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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 months

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The antitrust case against Apple

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT (Mar 22) in TORONTO, then SUNDAY (Mar 24) with LAURA POITRAS in NYC, then Anaheim, and beyond!

The foundational tenet of "the Cult of Mac" is that buying products from a $3t company makes you a member of an oppressed ethnic minority and therefore every criticism of that corporation is an ethnic slur:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones

Call it "Apple exceptionalism" – the idea that Apple, alone among the Big Tech firms, is virtuous, and therefore its conduct should be interpreted through that lens of virtue. The wellspring of this virtue is conveniently nebulous, which allows for endless goal-post shifting by members of the Cult of Mac when Apple's sins are made manifest.

Take the claim that Apple is "privacy respecting," which is attributed to Apple's business model of financing its services though cash transactions, rather than by selling it customers to advertisers. This is the (widely misunderstood) crux of the "surveillance capitalism" hypothesis: that capitalism is just fine, but once surveillance is in the mix, capitalism fails.

Apple, then, is said to be a virtuous company because its behavior is disciplined by market forces, unlike its spying rivals, whose ability to "hack our dopamine loops" immobilizes the market's invisible hand with "behavior-shaping" shackles:

http://pluralistic.net/HowToDestroySurveillanceCapitalism

Apple makes a big deal out of its privacy-respecting ethos, and not without some justification. After all, Apple went to the mattresses to fight the FBI when they tried to force Apple to introduced defects into its encryption systems:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/04/fbi-could-have-gotten-san-bernardino-shooters-iphone-leadership-didnt-say

And Apple gave Ios users the power to opt out of Facebook spying with a single click; 96% of its customers took them up on this offer, costing Facebook $10b (one fifth of the pricetag of the metaverse boondoggle!) in a single year (you love to see it):

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/02/facebook-makes-the-case-for-activity-tracking-to-ios-14-users-in-new-pop-ups/

Bruce Schneier has a name for this practice: "feudal security." That's when you cede control over your device to a Big Tech warlord whose "walled garden" becomes a fortress that defends you against external threats:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/08/leona-helmsley-was-a-pioneer/#manorialism

The keyword here is external threats. When Apple itself threatens your privacy, the fortress becomes a prison. The fact that you can't install unapproved apps on your Ios device means that when Apple decides to harm you, you have nowhere to turn. The first Apple customers to discover this were in China. When the Chinese government ordered Apple to remove all working privacy tools from its App Store, the company obliged, rather than risk losing access to its ultra-cheap manufacturing base (Tim Cook's signal accomplishment, the one that vaulted him into the CEO's seat, was figuring out how to offshore Apple manufacturing to China) and hundreds of millions of middle-class consumers:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-apple-vpn/apple-says-it-is-removing-vpn-services-from-china-app-store-idUSKBN1AE0BQ

Killing VPNs and other privacy tools was just for openers. After Apple caved to Beijing, the demands kept coming. Next, Apple willingly backdoored all its Chinese cloud services, so that the Chinese state could plunder its customers' data at will:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-censorship-data.html

This was the completely foreseeable consequence of Apple's "curated computing" model: once the company arrogated to itself the power to decide which software you could run on your own computer, it was inevitable that powerful actors – like the Chinese Communist Party – would lean on Apple to exercise that power in service to its goals.

Unsurprisingly, the Chinese state's appetite for deputizing Apple to help with its spying and oppression was not sated by backdooring iCloud and kicking VPNs out of the App Store. As recently as 2022, Apple continued to neuter its tools at the behest of the Chinese state, breaking Airdrop to make it useless for organizing protests in China:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/11/foreseeable-consequences/#airdropped

But the threat of Apple turning on its customers isn't limited to China. While the company has been unwilling to spy on its users on behalf of the US government, it's proven more than willing to compromise its worldwide users' privacy to pad its own profits. Remember when Apple let its users opt out of Facebook surveillance with one click? At the very same time, Apple was spinning up its own commercial surveillance program, spying on Ios customers, gathering the very same data as Facebook, and for the very same purpose: to target ads. When it came to its own surveillance, Apple completely ignored its customers' explicit refusal to consent to spying, spied on them anyway, and lied about it:

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

Here's the thing: even if you believe that Apple has a "corporate personality" that makes it want to do the right thing, that desire to be virtuous is dependent on the constraints Apple faces. The fact that Apple has complete legal and technical control over the hardware it sells – the power to decide who can make software that runs on that hardware, the power to decide who can fix that hardware, the power to decide who can sell parts for that hardware – represents an irresistible temptation to enshittify Apple products.

"Constraints" are the crux of the enshittification hypothesis. The contagion that spread enshittification to every corner of our technological world isn't a newfound sadism or indifference among tech bosses. Those bosses are the same people they've always been – the difference is that today, they are unconstrained.

Having bought, merged or formed a cartel with all their rivals, they don't fear competition (Apple buys 90+ companies per year, and Google pays it an annual $26.3b bribe for default search on its operating systems and programs).

Having captured their regulators, they don't fear fines or other penalties for cheating their customers, workers or suppliers (Apple led the coalition that defeated dozens of Right to Repair bills, year after year, in the late 2010s).

Having wrapped themselves in IP law, they don't fear rivals who make alternative clients, mods, privacy tools or other "adversarial interoperability" tools that disenshittify their products (Apple uses the DMCA, trademark, and other exotic rules to block third-party software, repair, and clients).

True virtue rests not merely in resisting temptation to be wicked, but in recognizing your own weakness and avoiding temptation. As I wrote when Apple embarked on its "curated computing" path, the company would eventually – inevitably – use its power to veto its customers' choices to harm those customers:

https://memex.craphound.com/2010/04/01/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either/

Which is where we're at today. Apple – uniquely among electronics companies – shreds every device that is traded in by its customers, to block third parties from harvesting working components and using them for independent repair:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/yp73jw/apple-recycling-iphones-macbooks

Apple engraves microscopic Apple logos on those parts and uses these as the basis for trademark complaints to US customs, to block the re-importation of parts that escape its shredders:

https://repair.eu/news/apple-uses-trademark-law-to-strengthen-its-monopoly-on-repair/

Apple entered into an illegal price-fixing conspiracy with Amazon to prevent used and refurbished devices from being sold in the "world's biggest marketplace":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/10/you-had-one-job/#thats-just-the-as

Why is Apple so opposed to independent repair? Well, they say it's to keep users safe from unscrupulous or incompetent repair technicians (feudal security). But when Tim Cook speaks to his investors, he tells a different story, warning them that the company's profits are threatened by customers who choose to repair (rather than replace) their slippery, fragile glass $1,000 pocket computers (the fortress becomes a prison):

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/01/letter-from-tim-cook-to-apple-investors/

All this adds up to a growing mountain of immortal e-waste, festooned with miniature Apple logos, that our descendants will be dealing with for the next 1,000 years. In the face of this unspeakable crime, Apple engaged in a string of dishonest maneuvers, claiming that it would support independent repair. In 2022, Apple announced a home repair program that turned out to be a laughably absurd con:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/22/apples-cement-overshoes/

Then in 2023, Apple announced a fresh "pro-repair" initiative that, once again, actually blocked repair:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/22/vin-locking/#thought-differently

Let's pause here a moment and remember that Apple once stood for independent repair, and celebrated the independent repair technicians that kept its customers' beloved Macs running:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/29/norwegian-potato-flour-enchiladas/#r2r

Whatever virtue lurks in Apple's corporate personhood, it is no match for the temptation that comes from running a locked-down platform designed to capture IP rights so that it can prevent normal competitive activities, like fixing phones, processing payments, or offering apps.

When Apple rolled out the App Store, Steve Jobs promised that it would save journalism and other forms of "content creation" by finally giving users a way to pay rightsholders. A decade later, that promise has been shattered by the app tax – a 30% rake on every in-app transaction that can't be avoided because Apple will kick your app out of the App Store if you even mention that your customers can pay you via the web in order to avoid giving a third of their content dollars to a hardware manufacturer that contributed nothing to the production of that material:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/save-news-we-must-open-app-stores

Among the apps that Apple also refuses to allow on Ios is third-party browsers. Every Iphone browser is just a reskinned version of Apple's Safari, running on the same antiquated, insecure Webkit browser engine. The fact that Webkit is incomplete and outdated is a feature, not a bug, because it lets Apple block web apps – apps delivered via browsers, rather than app stores:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/13/kitbashed/#app-store-tax

Last month, the EU took aim at Apple's veto over its users' and software vendors' ability to transact with one another. The newly in-effect Digital Markets Act requires Apple to open up both third-party payment processing and third-party app stores. Apple's response to this is the very definition of malicious compliance, a snake's nest of junk-fees, onerous terms of service, and petty punitive measures that all add up to a great, big "Go fuck yourself":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/06/spoil-the-bunch/#dma

But Apple's bullying, privacy invasion, price-gouging and environmental crimes are global, and the EU isn't the only government seeking to end them. They're in the firing line in Japan:

https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/Japan-to-crack-down-on-Apple-and-Google-app-store-monopolies

And in the UK:

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/cma-wins-appeal-in-apple-case

And now, famously, the US Department of Justice is coming for Apple, with a bold antitrust complaint that strikes at the heart of Apple exceptionalism, the idea that monopoly is safer for users than technological self-determination:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1344546/dl?inline

There's passages in the complaint that read like I wrote them:

Apple wraps itself in a cloak of privacy, security, and consumer preferences to justify its anticompetitive conduct. Indeed, it spends billions on marketing and branding to promote the self-serving premise that only Apple can safeguard consumers’ privacy and security interests. Apple selectively compromises privacy and security interests when doing so is in Apple’s own financial interest—such as degrading the security of text messages, offering governments and certain companies the chance to access more private and secure versions of app stores, or accepting billions of dollars each year for choosing Google as its default search engine when more private options are available. In the end, Apple deploys privacy and security justifications as an elastic shield that can stretch or contract to serve Apple’s financial and business interests.

