#Computers and Internet

[josephthesnailshow]

This photo was taken from a website known as 1092paradise.com, but it ended up being used on this website. This face on the website is named White Man, the head admin on the web. Though, unlike 1092paradise.com, this website is a threat.

There’s a website called Parasites.org, and it’s claimed that when you first enter the website, it automatically asks what your name is, bank account information, and other personal stuff like your address. Not doing so will not do anything to you, but if you put in your information, it shows up with the following text:

Thank you, customer! Enjoy your parasites! ;)

And it directs you to the main part of the website; it’s a shop that includes, as you guessed, parasites, which can be anything: ticks, bedbugs, tapeworms, and leeches, notably human parasites; each of them costs a small price with the following text on top that says “No Refunds!” It also comes with an illegal drug that contains an organ-eating parasite.

You can also use the contact forum for chatting with the people who run the website. The people are friendly, greeting people like a regular employee does, but when you ask for assistance with White Man, he automatically shows up; he has a profile picture of an evil smiling white face with sharp teeth, followed by two black itty-bitty dots on the eyes.

Here’s what he says:

White Man: Hello, thanks for asking for my assistance! How could I help you?

You have two options. You can reply with “my drug isn’t coming!” or “what do you do with my address?”

If you pick “my drug isn’t coming!” You will be forced to buy the drug again, even if you didn’t buy it. The White Man also says that if you don’t buy the drug, he will come over to your house and end your life.

If you pick “what do you do with my address?” He responds, “It’s our company policy; if we don’t get your address, we can’t mail the drugs or parasites to you.” Though, when you buy something from Parasites, someone at Parasites.org will email you back and say the following short text:

“Hello! Thanks for shopping at Parasites.org; your parasite or drug will arrive in 3 days! Check your mailbox daily, and give us a message on our website if you don’t find anything there.

Have a wonderful rest of your day, night, or evening.”

After 3 days, the item will arrive in the mail, and it will be inside a box. Upon opening, it will contain some blood from someone and a bit of fluid with the drug or parasite in the middle, and every order will contain a note inside that contains a link that, upon typing in the search engine, will direct you to a texting UI where, with darkness in the background, the text says the following:

“Hello! Thanks for buying our product; we will do whatever you want us to do. If you want us to kill an enemy of yours or anything, type that in the box underneath. Though it’s recommended If you don’t include your name, the same thing will happen to you.”

This is where the website goes downhill, and the entirety of it will lead to the main reason why it got removed.

According to the victims list, it says that your enemy will be stabbed to death, and sometimes the employees will record their murder and make a snuff film out of it. If you put your name instead, it’s more graphic.

Your death will be either getting shot or they will put a maggot on your body so it can dig into you and lay eggs inside of you. They usually shoot you afterwards as they want you to feel the most pain.

As of now, luckily, the site's owner and the other employees ended up getting arrested, and the website got deleted altogether, but there’s something on the corpses that didn’t get answered yet and should be answered.

“Let them eat what’s inside of you :)”

[veryluckyclovers]

[youre-dreaming-302]

[yodaprod]

Burger King Internet corner, New York (1998)

[prokopetz]

About twenty years back, there was this weird transitional period after companies had figured out that harvesting their users' demographic information was a potential gold mine but before we lived in a hellish panopticon where any website operator could look up your IP address and know what you had for breakfast where some sites would try to get you to fill out, like, detailed demographic surveys before they'd let you access their stuff. Not just age, gender and geographic location, either – some of them would fish for employment status, marital status, brand preferences, even religious affiliation. A lot of folks I knew would just pick the first option in every dropdown, but my move was always to fill in the demographic information of the current Pope, at least as far as I was able to determine it (brand preference was always a tricky one). I like to think that, thanks to my efforts, their data sets are haunted to this day by a phantom pontiff.

[never-obsolete]

Computer Chronicles - Internet (1995)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Kickstarting a book to end enshittification, because Amazon will not carry it

My next book is The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation: it’s a Big Tech disassembly manual that explains how to disenshittify the web and bring back the old good internet. The hardcover comes from Verso on Sept 5, but the audiobook comes from me — because Amazon refuses to sell my audio:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/the-internet-con-how-to-seize-the-means-of-computation

Amazon owns Audible, the monopoly audiobook platform that controls >90% of the audio market. They require mandatory DRM for every book sold, locking those books forever to Amazon’s monopoly platform. If you break up with Amazon, you have to throw away your entire audiobook library.

