[Plura-list] EFF livestream tonight, Private equity looter ransoms his empty hospital, Privacy-preserving (?) tracking, Inkjet-business-model covid tests, AI pranks

[Cory Doctorow]

Today's links

* Private equity titan squats on empty hospital: But he'll get a massive
stimulus bailout anyway.

* A promising, plausible plan for "privacy-preserving" surveillance: A
thoughtfully designed, opt-in based way to do contact tracing.

* UK public health official endorses official reagents for covid tests:
Chemicals is chemicals.

* An AI's prank suggestions: I have provisionally uncancelled April
Fool's Day, but only for these.

* How David Got His Scar: A free story in the universe of Scott
Westerfeld's Uglies books.

* Bird's "Black Mirror" mass layoffs: Revenge of the Kwak.

* At Home with EFF: An online discussion of covid-19 and digital rights.

* Ted Chiang on pandemics as idiot plots: We can't afford a return to
the status quo.

* How you are subsidizing the otherwise unprofitable Fox News: Fox cheats.

* Ghostcrash: Car crashes with all but one of the cars removed.

* The paintings of Rod Serling's Night Gallery: Now streaming on Hulu!

* Borderlands is shipping books: Shop a science fiction institution, not
Amazon.

* Coronavirus travel posters: Stay the fuck home.

* Turn on wifi sharing: Save a kid's future.

* This day in history: 2010, 2015, 2019

* Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming appearances, current writing
projects, current reading

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💥 Private equity titan squats on empty hospital

From 1848-2018, Philadelphia's Hahnemann University Hospital served
low-income families. Then it was purchased for $170m by the LA base
dprivate equity looter Joel Freedman of American Academic Health System
LLC (part of Paladin Healthcare).

https://theintercept.com/2020/04/01/philadelphia-hahnemann-hospital-joel-freedman/

Ignoring community outcry at the loss of a critical health resource,
Freedman mooted turning the hospital into luxury condos, but didn't make
progress. It's still a hospital. A giant, empty hospital. In the middle
of a pandemic.

Freedman has offered to rent his giant empty hospital in the middle of a
pandemic to the city for $1m/mo, plus retrofitting/reopening expenses,
to house covid patients or those displaced from other hospitals by the
pandemic.

Freedman stands to make millions from the pandemic stimulus, which will
allow him to claim retrospective tax credits by accellerating the
depreciation schedules for his substantial real-estate holdings,
including the hospital.

He's turned down the city's counteroffer, "to pay a smaller amount in
rent and to cover costs of what would be time-consuming repair and
upkeep to make the hospital usable again."

"Philadelphia has the highest poverty rate of the nation's 10 most
populous cities"

The city isn't going to use Freedman's hospital. Instead, they're using
Temple University's Liacouras Center…for free.

https://www.fox29.com/news/philadelphia-will-use-temple-universitys-liacouras-center-as-coronavirus-overflow-site

Philadelphia City Council Member Helen Gym has called for the city to
seize Hahnemann through eminent domain. Freedman's Philly pied-a-terre
in fancy Rittenhouse Square has been spraypainted with JOEL KILLS and
FREE HAHNEMANN.

https://www.inquirer.com/health/coronavirus/coronavirus-covid-19-hahnemann-joel-freedman-philadelphia-graffiti-20200330.html


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💥 A promising, plausible plan for "privacy-preserving" surveillance

Epidemiologists call the stuff they do to trace the spread of disease
"public health surveillance." The word "surveillance" there isn't an
accident – doing things like contact-tracing IS surveillance, and it has
enormous potential for abuse and accidental, terrible breaches.

As the pandemic spreads, some are rethinking their stance on
surveillance, but this could go really bad – as we learned after 9/11,
lots of people are committed to "not letting a crisis go to waste" – and
authoritarianism is a one-way ratchet.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/eff-and-covid-19-protecting-openness-security-and-civil-liberties

The holy grail is "privacy protecting surveillance," which is as much of
a minefield as it sounds like. But this proposal, from a new nonprofit
called PEPP-PT describes a plausible – even promising – approach.

https://www.pepp-pt.org/content

Here's how I THINK it works: your phone runs an app that gathers your
location data as it moves from through time and space, emitting a
temporary, anonymous identifier to other nearby phones that are also
running the app.

