#small law office software

[casefoxinc]

This blog explains the challenges small-sized law firms face during their growth-cycle. The blog lists down challenges of a law firm including cost control, industry competition, work-life balance, professional development, legal tech, and more.

[bi-writes]

whats wrong with ai?? genuinely curious <3

okay let's break it down. i'm an engineer, so i'm going to come at you from a perspective that may be different than someone else's.

i don't hate ai in every aspect. in theory, there are a lot of instances where, in fact, ai can help us do things a lot better without. here's a few examples:

ai detecting cancer

ai sorting recycling

some practical housekeeping that gemini (google ai) can do

all of the above examples are ways in which ai works with humans to do things in parallel with us. it's not overstepping--it's sorting, using pixels at a micro-level to detect abnormalities that we as humans can not, fixing a list. these are all really small, helpful ways that ai can work with us.

everything else about ai works against us. in general, ai is a huge consumer of natural resources. every prompt that you put into character.ai, chatgpt? this wastes water + energy. it's not free. a machine somewhere in the world has to swallow your prompt, call on a model to feed data into it and process more data, and then has to generate an answer for you all in a relatively short amount of time.

that is crazy expensive. someone is paying for that, and if it isn't you with your own money, it's the strain on the power grid, the water that cools the computers, the A/C that cools the data centers. and you aren't the only person using ai. chatgpt alone gets millions of users every single day, with probably thousands of prompts per second, so multiply your personal consumption by millions, and you can start to see how the picture is becoming overwhelming.

that is energy consumption alone. we haven't even talked about how problematic ai is ethically. there is currently no regulation in the united states about how ai should be developed, deployed, or used.

what does this mean for you?

it means that anything you post online is subject to data mining by an ai model (because why would they need to ask if there's no laws to stop them? wtf does it matter what it means to you to some idiot software engineer in the back room of an office making 3x your salary?). oh, that little fic you posted to wattpad that got a lot of attention? well now it's being used to teach ai how to write. oh, that sketch you made using adobe that you want to sell? adobe didn't tell you that anything you save to the cloud is now subject to being used for their ai models, so now your art is being replicated to generate ai images in photoshop, without crediting you (they have since said they don't do this...but privacy policies were never made to be human-readable, and i can't imagine they are the only company to sneakily try this). oh, your apartment just installed a new system that will use facial recognition to let their residents inside? oh, they didn't train their model with anyone but white people, so now all the black people living in that apartment building can't get into their homes. oh, you want to apply for a new job? the ai model that scans resumes learned from historical data that more men work that role than women (so the model basically thinks men are better than women), so now your resume is getting thrown out because you're a woman.

ai learns from data. and data is flawed. data is human. and as humans, we are racist, homophobic, misogynistic, transphobic, divided. so the ai models we train will learn from this. ai learns from people's creative works--their personal and artistic property. and now it's scrambling them all up to spit out generated images and written works that no one would ever want to read (because it's no longer a labor of love), and they're using that to make money. they're profiting off of people, and there's no one to stop them. they're also using generated images as marketing tools, to trick idiots on facebook, to make it so hard to be media literate that we have to question every single thing we see because now we don't know what's real and what's not.

the problem with ai is that it's doing more harm than good. and we as a society aren't doing our due diligence to understand the unintended consequences of it all. we aren't angry enough. we're too scared of stifling innovation that we're letting it regulate itself (aka letting companies decide), which has never been a good idea. we see it do one cool thing, and somehow that makes up for all the rest of the bullshit?

[treason-and-plot]

At the other end of the table Helene gives a gentle laugh and spears a glistening piece of steak with her fork. Tom takes a long drink from his beer glass, as if toasting his own wit. Connor sets his fork down on his plate. Saffron tries to make eye contact with him but he is staring at the wooden salt and pepper shakers, his jaw clenched.

“That's not true at all,” Saffron says to Tom. "Why would you even say that?"

“Saff, it's okay," says Connor. “Dad just thinks he's being funny. Don't worry about it."

“All I'm trying to say is that Helene and I are exceedingly grateful to you for all you've done for Connor this term," says Tom. He bestows his shark-like smile upon her once again, but she doesn't smile back. “I meant academically, but I’m sure you’ve helped him in myriad other ways as well. We’ve noticed a lot of positive changes, haven’t we Helene?"

“Oh, definitely,” says Helene.

“What are you talking about? You wouldn't notice if I grew two heads,” says Connor.

“Watch the attitude, son,” says Tom. His tone is pleasant, and sends a small shiver down Saffron's spine.  

“I'm glad to hear that you think I'm a positive influence, because I was paranoid you'd think I was a bad influence after I made Connor skip school with me the other day," says Saffron. Tom looks at her blankly, his eyebrows raised.

“I didn’t hear anything about this,” says Tom. “Did you, Hel?”

“I think I may have received a voicemail or an email from the school, now that you mention it,” Helene says. “I probably just assumed it was a message asking me to donate to the second-hand uniform sale or something.”

“Wow," says Saffron. “My mother went off her head.”  

“Saffron’s mother is a police officer,” Helene tells Tom, as if this is the sole explanation for her reaction.

“Ah,” says Tom. “And what does your father do, Saffron?”

“Here we go,” mutters Connor.

“He operates a chain of childcare centres,” says Saffron.

“Really,” says Helene. “What's the name of his business?”

“Little Sprouts,” says Saffron. Both Helene and Tom make noises signifying their recognition and approval. 

“Oh, I’ve heard they’re doing very well!” Helene says. “Didn’t he just open several more centres?”

“Yeah, he’s got five now,” says Saffron.

“Does he use an accountancy firm?” says Tom. Connor mutters something under his breath.

“I think Mireille- his girlfriend- does all the accounting,” says Saffron.

“There’s a wise saying that I like to tell my clients, Saffron,” says Tom. “And that saying is: 'It’s not the money that matters, it’s how you use it that determines its true value'.”

He pauses for effect.

“Woah. Interesting,” Saffron deadpans while Connor stifles a loud yawn. Helene narrows her eyes at him.

“Now, I’m sure your Dad’s girlfriend is more than competent in the area of bookkeeping and handling the payroll and the rest of the basics, but how up to date is she with the latest tax laws?” says Tom. “Does she know how to forecast cash flow? Does she realise the importance of accurate record keeping? Does she have access to the most up-to-date accounting software, which will enable she and your father to maximise business efficiency and productivity?” 

"I have no idea," says Saffron sweetly. "But I'm guessing you do, right?"

[nyaagolor]

The software I use at work is Not Working and I have an hour to kill before I can go home so here’s some HCs about assorted characters’ living situations bc I wanted to make notes for myself for fic purposes:

Phoenix: Used to live in a regular apartment, but moved into the apartment above Wright and Co Law offices with Trucy after his disbarment. Edgeworth paid off the building’s mortgage after Turnabout Goodbyes so Phoenix doesn’t have to worry about rent

Edgeworth: Owns a penthouse in LA. He rents hotel penthouse suites while in Europe but doesn’t have a permanent one anywhere other than LA because he thinks it’s a hassle. There’s a locked room in the LA penthouse filled with Steel Samurai merch

Gumshoe: Rents the shittiest basement studio you have ever seen. Does not own a bed. Genuinely questionable if the building is up to code (it’s prolly not)

Maya: Lived in Kurain Village until Mia’s death, then moved into the apartment above the office. After BttT she moves back to Kurain

Pearl: Lived in Kurain until her mother’s incarceration, then moved in with Maya in the upstairs apartment, then back to Kurain with Maya after BttT

Mia: Lived in Kurain Village until she founded Fey and Co law offices with Diego, at which point they moved into the apartment upstairs together until her death

Diego: Lived in a regular LA apartment until he founded Fey and Co with Mia. They moved into the upstairs apartment together until his coma. When he wakes from the coma he spends about half a year recovering in the hospital, then throughout AA3 just loiters around the courthouse because he refuses to speak to Phoenix. After BttT he goes to prison and moves in with Maya and Pearl in Kurain Village after his release

Franziska: Technically lives in the von Karma estate with her mother and sister, but is so busy traveling that she mostly stays in hotels. She used to spend holidays there, but Edgeworth has taken to inviting her to stay with him because she's not very close with the rest of her family, so now her room is mostly just storage.

Ema: Her and Lana lived in their parents’ house together until Lana’s imprisonment, during which Ema moves to Europe with an exchange family. When Ema returns from Europe, she moves back into the house with Lana joining her when she’s released

Apollo: He lived on the road with Thalassa and Jove until the latter’s death, then with Dhurke in the countryside, then in an American orphanage until he was 18, at which point I imagine he crashes on Clay’s couch for most of law school because he is technically an orphaned illegal immigrant with absolutely no money or credit. The internship with Kristoph and his job with the WAA gets him enough money to actually rent a place, but his lack of documentation and student loans mean he’s in the cheapest possible apartment. He keeps it extremely neat but there's only so much one can do. He and gumshoe can commiserate about it.

Trucy: Lived mostly on the road / in the tourbus + hotels with her dad and the troupe until she was adopted by Phoenix, at which point she moved into the apartment above the WAA

Klavier: Lived in his parents’ mansion with Kristoph until going to Themis. When he moved back he had enough money from gigging / his band to buy a fancy ass house and still lives there. It’s a little lonely by himself but when he let Daryan throw parties there it was POPPIN

Kristoph: Lived in his parents’ mansion his entire life. He got ownership of it when they died and raised Klavier in it, and continued to live there until he got arrested. Now he’s cushy in solitary cell 13

Athena: Lived in the space center then was shipped off to European relatives when her mom died. When she moved back to the states she got a decent apartment bc her WAA income was supplemented by those rich as hell European relatives

Simon: Lived in a small apartment with his sister growing up, which he continued to live in after she moved to the Space Center. It was sold when he was incarcerated. After his release he moved in with Athena briefly (no one thought it was a good idea for him to live alone) then to a small but nice apartment, which Edgeworth paid for until he could get back on his feet financially

[iamknicole]

Prologue

A/N: Bare with me the holidays are a busy time for me so it'll most likely be week day uploads when I do start posting chapters! Enjoy! Comment, reblog & share! Updates depend on engagement! 🌻

Warnings: A bit of cursing, 18+, Minors DNI

Masterlist

The sound of kids talking and playing filled Shania's ears as she entered the three year old classroom. A few kids noticed her, running to give her hugs then went back to playing. She watched them for a moment then went to the connected boys restroom, peeking in. 

