Three Things: This Week’s Massive Dickhead Award Goes To…

[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

This last week was bad. We were swamped with dickheads, more so than usual, and some of them bigger dickheads than the usual fare.

There are so many it’s worth assessing who was the champion dickhead this week.

Below are my top three. Tell us in comments who you’d have picked for this week’s Massive Dickhead Award.

~ 3 ~

WINNER: Rep. Patrick McHenry (R, NC-10)

This asshat became the Acting House Speaker after the ultra-fascist faction of the GOP House Caucus led by Matt Ephebophile Gaetz forced the feckless Kevin McCarthy out of the speaker’s role.

McHenry chose to come out swinging rather than settling calmly and rationally into the speakership.

Within hours of McCarthy’s removal, McHenry booted Nancy Pelosi out of her office while she was out of D.C. escorting Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s body back to California. She was not accorded a reasonable amount of time to attend the funeral service and return to D.C. to clean out her office.

He then blew off the Congressional delegation in need of air transportation to California for Feinstein’s funeral.

…the House Republican leadership did not allow a plane to transport the late Senator’s colleagues from DC to SFO. After the late Senator passed, Rep. Zo Lofgren contacted former Speaker Kevin McCarthy to request air transportation for colleagues to attend the memorial service.

This is a courtesy any delegation is traditionally afforded to allow members to travel together to honor a member who passed away. But, Rep. Lofgren, who’s the delegation representative, never heard back from McCarthy. According to Thompson, she made the same request of Speaker Pro Tem Patrick McHenry but also didn’t get a response.

“It’s just sad commentary on the House Republican leadership where they wouldn’t allow a plane to come back so her colleagues can pay tribute to this great legislator, great Senator remarkable leader,” Thompson said. “I’m assuming some people will not be able to make it because of that.”

Sloppy if not arrogantly thoughtless. A slap at the state which is the fifth largest economy in the world, with the largest congressional delegation, as if McHenry doesn’t think anything of winning Democratic seats in California.

There have been 39 representatives and senators who’ve died in office since 2000, and at no time has there been such a pointed dickishness toward the congressional delegation traveling to funeral services, regardless of the political party in control of the House or Senate.

But this is McHenry’s SOP, has been since at least 2008. He demonstrated his sloppy thoughtless arrogance then:

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon told a North Carolina lawmaker Tuesday that he couldn’t re-air a video he’d shot in Baghdad after accusations surfaced that he breached operational security in detailing enemy rocket attacks.

Rep. Patrick McHenry, a Republican, traveled to Iraq with other lawmakers for the first time on March 22. The video was the second incident stemming from that trip that has drawn unwanted attention to McHenry. Earlier, he was criticized for berating a guard in Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone for not allowing him into a gym there because the congressman did not have the proper identification credential.

The new criticism stems from a video that was featured on his Web site last Friday. Shot in the Green Zone, it showed McHenry gesturing to a building behind him and saying that one of 11 rockets “hit just over my head.” Then he named two other places struck by the rockets.

As in 2008, his unthinking reflexive behavior is a sign McHenry is not capable of governance, only peevish pettiness which pisses on the American public and their needs for rational effective government.

Our country deserves and needs better than massive dickheads who believe owning the libs is the job for which the American public pays them. It’d be nice to think the GOP thinks so, too, but they actually allowed McHenry to pull this bullshit and spit on congressional comity at a time when it’s most needed to negotiate a budget. Thanks to North Carolina’s persistent partisan gerrymandering, the GOP ensures both NC-10 and the country are stuck with this prize-winning jerk, at least through the 2024 election.

~ 2 ~

SECOND PLACE: Vladimir Putin

Killing 50 civilians including a child with a missile, wiping out half the village of Hroza while its residents interred a loved one is both a war crime and the height of dickishness.

Way to win hearts and minds, Pooty, you kidnapper and murderer of children.

You’d think he’d have learned something from U.S. errors in places like Iraq and Afghanistan but nope. He just doubles down on his criminality.

Added asshole-ishness: this agitprop trying to stir up shit between the U.S. and Israel immediately after the attack by Hamas.

Unlike Putin, POTUS can walk and chew gum, isn’t hiding in their ill-gotten fortress of solitude, and isn’t obsessed with toxic nostalgia for the past like the decades-plus effort to restore the USSR.

The U.S. also has a defense budget larger which makes Russia’s look like nothing – we can manage more than one challenge.

But that’s the point, isn’t it? All Russia has in its arsenal is cheap influence operations amplified by cringelords?

Speaking of cringelords…

~ 1 ~

THIRD PLACE: Elon Musk

Why this guy bothers with American citizenship is beyond me given his reluctance to respect its government.

The Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday sought to force Elon Musk to sit for a deposition as part of an ongoing investigation about his purchase of Twitter, now known as X.

The SEC said Musk failed to appear for testimony as required by a May subpoena despite agreeing to show up last month at the SEC’s office in San Francisco.

Musk waited until two days before the scheduled date to notify the SEC he would not appear, regulators said. They’re now seeking a court order to force Musk to comply.

Musk’s response this week was pure DARVO:

Elon Musk called for an overhaul of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Thursday, the same day the agency sued him in an effort to compel him to testify about his purchase of Twitter, the platform now known as X.

“A comprehensive overhaul of these agencies is sorely needed, along with a commission to take punitive action against those individuals who have abused their regulatory power for personal and political gain. Can’t wait for this to happen,” Musk wrote on X in response to news of the SEC suing him.

So predictable: deny the abuse, reverse victim-abuser order. Poor Musk is the victim, won’t somebody deal with the mean old SEC?

The acquisition of Twitter by this narcissistic git very much needs investigation. As noted previously, Musk was so desperate to avoid Delaware’s Chancery Court after he sued to stop his acquisition last year that he threw in the towel and proceeded to buy Twitter.

What is it that Musk doesn’t want revealed in public record?

An alleged proponent of free speech, Musk appears to have shrugged off an egregious persecution of civil rights though it’s his platform which has been at the heart of the Saudis’ charges and death sentence against Saudi citizen Mohammad Alghamdi for their tweets.

Besides blowing off the SEC’s subpoena and blowing off free speech, Musk also managed to both screw up his own company’s product and spit in the face of media outlets which have continued to bolster the sagging social media platform.

Musk decided headlines make tweets look bad so he’s had them removed. Before the change if a news outlet included a link to a news article in their post, the article’s headline would appear next to an image served from the link so that users would know what the link was about and the tweeter could add a prefacing blurb in the tweet’s body.

