I’m listening to the Supreme Court and those arguing before it debate the color and size of the cups in the shell game of campaign finance. The most hilarious claim is that there is no quid pro quo bribery.
The original machination.org was kind of a relentless real time (as soon as I consumed something and gave it some sort of credence in my mind) link log. The post yesterday was a more emblematic of a later stage, a slightly more sanely paced round-up. Thought about doing it again today. No. I’ve got other stuff I need to do. I was pushing through being sick and hanging the noose of the world’s news as seen by me around my neck isn’t going to help. Maybe intermittent long links, Tim Bray style. The things that stick with me and why and how, that don’t seem too redundant to what has stuck in the zeitgeist. If I can keep a good habit.
But what a wild headline ride this last day, huh? Definitely worth getting off and stepping back for a moment, at least.
What a horrible habit, reading the news
This is a sample of headlines from the past day. This is what the initial version of Machination.org looked like during President George W. Bush’s term. The tagline was “devices of trade and war.” It gained some traction among a subset of other like-driven link loggers during those early days. Eventually I couldn’t keep up with the pace I had set and didn’t foresee (or desire) how to monetize this habit.
I had day jobs, a life, and started seeing other professional publications and blogs, even Harper’s Weekly Review email that were doing it faster and better than I was.
Then, RSS and Twitter really eliminated this… this… act of OCD-as-calling-for-others’-focus, for me. It seemed like everyone who would, could see what I saw just as fast.
But I still do this in my head as I scan the news, actively seeking out multiple news sources through various direct access methods, social media, and other mechanisms. I imagine many of us do.
The Indian Health Service Is Flagging Vaccine-Related Speech. Doctors Say They’re Being Censored.
Officials have deemed terms like “immunizations” and “vaccines” risky “buzzwords” that require approval to be used in social media posts, pamphlets and presentations.
They’re really throwing a blanket on things, huh?
Trump calls Democrat video to troops ‘seditious behaviour, punishable by death’ Trump calls for Democratic lawmakers to face trial for ‘seditious behavior’
The six Democrats later panned Trump’s reaction, writing in a joint statement that “no threat, intimidation, or call for violence” would deter them from defending the Constitution.
“What’s most telling is that the President considers it punishable by death for us to restate the law,” they said. “Our servicemembers should know that we have their backs as they fulfill their oath to the Constitution and obligation to follow only lawful orders. It is not only the right thing to do, but also our duty.”
Gmail can read your emails and attachments to train its AI, unless you opt out
If you use Gmail, you need to be aware of an important change that’s quietly rolling out. Reportedly, Google has recently started automatically opting users in to allow Gmail to access all private messages and attachments for training its AI models. This means your emails could be analyzed to improve Google’s AI assistants, like Smart Compose or AI-generated replies. Unless you decide to take action.
Home Prices on a Warming Planet
Violent ‘storms’ hidden under Antarctica’s ice could be speeding its decline “When ice freezes and melts, it creates vortices that drag warmer waters from the depths to the surface, where they eat away at the continent’s rapidly degrading ice shelves.”
More than 250 arrested in Charlotte as immigration crackdown escalates
Charlotte is the latest US city that Trump has targeted with federal troops, following similar measures in bigger cities like Chicago and Los Angeles earlier this year. Officials with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) told the BBC that those arrested are criminals and gang members.
But local lawmakers and residents have railed against the detainments, which the federal government has dubbed “Operation Charlotte’s Web”. The state’s Democratic governor has alleged people are being targeted because of their race.
In a statement released on Wednesday, a DHS spokesperson said the operation has led to the arrest of “some of the most dangerous criminal illegal aliens”, including gang members.
…
“We’ve seen masked, heavily armed agents in paramilitary garb driving unmarked cars, targeting American citizens based on their skin colour, racially profiling and picking up random people in parking lots,” Stein said on Sunday. “This is not making us safer.”
