Hasta La Gadget!

All signs seem to be pointing at a new Time Warner Cable merger. And this one might actually succeed.

Just last week, a deal between Time Warner Cable and Comcast, the country’s two largest cable providers, fell apart. Charter, another top cable company, is already preparing a proposal to purchase Time Warner Cable, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.

Though Comcast’s deal broke down after regulators said they would block the merger, citing concerns about the impact on customers, Charter’s bid might have a better chance.

Comcast, with its 22.4 million cable subscribers and 22 million Internet subscribers, would have created a giant conglomerate with its Time Warner Cable deal, and authorities worried that the potential mega-merger posed a threat to competition and net neutrality. Combined, Charter and Time Warner Cable would have 15 million cable and 16.5 million Internet subscribers, a much smaller entity.

“Regulators are concerned about controlling the end pipe into the home, and I think that wouldn’t be an issue with Charter-Time Warner Cable,” Mike McCormack, managing director of the investment bank Jefferies, told The Huffington Post.

Charter may have another advantage because it doesn’t own a TV network, while Comcast’s full acquisition of NBCUniversal last year broadened its influence over TV programming and distribution, according to Bloomberg.

Charter even tried to acquire Time Warner Cable for $37.3 billion last year, before Comcast jumped in with a $45.2 billion offer.

Time Warner Cable recently indicated that it is open to a merger with Charter. CEO Robert Marcus called his company a “one-of-a-kind” asset in a statement released after the Comcast merger fell through.

Executives at Liberty Media, which controls Charter, had expressed eagerness at the possibility of pursuing Time Warner Cable again if the Comcast deal didn’t close. “There’d be a ton of reasons” for Charter to make a second bid, Liberty CEO Greg Maffei said last month.

“Both companies have done a really good job turning around subscriber counts and rolling out higher speed data products,” McCormack told HuffPost. “Both are better positioned today than they were a year ago.”

Investors seemed to support the dissolution of the Comcast merger. Time Warner Cable shares rose 4 percent shortly after the Comcast deal collapsed last Friday. Charter and Comcast stocks also increased slightly.

Charter is also in talks to acquire Bright House Networks, a cable provider with 2.5 million subscribers. But if Time Warner Cable strikes a deal with Charter, it has the right to refuse that agreement, a result of its former ownership of Bright House.

An acquisition of Cablevision may also come into play, McCormack said. Time Warner Cable could seek a bid for Cablevision to use as leverage in a deal with Charter.

Charter and Time Warner Cable declined to comment.

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WASHINGTON — Multiple members of Congress suggested Wednesday that the misguided policies of the drug war have played a central role in brewing tensions between police and residents in Baltimore that exploded into chaos after the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray.

At a press conference for a new bill that would ensure legal marijuana businesses have access to the banking system, the lawmakers advocated for changes to the nation’s drug policies. Reforms would start to address the racial disparities in law enforcement and mass incarceration that the decades-long war on drugs has produced in the U.S., they said.

“Right now when you see all of this disturbance in our inner cities, a lot of that has to do with frustration that’s been a problem when police end up doing what — having to search people to see if they can find some joint in their pocket, a little piece of weed, in order to ruin their life and put them in jail,” said Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.). “That doesn’t happen a lot in Orange County, but I know it happens in the inner city.”

Rohrabacher was joined by other members, including Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.), Denny Heck (D-Wash.) and Jared Polis (D-Colo.). Perlmutter and Heck introduced the bill on Wednesday, along with 16 other legislators.

There is approximately one marijuana arrest every minute in the U.S., according to the most recent FBI crime data. And while marijuana arrests are down overall, nearly 700,000 people were arrested for marijuana possession in 2013 — a figure totaling about half of all drug arrests in the nation. Despite similar rates of marijuana use, blacks and Latinos are four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than whites nationwide, according to a recent American Civil Liberties Union study. In some parts of the country, blacks are seven or eight times more likely to be arrested for simple possession.

Gray suffered a spinal cord injury in police custody and died after slipping into a coma, setting off protests and riots in Baltimore. Officials said he ran from police, who then chased him and put him under arrest for carrying a switchblade knife. Grey’s arrest record shows that he had frequent encounters with police and multiple charges of possession or intent to distribute unspecified drugs, as well as possession of marijuana.

Neill Franklin, a 34-year veteran of both the Maryland state police and the Baltimore Police Department who now serves as executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, told HuffPost that Gray’s rap sheet tells an all-too-familiar story. LEAP is a group of former cops, prosecutors and judges working to end the war on drugs.

“The drug war is central to what’s going on in Baltimore,” Franklin said. “We have tasked our police officers with an impossible job of enforcing these drug laws in our country. But it’s not just impossible, it’s disheartening. It’s a job where there is no progress.”

The illicit drug trade, Franklin said, not only creates a very dangerous environment for police officers, it also drives a wedge between police and their communities.

“Communities just get tired,” Franklin said. “If you’re not being stopped and searched by police, you are seeing it happen to a friend or family member. Then every once in a while we end up with a Freddie Gray.”

Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) said after the press conference that “highly discriminatory” patterns of enforcement are a major problem in inner cities.

“For lower-income minority young men, an arrest or incarceration can be really devastating,” he said. “If you’re a middle-class white kid, you probably wouldn’t have been arrested in the first place, and your parents can get you off. A young minority male is more likely to have this wreck their lives. Lose qualification for student loans; if they live in public housing, they may not be able to live with their family. And this compounds.”

The U.S. has the largest prison population in the world — with just 5 percent of the global population, it houses 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. Harsh and lengthy sentences for drug crimes have dramatically increased that figure in recent decades. According to a study from the Sentencing Project, in 1980 there were approximately 40,000 drug offenders held in U.S. prisons, but by 2011 that number skyrocketed to more than 500,000. Roughly two-thirds of this group are people of color, according to the Sentencing Project.

Legalizing marijuana wouldn’t fix everything, said Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), who authored a bill to make the drug legal Arizona during his time in the state legislature. But it could remove the point of tension over disproportionate enforcement of marijuana laws, he said.

“I do believe it would help,” he told HuffPost Wednesday at a separate event. “It doesn’t solve the problems that inner-city youth have, because that’s long-term problems dealing with unemployment, institutional racism, all of those kind of things. But it does help, I think, negate at least a little and also bring down the tension between police officers and young men.”

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Unethical abuse of communication is not new. The rabbinic scholar, Rabbeinu Gershom, lived a thousand years ago and was considered one of the earliest and greatest scholars of the Ashkenazi Jewish community. Known as “The Light of the Exile,” Rabbeinu Gershom enacted a number of new rules for his generation. These new rules, called “takanot,” would only have been created if there was a reason. One of his more famous takanot was a prohibition against reading other people’s mail. Letters back then contained sensitive business information which could be very harmful if read by an outsider, so Rabbeinu Gershom legislated against reading other people’s mail as a safeguard against this immoral practice.

A thousand years later, unethical hackers are breaking into computer networks to read innocent people’s mail. In today’s age, the mail is electronic and no rabbinic decree or security software is capable of blocking a determined hacker from intrusion into our privacy. Internet hackers are striking several times a minute around the world and anyone with an internet connection is at risk.

Arguably, the most well-known company of the Digital Age is Google, whose mantra is “Don’t be evil.” If everyone adopted this precept, we would have no need for Norton, Kaspersky or Mcafee — all multi-million dollar companies creating new secure ways to stop hacking, malware, online identity theft and viruses. Big companies, small companies and the little old lady down the street are all vulnerable to being hacked.

We’ve all read about the larger online hacking debacles of the past couple years. In late 2013, Target Corp. lost 40 million credit card numbers to Russian-speaking hackers. After that hackers broke into the servers of Home Depot, Adobe Systems, Chase, eBay and Anthem. If you do business with any of these companies there was a good chance your personal data was violated. Then, of course, there was the much publicized hacking of Sony, in which the personal email messages of many Hollywood actors and executives were compromised.

On the smaller scale of email hacking, which hits closer to home for many, is when your private email account is attacked and thousands of email messages are sent to everyone in your contact database without your knowledge. In some cases the email message might be a scam, stating that you’ve been stranded in a remote location far from home and need some money wired to you. In other instances, your email might be hacked to provide access into your Facebook account or even your online banking account, causing fraudulent abuse of your finances. These violations of privacy are becoming more commonplace.

Sometimes the hacking occurs by taking advantage of our better judgment. One woman told me that she recently received an email explaining there was a dangerous file on her computer that had to be deleted at once. She was not sure of the validity of such an odd message, but became concerned that this file could wipe out her data — including thousands of digital photos of her family’s vacations. She went ahead and removed this essential Windows system file causing her computer to stop working. Over the years, I’ve seen dozens of people suffer with anxiety after a virus has corrupted their computer data. This data loss is more than simply a hassle; it’s a violation of privacy and the theft of ones possessions.

We’ve come to regard spam email as simply a nuisance, but in truth these messages constitute a virus. Each second of our lives that we use to delete an email from a Saudi Prince who needs to transfer a few million dollars into our bank account is our time that is stolen from us. Each second of our lives that we have to decipher whether the “secure” message from our bank is legitimate or an attempt at phishing is more time stolen from us. The minutes we take out of our busy day to visit Snopes.com to determine whether the urgent email we received from a friend is a hoax or a legitimate concern is time wasted. These are unnecessary intrusions.

Someone neglects to sign out of their email account while in an Internet Cafe out of the country has their email hacked and unintentionally sends out thousands of email messages to friends, relatives and business contacts with an attached file that contains a virus. Even if only a handful of recipients open the risky file, the hassle that has been caused is significant and can lead to data loss, hours of time wasted, financial setback and considerable anxiety. We are all victims of this pernicious activity on the Web and since there’s no end in sight to this unethical abuse, we all must become more vigilant.