"Hey, Ms. Martina. You buzzed for me?"

Martina stood from her kneel in front of the middle stall. "Yeah. Jaden has a stomach thing and no clothes."

Shania walked in to check on the child, giving him a soft smile. "Not feeling good, buddy?"

His voice came out weak and sad. "No ma'am."

"I'll get somebody to bring you some ginger ale and extra clothes while I call mommy and daddy. Sound good?" Giving him another pout, she turned to Martina. "If you want when he's cleaned up, you can bring him to the office with me. Tell me the last name again."

"Fatu."

Leaving the classroom, Shania power walked through the daycare back to her office and to her desk. After going through her software, she found his profile and dialed the first number. 

"Good morning, Mrs. Fatu. This is Shania Taylor at Busy Bees. Jaden's not feeling well and he's had an accident so you're gonna have to come pick him up. Thank you. See you soon."

Shania left the same message three times with Jaden's mom, dad and uncle. She sighed softly realizing there was only one more number to call. Dialing the number, she put it on speaker so she could pull her curls away from her face. 

"Hello?"

The deep voice startled her a bit as she honestly wasn't expecting anyone to answer. 

"Helloooo," the voice sang out, "Somebody there?"

"Sorry, yes." She picked her phone up, moving it closer to her.  "Hey, I'm sorry to bother you. This is Shania Taylor from Busy Bees. Is this Joshua Fatu?"

"Uh, yeah, this Josh. Busy Bees?"

"Yes, Busy Bees. Your nephew, Jaden, is enrolled here."

"Oh shit, my bad," he said quickly, "I don't think I ever knew the name. He aight? He need something?"

She glanced at her office door when she heard a light knock, finding Martina standing in the doorway with Jaden in tow. She waved them in, pointing at the ottoman in front of her window. 

"He's actually not feeling well and had an accident. He didn't have any clothes but I keep extras here so that's taken care of. You are gonna have to get him though."

Josh went silent for a moment, Shania could hear rustling around in his background.

"I don't mind at all but did you call Jon or Trinity first?"

"Yes sir," she said softly as she rolled her chair over to Jaden. She covered him with her throw blanket. "I called them and the other uncle they had listed, no one answered."

"Aight, I'll try to call them. I'm on the way though, Ms. Taylor."

"Thank you, see you soon."

The small monitor on her desk chimed and real time video popped up fifteen minutes later. Easing up from her spot, Shania checked the monitor then went to the front door of the center. She pushed the door open for him, a small smile on her face. 

"Hey, Mr. Fatu." She watched him as he stepped inside. "Thank you for coming."

He looked around the foyer then at her, giving her a small nod. "Josh. Just Josh. I gotta get em from the class?"

"Nope, he's actually been in my office with me. Fell asleep not too long ago. He had me watching toy videos so the nap was a blessing in disguise for us both," she joked. "Since he is asleep, I can go ahead and get a copy of your license."

He frowned a little at that. "Why?"

"I make copies of everyone's licenses when they come to pick up one of my babies. State law. Keeps them safe. You can step into my office."

The two stood in silence while she made her copies. Josh grabbed Jaden's backpack, bag of soiled clothes and the small bottle of ginger ale beside him. He watched Shania move quickly around her office from the printer to the filling cabinet then to her desktop, lingering there for a few minutes. She wrote something down on her post it before peeling it off. Going to Josh, she held it out to him smiling. Slowly, he took it then looked at her. 

"What's this?"

"Your family's code to get into the door so you don't have to wait to be let in whenever you come get him."

"Thank you," he stuffed it into his pocket then carefully picked up his sleeping nephew, "I need to sign em out?"

"I'll take care of it. You just take care of my buddy. When you talk to his parents, let them know he can return when he's been symptom free for 24 hours."

"Gotcha. You the boss lady huh?" He joked adjusting Jaden in his arms. 

Her smile grew a little wider, her cheeks pushing her eyes into small slits. "I wouldn't say boss lady but I am the owner."

"Shit. Forreal?"

"Yes and we don't talk like that in Busy Bees, Josh." She chastised playfully.

He flashed her a quick smile, giving a peek of his gold fronts on his bottom teeth. "My bad, Ms. Taylor. Ima let them know though. Have a good day, don't work too hard."

Walking in front of him to the door, she propped the door open for him to exit. She watched him effortlessly unlock his truck, put Jaden's things in then Jaden into his seat. She called out to him before he could open the driver side. 

"What's up?"

"Call me Shania."

His fronts made another appearance. "Yes ma'am."

[feminismisstillahatemovement]

A few years ago, during one of California’s steadily worsening wildfire seasons, Nat Friedman’s family home burned down. A few months after that, Friedman was in Covid-19 lockdown in the Bay Area, both freaked out and bored. Like many a middle-aged dad, he turned for healing and guidance to ancient Rome. While some of us were watching Tiger King and playing with our kids’ Legos, he read books about the empire and helped his daughter make paper models of Roman villas. Instead of sourdough, he learned to bake Panis Quadratus, a Roman loaf pictured in some of the frescoes found in Pompeii. During sleepless pandemic nights, he spent hours trawling the internet for more Rome stuff. That’s how he arrived at the Herculaneum papyri, a fork in the road that led him toward further obsession. He recalls exclaiming: “How the hell has no one ever told me about this?”

The Herculaneum papyri are a collection of scrolls whose status among classicists approaches the mythical. The scrolls were buried inside an Italian countryside villa by the same volcanic eruption in 79 A.D. that froze Pompeii in time. To date, only about 800 have been recovered from the small portion of the villa that’s been excavated. But it’s thought that the villa, which historians believe belonged to Julius Caesar’s prosperous father-in-law, had a huge library that could contain thousands or even tens of thousands more. Such a haul would represent the largest collection of ancient texts ever discovered, and the conventional wisdom among scholars is that it would multiply our supply of ancient Greek and Roman poetry, plays and philosophy by manyfold. High on their wish lists are works by the likes of Aeschylus, Sappho and Sophocles, but some say it’s easy to imagine fresh revelations about the earliest years of Christianity.

“Some of these texts could completely rewrite the history of key periods of the ancient world,” says Robert Fowler, a classicist and the chair of the Herculaneum Society, a charity that tries to raise awareness of the scrolls and the villa site. “This is the society from which the modern Western world is descended.”

The reason we don’t know exactly what’s in the Herculaneum papyri is, y’know, volcano. The scrolls were preserved by the voluminous amount of superhot mud and debris that surrounded them, but the knock-on effects of Mount Vesuvius charred them beyond recognition. The ones that have been excavated look like leftover logs in a doused campfire. People have spent hundreds of years trying to unroll them—sometimes carefully, sometimes not. And the scrolls are brittle. Even the most meticulous attempts at unrolling have tended to end badly, with them crumbling into ashy pieces.

In recent years, efforts have been made to create high-resolution, 3D scans of the scrolls’ interiors, the idea being to unspool them virtually. This work, though, has often been more tantalizing than revelatory. Scholars have been able to glimpse only snippets of the scrolls’ innards and hints of ink on the papyrus. Some experts have sworn they could see letters in the scans, but consensus proved elusive, and scanning the entire cache is logistically difficult and prohibitively expensive for all but the deepest-pocketed patrons. Anything on the order of words or paragraphs has long remained a mystery.

But Friedman wasn’t your average Rome-loving dad. He was the chief executive officer of GitHub Inc., the massive software development platform that Microsoft Corp. acquired in 2018. Within GitHub, Friedman had been developing one of the first coding assistants powered by artificial intelligence, and he’d seen the rising power of AI firsthand. He had a hunch that AI algorithms might be able to find patterns in the scroll images that humans had missed.

After studying the problem for some time and ingratiating himself with the classics community, Friedman, who’s left GitHub to become an AI-focused investor, decided to start a contest. Last year he launched the Vesuvius Challenge, offering $1 million in prizes to people who could develop AI software capable of reading four passages from a single scroll. “Maybe there was obvious stuff no one had tried,” he recalls thinking. “My life has validated this notion again and again.”

As the months ticked by, it became clear that Friedman’s hunch was a good one. Contestants from around the world, many of them twentysomethings with computer science backgrounds, developed new techniques for taking the 3D scans and flattening them into more readable sheets. Some appeared to find letters, then words. They swapped messages about their work and progress on a Discord chat, as the often much older classicists sometimes looked on in hopeful awe and sometimes slagged off the amateur historians.

On Feb. 5, Friedman and his academic partner Brent Seales, a computer science professor and scroll expert, plan to reveal that a group of contestants has delivered transcriptions of many more than four passages from one of the scrolls. While it’s early to draw any sweeping conclusions from this bit of work, Friedman says he’s confident that the same techniques will deliver far more of the scrolls’ contents. “My goal,” he says, “is to unlock all of them.”

Before Mount Vesuvius erupted, the town of Herculaneum sat at the edge of the Gulf of Naples, the sort of getaway wealthy Romans used to relax and think. Unlike Pompeii, which took a direct hit from the Vesuvian lava flow, Herculaneum was buried gradually by waves of ash, pumice and gases. Although the process was anything but gentle, most inhabitants had time to escape, and much of the town was left intact under the hardening igneous rock. Farmers first rediscovered the town in the 18th century, when some well-diggers found marble statues in the ground. In 1750 one of them collided with the marble floor of the villa thought to belong to Caesar’s father-in-law, Senator Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, known to historians today as Piso.

During this time, the first excavators who dug tunnels into the villa to map it were mostly after more obviously valuable artifacts, like the statues, paintings and recognizable household objects. Initially, people who ran across the scrolls, some of which were scattered across the colorful floor mosaics, thought they were just logs and threw them on a fire. Eventually, though, somebody noticed the logs were often found in what appeared to be libraries or reading rooms, and realized they were burnt papyrus. Anyone who tried to open one, however, found it crumbling in their hands.

Terrible things happened to the scrolls in the many decades that followed. The scientif-ish attempts to loosen the pages included pouring mercury on them (don’t do that) and wafting a combination of gases over them (ditto). Some of the scrolls have been sliced in half, scooped out and generally abused in ways that still make historians weep. The person who came the closest in this period was Antonio Piaggio, a priest. In the late 1700s he built a wooden rack that pulled silken threads attached to the edge of the scrolls and could be adjusted with a simple mechanism to unfurl the document ever so gently, at a rate of 1 inch per day. Improbably, it sort of worked; the contraption opened some scrolls, though it tended to damage them or outright tear them into pieces. In later centuries, teams organized by other European powers, including one assembled by Napoleon, pieced together torn bits of mostly illegible text here and there.

