unfriendlypedestrian

[unfriendlypedestrian]

and the don't belong in elevators, or anywhere that people with needs will use.

Touchscreens do not belong in cars

[unfriendlypedestrian]

“If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing”

20 years ago, I got in a (friendly) public spat with Chris Anderson, who was then the editor in chief of Wired. I'd publicly noted my disappointment with glowing Wired reviews of DRM-encumbered digital devices, prompting Anderson to call me unrealistic for expecting the magazine to condemn gadgets for their DRM:

https://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2004/12/is_drm_evil.html

I replied in public, telling him that he'd misunderstood. This wasn't an issue of ideological purity – it was about good reviewing practice. Wired was telling readers to buy a product because it had features x, y and z, but at any time in the future, without warning, without recourse, the vendor could switch off any of those features:

https://memex.craphound.com/2004/12/29/cory-responds-to-wired-editor-on-drm/

I proposed that all Wired endorsements for DRM-encumbered products should come with this disclaimer:

WARNING: THIS DEVICE’S FEATURES ARE SUBJECT TO REVOCATION WITHOUT NOTICE, ACCORDING TO TERMS SET OUT IN SECRET NEGOTIATIONS. YOUR INVESTMENT IS CONTINGENT ON THE GOODWILL OF THE WORLD’S MOST PARANOID, TECHNOPHOBIC ENTERTAINMENT EXECS. THIS DEVICE AND DEVICES LIKE IT ARE TYPICALLY USED TO CHARGE YOU FOR THINGS YOU USED TO GET FOR FREE — BE SURE TO FACTOR IN THE PRICE OF BUYING ALL YOUR MEDIA OVER AND OVER AGAIN. AT NO TIME IN HISTORY HAS ANY ENTERTAINMENT COMPANY GOTTEN A SWEET DEAL LIKE THIS FROM THE ELECTRONICS PEOPLE, BUT THIS TIME THEY’RE GETTING A TOTAL WALK. HERE, PUT THIS IN YOUR MOUTH, IT’LL MUFFLE YOUR WHIMPERS.

Wired didn't take me up on this suggestion.

But I was right. The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you've already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations. Inkjet printers were always a sleazy business, but once these printers got directly connected to the internet, companies like HP started pushing out "security updates" that modified your printer to make it reject the third-party ink you'd paid for:

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

Now, this scam wouldn't work if you could just put things back the way they were before the "update," which is where the DRM comes in. A thicket of IP laws make reverse-engineering DRM-encumbered products into a felony. Combine always-on network access with indiscriminate criminalization of user modification, and the enshittification will follow, as surely as night follows day.

This is the root of all the right to repair shenanigans. Sure, companies withhold access to diagnostic codes and parts, but codes can be extracted and parts can be cloned. The real teeth in blocking repair comes from the law, not the tech. The company that makes McDonald's wildly unreliable McFlurry machines makes a fortune charging franchisees to fix these eternally broken appliances. When a third party threatened this racket by reverse-engineering the DRM that blocked independent repair, they got buried in legal threats:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cold-war

Everybody loves this racket. In Poland, a team of security researchers at the OhMyHack conference just presented their teardown of the anti-repair features in NEWAG Impuls locomotives. NEWAG boobytrapped their trains to try and detect if they've been independently serviced, and to respond to any unauthorized repairs by bricking themselves:

https://mamot.fr/@[email protected]/111528162905209453

Poland is part of the EU, meaning that they are required to uphold the provisions of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive, including Article 6, which bans this kind of reverse-engineering. The researchers are planning to present their work again at the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg this month – Germany is also a party to the EUCD. The threat to researchers from presenting this work is real – but so is the threat to conferences that host them:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/researchers-face-legal-threats-over-sdmi-hack/

20 years ago, Chris Anderson told me that it was unrealistic to expect tech companies to refuse demands for DRM from the entertainment companies whose media they hoped to play. My argument – then and now – was that any tech company that sells you a gadget that can have its features revoked is defrauding you. You're paying for x, y and z – and if they are contractually required to remove x and y on demand, they are selling you something that you can't rely on, without making that clear to you.

But it's worse than that. When a tech company designs a device for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades, they invite both external and internal parties to demand those downgrades. Like Pavel Chekov says, a phaser on the bridge in Act I is going to go off by Act III. Selling a product that can be remote, irreversibly, nonconsensually downgraded inevitably results in the worst person at the product-planning meeting proposing to do so. The fact that there are no penalties for doing so makes it impossible for the better people in that meeting to win the ensuing argument, leading to the moral injury of seeing a product you care about reduced to a pile of shit:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification

But even if everyone at that table is a swell egg who wouldn't dream of enshittifying the product, the existence of a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature makes the product vulnerable to external actors who will demand that it be used. Back in 2022, Adobe informed its customers that it had lost its deal to include Pantone colors in Photoshop, Illustrator and other "software as a service" packages. As a result, users would now have to start paying a monthly fee to see their own, completed images. Fail to pay the fee and all the Pantone-coded pixels in your artwork would just show up as black:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/28/fade-to-black/#trust-the-process

Adobe blamed this on Pantone, and there was lots of speculation about what had happened. Had Pantone jacked up its price to Adobe, so Adobe passed the price on to its users in the hopes of embarrassing Pantone? Who knows? Who can know? That's the point: you invested in Photoshop, you spent money and time creating images with it, but you have no way to know whether or how you'll be able to access those images in the future. Those terms can change at any time, and if you don't like it, you can go fuck yourself.

