In the first half, online privacy advocate Mark Weinstein offered commentary on technology and privacy issues. What many people don't realize is that when they agree to the terms of usage of certain apps on their smart phones, they're often giving them permission to data mine their information, including location and social media posts, he pointed out. Google's Gmail recently made security changes adding more encryption, yet from their server side, Google can still scan your emails, even if they've made it more difficult for the NSA to do so, he noted.
According to a Princeton study, Facebook may lose 80% of their members by 2017, as younger users find other social networks, Weinstein reported, adding that Facebook subsequently spent millions to try and discredit the study. To help stay relevant, Facebook has spent billions acquiring properties such as the messaging app WhatsApp. A competing app, Snapchat (whose owner was said to turn down a $3 billion buyout bid from Facebook), offers the ability to send private messages, photos, and videos that quickly disappear off the recipient's device. Yet, Weinstein uncovered that really isn't the case, and that Snapchat has misrepresented its core service (more in his HuffPo blog posting). He also offered a prediction-- in the next several years, there will be a backlash against storing one's data in the cloud, and people will cycle back to saving their personal material on their desktop computers or hard drives out of privacy concerns.
----------------------------------------
In the latter half, retired Air Force Lt. Col Chris McCleary talked about how he became interested in precognitive dreams, and dream forecasting using "DreamBot" linguistic technology. An adaptation of Nostracodeus' web searching algorithms, similarly used in George Ure's WebBot predictive program, the DreamBot is based on the idea that language about dreams found on the web can precede or predict events, or suggest trends. The culled data is like a weather map of the collective unconscious, he explained.
Among the predictions based on the DreamBot and other dream sources, is that the Florida coastline is going to get decimated, and the Cumbre Vieja volcano may erupt on the Canary Islands, he revealed. He also announced the global Project August, with participants setting an intention to dream about the major, newsworthy events that will happen in the month of August 2014, and record the results in their database in advance of that time.
News segment guests: James Sanders, Howard Bloom, Kerri Kasem