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A 271,000-word WhatsApp conversation between a Bay Area man and his scammer reveals the heartbreaking mechanics of a new breed of investment racket.

These scams are carried out “on a large scale, on an industrial scale — like they’re doing fraud in a factory,” Jan Santiago, the deputy director of advocacy group Global Anti-Scam Organization, told Forbes.

10/20/21 Jessica: The money you earn can better help your father Cy: I’m not greedy as long as it is safe Jessica: Ok, let's talk back Cy: Ok.

Cy: I keep telling myself Cy: If I can make 1.7m in two weeks we should be able to get it back especially your news are 100% accurate inside info But by the following day, he tried to stave off Jessica by lying to her, claiming that his family was onto him.

In the end, Cy managed to borrow $100,000 from a childhood friend and sold hundreds of thousands more of his own assets, all of which he promptly invested with Jessica’s guidance — an additional $600,000 on top of the $440,000 he’d already handed over.

I had this thought of ramming the car into a barrier and just let that be and let God decide whether I would live through this or I would die.”

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Source: CNN With the sun shining, drinks on the table and music in the air, it looks like the young men in the video, which has gone viral on Chinese social media, have picked a great day for a picnic.

The island's military later confirmed these mysterious menaces are indeed civilian drones from mainland China.

That trip angered China's ruling Communist Party -- which views Taiwan as part of its territory, despite never having governed it -- and it responded by launching unprecedented military drills around the island, sending warplanes across the Taiwan Strait and firing missiles over the main island.

"(It's) designed to remind Taiwan that there's no escape from Chinese pressure, and that in the end, China will take over.

He said Taiwan could ask DJI, the China-based manufacturer whose logo appeared in a few of the trolling videos, to make the Kinmen islands a restricted area in its database -- a move that would prevent operators from being able to fly the drones there.

If they want to be in control, they better control these civilian drone operators first," Huang said.

Starlink is meant for peaceful use only

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 17, 2022

Highlights

• I examine the relationship between university students’ appearance and grades.

• When education is in-person, attractive students receive higher grades.

• The effect is only present in courses with significant teacher–student interaction.

• Grades of attractive females declined when teaching was conducted remotely.

• For males, there was a beauty premium even after the switch to online teaching.

Abstract

This paper examines the role of student facial attractiveness on academic outcomes under various forms of instruction, using data from engineering students in Sweden. When education is in-person, attractive students receive higher grades in non-quantitative subjects, in which teachers tend to interact more with students compared to quantitative courses. This finding holds both for males and females. When instruction moved online during the COVID-19 pandemic, the grades of attractive female students deteriorated in non-quantitative subjects. However, the beauty premium persisted for males, suggesting that discrimination is a salient factor in explaining the grade beauty premium for females only.

Concluding remarks

This paper has shown that students’ facial attractiveness impact academic outcomes when classes are held in-person. As education moved online following the onset of the pandemic, the grades of attractive female students deteriorated. This finding implies that the female beauty premium observed when education is in-person is likely to be chiefly a consequence of discrimination. On the contrary, for male students, there was still a significant beauty premium even after the introduction of online teaching. The latter finding suggests that for males in particular, beauty can be a productivity-enhancing attribute.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016517652200283X/pdfft?md5=d3f53c2b5d308049b741ef583e246748&pid=1-s2.0-S016517652200283X-main.pdf

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016517652200283X

HN

‘I can’t afford not to have a job,’ says one worker who was promised a similar position at Google before subsequently learning that she would be laid off with no other job in sight

Nearly 100 Facebook janitors were laid off from the tech giant’s California offices Friday, two months after being told their jobs would be safe.

The number of job cuts was actually supposed to be closer to 120, but about 30 janitors are being placed elsewhere, according to workers who spoke with MarketWatch as well as the union that represents them, SEIU United Service Workers West.

Janitors at Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc.’s META, -2.18% headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., and the company’s other offices in the Bay Area, were affected. According to a roster of workers seen by MarketWatch, about 193 janitors and other service workers were retained by SBM, the vendor that directly employs them.

The terminations come after the janitors and other service workers at Meta kept their jobs through the first two-plus years of the COVID-19 pandemic, even when the company closed its campuses during shelter-in-place lockdowns. Meta, along with other big Silicon Valley employers such as Alphabet Inc. GOOG, -0.26% GOOGL, -0.11%, Apple Inc. AAPL, -1.10% and Intel Corp. INTC, +1.39%, touted their commitment to keeping their service workers employed at the time.

But now, as hybrid or remote work become a permanent plan for some companies — and as layoffs hit a range of industries — Big Tech companies are looking to cut costs. Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has warned of tough economic times ahead, and he’s not alone. At Meta, that means engineers are bracing for job cuts, and service workers are getting laid off. Before the janitors were laid off, about 40 bus drivers had lost their jobs on the company’s campuses in the past several months, according to a Teamsters union official.

Meta spokesman Tracy Clayton denied that the company asked for job cuts in its janitorial ranks, and as recently as August said the company was not aware of any pending job cuts by its vendor partners.

But David Huerta, president of SEIU United Service Workers West, the union that represents the janitors, told MarketWatch that Meta is “very well-informed about all of this” and that “it’s not true that they don’t have control over this.”

