Originally posted on May 26, 2021. Reposted without edits. On or about May 19, 2021, it transpired that The Associated Press (“AP“) has fired one of its newsroom assistants, Emily Wilder, after only 16 days on the job. While AP has remained fairly cagey regarding the firing, only noting that Wilder had violated the organisation’s […]
Originally posted on June 23, 2021. Reposted here without edits. Yesterday’s Democratic primaries held in New York City employed a novel voting system entitled ranked choice voting. Specifically, instead of opting for a single candidate for a given office, voters were given the opportunity to select up to five choices, ranked in order of preference. […]
Originally posted on December 17, 2020. Reposted here without edits. There have already been several fairly readable articles on the SolarWinds hack published in the mainstream press1 – and even better ones in InfoSec-specific resources such as the Krebs on Security blog2. Nevertheless, it would do well to provide a rough summary of the sequence […]
Originally posted on March 17, 2021. Reposted here without edits. On March 9, 2021, CBC published an article on its website under a rather worrying headline – “New outbreak of COVID-19 in B.C. care home where 82% of residents were already vaccinated”1. At face value, in fact, the headline is downright alarming, since the last […]
Originally posted on June 15, 2021. Reposted without any edits. Thus past Sunday, June 13, 2021, The Guardian published a fairly lengthy piece on the present flare-up of COVID-19 in Southeast Asia, in particular among native and migrant factory workers1. The piece in general is laudatory, describing at times truly atrocious conditions and circumstances faced […]
Originally posted July 13, 2021. Reposted without edits. As US forces continue to withdraw from Afghanistan, at times literally fleeing in the dead of night1, the Taliban launched a sweeping offensive that has already attained fairly spectacular gains. When its delegation visited Moscow a few days ago, Taliban spokesmen claimed that the movement now controlled […]
Originally posted on December 30, 2020. Reposted here without edits. There is a lot more to be said on the subject, and especially on the juxtaposition of “individualism” and “collectivism” in contemporary propaganda, both in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and as a more general phenomenon. Let us establish a few core principles before […]
Originally published on June 24, 2021, reposted with only the tiniest of edits. Notably, in recent months it seems that even many healthcare facilities in the US have by and large dispensed with masking or with any other form of COVID-19 protections. Given the insistence of the Biden White House that we must now learn […]
Originally posted on December 9, 2020. Reposted here without edits. On December 8, Anne Longfield, the children’s commissioner for England, published a briefing decrying the planned move to end-to-end encryption for their direct messaging (“DM”) applications by social media companies such as Facebook1. The utterly cynical interpretation of all this is that the government plans […]
It turns out that one of the first initiatives undertaken by the newly elected Republican majority in the US House of Representatives was to demonstrate its unswerving commitment to the still apparently ongoing fight against socialism by enacting a resolution, H.R. 9, entitled “Denouncing the horrors of socialism”1. This resolution was duly passed on February […]