Failure to sign the Ottawa treaty (anti landmine) and the international criminal court agreements, execution of minors (and execution at all), assassination of opponents even if citizens (via drones), torture, war crimes, illegal invasions, use of phosphorus (probably comes under war crimes), continual killing of civilians in non declared wars, massive prison population, secret prisons, outsourcing torture, supporting some of the worst governments of earth etc. Who sees the US as a leader in human rights? No one I know.

I was all enthusiastic about G+ for about 5 minutes - until they wouldn't allow my wife to sign up without giving them her phone number, and proving that it was hers by accepting a call from them. Just who the fuck do they think they are??

There is no way I could suggest my friends and family sign up to such an intrusive service, so I quickly deleted my own account.

It's an absolutely stunning achievement to create a web-site that's even more offensively intrusive than Facebook. I hope Google are proud.

It's a crying shame. Normally that's an empty phrase, but it describes this.

I can't imagine reading this and not feeling tears well up.

No sense of what I would call humanity. From what perspective does this make the world a better place?

What am I missing about being human that this fits into that I don't understand?

Does Google believe that if they just push a little harder and finish the job, that somehow the people so alienated will be won over?

Or is the pursuit of profit far more important than the perception of the brand overall?

Right now, and for the last year, the brand is being severely tarnished in all of the networks I have, tech and real-life. I don't see them winning on any front. A Pyrrhic victory.

I've worked for quite some time in the digital display industry, at a company which has a very feature rich, Mac OS X based digital signage solution [1] with high profile customers such as Mercedes-Benz, or Disney. Since the company is small, it is easy to be part of all steps of the process, including marketing and sales. I learned a lot about B2B buying behaviour while I worked for this company.

We oftentimes ran into the situation where a potential customer really liked our solution, but wanted to run Windows instead of Mac OS X (this was arguably a lot tougher in 2005 when we started, and less so after the iPhone hit). There were a variety of reasons for this:

- Windows was the OS that the company was also using for employee machines, so they knew it.

- The IT department only wanted Windows machines on their network (our grand solution for this was that our machines were sold with direct support and did not need to run on the customers network, which also removed a lot of security pain)

- The customer was afraid of Mac OS X because they thought it would not be stable enough

But most importantly, it came down to simple risk aversion. The employee at a big company that was internally responsible for the 'digital signage' project, would base every decision on which choice would be less risky for his carreer in case the project fails. Lets say they roll out digital signage, and it costs a lot of money, and it doesn't work right. In that case, the employee needs to be able to defend himself against all sorts of questions: "Why was this product chosen", "Why was this vendor chosen", "Why was it implemented in this way", etc. In that case, being able to answer "We choose Windows, because it is the de facto standard" is better for the career than having to say "It seemed to be a stable product". Out of this reason alone, we found companies would choose a solution where they knew that it was far worse (less stable, less flexible, less features) simply because on paper it looked less risky.

[1] http://www.videro.com/

I work at such a company. In real life, I have also lived in a whole lot of countries and thus have experienced the joys of attempting to get both business and personal accounts opened, even those wholly unrelated to Bitcoin, across many countries.

The current global situation is essentially an unspoken global monopoly on the world financial system that has been standing since at least the 1970s through the unholy triumvirate of SWIFT, ISO, and SIX Interbank Clearing. Credit cards are an adjunct to all this, essentially representing systematized usury and privacy loss as a requisite convenience, but they do not stand at the core. Western Union and so on are similarly edge case, but guilty.

If you are a country, you first need to be recognized by the UN in order to be recognized by the ISO. Then, you need to have your currency recognized. Finally, your central bank and national banking system need to play ball with SWIFT. If you refuse to play ball, then you don't get connected (North Korea), or get disconnected (Iran).

What do we mean here by play ball? We mean agree to give the US all of the information about all of the international financial transactions that anyone within your entire economy either does or attempts to do that cross a border. If you are a small country, this essentially draws a very accurate picture of your above board international economy including key players, volume of trade, key supply chain links, etc. To put it simply, SWIFT is one of the US' most important global intelligence assets and despite the best efforts of Europe to rid itself of SWIFT-based surveillance, it has persisted in a complete fashion (100% of all transactions) since at least 2001 (source: FOIA response, European Data Protection Supervisor, http://www.asktheeu.org/en/user/walter_stanish). (I would argue since at least the establishment of its first, hush-hush, 'International Operations Center' in the questionable location of CIA-friendly Virginia, way back in the 70s. But I digress.)

Understanding that this is the general government and international relations level background, then, let's now turn to the commercial. In order to actually create a bank account ('financial endpoint'), you basically need to be a bank. While there are often financial service provider (money transmission provider, or whatnot) categories that act as extremely limited alternatives, in reality any form of serious innovation does require being a bank. Unfortunately, to become a bank within a UN-recognized country and actually innovate, one must simultaneously face the wrath of both the entire established international system and the national government and industry of your home jurisdiction.

The solution which we are charting, is four pronged:

(1) to collaborate simultaneously with regulators across multiple jurisdictions such that a jurisdiction attempting to erect unfair barriers to innovation simply faces a direct loss of capital (as scaleup occurs);

(2) to establish forward looking financial settlement paradgims which empower the initiator to enable routing around specific assets or nations based upon their own priorities ("ethical settlement" as an adjunct to "ethical business") while using arbitrary settlement systems or assets: http://www.ifex-project.org/our-proposals/ifex ;

(3) to democratize the creation of individal financial endpoints ('bank accounts') by embracing and extending the emerging dominant financial standard for such, the IBAN, to a nominally familiar and interoperable system that can be decentrally allocated through a neutral party (IANA): http://www.ifex-project.org/our-proposals/iiban

(4) To standardize the intersystem identification of non-ISO approved currencies (new release of this about to come out; ISO reformatted their source release so slightly delayed): http://www.ifex-project.org/our-proposals/x-iso4217-a3

Regulators as well as banks and a lot of private sector businesses can see clearly that massive paradigm change is coming within global finance. Nobody quite knows how it will play out, but there are numerous significant factors supporting a shakeup: (1) the rise of China and the CNY as a reserve currency (2) Chinese parallel settlement networks (3) India and Iran's need to trade oil (4) cryptographic currencies (5) the increasingly globalized 24x7x365 nature of business (6) the inability of established banks to meaningfully innovate (is there even one globally with no downtime, where downtime includes evenings, weekends, holidays and scheduled systems maintenance?) ... we're talking 365 - 52*2 (= 104 weekend days) - 10 public holidys = ~251 days per year of actual availability, in which 80% of services are unavailable for at least 1/2 the time (6pm-6am) ... a far cry from five nines. (6) the coming rise of distributed manufacturing (7) the unsustainable social, environmental and economic costs of the current global consumer system.

We live in interesting times.