That’s a hell of a lot of leverage to hand to any company, let alone a rapacious monopoly that ran a program targeting small publishers called “Project Gazelle,” where execs were ordered to attack indie publishers “the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle”:

https://www.businessinsider.com/sadistic-amazon-treated-book-sellers-the-way-a-cheetah-would-pursue-a-sickly-gazelle-2013-10

[Image ID: Journalist and novelist Doctorow (Red Team Blues) details a plan for how to break up Big Tech in this impassioned and perceptive manifesto….Doctorow’s sense of urgency is contagious -Publishers Weekly]

I won’t sell my work with DRM, because DRM is key to the enshittification of the internet. Enshittification is why the old, good internet died and became “five giant websites filled with screenshots of the other four” (h/t Tom Eastman). When a tech company can lock in its users and suppliers, it can drain value from both sides, using DRM and other lock-in gimmicks to keep their business even as they grow ever more miserable on the platform.

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

[Image ID: A brilliant barn burner of a book. Cory is one of the sharpest tech critics, and he shows with fierce clarity how our computational future could be otherwise -Kate Crawford, author of The Atlas of AI”]

The Internet Con isn’t just an analysis of where enshittification comes from: it’s a detailed, shovel-ready policy prescription for halting enshittification, throwing it into reverse and bringing back the old, good internet.

How do we do that? With interoperability: the ability to plug new technology into those crapulent, decaying platform. Interop lets you choose which parts of the service you want and block the parts you don’t (think of how an adblocker lets you take the take-it-or-leave “offer” from a website and reply with “How about nah?”):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

But interop isn’t just about making platforms less terrible — it’s an explosive charge that demolishes walled gardens. With interop, you can leave a social media service, but keep talking to the people who stay. With interop, you can leave your mobile platform, but bring your apps and media with you to a rival’s service. With interop, you can break up with Amazon, and still keep your audiobooks.

So, if interop is so great, why isn’t it everywhere?

Well, it used to be. Interop is how Microsoft became the dominant operating system:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay

[Image ID: Nobody gets the internet-both the nuts and bolts that make it hum and the laws that shaped it into the mess it is-quite like Cory, and no one’s better qualified to deliver us a user manual for fixing it. That’s The Internet Con: a rousing, imaginative, and accessible treatise for correcting our curdled online world. If you care about the internet, get ready to dedicate yourself to making interoperability a reality. -Brian Merchant, author of Blood in the Machine]

It’s how Apple saved itself from Microsoft’s vicious campaign to destroy it:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay

Every tech giant used interop to grow, and then every tech giant promptly turned around and attacked interoperators. Every pirate wants to be an admiral. When Big Tech did it, that was progress; when you do it back to Big Tech, that’s piracy. The tech giants used their monopoly power to make interop without permission illegal, creating a kind of “felony contempt of business model” (h/t Jay Freeman).

The Internet Con describes how this came to pass, but, more importantly, it tells us how to fix it. It lays out how we can combine different kinds of interop requirements (like the EU’s Digital Markets Act and Massachusetts’s Right to Repair law) with protections for reverse-engineering and other guerrilla tactics to create a system that is strong without being brittle, hard to cheat on and easy to enforce.

What’s more, this book explains how to get these policies: what existing legislative, regulatory and judicial powers can be invoked to make them a reality. Because we are living through the Great Enshittification, and crises erupt every ten seconds, and when those crises occur, the “good ideas lying around” can move from the fringes to the center in an eyeblink:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/12/only-a-crisis/#lets-gooooo

[Image ID: Thoughtfully written and patiently presented, The Internet Con explains how the promise of a free and open internet was lost to predatory business practices and the rush to commodify every aspect of our lives. An essential read for anyone that wants to understand how we lost control of our digital spaces and infrastructure to Silicon Valley’s tech giants, and how we can start fighting to get it back. -Tim Maughan, author of INFINITE DETAIL]

After all, we’ve known Big Tech was rotten for years, but we had no idea what to do about it. Every time a Big Tech colossus did something ghastly to millions or billions of people, we tried to fix the tech company. There’s no fixing the tech companies. They need to burn. The way to make users safe from Big Tech predators isn’t to make those predators behave better — it’s to evacuate those users:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/18/urban-wildlife-interface/#combustible-walled-gardens

I’ve been campaigning for human rights in the digital world for more than 20 years; I’ve been EFF’s European Director, representing the public interest at the EU, the UN, Westminster, Ottawa and DC. This is the subject I’ve devoted my life to, and I live my principles. I won’t let my books be sold with DRM, which means that Audible won’t carry my audiobooks. My agent tells me that this decision has cost me enough money to pay off my mortgage and put my kid through college. That’s a price I’m willing to pay if it means that my books aren’t enshittification bait.