These companies are all run by CEOs who got their MBAs at Darth Vader University, where the first lesson is "I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it further." Adobe chose to design its software so it would be vulnerable to this kind of demand, and then its customers paid for that choice. Sure, Pantone are dicks, but this is Adobe's fault. They stuck a KICK ME sign to your back, and Pantone obliged.

This keeps happening and it's gonna keep happening. Last week, Playstation owners who'd bought (or "bought") Warner TV shows got messages telling them that Warner had walked away from its deal to sell videos through the Playstation store, and so all the videos they'd paid for were going to be deleted forever. They wouldn't even get refunds (to be clear, refunds would also be bullshit – when I was a bookseller, I didn't get to break into your house and steal the books I'd sold you, not even if I left some cash on your kitchen table).

Sure, Warner is an unbelievably shitty company run by the single most guillotineable executive in all of Southern California, the loathsome David Zaslav, who oversaw the merger of Warner with Discovery. Zaslav is the creep who figured out that he could make more money cancelling completed movies and TV shows and taking a tax writeoff than he stood to make by releasing them:

https://aftermath.site/there-is-no-piracy-without-ownership

Imagine putting years of your life into making a program – showing up on set at 5AM and leaving your kids to get their own breakfast, performing stunts that could maim or kill you, working 16-hour days during the acute phase of the covid pandemic and driving home in the night, only to have this absolute turd of a man delete the program before anyone could see it, forever, to get a minor tax advantage. Talk about moral injury!

But without Sony's complicity in designing a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature into the Playstation, Zaslav's war on art and creative workers would be limited to material that hadn't been released yet. Thanks to Sony's awful choices, David Zaslav can break into your house, steal your movies – and he doesn't even have to leave a twenty on your kitchen table.

The point here – the point I made 20 years ago to Chris Anderson – is that this is the foreseeable, inevitable result of designing devices for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades. Anyone who was paying attention should have figured that out in the GW Bush administration. Anyone who does this today? Absolute flaming garbage.

Sure, Zaslav deserves to be staked out over and anthill and slathered in high-fructose corn syrup. But save the next anthill for the Sony exec who shipped a product that would let Zaslav come into your home and rob you. That piece of shit knew what they were doing and they did it anyway. Fuck them. Sideways. With a brick.

Meanwhile, the studios keep making the case for stealing movies rather than paying for them. As Tyler James Hill wrote: "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing":

https://bsky.app/profile/tylerjameshill.bsky.social/post/3kflw2lvam42n

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/2023/12/08/playstationed/#tyler-james-hill

Image: Alan Levine (modified) https://pxhere.com/en/photo/218986

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[unfriendlypedestrian]

So this year for Halloween I will be wearing this mask...

... in case the image isn't clear, its a mask that makes it look like the alien is sitting on your shoulders and 'driving' your body. You can see the model's eyes peering out at the alien's waist.

I will also be dressing the alien up in this baby clown costume...

While riding this inflatable chicken...

I hope the neighborhood kids appreciate me as I chase them around the block.

#Halloween #Halloween 2023 #thehorrordome #alien #clown #baby clown #inflatable chicken

[unfriendlypedestrian]

hey!!!! remember standing rock water protectors and the dakota access pipeline?

the massive, poorly constructed environmental risk that spat all over the Standing Rock Sioux people's treaty rights? that dug up their sacred burial sites? the one where the oil corporation who owned it bought out a private company to do a sham of an "environmental analysis" and never consulted the tribe and STILL didn't actually get approval? the one that's literally operating illegally and without proper permits right fucking now?

yeah, that.

you remember that.

surprising absolutely no one, the army corps of engineers this week (September 8, 2023) released an EIS (environmental impact statement) draft for public comment that takes into account absolutely 0 of the tribe's concerns, and in fact did not consult with them once in the process!

they're going to officially approve the pipeline.

what's the good news?

IT'S A DRAFT. YOU CAN SUBMIT PUBLIC COMMENT RIGHT NOW UNTIL NOVEMBER 13!!!

This link RIGHT HERE (https://action.lakotalaw.org/action/dapl-eis-2023) will take you to a Lakota Law Project page where they've set up a form to make it easy to submit a comment.

All you have to do is add your name, email, and zip code, and it pulls up a form with a pre-written message you can just click and submit, listing the most pressing concerns. You can also personalize it if you want, but you don't have to. This will take you two minutes. Please.

you can also access the comment information on the USACE website here, email [email protected] yourself, or call Brent Cossette, the contact for the draft, at 402-995-2716!!!

you can also donate directly to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe here.

