True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.
— Kurt Vonnegut1
Happy birthday to one of the best people our species has ever managed to squirt out. Go read Slaughterhouse Five or Cat’s Cradle or Bluebeard or just read a bit about someone that knew a few things about humans.2
Probably. I’ve never found a reliable source for the quote.
Huge thanks to the Library of Congress and the U.S. Copyright Office for helping out with the train wreck that is the DMCA. This week we get exemptions for to allow us to monitor and analyze our own cars and to play games with dead authentication servers.
From Jalopnik:
Specifically, the Copyright Office said such copies and mods constitutes “noninfringing activity as a matter of fair use and/or under the exception set forth insection 117 of the Copyright Act, which permits the owner of a copy of a computerprogram to make certain copies and adaptations of the program.
This is what it looks like when a massive industry is disrupted by those with less money and power. There’s a huge amount of money in selling beer and it’s one of the oldest industries in the US. While craft beer only makes up a very small percentage of total production the trend is clear. The incumbents are showing their teeth.
Distributors are buying politicians and ever more restrictive laws to control the exploding craft beer market.
Thomas Phinney takes a logical walk through the spurious claims that changing fonts will save the US government $400M per year.
There is a different way an effectively smaller font will definitely save money: by allowing multi-page documents, especially long ones, to take fewer pages! So maybe it all works out—if you don’t worry about legibility.
Personally, I don’t think many of the documents are even written to be read.
This Guardian article really lays it all out. Apparently Senators like Dianne Feinstein only like spying when they are excluded from the enormous drag net.
The exasperation with Ms Feinstein is that she directs her sense of outrage only at the CIA. It seems restricted to issues that impact on her. She is outraged when the CIA allegedly hacked into her committee’s computers. She is upset over the alleged intrusion into the privacy of her own staff.
Here’s a great little collection of crazy sounding conspiracy theories that turned out to actually be true:
The plot developed into a semi-big deal, with financing channels and a new economic initiative all ready to go, but was undone by the plotters’ choice for the American Benito Mussolini: the even-more hilariously named Smedley Butler. The idea was to assemble a force of disgruntled veterans (brown shirts optional, one imagines), march them to Washington, and force President Roosevelt to appoint Butler to some kind of cabinet position, from which he could pass the cabal’s orders to the basically powerless president.
From Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept comes this completely unsurprising story:
Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable
But what should be surprising and disturbing are the tactics, which frankly can destroy innocent lives and families:
From David Johnston at Aljazeera America comes this detailed summary of the state of welfare for the rich.
Federal, state and local governments publish exhaustively detailed statistical reports on welfare to the poor, disabled, sick, elderly and other individuals who cannot support themselves. The cost of subsidized food, housing and medical care are all documented at government expense, with the statistics posted on government websites.
But corporate welfare is not the subject of any comprehensive reporting at the federal level.
From “Dave’s Blog”:
In my personal opinion, this is Verizon waging war against Netflix. Unfortunately, a lot of infrastructure is hosted on AWS. That means a lot of services are going to be impacted by this.
The Verizon support chat log is pretty specific too:
you haven’t answered my question. It is a yes or no question. Is verizon now limiting bandwidth to cloud providers like Amazon’s AWS services?
From Quartz:
This completely unexpected turn, which Chambers said was the fastest swing he had ever seen in emerging markets, comes just as Cisco is trying to establish itself as a bedrock technology provider for of the internet of things, which industry analysis firm IDC says will be an $8.9 trillion market by 2020. This quarter Cisco unveiled the nPower chip, a super-fast processor designed to funnel the enormous volumes of data that the internet of things will generate.