Now the user must allocate their post’s text to adding a headline. Jay Peters at The Verge does a better job of explaining the problem (red markup mine on image below):

In short, Musk stiffed news media the most with this move which he claims improves the platform’s aesthetics.

Ri-ight. Because all the white supremacists and TERFs and other haters don’t damage the platform at all.

Bloomberg’s finally coming around about the moral argument against the former bird app, but it’s infuriating they can’t see the business argument is right there, too, thanks to Musk’s constant degradation of service.

What happens when journalists are targeted by intelligence operatives because Musk has decided maintaining privacy of personal data shared with the former Twitter is now an inconvenience, or that data is just another fungible to be harvested without regard to users’ privacy and security and the FTC’s consent decree?

~ 0 ~

Honorable Mention:

Matt Gaetz, because a pumpkin has more smarts and savvy than this shit stirrer who launched the ouster of Kevin McCarthy thereby setting McHenry loose to be a bigger dick than usual.

At some point we need to call Gaetz and his wrecking crew anarchists because that’s what they are – they don’t give a fuck about the republic and keeping it, they just want to destroy it.

Let’s hope this next week we run into fewer dickheads.

Who’s on your list of Massive Dickheads from this past week? Who has screwed over more people and undermined democracy in a big way? Share your nominees in comments.

This is an open thread.

What Is The Sound of a Dead Bird Xitting?

[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

This post contains observed and speculative material following the reported loss of content circa 2011-2014 at the former bird app.

~ ~ ~

Observed:

August 9, 2023 – D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the D.C. district court’s earlier finding holding Twitter in contempt and assessing a $350,000 fine for failure to fully comply by the district court’s subpoena deadline.

August 16, 2023 6:41 a.m. ET – Marcy posted about Xitter’s sketchy behaviors in its response to a DOJ subpoena approved on January 17, 2023. Xitter has been held in contempt and assessed a $350,000 fine for failure to comply with the subpoena.

August 16, 2023 1:59 p.m. ET – Marcy posted about the importance of attribution related to January 6 tweets which could have gotten former VP Mike Pence killed. Twitter data could reveal the account login information and device used for the purposes of threatening Pence.

August 17, 2023 6:23 a.m. ET – Marcy posted about Elon Musk’s meetings with with Jim Jordan and Kevin McCarthy while Xitter’s internal and external legal team tap danced about the subpoena it had failed to comply with fully and on a timely basis. This dancing may have been an effort to protect Musk and his political network including certain members of Congress.

August 17, 2023 3:26 p.m. ET – Brazilian Xitter user Danilo Takagi posted,

Acabei de confirmar aqui. O Twitter/X removeu todas as mídias e imagens postadas de 2014 pra trás. Eles não tem dinheiro nem pra armazenamento mais. Artistas e criadores de conteúdo, vocês realmente ainda querem continuar usando esta rede?

[Translation from Portuguese: I just confirmed here. Twitter/X has removed all media and images posted from 2014 onwards. They don’t even have money for storage anymore. Artists and content creators, do you really want to continue using this network?]

August 19, 2023 11:31 a.m. ET – Xitter user Tom Coates confirms Danilo Takagi’s earlier observation:

More vandalism from @elonmusk. Twitter has now removed all media posted before 2014. Thats – so far – almost a decade of pictures and videos from the early 2000s removed from the service. For example, here’s a search of my media tweets from before 2014. https://twitter.com/search?q=From%3Atomcoates%20until%3A2014-01-01&src=typed_query&f=media

Xitter Birdwatch contributors added context:

Images before/around 2014 are still saved on Twitter/X’s servers, however, the t.co links appear to be broken at the moment.

The famous Ellen DeGeneres selfie from the 2014 Oscars is currently missing from her tweet. https://twitter.com/EllenDeGeneres/status/440322224407314432
But the original file is still available on their servers.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BhxWutnCEAAtEQ6?format=jpg&name=large
thttps://twitter.com/Accountabilabud/status/1693026133191819518?s=20

Each of the links above in the Birdwatch context field have not been available consistently; they have been converted by Xitter’s t.co link shortener when the tweet is shared but the shortened links may not work properly.

The erasure appears to be related in part to a “failure” of the t.co link shortener which eliminates accessibility to content, but this doesn’t explain why graphic media circa 2011-2014 is no longer available.

What the actual fuck is going on at Xitter?

~ ~ ~

Here are several prominent theories about the loss of media on Xitter:

Musk is cutting costs, some say, by refusing to host media content.

It’s possible, but why 2011-2014 and not ALL of the former Twitter’s media content? Is this explanation consistent with the “failure” of the t.co shortener and loss of graphics in that date range?

Musk is trying to damage social networks within Xitter for his personal political agenda, others say.

Again, why that specific range and not from the former Twitter’s inception?

Musk is erasing cultural history, engaging in ethnocide or cultural genocide, noted by minority groups.

True. Erasing key parts of the Black Lives Matter movement’s inception and the social response to deaths which preceded it is one example targeted by this date range.

Also the erasure of Arab Spring-related content may be ethnocide.

You’re going to see folks making these points across social media, but there’s at least one more possible factor driving Musk’s erasure.

~ ~ ~

Speculative:

What if Musk is eliminating access to evidence?

How do we know for sure whether Xitter the former dead bird platform is simply running into the operations problems expected since Musk canned 75-80% of staff, or whether he’s actively obstructing investigations which rely on former Twitter content by screwing with data accessibility?

How do we know Musk isn’t doing the bidding of his fossil fuel financiers from Qatar and KSA by suppressing access to content critical of leadership in those countries? Perhaps even hiding what it was spies for KSA employed by Twitter had been doing, or hiding possible foreign interference in democracy here and abroad?

Ponder this bit of dead bird xit for a while.

Hanging by Meta’s Threads

[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

If you are very much online in social media, you’ve likely heard the buzz about Threads – the new microblogging platform owned and operated by Facebook’s parent, Meta.

I’m not going to get into a detailed discussion of Threads versus its problematic competitor Twitter or ex-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s problematic alternative, Bluesky Social. You’re perfectly capable of doing the homework on them and other competing microblogging platforms.

Of concern to me: how will Threads eventually interact with the open source federated universe (fediverse) of platforms including Mastodon. Threads is expected to federate eventually and allow easy sharing of communications and content between member platforms in the fediverse.

There has been so much conversation about this topic in Mastodon that I’ve had to filter it out. The discussion has been warranted, but the subject has been polarizing and frankly exhausting.

