How do you like it as far as you’ve got?
Jefferson D, Jefferson D,
Are you glad you began it, or do you wish you had not?
Jefferson, Jefferson D.
People say, though of course I don’t know that it’s so,
That your spirits are getting decidedly low,
That you’re sick and discouraged and don’t know what,
But say though — do you like it as far as you’ve got.
Ho! Ho! Jefferson D,
Things look rather shaky now
‘Twixt you and me.
You can’t think how sorry I was when I heard,
Jefferson D, Jefferson D,
That your visit to Washington had been deferred,
Jefferson, Jefferson D,
But I hope you will find it convenient to come
When Abe and the rest of the boys are at home
And I trust you won’t mind it, they’re such a lot,
If they ask you how you like it as far as you’ve got.
Ho! Ho! Jefferson D.
Also of note is the following advertisement poking fun at Confederates who both advertised for whereabouts of their escaped slaves, while also tending themselves to run away.
“Two Dollars Reward, Confederate Currency,” for the whereabouts of “Jube, answering to the name of Early,” [i.e., Confederate general Jubal A. Early] and One Cent Reward for General [Thomas L.] Rosser.
They shoot horses don’t they? Heavy, loud, small, clumsy and exposed. A vehicle so poorly conceived, soldiers are said to be better off on foot.
I love everything about the Task & Purpose article explaining what is wrong with the U.S. Army’s latest “infantry assault buggy”.
This thing is absolute dog shit. …Army’s new lightweight infantry assault buggy is cramped as hell, too small to haul supplies, and “not operationally effective for employment in combat and [engagement, security cooperation and deterrence] missions against a near-peer threat,” according to a new assessment from the Pentagon’s chief weapons tester.
Such good writing.
A classic failure of basic economics, the vehicle is a tragedy. An example of critical thinking failure that prevents safety.
Its trade-offs are completely wrong, bringing a massive footprint (heavy, large, loud) that turns anyone inside of it into a target more likely to be seen and heard while offering no protection and making them unable to function normally let alone respond to threats.
Soldiers were far better off without their vehicles and walking on foot, given any reasonable metric of mission success.
The ISV proved so ineffective at providing rapid mobility capabilities to the squad during testing that the unit “concealed their ISVs and drivers close to the objective and dismounted eight soldiers per vehicle to accomplish missions before recovering their [vehicles],” basically ditching their rides in favor of a dismounted engagement.
The stupidity of this complete waste of money would be shocking, except that it’s a logical extension of American lack of focus on quality metrics (e.g. U.S. Army statistician Deming rolling in his grave).
That same article also quotes a November 2021 Deputy Secretary of Defense’s boast that reveals some misaligned incentives like increasing rates of production regardless of what is being produced.
…transport made from 90% off-the-shelf components. This is the kind of innovation which will allow us to quickly field the equipment our warfighters need…
That reads to me like “Here are three boots that don’t fit. You can’t walk in them but don’t blame me I’m just being measured on how quickly I pumped boots out of a factory”.
It’s almost like a joke about Soviet Russia. But this isn’t a joke, it’s real.
Indeed, it sounds almost exactly like the American scam operation known as Tesla, a company that cares only about pumping up the rate of trash they dump onto roads — ignoring things like safety, survival and any reasonable metric of mission success.
And since Tesla owners now face criminal prosecution for using their vehicle as it was designed and marketed to them, it begs the question which soldier in this buggy will be held responsible instead of GM when the vehicle gets the wrong people killed.
What’s the solution? Change Pentagon (and American manufacturing) accountability to real values. A small electric cart or an electric bike are obvious superior options for infantry rapid-deploy concepts, as I’ve written about here many times before…
In 2006 I wrote about fast quiet special operations engines, when I briefly profiled the 1999 US Military RST-V Hybrid Electric Diesel: the “Shadow“. It had an electric-only mode with three huge “ghost” benefits: super fast, yet the heat and sound emissions were reduced to almost nothing.
And then there was my post about the US Air Force’s “Ghost Camaro” debacle…
I also am reminded of the old yarn that GM spent more money on robots and automation (over 1 billion) to be more like Toyota, yet failed, than if they had just bought all of Toyota instead and rebranded it GM. Here’s the elephant in the GM design room, even to this day:
ISBN-13: 9781667811291
Published: February 24th, 2022
In November 2019 I posted a gripping tale here about U.S. Army Paratrooper Marvin Williams. I also asked the simple question why nobody seems to know his story outside small hushed circles in Arkansas, where he was brutally murdered by police who were never held accountable.
As I dug more and more into the details, I thought this has to be a movie… someone must be making a film. Alas I found nothing.
Finally a detailed book has landed, written by Williams’ brother, giving us a history lesson that ought to become required reading in every American school.
…a prodigy who graduated from high school at the age of 15, Marvin desperately tried to escape the grinding poverty of field labor. He joined the Navy and later the Army, where he became a respected U.S. Paratrooper. At age 20, he was a beloved son, husband, and father. He had a good job, a second child on the way, and a bright future – until the night he was unlawfully arrested on Markham Street and bludgeoned to death by police.
Google Fonts is a very suspicious “service library” allegedly meant to make it easier for developers to use fonts by referencing a stylesheet. There are thousands of fonts available but the completely hidden tradeoff is that use of any font transmits personal user data to Google, without disclosing the tradeoff to anyone involved.
A court has now ruled that users may claim damages from site operators who use Google Fonts.
Note that Google marketing doesn’t mention anything about privacy or safety when they try to pitch their product.
Making the web more beautiful, fast, and open through great typography and iconography Google Fonts makes it easy to bring personality and performance to your websites and products. Our robust catalog of open-source fonts and icons, makes it easy to integrate expressive type and icons seamlessly—no matter where you are in the world.
