I’ve been videochatting with Mixæl Swan Laufer for about 30 minutes about an exciting discovery when he points out that to date, the best way he’s been able to bring attention to his organization is “the old school method of me performing a bunch of federal felonies on stage in front of a bunch of people.”

I stop him and ask: “In this case, what are the felonies?” 

“Well, the list is pretty long,” he said. 

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.

“Normally you have a virus, and your body fights it off or your body fights it to a standstill and you just have it forever, basically, and hope it remains dormant more or less,” Laufer said. “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?”   

I have been familiar with Four Thieves Vinegar Collective’s work since 2018, when I edited a (fantastic) feature about Laufer and the collective written by Daniel Oberhaus at Motherboard. At the time, Four Thieves had figured out how to make EpiPens and Daraprim—an HIV medication controlled at the time by “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli—for far below what they cost in the United States. Daniel began that article with a description of Laufer “throwing thousands of dollars worth of homemade medicine into a packed audience at Hackers on Planet Earth, a biennial conference in New York City.” 

Six years later, Laufer’s promotional tactics are largely the same. “It’s very vague,” he said when I asked him to list out the felonies he thought he’d be committing at DEF CON. “I’ll be on stage, handing out drugs that I made, that are under patent and not owned by me or licensed to me. When the moment comes, the list of things they can come after me with is very long because of how vaguely most of these laws are written.” 

Crucially, unlike other medical freedom organizations, Four Thieves isn’t suggesting people treat COVID with Ivermectin, isn’t shilling random supplements, and doesn’t have any sort of commercial arm at all. Instead, they are helping people to make their own, identical pirated versions of proven and tested pharmaceuticals by taking the precursor ingredients and performing the chemical reactions to make the medication themselves.

“We don’t invent anything, really,” Laufer said. “We take things that are on the shelf and hijack them. We like to take something established, and be like ‘This works, but you can’t get it.’ Well, here’s a way to get it.” 

A slide at his talk reads “Isn’t this illegal? Yeah. Grow up.” 

“I am of the firm belief that we are hitting a watershed where economics and morality are coming to a head, like, ‘Look: intellectual property law is based off some ideas that came out of 1400s Venice. They’re not applicable and they’re being abused and people are dying every day because of it, and it’s not OK,’” Laufer told me.

Four Thieves’ work has resonated with me since I learned about it from Daniel’s article, in part because I have seen firsthand how patents owned by Big Pharma and the American healthcare industrial complex hurt and kill people in their cold machinations. In my early 20s, I watched my best friend have to forgo several different treatments for cystic fibrosis because she couldn’t afford them or because the medication was not available in the U.S. She died when she was 25. 

At the time, 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. The article I wrote about my friend’s life and how it was difficult for me to not blame the American medical system was the most emotionally difficult I’ve ever written, and even now, years later, it is hard to talk about.

On the phone with Laufer, I told him about what happened to my friend. He started typing while I was talking to him. “K-A-L-Y-D-E-C-O,” I spelled out for him.

“What? This is a nothing molecule,” he said, pulling up the molecular structure of the drug on Wikipedia. “Look. You’ve got two benzine rings, an NH here, a second ring with an alcohol here, and then two ammonias coming off of it. I mean, that’s so fucked. Like, you can I could make that in a weekend.” 

For the next 15 minutes, Laufer showed me how someone would theoretically make a DIY version of Kalydeco using Four Thieves’ tools. The heart of what Four Thieves has built is called Chemhacktica, a forked version of an MIT-DARPA project called ASKOS that uses machine learning to map out chemical pathways for molecule synthesis, and to suggest potential chemical reactions that would yield the molecule that you want to make. Chemhacktica is a piece of software that allows users to input the desired molecule, and it will show “possible synthesis plans,” will suggest precursor materials and will search a database to see whether it is buyable, and will show what the potential chemical reactions might look like, among other features.

Another core piece of technology Four Thieves has created and open sourced is the Microlab, an “open source jacketed lab reactor made from off-the-shelf components you can buy online.” 

