#Direct selling software Company

[rudramsoft]

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[ms-demeanor]

Hi! You’re in the LA area, right? I hope you and your family are okay.

Unrelatedly, I ran across a thread on Mastodon about Proton Mail, which I think you’ve talked about before, and was curious what you make of it / how credible it is: https://code4lib.social/@inthehands@hachyderm.io/113838748729664639

I'm fine thanks! Worried about some friends but I'm good.

I think that thread is not incorrect, but is also bullshit.

Email protocols do not allow for 100% anonymous communication and never will, when Proton was subpoenaed for user data that ended up with some French climate activists getting prosecuted they were transparent about what was requested and updated their logging rules to store less data. *Starting* from the assumption that protonmail is supposed to be totally secure OR sells itself as totally secure is disingenuous.

The great thing about open source software is that you never have to trust a shithead CEO when they talk about what the software does. I get why people are angry at the CEO (I think the CEO is at least half wrong in that he is claiming that Republicans will challenge monopolies, but he's not wrong about the destructive corporatism of the Democratic party even if he is *in essence* wrong about which party is more likely to gesture in the direction of breaking up tech monopolies) but A) the thread says that proton's software is "opaque" and it just. Literally is not. and B) that thread links to another thread talking about how what proton is selling is trust and nope. They don't have to sell trust; you can see what their software does if you choose to investigate it, there's no need for trust when you can verify. What they're selling is transparency and from where i'm standing they are indeed quite transparent.

God. Imagine thinking that a zero trust service is selling trust.

So I think the argument that "protonmail actually isn't as secure as it claims" is bullshit that people bring up whenever they're mad at the company (whether they have legitimate reasons to be mad at the company or not).

For the record: you should never, ever, EVER treat email as a secret. Nothing you do over email is really secret because *the rules that allow email to function as a service* require at least some very sensitive information to be an open part of the protocol.

The Proton page on end to end encryption is *very* clear that it is the contents of your email messages that are encrypted, not your email as a whole, and in the image they use to illustrate this the parts of your email that *cannot* be made private (sender, recipient, subject line, time sent) are shown unencrypted:

They're not subtle about letting people know this. Nor are they quiet about the fact that replies to encrypted emails are not encrypted by default.

So the thread is *technically* correct in that all the security "holes" described reflect reality, but it's correct like saying "McDonald's says that you can eat their food for every meal and you'll put on ten pounds of muscle but ACTUALLY putting on ten pounds of muscle requires a huge amount of dedication and a very careful diet and a lot of resistance exercise" - like, I guess yeah that's what you have to do to put on ten pounds of muscle but where exactly was McDonald's making that claim? Did they actually make that claim or are general statements like "I'm Lovin' It" being misinterpreted in bad faith by people on the internet who are mad at something a CEO did?

So. Like. Yeah the CEO is being a shithead, the social media team made a pretty bad fuckup by doubling down on his shitheadery, the product still works as described, AND the thread discussing all of that is deeply annoying.

So.

I think this thread actually does a great job of explaining why I've never seen a "hackers for social justice" group that has lasted. This reminds me a LOT of when someone tried to say that you shouldn't use firefox because the former CEO was a homophobe. There are a lot of deeply shitty people who have made important contributions to our tech ecosystem and if we threw the baby out with the bathwater every time Notch from Minecraft ended up being Notch from minecraft you'd lock yourself out of a lot of really important tools. And this isn't the same as "buying harry potter merch funds transphobia" because it literally doesn't; especially with open source tools you can continue using the software and cheerfully hate the CEO because A) fuck that guy and B) what the fuck are you going to do about it, guy, this shit's encrypted.

I don't want to get too deeply into a discussion about what is or is not cancel culture, but what I'm seeing in that thread (and what I see coming up every time someone brings up the "But the French Climate Activists!" thing) is an attempt to prioritize political alignment over real-world utility. It's attempting to cancel a *genuinely useful tool* because someone involved in the development is an asshole.

By all means, don't give protonmail money if the CEO's trump-positive comments make you feel unsafe.

However: What service are you going to use that is as accessible and as secure to ensure that you actually *are* safe? There are alternatives out there. Do they actually do more than proton? Are they easier to use? Are they open source? One of the responses to that thread was "yeah, that dude seems shitty; i'd switch to another service if there was another one that I felt was as secure" and that's pretty much what I think the correct attitude is. (If you really, really still want to switch, Tuta has been the broadly recommended alternative to protonmail for years but at this point Proton has a suite of services that some users would need to replace, not just email)

IDK i think shit like this contributes to a lot of the bad kind of security nihilism where people are like "oh no, things will never be secure and even my scrappy little open source product is headed by an asshole, i may as well use google because everything sucks" when they should have the good kind of nihilism which is like "man, there are a lot of assholes out there and they're never going to stop being assholes; i'd better take proactive steps to act like the people who make tech stuff are assholes and operate from a better base of security at the start"

so the takeaways are:

Proton never claimed that anything but the message contents of your e2e encrypted messages are encrypted; as far as these things go, they do a pretty good job of being both secure and easy to use compared to other offerings.

Yeah the CEO is being kind of a shithead and I'm not a huge fan of that.

If you think the CEO is being a shithead and don't want to give the company your money, don't pay for their services, but the CEO being a shithead doesn't actually mean you can't trust their services; their services are literally built on zero trust, if the CEO literally wanted to hunt you down personally he wouldn't be any more able to decrypt your emails than he was before and he wouldn't be any more likely to respond to a subpoena than he was before (proton does respond to subpoenas when required but not otherwise; they've been compelled to produce more data in the last decade than before because law enforcement finally realized who they needed to yell at - one of the bigger issues here is the Swiss courts being more willing to grant subpoenas to international complainants than they were before)

The reason we don't go see hogwarts movies is because doing so gives JK money and that does actual real world harm; using firefox does not have an impact on Brendan Eich's ability to materially change the world. It is very weird that we're in a place where we're treating *open source encryption software that is simple enough for your grandma to use it* as though it is Orson Scott Card.

Sorry i'm still stuck on people thinking that proton, famously open source, is opaque, and that an encryption service with zero trust architecture is selling trust.

Anyway if you've ever got questions about security/privacy/whatever services privacyguides.org is a very reliable source.

OH I FIGURED OUT WHAT WAS BUGGING ME

There are a bunch of people discussing this talking about how the CEO's social media is what has made them feel unsafe and I'm going to be a dick here and say that facts don't care about your feelings.

The CEO saying stupid shit doesn't actually make you unsafe in a situation like this; if the CEO was a violent transphobe or aggressive racist or horribly misogynist that wouldn't actually make any of the users of the product less safe. That's why the SJ hacker stuff I've seen hasn't had much staying power; I think that groups that focus on making people feel included and welcome and safe to be themself within the group run into really big problems when there's a conflict between people in the group FEELING unsafe because of (genuinely important in many ways) cultural signifiers like political alignment and so in order to accommodate that feeling they end up doing things (like some kinds of collaboration/accountability practices, abandoning useful tools, WAY too much personal transparency and radical vulnerability for people who are doing crime shit) that ACTUALLY make them less safe.

The CEO being a shithead may make you feel bad, but moving to a less secure platform may actually be dangerous. One of these things can have a big impact on your life, and it is not the one that is happening on twitter.

Anyway. Email is inherently insecure and if you want a secure messaging tool use Signal.

If you are doing crime shit don't talk about it on the internet and DEFINITELY don't talk about it in any kind of unencrypted platform.

If you are a French climate activist who would like to not get arrested if Tuta gets a subpoena for data, use the email service in concert with tor and be cautious about senders/receivers and subject lines.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Conspiratorialism as a material phenomenon

I'll be in TUCSON, AZ from November 8-10: I'm the GUEST OF HONOR at the TUSCON SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION.

I think it behooves us to be a little skeptical of stories about AI driving people to believe wrong things and commit ugly actions. Not that I like the AI slop that is filling up our social media, but when we look at the ways that AI is harming us, slop is pretty low on the list.