Today the villa remains mostly buried, unexcavated and off-limits even to the experts. Most of what’s been found there and proven legible has been attributed to Philodemus, an Epicurean philosopher and poet, leading historians to hope there’s a much bigger main library buried elsewhere on-site. A wealthy, educated man like Piso would have had the classics of the day along with more modern works of history, law and philosophy, the thinking goes. “I do believe there’s a much bigger library there,” says Richard Janko, a University of Michigan classical studies professor who’s spent painstaking hours assembling scroll fragments by hand, like a jigsaw puzzle. “I see no reason to think it should not still be there and preserved in the same way.” Even an ordinary citizen from that time could have collections of tens of thousands of scrolls, Janko says. Piso is known to have corresponded often with the Roman statesman Cicero, and the apostle Paul had passed through the region a couple of decades before Vesuvius erupted. There could be writings tied to his visit that comment on Jesus and Christianity. “We have about 800 scrolls from the villa today,” Janko says. “There could be thousands or tens of thousands more.”

In the modern era, the great pioneer of the scrolls is Brent Seales, a computer science professor at the University of Kentucky. For the past 20 years he’s used advanced medical imaging technology designed for CT scans and ultrasounds to analyze unreadable old texts. For most of that time he’s made the Herculaneum papyri his primary quest. “I had to,” he says. “No one else was working on it, and no one really thought it was even possible.”

Progress was slow. Seales built software that could theoretically take the scans of a coiled scroll and unroll it virtually, but it wasn’t prepared to handle a real Herculaneum scroll when he put it to the test in 2009. “The complexity of what we saw broke all of my software,” he says. “The layers inside the scroll were not uniform. They were all tangled and mashed together, and my software could not follow them reliably.”

By 2016 he and his students had managed to read the Ein Gedi scroll, a charred ancient Hebrew text, by programming their specialized software to detect changes in density between the burnt manuscript and the burnt ink layered onto it. The software made the letters light up against a darker background. Seales’ team had high hopes to apply this technique to the Herculaneum papyri, but those were written with a different, carbon-based ink that their imaging gear couldn’t illuminate in the same way.

Over the past few years, Seales has begun experimenting with AI. He and his team have scanned the scrolls with more powerful imaging machines, examined portions of the papyrus where ink was visible and trained algorithms on what those patterns looked like. The hope was that the AI would start picking up on details that the human eye missed and could apply what it learned to more obfuscated scroll chunks. This approach proved fruitful, though it remained a battle of inches. Seales’ technology uncovered bits and pieces of the scrolls, but they were mostly unreadable. He needed another breakthrough.

Friedman set up Google alerts for Seales and the papyri in 2020, while still early in his Rome obsession. After a year passed with no news, he started watching YouTube videos of Seales discussing the underlying challenges. Among other things, he needed money. By 2022, Friedman was convinced he could help. He invited Seales out to California for an event where Silicon Valley types get together and share big ideas. Seales gave a short presentation on the scrolls to the group, but no one bit. “I felt very, very guilty about this and embarrassed because he’d come out to California, and California had failed him,” Friedman says.

On a whim, Friedman proposed the idea of a contest to Seales. He said he’d put up some of his own money to fund it, and his investing partner Daniel Gross offered to match it.

Seales says he was mindful of the trade-offs. The Herculaneum papyri had turned into his life’s work, and he wanted to be the one to decode them. More than a few of his students had also poured time and energy into the project and planned to publish papers about their efforts. Now, suddenly, a couple of rich guys from Silicon Valley were barging into their territory and suggesting that internet randos could deliver the breakthroughs that had eluded the experts.

More than glory, though, Seales really just hoped the scrolls would be read, and he agreed to hear Friedman out and help design the AI contest. They kicked off the Vesuvius Challenge last year on the Ides of March. Friedman announced the contest on the platform we fondly remember as Twitter, and many of his tech friends agreed to pledge their money toward the effort while a cohort of budding papyrologists began to dig into the task at hand. After a couple of days, Friedman had amassed enough money to offer $1 million in prizes, along with some extra money to throw at some of the more time-intensive basics.

Friedman hired people online to gather the existing scroll imagery, catalog it and create software tools that made it easier to chop the scrolls into segments and to flatten the images out into something that was readable on a computer screen. After finding a handful of people who were particularly good at this, he made them full members of his scroll contest team, paying them $40 an hour. His hobby was turning into a lifestyle.

The initial splash of attention helped open new doors. Seales had lobbied Italian and British collectors for years to scan his first scrolls. Suddenly the Italians were now offering up two new scrolls for scanning to provide more AI training data. With Friedman’s backing, a team set to work building precision-fitting, 3D-printed cases to protect the new scrolls on their private jet flight from Italy to a particle accelerator in England. There they were scanned for three days straight at a cost of about $70,000.

Seeing the imaging process in action drives home both the magic and difficulty inherent in this quest. One of the scroll remnants placed in the scanner, for example, wasn’t much bigger than a fat finger. It was peppered by high-energy X-rays, much like a human going through a CT scan, except the resulting images were delivered in extremely high resolution. (For the real nerds: about 8 micrometers.) These images were virtually carved into a mass of tiny slices too numerous for a person to count. Along each slice, the scanner picked up infinitesimal changes in density and thickness. Software was then used to unroll and flatten out the slices, and the resulting images looked recognizably like sheets of papyrus, the writing on them hidden.

The files generated by this process are so large and difficult to deal with on a regular computer that Friedman couldn’t throw a whole scroll at most would-be contest winners. To be eligible for the $700,000 grand prize, contestants would have until the end of 2023 to read just four passages of at least 140 characters of contiguous text. Along the way, smaller prizes ranging from $1,000 to $100,000 would be awarded for various milestones, such as the first to read letters in a scroll or to build software tools capable of smoothing the image processing. With a nod to his open-source roots, Friedman insisted these prizes could be won only if the contestants agreed to show the world how they did it.

Luke Farritor was hooked from the start. Farritor—a bouncy 22-year-old Nebraskan undergraduate who often exclaims, “Oh, my goodness!”—heard Friedman describe the contest on a podcast in March. “I think there’s a 50% chance that someone will encounter this opportunity, get the data and get nerd-sniped by it, and we’ll solve it this year,” Friedman said on the show. Farritor thought, “That could be me.”

The early months were a slog of splotchy images. Then Casey Handmer, an Australian mathematician, physicist and polymath, scored a point for humankind by beating the computers to the first major breakthrough. Handmer took a few stabs at writing scroll-reading code, but he soon concluded he might have better luck if he just stared at the images for a really long time. Eventually he began to notice what he and the other contestants have come to call “crackle,” a faint pattern of cracks and lines on the page that resembles what you might see in the mud of a dried-out lakebed. To Handmer’s eyes, the crackle seemed to have the shape of Greek letters and the blobs and strokes that accompany handwritten ink. He says he believes it to be dried-out ink that’s lifted up from the surface of the page.

The crackle discovery led Handmer to try identifying clips of letters in one scroll image. In the spirit of the contest, he posted his findings to the Vesuvius Challenge’s Discord channel in June. At the time, Farritor was a summer intern at SpaceX. He was in the break room sipping a Diet Coke when he saw the post, and his initial disbelief didn’t last long. Over the next month he began hunting for crackle in the other image files: one letter here, another couple there. Most of the letters were invisible to the human eye, but 1% or 2% had the crackle. Armed with those few letters, he trained a model to recognize hidden ink, revealing a few more letters. Then Farritor added those letters to the model’s training data and ran it again and again and again. The model starts with something only a human can see—the crackle pattern—then learns to see ink we can’t.

Unlike today’s large-language AI models, which gobble up data, Farritor’s model was able to get by with crumbs. For each 64-pixel-by-64-pixel square of the image, it was merely asking, is there ink here or not? And it helped that the output was known: Greek letters, squared along the right angles of the cross-hatched papyrus fibers.

In early August, Farritor received an opportunity to put his software to the test. He’d returned to Nebraska to finish out the summer and found himself at a house party with friends when a new, crackle-rich image popped up in the contest’s Discord channel. As the people around him danced and drank, Farritor hopped on his phone, connected remotely to his dorm computer, threw the image into his machine-learning system, then put his phone away. “An hour later, I drive all my drunk friends home, and then I’m walking out of the parking garage, and I take my phone out not expecting to see anything,” he says. “But when I open it up, there’s three Greek letters on the screen.”

Around 2 a.m., Farritor texted his mom and then Friedman and the other contestants about what he’d found, fighting back tears of joy. “That was the moment where I was like, ‘Oh, my goodness, this is actually going to work. We’re going to read the scrolls.’”

Soon enough, Farritor found 10 letters and won $40,000 for one of the contest’s progress prizes. The classicists reviewed his work and said he’d found the Greek word for “purple.”

Farritor continued to train his machine-learning model on crackle data and to post his progress on Discord and Twitter. The discoveries he and Handmer made also set off a new wave of enthusiasm among contestants, and some began to employ similar techniques. In the latter part of 2023, Farritor formed an alliance with two other contestants, Youssef Nader and Julian Schilliger, in which they agreed to combine their technology and share any prize money.

In the end, the Vesuvius Challenge received 18 entries for its grand prize. Some submissions were ho-hum, but a handful showed that Friedman’s gamble had paid off. The scroll images that were once ambiguous blobs now had entire paragraphs of letters lighting up across them. The AI systems had brought the past to life. “It’s a situation that you practically never encounter as a classicist,” says Tobias Reinhardt, a professor of ancient philosophy and Latin literature at the University of Oxford. “You mostly look at texts that have been looked at by someone before. The idea that you are reading a text that was last unrolled on someone’s desk 1,900 years ago is unbelievable.”

A group of classicists reviewed all the entries and did, in fact, deem Farritor’s team the winners. They were able to stitch together more than a dozen columns of text with entire paragraphs all over their entry. Still translating, the scholars believe the text to be another work by Philodemus, one centered on the pleasures of music and food and their effects on the senses. “Peering at and beginning to transcribe the first reasonably legible scans of this brand-new ancient book was an extraordinarily emotional experience,” says Janko, one of the reviewers. While these passages aren’t particularly revelatory about ancient Rome, most classics scholars have their hopes for what might be next.

