Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
The New York Times gift article: “The Mamdani administration released more than 170,000 pages of documents related to the air quality around the World Trade Center site in the months after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Tax has used AI and advanced analytics for decades, tackling fraud through machine learning, network analytics and quality data.
Alex sic Andrew Watson, deputy commissioner and chief data officer at the Australian Taxation Office.
When it comes to conferences hard-ramping the latest cult of artificial intelligence, nothing is worse than a senior public servant courteously dampening the meme-du-jour of alleged computational breakthroughs by pointing out that they have already been at it for years.
Make that decades.
As corporations and a variety of analysts marvel at the ability of proprietary language models to generate ‘content’ and ‘stuff’ approximating human output under the guise of generative AI, the Australian Taxation Office has reasserted its claim to the raw computational logic — that’s rules — that supposedly feeds into public AI outputs.
The tale of ‘black-cab rapist’ John Worboys gives the spotlight to the survivors. It’s a sensitive, compelling look at their fight for justice – which rightly pushes the perpetrator into the background
"If there's any billionaires watching, I hope they're scared shitless"
- Andrew Garfield on what he hopes people take away from watching #TheUprising
Open a tool, do the thing, leave. No account, no download, and nothing between you and the answer. Private by default. 193 Tools. Calculators, converters, generators, checkers, file tools, and text tools run in your browser. Normal Tools does not save their inputs or outputs. The Domain Age Checker is the exception: it sends the domain you enter to the public RDAP service for the lookup, but Normal Tools does not save the query or response.
“The Podcast Indexis here to preserve, protect and extend the open, independent podcasting ecosystem. We do this by enabling developers to have access to an open, categorized index that will always be available for free, for any use.
Total podcasts in the index …4,725,221
The core, categorized index will always be available for free, for any use.
The Happy Planet Index is powered by a group of collaborators who believe that the twenty-first century should be defined by the pursuit of good lives that do not cost the Earth.
Six years ago, the Commonwealth collected $16.3 billion in tobacco excise. That figure will have collapsed to $4.1 billion this year, Treasury estimates, and by the end of the decade it’ll be just $2 billion. Meanwhile, investigations of wastewater by the Australian Bureau of Statistics suggest that since 2017 nicotine consumption (including from illegal vapes) has increased by 40 per cent.
Let’s face it: the mafia has won the tobacco wars.
The Commonwealth now faces competitors in the form of black market shops on every second suburban strip. Those competitors have 80 per cent market share to the Commonwealth’s 20 per cent. The Commonwealth is a bit player now with the main field of competition between the black market suppliers – and that is why we have seen more than 200 firebombed tobacco shops in Victoria alone.
Billions of dollars of revenue are going up in smoke while the crime bosses are cashing in. MARIJA ERCEGOVAC
Let’s be clear about who we are dealing with. Organised crime is run like a business. It has suppliers, logistics, retail outlets and market share estimates. Its product costs a couple of dollars to make and sells for $15 to $20 against a legal price of $40 to $50, of which about $30 is tax. It responds to margins as any firm would, and uses arson the way a legit business uses advertising.
Imagine an organised crime business watching its revenues fall from $16 billion to $4 billion. It would not have watched. It would have organised itself so that the leak was noticed early and made sure that people who could stop it were rewarded for stopping it. If you are going to fight the mafia, you need to think like the mafia. That means thinking like a business, and thinking about incentives.
Ours are wrong. The Commonwealth sets the tax and collects every dollar. The states run the police, the inspectors, the licensing schemes and the courts that actually determine whether the tax gets paid. The states bear all the costs of closing down the mafia but get none of the revenue. Preventing an illegal sale sends $30 to Canberra of which the state governments in Spring and Macquarie Street get nothing. What Spring/Macquarie Street do get is the costs of enforcement: a police taskforce, a licensing bureaucracy, more cops on the beat, more time taken up in courts and space taken up in remand/prison. The revenue they would protect belongs to somebody else…
“It’s no longer strange to think that AI might be everywhere, edging out all forms of human interaction: bots talking to bots, all the way down.” This is … not great. - The Atlantic
Epstein Files Transparency Act II
Thomas Massie just dropped a bombshell on the House floor. He named 14 Epstein co-conspirators, some of whom had previously been redacted and or as not identified co-conspirators in the incomplete library of documents released by the DOJ. Massie and Ro Kanna are demanding immediate prosecutions.
