Rendering of Dropbox’s new offices under development in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood. Image: William McDonough + Partners
Dropbox, the file-syncing startup angling to become as popular as Facebook, will soon have a new home that’s as big as its ambitions.
The company, which is furiously hiring top Silicon Valley talent to expand its ranks, has agreed to lease every floor of a 182,000-square-foot multi-story office building under construction in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood. It’s a far cry from the North Beach apartment where co-founders Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi got the service up and running a few short years ago.
It’s also another example of an up-and-coming tech startup carving out a major headquarters in San Francisco as opposed to the traditional tech hub of Silicon Valley south of the city. As they seek new talent, these companies — including payments company Square, social networking giant Twitter, and ride-sharing startup Uber, as well as Dropbox — see the city as a major draw for new recruits.
A United Airlines plane takes off at the Calgary International Airport in Calgary. (Reuters / Todd Korol)
Documents released by US whistleblower Edward Snowden show the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) used airport Wi-Fi to track passengers from around the world.
Travelers passing through a major Canadian airport were potentially caught up in a vast electronic surveillance net, which allowed the nation’s electronic spy agency to track the wireless devices of thousands of airline passengers – even for days after they had departed the terminal, a document obtained by CBC News revealed.
The document shows the spy agency was then able to track travelers for a week or more as the unwitting passengers, together with their wireless devices, visited other Wi-Fi “hot spots” in locations across Canada – and even across the border at American airports.
The CBS report said any place that offered Wi-Fi internet access, including “airports, hotels, coffee shops and restaurants, libraries, ground transportation hubs” was vulnerable to the surveillance operation.
After reviewing details of the leaked information, one of Canada’s leading authorities on internet security says the secret operation was almost certainly illegal.
“I can’t see any circumstance in which this would not be unlawful, under current Canadian law, under our Charter, under CSEC’s mandates,” Professor Ronald Deibert, an internet security expert at the University of Toronto, told CBC News.
It remains unclear from the leaked data how CSEC was able to infiltrate so many wireless devices to see who was using them — both on Canadian territory and beyond.
Is this massive sell off a sign of trouble behind the scenes at Facebook?
By John Vibes
(INTELLIHUB) — After experiencing some censorship issues, us at Intellihub have started paying close attention to what is going on behind the scenes at Facebook.
One theme that has been common in our research, is the idea that Facebook is in the midst of a decline, and that the social network will soon lose dominance, in favor of websites that offer a more secure, and censorship free platform.
Not only have there been market studies and mathematical models to show that the decline of Facebook is taking place, but there have also been some telltale signs in terms stock activity.
After just establishing the IPO less than two years ago, Founder Mark Zuckerberg just unloaded 41.4 million Facebook shares for $2.3 billion, ensuring that even if the stock price collapses, he will remain wealthy, Aljazeera reported.
The worst fears of all free speech proponents are upon us. The Verizon suit against the Federal Communications Commission, appellate decision sets the stage for a Supreme Court review. The Wall Street Journal portrays the ruling in financial terms: “A federal court has tossed out the FCC’s “open internet” rules, and now internet service providers are free to charge companies like Google and Netflix higher fees to deliver content faster.”
In essence, this is the corporate spin that the decision is about the future cost for being connected.
“The ruling was a blow to the Obama administration, which has pushed the idea of “net neutrality.” And it sharpened the struggle by the nation’s big entertainment and telecommunications companies to shape the regulation of broadband, now a vital pipeline for tens of millions of Americans to view video and other media.
For consumers, the ruling could usher in an era of tiered Internet service, in which they get some content at full speed while other websites appear slower because their owners chose not to pay up.
“It takes the Internet into completely uncharted territory,” said Tim Wu, a Columbia University law professor who coined the term net neutrality.”
What the Journal is not telling you is that this “uncharted territory” is easy to project. If ISP’s will be able to charge varied rates or decide to vary internet speed, it is a very short step towards selectively discriminate against sites based upon content. Do not get lulled into thinking that constitutional protective political speech is guaranteed.
“Verizon’s argument that network neutrality regulations violated the firm’s First Amendment rights. In Verizon’s view, slowing or blocking packets on a broadband network is little different from a newspaper editor choosing which articles to publish, and should enjoy the same constitutional protection.”
The response from advocates of the Net Neutrality standard, that is about to vanish, sums up correctly.
“The First Amendment does not apply, however, when Verizon is merely transmitting the content of third parties. Moreover, these groups point out, Verizon itself has disclaimed responsibility for its users’ content when it was convenient to do so, making its free speech arguments ring hollow.”
Prepare for the worst. The video, Prepare To Be Robbed. Net Neutrality Is Dead!, which includes frank language and expletives, provides details that place the use of internet access into question coming out of this appellate decision.Analyze the implications logically. It is one thing to charge a for profit service like Netflix a higher fee to transverse the electronic bandwidth of a communication network. Selling a membership to an end user is the source of their cash flow. However, most activist political sites usually provide internet users free access to their particular viewpoint and source links.Your internet service provider controls the pipeline that feeds your devices and data connection. No matter which company you pay for this service, you are dependent upon this union. A free WiFi link may well become a memory. Beaming a satellite signal, mostly is an alternative, when DSL, cable or other broadband is not available.No matter what method is used to surf the net, this decision clearly implies that internet access is now a privilege, at the effective discretion, if not mercy; of a provider that allow an account for service.
