ICE Lawyers Are Hiding Their Names in Immigration Court:

"I've never heard of someone in open court not being identified," said Elissa Steglich, a law professor and co-director of the Immigration Clinic at the University of Texas at Austin. "Part of the court's ethical obligation is transparency, including clear identification of the parties. Not identifying an attorney for the government means if there are unethical or professional concerns regarding [the Department of Homeland Security], the individual cannot be held accountable. And it makes the judge appear partial to the government."

"Part of the court's ethical obligation is transparency, including clear identification of the parties." [...]

When Judge ShaSha Xu omitted the ICE lawyer's name, Attorney Jeffrey Okun asked her to identify who was arguing to deport his client. She refused.

Xu attributed the change to "privacy" because "things lately have changed." Xu told Okun that he could use Webex's direct messaging function to send the ICE lawyer his email, and the ICE lawyer would probably respond with her own name and address. [...]

The government's mystery attorney, who was prosecuting both Okun's and Gonzalez-Venegas's clients, wore glasses and a navy blue suit; her hair was pulled back primly from her face. She spoke quietly, with a tinge of vocal fry. Her name, according to Gonzalez Venegas, was Cosette Shachnow.

Shachnow, 33, began working for ICE in 2021, shortly after she graduated from law school, according to public records and her LinkedIn account. The latter lists "Civil Rights and Social Action" among her "favored causes."

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Elon Musk's health tech company Neuralink labeled itself a "small disadvantaged business" in a federal filing with the U.S. Small Business Administration, shortly before a financing round valued the company at $9 billion. [..] Neuralink's filing, dated April 24, would have reached the SBA at a time when Musk was leading the Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency. [...]

According to the SBA's website, a designation of SDB means a company is at least 51% owned and controlled by one or more "disadvantaged" persons who must be "socially disadvantaged and economically disadvantaged." An SDB designation can also help a business "gain preferential access to federal procurement opportunities," the SBA website says. [...]

Jared Birchall, a Neuralink executive, was listed as the contact person on the filing from April. Birchall, who also manages Musk's money as head of his family office, didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Previously, previously, previously, previously.

I went to Dubai wrongheaded. I learnt nothing and left nauseated. I had thought it would be fun -- funny, even -- to experience the disorientation of standing at the pivot point between two world systems. Instead, it was merely disorientating -- sickeningly so. There are hells on earth and Dubai is one: an infernal creation born of the worst of human tendencies. Its hellishness cannot be laid solely at the feet of the oligarchs, whose wealth it attracts, nor the violent organised criminals who relocate there to avoid prosecution. It is hellish because, as the self-appointed showtown of free trade, it provides normal people with the chance to buy the purest form of the most heinous commodity: the exploitation of others. If you want to know how it feels to have slaves, in the modern world -- and not be blamed openly for this desire -- visit Dubai. But know that you will not be blameless for doing so. Every Instagram post, every TikTok video, every gloating WhatsApp message sent from its luxury is an abomination. A PR campaign run by those who have already bought the product, and now want only to show you that they can afford it. [...]

If you try to humanise the place you will lose your mind. If you ask yourself what the woman at the hair-braiding stand left behind to be here, and why, you will lose your mind. If you accept the kindness of the staff with whom you make a paltry effort to speak each morning as they clear your dirty breakfast plate, you will lose your mind, because your tip is the only kindness you can meaningfully offer in return. Trying to attend to your own towel by the pool might cause the man who stands for hours in the ferocious sun to do so for you to lose his job. Being served makes us cruel infants. It demeans us all.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

If you ever wanted to know what it was like to be an engineer at Google during the early to late 2000s, here you go.

Now even though Google is fundamentally a spyware advertising company (some 80% of its revenue is advertising; the proportion was even higher back then), we Engineers were kept carefully away from that reality, as much as meat eaters are kept away from videos of the meat industry: don’t think about it, just enjoy your steak. If you think about it it will stop being enjoyable, so we just churned along, pretending to work for an engineering company rather than for a giant machine with the sole goal of manipulating people into buying cruft. The ads and business teams were on different floors, and we never talked to them.

↫ Elilla

Even back then, Google knew full well that what they were doing and working towards was deeply problematic and ethically dubious, at best, and reading about how young, impressionable Google engineers at the time figured that out by themselves is kind of heartbreaking. In those days, Google tried really hard to cultivate an image of being different than Apple or Microsoft, a place where employees were treated better and had more freedom, working for a company trying to make the web a better place.

Of course, none of that was actually true, but for a short while back then, a lot of people fell for it – yes, including you, even if you now say you didn’t – and reading about the experiences from people on the inside at the time, it was never actually true.

The lone volunteer maintainer of libxml2, one of the open source ecosystem’s most widely used XML parsing libraries, has announced a policy shift that drops support for embargoed security vulnerability reports. This change highlights growing frustration among unpaid maintainers bearing the brunt of big tech’s security demands without compensation or support.

[…]

Wellnhofer’s blunt assessment is that coordinated disclosure mostly benefits large tech companies while leaving maintainers doing unpaid work. He criticized the OpenSSF and Linux Foundation membership costs as a financial barrier to single person maintainers gaining additional support.

↫ Sarah Gooding

The problem is that, according to Wellnhofer, libxml2 was never supposed to be widely used, but now every major technology company with billions in quarterly revenue are basically expecting an unpaid maintainer to fix the security issues – many of which questionable – they throw his way.

The point is that libxml2 never had the quality to be used in mainstream browsers or operating systems to begin with. It all started when Apple made libxml2 a core component of all their OSes. Then Google followed suit and now even Microsoft is using libxml2 in their OS outside of Edge. This should have never happened. Originally it was kind of a growth hack, but now these companies make billions of profits and refuse to pay back their technical debt, either by switching to better solutions, developing their own or by trying to improve libxml2.

The behavior of these companies is irresponsible. Even if they claim otherwise, they don’t care about the security and privacy of their users. They only try to fix symptoms.

↫ Nick Wellnhofer

It’s wild that a library never intended to be widely used in any critical infrastructure is now used all over the place, even though it just does not have the level of quality and security needed to perform such a role. These are the words of Wellnhofer himself – an addition to the project’s readme now makes this point very clear, and I absolutely love the wording:

This is open-source software written by hobbyists, maintained by a single
volunteer, badly tested, written in a memory-unsafe language and full of
security bugs. It is foolish to use this software to process untrusted data.
As such, we treat security issues like any other bug. Each security report
we receive will be made public immediately and won’t be prioritized.

↫ libxml2’s readme

If you want libxml2 to fulfill a role it was never intended to fulfill, make it happen. With contributions. With money. Don’t just throw a whole slew of security demands a sole maintainer’s way and hope he will do the work for you.