Senate Republicans Vote To Gut Internet Privacy
Senate Republicans Vote To Gut Internet Privacy
Hamza Shaban, writing for BuzzFeed:
The Senate voted Thursday to make it easier for internet service providers to share sensitive information about their customers, a first step in overturning landmark privacy rules that consumer advocates and Democratic lawmakers view as crucial protections in the digital age. The vote was passed along party lines, 50-48, with all but two Republicans voting in favor of the repeal and every Democrat voting against it. Two Republican Senators did not vote.
Disgusting. This is what buying policy looks like, folks. Kate Tummarello of the Electronic Frontier Foundation also did a write-up, and included a particularly scary piece of information:
Republicans in the Senate just voted 50-48 (with two absent votes) to approve a Congressional Review Action resolution from Sen. Jeff Flake which—if it makes it through the House—would not only roll back the FCC’s rules but also prevent the FCC from writing similar rules in the future.
(emphasis added)
This may not seem like a big deal, but it very much is, especially in an age where ISPs and the data brokers to whom they sell your information are frequently hacked.
More shameful behavior from Senate Republicans whose retirement can’t possibly come soon enough.
Heinz running Don Draper’s ‘Pass the Heinz’ ads
Heinz running Don Draper’s ‘Pass the Heinz’ ads
Tim Nudd at Adweek:
In a meta union of advertising’s real and fictional worlds, Heinz just greenlighted the ads—and will run them almost exactly as Draper intended, beginning today, in print and out-of-home executions in New York City.
This is awesome, not just because it’s a marriage of television and the real world, but because the ads themselves are actually brilliant.
Trans characters in the first big video games of 2017
Trans characters in the first big video games of 2017
Laura Dale, writing at Polygon:
The past month of AAA video game releases might be the most interesting I have ever experienced as a trans woman, meaning someone who was designated male at birth but is now living as female. While far from perfect in execution, I can point out three trans characters in three separate AAA video games released in the past four weeks. That’s pretty unbelievable.
I’ve been playing Zero Dawn with my wife and it’s a truly remarkable game. I wish I hadn’t missed the trans character’s introduction, but now that Dale points it out it does seem like a respectful, if imperfect, attempt to include a trans person in Aloy’s world.
DOJ internal watchdog to investigate FBI's Clinton inquiry
Justice Dept. internal watchdog to investigate FBI’s Clinton inquiry
The inquiry by the Justice Department's inspector general, likely to keep open the wounds of the bitter 2016 presidential race, will focus on whether "policies or procedures were not followed" by the FBI and Justice Department.Of particular focus will be the letter sent by Comey to Congress just 11 days before the Nov. 8 election that disclosed that his agents were reviewing newly discovered emails possibly pertinent to the then-closed investigation on Clinton’s handling of classified material while serving as secretary of State.
At first I was heartened by this news, but if the review is limited only to whether “policies and procedures were not followed” there will be no investigation into the Hatch Act1 implications of Comey’s election-week disclosure.
- "The Hatch Act of 1939, officially An Act to Prevent Pernicious Political Activities, is a United States federal law whose main provision prohibits employees in the executive branch of the federal government, except the president, vice-president, and certain designated high-level officials of that branch, from engaging in some forms of political activity. The law was named for Senator Carl Hatch of New Mexico. It was most recently amended in 2012." -- via Wikipedia ↩
On bookstores
I’m in a bookstore, Joseph Fox in Philadelphia, and there are people here in the cramped sometimes hallway-narrow store with me. Many of them. People I mean. Some smell like rain. That’s how close they are. It’s raining outside and they’re coming into the store and I can smell the rain on them.
You have to look behind you and on both sides before kneeling or unkneeling or turning one way or another. And me personally I get the sense literally everyone else in the store is there to find a specific book and they’re all searching the stacks carefully, assiduously even. And here I am awkward and targetless and perusing aimlessly the myriad paper- and hardbacks.
That sweaty I-don’t-belong-here feeling creeps in slowly at first and then a major decision crashes into my field of vision: get it the hell together and be hunted by these books with a little goddamn dignity or get out go home leave now. As many who experience similar moments can no doubt relate to, my outward demeanor doesn’t change while this storm is raging behind my eyes. The capital v Visible me is cool as a cucumber as they say. The capital i Invisible me processes this all in a few blinks and when I open my eyes again I’ve decided to stay.
These days books are most easily purchased online. However, visiting a bookstore is a special and enviable thing. When I step into a bookstore I am aware only that there is a book looking for me. I almost never have one in mind but am dogged from the moment I cross the threshold with a sense that there is one, somewhere in there, which has me in mind.
