Last week, free software developer Seth Vargo pulled the plug on tools he made to work with software developed by his former employer Chef, in protest of Chef's ongoing contracts with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a federal agency that has been implicated in crimes against humanity, including ethnic cleansing, family separation, and the deaths of children in its custody. Read the rest
Last week, a drone video showing hundreds of people in China being shackled and blindfolded and made to kneel on a train platform went viral; a piece of amazing digital detective work by Nathan Ruser presents a compelling case that the video is real, and that it was recorded in August 2018 near the city of Korla in Xinjiang province, where the Chinese state has been prosecuting a vicious, genocidal ethnic cleansing campaign against the predominantly Muslim Uyghur people. Read the rest
Early this month, Google's Project Zero revealed a breathtaking attack on multiple OSes, including Apple's Ios, in which a website that served Uyghur people was found to be hosting at least five different kinds of Ios malware that exploited previously unknown defects in Apple's code (the attack is presumed to have been the work of the Chinese state, which has been prosecuting a genocidal campaign against Uyghurs, whose high-tech fillips have seen both cities and apps suborned to aid in the pogrom). Read the rest
Remember when the words "shithole country" erupted from Trump's oozing, racist mouth-hole? Yeah, so does everyone else. Read the rest
The largest, wealthiest cities in America are filling up with tent cities -- especially on the west coast, where East Coast style right-to-shelter laws are rare -- and if the spectacle of human misery doesn't alarm you, perhaps you should be thinking about communicable disease epidemics. Read the rest
1.4 million people in Puerto Rico lost power yesterday in an outage that lasted for a day and left part of the island without power even after service was mainly restored. Read the rest
Public records requests have shown that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement -- who have continued and intensified Obama's program of mass deportations and separation of families under Trump -- uses Facebook's logs, merged with logs from cellular carriers and analyzed by software from Palantir (Peter Thiel's police-state arms-dealer) to track immigrants people they're investigating. Read the rest
Myanmar has been a technologically backwards authoritarian state for much of the past 50 years, with less than 1% of the country connected to the net, until 2015, when the country held its first elections in decades, a moment that was swiftly followed by a relaxation in telcoms controls and widespread access to the internet via mobile devices. Read the rest
Execs representing the biggest tech companies in America are gathering for a meeting with Donald Trump tomorrow in New York; these companies have it in their power to spy on us, locate us, censor us, and terminally compromise the free and open internet. Read the rest
IDNYC is New York City's ID card program, and it has served as a critical means for undocumented migrants to get identity papers that they can use to establish utilities accounts, bank accounts, and so on. The city has announced a change to the program's data-retention policy, vowing to purge information that might be useful in the mass deportations promised by Donald Trump during his presidential campaign. Read the rest
If there's anyone qualified to recognize a genocidal strongman when they see one, it's the far-right Serbian and Macedonian ultra-nationalists who celebrate the Milosevic legacy of rape-camps, genocide and ethnic cleansing, and those guys love Donald Trump. Read the rest
Sequoia Capital Chairman Michael Moritz and angel investor Ron Conway have donated to San Francisco's Proposition Q: if passed, "the city would give residents of tent encampments 24 hours’ notice to relocate to a shelter or accept a bus ticket out of town." Read the rest
Vojislav Seselj, leader of the Serbian Radical Party and loud-mouthed bigot whose racist invective kicked off Serbia's horrific ethnic cleansing campaign, led a pro-Trump rally in Belgrade to protest the state visit of Democratic VP Joe Biden. Read the rest
A group of about 30 black Valdosta State University students say that they were ejected yesterday from an on-campus Trump speech by Secret Service agents who told them that Donald Trump didn't want them in the audience. Read the rest
The domestic terrorists occupying the Malheur National Widlife Refuge Building near Burns, Oregon justify their actions with a highly selective -- and largely fabricated -- history of the federal lands they've seized. The truth is a lot sleazier. Read the rest
