[Plura-list] Crowdfunding an open access jewelry course; Bahamas Company Registry leaked; Mafia logic and conservative ideology

[Cory Doctorow]

Today's links

* Crowdfunding an open access jewelry course: Elise Matheson wants to
preserve her "wandering wire" methodology.

* Bahamas Company Registry leaked: Another service of the Distributed
Denial of Secrets project.

* Mafia logic and conservative ideology: There is a difference.

* Podcast: Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town Part 4: Enter Kurt.

* Google's free/open multilingual font: Banishing tofu with Noto.

* Soviet Signs and Relics: A book of sovkitsch sourced from Google
Street View.

* Rogue UK civil service tweet damns "truth-twisters": Impunity rage.

* A jailbreak for every version of Ios: Attacking is easier than defending.

* Texas Instruments locks down its hackable calculators: Designed to
control the user.

* This day in history: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2019

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

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👩🏾‍🏭 Crowdfunding an open access jewelry course

The people are the best thing about a life in science fiction -
eclectic, bright, opinionated, talented - people like Elise Mathson:
writer, jeweller, and all-round brilliant person (she's up for a Hugo
this year).

Matheson's "wandering wire" jewellery is unmistakable - as anyone who's
ever bid at a Wiscon auction knows. And as great as she is at making
jewellery, she's even better at teaching, much beloved for her patient
one-on-one lessons.

But Elise's health issues are making it harder for her to teach, so
she's kickstarting a series of high-quality instructional videos that
document her methods while she can still work.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lionesselise/wandering-wire-jewelry-videos-with-lionesselise

The idea is that these can be shared among students, including students
who can't afford to travel, or who have disabilities that make in-person
tutelage impractical (they will all have captions). The videos will be
limited to backers for a year, and open access thereafter.

With 40 hours to go, Elise has made her funding goal, but is shooting
for an ambitious stretch goal: if she hits $25K, she'll make a
mini-documentary about her methods, including interviews with the
astronomers who inspire her work.

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👩🏾‍🏭 Bahamas Company Registry leaked

The Distributed Denial of Secrets project publishes leaks that reveal
corruption, particularly leaks that undo financial secrecy. They have
just released their latest dump: Project X-Ray, a leak of scanned the
Bahamas Company Registry.

https://xray.ddosecrets.com/

These are scanned documents - 135,166 in all - that reveal the directors
and officers of shell companies, many of them used to hide the looted
wealth of poor nations, or funds hidden away by corrupt "businesspeople"
evading taxes, or just plain criminals.

They're looking for help transcribing the contents of these records so
they can be made fully searchable. Many of these companies are
matrioshke grifts, numbered owned by other numbered companies in other
notorious secrecy jurisdictions from New Zealand to Delaware.

A previous dump revealed the contents of the Cayman National Bank and
Trust, a favored cutout for Russian oligarchs.

https://data.ddosecrets.com/file/Sherwood/

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👩🏾‍🏭 Mafia logic and conservative ideology

It's a commonplace that labels like "left" and "right" don't mean
anything, but that's not true.

The first clean distinguishing test I ever heard came from  Steven
Brust: "Ask what's more important, human rights, or property  rights. If
they say property rights are a human right, they're on the right." (I
liked this so much I put it in my novel Walkaway)

Then came the definition from Corey Robin's "The Reactionary Mind": to
be on the right is to believe that some of us were ordained to rule and
the rest to be ruled over, and that the world is only right when the
correct rulers are enthroned.

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-reactionary-mind-9780190692001

(I liked this so much I put it in my novella "The Masque of the Red Death).

https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/03/13/the-masque-of-the-red-death/

Today, I learned a new definition, courtesy of John Holbo: "Conservatism
says the law protects in-group members without binding them; while
binding out-group members, not protecting them. Mafia logic all the way
up and down."

https://twitter.com/jholbo1/status/1264387116982661120

This follows perfectly from the second definition. The purpose of the
law is to protect the rightful rulers, so the law can't - by definition
- punish them. And it is "mafia logic."

Holbo was talking about Michael Gove - a UK Tory Minister - excusing his
the Prime Minister's advisor Dominick Cummings repeatedly breaking the
quarantine rules that Cummings is responsible for creating and enforcing.

But it could apply equally well to Trump's pardons for his crooked
henchmen, or the legions of Karens who think the cops should come and
bust some Black kid's head for selling lemonade without a license, while
ignoring their own anti-vax playground quarantine-breaking.

It's pure Blue Lives Matter logic: the law should protect cops from
Black people, but not Black people from cops. It should punish Black
people who break the law, but protect cops who break the law.

There is a meaningful difference between reactionary and progressive,
left and right. It's the difference of property rights vs human rights -
whether you exact the right to hoard while others starve, or the right
not to starve while others hoard.

It's the difference between pluralism and elitism: whether you think
some of us were born to be ruled over, or whether you think we should
have a government selected by its people to serve those people.

It's the difference of equal protections and duties under the law, as
opposed to impunity for the powerful and the legalized oppression of the
powerless.

