To say the Panama Papers accomplished nothing is an insult to Daphne Galizia’s memory. Her work, and the work of the hundreds of other journalists who contributed to the Papers, changed the world.
Disinformation like this is designed to discourage you, to make you feel you’re powerless against the monsters of the world. They want you to feel that way, because they are terrified of your power to make change.
Take your power back. Demand better. Keep fighting for a better world, because a better world is possible.
Price fixing lawsuit against Amazon, publishers refiled in federal court
In the US, a class action lawsuit accusing Amazon and the Big Five publishers of colluding to fix ebook prices has been re-filed in federal court, reports Publishers Weekly.
In September this year a New York federal judge dismissed the price-fixing claims against Amazon and the publishers, following a magistrate’s recommendation that the case be dismissed due to lack of evidence. As previously reported by Books+Publishing, in January 2021 law firm Hagens Berman filed the class action suit against Amazon for allegedly colluding with Big Five publishers for anti-competitive behaviour in the ebook market.
The refiled complaint, which has been amended, accuses Amazon and Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster and Penguin Random House of a hub-and-spoke agreement to eliminate price competition from the ebook market, and alleges Amazon is a monopoly that has used its market dominance to ‘coerce’ publishers into ‘entering into contractual provisions that foreclose competition on price or product availability’.
Won’t somebody think of Stephen King? Antitrust law and the publishing world’s mega-deal
An unusual Justice Department strategy sank the merger of two publishing titans. Here are the real-world effects
by Spencer Hamersmith
Antitrust is having a moment. From both the left and the right, politicians clamor for new tools and enforcement to maintain a spirit of competition in the U.S. economy. While many focus onBig Tech, one of the Biden administration’s first big swings in a more aggressive antitrust enforcement regime took aim at a decidedly un-techy industry: book publishing. In a sealed ruling issued on Oct. 31, a federal judge sided with the government and blocked the merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster. While the country’s attention was focused on the midterm elections, Judge Florence Pan unsealed her full opinion. In it, she sided with the federal government’s persuasive and creative legal thinking, which focused on harms to an unusual victim: highly paid authors. Faced with this setback, the merger officially collapsed this week when Simon & Schuster’s owner decided not to appeal.
It’s worth focusing on how the government achieved this victory. The fact that it felt compelled to make such an atypical argument shows how the current legal regime forces regulators to hide the ball in terms of whom they’re really advocating for in the courtroom. This trend isn’t limited to publishing; it also arises in one of the biggest of Big Tech suits — the case against Google.
TikTok to sell books directly to users via marketplace
To further capitalise on the popularity of BookTok the social media giant will let users purchase titles through partnerships with publishers and retailers
by Lucy Knight and Sarah Shaffi
TikTok has proved to be a hugely successful way to promote books in recent years, with publishers attributing the popularity of books such as It Ends With Us byColleen Hooverand The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid in large part to recommendations on the app. Now TikTok has decided to sell books directly, announcing partnerships with publishers HarperCollins UK, WH Smith, Bloomsbury and bookshop.org, all of which will sell books via TikTok’s online marketplace.
#BookTok is one of the social media platform’s most popular hashtags, reaching more than 90bn views to date, and as a resultTikTokhas formed several partnerships off the back of its success, including with the Hay festival and publisher Penguin Random House (PRH), where since September, app users have been able to tag any PRH title in their videos.
However, these new partnerships mark the first time users have been able to buy books directly through TikTok. Any merchant signed up to TikTok Shop can advertise and sell products to users within the app. The marketplace has been gradually expanding to include fashion, consumer electronics, beauty and fresh and frozen goods – and now books.
YOU SHOULD WAKE UP TO THE FACT THAT THE INTERNET IS ONLY ONE OR TWO SERIOUS IOT EXPLOITS AWAY FROM BEING SEVERELY DISRUPTED. The damage ofsuch an event is immeasurable given how digitally connected our societies have become, yet CERTs, ISPs and governments are not taking the gravity of the situation seriously enough.
Basically, this person was trackint IoT (Internet of Things) botnets for a while, back-hacking to clean them up, until they saw a massive vulnerability and decided that bricking the devices was the only way. They claimed to brick 10 million devices over a 13 month period. But things are getting worse over time out there. Just a couple massive openings and we might need to rethink the entire architecture (a long shot I know, but really) of the Internet.
That end point there, as unlikely as it is, was the backstory of .Hack//Sign. Basically the internet broke, and they had to make a new one. The game that the show is set in was so popular as it was the first MMO to use the new network. I’ve felt that something along those line, if not as extreme could be coming if companies producint IoT devices are not required by law to be more secure, and if ISPs in this case also aren’t required to do so as well - which given what they just got out of the FCC seems unlikely until something much worse happens.
Man, poking my nose into the infosec side of twitter was not beneficial to my background stress level of things that could go very wrong.
Made pepper sauce today. I used three ghost peppers I grew myself, as well as four jalapeño peppers, and two habanero peppers. Filler was four stalks of celery, a handful of fresh picked tomatoes, a carrot, and half an onion. I just made the mistake of rubbing near my eye, and it’s watering and burning slightly, plus my tongue is lightly burning. Good times.
There’s a reason I’m quite glad I got dragged into the Fate/Zero, Fate/Stay Night, etc universe. It’s awesome and I’m quite glad I know more background info. It makes it even better.
Going to try and get a few things done this weekend. Make pepper sauce, clean, and write stuff for a LARP. Also I need to start plowing through the ILL books I have before the new ones show up.
So, if you’re trying this out on Micro.blog (it’s cool), I’ve not yet set up a clean feed for it, so all my old tumblr blogs are showing up. If anyone has an idea of how to segment an RSS feed, I’d appreciate it.