The Microlab is the lab equipment (called a controlled lab reactor or CLR) that you use to actually make medicine, using the suggested reaction pathways given by Chemhacktica. Costs for the materials to build this are between $300 and $500, depending on the features you want. Four Thieves has released detailed instructions about how to build and use the Microlab, as well as software that will make it run.

“A CLR is to organic chemistry what an espresso machine is to coffee. It is possible to make coffee over an open fire with nothing more than beans, water, and a tin can,” Four Thieves explains on its website. “But you will get a better, more consistent cup of coffee from an automatic machine that dispenses the right amount of water at the right temperature in such a way that ensures the water is in contact with the grounds for the right amount of time.”

The Microlab “won’t do every single step for you,” they say. But “the Microlab is designed to load a recipe for a chemical reaction, then automate the temperature control, reagent addition, and stirring that are needed. It is designed for small-molecule organic chemistry to make certain medicinal compounds in your own home or workshop.”

Four Thieves has also released the Apothecarium, a drag-and-drop recipe system that Laufer explains as “how you generate a file that the Microlab will run,” and which gives step-by-step instructions on how to make specific medications. 

Releasing the Microlab and its software is an iterative process that Four Thieves has been working on for years, and the latest version, called .6, was released just a few weeks ago.

“It’s a new version that is very well-documented, and easier to build, and simpler in its implementation,” Laufer said. “It does everything I was dreaming of, in a way, which is, I mean, you see me smiling. I’m just amazed at all the people I get to work with and what they do.”

On the call, Laufer inputs the Kalydeco molecule into Chemhacktica and waits for the program to run.

“All right, here’s your reaction,” he says, showing me the screen. 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.

I tell Laufer more about my friend, and about how she sometimes couldn’t afford basic medications during periods when she lost her health insurance. I explained that some treatments she wanted to try were approved for use in other countries, but not in the United States. Laufer explains that, over the years, he’s learned about so many different medications for so many different types of diseases that are either very expensive or very hard to get. 

“There are so many of these that fall into this unbelievable fucking category, where it would just take nothing to make it,” he said. “Everybody’s got a story like this, and it’s just so heartbreaking and it never gets easier … we do have happy stories, and they keep us going, but there’s a lot of heartbreakers.” 

At DEF CON, Laufer begins his talk by explaining that, a few years ago, he had a mystery illness that caused him to lose his hair and shed layers of his skin. Ultimately, he had a tumor removed.

“I don't know who needs to hear this but I'm scared too all the time of losing the health that I have. I know what it feels like,” he says. “I know what it feels like to not know what's wrong with your body and to have to go shop for a stranger who has the authority to maybe or maybe not give you what you need. I know what it feels like to know what's wrong with your body and to know what you need and to be told you can't have it because the infrastructure has failed and it's not available.”

“This is wrong,” he says. “And I hope to show you all some tools so that it doesn’t ever have to happen again … most medications, you can make a better, cheaper version of, yourself, at home.”

Throughout his talk, Laufer explains how Four Thieves was able to make cheaper versions of Daraprim, the epipen, and abortion medication. 

“Daraprim is still $750 per 50mg pill,” his presentation slides say. He holds up a full pill bottle of DIY Daraprim that he made for $80. “You want it? I’ll toss it out.” He tosses it into the audience. 

Then, Laufer explains how the collective was able to make sofosbuvir to treat Hepatitis C at an enormously cheaper price than Gilead, which makes Sovaldi. He pulls up a photo of Daniel O’Day, the CEO of Gilead, and says he has obtained O’Day’s phone number. He calls the number on stage. A woman answers.

“This is Dr. Mixæl Laufer. I’m calling from Four Thieves. He’s expecting my call,” he says. The woman goes to grab O’Day. O’Day answers the phone. “I don’t know how you got my number but please don’t call again.” He hangs up.

“Well, I tried,” Laufer tells the crowd. 

Later in the talk, he details how the team made sofosbuvir and pressed it into a small pill. He pulls some out, and hands them to members of the crowd. He shows the crowd testing Four Thieves did to show that the pills they made are, chemically, the same as Sovaldi. He takes out a pill, swallows it on stage, and pumps his fist. 