The real AI harms come from the actual things that AI companies sell AI to do. There's the AI gun-detector gadgets that the credulous Mayor Eric Adams put in NYC subways, which led to 2,749 invasive searches and turned up zero guns:

https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/nycs-subway-weapons-detector-pilot-program-ends/

Any time AI is used to predict crime – predictive policing, bail determinations, Child Protective Services red flags – they magnify the biases already present in these systems, and, even worse, they give this bias the veneer of scientific neutrality. This process is called "empiricism-washing," and you know you're experiencing it when you hear some variation on "it's just math, math can't be racist":

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/23/cryptocidal-maniacs/#phrenology

When AI is used to replace customer service representatives, it systematically defrauds customers, while providing an "accountability sink" that allows the company to disclaim responsibility for the thefts:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

When AI is used to perform high-velocity "decision support" that is supposed to inform a "human in the loop," it quickly overwhelms its human overseer, who takes on the role of "moral crumple zone," pressing the "OK" button as fast as they can. This is bad enough when the sacrificial victim is a human overseeing, say, proctoring software that accuses remote students of cheating on their tests:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/16/unauthorized-paper/#cheating-anticheat

But it's potentially lethal when the AI is a transcription engine that doctors have to use to feed notes to a data-hungry electronic health record system that is optimized to commit health insurance fraud by seeking out pretenses to "upcode" a patient's treatment. Those AIs are prone to inventing things the doctor never said, inserting them into the record that the doctor is supposed to review, but remember, the only reason the AI is there at all is that the doctor is being asked to do so much paperwork that they don't have time to treat their patients:

https://apnews.com/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-health-business-90020cdf5fa16c79ca2e5b6c4c9bbb14

My point is that "worrying about AI" is a zero-sum game. When we train our fire on the stuff that isn't important to the AI stock swindlers' business-plans (like creating AI slop), we should remember that the AI companies could halt all of that activity and not lose a dime in revenue. By contrast, when we focus on AI applications that do the most direct harm – policing, health, security, customer service – we also focus on the AI applications that make the most money and drive the most investment.

AI hasn't attracted hundreds of billions in investment capital because investors love AI slop. All the money pouring into the system – from investors, from customers, from easily gulled big-city mayors – is chasing things that AI is objectively very bad at and those things also cause much more harm than AI slop. If you want to be a good AI critic, you should devote the majority of your focus to these applications. Sure, they're not as visually arresting, but discrediting them is financially arresting, and that's what really matters.

All that said: AI slop is real, there is a lot of it, and just because it doesn't warrant priority over the stuff AI companies actually sell, it still has cultural significance and is worth considering.

AI slop has turned Facebook into an anaerobic lagoon of botshit, just the laziest, grossest engagement bait, much of it the product of rise-and-grind spammers who avidly consume get rich quick "courses" and then churn out a torrent of "shrimp Jesus" and fake chainsaw sculptures:

https://www.404media.co/email/1cdf7620-2e2f-4450-9cd9-e041f4f0c27f/

For poor engagement farmers in the global south chasing the fractional pennies that Facebook shells out for successful clickbait, the actual content of the slop is beside the point. These spammers aren't necessarily tuned into the psyche of the wealthy-world Facebook users who represent Meta's top monetization subjects. They're just trying everything and doubling down on anything that moves the needle, A/B splitting their way into weird, hyper-optimized, grotesque crap:

https://www.404media.co/facebook-is-being-overrun-with-stolen-ai-generated-images-that-people-think-are-real/

In other words, Facebook's AI spammers are laying out a banquet of arbitrary possibilities, like the letters on a Ouija board, and the Facebook users' clicks and engagement are a collective ideomotor response, moving the algorithm's planchette to the options that tug hardest at our collective delights (or, more often, disgusts).

So, rather than thinking of AI spammers as creating the ideological and aesthetic trends that drive millions of confused Facebook users into condemning, praising, and arguing about surreal botshit, it's more true to say that spammers are discovering these trends within their subjects' collective yearnings and terrors, and then refining them by exploring endlessly ramified variations in search of unsuspected niches.

(If you know anything about AI, this may remind you of something: a Generative Adversarial Network, in which one bot creates variations on a theme, and another bot ranks how closely the variations approach some ideal. In this case, the spammers are the generators and the Facebook users they evince reactions from are the discriminators)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network

I got to thinking about this today while reading User Mag, Taylor Lorenz's superb newsletter, and her reporting on a new AI slop trend, "My neighbor’s ridiculous reason for egging my car":

https://www.usermag.co/p/my-neighbors-ridiculous-reason-for

The "egging my car" slop consists of endless variations on a story in which the poster (generally a figure of sympathy, canonically a single mother of newborn twins) complains that her awful neighbor threw dozens of eggs at her car to punish her for parking in a way that blocked his elaborate Hallowe'en display. The text is accompanied by an AI-generated image showing a modest family car that has been absolutely plastered with broken eggs, dozens upon dozens of them.

According to Lorenz, variations on this slop are topping very large Facebook discussion forums totalling millions of users, like "Movie Character…,USA Story, Volleyball Women, Top Trends, Love Style, and God Bless." These posts link to SEO sites laden with programmatic advertising.

The funnel goes:

i. Create outrage and hence broad reach;

ii, A small percentage of those who see the post will click through to the SEO site;

iii. A small fraction of those users will click a low-quality ad;

iv. The ad will pay homeopathic sub-pennies to the spammer.

The revenue per user on this kind of scam is next to nothing, so it only works if it can get very broad reach, which is why the spam is so designed for engagement maximization. The more discussion a post generates, the more users Facebook recommends it to.

These are very effective engagement bait. Almost all AI slop gets some free engagement in the form of arguments between users who don't know they're commenting an AI scam and people hectoring them for falling for the scam. This is like the free square in the middle of a bingo card.

Beyond that, there's multivalent outrage: some users are furious about food wastage; others about the poor, victimized "mother" (some users are furious about both). Not only do users get to voice their fury at both of these imaginary sins, they can also argue with one another about whether, say, food wastage even matters when compared to the petty-minded aggression of the "perpetrator." These discussions also offer lots of opportunity for violent fantasies about the bad guy getting a comeuppance, offers to travel to the imaginary AI-generated suburb to dole out a beating, etc. All in all, the spammers behind this tedious fiction have really figured out how to rope in all kinds of users' attention.

Of course, the spammers don't get much from this. There isn't such a thing as an "attention economy." You can't use attention as a unit of account, a medium of exchange or a store of value. Attention – like everything else that you can't build an economy upon, such as cryptocurrency – must be converted to money before it has economic significance. Hence that tooth-achingly trite high-tech neologism, "monetization."

The monetization of attention is very poor, but AI is heavily subsidized or even free (for now), so the largest venture capital and private equity funds in the world are spending billions in public pension money and rich peoples' savings into CO2 plumes, GPUs, and botshit so that a bunch of hustle-culture weirdos in the Pacific Rim can make a few dollars by tricking people into clicking through engagement bait slop – twice.

The slop isn't the point of this, but the slop does have the useful function of making the collective ideomotor response visible and thus providing a peek into our hopes and fears. What does the "egging my car" slop say about the things that we're thinking about?

Lorenz cites Jamie Cohen, a media scholar at CUNY Queens, who points out that subtext of this slop is "fear and distrust in people about their neighbors." Cohen predicts that "the next trend, is going to be stranger and more violent.”

This feels right to me. The corollary of mistrusting your neighbors, of course, is trusting only yourself and your family. Or, as Margaret Thatcher liked to say, "There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families."

We are living in the tail end of a 40 year experiment in structuring our world as though "there is no such thing as society." We've gutted our welfare net, shut down or privatized public services, all but abolished solidaristic institutions like unions.

This isn't mere aesthetics: an atomized society is far more hospitable to extreme wealth inequality than one in which we are all in it together. When your power comes from being a "wise consumer" who "votes with your wallet," then all you can do about the climate emergency is buy a different kind of car – you can't build the public transit system that will make cars obsolete.

When you "vote with your wallet" all you can do about animal cruelty and habitat loss is eat less meat. When you "vote with your wallet" all you can do about high drug prices is "shop around for a bargain." When you vote with your wallet, all you can do when your bank forecloses on your home is "choose your next lender more carefully."

Most importantly, when you vote with your wallet, you cast a ballot in an election that the people with the thickest wallets always win. No wonder those people have spent so long teaching us that we can't trust our neighbors, that there is no such thing as society, that we can't have nice things. That there is no alternative.

