Month: July 2020

Not Just Violent, Corrupt

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Accused murderer, and one time Minneapolis cop, Derek Chauvin has been charged with tax fraud, so in addition to being a brutal thug, he’s a rather more mundane criminal as well:

The fired Minneapolis police officer charged with killing George Floyd was charged along with his wife Wednesday with felony tax crimes dating back to 2014 that allege failure to claim more than $460,000 in income — at least $96,000 of that in his off-duty security work.

 Derek Chauvin and Kellie Chauvin, of Oakdale, were each charged by summons in Washington County District Court with nine felony counts of aiding and abetting false or fraudulent tax returns or failing to file returns.

 From 2014 to 2019, the Chauvins underreported $464,433 in joint income and owed a total of $21,853 in taxes, according to the charges. With interest and late filing and fraud penalties, they owe $37,868, the complaints said.

 Derek Chauvin, 46, remains jailed on second-degree murder and manslaughter charges in connection with the death of Floyd while in police custody on May 25. Three other ex-officers, Thomas Lane, J. Alexander Kueng and Tou Thao are charged with aiding and abetting Chauvin.

………

The filing includes a litany of allegations. Among them, prosecutors say the Chauvins bought a new BMW X5 in January 2018 for $100,230 from a Minnetonka dealership and registered the SUV in Florida — they own a condo in Windermere, outside Orlando — and paid $4,664 in taxes in that state.

However, the vehicle was serviced 11 times in Minnetonka and never in Florida, investigators say they found. Kellie Chauvin told investigators they opted for Florida because it was less expensive. The taxes due on the SUV had it been registered in Minnesota were $5,053.

………

The charges document various sources of income for the couple. The complaints said that between 2014 and 2019, Derek Chauvin made between $52,000 and $72,000 annually as a police officer. He also worked off-duty security nearly every weekend in that time at El Nuevo Rodeo dance club, Cub Foods, Midtown Global Market and EME Antro Bar on E. Lake Street.

During that span, Chauvin failed to pay taxes on nearly $96,000 he earned from El Nuevo Rodeo alone, investigators estimated.

Beginning in June 2019, he routinely worked off-duty at EME Antro Bar on weekends from 11 p.m. to 2:30 a.m. after his MPD shift and was paid $250 in cash each night, said investigators, who located no corresponding tax papers.

I would note that the entire “Cops being paid cash for security by a club” thing is probably pretty common in Minneapolis.

Tax authorities take note.

Candy-Ass Punks

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It turns out that the Department of Homeland Security’s little “Geheime Staatspolizei” act in Portland has DHS agents cowering in the courthouse that they were nominally brought in to protect.

The irony is delicious:

Night upon night the chant goes up in front of Portland’s federal courthouse: “Whose streets?”

The answer depends on the hour of the day. After Donald Trump sent federal agents to take control of a city he said had been abandoned by its mayor to anarchists and mob rule, the protesters still turning out in support of Black Lives Matter can make a legitimate claim that these are, as the chant goes, “our streets”.

Department of Homeland Security taskforce agents were again out firing waves of teargas and throwing stun grenades against a hard core of a few hundred demonstrators in the early hours of Wednesday morning. The confrontation centered on the courthouse at the heart of several blocks of downtown Portland that have effectively fallen under the control of the protesters after the city police withdrew.

But after pushing back demonstrators, many of them kitted out in helmets and gas masks, the federal agents retreated into their courthouse citadel to mocking jeers and women who were part of the “Wall of Moms” protest linking arms and chanting: “Our streets.”

This ritual was played out three times on Wednesday morning but the end result was the same as every other night. The DHS officers dispatched by the president to put down the demonstrations have instead become prisoners of the building they are ostensibly there to defend.

………

But if the intent was to intimidate the protesters into abandoning the few square blocks of downtown Portland under their control, it backfired spectacularly.

………

It is now the federal agents who appear under siege, reduced to defending the courthouse from attempts to break in or set it on fire. In a visible surrender of ground, the DHS taskforce has even abandoned bothering to re-erect a fence around the federal building torn down on Saturday night. 

The Portland protesters have made the Feds their bitches.

