Loneliness is killing men – and without proper support and intervention nothing will change
Even a PhD isn’t enough to erase the effects of class Financial Times
Russia Sentences Evan Gershkovich to 16 Years in Prison on Spying Charges Moscow Times
How gravity falls down on falling down Physics World
What’s worse than thieves hacking into your bank account? When they steal your phone number, tooAssociated Press (Kevin W). Maybe this sort of thing will roll back one of my pet peeves, using SMS for 2FA?
Cloudflare Reports Almost 7% of Internet Traffic Is Malicious ZDNet. Seems about right, looking at the volume of phishing e-mails I receive.
Rite Aid Says Breach Exposes Sensitive Details of 2.2 Million Customers ars technica. :-(. I was a Rite Aid customer then, but they would not have any gov’t ID from me. Hope no one here exposed.
“In June 2024, NewsGuard reported that so-called pink slime websites — sites posing as independent news outlets but secretly funded by partisan groups — now outnumber daily newspapers in the U.S.
Below, we track the spread of pink slime websites, as compared to Northwestern Local News Initiative’s count of daily newspapers. (Northwestern’s tracker was last updated in December 2023.)…The odds are now better than 50-50 that if you see a news website purporting to cover local news, it’s fake.”
WSJ via MSN: “You’re on Facebook, LinkedIn or X and get a message. Maybe it’s from a stranger in your industry, maybe someone from your hometown claiming to know you from way back when.
The person wants to reconnect or get your advice. This could all be wonderful. Or it could be the start of a scam. Unfortunately, security experts say, the latter is more likely, because personalized schemes to dupe internet users are on the rise. Trouble is, it is harder than ever to know whether that person showing up in your messages is real or not. A check mark next to someone’s name on social media used to mean their identity had been verified. That’s now not the case on all sites. Artificial intelligence can help bad actors replicate the voices and appearances of strangers.
Online transactions—such as selling furniture on Facebook Marketplace—are magnets for fraud, banks and security experts warn. And schemers are cozying up to people online and pretending to kindle romance to gain access to their money, a form of fraud called “pig butchering.” The single best step to determine someone’s identity online and protect yourself is to slow down.
Don’t rush to respond to an intriguing message. Instead do some vetting before taking things further. Tech companies are beginning to help, too, with Google, LinkedIn and Bumble introducing features to detect suspicious messages and users…”
Five Interesting, And Perhaps Flawed, Metaphors For Translation
For Writer Tomi Adeyemi, Getting To Book Three Was A Long, Fraught Journey
"Did you know you could give your local government officials tips when they do things you like? Brett Kavanaugh thinks you can. In fact, if you’re rich enough, says the US supreme court, you can now pay off state and local officials for government acts that fit your policy preferences or advance your interests. You can give them lavish gifts, send them on vacations, or simply cut them checks. You can do all of this so long as the cash, gifts or other “gratuities” are provided after the service, and not before it – and so long as a plausible deniability of the meaning and intent of these “gratuities” is maintained.That was the ruling authored by Kavanaugh in Snyder v United States, a 6-3 opinion issued on Wednesday, in which the supreme court dealt the latest blow to federal anti-corruption law. In the case, which was divided along ideological lines, the court held that “gratuities” – that is, post-facto gifts and payments – are not technically “bribes”, and therefore not illegal. Bribes are only issued before the desired official act, you see, and their meaning is explicit; a more vague, less vulgarly transactional culture of “gratitude” for official acts, expressed in gifts and payments of great value, is supposed to be something very different. The court has thereby continued its long effort to legalize official corruption, using the flimsiest of pretexts to rob federal anti-corruption statutes of all meaning.The case concerns James Snyder, who in 2013 was serving as the mayor of small-town Portage, Indiana. Late that year, the city of Portage awarded a contract to Great Lakes Peterbilt, a trucking company, and bought five tow trucks from them; a few weeks later, Snyder asked for and accepted a check for $13,000 from the company. Snyder was found guilty of corruption and sentenced to 21 months in federal prison. He argued that the kickback was not illegal because it came after he awarded a contract to the company that ultimately paid him off, not before.Absurdly the US supreme court agreed, classifying such payments as mere tokens of appreciation and claiming they are not illegal when they are not the product of an explicit agreement meant to influence official acts in exchange for money...For an example, we need look no further than the conservative justices of the supreme court itself, who have become notorious, in recent years, for accepting lavish gifts and chummy intimacy from rightwing billionaires. According to investigative reporting by ProPublica, Clarence Thomas has accepted vacations, real estate purchases, tuition for his young relatives, and seemingly innumerable private jet trips from the billionaire Harlan Crow, as well as financing for an RV from another wealthy patron, Anthony Welters. Thomas has argued that these gifts and favors are merely the “personal hospitality” of “close personal friends”...Adding money – or, in the court’s parlance, “gratuities” – to these arrangements only makes this more obvious. It is not a coincidence that the court has chosen to legalize for state and local officials exactly the sort of corruption that they partake of so conspicuously themselves."
Related: Kleptocracy and kakistocracy explained.