Next, consider the implication that search engines will use this decision to re-work their algorithms lowering their spider bots selection of sites that challenge the “PC” culture. Restrictive categorization used for years by Google, Yahoo and Bing can use this decision as cover to purge dissenting sites even more from their result rankings.
It is common knowledge that YouTube censors and targets certain uploads. One particular subject that experiences technical glitches is Fukushima. The video You Tube Censoring Truther Channels explains the drill. Add to the frustration are the ads, especially the ones with no skip option and imagine future requirements for uploading approval. What is next, a paid subscription to use and upload to the service?
“Without Net Neutrality, ISPs will be able to devise new schemes to charge users more for access and services, making it harder for us to communicate online – and easier for companies to censor our speech.”
Corporate gatekeepers will control “where you go and what you see.”
Verizon, AT&T, Comcast and Time Warner Cable “will be able to block content and speech they don’t like, reject apps that compete with their own offerings, and prioritize Web traffic…”
They’ll be able to “reserve the fastest loading speeds for the highest bidders (while) sticking everyone else with the slowest.”
Doing so prohibits free and open communications. Censorship will become policy. Net Neutrality is too important to lose.”
“In the U.S., there’s no practical competition. The vast majority of households essentially have a single broadband option, their local cable provider. Verizon and AT&T provide Internet service, too, but for most customers they’re slower than the cable service. Some neighborhoods get telephone fiber services, but Verizon and AT&T have ceased the rollout of their FiOs and U-verse services–if you don’t have it now, you’re not getting it.
Who deserves the blame for this wretched combination of monopolization and profiteering by ever-larger cable and phone companies? The FCC, that’s who. The agency’s dereliction dates back to 2002, when under Chairman Michael Powell it reclassified cable modem services as “information services” rather than “telecommunications services,” eliminating its own authority to regulate them broadly. Powell, by the way, is now the chief lobbyist in Washington for the cable TV industry, so the payoff wasn’t long in coming.”
In a digital environment, access to an internet that provides uncensored content at the lowest costs is a direct threat to the corporate economy. Innovation and creative cutting-edge services are clearly marked as competing challenges to the Amazon jungle of merchandising. The big will just get bigger.
Then the unavoidable effects from the “all the news fit to report” mass medium, intensifies their suppression of honest investigative journalism. Filtering out the alternative and truth media is the prime objective of this ruling. Eliminating political dissent from the internet is the ultimate implication. What would the net be like without access to the Drudge Report?
Welcome to http://NewWorldNextWeek.com — the video series from Corbett Report and Media Monarchy that covers some of the most important developments in open source intelligence news.
This week:
Story #1: Ukraine Opposition Sets 24-hour Deadline As Protests Rage http://ur1.ca/ghhxb
Putin Scores a New Victory: What Really Happened In Ukraine http://ur1.ca/ghhxc
Ukraine Texts Citizens: Hey, We See You’re In a Mass Disturbance http://ur1.ca/ghhxe
Reddit: Ukraine Revolt Livestream http://ur1.ca/ghhxh
State Of Emergency Begins As Thailand Copes With Protests http://ur1.ca/ghhxk
Geneva II: Day 1 of Syria Peace Talks Ends on Fragile Ground http://ur1.ca/ghhxl
Story #3: Homeland Security Special Agents Hold Up Google Glass Moviegoer http://ur1.ca/ghhxs
Google Unveils ‘Smart Contact Lens’ to Measure Glucose Levels http://ur1.ca/ghhxv
Like an infectious disease that initially spreads and then abruptly dies, Facebook’s growth is set for a rapid decline within the next few years, according to a new study from Princeton University.
Researchers at Princeton’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering predict that Facebook will lose 80 per cent of its peak user base between 2015 and 2017.
The study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, used epidemiological models used to track the spread of infectious diseases and publicly available Google search query data, to explain how users adopt and abandon online social networks.
Imagine for a moment, that you are at the farmer’s market on a Saturday morning, getting your veggies and minding your own business. Suddenly, a creepy guy with a comb-over approaches you. “Hey, there. I bet you like long walks on the beach and strawberry margaritas, baby.” What? you think. How on earth did he know that? Then he begins to talk to you, and it’s eerie, simply uncanny all the things Mr. Creepster has in common with you. Suddenly you realize, he is all but plagiarizing that profile you put on OKCupid last month in the hopes of meeting Mr. Right. He knows that you don’t smoke, that you have 3 children, the city in which you reside, what you do for a living, and that you go hiking alone to enjoy the solitude of a nearby mountain trail every single weekend.
Putting the “stalk” in stalker, a new facial recognition app for Smartphones will allow a user to scan a crowd and pinpoint people with profiles on online dating sites or social media sites. NameTag, designed for Android and iOS, scans a person in whom the user is interested and looks for that person on dating sites such as PlentyOfFish, OkCupid, and Match as well as social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
NameTag wirelessly sends the photo that the user has surreptitiously taken of the prospective date to a server, where it is then compared to millions of records. In seconds, a match is returned that has the unwitting victim’s full name, additional photos and all social media profiles.
The worst fears of all free speech proponents are upon us. The Verizon suit against the Federal Communications Commission, 
Marlene Leung, CTVNews.ca
by Kimberly Paxton
PN 