I guess if you wanna go off at people like that, I have to go through your links and point out that

1. Providing services to a cyber warfare organization does not make one a cyber warfare company. I bet they contract out their cafeteria services too. The article specifically states the contract is for data analysis.
2. Doing data analysis for target selection also does not make one a cyber warfare company.
3. Data analysis is not cryptography. Also, my personal computer is encrypted. Am I a cryptographer?
4. Receiving data from your customers does not make you a data collection company, and the article points out that the data is being collected by Oura. Compare that with the NSA who for example have internet backbone splitters installed at the major telcos, or put cell spoofers in cities.

Why is doing data analysis for unethical ends not enough?

Palantir is a data analysis company. Data analysis is just one part of what the NSA does. Other important functions of the NSA include cyber warfare, cryptography, and data collection. I have not read that Palantir does any of that.

If different people with similar visual characteristics have similar behavioral characteristics, doesn’t that imply that perhaps we can judge a book by its cover?

Haven’t read the book, but the title suggests things could have been different. That something happened to make things bad. If that’s the argument, it is completely wrong. Israel could have turned out no other way. Extermination is the only possible outcome of a colonial ethno-state.

Imagine explaining to a patient they have permanent neurological damage because they wanted to sniff their video games.

Yeah I can’t believe this is still around. It was a beast to work with like a decade ago, and it kinda looks exactly the same. Surely there are some smooth phone or web apps that do this better now.

I have a hard time believing that Gore would have made a difference on preventing 9-11, but I’m sure the response would have been different. Maybe no Patriot Act, maybe no Afghanistan War, almost certainly no Iraq War. That’s a big enough difference for me.

Tactical assault Torah

Sounds like a play for protectionism.

I guess taking bets on whether the US will drop a nuke on Iran is too spicy for polymarket. I wonder what the odds would be now.

I’m used to AP titles being pretty dry, but they have started putting some bite in them.

Sounds like the next year or two may be a good time to finally get a battery for my panels

I’m having a conversation with a family member. Somehow the topic of firefighters comes up. She pauses, looks very thoughtful for a moment, then asks, “Do you not like firefighters, either?”

“What? Why would I not like firefighters?”

“Like how you don’t like police.”

She knows me well. I boggle at how my distaste for cops could be this misunderstood.

The Trump admin have been filling US attorneys offices with temporary appointments, and attempting to leave those temporary appointments in place indefinitely. This is an attempt to avoid the constitutional requirement that US attorneys be approved by the Senate.

Courts have recently ruled that this is illegal, and that some of the people currently attempting to exercise the powers of a US attorney have no such legal authority. Ms. Habba is an example of one such person.

The law allows the courts to appoint US attorneys if the position has been vacant for some period. Some courts have chosen to do so, I believe in the case of Ms. Habba specifically, and the Trump administration have immediately fired the court appointed US attorneys. I believe after firing the court appointed US attorney, they attempted to make another temporary appointment, which the law does not allow, but were hoping to muddle the issue by appointing three people as a “triumvirate.”

The courts subsequently ruled that that is also illegal, but it sounds like the ruling judged stayed their order to allow for appeals.

This judge in the transcript is attempting to discover whether the prosecutor attempting to participate in this plea deal and sentencing hearing have any legal authority to do so. It sounds like the hearing was supposed to resolve these matters of fact, but the attorney present wasn’t able to say anything about who is actually running the US attorneys office.

Consequently, the judge has indicated that they will be summoning the “triumvirate” to testify in person, under oath to determine who is really running the US attorney office.

IANAL and this is all from memory of previous reporting I’ve read. Do fact check if you’re interested.

I think it kinda doesn’t matter. If they can catch 95% of all users, that’s pretty close to total victory. Well more than enough to shut out access from Linux systems for most things without causing public backlash.

Apple, Microsoft, and Google account for roughly 95% of all human user systems.

Did any of these outfits actually produce quality tech journalism? In my mind CNET and the like were all marketing pieces about the next smart TV. I do use Tom’s Hardware when I’m shopping for PC parts because they seem to do a good job with their benchmarking. The all-time great hard tech news site was Anandtech, and that’s been gone for years.

Hello sneaky lady in the distance

Oh shit you got me talking political theory. Here we go…

One thing I’ve observed when people discuss anarchist theory or practice is that it is frequently imbued with a radical absolutism that isn’t applied to other political theories. It’s common to see people asking how the world could work without any rules, or punishments, or coercion? You almost never encounter honest questions of a similar type for, say, socialism, e.g. how will I ever get anything done if I need the state to plan everything I do? Or the capitalist case, how would the world work if everything is someone else’s property? No serious socialist believes the state should plan everything. No serious capitalist believes that all things should be private property for profit. No serious anarchist believes that the world can be free of all regulation.

So why is this? I have a two part theory. When the socialist revolutions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were unfolding, the socialist camp split between authoritarian and anarchist socialists. In the end the authoritarians (communists) won that conflict and expelled the anarchists. This left the world with two camps, the communists, championed by the Soviet Union, and the capitalists, championed by the United States. Both camps considered anarchists villainous enemies, and both camps spent the next 50+ years producing voluminous propaganda extolling their own virtues, and denigrating their enemies. This meant that anarchists were being dunked on by two super powers for most of the 20th century without anyone of even remotely similar influence to respond. As a result basically everyone’s understanding of anarchism is a caricature produced by anarchism’s opponents.

The second part of this theory is the fact that there really are a lot of self-described anarchists who adhere to this cartoon version of anarchism! I find this harder to explain. Perhaps it is that anarchism as an active political force was effectively destroyed during this period, and today’s anarchists are in some significant part the people who were exposed to the cartoon anarchism propaganda, and thought, hey I like that. It could be that political anarchism has no influence and thus no responsibility to achieve anything, so why not indulge in ideological purity contests. I don’t really know.

This bums me out, because I think practical anarchist theory has a lot to like. Not a theory that says I may do whatever I want whenever I want, and anything which impinges on that is oppression. Rather one that says that imbalanced power relations are necessary and sufficient for exploitation and oppression, and so we should build political structures that distribute power as broadly as possible. That we should minimize hierarchy and coercion to enable people to spontaneously organize to solve problems.

And when spontaneous organization isn’t sufficient for the problem, an anarchism that has the practical humility to apply different techniques. Utopia is a direction, not a destination.

Has anyone been able to find the list of persons included in the source? Vmfunc’s blog says that a list was published but later taken down.

EDIT: wayback machine of course