After his talk, I told Laufer that I got the sense that he actually wanted to talk to O’Day, and didn’t just want to yell at him. “I would have been interested to hear more of his perspective, because I am of the general impression that most people in most situations do what they do because they think it’s the right thing,” Laufer told me. “When you find someone doing something you think is really wrong, they’re usually dealing with a different set of assumptions and logical structure than you are. It’s not that there’s no logic. Usually people have thought it through and their manner of thought is different than yours.”

“If the science [of Big Pharma] didn’t work, I wouldn’t care what they fucking charged,” Laufer said. “The point is the science works and people can’t get it. There’s often this ‘good guy, bad guy, black-and-white disconnect that happens in the rhetoric. And I’m like, ‘No, pharmaceutical science is amazing. That’s the whole point.”

Laufer’s point is that the research that goes into making a new drug is hard, but that actually producing some of these medications after they’ve been invented is sometimes easy and inexpensive. Charging astronomical prices to people who are dying is immoral, and Four Thieves seeks to normalize the idea of making some types of medicine yourself. 

“Most people kind of cower,” he says at Def Con. “Chemistry seems hard. It seems like a specialized thing. Well, sure, if you’re doing research chemistry, that’s why there’s a PhD in it. Of course. But if you just need to operate it, similar to the difference between building a computer, and using a computer, it’s significantly easier.”

On the call, Laufer told me that, “for the first time, we are possibly at least within striking distance of our ultimate goal of being able to disband as an organization.”

“Our ultimate hope is to get to a point where we’re no longer necessary because the notion of DIY medicine, no matter anybody’s opinion of it is common enough that if it comes up in conversation, someone can say ‘Oh I’m just going to 3D print a replacement,’” he said. “Or, you know ‘there’s this migraine medication that I like, can’t get a prescription for, and it’s so expensive,’ and someone says ‘just try making that.’ I want to get to where that sort of exchange is common.”

“I can’t tell people that they should use what we make, because I don’t think that’s morally defensible,” he said. “We develop things that we think are a good idea, and the tools to make them. We leave them on the table and people can use them or not, but we’re never going to push it. I would much rather the world be like ‘We thought about this really carefully, and capitalism is here to stay.’ If people decide for themselves that ‘Look, the infrastructure does abuse us, but this is the system we like, and we like it better.’ If that’s the way it breaks, that’s the way it breaks.”

Back before we had TV shows running all year long, fall used to mark the beginning of a brand new TV season (it still does for some networks). So, with September on the horizon, this week's staff Q&A is a nod to that special time of year when new shows start cropping up like pumpkin patches: What's your favorite TV pilot of all time?

[jezebel_slideshow]

This article was produced in collaboration with Court Watch, an independent outlet that unearths overlooked court records. To subscribe to Court Watch, click here. 

In its antitrust case against Google, the Federal Government filed a list of chats it had obtained that show Google employees explicitly asking each other to turn off a chat history feature to discuss sensitive subjects, showing repeatedly that Google workers understood they should try to avoid creating a paper trail of some of their activities. 

The filing came following a hearing in which judge Leonie Brinkema ripped Google for “destroyed” evidence while considering a filing from the Department of Justice asking the court to find “adverse interference” against Google, which would allow the court to assume it purposefully destroyed evidence. Previous filings, including in the Epic Games v Google lawsuit and this current antitrust case, have also shown Google employees purposefully turning history off.

The chats show 22 instances in which one Google employee told another Google employee to turn chat history off. In total, the court has dozens of specific employees who have told others to turn history off in DMs or broader group chats and channels. The document includes exchanges like this (each exchange includes different employees):

Employee 1: “btw you might want to turn your chat history off”

Employee 2: “geez . . . for sure! . . . thank you! [end of chat]

and

Employee 1: “Please keep history off on this legally sensitive chat room”

Employee 2: “who all have we debriefed in legal?” [end of chat]

and

Employee 1: “do you know if our pings are privileged/discoverable?”

