#10yrsago

#10yrsago #Elsevier censors self-publication by papers’ co-authors https://svpow.com/2013/12/06/elsevier-is-taking-down-papers-from-academia-edu/

#5yrsago #Uber is a “#bezzle,” doomed to disappoint the suckers who buy into its IPO https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/will-uber-survive-the-next-decade.html

#5yrsago Argentine hacker mods #Furby so it quotes #Borges, creates a “Borgy” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jlDL-j9upg

#5yrsago Merry Mixmas! It’s time again for DJ Riko’s badass Christmas mashup http://djriko.com/mixmases.htm

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#15yrsago HOWTO Carry a gun onto an airplane https://web.archive.org/web/20081218004445/http://wbztv.com/local/fake.federal.agent.2.874625.html</a.

#10yrsago Lessons from #Glitch http://20minutegarden.com/2013/12/09/life-lessons-from-glitch-the-game/

#10yrsago #TSA seize tiny, itsy-bitsy gun from sock-monkey https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/tsa-agent-confiscates-sock-monkeys-toy-pistol/281-246977307

#10yrsago Spooks of Warcraft: how the NSA #infiltrated gamespace https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/09/nsa-spies-online-games-world-warcraft-second-life

#10yrsago We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves: spectacular, deep, zingy novel https://memex.craphound.com/2013/12/09/we-are-all-completely-beside-ourselves-spectacular-deep-zingy-novel/

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Pluralistic: Kinkslump Linkdump (09 Dec 2023)

Today's links Kinkslump Linkdump: A week's worth of assortment. This day in history: 2008, 2013, 2018 Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading Kinkslump Linkdump (permalink) This is my dozenth linkdump! The world comes at you fast, and even though I'm writing 4-5 essays a week for this newsletter, many's the week that ends with more stray links than will fit in that format. Here's the previous ones: https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/ I managed to turn out five posts last week, despite being on tour with my latest novel, The Lost Cause, a hopeful solarpunk novel endorsed by Rebecca Solnit, Bill McKibben and Kim Stanley Robinson. The tour went great – the book's now a national bestseller on the USA Today list! Here's an essay I wrote explaining the structure of the feeling that the book is meant to convey: https://www.torforgeblog.com/2023/11/14/cory-doctorow-the-swerve/ This is a climate emergency novel full of rising seas, terrible storms, wildfires and zoonotic plagues, and yet – it is a hopeful novel. What makes it hopeful? It depicts a future in which we are treating these phenomena with the gravitas and urgency they warrant, with our whole society's focus shifting to moving coastal cities inland, weatherizing and solarizing our housing, and creating permanent housing for internal refugees. While it would be infinitely preferable to live in a world where none of that is necessary, that's not the world we have. This is an sf novel, not a fantasy novel, so all the climate harms we've locked in through decades of expensively procured inaction are present. But the difference between disaster and catastrophe is how and whether we address those harms. Sure, this is a world where superstorms wipe away whole cities and Miami is a drowned mangrove swamp, but it's also a world in which oil executives do not chair UN climate summits or complain that oil companies are being "unjustly vilified": https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/27/opec-says-oil-industry-unjustly-vilified-ahead-of-climate-talks-.html I write a lot, and it's not just this newsletter. Writing transports me from my anxieties and aches. That's how I came to write nine books during lockdown ("when life gives you SARS, make sarsaparilla"). Lost Cause was one of three books I published in 2023. I'm going to greet 2024 with another novel, The Bezzle, a sequel to 2023's Red Team Blues, about the hard-charging, high-tech forensic accountant Marty Hench: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle The Bezzle is a story about the shitty technology adoption curve – the way that the worst technologies we have are first rolled out on the people least able to complain about them. After these bad technologies have their sharp edges sanded down on the bodies of prisoners, refugees and kids, they move up to blue collar workers and discount store shoppers, and so on, until we're all living under their thumb. In The Bezzle, a dear friend of Marty finds himself serving a long sentence in a privatized California prison that flips from one private equity fund to the next, each with even worse, more extractive ways to use technology to bleed prisoners and their families dry. You can read the opening scenes in a just-published excerpt on Tor Books's site: https://www.torforgeblog.com/2023/11/20/excerpt-reveal-the-bezzle-by-cory-doctorow/ The period immediately before a book's publication is always a tense one, as the first reviews trickle in. Library Journal's Marlene Harris is the first out of the gate, with a spectacular review: https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/the-bezzle-1802415 Marty’s reminiscences range from obscure financial machinations to heaping helpings of social commentary but always move the underlying thriller story forward in a backwards heist tale that delivers a righteously satisfying ending to the surprise of both the reader and the villain. This novel, like his previous outing, rides on Marty’s voice. He has a jaundiced view of everything, but he tells it with such style and verve that readers are caught up and ride along on the surface until the shark beneath the water jumps out and bites the villain where it hurts. I'm headed into Skyboat Media's studios on Monday with Wil Wheaton to record the audiobook for this one, directed as ever by the amazing Gabrielle de Cuir. Keep your eyes peeled for a presale crowdfunder in January! I am often asked how I decide when to present an idea through fiction and when to do so with nonfiction. The answer is a complicated one, and I got into it in some detail on Nature's Working Scientist podcast, in discussion with Paul Shrivastava: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03394-8 When it comes to politics, fiction and nonfiction are intensely complementary. Nonfiction can convey the data about a social phenomenon, but fiction can convey the meaning of the data. It's one thing to see a chart about inequality, and another to inhabit it through fiction. Marty Hench's narrative adventures are a way into the feeling of living in a corrupt oligarchy. There are other ways into that feeling, of course. Take Barry Bowen's "Lifestyles of the Blessed & Famous: Preacher Homes Sold in 2023" for The Roys Report: https://julieroys.com/lifestyles-blessed-famous-preacher-homes-sold-2023/?mc_cid=9678383b64 If a picture is worth a thousand words, then carefully staged realtor drone shots ganked from the Redfin listing for a "pastor"'s $3.5m mansion in Newport Beach is a full-on sermon about the corruption of the Hillsong megachurch: https://www.redfin.com/CA/Newport-Beach/503-30th-St-92663/home/12363926 Narratives and photos are all well and good, but there's always room for some data. The USA's weird breed of federalism and devolved power makes for some very interesting data. Writing for The American Prospect, Paul Starr rounds up several studies evaluating the "natural experiments" created by enacting very different policies in otherwise similar states: https://prospect.org/health/2023-12-08-life-death-cost-conservative-power/ The data is in: conservativism kills. Living in a red state shortens your life expectancy. The redder the state, the worse it is. The bluer the state, the longer you're likely to live: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1468-0009.12469 The exemplars here are Connecticut and Oklahoma, whose life expectancies were at par until they began to diverge in policies. Oklahoma got more conservative, Connecticut got more liberal. Today, the average Oklahoman will pop their clogs at 75.8, while a Connecticutensian can expect 80.7 years. Different scholars have parsed out different policy outcomes. Giving Medicaid to children, for example, shows benefits for the next 50 years: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20171671 The big one, of course, is gun control. Here's the topline: "restrictive state gun policies reduce overall gun deaths." Water also wet: https://journals.lww.com/epidem/fulltext/2023/11000/the_era_of_progress_on_gun_mortality__state_gun.3.aspx Fact-free spiritual beliefs like "an armed society is a polite society" are key to conservative policymaking. Pesky progressives who confuse the issue with relevant facts are playing dirty, pointing out reality's unfair leftist bias. But after 40 years of neoliberal deference to corporate power, the worm is turning. Somehow, a world on fire, filled with megapastors in megamansions who brief for lethal policies, has finally inspired a global vibe-shift (and not a moment too soon!). One of the most tangible expressions of that shift is the revival of antitrust, which has been in a coma since the Reagan administration. All over the world – the EU, the UK, Ireland, Australia, and the USA – there are new competition enforcers challenging corporate power in ways that were unthinkable just a few years ago. If I'd written an enforcer like FTC chair Lina Khan in 2010, critics would have slammed me for wish-fulfillment too unrealistic for science fiction. But today, Khan is taking big swings at corporate power, fighting against a calcified edifice of decades of bad, pro-monopoly precedent. The pro-monopoly press hate her, which is why the WSJ keeps publishing sweaty op-eds insisting that she is wasting her time and that monopolies are good, actually: https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/14/making-good-trouble/#the-peoples-champion But she is still out there, fighting for all of us. After a pro-monopoly judge stymied the FTC's bid to block the rotten Microsoft/Activision merger, Khan re-filed, appealing the decision: https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/us-ftc-tries-again-stop-microsofts-already-closed-deal-activision-2023-12-06/ Critics insist that she's on a foolish errand, but Khan is tackling the most promising face of a sheer cliff, and the plainly anticompetitive merger between one of the world's largest console makers (a convicted monopolist!) with one of the world's largest games publishers is the right place to start. If she can get her piton into one of the hairline cracks in that face, her arduous climb gains a solid anchor for the next stage of her assent. Of course, Khan's highest-profile action is her case against Amazon, the omnipresent, dystopian poster-child for enshittification, a platform we can't avoid, but which is so haphazardly policed that the bestselling bitter lemon energy drink you order might be bottled piss harvested from its immiserated drivers: https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/20/release-energy/#the-bitterest-lemon In a world of murderous, community-destroying monopolies, Amazon stands out for the sheer number of ways it makes the world worse. Amazon maims its warehouse workers and kills its drivers with impossible quotas. It poisons Black and brown neighborhoods with truck exhaust from its giant depots. It destroys small businesses that sell on its platform. It was part of the studio cabal scheming to destroy actors and writers' livelihoods with unfair contracts and AI. Its audiobook monopoly stole at least $100m from independent authors. It makes goods and services more expensive at every retailer (not just Amazon), and price-gouges on its own storefront: https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens Keeping that scam going requires a lot of skullduggery. A new set of leaked internal Amazon documents shed some light on how that inedible sausage gets made: https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxjbm9/amazon-brags-it-cultivated-california-mayor-with-donations-in-leaked-policy-document Amazon's "Community Engagement Plan 2024" brags about buying off small-town mayors and astroturf groups in its bid to resist regulations that would limit warehouse delivery van emissions in communities of color (Amazon calls this "philanthropic work"). Coincidentally, that "philanthropy" targeted Perris, a town where residents voted for a warehouse tax to repair the roads that had been trashed by fleets of Amazon vans. But the real focus of Amazon's "Community Engagement" is California's AB1000, a bill that will limit the construction of supersized, 100k+ sqft warehouses near daycare centers, schools or rec centers. Secondarily, Amazon is hoping to get California to make it easier to advertise alcohol around kids, to "unlock" California's liquor market. This kind of shameless, mustache-twirling villainry can only go on so long before it meets resistance. One of the longest-running, hardest fought struggles against corporate malfeasance is the farmers' right ro repair fight against John Deere. Deere boobytraps its tractors so that after a farmer repairs a Deere tractor, they have to wait for days, and pay hundreds of dollars, for a Deere technician to come out to the farm and type an unlock code into the tractor's console: https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/ Despite multiple state right-to-repair initiatives and a pending rulemaking from the FTC, Deere is still fucking around. Now, they've found out. US District Court Judge Iain Johnson just handed Deere a scathing, 89-page memo rejecting the company's bid to kill a class action suit brought by its customers: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/deere-must-face-us-farmers-right-to-repair-lawsuits-judge-rules-2023-11-27/?ref=404media.co The memo hearkens back to company founder John Deere, "an innovative farmer and blacksmith who—with his own hands—fundamentally changed the agricultural industry": https://www.404media.co/a-massive-repair-lawsuit-against-john-deere-clears-a-major-hurdle/ Judge Johnson tells Deere's lawyers that the real John Deere "would be deeply disappointed in his namesake corporation," and calls out their lying. You love to see it. This kind of thing is happening all over the world as policymakers, regulators and lawmakers take aim at corporate power. The Australian government just announced that it would force Apple to open up iOS to alternative browser engines: https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/new-digital-competition-laws-for-australia/ This is obscure and technical, but that's why it's so exciting: rather than mumbling broad platitudes about competition and user choice, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's regulation targets a critical leverage point where a small change will deliver huge benefits: https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/consumers-and-small-businesses-to-benefit-from-proposed-new-regulation-of-digital-platforms While there are many browsers in Apple's App Store, they're all just reskinned versions of Safari, all running on the same core engine, Webkit. Webkit is ancient, undermaintained and feature-poor. Crucially, Webkit does not implement the parts of the HTML5 standard needed for WebApps, which would allow app developers a safe channel to offer apps that don't go through Apple's App Store monopoly chokepoint: https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/13/kitbashed/#app-store-tax Now, there's a big jump between announcing this kind of regulation and enacting it. As Mark Nottingham points out, Australia's had an "in principle" commitment to enact a privacy regulation for two successive governments, with no actual regulation in sight: https://techpolicy.social/@mnot/111546662237364754 So we can't take these announcements as a sign to declare victory and stand down. The policymakers who announce these proposals deserve our accolades for the announcement and they require our constant vigilance until they make good on their promises. That's the case in Ireland, where the Coimisiún na Meán has just published a fantastic regulatory proposal for recommendation systems, requiring recommenders to be turned off by default and that recommendations based on "political views, sexuality, religion, ethnicity or health" have to be switched off by default: https://www.cnam.ie/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Draft_Online_Safety_Code_Consultation_Document_Final.pdf It's especially significant that this is coming out of Ireland, a corporate crime haven that has successfully lured the world's tech giants into flying its flag of convenience, with the guarantee of tax evasion and lax regulation: https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town This rule won't enforce itself. It'll require constant vigilance and pressure. There's plenty of ways to do that on a part-time, voluntary basis, but if this kind of thing enflames you enough to make a career out of it, here's a tenure-track job for an infosec professor at Citizen Lab, fearless slayers of high-tech corporate ogres: https://jobs.utoronto.ca/job/Toronto-Assistant-Professor-Information-Security-ON/576463017/ That's all for this week's linkdump. It's time for me to go hole up in my office and wrap presents. When I do, I'll be tuning into the latest Merry Mixmas MP3 of Christmas mashups from DJ Riko: http://www.djriko.com/dls/DJ%20Riko%20-%20Merry%20Mixmas%202023.mp3 Riko's Christmas mashups have been part of my holidays for more than two decades now. He's been making them for 22 years! That's a lot of great holiday mashups: https://www.djriko.com/mixmases.htm This day in history (permalink) #15yrsago William Gibson’s self-destructing poem Agrippa: screen-movie https://agrippa.english.ucsb.edu/post/bibliography-subcategories/video-resources/a-run-of-william-gibsons-agrippa-poem-made-from-playing-a-copy-of-original-1992-agrippa-diskette #15yrsago Chinese “poem” on the cover a scholarly journal is actually an ad for a brothel in Macau https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/chinese-classical-poem-was-brothel-ad-1058031.html #15yrsago Theme Time Radio Hour: With Your Host Bob Dylan — the greatest shuffle-run on Dylan’s MP3 player https://memex.craphound.com/2008/12/09/theme-time-radio-hour-with-your-host-bob-dylan-the-greatest-shuffle-run-on-dylans-mp3-player/ #15yrsago Stem-cell trachea transplant was endangered by EasyJet: “your cell culture is a security risk” https://web.archive.org/web/20081214063827/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/3490549/Easyjet-threatened-to-derail-stem-cell-transplant.html #15yrsago HOWTO Carry a gun onto an airplane https://web.archive.org/web/20081218004445/http://wbztv.com/local/fake.federal.agent.2.874625.html #10yrsago Lessons from Glitch http://20minutegarden.com/2013/12/09/life-lessons-from-glitch-the-game/ #10yrsago TSA seize tiny, itsy-bitsy gun from sock-monkey https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/tsa-agent-confiscates-sock-monkeys-toy-pistol/281-246977307 #10yrsago Spooks of Warcraft: how the NSA infiltrated gamespace https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/09/nsa-spies-online-games-world-warcraft-second-life #10yrsago We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves: spectacular, deep, zingy novel https://memex.craphound.com/2013/12/09/we-are-all-completely-beside-ourselves-spectacular-deep-zingy-novel/ #10yrsago Elsevier censors self-publication by papers’ co-authors https://svpow.com/2013/12/06/elsevier-is-taking-down-papers-from-academia-edu/ #5yrsago Uber is a “bezzle,” doomed to disappoint the suckers who buy into its IPO https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/will-uber-survive-the-next-decade.html #5yrsago Argentine hacker mods Furby so it quotes Borges, creates a “Borgy” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jlDL-j9upg #5yrsago Merry Mixmas! It’s time again for DJ Riko’s badass Christmas mashup http://djriko.com/mixmases.htm #5yrsago Uber forces its drivers to arbitrate, rather than sue, but Uber also won’t arbitrate https://www.reuters.com/article/legal-us-otc-uber/forced-into-arbitration-12500-drivers-claim-uber-wont-pay-fees-to-launch-cases-idUSKBN1O52C6/ Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Naked Capitalism (https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/), Slashdot (https://slashdot.org/), Johnny Ryan (https://twitter.com/johnnyryan), Ron Deibert (https://twitter.com/RonDeibert), OWA (https://mastodon.social/@owa), djriko). Currently writing: A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2024 Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: Don’t Be Evil https://craphound.com/articles/2023/12/03/dont-be-evil/ Recent appearances: AI needs to work with humans — not replace us (CBC IDEAS) https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/artificial-intelligence-provocation-ideas-festival-1.7046841 Explore the Future of the 🔥 Climate and Information Climate (Andrew Revkin) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OGT-cvs4_Q Digital Markets Act; Interoperability; Entrenchment; Copyright; "What-About-Ism" (Digital Markets Research Hub) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm23pO5_WKM Latest books: "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. Upcoming books: The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books, February 2024 Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

https://poliverso.org/display/0477a01e-1039a27e-733396d8c1e9f99a

#10yrsago Medieval kids’ birch-bark doodles https://erikkwakkel.tumblr.com/post/67681966023/medieval-kids-doodles-on-birch-bark-heres

#10yrsago Botnet of 20,000 point-of-sale machines https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/credit-card-fraud-comes-of-age-with-first-known-point-of-sale-botnet/

#5yrsago #JamieDimon is getting fed up with the protesters who “#occupy” him everywhere he goes https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-03/wherever-dimon-goes-activists-turn-his-speeches-into-spectacles

#5yrsago Wells Fargo blames “computer glitch” for its improper #foreclosure on 545 homes https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wells-fargo-loan-modification-error-homeowners-who-went-into-foreclosure-seek-answers/

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#20yrsago #WaltDisney’s FBI files https://memex.craphound.com/2003/12/06/walt-disneys-fbi-files/

#20yrsago #Ska-anthem about #DuctTape https://web.archive.org/web/20031209020640/http://www.ducktapeclub.com/contests/roll/lyrics.asp?entryid=131

#15yrsago Britain’s “Great Firewall” set to restrict access to Wikipedia https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/British_ISPs_restrict_access_to_Wikipedia_amid_child_pornography_allegations

#15yrsago Workers in Argentina taking over dead factories and running them democratically https://www.newstatesman.com/long-reads/2007/08/argentina-workers-movement

#10yrsago What #NelsonMandela’s life tells us about the legitimacy of “democratic nations” https://memex.craphound.com/2013/12/06/what-nelson-mandelas-life-tells-us-about-the-legitimacy-of-democratic-nations/

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Pluralistic: Privacy first (06 Dec 2023)

Today's links Privacy first: A powerful principle with a vast constituency. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2003, 2008, 2013, 2018 Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading Privacy first (permalink) The internet is embroiled in a vicious polycrisis: child safety, surveillance, discrimination, disinformation, polarization, monopoly, journalism collapse – not only have we failed to agree on what to do about these, there's not even a consensus that all of these are problems. But in a new whitepaper, my EFF colleagues Corynne McSherry, Mario Trujillo, Cindy Cohn and Thorin Klosowski advance an exciting proposal that slices cleanly through this Gordian knot, which they call "Privacy First": https://www.eff.org/wp/privacy-first-better-way-address-online-harms Here's the "Privacy First" pitch: whatever is going on with all of the problems of the internet, all of these problems are made worse by commercial surveillance. Worried your kid is being made miserable through targeted ads? No surveillance, no targeting. Worried your uncle was turned into a Qanon by targeted disinformation? No surveillance, no targeting. Worried that racialized people are being targeted for discriminatory hiring or lending by algorithms? No surveillance, no targeting. Worried that nation-state actors are exploiting surveillance data to attack elections, politicians, or civil servants? No surveillance, no surveillance data. Worried that AI is being trained on your personal data? No surveillance, no training data. Worried that the news is being killed by monopolists who exploit the advantage conferred by surveillance ads to cream 51% off every ad-dollar? No surveillance, no surveillance ads. Worried that social media giants maintain their monopolies by filling up commercial moats with surveillance data? No surveillance, no surveillance moat. The fact that commercial surveillance hurts so many groups of people in so many ways is terrible, of course, but it's also an amazing opportunity. Thus far, the individual constituencies for, say, saving the news or protecting kids have not been sufficient to change the way these big platforms work. But when you add up all the groups whose most urgent cause would be significantly improved by comprehensive federal privacy law, vigorously enforced, you get an unstoppable coalition. America is decades behind on privacy. The last really big, broadly applicable privacy law we passed was a law banning video-store clerks from leaking your porn-rental habits to the press (Congress was worried about their own rental histories after a Supreme Court nominee's movie habits were published in the Washington City Paper): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act In the decades since, we've gotten laws that poke around the edges of privacy, like HIPAA (for health) and COPPA (data on under-13s). Both laws are riddled with loopholes and neither is vigorously enforced: https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/09/how-to-make-a-child-safe-tiktok/ Privacy First starts with the idea of passing a fit-for-purpose, 21st century privacy law with real enforcement teeth (a private right of action, which lets contingency lawyers sue on your behalf for a share of the winnings): https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/07/americans-deserve-more-current-american-data-privacy-protection-act Here's what should be in that law: A ban on surveillance advertising: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/03/ban-online-behavioral-advertising Data minimization: a prohibition on collecting or processing your data beyond what is strictly necessary to deliver the service you're seeking. Strong opt-in: None of the consent theater click-throughs we suffer through today. If you don't give informed, voluntary, specific opt-in consent, the service can't collect your data. Ignoring a cookie click-through is not consent, so you can just bypass popups and know you won't be spied on. No preemption. The commercial surveillance industry hates strong state privacy laws like the Ohio biometrics law, and they are hoping that a federal law will pre-empt all those state laws. Federal privacy law should be the floor on privacy nationwide – not the ceiling: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/07/federal-preemption-state-privacy-law-hurts-everyone No arbitration. Your right to sue for violations of your privacy shouldn't be waivable in a clickthrough agreement: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/04/stop-forced-arbitration-data-privacy-legislation No "pay for privacy." Privacy is not a luxury good. Everyone deserves privacy, and the people who can least afford to buy private alternatives are most vulnerable to privacy abuses: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/10/why-getting-paid-your-data-bad-deal No tricks. Getting "consent" with confusing UIs and tiny fine print doesn't count: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/02/designing-welcome-mats-invite-user-privacy-0 A Privacy First approach doesn't merely help all the people harmed by surveillance, it also prevents the collateral damage that today's leading proposals create. For example, laws requiring services to force their users to prove their age ("to protect the kids") are a privacy nightmare. They're also unconstitutional and keep getting struck down. A better way to improve the kid safety of the internet is to ban surveillance. A surveillance ban doesn't have the foreseeable abuses of a law like KOSA (the Kids Online Safety Act), like bans on information about trans healthcare, medication abortions, or banned books: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/kids-online-safety-act-still-huge-danger-our-rights-online When it comes to the news, banning surveillance advertising would pave the way for a shift to contextual ads (ads based on what you're looking at, not who you are). That switch would change the balance of power between news organizations and tech platforms – no media company will ever know as much about their readers as Google or Facebook do, but no tech company will ever know as much about a news outlet's content as the publisher does: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-ban-surveillance-advertising This is a much better approach than the profit-sharing arrangements that are being trialed in Australia, Canada and France (these are sometimes called "News Bargaining Codes" or "Link Taxes"). Funding the news by guaranteeing it a share of Big Tech's profits makes the news into partisans for that profit – not the Big Tech watchdogs we need them to be. When Torstar, Canada's largest news publisher, struck a profit-sharing deal with Google, they killed their longrunning, excellent investigative "Defanging Big Tech" series. A privacy law would also protect access to healthcare, especially in the post-Roe era, when Big Tech surveillance data is being used to target people who visit abortion clinics or secure medication abortions. It would end the practice of employers forcing workers to wear health-monitoring gadget. This is characterized as a "voluntary" way to get a "discount" on health insurance – but in practice, it's a way of punishing workers who refuse to let their bosses know about their sleep, fertility, and movements. A privacy law would protect marginalized people from all kinds of digital discrimination, from unfair hiring to unfair lending to unfair renting. The commercial surveillance industry shovels endless quantities of our personal information into the furnaces that fuel these practices. A privacy law shuts off the fuel supply: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/digital-privacy-legislation-civil-rights-legislation There are plenty of ways that AI will make our lives worse, but copyright won't fix it. For issues of labor exploitation (especially by creative workers), the answer lies in labor law: https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/01/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship/ And for many of AI's other harms, a muscular privacy law would starve AI of some of its most potentially toxic training data: https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-updated-terms-to-use-customer-data-to-train-ai-2023-9 Meanwhile, if you're worried about foreign governments targeting Americans – officials, military, or just plain folks – a privacy law would cut off one of their most prolific and damaging source of information. All those lawmakers trying to ban Tiktok because it's a surveillance tool? What about banning surveillance, instead? Monopolies and surveillance go together like peanut butter and chocolate. Some of the biggest tech empires were built on mountains of nonconsensually harvested private data – and they use that data to defend their monopolies. Legal privacy guarantees are a necessary precursor to data portability and interoperability: https://www.eff.org/wp/interoperability-and-privacy Once we are guaranteed a right to privacy, lawmakers and regulators can order tech giants to tear down their walled gardens, rather than relying on tech companies to (selectively) defend our privacy: https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar The point here isn't that privacy fixes all the internet's woes. The policy is "privacy first," not "just privacy." When it comes to making a new, good internet, there's plenty of room for labor law, civil rights legislation, antitrust, and other legal regimes. But privacy has the biggest constituency, gets us the most bang for the buck, and has the fewest harmful side-effects. It's a policy we can all agree on, even if we don't agree on much else. It's a coalition in potentia that would be unstoppable in reality. Privacy first! Then – everything else! (Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) After $500m Zuckerberg donation, Harvard university gutted its disinfo team studying Facebook https://boingboing.net/2023/12/04/after-500m-zuckerberg-donation-harvard-university-gutted-its-disinfo-team-studying-facebook.html Silicon Valley vs. teenage girls https://www.garbageday.email/p/silicon-valley-vs-teenage-girls Writing Documentation for Your House https://luke.hsiao.dev/blog/housing-documentation/ (h/t Jessamyn West) This day in history (permalink) #20yrsago Walt Disney’s FBI files https://memex.craphound.com/2003/12/06/walt-disneys-fbi-files/ #20yrsago Ska-anthem about duct tape https://web.archive.org/web/20031209020640/http://www.ducktapeclub.com/contests/roll/lyrics.asp?entryid=131 #15yrsago Britain’s “Great Firewall” set to restrict access to Wikipedia https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/British_ISPs_restrict_access_to_Wikipedia_amid_child_pornography_allegations #15yrsago Workers in Argentina taking over dead factories and running them democratically https://www.newstatesman.com/long-reads/2007/08/argentina-workers-movement #10yrsago rWhat Nelson Mandela’s life tells us about the legitimacy of “democratic nations” https://memex.craphound.com/2013/12/06/what-nelson-mandelas-life-tells-us-about-the-legitimacy-of-democratic-nations/ #10yrsago Medieval kids’ birch-bark doodles https://erikkwakkel.tumblr.com/post/67681966023/medieval-kids-doodles-on-birch-bark-heres #10yrsago Botnet of 20,000 point-of-sale machines https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/credit-card-fraud-comes-of-age-with-first-known-point-of-sale-botnet/ #5yrsago Jamie Dimon is getting fed up with the protesters who “occupy” him everywhere he goes https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-03/wherever-dimon-goes-activists-turn-his-speeches-into-spectacles #5yrsago Wells Fargo blames “computer glitch” for its improper foreclosure on 545 homes https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wells-fargo-loan-modification-error-homeowners-who-went-into-foreclosure-seek-answers/ #5yrsago The third annual AI Now report: 10 more ways to make AI safe for human flourishing https://web.archive.org/web/20181206184028/https://ainowinstitute.org/AI_Now_2018_Report.pdf #5yrsago Europe’s biggest sports leagues and movie studios disavow #Article13, say it will give #BigTech even more control https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/12/letter-eu-european-film-companies-and-sports-leagues-disavow-article-13-say-it #5yrsago On January 1, America gets its public domain back: join us at the Internet Archive on Jan 25 to celebrate https://creativecommons.org/2018/12/05/join-us-for-a-grand-re-opening-of-the-public-domain/ Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Slashdot (https://slashdot.org/). Currently writing: A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2024 Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: Don’t Be Evil https://craphound.com/articles/2023/12/03/dont-be-evil/ Upcoming appearances: The Geneva Dialog (Dec 7) https://genevadialogue.ch/event/geneva-manual-event/ Recent appearances: AI needs to work with humans — not replace us (CBC IDEAS) https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/artificial-intelligence-provocation-ideas-festival-1.7046841 Explore the Future of the 🔥 Climate and Information Climate (Andrew Revkin) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OGT-cvs4_Q Digital Markets Act; Interoperability; Entrenchment; Copyright; "What-About-Ism" (Digital Markets Research Hub) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm23pO5_WKM Latest books: "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. Upcoming books: The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books, February 2024 Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

https://poliverso.org/display/0477a01e-123967bf-9bca11de633d0547

#10yrsago Orange UK plumbs the depths of insulting, stupid marketing, finds a new low https://memex.craphound.com/2013/12/05/orange-uk-plumbs-the-depths-of-insulting-stupid-marketing-finds-a-new-low/