Meta relies on vendors to directly employ janitors, security guards, shuttle drivers and more. The company switched janitorial providers in July, about a year after MarketWatch reported that its previous vendor, ABM Industries Inc. ABM, -2.53%, had changed the amount of vacation that some janitors had been receiving, which Facebook representatives said they were unaware of at the time. SBM Management Services took over the janitorial contract, and Huerta said both Meta and SBM “made commitments” that no one would be laid off back then.

Asked for further comment, a Meta spokesman referred MarketWatch to SBM, which has not returned repeated requests since early August for comment.

Raquel Avalos, who had worked as a janitor at Meta for three years, said she was told she would be given a job at a Google GOOGL, -0.11% GOOG, -0.26% campus that would’ve paid her a little bit more than her hourly wage at Meta, which was $20.50.

“It was a dollar and something more,” she said. “That was a win-win for me. I was excited.”

Then the single mother of four was told she would be out of a job after all.

“I can’t afford not to have a job,” Avalos said, adding that she was ready to take whatever she was offered, and planned to also look for a part-time job to make ends meet. “I pay for a two-bedroom apartment by myself.”

Like Avalos, another janitor at Meta who got laid off described the past couple of months of uncertainty about their jobs as stressful. Erick Miranda said that before he finally lost his job this week, he had to take some days off to deal with the physical and mental effects of being so worried about whether he would keep his job.

Miranda, who worked at Meta for four years, said he had headaches, as well as pain in his neck, back, shoulder and arms. He had to seek medical care.

“My nervous system is all tense due to all the worries this situation carries,” he said.

Now he plans to apply for unemployment benefits and look for a new job, he said. He has a wife, who’s also unemployed, and his 87-year-old father to support.

As for the janitors who kept their jobs at Meta, they’re worried about heavier workloads because of the 40% reduction in their workforce. One janitor who didn’t want to be named said she and others are already being asked to work night shifts and overtime. She also said that in certain buildings that used to have five janitors assigned to them, there are now only two.

Twenty-three years ago, computer programmer and writer Ellen Ullman noticed a change in the internet. In a lecture at the University of Vermont in 1999, she observed that between 1995 and 1998, it went from being a “private dream,” which one might experience in moments away from “real life,” to a site of extreme individualism, in which companies attempted “to isolate the individual within a sea of economic activity.” She described a Packard Bell ad from that time: First, it shows a seething dystopian city complete with groaning slaves and Gestapo-like police patrolling the public library. Then it cuts to a breezy house with a computer, surrounded by green grass. “Wouldn’t you rather be home?” The point was to encourage people who could afford it to desert the agora for the hearth, to withdraw from public life into a safe and suburbanized individualism.

It could be argued that today the internet is actually very social—perhaps too social. It certainly isn’t devoid of argument, and any committed user of platforms from Reddit to Telegram to TikTok might argue that it’s a boon for community. But much of that activity is circumscribed by corporate motivations in exactly the ways Ullman saw coming as Y2K dawned. There’s a lot of discussion today, including in Congress, about why parts of the web are so toxic and what to do about it—better content moderation? Updated monopoly laws?—but it seems that no one wants to say that the problem is that the web was commercialized in the first place. It’s hard at this point to imagine what anything else would look like.

In this stalled conversation, Ben Tarnoff’s new book, Internet for the People, makes a striking intervention. Tarnoff is blunt about why things suck so bad: “The internet,” he proposes, “is broken because the internet is a business.” What if it weren’t? Tarnoff is co-founder of Logic, a magazine about tech that publishes a variety of journ*lists and tech workers and insiders, in a unique blend of technical expertise and radical analysis. By retelling the story of the internet with a focus on those who have tried to democratize it—ranging from a collective in Detroit that improves neighborhood internet access to visionary officials in Chattanooga, Tennessee, who introduced cheap, fast internet for everybody—his book reveals the hidden history of the internet and expands our ideas about its possible futures. His strategy for change is more thoroughgoing than what’s on offer from Web3 boosters, billionaire founders, or even well-meaning regulators. He advocates nothing less than deprivatizing the internet.

•••

In the beginning, the state owned the internet. The federal government created the basic infrastructure in the 1960s and ’70s, thinking it could improve military communications and planning, and developed a protocol that made it possible for computers to exchange messages so that users could collaborate across large distances. The internet, Tarnoff notes, was “designed to run anywhere because the US military is everywhere.” Universities soon began to gain access to this useful tool, allowing them to collaborate on research with the Defense Department, but also among themselves. In the 1980s, the National Science Foundation invested in a big nationwide network, essentially a new backbone for the internet with many regional connections. It was pricey to build, but a boon for access: Ordinary researchers, and not just those with ties to the military, could log on.

The government’s plan had always been to turn the infrastructure over to private companies eventually, and, as demand grew, the network became overloaded and ready for change. But the current system of private ownership by a few corporate giants was not inevitable. There were plenty of other proposals at the time for how the internet could evolve. Telecom companies could be required to reserve some of their capacity to give public institutions like libraries free internet, or the government could have decided to maintain and develop the original backbone, in order to give rural communities cheap and speedy access. What followed instead was a victory for private companies “so complete that it became nearly invisible.” The government abandoned the existing network (much of the physical infrastructure had technically been leased from private companies), eliminating the publicly controlled foundation of the internet. Now, a few businesses were allowed to offer competing internet infrastructures with practically no oversight. Tarnoff notes that there was no big social movement around this obscure issue demanding otherwise.

