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#how to buy smartphone

invisiblefoxfire · 8 months

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How to transfer your 2FA accounts on your authenticator app from your old phone to your shiny new phone:

Open the Authenticator app on your old phone.

Open the settings.

Select "transfer to another device" to generate a QR code which you can scan on your new phone and instantly transfer everything over.

Oh, that option isn't there.

Apparently this is an outdated version of the app.

Head to the Play store to update.

Update is not compatible with this device.

Ah, this phone is too old. Cool. Cool, cool, cool, cool.

Back to the settings menu.

Find the toggle that says "back up accounts to the cloud" and hit it.

This will open the Play store to download the LastPass app, and when you make an account on it, you can transfer your info there.

App is not compatible with this device.

Cry.

Disable 2FA on each of the dozen or so accounts you have across various services, re-enable it, and go through the tedious process of confirming each account via text messages and emails.

Actually, screw step 14. Just leave it on the old phone for now and deal with it later.

It's as simple as that! 👍

#i fucking hate smartphones #when did the world collectively decide everyone had to have a tiny expensive shitty pocket computer #and if they don't have one they can't participate in society #and if it's more than a year or so old nothing will work on it anymore #so even though it's perfectly functional they have to buy a new one #how did we allow this to fucking happen #smartphones #android

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gothhabiba · 3 months

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🍉🇵🇸 eSims for Gaza masterpost 🇵🇸🍉

Which eSims are currently being called for?

Gaza Online is calling for:

Holafly (“Israel” and “Egypt” plans): code HOLACNG

Nomad (“regional Middle East” plan): code NOMADCNG (can now be used multiple times from the same email)

Airalo (“Middle East and North Africa” plan)

Sparks (“Israel” plan)

Numero (“Egypt” plan)

Connecting Humanity is calling for:

Nomad (“regional Middle East” plan): code NOMADCNG (can now be used multiple times from the same email)

Holafly (“Israel” and “Egypt” plans): code HOLACNG—be sure to include which plan it is in the subject line

Simly (“Palestine” and “Middle East” plans)

Airalo (“Discover” plans)

For Connecting Humanity: if you sent an eSim more than two weeks ago and it is still valid and not yet activated, reply to the email in which you originally sent the eSim. To determine whether the eSim is still valid, scan the QR code with a smartphone; tap the yellow button that reads “Cellular plan”; when a screen comes up reading “Activate eSIM,” click the button that says “Continue.” If a message comes up reading “eSIM Cannot Be Added: This code is no longer valid. Contact your carrier for more information,” the eSim is activated, expired, or had an error in installation, and should not be sent. It is very important not to re-send invalid eSims, since people may walk several kilometers to access wifi to connect their eSims only to find out that they cannot be activated.

If a screen appears reading “Activate eSIM: An eSIM is ready to be activated” with a button asking you to “Continue,” do not click “Continue” to activate the eSim on your phone; exit out of the screen and reply to the email containing that QR code.

Be sure you're looking at the original post, as this will be continually updated. Any new instructions about replying to emails for specific types of unactivated plans will also appear here.

Check the notes of blackpearlblasts's eSim post, as well as fairuzfan's 'esim' tag, for referral and discount codes.

How do I purchase an eSim?

If you cannot download an app or manage an eSim yourself, send funds to Crips for eSims for Gaza (Visa; Mastercard; Paypal; AmEx; Canadian e-transfer), or to me (venmo @gothhabiba; paypal.me/Najia; cash app $NajiaK, with note “esims” or similar; check the notes of this post for updates on what I've purchased.)

You can purchase an eSim yourself using a mobile phone app, or on a desktop computer (with the exception of Simly, which does not have a desktop site). See this screenreader-accessible guide to purchasing an eSim through each of the five services that the Connecting Humanity team is calling for (Simly, Nomad, Mogo, Holafly, and Airalo).

Send a screenshot of the plan's QR code to [email protected]. Be sure to include the app used, the word "esim," the type of plan (when an app has more than one, aka "regional Middle East" versus "Palestine"), and the amount of data or time on the plan, in the subject line or body of your email.

Message me if you have any questions or if you need help purchasing an eSim through one of these apps.

If you’re going to be purchasing many eSims at once, see Jane Shi’s list of tips.

Which app should I use?

Try to buy an eSim from one of the apps that the team is currently calling for (see above).

If the team is calling for multiple apps:

Nomad is best in terms of data price, app navigability, and ability to top up when they are near expiry; but eSims must be stayed on top of, as you cannot top them up once the data has completely run out. Go into the app settings and make sure your "data usage" notifcations are turned on.

Simly Middle East plans cannot be topped up; Simly Palestine ones can. Unlike with Nomad, data can be topped up once it has completely run out.

Holafly has the most expensive data, and top-ups don't seem to work.

Mogo has the worst user interface in my opinion. It is difficult or impossible to see plan activation and usage.

How much data should I purchase?

Mirna el-Helbawi has been told that large families may all rely on the same plan for data (by setting up a hotspot). Some recipients of eSim plans may also be using them to upload video.

For those reasons I would recommend getting the largest plan you can afford for plans which cannot be topped up: namely, Simly "Middle East" plans, and Holafly plans (they say you can top them up, but I haven't heard of anyone who has gotten it to work yet).

For all other plans, get a relatively small amount of data (1-3 GB, a 3-day plan, etc.), and top up the plan with more data once it is activated. Go into the app’s settings and make sure low-data notifications are on, because a 1-GB eSIM can expire very quickly.

Is there anything else I need to do?

Check back regularly to see if the plan has been activated. Once it's been activated, check once a day to see if data is still being used, and how close the eSim is to running out of data or to expiring; make sure your notifications are on.

If the eSim hasn't been activated after three weeks or so, reply to the original email that you sent to Gaza eSims containing the QR code for that plan.

If you purchased the eSim through an app which has a policy of starting the countdown to auto-expiry a certain amount of time after the purchase of the eSim, rather than only upon activation (Nomad does this), then also reply to your original e-mail once you're within a few days of this date. If you're within 12 hours of that date, contact customer service and ask for a credit (not a refund) and use it to purchase and send another eSim.

How can I tell if my plan has been activated? How do I top up a plan?

The Connecting Humanity team recommends keeping your eSims topped up once they have been activated.

See this guide on how to tell if your plan has been activated, how to top up plans, and (for Nomad) how to tell when the auto-expiry will start. Keep topping up the eSim for as long as the data usage keeps ticking up. This keeps a person or family connected for longer, without the Connecting Humanity team having to go through another process of installing a new eSim.

If the data usage hasn't changed in a week or so, allow the plan to expire and purchase another one.

What if I can't afford a larger plan, or don't have time or money to keep topping up an eSim?

I have set up a pool of funds out of which to buy and top up eSims, which you can contribute to by sending funds to my venmo (@gothhabiba), PayPal (paypal.me/Najia), or cash app ($NajiaK) (with note “esims” or similar). Check the notes of this post for updates on what I've purchased, which plans are active, and how much data they've used.

Crips for eSims for Gaza also has a donation pool to purchase eSims and top them up.

Gaza Online (run by alumni of Gaza Sky Geeks) accepts monetary donations to purchase eSims as needed.

What if my eSim has not been activated, even after I replied to my email?

Make sure that the QR code you sent was a clear screenshot, and not a photo of a screen; and that you didn’t install the eSim on your own phone by scanning the QR code or clicking “install automatically."

Possible reasons for an eSim not having been activated include: it was given to a journalist as a back-up in case the plan they had activated expired or ran out of data; there was an error during installation or activation and the eSim could no longer be used; the eSim was installed, but not activated, and then Israeli bombings destroyed the phone, or forced someone to leave it behind.

An eSim that was sent but couldn’t be used is still part of an important effort and learning curve. Errors in installation, for example, are happening less often than they were in the beginning of the project.

Why should I purchase an eSim? Is there any proof that they work?

Israel is imposing near-constant communications blackouts on Gaza. The majority of the news that you are seeing come from Gaza is coming from people who are connected via eSim.

eSims also connect people to news. People are able to videochat with their family for the first time in months, to learn that their family members are still alive, to see their newborn children for the first time, and more, thanks to eSims.

Some of this sharing of news saves lives, as people have been able to flee or avoid areas under bombardment, or learn that they are on evacuation lists.

Why are different plans called for at different times?

Different eSims work in different areas of the Gaza Strip (and Egypt, where many refugees currently are). The team tries to keep a stockpile of each type of sim on hand.

Is there anything else I can do to help?

There is an urgent need for more eSims. Print out these posters and place them on bulletin boards, in local businesses, on telephone poles, or wherever people are likely to see them. Print out these foldable brochures to inform people about the initiative and distribute them at protests, cafes and restaurants, &c. Also feel free to make your own brochures using the wording from this post.

The Connecting Humanity team is very busy connecting people to eSims and don't often have time to answer questions. Check a few of Mirna El Helbawi's most recent tweets and see if anyone has commented with any questions that you can answer with the information in this post.

#esims #esims for gaza #palestine #gaza #action

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vikas7890 · 6 months

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Buying Your First Foldable? Here’s What You Need to Know

Manufacturers like Samsung and Xiaomi have been playing with the idea of foldables for several years; buyers have been waiting for the various technologies that make these foldables work to become more reliable. Is 2023 that year? Well, it surely seems that way. While Samsung has dominated the foldable segment, delivering new models and upgrades year after year, it was expected that Chinese…

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#foldable buying guide how to choose your first foldable smartphone foldables #foldable devices #foldable displays #foldables hinge #motorola razr 40 ultra #oneplus open #oppo find n3 flip #samsung galaxy z flip 5 #samsung galaxy z fold 5 #tecno phantom v flip

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gremlingottoosilly · 17 days

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Sleepy!Reader X Pushover!König?

Konig kidnaps a sleepy girl who doesn't give a fuck that she is kidnapped. A dream come true. You are quite cranky when woken up prematurely - so Konig dims the lights in all the rooms. Makes his bedroom soundproof not only to silence the sounds of your screams but also because he doesn't want to wake you up suddenly. He has the grace of an elephant in a tea cup shop, so he learns how to be soft, quiet, just for you. A warm hand rubs your hair, allowing you to lean into the touch. Konig smiles each time, kissing you softly. You murmur something in your sleep, looking absolutely adorable. Konig almost rethinks breaking your ankles so you could never leave the bed again. He resolves on a half measure - chaining you to a bedpost, occasionally letting you out for a bathroom break or some light stretching. He used to allow you to take baths on your own, a bit too shy to invade your privacy and a bit of pushover wile obeying your whining, but you fell asleep in the warm water - almost slipped down, almost drowned. Dumb girl, his precious girl - he is watching you like a hawk now, knowing he can't let you be off to your own devices. He doesn't want to call you stupid, but you are silly. You're silly, dizzy, and he is utterly whipped. Hates using his smartphone, but bought the latest Samsung for the best pictures of his sleepy girlfriend. Konig is enough of a pushover to not fuck you in your sleep - he wants you to be aware, to like it. To press your body closer to his and smile as he pushes his cock even further. You're adorable, really, and Konig wants to see you like him. You allow him to fuck you because he provides everything for you - even kidnapped and chained to the bed, and you find yourself kinda liking the situation. He brings out the best mattress and softest bedsheets, buys you an army of plush toys. Plays with your cunt while you hug one of the pillows, inhaling soft laundry scent. This is perfect - and you don't have to perform for anyone. Konig likes your bed hair and your sleepy expressions. He smiles when you blush and brings a kiss to your temple before diving in to fuck you properly. It's almost perfect, really.

#cod #konig x reader #konig #yandere konig #cod x reader #yandere cod #loser!konig

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intercal · 10 months

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Why don't zoomers use emulators or torrent things anymore? A good amount of zoomers could probably figure it out with time but people either just buy digital games or use pirate streaming sites.

I think there's a certain technical knowledge gap between people whose first computer was a Windows XP machine and people whose first computer was an iPad. On a mobile device like that, even the filesystem is abstracted away from you, so if that's all you've used your whole life, you may not know what a "folder" or a "file" is. If you don't know what those are, how could you be expected to understand something like torrenting? Then add the layer of a VPN, which is basically a necessity when torrenting lest you get a love letter from your ISP, and I'd say it's all but impenetrable for our strawman.

Idk man. Torrenting isn't hard, but there's a barrier to entry that a lot of people who grew up using smartphones aren't equipped to handle. There are plenty of millenials who don't know how to torrent either, and plenty of zoomers who do. It's just a technological generation gap.

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rangpurcity · 1 year

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Buy these 5 portable Bluetooth speakers for less than Rs 5000, you will get powerful sound

highlights The price of Sony SRS-XB13 Portable Bluetooth Speaker is Rs.3,600 on Amazon. Blaupunkt Atomik BB30 can be bought for just Rs.4,290. You can own boAt Stone 620 with tws feature for Rs.1,999. new Delhi. Portable Bluetooth speakers of many companies are available in the market. Many times people get very confused while buying it. Actually the cost of some speakers is high but the…

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#best selling portable bluetooth speaker in india #bluetooth #bluetooth speaker range #Buy #how to connect bluetooth speaker to laptop #How to connect bluetooth speaker to smartphone #how to connect bluetooth speaker with mobile #how to connect speaker in laptop #portable #powerful #sound #speakers #what is the feature of bluetooth speaker #what is the range of bluetooth speakers #What is the starting price of bluetooth speaker #Which is the best selling bluetooth speaker

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brunelsblog · 5 months

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On 5th December of 2023, The Atlantic came out with an article titled "War in the Congo Has Kept the Planet Cooler" written by Ross Anderse, the senior editor at the Atlantic, where he oversees the science, technology, and health sections. As you could've guessed, this genocide-friendly title did not fly by the internet and they have since (9th December at the time of writing) changed the title to "The Grim Ironies of Climate Change", a paywalled article.

Let us break this down further to try to understand their thought process-

1) They posted an article with an insanely insensitive and dangerously racist title.

2) They, rightly, faced backlash.

3) With the knowledge that what they had done was wrong at least on some level, they decide not to remove the dangerous article...

4) ... but rename it and continue to unapologetically host it in their site?

There is no way to make sense of it outside of the framework of white supremacy that has dehumanized African bodies to the point where they, to a colonial mind, appear as viable sacrifices to quell the climate disaster that continues to be driven by the same countries whose foreign policy is to keep Congo as unstable as posible. There is no "war" in Congo, there is a genocide for raw minerals that, through multiple levels of slave labor, become the smartphones and other electronic devices you and I own. And the colonizers know this -- that they have implicated billions of people around the world in their inhumane project, and they hope to turn this forced complacency into active genocidal intent, where the plunder of Congo becomes acceptable to you if it buys the west a little extra time to protect what little comforts it has thrown your way. I am not going to tell you how to think. Sit with this information and come to your own conclusions.

They might have changed the title of the article but the internet is forever. Here is the link to the Wayback Machine snapshot of the original title. Ironically, you can access the archived version that implicates them for free, while you would have to pay to read the current version.

#free congo #dr congo #congo #democratic republic of the congo #congo genocide #im gonna tag gaza too because this has Israel all over this #free gaza #free palestine #israel doesn't have a right to exist #fuck israel #fuck united states #fuck britain #fuck europe

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accesoriosindia · 2 years

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4 Tips to Personalize Your Smartphone Case or Flip Cover

The smartphone that we use is a very personal thing for us. It remains in your hand or pocket most of the day no matter where you are. It sleeps by your side too.

With that, it makes perfect sense to give your smartphone a personal touch – something that enhances its look and reflects that it belongs to you. In this blog, we will talk about a few ways you can add a personal feel to your smartphone and smartphone cover. Check out the following pointers –

Put an image of you or you with a loved one as the screensaver and wallpaper on your smartphone. This is a cool way to personalize your smartphone. If someone finds your phone, she/he will see your image, and realize that this phone belongs to you.

Similarly, you can apply a sticker with a special picture of yours on the backside of phone. Though, you will need to be plan for the camera and flashlight openings.

There are some mobile flip cover online stores in India that offer personalized flips covers and smartphone cases with your image and quotes on it. It could be a great idea for adding personalization to your phone. It also makes a cool idea for gifting. However, for this, you will need to send your picture or text to the mobile phone case supplier.

If you already have a leather flip cover for your smartphone and if you are good at calligraphy and sketching, you can write or draw something on your cover. This way, you can add your own personalization to your smartphone and smartphone case.

There you have it. These are a few ways you can personalize your smartphone and its back or flip cover.

This blog has been brought to you by accesorios.in, one of the best sites for online shopping for flip covers in India.

#personalized smartphone #personalized smartphone cover #how to personalize your smartphone #buy smartphone cover #online shopping for flip cover #mobile flip cover online

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mostlysignssomeportents · 7 days

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The disenshittified internet starts with loyal "user agents"

I'm in TARTU, ESTONIA! Overcoming the Enshittocene (TOMORROW, May 8, 6PM, Prima Vista Literary Festival keynote, University of Tartu Library, Struwe 1). AI, copyright and creative workers' labor rights (May 10, 8AM: Science Fiction Research Association talk, Institute of Foreign Languages and Cultures building, Lossi 3, lobby). A talk for hackers on seizing the means of computation (May 10, 3PM, University of Tartu Delta Centre, Narva 18, room 1037).

There's one overwhelmingly common mistake that people make about enshittification: assuming that the contagion is the result of the Great Forces of History, or that it is the inevitable end-point of any kind of for-profit online world.

In other words, they class enshittification as an ideological phenomenon, rather than as a material phenomenon. Corporate leaders have always felt the impulse to enshittify their offerings, shifting value from end users, business customers and their own workers to their shareholders. The decades of largely enshittification-free online services were not the product of corporate leaders with better ideas or purer hearts. Those years were the result of constraints on the mediocre sociopaths who would trade our wellbeing and happiness for their own, constraints that forced them to act better than they do today, even if the were not any better:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

Corporate leaders' moments of good leadership didn't come from morals, they came from fear. Fear that a competitor would take away a disgruntled customer or worker. Fear that a regulator would punish the company so severely that all gains from cheating would be wiped out. Fear that a rival technology – alternative clients, tracker blockers, third-party mods and plugins – would emerge that permanently severed the company's relationship with their customers. Fears that key workers in their impossible-to-replace workforce would leave for a job somewhere else rather than participate in the enshittification of the services they worked so hard to build:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/22/kargo-kult-kaptialism/#dont-buy-it

When those constraints melted away – thanks to decades of official tolerance for monopolies, which led to regulatory capture and victory over the tech workforce – the same mediocre sociopaths found themselves able to pursue their most enshittificatory impulses without fear.

The effects of this are all around us. In This Is Your Phone On Feminism, the great Maria Farrell describes how audiences at her lectures profess both love for their smartphones and mistrust for them. Farrell says, "We love our phones, but we do not trust them. And love without trust is the definition of an abusive relationship":

https://conversationalist.org/2019/09/13/feminism-explains-our-toxic-relationships-with-our-smartphones/

I (re)discovered this Farrell quote in a paper by Robin Berjon, who recently co-authored a magnificent paper with Farrell entitled "We Need to Rewild the Internet":

https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-rewild-the-internet/

The new Berjon paper is narrower in scope, but still packed with material examples of the way the internet goes wrong and how it can be put right. It's called "The Fiduciary Duties of User Agents":

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3827421

In "Fiduciary Duties," Berjon focuses on the technical term "user agent," which is how web browsers are described in formal standards documents. This notion of a "user agent" is a holdover from a more civilized age, when technologists tried to figure out how to build a new digital space where technology served users.

A web browser that's a "user agent" is a comforting thought. An agent's job is to serve you and your interests. When you tell it to fetch a web-page, your agent should figure out how to get that page, make sense of the code that's embedded in, and render the page in a way that represents its best guess of how you'd like the page seen.

For example, the user agent might judge that you'd like it to block ads. More than half of all web users have installed ad-blockers, constituting the largest consumer boycott in human history:

https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/

Your user agent might judge that the colors on the page are outside your visual range. Maybe you're colorblind, in which case, the user agent could shift the gamut of the colors away from the colors chosen by the page's creator and into a set that suits you better:

https://dankaminsky.com/dankam/

Or maybe you (like me) have a low-vision disability that makes low-contrast type difficult to impossible to read, and maybe the page's creator is a thoughtless dolt who's chosen light grey-on-white type, or maybe they've fallen prey to the absurd urban legend that not-quite-black type is somehow more legible than actual black type:

https://uxplanet.org/basicdesign-never-use-pure-black-in-typography-36138a3327a6

The user agent is loyal to you. Even when you want something the page's creator didn't consider – even when you want something the page's creator violently objects to – your user agent acts on your behalf and delivers your desires, as best as it can.

Now – as Berjon points out – you might not know exactly what you want. Like, you know that you want the privacy guarantees of TLS (the difference between "http" and "https") but not really understand the internal cryptographic mysteries involved. Your user agent might detect evidence of shenanigans indicating that your session isn't secure, and choose not to show you the web-page you requested.

This is only superficially paradoxical. Yes, you asked your browser for a web-page. Yes, the browser defied your request and declined to show you that page. But you also asked your browser to protect you from security defects, and your browser made a judgment call and decided that security trumped delivery of the page. No paradox needed.

But of course, the person who designed your user agent/browser can't anticipate all the ways this contradiction might arise. Like, maybe you're trying to access your own website, and you know that the security problem the browser has detected is the result of your own forgetful failure to renew your site's cryptographic certificate. At that point, you can tell your browser, "Thanks for having my back, pal, but actually this time it's fine. Stand down and show me that webpage."

That's your user agent serving you, too.

User agents can be well-designed or they can be poorly made. The fact that a user agent is designed to act in accord with your desires doesn't mean that it always will. A software agent, like a human agent, is not infallible.

However – and this is the key – if a user agent thwarts your desire due to a fault, that is fundamentally different from a user agent that thwarts your desires because it is designed to serve the interests of someone else, even when that is detrimental to your own interests.

A "faithless" user agent is utterly different from a "clumsy" user agent, and faithless user agents have become the norm. Indeed, as crude early internet clients progressed in sophistication, they grew increasingly treacherous. Most non-browser tools are designed for treachery.

A smart speaker or voice assistant routes all your requests through its manufacturer's servers and uses this to build a nonconsensual surveillance dossier on you. Smart speakers and voice assistants even secretly record your speech and route it to the manufacturer's subcontractors, whether or not you're explicitly interacting with them:

https://www.sciencealert.com/creepy-new-amazon-patent-would-mean-alexa-records-everything-you-say-from-now-on

By design, apps and in-app browsers seek to thwart your preferences regarding surveillance and tracking. An app will even try to figure out if you're using a VPN to obscure your location from its maker, and snitch you out with its guess about your true location.

Mobile phones assign persistent tracking IDs to their owners and transmit them without permission (to its credit, Apple recently switch to an opt-in system for transmitting these IDs) (but to its detriment, Apple offers no opt-out from its own tracking, and actively lies about the very existence of this tracking):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

An Android device running Chrome and sitting inert, with no user interaction, transmits location data to Google every five minutes. This is the "resting heartbeat" of surveillance for an Android device. Ask that device to do any work for you and its pulse quickens, until it is emitting a nearly continuous stream of information about your activities to Google:

https://digitalcontentnext.org/blog/2018/08/21/google-data-collection-research/

These faithless user agents both reflect and enable enshittification. The locked-down nature of the hardware and operating systems for Android and Ios devices means that manufacturers – and their business partners – have an arsenal of legal weapons they can use to block anyone who gives you a tool to modify the device's behavior. These weapons are generically referred to as "IP rights" which are, broadly speaking, the right to control the conduct of a company's critics, customers and competitors:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

A canny tech company can design their products so that any modification that puts the user's interests above its shareholders is illegal, a violation of its copyright, patent, trademark, trade secrets, contracts, terms of service, nondisclosure, noncompete, most favored nation, or anticircumvention rights. Wrap your product in the right mix of IP, and its faithless betrayals acquire the force of law.

This is – in Jay Freeman's memorable phrase – "felony contempt of business model." While more than half of all web users have installed an ad-blocker, thus overriding the manufacturer's defaults to make their browser a more loyal agent, no app users have modified their apps with ad-blockers.

The first step of making such a blocker, reverse-engineering the app, creates criminal liability under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, with a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $500,000 fine. An app is just a web-page skinned in sufficient IP to make it a felony to add an ad-blocker to it (no wonder every company wants to coerce you into using its app, rather than its website).

If you know that increasing the invasiveness of the ads on your web-page could trigger mass installations of ad-blockers by your users, it becomes irrational and self-defeating to ramp up your ads' invasiveness. The possibility of interoperability acts as a constraint on tech bosses' impulse to enshittify their products.

The shift to platforms dominated by treacherous user agents – apps, mobile ecosystems, walled gardens – weakens or removes that constraint. As your ability to discipline your agent so that it serves you wanes, the temptation to turn your user agent against you grows, and enshittification follows.

This has been tacitly understood by technologists since the web's earliest days and has been reaffirmed even as enshittification increased. Berjon quotes extensively from "The Internet Is For End-Users," AKA Internet Architecture Board RFC 8890:

Defining the user agent role in standards also creates a virtuous cycle; it allows multiple implementations, allowing end users to switch between them with relatively low costs (…). This creates an incentive for implementers to consider the users' needs carefully, which are often reflected into the defining standards. The resulting ecosystem has many remaining problems, but a distinguished user agent role provides an opportunity to improve it.

And the W3C's Technical Architecture Group echoes these sentiments in "Web Platform Design Principles," which articulates a "Priority of Constituencies" that is supposed to be central to the W3C's mission:

User needs come before the needs of web page authors, which come before the needs of user agent implementors, which come before the needs of specification writers, which come before theoretical purity.

https://w3ctag.github.io/design-principles/

But the W3C's commitment to faithful agents is contingent on its own members' commitment to these principles. In 2017, the W3C finalized "EME," a standard for blocking mods that interact with streaming videos. Nominally aimed at preventing copyright infringement, EME also prevents users from choosing to add accessibility add-ons that beyond the ones the streaming service permits. These services may support closed captioning and additional narration of visual elements, but they block tools that adapt video for color-blind users or prevent strobe effects that trigger seizures in users with photosensitive epilepsy.

The fight over EME was the most contentious struggle in the W3C's history, in which the organization's leadership had to decide whether to honor the "priority of constituencies" and make a standard that allowed users to override manufacturers, or whether to facilitate the creation of faithless agents specifically designed to thwart users' desires on behalf of manufacturers:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/09/open-letter-w3c-director-ceo-team-and-membership

This fight was settled in favor of a handful of extremely large and powerful companies, over the objections of a broad collection of smaller firms, nonprofits representing users, academics and other parties agitating for a web built on faithful agents. This coincided with the W3C's operating budget becoming entirely dependent on the very large sums its largest corporate members paid.

W3C membership is on a sliding scale, based on a member's size. Nominally, the W3C is a one-member, one-vote organization, but when a highly concentrated collection of very high-value members flex their muscles, W3C leadership seemingly perceived an existential risk to the organization, and opted to sacrifice the faithfulness of user agents in service to the anti-user priorities of its largest members.

For W3C's largest corporate members, the fight was absolutely worth it. The W3C's EME standard transformed the web, making it impossible to ship a fully featured web-browser without securing permission – and a paid license – from one of the cartel of companies that dominate the internet. In effect, Big Tech used the W3C to secure the right to decide who would compete with them in future, and how:

https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/the-end-of-indie-web-browsers/

Enshittification arises when the everyday mediocre sociopaths who run tech companies are freed from the constraints that act against them. When the web – and its browsers – were a big, contented, diverse, competitive space, it was harder for tech companies to collude to capture standards bodies like the W3C to secure even more dominance. As the web turned into Tom Eastman's "five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four," that kind of collusion became much easier:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/18/cursed-are-the-sausagemakers/#how-the-parties-get-to-yes

In arguing for faithful agents, Berjon associates himself with the group of scholars, regulators and activists who call for user agents to serve as "information fiduciaries." Mostly, information fiduciaries come up in the context of user privacy, with the idea that entities that hold a user's data would have the obligation to put the user's interests ahead of their own. Think of a lawyer's fiduciary duty in respect of their clients, to give advice that reflects the client's best interests, even when that conflicts with the lawyer's own self-interest. For example, a lawyer who believes that settling a case is the best course of action for a client is required to tell them so, even if keeping the case going would generate more billings for the lawyer and their firm.

