(date: 2024-02-09 08:22:27)
date: 2024-02-09, from: Dan Rather’s Steady
Fascist Germany may feel like a lifetime ago, but it was actually during my lifetime. And yet many people old enough to remember seem to have forgotten the horrible lessons of that time. Many more have never been taught what happened, why, or how. So given the current state of the world, including the situation in our own country, this is as good a time as any for review and reminders.
https://steady.substack.com/p/not-so-long-ago Save to Pocket
date: 2024-02-09, from: Robert Reich’s blog
And last night’s bombshell
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/bidens-brain-trumps-brain Save to Pocket
date: 2024-02-09, updated: 2024-02-09, from: Daring Fireball
https://blog.lastpass.com/2024/02/warning-fraudulent-app-impersonating-lastpass-currently-available-in-apple-app-store/ Save to Pocket
date: 2024-02-09, from: John Naughton’s online diary
Writing by candlelight In memory of E.P. Thompson. Quote of the Day I loathe writing. On the other hand I’m a great believer in money. S. J. Perelman Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Handel | Violin Sonata, Op.1 … Continue reading
https://memex.naughtons.org/friday-9-february-2024/39110/ Save to Pocket
date: 2024-02-08, updated: 2024-02-08, from: Daring Fireball
https://thewaltdisneycompany.com/disney-and-epic-games-fortnite/ Save to Pocket
date: 2024-02-08, updated: 2024-02-08, from: Daring Fireball
https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/5/24062425/youtube-vision-pro-app-360-vr-video Save to Pocket
date: 2024-02-08, updated: 2024-02-08, from: Daring Fireball
https://christianselig.com/2024/02/introducing-juno/ Save to Pocket
date: 2024-02-08, from: David Rosenthal’s blog
“Vicky” |
I showed my phone to my friend and explained that I was stringing Vicky along because I’d heard about a new kind of investment fraud that often started with a random text message. I had a hunch that this was why “Vicky” was texting me. The scam was called “pig butchering” because the scammers liked to build up the victim’s confidence with a pretend romantic relationship and made-up investment gains before stealing all their money in one fell swoop—like how hogs are fattened up before their slaughter.This is a romance- and cryptocurrency-enabled version of the “Wee Forest Folk” scam we described in our 2003 SOSP paper.
Source |
My short-lived texting flirtation with Vicky confirmed something that I had suspected: The scammers were using Tether to move the money. I spoke with several other pig-butchering victims, and they said they’d been asked to send Tether too.How much Tether are we talking?:
…
From the scammer’s perspective, Tether was a clear improvement on bribing bankers or money mules. It was instant, there was no recourse for refunds, and it didn’t ask for anyone’s name or address. And unlike other cryptocurrencies, its value didn’t fluctuate from hour to hour, making it less scary for potential victims and easier to manage for criminals.
News stories revealed that people were losing huge amounts of money. A project finance lawyer in Boston with terminal cancer handed over $2.5 million. A divorced mother of three in St. Louis was defrauded of $5 million. A twenty-four-year-old social media producer in Tennessee lost $300,000 she inherited from the sale of her childhood home.Despite Tether’s ability to freeze wallets, Faux writes:
…
I came across a group that claimed to be raising money dedicated to helping victims. It was called the Global Anti-Scam Organization. The group said it had helped a huge number of pig-butchering victims: 1,483 worldwide, who’d lost more than $250 million combined.
Icetoad and other volunteers from the Global Anti-Scam group told me that Tether refused to help them by freezing accounts or seizing stolen money, even when presented with evidence that an account held the proceeds of fraud.Faux got Rich Sanders of CipherBlade to trace his payment to “Vicky”:
…
In another exchange provided by Global Anti-Scam, Tether told a Hong Kong police official that it did have the ability to intervene. But the company still refused, saying the case was too small. “We must sometimes decline fraud cases involving relatively small amounts of stolen USDT,” the Tether representative wrote, using the ticker symbol for the cryptocurrency. It said they would only intervene if the case was “directly connected to acts of violence.”
