Like most people, I've been staying at home, doing a bit in the garden, cooking a lot and managing occasional bouts of anxiety. I've also written more here than I have done for a while. At a time when every Friday night has me missing my mates, it's been nice to see you all again.
But in the midst of it all – and after everything else disappeared – I got a new gig. It's with my friends from Spark Lab, it's called The Pivot Reports and it's a series of live-streamed shows over the next six weeks talking to business owners…

Our Beloved Denver (Big Guy), Thank you for teaching us the true meaning of what love was always meant to be. You were a beautiful dog with a beautiful

My brother owned a Chinese Crested named Phantom for almost 15 years. Their relationship was far beyond owner and pet, it was 100% family. Old age left

Death is in air The death of an old white horse His name; Donny His death was tragic to me How loved could he be How much I loved my Donny With his

Our Beloved Denver, Thank you for teaching us the true meaning of what love was always meant to be. You were a beautiful dog with a beautiful soul that

Since I was little we had a lovely golden working Cocker Spaniel. She was a lovely little dog and everyone in my family loved her. I grew up with her,

Ivy came into my life on December 22, 2012. She was the most beautiful little creature I had ever seen and I knew instantly that she was supposed to be

Pepper was not my dog at first, she was given to me when she was a year old. She suffered horrible abuse for the first year of her life, when I got her

My 19 year old cat had to be euthanized a couple of days before Christmas. I must admit the guilt was horrible and all I could do is wonder where my dear

Hi my baby girl, How are you? Are you playing and having a good time? Are you staying close to Rufus? I hope you're happy and have all kinds of new friends

Hi my big guy, How are you are you having fun? Are you playing and have you made new friends? Are you keeping an eye on Diana? I hope you are happy and

The Origin of Love Hedwig and the Angry Inch When the earth was still flat and the clouds made of fire and the mountains stretched up to the sky, sometimes higher folks roamed the earth like big rolling kegs they had two sets of arms they had two sets of legs they had two faces […]

Медики уже месяц живут в госпитале, а число пациентов растет

Как они стали волонтерами в эпидемию и что оказалось самым трудным

  From a Vermont librarian: VPNs are really important and I’d like to remind our patrons about them, but it...

  I am looking for someone who can help me find and clear out excess data on one of my...

I was wondering if you might give my little women’s (boomers) some guidance as to a beginning graphic novel for...

The poster to the left hangs on the wall of my office. Can you figure out the pattern to the sequence? Now you can estimate the size of the nth entry? John Horton Conway died yesterday, a victim of Covid-19. His unique mathematical style combined brilliance and playfulness in equal measure. I came across his […]

For cost-benefit analysis, the usual ballpark figure for the value of a life is about $10,000,000. But I keep hearing it suggested that when it comes to fighting a disease like Covid-19, which mostly kills the elderly, this value is too high. In other words, an old life is worth less than a young life. […]

Platform.sh removes a major pain point for developers: having to invest time in managing servers, virtual machines, or containers. Instead, Platform.sh enables developers to focus 100% of their time on their code. Since the beginning, Platform.sh has provided instant cloning capability, so dev teams can work on perfect copies of their production sites in the cloud for every Git branch. Now, in partnership with Lando, we’re extending that capability to the desktop.

The post Interview with Derick Alangi appeared first on Voices of the ElePHPant.

Back when T-Mobile and Sprint were trying to gain regulatory approval for their $26 billion merger, executives repeatedly promised the deal would create jobs. Not just a few jobs, but oodles of jobs. Despite the fact that US telecom history indicates such deals almost always trigger mass layoffs, the media dutifully repeated T-Mobile and Sprint executive claims that the deal would create "more than 3,500 additional full-time U.S. employees in the first year and 11,000 more people by 2024."

About that.

Before the ink on the deal was even dry, T-Mobile began shutting down its Metro prepaid business and laying off impacted employees. When asked about the conflicting promises, T-Mobile refused to respond to press inquiries. Now that shutdown has accelerated, with estimates that roughly 6,000 employees at the T-Mobile subsidiary have been laid off as the freshly-merged company closes unwanted prepaid retailers. T-Mobile says the move, which has nothing to do with COVID-19, is just them "optimizing their retail footprint." Industry insiders aren't amused:

"Peter Adderton, the founder of Boost Mobile in Australia and in the U.S. who has been a vocal advocate for the Boost brand and for dealers since the merger was first proposed, figures the latest closures affect about 6,000 people. He cited one dealer who said he has to close 95 stores, some as early as May 1.

In their arguments leading up to the merger finally getting approved, executives at both T-Mobile and Sprint argued that it would not lead to the kind of job losses that many opponents were predicting. They pledged to create jobs, not cut them.

“The whole thing is exactly how we called it, and no one is calling them out. It’s so disingenuous,” Adderton told Fierce, adding that it’s not because of COVID-19. Many retailers in other industries are closing stores during the crisis but plan to reopen once it’s safe to do so."

None of this should be a surprise to anybody. Everybody from unions to Wall Street stock jocks had predicted the deal would trigger anywhere between 15,000 and 30,000 layoffs over time as redundant support, retail, and middle management positions were eliminated. It's what always happens in major US telecom mergers. There is 40 years of very clear, hard data speaking to this point. Yet in a blog post last year (likely to be deleted by this time next year), T-Mobile CEO John Legere not only insisted layoffs would never happen, he effectively accused unions, experts, consumer groups, and a long line of economists of lying:

"This merger is all about creating new, high-quality, high-paying jobs, and the New T-Mobile will be jobs-positive from Day One and every day thereafter. That’s not just a promise. That’s not just a commitment. It’s a fact....These combined efforts will create nearly 5,600 new American customer care jobs by 2021. And New T-Mobile will employ 7,500+ more care professionals by 2024 than the standalone companies would have."