Employee 2: “we should turn history off” [end of chat]

and

Employee 1: “ok team false start - by the IRC semantics of chat Rooms, History remains ON - so I’m going to kill this room and re-create as a group chat with History OFF. sorry about that [end of chat]

and 

Employee 1: “pls turn off history” 

and 

Employee 1: “What is the history status of this group?” 

and

Employee 1: “ugh pl [sic] stop this chat, for some reason History is on”

and 

Employee 1: “ok for me to keep history on here? need to keep some info for memory purposes”

Employee 2: “unfortunately, I’m not supportive of turning history on. The discussion that started this thread gets into legal and potentially competitive territory, which I’d like to be conscientious of having under privilege. So that you’re aware, when history is on, it’s discoverable. Sometimes that’s totally fine but I’d like to stick to the default of history off. Thanks.”

The chats explicitly show Google employees deliberately trying to avoid creating chat logs that would have been “discoverable” by the court in a lawsuit, and are also an attempt to assert attorney-client privilege before any lawsuit was filed, which is a legal doctrine in which certain conversations between an attorney and their client cannot be used as evidence in court. More broadly, they show Google practicing the teachings of “The Walker Memo,” a “HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL” internal Google document about the “Google Chat Retention Policy” that was circulated at the company and which explains how long chats will be saved under certain settings. 

“Google's success depends on making sure that we safeguard our information, keep critical business content for the appropriate amount of time, and discard materials that are no longer necessary,” the memo reads. “We do this by keeping only timely, meaningful and useful data, while reducing redundant, obsolete, or trivial information, such as chat messages not intended to be kept past their initial transmission (similar to a telephone call or in-person conversation).”

Google has also told employees to “communicate with care,” according to documents filed in the case, which included instructions to try to CC lawyers on emails often in an attempt to put that communication under attorney/client privilege: “lawyer in ‘to’ field, mark ‘Attorney/Client Privileged,’ ‘ask the lawyer a question.’”

According to antitrust expert Matt Stoller of the American Economic Liberties Project, who attended a hearing earlier this week in the case, Judge Leonie Brinkema has said she believes Google has given its employees a “‘wink and a nod’ instruction to employees not to retain evidence.”

“Since 2008, Google has systemically destroyed evidence relating to antitrust investigations,” Stoller tweeted. “And judges are beginning to hold Google accountable.” 

AnandTech, a pioneering technology news website, is shutting down after 27 years on August 30, 2024. Founded in 1997 by Anand Lal Shimpi, the site earned a reputation for its in-depth hardware reviews and technical analysis. In a final post on the site, AnandTech Editor-in-Chief Ryan Smith cited changing market dynamics for written tech journalism as the primary reason for closure. The site's 21,500 articles will remain accessible indefinitely, hosted by publisher Future PLC. AnandTech's forums will continue operating under Future's management.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Remedy Entertainment is teaming up with Annapurna Pictures to expand the world of Control. The most concrete part of the news is that Annapurna — which also has an indie game publishing arm — will be funding half of the development budget for the previously-announced Control 2.

Beyond that, there’s the potential for Annapurna to create film and TV adaptations of both Control and Alan Wake, which just got a long-awaited sequel last year. No specific projects were announced. “Annapurna will take the lead in expanding Control and Alan Wake into new entertainment mediums,” the companies explain in a press release, “enabling Remedy to focus on the development of Control 2 and other upcoming games.”

Notably, the release also says that “Remedy will retain the full IP rights for Control and Alan Wake.” (The studio purchased the rights for Control from publisher 505 Games earlier this year.)

Remedy has some track record with sneaking live-action moments into its games, and 2016’s Quantum Break was an interesting exercise in merging TV and gaming. The studio’s games — Control and Alan Wake included — are also heavily influenced by film and TV, most notably the works of David Lynch. So the expansion into these mediums makes a lot of sense, particularly as the various worlds of entertainment continue to crossover.

“The future of storytelling requires seamlessly integrating gaming, film, and television,” Annapurna CEO Megan Ellison explained in a statement, “and this partnership will allow us to explore new ways of bringing these narratives to life.”

Lobbying groups across most of the device manufacturing industry—from tractor manufacturers to companies that make fridges, consumer devices, motorcycles, and medical equipment—are lobbying against legislation that would require military contractors to make it easier for the U.S. military to fix the equipment they buy, according to a document obtained by 404 Media. 

