Holy moly:

Nearly every digital copier built since 2002 contains a hard drive - like the one on your personal computer - storing an image of every document copied, scanned, or emailed by the machine.

In the process, it's turned an office staple into a digital time-bomb packed with highly-personal or sensitive data.

yikes. On the one hand, it seems slightly quaint - we've all adjusted to an extremely identity-insecure, vital-documents-are-hackable world already, and this could have happened pre-internet.

It took Juntunen just 30 minutes to pull the hard drives out of the copiers. Then, using a forensic software program available for free on the Internet, he ran a scan - downloading tens of thousands of documents in less than 12 hours.

The results were stunning: from the sex crimes unit there were detailed domestic violence complaints and a list of wanted sex offenders. On a second machine from the Buffalo Police Narcotics Unit we found a list of targets in a major drug raid.

The third machine, from a New York construction company, spit out design plans for a building near Ground Zero in Manhattan; 95 pages of pay stubs with names, addresses and social security numbers; and $40,000 in copied checks.

But it wasn't until hitting "print" on the fourth machine - from Affinity Health Plan, a New York insurance company, that we obtained the most disturbing documents: 300 pages of individual medical records. They included everything from drug prescriptions, to blood test results, to a cancer diagnosis. A potentially serious breach of federal privacy law.

Given that our current approach to identity theft is "maybe you'll fly under the radar!" maybe this whole thing is just one of many, many avenues to identity thieves, and it's kind of clunky and personal to boot. Nevertheless: everything is always storing everything. Keep your nose clean.

via one of you elsewhere

I haven't forgotten that I tossed out the idea of an Unfoggedquincenara, but I'm overwhelmed and don't know where to start. I'm not overwhelmed by the planning process - I'd do what I did last time: hold a survey to find out who would be interested in various dates and locations. I'm overwhelmed by the idea of me then personally showing up and figuring out how to integrate it into life. As I'm writing that out, it doesn't quite hit the nail on the head. I don't know but it's giving me the vapors.

(Maybe it's this: that I really don't want the event to be a dud, and it takes someone being extroverted and bringing the energy for it not to be a dud. Last time turned out spectacular, and so I feel on the hook to bring the energy here. But I also enjoy not bringing energy.)

Shall we have an Avenatti thread? I have to say, I was always nervous that Trump himself would never really get connected to Russia in a way that he couldn't senile-conflate-deny-obfuscate his way out of. This is the smoking gun, right?

What I'm particularly enjoying is: Stormy Daniels is Trump's problem. It's not Mueller, it's not nefarious campaign staff, etc. And the idea that Stormy Daniels turned out to be the path to a smoking gun on Trump's connection with Russia is just fucking delightful.

I think I barely knew what Ferrero Rocher was before reading this article. I've definitely had them and thought they were sort of gross. My memory is that it's like nutella with grass in it. (Not weed.)

Most Americans now know Ferrero Rocher by way of Nutella, but long before the hazelnut cocoa spread became an ingredient seemingly found in every trendy dessert recipe, the gifting and receiving of a Ferrero Rocher chocolate box (48 pieces if you were lucky) was a secret, universal language shared by immigrants in the '80s and '90s. It was a truth acknowledged amongst the hospitality-ladened cultures of their families: You never showed up to someone's house -- whether they were strangers or family -- without a gift. And if the gift turned out to Ferrero Rocher, it was a surefire way to know you had almost literally struck gold with your hosts.

It also had a permanent place on the tables inside immigrant homes, served to guests as a way to honor their presence.

Huh, I never knew. Is this right?

We should probably have a follow-up thread about Junot Diaz, now that all these allegations of abuse and misconduct have come out. Here's one sample, with links to others at the top.

I thought this was a nice response:

I'm not trying to rush anyone's process of raging about this level of misogynist abuse. But what comes after the anger? Once we've had the whitest hot flame of our fury, what do we do with the eight-year-old Diaz who was raped? If he hadn't grown up to act like an asshole, we would have compassion for him. Since he did grow up to act like an asshole, is there any way that we, as a community, can hold both? I'm not saying to stop being angry. Who can stop being angry when rape culture is certainly not stopping it's steamroll over our bodies and our consent? But can we hold the complex reality that Junot Diaz is both a #MeToo survivor and a perpetrator?

and

Right now, many of us women are in our own typical pattern for trauma survivors: we see men through a binary. He's either a good brother or he's trash. People either want to excuse Junot or vilify him. We need to hold both: he's a brother with a history of abusing and being abused. I believe that a man like Junot can be redeemed. But let's be clear, he hasn't redeemed himself yet. He would need to start telling more of the truth in his public statements, he would need to keep doing his healing work, and he would need to find ways to make amends for all the harm he caused. Maybe he needs to stop teaching for a while. Maybe he needs to be supervised when he's with female students. Maybe he shouldn't be jet setting as a guest lecturer star to places with wide-eyed students. I'm not sure what consequences are needed, but it can't be business as usual.

ACES, man, it's always ACES. Really, one of our top priorities as a nation should be reduction and prevention of Adverse Childhood Events. They intersect with a lot of other problems, obviously - crime, poverty, violence - but the early childhood intervention programs that get in there and help vulnerable parents navigate these crises are really specifically trying to stop these cycles from getting transmitted across generations.