News gathered 2024-02-22

(date: 2024-02-22 08:47:24)

Samsung Galaxy Book4 series notebooks with Intel Meteor Lake launch globally on Feb 26

date: 2024-02-22, from: Liliputing

The Samsung Galaxy Book4 line of laptops are premium thin and light notebooks with 120 Hz AMOLED touchscreen displays, and Intel Meteor Lake processor with Intel Arc integrated graphics. First unveiled in December, the 14 and 16 inch laptops went on sale in South Korea in January, and now Samsung says they’re set to launch in global […]

The post Samsung Galaxy Book4 series notebooks with Intel Meteor Lake launch globally on Feb 26 appeared first on Liliputing.

https://liliputing.com/samsung-galaxy-book4-series-notebooks-with-intel-meteor-lake-launch-globally-on-feb-26/ Save to Pocket

Apple’s Vision Pro Is Compelling… In the Future

date: 2024-02-22, from: TidBITS blog

Self-professed “sucker for gadgets” Marc Zeedar shares his experiences with the Vision Pro, which are largely positive despite some awkward interactions due to needing to wear hard contacts.

https://tidbits.com/2024/02/22/apples-vision-pro-is-compelling-in-the-future/ Save to Pocket

A Kickstarter campaign for a book on the art of band logos….

date: 2024-02-22, updated: 2024-02-22, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/02/0044033-a-kickstarter-campaign-fo Save to Pocket

San Jose affordable homes land financing package of $100 million-plus

date: 2024-02-22, from: San Jose Mercury News

A big affordable housing project in San Jose is pushing ahead with a property purchase and a key construction financing package.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/02/22/san-jose-home-house-affordable-real-estate-loan-build-develop-economy/ Save to Pocket

Useful use of cat(1)

date: 2024-02-22, from: Tilde.news

Comments

https://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/various/uuoc/ Save to Pocket

Russia arrests California woman with dual US-Russian citizenship for treason after she gave $51 to Ukraine, employer says

date: 2024-02-22, from: San Jose Mercury News

Ksenia Karelina, a 33-year-old woman who lives in Los Angeles, was arrested in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg for allegedly “providing financial assistance to a foreign state in activities directed against Russia security.”

https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/02/22/russia-arrests-california-woman-with-dual-us-russian-citizenship-for-treason-after-she-gave-51-to-ukraine-employer-says/ Save to Pocket

High school soccer playoffs: Wednesday’s top storylines, surprises, more

date: 2024-02-22, from: San Jose Mercury News

Los Gatos boys beat Menlo School in match for the ages. Mitty, St. Francis to meet for CCS boys, girls titles. In NCS, Dougherty Valley, Berkeley boys, San Ramon Valley, Carondelet girls among winners.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/02/22/high-school-soccer-playoffs-wednesdays-top-storylines-surprises-more/ Save to Pocket

Employees saved Musk from himself over Twitter Files

date: 2024-02-22, updated: 2024-02-22, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

Unfettered access to non-public info would have violated FTC order

Longtime Twitter staffers saved Elon Musk from himself, according to a letter from the US Federal Trade Commission chair.…

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/02/22/twitter_staffers_saved_musk/ Save to Pocket

Larry Magid: How to protect your online security

date: 2024-02-22, from: San Jose Mercury News

When criminals operate from other counties, we have to remain extra vigilant

https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/02/22/larry-magid-how-to-protect-your-online-security/ Save to Pocket

Competition-proofing

date: 2024-02-22, from: David Rosenthal’s blog

Source

Apart from getting started in the midst of one of Silicon Valley’s regular downturns, another great thing about the beginnings of Nvidia was that instead of insisting on the “minimum viable product” our VCs, Sutter Hill and Sequoia, gave us the time to develop a real architecture for a family of chips. It enabled us to get an amazing amount of functionality into a half-micron gate array; I/O virtualization, a DMA engine, a graphics processor that rendered curved surfaces directly, not by approximating them with triangles, a sound engine and support for game controllers. As I write, after a three decade-long history of bringing innovations to the market, Nvidia is America’s third most valuable company.

I’ve written several times about how in pursuit of a quicker buck, VCs have largely discarded the slow process of building an IPO-ready company like Nvidia in favor of building one that will be acquired by one of the dominant monopolists. These VCs don’t support innovation. Even if their acquisition-bound companies do innovate in their short lives, their innovations are rarely tested in the market after the acuisition.

Below the fold I discuss a new paper that presents a highly detailed look at the mechanisms the dominant companies use to neutralize the threats startups could pose to their dominance.

In Coopting Disruption law professors Mark Lemley (Stanford) and Matthew Wansley (Cardozo) ask a good question:

Our economy is dominated by five aging tech giants—Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft. Each of these firms was founded more than twenty years ago: Apple and Microsoft in the 1970s, Google and Amazon in the 1990s, and Facebook in 2004. Each of them grew by successfully commercializing a disruptive technology—personal computers (Apple), operating systems (Microsoft), online shopping (Amazon), search engines (Google), and social networks (Facebook). Each of them displaced the incumbents that came before them. But in the last twenty years, no company has commercialized a new technology in a way that threatens the tech giants. Why?

The TL;DR of Lemley and Wansley’s answer to their question is:

While there are many reasons for the tech giants’ continued dominance, we think an important and overlooked one is that they have learned how to coopt disruption. They identify potentially disruptive technologies, use their money to influence the startups developing them, strategically dole out access to the resources the startups need to grow, and seek regulation that will make it harder for the startups to compete. When a threat emerges, they buy it off. And after they acquire a startup, they redirect its people and assets to their own innovation needs.

They observe that:

a company that is started with the goal of being swallowed by a tech giant probably isn’t contributing much to society.

Introduction

They start by identifying the advantages and disadvantages the incumbents possess in their efforts to monetize innovations. Their list of advantages is:

“large incumbents can take advantage of economies of scale” not just in manufacturing, but also in marketing an distribution by exploiting their existing customer relationships.
“Large incumbents can also take advantage of economies of scope. Innovation creates “involuntary spillovers”—new knowledge that has economic value beyond the specific product that the firm was developing.”
“large incumbents can access capital at a lower cost” for example from retained earnings from their cash cows.
“large incumbents may have another potential advantage—a longer investment time horizon” even more so now with the compression of VC time horizons.

Their list of incumbents disadvantages in innovation is more interesting:

“their success will cannibalize their own market share” or “More generally, a monopolist has diminished incentives to introduce new products, improve product quality, or lower prices because any new sales generated replace its existing sales.” Economists call this “Arrow’s replacement effect”; more specifically: “The general lesson is, all else equal, the larger a firm’s market share and the less it is threatened by competition, the weaker its incentives to innovate. So we should expect large incumbents to not innovate much. And if they can dispense with the competitors rather than have to compete with them, they will do that.”
“their managers prefer to deliver incremental innovations to their existing customers”. Unlike Arrow’s theory, “Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation, … focuses on the career incentives of middle managers … Incumbent managers have an incentive to deliver sustaining innovations—incremental improvements in quality to the firm’s existing products that will please its existing customers. But they have substantial disincentives to pursue projects that upset the apple cart, even if doing so would bring new customers to the firm” The fundamental problem is that “Housing an innovation project inside a firm with diverse lines of business creates conflict with those other businesses. Some firm assets—cash, cloud computing, equipment, facilities, and engineers’ time—are rivalrous and finite, so executives must be willing to fight internal constituencies to devote those resources to innovation.” Ingenuity, NASA’s wildly successful Mars helicopter is a good example, as Eric Berger reports in Before Ingenuity ever landed on Mars, scientists almost managed to kill it. It was competing for cost, weight and risk with Perseverance’s primary mission.
“their single veto point decision-making structure encourages risk-aversion” More specifically: “Inside a large incumbent, decisions about whether to fund an innovative project must pass through one veto point. In the venture capital market, many competing investors independently decide whether to finance an innovative idea. Inside a firm, an employee with an innovative idea must pitch an idea to managers who ultimately report to one executive gate-keeper. In the venture capital market, if a would-be startup founder pitches an idea to ten VC firms, and nine of them are not persuaded, the idea gets funded.” The advantage of market-based finance over internal finance applies not just to the initiation but also the continuation of an innovation project. Inside a firm, an executive who has soured on a project can terminate it. In the venture capital market, when a startup’s initial investors grow skeptical, the company can still pitch outsiders on infusing more cash.” The authors make this important point (my emphasis): “And while economists often describe markets as efficient, there is no reason to believe individual corporate executives make efficient (or even rational) decisions. Just ask Twitter. Markets work not because private executives make good decisions but because the ones who make bad decisions get driven out. But that dynamic only works with competition.”
“they cannot appropriately compensate employees working on innovation projects.” The reason they cannot is that: “Startups solve this problem by giving employees stock options. Every employee with significant equity knows that if the startup successfully exits, they will be rewarded. Stock in a large, diversified public company does not create similar incentives. The incentives are diluted because the value of the stock will be affected by too many variables unrelated to the success of the specific innovation project.” And that: “large firms do not recognize internal “property rights” to innovations that employees develop. If they did, employees might become reluctant to share information. But not protecting internal property rights gives innovative employees incentive to leave. If employees at a large firm found their own startup and raise venture capital to fund it, they will earn a much greater share of the profits of the innovation.”

The authors go on to describe five techniques incumbents use to neutralize the threat of disruption that innovative startups might pose; network effects, self-preferencing, paying for defaults, cloning, and coopting the disruptor. They claim other have described the first four, but they don’t amount to an adequate explanation for why the tech giants haven’t been disrupted. I will summarize each of the four in turn..