News You Can Use

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Researchers at the University of Chicago have a project named Fawkes, which poisons images so that AI cannot be trained by scraping them from public websites while the images remain nearly unchanged to human eyes.

I’m thinking that Imgur should offer this as a filter:

Researchers at the University of Chicago’s Sand Lab have developed a technique for tweaking photos of people so that they sabotage facial-recognition systems.

The project, named Fawkes in reference to the mask in the V for Vendetta graphic novel and film depicting 16th century failed assassin Guy Fawkes, is described in a paper scheduled for presentation in August at the USENIX Security Symposium 2020.

Fawkes consists of software that runs an algorithm designed to “cloak” photos so they mistrain facial recognition systems, rendering them ineffective at identifying the depicted person. These “cloaks,” which AI researchers refer to as perturbations, are claimed to be robust enough to survive subsequent blurring and image compression.

The paper [PDF], titled, “Fawkes: Protecting Privacy against Unauthorized Deep Learning Models,” is co-authored by Shawn Shan, Emily Wenger, Jiayun Zhang, Huiying Li, Haitao Zheng, and Ben Zhao, all with the University of Chicago.

………

The boffins claim their pixel scrambling scheme provides greater than 95 per cent protection, regardless of whether facial recognition systems get trained via transfer learning or from scratch. They also say it provides about 80 per cent protection when clean, “uncloaked” images leak and get added to the training mix alongside altered snapshots.

They claim 100 per cent success at avoiding facial recognition matches using Microsoft’s Azure Face API, Amazon Rekognition, and Face++. Their tests involve cloaking a set of face photos and providing them as training data, then running uncloaked test images of the same person against the mistrained model.

………

The researchers have posted their Python code on GitHub, with instructions for users of Linux, macOS, and Windows. Interested individuals may wish to try cloaking publicly posted pictures of themselves so that if the snaps get scraped and used to train to a facial recognition system – as Clearview AI is said to have done – the pictures won’t be useful for identifying the people they depict. 

If someone comes up with a simple tool, it should be used on every social social media post.

St. Louis Ken and Karen Charged

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The McCloskeys have been charged with brandishing a weapon, and while it is unlikely that they will result anything beyond a deferred adjudication and some community service time.

Of course, given that their history, their record shows entitled hyper-hostile assholes, there is always the chance that they will screw up that period of good behavior.

One can only hope:

St. Louis’ top prosecutor on Monday charged a white husband and wife with felony unlawful use of a weapon for displaying guns during a racial injustice protest outside their mansion.

 Mark and Patricia McCloskey are both personal injury attorneys in their 60s. Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner told The Associated Press that their actions risked creating a violent situation during an otherwise nonviolent protest last month.

 “It is illegal to wave weapons in a threatening manner — that is unlawful in the city of St. Louis,” Gardner said.

………

Gardner is recommending a diversion program such as community service rather than jail time if the McCloskeys are convicted. Typically, class E felonies could result in up to four years in prison.

I’m hoping for justice, but I’m realistic.

Lawless Criminals

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Trump has ordered the US Census not to count illegal immigrants, in yet another attempt to corrupt the census for partisan purposes.

Given that the Supreme Court has already ruled against his putting a citizenship question on the tally, in Dept of Commerce v. New York, and the same 5 votes that ruled against him in that case are still on the court, and they ruled against him because he and his Secretary of Commerce lied to them.

I think that either

  • He is hoping that Ginsberg is going to die soon.
  • He is hoping that the wheels of justice will grind slowly enough to allow Republican states to gerrymander extremely enough to skew the house for most of the next decade.

This is truly contemptible.

Donald Trump signed a memorandum on Tuesday instructing the US Census Bureau to exclude undocumented immigrants from the population totals that determine how many seats in Congress each state gets. It’s an unprecedented move that seems to be an attempt to preserve white political power.

The American Civil Liberties Union said immediately that it would sue and the action is likely to be met with a flood of legal challenges. The Trump administration appears to be on shaky legal ground – the US constitution requires seats in Congress to be apportioned based on the “whole number of persons” counted in each state during each decennial census. The constitution vests Congress with power over the census (though Congress has since designated some of that authority to the executive).

