12 Year-old Commits Suicide Because of Cyber Bullying

Look on the picture above and weep. 12 year-old Rebecca Ann Sedwick, after being viciously targeted by cyberbullies for over a year, climbed over a high fence with barbed wire on top, then made her way to the top of a platform at an abandoned cement plant and jumped to her death.

Twelve years old.

It’s easy to want to blame somebody but that won’t bring Rebecca back, or change anything for the next child who gets victimized. Is being victimized right now and contemplating suicide because he or she doesn’t know where to turn, doesn’t believe there’s any safe haven. Can’t really talk to their parents, doesn’t get any support from school. Can’t say anything to friends for fear of being laughed at. Or doesn’t have any friends.

It’s hard enough for adults to understand that when somebody trashes you it’s not a reflection of you; it doesn’t say anything about you at all but it does say a whole lot about them, and none of it is pretty. If adults can’t get their head around that, how on earth can children?

They can’t and they don’t. Rebecca’s mother did everything she could. She knew about the bullying, she was very concerned about it, she closed down Rebecca’s Facebook account, complained to the school where Rebecca was being real-world bullied as well, took away her cellphone for a while.

The school promised to give Rebecca an escort between classes but they never came through. 

Rebecca’s mother moved her to another school. For a while it seemed to work. Relieved from the bullying, she became happier, more relaxed, more like her old self before the bullying started.

But the bullying started again. The day before she killed herself she told her mother she wanted to hurt herself really badly. The next day she changed her ID on a cyber app to That Dead Girl and left her mobile and her books at home. Instead of going to school she went to that abandoned cement plant. Climbed the platform and jumped. And found peace that nobody could take away from her.

Rest in peace, Rebecca Ann Sedwick, beautiful child.

Monopoly, Abundance and Fulfillment for Jeff Bezos and Amazon with Help from DOJ

The US Department of Justice has announced that it will block a huge proposed merger deal between American Airlines and US Airways that would have given them almost a monopoly in the country, free to do what they want with prices and services. In this case, there’s no doubt that Attorney General Eric Holden is acting to protect the consumer. 

But it’s not always so simple. A month ago the Department of Justice took on and won against Apple and five of the largest publishers for colluding to keep book prices higher. In this case, publishers, including giant Barnes and Noble, weren’t colluding to screw the consumer, they were desperately trying to stay alive. It’s no news to anybody that publishers are struggling to compete against the ebook industry, and in particular against Amazon. Barnes and Noble recently lost its CEO who it isn’t going to replace. Pretty soon it will probably break up. 

There’s only one winner and that’s Amazon. Anybody who reads loves Amazon. It’s fabulous that they drive prices down so you can have a whole library and pay very little for it. What people who read but don’t write don’t know about Amazon is that as a writer you get your biggest royalty – 70% - if you keep your price below $9.99. Anything above that and you only get 35%.

Everybody knows about books like Shades of WTF as a friend of mine called it. The author could have sold them for a few bucks apiece and still made a fortune, and that’s Amazon’s argument for keeping prices low. You sell more and there are no big megalomaniac control freak publishers telling you your book isn’t good enough. It costs you nothing to format it and load it onto Amazon. Anything you sell is money for jam. 

But here’s the real catch; Amazon doesn’t market your books. They leave that to the authors. Who, because they make so little per book, are desperate to make something. And bingo, Amazon has free marketing. No wonder Jeff Bezos has such a huge fortune.

Most writers who start out think that marketing on the internet will be a breeze but it isn’t, because there’s no barrier to entry and you’re literally competing against millions trying to sell something. Most people who have succeeded with selling ebooks advise writers to give their first one away for free. So what, you say? It didn’t cost you anything. Apart from the time that it took you to write. Very few non-writers who love to read take that into account. That writers often have to work for nothing so that readers can read.

So from the writer’s side of the fence, for once the big giants colluding was a good thing. It helped to stabilise prices for writers and keep some reality alive. Ebooks are always cheaper than paper books, but at least there’s something to correlate prices against. If paper books disappear Amazon will have total control over the whole book industry. World-wide. Scary thought.

Harder for writers? Definitely. Pretty good for people who know how to manipulate the internet marketing-wise, regardless of the quality of what they’ve written – which actually is nothing new, so it’s barely worth mentioning. Great for readers? Maybe. For now. Until Jeff Bezos’ lust for power consumes him. Who knows what he’ll do with prices then. Wonderful for Amazon shareholders? Oh yes. For now. Until the book industry or Amazon implodes. So the Justice Department’s decision in this case actually worked to enable a monopoly that will become a stranglehold in the book industry.