Network effects

Nearly three decades ago W. Brian Arthur, in Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy explained how increasing returns to scale, or network effects, of technology markets typically led to them being dominated by one player. Consider a new market opened up by a technologcal development. Several startups enter, for random reasons one gets bigger then the others, network effects amplify its advantage in a feedback loop.

This effect is more important now, as the the giants’ business models have evolved to become platforms:

The tech giants’ core businesses are built on platforms. A platform is an intermediary in a two-sided market. It connects users on one side of the market with users on the other side for transactions or interactions.
…
Platforms tend to exhibit network effects—the addition of a new user increases the value of a platform to existing users and attracts new users.

This is precisely the mechanism Brian Arthur described, but applied to a business model that has since been enabled by the Internet.

Self-preferencing

Self-preferencing happens when a platform isn’t just a two-sided market, but one in which the platform itself is a vendor:

Amazon, for example, both invites third party vendors to sell their products in its online marketplace and sells its own house brands that compete with those vendors. Amazon has a powerful advantage in that competition. It has access to data on all of its competitors—who their customers are, which products are selling well, and which prices work best. And it controls which ads consumers see when they search for a specific product. Assuming Amazon uses that information to prefer its own products to those of its competitors (either by pricing strategically or by promoting its own products in search results) – something alleged but not yet proven in a pending antitrust case – the result is to bias competition. Vendors cannot realistically protest Amazon’s self-preferencing (or just go elsewhere) because Amazon has such a dominant share in the online retail market.

Paying for defaults

The value of the default position is notorious because:

Alphabet pays Apple a reported $18 billion (with a b) each year for Google to be the default search engine on iOS devices. Android and iOS together account for 99% of the U.S. mobile operating system market. Consequently, almost everyone who uses a smartphone in America is accustomed to Google search. Alphabet claims that “competition is just a click away.” But research and experience have shown that defaults can be somewhat sticky. So controlling the default position can give Alphabet (or whoever wins the Apple bid) an advantage. That said, someone has to be the default, and it might be better for consumers if the default is the search engine most users already prefer. The real problem might be the idea of paying for placement, whoever wins the bidding war.

Cloning

There are many examples of a tech giant tryng to neutralize the threat from a startup by using the threat of cloning their product to force the startup to sell itself, or of actually cloning the product and using their market power to swamp the startup. Meta’s addition of Reels to Instagram in response to Tik Tok is an obvious example. But the authors make two good points: First:

Cloning is only objectionable if the tech giant wins out not by competition on the merits, but by exclusionary conduct.

Second, that cloning often fails:

Google+, Google’s effort to build a social media service that combined the best of Facebook and Twitter was an abject failure. Apple’s effort to control the music world’s move to streaming by offering its own alternative to Spotify hasn’t prevented Spotify from dominating music streaming and eclipsing the once-vibrant (and Apple-dominated) market for music downloads. Meta’s effort to copy Snap, then TikTok, by introducing Stories and Reels has not proven terribly successful, and certainly has not prevented those companies from building their markets.

The fact that the giants can clone a startup’s product leads the authors to ask:

If the product is cloneable, then why would you buy the company and burn cash paying off its VCs?

There are two possible answers. It may be faster and easier, though likely not cheaper, to “acquihire” the startup’s talent than to recruit equivalent talent in the open market. Or it may be faster and easier, though likely not cheaper, to acquire the company and its product rather than cloning it.

Inadequate Explanation

The authors use the example of Microsoft:

Microsoft enjoyed strong network effects in the 1990s as the dominant maker of operating system software – far more dominant than it is today. It cloned internet browser technology from upstarts like Netscape, and it engaged in anticompetitive conduct designed to ensure that it, not Netscape, became the browser of choice.82 But Microsoft’s victory over Netscape was short-lived. New startups – Mozilla and then Google – came out of nowhere and took the market away from it. Microsoft still benefits from network effects, and it still uses cloning and self-preferencing to send users to its Edge browser. But it doesn’t work. Microsoft employed all the tools of a dominant firm in a network market, but it still faced disruption.

So these four techniques aren’t an explanation for the recent dearth of disruption.

Coopting disruption

The authors imagine themselves as a tech giant, asking what else they would do to prevent disruption, and coming up with four new techniques:

“First, you would learn as much as you can about which companies had the capability to develop disruptive innovations and try to steer them away from competing with you – perhaps by partnering with them, or perhaps by investing in them.”
“Second, you would make sure that those companies could not access the critical resources they would need to transform their innovation into a disruptive product.”
“Third, you would tell your government relations team to seek regulation that would build a competitive moat around your position and keep disruption out.”
“Fourth, if one of the companies you were tracking nevertheless did start to develop a disruptive product, you would want extract that innovation—and choke off the potential competition—in an acquisition.”

These are the techniques they call “coopting disruption”, pointing out that the tech giants have:

“built a powerful reconnaissance network covering emerging competitive threats by investing in startups as corporate VCs and by cultivating relationships with financial VCs.”
“accumulated massive quantities of data that are essential for many software and AI innovations, and they dole out access to this data and to their networks selectively.”
“asked legislators to regulate the tech industry—in a way that will buttress incumbents.”
“repeatedly bought potentially competitive startups in a way that has flown—until a few years ago—below the antitrust radar.”

The authors detail many examples of each of these techniques, for example Facebook conditioning access to user data on the purchase of advertising, and Google’s purchase of DoubleClick and YouTube. Interestingly, they contrast the recent purchasing of the tech giants with Cisco’s famously successful purchases in the 90s:

The Cisco story exemplifies how the venture capital market, as a market, is better at exploring a series of risky ideas than a firm with a single risk-averse gatekeeper. It also illustrates how the advantages of a large incumbent—in this case access to markets and existing customer relationships—can sometimes extract more market value out of a technology than a new entrant.

The rapid evoluution of networking technology at the time meant that even Cisco, the largest company in the market, didn’t have the R&D resources to explore all the opportunities. They depended upon VCs to fund the initial explorations, rewarding them by paying over the odds for the successes. Their market power then got the successes deployed much faster than a startup could.

Why Is Cooption Bad?

The authors explain the harms of cooption:

Our claim here is that the same dynamics that inhibit disruptive innovation by longstanding employees of large incumbents inhibit disruptive innovation by new employees from acquired startups.
…
The tech giants win from coopting disruption even though it destroys social value. In fact, they benefit in two ways. They make faster incremental progress on the sustaining innovations that they want. They get the new code, the valuable intellectual property, and the fresh ideas of the startup. And, critically, they also kill off a competitor. They no longer have to worry about the startup actually developing the more disruptive innovation and leapfrogging them or other tech giants acquiring the startup and using its assets to compete with them.

And, by making the innovators from the startup rich, the acquirer greatly reduces their incentives for future innovation. Andy Bechtolsheim is an outlier.

Remedies?

Lemley and Wansley, who seem to think in fours, make a set of four proposals for how these harms might be reduced:

Unlocking Directorates — under the Clayton Act “interlocking officers and directors between companies that compete, even in part, are illegal per se – without any inquiry into whether the companies in fact restrained competition because of their overlapping interests or whether the conduct offered procompetitive benefits.” Companies with less than $4.1M in revenue are exampt, which excludes most startups; this should be revised.
Limiting Leveraging of Data and Networks — “we would impose on incumbent tech monopolists a presumptive duty of nondiscrimination in access where the defendant (1) provides or sells data or network access to at least some unaffiliated companies and (2) refuses to provide or sell the same data or network access to the plaintiff company on comparable terms, but (3) the plaintiff does not operate a competing network or otherwise compete with the defendant in the market from which it collected the relevant data.”
Regulating Regulation — “Done right, regulation of technology can be beneficial and even necessary to the development of that technology, minimizing the risk of harm to third parties and ensuring that the world views the technology as safe and trustworthy. But all too often regulation has become a way to insulate incumbents from competition, with predictable results.” The authors’ suggestions exemplify this difficulty, being rather vague and aspirational.
Blocking Cooptive Acquisitions — this is the most complex of the four proposals, and builds on Nascent Competitors by C. Scott Hemphill & Tim Wu, who write:

We favor an enforcement policy that prohibits anticompetitive conduct that is reasonably capable of contributing significantly to the maintenance of the incumbent s market power. That approach implies enforcement even where the competitive significance of the nascent competitor is uncertain.
Justifying blocking mergers because of a nascent threat that might never materialize is problematic. But it is only more so than the current way anti-trust works, by projecting likely harm to consumer welfare, which also might never materialize (although it almost always does). Lemley and Wansley explain the dilemma:

antitrust enforcers need a strategy for blocking cooptive acquisitions that works within existing case law (or plausible improvements to that law) and is surgical enough to avoid chilling investment.
Some cases are obvious:

For cooptive acquisitions like Facebook/Instagram deal, we think Hemphill and Wu’s strategy makes sense. Zuckerberg’s email arguing for acquiring startups like Instagram because “they could be very disruptive to us” is a smoking gun of anticompetitive intent.
But Lemley and Wansley go further, arguing for blocking megers based the startup’s ability to innovate distruptive technology:

Of course, an approach to policing startup acquisitions based on innovation capabilities need limits. Many startups have some innovation capabilities that could have a significant effect on competition. We can cabin enforcement in three ways—by focusing on specific technologies and specific firms and by looking at the cumulative effects of multiple acquisitions.
Their examples of technologies include generative AI and virtual and augmented reality, both cases where it is already too late. The companies they identify “Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Meta” are all veterans of multiple acquisitions in these areas. But they argue that committing to challenge fuure mergers:

would create socially desirable incentives for startups. A startup developing one of the listed technologies would gain stronger incentives to turn its innovations into the products that its management team believed would garner the highest value on the open market—rather than the one most valuable to the tech giants. They would also gain stronger incentives to build a truly independent business and go public since an acquisition by the tech giants would be a less likely exit.