For a user agent to be faithful, it must be your fiduciary. It must put your interests ahead of the interests of the entity that made it or operates it. Browsers, email clients, and other internet software that served as a fiduciary would do things like automatically blocking tracking (which most email clients don't do, especially webmail clients made by companies like Google, who also sell advertising and tracking).

Berjon contemplates a legally mandated fiduciary duty, citing Lindsey Barrett's "Confiding in Con Men":

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3354129

He describes a fiduciary duty as a remedy for the enforcement failures of EU's GDPR, a solidly written, and dismally enforced, privacy law. A legally backstopped duty for agents to be fiduciaries would also help us distinguish good and bad forms of "innovation" – innovation in ways of thwarting a user's will are always bad.

Now, the tech giants insist that they are already fiduciaries, and that when they thwart a user's request, that's more like blocking access to a page where the encryption has been compromised than like HAL9000's "I can't let you do that, Dave." For example, when Louis Barclay created "Unfollow Everything," he (and his enthusiastic users) found that automating the process of unfollowing every account on Facebook made their use of the service significantly better:

https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/facebook-unfollow-everything-cease-desist.html

When Facebook shut the service down with blood-curdling legal threats, they insisted that they were simply protecting users from themselves. Sure, this browser automation tool – which just automatically clicked links on Facebook's own settings pages – seemed to do what the users wanted. But what if the user interface changed? What if so many users added this feature to Facebook without Facebook's permission that they overwhelmed Facebook's (presumably tiny and fragile) servers and crashed the system?

These arguments have lately resurfaced with Ethan Zuckerman and Knight First Amendment Institute's lawsuit to clarify that "Unfollow Everything 2.0" is legal and doesn't violate any of those "felony contempt of business model" laws:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/02/kaiju-v-kaiju/

Sure, Zuckerman seems like a good guy, but what if he makes a mistake and his automation tool does something you don't want? You, the Facebook user, are also a nice guy, but let's face it, you're also a naive dolt and you can't be trusted to make decisions for yourself. Those decisions can only be made by Facebook, whom we can rely upon to exercise its authority wisely.

Other versions of this argument surfaced in the debate over the EU's decision to mandate interoperability for end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging through the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which would let you switch from, say, Whatsapp to Signal and still send messages to your Whatsapp contacts.

There are some good arguments that this could go horribly awry. If it is rushed, or internally sabotaged by the EU's state security services who loathe the privacy that comes from encrypted messaging, it could expose billions of people to serious risks.

But that's not the only argument that DMA opponents made: they also argued that even if interoperable messaging worked perfectly and had no security breaches, it would still be bad for users, because this would make it impossible for tech giants like Meta, Google and Apple to spy on message traffic (if not its content) and identify likely coordinated harassment campaigns. This is literally the identical argument the NSA made in support of its "metadata" mass-surveillance program: "Reading your messages might violate your privacy, but watching your messages doesn't."

This is obvious nonsense, so its proponents need an equally obviously intellectually dishonest way to defend it. When called on the absurdity of "protecting" users by spying on them against their will, they simply shake their heads and say, "You just can't understand the burdens of running a service with hundreds of millions or billions of users, and if I even tried to explain these issues to you, I would divulge secrets that I'm legally and ethically bound to keep. And even if I could tell you, you wouldn't understand, because anyone who doesn't work for a Big Tech company is a naive dolt who can't be trusted to understand how the world works (much like our users)."

Not coincidentally, this is also literally the same argument the NSA makes in support of mass surveillance, and there's a very useful name for it: scalesplaining.

Now, it's totally true that every one of us is capable of lapses in judgment that put us, and the people connected to us, at risk (my own parents gave their genome to the pseudoscience genetic surveillance company 23andme, which means they have my genome, too). A true information fiduciary shouldn't automatically deliver everything the user asks for. When the agent perceives that the user is about to put themselves in harm's way, it should throw up a roadblock and explain the risks to the user.

But the system should also let the user override it.

This is a contentious statement in information security circles. Users can be "socially engineered" (tricked), and even the most sophisticated users are vulnerable to this:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/05/cyber-dunning-kruger/#swiss-cheese-security

The only way to be certain a user won't be tricked into taking a course of action is to forbid that course of action under any circumstances. If there is any means by which a user can flip the "are you very sure?" circuit-breaker back on, then the user can be tricked into using that means.

This is absolutely true. As you read these words, all over the world, vulnerable people are being tricked into speaking the very specific set of directives that cause a suspicious bank-teller to authorize a transfer or cash withdrawal that will result in their life's savings being stolen by a scammer:

https://www.thecut.com/article/amazon-scam-call-ftc-arrest-warrants.html

We keep making it harder for bank customers to make large transfers, but so long as it is possible to make such a transfer, the scammers have the means, motive and opportunity to discover how the process works, and they will go on to trick their victims into invoking that process.

Beyond a certain point, making it harder for bank depositors to harm themselves creates a world in which people who aren't being scammed find it nearly impossible to draw out a lot of cash for an emergency and where scam artists know exactly how to manage the trick. After all, non-scammers only rarely experience emergencies and thus have no opportunity to become practiced in navigating all the anti-fraud checks, while the fraudster gets to run through them several times per day, until they know them even better than the bank staff do.

This is broadly true of any system intended to control users at scale – beyond a certain point, additional security measures are trivially surmounted hurdles for dedicated bad actors and as nearly insurmountable hurdles for their victims:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/07/como-is-infosec/

At this point, we've had a couple of decades' worth of experience with technological "walled gardens" in which corporate executives get to override their users' decisions about how the system should work, even when that means reaching into the users' own computer and compelling it to thwart the user's desire. The record is inarguable: while companies often use those walls to lock bad guys out of the system, they also use the walls to lock their users in, so that they'll be easy pickings for the tech company that owns the system:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/05/battery-vampire/#drained

This is neatly predicted by enshittification's theory of constraints: when a company can override your choices, it will be irresistibly tempted to do so for its own benefit, and to your detriment.

What's more, the mere possibility that you can override the way the system works acts as a disciplining force on corporate executives, forcing them to reckon with your priorities even when these are counter to their shareholders' interests. If Facebook is genuinely worried that an "Unfollow Everything" script will break its servers, it can solve that by giving users an unfollow everything button of its own design. But so long as Facebook can sue anyone who makes an "Unfollow Everything" tool, they have no reason to give their users such a button, because it would give them more control over their Facebook experience, including the controls needed to use Facebook less.

It's been more than 20 years since Seth Schoen and I got a demo of Microsoft's first "trusted computing" system, with its "remote attestations," which would let remote servers demand and receive accurate information about what kind of computer you were using and what software was running on it.

This could be beneficial to the user – you could send a "remote attestation" to a third party you trusted and ask, "Hey, do you think my computer is infected with malicious software?" Since the trusted computing system produced its report on your computer using a sealed, separate processor that the user couldn't directly interact with, any malicious code you were infected with would not be able to forge this attestation.

But this remote attestation feature could also be used to allow Microsoft to block you from opening a Word document with Libreoffice, Apple Pages, or Google Docs, or it could be used to allow a website to refuse to send you pages if you were running an ad-blocker. In other words, it could transform your information fiduciary into a faithless agent.

Seth proposed an answer to this: "owner override," a hardware switch that would allow you to force your computer to lie on your behalf, when that was beneficial to you, for example, by insisting that you were using Microsoft Word to open a document when you were really using Apple Pages:

https://web.archive.org/web/20021004125515/http://vitanuova.loyalty.org/2002-07-05.html

Seth wasn't naive. He knew that such a system could be exploited by scammers and used to harm users. But Seth calculated – correctly! – that the risks of having a key to let yourself out of the walled garden were less than being stuck in a walled garden where some corporate executive got to decide whether and when you could leave.

Tech executives never stopped questing after a way to turn your user agent from a fiduciary into a traitor. Last year, Google toyed with the idea of adding remote attestation to web browsers, which would let services refuse to interact with you if they thought you were using an ad blocker:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/02/self-incrimination/#wei-bai-bai

The reasoning for this was incredible: by adding remote attestation to browsers, they'd be creating "feature parity" with apps – that is, they'd be making it as practical for your browser to betray you as it is for your apps to do so (note that this is the same justification that the W3C gave for creating EME, the treacherous user agent in your browser – "streaming services won't allow you to access movies with your browser unless your browser is as enshittifiable and authoritarian as an app").

Technologists who work for giant tech companies can come up with endless scalesplaining explanations for why their bosses, and not you, should decide how your computer works. They're wrong. Your computer should do what you tell it to do:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/08/your-computer-should-say-what-you-tell-it-say-1

These people can kid themselves that they're only taking away your power and handing it to their boss because they have your best interests at heart. As Upton Sinclair told us, it's impossible to get someone to understand something when their paycheck depends on them not understanding it.

The only way to get a tech boss to consistently treat you well is to ensure that if they stop, you can quit. Anything less is a one-way ticket to enshittification.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en