Chris PeBenito

Facebook is a breeding ground for fake news and polarized outrage, accused of corrupting democracy and spurring genocide. Twitter knows it has become a seething battleground of widespread, targeted abuse — but has no solution. YouTube videos are messing with the minds of children and adults alike — so YouTube decided to pass the buck to Wikipedia, without telling them.

All three of those sentences would have seemed nearly unimaginable five years ago. What the hell is going on? Ev Williams says, of the growth of social media: “We laid down fundamental architectures that had assumptions that didn’t account for bad behavior.” What changed? And perhaps the most important question is: have people always been this awful, or have social networks actually made us collectively worse?

I have two somewhat related theories. Let me explain.

The Uncanny Social Valley Theory

“Social media is poison,” a close friend of mine said to me a couple of years ago, and since then more and more of my acquaintances seem to have come around to her point of view, and are abandoning or greatly reducing their time spent on Facebook and/or Twitter.

Why is it poison? Because this technology meant to provoke human connection actually dehumanizes. Not always, of course; not consistently. It remains a wonderful way to keep in contact with distant friends, and to enhance your relationship and understanding of those you regularly see in the flesh. What’s more, there are some people with whom you just ‘click’ online, and real friendships grow. There are people I’ve never met who I’d unhesitatingly trust with the keys to my car and home, because of our interactions on various social networks.

And yet — having stipulated all the good things — a lot of online interactions can and do reduce other people to awful caricatures of themselves. In person we tend to manage a kind of mammalian empathy, a baseline understanding that we’re all just a bunch of overgrown apes with hyperactive amygdalas trying to figure things out as best we can, and that relatively few of us are evil stereotypes. (Though see below.) Online, though, all we see are a few projections of those mammal brains, generally in the form of hastily constructed, low-context text and images … as mediated and amplified by the outrage machines, those timeline algorithms which think that “engagement” is the highest goal to which one can possibly aspire online.

I am reminded of the concept of the Uncanny Valley: “humanoid objects which appear almost, but not exactly, like real human beings elicit uncanny, or strangely familiar, feelings of eeriness and revulsion in observers.” Sometimes you ‘click’ with people online such that they’re fully human to you, even if you’ve never met. Sometimes you see them fairly often in real life, so their online projections are just a new dimension to their existing humanity. But a lot of the time, all you get of them is that projection … which falls squarely into an empathy-free, not-quite-human, uncanny social valley.

And so many of us spend so much time online, checking Twitter, chatting on Facebook, that we’ve all practically built little cottages in the uncanny social valley. Hell, sometimes we spend so much time there that we begin to believe that even people we know in real life are best described as neighbors in that valley … which is how friendships fracture and communities sunder online. A lot of online outrage and fury — the majority, I’d estimate, though not all — is caused not by its targets’ inherent awfulness but by an absence, on both sides, of context, nuance, and above all, empathy and compassion.

The majority. But not all. Because this isn’t just a story of lack of compassion. This is also a story of truly, genuinely awful people doing truly, genuinely awful things. That aspect is explained by…

The Intransigent Asshole Theory

Of course the Internet was always full of awful. Assholes have been trolling since at least 1993. “Don’t read the comments” is way older than five years old. But it’s different now; the assholes are more organized, their victims are often knowingly and strategically targeted, and many seem to have calcified from assholedom into actual evil. What’s changed?

The Intransigent Asshole Theory holds that the only thing that’s changed is that more assholes are online and they’ve had more time to find each other and agglomerate into a kind of noxious movement. They aren’t that large in number. Say that a mere three percent of the online population are, actually, the evil stereotypes that we perceive so many to be.

If three of 100 people are known to be terrible human beings, the other 97 can identify them and organize to defend themselves with relative ease. 97 is well within Dunbar’s number after all. But what about 30 of a 1,000? That gets more challenging, if those thirty band together; the non-awful people have to form fairly large groups. How about 300 of 10,000? Or 3,000 of 100,000? 3 million of 100 million? Suddenly three percent doesn’t seem like such a small number after all.

I chose three percent because it’s the example used by Nassim Taleb in his essay/chapter “The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority.” Adopting his argument slightly, if only 3% of the online population really wants the online world to be horrible, ultimately they can force it to be, because the other 97% can — as empirical evidence shows — live with a world in which the Internet is often basically a cesspool, whereas those 3% apparently cannot live with a world in which it is not.