What’s striking about the privatization of internet infrastructure is how poorly it serves everyone. Tarnoff notes that Americans pay some of the highest rates in the world for internet access that is relatively slow and very spottily distributed. In 2018, nearly half the country lacked access to a broadband connection. We saw the fallout from this when rural and poor students were instructed to take classes online during the Covid-19 pandemic but didn’t have broadband, and therefore lacked internet that was fast and reliable enough to let them consistently participate in classes. A 2021 study cited by The New York Times estimated that 42 million Americans live in areas where they are simply unable to buy broadband. The reason for this anemic coverage? “The high fees extracted from users aren’t being reinvested to build better infrastructure,” Tarnoff reports, “but to enrich executives and investors.”

For contrast, Tarnoff describes an experiment in Chattanooga. The city developed its own broadband service, which launched in 2010, and is commonly known as the Gig, named after its speed: 1 gigabit per second. The network is so fast because the city used a bond issue and a stimulus grant to build infrastructure that actually reached everyone’s homes. The city also ensured access and reasonable rates, including big discounts for low-income internet users.

Tarnoff also cites the Detroit Community Technology Project, designed to expand access in the city. There, a locally controlled system of transmitters beams steeply discounted internet into people’s homes and also gives residents access to an “intranet,” or a private network that they can use to share information about what’s happening in their community and what resources are available for food and transit. The program also trains “digital stewards,” who come from the neighborhoods in question and learn to maintain the network through repairs, equipment installations, and explaining the technology to older neighbors. The project not only solves a practical problem but increases democratic control over technology used by the community and encourages a more social experience of the internet.

All of this sounds lovely, so why isn’t it the norm?

Well, think back to that discount Chattanooga gives to low-income internet users. The city had set out to offer internet access “for even less,” Tarnoff writes, but can’t, because “a state law prohibits utilities from selling services below cost to prevent them from undercutting private firms.” Not only that: When Chattanooga tried to set up its cheap, fast internet, Comcast sued, claiming that it was worried about being “allowed to compete in a fair environment.” Internet service providers have brought such lawsuits all over the country against tiny networks that threaten their control over internet access and set an example for better service. One would think that an advantage of the big networks would be their reach, but this isn’t the case; big ISPs receive billions from the federal government—from you and me—with the goal of expanding access but have repeatedly failed to deliver for rural and low-income users.

•••

The privatized internet is not just expensive and unreliable; it has also unleashed a range of corrosive social forces, from an upswelling in hate groups and harassment, to the rise of unprecedented systems of surveillance, to the hollowing out of large portions of the labor market. The major Web 2.0 companies, from Facebook to Uber, don’t like to take responsibility for these transformations. They claim they are simply platforms, enabling users to connect with other users.

Tarnoff prefers to think of them, instead, as more like malls. They are private spaces designed for commerce, not public spaces meant for open-ended creativity. Everything that happens inside these spaces is calibrated to generate a profit. You don’t have to buy something on Facebook in order to make money for Facebook, when the company can profit from data on what you looked at, who you interacted with, and for how long. Tarnoff quotes a former Amazon executive talking to the BBC about his former employer: “They happen to sell products, but they are a data company.”

Tracking online movements and holding users’ attention have become the core business of the major online platforms. In turn, data lubricates companies’ paths to venture capital and other fundraising by promising revenue streams far beyond whatever the company actually sells. Now, “smart” technology from watches to thermostats has extended data collection into most people’s lives away from their desks or phones. As Tarnoff writes: “Sun Microsystems once had a slogan, credited to chief scientist John Gage: The network is the computer. The phrase has become infinitely truer than it was when it was first coined in the 1980s. The network is the computer, and the computer is everywhere.” In other words, the small gadgets that populate your personal life are cogs in one big data-collecting machine, feeding off your life, and into the intelligence of Google and Amazon.

None of this would matter so much, except that platforms have become “inequality machines” that “push risks downward and spread them around. They pull rewards upward and focus them in fewer hands.” This is a familiar story—who hasn’t followed the travails of Uber drivers and compared their conditions to those of their erstwhile boss Travis Kalanick, who made a couple of billion off the company even after being fired? But Tarnoff makes the point that the business models of the privatized internet have been responsible for creating “islands of super-profits in a sea of stagnation.” As traditional working-class jobs in manufacturing have declined, web companies have relied on “predatory inclusion”: offering low-wage digital piecework to working-class people, and targeting those same demographics with exploitative advertising supported by relentless digital tracking.

Meanwhile, the same companies that bolster predatory inclusion also play host to explicitly racist and sexist material, because of the ways that algorithms reflect human biases, and because of the innovative and well-funded efforts of right-wing activists to game search engine results and exploit online advertising. In the attention economy, it doesn’t necessarily behoove companies like Facebook to control disgusting content—if it draws eyeballs.

Tarnoff’s book is part of a re-democratizing project, from its sourcing to its recommendations. He cites widely, from experts in predatory inclusion like Tressie McMillan Cottom and Safiya Umoja Noble to Marxist theorists like Felix Guattari and Stuart Hall, but to understand what Uber has done to its workers, he turns to Doug Schifter. Schifter had been a black livery car driver in New York for decades, and wrote regularly for Black Car News about the catastrophe that ensued when Uber created a massive increase in drivers and forced prices down. People like Schifter could no longer make a living, no matter how much they drove. On February 5, 2018, he drove to City Hall and shot and killed himself.

