In 2017, Equifax suffered the worst data-breach in history, leaking the deep, nonconsensual dossiers it had compiled on 148m Americans and 15m Britons, (and 19k Canadians) into the world, to form an immortal, undeletable reservoir of kompromat and premade identity-theft kits:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Equifax_data_breach
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/28/dealer-management-software/#antonin-scalia-stole-your-car
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Equifax_data_breach
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/28/dealer-management-software/#antonin-scalia-stole-your-car
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/2
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/3
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/equifax-password-username-admin-lawsuit-201118316.html
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/4
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents_involving_the_Boeing_737
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/5
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/6
Drip, drip, drip, as you realize that the most expensive thing you own - which is also the thing you had hoped to shelter for the rest of your life - isn't even a teardown, it's just a pure liability. Even if you razed the structure, you couldn't start over, because the soil is full of PCBs. It's not a toxic asset, because it's not an asset. It's just toxic.
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Cory Doctorow
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https://jacobin.com/2017/09/equifax-retail-credit-company-discrimination-loans
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The Equifax Way
jacobin.comCory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/8
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/9
There's a direct line from that acquisition spree to the Equifax breach(es). First of all, companies like Equifax were early adopters of technology.
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Cory Doctorow
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These systems are intrinsically fragile, because things fall apart at the seams, and these systems are *all* seams. They are tech-debt personified.
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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https://www.bl.uk/home/british-library-cyber-incident-review-8-march-2024.pdf
There's a reason libraries, cities, insurance companies, and other giant institutions keep getting breached: they started accumulating tech debt before anyone else, so they've got more asbestos in the walls, more sagging joists, more foundation cracks and more termites.
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/13
Then, Equifax deliberately made this situation *infinitely worse* through a series of mergers in which it bought dozens of *other* companies that all had their own version of this problem, and duct-taped their failing, fucked up IT systems to its own.
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/14
But wait, there's more! The *reason* to merge with your competitors is to create a monopoly position, and the value of a monopoly position is that it makes a company too big to fail, which makes it too big to jail, which makes it *too big to care*.
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Cory Doctorow
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Which is why the increasingly desperate pleas for more resources to shore up Equifax's crumbling IT and security infrastructure went unheeded.
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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(The biggest difference was that Boeing once had a useful, high-quality product, whereas Equifax *started off* as an irredeemably terrible, if efficient, discrimination machine, and *grew* to become an equally terrible, but also ferociously incompetent, enterprise.)
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Change_Healthcare_ransomware_attack
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/22
United's execs are the kind of execs on a relentless quest to be too big to care, and so they don't care.
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/23
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/01/politics/data-stolen-healthcare-hack/index.html
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/24
Failures like Ticketmaster's, which flushed 500 million users' personal information into the identity-theft mills just last month.
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/25
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/31/business/ticketmaster-hack-data-breach.html
But enough about that. Let's go car-shopping!
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Cory Doctorow
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https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/27/business/cdk-global-cyber-attack-update/index.html
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Cory Doctorow
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https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/a-supreme-court-justice-is-why-you
The CDK story follows the Equifax/Boeing/Change Healthcare/Ticketmaster pattern, but with an important difference.
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A Supreme Court Justice Is Why You Can’t Buy a Car Right Now
Matt Stoller (BIG by Matt Stoller)Cory Doctorow
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Rather than selling out, Cottrell blew the whistle, using Cottrell's own words to convince a district court that CDK had violated antitrust law.
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Cory Doctorow
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Dealers cheered this on: CDK/Reynolds had been steadily hiking prices, while ingesting dealer data and using it to gouge the dealers on additional services, while denying dealers access to their own data.
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-7th-circuit/1879150.html
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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https://locusmag.com/2022/09/cory-doctorow-moneylike/
When the 7th Circuit set up every American car owner to be pig-butchered, they cited one of the most important cases in antitrust history: the 2004 unanimous Supreme Court decision in *Verizon v Trinko*:
https://www.oyez.org/cases/2003/02-682
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Cory Doctorow: Moneylike
Locus OnlineCory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/073_2021.06.28_mtd_order_memo.pdf
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Cory Doctorow
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/billionaire-robert-brockman-accused-of-biggest-tax-fraud-in-u-s-history-dies-at-81-11660226505
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Cory Doctorow
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It's why you can't buy a car.
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Cory Doctorow
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https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca10/22-1164/22-1164-2023-08-21.html
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Chase Manufacturing v. Johns Manville Corporation, No. 22-1164 (10th Cir. 2023)
Justia LawCory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/45
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/18/urban-wildlife-interface/#combustible-walled-gardens
But they misunderstand the relationship between corporate power and corporate conduct. The *reason* corporations accumulate power is so that they can be insulated from the consequences of the harms they wreak upon the rest of us.
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/46
The *only* reason to accumulate corporate power is to grow too big to care. Any corporation that amasses enough power that it *need not* care about us *will not* care about it.
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/47
Zuck is not exceptional: there were a million sociopaths whom investors would have funded to monopolistic dominance if he had balked. A monopoly like Facebook has a Zuck-shaped hole at the top of its org chart, and only someone Zuck-shaped will ever fit through that hole.
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/51
https://www.hope.net/talks.html
On July 20, I'm appearing at Chicago's Exile in Bookville:
https://exileinbookville.com/events/39808
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Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!
https://clarionwriteathon.com/members/profile.php?writerid=293388
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Authors on Tap: Cory Doctorow
exileinbookville.comCory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/eof
Cryteria (modified)
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File:HAL9000.svg - Wikimedia Commons
commons.wikimedia.orgNosirrahSec 🏴☠️
•We, predictably as a society, chose inaction. We are now irredeemably fucked and companies can do whatever they want with our data with no consequence.
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•Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: re: Long thread/35
There are only Wardukes: https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Warduke
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