Republicans in recent years have been pushing to exclude non-citizens and other people ineligible to vote from the tally used to draw electoral districts. In 2015, Thomas Hofeller, a top Republican redistricting expert, explicitly wrote that such a change “would be advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites”.

The White House memo, titled “Excluding Illegal Aliens From the Apportionment Base Following the 2020 Census,” argues that the term “person” in the constitution really means “inhabitant” and that the president has discretion to define what that means. The memo also argues that allowing undocumented people to count rewards states with high numbers of undocumented people.

“My administration will not support giving congressional representation to aliens who enter or remain in the country unlawfully, because doing so would create perverse incentives and undermine our system of government,” Trump said in a statement. “Just as we do not give political power to people who are here temporarily, we should not give political power to people who should not be here at all.”

This is so deeply and profoundly venal and corrupt that it actually exceeds my already low expectations.

Today, I am a San Francisco Giants Fan

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San Francisco Giants manager Gabe Kapler plans to use his position to speak out against racial injustice and provide a voice for those who aren’t heard.

Kapler and several of his players knelt during the national anthem before their 6-2 exhibition victory against the Oakland Athletics. Kapler shared his plans when he addressed the team earlier Monday, and he said everyone would be supported by the Giants no matter what they decided to do.

“I wanted them to know that I wasn’t pleased with the way our country has handled police brutality and I told them I wanted to amplify their voices and I wanted to amplify the voice of the Black community and marginalized communities as well,” Kapler said. “So I told them that I wanted to use my platform to demonstrate my dissatisfaction with the way we’ve handled racism in our country. I wanted to demonstrate my dissatisfaction with our clear systemic racism in our country and I wanted them to know that they got to make their own decisions and we would respect and support those decisions. I wanted them to feel safe in speaking up.”

Right fielder Jaylin Davis, who is African American, and first base coach Antoan Richardson also took a knee as shortstop Brandon Crawford stood between them with a hand on each of their shoulders. Davis held his right hand over his heart, while Richardson, who is Black and from the Bahamas, clasped his hands in front of him.

In honor of the late Steve Gilliard, life-long Mets fan, let me say the following, “F$#@ the F%$#ing Yankees.”  (I favor the Boston Red Sox, but I only have to make a choice if they meet in the World Series, as the Giants are NL, and the Red Sox are AL.)

Republican Governance

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Ohio State House Speaker Larry Householder (R-Perry County) has been arrested for bribery involving a massive state bailout for two nuclear power plants in the state:

Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder was arrested Tuesday morning ahead of an announcement about a $60 million federal racketeering case related to Ohio’s new nuclear bailout law, according to sources and media reports.

FBI agents, who were assisted by the Perry County Sheriff’s Department, were deployed to Householder’s property in Glenford, the Dayton Daily News reported. The investigation centers on House Bill 6, the $1 billion-plus ratepayer bailout of two Ohio nuclear power plants owned by FirstEnergy Solutions (now Energy Harbor) that Householder helped push through last year with the help of millions in dark money, according to the Toledo Blade.

Besides Householder, four others have been arrested, according to sources and media reports: former Ohio Republican Party Chair-turned-consultant Matt Borges, prominent lobbyist Neil Clark, FirstEnergy Solutions lobbyist Juan Cespedes, and Householder aide Jeff Longstreth. All are currently in custody, according to a source.

………

The news comes as the FBI and U.S. Attorney David M. DeVillers called a news conference in Columbus at 2:30 p.m. Tuesday to announce charges related to $60 million bribe to a “state official” and “associates.”

The campaign to pass HB6 — as well as their brutally successful effort to stop opponents from hold a statewide referendum to overturn it — included a wave of campaign donations from FirstEnergy Corp., as well as a multi-million-dollar ad campaign paid for with dark money.

It’s not the first time the FBI has looked into Householder’s activities. In 2004, during the Republican’s first stint as speaker, the FBI opened an investigation into Householder after receiving an anonymous tip that the speaker and aides received kickbacks from vendors doing business with the Ohio House GOP’s campaign arm. That investigation closed in 2006 without any charges being filed.