a small dark circle represented Vicky Ho’s wallet. This was where I’d sent the eighty-one Tethers. Sanders explained that the wallet was active for about two months and received many deposits from addresses that were known to be associated with U.S. and Canadian Canadian crypto exchanges. There were transfers of $3,600, $180, $400, $500, and $9,774, always in Tether. These were other people who’d been scammed by the same operation, Sanders said. In other words, I wasn’t Vicky’s only love interest. Once Vicky Ho had collected the money, they sent it to another numbered address, represented on the screen by a larger white circle. This one was likely controlled by the scammers too, Sanders said, and it held $9.4 million in Tethers. From there, many of the Tethers were sent to addresses associated with the crypto exchange Binance, and to others that belonged to Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX.Global Anti-Scam told Faux that:
most butchering scams were orchestrated by gangsters based in Cambodia or Myanmar. These bosses would lure young men and women from across Southeast Asia to move abroad with the promise of well-paying jobs in customer service or online gambling. Then, when the workers arrived, they’d be held captive and forced to work on online scams. Icetoad and his colleagues told me there were thousands of people who’d been tricked this way. Entire office towers were filled with floor after floor of people forced to send spam messages around the clock, under threat of torture or death. These were the people using Tether to move their money.His next chapter recounts his trip to Cambodia to see the pig-butchering campuses. Like the rest of the book, it is well worth reading. Conditions in these campuses were horrific:
Workers who missed quotas were beaten, starved, made to hit one another. One said he’d seen people forcibly injected with methamphetamine to increase productivity. Two others said they’d seen workers murdered, with the deaths passed off as suicides. They said the bosses would buy and sell captive laborers like livestock.
…
Local news reports described a string of suspicious deaths near Chinatown—one body was found hanging at a construction site, and another corpse was dug up handcuffed from a shallow grave in a field nearby. A local vendor told a Cambodian outlet that there had been many suicides at the complex. “If an ambulance doesn’t go inside at least twice a week, it is a wonder,” he said.
Wang and cybercrime cop> |
At a Thai police headquarters in October 2022, Chinese businessman Wang Yicheng congratulated one of Bangkok’s most senior cybercrime investigators on his recent promotion, presenting the official with a large bouquet of flowers wrapped in red paper and a bow.Where was Wang’s account?:
Wang, the vice president of a local Chinese trade group, wished the new cybercrime investigator “smooth work and new achievements,” according to the group’s website, which displays photographs of the event.
Over the past two years, Wang has forged relationships with members of Thailand’s law-enforcement and political elite, the trade group’s online posts show. During that time, a cryptocurrency account registered in Wang’s name was receiving millions of dollars linked to a type of cryptocurrency investment scam known as pig butchering, a Reuters investigation has found.
In total, crypto worth more than $90 million flowed into the account between January 2021 and November 2022, according to registration documents and transaction logs reviewed by Reuters. Of that, at least $9.1 million came from a crypto wallet that U.S. blockchain analysis firm TRM Labs said was linked to pig-butchering scams. Two other major crypto-tracking firms also said the account received funds linked to such scams.
…
Lisa Wolk, a blockchain intelligence analyst at TRM, said the crypto account in Wang’s name “is a node in a money laundering network and not necessarily the ultimate recipient of funds.” Reuters was unable to determine whether anyone else benefited from the account or used Wang’s identity to open it.
The crypto account registered to Wang was held at Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, according to three blockchain analysis firms. Asked about the account, Binance spokesperson Jessica Jung declined to comment on individual users or Reuters’ findings. In an August post on its website, the company said the number of reports of pig-butchering scams it had received this year was double that of 2022, an increase it attributed to an influx of inexperienced crypto investors and scammers looking to exploit them.Wang’s account moved a lot of Tether:
…
In April, the U.S. Department of Justice said it seized about $112 million worth of crypto linked to pig-butchering scams, without identifying suspects. A warrant that resulted in the seizure of more than half that amount specified a Binance account registered in Thailand.
The crypto account in Wang’s name was registered in November 2020, according to the financial records Reuters reviewed. The three blockchain-analysis firms determined the account was with Binance. The documents, which relate to the Binance account, span two years to November 2022. They show that the account was accessed mostly from Bangkok.The pigs weren’t butchered in Bangkok:
Deposits started arriving in the account in early 2021 and quickly increased in size to include sums of more than $100,000, the financial records show.
