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The Internet Archive and its 916 billion saved web pages are back online

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Last week, hackers defaced the Internet Archive website with a message that said, "Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and is constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach? It just happened. See 31 million of you on HIBP!"

HIBP is a reference to Have I Been Pwned, which was created by security researcher Troy Hunt and provides information and notifications on data breaches. The hacked Internet Archive data was sent to Have I Been Pwned and "contains authentication information for registered members, including their email addresses, screen names, password change timestamps, Bcrypt-hashed passwords, and other internal data," BleepingComputer wrote.

Kahle said on October 9 that the Internet Archive fended off a DDoS attack and was working on upgrading security in light of the data breach and website defacement. The next day, he reported that the "DDoS folks are back" and had knocked the site offline. The Internet Archive "is being cautious and prioritizing keeping data safe at the expense of service availability," he added.

"Services are offline as we examine and strengthen them... Estimated Timeline: days, not weeks," he wrote on October 11. "Thank you for the offers of pizza (we are set)."

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freeAgent
21 hours ago
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Why in the world would anyone want to mess with the Wayback Machine?
Los Angeles, CA
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Apple study exposes deep cracks in LLMs’ “reasoning” capabilities

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freeAgent
21 hours ago
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I've seen many people speculate that AI will be able to innovate on its own, but I don't see it. The current LLM-style AIs are all just pattern matching. They don't really "think" of anything novel.
Los Angeles, CA
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A Message From the Past (Thoughts on Nostalgia)

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freeAgent
21 hours ago
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How well is California's political watchdog doing its job?

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freeAgent
1 day ago
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J.D. Vance Accuses Ohio's Haitians of 'Massively Violating' Zoning Laws

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Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio) took another swing at the Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio, over the weekend. The Republican vice presidential nominee accused them of "massively violating" the city's zoning laws by living multiple families to a home.

Springfield's Haitian immigrant community has been the subject of a lot of attacks recently, including the salacious rumor that they've been stealing and eating local pets. Former President Donald Trump and other right-wing commenters endorsed this story, which appears to be an urban legend. Vance did as well, arguing that it helped to highlight the problems immigrants "flooding" communities.

In an interview posted Saturday, New York Times reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro pressed Vance on this point, asking this was a worthy trade-off given the turmoil those rumors have caused for Springfield's Haitian community. The town has received a number of bomb threats, and some Haitian parents have kept their kids out of school.

Vance responded by saying American leaders have ignored all the ways that Haitian immigrants have made life worse for American citizens in Springfield—specifically citing the rising cost of housing.

"Have we talked about the fact that many of them have been evicted from their homes, and then Haitian migrants are moved in, four families to a home, massively violating zoning laws?" he said. "They are paying way more for rent than an American citizen in Springfield can pay. So the American citizens have been evicted from their homes. They are finding housing unaffordable."

In the Times' printed interview transcript, the paper says it asked Vance for evidence of these zoning violations but hasn't been provided any.

While the cat-hunting always seemed implausible, it's more conceivable that some Haitian immigrants are violating Springfield's zoning laws.

The city's zoning code, like most zoning codes, groups much of the town's residential land into single-family zoning districts. The town's zoning code also defines what counts as a single family. In Springfield, that's either an individual or a married couple, their children, and up to two relatives, or a maximum of five unrelated individuals.

So to the degree that Haitian families are splitting homes between themselves (a not-unusual practice for low-income, newly arrived immigrants), they would be violating the town's zoning code.

An early purpose of zoning codes was to exclude immigrant populations from settled communities, as Jim Burling, the vice president of legal affairs at the Pacific Legal Foundation, recounts in his new book Nowhere to Live.

The famous/infamous 1926 U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld single-family-only zoning originated out of Euclid, Ohio, where the local government reserved much of the town's land for single-family homes as a way of keeping out new industry and the "immigrant hordes" it would attract.

Zoning codes that banned apartments, rooming houses, and other types of affordable housing did a lot of work to exclude lower-income immigrants (and lower-income people generally).

The poor could still get around these restrictions by dividing single-family homes among themselves. Municipal governments cracked down on this behavior by including definitions of families in their zoning codes, so that single-family structures would be reserved for single families.

The U.S. Supreme Court upheld occupancy limits with the 1974 case Village of Belle Terre v. Boraas.

A lack of data makes it difficult to evaluate Vance's claim that immigrants are causing local residents to be evicted and to see affordable housing options disappear.

We don't have good data on evictions in Springfield, Ohio. Princeton University's Eviction Lab, the most comprehensive national database on evictions, models the surrounding county's eviction rate only through 2018.

The local Springfield News-Sun reported in a recent investigation that local social service organizations had received reports of Haitian families being in overcrowded, substandard conditions. The city government is also investigating these claims. However, the paper didn't substantiate these claims.