Only a very small number of people comment on articles. But they are devoted to it; and, as a result, “don’t read the comments,” became a cliché. Is it really so surprising that “don’t read the comments” spread to “Facebook is for fake outrage and Twitter is for abuse,” given that Facebook and Twitter are explicitly designed to spread high-engagement items, i.e. the most outrageous ones? Really the only thing that’s surprising is that it took this long to become so widespread.

Worst of all — when you combine the Uncanny Social Valley Theory with the Intransigent Asshole Theory and the high-engagement outrage-machine algorithms, you get the situation where, even if only 3% of people actually are irredeemable assholes, a full 30% or more of them seem that way to us. And the situation spirals ever downwards.

“Wait,” you may think, “but what if they didn’t design their social networks that way?” Well, that takes us to the third argument, which isn’t a theory so much as an inarguable fact:

The Outrage Machine Money Maker

Outrage equals engagement equals profit. This is not at all new; this goes back to the ‘glory’ days of yellow journalism and “if it bleeds, it leads.” Today, though, it’s more personal; today everyone gets a customized set of screaming tabloid headlines, from which a diverse set of manipulative publishers profit.

This is explicit for YouTube, whose creators make money directly from their highest-engagement, and thus (often) most-outrageous videos, and for Macedonian teenagers creating fake news and raking in the resulting ad income. This is explicit for the politically motivated, for Russian trolls and Burmese hate groups, who get profits in the form of the confusion and mayhem they want.

This is implicit for the platforms themselves, for Facebook and Twitter and YouTube, all of whom rake in huge amounts of money. Their income and profits are, of course, inextricably connected to the “engagement” of their users. And if there are social costs — and it’s become clear that the social costs are immense — then they have to be externalized. You could hardly get a more on-the-nose example of this than YouTube deciding that Wikipedia is the solution to its social costs.

The social costs have to be externalized because human moderation simply doesn’t scale to the gargantuan amount of data we’re talking about; any algorithmic solution can and will be gamed; and the actual solution — which is to stop optimizing for ever-higher engagement — is so completely anathema to the platforms’ business models that they literally cannot conceive of it, and instead claim “we don’t know what to do.”

 

In Summary

• Only ~3% of people are truly terrible, but if we are sufficiently compliant with their awfulness, that’s enough to ruin the world for the rest of us. History shows that we have been more than sufficiently compliant.
• Social networks often dehumanize their participants; this plus their outrage-machine engagement optimization makes fully 30% of people seem like they’re part of those 3%, which breeds rancor and even, honestly no fooling not exaggerating, genocide.
• (Are those the exact numbers? Almost certainly not! My point is that social networks cause “you are an awful, irredeemable human being” to be massively overdiagnosed, by an order of magnitude or more.)
• A solution is for social networks to ramp down their outrage machine, i.e. to stop optimizing for engagement.
• They will not implement this solution.
• Since they won’t implement this solution, then unless they somehow find another one — possible, but unlikely  — our collective online milieu will just keep getting worse.
• Sorry about that. Hang in there. There are still a lot of good things about social networks, after all, and it’s not like things can get much worse than they already are. Right?
• …Right?

 

 If you can’t get enough new Black Mirror episodes, Netflix confirmed that the series will be coming back with a fifth season. The company shared the news with a cryptic teaser video on Twitter with “Be Right Back” written at the end. The future will be brighter than ever. pic.twitter.com/slVeg3VPd7 — Black Mirror (@blackmirror) March 5, 2018 Black Mirror is a… Read More

Over the past five years, Mondrea Hasty has had officers come to his house multiple times to arrest him, had his mugshot taken, and been handcuffed during a routine traffic stop. His 10-year-old daughter now cries when she sees a person in a police uniform, fearing they could be coming for her father.

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NOTE: Check your volume, the videographer's play-by-play is screamy. This is a short video from Oceanside, California of two tough guys road-raging out on each other. Personally, I could have taken both of them, but I drive a monster truck and that's not a fight you want to pick. In the videographer's own words:

"First I was recording just because he was swerving into the left lane. But as you can see it did take a crazy turn. I cannot believe I witnessed such a crazy accident. Just because he was mad he wasn't able to cut someone off. After the incident, the convertible man took off about 15-20 feet, then parked, and decided to walk back. I was so scared and nervous, I drove off as safely as I could."