#5yrsago What it’s like to be a woman reporter on a #cryptocurrency cruise where nearly all the other women are sex-workers https://web.archive.org/web/20181205144647/https://breakermag.com/trapped-at-sea-with-cryptos-nouveau-riche/

#5yrsago See you in court: amid protests, shameless #WisconsinGOP neuters the incoming governor in an all-night, lame-duck session https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2018/1205/Wisconsin-GOP-pass-slew-of-measures-during-lameduck-session

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#10yrsago #NSA collecting unimaginable quantities of mobile phone #LocationData for guilt-by-association data-mining https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-tracking-cellphone-locations-worldwide-snowden-documents-show/2013/12/04/5492873a-5cf2-11e3-bc56-c6ca94801fac_story.html

#10yrsago Democratic lawmakers share a squalorous house in DC https://edition.cnn.com/2013/12/04/politics/real-alpha-house/index.html

#10yrsago #RobFord police document: allegations of heroin use and more https://torontolife.com/category/city/toronto-politics/2013/12/04/new-bombshells-from-police-documents-suggest-rob-ford-may-have-tried-heroin-been-blackmailed/

#10yrsago #NYPD shoot at unarmed man, hit bystanders, charge man for making them shoot https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/05/nyregion/unarmed-man-is-charged-with-wounding-bystanders-shot-by-police-near-times-square.html?smid=pl-share

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#15yrsago Berlin hacker con will use #RFID badges to simulate life in a totalitarian panopticon https://events.ccc.de/congress/2008/wiki/OpenBeacon_with_OpenAMD/

#15yrsago RIP, #ForrestJAckerman https://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-ackerman6-2008dec06-story.html

#15yrsago Googling Security: book that opens your eyes to how much you disclose to Google https://memex.craphound.com/2008/12/05/googling-security-book-that-opens-your-eyes-to-how-much-you-disclose-to-google/

#10yrsago 75% of American silent feature films lost https://variety.com/2013/film/news/library-of-congress-only-14-of-u-s-silent-films-survive-1200915020/

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Pluralistic: Pedophiles for Purdue Pharma (05 Dec 2023)

Today's links Pedophiles for Purdue Pharma: With amici like these… Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2008, 2013, 2018, 2022 Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading Pedophiles for Purdue Pharma (permalink) It's not merely that the Sacklers – a multigenerational, ultra-wealthy drug-pusher dynasty – made billions while murdering hundreds of thousands of Americans by lying about the safety of Oxycontin, the flagship product of their Purdue Pharma drug company. It's that they got away with it. After a decade-long crime spree in which the family used a combination of elite philanthropy and vicious legal threats against critics (including me!) to maintain a squeaky-clean image, the Sackler name is finally a synonym for mass murder, and will forever be a curse. But though they lost their name, they kept their billions. In so doing, the Sacklers exposed the rot at the heart of American bankruptcy, bringing an obscure, deeply corrupt system into the public eye. Bankruptcy has always been with us. As Michael Hudson reminds us, "Debts that can't be paid, won't be paid." Without some system for discharging debt, control over the entire productive capacity of a society is eventually shifted to a hereditary creditor class, which precipitates calamity: https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/08/jubilant/#construire-des-passerelles But America has a bifurcated bankruptcy system. For normal people, bankruptcy is more punishment than relief. For the ultra-wealthy, bankruptcy is a system of total impunity for ghastly crimes. Simply undertake those crimes through the "personage" of an LLC and you're on easy street: https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/bankruptcy-protects-fake-people-brutalizes-real-ones/ (This is America, so of course there's a racial dimension to punishment-by-bankruptcy. Broke white people are funneled into quick means of discharging debts while people of color are pushed into "expensive and lengthy repayment plans") https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2376 Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. At a certain point, it wasn't possible for the Sacklers to maintain their cuddly billionaire charade. It was time to shut down the Big Store con, cool the mark, and blow town. For the Sacklers, that meant going to court. The Sacklers were facing hundreds of billions of dollars in personal liability for their individual and collective corrupt acts. They were being sued by estates, by survivors, by cities, by states, and by the USA itself. If even a fraction of these claims succeeded, the Sacklers would be wiped out. To get away clean, the Sacklers needed a plan. Enter the "Third-Party Nonconsensual Release," a bizarre and wildly corrupt feature of elite bankruptcy. The Sacklers offered the court a deal: they would take the family business, Purdue Pharma, into bankruptcy, and kick in a few billion out of their collective hoard. In return, the court would settle all claims against both Purdue and the family. The family would not have to go bankrupt. They could keep their billions. And no one would be allowed to sue them for their opioid killing-spree, ever: https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/18/lets-make-a-deal/#art-of-the-deal You can't make this argument in front of just any judge. It takes a Very Special judge, with a Very Special brain, to grant a proposal like this. There were just three courts in the USA where the Sacklers were likely to find a willing accomplice: two in Texas, one in New York. They chose the Empire State. To get their case in front of Judge Robert Drain, the Sacklers opened a tiny, empty office in White Plains, New York. They waited 190 days (satisfying the six-month residency requirement with a few days to spare), and then filed in the Southern District of New York. They hid invisible metadata in the PDF of their filing, which tricked the Case Management/Electronic Case Files system into putting their case in front of Drain. They even pre-captioned their brief with "RDD" for Robert D Drain: https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/23/a-bankrupt-process/#sacklers The Sacklers' plan worked. Judge Drain nonconsensually settled all the third-party claims against the Sacklers, without requiring the Sacklers to give up the majority of their fortunes. Then, Drain resigned from the bench and took a cushy job with the BigLaw corporate crime enablers at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/judge-who-oversaw-purdue-sears-bankruptcies-join-law-firm-skadden-2023-04-13/ But the story doesn't end here. While this kind of bankruptcy judge shopping and third-party nonconsensual releases had been SOP for some of the most vicious and unrepentant institutional criminals of the century, the Sacklers' impunity was so egregious, so revolting, that the Supreme Court (yes, this Supreme Court!) agreed to hear a case challenging its constitutionalilty: https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/11/justice-delayed/#justice-redeemed As the hearing looms, various "friends of the court" are filing amicus briefs, trying to ensure that the Supremes understand what's at stake here. This is a normal part of any Supreme Court case, but what's less normal is who these amici are, and what they want the court to understand. Writing for the New York Times, Abbie Van Sickle rounds up an eye-popping summary of these amici and their concerns. Tldr? There are a lot of pedophiles who are briefing for the Sacklers: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/03/us/politics/oxycontin-supreme-court-purdue-sacklers.html First on deck is the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, who remind the court that nonconsensual third-party releases were essential to the Catholic Church's ability to walk away from the untold number of children abused by the clergy who were protected by the Church: https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/23/23-124/288262/20231027145345921_23-124%20bsac%20USCCB%20Purdue%20Pharma.pdf Next up are the Boy Scouts of America. Like the Bishops, the Scouts want the Court to remember that the decades of sexual abuse committed by scoutmasters who were protected by the BSA while their victims were marginalized and silenced would have destroyed the Scouts if the victims had been able to get justice. It was only through the magic of the Third-Party Nonconsensual Release that the BSA was able to live on, even after decades of unspeakable crimes. However the case pans out, there is change in the air. Johnson & Johnson's bid to escape liability for the years it spent knowingly telling women to dust their vulvas with asbestos failed (thank goodness): https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/01/j-and-j-jk/#risible-gambit Bankruptcy scholars are taking aim at the obviously corrupt practice of bankruptcy shopping: https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/07/hr-4193/#shoppers-choice And the judges who specialize in these Third-Party Nonconsensual Releases are dropping like flies. Not long after Judge Drain went through the revolving door at a BigLaw firm, (ex-)Judge David Jones was forced to resign when it emerged that he was romantically involved with a lawyer who kept winning huge windfalls for her clients in his court: https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/16/texas-two-step/#david-jones There's never just one ant. The kinds of judges, lawyers, law firms and corporations who use the bankruptcy system this way are bound to be corrupt in many, many other ways as well. Rooting out elite bankruptcy fraud doesn't have to stop in bankruptcy court. Anyone arrogant and immoral enough to pull these scams will have plenty of other skeletons in their closets. (Image: Jesse Collins, CC BY 3.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) Please Help Duane Wilkins Pay His Medical Debt https://www.gofundme.com/f/please-help-duane-wilkins-pay-his-medical-debt (h/t Jon Lasser) Inside America's School Internet Censorship Machine https://www.wired.com/story/inside-americas-school-internet-censorship-machine/ What Drives This Madness On Small Modular Nuclear Reactors? https://cleantechnica.com/2023/11/30/what-drives-this-madness-on-small-modular-nuclear-reactors/ (h/t Slashdot) This day in history (permalink) #15yrsago Berlin hacker con will use RFID badges to simulate life in a totalitarian panopticon https://events.ccc.de/congress/2008/wiki/OpenBeacon_with_OpenAMD/ #15yrsago RIP, Forrest J Ackerman https://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-ackerman6-2008dec06-story.html #15yrsago Googling Security: book that opens your eyes to how much you disclose to Google https://memex.craphound.com/2008/12/05/googling-security-book-that-opens-your-eyes-to-how-much-you-disclose-to-google/ #10yrsago 75% of American silent feature films lost https://variety.com/2013/film/news/library-of-congress-only-14-of-u-s-silent-films-survive-1200915020/ #10yrsago NSA collecting unimaginable quantities of mobile phone location data for guilt-by-association data-mining https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-tracking-cellphone-locations-worldwide-snowden-documents-show/2013/12/04/5492873a-5cf2-11e3-bc56-c6ca94801fac_story.html #10yrsago Democratic lawmakers share a squalorous house in DC https://edition.cnn.com/2013/12/04/politics/real-alpha-house/index.html #10yrsago Rob Ford police document: allegations of heroin use and more https://torontolife.com/category/city/toronto-politics/2013/12/04/new-bombshells-from-police-documents-suggest-rob-ford-may-have-tried-heroin-been-blackmailed/ #10yrsago NYPD shoot at unarmed man, hit bystanders, charge man for making them shoot https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/05/nyregion/unarmed-man-is-charged-with-wounding-bystanders-shot-by-police-near-times-square.html?smid=pl-share #10yrsago Orange UK plumbs the depths of insulting, stupid marketing, finds a new low https://memex.craphound.com/2013/12/05/orange-uk-plumbs-the-depths-of-insulting-stupid-marketing-finds-a-new-low/ #5yrsago What it’s like to be a woman reporter on a cryptocurrency cruise where nearly all the other women are sex-workers https://web.archive.org/web/20181205144647/https://breakermag.com/trapped-at-sea-with-cryptos-nouveau-riche/ #5yrsago See you in court: amid protests, shameless Wisconsin GOP neuters the incoming governor in an all-night, lame-duck session https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2018/1205/Wisconsin-GOP-pass-slew-of-measures-during-lameduck-session #5yrsago British Member of Parliament publishes 250 pages of damning internal Facebook documents that had been sealed by a US court https://www.parliament.uk/globalassets/documents/commons-committees/culture-media-and-sport/Note-by-Chair-and-selected-documents-ordered-from-Six4Three.pdf #5yrsago The longest-serving Congressman in US history proposes a four fixes for American democracy https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/john-dingell-how-restore-faith-government/577222/ #5yrsago RIP, George HW Bush: a mass-murderer and war-criminal https://theintercept.com/2018/12/05/george-h-w-bush-1924-2018-american-war-criminal/ #5yrsago Trump cybersecurity advisor Rudy Giuliani has no idea how the internet works https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/rudy-giuliani-doesnt-seem-to-know-how-the-internet-works.html #5yrsago Not just breaches: Never, ever use Quora https://waxy.org/2018/12/why-you-should-never-ever-use-quora/ #5yrsago Obamacare study: 25% decline in home delinquencies among newly insured poor people https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-04/how-access-to-obamacare-cuts-late-housing-payments #5yrsago Poland rejects the EU’s copyright censorship plans, calls it #ACTA2 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/11/poland-saved-europe-acta-can-they-save-us-acta2 #1yrago Monopoly's event-horizon: The true capitalist singularity https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/05/eldritch-physics/#wouldnt-start-from-here Banning surveillance ads and banning drm as good politics Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: James Boyle (http://james-boyle.com/). Currently writing: A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2024 Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: Don’t Be Evil https://craphound.com/articles/2023/12/03/dont-be-evil/ Upcoming appearances: The Lost Cause at Flyleaf Books (Chapel Hill), Dec 5 https://www.flyleafbooks.com/doctorow-2023 The Geneva Dialog (Dec 7) https://genevadialogue.ch/event/geneva-manual-event/ Recent appearances: Explore the Future of the 🔥 Climate and Information Climate (Andrew Revkin) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OGT-cvs4_Q Digital Markets Act; Interoperability; Entrenchment; Copyright; "What-About-Ism" (Digital Markets Research Hub) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm23pO5_WKM Science fiction for a dystopian present (Institute of Art and Ideas) https://iai.tv/video/science-fiction-for-a-dystopian-present-cory-doctorow?_auid=2020 Latest books: "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. Upcoming books: The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books, February 2024 Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

https://poliverso.org/display/0477a01e-562e3560-a964467159552607

#10yrsago Podcasting Lawful Interception, a #LittleBrother story https://ia800903.us.archive.org/6/items/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_257/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_257_Lawful_interception_01.mp3

#10yrsago Terabyte laptop SSDs for $435! https://memex.craphound.com/2013/12/03/terabyte-laptop-ssds-for-435/

#10yrsago Charity sends Amazon a cake celebrating 3d anniversary of unpaid invoice https://twitter.com/MusicBrainz/status/408000817048731648

#10yrsago #BluesBrothers mall car-chase recreated in Lego https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJ_uqlNgSU8

#10yrsago #NSA’s talking points for friends and family — rebutted https://web.archive.org/web/20131202215105/http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2013/12/02/nsa-sent-home-talking-points-for-employees-to-use-in-conversations-with-family-friends-during-holidays/

8/

#15yrsago What is non-commercial use? #CreativeCommons survey https://web.archive.org/web/20081210100702/https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/11045

#15yrsago Women in science group want a #FemaleDoctorWho https://web.archive.org/web/20081204091523/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/celebritynews/3538551/Doctor-Who-should-be-a-woman-say-female-scientists.html

#15yrsago US military interrogator decries #torture — worse than useless https://www.democracynow.org/2008/12/3/us_interrogator_in_iraq_says_torture

#10yrsago UN counter-terrorism rapporteur announces investigation into #NSA and #GCHQ surveillance https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/02/guardian-terrorism-snowden-alan-rusbridger-free-press

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Pluralistic: Francis Spufford's "Cahokia Jazz" (04 Dec 2023)

Today's links Francis Spufford's "Cahokia Jazz": A stunning alternate history that fires on every cylinder. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2003, 2008, 2013, 2018, 2022 Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading Francis Spufford's "Cahokia Jazz" (permalink) Francis Spufford's Cahokia Jazz is a fucking banger: it's a taut, unguessable whuddunit, painted in ultrablack noir, set in an alternate Jazz Age in a world where indigenous people never ceded most the west to the USA. It's got gorgeously described jazz music, a richly realized modern indigenous society, and a spectacular romance. It's amazing: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Cahokia-Jazz/Francis-Spufford/9781668025451 Cahokia is the capital city of Deseret, a majority Catholic, majority indigenous state at the western frontier of the USA. It swirls with industry, wealth, and racial politics, serving as both a refuge from Jim Crow and a hive of Klan activity. Joe Barrow is new in town, a veteran who survived the trenches of WWI and moved to Cahokia with his army buddy, Phineas Drummond, where they both quickly rose through the police ranks to become detectives. We meet Joe and Phin on a frigid government building rooftop in the predawn night, attending a grisly murder. Someone has laid out a man across a skylight, cut his throat, split his chest open, and excised his heart. This Aztec-inspired killing points at Cahokian indigenous independence gangs, some of whom embrace an apocryphal tale of being descended from Mesoamerican conquerors in the distant past. That makes this more than a mere ugly killing – it's a political flashpoint. The Klan insists that Cahokia's system of communal land ownership is a form of communism (Russia never ceded Alaska in this world, so the USSR is now extending tendrils across the Bering Strait). They also insist that Cahokians' reverence for the Sun and the Moon – indigenous royals who have formally ceded power to elected leaders – makes them a threat to democracy. Finally, the Cahokians' fusion of Catholocism with traditional faith makes the spritually suspect. A rooftop blood-sacrifice could cause simmering political tension to boil over, and for ever white oligarch drooling at the thought of enclosing the shared land of Deseret, there are a thousand useful idiots in white hoods. Joe and Phin now have to solve the murder – before the city explodes. But Phin seems more interested in pinning the case on an Indian – any Indian – than he is on solving the murder. And Joe – an indigenous orphan who has neither the language nor the culture that the Cahokians expect him to have – is reappraising his long habit of deferring to Phin. This is the setup for a delicious whodunnit with a large helping of what if…? but Spufford doesn't stop there. Joe, you see, is a jazz pianist, and his old bandmates are back in town, and one thing leads to another and before you know it he's sitting in with them at a speakeasy. This gives Spufford a chance to roll out some of the most evocative, delicious descriptions of jazz since Doctorow's Ragtime (no relation): https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/41529/ragtime-by-e-l-doctorow/9780812978186 It's not just the jazz. This is a book that fires on every cylinder: there's brilliant melee (and a major battle set-piece that's stunning), a love storyline, gunplay, and a murder mystery that kept me guessing right to the end. There's fakeouts and comeuppances, bravery and treachery, and above all, a sense of possibility. Most of what I know about Cahokia – and the giant mounds it left behind near St Louis – I learned from David Graeber and David Wengrow's brilliant work of heterodox history, The Dawn of Everything: https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/08/three-freedoms/#anti-fatalism Graeber and Wengrow's project is to make us reassess the blank spaces in our historical record, the ways of living that we have merely guessed at, based on fragments and suppositions. They point out that these inferences are vastly overdetermined, and that there are many other guesses that fit the facts equally well, or even better. This is a powerful message, one that insists that history – and thus the future – is contingent and up for grabs. We don't have to live the way we do, and we haven't always lived this way. We might live differently in the future. In evoking a teeming, indigenous metropolis, conjured out of minor historical divergences, Spufford follows Graeber and Wengrow in cracking apart inevitability and letting all the captive possibility flow out. The fact that he does this in a first rate novel makes the accomplishment doubly impressive – and enjoyable. Hey look at this (permalink) Small Frame, Infinite Canvas https://timmb.com/small-frame-infinite-canvas/ It’s All Bullshit https://thebaffler.com/latest/its-all-bullshit-tan (h/t Naked Capitalism) Plagiarism and You(Tube) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDp3cB5fHXQ (h/t Metafilter) This day in history (permalink) #20yrsago What happens when you give gamers intellectual property rights? https://web.archive.org/web/20031205163841/https://research.yale.edu/lawmeme/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1290 #15yrsago Little Nemo in Slumberland, Many More Splendid Sundays — a new gigantic collection of Winsor McCay’s lush and surreal comics https://memex.craphound.com/2008/12/03/little-nemo-in-slumberland-many-more-splendid-sundays-a-new-gigantic-collection-of-winsor-mccays-lush-and-surreal-comics/ #20yrsago Stephen King: forget piracy, boomers are just tired of buying crap https://ew.com/article/2007/02/01/stephen-king-laziness-baby-boomers/ #15yrsago Britain ordered to destroy its database of innocents’ DNA https://web.archive.org/web/20130905083503/https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2008/dec/05/dna-database-civilliberties #15yrsago What is non-commercial use? Creative Commons survey https://web.archive.org/web/20081210100702/https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/11045 #15yrsago Women in science group want a female Doctor Who https://web.archive.org/web/20081204091523/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/celebritynews/3538551/Doctor-Who-should-be-a-woman-say-female-scientists.html #15yrsago US military interrogator decries torture — worse than useless https://www.democracynow.org/2008/12/3/us_interrogator_in_iraq_says_torture #10yrsago UN counter-terrorism rapporteur announces investigation into NSA and GCHQ surveillance https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/02/guardian-terrorism-snowden-alan-rusbridger-free-press #10yrsago Podcasting Lawful Interception, a Little Brother story https://ia800903.us.archive.org/6/items/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_257/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_257_Lawful_interception_01.mp3 #10yrsago Terabyte laptop SSDs for $435! https://memex.craphound.com/2013/12/03/terabyte-laptop-ssds-for-435/ #10yrsago Charity sends Amazon a cake celebrating 3d anniversary of unpaid invoice https://twitter.com/MusicBrainz/status/408000817048731648 #10yrsago Blues Brothers mall car-chase recreated in Lego https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJ_uqlNgSU8 #10yrsago NSA’s talking points for friends and family — rebutted https://web.archive.org/web/20131202215105/http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2013/12/02/nsa-sent-home-talking-points-for-employees-to-use-in-conversations-with-family-friends-during-holidays/ #5yrsago Malware authors have figured out how to get Google to do “irreversible takedowns” of the sites they compete with https://torrentfreak.com/scammers-hit-pirate-game-sites-with-irreversible-google-takedowns-181130/ #5yrsago Facebook lured charities to its platform, then abandoned them once they got hacked https://www.wired.com/story/nonprofits-facebook-get-hacked-need-help/ #5yrsago Thousands of Wisconsinites turn out to protest outgoing Republicans’ plan to seize power after electoral defeat https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/12/04/coup-protests-engulf-wisconsin-capitol-outgoing-scott-walker-and-gop-move-cripple #5yrsago Facebook made itself indispensable to media companies, “pivoted to video,” changed its mind, and triggered a industrywide mass extinction event https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-digital-media-bubble-is-bursting-thats-hurting-a-generation-of-promising-young-journalists/2018/12/03/d7887d30-f6f2-11e8-8c9a-860ce2a8148f_story.html #5yrsago Med students are being paid to act as Instagram “influencers” on behalf of cosmetics and other products https://slate.com/technology/2018/11/medical-students-instagram-influencers-ethics-debate.html #5yrsago Spiegel claims ties between Germany’s neofascist movement and secretive billionaire https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/billionaire-backing-may-have-helped-launch-afd-a-1241029.html #5yrsago A seemingly ingenious, simple solution to nonrepresentative government and gerrymandering https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevensalzberg/2018/11/12/the-problem-with-our-democracy-isnt-gerrymandering-its-integers/?sh=5bd7e9f2899c #5yrsago We don’t know how much Village Roadshow paid to buy Australia’s new censoring copyright law https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/dec/02/village-roadshow-donates-millions-to-major-parties-while-lobbying-on-piracy #5yrsago The best Christmas computer and electronics ads of 1980 https://paleotronic.com/2018/12/02/paleotronics-12-years-of-christmas-year-one-1980/ #5yrsago An appreciation of the long-lost MP3 player skins of yesteryear https://twitter.com/fart/status/1069312730249650176 #1yrago The urinary tract infection business-model https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/03/painful-burning-dribble/#law-of-intended-consequences #1yrago Yes, It’s Censorship https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/04/yes-its-censorship/ Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2024 Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: Don’t Be Evil https://craphound.com/articles/2023/12/03/dont-be-evil/ Upcoming appearances: The Lost Cause at Flyleaf Books (Chapel Hill), Dec 5 https://www.flyleafbooks.com/doctorow-2023 The Geneva Dialog (Dec 7) https://genevadialogue.ch/event/geneva-manual-event/ Recent appearances: Explore the Future of the 🔥 Climate and Information Climate (Andrew Revkin) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OGT-cvs4_Q Digital Markets Act; Interoperability; Entrenchment; Copyright; "What-About-Ism" (Digital Markets Research Hub) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm23pO5_WKM Science fiction for a dystopian present (Institute of Art and Ideas) https://iai.tv/video/science-fiction-for-a-dystopian-present-cory-doctorow?_auid=2020 Latest books: "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. Upcoming books: The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books, February 2024 Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

https://poliverso.org/display/0477a01e-60007fa8-06c8e3ee486f4f5e

#10yrsago RIP, #RoyTrumbull: happy mutant, TV/radio engineering legend, podcaster https://memex.craphound.com/2013/12/02/rip-roy-trumbull-happy-mutant-tv-radio-engineering-legend-podcaster/

#10yrsago Leaked UN document: countries want to end #WarOnDrugs and prohibition https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/nov/30/un-drugs-policy-split-leaked-paper

#10yrsago How big corporations and government spy agencies surveil and sabotage activist groups https://web.archive.org/web/20131121063549/http://www.corporatepolicy.org/spookybusiness.pdf

#10yrsago 84% of stocks owned by richest 10% of Americans https://money.com/stock-ownership-10-percent-richest/

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Pluralistic: Stinkpump Linkdump (02 Dec 2023)

