Spilled Ink
Judges
In June I wrote a series of pieces about structural racism in America. Judges play a central role in perpetuating bias in charging and criminal sentencing. In some cases, their conduct may be outright illegal. Later that month, Reuters published an investigation into how difficult it’s become to hold judges who violate the law accountable:
In the first comprehensive accounting of judicial misconduct nationally, Reuters identified and reviewed 1,509 cases from the last dozen years – 2008 through 2019 – in which judges resigned, retired or were publicly disciplined following accusations of misconduct. In addition, reporters identified another 3,613 cases from 2008 through 2018 in which states disciplined wayward judges but kept hidden from the public key details of their offenses – including the identities of the judges themselves.
All told, 9 of every 10 judges were allowed to return to the bench after they were sanctioned for misconduct, Reuters determined. They included a California judge who had sex in his courthouse chambers, once with his former law intern and separately with an attorney; a New York judge who berated domestic violence victims; and a Maryland judge who, after his arrest for driving drunk, was allowed to return to the bench provided he took a Breathalyzer test before each appearance.
Uhhhhh. They gave a judge a blow to start for his courtroom? The problem, Reuters found, was that judicial oversight is at best lax, and at worst run by people who have a vested interest in avoiding accountability for their peers. Americans are far more likely to come into contact with a judge than in any other developed nation:
The country’s approximately 1,700 federal judges hear 400,000 cases annually. The nearly 30,000 state, county and municipal court judges handle a far bigger docket: more than 100 million new cases each year, from traffic to divorce to murder. Their titles range from justice of the peace to state supreme court justice. Their powers are vast and varied – from determining whether a defendant should be jailed to deciding who deserves custody of a child.
Even if most judges do a good job and behave responsibly, is that really where we should be setting the bar? A single bad judge can directly impact hundreds or thousands of people, as Reuters recounts in alarming detail. Many state oversight bodies require other judges to sit in…judgement of their peers. Unsurprisingly, these systems rarely result in any discipline.
Alabama is a particularly egregious example:
As in most states, Alabama’s nine-member Judicial Inquiry Commission is a mix of lawyers, judges and laypeople. All are appointed. Their deliberations are secret and they operate under some of the most judge-friendly rules in the nation.
Alabama’s rules make even filing a complaint against a judge difficult. The complaint must be notarized, which means that in theory, anyone who makes misstatements about the judge can be prosecuted for perjury. Complaints about wrongdoing must be made in writing; those that arrive by phone, email or without a notary stamp are not investigated, although senders are notified why their complaints have been summarily rejected. Anonymous written complaints are shredded.
[…]
In most other states, commission staff members can start investigating a judge upon receiving a phone call or email, even anonymous ones, or after learning of questionable conduct from a news report or court filing. In Alabama, staff will not begin an investigation without approval from the commission itself, which convenes about every seven weeks.
By rule, the commission also must keep a judge who is under scrutiny fully informed throughout an investigation. If a subpoena is issued, the judge receives a simultaneous copy, raising fears about witness intimidation. If a witness gives investigators a statement, the judge receives a transcript. In the U.S. justice system, such deference to individuals under investigation is extremely rare.
Judges in America wield incredible power over citizens, and in Alabama they’re given unheard-of levels of protection against complaints of misconduct. You may remember Roy Moore, who was forced out of the Alabama Supreme Court twice for defying federal court orders. While he was making a spectacle in the media, hundreds of other state judges were putting Black Americans in jail for minor offenses, like traffic tickets:
A clear sign that something was amiss in Montgomery courts came in November 2013, when a federal lawsuit was filed alleging that city judges were unlawfully jailing the poor. A similar suit was filed in 2014, and two more civil rights cases were filed in 2015. Johnson and McCullough were plaintiffs.
[…]
Today, about 60% of Montgomery’s 198,000 residents are Black, U.S. census records show. Even so, Black motorists account for about 90% of those charged with unpaid traffic tickets, a Reuters examination of court records found.
Some of the worst offending judges in the civil complaints spent years on the bench as complaints wound their way through the oversight commission. In Alabama, like the rest of America, a mostly white judiciary inflicted cruel and often unnecessary punishment on poor and minority populations over minor infractions. Despite what our laws say, it can be a crime to be poor in America. Meanwhile, the people who mete out punishment remain insulated from the consequences of their own actions.
On a lighter note, the article did contain the punchline to the joke about what happens when three judges walk into a bar:
In Indiana, three judges attending a conference last spring got drunk and sparked a 3 a.m. brawl outside a White Castle fast-food restaurant that ended with two of the judges shot. Although the state supreme court found the three judges had “discredited the entire Indiana judiciary,” each returned to the bench after a suspension.
