Trump doesn't need Twitter, he could just use a blog. If he did, there would be pathways for people to find out he updated, and software that would let his followers read his latest messages, in reverse chronological order. There would be no Twitter to shut him down. Now, I'm not sure where he could go to get the blog hosted. I wonder if Blogger and Wordpress et al have considered what they'd do if he started a blog in either of those places. Thing to know is RSS is a lot easier to deploy than a Twitter-like system, and it could be distributed. We looked at lots of those things in the heyday of Napster to route around the music industry. I hate that I'm helping Trump be the monster he is, but I feel obligated to share this with my followers, who probably want to think about real-world applications of distributed internet technology.

Patience may be a virtue. For U.S. tech companies looking to do deals that involve China, it is also an expensive necessity. From a report: Cisco Systems and Applied Materials each received different lessons on that score last week. On Friday, Cisco found its $2.6 billion deal to buy Acacia Communications in serious jeopardy after Acaia announced it was terminating the merger due to a lack of approval from Chinese regulators. Cisco's unusual response was that it did, in fact, receive the necessary approval, and it is now seeking a court mandate that would prevent the deal from being terminated. The deal was first struck in July 2019 and was Cisco's largest acquisition since its $3.7 billion pickup of AppDynamics more than two years prior. Applied Materials took a different tack. The maker of semiconductor manufacturing gear earlier in the week announced in a regulatory filing that it has upped its price for Kokusai Electric to $3.5 billion from the $2.2 billion the two companies first agreed upon in June 2019. That deal is also only awaiting approval from Chinese regulators. With its higher price, Applied was able to extend the deadline to close the merger to March 19 from its original date of Dec. 30. Both cases are just the latest sign of soured trade relations between the U.S. and China. The departing Trump administration has continued to pursue aggressive actions, such as export controls on Chinese chipmaking giant SMIC and an order requiring the delisting of three Chinese telecommunications companies from the New York Stock Exchange.

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A new trend is emerging among ransomware groups where they prioritize stealing data from workstations used by top executives and managers in order to obtain "juicy" information that they can later use to pressure and extort a company's top brass into approving large ransom payouts. From a report: ZDNet first learned of this new tactic last week during a phone call with a company that paid a multi-million dollar ransom to the Clop ransomware gang. Similar calls with other Clop victims and email interviews with cybersecurity firms later confirmed that this wasn't just a one-time fluke, but instead a technique that the Clop gang had fine-tuned across the past few months. The technique is an evolution of what we've been seen from ransomware gangs lately. For the past two years, ransomware gangs have evolved from targeting home consumers in random attacks to going after large corporations in very targeted intrusions. These groups breach corporate networks, steal sensitive files they can get their hands on, encrypt files, and then leave ransom notes on the trashed computers. In some cases, the ransom note informs companies that they have to pay a ransom demand to receive a decryption key. In case data was stolen, some ransom notes also inform victims that if they don't pay the ransom fee, the stolen data will be published online on so-called "leak sites."

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D-Link is trying to make it simple to give your computer a Wi-Fi upgrade. From a report: The networking company has announced what it's calling an "industry-first" Wi-Fi 6 adapter built into a USB stick. Plug it into your laptop or desktop computer, and you may be able to get better performance than from your older Wi-Fi chip. The adapter advertises speeds up to 1,200Mbps. It's not entirely clear who the target audience is for this upgrade. You'll need to be connected to a Wi-Fi 6 router to get the biggest benefits, and most people still don't own one of those (the Wi-Fi 6 standard only started rolling out two years ago). And if the laptop or desktop you're using was bought any time in recent memory, chances are it supports Wi-Fi 5, which isn't a huge step down from Wi-Fi 6.

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Donald Trump received unexpected backing from Germany and France after the U.S. president was shut off social media platforms including Twitter and Facebook, extending Europe's battle with big tech. From a report: German Chancellor Angela Merkel objected to the decisions, saying on Monday that lawmakers should set the rules governing free speech and not private tech companies. "The chancellor sees the complete closing down of the account of an elected president as problematic," Steffen Seibert, her chief spokesman, said at a regular news conference in Berlin. Rights like the freedom of speech "can be interfered with, but by law and within the framework defined by the legislature -- not according to a corporate decision." The German leader's stance was echoed by French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire, who said that the state and not "the digital oligarchy" is responsible for regulations, calling big tech "one of the threats" to democracy.

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Today's song: Get Together.