Some Mastodon users – mostly those who left Twitter and miss it badly – want this new Meta project to integrate seamlessly with Mastodon so that they can encourage former Facebook folks to come over to Mastodon. They’re missing much busier levels of activity in their timelines which was driven by algorithms at Twitter and as well at Facebook. And some simply can’t handle the increased complexity Mastodon poses, from choosing an instance to finding friends old and new, or building a feed.

Some Mastodon users – like me – don’t really care to federate with Meta’s users whether from Facebook or Instagram. In my case my primary concerns are data privacy and remaining ad free. While I feel fairly confident my experience within Mastodon won’t ever involve ads, I can’t say that will be the case once I make contact with someone in Threads just as looking at a tweet on Twitter will likely expose me to advertising. I simply do not want to give my attention without my advance consent to any business advertising in social media.

(Side note: look around here in emptywheel – see any ads? How’s that shape your experience here?)

Because of these concerns I’ve been looking for ways to limit exposure of personal data now that Meta has begun a soft launch of Threads over the last 24 hours.

~ ~ ~

Ahead of a formal launch, Eugen Rochko, Mastodon’s creator, published a statement about the way Threads and Mastodon are supposed to work. This statement was the result of meetings he had with Meta about the way Threads was expected to work once it joined the fediverse.

See https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/

Note this paragraph in particular:

Will Meta get my data or be able to track me?

Mastodon does not broadcast private data like e-mail or IP address outside of the server your account is hosted on. Our software is built on the reasonable assumption that third party servers cannot be trusted. For example, we cache and reprocess images and videos for you to view, so that the originating server cannot get your IP address, browser name, or time of access. A server you are not signed up with and logged into cannot get your private data or track you across the web. What it can get are your public profile and public posts, which are publicly accessible.

There’s still a problem here, if you think back to what researcher Aleksandr Kogan could do with Facebook’s data harvested ~2014. The network of people around those whose data had been obtained could still be deduced.

If some users outside Meta have past usernames in Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp which match; and/or if users have had previous long-term contacts with Meta users, and/or if data from Twitter or other social media platforms can also be acquired and correlated, it wouldn’t be difficult to build out the social network of Threads users who interface with Mastodon or other fediverse platform users.

This gets around the reason why Mastodon in particular has been resistant to integrating search across the fediverse. Search was intentionally limited during Mastodon’s development to prevent swarming and brigading attacks and other forms of harassment targeting individuals, particularly those identified in minority and/or protected classes.

Consider for example the case of a gay person who associates with other gay people who know each other locally but communicate using these tools. It won’t take that much effort especially with the aid of GPT AI to to create the means to identify entire networks of gay persons related one to several degrees apart. Once identified, it wouldn’t take much to begin brigading them if enough other hostile accounts have been established. One could even imagine the reverse identification process applied in order find persons who are violently anti-gay and likely to welcome opportunities to harass gays.

Imagine, too, how this could affect young women contacting others looking for reproductive health care information.

~ ~ ~

There is a temporary saving grace: Threads is not approved in the EU. Not yet.

The server which hosts my Mastodon account is located in the EU and therefore will not yet allow Threads users access through federation.

The same server’s administrator also polled users and asked if they wanted to allow Threads to federate with this server they voted it down.

So I guess I’m okay where I’m at for the moment.

There are fediverse servers out there which will never allow Threads to federate with them. I’ve seen a Mastodon server which has said it will never allow Meta applications to federate because it’s against their server’s terms of use to allow entities which enable genocide and crimes against humanity to do so.

Good for them.

And good for us: PressProgress editor Luke LeBrun collected the app privacy policies for Threads, Bluesky, Twitter and Mastodon for contrast and comparison:

Can’t imagine why I would have any concerns about Threads…ahem.

~ ~ ~

This is all fairly new and unfolding even as I write this. What the fediverse will look like once Threads makes full contact is anybody’s guess.

But there are several things we do know right now, with certainty:

– Meta has been and remains a publicly-held holding company for a collection of for-profit social media businesses. Its business model relies on selling ad space based on targeted markets, and selling data. This will not change short of a natural disaster like a meteor strike taking out all of Silicon Valley and the greater San Francisco area, and that may still not be enough to change the inevitable monetization of Threads and all the platform touches.

– Meta has been operating under a consent decree issued by the Federal Trade Commission since 2011 after violating users’ privacy; it violated that agreement resulting in a $5 billion fine which it has fought against paying. Meta’s track record on privacy is not good and includes the non-consensual collection of personal data by academic Aleksandr Kogan. The data was later used by Cambridge Analytica/SCL and may have been involved in influence operations during the 2016 election.

– The EU is light years ahead of the US when it comes to privacy regulations. California as a state comes closest to the EU in its privacy regulations but it shouldn’t matter which state we are in – our privacy concerns are the same across the country, and opt-in should be the standard, period. US state and federal lawmakers have been and will likely continue to be slow to take any effective action unless there is considerable pressure by the public to meet the EU’s efforts.

– Law enforcement in the US have purchased and used without a warrant personal data collected through users’ use of social media. There has been inadequate pressure by the public to make this stop and will put the health and safety of women and minority groups at risk.

Changing the direction in which this is headed requires engagement and action. By now you know the drill: contact your representatives in Congress and demand legislation to protect media users’ privacy. (Congressional switchboard: (202) 224-3121 or Resist.bot)

That’s no slip: no form of media on the internet should be immune from protecting its users’ privacy.

You should also contact your state’s attorney general and as well as your legislators and demand your state matches California’s Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) when it comes to privacy protections – at a minimum. Meeting the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) would be better yet.

Fertile Ground: Lack of Broadband and Disinformation Proliferation

Focusing on infrastructure this week, The Verge published an article Monday about broadband distribution in the U.S., providing a tidy map denoting which counties are not adequately served by high-speed internet.

Do you see what I see? Because it looks really familiar, kind of like this somewhat more granular map published in USAToday:

There are exceptions to my theory, but on the face of it there’s a correlation in most states between broadband access and so-called conservative voters.

Look at these two excerpts side by side:

There may be another corollary, at least in Michigan: the areas with crappy to nonexistent broadband are the ones which were hardest hit by the third wave COVID because there are more anti-mask, anti-lockdown, ‘COVID’s a hoax’ residents on average. Here’s NYT’s national map of COVID hot spots from April 9 (sorry, I didn’t get a zoomed-in image of WI-MI at that time):

Wisconsin is not as obvious a challenge in this map but the lack of broadband and red voters correlates to COVID hot spot region in north Texas.

