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Spectrum Internet Down Across Texas

Tuesday, July 9th, 2024

Houston isn’t the only place in Texas having trouble. Spectrum Internet is down all across Texas. Including here. I’m typing this on my iPhone.

They’re not sure if it’s from Beryl or not, but it didn’t go out here until after noon today, and if a Houston power outage is affecting service in the entire state, that’s pretty poor disaster planning by Spectrum.

Will update when I know more.

Update: Back up here at 4:49 PM.

Update 2: All four lights are on but The Internet isn’t showering my screens with any bits. Those 30 minutes of Internet were useful while they lasted…

Update 3: Give them credit: They said by 7 PM, and it came on only a few minutes after that.

Supposedly a Spectrum tower in Houston that was damaged by Beryl was the root of a problem, but that seems suspicious. How can a single tower in Houston take out Internet in Austin and San Antonio? If true, this would be a whole lot of failover plans failed to switch over properly. Where’s the emergency redundancy?

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Posted in Austin, Texas | 8 Comments »

Adobe Update: Uncle Fed Sues

Wednesday, June 19th, 2024

Some interesting updates on Adobe. When last we checked, Adobe just wanted unlimited use of everything you create forever, and you have to agree to those terms before you can even access your existing work.

Now Uncle Fed is suing Adobe…but not over that issue.

The United States Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission today levied a lawsuit against Adobe [PDF] for imposing a hidden termination fee on subscribers who want to cancel their Adobe plans. Adobe is accused of forcing subscribers to “navigate a complex and challenging cancellation process designed to deter them from cancelling subscriptions they no longer wanted.”

Adobe offers its Creative Cloud products on a subscription basis, with fees that are paid monthly. A monthly payment suggests that it’s possible to cancel anytime, but that’s not how Adobe works because most customers are actually locked into a hidden annual agreement.

Customers who sign up for a free trial and are then charged and signed up to the default Creative Cloud plan, which is actually an annual contract. Canceling the annual contract requires customers to pay a lump sum of 50 percent of the “remaining contractual obligation” to cancel, despite the fact that service ends that month.

Adobe does let customers sign up for a month-to-month subscription plan, but at a higher cost than the annual contract that’s paid monthly, and the difference is not always clear to new or existing customers. Adobe even has a whole help page because of the confusing nature of its subscription. If you look at the Adobe website, for example, Adobe lists a $60/month fee for accessing its full suite of apps, but that’s only if you agree to the annual contract. A true month-to-month plan that you can cancel anytime is $90/month, and if you pay for a year upfront, you get no money back when you cancel after a 14-day period.

If memory serves, back in the dim mists of time, $75 was around what I paid to upgrade from PageMaker 3.0 to 4.0. And that wasn’t a month, that was “Pay this fee once and use this software forever.” None of this pay $60 a month BS. Of course, I was running it on a Mac Plus running System 6.0.8 (which some still insist was the last truly stable Mac operating system), so that was four CPU architectures and innumerable OS versions ago. Now get the hell off my lawn before I hit you with my cane.

According to the DoJ, Adobe’s setup violates the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act (ROSCA) through the use of fine print and inconspicuous hyperlinks to hide information about the Early Termination Fee.

According to Kneon and Geeky Sparkles at ClownfishTV, Adobe’s own staff is none too happy about the draconian terms of service.