As funny as it is to watch these two idiots, I'm pretty sure the driver of the Jeep was trying to kill the man when he came at him with his vehicle. That, or he can't pass a stopped car for shit. Whatever the case, I hope these two were both charged and required to take turns giving each other sensual massages until they fall in love. Keep going for the video.

Well folks, all good things must come to an end eventually. Swype Keyboard is officially being discontinued. This was one of the most popular apps for years, becoming so popular that Huawei eventually pre-installed Swype on its devices.

However, it seems that the road has ended, after a redditor revealed that Nuance support issued the following:

However, we are sad to announce that Swype+Dragon for Android has faced end of development. Here is a statement from Swype Product Team:

Nuance will no longer be updating the Swype+Dragon keyboard for Android. We’re sorry to leave the direct-to-consumer keyboard business, but this change is necessary to allow us to concentrate on developing our AI solutions for sale directly to businesses.

We hope you enjoyed using Swype, we sure enjoyed working with the Swype community.

This was then confirmed by multiple outlets, which all said that Nuance would be shutting down Swype. As you can see from the provided comment, Nuance (the company that owns Swype), is looking to provide more solutions for businesses versus the public.

There are a lot of different keyboard apps still available on the Play Store, but only one has my trust and attention – Gboard. This may not be the sexiest pick, and there may not be a slew of customization options in Gboard, but it gets the job done. I have rarely run into an issue that caused any problems with Gboard.

Nonetheless, that may not be for you, so let us know in the comments what your favorite keyboard app is for Android!

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The English language is constantly evolving, with new words and phrases spreading among us like an infection—we hear things, then we say those things. The problem is that we don’t always bother to wonder if we should. Because of that, the original meaning of some demeaning and hateful expressions get lost in time.…

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Trump FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's tenure has been marked by a disregard for the rules under which his agency is legally bound to operate: his Net Neutrality killing order was made without satisfying the evidentiary burden required by law, on the basis of laughable lies (including more than a million fake anti-Neutrality comments from bots pretending to be dead people, nonexsitent people and people who support Net Neutrality) that even his own agency knew to be false, then stonewalling law enforcement attempts to identify the botmasters -- no surprise that Pai's Neutracide is going to be tied up in court for years. (more…)

David Daley's hugely important 2016 book Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America's Democracy uses original documents to trace the Republican master gerrymandering plan -- which gave them disproportionate control in several states, allowing them to redraw federal districts to repeat the feat at the national level -- to meetings in 2009; but a pair of leaked Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC) powerpoints show that GOP strategists were scheming and fundraising to ensure that their candidates would wield power regardless of popular support at least a year and a half earlier. (more…)

In 1992, Oklahoma passed a ballot initiative saying that the state could only raise taxes with a three quarters majority in the state assembly, creating a one-way ratchet where every tax cut becomes effectively permanent, including the sweetheart deals cut for frackers and the deep cuts to taxes on the wealthiest residents of the state. (more…)

Mick Mulvaney, the former loan-shark lobbyist who killed plans to regulate payday lenders after being appointed chief of the Consumer Finance Protection Board, has effective abandoned the agency's efforts to punish Equifax for leaking the sensitive personal and financial information of at least 145,500,000 Americans. (more…)

Calling names, now huh? I've got enough problems without appliances getting an attitude. There's a perfectly logical explanation. "Slut" mean "finished" in Danish and Swedish. In Norwegian, it would say "slutt." I don't know how you would say finished in Finnish. -via reddit

Going viral this evening is a marvelous comic strip by the legendary W.K. Haselden, as published in the Daily Mirror on March 5, 1919.

Without formal training his drawings first appeared in a couple of short lived publications but in 1903 he was taken onto the staff of the Daily Mirror, which was then a ‘Ladies’ newspaper, in the true Edwardian sense.

His daily cartoons on the fads, fashions, foibles and follies of the age soon earned him a large following. His style was gentle, subtle and his tone conservative. His targets were the upper middle-class householder and his family, and he was greatly exercised by the advances made by women, their careers, their voting rights and their increasing independence from the corset, both the physical and the metaphorical one of male domination. A viewpoint with which at the time the majority of his readers would have approved.

