Cautionary Note Before Voting On This Post: It's come to my attention that HiveWatchers believes, that news roundups, rundowns, aggregation, etc. along with quips that prompt engagement should not receive rewards. Moreover, as a DHF-funded, whale backed account they consider their opinion of what you are allowed to value as more important than your own as a smaller stake holder. These are the realities of DPOS. So, if you're inclined to upvote this please be aware that you may be wasting your vote in terms of ROI. You might wish to consider other ways to support my activity — I do post other types of articles in my feed.

Watching HiveWatchers

And with that I introduce a new beat, featuring firsthand activist-journalism, to what up until now had been mostly a news roundup, or rundown, or...quips. Something.

Activist journalists are usually more activist than journalist so, yes, a lot of my inquiry will reflect my personal and long running skepticism about HiveWatchers and its predecessors. But I also acknowledge there's an awful lot that I still don't know and that I'm only just now getting around to asking.

To kick off, I'll just point to this piece I posted yesterday explaining some of my personal HiveWatchers story and showcasing a bit of what I learned in an early expedition down the rabbit hole of the HiveWatchers DHF Proposal and its comments:

Impressions and Concerns Regarding HiveWatchers

• What HiveWatchers calls an appeal really isn't.
• HiveWatchers judges unilaterally without confronting the accused.
• There's a noticeable amount of intemperate language in and around HiveWatchers' community.

Do these points remind you of problems with any other social media platforms? They do for me.

Nothing turns the armchair critic into a vocal critic faster than becoming the target of criticism from the subject of his criticism.

Hm. I thought that'd be pithier when I heard it my head.

Ya know what? I'm going with it.

Here's a quote from Cory Doctorow that explains why. It speaks to one of the things that HiveWatchers and the community around it have wrong about originality, IP and the work of ideas:

Copyright does not protect the fruits of your hard work. It just doesn’t. No matter what you’ve heard, the legal basis for copyright — in US law and in international treaties — is to protect creativity, not effort.

If you labor for five years to create a faithful catalog of all the houses in a city or all the books in a library, with the goal of creating as faithful, logical and linear resource as possible, copyright holds no protection for you.

On the other hand, if you dash off a haiku in five seconds, copyright will reward you with the exclusive right to reproduce, display and adapt your work, for your entire lifetime and 70 years beyond.

Copyright rewards creativity, not effort.

The moral basis too for plagiarism as an evil in contrast to the ideal of originality has its roots in the same 18th century intellectual movements that stuck the copyright clause into the Constitution of the United States. That's why activity like selection, compilation and transformation are valued.

And that's why some, perhaps many, of HiveWatchers condemnations are misplaced.

Anyway, that's about all I've got for today. I promise I'll get better at this. I only just decided to be a journalist like 10 minutes ago.

On to the roundup! I often rewrite the summaries in these rundowns drawing inspiration from the original copy. Today I've intentionally left all the blurbs from sources untouched to make a point: This isn't stealing the work of the original y copywriters. It's making use of it.

Those copywriters are employed by publishers so that it will be used. For this. If many works like this one didn't rely on that copy there'd be no reason to employ those copywriters. Using their work isn't stealing from them. It's supporting their livelihood.

Trading and Business

T-Mobile Hacker Who Stole Data on 50 Million Customers: ‘Their Security Is Awful’

A 21-year-old American said he used an unprotected router to access millions of customer records in the mobile carrier’s latest breach.

Family of Taliban Hostage Mark Frerichs Urge Biden to Make Deal for His Freedom

State Department says efforts to return Illinois-born civil engineer ‘ongoing’; Taliban have said they would trade for imprisoned drug lord.

Lordstown Motors Names Former Icahn Executive as CEO

Daniel Ninivaggi has joined the electric-truck startup as chief executive and a member of the board.

World’s Largest Chip Maker to Raise Prices, Threatening Costlier Electronics

TSMC to increase prices of most advanced chips by roughly 10%; less advanced chips will cost about 20% more.

U.S. Allies Halt Afghanistan Evacuations, Warn of Growing Threat From Islamic State

European countries say they can’t airlift citizens, Afghans to safety because U.S. forces need to prepare for withdrawal.

In Other News

Explosion outside Kabul airport, casualties unclear, Pentagon says

There has been an explosion outside the Kabul airport, the Pentagon press secretary said on Thursday, adding that it was unclear whether there were casualties amid the large evacuation effort in Afghanistan's capital.

Sanders not ruling out trips to Manchin, Sinema home states to pitch spending plans

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) says he's open to paying visits to Sen. J...

Pentagon confirms explosion near Kabul airport

An explosion was reported Thursday at the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, the Department of Defens...

Pace drops but US evacuates another 13,400 from Afghanistan

Roughly 13,400 people were evacuated from Afghanistan between early Wednesday morning and early T...

U.S. second-quarter economic growth revised slightly higher; weekly jobless claims rise

The U.S. economy grew a bit faster than initially thought in the second quarter, lifting the level of gross domestic product above its pre-pandemic peak, as massive fiscal stimulus and vaccinations against COVID-19 boosted spending.

Entertainment & Tech

Statistical process control after W. Edwards Deming (2020)

Simulator of digging a tunnel through the earth

There is no such thing as a “glibc based alpine image”

Why rent control isn’t working in Sweden

Young people are struggling to afford city living, and even the Swedes can't crack the problem.

And also this...

Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #9

Photo credit: Jeremy Bishop / Unsplash