[unfriendlypedestrian]

The thing is, they’re Housewives only 3 days a month during a full moon.

The rest of the time, their are in their natural animal form.

Their curse is that during those 3 days they are compelled to do all of the cooking, cleaning, ‘wifely duties’, etc. and have no time for themselves.  (Similar to a werewolf’s compulsion to hunt.)

... and as soon as I said this I realized that I just described some twisted manga that probably already exists.

The Real Werewives of London

#Werewives of London #Werewives #The Real Werewives of London

[unfriendlypedestrian]

Source 

[unfriendlypedestrian]

This list includes doctors in the United States, Australia, Canada, and Europe!

Even if you're not the target demographic, please share for any of your friends who may be.

And if you or someone you know would like to be added to the list, there's a place for that!

[unfriendlypedestrian]

[unfriendlypedestrian]

[unfriendlypedestrian]

hey netizens! i'm not sure how many people are aware, but youtube's been slowly rolling out a new anti-adblock policy that can't be bypassed with the usual software like uBlock Origin and Pi-Hole out of the gate

BUT, if you're a uBlock Origin user (or use an adblocker with a similar cosmetics modifier), you can add these commands in the uBlock dashboard to get rid of it!

youtube.com##+js(set, yt.config_.openPopupConfig.supportedPopups.adBlockMessageViewModel, false) youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.adBlocksFound, 0) youtube.com##+js(set, ytplayer.config.args.raw_player_response.adPlacements, []) youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.hasAllowedInstreamAd, true)

reblog to help keep the internet less annoying and to tell corporations that try shit like this to go fuck themselves <3

[unfriendlypedestrian]

Last 48 hours: the Solstice "Get Our Whole (ebook) Store For $44" sale ends...!

(sound UP for the music if you want it!)

So this is the last leg of the Solstice's Get Our Whole Store For $44 Sale"! That's 36 of Diane Duane's ebooks (@petermorwood's are still with another e-publisher, sorry, though there's a freebie of his in the package...), all DRM-free and with free replacements included in the price if they're lost or you change platforms. The package on offer includes the 9-book set of Young Wizards New Millennium Editions and the LGBTQ-centered Middle Kingdoms books, along with much more fantasy and SF. So if you've missed out on this offer previously, now's your chance to take advantage of it!

Also, in honor of Pride Month—and much earlier than we'd normally put a new release into the whole-book package—we've added Tales of the Middle Kingdoms #2: Overdue to the offer. The only other place this new work appears at the moment is in the 2023 Pride Month package. If you've been looking at that package, please note that everything in it also appears in the Whole Store bundle, at a similar discount level. But both these sale packages will expire in slightly less than 48 hours, at the end of Pride month, at Irish midnight [GMT+1] on June 30.

Interested? Then just click here to put the $44 whole-store package in your shopping basket and grab yourself a bargain! The product page will say it costs $55. But the link above has the discount baked in. Use it and the store will show the $44 price when you've gone through all the checkout steps before payment. (Sorry about this: it's how the store behaves when there are two discount offers running at once.)

If you go through to the just-before-paying stage and are still seeing the $55 price, please put the discount code EVERY72 into the "gift card or discount code" field on that page, and enter it. That'll sort things out.

If you're not interested in the offer, would you consider reblogging it so that others in your timeline can have a look? Thanks! (And one final note: due to Brexit, unfortunately this offer isn't valid in the UK. Details about the situation are here. Our apologies, as always, for the inconvenience.)

Meanwhile, happy week-after-Solstice to everybody! (Bearing in mind that another Solstice has been going on in the Southern Hemisphere... probably not so sunny.) And here's hoping that our offer will make the current long days (or short ones) a little brighter.

[unfriendlypedestrian]

Fast X

Say what you will about the movie, but Phineas and Ferb did it better.

#fast x #fast and furious #phineas and ferb #movie

[unfriendlypedestrian]

This means that Madmartigan is a Capricorn.

“Gentlemen... Meet Lug.”

I wish IRL star signs actually meant shit aside from like.. gay tumblr overthinking… i wish they were like the elder scrolls ones. Accidentally locked yourself out? Good thing you’re a virgo and you can open a medium lock every 24 hours

#willow #Madmartigan #val kilmer

[unfriendlypedestrian]

I’m still in the chair.  Listening...

fuck whoever turned off reblogs on this post

[unfriendlypedestrian]

If you live in this state you are not surprised.

@ubernegro @nerdymouse @antifaspiderman

[unfriendlypedestrian]

Did you know Witches and cowboys actually are the same?

I do now.

[unfriendlypedestrian]

Nanobots

I think that the best use of the development of nanobots (in the traditional science fiction context) is not to heal people, spread civilization, or such nonsense. 

I think the best use would be to create a self healing, perpetual dungeons out in the middle of nowhere that people could go and adventure.  The creatures inside would re-spawn (rebuild themselves) every so often, each time with different strengths and weaknesses.  And yes it would be a lethal environment.

Then leave clues laying around for people to find.

#Dungeons and Disney #or Disney and Dragons