Tarnoff delves into Schifter’s columns to show drivers’ growing desperation as their profession collapses as a middle-class job. “There are too many feeding off the same pie,” Schifter wrote before his death, “and there is not enough for everyone.” Tarnoff demonstrates the damage Uber did because it was designed as an online mall. It exercised total control over its private space: Drivers were rated, and Uber could kick them off the platform. Uber was a middleman: The company facilitated the exchange between passengers and drivers, making both dependent on the growing behemoth. Finally, Uber created network effects: It rapidly scaled up, often by bulldozing local taxi regulations. Many times, Uber evaded those rules by describing itself as an internet company, or a “Transportation Network Company,” rather than a traditional taxi company.

Schifter’s columns were about cabs, but they shine a light on the immiseration caused by the “Uberization” of the economy as a whole, when large tech companies effectively deregulate industries and seize new powers over labor.

•••

Tarnoff doesn’t recommend stripping the internet back to its early days under Defense Department ownership. Instead, he finds inspiration for a new public internet in an unusual source: Angela Davis’s work on prison abolition. Abolitionists are trying not only to eliminate prisons and police but, in Davis’s words, to create a “constellation of alternative strategies and institutions.” What is often considered utopian thinking actually leads to serious political campaigns and creative solutions (see: housing and mental health advocacy associated with the Defund movement), whereas incremental reforms all too often lead to a further entrenchment of the system (see: giving police more funding for training). Similarly, Tarnoff sees increasing privacy regulations and breaking up tech monopolies as positive but insufficient. “A privatized internet,” he says, “will always amount to the rule of the many by the few.”

He draws on examples from the past as well as contemporary experiments to feed the imaginative process. Certainly, Chattanooga and Detroit emerge as good examples of local networks under democratic control that run the pipes better than any monster ISP. (He’s also careful to flag potential problems—a downside of a locally governed network is the problem of local governance of all kinds—that prejudice could override liberal values of inclusion.) Today, the Mastodon network offers a decentralized sort of social media. The open-source software allows users to create their own small communities, governed by their own rules, and then connects these communities in a “Fediverse.” The result is that users have more control, and hateful communities can’t spread their message as quickly. To scale up projects like Mastodon, Tarnoff suggests public investment and the administration of these networks from public libraries, which could provide servers and help people set up accounts.

He also imagines an expansion of worker-run cooperative platforms, citing Up & Go, a New York cleaning service where workers find clients through an app they collectively own. He imagines democratic control over how our data is collected and used, and forcing companies like Facebook to adopt protocols that allow other so-called platforms to interact with them, breaking down the walled gardens. But none of these ideas provides a complete road map to the future, nor can one book hope to lay one. As long as internet policy is the exclusive interest of a handful of specialists, the whole system is as vulnerable as it was when ISPs first privatized the pipes. After all, Tarnoff notes, “creativity is a social act.”

It is also necessarily a political one. When the left wing of the Labour Party took over the Greater London Council in 1981, Tarnoff notes, they established programs to help mitigate the effects of deindustrialization and unemployment. One program involved setting up tech hubs, where people could get training and materials to invent things. Those designs would then go into a product bank accessible both to the public and to private companies. The result was a shrinking of the gap between creators and users, but also a political shift. People in these spaces tended to talk. Several groups began community organizing around energy-efficiency initiatives, which included forming cooperatives and pressuring the government to fund energy conservation. Democratizing tech led participants to pursue more democracy in general.

Naturally, Margaret Thatcher’s government spelled the end of the hubs—demonstrating again that it’s not so much that there’s “no alternative” to neoliberal capitalism, as she famously put it, but that there are so many alternatives, they have to be brutally shut down over and over.

•••

Internet for the People doesn’t address so-called Web3—essentially a rebranding of cryptocurrency and DeFi, or decentralized finance. Blockchain and cryptocurrency proponents claim that these technologies solve the problems Tarnoff describes and make the internet more democratic. Mega–crypto-investor Chris Dixon has called Web3 a “movement,” and last August, Jack Dorsey, who was then Twitter’s CEO, tweeted: “#Bitcoin will unite a deeply divided country. (and eventually: world).” As New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo has written, supporters of DeFi “argue that the technology will expand access to financial products and unleash a wave of innovation now hampered by the overlords of traditional finance.”

But many people without Dixon’s millions also believe Web3 is an equalizer, or at least they hold out hope that it might be. In a revealing article about her time lurking in online crypto spaces, writer Sarah Resnick noted the crypto investors had an older average age than she expected (around 38), that about half had no college degree, and nearly half were people of color. She witnessed the aspirations of many investors, which were often more poignant than the bragging of cryptobros. “I’m a girl in uni and take care of my whole family,” one writes. “I’m not here to whine I have accepted how life is and I am patient . I’m going to try so hard to grow my $83.” Another says: “I have only $100 to put in. My wife stays home with our baby and I work full time and do delivery apps on weekends to make extra.”