That was never going to happen. Less competition and revolving door, captured regulators and a broken court system means there's less than zero incentive for T-Mobile to do much of anything the company promised while it was wooing regulators. And of course such employment growth is even less likely to happen under a pandemic, which will provide "wonderful" cover for cuts that were going to happen anyway.

Having watched more telecom megadeals like this than I can count, what usually happens is the companies leave things generally alone for about a year to keep employees calm and make it seem like deal critics were being hyperbolic. Then, once the press and public is no longer paying attention (which never takes long), the hatchets come out and the downsizing begins. When the layoffs and reduced competition inevitably arrives, they're either ignored or blamed on something else. In this case, inevitably, COVID-19.

In a few years, the regulators who approved the deal will have moved on to think tank, legal or lobbying positions at the same companies they "regulated." The same press that over-hyped pre-merger promises won't follow back up, because there's no money in that kind of hindsight policy reporting or consumer advocacy. And executives like John Legere (who just quit T-Mobile after selling his $17.5 million NYC penthouse to Giorgio Armani) are dutifully rewarded, with the real world market and human cost of mindless merger mania quickly and intentionally forgotten.

For years, the Orleans Parish District Attorney's Office in Louisiana issued fake subpoenas to witnesses and crime victims. Unlike subpoenas used in ongoing prosecutions, these were used during the investigation process to compel targets to talk to law enforcement. They weren't signed by judges or issued by court clerks but they did state in bold letters across the top that "A FINE AND IMPRISONMENT MAY BE OPPOSED FOR FAILURE TO OBEY THIS NOTICE."

Recipients of these bogus subpoenas sued the DA's office. In early 2019, a federal court refused to grant absolute immunity to the DA's office for its use of fake subpoenas to compel cooperation from witnesses. The court pointed out that issuing its own subpoenas containing threats of imprisonment bypassed an entire branch of the government to give the DA's office power it was never supposed to have.

Allegations that the Individual Defendants purported to subpoena witnesses without court approval, therefore, describe more than a mere procedural error or expansion of authority. Rather, they describe the usurpation of the power of another branch of government.

The court stated that extending immunity would be a judicial blessing of this practice, rather than a deterrent against continued abuse by the DA's office.

The DA's office appealed. The Fifth Circuit Appeals Court took the case, but it seemed very unimpressed by the office's assertions. Here's how it responded during oral arguments earlier this year:

“Threat of incarceration with no valid premise?” Judge Jennifer Elrod said at one point during arguments. She later drew laughter from some in the audience when she said, “This argument is fascinating.”

“These are pretty serious assertions of authority they did not have,” said Judge Leslie Southwick, who heard arguments with Elrod and Judge Catharina Haynes.

The Appeals Court has released its ruling [PDF] and it will allow the lawsuit to proceed. The DA's office has now been denied immunity twice. Absolute immunity shields almost every action taken by prosecutors during court proceedings. But these fake subpoenas were sent to witnesses whom prosecutors seemingly had no interest in ever having testify in court. This key difference means prosecutors will have to face the state law claims brought by the plaintiffs.

Based upon the pleadings before us at this time, it could be concluded that Defendants’ creation and use of the fake subpoenas was not “intimately associated with the judicial phase of the criminal process,” but rather fell into the category of “those investigatory functions that do not relate to an advocate’s preparation for the initiation of a prosecution or for judicial proceedings.” See Hoog-Watson v. Guadalupe Cty., 591 F.3d 431, 438 (5th Cir. 2009)

[...]

Defendants were not attempting to control witness testimony during a break in judicial proceedings. Instead, they allegedly used fake subpoenas in an attempt to pressure crime victims and witnesses to meet with them privately at the Office and share information outside of court. Defendants never used the fake subpoenas to compel victims or witnesses to testify at trial. Such allegations are of investigative behavior that was not “intimately associated with the judicial phase of the criminal process.”

Falling further outside the judicial process was the DA's office itself, which apparently felt the judicial system didn't need to be included in its subpoena efforts.

In using the fake subpoenas, Individual Defendants also allegedly intentionally avoided the judicial process that Louisiana law requires for obtaining subpoenas.

The case returns to the lower court where the DA's office will continue to face the state law claims it hoped it would be immune from. The Appeals Court doesn't say the office won't ultimately find some way to re-erect its absolute immunity shield, but at this point, it sees nothing on the record that says prosecutors should be excused from being held responsible for bypassing the judicial system to threaten crime victims and witnesses with jail time.

Given all we know about facial recognition tech, it is literally jaw-dropping that anyone could make this claim… especially without being vetted independently.

A group of Harrisburg University professors and a PhD student have developed an automated computer facial recognition software capable of predicting whether someone is likely to be a criminal.

The software is able to predict if someone is a criminal with 80% accuracy and with no racial bias. The prediction is calculated solely based on a picture of their face.

There's a whole lot of "what even the fuck" in CBS 21's reprint of a press release, but let's start with the claim about "no racial bias." That's a lot to swallow when the underlying research hasn't been released yet. Let's see what the National Institute of Standards and Technology has to say on the subject. This is the result of the NIST's examination of 189 facial recognition AI programs -- all far more established than whatever it is Harrisburg researchers have cooked up.

Asian and African American people were up to 100 times more likely to be misidentified than white men, depending on the particular algorithm and type of search. Native Americans had the highest false-positive rate of all ethnicities, according to the study, which found that systems varied widely in their accuracy.

The faces of African American women were falsely identified more often in the kinds of searches used by police investigators where an image is compared to thousands or millions of others in hopes of identifying a suspect.

Why is this acceptable? The report inadvertently supplies the answer:

Middle-aged white men generally benefited from the highest accuracy rates.