This map, published by State of Michigan a few weeks earlier into Michigan’s third wave COVID cases, also shows the correlation:

While there are some exceptions like Marquette and Keweenaw Counties (both of which may have been affected by student and faculty populations in state universities) in the Upper Peninsula, the hot spots tracked from March into May the areas with low broadband and red voters.

Do note the one small outlier county near the middle of Wisconsin — that’s Menominee County, which voted blue but has crappy broadband. It’s the least populated of all counties in the state but its roughly 4550 residents are more than 87% Native American. Which means there’s not enough profit for broadband providers, and no ethics or adequate legislation at either state or federal level obligating coverage.

This week’s map of vaccination uptake in Michigan as published by Mlive shows the effect of anti-vaxx disinformation. In spite of horrific case counts, hospitalizations, and deaths in the low broadband Trump-voting areas, vaccine uptake has been slow.

Note the yellow county at the right of the map along Lake Huron; this is in MI-10, an area so pro-Trump that its previous congressional representative retired rather than run for re-election. Also not served adequately by broadband. (Also ripe for manipulation by outside parties like banking and real estate investors; it’s through this county that the new pipeline for water from Lake Huron to Flint was run at considerable expense and time, in spite of the proximity to Saginaw’s water system to the north and Detroit’s to the south.)

Another layer to this onion is the lack of print news media, shown on this Knight Foundation national map:

While that Trump-voting Michigan county of Sanilac on Lake Huron has print media, there’s a correlation between other counties without adequate broadband and low vaccine uptake.

I can’t find a decent map showing broadcast TV and radio coverage but some of the same problematic counties are underserved — most definitely in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and the upper portion of Wisconsin. There are concerns about how much of the state is served by Sinclair-owned television stations; they’re not as bad as Fox, but Sinclair owns far too much opportunity to push right-wing friendly content over publicly-owned airwaves.

Granted, there are some additional factors which shape the ideology espoused by persons who are slow to accept vaccination and reject masks. Some of these counties are extremely non-diverse, by which I mean more than 96% non-Hispanic white. Some are more than 55% male.

At least one of the counties in Michigan’s UP leans the other way because its population is older. Ontonagon County’s median age is 52.7 years while Sanilac’s median age is 43.

All of this is to say that the lack of broadband infrastructure serving Americans uniformly leaves them prey to disinformation about existential matters. If they aren’t getting information from a variety of media served up by broadband, AND they don’t have ready access to print media, AND they are likely underserved by broadcasters, they are ripe for whatever media is easiest to access including Facebook and other social media platforms on their cell phones.

~ ~ ~

Now here’s where it gets personal.

I have a family member who lives in a broadband desert, in a Trump-voting rural county. I thought of them immediately when Marcy wrote Radicalized by Trump: A Tale of Two Assault Defendants last week. This family member has written some things my kids won’t share with me (I’m not on Facebook and they are) because what this person has shared is so Trumpy and Qultish.

One of the two defendants Marcy wrote about blamed “Foxitis” for their radicalization. This isn’t the case for this family member because they live in a broadband desert. They may get digital broadcast but this means they aren’t exposed to Fox programming on cable. They don’t have cable, DSL, or wireless internet, only the data they purchase with their cell phone service.

This family member isn’t getting the newspaper, either; they’re not stupid but they’ve never been much of a reader.

Whatever is rotting their brain is coming through their phone, and my kids already know Facebook is one of the social media outlets this family member uses.

Fortunately this same family member isn’t prone to activism and has enough demands on their personal time that they aren’t likely to take off and go to rallies with other Trumpers and Qultists.

But we’re still looking at someone who views any messaging from the state government under Governor Whitmer and the federal government under President Biden with great suspicion and skepticism, to the point where they may resist measures intended to protect them, their family, and their community. The only information they’re getting about either state or federal government is through the filter of their limited social media.

I’m afraid this person’s mind won’t change until they have access to a lot more information from a much broader range of sources. Until they have cheap and easily accessible broadband, they’re going to be lost to disinformation and at continued risk.

This is bad enough — a family member who lives a couple hours away who I’ll have to write off as inaccessible for the near term because they have been poisoned by disinfo.

But this disinfo poisoning managed to affect my household directly.

Friends who are in agriculture suggested purchasing a side of beef soon as they expect meat prices to go up over the next few months. They recommended a processor in one of the counties which was hit hard by the third wave — a processor from whom we haven’t purchased before.

I suggested to my spouse that we try a processor up north who we’ve used in the past. They live in a very rural county which has fared a little better, and we’ve always liked their service.

When my spouse looked into placing an order, he was told they’d just lost two personnel who died of COVID and orders were backlogged.

How the heck do people who process meat for a country store in a county of less than 15,000 people end up dead of COVID?

What else may be hurting, possibly killing these people for lack of adequate, rational information?

I can’t be certain of anything except for not buying my beef there any time soon, and that country store’s location in a county indicated by blue denoting a lack of broadband.

Long Overdue Policies that Look Obvious in the Age of Pandemic

I’m not usually a fan of George Packer. But I keep coming back to this column, We Are Living in a Failed State. The coronavirus didn’t break America. It revealed what was already broken, which is something I might have written. It argued that this pandemic, to which the US responded like a corrupt poor country, was actually the third crisis of this century, and our responses to the previous two — 9/11 and the Iraq War, and the Wall Street crisis — simply brought this country to the place where Trump could loot it.

Like a wanton boy throwing matches in a parched field, Trump began to immolate what was left of national civic life. He never even pretended to be president of the whole country, but pitted us against one another along lines of race, sex, religion, citizenship, education, region, and—every day of his presidency—political party. His main tool of governance was to lie. A third of the country locked itself in a hall of mirrors that it believed to be reality; a third drove itself mad with the effort to hold on to the idea of knowable truth; and a third gave up even trying.

Trump acquired a federal government crippled by years of right-wing ideological assault, politicization by both parties, and steady defunding. He set about finishing off the job and destroying the professional civil service. He drove out some of the most talented and experienced career officials, left essential positions unfilled, and installed loyalists as commissars over the cowed survivors, with one purpose: to serve his own interests. His major legislative accomplishment, one of the largest tax cuts in history, sent hundreds of billions of dollars to corporations and the rich. The beneficiaries flocked to patronize his resorts and line his reelection pockets. If lying was his means for using power, corruption was his end.

Packer ends with a call for renewed solidarity.

But he might as well also call for a fix to all the failures of the past twenty years. Right now, mind you, Trump is failing, miserably, in part because he believes maximizing the opportunities for looting by his friends is all the policy he needs.