One way to read this situation is that many of the people investing in crypto are the same people who are drowning in Tarnoff’s “sea of stagnation,” victims of the Uberization of work. Trying to get onto dry ground, they’re putting their faith in investments that have so far proved volatile. The crypto market lost half its value this year. The well-known technologist and writer Jaron Lanier recently told tech journ*list Siobhan Roberts that the world of crypto simply hides a new elite—largely made up of the people who were already elites and had the capital to invest in new systems. (Dixon and Dorsey are good examples.) The liberating promise of Web3, therefore, appears to be another instance of predatory inclusion.

The democratic nature of crypto also turns out to be overhyped. Moxie Marlinspike, the creator of Signal, has pointed out that, despite its reputation for decentralization, blockchain technology depends on a small number of large businesses that run its servers. In other words, far from being the sort of utopian dreaming that Tarnoff advocates, much of the Web3 ecosystem is actually shaped and circumscribed by elites with a financial interest in what the rest of us do on the internet. Some thought we were finally breathing fresh air, but we’re just in the courtyard of the same stupid mall.

More in the comments

Orange site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32875404

On June 6 this year, Jim Watkins, a 58-year-old American entrepreneur and website administrator, is summoned to testify before US Congress. He has to answer questions about his website ‘8kun’, an internet forum on which visitors can post messages anonymously. What role did this site play in the storming of the Capitol, in the beginning of 2021? The hearing wasn’t easy, Watkins complains afterwards in a livestream to his followers. „I was interrogated by prosecutors for six hours,” he says.

Watkins’ website 8kun is the birthplace of QAnon, the anonymous figure at the center of an extreme conspiracy theory surrounding former US president Donald Trump. Trump, Q explains, has made many secret attempts to purge the US ‘deep state’ of covert agents employed by a mysterious group of powerful people like Soros, the Obamas and the Clintons. Only on 8kun did the real Q share his messages. Thousands of believers pondered his apocalyptic predictions daily - self-proclaimed ‘bakers’ who tried to distill meaning from Q’s ‘crumbs’.

When thousands of Americans stormed the Capitol on January 6th 2021, it became clear how much of the internet craze had spilled over into the real world. This was symbolized by the infamous ‘Q-shaman’ standing in the Capitol in a fur hat with bison horns and bared torso. ‘Q sent me’, a sign he carried read.

Even before QAnon rose to prominence, 8kun was already widely regarded as the cesspool of the internet. The site, previously called 8chan, is filled with hate speech, racism, right-wing extremist ideology and, occasionally, child pornography. In 2019, in the span of a few months, three gunmen posted their ‘manifesto’ on the site in advance of their terrorist attacks. The attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, on a synagogue in Poway, California, and in a Latinx-area mall in El Paso near the Mexican border took the lives of 75 people.

Only then was the limit of major internet parties met. They decided publicly to no longer host or provide other services to the site, a rarity in Internet business. 8kun soon experienced how difficult it was to remain online without their help.

Small Dutch city

Three years later, 8kun is still online - although there are only a few routes left through which internet traffic can reach the site. And one of them runs through a small village in the Dutch province Flevoland.

Across a car and dog wash named Pitstop, on an industrial zone located on the outskirts of the small city of Dronten, 70 kilometers northeast of Amsterdam, sits a facility of the Dutch internet company Serverius IT Infrastructure. Behind the modern, wood-finished office building, Serverius runs a data center. The company also runs two others in Meppel and Apeldoorn in the east of the Netherlands. Just as a landlord sublets rooms, the company provides its internet tenants with electricity, cooling and internet for their digital rooms. From those servers, stacked horizontally in racks upon racks of computers, Serverius’ clients run their own internet services.

The tenants come from all over the world. The liberal and stable Netherlands, with its reliable power grid and excellent internet infrastructure, is a desirable place for data centers and the hosting industry alike.

But insight into who is renting the rooms is limited. The standing practice in the hosting industry is to show very little interest in what customers do or who they are, a limited sense of responsibility combined with complex and border crossing subletting arrangements. Oversight is not the highest priority. Why risk turning away one bad customer - who potentially brings in tens of thousands of dollars a month - among the many tens of thousands good clients a datacenter can service?

For whatever the reason, internet traffic bound to the infamous 8kun image board go through Serverius’ data center in Dronten, research by Ron Guilmette, an American independent internet researcher, has shown. Guilmette has worked tirelessly to scrub 8kun of the internet entirely. One by one, he demands internet companies that pass traffic to 8kun to stop doing that: his ultimate goal is to make the site inaccessible from anywhere on the web. „This work however is made much more difficult because these sites hide all the time”, he says.

Analysis of the data packets bound for 8kun reveals that a company called VDSina is passing them along. VDSina is a Moscow-based Russian hosting company, and, according to their website, has „super epic servers” at Serverius in the Netherlands.

Besides facilitating connectivity to 8kun, VDSina is well-known for hosting clients that perform ddos-attacks that take down websites, for spreading computer viruses and hosting websites involved with credit card and identity theft. In the first quarter of this year, the influential internet organization Spamhaus ranked VDSina number 7 on its global ranking of bad hosters who run botnets: networks of infected computers used for nefarious purposes. „In our internal database of Internet service providers, VDSina scores a two out of ten, where a score of one is the worst imaginable”, says Carel Bitter, a Dutch analyst at Spamhaus.

Internet fundamentalist Nick Lim

VDSina not only aids in keeping 8kun accessible through its footprint in the Dutch data center, but the Daily Stormer as well. The Daily Stormer is an infamous neo-Nazi news website.

