Things To Keep An Eye On

Controversy over Unit 8200 veteran banned from Silicon Valley event

What happened here is what always happens when someone points out an Israeli has done something bad or they simply don’t want to be associated with them, scream they hate Jews.

Naturally David Ulevich chimed in to act like there’s some equivalence between barring a recent veteran of Israeli signals intelligence and someone who served in the military of our own country:

Ulevitch, of Andreessen Horowitz, seems to think that no principled position exists by which you might bar a member of a foreign military’s signals intelligence division, but admit one from our own country. Odd that he isn’t able to consider that. He continues:

In other words he wants the word put out, because Benhenda has barred someone who recently left a foreign military’s signals intelligence, that people from our own country’s services are barred also. What he’s doing here is trying to dragoon an IDF service member into the civil rights protection veterans of our own country enjoy. Is he doing this because he has some strange ethnic attachment to the country whose servicemember was barred?

Fake FBI militia was six informants, one target

More on the “Pineapple Front” from Ken Silva

New DOJ corporate fraud enforcement memo

Important statement of enforcement priorities here

Prescribing doctor using Done convicted

Done was a mess of a company, backed by David Sacks, and the executives were charged. Now the doctors are getting got:

A federal jury in the Western District of Michigan convicted Jonathan Decker, 46, of Rockford, Michigan, for distributing over 2 million pills of Adderall and other stimulants over the Done ADHD platform. Decker provided prescriptions for methamphetamine and amphetamines to patients without examining them, including to patients with substance use disorders and with significant mental health diagnoses, symptoms of which were exacerbated by the drugs Decker prescribed. Decker was paid more than $1 million for his prescriptions.

Dutch police bust one ShinyHunters guy

From OCCRP:

Dutch Police have announced the arrest of a 24-year-old alleged member of the cybercrime group ShinyHunters that has been responsible for a string of major data breaches, including the hacking of an FBI website last week.

Oklahoma judge rules Flock search unconstitutional

Important ruling here, and one of the first.

NSA rolls out post-quantum cryptography resource hub

Check it out here.

New Dutch deepfake detection company to show its work

From Biometric Update:

Amsterdam-based media forensics startup Cyberette launched a deepfake detection platform on September 30 for fraud, identity and investigative teams that need more than a verdict on whether an image, video or voice recording is fake.

Catholic school reopens in Gaza

Under the supervision of Fr. Romanelli, whom Mr. Apelbaum accused of lying about his injuries.

Unborn baby in New Mexico wins wrongful death lawsuit

Against an abortionist

Nazi-looted Pissaro settlement contested

These cases are a mess:

The catalogue carried the now-familiar line: the work was “offered for sale pursuant to a settlement between the current owner and heirs of Salomon Flavian.” Settlements like this have become the ordinary way Nazi-era spoliation claims to privately held works get resolved at auction. The consignor gets clean title and the claimants get a share of the proceeds. The auction house gets to sell the picture.

Except that not everyone was at the table. As Vincent Noce reports in The Art Newspaper, seven of Flavian’s heirs appeared before a Paris court on September 18 and asked it to retrospectively cancel the sale and annul the contract behind it

Met returns Cretan bronzes

From David Gill

Outlandish but awesome paper watch

The intersection of antiquities hunters and drug traffickers:

I am still disappointed that I couldn’t call this Breaking Klad (which means buried treasure), since Max Daly and Patrick Shortispublished their investigation into Russia’s dead drop drug revolution (wherein the buried treasure is a stash of drugs). Still, I am delighted to say that my first study of interactions between antiquities looting and cannabis foraging/cultivation has been published by Public Archaeology.

Microsoft is about to find out

The company doesn’t even want to kick in a pittance to the community for its South Bend data center. The town is of course home to Notre Dame:

While Microsoft stands to benefit enormously from such tax breaks, the community living around a 900-acre Granger data center in St. Joseph County is suffering, according to We Make Indiana, a local nonpartisan group of about 25 congregations and community organizations.

Last year, the state passed a property tax savings bill that reportedly hamstrung local governments’ ability to raise revenue for community services. As vital services deteriorated, We Make Indiana spent the past six months trying to alert Microsoft to the most urgent community needs in areas like health care, child care, elder care, transportation, and affordable housing.

Recently, it became clear that Microsoft was not prepared to meaningfully help address the bigger issues plaguing South Bend. We Make Indiana was disappointed to learn from a company liaison that Microsoft will only approve a series of one-time nonprofit donations totaling up to $1 million. We Make Indiana believes that maximum budget is not proportionate to the tax savings or improved profit margins Microsoft will get from operating the Granger hyperscaler.

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