Linked List: August 15, 2023

Tuesday, 15 August 2023

Trump, 18 Others Indicted for Trying to Overthrow 2020 Georgia Election ★

Tamar Hallerman and Bill Rankin, reporting for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Former President Donald Trump orchestrated a sweeping criminal enterprise, committing more than a dozen felonies, as he tried and failed to overturn his defeat in Georgia’s 2020 election, according to an indictment handed up Monday by a Fulton County grand jury.

The indictment also lodged charges against 18 of Trump’s allies, who helped him spread false conspiracy theories and twist the arms of top state officials as he scrambled to cling to power.

The blockbuster 41-count, 98-page indictment said Trump and his co-defendants refused to accept the fact that Trump lost in Georgia. But “they knowingly and willfully joined a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump. That conspiracy contained a common plan and purpose.”

This is only the fourth time in the history of the United States that a former president has been indicted.

Hanlon’s Razor Meets Its Match: Twitter/X ★

Jeremy B. Merrill and Drew Harwell, reporting for The Washington Post:

The company formerly known as Twitter has begun slowing the speed with which users can access links to the New York Times, Facebook and other news organizations and online competitors, a move that appears targeted at companies that have drawn the ire of owner Elon Musk. [...] The delayed websites included X’s online rivals Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky and Substack, as well as the Reuters wire service and the Times. All of them have previously been singled out by Musk for ridicule or attack.

The delay affects the t.co domain, a link-shortening service that X uses to process every link posted to the website. Traffic is routed through the middleman service, allowing X to track — and in this case throttle — activity to the target website, potentially taking away traffic and ad revenue from businesses Musk personally dislikes.

The Post’s analysis found that links to most other sites were unaffected — including those to The Washington Post, Fox News and social media services such as Mastodon and YouTube — with the shortened links being routed to their final destination in a second or less. A user first flagged the delays early Tuesday on the technology discussion forum Hacker News.

The Hacker News thread has the sort of nerdery you’d expect, including the fact that you won’t see the delay when using curl with its default user-agent string, because curl is special-cased by t.co.

Hanlon’s Razor — “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity” — is a remarkably accurate rule of thumb. But in the case of Twitter/X, it’s not helpful: the stupidity behind the company’s poorly run services is matched by the spitefulness of its owner. Purposeful spite and inadvertent bug strike me as equally likely here, and the list of domain that suffer this delay really does look like Musk’s shitlist. But regardless of the cause, the effect is undeniably bad for users: click or tap a link to these popular sites from Twitter, and it takes about 5 seconds for the URL to resolve.

Trump’s Unsent Draft Tweets ★

From a Business Insider report last July:

The House committee investigating the Capitol riot on Tuesday revealed a draft tweet in which President Donald Trump called on his supporters to go to the US Capitol after his speech on January 6, 2021.

“I will be making a Big Speech at 10AM on January 6th at the Ellipse (South of the White House). Please arrive early, massive crowds expected. March to the Capitol after. Stop the Steal!!” Trump wrote in the draft tweet, which is undated.

Trump never sent the tweet, but its existence, along with other messages exchanged between rally organizers, offer proof that the march to the Capitol was premeditated, the January 6 committee said.

Democratic Rep. Stephanie Murphy of Florida presented the evidence during Tuesday’s hearing, and said: “The evidence confirms that this was not a spontaneous call to action, but rather it was a deliberate strategy decided upon in advance by the president.”

Unsent draft tweets seem among the most likely targets of the January 6 special counsel subpoena — and it’s possible that Twitter saves everything each user has ever typed in the tweet-editing field.