I think these would all be worthwhile steps, and I’m all in favor of updating anti-trust law and, even better, actually enforcing the laws on the books. But I am skeptical that the government can spot potentially disruptive technologies before the tech giants spot and acquire them. Especially since the government can’t be embedded in the VC industry the way the tech giants are. Note that many of the harms Lemley and Wansley identify happen shortly after the acquisition. Would forcing Meta to divest Instagram at this late date restore the innovations the acquisition killed off?

https://blog.dshr.org/2024/02/competition-proofing.html Save to Pocket

Ford leaks J3400 to CCS adapter for Tesla Superchargers

date: 2024-02-22, from: Electrek Feed

Ford is seemingly leaked its J3400 to CCS adapter to give its EV owners access to Tesla’s Supercharger network.

more…

https://electrek.co/2024/02/22/ford-leaks-j3400-to-ccs-adapter-for-tesla-superchargers/ Save to Pocket

Crowded Table

date: 2024-02-22, updated: 2024-02-22, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/02/crowded-table Save to Pocket

UAW Pledges $40 Million To Organize EV Battery Workers

date: 2024-02-22, from: Inside EVs News

Plus, Waymo’s expansion plans get put on pause and Lotus’ EV division gets huge valuation ahead of stock market debut.

https://insideevs.com/news/709684/uaw-organize-ev-critical-materials/ Save to Pocket

A New Agenda for Low-Dimensional Topology

date: 2024-02-22, from: Quanta Magazine

This past October, dozens of mathematicians gathered in Pasadena to create the third version of “Kirby’s list” — a compendium of the most important unsolved problems in the field.

The post A New Agenda for Low-Dimensional Topology first appeared on Quanta Magazine

https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-agenda-for-low-dimensional-topology-20240222/ Save to Pocket

Fatal vehicle collision closes down stretch of major East Bay roadway

date: 2024-02-22, from: San Jose Mercury News

The crash happened on San Pablo Avenue, and affected morning commute traffic.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/02/22/fatal-vehicle-collision-closes-down-stretch-of-major-east-bay-roadway/ Save to Pocket

Is a free-agency deadline the solution to MLB’s stalled offseason? Players are skeptical

date: 2024-02-22, from: San Jose Mercury News

Farhan Zaidi and Rob Manfred have suggested a deadline for multiyear deals. But Austin Slater, on the board of the players’ union, says that is an “automatic no.”

https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/02/22/is-a-deadline-the-solution-to-baseballs-stalled-offseason-players-are-skeptical/ Save to Pocket

GEEKOM Mini Air12 Review: An affordable Intel N100 mini PC with DDR5 memory and PCIe Gen 3 storage

date: 2024-02-22, from: Liliputing

There are more “4 inch x 4 inch” form-factor mini PCs available now than you can shake the proverbial stick at, including high-priced, high-performance models like the Simply NUC Onyx NUC13OXv9 and GEEKOM Mini IT13, as well as cheaper, more energy-efficient models like the GEEKOM Mini Air12. This little computer looks a lot like an Intel […]

The post GEEKOM Mini Air12 Review: An affordable Intel N100 mini PC with DDR5 memory and PCIe Gen 3 storage appeared first on Liliputing.

https://liliputing.com/geekom-mini-air12-review-an-affordable-intel-n100-mini-pc-with-ddr5-memory-and-pcie-gen-3-storage/ Save to Pocket

Ukrainian police arrest father and son in suspected LockBit affiliate double act

date: 2024-02-22, updated: 2024-02-22, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

If they did it, it gives new meaning to quality family time. Meanwhile, key LockBit leaders remain at large

Today’s edition of the week-long LockBit leaks reveals a father-son duo was apprehended in Ukraine as part of the series of takedown-related arrests this week.…

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/02/22/ukrainian_police_arrest_father_and/ Save to Pocket

About these regional bank-commercial real estate concerns…

date: 2024-02-22, from: Marketplace Morning Report

Commercial real estate is a market that’s been sagging with lots of people still working from home. That’s been a source of consternation for regional banks with exposure to commercial real estate, like New York Community Bancorp, which Moody’s recently downgraded. But is all this anxiety actually overblown? We dig in. Plus, Japan’s stock market climbs out of a decadeslong slump, and the first online-only grocer will soon begin accepting SNAP benefits.

https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/about-these-regional-bank-commercial-real-estate-concerns Save to Pocket

Pose Bowl: Spacecraft Detection and Pose Estimation Challenge

date: 2024-02-22, from: NASA breaking news

In the Pose Bowl: Spacecraft Detection and Pose Estimation Challenge, solvers will help NASA develop algorithms that could be run on inspector (chaser) spacecraft. There are two tracks, with different associated prizes. In the Detection Track, solvers develop object detection solutions that identify the boundaries of spacecraft in an image. In the Pose Estimation Track, […]

https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/stmd/stmd-prizes-challenges-crowdsourcing-program/center-of-excellence-for-collaborative-innovation-coeci/pose-bowl-spacecraft-detection-estimation-challenge/ Save to Pocket

My Mother Got on a Bike. It Changed Her Life. “I rode…

date: 2024-02-22, updated: 2024-02-22, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/02/0044030-my-mother-got-on-a Save to Pocket

Want a risk-free California home purchase? Own it for 12 years.

date: 2024-02-22, from: San Jose Mercury News

If buying a home “works out over time” – how long must you wait so a purchase isn’t a money-loser?

https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/02/22/want-a-risk-free-california-home-purchase-own-it-for-12-years/ Save to Pocket

PG&E profits hop higher as revenue from electricity and gas surges

date: 2024-02-22, from: San Jose Mercury News

Excluding an array of one-time or unusual items that aren’t related to the company’s core operations, PG&E earned $2.63 billion in 2023, an increase of 12.2% compared to the prior year.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/02/22/pge-electric-gas-profit-fire-energy-economy-bay-area-san-jose-oakland/ Save to Pocket

Mercedes-Benz drastically backtracks EV plans, will build gas cars well into 2030s

date: 2024-02-22, from: Electrek Feed

Mercedes-Benz is backtracking on its EV plans as the luxury automaker plans to continue building gas-powered cars “well into the 2030s.”

more…

https://electrek.co/2024/02/22/mercedes-backtracks-ev-plans-gas-cars-2030s/ Save to Pocket

I don’t care if you’re at a BigCo

date: 2024-02-22, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News

I don’t care if you work at a big company or are an individual developer.

I care if you can make a contribution toward interop on the open web.

I’ve found over the years that sometimes devs at bigco’s can help enormously (eg microsoft, netscape, automattic) but usually they are harmful (apple, ibm, sun, google stand out as the worst). sometimes companies play both roles (apple).

But i also know that bigco’s because they are big, have lots of different ideas how the world should work. And that can help.

http://scripting.com/2024/02/22/151240.html?title=iDontCareIfYoureAtABigco Save to Pocket

Twitter’s big competitive advantage

date: 2024-02-22, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News

I wrote this on Twitter this morning. Re-posted here with minimal editing. The fact that I could write it on Twitter was the point.

Twitter has one advantage over all the other social webs. no character limit.

I started typing a post on Threads which has a large character limit compared to the others, but ran out of space and decided to write it over here in twitter instead.

yes they charge me $8 a month for it, but it’s worth it.

we have to get used to the idea of paying for value, it’s how we avoid the messes of the last 20 years. esp if we can make sure we retain copies of everything we write (guaranteed by using our own writing tools, btw) which is another requirement for the new blogosphere.

btw, i’m having a blast these days. it’s like tinkerbell in peter pan. all the open web needed was people to believe it exists for it to come (back) into existence.

still diggin.

ps: i also like they have simple styling, but where are the freaking links, twitter. do I have to pay another $8 to get those??

pps: the worst character limit is bluesky, i can’t write anything there. too bad, it’s a really nice system otherwise.

ppps: it would be nice to give something like this a title so you don’t have to read pgf after pgf to try to figure out where i’m going and if you’re interested. so i gave it a title, using markdown syntax. maybe they could just support markdown. hmmm.

pppps: i asked chatgpt to draw an illustration. that light in the middle of the room is the open social web. it’s a vision of self-reliance, empowerment and cooperation. I asked for the light to be tinkerbell, but i guess they were concerned the image might belong to someone. creeping shitification.

This is not a picture of Tinkerbell.

http://scripting.com/2024/02/22/151130.html?title=twittersBigCompetitiveAdvantage Save to Pocket

Severe Drought Erased Climate Progress in the Northwest in 2023

date: 2024-02-22, from: Distilled Earth blog

Power emissions rose in the region due to drier conditions and less hydro output

https://www.distilled.earth/p/severe-drought-erased-climate-progress Save to Pocket

@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-02-22, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)

Twitter's big competitive advantage.

https://twitter.com/davewiner/status/1760681139407360255 Save to Pocket

Amazon seeks to avoid labor problems by abolishing national regulators

date: 2024-02-22, updated: 2024-02-22, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

Big Tech takes aim at Big Government

Amazon, currently fighting a legal battle with the US National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) over its treatment of workers, is arguing that the labor agency is unconstitutional. And it’s not the only company testing that line of reasoning.…

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/02/22/amazon_nlrb_regualtion/ Save to Pocket

What does California’s rainy season mean for water supply?

date: 2024-02-22, from: San Jose Mercury News

The vital Sierra Nevada snowpack, which normally supplies about 30% of California’s water when it melts, has rebounded somewhat from a slow start.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/02/22/californias-rainy-season-is-here-what-does-it-mean-for-water-supply/ Save to Pocket

YouTuber Puts Tesla Cybertruck’s Wade Mode To The Test, Damage Ensues

date: 2024-02-22, from: Inside EVs News

Some plastic pieces left the conversation but the car still drove fine after the experiment.

https://insideevs.com/news/709616/tesla-cybertruck-water-wade-mode-test-video-damage/ Save to Pocket

NASA to Continue Testing for New Artemis Moon Rocket Engines

date: 2024-02-22, from: NASA breaking news

NASA will conduct an RS-25 hot fire Friday, Feb. 23, moving one step closer to production of new engines that will help power the agency’s SLS (Space Launch System) rocket on future Artemis missions to the Moon and beyond. Teams at NASA’s Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, are set to begin the […]

https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/stennis/nasa-to-continue-testing-for-new-artemis-moon-rocket-engines/ Save to Pocket

A list of tautological place names, including Mississippi River (Big River River),…

date: 2024-02-22, updated: 2024-02-22, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/02/0044031-a-list-of-tautological-pl Save to Pocket

That’s Leadership

date: 2024-02-22, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News

One of greatest gifts of a democratic civil society is the freedom not to think about government, to wake up and not worry about the mood of a leader.