It wasn’t Rilke, it never has been. I have read him, and I love him, but none of his books have ever shopped for me in a bookstore. I have often thought it was David Foster Wallace, and once even gave up early and bought The Broom of the System, lying to myself that it was the book I had been in the store to purchase. But it wasn’t, I had just grown a bit impatient and lazy and bought it and left.
The covers are part of it, the titles more so, but the randomly turned-to page most of all. No other indicator is as accurate in determining which tome hunts me. If the writing doesn’t stick in your heart like a grappling hook breaching the top of a prison wall, the book isn’t looking for you.
Today it may be George Musser’s Spooky Action at a Distance, about nonlocality in quantum mechanics. The title, the cover, and every passage I randomly turned and read all suggested a strong attraction between book and reader. Like a word on the tip of the tongue I was almost certain. But no, it isn’t the one. I want to read it, sure, but it’s not the one hunting me today.
In fact, today nothing was looking for me at all and so I leave with nothing new. Don’t for a moment think I wasted my time though. It’s nothing to be upset about. This visit was eventful and quietly explosive. There are sections and authors and books I must absolutely return to, whether here, physically, or online, digitally. Today was like an expedition into an unexplored region: though I return with no artifacts or specimens I have mapped whole tracts unknown to me until today.
Electronic books are convenient as hell, but I’ve never ended an Amazon or iBooks shopping session feeling like I’ve had a capital E Experience. It’s more efficient, simpler, faster and less anxious to look for books on a computer. But it just isn’t much fun.
NBC stupidly shutting down Breaking News app, service
NBC stupidly shutting down Breaking News app, service
The decision, as it often does in the media business, came down to revenue. "Unfortunately, despite its consumer appeal, Breaking News has not been able to generate enough revenue to sustain itself," Ascheim said in the letter supplied by NBC News. "We have therefore made the hard decision to close its operations so that we can re-invest that funding into NBC News’ core digital products to help us achieve our ambitious goals for those businesses."
This is short-sighted. Web-based news isn’t generating revenue? No shit. Breaking News has been a standard-bearer of confirm-before-publishing and still manages to be ahead of every other news outlet’s attempt at a breaking news product.
I’d spend $2.99/month on this thing to keep it alive. Let’s say 1/4 of its Twitter followers would do the same. That’s $84.6 million in revenue right there.
Would that be sustainable?
Wells Fargo claims customers agreed to arbitration... for accounts they never asked for
Wells Fargo Killing Sham Account Suits by Using Arbitration
[Jennifer] Zeleny, a lawyer who lives outside Salt Lake City and opened a Wells Fargo account when she started a new law practice, said it would be impossible for her to agree to arbitrate her dispute over an account that she had never signed up for in the first place.The bank’s counterargument: The arbitration clauses included in the legitimate contracts customers signed to open bank accounts also cover disputes related to the false ones set up in their names.
Arbitration is reasonable on a case-by-case basis but it’s a hard concept to defend:
- Ideologically, when a corporation is responsible for the deliberate mass-deception of its customers
- Contractually, when the affected customers never agreed to anything at all with regard to the accounts at issue
If Wells Fargo has any intellect in the board room or in the C-suites they’re taking this tough stance in public but working quietly on negotiating a mass settlement fund.
Of course, any intellect in the board room or the C-suites would likely prevent the type of sales environment which catalyzed this large-scale fraud and identity theft operation.
Poultry Fraud
‘Dark Meat’ by Gabriel Thompson
Failing to record injuries is one strategy to create the illusion of a safe workplace. Another is to fail to refer workers to doctors for proper tests and diagnoses. Each time an injury causes an employee to miss a day of work or to receive medical treatment beyond first aid, the company is required to record it in an OSHA log book. This data is reported each year to the Department of Labor and is used to identify industries with high injury rates—whose facilities will then face increased inspections. An industry that reports low injury rates is less likely to receive scrutiny from OSHA’s overstretched investigators.
If employers can self-report why can’t employees?
The argument against employee reports would be:
Well, employees will inflate injury rates!
Let’s think about this: employers are already fraudulently minimizing the rates. Now, that doesn’t mean it’s okay for employees to do it, too. It isn’t okay for anyone to massage the numbers in their own favor. But they do, and they will, because self-interest is a helluva drug.
So my thought is that having an inflated employee-reported rate to compare with minimized employer-reported rates may help regulators find the truth, somewhere between the two numbers.
FCC abides by GOP request, deletes everything from meeting agenda
FCC abides by GOP request, deletes everything from meeting agenda
Wheeler's attempt to impose new set-top box rules that help consumers avoid paying cable box rental fees may also be doomed. Consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge sent a letter to Trump today urging him to side with consumers instead of "cable and Hollywood lobbyists" on the issue.
Jesus.
