#5yrsago How the University of New Hampshire spun blowing a frugal librarian’s donation on a stupid football scoreboard deadspin.com/how-unh-turned… 13/
#1yrago Adobe uses copyfraud to preserve spyware: A free-as-in-surveillance-free Flash installer is gone thanks to a bogus copyright claim pluralistic.net/2021/10/13/the… 15/
#1yrago Charter uses bad credit threats to corral ex-subscribers: "Resubscribe or we'll keep trashing your credit report." pluralistic.net/2021/10/13/the… 16/
Monday's threads: Undetectable, undefendable back-doors for machine learning; Shelter in place; and more!
My ebooks and audiobooks (from @torbooks, @HoZ_Books, @mcsweeneys, @BeaconPressBks et al) are for sale all over the net, but I sell 'em too, and when you buy 'em from me, I earn twice as much and you get books with no DRM and no license "agreements."
Happy #SpookySeason! My picture book "Poesy the Monster Slayer" is the perfect read for your little monsters: it's an epic tale of bedtime-refusal, toy-hacking and monster-hunting, illustrated by @mcrockefeller.
If you're a @Medium subscriber, you can read these essays - as well as previews of upcoming magazine columns and early exclusives on doctorow.medium.com.
My latest Medium column is "Bankruptcy protects fake people, brutalizes real ones"
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Andrea Salinas should be a shoe-in to win the midterms to represent Oregon's 6th; the Democratic candidate is facing an extraordinarily weak GOP challenger: the millionaire perennial also-ran, philanderer, drunk driver and oxy trafficker Mike Erickson:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Erickson claims to be tough on crime but when he plead guilty to a DUI, he managed to wriggle out of charges for the unprescribed Oxy the cops found (his defense boils down to "I wasn't charged with possession so shut up about it or I'll sue"):
In summer 2020, I committed minor heresy: I argued that - contrary to the orthodoxy of free culture and free software advocates - the term "IP" has a very crisp meaning: "any law or rule used to control one's critics, competitors or customers":
In free culture/free software circles, the term "IP" is viewed as a smokescreen,. 2/
"IP" indiscriminately blends unrelated ideas (copyright, trademark, patent, trade secrets, anticircumvention, noncompetes, nondisclosure, etc) and then declared them to be "property" and thus sacred to neoliberal religious doctrine. 3/
US healthcare is the worst of all worlds. Unlike other wealthy countries, the US leaves insurance to the private sector, where your health and your life come second to profits. Worse: the majority of "private" insurance companies earnings come from public subsidies. 1/
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
In other words, the US has a privately run health care sector that is publicly financed, without any public accountability or duty to the public good. Insurance companies take ever more billions from the federal government and deliver ever less care to their customers. 3/