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This week we had the honour and the privilege to welcome Demetri Kofinas, the host of the Hidden Forces podcast. Unfortunately Charles was not on today, we also had to drop off of Jitsi and move it to Zoom, but after all that, the show went on as planned. For more about Demetri and to check out Hidden Forces, head to… HiddenForces.io

In this issue: Hackers target crypto exchanges via their registrar Vatican cries foul after pontiff “likes”  racy pic on Instagram Cybersecurity agency names four state actors as threats to Canada RCMP dragging feet at disclosing data via FOIA requests Swatters target home after hacking their Ring video doorbell Librem 5 phones are finally shipping Large colo provider hit with ransomware attack Large scale WordPress Epsilon theme attack Now available on the Internet: Music AxisOfEasy Salon #31: The Covid Episode Full show notes: https://AxisOfEasy.com/173

This week we felt like it was no longer possible to tip-toe around the elephant in the room. We had to talk about COVID-19, the pandemic, Coronavirus and how, as Charles put it “That system we thought was solid is about to go non-linear”. Pardon the longer than usual pre-roll but I felt the conversation in it was germane to the rest of the show…. References and Links Michael Pollan The Cornification of Food (Alternative Radio) Chris Martenson, Peak Prosperity Ivor Cummins interview on Triggernometry Charles’ articles on mRNA vaccines and here Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets Klaus Schwab, COVID-19: The Great Reset Alvin Toffler, Future Shock

In this issue: Ticketmaster to require immunity passports for event attendance DNS cache poisoning attacks are back EC charges Amazon with anti-trust violations EU wants to outlaw end-to-end encryption Ethereum unexpectedly hard forks, hilarity ensues Ransomware group using Facebook ads to pressure victims Google sued for unauthorized data transfers from Android devices Mac OSX 11 removes your ability to avoid Apple’s surveillance AxisOfEasy Salon #30: The one, the only Doc Searls Full show notes: https://AxisOfEasy.com/172

We will be splitting the guest shows out into a separate series, but until we do, Salon #30 had us welcome the one, the only Doc Searls. Co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto and The Intention Economy, alumni fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Project VRM leader and open source champion. Books, references and links The Cluetrain Manifesto Project VRM at the Berkman Center at Harvard The Intention Economy, When Customers Take Charge, by Doc Searls Linux Journal We’re in the Epilogue Now, via the Doc Searls blog Where Journalism Fails Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media Moral Politics by George Lakoff Customer Commons (How good customers work with good companies) Subprime Attention Crisis by Tim Hwang

In this episode: Ledger owners lose over  1M XRP to homoglyph attack Police pilot program will live stream neighbourhood Ring cameras Pervasive Windows ransomware strain now targeting linux Calls grow to leave Github quasi-monopoly Big Tech moves quickly to quash election truthers Trump campaign site to report rejected ballots leaked voter data Canada’s bill C-10 would give CRTC regulatory powers over internet Who knew? Crispr babies can have software bugs in their genes AxisOfEasy #29: A Deep Dive into the Network State Full show notes: https://AxisOfEasy.com/171

This week in politics: two ducks standing on a 3 tonne pile of horseshit. That was pretty much all we had to say about the election. Then we got onto weightier matters. References and Books: Picture My Face: The Story of Teenage Head Cluetrain Manifesto and Intention Economy, by Doc Searls (next week’s guest) Marshall McLuhan & Bruce R Powers, The Global Village Technocracy in America: The Rise of the Info-State, by Parag Khanna Kubrick’s Game, by Derek Taylor Kent Infomocracy, Malka Older Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson

In this issue: Drop what you’re doing and go update Chrome, again New scam using Google to send malware links Mailchimp will henceforth deactivate accounts sending “misinformation” Canadian mall giant caught harvesting shopper images Trump campaign website hacked and defaced Update on Chrome 0-day, Chromium also impacted Paypal terminates ICANN registrar over alternative currency Twitter suppression debacles roll on like a slow motion car-crash Trudeau: Free Speech has its limits AxisOfEasy #28: This Show has been brought to you by the letter K(leptocracy) Show notes: https://AxisOfEasy.com/170