  • Geeky Sparkles: So Adobe will get punished, but Google can do all kinds of crap and take down all kinds of websites, and the Department of Justice doesn’t do anything about that.
  • Kneon: Yes.
  • GS: I’m just pointing that out.
  • K: A lot of companies are doing this, I’ve noticed this. They make it very, very hard to cancel, which is illegal.
  • K: Every time we’ve tried to cancel like Direct TV or something, you have to call them. You can’t just like do it on the website, and they always do that, and then they want to get you on the phone. They want to actually try to upsell you.
  • K: Comcast does that especially with their Internet. Oh yeah, it’s only going to be like you know 100 bucks a month or whatever, $200 a month. And then then after your trial is over whatever…they’re like. “Oh now it’s like $350 a month. You wanted usable Internet? Wow, that’s an up charge.”
  • K: The justice department alleges that Adobe hid early cancellation fees and trapped consumers in pricey subscriptions, so you have to pay a fee if you cancel. A lot of times they’re like “Oh yeah, it’s whatever a month,” but then you read the fine prints, you have to commit to two years.
  • K: The Department of Justice claims Adobe has harmed consumers by enrolling them in its default, most lucrative subscription plan without clearly disclosing important plan terms and this is on top of them being allowed to snoop in your files.
  • K: The lawsuit alleges Adobe hides the terms of its annual paid monthly plan in the fine print and behind optional text boxes and hyperlinks, and, in doing so, the company fails to properly disclose the early termination fees incurred upon cancellation that can amount to hundreds of dollars.
  • K: When the customers do attempt to cancel, the Department of Justice alleges Adobe requires them to go through an onerous and complicated cancellation process that involves navigating through multiple web pages and popups. It then allegedly ambushes customers with an early termination fee which may discourage them from canceling.
  • Try to cancel via livechat or over the phone? Expect your call to be mysteriously dropped.
  • K: They want you to get frustrated and just give up.
  • K: These practices break federal laws designed to protect consumers.
  • The lawsuit also targets “two Adobe executives, Maninder Sawhney and David Wadhwani, for alleged violations of the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act (ROSCA).”
  • K: Up until 2012, Adobe, you bought the software, you got it on a disc, you put it on your computer.
  • K: Though Adobe is doing some scummy stuff, it almost feels like somebody’s gunning for Adobe. Like this lawsuit drops a week or two after they get backlashed.
  • GS: It is weird, especially when you have Google out there doing all the weird stuff that’s been going on, with their websites and things. And a lot of sites are losing all their ad revenue because they’re not being found, or they’re shutting down because they they they just completely sunk in both traffic and revenue. And they’re allowed to tank thousands and thousands and thousands and tens of thousands of sites and that’s OK, and put up when they put up AI information that comes above everything else a lot of times it’s wrong.
  • One possible reason for the difference in treatment is that Adobe is screwing actual paying customers, while Google, in screwing random websites, may only be screwing people and companies with whom they have no actual contractual obligation to. Which is a big difference between software you pay for and software you use for free.
  • K: It does seem weird that it’s like “boom boom,” like this is a kill shot to take Adobe out of play.
  • GS: Two things can be correct at the same time. It does feel like they’re being targeted, but I also think that they kind of have it coming.
  • K: Apparently the community dissatisfaction with the company grew so intense that even Adobe’s own staff started expressing unhappiness about the whole ordeal.
  • To the point that someone in Adobe is evidently leaking internal slack threads to Business Insider.
  • K: The company’s workers appear to be siding with regular users voicing complaints about the terms of service updates and the resulting backlash, as well as Adobe’s poor communication and apparent mishandling of the situation.
  • K: “The general perception is Adobe is is an evil company that will do whatever it takes to fuck its users. Let’s avoid becoming IBM, which seems to be surviving primarily due to its entrenched market position and legacy systems.”
  • K: This is not the right time to be pushing your your AI stuff when creatives are worried about losing their jobs as it is.
  • Aside: I sort of hate that the word “Creatives” has become a thing, since it aggregates too many diverse sets of people (writers, artists, movie makers, graphic designers, etc.) into an amorphous class. It’s a fairly recent coinage, but I wonder if it’s already too late to stamp out that particular linguistic “innovation.”
  • K: They’re trying to say they never trained their AI on customer data, we never trained generative AI on customer content, taken ownership of a customer’s work or allowed access to customer content beyond legal requirements. People aren’t going to believe you.
  • GS: Then why word it the way you did? That doesn’t make any sense.

    • Indeed.

    Adobe does indeed a lot of splainin to do, and those heinous terms should be revised before anyone gives Adobe another dime, since there are cheaper alternatives to just about everything they offer. But that’s not to say that there aren’t other tech giants out there with even more heinous policies (Google and Microsoft are two that immediately come to mind), with or without AI, and it is curious that Adobe, a relatively new and smaller player in the AI space, has suddenly been subjected to so much official heat.

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    Posted in Crime, video | 4 Comments »

    Adobe Just Wants Unlimited Use Of Everything You Create

    Monday, June 10th, 2024

    Adobe has just changed the terms for subscription applications like Photoshop. Nothing big, just a demand of unlimited use of everything you ever create, forever. Oh, and you’re locked out of your existing work until you agree.

    A change to Adobe terms & conditions for apps like Photoshop has outraged many professional users, concerned that the company is claiming the right to access their content, use it freely, and even sub-licence it to others.

    The company is requiring users to agree to the new terms in order to continue using their Adobe apps, locking them out until they do so …

    Adobe says that its new terms “clarify that we may access your content through both automated and manual methods, such as for content review.”

    The terms say:

    Solely for the purposes of operating or improving the Services and Software, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free sublicensable, license, to use, reproduce, publicly display, distribute, modify, create derivative works based on, publicly perform, and translate the Content. For example, we may sublicense our right to the Content to our service providers or to other users to allow the Services and Software to operate with others, such as enabling you to share photos

    If you’re using our tools, we get unlimited rights to anything you ever created on our tools for any purpose forever, plus we get to sublicense them. It’s as if Microsoft announced that it was publishing Joe Schmoo’s Misery II: Misery Harder because Stephen King agreed to the license agreement for Word 4.0.

    Designer Wetterschneider, who counts DC Comics and Nike among his clients, was one of the graphics pros to object to the terms.

    Here it is. If you are a professional, if you are under NDA with your clients, if you are a creative, a lawyer, a doctor or anyone who works with proprietary files – it is time to cancel Adobe, delete all the apps and programs. Adobe can not be trusted.

    But don’t worry! It gets worse! You can’t access your server-stored work or even uninstall the app until you agree to the term!

    Concept artist Sam Santala pointed out that you can’t raise a support request to discuss the terms without first agreeing to them. You can’t even uninstall the apps!

    I can’t even get ahold of your support chat to question this unless I agree to these terms beforehand.

    I can’t even uninstall Photoshop unless I agree to these terms?? Are you f**king kidding me??

    But don’t worry! Adobe has “clarified” that they’re really not going to steal your content, despite the terms and conditions clearly giving them the permissions to do precisely that. They also swear up and down that they’re never, ever, ever going to use your work to train AI on, despite the fact that we all know that’s exactly what they’re doing.

    All of this points out how stupid it is to rely on a subscription model for your software.

    Is there a Louis Rossmann rant on the subject? Yes. Yes there is.