The details seem to indicate that this was more of a shake-down by Householder and his Evil Minions™ rather than the graft naturally flowing from the utility:


Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder’s political operation accepted more than $60 million in bribe money from FirstEnergy Corp. to secure the company a $1.3 billion public bailout, according to a federal complaint filed Thursday.

………

“(It) is likely the largest bribery, money-laundering scheme ever perpetrated against the people in the state of Ohio,” said David DeVillers, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Ohio, during a news conference Tuesday.

In all, Householder received more than $500,000 for his personal benefit, according to DeVillers.

More than $100,000 of the bribe money from FirstEnergy Corp. was used to pay costs associated with Householder’s Florida home, and at least $97,000 was used to pay expenses for Householder’s 2018 House campaign, the complaint stated.

………

DeVillers said there’s a “strong inference” in the complaint that Householder and his allies approached FirstEnergy, rather than the other way around.

“This enterprise went looking for someone to bribe them,” DeVillers said.

………

Other money went to fight an (ultimately unsuccessfully) attempt by HB6 opponents last summer to organize a statewide referendum to repeal HB6, which Gov. Mike DeWine signed in late July 2019.

Between July and October of last year, FirstEnergy Solutions wired more than $38 million to Generation Now to help defeat the referendum effort, which the group did through a barrage of TV ads and schemes to prevent opponents from collecting the necessary signatures, including hiring people to intimidate petition canvassers.

When they say, “Hiring people to intimidate petition canvassers,” they mean paying money to get the canvassers to quit, and having people harass, and in some cases assault, petition gatherers.

Nothing the see here, just Republican Party governance in its purest form.

Least Surprising News of the Day

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Pro Publica has reviewed hundreds of videos from protests, and has spotted the obvious, that it’s the police who are rioting, not the protesters:

As protests denouncing police brutality against unarmed Black people spread to thousands of cities, it was videos of police violence — this time, directed at protesters — that went viral. Clips showed officers launching tear gas canisters at protesters’ heads, shooting pepper spray from moving vehicles and firing foam bullets into crowds.

ProPublica looked at nearly 400 social media posts showing police responses to protesters and found troubling conduct by officers in at least 184 of them. In 59 videos, pepper spray and tear gas were used improperly; in a dozen others, officers used batons to strike noncombative demonstrators; and in 87 videos, officers punched, pushed and kicked retreating protesters, including a few instances in which they used an arm or knee to exert pressure on a protester’s neck.

While the weapons, tactics and circumstances varied from city to city, what we saw in one instance after another was a willingness by police to escalate confrontations.

The goal of police in protests about the police is most often to escalate so that they can respond even more violently.

They are showing the maturity of Eric Cartman.

This Was a Foreseeable Consequence

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In response to China’s new security laws imposed by Beijing, the there have been calls for the UK to suspend its extradition treaty with Hong Kong.

This makes sense.

Given that the law makes protests against China illegal anywhere in the world that they occur, it’s a reasonable step.

China throwing a hissy fit over this is akin to a soccer player pretending that a foul occurred:

Conservative MPs and Labour are calling for the wholesale overhaul of relations with China after the government suspended extradition with Hong Kong and banned the export of riot control equipment following Beijing’s imposition of a sweeping national security law on the territory.

Announcing the measures to the Commons, Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, stressed the desire for continued cooperation with China, but said the actions were “a reasonable and proportionate response” to the law, which effectively criminalises most political dissent.

………

Speaking before Raab’s announcement, China’s foreign ministry said it would be a mistake to suspend the extradition treaty and urged the UK “to take no more steps down the wrong path”.

While Raab’s decisions were welcomed by both Labour and Conservative MPs, the foreign secretary faced calls to take more robust action, particularly over the mass repression of the Uighur population in China’s Xinjiang province which rights groups warn amounts to cultural genocide.

………

Saying this was a serious violation of the agreement that set out Hong Kong’s semi-autonomous status after the handover to China in 1997, Raab said extradition would be stopped unless Beijing gave “clear and robust safeguards” about how the law would be used. The UK does not have an extradition agreement with mainland China.

