geese_feces

Laufer is the chief spokesperson of Four Thieves Vinegar Collective, an anarchist collective that has spent the last few years teaching people how to make DIY versions of expensive pharmaceuticals at a tiny fraction of the cost. Four Thieves Vinegar Collective call what they do “right to repair for your body.”

Laufer has become well known for handing out DIY pills and medicines at hacking conferences, which include, for example, courses of the abortion drug misoprostol that can be manufactured for 89 cents (normal cost: $160) and which has become increasingly difficult to obtain in some states following the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs.

In our call, Laufer had just explained that Four Thieves’ had made some miscalculations as part of its latest project, to create instructions for replicating sofosbuvir (Sovaldi), a miracle drug that cures hepatitis C, which he planned to explain and reveal at the DEF CON hacking conference. Unlike many other drugs that treat viruses, Sovaldi does not suppress hepatitis C, a virus that kills roughly 250,000 people around the world each year. It cures it.

“The holy grail for every virologist is to find a way to drain the viral reservoir, and Sovaldi does this. You take one pill of Sovaldi a day for 12 weeks and then you don’t have hepatitis C anymore.” The problem is that those pills are under patent, and they cost $1,000 per pill.

“Literally, if you have $84,000 then hepatitis C is not your problem anymore,” Laufer said. “But given that there are other methodologies for managing hepatitis C that are not curing it and that are cheaper, insurance typically will not cover [Sovaldi]. And so we’ve got this incredible technology and it’s sitting on the shelf except for people who are ridiculously wealthy.”

So Four Thieves Vinegar Collective set out to teach people how to make their own version of Sovaldi. Chemists at the collective thought the DIY version would cost about $300 for the entire course of medication, or about $3.57 per pill. But they were wrong. “It’s actually just a little under $70 (83 cents per pill), which just kind of blew my mind when they finally showed me the results,” Laufer said. “I was like, can we do the math here again?”

A miracle drug called Kalydeco had recently been approved for use on some patients with cystic fibrosis. It cost $311,000 per patient, per year.

Laufer explains that both precursors needed to make Kalydeco are available commercially, and that one costs $1 per gram and the other costs $28 per gram. He checks the daily dosage (roughly 300 mg per day), and Chemhacktica spits out a potential yield. He explains that, in back-of-the-envelope math, “me, a non-chemist doing a first pass,” Kalydeco could be made “in the range of $10 a day for raw materials.” When Kalydeco was first introduced, it cost roughly $820 per patient per day.

As members of Disney’s exclusive Club 33, Scott and Diana Anderson visited the two Anaheim theme parks 60 to 80 times a year. The private club, with its wood-paneled trophy room and other amenities, was the center of their social life. They brought friends, acquaintances and business associates. As a couple, they went on the Haunted Mansion ride nearly 1,000 times. The club’s yearly dues were $31,500, and with travel and hotel expenses, the Arizona couple were spending close to $125,000 annually to get their Disney fix.

All of it came to an end in 2017, when Disney revoked their membership in the club after an allegation that Scott Anderson was drunk in public. Diana Anderson, a hardcore Disney aficionado since childhood, called it “a stab in the heart.” The Andersons, both 60, have spent the years since then — and hundreds of thousands of dollars — trying to get back into Club 33. On Tuesday, an Orange County jury rejected their claim that Disney ousted them improperly. It had taken the Andersons more than a decade to gain membership in Club 33, which includes access to exclusive lounges, dining, VIP tours and special events. They finally made it off the waiting list in 2012.

“My wife and I are both dead set that this is an absolute wrong, and we will fight this to the death,” Scott Anderson, who owns a golf course in Gilbert, Ariz., told The Times. “There is no way we’re letting this go.” He said the lawsuit has cost him about $400,000. “My retirement is set back five years,” he said. “I’m paying through the nose. Every day, I’m seeing another bill, and I’m about to keel over.” He said he will appeal. His wife said she wants to keep fighting. “I’ll sell a kidney,” Diana said. “I don’t care.”

An interdisciplinary team of researchers put a culture of the edible mushroom species Pleurotus eryngii (also known as the king oyster mushroom) in control of a pair of vehicles, which can twitch and roll across a flat surface.

By applying algorithms based on the extracellular electrophysiology of P. eryngii mycelia and feeding the output into a microcontroller unit, the researchers used spikes of activity triggered by a stimulus – in this case, UV light – to toggle mechanical responses in two different kinds of mobile device.

https://youtu.be/5ZkkaM54RH8

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scirobotics.adk8019

The tax applies only to individuals with at least $100 million in wealth and mostly affects hedge fund managers.

t_d thread: https://archive.is/5pFXr

here's fox news trying to convince people that the tax will mean that if your home goes up in value, the government will take your house: https://archive.is/Ay89M

"This would be the most crazy tax structure we have ever seen. It makes Venezuela look normal. It makes Russia look normal," Gingrich stressed. "That speech last week in Raleigh, where [Harris] outlined her economic plan, that was crazy. That was so far to the left of Bernie Sanders that Gorbachev in Russia would have thought it was a radical speech."