The commercial surveillance industry really wants you to believe that they're good at convincing people of things, because that's a good way to sell advertising. But claims of mind-control are pretty goddamned improbable – everyone who ever claimed to have managed the trick was lying, from Rasputin to MK-ULTRA:

https://pluralistic.net/HowToDestroySurveillanceCapitalism

Rather than seeing these platforms as convincing people of things, we should understand them as discovering and reinforcing the ideology that people have been driven to by material conditions. Platforms like Facebook show us to one another, let us form groups that can imperfectly fill in for the solidarity we're desperate for after 40 years of "no such thing as society."

The most interesting thing about "egging my car" slop is that it reveals that so many of us are convinced of two contradictory things: first, that everyone else is a monster who will turn on you for the pettiest of reasons; and second, that we're all the kind of people who would stick up for the victims of those monsters.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

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/2024/10/29/hobbesian-slop/#cui-bono

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

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

[autolenaphilia]

The main reason to use Firefox and Linux and other free and open source software is that otherwise the big tech monopolies will fuck you as the customer over in search of profits. They will seek to control how you use their products and sell your data. When a company dominates the market, things can only get worse for ordinary people.

Like take Google Chrome for example, which together with its chromium reskins dominate the web browser market. Google makes a lot of money from ads, and consequently the company hates adblockers. They already are planning to move to manifest V3, which will nerf adblockers significantly. The manifest V3 compatible chrome version of Ublock Orgin is a "Lite" version for a reason. Ublock's Github page has an entire page explaining why the addon works best in Firefox.

And Google as we speak are trying to block adblockers from working on Youtube, If you want to continue blocking Youtube ads, and since Youtube ads make the site unuseable you ought to want that, it makes the most sense to not use a browser controlled by Google.

And there is no reason to think things won't get worse. There is for example nothing stopping Google from kicking adblockers off their add-on stores completely. They do regard it as basically piracy if the youtube pop-ups tell us anything, so updating the Chrome extensions terms of service to ban adblocking is a natural step. And so many people seem to think Chrome is the only browser that exists, so they are not going to switch to alternatives, or if they do, they will switch to another chrominum-based browser.

And again, they are fucking chromium itself for adblockers with Manifest V3, so only Firefox remains as a viable alternative. It's the only alternative to letting Google control the internet.

And Microsoft is the same thing. I posted before about their plans to move Windows increasingly into the cloud. This already exists for corporate customers, as Windows 365. And a version for ordinary users is probably not far off. It might not be the only version of Windows for awhile, the lack of solid internet access for a good part of the Earth's population will prevent it. But you'll probably see cheap very low-spec chromebookesque laptops running Windows for sale soon, that gets around Windows 11's obscene system requirements by their Windows being a cloud-based version.

And more and more of Windows will require Internet access or validation for DRM reasons if nothing else. Subscription fees instead of a one-time license are also likely. It will just be Windows moving in the direction Microsoft Office has already gone.

There is nothing preventing this, because again on the desktop/laptop market Windows is effectively a monopoly, or a duopoly with Apple. So there is no competition preventing Microsoft from exercising control over Windows users in the vein of Apple.

For example, Microsoft making Windows a walled garden by only permitting programs to be installed from the Microsoft Store probably isn't far off. This already exists for Win10 and 11, it's called S-mode. There seem to be more and more laptops being sold with Windows S-mode as the default.

Now it's not the only option, and you can turn it off with some tinkering, but there is really nothing stopping Microsoft from making it the only way of using Windows. And customers will probably accept it, because again the main competition is Apple where the walled garden has been the default for decades.

Customers have already accepted all sorts of bad things from Microsoft, because again Windows is a near-monopoly, and Apple and Google are even worse. That’s why there has been no major negative reaction to how Windows has increasingly spies on its users.

Another thing is how the system requirements for Windows seem to grow almost exponentially with each edition, making still perfectly useable computers unable to run the new edition. And Windows 11 is the worst yet. Like it's hard to get the numbers of how many computers running Win10 can't upgrade to Win11, but it's probably the majority of them, at least 55% or maybe even 75%. This has the effect of Windows users abandoning still perfectly useable hardware and buying new computers, creating more e-waste.

For Windows users, the alternative Windows gives them is to buy a new computer or get another operating system, and inertia pushes them towards buying another computer to keep using Windows. This is good for Windows and the hardware manufacturers selling computers with Windows 11 pre-installed, they get to profit off people buying Windows 11 keys and new computers, while the end-users have to pay, as does the environment. It’s planned obsolescence.

And it doesn’t have to be like that. Linux distros prove that you can have a modern operating system that has far lower hardware requirements. Even the most resource taxing Linux distros, like for example Ubuntu running the Gnome desktop, have far more modest system requirements than modern Windows. And you can always install lightweight Linux Distros that often have very low system requirements. One I have used is Antix. The ballooning Windows system requirements comes across as pure bloat on Microsoft’s part.

Now neither Linux or Firefox are perfect. Free and open source software don’t have a lot of the polish that comes with the proprietary products of major corporations. And being in competition with technology monopolies does have its drawbacks. The lacking website compatibility with Firefox and game compatibility with Linux are two obvious examples.

Yet Firefox and Linux have the capacity to grow, to become better. Being open source helps. Even if Firefox falls, developers can create a fork of it. If a Linux distro is not to your taste, there is usually another one. Whereas Windows and Chrome will only get worse as they will continue to abuse their monopolistic powers over the tech market.

[ftafp]

Just a heads-up to anyone who thinks peaceful protests don't do anything: a lot of the things you think of as peaceful protest aren't actually the "real" protest, they're closer to recruitment drives.

The point of rallies and marches is to get people aware, raise funds and recruit volunteers. If they convince sympathetic local politicians, that's a bonus, but it's not the main goal.

Once the movement has the resources they need to organize more direct actions, that's when you get to the meaty stuff

Strikes: Strikes deprive companies of a large portion of their staff, shutting down production. They can hire scabs to replace the striking employees, but doing so takes time, and costs money they're not earning. Meanwhile, strikers are usually still earning enough money to pay their bills, as strike organizers use the funds collected to pay a sufficient portion of the striker's income.

Sit-Ins: Sit-ins interfere with road and foot traffic, often blocking off key bottlenecks, preventing people from accessing businesses, construction sites, or ecosystems. People aren't going to get into the Chick-fil-a if there are 100 fucking people blocking the door, and construction workers aren't going to run over a bunch of civilians to bulldoze a neighborhood.

Hacktivism: Hackstivism is more of an umbrella term for different forms of direct action than a form in and of itself. DDoSing web pages prevents companies from earning ad revenue or selling products, and often results in them having to pay their engineers a substantial amount of overtime to fix. Publically releasing proof of illegal activities makes it hard for courts or legal firms to ignore

Counter-Economics: This is my favorite because it's so easy to do. That's because "Counter-Economics" is just the polite way of saying piracy. The use of ad-blockers, torrented software, free streaming sites, and emulators not only gives you better services for free, it costs these companies millions every year. Using libraries or used book stores to avoid giving money to shitty publishing companies or famous authors also qualifies as this

Disruptive Pranks: Perhaps the funniest one on the list, this is where you get things like glitter-bombing, stink-bombing, pulling fire alarms, pie-ing public figures, and my favorite: releasing three squealing hogs in a building that are labeled 1, 3, and 4 and watching as security tries to find number 2

Sabotage: When the rest fail, this is how you take down border walls, confederate statues, toll booths, and detention centers. Compared to the others, this is harder and generally way more illegal, but it's as direct and effective as peaceful protest can get.

[mariacallous]

If you try to access Pornhub, one of the world’s biggest websites, from any of 17 US states, you’ll be blocked. Pornhub’s parent company, Aylo Holdings, has restricted access in response to a slew of laws that says Pornhub itself should be responsible for checking that every visitor is over 18. Now, the United States Supreme Court has made a decision on a key age verification law, which could have ramifications for the entire country and the wider internet as a whole.