The UK is also extending to Hong Kong an arms embargo that has covered mainland China since the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, including a bar on equipment that could be used for crowd control, such as shackles and smoke grenades.

………

Britain has already promised that up to 3 million Hong Kong residents will be offered the chance to settle in the UK and a path to permanent citizenship.

These are foreseeable consequences to the Chinese security laws, and the Chinese government must have anticipated these actions.

Chill the f%$# out.

The Hippie Punching Will Continue until Morale Improves

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John Kasich will speak at the DEMOCRATIC PARTY national convention.

Yes, arguing that ideas, and ideals, don’t count for sh%$, and some random wing-nut can headline the convention because he hates Trump enough.

A brief curriculum vitae of Kasich:

  • Investment banker at Lehman until it collapsed.
  • Major force for the 1996 eat the poor welfare reform.
  • Repeatedly voted to cut Medicare.
  • Supported NAFTA.
  • Voted to impeach Clinton.
  • Had a Fox News show.
  • Supports criminalizing abortion.
  • Favored privatizing prisons.
  • Supported stripping labor rights from public servants.
  • Supported a balanced budget amendment.
  • Big on charter schools, and the largest charter school scandal of all time, happened while he was Governor.  (And aggressively supporting said charter)
  • Pro school vouchers.
  • Supported the Iraq war. (Now claims to have recanted) 

Yeah, just the guy you want talking at your f%$#ing convention.

Buck Fiden.

Linkage

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Steel being made.  It gets my engineering geek on:

We Live in Strange Times………

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She has been dubbed “Naked Athena”.

Photos from Killen and independent journalist Donovan Farley went viral on social media. The woman hasn’t been identified, but she’s been dubbed by some as “Naked Athena.”

The officers shot pepper balls at her feet. Another protester ran out in front of her with a homemade shield, Killen added, but she sidestepped him and his shield.

………

About 10 minutes after she arrived, the officers left. The woman left soon after without any additional fanfare. 

This is profoundly weird.

Chaos is Job Won

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The new Postmaster General is a Trump toady, and he is doing his best to destroy the post office in order to kill postal voting:

The new head of the U.S. Postal Service established major operational changes Monday that could slow down mail delivery, warning employees the agency would not survive unless it made “difficult” changes to cut costs. But critics say such a philosophical sea change would sacrifice operational efficiency and cede its competitive edge to UPS, FedEx and other private-sector rivals.

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy told employees to leave mail behind at distribution centers if it delayed letter carriers from their routes, according to internal USPS documents obtained by The Washington Post and verified by the American Postal Workers Union and three people with knowledge of their contents, but who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retribution.

“If the plants run late, they will keep the mail for the next day,” according to a document titled, “New PMG’s [Postmaster General’s] expectations and plan.” Traditionally, postal workers are trained not to leave letters behind and to make multiple delivery trips to ensure timely distribution of letters and parcels.

………

The Trump administration has consolidated control over the Postal Service, traditionally an apolitical institution, during the pandemic by making a financial lifeline for the nation’s mail service contingent upon the White House political agenda. President Trump in April called the agency “a joke” and demanded it quadruple package rates before he’d authorize any emergency aid or loans.

………

“This is framing the U.S. Postal Service, a 245-year-old government agency, and comparing it to its competitors that could conceivably go bankrupt,” said Philip Rubio, a professor of history at North Carolina A&T State University and a former postal worker. “Comparing it to U.S. Steel says exactly that ‘We are a business, not service.’ That’s troubling.”

The changes also worry vote-by-mail advocates, who insist that any policy that slows delivery could imperil access to mailed and absentee ballots. It reinforces the need, they say, for Congress to provide the agency emergency coronavirus funding.

These changes achieve 2 goals of Trump and his Evil Minions™:  Shafting Amazon, and suppressing the vote to boost his own reelection chances.

How Is This Not Attempted Bribery and Extortion?