The post That’s Leadership appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.

https://www.independent.com/2024/02/22/thats-leadership/ Save to Pocket

KDE Slimbook V is a Linux laptop with Ryzen 7 7840HS and KDE Plasma 6

date: 2024-02-22, from: Liliputing

The KDE Slimbook is a thin and light laptop that comes from a partnership between Spanish PC maker Slimbook and the developers of KDE, a free and open source desktop environment for GNU/Linux distributions. The two groups have been releasing KDE Slimbook models since 2017, but the new KDE Slimbook V is a big step up from […]

The post KDE Slimbook V is a Linux laptop with Ryzen 7 7840HS and KDE Plasma 6 appeared first on Liliputing.

https://liliputing.com/kde-slimbook-v-is-a-linux-laptop-with-ryzen-7-7840hs-and-kde-plasma-6/ Save to Pocket

Dirty Tricks?

date: 2024-02-22, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News

Who exactly are behind “SB Citizens for Democracy”?

The post Dirty Tricks? appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.

https://www.independent.com/2024/02/22/dirty-tricks-2/ Save to Pocket

7 terrific Bay Area things to do this weekend, Feb. 23-25

date: 2024-02-22, from: San Jose Mercury News

From Noise Pop and “Swan Lake” to brunch spots, inspirational movies and a cider tasting room, here’s how to fill your weekend.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/02/22/7-terrific-bay-area-things-to-do-this-weekend-feb-23-25/ Save to Pocket

Sirota’s Signals: Yes, $13,000 Per Hour

date: 2024-02-22, from: The Lever News

Plus, the truth about your credit cards, the scourge of our distraction economy, Honest Abe’s dying wish, banning your right to cold beer, and much more.

https://www.levernews.com/sirotas-signals-yes-13-000-per-hour/ Save to Pocket

AI is going to need a global investment, just maybe not $7T, says OpenAI CEO Sam Altman

date: 2024-02-22, updated: 2024-02-22, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

Maker of sometimes less than accurate AI chatbot reminds everyone not to believe everything you read on the net

FDC OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has driven a lot of hype around generative AI, but as he reminded attendees at Intel’s Foundry Direct Connect (FDC) event Wednesday, not everything you read on the internet is true.…

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/02/22/openai_intel_chips/ Save to Pocket

VinFast (VFS) Q4, full 2023 results: Rising revenues help offset missed delivery targets

date: 2024-02-22, from: Electrek Feed

After giving the public a glimpse of its Q4 2023 delivery targets last month, VinFast shared its full financial results for the previous quarter and year-over-year comparisons. Revenues are up, but the Vietnamese automaker will have to truly ramp up if it wants to reach its newly proposed delivery targets for 2024.

more…

https://electrek.co/2024/02/22/vinfast-vin-q4-full-2023-results-revenues-missed-delivery-targets/ Save to Pocket

Hardened Gentoo with Full Disk Encryption on the Star Labs StarBook Mk VI

date: 2024-02-22, from: mrusme blog

A brief guide on installing Gentoo Linux with Full Disk Encryption and the hardened profile, with SELinux, on the Star Labs StarBook Mk VI.

https://xn–gckvb8fzb.com/hardened-gentoo-with-full-disk-encryption-on-the-star-labs-starbook-mk-vi/ Save to Pocket

Touratech’s Honda XL750 Transalp Comfort Seat Will See You Go That Extra Mile

date: 2024-02-22, from: Ride Apart, Electric Motorcycle News

Ergonomically designed to keep your butt nice and comfy.

https://www.rideapart.com/news/709607/touratech-comfort-seat-honda-xl750-transalp/ Save to Pocket

Americans wake to widespread cellular outages, cause unclear

date: 2024-02-22, updated: 2024-02-22, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

Most reports center on AT&T, which has admitted trouble; T-Mobile, Verizon deny issues

Residents of the United States woke this morning to find widespread outages in cellular service, with AT&T bearing the brunt of a seemingly nationwide issue.…

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/02/22/americans_wake_to_widespread_cellular/ Save to Pocket

Prologue first drive: A beginner-level EV on par with Honda’s first entry into the segment

date: 2024-02-22, from: Electrek Feed

Honda Motor Company sits on the cusp of delivering its first EV – the Prologue – to the US market. Developed with the help of General Motors, this all-electric SUV is a notable start to zero-emissions vehicles and should do well with fans of the Japanese brand who are new to EVs. I got to drive the Prologue in California last month and have plenty of thoughts.

more…

https://electrek.co/2024/02/22/prologue-first-drive-beginner-level-ev-honda-first-entry-into-segment-suv/ Save to Pocket

@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-02-22, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)

Another Beatles post. Even though they are, for me, the biggest band ever, I’ve never been able to see the connection to the John Lennon of the early Beatles, and the long-haired bespectacled wild John Lennon that came later. I don’t see them as the same person. Not the other Beatles, they all make sense to me. Sometimes they have longer hair or a beard or whatever, but it’s still the same face as before. Also I have trouble figuring out which Beatle is singing sometimes. On some songs it’s perfectly obvious, others I have no clue. For example Norwegian Wood, Strawberry Fields and Lucy in the Sky, that’s John of course. Right? Hey Jude, that’s clearly Paul, as is Let it Be, Yesterday. But for years I didn’t know who sang Lady Madonna. Martha My Dear? Paul could sing so many different kinds of music. John, not so much. I guess. I’m still pretty unsure.

http://scripting.com/2024/02/22.html#a135818 Save to Pocket

British Judges to Rule on US Extradition of WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange

date: 2024-02-22, from: VOA News USA

London — British judges are set to rule whether Julian Assange, the founder of the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks, will be extradited to the United States after he launched a last-ditch legal bid this week to block the order, the latest chapter in a legal battle stretching back nearly 14 years.

U.S. prosecutors are seeking Assange’s extradition in relation to 18 federal charges relating to allegations of hacking and theft of classified material, after Wikileaks published a trove of stolen U.S. diplomatic cables and military documents in 2010 relating to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Reserved judgement

The two-day hearing at the High Court in London concluded Wednesday and the two senior judges hearing the case are expected to deliver a ruling in the coming days or weeks. “We will reserve our decision,” judge Victoria Sharp said. It is unclear when she and fellow judge Jeremy Johnson will issue their decision.

Julian Assange’s supporters staged demonstrations outside the London court and in cities across the world, with protestors marching on U.S. embassies to demand Assange’s release.

Assange was not present at the High Court due to his poor health, and he did not appear via video link.

Assange’s defense

His defense lawyers argued the extradition warrant was politically motivated and that Assange was simply doing his job as a journalist by publishing the stolen U.S. files, according to Simon Crowther, a legal adviser for the human rights group Amnesty International, which is campaigning for the extradition order to be blocked.

“Firstly, they pointed out this is something that journalists do all the time: you receive classified material as journalists from confidential sources and you publish it when it’s in the public interest, particularly when it covers issues such as war crimes, crimes against humanity, accusations of torture, extrajudicial execution,” Crowther said.

“So, Julian Assange’s lawyers were able to point to legal arguments and found legal precedent that showed that this is political action that journalists take. And as a result, they say it’s outside of the extradition treaty between the U.S. and the U.K.,” he added.

Crowther said the second argument the lawyers made is that Assange’s actions were protected under guarantees of freedom of expression.

Press freedom

Press freedom campaigners have called for the United States to drop the charges against Assange and for him to be released from the high-security Belmarsh prison in London. Rebecca Vincent, the director of campaigns at Reporters Without Borders, said Assange would not get a fair trial in the United States.

“The publication by WikiLeaks in 2010 of the leaked classified documents exposed information that was in the public interest and informed journalism around the world. The prosecutor and other US officials have stated that as a foreign national, Assange will not be afforded First Amendment protections. Combined with the fact that the Espionage Act has no public interest defense, that means he cannot get a fair trial,” Vincent told VOA in a statement.

US prosecutors

U.S. prosecutors insist that Assange would receive a fair trial. In past hearings, British judges have also ruled that Assange would receive fair treatment under the U.S. judicial system.

Clair Dobbin, one of the lawyers representing the U.S. government, argued that Assange had encouraged people to steal documents, and that the published material contained unredacted names of U.S. sources, putting their lives at risk. She told the court this week that Assange had published them “indiscriminately” without redactions, and alleged that his actions were “unprecedented” and did not constitute journalism.

Assange could not therefore be “treated as akin to an ordinary journalist or Wikileaks akin to an ordinary publisher,” she said.

WikiLeaks cables

In 2010, WikiLeaks published a trove of diplomatic cables relating to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that had been stolen by the U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning. Assange said Manning’s leaks exposed abuses by the United States military, including potential war crimes.

