The Biden-Harris admin is reviving anti-trust in a big way, with lawsuits against Amazon, Apple, Ticketmaster, and many more.
Corporate execs are terrified of their monopolies being broken up.
Wealthy execs in media, tech, crypto, financial, & fossil fuel sectors are *lobbying* against a Democratic-led White House and Congress because they want to avoid more biz regulations designed to protect consumers + avoidance of corp taxes FREE NYT LINK
Why isn’t the NY Times reporting on Nazi banners at Trump rallies?
forbes.com Microsoft Quits OpenAI Board As Regulators Crack Down On Big Tech’s A1 Dealmaking
Jul 10, 2024, 07:18am EDT
Microsoft has relinquished its seat on OpenAI’s board and Apple will no longer assume an equivalent role, according to news reports Wednesday, an unexpected move from the tech giants as they jostle for A1 supremacy amid increasing scrutiny from regulators over their investments in artificial intelligence.
David Zaslav, the CEO of CNN’s parent company, at the Allen & Co. media conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, on Tuesday:
Asked about the upcoming presidential election,
Zaslav said it mattered less to him which which
party wins, as long as the next president was
friendly to business.
“We just need an opportunity for deregulation, so
companies can consolidate and do what we need
to to be even better,” he said. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-08/media-tech-titans-head-to-sun-valley-with-biden-future-in-doubt
Has the media asked Trump about the unsealed Epstein court documents detailing accounts of him raping 12-year old girls yet?
What the fuck. Clarence Thomas Accepted Yacht Trip to Russia, Chopper Flight to Putin’s Hometown.
$267k provided by Thomas’ friend Anthony Welters, the yacht trip to Russia from Baltics, and the helicopter ride to Yusupov Palace, St Petersburg. ProPublica first reported last yr on the existence of extensive undisclosed gifts and lavish trips from Crow. https://www.thedailybeast.com/clarence-thomas-accepted-yacht-trip-to-russia-chopper-flight-to-putins-hometown-democrats The allegedly secret gifts were disclosed in a letter from two Democratic senators that accused Thomas of potentially committing tax fraud.
Five years ago, Clarence Thomas was just getting back (on a private jet) from yachting in Indonesia on Harlan Crow’s dime. But that was just the beginning of his jam-packed summer of 2019. We put together a timeline of his craziest summer vacation:
OF COURSE THE REPUBLICANS WOULD STEAL THE MONEY MEANT FOR THE PEOPLE AND DIVERT IS TO THEIR FRIENDS WHO RUN PRIVATE JAILS FOR THEIR OWN POCKETS. With the government paying private prison operators about $23,000 per year per inmate (keep in mind, the minimum wage is $15,000 per year), it’s a lucrative business.
Private Prisons in the United States
Corrections Corporation of America, a $1.8 billion private prison corporation now known as CoreCivic, Terrell Don Hutto ran a cotton plantation the size of Manhattan. 2015 Who Owns Private Prison Stock? Pennsylvania Correctional Industries (PCI) is a Bureau of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (DOC) that employs inmates to produce a variety of items that are available for sale to non-profit organizations and government entities located throughout Pennsylvania.
FACT: $2,000 is much better than $600.
FACT: Neither are remotely adequate.
In a fair and just country, people would get $3,000/month, retroactive to March, and debts cancelled.
Also, all net worth above $10 million would be taxed at 100%. We beat fascism by being ANTI-FASCIST.
1 RCM Inc. [NASDAQ:RCM], one of the nation’s largest medical debt collection companies, has been hit in a ransomware attack.Formerly known as Accretive Health Inc., Chicago-based R1 RCM brought in revenues of $1.18 billion in 2019. The company has more than 19,000 employees and contracts with at least 750 healthcare organizations nationwide. According to Trend Micro, Defray usually is spread via booby-trapped Microsoft Office documents sent via email.
