We all love the Google we know.  Using the world’s most popular (and powerful) search engine is  like having direct access to Stephen Hawking’s brain, times a million, to the tenth power. Google’s  tentacles reach around the globe providing news, entertainment and information at our fingertips with the stroke of a key. One could argue that Google has literally changed the world.

And it has, in ways you may not have even imagined. Perhaps it’s time to take a moment to learn about Google, which organizations were behind it from the start and why the Google you may not yet know, has Orwell rolling in his grave.

by Nafeez Ahmed, Medium.com:

INSURGE INTELLIGENCE, a new crowd-funded investigative journalism project, breaks the exclusive story of how the United States intelligence community funded, nurtured and incubated Google as part of a drive to dominate the world through control of information. Seed-funded by the NSA and CIA, Google was merely the first among a plethora of private sector start-ups co-opted by US intelligence to retain ‘information superiority.’

The origins of this ingenious strategy trace back to a secret Pentagon-sponsored group, that for the last two decades has functioned as a bridge between the US government and elites across the business, industry, finance, corporate, and media sectors. The group has allowed some of the most powerful special interests in corporate America to systematically circumvent democratic accountability and the rule of law to influence government policies, as well as public opinion in the US and around the world. The results have been catastrophic: NSA mass surveillance, a permanent state of global war, and a new initiative to transform the US military into Skynet.

Read More @ Medium.com

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Adobe’s Flash player has had more than its fair share of problems. Among them, performance issues for OSX users, endless security vulnerabilities requiring a multitude of patches, Apple refusing to implement Flash on the iPhone, and Google ceasing its support for Flash on Android. In short, the curtain has been slowly closing on the much maligned Flash in recent years. It looks like the coffin just received its final nail. The Guardian has the skinny.

by Alex Hern, The Guardian:

Flash is dead, long live Fl– actually, no, scratch that, Flash really is dead and it deserved to die. Flash is terrible.

The killer blows to Adobe’s multimedia browser plugin were delivered this week in a one-two punch. Firstly, users of Flash were left open to not one but two “zero-day” vulnerabilities in the same week, affecting users of Chrome, Internet Explorer and Firefox. Almost immediately, hackers were able to abuse these flaws to dump malware on Windows PCs, which led Mozilla to disable the plugin entirely until users had updated to a secure version.

Then on Tuesday, YouTube – the biggest provider of Flash video ever – announced that it would stop serving its videos using the plugin for anyone visiting the site in a modern browser.

Read More @ The Guardian.com

The post Flash is Dead, And You Tube Dealt The Killer Blow appeared first on Digital Bucket.