After all, Apple punishes its customers for communicating with Android users by forcing them to do so without any encryption. When Beeper Mini rolled out an Imessage-compatible Android app that fixed this, giving Iphone owners the privacy Apple says they deserve but denies to them, Apple destroyed Beeper Mini:

https://blog.beeper.com/p/beeper-moving-forward

Tim Cook is on record about this: if you want to securely communicate with an Android user, you must "buy them an Iphone":

https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/7/23342243/tim-cook-apple-rcs-imessage-android-iphone-compatibility

If your friend, family member or customer declines to change mobile operating systems, Tim Cook insists that you must communicate without any privacy or security.

Even where Apple tries for security, it sometimes fails ("security is a process, not a product" -B. Schneier). To be secure in a benevolent dictatorship, it must also be an infallible dictatorship. Apple's far from infallible: Eight generations of Iphones have unpatchable hardware defects:

https://checkm8.info/

And Apple's latest custom chips have secret-leaking, unpatchable vulnerabilities:

https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/03/hackers-can-extract-secret-encryption-keys-from-apples-mac-chips/

Apple's far from infallible – but they're also far from benevolent. Despite Apple's claims, its hardware, operating system and apps are riddled with deliberate privacy defects, introduce to protect Apple's shareholders at the expense of its customers:

https://proton.me/blog/iphone-privacy

Now, antitrust suits are notoriously hard to make, especially after 40 years of bad-precedent-setting, monopoly-friendly antitrust malpractice. Much of the time, these suits fail because they can't prove that tech bosses intentionally built their monopolies. However, tech is a written culture, one that leaves abundant, indelible records of corporate deliberations. What's more, tech bosses are notoriously prone to bragging about their nefarious intentions, committing them to writing:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

Apple is no exception – there's an abundance of written records that establish that Apple deliberately, illegally set out to create and maintain a monopoly:

https://www.wired.com/story/4-internal-apple-emails-helped-doj-build-antitrust-case/

Apple claims that its monopoly is beneficent, used to protect its users, making its products more "elegant" and safe. But when Apple's interests conflict with its customers' safety and privacy – and pocketbooks – Apple always puts itself first, just like every other corporation. In other words: Apple is unexceptional.

The Cult of Mac denies this. They say that no one wants to use a third-party app store, no one wants third-party payments, no one wants third-party repair. This is obviously wrong and trivially disproved: if no Apple customer wanted these things, Apple wouldn't have to go to enormous lengths to prevent them. The only phones that an independent Iphone repair shop fixes are Iphones: which means Iphone owners want independent repair.

The rejoinder from the Cult of Mac is that those Iphone owners shouldn't own Iphones: if they wanted to exercise property rights over their phones, they shouldn't have bought a phone from Apple. This is the "No True Scotsman" fallacy for distraction-rectangles, and moreover, it's impossible to square with Tim Cook's insistence that if you want private communications, you must buy an Iphone.

Apple is unexceptional. It's just another Big Tech monopolist. Rounded corners don't preserve virtue any better than square ones. Any company that is freed from constraints – of competition, regulation and interoperability – will always enshittify. Apple – being unexceptional – is no exception.

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

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/2024/03/22/reality-distortion-field/#three-trillion-here-three-trillion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

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nanowrimo · 2 years

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What Are Tropes and Why Should You Include Them in Your Story?

Every year, we’re lucky to have great sponsors for our nonprofit events. Campfire Technology, a 2022 NaNoWriMo sponsor, creates writing software to help storytellers write better stories faster. NaNoWriMo writers can try out Campfire’s Manuscript Module for free thisNovember! In this post, writer Amanda Jones shares some of the pros of story tropes:

With NaNoWriMo 2022 quickly approaching, writers everywhere are plotting, planning, and exploring ideas for the worlds they intend to visit come November. This, of course, likely includes drafting the elements of your story from literary tropes!

What are tropes, you ask? The definition has changed slightly over time, but we have come to know them as the commonly used building blocks of the stories we read and write. Not only are they just fun to play with in a setting of your own making, but they help us connect over shared experiences, regardless of the places we are from or the time we live in.

As a member of several online writing communities, I’ve often seen anti-trope discourse such as: “If a book contains X trope, I won’t read it,” or “X trope is so overdone, I can’t stand it.” And it worries me to think there is at least one writer out there who will stop writing their story after coming across something like this.

Because tropes exist for a reason.

You’re probably well acquainted with The Chosen One trope, about the one who came from a place no one has ever heard of. There has likely never been anything particularly special about them until they are called upon to be the hero.

You also know The Evil One and the moment in the story where they raise the stakes by gaining the upper hand—usually in the form of briefly acquiring the one thing you don’t want them to have… Until The Chosen One wins it back by overcoming the odds, that is.

You know these because tropes are as old as storytelling itself. As the familiar bones that make up our most cherished stories, they make us feel more at ease in unknown worlds. You may be adventuring on a different planet or in a new mystical realm, but hey, you recognize that old wizard there!

So the question isn’t how do you write a story without any tropes, but rather:

How do you make tropes unique to your story?

How do tropes take shape and form and establish the setting in your world?

How do they create conflict and how do your characters overcome that conflict?

Ask yourself these questions when planning & ultimately writing your story.

I know there is at least one writer out there telling themselves that their ideas aren’t original, maybe because it’s been done before, maybe for some other reason, whatever it may be. It's important for writers (myself included) to be reminded that it’s okay if you’re not reinventing the wheel. After all, it is already invented—but that doesn’t mean you still can’t soup that wheel up!

Writing is hard enough as it is, never mind comparing yourself to other writers. So write about the tropiest of tropes that ever did exist if that’s what you want your story to include. All that matters is what you do with it.

Still looking for a place to actually write this trope-heavy masterpiece we are speaking of? Hi, meet Campfire. As a proud partner of NaNoWriMo, we are offering our Manuscript Module for FREE during the month of November to all writers participating in NaNoWriMo 2022.

You’ll need an account on both Campfire and NaNoWriMo—free to sign up on each—and then you can simply integrate both from your Campfire account settings beginning October 20th, 2022. We’ll automatically track your writing progress, too, so you have one less thing to worry about.

Good luck this year, Wrimos!

Amanda Jones is the Digital Content Coordinator at Campfire Technology where she leads their content marketing initiatives, from managing their social media channels to drafting copy and overseeing Campfire Learn’s SEO strategy. You can follow her on Campfire or connect with her on Campfire’s Discord server. If you’re looking to organize your writing notes better, try out Campfire Write for free!

Top image: The dragon of Moston from Ballads and Legends of Cheshire (1867). Original from the British Library. Source: Rawpixel.

#nanowrimo #writing #writing tropes #writing advice #nano prep #by nano sponsor #campfire #amanda jones

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benk625-blog · 2 years

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Confections Pulverizer

Commandant Effyl of Military intelligence began the briefing. Behind and above them was a large viewscreen displaying the galaxy's most popular video game, "Confections Pulverized." Game play involved manipulation of brightly colored geometric shapes so that three or more were aligned orthogonally. Success resulted in pleasant, on screen explosions and increased score. The audience quietly chuckled.

"The incongruity of this briefing is not lost on me." The Commandant began. "No doubt many of you are wondering why Military Intelligence would bother researching such a harmless frivolity. My own subordinates had a difficult time convincing me of the grave threat human malware presented.

“The game on display is relatively harmless. The danger is the underlying code within it. Almost all human programs include instructions to save and transmit user location data. In short, they have turned our electronic devices into little spies that note our every move.”

The viewscreen changed to display military personnel exercising in group calisthenics.

"The coordinates of several secret military bases became known to humans through fitness trackers. Hidden in the code of so-called "health software" is location tracking. Earth government has purchased the data generated by the applications, or apps. These apps are available to consumers free of charge. This data was analyzed and it was noted that users flagged as military service members had begun exercising in a routine manner in remote locations."

The next image was a spinning circle of question marks.

"Trivia games are being used to assess information ubiquity in user populations. Using algorithmic, artificial intelligence, the game learns the depth and breadth of each user's information and skill level. Military Intelligence was informed of this by an arms research group that noticed the trivia categories had gradually shifted from general knowledge questions towards categories that match their professional expertise."

Above the Commandant's head was a sound wave & a timer icon.

"This is an application titled 'Sound Worms.' It is a specific type of trivia game. Players are presented with an audio file of popular music. The task is to identify the composition in the least amount of time. Preliminary reports indicate the data mined from this app aids in the creation of propaganda."

New image is a nine digit number. Straight lines emanate from it to other numbers. Webs and clusters form as the video continues.

"Military Intelligence has been able to purchase data sets from the human malware companies. Displayed behind me are social networks. The deductions and probability extrapolations generated are truly staggering. We are still analyzing the data and will make a full report later”

Icons and symbols referring to romance and sexuality start to flicker onto the screen. Quickly the display becomes a scrolling screen of tiny thumbnail images.

“These are just a small sampling of the countless dating apps that humans have been flooding the personal electronic software market with. I say without exaggeration that they will fundamentally destabilize interstellar society. There are unpleasant and unspoken differences between public morality and private behavior. A staggering amount of politicians and bureaucrats have become susceptible to blackmail and corruption.”

Stifled gasps and nervous laughter from the audience

“Compounding this danger is that the private entities that publish this malware do not properly secure their data networks. Collectives that are not associated with governmental or commercial entities routinely release huge swaths of privileged user information on the galactinet. So far these disclosures have been small in scale and limited in damage. If anyone here has used these services, I implore you to stop at once and delete it from your devices.”

More than half the attendees start pulling out various objects and interacting with operating screens. Some hurriedly leave the lecture hall. Effyl was losing their audience.

“Oh, and one last thing.” The Commandant pulls out their own personal device. “These damn things are recording audio and video without our permission.”

#humans are space orcs #humans are space oddities #humans are aliens #humans are confusing #humans are deathworlders #humans are silly #humans are space australians

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aesteraceae · 7 months

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Boiling Over

Pairing: Minho/Chan, Minho & Chan

Rating: Gen

Summary: Chan has a nasty habit of throwing his health to the wind, and when his mind finally cracks under the pressure, Minho is there to help him through it.

Word count: 4.1k

Tags under the cut!

