you know what's equally hilarious/scary about this pokemon go thing? the company behind it has worked for google+government/ish types b4 (i think they might be THE company, if not one of the major players, who came up with (some of?) the software/code/engine that gave us google earth) so they have a history/background/pedigree with doing "official" stuff re: mapping and whatnot.... and now they've got this "game" that's "you know.... for kids!" (- the hudsucker proxy) where they're arbitrarily going to be able to send (up to hordes of) to wherever they want, and if i'm not mistaken you actually "catch" the pokemon by using your camera/function, and when you do so it does some sort of on-the-fly 3D mapping of what it can see through the lens.
so let's say you wanted to REALLY COVERTLY surveil some suspect/business/operation/person/people/entity/whatever. you wanted to put surveillance on something. well now alls you gotta do is pop up some "pokecenter" right by where you want ppl to go, and then kids/casuals of all ages will show up playing pokemon go and using their cameras to search for that dang pokemon, all the while sending back video/GPS location back to the mothership. obviously they're not gonna send a bunch of 8 year olds(dude, eight year olds...) to constantly pop over right outside of scarface's compound or anything, but now they're gonna be able to use these ARGs (Alternate/Reality Games) to have unwitting people brandish their computerphones in a constant video-transmitting state in any areas that "they" decide.
so yeah, maybe some kind of local "smooth operator" drug dealer/operation does a good job of minding its P's and Q's and spotting possible attempts to keep an eye on them..... but now what if you say there's a pokecenter 1-2 houses/buildings down from one of their locations and therefore you've got kids/autists of all types constantly going there all morning/day/night living up to the mantra of "gotta catch em all!" and since the app intrinsically pumps back video from everyone playing it, man, you'll be able to send all kinds of useful idiots out that way to canvas the area with de-facto video surveilence whenever you want..... so if that drug-dealer/operation doesn't have enough paranoia to assume that ANYONE with a computerphone, even a 8 year old little girl, could be keeping an "eye" on them? lol man, who knew that the gub'mint/the-powers-that-be take that whole "gotta catch em all" mantra way more serious than all of us, eh?
TLDR = scary precedent for "gaming" and all kinds of exploitable uses for nefarious surveillance/police/dystopia-state intelligence-gathering.... and just think: if this ends up being some kind of popular (read: if it's at least "popular" enough to have the media kick into overdrive and just keep on endlessly prattling on about how popular and "HUGE!" it is for long enough to have people actually accept that it IS popular/huge, akin to jimmy fallon and the tonight show) then you know our cantankerous clone age is gonna provide like 20-200 different versions of this with all kinds of similar "gameplay" and "ulterior motives/uses"
THE BEST PART = not only is it a proper "Freemium" game (aka "free to play; pay to win") designed to get you hooked and then doling out microtransactions of real-world-$$$ for in-game-currency, but then if you read the EULA/fine-print you'll see that the company can and will compile/disseminate (read: sell) any and all data collected to "third parties" for the purposes of [essentially data-mining and then all the conspiratard "surveillance" stuff i babbled about b4] --- so yeah it's DOUBLY profitable as this company will rake in the dough from every conceivable angle for all the work that YOU aren't just technically doing for free.... but [url=
you're actually PAYING THEM TO DO! fuckin
man! Info on the company that makes Pokemon Go! wrote:
Niantic, Inc. is a software development company best known for the augmented reality mobile games Ingress and Pokémon GO. It was formed by Keyhole, Inc. founder John Hanke in 2010.
Keyhole, Inc., founded in 2001, was a pioneering software development company specializing in geospatial data visualization applications and was acquired by Google in 2004. Initially launched as a spin-off of Intrinsic Graphics, first round funding came from a Sony venture capital fund and others, additional capital came from an NVIDIA bundling deal, from the CIA's venture capital arm In-Q-Tel, with the majority of In-Q-Tel' funds coming from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and from angel investor Brian McClendon (who later came on as a board member and VP). Keyhole's marquee application suite, Earth Viewer, emerged as the highly successful Google Earth application in 2005; other aspects of core technology survive in Google Maps, Google Mobile and the Keyhole Markup Language.
The name "Keyhole" is also a homage to the KH reconnaissance satellites, the original eye-in-the-sky military reconnaissance system now some 50 years old.
John Hanke, CEO – previously worked in "foreign affairs" in Washington DC, Myanmar & Indonesia.
ahh well, it's about that time of the post where most of you [good upstanding people] have skimmed down to in order to avoid reading all the drivel that's contained within my antiquated torture devices formerly known as "paragraphs" and i spose at this juncture we can all just kick back and =] as i confess that this post is simply "sini going tinfoil again" because when you ostensibly lack a proper middle-class-superburban life like i do, that's where you tend to have all this time to sit around and think up nightmare scenarios about some stupid "Pokemon Go!" game (that will likely be a fad that dies out in the next 3-6 months) is a frightening step towards total digiquitous lockdown towards/via martial-law.
but HEY NOW, that's where my good-upstanding C/S/FMB strawmen are busy scoffing at such incredulous nonsense and thinking about what positions they're gonna use when whey lay the pipe in the wifey later on tonight! vodka+redbulls up >> conspiratards down!
_________________
Curious Hair wrote:
Les Grobstein's huge hog is proof that God has a sense of humor, isn't it?