But the sheer scale of the crisis makes policies that long made sense for the United States more urgent and far easier to justify. I plan to keep a running list of those policies.

Medicare for All

No one has figured out how all the people put out of work by the shut-downs will pay for COVID-related health care. Trump has persisted in a plan to kill Obamacare, and some badly affected states never even expanded Medicaid.

Early reports suggested that Trump’s administration has claimed it is willing to pay hospital bill, so long as they pay those bills directly (thereby avoiding establishing a policy, I guess). But with so many people out of work and with hospitals reeling from the shut-down, the far better solution is to make Medicare available to all.

Universal Basic Income

The US government has been backing credit for big industry and tried, but failed, to provide free money for small businesses to keep their employees on staff. Instead, 26 million Americans have applied for unemployment, a sixth of all workers (and a third of all workers in MI, KY, and RI). Meanwhile, the Administration botched even a one-time $1,200 payment.

The government could better ensure that markets don’t crash entirely–and keep states from buckling as they try to serve all these unemployed people–if they simply gave a UBI to all people, as Spain has decided it will do. By keeping it, the US might be able to address the underlying inequality problems that have led to such a disproportionate impact of COVID on communities of color.

Decarceration

Closed spaces, generally, amount for a huge percentage of COVID cases and (in the case of nursing homes) deaths. ACLU just rolled out a paper that argues the models for COVID (which were originally based off other societies’ social patterns, including their prison system) underestimate the total number of deaths because they don’t account for the spread in our prisons.

COVID will remain lethal for long enough that states and the federal government will need to achieve some level of decarceration to prevent the prisons from becoming a source of spread to the wider community (as they have become in the localities with harder hit prisons).

In this case, even before COVID hit, there was bipartisan support to wean ourselves from overincarceration. Prisons will become less lucrative in conservative communities, especially as some states begin to end prison gerrymandering (which gives rural communities representation for prisoners who can’t vote, just like slavery did).

So now is the time to end incarceration for minor crimes, and improve the humanity of incarceration for those who need to be jailed.

Deindustrialization of the Food System

We’ll be lucky if we avoid famine conditions. That’s partly because our food system has the same institutional/retail split our toilet paper supply chain does, meaning the market for half of the food out there disappeared when restaurants and other institutional buyers shut down. That’s partly because bottlenecks in our food supply chain — most notably, thus far, meatpacking plants, but there will be others — have further undermined the market for our plentiful food production. And that’s partly because Trump’s farmer support, thus far, has emphasized direct payments that are effectively a continuation of his earlier bribery of farmers whose markets his trade war screwed, rather than purchasing up surpluses to provide to food banks.

Trump hasn’t shown an ability to get any other needed supplies where they’re needed; it’s unlikely he’ll do better with food.

Meanwhile, food supplies that bypass these commodity markets remain. We need to make this food supply chain more resilient and one way of doing so is to bypass the industrial bottlenecks.

Broadband as a Utility

When schools shut down, it suddenly became acutely visible how many Americans — both rural and urban — don’t have broadband. While some areas have gerry-rigged solutions (like driving wifi-enabled busses to poorer neighborhoods) to get some kids online and learning, that’s not possible everywhere. And even for adults, it takes broadband access to be able to social distance.

Trump is already talking about using infrastructure investments to get America working again. Extending basic broadband as a utility should be part of that.

Update: Arne Duncan describes what needs to happen for existing efforts to expand broadband access to be really effective.

Industrial Policy

Two months after we first identified shortages in necessary medical supply, we’ve barely managed to switch production to those necessary objects, even as entire factories were otherwise shut down. We’ve got shortages of not just testing kits, but the underlying supplies. We’ve got drug shortages too (and had them, even before the President started pitching miracle cures).

It’s long past time to admit that we do have an industrial policy — but right now, it’s focused on building the troubled F-35, not ensuring that the United States has the ability to build the things we need domestically, even if we interact openly with the rest of the world. This story uses the failed lithium battery investments Obama made, largely in Michigan, to talk about how we came to be unable to supply our own medical equipment.

We have an industrial policy. We just need to be willing to match that policy to our society’s real needs, not exporting warmongering.

Facebook, Hot Seat, Day Two — House Energy & Commerce Committee Hearing

This is a dedicated post to capture your comments about Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony before the House Energy & Commerce Committee today.

After these two hearings my head is swimming with Facebook content, so much so that I had a nightmare about it overnight. Today’s hearing combined with the plethora of reporting across the internet is only making things more difficult for me to pull together a coherent narrative.

Instead, I’m going to dump some things here as food for further consideration and maybe a possible future post. I’ll update periodically throughout the day. Do share your own feedback in comments.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) — every time Mark Zuckerberg brings up AI, he does so about a task he does not want to employ humans to do. Zuckerberg doesn’t want to hire humans even if it means doing the right thing. There are so many indirect references to creating automated tools that are all substitutions for labor that it’s obvious Facebook is in part what it is today because Facebook would rather make profits than hire humans until it is forced to do otherwise.

Users’ control of their data — this is bullshit whenever he says it. If any other entity can collect or copy or see users’ data without explicit and granular authorization, users do not have control of their data. Why simple controls like granular read/not-read settings on users’ data operated by users has yet to be developed and implemented is beyond me; it’s not as if Facebook doesn’t have the money and clout to make this happen.

Zuckerberg is also evasive about following Facebook users and nonusers across the internet — does browsing non-Facebook website content with an embedded Facebook link allow tracking of persons who visit that website? It’s not clear from Zuckerberg’s statements.

Audio tracking — It’s a good thing that Congress has brought up the issue of “coincident” content appearing after users discuss topics within audible range of a mobile device. Rep. Larry Buschon (R-Indiana) in particular offered pointed examples; we should remain skeptical of any explanation received so far because there are too many anedotes of audio tracking in spite of Zuckerberg’s denials.

Opioid and other illegal ads — Zuckerberg insists that if users flag them, ads will be reviewed and then taken down. Congress is annoyed the ads still exist. But at the hear of this exchange is Facebook’s reliance on users performing labor Facebook refuses to hire to achieve the expected removal of ads. Meanwhile, Congress refuses to do its own job to increase regulations on opioids, choosing instead to flog Facebook because it’s easier than going after donors like Big Pharma.

Verification of ad buyers — Ad buyers’ legitimacy based on verification of identity and physical location will be implemented for this midterm election cycle, Zuckerberg told Congress. Good luck with that when Facebook has yet to hire enough people to take down opioid ads or remove false accounts of public officials or celebrities.