Tags: SFW, Age regression, hurt/comfort, stress relief, Chan is overworking himself as usual, Minho has Things To Say about that, angst, little Bang Chan, Caregiver Lee Minho, stim toys, panic attacks, crying, autistic Bang Chan

Also posted on ao3 here.

Notes: This will be part of a series of Chan age regressing because I am contractually obligated to project on Chan whenever I can. This is also for his birthday. No I'm not 2 weeks late shut UP.

Also, this fic isn't explicitly romantic in any sense beyond Chan calling Minho pretty like once, I wrote it with the implication that they like eachother (bc I'm a minchan truther at heart) but you can 1000% read this fic as platonic with no trouble at all.

Tags: @simpracha @sunnyville36 @toastyseungmo @sstarryyoong @decaffedthoughts @bunnypig18 @xcookiemonsteer

This is not going well.

Chan forces himself not to slam the studio door behind him, slumping down into his desk chair and shoving his hands into his hair.

His entire morning was spent talking with department executives and marketing managers and other producers, all asking him the same question; when will the next title track be ready.

And Chan has had to tell every single one of them, multiple times, that no it isn't finished and yes he's working on it and no he doesn't need any help.

It's almost finished, is the thing. He has the guide, tentative lyrics, he's even shown it to the other members, but he doesn't like it.

He's been doing this a very long time, he knows what a good song sounds like, knows what he's capable of making, and this is so far from his best he's terrified to show it to anyone.

The other members said they liked it, of course, but Chan knows better than to take their words at face value. He doesn't think they'd lie out of malice, of course, but they can all see the way Chan has been... Strung a little tighter than usual, lately.

He wouldn't put it past them to just say the song is good to not anger him or stress him out further. And he can't even blame them, really— if anyone said anything about the song to him right now, positive or otherwise, he doesn't know what he'll do.

Break something, probably. Or cry.

He wants to do both right now, but he shoves the urges away and opens up the editing software. He grabs his headphones a bit too hard and knocks over their stand, and he just watches it clatter to the floor, loudly.

He leaves it there.

Maybe kicks it a little, just for good measure.

It's probably not good to let this anger simmer underneath the surface like this, especially if one of the others comes to check on him, but he doesn't have time to go blow off steam in the gym.

Instead, he puts his headphones on and opens the file, shoving his anger into a box to be dealt with later.

· · ────────── ·𖥸· ────────── · ·

Chan's anger never lingers, at least not when it's because of stress.

By that night, nearing 2 in the morning, all of his anger has fizzled out into bone-deep exhaustion.

His ears ache under the headphones, but he left his earbuds in the dorms so he ignores the pain. Similarly, something in his back keeps sending sharp pains throughout his body every time he shifts wrong, and it's unpleasant, but it fades after a moment so he doesn't bother worrying about it.

He's listening to a new version of the track when he feels the anger starting to bubble up again, except it's decided to show itself in tears this time rather than violence.

He will not cry over a song, he won't.

But it's horrible. It feels like every change he makes somehow makes the song worse, even the tricks he's relied on in the past. He's searched for inspiration, looked at old songs, even rewritten entire sections but it's still wrong.

He claws the headphones off and presses his hands into his eyes until bright colors flash behind them, forcing the tears back. The burn of it forces his brain to reconnect with his body, and he realizes that he hurts all over.

How long has he been sitting here?

Shakily, he reaches for his phone.

There's a few messages in the group chat, an email from the project designer that he swiftly ignores, and 3 missed calls from Minho.

Fuck.

He's trying to calculate the math of how long he's been in here and how he missed his ringtone 3 times in a row when someone knocks on the door.

Chan considers not answering, pretending the room is empty. He can't let anyone else see him in this state, he cant. tears are clinging to his lashes, he's in pain, and he doesn't even remember the last time he slept.

There's a moment when he thinks it will work, if he stays very still, but then the door clicks open.

Minho pushes into the room, placing his key card neatly back into his bag.

He looks like he just got out of the shower, hair still damp and fluffy, cheeks still a bit flushed from the heat. He's pretty, because Minho always is, and Chan almost says so before he gets a hold of himself.

"Minho!" He says, instead, running hands through his hair both to tame the rat's nest it must be and to hide how wet his eyes are.

Fuck, his back hurts. When did just moving his arms over his head start to hurt this badly?

"Chan. It's like 2 in the morning, why are you still working?"

Minho has that disapproving look in his eyes, dark and unquestionable. He must be here to drag Chan back to the dorms, but he can't go back yet, not with the song like this.

"Oh, you know how it is. I, uh, got in the zone, I guess."

Minho shoots him an unimpressed look and reaches into his bag, pulling out a bottle of water.

He must have grabbed it from the breakroom downstairs, and the tiniest sliver of affection breaks through the panic buzzing through his veins.

He doesn't wait for Chan to take the bottle, just uncaps it and forces it into his hand. Chan knows better than to fight when Minho gets like this, so he drinks.

And... Fuck.

The water feels like heaven in his mouth, cool and refreshing and perfect. His head relents in its pounding, and he slumps down into the chair.

Minho passes him another bottle and takes the empty one, and Chan doesn't have to look at him to see his disapproving look.

"How long have you been working in here?" Minho asks, picking up his headphone stand from across the room. Huh, he'd almost forgotten about that.

"Couple hours," He lies, trying and failing to figure out the real answer. For some reason he can't wrap his brain around the numbers, the passage of time — he isn't sure when he even got here, just that it was daytime... Maybe morning? Noon?

"Bullshit. None of us have even seen you today, and you missed dinner. What's going on?"

Chan ducks under the anger in Minho's voice, trying to hide the tremor in his hands.

"Nothing's going on," He tries, "I promise I'm fine. I grabbed something from downstairs a little while ago." It's a flimsy lie, and he knows it doesn't land the moment he finishes speaking.

Minho just clicks his tongue and walks over to the trashcan in the corner, perfectly empty. The studio is immaculate, no trace of a wrapper or package.

Minho is silent for a long moment, only speaking when Chan starts to squirm, practically burning alive with the awkwardness and disapproval. He doesn't know why it's bothering him so much, but Minho looks upset, upset with Chan, and it almost hurts worse than his back.

"I thought we agreed not to lie to eachother, Chan." Minho finally says, and there's a hint of pain, there, under the anger.

Chan honest to God whines, trying to curl in on himself and stopping with a wince. He doesn't want to lie, especially not to Minho. He doesn't want to be a disappointment, doesn't want to be bad.

Minho doesn't like being lied to, he hates it, they've had so many arguments over little white lies that Chan or the others didn't think we're important but hurt Minho deeply. Chan knows Minho hates being lied to, but here he is doing it, without a second thought.

He's horrible.

"M' sorry," He mumbles, twisting his fingers into his jeans. He's being bad, and Minho is disappointed in him, and he has every right to be.

Part of Chan is screaming to correct the issue, but a far stronger part wants to sit in this discomfort, squirm under Minho's pained and angry gaze. He deserves it, Chan thinks. It's a fitting enough punishment, this gnawing ache in his chest that begs for praise forced to receive the opposite.

It hurts, but Chan deserves it for being bad, for hurting Minho.

... Wait.

Chan blinks, vision refocusing on a spot on the wall. Being bad?

No. No no no no no-

"I'm really okay," He says, a little bit frantic, heart rate picking up, because this cannot be happening.

The only reason he'd be thinking like that, thinking he deserves punishment or that he was being bad is if he was slipping, and that cannot happen with Minho in here.

"I'll be back home in an hour, okay?" He says, spinning in the chair so he doesn't have to look at Minho. Something about him being here is making Chan slip, hard, And maybe looking away would solve the issue. He just has to get Minho to leave, then he can handle this on his own and everything will be fine.

"No, you've been here long enough. I'm taking you home."

No.

"Min, I'm not-"

Minho just holds up a hand, pulling Chan's chair away from the desk and back to face him.

"This isn't a discussion. I won't let you weasel your way out of it, either— you've been in here for at least nine hours, that's enough. You need food and sleep."

"I'm fine. I'll grab something from downstairs, alright? But I really need to get this finished."

Minho doesn't answer— he just reaches over the desk to save the file. Chan doesn't realize what he's doing until his hand shifts to the power button, clicking off his laptop.

"Minho!" Chan snaps, trying to swat his hands away, but Minho just closes the laptop and shoves it into his bag, zipping it up tight.

"Are you seriously— Minho, give that back!"

Minho ignores him, grasping his arm and pulling. Chan stumbles out of the chair, and any other day it would be perfectly fine, but his back immediately protests at the movement.

He collapses down to his knees, trying to breathe through the pain and keep himself from crying. He will not cry in front of Minho, he won't.

"Chan? Hey, what's wrong?" Minho is crouched in front of him, anger entirely forgotten in favor of worry.

And Chan tries, he really does, but his back hurts and he knows he's already crying, and he can feel his grip on everything sensible slipping away.

"Leave," He begs, even though he knows it's futile. Minho won't leave him like this because he's a good friend, and he cares, and right now that care is going to burn Chan alive.

"I'm not going anywhere, Chan. I'm right here. You're safe, I've got you."

Chan whines against his will, listing forward, further into Minho's arms. He takes him easily, sitting completely on the floor to pull Chan into his lap. And Chan goes, because Minho feels so much bigger than him right now. He doesn't stand a chance at resisting, and he wants to sit in Minho's lap, wants to cry into his shoulder and know that the world won't end once he's done.

"Min..." He mumbles, wet and pathetic and sad, and Minho makes a noise like a wounded animal.

"Come here, Chan." He urges, even as Chan tucks his head into Minho's neck.

He puts a hand on Chan's neck, gently playing with the hair curling there, and the other slips underneath his shirt to rub massaging circles into the small of his back.

Chan doesn't even stand a chance— he drops so hard and so fast that he has to blink his vision back into focus.

His eyes slip right back closed, though, because Minho is still massaging him, both his neck and back, steadily loosening the knots and aches there.

It's good, it's blissful, and Chan lets his mind go entirely blank.

· · ────────── ·𖥸· ────────── · ·

The thing with Chan is that he never knows when to quit.