#Accretive Health, #Defray ransomware, 3proofpoint, #R1 #RCM ransomware,
Phishing Emails Used to Deploy KONNI Malware https://us-cert.cisa.gov/ncas/alerts/aa20-227a
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has observed cyber actors using emails containing a Microsoft Word document with a malicious Visual Basic Application (VBA) macro code to deploy KONNI malware. KONNI is a remote administration tool (RAT) used by malicious cyber actors to steal files, capture keystrokes, take screenshots, and execute arbitrary code on infected hosts.
NO ONE IS BETTER AT MANUFACTURING MEDICINE THAN PFIZER
400M doses = 200M full vaccinations. 2 dose regime for Pfizer and Moderna.
It’s official: Pfizer-BioNTech reach deal to supply 100M doses of #covid19 vaccine to the US for $1.95B, delivery by July 31.
“NEW: Draft legislation from @SenThomTillis reforming the DMCA is out today. And it includes a “notice-and-staydown” provision, which the tech industry is already gearing up to oppose once the fight over online copyright starts in earnest next year. ‘Notice-and-stay-down’ set to be sticking point in new online-piracy fight Sen. Thom Tillis unveiled a sweeping plan to reform the Digital Millennium Copyright Act—and one provision in particular will be a bitter pill for the tech industry to swallow. bill text
SEDITION TREASON
Laurence Tribe @Tribelaw
What would the Framers say about an American president who lets a hostile power put bounties on the heads of our soldiers, looks the other way while that power wages war on our government agencies, and spends his time attempting a coup rather than fighting a pandemic?
Treason 18 U.S. Code 2381 “Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies giving them aid and comdfort withting the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall ve imprisoned not less than five years and fined… and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.”
CBS NEWS headline DOES NOT SAY HIS NAME ERIK PRINCE – Trump pardons Blackwater global mercenary force led by Erik F’ing Prince involved in Baghdad massacre
ROBERT REICH Millennials own less than 5% of all US wealth. In 1989, when baby boomers were the same age, they owned 21% of all US wealth. Young people aren’t going broke because they’re buying avocado toast. They’re going broke because the economy is rigged against them.
On Dec 18th, FinCEN announced a proposed rule that will require collection of personal information for transactions of >$3,000 sent to self-hosted wallets. https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2020-28437.pdf
You either keep the bitcoin info on your own Wallet
Or you allow someone else to keep the info instead
You should always keep your own info cause then you own it.
► ► A “wallet” is either an address or a collection of addresses mathematically derived from a equation everyone uses but with different variables.
► ► It’s a string of numbers.
► ►You either possess the variables or you do not.
Trump is contractually prohibited from living at Mar a Lago. Therefore, he cannot be a Florida resident with Mar a Lago as his primary address. Er go, Trump committed voter fraud.
Buried in pandemic aid: $200 billion in tax cuts, largely for the richest. How about instead of pumping trillions into an endless war machine, we provide our people with actual security: food, shelter, and health care?
China-Based Executive at U.S. Telecommunications Company @ZOOM Charged with Disrupting Video Meetings Commemorating Tiananmen Square Massacre
Defendant Coordinated with the People’s Republic of China to Target Dissidents and Disrupt Meetings #natsec #counterintelligence #insider #insiderthreat
Former Zoom Employee Wanted by the FBI for Support to Chinese Government He was a 16 yr veteran of Zoom who was the liaison between the company and China’s security and intelligence services “Not surprisingly, social media monitoring was used to identify individuals who were hosting the #Zoom calls.” China’s #MSS asked Jin to keep meetings open. This ensured the MSS would be able to “obtain additional details on meeting participants.”
THEY WILL BACK EACH OTHER TO SUPPORT FACEBOOK BECAUSE NONE OF THEM WANT TO HAVE ANTI TRUST LAW BREAK THEM UP – THEY ALL NEED TO GET BROKEN UP.
THE ETHICS OF BROGRAMMERS
Like the guards at concentration camps who thought they weren’t in charge, the brogrammers whose code is used to do atrocious things against the world for profit will also go to jail.
Unlike governments which are bound by international laws and diplomatic norms, private companies like the Israeli firm are only motivated by profit.
