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Monday, December 13, 2021

Show me a 10ft paywall, I’ll show you a 12ft ladder.

Three Stories That Further Illustrate Why US Government Can’t Be Trusted In Assange CaseThe Dissenter


Philadelphia: Seven years prison for man who filed bogus returns; sought $7 million



ATO staff support hybrid working pilot but want work-from-home cap lifted


When corporations, hippos, gorillas, and rivers can all, legally, be classified as people, has personhood lost its meaning? 


Brazil health ministry website hit by hackers, vaccination data targeted


Show me a 10ft paywall, I’ll show you a 12ft ladder.


Thomas Miller – I build things on the internet 12ft.io / billclintonswag.com

  • FAQ What? Prepend 12ft.io/ to the URL of any paywalled page, and we’ll try our best to remove the paywall and get you access to the article.
  • Why? I believe Google Adwords killed the web. Google Adwords incentivized sites to peddle SEO optimized garbage. Sites who aren’t are forced to optimize for email capture so they can market directly to you. Search results now show “news”, ads, and SEO spam instead of surfacing information. You ought to be able to search something on Google and get an answer to your question without signing up for some newsletter. This is why I created 12ft.io.
  • How does it work? The idea is pretty simple, news sites want Google to index their content so it shows up in search results. So they don’t show a paywall to the Google crawler. We benefit from this because the Google crawler will cache a copy of the site every time it crawls it. All we do is show you that cached, unpaywalled version of the page.”


 

US seeks to block Spanish investigation into CIA operation against Assange as British ruling on extradition appeal is “imminent” WSWS



A Baby Elephant Tries to Make Friends With a DogLaughing Squid



The Other Side of a Mania Compound Advisors


ETFs shine as high taxes loom on US mutual fund capital gains FT



District Court Holds that Custodial FBI Investigation on Arrest for Nontax Crime Producing Tax Crime Information Not in Charges Originally Made Did Not Violate Rights


How Courts Embraced Technology, Met the Pandemic Challenge, and Revolutionized Their Operations

Pew – “What the changes mean for the millions of people who interact with the civil legal system each year—and what remains to be done…To begin to assess whether, and to what extent, the rapid improvements in court technology undertaken in 2020 and 2021 made the civil legal system easier to navigate, The Pew Charitable Trusts examined pandemic-related emergency orders issued by the supreme courts of all 50 states and Washington, D.C. The researchers supplemented that review with an analysis of court approaches to virtual hearings, e-filing, and digital notarization, with a focus on how these tools affected litigants in three of the most common types of civil cases: debt claims, evictions, and child support…”



Vice: “…At the beginning of the pandemic almost two years ago, there was much speculation about how the global crisis of COVID-19 would bring a newfound appreciation for how short life is, and how no one really wants to spend it chained to a desk. Out of that, we got the “Great Resignation” with people leaving their jobs in record numbers, and a new word for micromanagers of remote workers: Bossware.  Bossware is spyware from your boss. Some companies make employees use keyboard or mouse-tracking software to ensure that they’re working every moment they’re on the clock, even if they’re at home. Even if managers aren’t spying on your mouse, chat apps quickly turn users’ activity bubbles to “away” when they’re inactive for a short time, like in Leah’s case. The Electronic Frontier Foundation denounced bossware as being invasive, unnecessary and unethical, and the Center for Democracy and Technology called it out as being actively detrimental to employees’ health, demanding that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration update its policies on worker safety to include at-home workers