The Daily Parker

I'll get to the final head-to-head comparison between my Garmin Venu and Fitbit Ionic later today. Meanwhile:

• The Dept of Homeland Security plans to deploy 150 agents to Chicago, and no one will say why.
• Could Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan finally face consequences for his career-spanning corruption?
• Charles Blow asks: where's the outrage?
• Bruce Schneier explains and hypothesizes about the Twitter class break last week.

And finally, because our Covid-19 numbers have started creeping up, indoor bar service will halt on Friday.

Happy tax day! And now, we're off to the races:

• Jeff Sessions lost the Republican US Senate primary in Alabama.
• What the hell was the president talking about yesterday?
• George Will explains the differences, such as they are, between 
• Illinois governor JB Pritzker announced a tightening of the state's re-opening rules, while Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot warned we're dangerously close to shutting down again.
• Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt tested positive for Covid-19.
• Author John M. Barry, who wrote about the 1918 influenza pandemic, says our current pandemic will get much, much worse.
• Lauren Martinchek says the Lincoln Project are not our friends.
• The NSA has a good set of rules to follow to secure your VPN.

Finally, Bloomberg takes a backward glance at the rise and fall of the Segway.

As I take a minute from banging away on C# code to savor my BBQ pork on rice from the local Chinese takeout, I have these to read:

• President Trump once again said the quiet part out loud, announcing he plans to gut fair-housing rules because otherwise they would "have...a devastating impact on these once thriving Suburban areas."
• The Supreme Court will hear arguments whether the House can have access to Robert Mueller's unredacted report—in the fall.
• Josh Marshall goes over the "ominous and harrowing" Covid-19 numbers from yesterday.
• Bruce Schneier discusses the security value of inefficiency.
• Summer in Illinois started warm and dry, and will continue to be.

And today's fortune cookie says: "Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst in bed."

My inbox does not respect the fact that I had meetings between my debugging sessions all day. So this all piled up:

• Josh Marshall calls our Covid-19 response an "abject failure" compared to, say, Europe's. Paul Krugman says it shows we've "failed the marshmallow test."
• Former CIA acting director Michael Morell says President Biden will inherit "a world of trouble." ("Arguably, only Abraham Lincoln, with Southern secession waiting, faced a tougher challenge when taking office than would Biden.")
• Illinois governor JB Pritzker yesterday signed legislation decreeing Election Day a state holiday.
• Alexandra Petri lists some other statues we should remove.
• Bruce Schneier calls out Postbank, a South African bank, for a "catastrophic security failure."
• Arizona State University researchers have found evidence that burning coal in the Siberian Traps caused sudden global warming that led to the Permo-Triassic extinction event 252 million years ago.
• Chicago's Mercury Theater has become the latest fatality in Covid-19's assault on the arts.
• Chicago History Today found photos of the very last Western Avenue streetcar run on 17 June 1956.

Finally, conferencing app Zoom will roll out true end-to-end encryption in July.

Last weekend's tsunami continues to ripple:

• Ultra-right-wing US Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR), writing in the New York Times to great opprobrium, recommends sending in the troops.
• Former general and Defense Secretary James Mattis publicly rebuked President Trump in a 3-page letter published in the Atlantic, a move that Josh Marshall supports while adding that the letter also "its own form of militarization of society." Former Joint Chiefs Chair Mike Mullen also criticized the president earlier this week.
• In Washington, law enforcement officers from unknown parts of the government have refused to identify themselves or their agencies to reporters, adding to the chaos.
• Nationwide, last weekend's protests already seem to have caused an increase in Covid-19 cases, with many more expected over the next two weeks.
• Kevin Drum says the Republican Party must not just be defeated in November; it must be routed.
• Radley Balko says the raid that killed Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Ky., was illegal—but there is almost no way to stop the police from doing something like that again.
• Architecture critic Bryan Lee Jr believes "America's cities were designed to oppress."
• In Columbus, Ohio, employees at a local taco chain quit when directed to fill orders for local police.
• In Chicago, local liquor store chain Binny's sustained damage at 11 of its 42 locations, but vows to reopen. Also, yesterday Governor Pritzker approved legislation allowing takeout cocktails from licensed restaurants.
• April 2020 saw the largest number of job losses of any month since 1939, and May will come in second.
• Finally, Bruce Schneier takes Zoom CEO Eric Yuan to task for the firm's latest security misstep.

Just another quiet week in 2020...

The most powerful man in the world threw a hissy fit yesterday when Twitter finally—finally!—slapped a misinformation warning on one of his lies:

President Donald Trump on Wednesday threatened social media companies with new regulation or even shuttering a day after Twitter added fact checks to two of his tweets.

The president can’t unilaterally regulate or close the companies, which would require action by Congress or the Federal Communications Commission. But that didn't stop Trump from angrily issuing a strong warning.

Claiming tech giants “silence conservative voices,” Trump tweeted, “We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen.”

