Powderhorn

I recently wrote about an ambush we initiated six days ago (me working remote on this).

There is a lot to unpack here.

The New York owners showing up led to the third owner flying in from Austria to see what the fuck was going on.

Essentially:

• The office manager has been fired.
• The pest-control service has been fired.
• The landscaping company has been fired.
• The maintenance guy has been fired.
• The entire property management company has been fired.
• The military has finalized removing the complex from its list of approved housing.
• New companies have been hired to start fixing shit, which she says has made a seachange in the prior 48 hours.
• The fire marshal shows up Monday to do a unit-by-unit inspection to ensure that each has functioning smoke detectors and a functioning fire extinguisher.
• A mysterious dotted-lined-to-the-owners woman has appeared to handle the boots-on-the-ground problems.
• Several tenants on illegal leases (i.e., signed in someone else's name) have been evicted.
• Narcotics is looking into the complex.
• The Killeen Police Department is stepping up patrols.
• The roaches are gone for now, the hot water is working again, and her grandson could be heard in the background (the "little bug" uses my old phone for games).

I mean, not bad for a couple of plebs.

The owners seem to have been caught totally off-guard and seem genuinely alarmed by the state the complex was allowed to get into, and they are not holding back on fixing things even though they've lost all their soldiers.

The military determination can be reversed with corrective action, and you really don't want to own a complex in Killeen when you're blacklisted from service members.

All in all, could have been a worse result. The funny thing is, the local reporter didn't show up to the ambush as scheduled, but all of this is happening all the same.

As I well know, you really don't want to get on my ex's bad side. Machiavellian is a kind term for what she can do, and when she brings me into the mix for plotting, we are a destructive force.

The complex pissed off the wrong person.

A San Francisco-based coffee chain that sparked backlash with a policy to remove Pride flags from their stores has reversed its decision over a week later.

“I made a mistake and I am sincerely sorry,” said Mahesh Sadarangani, the chief executive of Philz Coffee, in a statement on Friday. “The Pride flag is a symbol of safety and belonging for people who don’t always find that in the world, and that is not something I want to take away from anyone who walks into a Philz.”

Last week, in a statement to the Guardian, Sadarangani framed the move as a step toward inclusivity. He said other flags would also come down for consistency.

Backlash from Philz Coffee’s workers and customers was swift. An online petition expressing opposition to the policy, which appeared to be started by company baristas, racked up more than 7,300 signatures. The company has built a reputation on being an ally to the LGBTQ+ community. outside of building marked 'department of education'

I'm tired of all this winning.

Air Canada has announced a temporary suspension of flights from Toronto and Montreal to New York’s John F Kennedy airport, citing rising fuel prices.

The move comes amid growing concerns that airlines worldwide may scale back services as aviation fuel costs climb in the wake of the US and Israel’s ongoing war with Iran, which entered a fragile ceasefire earlier in April. Although Iran announced on Friday that the strait of Hormuz had reopened, helping ease oil prices, fuel costs remain significantly elevated after weeks of disruption.

Separately on Friday, Spirit Airlines has asked the US federal government for hundreds of millions of dollars in emergency funding to offset a surge in fuel costs, the Air Current industry website reported, citing unnamed sources. Spirit did not immediately return a request for comment.

“Jet fuel prices have doubled since the start of the Iran conflict, affecting some lower profitability routes and flights which now are no longer economically feasible,” Air Canada said in a statement on Friday. “Schedule adjustments including some frequency reductions are being made in response.”

Hundreds of previously redacted records reveal how Amazon has put pressure on independent sellers using its platform into raising their prices on the sites of competitors such as Walmart and Target, so that Amazon can appear to have lower prices, California authorities allege.

The global conglomerate became concerned even if a competitor was selling an item for as little as a penny less, according to one segment of the newly unredacted evidence.

The documents – which have never previously been reported on – include internal emails, deposition testimony and confidential corporate presentations that the California attorney general, Rob Bonta, obtained as part of a civil case his office launched in 2022 accusing Amazon of large-scale price-fixing.

The Guardian obtained and reviewed the cache of evidence, which has been filed in San Francisco county superior court but has not yet become publicly available. Within the documents, lawyers for the state of California have unmasked key details, paragraphs and sometimes whole pages that had previously been blacked out. A judge permitted some redactions to remain at Amazon’s request.

Just wait until we bomb tomorrow to cover the spread on oil futures for these oligarchs. Nothing about this war feels real in terms of motives.

Oil and gas prices fell sharply on Friday after Iran said the strait of Hormuz was open to commercial shipping, potentially clearing the way for tankers holding millions of barrels of oil and gas to reach the global market.

Iran’s foreign minister said vessels would be free to transit the strait of Hormuz for the duration of the 10-day ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon, which was struck on Thursday.

Brent crude, the international benchmark, fell more than 10% to $88.8 a barrel. That is well below a peak of $119 last month, but still much higher than the $72 before the war.

Donald Trump later said the US naval blockade on Iran’s use of the strait would remain in full force until Washington had struck a deal with Tehran. He said the process “should go very quickly” because “most of the points are already negotiated”.

OnlyFans, the UK adult video platform, is in talks to sell a minority stake to a US investor that will value the business at more than $3bn (£2.2bn).

The London-based company is in advanced talks to sell a stake of less than 20% to the San Francisco-based investment firm Architect Capital, according to the Financial Times. Sources familiar with the process confirmed the talks to the Guardian.

OnlyFans has decided that offloading a minority stake is the best guarantee of stability for a business dealing with the death of its owner, Leonid Radvinsky. Radvinsky, a Ukrainian-American billionaire, died of cancer last month at the age of 43.