On Friday, in a 6–3 decision that could reshape the landscape of online privacy and free speech, the Supreme Court upheld in full the Texas age verification law—one of the first passed in the country—requiring many websites publishing pornographic content to check that all visitors are over 18. The law, TX HB1181, says sites that are “more than one-third sexual material” can face fines of up to $10,000 per day if they don’t put in place age verification systems, plus extra penalties of up to $250,000. It also states websites should display health warnings about the potential health risks of pornography.

Writing for the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas said that because the law "simply requires proof of age to access content that is obscene to minors, it does not directly regulate adults’ protected speech," adding, "adults have no First Amendment right to avoid age verification."

In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan argued that the Texas law imposes a direct and unconstitutional burden on adults’ access to protected speech. “A State may not care much about safeguarding adults’ access to sexually explicit speech; a State may even prefer to curtail those materials for everyone,” she wrote, “but the First Amendment protects those sexually explicit materials, for every adult.”

The ruling marks a major victory for Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, who defended the law amid fierce opposition from digital rights groups and the adult entertainment industry.

Legislators in Texas passed HB1181 in early 2023, but it was struck down in the US District Court for the Western District of Texas for potentially being unconstitutional before the law went into effect. Adult industry group the Free Speech Coalition, among others, challenged the Texas law on the grounds that it violates the First Amendment by restricting adults’ access to constitutionally protected speech. In March last year, a Fifth Circuit appeals court upheld the Texas law before the Free Speech Coalition took the case to the Supreme Court in a January hearing.

In recent years, a wave of age verification laws have been proposed in states across the country. More than half of US states have passed or have tried to pass age verification laws, according to a tracker published by the Free Speech Coalition.

“Efforts to regulate online pornography are often the opening move in broader campaigns to censor the internet,” Jess Miers, a visiting assistant professor of law at the University of Akron School of Law, said before the decision. “While this case focuses on mandatory age verification for adult content, state lawmakers are hoping it provides a legal foundation to impose sweeping restrictions on a wide range of online material.”

Attempts to get pornographic websites to implement age checks—more than just clicking a button saying you are over 18—have been accelerating over the past decade, since government officials in the UK passed laws on age verification checks only to delay and abandon them in 2019. Since then, though, a wave of companies and technologies selling age-checking software has rapidly expanded and matured. Adult websites and pornographers aren’t against introducing robust age checks; they say they don’t want children to be exposed to illicit content.

Multiple methods of age verification, which is often called age assurance, have been proposed or developed in recent years, with regulators and governments around the world pushing for them to be used to stop children accessing content that may not be suitable for them. These age verification methods can include, but aren’t limited to, checking someone’s identity against government ID, providing banking details, or using face-checking systems that can predict someone’s age.

Typically, third-party companies are developing the age-checking methods, with adult websites paying to use their services. This can mean people do not directly share their ID documents or other details used to verify their age directly with pornography websites or the companies that own them. Some companies, including Pornhub owner Aylo Holdings and Meta, have argued that age checks should happen by Google and Apple on their respective app stores. Those companies don’t agree.

Repeatedly, privacy and civil liberties experts have stated that any data collection or understanding of how people consume pornography could have devastating consequences if there’s a data breach or information is leaked. (One ID verification company suffered a data breach last year.) Unscrupulous companies could also sell or share data, privacy advocates say.

Last week, the preliminary results of an age checking trial in Australia, which has passed laws to ban under-16s from social media apps, found such systems may not be effective. Plus, age checks can often be easily circumvented by using a VPN. Aylo has claimed that current age verification proposals aren’t effective and push people to smaller websites, which may have fewer safety tools in place to moderate images and videos.

Despite potential concerns, laws mandating companies use age verification systems are being introduced around the world, and multiple companies are adopting the systems. Since 2022, Instagram has been using facial age estimation software to check people’s ages. In April, chat app Discord announced it is testing face scans in the UK and Australia. Regulators in Germany have been pursuing age checks—going as far as to fine individuals posting on X (then Twitter) in 2023—for years. Last week, Pornhub returned to France—it pulled services relating to the country’s age checking at the start of June—after a court ruling limited the law. And by July this year, porn sites and social media platforms operating in the UK are required to introduce “robust” age checks. Pornhub owner Aylo announced on Thursday that it would adopt "government approved age assurance methods” to comply with the law.

With the Supreme Court’s Friday decision, the threat to pornography and sexual expression in the country may be more grave. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 plan, which has been partially followed by the US government, has suggested criminalizing pornography and shutting down its producers. Earlier this year, Senator Mike Lee of Utah proposed the Interstate Obscenity Definition Act, which could redefine what’s considered “obscene” content and potentially ban pornography entirely.

“Once the state has the authority to restrict access to adult content, it will almost certainly broaden the definition of ‘material harmful to minors,’” Miers says. “This could include reproductive health information, LGBTQ+ resources, and educational content related to race, gender, or diversity.”

[spaghettioverdose]

regarding your recent posts on petit bougeoisie, one thing ive never managed to understand is how someone like an independent digital artist isnt considered to be selling their labour. in that scenario there is nothing they own that is making them more capable of making artworks, as they could fairly easily just be working off of a library computer or something, and what they’re selling is basicaly just the time and skill they’ve invested into producing their clients request. so besides the fact that they arnt being paid hourly and are instead charging based on how much work they’ve done, i dont really understand how they’re not considered to be selling their labour?

with something like a carpenter selling chairs or something i can more understand it as theres at least a physical thing being owned with the wood, and another being sold with the chairs, but even there it still seems like a stretch to say they’re not selling their labour at least in part, as the increased price of the chair compared to the wood is due to the work the carpeter put into sculpting it.

so far any reading ive done has been only really adressing small buisness owners who employ others and not really touching fully independent people working off of commisions or similar models of buisness, so im hoping you can clarify this for me or direct me to somewhere that does

Firstly, a clarification: a worker is not selling their labour, but rather their labour power. In some of the earlier works by Marx and Engles, they talk about selling their labour, which is later corrected to labour power. This is a more precise and useful term. When we refer to selling labour power, we are talking about the worker selling their ability to work for a given amount of hours in exchange for a wage. The worker who builds phones in a factory does not sell phones to the capitalist and their are not paid per phone. They are paid per hour. What is being purchased is their ability to work during those hours.

According to the formulation of labour in your ask, essentially everyone would be proletarian. In all commodities, regardless of who produces them and how they are made, the labour hours used to create them are factored into the price.

When it comes to independent artists, they are putting their labour power into the commodity (regardless if it is physical or digital) that their are selling, rather than selling the labour power itself. When an artist makes art in exchange for patreon money or doing comissions, the commodity that they are selling is the piece of art that they have made, rather than their labour power. They also receive income in the form of profits and not wages. This is in contrast with, for example, a digital artist who works for a AAA games company and is paid a wage for their ability to produce a certain amount of art per hour, rather than the piece of art itself.

In theory you could be an independent digital artist as someone who draws with a mouse on mspaint at a library computers and perhaps someone has done this before, but it is absolutely not how independent digital artists tend to operate. In reality, an independent digital artist is someone who owns a set of tools (copy of art software, computer, drawing tablet etc.) which act as the means of production when they produce a commodity (a piece of art that they intend to sell). When they invest their money into their further ability to produce more commodities (buying better software or hardware for example), that money acts as capital.

If I misinterpreted any part of your ask, please let me know.

As far as reading recommendations, and assuming that you have read Wage Labour and Capital, I would recommend Value, Price and Profit which touches more on this.

[drst]

So this is what the Biden administration spent it's last week in office doing. It's important to know this isn't unusual activity for them. But this is all just in one week:

"Out With a Bang: Enforcers Go After John Deere, Private Equity Billionaires

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/out-with-a-bang-enforcers-go-after

At least for a few more days, laws are not suggestions. In the end days of strong enforcement, a flurry of litigation is met with a direct lawsuit by billionaires against Biden's Antitrust chief.

Matt Stoller

Jan 16, 2025

It’s less than a week until this era of antitrust ends. And while much of the news has been focused elsewhere, enforcers have engaged in a flurry of action, which will by legal necessity continue into the next administration. One case in particular angered some of the most powerful people on Wall Street, the partners of a $600 billion private equity firm called Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR).

But before getting to that suit, here’s a partial list of some of the actions enforcers have taken in the last two weeks.