Well, that's not quite true. Most of the time, he's perfectly happy to quit, when necessary; scrapping a song or going back to the foundations of a dance, but sometimes, like now, he gets so caught up in finishing something that he can't even fathom the idea of stopping.

Minho knew Chan was spiraling, he’s known since this morning when Chan refused breakfast and left the dorms in a hurry for a meeting. He knew when he didn’t respond in the group chat, he knew when Chan missed three of his calls in a row.

Guilt settles deep in Minho's stomach as he holds Chan, shuddering and shaking and hurting. He talked himself out of dragging Chan back for dinner because he thought he was worrying too much, but now he cant help but think that he didn’t worry enough. There are headphone marks around his ears, for god's sake.

“You’re okay, I’ve got you. Just relax, Chan, I’ve got you.” And god, Minho didn’t think it was possible to feel fondness and fear at the same time, but here he is. Chan nuzzles further into his neck, trembling all over, and Minho has absolutely no idea what to do. Chan rarely cries in front of them, and even if he does the very last thing he wants is to be comforted.

It makes Minho’s chest hurt, sometimes, how insanely solitary Chan gets when he’s upset, but this is almost worse. He’s so far gone that Chan cant help but cling to him. Minho blinks tears back.

“Let’s get you to the couch, yeah? Come on, Channie, it’ll be more comfy there.” Chan whines, unwilling to move, so Minho does something a bit stupid.

He shifts Chan just enough that he can loop his arm underneath his legs, settling the other around his back.

Chan is heavy, but not too heavy for Minho to carry a few feet. He settles them back onto the couch, lying down so Chan can stretch his back a bit. The new position seems to switch something in Chan, and his sobs quiet, somewhat. He slips one of his arms up to cup Minho’s neck, like he’s… Oh. Like he’s feeling his heartbeat. His ear is pressed right over his heart, as well.

God, Minho is going to explode from all of this sympathy one day.

“That’s it,” He soothes, “I'm here. Feel my heartbeat? Try and breathe with me, okay? Can you do that for me?” The words come easy — Years of helping the other members through panic and anxiety attacks make things like this nearly second nature. In any other scenario Minho might feel awkward about speaking to Chan like this — not condescending, exactly, but something akin to it — but right now, anything else feels like a cardinal sin. Chan needs softness, right now; he needs a gentle voice to guide him, to remind him that its okay for him to relax.

It takes him a while, maybe 10 minutes, to completely match Minho’s breathing, but he’s so determined that it's almost cute. His voice hiccups every now and then and Minho can see the frustration on his face, but he just tries again with the same determination.

Minho is besotted. He knows it, and he doesn't really try to hide the love in his eyes as he looks down at Chan, whispering sweet encouragements into his ear as his breathing steadily evens out.

“Good job, Chan,” he whispers, when the last of the tension drains out of his shoulders. Chan hums and shifts to look up at him, eyes wide and glossy and vulnerable, and Minho forgets how to breathe.

“I was good?” He whispers, voice rough from crying but still somehow higher than normal, so sweet that Minho has to take a long, deep breath before he can respond. “So good. Look, you’re breathing smooth again, right?”

Chan nods, settling his head back against Minho’s chest, and Minho almost feels bad for being relieved, but Christ. That look, his eyes, so trusting and soft and loving, its—

It’s a lot.

It’s good.

“Breathing with Hyung,” Chan says, sweet, almost sing-song, and Minho…

Hm.

Minho starts to pet Chan's hair again, smiling when he melts against his chest, and takes advantage of it to think.

Minho knows a lot of things. He’s researched a lot of things, either for Jisung or Felix or Jeongin, ways to deal with stress or handle panic attacks or sensory overloads, anything he might need to make sure he knew what to do if one of the members needed him.

This… Minho thinks he knows what this is.

It would make sense, really. Chan joined the company at 13, barely a teenager and still very much a child, put into a stress-filled environment in a new country alone. It would make perfect sense for Chan to cope with that stress by regressing into a younger age, where he wouldn't have to think about training or producing.

That guilt pokes at him again — Chan has been stressing over this song for ages, and Minho knew, but he thought Chan could handle it, or at least that Chan would ask Jisung or Changbin for help.

None of that mattered now, though. Now Chan needs him, and they can talk about asking for help later.

“Hyung?”

Minho has to bite his lip to keep from cooing at how cute Chan sounds, schooling his expression into something calm and attentive.

"Yeah, baby?"

Chan takes a moment to preen at the nickname, but takes a deep breath and sobers. Minho can't help but frown— the serious expression, while familiar, doesn't seem to suit Chan, right now.

"I'm sorry for lying. 'was mean. I know you don' like it, but I was scared. Sorry."

Minho's heart breaks.

A million microscopic pieces, each and every one sucked into Chan's eyes, big and just the slightest bit teary.

"Oh, Darling. It's okay, I understand. It's okay to be scared." He bites his lip before continuing, but... well. It did hurt, and Minho would only feel worse about it if he didn't even express it.

"But, baby, in the future, you can just tell me what's wrong. I promise, I won't judge or be angry with you for telling the truth, okay?"

Chan nods, crawling up slightly to tuck his head underneath Minho's chin.

"I will, promise."

Minho can't help himself, he presses a soft kiss against Chan's hair. "Thank you for apologizing, baby. You're very sweet."

Chan is silent for a moment, and then—

"Chan?" Minho yelps, gasping a little, because Chan is... sucking on his collarbone?

He jerks back, already babbling out apologies, but Minho pets his cheek to soothe him. "It's okay, it's okay, I was just startled, baby, that's all."

Chan quiets, staring down at his hands in his lap, and there's something in his eyes, a hint of awareness, and... well. Maybe it's a bit selfish, but Minho doesn't want Chan to come out of this headspace just yet. He seems relaxed, less worn down by racing thoughts, more willing to be honest and ask for what he needs.

And Minho wants to provide. He wants to keep helping Chan like this, and maybe it does make him selfish, but Chan needs this, and Minho won't deny him.

"Here, can you hop off of me for a moment, little one?" The nickname does the trick— Chan whines a little and backs up so Minho can move, leaning against the couch like he can't sit up on his own. It's adorable, and Minho moves quickly so he can hold Chan again.

He brought his bag up here because he suspected that Chan would need some things— water, earbuds, painkillers— but there's also a little pocket full of stuff for Seungmin. Noise-canceling headphones, a few stim toys, and what Minho's after now, chewable toys.

Headphones are probably a bad idea now so he leaves those, but he takes out everything else and spreads them out in his hands.

The chewable toys are brand new— they're in the bag for emergencies, but Seungmin is just as overly prepared as he is so they're hardly ever needed — so he opens one of the bags and offers it to Chan.

"You can bite and suck on this for now, okay?"

Chan takes it tenderly, looking awestruck. "But... this is yours?"

Minho puts the other toys on the side table and sits beside him again, suppressing a smile when Chan immediately burrows back into his side.

"They're for whoever needs them, and I think you need them right now. I can... get you something else later, once we've talked about it, but if you just want something to do with your mouth, that should help."

Minho adds a few more things to his list of Things To Talk to Chan About When He's Big Again. Pacifiers, maybe, and Minho specifically caring for him, definitely.

Chan eyes the toy warily for a moment, like he doesn't believe that he can actually have it, but eventually he bites down on it.

His eyes light up.

He doesn't really chew it so much as he sucks on it, but his eyes droop a little and his shoulders slump.

Maybe Minho doesn't entirely suck at this, at least.

"There we go. Is that better?"

Chan nods, eyes slipping fully closed.

"Good. Come on, I'll put on some music, how about that?"

Chan perks up at that, slipping the toy out of his mouth to babble, "Can you sing? Please, Hyung? I'll be good!"

Minho blinks, "You don't have to be good." It comes out without his permission, but he doesn't backtrack. "I don't want you to worry about being good or not disobeying. You're perfect, Chan."

Chan stares at him for a beat, and then he breaks. He whines, high in the back of his throat, and tears flood over his cheeks in waves.

"Whoa, baby, baby, it's okay," Minho is on him in an instant, pulling Chan into his arms and rocking them like he did before.

"M' not, not perfect, not-" He cuts himself off with a painful-sounding hiccup, and Minho's heart aches.

"Shh, little one, it's okay." He says, growing frantic, because it isn't working. Chan is trembling, and instead of hugging Minho back he's covering his face, sobbing into his hands instead of Minho's chest. This is different, this is new, and Minho needs a different approach.

So. He sings.

It starts out shaky, because he's on the verge of tears himself and hasn't sung at all today, but he settles into it easily.

It's a song Chan wrote for him months ago, unreleased because he hasn't had the time to record it. It's short, unfinished, and Minho prays that it'll work.

He's on the second chorus before he notices any change, and it feels like the first sip of water in a desert. Chan shudders, cries quieting, finally tucking his head into Minho's neck.

He tightens his grip, remembering that Chan liked tight hugs, and he breathes.

He sings through the end of the song and Chan finally stops sobbing, just tiny little whimpers against Minho's chest, and he leans them back against the couch.

"I've got you," He murmurs, thinking of the first lines to Chan's favorite song, "I've got you, baby."

· · ────────── ·𖥸· ────────── · ·

Chan wakes up a few hours later, cheeks itchy with dried tears and more relaxed than he's felt in years.

He's... hm. He's lying on Minho's chest.

Minho is asleep, long eyelashes fluttering as his eyelids shift, and Chan can't help but settle back against his chest.

Minho hums, readjusting his hand to hold Chan a little more securely.

"Go back to sleep, little one," He murmurs, voice thick with sleep and fondness.

Jesus. He hasn't slipped up like that in front of someone since he was a trainee.

Chan flushes pink, hazy memories flooding back. He remembers crying, a lot, calling Minho hyung...

Chan can feel mortification creeping up on him, but Minho must notice that he isn't relaxing, because he tightens his grip. One of his hands comes up to hold the back of Chan's head, guiding his ear over Minho's chest.

The steady thump-thump thump-thump of Minho's heartbeat makes Chan melt, against all his better wishes.

"...thank you, hyung."