There’s a chance that the villa is tapped out—that there are no more libraries of thousands of scrolls waiting to be discovered—or that the rest have nothing mind-blowing to offer. Then again, there’s the chance they contain valuable lessons for the modern world.

That world, of course, includes Ercolano, the modern town of about 50,000 built on top of ancient Herculaneum. More than a few residents own property and buildings atop the villa site. “They would have to kick people out of Ercolano and destroy everything to uncover the ancient city,” says Federica Nicolardi, a papyrologist at the University of Naples Federico II.

Barring a mass relocation, Friedman is working to refine what he’s got. There’s plenty left to do; the first contest yielded about 5% of one scroll. A new set of contestants, he says, might be able to reach 85%. He also wants to fund the creation of more automated systems that can speed the processes of scanning and digital smoothing. He’s now one of the few living souls who’s roamed the villa tunnels, and he says he’s also contemplating buying scanners that can be placed right at the villa and used in parallel to scan tons of scrolls per day. “Even if there’s just one dialogue of Aristotle or a beautiful lost Homeric poem or a dispatch from a Roman general about this Jesus Christ guy who’s roaming around,” he says, “all you need is one of those for the whole thing to be more than worth it.”

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How tech changed global labor struggles for better and worse

The original sin of both tech boosterism and tech criticism is to focus unduly on what a given technology does, without regard to who it does it to and who it does it for. When it comes to technology’s effect on our daily lives, the social arrangements matter much more than the feature-sets.

This is the premise behind my idea of the “shitty technology adoption curve”: if you want to do something horrible to people with technology, you must first inflict it on people without social power and then work your way slowly up the privilege gradient, smoothing the tech’s rough edges by sanding them against the human bodies of people who can’t fight back.

Thus we see the rise of all disciplinary technology, especially bossware, which started off monitoring forced prison labor, then blue-collar workers, then pink collar workers (like the largely female, largely Black work-from-home customer service reps who work for Arise):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/22/paperback-writer/#toothless

The pandemic saw the spread of bossware to affluent, “high-skilled” white-collar workers, from doctors to teachers to IT workers, as the idea of being monitored continuously in your own home, from camera to keystrokes, was normalized by the lockdown:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

And yet, what matters about bossware isn’t what it does — a keylogger that you control is just called “undo” — but who it does it to. When gig workers “seize the means of reproduction” and hack the apps that boss them around, they can turn the tables. That’s what’s happening in Indonesia, where Tuyul apps are produced by worker co-ops and small software vendors to give drivers direct control over their working conditions:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#gojek

This is true disruption, where tech isn’t just used for regulatory arbitrage (as when gig-work apps are used to avoid labor laws by misclassifying workers as contractors):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/21/contra-nihilismum/#the-street-finds-its-own-use-for-things

That’s what makes Rida Qadri’s research so exciting: the premise that if workers can hack their employers back, bossware can become laborware:

https://www.wired.com/story/disruption-mobility-platforms-politics/

In the USA, companies like Para are creating apps that sit on top of the gig work dispatch apps, monitoring all the offers from all the different apps and auto-declining offers that are too low, forcing the algorithm to bid up the labor share of the companies’ income:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/tech-rights-are-workers-rights-doordash-edition

Writing for IT for Change’s outstanding inaugural “State of Big Tech” issue, the Vidhi Centre For Legal Policy’s Jai Vipra presents “Changing Dynamics of Labor and Capital,” a deep, essential look at the way that tech affects labor struggles around the world:

https://projects.itforchange.net/state-of-big-tech/changing-dynamics-of-labor-and-capital/

Vipra’s report is fascinating not just for the eye-watering new ways that capital uses tech to inflict pain on labor, but for the ingenious, effective mechanisms that workers use tech to answer power with countervailing power.

For example, when workers delivering for the Swiggy app were unable to get the company to respond to the ways that the app was driving them into unsustainable and dangerous working schedules, they staged a “log-out strike” and collectively withheld their labor from the app, triggering a crisis that management couldn’t ignore.

Likewise, drivers for Ola began mass-cancelling rides to protest the company’s policy of not showing drivers their destinations and pay until they accepted a job — the resulting chaos forced the company to let drivers see all the details of an offer of work before accepting it.

These direct actions are driven in part by the platforms’ relentless pursuit of a reduced wage-bill, which sees them laying off swathes of back-office workers who once stepped in to mediate between gig workers and their algorithmic managers. When you can’t get anyone on the phone or a livechat to complain that your app wants you to drive off a pier and into the deep blue sea, collective digital power swings into action.

The Shitty Tech Adoption Curve means that we find the tactics of gig drivers working their way up the privilege gradient to white-collar workers, and sure enough, in Mar 2021, Goldman Sachs bankers coordinated a threat of mass resignation over the bossware monitoring them in their homes 24/7, complaining of 105 hour (!!) work-weeks:

https://www.thejakartapost.com/life/2021/03/28/goldman-sachs-overwork-accusation-hits-nerve-as-pandemic-blurs-work-life-line-.html

But ad-hoc coordination has its limits. Spinning up a new organizing group to counter each new bossware fuckery exacts a terrible price from already overstretched, precarious workers. That’s where unions come in. On the face of it, unionizing gig workers presents an insurmountable challenge: they are atomized, geographically dispersed and lack even a break room.

But tech taketh away and it giveth back. When Uber Eats bait-and-switched drivers into signing up in 2016 and then slashed their wages, organizers connected with other workers by placing small food orders with Uber Eats and then had organizing conversations with the drivers who delivered the orders:

https://www.ft.com/content/88fdc58e-754f-11e6-b60a-de4532d5ea35

Bosses push back. They’ve convinced gutless labor regulators to ban the use of work email addresses for union organizing; they send infiltrators to monitor private Facebook conversations, they plant spyware on phones and laptops to crack open Whatsapp group-chats. Location-aware ID badges let bosses follow workers around and target potential union organizers for retaliatory firings.

The same monitoring tools let bosses nickel-and-dime their workers, clocking them off while they’re “unproductive” (peeing, driving to pick up their next passenger or delivery, or only paying retail workers while a customer is in the shop).

It’s a mixed bag: in China, independent workers’ rights centers work almost exclusively through social media, “for both direct consultations and mass dissemination of information, and this use is contributing to the organizing of labor as well.”

And ironically, monopoly helps labor organizers: the rollup plays that have seen most CloudKitchens gathered into the hands of a few firms means that their workers are more likely to be physically proximate and able to organize labor resistance to their monopolist bosses.

A common labor complaint in the age of digitalization is that their bosses monitor and discipline them for their off-hours activities: think of Deutsche Welle and the AP firing journalists who used their personal social media accounts to express support for Palestinians’ struggle for justice.

Bossware vendors boast that they can monitor workers’ personal online activity “to help them stay focused” — something 72% of workers object to. It’s easy to see how this can become a focus of labor activism, especially as employers announce that they will fire any worker who refuses to supply a full list of their social media accounts for monitoring:

https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/all-things-work/pages/watching-the-workers.aspx

The next level of personal surveillance comes from “voluntary” health monitoring in which employees are required to wear Fitbits or other biometric tracking tools, or face increases to their health care premiums and other penalties. This is bad enough, but these biometric companies are choice acquisition targets for the biggest surveillance companies in the world, which means that you might one day wake up and find out that the data from your employer-mandated tracking cuff is now in Google’s hands:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/04/google-fitbit-merger-would-cement-googles-data-empire

Neoliberalism got us into this mess, and tech was its willing accomplice. But Vipra makes a good case that tech can “increase the negotiating power of labor over capital.” For Vipra, this starts with access to data: in India, “analog” workers have the legal right to know their employers’ profit margins, which is key for collective bargaining. But digital workers don’t have this right:

https://medium.com/tech-people/new-labour-codes-explained-48a4679d4a29

Giving gig workers the right to their own performance data would help those workers secure competitive bids for their labor — denying workers access to this data is anti-competitive:

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/09/workplace-data-rights-regulation/

This same data can be used to make the case for regulation and unionization: when it’s your word against your boss’s, it might be hard to interest public officials in protecting your working conditions. But when the data shows that gig workers are putting in 12–18 hour days without overtime, the case is harder to ignore:

https://www.justjobsnetwork.org/wp-content/pubs/reports/transformations_in_technology_report.pdf

Modern employers collect vast amount of data about their workers, but share almost none of it. Again, the important thing isn’t what the tech is doing, but who it’s doing it for and who it’s doing it to.

Vipra also singles out the one-sided nature of the platforms’ use of payment technologies. Modern payment systems mean that gig work platforms collect their customers’ money in near-realtime, but despite this, gig companies are the most delay-prone employers, paying workers after totally unjustifiable delays that give bosses free cash flow and force workers into precarity.

https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/08/former-head-of-mint-raises-4-5m-for-lean/

After this critique, Vipra proposes “a substantive agenda for labor” in five areas: algorithmic regulation, data sharing, remote work rights, financial rights, and “emancipatory automation.”

Algorithmic regulation: Algorithms should have “a minimum level of explainability”; “minimum performance levels” (error rates, transparency, etc); and “human involvement in decision making” must be mandatory (so you can get prompt and effective redress when the algorithm misfires).

Data sharing: Don’t just “data minimize” — “reorient it towards goals that are worker- and society-friendly.” Collect and share data on labor safety, and mandate that companies “collect, analyze, and share big data to protect workers’ rights.”

Remote work rights: The right to disconnect from work; the right to be paid for work equipment, including chairs, internet access, etc (I would add here, the right to have those devices configured to block employer monitoring).

Financial rights: The state should mandate financial interoperability and use account aggregators and open banking to “minimize[] the information asymmetry in favor of people for whom information is collateral.” Force platforms to disclose the commissions, fees, incentives, etc they offer to workers. Provide source-code for these systems to regulators.

Emancipatory automation: “Automation should mean less drudgery and fewer working hours overall.” This is what I’m getting at when I call for technologists to become full-stack Luddites:

https://locusmag.com/2022/01/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature/

Overall, Vipra presents a bracing, challenging view of the way that tech can serve both labor and capital, depending on how it is configured and used. I don’t agree with everything she says (the privacy section in data rights could use its own article of equal depth and critical analysis), but reading this made the hair on the back on my neck stand up (in a good way).

This is more or less what I had in mind back in 2009 when I was writing For the Win, about how multiplayer games could serve as organizing platforms for an international labor vanguard (the Industrial Workers of the World Wide Web, or Webblies):

https://craphound.com/category/ftw/

[Image ID: An altered version of J.C. Leyendecker's Labor Day 1946 cover illustration for Hearst's 'American Weekly' magazine. The original features a muscular worker in dungarees sitting atop a banner-draped globe, holding a sledgehammer. In this version, his head has been replaced with a faceless hacker-in-a-hoodie, and his sledgehammer has been filled with Matrix code-waterfall characters. Leyendecker's signature has been replaced with an IWW graphic depicting workers with upraised fists all joining together to form a gigantic fist.]

[nomadicism]

Any more thoughts about the whole Twitter situation? What do you think will happen to that site over the next while?

Hi Anon, thank you for the Ask!

By the gods, what to even say now?

I wish that I had the wit to voice my thoughts with brevity and good humor. The Twitter Musk situation is hilarious-but-also-serious, and alas, I am verbose in my thoughts and not very funny.

I'm not sure that Twitter will survive, if I have time I'll post more deeply on what I think will happen with that.

I don't follow much outside of USA Twitter, so I can see all of this going in a lot of directions, such as the platform being irrelevant in the US, while remaining utilized outside of the USA.

We can still use Twitter and curate our experience by muting every slur that ever existed while using mega block on shitty tweets to expand our block lists, but that's not gonna change the fact if Twitter survives—without Furry Musk-gland backtracking on moderation—then the winners will be authoritarian regimes and con artists. Both rely upon sowing disinformation, distrust, propaganda, and conspiracies.

There are many choice threads on Twitter that reveal the convergence of serious issues, and I don’t even know where to begin summarizing them all. I’ve included a list of URLs to a variety of threads that might be of interest. What's happening here is not a simple thing, it's bigger than one spoiled mediocre man's ego.

Content is king, and Black people did a lot of labor in creating the kind of content that draws users to Twitter. Michael Harriot of The Grio has some words.

Hark! A graph showing Mastodon new user sign up spikes plotted against new user sign-ups on Twitter

A kind and thoughtful thread by Gerard K Cohen about his team members. Their entire team (Accessibility Experience Team) was among the mass firings at Twitter last week.

Of which, the unsurprising firing of thousands of employees (not all of them whom are software engineers) potentially poses as serious legal issue for Twitter due to California’s WARN law.

Also in Ireland (though small potatoes I suppose).

Apartheid Clyde (thank you Black Twitter for this most excellent name for Elon Musk) tries to blame advertisers bailing on the platform on activists. Gets called out by the president and Chief Operating Officer of MMA Global (a multi-national marketing trade association) whom he had just had a call with.

On the value of experts discussing in an open public forum

Concerns from a Chinese dissident

Discount Stark is fact-checked on his lie about advertising

Profoundly bad business decisions. There is no 5D chess here folks. There may well be a case for Tesla stock-holders to sue for breach of fiduciary responsibility.

Being an asshole to everyone and then firing the security team (who were already pissed at you very likely) as you’re rolling out a feature that requires both financial and personal data to be transmitted and stored is beyond foolish.

Ohhhh, hmmm about those critical employees…

Some of the fired employees are here on work visas

Potentially disruptive for upcoming elections in the USA.

Listen, I work in tech. I co-founded a startup back in 2013. No job is worth a 9:30pm stand-up while your colleagues are being fired by a useless billionaire.

Does Twitter really matter though?

Learn to host your own content.

Make a list of your fave Twitter artists, authors, etc.

When parody is only comedy if it comes with a disclaimer

Comedy as a venn diagram

Use lists to get around shadow banning of un-verified accounts

Paying for verification reduces identity to a trademark. The average person does not have the resources to continuously litigate their identity, such people who are recognized experts in their field, journalists, government officials, etc will be the ones impersonated.

A must-read thread about Twitter and counter-convergence (spoiler, Harry Potter was a counter-convergence)

Faith and trust rely on knowing that people are who they claim to be when they speak on subjects with authority and expertise. Undercutting the ability of such people to verify themselves is a form of discrediting, and when that happens systematically to scientists, educators, and public servants, then we have fascist propaganda tactics on our hands.

I hope you find these useful Anon!

(Y'all give me some reblogs because I'm not sure if this post will show up organically since it has links in it.)

[darkmaga-retard]

Should you take an arch-technocrat at his word? I think so. Larry Ellison is the founder and former chairman of Oracle, the third-largest software company in the world. According to SFGATE, “The CIA was not just Oracle’s first customer. Founded in May 1977, the firm’s name came from a CIA project code-named “Oracle.” Small world, indeed. Listen to the video and be prepared to be shocked.

When I was in the software business in the 1990s, the VP of Sales at Oracle approached me about integrating my sales and marketing software into the growing stable of Oracle products. I thought I had struck it rich! That is, until I got a whiff of their internal culture. The sales manager for Oracle was a woman who affectionally called her sales team her “yuppie guppies.” How cute, I thought, until I asked one of her “guppies” what that meant. He explained that guppies eat their own offspring and if they didn’t make their sales quotas by hook or by crook, they would be escorted off the campus within the hour. Needless to say, I ran as fast as I could to get away from them.

Larry Ellison has never changed his spots over the years. He should have been branded as a menace to society long ago. ⁃ Patrick Wood, TN Editor.

On Thursday, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison shared his vision for an AI-powered surveillance future during a company financial meeting, reports Business Insider. During an investor Q&A, Ellison described a world where artificial intelligence systems would constantly monitor citizens through an extensive network of cameras and drones, stating this would ensure both police and citizens don’t break the law.

Ellison, who briefly became the world’s second-wealthiest person last week when his net worth surpassed Jeff Bezos’ for a short time, outlined a scenario where AI models would analyze footage from security cameras, police body cams, doorbell cameras, and vehicle dash cams.

“Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on,” Ellison said, describing what he sees as the benefits from automated oversight from AI and automated alerts for when crime takes place. “We’re going to have supervision,” he continued. “Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there’s a problem, AI will report the problem and report it to the appropriate person.”

he 80-year-old billionaire also predicted that AI-controlled drones would replace police vehicles in high-speed pursuits. “You just have a drone follow the car,” he explained. “It’s very simple in the age of autonomous drones.”

Ellison co-founded Oracle in 1977 and served as CEO until he stepped down in 2014. He currently serves as the company’s executive chairman and CTO.

Sounds familiar

While Ellison attempted to paint his prediction of universal public surveillance in a positive light, his remarks raise significant questions about privacy, civil liberties, and the potential for abuse in a world of ubiquitous AI monitoring.

Ellison’s vision bears more than a passing resemblance to the cautionary world portrayed in George Orwell’s prescient novel 1984. In Orwell’s fiction, the totalitarian government of Oceania uses ubiquitous “telescreens” to monitor citizens constantly, creating a society where privacy no longer exists and independent thought becomes nearly impossible.

But Orwell’s famous phrase “Big Brother is watching you” would take on new meaning in Ellison’s tech-driven scenario, where AI systems, rather than human watchers, would serve as the ever-vigilant eyes of authority. Once considered a sci-fi trope, automated systems are already becoming a reality: Similar automated CCTV surveillance systems have already been trialed in London Underground and at the 2024 Olympics.

China has been using automated systems (including AI) to surveil its citizens for years. In 2022, Reuters reported that Chinese firms had developed AI software to sort data collected on residents using a network of surveillance cameras deployed across cities and rural areas as part of China’s “sharp eyes” campaign from 2015 to 2020. This “one person, one file” technology reportedly organizes collected data on individual Chinese citizens, leading to what The Economic Times called a “road to digital totalitarianism.”

Begging for GPUs

[mariacallous]

For years, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been unraveling what it asserts is a scam perpetrated by agents of North Korea, which used fake companies employing real IT workers to funnel money back to the regime’s military.

An American company played a key role in creating shell companies used as part of the scheme, a WIRED review of public records shows. Elected officials are now contemplating addressing loopholes in business-registration law that the scheme exposed.

In May, Wyoming secretary of state Chuck Gray revoked the business licenses of three companies linked to the North Korean scam: Culture Box LLC, Next Nets LLC, and Blackish Tech LLC. Gray said his office made the decision after receiving information from the FBI and conducting an investigation.

“The communist, authoritarian Kim Jong Un regime has no place in Wyoming,” Gray said in a May press release.

The companies posed as legitimate operations where businesses could hire contract workers to perform IT solutions, complete with fake websites featuring smiling photos of apparent employees. The companies all had one thing in common: Their incorporation documents were filed by a company called Registered Agents Inc., which says its global headquarters is in Sheridan, Wyoming.

Registered Agents, which provides incorporation services in every US state, takes the practice of business privacy to the extreme, and regularly uses fake personae to file formation documents with state agencies, a WIRED investigation previously found.

Culture Box LLC, one of the companies that Gray and the FBI linked to North Korea, listed “Riley Park” as the name of a Registered Agents employee on documents submitted to the Wyoming secretary of state. Park, according to several former employees of Registered Agents, is a fake persona that the company regularly used to file incorporation documents.

In a statement provided to WIRED, Registered Agents wrote, “The Wyoming Secretary of State dissolved the entities and we initiated the 30-day process to resign as their agent in mid-May. Ours and Wyoming's processes to identify bad actors works. It strikes the best balance of individual privacy and business transparency supported by an entire ecosystem that cares about supporting entrepreneurs while rooting out the small percent of scammers.” The FBI’s St. Louis office, which led the investigation, did not respond to a request for comment.

The North Korean operation worked like this: Agents of the regime created fake companies purporting to be legitimate firms offering freelance IT services. Workers hired by North Koreans, or North Koreans themselves, would then perform legitimate contractor work, often using assumed identities.

In some instances, Americans would set up low-cost laptops with remote-access software, allowing North Korean workers to perform freelance IT work while appearing to use American IP addresses. The FBI referred to these Americans as “virtual assistants.”

The payments for the IT work were eventually funneled back to North Korea—where, the Department of Justice asserts, it was directed to the country’s Ministry of Defense and other agencies involved in WMD work. The scheme was so expansive that any company that hired freelance IT workers “more than likely” hired someone involved in the operation, according to FBI agent Jay Greenberg.

