friendly strangers

While I was dealing with trying to figure out whether I could see my psychiatrist, and what it would cost if so, I got an email from medicare.gov about the Medicare Advantage "open enrollment" period: anyone who enrolled in a Medicare Advantage (part C) plan at the end of the previous year can change to a different Medicare Advantage plan between January 1 and March 31st. I decided that it would be worth it to get into a PPO instead of the HMO I had somehow signed up for, even though it means I'll be starting over on the annual out-of-pocket maximums for prescription drugs and for medical care generally. I put the application in this afternoon, and was told the process might take 10 days, but I also think it's supposed to be effective the first day of the month after I requested the change. My confirmation email from Medicare says the plan will notify me after they verify my information and confirm my enrollment, so I will wait and see.

Fortunately, I can afford to do this, rather than having to find new specialists who are in that stupid HMO's network, or spend large amounts to see my current doctors. (Switching now is expensive because I take one very expensive drug, the Kesimpta.)

Wikipedia has blacklisted the site archive.today a.k.a. archive.is, .li, .ph, .fo, .md, and .vn), because Wikipedia editors discovered that the pseudonymous owners of the site were altering some archived pages. The alterations inserted the name of a blogger that the pseudonymous person who runs archive.today has a grudge against, because the blogger speculated about their identity.

Wikipedia editors were already debating whether to blacklist the site, after discovering it was being used in a distributed denial-of-service attack against that same blogger. The argument for blacklisting the site was straightforward: archive.today captchas were running malicious code on people's computers. The argument against was that it would be difficult to replace hundreds of thousands of links, an argument that made sense only as long as the saved websites were considered trustworthy.

My decidedly non-expert hunch is that using the site to look at static content behind a paywall is probably safe unless the site asks you to complete a captcha.