Jes Staley
Leon Black
Les Wexner
David Copperfield
Lapo Elkann
Tom Pritzker
Glenn Dubin
Frédéric Fekkai
Eduardo Teodorani
Jean-Luc Brunel – purportedly died by suicide in a French prison.
Daniel Siad – found dead in his apartment in France this summer.
Ramsey Elkholy
Andrew Albert Christian Edward Mountbatten-Windsor [formerly known as Prince Andrew] – who committed crimes in the United States.
Lesley Groff – who participated in trafficking girls and young women along with Jeffrey Epstein.
Rep. Thomas Massie announced the introduction of H.R. 9694, the Epstein Files Transparency Act II. This bill gives standing to state attorneys general, the victims of Jeffrey Epstein and his co-conspirators, and members of Congress to challenge the Department of Justice (DOJ) in court for the DOJ’s failure to comply with the disclosure of materials required by Public Law 119-38, the Epstein Files Transparency Act(EFTA). Reps. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Teresa Leger Fernández (D-NM), Chair of the Democratic Women’s Caucus, are co-leading the House legislation. Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) are leading the Senate version of the bill.
The Epstein Files Transparency Act II is a proposed law designed to enhance accountability regarding the release of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein. Massie warned s that Mike Johnson may recess the House early just to dodge a vote on the Epstein Files Transparency Act 2.0
The Electronic Frontier Foundation – Doxxing is the deliberate disclosure of personal information in order to bully, harass, intimidate, or instigate a chain of harms against someone.
It’s a tricky thing to protect against when the jerk doing it is often able to use legal and accessible means to do so. The odds are stacked against everyday internet folk when there’s little to no comprehensive data privacy legislation keeping us safe. The responsibility is on each of us to protect ourselves, but the good news is that there’s a lot you can do to reduce your digital footprintand take control of your data.
This post is part one of a two-part series discussing safety and response to doxxing. This first part focuses on prevention and ways to reduce your overall footprint. The second focuses on incident response, as in, steps to take if you’re in the midst of being doxxed. There will be some crossover and redundancy between these two posts, so it’s worth reading each and gaining familiarity with the steps well ahead of time.
Krebs on Security: A new identity theft service launched on the dark web this week is selling digital scans of more than 153 million drivers licenses from people in the United States and Canada. Based on interviews with individuals whose licenses are available for purchase on this service, it appears to be siphoning images collected by a widely-used identity verification company based in Louisiana. KrebsOnSecurity also has learned that the New Orleans field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation(FBI) today launched an official inquiry into the source of the images.
A record available at this identity theft service that includes the drivers license for U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, one of several high-ranking U.S. government officials whose drivers licenses can be found for sale. On Monday, Aug. 31, a source alerted KrebsOnSecurity to a service advertised by a new user on the Russian cybercrime forum Exploit, offering access to digital scans of identity documents on more than 170 million people in North America.
The source brought it to my attention because the proprietor of this identity theft service offered my Virginia drivers license as a free sample in their initial sales thread on Exploit.
The service, dubbed Nexus, claims to have more than 153 million drivers licenses for people in the United States and Canada, as well as more than 10 million identification cards; more than three million travel documents and/or international IDs; and at least 579,000 medical cards. A quick look around Nexus finds they are likely not exaggerating about that 153 million number:
Running a blank search in Nexus (with no search parameters entered) returns approximately 11.5 million pages of results, with roughly 15 results displayed per page. It includes documents from people in both Canada and the United States, but the bulk of these records are on Americans: searching for just Canadian drivers licenses returns approximately 1.1 million results, with the largest concentration from Ontario (473,673 records)…”
Who Will Save the Internet From Disappearing?
Current Affairs: “From deleted government records to disappearing music, our digital culture can be erased overnight. The Internet Archive’s Mark Graham and Chris Freeland explain what it will take to save it. We’ve all heard the warning that “the internet is forever.”
In reality, huge swaths of the digital world are disappearing all the time, as websites go dark, governments purge public records, social media posts vanish, and streaming platforms remove films and music. Without deliberate efforts to preserve this material, much of our recent history could simply cease to exist. The Internet Archive has spent decades fighting that disappearance, most notably through its Wayback Machine, which preserves snapshots of a web that is otherwise constantly being rewritten.