#stray kids #dahlia writes #bang chan #lee minho #skz #skz fluff #minchan #this was a bitch and 3 quarters to post tumblr my beloathed

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neurosismancer · 1 year

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So, let me put on my Internet Old Person hat and tell you kids about the the way we committed music piracy in the long long ago of 2001, and the fragility of those music collections in those days.

You might know Napster. You might know Limewire. But there was a music piracy tool in between those. A little remembered program called AudioGalaxy, and it worked a little like Napster and a little like BitTorrent. The exact details of how it worked are immaterial, but one thing it did was when you searched for an artist, the songs were sorted, in essence, by popularity (e.g. how many people had that specific song file shared.)

Now, I can’t understand why this was a thing, but there was a strange phenomenon in the early days of file sharing and music piracy where people would share songs with the wrong artist name or song title. Certain bands and artists got a lot of stuff attributed to them that they never recorded. “Weird” Al Yankovic may be the most infamous victim of this, with nearly every novelty song and song parody released attributed to him regardless of quality or subject matter.

The confluence of these two phenomena are how I discovered one of my favorite bands of all time.

So, in my late teens, I found a new favorite band. A quickly little one-hit wonder known as DEVO. Y’know, the band that dd “Whip It.” They had the funny red hats that looked like flowerpots. Those guys.

Anyway, I had become obsessed with this band to the point of autistic hyperfixation, and I wanted to hear everything they’d ever put out. At that point, they’d released nine studio albums, a couple live albums, and two collections of early demos, and I wanted them all. So I would find myself crawling in the bottom pages of the AudioGalaxy search results looking for those obscure tracks—b-sides, songs on soundtracks and compilations, the occasional bootleg, They’d pop up between songs that were obviously not by DEVO, and much like our poor friend Alfred Yankovic, any sort of vaguely quirky 80s song got assigned to DEVO.

That was how I found it. A song called, simply, “Detachable Penis.”

Now, I had never heard of such as song, but I knew on the face of it, it wasn’t a DEVO song.

But with a title like that, I knew I had to find out just what in the name of fuck a song called “Detachable Penis” sounded like.

It sounded, dear reader, like this:

youtube

(CWs: blurry images of a dildo, the word penis, spoken word poetry)

And I immediately went to Google, because this song somehow tickled an itch in my brain, and I had to go and find out the real band that recorded this song, because how the hell else was I going to get every song I could of theirs I could get my grubby little hands on. The band was called King Missile, and I was hooked.

I’d like to see any music discovery algorithm beat that.

I eventually acquired their entire major discography along with a few EPs and B-Sides. I eventually burned those to a CD, which I could listen to with my MP3 CD Player.

And I realize, upon writing that, for you youth “MP3 CD Player” is a noun phrase that needs explaining. See, while the iPod had been released at that point, and similar devices were also on the market, they were all prohibitively expensive. The economical way to listen to pirated music files was to burn them to CD, but some CD players had software that allows you to burn those song as as _data_. Suddenly, you could have a single CD with 700 megabytes of MP3 files—room for an artist’s entire discography, if not multiple artists.

Since I was download a whole lot of MP3s with my high speed DSL connection, I was taking up an awful lot of space on my hard drive that needed to be offloaded somehow. CD-Rs and an MP3 CD Player were the optimal solution. And it worked…

…until it didn’t.

In the summer of 2002, my parents took me on a vacation to Las Vegas and Los Angeles. It was in the latter city where someone got into our rental car and swiped my MP3 CD player and a binder of CDs—both pressed CDs I’d acquired and CD-Rs of illicitly acquired MP3s, along them a CD-R I’d burned containing the nearly complete King Missile discography.

Songs I had only on that one CD-R.

It took me a decade—ten fucking years—before I’d recovered all the music that was on that disc.

This is the sort of discovery and the sort of loss that kids will never experience again in this day of Spotify and the all-you-can-eat buffet of music on demand we have now.

#internet old person #music piracy #music discovery #AudioGalaxy #Napster #Limewire #2001 #2002 #back in the day #2000s nostalgia #long and rambling story #DEVO #king Missile #Youtube

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yuristarwars · 1 year

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Andor Modern AU

Cassian works as a hacker. He knows the ins and outs of the stock market, every single software he can get his hands on, and doesn’t trust modern tech one bit. No one knows his real name, but people call him: “The Digital Devil.” One day he’s hiding out in a small town, when two cops pull him over and start searching his car, which has a lot of evidence of his crimes. He kills them both and runs home, hoping to get one last job before leaving the country...

Luthen is a mysterious man putting together a team. He believes that there is a global human-trafficking conspiracy happening right now that some amjor world leaders are in on, and he wants the best minds to figure out what is going on and who you can trust. He recruits Cassian and Senator Mon Mothma for this task, but he doesn’t know if he can even trust them.

Mon Mothma, a progressive activist in congress that owns a ranch in Wisconsin. She has been working with Luthen for two years, rubbing elbows with the most disgusting senators to get any knowledge on what could be going on. She has also embezzled treasury funds for this expedition, which some people are starting to catch on too...

Syril Karn is a detective in a small town in rural Wisconsin, so he’s quite shook when he hears two of his fellow officers died on the job in this quiet town. He starts a quest to look for the murderer, but ends up getting in way over his head.

Dedra Meero is a private detective, working for the Imperial Security Bureau. She has been hired to track down the man known as “Axis” and bring him to the authorities for his multiple connections to different criminals. After she nose-dives into this case, she realizes that this man is much more dangerous and involved than she expected.

#star wars #andor #modern au #cassian andor #luthen rael #mon mothma #syril karn #dedra meero #diego luna #stellan skarsgard #genevieve o'reilly #kyle soller #denise gough

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insipid-drivel · 1 year

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Y2K’s Forgotten Heroes And The Looming Threat of 2038

I feel like sharing some information about the 90′s to people here. Particularly about Y2K, aka Internet Armageddon That Didn’t Happen In 2000 Thanks To People You Haven’t Heard Of Like My Mom.

My mom, among her teammates and people tasked with similar roles to her, never get any recognition for the work they did in keeping computers across the globe functioning in 2000. She was a project manager among a group of overstressed, underappreciated people that worked at a company called Intel that are responsible for preventing a global societal collapse in 1999. Y2K being allowed to happen the way people thought it would (and really, it was going to be worse than even Intel could forecast and they still don’t know how bad it would’ve been) would’ve undoubtedly destroyed the fabric of the internet in 1999 and 2000, and therefore, no social media platforms like this Hellsite right here. She’s actually on tumblr and has been following the Muskrat’s destruction of Twitter with mute, techie horror.

In the years leading up to 2000, the world was panicking on its tenderhooks due to the looming crisis that was Y2K. For those of you that are either too young to remember or just didn’t know about it, Y2K was a big deal. A planet-alteringly big deal. A “We don’t know how much would’ve crashed and burned in our world’s society and economy if we’d ignored it,” big deal. tl;dr: All computer software around the world wasn’t programmed to have their internal clocks transfer to January 1st, 2000. Instead, what was going to happen was every functioning computer in the world running Intel software - on New Years Eve, 1999 - would change calendars to January 1st, 1900.

This was a catastrophic prospect for everyone impacted by the computer age. People receiving social security benefits and paying off formal loans with interest rates would suddenly receive benefits and payment rates documented in 1900. NORAD, the international weather-tracking service kids use to track Santa on Christmas Eve and that warns people of natural disasters like hurricanes, would have gone dark with no timestamps to indicate major shifts in weather. Entire governments would lose all digital contact with one another. The WHO and CDC would go dark. Hospital networks would’ve gone down. The Stock Market would’ve gone to shit. No one in the world would’ve been immune. If Japan suffered a massive, horrific famine due directly to the 1929 crash of the US Stock Market before the Internet, imagine what would’ve happened if the very screens that displayed the global stock market records to major metropolitan cities around the world just... stopped working in 2000. Went dark. Blue-screened. An entire system built upon split-second trades, bids, buyouts, and reports for trade around the world would’ve shut down for a lot longer than just a split second.

By the time it was almost the year 2000, the Internet as we knew it was like a gigantic, invisible, planet-sized Rube Goldberg machine that a comparatively microscopic group of people were tasked with repairing before it could fail in ways they couldn’t foretell, without being able to live-test any of their solutions. It was “Fuck it, we’re doing it live!” to the extreme. Most of the programmers that had built the infrastructure for the Internet and computer technology as we recognize it, all the way back in the 60′s, were retired, dead, no longer working in those sectors, or simply hadn’t kept up with changes in the technology and couldn’t be brought up to speed to help in time. Even the highest echelons of the management at Intel itself didn’t really consider Y2K to be a big concern, except for my mom’s department. I still have lingering anxiety and trauma from hearing the sound of a woman’s voice shouting with panic and anger, because she was the one literally shouting into her phone to “Nah, we’ll be fine,” Luddite tech giants that NO, NOTHING WAS FINE AND EVERYTHING WAS GOING TO BE VERY BAD from the time I was born in 1992 to January 1st, 2000.

Any programs and companies relying upon Microsoft software, even Word and Excel, would have either suffered catastrophic errors, or ceased to function altogether, too. The team handling Y2K didn’t know how bad it could’ve actually gotten at the time, and they were still responsible for stopping it. To this day, my mom and the rest of the team members that worked with her can’t actually say how much of our technological lives would’ve been destroyed if they’d done nothing. The potential destruction was literally unfathomable. The global economy relied on computers and tech by the time Y2K became a major topic of concern to experts, much less casual everyday users.

This was before WiFi. This was before smartphones. HotSpots? The stuff of cyberpunk fantasies. This was before most cell phones had a text feature; you carried your cell phone and a pager separately, and if you thought character limits on Twitter were bad? lol. Ever had to make a collect call in a phone booth? Do you have any idea how badly we’d freak each other out over the thought of the germs on those things? If you couldn’t afford a collect call, which cost for every minute you were talking, you had to get creative and learn to say who you were and where you were to someone in the, “Caller, at the tone, please state only your name, beep” 3-second window of free time you got to contact someone.

