The Death of the Mind

You know you’re fucked when the only way out of your current SEO/PR nightmare is to distance yourself… well, from yourself. Some of this predates Google’s search engine stranglehold. But altering public perception sometimes means hoping someone will look at your shiny new logo, rather than your disturbing past.
After killing innocent people while providing security to government forces in Iraq in 2007, Blackwater rebranded several times, hoping to keep one step ahead of negative news cycles. It became Xe Services in 2009, Academi in 2011, and — after a merger with Triple Canopy (another private security firm) — Constellis.
The same thing happened with Taser. Taser — named after its foremost product (itself a loose acronym for…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/19/shotspotter-attempts-to-memory-hole-itself-rebrands-as-soundthinking/

Here’s an article from a French anarchist describing how his (encrypted) laptop was seized after he was arrested, and material from the encrypted partition has since been entered as evidence against him. His encryption password was supposedly greater than 20 characters and included a mixture of cases, numbers, and punctuation, so in the absence of any sort of opsec failures this implies that even relatively complex passwords can now be brute forced, and we should be transitioning to even more secure passphrases.Or does it? Let’s go into what LUKS is doing in the first place. The actual data is typically encrypted with AES, an extremely popular and well-tested encryption algorithm. AES has no known major weaknesses…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/66429.html

The role of the New York Times in publicly identifying the source of documents exposing US government lies marks a milestone in the degeneration of the American press into an appendage of the state.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/04/15/pnpm-a15.html

OK, here’s my question: Would you like to have it on x86 Linux?

Friday FOSS Fest  If you’re old enough to remember After Dark, you might appreciate this: a new screensaver. Yes, in 2023. It was never really about saving screens.…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/04/14/return_flying_toasters/

On Thursday, the New York Times publicly exposed the identity of the individual who allegedly shared classified documents that exposed lies by the Biden administration and media about US involvement in Ukraine.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/04/14/xfxa-a14.html

Last week, confusion erupted in response to the INDY’s publication of an April 3 letter, sent from Habitat for Humanity of Durham to members of Durham’s city council and board of county commissioners, in which a spokesperson for Durham Habitat stated that the organization did not authorize its co-sponsorship of the proposed “SCAD” text amendment to Durham’s zoning ordinance. The letter—which also stated that Durham Habitat’s involvement in the proposal “was enacted through an unauthorized third party” and noted that “the same third party has been speaking and negotiating on the behalf of Habitat for Humanity of Durham with members of City Council and others”—seemed, to many observers, inaccurate and easily refutable. While Durham Habitat had…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://indyweek.com/news/durham/durham-builder-scad-habitat-humanity/

The Pirate Bay has been around for nearly two decades, which is quite an achievement considering the immense legal pressure it has faced over the years.
Swedish police tried to shut the site down, twice, raiding dozens of servers. This ultimate goal failed but local authorities did prosecute the site’s three co-founders, who all served time in prison for their involvement.
The notorious torrent site stood tall in the midst of this turmoil and continues to operate from thepiratebay.org until this day. While it is no longer the largest piracy site online, anti-piracy forces haven’t forgotten about it.
Pirate Bay Targeted in New Subpoena Wave
This week, we spotted yet another attempt to uncover the current operators. Through the Motion…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://torrentfreak.com/ace-wants-cloudflare-to-expose-the-pirate-bays-operators-230412/

 
Thanks in large part to pandemic social spending, employment recovered from the 2020 recession in record time (Chart: Apricitas Economics, 4/8/23).
A ban on evictions. Required paid leave. Continuous Medicaid coverage. Free school meals. Emergency SNAP allotments. An extra $600 a week in unemployment benefits. Child tax credit expansion. Thousands in stimulus checks.
These measures were part of a suite of policies the US government passed in response to the Covid-19 pandemic and the economic fallout it precipitated. They were meant to blunt the damage, to protect the population from a much darker alternative.
And they were remarkably successful. The government boosted incomes of the worst-off in a way that would have appeared totally alien in 2001 or 2008….

External feed Read More at the Source: https://fair.org/home/nyt-blames-american-public-for-collapse-of-pandemic-safety-net/

The AT&T Time Warner and DirecTV mergers were a monumental disasters. AT&T spent $200 billion to acquire both companies thinking it would dominate the video and internet ad space. Instead, the company lost 9 million subscribers in nine years, fired 50,000 employees, closed numerous popular brands (including Mad Magazine), and stumbled around incompetently for several years before giving up.
But that was just the start.
After its tactical retreat, AT&T spun off Time Warner into an entirely new company, Warner Media. Warner Media then immediately turned around and announced a blockbuster merger with Discovery, creating the creatively named Warner Brothers Discovery.
This new company has been a blistering mess as well. Executives there have been so cheap they’ve refused to pay residuals to…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/12/congress-urges-doj-to-review-the-time-warner-discovery-merger-mess-amidst-chaos-and-ongoing-layoffs/