  • “When you are at the mercy of connecting to somebody else’s computer to use your software, this means that your data can be held hostage and they can change the terms on you at any time.”
  • He states he feels anything he’s published on the Internet is fair game for training AI. But: “I do not want Adobe’s machine learning algorithms going through my personal private content. When I have something in my drawer, that belongs to me. That is not for anybody else to learn from.”
  • “If you have a halfway finished creative project, you are literally not able to access it unless you agree to terms and conditions that allow their machine learning algorithms to go through all of your private fucking library. You rapist pieces of shit!”
  • “The problem with having your data on somebody else’s computer is that they can roofy you anytime they want and get access to it.”
  • “Where on this page does it say that if you don’t want us to access your data, that you can grab all your data out of there and cancel? Does it say that? No, it says you either accept and continue you take the roofy or you don’t get access to any of your stuff ever again.”

    • Until Adobe actually changes the terms and conditions to provide the narrow permissions they claim they actually need (like the ability to create thumbnails), no one should agree to their terms. And not allowing someone to retrieve or delete their data without agreeing to draconian terms and conditions first is unconscionable extortion.

    Expect lawsuits.

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    Posted in Media Watch, video | 17 Comments »

    NYTimes Hacked, Source Code Stolen

    Sunday, June 9th, 2024

    This seems like a story that should be getting a lot more coverage: The New York Times was evidently hacked and hundred of gigabytes of their source code released.

    An anonymous hacker has claimed to have leaked 270 GB of internal data and source code from The New York Times (NYT) on the controversial image board 4chan.

    The leak, reportedly containing over 5,000 repositories and 3.6 million files, was published on June 6, 2024. It has since raised widespread concern and speculation about the potential implications for the historic news organization.

    The hacker, who has not been identified, posted a magnet link to the files on 4chan, encouraging users to download and share the data. According to the hacker, the leaked collection comprises uncompressed tar files with fewer than 30 encrypted repositories.

    The leaked data reportedly contains a variety of source code, including the blueprints of well-known games like Wordle, email marketing campaigns, and ad reports. The hacker’s message was signed “With love from /aicg/,” a nod to a 4chan community.

    While the leak’s legitimacy has not been independently verified, cybersecurity experts and media outlets have expressed serious concerns. The Register reported that it had seen a list of files in the purported leak but had not confirmed their authenticity.

    Bryan Lunduke of The Lunduke Journal (who’s covered leaked/hacked material like this before) downloaded the files. He says they’re 334GB worth of files (maybe the size discrepancy is zipped vs unzipped) and thinks they’re real.

  • This dropped June 6.
  • “We are talking about a 334 gigabyte archive containing supposedly 3.6 million and some change files, individual source code files. Massive. Off-the-charts massive.”
  • He though it might just be every New York Times story ever published, but it doesn’t appear to be. Nor does it look like an email server dump.
  • “This is massive. It almost is making my brain hurt simply going through all of this.”
  • “I went through it. I read a bunch of it in depth. When I say a bunch of it, I mean I spent a long time on it and barely made a dent.”
  • “It truly does look to be over 3 something million source code files.”
  • “The first things I looked through were tremendously boring. It was just stupid JavaScript files dealing with Markdown.” JavaScript is a front-end programming language used for performing a huge variety of tasks in your browser. Markdown is an HTML-like text markup language used as a basis for rendering documents in a variety of different formats (standard web page, phone webpage, PDF, online help, etc.
  • A lot of it appears to be internal website documents.
  • “It’s from a wide variety of stuff. I mean it’s all over the map. We’re talking onboarding documents and technical documents, hiring documents, switchboard documents, user attribute documents, a huge amount of documentation.”
  • Plus actual source code for iOS and Android applications.
  • Lunduke explains legal doctrine on leaked materials and reporting, saying he didn’t commit any crime to obtain the material, which should legally put him in the clear for talking about material therein relevant to the public interest. Normally I’d point out “Hacking is wrong, mkay,” but New York Times has itself published hacked/leaked/stolen material itself at least as far back as The Pentagon Papers, so this is a case of biter bit.
  • “There a reasonable assumption that publishing some of this leaked material would be of the public interest…There are a number of policies and other interesting things in place documented within this material that could be of the public interest.”
  • “This does appear to be real. I cannot fathom how all of this could have been created if it wasn’t real.” I am inclined to agree. But! It’s important to note that a real archive can be salted with false information for a variety of nefarious purposes, so caveat lector.
  • “It is an absolutely monstrous amount. Simply searching through it and scanning it is insane. There are over 5,000 individual mini-archives within this link each one appears to represent an individual source code repository, or at least a folder or subfolder within source code repositories.” He says it appears to be just the latest snapshot, and not all the versions you would find in a source code repository like GitHub.

  • The time stamps on the files look recent.
  • “Man, there’s some funky things going on here.”

    • I am most interested in how internal policies codify/enforce woke social justice priorities, if there are any special instructions for covering Donald Trump (or other Republicans), racial preferences in hiring policies, etc.

    I’m hoping for some juicy revelations…

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    Posted in Media Watch, Social Justice Warriors, video | 7 Comments »

    Paxton Takes On Big Data

    Wednesday, June 5th, 2024

    Texas Attorney general Ken Paxton is launching a new initiative to protect data privacy.

    Attorney General Ken Paxton announced today the launch of a new major initiative to protect citizens’ sensitive data from unauthorized exploitation by tech companies and artificial intelligence.

    The initiative was launched under the umbrella of the Attorney General Office Consumer Protection Division and established a team for “aggressive enforcement” of state privacy laws. It will also “ensure companies respect Texans’ privacy rights and safeguard their personal data.”