Yep. And guess who's making laws or running police departments or marketing AI to cops or telling people on Twitter not to break the law or etc. etc. etc.

To craft a terrible pun, the researchers' claim of "no racial bias" is absurd on its face. Per se stupid af to use legal terminology.

Moving on from that, there's the 80% accuracy, which is apparently good enough since it will only threaten the life and liberty of 20% of the people it's inflicted on. I guess if it's the FBI's gold standard, it's good enough for everyone.

Maybe this is just bad reporting. Maybe something got copy-pasted wrong from the spammed press release. Let's go to the source… one that somehow still doesn't include a link to any underlying research documents.

What does any of this mean? Are we ready to embrace a bit of pre-crime eugenics? Or is this just the most hamfisted phrasing Harrisburg researchers could come up with?

A group of Harrisburg University professors and a Ph.D. student have developed automated computer facial recognition software capable of predicting whether someone is likely going to be a criminal.

The most charitable interpretation of this statement is that the wrong-20%-of-the-time AI is going to be applied to the super-sketchy "predictive policing" field. Predictive policing -- a theory that says it's ok to treat people like criminals if they live and work in an area where criminals live -- is its own biased mess, relying on garbage data generated by biased policing to turn racist policing into an AI-blessed "work smarter not harder" LEO equivalent.

The question about "likely" is answered in the next paragraph, somewhat assuring readers the AI won't be applied to ultrasound images.

With 80 percent accuracy and with no racial bias, the software can predict if someone is a criminal based solely on a picture of their face. The software is intended to help law enforcement prevent crime.

There's a big difference between "going to be" and "is," and researchers using actual science should know better than to use both phrases to describe their AI efforts. One means scanning someone's face to determine whether they might eventually engage in criminal acts. The other means matching faces to images of known criminals. They are far from interchangeable terms.

If you think the above quotes are, at best, disjointed, brace yourself for this jargon-fest which clarifies nothing and suggests the AI itself wrote the pullquote:

“We already know machine learning techniques can outperform humans on a variety of tasks related to facial recognition and emotion detection,” Sadeghian said. “This research indicates just how powerful these tools are by showing they can extract minute features in an image that are highly predictive of criminality.”

"Minute features in an image that are highly predictive of criminality." And what, pray tell, are those "minute features?" Skin tone? "I AM A CRIMINAL IN THE MAKING" forehead tattoos? Bullshit on top of bullshit? Come on. This is word salad, but a salad pretending to be a law enforcement tool with actual utility. Nothing about this suggests Harrisburg has come up with anything better than the shitty "tools" already being inflicted on us by law enforcement's early adopters.

I wish we could dig deeper into this but we'll all have to wait until this excitable group of clueless researchers decide to publish their findings. According to this site, the research is being sealed inside a "research book," which means it will take a lot of money to actually prove this isn't any better than anything that's been offered before. This could be the next Clearview, but we won't know if it is until the research is published. If we're lucky, it will be before Harrisburg patents this awful product and starts selling it to all and sundry. Don't hold your breath.

The government loves its secrets. It loves them so much it does stupid things to, say, "secure the nation..." or "protect the integrity of deliberative processes" or whatever the fuck. We should not trust the government's reasoning when it chooses to redact information from documents it releases to FOIA requesters. These assertions should always be challenged because the government's track record on redactions is objectively awful.

Here's the latest case-in-point: Emma Best -- someone the government feels is a "vexatious" FOIA filer -- just received a completely stupid set of redactions from the Secret Service. Best requested documents mentioning darknet market Hansa, which was shut down (along with Alpha Bay) following an investigation by US and Dutch law enforcement agencies.

The documents returned to Best contained redactions. This is unsurprising given the nature of the investigation. What's surprising is what the Secret Service decided to redact. As Best pointed out on Twitter, the Secret Service decided public press releases by the DOJ were too sensitive to be released to the general public.

Here's one of the redactions [PDF] the Secret Service applied to a press release that can be found unaltered and unedited at the Justice Department's publicly-accessible website:

And here's what the Secret Service excised, under the bullshit theory that a publicly-released press statement is somehow an "inter-agency or intra-agency memorandums or letter which would not be available by law to a party other than an agency in litigation with the agency."

“This is likely one of the most important criminal investigations of the year – taking down the largest dark net marketplace in history,” said Attorney General Jeff Sessions. “Make no mistake, the forces of law and justice face a new challenge from the criminals and transnational criminal organizations who think they can commit their crimes with impunity using the dark net. The dark net is not a place to hide. The Department will continue to find, arrest, prosecute, convict, and incarcerate criminals, drug traffickers and their enablers wherever they are. We will use every tool we have to stop criminals from exploiting vulnerable people and sending so many Americans to an early grave. I believe that because of this operation, the American people are safer – safer from the threat of identity fraud and malware, and safer from deadly drugs.”

Um. Is Jeff Sessions being Yezhoved by the Secret Service? Does the agency consider him to be enough of a persona non grata after his firing by Trump to be excised from the Secret Services' official recollection of this dark web takedown? This insane conspiracy theory I just made up makes as much sense as anything the Secret Service could offer in explanation for this redaction. The redaction removed nothing but the sort of swaggering statement Attorney Generals always make after a huge bust.

Needless to say, Emma Best is challenging the Secret Service's redactions. Pithily.

I am appealing the integrity of the redactions, as you withheld public press releases under b5, which is grossly inappropriate.

Yeah. That's an understatement. The Secret Service has no business redacting publicly-available info. Even if this was a clerical error, it's so bad it's insulting. And that's why you can't trust the government on things like this: when it's not being malicious, it's being stupid.