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👩🏾‍🏭 Podcast: Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town Part 4

My latest podcast is part 4 of my ongoing reading of my novel "Someone
Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town," a book Gene Wolfe called "a
glorious book unlike any book you’ve ever read.”

https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/05/24/someone-comes-to-town-someone-leaves-town-part-04/

In this episode, we meet Kurt, the high tech, crustypunk dumpster-diver
who is building a citywide mesh wireless freenet with refurbished
e-waste he's pulled out of the trash.

Kurt is based on a real person! Darren Atkinson, a high-tech
dumpster-diver who was the subject of my first-ever Wired article. Some
of the most memorable nights of my life were spent chest-deep in
suburban Toronto dumpsters with Darren.

https://www.wired.com/1997/09/es-dumpster/

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👩🏾‍🏭 Google's free/open multilingual font

"Tofu Type" is a web design term for the square boxes that show up in
lieu of letters when type is specified in a language for which the font
has no glyphs. Google's Noto ("no more tofu") Fonts aims to fix this
with character sets for 75 alphabets.

https://www.google.com/get/noto/

It's one of many high-quality, open/free fonts from the company. I'm
especially fond of their monospace fonts.

https://fonts.google.com/?category=Monospace

The fonts are licensed under the SIL Open Font License: "The OFL meets
the specific needs of typographic design and engineering as well as the
gold standards of the FLOSS (Free/Libre and Open Source Software)."

http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id;=OFL

Noto is missing a few languages. From the FAQ:

> When will Google support Klingon/Elvish/etc?

> Once Klingon/Elvish/etc is included in Unicode. Please contact the
Unicode consortium to encourage them to support your favourite invented
language.

https://www.google.com/get/noto/help/faq/

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👩🏾‍🏭 Soviet Signs and Relics

French photographer Jason Guilbeau has used the lockdown to virtually
travel through the former USSR with Google Street View, capturing images
of Soviet relics and signage. These have been collected in "Soviet Signs
and Street Relics," a new book.

http://fuel-design.com/publishing/soviet-signs-street-relics/

The publisher writes, "This collection of photographs portrays a surreal
reality: it is a document of a vanishing era, captured by an omniscient
technology that is continually deleting and replenishing itself – an
inadvertent definition of Russia today."

I love this kind of exuberant relic, these monuments to a vanished past
of promise and progress; first, because they remind me of the strange
gifts my great-grandparents would bring when they came from Leningrad to
Toronto for visits in the 70s and 80s.

And second, because they are forceful reminders of the fragility of
hegemony - the fact that a society is busily sticking up giant monuments
to its durability in no way indicates whether it is, indeed, durable.

One of the most striking passages in OCTOBER, China Mieville's
novelistic history of the Russian Revolution, deals with the events
leading up to the revolution, a series of minor peasant uprisings that
were put down with overwhelming shows of force.

Many revolutionary strategists took this to be an indication of the
Czar's strength: why would a Czar squander all this military might for
these insignificant uprisings in the outer provinces? Imagine how he'll
deal with a real revolution!

But it turned out that the reason that the Czar was so dedicated to
stamping out the most insignificant embers of rebellion is that he knew
he was surrounded by dry tinder, and a single spark could send his
empire up in flames.

Reading it, I was struck by the underlying lesson: that the behavior of
autocrats at their top strength is indistinguishable - from the outside
- from their behavior when their strength is at its lowest ebb.

The Trump administration embodies this principle - every time Trump does
something arrogant and overreaching, the sort of thing you'd expect of
an autocrat with power to burn, it emerges that his motivation was a
bluffer's desperation.

Crumbling Soviet monuments are mementos mori, the skull on your desk
that reminds you that this too shall pass.

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👩🏾‍🏭 Rogue UK civil service tweet damns "truth-twisters"

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson's top advisor, Dominic Cummings,
violated the quarantine rules he'd personally overseen and drove 264
miles to his parents' "estate" while his wife was ill with coronavirus.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/may/25/boris-johnson-faces-renewed-tory-pressure-to-sack-dominic-cummings

Not only that: Cummings is credibly accused of repeatedly violating his
own public health measures.

What's more, Johnson "vigorosly defended" this conduct in a "sometimes
extraordinary" press conference.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/may/24/can-you-imagine-having-to-work-with-these-truth-twisters

This presser appears was the final straw for the manager of the
@UKCivilService Twitter account, which posted, "Arrogant and offensive.
Can you imagine having to work with these truth twisters?”

The tweet was quickly deleted but was still shared tens of thousands of
times.

The UK Cabinet Office account later tweeted "An unauthorised tweet was
posted on a government channel this evening. The post has been removed
and we are investigating the matter."

https://twitter.com/cabinetofficeuk/status/1264613950790008835

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👩🏾‍🏭 A jailbreak for every version of Ios

Whenever I talk about protections for "adversarial interoperability"
(allowing third parties to service, extend, improve existing products)
someone will inevitably say that the legal right to mod a product is
irrelevant because companies like Apple make impregnable products.

But when it comes to security, attacking is easier than defending. For
Apple to fend off third-party app stores or other products that give its
customers more rights to their property, Apple needs to be perfect. To
defeat this, third parties only need to find a single error.