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In response to Maryland Delegate Gabriel Acevero promoting legislation repealing the so-called “Maryland Police Bill of Rights”, his employer, Montgomery County Government Employees Organization Local 1994, browbeat him over his bill, and then fired him when he refused to withdraw the bill. (Local 1994 has a few Montgomery County deputy sheriffs among its members)

When Mr. Acevero noted that the meeting was completely inappropriate, they fired him:

The movement for greater accountability in policing poses a dilemma for organized labor. Union federations include and indeed welcome police organizations. Yet police unions can use their clout to win protection from complaints of officer brutality and other misconduct.

We offer no advice as to how union leaders should address this conundrum, but it is clear what they should not do: expel unionists who take a principled position in favor of police reform. And that is what Local 1994, which represents Montgomery County’s public employees, stands accused of doing to one of its salaried employees.

The staffer, Gabriel Acevero, 29, doubles as a member of Maryland’s House of Delegates, having represented District 39 in Montgomery County since January 2019. Mr. Acevero, who is black, has been outspoken against police abuses and is sponsoring a bill to provide greater transparency on misconduct cases: A key provision gives complainants access to previous documented allegations against accused officers. Mr. Acevero calls his bill Anton’s Law, after a 19-year-old African American from Caroline County, Anton Black, who died in policy custody in September 2018 under still-unclear circumstances.

In December, Local 1994 president Gino Renne, whose union also includes Montgomery County deputy sheriffs, summoned Mr. Acevero to meet with him, as well as deputies and an official of the county’s Fraternal Order of Police unit. The topic, according to an email from Mr. Renne: Mr. Acevero’s “support of legislation that interferes with our members’ employment rights” and “is in direct conflict with [the union’s] representational obligations and responsibilities.”

Mr. Acevero reiterated his position and said he considered the meeting inappropriate — whereupon Mr. Renne fired him. “I can’t have someone on my payroll who is slandering the very people who pay his salary,” Mr. Renne told us in an interview. Mr. Renne offered Mr. Acevero $35,000 severance if he would promise in writing not to discuss his firing publicly. Mr. Acevero refused, and instead filed a formal complaint against Mr. Renne’s union at the National Labor Relations Board last month. 

Gino Renne should be under criminal investigation, because this was a clear attempt to offer something of value to influence the actions of a public official.

Renne should be frog-marched out of his offices in handcuffs.

Yes, There Is a Historical Precedent

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Hmm, Police Officers hiding their names and only obliged to identify themselves with a generic tag as a member of their organisation? Im sure I’ve heard of that approach used somewhere before… pic.twitter.com/LJ1sfeEJbV

— Sam White (@Whitesv2128) July 18, 2020

For those of you who do not understand the meaning of “Geheime Staatspolizei”, which translates to secret state police, which is generally referred to its contraction, Gestapo.

The insistence of CBP that its agents will not carry any sort of external identification beyond a label saying, “Police” on the back of their uniforms has some profoundly ominous historical echoes.

Why Governments Should Insource their IT

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It turns out that, after millions of dollars poured down the drain, the unemployment websites created by companies like DeLoitte and IBM do not work.

It’s a hell of a racket. You get paid to create the website, and then you get paid to fix your own piss-poor work:

In 2010, California hired the consulting firm Deloitte to overhaul the state website people use to apply for unemployment benefits. Things didn’t go well: Later that year, technical errors led to the halting of payments for some 300,000 people, according to the Los Angeles Times. And, the paper reported that, at $110 million, the final cost of the system was almost double the initial estimate.

A decade later, the taxed, aging system built by Deloitte in California is struggling again, this time under the strain of new applicants put out of work by the pandemic.

But Deloitte still won a fresh contract last month to again help out with California’s unemployment system. The Sacramento Bee reported that the company has received another $16 million to provide unemployment call center services and help deliver benefits. Deloitte still receives nearly $6 million per year under the contract to maintain the system, the Bee reported.

The move is part of a pattern: States continue to spend millions of dollars hiring Deloitte, IBM, and other contractors to build and fix unemployment websites, even amid growing concerns about the quality of their work. And the crush of unemployment applications flooding in around the country since the pandemic hit have only made the situation worse.