When your phone and another phone are close to each other for " an
epidemiologically sufficient period of time," each of them record the
other's unique identifier, but doesn't send it anywhere. Old records are
deleted over time.

If you ever test positive for coronavirus, you get a cryptographically
signed token from the health authority, and then you get to opt into
sharing your recorded recent-contact identifiers with the system.

The system then broadcasts a message to all users saying, "Hey, if you
had contact with a user with this identifier, you might have been
exposed. Please get tested!" Your app interprets the message and alerts
you if you have had contact with the positive-testing person.

Each national health authority has its own prefix or something for the
unique IDs, so there's a way to know if you had contact with someone
who's left the country and needs to be warned that you might have
infected them (all this happens automagically in the background).

This sounds really good! But there are some caveats.

First of all, someone – not me – should audit both the high-level plan
and the code that implements it. There are millions of ways this could
go wrong.

And second, the consortium of 130 member orgs includes some really good
academic institutions, but also (for obvious reasons) lots of phone
companies and other historic privacy abusers.

Figuring out how we can trust this system without having to trust its
creators (through source/binary transparency, and maybe something like
Certificate Transparency's use of public append-only logs) is really
important, too.

I am NOT qualified to audit the plan or the code here. At a high level
geared to a dum-dum like me, this is plausible and promising. All I'm
qualified to do is look at the metadata: who is doing it, and what have
they done to show their working to smarter people than me?


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💥 UK public health official endorses official reagents for covid tests

Yvonne Doyle of Public Health England answered press questions after a
briefing on coronavirus testing delays in which she seemed to endorse
the idea that only manufacturer-supplied reagents should be used in
testing machines.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2020/apr/01/uk-coronavirus-live-nhs-testing-covid-19-updates-latest

The Guardian's liveblog: "She added that the reagents that worked best
were those that worked best with the machines they were intended for. As
the head of the industry has said, there is a global market for this."

It is *definitely* the case that lab tests need high-quality chemicals
to work accurately, but it is also *definitely not* the case that the
only way to assure the quality of consumables is to buy them from the
original manufacturer.

Not only does this introduce brittleness into the testing system by
turning manufacturer-supplied reagents into a single point of failure —
it also creates a moral hazard for manufacturers, who are assured sales
irrespective of gouging.

At a Health and Safety Executive briefing, Dr. Cillian de Gascun of
National Virus Research Laboratory revealed that one of the three
reagents needed for the tests is being kept secret by its manufacturers
to prevent third parties from making it.

https://twitter.com/WSMIreland/status/1245296677885534208

I hope that Public Health England is open to third-party consumables for
badly needed testing – these need to be checked for quality (as is
generally necessary with consumables), but shouldn't be ruled out.

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💥 An AI's prank suggestions

AI Weirdness Queen Janelle Shane fed the GPT-2 text-processing neural
net a short list of April Fools Day pranks and asked it to suggest more.
They are…weird.

https://aiweirdness.com/post/614209593176899584/an-ais-idea-of-a-prank

She'll send you more if you give her an email address.

Look, I know April Fools is cancelled, but if you want to put your fear
of insects in a lemon I absolve you.

If you want a whole book explaining why AIs are so great at doing things
until they're terrible at them and then they're laughably bad at it, try
her book, "You Look Like a Thing and I Love You."

https://www.littlebrown.com/titles/janelle-shane/you-look-like-a-thing-and-i-love-you/9781549171529/

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💥 How David Got His Scar

The UGLIES books from Scott Westerfeld are some of my favorite YA novels
— both to read and to recommend. They're often packaged as "girl books"
but in my experience there's something for everyone in these books about
beauty, dystopia and authenticity.

Westerfeld has just posted a new short story from the Ugliesverse,"How
David Got His Scar", as a free read to his site. It's got some important
backstory on David, a fantastic character from the original series.

https://scottwesterfeld.com/blog/2020/04/how-david-got-his-scar/

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💥 Bird's "Black Mirror" mass layoffs

A little over a year ago, Bird sent me literally the stupidest legal
threat I've ever received. I mean, I've seen some incompetent
dumbfuckery from butthurt lawyers in my day, but sheesh.

https://boingboing.net/2019/01/11/flipping-the-bird.html

Even stupider was their nonpology, which amounted to, "We slipped and
accidentally threatened to sue you."

https://boingboing.net/2019/01/16/spin-spin-spin.html

It was a copyright threat, but the lawyer who sent it was an employment
law specialist, so maybe that explains it, but…

…explain this?!

https://dot.la/bird-layoffs-meeting-story-2645612465.html

Here's how Bird laid off 406 people: They invited some (but not all) of
their employees to a Zoo call, and then, two minutes later, all 406 of
the invitees were fired.

"It should go down as a poster child of how not to lay people off,
especially at a time like this"

The call started five minutes late. During those five minutes, all 406
were treated to a slide reading COVID19.

"It was not our brand color or font, which frankly was unsettling in a
way I couldn't articulate."

"This is a suboptimal way to deliver this message" – a "robotic,
disembodied voice"

"Unfortunately your role is impacted by this decision."

"Then their screens suddenly went dark and their company issued MacBooks
restarted. By 10:40 a.m, everyone was locked out, just as employees were
frantically trying to exchange personal numbers and emails on Slack and
take screenshots of their contacts."

"IT will send a box with a return shipping label to retrieve company
assets (e.g., Laptops, chargers, and badge. All items should be put in
the box and mailed back to us by April 15."

"They said any personal items would be sent back to us 'eventually.'"

"It seems like they got rid of the majority of women and people of color"

"As far as I know, the folks that are left from my immediate team
consist of all men, most of whom are white." -Jenny Li Alva

https://medium.com/@jennylihoward/covid-bird-scooters-layoffs-and-relationships-cc151428ee67

"The leadership at Bird handled this in an immature manner. The world
deserves to hear about it."


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💥 At Home with EFF

The covid pandemic has forced more of our offline activities online than
any other event in world history. EFF is working flat out to make sure
that our civil liberties move with them.

https://www.eff.org/issues/covid-19

Tomorrow at 5PM Pacific/8PM eastern, various EFFers (including me) are
hosting a live Twitch/Youtube/Facebook stream to discuss threats to our
digital rights in the age of pandemic and what we can do to defend them.

https://www.eff.org/event/at-home-with-eff-covid19

* Cindy Cohn will give opening remarks, with an update on the dangerous
new EARN IT bill that's threatening encryption for everyone.

* Elliot Harmon will talk to Cory Doctorow about emergency medicine and
emerging tech like 3d-printed ventilator parts and open science

* Staff Attorney Saira Hussain talk to Cindy about surveillance, the
spread of coronavirus, and the need to preserve our privacy.

Have questions now? Send them to jason at eff.org.

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💥 Ted Chiang on pandemics as idiot plots

Ted Chiang isn't just a fantastic writer, he's also a fantastic thinker
about the world (these don't always go together, surprisingly). Here he
is being incredibly smart about this current moment.

https://electricliterature.com/ted-chiang-explains-the-disaster-novel-we-all-suddenly-live-in/

He reiterates the important observation that "good vs evil" stories are
intrinsically conservative in that they are about a good world being
upturned by evil, then returned to goodness in the happy ending.

Whereas sf is progressive in that it is often about the world being
changed, not restored.

So the stfnal question about the pandemic is how will things change, not
how will we put them back the way they were.

Irrespective of ideology, no one wants a return to the old status quo
inasmuch as no one wants a return to a world where a pandemic leads to
ventilator, hospital bed, and mask shortages. So everyone wants some
kind of change.

Which kind of change is the question of the moment. Naomi Klein's Shock
Doctrine and its disaster capitalism perfectly predict the worst changes
we see happening around us: unlimited corporate welfare and
profiteering, authoritarianism and surveillance.

But there are other changes possible. Everyone could see how student
debt, weak labor laws, and incompetent demagogues worked, but now we see
how they fail.

It would be nice to convince your stubborn uncle to fix his brakes
BEFORE the wreck, but if you can't, then you should seize upon the wreck
as a teachable moment to change your uncle's attitude towards his
brakes. How things fail is much more important than how they work.

As Chiang says, if this was an sf novel it would be an "idiot plot":

"…a plot that would be resolved very quickly if your protagonist weren't
an idiot. What we're living through is only partly a disaster novel;
it's also—and perhaps mostly—a grotesque political satire."

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💥 How you are subsidizing the otherwise unprofitable Fox News

Like so many cults, Fox News is a zombie business, whose profitability
depends on blind loyalty from its cultists – not normal business
fundamentals.

https://twitter.com/GoAngelo/status/1244819790650322944

Its ad revenues have been in freefall for years – Tucker Carlson ad
revenues, for example, are down $75-80m since 2017. They're missing
sales targets by wide margins. But it's still in business, because, as
Angelo Carusone writes, they cheat.

Like all cable news networks, Fox has a built-in cushion in the form of
payments that cable operators make to it in exchange for including the
network in their offerings. This means that every cable subscriber is
keeping Fox in business (as well as other cable stations).

But Fox cheats. While MSNBC gets $0.33/customer/month from the cable
operators, Fox gets more like $2. It gets that money by cheating: its
newscasters lie to viewers and claim that any cableco that fails to pay
7X what MSNBC brings in is trying to silence conservative voices.

The threat of rabid Fox cultists is apparently what it takes to make the
notoriously intransigent cable cos pliable. And that threat means that
every cable subscriber is subsidizing the otherwise unprofitable,
failing pile of garbage that is Fox.

Here's the kicker, though: 65% of Fox's cable contracts are up for
renegotiation, seeking around $3/customer/month (!!).

The #UnFoxMyCableBox campaign needs your help to head this off and end
Fox's cheating.

https://unfoxmycablebox.com/

Carusone thinks Fox has tough times ahead no matter what when the
inevitable lawsuits for coronavirus disinformation roll in – if nothing
else, the discovery phase of those suits might reveal direct
coordination with the White House on lethal disinformation campaigns.

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💥 Ghostcrash

Donato Sansone's Ghostcrash is a brilliant, Ballardian 2018 video in
which the visual artist digitally removes all but one of the cars from
several real car-crash videos.

https://vimeo.com/272434289

The result is positively eerie. So eerie, in fact, that it was shared
(millions and millions of times) with titles like "Bizzare and
Unexplainable: 8 Car Accidents That Were Recorded by CCTV."

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/video-8-supernatural-car-crashes/

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💥 The paintings of Rod Serling's Night Gallery

Night Gallery was Rod Serling's followup to the Twilight Zone, which
lasted a bare three seasons before it was killed by meddling from the
producer, Jack Laird.

https://dangerousminds.net/comments/a_gallery_of_the_paintings_from_rod_serlings_night_gallery

Episodes opened with a macabre painting from Serling's "gallery," most
by Tom Wright, but the original 3 were by Jaroslav "Jerry" Gebr – these
were sold or repurposed after the show ended production.

These are available at the official show site:

http://nightgallery.net/

It's streaming on Hulu!

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💥 Borderlands is shipping books

SF's beloved sf bookstore, Borderland Books, has been given something of
a reprieve from the city's shelter-in-place order, which has been
modified to allow the owners to pack and ship their existing inventory
for mail order.

The store's entire inventory (including its excellent used and rare book
selections) is available here:

https://www.biblio.com/bookstore/borderlands-books-san-francisco

Borderlands is more than a store, it's a community hub for readers and
writers, and has done so much to support the sf writers you love. It's
where we launched my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

The shelter-in-place order's exemption for "essential businesses" has
meant that for many of us, Amazon is the only way to get books during
the lockdown. Here's a way to fight that monopolization of our culture.
Please consider supporting them and other indie booksellers.

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💥 Coronavirus travel posters

I love Jennifer Baer's "Coronavirus Travel Posters," which extol the
benefits of staying the fuck home.

https://twitter.com/jenniferbaer/status/1243264962580992001

You can get 'em as print-on-demands at:

https://society6.com/product/your-own-bathroom_poster

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💥 Turn on wifi sharing

The decision to allow private sector monopolists – phone and cable
companies – to build out the 21st century's electronic nervous systems
was one of the most consequential errors of the digital revolution.

