WINDOWS 10 Spying on Your Personal Data with Default Settings Enabled

""Americans are still waiting for a resolution to the controversy that erupted when it was discovered that the National Security Agency was spying on everyone’s telephones – lawsuits still are pending and Congress is working on making changes to the law.

Now they’re learning that while the NSA was collecting telephone data, the newest version of the ubiquitous Windows software, version 10, is watching everything that’s on their computer.

“From the moment an account is created, Microsoft begins watching. The company saves customers’ basic information – name, contact details, passwords, demographic data and credit card specifics,” explains a new report from the online Newsweek.

“But it also digs a bit deeper,” the report says.

“Other information Microsoft saves includes Bing search queries and conversations with the new digital personal assistant Cortana; contents of private communications such as email; websites and apps visited (including features accessed and length of time used); and contents of private folders,” the warning explains.

“Furthermore, ‘your typed and handwritten words’ are collected.’”

All of the warnings come from the company’s software privacy statement, which includes the statement that Microsoft collects information “to provide you a personalized user dictionary, help you type and write on your device with better character recognition, and provide you with text suggestions as you type or write.”

Alec Meer at the RockPaperShotgun blog warned it’s not something that should be ignored.

What’s America coming to? Find out in “Police State U.S.A.’

“Unless you pay close attention to the fluffy options offered when you first install Microsoft’s new operating system, it’s going to quietly track your behavior and use it to fire targeted ads at you, as well as keeping tabs on your location history, data from messages, calendars, contacts and God knows what else.”

The blog noted that “some of this stuff” can be turned off, but the key point is that people “aren’t so hot” about paying for tools to access the Web and such, so “the money comes from harvesting data and flogging it to advertisers and other organizations who want to know exactly what we’re all up to online.”

He continued, “If you ever wondered why they’ve made the Windows 10 upgrade free to Win 7 & 8 users, here’s one possible answer. Windows 10 has all sorts of user tracking baked right in.”

The Daily Mail reported another complication with the software.

The update to Windows 10, the report said, “automatically made [a man's] porn collection into a slideshow and used it as a screensaver. And to make matters worse, the malfunction was discovered by his wife, who was greeted by the explicit images first thing in the morning.”

The report said a user posted the story online so others would not repeat the mistake, which reportedly happened when the images were saved into the “My Pictures” folder. It is from that folder the software draws data to build slideshows, the report said.

“I have no idea how to shut that feature off and that computer is staying shut down until I do,” the man wrote, according to the Mail. “Free Windows and a free trip to the doghouse. Thanks Microsoft!”

Newsweek reported an estimated 14 million machines already are running Windows 10.

“The company says it uses the data collected for three purposes: to provide and improve its services; to send customers personalized promotions; and to display targeted advertising, which sometimes requires the information be shared with third parties.”

The report said Microsoft’s practices actually are similar to Google’s, which analyzes the content of users’ emails to provide a “more personalized product.”

Online privacy group European Digital Rights told the Times that the MS policy not only was bad news for privacy.""

“Your free speech rights can also be 

violated on an ad hoc basis,” the group said:

http://www.wnd.com/2015/08/windows-10-spies-on-emails-images-credit-cards-more/

What Happens to Your Body When You Drink a Can of Cola?: A 60 Minute Soda Bomb in Your Stomach

""Cleaning a toilet is cheap and easy with a can of Coca-Cola. After the Coke sits in the toilet for an hour, the carbonic and phosphoric acid gets the job done, leaving behind a scum-free toilet bowl!

When that same can of Coke is poured into the mouth and down the esophagus of a human being, a much more complex chain of events occurs. After burning its way down the throat and leaving behind a film of caramel coloring on the teeth, the Coca-Cola begins its nutritional destruction on the inside of the body.

In 60 minutes, a can of Coke takes the body on a roller coaster ride, taxing the liver, spiking the blood sugar, accelerating the production of bad fat and robbing the body of beneficial nutrients.

With 1.6 billion servings of Coke sold worldwide every day, it's no wonder why heart disease, malnutrition, dehydration, diabetes and obesity are slowly killing people.

Doctors often advise obese patients to stop eating fats, but many fats are good for the heart and the brain, like Omega-3 fatty acids. To top it off, simply avoiding fats disregards one of the most silent perpetrators of weight gain and disease – high fructose corn syrup.