Assange was first arrested in Britain in 2010 on unrelated allegations of rape and sexual assault in Sweden. He jumped bail and sought refuge inside the Ecuadorian Embassy, where he stayed for seven years.

Sweden later dropped the charges. However, Assange was evicted from the Ecuadorian embassy in 2019 and imprisoned for breaching bail.

The British government signed an extradition order to the United States in June 2022, after successive failed legal challenges by Assange.

‘Life in danger’

Assange’s wife Stella has repeatedly claimed that the 52-year-old’s life is in danger if he is extradited to the U.S. “It’s an attack on all journalists, all over the world. It’s an attack on the truth and an attack on the public’s right to know. Julian is a political prisoner, and his life is at risk,” she told reporters outside the High Court as the hearing began this week.

In previous legal challenges, Assange’s lawyers unsuccessfully sought to block the extradition on claims that the U.S. prison system would constitute a risk to his life, potentially causing him to commit suicide.

“If he was extradited to the U.S., Julian Assange could be held in solitary confinement – prolonged solitary confinement. And that constitutes a violation of the (convention on the) prohibition of torture,” Amnesty’s Simon Crowther told VOA.

U.S. authorities have disputed the notion that Assange would inevitably be held in solitary confinement.

Prison term

If he is found guilty in the U.S., Assange’s lawyers say he could face a prison sentence of up to 175 years, but a term of 30 to 40 years was more likely. U.S. prosecutors have said he would serve no more than 63 months.

The Australian parliament last week called for Assange, who holds Australian citizenship, to be allowed to return to his homeland in a motion supported by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

If Assange wins his case at the British High Court, a full appeal hearing will be held. If his legal bid fails, the case could be taken to the European Court of Human Rights. However, Britain could seek to extradite Assange to the United States before European judges could rule on the case.

https://www.voanews.com/a/british-judges-to-rule-on-us-extradition-of-wikileaks-julian-assange/7498019.html Save to Pocket

Lectric XPeak e-bike review: Here’s why it’s the highest-value adventure bike out there

date: 2024-02-22, from: Electrek Feed

The Phoenix-based electric bike brand Lectric Ebikes is known for rolling out some of the best bang-for-your-buck electric bicycles in the US. Time after time, the company has entered new markets and broken ground with high-performing, low-cost e-bikes that send the competition into panic. And the $1,299 Lectric XPeak might just be the best example of that high-value game plan yet.

more…

https://electrek.co/2024/02/22/lectric-xpeak-e-bike-review-heres-why-its-the-highest-value-adventure-bike-out-there/ Save to Pocket

Will SCOTUS Block a Major Air Pollution Rule?

date: 2024-02-22, from: Heatmap News

Current conditions: Heavy rain caused extreme flooding outside Rio de Janeiro • Japan is enduring record-breaking warm winter weather • It’ll be 72 degrees Fahrenheit and sunny at Peoria Stadium in Arizona for the MLB’s first spring training game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San Diego Padres.

THE TOP FIVE

Supreme Court weighs challenge to EPA pollution rule

The Supreme Court this week has been hearing arguments in what CNN called “the most significant environmental dispute at the high court this year,” and things aren’t looking good for the Environmental Protection Agency. Several states and energy companies want to block the EPA’s “good neighbor” plan, which seeks to impose strict emissions limits on industrial activities in 23 states in an effort to prevent pollution from drifting across state lines and forming dangerous smog. Challengers say the regulation is overreaching and want its implementation delayed. Yesterday the court’s conservative majority appeared skeptical of the EPA’s authority, citing the fact that lower court decisions have paused the regulation in 12 states.

Environmental groups worry a ruling against the EPA here could set a dangerous precedent. “The Supreme Court — if it were to block this rule — would effectively be saying to industry, ‘Look, any time you face costs from a regulation, come on up and take a shot. We might block that rule for you,’” Sam Sankar, senior vice president for programs at Earthjustice, told E&E News.

Rivian to cut 10% of salaried workers

Rivian released its Q4 earnings yesterday, and the results were a mixed bag. The company saw $4.4 billion in annual revenue, up 167% from 2022, but it still lost more money per vehicle ($43,000) in Q4 than in the two quarters prior. It also forecast no growth in vehicle production for 2024, and said it will cut 10% of its staff as EV sales growth slows. “We firmly believe in the full electrification of the automotive industry, but recognize in the short-term, the challenging macro-economic conditions,” CEO RJ Scaringe said. The company is expected to unveil its smaller, more affordable R2 electric SUV in two weeks. Scaringe has called the vehicle “Rivian’s version of the Tesla Model 3.”

America will soon get its first Stellantis EV

In more EV news, Stellantis announced that its first U.S.-bound electric vehicles have rolled off the assembly lines in Italy this week and will arrive stateside by the end of the first quarter. The first dealer allocations of the Fiat 500e models sold out in less than a week. The car is lightweight, has a range of about 150 miles, and is one of the cheapest EVs in the U.S., starting at $32,500. Globally it has sold more than 185,000 units, but Stellantis seems to know Americans like big cars, and reportedly plans to launch electric pickups, SUVs, and muscle cars.

Fiat 500eStellantis

China’s climate targets in jeopardy as CO2 emissions rise

China’s carbon emissions increased by 12% between 2020 and 2023, putting its 2025 climate goals in jeopardy, according to analysis from Carbon Brief. One reason for the emissions uptick is that drought has reduced output from hydropower, forcing China to rely more on coal. “China has approved 218 GW of new coal power in just two years, enough to supply electricity to the whole of Brazil,” reported Reuters. But at the same time, huge amounts of renewable energy are coming online. This presents a strange contradiction: Coal plants will see less use, which could spark outcry from all the new coal plant operators, and “potential pushback against the energy transition,” said Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst for the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. China is the world’s biggest CO2 emitter.

‘World’s most sustainable company’ sued for pollution

Radius Recycling, the metal recycling giant that research firm Corporate Knights last year dubbed the “world’s most sustainable company,” is being sued by an environmental group for allegedly polluting the San Francisco Bay with heavy metals and other pollutants, Reuters reported. Radius makes “some of the lowest-carbon emissions steel made in the world,” but has recently pivoted to focus more on recycling metals. The lawsuit, brought by San Francisco Baykeeper, accuses the company of failing to limit pollution from its operations. Last year Radius settled in three similar lawsuits.

THE KICKER

Sales of plug-in hybrids increased by 83% in China last year, compared with 21% growth for fully-electric battery powered vehicles.

https://heatmap.news/politics/scotus-epa-good-neighbor-pollution Save to Pocket

EU wants to make undersea internet cables more resilient

date: 2024-02-22, updated: 2024-02-22, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

Threat to data means submarine infrastructures should get status of ‘highest possible national significance’

The European Commission has issued recommendations to up the security and resilience of submarine data cables, but says private finance should fund projects to expand capacity, assisted by governments where necessary.…

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/02/22/eu_wants_to_make_undersea/ Save to Pocket

@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-02-22, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)

An Approach to Paying for Everything That’s Free.

https://projectvrm.org/2024/01/28/an-approach-to-paying-for-everything-thats-free/ Save to Pocket

Cellular Outages Hit Thousands in US, AT&T Users Most Affected

date: 2024-02-22, from: VOA News USA

https://www.voanews.com/a/cellular-outages-hit-thousands-in-us-at-t-users-most-affected-/7498006.html Save to Pocket

NASA Center Boosted YF-12 Supersonic Engine Research

date: 2024-02-22, from: NASA breaking news

Supersonic flight became a reality in October 1947, when the Bell X-1 rocket plane broke the sound barrier. NASA’s Lewis Research Center in Cleveland (now, NASA Glenn), which had served as the agency’s aeropropulsion leader since it was established in the 1940s, subsequently helped NASA advance the technology needed to make longer supersonic flights possible. […]

https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/glenn/nasa-center-boosted-yf-12-supersonic-engine-research/ Save to Pocket

Good news on the emissions front

date: 2024-02-22, from: Marketplace Morning Report

In a bright spot for news on the climate crisis, new data shows that U.S. carbon emissions dipped by 1.8% last year. Most of the reduction in emissions is coming from the power sector. We’ll explore what’s driving the shift and where progress still needs to be made. Plus, Nvidia saw a 265% revenue bump from a year ago. Then, inflation and health care remain key worries for voters.

https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/good-news-on-the-emissions-front Save to Pocket

Volvo EX30 Winter Energy Consumption Test Leaves Much To Be Desired

date: 2024-02-22, from: Inside EVs News

The car was running pre-production software, but the real-world energy consumption was almost double the advertised figure.

https://insideevs.com/news/709666/volvo-ex30-winter-energy-consumption/ Save to Pocket