Border Patrol leaving Charlotte, sheriff and local officials say
Masked federal agents in paramilitary gear worked out of large SUVs arresting people, prompting businesses to close, especially in east Charlotte, and families to keep children out of school. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said over 370 people have been arrested in the Charlotte area as of Thursday. DHS has declined to provide many details, and would not release the names or information on most of the people arrested or taken. It remained unclear what has happened to them. Federal agents targeted grocery stores, churches, and residential areas. At night, they flew drones. Throughout the week, agents faced opposition from protesters and community activists who tracked their movements and blew whistles to alert people to their presence, shouted in their faces, and filmed them.
Cops Used Flock to Monitor No Kings Protests Around the Country “A massive cache of Flock lookups collated by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) shows as many as 50 federal, state, and local agencies used Flock during protests over the last year.” See also: How Cops Are Using Flock Safety’s ALPR Network to Surveil Protesters and Activists
Grand jury investigating potential misconduct in probes of Trump critics “You guys are like the Keystone Cops,” Bish said she told the investigators. “You’re investigating each other.”
“Shitshow:” Greg Bovino’s Zero Success Rate
Bovino, I noted, was batting just 9% on his claims that protestors had engaged in violence.
Well, yesterday, the case of Dana Briggs, a 70-year old Air Force veteran charged with assault when he fell as officers were pushing him back, was dismissed too. He had planned to call Bovino as a witness at his December trial. Bovino’s success rate at substantiating his claim there were any rioters from that day is now zero.
Border Patrol is monitoring US drivers and detaining those with ‘suspicious’ travel patterns
The predictive intelligence program has resulted in people being stopped, searched and in some cases arrested. A network of cameras scans and records vehicle license plate information, and an algorithm flags vehicles deemed suspicious based on where they came from, where they were going and which route they took. Federal agents in turn may then flag local law enforcement.
Suddenly, drivers find themselves pulled over — often for reasons cited such as speeding, failure to signal, the wrong window tint or even a dangling air freshener blocking the view. They are then aggressively questioned and searched, with no inkling that the roads they drove put them on law enforcement’s radar.
Once limited to policing the nation’s boundaries, the Border Patrol has built a surveillance system stretching into the country’s interior that can monitor ordinary Americans’ daily actions and connections for anomalies instead of simply targeting wanted suspects. Started about a decade ago to fight illegal border-related activities and the trafficking of both drugs and people, it has expanded over the past five years.
Nursing Excluded as ‘Professional’ Degree By Department of Education We wouldn’t want any professional nurses, now, would we? And we certainly don’t want to smooth out access to bolster a flagging workforce. This is how much Trump hates his own voters.
New US rules say countries with diversity policies are infringing human rights
How a French judge was digitally cut off by the USA “The reason for the US sanctions are the arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. They were indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity in the context of the destruction of the Gaza Strip.”
CAIR sues Texas governor over ‘unconstitutional’ terror designation
“The lawsuit we have filed today is our first step towards defeating Governor Abbott again so that our nation protects free speech and due process for all Americans,” Masri said. “No civil rights organisations are safe if a governor can baselessly and unilaterally declare any of them terrorist groups, ban them from buying land, and threaten them with closure,” she said.
When a shield becomes a shackle
Today’s Cloudflare outage illuminates another infrastructure dependency we’ve sleepwalked into: defensive consolidation. Sites adopt Cloudflare not for performance but survival, protection from the automated scraping that feeds AI systems and other bots that now dwarf human traffic.
In defending against automated consumption, most hand control to intermediaries. When Cloudflare stumbled this morning, some sites that delegated DNS entirely couldn’t even disable Cloudflare to restore access. The protection became a jail.
Once again, this isn’t inherently about Cloudflare.
It’s about thoughtful defense architecture versus reactive adoption. The question isn’t only whether to use these services but how to use them while retaining agency.
Before reaching for the CDN, consider the actual threat. Is it sustained abuse or periodic spikes? Are you conflating high traffic with hostile traffic? A statically generated site, if otherwise practical, might simply weather the storm. Rate limiting at your application layer might suffice. Sometimes vertical scaling costs less than the complexity you’re adding (Cloudflare makes it free or cheap for small endeavors, so once again it depends on how you value things and what you can afford).