Today's links Stinkpump Linkdump: With a bonus jarring shift in tone. This day in history: 2003, 2008, 2013, 2018, 2022 Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading Stinkpump Linkdump (permalink) Once again, I greet the weekend with more assorted links than I can fit into my nearly-daily newsletter, so it's time for another linkdump. This is my eleventh such assortment; here are the previous volumes: https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/ I've written a lot about Biden's excellent appointees, from his National Labor Relations Board general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo to Consumer Financial Protection Bureau chair Rohit Chopra to FTC Chair Lina Khan to DoJ antitrust boss Jonathan Kanter: https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/14/prop-22-never-again/#norms-code-laws-markets But I've also written a bunch about how Biden's appointment strategy is an incoherent mess, with excellent appointees picked by progressives on the #UnityTaskForce being cancelled out by appointees given to the party's reactionary finance wing, producing a muddle that often cancels itself out: https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/08/fiduciaries/#but-muh-freedumbs It's not just that the finance wing of the Democrats chooses assholes (though they do!), it's that they choose comedic bunglers. The Dems haven't put anyone in government who's as much of an embarrassment as George Santos, but they keep trying. The latest self-inflicted Democratic Party injury is Prashant Bhardjwan, a serial liar and con-artist who is, incredibly, the Biden Administration's pick to oversee fintech for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC): https://www.americanbanker.com/news/did-the-occ-hire-a-con-artist-to-oversee-fintech When the 42 year old Bhardjwan was named Deputy Comptroller and Chief Financial Technology Officer for OCC, the announcement touted his "nearly 30 years of experience serving in a variety of roles across the financial sector." Apparently Bhardjwan joined the finance sector at the age of 12. He's the Doogie Houser of Wall Street: https://www.occ.gov/news-issuances/news-releases/2023/nr-occ-2023-31.html That wasn't the only lie on Bhardjwan's CV. He falsely claimed to have served as CIO of Fifth Third Bank from 2006-2010. Fifth Third has never heard of him: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/the-occ-crowned-its-first-chief-fintech-officer-his-work-history-was-a-web-of-lies Bhardjwan told a whole slew of these easily caught lies, suggesting that OCC didn't do even a cursory background search on this guy before putting him in charge of fintech – that is, the radioactively scammy sector that gave us FTX and innumerable crypto scams, to say nothing of the ever-sleazier payday lending sector: https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/01/usury/#tech-exceptionalism When it comes to appointing corrupt officials, the Biden administration has lots of company. Lots of eyebrows went up when the UN announced that the next climate Conference of the Parties (COP) would be chaired by Sultan Ahmed Al-Jaber, who is also the chair of Dubai's national oil company. Then the other shoe dropped: leaks revealed that Al-Jaber had colluded with the Saudis to use COP28 to get poor Asian and African nations hooked on oil: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-67508331 There's an obvious reason for this conspiracy: the rich world is weaning itself off of fossil fuels. Today, renewables are vastly cheaper than oil and there's no end in sight to the plummeting costs of solar, wind and geothermal. While global electrification faces powerful logistical and material challenges, these are surmountable. Electrification is a solvable problem: https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/09/practical-visionary/#popular-engineering And once we do solve that problem, we will forever transform our species' relationship to energy. As Deb Chachra explains in her brilliant new book How Infrastructure Works, we would only need to capture 0.4% of the solar radiation that reaches the Earth's surface to give every person on earth the energy budget of a Canadian (AKA, a "cold American"): https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/17/care-work/#charismatic-megaprojects If COP does its job, we will basically stop using oil, forever. This is an existential threat to the ruling cliques of petrostates from Canada to the UAE to Saudi. As Bill McKibben writes, this isn't the first time a monied rich-world industry that had corrupted its host governments faced a similar crisis: https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/a-corrupted-cop Big Tobacco spent decades fueling science denial, funneling money to sellout scientists who deliberately cast doubt on both sound science and the very idea that we could know anything. As Tim Harford describes in The Data Detective, Darrell Huff's 1954 classic How to Lie With Statistics was part of a tobacco-industry-funded project to undermine faith in statistics itself (the planned sequel was called How To Lie With Cancer Statistics): https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/04/how-to-truth/#harford But anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. When the families of the people murdered by tobacco disinformation campaigns started winning eye-popping judgments against the tobacco industry, the companies shifted their marketing to the Global South, on the theory that they could murder poor brown people with impunity long after rich people in the north forced an end to their practice. Big Tobacco had a willing partner in Uncle Sam for this project: the US Trade Representative arm-twisted the world's poorest countries into accepting "Investor-State Dispute Settlements" as part of their treaties. These ISDS clauses allowed tobacco companies to sue governments that passed tobacco control legislation and force them to reverse their democratically enacted laws: https://ash.org/what-is-isds-and-what-does-it-mean-for-tobacco-control/ As McKibben points out, the oil/climate-change playbook is just an update to the tobacco/cancer-denial conspiracy (indeed, the same think-tanks and PR agencies are behind both). The "Oil Development Sustainability Programme" – the Orwellian name the Saudis gave to their plan to push oil on poor countries – maps nearly perfectly onto Big Tobacco's attack on the Global South. Nearly perfectly: second-hand smoke in Indonesia won't give Americans cancer, but convincing Africa to go hard on fossil fuels will contribute to an uninhabitable planet for everyone, not just poor people. This is an important wrinkle. Wealthy countries have repeatedly demonstrated a deep willingness to profit from death and privation in the poor world – but we're less tolerant when it's our own necks on the line. What's more, it's far easier to put the far-off risks of emissions out of your mind than it is to ignore the present-day sleaze and hypocrisy of corporate crooks. When I quit smoking, 23 years ago, my doctor told me that if my only motivation was avoiding cancer 30 years from now, I'd find it hard to keep from yielding to temptation as withdrawal set in. Instead, my doctor counseled me to find an immediate reason to stay off the smokes. For me, that was the realization that every pack of cigarettes I bought was enriching the industry that invented the denial playbook that the climate wreckers were using to render our planet permanently unsuited for human habitation. Once I hit on that, resisting tobacco got much easier: https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/03/i-quit/ Perhaps OPEC Secretary General Haitham Al-Ghais is worried about that the increasing consensus that Big Oil cynically and knowingly created this crisis. That would explain his new flight of absurdity, claiming that the world is being racist to oil companies, "unjustly vilifying" the industry for its role in the climate emergency: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/27/opec-says-oil-industry-unjustly-vilified-ahead-of-climate-talks-.html Words aren't deeds, but words have power. The way we talk about things makes a difference to how we act on those things. When discussions of Israel-Palestine get hung up on words, it's easy to get frustrated. The labels we apply to the rain of death and the plight of hostages are so much less important than the death and the hostages themselves. But how we name the thing will have an enormous impact on what happens next. Take the word "genocide," which Israel hawks insist must not be applied to the bombing campaign and siege in Gaza, nor to the attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank. On this week's On The Media, Brooke Gladstone interviews Ernesto Verdeja, executive director of The Institute for the Study of Genocide: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/genocide-powerful-word-so-why-its-definition-so-controversial-on-the-media Verdeja lays out the history of the word "genocide" and connects it to the Israeli government and military's posture on Palestine and Palestinians, and concludes that the only real dispute among genocide scholars is whether the current campaign it itself an act of genocide, or a prelude to an act of genocide. I'm not a genocide scholar, but I am a Jew who has always believed in Palestinian solidarity, and Verdeja's views do not strike me as outrageous, or (more importantly) antisemitic. The conflation of opposition to Israel's system of apartheid with opposition to Jews is a cheap trick, one that's belied by Israel itself, where there is a vast, longstanding political opposition to Israeli occupation, settlements, and military policing. Are all those Israeli Jews secret antisemites? Jews are not united in support for Israel's oppression of Palestinians. The hardliners who insist that any criticism of Israel is antisemitic are peddling an antisemitic lie: that all Jews everywhere are loyal to Israel, and that we all take our political positions from the Knesset. Israel hawks only strengthen that lie when they accuse me and my fellow Jews of being "self-hating Jews." This leads to the absurd circumstance in which gentiles police Jews' views on Israel. It's weird enough when white-nationalist affiliated evangelicals who support Israel in order to further the end-times prophesied in Revelations slam Jews for being antisemitic. But in Germany, it's even weirder. There, regional, non-Jewish officials charged with policing antisemitism have censured Jewish groups for adopting policies on Israel that mainstream Israeli political parties have in their platforms: https://jewishcurrents.org/the-strange-logic-of-germanys-antisemitism-bureaucrats Antisemitism is real. As Jesse Brown describes in his recent Canadaland editorial, there is a real and documented rise in racially motivated terror against Jews in Canada, including school shootings and a firebombing. Likewise, it's true that some people who support the Palestinian cause are antisemites: https://www.canadaland.com/podcast/is-jesse-a-zionist-editorial/ But to stand in horror at Israel's military action and its vast civilian death-toll is not itself antisemitic. This is obvious – so obvious that the need to say it is a tribute to Israel hardliners – Jewish and gentile – and their ability to peddle the racist lie that Israel is Jews and Jews are Israel, and that every Jew is in support of, and responsible for, Israeli war-crimes and crimes against humanity. One need not choose between opposition to Hamas and its terror and opposition to Israel and its bombings. There is no need for a hierarchy of culpability. As Naomi Klein says, we can "side with the child over the gun": https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/11/why-are-some-of-the-left-celebrating-the-killings-of-israeli-jews Moral consistency is not moral equivalency. If you're a Jew like me who wants to work for an end to the occupation and peace in the region, you could join Jewish Voice For Peace (like me): https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org Now, for a jarring tone shift. In these weekend linkdumps, I put a lot of thought into how to transition from one subject to the next, but honestly, there's no good transition from Israel-Palestine to anything else (yet – though someday, perhaps). So let's just say, "word games can be important, but they can also be trivial, and here are a few of the latter." Start with a goodie, from the always brilliant medievalist Eleanor Janeaga, who tackles the weirdos who haunt social media in order to dump on people with PhDs who call themselves "doctor": https://going-medieval.com/2023/11/29/doctor-does-actually-mean-someone-with-a-phd-sorry/ Janega points out that the "doctor" honorific was applied to scholars for centuries before it came to mean "medical doctor." But beyond that, Janega delivers a characteristically brilliant history of the (characteristically) weird and fascinating tale of medieval scholarship. Bottom line, we call physicians "doctor" because they wanted to be associated with the brilliance of scholars, and thought that being addressed as "doctor" would add to their prestige. So yeah, if you've got a PhD, you can call yourself doctor. It's not just doctors; the professions do love their wordplay. especially lawyers. This week on Lowering The Bar, I learned about "a completely ludicrous court fight that involved nine law firms that combined for 66 pages of briefing, declarations, and exhibits, all inflicted on a federal court": https://www.loweringthebar.net/2023/11/federal-court-ends-double-spacing-fight.html The dispute was over the definition of "double spaced." You see, the judge in the case told counsel they could each file briefs of up to 100 pages of double-spaced type. Yes, 100 pages! But apparently, some lawyer burn to write fat trilogies, not mere novellas. Defendants accused the plaintiffs in this case of spacing their lines a mere 24 points apart, which allowed them to sneak 27 lines of type onto each page, while defendants were confined to the traditional 23 lines. But (the court found), the defendants were wrong. Plaintiffs had used Word's "double-spacing" feature, but had not ticked the "exact double spacing" box, and that's how they ended up with 27 lines per page. The court refused to rule on what constituted "double-spacing" under the Western District of Tennessee’s local rules, but it ruled that the plaintiffs briefs could fairly be described as "double-spaced." Whew. That's your Saturday linkdump, jarring tone-shift and all. All that remains is to close out with a cat photo (any fule kno that Saturday is Caturday). Here's Peeve, whom I caught nesting most unhygienically in our fruit bowl last night. God, cats are gross: https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/53370882459/ This day in history (permalink) #20yrsago Dell won’t help customers remove spyware https://yro.slashdot.org/story/03/12/03/0257238/dell-to-techs-dont-help-customers-remove-spyware #15yrsago Spider Robinson reads John Varley’s “The Persistence of Vision” https://web.archive.org/web/20111215214809/http://hw.libsyn.com/p/b/f/e/bfea9a6569a591aa/SOTW057.mp3?sid=669e18ee3a02e91b0ddc3bc71878673a&l_sid=21159&l_eid=&l_mid=1970776&expiration=1323992876&hwt=f3158434ea94dcfa536ce7d3b1a49107 #15yrsago Atheism Song — Adam Sandler’s Hannukah Song, but for nonbelievers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFqSNpK9vm8 #15yrsago Interview with Harvard law prof who’s challenging the constitutionality of the RIAA suits https://archive.blogs.harvard.edu/mediaberkman/2008/12/02/radio-berkman-the-pay-us-hotline-fines-and-the-riaa/ #10yrsago RIP, Roy Trumbull: happy mutant, TV/radio engineering legend, podcaster https://memex.craphound.com/2013/12/02/rip-roy-trumbull-happy-mutant-tv-radio-engineering-legend-podcaster/ #10yrsago Leaked UN document: countries want to end War on Drugs and prohibition https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/nov/30/un-drugs-policy-split-leaked-paper #10yrsago How big corporations and government spy agencies surveil and sabotage activist groups https://web.archive.org/web/20131121063549/http://www.corporatepolicy.org/spookybusiness.pdf #10yrsago 84% of stocks owned by richest 10% of Americans https://money.com/stock-ownership-10-percent-richest/ #1yrago How tech changed global labor struggles for better and worse https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/02/not-what-it-does/#who-it-does-it-to Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Naked Capitalism (https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/). Currently writing: A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2024 Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: Moral Hazard (from Communications Breakdown) https://craphound.com/stories/2023/11/12/moral-hazard-from-communications-breakdown/ Upcoming appearances: The Lost Cause at Flyleaf Books (Chapel Hill), Dec 5 https://www.flyleafbooks.com/doctorow-2023 The Geneva Dialog (Dec 7) https://genevadialogue.ch/event/geneva-manual-event/ Recent appearances: Explore the Future of the 🔥 Climate and Information Climate (Andrew Revkin) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OGT-cvs4_Q Digital Markets Act; Interoperability; Entrenchment; Copyright; "What-About-Ism" (Digital Markets Research Hub) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm23pO5_WKM Science fiction for a dystopian present (Institute of Art and Ideas) https://iai.tv/video/science-fiction-for-a-dystopian-present-cory-doctorow?_auid=2020 Latest books: "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. Upcoming books: The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books, February 2024 Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

https://poliverso.org/display/0477a01e-90b05c30-e780dd3c061d8d01

#10yrsago JP Morgan’s “Twitter takeover” seeks questions from Twitter, is flooded with critiques of banksterism https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/30/shock-poll-reveals-gulf-britain-eu-france-germany-poland-hostile

#10yrsago UK #HomeSecretaryTheresaMay secretly charters private jet to (unsuccessfully) deport dying man to Nigeria https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/nov/30/theresa-may-hunger-striker-ifa-muaza-asylum-uk

#5yrsago To save #Brexit deal, #PrimeMinisterTheresaMay dropped an assault rifle ban https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2018/11/something-crazy-happened-parliament-last-night-and-no-one-talking-about-it

#5yrsago #DavidByrne’s “Eclectic Music for the Holidays” playlist http://davidbyrne.com/radio/david-byrne-presents-eclectic-for-the-holidays

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#10yrsago Porno copyright trolls #PrendaLaw fined $261K https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/11/unhappy-thanksgiving-for-prenda-law-ordered-to-pay-261k-to-defendants/

#10yrsago Presenting political argument on Twitter, and the “prestige economy” https://www.mic.com/articles/48829/why-you-should-never-have-taken-that-prestigious-internship

#10yrsago Apps come bundled with secret #Bitcoin mining programs, paper over the practice with #EULAs https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2013/11/potentially-unwanted-miners-toolbar-peddlers-use-your-system-to-make-btc

#10yrsago Study shows removing #DRM increased music sales https://torrentfreak.com/what-piracy-removing-drm-boosts-music-sales-by-10-percent-131130/

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Pluralistic: All the books I reviewed in 2023 (01 Dec 2023)

Today's links All the books I reviewed in 2023: Plus three of my own. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2003, 2008, 2018, 2022 Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading All the books I reviewed in 2023 (permalink) It's that time of year again, when I round up all the books I reviewed for my newsletter in the previous year. I posted 21 reviews last year, covering 31 books (there are two series in there!). I also published three books of my own last year (two novels and one nonfiction). A busy year in books! Every year, these roundups remind me that I did actually manager to get a lot of reading done, even if the list of extremely good books that I didn't read is much longer than the list of books I did read. I read many of these books while doing physiotherapy for my chronic pain, specifically as audiobooks I listened to on my underwater MP3 player while doing my daily laps at the public pool across the street from my house. After many years of using generic Chinese waterproof MP3s players – whose quality steadily declined over a decade – I gave up and bought a brand-name player, a Shokz Openswim. So far, I have no complaints. Thanks to reader Abbas Halai for recommending this! https://shokz.com/products/openswim I load up this gadget with audiobook MP3s bought from Libro.fm, a fantastic, DRM-free alternative to Audible, which is both a monopolist and a prolific wage-thief with a documented history of stealing from writers: https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/25/can-you-hear-me-now/#acx-ripoff All right, enough with the process notes, on to the reviews! NOVELS I. Temeraire by Naomi Novik One of the finest pleasures in life is to discover a complete series of novels as an adult, to devour them right through to the end, and to arrive at that ending to discover that, while you'd have happily inhabited the author's world for many more volumes, you are eminently satisfied with the series' conclusion. I just had this experience and I am still basking in the warm glow of having had such a thoroughly fulfilling imaginary demi-life for half a year. I'm speaking of the nine volumes in Naomi Novik's Temeraire series, which reimagines the Napoleonic Wars in a world that humans share with enormous, powerful, intelligent dragons. https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/08/temeraire/#but-i-am-napoleon II. Destroyer of Worlds by Matt Ruff The Destroyer of Worlds is a spectacular followup to Lovecraft Country that revisits the characters, setting, and supernatural dread of the original. Country was structured as a series of linked novellas, each one picking up where the previous left off, with a different focal characters. Destroyer is a much more traditional braided novel, moving swiftly amongst the characters and periodically jumping back in time to the era of American slavery, retelling the story of the settlement of the Great Dismal swamp by escaped slaves. https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/21/the-horror-of-white-magic/#anti-lovecraftian III. Scholomance by Naomi Novik The wizards of the world live in constant peril from maleficaria – the magic monsters that prey on those born with magic, especially the children. In a state of nature, only one in ten wizard kids reaches adulthood. So the wizarding world built the Scholomance, a fully automated magical secondary school that exists in the void – a dimension beyond our world. The Scholomance is also an extremely dangerous place – three quarters of the wizard children who attend will die before graduation – but it is much safer than life on the outside. https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/29/hobbeswarts/#the-chosen-one IV. Tsalmoth by Steven Brust Longrunning Brust hero Vlad Taltos has been convinced to recount the story of how he and Cawti came to fall in love, and how they planned their marriage. This is quite an adventure – it plays out against the backdrop of a gang-war within the Jhereg organization, with Vlad in severe mortal peril that he can only avoid by uncovering an intricate criminal caper of crosses, double-crosses, smuggling and sorcery. But while Vlad is dodging throwing knives and lethal spells (or not!), what's really going on is that he and Cawti are falling deeply, profoundly, irrevocably in love. The romance that plays out among the blades and magic is more magical still, a grand passion that expresses itself through Nick-and-Nora wordplay and Three Musketeers swordplay. https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/27/mannerpunk/#ask-anyone V. Hopeland by Ian McDonald Seriously what the fuck is this amazing, uncategorizable, unsummarizable, weird, sprawling, hairball of a novel? How the hell do you research – much less write – a novel this ambitious and wide-ranging? Why did I find myself weeping uncontrollably on a train yesterday as I finished it, literally squeezing my chest over my heart as it broke and sang at the same moment? The stars of Hopeland are members of two ancient, secret societies. There's Raisa Hopeland, who belongs to a globe-spanning, mystical "family," that's one part mutual aid, one part dance music subculture, and one part sorcerer (some Hopelanders are electromancers, making strange, powerful magic with Tesla coils). Amon is a composer and DJ who specializes in making music for very small groups of people – preferably just one person – that is so perfect for them that they are transformed by hearing it. https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/30/electromancy/#the-grace VI. The World Wasn't Ready For You by Justin Key These are horror stories, though some of them are science fiction too, and more to the point, they're Black horror stories. In his afterword, Key writes about his early fascination with horror, the catharsis he felt in watching nightmares unspool on screen or off the page. And then, he writes, came the dawning recognition that the Black characters in these stories were always there as cannon-fodder, often nameless, usually picked off early. "Black horror" isn't merely parables about racism. In the deft hands of these writers – and now, Key – the stories are horror in which Blackness is a fact, sometimes a central one, and that fact is ever a complication, limiting how the characters move through space, interact with authority, and relate to one another. https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/19/justin-c-key/#clarion-west-2015 VII. Liberty's Daughter by Naomi Kritzer There's so much sf about "competent men" running their families with entrepreneurial zeal, clarity of vision and a firm confident hand. But there's precious little fiction about how much being raised by a Heinlein dad would suuuck. But it would, and in Liberty's Daughter, we get a peek inside the nightmare. https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/21/podkaynes-dad-was-a-dick/#age-of-consent NONFICTION I. The Once and Future Sex by Eleanor Kaneaga A history of gender and sex in the medieval age, describing the weird and horny ways of medieval Europeans, which are far gnarlier and more complicated than the story we get from "traditionalists" who want us to believe that their ideas about gender roles reflect a fixed part of human nature, and that modern attitudes are an attempt to rewrite history: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/17/ren-faire/#going-medieval II. Pirate Enlightenment by David Graeber In the early 18th century, the Zana-Malata people – a new culture created jointly by pirates from around the world and Malagasy – came to dominate the island. They brought with them the democratic practices of pirate ships (where captains were elected and served at the pleasure of their crews) and the matriarchal traditions of some Malagasy, creating a feminist, anarchist "Libertalia." Graeber retrieves and orders the history of this Libertalia from oral tradition, primary source documents, and records from around the world. Taken together, it's a tale that is rollicking and romantic, but also hilarious and eminently satisfying. https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/24/zana-malata/#libertalia III. A Hacker's Mind by Bruce Schneier Schneier broadens his frame to consider all of society's rules – its norms, laws and regulations – as a security system, and then considers all the efforts to change those rules through a security lens, framing everything from street protests to tax-cheating as "hacks." This leaves us with two categories: hacks by the powerful to increase their power; and hacks by everyone else to take power away from the powerful. https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/06/trickster-makes-the-world/#power-play IV. Responding to the Right by Nathan J Robinson Robinson describes conservativism as a comforting, fixed ideology that allows its adherents to move through the world without having to question themselves: you broke the law, so you're guilty. No need to ask if the law was just or unjust. This sidelines sticky moral dilemmas: no need for judges to ask if something is good or fair – merely whether it is "original" to the Constitution. No need for a CEO to ask whether a business plan is moral – only whether it is "maximizing shareholder benefit." Robinson anatomizes the most effective parts of conservative rhetoric and exhorts his leftist comrades to learn from it, and put it to better use. https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/14/nathan-robinson/#arguendo V. A Collective Bargain by Jane McAlevey An extraordinary book that is one part history lesson, one part case-study, two parts how-to manual, one part memoir, and one million parts call to action. McAlevey devotes the early chapters to the rise and fall of labor protections in America, explaining how the wealthy mounted a sustained, expensive, obsessive fight to smash union power. She moves into a series of case-studies of workers who tried to organize unions under these increasingly inhospitable rules and conditions. The second half of the book is two case studies of mass strikes that succeeded in spite of even stiffer opposition. For McAlevey, saving America is just a scaled up version of the union organizer’s day-job. https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/23/a-collective-bargain/ VI. Open Circuits by Windell Oskay and Eric Schlaepfer A drop-dead gorgeous collection of photos of electronic components, painstakingly cross-sectioned and polished. The photos illustrate layperson-friendly explanations of what each component does, how it is constructed, and why. Perhaps you've pondered a circuit board and wondered about the colorful, candy-shaped components soldered to it. It's natural to assume that these are indivisible, abstract functional units, a thing that is best understood as a reliable and deterministic brick that can be used to construct a specific kind of wall. Peering inside these sealed packages reveals another world, a miniature land where things get simpler – and more complex. https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/14/hidden-worlds/#making-the-invisible-visible-and-beautiful VII. Doppelganger by Naomi Klein This is a very odd book. It is also a very, very good book. The premise – exploring the divergence between Naomi Klein and Naomi Wolf, with whom she is often confused – is a surprisingly sturdy scaffold for an ambitious, wide-ranging exploration of this very frightening moment of polycrisis and systemic failure. For Klein, the transformation of Wolf from liberal icon – Democratic Party consultant and Lean-In-type feminist icon – to rifle-toting Trumpling with a regular spot on the Steve Bannon Power Hour is an entrypoint to understanding the mirror world. How did so many hippie-granola yoga types turn into vicious eugenicists whose answer to "wear a mask to protect the immunocompromised" is "they should die"? https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine VIII. Your Face Belongs to Us by Kashmir Hill A tell-all history of Clearview AI, the creepy facial recognition company whose origins are mired in far-right politics, off-the-books police misconduct, sales to authoritarian states and sleazy one-percenter one-upmanship. Facial recognition is now so easy to build that – Hill says – we're unlikely to abolish it, despite all the many horrifying ways that FR could fuck up our societies. https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/20/steal-your-face/#hoan-ton-that IX. Blood In the Machine by Brian Merchant The definitive history of the Luddites, and the clearest analysis of the automator's playbook, where "entrepreneurs'" lawless extraction from workers is called "innovation" and "inevitable." Luddism has been steadily creeping into pro-labor technological criticism, as workers and technology critics reclaim the term and its history, which is a rich and powerful tale of greed versus solidarity, slavery versus freedom. Luddites are not – and have never been – anti-technology. Rather, they are pro-human, and see production as a means to an end: broadly shared prosperity. The automation project says it's about replacing humans with machines, but over and over again – in machine learning, in "contactless" delivery, in on-demand workforces – the goal is to turn humans into machines. https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/26/enochs-hammer/#thats-fronkonsteen X. Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis Varoufakis makes an excellent case that capitalism died a decade ago, turning into a new form of feudalism: technofeudalism. A feudal society is one organized around people who own things, charging others to use them to produce goods and services. In a feudal society, the most important form of income isn't profit, it's rent. Varoufakis likens shopping on Amazon to visiting a bustling city center filled with shops run by independent capitalists. However, all of those capitalists are subservient to a feudal lord: Jeff Bezos, who takes 51 cents out of every dollar they bring in, and furthermore gets to decide which products they can sell and how those products must be displayed. The postcapitalist, technofeudal world isn't a world without capitalism, then. It's a world where capitalists are subservient to feudalists ("cloudalists" in Varoufakis's thesis), as are the rest of us the cloud peons https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital XI. Underground Empire by Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman Two political scientists tell the story of how global networks were built through accidents of history, mostly by American corporations and/or the American state. The web was built by accident, but the spider at its center was always the USA. At various junctures since the Cold War, American presidents, spies and military leaders have noticed this web and tugged at it. A tariff here, a sanction there, then an embargo. The NSA turns the internet into a surveillance grid and a weapon of war. The SWIFT system is turned into a way to project American political goals around the world – first by blocking transactions for things the US government disfavors, then to cut off access for people who do business with people who do things that the US wants stopped. Political science, done right, has the power to reframe your whole understanding of events around you. Farrell and Newman set out a compelling thesis, defend it well, and tell a fascinating tale. https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#the-other-swifties XII. How Infrastructure Works by Deb Chachra A hopeful, lyrical – even beautiful – hymn to the systems of mutual aid we embed in our material world, from sewers to roads to the power grid. It's a book that will make you see the world in a different way – forever. It's a bold engineering vision, one that fuses Chachra's material science background, her work as an engineering educator, her activism as an anti-colonialist and feminist. The way she lays it out is just…breathtaking. https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/17/care-work/#charismatic-megaprojects GRAPHIC NOVELS I. Shubiek Lubiek by Deena Mohamed An intricate alternate history in which wishes are real, and must be refined from a kind of raw wish-stuff that has to be dug out of the earth. Naturally, this has been an important element of geopolitics and colonization, especially since the wish-stuff is concentrated in the global south, particularly Egypt, the setting for our tale. The framing device for the trilogy is the tale of three "first class" wishes: these are the most powerful wishes that civilians are allowed to use, the kind of thing you might use to cure cancer or reverse a crop-failure. https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/11/your-wish/#is-my-command II. Ducks by Kate Beaton In 2005, Beaton was a newly minted art-school grad facing a crushing load of student debt, a debt she would never be able to manage in the crumbling, post-boom economy of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Like so many Maritimers, she left the home that meant everything for her to travel to Alberta, where the tar sands oil boom promised unmatched riches for anyone willing to take them. Beaton's memoir describes the following four years, as she works her way into a series of oil industry jobs in isolated company towns where men outnumber women 50:1 and where whole communities marinate in a literally toxic brew of carcinogens, misogyny, economic desperation and environmental degradation. The story that follows is – naturally – wrenching, but it is also subtle and ambivalent. Beaton finds camaraderie with – and empathy for – the people she works alongside, even amidst unimaginable, grinding workplace harassment that manifests in both obvious and glancing ways. https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/14/hark-an-oilpatch/#kate-beaton III. Justice Warriors by Matt Bors Justice Warriors is what you'd get if you put Judge Dredd in a blender with Transmetropolitan and set it to chunky. The setup: the elites of a wasted, tormented world have retreated into Bubble City, beneath a hermetically sealed zone. Within Bubble City, everything is run according to the priorities of the descendants of the most internet-poisoned freaks of the modern internet, click- and clout-chasing mushminds full of corporate-washed platitudes about self-care, diversity and equity, wrapped around come-ons for sugary drinks and dubious dropshipper crapola. It's a cop buddy-story dreamed up by Very Online, very angry creators who live in a present-day world where reality is consistently stupider than satire. https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/22/libras-assemble/#the-uz IV. Roaming by Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki The story of three young Canadian women meeting up for a getaway to New York City. Zoe and Dani are high-school best friends who haven't seen each other since they graduated and decamped for universities in different cities. Fiona is Dani's art-school classmate, a glamorous and cantankerous artist with an affected air of sophistication. It's a dizzying, beautifully wrought three-body problem as the three protagonists struggle with resentments and love, sex and insecurity. The relationships between Zoe, Dani and Fiona careen wildly from scene to scene and even panel to panel, propelled by sly graphic cues and fantastically understated dialog. https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/11/as-canadian-as/#possible-under-the-circumstances Like I said, this has been a good year in books for me, and it included three books of my own: I. Red Team Blues (novel, Tor Books US, Head of Zeus UK) Martin Hench is 67 years old, single, and successful in a career stretching back to the beginnings of Silicon Valley. He lives and roams California in a very comfortable fully-furnished touring bus, The Unsalted Hash, that he bought years ago from a fading rock star. He knows his way around good food and fine drink. He likes intelligent women, and they like him back often enough. Martin is a—contain your excitement—self-employed forensic accountant, a veteran of the long guerilla war between people who want to hide money, and people who want to find it. He knows computer hardware and software alike, including the ins and outs of high-end databases and the kinds of spreadsheets that are designed to conceal rather than reveal. He’s as comfortable with social media as people a quarter his age, and he’s a world-level expert on the kind of international money-laundering and shell-company chicanery used by Fortune 500 companies, mid-divorce billionaires, and international drug gangs alike. He also knows the Valley like the back of his hand, all the secret histories of charismatic company founders and Sand Hill Road VCs. Because he was there at all the beginnings. Now he’s been roped into a job that’s more dangerous than anything he’s ever agreed to before—and it will take every ounce of his skill to get out alive. https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865847/red-team-blues II. The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation (nonfiction, Verso) We can – we must – dismantle the tech platforms. We must to seize the means of computation by forcing Silicon Valley to do the thing it fears most: interoperate. Interoperability will tear down the walls between technologies, allowing users to leave platforms, remix their media, and reconfigure their devices without corporate permission. Interoperability is the only route to the rapid and enduring annihilation of the platforms. The Internet Con is the disassembly manual we need to take back our internet. https://www.versobooks.com/products/3035-the-internet-con III. The Lost Cause (novel, Tor Books US, Head of Zeus UK) For young Americans a generation from now, climate change isn't controversial. It's just an overwhelming fact of life. And so are the great efforts to contain and mitigate it. Entire cities are being moved inland from the rising seas. Vast clean-energy projects are springing up everywhere. Disaster relief, the mitigation of floods and superstorms, has become a skill for which tens of millions of people are trained every year. The effort is global. It employs everyone who wants to work. Even when national politics oscillates back to right-wing leaders, the momentum is too great; these vast programs cannot be stopped in their tracks. But there are still those Americans, mostly elderly, who cling to their red baseball caps, their grievances, their huge vehicles, their anger. To their "alternative" news sources that reassure them that their resentment is right and pure and that "climate change" is just a giant scam. And they're your grandfather, your uncle, your great-aunt. And they're not going anywhere. And they’re armed to the teeth. The Lost Cause asks: What do we do about people who cling to the belief that their own children are the enemy? When, in fact, they're often the elders that we love? https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause I wrote nine books during lockdown, and there's plenty more to come. The next one is The Bezzle, a followup to Red Team Blues, which comes out in February: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle While you're waiting for that one, I hope the reviews above will help you connect with some excellent books. If you want more of my reviews, here's my annual roundup from 2022: https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/01/bookishness/#2022-in-review Here's my book reviews from 2021: https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/08/required-ish-reading/#bibliography And here's my book reviews from 2020: https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/08/required-reading/#recommended-reading Hey look at this (permalink) We pulled off an SEO heist that stole 3.6M total traffic from a competitor https://twitter.com/jakezward/status/1728032634037567509 Tech Conference Collapses After Organizer Admits to Making Fake ‘Auto-Generated’ Female Speaker https://www.404media.co/devternity-fake-speakers-eduard-sizovs/ The Secret Trial https://prospect.org/justice/2023-11-28-google-secret-trial/ This day in history (permalink) #20yrsago San Francisco’s homelessness quagmire https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/SHAME-OF-THE-CITY-HOMELESS-ISLAND-They-live-2510831.php #20yrsago Roy Disney resigns from Disney, slams Eisner https://craphound.com/roytoeisner.txt #20yrago Bruce Sterling hits his stride on his blog https://web.archive.org/web/20040505163610/https://wiredblogs.tripod.com/sterling/index.blog?entry_id=154868 #20yrsago Hayes Micro: the moral is, take the money and run https://web.archive.org/web/20031205001612/https://www.ajc.com/business/content/business/1103/23hayes.html #20yrsago Fan builds 11,000 sqft Haunted Mansion replica https://web.archive.org/web/20031203011208/https://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/gwinnett/1103/26haunted.html #15yrsago Neil Gaiman explains why he opposes laws banning speech he disagrees with https://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/12/why-defend-freedom-of-icky-speech.html #15yrsago Why Candyland doesn’t suck https://web.archive.org/web/20081205063135/http://playthisthing.com/candy-land #15yrsago Vietnam’s amazing phone-unlockers https://www.cnet.com/culture/unlocking-iphone-3gs-the-vietnamese-way/ #15yrsago UK to punish “publishing police info” with 10 years in jail https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2008/11/413023.html #15yrsago How Dan Kaminsky broke and fixed DNS https://www.wired.com/2008/11/ff-kaminsky/ #10yrsago Porno copyright trolls Prenda Law fined $261K https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/11/unhappy-thanksgiving-for-prenda-law-ordered-to-pay-261k-to-defendants/ #10yrsago Presenting political argument on Twitter, and the “prestige economy” https://www.mic.com/articles/48829/why-you-should-never-have-taken-that-prestigious-internship #10yrsago Apps come bundled with secret Bitcoin mining programs, paper over the practice with EULAs https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2013/11/potentially-unwanted-miners-toolbar-peddlers-use-your-system-to-make-btc #10yrsago Study shows removing DRM increased music sales https://torrentfreak.com/what-piracy-removing-drm-boosts-music-sales-by-10-percent-131130/ #10yrsago JP Morgan’s “Twitter takeover” seeks questions from Twitter, gets flooded with critiques of banksterism #AskJPM https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/30/shock-poll-reveals-gulf-britain-eu-france-germany-poland-hostile #10yrsago UK Home Secretary Theresa May secretly charters private jet to (unsuccessfully) deport dying man to Nigeria https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/nov/30/theresa-may-hunger-striker-ifa-muaza-asylum-uk #5yrsago To save Brexit deal, Prime Minister Theresa May dropped an assault rifle ban https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2018/11/something-crazy-happened-parliament-last-night-and-no-one-talking-about-it #5yrsago David Byrne’s “Eclectic Music for the Holidays” playlist http://davidbyrne.com/radio/david-byrne-presents-eclectic-for-the-holidays #5yrsago Incredibly detailed technical guide to camgirling is a mix of advanced retail psychology and advice on performing emotional labor https://knowingless.com/2018/11/19/maximizing-your-slut-impact-an-overly-analytical-guide-to-camgirling/ #5yrsago AI scientist who quit Google over Chinese censorship plans details the hypocrisy that sent him packing https://theintercept.com/2018/12/01/google-china-censorship-human-rights/ #5yrsago St Louis cops indicted for beating up a “protester” who turned out to be an undercover cop https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2018/11/30/its-still-blast-beating-people-st-louis-police-indicted-assault-undercover-officer-posing-protester/ #5yrsago Tavi Gevinson is folding up Rookie, after seven years: part mediapocalypse, part moving on https://www.rookiemag.com/2018/11/editors-letter-86/">https://www.rookiemag.com/2018/11/editors-letter-86/ #5yrsago Peak indifference has arrived: a majority of Republicans say climate change is real https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/reports/MonmouthPoll_US_112918/ #5yrsago The EU took the word “filters” out of the Copyright Directive, but it’s still all about filters https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/11/yes-eus-new-copyrightdirective-all-about-filters #5yrsago One More For the Road: The Laugh-Out-Loud Cats are back! https://memex.craphound.com/2018/11/30/one-more-for-the-road-the-laugh-out-loud-cats-are-back/ #1yrago Booz Allen ticketmastered America's public lands https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/30/military-industrial-park-service/#booz-allen #1yrago All the books I reviewed in 2022 https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/01/bookishness/#2022-in-review Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2024 Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: Moral Hazard (from Communications Breakdown) https://craphound.com/stories/2023/11/12/moral-hazard-from-communications-breakdown/ Upcoming appearances: The Lost Cause at Flyleaf Books (Chapel Hill), Dec 5 https://www.flyleafbooks.com/doctorow-2023 The Geneva Dialog (Dec 7) https://genevadialogue.ch/event/geneva-manual-event/ Recent appearances: Explore the Future of the 🔥 Climate and Information Climate (Andrew Revkin) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OGT-cvs4_Q Digital Markets Act; Interoperability; Entrenchment; Copyright; "What-About-Ism" (Digital Markets Research Hub) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm23pO5_WKM Science fiction for a dystopian present (Institute of Art and Ideas) https://iai.tv/video/science-fiction-for-a-dystopian-present-cory-doctorow?_auid=2020 Latest books: "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. Upcoming books: The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books, February 2024 Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