The Federal Trade Commission

Filed a monopolization claim against agricultural machine maker John Deere for generating $6 billion by prohibiting farmers from being able to repair their own equipment, a suit which Wired magazine calls a “tipping point” for the right to repair movement.

Released another report on pharmacy benefit managers, including that of UnitedHealth Group, showing that these companies inflated prices for specialty pharmaceuticals by more than $7 billion.

Sued Greystar, a large corporate landlord, for deceiving renters with falsely advertised low rents and not including mandatory junk fees in the price.

Issued a policy statement that gig workers can’t be prosecuted for antitrust violations when they try to organize, and along with the Antitrust Division, updated guidance on labor and antitrust.

Put out a series of orders prohibiting data brokers from selling sensitive location information.

Finalized changes to a rule barring third party targeted advertising to children without an explicit opt-in.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

Went to court against Capital One for cheating consumers out of $2 billion by deceiving them on savings accounts and interest rates.

Fined cash app purveyor Block $175 million for fostering fraud on its platform and then refusing to offer customer support to affected consumers.

Proposed a rule to prohibit take-it-or-leave-it contracts from financial institutions that allow firms to de-bank users over how they express themselves or whether they seek redress for fraud.

Issued a report with recommendations on how states can update their laws to protect against junk fees and privacy abuses.

Sued credit reporting agency Experian for refusing to investigate consumer disputes and errors on credit reports.

Finalized a rule to remove medical debt from credit scores.

The Antitrust Division

Sued to block a merger of two leading business travel firms, American Express Global Business Travel Group and CWT Holdings.

Filed a complaint against seven giant corporate landlords for rent-fixing, using the software and consulting firm RealPage.

Got four guilty pleas in a bid-rigging conspiracy by IT vendors against the U.S. government, a guilty plea from an asphalt vendor company President, and convicted five defendants in a price-fixing scam on roofing contracts.

Issued a policy statement that non-disclosure agreements that deter individuals from reporting antitrust crimes are void, and that employers “using NDAs to obstruct or impede an investigation may also constitute separate federal criminal violations.”

Filed two amicus briefs with the FTC, one supporting Epic Games in its remedy against Google over app store monopolization, and the other supporting Elon Musk in his antitrust claims against OpenAI, Microsoft, and Reid Hoffman.

And honorary mention goes to the Department of Transportation for suing Southwest and fining Frontier for ‘chronically delayed flights.’"

It's worth reading the entire piece because the Biden people have also gone after KKR which is one of the biggest and most well-connected private equity firms. Remember when suddenly last year all the rich people who used to donate to both parties stopped giving money to Democrats? The billionaires coup against Biden was because of anti trust enforcement.

IF YOU'RE THINKING "GOSH I NEVER HEARD ABOUT ANY OF THIS BEFORE" I HOPE YOU CAN PUT TOGETHER THAT THE NEWS AND SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS ARE ALL OWNED BY BILLIONAIRES WHO ARE VERY ANGRY ABOUT ALL OF THIS AND MAYBE THAT'S WHY YOU NEVER SAW ANYONE TALK ABOUT THE HUGE RESURGENCE OF ANTI TRUST WORK DONE BY BIDEN FOR THE LAST FOUR YEARS.

And no, Trump cannot magically make this all go away. The lawsuits will have to be played out and many of them have state level components that mean the feds can't just shut them down.

X

[viewwrangler]

I mean ... that's an interesting approach, to put it mildly

CrowdStrike to vendors: Sorry for the global tech outage. Here’s a $10 Uber Eats voucher Analysis by Elisabeth Buchwald, CNN Updated 7:17 PM EDT, Wed July 24, 2024

A single CrowdStrike bug sent the entire tech world into chaos last week — a snafu some companies (see: Delta) are still recovering from. Third-party agents selling and supporting CrowdStrike software and the complicated repairs for customers have been a miserably busy bunch over the past week.

CrowdStrike’s token of appreciation for those vendors: a $10 Uber Eats voucher. We’re not kidding....

We finally know what caused the global tech outage - and how much it cost By Brian Fung, CNN 4 minute read Updated 7:30 PM EDT, Wed July 24, 2024

Insurers have begun calculating the financial damage caused by last week’s devastating CrowdStrike software glitch that crashed computers, canceled flights and disrupted hospitals all around the globe — and the picture isn’t pretty.

What’s been described as the largest IT outage in history will cost Fortune 500 companies alone more than $5 billion in direct losses, according to one insurer’s analysis of the incident published Wednesday.

The new figures put into stark relief how a single automated software update brought much of the global economy to a sudden halt — revealing the world’s overwhelming dependence on a key cybersecurity company — and what it will take to recover....

And that's only the Fortune 500 they're talking about. There are myriad smaller businesses that use Crowdstrike that were affected as well. The companies hit by the buggy release were also far broader than just the "tech world".

Not sure that an Uber Eats coupon will be regarded as sufficient recompense for a week that could have cost millions of dollars, somehow.

[rudramsoft]

Transform your business ideas into reality with Rudramsoft, a premier software development company. We deliver innovative, custom solutions tailored to your goals. Empower your growth today!

[meret118]

Two days before the 2024 election, I wrote that Musk’s chaotic takeover of Twitter was going to be the blueprint for his potential tenure at DOGE. Unfortunately, I was right—he’s running the exact same playbook. But it’s worth keeping in mind that there are two ways of measuring success for Musk’s projects: first, whether the organizations themselves benefit under his leadership, and second, whether Musk himself gets something out of the arrangement. Musk’s stewardship of X has been a financial nightmare. He has alienated advertisers, tanked revenue and user growth, and saddled investment banks with debt from the purchase that they’ll need to sell off. Yet Musk’s own influence and net worth have grown considerably during this time. His fanboys and the MAGA faithful don’t care that X is a flailing business, because Musk did deliver on giving liberals their supposed comeuppance by de-verifying accounts and reinstating banned trolls. He turned the platform into a conspiratorial superfund site, has boosted right-wing accounts and talking points, and helped elect Donald Trump as president. Musk’s purchase is a success in their eyes because he succeeded in turning X into a political weapon.

Read: Musk’s Twitter is the blueprint for a MAGA government

The same thing is happening right now with DOGE. Musk and his Silicon Valley acolytes are acting on a long-held fantasy of approaching the federal government like a software company and running it like a venture-backed tech start-up during the days of zero-percent interest rates. Here’s the problem: The federal government is not a software company. “The stakes are wildly different,” a former senior Twitter executive told me recently. This person, who requested anonymity because they worked closely with Musk during his takeover and fear retribution, argued that Musk seems incapable of recognizing the limits of his own knowledge. When I asked them to describe Musk’s managerial strategy, they borrowed a term of art from SpaceX’s own rocket mishaps: “This is a rapid unscheduled disassembly of government services.”

. . .

The end game for Musk seems to be just as it was with Twitter: seize a polarized, inefficient institution; fuse his identity with it; and then use it to punish his enemies and reward his friends. DOGE is a moon-shot program to turn the government into Musk’s personal political weapon.

In a post on X, unelected government official Elon Musk revealed that he has cut the staff of the Internal Revenue Service that oversaw the system that allows Americans to file their taxes for free easily on its website.

. . .

Thus far, the website remains active.

The Treasury Department said on its website, "Direct File is a historic new IRS service that allows eligible taxpayers to prepare and file their tax return online, for free, including access to help from dedicated IRS Direct File customer support representatives."

It was available in both Spanish and English and wasn't a mandatory program for anyone. Those who didn't trust the system could still fill out their taxes by hand and mail them.

[c-rowlesdraws]

The real crux of the whole discussion is that windows and Mac are both closed proprietary systems that want to withhold your own hardware and software from you and give control of it to a company with the explicit goal of extracting more and more profit from you.

Use whatever environment that you like best, but understand that ultimately both suffer from Capitalism Problems, and those are only averted by the Free and Open-Source philosophy (which Linux is a project of). Remember that if they could get their way, both Apple and Microsoft would happily charge you a fee every time you turn on your own computer and lock access to your files and software behind a subscription service. In a lot of ways what's sold to you as user friendliness and ease and convenience is walls, locks, and a loss of control of hardware that you wholly own.

Whatever system you do use, I recommend doing everything you can to learn how to tear down those walls. Pirate stuff, use FOSS programs, learn enough about your hardware and software to confidently bypass the restrictions built into it by people who want you to be a product.

I'm not interested in selling you on a particular OS, but I deeply passionately want everyone who depends on technology to feel a confidence and sense of ownership over their stuff.

Personally I use windows as my daily driver, and I have for decades. There are shockingly easy ways to wrest control back from Microsoft within it, and if you'd like some help or advice in that direction I'd love to provide that for you if you reach out to me.

You don't have to learn disk architecture or command line operations or throw your iMac down a well in order to make your computer truly yours, but you do have to proactively choose not to accept the cages these capitalist entities try to force you into.

Whatever you do, *do not* use the windows app store for software.

I appreciate all of this, I really do. I would love to give a big ol middle finger to capitalism and seize my computer destiny with both hands. But I am, for now, completely willing to sacrifice freedom for convenience and suckle meekly at the teats of Microsoft and Apple if it means never having to mess around with the intricate and fragile and expensive insides, hard or soft, of my computer where basically my entire life and work are stored.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Chapter One of “Picks and Shovels” (Part 1)

Picks and Shovels is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You can pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by Wil Wheaton.

My next novel is Picks and Shovels, out next month. It's tells the origin story of Martin Hench, my hard-charging, scambusting, high-tech forensic accountant, in a 1980s battle over the soul of a PC company:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels

I'm currently running a Kickstarter to pre-sell the book in every format: hardcover, DRM-free ebook, and an independently produced, fabulous DRM-free audiobook read by Wil Wheaton, who just nailed the delivery:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/picks-and-shovels-marty-hench-at-the-dawn-of-enshittification

Picks and Shovels opens with a long prologue that recounts Marty's misadventures as a failing computer science student at MIT, his love-affair with computers, and his first disastrous startup venture. It ends with him decamping to Silicon Valley with his roommate Art, a brilliant programmer, to seek their fortune.

Chapter one opens with Marty's first job, working for a weird PC company (there were so many weird PC companies back then!). I've posted Wil's audio reading of chapter one as a teaser for the Kickstarter:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGXz1mkAd2Q

(Here it is as an MP3 at the Internet Archive:)

https://ia600607.us.archive.org/5/items/picks-and-shovels-promo/audio.mp3

The audio is great, but I thought I'd also serialize the text of Chapter One here, in five or six chunks. If you enjoy this and want to pre-order the book, please consider backing the Kickstarter:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/picks-and-shovels-marty-hench-at-the-dawn-of-enshittification

Chapter One

Fidelity Computing was the most colorful PC company in Silicon Valley.

A Catholic priest, a Mormon bishop, and an Orthodox rabbi walk into a technology gold rush and start a computer company. The fact that it sounded like the setup for a nerdy joke about the mid-1980s was fantastic for their bottom line. Everyone who heard their story loved it.

As juicy as the story of Fidelity Computing was, they flew under most people’s radar for years, even as they built a wildly profitable technology empire through direct sales through faith groups. The first time most of us heard of them was in 1983, when Byte ran its cover story on Fidelity Computing, unearthing a parallel universe of technology that had grown up while no one was looking.

At first, I thought maybe they were doing something similar to Apple’s new Macintosh: like Apple, they made PCs (the Wise PC), an operating system (Wise DOS), and a whole line of monitors, disk drives, printers, and software.

Like the Mac, none of these things worked with anything else—you needed to buy everything from floppy disks to printer cables specially from them, because nothing anyone else made would work with their system.

And like the Mac, they sold mostly through word of mouth. The big difference was that Mac users were proud to call themselves a cult, while Fidelity Computing’s customers were literally a religion.

Long after Fidelity had been called to the Great Beyond, its most loyal customers gave it an afterlife, nursing their computers along, until the parts and supplies ran out. They’d have kept going even then, if there’d been any way to unlock their machines and use the same stuff the rest of the computing world relied on. But that wasn’t something Fidelity Computing would permit, even from beyond the grave.

I was summoned to Fidelity headquarters—in unfashionable Colma, far from the white-hot start-ups of Palo Alto, Mountain View, and, of course, Cupertino—by a friend of Art’s. Art had a lot more friends than me. I was a skipping stone, working as the part-time bookkeeper/accountant/CFO for half a dozen companies and never spending more than one or two days in the same office.

Art was hardly more stable than me—he switched start-ups all the time, working for as little as two months (and never for more than a year) before moving on. His bosses knew what they were getting: you hired Art Hellman to blaze into your company, take stock of your product plan, root out and correct all of its weak points, build core code libraries, and then move on. He was good enough and sufficiently in demand to command the right to behave this way, and he wouldn’t have it any other way. My view was, it was an extended celebration of his liberation from the legal villainy of Nick Cassidy III: having narrowly escaped a cage, he was determined never to be locked up again.

Art’s “engagements”—as he called them—earned him the respect and camaraderie of half the programmers and hardware engineers in the Valley. This, in spite of the fact that he was a public and ardent member of the Lavender Panthers, wore the badge on his lapel, went to the marches, and brought his boyfriend to all the places where his straight colleagues brought their girlfriends.

He’d come out to me less than a week after I arrived by the simple expedient of introducing the guy he was watching TV with in our living room as Lewis, his boyfriend. Lewis was a Chinese guy about our age, and his wardrobe—plain white tee, tight blue jeans, loafers—matched the new look Art had adopted since leaving Boston. Lewis had a neat, short haircut that matched Art’s new haircut, too.

To call the Art I’d known in Cambridge a slob would be an insult to the natty, fashion-conscious modern slob. He’d favored old band T-shirts with fraying armpit seams, too-big jeans that were either always sliding off his skinny hips or pulled up halfway to his nipples. In the summer, his sneakers had holes in the toes. In the winter, his boots were road-salt-crusted crystalline eruptions. His red curls were too chaotic for a white-boy ’fro and were more of a heap, and he often went days without shaving.

There were members of the Newbury Street Irregulars who were bigger slobs than Art, but they smelled. Art washed, but otherwise, he looked like a homeless person (or a hacker). His transformation to a neatly dressed, clean-shaven fellow with a twenty-five-dollar haircut that he actually used some sort of hairspray on was remarkable. I’d assumed it was about his new life as a grown-up living far from home and doing a real job. It turned out that wasn’t the reason at all.

“Oh,” I said. “That makes a lot of sense.” I shook Lewis’s hand. He laughed. I checked Art. He was playing it cool, but I could tell he was nervous. I remembered Lucille and how she listened, and what it felt like to be heard. I thought about Art, and the things he’d never been able to tell me.

There’d been a woman in the Irregulars who there were rumors about, and there were a pair of guys one floor down in Art’s building who held hands in the elevator, but as far as I knew up until that moment, I hadn’t really ever been introduced to a homosexual person. I didn’t know how I felt about it, but I did know how I wanted to feel about it.

So Art didn’t just get to know all kinds of geeks from his whistle-stop tour of Silicon Valley’s hottest new tech ventures. He was also plugged into this other network of people from the Lavender Panthers, and their boyfriends and girlfriends, and the people he knew from bars and clubs. He and Lewis lasted for a couple of months, and then there were a string of weekends where there was a new guy at the breakfast table, and then he settled down again for a while with Artemis, and then he hit a long dry spell.

I commiserated. I’d been having a dry spell for nearly the whole two years I’d been in California. The closest I came to romance was exchanging a letter with Lucille every couple of weeks—she was a fine pen pal, but that wasn’t really a substitute for a living, breathing woman in my life.

Art threw himself into his volunteer work, and he was only half joking when he said he did it to meet a better class of boys than you got at a club. Sometimes, there’d be a committee meeting in our living room and I’d hear about the congressional committee hearing on the “gay plague” and the new wave of especially vicious attacks. It was pretty much the only time I heard about that stuff—no one I worked with ever brought it up, unless it was to make a terrible joke.

It was Murf, one of the guys from those meetings, who told me that Fidelity Computing was looking for an accountant for a special project. He had stayed after the meeting and he and Art made a pot of coffee and sat down in front of Art’s Apple clone, a Franklin Ace 1200 that he’d scored six months ahead of its official release. After opening the lid to show Murf the interior, Art fired it up and put it through its paces.

I hovered over his shoulder, watching. I’d had a couple of chances to play with the 1200, and I wanted one more than anything in the world except for a girlfriend.

“Marty,” Art said, “Murf was telling me about a job I thought you might be good for.”

The Ace 1200 would have a list price of $2,200. I pulled up a chair.

Fidelity Computing’s business offices were attached to their warehouse, right next to their factory. It took up half of a business park in Colma, and I had to circle it twice to find a parking spot. I was five minutes late and flustered when I presented myself to the receptionist, a blond woman with a ten – years – out – of – date haircut and a modest cardigan over a sensible white shirt buttoned to the collar, ring on her finger.

“Hello,” I said. “I’m Marty Hench. I—uh—I’ve got a meeting with the Reverend Sirs.” That was what the executive assistant I’d spoken to on the phone had called them. It sounded weird when he said it. It sounded weirder when I said it.

The receptionist gave me a smile that only went as far as her lips. “Please have a seat,” she said. There were only three chairs in the little reception area, vinyl office chairs with worn wooden armrests. There weren’t any magazines, just glossy catalogs featuring the latest Fidelity Computing systems, accessories, consumables, and software. I browsed one, marveling at the parallel universe of computers in the strange, mauve color that denoted all Fidelity equipment, including the boxes, packaging, and, now that I was attuned to it, the accents and carpet in the small lobby. A side door opened and a young, efficient man in a kippah and wire-rim glasses called for me: “Mr. Hench?” I closed the catalog and returned it to the pile and stood. As I went to shake his hand, I realized that something had been nagging me about the catalog—there were no prices.

“I’m Shlomo,” the man said. “We spoke on the phone. Thank you for coming down. The Reverend Sirs are ready to see you now.”

He wore plain black slacks, hard black shiny shoes, and a white shirt with prayer-shawl tassels poking out of its tails. I followed him through a vast room filled with chest-high Steelcase cubicles finished in yellowing, chipped wood veneer, every scratch pitilessly lit by harsh overhead fluorescents. Most of the workers at the cubicles were women with headsets, speaking in hushed tones. The tops of their heads marked the interfaith delineators: a block of Orthodox headscarves, then a block of nuns’ black and white scarves (I learned to call them “veils” later), then the Mormons’ carefully coiffed, mostly blond dos.

“This way,” Shlomo said, passing through another door and into executive row. The mauve carpets were newer, the nap all swept in one direction. The walls were lined with framed certificates of appreciation, letters from religious and public officials (apparently, the church and state were not separate within the walls of Fidelity Computing), photos of groups of progressively larger groups of people ranked before progressively larger offices—the company history.

We walked all the way to the end of the hall, past closed doors with nameplates, to a corner conference room with a glass wall down one side, showing a partial view of a truck-loading dock behind half-closed vertical blinds. Seated at intervals around a large conference table were the Reverend Sirs themselves, each with his own yellow pad, pencil, and coffee cup.

Shlomo announced me: “Reverend Sirs, this is Marty Hench. Mr. Hench, these are Rabbi Yisrael Finkel, Bishop Leonard Clarke, and Father Marek Tarnowski.” He backed out of the door, leaving me standing, unsure if I should circle the table shaking hands, or take a seat, or—

“Please, sit,” Rabbi Finkel said. He was fiftyish, round-faced and bear-shaped with graying sidelocks and beard and a black suit and tie. His eyes were sharp behind horn-rimmed glasses. He gestured to a chair at the foot of the table.

I sat, then rose a little to undo the button of my sport coat. I hadn’t worn it since my second job interview, when I realized it was making the interviewers uncomfortable. It certainly made me uncomfortable. I fished out the little steno pad and stick pen I’d brought with me.

“Thank you for coming, Mr. Hench.” The rabbi had an orator’s voice, that big chest of his serving as a resonating chamber like a double bass.

“Of course,” I said. “Thanks for inviting me. It’s a fascinating company you have here.”

Bishop Clarke smiled at that. He was the best dressed of the three, in a well-cut business suit, his hair short, neat, side-parted. His smile was very white, and very wide. He was the youngest of the three—in his late thirties, I’d guess. “Thank you,” he said. “We know we’re very different from the other computer companies, and we like it that way. We like to think that we see something in computers—a potential—that other people have missed.”

Father Tarnowski scowled. He was cadaverously tall and thin, with the usual dog collar and jacket, and a heavy gold class ring. His half-rim glasses flashed. He was the oldest, maybe sixty, and had a sour look that I took for habitual. “He doesn’t want the press packet, Leonard,” he said. “Let’s get to the point.” He had a broad Chicago accent like a tough-guy gangster in The Untouchables.

Bishop Clarke’s smile blinked off and on for an instant and I was overcome with the sudden knowledge that these two men did not like each other at all, and that there was some kind of long-running argument simmering beneath the surface. “Thank you, Marek, of course. Mr. Hench’s time is valuable.” Father Tarnowski snorted softly at that and the bishop pretended he didn’t hear it, but I saw Rabbi Finkel grimace at his yellow pad.

“What can I help you Reverend Sirs with today?” Reverend Sirs came more easily now, didn’t feel ridiculous at all. The three of them gave the impression of being a quarter inch away from going for each other’s throats, and the formality was a way to keep tensions at a distance.

“We need a certain kind of accountant,” the rabbi said. He’d dated the top of his yellow pad and then circled the date. “A kind of accountant who understands the computer business. Who understands computers, on a technical level. It’s hard to find an accountant like that, believe it or not, even in Silicon Valley.” I didn’t point out that Colma wasn’t in Silicon Valley.

“Well,” I said, carefully. “I think I fit that bill. I’ve only got an associate’s degree in accounting, but I’m a kind of floating CFO for half a dozen companies and I’ve been doing night classes at UCSF Extension to get my bachelor’s. I did a year at MIT and built my own computer a few years back. I program pretty well in BASIC and Pascal and I’ve got a little C, and I’m a pretty darned good debugger, if I do say so myself.”

Bishop Clarke gave a small but audible sigh of relief. “You do indeed sound perfect, and I’m told that Shlomo spoke to your references and they were very enthusiastic about your diligence and . . . discretion.”

I’d given Shlomo a list of four clients I’d done extensive work with, but I hadn’t had “discretion” in mind when I selected them. It’s true that doing a company’s accounts made me privy to some sensitive information—like when two employees with the same job were getting paid very different salaries—but I got the feeling that wasn’t the kind of “discretion” the bishop had in mind.

“I’m pretty good at minding my own business,” I said, and then, “even when I’m being paid to mind someone else’s.” I liked that line, and made a mental note about it. Maybe someday I’d put it on my letterhead. Martin Hench: Confidential CPA.

The bishop favored me with a chuckle. The rabbi nodded thoughtfully. The priest scowled.

“That’s very good,” the bishop said. “What we’d like to discuss today is of a very sensitive nature, and I’m sure you’ll understand if we would like more than your good word to rely on.” He lifted his yellow pad, revealing a single page, grainily photocopied, and slid it over the table to me. “That’s our standard nondisclosure agreement,” he said. He slid a pen along to go with it.

I didn’t say anything. I’d signed a few NDAs, but only after I’d taken a contract. This was something different. I squinted at the page, which was a second- or third-generation copy and blurry in places. I started to read it. The bishop made a disgusted noise. I pretended I didn’t hear him.

I crossed out a few clauses and carefully lettered in an amendment. I initialed the changes and slid the paper back across the table to the bishop, and found the smile was gone from his face. All three of them were now giving me stern looks, wrath-of-God looks, the kind of looks that would make a twenty-one-year-old kid like me very nervous indeed. I felt the nerves rise and firmly pushed them down.

“Mr. Hench,” the bishop said, his tone low and serious, “is there some kind of problem?”

It pissed me off. I’d driven all the way to for-chrissakes Colma and these three weirdo God-botherers had ambushed me with their everything – and – the – kitchen – sink contract. I had plenty of work, and I didn’t need theirs, especially not if this was the way they wanted to deal. This had suddenly become a negotiation, and my old man had always told me the best negotiating position was a willingness to get up from the table. I was going to win this negotiation, one way or another.