This is no coincidence. They belong to the same customer of VDSina: Nick Lim, a young American Internet fundamentalist with absolutist views on freedom of speech, who is either 24 or 25 – his real age is unknown to the public. When 8kun was largely pushed off the Internet after the terror attacks of 2019, administrator Watkins turned to Lim’s hosting company.

Lim had also welcomed Daily Stormer after it too was spat out by major services in 2017. The site is openly racist and antisemitic and it regularly advocates a second genocide of Jews. More recently Kiwi Farms, a bullying site that organizes stalking of transgenders, lhbtqi people and people with autism, also washed up at Lim’s internet company. At least three suicides have been linked to the brigading on this site.

Lim confirms in terse emails that his company indeed has a presence in Dutch data centers and that he has a „strict commitment to freedom of expression and neutrality”. Beyond that, he reveals very little.

One of the few other internet routes to these websites that remain, go through the Finnish company Oy Crea Nova, where Nick Lim personally bought a server. The Finnish Helsingin Sanomat (HS), a newspaper with which NRC has cooperated for this article, is investigating the company. According to an article published by HS this Saturday, the owner of Oy Crea Nova is under criminal investigation for tax evasion. The owner was recently fined when Finnish authorities discovered child sexual abusive material on one of its devices.

Tax purposes

Who is responsible for these bad sites? Who can take them down? When NRC starts making telephone calls, all parties point at each other and at their customers. They state that they were unaware of hosting 8kun and the other sites.

Gijs van Gemert, CEO of Serverius, says on the phone he does not know a client by the name of VDSina. Van Gemert however does know a customer identified by the exact same technical specifications, but under a different name: ‘Hosting Technology Limited’. The company used to be a direct customer of Serverius, but is now a customer of a customer, says Van Gemert – he does not want to explain why. He stresses that NRC should not be addressing questions to him, the data center, but at the hosting company, his customer. He refers to MIRholding: VDSina is their customer, he says.

MIRholding, as it turns out, belongs to a young Dutch-Russian pianist and internet entrepreneur Andrej Nesterenko. He has a P.O. Box in a large office building in Amsterdam. Since last December, he has taken over VDSina as a customer of Serverius, Nesterenko admits on the phone. His guess is that Hosting Technology Limited is a foreign entity of VDSina, set up for tax purposes. The servers are still in Dronten, but his company offers additional services that Serverius could not provide. When NRC points out his client’s reputation, Nesterenko says that VDSina is a large and respected party. „They have a 24-hour complaints desk”, he says. VDSina did not respond to questions from this newspaper.

An hour after NRC reached out to Serverius and MIR, 8kun and Daily Stormer go down worldwide. When asked about the outage during a livestream, Jim Watkins starts talking about a plot by an American journ*list and a former employee for whose „capture and return” he claims to have offered a $20,000 bounty. News website Vice speculates that the sites are down because of ddos-attacks, caused by the recent addition of Kiwi Farms to Nick Lim’s clients.

Five hours after the initial calls, 8kun and the Daily Stormer are back online, but the connection through Dronten has been severed. The Finnish route is also down. When confronted by the HS newspaper, the owner of Oy Crea Nova quickly pulled the plug on the server. Nick Lim angrily called and demanded his money back – just over a thousand dollars. Afterwards, VDSina removed Serverius’ name and photo from their website.

New shelter

The cat and mouse game goes on for days, as Lim tries to find a new foothold for his sites. Repeatedly he is thrown out by parties after inquiries by NRC. „Right now, Nick Lim is like a wounded elk”, says internet researcher Guilmette, who monitors the websites’ every move. „It is time to move in quickly for the kill, before he gets away again.”

8kun and Daily Stormer do manage to restore their connections to the world wide web. Internet traffic to Nick Lim’s servers currently goes through an old acquaintance, a Dutch hosting company where until recently the largest amount of child pornography in the Netherlands was located – the company has however dismissed several problematic customers in recent months.

Of all the places on earth that Nick Lim could have picked to host these hated websites, he ends up back where it all started: in the Netherlands. The company that chooses to transmit his data – one of three currently remaining in the entire world --- is called NForce Entertainment, a company in Roosendaal, Brabant.

Prior coverage

Orange site

r/technology thread

If a traveler's phone, tablet or computer ever gets searched at an airport, American border authorities could add data from their device to a massive database that can be accessed by thousands of government officials. US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) leaders have admitted to lawmakers in a briefing that its officials are adding information to a database from as many as 10,000 devices every year, The Washington Post reports.

Further, 2,700 CBP officers can access the database without a warrant and without having to record the purpose of their search. These details were revealed in a letter Senator Ron Wyden wrote to CBP Commissioner Chris Magnus, where the lawmaker also said that CBP keeps any information it takes from people's devices for 15 years.

In the letter, Wyden urged the commissioner to update CBP's practices so that device searches at borders are focused on suspected criminals and security threats instead of allowing "indiscriminate rifling through Americans' private records without suspicion of a crime." Wyden said CBP takes sensitive information from people's devices, including text messages, call logs, contact lists and even photos and other private information in some cases.

While law enforcement agencies are typically required to secure a warrant if they want to access the contents of a phone or any other electronic device, border authorities are exempted from having to do the same. Wyden also pointed out that travelers searched at airports, seaports and border crossings aren't informed of their rights before their devices are searched. And if they refuse to unlock their electronics, authorities could confiscate and keep them for five days.