Continuing on that same page there are some obvious red flags (misrepresentations) that jump out right away:
First, they assert the entire experience is free and open.
All the fonts and icons in our catalog are free and open source, making beautiful typography and iconography accessible to anyone for any project. This means you can share favorites and collaborate easily with friends and colleagues. Google Fonts takes care of all the licensing and hosting, ensuring that the latest and greatest version of any font is available to everyone.
FALSE. “Fonts” is a service. You pay with your privacy and Google does not open source all the “Fonts” code, such as what’s involved in collecting and processing your personal information.
Second, they claim adding more traffic makes the web faster.
Using the code generated by Google Fonts, our servers will automatically send the smallest possible file to every user based on the technologies that their browser supports. For example, we use WOFF 2.0 compression when available. This makes the web faster for all users—particularly in areas where bandwidth and connectivity are an issue. The icon sets that are delivered by Google Fonts benefit from the same infrastructure.
FALSE. This reads to me as lying. “The smallest possible file to every user” does not make the web faster than sending no file at all. Fonts are not required to be served remotely. Google is literally saying they are slowing the web down, and trying to pivot that into a phrase of the “smallest possible” slowdown. That’s a lie. Smaller is possible.
In the FAQ provided by Google Fonts they even admit to tracking users.
What does using the Google Fonts API mean for the privacy of my users?
The Google Fonts API is designed to limit the collection, storage, and use of end-user data to only what is needed to serve fonts efficiently. Use of Google Fonts API is unauthenticated. No cookies are sent by website visitors to the Google Fonts API. Requests to the Google Fonts API are made to resource-specific domains, such as fonts.googleapis.com or fonts.gstatic.com. This means your font requests are separate from and don’t contain any credentials you send to google.com while using other Google services that are authenticated, such as Gmail. In order to serve fonts quickly and efficiently with the fewest requests, responses are cached by the browser to minimize round-trips to our servers. Requests for CSS assets are cached for 1 day. This allows us to update a stylesheet to point to a new version of a font file when it’s updated, and ensures that all websites using fonts hosted by the Google Fonts API will be using the most updated version of each font within 24 hours of each release. The font files are cached for 1 year. Google Fonts logs records of the CSS and the font file requests, and access to this data is kept secure. Aggregate usage numbers track how popular font families are and are published on our analytics page. We use data from Google’s web crawler to detect which websites use Google fonts. To learn more about the information Google collects and how it is used and secured, see Google’s Privacy Policy.
Did you catch that? First “limit…to only what is needed“.
That’s fishy.
Then “font files are cached for 1 year. Google Fonts logs records of the CSS and the font file requests, and access to this data is kept secure.” That smells rotten.
“Secure” is a relative term, whereas as compliance (e.g. GDPR) is an absolute one. Secure against whom and what?
I call BS.
This blog, for example, is self-hosted and has zero connection to Google. Yet because it runs on default WordPress and uses a standard default theme it still had embedded Google fonts and without any warning or notice to me or my blog readers that Google was tracking them.
Both my readers and I noticed this by digging into the code as well as the network traffic but you can’t expect everyone to be in the weeds, especially given Google is supposedly offering a “service”…
Thus, for the last several years, I always have had the “disable-remove-google-fonts” plugin by Danny Cooper enabled to protect privacy of my blog readers.
Improve frontend performance by disabling Google Fonts loaded by themes and plugins.
The plugin hits back on obvious lies. Improve performance by disabling Fonts. Really though… the plugin improves privacy.
Now a court in Germany has made this concern an official ruling.
Google was found on the wrong side of this issue because Fonts never should have been dragged by them into being a human tracking system.
The court ruled that penalties are owed to someone reading a site with Google Fonts since it violates GDPR, making website operators liable.
The use of font services such as Google Fonts cannot be based on Article 6 Paragraph 1 S.1 lit. f GDPR, since the use of fonts is also possible without the visitor having to connect to Google servers. RN 8
The visitor is not obliged to “encrypt” his IP address (probably means to disguise it, for example by using a VPN). RN 9
The transfer of the user’s IP address in the above-mentioned manner and the associated encroachment on general personal rights is, with regard to the loss of control over personal data, to Google, a company that is known to collect data about its users and the way the user perceives it individual discomfort is so significant that a claim for damages is justified. RN 12
Use of fonts is possible without having to connect to Google.
BOOM.
Perhaps also notable here is that dynamic IP address is ruled personal data. That surprises me a little, to be honest, because dynamic IP is meant to be privacy-preserving so it’s an indictment of Google while also pointing out technical solutions on the consumer end aren’t enough to fight surveillance.
The user thus is not obligated to increase defensive measures against Google, it is the site operator who knowingly or unknowingly works with Google who is under obligation to either remove them or pay fines for violating privacy because of them.
What is the upside, if any, to the surveillance by Google? In other words, do we know what the tracking looks like?
Google offers the public a only a very limited view into the big analytic engine and that “1 year” reference to data preservation.
Source: fonts.google.com/analytics
It kind of begs the question if Google is calculating a 1 year change percentage whether they keep more than 1 year of data (year over year) in order to do a calculation (percent decrease versus the prior year), violating their own stated policy of not keeping more than 1 year of data?
And do you believe the following Fonts usage chart is trustworthy, or even makes sense to be generated from fonts?
Source: fonts.google.com/analytics
What do you think Google is doing with the rest of the data collected via a totally opaque platform they fraudulently market as “free and open”? If you can’t even trust Fonts, what can you trust from Google? Does anyone really need to determine the Chrome and Linux usage on the Internet by tracking the use of Fonts? It seems incredibly tone deaf.
Buyer beware. More to the point if you’re operating any resource using the heavily tainted and opaque Google Fonts service, you may be liable in court for financial damages because violating the privacy of your readers.