    According to a press release from Paxton’s office, the data protection team is set to be one of the largest privacy law enforcement teams in the entire United States.

    “Any entity abusing or exploiting Texans’ sensitive data will be met with the full force of the law,” said Paxton. “Companies that collect and sell data in an unauthorized manner, harm consumers financially, or use artificial intelligence irresponsibly present risks to our citizens that we take very seriously.

    “As many companies seek more and more ways to exploit data they collect about consumers, I am doubling down to protect privacy rights,” he continued. “With companies able to collect, aggregate, and use sensitive data on an unprecedented scale, we are strengthening our enforcement of privacy laws to protect our citizens.”

    Specifically, the new team will focus on enforcing the Data Privacy and Security Act, the Identify Theft Enforcement and Protection Act, the Data Broker Law, the Biometric Identifier Act, the Deceptive Trade Practices Act, and federal laws such as the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

    “Texas has been a national leader in advancing conservative technology policy, and this initiative is the perfect complement to legislative wins in recent sessions as it will ensure Texas has the expertise and firepower to enforce laws that protect consumers and hold Big Tech accountable,” said David Dunmoyer—the Texas Public Policy Foundation Better Tech for Tomorrow campaign director.

    “Big Tech companies have gleefully flouted laws like the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act for years, and in the absence of meaningful federal action, this initiative demonstrates Texas’ willingness to once again step into the breach and fight on behalf of Texans,” he continued. “This initiative will only further cement Texas’ national leadership in this space.”

    This is the latest development in Texas’ efforts to crack down on data privacy infringement. In mid-summer of last year, Gov. Greg Abbott signed the Texas Data Privacy & Security Act into law.

    The law applies to primarily businesses and entities who conduct business in the state of Texas or produce a product consumed by Texans, process or engage with the sale of personal data, and who are not considered “small businesses” unless the business has its hand in transactions of personal data.

    That enforcement effort sounds both needed and deserved, but the question is how you enforce those laws when they cows have not only left the barn, but have been sucked down and sliced up into thousands of vast international data farms far beyond the regulatory reach of the state of Texas.

    Big data lives and breathes on personal data that you’ve agreed to give up in variegated clauses scattered throughout the sprawling text swamps of terms and conditions for online sites you use for free.

    Have a Facebook account? Congratulations! Every bit of information you’ve shared with Facebook (your friends network, your interests, the sports teams you follow, the foods you favor, etc.) is now available to every partner of Facebook. And everyone partners with Facebook. If they have your email address or your phone number, they have your data.

    Ditto Google, with the additional proviso that Google has sucked up and cataloged pretty much every public database in the world, plus every single search query you’ve launched, ever, and every web page you’ve ever viewed through Chrome.

    Ditto Microsoft, for LinkedIn (yes, Microsoft bought LinkedIn), Windows, Explorer, Edge, Bing, etc.

    Ditto Twitter for everything you’ve ever tweeted or liked there.

    Ditto Sony, whose PlayStation Network data got hacked.

    Ditto Apple, though they seem to have better privacy protection provisions than most, mainly because they make their money off hardware. This doesn’t make them the good guys, just the least bad buys.

    Even Samsung sucks down data to target ads at you.

    And don’t forget state, location and federal government entities, whose data security is probably several orders of magnitude worse than the tech giants.

    Given that there’s so much personal data out there, so much legally acquired, how do you go about putting the genie back in the bottle? It’s a near impossible task, given that the tech giants not only hire armies of lawyers to defend themselves from lawsuits, but also lobbyists to write laws protecting them from said lawsuits.

    One place to start: Joining in a lawsuit where Facebook’s parent company Meta actually used stolen data to train AI, namely using a giant database of pirated books without paying authors. Paxton’s office could join one of the lawsuits against Meta, or file a new one on behalf of Texas authors whose work was used without compensation.

    Catching a tech giant with their pants down while actually breaking the law may give Paxton leverage to address other privacy concerns, and possibly the chance to do some eye-opening discovery…

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    Posted in Media Watch, Texas | 2 Comments »

    China Throws Money At Semiconductors Again

    Monday, May 27th, 2024

    Madness is doing the same thing over and expecting different results, and China is throwing money at semiconductors again.

    China has launched a massive $47 billion fund, the largest in its history, to bolster its semiconductor industry and establish a local supply chain. This fund, equivalent to 344 billion yuan, is the third phase initiated by the China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund [also known as the National Integrated Circuit Industry investment Fund Company (ICF), or just “Big Fund.”-LP]. It’s worth noting that this amount is twice the total funds raised in the previous phases in 2014 and 2019.

    Do you remember the last time I covered where the money went to in those previous phases? The money went to companies like Wuhan Hongxin Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Result? “Hongxin’s unfinished plant in the port city of Wuhan now stands abandoned. Its founders have vanished, despite owing contractors and investors billions of yuan.”

    Or maybe Tsinghua Unigroup. Result? The arrested a whole lot of executives, a lot of money disappeared into various pockets, and “Tsinghua Unigroup abandoned its plan to build DRAM memory chip manufacturing plants in Chongqing and Chengdu in southwest China earlier this year.”

    As I wrote before, China’s semiconductor industry is shell games all the way down.

    At lot of times, loans and investments are siphoned through four or five different entities from the purposes for which they were originally obtained. Everyone’s trying to get rich, and they hope to survive on smoke and mirrors long enough to get profitable. Imagine if Kleiner Perkins invested $25 million in a software startup, only to find that money was spent on a noodle shop, a used car dealership and a golf club manufacturer.