This principle keeps getting proved. A new jailbreak from the unc0ver
team works on every Iphone and every version of Ios, including version
13.5, only released this week.

https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/23/hackers-iphone-new-jailbreak/

This is in addition to Axi0mx's "Checkm8" crack, which exploits a defect
in a security component that Apple designed not to be modified after
manufacture, meaning that any patch from Apple would require
de/resoldering a tamper-resistant component.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/09/developer-of-checkm8-explains-why-idevice-jailbreak-exploit-is-a-game-changer/

Checkm8 is a forever-day bug that affects 11 years' worth of Iphone
models, though not the most recent ones.

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👩🏾‍🏭 Texas Instruments locks down its hackable calculators

In a deceptive software update, Texas Instruments removed a popular
feature from its bestselling TI-84 graphing calculators, removing the
ability of calculator owners to write and run their own C and assembler
programs.

https://www.cemetech.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=16652

The change was blamed on "exam boards and teachers" who'd been inflamed
by "sensationalized videos" that showed how homebrew software could help
students cheat during exams.

Peter Balyta, Texas Instruments' President of Educational Technology,
called the move "a difficult decision, but one that was made out of an
abundance of caution to prioritize learning for students and minimize
any security risks."

The practice of using deceptive software updates to remove desirable
features from products after they have been sold is an incredibly bad
idea. Regular software updating is the key to technological "herd immunity."

The failure to patch devices is largely to blame for Denial of Service
epidemics, and compromised systems can be used as a jumping-off point
for attacks on other systems. As a technologically dependent
civilization, we cannot afford to disincentivize people from updating.

The first time I encountered this tactic was with Apple's Itunes, which
went through a multi-year period of deceptive updates that removed
desirable functionality to please the record companies whose approval
was needed to keep the Itunes Store in business.

More recently, HP pushed a fake "security update" to its printers that
lay dormant for six months, then activated and began blocking
third-party/remanufactured ink cartridges.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/09/what-hp-must-do-make-amends-its-self-destructing-printers

It's such a reckless act, a poisoning of the well, like Trump's attempt
to use the US census to gather citizenship data or the CIA's
impersonation of public health workers when they were searching for
Osama bin Laden.

These practices are essential to our common wellbeing, and rely heavily
on voluntary cooperation. Teaching people that participating in these
actions - whose benefits are not personal, but rather distributed across
our whole society - is an act of depraved indifference.

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👩🏾‍🏭 This day in history

#15yrsago Internet features in modern paranoid delusions
https://mindhacks.com/2005/05/25/internet-delusions/

#15yrsago Register of copyrights: a national embarrassment
https://web.archive.org/web/20050526173115/http://www.corante.com/importance/archives/2005/05/25/senate_judiciary_ip_subcommitee_hearing_on_intl_copyright_infringement.php

#10yrsago 7 Copyright Questions for Canada's DMCA Minister
https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2010/05/7-qs-for-moore-post/

#10yrsago Debt-crisis explained through tearful laughter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5D0VhS8qXT0

#5yrsago If you want a picture of the future, imagine a Roomba leaking
pix of your home, forever
https://www.wired.com/2015/05/next-roomba-may-recognize-crap/

#5yrsago John Scalzi and Tor Books sign 13 book, 10 year, $3.4M deal
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/25/business/media/science-fiction-writer-signs-a-3-4-million-deal.html

#5yrsago This Towel Day, remember Terry Pratchett, too http://towelday.org/

#5yrsago Anti-austerity parties soar in Spanish elections as Greece
threatens default
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/25/spains-indignados-ada-colau-elections-mayor-barcelona

#5yrsago Screw the techno-determinists -- give me hope instead
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/may/26/hope-future-internet-activism-freedom

#5yrsago Al Qaeda's job application form
https://abcnews.go.com/International/al-qaedas-job-application-form-suicide-bomber/story?id=31183947

#1yrago Europe's surging, far-right, "anti-establishment" parties:
funded by billionaires, voting for billionaire-friendly policies, lining
their own pockets
https://corporateeurope.org/sites/default/files/2019-05/Europe%E2%80%99s%20two-faced%20authoritarian%20right%20FINAL_1.pdf

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👩🏾‍🏭 Colophon

Today's top sources: Matthew Caruana Galizia
(https://twitter.com/mcaruanagalizia), Slashdot (https://slashdot.org/),
Naked Capitalism (https://nakedcapitalism.com/), Four Short Links
(https://www.oreilly.com/feed/four-short-links), Damon Murray.

Currently writing: My next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel
about truth and reconciliation. Friday's progress: 543 words (18963 total).

Currently reading: The Case for a Job Guarantee, Pavlina Tcherneva

Latest podcast: Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (part 03)
https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/05/18/someone-comes-to-town-someone-leaves-town-part-03/

Upcoming appearances: Discussion with Nnedi Okorafor, Torcon, June 14
https://www.torforgeblog.com/torcon-2020/

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

"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

This work licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.
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basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla* -Joey "Accordion Guy"
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