Last week AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson stepped down after his $150 billion bid to dominate the video advertising space fell flat on its face. Stephenson's tenure was plagued by no shortage of scandals, though it was his failures on the TV front that likely cost him his comfy seat as one of the highest paid executives in America.

After spending $150 billion on several dubious megamergers (most notably the 2015 purchase of a satellite TV provider DirecTV), Stephenson saddled the company with an ocean of debt. So much debt it was forced to raise rates on customers in the middle of one of the biggest transformational shifts in the TV sectors in decades (cord cutting and the rise of streaming video). And while Stephenson deserves credit for at least trying to get out ahead of the trend, his tenure was pockmarked by a long line of dubious decisions that directly contributed to the company losing more than 3.2 million pay TV subscribers last year alone.

But Stephenson's replacement, AT&T executive John Stankey, doesn't seem much better. In a profile piece last week, Bloomberg described fairly idiotic and cocky recent comments by Stankey as "blunt." Among them was the claim that "nobody knows as much about TV as me," and the insistence that those who don't subscribe to AT&T's confusing assortment of discount TV streaming services must certainly be stupid:

"When pitching AT&T’s new HBO Max streaming platform, he told the audience that anyone unwilling to pay $15 a month for the service had a low IQ. At a town hall with HBO employees last year, Stankey said the network had to dramatically increase its programming output, comparing the work ahead to childbirth. Once, when a Time Warner veteran criticized an idea during a meeting, Stankey replied, “I know more about television than anybody."

Yeah, sounds like just the guy to right the ship, and earn employee and customer respect. Especially for a company plagued with no shortage of hubris that believed it could just bully, bullshit, and bribe its way to industry domination.

One of the major reasons Stephenson was ejected was courtesy of recently hyperactive hedge fund Elliott Management, which holds a massive stake in AT&T. Elliott complained that Stephenson had become megamerger happy and, despite eliminating 37,000 jobs to recoup merger debt (despite billions in regulatory FCC favors and a $42 billion Trump tax cut) wasn't doing enough firing. Reports now suggest that Elliott didn't much like Stankey either, but settled on him after external options proved even more underwhelming:

"Elliott, the hedge fund run by Paul Singer, remains skeptical of incoming CEO John Stankey’s decision-making but has decided his understanding of AT&T’s sprawling assets makes him a better candidate to take over for Stephenson than any external candidate, according to the people...Elliott was skeptical of Stankey’s decision-making as an architect of AT&T’s acquisitions of DirecTV and Time Warner. It advocated that AT&T focus on divesting assets and lowering debt, pushing the largest U.S. wireless company to sell DirecTV, one of the assets Stankey has steadfastly defended."

In short nobody in this drama seems to know what they're actually doing. Few were happy with AT&T's previous leadership. And few seem happy with AT&T's new leadership, who apparently thinks he's a TV sector super genius, and you're a moron if you don't subscribe to AT&T's generally underwhelming TV offerings. Surely this will all go swimmingly.

For well over a decade we've talked about the many problems that arise when copyright is compared to "property" -- and people try to simply move over concepts from physical, tangible property into the world of digital. A key aspect of this: when you "purchase" something digital online, is it really a "purchase" or is it a "license" (especially a license that could be revoked)? If it was a true "purchase" then you should own it and the seller shouldn't be able to take it back. But in practice, over and over and over again, we've seen stories of people having things they supposedly "bought" disappear. The situation is so crazy that we've referred to it as Schrödinger's Download, in that many copyright holders and retailers would like the very same thing to be a "sale" some of the time, and a "license" some of the time (the "times" for each tend to be when it hurts the consumers the most). This has, at times, seeped into physical goods, where they've tried to add "license agreements" to physical products. Or, worse, when some copyright folks claimed that buying a DVD means you don't actually own what you bought, but rather are merely "purchasing access" to the content, and that could be revoked.

Anyway, I'm amazed that we don't see more lawsuits about this kind of thing -- but one was recently filed in California. Someone named Amanda Caudel is suing Amazon for saying that you've "purchased" a video download, which Amazon might disappear from your library whenever it wants. As the lawsuit makes clear, Amazon directly says that you are buying the movie (as opposed to renting it). From the lawsuit filing itself:

And, they point out, in your account there's a listing of "Your Video Purchases & Rentals." But, the lawsuit claims, what you purchase doesn't seem to behave like a real purchase:

Reasonable consumers will expect that the use of a “Buy” button and the representation that their Video Content is a “Purchase” means that the consumer has paid for full access to the Video Content and, like any bought product, that access cannot be revoked.

Unfortunately for consumers who chose the “Buy” option, this is deceptive and untrue. Rather, the ugly truth is that Defendant secretly reserves the right to terminate the consumers’ access and use of the Video Content at any time, and has done so on numerous occasions, leaving the consumer without the ability to enjoy their already-bought Video Content.

Defendant’s representations are misleading because they give the impression that the Video Content is purchased – i.e. the person owns it - when in fact that is not true because Defendant or others may revoke access to the Video Content at any time and for any reason.

In so representing the “Purchase” of Video Content as true ownership of the content, Defendant took advantage of the (1) cognitive shortcuts made at the point-of-sale, e.g. Rent v. Buy and (2) price of the Video Content, which is akin to an outright purchase versus a rental.

Though some consumers may get lucky and never lose access to any of their paid-for media, others may one day find that their Video Content is now completely inaccessible. Regardless, all consumers have overpaid for the Video Content because they are not in fact owners of the Video Content, despite have paid extra money to “Buy” the product.

The plaintiff (or rather, her lawyers) are trying to make this a class action lawsuit, and are arguing that (among other things) this is false advertising. I am, not surprisingly, sympathetic to the plaintiff -- and remain disappointed at how copyright and similar restrictions are being used to chip away at ownership and actual property rights. That said... I'm not that optimistic the case will get very far. In the past, companies have been able to wiggle out of similar claims, and I'm pretty sure that Amazon tries to push disputes like this to binding arbitration, meaning that the lawsuit may be dead on arrival.

