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John Davisson, the senior counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said in a comment to The Verge that the promise that this policy won’t share data in new ways sounds good, but “the problem is that Facebook already funnels user data at industrial scale into a vast targeted advertising ecosystem. So the status quo is not good for privacy.”
Read the full article here.
As explained by John Davisson of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, “Facebook already funnels user data at industrial scale into a vast targeted advertising ecosystem.” For Davisson, it’s “unrealistic” to believe that Facebook users will read dozens of pages about how the company is handling their data, but of course Meta will try to make it seem like the company is now more concerned about privacy.
In other words, nothing has changed, which is not good since we’re talking about Facebook.
Read the full article here.
Often touted as a “survival superfood”, pemmican has a deep history in North America as it has sustained populations for centuries.
It is currently used as survival food or for preppers eager to bolster their reserves. It can be formed into bars or strips to be eaten as is or used in a variety of recipes for nutrition and flavor.
In our age of convenience and abundance, you don’t hear much about pemmican in mainstream educational outlets.
Packed full of nutrients, proteins, and fats you can easily meet your calorie and nutrition requirements with this indigenous tradition.
It has been adopted by modern civilizations as a way to prepare for situations where food will come by. Pemmican stores extremely well if you take the time to preserve it properly.
But how long can it last?
Pemmican has a high shelf life of anywhere between 3 years to 5 years if prepared and stored properly. The variability in how long it stores for lies in the meat quality, preparation method, and storage process.
Native cultures in North America have been using pemmican for centuries which was then acquired by the first settlers.
It was a tradeable commodity and used as both a survival food in lean times as well as a special treat during times of celebration or holidays.
Pemmican is so versatile that it’s been used in rations during times of war. Let’s look at what makes this survival food so versatile and ideal for long-term storage.
Pemmican consists of dried meat, animal fat, and dried fruit. Beef jerky is a popular dried meat to use because it already has a long shelf life and can add flavoring.
The dried meat is then combined with rendered animal fat (suet is popular) and dried berries. You can substitute the suet for tallow if that is more convenient for you.
It can be made with any type of meat, as long as it can be dried and pulverized into a flour-like texture.
Traditionally, bigger animals such as moose, deer, and elk are used as they make an excellent jerky.
While you can use animals such as fish, rabbits, and squirrels, they don’t have the fat content that you want to have when forming your pemmican.
The meat can be drier than typical jerky because you are going to end up smashing it into a coarse mixture and doesn’t need to be chewy.
Some people prefer chewy pemmican but the more moisture you have the less shelf life it’ll have.
The next step in making pemmican is to render your source of fat. You want to bring the fat up to temperature and then cook it for several hours.
You’ll notice bubbles forming on the top of the mixture which is an indication to keep cooking. It needs to stay at a low temperature and can be taken off when the bubbles stop forming.
Afterward, strain your fat to get rid of any particulate matter and set it aside for a few minutes. Mix your beef shred with…
By Bulelani Jili, EPIC Scholar-in-Residence
Many Chinese tech companies continue to export their facial recognition technologies into Africa markets while supporting domestic surveillance practices that include Uyghur and ethnic minority detection. Facial recognition technology, once framed as a potential ameliorant to social challenges like crime, is now widely criticized for racial bias and the risks the technology poses to privacy and civil liberties. These risks and more are clearly present in China’s current testing and expansion of facial recognition systems in Africa. The technology’s arrival in African countries like Zimbabwe is a mark of China’s growing geopolitical footprint and Chinese corporate expansion.
Facial recognition is a digitally automated process of comparing images of human faces to determine whether they represent the same individual. This process is contingent on an algorithm that first detects a face and then is able to rotate, scale, and align the image so that every face the algorithm compares it with will be in the same position. The algorithm also aims to capture qualities like skin pigmentation and eye color. The algorithm then examines and compares faces found in a biometric dataset where it issues a numerical score reflecting the degree of similarity between the face detected and the ones found in the dataset.
Crucially, this probabilistic approach aims to identify likely matches.
These systems do not operate perfectly and are, in fact, plagued by inaccuracies and biases, resulting in false matches which can undermine civil liberties or failures to match correct identification which can lead to denial of access to services or functions. The substantial disparities in the accuracy of being able to identify dark-skinned people has inspired much research and urgent attention from commercial companies. Recent studies show that algorithms trained with biased data have resulted in algorithmic discrimination. For instance, Buolamwini and Gebru have produced extensive work demonstrating bias present in automated facial analysis algorithms and datasets in regard to race and gender. Purportedly in an attempt to improve accuracy in these areas, companies like CloudWalk, a Guangzhou-based start-up, have entered developing markets like Zimbabwe in part to improve their means of facial recognition. By gaining access to a black population, their algorithm will supposedly be better trained at identifying darker-skinned people.
More to the point, computer vision systems with better performance in identifying dark-skinned people give Chinese companies a comparative advantage over Western competition.
The Zimbabwean government, working with CloudWalk, aims to establish a mass facial recognition program. This initiative was supplemented by a grant from the Guangzhou municipality given to Cloudwalk. The purpose of this initiative is to supposedly improve administrative and security capacity. The Zimbabwean state has insisted that these technologies would empower the state to fight crime and advance the state’s law enforcement ambitions. Yet digital rights advocates have expressed trepidations over the country’s poor human rights record and the unwarranted surveillance and collection of citizens’ biometric data. Examining how these improvements in phenotypic and demographic accuracy of facial recognition could be used or abused requires urgent…
Many Chinese tech companies continue to export their facial recognition technologies into Africa markets while supporting domestic surveillance practices that include Uyghur and ethnic minority detection. Facial recognition technology, once framed as a potential ameliorant to social challenges like crime, is now widely criticized for racial bias and the risks the technology poses to privacy and civil liberties. These risks and more are clearly present in China’s current testing and expansion of facial recognition systems in Africa. The technology’s arrival in African countries like Zimbabwe is a mark of China’s growing geopolitical footprint and Chinese corporate expansion.
