Sumner Redstone is declared incapacitated. Court doesn't rule on media mogul's competency

Media mogul Sumner Redstone is incapacitated and needs a guardian ad litem to protect his interests in a current legal case, a judge determined Monday during a hearing in a long-running court dispute about the health of the controlling shareholder of CBS Corp. and Viacom Inc. Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge David J. Cowan once again stopped short of making a determination on whether the 95-year-old billionaire is mentally competent. Cowan said his ruling on whether Redstone was incapacitated was based on an opinion by Redstone’s doctor on the mogul’s dysarthria, a severe speech impediment. His physical ailment was enough to justify the determination. Redstone remains chairman of National Amusements Inc., the Redstone family investment vehicle that holds the controlling stakes in Viacom and CBS. “The bottom line, essentially, is, the court is finding that Mr. Redstone is incapacitated — but not because he is incompetent,” Cowan said. Redstone, in his limited capacity, consented to the determination.

Judges appoint a guardian ad litem when someone independent is needed to look out for the best interests of a disabled or elderly person or a child. Redstone’s attorney, Robert Klieger, said after the 50-minute hearing that the guardian’s representation would be limited to the court proceedings. Cowan appointed Samuel D. Ingham III, a specialist in probate and estate planning matters whose law practice is based in downtown Los Angeles, to serve as Redstone’s guardian ad litem. Ingham was recommended by attorneys who represent the Redstone family. The 1975 UCLA Law School graduate primarily handles cases involving conservatorships and trusts.

Monday’s hearing came in litigation initially pursued by Manuela Herzer, one of Redstone’s former female companions. Once part of Redstone’s orbit, Herzer was kicked out of Redstone’s Beverly Park mansion in October 2015 and later written out of his estate plan. Herzer tried unsuccessfully to restore her standing as an agent for Redstone and secure a place in his will, which would put her in line for tens of millions of dollars from his estate. Herzer withdrew her lawsuit, but in April, Redstone filed his own petition to preserve changes made in May 2016 that removed Herzer from his trust. The May 2016 change marked the 40th amendment to Redstone’s trust, which maps out his wishes about how his property should be divided and his empire run long after he is gone. Herzer’s legal team challenged Redstone’s petition, contending that the mogul had lost his mental competence and that lawyers who surround him don’t really know what he wants. Herzer’s legal team, which has been trying for more than three years to get a judge to declare Redstone mentally incompetent, also opposed the motion for a guardian ad litem.

https://www.latimes.com/business/hollywood/la-fi-ct-sumner-redstone-incapacitated-20181217-story.html

>>4352576

Interesting wonder who benefits.

Google’s Secret China Project “Effectively Ended” After Internal Confrontation

Google has been forced to shut down a data analysis system it was using to develop a censored search engine for China after members of the company’s privacy team raised internal complaints that it had been kept secret from them, The Intercept has learned. The internal rift over the system has had massive ramifications, effectively ending work on the censored search engine, known as Dragonfly, according to two sources familiar with the plans. The incident represents a major blow to top Google executives, including CEO Sundar Pichai, who have over the last two years made the China project one of their main priorities.

The dispute began in mid-August, when the The Intercept revealed that Google employees working on Dragonfly had been using a Beijing-based website to help develop blacklists for the censored search engine, which was designed to block out broad categories of information related to democracy, human rights, and peaceful protest, in accordance with strict rules on censorship in China that are enforced by the country’s authoritarian Communist Party government. The Beijing-based website, 265.com, is a Chinese-language web directory service that claims to be “China’s most used homepage.” Google purchased the site in 2008 from Cai Wensheng, a billionaire Chinese entrepreneur. 265.com provides its Chinese visitors with news updates, information about financial markets, horoscopes, and advertisements for cheap flights and hotels. It also has a function that allows people to search for websites, images, and videos. However, search queries entered on 265.com are redirected to Baidu, the most popular search engine in China and Google’s main competitor in the country. As The Intercept reported in August, it appears that Google has used 265.com as a honeypot for market research, storing information about Chinese users’ searches before sending them along to Baidu.

According to two Google sources, engineers working on Dragonfly obtained large datasets showing queries that Chinese people were entering into the 265.com search engine. At least one of the engineers obtained a key needed to access an “application programming interface,” or API, associated with 265.com, and used it to harvest search data from the site. Members of Google’s privacy team, however, were kept in the dark about the use of 265.com. The engineers used the data they pulled from 265.com to learn about the kinds of things that people located in mainland China routinely search for in Mandarin. This helped them to build a prototype of Dragonfly. The engineers used the sample queries from 265.com, for instance, to review lists of websites Chinese people would see if they typed the same word or phrase into Google. They then used a tool they called “BeaconTower” to check whether any websites in the Google search results would be blocked by China’s internet censorship system, known as the Great Firewall. Through this process, the engineers compiled a list of thousands of banned websites, which they integrated into the Dragonfly search platform so that it would purge links to websites prohibited in China, such as those of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia and British news broadcaster BBC.

Under normal company protocol, analysis of people’s search queries is subject to tight constraints and should be reviewed by the company’s privacy staff, whose job is to safeguard user rights. But the privacy team only found out about the 265.com data access after The Intercept revealed it, and were “really pissed,” according to one Google source. Members of the privacy team confronted the executives responsible for managing Dragonfly. Following a series of discussions, two sources said, Google engineers were told that they were no longer permitted to continue using the 265.com data to help develop Dragonfly, which has since had severe consequences for the project. “The 265 data was integral to Dragonfly,” said one source. “Access to the data has been suspended now, which has stopped progress.” In recent weeks, teams working on Dragonfly have been told to use different datasets for their work. They are no longer gathering search queries from mainland China and are instead now studying “global Chinese” queries that are entered into Google from people living in countries such as the United States and Malaysia; those queries are qualitatively different from searches originating from within China itself, making it virtually impossible for the Dragonfly team to hone the accuracy of results. Significantly, several groups of engineers have now been moved off of Dragonfly completely, and told to shift their attention away from China to instead work on projects related to India, Indonesia, Russia, the Middle East and Brazil.

https://theintercept.com/2018/12/17/google-china-censored-search-engine-2/

>>4352762

>>4352763

Agreed, What is China's interest in this, is simple, they have a goal/plan of being the one and only in AI, which is why they have sweetened the pot for Hedge Fund companies to do business there. No chance this will be let go by their government.

>>4353014

hmm. that is interesting…