Still, it's yet another reminder of how copyright is chipping away at real property.

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A couple of months ago, a records request revealed a private surveillance contractor had access to nearly every piece of surveillance equipment owned and operated by the state of Utah. Banjo was the company with its pens in all of the state's ink. Banjo's algorithm ran on top of Utah's surveillance gear: CCTV systems, 911 services, location data for government vehicles, and thousands of traffic cameras.

All of this was run through Banjo's servers, which are conveniently located in Utah government buildings. Banjo's offering is of the predictive policing variety. The CEO claims its software can "find crime" without any collateral damage to privacy. This claim is based on the "anonymization" of harvested data -- a term that is essentially meaningless once enough data is collected.

This partnership is now on the rocks, thanks to an investigation by Matt Stroud and OneZero. Banjo's CEO, Damien Patton, apparently spent a lot of his formative years hanging around with white supremacists while committing crimes.

In grand jury testimony that ultimately led to the conviction of two of his associates, Patton revealed that, as a 17-year-old, he was involved with the Dixie Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. On the evening of June 9, 1990 — a month before Patton turned 18 — Patton and a Klan leader took a semi-automatic TEC-9 pistol and drove to a synagogue in a Nashville suburb. With Patton at the wheel, the Ku Klux Klan member fired onto the synagogue, destroying a street-facing window and spraying bullets and shattered glass near the building’s administrative offices, which were next to that of the congregation’s rabbi. No one was struck or killed in the shooting. Afterward, Patton hid on the grounds of a white supremacist paramilitary training camp under construction before fleeing the state with the help of a second Klan member.

If you're wondering where the state of Utah's due diligence is in all of this, there's a partial explanation for this lapse: the feds, who brought Patton in, screwed up on their paperwork.

Because Patton’s name was misspelled in the initial affidavit of probable cause filed in Brown’s case — an FBI agent apparently spelled Damien with an “o” rather than an “e” — any search of a federal criminal court database for “Damien Patton” would not have surfaced the affidavit.

Now that his past has been exposed, the state of Utah has announced it won't be working with Banjo.

The Utah attorney general’s office will suspend use of a massive surveillance system after a news report showed that the founder of the company behind the effort was once an active participant in a white supremacist group and was involved in the shooting of a synagogue.

The AG's office can only shut down so much of Banjo's surveillance software. Other government agencies not directly controlled by the state AG are making their own judgment calls. The University of Utah is suspending its contract with Banjo, but the state's Department of Public Safety has only gone so far as to "launch a review" of its partnership with the company. City agencies and a number of police departments who have contracts with Banjo have yet to state whether they will be terminating theirs.

And the AG's reaction isn't a ban. The office appears to believe it might be able to work through this.

“While we believe Mr. Patton’s remorse is sincere and believe people can change, we feel it’s best to suspend use of Banjo technology by the Utah attorney general’s office while we implement a third-party audit and advisory committee to address issues like data privacy and possible bias,” Piatt said. “We recommend other state agencies do the same.”

It's refreshing to hear a prosecutor state that it's possible for former criminals to turn their lives around and become positive additions to their communities, but one gets the feeling this sort of forgiveness is only extended to ex-cons who have something to offer law enforcement agencies. Everyone else is just their rap sheet for forever, no matter how many years it's been since their last arrest.

The other problem here is the DA's office's tacit admission it did not take data privacy or possible bias into account before granting Banjo access to the state's surveillance equipment, allowing it to set up servers in government buildings, and giving it free rein to dust everything with its unaudited AI pixie dust.

These are all steps that should have taken place before any of this was implemented, even if the state had chosen to do business with a company with a less controversial CEO. This immediate reaction is the right step to take, but a little proactivity now and then would be a welcome change.

Kelly Loeffler is, by far, the wealthiest elected official in Congress, with an estimated net worth of half a billion dollars (the second wealthiest is Montana Rep. Greg Gianforte (famous for his body slamming a journalist for asking him a question and then lying to the police about it)). Loeffler may be used to getting away with tearing up the red tape in her previous life, but in Congress, that often looks pretty corrupt. In just the last few months since she was appointed, there were concerns about her stock sales and stock purchases, which seemed oddly matched to information she was getting during briefings regarding the impact of COVID-19. She has since agreed to convert all her stock holdings to managed funds outside of her control (something every elected official should do, frankly).

Now, the NY Times is noting another form of what we've referred to as "soft corruption" -- moves that might technically be legal, but which sure look sketchy as hell to any regular non-multimillionaire elected official. In this case, Senator Loeffler received what was, in effect, a gift worth $9 million from her former employer, Intercontinental Exchange (the company that runs the NY Stock Exchange, and where her husband is the CEO).

The key issue was that since she was leaving the job to go join the Senate, she had a bunch of unvested stock. For normal people, if you leave a job before your stock vests, too bad. That's the deal. The vesting period is there for a reason. But for powerful, rich people, apparently the rules change. Intercontinental Exchange changed the rules to grant her the compensation that she wasn't supposed to get, because why not?

Ms. Loeffler, who was appointed to the Senate in December and is now in a competitive race to hold her seat, appears to have received stock and other awards worth more than $9 million from the company, Intercontinental Exchange, according to a review of securities filings by The New York Times, Ms. Loeffler’s financial disclosure form and interviews with compensation and accounting experts. That was on top of her 2019 salary and bonus of about $3.5 million.

