i really don't know anything about what hackers do.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/hacker_(computer_security).
in the computer security context, a hacker is someone who seeks and exploits weaknesses in a computer system or computer network.
hackers may be motivated by a multitude of reasons, such as profit, protest, challenge or enjoyment.
If they're smart, any damning evidence would all be on an isolated network, or would (at the very least) be accessible only via VPN with two-factor authorization. The latter is pretty standard for corperate networks these days, and the former would just make good sense when you're potentially liable for billions in damages from victims.
That said, the delusion that they're backed by the almighty himself can make people do some pretty reckless things.
i really don't know anything about what hackers do.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/hacker_(computer_security).
in the computer security context, a hacker is someone who seeks and exploits weaknesses in a computer system or computer network.
hackers may be motivated by a multitude of reasons, such as profit, protest, challenge or enjoyment.
Hacking a site and replacing it with your own content is a higher level attack than most. Usually hacks are about stealing information or taking a site down. As for the first one, the best that you'd be likely to get from the site is the BOE letters, which are always leaked anyways.
What I'd like to see (and I posted this in another thread about the site) is someone write a script to basically spam the "request a visit" form with random information that appears valid. Realistically, it wouldn't even need to be spammed all that much to make a significant impact upon the minds of the brothers in the congregations. If half of the visits they go on turn out to be people who claim that they didn't ask for it (or, as the case may be, commercial addresses or vacant houses, etc) then the R/F will start see that 'mother' isn't infallable. If you spam it enough, it would likely result in them throwing away real requests, which would put a damper on their recruitment efforts.
Another attack would be a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, in which you just get a bunch of computers to make page requests (or even just ping the site) overloading the servers. The trick here is you need a large number of computers to execute the attack, and this in itself requires either a large number of people willing to risk getting in trouble with the law, or someone who's gotten trojans on a lot of computers and can use them to carry out the attack.
its not like there was anything wrong with them was there?
i used to love the old ones.
these new ones feel like the equivalent of a deflated balloon.. does anyone have the answer?.
Yeah the new songs certainly aren't easier to sing, the only reasons I cab think of are to let us stop singing about beating off bees that have been molested. The other reason is maybe they felt they needed to steep up the propaganda and subconscious indoctrination with tunes like listen obey and be blessed.
i have read a pile of vitrol over the years about the pope and "false" religious leaders of every variety.
why not islam ?
have i missed a more recent awake!
The issue at hand is probably more to do with the fact that most christians would never consider Islam a viable alternative religion. The demonization of christendom is just to make the "where else to go to" (even though it's really "whom") question that much more difficult for someone who's thinking of leaving to answer.
That's probably also got something to do with the fact that the WTS produces more atheists (by percentage) than any other religion.
so, i am in washinton state visiting my son and his family and we went to a concert that had a fortune tellers booth, actually a gypsy wagon.
i decided to do something no jw would ever do, have a tarot card reading.
i wasn't really expecting anything, as i don't believe they are connected with the satan, but i don't believe they can actually read your future either.
I feel like I just had a reading. All that applies to me as well (not the specifics you gave, but the generalities of what the reader gave you).
just had an interesting (?
) visit.. 1.30pm, i was outside the front of my house on a small housing estate doing man-stuff on the car.
three young guys (maybe 16-18 or so) wearing long-sleeved shirts approached.
You clearly knew too much about the org, which is scary to a JW. For some reason (I'm not really able to put my finger on why, exactly) any time I talked to someone D2D who responded like you did (i.e. clearly knew who we were, but was polite and kind and wanted to talk) I'd always get a weird feeling and want to get out of there. Maybe that was just me being afraid of my own doubts though, I'm not sure it's a universal thing.
One thing was always certain, no one who knew right off the bat who we were ever wanted to take the literature or start a study...that was always suspicious too.
i recently ordered a copy of coc for my wife.
she doesn't know it exists, but i'm hoping she's ready to read it.
it seems to be the best red pill out there.
The point of no return for me was the JWfacts article that clearly laid out the misquotes (and some associated outright lies) in the creation book. Everything else I was able to dismiss because it meant that the GB had lied to millions of people, and I couldn't accept that. Once I saw their lies in black and white, I knew that all my other doubts where founded.
