. And NRA spokesman Dana Loesch has certainly received more than her fair share of threats, including raping her to death, and hunting down her and her children and assaulting them.

Why is it, all the “stop the violence” “give peace a chance” “end gun violence” people are so, well, violent? Wanting to physically harm and dominate physically smaller and weaker people with whom they disagree? And progressives wonder why we need to be armed? I don’t think they really do, I think they just want to manipulate citizens into defenselessness. But all this business about posting pictures of her house? She ended up moving. I don’t blame her. Wonder how they know some of this stuff? Because I’m pretty sure she didn’t give them her address and invite them over for coffee.

Interesting you should ask in light of other hearing that have been going on at another “Crapital”. Yes I will explain that later.

Yes, I’m referring to the hearing currently going on in Jefferson City about the massive amount of data collection Facebook has been doing. I heard a radio host ask an interesting question lately. If Facebook is free, and they don’t collect and sell our data, or give it away, how did Zuckerberg get to be such a rich man off providing a “free” service and web site? Good question. They can’t, at least they can’t in Europistan. Facebook’s Dirty Little Secret

Here’s the proof. This month, the European Court of Justice, the European Union’s highest court, handed down a ruling that stops Facebook from collecting digital information about non-Facebook users. Wait, what? Yes, Facebook collects information about the online activities of users and non-users alike. Any site that has a Facebook “Like” button plays peek-a-boo with your private information. According to Facebook, that button along with the “Share” one are on almost 10 million websites and used 4.5 billion times every day.

But Zuckerberg didn’t want it to end there.

Facebook’s secret operation to access medical records

According to sources close to the project, Facebook planned to collect information about age, diseases, prescribed medications and visits to the hospitals. This data could be combined with the information that Facebook knows about its users: marital status, language preferences, activity in the community and etc. After the Cambridge Analytica and the call-data collection scandals, this crazy medical data gathering project seem to be even more ludicrous.

Oh well, it’s not like insurance companies are anti-freedom and anti-self-defense, right?

Kaiser Permanente to launch $2 million gun violence research effort

It’s not like Facebook would ever use any of your posts, like about going to a Second Amendment rally, or anything to turn you in to your anti-gun insurance company is it? And it’s not like your anti-gun insurance company would ever turn you in to the FBI because you take one of the drugs your doctor says you should take, but ex-medical expert barry obama said you shouldn’t be allowed to own a gun if you do.

A friend of mine asked an interesting question in response to the Kaiser article I posted.

Trivia for you. How did the Germans know who to round up for the death camps. After all you can’t see Jewish, and a lot of Jews are notorious non practitioners. So how the brown shirts know? Hint: If you are dying in a hospital how do the know to send a Priest, Rabbi, witch doctor or Baptist Minister? Bonus Hint: Germany had a “better” national health care system in 1898 than the U.S. does now. Be afraid of those who control your medical records and what they put in it.

Kind of goes along with the gun confiscations we’re seeing on “Mental health” grounds doesn’t it? The ones without due process.

So, if you’re feeling like a bit of activism at the moment, you can go to Gun Owners of America and send letters to your state’s congress critters. Here is their article.

Legislative Proposals to Confiscate Guns are Sweeping Through the Country You might want to do a pre-emptive strike since the NRA may be “helping”.

In addition, NRA has reportedly entertained support for some form of these bills, although it is not clear where they would draw the line.

And here’s a direct link to the letter. Stop Gun Confiscation Orders In Your State

So, about the “Crapital” comment. A friend of mine at rally has two boys. Young, I’m guessing 8 and 4 years maybe? Hey, it’s not like horses where you can check their teeth! But the oldest one calls the Capitol, the “Crapitol” out of the mouths of babes. These are awesome kids. We sent a couple messages back and forth on Face (the spy who hates me) book and he relayed his visit to his legislative rep. The man turned to:

Leif and asks if this is his first time at the Crapital and Leif responds “This is my fourth RALLY” and points to Hakon and says “it is his third”.

These are kids that will grow up valuing freedom. Because they know it takes work. So when your state has a Second Amendment rally? Take the day off, go. When our side has a dismal turn out it does not bode well. Many of the legislators with less than pure motives respond not to what’s right, but to who has the most votes to offer. And I will tell you I was told that Mad Mommies in their little red shirts are at the Crapitol every week. Every week. Handing out Bloomberg disarmament talking points. We’ve got to suit up and show up. I don’t plan to miss another one. Lobbyists get a bad rap, but unless you can take time off work every week, it helps for your grassroots Second Amendment group to have one to watch out for you. And that’s my last point, do, please find your local grassroots Second Amendment group and join and get involved. Very often they are the ones doing the heavy lifting on these good pro-freedom pro-gun bills. But for now? You can send a letter for free.

