Monthly Archives: May 2024

Article note: The modern executive refrain, "_I_ didn't engage in any malfeasance, I just created conditions in which every supplier and employee in the intentionally diffuse web of accountability could _choose_ to engage in malfeasance, or choose to be unemployed." We really need to find a way to prosecute that behavior before our society collapses.

Enlarge / An American Airlines Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner preparing to take off at Barcelona-El Prat Airport in Spain on May 1, 2024. (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )

The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating whether Boeing failed to complete required inspections on 787 Dreamliner planes and whether Boeing employees falsified aircraft records, the agency said this week. The investigation was launched after an employee reported the problem to Boeing management, and Boeing informed the FAA.

"The FAA has opened an investigation into Boeing after the company voluntarily informed us in April that it may not have completed required inspections to confirm adequate bonding and grounding where the wings join the fuselage on certain 787 Dreamliner airplanes," the FAA said in a statement provided to Ars today.

The FAA said it "is investigating whether Boeing completed the inspections and whether company employees may have falsified aircraft records. At the same time, Boeing is reinspecting all 787 airplanes still within the production system and must also create a plan to address the in-service fleet." The agency added that it "will take any necessary action—as always—to ensure the safety of the flying public."

Article note: It's weird reading about the Elop era (In which Microsoft executive Stephen Elop was hired to lead Nokia, publically sabotaged their platform projects, then returned to his former position at Microsoft when they bought Nokia's devices and services business for pennies on the dollar) as a historical piece. I had an n810 and was active on the Mameo forums while it was happening.

Article note: This is going to be a wild ride. The language in Section 230 that was probably inserted to protect content blockers (think porn blockers) potentially also protects Ad blockers (yay!) and likely also adversarial API access for removing content.

Article note: Hey! Relatively coherent, adult writing about the current middle east situation that admits there are no "good guy" political entities, only dead and suffering civilians. I hate that decade old grim predictions about the widespread rooting of oppression Olympics as the singular lens on society could lead nowhere good, no where coherent, and to performative-victimhood-as-power-play at all scales, but here we are.

Article note: What a weird object. Data General field data terminal thingy, running WinowsCE, on a PowerPC chip. Possibly the last new product introduced before EMC ate DG.

Article note: Turns out google understands privacy when it's them.

Enlarge / Kenneth Dintzer, litigator for the US Department of Justice, exits federal court in Washington, DC, on September 20, 2023, during the antitrust trial to determine if Alphabet Inc.'s Google maintains a monopoly in the online search business. (credit: Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg)

Near the end of the second day of closing arguments in the Google monopoly trial, US district judge Amit Mehta weighed whether sanctions were warranted over what the US Department of Justice described as Google's "routine, regular, and normal destruction" of evidence.

Google was accused of enacting a policy instructing employees to turn chat history off by default when discussing sensitive topics, including Google's revenue-sharing and mobile application distribution agreements. These agreements, the DOJ and state attorneys general argued, work to maintain Google's monopoly over search.

According to the DOJ, Google destroyed potentially hundreds of thousands of chat sessions not just during their investigation but also during litigation. Google only stopped the practice after the DOJ discovered the policy. DOJ's attorney Kenneth Dintzer told Mehta Friday that the DOJ believed the court should "conclude that communicating with history off shows anti-competitive intent to hide information because they knew they were violating antitrust law."

Article note: ...I was talking to a buddy in the Navy about how they're one of the last places with genuinely traceable, trustworthy supply lines. Apparently only in specific niches.

Enlarge / Cisco Systems headquarters in San Jose, California. (credit: Getty)

A Florida resident was sentenced to 78 months for running a counterfeit scam that generated $100 million in revenue from fake networking gear and put the US military's security at risk, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) announced Thursday.

Onur Aksoy, aka Ron Aksoy and Dave Durden, pleaded guilty on June 5, 2023, to two counts of an indictment charging him with conspiring with others to traffic in counterfeit goods, to commit mail fraud, and to commit wire fraud. His sentence, handed down on May 1, also includes an order to pay $100 million in restitution to Cisco, a $40,000 fine, and three years of supervised release. Aksoy will also have to pay his victims a sum that a court will determine at an unspecified future date, the DOJ said.

According to the indictment [PDF], Aksoy began plotting the scam around August 2013, and the operation ran until at least April 2022. Aksoy used at least 19 companies and about 15 Amazon storefronts, 10 eBay ones, and direct sales—known collectively as Pro Network Entities—to sell tens of thousands of computer networking devices. He imported the products from China and Hong Kong and used fake Cisco packaging, labels, and documents to sell them as new and real. Legitimate versions of the products would've sold for over $1 billion, per the indictment.

Article note: The Gnome folk's "Let's break the ecosystem to support oUr ViSiOn, then act condescending to anyone who complains" behavior has been going on for over a decade. I essentially stopped using xfce as my daily driver because of trickle-down brain damage, and they just keep breaking more things. At least KDE has been generally good lately.

Article note: Interesting. OpenCASCADE geometry with SolveSpace's constraint solver, glued together by the HorizonEDA guy. FreeCAD >0.19 isn't _as_ horrible as people like to act, but I always like to see reasonable options in the FOSS CAD space. I compiled and made a quick NEMA17 mount plate just to jam a dimensioned thing in to it, it has some quirks about commit vs. cancel and not entering input fields when I expect, but the basic experience seems pretty decent.