Each year between 1906 and 1935 around 100 of these cartoons were published in paperback under the title of ‘Daily Mirror Reflections’ and it was a stack of these from 1918 to 1931 that I unearthed. His pioneering work with the large single frame divided into four or more panels connected by a single theme gave him the title, according to his Times Obituary, ‘the father of British strip cartoon’.

↬ Myko Clelland

Comics writer G. Willow Wilson, who previously lived in Egypt and wrote for the opposition weekly Cairo Magazine, writes movingly and hauntingly on Twitter about the experience of a living in a state that is transitioning into dictatorship, which does not feel "intrinsically different on a day-to-day basis than a democracy does," but rather is marked by "the steady disappearance of dissent from the public sphere. Anti-regime bloggers disappear. Dissident political parties are declared 'illegal.' Certain books vanish from the libraries." (more…)

Multiple White House sources have told reporters that the Trump administration has been negotiating with Erik Prince (founder of the war-crimes plagued mercenary firm Blackwater; brother to pyramid-scheme billionaire/Education Secretary Betsy Devos) and ex-CIA operative John R. Maguire to assemble a private army of deniable, off-the-books spy/mercenaries who could target Trump's "deep state" political enemies in the USA, and kidnap and render similar figures overseas. (more…)

schwit1 quotes ScienceAlert: In May 2017, researchers at Google Brain announced the creation of AutoML, an artificial intelligence (AI) that's capable of generating its own AIs. More recently, they decided to present AutoML with its biggest challenge to date, and the AI that can build AI created a 'child' that outperformed all of its human-made counterparts... For this particular child AI, which the researchers called NASNet, the task was recognising objects -- people, cars, traffic lights, handbags, backpacks, etc. -- in a video in real-time. AutoML would evaluate NASNet's performance and use that information to improve its child AI, repeating the process thousands of times. When tested on the ImageNet image classification and COCO object detection data sets NASNet was 82.7 percent accurate at predicting images on ImageNet's validation set. This is 1.2 percent better than any previously published results, and the system is also 4 percent more efficient, with a 43.1 percent mean Average Precision (mAP).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the winter of 1994, Sam Calagione was living in Manhattan and working as a waiter when he fell in love with beer and bought a beginner’s homebrewing kit. On a whim, he added overripe cherries from the corner bodega when he brewed an English Pale Ale in his kitchen in Chelsea.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In addition to ditching its own net neutrality rules, the Federal Communications Commission also plans to tell state and local governments that they cannot impose local laws regulating broadband service. This detail was revealed by senior FCC officials in a phone briefing with reporters today, and it is a victory for broadband providers that asked for widespread preemption of state laws. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's proposed order finds that state and local laws must be preempted if they conflict with the U.S. government's policy of deregulating broadband Internet service, FCC officials said. The FCC will vote on the order at its December 14 meeting. It isn't clear yet exactly how extensive the preemption will be. Preemption would clearly prevent states from imposing net neutrality laws similar to the ones being repealed by the FCC, but it could also prevent state laws related to the privacy of Internet users or other consumer protections. Pai's staff said that states and other localities do not have jurisdiction over broadband because it is an interstate service and that it would subvert federal policy for states and localities to impose their own rules.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Gary Cohn is Donald Trump's top economic advisor; while on stage this week at the Wall Street Journal's CEO Council meeting, he called for a show of hands from CEOs who were planning to invest more if their tax bills were slashed in the new GOP tax plan. (more…)

Security researchers from Rhino Security Labs have shown that it is trivial to disable the Amazon Cloud Cam that is a crucial component of the Amazon Key product -- a connected home door-lock that allows delivery personnel to open your locked front door and leave your purchases inside -- and have demonstrated attacks that would allow thieves to exploit this weakness to rob your home. (more…)

There’s no denying the fact that data breaches are only becoming more and more common. Target, Anthem, Sony PlayStation, and most recently Equifax have all taken a lot of heat for the massive amount of personal information that was exposed while under the care of these companies.

There are, however, many more data breaches that you’ve never heard about because they weren’t quite as “sexy” to cover. So far in 2017 alone, PrivacyRights.org reports that at least 422 data breaches have been made public. That’s well over one per day. Here’s a sampling of some other big names that have experienced a data breach.

Sonic Drive-In

On Sept. 26, 2017, fast-food chain Sonic, with approximately 3,600 locations across the U.S., announced a breach that affected an “unknown number of store payment systems.” The data hack may have resulted in the sale of millions of stolen credit card and debit card account numbers, according to Krebs on Security.