    Sometimes it works. You can build a company on margin, get profitable quickly, and be paying off investors and contractors before anyone realizes how shaky the entire enterprise is.

    But you can’t do that with semiconductor manufacturing. The startup costs are simply too high, easily in the billions. Very, very few companies can afford to be in a game that expensive. China’s two biggest semiconductor manufacturing success stories, SMIC and Tsinghua Unigroup, all have have CCP direct government investment.

    And bunches of Tsinghua Unigroup executive still got pinched for sticking their snouts into the trough.

    And everything should theoretically be harder now that the U.S. has imposed sanctions on China’s semiconductor industry. But one wonders just how effective these sanctions are when Applied Materials reported that 43% of its total revenue came from China in the second quarter. That suggests a certain kayfabe quality to the sanction, with just the right loopholes for AMAT (and presumably other semiconductor equipment manufacturing giants like Lam Research and Tokyo Electron) to keep getting those conveyor belts of Chinese money.

    My assumption is that, yet again, the funds earmarked for semiconductor companies will be siphoned off into a thousands unrelated pockets. (Though the rest of China’s business climate is sucking so badly that maybe some money will actually fund real semiconductor startups, if only through lack of other money-making opportunities to siphon funds off for.) Sanctions will continue to leak. A few years from now, China will announce the arrests of more executives using the Big Fund to play more investment shell games. And five years from now China will announce an even bigger set of subsidies…

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    Posted in Communism, Economics, Foreign Policy | 11 Comments »

    LinkSwarm for May 3, 2024

    Friday, May 3rd, 2024

    More corruption from the Biden family (plus a Texas Democratic congressman), more bad news from the Biden Recession, more pedophile sex offenders, more college madness, and virtue signaling, Third Reich style. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

    And remember: If you’re in a large Texas county, there’s a tax appraisal district election tomorrow, so be sure to get out and vote if you haven’t already voted early.

  • Another week, another corrupt Biden family scheme exposed. “Joe Biden’s Brother Embroiled In High-Ranking Qatari Scheme To ‘Provide Wealth Of Introductions’ Through ‘My Family.'”

    Qatar has had a lot of fingers in a lot of pies. While we knew about the EU’s ‘Qatargate,’ investments with the Kushner family, and of course Sen. Bob Menendez advancing Qatar’s interests, Politico reports that the Biden family’s ties to Qatar “would constitute some of the closest known financial links between a relative of President Joe Biden and a foreign government,” if courtroom testimony about Jim Biden’s foreign fundraising efforts is substantiated.

    In June 2017, Qatar’s neighbors – led by Saudi Arabia, banded together and cut diplomatic ties with the country, citing its alleged support for terrorism. As a result, the country was thrown into a sustained crisis.

    To dig themselves out, Qatari rulers began showering well-connected Westerners with gifts and financial benefits, according to Politico, “sometimes in the form of investment funding.”

    Around this time, Jim Biden was trying to raise $30 million for embattled hospital chain Americore – teaming up with Florida businessman Amer Rustom, CEO of the Platinum Group, who boasted of his ties to officials in the Middle East, as well as fund manager Michael Lewitt. Together, the three sought investment funding from various Middle Eastern sources for Americore and other ventures – “which came to focus largely on Qatar,” according to a former Americore executive who spoke on condition of anonymity.

    According to public records obtained by the outlet, Jim Biden leveraged ties to his older brother and “sought workarounds to restrictions on international money movements,” including one discussion about trying to move money across a Middle Eastern border in the form of gold bars that may or may not have happened.

    Let ye who has never smuggled gold across the border of an Arab country cast the first stone.

    “My family could provide a wealth of introductions and business opportunities at the highest levels that I believe would be worthy of the interest of His Excellency,” Jim Biden and Rustom wrote in a draft letter to an official at the Qatari sovereign wealth fund, the Qatar Investment Authority. “On behalf of the Biden family, I welcome your interest here,” the draft continues.

    Corrupt to the core.

  • More evidence from the Biden recession: “Job Openings Tumble, Quits Plunge, Hires Unexpectedly Crater To January 2018 Levels.”

    After several months of relatively boring JOLTS prints, this morning Janet Yellen’s favorite labor market indicator once again got exciting, and not in a good way.

    Starting at the top, according to the March JOLTS reported, job openings unexpectedly tumbled by 325K – the biggest drop since October 2023 – from an upward revised 8.813 million in February to just 8.488 million, far below the 8.690 million expected – and the lowest number since February 2021 when it last printed below 8 million.

    “Unexpectedly.”

  • “Chinese Nationals Charged With Conspiracy to Export US Technology.”

    The Department of Justice has arrested two Chinese nationals who allegedly plotted to export U.S. technology to advance the People’s Republic of China’s military operations.

    Han Li, 44, and Lin Chen, 64, have been charged with several counts of conspiracy to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), in addition to the Export Administration Regulations (EAR), for attempting to export a machine used to process silicon microchips….

    “Specifically, the defendants sought to illegally obtain for CGTC a DTX-150 Automatic Diamond Scriber Breaker machine from Dynatex International, a Santa Rosa, California company.”

    That’s a backend semiconductor machine for slicing finished individual computer chips off a processed wafer.

  • “Texas Democrat Henry Cuellar Indicted on Bribery, Money-Laundering Charges.”