It's left billions with inadequate – and unaffordable – broadband, and
boy are the chickens coming home to roost on that one right now.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/30/medtronic-stole-your-ventilator/#fiber-now

Our daughter attends a Title I school, which means that some of her
classmates are going to be receiving distance ed instruction via
photocopied packets that their parents are expected to pick up and drop
off from the school's office.

We've refurbed all the old laptops in our house – four of them – and are
donating them to the school, but without broadband, those kids are still
screwed.

That's where you (and I) come in.

If your home wifi router has a guest mode, turn it on.

https://paulallen.ca/share-your-internet-access-with-neighbours/

Share your broadband with your neighbors.

It has some potential downsides (slower connections, mostly, and maybe
your shitty monopolistic ISP getting on your case) but the upside is you
might rescue a child's future, or their parents' economic future.


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💥 This day in history

#10yrsago Why I won't buy an iPad (and think you shouldn't, either)
https://boingboing.net/2010/04/02/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-thi.html

#10yrsago Digital Economy Bill: the last hours
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOyg1GUY18U

#5yrsago DOT EVERYONE: a UK institution to promote the public, civic,
noncommercial Internet
https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2015/dimbleby-lecture-martha-lane-fox

#1yrago RIP, science fiction writer Vonda N McIntyre
http://file770.com/science-fiction-author-vonda-n-mcintyre-official-obituary/

#1yrago Patagonia tells banks and oil companies that they can no longer
buy co-branded vests
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katienotopoulos/patagonia-power-vest-policy-change

#1yrago Bernie Sanders raises $18.2m from 525,000 small-money donors
(including me)
https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/02/politics/bernie-sanders-18-2-million-raised-first-quarter/index.html

#1yrago Microsoft announces it will shut down ebook program and
confiscate its customers' libraries
https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-removes-the-books-category-from-the-microsoft-store/

#1yrago After boasting about running his company from prison, Martin
Shkreli gets solitary confinement
https://www.thedailybeast.com/martin-shkreli-thrown-in-solitary-confinement-after-running-drug-company-from-prison-cellphone-report

#1yrago Moderators for large platform tell all, reveal good will,
frustration, marginalization
https://onezero.medium.com/your-speech-their-rules-meet-the-people-who-guard-the-internet-ab58fe6b9231

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💥 Colophon

Today's top sources: Lexi Alexander (https://twitter.com/Lexialex),
Steve Lloyd (https://twitter.com/zosho), Waxy (https://waxy.org/),
Slashdot (https://slashdot.org), Paul Bennun
(https://twitter.com/benoonbenoon), Kottke (https://kottke.org),
Borderlands (https://borderlands-books.com/).

Currently writing: I'm getting geared up to start work my next novel,
"The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and reconciliation.

Currently reading: Just started Lauren Beukes's forthcoming Afterland:
it's Y the Last Man plus plus, and two chapters in, it's amazeballs.
Last month, I finished Andrea Bernstein's "American Oligarchs"; it's a
magnificent history of the Kushner and Trump families, showing how they
cheated, stole and lied their way into power. I'm getting really into
Anna Weiner's memoir about tech, "Uncanny Valley." I just loaded Matt
Stoller's "Goliath" onto my underwater MP3 player and I'm listening to
it as I swim laps.

Latest podcast: Author's Note from Attack Surface
https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/03/30/authors-note-from-attack-surface/

Upcoming appearances:

* Museums and the Web, April 2, 12PM-3PM Pacific https://mw20.museweb.net/

* Short Story Club, April 7, 530PM Pacific https://www.shortstory.club/

Upcoming books: "Poesy the Monster Slayer" (Jul 2020), a picture book
about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Pre-order here:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627?utm_source=socialmedia&utm_medium=socialpost&utm_term=na-poesycorypreorder&utm_content=na-preorder-buynow&utm_campaign=9781626723627

(we're having a launch for it in Burbank on July 11 at Dark Delicacies
and you can get me AND Poesy to sign it and Dark Del will ship it to the
monster kids in your life in time for the release date).

"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother book, Oct 20, 2020.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250757531

"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new
introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583

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When live gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla -Joey "Accordion Guy"
DeVilla

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