The shell companies created in Wyoming were used to hire virtual assistants and receive payments. “I discovered that North Korean IT workers create and use domain names and limited liability companies (LLCs) in furtherance of their fraudulent activity and to mask their true identities as North Koreans. The LLCs are used to recruit ‘Virtual Assistants’ who can receive and ship devices needed for the North Korean IT workers as well as recruit and employ software developers from countries such as Pakistan, India, and China,” an FBI agent wrote in a May affidavit. “These LLCs are often registered in the United States through business registry services and sometimes use the identities of individuals who had a previous relationship with North Korean IT workers.”

The affidavit alleges that money from North Korean workers was used to purchase domain names for the IT front companies, in violation of sanctions laws. The domains were purchased using “payment service providers” with accounts belonging to the Wyoming companies.

In response to a request for comment from WIRED, the Wyoming secretary of state’s office said that it has “increased the number of complete, in-person audits of commercial registered agents, resulting in several ongoing investigations, as well as the issuance of findings and orders.”

The secretary of state has offered proposals to the Wyoming state legislature “aimed at preventing fraud and abuse of corporate filings by commercial registered agents, as ways to strengthen the Wyoming secretary of state's administrative authority to dissolve business entities controlled by foreign adversaries,” said Joe Rubino, the chief policy officer and general counsel at the Wyoming Secretary of State's Office.

[good-old-gossip]

Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah: ‘Tomorrow is a Palestinian day’

On April 12, the German government prevented Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah from entering the country to address a conference in Berlin as a witness to the genocide in Gaza. The day before, on April 11, Abu-Sittah was installed as Glasgow University Rector in Bute Hall following his landslide election with 80% of the vote. Below is a transcript of Dr. Abu-Sittah’s address. 

“Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity.”Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

The students of Glasgow University decided to vote in memory of 52,000 Palestinians killed. In memory of 14,000 children murdered. They voted in solidarity with 17,000 Palestinian children orphaned, 70,000 wounded — of whom 50% are children — and the 4-5,000 children whose limbs have been amputated.

They voted to stand in solidarity with the students and the teachers of 360 schools destroyed and 12 universities completely leveled. They stood in solidarity with the family and the memory of Dima Alhaj, a Glasgow University alumni murdered with her baby and with her whole family. 

At the beginning of the 20th century, Lenin predicted that real revolutionary change in Western Europe depended on its close contact with the liberation movements against imperialism and in the slave colonies. Glasgow University students understood what we have to lose when we allow our politics to become inhuman. They also understand that what is important and different about Gaza is that it is the laboratory in which global capital is looking at the management of surplus populations. 

They stood next to Gaza and in solidarity with its people because they understood that the weapons that Benjamin Netanyahu uses today are the weapons that Narendra Modi will use tomorrow. The quadcopters and drones fitted with sniper guns – used so deviously and efficiently in Gaza that one night at Al-Ahli hospital we received over 30 wounded civilians shot outside our hospital by these inventions – used today in Gaza will be used tomorrow in Mumbai, in Nairobi and in Sao Paulo. Eventually, like the facial recognition software developed by the Israelis, they will come to Easterhouse and Springburn. 

So, in reality, who did these students vote for? My name is Ghassan Solieman Hussain Dahashan Saqer Dahashan Ahmed Mahmoud Abu-Sittah and, with the exception of myself, my father and all of my forefathers were born in Palestine, a land that was given away by one of Glasgow University’s previous rectors. Three decades before his forty-six-word declaration announced the British government’s support for the settler colonization of Palestine, Arthur Balfour was appointed Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow. “A survey of the world… shows us a vast number of savage communities, apparently at a stage of culture not profoundly different from that which prevailed among pre-historic man,” said Balfour during his rectorial address in 1891. Sixteen years later, this antisemite masterminded the Aliens Act of 1905 to prevent Jews escaping from the pogroms of Eastern Europe from coming to safety in the United Kingdom. 

In 1920, my grandfather Sheikh Hussain built a school with his own money in the small village where my family lived. There he set the foundations for a relationship that made education central to my family’s life. On May 15, 1948, Haganah forces ethnically cleansed that village and drove my family, who had lived on that land for generations, into a refugee camp in Khan Younis that now stands in ruins in the Gaza Strip. The memoirs of the Haganah officer who had invaded my grandfather’s house were found by my uncle. In these memoirs, the officer notes with incredulity how the house was full of books and had a certificate for a law degree from the University of Cairo, belonging to my grandfather. 

The year after the Nakba, my father graduated from medical school at Cairo University and moved back to Gaza to work in UNRWA in its newly formed clinics. But like many of his generation, he moved to the Gulf to help build the health system in those countries. In 1963, he came to Glasgow to pursue his postgraduate training in pediatrics and fell in love with the city and its people. 

And so it was that in 1988, I came to study medicine at Glasgow University, and here I discovered what medicine can do, how a career in medicine places you at the cold face of people’s lives, and how if you are equipped with the right political, sociological and economic lenses, you can understand how people’s lives are being shaped, and many times contorted, by political forces beyond their control. 

And it was in Glasgow that I saw for the first time the meaning of international solidarity. Glasgow in that time was rife with groups that were organizing solidarity with El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Palestine. Glasgow City Council was one of the first to twin with cities in the West Bank and Glasgow University set up its first scholarship for the victims of the Sabra and Shatila massacre. It really was during my years in Glasgow that my journey as a war surgeon started, first as a student when I went to the first American war in Iraq in 1991; then with Mike Holmes to South Lebanon in 1993; then with my wife to Gaza during the Second Intifada; then to the wars waged by the Israelis on Gaza in 2009, 2012, 2014 and 2021; to the war in Mosul in Northern Iraq, to Damascus during the Syrian war and to the Yemen war. But it wasn’t until the 9th of October that I got to Gaza and saw the genocide unfold. 

Everything that I had known about wars compared to nothing that I had seen. It was the difference between a flood and a tsunami. For 43 days, I watched the killing machines tear apart the lives and the bodies of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, half of whom were children. After I came out, the students of Glasgow University reached out for me to run for election as rector. Soon after, one of Balfour’s savages won the election. 

So what have we learned from the genocide and about genocide over the last 6 months? We’ve learned that scholasticide, the elimination of whole educational institutions, both infrastructure and human resources, is a critical component of the genocidal erasure of a people. 12 universities completely flattened. 400 schools. 6,000 students killed. 230 school teachers killed. 100 professors and deans and two university presidents killed. 

We also learnt, and this is something I found out when I left Gaza, that the genocidal project is like an iceberg of which Israel is only the tip. The rest of the iceberg is made up of an axis of genocide. This axis of genocide is the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, Canada, and France… countries that have supported Israel with arms – and continue to support the genocide with arms – and have maintained political support for the genocidal project so that it would continue. We should not be fooled by the United States’ attempts at humanitarianizing the genocide: Killing people while dropping food aid by parachute. 

I also discovered that part of the genocidal iceberg are genocide enablers. Little people, men and women, in every facet of life, in every institution. These genocidal enablers come in three types. 

The first are those whose racialization and total othering of Palestinians has rendered them unable to feel anything for the 14,000 children who have been killed and for whom Palestinian children remain ungrievable. Had Israel killed 14,000 puppies or kittens they would have been completely destroyed by the barbarity of it. 

The second group are those whom Hannah Arendt said in ‘The Banality of Evil’, “had no motives at all, except for extraordinary diligence in looking after his personal advancement.”

The third are the apathetic. As Arendt said, “Evil thrives on apathy and cannot exist without it.”

In April 1915, one year after the First World War began, Rosa Luxemburg wrote about German bourgeois society. “Violated, dishonored, wading in blood… the ravening beast, the witches’ sabbath of anarchy, a plague to culture and humanity.” Those of us who have seen, smelt, and heard what the weapons of war do to a child’s body by design, those of us who have amputated the unsalvageable limbs of wounded children can never have anything but the utmost disdain for all involved in the manufacture, design, and sale of these instruments of brutalism. The aim of weapons manufacturing is to destroy life and to ravage nature. In the arms industry, profits rise not only as a result of the resources captured in or through war, but through the process of destruction of all life, both human and environmental. The idea that there would be peace or an unpolluted world while capital grows by war is ludicrous. Neither the arms trade nor the fossil fuel trade, have any place at University. 

So, what is our plan, this “savage” and his accomplices? 

We will campaign for divestment from arms manufacturing and the fossil fuel industry in this University, both to de-risk the University following the International Court of Justice’s ruling that this is plausibly a genocidal war and the current case brought against Germany by Nicaragua for complicity in genocide. 

Genocidal blood money made as a profit from these shares during the war will be used to set up a fund to help rebuild Palestinian academic institutions. This fund will be in the name of Dima Alhaj and in memory of a life cut short by this genocide. 

We will form a coalition of student and civil society groups and unions to turn Glasgow University into a campus free from gender-based violence. 

We will campaign to find concrete solutions to end student poverty at Glasgow University and to provide affordable housing to all students. 

We will campaign for a boycott of all Israeli academic institutions that have progressed from being complicit in apartheid and the denial of education to Palestinians to genocide and the denial of life. We will campaign for a new definition of antisemitism that does not conflate anti-zionism and anti-Israeli genocidal settler colonialism with antisemitism. 

We will fight with all othered and racialized communities, including the Jewish community, the Roma community, Muslims, black people, and all racialized groups, against the common enemy of a rising right-wing fascism, now absolved of its antisemitic roots by an Israeli government in exchange for their support for the elimination of the Palestinian people. 

Only this week, just this week, we saw how a German government-funded institution censured a Jewish intellectual and philosopher, Nancy Fraser, because of her support of the Palestinian people. Over a year ago, we watched the Labour Party suspend Moshé Machover, a Jewish anti-zionist campaigner, for antisemitism. 

On the flight up, I was fortunate enough to be reading ‘We Are Free to Change the World’ by  Lyndsey Stonebridge. I quote from this book: “It is when the experience of powerlessness is at its most acute, when history seems at its most bleak, that the determination to think like a human being, creatively, courageously and complicatedly matters the most.” 90 years ago, in his “Solidarity Song,” Bertolt Brecht asked, “Whose tomorrow is tomorrow? And whose world is the world?”

Well, my answer to him, to you, and to the students of Glasgow University: It is your world to fight for. It is your tomorrow to make. For us, all of us, part of our resistance to the erasure of genocide is to talk about tomorrow in Gaza, to plan for the healing of the wounds of Gaza tomorrow. We will own tomorrow. Tomorrow will be a Palestinian day. 

