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Mobile phone users in Turkey got surprise voice message by Turkish President Erdogan when placing a call through Turkcell or Vodafone around midnight on the anniversary of the 15 July 2016 coup attempt.

After dialing a number, the dial tone were replaced with a voice message from Erdogan congratulating them on the national holiday of “democracy and unity” and only after Erdogan’s message did the dial tone begin.

If people had any doubt that mobile communications are unsafe. Then they got a in your face status message this midnight. Maybe people will reconsider end-to-end crypto VoIP now.

CHP MP Barış Yarkadaş wrote that it's a "extortion of freedom of communication". And MP Aykut Erdoğdu said "What is this on top of all insults? It’s such a nightmare!".

Maybe they got inspired by USA Belkin http MITM attack in 2003 ..?

(At other times Erdogan tells his son to hide the millions of Euros (2014) and that Turks should reproduce with at least five children, especially if they live in Europe.)

Robert Michels (1876-1936):

"Who says organization, says oligarchy." /../ "Historical evolution mocks all the prophylactic measures that have been adopted for the prevention of oligarchy."

/../ all organizations eventually come to be run by a "leadership class", who often function as paid administrators, executives, spokespersons, political strategists, organizers, etc. for the organization. Far from being "servants of the masses", Michels argues this "leadership class," rather than the organization's membership, will inevitably grow to dominate the organization's power structures. By controlling who has access to information, those in power can centralize their power successfully, often with little accountability, due to the apathy, indifference and non-participation most rank-and-file members have in relation to their organization's decision-making processes. Michels argues that democratic attempts to hold leadership positions accountable are prone to fail, since with power comes the ability to reward loyalty, the ability to control information about the organization, and the ability to control what procedures the organization follows when making decisions. All of these mechanisms can be used to strongly influence the outcome of any decisions made 'democratically' by members.

Michels stated that the official goal of representative democracy of eliminating elite rule was impossible, that representative democracy is a façade legitimizing the rule of a particular elite, and that elite rule, which he refers to as oligarchy, is inevitable

These factors seems interesting enough to pay attention to:
  * Power comes the ability to reward loyalty.
  * Ability to control information about the organization.
  * Controlling procedures.

Jerry Pournelle (1933-)

In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.

On other words. The people that indulge themselves into the organization itself and gives a shit about the outcome gains the most?

It just seems like these intrinsic of people and organizations to play out repeatedly in the society. The ability to recognize these phenomena and negate them may be of importance.

Do you recognize these things anywhere where it mattered?

Vertical takeoff vehicle using batteries already here?

Lilium - Vertical takeoff vehicle
World's First All-Electric VTOL Jet Tested - Are Flying Cars Here?

Quick data:
Motor power: 324 kW
Range: 300 km
Top speed: 300 km/h
Planned release: year 2025

It's started by technical students from Technical University of Munich (Germany). And they use ESA business incubator facilities.

Seems like it might get some trouble if power fails because the front seems to lack passive lift power, ie wings.

At least 1 million homes in the USA have solar systems on their rooftops and their use together with local batteries is increasing, enabling homeowners the ability to collect energy and store it for later usage on-site. Enabling homeowners to cut their dependence on the electrical grid and their bills. This could be economically painful for utilities. A new McKinsey study predicts two outcomes 1) electrical grid cut off completely 2) primarly local energy collection and the electrical grid as a backup.

The cost of of collecting solar energy and store it on-site makes the incentive too small even for residents of sunny Arizona to cut the electrical grid off. But partial defection from the grid with 80-90% of the demand supplied on-site makes economic sense in 2020 and total defection makes sense around 2028

The prediction by McKinsey is that the electrical grid will be repurposed as an enormous, sophisticated backup. Where utilities only adds energy at those times when the on-site systems aren't collecting enough energy.

My comment: So far good enough. But then why not simple connect to neighbors directly for electrical power transfer and cutting the utilities out of the loop even for electrical fallback needs?
A electrical power mesh grid might need some interesting mathematical modeling though.

(As a side note, maybe this makes UPS for home use obsolete soon enough?)

Daniel Stenberg a Swedish Mozilla employee was denied entry at the airport ticket counter early Monday morning despite his visa waiver ESTA. The incident stirred fears among international tech workers, who fear they'll miss out on work and research opportunities in USA. Microsoft's chief legal officer Brad Smith, tweeted a legal assistance offer. Many commenters have suggested to apply for a standard visa despite it being a pain in the ass.
Daniel have also written the command-line tool curl.

This movie kind of illustrates what can happen when AI gets the opportunity for power:
Colossus: The Forbin Project
It's a movie from 1970 but perhaps even more relevant now.

Danish minister of Science, Technology, Information and Higher Education Søren Pind drops his Facebook account with 42 320 "followers". He says, he can't accept a system that is setup with algorithms that ascribes him and tries to create further dependencies.

He wants to read more books longer comprehensive blogs and posts at a slow pace, not have fragmentation and haste.

Source: nordjyske.dk (via spyoogle translate service)

Parts of the Microsoft Windows 10 source leaks online with a size of 32 TB. What's leaked is Microsoft's Shared Source Kit that supposedly includes the source to the base Windows 10 hardware drivers, Redmond's PnP code, USB and Wi-Fi stacks, storage drivers, and ARM-specific OneCore kernel code. Also non-public builds of Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016. (Betaarchive.com now says it's only 1.2 GB of data. But regardless. There is something to look for.)

However Beta Archive's administrators are in the process of removing non-public Microsoft components and builds from its FTP server and its forums. But the various bays of ships with sot colored flags will surely deliver.

So head first for https://betaarchive.com/ for treasure hunting and then to that bay.

The British government demands a fee for every single fiber you buy yourself and lay down. And make use of to the tune of 333 GBP per kilometer per year (423 US$).

So much for promoting the future digital society. Maybe the British islands were spared the extinction level event 65 million years ago? :p

A workaround is to lay cat.6 cable perhaps or at least pretending to do so..

It seems a lot of people that had not contact with previous incarnations of computers with a GUI capability completely misses how much resources that needs. So here it is:

CPU: 8-bit @ 1 MHz
RAM: 64 kB
Video: 320 x 200 bitmapped @ 1 bpp (alternative: 160 x 200 @ 2 bpp)
Storage: 170 kB
(MOS6502, VIC-II, C1541)

This setup managed to run a window system called GEOS. It is noticeable slow, but it pulled it of!

CPU: 16-bit @ 7 MHz
RAM: 512 kB @ 150 ns
Video: 640 × 256 bitmapped @ 6 bpp
Storage: 880 kB
(MC68000, Agnus, 3,5")

With this hardware a workable window system was no problem. And it actually needed no more than 256 kB system ROM to pull it off.

CPU: 32-bit @ 20-40 MHz
RAM: 8192 kB
Video: 640 × 480 bitmapped @ 8 bpp (or better..)
Storage: 1934 MB
(AMD386, "VGA", IDE)

Running a graphics FreeBSD+XFree86 environment is is no problem. Even with the NCSA mosaic web browser on top of that.

From this it can be concluded that computers that need CPU in the GHz range, RAM in the GBs, storage in the GBs etc. Simply wastes most of the resources available and that a graphics environment can be had with a lot less resources. This means that a embedded MCU with few resources *can* do graphics environment. Which is very useful for visualizing data or having interactive environments. And that your main desktop can do a lot more than it does with the present bloat.

And this also means that operating systems like KolibriOS are possible on 133 MHz x86 with 24 MB and VGA with fast boot times. Another example with a Asus computer that likely have a CPU Atom 900 MHz, RAM 1 GB, SVGA and 20 GB flash, here.