While the world was distracted with President Donald Trump leaving office on Jan. 20, an obscure Florida company discreetly announced to the world’s computer networks a startling development: It now was managing a huge unused swath of the Internet that, for several decades, had been owned by the U.S. military.

What happened next was stranger still.

The company, Global Resource Systems LLC, kept adding to its zone of control. Soon it had claimed 56 million IP addresses owned by the Pentagon. Three months later, the total was nearly 175 million. That’s almost 6 percent of a coveted traditional section of Internet real estate — called IPv4 — where such large chunks are worth billions of dollars on the open market.

The entities controlling the largest swaths of the Internet generally are telecommunications giants whose names are familiar: AT&T, China Telecom, Verizon. But now at the top of the list was Global Resource Systems — a company founded only in September that has no publicly reported federal contracts and no obvious public-facing website...

The change is the handiwork of an elite Pentagon unit known as the Defense Digital Service, which reports directly to the secretary of defense. The DDS bills itself as a “SWAT team of nerds” tasked with solving emergency problems for the department and conducting experimental work to make big technological leaps for the military...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/24/pentagon-internet-address-mystery/

For nearly his entire life, my 80-something-year-old father has been a quiet, gentle and deeply religious man who went to Mass and said the rosary daily. Although his political views have always been conservative, he has also always believed in kindness and fairness. Since the start of the pandemic, his social interactions have become severely reduced, limited to daily calls from me (I live across the country), weekly visits from my brother and the occasional shopping trips and church attendance. As our mother passed away before the pandemic, his one loyal companion has been his iPad and YouTube. Because of his viewing of religious programs, YouTube has increasingly steered him toward conservative media, so that he is now obsessed with right-wing extremist politics and is absolutely against taking the Covid vaccine. Every time my brother or I have a conversation with him, he talks politics and pushes his views, and even after we asked him to stop, he tries to get the last word in by sending us angry emails or texts. Now both of us try to avoid having any interactions with him. I have the password to his YouTube account from a year ago when I helped him with a tech problem. In order to preserve our relationship, I’m thinking about going into his account to delete and pause his viewing history, and perhaps put in some links to more wholesome entertainment such as music and soccer to counter the constant bombardment of extremism. My justification is that if he is being brainwashed by an algorithm, then I might as well use the algorithm to steer him back to his old self so that we can at least have a normal conversation. What is your view on this? Name Withheld

The phenomenon you’re describing has been widely discussed and reported on, including in this publication. There’s widespread concern that YouTube’s recommendation engine has had the unintended consequence of radicalizing certain viewers by offering them progressively more inflammatory takes on political, or politicized, topics. (YouTube says it has made adjustments in recent years to favor trusted journalistic outlets over sources of what it calls “borderline content and harmful misinformation.”)...

One of my wife’s friends of longest standing has been engaged with a cult. While it initially looked like a quirky pseudoreligious encounter, she is now exhibiting quite concerning behaviors, steeped in conspiracy theories. She has two children with her ex-husband: an older child who decided to live with the father, and a younger child who, when we last saw them, behaved strangely, acting out characters of what her mother called previous lives. We thought at first that this was a comedy act, but it turned out to be serious! Part of the belief system is a strange relationship to food and nutrition, and the child looked pretty slim, bordering on malnourished. The cult itself practices certain procedures that look sexually abusive to us, cloaked in the mantra of alternative healing.

My wife feels that she cannot keep up this friendship anymore; it is draining, especially with the insistent preaching about the cult, which borders on the emotionally abusive. I would go a step further, given our friend’s latest post on social media, and call her a fascist. The question for us is how can we ensure that her child is safe...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/20/magazine/youtube-radicalization.html

...Fowler said he would have classified Floyd’s death as “undetermined,” which raised concerns from some in the medical community.

“Dr. Fowler’s stated opinion that George Floyd’s death during active police restraint should be certified with an ‘undetermined’ manner is outside the standard practice and conventions for investigating and certification of in-custody deaths. This stated opinion raises significant concerns for his previous practice and management,” a letter signed by 400 doctors said.

Fowler stood by his work in a statement to The Baltimore Sun, saying, “People need to do what they need to do [but] there’s a large team of forensic pathologists, with layers of supervision, and those medical examiners always did tremendous work.”

More than a decade of work will be investigated, as Fowler was the medical chief from 2002 to 2019...

https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/550097-maryland-launches-review-of-cases-handled-by-ex-medical-chief-after

As problematic as the defense’s expert witness is in the murder trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin—and he is problematic—the doctor still couldn’t manage to offer Chauvin a verified and assured escape route. The closest Dr. David Fowler, a forensic pathologist, came was an obscure game of what-ifs that had Floyd dying from causes as varied as heart disease, drug use, and car fumes.

None of the theories, however, seemed to outrank Fowler’s answer to an important element of the case. “Do you feel that Mr. Floyd should have been given immediate emergency attention to try to reverse the cardiac arrest?” Jerry Blackwell, an attorney for the prosecution, asked. The doctor responded: “As a physician, I would agree.” The central element of Chauvin’s trial, however, is cause...

Questioning centered on Fowler, a former chief medical examiner in Maryland. The doctor retired from his position in 2019 and is currently named in a lawsuit from the family of Anton Black, another Black man killed by police. "As Maryland medical examiner, Fowler claimed that Anton died of natural causes, saying that his bipolar disorder was a contributing factor, rather than the weight pressed on Anton while he was held facedown by three white officers and a white civilian," the ACLU of Maryland said in a news release on Wednesday.

Sonia Kumar, a senior staff attorney for the organization, said in a statement that "under Dr. Fowler's leadership" the Maryland medical examiner's office has been "complicit in creating false narratives about what kills Black people in police encounters, including Tyrone West, Tawon Boyd, Anton Black, and too many others." She added:

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/4/14/2025941/-Forensic-pathologist-named-in-lawsuit-for-his-medical-opinion-is-best-Chauvin-defense-can-do