Monthly Archives: July 2015

Is the USA becoming a POLICE STATE?

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I remember the times when people around the world used to admire how American will respect and trust their Police. when I was a kid, growing up in Mexico City and traveling around the country and Central America, my Father will always remind us to be careful specially with the Police and to never approach them unless there was an adult with me. Police in many countries around the world is perceived as “Pirates with the King’s license”… For many years

We used to fight against ANY State where police could detain you for any reason, that will hit you and beat you for just watching them the wrong way.

There was this dream among many around the Globe that now they all became corrupt, the typical first step for any “Police State” that we talk and hated so much about Communism. Our US scholars used to call the regimes of URSS, China, Cuba, Yugoslavia, etc. the “POLICE STATES”.

USA history of intervention to bring down so many governments because they have NO respect for the locals and the heads of those States have decided that they were THE LAW. In must cases POLICE or ARMY was not worried about the safety of society but they were defending a condition that allows them to become above the LAW.

Some will say that this POLICE or ARMIES acquired a life of their own imposing their own laws and became a rogue body inside those countries.

We seem to be heading the same way.

Once again, our best and finest NYPD – the way Giuliani, Bloomberg, Bush, etc. called the best int eh country- have attacked again. Like a POLICE MOB, they move and beat the hell out of a single person. How are we supposed to trust the efficiency and training of our Police if they can not deal with ONE single person ? This finest POLICE men and women – video is clear both participate equally – are the same that are not able to find those in motorcycles ( some of them police on their free day) attacking and scaring a little girl when they hit his father and his mother. Of course that will be too much to ask, they are not going after their own. That is exactly the definition of the MOB or a POLICE STATE.

Ironic, as these “brave” men and women were piled on top of one man, pummeling him into the ground, the brave and finest NYPD look nervous and concerned about being surrounded and outnumbered by an angry (but non-violent) crowd.

The video is very clear, when our Police have to always beat people, outnumber them, we should all be concerned.  When our children look at this, what is going to be their reaction when a member of the Police Department in an y City in the US , ask them to stop ? If it was me I will be running…

I remember how many bystanders were beaten by the NYPD during Mr. Bloomberg Dictatorship ( yes, he was that at the helm of NYC, he modified the local laws so he can reelect himself an extra period, just like the same people the US fights around the world, Chavez or Maduro in Venezuela, La Junta in Argentina, Pinochet in Chile, Mao in China, Stalin and Lenin in the USSR) just because they were in the wrong place, during the Occupy Wall Street movement?   The Police didn’t came as Heroes except for the Bankers and the Wall Street Tycoons – useless leaders at running their own companies that the Government had to intervene and save them – that sounds to me like so much government intervention, but of course our friends at Fox News won’t see it that way.  Government, too much of it, is ok as long as it defend the CAPITAL, not the SOCIETY.

I was reminded by so many people that in the US you can NOT demonstrate freely, you need a permit, but we think that the Chinese Government is wrong because one guy started a demonstration in front of the Tanks in Tiananmen or because a large number of people in HongKong decided to demonstrate and were taken out of a Park – sounds familiar Mr. Bloomberg?- or we decide to bomb a whole country because the local government decides to “control popular demonstrations”… of course as long as it happens in other places is wrong but we will NOT accept people demonstrating against ANYTHING popular in the US without beaten them and making sure they are hospitalized or even dead by choking.

According to the WashingPost 559 people shot dead by police this year, that is much more than crazy people going into theaters or schools or public places armed and shooting randomly.

We are in the brink of a revolution : REMEMBER THAT THE WOLF LIVES UNTIL WE SAY BASTA!!

Facebook vs Google : Who controls the DATA generated by the Internet of Things (IoT)

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Beacons are capable of transmitting and activate functions on your smart phone…. creating DATA

Beacons are capable of transmitting and activate functions on your smart phone…. creating DATA

A race between @Facebook & @Google is happening without too many noticing.  The Internet of Things ( IoT ) needs tone able to communicate among them and with devices that actually control their functions or use their services for some linear activity ( from opening a door, control temperature, assigning you a table at a restaurant, pointing you to where to find products displayed in your shopping list, instant coupons, etc.) that interacts with smarter devices, some mobile and some other at a distance. These devices also “take info from humans” as they walk and their smart phones are connected to the WEB using so many applications that we all leave open all the time.   Think if you enter a restaurant or a store, and your phone has the Facebook app open or the Google+ or even just Gmail or Gtalk open, the beacon can activate it, letting know your app that you just enter this area.  That information is delivered through your PHONE, not through the beacon (remember i is for now a single way communication) to whoever control the application ( Facebook or Google in this specific case I am talking about).  Then the app creates a notification into your phone and ask you ” do you want to become a FAN of this XYZ Restaurant, click here” or “add Restaurant XYZ to your Google+ Circles?”

Well while you walk, your apps start collecting data from all those beacons and that info related to your Journey is conveyed to the app owners. The Wireless Registry ( TWR) is in the process of launching a large initiative so all those beacons are forced to have an ID and we can control the use of that DATA.  In the meantime Facebook and Google already started controlling the access.

So FB started a program to flood retailers, service providers, any place where humans tend to congregate with these BEACONS “Facebook Bluetooth® beacons are devices that businesses receive from Facebook. These beacons use Bluetooth® technology to send a signal to the Facebook app on your phone…”

So Google launched “set out to build a new class of beacons that addresses real-life use-cases, cross-platform support, and security.” So just like they did with Droid OS, they created an open format for BLE beacons that anyone can use: Eddystone. This programming platform has some very amazing capabilities: supports versioning so you can start small in functionality and suddenly grow as much as you want and it’s cross-platform, capable of supporting Android, iOS or any platform that supports BLE beacons. And it’s available on GitHub under the open-source Apache v2.0 license,

Of course the Facebook and Google solutions that are FREE come with caveats : each one of them control who has access to the DATA collection format and function. This is the main reason why we need a 3rd. party body that controls the famous ID’s of each IoT device, the beacons and the wireless devices.

Remember that a beacon is meant to be discoverable by any nearby Bluetooth Smart device. What makes it possible for you to stop or give access to the signal is via its identifier. Google has built a feature called Ephemeral Identifiers (EIDs), which change frequently, and allow only authorized clients to decode them. EIDs will enable you to securely do things like find your luggage once you get off the plane or find your lost keys. Google has promised to publish the technical specs of this design soon.

For some people these events are finally building a map of what is the next generation of deployments over the WEB, the so called “micro-web”, that of the IoT talking among themselves, and exchanging data that is supposed to enhance our quality of life. Until somebody starts using it for the wrong purposes….

In the meantime, watching how Facebook is trying to dominate the space by giving away the Hardware and making sure they control the features in those devices (and maybe lease in the future for 3rd. party applications?); and then waiting to see what my friend Jeff Jarvis describe very well in his book “What would google do?”, where they try to set the sandbox for everybody to play, they want to be perceived as the good guys here, and in the future they will just crush anything that is NOT inside their sandbox.

(some of this material came from Google and Facebook sites).