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)

On Sept. 20, 2017, the SEC announced that its online database of corporate filings was hacked. Cybercriminals were able to hack into the agency’s “test Edgar system,” designed to help startups learn how to fill out SEC forms without the necessity of making those announcements public. The SEC revealed that the breach of their Edgar system, which actually occurred in 2016, may have resulted in the theft of corporate secrets.

CoreLogic/Credco

On August 29, 2017, Credco announced that between July 21 and August 7, 2017, unauthorized access to the company’s system occurred and that, as a result, consumer information was accessed without proper authorization. The information exposed during the hack included the sensitive stuff typically found on a credit report: names, addresses, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, account numbers, and the like.

Keller Williams Realty

On July 18, 2017, Keller Williams Realty announced that an unauthorized third party gained access to their network. Types of information compromised included names, addresses, Social Security numbers, and some user names and passwords.

DocuSign

On May 15, 2017, DocuSign, an electronic signature technology provider, announced a computer systems data breach. The breach resulted in a series of malware phishing email attacks — which the recipients would be particularly vulnerable to, since they were already expecting to receive and click on DocuSign email links.

Schoolzilla

On April 12, 2017, student data service Schoolzilla announced a large-scale breach that might have exposed the personal information of some 1,300,000 students. The compromised information included names, test scores, and Social Security numbers of minors enrolled in kindergarten through 12th grade. However, the data breach was discovered by a computer security researcher, and it’s believed to have been resolved before the information fell into the hands of any cybercriminals.

U.S. Labor Department

On March 27, 2017, the U.S. Department of Labor announced that the agency’s online job portal, America’s Job Link Alliance, was hacked. Some 2,100,000 U.S. job seekers from at least 16 different states had sensitive personal data such as names, Social Security numbers, and dates of birth exposed.

Dunn and Bradstreet

On March 15, 2017, Dunn and Bradstreet, a company that provides commercial data and analytics for businesses, announced a massive data breach that compromised the information of some 33,500,000 employees of various U.S. corporations. The hacked information contains names, job titles, work email addresses, and phone numbers.

Toys ‘R’ Us

On Feb. 2, 2017, Toys “R” Us announced the unauthorized access of an unidentified number of the company’s Rewards “R” Us loyalty member accounts. The exposed information included logins and passwords — which cybercriminals know are often used across multiple accounts — in addition to the names and dates of birth of many users’ children. The company stated that the compromised database did not contain credit card numbers, payment information, or other sensitive personal information such as Social Security numbers.

The Tip of the Iceberg

This is just a micro-sampling of the data breaches that have occurred in 2017 alone. There are many, many more well known companies and organizations that have been breached in recent memory (HBO, UCLA, the IRS, the DNC, Instagram… to name just a few).

Point being, while we’re all focused on Equifax, it’s important to recognize that our personal and payment information may have already been exposed, years earlier, by some other breach that has flown completely under our radar.

Related Articles:

• Why You Need to Check Your Credit Report With All Three Bureaus
• Identity Theft Basics
• What Your Credit Report Says About You Behind Your Back

The post Other Big Data Hacks That Nobody’s Talking About appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

It turns out that Instant Messenger (AIM) isn't the only thing that AOL is shutting down next month. On December 15th, Oath (AOL and Engadget's dear parent) is also closing what remains of the CompuServe forums which, yes, still actually exist. Compu...

In real life, in the natural course of conversation, it is not uncommon to talk about a person you may know. You meet someone and say, “I’m from Sarasota,” and they say, “Oh, I have a grandparent in Sarasota,” and they tell you where they live and their name, and you may or may not recognize them.

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Roy Moore's judicial career died not on a hill but a tacky Christian cut of the 10 commandments inside the courthouse and hatin' on the gays. But he's back in style, thrashing incumbent Alabama Republican Sen. Luther Strange to take his party into the next election.

He's shamelessly racist, thinks parts of Illinois are under Sharia, wants homosexual behavior punished, and will look just fabulous in President-select Mike Pence's first cabinet.

https://twitter.com/mike_pence/status/912867571015258113

President Donald Trump, who supported Luther Strange, spent election night deleting his Tweets supporting Luther Strange.

Here's an excerpt from one of Moore's poems.