THEY WILL ALL GO TO JAIL
NSO Group’s actions should not be granted legal immunity
The social network took the Israeli firm to court after alleging that the latter exploited a vulnerability in WhatsApp which helped its clients spy on over 1400 users globally. It’s believed that the bug or similar ones may also have been used to help Saudi Arabian officials spy on murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi and his former boss, Jeff Bezos. NSO Group has argued that its tools are only ever used for legitimate law enforcement purposes, and that, as it sells exclusively to governments, it should benefit from the “sovereign immunity” that means nation states can’t be taken to court.
How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism is a short book that delivers a different thesis: Big Tech is a monopoly problem. In fact, it’s just a part of a wider monopoly problem that afflicts every sector
of our global economy.
Accidentally and deliberately, monopolies create all kinds of malignant outcomes. If the company that has a monopoly on search starts serving wrong answers, people will believe them – not because of mind control, but because of dominance.
But monopolies have an even graver failure-mode: when a large, profitable industry collapses down to 4 or 5 companies, it’s easy for those companies to agree on what they think policy should be.
And being monopolists, they have lots of spare cash to convert that agreement to actual policy. What’s more, once an industry is monopolized, everyone qualified to understand and regulate it probably came from one of the dominant companies.
Think of how the “good” Obama FCC chairman was a former Comcast exec and the “bad” Trump FCC chair is a former Verizon lawyer.
There’s a name for regulatory outcomes driven by collusion among monopolists whose regulators come from their own ranks.
We call them: “Conspiracies.”
When social scientists investigate conspiracists, they find people whose beliefs are the result of real trauma (like losing a loved one to opiods) and real conspiracies (the Sackler family and other Big Pharmabarons suborning their regulators).
The combination of real trauma and real conspiracies gives ALL conspiracies explanatory power. This is brilliantly documented in Anna Merlan’s “Republic of Lies,” one of the most important books on the rise of conspiratorial thinking I’ve read.
Surveillance Capitalism is a real, serious, urgent problem, but not because it accidentally led to a working mind-control ray and then turned it over to Nazis.
It’s a problem because it is both emblematic of monopolies (which lead to corruption, AKA conspiracies) and because the vast, nonconsensual dossiers it compiles on us can be used to compromise and neutralize opposition to the status quo.
And Big Tech *does* exert control over us, but not with mind-control rays. Lock-in (and laws that support it) allows Big Tech to decide how we can use our devices, who can fix them, and when they must be thrown away.
Lock-in is an invitation to totalitarianism: the Chinese government observed the fact that Apple alone could decide which apps can run on Iphones, then ordered Apple to remove apps that allowed Chinese people privacy from the state.
I’m sure that the Uyghurs in concentration camps and the Falun Gong members having their organs harvested are relieved that Apple abetted their surveillance for reasons other than mere marketing.
This is the core of my critique, the reason I wrote this book: we should be suspicious of all corporate control over our lives, and should insist on nothing less than absolute technological self-determination.
The idea that “if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product,” suggests the simplistic solution of just charging for everything. But the reality is that in a monopoly, you’re the product irrespective of whether you’re paying.
We deserve to be more than products.
I am so grateful to Onezero for the incredible look-and-feel of my new book. It’s a free read on their site, with a really fantastic new nav system that will help you pick up where you left off.
And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the spectacular artwork that Shira Inbar did for the book, and the tireless efforts of my editor, Brian Merchant, who championed it internally and is ultimately responsible for the brilliant package you see before you.
I’m also excited to note that this will be shortly coming out as a printbook, doubtless just as beautiful as this digital edition.
I know it’s a longread, but I hope you’ll give it a try.
Big Tech *needs* a corrective, and that corrective – antimonopoly enforcement – is part of a global movement that addresses deep, systemic problems in every sector. This is a moment for us to seize, but we have to understand where the problem really lies.
—
The algorithms that make up the Facebook world create a disturbing distortion of reality. Yet, people believe what they see because Facebook gathered enough data on you to know what you would believe.#SurveillanceCapitalism
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Educational CyberPlayGround, Inc. K12 Education 12-23-2020
FACT: $2,000 is much better than $600.