#07 August 2023

[senorboombastic]

Live Review: BC Camplight at Low Four Studio in Manchester 07 August 2023

Words: Ben Forrester I remember when I first started visiting the fair city of Manchester back in my late 00s uni days, I attended the studios of the now defunct Channel M to watch new bands do live sessions. I think I saw three sessions in total, but it was that channel that would introduce me to some of my favourite Manchester bands (hello Dutch Uncles, Everything Everything and…

[glimmerofawesome]

Zećira Mušović saves versus the United States during the round of 16 at the FIFA Women's World Cup 2023 - August 6 2023

[dteam-snaps]

→ AUGUST 07 2023

[deoduh]

line sketch portrait

[dopingconsomme]

バリバリANNYUI NO.1

,バリバリANNYUI NO.1,https://b.hatena.ne.jp/dopingconsomme/20230829#bookmark-4741447148352357007 https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm42686487

[ao3feed-radskier]

Thème : Mermaid fic

Radovid se sent seul depuis son couronnement. Il décide alors d'aller vers la Mer du Nord et croise une personne qu'il espérait revoir depuis longtemps.

Words: 870, Chapters: 1/1, Language: Français

Fandoms: The Witcher (TV)

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Categories: M/M

Characters: Radowid V Srogi | Radovid V the Stern, Jaskier | Dandelion

Relationships: Jaskier | Dandelion/Radowid V Srogi | Radovid V the Stern

Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Reunions, Mermaid Jaskier | Dandelion, Netflix-Canon Radowid V Srogi | Radovid V the Stern, Suicide Attempt, Angst with a Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Song: Extraordinary Things (The Witcher)

[ao3feed-bottom-geralt-rights]

by SnakeOilSalesDepartment Forgot to say in the notes but this is part of the Season of Kink Collection! Author's Summary: Geralt shows up unexpectedly at Jaskier's office in Oxenfurt. Now it was his turn to be confused. “Did I misread the situation?” Jaskier wondered out loud. “Excuse me for assuming, but—you did come here for sex, didn’t you?” “I did,” Geralt finally admitted. “I didn’t want to be quite that direct.” Jaskier couldn’t help but laugh. “Since when you’re oblique about sex?” “I didn’t want to be quite that direct for once,” Geralt muttered into his cup. Words: 26, Chapters: 1/1, Language: English

Fandoms: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types, The Witcher (TV)

Rating: Explicit

Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Categories: M/M

Characters: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia, Jaskier | Dandelion

Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion

Additional Tags: Desk Sex, Rimming, Anal Fingering, Awkward Flirting, Manhandling, Dom/sub Undertones, Bottom Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia, Top Jaskier | Dandelion, Rough Kissing, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Anal Sex, Podfic & Podficced Works, Podfic Length: 20-30 Minutes

Read on AO3

[tracyunawagner]

The Weekly Energy Foresight ~Snapshot~ for August 07-13, 2023

[banglakhobor]

আজ আপনার হাতে আসবে আটকে থাকা টাকা! জলের মতো খরচ হবে কাদের? রাশি মিলিয়ে জানুন

আমাদের দেশের বৈদিক জ্যোতিষশাস্ত্র বলছে যে আমাদের রাশিচক্রের ১২টি রাশি মানবজীবনের বিভিন্ন দিক সম্পর্কে বিস্তারিত বর্ণনা দিতে সক্ষম। প্রত্যেকটি রাশি তাদের প্রতিদিনের গ্রহের ভিন্ন ভিন্ন অবস্থানের কারণে জীবনে ভিন্ন ভিন্ন ঘটনার সম্মুখীন হয়ে থাকে। সেই কারণেই প্রতিটি রাশির জাতক-জাতিকাদের জীবনের বিভিন্ন দিক নিয়ে জ্যোতিষশাস্ত্র ভবিষ্যদ্বাণী করতে সক্ষম। এবারে দেখে নেওয়া যাক আজকের রাশিফল আমাদের অর্থভাগ্য…

[webmorch-blog]

Weekly Horoscope 7-13 August: इस सप्ताह ये रहे अलर्ट, इनके लिए होगा खास

Weekly Horoscope 07- 13 August 2023: मीन राशि वालों के पराक्रम में वृद्धि की स्थिति रहेगी. इस दौरान आप भाग्यशाली रहेगी. वृषभ राशि वालों को कार्य क्षेत्र में विरोधी पक्ष आपको नीचा दिखाने की कोशिश में रहेंगे. वृश्चिक राशि वाले किसी व्यक्ति से पहली दफा मिलकर प्रसन्न रहेंगे. कैसा रहेगा सभी 12 राशियों का ये पूरा सप्ताह जानते हैं साप्ताहिक राशिफल (Saptahik Rashifal)…. मेष इस राशि के लिए अगस्त महीने का…

[jstor]

From all of us at JSTOR, happy Black History Month!