• Trump says he would consider Musk for Cabinet role
• Elon Musk says he’ll take a job in the Trump cabinet if offered
• Trump says he’d consider appointing RFK Jr. to role in administration
• RFK Jr to weigh dropping US presidential bid to join forces with Trump

SAG-AFTRA has called for a strike of all its members working in video games, with the union demanding that its next contract not allow "companies to abuse AI to the detriment of our members."

The strike mirrors similar actions taken by SAG-AFTRA and the Writers Guild of America (WGA) last year, which, while also broader in scope than just AI, were similarly focused on concerns about AI-generated work product and the use of member work to train AI.

During the strike, the more than 160,000 members of the union will not provide talent to games produced by Disney, Electronic Arts, Blizzard Activision, Take-Two, WB Games, and others. Not every game is affected. Some productions may have interim agreements with union workers, and others, like continually updated games that launched before the current negotiations starting September 2023, may be exempt.

The Washington Post says the biggest remaining issue involves on-camera performers, including motion capture performers. Crabtree-Ireland told the Post that while AI training protections were extended to voice performers, motion and stunt work was left out.

The other day, in Ireland, in our innovation center there, one of our team members showed me a forever mouse with the comparison to a watch. This is a nice watch, not a super expensive watch, but I’m not planning to throw that watch away ever. So why would I be throwing my mouse or my keyboard away if it’s a fantastic-quality, well-designed, software-enabled mouse. The forever mouse is one of the things that we’d like to get to.

What made the mouse a forever mouse?

It was a little heavier, it had great software and services that you’d constantly update, and it was beautiful. So I don’t think we’re necessarily super far away from that.

I’m still stuck on, “You’re going to sell me a mouse once and it’s going to have ongoing software updates forever.”

Imagine it’s like your Rolex. You’re going to really love that.

I’m going to ask this very directly. Can you envision a subscription mouse?

Possibly.

And that would be the forever mouse?

Yeah.

So you pay a subscription for software updates to your mouse.

Yeah, and you never have to worry about it again, which is not unlike our video conferencing services today.

But it’s a mouse.

But it’s a mouse, yeah.

I think consumers might perceive those to be very different.

[Laughs] Yes, but it’s gorgeous. Think about it like a diamond-encrusted mouse.

The forever mouse, and the forever mouse could be the mouse that you keep and we just send you software updates, but it could also be the mouse that you turn in at Best Buy and we get it back or Best Buy takes it back and refurbs and resells it, which is another business model. We’re starting to do that but not yet at the scale that we need to.

Amazon is known to have sold Echo speakers for cheap or at a loss in the hopes of making money off Alexa later. In 2019, then-Amazon Devices SVP Dave Limp, who exited the company last year, told WSJ: "We don’t have to make money when we sell you the device." WSJ noted that this strategy has applied to other unspecified Amazon devices, too.

People tend to use Alexa for free services, though, like checking the weather or the time, not making big purchases.

"We worried we’ve hired 10,000 people and we’ve built a smart timer,” a former senior employee told the WSJ.

Amazon is now banking on the impending release of a subscription-based gen AI Alexa to finally drive profits. The idea is that people will be willing to pay a recurring fee to use Alexa if it can do more advanced things, like perform multiple commands without the user having to say "Alexa" repeatedly, be more conversational, and manage smart homes more intuitively. Amazon is considering charging $5 to $10 per month for generative AI Alexa, Reuters reported in June.

https://archive.is/6LDp9

An established cybercrime group with a track record of attacking political targets posted on Tuesday roughly two gigabytes of data from the Heritage Foundation, a prominent conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C.

Self-described “gay furry hackers,” SiegedSec said it released the data in response to Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a set of proposals that aim to give Donald Trump a set of ready-made policies to implement if he wins this fall’s election.

The data includes the “full names, email addresses, passwords, and usernames” of people associating with Heritage, vio said, including users with U.S. government email addresses.

The attack was carried out as part of SiegedSec’s “OpTransRights,” campaign, which has previously included the defacement of government websites and data theft from states either considering or implementing anti-abortion or anti-trans legislation.

SiegedSec, which emerged on Telegram in April 2022, has also targeted various NATO portals, the city of Fort Worth and a company involved in the monitoring of offshore oil and gas facilities.

Samsung's largest labor union is beginning its three-day strike in South Korea. The union is now 36,570 members strong, making up a quarter of Samsung Electronics' workforce.
It is demanding one more day of annual leave, a change to the company's draconic bonus structure, and better pay overall.

The union has 6,540 members participating in the strike, and the union says 5,211 of these are workers involved in semiconductor manufacturing.

This week's three-day strike is not estimated to seriously impact Samsung's productivity, but the union has pledged to begin a second five-day strike next Monday if demands are not met in time.