You could’ve been stuck in a bad neighborhood at 3am. Taxis didn’t pick up hitchhikers like they do in New York, and you could screw off if you didn’t have cash on you; credit cards were mostly used at malls and supermarkets, and retail workers from the 90′s to this day still have the question “Credit or debit?” burned into their souls. You needed coins as well as bills and credit cards. It was still common to pay for groceries with a paper check, because you carried a checkbook around with you everywhere as an adult. There was no RideShare service with anyone but a serial killer, because yeah, serial killers loved targeting stranded pedestrians back then and that’s why nobody hitchhikes anymore. Homicidal freaks like The Green River Killer (Gary Ridgway) and BTK (Dennis Rader) were still at large and unidentified. It was thanks to revolutions in tech and computers that they were caught at all; BTK having been busted thanks to metadata and TIME STAMPS on a floppy disk.

AOL was still one of the top ISPs and email services to the United States. You would receive installation CDs for AOL in children’s cereal boxes like prizes. Dial-up was still a normal part of life. Blockbuster was renting out Nintendo 64 games along with VHS movies. DVD players were revolutionary. Barnes & Noble and Borders were still competing. The FBI still warned you at the start of a movie that piracy was illegal while almost every VHS had a “record” setting you could use with impunity. Amazon was primarily an online bookstore. J.K. Rowling was just some closeted TERF that just published her first weird, popular British fairytale about some kid that went to a school for wizards where goblins were real but black people weren’t. You could get a copy at the Scholastic Book Faire if your school library didn’t have it. MySpace wasn’t a thing. YouTube didn’t exist. Cell phones were big and sturdy enough to be used as a lethal weapon. AskJeeves was one of the most popular search engines because, fuck it, Jeeves was a dapper butler and asking him questions was fun. A phone call could disconnect you from the internet unless you paid for multiple lines. DSL was seen as the newest, hottest, next-gen concept. The World Trade Center was still standing and present in the generic backdrops of nearly every daytime or New York-based news or talk show. Mr. Rogers, Bill Nye, and Bob Ross were amazing children on PBS between episodes of Reading Rainbow and Sesame Street while people were shell-shocked over Princess Diana’s death. Pluto was still classified as a planet. Wishbone was a Jack Russel Terrier that reenacted famous literary adventures.

Germany was being cajoled into reunifying after Mr. Gorbachev agreed to take the wall down. Namibia was a new country and no longer part of South Africa. We were losing our minds over photos from the brand new Hubble Space Telescope. Yugoslavia existed. Czechoslovakia was splitting. We were learning to call the USSR “Russia” again. Yemen was being unified. The Human Genome Project had just been announced. The Cold War was finally over!

Meanwhile, my mom worked as a project manager at Intel specifically tasked with replacing and/or reprogramming any and all Intel computer software with extended time stamps past 1999, for the entire technological world. You’re here, right now, reading this very post in part thanks to her and her team’s exhaustive years of work to change and update the entire world’s software. If it required anything from Intel to function or had to co-function with Intel, it was part of my mom’s job to beat the literal countdown to January 1st, 2000.

If she and her team failed, it was lights out. She was bouncing me on her knee while fielding calls from everywhere from Silicon Valley, California, to London, England, to Beirut, Lebanon, to Tokyo, Japan. My every day around her was nothing but tech-talk when it was actually in English. Those incredibly intelligent, clever, gifted men and women from around the world spared not a single second for themselves when it came to their singular, united focus on stopping Y2K from bringing the entire global economy and communications to their knees.

My mom didn’t take maternity leave with my baby brother in 1998; she telecommuted instead in order to keep working. When she would go on business trips almost every week, she would bring me back plush toys of dolls in clean-room Intel Bunny Suits instead of stuffed animals. Stopping Y2K was too important.

And you know what happened? Nothing. 2000 rolled around, and the first thing to start were conspiracy theories that Y2K had been made up, or that Y2K itself had been its own conspiracy theory to trick users into buying new computers and software. In fact, the people responsible for preventing Y2K turned an impending global disaster into what is now known as “the first challenge of the 21st century successfully met.“

And yet, to this very day, the real people responsible for fixing everything before it had a chance to break go unmentioned and unrecognized. They never received fanfare or thanks, but scrutiny and skepticism instead. Can you imagine doing a job so well and so efficiently that the entire modern world either ignored you, or even got pissed at you because things didn’t fall apart? Their children - me included - grew up steeped in the understanding and fear that if we tried to demand more attention from them, we were stopping them from saving the world as we knew it.

So, as you finish reading this, I ask you to go out there and learn about “The 2038 Problem”. While it’s being handled differently thanks to the precedent my mom and her fellow badass, dedicated teammates set, it still has to be handled in time, just like Y2K. The original team may have been left to disappear into obscurity, so the very least we can do is thank the hard-working people that are toiling away as we speak to keep the lights on again in 2038.

#long post #y2k #the 90's #90's things #the 2038 problem #2038 #millennials #computer history #internet history #modern history #tech news #tumblr stories #intel #microsoft

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mariacallous · 10 days

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In February 2022, a meeting was set up between New York City mayor Eric Adams’ team and an artificial intelligence gun-detection company called Evolv. An email thread from Evolv representatives included an accompanying brochure, which listed opportunities to partner together: in the Port Authority Bus Terminal, NYC schools, hospitals, and gathering places such as Times Square. One area conspicuously missing from the list, though, was the subway.

After an in-person meeting a few days later, Evolv cofounder Anil Chitkara made another attempt to sell the company’s technology—through name-dropping.

“As I mentioned, Linda Reid, VP Security for Walt Disney World (Florida) has known us since 2014 and deployed many of our systems at the Parks and Disney Springs,” Chitkara wrote in a February 7 email to the Mayor’s Office, obtained by WIRED. “They’ve had success screening for weapons with Evolv Express … There may be some interesting parallels to how you are thinking about everyone’s role in security."

The comparison of safety in NYC to that in Disney World apparently helped to persuade the Adams team. A couple of weeks later, Evolv’s technology was used to screen visitors in a city-run Bronx hospital, where a man had been shot inside the emergency room in January 2022. This wasn’t very successful—the scanners produced false positives 85 percent of the time during the seven-month pilot.

If Evolv’s accuracy in a hospital was low, its accuracy in NYC subway stations may be worse. In an investor call on March 15, 2024, Peter George, the company’s CEO, admitted that the technology was not geared toward subway stations. “Subways, in particular, are not a place that we think is a good use case for us,” George said, due to the “interference with the railways.”

Despite this, following the death of a man who was pushed onto the subway tracks in late March, Adams announced that Evolv’s gun-detection scanners would be tested in the city’s train stations. “This is a Sputnik moment,” Adams said on March 28. “When President Kennedy said we were going to put a man on the moon.”

Alexandra Smith Ozerkis, an Evolv representative, tells WIRED that when the company developed Evolv Express, its flagship product launched in 2019, they “did not do so with the NYC subway system in mind. That said, we are a mission-driven company, and when we are asked to test our technology in a new environment, we are happy to do so.”

However, the company that Adams wants to trust with the safety of New Yorkers has left a trail of controversies across the country—and critics wonder whether its technology works effectively. Its software, which uses “electromagnetic fields and advanced sensors” to detect weapons such as guns and knives, has missed them multiple times, particularly in schools. Yet neither this nor the recent disclosure that the US Securities and Exchange Commission has initiated a fact-finding investigation of Evolv (which follows a 2023 probe by the Federal Trade Commission over the company's marketing practices) has deterred the Adams administration, which has connections to the company’s employees who previously worked for the New York Police Department—something the company was keen to stress in its pitch.

Mixed Company

Back in 2022, Adams tasked New York’s deputy mayor, Philip Banks III, with finding a gun-detection solution. Before joining the administration, he served as NYPD’s chief of department, but resigned in 2014 amid a federal bribery and corruption investigation in which he was later named as an unindicted coconspirator. (Banks was never charged.)

While Adams said in May 2022 that he found Evolv online, Ozerkis from Evolv tells WIRED that the NYPD had contacted Evolv “to explore and test the possibility of using our screening solution around the city as part of their multi-pronged plan to curb violent crime.”

There was a lot of overlap with former members of the NYPD. Adams and Banks came up together as police officers—as did a then-account-executive of Evolv, also name-dropped by Chitkara in the email to the mayor’s staff. Dominick D’Orazio, who had been Evolv’s sales manager in the northeast US before being promoted to regional manager in April, was a commander in Brooklyn South whose reporting line included Banks—who was, at the time, deputy chief of patrol for Borough Brooklyn South. (Banks has denied meeting D’Orazio in his capacity as an Evolv employee.)

Evolv’s connection to the NYPD is something George, Evolv’s CEO, has used to market the company’s technology. “About a third of our salespeople were former police officers,” George said at a conference in June 2022. “The one here in New York was an NYPD cop, and he’s a really good sales guy because he understands who we’re selling to. He has the secret handshake.”

David Cohen, former NYPD deputy commissioner of intelligence, also sits on Evolv’s Security Advisory Board.

The Mayor’s Office has been keen to stress that it is not set on Evolv being a permanent fixture. “To be clear, we have NOT said we are putting Evolv technology in the subway stations,” Kayla Mamelak, deputy press secretary of the Mayor’s Office, tells WIRED in an email. “We said that we are opening a 90-day period to explore using technology, such as Evolv, in our subway stations.”

Civil rights and technology experts have argued that utilizing Evolv’s scanners in subway stations is likely to be futile. “This is Mickey Mouse public safety,” says Albert Fox Cahn, founder of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a privacy advocacy organization. “This is not a serious solution for the largest transit system in the country.”

Moreover, deploying the company’s technology might not just be ineffective—it’s also likely to add more police officers to the daily rhythms of New Yorkers’ lives, heightening Adams’ pro-cop agenda. The NYC subway has 472 stations. “That is roughly 1,000 subway station entrances,” explains Sarah Kaufman, director of the New York University’s Rudin Center for Transportation. “That means that Evolv would have to be at every single entrance in order to be effective, and that of course would require monitoring.”