I don't know where your wife is in her journey, but I suspect that someone would have to already have some pretty persistent doubts in their minds before they'd be able to read and accept that book. If they have no doubts, he's just going to be an angry manipulative appostate speaking in half-truths like the devil himself. Definitely report back on how it goes, I wish you nothing but the best!
it will obviously make a difference to how jw's obtain their literatrash, they will have to download and print it all themselves before long.. it will make a small difference to the dtod work, they will now refer even genuine questions and interest etc to the site, not taking the opportunity to "witness" on the initial call at all.
this has been happening already to a degree.. the difference i am mainly interested in is the capture of new suckers in to the borg.. we will be able to see when we get 2014's figures, sometime next year, what the rate of increase was over the last ten years.. phizzy the prophet predicts that the rate of increase over the next ten years will not be significantly up.
probably down, but certainly, i feel, not so different from the last ten.. should i be around in ten years to do so, i will wish to ask jw's:.
Unique requests for a bible study might not even be a really useful number. They've not got a captcha on the request form, and I'm sure there's a few "requests" from appostates that aren't genuine. You'd have to filter those out first.
Actually, now that I think about it, the lack of a captcha could be taken advantage of if anyone wanted to make the "request a bible study" feature essentially useless to them. All someone would have to do is write a script that submits tons of requests. Ideally, with unique legitimate addresses (doesn't have to be residential...just something that'll come up on google maps) and names, etc so that they would have no way of filtering out the genuine requests. They'd then have a choice on their hands, either treat them all as legitimate and have people in the local congregations follow up on every one, or throw them all out. Either way, there'd probably be a useful effect. If folks in the congregations keep getting a request to follow up from "mother" and they're always BS, they'll probably stop following up. At the very least, they'll be forced to acknowledge that the org isn't as innovative and efficiently organized as they once thought.
If they throw out all the requests, then at least it might prevent a few people from getting sucked into the cult.
the watchtower study to be considered this sunday, august 3, 2014 (using the magazine dated may 15, 2014), titled are you moving ahead with jehovahs organization?, in paragraph seven (on pages 27-28), talks about the number of people baptized in recent years:.
7 where do those making up the great crowd come from?
they are being brought together because of what jesus foretold as part of the sign of his presence.
This sort of thread always makes me think of a elder that used to be in my congregation. The more I think about a lot of his talks and comments, the more I think he was fully awake, but stuck in for family (he was older and in poor health). He would often make comments that were completely contrary to the WT article being discussed (ie when the article demonizes education, he'd make a comment about how a man is obligated to support his family and sometimes an education is the best way of doing that). Since his passing, I've also learned that he often would raise issues in elder's meetings, creating an unwanted discussion that would last an hour or more, only to drop any objection when it comes to a vote. In his talks he seemed to either take the WTS's stance on such a hard line that it would demonstrate how absurd it is to anyone who's really paying attention (one of his talks like this was a source of continued distress and doubt to me, and helped me to wake up) or sometimes he'd give a half hour talk that was a reasonable explanation of scritures that completely (but subtly) contradicted the WTS's official stance.
The result? asside from one brother that knew him best (who i once heard describe him as "almost appostate") everyone in the hall thought he was so smart and was just the deepest thinker and most knowledgable witness there was. No one immagined that anything he said was anything but a raving endorsement of the WTS's policies.
there are people who mock at the reports of ndes and communication from the dead and so on.
things are changing now!
a new finding has discovered that the whole universe is intimately interconnected.
Your metaphors are a little off. A great, every day (ish) example of the principle of emergence (in the sense that I'm talking about) is a flock of birds or a school of fish. When you watch a huge group of birds in a field (usually happens during migratory season) it often seems as though the entire flock (or school in the case of fish) is performing a very coordinated complex action, but when you actually analyze the bird's movements, you can find that each member is actually following a very simple set of rules, and this results in the complex behavior of the entire group.
The brain is just doing the same thing, but on a much larger scale. instead of a few thousand members the human brain has 100 Billion neurons, and each of these neurons typically has about 7000 connections to other neurons. These connections can be thought of as the individual members of the group, so there's usually about 7e14 'members' in the group, all following relatively simple rules. The result is the appearance of conscioiusness, which is an emergent property.
Anyway, all of that is more or less irrelavent to your premise, except to demonstrate that while we humans want to make ourselves feel special, there's really not anything all that special about consciousness. It's certainly not the result of some exotic form of energy. Its also quite unlikely that quantum entaglement will be used to establish meaningful 2-way communication with people in the past or future in our lifetime.