…
In 2022, the volume of crypto reaching the account in Wang’s name mushroomed to almost $79 million, a near six-fold increase on the previous year, the account records seen by Reuters show.
Coinfirm, the blockchain analysis firm that reviewed the transaction records for Reuters, said deposits from funds linked to pig-butchering scams it previously investigated began entering the account as early as February 2022. Stolen crypto was moved to the account via a “complex layering scheme,” involving multiple different wallets, Coinfirm’s then-head of fraud investigations Roman Bieda told Reuters in May. The crypto moved between “dozens” of wallets and was mixed with funds from other sources, he said.
More than $102,000 originating from fraudsters’ wallets that the California man identified were deposited into the account in Wang’s name between June 26 and Oct. 23, 2022, according to Coinfirm.
Nearly all of the crypto deposited in the Wang-registered account was moved to other wallets, the transaction records reviewed by Reuters show. Between January 2021 and October 2022, about $87.5 million was transferred to almost 50 other crypto wallets, including at least five registered at regionally based crypto exchanges, Coinfirm said.
Several scams connected to deposits made into the account in Wang’s name were run from an industrial park on the Myanmar-Thai border, one of the blockchain analysis firms told Reuters. Workers are trafficked to the area, known as KK Park, by gangs that force them to con people online, according to two former workers and groups that support workers or scam victims.This was clearly a different pig abattoir from the Cambodia-based one Faux investigated.
The world is experiencing an epidemic of online scams with at least tens of billions of dollars lost across dozens of countries. One particular class of scam known as “pig butchering” has grown dramatically and often involves the use of cryptocurrency both to collect funds from victims and to launder the proceeds. Here we are going to explore the use of cryptocurrency in pig butchering scams beginning with victims in both the People’s Republic of China and United States of America, and demonstrating the remarkable degree of similarity for cases that have no reason a priori to be similar at all.The two teams use press accounts of two cases with victims in China and legal filings from two cases with victims in Florida and California. They provide detailed traces, including wallet addresses, of flows from the victims to exchanges including Binance, Bitkub, FTX, OKX, Coinbase, Huboi, Maskex, Paribu and Peatio amounting to $635M. In particular, one of the Binance wallets was one of those identified in Reuters’ reporting. The paper concludes:
Specifically we will show that scammers with victims in both these countries share cryptocur- rency addresses, use overlapping sets of money-laundering services, and are therefore likely parts of the same group or syndicate. Our analysis begins with reports from victims in both countries where we find source victim and scam wallet addresses. From there we are able to trace scam proceeds through the cryptocurrency ecosystem to prove these connections. Finally, a range of exchanges and other service providers are identified through a combination of on-chain and documentary research, to demonstrate the cross-border nature of modern scams leveraging cryptocurrencies, and highlight the challenges facing law enforcement agencies globally when it comes to such scams.
The ChainArgos team followed up with Laundering the Proceeds of Crime: Crypto’s Killer App?:
- Similar simultaneously-run scams have victims in both China and the United States.
- Funds taken from both jurisdictions flow through common service providers.
- The sums involved range from the tens to possibly hundreds of millions of dollars.
Now we are going to connect a few more dots to argue that scamming and the laundering of scam proceeds was not just a use case for cryptocurrencies in Asia, but likely a major driver of flows through several well-known industry players.They note that Genesis Block, whose Charles Yang admitted maintaining bank accounts in South-East Asia under false pretences, appears to have been the on- and off-ramp for FTX in the region. The earlier paper showed that:
This may well even be, empirically, crypto’s killer app.
FTX was involved in processing over US$250 million in flows downstream from scams and Bitkub, Thailand’s largest crypto exchange, was involved in over US$100 million.Could this be “banking Cambodia’s unbanked”?:
Cambodia’s population is only 16 million, with a per capita GDP of about US$1,600 — it’s hard to imagine Cambodia driving hundreds of millions of dollars worth of stablecoin flows.They refer to the interview with Charles Yang and note that:
Genesis Block’s head trader explicitly talks about scam proceeds leading to bank account freezes and how they actively manage this problem.Genesis Block was plugged in to the top level of cryptocurrency infrastructure:
So Genesis Block were clearly a downstream service provider and knew that at least some of their clients were, or at least were dealing with, criminals.