That said, it would be expected that an influx of Haitian immigrants into Springfield would raise rents and housing prices—at least in the short term. All else being equal, higher demand means higher prices.

But that would be true of any form of population or economic growth, two things that Vance has expressed he'd like to see more of.

If Vance's dream of an all-American toaster factory opened in Springfield, Ohio, increasing wages and attracting new employees to town, that would increase housing demand and prices too. If Springfield's native residents started having more children, that would also put upward pressure on home prices over time.

That doesn't mean home prices would stay up. In free markets, high prices induce new supply.

America's perpetually rising housing costs aren't an inevitable result of rising demand from immigrants or anyone else. They're a product of zoning regulations that limit where new homes can be built, of tariffs that drive up the costs of imported building materials, and of countless other regulations.

Liberalizing zoning codes (or abolishing them completely) would make supply more elastic, cooling the upward cost pressures that come with economic and population growth.

Vance said in his Times interview that he would like to see more homes get built. But he also kept returning to his main claim that immigrants' demand for new housing is fundamentally illegitimate. For Vance, Haitians' presence in Springfield is unacceptable and so too is their demand for housing. The fact that their demand for housing need not come at the expense of American citizens is beside the point for him.

So instead of focusing on the ways a repeal of zoning laws might lower housing costs for everyone, Vance is instead focused on zealously enforcing zoning codes to keep Haitians out of town in the first place.

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freeAgent
1 day ago
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JD Vance: NIMBY.
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Former fugitive Alice Guo tied to crypto exchange that stole millions from users

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Disgraced former Philippine mayor Alice Guo has been linked to defunct Atom Asset Exchange (AAX), which laundered and stole customers’ crypto assets in 2022, amid a shocking trial of human trafficking and fraud that has captured the nation.

Guo made headlines in March for her ties to a financial slavery ring operating just 100 meters from her mayoral office in Bamban, a small town north of Manila. Investigators found almost 1,000 workers on the property, mostly running an illegal gambling operation that catered to Chinese clients. Some of the workers had been human trafficked and forced into conducting pig-butchering scams.

Baofu, the 20-acre compound housing the operation, was once 50% owned by Alice Guo. Investigators raiding Baofu found a car registered in her name, and three escape tunnels that led to an empty lot owned by Guo. An electricity bill in her name was also discovered.

Read more: Thousands enslaved in Cambodia to run fake ICOs and scams

This revelation led investigators to find anomalies in her documents suggesting that Guo had forged her Philippine heritage. Alice Guo’s fingerprints matched a Chinese citizen, raising concerns that she may be a Chinese spy.

“Is this mayor […] a Chinese spy? A big-time launderer? An enabler of scams and human trafficking? None of the above, one of the above or all of the above?” questioned Senator Risa Hontiveros at a hearing (via The Guardian).

Alice Guo’s business partners linked to AAX crypto exchange

Baofu’s co-incorporator, Huang Zhiyang, was a shareholder in another fraudulent business in the Philippines called Sun Valley Clark Hub Corporation. The firm owned several commercial and residential properties that housed a human trafficking ring that similarly forced victims into running crypto scams.

Rappler’s investigation found that Sun Valley’s shareholder, Hanyip Limited, was founded by Wang Dingkai. Hanyip’s listed address in Hong Kong is the same as Vico Capital Limited, owned by Chinese national Su Weiyi.

According to Hong Kong police, Su is also the “mastermind” of AAX cryptocurrency exchange, a now-defunct operation that once had over 2 million users. He’s accused of taking off with at least $2.15 million in customers’ crypto — but a petition alleges that figure is at least $30 million.

Su Weiyi co-owns other companies with partners tied to convicted felons Lin Baoying and Zhang Ruijin, who made international headlines last year for running Singapore’s largest money laundering ring. This connection has raised concerns that AAX, formerly one of Hong Kong’s largest crypto exchanges, was also laundering funds.

Zhang Ruijin was also an incorporator of Baofu together with Alice Guo and Huang Zhiyang.

Read more: India disconnects 20M phone numbers in ‘cyberslave’ crackdown

This intricate network of money laundering, human trafficking, and cryptocurrency scams is just one alarming case in South East Asia, where such organized crime is rapidly rising. In the Philippines, Alice Guo’s case has raised concerns of Chinese interference, where disputed territory in the South China Sea has escalated tensions between the two nations.

Guo faces 87 counts of money laundering and complaints of operating an illegal gambling ring and human trafficking. She and her accomplices could face up to 1,218 years in prison if found guilty.

Guo has denied all charges.

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freeAgent
1 day ago
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This story will make a good documentary someday.
Los Angeles, CA
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