But not selling on Audible has another cost, one that’s more important to me: a lot of readers prefer audiobooks and 9 out of 10 of those readers start and end their searches on Audible. When they don’t find an author there, they assume no audiobook exists, period. It got so bad I put up an audiobook on Amazon — me, reading an essay, explaining how Audible rips off writers and readers. It’s called “Why None of My Audiobooks Are For Sale on Audible”:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/25/can-you-hear-me-now/#acx-ripoff

[Image ID: Doctorow has been thinking longer and smarter than anyone else I know about how we create and exchange value in a digital age. -Douglas Rushkoff, author of Present Shock]

To get my audiobooks into readers’ ears, I pre-sell them on Kickstarter. This has been wildly successful, both financially and as a means of getting other prominent authors to break up with Amazon and use crowdfunding to fill the gap. Writers like Brandon Sanderson are doing heroic work, smashing Amazon’s monopoly:

https://www.brandonsanderson.com/guest-editorial-cory-doctorow-is-a-bestselling-author-but-audible-wont-carry-his-audiobooks/

And to be frank, I love audiobooks, too. I swim every day as physio for a chronic pain condition, and I listen to 2–3 books/month on my underwater MP3 player, disappearing into an imaginary world as I scull back and forth in my public pool. I’m able to get those audiobooks on my MP3 player thanks to Libro.fm, a DRM-free store that supports indie booksellers all over the world:

https://blog.libro.fm/a-qa-with-mark-pearson-libro-fm-ceo-and-co-founder/

Producing my own audiobooks has been a dream. Working with Skyboat Media, I’ve gotten narrators like @wilwheaton​, Amber Benson, @neil-gaiman​ and Stefan Rudnicki for my work:

https://craphound.com/shop/

[Image ID: “This book is the instruction manual Big Tech doesn’t want you to read. It deconstructs their crummy products, undemocratic business models, rigged legal regimes, and lies. Crack this book and help build something better. -Astra Taylor, author of Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When Its Gone”]

But for this title, I decided that I would read it myself. After all, I’ve been podcasting since 2006, reading my own work aloud every week or so, even as I traveled the world and gave thousands of speeches about the subject of this book. I was excited (and a little trepedatious) at the prospect, but how could I pass up a chance to work with director Gabrielle de Cuir, who has directed everyone from Anne Hathaway to LeVar Burton to Eric Idle?

Reader, I fucking nailed it. I went back to those daily recordings fully prepared to hate them, but they were good — even great (especially after my engineer John Taylor Williams mastered them). Listen for yourself!

https://archive.org/details/cory_doctorow_internet_con_chapter_01

I hope you’ll consider backing this Kickstarter. If you’ve ever read my free, open access, CC-licensed blog posts and novels, or listened to my podcasts, or come to one of my talks and wished there was a way to say thank you, this is it. These crowdfunders make my DRM-free publishing program viable, even as audiobooks grow more central to a writer’s income and even as a single company takes over nearly the entire audiobook market.

Backers can choose from the DRM-free audiobook, DRM-free ebook (EPUB and MOBI) and a hardcover — including a signed, personalized option, fulfilled through the great LA indie bookstore Book Soup:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/the-internet-con-how-to-seize-the-means-of-computation

What’s more, these ebooks and audiobooks are unlike any you’ll get anywhere else because they are sold without any terms of service or license agreements. As has been the case since time immemorial, when you buy these books, they’re yours, and you are allowed to do anything with them that copyright law permits — give them away, lend them to friends, or simply read them with any technology you choose.

As with my previous Kickstarters, backers can get their audiobooks delivered with an app (from libro.fm) or as a folder of MP3s. That helps people who struggle with “sideloading,” a process that Apple and Google have made progressively harder, even as they force audiobook and ebook sellers to hand over a 30% app tax on every dollar they make:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/red-team-blues-another-audiobook-that-amazon-wont-sell/posts/3788112

Enshittification is rotting every layer of the tech stack: mobile, payments, hosting, social, delivery, playback. Every tech company is pulling the rug out from under us, using the chokepoints they built between audiences and speakers, artists and fans, to pick all of our pockets.

