Lauri Love Extradition Ordered

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The US has ruthlessly persecuted hackers and digital activists for years, and nobody expects that to improve under President Trump. Theresa May set a good example by protecting Gary McKinnon back in 2012. For a Home Secretary in her government now to willingly send a brilliant and vulnerable UK citizen [Lauri Love] to Donald Trump’s America beggars belief.—Sarah Harrison, Courage Foundation Acting Director

On Monday, Amber Rudd, the United Kingdom’s Home Secretary, signed the order to approve Lauri Love’s extradition to the United States. From that day, Monday, he and his legal team have fourteen days to file an appeal. The team reports that it intends to do so.

Love is accused of stealing data from U.S. government agencies in 2012 and 2013 as a part of a hacking protest known as #OpLastResort. Because he is in Great Britain and the data breach took place in the United States, the fact that indictments have been filed against him in three district courts is known but how the U.S. plans to proceed is not known. His lawyers estimate that Love faces—if he is extradited, charged with the crimes that they think he is to be charged with, tried, and convicted—up to 99 years in prison.

Love and his lawyers have yet to see any evidence against him.
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Clean-up in the Shakespeare Aisle

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

There is nothing wrong with Shakespeare that couldn’t be fixed by getting rid of all the violence, and, oh! those sad endings. So many of his plays end with a pile of bodies on stage and no detective to sort it all out for us and arrest the bad guys. No one leaves the theater smiling after seeing one of those productions.

For the first few generations of critics and theater producers that followed Shakespeare, this was a common attitude. The audiences loved Shakespeare from the start, the 1590s, when his plays started to be performed in London, even if they missed some of his … finer points. There were a lot of entertaining murders, after all.
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Today in History: Nov. 16

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say “I’m going to sleep.” And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me; I would try to put away the book which, I imagined, was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had been thinking all the time, while I was asleep, of what I had just been reading, but my thoughts had run into a channel of their own, until I myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book …—Marcel Proust, the opening of Swann’s Way, transl. by C. K. Scott Moncrieff

On this date in 1913, French publisher Grasset published Swann’s Way (Du côté de chez Swann), the first volume of Marcel Proust’s novel À la recherche du temps perdu, or In Search of Lost Time. (For decades, readers in English knew it as Remembrance of Things Past.)

Proust struggled to find a publisher for his work. Three prominent houses rejected it; Grasset only published it under an agreement with Proust that he would pay the cost of publishing it.

Proust’s work is not the longest novel, but it may be the longest very popular novel or the most popular very long one. It took a decade and a half to publish the entire work: seven volumes, 4000+ pages, 2000+ characters.
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