The profound impact of African American writers, artists, politicians, and academics, along with countless others, is indelibly etched into the fabric of American history–and we'll be highlighting them all month long.

Image credit: 

Fink, Larry (1941-2023). Malcolm X, Rally for Birmingham, Harlem, NY, May, 1963. 1963, printed 2019. Archival pigment print, 22 x 17 in. (55.88 x 43.18 cm). 

Levy, Mark. Mississippi Freedom Summer 1964. 1964. Queens College Special Collections and Archives.

Borg, Erik. Toni Morrison. August 26, 1977. 

Lisa Kuzia. Angela Davis. 1980-1985. Black and white photography, 4 3/4 x 3 3/4 in. Special Collections and Archives, Colby College Libraries, Waterville, Maine. 

Padow-Sederbaum, Phyllis. Junior NAACP Demonstration. 1963. Queens College Special Collections and Archives. 

Allied Printing Trades Council. Placard from Memorial March Reading “HONOR KING: END RACISM!” 1968.  National Museum of African American History and Culture; On View: NMAAHC (1400 Constitution Ave NW), National Mall Location, Concourse 1, C1 053; Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. 

Created by C. M. Battey, American. W.E.B. Du Bois/. 1918. Silver and photographic gelatin on photographic paper. National Museum of African American History and Culture; Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. 

Mosley, John W. Civil Rights Demonstrators at Girard College. Philadelphia PA: Temple University Libraries, 1965-07-17. Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection.

[glimmerofawesome]

[dteam-snaps]

→ AUGUST 07 2023 pt. 1

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Forcing Google to spin off Chrome (and Android?)

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/19/breaking-up-is-hard-to-do/#shiny-and-chrome

Last August, a federal judge convicted Google of being "a monopolist" and acting "as one to maintain its monopoly." The judge concluded that key to Google's monopoly was the vast troves of data it collects and analyzes and asked the parties to come up with remedies to address this.

Many trustbusters and Google competitors read this and concluded that Google should be forced to share its click and quer y data. The technical term for this is "apocalyptically stupid." Releasing Google's click and query data into the wild is a privacy Chernobyl in the waiting. The secrets that we whisper to search engines have the power to destroy us a thousand times over.

Largely theoretical answers like "differential privacy" are promising, but remain theoretical at scale. The first large-scale live-fire exercise for these should not be something as high-stakes as Google's click and query data. If anything, we should delete that data:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/07/revealed-preferences/#extinguish-v-improve

The last thing we want to do is use antitrust to democratize surveillance so that everyone can spy as efficiently as Google does. In theory, we could sanitize the click and query data by limiting sharing to queries that were made by multiple, independent users (say, only sharing queries that at least 30 users have made), but it's unlikely that this will do much to improve the performance of rival firms' search engines.

Google only retains 18 months' worth of click and query data, thus once we cut off its capacity to collect more data, whatever advantage it has from surveillance will begin to decay immediately and fall to zero in 18 months.

(However: the 18 months figure is deceptive, and deliberately so. Google may only retain your queries for 18 months, but it is silent on how long it retains the inferences from those queries. It may discard your "how do I get an abortion in my red state" query after a year and a half, but indefinitely retain the "sought an illegal abortion" label it added to your profile. The US desperately needs a federal consumer privacy law!)

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy

And just to be clear, there's other Google data that would be very useful to rival search engines, like Google's search index – the trove of pages from the internet. Google already licenses this out, and search engines like Kagi use it to produce substantially superior search results:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

The DOJ has just filed its proposal for a remedy, and it's a doozy: forcing Google to sell off Chrome, on the basis that both of these are the source of much of Google's data, and no rival search engine is likely to also have a widely used browser:

https://9to5google.com/2024/11/18/us-doj-google-sell-chrome/

This represents something of a compromise position: the DOJ had initially signalled that it would also demand a selloff of Android, and that's been dropped. I think there's a good case for forcing the sale of Android as a source of data, too.

In competition theory, these selloffs are referred to as "structural separation" – when a company that provides infrastructure to other firms is prohibited from competing with those firms:

https://locusmag.com/2022/03/cory-doctorow-vertically-challenged/

For example, it used to be that banks were prohibited from competing with the companies they loaned money to. After all, if you borrow money from Chase to open a pizzeria, and then Chase opens a pizzeria of its own across the street, you can see how your business would be doomed. You have to make interest payments to Chase, and your rival doesn't, and if Chase wants to, it can subsidize that rival so it can sell pizzas below cost until you're out of business.

Likewise, rail companies were banned from owning freight companies, because otherwise they would destroy the businesses of every freight company that shipped on the railroad.