Read more here.
John Davisson, director of litigation and senior counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, called the issue “a regulatory failure, pure and simple.” But he said he’s encouraged by the Federal Trade Commission recently warning edtech vendors about their obligations to protect children’s privacy.
Read the full article here.
The blood that runs through our nation’s veins is carried by the men and women who get behind the wheels of semis each morning.
On little sleep, they take on the essential yet monotonous task of delivering nearly every single thing you consume or require into your city or town.
According to Census.gov, 71 percent of all freight arrived by tractor-trailer last year.
Driving trucks for a living has been plagued by complaints about low wages, poor work life balance, and massive turnover. To articulate the crisis, that some even call a myth, we are around 80,000 truckers short of what is needed.
Add to this the skyrocketing price of diesel and we could see even more truck drivers bow out because they just won’t make the money, they need to justify giving much of their life over to their work.
Trucker shortage, fuel shortage, energy shortage, what does all of this mean for us preppers? This is the world we are inheriting.
If rapid action is not taken, then this holiday season is going to be a nightmare. Let’s look at how the truck driver crisis could affect preppers.
Survival food is a key element of any prepper’s food storage plans.
That freeze dried food has to be brought in as fresh ingredients.
Those ingredients are brought in by truck drivers. Then the food is freeze dried and packed up.
After that it leaves inside another truck. None of this is possible if we are dealing with a truck driver crisis.
The other thing that will affect your survival food is the fact that a truck driver crisis also means that deliveries of regular food to supermarkets could be staggered or missed altogether.
That means the average person will see less on the shelves. This could nudge them in the direction of buying their own survival food.
As preppers we often say we want everyone to be prepared but the survival food companies are not prepared for an influx of customers like that. They will run out of product and that might be product you need.
Not everyone is prepared for a crisis.
This means they don’t have extra supplies or enough food to wait out the crisis.
If this is the situation, then you are going to experience lots of people who are slowly sinking into desperation.
Some will get resourceful and figure out where or how to get food. Others will not and they will be looking for people to help them.
What is your plan when neighbors come knocking? If your neighbors know you are a prepper or even if they see your garden, they are going to expect some help if there…
In a letter to Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Senators Ron Wyden, Ed Markey, Alex Padilla, and Cory Booker urged Chair Lina Khan to “investigate evidence of deceptive statements made by ID.me — a provider of identity verification services widely used by federal and state government agencies — about its use of facial recognition.” The Senators argued that ID.me’s repeated false claims about the use of one-to-many facial recognition technology constitute a deceptive practice that misled consumers about the safety of their biometric information and convinced government officials to use ID.me instead of competing products.
One-to-many facial recognition software is used to identify a photo of an unknown person and requires a database of face prints to compare the unknown image to. One-to-one face verification does not require a database of face prints. Although both forms of facial recognition technology are problematic, the use of one-to-many presents greater risks to privacy and civil liberties. ID.me previously claimed to only use one-to-one face verification technology before it was revealed that they used one-to-many also.
Recently, an EPIC-led coalition of privacy and civil liberties groups urged federal and state agencies to end the use of ID.me and other face verification services. IRS dropped its plan to use ID.me after criticism from members of Congress, EPIC, and many others. The company came under fire for forcing individuals to submit to intrusive facial recognition identity verification, subjecting people to long wait times for verification, and misleading the public. Individuals can join organizations pushing back against the use of face verification by signing this petition to Dump ID.me.
The following Dirty Rice recipe is from SurvivalBlog reader “Monkeyman”. He notes that he often makes this doubled recipe.
Some family members add salt to their own servings, to taste.
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Do you have a favorite recipe that would be of interest to SurvivalBlog readers? In this weekly recipe column, we place emphasis on recipes that use long term storage foods, recipes for wild game, dutch oven and slow cooker recipes, and any that use home garden produce. If you have any favorite recipes, then please send them via e-mail. Thanks!
The Federal Trade Commission today unanimously approved a policy statement that prioritizes enforcement of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) against education technology providers and warns companies not to make surveillance a condition of accessing educational tools. The use of edtech expanded dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Children should not have to needlessly hand over their data and forfeit their privacy in order to do their schoolwork or participate in remote learning, especially given the wide and increasing adoption of ed tech tools,” the statement reads. “Going forward, the Commission will closely scrutinize the providers of these services and will not hesitate to act where providers fail to meet their legal obligations with respect to children’s privacy.”
EPIC Law Fellow Sara Geoghegan delivered comments commending the FTC’s new policy and encouraging the Commission to use all of its authorities to protect children’s and students’ privacy, including promulgating a data minimization rule. The comments highlighted EPIC’s complaint against online test proctoring firms, which laid out how the pandemic exacerbated inequalities among students and how proctoring firms’ use of opaque, intrusive, and unreliable automated decision-making harms test-takers.
EPIC has long advocated for students’ and children’s privacy protections and regularly calls on the FTC to curb data abuses.