According to the draft policy posted by the NYPD, the process surrounding weapons-detection technology in the subway is extremely vague, and still relies heavily on police officers. “The checkpoint supervisor will determine the frequency of passengers subject to inspection (for example, every fifth passenger or every tenth passenger),” the document reads. It will also be based on “available police personnel on hand to perform inspections.”

The NYC subway has an estimated 3.6 million daily riders. Stopping every 10th passenger would mean 360,000 searches a day.

“It’s going to mean that people are routinely going to have to go through invasive and inconvenient searches,” says Cahn. “What’s really emblematic here is that the city keeps trying to go for security measures that are highly visible, even when they’re highly ineffective.”

School Supplies

In the email thread to the NYC officials who attended the meeting, Chitkara touted Evolv’s successful deployment in schools. But there, too, the scanners have failed to detect weapons and guns on multiple occasions. While the Adams administration was being persuaded to pilot the technology, internal emails obtained from a large school district that uses Evolv’s technology illustrate how everyday objects were being mistaken by the scanners.

“I know the simple solution is to tell kids not to use binders but rather regular notebooks,” Jacqueline Barone, principal of Piedmont Middle School, part of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in North Carolina, wrote at the end of 2022. “But it hurts my soul to have to tell kids or teachers that certain supplies can’t be used because the scanners mistake them for weapons.”

In mid-April, the school district’s chief operating officer announced at a conference panel with an Evolv executive in Las Vegas that they were “eliminating” metal three-ring binders.

“As we transition into the next school year, teachers will utilize other alternatives for classroom supplies,” Jessica Saunders, a Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools spokesperson, tells WIRED in an email. She also says student laptops most often alert the weapons detection system.

Meanwhile, the company is currently being sued by a high school student in upstate New York who alleges that Evolv misrepresented its technology and is responsible for failing to detect the large knife that was used to stab him.

A class action was also recently filed by Evolv’s shareholders who claim that the company made misleading statements in violation of securities law that led to huge financial losses, while also claiming that the technology “does not reliably detect knives or guns.”

“Evolv Express systems are designed to configure various levels of a security profile with different sensitivity settings, which are selected by the customer, based on their specific needs and events,” Ozerkis tells WIRED. “That doesn’t mean our technology doesn’t work; it means the security professionals in charge of keeping that environment safe made the decision that they need to screen for different—or a wider variety—of threats.”

“Getting the Word Out”

For now, as part of NYC’s pilot program, there is that mandatory waiting period. This is likely to begin in late June and will last 90 days. According to the Mayor’s Office, the city will also explore the use of other technologies and companies.

“We are conducting outreach to several tech companies and the mayor even said that the point of the presser was to get the word out,” Mamelak from the Mayor’s Office says.

ZeroEyes, a competitor of Evolv, is one company possibly being considered. Like Evolv, the company has been represented by lobbyist Mike Klein, who lobbied the Mayor’s Office on ZeroEyes’ behalf in 2022 and 2023, according to disclosure documents. (Klein tells WIRED he no longer represents the company.)

So far, ZeroEyes hasn’t been wholly successful in the transport space: The Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority quietly ended its pilot program with the company in December. A representative from ZeroEyes tells WIRED they could not confirm whether their technology would be piloted in New York.

Once the waiting period begins, the public will have 45 days to submit comments on the use of the technology before they are considered by the Mayor’s Office—although the Adams administration has no obligation to alter the policy.

Public safety advocates aren’t particularly hopeful that their concerns will be heard. “It’s obviously a pattern that we see repeated,” says Daniel Schwarz, privacy and technology strategist at the New York Civil Liberties Union. “They are rolling out more surveillance technologies and pouring more money into policing and surveillance infrastructure instead of the actual services that New Yorkers need.”

At the press conference in Fulton Station, standing next to Deputy Mayor Banks and an Evolv scanner, Adams seemed intent that the technology would be successful.

“Let’s bring on the scanners,” Adams said, adding: “We are taking a huge step toward public safety.”

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clericofshadows · 8 months

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WIP Saturday!

tagged by the lovely @rotschopf-thedrow :D thank you!

rules:

In a reblog (or new post/w rules attached) post up to five filenames of your WIPs, not titles, file names

Post a snippet from one of them. Snippet must be something you wrote in the last 7 days (we're posting progress here. If you haven't made any, go make some and come back to post!)

After you've posted, people can send you an ask with one of your file names. You must then write 3 sentences in that file. If the filename is one you can't share from, write 3 sentences on it anyway and then 3 more on another to share!

That's it! You can invite others to join in or just post. If you tag me in your post, I will send you an ask request.

as usual, tagging anyone who sees this and wants to participate :)

I name my files the title of my fics lol, I usually come up with the title pretty early.

nothing will shine as bright: Kaidan Alenko/Zaeed Massani meet the parents fic, and where Kaidan shows off how powerful of a biotic he really is. (ME1-ME2 ERA)

don't ask about Ryuusei: My write-up of the Citadel DLC prologue (POST WAR). Regis Shepard/Zaeed Massani/Kaidan Alenko.

tear it down, start again (tentative title): Regis Shepard/Zaeed Massani, takes place directly after feeling numb, lost in time. Regis confronts Aria, confronts Miranda, and prepares to grab the Convict dossier. He also opens Grunt's tank, although not without some reservations. (ME2 ERA)

zorya: Regis Shepard/Zaeed Massani. The write up of Zaeed's loyalty mission. (ME2 ERA)

and I will post a snippet from don't ask about Ryuusei under the cut :)

“Listen,” he said, getting Moreau’s attention. “I’m going to go after her. I’ve already sent word to Kaidan and Zaeed but rally the crew.” “Rally the crew and your crazy husbands, got it,” he said, slowly getting up from the cover. Regis smirked and kept an eye on Moreau, waiting for a trooper to try and get the obvious bait, holstering his Eagle. And then, one shouted. “Hey!” Regis reached up and yanked the merc over his cover, flash-forging his omni-blade and sinking it in his chest with a growl. He took the weapon off the corpse, not recognizing it as anything currently on the market, much less the Spectre market. Lightweight, suppressed, and human made. Interesting. “You used me as bait!” Moreau accused. “Yes, I did. Now get the hell out of here!” Regis replied, twisting his fingers into a barrier, feeling the dark energy settle over him. He forged his Tech Armor as well, trying to provide as much protection on him as possible before leaving the compromised position. Regis peaked around the corner, aiming with the new pistol and headshotting the nearest merc, watching in satisfaction as they collapsed to the ground. The gun barely made a sound, low enough to not be immediately detected as a gunshot. Well, his Eagle is going to be useless. Damn. His favorite gun is already overshadowed by some new black market tech. He crept forward, gathering dark energy in one hand, twisting it into a Reave, tossing it at the nearest merc. The merc panicked, making him a perfect target. Pull the trigger, and then–dead. Regis prepped an overload on his omnitool, using his eye-tracking software to pinpoint the group of mercs near the bar, creeping towards his location. In a flash of red, he overloaded their shields in a rain of sparks, making them vulnerable to a blast of dark energy. He teased the energy in his palm, twisting his fingers to point forwards into a shockwave. The energy pulsed on the ground before blowing up in their faces, knocked out by the force of the blast. “I’m over here!” Brooks called out. Shit. Another merc turned towards his direction, walking away from his position at the bar. Can she not read the fucking room? Regis reloaded the pistol, grabbing a fresh heat sink from the ground and vaulting over the bar. He rushed towards the merc, detonating his tech armor with a clench of his fist, causing them to stagger. He forged another omni blade and stabbed it through the helmet, ripping it away in a spray of blood. There definitely goes his suit. Brooks was lying on the glass in front of the entrance. He ran towards her, gunning down the merc guarding the entrance. He slid down to her. Holding out a hand, he helped her up, her grip very tight. “You alright?” Regis asked, brushing off his vest, stuffing the new gun in his other holster. “Come on, we need to–” He heard the sound of jet-propelled armor, and then a flash of red. She pushed him out of the way. Brooks took the shot meant for him, clipping her side. Regis gritted his teeth as he moved to get up, winded by the way he fell on his back. The merc continued to fire around him, missing every shot, hitting the glass… Well, shit. His visor flashed with warnings, the glass started to creak ominously, and then– The glass shattered.

#cleric's wip #wip whenever

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demilypyro · 3 months

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i think i vaguely remember you answering this question, but what do you use for your setup, like the facial tracking and such? i remember you mentioning an app that you then converted from your phone into a different program?

I have an iphone on a small tripod at eye level. I use an iphone because it has some of the best facial tracking tech on the market but it's proprietary software so you can't get it anywhere else. The iphone sends the tracking data to my PC through a USB cable, where a plugin called Vbridger converts it for use by Vtube studio, a vtuber program. I then capture the model and stream it from OBS.

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mostlysignssomeportents · 7 months

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A link-clump demands a linkdump

Cometh the weekend, cometh the linkdump. My daily-ish newsletter includes a section called "Hey look at this," with three short links per day, but sometimes those links get backed up and I need to clean house. Here's the eight previous installments:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

The country code top level domain (ccTLD) for the Caribbean island nation of Anguilla is .ai, and that's turned into millions of dollars worth of royalties as "entrepreneurs" scramble to sprinkle some buzzword-compliant AI stuff on their businesses in the most superficial way possible:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/08/ai-fever-turns-anguillas-ai-domain-into-a-digital-gold-mine/

All told, .ai domain royalties will account for about ten percent of the country's GDP.

It's actually kind of nice to see Anguilla finding some internet money at long last. Back in the 1990s, when I was a freelance web developer, I got hired to work on the investor website for a publicly traded internet casino based in Anguilla that was a scammy disaster in every conceivable way. The company had been conceived of by people who inherited a modestly successful chain of print-shops and decided to diversify by buying a dormant penny mining stock and relaunching it as an online casino.

But of course, online casinos were illegal nearly everywhere. Not in Anguilla – or at least, that's what the founders told us – which is why they located their servers there, despite the lack of broadband or, indeed, reliable electricity at their data-center. At a certain point, the whole thing started to whiff of a stock swindle, a pump-and-dump where they'd sell off shares in that ex-mining stock to people who knew even less about the internet than they did and skedaddle. I got out, and lost track of them, and a search for their names and business today turns up nothing so I assume that it flamed out before it could ruin any retail investors' lives.

