They call the gang leader “Barbeque” and he has announced plans to destroy the country to prevent the Prime Minister from staying in power.

Haiti has declared a three-day state of emergency and a night-time curfew after armed gangs stormed the country’s two biggest jails, allowing more than 3,000 dangerous criminals, including murderers and kidnappers, to escape back on to the streets of the poor and violence-racked Caribbean nation.

The finance minister, Patrick Boisvert – who is in charge while the embattled prime minister, Ariel Henry, is abroad trying to salvage support for a UN-backed security force to stabilise Haiti – said police would use “all legal means at their disposal” to recapture the prisoners and enforce the curfew.

The banks, schools, hospitals, Internet lines, and airport all have come under escalating attack by militant gangs opposed to the Prime Minister. Critical infrastructure is under siege.

Now even prisons have been destroyed, adding thousands of violent criminals to the chaos.

Notably the few people who remained in prison after it was broken included the group of mercenaries who stand accused of assassinating Haiti’s president in 2021.

That’s actually an important detail.

Recall that Barbeque was fired from the Police for corruption related to gang violence. It turned out he had been heavily sponsored by the Haitian president to murder political opposition until… assassination of that president. Violent (murderous) anti-gang work actually was Barbeque just being a paid gang-building leader (classic dirty cop stuff, complicating a decade of analysis of who has been fighting for what).

Barbecue presented the gang alliance as a way to restore peace across Port-au-Prince. Instead, the coalition has expanded its territorial control and provided politicians a way to stamp out opposition.

Not to over simplify here but it seems Barbeque is deploying excessive violence and stoking crime to protest anti-corruption of new government leadership.

Mussolini would be proud.

Wrecking his own country suits Barbeque’s fascist strategy as he intends unlimited violence to intimidate and force every citizen into paying his gang protection money. He doesn’t want a safe country, he wants an unsafe country and a government so corrupt it pays his gangs to use extra-judicial killings to prevent political stability.

Legal experts on data processing and transparency rights are increasingly in the news to call out Facebook as a criminal business model (gathering other people’s data and using it without real consent)

Today’s GDPR complaints from BEUC argue that Meta’s pay-or-consent model breaches data protection principles of the law, including the principles of purpose limitation, data minimisation, fair processing and transparency, with said processing enabling the company to “infer private details about the consumer.”

The group also claim Meta has no valid legal basis under the GDPR for its data processing for advertising because it relies on consent. It also claims Meta cannot “account for the lawfulness of its processing for content personalisation” because the social media giant doesn’t make it clear that its purpose is necessary for the relevant contract or that the “profiling” is consistent with the principle of data minimisation. Lastly, the Euro groups are claiming in their complaints that the model is inherently unfair because of a “lack of transparency, unexpected processing, [the] use of its dominant position to force consent, and switching of legal bases in ways which frustrate the exercise of data subject rights.”

My, how time flies.

On the 18th of August, 2011 ULD presented a technical and legal analysis of the use of fanpages and social plug-ins. We stated that fanpages and social plug-ins implement long-persisting cookies not only on the devices of Facebook members, but also of non-members. Some of those cookies are used to provide data for an analytics tool called Insights that give fanpage and website owners feedback on users and their behaviour. As we couldn’t see any legal justification for those cookies and the processing of personal traffic data in the US, we had to denounce the operating of those fanpages and social plug-ins by controllers in Schleswig-Holstein as illegal. There is no valid informed consent of the user, there is even no possibility to opt out.

Certainly, more than a decade of arguments about consent and human rights aren’t going to resonate with a CEO who has boldly declared, “I don’t care if people like me,” when imposing his own wishes on others, even when it blatantly disregards the law.

The beginnings of Facebook involve a controversial incident at Harvard, where Mark Zuckerberg used “Facemash” in 2003 to attack women who refused to date him. Zuckerberg fell under scrutiny after women of color reported consent violations — clear and severe privacy breaches, gathering unauthorized photos of women to solicit abuse of them if they refused his demands. Despite a brief investigation of breach of security, violating copyrights, and violating individual privacy, Harvard dumped the charges to instead become an early investor in a platform for misogynist attacks and political destabilization.

…FaceMash website began with a love-scorned Zuckerberg in 2003, who began to drink and write in his blog about an idea to hack university servers and download photos of students without permission… The Kirkland [dorm] facebook is open on my desktop and some of these people have pretty horrendous facebook pics,” he wrote that night. “I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.”

This is all a good reminder that on this blog in 2011 I called out very concerning Russian influence and interference in Facebook, yet the CEO even five years later in the hot seat still tried to claim ignorance of what was never a secret.

…private company ruled by a man funded by Russians without any transparency that most likely hopes to profit from your loss (of privacy)

Makes you wonder what might have happened if regulators had done the right thing and shut down Facebook back then. Of course it is a criminal business model in 2024. We know so much more about harms due to hindsight, because it has always been a criminal business model.

UT police dash-cam video is a must watch for those who want to see the future-present of stopping robots that pose a threat to society.

Dashcam video released by the Kaysville Police Department on February 27 shows Officer Kalawai Delos Santos intercepting the wrong-way driver on northbound lanes of Interstate 15 and deliberately colliding with the vehicle to bring it to a stop.

After the crash, the video goes dark but the audio continues. “I got him,” Delos Santos is heard telling colleagues over a radio. “I need medical…bad,” he adds.

News details suggest it was another case of driving under the influence of Autopilot (DUI-A).

The incident occurred on Feb. 9 around 2 a.m. near Farmington in Davis County. Reports indicated a wrong-way driver heading north in the southbound lanes of Interstate 15.

KSL News has the dashcam video on YouTube

Here’s another example of Tesla and its drivers being the least safe on public roads.

Apparently in North East London (Romford) an attempt to speed around a public bus ended in disaster, when a typically out-of-control Tesla crashed into a house.

…appears to be a Tesla, has crashed through a brick either a wall or fence of the home on Collier Row Lane, near the junction of Hainault Road, ending up in the garden. The car was said to be in a race with a bus before it crashed

A race with a bus. Early morning. Sounds like someone in London was intoxicated… by Tesla. We have to wait and see what else London police say.

It reminds me of another recent police investigation.

A man has been accused of driving more than 100km/h over the speed limit and crashing into a house west of Brisbane. Police said a 32-year-old man reached speeds of up to 150km/h in a 50km/h zone in a Tesla before coming off the road at Ipswich.

Only in a Tesla. It’s the sad lawn dart of public roads.