The Internet Con isn’t just a lament for the internet we lost — it’s a plan to get it back. I hope you’ll get a copy and share it with the people you love, even as the tech platforms choke off your communities to pad their quarterly numbers.

Next weekend (Aug 4-6), I'll be in Austin for Armadillocon, a science fiction convention, where I'm the Guest of Honor:

https://armadillocon.org/d45/

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/31/seize-the-means-of-computation/#the-internet-con

[Image ID: My forthcoming book 'The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation' in various editions: Verso hardcover, audiobook displayed on a phone, and ebook displayed on an e-ink reader.]

[warakami-vaporwave]

The 84 Series

[zaraz7-art]

[insandriumheart]

༺2007༻

[josephthesnailshow]

Prototype Fredbear’s Ask Series #0

Written by Joseph Arrington about a month ago, it was first posted to the "Five Nights at Freddy's" amino community.

This is my post about my experiences with this amino since 2020. I started this little series called "Prototype Fredbear’s Ask Series." It’s a concept where people can ask the characters to do random stuff; mainly, people make Shadow Fredbear beat himself up since he gets harassed and picked on constantly since he's shown to be a jerk for no reason. I’m fine with it, and it doesn’t bother me at all, but I’m mainly obsessed with the concept of gore, so I mainly put horror elements in the dares. But I always try to make sure it’s not too disturbing. There’s a little bit of blood included, and sometimes I go a little overboard with it.

However, following my experience with this particular amino, a fan of my series sent me a link to some amino that I had never seen before. The amino looked very shady, and it looked a little like the amino. I went into the amino, and something seemed off about it. There were barely any posts, except for a few of them. There were a lot of members in the amino.

I talked to a few of them; most of them were depressed, two of them were friendly, and one of them was not active. One of them warned me to leave the amino, and I told them that I was just investigating the amino. They allowed me to investigate, and after searching, I found an episode of my series.

It was called "Prototype Fredbear’s Ask series #0." I don’t remember making this episode; the only episode I made of the series was number 1, and that was made with my older art style.

This one, however, contained my current art style, but it was badly edited, and this time, it was a video. I was shocked since I don’t remember making a video for the series since it’s only a picture in the series. I watched the video, and it started with a picture of the Prototype Fredbear and Shadow Fredbear’s heads on a toned-down version of the outside background as seen in the series. It was a little eerie.

Just their heads on an empty background, badly edited. No trees, no shading, just grass and the blue sky. As you are aware, each Dare episode has a standard background. The older episodes don’t count. The characters were in a frenzy. It looked pretty low-quality and badly edited.

The episode begins with Prototype Fredbear. However, he looked like a cosplayer. He looked like an actual animatronic, but he was alive and functional. There was a guy inside Prototype Fredbear, and it was obvious that it was a suit.

A dare comment pops up, and an unknown person asks Shadow Fredbear to grab a screwdriver and ram it into his eye and groin. Shadow Fredbear does that, and then Prototype Fredbear covers his eye in pain, and he curls up on the ground.

The next dare was shown, and there was lolbit. A dare popped up, and she was told to break Shadow Fredbear’s spine. Shadow Fredbear sees Lolbit, and Lolbit tackles him and breaks his spine in half. Shadow Fredbear started to cry, and he crawled away in pain.

The next part shows an unknown person drawing a prototype Fredbear murdering Lolbit picture, and it starts getting animated. It never even ended, and it was like a loop; however, Lolbit isn’t seen at all.

The outside background was also accurate to the original, but it was zoomed in. Prototype Fredbear had a knife in his hand, and he was forlorn. The worst part is that you can see a gun behind him, which looked as if he was being forced to do it.

It pans away from the horrific sight of Prototype Fredbear murdering Lolbit, and after seeing that, I was asking myself how out of character it was for him to be doing this to his girlfriend, since he’s shown in every drawing to be liking Lolbit.

Keep in mind that this is an alternate reality, not the original game.

However, the sick people behind this episode probably didn’t know Prototype Fredbear’s character, and once again, Prototype Fredbear was very badly edited. His pose was obviously taken from a different episode. The disturbing scene of prototype Fredbear stabbing her on a loop finally ended after a few minutes.