    Representative Henry Cuellar and his wife were indicted by a federal grand jury on bribery, foreign influence, and money-laundering charges, the U.S. Department of Justice announced on Friday afternoon.

    The Texas Democrat and his wife are accused of accepting roughly $600,000 in bribes from two foreign entities starting in December 2014 and continuing through 2021. The foreign entities are a Mexican bank and an oil and gas company linked to the government of Azerbaijan, according to the Justice Department.

    In exchange for the bribes, Cuellar agreed to use his office for promoting favorable U.S. foreign policy towards Azarbaijan and pushing legislative and executive branch officials to adopt policy measures beneficial to the bank, authorities said.

    In 2022, Cuellar’s home and office were searched during a federal investigation into Azerbaijan and American businessmen linked to the Middle Eastern nation. Cuellar formerly co-chaired the congressional Azerbaijan caucus.

    Cuellar represents TX28. Republicans Jay Furman and Lazaro Garza Jr. are competing in the runoff to challenge Cuellar this fall.

  • Columbia shows some semblance of a spine, threatens to expel students occupying administrative buildings.
  • Related: “Columbia Student Who Said ‘Zionists Don’t Deserve To Live’ Reportedly ‘Thrown Out Of School.'”
  • Also: “Police Begin Detaining UCLA Protesters Occupying Campus.”
  • “Tucked away in the $95 billion military aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan is a $3.5 billion slush fund to open new processing centers for Muslim migrants, in what Sen. Eric Schmitt described as a bid to “supercharge mass migration from the Middle East.” Republicans in congress asleep at the switch again.
  • Ukraine hits two more oil refineries.
  • It’s not just China that the CCP’s crazy policies are ruining. There are over 500 abandoned, unfinished buildings in Cambodia. A crackdown on online gambling also hastened the demise of many real estate ventures there.
  • Tranny sex offender tries to snatch a child from an elementary playground in broad daylight. “Trans-identifying male Solomon Galligan [simply] walked on campus last Friday afternoon during recess at Black Forest Hills Elementary School in Aurora, Colorado, and straight-up tried to steal a kid.”

    The suspect, who is identified as male in the arrest affidavit, shared news of his transition on Facebook back in 2011.

    ‘So im starting my hormone shots and i relly cant wait im on my hormone pills ive been on them for almost 4 months i wake up all depressed and crying but in the end its gonna be totally worth it you know what io mean im really excited my measurements are already changing and im super thrilled,’ he wrote.

    Galligan was put on the sex offender registry and was convicted that same year of non-consent sexual contact, according to his latest arrest affidavit.

  • Another week, three more Texas teachers arrested for having sex with students.

    Ernest Herrera, 56, was arrested Monday after he admitted to sexual contact with a 13-year-old student, claiming they had “developed a relationship.”

    Herrera taught social studies at Southside Independent School District’s Losoya Middle School in San Antonio.

    He was charged with improper relationship between educator and student, a second-degree felony punishable by 2 to 20 years in prison.

    Herrera was booked into Bexar County Jail and held on a $75,000 bond.

    The district superintendent stated that Herrera was fired “effective immediately.”

    Andrew McCown, 27, was arrested Wednesday and charged with having an “improper relationship” with a 17-year-old female student.

    McCown is a math teacher and football coach at Roosevelt High School in San Antonio’s North East ISD.

    He was reportedly placed on leave in March and will be terminated.

    McCown, who is related to former NFL quarterbacks Josh and Luke McCown, was arrested in 2022 for drunk driving while he was a teacher and coach at Robinson ISD.

    According to a statement to MySA, the district “conducted a background check on April 25, 2023, and at that time, it was clear and McCown was hired.”

    Another football coach, Perryton ISD athletic director Cole Underwood, was arrested Wednesday and charged with sexual assault of a child, a second-degree felony.

    The alleged victim is a Perryton High School student, reportedly a 14-year-old girl.

    Underwood was released from Ochiltree County Jail on Thursday after posting a $125,000 bond.

    According to a statement from Perryton ISD, Underwood resigned.

  • The new York case against Trump isn’t going so well for the prosecution. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • In a poll of Texas voters, Trump leads Biden by 9%, and Ted Cruz leads Democratic challenger Colin Allred by 13%. Usual “polls this far out are meaningless” caveats apply.
  • Four reform candidates elected to NRA board. Now they just need to replace all of Wayne’s cronies on the board for me to rejoin.

  • Democrats passing a “living wage” law for Seattle ensures that they can’t make a living wage.
  • Second Boeing whistleblower dies suddenly.

  • Chinese officials are asking villagers to take out fake business licenses. Is that for their own business scams, or to artificially pump up Chinese economic statistics?

  • Profiles in Cowardice: “PEN America, a leading nonprofit dedicated to free expression, canceled its 2024 World Voices Festival late last week under pressure from pro-Palestinian activists. Many writers affiliated with the organization either threatened to boycott the event unless PEN acceded to certain demands, including labeling Israel’s actions in Gaza ‘genocide,’ or distanced themselves from the free-speech group in response to online pressure from pro-Palestinian activists.”
  • Monroe County, New York, Democratic District Attorney Sandra Doorley wants you to know that she’s simply better than you and doesn’t have to pull over for police.
  • Virtue signaling: Third Reich Edition.
  • Brandon Herrera has both a meme review and an update on his runoff against Tony Gonzalez for TX23.
  • OnlyFans camgirl paid to propagandize for the Biden Administration. It’s a shame she wasn’t paid for sex, since then American taxpayers could see the Biden administration paying money to screw someone other than themselves…
  • Sale of books from the library of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg results in $187,740 loss.
  • “Missionaries Travel From Africa To Bring The Gospel To United Methodist Church.”
  • History Repeats Itself As Communists Run Out Of Food.

    • Hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.





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    Posted in Communism, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Military, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Supreme Court, Texas | 4 Comments »

    Samsung Snags $6.4 Billion For Texas Fabs

    Monday, April 15th, 2024

    Samsung’s Texas fabs are evidently going to be the beneficiary of CHIPS Act subsidies.

    The U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC) has announced that $6.4 billion will be sent to a Texas Samsung facility to bolster the supply chain of semiconductors.

    The multi-billion dollar investment is part of a larger $40 billion dollar federal funding agreement as part of the CHIPS and Science Act.

    As a White House press release states, the investment aims to “cement central Texas’s role as a state-of-the-art semiconductor ecosystem, creating at least 21,500 jobs and leveraging up to $40 million in CHIPS funding to train and develop the local workforce.”

    This investment would be used at both the research and development facilities in Taylor and the expansion of the fabrication factory in Austin.

    The Taylor facility isn’t just an R&D site, it’s a full-blown state-of-the-art fab, and they could start running the line as early as July. The chips Samsung will be producing are planned to be on their 4 nanometer node.

    The City of Austin has previously identified semiconductor production as part of its Opportunity Austin economic expansion plan where the city sees itself as a “top global destination for businesses and investment.”

    “We’re not just expanding production facilities; we’re strengthening the local semiconductor ecosystem and positioning the U.S. as a global semiconductor manufacturing destination,” said Kye Hyun Kyung, president and CEO of the Device Solutions (DS) Division at Samsung Electronics.

    “To meet the expected surge in demand from U.S. customers, for future products like AI chips, our fabs will be equipped for cutting-edge process technologies and help advance the security of the U.S. semiconductor supply chain.”

    As I’ve written before, semiconductor subsidies are the wrong solution for the wrong problem (especially if the Biden Administration demands Samsung pledge fealty to social justice before sucking the taxpayers teat). But if you are going to subsidize someone, and your goal is more cutting edge American fabs, then Samsung isn’t the worst recipient. Their fab tech is either second third best (depending on whether intel has actually gotten their act together or not) in the world behind TSMC, and 4nm is good enough for just about every fab customer in the world, save Apple (who is TSMC’s alpha customer), Intel (yes, Intel gets some of their cutting edge chips fabbed at TSMC), AMD, and a few others. Technical details here, assuming the difference between FinFET and GAAFET doesn’t make your eyes glaze over.

    But the American taxpayer might rightly question why they’re being asked to subsidize the twenty-first largest company in the world, and one headquartered in South Korea.

    Once again, the Biden Administration is taking money from the poor to give to the rich.

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    Posted in Austin, Texas | 8 Comments »

    Biden Admin Tries To Infect Chip Makers With DEI

    Wednesday, April 3rd, 2024

    I’ve already said repeatedly that semiconductor subsidies are the wrong solution for the wrong problem. However, this piece by Matt Cole and Chris Nicholson shows the CHIPS Act was far more poisonous than I thought.

    DEI — the identity-obsessed dogma that goes by “diversity, equity, and inclusion” — has now trained Google’s new AI to refuse to draw white people. What’s even more alarming is that it’s also infected the supply chain that makes the chips powering everything from AI to missiles, endangering national security.

    The Biden administration recently promised it will finally loosen the purse strings on $39 billion of CHIPS Act grants to encourage semiconductor fabrication in the U.S. But less than a week later, Intel announced that it’s putting the brakes on its Columbus factory. The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has pushed back production at its second Arizona foundry. The remaining major chipmaker, Samsung, just delayed its first Texas fab.

    Actually, Samsung opened it’s first Austin fab in 2007. The fab that was delayed was their second fab in Taylor.

    This is not the way companies typically respond to multi-billion-dollar subsidies. So what explains chipmakers’ apparent ingratitude? In large part, frustration with DEI requirements embedded in the CHIPS Act.

    Commentators have noted that CHIPS and Science Act money has been sluggish. What they haven’t noticed is that it’s because the CHIPS Act is so loaded with DEI pork that it can’t move.

    The law contains 19 sections aimed at helping minority groups, including one creating a Chief Diversity Officer at the National Science Foundation, and several prioritizing scientific cooperation with what it calls “minority-serving institutions.” A section called “Opportunity and Inclusion” instructs the Department of Commerce to work with minority-owned businesses and make sure chipmakers “increase the participation of economically disadvantaged individuals in the semiconductor workforce.”

    The department interprets that as license to diversify. Its factsheet asserts that diversity is “critical to strengthening the U.S. semiconductor ecosystem,” adding, “Critically, this must include significant investments to create opportunities for Americans from historically underserved communities.”

    The department does not call speed critical, even though the impetus for the CHIPS Act is that 90 percent of the world’s advanced microchips are made in Taiwan, which China is preparing to annex by 2027, maybe even 2025.

    Handouts abound. There’s plenty for the left—requirements that chipmakers submit detailed plans to educate, employ, and train lots of women and people of color, as well as “justice-involved individuals,” more commonly known as ex-cons. There’s plenty for the right—veterans and members of rural communities find their way into the typical DEI definition of minorities. There’s even plenty for the planet: Arizona Democrats just bragged they’ve won $15 million in CHIPS funding for an ASU project fighting climate change.