Consumer protection is supposed to protect the consumer in the short and the long term. But if it leaves the manufacturer so exposed that manufacturing either stops or produces worse and worse quality, then nobody is protected. Writers need to live, a fact that anybody who doesn’t write but loves to read happily ignores. The harder it gets for writers to earn, the more they’re forced to write highly marketable but utterly unoriginal crap.  And that's good for readers how?

Amazon’s global monopoly doesn’t bode well in the long term for readers, and for writers it spells slave labor on a global scale.Thanks a lot, Jeff. BTW, have fun with the Washington Post.

Big Brother isn't NSA and the US Government, it's Google and Facebook

When I first heard of George Orwell’s 1984 it sounded so science fiction and beyond my capacity to grasp as a potential reality that I dismissed it. I can’t even remember if I read it. I knew very little of the sinister world at large, and in my world the internet didn’t exist. I could conceive of societal over-management in a distant sort of way but I imagined that if a Big Brother kind of scenario ever came into play it would be recognizably science fiction. And it would, of course, be about a corrupt government. 

I was wrong about it all, and it seems I’m not alone. The world has gone beserk with the exposure of NSA privacy invasion, masses of people quoting George Orwell, predicting gloom and doom. Our independence is over; Big Brother Government controls your every move.  

There’s something perfectly Hollywood about it all. Cloak and dagger shadowy organizations, spies, international relations, diplomatic nightmares, global chases from the US to China to Russia to Havanna.

But the real Big Brother – or a fraternity of them – has been operating in our lives and homes for ages. They did what all exploiters do. Groomed us. Here, you can have this for free. We’re doing it because we love you. That how can we help you? transmogrified over time from into how can we exploit you and earn billions of bucks? We all found out about it and had a hissy fit. But we didn’t stop using those products. 

There’s nothing science fiction about it. Nothing out of the ordinary. Not anymore. Only because we’ve become slowly inured to how much of ourselves we give away, and now we're kind of hooked on the idea that unless everybody knows everything about us we’re alone and isolated. 

We still hold onto the concept of the value of privacy. But the reality of what preserving your privacy involves in today’s tech world - being cut off from some potential friend somewhere - scares us. We give ourselves away every second of the day because we somehow believe it’s the only way we can get more and more connected. There was a time when the idea of having having your privacy invaded made you feel naked. Now living in a cocoon where your privacy is utterly protected makes you feel exposed.

I read a great article on BuzzFeed/CNN, "10 ways you give up data without knowing it". It’s a kind of shortened Orwellian type of expose on privacy. I followed one of the links to a pretty detailed inventory of info about how advertisers on Facebook can manipulate their friends, friends of their friends, college students, different age groups, nationalities, genders, occupations, interests, you name it.  

It’s done in the form of Q & A and is of course selling Facebook advertising. Very seductive. If you’ve got something to sell that is. It's a bit of a shock if you're on the receiving end. Nowhere on the page could I see a question like do people supply this information willingly and knowingly? 

We still hold onto the Big Brother idea that it’s the government we have to worry about; that it will control us in a recognisably sinister and science-fiction kind of way. So when Edward Snowden exposes NSA surveillance information everybody throws up their hands in a riot of protest. We know what this is! But the mundane reality of it is that the NSA doesn’t analyse all the info in detail, they simply mine it for specific alerts. They sure don’t use it to manipulate citizens. And the point of it isn’t mass control, but to try and control terrorism. They don’t want to know every intimate detail about us; they want to know whether we know any terrorists or not. 

I guess we focus on the NSA as public enemy number one because the average Joe doesn’t think its work is useful. That’s because they’ve never had to personally pay for their security. The US – and its allies – have usually chosen the military option and most of the casualties have been suffered by the enemy.  

Now the US has a leader who seems hell-bent on peace and not war, but still remains realistically alert to security risks. The only problem with the choice he's put before US citizens is that the more peaceful solution requires them to pay something. For their own security benefits. Personally, given the choice between some innocent child getting its limbs blown off while I sleep peacefully at home, and having the NSA collect my data to see if I'm cavorting with terrorists, it's a no brainer. It’s hard for me to understand why everybody doesn’t clamour to make that same choice.

In real terms this NSA surveillance isn’t much of a payment, not if one is realistic about it. But in a world where media influence has blurred the lines between truth and lies, where politicians and giant corporations are expert fear-mongers, where we get our information from movies and TV series, realism isn’t a strong point. 

Meanwhile the real Big Brother fraternity continue to really control us more and more every day. They have the key to our lives and they can let anybody in to prowl around any time they like. Whether we know about it or not, whether we want it or not. Contrary to the NSA they do want to know intimate details about us; they target each of us very specifically. 