https://poliverso.org/display/0477a01e-49078884-79ec3dab81f6d4da

#10yrsago #Berlusconi kicked out of Italian senate https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/27/silvio-berlusconi-ousted-italian-parliament-tax-fraud-conviction

#5yrsago #Sennheiser’s headphone drivers covertly changed your computer’s root of trust, leaving you vulnerable to undetectable attacks https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/sennheiser-headset-software-could-allow-man-in-the-middle-ssl-attacks/

#5yrsago New York City’s municipal #debt collectors have forged an unholy alliance with sleazy subprime lenders https://www.bloomberg.com/confessions-of-judgment

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#15yrsago #PeakPopulation: when will population growth stop, why, and how? https://www.alexsteffen.com/peak_population_and_sustainability

#15yrsago @thepublicdomain's “The Public Domain” — a brilliant #copyfighter’s latest book, from a law prof who writes like a comedian https://memex.craphound.com/2008/11/29/james-boyles-the-public-domain-a-brilliant-copyfighters-latest-book-from-a-law-prof-who-writes-like-a-comedian/

#10yrsago NSA and Canadian spooks illegally spied on diplomats at Toronto #G20 summit https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/new-snowden-docs-show-u-s-spied-during-g20-in-toronto-1.2442448

#10yrsago New #CreativeCommons licenses: tighter, shorter, more readable, more global https://creativecommons.org/Version4/

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Pluralistic: Sponsored listings are a ripoff…for sellers (29 Nov 2023)

Today's links Sponsored listings are a ripoff…for sellers: Welcome to the age of danegeld. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2008, 2013, 2018, 2022 Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading Sponsored listings are a ripoff…for sellers (permalink) Not all ads are created equally sleazy. The privacy harms from surveillance ads, though real, are often hard to pin down. But there's another kind of ad – or "ad" that picks your pocket every time you use an ecommerce site. This is the "sponsored listing" ad, which allows merchants to bid to be among the top-ranked items in response to your searches – whether or not their products are a good match for your query. These aren't "ads" in the way that, say, a Facebook ad is an ad. These are more #payola, a form of bribery that's actually a crime (but not when Amazon does it): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola#U.S._investigations_and_aftermath Amazon is the global champion of payola. It boasts of $31 billion in annual "ad" revenue. That's $31 billion that Amazon sellers have to recoup from you. But Amazon's use of "most favored nation" deals (which requires sellers to offer their lowest prices on Amazon) mean that you don't see those price-hikes because sellers raise their prices everywhere: https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/#commissar-bezos Forget Twitter: Amazon search is the poster-child for enshittification, in which Amazon locks you in (for example, with a year's shipping prepaid through Prime) and then you get recommended worse products while sellers make less money and Amazon pockets the difference. Sellers who don't sell on Amazon are dead in the water, because most US households have Amazon Prime and overwhelmingly, Prime users start their search on Amazon, and, if they find the goods they're seeking. After all, they've prepaid for shipping. So sellers suck it up and pay a 45-51% Amazon tax and pass it on to us – no matter where we shop. A lot of the junk fees sellers pay are related to Prime and other fulfillment services, but an increasing share of the Amazon tax comes from the need to pay to "advertise," because if they don't buy the top result for searches for their own products, their competitors' ads will push them right off the first page (those competitors spend money on advertising, rather than manufacturing quality). There's a lot of YOLO/ROFLMAO in those ads: search for "cat beds" and 50% of the first five screens are ads – including ads for dog products, apparently bought by companies adopting a spray-and-pray approach to advertising. Someone selling a quality product still has to outbid all of those garbage sellers: https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola This is at the root of Amazon's Pricing Paradox: while Amazon can defend itself against regulators by citing sellers whose prices are lower and/or whose quality is higher, it's nearly impossible for shoppers to get those deals. If you click the top result for your search, you will, on average, pay 29% more than you would if you found the best bargain on the site: https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens What's more, you can't fix this by simply sorting by price, or by reviews, or some mix of the two. The sleaziest sellers have mastered tricks like changing the number of units they sell so the total price is lower. For example, if batteries are normally sold $10 for a four-pack, a sleazy seller can offer batteries at $9 for three units. A lowest-to-highest price-sort will put this item ahead of a cheaper rival. Researchers found that getting a good deal at Amazon requires that you make a multifactorial spreadsheet by laboriously copy/pasting multiple details from individual listing pages and then doing sorts that Amazon itself doesn't permit: https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship/3645/ There's an exception to this: Amazon and Apple have a cozy, secret arrangement to exclude these "ads" from searches for Apple products. But if you're shopping for anything else, you're SOL: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-gives-apple-special-treatment-while-others-suffer-junk-ads-2023-11 These payola markets are bad for buyers, and they cost sellers a lot of money, but are they at least good for sellers? A new study from three business-school researchers – Vibhanshu Abhishek, Jiaqi Shi and Mingyu Joo – shows that payola is a very bad deal for good sellers, too: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3896716 After doing a lot of impressive quantitative work, the authors conclude that for good sellers, showing up as a sponsored listing makes buyers trust their products less than if they floated to the top of the results "organically." This means that buying an ad makes your product less attractive than not buying an ad. The exception is sellers who have bad products – products that wouldn't rise to the top of the results on their own merits. The study finds that if you buy your mediocre product's way to the top of the results, buyers trust it more than they would if they found it buried deep on page eleventy-million, to which its poor reviews, quality or price would normally banish it. But of course, if you're one of those good sellers, you can't simply opt not to buy an ad, even though seeing it with the little "AD" marker in the thumbnail makes your product less attractive to shoppers. If you don't pay the danegeld, your product will be pushed down by the inferior products whose sellers are only too happy to pay ransom. It's a system where everybody loses – except monopoly ecommerce platforms, who enshittify everything and rake it in. Hey look at this (permalink) The 2023 Kottke Holiday Gift Guide https://kottke.org/23/11/the-2023-kottke-holiday-gift-guide FLAMING HYDRA: 60 Brilliant Writers & Artists Join Forces https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thebrickhouse/flaming-hydra-60-brilliant-writers-and-artists-join-forces Read These 10 Articles to Understand the Landmark Google Search Monopoly Trial https://usvgoogle.org/trial-wrap-11-20 This day in history (permalink) #15yrsago Peak Population: when will population growth stop, why, and how? https://www.alexsteffen.com/peak_population_and_sustainability #15yrsago James Boyle’s “The Public Domain” — a brilliant copyfighter’s latest book, from a law prof who writes like a comedian https://memex.craphound.com/2008/11/29/james-boyles-the-public-domain-a-brilliant-copyfighters-latest-book-from-a-law-prof-who-writes-like-a-comedian/ #10yrsago NSA and Canadian spooks illegally spied on diplomats at Toronto G20 summit https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/new-snowden-docs-show-u-s-spied-during-g20-in-toronto-1.2442448 #10yrsago New CC licenses: tighter, shorter, more readable, more global https://creativecommons.org/Version4/ #10yrsago Berlusconi kicked out of Italian senate https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/27/silvio-berlusconi-ousted-italian-parliament-tax-fraud-conviction #5yrsago Sennheiser’s headphone drivers covertly changed your computer’s root of trust, leaving you vulnerable to undetectable attacks https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/sennheiser-headset-software-could-allow-man-in-the-middle-ssl-attacks/ #5yrsago New York City’s municipal debt collectors have forged an unholy alliance with sleazy subprime lenders https://www.bloomberg.com/confessions-of-judgment #5yrsago Here’s how the Pentagon swindled Congress with $21 trillion worth of undocumented, untraceable, unaccounted for expenditures https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/pentagon-audit-budget-fraud/ #5yrsago The prosecutor who helped Jeffrey Epstein escape justice is now a Trump Cabinet member https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article220097825.html #5yrsago Reddit takes a stand against the EU’s plan to break the internet https://www.redditinc.com/blog/the-eu-copyright-directive-what-redditors-in-europe-need-to-know/ #5yrsago The secret history of science fiction’s women writers: The Future is Female! https://memex.craphound.com/2018/11/29/the-secret-history-of-science-fictions-women-writers-the-future-is-female/ #5yrsago Redaction ineptitude reveals names of Proud Boys’ self-styled new leaders https://splinternews.com/proud-boys-failed-to-redact-their-new-dumb-bylaws-and-a-1830700905 #5yrsago Redaction ineptitude reveals Facebook’s 2012 plan to sell Graph API access to user data for $250,000 https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/11/facebook-pondered-for-a-time-selling-access-to-user-data/ #5yrsago Google engineer calls for a walkout over China censorship and raises $200K strike fund in hours https://twitter.com/lizthegrey/status/1068208484053856256 #5yrsago Correlates of Trump voting: searches for erectile dysfunction, hair loss, how to get girls, penis enlargement, penis size, steroids, testosterone and Viagra https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/11/29/how-donald-trump-appeals-to-men-secretly-insecure-about-their-manhood/ #5yrsago Google’s secret project to build a censored Chinese search engine bypassed the company’s own security and privacy teams https://theintercept.com/2018/11/29/google-china-censored-search/ #5yrsago Mozilla pulls a popular paywall circumvention tool from Firefox add-ons store https://web.archive.org/web/20181130141509/https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox/issues/82 #1yrago The Big Four accounting firms are one (more) scandal away from collapse https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/29/great-andersens-ghost/#mene-mene-bezzle Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Researchbuzz (@researchbuzz). Currently writing: A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2024 Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: Moral Hazard (from Communications Breakdown) https://craphound.com/stories/2023/11/12/moral-hazard-from-communications-breakdown/ Upcoming appearances: The Lost Cause at The Strand (NYC), Nov 29 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-the-lost-cause-tickets-734958008187 The Lost Cause at Flyleaf Books (Chapel Hill), Dec 5 https://www.flyleafbooks.com/doctorow-2023 Recent appearances: Digital Markets Act; Interoperability; Entrenchment; Copyright; "What-About-Ism" (Digital Markets Research Hub) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm23pO5_WKM Science fiction for a dystopian present (Institute of Art and Ideas) https://iai.tv/video/science-fiction-for-a-dystopian-present-cory-doctorow?_auid=2020 Pushing back on unconstrained capitalism (Changelog) https://changelog.com/podcast/565 Latest books: "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. Upcoming books: The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books, February 2024 Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

https://poliverso.org/display/0477a01e-2807eddd-ae75cb7767c2807f

#15yrsago Canada’s Internet is crap https://web.archive.org/web/20081207154815/https://www.cbc.ca/searchengine/blog/2008/11/is_canada_becoming_a_digital_g.html

#10yrsago Brainwashed: Neuroscience vs #neurobollocks https://memex.craphound.com/2013/11/28/brainwashed-neuroscience-vs-neurobollocks/

#10yrsago Florida sheriff arrests mayor on drug charges: “This isn’t Toronto” https://www.onlineathens.com/story/news/state/2013/11/26/florida-mayor-arrested-drug-charges/15549584007/

#10yrsago Pope blasts capitalism https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/11/26/pope-francis-has-a-few-thoughts-about-the-global-economy-we-added-these-13-charts/

#10yrsago Venn menu https://memex.craphound.com/2013/11/28/venn-menu/

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Pluralistic: Insurance companies are making climate risk worse (28 Nov 2023)

Today's links Insurance companies are making climate risk worse: How to break the climate insurance doom-loop. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2008, 2013, 2018, 2022 Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading Insurance companies are making climate risk worse (permalink) Conservatives may deride the "reality-based community" as a drag on progress and commercial expansion, but even the most noxious pump-and-dump capitalism is supposed to remain tethered to reality by two unbreakable fetters: auditing and insurance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community No matter how much you value profit over ethics or human thriving, you still need honest books – even if you never show those books to the taxman or the marks. Even an outright scammer needs to know what's coming in and what's going out so they don't get caught in a liquidity trap (that is, "broke"), or overleveraged ("broke," again) exposed to market changes (you guessed it: "broke"). Unfortunately for capitalism, auditing is on its deathbed. The market is sewn up by the wildly corrupt and conflicted Big Four accounting firms that are the very definition of too big to fail/too big to jail. They keep cooking books on behalf of management to the detriment of investors. These double-entry fabrications conceal rot in giant, structurally important firms until they implode spectacularly and suddenly, leaving workers, suppliers, customers and investors in a state of utter higgeldy-piggeldy: https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/29/great-andersens-ghost/#mene-mene-bezzle In helping corporations defraud institutional investors, auditors are facilitating mass scale millionaire-on-billionaire violence, and while that may seem like the kind of fight where you're happy to see either party lose, there are inevitably a lot of noncombatants in the blast radius. Since the Enron collapse, the entire accounting sector has turned to quicksand, which is a big deal, given that it's what industrial capitalism's foundations are anchored to. There's a reason my last novel was a thriller about forensic accounting and Big Tech: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865847/red-team-blues But accounting isn't the only bedrock that's been reduced to slurry here in capitalism's end-times. The insurance sector is meant to be an unshakably rational enterprise, imposing discipline on the rest of the economy. Sure, your company can do something stupid and reckless, but the insurance bill will be stonking, sufficient to consume the expected additional profits. But the crash of 2008 made it clear that the largest insurance companies in the world were capable of the same wishful thinking, motivated reasoning, and short-termism that they were supposed to prevent in every other business. Without AIG – one of the largest insurers in the world – there would have been no Great Financial Crisis. The company knowingly underwrote hundreds of billions of dollars in junk bonds dressed up as AAA debt, and required a $180b bailout. Still, many of us have nursed an ember of hope that the insurance sector would spur Big Finance and its pocket governments into taking the climate emergency seriously. When rising seas and wildfires and zoonotic plagues and famines and rolling refugee crises make cities, businesses, and homes uninsurable risks, then insurers will stop writing policies and the doom will become undeniable. Money talks, bullshit walks. But while insurers have begun to withdraw from the most climate-endangered places (or crank up premiums), the net effect is to decrease climate resilience and increase risk, creating a "climate risk doom loop" that Advait Arun lays out brilliantly for Phenomenal World: https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/the-doom-loop/ Part of the problem is political: as people move into high-risk areas (flood-prone coastal cities, fire-threatened urban-wildlife interfaces), politicians are pulling out all the stops to keep insurers from disinvesting in these high-risk zones. They're loosening insurance regs, subsidizing policies, and imposing "disaster risk fees" on everyone in the region. But the insurance companies themselves are simply not responding aggressively enough to the rising risk. Climate risk is correlated, after all: when everyone in a region is at flood risk, then everyone will be making a claim on the insurance company when the waters come. The insurance trick of spreading risk only works if the risks to everyone in that spread aren't correlated. Perversely, insurance companies are heavily invested in fossil fuel companies, these being reliable money-spinners where an insurer can park and grow your premiums, on the assumption that most of the people in the risk pool won't file claims at the same time. But those same fossil-fuel assets produce the very correlated risk that could bring down the whole system. The system is in trouble. US claims from "natural disasters" are topping $100b/year – up from $4.6b in 2000. Home insurance premiums are up (21%!), but it's not enough, especially in drowning Florida and Texas (which is also both roasting and freezing): https://grist.org/economics/as-climate-risks-mount-the-insurance-safety-net-is-collapsing/ Insurers who put premiums up to cover this new risk run into a paradox: the higher premiums get, the more risk-tolerant customers get. When flood insurance is cheap, lots of homeowners will stump up for it and create a big, uncorrelated risk-pool. When premiums skyrocket, the only people who buy flood policies are homeowners who are dead certain their house is gonna get flooded out and soon. Now you have a risk pool consisting solely of highly correlated, high risk homes. The technical term for this in the insurance trade is: "bad." But it gets worse: people who decide not to buy policies as prices go up may be doing their own "motivated reasoning" and "mispricing their risk." That is, they may decide, "If I can't afford to move, and I can't afford to sell my house because it's in a flood-zone, and I can't afford insurance, I guess that means I'm going to live here and be uninsured and hope for the best." This is also bad. The amount of uninsured losses from US climate disaster "dwarfs" insured losses: https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/hurricanes-floods-bring-120-billion-insurance-losses-2022-2023-01-09/ Here's the doom-loop in a nutshell: As carbon emissions continue to accumulate, more people are put at risk of climate disaster, while the damages from those disasters intensifies. Vulnerability will drive disinvestment, which in turn exacerbates vulnerability. Also: the browner and poorer you are, the worse you have it: you are impacted "first and worst": https://www.climaterealityproject.org/frontline-fenceline-communities As Arun writes, "Tinkering with insurance markets will not solve their real issues—we must patch the gaping holes in the financial system itself." We have to end the loop that sees the poorest places least insured, and the loss of insurance leading to abandonment by people with money and agency, which zeroes out the budget for climate remediation and resiliency where it is most needed. The insurance sector is part of the finance industry, and it is disinvesting in climate-endagered places and instead doubling down on its bets on fossil fuels. We can't rely on the insurance sector to discipline other industries by generating "price signals" about the true underlying climate risk. And insurance doesn't just invest in fossil fuels – they're also a major buyer of municipal and state bonds, which means they're part of the "bond vigilante" investors whose decisions constrain the ability of cities to raise and spend money for climate remediation. When American cities, territories and regions can't float bonds, they historically get taken over and handed to an unelected "control board" who represents distant creditors, not citizens. This is especially true when the people who live in those places are Black or brown – think Puerto Rico or Detroit or Flint. These control board administrators make creditors whole by tearing the people apart. This is the real doom loop: insurers pull out of poor places threatened by climate disasters. They invest in the fossil fuels that worsen those disasters. They join with bond vigilantes to force disinvestment from infrastructure maintenance and resiliency in those places. Then, the next climate disaster creates more uninsured losses. Lather, rinse, repeat. Finance and insurance are betting heavily on climate risk modeling – not to avert this crisis, but to ensure that their finances remain intact though it. What's more, it won't work. As climate effects get bigger, they get less predictable – and harder to avoid. The point of insurance is spreading risk, not reducing it. We shouldn't and can't rely on insurance creating price-signals to reduce our climate risk. But the climate doom-loop can be put in reverse – not by market spending, but by public spending. As Arun writes, we need to create "a global investment architecture that is safe for spending": https://tanjasail.wordpress.com/2023/10/06/a-world-safe-for-spending/ Public investment in emissions reduction and resiliency can offset climate risk, by reducing future global warming and by making places better prepared to endure the weather and other events that are locked in by past emissions. A just transition will "loosen liquidity constraints on investment in communities made vulnerable by the financial system." Austerity is a bad investment strategy. Failure to maintain and improve infrastructure doesn't just shift costs into the future, it increases those costs far in excess of any rational discount based on the time value of money. Public institutions should discipline markets, not the other way around. Don't give Wall Street a veto over our climate spending. A National Investment Authority could subordinate markets to human thriving: https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/industrial-policy-requires-public-not-just-private-equity/ Insurance need not be pitted against human survival. Saving the cities and regions whose bonds are held by insurance companies is good for those companies: "Breaking the climate risk doom loop is the best disaster insurance policy money can buy." I found Arun's work to be especially bracing because of the book I'm touring now, The Lost Cause, a solarpunk novel set in a world in which vast public investment is being made to address the climate emergency that is everywhere and all at once: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause There is something profoundly hopeful about the belief that we can do something about these foreseeable disasters – rather than remaining frozen in place until the disaster is upon us and it's too late. As Rebecca Solnit says, inhabiting this place in your imagination is "Completely delightful. Neither utopian nor dystopian, it portrays life in SoCal in a future woven from our successes (Green New Deal!), failures (climate chaos anyway), and unresolved conflicts (old MAGA dudes). I loved it." Hey look at this (permalink) Portal – 1987 – MS-DOS Game Reviews https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3URO-5pCMyw (h/t Salim Fadhley) Draft Digital Replica Bill Risks Living Performers’ Rights over AI-Generated Replacements https://rightofpublicityroadmap.com/news_commentary/draft-digital-replica-bill-risks-living-performers-rights-over-ai-generated-replacements/ The Case For A Technology Aware Lobby Correspondent https://hackaday.com/2023/11/17/the-case-for-a-technology-aware-lobby-correspondent/ This day in history (permalink) #15yrsago Canada’s Internet is crap https://web.archive.org/web/20081207154815/https://www.cbc.ca/searchengine/blog/2008/11/is_canada_becoming_a_digital_g.html #10yrsago Brainwashed: Neuroscience vs neurobollocks https://memex.craphound.com/2013/11/28/brainwashed-neuroscience-vs-neurobollocks/ #10yrsago Florida sheriff arrests mayor on drug charges: “This isn’t Toronto” https://www.onlineathens.com/story/news/state/2013/11/26/florida-mayor-arrested-drug-charges/15549584007/ #10yrsago Pope blasts capitalism https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/11/26/pope-francis-has-a-few-thoughts-about-the-global-economy-we-added-these-13-charts/ #10yrsago Venn menu https://memex.craphound.com/2013/11/28/venn-menu/ #5yrsago Probing a mysterious network of dropshippers, evangelicals, crapgadgets, and semi-vacant Manhattan department stores https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/27/style/what-is-inside-this-internet-rabbit-hole.html #5yrsago Houston’s “inchworm bandits” create performance art while robbing restaurants on their bellies https://www.loweringthebar.net/2018/11/inchworm-bandits-are-either-idiots-or-comedy-geniuses.html #5yrsago Dutch church holds 27 days of round-the-clock services to protect immigrant family from deportation https://qz.com/1470153/a-dutch-church-is-holding-non-stop-services-for-a-refugee-family #5yrsago Comcast cranks up extra charges on cable bills, again, even for people who signed contracts promising a lower rate https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/11/comcasts-controversial-tv-and-sports-fees-rise-again-hit-18-25-a-month/ #5yrsago Prince’s entire catalog of obscure, hard-to-find music videos, collected and annotated https://www.anildash.com/2018/11/28/every-single-video-prince-ever-made/ #5yrsago Before Youtube nukes annotations, take one last look at these amazing, creative projects that showed how much annotations could do https://waxy.org/2018/11/a-tribute-to-youtube-annotations/ #5yrsago Labour report on executive pay proposes giving customers a vote on compensation, ending share-based compensation for execs https://web.archive.org/web/20181129113350/visar.csustan.edu/aaba/LabourExecutiveRemunerationReview2018.pdf #5yrsago Toronto 2033: science fiction writers imagine the city of the future https://web.archive.org/web/20190306140656/https://toronto2033.com/ #1yrago How monopoly enshittified Amazon https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Naked Capitalism (https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/). Currently writing: A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2024 Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: Moral Hazard (from Communications Breakdown) https://craphound.com/stories/2023/11/12/moral-hazard-from-communications-breakdown/ Upcoming appearances: The Lost Cause at The Strand (NYC), Nov 29 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-the-lost-cause-tickets-734958008187 The Lost Cause at Flyleaf Books (Chapel Hill), Dec 5 https://www.flyleafbooks.com/doctorow-2023 Recent appearances: Digital Markets Act; Interoperability; Entrenchment; Copyright; "What-About-Ism" (Digital Markets Research Hub) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm23pO5_WKM Science fiction for a dystopian present (Institute of Art and Ideas) https://iai.tv/video/science-fiction-for-a-dystopian-present-cory-doctorow?_auid=2020 Pushing back on unconstrained capitalism (Changelog) https://changelog.com/podcast/565 Latest books: "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. Upcoming books: The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books, February 2024 Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