    That project is going better for Arizona than the actual chips part of the CHIPS Act. Because equity is so critical, the makers of humanity’s most complex technology must rely on local labor and apprentices from all those underrepresented groups, as TSMC discovered to its dismay.

    Tired of delays at its first fab, the company flew in 500 employees from Taiwan. This angered local workers, since the implication was that they weren’t skilled enough. With CHIPS grants at risk, TSMC caved in December, agreeing to rely on those workers and invest more in training them. A month later, it postponed its second Arizona fab.

    Now TSMC has revealed plans to build a second fab in Japan. Its first, which broke ground in 2021, is about to begin production. TSMC has learned that when the Japanese promise money, they actually give it, and they allow it to use competent workers. TSMC is also sampling Germany’s chip subsidies, as is Intel.

    Intel is also building fabs in Poland and Israel, which means it would rather risk Russian aggression and Hamas rockets over dealing with America’s DEI regime. Samsung is pivoting toward making its South Korean homeland the semiconductor superpower after Taiwan falls.

    To be fair, Intel has had fabs in Israel since since 1996, and Tower Semiconductor has had fabs in Israel since the 1980s. Poland, to the best of my knowledge, has never had a fab.

    In short, the world’s best chipmakers are tired of being pawns in the CHIPS Act’s political games. They’ve quietly given up on America. Intel must know the coming grants are election-year stunts — mere statements of intent that will not be followed up. Even after due diligence and final agreements, the funds will only be released in dribs and drabs as recipients prove they’re jumping through the appropriate hoops.

    So in the name of embedding the racist poison of social justice, the CHIPS Act, ostensibly designed to increase America’s share of cutting-edge semiconductor manufacturing, is actually driving new fab construction out of America.

    Heck of a Job, Brandon.

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    Posted in Austin, Budget, Democrats, Global Warming, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, Welfare State | 5 Comments »

    Does Malicious Backdoor Compromise SSH?

    Monday, April 1st, 2024

    A newly discovered backdoor found in the xz liblzma library of XZ Utils, the XZ format compression utilities included in most Linux distributions, targets the RSA implementation of OpenSSH.

    For those outside of tech, that sentence was an unreadable jumble of acronyms. For those inside tech, a chill probably ran down their spine, as those technologies are everywhere. Anytime anyone buys something online, they’re going to be using SSH to create a secure channel to pass transaction information. [As a commenter noted, SSH is a command tool rather than Secure Socket Layer (SSL), which is used for encrypted transactions. Mental typo. My bad. – LP.] Depending on how many distros are using that library, the consequence range from “bad” to “really, really bad.”

    Details:

    A vulnerability (CVE-2024-3094) in XZ Utils, the XZ format compression utilities included in most Linux distributions, may “enable a malicious actor to break sshd authentication and gain unauthorized access to the entire system remotely,” Red Hat warns.

    The cause of the vulnerability is actually malicious code present in versions 5.6.0 (released in late February) and 5.6.1 (released on March 9) of the xz libraries, which was accidentally found by Andres Freund, a PostgreSQL developer and software engineer at Microsoft.

    “After observing a few odd symptoms around liblzma (part of the xz package) on Debian sid installations over the last weeks (logins with ssh taking a lot of CPU, valgrind errors) I figured out the answer: The upstream xz repository and the xz tarballs have been backdoored,” he shared via the oss-security mailing list.

    According to Red Hat, the malicious injection in the vulnerable versions of the libraries is obfuscated and only included in full in the download package.

    “The Git distribution lacks the M4 macro that triggers the build of the malicious code. The second-stage artifacts are present in the Git repository for the injection during the build time, in case the malicious M4 macro is present,” they added.

    “The resulting malicious build interferes with authentication in sshd via systemd.”

    I’m just going to note for the record that a whole lot of longtime Linux programmers absolutely hated the introduction of systemd. I don’t have deep enough Linux chops to take a side in this controversy, or know whether systemd was a significant factor in allowing the exploit to work.

    Moving on:

    The malicious script in the tarballs is obfuscated, as are the files containing the bulk of the exploit, so this is likely no accident.

    “Given the activity over several weeks, the committer is either directly involved or there was some quite severe compromise of their system. Unfortunately the latter looks like the less likely explanation, given they communicated on various lists about the “fixes” [for errors caused by the injected code in v5.6.0],” Freund commented.

    One silver lining is that the problem doesn’t look to be as widespread as it could be.

    “Luckily xz 5.6.0 and 5.6.1 have not yet widely been integrated by Linux distributions, and where they have, mostly in pre-release versions.”

    Red Hat says that the vulnerable packages are present in Fedora 41 and Fedora Rawhide, and have urged users of those distros to immediately stop using them.

    “If you are using an affected distribution in a business setting, we encourage you to contact your information security team for next steps,” they said, and added that no versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are affected.

    Since Red Hat is usually the default for big E-commerce platforms, it looks like this exploit is merely “bad” rather than “really, really bad,” which means its not nearly as bad as, say, Log4J was. Your Amazons and eBays are probably safe from the exploit.

    The people who are likely going to be hurt by this exploit are mom and pop E-commerce sites using their webhost’s “build an E-commerce site using these easy tools” feature. The smaller the site, the more likely they’re using a free distro, some of which may have this vulnerability.

    Whatever the site, they should run an updated software composition analysis tool on stacks and build-chains to see if they’re vulnerable.

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    Posted in Crime | 8 Comments »

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