As The Post notes, a CBP official previously went on record to say that the agency's directive gives its officers the authority to scroll through any traveler's device in a "basic search." If they find any "reasonable suspicion" that a traveler is breaking the law or doing something that poses a threat to national security, they can run a more advanced search. That's when they can plug in the traveler's phone, tablet or PC to a device that copies their information, which is then stored in the Automated Targeting System database.

CBP director of office of field operations Aaron Bowker told the publication that the agency only copies people's data when "absolutely necessary." Bowker didn't deny that the agency's officers can access the database, though — he even said that the number was bigger than what CBP officials told Wyden. Five percent of CBP's 60,000 personnel have access to the database, he said, which translates to 3,000 officers and not 2,700.

Wyden wrote in his letter:

"Innocent Americans should not be tricked into unlocking their phones and laptops. CBP should not dump data obtained through thousands of warrantless phone searches into a central database, retain the data for fifteen years, and allow thousands of DHS employees to search through Americans’ personal data whenever they want."

Two years ago, the Senator also called for an investigation into the CBP's use of commercially available location data to track people's phones without a warrant. CBP had admitted back then that it spent $500,000 to access a commercial database containing "location data mined from applications on millions of Americans’ mobile phones."

Court Documents

r/law thread

r/politics thread

The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday upheld a controversial Texas social media law that bars companies from removing posts based on a person’s political ideology, overturning a lower court’s decision to block the law from taking effect and likely setting up a Supreme Court showdown over the future of online speech.

The ruling could have wide-ranging effects on the future of tech regulation, as states throughout the country consider legislation similar to the Texas law.

The opinion was written by Judge Andrew Stephen Oldham, who was nominated by former president Trump. He was joined by Judge Edith Jones, a Reagan nominee. Judge Leslie H. Southwick, a George W. Bush nominee, concurred in part and dissented in part.

The judges ruled that while the First Amendment guarantees every person’s right to free speech, it doesn’t guarantee corporations the right to “muzzle speech.”

The ruling sets up a split between two circuit courts on key issues, which could potentially need to be resolved by the Supreme Court. Earlier this year, the 11th Circuit Court blocked major provisions of a social media that had been passed by Florida’s Republican-led legislature.

Tech industry representatives said they disagreed with the decision, and said that they are evaluating options for appeal.

“Little could be more Orwellian than the government purporting to protect speech by dictating what businesses must say,” said Matt Schruers, president of the Computer & Communications Industry Association, which had challenged the Texas law. “The Texas law compels private enterprises to distribute dangerous content ranging from foreign propaganda to terrorist incitement, and places Americans at risk.”

EVGA has finally gotten tired of Nvidia's bullshit and is dropping out of the GPU market. A 2 decade old partnership, kaput.

Orange Site

Orange Site discusses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32864810

Two days ago the NYT posted an investigation into politicians trading stocks

They found that 81 Democrats & 101 Republicans filed up to 3,700 trades and $100M in possible volume

Many had 100% winners, with some perfectly timed

Here’s examples of just how good they were

— Chris Josephs (@Chrisjjosephs) September 15, 2022

Ok my unironic opinion: I think they should be obligated to report same day, but still trade. But nothing will ever be done about it, so whatever

Why does Apple still use Lightning cables? However,

Fortunately, rumors suggest that all iPhone 15 models will be equipped with a USB-C port instead of Lightning, which should result in speeds up to 10 Gbps or even up to 40 Gbps with Thunderbolt 3 support.

This sounds promising.

iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max models feature an upgraded rear camera system that can shoot 48-megapixel ProRAW photos, which retain more detail in the image file for more editing flexibility. 48-megapixel ProRAW photos are very large files that clock in at around 75MB each, according to Apple, and sometimes even larger.

Despite these very large image sizes, we have confirmed that the Lightning connector on the iPhone 14 Pro models remains limited to USB 2.0 speeds of up to 480 Mbps like previous models, meaning that transferring full-resolution 48-megapixel ProRAW photos to a Mac or other device with a Lightning cable will take a long time.

Apple recommends using iCloud Photos to access ProRAW files in full resolution on a Mac or other Apple devices, or to transfer the photos off an iPhone wirelessly by using AirDrop, but the Lightning connector certainly remains a bottleneck.

Back in 2015, the original iPad Pro's Lightning connector supported USB 3.0, which was capable of up to 5 Gbps speeds based on the spec at the time, but Apple has evidently chosen not to move in this direction for the iPhone. Fortunately, rumors suggest that all iPhone 15 models will be equipped with a USB-C port instead of Lightning, which should result in speeds up to 10 Gbps or even up to 40 Gbps with Thunderbolt 3 support.

A small Dutch town took Twitter to court on Friday to demand the social media company take down all messages relating to a supposed ring of Satan-worshipping paedophiles alleged to have been active in the town in the 1980s.

Bodegraven-Reeuwijk, a town of about 35,000 inhabitants in the middle of the Netherlands, has been the focus of conspiracy theories on social media since 2020, when three men started spreading unfounded stories about the abuse and murder of children they said took place in the town in the 1980s.

The main instigator of the stories said he had childhood memories of witnessing the abuse by a group of people in Bodegraven.

The stories caused much unrest in Bodegraven, as scores of followers of the men’s tweets flocked to the local graveyard to lay flowers and written messages at the graves of seemingly random dead children, who they claimed were victims of the satanic ring.

