She was the brainy assistant to a soldier named John, keeping track of objectives, maps, where hostiles were, etc., keeping John on task and updating him as situations developed. Sometimes she’d hop inside a computer, run around, hack into things, maybe drop a virus or grab some data for a special operations division of the Office of Naval Intelligence, part of the United Nations Space Command.
This woman would seriously get around! But. . . not how anyone unfamiliar with my hints will assume. You see, she was the almost-perfect non-human! She was a smart-AI as they called it. AI that was self-aware. She was very good at what she did, and what she did was surreptitiously spy on unsuspecting victims. She was not your friend. She would eventually turn on John!
The game this description is based on, is none other than Halo, a game created by Bungee and published by Microsoft years ago, with multiple updates and versions. However, although Bungee left Microsoft for greener pasture, Microsoft would carry on the franchise by creating “343 Industries” to continue publishing Halo for X-box, and their attachment to our cyberwarfare heroine continued. So much so. . .
She reappeared in Windows 10 OS, as YOUR personal assistant now! Clippy, that annoying little cartoon in Microsoft Office, although mercifully done away with in Office, was now replaced by Cortana across the entire operating system!
Microsoft made a big deal about the Cortana personal assistant when Win10 first came out, showcasing how she could help you be more efficient with your daily computerized tasks. That was 2015.
Fast forward to 2022, and we have Microsoft up to it’s neck in as many tech and bio-tech pies as it can get it’s hands on! From vaccine research in the mid 2000’s, to embedded chips back as far as 2004 if not earlier, and in 2022, championing digital ID’s across the globe and “vaxx” passports.
I grew wary of Microsoft when I heard about the embedded chip research back in 2004 with their collaboration with Digital Angel at the time. That wariness would grow with passing years, and not always with a thumb to put on the reason.
In an article on data-scanning on Lifesite News, about a company called PredictWise supposedly founded in 2017, the author of the article would share that PredictWise was founded by two people, a former FB employee, and David Rothschild, an economist with Microsoft Research. Rothschild!!! The history of this family in the realms of money, governmental influence, international dealings, and secret club memberships is one for the serial novel stories, but they have been an influential clan on the world stage for well over 200 years. If I wasn’t wary of Microsoft before, I’m even moreso now.
We have a software company creating a fictional smart-AI, then naming a real-world operating system feature after the same character. Back in 2015, various computer technicians were discovering just how frequently Windows 10 was “calling home” so-to-speak, and expressing varying degrees of shock and dismay at the data they recorded the operating system sending to MS servers. They began looking for ways to turn off this flow of data, only to discover that as thorough as one could be in turning off every available communication point they could uncover, they couldn’t completely stop the data flow to MS servers. They learned that if you said no to every available option during custom setup, that you could turn off up to 75% of the data flow. Not using a Microsoft account and using a local account only would further reduce what got sent back to MS servers, but the flow could not be fully stopped.
At the time, no one I came across in the tech space would make the correlation that my daughter would make. Although she never played the Halo game, she heard about it from others she played different games with, and in news reels those games would put out about the gaming industry. When she learned that Clippy had been replaced by Cortana, she clopped herself in the forehead demanding to know”
“WHY??!!” Why would anyone want a spec-ops smart AI character as their vaunted and lauded personal assistant?!
Very good question!
- Information available on the Internet says that Microsoft’s first version of Halo created without Bungee in the mix, would appear on the X-box in 2012.
- According to LinkedIn, 2012 was when David Rothschild would come to work for Microsoft and apparently he still works for Microsoft Research as an economist. His LinkedIn profile also lists PredictWise from 2010 to present as well, and that he previously worked for Yahoo Research from 2011 to 2012. Halo had been appearing on the X-box since 2001. Cortana has been a regular cyber character since 2001 as well. So fictionally-speaking, the idea of espionage – digital spying and info gathering, packaged into the convenience of a personal assistant, has been around 22 years now.
- Bring an economist into the mix who also just happens to found and work for a realworld surreptitious data mining company in 2012, and hardly 3 years later, we have a new real-world personal assistant on the scene with the same name as a fictional smart-AI who turns on her “human” partner. Just like in the games, she gathers info, keeps track of day planners and todo items and runs searches, while in the background, the system she is on is very busy reporting back to Microsoft servers!!!
10 years after founding PredictWise, 7 years after joining Microsoft (and remember, doing both businesses to this day as of the time of this blog article), PredictWise is given this less than savoury description of it’s activities!
“A voter analytics firm harvested data from millions of Americans’ cellphones during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdowns and used the data to assign phone users a “COVID-19 decree violation” score and a “COVID-19 concern” score, according to a whitepaper released by PredictWise, the firm that harvested the data.
The data, derived from “nearly 2 billion GPS pings” stemming from “ground truth, real-time, ultra-granular location patterns,” according to PredictWise, was then used to target election-related messages to voters during the 2020 election season.”
Kind of sounds similar to the Cambridge Analytica scandal that broke out with Facebook, where CA was gathering info on up to 87 million Facebook users starting around 2013, and then using the accumulated data in the 2016 election season.
Tobias Konitzer, PhD, listed as a co-founder of PredictWise, although not joining the company till 2017, was working for Facebook as a Research Consultant from 2017 to 2018. He would eventually leave PredictWise and found Ocurate in 2021.