In 1984, when Glasgow University made Winnie Mandela its Rector in the darkest days of P. W. Botha’s rule under a brutal apartheid regime, supported by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, no one could have dreamt that in 40 years South African men and women could be standing in front of the International Court of Justice defending the Palestinian people’s right to life as free citizens of a free nation. 

One of this genocide’s aims is to drown us in our own sorrow. On a personal note, I want to hold space so that I and my family can grieve for our loved ones. I dedicate this to the memory of our beloved Abdelminim killed at 74 on the day of his birth. I dedicate it to the memory of my colleague Dr. Midhat Saidam who had stepped out for half an hour to take his sister to their house so that she could be safe with her children and never came back. I dedicate it to my friend and my colleague Dr. Ahmad Makadmeh who was executed by the Israeli army in Shifa Hospital just over 10 days ago with his wife. I dedicate it to the ever-smiling Dr. Haitham Abu-Hani, head of the Emergency Department at Shifa Hospital, who always met me with a smile and a pat on the shoulder. But most of all we dedicate this to our land. In the words of the ever-present Mahmoud Darwish,

“To our land, and it is a prize of war, the freedom to die from longing and burning and our land, in its bloodied night, is a jewel that glimmers for the far upon the far and illuminates what’s outside it … As for us, inside, we suffocate more!”

And so I want to end with hope. In the words of the immortal Bobby Sands, “Our revenge will be the laughter of our children.” 

HASTA LA VICTORIA SIEMPRE!

Source -

[gec-engineering]

Project ROVER!

Project ROVER is a new robotic platform that is being developed in collaboration with Global Communication Services, GEC Engineering, WVLT, and Project ROVER for law enforcement and emergency use. ROVER is a small, four-wheeled robot that is equipped with a variety of sensors, devices, components and capabilities, including:

    BLE tracking: ROVER can follow officers into a building using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology. This allows officers to enter a building without having to worry about losing track of their robot. This follow-behind technology allows an operator in a command center to see live video of officer movement and situational awareness.

    Live camera view: ROVER can provide an operator outside a building with a live camera view of the environment. This allows the operator to see what the robot is seeing and to give the robot commands.

    Software Defined RF Grid Mapping: ROVER can do RF Grid Mapping, which logs the RF signal strength against the LiDAR at points within the grid. This can be used to identify areas of poor RF coverage or to map out the location of radio-emitting devices.

   Software Defined Deployable bi-directional amplifier: ROVER can act as a deploy-able bi-directional amplifier for Land Mobile Radios in the 100MHZ to 3.2GHZ range. This can be used to improve the signal strength of radios in areas with poor reception.

   Software Defined Capabilities to stand up a ad-hoc cellular network for use to locate individuals during search and rescue missions.

ROVER is a versatile platform that can be used for a variety of law enforcement tasks, including:

    Search and rescue: ROVER can be used to search for missing persons or victims of natural disasters.

    Patroling: ROVER can be used to patrol areas that are difficult or dangerous for officers to access, such as high-crime areas or areas with hazardous materials.

    Evidence collection: ROVER can be used to collect evidence from crime scenes.

    Disaster response: ROVER can be used to help with disaster response efforts.

    Active Shooter Response: ROVER can be deployed to assist in active shooter response by providing live video, LiDAR mapping, and in-building radio coverage enhancement.

ROVER is still under development, but it has the potential to be a valuable tool for law enforcement. It is a versatile platform that can be used for a variety of tasks, and it can help to improve officer safety and effectiveness.

How ROVER Works

ROVER is powered by a lithium-ion battery and has a top speed of 5 mph. It is equipped with a variety of sensors, including a 360-degree camera, a LiDAR scanner, a BLE receiver, and a software-defined radio provided by WVLT..

The 360-degree camera allows ROVER to see its surroundings in all directions. The LiDAR scanner allows ROVER to create a 3D map of its environment. The BLE receiver allows ROVER to follow officers using BLE technology. The software-defined radio allows ROVER to do RF Grid Mapping and to act as a deploy-able bi-directional amplifier.

ROVER is controlled by an operator who uses a remote control. The operator can use the remote control to move ROVER around, to pan and tilt the camera, and to give ROVER commands.

Benefits of Using ROVER

There are a number of benefits to using ROVER, including:

    Increased officer safety: ROVER can help to increase officer safety by allowing officers to enter dangerous or hazardous environments without having to put themselves at risk.

    Improved situational awareness: ROVER can help to improve officer situational awareness by providing officers with a live camera view of the environment. This can help officers to identify potential threats and to make better decisions.

    Increased efficiency: ROVER can help to increase officer efficiency by allowing officers to focus on other tasks, such as investigating a crime scene or providing medical assistance.

Conclusion

Project ROVER is a new robotic platform that has the potential to be a valuable tool for law enforcement. It is a versatile platform that can be used for a variety of tasks, and it can help to improve officer safety and effectiveness.

· Official website of the project: https://www.roverrobot.org/

· The official website of the project on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/project-rover-inc/about/

· Leaders and members of the company:

· Brian Martin CEO: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-martin--/

· Dhruv A. — director: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dhruv-a-72662166/

· Mike Matranga — President: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-matranga-23b59427/

· Anthony Ferguson — Secretary: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthony-j-ferguson/

· Engineering Team CTO: https://www.linkedin.com/in/oleg-gridin-74563a226/

· Engineering team: https://gec-engineering.tech/about-us/

[sasmediagh]

Work from home jobs: 6 top 50k plus jobs

Work from home jobs is not lucrative…that is what most people think. Most of the time, you think of rewarding jobs as ones where you work in an office, but employment trends have changed a lot in recent years. You can earn more than $50,000 while staying in the familiar surroundings of your own house. Let’s examine it more closely.

What are 50k-plus home jobs?

It basically means jobs you can do right at the comfort of your home that can earn you an amount of about 50k or more. Producing income does not always necessitate filling out an application before offering your services to a specific employer. You can always be your own boss. Think outside the box, be creative, and look at the needs of the service and product right now. From here on you can set up your own foundation at home. There are always government and private organizations willing to assist you if you do not have the necessary start-up funds, not to forget some countries in Africa finds it difficult to get funds from government but you can get from private organizations.

Let us go on to list out our best 6 50k plus work from home jobs;

Top Six (6) 50k home jobs

Graphic design: Graphic Design jobs are all over the internet if you think you don’t have the heart for business but have the creativity and software. Designers can now create their own profiles and speak with potential employers. You can become a very rewarding worker from home with additional experience and excellent Photoshop skills. With the help of Canva.com it is now easy to be a graphic designer without a software or a computer.

IT specialists: IT specialists are always in high demand in a world dominated by computers. People who are capable of providing effective software design, robust networking, and efficient and dependable security setups are needed by nearly every business in the world, including small and medium-sized businesses. A high-speed internet connection, a headset, and the appropriate software are all you need to communicate with businesses that can financially reward you for good service if you have the capabilities of an engineer or programming-trained professional.

3. Medical professionals: Now, medical professionals can practice outside of hospitals and other healthcare facilities. Opportunities for working from home include medical billers, medical transcriptionists, and medical writers. Medical billers with experience can make anywhere from $30 to $40 per hour.

4. Real estate market: Although the real estate market is extremely volatile, you can still win big if you have the right credentials and strategy. You can make up to $100,000 with the right moves and sales. You have the option of starting your own business or working for a large real estate company. Everything hinges on your capacity to use your license appropriately.

7 Online business mistakes to avoid if you want to succeed

4. Virtual law firms: Virtual law firms are beginning to take action by hiring competent lawyers who can work from home as office rents and other related costs continue to soar. A home office is preferable if you believe you are capable of standing on your own. You can avoid the expenses of expensive office rentals and the hassles of daily driving or commuting, just like law firms do.

4. Accountants and Certified public accountants (CPAs): During tax season, accountants and Certified public accountants (CPAs) are in high demand. You can earn up to six figures in compensation, depending on the clients and your experience. The 50k-plus parade also includes financial consultants. The professional can earn approximately 50,000 dollars from jobs that involve retirement, security, and financial planning.

Conclusion

This is my 6 top 50k plus work from home jobs you can’t go away from. Don’t wait for businesses to employ you before you can earn 50k plus of money. You can do these aforementioned jobs to earn decent money right from the comfort of your home.

Source: www.sharpytech.com

[hexdsl]

Subscriptions: The cost of productivity.

Subscriptions are mad things. They allow services to have a constant stream of financial revenue. They allow customers, in theory to have more flexible pricing on things that they may only want for short periods of time. They are also the tiny leaks that sink the massive boat.

I understand the rationale behind media streaming services being subscription based and this post is in no way about them. I can't expect a lifetime of Netflix for one fee, that wouldn't make sense - I get that. Really... but software, there's a different beast.

Task Manager: ToDoist

A good example of my frustration here is the task management service ToDoist. I love the service. I use it multiple times a day and it's an integral part of how I get things done in my life.

I have multiple 'Projects' in there, Work, home, a media watch list, writing schedules, and more. I use the feature that lets me e-mail things to it as well as uploading files. It's basically my day-to-day calendar. So, when I ask why the heck its £48 a year, I don't mean it's not worth the money.

The entire Microsoft office suite costs at most £59 a year. For that I get cloud storage, the office suite and, in there some place is, yep, a task manager software.

The thing is, I pay for office, yet I, also, pay for ToDoist. This is in no small part because Microsoft ToDO is a bit very rubbish.

Honestly, I would pay the £59 a year for ether the storage, or Word alone. For me it's worth it and the running costs for cloud storage on top of the development costs of the office suite, make sense to be charged to me. Also, before Office was a subscription service it used to cost hundreds of pounds. While I'm pretty sure this was overpriced, the addition of online services makes is feel like a reasonable value proposition to me.

Now, imagine is Microsoft ToDo wasn't trash. I would effectively be saving £48 a year. If Microsoft made this one tiny, after-thought of an application slightly better, I would save money. But, by the logic of ToDoist pricing, they would need to add £40+ to the price of office to make it sustainable. Is office under-priced, or is ToDoist overpriced? It's all a made-up value propositions, but it seems out of line somehow.

I'm not actually sure it matters. Their costs are firmly secondary to my needs. Microsoft don't have a good Task Manager, I need one. So, I pay ToDoist.