This problem is as follows:

  • Basic capabilities are outsourced to consultants.
  • The knowledge to supervise these projects beyond the most superficial walks out the door as the personnel are hired by these consultants.
  • The consultants do their jobs poorly, but the government cannot spot this until it is too late.
  • The consultants are then paid to fix the problem because the government lacks the ability to fix the system.
  • The consultants are paid to maintain the system because the government lacks the ability to fix the system.
  • Rinse, lather, repeat.

Somewhere along the line, there are likely some campaign donations, or similar skulduggery, but that’s a feature, not a bug.

AI Scams

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In this case, it is food delivery robots known as Kiwibots, which, in addition to frequently blocking curb cuts in ways that threaten the lives of the disabled, lies about their use of artificial intelligence to navigate.

In reality, it uses remote operators in Columbia who are paid only $2.00/hour:

It seemed inevitable with the era of the autonomous car, ideas like the Kiwibots emerged. Small ostensibly autonomous vehicles that were in charge of food distribution, thus posing an alternative to courier services such as Glovo, Deliveroo or Uber Eats where deliveries are carried out by human messengers through the bike.

Everything seemed fantastic until it has been discovered that these vehicles have little of self-employed: an investigation has discovered that in reality these robots are remotely controlled by operators in Colombia who charge $2 per hour for this work.

………

This startup, called Kiwi Campus, launched small robots that looked like small carts with four wheels and a storage compartment at the top for orders. The robots became a sensation in the surroundings of that university, where the activity of the autonomous vehicles began.

………

The people in charge of the Kiwibots have several videos on their website that show how these messenger robots work: theoretically, the magic is provided by a complex artificial vision system that is able to recognize obstacles and detect when they can cross the street or not.

………

What was not shown to us as indicated in the San Francisco Chronicle is that they are remotely controlled by human operators who use the GPS sensors and cameras of these robots to send orders to the robots every 5 or 10 seconds.

On Kiwi Campus, they have recognized that there is indeed a part of human remote control, but for them, their service is a “parallel autonomy” system. The robots also circulate at a very reduced speed that goes from 1.6 to 2.4 km/h, which makes Kiwi workers have to pick up food orders from restaurants and go to the Kiwibots points of Departure to put the foods in the storage compartments of the robots and then make deliveries.

The model is unique, but it has more secrets than it might seem and much less autonomy than the robots seemed to raise – each of them costs $ 2,500 – initially. The ideal benefits from the low cost of the workforce that controls them: the operators that handle them in Colombia charge $2 per hour, a much lower cost than installing, for example, LIDAR systems – which would be difficult to integrate into these robots.

Seriously, why do we let fraudsters extract private profits from public space based on their lies?

Weep for the Overpaid Executives

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There are claims that Russia is trying to steal coronavirus vaccine research from the US, UK, and Canada.

The hand wringing over this is kind of silly for two reasons:

  • The more people who have access to this research, the more chance there is for a successful vaccine to be developed and manufactured.
  • The only people who could possibly be harmed are big-pharma profiteers.

I’m sorry, but, “Think of the overpaid pharmaceutical executives’ bonuses,” is just not something that inspires me to paroxysms of fear.

So, Now Nazis are a Protected Group in Canada?

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Police in Ontario are investigating graffiti on a monument to an SS division as a hate crime.

I can understand that someone spray painting, “Nazi war monument,” on the side of a ……… well ……… Nazi war monument ……… might constitute vandalism, but it’s not a hate crime, it’s truth in labeling.

It appears that as a result of this controversy, a number of Canadians have become rather upset about the cenotaph in a Ukrainian cemetary to the 14th SS Division as well, so perhaps the end game may involve taking this item down.

I’m sure that some Canadian-Ukrainians would object to that, claiming that this is their heritage, but, much like people claiming Confederate heritage in the United States, I don’t give a crap what they think:

An incident involving graffiti spray painted on a monument to those who fought in Adolf Hitler’s SS is being investigated as a hate crime by an Ontario police force.

Someone painted “Nazi war monument” on a stone cenotaph commemorating those who served with the 14th SS Division. The monument is located in Oakville in the St. Volodymyr Ukrainian Cemetery.

The division, made up of Ukrainians who pledged allegiance to Hitler, was part of the Nazi’s Waffen SS organization. Some members of the division have been accused of killing Polish women and children as well as Jews during the Second World War.

