Covered this week; Cable guys see the worst of America as they grind away in a broken system… Monty Python and the Holy Grail endures as the classic it is… The long, sordid take down of El Chapo… Jon Lovett explains why Congress (probably) won’t regulate Facebook… A rare chat with the indomitable Charlie Watts… New ransomware employing ‘big game hunting’ strategy… Where to find books and other media just released into the public domain…
January 7, 2019
I happened upon this post on the Huffington Post through a suggested long-read link on Apple News… and as promised, I couldn’t stop reading. There’s something supremely interesting about the stories told by people whose job it is to go into random people’s houses on a daily basis. Some disturbing stuff mixed in here.
I’d walk in prepared for anything. There was sobbing, man or woman, didn’t matter. There were the verbal assaults. There were physical threats. To say they were just threats undermines what it feels like to be in someone else’s home, not knowing the territory, where that hallway leads, what’s behind that door, if they have a gun, if they’ll back you into a wall and scream at you. If they’ll stop there. If they’ll call in a complaint no matter what you do. Sure, we were allowed to leave if we felt threatened. We just weren’t always sure we could. In any case, even if we canceled, someone else would always be sent to the same house later. “Irate. Repeat call.” And we’d lose the points we needed to make our numbers.
January 8, 2019
Clearly one of the favorite movies of my lifetime… glad to see/hear that it lives on with successive generations. I’ll just need you to cut down the tallest tree in the forest, with… a shrubbery.
The word “shrubbery” is dead. I’m not sure how often it was used before 1975, when the British comedy troupe Monty Python released Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but hence, a notinsignificant number of people couldn’t say it without the urge to raise their voice a pitch. There are people who can’t see a coconut without yammering on about swallows. Who can’t be injured without hollering, “It’s just a flesh wound.” Who, out of nowhere, will yell “ni!” As adults, they’re insufferable, but as kids…well, I was one of many.
January 9, 2019
In the end, it’ll just be another story of a fallen drug king pin… it will resound louder if you were connected to one of the thousands killed by his ‘enterprise’, but in the case of El Chapo, it could have just come down to treating your IT staff better.
Not long after his 21st birthday, Christian Rodriguez got the contract of a lifetime for his new info-tech company: The Colombian was hired as a cybersecurity consultant by Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the Mexican drug lord known as El Chapo.
January 10, 2019
Sometimes things that really need to happen… simply don’t… for a variety of reasons… some sane, some insane and sad…
On the latest episode of Pivot, Recode’s Kara Swisher traded in Scott Galloway for a guest co-host: Crooked Media’s Jon Lovett, the co-host of Pod Save America and host of Lovett or Leave It. They talked about everything from Trump’s shutdown to Netflix’s Bird Box, and why the newly Democratic-controlled House of Representatives probably won’t make a move to regulate tech giants like Facebook.
January 11, 2019
Providing that voodoo back beat for 60 years now, can you believe it? I wouldn’t say that Charlie Watts is intriguing to me, personally, he’s serviceable and steady… as far as drumming goes, nothing out of the ordinary going on here… but appreciated just the same. One way or another, an interesting conversation with Chad Smith for DrumChannel.com…
For many Rolling Stones fans, Charlie Watts is the band’s most mysterious and intriguing member. He’s a guy who prefers jazz to rock, yet has spent nearly 60 years playing in the world’s greatest rock & roll band. (When the Stones played Glastonbury in 2013, he said, “I don’t want to do it. Everyone else does. I don’t like playing outdoors, and I certainly don’t like festivals.”) A well-dressed eccentric, he is known to draw a sketch of every single hotel room he stays in and owns cars despite being unable to drive. “He’s a very secretive man,” Keith Richards recently told Rolling Stone, asked to explain how Watts is still able to carry a two-plus hour show at his age. “I think it’s just him. I don’t think he does anything particularly. That is just Charlie. That’s what’s so amazing about the man. It’s my privilege to play with Charlie Watts.”
January 12, 2019
Read this article. The thing that strikes me about it as that even though I consider myself relatively tech savvy including some coding experience in varying computer languages… it amazes me how little of this I even understand… which doesn’t bode well for the subject of ransomware and the digital degenerates that practice it and the success that they will have moving forward. It often seems like they’re always a few steps ahead of the good guys when it comes to vulnerability of data.
A recently discovered ransomware group has netted almost $4 million since August, in large part by following a path that’s uncommon in its industry—selectively installing the malicious encryption software on previously infected targets with deep pockets. The method differs from the usual one of indiscriminately infecting all possible victims.
January 13, 2019
Mildly interesting if you’re into old stuff… but after the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act of 1998, this marks the first year since then where works have once again began entering the public domain. This article outlines where you might find some of those if you’re so inclined.
Starting at midnight on January 1, tens of thousands of books (as well as movies, songs, and cartoons) entered the public domain, meaning that people can download, share, or repurpose these works for free and without retribution under US copyright law.
Editor’s Note; Lots going on currently… so sad to say I’ll be taking next week off unexpectedly, back on 1/21…