Printer Ink
Anyone who has ever owned a home printer is familiar with the misery that is ink replacement. The battle between printer manufacturers and consumers is ongoing, and extremely one-sided. Cory Doctorow details the conflict in a piece for the EFF:
Printers are grifter magnets, and the whole industry has been fighting a cold war with its customers since the first clever entrepreneur got the idea of refilling a cartridge and settling for mere astronomical profits, thus undercutting the manufacturers' truly galactic margins. This prompted an arms race in which the printer manufacturers devote ever more ingenuity to locking third-party refills, chips, and cartridges out of printers, despite the fact that no customer has ever asked for this.
In 2002, Lexmark sued a company called Static Controls over its business of modifying toner cartridges to work after they were refilled. Lexmark lost, but in an unexpected twist the parent company of Static bought Lexmark. Within a year, Lexmark was trying to sue other companies for refilling cartridges. Ah, capitalism.
Soon, the battle moved to the larger and more lucrative world of inkjet cartridges, where HP ruled the market. They’d been engaging in shady tactics like selling half-full cartridges in new printers and wasting ink on calibration and maintenance routines for years. Now, HP saw replacement cartridge manufacturers as an existential threat.
It’s worth pointing out that, according to Consumer Reports, printer ink is the most expensive liquid the average person will ever buy:
HP turned to technology to take out ink refill and replacement cartridge companies:
Shutting out these rivals became job one. When your customers reject your products, you can always win their business back by depriving them of the choice to patronize a competitor. Printer cartridges soon bristled with "security chips" that use cryptographic protocols to identify and lock out refilled, third-party, and remanufactured cartridges. These chips were usually swiftly reverse-engineered or sourced out of discarded cartridges, but then the printer companies used dubious patent claims to have them confiscated by customs authorities as they entered the USA.
Ironically, their laser focus on protecting an ink monopoly blinded HP engineers to potential security vulnerabilities, and they started making printers that could be used as botnets, or worse:
Cui found that simply by hiding code inside a malicious document, he could silently update the operating system of HP printers when the document was printed. His proof-of-concept code was able to seek out and harvest Social Security and credit-card numbers; probe the local area network; and penetrate the network's firewall and allow him to freely roam it using the compromised printer as a gateway. He didn't even have to trick people into printing his gimmicked documents to take over their printers: thanks to bad defaults, he was able to find millions of HP printers exposed on the public Internet, any one of which he could have hijacked with unremovable malware merely by sending it a print-job.
Not good! HP issued what it said was a “security update” in 2016, but it didn’t address those security concerns:
But this "security update" was actually a ticking bomb: a countdown timer that waited for five months before it went off in September 2016, activating a hidden feature that could detect and reject all third-party ink cartridges.
HP had designed this malicious update so that infected printers would be asymptomatic for months, until after parents had bought their back-to-school supplies. The delay ensured that warnings about the "security update" came too late for HP printer owners, who had by then installed the update themselves.
Truly diabolical stuff. They installed an update that locked down the printers of millions of customers, to force them into expensive ink purchases. HP claimed it was protecting its consumers from “counterfeit” cartridges, though never explained why that was a bad thing. Ink is ink! Emboldened, HP did it again the following year.
Anecdotally, this happened to me. My HP laser printer got caught by the 2017 security update. Amusingly, I’d purchased what I thought was a genuine HP toner cartridge off Amazon the year before, only to discover it was a mis-labeled knockoff from a third party. For a year I could get around my printer’s protests by cancelling out the error, but the next update locked me out entirely. I faced a choice - buy a new toner cartridge from HP that cost as much as a new printer, or throw the thing in the trash. I chose the latter.
Anyhow, HP has outdone themselves again, unveiling a bold new scheme to rip off customers. They no longer own their ink - they rent it:
With the HP Instant Ink program, printer owners no longer own their ink cartridges or the ink in them. Instead, HP's customers have to pay a recurring monthly fee based on the number of pages they anticipate printing from month to month; HP mails subscribers cartridges with enough ink to cover their anticipated needs. If you exceed your estimated page-count, HP bills you for every page (if you choose not to pay, your printer refuses to print, even if there's ink in the cartridges).
Incredible. If you thought that was the limit of their predatory behavior, well:
HP takes the position that its offers can be retracted at any time. For example, HP's “Free Ink for Life” subscription plan offered printer owners 15 pages per month as a means of tempting users to try out its ink subscription plan and of picking up some extra revenue in those months when these customers exceeded their 15-page limit.