https://poliverso.org/display/0477a01e-6f9b6af5-8503d3e2931c1a28

#10yrsago #NSA spied on non-terrorist “radicalizers”‘ porn use in order to discredit them https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nsa-porn-muslims_n_4346128

#10yrsago #PublicCitizen threatens legal action against #Kleargear on behalf of customers https://www.techdirt.com/2013/11/26/public-citizen-suing-behalf-customers-whose-credit-was-ruined-kleargears-3500-bad-review-fee/

#10yrsago Beasties/#GoldieBlox debunked https://waxy.org/2013/11/goldieblox_and_the_three_mcs/

#5yrsago Billboards are using sensors to identify, target and track individuals https://onezero.medium.com/irl-ads-are-taking-scary-inspiration-from-social-media-7088e8241beb

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#20yrsago #BigMouthBillyBass runs #Linux, does impressions https://web.archive.org/web/20031123212606/http://bigmouth.here-n-there.com/

#15yrsago #TonyBenn’s War on Terror diaries — an inspirational look at the life of a princpled fighter https://memex.craphound.com/2008/11/26/tony-benns-war-on-terror-diaries-an-inspirational-look-at-the-life-of-a-princpled-fighter/

#15yrsago Passwords suck https://web.archive.org/web/20081220181358/http://www.links.org/?p=425

#10yrsago RIP, Richard “#Datamancer” Nagy https://web.archive.org/web/20131129114041/http://brassgoggles.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,41728.msg879191.html

#10yrsago #TerryPratchett’s “Raising Steam”: the magic of modernity https://memex.craphound.com/2013/11/27/pratchetts-raising-steam-the-magic-of-modernity/

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Pluralistic: The real AI fight (27 Nov 2023)

Today's links The real AI fight: Effective Accelerationists and Effective Altruists are both in vigorous agreement about something genuinely stupid. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2003, 2008, 2013, 2018, 2022 Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading The real AI fight (permalink) Last week's spectacular OpenAI soap-opera hijacked the attention of millions of normal, productive people and nonsensually crammed them full of the fine details of the debate between "Effective Altruism" (doomers) and "Effective Accelerationism" (AKA e/acc), a genuinely absurd debate that was allegedly at the center of the drama. Very broadly speaking: the Effective Altruists are doomers, who believe that Large Language Models (AKA "spicy autocomplete") will someday become so advanced that it could wake up and annihilate or enslave the human race. To prevent this, we need to employ "AI Safety" – measures that will turn superintelligence into a servant or a partner, nor an adversary. Contrast this with the Effective Accelerationists, who also believe that LLMs will someday become superintelligences with the potential to annihilate or enslave humanity – but they nevertheless advocate for faster AI development, with fewer "safety" measures, in order to produce an "upward spiral" in the "techno-capital machine." Once-and-future OpenAI CEO Altman is said to be an accelerationists who was forced out of the company by the Altruists, who were subsequently bested, ousted, and replaced by Larry fucking Summers. This, we're told, is the ideological battle over AI: should cautiously progress our LLMs into superintelligences with safety in mind, or go full speed ahead and trust to market forces to tame and harness the superintelligences to come? This "AI debate" is pretty stupid, proceeding as it does from the foregone conclusion that adding compute power and date to the next-word-predictor program will eventually create a conscious being, which will then inevitably become a superbeing. This is a proposition akin to the idea that if we keep breeding faster and faster horses, we'll get a locomotive: https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/ As Molly White writes, this isn't much of a debate. The "two sides" of this debate are as similar as Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Yes, they're arrayed against each other in battle, so furious with each other that they're tearing their hair out. But for people who don't take any of this mystical nonsense about spontaneous consciousness arising from applied statistics seriously, these two sides are nearly indistinguishable, sharing as they do this extremely weird belief. The fact that they've split into warring factions on its particulars is less important than their unified belief in the certain coming of the paperclip-maximizing apocalypse: https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/effective-obfuscation White points out that there's another, much more distinct side in this AI debate – as different and distant from Dee and Dum as a Beamish Boy and a Jabberwork. This is the side of AI Ethics – the side that worries about "today’s issues of ghost labor, algorithmic bias, and erosion of the rights of artists and others." As White says, shifting the debate to existential risk from a future, hypothetical superintelligence "is incredibly convenient for the powerful individuals and companies who stand to profit from AI." After all, both sides plan to make money selling AI tools to corporations, whose track record in deploying algorithmic "decision support" systems and other AI-based automation is pretty poor – like the claims-evaluation engine that Cigna uses to deny insurance claims: https://www.propublica.org/article/cigna-pxdx-medical-health-insurance-rejection-claims On a graph that plots the various positions on AI, the two groups of weirdos who disagree about how to create the inevitable superintelligence are effectively standing on the same spot, and the people who worry about the actual way that AI harms actual people right now are about a million miles away from that spot. There's that old programmer joke, "There are 10 kinds of people, those who understand binary and those who don't." But of course, that joke could just as well be, "There are 10 kinds of people, those who understand ternary, those who understand binary, and those who don't understand either": https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/11/the-ten-types-of-people/ What's more, the joke could be, "there are 10 kinds of people, those who understand hexadecenary, those who understand pentadecenary, those who understand tetradecenary [und so weiter] those who understand ternary, those who understand binary, and those who don't." That is to say, a "polarized" debate often has people who hold positions so far from the ones everyone is talking about that those belligerents' concerns are basically indistinguishable from one another. The act of identifying these distant positions is a radical opening up of possibilities. Take the indigenous philosopher chief Red Jacket's response to the Christian missionaries who sought permission to proselytize to Red Jacket's people: https://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5790/ Red Jacket's whole rebuttal is a superb dunk, but it gets especially interesting where he points to the sectarian differences among Christians as evidence against the missionary's claim to having a single true faith, and in favor of the idea that his own people's traditional faith could be co-equal among Christian doctrines. The split that White identifies isn't a split about whether AI tools can be useful. Plenty of us AI skeptics are happy to stipulate that there are good uses for AI. For example, I'm 100% in favor of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group using an LLM to classify and extract information from the Innocence Project New Orleans' wrongful conviction case files: https://hrdag.org/tech-notes/large-language-models-IPNO.html Automating "extracting officer information from documents – specifically, the officer's name and the role the officer played in the wrongful conviction" was a key step to freeing innocent people from prison, and an LLM allowed HRDAG – a tiny, cash-strapped, excellent nonprofit – to make a giant leap forward in a vital project. I'm a donor to HRDAG and you should donate to them too: https://hrdag.networkforgood.com/ Good data-analysis is key to addressing many of our thorniest, most pressing problems. As Ben Goldacre recounts in his inaugural Oxford lecture, it is both possible and desirable to build ethical, privacy-preserving systems for analyzing the most sensitive personal data (NHS patient records) that yield scores of solid, ground-breaking medical and scientific insights: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-eaV8SWdjQ The difference between this kind of work – HRDAG's exoneration work and Goldacre's medical research – and the approach that OpenAI and its competitors take boils down to how they treat humans. The former treats all humans as worthy of respect and consideration. The latter treats humans as instruments – for profit in the short term, and for creating a hypothetical superintelligence in the (very) long term. As Terry Pratchett's Granny Weatherwax reminds us, this is the root of all sin: "sin is when you treat people like things": https://brer-powerofbabel.blogspot.com/2009/02/granny-weatherwax-on-sin-favorite.html So much of the criticism of AI misses this distinction – instead, this criticism starts by accepting the self-serving marketing claim of the "AI safety" crowd – that their software is on the verge of becoming self-aware, and is thus valuable, a good investment, and a good product to purchase. This is Lee Vinsel's "Criti-Hype": "taking press releases from startups and covering them with hellscapes": https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5 Criti-hype and AI were made for each other. Emily M Bender is a tireless cataloger of criti-hypeists, like the newspaper reporters who breathlessly repeat " completely unsubstantiated claims (marketing)…sourced to Altman": https://dair-community.social/@emilymbender/111464030855880383 Bender, like White, is at pains to point out that the real debate isn't doomers vs accelerationists. That's just "billionaires throwing money at the hope of bringing about the speculative fiction stories they grew up reading – and philosophers and others feeling important by dressing these same silly ideas up in fancy words": https://dair-community.social/@emilymbender/111464024432217299 All of this is just a distraction from real and important scientific questions about how (and whether) to make automation tools that steer clear of Granny Weatherwax's sin of "treating people like things." Bender – a computational linguist – isn't a reactionary who hates automation for its own sake. On Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 – the excellent podcast she co-hosts with Alex Hanna – there is a machine-generated transcript: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2126417 There is a serious, meaty debate to be had about the costs and possibilities of different forms of automation. But the superintelligence true-believers and their criti-hyping critics keep dragging us away from these important questions and into fanciful and pointless discussions of whether and how to appease the godlike computers we will create when we disassemble the solar system and turn it into computronium. The question of machine intelligence isn't intrinsically unserious. As a materialist, I believe that whatever makes me "me" is the result of the physics and chemistry of processes inside and around my body. My disbelief in the existence of a soul means that I'm prepared to think that it might be possible for something made by humans to replicate something like whatever process makes me "me." Ironically, the AI doomers and accelerationists claim that they, too, are materialists – and that's why they're so consumed with the idea of machine superintelligence. But it's precisely because I'm a materialist that I understand these hypotheticals about self-aware software are less important and less urgent than the material lives of people today. It's because I'm a materialist that my primary concerns about AI are things like the climate impact of AI data-centers and the human impact of biased, opaque, incompetent and unfit algorithmic systems – not science fiction-inspired, self-induced panics over the human race being enslaved by our robot overlords. (Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) "A Pan-African Vision for Structural Transformation" ~ Fadhel Kaboub https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnXjtyTnpig DISENGAGE Opting Out—and Finding New Options—to Reclaim the Internet from Spammers, Scammers, Intrusive Marketers and Big Tech https://www.lindaformichelli.com/_files/ugd/7f54e8_b4212db40a8342b59fe1e0a4c2087997.pdf National Rail Action Plan https://youtu.be/-VrvAzwpFmE This day in history (permalink) #20yrsago Big Mouth Billy Bass runs Linux, does impressions https://web.archive.org/web/20031123212606/http://bigmouth.here-n-there.com/ #15yrsago Tony Benn’s War on Terror diaries — an inspirational look at the life of a princpled fighter https://memex.craphound.com/2008/11/26/tony-benns-war-on-terror-diaries-an-inspirational-look-at-the-life-of-a-princpled-fighter/ #15yrsago Passwords suck https://web.archive.org/web/20081220181358/http://www.links.org/?p=425 #10yrsago RIP, Richard “Datamancer” Nagy https://web.archive.org/web/20131129114041/http://brassgoggles.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,41728.msg879191.html #10yrsago Pratchett’s “Raising Steam”: the magic of modernity https://memex.craphound.com/2013/11/27/pratchetts-raising-steam-the-magic-of-modernity/ #10yrsago NSA spied on non-terrorist “radicalizers”‘ porn use in order to discredit them https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nsa-porn-muslims_n_4346128 #10yrsago Public Citizen threatens legal action against Kleargear on behalf of customers https://www.techdirt.com/2013/11/26/public-citizen-suing-behalf-customers-whose-credit-was-ruined-kleargears-3500-bad-review-fee/ #10yrsago Beasties/GoldieBlox debunked https://waxy.org/2013/11/goldieblox_and_the_three_mcs/ #5yrsago Billboards are using sensors to identify, target and track individuals https://onezero.medium.com/irl-ads-are-taking-scary-inspiration-from-social-media-7088e8241beb #5yrsago Man arrested for rape after his Playstation mic allegedly broadcast audio from the crime to other players https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/11/a-hot-playstation-mic-captures-sounds-of-apparent-rape-leads-to-arrest/ #5yrsago Amnesty will stage global protests over Google’s spying, censoring Chinese search engine plan https://theintercept.com/2018/11/26/google-dragonfly-project-china-amnesty-international/ #5yrsago Supreme Court looks ready to let customers sue Apple for abusing its App Store monopoly https://gizmodo.com/supreme-court-appears-to-lean-heavily-against-apples-de-1830662533?IR=T #5yrsato A visual guide to America’s concentrated, uncompetitive markets https://concentrationcrisis.openmarketsinstitute.org #5yrsago US tax shortfalls have our public schools begging for donations https://truthout.org/articles/bake-sales-cant-fix-school-funding-pinch-caused-by-corporate-tax-cuts/ #5yrsago Using information security to explain why disinformation makes autocracies stronger and democracies weaker https://memex.craphound.com/2018/11/27/using-information-security-to-explain-why-disinformation-makes-autocracies-stronger-and-democracies-weaker/ #5yrsago The Fifth Risk: Michael Lewis explains how the “deep state” is just nerds versus grifters https://memex.craphound.com/2018/11/27/the-fifth-risk-michael-lewis-explains-how-the-deep-state-is-just-nerds-versus-grifters/ #5yrsago Malware vector: become an admin on dormant, widely-used open source projects https://github.com/dominictarr/event-stream/issues/116 #5yrsago Babysitter vetting and voice-analysis: Have we reached peak AI snakeoil? https://memex.craphound.com/2018/11/26/babysitter-vetting-and-voice-analysis-have-we-reached-peak-ai-snakeoil/ #5yrsago Chinese AI traffic cam mistook a bus ad for a human and publicly shamed the CEO it depicted for jaywalking https://www.scmp.com/tech/innovation/article/2174564/facial-recognition-catches-chinas-air-con-queen-dong-mingzhu #5yrsago Using data-science to evaluate whether Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption sweeps were really about consolidating power https://www.aeaweb.org/conference/2019/preliminary/paper/hSA5ri6d #1yrago Poe vs. Property https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/27/poe-vs-property/ Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2024 Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: Moral Hazard (from Communications Breakdown) https://craphound.com/stories/2023/11/12/moral-hazard-from-communications-breakdown/ Upcoming appearances: Who Is Watching Big Tech? Nov 27 (Toronto)` https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/who-is-watching-big-tech-tickets-707927880347 The Lost Cause at The Strand (NYC), Nov 29 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-the-lost-cause-tickets-734958008187 The Lost Cause at Flyleaf Books (Chapel Hill), Dec 5 https://www.flyleafbooks.com/doctorow-2023 Recent appearances: Digital Markets Act; Interoperability; Entrenchment; Copyright; "What-About-Ism" (Digital Markets Research Hub) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm23pO5_WKM Science fiction for a dystopian present (Institute of Art and Ideas) https://iai.tv/video/science-fiction-for-a-dystopian-present-cory-doctorow?_auid=2020 Pushing back on unconstrained capitalism (Changelog) https://changelog.com/podcast/565 Latest books: "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. Upcoming books: The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books, February 2024 Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

https://poliverso.org/display/0477a01e-a0dc686e-6789a91d2990ac8f

#10yrsago #MiamiGardens police arrest Black man for trespassing 56 times — at the store where he works https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article1957716.html

#10yrsago Court rules that calling an MP “a coward” isn’t a crime https://www.independent.co.uk/student/news/protester-cleared-of-threatening-behaviour-for-calling-hove-mp-a-coward-8937208.html

#10yrsago #RobFord gets a New Yorker cartoon https://www.joeydevilla.com/2013/11/23/rob-fords-appearance-in-a-new-yorker-cartoon/

#5yrsago While serving, Trump’s comms director will get a $7M Fox News bonus for his mishandling of sexual abuse https://thinkprogress.org/bill-shine-fox-news-donald-trump-white-house-communications-director-severance-package-e24734b145c0/

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#15yrsago #Bailout costs more than Marshall Plan, Louisiana Purchase, moonshot, S&L bailout, Korean War, New Deal, Iraq war, Vietnam war, and NASA’s lifetime budget — *combined*! https://memex.craphound.com/2008/11/24/bailout-costs-more-than-marshall-plan-louisiana-purchase-moonshot-sl-bailout-korean-war-new-deal-iraq-war-vietnam-war-and-nasas-lifetime-budget-combined/

#10yrsago Man convicted of urinating on hotel carpet while shouting racist abuse, while masturbating with a fire-extinguisher hose up his ass https://metro.co.uk/2013/11/12/premier-inn-guest-hurled-racist-abuse-with-fire-extinguisher-hose-up-his-bottom-4184507/

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Pluralistic: Thankful for class consciousness (24 Nov 2023)

Today's links Thankful for class consciousness: Eggs, Teslas, airlines, turkeys, and the roof over your head. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2008, 2013, 2018 Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading Thankful for class consciousness (permalink) Before the term "ecology" came along, people didn't know they were on the same side. You care about owls, I care about the ozone layer – what does the destiny of charismatic nocturnal avians have to do with the gaseous composition of the upper atmosphere? But as James Boyle has written, the term "ecology" welded together a thousand issues into a single movement. When we talk about "looking at our world through a lens," this is what we mean – apply the right analytical lens and a motley assortment of disparate causes becomes a unified, coherent project: https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1013&context=dlj Unfettered, planet-destroying, worker immiserating corporate power is only possible in the absence of such a lens. Before neoliberalism can destroy our lives, it must first convince us that we are all disconnected. "There is no such thing as society," isn't just an empty slogan: it's a weapon for dismantling the democratically accountable structures that can stand against industrial tyrants. That's why neoliberalism is so viciously opposed to all kinds of solidarity, why corporate apologists insist that the only elections that matter are the ones where you "vote with your wallet." It's no surprise that the side with the thickest wallets wants to replace ballots with dollars! Today, at long last, after generations of deadly corporate power-grabs, we are living through an ecology moment where all kind of fights are coalescing into one big fight: the fight to save democracy from oligarchy. There are many tributaries flowing into this mighty river, but two of the largest are antitrust and labor. Antitrust seeks to ensure that our world is regulated by democratically accountable lawmakers who deliberate in public, rather than shareholder-accountable monopolists who deliberate in smoke-filled rooms. Labor seeks to ensure that contests between profit for the few and prosperity for the many are decided in favor of people, not profit. This coalition is so powerful that the ruling class has never stopped attacking it. Indeed, the history of US antitrust law can be viewed as a succession of ever-more-insistent laws enacted solely to make it clear to deliberately obtuse judges that competition law is aimed at corporations, not unions: https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/14/aiming-at-dollars/#not-men Rising corporate power and declining worker power is bad for all of us. The failure of successive US administrations to block airline mergers led to sky-high prices and a proliferation of "junk fees" that can double the price of a ticket. The monopoly carriers stand to make $118b this year from these fees: https://www.fastcompany.com/90981005/airlines-fees-118-billion-dark-patterns The consolidation of the agricultural sector led to cartels that conspired to rig the prices of our food. These Les Mis LARPers rigged the price of bread! https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/canada-bread-price-fixing-1.6883783 Remember eggflation? Nearly all the eggs in US grocery stores come from a single company, Cal-Maine, which owns dozens of brands, including "Farmhouse Eggs, Sunups, Sunny Meadow, Egg-Land’s Best and Land O’ Lakes eggs": https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/13/business/egg-prices-cal-maine-foods/index.html With all our eggs in one basket, it was easy for a single company to rig the egg market, blaming everything from bird flu to Russian invasion of Ukraine for doubling egg prices while their profits shot up by 65%: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/23/cant-make-an-omelet/#keep-calm-and-crack-on Antitrust isn't just about monopoly – it's also about oligopoly. The American meat cartel pretends that it's not rigging markets by outsourcing its price-fixing to a "clearinghouse" called Agri Stats: https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/04/dont-let-your-meat-loaf/#meaty-beaty-big-and-bouncy Agri-Stats gets data from all the Big Meat companies, "anonymizes" it, and publishes it back to its subscribers, who use the service to coordinate across-the-board price-hikes that have cost the public billions in price gouging (meanwhile, Big Meat was able to secure $50b in public subsidies). For forty years, governments have ceded power to "autocrats of trade" who usurped control "over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life": https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/ But that era is coming to an end. In the past year, American regulators have blocked airline mergers and promulgated rules banning junk fees. They've dragged price-fixing clearinghouses into court: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-turkey-eggs-and-air-travel-just They're getting results, too: for the second year in a row, turkey prices are down. Cranberries, too (18%). Same for whipping cream (25%). Pie crusts are down. So are russet potatoes. Airfares are down 13.2%. The egg cartel just lost a long-running court case over the last egg price-fixing campaign, which gouged Americans from 1990-2008: https://www.pymnts.com/cpi_posts/kellogg-kraft-secure-victory-in-price-fixing-lawsuit-against-egg-producers The same fact-pattern that was revealed in that court case is repeated in this year's eggflation scandal: https://farmaction.us/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Farm-Action-Letter-to-FTC-Chair-Lina-Khan.pdf That's terrific ammo for the FTC, and will doubtless benefit the Democrats running against would-be Illinois senator John Rust, whose family owns convicted egg cartel member Rose Acre Farms and whose wife just stepped down as chair of the board. One underappreciated aspect of the global war on corporate power is that the same corporations commit the same crimes in countries all over the world, which means that whenever any government establishes evidence of those crimes, they are of use to all the other governments. Competition enforcers from the UK, EU, USA, Singapore, South Korea and elsewhere are coordinating to target the Big Tech cartel. Maybe Google and Facebook and Apple are bigger enough to resist any one of those governments – but all of them? https://cmadataconference.co.uk/ One notable absence from the anti-monopoly coalition is Canada. While other countries merely stopped enforcing their competition laws in the neoliberal era, Canada never had a good competition law to enforce. Canada's official tolerance for monopolies has allowed a handful of companies to seize control over the economy of Canada and the lives of Canadians: https://www.canadaland.com/shows/commons-monopoly/ These monopolies are largely controlled by powerful families, Canada's de facto aristocracy, whose wealth and power make them above the law and subordinate the country's democratic institutions to billionaires' whims: https://www.canadaland.com/tag/dynasties/ At long last, Canada has called time on oligarchy. Last week's Fall Economic Statement included an announcement of a muscular new competition law, including new merger guidelines, a new "abuse of dominance" standard, and Right to Repair rules: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7132855021548769282/ The law also includes interoperability mandates for Canada's highly concentrated – and deeply corrupt – banking sector. These measures are strikingly similar to new measures just introduced in the US by the CFPB: https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/21/let-my-dollars-go/#personal-financial-data-rights The arrival of Canada's first fit-for-purpose competition rule coincides with all kinds of solidaristic movements in Canada that are fighting corporate power from the bottom up. Even Ontario, led by one of the most corrupt premiers in provincial history, can't break its teachers' union: https://globalnews.ca/news/10105600/ontario-elementary-teachers-reach-contract-deal/ It's not just workers who benefit from solidarity: Tenants' unions have formed across the province in response to corporate takeovers of scarce rental stock. These finance-sector landlords have armies of lawyers who've figured out how to bypass rent-control rules and evict tenants who balk. Rather than rolling over, tenants' unions are organizing waves of rent-strikes: https://macleans.ca/longforms/rent-strikes-canada/ As with Big Tech, the illegal tactics of the rental sector aren't confined to a single nation. In America, Wall Street landlords have dramatically increased the price of housing and kicked off an eviction epidemic the likes of which the country has never seen: https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/16/mortgages-are-rent-control/#housing-is-a-human-right-not-an-asset And as with Big Meat, landlords use arm's-length clearing houses to rig rental markets, coordinating across-the-board rent hikes: https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-realpage-rent In other words: to fix the housing market, tenants all over the world need to learn the tactics of labor unions. Housing regulators have to learn from agricultural regulators. Americans tenants have to learn from Canadians. These aren't 1,000 different fights – they're one big fight, and the coalition for dismantling corporate power is vast and powerful. The most powerful weapons our bosses have is convincing us that we are weak and they are strong – so strong that we shouldn't even try to fight them. But solidarity is absurdly powerful, which is why they go to such great lengths to discredit it. In Sweden, the solidarity strikes against Tesla – who refuses to recognize its maintenance workers' union – have spread to nine unions. Tesla can't get its cars offloaded at the ports. It can't get its showrooms cleaned. No one will deliver its mail. No one will fix its chargers. The strike is spreading to Germany, and workers at its giant Berlin factory is set to walk out: https://www.metafilter.com/201514/Swedish-Tesla-workers-go-on-strike There's something delicious about how palpably frustrated Elon Musk is by all this, as he realizes that neither his billions nor his bully pulpit are a match for workers in solidarity: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-23/elon-musk-calls-swedish-tesla-strikes-insane-as-impact-spreads It's a reminder of just how fragile and weak billionaires are, when we stop believing in them and deferring to them. Rebecca Solnit's latest Guardian column adds up the ways that allowing billionaires to run the show puts us all in danger: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/20/billionaires-great-carbon-divide-planet-climate-crisis They are the unelected "autocrats of trade" who control "the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life." They are the force that this new ecology movement is coalescing to fight: across borders, across sectors, across identities. No matter whether you are a worker, a tenant, a voter, a shopper or a citizen, your enemy is the billionaire class. Hey look at this (permalink) Apple privately asked Amazon to block rival ads https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-gives-apple-special-treatment-while-others-suffer-junk-ads-2023-11 (h/t Naked Capitalism) Stocking Up on Wealth … Concentration https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2023/11/23/stocking-up-on-wealth-concentration/ CEO Reminds Everyone His Company Collects Customers' Sleep Data https://www.404media.co/ceo-reminds-everyone-eightsleep-pod-collects-sleep-data-to-make-zeitgeisty-point-about-openai-drama/ (h/t Slashdot) This day in history (permalink) #15yrsago Bailout costs more than Marshall Plan, Louisiana Purchase, moonshot, S&L bailout, Korean War, New Deal, Iraq war, Vietnam war, and NASA’s lifetime budget — combined! https://memex.craphound.com/2008/11/24/bailout-costs-more-than-marshall-plan-louisiana-purchase-moonshot-sl-bailout-korean-war-new-deal-iraq-war-vietnam-war-and-nasas-lifetime-budget-combined/ #10yrsago Man convicted of urinating on hotel carpet while shouting racist abuse, while masturbating with a fire-extinguisher hose up his ass https://metro.co.uk/2013/11/12/premier-inn-guest-hurled-racist-abuse-with-fire-extinguisher-hose-up-his-bottom-4184507/ #10yrsago Miami Gardens police arrest Black man for trespassing 56 times — at the store where he works https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article1957716.html #10yrsago Court rules that calling an MP “a coward” isn’t a crime https://www.independent.co.uk/student/news/protester-cleared-of-threatening-behaviour-for-calling-hove-mp-a-coward-8937208.html #10yrsago Rob Ford gets a New Yorker cartoon https://www.joeydevilla.com/2013/11/23/rob-fords-appearance-in-a-new-yorker-cartoon/ #5yrsago While serving, Trump’s comms director will get a $7M Fox News bonus for his mishandling of sexual abuse https://thinkprogress.org/bill-shine-fox-news-donald-trump-white-house-communications-director-severance-package-e24734b145c0/ #5yrsago On Thanksgiving Eve, Facebook quietly admitted to hiring dirty tricksters to publish an anti-Semitic Soros hoax smearing its critics https://web.archive.org/web/20181122231310/https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/22/business/on-thanksgiving-eve-facebook-acknowledges-details-of-times-investigation.html Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Kottke (https://kottke.org/), Metafilter (https://www.metafilter.com/), Naked Capitalism (https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/), Slashdot (https://slashdot.org/), Currently writing: A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2024 Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: Moral Hazard (from Communications Breakdown) https://craphound.com/stories/2023/11/12/moral-hazard-from-communications-breakdown/ Upcoming appearances: Who Is Watching Big Tech? Nov 27 (Toronto)` https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/who-is-watching-big-tech-tickets-707927880347 The Lost Cause at The Strand (NYC), Nov 29 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-the-lost-cause-tickets-734958008187 The Lost Cause at Flyleaf Books (Chapel Hill), Dec 5 https://www.flyleafbooks.com/doctorow-2023 Recent appearances: Digital Markets Act; Interoperability; Entrenchment; Copyright; "What-About-Ism" (Digital Markets Research Hub) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm23pO5_WKM Science fiction for a dystopian present (Institute of Art and Ideas) https://iai.tv/video/science-fiction-for-a-dystopian-present-cory-doctorow?_auid=2020 Pushing back on unconstrained capitalism (Changelog) https://changelog.com/podcast/565 Latest books: "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. Upcoming books: The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books, February 2024 Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