Pluralistic: The majority of censorship is self-censorship; The Bezzle excerpt (Part V) (22 Feb 2024)

date: 2024-02-22, from: Cory Doctorow’s blog

Today’s links The majority of censorship is self-censorship: …But the majority of self-censorship is intentionally cultivated by an outside power. The Bezzle excerpt (Part V): Keep your hands at 10 and 2. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2009, 2014, 2019, 2023 Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading The majority of censorship is self-censorship (permalink) I know a lot of polymaths, but Ada Palmer takes the cake: brilliant science fiction writer, brilliant historian, brilliant librettist, brilliant singer, and then some: https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/10/monopoly-begets-monopoly/#terra-ignota Palmer is a friend and a colleague. In 2018, she, Adrian Johns and I collaborated on “Censorship, Information Control, & Information Revolutions from Printing Press to Internet,” a series of grad seminars at the U Chicago History department (where Ada is a tenured prof, specializing in the Inquisition and Renaissance forbidden knowledge): https://ifk.uchicago.edu/research/faculty-fellow-projects/censorship-information-control-information-revolutions-from-printing-press/ The project had its origins in a party game that Ada and I used to play at SF conventions: Ada would describe a way that the Inquisitions’ censors attacked the printing press, and I’d find an extremely parallel maneuver from governments, the entertainment industry or other entities from the much more recent history of internet censorship battles. With the seminars, we took it to the next level. Each 3h long session featured a roster of speakers from many disciplines, explaining everything from how encryption works to how white nationalists who were radicalized in Vietnam formed an armored-car robbery gang to finance modems and Apple ][+s to link up neo-Nazis across the USA. We borrowed the structure of these sessions from science fiction conventions, home to a very specific kind of panel that doesn’t always work, but when it does, it’s fantastic. It was a natural choice: after all, Ada and I know each other through science fiction. Even if you’re not an sf person, you’ve probably heard of the Hugo Awards, the most prestigious awards in the field, voted on each year by attendees of the annual World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon). And even if you’re not an sf fan, you might have heard about a scandal involving the Hugo Awards, which were held last year in China, a first: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/science-fiction-authors-excluded-hugo-awards-china-rcna139134 A little background: each year’s Worldcon is run by a committee of volunteers. These volunteers put together bids to host the Worldcon, and canvass Worldcon attendees to vote in favor of their bid. For many years, a group of Chinese fans attempted to field a successful bid to host a Worldcon, and, eventually, they won. At the time, there were many concerns: about traveling to a country with a poor human rights record and a reputation for censorship, and about the logistics of customary Worldcon attendees getting visas. During this debate, many international fans pointed to the poor human rights record in the USA (which has hosted the vast majority of Worldcons since their inception), and the absolute ghastly rigmarole the US government subjects many foreign visitors to when they seek visas to come to the US for conventions. Whatever side of this debate you came down on, it couldn’t be denied that the Chinese Worldcon rang a lot of alarm-bells. Communications were spotty, and then the con was unceremoniously rescheduled for months after the original scheduled date, without any good explanation. Rumors swirled of Chinese petty officials muscling their way into the con’s administration. But the real alarm bells started clanging after the Hugo Award ceremony. Normally, after the Hugos are given out, attendees are given paper handouts tallying the nominations and votes, and those numbers are also simultaneously published online. Technically, the Hugo committee has a grace period of some weeks before this data must be published, but at every Worldcon I’ve attended over the past 30+ years, I left the Hugos with a data-sheet in my hand. Then, in early December, at the very last moment, the Hugo committee released its data – and all hell broke loose. Numerous, acclaimed works had been unilaterally “disqualified” from the ballot. Many of these were written by writers from the Chinese diaspora, but some works – like an episode of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman – were seemingly unconnected to any national considerations. Readers and writers erupted in outrage, demanding to know what had happened. The Hugo administrators – Americans and Canadians who’d volunteered in those roles for many years and were widely viewed as being members in good standing of the community – were either silent or responded with rude and insulting remarks. One thing they didn’t do was explain themselves. The absence of facts left a void that rumors and speculation rushed in to fill. Stories of Chinese official censorship swirled online, and along with them, a kind of I-told-you-so: China should never have been home to a Worldcon, the country’s authoritarian national politics are fundamentally incompatible with a literary festival. As the outrage mounted and the scandal breached from the confines of science fiction fans and writers to the wider world, more details kept emerging. A damning set of internal leaks revealed that it was those long-serving American and Canadian volunteers who decided to censor the ballot. They did so out of a vague sense that the Chinese state would visit some unspecified sanction on the con if politically unpalatable works appeared on the Hugo ballot. Incredibly, they even compiled clumsy dossiers on nominees, disqualifying one nominee out of a mistaken belief that he had once visited Tibet (it was actually Nepal). There’s no evidence that the Chinese state asked these people to do this. Likewise, it wasn’t pressure from the Chinese state that caused them to throw out hundreds of ballots cast by Chinese fans, whom they believed were voting for a “slate” of works (it’s not clear if this is the case, but slate voting is permitted under Hugo rules). All this has raised many questions about the future of the Hugo Awards, and the status of the awards that were given in China. There’s widespread concern that Chinese fans involved with the con may face state retaliation due to the negative press that these shenanigans stirred up. But there’s also a lot of questions about censorship, and the nature of both state and private censorship, and the relationship between the two. These are questions that Ada is extremely well-poised to answer; indeed, they’re the subject of her book-in-progress, entitled Why We Censor: from the Inquisition to the Internet. In a magisterial essay for Reactor, Palmer stakes out her central thesis: “The majority of censorship is self-censorship, but the majority of self-censorship is intentionally cultivated by an outside power”: https://reactormag.com/tools-for-thinking-about-censorship/ States – even very powerful states – that wish to censor lack the resources to accomplish totalizing censorship of the sort depicted in Nineteen Eighty-Four. They can’t go from house to house, searching every nook and cranny for copies of forbidden literature. The only way to kill an idea is to stop people from expressing it in the first place. Convincing people to censor themselves is, “dollar for dollar and man-hour for man-hour, much cheaper and more impactful than anything else a censorious regime can do.” Ada invokes examples modern and ancient, including from her own area of specialty, the Inquisition and its treatment of Gailileo. The Inquistions didn’t set out to silence Galileo. If that had been its objective, it could have just assassinated him. This was cheap, easy and reliable! Instead, the Inquisition persecuted Galileo, in a very high-profile manner, making him and his ideas far more famous. But this isn’t some early example of Inquisitorial Streisand Effect. The point of persecuting Galileo was to convince Descartes to self-censor, which he did. He took his manuscript back from the publisher and cut the sections the Inquisition was likely to find offensive. It wasn’t just Descartes: “thousands of other major thinkers of the time wrote differently, spoke differently, chose different projects, and passed different ideas on to the next century because they self-censored after the Galileo trial.” This is direct self-censorship, where people are frightened into silencing themselves. But there’s another form of censorship, which Ada calls “middlemen censorship.” That’s when someone other than the government censors a work because they fear what the government would do if they didn’t. Think of Scholastic’s cowardly decision to pull inclusive, LGBTQ books out of its book fair selections even though no one had ordered them to do so: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/06/books/scholastic-book-racism-maggie-tokuda-hall.html This is a form of censorship outsourcing, and it “multiplies the manpower of a censorship system by the number of individuals within its power.” The censoring body doesn’t need to hire people to search everyone’s houses for offensive books – it can frighten editors, publishers, distributors, booksellers and librarians into suppressing the books in the first place. This outsourcing blurs the line between state and private surveillance. Think about comics. After a series of high-profile Congressional hearings about the supposed danger of comics to impressionable young minds, the comics industry undertook a regime of self-censorship, through which the private Comics Code Authority would vet comings for “dangerous” content before allowing its seal of approval to appear on the comics’ covers. Distributors and retailers refused to carry books without a CCA stamp, so publishers refused to publish books unless they could get a CCA stamp. The CCA was unaccountable, capricious – and racist. By the 60s and 70s, it became clear that comic about Black characters were subjected to much tighter scrutiny than comics featuring white heroes. The CCA would reject “a drop of sweat on the forehead of a Black astronaut as ‘too graphic’ since it ‘could be mistaken for blood.’” Every comic that got sent back by the CCA meant long, brutal reworkings by writers and illustrators to get them past the censors. The US government never censored heroes like Black Panther, but the chain of events that created the CCA “middleman censors” made sure that Black Panther appeared in far fewer comics starring Marvel’s most prominent Black character. An analysis of censorship that tries to draw a line between private and public censorship would say that the government played no role in Black Panther’s banishment to obscurity – but without Congressional action, Black Panther would never have faced censorship. This is why attempts to cleanly divide public and private censorship always break down. Many people will tell you that when Twitter or Facebook blocks content they disagree with, that’s not censorship, since censorship is government action, and these are private actors. What they mean is that Twitter and Facebook censorship doesn’t violate the First Amendment, but it’s perfectly possible to infringe on free speech without violating the US Constitution. What’s more, if the government fails to prevent monopolization of our speech forums – like social media – and also declines to offer its own public speech forums that are bound to respect the First Amendment, we can end up with government choices that produce an environment in which some ideas are suppressed wherever they might find an audience – all without violating the Constitution: https://locusmag.com/2020/01/cory-doctorow-inaction-is-a-form-of-action/ The great censorious regimes of the past – the USSR, the Inquisition – left behind vast troves of bureaucratic records, and these records are full of complaints about the censors’ lack of resources. They didn’t have the manpower, the office space, the money or the power to erase the ideas they were ordered to suppress. As Ada notes, “In the period that Spain’s Inquisition was wildly out of Rome’s control, the Roman Inquisition even printed manuals to guide its Inquisitors on how to bluff their way through pretending they were on top of what Spain was doing!” Censors have always done – and still do – their work not by wielding power, but by projecting it. Even the most powerful state actors are not powerful enough to truly censor, in the sense of confiscating every work expressing an idea and punishing everyone who creates such a work. Instead, when they rely on self-censorship, both by individuals and by intermediaries. When censors act to block one work and not another, or when they punish one transgressor while another is free to speak, it’s tempting to think that they are following some arcane ruleset that defines when enforcement is strict and when it’s weak. But the truth is, they censor erratically because they are too weak to censor comprehensively. Spectacular acts of censorship and punishment are a performance, “to change the way people act and think.” Censors “seek out actions that can cause the maximum number of people to notice and feel their presence, with a minimum of expense and manpower.” The censor can only succeed by convincing us to do their work for them. That’s why drawing a line between state censorship and private censorship is such a misleading exercise. Censorship is, and always has been, a public-private partnership. The Bezzle excerpt (Part V) (permalink) I’m out on tour with my new novel, The Bezzle, a cyberpunk revenge thriller about Marty Hench, a two-fisted forensic accountant, and a guerrilla war he wages on a prison-tech provider that treats incarcerated people as assets to be strip-mined: https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/16/narrative-capitalism/#bezzle-tour If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog: https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/22/self-censorship/#acab As part of the promotion for the book, I’ve been serializing an excerpt: Chapter 14, in which Marty takes on a side-quest to recover the stolen royalties of one-time funk star Stephon Magner (AKA Steve Soul) which were stolen by his scumbag manager and then sold on to an even scummier sample-licensing clearinghouse. Today, I bring you part five, in which Marty’s simple cross-referencing project is violently altered by an encounter with the criminal gangs of the LA Sheriffs Deputy departments, a real crime-syndicate whose reign of terror