But Free Ink for Life customers got a nasty shock at the end of last month: HP had unilaterally canceled their "free ink for life" plan and replaced it with "a $0.99/month for all eternity or your printer stops working" plan.
Revoking a plan that is literally called free for life in the midst of a pandemic that forced millions of Americans to work from home is really a master stroke. You have to hand it to the ghouls at HP. A pioneer in computing, one of the early American technology giants, has become nothing more than a bait-and-switch ink thief.
Project Veritas
Last week, another Project Veritas voting fraud “bombshell” dropped. A postal worker in Erie, Pennsylvania claimed a postmaster instructed him to backdate ballots mailed after election day. Veritas spread his story, which was quickly picked up by prominent Republicans as evidence of voter fraud. Turns out he made the whole thing up:
But on Monday, Hopkins, 32, told investigators from the U.S. Postal Service’s Office of Inspector General that the allegations were not true, and he signed an affidavit recanting his claims…
Sensing a pattern? Veritas has a history of convincing people to make false claims, when they aren’t editing video in deceptive ways. Anyhow, not content to simply take the L on this one, James O’Keefe has decided to tweet through it, which prompted the creation of another one of my Rules of Doing Crimes:
Quibi
Back in July I wrote about Quibi, when Quibi’s future looked somewhat uncertain amidst poor subscriber numbers and a shaky business model.
Well, it didn’t work out, and Quibi shut down in October. So what happened? A lot of things, according to the Wall Street Journal:
In addition to recommending that Quibi should be made available on TVs, outside advisers and some Quibi employees also recommended, to no avail, that the service allow social-sharing features similar to Alphabet Inc.’s YouTube at launch.
Yes, letting people stream your expensive shows with top talent on an actual television was probably a good idea! More on that later. Quibi got off to an…inauspicious start, to put it mildly:
In March, the reality of the coronavirus pandemic began to set in. CBS and Quibi held a dinner at a Mediterranean restaurant in New York to celebrate the launch of “60 in 6,” a Quibi newscast developed with CBS meant to help “60 Minutes” reach younger audiences. Several CBS staffers contracted Covid-19, and health officials informed them they were among the first batch of known cases in the city.
Holy moly. When your launch party is a superspreader event, it’s not a good sign of things to come. Despite this, Quibi launched in April. Katzenberg tried to reassure his staff things would be okay in a very…odd way:
He said he was confident life would return to normal and people would be back standing in line at the dry cleaners, where they could watch Quibi—the sort of line some employees viewed as out-of-touch, the attendees said. He also mentioned that his company, WndrCo LLC, nearly invested in the company that became TikTok but passed, a statement that puzzled some staffers, who wondered why he would volunteer the fact that he missed out on a great deal, one of them said.
Thanks boss! Elsewhere, company morale was not great:
Though Quibi didn’t last long, the company had its share of internal drama. There was a section of a stairwell in Quibi’s office building where some employees went to cry, some of the people said.
Quibi rushed to build apps to stream on TVs, but launched them only weeks before the company shut the doors. Even that was handled…strangely:
At an all-hands video call on Oct. 21, Quibi told its roughly 250 employees it would be closing and they would be paid severance. Mr. Katzenberg suggested employees listen to “Get Back Up Again,” a song from the soundtrack of “Trolls,” to lift their spirits, according to people familiar with the call.
What a deeply weird person. Quibi is exploring the sale of its media assets and will wind down the company, returning some of the $1.7 billion it collected to investors. Was Quibi a scam? It certainly was a flawed idea, and maybe a little unlucky. It’s rare I get to write about the rise and fall of a 10-figure media company over the course of a summer. I’m waiting to hear where I can watch the Liam Hemsworth show about hunting human beings in convenient 7 minute episodes.
Short Cons
Bleacher Report - “"One time I was using my wife's [urine] and my wife was like, 'Baby, you better not hope that it comes back pregnant or something.' And I said, 'Nah, so we ain't gonna use you any more, we're gonna use the kid.' Cuz I got scared that the piss might come back pregnant."”
NYT - “FTI, a global consulting firm, helped design, staff and run organizations and websites funded by energy companies that can appear to represent grass-roots support for fossil-fuel initiatives.”
Wired - ““If you were this good, why would you be playing in games only with a videofeed at $1/$3 tables at Stones' poker room?” he asked as he wrapped the segment. “Why wouldn't you be in Vegas winning all the money in the world?””
Tips, thoughts, or clean urine samples to scammerdarkly@gmail.com