First Amendment protections for content — Congressional GOP is beating on Facebook for what it perceives as consistent suppression of conservative content. This is a disinfo/misinfo operation happening right under our noses and Facebook will cave just like it did in 2016 while news media look the other way since the material in question isn’t theirs. Facebook, however, has suppressed neutral to liberal content frequently — like content about and images featuring women breastfeeding their infants — and Congress isn’t uttering a peep about this. Congress also isn’t asking any questions about Facebook’s assessments of content

Connecting the world — Zuckerberg’s personal desire to connect humans is supreme over the nature and intent of the connections. The ability to connect militant racists, for example, takes supremacy (literally) over protecting minority group members from persecution. And Congress doesn’t appear willing to see this as problematic unless it violates existing laws like the Fair Housing Act.

More to come as I think of it. Comment away.

UPDATE — 2:45 PM EDT — I’m gritting my teeth so hard as I listen to this hearing that I’ve given myself a headache.

Terrorist content — Rep. Susan Brooks (R-Indiana) asked about Facebook’s handling of ISIS content, to which Zuckerberg said a team of 200 employees focus on counterintelligence to remove ISIS and other terrorist content, capturing 99% of materials before they can be see by the public. Brooks further asked what Facebook is doing about stopping recruitment.

What. The. Fuck? We’re expecting a publicly-held corporation to do counterintelligence work INCLUDING halting recruitment?

Hate speech — Zuckerberg used the word “nuanced” to describe the definition while under pressure by left and right. Oh, right, uh-huh, there’s never been a court case in which hate speech has been defined…*head desk*

Whataboutism — Again, from Michigan GOPr Tim Walberg, pointing to the 2012 Obama campaign…every time the 2012 campaign comes up, you know you are listening to 1) a member of Congress who doesn’t understand Facebook’s use and 2) is working on furthering the disinfo/misinfo campaign to ensure the public thinks Facebook is biased against the GOP.

It doesn’t help that Facebook’s AI has failed on screening GOP content; why candidates aren’t contacting a human-staffed department directly is beyond me. Or why AI doesn’t interact directly with campaign/candidate users at the point of data entry to let them know what content is problematic so it can be tweaked immediately.

Again, implication of discrimination against conservatives and Christians on Facebook — Thanks, Rep. Jeff Duncan, waving your copy of the Constitution insisting the First Amendment is applied equally and fairly. EXCEPT you’ve missed the part where it says CONGRESS SHALL MAKE NO LAW respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…

The lack of complaints by Democratic and Independent representatives about suppression of content should NOT be taken to mean it hasn’t happened. That Facebook allowed identified GOP-voting employees to work with Brad Parscale means that suppression happens in subtle ways. There’s also a different understanding between right and left wings about Congress’ limitation under the First Amendment AND Democrats/Independents aren’t trying to use these hearings as agitprop.

Internet service — CONGRESS NEEDS TO STOP ASKING FACEBOOK TO HELP FILL IN THE GAPS BETWEEN NETWORKS AND INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDERS THEY HAVE FAILED TO REGULATE TO ENSURE BROADBAND EVERYWHERE. Jesus Christ this bugs the shit out of me. Just stop asking a corporation to do your goddamned jobs; telcos have near monopoly ensured by Congress and aren’t acting in the best interest of the public but their shareholders. Facebook will do the same thing — serve shareholders but not the public interest. REGULATE THE GAP, SLACKERS.

3:00 PM thank heavens this beating is over.

Three more thoughts:

1) Facial recognition technology — non-users should NEVER become subjected to this technology, EVER. Facebook users should have extremely simple and clear opt-in/opt-out on facial technology.

2) Medical technology — absolutely not ever in social media. No. If a company is not in the business of providing health care, they have no business collecting health care data. Period.

3) Application approval — Ask Apple how to do it. They do it, app by app. Facebook is what happens when apps aren’t approved first.

UPDATE — 9:00 PM EDT — Based on a question below from commenter Mary McCurnin about HIPAA, I am copying my reply here to flesh out my concerns about Facebook and medical data collection and sharing:

HIPAA regulates health data sharing between “covered entities,” meaning health care clearinghouses, employer-sponsored health plans, health insurers, and medical service providers. Facebook had secretly assigned a doctor to work on promoting a proposal to some specific covered entities to work on a test or beta; the program has now been suspended. The fact this project was secret and intended to operate under a signed agreement rather than attempting to set up a walled-off Facebook subsidiary to work within the existing law tells me that Facebook didn’t have any intention of operating within HIPAA. The hashing concept proposed for early work but still relying on actual user data is absurdly arrogant in its blow off of HIPAA.

Just as disturbing: virtually nothing in the way of questions from Congress about this once-secret program. The premise which is little more than a normalized form of surveillance using users’ health as a criteria is absolutely unacceptable.

I don’t believe ANY social media platform should be in the health care data business. The breach of U.S. Office of Personnel Management should have given enough Congress enough to ponder about the intelligence risks from employment records exposed to foreign entities; imagine the risks if health care data was included with OPM employment information. Now imagine that at scale across the U.S., how many people would be vulnerable in so many ways if their health care information became exposed along with their social records.

Don’t even start with how great it would be to dispatch health care to people in need; we can’t muster the political will to pay for health care for everybody. Why provide monitoring at scale through social media when covered entities can do it for their subscriber base separately, and apparently with fewer data breaches?

You want a place to start regulating social media platforms? Start there: no health care data to mingle with social media data. Absolutely not, hell to the no.

Facebook on the Hot Seat Before Senate Judiciary Committee

This is a dedicated post to capture your comments about Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee this afternoon. At the time of this post Zuckerberg has already been on the hot seat for more than two hours and another two hours is anticipated.

Before this hearing today I have already begun to think Facebook’s oligopolic position and its decade-plus inability to effectively police its operation requires a different approach than merely increasing regulation. While Facebook isn’t the only corporation monetizing users’ data as its core business model, its platform has become so ubiquitous that it is difficult to make use of a broad swath of online services without a Facebook login (or one of a very small number of competing platforms like Google or Twitter).

If Facebook’s core mission is connecting people with a positive experience, it should be regulated like a telecommunications provider — they, too, are connectors — or it should be taken public like the U.S. Postal Service. USPS, after all, is about connecting individual and corporate users by mediating exchange of analog data.

The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) offers a potential starting point as a model for the U.S. to regulate Facebook and other social media platforms. GDPR will shape both users’ expectations and Facebook’s service whether the U.S. is on board or not; we ought to look at GDPR as a baseline for this reason, while compliant with the First Amendment and existing data regulations like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).