When you do need stronger defenses, maintain your exits. Keep authoritative DNS separate from your CDN provider. Use CNAMEs, not full delegation. It is too easy to hand over the DNS keys, especially for a simple web site, but this is like a reverse mortgage on your house. Maintain an origin subdomain for direct access. Document your configuration outside your provider’s walled garden. _Test your ability to redirect traffic _ away from your protector.
I’ve found a lot of the kinds of efforts I’ve worked with can get by with fairly humble technical solutions, and commodified technical solutions can do well by them (I worked on, and owned the end-of-life of a platform that was essentially commodified). It still requires having a person on hand who understands what is being paid for and can take ownership of different circumstances that arise, adapt, and when surprised, learn and iterate.
At the very least, consider whether solutions for immediate problems are worth ceding control. In some cases, sure. But if you didn’t even have the resources on hand to intentionally make the choices and if the results caused unexpected pain, start looking for resources that understand the Internet, value lean and independent development, and are interested in what you do and what you need and can interrogate you and the technologies within reach to find an informed and suitable match.
Did I mention that I am, like everyone, looking for new work?
Gardens vs. giveaways
So much more vision than in D.C.
A relatively low-effort, certainly less expensive, high-impact community-centric and green way to re-use a stadium site. Certainly better than what D.C. is actually going for now.
Moot now, anyway, as the old RFK stadium was being taken down before the options going forward were finalized and the Commanders deal reached. There was an option for the site without a publicly subsidized NFL stadium.
Instead, I guess we have RFK Jr. (or Trump!?) stadium to look forward to… and compromised, commercialized environment around it.
By A. Litteri in Union Market
Hochul can go, just like Jeffries and Schumer and Gillibrand.
The best way we can honor service members is to send the National Guard home
There isn’t an obvious public link to this specific message, sent out on Free DC’s list, though their site has plenty of their digital campaign materials about this and other issues they advocate for. I thought it was excellent though. Once again, I think of my passed grandfather, Battle of the Bulge veteran, Republican, who I know would find this use of the military offensive.
I’ve reproduced the core of the email I received, including their emphasis and links (minus ActionNetwork’s redirects):
Armed soldiers don’t belong in our communities. The National Guard isn’t supposed to police American civilians. They are not supposed to chase down children, intimidate people on the street, harass residents for simply being outside, or be used as props in Shake Shack photo-ops.
Trump is trying to make the National Guard do all these things here in DC as well as in Chicago, Memphis, Los Angeles, and Portland. Guard members themselves are increasingly fed up with it.
Yesterday we learned that National Guard members are increasingly questioning their role in Trump’s agenda of occupation and deportation.
“This is just not what any of us signed up for, and it’s so out of the scope of normal operations,” said J, a member of the Ohio National Guard who spoke on condition of anonymity. "[Y]ou want me to go pick up trash and dissuade homeless people in D.C. at gunpoint. Like, no dude."
J isn’t alone. In September, leaked documents revealed that the Guard knows its occupation of American cities is “leveraging fear,” driving a “wedge between citizens and the military,” and promoting a sense of “shame” among some troops and veterans. That’s not what service members deserve.
This Veterans Day, the best way we can honor service members is to send the National Guard home. These deployments are unsafe, unlawful, inappropriate, and a waste of public funds. Our demand remains: National Guard Out Now.
Dick Cheney’s death should be a reminder that we must fix the process of politics whatever content we would advocate for. Cheney is, as much as anyone else, the godfather of Donald Trump. As Jonah Goldberg put it, Trump is kind of his “Frankenstein’s Monster.”
I might become a decent writer if I put as much effort into composing and finishing prose in private as I did in venting it off as stream of consciousness to a couple of poor victims I portray as friends. Instead, it gets vented there (and sometimes cribbed for here) and I don’t feel the urge to revisit and work it further.
What happens when we all put our heads in the cloud
Yesterday’s AWS outage reinforces an old truth: the cloud is—oversimplified but not wrong—someone else’s computer.
This isn’t an argument against cloud adoption. It’s about trust distribution and control boundaries. How much faith do you place in a single provider, how much can you afford to take advantage of their redundancies—or can you afford not to? What’s beyond your control regardless of SLAs? What do those SLAs actually mean? Are you hedging those bets?