Dropbox employee’s password reuse led to theft of 60M+ user credentials
Dropbox employee’s password reuse led to theft of 60M+ user credentials
Kate Conger, reporting at TechCrunch:
Dropbox disclosed in 2012 that an employee’s password was acquired and used to access a document with email addresses, but did not disclose that passwords were also acquired in the theft. Because Dropbox stores its user passwords hashed and salted, that’s technically accurate — it seems that hackers were only able to obtain hashed files of Dropbox user passwords and were unable to crack them. But it does appear that more information was taken from Dropbox than was previously let on, and it’s strange that it’s taken this long for the breach to surface.
Don’t reuse passwords folks. Find a password manager and learn to love it. There’s 1Password, LastPass, Dashlane and many others. That means there’s no excuse for you to keep using your dog’s name combined with your college graduation year or whatever terrible password you’re using for everything.
Secret Cameras Record Baltimore’s Every Move From Above
Secret Cameras Record Baltimore’s Every Move From Above
Pritchett had no idea that as he spoke, a small Cessna airplane equipped with a sophisticated array of cameras was circling Baltimore at roughly the same altitude as the massing clouds. The plane’s wide-angle cameras captured an area of roughly 30 square miles and continuously transmitted real-time images to analysts on the ground. The footage from the plane was instantly archived and stored on massive hard drives, allowing analysts to review it weeks later if necessary.
It must be the NSA or the CIA or the FBI, right? They must have a warrant, right? They must be deleting the video after a certain period of time, right?
Wrong.
It’s the Baltimore Police Department. The article and accompanying video clarify the motivation of the company providing the technology and the service to BPD. Founder Ross McNutt says he hopes technology like his will have a deterrent effect on crime in cities where its deployment is disclosed. That’s a good goal but it’s not the BPD or the company’s founder I’m worried about.
Anything on a hard drive that isn’t air gapped is vulnerable to exfiltration by hackers. That includes a massive digital video recorder covering an entire city for an indeterminate amount of time.
Scary stuff.
I fact-checked that old anti-Muslim mass email, and you'll totally believe what happened next
A beloved relative recently included me on an email forward that I simply could not ignore. I’m not the first person to write a rebuttal to this email. It has been making the rounds since at least 2009, as the screenshot below illustrates.
[caption id=“attachment_2525” align=“aligncenter” width=“700”]<img class=“size-large wp-image-2525” src=“https://joeross1.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/27aed-scr.png?w=1024&h=768" alt=‘Earliest Google result for “An Eye Opener” email: archive.is/jO20n’ width=“700” height=“525”> Earliest Google result for “An Eye Opener” email: archive.is/jO20n[/caption]
My response took about an hour to research and draft but there is so much factual evidence available to refute the absurd claims made in the “An Eye Opener” email that you could do a thesis on it. In other words, the little bit of work I did here is just the tip of the iceberg.
Here’s the full text of the email, followed by my reply.
NJ law would require pet stores sell only rescue animals
NJ law would require pet stores sell only rescue animals
John C. Ensslin reports for The Record:
New pet stores in New Jersey would be allowed to sell only cats and dogs obtained from shelters, pounds and animal rescue organization under a bill the state Senate passed Thursday.
The bill still has to go to the Assembly and will face industry opposition there, but it’s a great step forward. Find more information about the bill here. You can read an embedded PDF of the Senate version below this post.
A Slack bot to alert about missing children
A Slack bot to alert about missing children
[caption id=“attachment_2481” align=“aligncenter” width=“700”]
Slack screenshot of MissingKidsBot[/caption]
From the product page of MissingKidsBot, built by David Markovich and Daniel Doubrovkine:
According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, roughly 800,000 children are reported missing each year in the United States -- that's roughly 2,000 per day.
This is a really great idea, and something everyone with a Slack group should consider adding. However small the chances are that you’ll ever see something that might help with one of these alerts, a child’s life will always be worth it.
Nerds can look at the code over on Github. And those of you who don’t use Slack should keep an eye out for MissingKidsBot on Facebook, Skype and WhatsApp.
Apple users targeted in first known Mac ransomware campaign
Apple users targeted in first known Mac ransomware campaign
Jim Finkle reports for Reuters:
Hackers infected Macs through a tainted copy of a popular program known as Transmission, which is used to transfer data through the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing network, Palo Alto said on a blog posted on Sunday afternoon.
The cynical part of me wonders whether this is a clever move by one or more media companies to discourage the use of BitTorrent clients.
I know, maybe I need to order a tin-foil hat. But when even Kanye is pirating stuff it’s really time to bust out some innovative new tactics.