Instead of drinking poisonous soda, drink a hydrating glass of WATER.

Soda robs the body of nutrients and burdens the liver

High fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is found in all sorts of processed foods, condiments and sweet drinks. It's even in the "low fat" alternative foods that people are conned into buying for losing weight.

The thing is this: HFCS is NOT like glucose. Glucose is recognized by the body, metabolized by the cells, and more readily used for energy, whereas HFCS breaks down into glucose and fructose, making it harder for the body to use.

The fructose that is broken down is nothing like the fructose in fruits, either. Fruits naturally have fiber to prevent the body from absorbing too much of the fructose. HFCS does not contain fiber. It floods the body with no accountability or balance, taxing the liver. HFCS is often consumed with other artificial sweetening agents that are only there to enhance a product's flavor. This flood of toxins is hard on the blood, skin and detoxifying organs.

HFCS is ultimately metabolized by the liver in similar fashion to ethanol found in an alcoholic drink. As fructose floods the liver, the liver becomes confused and ends up producing a bunch of bad fats. As the body is "intoxicated" by HFCS, the brain never receives the signal that it is full either. This may lead to a person to eating and drinking more, adding to weight gain woes.

Read other interesting articles on both toxic sweeteners like aspartame and natural sweeteners like coconut sugar at sweeteners.news

60 minutes of abuse

In the first 10 minutes of drinking a Coke, 10 teaspoons of sugar enter the body. That's 100 percent of a person's recommended daily intake. A person can only tolerate the extreme sweetness because the teeth-rotting phosphoric acid offsets the sweetness.

After 20 minutes has gone by, the blood sugar spikes, causing a burst of insulin. As the fructose runs rampant and goes unabsorbed, the liver goes into overtime, drawing in the sugar molecules and turning them into bad fats.

By the time 40 minutes hits, caffeine absorption maxes out. A person's blood pressure spikes and their pupils dilate. This spurs the liver to dump more sugar into the bloodstream. Consequentially, the brain's adenosine receptors are blocked, making the person feel awake.

Five minutes later, dopamine production goes up in the brain, giving the person feelings of pleasure that addict them into wanting more.

After an hour, the phosphoric acid that has made its way through the system has pulled out vital nutrients from the body. Calcium, magnesium and zinc bind with phosphoric acid in the lower intestine.

Calcium, magnesium, zinc, electrolytes and water are then urinated out the body and wasted. The Coke has not only addicted the brain to its curse but it has also caused the formation of bad fats, blood sugar spikes, blood pressure changes, dehydration and the loss of bone building nutrients!

As the hour climaxes, a person begins to have a sugar crash. Irritability and fatigue sets in. The bones are robbed of vital nutrients and the system is left dehydrated.""

It's 60 minutes of abuse and it 

happens with every can of soda:

http://www.naturalnews.com/050654_drinking_Coke_liquid_sugars_sweeteners.html

When You Don't Exist: What Happens to Your Sense Of Self?

Science journalist Anil Ananthaswamy thinks a lot about "self" — not necessarily himself, but the role the brain plays in our notions of self and existence.

In his new book, The Man Who Wasn't There, Ananthaswamy examines the ways people think of themselves and how those perceptions can be distorted by brain conditions, such as Alzheimer's disease, Cotard's syndrome and body integrity identity disorder, or BIID, a psychological condition in which a patient perceives that a body part is not his own.

Ananthaswamy tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross about a patient with BIID who became so convinced that a healthy leg wasn't his own that he eventually underwent an amputation of the limb.

"Within 12 hours, this patient that I saw, he was sitting up and there was no regret. He really seemed fine with having given up his leg," Ananthaswamy says.

Ultimately, Ananthaswamy says, our sense of self is a layered one, which pulls information from varying parts of the brain to create a sense of narrative self, bodily self and spiritual self: "What it comes down to is this sense we have of being someone or something to which things are happening. It's there when we wake up in the morning, it kind of disappears when we go to sleep, it reappears in our dreams, and it's also this sense we have of being an entity that spans time."