What aggravates me as I watch this hearing is Zuckerberg’s obvious inability to grasp nuance, whether divisions in political ideology or the fuzzy line between businesses’ interests and users’ rights. I don’t know if regulation will be enough if Facebook (manifest in Zuckerberg’s attitude) can’t fully and willingly comply with the Federal Trade Commission’s 2011 consent decree protecting users’ privacy. It’s possible fines for violations of this consent decree arising from the Cambridge Analytica/SCL abuse of users’ data might substantively damage Facebook; will we end up “owning” Facebook before we can even regulate it?

Have at it in comments.

UPDATE — 6:00 PM EDT — One of my senators, Gary Peters, just asked Zuck about audio capture, whether Facebook uses audio technology to listen to users in order to place ads relevant to users’ conversational topics. Zuck says no, which is really odd given the number of anecdotes floating around about ads popping up related to topics of conversation.

It strikes me this is one of the key problems with regulating social media: we are dealing with a technology which has outstripped its users AND its developers, evident in the inability to discuss Facebook’s operations with real fluency on either the part of government or its progenitor.

This is the real danger of artificial intelligence (AI) used to “fix” Facebook’s shortcomings; not only does Facebook not understand how its app is being abused, it can’t assure the public it can prevent AI from being flawed or itself being abused because Facebook is not in absolute control of its platform.

Zuckerberg called the Russian influence operation an ongoing “arms race.” Yeah — imagine arms made and sold by a weapons purveyor who has serious limitations understanding their own weapons. Gods help us.

EDIT — 7:32 PM EDT — Committee is trying to wrap up, Grassley is droning on in old-man-ese about defending free speech but implying at the same time Facebook needs to help salvage Congress’ public image. What a dumpster fire.

Future shock. Our entire society is suffering from future shock, unable to grasp the technology it relies on every day. Even the guy who launched Facebook can’t say with absolute certainty how his platform operates. He can point to the users’ Terms of Service but he can’t say how any user or the government can be absolutely certain users’ data is fully deleted if it goes overseas.

And conservatives aren’t going to like this one bit, but they are worst off as a whole. They are older on average, including in Congress, and they struggle with usage let alone implications and the fundamentals of social media technology itself. They haven’t moved fast enough from now-deceased Alaska Senator Ted Steven’s understanding of the internet as a “series of tubes.”

Software is a Long Con

I had a conversation with a bridge engineer one evening not long ago. I said, “Bridges, they are nice, and vital, but they fall down a lot.”

He looked at me with a well-worn frustration and replied, “Falling down is what bridges do. It’s the fate of all bridges to fall down, if you don’t understand that, you don’t understand bridges.”

“Ok, I do understand that,” I replied. “But they fall down a lot. Maybe if we stepped back and looked at how we’re building bridges –”

“You can’t build a bridge that doesn’t fall down. That’s just not how bridges work”

I took a deep breath. “What if you could build a bridge that didn’t fall down as often?”

“Not practical — it’s too hard, and besides, people want bridges.” By now, he was starting to look bored with the conversation.

“I bet if you slowed down how you build bridges, you could make ones that lasted decades, even in some cases, centuries. You might have to be thoughtful, set more realistic expectations, do a lot more of the design of a bridge before you start building it, but..”

He interrupted me again. “Look, you’re not a bridge engineer, so you don’t really understand how bridges work, but people want bridges now. So no one is going to build a bridge like that, even if it were possible, and I’m not saying it is.”

“But people get hurt, sometimes die, on these bridges.”

“Bridges fall down. Sometimes people are on them when they do. That’s not my fault as a bridge engineer, that’s literally how gravity works,” he said.

“I know there will always be accidents and problems with bridges, but I really do think that you could build them with careful planning, and maybe shared standards and even regulations in such a way that bridge collapses could be rare. Some of the problems with bridges are faults we’ve known about for decades, but they still get built into bridges all the time.”

He took a deep breath, and pinned me with a stare. “Even if we could, and it’s still entirely possible that no one can build these mythical bridges you’re talking about, that would slow down the building of bridges. People need bridges to get places. No one could afford to build bridges that slowly, and people would complain.” He stretched out the –plaaaain in complain, in a way that made clear this was the end of the argument and he’d won.

“They might not complain if they didn’t fall off bridges so often,” I mumbled.

He heard me. “Unlike you, people know that bridges fall down.”

Just then, a friend of mine, also a writer, also interested in bridges, stopped by.

“Hey guys!” he said. “So it looks like there’s a crew of Russian bridge destroyers with hammers and lighters who are running around in the middle of the night setting fires to bridges and knocking off braces with hammers. They started in Ukraine but they’re spreading around the world now, and we don’t know if our bridges are safe. They’ve studied bridges carefully and they seem to be good at finding where they’re most flammable and which braces to knock off with their hammer.”

We both regarded my friend a long moment, letting it sink in. I turned back to the bridge engineer and said, “Maybe we need to make them out of non-flammable material and rivet them instead of using exposed braces and clamps.”

But he was already red in the face, eyes wide with anger and fear. “GET THE RUSSIANS!” he screamed.

OK, obviously it’s not bridges I’m talking about, it’s software. And that other writer is Wired’s Andy Greenberg, who wrote a  piece not that long ago on Russian hacking.

Greenberg’s detailed and riveting story focuses largely on the politics of hacking, and the conflict between an increasingly imperialist Russia, and Ukraine, with an eye towards what it means for America. For people who respond to such attacks, like FireEye and Crowdstrike, these kinds of events are bread and butter. They have every reason to emphasize the danger Russia (or a few years ago, China) pose to the USA. It’s intense, cinematic stuff.

It’s also one of a long sequence of stories in this vein. These stories, some of which I’ve written over the years, show that our computers and our networks are the battlegrounds for the next great set of political maneuvers between nation-states. We the people, Americans, Russians, whomever, are just helpless victims for the coming hacker wars. We have Cyber Commands and Cyber attack and Cyber defense units, all mysterious, all made romantic and arcane by their fictional counterparts in popular media.

But there’s another way to look at it. Computer systems are poorly built, badly maintained, and often locked in a maze of vendor contracts and outdated spaghetti code that amounts to a death spiral. This is true of nothing else we buy.

Our food cannot routinely poison us. Our electronics cannot blow up, and burn down our houses. If they did, we could sue the pants off whomever sold us the flawed product. But not in the case of our software.

