To read this post please scroll down.

 

Readers! A November fund-raising drive!

 

It is unfortunately time for another November fund-raising campaign to support my work here at Behind the Black. I really dislike doing these, but 2025 is so far turning out to be a very poor year for donations and subscriptions, the worst since 2020. I very much need your support for this webpage to survive.

 

And I think I provide real value. Fifteen years ago I said SLS was garbage and should be cancelled. Almost a decade ago I said Orion was a lie and a bad idea. As early as 1998, long before almost anyone else, I predicted in my first book, Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8, that private enterprise and freedom would conquer the solar system, not government. Very early in the COVID panic and continuing throughout I noted that every policy put forth by the government (masks, social distancing, lockdowns, jab mandates) was wrong, misguided, and did more harm than good. In planetary science, while everyone else in the media still thinks Mars has no water, I have been reporting the real results from the orbiters now for more than five years, that Mars is in fact a planet largely covered with ice.

 

I could continue with numerous other examples. If you want to know what others will discover a decade hence, read what I write here at Behind the Black. And if you read my most recent book, Conscious Choice, you will find out what is going to happen in space in the next century.

 

 

This last claim might sound like hubris on my part, but I base it on my overall track record.

 

So please consider donating or subscribing to Behind the Black, either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. I could really use the support at this time. There are five ways of doing so:

 

1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.

 

2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation. Takes about a 10% cut.
 

3. A Paypal Donation or subscription, which takes about a 15% cut:

 

4. Donate by check. I get whatever you donate. Make the check payable to Robert Zimmerman and mail it to
 
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652

 

You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.


Facebook and Ray-Ban selling sunglasses able to take pictures also

Your privacy belongs to us! Facebook and Ray-Ban have teamed up to create sunglasses that the wearer can use to discreetly to take pictures of their surroundings.

The Ray-Ban Stories eyewear features two 5-MP front-facing cameras for 2,592 x 1,944-pixel photos or 1,184 x 1,184-pixel videos at 30 frames per second.

A capture button is pushed to snap photo memories of what you see on your stroll through the city on a hot and sunny day, or record 30-second video clips to post online to such platforms as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok via a new Facebook View app for iOS and Android. The app also allows content to be edited or enhanced before upload, and saved to the phone’s memory, though the smart glasses do have enough built-in storage for more than 500 photos or 30 video clips. Or users can opt to for hands-free operation via Facebook Assistant voice commands.

The article describes several features that supposedly address the questions of privacy, such as led lights that glow when a picture is taken, but in the end these glasses are essentially a voyeur’s dream.

Without question such products have their legitimate uses, such as by undercover journalists or criminal investigators. To market them to the general public however means that both Facebook and Ray-Ban are willing to ignore concerns of right and wrong and the likelihood that their product will be badly misused for entire immoral reasons. All they care about is profit.

Or maybe the two companies are really developing this product to sell a more secretive version to their allies in the government. One does wonder.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 

The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

8 comments

  • Ian C.

    Just another item that needs to be checked for and taken off by visitors and staff before entering any restricted facility.
    On the positive side, it (and more capable successors) will be used to document a lot of police abuse, crime, and hilarious situations.

    We knew that tech like that will become cheap and potentially widespread. And it’ll improve soon. More storage, higher resolution, connected to a knowledge base to identify objects, sensors with a range beyond the visible spectrum. Wait until that stuff is integrated into one’s retina and brain-machine interface — do you have control over the footage or are you embedded into a network and remotely monitored/controlled? What if you look at licensed content, will the fee automatically be subtracted from your digital wallet? Or the inbuilt AI identifies that you engage in forbidden pleasures. But then, we can hack this to do what we want, implement our own pattern matchers to detect enemies of liberties, connect with our allies, identify harmful substances, and combine it with other sensors to have a more complete picture of our surroundings. Oh the possibilities… amazing.

  • Jeff Wright

    William Burroughs was right-we are a nation of finks.

  • Andrew_W

    Taking photos in public spaces is unrestricted, the cameras are obvious enough that they should be noticed in close proximity private settings, someone wearing sunglasses in bed with you should cause a little suspicion.

    These sorts of technological innovations are inevitable and have been going on for over a century, so, as with all technological innovations, society and people will learn to adapt.

  • Questioner

    Ian C.:

    Our future: is presented in the film THX 1138 (including electrical cars)!

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hLXOVCZr-8

  • wayne

    Jeff-
    here you go….

    William S. Burroughs prediction….
    “Drugstore Cowboy” (1989)
    https://youtu.be/kZszbqdOq7g
    1:25

  • wayne

    Red Dawn (1984) –
    The death of Daryl Bates’
    https://youtu.be/Kt7zsac1q_0
    5:32

  • Alton

    My pair of sunglasses ? only does 1k pics
    But records at the old 720p for movies but does give two hours of run-time.

    Six years odle they are….yoda

    Ah!!! now [deleted] can capture it even more data in Real-time !!!

  • Going William Gibson one better: his captures required replacing an eyeball. It seems reality tends to better fiction.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *