@pluralistic following you and complaining about long threads is just silly.
That being said, I don't do threads, unless each toot works individually (or the stuff I add is an afterthought). Otherwise, whenever I feel like writing longer stuff, I write it on the friendica account I opened just for that and then boost it here. I find it much neater that way.
Here's a fun AI story: a security researcher noticed that large companies' AI-authored source-code repeatedly referenced a nonexistent library (an AI "hallucination"), so he created a (defanged) malicious library with that name and uploaded it, and thousands of developers automatically downloaded and incorporated it as they compiled the code:
@pluralistic > Lanyado also said that there was a Hugging Face-owned project that incorporated the fake huggingface-cli, but that was removed after he alerted the biz.
Vice died the way it lived: being suckered in by smarter predators, even as it trained its own predatory instincts on those more credulous than its own supremely gullible leadership. RIP, we hardly knew ye.
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@pluralistic I am actually suprised that Vice lasted that long. Your article supposes that Vice leaders were gullible for following FB "pivot to video" when everybody with half a brain knew that strategy to be doomed from the onset. Except that: 1) it is not a unique case 2) they must have known about FB plans, because it mirrors their own only plan: lock-in people and then extract revenue. (1/5)
Apple's most valuable intangible asset isn't its patents or copyrights - it's an army of people who believe that using products from a $2.89 trillion multinational makes them members of an oppressed religious minority whose identity is coterminal with the interests of Apple's shareholders.
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Apple's most valuable intangible asset isn't its patents or copyrights - it's an army of people who believe that using products from a $2.89 trillion multinational makes them members of an oppressed religious minority whose identity is coterminal with the interests of Apple's shareholders.
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Take the #AppStore. Apple blocks third parties from offering rival app stores for its #iOS platform, which means you can only install apps that have been blessed by Apple. That blessing is contingent on the software authors involved giving $0.30 out of every dollar you spend in their apps to Apple.
@pluralistic a lot more needs to be said about the 2-3 decades that tech used PR to really horrific ends, and the journalists and interested tech employees who help them out
@pluralistic This is basically the exact opposite of a proposal I saw a few years ago to switch to an 8 day week, with one of the key benefits being that Christmas would always be at the weekend so we wouldn't need to have time off work for it
For a brief time this year, Amazon's bestselling "bitter lemon drink" was "Release Energy," which consisted of the harvested urine of Amazon delivery drivers, rebottled for sale by #CatfishUK prankster #OobahButler in a stunt for a new #Channel4 doc, "#TheGreatAmazonHeist":
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
For a brief time this year, Amazon's bestselling "bitter lemon drink" was "Release Energy," which consisted of the harvested urine of Amazon delivery drivers, rebottled for sale by #CatfishUK prankster #OobahButler in a stunt for a new #Channel4 doc, "#TheGreatAmazonHeist":
I'm kickstarting the audiobook for "The Internet Con: How To #SeizeTheMeansOfComputation," a #BigTech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and bring back the old, good internet. It's a #DRMFree book, which means #Audible won't carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:
#Enshittification is the process by which digital platforms devour themselves: first they dangle goodies in front of end users. Once users are locked in, the goodies are taken away and dangled before business customers who supply goods to the users. Once those business customers are stuck on the platform, the goodies are clawed away and showered on the platform's shareholders:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
In "Behavioral Advertising and Consumer Welfare," business researchers from #CarnegieMellon and #PamplinCollege investigate goods purchased through highly targeted online ads and just plain web-searches, and conclude social media ads push overpriced junk:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
The online debate over #FreeSpeech *suuuuucks*, and, amazingly, it's *getting worse*. This week, it's the false dichotomy between #FreedomOfSpeech and #FreedomOfReach, that is, the debate over whether a platform should override your explicit choices about what you want to see:
It's wild that we're still having this fight. It is literally the first internet fight! The modern internet was born out of an epic struggled between #Bellheads (who believed centralized powers should decide how you used networks) and #Netheads (who believed that services should be provided and consumed "at the edge"):
I've been having anxiety over my 401k for the past decade. Now I'm unemployed, can't finda job, about to lose my COBRA benefits, can't afford ACA, and now terrified that Social Security won't be there when I talk my need it.
And I don't imagine things are going to be any better for my 6 year old daughter when she's in my shoes.
How long will we need to wait until the next reckoning?
@pluralistic For the last 20 years or so, one of my catchphrases has been: 2 World Wars and The Great Depression took the wind out of the sails of the rich and powerful. And now they have come to take it back.
@pluralistic One thing I took away from the article were how tangled all the different policies are and how politicizing them has led to just hypocrisies and blame games which in turn has led to more downward spiral.
@pluralistic I enjoyed this article, but I don't think we need to use govt force to force social media companies to be interoperable. The article an the article it liked to made me think about the journey from letters to magazines and newspapers to open protocols and back to centrally managed sites like FB.
Sometime in 2001, I walked into a Radio Shack on San Francisco's Market Street and asked for a Cuecat: a handheld barcode scanner that looked a bit like a cat and a bit like a sex toy. The clerk handed one over to me and I left, feeling a little giddy. I didn't have to pay a cent.
The Cuecat was a good idea and a terrible idea. The good idea was to widely distribute barcode scanners to computer owners, along with software that could read and decode barcodes; the company's marketing plan called for magazines and newspapers to print barcodes alongside ads and articles, so readers could scan them and be taken to the digital edition.
Computer security is really, really important. It was important decades ago, when computers were merely how we ran our financial system, aviation, and the power grid. Today, as more and more of us have our bodies inside of computers (cars, houses, etc) and computers in our body (implants), computer security is *urgent*.
Decades ago, security practitioners began a long argument about how best to address that looming urgency. The most vexing aspect of this argument was a modern, cybernetic variant on a debate that was as old as the ancient philosophers - a debate that Rene Descartes immortalized in the 17th Century.
This week on my podcast, I read the first part of "The Internet Heist," a three-part series I wrote for Medium on the #BroadcastFlag, which was invented 20 years ago, on my first day on the job at EFF. It's basically my origin-story.
The Broadcast Flag was an incredibly gnarly, high-stakes digital technology issue. It combined no fewer than three esoteric fields - spectrum allocation, computer science, and copyright - and threatened to ban all free/open source software, while making it illegal to produce *any* digital technology unless the Hollywood studios approved it.
The world is experiencing a "pandemic of the unvaccinated," but the largest pool unvaccinated people isn't to be found among vaccine deniers of the rich world.
Rather, these vulnerable people - whose infections might spawn new, vaccine-bypassing, more-lethal variants - are the 2.5b people in the world's 125 poorest countries, where vaccines are not widely available and the vaccination rate is 2.6%.
The pharma lobbyists who have blocked a WTO waiver are the true vaccine deniers. They are literally denying vaccines to billions of people, but also implicitly denying that constitutes an existential risk to all of us, as unvaccinated nations offer fertile breeding grounds for new, scarier variants.
The politicization of covid started early, with the "noble lie" that masks wouldn't prevent the spread of the disease, a lie told in a bid to prevent panic-shoppers buying up all the N95s that health workers needed.
The British "health and safety gone mad" panic of the 1990s is a perfect microcosm of how this works. After a revolution in evidence-based public safety measures improved the daily lives of millions of people, puny authoritarians and grifters of every stripe realized that safety talk was a powerful weapon for bossing people around while lining their pockets.
Gregory's Server
@pluralistic it’s also not in block caps
@pluralistic ye olde medadata
@pluralistic I wish I had seen this post before. I would've spent the day walking around to find it (I live in Turin -- not our proudest moment).