Issue 1738 - Monday 21st November, 2022

I'm back! Thanks Josh, Dan and Chris for keeping the Sizzle going while I spent some time away from the computer.

In Today's Issue

The News

Elon still appears to be running Twitter into the ground

By far the dominate story while I've been away are Elon Musk's antics at Twitter. Every few hours there's a mind bending anecdote that makes you go "huh, SpaceX and Tesla must be successful in spite of Elon, not because of him". I gave up trying to track them all, but a website called Twitter Is Going Great has done it for me. Just over the weekend Twitter let Trump back on (plus Kanye West, Jordan Peterson and more persona non grata types), its copyright detection system failed (during a World Cup, FIFA is overly precious of fans sharing clips), the head of ad sales and head of trust & safety both quit and there's no content moderators for the entire Asia-Pacific region. Elon rat fucking the shit out of Twitter genuinely makes me sad.

Elizabeth Holmes sentenced to 11 years prison

Infamous medical laboratory charlatan Elizabeth Holmes has been sentenced to 11 years and 3 months in jail "on four counts of defrauding investors" with Theranos - not flogging dodgy blood tests, there wasn't enough evidence of that - her punishment is for ripping off a few rich people. Just before her sentencing, she told the court through tears that "every day for the past years I have felt deep pain for what people went through because I failed them. I regret my failings with every cell of my body". There will be another hearing soon to determine how much restitution Elizabeth pays the investors she mislead. Her partner in crime, Sunny Balwani, will be sentenced December 7th for his sins of defrauding both investors and patients.

Creators of Z-Library arrested in Argentina

The US DoJ nabbed two Russians, Anton Napolsky and Valeriia Ermakova in Argentina, claiming they operated Z-Library, pirated 11 million books and charged them with "criminal copyright infringement, wire fraud and money laundering". It's pretty tough to run a large scale piracy service without getting busted by the US government eventually, but Anton and Valeriia made it easy for the FBI to find them, using Gmail and AWS for Z-Library activities, who happily handed over all the personal info they had on the pair. The good news is that Z-Library's collection lives on, with the Pirate Library Mirror creating a copy of Z-Library as late as September. Anna's Archive is a great portal to access a bunch of these pirate book libraries.

Something I Saw On The Internet

News that happened while I was away

Bargains

Image Of The Day

In 1999 the Japanese mobile phone company NTT DOCOMO released a set of 176 emoji for mobile phones and pagers. Designed on a twelve-by-twelve-pixel grid, the emoji—a portmanteau of the Japanese words e, or picture, and moji, or character—enhanced the visual interface for NTT DOCOMO’s devices and facilitated the nascent practice of text messaging and mobile email. Drawing on sources as varied as Japanese graphic novels, the typeface Zapf Dingbats, and common emoticons (simple faces that computer users made out of preexisting punctuation marks), Kurita, a designer at NTT DOCOMO, included illustrations of weather phenomena, pictograms like the heart symbol, and a range of facial expressions.

The shift toward concise, telegraphic correspondence that began with the advent of email in the 1970s accelerated dramatically when messaging moved to mobile devices. People had even less space and time to get their point across, and the conveyance of tone and emotion became both more difficult and more urgent. Emoji, when combined with text, allow for more nuanced intonation. Filling in for body language, they reassert the human within the deeply impersonal, abstract space of electronic communication. Now, with more than 2,600 in use, emoji have evolved far beyond NTT DOCOMO’s original set into an essential, global, and increasingly complex companion to written language. Nonetheless, the DNA for today’s emoji is clearly present in Kurita's humble pixelated designs. (MoMA)

The End

📻 Revolt III - Kent

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