https://poliverso.org/display/0477a01e-1be61633-65998efe58c07204

#10yrsago #NSA hacked 50,000 global networks https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2013/11/23/nsa-infected-50000-computer-networks-with-malicious-software-a1429487

#10yrsago Prisoners return to Philippines jail after escaping home to help their families https://www.rappler.com/environment/disasters/44412-prisoners-return-after-yolanda-typhoon-mass-escape/

#10yrsago Six ways that NSA and #GCHQ spying violated your rights, and six things you can do about it https://web.archive.org/web/20131128062334/https://www.openrightsgroup.org/campaigns/take-action-against-mass-surveillance

#10yrsago How an enraged mom chased #RevengePorn slime-king #HunterMoore offline https://web.archive.org/web/20131121172634/http://www.xojane.com/it-happened-to-me/charlotte-laws-hunter-moore-erin-brockovich-revenge-porn

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Pluralistic: The FTC has Big Pharma's number (23 Nov 2023)

Today's links The FTC has Big Pharma's number: The sleazy game of Orange Book evergreening. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2013, 2018, 2022 Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading The FTC has Big Pharma's number (permalink) The most consistent bright spot in the dark swirl of US politics is the competence of the Biden Administration's progressive enforcers: people like Rohit Chopra, Jonathan Kanter and Lina Khan, who keep demonstrating just how far a good administrator can go. Anyone can have a vision, but knowing how to execute is the difference between hot air and real change: https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/23/getting-stuff-done/#praxis Take a minute to contrast Biden's administrators with Trump's: Trump's administrators had an ideological vision just as surely as Biden's do, and Trump himself had a much more pronounced and explicit ideology than Biden, whose governance style is much more about balancing the Democratic Party's blocs than bringing about a specific set of policies: https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/06/personnel-are-policy/#janice-eberly But whatever clarity of vision the Trump administration brought to DC was completely undermined by its incompetence (thankfully!). Apart from one gigantic tax break, Trump couldn't get stuff done. He couldn't deliver, because he'd lose his temper or speak out of turn: https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/14/when-youve-lost-the-fedsoc/#anti-buster-buster And his administrators followed his lead. Scott Pruitt was appointed to run the EPA after a career spent suing the agency. It could have been the realization of his life's dream to dismantle environmental law in America and open the floodgates for unlimited, wildly profitable corporate pollution and pillaging. But the dream died because he kept getting embroiled in absurd scandals – like the time he sent his staffers out to drive around all night looking for a good deal on a used mattress: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/epa-s-pruitt-told-aide-obtain-old-mattress-trump-hotel-n879836 Or his insistence on installing a CIA-style "Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility" (SCIF) so he could play super-spy while reading memos: https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/26/politics/epa-administrator-scott-pruitt-sound-proof-booth-scif/index.html Or the time he sent his security detail to the Ritz-Carlton to demand that they supply him lots of little bottles of his favorite hand-cream: https://www.vox.com/2018/6/7/17439044/scott-pruitt-ritz-carlton-moisturizing-lotion There were other examples in the Trump administration, but Priutt is such a good case-study. He's like a guy who spent his whole life training to compete in the Olympics, and finally got a shot, only to be disqualified for ordering too much room-service in the Olympic Village. Priutt was wildly ambitious, but he was profoundly undisciplined – and wildly incompetent. Compare that with Biden's progressive enforcers and agency heads, who showed up on the first day of work with an encyclopedic knowledge of their administrative powers, and detailed plans for using them to transform the lives of the American people for the better: https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff The Biden administration's competence translates into action, getting stuff done. Maybe that shouldn't surprise us, given the difference between the stories that reactionaries and progressives tell about where change comes from. In reactionary science fiction, we enter the realm of the "Competent Man" story. Think of a Heinlein hero, who is "able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly." In Competent Man stories, a unitary hero steps into the breach and solves the problem – if not single-handedly, then as the leader of others, whose lesser competence is a base metal that the Competent Man hammers into a tempered blade: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Creator/RobertAHeinlein Contrast this with a progressive tale, like, say, Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry For the Future, where the Competent Man is replaced by the Competent Administration, in which people of goodwill and technical competence figure out how to join forces to create population-scale architectures of participation that allow every person to contribute their skills and perspective: https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/03/ministry-for-the-future/#ksr The right's whole ideology insists that the world can only be saved by Competent Men. As Corey Robin writes in The Reactionary Mind, the unifying factor that binds together conservative factions from monarchists to racists to Christian Dominionists is the belief that a few of us are born to rule, and the rest to be ruled over: https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/25/mafia-logic/#mafia-logic The Reaganite insistence that governments are, by their very nature, incompetent and malign ("The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I’m from the government, and I’m here to help'"), means that conservatives deny the possibility of a Competent Administration. When conservatives take office and proceed to bungle the most basic elements of administration, they're fulfilling their own campaign narrative, which starts with "We must dismantle the government because it is bad at everything." Conservatives who govern badly prove their own point, which explains a lot about the UK Tory Party's long run of governmental failure and electoral success: https://apnews.com/article/uk-suella-braverman-fired-cabinet-shuffle-7ea6c89306a427cc70fba75bc386be79 There's a small mercy in the fact that so many of the most ideologically odious and extreme conservative governments are so technically incompetent in governing, and thus accomplish so little of their agendas. But the inverse – the incredible competence of the best progressive administrators – is nothing short of a delight to witness. Here's the latest example to cross my path: the FTC has intervened in a lawsuit over generic insulin pricing, on an issue that is incredibly technically specific and also fantastically important: https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/ftc-blasts-pharmas-abuse-fda-patent-system-sanofi-mylans-insulin-monopoly-lawsuit The underlying case is before the FDA, and it concerns the dirty tricks that pharma giant Sanofi used to keep Mylan from making a generic version of Mylan's Lantus insulin after its patent expired. There's an explicit bargain in patents: inventors can enlist the government to punish their rivals for copying their ideas, but in exchange, the government demands that the inventor has to describe how the invention works in a detailed patent filing, and when the patent expires, 20 years later, rivals can use the patent application as instructions for freely copying and selling the invention. In other words: you get 20 years of exclusive rights in return for facilitating your competitors' copying and selling your invention when the 20 years are up. Pharma doesn't like this, naturally: not content with 20 years of exclusivity, they want the government to step in and punish their competitors forever. In service to that end, pharma companies have perfected a process called evergreening, where they dribble out ancillary patents after their initial filing, covering minor reformulations, delivery systems, or new uses. Evergreening got a moment in the public eye earlier this year, with John Green's viral campaign to shame Johnson & Johnson out of using evergreening to restrict poor countries' access to TB medication: https://armandalegshow.com/episode/john-green-part-1/ The story of pharma is that it commands gigantic profits, but it invests those profits into medicines that save our lives. The reality is that most of the key underlying pharma research is publicly funded (by Competent Administrators who apportion funding to promising scientific inquiry). Pharma companies' most inventive genius is devoted to inventing new evergreening tactics: https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/19/solid-tumors/#t-cell-receptors That's where the FTC comes in, in this Sanofi-Mylan case. To facilitate the production of generic, off-patent drugs, the FDA maintains a database called the "Orange Book," where pharma companies are asked to enumerate all the ancillary patents associated with a product whose patent is expiring. That way, generics manufacturers who make their own version of these public domain drugs and therapeutics don't accidentally stumble over one of those later patents – say, by replicating a delivery system or special coating that is still in patent. This is where the endless, satanic inventiveness of the pharma sector comes in. You see, US law provides for triple damages for "willful patent infringement." If you are a generics manufacturer eyeing up a drug whose patent is about to expire and you are notified that some other patents might be implicated in your plans, you must ensure that you don't accidentally infringe one of those patents, or face business-destroying statutory damages. So pharma companies stuff the Orange Book full of irrelevant patent claims they say may be implicated in a generic manufacture program. Each of these claims has to be carefully evaluated, both by a scientific team and a legal team, because patents are deliberately obfuscated in the hopes of tricking an inattentive patent examiner into granting patents for unpatentable "inventions": https://blueironip.com/patents-that-hide-the-ball/ What's more, when a pharma giant notifies the FDA that it has ancillary patents that are relevant to the Orange Book, this triggers a 30-month delay before a generic can be marketed – adding 2.5 years to the 20 year patent term. That delay is sometimes enough to cause a manufacturer to abandon plans to market a generic drug – so the delay isn't 2.5 years, it's infinite. This is a highly technical, highly consequential form of evergreening. It's obscure as hell, and requires a deep understanding of patent obfuscation, ancillary patent filings, generic pharma industry practice, and the FDA's administrative procedures. Sanofi's Orange Book entry for Lantus insulin listed 50 related patent claims. Of these, 48 were invalidated through "inter partes" review (basically the Patent Office decided they shouldn't have allowed these claims to be included on a patent). Neither of the remaining two claims were found to be relevant to the manufacture of generic Lantus. This is where the FTC's filing comes in: their amicus brief doesn't take a position whether Sanofi's Orange Book entries were fraudulent, but they do ask the FDA to intervene to prevent Orange Book stuffing because "improper listings can cause significant harm to competition and consumers." This is the kind of boring, technical, important stuff that excellent administrators can do. The FTC's brief is notice to the FDA that it should amend its procedures to ban (and punish) Orange Book abuse. That will make it possible for you, a person who needs medicine, to get that medicine more cheaply and quickly. In America's pay-for-use privatized healthcare hellscape, this could be a life-or-death matter. There's plenty of things the Biden administration is getting very, very badly wrong, but we shouldn't lose sight of how its progressive wing is making real, lasting change for the better. Competent Administrations are the true peoples' champions. They beat Competent Men every time. Hey look at this (permalink) Google Chrome will limit ad blockers starting June 2024 https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/11/google-chrome-will-limit-ad-blockers-starting-june-2024/ Firefox adds "copy link without site tracking" https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2023/11/firefox-120-released-tracking-protection What OpenAI shares with Scientology https://crookedtimber.org/2023/11/21/what-openai-shares-with-scientology/ This day in history (permalink) #10yrsago NSA hacked 50,000 global networks https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2013/11/23/nsa-infected-50000-computer-networks-with-malicious-software-a1429487 #10yrsago Prisoners return to Philippines jail after escaping home to help their families https://www.rappler.com/environment/disasters/44412-prisoners-return-after-yolanda-typhoon-mass-escape/ #10yrsago Six ways that NSA and GCHQ spying violated your rights, and six things you can do about it https://web.archive.org/web/20131128062334/https://www.openrightsgroup.org/campaigns/take-action-against-mass-surveillance #10yrsago How an enraged mom chased revenge-porn slime-king Hunter Moore offline https://web.archive.org/web/20131121172634/http://www.xojane.com/it-happened-to-me/charlotte-laws-hunter-moore-erin-brockovich-revenge-porn #5yrsago Insurance companies gouge on CPAP machines and consumables, use wireless modems to spy on your usage https://www.propublica.org/article/you-snooze-you-lose-insurers-make-the-old-adage-literally-true #5yrsago Chinese Iphone ownership is a marker of membership in the “invisible poor” https://www.scmp.com/tech/article/2174310/research-highlights-class-divide-between-poor-apple-iphone-and-rich-huawei #1yrago Citizens United and the FTX meltdown https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/23/incentives-matter/#blockchain-eight Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Naked Capitalism (https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/). Currently writing: A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2024 Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: Moral Hazard (from Communications Breakdown) https://craphound.com/stories/2023/11/12/moral-hazard-from-communications-breakdown/ Upcoming appearances: Who Is Watching Big Tech? Nov 27 (Toronto)` https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/who-is-watching-big-tech-tickets-707927880347 The Lost Cause at The Strand (NYC), Nov 29 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-the-lost-cause-tickets-734958008187 The Lost Cause at Flyleaf Books (Chapel Hill), Dec 5 https://www.flyleafbooks.com/doctorow-2023 Recent appearances: Digital Markets Act; Interoperability; Entrenchment; Copyright; "What-About-Ism" (Digital Markets Research Hub) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm23pO5_WKM Science fiction for a dystopian present (Institute of Art and Ideas) https://iai.tv/video/science-fiction-for-a-dystopian-present-cory-doctorow?_auid=2020 Pushing back on unconstrained capitalism (Changelog) https://changelog.com/podcast/565 Latest books: "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. Upcoming books: The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books, February 2024 Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

https://poliverso.org/display/0477a01e-1dc3c76b-872ea5e20a001e00

#20yrsago @lessig: Towns should own their #fiber https://www.wired.com/2003/12/fiber-to-the-people/

#10yrsago Germany threatens to jail @carlmalamud for making the law available for free https://law.resource.org/pub/de/

#10yrsago WordPress joins its users in court to fight bogus, censoring copyright claims https://wordpress.com/blog/2013/11/21/striking-back-against-censorship/

#10yrsago Wikimedia sends legal threat to #WikiPR over sockpuppetry and meatpuppetry https://diff.wikimedia.org/2013/11/19/wikimedia-foundation-sends-cease-and-desist-letter-to-wikipr/

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Pluralistic: Don't Be Evil (22 Nov 2023)

Today's links Don't Be Evil: My new Locus Column. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2003, 2013, 2018, 2022 Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading Don't Be Evil (permalink) My latest Locus Magazine column is "Don't Be Evil," a consideration of the forces that led to the Great Enshittening, the a dizzying, rapid transformation of formerly useful services went from indispensable to unusable to actively harmful: https://locusmag.com/2023/11/commentary-by-cory-doctorow-dont-be-evil/ While some services have fallen harder and/or faster, they're all falling. When a whole cohort of services all turn sour in the same way, at the same time, it's obvious that something is happening systemically. After all, these companies are still being led by the same people. The leaders who presided over a period in which these companies made good and useful services are also presiding over these services' decay. What factors are leading to a pandemic of rapid-onset enshittification? Recall that enshittification is a three-stage process: first surpluses are allocated to users until they are locked in. Then they are withdrawn and given to business-customers until they are locked in. Then all the value is harvested for the company's shareholders, leaving just enough residual value in the service to keep both end-users and business-customers glued to the platform. We can think of each step in that enshittification process as the outcome of an argument. At some product planning meeting, one person will propose doing something to materially worsen the service to the company's advantage, and at the expense of end-users or business-customers. Think of Youtube's decay. Over the past year, Google has: Dramatically increased the cost of ad-free Youtube subscriptions; Dramatically increased the number of ads shown to non-subscribers; Dramatically decreased the amount of money paid to Youtube creators; Added aggressive anti-adblock; Then, this week, Google started adding a five-second blanking interval for non-Chrome users who have adblockers installed: https://www.404media.co/youtube-says-new-5-second-video-load-delay-is-supposed-to-punish-ad-blockers-not-firefox-users/ These all smack of Jenga blocks that different product managers are removing in pursuit of their "key performance indicators" (KPIs): https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/ We can think of each of these steps as the outcome of an argument. Someone proposes a Youtube subscription price-hike, and other internal stakeholders object. These objections fall into two categories: We shouldn't do this because it will make the product worse; and/or We should do this because it will reduce the company's earnings. Lots of googlers sincerely care about product quality. People like doing a good job, and they take pride in making good things. Many have sacrificed something that mattered in the service of making the product better. It's bad enough to miss your kid's school play so you can meet a work deadline – but imagine making that sacrifice and then having the excellent work you put in deliberately degraded. I have been around Google's orbit since its early days, going to the odd company Christmas party in the early 2000s and giving talks at Google offices in cities all over the world. I've known hundreds of skilled googlers who passionately cared about making the best products they could. For most of Google's history, those googlers won the argument. But they didn't do so merely by appealing to their colleagues' professional pride in a job well-done. For most of Google's history, the winning argument was a combination of "doing this bad thing would make me sad," and "doing this bad thing will make Google poorer." Companies are disciplined by three forces: I. Competition (the fear of losing business to a rival); II. Regulation (the fear of legal penalties that would exceed the expected profits from a given course of action); III. Self-help (the fear that customers or users will change their behavior, say, by installing an ad-blocker). The ability of googlers to win enshittification arguments by appealing to the company's bottom line was a function of one or more of these three disciplining factors. The weakening of each of these factors is the reason that every tech company is sliding into enshittification at once. For example, when Google contemplates raising the price of a Youtube subscription, the dissent might say, "Well, this will reduce viewership and might shift viewers to rivals like Tiktok" (competition). But the price-hiking side can counter, "No, because we have a giant archive, we control 90% of searches, we are embedded in the workflow of vloggers and other creators who automatically stream and archive to Youtube, and Youtube comes pre-installed on every Android device." Even if the company leaks a few viewers to Tiktok, it will still make more money in aggregate. Prices go up. When Google contemplates increasing the number of ads shown to nonsubscribers, the dissent might say, "This will incentivize more users to install ad-blockers, and then we'll see no ad-revenue from them." The pro-ad side can counter, "No, because most Youtube viewing is in-app, and reverse-engineering the Youtube app to add an ad-blocker is a felony under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. As to non-app viewers: we control the majority of browser installations and have Chrome progressively less hospitable to ad-blocking." When Google contemplates adding anti-adblock to its web viewers, the dissent might say, "Processing users' data in order to ad-block them will violate Europe's GDPR." The anti-adblock side can counter, "But we maintain the fiction that our EU corporate headquarters is in the corporate crime-haven of Ireland, where the privacy regulator systematically underenforces the GDPR. We can expect a very long tenure of anti-adblock before we are investigated, and we might win the investigation. Even if we are punished, the expected fine is less than the additional ad-revenue we stand to make." When Google contemplates stealing performers' wages through opaque reshufflings of its revenue-sharing system, the dissent might say, "Our best performers have options, they can go to Twitch or Tiktok." To which the pro-wage-theft side can counter, "But they have no way of taking their viewers with them. There's no way for them to offer their viewers on Youtube a tool that alerts them whenever they post a new video to a rival platform. Their archives are on Youtube, and if they move them to another platform, there's no way redirect users searching for those videos to their new homes. What's more, any attempt to unilaterally extract their users' contact info, or redirect searchers or create a multiplatform client, violates some mix of our terms of service, our rights under DMCA 1201, etc." It's not just Google. For every giant platform, the threats of competition, regulation and self-help have been in steady decline for years, as acquisitions, underenforcement of privacy/labor/consumer law, and an increase in IP protection for incumbents have all mounted: https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/ When internal factions at tech companies argue about whether to make their services worse, there's a heavy weight tilting the scales towards enshittification. The lack of competition, an increase in switching costs for users and business-customers, and broad powers to prevent users from modifying the service for themselves all mean that even when a product gets worse, profits can still go up. This is the culprit: monopoly, and its handmaiden, regulatory capture. That's why today's antimonopoly movement – and the cases against all the tech giants – are so important. The old, good internet was built by flawed tech companies whose internal ranks included the same amoral enshittifiers who are gobbling up the platforms' seed corn today. The thing that stood in their way before wasn't merely the moral character of colleagues who shrank away from these cynical maneuvers: it was the economic penalties that befell those who enshittified too rashly. Incentives matter. Money talks and bullshit walks. Enshittification isn't due to the moral failings of individuals in tech companies. It's possible to have a good internet run by flawed people. But to get that new, good internet, we have to support technologists of good will and character by terrorizing their venal and cynical colleagues by hitting them where they live: in their paychecks. Hey look at this (permalink) The Corporate Takeover of Music (Lessons From Bandcamp) https://player.fm/1BZsQSX (h/t Nancy Lizza) Rising Juniors and Seniors – Do you want to make an impact with public interest technology this summer? https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2023/11/20/rising-juniors-and-seniors-do-you-want-to-make-an-impact-with-public-interest-technology-this-summer/ A Perfectly Designed Climate Report Cover https://kottke.org/23/11/a-perfect-climate-report-cover This day in history (permalink) #20yrsago Lessig: Towns should own their fiber https://www.wired.com/2003/12/fiber-to-the-people/ #10yrsago Germany threatens to jail Carl Malamud for making the law available for free https://law.resource.org/pub/de/ #10yrsago WordPress joins its users in court to fight bogus, censoring copyright claims https://wordpress.com/blog/2013/11/21/striking-back-against-censorship/ #10yrsago Wikimedia sends legal threat to WikiPR over sockpuppetry and meatpuppetry https://diff.wikimedia.org/2013/11/19/wikimedia-foundation-sends-cease-and-desist-letter-to-wikipr/ #5yrsago CBC’s longstanding tech columnist condemns the broadcaster’s cozy relationship with Facebook https://memex.craphound.com/2018/11/22/cbcs-longstanding-tech-columnist-condemns-the-broadcasters-cozy-relationship-with-facebook/ #5yrsago Let’s get artists paid by making Big Tech pay them, not by creating EU copyright filters https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/11/article-13-if-you-want-force-google-pay-artists-more-force-google-pay-artists-more #1yrago Tax prep services send sensitive financial info to Facebook https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/22/free-file-now/#still-the-product Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2024 Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: Moral Hazard (from Communications Breakdown) https://craphound.com/stories/2023/11/12/moral-hazard-from-communications-breakdown/ Upcoming appearances: Generation of Lost Causes, Nov 22 (Toronto) https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/705457551527?aff=oddtdtcreator Who Is Watching Big Tech? Nov 27 (Toronto)` https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/who-is-watching-big-tech-tickets-707927880347 The Lost Cause at The Strand (NYC), Nov 29 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-the-lost-cause-tickets-734958008187 The Lost Cause at Flyleaf Books (Chapel Hill), Dec 5 https://www.flyleafbooks.com/doctorow-2023 Recent appearances: Digital Markets Act; Interoperability; Entrenchment; Copyright; "What-About-Ism" (Digital Markets Research Hub) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm23pO5_WKM Science fiction for a dystopian present (Institute of Art and Ideas) https://iai.tv/video/science-fiction-for-a-dystopian-present-cory-doctorow?_auid=2020 Pushing back on unconstrained capitalism (Changelog) https://changelog.com/podcast/565 Latest books: "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. Upcoming books: The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books, February 2024 Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

https://poliverso.org/display/0477a01e-ef83efc9-3a340021cc269c7f

#10yrsago Differences between life when you’re poor and life when you’re middle class https://web.archive.org/web/20131109113219/https://killermartinis.kinja.com/why-i-make-terrible-decisions-or-poverty-thoughts-1450123558

#10yrsago Because is a new, Internet-driven preposition, because grammar https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/11/english-has-a-new-preposition-because-internet/281601/

#10yrsago #NSA Primary Sources: a catalog of leaked NSA files https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/nsadocs

#10yrsago #HealthCanada outs 40,000 #MedicalMarijuana users https://web.archive.org/web/20131125023133/http://metronews.ca/news/ottawa/861955/medical-marijuana-patients-outed-by-health-canada/

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#20yrsago #Vivendi burning MP3.com library to the ground https://web.archive.org/web/20031125201326/http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/11/21/14616/561

#15yrsago Homes with Tails: Homeowners providing their own fiber https://web.archive.org/web/20081123114400/http://www.newamerica.net/files/HomesWithTails_wu_slater.pdf

#15yrsago Voices of #APeoplesHistoryOfTheUnitedStates: Fantastic voice actors read the historic work of people who demanded justice from America https://memex.craphound.com/2008/11/21/voices-of-a-peoples-history-of-the-united-states-fantastic-voice-actors-read-the-historic-work-of-people-who-demanded-justice-from-america/

#10yrsago Sweden’s telcos hand over mass spying powers to police, tax authority, customs and other agencies https://falkvinge.net/2013/11/19/swedish-regime-to-give-police-customs-tax-authorities-realtime-access-to-citizens-phone-mail-more/

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Pluralistic: Naomi Kritzer's "Liberty's Daughter" (21 November 2023)

