schwit1 shares a pay-walled op-ed from the Wall Street Journal (also excerpted at the URL below): The U.S. Postal Service delivers the company's boxes well below its own costs. Like an accelerant added to a fire, this subsidy is speeding up the collapse of traditional retailers in the U.S. and providing an unfair advantage for Amazon... First-class mail effectively subsidizes the national network, and the packages get a free ride. An April analysis from Citigroup estimates that if costs were fairly allocated, on average parcels would cost $1.46 more to deliver... My analysis of available data suggests that around two-thirds of Amazon's domestic deliveries are made by the Postal Service. It's as if Amazon gets a subsidized space on every mail truck... Congress should demand the enforcement of the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, and the Postal Service needs to stop picking winners and losers in the retail world. The federal government has had its thumb on the competitive scale for far too long.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Israeli Prime minister's office says the compound will be accessible gradually as from Sunday.

Reader nik submitted a malicious document. It width:867px" />

It width:852px" />

And then we can use Woanware width:829px" />

Unfortunately, the .lnk file does not contain interesting metadata. But we can see that it uses PowerShell to download an executable from Dropbox.

Didier Stevens
Microsoft MVP Consumer Security
blog.DidierStevens.com DidierStevensLabs.com

(c) SANS Internet Storm Center. https://isc.sans.edu Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

Must-read: How Trump used Facebook to win. Take-away -- vote your interests, completely discount emotions. They are being programmed.

To fully appreciate the norm-busting insanity of Ivanka repping the US at the G20, imagine another country doing it.

The tech industry feels threatened by the FCC nuking "net neutraility." Of course the net should be neutral. But the tech industry's idea of net neutrality is "we own the net."

The tech industry is no better or worse than any other industry. They will take whatever isn't nailed down. When they claim to rep the public, know that that's just public relations. They only rep their own interest.

So if you want to be able to link out of Facebook and not be trapped in their silo, tell them that. And if you want Google's search engine to be free of Google's strategy taxes, say so.

Without their full committment to public ownership of the Internet, I'd tell them to forget about public support.

To answer the question -- you ask for something from tech when they want something from us.

I wonder if news orgs consider that Americans would stand up for them as the president and his family get more abusive (the same family that stands in for the president at international summit meetings). The assumption that all or most Americans are lazy and weak is itself weak. Flip it around, set the expectation for us all to be strong.

In 2002, when I was working on RSS 2.0, I started keeping a blog-like diary of thoughts. I stumbled across this doc when I was looking for an explanation of guids for the piece about the blog bugfix. The first part was so good, I wondered why I had no memory of it. Then I got to the second part. The attacks were ugly, personal and awful and that's what I had put out of my mind, and I never wanted to point to this piece for fear of inviting more abuse. But the first and last parts were good, and RSS 2.0 went on to be a juggernaut. And that's most of what I wanted.

In my blogging software, permalinks are constructed by smashing together the hour, minute and second a post was created into a string. So if a post was created at 11:52:02, its permalink would be 115202.

But my code was erroneously constructing the permalink by smashing together the hour, month (the error) and second. The month is the same for all posts published on the same day. And that meant that if one item were posted at 11:02:53 and another at 11:17:53 they would have the same permalink, 110753 (07 is the month). Not a huge problem except we use the permalink to form the guid, and that's what feed readers use to determine if an item is new or not. So the second item would be ignored, erroneously because it has the same guid as the first.

The error probably happened a few times in the approximately two months I've been using the new old school system. It certainly happened yesterday (which is how I got on the trail of the bug). It was very deeply buried, but the rational code debugging method eventually revealed the problem and the fix for such problems is well-known.

How could one make such a mistake you might ask? A month and a minute, what do they have in common that could confuse a computer? Well, in the language of dateformat, a package used to format dates, a month is noted as "mm" and the minute as "MM". So the errant programmer literally asked for the month by specifying the permalink as "ddmmss" when it should have been "ddMMss". This, my friends, is where the bug was buried. ;-)

But! You can't just fix it. Because that would change the guids of all previous posts, potentially, and cause posts that have already been seen, many of them perhaps, to be seen as new by feed readers. People don't like it when your feed does that. So I left the bug as-is for posts before today, and all new posts have correctly formed permalinks. This is the first post with a correct permalink. Let's see if it worked! :-)

PS: Yes it did. And the old links worked too. Whew.

Kind of obvious Trump Jr and Kushner were briefed on the hacked DNC emails at the meeting.

Seems like a day for looking back through tech history. Brendan Eich dug up a 1998 email exchange betw Bill Joy and myself re Java being a locked box. In 2017 people still program in Java, but it did not take over the world.

Rex Hammock: "Note: on this account, there is no arguing over the who's at fault. This isn't a court of law. It's a court of Rex."

Sorry, I pointed to Facebook. Had to. That bit of philosophy needed to be enshrined. It's so correct. When people debate stuff on Facebook as if they're on All In with Chris Hayes or The Situation Room, or in front of the Supreme Court, they are being foolish. Rex is listening. Maybe a couple of other people. You're hanging out in his back yard on a hot summer afternoon. We're talking about a car driver who deliberately hit a bike rider and fled the scene, and everyone else here is an urban bike rider. Arguing about who was at fault based on some weird technicality is rude.

This is not a court of law, as Rex says, it's a court of Rex. In other words, mind your manners dude.

Frank Rich says the moment of truth will come for Trump as 2018 midterms approach as it did for Nixon in 1974.

I didn't discover cargo shorts until people started dissing them. They are useful. I need pockets esp when I'm out bike riding. If you don't like em, you don't know what you're missing.

And at my age, I don't worry too much about how I look. I'm pretty much invisible anyway. And if you still have a problem with my wearing cargo shorts, you seriously need to get a life. ❤️

Good progress on the Feedviewer app. Here's the NYT > Politics feed. Note it is not a full-item feed. It would be interesting to curate a set of feeds that are designed for the feedviewer approach to reading.