We know it's real, what Facebook and Google do. Why don't we rise up in global protest? Because they’re useful to us. When we advertise, do we care anymore what people have had to give up so we can get to them? Not really. So in fact, we welcome the Big Brother Frat with open arms. And while we’re waving our fists at a red herring that attracts us because of the drama, the real enemy is sucking the will-power out of us through a giant umbilical cord inserted into our Achilles heel.

If you want to opt out of being ad-targeted by Google, click here. To opt out of Facebook targeted ads close your account. Click here for their reasons why they need to continue with targeted advertising and can’t give you the option to opt out. It’s all about how much they love you and how can we help you? They focus on all the things they don’t do and deftly avoid the central question, which is Can I stop my personal and intimate information and that of my friends, my family, my children, being used by Facebook?

 

Because the unspoken answer is unapologetically and categorically No. 

Edward Snowden - How Much Does He Really Care About Citizen's Rights?

There are more than one ways to skin a cat. Oprah Winfrey once said she always wanted to be a star. Naturally she was drawn to Hollywood but she didn’t like what stars had to do to achieve fame. Nobody does, but some suck it up, believing they don’t have another option. Not Oprah. She chose another route and got nicely rewarded for that bit of lateral thinking.

What about Edward Snowden? Did he reveal US surveillance secrets for a noble cause? Was he a traitor to or a martyr for his country? He has denied that he’s either and insisted he’s just an ordinary guy wanting to protect ordinary Americans from their Big Brother nasty spying government.

Regardless of whether he’s succeeded in doing that or not and whether or not he actually believes his own motives to be pure, he’s created a diplomatic nightmare for the US, China and Russia and possibly even Eduador. More importantly, the choices he’s made since the revelation show him as not being so fundamentally noble after all.

In protecting Americans from having their privacy violated, Snowden chose to seek asylum first in a country with horrific human rights and gargantuan freedom of speech violations. Granted Hong Kong has autonomy but it answers to the Chinese government, which Snowden has got to have known, given the work he did. 

China didn’t want him and he’s been neatly shuffled out of Hong Kong. Under the pretext of the arrest warrant not being properly filled out, which allegedly left the Hong Kong authorities no option but to let him go. The US and Hong Kong are huffing and puffing at each other, but the reality is, they’ve neatly averted a situation that would impede the trade relationship they’re both trying to build. Ironically, they both cyber-spy on each other and they both know they do. It’s unlikely China would want somebody like Snowden in the country.

From China, it was onto Russia. Another country whose human rights record is atrocious and where freedom of speech is severely curtailed. A country whose leader supports Bashar Al-Assad. Nice work, Snowden.

They apparently don’t want him either. Putin has been accused of taking pleasure in sticking his middle finger up at the US for even allowing Snowden into the country without a passport, but he’s just stuck in a transit lounge at the airport. That’s a pretty clear message from Putin. I doubt he has feelings of affection for Snowden who has put him in a right spot. Obviously he doesn’t want to wave that finger too close to the US nose, otherwise he would have granted Snowden asylum. But officially ganging up against him would discredit him with his voters.

He chose a pretty wise diplomatic option. A kind of halfway measure that lets him off the hook in both directions. He’s no fool, Putin. So it’s on to Ecuador for Snowden.

Which has defamations provisions in its criminal code that allow the government to persecute its critics. In 2011 journalist Emilio Palacio wrote an opinion piece in El Universo in which he accused Ecuadorean President Correa of being a dishonest dictator. Correa sued Palacio and three of the newspaper’s board members, brothers Carlos Eduardo Pérez Barriga, César Enrique Pérez Barriga, and Carlos Nicolás Pérez Barriga. They were jailed with 3 year sentences and ordered to pay $40 million in fines altogether.

In an interview with The Guardian, where Snowden talked about his motives, he said "I don't want to live in a society that does these sorts of things..." Really? China, Russia and Ecuador don't do these sort of things?  

Predictably, Jullian Assange and his lawyers and friends were behind getting Snowden out of Hong Kong and attempting to get him asylum in Ecuador. Whether it’ll work or not is debatable. Assange is still holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he’s been for almost a year. He’s obviously not that bothered about freedom of speech in Ecuador either. 

You can’t tell much about a person from what they say. You can’t even always tell who they are from what they do, especially in the beginning, when the ramifications of their behaviour haven’t kicked in. But you can tell a lot from the company they keep. That Assange and Snowden happily accept help from countries with atrocious human rights and freedom of speech violations  makes a mockery of the cloak of nobility they wear as whistle-blowers hell-bent on protecting everybody’s freedom.