Notices by Karl Auerbach (karlauerbach@sfba.social)

The reason I went to law school and became an attorney was because one evening I was with my friend, who is Greek.

We were pulled over, violently pulled from the car (including my girlfriend), we were thrown up against the car and wall, intrusively searched (including my girlfriend's purse and the car trunk).

The only reason that the cops gave was that my friend "looked Mexican".

ICE is the American Stasi, the American Gestapo. Any officer who participates is not an American, he should be ashamed.

I see that Express Scripts - one of the large Pharmaceutical Benefits Manager companies - is doing online ads saying "we are not a middleman".

Well, they are a middleman, one that dictates to patients, doctors, and insurance companies what drugs, what dosages, what quantities, and what prices.

Well today I got a drug denial - as usual umpteen pages in umpteen languages, sent first class USPS. In other words it cost them several dollars to send.

And it was to tell me that my doctor prescribed an off-formulary anti-bacterial ointment that costs about $2.

Not very efficient, and very middle-man.

@hakan_geijer By-the-way, when taking actions please consider not only how good that makes you feel but also how it is perceived by those who could be convinced to move to the good side. We really want to push those people towards us, not away from us.

I just read the Larkin-Riley (LR) bills. Our congress essentially passes diff-patches rather to existing text. This makes the Bills difficult to read.

The use of quotation marks in these patches would make any computer programming tool barf - Congressional bills sometimes use semicolons to end a sequence started with a quotation mark.

This sloppy form of patching existing laws is an invitation to ambiguity and mistake.

Good drafting would simply replace entire textual blocks rather.

Even better if Congress were to use a tool like git and propose amendments as pull requests. Then we would have a much clearer view of text before and after the proposed amendment and we would always have a way to see the latest amended version.

By-the-way, the proposed Larkin-Riley Bill (Senate Bill 5) pretty much shoots the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments of our Constitution in the head and abandons due process even more than when we sent Japanese (including US citizens) to concentration camps in WW-II.

#LarkinRiely

We need to resist the oncoming repressive white-nationalist-christian regime that is rapidly invading our United States.

May I suggest that we use the anti-fascist partisian song Bella Ciao as our anthem.

https://youtu.be/Zr6CeTm3aSE?t=103

@_elena @emmecola I've found that the real test of self hosting (whether of web servers, DNS servers, etc) is usually less in the establishment/set-up phase and more in the recovery from failure (e.g. lost disk) phase.

Las Vegas is going to be very sorry that Musk has made such a mess of underground transport in the city. And that mess is permanent - those tesla-tunnels will remain to bedevil future, more sane, infrastructure projects.

Unregulated construction of an underground grid of tunnels, using human driven Tesla's as vehicles, is about as stupid a design as is possible. But then again we are talking about the "brain" that brewed up the even worse "hyperloop".

Las Vegas could use an underground system (although it has a decent above ground bus system). But that system should use much more efficient, proven methods, such as the driverless shuttle-trains so often used at airports, such as at Atlanta or Denver.

Musk is a great pooper - he dumps on everything and leaves the rest of us to clean up his mess.

https://www.propublica.org/article/elon-musk-boring-company-las-vegas-loop-oversight

Sigh, Peter Yarrow died. I've been a very long time fan of Peter, Paul, and Mary - I saw pretty much every show they did in the LA area during the late 1960s and 1970s. I have heard that my father was friends with Yarrow. Now all we have is Paul.

BTW, I also saw the Weavers perform.

Israel is rapidly loosing even the pretense of sympathy from other nations.

Whatever the outcome it will be violent - possibly nuclear-level violence. That violence probably will not be contained to the Levant especially if the great powers get involved.

Israel ought to continue to exist. On the whole Israel has good people and is a benefit to the world. But it - or rather its government - is doing its best to assure that Israel no longer has the moral claim it once had.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/28/middleeast/kamal-adwan-israel-arrests-hospital-director-gaza-intl/index.html

For a couple of years I have been trying to raise awareness of a part of the US health care industry that has a huge impact but for some reason gets almost no attention:

Pharmaceutical Benefits Manager companies.

These companies tell doctors, insurers, pharmacies, and patients what drugs are covered by insurance, what the dosages are, and imposes limits on prescriptions.

Well, these companies have been taking bribes.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/17/business/pharmacy-benefit-managers-opioids.html

@Nonilex The media is caving and ignoring their first amendment rights - and their public obligations.

With regard to Firefox and its choice to discontinue the Do Not Track flag, @mkj pointed me to a rather interesting article:

Is Recognising Do Not Track (DNT) Signals Required Under the GDPR?

https://wideangle.co/blog/do-not-track-gdpr-opt-out

STUPID - how stupid has the Mozilla foundation become? Here's how stupid:

"Mozilla removes ‘Do Not Track’ from Firefox because it was useless"

DNT is far from useless. It may not have *technical* weight but it can have substantial legal weight.

If a user asserts DNT to a website and that website ignores DNT than there are substantial legal arguments that the website's terms of service do not come into force because there has been a failure of negotiation on a material element of the contract that is formed when that website is accessed.

Removing DNT from Firefox is beyond stupid, it is ignorant, it harms internet users.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/11/mozilla-removes-do-not-track-setting-from-firefox-because-it-was-useless/

@joebeone Web 4.0? Not heard that phrase before.

BTW, I find it interesting that Bing refuses to index pages that were published circa 1995. Bing says they are missing "required" HTML meta fields - thus relegating "old" web content to the undiscoverable realm of Internet pre-history.

@joebeone What kool-aid are they drinking? Their description, below, sounds like the blurb for a bad sci-fi video.

WHAT IS WEB 4.0?

The expected fourth generation of the World Wide Web. Using advanced artificial and ambient intelligence, the internet of things, trusted blockchain transactions, virtual worlds and XR capabilities, digital and real objects and environments are fully integrated and communicate with each other. This enables truly intuitive and immersive experiences, seamlessly blending the physical and digital worlds.

@glynmoody Yup, this looks like a waste of money.

@lauren Wouldn't this create a demand for ATSC 3.0 to HDMI widgets? I would imagine that those could be fairly small, USB powered, and inexpensive; or be built into things like Roku boxes with an antenna lug.

@eob @nazokiyoubinbou EFF has a fingerprint tool to test your browser's resistance. Link below.

It would be easy for browser makers to add things to block certain kinds of fingerprinting - like putting some random bits around webcanvas etc.

There no particular code of ethics that governs browser makers or website publishers - it would be better if this kind of tracking were unlawful.

https://firstpartysimulator.net/

@yosh Way back in the 1970s we worked on machines with true hardware Capability architectures (not that weak thing with that name in Linux).

Those architectures let us get closer to the security rule of giving no module more authority than it needed to get its job done.

(I once got to help design an OS and then to design/build the capability based computer to run it. But it was classified so nobody ever heard about it.)

I wish we would revive the lost technology of capability hardware architectures.

Here's one such effort:

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/ctsrd/cheri/

@mekkaokereke In our Tesla people have trouble finding the electric door open buttons.

And even people who know that they are there can not often find the mechanical opener levers.

But if you are in the back seat you can kiss the world goodbye because there are no mechanical door opener levers, only the electronic buttons. (Oh yeah, there is a rear door release if you have a pry bar to open up one of the door panels.)