America the Beautiful, or so you used to be,
Land of the Pilgrims’ pride, I’m glad they’re not here to see,
Babies piled in dumpsters, abortion on demand,
Oh, sweet land of liberty, your house is on the sand.

"This is brilliant and terrifying in equal measure," writes the Morning Paper. Long-time Slashdot reader phantomfive writes: Many CPUs these days have DVFS (Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling), which allows the CPU's clockspeed and voltage to vary dynamically depending on whether the CPU is idling or not. By turning the voltage up and down with one thread, researchers were able to flip bits in another thread. By flipping bits when the second thread was verifying the TrustZone key, the researchers were granted permission. If number 'A' is a product of two large prime numbers, you can flip a few bits in 'A' to get a number that is a product of many smaller numbers, and more easily factorable. "As the first work to show the security ramifications of energy management mechanisms," the researchers reported at Usenix, "we urge the community to re-examine these security-oblivious designs."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Say you're worried that Equifax has just destroyed your life with its callous disregard for the dossier it compiled on you and your finance; maybe you'll contact an Equifax competitor like Experian and ask them to "freeze" your credit so no one can use that data to open a new account in your name. (more…)

Shot of a lifetime. #solareclipse #2017 #Nikon #makeshift #solar #filter

A post shared by Kirsten Jorgensen (@cursetenj) on Aug 21, 2017 at 11:12am PDT

Kirsten Jorgensen almost didn't get this shot. She was getting ready to leave after taking pictures of the solar eclipse in Lewiston, Idaho, and then a plane approached. It was probably American Airlines flight 9661, as later research indicated. She tells about the moment it happened:

I was about to pack my stuff up and go back inside, but I had my camera set up and in the direction of the sun when I was taking pictures. All of the pictures were ending up looking like the moon pretty much so I gave up. Then I saw the plane fly over and ran over to take a photo. It caught me off guard!

The result is beautiful, and you might see it in many places over the next few days. Or years. -via reddit 

From a report on WSJ: Dan Sisco has discovered a technology that allows him to access half a dozen major TV channels, completely free. "I was just kind of surprised that this is technology that exists (alternative source)," says Mr. Sisco, 28 years old. "It's been awesome. It doesn't log out and it doesn't skip." Let's hear a round of applause for TV antennas, often called "rabbit ears," a technology invented roughly seven decades ago, long before there was even a cord to be cut, which had been consigned to the technology trash can along with cassette tapes and VCRs. The antenna is mounting a quiet comeback, propelled by a generation that never knew life before cable television, and who primarily watch Netflix , Hulu and HBO via the internet. Antenna sales in the U.S. are projected to rise 7 percent in 2017 to nearly 8 million units, according to the Consumer Technology Association, a trade group. Mr. Sisco, an M.B.A. student in Provo, Utah, made his discovery after inviting friends over to watch the Super Bowl in 2014. The online stream he found to watch the game didn't have regular commercials -- disappointing half of his guests who were only interested in the ads. "An antenna was not even on my radar," he says. He went online and discovered he could buy one for $20 and watch major networks like ABC, NBC, Fox and CBS free.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This is a video of 64-year old Florida Man Jorge Jove calmly shooting out all the tires of the AT&T work truck that parked in front of his home in Hialeh, blocking his driveway. He then proceeds to fire a couple bonus shots into the engine of another AT&T work truck parked further down the street. Apparently Jove, a retired firefighter, was upset that the truck had blocked his driveway, and, according to Florida Man logic, giving it four flats will help remedy that. Jove fired at least 18 rounds (reloading several times), and currently has criminal charges pending against him from the incident. Honestly, I'm impressed with how calmly AT&T technician Derrick Taylor filmed the whole thing while on the phone with police. Because there is absolutely no way he gets paid enough to be shot by a old man who swears he's switching to Verizon. Keep going for the video.

This story begins, as they so often do, when I noticed that my machine was behaving poorly. My Windows 10 work machine has 24 cores (48 hyper-threads) and they were 50% idle. It has 64 GB of RAM and that was less than half used. It has a fast SSD that was mostly idle. And yet, as I moved the mouse around it kept hitching - sometimes locking up for seconds at a time. So I did what I always do - I grabbed an ETW trace and analyzed it. The result was the discovery of a serious process-destruction performance bug in Windows 10. Great story.