Microsoft, the new Ingsoc, has joined with a number of media and tech firms to create a system that can trace your content around the internet, a concept that I predict will kill online privacy and individual anonymity and will eventually fundamentally transform the web.
Why would a tech company do this? I am a programmer and earlier in my career, I once dealt with a situation where a virus, not unlike the Melissa virus that was unleashed back in 1999, was written using Microsoft’s VBA programming language which stands for Visual Basic for Applications. It’s built into Microsoft’s Office products. Inside Office products is a fully functional version of Visual Basic for VBA that will allow you to write VBA programming code that will do things inside the documents you’re working on? Don’t believe me? Open up a Word document and then simultaneously hit the ALT/F11 keys and watch what happens. The Visual Basic for Applications IDE opens up. You may have already written VBA code without even knowing it. One of the functions of VBA inside the Office suite is when you create a macro to record tasks to be used later on, the macro creates programming code that runs your macros. If you create macros to automate something you can then go into VBA, look up the macro name you gave it, and voila, there’s programming code that makes up the macro you created. Pretty cool, eh? But I digress.
Now that you know what Microsoft has been capable of doing for decades, it’s time to look at what they have done now. Microsoft, along with the tech and media companies who signed up, has constructed a plan that could turn out to be the tech tyrant’s boldest, most shameless power grab ever.
Microsoft gave a press release that revealed a partnership with several other companies to form what they call the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA). Their mission is to develop a system where all content that enters the internet can be traced back to the original author.
They’re Trying to Shut Us Down
Over the last several months, I’ve lost count of how many times the powers-that-be have tried to shut us down. They’ve sent hackers at us, forcing us to take extreme measures on web security. They sent attorneys after us, but thankfully we’re not easily intimidated by baseless accusations or threats. They’ve even gone so far as to make physical threats. Those can actually be a bit worrisome but Remington has me covered.
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Thank you and God bless!
JD Rucker