In theory, you could create fair play rules that required the bank or the railroad to play nice with the business customers that used their platforms, but in practice, there are so many ways of cheating that this would be unenforceable.

This principle is well established in all other areas of business, and we recoil in horror when it is violated. You wouldn't hire a lawyer who was also representing the person who's suing you. Judges (with the abominable exception of Supreme Court justices!) are required to recuse themselves when they have a personal connection with either of the parties in a case they preside over.

One of the weirdest sights of the new Gilded Age is when lawyers for monopoly companies argue that they can play fair with their customers despite their conflicts of interest. Think of Google or Meta, with their ad-tech duopoly. These are companies that purport to represent sellers of ads and buyers of ads in marketplaces they own and control, and where they compete with sellers and/or buyers. These companies suck up 51% of the revenue generated by advertising, while historically, the share taken by ad intermediaries was more like 15%!

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/25/structural-separation/#america-act

Imagine if you and your partner discovered that the same lawyer was representing both of you in the divorce, while also serving as the judge, and trying to match with both of you on Tinder. Now imagine that when the divorce terms were finalized, lawyer got your family home.

No Google lawyer would agree to argue on the company's behalf in a case where the judge was employed by the party that's suing them, but they will blithely argue that the reason they're getting 51% of the ad-rake is that they're providing 51% of the value.

Structural separation – like judicial recusal – comprehensively and unarguably resolves all the perceptions and realities of conflict between parties. The fact that platform owners compete with platform users is the source of bottomless corruption, from Google to Amazon:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

In other words, I think the DOJ is onto something here. That said, the devil is – as always – in the details. If Google is forced to sell off Chrome, rather than standing it up as its own competing business, things could go very wrong indeed.

Any company that buys Chrome will know that it only has a certain number of years before Google will be permitted to spin up a new browser, and will be incentivized to extract as much value from Chrome over that short period. So a selloff could make Chrome exponentially worse than Google, which, whatever other failings it has, is oriented towards long-term dominance, not a quick buck.

But if Google is forced to spin Chrome out as a standalone business, the incentives change. Anyone who buys Chrome will have to run it as a functional business that is designed to survive a future Google competitor – they won't have another business they can fall back on if Google bounces back in five years.

There's a good history of this in antitrust breakups: both Standard Oil and AT&T were forced to spin out, rather than sell off, parts of their empire, and those businesses stood alone and provided competitive pressure. That is, until we stopped enforcing antitrust law and allowed them to start merging again – womp womp.

This raises another question: does any of this matter, given this month's election results? Will Trump's DoJ follow through on whatever priorities the current DoJ sets? That's an open question, but – unlike so many other questions about the coming Trump regime – the answer here isn't necessarily a nightmare.

After all, the Google antitrust case started under Trump, and Trump's pick for Attorney General, the credibly accused sexual predator Matt Gaetz, is a "Khanservative" who breaks with his fellow Trumpians in professing great admiration for Biden's FTC chief Lina Khan, and her project of breaking up corporate monopolies:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/trump-nominates-khanservative-matt

What's more, Trump is a landing strip for a stroke or coronary, which would make JD Vance president – and Vance has also expressed his approval of Khan's work.

Google bosses seem to be betting on Trump's "transactional" (that is, corrupt) style of governance, and his willingness to overrule his own appointees to protect the interests of anyone who flatters or bribes him sufficiently, or convinces the hosts of Fox and Friends to speak on their behalf:

https://www.mediamatters.org/donald-trump/comprehensive-review-revolving-door-between-fox-and-second-trump-administration

That would explain why Google capo Sundar Pichai ordered his employees not to speak out against Trump:

https://www.businessinsider.com/google-employees-memes-poke-fun-company-rules-political-discussion-2024-11

And why he followed up by publicly osculating Trump's sphincter:

https://twitter.com/sundarpichai/status/1854207788290850888

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

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

[dopingconsomme]

ライアーダンサー

,https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm42418641,https://b.hatena.ne.jp/dopingconsomme/20230826#bookmark-4738740065671233285 https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm42418641

[ao3feed-radskier]

It was truly a mockery to have Radovid be the one who — albeit unknowingly — delivered the severed head of his brother’s wife to his dinner table.

Words: 1536, Chapters: 1/1, Language: English

Fandom: The Witcher (TV)

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Categories: M/M

Relationships: Jaskier | Dandelion/Radowid V Srogi | Radovid V the Stern

Characters: Radowid V Srogi | Radovid V the Stern

Additional tags: Spoilers for The Witcher (TV) Season 3, Character Study, Non-Linear Narrative, Angst and Feels, Netflix-Canon Radowid V Srogi | Radovid V the Stern, POV Radowid V Srogi | Radovid V the Stern, Canon Compliant, but also a bit of canon divergence, Radovid is miserable