With regards to Genesis Block’s Chinese client base, in a different interview the same person says:
We’ve been seeing a lot of our partners pretty much disappear…a lot of our friends over there are kind of in big trouble…it’s not really about crypto it’s more about the source of the RMB… [which was] a lot of pyramid schemes, a lot of scams.Genesis Block were clearly dealing with people who were either criminals themselves, or service providers to criminals, and Genesis Block appeared comfortable talking about such activities on camera.
Genesis Block OTC was on the Signet client list, as were many of the other exchanges referenced in our earlier work.This leads ChainArgos to argue that:
A service provider that talked openly about dealing with criminals was active on a platform another commentator described as “a walled garden filled with snakes.”
That service provider (Genesis Block) was integrated with FTX/Alameda Research), which was both the largest recipient of new USDT and a major exchange operator with myriad, sometimes-remarkably-creative, schemes to access fiat currency.
it is entirely plausible that:Thus ChainArgos concludes:
and this isn’t just plausible, it’s provable, because the illicit flows documented in our prior work were laundered by someone.
- Genesis Block’s client base included many of these scammers and/or crimionals;
- the outsized involvement of FTX was this flow; and/or
- so was the Bitkub flow, via Genesis Block or otherwise;
If it wasn’t this route it means there is at least one more multi-billion-dollar laundering pipeline connected to this activity we know nothing about.
That is possible of course, but seems unlikely.
Certainly the simplest explanation is that no second as-yet-undiscovered group of scammers or criminals exists and it’s all the same organization.
Now remember these actors specifically mentioned that the traditional financial system was blocking them and freezing their accounts.
We are looking at a gigantic amount of bad flow that was caught by banks and how cryptocurrencies were used to circumvent those controls.Taken together, what these documents show is lives being wrecked, both by the scams themselves leading to suicides, and by the human trafficing that provides the scammers workforce, leading to beatings, imprisonment and suicides. Pillars of the cryptocurrency community are enabling this:
The contents of those frozen accounts could have been, and at least partially would have been, sent back to the victims instead of being irreversibly exfiltrated.
So this may well be crypto’s real killer app — irreversible cross-border transfers for criminals.
Binance publicly said it assisted Thai police with a probe into “a significant pig butchering scam,” and that about $277 million of assets were confiscated.and they blamed the victims:
the number of reports of pig-butchering scams it had received this year was double that of 2022, an increase it attributed to an influx of inexperienced crypto investors and scammers looking to exploit them.and they responded to a Dept. of Justice warrant about these funds.
Thus these businesses cannnot claim ignorance of the flow of
pig-butchering funds, or of their scale. But they are clearly motivated
to turn a blind eye to them whenever possible.
https://blog.dshr.org/2024/02/tracing-pig-butchers.html Save to Pocket
date: 2024-02-08, from: Robert Reich’s blog
They will dissect Section 3 of the 14th Amendment during oral argument
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/oral-surgery-at-todays-supreme-court Save to Pocket
date: 2024-02-08, updated: 2024-02-07, from: Bruce Schneier blog
Over on Lawfare, Jim Dempsey published a really interesting proposal for software liability: “Standard for Software Liability: Focus on the Product for Liability, Focus on the Process for Safe Harbor.”
Section 1 of this paper sets the stage by briefly describing the problem to be solved. Section 2 canvasses the different fields of law (warranty, negligence, products liability, and certification) that could provide a starting point for what would have to be legislative action establishing a system of software liability. The conclusion is that all of these fields would face the same question: How buggy is too buggy? Section 3 explains why existing software development frameworks do not provide a sufficiently definitive basis for legal liability. They focus on process, while a liability regime should begin with a focus on the product—that is, on outcomes. Expanding on the idea of building codes for building code, Section 4 shows some examples of product-focused standards from other fields. Section 5 notes that already there have been definitive expressions of software defects that can be drawn together to form the minimum legal standard of security. It specifically calls out the list of common software weaknesses tracked by the MITRE Corporation under a government contract. Section 6 considers how to define flaws above the minimum floor and how to limit that liability with a safe harbor…
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date: 2024-02-08, from: Robert Reich’s blog
The Street is a major buyer of single-family housing — driving up prices. Here’s a way to get our houses back.