Current Affairs spoke with Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, and librarian Chris Freeland, co-editor of the Internet Archive’s new Vanishing Culturereport, about why the internet is far more fragile than we think and what is lost when corporations and governments can make information disappear…”
Venice: A four-hour documentary tracing the life and work of Elon Musk – maker of electric cars, rockets, Starlink satellites, right-wing propaganda and “a legion of children” from his own loins – has proved the pivotal talking point of the Venice Film Festival.
Alex Gibney, the prolific director of documentaries about subjects including Enron, Edward Snowden and Scientology, tells the story of his rise to dizzying power – and phenomenal riches – in Musk, which confronts the question of how and why anyone has been allowed so much influence. Gibney usually interviews his subjects, but Musk refused to participate.
Filmmaker Alex Gibney (middle) with tech journalist Zoë Schiffer (left) and Musk’s former girlfriend Ashley St Clair, at the Venice Film Festival this week.AP PHOTO/SCOTT A GARFITT
It wasn’t easy to find other willing interviewees.
“There was a fear of talking. Among his critics, his business colleagues and his friends, very few agreed to speak,” Gibney said at a festival press conference. One exception was the film’s trump card, a former MAGA influencer and Musk’s ex-girlfriend Ashley St Clair, who gave birth to one of Musk’s 14 children in 2024.
St Clair was close to Musk during the heady few months when he was head of US President Donald Trump’s newly minted Department of Government Efficiency, striking out entire project budgets and sacking thousands of government employees.
A new documentary called Musk, by filmmaker Alex Gibney, tells the story of Elon Musk's rise and influence.
“Elon is a nuke,” St Clair told the cameras. St Clair, who was in Venice with the film, alleged he had offered her $US40 million not to participate in the documentary. “When you’re offered something like that it really causes a debate in your head about what your speech means,” she says.
“How valuable that is – and why do they want to offer me that much money not to speak?” She has her own answers. “It has to do with his sense of unreality, Elon’s relationships are complicated in general but, especially, he has a complicated relationship with the truth.”
Gibney put his own spin on this by putting Musk’s extreme pronouncements into the mouth of a graphic avatar in a space suit. He says he was picking up on Musk’s obsession with video games.
“But also, so much of what Elon Musk says has an air of unreality to it.” He soon realised that what looked like a story about new technology and its overlords was “the story of old wine in a new bottle, the story of the confidence man. His wealth and power come from inflated stock.”
Elon Musk was appointed head of the Department of Government Efficiency and took to the task with gusto.AP
It was Enron all over again. He maintains a measured tone, however, as he covers the tech lord’s troubled South African childhood, his command over the satellites crucial to many countries’ military operations, his acquisition and manipulation of Twitter, now called X, his alliance – and fall-out – with Trump and his$US158 billion Tesla remuneration package.
We see his beginnings, devising and then selling an online business directory, then taking and selling a slice of Peter Thiel’s Paypal, which provided him with working capital. Gibney spends a good deal of time debunking Musk’s promise of an imminent life on Mars. The research is meticulous, even if nothing is new.
“I think it’s bearing witness and reaching out to witnesses,” says Gibney. “And also trying to understand. Particularly in this bewildering world of inputs from social media and 24-hour news access. There are so many trees that I think it’s worth stitching together a narrative that shows the forest. The film attempts to reframe the story.”
There were mutterings before the press screenings about the prospect of having to watch a four-hour documentary half-way through an exhausting festival, but the film proved a literal eye-opener that drew an energetic critical response.
It is Musk’s involvement in political influence, especially on the eve of the midterm elections in the United States, that feels least transparent and thus the most troubling aspect of his influence.
“We know during DOGE, the boys [Musk’s team of very young men who carried out mass sackings from government departments] had super administrative status at all agencies,” says Gibney.
“That meant they had access to an extraordinary amount of data on American citizens - and moving that data would be as easy, as I understand it, as copying a file into a folder.
“Would that folder be at Space X and might he be using that information for an AI [tool] to influence the election? Yes. I don’t know that it will happen but it might happen. It was a warning.”
So, asks one journalist at the press conference, one short answer: is Elon Musk dangerous to democracy?
“Extremely,” says Gibney. “There’s your short answer. He’s very dangerous.”
