• Brazil's spiral into becoming the North Korea of the Southern Hemisphere continues to accelerate. (AP News)
  
  Tomas de Torquemada of the country's Supreme Federal Court has ordered all ISPs in the country - presumably somehow including Starlink - and all app stores to block access to Twitter.
  
  Torquemada also ordered app stores to remove VPN software, and ordered a fine of $8900 per day for any company or individual using a VPN to access Twitter.
  
  The justification for this is that Twitter doesn't have a legal representative in Brazil. (Nor I should note does this blog. Does Torquemada know how the internet works?)
  
  The reason Twitter doesn't have a legal representative in Brazil is that Torquemada threatened to jail her, and when she resigned, froze her bank accounts.
  
  
  
• Space rocks.
  

• A Texas judge has tossed Media Matters motion to dismiss Elon Musk's "thermonuclear" lawsuit. (WCCFTech)
  
  The case now goes to trial.
  
  Media Matters showed how ads were being placed on Twitter against unsavoury content, scaring off major advertisers.
  
  The problem is, to do this they deliberately followed those unsavoury accounts, and then spent hours refreshing the page until they got the results they wanted.
  
  And Twitter logged all of their activity.
  
  
  
• French president Emmanuel Macron has stated that France is deeply committed to freedom of expression and communication, to innovation, and to the spirit of entrepreneurship, as we established in 1793 when we suspended the constitution and murdered 16,000 people. (Twitter)
  
  Meanwhile in France Telegram CEO Pavel Durov has been charged with... Allowing crime. (MSN)
  
  Which if equitably enforced would see the French government locked away for good.
  
  
  
  
• AnandTech is shutting down. (AnandTech)
  
  It will be missed. In an industry overrun with utter bullshit it stuck to the facts.
  
  
  
• AMD has announced the Ryzen 7600X3D. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Like the 5600X3D it's Micro Center exclusive, so if you don't live in the right place you just can't get one.
  
  
  
• Ew. (Ars Technica)
  
  Just ew.
  
  
  
• A $400 million Medicaid signup form developed for the state of Tennessee by Deloitte is broken to the point that it violates the law. (Gizmodo)
  
  The article doesn't mention what form restitution will take, just the judge's decision on the lawsuit.
  
  
  
• Michael Lacey, founder of the classified ads website Backpage, has been convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. (Ars Technica)
  
  On one count of money laundering.
  
  He was acquitted on 50 other charges and the jury returned no verdict on an additional 35 charges.
  
  This comes after a previous case ended in a mistrial in 2021 over prosecutor misconduct.
  
  
  
• Intel says its laptop chips aren't affected by the instability issue affecting its desktop chips. (The Verge)
  
  The same company knew about the instability issue for most of two years before admitting it, so I'll take that with the usual Sifto-sized grain of salt.
  
  
  
• A Wells Fargo worker died at her desk and nobody noticed for four days. (Vice)
  
  I can't imagine that level of peace and tranquility.
  
  
  
• Yelp is suing Google over antitrust violations. (The Verge)
  
  Yelp has been complaining about Google's practices in the search business for years. Now that Google has been found guilty of antitrust violations generally, apparently it's open season.
  
  
  
• What that California AI bill means for Silicon Valley. (Tech Crunch)
  
  You idiots voted for this.
  
  
  
• Apple has terminated a developer account because they... Tried to work with Apple to resolve problems perceived by Apple. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Eric S Raymond responded:

  Huh? What the fuck did you think was going to happen when you tied yourself to a platform monopoly? A for effort but F for being too dumb to live.

  Harsh but fair.
  
  
  
• The FDA has issued a new ruling requiring photo ID for anyone under the age of 30 to buy tobacco. (UPI)
  
  Does the FDA have authority to pass such a law?
  
  Thought not.
  
  
  
• NASA's ACS3 mission has successfully deployed after encountering a literal snag. (Gizmodo)
  
  ACS3 stands for Advanced Composite Solar Sail System. The sail got stuck when they were trying to unfurl it, so they had to send a space monkey out to get it to open all the way.
  
  Or so I choose to believe. Don't try to tell me otherwise.
  
  
  
• SpaceX's Falcon 9 has been cleared to fly again after fall down go boom. (CNN)
  
  A landing strut appeared to fail on Booster 1062 when it was coming in for its 23rd landing on the drone ship A Shortfall of Gravitas, causing it to tip over and undergo rapid unscheduled disassembly.
  
  This poses no risk for missions - manned or otherwise - because Falcon 9 doesn't land with passengers or cargo aboard.
  
  
  
• I have a forty dollar chicken.
  
  I did not order a forty dollar chicken. I ordered an ordinary large chicken (between 1.8 and 2.4kg) at a price of A$4 per kg. (That's $1.23/lb in Freedom Units.)
  
  Somehow in the six days between placing the order and receiving my groceries they ran out of every remotely reasonable chicken and I ended up with a 2.9kg (6lb 6oz) macro organic free range grass fed dinosaur at more than three times the price per pound.
  
  Except that they price matched, so I actually paid $9.20 for the $40 chicken.
  
  So now all I need to do is cook it and eat it.

Satire Is Dead

I was doing some reading for my planned item on the video game industry implosion happening right now, and I ran into this: