I’d explain it, but I’d have to kill you. — The fact that every president and VP has a garage or filing cabinet or shoebox full of classified documents isn’t (merely) evidence of political impunity — it’s also the latest absurd turn in the long-running true scandal: the American epidemic of overclassification and excessive secrecy. If you’d like an essay-formatted…

2013, 2018, 2022. — #10yrsago What the ban on unlocking phones means (worse than you think) https://www.eff.org/is-it-illegal-to-unlock-a-phone #10yrsago WTO gives Antigua the right to sell pirated American copyrighted goods https://torrentfreak.com/antiguas-legal-pirate-site-authorized-by-the-world-trade-organization-130128/ #10yrsago American insurers charge reckless rich drivers less than safe poor drivers https://consumerfed.org/pdfs/PR.AutoInsurancePremiums1.28.13.pdf

A read-only interlocutor is a robot troll. In 1977, my father, a computer scientist, brought home a teletype terminal (a keyboard and a printer, no screen) and an acoustic coupler (a box with two suction-cups that matched up with the speaker and mic on the receiver of a standard Bell…

2003, 2008, 2013, 2018, 2022. — #20yrsago Category Management: retail trendiness or criminal anti-trust? https://web.archive.org/web/20030207054524/http://www.business2.com/articles/mag/print/0,1643,46334,00.html #20yrsago Finnish recording industry demands royalties for kindergarten singing https://web.archive.org/web/20030207180706/http://www.infoanarchy.org/story/2003/1/29/02755/7928 #15yrsago Tipping-point skeptic says that super-Influencers are overrated https://www.fastcompany.com/641124/tipping-point-toast

The final adventure of Marty Hench. — My next novel is Red Team Blues, a noir technothriller/heist novel about Marty Hench, a forensic accountant who is the most fearsome financial sleuth in Silicon Valley history. Marty has spent 40 years unwinding tech’s biggest, sleaziest scams, and now he’s ready to retire — but first he has to…

Walled gardens considered harmful (to performers and audiences). — In the enshittification cycle, a platform lures in users by giving them a good deal at first, then it lures in business customers (advertisers, sellers, performers) by shifting the surplus from users to them; finally, it takes all the surplus for itself, turning the whole thing into a pile of…

2003, 2018, 2022. — #20yrsago Telcos attack VoIP numbering https://www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/networking/voip-caught-in-a-numbers-crunch/ #5yrsago Kimberly Clark says the Trump tax-cuts let it fire 5,500 US workers and pay out dividends to its shareholders https://www.businessinsider.com/kimberly-clark-pays-for-layoffs-with-trump-tax-cuts-2018-1 #5yrsago Short-termism led the Democratic Party to let unions die, and now they’ve lost their base https://jamesfeigenbaum.github.io/research/pdf/fhw_rtw_jan2018.pdf

2008, 2013, 2018. — #15yrsago Southern racists adopt “Canadian” as a euphemism for “black” https://memex.craphound.com/2008/01/26/southern-racists-adopt-canadian-as-a-euphemism-for-black/ #15yrsago Bavarian gov’t caught buying malware to intercept Skype calls https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Skype_and_the_Bavarian_trojan_in_the_middle #10yrsago Berlin activists create CCTV-smashing street game https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GCsd2TJKjQ

”Yes, our beaches are the most beautiful, but our leaders are the dirtiest in the world, aren’t they?” — A common refrain from Facebook apologists and anti-anonymity activists is that its “Real Names Policy” promoted “civility” by making users “accountable” for their words. In this conception, snuffing out anonymous speech is key to protecting “the vulnerable” from trolls and other bad actors. If you’d like an essay-formatted version of…