Boing Boing: Youtube removes video of woman playing harp with a distortion pedal because it “endangers children”. “Last week, Emily Hopkins ruled Youtube for a day after attaching a roaring distortion pedal to her harp and performing enchanting and extremely hardcore melodies thereof. YouTube removed it citing its ‘child endangerment’ policy.”
Techdirt: Olympics Copyright Insanity Rules Again: Gold Medal Winner Blocked From Sharing Her Own Victory. “Elaine Thompson-Herah of Jamaica won both the women’s 100 meter and 200 meter gold medals at the Olympics this year, and then did the super piratey thing of… excitedly posting snippets of her victories to Instagram, which responded by blocking her account for copyright violations.”
KCTV: Facebook removes page for French town named Bitche. “Sometimes, life can just be a Bitche. The residents of the French town carrying that name thought just that after social media giant Facebook removed Ville de Bitche’s official page from its site last month.”
BBC: Stokes twins: YouTubers plead guilty over fake bank robbery. “A pair of YouTubers have pleaded guilty to faking a bank robbery that led to an unsuspecting Uber driver being held at gunpoint by police. Alan and Alex Stokes, 24, who have six million followers on their channel, wore balaclavas and called an Uber as a getaway vehicle.”
And in today’s episode of “That actually makes it worse,” from CNN: Former SolarWinds CEO blames intern for ‘solarwinds123’ password leak. “Current and former top executives at SolarWinds are blaming a company intern for a critical lapse in password security that apparently went undiagnosed for years. The password in question, ‘solarwinds123,’ was discovered in 2019 on the public internet by an independent security researcher who warned the company that the leak had exposed a SolarWinds file server.”
San Francisco Chronicle: S.F. Mayor London Breed had her own French Laundry party — the night after Gavin Newsom’s. “Gov. Gavin Newsom is in good company when it comes to politicians attending fancy birthday parties while encouraging others to avoid gathering. It turns out San Francisco Mayor London Breed dined at the French Laundry the night after Newsom’s infamous, ill-advised, mid-pandemic soiree at the three-star Michelin restaurant in Yountville.”
KWWL: Local nonprofit believes Facebook took down their page by mistake. “Just 4 days before Giving Tuesday, the largest day of giving worldwide, the nonprofit Table 2 Table Food Rescue sees an impact after Facebook unpublished their page.”
Politico: California doctors’ top brass attended French Laundry dinner with Newsom. “California Medical Association officials were among the guests seated next to Gov. Gavin Newsom at a top California political operative’s opulent birthday dinner at the French Laundry restaurant this month. CEO Dustin Corcoran and top CMA lobbyist Janus Norman both joined the dinner at the French Laundry, an elite Napa fine dining restaurant, to celebrate the 50th birthday of lobbyist and longtime Newsom adviser Jason Kinney, a representative of the powerful interest group confirmed Wednesday morning.”
Washington Post: Democrats abandon indoor Capitol meal for new House members after photo raises eyebrows. “House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Friday that lawmakers would continue to vote long distance, citing concerns about the coronavirus — but newly elected members were still set to eat together indoors…. By evening, the new members event was changed to grab-and-go. The House’s newest legislators were already in the capital for an orientation like no other, filled with masks and new precautions.”
Slate: Oh Good, Dianne Feinstein Concluded the Barrett Hearings by Giving a Maskless Lindsey Graham a Hug. “No one is supposed to be hugging anyone outside of their family right now, never mind hugging a possible vector when you are in a high-risk category for a deadly virus while neither party wears a mask. But for old Lindsey Graham, sure, a maskless hug was apparently in order—he did such a good job with the hearings, after all.”
Thrillist: Facebook Rejected a Photo of Onions for Being ‘Overtly Sexual’. “Earlier this week, a Canadian store — known around St. John’s, Newfoundland as the Seed Company by EW Gaze — shared a perfectly innocent promotional photo of some Walla Walla onions (this is not a euphemism. They were really just onions). Facebook, however, did not agree and flagged the post for being… too sexy.”
BBC: Woman falls from car on M25 filming Snapchat video. “A woman fell out of a moving car on the M25 while leaning out of the window to film a video for Snapchat. She fell from the car into a ‘live lane’ between junction six and the Clacket Lane Services at 01:30 BST, Surrey Police traffic officers tweeted. The woman was not badly hurt but police said it was lucky ‘she wasn’t seriously injured or killed’.”
TMZ: YouTube Stars Charged With Swatting … After Bank Robbery Pranks. “YouTube stars Alan and Alex Stokes are in very real trouble for allegedly faking a series of bank robberies … they’ve each just been hit with a felony charge. Authorities say the twin brothers, who have 4.81 million subscribers on their Stokes Twins YouTube page, staged a pair of fake bank robberies in Irvine, CA back in October, one of which resulted in an unsuspecting Uber driver being held at gunpoint by police.”
Washington Post: At the heart of dismal U.S. coronavirus response, a fraught relationship with masks. “The mask is the simplest and among the most effective weapons against the coronavirus in the public health arsenal. Yet from the start, America’s relationship with face coverings has been deeply fraught. Faulty guidance from health authorities, a cultural aversion to masks and a deeply polarized politics have all contributed. So has a president who resisted role modeling the benefits of face coverings, and who belittled those who did. The result, experts say, is a country that squandered one of its best opportunities to beat back the coronavirus pandemic this spring and summer. In the process, the United States fell far behind other nations that skipped the fuss over masks, costing lives and jeopardizing the recovery heading into the fall.”
Excuse me a moment while I headdesk? Washington Post: Elite CIA unit that developed hacking tools failed to secure its own systems, allowing massive leak, an internal report found. “The theft of top-secret computer hacking tools from the CIA in 2016 was the result of a workplace culture in which the agency’s elite computer hackers ‘prioritized building cyber weapons at the expense of securing their own systems,’ according to an internal report prepared for then-director Mike Pompeo as well as his deputy, Gina Haspel, now the current director.”