The additional compensation came in the form of shares, stock options and other instruments that Ms. Loeffler had previously been granted but was poised to forfeit by leaving the company. Intercontinental Exchange altered the terms of the awards, allowing her to keep them. The largest component — which the company had previously valued at about $7.8 million — was a stake in an Intercontinental Exchange subsidiary that Ms. Loeffler had been running.

The entitlement factor oozes out of the statement put out from her office in response to this:

“Kelly left millions in equity compensation behind to serve in public office to protect freedom, conservative values and economic opportunity for all Georgians,” said Stephen Lawson, a spokesman for Ms. Loeffler. “The obsession of the liberal media and career politicians with her success shows their bias against private sector opportunity in favor of big government.”

No, Stephen, that's not the issue. The issue is that normal people who haven't vested yet, don't get to have the board change the vesting rules as you're leaving to go legislate in order to give you a $9 million windfall you didn't earn because it hadn't vested. If it had just been a question of compensation, no one would be complaining. If she had played by the rules that everyone else played by, lived up to her end of the contract and vested the equity, then no big deal. The problem is the last minute changing of the rules to get her a pretty massive payout (perhaps not by her standards, but by anyone else's).

Indeed, the details show that this wasn't just a timing thing, like a standard vesting deal, but that Loeffler was supposed to reach certain milestones to be able to get the equity. She didn't, but she still gets it. That's the part that has people concerned.

In February 2019, Intercontinental Exchange gave Ms. Loeffler a stake in a limited liability company that owned a stake in Bakkt, according to a March 2019 securities filing. The company at the time estimated the award was worth $15.6 million. But Ms. Loeffler would be able to cash in on the award only under certain circumstances, including if Bakkt’s value soared or if it became a publicly traded company.

When Ms. Loeffler stepped down from the company less than 10 months later, she was poised to forfeit much of that Bakkt stake. But Intercontinental Exchange sped up the vesting process so that she got half of it immediately.

The company, of course, puts a nice spin on it, saying "We admire Kelly’s decision to serve her country in the U.S. Senate and did not want to discourage that willingness to serve,” but what else are they going to say anyway?

Still waiting for that supposed swamp draining we keep hearing about.

The coronavirus pandemic and its associated lockdown in most countries has forced major changes in the way people live, work and study. Online learning is now routine for many, and is largely unproblematic, not least because it has been used for many years. However, online testing is more tricky, since there is a concern by many teachers that students might use their isolated situation to cheat during exams. One person's problem is another person's opportunity, and there are a number of proctoring services that claim to stop or at least minimize cheating during online tests. One thing they have in common is that they tend to be intrusive, and show little respect for the privacy of the people they monitor.

As an article in The Verge explains, some employ humans to watch over students using Zoom video calls. That's reasonably close to a traditional setup, where a teacher or proctor watches students in an exam hall. But there are also webcam-based automated approaches, as explored by Vox:

For instance, Examity also uses AI to verify students' identities, analyze their keystrokes, and, of course, ensure they're not cheating. Proctorio uses artificial intelligence to conduct gaze detection, which tracks whether a student is looking away from their screens.

It's not just in the US that these extreme surveillance methods are being adopted. In France, the University of Rennes 1 is using a system called Managexam, which adds a few extra features: the ability to detect "inappropriate" Internet searches by the student, the use of a second screen, or the presence of another person in the room (original in French). The Vox articles notes that even when these systems are deployed, students still try to cheat using new tricks, and the anti-cheating services try to stop them doing so:

it's easy to find online tips and tricks for duping remote proctoring services. Some suggest hiding notes underneath the view of the camera or setting up a secret laptop. It's also easy for these remote proctoring services to find out about these cheating methods, so they're constantly coming up with countermeasures. On its website, Proctorio even has a job listing for a "professional cheater" to test its system. The contract position pays between $10,000 and $20,000 a year.

As the arms race between students and proctoring services escalates, it's surely time to ask whether the problem isn't people cheating, but the use of old-style, analog testing formats in a world that has been forced by the coronavirus pandemic to move to a completely digital approach. Rather than spending so much time, effort and money on trying to stop students from cheating, maybe we need to come up with new ways of measuring what they have learnt and understood -- ones that are not immune to cheating, but where cheating has no meaning. Obvious options include "open book" exams, where students can use whatever resources they like, or even abolishing formal exams completely, and opting for continuous assessment. Since the lockdown has forced educational establishments to re-invent teaching, isn't it time they re-invented exams too?

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A few weeks ago, the US telecom industry began pushing a bullshit narrative through its usual allies. In short, the claim revolves around the argument that the only reason the US internet still works during a pandemic was because the Trump FCC ignored the public, ignored most objective experts, and gutted itself at the behest of telecom industry lobbyists. The argument first popped up over at AEI, then the Trump FCC, then the pages of the Wall Street Journal, and has since been seen in numerous op-eds nationwide. I'd wager that's not a coincidence, and I'd also wager we'll be seeing a lot more of them.

All of the pieces try to argue that the only reason the US internet works during a pandemic is because the FCC gutted its authority over telecom as part of its "restoring internet freedom" net neutrality repeal. This repeal, the story goes, drove significant investment in US broadband networks (not remotely true), resulting in telecom Utopia (also not true). The argument also posits that in Europe, where regulators have generally taken a more active role in policing things like industry consolidation and telecom monopolies, the internet all but fell apart (guess what: not true).

Usually, like in this op-ed, there's ample insistence that the US broadband sector is largely wonderful while the EU has gone to hell:

"Unlike here, European networks are more heavily regulated. This has led to less investment and worse performance for consumers for years. American consumers are being generally well served by the private sector."