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FEELING A BIT, WELL, DUMB

A friend sent me a story the other day about how Chrysler cars could be hacked and controlled. This is not a trifling deal like the Iranian nuke deal either. This is a big important deal if you happen to be driving one of these vehicles that is connected to the Sprint wireless program Uconnect.

Hackers can cut the brakes, shut down the engine, drive it off the road, or make all the electronics go haywire.


Uh oh.

But to be fair, it seems that the only reason that the article is about Chrysler products is because the investigators are

a tiny team that lacks the funding to keep buying cars and the time to break into them.

Uh oh.

Sprint, as network controller could block the hacks, but has not said if it will do so, just that it is working with Chrysler.

You can read the whole article yourself.

I can save the team some footwork and expense though. Government Motors onStar is a huge liability. At the very least to your privacy, and that’s NOT if it’s hacked. Turns out that onStar collects quite a lot of information on vehicles and sends it to Government Motors. Well, and third parties, not defined or designated. But hacked, why yes indeed. An article came out yesterday that onStar can be hacked and it seems Government Motors is far less willing than Chrysler to acknowledge or discuss fix. Government Motors told the hacker who contacted them it had fixed the vulnerability.

Kamkar said he discussed the fix with representatives from GM, but their efforts failed to thwart the attack method he uncovered, which uses a device he built and dubbed ‘OwnStar.'”

“They have not yet fixed the bug that ‘OwnStar’ is exploiting,” he told Reuters.

I’m shocked, shocked I say. Uh oh.

You can read the whole article yourself.

Beyond that, some people are incredible creatures called “nerds”, and they read changes in things called “Terms and Conditions”. Some of these “nerds” have blogs, where they put in regular people language what these things say. One such “nerd” detailed what he found out about the changes in onStar’s terms and conditions and what it meant for regular humans. Not good stuff, but if you use or have used onStar you might want to give it a read.

You can read the whole article yourself.

The right wing conspiracy publication known as USAToday came out with an article a couple years ago talking about the pending installation of “black boxes” into the moving data collection devices that used to be known as the family car. USAToday does a nice job of detailing what all can and will be collected and again how it can be used. The black boxes are not the same as onStar, this is a separate avenue of data collection. Although we have nothing to fear from this. Nothing at all.

Fears have been “blown out of proportion,” says Mukul Verma, a former top GM safety expert who is now a consultant. “I don’t think there is any chance of it being used or misused without people’s permission.”

You can read the whole article yourself.

Uh oh.

Sure makes one wish for the good old fashioned cars doesn’t it? One you could just drive. Yeah, I did when I needed to get a car a couple years ago. I knew exactly what brand I wanted, and hunted and hunted and hunted for one. Most of the dealerships I stopped at or contacted gave me the same information. “I’m sorry ma’am, but since cash for clunkers happened those are hard to find. In fact good used cars that people wanted that they could just buy outright are VERY hard to find. But we have a really nice Chevy Cruze, or this gently used Chevy Volt. If you don’t mind a little singeing, we have almost all the burn smell out of it now. Can give you a really good deal on it.” Ok, I admit, I made up the last part about the Volt, but not the rest of it.

Yep, I do love technology, I really do. I adore my phone, my computer and my tablet. But let’s be honest, they have vulnerabilities. I suppose if you choose to get one of those cars with that kind of technology you can decide for yourself the risk to benefit ratio.

But any time you get something with mechanical moving parts and introduce electronic control into it I think there is probably a risk. We should each get to decide if we take the risk or no.

That being said the last electronic I wish to draw your attention to is the “smart gun”. From Bearing Arms today comes a article about rifles using TrackingPoint technology. A married couple has figured out how to hack into TrackingPoint. They can use a wireless connection to change the information and even the target the gun tells the shooter they are aiming for. Wired details all the work the couple did and what all they can do with it.

You can read the whole article yourself.

Uh oh.

Smart gun technology, you know, the kind gun grabbing politicians keep telling us will keep us “safe”. It will prevent the “evil handguns that only have a purpose to kill” from doing so, according to Democratic Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, who wants them banned. Seeing as how they have no “sporting purpose”. Smart gun technology, like having to wear a special watch to be able to use your gun. What could go wrong with that? Or your gun has to recognize your fingerprint to use your gun. While you may be annoyed your spouse used your toothbrush, I’m pretty sure if they need to use YOUR gun, it is important.

I don’t hate technology, but it does seem we are losing choice in just how much of it is allowed into our daily lives. And it seems to me, that when the direction that push is coming from is the government, the results won’t be good. After all, what could go wrong?

From the Bearing Arms Article

By their computerized nature, any computerized “smart” gun can be rendered inoperable just as the TrackingPoint was in this test, and some smart guns are rumored to have been designed from the ground up to be rendered inoperable with the push of a button by either the manufacturer, or by government itself.

Uh oh.

Ok, this one is just for a grin. No “uh oh” honest.

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