Charlotte Web writes: With Linux 5.10 having shipped as the latest Long Term Support (LTS) release to be maintained for at least the next five years, a discussion has begun over dropping a number of old and obsolete CPU platform support currently found within the mainline kernel. For many of the architectures being considered for removal they haven't seen any new commits in years but as is the case once proposals are made for them to be removed there are often passionate users wanting the support to be kept.

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Social networking service Parler sued Amazon on Monday, accusing its web hosting service of breaking anti-trust laws in taking off the platform that is popular with many right-leaning social media users. You can read the court document here.

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A hacker took control of people's internet-connected chastity cages and demanded a ransom to be paid in Bitcoin to unlock it. From a report: "Your cock is mine now," the hacker told one of the victims, according to a screenshot of the conversation obtained by a security researcher that goes by the name Smelly and is the founder of vx-underground, a website that collects malware samples. In October of last year, security researchers found that the manufacturer of an Internet of Things chastity cage -- a sex toy that users put around their penis to prevent erections that is used in the BDSM community and can be unlocked remotely -- had left an API exposed, giving malicious hackers a chance to take control of the devices. That's exactly what happened, according to a security researcher who obtained screenshots of conversations between the hacker and several victims, and according to victims interviewed by Motherboard. A victim who asked to be identified only as Robert said that he received a message from a hacker demanding a payment of 0.02 Bitcoin (around $750 today) to unlock the device. He realized his cage was definitely "locked," and he "could not gain access to it."

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Here's something positive. I read in this profile of the GuyOnPorch and WomanInCar meme that became viral. Let me set the stage. The guy on the porch is an older white man. He's screaming obscenities at MAGAs (off-camera) telling them to get the fuck out of DC. Then the camera swings to a black woman in her car, and she's kind of astonished to see the white man saying what she was thinking. And she said so. I cried watching it. Later in the profile they said something that grabbed me. “Humphries was stunned that it was this 60-year-old White man speaking her truth. Their truth.” I wanted to give them both a big hug. We need to get our shit together. It's not just her truth and his truth, it's the truth of America. We love this country. And that means we love each other. For real.

Game streaming has been slowly growing in recent years with the launches of Nvidia's GeForce Now, Google's Stadia, Microsoft's xCloud and Amazon's Project Luna. This year, however, it looks to finally be picking up more steam. At CES 2021, LG announced that some of its 2021 TVs will support apps for playing games from Google Stadia and GeForce Now right on the TV. From a report: Those who subscribe to Stadia Pro, Google's subscription offering for Stadia that runs $10 per month that allows gamers to play an assortment of games for free, will be able to stream in 4K HDR, 60 FPS and 5.1 surround sound to their LG TVs. Stadia support is expected to arrive in the second half of the year in a handful of countries including the US, Canada, UK, France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway the Netherlands and Belgium. At launch, the app will only work on LG TVs running the company's webOS 6.0 software though the company says it will come to webOS 5.0 TVs "later this year." Support for Nvidia's platform is slightly less vague, with LG only promising that it will be available in the fourth quarter. The company did not mention which countries would be able to access the service.

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When we throw the Repubs out the airlock, I nominate Lee Zeldin to lead the parade, for this tweet.

I had a post here entitled Morning Depression Notes. I deleted it. I don't need to make your day worse. But I do want to say Monday January 11, 2021 is one of the worst days ever. I somehow made it through 2020 without getting depressed. But 2021, it's a real challenge. Maybe I just want to say one thing. Let's remove all the Republican senators, except Mitt Romney. Send them all home. They had a chance to stop this, the Dems tee'd it up for them, all they had to do was vote to convict. Sure they might have lost their jobs. They're going to lose them anyway. But they might have had a tiny little bit of residual honor, and we all could have stood up for them, when the MAGA mob comes for them. Now, let em go -- out the airlock. Good riddance.

Mozilla developers plan to remove support for using the Backspace key as a Back button inside Firefox. From a report: The change is currently active in the Firefox Nightly version and is expected to go live in Firefox 86, scheduled to be released next month, in late February 2021. The removal of the Backspace key as a navigational element didn't come out of the blue. It was first proposed back in July 2014, in a bug report opened on Mozilla's bug tracker. At the time, Mozilla engineers argued that many users who press the Backspace key don't always mean to navigate to the previous page (the equivalent of pressing the Back button).

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In 2018, the EU and UK imposed an almost-total ban because of the serious damage it could cause.