It's hard to overstate what a scam academic and scientific publishing is. 1/

"Hitler's only kidding about the antisemitism" New York Times, 1922

Back in November, we learned that Disney had pulled a breathtakingly criminal wage-theft manuever on one of science-fiction's most beloved authors, Allan Dean Foster, an elderly cancer-patient caring for his sick wife. 1/

Alan Dean Foster is an sf legend - a writer who produced a shelf of original novels but also made a reputation novelizing movies and TV from Star Wars to Aliens, turning out books that transcended quickie adaptations, becoming beloved bestsellers in their own right. 1/

It's been eight years since @aaronsw  took his own life. Aaron had been charged with 13 felonies under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act #CFAA ) for violating the terms of service on the @JSTOR  database of scholarly articles. 1/

Dutch resistance members celebrate at the moment they heard of Adolf Hitler’s death over the radio, May 1945. (Colorized)

Today in "Cyberpunk is a warning, not a suggestion" news, Amazon has released a landlord edition of its Alexa surveillance speaker that can be forced upon tenants. 1/

Uber is a bezzle ("the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it"). Every bezzle ends. Uber's time is up. 1/

Byju's is a titan of the Indian ed-tech market, and its flagship program, The Learning App, has 40m users and 2.8m paid subscribers; its valuation is about to climb to $21b; it's been on a spending spree, buying up competitors in Asia and the USA. 1/

You know that free-floating sense that multinational corporations are above the law, able to buy their way out of consequences for even the most blatant, heinous crimes? There's a (nearly) unbelievable, highly concrete example of it underway right at this moment. 1/