Today's links Naomi Kritzer's "Liberty's Daughter": The market authoritarianism of a seastead childhood. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2003, 2008, 2013, 2018, 2022 Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading Naomi Kritzer's "Liberty's Daughter" (permalink) There's so much sf about "competent men" running their families with entrepreneurial zeal, clarity of vision and a firm confident hand. But there's precious little fiction about how much being raised by a Heinlein dad would suuuck. But it would, and in Naomi Kritzer's Liberty's Daughter, we get a peek inside the nightmare: https://fairwoodpress.com/store/p148/LIBERTY%27S_DAUGHTER.html Beck Garrison is a seasteader, living on a floating platform built by libertarian cranks to get away from big government, taxes, and the idea that people owe each other care and consideration. Various kinds of market trufans have built their own fiefdoms: there's a sin city, a biotech free-for-all, a lawless Mad Max zone, and so on. Beck's father, Paul, is some kind of local functionary. He's wealthy and respected, both a power-broker and a power in his own right. He pays for Beck to get private tutoring (no public schools – no public anything) and if she needs bailing out from some kind of sticky situation, he's got her on his account with Alpha Dogs, the toughest mercenaries on the sea (no police, either). An armed society is a polite society, after all. Beck has a job, naturally (there ain't no such thing as a free lunch). She's a finder: for all that the steaders worship commerce as a sacrament consecrated to the holy Invisible Hand, there's not a lot of retail at sea. California – the nearest onshore neighbor – has lots of pesky taxes, and besides, it's a long ways off. Besides, space is at a premium on the stead, so people don't have attics and basements to fill with excess consumer junk. Instead, when a steader needs something – a shoelace, a fashion accessory, or any other creature comfort – they hire a finder like Beck to clamber around between the decks of the aircraft carriers, scows, yachts and other vessels comprising the stead. It's a good way for Beck to earn spending money, and she's a natural at it. After all, she's been a steader since she was four, when her mother died in a drunk driving accident and her father took her to sea. The story opens with a finding job. Beck wants a pair of sparkly shoes for her client, and the woman who owns them is an indentured servant whose sister has gone missing. Find the sister, get the shoes. Indentured servant? Yeah, of course. Freedom of contract is the one freedom from which all the others flow, so you can sell yourself into bond labor. Hell, maybe you can earn enough to buy a share in the stead and become a co-owner/citizen. This is the setup for Beck's adventure, which sees her liberating bond slaves tricked into fatal work details, getting involved in reality TV production, meeting illegal IWW organizers, and becoming embroiled in a pandemic that threatens the lives of all the steaders. It's a coming of age novel, told with the same straightforward, spunky zeal of Heinlein's juvies, but from the perspective of the daughter, not the dad. Kritzer makes it clear that growing up under the thumb of a TANSTAAFL-worshipping, self-regarding, wealthy autocrat who worships selfishness as the necessary precondition for market clearing would be a goddamned nightmare. She also thinks through some of the important implications of life in one of these offshore libertarian archipelagos, like the fact that the wealthy residents would be overwhelming drawn from the ranks of corporate criminals and tax-cheats, and the underclass would be bail-skipping proles ensnared in the War on Drugs. But Liberty's Daughter isn't a hymn to big government. Most of the steaders are escaping the US government, a state whose authoritarian and cruel proclivities are well-documented. Kritzer uses the labor dispute at the core of the novel to reveal market authoritarianism – the coercive power that hunger and poverty transfers from the have-nots to the haves. Think of Anatole France's wry observation that "the law, in its majestic equality, equally forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread." If you're familiar with Kritzer's work, you won't be surprised to learn that she tells a zippy, fast moving tale that smuggles in sharp observations about the cleavage lines between solidarity and selfishness. Her story "So Much Cooking" – published years before the pandemic – captured life under lockdown with eerie prescience: https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/17/pack-of-knaves/#so-much-cooking More recently, her "Better Living Through Algorithms" is a dazzling display of knifework that'll cut you a dozen times before you even notice that you're bleeding: https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/02/wunderkammer/#jubillee If you habitually read Kritzer's short fiction, Liberty's Daughter might be familiar to you, as it is adapted from a series of stories that originally ran in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Kritzer's YA debut, Catfishing on the CatNet, was also adapted from a short story, "Cat Pictures Please," which won the Hugo Award in 2016: https://boingboing.net/2019/11/19/setec-astronomy-kitteh.html "Libertarian exit" – buying a country, or an archipelago, or just a luxury bunker – has been in the air lately. It's a major element of my new novel, The Lost Cause, which came out this month – anarchocapitalist wreckers try to sabotage the Green New Deal from the seastead they've moored to the tallest point in the drowned Grand Caymans and declared to be a sovereign nation: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause Kritzer is great at catching that zeitgeist. Seasteading is part of a long, bitter dream of a certain kind of selfish person to escape society, a tale told in lurid and fascinating detail in Raymond Craib's 2022 history Adventure Capitalism: https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/14/this-way-to-the-egress/#terra-nullius There's a longstanding joke to the effect that you can shut down any discussion of the merits of a libertarian exit by asking three questions about the brave new world: I. Whether you can sell your organs; II. Whether you can sell yourself into slavery; and III. Whether there is any age of consent. Kritzer tackles the first two, but tacks around the third. Instead, by giving us a young adult protagonist who has been raised in a rusting libertopia, she finds a decidedly less incendiary way to think about the role of autonomy in adolescents, and thus generates far more heat than light. The result is a cracking read with a sting in its tail. Hey look at this (permalink) Build your own Patek Philippe-style Chronograph using this DIY Wooden Watchmaking Kit https://www.yankodesign.com/2023/11/19/build-your-own-patek-philippe-style-chronograph-using-this-diy-wooden-watchmaking-kit/ 2023 CBC Massey Lectures: Astra Taylor https://www.cbc.ca/radiointeractives/ideas/2023-cbc-massey-lectures-astra-taylor The main risk of machine learning is not that it's good at what it does https://mamot.fr/@arri@hachyderm.io/111443798898077800 This day in history (permalink) #20yrsago Vivendi burning MP3.com library to the ground https://web.archive.org/web/20031125201326/http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/11/21/14616/561 #15yrsago Homes with Tails: Homeowners providing their own fiber https://web.archive.org/web/20081123114400/http://www.newamerica.net/files/HomesWithTails_wu_slater.pdf #15yrsago Voices of a People’s History of the United States: Fantastic voice actors read the historic work of people who demanded justice from America https://memex.craphound.com/2008/11/21/voices-of-a-peoples-history-of-the-united-states-fantastic-voice-actors-read-the-historic-work-of-people-who-demanded-justice-from-america/ #10yrsago Sweden’s telcos hand over mass spying powers to police, tax authority, customs and other agencies https://falkvinge.net/2013/11/19/swedish-regime-to-give-police-customs-tax-authorities-realtime-access-to-citizens-phone-mail-more/ #10yrsago Differences between life when you’re poor and life when you’re middle class https://web.archive.org/web/20131109113219/https://killermartinis.kinja.com/why-i-make-terrible-decisions-or-poverty-thoughts-1450123558 #10yrsago Because is a new, Internet-driven preposition, because grammar https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/11/english-has-a-new-preposition-because-internet/281601/ #10yrsago NSA Primary Sources: a catalog of leaked NSA files https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/nsadocs #10yrsago Health Canada outs 40,000 medical marijuana users https://web.archive.org/web/20131125023133/http://metronews.ca/news/ottawa/861955/medical-marijuana-patients-outed-by-health-canada/ #5yrsago Machine learning hucksters invent an AI racist uncle that predicts your personality from your facial bone structure https://www.faception.com #5yrsago Assessing Snowden’s legacy, five years on https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/11/the-snowden-legacy-part-one-whats-changed-really/ #5yrsago Make: a gingerbread house zoetrope https://medium.com/george-eastman-museum/how-we-made-a-gingerbread-house-zoetrope-b4112b5a9dbe #5yrsago UK minister says airlines used “exploitative algorithms” to split up families unless they paid extra https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/airline-flights-pay-extra-to-sit-together-split-up-family-algorithm-minister-a8640771.html #5yrsago The billionaire family who profited off the opioid epidemic are finally facing legal reprisals https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/19/sackler-family-members-face-mass-litigation-criminal-investigations-over-opioids-crisis #5yrsago In a weird way, Donald Trump is the most honest American president in history https://theintercept.com/2018/11/21/thanksgiving-donald-trump-lies-honest-president/ #5yrsago Americans pay some of the highest prices for wireless data in the world, and it’s going to get worse https://research.rewheel.fi/downloads/The_state_of_4G_pricing_DFMonitor_10th_release_2H2018_PUBLIC.pdf #1yrago Universities secretly sold their students to online casinos https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/21/rah-rah/#sis-boom-bah Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2024 Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: Moral Hazard (from Communications Breakdown) https://craphound.com/stories/2023/11/12/moral-hazard-from-communications-breakdown/ Upcoming appearances: Lost Cause at Simsbury Public Library, Nov 20 (Simsbury, CT) https://simsbury.librarycalendar.com/event/author-visit-cory-doctorow-29257 Generation of Lost Causes, Nov 22 (Toronto) https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/705457551527?aff=oddtdtcreator Who Is Watching Big Tech? Nov 27 (Toronto)` https://web.archive.org/web/20230907160103/https://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/detail.jsp?Entt=RDMEVT496408&R=EVT496408 The Lost Cause at The Strand (NYC), Nov 29 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-the-lost-cause-tickets-734958008187 The Lost Cause at Flyleaf Books (Chapel Hill), Dec 7 https://www.flyleafbooks.com/doctorow-2023 Recent appearances: Digital Markets Act; Interoperability; Entrenchment; Copyright; "What-About-Ism" (Digital Markets Research Hub) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm23pO5_WKM Science fiction for a dystopian present (Institute of Art and Ideas) https://iai.tv/video/science-fiction-for-a-dystopian-present-cory-doctorow?_auid=2020 Pushing back on unconstrained capitalism (Changelog) https://changelog.com/podcast/565 Latest books: "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. Upcoming books: The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books, February 2024 Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

https://poliverso.org/display/0477a01e-21611fd4-e12ef75c4148fd2a

#15yrsago #FreeToBeYouAndMe: the 35 Anniversary Edition: the book every kid needs https://memex.craphound.com/2008/11/20/free-to-be-you-and-me-the-35-anniversary-edition-the-book-every-kid-needs/

#15yrsago Digital Youth Project: If you care about kids and want to understand how they use technology and why, this is a must-read https://web.archive.org/web/20081127101442/http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu/files/report/digitalyouth-WhitePaper.pdf

#10yrsago Data visualization shows US isolation in pushing for brutal #TransPacificPartnership https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2013/11/18/the-united-states-is-isolated-in-the-trans-pacific-partnership-negotiations/

#5yrsago Copyright and the “#MaleGaze”: a feminist critique of copyright law https://web.archive.org/web/20181106072516/http://harvardjlg.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/HLG204_2018.pdf
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Pluralistic: Larry Summers' inflation scare-talk incinerated climate action (20 Nov 2023)

Today's links Larry Summers' inflation scare-talk incinerated climate action: Now can we please stop listening to this ghoul? Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2008, 2013, 2018, 2022 Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading Larry Summers' inflation scare-talk incinerated climate action (permalink) Economists tell us that the market can remain irrational longer than we can remain solvent, but how long can economists remain irrational? Judging from the inflation scare we just lived through, the answer appears to be "longer than you can remain solvent." Experts of all description are prone to enduring folly in which the failure of some cherished intervention triggers more of that intervention. This is the famed "doing the same thing but expecting different results" and it's a grand American tradition. Take bloodletting, a therapy that does not work and that only makes things worse, but which nevertheless served as the first recourse for "doctors" for centuries. Patients who worsened after a bloodletting were presumed to be undertreated, so their doctors would bleed them again, and again. Every turn for the worse was evidence of the need for more bleeding. If you grew up in America, you doubtless learned a lot about George Washington – even apocryphal stories about his boyhood, like the cherry-tree incident: https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/cherry-tree-myth/ You know all about Washington, from his wooden teeth to his military victories. Lin-Manuel Miranda's ballad made Washington's dream of a life spent "under his own vine and fig-tree" famous: https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/vine-and-fig-tree/ But it's very unlikely that you heard about how George Washington died. After eating dinner in cold, wet clothes, he developed a vicious cold. A succession of doctors attended Washington, each one bleeding him, until more than half of Washington's blood had been extracted, whereupon the country's father died: https://timharford.com/2023/11/cautionary-tales-george-washingtons-beard-of-beetles-with-the-dollop/ Today, a different kind of quack is given free rein to bleed another Washington: central bankers like Jerome Powell sit in DC, bleeding the economy with interest rate hikes, in the name of preventing inflation: https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/14/medieval-bloodletters/#its-the-stupid-economy The theory goes: the government gave the poors too much money in the form of covid relief. That made working people lazy and feckless. The proles' fat cash cushions let them demand unrealistically high wages, and this is driving up the price of goods. To solve this, we need to destroy lots of jobs, so workers will bid against each other for the remaining, scarce gigs, until wages go down. Even a cursory examination of the facts revealed this theory's hollowness. Even as the Fed was cranking up interest rates in October 2022, real wages were 2.3% lower than they'd been a year before: https://rooseveltinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/RI_CausesofandResponsestoTodaysInflation_Report_202212.pdf Prices did rise, of course, but there was no evidence that they rose because of greedy workers. Some of that price-rise was due to covid shocks – a drop in the ability to make things because of lockdowns. Some was due to war-shocks – disruptions to energy and food supplies following from Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Some was due to changes in what we wanted to buy (high demand for work-from-home equipment, changes to the rental market as people moved out of cities). But one undeniable factor was price-gouging. The CEOs of large companies have spent the past two years boasting to shareholders on their earnings calls about how all the scare-talk about inflation let them hike prices and blame the Biden administration: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/23/cant-make-an-omelet/#keep-calm-and-crack-on It takes a deliberate act of will to see energy companies hiking prices and raising prices and decide that the real problem is workers have too much money, and that the solution cannot under any circumstances involve a tax of those "windfall" profits: https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/15/sanctions-financing/#soak-the-rich Or breaking up monopolies: https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/02/its-the-economy-stupid/#overinflated But some people want to see workers suffer. Well, at least one person wants workers to suffer. Larry Summers, the Clintonite ghoul who led the charge on punishing workers to fight inflation: https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/11/price-over-volume/#pepsi-pricing-power Summers is a man who is wrong about a lot of things. Like, when he was president of Harvard, he was wrong about women's natural incapacity to do science: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2005/jan/18/educationsgendergap.genderissues That had a lot of consequences, as did Summers' economic guidance when he served as Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton. But the fully operational battle station version of Larry Summers emerged when he became a talking head, helping to sabotage the Biden Administration's ability to continue providing relief during the pandemic. Summers' pitch went like this: inflation is caused by workers having too much money, and anyone who disagrees with me is a sentimental lackwit who doesn't understand the Science of Economics: https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/20/quiet-part-out-loud/#profiteering Summers' confident pronouncements about the enduring, structural nature of inflation were used as ammo for all kinds of cuts in the Biden agenda, and were used to argue against student debt cancellation. According to Summers, we just can't have nice things, and if we do, we risk hyperinflation and the collapse of the US dollar: https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/01/mayday/#inflationary-political-economy Not only was Summers wrong, but his prescriptions also scuttled wildly popular moves that could turn out voters for larger Dem majorities in the Senate and retaking the House, enabling even more muscular action. Summers' argument fails on its own terms, too. If inflation is "too many dollars chasing too few goods," then one way to solve inflation is to increase America's capacity to fulfill demand. You know, by educating people, investing in infrastructure, re-shoring critical manufacturing, and so on: https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/01/factories-to-condos-pipeline/#stuff-not-money Some of the steepest inflation Americans experienced came from nondiscretionary spending: on healthcare, childcare, long-term care, rehab, etc. This is "care inflation," and you don't reduce demand for it by hurting workers: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/18/wages-for-housework/#low-wage-workers-vs-poor-consumers The price of care labor has outpaced the CPI every year since 1978. As the price of goes up, working-age adults are taken out of the workforce so they can care for their kids, parents, spouses, and other family members: https://prospect.org/economy/2023-01-18-inflation-unfair-costs-of-care/ This reduces America's capacity, removing skilled workers from the workforce. In other words, to increase its capacity, America needs to increase social spending, not reduce it. Instead, we're allowing private equity funds to "roll up" (that is, monopolize) the care sector, raising prices and slashing wages. The quality of care goes down, and the price goes up. You know – inflation: https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/16/schumpeterian-terrorism/#deliberately-broken Larry Summers was wrong about inflation. Don't take it from me: just ask Larry Summers! He's now saying that inflation is over, it was "transitory" and it was caused by supply chain problems, not giving the poors too much money: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/summers-says-transitory-factors-behind-001613380.html As David Dayen writes for The American Prospect, Larry Summers' latest pronouncements conspicuously fail to reckon with Larry Summers' greatest detractor: Larry Summers, who spent years calling covid relief "the least responsible economic policy in 40 years": https://prospect.org/environment/2023-11-20-larry-summers-inflation-prediction-climate-change/ Summers' delusion was anything but harmless. He and his fellow interest-rate hawks provided cover for the Feds' brutal rate-hikes, which led to steep cuts to planned solar, geothermal, wind, and grid investments. Alternative energy companies went from profitable to unprofitable overnight: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4650157-plug-power-q3-earnings-on-verge-of-failure-sell Giant offshore wind projects were canceled. This is the cancel culture no one is talking about: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/01/business/energy-environment/offshore-wind-farm-new-jersey.html Heat-pump retrofitting is behind schedule: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/09/business/energy-environment/heat-pumps-biden-tax-credits-rebates.html As Dayen says, "The Inflation Reduction Act is effectively being offset by interest costs." (Image: mosaic36, Chatham House, CC BY 2.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) Chief Justice John Roberts’s Guide to the New Supreme Court Ethics Code https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/chief-justice-john-robertss-guide-to-the-new-supreme-court-ethics-code (h/t Naked Capitalism) The stones left unturned in the Sam Bankman-Fried trial https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/the-stones-left-unturned NAKATOMI CORP. CHRISTMAS '88 SWEATSHIRT https://www.lastexittonowhere.com/catalogue/nakatomi-corp-christmas-88-green-white-ink_16430/ (h/t Super Punch) This day in history (permalink) #15yrsago Free to Be… You and Me: the 35 Anniversary Edition: the book every kid needs https://memex.craphound.com/2008/11/20/free-to-be-you-and-me-the-35-anniversary-edition-the-book-every-kid-needs/ #15yrsago Digital Youth Project: If you care about kids and want to understand how they use technology and why, this is a must-read https://web.archive.org/web/20081127101442/http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu/files/report/digitalyouth-WhitePaper.pdf #10yrsago Data visualization shows US isolation in pushing for brutal Trans-Pacific Partnership https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2013/11/18/the-united-states-is-isolated-in-the-trans-pacific-partnership-negotiations/ #5yrsago Copyright and the “male gaze”: a feminist critique of copyright law https://web.archive.org/web/20181106072516/http://harvardjlg.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/HLG204_2018.pdf #5yrsago Leaks reveal the health care industry’s playbook for smearing and spinning Medicare for All out of existence by 2020 https://theintercept.com/2018/11/20/medicare-for-all-healthcare-industry/ #5yrsago “The End of Trust” – EFF/McSweeney’s collaboration on privacy and surveillance – is in stores and free to download now! https://www.eff.org/the-end-of-trust #5yrsago On the role of truth and philosophy in fantastic fiction http://dreamcafe.com/2018/11/19/truth-as-a-vehicle-for-enhancing-fiction-fiction-as-a-vehicle-for-discovering-truth/ #5yrsago Trump spent $200,000,000 on the election stunt of sending 6,000 troops to the border, then withdrew them before the caravan arrived https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/11/trump-troops-border-caravan-stunt #5yrsago Electrification 2.0: Rural broadband co-ops are filling the void left by indifferent monopolists https://www.wired.com/story/rural-america-diy-internet-spirit-reboot/ #5yrsago Dystopia watch: a roundup of the DOD’s new less-lethal weapons https://www.wired.com/story/ingredients-powering-defense-department-new-nonlethal-weapons/ #5yrsago Portrait of a fake news troll and the racist retiree who believes everything he writes https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/nothing-on-this-page-is-real-how-lies-become-truth-in-online-america/2018/11/17/edd44cc8-e85a-11e8-bbdb-72fdbf9d4fed_story.html #5yrsago This month, the climate-denyingist red state AGs lost their jobs to Dems: time to sue the US government https://web.archive.org/web/20181120113921/https://www.climateliabilitynews.org/2018/11/19/democratic-ag-midterm-climate-change/ #1yrago Anything That Can’t Go On Forever Will Eventually Stop https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/20/anything-that-cant-go-on-forever-will-eventually-stop/ Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Naked Capitalism (https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/) Currently writing: A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2024 Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: Moral Hazard (from Communications Breakdown) https://craphound.com/stories/2023/11/12/moral-hazard-from-communications-breakdown/ Upcoming appearances: Lost Cause at Simsbury Public Library, Nov 20 (Simsbury, CT) https://simsbury.librarycalendar.com/event/author-visit-cory-doctorow-29257 Generation of Lost Causes, Nov 22 (Toronto) https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/705457551527?aff=oddtdtcreator Who Is Watching Big Tech? Nov 27 (Toronto)` https://web.archive.org/web/20230907160103/https://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/detail.jsp?Entt=RDMEVT496408&R=EVT496408 The Lost Cause at The Strand (NYC), Nov 29 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-the-lost-cause-tickets-734958008187 The Lost Cause at Flyleaf Books (Chapel Hill), Dec 7 https://www.flyleafbooks.com/doctorow-2023 Recent appearances: Digital Markets Act; Interoperability; Entrenchment; Copyright; "What-About-Ism" (Digital Markets Research Hub) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm23pO5_WKM Science fiction for a dystopian present (Institute of Art and Ideas) https://iai.tv/video/science-fiction-for-a-dystopian-present-cory-doctorow?_auid=2020 Pushing back on unconstrained capitalism (Changelog) https://changelog.com/podcast/565 Latest books: "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. Upcoming books: The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books, February 2024 Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

https://poliverso.org/display/0477a01e-a55efb2e-4866f9dababa557e

#10yrsago Jack Womack’s Random Acts of Senseless Violence: apocalypse in a young girl’s diary https://memex.craphound.com/2013/11/19/jack-womacks-random-acts-of-senseless-violence-apocalypse-in-a-young-girls-diary/

#10yrsago Complete meal cooking with a hotel coffee-maker https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/11/15/245442083/coffee-maker-cooking-brew-up-your-next-dinner

#5yrsago #ConcealedCarry scammers spent $2m on gunhumper scare-ads on Facebook during the 2018 midterms https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-ads-political-concealed-online/

#5yrsago Finns to Trump: We don’t rake our forests https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46256296

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#15yrsago #Viridianism’s last note: surround yourself with beautiful, excellent things and get rid of all else https://craphound.com/lastviridian.txt

#15yrsago Buckell’s Sly Mongoose: character-driven, exciting space opera pits space-rastas, neo-Aztecs, against the alien zombie hivemind https://memex.craphound.com/2008/11/18/buckells-sly-mongoose-character-driven-exciting-space-opera-pits-space-rastas-neo-aztecs-against-the-alien-zombie-hivemind/

#10yrsago #TropesVsWomenInVideoGames: Ms. Male Character https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYqYLfm1rWA

#10yrsago #ViHart explains logarithms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-7tcTIrers

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Pluralistic: Pinkdrunk Linkdump (18 Nov 2023)