The perils of marriage equality
The perils of marriage equality
Professor Kimberly Mutcherson of Rutgers Law School writes at Concurring Opinions about Professor Katherine Franke’s recent book ‘Wedlocked: the Perils of Marriage Equality’:
We do not want to reinforce familial hierarchies by forcing people into specific family arrangements in order to warrant recognition (2 parents only), nor do we want to fetishize outsider families such that those who do not fit that model are denigrated for their choices (i.e., the adoptive parents who choose a closed adoption or the birth mother who opts for such an adoption thus perhaps not being queer enough in their choices). In thinking about the ways in which reproductive justice calls for us to respect the right to have a child, not have a child, or parent that child in a safe and healthy environment, the upshot for me is that the reproductive justice paradigm does not demand that outsider families conform to some particular form in order to help dismantle hierarchy.
I have thought about this concern since undergrad, where postcolonial literature, feminism and even semiotics courses touched on the nature of othering as an active verb, something done to a group of people. I was lucky enough to take a course in law school called Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and the Law with Professor Leonore F. Carpenter which expanded my understanding and interest in the dynamics of queer identity, family and legal frameworks.
The specific concern with which I’ve been preoccupied since then is that there is a danger in radical acceptance or the success of various equality movements. The danger I see is in achieving a nominal or “seat at the table” equality that normalizes othered groups to the frameworks of the groups that have historically done the othering.
One infuriating example of how I think about this stuff is the so-called equality of separate-but-equal, which of course was not equality at all. In the case of race, equality is not allowing non-white people to do all the stuff white people are allowed to do, but allowing non-white people to do whatever it is non-white people want to do, which is really what has always been allowed to white Americans.
I see Professors Franke and Mutcherson making a similar point about the danger of seeing marriage equality as squeezing queer couples and families into 1) heteronormative cis-gendered and/or culturally/racially segregated family models or 2) altogether new models, sometimes developed by hand-wavingly obnoxious if well-intentioned hetero-cis folks. Maybe I’m mistaken, but the overall approach as I see it being explained by these two scholars is essentially to stop putting up new roads and signs for queer families and just get the hell out of the way.
Read Mutcherson’s entire post, it’s worth it. And I’ve added “Wedlocked' to my Kindle wishlist, which is growing faster than I can keep up.
Re: Dumb conspiracy theories on Scalia's death
Enough with the conspiracy theories about Justice Scalia’s death
I read this earlier today:
"As a former homicide commander, I am stunned that no autopsy was ordered for Justice Scalia," William O. Ritchie wrote in a Facebook post on Sunday, according to reports. After seeking to cast doubt on the conclusion of the deputy U.S. marshals who responded to a call from the ranch, he added, "My gut tells me there is something fishy going on in Texas."
My gut tells me there is some fishing for attention going on in the head of the former D.C. police officer who said that.
Why?
Let’s consider this:
- Why?
- Why??
- Why???
Was it a Liberal conspiracy to get President Obama one more lasting decision about the future of United States legal policy?
Was it a “Conservative” conspiracy to give Congressional Republicans and presidential candidates something “meaningful” to “stand up” to Obama about?
Was it Ancient Aliens?
There was no autopsy, they say! There was a pillow above his head, they say! The President was told long before anyone else, they say (as if the President doesn’t get most of the news before everyone else…)!
Conspiracy theorists demand: “What is your proof Scalia wasn’t murdered?”
These stupid theories remind me of one of the frequent arguments levied against atheists: “What is your proof that there is no god??”
Who proved god exists in the first place?
Pillows
Many articles note the ranch owner who found Scalia said there was a pillow above his head, and many conspiracy theorists point to this as suspicious. I sleep with a pillow over my head every night, and another one underneath it, using the two to drown out the sounds of an increasingly conspiratorial world so I can maintain my slumber all night long.
No conspiracy. Just a light sleeper.
Politics aside
I disagreed with much of Justice Scalia’s Supreme Court jurisprudence but his presence on the Court was invaluable to the development of United States law and the debates from which it springs.
He articulated his positions in such a way that I (almost always) respected them, even when I found it hard to believe someone so intelligent was seriously asserting them. He was rarely conclusory, giving reasons for his views, and whether you agreed with those reasons or not, that’s more than most politicians (and lawyers) usually do.
His death is a loss, but there are few more certain paths to some sort of immortality than thirty years on the Supreme Court of the United States.
Photo: Then-nominee Antonin Scalia, right, with President Ronald Reagan in 1986, via Wikipedia
Google begins rolling out free internet to public housing in Fiber cities
Google begins rolling out free internet to public housing in Fiber cities
This is a big deal. I worked at the Philadelphia Housing Authority for years and talked to a lot of kids and adults about their desire to get online. Philly isn’t yet on Google’s Fiber expansion roadmap, but this is a great development.