“No problem,” I said.

“And yet you appear to have made alterations to our standard agreement.”

“I did,” I said. That’s not a problem for me, I didn’t say.

He gave me more of that stern eyeball-ray stuff. I let my negotiating leverage repel it. “Mr. Hench, our standard agreement can only be altered after review by our general counsel.”

“That sounds like a prudent policy,” I said, and met his stare.

He clucked his tongue. “I can get a fresh one,” he said. “This one is no good.”

I cocked my head. “I think it’d be better to get your general counsel, wouldn’t it?”

The three of them glared at me. I found I was enjoying myself. What’s more, I thought Rabbi Finkel might be suppressing a little smile, though the beard made it hard to tell.

“Let me see it,” he said, holding his hand out.

Bishop Clarke gave a minute shake of his head. The rabbi half rose, reached across the table, and slid it over to himself, holding it at arm’s length and adjusting his glasses. He picked up his pen and initialed next to my changes.

“Those should be fine,” he said, and slid it back to me. “Sign, please.”

“Yisrael,” Bishop Clarke said, an edge in his voice, “changes to the standard agreements need to be reviewed—”

“By our general counsel,” the rabbi finished, waving a dismissive gesture at him. “I know, I know. But these are fine. We should probably make the same changes to all our agreements. Meanwhile, we’ve all now had a demonstration that Mr. Hench is the kind of person who takes his promises seriously. Would you rather have someone who doesn’t read and signs his life away, or someone who makes sure he knows what he’s signing and agrees with it?”

Bishop Clarke’s smile came back, strained at the corners. “That’s an excellent point, Rabbi. Thank you for helping me understand your reasoning.” He collected the now-signed contract from me and tucked it back under his yellow pad.

“Now,” he said, “we can get down to the reason we asked you here today.”

Check out my Kickstarter to pre-order copies of my next novel, Picks and Shovels!

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/2025/01/09/the-reverend-sirs/#fidelity-computing/

[jeffgerstmann]

Do you think there could be a situation like the CD-i where consoles are also made by third parties? So the majority of X-Boxes are made by Microsoft but there are also Philips X-Boxes and Samsung X-Boxes all with slightly different feature sets? Am I just describing a less-good PC?

I guess the question here is: why?

Anything's possible, but getting more players involved in the process means that they're splitting the money even more ways. What's the incentive for one of these CE companies to take on the manufacturing and sales of their very own "third-party" Xbox? They'd probably have to kick money to Microsoft for licensing and they probably wouldn't get a taste of the software sales. So they'd probably have to price such a device as high as possible in order for it to make them any money. Or they'd have to bloat it out like an Android phone in order to get their hooks into those customers a different way, allowing them to keep hardware costs down by shunting people over to whatever core services make them the most money.

I know it's certainly possible to de-bloat an Android phone, but having seen what some of those things look like out of the box, I don't think I'd want, like, a "Samsung Xbox" full of their garbage streaming apps and whatever else. When Microsoft makes and sells an Xbox, their incentives are a little more direct and focused on games and getting you to buy them (with a secondary focus on streaming services and whatever else they allow in their app store) but they, for the most part, keep the bloat fairly low on their devices.

I'd maybe view it as a "be careful what you wish for" kind of thing, on the consumer end.

[nividawebsolutions]

How to Choose the Right Web Design for Your Brand

Imagine walking into a store with flickering lights, chaotic shelves, and no one to guide you. You’d probably walk out, right? Your website is no different. In the digital world, your website is your storefront, your first handshake, your 24/7 brand ambassador. At Nivida Software, recognised as the Best Website Design Company in Gujarat, we understand that web design isn’t just about aesthetics—it’s about aligning visuals with values, purpose with presence, and design with direction.

So, how do you choose the right web design for your brand? Here’s a thought-provoking guide to help you decode that puzzle—with insight, not just information.

Understand Your Brand’s DNA:

Before you pick fonts and colours, you must know who you are. Is your brand bold or subtle? Youthful or sophisticated? Playful or professional? You should design your logo considering all the above factors.

Start by defining your brand’s tone, mission, and unique selling points. When we, as a Web Design Company in Gujarat, take on a project, we dig deep to understand what drives your business. A well-defined brand voice makes design decisions far more intuitive and authentic.

Know Your Audience Like You Know Your Product:

Your website should speak your audience’s language—visually and functionally. Designing with interaction, minimalism, and mobile in mind is essential if you want to attract tech-savvy millennials. Targeting B2B clients? Your site should inspire trust, credibility, and professionalism.

At Nivida Software, one of the Best Web Design Agencies in Vadodara, we conduct extensive user profiling to ensure your website design connects with the right emotions and expectations of your audience. Because relevance is the real design currency.

Prioritise User Experience (UX), Not Just Decoration:

You may fall in love with a particular layout or animation, but if it confuses your user or slows down their journey, it’s a liability, not an asset. Building a house without doors is the same of web design without user experience.

As a forward-thinking Web Design Agency in Vadodara, we follow a user-first approach. We map the customer journey, define intuitive navigation paths, and ensure that every scroll, swipe, and click contributes to conversions.

Design for Mobile—Not as an Option, but as a Rule:

We live in a pocket-first world. More than 60% of users will visit your website on a mobile device. If your design isn’t responsive, you’re practically invisible to half your audience.

Being a Best Website Design Company in Vadodara, our responsive design philosophy ensures your website adapts seamlessly across devices—whether it’s a smartphone, tablet, or desktop—without compromising on speed or quality.

Stay Consistent, but Never Boring:

Brand consistency builds recognition, but that doesn’t mean being repetitive. It means using cohesive colour palettes, typography, and imagery that align with your brand guidelines while still allowing creative expression in layouts and content blocks.

We at Nivida Software, a leading Web Design Agency in Gujarat, blend innovation with identity, ensuring your design remains fresh without straying from the core brand essence.

Content and Design Must Work Like a Duet:

A stunning design without engaging content is like a concert with no music. Your design must support your message, not distract from it.

We ensure that copy and visuals work hand-in-hand. Our collaborative approach makes us stand out as one of the Best Website Design Agencies in Vadodara. Every button, headline, and image placement is intentional, crafted to guide the visitor naturally toward action.

SEO-Optimised Design Is Not a Luxury, It’s a Necessity:

Search engines don’t care if your site looks like a masterpiece. They care about structure, speed, tags, responsiveness, and accessibility.

As a highly experienced Web Design Company in Gujarat, we bake SEO into the foundation of our designs. Clean code, proper heading hierarchy, optimised images, and fast loading speeds are non-negotiables in our workflow.

Scalability: Design Today with Tomorrow in Mind

Whether it’s adding new product lines, integrating with CRM tools, or including multilingual capabilities, a scalable architecture is crucial.

That’s why our design frameworks at Nivida Software, the Best Website Design Company in Gujarat, are built to be modular and flexible—so your site can evolve as your brand does.

Choose the Right Design Partner:

At the end of the day, choosing the right web design comes down to choosing the right people to build it. A team that listens, understands, advises, and executes with precision.

At Nivida Software, we’re not just designers—we’re digital storytellers, strategists, and brand builders. As one of the Best Web Design Agencies in Vadodara, we bring years of industry experience, a robust creative process, and an obsession with pixel-perfect delivery.

We don’t just build websites. We craft experiences that help brands stand out, sell more, and stay memorable.

Look Beyond the Portfolio, Seek the Process:

Many agencies flaunt flashy portfolios. A well-thought-out plan, however, is essential to its success. Always ask about their process—how do they understand your business, plan your sitemap, choose your design direction, or test user journeys?

Our proven design methodology, backed by extensive market research and conversion insights, has made us the go-to Web Design Agency in Vadodara for businesses that want more than just a pretty face—they want performance.

Closing Thoughts:

Choosing the right web design for your brand is not a checkbox—it’s a commitment to crafting a digital presence that reflects who you are, resonates with your audience, and drives results.

At Nivida Software, the Best Website Design Company in Vadodara, we walk that path with you—from ideation to implementation. With a blend of strategic thinking, technical expertise, and aesthetic excellence, we help brands come alive online.