Until the investigation into the millions of documents that comprise the Pandora Papers, the two events appeared unconnected. But, as is often the case in such document dumps, a handful of documents uncovered a link between the Australian media scions and an Israeli arms dealer turned film producer. ... ... The buyer of the Murdoch apartment, it can now be revealed, was Arnon Milchan, a legend in Hollywood for the successes of his New Regency films, which won back-to-back Oscars for best picture for 12 Years A Slave (2014) and Birdman (2015).

THE SENATE’S $1.2 TRILLION bipartisan infrastructure bill proposes a national test program that would allow the government to collect drivers’ data in order to charge them per-mile travel fees. The new revenue would help finance the Highway Trust Fund, which currently depends mostly on fuel taxes to support roads and mass transit across the country. ... ... Under the proposal, the government would collect information about the miles that drivers travel from smartphone apps, another on-board device, automakers, insurance companies, gas stations, or other means. For now, the initiative would only be a test effort — the government would solicit volunteers who drive commercial and passenger vehicles — but the idea still raises concerns about the government tracking people’s private data.

If we think of voting as a supply chain, we can see that the electoral system was, if not overwhelmed, at least challenged, by an unexpected glut caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused people to mail in their ballots rather than vote in person, risking infecting others (and themselves). In this post, I will focus not on the effects of the pandemic, plus logistical and political issues at the United States Post Office.

Under a recent policy change, the FBI will notify states if local election systems are hacked, but some state officials and lawmakers want the feds to commit to informing a broader range of stakeholders.

So, summarizing the scenario: In the case of a challenged election that turns on precincts using BMDs, we could trust the exit polls, but they may disagree. So far as I can tell, the only authority to turn to would be the DHS — which presents issues for the Constitutional order in and of itself — who have not yet done a forensic audit, and in any case cannot audit BMDS, because that can’t be done. I would imagine IT experts could be hired to dig into the code on the machines, but it’s likely those experts would be party-adjacent and not especially competent. We could, of course, appeal to the Supreme Court, but on what basis would a decision be made, given that the actual intent of the voters with BMDs is fundamentally not knowable? (Bush v. Gore, let us remember, took place when Florida had paper ballots. Not BMDs.) ... ... I really can’t see my way to a scenario with a happy outcome, though I’d welcome a successful reader effort to relieve my angst. ... .. Of course, with hand-marked paper ballots, hand-counted in public, no such problems arise. That would break a lot of rice bowls, though.

Because of an unforeseen software glitch in Sedgwick County’s new voting machines, not all the candidates’ names appear on the first screen when the voting machine gets to the gubernatorial election. ... ... To see all the names, voters have to touch “more” at the bottom of the screen, which opens another page with the rest of the candidates.

Honorlock records the exam session while allowing students to test at their convenience whenever and wherever. Afterwards, our certified in-house proctoring staff will review all footage to ensure test integrity.

Allow me to explain. I have two-and-one-half hours to write this post, which always includes at least one graphic. For graphics, the workflow is: (1) download, (2) resize/edit/rename, (3) upload to the site, and (4) place in HTML. The above screen shows the problem at step (3): the Mac apparently does not collect the file creation or addition date at the moment the graphic is added to the file system via download. If it were, the graphic file I want to upload would be at the top of the dialog box. Instead, it ends up at the bottom, so that every time I upload a file to the site I have to waste a little time by scrolling to the bottom of the file dialog, which is long, and worse — maybe Apple Marketing will pay attention, here — I get to experience a brief jouissance of toothgrinding frustration as I realize how much Apple hates me, the professional user. At one time, this horrid UI/UX would never have been allowed, but the iOS programmers have been gradually crapifying the professional Mac user’s experience, and so has Apple as a whole. Crapified keyboards. Laptops where performance is throttled when the machine overheats, which it inevitably does after twenty or so minutes, because functional heat sinks have been sacrificed on the altar of thinness. What is wrong with you people? But who cares about my time? My laptop is thin!

First, look at the page, which is a complete screenful on a laptop (i.e., on the screen of professional content creator who values his time, not a teensy little cellphone screen). In the news links column at left, there are a grand total of nine (9) stories. Please, can we get the steam-era list of blue links back, where we could scan 30 or 40 headlines in a single second’s saccade? And note the sources: CNN, HuffPost, Fox, WaPo, NBC News, NPR, CNN, and the WSJ. This is an ecoystem about as barren as my neighbor’s lawn! (And if you click on the laughingly named “View full coverage” link, you’ll see a page just as empty and vacuous though slightly less barren, with more obcure sources, like Reuters. Or Salon.) You will also note the obvious way in which the page has been gamed by gaslighters and moral panic engineers, who can drive every other story off the front page through sheer volume Finally, you’ll note that the fact checkers include organs of state security, in the form of polygraph.info, “a fact-checking website produced by Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.” Now let’s try to use Google News for search. (I find Google proper, though still crapified, better for news, especially if I limit the search by time.) I chose “start treaty,” for obvious reasons. ... ... Yes, on a complete, entire laptop page, there are in total five (5) hits, 3 from the impoverished ecosytem noted above, and one from an organ of state security (RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty). The last hit, from Vox, is twelve (12) days old. Surely there’s something more current? Note also the random ordering of the hits: Today, yesterday, 6 days ago, 2 days ago, 12 days ago. (There is, of course, no way to change the ordering.) A news feed that doesn’t organize stories chronologically? That doesn’t surface current content? What horrible virus has rotted the brain matter of the Google engineers who created this monstrosity? ... ... Famously, the normal Google search page ends with “1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Next.” Crapified though Google search results are, if you spend some time clicking and scanning, you’ll generally be able to come up with something useful five or ten pages in, maybe (if you’re lucky) from a source you don’t already know exists. Not so with Google “News.” When the page ends, it just ends. When the algo has coughed up whatever hairball it’s coughed up, it’s done. No more. Again, this is news? What about the same story a week ago? A month ago? What does “our democracy” have a free press for, if Google gets in the way of being able to find anything?