continues to this day: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-05-17/dozens-of-lasd-deputies-ordered-to-show-suspected-gang-tattoos-reveal-others-who-have-them I’m posting this installment en route to San Diego, where I’ll be appearing tonight at Mysterious Galaxy: https://www.mystgalaxy.com/22224Doctorow From there, it’s back to LA, where I’m appearing on Saturday evening with Adam Conover at Vroman’s: https://www.vromansbookstore.com/Cory-Doctorow-discusses-The-Bezzle And then on Monday I’ll be at Third Place Books with Neal Stephenson: https://www.thirdplacebooks.com/event/cory-doctorow From there, I’m off to Portland, Phoenix, Tucson and points further: https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/16/narrative-capitalism/#bezzle-tour Here’s part one of the serial: https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/17/the-steve-soul-caper/#lead-singer-disease Part two: https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/19/crad-kilodney-was-an-outlier/#copyright-termination Part three: https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/20/fore/#lawyer-up Part four: https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#poacher-turned-keeper And now, part five! * * * The storefront had an old break room with a first-aid kit, and a bathroom with a sink. I sponged myself clean in the mirror, ate two expired Aleves and three 200 mg expired Tylenols out of the kit. The ass was ripped most of the way out of my pants, so I moved my wallet to my front pocket, which my massage therapist had been nagging at me to do for years. I opened the door more carefully this time and limped out into the parking lot. My rental—a little red Civic—was the only car left in the parking lot, except for a rusted junker with no tires that was the perennial sentry of its farthest corner. I bipped the doors open with my fob, checked the back seat, then slid inside. I checked my reflection in the rearview mirror and winced, which pulled at my bruises and set blood oozing from my lip and cheekbone again, which made me wince harder. I was already halfway to Quasimodo and I tried to remember if there was a 7-Eleven on the route home where I could buy a couple of bags of frozen peas for the swelling. I reset the mirror and backed out of my spot. The pain was increasing. They’d have Advil at the 7-Eleven, and I’d remembered where there was one on the way back to my Airbnb. As I waited for a red light at Eagle Rock and Colorado Boulevard, I watched as a homeless man labored across the road with his shopping cart. I was still watching him when I realized the light had been green for some time and had just toggled yellow. I made the turn and headed up Colorado, but I was barely a hundred yards down the road when I heard a siren blat and saw the police lights. I checked my mirrors and saw the LASD cruiser directly behind me, racing right up to my bumper, slowing only at the very last moment. The cruiser’s high beams blinked insistently and the siren whooped. I pulled over. I waited while the officer slowly got out of his car and walked to my driver’s-side window. I kept my hands at ten and two. The officer tapped my window and made a roll-down motion, so I hit the button, moving slowly, putting my hand back. I got a light in my face, squinting and thus reopening my cheekbone and lip. “Everything all right, sir?” “Yes,” I said, feeling the blood ooze down my chin. “I was beaten up,” I said, stating the obvious. “That is unfortunate,” the officer said. “License and registration.” I got my driver’s license out of my wallet and found the rental papers in the glove box and handed them over. He crunched back to his cruiser and I watched him in the side mirror. He’d left his cruiser’s headlights on and in the glare it was hard to tell, but it looked like there was another cop in the car whom he was conferring with. After a long delay, he came back. “Step out of the car, please.” I did. He turned me around and had me plant my hands on the hood, kicked my feet apart, and roughly frisked me, getting his hand inside the rent in the seat of my pants and patting my boxer shorts and giving my balls a hard squeeze. “Sir, do you know why I stopped you?” “I don’t,” I said. “You proceeded unsafely through a traffic signal. Have you been drinking, sir?” “I haven’t.” “Have you consumed any cannabis or other drugs?” “I haven’t.” He turned me around and shone his light in my eyes. “If I search your car, am I gonna find any drugs?” “No, sir.” “Because I am gonna search that car and if I do find drugs and you’ve been lying to me, this is gonna be a lot worse than it needs to be.” I didn’t dignify that with a response. My head hurt. My face hurt. My back hurt. This was a bullshit stop. I expected the deputy’s partner to get out of the cruiser while my tormentor tossed the rental car, but he stayed put. I did, too. Obviously. I wasn’t going to take off on foot. I’m a forensic accountant, not a gang kid getting fifteen minutes of fame on Cops. He spent long enough on the rental that I started to worry. Who knew what some previous driver might have shoved between the seats? But after pulling out the floor mats and tossing them onto the grassy verge beside the car, he finally stood up. “All right, sir. I’m going to go and get a breathalyzer test. You can refuse it and I will then suspend your license for twenty- four hours. I will arrest you for a suspected DUI and bring you in for a blood test. If you fail that test, you will be subject to additional criminal penalties. Do you understand me?” He had old coffee on his breath. My face hurt. “I’ll take a test.” Back to the cruiser. It had been half an hour at least. Once the breathalyzer was done—fifteen minutes, if memory served—I could go to the 7-Eleven for painkillers and frozen peas. I decided I’d add a six-pack, I was so tired. My face hurt. I knew that mouthing off to this cop wouldn’t make things go faster, quite the opposite, but as he took his leisurely time coming back to me, I was hard-pressed not to. I blew. “May I sit down?” I asked. “My face hurts.” He didn’t bother to look up from his phone. “Stay where you are, sir.” I stood. My face hurt. Time crawled. Finally, the breathalyzer beeped. He held it up and squinted at it, then used his phone to light up its face. When he did, his sleeve rode up and revealed the “998” tattoo on his forearm. Suddenly, I didn’t care so much about the pain in my face. The cop looked at me. He was an older guy, but quite a silver fox, in a Clooneyoid sort of way. Had the same smile lines at the corners of his lips and eyes. But on him, they looked mean. Dangerous. A man who would smile at you while he beat your face in. “All right, sir,” he said. “I’m going to write you a citation for reckless driving and you will be free to go.” He smiled. “Thank you for your cooperation.” It sounded like “fuck you.” Back to the cruiser again. When he was done writing, he switched off his headlights, and the bubble light inside the car lit up his partner. Heavyset. Smiling. Excellent teeth. He gave me the same look as he had just before kicking me in the ribs. I gasped involuntarily and my ribs burned. His smile got bigger. The Clooneyoid deputy returned with my ticket. I looked at it and then I realized he’d said “reckless driving”—not “dangerous driving.” This was a summons, not a citation. For a misdemeanor. Two points off my license and I’d have to go to court. Depending on the judge, I could be in for fines or even a jail sentence. Clooneyoid saw me figuring this out and he smiled, too. Everyone was having a great time tonight except for poor old Marty Hench. “See you in court, sir,” he said. I exercised extreme care on the drive to the 7-Eleven, even backing out of my parking spot and reparking so that I was perfectly centered between the white lines. The clerk didn’t bat an eye at my hamburger face. I gave myself five minutes to bury my bruises in the frozen peas before I backed out and drove the rest of the way to my Airbnb. I drove five under the limit the whole way, and when I got out of my rental, I looked long and hard up and down the street for an LA Sheriff’s Department cruiser. Hey look at this (permalink) Will GPT models choke on their own exhaust? https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2023/06/06/will-gpt-models-choke-on-their-own-exhaust/ (h/t John Naughton) Why Flying is Miserable and Why It Doesn’t Have to Be https://lpeproject.org/blog/why-flying-is-miserable-and-why-it-doesnt-have-to-be/ The Big Idea: Cory Doctorow https://whatever.scalzi.com/2024/02/21/the-big-idea-cory-doctorow-4/ This day in history (permalink) #15yrsago Parent of gamer asks his son to honor the Geneva Conventions https://memex.craphound.com/2009/02/21/parent-of-gamer-asks-his-son-to-honor-the-geneva-conventions/ #15yrsago UAE plans ban on negative economic reporting https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/12/world/middleeast/12dubai.html #15yrsago UK’s top snoop gets finked out by her neighbours https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/feb/22/jacqui-smith-expenses-inquiry #15yrsago Stimulus bill requires RSS feeds of how the money is spent http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rssstimulus #10yrsago Conservative western bloggers: Ukraine strongman’s pay-for-play useful idiots https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rosiegray/exclusive-how-ukraine-wooed-conservative-websites #10yrsago I am a Ukrainian: powerful, viral video about Euromaidan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hvds2AIiWLA #10yrsago Kansas lawmaker introduces bill to permit teachers to hit children hard enough to bruise https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/02/kansas-spanking-bill-new-legislation-allows-parents-and-teachers-to-hit-kids-harder.html #10yrsago Canadian court rules on copyright trolls: letters can go ahead, under strict supervision https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2015/03/defending-privacy-doesnt-pay-federal-court-issues-ruling-in-voltage-teksavvy-costs/ #10yrsago Mall cops freak out over steampunk meetup, call the real cops https://www.kpbs.org/news/2014/feb/19/steampunk-carousel-outing-cut-short-security-guard/ #10yrsago Openknit: a Reprap-inspired open source knitting machine http://openknit.org #5yrsago Beyond “more copyright”: how do we improve artists’ lives and livelihoods through policy? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0294Y6Lv3Eo #5yrsago Iowa’s electricity monopolist Midamerican Energy has written a bill to let it “monopolize the sun” https://www.bleedingheartland.com/2019/02/20/new-bill-is-clear-attempt-by-midamerican-to-monopolize-the-sun-in-iowa/ #5yrsago Tucker Carlson thought anti-elite historian would be an easy interview, but ended up telling him “go fuck yourself” https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/feb/20/historian-who-confronted-davos-billionaires-leaks-tucker-carlson-rant #5yrsago As sports company abandons support for “smart” basketball, Nike pushes a software update that bricks its self-tying shoes https://mashable.com/article/nike-app-connected-shoe-bricked#duGbFcvYdsqa #5yrsago The TRUE Fees Act: legislative proposal to force cable/ISP companies to advertise the true cost of their services, inclusive of surcharges https://www.vice.com/en/article/j57ddb/new-bill-would-stop-internet-service-providers-from-screwing-you-with-hidden-fees #1yrago Matt Ruff’s “Destroyer of Worlds” https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/21/the-horror-of-white-magic/#anti-lovecraftian Colophon (permalink) Today’s top sources: Currently writing: A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2024 Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: How I Got Scammed (https://craphound.com/news/2024/02/18/how-i-got-scammed/) Upcoming appearances: The Bezzle at Mysterious Galaxy (San Diego), Feb 22 https://www.mystgalaxy.com/22224Doctorow The Bezzle at Vroman’s (Pasadena), Feb 24 https://www.vromansbookstore.com/Cory-Doctorow-discusses-The-Bezzle The Bezzle at Third Place Books (Seattle), Feb 26 https://www.thirdplacebooks.com/event/cory-doctorow The Bezzle at Powell’s (Portland) Feb 27: https://www.powells.com/book/the-bezzle-martin-hench-2-9781250865878/1-2 The Bezzle at Changing Hands (Phoenix), Feb 29: https://www.changinghands.com/event/february2024/cory-doctorow Tucson Festival of Books, Mar 9/10 https://tucsonfestivalofbooks.org/?id=676 Enshittification: How the Internet Went Bad and How to Get it Back (virtual), Mar 26 https://libcal.library.ubc.ca/event/3781006 Wondercon Anaheim, Mar 29-31 https://www.comic-con.org/wc/ The Bezzle at Anderson’s Books (Chicago), Apr 17 https://www.andersonsbookshop.com/event/cory-doctorow-1 Torino Biennale Tecnologia (Apr 19-21) https://www.turismotorino.org/en/experiences/events/biennale-tecnologia Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (Winnipeg), May 2 https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/cory-doctorow-tickets-798820071337?aff=oddtdtcreator Tartu Prima Vista Literary Festival (May 5-11) https://tartu2024.ee/en/kirjandusfestival/ Media Ecology Association keynote (Amherst, NY), Jun 6-9 https://media-ecology.org/convention American Association of Law Libraries keynote (Chicago), Jul 21 https://www.aallnet.org/conference/agenda/keynote-speaker/ Recent appearances: Aaron Swartz (EpistemiCast) https://open.spotify.com/episode/5t9QVHSQBjIXKUiN2EvEmK Medieval Enshittification (We’re Not So Different) https://www.spreaker.com/episode/medieval-enshittification-feat-cory-doctorow–58764264 This Is Hell https://thisishell.com/interviews/1701-cory-doctorow Latest books: The Bezzle: a sequel to “Red Team Blues,” about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/). “The Lost Cause:” a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) “The Internet Con”: A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). “Red Team Blues”: “A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before.” Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. “Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin”, on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com “Attack Surface”: The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it “a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance.” Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html “How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism”: an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) “Little Brother/Homeland”: A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html “Poesy the Monster Slayer” a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. Upcoming books: Picks and Shovels: a sequel to “Red Team Blues,” about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic “When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla” -Joey “Accordion Guy” DeVilla