So we have this unlikely trio:
- Cortana, a smart-AI game character-turned real-world digital assistant, game debut: 2001, showing up on X-Box without Bungee at the helm in 2012 for Halo 4.
- David Rothschild who has worked for Microsoft Research (2012 – present) while simultaneously running PredictWise (2010 to present).
- Tobias Konitzer, PhD who worked for Facebook Research for a year in 2017, followed by PredictWise for the next 4 years ending in 2021.
Who knew that Cortana’s data-gathering, surreptitious spy capabilities, and manipulative methods of handling the results of those efforts, would now be done in realtime, enabled by humans bent on bringing such capabilities to life, affecting real-world human decisions regarding votes for government oversight, behaviour around the COVID-19/vaxx narrative, and taking advantage of user-indentured cellphone use!
By the way, which company listed above isn’t just interested in national government oversight, but has fingers in global governmental efforts as well? I’ll give you a hint: their founder thinks vaccines are the path of the future!
Basically, what we have here, is a company that boldly and blatantly told everyone what they were going to do, literally using entertainment and attachment to fictional characters to hook everyone in the nose and lead them along. If you do a search for Cortana and view the wiki page for her, even when she turns on her “human” (I put that in quotes as he’s a super-human clone), long-time fans of the game continued to love her while new players scratched their heads trying to make sense of her storyline. When asked, game developers supposedly said that such a conundrum had to be tackled strictly by the player and that long-time players claimed it gave the character “more depth”!
Talk about anti-heroes!
Not just anti-heroes, but real world behaviour being blatantly announced to the public in gamer terms, and because so much of the public doesn’t play the game, and because so much of the Halo gaming community loves the character, the realization that Microsoft was going to start behaving like the game character flew completely under the radar, and to my knowledge, not only isn’t being brought to task over this, but is actively working toward a global digital ID system (link added 4-03-2024) that would force greater ease of data mining against everyday citizens of countries around the world!
The issue of election integrity in the US and elsewhere is what brought to light Cambridge Analytica, and now PredictWise. Connections to Microsoft and Facebook simply add the filling between the layers. COVID-19 was the perfect cover for many things as it turns out, over the past 3 years, with these companies pushing an agenda on their users who somehow stayed blind long enough for major progress to be made before their actions were brought to light.
Is there anything you can do to slow down their data mining forays, or inhibit or make their efforts more difficult? The answers will require you to get a little uncomfortable, get a little adventurous, perhaps teach yourself something new, and get used to fewer conveniences.
1) Leave as many Big Tech platforms as you can. Replacements exist for FB, Twitter (Gab/Parler), Youtube (Bitchute, Rumble, newtube, GabTV, etc), and many other alternative platforms have sprung up as well.
2) Wean yourself off your cellphone, particularly your smartphone. Get used to only using it for talk and text and doing everything else on the laptop or desktop computer. Leave your cellphone at home when you go out. Apparently the WEF knows this could become a vector for noncompliance, so they are looking into microchipped clothing.
3) Stop using as many Google and Microsoft programs and application and services as possible. Replace Google Docs with Zoho Docs. Replace OneDrive with any of a myriad of other online storage services. Replace outlook, hotmail, and gmail with zoho mail, proton mail, or get your own email hosting account with your own domain at a hosting company. Stop backing up your photos to google’s servers. Get your own external drive to back up to instead. Replace Google Calendar with zoho calendar or any of a myriad of other options out there. There are many good, free alternatives to what you got used to using from these companies.
4) Replace your Windows operating system with Linux. There are many how-to’s online, and technicians out there who could do it for you if you would rather pay someone. As a PC tech myself since 1999, I have put linux on two of the machines in my household this year. There are many programs for Linux now, that do what you’re used to doing in Windows. Some do it a bit differently, but it’s worth getting off the data train just that much further if you are willing to teach yourself the occasional new way to do an old task.
As one independent reporter put it,
Global tyranny is coming in on the backs of
Convenience, Compliance, and Complacency!
If you don’t want to take part in the predicted global famine, start growing your own food or learning to forage in the wild.
If you don’t want to be tracked, you need to start readjusting to life before cellphones got smart, and put the above four points into action in some fashion.
If you don’t want your clothing or your own body tracking you, start learning to use a sewing machine or learn to hand sew so that you can provide your household’s clothing that way. Don’t buy from stores or brands that boast of chip-based resellability of their clothing.
If you want to stay mechanically mobile in the future, don’t buy EV’s and if possible, stock up on the fuel your vehicle uses, taking measures to ensure the fuel stays viable for up to 5 years. Products out there exist that will do this.
The uncanny thing about all this, is the crowing and dancing the tech world is doing as they create AI’s that can write fiction and paint pictures! They are playing with deep fake video creation and trying to make robots look more human. But never forget: Cortana is NOT your friend! (or siri or alexa or your smart TV)
Lastly, don’t “check out” when watching or engaging with entertainment anymore! I have LONG told people that entertainment is the testing ground for realworld behaviour later on, and this data mining situation is just another example! Be critical about what you allow into your heart and mind when it comes to entertainment, and when realworld personages or companies use names, terms, or behaviours from your favourite source of entertainment, ask WHY! BE suspicious! Don’t jump on their bandwagon because they are using your favourite character, fictional tech, or drink at Disney World!
Keep your head on swivel.