Anybody who has spent five minutes talking to Comcast customer support -- or tried to get scandal-plagued ISP like Frontier Communications to upgrade rotten DSL lines -- knows this is bullshit. Still, we penned a lengthy post exploring just how full of shit this argument is, and how there's absolutely zero supporting evidence for the claims. The entire house of cards is built on fluff and nonsense, and it's just ethically grotesque to use a disaster to help justify regulatory capture and market failure.

While it's true that the US internet, in general, has held up relatively well during a pandemic, the same can't be said of the so called "last mile," or the link from your ISP's network to your home. Yes, the core internet and most primary transit routes, designed to handle massive capacity spikes during events like the Superbowl, has handled the load relatively well. The problem, as Sascha Meinrath correctly notes here, is sluggish speeds on consumer and business lines that, for many, haven't been upgraded in years:

"Right now, an international consortium of network scientists is collecting 750,000 U.S. broadband speed tests from internet service provider (ISP) customers each day, and we’ve been tracking a stunning loss of connectivity speeds to people’s homes. According to most ISPs, the core network is handling the extra load. But our data show that the last-mile network infrastructure appears to be falling down on the job."

Again, your 5 Mbps DSL line might be ok during normal times, but it's not going to serve you well during a pandemic when your entire family is streaming 4K videos, gaming, and Zooming. And your DSL line isn't upgraded because there's (1) very little competition forcing your ISP to do so, and (2) the US government is filled to the brim with sycophants who prioritize campaign contributions and ISP revenues over the health of the market and consumer welfare. And while there's a contingency of industry-linked folks who try very hard to pretend otherwise, this is a policy failure that's directly tied to mindless deregulation, a lack of competition, and, more importantly, corruption. In short, the complete opposite of the industry's latest talking point.

For years we've been noting how US telcos have refused to repair or upgrade aging DSL lines because it's not profitable enough, quickly enough for Wall Street's liking. Facing no competition and no regulatory oversight, there's zero incentive for a giant US broadband provider to try very hard. Similarly, because our lawmakers and regulators are largely of the captured, revolving door variety, they rubber stamp shitty mergers, turn a blind eye to very obvious industry problems, routinely throwing billions in taxpayer money at monopolies in exchange for fiber networks that are usually only partially deployed -- if they're deployed at all.

Meanwhile, US telcos that have all but given up on upgrading aging DSL lines have helped cement an even bigger Comcast monopoly across vast swaths of America. It's a problem that the telecom sector, Trump FCC, and various industry apologists will ignore to almost comical effect. Also ignored is the fact that this results in US broadband subscribers paying some of the highest prices for broadband in the developed world:

"Numerous studies, including those conducted by the FCC itself, show that broadband pricing is the second-largest barrier to broadband adoption (availability is the first). It’s obvious that if people are being charged a lot for a service, they’re less likely to purchase it. And independent researchers have already documented that poor areas often pay more than rich communities for connectivity. Redlining of minority and rural areas appears to be widespread, and we need accurate pricing data from the FCC to meaningfully address these disparities."

Try to find any instance where Ajit Pai, or anybody in this chorus of telecom monopoly apologists, actually admits that the US broadband market isn't competitive and, as a result, is hugely expensive for businesses and consumers alike. You simply won't find it. What you will find are a lot of excuses and straw men arguments like this latest one, designed to distract the press, public, and policymakers from very obvious market failure. Market failure that was a major problem in normal times, and exponentially more so during a pandemic where broadband is an essential lifeline.

You may recall in the early days of the pandemic, that pharma giant Gilead Sciences -- which has been accused of price gouging and (just last year!) charging exorbitant prices on drug breakthroughs developed with US taxpayer funds -- was able to sneak through an orphan works designation for its drug remdesevir for COVID-19 treatment. As we pointed out, everything about this was insane, given that orphan works designations, which give extra monopoly rights to the holders (beyond patent exclusivity), are meant for diseases that don't impact a large population. Gilead used a loophole: since the ceiling for infected people to qualify for orphan drug status is 200,000, Gilead got in its application bright and early, before there were 200,000 confirmed cases (we currently have over 1.3 million). After the story went, er... viral, Gilead agreed to drop the orphan status, realizing the bad publicity it was receiving.

After a brief dalliance with chloroquine, remdesivir has suddenly been back in demand as the new hotness of possible COVID-19 treatments. Still, a close reading of the research might give one pause. There have been multiple conflicting studies, and Gilead's own messaging has been a mess.

On April 23, 2020, news of the study’s failure began to circulate. It seems that the World Health Organization (WHO) had posted a draft report about the trial on their clinical trials database, which indicated that the scientists terminated the study prematurely due to high levels of adverse side effects.

The WHO withdrew the report, and the researchers published their results in The Lancet on April 29, 2020.

The number of people who experienced adverse side effects was roughly similar between those receiving remdesivir and those receiving a placebo. In 18 participants, the researchers stopped the drug treatment due to adverse reactions.

But then...

However, also on April 29, 2020, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) announced that their NIH trial showed that remdesivir treatment led to faster recovery in hospital patients with COVID-19, compared with placebo treatment.

“Preliminary results indicate that patients who received remdesivir had a 31% faster time to recovery than those who received placebo,” according to the press release. “Specifically, the median time to recovery was 11 days for patients treated with remdesivir compared with 15 days for those who received placebo.”

The mortality rate in the remdesivir treatment group was 8%, compared with 11.6% in the placebo group, indicating that the drug could improve a person’s chances of survival. These data were close to achieving statistical significance.

And then...

“In addition, there is another Chinese trial, also stopped because the numbers of new patients with COVID-19 had fallen in China so they were unable to recruit, which has not yet published its data,” Prof. Evans continues. “There are other trials where remdesivir is compared with non-remdesivir treatments currently [being] done and results from some of these should appear soon.”