---

Interview Highlights

On how to define "self"

When you ask someone, "Who are you?" you're most likely to get a kind of narrative answer, "I am so-and-so, I'm a father, I'm son." They are going to tell you a kind of story they have in their heads about themselves, the story that they tell to themselves and to others, and in some sense that's what can be called the narrative self. ...

There are also other ways of thinking about the self. For instance, you and I right now are probably sitting on our chairs, and we have a sense of being a body that is in one place and we can feel sensations in our body. ...

We can think back to our earliest memories. We can imagine ourselves in the future, and whatever perceptions arise when we remember or when we imagine, whatever emotions arise, they again feel like they're happening to the same person. So all of these things put together, in some sense, can be called our sense of self.

On Cotard's syndrome, in which a person believes he or she is already dead

Cotard's syndrome was something that was first identified by a French doctor in the late 1800s. His name was Jules Cotard, and it's named after him. It's a constellation of symptoms ... and the most characteristic symptom is the situation where people say that they don't exist. This is a perception that they have, and you cannot rationalize, you cannot really give them evidence to the contrary and expect them to change their mind. It is a complete conviction that they have that they don't exist. ... It's very, very paradoxical. It poses a great philosophical challenge to people who are trying to understand what it means to say "I exist" or "I don't exist." It also makes you wonder about all the other things that we are certain about, like you and I probably are very certain that we exist, well, these people are just as certain that they don't. So it makes you question about perceptions that arise in the brain and somehow, in this case, the delusion is so complete and so convincing that you really cannot shake their conviction that they are dead.

On what brain imaging of a patient with Cotard'ssyndrome shows us

What seems to be happening is that there is a network in the brain that is responsible for internal awareness, awareness of our own body, awareness of our emotions, awareness of our self-related thoughts, and in Cotard's, it seems like that particular network is tamped down. In some sense, their own experience of their body, in all its vividness, in experience of their own emotions in all its vividness, that's compromised very severely. In some sense they're not feeling themselves vividly. It's as simple as that. But, then there's something else that's happening in the brain. It seems like parts of the brain that are responsible for rational thought are also damaged. First of all, what might be happening is a perception that arises in their brain saying that they are dead because they're not literally perceiving their own body and body states and emotions vividly and then that perception — irrational though it is — is not being shot down.

On body integrity identity disorder, which causes a person to believe that a body part is not his or her own

It really is a very disturbing condition in the sense that it's not something you would normally ever experience. ... If you look at your hand, there is no doubt in your mind that it is your hand. Now imagine you looked at your hand and it didn't feel like yours and it didn't feel like yours for 20, 30 years; it could be a very debilitating thing. It seems to be like that for people experiencing or suffering from BIID. They do take extreme measures. It's basically a mismatch between the internal perception they have of their own body and the physical body and what's intriguing and interesting in terms of the self is that what is most important for our sense of self, our bodily self, is the internal perception of it. You can look at your body and you can see your hand or leg that is fully functional, and yet if it doesn't feel like yours. The feeling is the much more important part of one's self, not the fact that you can see it and you can function with this leg.

On a patient with BIID 
who got his leg amputated

I talked to him a few times before the operation trying to find out what it was really that he was suffering from and he really felt like this leg, part of his leg, was not his, it was really something he didn't want. He would try a whole range of things to make it seem as if he didn't have it. He would fold his leg and pretend it wasn't there, he would push it to one side, it really seemed to ruin his life. I remember asking him once, "So what does it exactly feel like?" He says, "It feels like my soul doesn't extend into that part of my leg." ...

One way to kind of understand might be happening in BIID is actually to look at the converse problem. Most people by now will be really well aware of this phenomenon called phantom limbs [syndrome] where you actually have an amputation because of some unfortunate accident or infection and you lose an arm or a leg. Many people continue to feel that the limb still exists and some people even feel pain in that imaginary limb. What that's telling you is what you are perceiving as your limb is actually some representation of the limb in your brain, not the physical limb.

On how Alzheimer's disease 

affects the narrative self:

http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/07/28/426753409/a-sense-of-self-what-happens-when-your-brain-says-you-dont-exist

Transform Your Health, Just Eat Dirt

""While it may seem counterintuitive for someone who adheres to a clean lifestyle to ingest dirt on a daily basis, age-old cultures, as well as our current day scientific community, have found the practice to be one of the healthiest habits you can adopt. But it's not just any dirt -- specific types of clay prove to be most beneficial. Where to begin?