The next scene of the video was even worse than the previous one; it was a picture again. The following image shows Prototype Fredbear and Shadow Fredbear standing in a room with the normal, regular background that other people are used to seeing in the series.

However, the background was darker, and it showed the night sky outside. There was still a little bit of blue in the image, but it was very hard to make out.

They were smiling at the camera with rotting-looking teeth, and their eyes were black voids with white tiny dots. The quality of the image had a sharp effect again. I realized that this episode had only 3 characters, and it was getting more disturbing than usual.

After waiting for a little while, a stock scream can be heard in the background, and the contrast and color act up, and then the screen pans away from the grotesque Prototype Fredbear and Shadow Fredbear picture.

It was back to the dares. Prototype Fredbear was cleaned up, and then he runs up to Shadow Fredbear, after which he knocks him out, possibly for revenge for hurting him. A new character was shown, and it was Springbonnie. Prototype Fredbear told Springbonnie to deal with him, and then he trips on something. He sticks his tool into his chest by accident.

Springbonnie fell to the ground, and that caused a metal object to fall on his chest with blood oozing out of every opening in his body. The character is bonnet. I know she wouldn’t hurt anyone, just like everyone else in this disturbing video. Nobody was wearing a bonnet, and she was being held on a string. Prototype Fredbear goes to her, getting ready to talk to her, but when he bends over, he has tools on his back that slide off and fall on her, killing and crushing her in the process.

As a tool fell onto Prototype Fredbear’s neck and decapitated him, I began to realize that nobody was asking any questions or making any dares during this incredibly disturbing and graphic scene.

I knew there was something off about this episode after seeing more of it; the scene cuts to Lolbit with Shadow Fredbear. She stole his screwdriver and drilled it into his brain.

The episode then ended on the spot, with no reasoning, just a simple project by a jerk.

I tried linking the post to the leaders and curators, but they didn’t respond.

I tried contacting the guy who posted the video. They were very nice, even though I was very skeptical about their personalities due to the video I just watched. They told me they weren’t the ones that made this, and it was a video taken from the people on the dark web who managed to know what my art was.

They were able to archive the video and post it to this forum. They were expecting me to see it and share my thoughts about it. However, they knew who the people were and what had happened to them; they were aware of the history of the video and the actors, and the uploader was formerly friends with them.

Lolbit was a narcissistic individual who was obsessed with a character who looked like the sun and moon; she was kidnapped while leaving her home.

Prototype Fredbear was an autistic individual that looked like me who was kidnapped while walking home from a party.

Springbonnie was an individual who liked a certain foundation; he was kidnapped while texting while walking outside.

And Shadow Fredbear was unknown; he got knocked out and then got kidnapped.

Lolbit and Springbonnie’s actors looked like two of my friends, but luckily it wasn’t them. It was just a coincidence that the four actors were identical to my friends—at least some of them were. Not a single actor was alive. The guy who filmed the whole thing is still out there somewhere, and nobody knows who or where he is.

The day after that, an investigation was started in the forest regarding the nature of the video, but there wasn’t much there. Corpses were discovered inside the rotting cosplay suits, and a small amount of dried-up blood was found on the suits. There was a notepad and a broken phone on the ground next to the corpses.

There was a camera in front of the whole thing, but it was broken as well.

Lolbit was the only actor alive; she was recovering before the police shot her down, mistaking her for the kidnapper, and a leader, active at the time, went over to the post and finally watched it. They were shocked, and the guy who made the post was told and begged to take action on it, and he deleted it afterward.

After leaving the amino, I moved on from it, and I’m still focusing on the things I’m doing today, like working on the series. However, focusing on this disturbing moment again messes with my head. But I’m finally done with venting about this godforsaken moment.

Well, I would love to tell you more, even though I don't want to.

But I need to end this here.

[natsumipocket]

[youre-dreaming-302]

IMac Aquariums

[incognitopolls]

We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

[prokopetz]

The whole Reddit thing is an especially striking example of corporate brain rot because, like, they managed to build their entire business model on the back of exploiting vast quantities of unpaid volunteer labour, and successfully convinced the entire Internet that this is a normal state of affairs. How do you fuck that up? How do you convince yourself that instituting a de facto demand for your very nearly 100% volunteer workforce to pay you for the ability to use the tools that are required to do their job is anything other than cutting your own throat?