Today's links Pinkdrunk Linkdump: Your semi-regular weekend declaration of link bankruptcy. This day in history: 2003, 2008, 2013, 2018 Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading Pinkdrunk Linkdump (permalink) Happy Saturday! As is so often the case, I have finished the week with more stray links that I can fit into my blog, so it's time for a linkdump post, in which an assorted assortment is assembled. This is my tenth such linkdump – here are the previous installments: https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/05/variegated/#nein While nostalgia is a toxic impulse (h/t John Hodgman), there's no denying that there once existed an old, good web, and that it has given way to the enshitternet. I don't want to bring the old, good web back, but I would welcome a new, good web, and by studying the factors that contributed to the old, good web's rise and fall, we can both conjure up that new, good web – and protect it. Above all, the old, good web was contingent, a series of lucky accidents, like Tim Berners Lee's decision to make the code and ideas and protocols for the original web as open and free as possible: https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/13/this-is-for-everyone/#revisiting This meant that there was no way to use the law to capture the web. Contrast that with, say, AOL or Compuserve. If you were the Compuserve's CEO and one of your rivals started using your servers to deliver a service that your users preferred, which shifted value from you to this new rival, you could just pull the plug on them. If they came back – using reverse-engineering or fake signups or whatever – you could sue them. Compuserve's bosses made the rules, any rules they wanted, and could kick you off if you violated them. If you pressed the issue, they could get the government to come and fine you, or, in extreme situations, arrest you. But the open web didn't have these enforcement hooks. If you ran an early website and Yahoo deeplinked to it, you could change the link, but you couldn't make Yahoo stop. The open web was competitive, and that prevented anyone from exercising a veto over who could make the web, and how. It meant that the web was always up for grabs, with key chokepoints like browser market share swinging around wildly from one vendor to another (until Microsoft started illegally tying blocking rival browsers in Windows). That meant that the "governance" of the web was often just a matter of the technical details of its standards. Code may not be law, but it was sure law-like – if something was in, say, a W3C browser standard, then all the browsers would support it, and then anyone trying to do something cool on the internet could rely on every potential user having it. Naturally, this made standards development organizations into the sites of vicious power-struggles. These SDOs are classic "weak institutions," lacking the robust rules of, say, a competition regulator, to say nothing of the investigative and enforcement powers of the DoJ: https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/30/weak-institutions/ But in the old, good web days, the SDOs had an important advantage: the corporate fragmentation of the web. Because of TBL's decision not to create IP chokepoints, even the wildly overcapitalized companies of the go-go dotcom bubble days weren't able to control the web. No one company was indispensable to the web. If Microsoft wanted to tilt a W3C standard to its advantage, it couldn't threaten to leave the consortium if it didn't get its way. For one thing, the consortium had such a diversity of membership that losing any one member's dues wouldn't sink the org's finances. For another, if Microsoft boycotted the W3C, that would just mean that the web standards that all those other companies were making wouldn't reflect its priorities or desires. By staying in the W3C, Microsoft got to participate in rulemaking – if it left, it would be relegated to rule-taking. But the DoJ and FTC spent the ensuing decades in something like a coma. After a failed bid to break up Microsoft – killed when GW Bush stole the 2000 election and dropped the case – America's antitrust enforcers snoozed through decades of consolidation, and the transformation of the old, good web into "five giant websites, filled with screenshots of text from the other four": https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040 This turned SDOs into increasingly fraught battlegrounds where giants duked it out among each other for control of the web. In the days of the old, good web, the W3C was able to continue TBL's chokepoint-free ethos, creating rules that forced members to surrender their patents at the door: https://www.w3.org/Consortium/Patent-Policy-20040205/ But once the enthitternet was fully in force, the largest corporate members became so important to SDOs' ability to operate that even the W3C wasn't able to resist. They started turning out IP-encumbered standards that were so proprietary that even filing bug-reports against browsers could mean jailtime: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/09/open-letter-w3c-director-ceo-team-and-membership Within a couple years, it became functionally impossible to implement a web-browser without a license from one of a tiny handful of gigantic, monopolistic corporations, who could use the license to exercise a veto over both who could make a browser, and what that browser could do: https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/the-end-of-indie-web-browsers/ Standards development is one of those esoteric, hugely important activities that almost no one knows anything about. Good standards are key to an open, free internet, and as governments around the world grapple with Big Tech monopolies, their plans often include a block that basically reads "insert good standard here." As exciting as the EU's Digital Markets Act and US proposals like the ACCESS Act are, the "insert good standard here" stuff is wildly underspecified and undertheorized. Making a good standard – one that is robust, flexible and secure – is hard enough even under competitive competitions where the SDO can play independent referee, more powerful than the participants. But making good standards under monopolistic conditions is really hard. And yet, it happens! Look at the Fediverse, powered by Mastodon and its adaptation of a W3C standard called ActivityPub. The Fediverse has done more for an interoperable, decentralized web than all the other projects of the past decade combined: https://fediverse.party/ How did something so useful and capture-resistant emerge from the enshitternet, from the same standards-body that gave us a proprietary "standard" that allowed three giant companies to seize the right to authorize the production of web browsers themselves? Therein lies quite a tale. In a talk for this year's Association of Internet Researchers conference, Robert Gehl talks about the weird, highly contingent factors that delivered a fit-for-purpose Fediverse standard: https://fossacademic.tech/2023/10/15/APnonStandard.html Gehl starts by describing ActivityPub as a "non-standard standard." The technologists who created it at the W3C were largely unpreturbed by the Big Tech members, who viewed ActivityPub as unimportant, a folly. While this meant that the ActivityPub creators were free from Big Tech attempts to corrupt the standard, they were also insulated from the discipline of Big Tech standards people, who are expert at propelling a standard to completion while resolving conflicts to create a single, unified spec. By contrast, ActivityPub's creators made seven different specs, resolving factional disputes by letting everyone get their way. Critical parts of these standards – including support for federation! – was marked as optional in group's charter. Then along came Mastodon, implementing the draft spec for ActivityPub. This triggered two extensions to the deadline for ActivityPub's completion. ActivityPub moved to final draft against the backdrop of the real-world experiences of early Mastodon users. Four of the five ActivityPub authors self-identified as queer, and they set out to make Mastodon more harassment-resistant than corporate social media: https://fossandcrafts.org/episodes/053-fediverse-reflections-while-the-bird-burns.html The early success of Mastodon shifted the focus of ActivityPub authors and implementers. In Gehl's words, "half of ActivityPub" is now ignored. Gehl's essay shows how many needles Mastodon threaded to get to where it is today, and while there's an argument that there was a Fediverse-shaped hole in the internet that something was going to fill, the Mastodon-inflected flavor of ActivityPub we got is pretty great. Gehl is working on a book about this for Oxford University Press, "Move Slowly and Build Bridges": https://fossacademic.tech/2023/08/17/OxfordUP.html One of the more contingent elements of the nascent new, good web is Signal, the secure, robust, easy-to-use encrypted messaging tool that has stepped in to fill the gap that encrypted email tools like PGP struggled to fill for years (though that doesn't mean that secure email is impossible!): https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/01/end-to-end-encryption-is-too-important-to-be-proprietary/ Like Mastodon, Signal threaded a bunch of different needles to get to its current status, and it's still threading needles. In a new article, Signal's amazing new president, Meredith Whittaker and Joshua Lund explain what it costs to keep Signal running: https://signal.org/blog/signal-is-expensive/ Bottom line: Signal costs $50m/year. The breakdown is fascinating and weird. Signal pays a fortune to send SMS messages to verify your number when you sign up. Here's an irony: as Signal displaces SMS, telcos are making up for lost revenue by charging Signal ever-higher rates to send those signup codes – Signal's spending $6m/year on SMSes! Storage costs Signal another $1.3m/year. Servers are $2.9m/year. Bandwidth is $2.8m/year. Signal's storage and compute costs are low because they're privacy-first, so they're collecting, processing and storing as little data as possible. Add a couple more zeros per user to approximate the costs for high-surveillance alternatives to Signal. Because Signal is end-to-end encrypted, they can use untrusted (and cheap) third parties for bandwidth, relaying and storage. Your phone encrypts the data before it leaves your device, and no one can decrypt it except the person you're talking to. That lets Signal shop around for server infra, saving much more. Even so, voice and video calls consume a lot of bandwidth, and it gets more expensive because they jump the connection through multiple servers to prevent the people you're talking to from capturing your IP address. Signal's got 50 full-time employees – a "shockingly small" team by industry standards. But still: 50 developers, managers, designers, accountants, etc all add up to $19m/year (the org pays "as close to industry wages as possible within the boundaries of a nonprofit"). As Signal scales up, it is discovering new and exciting bugs and problems. A one-in-a-billion bug that may never crop up in a small service can suddenly start occurring on a daily basis once you hit scale. That means Signal will continue to hire engineers to crush these weird little bugs, and they're going to be the kinds of specialists who can preserve privacy while fixing servers. Signal is amazing. It's been six years since they figured out how to transmit userids, numbers and photos as fully encrypted blobs. Not one of their competitors – not even the "secure" ones from giant Big Tech companies – have managed this. Even Signal's system for embedding animated GIFs is privacy-preserving – the system doesn't reveal your search terms to the GIF repositories. Today, Signal is tooling up to create "post-quantum resistance" to the system, anticipating the arrival of functional quantum computers that will (theoretically) make short work of existing encryption techniques. The article ends – logically enough – with a plea for donations. I'm a Signal donor already: https://signal.org/donate/ The Signal and ActivityPub stories reveal the important interplay between principled individuals and sustainable institutions. Benevolent dictators – whether that's Tim Berners Lee, or Mastodon's Eugen Rochko – work well, but fail badly. No matter how benevolent a dictator is, they are not infallible or omniscient. A critical juncture in any good project is its transition from a dictatorship to a democracy – an individual to an institution. Take the Archive of Contemporary Music, the largest archive of popular music in the world. It was founded in 1985 by Bob George, who had amassed a collection of 47,000 LPs in a loft he'd lived in since 1974: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/nov/16/archive-of-contemporary-music-new-york George and his co-founder, David Wheeler, have since grown the collection to 3m pieces of media with 90m songs. They were the first people to start seriously collecting and preserving music that others viewed as ephemeral and disposable. The collection wandered from place to place before settling in a Hudson Valley facility that it is about to outgrow. In part that's because they're still one of the only places where others' collections can be reliably consigned. When Keith Richards wanted to turn his blues collection over to a facility for long-term preservation, he chose ARC. Now, ARC is working with the Internet Archive to digitize and make available its vast holdings. But that's a fraught and contingent business, too. The Internet Archive has been targeted with one of those bowel-loosening record-industry lawsuits last seen during the Napster Wars, with Sony, Universal and others seeking damages that would permanently shutter the Archive and bankrupt its founder, the wonderful Brewster Kahle: https://blog.archive.org/2023/08/14/internet-archive-responds-to-recording-industry-lawsuit-targeting-obsolete-media/ The suit argues that when a library makes 78RPM recordings available for its patrons to check out over the internet, they cannot avail themselves of the copyright exemptions that have been a feature since copyright's inception. Remember, libraries are an order of magnitude older than copyright! The core of this suit is that libraries cannot move into the digital world. Rather than doing what libraries have done since (literal) time immemorial – collecting works, preserving them and making them available – digital libraries can only license time- and circulation-limited copies of works that can't be preserved. It's a grim vision of a future without libraries: https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/13/they-want-to-kill-libraries/ Giant corporations are an existential threat to human thriving. After 40 years of neoliberalism, there's a growing recognition that the market's invisible hand would like to swat you like a bug. Hence the rise and rise of the labor movement. Though "union density" (the proportion of unionized workers) is still at an historically low ebb, union support among the public is higher than at any time since the New Deal. That's why UAW president Shawn Fain is planning a general strike in 2028, calling on other unions "to align your contract expirations with our own" so that all the contracts come up for renegotiation at the same time: https://inthesetimes.com/article/uaw-auto-workers-general-strike-contract-labor-unions This is a very clever way to overcome America's ban on sympathy strikes, which was introduced in 1947 with the Taft-Hartley Act. Sympathy strikes – where all unionized workers refuse to provide any service to employers who won't bargain fairly with their own workforce – are a hugely powerful tool for labor movements. Look at Sweden, where Tesla has refused to bargain with the technicians who fix its cars. In response, the entire Swedish workforce has united against Tesla. Dockworkers won't unload its cars at the port. Electricians won't fix its chargers. Cleaners won't clean Tesla showrooms: https://www.wired.com/story/sweden-tesla-strike-cleaners/ This is how it's done. Musk has made his fortune by crushing worker power in every one of his businesses, joining the ranks of Apple and Amazon as one of the world's leading maimers and killers of his workforce: https://www.usnews.com/news/top-news/articles/2023-11-18/us-lawmakers-urge-scrutiny-of-spacex-worker-injuries-after-reuters-report While Musk's latest turn toward open antisemitism is grim, especially in light of his ownership of Twitter, it's perfectly in character for a man whose businesses have always been charnel houses of "crushed limbs, amputations, head injuries and death." But Musk can't fire or even intimidate the dockworkers who won't unload his cars. Sympathy strikes enlist workers who are beyond the reach of intransigent employers in aid of workers who are subject to retaliation for striking. That's why Taft-Hartley abolished sympathy strikes. But if all the major unions are negotiating their contracts in 2028 – as Fain has called for – they can all strike without falling afoul of Taft-Hartley. That's some shrewd tactics. Even if you believe in markets as a force for increasing human thriving, it takes an act of will to miss how corporations who can exploit their customers or workers will. When it comes to exploitable customers, prisoners are the ultimate captive audience. Most of us are familiar with the horrors of private prisons – especially after the acute phase of the covid pandemic, when corporate prison managers simply left America's prisoners to die. But prison privatization is fractal. You can privatize a prison facility, but you can also privatize the commissary, the library, the mail, even phone calls and visitations. Some of the slimiest prison profiteers are the ones providing telecoms facilities to prisons. These companies lobby to ban in-person visits and mail and then provide "free" phone service to state facilities – service that can cost prisoners and their families $10/minute. One of the worst of these companies is ViaPath (formerly Global Tel*Link). Not only did they charge prisoners sky-high rates for contact with their families, they ran a wildly insecure service that breached the data of 600,000 users: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/11/prison-phone-company-leaked-600k-users-data-and-didnt-notify-them-ftc-says/ These prisoners and families had "sensitive personal information" exposed online in unencrypted form, and were not informed of the breach, according to an FTC complaint: https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/Complaint-GlobalTelLinkCorp.pdf The company went on to defraud state and local prison systems whose contracts they were bidding on, by claiming to have never have suffered a breach. The sleaze of the prison-tech system is the worst imaginable – which is about what you'd expect. After all, prison-tech is at the very foot of the shitty technology adoption curve: https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware The prisoners who are abused by companies like Viapath are test subjects for technology that will work its way up the privilege gradient, moving on to mental patients, asylum seekers, kids, blue collar workers, white collar workers – then, everyone. This makes prison-tech a great oracle for understanding what's coming for the rest of us in a decade or two. That's why I made prison-tech the McGuffin of The Bezzle, the sequel to my 2023 novel Red Team Blues, which comes out next February: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle High-tech forensic accountant Marty Hench is back in The Bezzle for a story of early-2000s internet consolidation, LA Sheriffs Department gangs, prison privatization, collateralized debt obligations, and the absolute depraved sleaze of prison-tech privateers. If you still have a Twitter account, you can enter this sweepstakes to get an early copy: https://twitter.com/torbooks/status/1725544405879447745 (There will be other ways to get an early peek for non-Twitter users, rest assured!) Attentive readers will note that The Bezzle will be my fourth book in 14 months. I'm presently touring my third book of 2023, The Lost Cause, a climate emergency book that Rebecca Solnit described as "a future woven from our successes (Green New Deal!), failures (climate chaos anyway), and unresolved conflicts (old MAGA dudes). I loved it": https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause Book tours are exhausting and exhilarating. They have the weirdest social dynamic, where you're bouncing to a new city every day or two, having high-speed social contact with hundreds of people at a go, then hunkering down alone in a hotel room to do press calls and answer publicity emails. I've been doing this since 2006 or so, and one mystery I've pondered all that time is the weirdness of stinky hotel soap: https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/53339503041/ Go to any Marriott, any Hilton, a Comfort Inn or a Holiday Inn, and you will find yourself in the Kingdom of Beige. The wallpaper, art, carpets and bedspreads are all calculated to be as generic and invisible as possible. But the soap and shampoo stocked by these redoubts of nothingness are wildly perfumed. I'm not a big fan of floral perfume anyway, but the hand-soap in your typical hotel bathroom makes Axe Body Spray seem innocuous. No taxi air-freshener, no urinal puck, not even the most lethal of 1960s-era douches ever aspired to the eye-watering, clinging, scent of hotel soaps, shampoos, conditioners and hand-cream. It's like hygiene perfume is the mid-priced hotelier's equivalent of 1980s Wall Street traders' suspenders: while everything else must be absolutely uniform and staid, this is the one realm where you can really let your freak flag fly. I'm always up for a unfettered freak-flag, but holy shit does this stuff stink. I'll get a chance to ponder this anew on the tour for The Bezzle next February, and again for Picks and Shovels, the February 2025 Martin Hench novel that's already pending. I need to get ready for my bookstore event, but before I sign off, one more bit of science fiction publishing news. An indie filmmaker in Paris is working with the brilliant John Varley on an adaptation of his sf classic Titan, and they're trying to raise $65k on Kickstarter to pay for it. I kicked in – a world with more Varley in it is a better world: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/superstory/themis-the-next-frontier (Image: Famartin, CC BY-SA 4.0) This day in history (permalink) #20yrsago Xbox DRM adds insult to heartbreak https://www.gamegirladvance.com/2003/11/breaking-up-is-hard-to-do.html #15yrsago Regulator to hear Bell Canada network throttling case https://web.archive.org/web/20090123005142/http://saveournet.ca/content/media-advisory-crtc-make-landmark-decision-internet-freedom #15yrsago Apple to Mac owners: throw away your monitor if Hollywood says so https://web.archive.org/web/20081204010203/http://www.tuaw.com/2008/11/19/macbook-pro-users-getting-bitten-by-hdcp/ #15yrsago Liberation: a magical road-novel about America in collapse, Bradbury meets Kerouac https://memex.craphound.com/2008/11/19/liberation-a-magical-road-novel-about-america-in-collapse-bradbury-meets-kerouac/ #15yrsago Viridianism’s last note: surround yourself with beautiful, excellent things and get rid of all else https://craphound.com/lastviridian.txt #15yrsago Buckell’s Sly Mongoose: character-driven, exciting space opera pits space-rastas, neo-Aztecs, against the alien zombie hivemind https://memex.craphound.com/2008/11/18/buckells-sly-mongoose-character-driven-exciting-space-opera-pits-space-rastas-neo-aztecs-against-the-alien-zombie-hivemind/ #10yrsago Tropes vs Women in Video Games: Ms. Male Character https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYqYLfm1rWA #10yrsago Vi Hart explains logarithms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-7tcTIrers #10yrsago Jack Womack’s Random Acts of Senseless Violence: apocalypse in a young girl’s diary https://memex.craphound.com/2013/11/19/jack-womacks-random-acts-of-senseless-violence-apocalypse-in-a-young-girls-diary/ #10yrsago Complete meal cooking with a hotel coffee-maker https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/11/15/245442083/coffee-maker-cooking-brew-up-your-next-dinner #5yrsago Concealed Carry scammers spent $2m on gunhumper scare-ads on Facebook during the 2018 midterms https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-ads-political-concealed-online/ #5yrsago Finns to Trump: We don’t rake our forests https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46256296 #5yrsago Apple’s CEO: tech regulation is “inevitable” https://www.marketwatch.com/story/apples-tim-cook-says-tech-regulation-inevitable-because-free-market-isnt-working-2018-11-18 #5yrsago Pope condemns the “wealthy few” who hoard the riches that “belongs to all” https://apnews.com/article/c183ed8b9269499ea0f537d9e8a9f2b6 #5yrsago Sheryl Sandberg’s fingerprints are all over every one of Facebook’s scandals https://newrepublic.com/article/152320/punctured-myth-sheryl-sandberg #5yrsago How to use science fiction to teach tech ethics https://cfiesler.medium.com/the-black-mirror-writers-room-teaching-technology-ethics-through-speculation-f1a9e2deccf4 #5yrsago Insurer won’t pay murdered gunshot victim’s family because he didn’t disclose his high blood-sugar https://web.archive.org/web/20201108114908/https://www.news24.com/fin24/Companies/Financial-Services/momentum-we-rejected-r24m-life-insurance-claim-for-the-sake-of-our-other-clients-20181119 #5yrsago Trump’s FCC seems to have ended the practice of releasing its ISP speed-tests, leaving Americans in the dark about what they’re paying for https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/11/ajit-pai-isnt-saying-whether-isps-deliver-the-broadband-speeds-you-pay-for/ #5yrsago Ford CEO frankly admits that the car of the future is a surveillance device that you pay to spy on you https://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/2018/11/13/ford-motor-credit-data-new-revenue/1967077002/ #5yrsago White supremacy, minus gerrymandering: California GOP reduced to “third party status” https://www.politico.com/story/2018/11/17/rip-california-gop-republicans-lash-out-after-midterm-election-debacle-1000481 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Nancy Proctor (https://mastodon.world/@NancyProctor), Naked Capitalism (https://www.nakedcapitalism.com), Wired (https://www.wired.com/), Kevin Marks (https://www.kevinmarks.com/). Currently writing: A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2024 Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: Moral Hazard (from Communications Breakdown) https://craphound.com/stories/2023/11/12/moral-hazard-from-communications-breakdown/ Upcoming appearances: Gibson's Bookstore, Nov 18 (Concord, NH) https://www.gibsonsbookstore.com/event/doctorow-lost-cause Lost Cause at Simsbury Public Library, Nov 20 (Simsbury, CT) https://simsbury.librarycalendar.com/event/author-visit-cory-doctorow-29257 Generation of Lost Causes, Nov 22 (Toronto) https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/705457551527?aff=oddtdtcreator Who Is Watching Big Tech? Nov 27 (Toronto)` https://web.archive.org/web/20230907160103/https://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/detail.jsp?Entt=RDMEVT496408&R=EVT496408 The Lost Cause at The Strand (NYC), Nov 29 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-the-lost-cause-tickets-734958008187 The Lost Cause at Flyleaf Books (Chapel Hill), Dec 7 https://www.flyleafbooks.com/doctorow-2023 Recent appearances: Science fiction for a dystopian present (Institute of Art and Ideas) https://iai.tv/video/science-fiction-for-a-dystopian-present-cory-doctorow?_auid=2020 Pushing back on unconstrained capitalism (Changelog) https://changelog.com/podcast/565 Plutopia https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-the-internet-con/ Latest books: "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. Upcoming books: The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books, February 2024 Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

https://poliverso.org/display/0477a01e-c3824fb0-d417546a4428b05b

#20yrsago Send back your MP3s https://web.archive.org/web/20031015045308/https://sendthemback.org/

#10yrsago UK Home Office suffers setback: can’t destroy family by deporting American head-teacher as his British wife begins cancer treatment https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/nov/17/home-office-drops-us-teacher-deportation-threat

#10yrsago #RobFord gives staff $5,000 taxpayer dollars each to stay on https://torontosun.com/2013/11/16/mayor-rob-fords-week-one-for-the-books

#5yrsago Exec who oversaw Google’s failed babykiller projects and cozied up to Saudis quits after employee uprising https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/16/technology/diane-greene-google-cloud.html

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#20yrsago #OwnerOverride: a proposal to fix #TrustedComputing https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7055

#10yrsago #RobFord stripped of powers https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/city-hall/rob-ford-councillors-strip-mayor-of-certain-powers/article_c531a981-ab9a-5818-abef-83dc0ba6cf89.html

#5yrsago #GildedAge watch: America’s firefighting is turning into a two-tier system, with private services for the 1% https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/11/kim-kardashian-kanye-west-history-private-firefighting/575887/

#5yrsago One year later: kids #SmartWatches are still a privacy and security dumpster fire https://www.pentestpartners.com/security-blog/consumer-advice-kids-gps-tracker-watch-security/

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#10yrsago Toronto council turns their back to Rob Ford every time he speaks https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/11/the-acting-attorney-general-helped-an-alleged-scam-company-hawk-bizarre-products/

#5yrsago Trump’s Acting Attorney General was an active participant in a scam company that marketed “#MasculineToilets” https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/11/the-acting-attorney-general-helped-an-alleged-scam-company-hawk-bizarre-products/

#5yrsago The Florida of ballot-design mistakes is… https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2018/11/14/florida-is-the-florida-of-ballot-design-mistakes/

#5yrsago “Privacy Not Included”: Mozilla’s guide to insecure, surveillant gadgets to avoid https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/

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#10yrsago Punk #FreedomOfInformationAccess ninja learns how to beat FBI obfuscation, so they shut him out https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/11/foia-ryan-shapiro-fbi-files-lawsuit/

#10yrsago Massive 1978 Las Vegas fallout shelter https://www.cultofweird.com/architecture/underground-home-las-vegas/

#10yrsago #TPP’s worst evil: making all future copyright reform impossible https://www.techdirt.com/2013/11/14/most-nefarious-part-tpp-proposal-making-copyright-reform-impossible/

#10yrsago #RobFord: $170K/year, 11-3 working day https://www.joeydevilla.com/2013/11/14/one-thing-to-remember-during-this-whole-toronto-mayoral-kerfuffle/

#10yrsago Rob Ford articulates official mayoral cunnilingus policy https://www.joeydevilla.com/2013/11/14/rob-ford-will-ahem-go-down-in-history-with-this-quote/

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#15yrsago The Manuscript: a #technothriller written by someone who understands technology https://memex.craphound.com/2008/11/14/the-manuscript-a-technothriller-written-by-someone-who-understands-technology/

#10yrsago UK Conservative party tries to send all official speeches down the memory hole https://www.computerweekly.com/blog/Public-Sector-IT/Conservatives-erase-Internet-history

#10yrsago #TSA blows a billion bucks on unscientific “#BehavioralDetection” program, reinvents #phrenology https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/11/despite-lack-of-science-tsa-spent-millions-on-behavioral-detection-officers/

#10yrsago #Renault ships a brickable car with battery #DRM that you’re not allowed to own https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/drm-cars-will-drive-consumers-crazy

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#10yrsago Tune: Still Life, new installment in romcom/alien abduction graphic novel https://memex.craphound.com/2013/11/13/tune-still-life-new-installment-in-romcom-alien-abduction-graphic-novel/

#5yrsago Trump is bailing out a Chinese owned pork producer to compensate it for retaliatory Chinese tariffs https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-smithfield-china-tariffs-20181109-story.html

#5yrsago Yanis Varoufakis on capitalism’s incompatibility with democracy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGeevtdp1WQ

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#10yrsago Irish Freedom of Information amendment will send #FOI fees to infinity https://www.mcgarrsolicitors.ie/2013/11/10/freedom-information-fees-multiplied-new-amendment/

#10yrsago #GCHQ used fake Slashdot, LinkedIn to target employees at Internet exchanges https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/11/uk-spies-continue-quantum-insert-attack-via-linkedin-slashdot-pages/

#10yrsago Edward Snowden is almost broke https://world.time.com/2013/11/12/edward-snowden-is-almost-broke/

#10yrsago @vihart cramming #GooglePlus into YouTube has made comments even worse, I’m leaving https://web.archive.org/web/20131114001432/http://vihart.com/google-youtube-integration-kind-of-like-twilight-except-in-this-version-when-cullen-drinks-bellatubes-blood-they-both-become-mortal-but-cullen-is-still-an-abusive-creep-also-it-is-still-bad/

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#20yrsago #PearsonAirport threatens to sue websites that take its name in vain https://www.techdirt.com/2003/11/13/is-it-against-the-law-to-put-the-name-of-the-toronto-airport-on-the-web/

#15yrsago Zoe’s Tale: @scalzi's smart-ass young-adult sf thriller https://memex.craphound.com/2008/11/12/zoes-tale-scalzis-smart-ass-young-adult-sf-thriller/

#10yrsago UK home secretary wants to overturn #HumanRights treaties and make terror suspects stateless https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/nov/12/theresa-may-british-terror-suspects-stateless-passport

#10yrsago #DavidNutt wants to make non-addictive, safer synth-booze that comes with a sober-up pill https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/getting-drunk-without-the-hangover-or-health-risks-scientist-seeks-investment-for-alcohol-substitute-drug-8931946.html

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#20yrsago CVS as a means of keeping track of your life https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.5555/566949.566953

#15yrsago #AlJaffee’s Tall Tales: skinny comics with snappy humor https://memex.craphound.com/2008/11/11/al-jaffees-tall-tales-skinny-comics-with-snappy-humor/

#10yrsago #G4S forged documents used to return #AsylumSeeker who claims he was tortured after UK deportation https://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/nov/10/g4s-officials-accused-forgery

#5yrsago Security chips have not reduced US #CreditCardFraud https://geminiadvisory.io/card-fraud-on-the-rise/

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#10yrsago Employment advice for #Millennials https://medium.com/the-nib/six-totally-easy-tips-for-millennials-to-get-ahead-in-todays-economy-5451617c78de

#10yrsago Burglar surprised to discover the lady he’s robbing is an armed #AxThrowing champ https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/ax-wielding-woman-chases-thief-away-in-hemet/

#10yrsago Toronto’s crack-smoking mayor, covered in the style of foreign affairs https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/11/06/canadian-regime-roiled-by-provincial-scandal-sparking-fears-of-instability/

#5yrsago Talking about the #DMCA and 20 years of tech law malpractice on PRI’s Marketplace https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-tech/20-year-old-digital-copyright-law-still-being-fought-about-and-copied-today/

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#20yrsago We’ve had #Napster since 1909, and the sky still hasn’t fallen http://earlyradiohistory.us/1909musi.htm

#10yrsago Fruitfly evolved pictures of ants on its wings https://www.thenationalnews.com/uae/science/fruit-fly-with-the-wings-of-beauty-1.364064/#ixzz2jhxlLGaH

#10yrsago Rich America versus Poor America: stats about the #WealthGap https://web.archive.org/web/20131108055750/https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-11-07/which-america-do-you-live-–-21-hard-believe-facts-about-wealthy-america-and-poor-ame

#10yrsago Letter from a Chinese forced-labor camp found in Kmart Hallowe’en decorations https://consumerist.com/2013/11/07/inside-the-chinese-labor-camp-that-made-halloween-decorations-sold-at-kmart/

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#20yrsago How (not) to negotiate an #IntellectualPropertyTreaty https://web.archive.org/web/20031203202931/https://www.wcl.american.edu/pippi/031119agenda.pdf

#15yrsago Saturn’s Children: @cstross robopervy tribute to the late late ##Heinlein https://memex.craphound.com/2008/11/10/saturns-children-strosss-robopervy-tribute-to-the-late-late-heinlein/

#10yrsago All-purpose apology for corrupt, inept, thieving, substance-abusing Canadian politicians https://nationalpost.com/opinion/andrew-coyne-i-am-so-sorry-i-am-sorry-in-a-hundred-inadmissible-ways

#10yrsago Muzzling Canadian scientists: Comparing US and Canadian routine scientific secrecy https://www.terry.ubc.ca/2013/11/07/the-terry-project-on-citr-27-silencing-the-scientists/

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#10yrsago Feds subject drug suspect to vaginal/anal probe, X-ray, CT Scan, without a warrant — find nothing https://www.thedailybeast.com/dog-orders-cavity-search-lawsuits-ensue

#10yrsago Business-logic of cooperating with the #NSA has changed https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/11/a-fraying-of-the-public-private-surveillance-partnership/281289/

#10yrsago How much value did your account generate for Twitter? https://newsfeed.time.com/2013/11/07/interactive-this-is-how-much-money-twitter-owes-you/

#10yrsago #RobFord’s exaggerated and imaginary savings to the taxpayers of Toronto https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/city-hall/deconstructing-mayor-rob-fords-fiscal-record/article_8c6e3bf3-bea5-54d8-8e2c-d28b5bfcf631.html

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#20yrsago Economist replies to #JackValenti on #BroadcastFlag http://arnoldkling.com/~arnoldsk/aimst5/valenti.html

#10yrsago New #RobFord video: Laughable Fumblebuck drops a gigaton of F-bombs https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/rob-ford-caught-on-video-in-violent-rant/article_67244e8f-8561-5d4b-8054-c30750f36779.html

#10yrsago Google security engineer on #NSA: “Fuck these guys” https://memex.craphound.com/2013/11/07/google-security-engineer-on-nsa-fuck-these-guys/

#5yrsago AT&T disconnects whole families from the internet because someone in their house is accused of copyright infringement https://memex.craphound.com/2018/11/07/att-disconnects-whole-families-from-the-internet-because-someone-in-their-house-is-accused-of-copyright-infringement/

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#20yrsago Dashboard cig lighters are the new cup-holders https://money.cnn.com/2003/11/04/pf/autos/lighters/index.htm

#10yrsago #Regex Runner: a game to teach regular expressions to kids https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fs2ZchTUEvQ

#5yrsago #Unisyn voting machine manual instructs election officials to use and recycle weak passwords https://memex.craphound.com/2018/11/06/unisyn-voting-machine-manual-instructs-election-officials-to-use-and-recycle-weak-passwords/

#5yrsago Steganographically hiding secret messages in fake fingerprints https://memex.craphound.com/2018/11/06/steganographically-hiding-secret-messages-in-fake-fingerprints/

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