Trump and his campaign angrily lashed out Tuesday after Twitter added a warning phrase to two Trump tweets that called mail-in ballots “fraudulent” and predicted that “mail boxes will be robbed,” among other things. Under the tweets, there is now a link reading “Get the facts about mail-in ballots” that guides users to a Twitter “moments” page with fact checks and news stories about Trump’s unsubstantiated claims.

Trump replied on Twitter, accusing the platform of “interfering in the 2020 Presidential Election” and insisting that “as president, I will not allow this to happen.” His 2020 campaign manager, Brad Parscale, said Twitter’s “clear political bias” had led the campaign to pull “all our advertising from Twitter months ago.” Twitter has banned all political advertising since last November.

Since the only response that people of any intelligence should give this malarkey is laughter, I present to you the president's own words as lip-synced by comedian Sarah Cooper:

A total failure to imagine a likely risk scenario has lost the State of Washington possibly hundreds of millions of dollars to thieves who defrauded the state unemployment agency:

Employment Security Department Commissioner Suzi LeVine says the names of potentially thousands of Washingtonians, many who remain employed, were used to make fake unemployment claims and defraud the state of hundreds of millions of dollars.

The state was hit especially hard in the early weeks of the coronavirus pandemic, as state and federal benefits ramped up to handle the sharp and staggering number of claims. 

Commissioner LeVine says she will make sure victim’s rights are protected, and those where benefits were paid out to the criminals won’t be liable for any sort of repayment.

“I will say this again because it’s really important. We did not have a data breach,” said Levine. “And the information was not stolen from us. It was the utilization of stolen information on our site.”

The identity information most likely came from multiple earlier data breaches, including from credit-reporting agencies. Washington State simply didn't authenticate applications properly before disbursing money: 

“These are very sophisticated criminals who have pretty robust collections of information on people, and they are activating and monetizing that information,” [LeVine] said.

No, these are, in fact, really dumb criminals who exploited the eagerness of LeVine's department getting money to claimants before employers returned validation letters. And the fact that LeVine and her department's security folks couldn't see this possibility ahead of time means they may not have the skills to do their jobs in the Internet era.

Charlie Pierce, noting that "[p]eople with firearms forced the civil government of the state of Michigan to shut itself down," wants to know in what sense this isn't terrorism. In other fun weekend stories:

• The Illinois Dept. of Employment Security had a "glitch" in their unemployment claims processing app that exposed private information. I'm curious who wrote the software.
• Jared Kushner: evil and stupid.
• Speaking of evil and stupid, the president continues to downplay and undercount Covid-19 deaths because, let's face it, he's responsible for many of them.
• Chicago faces another $1bn budget hole next year.

And it's pouring, and will continue to do so for several more hours.

I read the news today, oh boy:

• Close to 2,000 former Justice Department and FBI officials called on Attorney General William Barr to resign, which he won't do because he's this close to total world domination.
• Former Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security Mary McCord agrees.
• Chicago will open six new Covid-19 testing sites around the city in an effort to get to 10,000 tests per day.
• Pilot-journalist James Fallows says "air travel is going to be very bad, for a very long time."
• Cranky Flyer agrees, pointing to United's short-sighted efforts to preserve cash.
• Will white-collar companies ever re-open offices? Maybe, but with differences.

Finally, the USS Nevada, a battleship that survived World War I and Pearl Harbor until the Navy scuttled her in 1948, has been found.

Remember slow news days? Me neither.

• Republican legislators and business owners have pushed back on Illinois Governor JB Pritzker's plan to re-open the economy, preferring instead to force their employees into unsafe situations so they can return to making money.
• Professional dilettante Jared Kushner's leadership in getting a bunch of kids to organize mask distribution went about as well as one might predict.
• More reasonable people simply see how it means we're going to be in this a while.
• California has sued Uber and Lyft for violating AB5, claiming the two ride-sharing companies “gain an unfair and unlawful competitive advantage by inappropriately classifying massive numbers of California drivers as independent contractors,” according to California Attorney General Xavier Becerra.
• Assuming states were allowed to go bankrupt, Crain's Steven Strahler believes an Illinois bankruptcy might not be what anyone actually wants.
• Illinois' $560m shortfall in gasoline taxes right now has put transit projects at risk.
• The BBC tries to help the rest of the world understand why the US has a backlash against face masks, as does NBC.
• If you take New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut out of the equation, the number of Covid-19 cases continues to rise in the US.
• Bottled water sales have gone up 57% year-over-year, so Consumer Reports wants to know why people are paying so much for someone else's tap water? Especially since bottlers often don't pay their water bills while residents are getting their water shut off.
• Anyone remember that it's the 20th anniversary of the ILOVEYOU virus?

And finally, a cute diner in Toronto where I had breakfast last June has moved to delivery service during the lockdown. Too bad they can't deliver to Chicago.