The Software Is Provided “As Is”, Without Warranty of Any Kind

This line is one of the most common in software licenses. In developed nations, it is a uniquely low standard. I cannot think of anything infrastructural that is held to such a low standard. Your restaurants are inspected. Your consumer purchases enveloped in regulations and liability law. Your doctors and lawyers must be accredited. Your car cannot stop working while it is going down the freeway and kill you without consequences, except maybe if it’s caused by a software bug.

It is to the benefit of software companies and programmers to claim that software as we know it is the state of nature. They can do stupid things, things we know will result in software vulnerabilities, and they suffer no consequences because people don’t know that software could be well-written. Often this ignorance includes developers themselves. We’ve also been conditioned to believe that software rots as fast as fruit. That if we waited for something, and paid more, it would still stop working in six months and we’d have to buy something new. The cruel irony of this is that despite being pushed to run out and buy the latest piece of software and the latest hardware to run it, our infrastructure is often running on horribly configured systems with crap code that can’t or won’t ever be updated or made secure.

People don’t understand their computers. And this lets people who do understand computers mislead the public about how they work, often without even realizing they are doing it.

Almost every initial attack comes through a phishing email. Not initial attack on infrastructure — initial attacks on everything — begins with someone clicking on an attachment or a link they shouldn’t. This means most attacks rely on a shocking level of digital illiteracy and bad IT policy, allowing malware to get to end-user computers, and failing to train people to recognize when they are executing a program.

From there, attackers move laterally through systems that aren’t maintained, or written in code so poor it should be a crime, or more often, both. The code itself isn’t covered by criminal law, or consumer law, but contract law. The EULAs, or End User Licensing Agreements (aka the contracts you agree to in order to use software), which are clicked through by infrastructure employees are as bad, or worse, as the ones we robotically click through everyday.

There are two reasons why I gave up reporting on hacking attacks and data breach. One is that Obama’s Department of Justice had moved their policies towards making that kind of coverage illegal, as I’ve written about here. But the other, more compelling reason, was that they have gotten very very boring. It’s  always the same story, no one is using sophistication, why would you bother? It’s dumb to burn a zero day when you can send a phishing mail. It’s dumb to look for an advanced zero day when you can just look for memory addressing problems in C, improperly sanitized database inputs, and the other programatic problems we solved 20 years ago or more.

Programmers make the same mistakes over and over again for decades, because software companies suffer no consequences when they do. Like pollution and habitat destruction, security is an externality. And really, it’s not just security, it’s whether the damn things work at all. Most bugs don’t drain our bank accounts, or ransom our electrical grids. They just make our lives suck a little bit more, and our infrastructure fail a little more often, even without any hackers in sight.

When that happens with a dam, or a streetlight, or a new oven, we demand that the people who provided those things fix the flaws. If one of those things blows up and hurt someone, the makers of those things are liable for the harm they have caused. Not so if any of these things happen because of software. You click through our EULA, and we are held harmless no matter how much harm we cause.

When I became a reporter, I decided I never wanted my career to become telling the same story over and over again. And this is, once again, always the same story. It’s a story of software behaving badly, some people exploiting that software to harm other people, and most people not knowing they could have it better. I’m glad people like Andy Greenberg and others at my old Wired home, the good folks at Motherboard and Ars Technica, and others, are telling these stories. It’s important that we know how often the bridges burned down.

But make no mistake, as long as we blame the people burning the bridges and not the people building them, they will keep burning down.

And shit software will still remain more profitable than software that would make our lives easier, better, faster, and safer. And yeah, we would probably have to wait a few more months to get it. It might even need a better business model than collecting and selling your personal information to advertisers and whomever else comes calling.

I could keep writing about this, there’s a career’s worth of pieces to write about how bad software is, and how insecure it makes us, and I have written many of those pieces. But like writing about hackers compromising terrible systems, I don’t want to write the same thing telling you that software is the problem, not the Chinese or the Russians or the boogeyman de jour.

You, the person reading this, whether you work in the media or tech or unloading container ships or selling falafels, need to learn how computers work, and start demanding they work better for you. Not everything, not how to write code, but the basics of digital and internet literacy.

Stop asking what the Russians could do to our voting machines, and start asking why our voting machines are so terrible, and often no one can legally review their code.

Stop asking who is behind viruses and ransomware, and ask why corporations and large organizations don’t patch their software.

Don’t ask who took the site down, ask why the site was ever up with a laundry list of known vulnerabilities.

Start asking lawmakers why you have to give up otherwise inalienable consumer rights the second you touch a Turing machine.

Don’t ask who stole troves of personal data or what they can do with it, ask why it was kept in the first place. This all goes double for the journalists who write about these things — you’re not helping people with your digital credulity, you’re just helping intel services and consultants and global defense budgets and Hollywood producers make the world worse.

And for the love of the gods, stop it with emailing attachments and links. Just stop. Do not send them, do not click on them. Use Whatsapp, use Dropbox, use a cloud account or hand someone a USB if you must, but stop using email to execute programs on your computer.

Thanks to my Patrons on Patreon, who make this and my general living possible. You can support this more of work at Patreon.

Image CC Skez

 

King Arthur Slays Internet Traffic to UK’s Tax Haven with Tons of Steel

I’m mostly writing about the fact that the Isle of Jersey lost most of its Internet connection after its three main submarine telecommunications cables were severed by the anchor of a liquified petroleum tanker named the King Arthur so I can use that headline.

Internet speeds on the UK island of Jersey have been slashed – literally – after a ship’s anchor destroyed three submarine cables linking the isle to the British mainland.

Broadband speeds on the Channel island immediately slowed to a trickle after the data cables, owned by telco JT, and the voice traffic cable, owned by ISP Sure, were severed. Network operators rerouted data to a separate cable connecting Jersey to the main French data networks to pick up the slack, but speeds are still below their usual level.

[snip]

The coastguard is investigating, and the ship involved was reportedly the King Arthur, an Italian-registered liquefied petroleum gas tanker. It is believed to have anchored in a restricted area over the submarine cables and then dragged its anchor over them.

But longtime readers of this site know that I obsess over severed cables, even if the cause is so readily apparent.

Plus, when things like this happen, it tends to get noticed. When the Northern Mariana Islands lost its one Internet cable in 2015 in a big storm, the FCC all of a sudden decided underseas cables were something it did and should have regulation authority over, passing a rule the telecoms were none too happy over.

And while Jersey will be back to full capacity a lot sooner than the three weeks it took to get the Marianas back online, given its role in global finance, Jersey is a tad more sensitive than the Marianas.

So keep an eye on the aftermath on this unlikely assault an Italian ship named King Arthur made on one of the UK’s key tax havens.

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