………

But researcher Moss Robeson, who has written articles on Ukrainians who collaborated with the Nazis, provided details about the graffiti and the monument on Twitter, prompting questions about why Halton Regional Police think members of the Nazi SS can be the subject of hate crimes.

In response to questions from this newspaper, Const. Steve Elms, spokesman for Halton-Regional Police, cited a section of the Criminal Code that noted those communicating statements in any public place inciting hatred against any identifiable group could face imprisonment not exceeding two years. “This incident occurred to a monument and the graffiti appeared to target an identifiable group,” he explained in an email to questions about how a hate crime could be perpetrated against members of the SS.

If this reminds you of people in the “Blue Lives Matter” movement claiming that protests against the police is a hate crime, not only are you very perceptive, and likely quite likely devastatingly attractive as well.

The 14th SS Division, also known as the Galizien Division, was formed in 1943 when Nazi Germany needed to shore up its forces as allied troops, including those from the U.S., Canada, Britain and Russia, started to gain the upper hand and turn the tide of the war. In May 1944, SS leader Heinrich Himmler addressed the division with a speech that was greeted by cheers. “Your homeland has become more beautiful since you have lost – on our initiative, I must say – the residents who were so often a dirty blemish on Galicia’s good name – namely the Jews,” Himmler said. “I know that if I ordered you to liquidate the Poles, I would be giving you permission to do what you are eager to do anyway.”

………

There are allegations members of the 14th SS Division took part in killing hundreds of Polish civilians in 1944 in the village of Huta Pieniacka. Some Ukrainians dispute that the SS division took part in the killings or they argue that only small elements from the unit – and under Nazi command – were involved. Others argue the SS members were heroes who fought against the Russians.

………

Bernie Farber of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network said there is a need for Halton Regional Police to better educate themselves on what constitutes a hate-motivated crime. “Yes, it’s destruction of property for sure,” Farber said of the graffiti on the monument. “But a hate crime? Far from it.”

The monument to the 14th SS Division was also in the headlines in 2017 when the Russian Embassy in Ottawa posted images on its Twitter account pointing out the “Nazi monuments” in Canada.

BTW, after the furor, the Halton Regional Police are now investigating the graffiti as simple vandalism, and the police chief is wondering why there is a Nazi monument in the first place.

Whoever put that graffiti on the monument may see it coming down now.

Self Dealing and Corruption at ICANN

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Just about a week after penning essays suggesting that “Geeks Must Be In Charge of the Internet,”* former ICANN chairman Fadi Chehadé has been revealed to be the CEO of the sketchy hedge fund that was trying to take over the .org registry.

There have long been allegations that the transfer of the registry to a for-profit entity, particularly when juxtaposed with the removal of price caps by ICANN just before the attempt began.

There needs to be a dive into corruption within ICANN, because what is going on now is almost certainly in violation of the requirements for non-profits in the United States and in California, where it is headquartered:

Former ICANN CEO Fadi Chehadé is currently listed as the co-CEO of Ethos Capital on the firm’s website.

Ethos Capital tried to buy Public Interest Registry, the non-profit that runs .org domains, but ICANN denied the transaction.

Chehadé’s name was nowhere on Ethos’ website when it announced the .org transaction. His involvement quickly became public because of Whois data for one of Ethos Capital’s domain names. The private equity company admitted that Chehadé was an advisor on the deal.

For months, the Ethos Capital website listed only two employees: CEO Erik Brooks and Chief Purpose Officer Nora Abusitta-Ouri. Abusitta-Ouri worked with Chehadé at ICANN.

The website change listing Chehadé as co-CEO appears to have happened very recently. The last Wayback Machine capture from June 15 did not show him. Elliot Silver spotted the difference today.

Many industry observers may wonder if Chehadé was pegged to be a co-CEO all along, only omitted from the website to avoid more controversy.

I hope that before this is over, some current and former senior staffers at ICANN need to be frog-marched out of their offices in handcuffs.

It’s the only way to fix the organization.

*Keep the Geeks in Charge of the Internet, Project Syndicate, July 7, 2020.