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/getting-wall-street-out-of-our-houses Save to Pocket
date: 2024-02-08, from: Om Malik blog
I gave up on Google’s Chrome a long time ago and switched to Brave before it started getting flak for doing questionable things. Then Josh Miller, the co-founder of The Browser Company (whom I met during his Branch.com days), offered me a chance to try out Arc, their new, clean, and refreshing take on a …
https://om.co/2024/02/07/tools-to-boost-your-browser/ Save to Pocket
date: 2024-02-07, from: Robert Reich’s blog
They’re both part of a sea change in labor
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/improbable-signs-of-union-ferment Save to Pocket
date: 2024-02-07, updated: 2024-02-07, from: Daring Fireball
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/apple-mega-episode-w-daring-fireballs-john-gruber-ai/id1522960417?i=1000644472738 Save to Pocket
date: 2024-02-07, updated: 2024-02-07, from: Daring Fireball
https://www.infos-app.com/?dftxt Save to Pocket
date: 2024-02-07, updated: 2024-02-06, from: Bruce Schneier blog
Interesting research: “Sleeper Agents: Training Deceptive LLMs that Persist Through Safety Training“:
Abstract: Humans are capable of strategically deceptive behavior: behaving helpfully in most situations, but then behaving very differently in order to pursue alternative objectives when given the opportunity. If an AI system learned such a deceptive strategy, could we detect it and remove it using current state-of-the-art safety training techniques? To study this question, we construct proof-of-concept examples of deceptive behavior in large language models (LLMs). For example, we train models that write secure code when the prompt states that the year is 2023, but insert exploitable code when the stated year is 2024. We find that such backdoor behavior can be made persistent, so that it is not removed by standard safety training techniques, including supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and adversarial training (eliciting unsafe behavior and then training to remove it). The backdoor behavior is most persistent in the largest models and in models trained to produce chain-of-thought reasoning about deceiving the training process, with the persistence remaining even when the chain-of-thought is distilled away. Furthermore, rather than removing backdoors, we find that adversarial training can teach models to better recognize their backdoor triggers, effectively hiding the unsafe behavior. Our results suggest that, once a model exhibits deceptive behavior, standard techniques could fail to remove such deception and create a false impression of safety…
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date: 2024-02-07, from: Daniel Stenberg Blog
This is a frequently asked question: how will I handle the situation if/when I step away from the curl project? What happens if I get run over by a bus go on a permanent holiday tomorrow? What’s the contingency plan? You would perhaps think that it could affect a few more things that I work … Continue reading Contingency planning for me and curl
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/02/07/contingency-planning-for-me-and-curl/ Save to Pocket
date: 2024-02-07, from: Robert Reich’s blog
And what should be America’s response?
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/what-kind-of-presidential-candidate Save to Pocket
date: 2024-02-07, from: Om Malik blog
Hello from somewhere over the Philippine Sea! My watch just nudged me to get up and walk around. My phone tells me that I am connected at roughly 10 Mbps. I am having a WhatsApp conversation with family members while receiving some email updates. The book I was reading on my iPhone is synced with …
https://om.co/2024/02/06/in-tech-magic-becomes-mundane-fast/ Save to Pocket
date: 2024-02-07, from: John Naughton’s online diary
The Barbican in Winter For a special friend who happens to live there. Quote of the Day “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” Louis Brandeis … Continue reading
https://memex.naughtons.org/wednesday-7-february-2024/39103/ Save to Pocket
date: 2024-02-07, updated: 2024-02-07, from: Daring Fireball
https://espnpressroom.com/us/press-releases/2024/02/espn-fox-and-warner-bros-discovery-forming-joint-venture-to-launch-streaming-sports-service-in-the-u-s/ Save to Pocket
date: 2024-02-06, from: Dan Rather’s Steady
This morning, a federal appeals court issued a per curiam decision rejecting Donald Trump’s claim that he is immune from prosecution for crimes he allegedly committed trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Described as speaking “with one voice,” the
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date: 2024-02-06, updated: 2024-02-06, from: Bruce Schneier blog
Via a FOIA request, we have documents from the NSA about their banning of Furby toys.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/02/documents-about-the-nsas-banning-of-furby-toys-in-the-1990s.html Save to Pocket
date: 2024-02-06, from: Daniel Stenberg Blog
This is the video recording of my talk with this title, done at February 4, 2024 10:00 in the K1.105 room at FOSDEM 2024. The room can hold some 800 people but there were a few hundred seats still unoccupied. Several people I met up with later have insisted that 10 am on a Sunday … Continue reading FOSDEM 2024: you too could have made curl
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/02/06/fosdem-2024-you-too-could-have-made-curl/ Save to Pocket
date: 2024-02-06, from: Dan Rather’s Steady
Since the security of the U.S.-Mexico border is a top issue for many Americans, the Republican Party is betting that their strategy will win the day … or at least the presidential election. But it isn’t much of a plan. The strategy: Do nothing. The reason: Because Donald Trump said so.