It is understood that OnlyFans is interested in a deal with Architect because the firm has expertise in the financial services sector, reflecting the UK company’s interest in offering banking products to its creators, who have struggled to access such services owing to the nature of their work.

I think it’s important to understand that, despite claims to the contrary, age verification is, inherently, a right-wing effort. While it’s currently true that age verification laws are being supported globally by those on the political right and left, they started as very much a right wing effort to suppress disliked speech by claiming it was harmful to children. Even if some of the laws now have bipartisan support, we need to understand its origins.

People will point to the bipartisan nature of many of these current laws to push back on the idea that it’s truly a right wing effort. Australia’s monstrosity of age-gating laws was adopted by the collective efforts of center-left and left-wing political parties part of the ruling government. The Online Safety Act in the United Kingdom was the brainchild of Conservative Party MPs under former Prime Minister Theresa May, but the Labour government under Prime Minister Keir Starmer is now carrying out the policies of the sweeping digital regulatory measures in national law.

But age verification laws, today, originate from right-wing and far-right efforts to restrict access to porn and other content that could be classified as “harmful to minors.” As documented extensively by academics, cybersecurity experts, folks here at Techdirt, and in my own investigative journalism, these laws define content as “pornographic” or “harmful to minors” under such broad definitions.

For example, the age verification law in Kansas defines the material on the internet covered by the harmful classification to include “acts of homosexuality.” That terminology is a clear nod to the not-too-long-ago era of unconstitutional state sodomy laws that made it a criminal offense to have same-sex sexual activity. The Texas age verification law intended to compel online adult entertainment platforms to plaster public health warnings about the ostensibly addictive nature of watching pornography. There is no accepted evidence of this.

Google began rolling out “personal intelligence” in Gemini early this year, giving AI subscribers the option of a more customized experience when using the company’s chatbot. Today, it’s using personal intelligence to tie its image-generation model to Google Photos. If you opt in, generated images will have access to your photos and associated labels to simplify prompts and produce more accurate AI images.

This change essentially streamlines an existing workflow. Google’s Nano Banana 2 is among the best AI image generators available, and it was already possible to feed it images of yourself or others to use as context for creating new AI content. Adding personal intelligence to the mix makes that process smoother by turning the image bot loose on the content of your photos, if indeed that’s something you want to do.

It is generally true that adding more personal data to an AI prompt results in a better output. Google offers a few examples of how connecting Nano Banana to Photos can help in this way. You won’t have to pack as much context into your prompts—you can just refer to “my family” or “my dog” to let the robot find useful images in your Photos library.

Just what I need. Family photos that never happened. "OK, Google, show me a Christmas photo where my dad actually went out for a pack of smokes and immediately returned."

The US could face foreign attacks, food shortages and agricultural “devastation” if the supreme court rules against Monsanto in a closely watched case over pesticide regulation that is set for arguments later this month, according to a series of legal briefs supporting the company.

In contrast, opposing legal briefs warn that if the court sides with Monsanto, consumers will be stripped of their rights to sue when they develop cancer or other serious diseases they attribute to exposure to dangerous chemicals. Companies will be able to hide product risks with little accountability, they warn.

The case centers on glyphosate – a widely used weed-killing pesticide that has long been a favorite of farmers, but also has been scientifically linked to cancer in multiple studies.

The court’s task is to determine if federal law essentially pre-empts states’ labeling requirements for products that could cause harm.

Europe has only six weeks’ supply of jet fuel left before shortages will hit because of the Iran war, according to the head of a global energy watchdog.

Fatih Birol, the executive director of the International Energy Agency, said there would be flight cancellations “soon” if oil supplies from the Middle East were not restored within the coming weeks.

“I can tell you soon we will hear the news that some of the flights from city A to city B might be cancelled as a result of lack of jet fuel,” he told the Associated Press.

Good time to take a train.

This morning, over breakfast, in the course of discussing the week’s news, I happened to say the word “Coachella” in front of my two scornful 11-year-olds, whose heads snapped up from their screens in unison. “How have you heard of Coachella?” said one in amazement. “How have you heard of Coachella?” I replied. They exchanged a look with which I’ve become increasingly familiar – namely, the “here we go” look reserved by the very young for the very middle-aged. “What is Coachella, then?” I said, to which they replied: “It’s where influencers go.”

This is, of course, an accurate summary of what the California music and arts festival has become in the 27 years since its inception, but that’s not why I bring it up. The festival, which is running this week, has featured Jack White, FKA Twigs and Sabrina Carpenter, but most of the publicity has gone on the audience; specifically, on the attendance of Justin Trudeau, the former prime minister of Canada, who, along with his girlfriend, Katy Perry, was photographed dancing to Justin Bieber and squatting chairless on a kerb, red plastic cups perched on their knees.

Just go to a burn instead! No photos, nearly everyone's middle-aged, and the music is better (at least at Flipside). There's also way more nudity, if that's your thing.

While Larry was producing most of the content for the "Request/Reponse" chapter for the next edition of our book, I took the lead on writing a section on QUIC, since I have closely followed its development.

Our expectation is that the role of QUIC will be about as important as that of TCP in the coming years, which means it warrants more substantial coverage than we provided in the last edition. So I dug a bit deeper into the bits and bytes of QUIC than I have previously, with a goal of bringing the coverage up to par with our TCP coverage. In addition to reading through the RFCs, I found lots of good information in the original QUIC design spec as well as some conference publications on the design and evaluation of SPDY (predecessor of HTTP/2) and QUIC.

One rather trivial thing that makes it harder for me to get to grips with QUIC is the fact that its RFCs (four of them, spanning hundreds of pages) lack pictures of the packet headers. The rationale for this, I believe, is that QUIC makes extensive use of fields that are variable in length and frequently not aligned on 32-bit boundaries, which makes packet header pictures a bit complicated and less tidy.