In the past no government had the power to keep its
citizens under constant surveillance.
George Orwell: 1984
My wife and I have been gone
from home for a number of days. Today,
after a five day hiatus, I turned on my computer and within minutes my disk
drive started to whirl and I had a pop-up notice from Norton showed that a
download was in progress and was deemed safe.
I clicked the info tab for more information and found that GOOGLE was
downloading something named ‘widevinecdmadapter.dll’ into a folder with other
GOOGLE downloads that I didn't know existed.
Every other program asks for
permission to update or modify its existence on my computer; but GOOGLE does it
totally without my knowledge (if it weren't for my Norton virus program.)
This has happened before:
perhaps when we download Google Chrome on our machines the permission for
shadow downloads is in the fine print of the agreement that we never read but
all accept.
Just think of the information
that GOOGLE can collect on us: it can read our G-Mail, our Blogs, see our map
searches and know our travel plans, catalog our searches, identify our banks
and financial info, see our income tax submissions – and have programs running
on our cell phones and computers that we are not aware of. Why are we worried about the NSA: our info
is out there – much of it hosted by GOOGLE.
Conspiracy theory? No, just a fact. Government information gathering tied in
with all the major communication companies is, like global warming, a fact of
life. And, like global warming, it has
gone too far to be reversed. Our
information is out there.
This is the new world we live
in that has resulted from global technology.
We are in the big brother world and for the most part we remain unconcerned
and apathetic.
The similarities to 1984 are
startling. But fuck, I am too old to
worry about it: my major concern is how I am going to afford new tires for my
motorcycle.
The two I value most.
the Ol’Buzzard