You know how when you think it’s a costume party and you show up in a toga and everybody else is in business casual? I thought we were all supposed to do today’s show from our respective private jets and then I’m the only one who showed up in one. References and notes: Mike Freccero’s video expose on the fake private jet studio Instagram influencers are using Emmanuel Wallerstein: World Systems, an Analysis Kleptopia author Tom Burgis on Hidden Forces James Kunstler, Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology and the Fate of the Nation Adbusters

In this issue: New Chrome 0-day, upgrade now Beyond the pale! Ransomware could target coffee machines GitHub suspends multiple Youtube-DL repositories after RIAA DMCA notice Police can hack into your phone DOJ files anti-trust against Google Paypal to support Bitcoin in 2021 Report: Governments use COVID to crackdown on online dissent Facebook’s China-based hate speech censors Senate panel subpoenas Zuckerberg and @jack after they decline invitation Update on the easyDNS Fold@Home team This Week on the AxisOfEasy Show notes: https://AxisOfEasy.com/169

This week brought another special guest to the show in Minds.com co-founder and CEO Bill Ottman. We commiserated and traded war stories about the vagaries of competing with the Big Tech incumbents, touching on a wide range of topics. Among them, The Manila Principles, an EFF sponsored framework for handling content liability among intermediaries like hosting providers and social networks. At the end of the episode Bill even made me a verified user on the Minds platform, my very own blue check! You can connect with me on Minds here, with Bill Ottman here, or create your own account here. Minds releases their code as open source, so you can also spin up your own version of Minds for your company, organization or other group. Episode Transcript: AxisofEasy19 Transcript Bill Ottman

In this episode: World grinds to a halt as Zoom crashes globally Facebook testing “virality” circuit breaker Copywriters brace for “GPT-3 shock” as Microsoft replaces journalists with AI Microsoft finally killing Internet Explorer Former Uber exec charged with concealing a data breach Secret Service bought access to cellphone location data Chinese iOS SDK steals click revenue from other ad networks AoE 18: The Endgame of Financialization Resembles a Philip K Dick Novel Show notes: https://AxisOfEasy.com/160

History is written by the copyright holders. We talked about the dichotomy between scarcity and abundance and how obsolescence can lead to gluts. Analogies were made between various aspects of pop culture and content creation (music, writing, blogging) and the financialization of everything and the gig economy. Monopolies then (Standard Oil) vs quasi-monopolies now (Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon). Jesse challenged us both to be more optimistic about this state of affairs, and our advice to those seeking to avoid neo-feudal slavery is this: don’t get on the galley, and don’t drink in the same bars as the galley crew. Especially the recruiters. Since we’re probably gonna get demonetized for the Jonathan Richman clip, I threw in the Barracuda track to close us out…. Episode Transcript: AxisofEasy18_transcript  

In this Episode: Microsoft waited two years to fix 0-day it knew was being actively exploited Canada’s COVID-19 contact tracing app now available, and why I installed it Canada Revenue Agency shuts down online services after cyber attack Facebook sued for conducting illegal biometrics via Instagram WSJ finds Tik Tok gamed Android security to harvest data Qualcomm chip defect puts over a billion Android devices at risk of data theft ByteDance censored anti-China content in Indonesia until mid-2020 UK court finds fault with facial recognition camera use by police A large chunk of Tor exit nodes have been hijacked by a mystery actor Medical debt collection agency hit with ransomware attack Uber threatens to quit California after labour decision Big Tech deplatforms documentary about private contractor data theft and surveillance AxisOfEasy Salon #17: Cognitive Conquest and Thinking the Unthinkable Full Show notes: https://AxisOfEasy.com/159