Twitter’s lawyer, Jens van den Brink, declined to comment before the hearing at The Hague district court on Friday.

Last year the same court ordered the men to immediately remove all their tweets, threats and other online content relating to the story and to make sure that none of it could ever emerge again.

But despite their conviction, stories about Bodegraven still circulate on social media as others have continued to echo the claims, leading the town to take the matter up with Twitter itself.

“If conspiracy theorists don’t remove their messages, then the platforms involved need to act,” the town of Bodegraven’s lawyer, Cees van de Zanden, was quoted as saying by the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant on Friday.

Van de Zanden said that in July the town requested that Twitter actively find and remove all messages relating to the Bodegraven story – not only those posted by the three convicted men – but had so far not received an answer from the company.

The men behind the Bodegraven story are all in jail, as they have been convicted in other court cases for incitement and making death threats to a range of people including the prime minister, Mark Rutte, and former health minister Hugo de Jonge.

imagine being FedEx rn

Wall Street analysts didn’t mince words in discussing FedEx Corp.’s forecast for the current quarter -- which missed by a landslide -- and its withdrawal of full-year guidance. It’s really bad.

To researchers at Deutsche Bank AG it’s the worst report they’ve seen in two decades.

“FedEx preannounced last night the weakest set of results we’ve seen relative to expectations in our ~20 years of analyzing companies,” the bank’s analysts including Amit Mehrotra said in a note to clients.

The package delivery giant said in a statement Thursday night that it expects first-quarter earnings, excluding some items, to be $3.44 per share, or roughly 33% below the average analyst estimate of $5.10. In addition, FedEx withdrew its earnings forecast for 2023, saying macroeconomic trends have “significantly worsened,” both internationally and in the US, and are likely to deteriorate further, fueling fears of a broad-based earnings decline.

At least four sell-side analysts covering the stock lowered their recommendations on FedEx Friday, as the stock sank 23%. Robert W. Baird & Co. analyst Garrett Holland summed up the opinions, calling it an “ugly quarter.” The bleak outlook pushed shares of rival United Parcel Service Inc., e-commerce giant Amazon.com Inc. and European delivery companies well into the red.

“The FedEx warning came as a slap. It’s a solid sign that the economy started slowing,” said Ipek Ozkardeskaya, a senior analyst at Swissquote. “This is certainly the first in a series of warnings that we may see for the quarters to come.”

Some strategists were already cautious on the earnings outlook before FedEx’s warning. Bank of America Corp.’s Michael Hartnett said in a note Friday that an earnings recession will likely drive US stocks to new lows, while Deutsche Bank strategists have said that company profits are set to drop, putting the S&P 500 at risk of a much deeper selloff.

FedEx isn’t the only company making a warning that the macroeconomic backdrop is likely to impact the bottom line. General Electric Co.’s finance chief said on Thursday that supply-chain challenges are weighing on its third-quarter performance, while some of Wall Street’s biggest banks expect deep declines in investment-banking fees for the current quarter with investors still spooked by inflation, rate hikes and possible recession.

In Europe, the profit warnings have already begun to trickle in. UK conglomerate Associated British Foods Plc warned that profit in the next fiscal year will be lower as rising energy costs and a stronger dollar weigh on its Primark clothing business, while Swedish appliance maker Electrolux AB said earnings would decline “significantly” in the third quarter amid rapidly accelerating inflation and low consumer confidence.

These ominous signs have already prompted analysts to moderate expectations, with weekly earnings downgrades outpacing upgrades for about four months in the US, according to a Citigroup Inc. index. But there may still be a long way to go to reset expectations -- analysts’ earnings estimates for US companies are near record highs, despite an 18% slump for the S&P 500 benchmark this year.

To hedge against the myriad headwinds facing companies, some strategists suggest being selective about regional exposures heading into the earnings season.

“The weakness in FedEx earnings is centered in Asia and Europe, where indeed we are seeing the biggest economic challenges, while US activity is reasonably strong,” said Marija Veitmane, a senior strategist at State Street Global Markets. “This fits with our broader assessment of the macro conditions at the moment. Indeed, the US is our favorite market.”

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. strategists agree, saying US firms that do most of their business at home will fare better than those exposed to Europe, where a recession is all but guaranteed. In dollar terms, the Stoxx Europe 600 has lagged the S&P 500 this year, while a Goldman basket of US firms with 100% domestic sales has outperformed one tracking those with high exposure to Europe.

Is it over for @EdgeShill?

From the article

The Microsoft Edge News Feed is a collection of thumbnails alternating between news content, traffic updates and advertisements. We have identified several ads that are malicious and redirect unsupecting users to tech support scams.

When a user clicks on one of the malicious ads, a request to the Taboola ad network is made via an API (api.taboola.com) to honor the click on the ad banner.... The goal of this script is to only show the malicious redirection to potential victims, ignoring bots, VPNs and geolocations that are not of interest that are instead shown a harmless page related to the advert.

Allowing Taboola

From commenter

I really, really hate the Edge News feed, which is also built into the Windows 10 "News and Interests" taskbar widget, and there's no way to disable the news feed without also getting rid of the weather. It's so distracting.

Microsoft not only allows malware to be pushed by their browser but also straight to people with their OS

orange site