Earlier this month, one of my personal websites was hacked into by a hacking team in France that uploaded over 3 million spam comments to the website. These hackers created their own user account to the website in order to advertise fake designer sunglasses and menswear. It took hours for me to recover my website and return it to normal functionality, not to mention the unnecessary frustration. Already this year my technology company has had to recover several websites of Jewish organizations that have been hacked by anti-Semitic groups. These hackers replace the websites of synagogues and Jewish nonprofits with their messages of hate and violence.

In the Digital Age, we all use the Internet and we are thus all susceptible to the malicious threats of hackers. Individuals and businesses are threatened on a daily basis with computer viruses, malware and identity theft. Critical files are held ransom if the business owner doesn’t send a money order to these nefarious individuals. Email messages can never be secure enough to be kept private from those intent on phishing our data. With all of the benefits of technology, we live in fear that our passwords aren’t strong enough, our data not backed up enough, and our online financial transactions are not encrypted enough. We continue to be inundated with spam and scams, hoaxes and hacks.

So what is the remedy for this dark side of technology? We should look to the wisdom of Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook. Zuckerberg, explains that at his company they have cultivated a unique culture and management approach called the Hacker Way. In fact, “Hacker Way” is the main street on which Facebook’s headquarters are located. “The word ‘hacker,’ he says, “has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world.”

Hacker culture, Zuckerberg claims, is extremely open and meritocratic. I believe that in the interest of creating a more ethical Internet, we must reclaim the idea of hacking for good. Rather than falling prey to the evil hackers who seek to take advantage of people through the Internet, we must invest in those who look for positive hacking initiatives.

We must remain vigilant to secure our online data and networks and encourage others to do so as well. The time and money we spend to defend the Internet from evil is a waste and could be used for good. As the Internet grows and matures, I hope morality wins.

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In this car, Pavarotti would play second fiddle to the driver.

Jeff Sullivan captured this video of his Uber driver beautifully belting out some opera and uploaded it to YouTube.

“He was playing [opera] on his radio and I told him how much I appreciated it,” Sullivan told The Huffington Post in an email. Sullivan was on his way to a bar in South Boston, and started chatting with his driver.

“He asked me if I could sing — I can’t, but entertained him with a few weak Andrea Bocelli lyrics,” Sullivan said.

“He mentioned that he was a student, but I’m not sure if he meant it in the literal sense or that he just enjoys music,” he added. “I then told him that ‘the floor is yours’ and he started [singing]… at first I thought he was kidding, then he started to impress more and more, so I pulled out my camera … no one would believe me when I told them I was just in an Uber with Pavoratti’s muse.”

“Wow, that’s brilliant,” Sullivan can be heard saying at the end of the song. He then gets back to offering the driver directions.

“Who needs a radio when you have an awesome uber driver!” Sullivan asked rhetorically in the video description.

Sullivan is currently trying to track down the driver, he told HuffPost. Uber users can see a history of their trips, but the list does not include drivers’ names or contact information.

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The riots in Baltimore are all over the news. As a parent, it would seem like the best thing to say to your kids is that riots are bad, that violence isn’t the way to solve anything.

But that would be missing the point — and missing an opportunity.

Don’t get me wrong; I don’t think that riots are good or that violence is the way to solve things. But what is happening in Baltimore is coming from an anger we need to face — because it is a righteous anger, an anger rooted in truth.

I don’t know how many more deaths we need before we are willing to admit that racism is alive and well. We’ve been talking about the 50th anniversary of the march from Selma to Montgomery and about how far we’ve come since then, but it’s still a reality that people are judged by the color of their skin, that assumptions are made and that those assumptions can be deadly.

And I don’t know how much more violence we need before we are willing to admit that the divide between rich and poor is growing as wide as an ocean, and that this divide is not only unfair, but breeds hopelessness, makes it so that people feel that they have nothing to gain in life — and nothing to lose in destruction.

As a pediatrician working in Boston, I see this death of the American dream get played out day after day, in small ways that feel like a slow-motion train wreck. Overworked, undereducated parents born of overworked, undereducated parents don’t always have the time or resources to encourage and support their children in getting ahead and getting out of poverty. The overworked teachers in the under-resourced schools try, but without parents and community backing them up, it’s hard. Some of my patients go to college, but few are able to use college as the jumping off point the way higher-income kids do. In this world, it’s all about connections, about where you come from and who can help you.

When you come from a poor neighborhood, not many people can help you.

If we ignore this, if we condemn the anger and the riots as just people behaving badly, it will only get worse. And if our kids watch us condemn it, if they learn from us that it’s just people behaving badly, then their future won’t be any different. Racism will flourish, and that divide between rich and poor will get even wider.

There is no simple way to fix all this. If there were, we’d have done it. But if we’re going to do anything at all, we need to feel and share that anger that is fueling those riots. We have to take a stand, and teach our children to take a stand, against the forces that make it so that the color of your skin and the zip code of your birthplace decide who you are and what you get in this world.

That’s simply wrong. We can do better. We need to do better.

So… tell your kids that they shouldn’t destroy things or hurt people. But when you talk about the riots in Baltimore with your kids, be angry along with the rioters. Because we all should be angry — we need to be angry.

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