Gilead also put out its own press release about another clinical trial, which seems more focused on determining the optimal length of remdesivir treatment. Suffice it to say, there's still a lot of conflicting data and no clear information on whether or not remdesevir actually helps.

Still, that hasn't stopped people from trying to figure out just how much Gilead will price gouge going forward:

The Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER), which assesses effectiveness of drugs to determine appropriate prices, suggested a maximum price of $4,500 per 10-day treatment course based on the preliminary evidence of how much patients benefited in a clinical trial. Consumer advocacy group Public Citizen on Monday said remdesivir should be priced at $1 per day of treatment, since “that is more than the cost of manufacturing at scale with a reasonable profit to Gilead.”

Some Wall Street investors expect Gilead to come in at $4,000 per patient or higher to make a profit above remdesivir’s development cost, which Gilead estimates at about $1 billion.

So... we've got a range of $10 to $4,500 on a treatment that we don't yet know works, and which may or may not save lives. But, given that we're in the midst of a giant debate concerning things like "reopening the economy" -- something that can really only be done if the public is not afraid of dying (or at least becoming deathly ill) -- the value to the overall economy seems much greater than whatever amount Gilead wants to charge. It seems the right thing to do -- again, if it's shown that remdesevir actually helps -- is to just hand over a bunch of money to Gilead, say "thank you very much" and get the drug distributed as widely as possible. Though, again, it should be noted that a decent chunk of the research around remdesevir was not done or paid for by Gilead, but (yet again) via public funds to public universities, which did the necessary research. The idea that it's Gilead that should get to reap massive rewards for that seems sketchy at best. But the absolute worst outcome is one in which Gilead sticks to its standard operating procedure and prices the drug in a way that millions of Americans can't afford it, and it leads to a prolonging/expanding of the pandemic.

There has been a lot of talk about how this moment in history is going to be remembered -- and as Professor Jay Rosen has been saying, a key part is going to be an effort by the many people who failed to respond properly to rewrite the history of everything that happened:

There is going to be a campaign to prevent Americans from understanding what happened within the Trump government during the critical months of January to April, 2020. Many times Donald Trump told the nation that it has nothing to worry about because he and his people have the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus well in hand. They did not. He misled the country about that.

“It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control,” he told CNBC on January 22. “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China,” he told Sean Hannity on February 2. On February 24, Trump tweeted that “the Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA.”

He misled the country. This basic fact is so damning, the evidence for it so mountainous, and the mountain of evidence so public — and so personally attached to Donald Trump — that the only option is to create confusion about these events, and about the pandemic generally, in hopes that people give up and conclude that the public record does not speak clearly and everything is propaganda.

The battle over rewriting history is going to take many forms in many different ways -- and so it's good to see a company like Twitter making it easier for researchers to look at the actual history of the public conversation during these months.

To further support Twitter’s ongoing efforts to protect the public conversation, and help people find authoritative health information around COVID-19, we’re releasing a new endpoint into Twitter Developer Labs to enable approved developers and researchers to study the public conversation about COVID-19 in real-time.

This is a unique dataset that covers many tens of millions of Tweets daily and offers insight into the evolving global public conversation surrounding an unprecedented crisis. Making this access available for free is one of the most unique and valuable things Twitter can do as the world comes together to protect our communities and seek answers to pressing challenges. 

It would be interesting to see if others (cough Facebook cough) would do the same thing as well. How the history of these times is written is going to be important in seeing how we deal with the next such crisis.

There is great confusion among Christians about the unforgivable sin. Jesus talks about it in Matthew 12:31-32. This brief study summarizes what the unforgivable sin is, and how you can know you have not committed it. This study is an excerpt from my Gospel Dictionary online course.

Lots of people are very confused about the topic of Forgiveness in the Bible. This study looks at what the book of Acts teaches about forgiveness, and in this way, we see a glimpse of what the Bible teaches about forgiveness. This study is an excerpt from from my Gospel Dictionary online course.

In Matthew 12:33-37, in the context of warning the religious leaders about the sin of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, Jesus talks about good fruit and bad fruit. Is Jesus telling people to look at the lives of other teachers to see if they have good works? No! Not at all. Listen to the study to see what Jesus IS teaching and why this is important for properly understanding the gospel.

In John 15:1-8, Jesus talks about the importance of the branches abiding in the vine in order to produce fruit. If branches do not produce good fruit, they will be burned. Is Jesus saying that if Christians do not have good works they will be sent to hell? No! Not at all. Listen to the study to see what Jesus IS teaching and why this is important for properly understanding the gospel.

Pretty sure we’ve all heard Tom Lehrer’s “Lobachevsky,” right? A song about plagiarism where all the bits of melody are...

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Just as in other types of victimization, victims of cybercrime can experience serious consequences, emotional or not. First of all, a repeat victim of a cyber-attack might face serious financial or emotional hardship. These victims are also more likely to require medical attention as a consequence of online fraud victimization. This means repeat victims have a … Continue reading Three Paper Thursday: Exploring the Impact of Online Crime Victimization →

This Avocado Caesar Salad Dressing is a great homemade dressing for those who want a different spin on an ordinary sauce for your salad. The creaminess from the Avocado gives it a much thicker texture as it coats all of the Rom

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These vegan double chocolate muffins are so soft, moist and packed with chocolate flavor! Dark cocoa and chocolate chip dairy free muffins recipe!

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These vegan waffles are perfectly crispy and flavored with a hint of vanilla! Super easy to make with a handful of pantry staples, and perfect for an indulgent breakfast or brunch.

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If you are unfamiliar with pavlovas, they are light meringue cakes; inspired by the tutu of a famous ballerina named Anna Pavlova. This dessert will be sure to impress.

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This amazing Vegan Almond Dark Chocolate is the best dessert for all chocolate lovers, that you must try!

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