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date: 2024-02-06, from: Chris Heilmann’s blog
Lately I have a person who pings me daily asking how many lines of code I have written today. The first time was on the weekend. My answer was “none, as weekends I concentrate on not doing computer things with my partner” which is an excellent idea. However, lines of code are often seen as […]
https://christianheilmann.com/2024/02/06/lines-of-code-how-to-not-measure-code-quality-and-developer-efficiency/ Save to Pocket
date: 2024-02-06, from: Robert Reich’s blog
But how to stop him from running out the the clock?
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date: 2024-02-06, from: Daniel Stenberg Blog
A few weeks ago I mentioned how we fund Stefan’s work on improving HTTP(/3) in curl. Now, in similar spirit we are funding Dan Fandrich to work on further improving test infrastructure. Dan has worked fiercely on the introduction of parallel tests over the recent year or so and this is work that builds on … Continue reading Funding Dan to improve curl tests
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/02/06/funding-dan-to-improve-curl-tests/ Save to Pocket
date: 2024-02-05, from: Liam on Linux
I am travelling onwards from Brussels as I write.
And this is the
slide
deck with speaker’s notes.
UPDATE: I’ve
moved the files to Dropbox for slightly easier public sharing. Please
let me know if they still don’t
work.
comments
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date: 2024-02-05, updated: 2024-02-05, from: Bruce Schneier blog
A deepfake video conference call—with everyone else on the call a fake—fooled a finance worker into sending $25M to the criminals’ account.
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date: 2024-02-05, from: Robert Reich’s blog
Friends, Several of you have asked me why I spend so much time and energy on this letter, which is read mainly (if not exclusively) by people who already share my views and values. “Why are you preaching to the choir?” you ask. “Wouldn’t your efforts be more useful if you tried to convince people who aren’t already convinced?”
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date: 2024-02-05, from: John Naughton’s online diary
Vernacular architecture, English style Somewhere in Cambridgeshire Quote of the Day ”One afternoon, when I was four years old, my father came home, and he found me in the living room in front of a roaring fire, which made him … Continue reading
https://memex.naughtons.org/monday-5-february-2024/39098/ Save to Pocket
date: 2024-02-04, updated: 2024-02-04, from: Daring Fireball
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date: 2024-02-04, from: Robert Reich’s blog
How to teach and how to learn about a tragedy. An open society sees truth as process and method — more verb than noun.
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/how-to-understand-the-politics-of Save to Pocket
date: 2024-02-04, from: Dan Rather’s Steady
Samara Joy has been called the new voice of jazz, a vocal phenom, a savior of the genre. This young lady is “joy” personified and today’s reason to smile, from her stunning jazz singing to her megawatt smile. The 24-year-old jazz sensation from the Bronx surprised a lot of people at last year’s Grammy Awards when she won not only Best Jazz Vocal Album but also Best New Artist, an award given only three times to a jazz artist. She will be back at the Grammys tonight as a presenter and again as a nominee. Take a listen to her incredible improvisation on the Grammy-nominated song “Tight.”
https://steady.substack.com/p/a-new-joy-in-jazz Save to Pocket
date: 2024-02-04, from: Robert Reich’s blog
And last week’s winner
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