The anti-repair lobbying shows that manufacturers are still doing everything they can to retain lucrative service contracts and to kill any legislation that would threaten the repair monopolies many companies have been building for years.

In a May hearing, Sen. Elizabeth Warren explained that “contractors often place restrictions on these deals [with the military] that prevent service members from maintaining or repairing the equipment, or even let them write a training manual without going back to the contractor.”

“These right to repair restrictions usually translate into much higher costs for DOD [Department of Defense], which has no choice but to shovel money out to big contractors whenever DOD needs to have something fixed,” she added. Warren gave the example of the Littoral combat ship, a U.S. Navy vessel that costs hundreds of millions of dollars per ship. 

“General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin consider much of the data on the ship to be proprietary, so the Navy had to delay missions and spend millions of dollars on travel costs just so that contractor-affiliated repairmen could fly in, rather than doing this ourselves,” she said.

To solve this problem, Warren and other lawmakers introduced something called Section 828 of the Defense Reauthorization Act, a must-pass bill that funds the military. Section 828 is called “Requirement for Contractors to Provide Reasonable Access to Repair Materials,” and seeks to solve an absurd situation in which the U.S. military cannot always get repair parts, tools, information, and software for everything from fighter jets to Navy battleships, because the companies want to make money by selling their customers repair contracts. 

Section 828 states: “The head of an agency may not enter into a contract for the procurement of goods or services unless the contractor agrees in writing to provide the Department of Defense fair and reasonable access to all the repair materials, including parts, tools, and information, used by the manufacturer or provider or their authorized partners to diagnose, maintain, or repair the good or service.”

Manufacturers are not happy about this prospect, and are aggressively opposing it. But, interestingly, it’s not just major military contractors who build warships who are mad. Some of the groups opposing the legislation in the letter we obtained are things like the “Institute of Makers of Explosives” and the Aerospace Industries Association. But others opposing it include, for example, the Irrigation Association, whose members make irrigation equipment, the Motorcycle Industry Council, the North American Equipment Dealers Association (who represents John Deere and other tractor manufacturers), the Plumbing Manufacturers Association, AdvaMed (which represents the medical device industry), TechNet (whose members make consumer tech), various state groups like Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce and the Arizona Manufacturers Council, and dozens of others. 

In the letter to lawmakers, these groups and dozens of others argued that being required to sell repair parts to the military “would impose significant burdens on contractors throughout the country, including the many small and medium-sized businesses and commercial suppliers that contractors rely on to support the Department’s operational readiness and effectiveness.” 

The letter states that the companies themselves “are critical to the Department’s ability to repair and maintain its assets,” which the military Warren has said is exactly the problem: the military is often stuck relying on the original manufacturer of a product to either do the repair or send through critical repair information, which can be expensive and cumbersome. 

The letter argues that the legislation “would undermine the principle underpinning existing technical data rights statutes, which are designed to balance the government’s technical data needs against contractors’ need to protect sensitive proprietary and trade secret information.” 

This idea that device repair information cannot be provided without giving away trade secrets and proprietary data is one that manufacturers have been making for years at the state level to kill right to repair legislation for consumers. State lawmakers largely have stopped buying this argument, but anti-repair lobbyists are still trying this line of attack with Congress and the military. The letter also takes issue with the idea that there would be cost controls for the military, which Warren said are necessary to prevent “price gouging.”

The fact that groups who represent companies that have nothing to do with the military have lined up to oppose this suggests that device manufacturers more broadly are worried about a national right to repair law, and that the entire sector is trying to kill repair legislation even if it would not affect them. 

“The goal of this legislation is to ensure that the lives of our service members, and their operations, are protected from repair restrictions gumming up the works. Incredibly, most of the signers don't even make military equipment! They range from motorcycles, to farm equipment to consumer devices,” Nathan Proctor, senior director of consumer rights group US PIRG’s campaign for the right to repair, told me. “Why are appliance manufacturers against the military buying equipment they are allowed to fix? Are the profits from additional service revenue, or more frequent device replacements, more important than the safety of our military personnel?”