onfocus

"Fox and CNN are not different flavors of news, they are different things entirely. News organizations with any legitimate claim to that title do not keep important information from the public based on which party it benefits. CNN — or primetime MSNBC — may be opinionated, but they remain fundamentally fact-based. Fox does not."

Fox is an imitation of the news style but it's something different in substance that makes viewers less informed about the world.

Reminded of this saying by the way right wing media frames every minor complaint as an existential threat and asks, "why aren't people acting violently about this right now?" knowing a portion of their audience will make it happen and they'll never face consequences.

"It’s Pink Floyd if it’s me and Nick, and that is the biggest promotional vehicle; that is, as I said, the platform that I’ve been working on for my whole adult life, since I was 21. I wouldn’t do this with many more things, but it’s so vitally, vitally important that people understand what’s going on there and do everything within their power to change that situation."

Sounds great. Wish we were getting new Pink Floyd music under better circumstances.

"Taherzadeh and Ali's alleged ruse was uncovered when a US Postal Inspector started investigating an alleged assault of a USPS letter carrier in an apartment complex where the two men allegedly had multiple units, according to court documents."

Speaking of federal agencies and crime, WTAF? Every time I see new information from this story it gets more bizarre.

"Armed with secret court orders in the United States and the help of governments around the world, the Justice Department and the F.B.I. disconnected the networks from the G.R.U.’s own controllers. “Fortunately, we were able to disrupt this botnet before it could be used,” Mr. Garland said."

Fantastic work and a great story. Just give me a steady stream of cybersecurity success stories please. Call the new beat Botnet Dragnet. I’ll waive my naming fee.

“I think that there is a sense among more senior members of Congress, who have been around in different political times, that we can get back to this time of buddy-buddy and backslapping and we’ll cut a deal and go into a room with some bourbon and some smoke and you’ll come out and work something out. I think there’s a real nostalgia and belief that that time still exists or that we can get back to that.” But those days, she says, have been over for a long time.

Every word of this resonates.

"Americans don’t have, and have never had, any right to be free of shaming or shunning. The First Amendment protects our right to speak free of government interference. It does not protect us from other people saying mean things in response to our speech. The very notion is completely incoherent. Someone else shaming me is their free speech, and someone else shunning me is their free association, both protected by the First Amendment."

The Media is really struggling to find a middle ground between rational and fascist and failing miserably.

"The larger point, though, is that network activity plus some corroborating evidence based on the content of the speech should allow plaintiffs to succeed in many cases where an attacker was playing out the paranoid fantasies of a larger radical network that was effectively under the control of a few key individuals."

Interesting proposal that could bring accountability to ringleaders who spread dangerous rhetoric online. If someone spreads violent paranoid fantasies and their followers act on it in the real world there’s really no consequences right now.

"This week, Congress nixed $15 billion in coronavirus funding from a $1.5 trillion spending bill, which President Joe Biden then signed on Tuesday. The decision is catastrophic, and as the White House has noted, its consequences will unfurl quickly."

Republicans are trying to maximize deaths as they always have.

"At the same time, as researchers look deeper and deeper into the bodies of infected people, they’re only seeing more damage. With each passing month, more studies emerge documenting how the coronavirus alters the function of vital organs such as the heart and the brain. The public has been cultured to think that most SARS-CoV-2 infections are trivial, and the repercussions brief, especially for the young, healthy, and privileged. But long COVID breaks the binary of severe and mild."

I think it's absolutely worth continuing to spend time and effort on covid prevention. It feels like we've collectively given up.

"They discussed how various platforms, from Twitter to TikTok and Telegram, are moderating the content coming out of Russia and Ukraine right now; the costs and benefits of Western companies pulling operations out of Russia during a period of increasing crackdown; and how the events of the last few weeks might shape our thinking about the nature and power of information operations."

Good discussion of the state of global social media moderation during an information war.

"Not surprisingly, then, after Goldman Sachs demanded employees return full-time to the office, the company announced it would raise its starting pay for first-year analysts by nearly 30%. In this new era, if you want employees in the office full time, you have to pay for it."

This is a positive development in work life especially with covid variant uncertainty. Being more distributed can also make an organization more resilient.