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/22/self-censorship/ Save to Pocket

Microsoft extends Copilot in Windows for Insiders

date: 2024-02-22, updated: 2024-02-22, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

Don’t want to learn how Windows works? Copilot can help you with that

Windows Insiders are set to receive more Copilot in Windows features, following an update for the Canary and Dev Channels to add extra functions for users unwilling to click through icons.…

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/02/22/microsoft_extends_copilot_in_windows/ Save to Pocket

Stressed Or Upset? Snoop Dogg Is Teaching Kids How To Breathe Through It

date: 2024-02-22, updated: 2024-02-22, from: The LAist

Bow Wizzle, voiced by rapper Snoop Dogg, teaches kids how to breathe through stress in his children’s animated series on YouTube.

https://laist.com/news/education/early-childhood-education-pre-k/snoop-dogg-mental-health-kids-breathing Save to Pocket

Another Major Hollywood Union, The IATSE, Is Heading Into Studio Negotiations. Here’s What To Know

date: 2024-02-22, updated: 2024-02-22, from: The LAist

IATSE represents more than 150,000 below-the-line entertainment workers, from costume designers to motion picture editors.

https://laist.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/iatse-studio-negotiations-what-to-know Save to Pocket

818 Till You Die? OG 213? LA, You Have Very Strong Feelings About Area Codes

date: 2024-02-22, updated: 2024-02-22, from: The LAist

Area codes are a badge of identity for many around Greater L.A. As we prepare for a new one this year, we find out what people think their area codes say about them.

https://laist.com/news/los-angeles-area-codes-818-626-213-downtown-sgv-san-gabriel-orange-county Save to Pocket

Japan’s Nikkei hits record high thanks to chips

date: 2024-02-22, from: Marketplace Morning Report

From the BBC World Service: Tokyo’s main stock exchange closed at a record high on Thursday, beating a three-decade old record and largely due to semiconductor microchips. The surge comes after U.S.-based chipmaker Nvidia posted Q4 financial results that beat estimates. An Nvidia-based bounce drove tech stocks in Europe too. Also on the program: How will Albania’s controversial migration deal with Italy work?

https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/japans-nikkei-hits-record-high-thanks-to-chips Save to Pocket

China to Send More Pandas to US, Jump-Starting New Era of ‘Panda Diplomacy’

date: 2024-02-22, from: VOA News USA

BEIJING — China’s Wildlife Conservation Association is working with the National Zoo in Washington in an arrangement that could bring more pandas back to the United States, signaling improving diplomatic relations between the two superpowers.

China has lent its beloved bears to zoos in various countries over the years as goodwill animal ambassadors and also fostered a modern Sino-U.S. “panda diplomacy” with the gesture.

“Relevant Chinese institutions have signed agreements with the Madrid Zoo in Spain and the San Diego Zoo in the United States on a new round of international cooperation in the protection of giant pandas,” said Mao Ning on Thursday, spokesperson for the Chinese foreign ministry, when addressing a query at a regular press briefing.

“They are also working with the Washington National Zoo in the United States and [Viennna Zoo] in Austria to actively negotiate and launch a new round of cooperation.”

Earlier, the Wildlife Conservation Association said on its WeChat social media account that it had reached and signed agreements for the conservation of giant pandas with several zoos.

Back in November, the National Zoo in Washington returned three pandas to China as part of a more than 50-year-old legacy, leaving Georgia’s Zoo Atlanta as the only one in the U.S. with a giant panda program.

That loan agreement for the zoo’s four pandas expires this year, which meant there would be no pandas in the U.S. for the first time since 1972 when the Chinese government presented two giant pandas as gifts to the United States after President Richard Nixon’s historic Cold War visit to China.

“We look forward to a new round of international giant panda protection cooperation with relevant countries, which will further expand scientific research results on the protection of giant pandas and other endangered species, and promote people-to-people bonds and people-to-people friendship,” Mao said.

Over the past year, China and the United States have had fraught relations over a number of global issues from regional wars, trade disputes and ongoing spying allegations. Leaders from both countries have had several round of talks over the past few months to ease tensions.

https://www.voanews.com/a/china-to-send-more-pandas-to-us-jump-starting-new-era-of-panda-diplomacy-/7497926.html Save to Pocket

date: 2024-02-22, updated: 2024-02-22, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

London Stock Exchange listed Bytes Technology Group ‘working to clarify details’ after Neil Murphy resigns

Neil Murphy, the boss of Bytes Technology Group – one of Microsoft’s largest cloud and software licensing resellers – has quit with immediate effect, at the same time admitting to making secret stock trades in the company.…

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/02/22/boss_ms_reseller_resigns/ Save to Pocket

A 101-Year-Old’s Fight Against Book Banning

date: 2024-02-22, from: Dan Rather’s Steady

Inspiring young 92-year-olds like me

https://steady.substack.com/p/a-101-year-olds-fight-against-book Save to Pocket

LEVER TIME: The Future Of Lever Podcasts

date: 2024-02-22, from: The Lever News

Lever founder David Sirota shares some exciting news about the future of Lever podcasts.

https://www.levernews.com/lever-time-the-future-of-lever-podcasts/ Save to Pocket

City council megaproject mulls ditching Oracle after budget balloons to £131M

date: 2024-02-22, updated: 2024-02-22, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

As bankrupt local authority slashes services and hikes taxes, consultants enjoy £1k-a-day while system still can’t offer auditable accounts

Birmingham City Council, the largest local authority in Europe, is considering ditching Oracle as its main ERP and HR software after a disastrous implementation has left it unable to file auditable accounts, with the budget rising from £20 million ($25 million) to £131 million ($166 million).…

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Prompt engineering is a task best left to AI models

date: 2024-02-22, updated: 2024-02-22, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)

Machine-learning boffins find open source neural nets can optimize their own queries

Large language models have given rise to the dark art of prompt engineering – a process for composing system instructions that elicit better chatbot responses.…

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