Anguilla is a British Overseas Territory, one of those former British colonies that was drained and then given "independence" by paternalistic imperial administrators half a world away. The country's main industries are tourism and "finance" – which is to say, it's a pearl in the globe-spanning necklace of tax- and corporate-crime-havens the UK established around the world so its most vicious criminals – the hereditary aristocracy – can continue to use Britain's roads and exploit its educated workforce without paying any taxes.

This is the "finance curse," and there are tiny, struggling nations all around the world that live under it. Nick Shaxson dubbed them "Treasure Islands" in his outstanding book of the same name:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780230341722/treasureislands

I can't imagine that the AI bubble will last forever – anything that can't go on forever eventually stops – and when it does, those .ai domain royalties will dry up. But until then, I salute Anguilla, which has at last found the internet riches that I played a small part in bringing to it in the previous century.

The AI bubble is indeed overdue for a popping, but while the market remains gripped by irrational exuberance, there's lots of weird stuff happening around the edges. Take Inject My PDF, which embeds repeating blocks of invisible text into your resume:

https://kai-greshake.de/posts/inject-my-pdf/

The text is tuned to make resume-sorting Large Language Models identify you as the ideal candidate for the job. It'll even trick the summarizer function into spitting out text that does not appear in any human-readable form on your CV.

Embedding weird stuff into resumes is a hacker tradition. I first encountered it at the Chaos Communications Congress in 2012, when Ang Cui used it as an example in his stellar "Print Me If You Dare" talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njVv7J2azY8

Cui figured out that one way to update the software of a printer was to embed an invisible Postscript instruction in a document that basically said, "everything after this is a firmware update." Then he came up with 100 lines of perl that he hid in documents with names like cv.pdf that would flash the printer when they ran, causing it to probe your LAN for vulnerable PCs and take them over, opening a reverse-shell to his command-and-control server in the cloud. Compromised printers would then refuse to apply future updates from their owners, but would pretend to install them and even update their version numbers to give verisimilitude to the ruse. The only way to exorcise these haunted printers was to send 'em to the landfill. Good times!

Printers are still a dumpster fire, and it's not solely about the intrinsic difficulty of computer security. After all, printer manufacturers have devoted enormous resources to hardening their products against their owners, making it progressively harder to use third-party ink. They're super perverse about it, too – they send "security updates" to your printer that update the printer's security against you – run these updates and your printer downgrades itself by refusing to use the ink you chose for it:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

It's a reminder that what a monopolist thinks of as "security" isn't what you think of as security. Oftentimes, their security is antithetical to your security. That was the case with Web Environment Integrity, a plan by Google to make your phone rat you out to advertisers' servers, revealing any adblocking modifications you might have installed so that ad-serving companies could refuse to talk to you:

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

WEI is now dead, thanks to a lot of hueing and crying by people like us:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/02/google_abandons_web_environment_integrity/

But the dream of securing Google against its own users lives on. Youtube has embarked on an aggressive campaign of refusing to show videos to people running ad-blockers, triggering an arms-race of ad-blocker-blockers and ad-blocker-blocker-blockers:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/where-will-the-ad-versus-ad-blocker-arms-race-end/

The folks behind Ublock Origin are racing to keep up with Google's engineers' countermeasures, and there's a single-serving website called "Is uBlock Origin updated to the last Anti-Adblocker YouTube script?" that will give you a realtime, one-word status update:

https://drhyperion451.github.io/does-uBO-bypass-yt/

One in four web users has an ad-blocker, a stat that Doc Searls pithily summarizes as "the biggest boycott in world history":

https://doc.searls.com/2015/09/28/beyond-ad-blocking-the-biggest-boycott-in-human-history/

Zero app users have ad-blockers. That's not because ad-blocking an app is harder than ad-blocking the web – it's because reverse-engineering an app triggers liability under IP laws like Section 1201 of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which can put you away for 5 years for a first offense. That's what I mean when I say that "IP is anything that lets a company control its customers, critics or competitors:

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

I predicted that apps would open up all kinds of opportunities for abusive, monopolistic conduct back in 2010, and I'm experiencing a mix of sadness and smugness (I assume there's a German word for this emotion) at being so thoroughly vindicated by history:

https://memex.craphound.com/2010/04/01/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either/

The more control a company can exert over its customers, the worse it will be tempted to treat them. These systems of control shift the balance of power within companies, making it harder for internal factions that defend product quality and customer interests to win against the enshittifiers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

The result has been a Great Enshittening, with platforms of all description shifting value from their customers and users to their shareholders, making everything palpably worse. The only bright side is that this has created the political will to do something about it, sparking a wave of bold, muscular antitrust action all over the world.

The Google antitrust case is certainly the most important corporate lawsuit of the century (so far), but Judge Amit Mehta's deference to Google's demands for secrecy has kept the case out of the headlines. I mean, Sam Bankman-Fried is a psychopathic thief, but even so, his trial does not deserve its vastly greater prominence, though, if you haven't heard yet, he's been convicted and will face decades in prison after he exhausts his appeals:

https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/sam-bankman-fried-guilty-on-all-charges

The secrecy around Google's trial has relaxed somewhat, and the trickle of revelations emerging from the cracks in the courthouse are fascinating. For the first time, we're able to get a concrete sense of which queries are the most lucrative for Google:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/1/23941766/google-antitrust-trial-search-queries-ad-money

The list comes from 2018, but it's still wild. As David Pierce writes in The Verge, the top twenty includes three iPhone-related terms, five insurance queries, and the rest are overshadowed by searches for customer service info for monopolistic services like Xfinity, Uber and Hulu.

All-in-all, we're living through a hell of a moment for piercing the corporate veil. Maybe it's the problem of maintaining secrecy within large companies, or maybe the the rampant mistreatment of even senior executives has led to more leaks and whistleblowing. Either way, we all owe a debt of gratitude to the anonymous leaker who revealed the unbelievable pettiness of former HBO president of programming Casey Bloys, who ordered his underlings to create an army of sock-puppet Twitter accounts to harass TV and movie critics who panned HBO's shows:

https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/hbo-casey-bloys-secret-twitter-trolls-tv-critics-leaked-texts-lawsuit-the-idol-1234867722/

These trolling attempts were pathetic, even by the standards of thick-fingered corporate execs. Like, accusing critics who panned the shitty-ass Perry Mason reboot of disrespecting veterans because the fictional Mason's back-story had him storming the beach on D-Day.

The pushback against corporate bullying is everywhere, and of course, the vanguard is the labor movement. Did you hear that the UAW won their strike against the auto-makers, scoring raises for all workers based on the increases in the companies' CEO pay? The UAW isn't done, either! Their incredible new leader, Shawn Fain, has called for a general strike in 2028:

https://www.404media.co/uaw-calls-on-workers-to-line-up-massive-general-strike-for-2028-to-defeat-billionaire-class/

The massive victory for unionized auto-workers has thrown a spotlight on the terrible working conditions and pay for workers at Tesla, a criminal company that has no compunctions about violating labor law to prevent its workers from exercising their legal rights. Over in Sweden, union workers are teaching Tesla a lesson. After the company tried its illegal union-busting playbook on Tesla service centers, the unionized dock-workers issued an ultimatum: respect your workers or face a blockade at Sweden's ports that would block any Tesla from being unloaded into the EU's fifth largest Tesla market:

https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-sweden-strike/

Of course, the real solution to Teslas – and every other kind of car – is to redesign our cities for public transit, walking and cycling, making cars the exception for deliveries, accessibility and other necessities. Transitioning to EVs will make a big dent in the climate emergency, but it won't make our streets any safer – and they keep getting deadlier.

Last summer, my dear old pal Ted Kulczycky got in touch with me to tell me that Talking Heads were going to be all present in public for the first time since the band's breakup, as part of the debut of the newly remastered print of Stop Making Sense, the greatest concert movie of all time. Even better, the show would be in Toronto, my hometown, where Ted and I went to high-school together, at TIFF.

Ted is the only person I know who is more obsessed with Talking Heads than I am, and he started working on tickets for the show while I starting pricing plane tickets. And then, the unthinkable happened: Ted's wife, Serah, got in touch to say that Ted had been run over by a car while getting off of a streetcar, that he was severely injured, and would require multiple surgeries.

But this was Ted, so of course he was still planning to see the show. And he did, getting a day-pass from the hospital and showing up looking like someone from a Kids In The Hall sketch who'd been made up to look like someone who'd been run over by a car:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/53182440282/

In his Globe and Mail article about Ted's experience, Brad Wheeler describes how the whole hospital rallied around Ted to make it possible for him to get to the movie:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/music/article-how-a-talking-heads-superfan-found-healing-with-the-concert-film-stop/

He also mentions that Ted is working on a book and podcast about Stop Making Sense. I visited Ted in the hospital the day after the gig and we talked about the book and it sounds amazing. Also? The movie was incredible. See it in Imax.

That heartwarming tale of healing through big suits is a pretty good place to wrap up this linkdump, but I want to call your attention to just one more thing before I go: Robin Sloan's Snarkmarket piece about blogging and "stock and flow":

https://snarkmarket.com/2010/4890/

Sloan makes the excellent case that for writers, having a "flow" of short, quick posts builds the audience for a "stock" of longer, more synthetic pieces like books. This has certainly been my experience, but I think it's only part of the story – there are good, non-mercenary reasons for writers to do a lot of "flow." As I wrote in my 2021 essay, "The Memex Method," turning your commonplace book into a database – AKA "blogging" – makes you write better notes to yourself because you know others will see them:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/

This, in turn, creates a supersaturated, subconscious solution of fragments that are just waiting to nucleate and crystallize into full-blown novels and nonfiction books and other "stock." That's how I came out of lockdown with nine new books. The next one is The Lost Cause, a hopepunk science fiction novel about the climate whose early fans include Naomi Klein, Rebecca Solnit, Bill McKibben and Kim Stanley Robinson. It's out on November 14:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause

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/2023/11/05/variegated/#nein

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