Dr. Edward F. Group III, founder of the Global Healing Center, recommends a high-quality zeolite or bentonite clay for increasing immunity, cleansing the colon, promoting healthy bacteria in the gut and detoxification of heavy metals. Additionally, research published in the Journal of Molecular Medicine discovered that finely ground zeolite clinoptilolite holds promise as an effective anti-cancer compound.

Why be worried about heavy metals?

Environmental heavy metals are an unfortunate reality in modern life. A byproduct of industry and energy production, we are saturated with these toxins. Found in our drinking water, food supply and the air we breathe, heavy metals are impossible to avoid. Below are four of the most prevalent.

Cadmium - An exceptionally toxic metal, cadmium is found in many soils and rocks as well as coal and mineral fertilizers. Cadmium is used in batteries, pigments, plastics and metal coatings. Long-term exposure can damage the kidneys, lungs and bones.

Mercury - Coal-burning power plants are the largest source of mercury emissions in the United States. Once in the soil and water, microorganisms convert the compound to methylmercury -- a bioaccumulating toxin that affects the nervous system, lungs, cardiovascular system and kidneys. Effects on the brain include memory problems, irritability, shyness, changes in vision or hearing and tremors.

Aluminum - Found in an array of personal products, from antiperspirants to cosmetics, as well as baking powders, foodstuffs, antacids, drinking water and pharmaceuticals, exposure to aluminum is difficult to dodge. This heavy metal is considered a neurotoxin and has been linked to the development of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.

Lead - Due to the burning of fossil fuels, along with mining and manufacturing, lead is a pervasive environmental toxin. Sources of exposure include water pipes in older homes, paint, contaminated soil, household dust, lead crystal, cosmetics, toys, drinking water and lead-glazed pottery. It's a suspected human carcinogen, and contact with high levels severely damages the brain and kidneys, ultimately causing death.""

Conclusions and Sources:

http://www.naturalnews.com/049676_bentonite_clay_zeolites_heavy_metal_detoxification.html

Alphabet Spy Agencies Got You Down and Blue? Try These 5 Things to Hide Your Email Activity

STEALTHY SEARCHING

Don't want a digital dossier of your personal interests to be stored and analyzed? Wean yourself from the most popular search engines — Google, Bing and Yahoo. All of them collect and dissect your queries to learn what kinds of products and services might appeal to you so they can sell advertising targeted to your interests. Just because that trove of data is meant to be used for commercial purposes doesn't mean snoopers such as the NSA couldn't vacuum up the information, too, to find out more about you. A small search engine called DuckDuckGo has been gaining more fans with its pledge to never collect personal information or track people entering queries on its site.

Just 10 percent of those participating in Pew's survey said they use a search engine that doesn't track their searching history.

___

SCRAMBLE YOUR EMAIL

Encryption programs such as Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP, can make your email appear indecipherable to anyone without the digital key to translate the gibberish. This can help prevent highly sensitive financial and business information from getting swept up by hackers, as well as a government dragnet. Yet only 2 percent of the people surveyed by Pew used PGP or other email encryption programs.

___

CLOAK YOUR BROWSER

A privacy tool called Blur, made by Abine, enables its users to surf the Web without their activities being tracked. It also masks passwords and credit card information entered on computers and mobile devices so they can't be lifted from the databases of the websites that collect them. Blur charges $39 annually for this level of protection. Privacy Badger from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, offers a free way to block tracking of browsing activity.

Only 5 percent of the Pew respondents used these kinds of tools.

___

CUT OUT THE INTERNET

It might sound old-school, but if you want to share something really sensitive, meet face to face. The Pew poll found 14 percent of respondents are choosing to speak in person more frequently rather than text, email or talk on the phone because of the Snowden revelations.

___

GET SMARTER

If you're looking to become more literate about the ins and outs of digital privacy, two of the most comprehensive guides can be found through the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Surveillance Self-Defense site, https://ssd.eff.org/en , and https://prism-break.org/en/ .

http://www.chicoer.com/business/20150316/dont-want-nsa-to-spy-on-your-email-5-things-you-can-do