Link Archiving: Raindrop

Another example of the odd value of Subscriptions is with bookmarking services. I pay a small amount every month (just over £2) for 'Raindrop.' This is a service that I'm starting to think of as essential. At first, I dismissed the usefulness of having my bookmarks outside of browser but over time the usefulness became clearer.

Explaining the usefulness of Raindrop is likely its own blog but the TLDR version is its searching and tagging is great. Again though, imagine is this functionality was built into Edge, or even office. I would save the ~£20 a year.

Input: RSS & Read-later

Part of my personal productivity workflow follows a simple rule that someone in a book once imparted as wisdom. If something takes less than two minutes, do it now. If it's going to take longer than that, schedule it.

I take this as a universal law when it comes to tasks and e-mails but, I also take it as law when it comes to the input streams.

I get a constant stream of articles from RSS. I don't tend to waste time with random browsing. I have subscriptions and I read them. If someone suggest a site, I add it to subscription and if it turns out to be trash, I remove it.

I have been using Newsblur for this, but its UI has been making me twitch recently. Its reading feels a bit clunky to me and it feels, well, just old. To tackle this, I have been trying other services. Feedly actual costs over £70 a year. While it's particularly good I won't pay that much money for RSS! It is, firmly over the limit of what I think it is worth. Which is a shame, because it's great!

I assume a lot of people look at the price of ToDoist and have a similar response.

When I find an article that I think I want to read, I blink at it for a moment assessing whether or not it will take more than a couple of minutes to read. If it will, I pass it to a read-later site.

Currently I use Instapaper for this but am trialling Pocket recently. This service is almost entirely for staging. Once I read the article, either its good and worth saving, in which case it moved to Notion or it gets deleted. Occasionally I see something that I think was interesting and may not want to archive, but may want to send to others if the topic arises, this is when it finds its way to Raindrop.

General Archival: Notion

Notion served one purpose for me: Archiving. Some archived items are notes about books I'm writing. Others Copies of websites, certificates, receipts, whatever else.

Notion, for me should never contain a surprise. Everything in there, is sorted tagged and organised. It is the extra bit of storage that my brain knows how to access, without having to keep inside (web search for 'second brain' and you'll find this is a common practice)

I use Notion premium because my needs are in excess of the free offering (I share a lot and upload a lot of files)

The cost of productivity

In summary, there is a cost to productivity. While I am sure you can be productive with a good text file (or a paper and pen) this is the workflow I have come to use. It works for me but there is a cost.

Notion: $48 a year.

ToDoist: $48 a year.

Office: £59 a year.

Raindrop: $25 a year (I think.)

RSS: About £40 a year, depending on current provider.

Read-later: About $30 a year, depending on current provider.

This is a bit mad: Given now much more organized I am now, compared to how I was before 'learning' productivity and picking up all this, it is totally worth it!

I get more than ~£230 of value from these products, per year though.

My critique here is not the cost or value of the product it is a general question of what is reasonable for them to charge.

Open alternatives.

While I absolutely could install open source, free software solutions, the maintenance and installation time makes me unlikely to bother. Also, part of the joy of having these things hosted by services is that they are not my responsibility to maintain. While this goes against a lot of the mindset of my readers, I will likely be able to use any of these services for a decade or more and put zero hours into maintainance, updates or bug-squishing. I won't accidentally wipe them. I can't lose anything, and they will not (probably) vanish or become unmaintained. Basically, it's worth the cost to me to not have to do it my self.

[finriseadvisors]

The Strategic Benefits of Outsourced Accounting

In an increasingly complex business environment, companies are continually seeking ways to streamline operations, enhance efficiency, and focus on core competencies. One strategic decision gaining momentum is outsourcing accounting functions. By leveraging Outsourced Accounting Services, businesses can not only save costs but also gain access to specialized expertise, enhance financial and managerial accounting, and achieve long-term growth. This blog delves into the strategic benefits of outsourced accounting and how it can position your business for success.

Understanding Outsourced Accounting Services

Outsourced accounting services involve hiring external firms to manage various financial tasks, such as bookkeeping, payroll, tax compliance, and financial reporting. These services allow companies to delegate accounting responsibilities to experts, freeing up internal resources and enabling teams to focus on strategic initiatives. Many Accounting 0utsourcing Companies offer tailored solutions to meet the specific needs of different businesses, from small startups to large corporations.

Cost Efficiency and Financial Savings

Reduced Overhead Costs

One of the most immediate benefits of outsourcing accounting functions is the potential for cost savings. Maintaining an in-house accounting team incurs various overhead costs, including salaries, benefits, training, and office space. By outsourcing, businesses can eliminate these expenses and pay only for the services they need. This is particularly advantageous for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that may not have the volume of work to justify a full-time accountant.

Access to Specialized Knowledge Without Full-Time Commitments

Overseas Accounting Services provide access to professionals with specialized knowledge in areas such as tax laws, financial regulations, and industry-specific practices. Instead of hiring a full-time expert, companies can engage these services as needed. This flexibility allows businesses to benefit from top-tier expertise without the burden of long-term commitments.

Scalability and Flexibility

As businesses grow, their accounting needs evolve. Outsourcing offers the scalability required to adapt to changing demands. Accounting outsourcing companies can quickly adjust the level of service provided, whether it's during peak periods or slower times. This ensures businesses are only paying for the resources they need, when they need them.

Enhanced Focus on Core Business Functions

Increased Efficiency

By Outsourced Accounting Services functions, companies can significantly improve operational efficiency. Professional accountants have established processes and systems in place, enabling them to handle tasks like bookkeeping and tax preparation quickly and accurately. This leads to reduced turnaround times and allows internal teams to focus on strategic initiatives rather than getting bogged down in routine financial tasks.

Better Decision-Making with Accurate Financial Data

Outsourced Accounting Services ensure that financial data is accurate and up-to-date, which is essential for informed decision-making. With reliable financial reports, business leaders can gain insights into their operations, identify trends, and make data-driven decisions. This strategic advantage can help companies seize opportunities and mitigate risks effectively.

Time Savings

Outsourcing accounting functions allows businesses to save time, which can be redirected toward growth-oriented activities. By offloading financial responsibilities, companies can allocate more resources to areas such as product development, marketing, and customer engagement. This shift in focus can lead to increased innovation and better overall business performance.

Access to Advanced Technology

Leveraging Cutting-Edge Software

Many Accounting Outsourcing Companies utilize advanced accounting software and technology to streamline processes. By outsourcing, businesses can take advantage of these tools without the need for significant upfront investments. This access to state-of-the-art technology enhances efficiency and accuracy in financial reporting and data management.

Real-Time Financial Insights

Outsourced Accounting Services often provide cloud-based solutions that enable real-time access to financial data. This allows business owners and managers to monitor their financial health continuously, facilitating timely decisions based on current data. The ability to access real-time insights can be a game-changer for companies looking to respond quickly to market changes or operational challenges.

Improved Financial and Managerial Accounting

Accurate Financial Reporting

Accurate financial reporting is crucial for maintaining compliance and making informed business decisions. Outsourced accounting services ensure that financial statements are prepared in accordance with relevant accounting standards and regulations. This accuracy helps businesses avoid costly penalties and enhances their credibility with stakeholders.

Strategic Financial Planning and Analysis

Accounting Outsourcing Services functions enables companies to access expertise in financial planning and analysis. These services can assist in developing budgets, forecasting future performance, and analyzing financial trends. By leveraging these insights, businesses can optimize resource allocation and implement strategies that drive profitability.

Enhanced Risk Management

Outsourced Accounting Services can help businesses identify potential financial risks and develop strategies to mitigate them. Professional accountants are trained to spot irregularities and compliance issues, which can prevent costly errors and legal problems. This proactive approach to risk management is essential for long-term sustainability.

The Advantages of Overseas Accounting Services

Cost-Effective Solutions

One of the most compelling reasons to consider overseas accounting services is the potential for significant cost savings. Many companies in developing countries offer high-quality accounting services at a fraction of the cost of domestic firms. This price advantage allows businesses to allocate their financial resources more efficiently, ensuring that they receive quality services without breaking the bank.

Access to Global Talent

Outsourcing accounting functions overseas gives businesses access to a diverse talent pool with various skills and expertise. Many overseas accounting professionals are highly educated and experienced, offering insights that can enhance financial management. This access to global talent can lead to innovative solutions and best practices that might not be available locally.

24/7 Availability

Working with Overseas Accounting Services firms often means that businesses can benefit from round-the-clock support. Time zone differences can be advantageous, allowing for faster response times and the ability to address urgent issues outside of regular business hours. This flexibility can be particularly beneficial for companies with international operations or clients.

Mitigating Common Concerns About Outsourcing

Maintaining Control Over Financial Processes

A common concern among business owners is the fear of losing control over their financial processes when outsourcing. However, reputable accounting outsourcing companies prioritize transparency and communication. Regular updates and detailed reporting ensure that business leaders remain informed about their financial health and can intervene when necessary.

Quality Assurance

Some business owners may worry that outsourcing will lead to a decline in the quality of service. To mitigate this concern, it’s essential to choose a well-established accounting outsourcing company with a proven track record. Conducting thorough due diligence, including checking references and reviewing case studies, can help ensure that the provider meets your quality standards.

Data Security

With financial data being sensitive, concerns about data security are valid. Reputable Accounting Outsourcing Companies implement robust security measures to protect client information. Ensuring compliance with data protection regulations and utilizing secure software solutions are critical steps in maintaining confidentiality and trust.

Conclusion

The strategic benefits of outsourced accounting are clear. By leveraging outsourced accounting services, companies can achieve significant cost savings, improve operational efficiency, and gain access to specialized expertise. The flexibility and scalability of outsourcing allow businesses to adapt to changing demands while focusing on their core competencies.

Moreover, outsourced accounting enhances financial and managerial accounting practices, leading to more accurate financial reporting, better decision-making, and effective risk management. With the added advantages of overseas accounting services, businesses can tap into global talent pools and benefit from cost-effective solutions.

In a rapidly changing business environment, Outsourcing Accounting Services functions is not merely a cost-cutting measure; it is a strategic move that positions companies for long-term success. By embracing the advantages of outsourced accounting, your business can thrive in today’s competitive landscape, allowing you to focus on growth and innovation while leaving the complexities of financial management to the experts.