We expanded more on Jesse’s concept of The Network State and how it looks to supplant the Nation States of yore. We may be in the early innings of a new type of global conflict, being waged with weapons that the majority of the populace (and possibly many in their governments) do not even recognize as being weapons. The front lines are in cyberspace, along economic fault lines, and rather than feeling the effects physically, we experience it cognitively. One of the original quotes in the AxisOfEasy newsletter was William Gibson’s “The future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed”. This week Jesse reiterated a similar sentiment and it’s an ongoing theme of his: What we think is the present, is really already the past. What we think is the future, is already the present. Charles brought up the stone cold game theory of climate change and we wondered whether society has hit peak tolerance for the narrative, or whether it will be intensified even more after the pandemic is seen to be in the rear-view mirror. Books Mentioned: Herman Kahn, Thinking About the Unthinkable Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash I wanted to mention Michael Schellenberger’s Apocalypse Never, but I never got it in…

In this episode: Private companies installed trackers in apps on your phone and sell the data to the government Intel hacked, 20GB of corporate data and chip designs dumped on the net “All your DNA are belong to Blackstone” In 4.7B Ancestry.com deal Tik Tok odyssey continues as merger with Twitter floated Protonmail founder says Apple uses monopoly to hold everybody hostage Uber and Lyft brace for California ruling on gig economy drivers AxisOfEasy: The No-Man’s Land Where Technology and Reality Intersect Show notes: https://AxisOfEasy.com/158

It was a pleasure and an honour to welcome Let’s Talk Bitcoin’s Adam B. Levine to talk about the role of decentralized crypto and blockchain throughout this ongoing systemic crisis. Adam is now the podcast editor at Coindesk and is also CEO of Tokenly, a company that understood the oncoming era of tokenization a couple years before the ICO craze. Predictably, we honed in on “platforms vs protocols” and how monopolies and oligarchies have this way of incentivizing their own disruption. Show links: Let’s Talk Bitcoin show Coindesk.com The Breakdown with NLW Episode Transcript: AxisofEasy16_transcript

In this issue: Tik Tok banned, sold, unsold, unbanned, rebanned or something Four Hong Kong youths arrested for online postings under new security law Surprise! Youtube censorship actually expanded reach of California doctors’ video The definitive database of canceled people How Chinese spies use LinkedIn to target assets The battle against encryption in the USA As COVID-19 drives businesses to the cloud, cybercrime follows AxisOfEasy Salon #15: Toxic Tech Platforms and Disposable Social Media Stars Show notes: https://AxisOfEasy.com/157

This was supposed to be the Geo-politics of Tik-Tok episode, but we never really got to the geopolitics part. Instead we talked a lot the merits of deleting one’s social media accounts and whether, in our super-connected age, it’s even tenable to do that. We three, alas, have a professional compulsion to chase after this stuff, so we have to immerse ourselves in it despite the mental and emotional cost of doing so. We converged around the theme of the nature of fame, how it is both defined and limited by the ecosystem it occurs within, and how it defines our legacies should it happen to us. Books and External References Jaron Lanier, 10 Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now Jerry Mander, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television Paul Levy Quantum Revelation & Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil Idubbbz “Ice Cream Man” Jani Lane The Tragic Story of the Warrant Frontman and Cherrie Pie Mark’s appearance on Doug Mckenty’s The Shift, and Paul Levy’s appearance is here. Episode Transcript: AxisofEasy15_transcript

In this episode: Amazon met with start-up founders, then ripped off their product ideas Top Top-4 Tech companies have more economic clout than many countries Garmin down hard after ransomware attack Microsoft forcing Edge browser installation on all devices FBI using travel company database as surveillance tool Blueleaks reveals DHS worried that face masks will impair facial recognition Twitter hack reveals vibrant dark market for inside access Axis Of Easy Salon #14: Jobageddon and the Coming Educational Revolts Show notes: https://AxisOfEasy.com/156