The pattern looks familiar: numerous organizations, despite apparent diversity in their offerings, seem to have concentrated their infrastructure in AWS US-East-1. No real surprise. What’s telling is (based on reporting to date) the apparent lack of tested multi-region failover capabilities. When this reportedly DNS-originated incident hit, rapid adaptation failed—if it even existed.
I don’t operate at hyperscale. I am a web developer who evolved through digital professional services into a technology manager. My experience comes from managing other technologists, engineers, and vendors for what was, in terms of staffing a larger medium-sized business where our budget probably couldn’t match what these tech giants spend on toilet paper. Yet we maintained business continuity—for a 24/7 crisis line—through outages. When any cloud component failed, whether SaaS platforms or our AWS deployments, we retained operational capability through alternative pathways, including fallback to “pre-cloud” configurations.
Our teams' recovery strategy addressed both RTO and RPO intuitively, before we knew what those terms were. We identified single points of failure, built redundancy where cost-effective, and accepted calculated risks elsewhere. Most importantly, we tested these failover procedures regularly.
This sounds like common sense. Experience suggests otherwise.
If your organization needs someone who treats information systems and infrastructure as a product serving your team, someone who speaks plainly and pragmatically about availability, threat models, and builds contingency plans that actually meet reality, especially if you’re trying to make the world a better place, I am interested.
I am a technologist but a morning like this encourages my Luddism (understanding technology’s impact, valuing autonomy, adopting it intentionally). I had cash; while Venmo was down, our visit to the PTSO coffee table outside school happened anyway & The Childe did some practical math.
A couple of photos from the No Kings rally in DC
I appreciate the ecumenical critiques. Not to “both-sides” it: there are significant differences and fairly one-sided undemocratic reasons for the complete deadlock, but the clippy sign could very well stand the test of time. I had my ear out for process and not just content critiques from the stage.
I have to wonder, with Donald Trump’s particular enthusiasm for McDonald’s, and his self-aggrandized narrative about his role in real estate, does Trump play their Monopoly game?
I took Metro this morning. Got on a Silver Line train in the direction of Ashburn. Operator pronounced it ASSburn.
Yeah, we’re all on the train to ass burn these days.
Paul Clement pretty much said it out loud
This morning I’ve been listening to SCOTUS arguments (rather than public radio pledge drive pleas) and heard conservative lawyer (and former Solicitor General under the end of the Bush II administration) Paul Clement admit Republicans have a hard time finding voters who want to join Republicans in court to have standing to support Republican complaints about (what in my mind amounts to) voter enfranchisement. This was all as an aside in the arguments being made this morning in Bost v. IL Bd. of Elections.
"Snake in the grass"
Am I missing something good?
Having taken a break from certain social media platforms in recent years, I might be missing the valuable content amidst the trolling, spam, and slop I imagine having to continued to fester. However, I don’t feel compelled to give any fucks on the news about Sora 2, except those which I give for all of generative AI (some of which I use): concern for its energy consumption, as a source of societal and civic distraction, and potential to cause confusion. Is there truly any art or communication being created with it or similar tools that was impossible or significantly more valuable than before its existence?
¡Presente!
Bruce Schneier on Digital Threat Modeling Under Authoritarianism
It might be uncomfortable to think about. I remember in the past, it was a bit of a no-go to even bring up whether we saw our government as a potential threat in our threat model at a past job. And getting an answer? Well, that was even less fun, given the sensitivity of certain data and the tension of priorities. (I didn’t get one!)
Journalism should have already be on board and well ahead on the idea, especially for certain stories and topics. But the Pentagon’s push this week should really make that clear. Nevermind the major networks recently being directly targeted and their general capitulation. Or maybe the State Department’s proclivity to kick out journalists who ask pesky questions?
I do not think this is a question anymore.
It’s always good news when the boss schedules a senior leadership meeting on short notice with no agenda.
The seasons change, but I am always anti-fascist.
I am not so naive, but one did hope that “if he can’t see it, it isn’t happening” would be limited to Trump’s tiny geographic orbit in DC and what he saw through the warping windows of The Beast. But no, whether its climate, people, labor numbers, or hunger, there will be no official seeing-of-it.
It’s grift all the way down for these clowns.